by Anne Weale
“In that case I’ll say good-night.”
“Good night.”
The next morning Jonathan announced that since her injured ankle would confine her to the rest house he thought they might as well return to the estate. They could, he added without enthusiasm, have a holiday on the hill later in the year. Alex made no demur. In her present mood she did not care if she never saw the rest house again.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Alex took the wailing baby from its mother’s arms and laid it gently on the padded surface of what Jonathan called her operating slab. The infant’s body was clammy with sweat and its little brown face blotched with tears. The cause of the trouble was an angry red boil under its fat right arm.
Aware that the parents were watching her with mingled hope and suspicion, Alex swabbed the armpit with antiseptic and while Rama held the child still she carefully lanced the boil. The baby bellowed its protest and the mother—a young Indian woman already cumbersome with her sixth pregnancy—moved forward. For a moment Alex feared she would snatch the little boy away, but the father said something in Tamil and the woman hesitated and then stood back murmuring resentfully.
As Alex fastened the dressing in place the child’s sobs lessened and presently with a final indignant hiccup it stopped crying and stared up at her with wide inquiring eyes.
“There you are, my chicken. You’ll be as right as rain in no time.” She tickled its plump tummy and the baby gurgled with laughter.
Immediately the atmosphere, so tense a moment ago, lightened, and with broad smiles and voluble thanks the Indian woman scooped up her son and went off across the compound, moving with a graceful undulating saunter that even her swollen body could not spoil.
Wearily Alex took off her white apron and sank onto the couch.
“Cold drink, mem?” Mat appeared with a large jug of iced lime juice.
“Bless you, Mat. I expect Rama would like some, too. She must be as tired as I am.”
“Soon too many people come, mem.” Mat held a light for her cigarette.
“I want them all to come.” Alex looked down the list of names she had entered in her logbook during the afternoon. Eleven patients. Not bad going considering it was only six weeks since she had started the clinic and for the first two afternoons nobody had come at all.
Finishing her drink, she helped Rama clear away the dressings and medicines and went to her bedroom to shower and change before Jonathan came home. Tired and hot as she was, she felt a deep sense of satisfaction, as if the long afternoon had been a milepost that she had not expected to pass.
But if the clinic was beginning to be a success it was a solitary achievement. Her relationship with Jonathan was as much of an impasse as on the day they drove back from their honeymoon. If anything the situation had been worsened by an incident that had occurred a few days after their return from the hill.
One morning a Taiping merchant had delivered a small crate to the bungalow. Inside was an exquisite jade figurine of the Chinese goddess of mercy—a wedding present from Carey Blake. Alex had been admiring the statuette when Jonathan came home unexpectedly, and when she told him that it was from Carey he had been so terrifyingly angry that for the first time she had felt really afraid of him. White with fury, he had told her that if he ever saw the jade figure again he would throw it into the rubbish pit.
Since then they had been living in a state of almost complete estrangement. Jonathan spent all his time at the factory or out on inspections and when he did come home he spoke only when he was obliged to. Sometimes Alex felt she could not bear another day, but pride would not let her seek sanctuary with the Lances.
This evening when Jonathan came home he looked worn-out and her heart ached for him. She longed to smooth the lines of fatigue from his forehead.
“Jonathan, would you mind if I asked Pippa to stay with us for a few days?” she asked.
“Invite whomever you wish,” he said. “This is your home.”
“Charles has been sent to Hong Kong for six weeks, so I expect she will be glad of a change,” Alex explained.
Pippa arrived the following weekend and Alex’s spirits lifted a little at her merry face and spate of chatter. With the pride of any new housewife she showed Pippa around the bungalow.
“You are lucky, Alex,” Pippa said enviously. “When I get married I shall have to live in a succession of married quarters. Isn’t it fun being the mistress of the house? I was frightfully disappointed that Jonathan couldn’t come to the airport. I’m dying to see him now that he’s an old married man. Have you mellowed him, duckie, or is he still the strong silent planter?”
