In the Mouth of the Tiger

by Lynette Silver

  It took a moment or two for what he’d said to register, and then I hauled myself onto my elbow and faced him. ‘You must be joking. It’s a hundred yards closer, if that.’

  ‘I’m quite serious. I would be much happier if we were in Starlight.’

  I still thought he was pulling my leg and turned on my bedside light to see his face more clearly. ‘You are serious, aren’t you?’ I said incredulously. ‘Denis, what you’re saying just doesn’t make sense. Both houses are equally isolated. There’s absolutely no difference between them. And anyway, we’ve told the agent we’re moving into Moonlight.’

  The lines hardened on Denis’s face. ‘I’m sorry, Norma, but I think we should move into Starlight. We’ll tell Mrs Prakesh first thing after breakfast. Fortunately there’s no harm done in changing our minds . . .’

  I was so astounded that I actually got out of bed and stood looking down at the man. ‘It’s because of what George Fortin said last night, isn’t it?’ I demanded. ‘So tell me the truth right now. Who it is that needs protecting at Moonlight?’

  Denis was staring back at me and I could see that he was suddenly furious. ‘Don’t talk tommy-rot!’ he snapped. ‘And for God’s sake listen to me. All right, Starlight may only be fractionally closer to Tanah Rata than Moonlight, but it’s a bigger house and it has more lawn area for the children to play.’ He made a visible effort to calm himself. ‘And I think we’ll be happier there.’

  I too made an effort to calm myself. ‘If you really do prefer Starlight, then of course we’ll take Starlight. But please, Denis, don’t treat me like a perfect fool.’

  And then it was over. But as I settled back on my pillow I shook my head. It really did seem to me that Denis was becoming a little erratic. Or less than completely frank.

  We called in on the Tanglin School after breakfast, to pay our respects to the redoubtable Miss Griff and to show the place to the children. The school was a bit of a disappointment at first sight. I had imagined ivy-clad walls and manicured playing fields, but Tanglin was merely a collection of darkstained timber bungalows set around a gravelled assembly area. Once inside the complex, however, one quickly forgot the modest scale of the buildings. It was morning recess, and healthy-looking pink-cheeked boys and girls were running everywhere. Behind the school, jungle-clad peaks rose up like painted scenery while birds and butterflies danced in the sunlit air.

  One could not imagine a better advertisement for the Highlands as a place for growing children.

  Miss Griff received us in her spartan office, coming around her desk to sit with us at a low table set with coffee for the grown-ups and glasses of fresh milk for the children. ‘Welcome to your new school,’ she said. ‘You two boys will be here at Hopetoun. Frances, you will be going to our kindergarten, which is just on the other side of the valley.’ She pointed through the window to a collection of cream buildings just visible through the trees.

  Frances pouted. She was at the stage when it was important to match her brothers in everything, and the word ‘kindergarten’, with its suggestion of ‘baby school’, clearly upset her.

  ‘Kindergarten!’ I said, with as much awe as I could summon up. ‘Is Frances really old enough for kindergarten? I thought she would be far too young.’

  Miss Griff caught on immediately. ‘Oh, I think Frances is quite big enough to manage kindergarten. She’ll be with some very nice children, too. I understand they have a Teddy Bear Club.’ She looked at Frances. ‘Do you have a teddy?’

  Frances nodded solemnly. She had a very good teddy indeed, a splendid Chad Valley bear with a little tartan waistcoat.

  ‘When do we start?’ Tony asked, and Miss Griff reached for a calendar. ‘We have a long weekend this weekend,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you all start on the following Tuesday?’

  Bob Stone had prepared a list of students who would be likely to go on to senior school, and Miss Griff handed it over to Denis in a manila folder. ‘I’ve got over forty names and addresses for you,’ she said. ‘Perhaps there will be a few more when the time comes, because some families are still waiting to see if their children have been given places in England. So if your school is up and running next year you will be able to start with two full classes. Do you think you’ll be ready for a February start?’

  ‘We’ll do our level best,’ Denis said. ‘I’ve already got a list of places available to rent, and I’ll be looking at them over the next few days. There’s one in particular that looks quite promising. It’s the old manager’s place on the Two Hills tea plantation.’

