In the Mouth of the Tiger

by Lynette Silver

  ‘I owe you a great deal, Mr Elesmere-Elliott,’ he said. ‘And I think you will find me a loyal and grateful friend. As a token of my gratitude I would like you to be my guests until you find a home. The Adelphi is noisy and uncomfortable and could not be pleasant for the children. Please use my brother’s house on Woodlands Road. It has been empty for almost a year, since my brother was taken by the Kempeitai, but it has a full staff, and it is clean and convenient.’

  In our room that night I poured us both a nightcap gin and tonic, and sat Denis down facing me. ‘I’m a little worried,’ I said frankly. ‘I learnt things this evening that I’m not sure I should know. I appreciate that you once promised me that you would never keep a secret from me, and I love you for saying that. But now I’m going to let you off the hook.’

  ‘I haven’t kept you in the picture for purely sentimental reasons,’ Denis said gently. ‘I need you to know what’s going on, for my sake as well as yours. This is a tricky game we are playing, Norma, and no doubt there will be times when you will have to act on your own initiative. So the more you know the better. We will have to be a team. As we were in Australia, dealing with secret cables.’

  ‘I didn’t think spying was a husband and wife business,’ I said. ‘I thought that spying was one lonely man against the world.’ I gave a wry shrug. ‘I think that may be a direct quote from an Oppenheim novel.’

  Denis was shaking his head. ‘All serious intelligence work needs a team. And the best teams come from within families. Blood is thicker than water, after all. It’s usually the males of the species, fathers and sons, or brothers, or cousins. But there have been quite a few husband and wife combinations, too. Norman and Mabel Brookes, for instance. You know what those two got up to during the war, don’t you?’

  I had heard the stories, from Ivan and from Alan Hillgarth. Sir Norman and Lady Brookes – leaders of the Melbourne social scene – had penetrated General Douglas MacArthur’s staff so well that Canberra often knew what MacArthur was up to before Washington did. Their modus operandi was simplicity itself. Charming Sir Norman would invite influential but lonely American servicemen home to tennis parties, high teas and champagne dinners. Equally charming Lady Brookes supplied them with patriotic and enthusiastic young ladies – the cream of Victoria’s social set – who promptly did their duty by milking them dry, in more senses than one. The best femmes fatales in the industry, the DNI had called them. One of them actually married General MacArthur’s Chief of Staff, and sauntered into Tokyo for the victory celebrations on his arm.

  ‘Then I will be the most loyal Mata Hari who ever existed,’ I said, raising my glass.

  But I was not as enthusiastic as I tried to sound. Denis’s new ferocity rather frightened me, and the thought of being involved in spying again sent shivers down my spine. But of course I didn’t even contemplate saying no. I loved my husband and would have followed him to Hell itself.

  We moved into the Cheng mansion the next afternoon. It was a large, four-storey structure designed in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright. I say ‘in the style of’ because while it resembled a Wright house it didn’t feel like a Wright house. Its jutting verandahs and sweeping, curved corners were awkward rather than elegant, and the pink external paintwork made me feel bilious. It was just as bad inside. The vast hall was paved in pale green marble, and the walls were the same sickly colour so that one felt one was swimming under water.

  The servants were magnificent. There were a dozen of them at least, and they whipped away our bags and had unpacked for us within half an hour of our arrival. They were all members of the broader Cheng family, and we were to learn that the senior members – the housekeeper Mrs Cheng Lee and the butler Mr Siew – had studied at the Swiss Hoteliers School in Hong Kong before the war. Mrs Cheng Lee in particular was disconcertingly efficient, anticipating every want almost before we could articulate it.

  ‘I hope Mem and Tuan will like living here,’ she said after our first dinner. She stood at the doorway of the dining room, backing out like a retainer in a Hollywood movie. ‘Anything you like we can arrange. Please just tell us what pleases you.’

  ‘I’m quite sure we will be very comfortable,’ I said.