“I think Jonathan will always be rather silent,” Alex said, flushing.
“Isn’t it fun, though, being married I mean? Sharing things and having someone to talk to in the middle of the night if you want to?”
“I thought you said you were going to have separate suites so that your husband wouldn’t see you cutting your toenails and so forth.”
“Hmm, well, I’ve been thinking it over and I’m not sure if separate suites aren’t a bit too regal to be really cozy,” Pippa said solemnly. “By the way, are you having a baby yet?”
Alex laughed, but even to her own ears it had a hollow ring.
“We’ve only been married seven weeks,” she pointed out.
“It seems ages since you left,” Pippa said. “I do miss you, Alex.”
Alex was relieved to see that when Jonathan came home that evening he was making an effort to be gay. At the same time the strain of pretending they were a normal happily married couple was almost more than she could endure. She half wished that she had not invited Pippa to come.
“I do envy you both. We shan’t be able to get married for at least another six months and even then Charles will be at sea half the time,” Pippa said with a sigh as Mat poured out coffee.
Alex stole a glance at Jonathan. He was smiling at Pippa but there was no mirth in his eyes. She saw that a pulse in his temple was beating.
She said hastily, “How is your mother, Pippa?”
“Darling, you are absentminded. I told you that she was running around in circles organizing a sale of crafts.”
“Oh, yes, so you did. I forgot.” Alex flushed.
“By the way, did you have good weather on your honeymoon?” Pippa said brightly. “It can be pretty dreary up there when it rains all the time.”
“Marvelous weather. Actually I sprained my ankle on the second day, so we decided to come home.”
“Oh, what ghastly luck. Still, I suppose it is better to be at home with a sore foot.” Pippa grinned. “How did you come to sprain it? Was Jonathan beating you?”
“I slipped on a rock.” Alex bit her lip. Everything that Pippa said was like a barb. She sighed with relief when Jonathan said that he was going to have a word with the guards.
It was an hour before he came back and Pippa said she was tired and would they mind if she went to bed. Alex felt that if her friend said, “You are so lucky” just once more she would scream.
Poor Pippa, she thought lying in bed some time later. How was she to know the number of bricks she had dropped? Better that she should drop a hundred bricks than find out the truth.
The visit passed quickly, and when it was time for Pippa to leave Alex felt a sinking feeling in her heart. Now the evenings would be silent again. Jonathan would immerse himself in a pile of business documents and she would get on with her sewing and the days would continue to drag by, each one widening the rift between them.
“Goodbye, darling. Persuade Jonathan to bring you over to Penang soon. We can have a shopping orgy and he and daddy can discuss big business,” Pippa said, hugging her.
Alex waved goodbye as the car disappeared through the compound gates. She turned back to the bungalow with a faint sigh of relief. Thank heaven Pippa did not guess the truth.
Perhaps Pippa would not have guessed anything had she not woken up on the second night of her stay and heard t
he muffled sound of sobbing through the bedroom wall. She had been surprised to note that Jonathan and Alex did not share a room, but then many people preferred not to do so in the humid Malayan climate. But having heard Alex crying—and Pippa could see no good reason for a bride of seven weeks to weep herself to sleep—her sharp eyes began to notice other things and by the time she left she had a very clear notion of the situation.
“Mommy will be pleased to hear how well Alex looks and how happy she is now,” she said to Jonathan as they drove through the main gates of the estate. “We were all so worried about her when she first came to Penang.
Jonathan glanced sharply at her and she grinned guilelessly at him and went on, “Of course it was obvious to us that she was madly in love with you but we couldn’t understand why, if you loved her, you let her come to Penang. We realized later that it was because you couldn’t very well court her while she was under your roof.”
Jonathan said nothing and Pippa eyed him slyly.
“Actually I think you must have hidden your feelings a bit too well and she thought you didn’t care for her after all, because anyone could see she didn’t give a hoot for Mr. Blake.”
