In the Mouth of the Tiger

by Lynette Silver

  ‘Not a bad feeling, is it?’ Denis asked, easing his horse alongside mine and reaching across to put Lucky’s reins into my left hand. ‘Now, always keep a gentle pressure on his mouth. A horse likes to know you’re in charge.’

  Lucky’s head suddenly started back and he gave a snort. Just for a second I felt panic rising but Denis’s hand kept mine unmoving on the reins and Lucky settled immediately. ‘It’s all right. He just spotted something that puzzled him. That child, perhaps.’ I looked up to see that a small boy had wandered into the enclosure.

  ‘Horses are much more observant than we are,’ Denis explained. ‘They see things we wouldn’t notice. A curious-shaped shadow or something moving that shouldn’t be moving. A person smaller than he should be. So just try and be as aware as he is and he won’t catch you by surprise.’

  ‘What do we do now?’ I asked.

  ‘We take these lazy beasts of ours for a walk. Syce!’ he called. ‘Which bridleway is reserved for beginners today?’

  ‘Lake Shore, Tuan.’

  ‘Good!’ Denis grinned. ‘The prettiest of them all.’

  We walked our horses for over an hour, meandering together through open, park-like countryside that bordered a fern-edged lake. Denis said little but kept close beside me and watched Lucky’s every move. For myself, I did exactly as I had been told. I kept my back straight, my chin in, and held the reins lightly but firmly in my left hand. Lucky had an easy, comfortable walking gait – and I felt like a princess on his back.

  ‘Guide him with your knees,’ Denis suggested at one stage when we were twisting and turning through a clump of coconut trees. ‘Just a little gentle pressure to show him the way you want him to turn.’ After a while it became second nature to guide Lucky with my knees and body weight, and I hardly had any need for the reins.

  All too soon we were back in the saddling enclosure, the syces ready to help us dismount.

  ‘Can’t we go round again?’ I asked. I had genuinely enjoyed the ride. How on earth could I have been frightened of horses, I wondered.

  ‘An hour is quite enough for a first ride, Nona,’ Denis smiled. ‘You’ll know precisely what I mean when you try and sit down to your dinner tonight.’

  Mother had not come with us, thank God, a number of factors conspiring to keep her away. To begin with, her jodhpurs had not fitted after five years in the cupboard, and a sombong tailor had arrogantly refused to alter them in time, citing Mother’s ‘interference’ for the failure. Then her riding boots had gone missing. I had a shrewd idea they were still in a cupboard at Dr Macleod’s house but did not feel it politic to suggest the possibility. The final straw had been a pulled hamstring muscle: Mother had overdone her warming-up exercises the evening before.

  ‘Just forget me and enjoy yourself, Nona,’ she had wailed from the chaise longue. And I was doing just that.

  The Riding Club was situated in good riding country about a half hour out of KL, and comprised a rather ugly but utilitarian two-storey clubhouse surrounded by a maze of stables linked by cobbled walks and exercise yards. After a lemonade on the club verandah, Denis showed me around, and then we visited his string of horses. He had four horses stabled there, three of them polo ponies and the fourth his pride and joy, Soliloquy, which he had ridden that day. Soliloquy was a thoroughbred, a magnificent coal-black mare with four white fetlocks. We spent a good half hour in her stall as Denis currycombed her himself, talking to her gently all the while. ‘They need you to talk to them,’ he explained to me over his shoulder. ‘Horses can get upset if you stay silent and they wonder what you’ve got in mind. So always chatter to them, Nona. Doesn’t really matter what you say as long as you say it calmly.’

  As we spun home through the late afternoon I felt bathed in happiness. The hood was down, the wind in my hair, and Denis by my side.

  ‘Why do you think Malcolm tried to stop me learning to ride?’ I asked. ‘Just trying to be a spoilsport?’ I couldn’t help wondering if he mightn’t have been just a bit jealous that Denis was to teach me.

  Denis considered the question carefully. ‘Malcolm doesn’t ride so don’t take any notice of what he was saying. But no – I don’t think he was being a spoilsport. Malcolm’s had a bit of a caring eye on you for years, you know.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, surprised. I didn’t know Malcolm from a bar of soap.

