East of India

by East of India (retail) (epub)

  Shuddering at the prospect she closed her eyes and opened them to the sight of her husband’s thrusting buttocks in the dressing table mirror. They were pink, glistening and wobbling like an unset blancmange.

  She lay there, accepting what he was doing but not really taking part. In her mind she was dancing, showing what her body could do, arousing passions in others that she had barely tasted herself.

  Even after their first copulation she’d felt no compunction to meet his firm thrust with a likewise jerk of her own hips. She felt nothing except impatience to have it done with, to retrieve her body and realign it with her thoughts.

  Martin never referred to her pedigree, though once when he’d drunk half a bottle of Johnnie Walker he had asked her to dance for him.

  ‘As you did that night,’ he’d said to her. ‘And not too many clothes,’ he’d added, his fat tongue licking his equally fat lips. ‘Leave your breasts bare.’

  She’d hit him over the head with a dinner plate and run out of the door, locking herself in an outhouse. She’d stayed there all night. Martin had staggered out, knelt outside the door and begged her to come out. She’d refused.

  ‘Come on, girl. You know I don’t like going to bed alone. That big old bed – without you in it – is no good at all.’

  ‘Use your right hand.’

  Martin was a man of the world. He’d known what she’d meant. She could imagine him using his right hand a lot before marrying her. Now it was her that he used: at least once a week, sometimes three times.

  That night he slept alone. In the morning he looked and acted contrite, and never mentioned dancing after that.

  At last Martin made a kind of yelping sound against her ear, stiffened as though he’d just died and slid out of her like an oily, soft slug.

  He never kissed her either before sex or after. Foreplay was horseplay: attempting to tickle her whilst demanding she get her tits out.

  ‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ he said suddenly once he’d got his breath back.

  She averted her eyes from his belly in case she might catch a glimpse of his dormant penis and the hairy loins beyond its gleaming swell. There was nothing she found enticing about Martin’s body and thus made a great effort not to look at it.

  ‘I thought you said the Japanese couldn’t possibly get this far.’

  He slapped her thigh before struggling into an upright position. ‘Better to be safe than sorry, girl. Now get your knickers on. We’re for Singapore.’

  ‘How long will we stay?’

  He fumbled for his socks. ‘Just until we get the all-clear. Shouldn’t be long before they’re whipped. Them damned Japanese ain’t much bigger than Snow White’s bloody dwarfs.’

  Nadine reached for her dressing gown. ‘So are the Chinese. They’re quite small too.’

  He shook his head as he pulled on his socks. ‘You’re right. The Chinese ain’t no different. It won’t be the same trying to knock our army about, especially the Australians. Big and professional, that’s the British Army.’

  Martin was Australian by birth, but colonial material through and through from his broad shoulders and wide girth to his vulgar language. It was easy to imagine some convict ancestor. Martin had that look about him: sturdy, clever though far from refined – especially now, she thought, his naked belly throwing a shadow over his socks, the only item of clothing he’d managed to put on.

  ‘Do you think we’ll ever come back here?’ she asked him.

  ‘Don’t be stupid, girl. Of course we will. Everything will get sorted pretty damn quick, don’t you worry.’

  * * *

  Things were not sorted. Even when the Japanese landed in the north of the peninsula no one really believed that they would succeed in their objective.

  ‘Look at it,’ said Martin as they drove southwards from the plantation towards the relative safety of Fortress Singapore. ‘You need an army of bloody supermen to get through this lot?’

  As they travelled, Nadine eyed the trinity of jungle, tin mines and rubber plantations, the latter offending the eye by the Prussian regularity of their planting, as though they too were soldiers, consistently under threat from the hot, damp jungle. This was full of menaces and wonders, hotter and damper than any Turkish bath, heated and soaked by the radiant mists produced by a sea of emerald green.

  She wondered why the labourers were still there, why they hadn’t run away.

  ‘They’re paid and fed well,’ said Martin when she’d asked him. ‘And they’re loyal.’