She felt Jonathan stiffen.
“Poor darling,” Pippa said thoughtfully. “It must have been the last straw for her when he burst in at the reception and asked her to marry him. Alex is so frightfully tenderhearted; she must have hated having to tell him that she was in love with you and that she’d just been married.”
“Did Alex tell you about that?” he asked.
“Only the bare bones,” Pippa said airily. “Was she very upset about it on your journey to Maxwell Hill? I had visions of her sobbing all the way and people thinking you were ill-treating her. Though I suppose she was so happy about being married to you that it rather swamped her concern for Carey.”
Jonathan made an inarticulate sound that might have meant anything.
“I hope you won’t be cross with me for saying this,” Pippa added, “but there was a time when I thought Alex was crazy to want to marry you.”
“May one ask why?” Under his sardonic tone she could detect the note of urgency.
“Well, you used to be such a stiff-necked creature, and Alex is so warmhearted and impulsive that I thought you might hurt her feelings by being too remote and dignified.”
“You flatter me,” Jonathan said.
“Anyway, it’s all turned out for the best,” Pippa said with a sentimental sigh. “You’re quite human and Alex looks like the cat that’s swallowed the canary.”
For the rest of the journey they discussed trivialities, and Pippa was amused and relieved to note that Jonathan seemed in a most unflattering hurry to see the back of her. Hardly had they said goodbye before he was sprinting back to the car. She smiled to herself. Thank goodness Charles wasn’t the strong silent type.
Jonathan drove back to the estate as if the entire terrorist army was on his tail. Thank God for Pippa. But for her ingenuous chatter he might never have understood his blind folly.
All these weeks his jealousy of Carey Blake had grown like a wound in his heart. Blind with it, he had refused to see the truth.
What was it Pippa had said? “Of course it was obvious to us that she was madly in love with you...”
But had he killed that love? Had his coldness toward her turned love to loathing? If only he had asked her to explain the scene with Blake. But no. Stiff with pride, he had made his own interpretation and, by heaven, in the past seven weeks he had paid for his blindness. Every night as he tossed and turned he had wanted to go to her, to ask her to forget Carey, to give their marriage a chance. But always his own arrogance had held him back and she, poor little sweet, had retreated further into her shell until there was nothing left between them.
He wrenched the wheel over and swung through the estate gates in a frenzy of impatience. The car was scarcely at a standstill before he sprang out and leaped up the steps.
“Alex! Alex, where are you?”
The veranda was deserted and her bedroom door, left ajar, showed him that she was not there.
He saw Mat crossing the compound and shouted, “Where is mem? Have you seen her, Mat?”
“Mem is gone, tuan.” Mat looked apprehensive. “You go, mem go.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
When the car had gone Alex felt intolerably restless.
The house and compound seemed a prison and she longed to go outside, anywhere to escape the sense of being hemmed in. In the old days she would have been able to walk through the rubber groves, but now it would be foolhardy to go outside the perimeter fence.
Mat was polishing the dining table.
“Is this the day Rama visits her mother?” Alex asked.
“Yes, mem. Rama takes the bus to fourth mile.”
“Could I go with her, Mat?”
He looked doubtful.
“Mem won’t like the bus,” he said. “Indian, Chinese, Malay women take the bus. Mem take the car.”
Alex bit her lip thoughtfully. It was true that before the war European women would not have dreamed of traveling by public bus and some diehards still considered it lowering to British prestige. In Alex’s view this was a pack of nonsense and she was glad that the influx of military families had destroyed the old regime when Europeans regarded themselves as superior beings duty-bound to preserve a false dignity.
“Nonsense. Ask Rama if I can go with her,” she said determinedly.
Mat went away and came back with Rama dressed in her best batik sarong and a yellow silk kebaya, a veil draped modestly over her glossy dark hair.
“Tuan won’t like mem to go,” he said dubiously. “Che Khatijah live in kampong—no shops, no film shows. Not good kampong.”