  Miss Griff clapped her hands. ‘Something like Two Hills would be ideal,’ she said. ‘It’s big enough to house boarders, and it’s got lovely grounds. I think there’s even room for a cricket pitch.’

  Denis went out to look at places that afternoon while I took the children for a picnic on the golf course. It was paradise out on the links in the sunshine, with the air crystal clear, and the grass vividly green. As the children ran on the springy turf they seemed healthier already, with colour in their cheeks and a sparkle in their eyes. Why didn’t we come up here sooner? I asked myself. This is so much healthier than the lowlands. And this is how it will be in England.

  Mrs Prakesh had arranged to take me up to Starlight at four, and we got back to the hotel just as her Oldsmobile rolled into the gravel carpark. Our boxes from the train had already been taken up and so I decided to do some unpacking and sorting out.

  I realised exactly what Nora Warin had meant about isolation when Mrs Prakesh and I began moving about the empty house. Starlight was beautiful, but one did feel cut off and a little bit alone. Mist was closing in, drifting in ragged banks from the jungle hillsides and draping the ornamental conifers at the front of the house with trailing white shrouds. The electricity had not yet been switched on, so that even though it was still afternoon the inside of the house was already quite dark.

  ‘It is very quiet,’ I said as Mrs Prakesh and I unpacked the linen from a tea chest in the hall. ‘Do you feel any sense of isolation up here?’

  Mrs Prakesh shrugged. ‘Some people like the quietness. Others don’t. For myself, I would love to live here. I am living with my husband’s people in a flat in Ringlet. There are six of us in the flat, and all I hear day in and day out is natter, natter, natter. I would give my right arm to live up here.’ Mrs Prakesh was a big, competent, practical woman and I don’t think she had an imaginative bone in her body.

  We worked for an hour, and then it was too dark to see anything. We locked up carefully and were making our way to the car when I had the shock of my life. There was a figure standing beside the car, a dark shape that seemed to melt into the mist even as I looked at it.

  ‘Who the devil was that?’ I asked, my voice not quite as steady as I would have liked.

  ‘Only a Sakai,’ Mrs Prakesh said in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘They sometimes come up to have a look at who is moving in. They will not bother you at all. You probably won’t see any more of them, now that they know you are here.’

  ‘They would be Temiar,’ I said softly, ‘from one of the settlements down on the Telom River.’

  Denis didn’t seem at all surprised when I told him at dinner about seeing the Temiar. ‘No doubt one of Krani Hondai’s people,’ he said. ‘They look after the trails this side of Batu Brinchang. I believe one of the trails comes out of the jungle just behind Starlight.’

  ‘Do you think we could make contact with them?’ I asked.

  Denis shook his head. ‘I don’t think we should. If old Krani Hondai finds out we’re up at Starlight, he’ll batten on us for anything he needs.’ It was unlike Denis to be negative like that but I didn’t press the issue.

  We moved into Starlight the next day. Denis had taken on a cook and an amah recommended by Gordon Fortin to look after us, and they were already ensconced when we arrived. Ah Khow met us at the front door, a tall, thin, vaguely aristocratic man who bowed politely to all of us in turn. ‘Tabek, Tuan,’ he said to Denis finally. ‘
Amah is scrubbing the upstairs bathrooms, but she would want me to welcome you all on her behalf.’

  The children ran screaming up the stairs to bag their rooms while Denis and I helped Ah Khow unload the car. The lonely feeling of the previous afternoon was completely gone. This was a delightful house, I realised, and I felt immediately comfortable with Ah Khow. When I met his wife a moment later, the comfortable feeling was reinforced. She was a smiling, roly-poly woman, with an open honest face and large, competent hands.

  ‘What a delightful couple,’ I said to Denis later. ‘I’m surprised they were available at such short notice.’

  ‘Ah Khow was the chef at the Blue Cow Inn until a week or so ago,’ Denis said. ‘He got the sack from its new owner because of stories he was a Communist rabble-rouser.’

  I clicked my tongue. ‘How terribly unfair. Surely, just being a Communist isn’t a crime any more, is it?’