  But almost from that first evening I knew that I could never be happy in that house. There was an unusual atmosphere about the place. It puzzled me at first, and then rather frightened me. It was always so quiet and still, almost as if the house was brooding over some long-gone tragedy. In my experience, servants tended to hang about a bit, moving things, laying the table, pottering with dusters and so on. But not the staff in this house. They would serve a meal and disappear back to their quarters while we were still eating, or bring in a tray of icy-cold ayer limau and vanish before anyone had taken a single sip. The cleaning was done before we rose in the morning, the washing taken away and returned as if by magic. Even the children seemed a little oppressed by the unnatural quietness, and I missed their chatter and rumbustious play.

  ‘You look after us very well, Mrs Cheng,’ I said finally, ‘but the house always seems so still. It is as if it is a tomb and not a house. You and the boys won’t stay in the place a moment longer than you need. You seem to want to escape, as if being here is a torture to you all.’

  Mrs Cheng seemed inclined to brush me off with one of her charming smiles, but changed her mind and gave a superstitious little shiver. ‘This place is a tomb for us, Mem,’ she said. ‘You see, Mr and Mrs Cheng Lo and their children, who made this house a place of laughter and of love, were killed here by the Kempeitai. Out there, on the little back lawn. The lawn that betrayed them to the Japanese.’ And she gestured to a square of green through the sitting room windows, an enclosed space that had been dug into the hillside behind the house.

  I sat Mrs Cheng beside me and took her hands in mine. ‘You must tell me all about it,’ I said gently. ‘I want to understand so that I can share your sorrow. Perhaps then I won’t feel so much like an intruder. Perhaps then we can try to make the house a home again.’

  Cheng Lo had apparently been too free in his support for the Kuomintang before the war and, fearing that he would be picked up as soon as the Japanese took over Singapore, he had excavated a hide-out in the hillside behind the house. It was a well-furnished set of rooms accessible from the house by an underground passage leading off the cellars. The Kempeitai had come around as expected, with their inevitable little book of photographs, asking for Cheng Lo. But the family and their loyal staff had been firm in their story: Cheng Lo was dead, killed by a bomb when leaving his office in Bridge Road. The Kempeitai had duly ransacked the place but they hadn’t found the underground passageway or the secret set of rooms. And so Cheng Lo had lived in the house for over three years, a strange, twilight existence no doubt, but at least he was alive and close to his family. And then the hiding place had been betrayed – by a garden weed. There is a plant in Malaya, a type of dwarf mimosa, which we call ‘touch-me-not’ because its sensitive leaves curl up at the slightest touch. It grows everywhere but for some reasons flourishes particularly well above any underground structure. You can see where buried pipelines run in Malaya by the long green lines of this plant.

  Apparently, the kanganis who scythed the Chengs’ lawns had been conscripted by the Japanese as labour, and before Mrs Cheng Lo could arrange fresh labour the lawns had grown long enough for the weed to reveal itself. A Japanese officer billeted on Mrs Cheng had noticed the line of weed during his morning exercise on the lawn. He had brought in the Kempeitai and all had been discovered. Cheng Lo was of course beheaded immediately, but the Japanese hated being made fools of and so the entire family, down to a twelve-year-old schoolgirl, had been lined up on the little green lawn and shot.

  I heard the story out in respectful silence, and in equal silence hugged Mrs Cheng Lee and wiped away her tears. It was too sad, this awful story, and that night I told Denis that we had to leave.

  We walked outside early next morning to look at the little lawn. It was a s
trange place. At this time of the day it was indescribably beautiful, the bank behind it gloriously blue with morning glory. But I knew that as the sun rose higher the picture would change. The morning glory’s blooms would close and the hill would turn dark green. Shadows would collect, hard black against the pink distemper of the house, giving the place the appearance of a closed prison yard.

  I imagined the Japanese officer standing in the middle of that yard, perhaps swinging his sword in the ritualised morning exercises expected of a Samurai. And then stopping dead as he spotted the touch-me-not running from the house into the hillside. Perhaps Mrs Cheng Lo, peering at him from a window, might have seen him pause and read the thoughts forming in his mind. Read her family’s fate in the stern, suspicious lines of his face.

  We found a suitable house to move into that very day, and under the most heart-warming circumstances. We’d gone for a drive out to Changi, the first time we’d had the courage to venture that way, and ended up passing the atap cottage Chu Lun and Amah had built on the Whitelawns estate. It was completely unchanged, tucked behind a hedge of frangipani just off the Tana Merah Besar Road, and we stopped the car. Chu Lun and Amah had seen us sitting there and run out to embrace us all.