  ‘Malcolm was the police officer who came down to Kuala Rau for the body after Robbie died. He had to do the report. He says he was very impressed by how you behaved, and he’s looked out for you from a distance ever since.’

  I shouldn’t have been surprised at the coincidence. Malaya was a very small world, with fewer Europeans living on the whole of the peninsula than in a small English country town.

  I thought back to that terrible night when Robbie had died. I’d been alone in the house with him, the amah having gone back to her kampong for the night. Robbie had been recovering from blackwater fever, or so the doctor thought. But he had suddenly taken a turn for the worse, the fever burning up again like a fire within him, making him hot to the touch. At about six in the evening he had become incoherent. I’d gone down to the kampong and pleaded with the headman to send someone on a bicycle to bring in the dresser, a man trained in first aid, from a nearby rubber estate. But village Malays were a superstitious lot and hated to travel through the jungle at night, and he had refused. So I had sat with Robbie, regularly bathing his face and arms with cold water and waiting for the morning. In the early hours he had seemed to fall sleep, and I’d fallen asleep in the chair beside him. The next thing I recall was waking in terror to Robbie’s death-rattle, and then clinging to him desperately as he had half risen from the bed, then collapsed and lain still.

  I had taken a lantern and walked through the blackness to the kampong, and beaten on the headman’s door. ‘Tuan Roberts is dead,’ I’d said flatly in Malay. ‘So you had better now go and get the police, or it will be a great shame for you and all the people of your kampong.’ A group of men had set off for the Sungei Rau Estate about twenty miles away, the lights on their bicycles wobbling and weaving along the uneven jungle road. I knocked on our amah’s door but she refused to answer, so I had to walk back by myself to the mine manager’s bungalow where Robbie lay. During the pearl-grey dawn I could hear women wailing down in the village, but nobody came up to the bungalow. Kampong Malays feared everything to do with death, particularly unexpected death, and I could not find it in my heart to blame them for staying away.

  I’d stayed alone with the body, numb with shock, until mid-morning, when a police jeep had arrived with a crisply-uniformed officer, two Malay policemen and the dresser from the Sungei Rau Estate.

  I shuddered at the memory of those terrible hours. Denis noticed and reached across and drew me to him. ‘It was thoughtless of me to remind you of things you’d much rather forget,’ he said. ‘It must have been awful for you.’

  ‘It was awful,’ I said. ‘Probably the worst thing of all was that Mother blamed me for not getting Robbie a doctor.’

  We drove on in silence. There were no more tears for me to shed – I’d shed them all years before – but a residual sorrow made me lean towards Denis for comfort. We were entering KL now, the sun low on the horizon behind us, painting everything in shades of gold.

  ‘What say we stop at my place for a quick bite of dinner?’ Denis asked. ‘It’s on the way. We’ll ring your mother from there and tell her you’ll be back about nine o’clock.’ I nodded compliantly, and moved a little closer.

  Denis had a substantial two-storey house in the Guthrie’s Compound on Ampang Road. We crunched up the curved gravel drive and stopped under the front porch, but didn’t get out immediately. Instead, we sat talking as the sun set in a flare of gold and red and the shadows deepened around us. The engine clicked as it cooled, there was a scent of mimosa in the air, and the tropical insects began their evening chorus.

  It seems to me, when I go back to that moment in my mind, th
at it marked the precise beginning of our life together. I never again thought of myself as a single person but as one of the two of us. All the things that happened after that, the lovely and the terrible, happened to us both.

  We dined on an upstairs balcony overlooking a leafy, well-kept garden that turned into a silver fairyland when a three-quarter moon arose. Dinner was a nasi goreng cooked in the Nonya style that I loved, and afterwards Denis dug out a silver case and offered me a cigarette. I’d never smoked but I took one to be companionable, and we smoked and talked about everything under the sun. When silences came between us they were comfortable silences.

  ‘You said at tiffin last Sunday that you had met me as a little girl,’ I said. ‘I can’t remember the meeting, but I’d love to know about it.’