  It would be an understatement to say that Ah Khow was a good cook. He was a magnificent cook, a peerless practitioner of his craft. And he really turned it on for us that first evening. We started with a chilled consommé, moved on to a crepe entrée, then duck à l’orange. We finished with a trifle so light it literally melted in our mouths.

  ‘Did Mem enjoy dinner?’ Ah Khow asked politely when we had finished, and I left my chair to stand in front of him and grip both his hands in mine.

  ‘Mem has never, ever eaten such a magnificent dinner,’ I said with complete sincerity, and I saw a faint blush touch Ah Khow’s aesthetic features.

  We were all tired but after the children had gone up to bed Denis and I took a walk on the lawns in front of Starlight. It was a balmy night for Cameron Highlands, and the air was fragrant with the smell of roses. Above us the stars seemed to glow through the faint mist like lights painted on a dark ceiling. I slipped my hand into Denis’s and turned my face up to his. ‘I think we are going to be very, very happy here,’ I said, and Denis reached down and kissed me on the lips.

  ‘I hope we’re going to be happy,’ he said. ‘And safe.’

  As we wandered up the staircase to our room we could hear Ah Khow locking the external doors downstairs. It was a comforting, cared-for sound.

  Within a day or two we had all fallen in love with Starlight, and wondered how we could ever have favoured Moonlight. The bedrooms were large and spacious, and all of them opened onto upstairs balconies with breathtaking views over the jungle. There was a huge open fire in the lounge, and a gallery-style dining room with a feature wall of glass through which the misty shape of Mount Brinchang could be seen, looking rather like the pastel image of a mountain in a Roman fresco.

  It was during our second week in Starlight that I woke one night to hear a heavy vehicle grinding up our private road. I leaned across to waken Denis but he was already awake, lying stiff and alert beside me. ‘It’s the party from the office,’ he said immediately. ‘Anthony Pang told me on the phone that they would be coming up tonight.’

  ‘Should someone go up to Moonlight and let them in?’ I asked.

  ‘Ah Khow has it all under control. He’s up there now, waiting for them. Now relax and go back to sleep.’

  But I slipped out of bed and ran out onto the balcony, just in time to see a heavy, canvas-covered truck passing the house, followed by a car. Denis quickly joined me, my dressing gown in his hands. ‘Come inside, darling,’ he said almost sharply. ‘It’s turned quite chilly. I don’t want you to catch a cold.’

  I came back into the room with him, strangely disturbed by the incident. I looked at our fluorescent bedside clock and saw that it was three in the morning, an extraordinary time for holiday-makers to arrive at their destination.

  But what had really worried me was the glimpse I had got under the canopy of the truck. As it had turned the corner just above Starlight, someone had lit a match, illuminating the inside of the canopy for half a second. I may have been wrong, it may have been just a trick of my eyes, but I could have sworn that the truck had been packed with men. I’d even seen, or thought I’d seen, the long, ugly shapes of weapons.

  I didn’t say anything at the time. I don’t quite know why – perhaps because of the sheer absurdity of what I thought I’d seen. But I did mention it next morning while we were having breakfast, and Denis chuckled.

  ‘Soldiers? Guns? What nonsense, darling!’ he said, pouring me a second cup of coffee. ‘They would have stacked their gear in the back of the truck, that’s all. A sensible thing to do too, if you ask me: bring the whole lot up together. The truck’s gone back to Tapah, by the way. It went past about seven but you were fast asleep.’

  We were sitting on the balcony in the pale morning sunshine, the breakfast things laid out on a rattan table. ‘But if they didn’t have anything to hide, why did they come up at that unearthly hour?’ I persisted.

  Denis gave a long-suffering sigh. ‘If they had left KL late in the evening, it would have taken them at least until three in the morning to get here.’ He chuckled dismissively. ‘I’m quite sure that there’s nothing untoward going on up at Moonlight. But if you are worried we’ll wander up there after breakfast and have a look around. We could say hullo to our new neighbours at the same time.’

  We walked up about eleven, coming around the bend in the road to find Moonlight looking absolutely normal. There was no truck, no soldiers, no pile of weapons. Just a few sleepy Chinese from Denis’s old office, chatting quietly on the front terrace.