  ‘Your daughter is so pretty!’ Amah said, collecting little Frances in her arms. ‘And your boys! So big! You must all come inside and I will make curry puffs.’

  We sat on the verandah and sipped tea and nibbled Amah’s familiar curry puffs. I could see the gaps amongst the coconut trees where Whitelawns’ tall grey roofs should be, but though my eyes kept straying that way I couldn’t bring myself to talk about the place. Instead we talked about the Japanese occupation, and the new Singapore that was emerging from the ashes.

  ‘We have been through the storm, but there is sunshine ahead,’ Chu Lun said in his flowery Malay. ‘Business is about to boom. Tuan, I knew you would come back so I have kept my eyes open. There is a small concern for sale in Changi, making fishing boats. So many boats were destroyed by the Japanese, and people could not be bothered replacing them during the war because the price of fish was too low to make fishing worthwhile. Now there is fishing again and a great demand for boats. The Three Man Kongsi could make a fortune . . .’

  ‘Steady on!’ Denis laughed, holding up a hand. ‘Give me a chance to find my bearings!’ It was so much like old times – the old times that could never be again – that I felt my eyes filling with tears. Amah must have noticed because she suddenly got to her feet and took my hand. ‘I have something for you, Mem,’ she said seriously.

  She led me into her garden, Chu Lun and the rest of them following, and taking a changkul began to dig under the roots of one of the frangipani trees.

  They had collected all our silver on the afternoon I’d left with Archdeacon Graham-White, wrapped it in tarred paper and buried it. As we knelt on the sandy soil, and Amah unwrapped each piece and handed it to me, the tears did flow. It wasn’t a king’s ransom, just a few odd pieces Denis and I had collected over the years. The boys’ silver christening cups and bowls, my sterling silver hairbrushes, a Georgian teapot Denis had collected years ago, and the fretted Bacchante fish knife Maxine Elliott had given me. But their sentimental value was beyond the price of diamonds: the last time I’d seen them they had been on my dressing table or on my pale green sideboard in Whitelawns. They were precious relics of our Golden Age.

  We did eventually walk over to see what was left of Whitelawns. There was little to see, just the foundations lying amidst the rank lallang, and some broken bits and pieces of brick and charred timber. I’m glad I had already cried because I could walk there in the shadows of our dream, laughing as the boys whooped and ran to the beach below us, and Frances tried to catch the geckoes scurrying in the grass.

  ‘There is a house for rent just along the beach,’ Amah said conversationally. ‘Just this side of Mata Ikun. Nobody wants it because it is so isolated, but if you were to take it you would be amongst friends. You would be back where you belong.’

  We signed the lease for Casuarinas the next day. It was a strange bungalow in many ways, with its long open front verandah shut off by heavy timber scaffolding to keep the ‘bad hats’ out. But it had a friendly, sunny feel about it, and it was right on the water’s edge, sheltered from the salty sea breeze by the magnificent stand of casuarinas which had given the house its name. We moved in the same weekend.

  The wheel had turned full circle, and when we sat out on the lawn on our first evening, with Amah preparing dinner in the house behind us and Chu Lun teaching the children to fly their kites, I could almost imagine that we were back at Whitelawns.

  We had arranged for Tony and Bobby to be boarders at Glamorgan Preparatory School in Melbourne, and decided to accompany them to Australia to see them installed. The fees were astronomical but when I expressed concern Denis shook his head impatiently. ‘We don’t have to worry about money any more, Norma,’ he said. ‘We don’t even have to pretend to worry about money. From now on we are going to spend the damned stuff whenever we want to.’ He sounded almost angry, as he often did these days, and I didn’t argue with him.

  The round trip to Melbourne took six weeks. We made it a leisurely holiday, going down by the Marella, staying a fortnight in a hotel just beside the school, and then rolling home in style on P&O’s Himalaya.

