“Go ahead.” She offered me the packet but I refused.
“So, how long?” she asked again, exhaling towards the ceiling.
“Belinda and I weren’t divorced ...”
“Oh!” Sophie said, taking her hand from mine.
I smiled, and this time I put my hand on hers. “I didn’t say aren’t, I said weren’t. She died in April this year.”
There were a few seconds silence as Sophie sat and looked at me. She stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette in the foil ashtray.
“I’m sorry, Richard. I wouldn’t have asked if I had known.”
“If you’d known you wouldn’t have had to ask. You didn’t know and, under the circumstances, it was probably an appropriate question.” I drank the rest of my coffee and looked around for the Chinese girl. She was seeing to another couple who had arrived about five minutes earlier. “Belinda died of cancer in April after a brave fight.”
“I’m so sorry, Richard, but for the right reason this time. Do you have any children?”
I nodded. “I have thirteen-year old twins, Isabelle and David. And you?”
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk about Belinda, I did, but such situations can be awkward and I had found that people felt they ought to ask further questions but didn’t quite know what to ask. I decided to save Sophie any embarrassment.
“I have a daughter, Emma. She’s the same age as Isabelle and David.” When I didn’t say anything she added, “I’ve been on my own now for about nearly six years … not that I’m counting.”
“On your own?”
“Well, I mean without my husband. We divorced in ninety-four and since then I suppose I can say I have been on my own. Emma’s away at school which means we see each other at exeats, half-terms and holidays. She goes to her father sometimes but his wife seems to want to sever all connections and isn’t keen on Emma going there. I feel so sorry for Emma, she loves her father but he dotes on the latest model. Poor Emma is paying the price.”
I managed to attract the waitress’s attention as she passed the table. “More coffee and a brandy?” I asked Sophie.
She nodded.
I remembered that the brandy was a special Coca Cola. “I find such situations very sad,” I said, wondering why any sane man would want someone like Sophie out of his life.
“I’m thirty-seven years old and at thirty-one I was replaced by someone younger. It’s as simple as that but still a little humiliating.” She reached for her cigarettes. There was the expected bitterness in her voice. “Let’s say that my ego was severely dented.” After lighting her cigarette she added, “No, don’t let’s say that, let’s say what I mean. The bastard was tired of me, some little tart opened her legs for him and that was it for me, cast aside as though I didn’t matter at the ripe old age of thirty-one.” Her eyes began to water, and I wondered whether the alcohol had taken longer to work on her than it had on me. “She didn’t last long either. He is now a couple of months short of forty and two years ago he married a twenty-one year old. Why are men such bastards?”
I was slightly amused by her question but didn’t show it. Sophie was opening her heart, albeit her openness was alcohol induced, but she was still saying what she wanted to say. I wondered when she had last felt able to do that. I wasn’t flattering myself but I got the impression, as I had before, that the Sophie on the surface was different to the real Sophie. I doubted whether many people got to see the latter.
I didn’t actually know what to say. She had been hurt, and as far as I could tell, she was still hurting.
A genuine compliment, though it was due would be misplaced, but silence wasn’t appropriate either. I wondered why I was even bothering to think like that. Why did it matter? I wasn’t sure that I wanted this outwardly strong-willed woman to start crying on my shoulder. I could cope quite easily with her confidence, even dominance, but feminine weakness wasn’t in her character, or so I believed, and it threw me.
I settled for, “Not all men are bastards.”
She looked at me with slightly glazed eyes, a definite frown on her forehead. “I didn’t mean to imply they were, Richard.” This time her fingers didn’t reach for the back of my hand but rested against my arm. “Mama Wong’s was an experience, and one I wouldn’t have missed for the world but I’m ready to leave now.”
Fortunately, when we got outside a taxi was about to move off, having deposited a rather rowdy group of Europeans at the door. He beamed when he realised he had a return fare. The heat was oppressive and, rather like Mama Wong’s, the taxi wasn’t air-conditioned. The short trip back to the hotel didn’t generate any further conversation, the only noise came from the engine of the rather clapped-out Mercedes. Either the tappets needed adjusting or his little ends were on the blink. Our driver appeared unperturbed.
Sophie stared at the floor indicator in the lift as we rose swiftly to the top floor in the Sheraton Utama. A simple shake of her head told me she didn’t want another coffee before retiring. She stood a couple of feet away from me, her arms hanging loosely by her side. The change in her mood since she had introduced her wayward ex-husband into the conversation still confused me.
For some reason I had expected to be grilled about my day at sea with Abby, and conversely I had expected to have the opportunity to find out a little more about what she actually did. Neither expectation was realised. The evening was normal. We met on the plane yesterday, again in the pool this morning, had breakfast together and then went for a fish and chip supper. We were behaving as though we’d known each other a good deal longer than we had.
The lift doors opened and Sophie stepped out into the wall-to-wall carpeted corridor and waited with her back to me.
“I’ve got some decent brandy in my room courtesy of Robert Cruickshank. Would you like a nightcap?” she asked without turning round.