It took Alex five minutes to overcome his arguments and explain that she merely wanted a ride on the bus, not a shopping excursion, and even though Rama was obviously pleased at a chance of presenting the mem to her family, Mat still looked uneasy.
The bus was crowded with Tamil and Malay women, a couple of Chinese youths and an old Malay wearing the round cap of a pilgrim to Mecca. They all stared at Alex with eager curiosity. The road to the kampong ran in the opposite direction to Taiping, and turned and twisted alarmingly so that the fat Chinese driver was perpetually tugging at the wheel to negotiate the bends. Every now and then he took his hands off the wheel to mop his dripping brow, grabbing the wheel again just in time to swing around another curve.
Kampong Batu—like every other Malay village—comprised a group of attap houses built on stone or wood stilts around a dusty open space where chickens scratched, children played and several mangy dogs lolled in the sun scratching themselves for fleas. The arrival of a European woman was evidently an unprecedented event, for as they approached, the dogs began to bark, the chickens to cluck, the children to shout and from every house heads poked forth to view this phenomenon.
As they walked toward Rama’s home, an old lady with gray hair and a wrinkled face appeared in the doorway and greeted Rama with a flood of interrogative Malay. This was Che Khatijah, and something in the sharp glance she shot at her unexpected visitor as Rama introduced them reminded Alex of Miss Emmeline.
For all her humble attap home and rough work-worn hands Che Khatijah had a gracious hospitality to match that of any wealthy European hostess. She gestured for Alex to sit down on a chair brought from within the house by a small boy and, seating herself on a box, inquired politely if the Tuan Fraser was in good health.
For over an hour Alex talked to the old lady, intrigued to find that, unlike most Malay matrons, she had a remarkably acute grasp of life beyond her own village. By the time Rama said they must leave Alex felt soothed and relaxed. She said a cordial farewell, promising to come again.
The bus was late, and after standing for a quarter of an hour in the sun Alex was very glad to sit down again. They were rounding a bend about two miles down the road when the driver gave a sharp yelp of alarm and the vehicle lurched to a s
tandstill, throwing the passengers out of their seats and dislodging a basket of durian fruit from the pile of luggage by the door.
A clamor of panic ran through the bus; women screamed, children began to whimper and the men jostled frantically in the aisle in an effort to see what had happened.
Rama clutched Alex’s arm, her soft brown eyes dilated with alarm. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the uproar died down and in the nervous silence Alex heard a rough Chinese voice ordering everyone into the road.
It was not until she had helped a Chinese woman with a baby in her arms to get down that she saw the four stocky, uniformed figures, rifles at the ready, surrounding the frightened passengers. An ambush!
She saw that the cause of their precipitate halt was a log rolled into the roadway. The terrorists wasted no time. While two men stood cover, the two others began collecting money and jewelry from their petrified victims. All four bandits were quite young, and under their stained green tunics their bodies were thin to the point of emaciation. She tried dazedly to remember what traffic there had been on the road during the outward journey, and could recall only a bullock cart. The nearest police station was more than two miles away; resistance was futile.
It was then, for the first time, that she thought of the peculiar danger of her own situation. Bus holdups were frequent enough and usually the terrorists were satisfied to relieve the passengers of their valuables and bum the bus. But how would they react to the presence of a European?
A shiver of fear crawled down her spine and all the tales of horrible outrages that she had ever heard echoed through her mind in grim detail.
At last one of the collectors reached her. A little murmur ran through the group. They, too, were aware of her danger. Fighting down terror, Alex produced her purse and held it out. The man snatched it roughly from her hand, spat contemptuously, and seemed about to move on when the glitter of diamonds caught his eye. Greedily he indicated her rings. Fearing that she might easily endanger the others as well as herself, Alex gave the opal engagement ring to him without protest. But he was not satisfied. Stuffing it into his pocket, he made a grab at her wedding ring.