  They had said that the Marella was an old tub, but I fell in love with her the moment we bordered her. She had been the German Kaiser’s yacht before the First World War and though the years had taken their toll she still looked the part, with a raked bow and elegant white superstructure. The first night aboard was pure magic. The sea was a glassy calm as we steamed out of Singapore, so that it reflected the sunset like a vast mirror. The children ran around the top deck just as I had as a child on the Lurline. And then, in the soft darkness, Denis and I descended arm in arm to the rococo dining room as a small ensemble played Gershwin and the waiters stood in line, their immaculate white uniforms glowing in the soft pink light.

  We were on the captain’s table, in positions of honour, which completely flummoxed me. ‘Why did they put us here?’ I hissed, but Denis merely smiled and shrugged.

  ‘Your husband looked after us during the war,’ Captain Tolly told me quietly during soup. ‘Marella had been taken over by the navy, running men and supplies to Port Moresby, and later Rabaul. Your husband made sure that we were never asked to take undue risks, and that every convoy was made up and properly escorted. He was also lucky. Few vessels were lost when he was in charge of shipping movements.’

  There was another officer at the table who had been on the Marella during those days. Jan Dixon was a big, blond man who had obviously been good-looking before his features became thickened by drink and easy living. That night he satisfied himself with just the odd curious comment, but I gathered that he didn’t share the Captain’s view of Denis. I asked Denis about him later.

  ‘Dixon?’ Denis made a dismissive gesture. ‘All I can recall of the man was that he used to be First Officer, and that he was a rotten first officer who couldn’t load a ship properly and quite properly was demoted. I think I may have told Burns Philp about him, so he probably has his hatchet out for me.’

  He certainly did have his hatchet out, and when he struck he hurt me badly. It was about the third day out, and Dixon was late to dinner, and clearly halfway plastered. Captain Tolly was on the bridge – I think we were going through the Lombok Straits at the time – and rather rudely Dixon sat in his seat, next to me. I avoided him as much as I could, but after dessert had been served Dixon leaned across to me. ‘You know your husband is a murderer, don’t you?’ he said almost conversationally.

  The others at the table were deep in conversation, so I had to respond on my own. ‘Denis is no more a murderer than any other fine, decent man who had to kill or be killed,’ I said. ‘It was war, Mr Dixon.’

  And I turned away, a bright smile on my face to show what contempt I had for the buffoon.

 
But Dixon didn’t give up. He pulled at my sleeve impatiently. ‘These were not Japanese or Germans he killed,’ he said, slurring his words slightly. ‘They were Chinese mariners on our side. God-fearing, decent men who were only trying to stick up for their mates. Your husband had them bumped off like rabid dogs. I’m not inventing this, Mrs Elesmere-Elliott. It was known throughout the Torres Strait in 1943. The men were from the Baralaba, which was doing the same work we were.’

  I felt my heart sink despite myself. Things had happened while Denis was in charge of the Marauke–Milne Bay area. Terrible things. I’d seen them written in his eyes when he had come south so ill. But I had not expected to have to face them like this. Thrown at me in malice across a dinner table.

  I turned on Dixon, pale with shock and anger, prepared to have it out with him and damn the consequences. But then I saw Denis, in a brown study as he so often was these days, toying with his bowl of ice-cream. He clearly hadn’t heard Dixon’s accusation, and I was suddenly utterly determined that he never would.

  ‘They are playing a waltz,’ I said rising to my feet. ‘Thank you for asking me to dance.’

  Dixon stared at me, and lumbered reluctantly to his feet. I swept him onto the floor, my left hand holding his in a grip of iron. ‘You wanted to tell me something about Denis. Well, spit it out and I’ll tell you if I don’t know it already.’

  Confronted, Dixon suddenly lost his enthusiasm, but I pushed him relentlessly, goading him, sneering at him. I knew that once he told me his story he would lose his power to hurt. Like a bee, he could sting only once. I wanted him to sting me when I was alone, when Denis didn’t have to share the pain.

  Slowly, reluctantly now, he gave up his story. Early in 1943 Baralaba was berthed at Thursday Island, en route to Marauke with men and equipment for the 59th Field Battery. The morning before she was due to make an unescorted dash across the Arafura Sea to Marauke, a deputation had called on the captain. Their message was simple. The risk of attack from Japanese planes and submarines was too great. They were civilians and nobody could order them to take such risks.