Before I could answer, she reached for my hand led me down the corridor towards her room. My mind was screaming, telling me to stop now. But my brain and my legs seemed to be disconnected, and rather like a lapdog I allowed myself to be guided away from sensibility into what had to be fantasy. I tried to call upon Belinda, I wanted to hear her telling me not to be stupid but I had temporarily lost contact.
After going into her room, Sophie said, “God, it’s nice to get back into the air-conditioning. I don’t know how these people survive day-in day-out in these conditions. The brandy’s in the bedside table and I’ll have a large one,” she added before disappearing into the bathroom.
I went over to the window. Although it was only a few minutes after nine-thirty, there was little traffic on the road below me. Each car passed in silence forty feet below. If the cars were sparse, the pedestrians were non-existent. It could have been four o’clock in the morning anywhere else: in Brunei it was only mid-evening.
“Sorry, the glasses were on the bathroom shelf,” Sophie said, coming out of the bathroom.
After her invitation and remark about the air-conditioning, I thought perhaps her motive for going into the bathroom was to slip into something cooler, but I was wrong.
She came over to the window and handed me the cut-glass tooth-mugs.
“I’ll have a large one,” she said again.
I had misjudged her and the situation, and allowed my own expectations to cloud my judgment. Standing next to her as we sipped our brandies, the lights of Bandar Seri Begawan flickering in front of us, I felt confused.
Sophie’s presence was obviously the main source of my confusion, but there was also Belinda and Isabelle to consider. I didn’t know what was expected of me and I felt like a teenager on his first date. Belinda and I had been lovers and soul mates for over twenty years, I didn’t want to break what we had … in my mind that bond still existed.
Nevertheless, as I watched Sophie when we were in Mama Wong’s I wanted to kiss her and I wanted to see if my imagination was telling the truth about her. I accepted the chemistry was there – for me anyway – and therefore my feelings were tho
se of any heterosexual man but it was because of this bond I still had with Belinda … and promise I’d made to Isabelle … that how I felt then and now was wrong.
I loved Belinda with all my heart.
I was still in love with her and nobody could ever replace her, nobody had any right to try to replace her. What I felt towards Sophie might have been normal but it was too basic to replace what Belinda and I had. Our love for each other was spiritual. If I ever touched another woman, then she would be the last female I was intimate with, and not Belinda.
She had been and still was my life, but although I accepted she was now dead and buried in the graveyard in Medbourne, for me she would always exist. She was there in my mind the way she had been in my life.
It was all happening too soon.
Chapter Seventeen
I did not see Sophie again until after she had been to The High Commission for her official lunch. For me another troubled night’s sleep followed our evening out but by the time I crawled out of bed and rang her room she had already left.
This time and in theory, I could control what kept me awake but it was to no avail. Feelings and emotions were perhaps something less controllable than I thought because they had a way of manifesting themselves into images in the mind. I woke up feeling as though I hadn’t slept at all.
Ringing Abby at home I used the excuse that I had probably had too much sun the previous day and did he mind if we didn’t meet up again until the following day. We hadn’t actually agreed to meet but I thought it would be best to touch base with him, especially as he would be waiting to hear if Sophie had said anything. I kept my report simple – there was actually nothing to report – to satisfy his obvious concern over the security of the passage of any information.
Nazira had answered the phone.
“Good morning, Richard.” Her voice suggested that she was having a silent chuckle to herself. I doubted whether Abby would have told her anything about the Chinese jets, nor what we actually discussed. However, as the PA to the Supreme Commander of the Royal Brunei Armed Forces, she probably knew more than she would tell either of us.
“Thanks again for a lovely meal, Nazira. Your hospitality was as outstanding as ever,” I said.
“My pleasure, Richard. I hope we will see you again before you go back to England.”
“Of course you will.” If she had known the real reason for my being in Brunei she may have asked why we weren’t seeing each other every day. “I don’t know how much longer I’ll be in Bandar but maybe you and Abby could come to the Sheraton Utama for a meal.” Before Nazira had even answered my suggestion I realised it was a little silly.
“I can entertain whom I like in my own house, Richard, but unfortunately eating in public, and especially with infidels such as you,” she said laughingly, “is still frowned upon, and with Abby’s position we have to be careful.”
“Yes, I’m sorry. That was stupid of me. I forgot I was an infidel.”
Nazira laughed. “Of the worst kind, Richard, and don’t you forget it. I’ll call him. I presume it’s him you want to speak to.”
“Yes, please.”
Her voice dropped slightly. “Take care, Richard and don’t put yourself in danger.”
Abby and I spoke for only a couple of minutes. I told him that my conversation with Sophie had been about our respective children and other innocent subjects that two people discuss when they are getting to know each other. His tone indicated his disappointment but we agreed that he would ring me the following morning and we would arrange to meet.
Cooling off as best I could in the hotel pool after a late breakfast, Nazira’s coded warning was on my mind. It was a strange thing for her to say, and yet I couldn’t ask for an explanation.
After a few hours by the pool and a light lunch I went for a walk into the centre of Bandar Seri Begawan and took a water taxi to Kampong Ayer, the Water Village. The sheer engineering brilliance of being able to build a small town on stilts strong enough to withstand the fast current of the River Brunei had always fascinated me.