  Denis drew on his cigarette thoughtfully. ‘You would have been – oh, about eleven or twelve, I suppose. It was down at Port Swettenham. I was playing in a cricket match and you and your mother had come along with Robbie to watch. I met up with you all after the game and we had a picnic under the fig trees.’

  I could vaguely remember the game of cricket at Port Swettenham, and the young player who had joined us for lunch. ‘What did you think of me?’ I asked curiously. ‘If you thought anything at all?’

  ‘I thought you were a dear, loyal little girl. Your mother was being a bit beastly to Robbie and you stood up for him.’

  I had often stood up for Robbie during that last year, when the Depression had ruined his business and his relationship with Mother had fallen apart. She could not abide weak people, and she must have judged Robbie to be weak because she had begun to belittle him in front of his friends. I knew exactly what Denis meant when he said that Mother had been beastly to Robbie.

  Denis dropped me home at about ten o’clock, and Mother turned on me immediately, her face pale with fury. ‘What is this all about, Nona? Ten o’clock at night! This man is almost old enough to be your father! Is he trying to seduce you? Do you want him to seduce you?’

  I’d come from somewhere lovely, and was back in my hurly-burly world. But it didn’t seem to matter. I was now here only as a visitor, and belonged somewhere else.

  ‘He is twenty-seven, Mother,’ I said evenly. ‘He could hardly have fathered me at ten years old.’

  Mother changed tack. ‘Nona, please listen to me. This man will hurt you if you let him play games with you. He has broken so many hearts, all over Malaya. Single girls, married women – he takes them for his pleasure and then he throws them aside! They say he treats his horses much better than he treats his women.’

  I laughed. ‘He certainly treats his horses well,’ I said emphatically. ‘Mother, I rode a horse today! I loved every minute of it!’

  We were sitting in my bedroom where Mother had pursued me and cornered me. I caught sight of Tanya outside the door and called her in. ‘Tanya – what do you think? I can ride a horse!’

  Tanya stood at the door, her face impassive. ‘Good for you, Nona. But did you hear your mother’s warning about Denis? I have heard the stories, too. He collects women like some people collect stamps, or butterflies. If you were older and wiser I would say “Go for it!” But you are very young and trusting. He will gobble you up!’

  I just smiled, and then dropped my bombshell. ‘He’s going to take me riding every morning next week before work,’ I said triumphantly. ‘Morning is the best time for riding in the tropics, and we’re not going to waste it.’

  Mother and Tanya exchanged shocked glances.

  ‘I simply cannot allow it, Nona,’ Mother said sharply. ‘You are an employee and I won’t have you tired all day in the salon.’

  ‘Then I will simply have to have a week off, Mother. I am serious about learning to ride and this is a tremendous opportunity. Denis is one of the finest horsemen in Malaya.’

  ‘A week off!’ Mother almost shouted. ‘I cannot give you the time off just now! You know how busy we are!’

  ‘Then you will simply have to let me go riding before work,’ I said. Then my voice hardened. ‘I will do this Mother, and nothing you say or threaten to do will change my mind.’

  There was a long silence. Mother stared into my face, read the absolute determination there, and stormed out of the room, slamming the door with an almighty crash. ‘My own daughter defies me in my own house!’ she shouted out in Russian in the hallway. ‘What is the world coming to?’

  I had won, and smiled in quiet triumph. But in reality it had not been much of a contest at all.

  Chapter Six

  I rode every morning of the following week, always on Lucky with Denis at my side on his beloved Soliloquy. I learnt to trot, rising in the stirrups to match the rhythm of Lucky’s gait, and then to canter. We cantered in an open field, and I thrilled to the freedom of the wind in my face and the drumbeat of hooves on the hard-packed clay. I know I was always smiling when I rode because Denis told me so. And I am smiling in all the photographs taken that week on Denis’s Box Brownie – lovely, faded brown scraps of memory that I have carried around with me for sixty years.

  I had my first tumble on the Thursday morning. We were trotting home, the stables in sight, when I took it into my head to try and beat Denis to the dismounting yard. I kicked Lucky into a canter that became a gallop as he sensed breakfast ahead. But I rode straight past the gate into his yard and Lucky objected, propping abruptly so that I cartwheeled over his head.

