Complete Works of Nevil Shute

by Nevil Shute

  I met Wilson-Hays at the United University Club a year later, when he was on leave. He was a tall, dark, quiet man with rather a long face. He said that she had been a little embarrassed to find that he had come to the air-strip to meet her personally; she did not seem to realise that she was quite a well-known person in that part of Malaya. Wilson-Hays knew all about her long before we wrote to him although, of course, he had heard nothing of her since the end of the war. He had sent word to Mat Amin when he got our letter to tell him that she was coming back to see them, and he had arranged to lend her his jeep with a driver to take her the hundred miles or so to Kuala Telang. I thought that very decent of him, and I told him so. He said that the prestige of the British was higher in the Kuala Telang district after the war was over than it was before, due solely to the presence of this girl and her party; he thought she’d earned the use of a jeep for a few days.

  She stayed in the Residency two nights, and bought a few simple articles in the native shops. When she left in the jeep next morning she was wearing native clothes; she left her suitcase and most of her things with Mrs. Wilson-Hays. She took with her only what a native woman of good class would take; she wore a faded old blue and white chequered sarong with a white coatee. She wore sandals as a concession to the softness of her feet, and she carried a plain tan Chinese type umbrella as a sunshade. She had done her hair up on top of her head in the native style with a large comb in the middle of it. She carried a small palm-leaf basket, but Mrs. Wilson-Hays told her husband there was very little in it; she took a toothbrush but no toothpaste; she took a towel and a cake of antiseptic soap and a few drugs. She took one change of clothes, a new sarong and a flowered cotton top to match; she took three small Woolworth brooches and two rings as little presents for her friends, but she took no cosmetics. That was about all she had.

  “I thought her very wise to go like that,” said Wilson-Hays. “If she had gone dressed as an Englishwoman she’d have made them embarrassed. Some of the English residents were quite upset when they heard she’d gone off in native dress — old school tie, and letting down the side, and all that sort of thing. I must say, when I saw her go I thought it was rather a good thing to do.” He paused. “After all, it’s how she was dressed all through the war, and nobody talks about her letting down the side then.”

  It is a long day in a jeep from Kota Bahru to Kuala Telang; the roads are very poor, and there are four main rivers to be crossed which necessitate ferrying the jeep over in a boat, apart from a large number of fords. It took her fourteen hours to cover the hundred miles, and it was dark when they drove into Kuala Telang. There was a buzz of excitement as the jeep drove through the shadowy village, and people came out of their houses doing up their sarongs; there was a full moon that night, so that there was light enough to see to drive. They stopped in front of the headman’s house, and she got out of the jeep a little wearily, and went to him, and put her hands up in the praying gesture, and said in Malay, “I have come back, Mat Amin, lest you should think the white mems have forgotten all about you when their need is past.”

  He said, “We have thought and talked about you ever since you went.” And then there were people thronging about them, and she saw Fatimah approaching with a baby in her arms and a toddler hanging on to her sarong, and she pushed through the crowd and took her by the hand, and said, “It is too long since we met.” And there was Raihana, and Safirah binti Yacob, and Safirah binti Taib, and little Ibrahim who squinted, now grown into a young man, and his brother Samat, and old Zubeidah, and Meriam, and many others some of whom she did not know, because the men had come back from the labour gangs soon after she left Malaya, and there were a number of new faces.

  Fatimah was married to a young man called Derahman bin Ismail, and she brought him forward and presented him to the white mem; Jean bowed before him and wished that she had brought a shawl to pull over her face, as would have been polite when being introduced to a strange man. She put her hand up to her face, and said, “Excuse me that I have no veil.” He bowed to her and said, “It is no matter,” and Fatimah broke in and said, “He knows and everybody knows that the white mems never veiled their faces when they lived with us, because different people have different ways. Oh Djeen, we are so happy that you have come back.”

  She made arrangements with Mat Amin for the accommodation of the driver, and then went with Fatimah to her husband’s house. They asked if she had eaten, and she said no, and they made her a supper of rice and blachan, the highly-spiced paste of ripe prawns and fish that the Malays preserve in an up-ended concrete drain pipe. And presently, tired out, she made a pillow of her palm-leaf bag and lay down on a mat as she had done a thousand times before, and loosened the sarong around her waist, and slept. It would not be entirely accurate to say that she slept well upon the floor after sleeping in a bed for three years. She woke many times throughout the night, and listened to the noises of the night, and watched the moonlight creep around the house, and she was happy.

  She had a talk with Fatimah and Meriam and old Zubeidah next morning, squatting round the cooking-pots behind the house out of the way of the men. “Every day that I have been away I have thought of this place,” she said; it was not precisely true, but near enough. “I have thought of you all living and working as I lived and worked. I was working in England, working in an office at books in the way that women have to work in my country, because, as you know, I am a poor woman and I have had to work all my life to earn my living till I find a husband who suits me, and I am very particular.” The women laughed, and old Zubeidah said, “It is very strange that a woman should earn her living in that way.”