  ‘They might not be when the shooting starts.’

  ‘If they run I’ll shoot them my bloody self,’ said Martin.

  Nadine believed him. They were just workers, not soldiers, so why would they stay?

  * * *

  The British enclave in Singapore was acting as though their presence was ordained by God. Nothing could possibly happen to shake their complacency or casual indifference as they sipped their Singapore Slings in the saloon bar at Raffles, or played a chukka on the Officers’ Club polo field.

  At Raffles the British lived an assured life, waited on by white-clad servants with brown skins and courteous manners.

  Even when clouds of Zeroes dropped bombs from a humid sky, no one seemed to notice that Singapore had few aircraft to fall back on.

  ‘Just a foray,’ Martin said. ‘Testing our defences and scurrying away.’

  On a dreadful day in mid-December when HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales were torpedoed, the first panic began. Hordes of Chinese took to the traditional water craft – sampans, junks and fishing boats, anything that would float.

  Despite Martin’s reassurances, the planes came back and more bombs fell on a sunny day when Nadine was out shopping with her friends.

  The British ran for cover and so did those of other races. The afternoon was a shambles. Professional mourners and the brass band following the lead-lined coffin of a Chinese funeral scattered in panic. The coffin was abandoned, the ornate blue-and-gold funeral cloth whipped away by a passing havildar.

  Shading her eyes, Nadine watched the mass of humanity charging across Kavanagh Bridge: brown-faced men carrying chairs and carpets on their heads; plump native women with babies, bundles over their backs, children hanging on to their skirts. She wondered if Martin’s workers were also running. It was more than likely.

  The Singapore seafront, already bristling with barbed wire and gun emplacements, now bristled with people.

  Nadine watched from a distance on a green lawn pierced with the kind of flower beds more usually found in an English park.

  ‘Poor people,’ she murmured.

  ‘Who can blame them? They hate the Japanese, and with good reason.’ Her friend, Lucy Lee van der Meer, daughter of a wealthy Chinese businessman, and wife to the owner of a Dutch copra mine, sounded unusually sombre.

  Nadine sighed. ‘I can’t help thinking we should be leaving too.’

  ‘You sound serious,’ said Lucy.

  ‘Of course I am. I don’t want to be killed. There are too many things I want to do. We should leave. I’m sure we should leave.’

  ‘We can’t do that!’

  Her second companion was Doreen Tracey. She was married to a police officer and although her husband had tried to persuade her to leave, Doreen, who had two children and was four months into expecting another, was having none of it.

  ‘We’re not like these cowardly natives. We have to stand our ground. Our troops will hold them back. You just see if they don’t.’

  Nadine and Lucy exchanged horrified looks. Nadine was moved to comment.

  ‘Doreen, that’s downright unfair. They are not cowards. They have families.’

  Doreen was tall and had chestnut hair that curled around her ears. She always looked well scrubbed, as though both herself and her clothes were freshly laundered and ironed just minutes before exiting the bungalow the family lived in. Today she wore a blue gingham dress with a wide white belt and matching white gloves. Doreen always wore
gloves.

  Lucy and Nadine were both in lemon. Lucy was wearing a traditional cheongsam, the embroidered satin clinging to her body like a second skin. Nadine’s dress was of cotton. They both had the same blue-black hair, and their bodies were the same shape, slim but curvy. From a distance they might have been mistaken as sisters except that Lucy had brown eyes and Nadine’s eyes were grey.

  ‘My father has urged me to leave,’ said Lucy. ‘Like yours, my husband thinks the war will pass us by. But my father thinks otherwise and is rarely wrong.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ Doreen snorted the word and turned to Nadine. ‘What does Martin say?’

  The corners of Nadine’s mouth twitched because she didn’t entirely believe what Martin had said.

  ‘He says we have nothing to fear. We are staying in Singapore until things settle down. It’s just a precaution.’