  I lay on the ground, winded and a little stunned but otherwise completely unhurt, until Denis swept me up into his arms.

  ‘I must be dead,’ I said, flinging my arms around his neck, ‘because surely I am in heaven!’ I’ve never been prouder of an extempore comment in my life, and Denis had to kiss me to stop my breathless laughter.

  ‘Horses are bears of little brain,’ he explained over breakfast in the clubhouse. ‘If you change their routine it throws them out completely. Lucky thought he was heading for his breakfast and couldn’t stand the thought of missing out. The secret is not to let them get into any routine when you’re out with them. That’s pretty well impossible when you’re on a hired nag, but bear it in mind when you get your own animal.’

  On the Friday we galloped. Choosing a long flat stretch of meadowland, we worked both animals up from a sedate trot to a canter and then to a controlled gallop. Right at the end I gave Lucky his head and felt him stretch out powerfully and easily beneath me. It was a glorious feeling, enhanced by the frisson of danger.

  ‘You are a natural rider,’ Denis said as we dismounted. ‘I’m very proud of you indeed.’ Even the syce seemed to regard me with more respect, and I insisted on rubbing Lucky down myself to confirm my graduation as an equestrienne.

  All that day I wandered about the salon in a happy daydream, dropping scissors (I was learning to cut under Tanya’s eagle eye) and forgetting the simplest things. At one stage Tanya had clicked her tongue in annoyance but the new Nona just gave her a comfortable grin.

  ‘You are different, Nona,’ Tanya said as we were closing down the salon. ‘I fear you really are in love with Denis.’

  ‘Why do you fear that I am in love?’ I asked. We were speaking in Russian, as Tanya and I often did when the subject was at all personal. Mother never spoke Russian to me as she had a theory that it would give me an accent when I spoke in English.

  ‘I fear that this Denis will use you, and then throw you aside. I think that would kill you.’

  I shook my head. ‘Denis will never leave me,’ I said. ‘Not that he has promised anything. With Denis and I it is not like that. We take it for granted that eventually, as night follows day, we will be together for ever.’

  Tanya shook her head sadly. ‘Dear Nona, you know so little about men. Of course he finds you fascinating. You are young, and fresh and different. He feels he can mould you, change you into what he wants. Turn a little hairdresser into a woman of his own class. But eventually he will tire of you. You do not have his sophistication, his knowledge of the world. He will wake up one mor
ning and see you as you are. A hairdresser. And then he will look for another challenge to his masculinity.’

  It was a long speech from Tanya, and I appreciated the intentions behind it. I put my hand on her arm affectionately. ‘Dear Tanya. If Denis does leave me, so be it. But it has been in my stars for a long time that I would love him. Since I was a frightened, lonely little girl in Penang. Even if I knew for certain that Denis was going to leave me I could not do anything to stop myself loving him. So please don’t try and separate us. And don’t warn me about the future. Don’t lessen my happiness while I have it.’

  She frowned thoughtfully, then seemed to make up her mind about something. ‘Then let me help you to become the fascinating creature you are capable of being,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow we will come in early and I will cut your schoolgirl hair, and curl it as befits a woman. Perhaps I will give you a tint as well. Will you trust me?’

  The business took over an hour. Tanya cut my shoulder length hair into a bob – what we called in those days the Tomboy style. She shampooed it and tinted it, then curled it with heated tongs. When she showed me the result in the mirror, I almost laughed. It looked like a shorter version of Shirley Temple’s famous mop top. By the time she had finished I had a furious headache but a glorious head of bouncing curls.

  ‘Now we must choose an appropriate make-up,’ she said, looking at me critically. ‘Coral pink lipstick, I think, and just the hint of powder on the cheeks. Dust Rose, perhaps.’

  When we got home for lunch, Mother pretended to be shocked. ‘What nonsense is this?’ she asked. ‘You are perhaps planning to join a circus, Nona?’ But I could tell by the way she touched the curls and stood back regarding me from several angles that she rather liked the result.

  Or perhaps she thought I had gone to all that trouble for Tim Featherstone, and approved this evidence of continued interest in him.