  Meriam said, “There is a woman of our people working in the bank at Kuala Rakit. I saw her through the window. She was doing something with her fingers on a machine, and it went clock-click-click.”

  Jean nodded. “That is how I earn my living in my country, working a machine like that to make a printed letter for the Tuan. But recently my uncle died; he lived far away from me and I had only met him once, but he had no other relatives and I inherited his money, so that now I need not work unless I want to.” A murmur of appreciation went around the women. Two or three more had drifted up to enlarge the circle. “And now, having money of my own for the first time in my life, I thought more of you here in Kuala Telang than ever before, and of your kindness to us when we lived with you as prisoners. And it came to me that I should give a thank-offering to this place, and that this thank-offering should be a present from a woman to the women of Kuala Telang, nothing to do with the men.”

  There was a pleased and excited little buzz amongst the women who surrounded her. Old Zubeidah said, “It is true, the men get everything.” One or two of the women looked shocked at this heresy.

  “I have thought many times,” Jean said, “that there should be a well in this place, so that you should not have to fetch fresh water from the spring morning and evening, but you could walk out of your houses only fifty paces at the most and there would be a well of fresh water with a bucket that you could go to and draw water at any time of the day whenever you had need of cool, fresh water.” There was a little buzz of appreciation again. “There would be smooth stones around the well where you could sit and talk while the young men work the bucket for you. And close beside the well, I would have an atap house for washing clothes with long slabs of smooth stone or concrete arranged so that you could face each other while you wash, and talk, but all surrounded by an atap wall so that the men will not be able to see.” The buzz rose to an excited clamour. “This is what I want to do, as a thank-offering. I will engage a gang of well-diggers, and they shall dig the well, and I will pay masons for the stonework round the top, and I will pay carpenters to build the washing-house. But for the arrangement inside the house I shall want two or three women of experience to advise me how it should be devised, for the height of the slabs, for concrete pools or channels for the water, and so on. This is the gift of a woman for women, and in th
is thing the men shall do what women say.”

  There was a long clamour of discussion. Some of the women were doubtful if the men would ever allow such a thing, and some were doubtful whether it was not impious to wish to alter the arrangements that had satisfied their mothers and their grandmothers before them. But most were avid for the innovation if it could be achieved; once they were used to the idea they savoured it and turned it over, examining it in every detail and discussing where the well should be and where the wash-house, and where the concrete pools should be, and where the drain. At the end of a couple of hours they had accepted the idea whole-heartedly, and Jean was satisfied that it would fill a real need, and that there was nothing that they would have preferred her to give.

  That evening she sat opposite Mat Amin on the small veranda before his house, as she had sat so many times before when matters that concerned the women had to be discussed. She sipped her coffee. “I have come to talk with you,” she said, “because I want to give a thank-offering to this place, that people may remember when the white women came here, and you were kind to them.”

  He said, “The wife has been talking of nothing else all day, with other women. They say you want to make a well.”

  Jean said, “That is true. This is a thank-offering from all the English mems to Kuala Telang, but because we are women it is fitting that it should be a present for the women of this place. When we lived here it was a great labour, morning and evening, to fetch water from the spring and I was sorry for your women when I thought of them, in England, fetching water all that way. That is why I want my thank-offering to be a well in the middle of the village.”

  He said, “The spring was good enough for their mothers and their grandmothers before them. They will get ideas above their station in life if they have a well.”

  She said patiently, “They will have more energy to serve you faithfully and kindly if they have this well, Mat Amin. Do you remember Raihana binti Ismail who lost her baby when she was three months pregnant, carrying this water?” He was shocked that she should speak of such a thing, but English mems would speak of anything. “She was ill for a year after that, and I don’t think she was any good to her husband ever again. If the women had had this well I want to give you as a thank-offering, that accident would not have happened.”

  He said, “God disposes of the lives of women as well as those of men.”

  She smiled gently, “Do I have to remind you, Mat Amin, that it is written, ‘Men’s souls are naturally inclined to covetousness; but if ye be kind towards women and fear to wrong them, God is well acquainted with what ye do.’”

  He laughed and slapped his thigh. “You said that to me many times when you lived here, whenever you wanted anything, but I have not heard it since.”

  “It would be kind to let the women have their well,” she said.

  He replied, still laughing, “I say this to you, Si-Jean; that when women want a thing as badly as they want this well that you have promised them, they usually get it. But this is a matter which concerns the village as a whole, and I must consult my brothers.”

  The men sat in conference next morning, squatting on their heels in the shade of the atap market house. Presently they sent for Jean and she squatted down with them a little to one side as is fitting for a woman, and they asked her where the well was to be put, and where the atap wash-house. She said that everything was in their hands, but it would be convenient for the women if it was on the patch of ground in front of Chai San’s shop, with the atap wash-house west of it and pointing toward Ahmed’s house. They all got up then and went to see the ground and discuss it from all angles, and all the women of the village stood around and watched their lords making this important decision, and Djeen talking with them almost as if she was an equal.