  ‘Right! That’s settled,’ said Doreen. ‘We’re staying. We have to. I need all hands to help make decorations for Wendy’s birthday. Wendy and William are counting on it, and there’s only days to go until the big event.’

  ‘When is it?’ asked Nadine.

  ‘The twelfth of February.’

  The date hung in the air. Hopefully by then the war would have passed them by.

  The sound of guns firing rumbled over the nearby buildings. Beyond the city, small puffs of smoke stained an otherwise perfect sky.

  The afternoon simmered with heat as befits a city only one degree north of the equator, though the nights were cooler at this time of year.

  They made their way to Doreen’s house for afternoon tea.

  ‘Milk?

  ‘Yes, please.’

  ‘Sugar?’

  ‘No, thank you.’

  ‘Biscuit?’

  ‘No… perhaps, yes…’

  Their talk remained trivial, each woman shuttered inside her own thoughts, waiting for something to happen.

  The sound of explosions sounded close at hand. Nadine exchanged a look with Lucy.

  ‘The causeway?’

  ‘They’ve blown it up!’

  They all gasped. The causeway connected the Malay Peninsula to Singapore Island.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Doreen with a confidence neither of the others felt. ‘Just target practice, I expect.’

  The children were chatting excitedly, the women drinking tea, when the telephone rang. They were not to know it would be the last telephone call any of them would receive for a very long time. They were also not to know that some of them would never hear a telephone ring again.

  Nadine helped William cut out stars from red shiny paper, but looked up when the tone of Doreen’s voice changed for the worse.

  ‘Geoff! You can’t mean that, darling!’

  The others trained unblinking eyes on her face, their expressions taut with anxiety.

  The colour drained from Doreen’s rustic complexion. She paused, her mouth hanging open. ‘Get packed? Now? But how…’

  No one moved. Sensing the gravity of the occasion, even the children fell silent, their attention trained rigidly on the drawings they were colouring in or the winding-up of a toy train.

  Nadine and Lucy held hands. Nadine wondered if her own hand felt as cold as the one she held. She couldn’t bring herself to check; she couldn’t bring herself to drag her attention away from Doreen.

  ‘Martin’s coming to fetch us in the car?’ It was obvious that Doreen was repeating whatever her husband had said word for word for Nadine and Lucy’s benefit. ‘But what about you?’ There was another pause as her husband said something else. Doreen was almost hysterical. ‘You can’t mean it!’

  It was obvious from Doreen’s expression that he did mean it, and whatever was being said was serious – very serious indeed.

  Whether her husband had severed the connection at his end was unclear. Doreen’s face lengthened like that of a wax doll left too close to the fire. Whatever Geoff had said had shocked her to the core. Her confidence was turning blurred and shapeless.

  Feeling a need to take charge of the situation, Nadine got to her feet. ‘Doreen?’

  Doreen’s mouth opened in a silent scream. Her fingers stiffened to either side of her face, the telephone receiver slithering down her arm and finally crashing to the floor.

  Observing their mother’s uncharacteristic behaviour, the children began to cry.

  Wendy’s bottom lip quivered. ‘Mummy?’

  Seeing his sister disturbed, William howled like a puppy that had taken on its parent’s terror.

  Lucy put her arms around them and opened her mouth, meaning no doubt to say comforting words, but none came out.

  Nadine concentrated on Doreen, grasping her arms and shaking her.

  ‘Listen, Doreen. Listen to me. Pull yourself together and tell me what Geoff said. What must we do?’

  For a moment it seemed as though Doreen was staring right through her, or perhaps feeling slightly insulted that such a young woman was speaking to her like this.

  In a bid to calm her, Nadine lowered her voice. ‘What did he say, Doreen? What must we do?’

  ‘Pack,’ she said, and licked at her lips. Small flecks of sweat sparkled like sequins on her brow. ‘Martin is coming for us to take us to a ship. We have to leave. The Japanese are almost here.’

  Lucy got to her feet. ‘I have to go. I have to find my husband.’

  ‘What about your father?’ Nadine asked.