Nearly ten thousand people lived in the village, complete with shops and a wooden mosque. By going to the village, as well as to admire the engineering, I also I hoped I would spot anyone from whatever faction that thought I was important enough to follow.
Was I being overly mistrustful?
After thoroughly enjoying my walk and forgetting that I ought to be looking over my shoulder, I went back to the hotel and resumed my position on the pool terrace with a cold orange and lemonade and a two-day old copy of The Times,
Sophie appeared minutes later.
She walked slowly across the terrace, the heels of her sling-backs clacking on the tiles. She was wearing a floral dress, a sun-hat and sunglasses. I stood up and she sat in the chair opposite mine, taking the hat off once she was under the umbrella.
“God,” she said, “that was hard work. I’ll have a quick drink and then get changed for a swim. How’s your day been?”
“Lazy,” I commented, signalling to the waiter who was hovering by the doors.
While she was quenching her thirst, Sophie told me about the lunch and having to be polite to people she wasn’t particularly keen on. They were all European, mainly British, and boring. It was supposed to be a relatively informal curry-lunch that the High Commissioner held every month, but it struck her that the men and their wives all felt they needed to impress, to score some brownie points.
Evidently, there was one exception. He was an Army Colonel who was the senior British Loan Service Officer on detachment to the Sultan’s Armed Forces. Sophie told me that she found him intriguing: he was about forty-five, tall, slim and handsome with close-cropped blond hair and the lightest blue eyes she had ever seen. She thought she recognised him from somewhere but, when they got chatting, they couldn’t discover where it might have been.
“He was like a coiled snake,” Sophie said. “He was sociable and attentive but I could see him watching what everybody else was doing, He wasn’t rude, but he was aware. His wife was reptilian as well, but she resembled a toad rather than a snake.” Sophie looked at me over her glasses to see how I was reacting to her observation, a smile on her lips. “I had obviously spent too long with her husband and they left early but not before he told me he’d been in the Special Forces at some stage in his career.”
After finishing her drink, Sophie went to get changed, had a swim, and then rejoined me at the table.
“That’s better,” she said, towelling herself dry before applying copious quantities of sun-cream. She had a slight tan, probably picked up from Singapore and the other places she had already been to. The cut of her red swimming costume complimented her slim figure and I could see out of the corner of my eye that the waiter was back on station.
“Time for tea,” I suggested, lifting my hand and calling the waiter over.
“So,” she said once the waiter had begrudgingly left. “What are your plans for the rest of the day?”
Sophie had said that she was in Brunei until Tuesday and I assumed she would be at The High Commission for most of that time. If I was going to find anything out for Abby I would have to make use of every opportunity.
I looked at my watch. “It’s just gone four and it’ll be dark by six-thirty, seven o’clock. We could always go down to the beach for a couple of hours, if I can find a taxi that is.”
“There’s no need. I brought back one of the cars from the pool at the Commission. This beach, are we likely to be surrounded by locals?”
“I doubt it, not at this time on a Sunday.”
“I’ve got a bottle of red wine in my room. We can sit and watch the sun go down.”
While Sophie disappeared to get changed, I cancelled our order for tea and managed to get a cool box from the hotel kitchen into which they kindly put some leftovers from the cold buffet lunch: a couple of bags of ice would keep the food fresh.
We drove out on the Muara road, turning off onto the track that would t
ake us to Cave beach. I was pleased when I managed to find the turning straight away because it certainly wasn’t that easy to spot from the main road. I had only been there twice before with a couple of friends I had made among the British civilians who worked for the Sultan on contract.
They had left Brunei in 1997 and we had since lost touch.
The beach was a couple of hundred yards from the road and we could only get the car about half way down the track. It was bumpy and needed a bit of skilful driving but Sophie seemed to enjoy the experience. Leaving the car, the jungle’s humidity and the cackling of some birds brought the scene to life. I didn’t know how often Sophie had been off the beaten track in Brunei, or anywhere else if it came to that, but if her furtive looks into the undergrowth were anything to go by, not often. I gave her a reassuring smile as I took the cool box and towels from the boot of the car.
“Peace and tranquillity,’ I said.
She reached into the car for her bag. “If you say so, but I reserve judgement,” she said, still looking about her.
“If we stay on the track the snakes and spiders will leave us alone,” I said, smiling at her.
“Don’t joke about such things,” she replied. “I hate spiders ... and snakes … and centipedes … and cockroaches … and …”
A single cave – eaten away by the elements in a prominent rock structure – gave the beach its name. The beach wasn’t easy to find, which made it attractive for those who wanted some privacy. It was about fifty yards deep at high tide and about a hundred yards long, forming a half moon of white sand. The jungle provided a backdrop and scattered along the beach were some smaller rocky areas. A fresh water stream divided the beach and, because of the recent storms, it was flowing quite quickly, stirring up the silt as it reached the sea. The cave was to the left of the beach.
Pooh Bridge: conscience stricken Page 19