  She did not hurry them; she had lived three years in this village and she knew the slowness of their mental processes, the caution with which all innovations were approached. It took them two days to make up their minds that the well would be a good thing to have, and that the Wrath of God would not descend upon them if they put the work in hand.

  Well-digging is a skilled craft, and there was one family only on the coast who could be entrusted with the work; they lived about five miles from Kuantan. Mat Amin dictated a letter for the Imam to write in the Jawi script, and then they took it into Kuala Rakit and posted it. Jean sent for five sacks of cement from Kota Bahru, and settled down to wait for several weeks while the situation developed.

  She spent much of the time with the fishermen on their boats, or sitting on the beach and playing with the children. She taught them to build sand castles and to play Noughts and Crosses on a chequer drawn with the finger in the sand; she bathed and swam a good deal, and worked for a week in the rice-fields at the time of harvest. She had lived so long with these people that she was patient about the passage of time; moreover, she had a use for time to consider what she was going to do with her life now that she had no further need to work. She waited there for three weeks in idleness, and she did not find it tedious.

  The well-diggers and the cement arrived about the same time, and work commenced. The diggers were a family of an old grey-bearded father, Suleiman, and his two sons, Yacob and Hussein. They spent a day surveying the land and all the arguments for the site chosen for the well had to be gone over once again to satisfy these experts; when work finally began it was done quickly and well. The diggers worked from dawn till dusk, with one at the bottom of the shaft and the other two disposing of the soil on top; they bricked it downwards from the top as they worked, supporting the brickwork upon stakes driven into the earth sides.

  Old Suleiman, the father, was a mine of information to the village, for he travelled up and down the east coast of Malaya building and repairing wells, and so visited most villages from time to time. The men and women of Kuala Telang used to sit around watching the progress of the new well and gossiping with the old man, getting news of their acquaintances and relatives up and down the coast. Jean was sitting there one afternoon, and said to him, “You are from Kuantan?”

  “From Batu Sawah,” said the old man. “That is two hours’ walk from Kuantan. Our home is there, but we are great travellers.”

  She was silent for a moment; then she said, “Do you remember the Japanese officer in charge at Kuantan in the first year of the war, Captain Sugamo?”

  “Assuredly,” the old man replied. “He is a very bad man, and we were glad when he went away. Captain Ichino who came after him was better.”

  Jean was surprised that he did not seem to know that Sugamo was dead; she had supposed that the War Crimes Commission would have taken evidence in Kuantan. She told him, “Captain Sugamo is dead now. He was sent to the Burma-Siam railway, and there he caused many atrocities, and many murders. But the Allies caught him when the war was over, and he was tried for murder, and executed in Penang.”

  “I am glad to hear it,” the old man replied. “I will tell my sons.” He called down the well with the news; it was discussed a little, and then the men went on with their work.

  Jean asked, “Did he do many evil things in Kuantan?” There was one still hideously fresh in her mind, but she could not bring herself to speak of it directly.

  Suleiman said, “Many people were tortured.”

  She nodded. “I saw one myself.” It had to come out, and it did not matter what she said to this old man. “When we were starving and ill, a soldier who was a prisoner helped us. The Japanese caught him, and they crucified him with nails through his hands, and they beat him to death.”

  “I remember that,” the old man said. “He was in hospital at Kuantan.”

  Jean stared at him. “Old man, when was he in hospital? He died.”

  “Perhaps there were two.” He called down the well to Yacob. “The English soldier who was crucified and beaten at Kuantan in the first year of the war. The English mem knew him. Tell us, did that man die?”

  Hussein broke in. “The one who was be
aten was an Australian, not English. He was beaten because he stole chickens.”

  “Assuredly,” the old man said. “It was for stealing the black chickens. But did he live or die?”

  Yacob called up from the bottom of the well. “Captain Sugamo had him taken down that night; they pulled the nails out of his hands. He lived.”

  5

  IN KUANTAN, IN the evening of that day in July 1942, a sergeant had come to Captain Sugamo in the District Commissioner’s house, and had reported that the Australian was still alive. Captain Sugamo found this curious and interesting, and as there was still half an hour before his evening rice, he strolled down to the recreation ground to have a look.

  The body still hung by its hands, facing the tree. Blood had drained from the blackened mess that was its back and had run down the legs to form a black pool on the ground, now dried and oxidised by the hot sun. A great mass of flies covered the body and the blood. But the man undoubtedly was still alive; when Captain Sugamo approached the face the eyes opened, and looked at him with recognition.

  It is doubtful if the West can ever fully understand the working of a Japanese mind. When Captain Sugamo saw that the Australian recognised him from the threshold of death, he bowed reverently to the torn body, and he said with complete sincerity, “Is there anything that I can get for you before you die?”

  The ringer said distinctly, “You bloody bastard. I’ll have one of your black chickens and a bottle of beer.”

  Captain Sugamo stood looking at the wreck of the man nailed to the tree, and his face was completely expressionless. Presently he turned upon his heel and went back to his house. He called for his orderly as he went into the shade, and he told him to fetch a bottle of beer and a glass, but not to open the bottle.