  Lucy Lee smiled sadly. ‘My father is a very wise man. He has already left.’ She reached for her handbag. ‘I must go.’

  Nadine grabbed her arm. She’d known Lucy Lee van der Meer for only a very short while, but in that time had become fond of the lovely Eurasian girl. She couldn’t help being concerned.

  ‘There may be no gharries or rickshaws to get you back into town.’

  Lucy shrugged. ‘Then I will walk.’ She left alone.

  The change in Doreen’s demeanour was extremely worrying, brought on, understandably, by her concern for her children.

  Nadine waited and worried with her, trying as best she could to keep the children occupied.

  It was an hour before Martin arrived. ‘Quickly,’ he ordered, throwing the children into the car with as much lack of care as he did the luggage. ‘There’s no time for niceties. We’ve got to get the hell out of here.’

  Doreen shot him a disparaging look. ‘Language, please! There are children present.’

  ‘Bollocks, Mrs Tracey. They’re going to have to put up with a lot bloody worse than bad language before we’re through!’

  The roads were crowded. Detours took them past locked shops once owned by Chinese and Punjabis, now fled in fear of their lives.

  Pretty faces looked out from dark doorways in Bugis Street, frightened eyes searching for business from sailors who now had more important things to do. When they’d first come down this street, Martin had taken great delight in informing Nadine that the sinuous beauties were male, not female. Today he didn’t give them a glance. Finding a ship about to leave was all that mattered.

  Geoff, Doreen’s husband, waved to them from amongst the crowd milling around the ship’s gangway, forcing his way towards them as best he could.

  Nadine helped the children from the car. Martin handed her the luggage he’d hastily packed on his way to the Traceys’ house.

  A surge of people carried them towards the boat.

  ‘Hardly a ship,’ said Nadine, remembering the shining white P&O liner on which they had spent their honeymoon on their way from Bombay to Singapore. The ship had carried a bristling armoury of extras on its decks. This small vessel failed to impress her in the same way, carrying as it did just one solitary gun.

  ‘It’s very small,’ she added, her eyes alighting on the high paddles straddling the ship’s sides.

  ‘Beggars can’t be choosers,’ said Martin, pushing her along in front of him. ‘Get yer ass aboard.’

  The boat lay heavy with the weight of passengers, no more than two feet between sea and deck. Th
e gangway was slippery. So was the deck.

  Once they were aboard, Martin looked over the side. ‘Don’t put your foot too far forward, whatever you do. A slight roll and a shark’s liable to bite it off.’

  Somehow they managed to stick together, Doreen, themselves and the kids all crammed like sardines along the railing, adults sitting on suitcases, children clamped against their parents’ sides.

  Doreen continually scanned the shore. ‘Where’s Geoff? He’ll miss the boat.’

  ‘He’ll join us when he can,’ said Martin. ‘Perhaps in Australia. There was something he had to do.’

  Nadine nudged him. ‘Is it true that he’ll join us when he can?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. He might do. He went off with some bloke who’s looking for his daughter. Anything to calm her down.’

  ‘Can’t we get the boat to wait?’

  Martin shook his head. ‘Forget it. The faster we get away from here the better.’

  ‘But he’s your friend.’

  Martin shrugged again. ‘Every man for himself, girl. That’s the way it’s going to be from now on.’

  Typical! It never ceased to amaze her how selfish Martin could be, and cynical too, it seemed. She didn’t dislike him all the time, just now and then – like now.

  ‘You’d better not tell Doreen,’ she warned, keeping her voice low.

  ‘I won’t go without him,’ said Doreen, braving an attempt to push through the crowded deck, children in tow and heading for the lifting gangway.

  ‘You’re too late. We’re moving,’ said Martin. ‘Better make the most of it.’

  The fact that he wasn’t used to handling women like Doreen, and certainly not children, was glaringly apparent.

  Nadine took over.

  ‘Doreen!’

  Doreen lurched towards the gangway that was already being swung against the ship’s side.