  The first to catch sight of us was Mr Soong, the man who had tried to prevent me entering Denis’s office. He got quickly to his feet, bobbing his head politely. ‘Tabek, Tuan!’ he called. ‘Tabek, Mem!’

  I didn’t know any of the others but they were equally polite. They were fit, tough-looking younger men, obviously from the cargo-handling side of the business. Using a truck – probably a company truck – to bring up their luggage suddenly seemed precisely the thing they would do. I felt a little silly about my fears of the morning and went out of my way to play the gracious neighbour.

  ‘If there is anything you need, please don’t hesitate to come over and ask for it,’ I said. ‘We’re pretty well established. Ah Khow has everything anyone could possibly want.’ They all nodded and smiled politely, but I got the impression that only Mr Soong understood English.

  Walking back to Starlight I had only one more query for Denis. ‘How can they afford it?’ I asked. ‘I mean, afford a holiday up here? They’re nice enough young men, but they seem quite out of place in a bungalow like Moonlight.’ I wasn’t being snobbish, just realistic. In the 1940s it was unheard of for a group of young Chinese office workers, or perhaps godown labourers, to live like English gentlemen in a hill-station resort.

  ‘They are reasonably wealthy men, Norma,’ Denis said severely. ‘Don’t forget that I passed the company over as a pretty profitable concern. We Europeans are going to have to get used to the idea of living with Asians on even terms.’

  But it still didn’t sound right to me. Why would fit young men stick themselves away in a house like Moonlight? Surely, the bright lights of Singapore would have been more to their taste. I shook my head uncertainly, and was about to say something further when Denis suddenly dropped to one knee, pointing into the thick foliage at the side of the road.

  ‘A pitcher plant,’ he said. ‘Have a look at this. It lures insects with the promise of a drink, and then traps anything foolish enough to crawl inside. The plant digests what it captures just as we digest food in our stomachs.’ He picked up a tiny beetle from the leaf mould and dropped it into the green pitcher. Almost immediately a ‘lid’ folded down, sealing the opening. Of course I had heard about the pitcher plant but I’d never seen one, and its deliberate, almost predatory action rather shocked me.

  I dreamed about the pitcher plant that night. It had turned into a creeper that swarmed all over Starlight, strangling the house and trapping us inside. Towards the end of the dream Malcolm Bryant appeared, the old KL version of Malcolm in his police uniform. ‘Yo
u’re well and truly trapped now, Nona,’ he was saying. ‘And it’s entirely your own fault. I did warn you.’

  I woke up sweating despite the cool night air and lay with my heart thumping and my eyes wide open. Through the window I could see the jungle-clad ridges marching away to the horizon like waves at sea. There was a quarter moon, drifting through high, filmy banks of mist. It was indescribably beautiful. So beautiful that my terror slowly ebbed away, replaced by a feeling of awe, and then of exultation. I could feel the warmth of Denis’s body close to me, radiating a sense of comfort and security. In the distance somewhere, perhaps down at the Golf Club, I could just hear the faintest sound of music, transported on a vagrant breeze.

  ‘I am a lucky, lucky girl,’ I said to myself. ‘I’m safe in the ulu with the man I love, and with my children around me. Nothing can touch us here, nothing can spoil this loveliness.’

  The next morning was 16 June 1948, and nightmare things began to happen up and down the Malayan peninsula. The first hint of trouble was in the morning papers, which contained reports about the sudden disappearance of the Communist regiments from all the towns and villages of Malaya. ‘Could it be,’ the Malay Mail asked in its editorial, ‘that Chin Peng, the Secretary-General of the Malayan Communist Party, has gone stark staring mad and led his forces back into the jungle? Could it be that this man, who has been a guest of His Majesty the King in London, is going to throw away the good will earned by his soldiers in the war against the Japanese by waging a futile, suicidal war against the forces of law and order?’

  The answer was not long in coming. At eight o’clock in the morning, three members of a Communist regiment rode up to the office of the Elphil Rubber Estate in Perak. They parked their bicycles beside the front door and ran up the steps with their pistols drawn. The manager, Arthur Walker, an old Malaya hand loved by his workers for his fairness and generosity, confronted them.