The Plantation (54 page)

Strangely, in spite of the neglect from her family, Bette never felt that she was completely cut off from them. She thought it was just a state of hiatus. She had suggested to her parents a couple of times that she could visit them, but they always seemed unenthusiastic about the idea. And then time had a way of slipping by without her noticing and now she rarely stopped to dwell on what changes might have taken place back in Brisbane preferring instead, if she did think of them, to recall happy childhood memories. So it came as a shock to receive a letter from home, written by Margaret, telling her that their father had died.

I did try to telephone your house but the language problem was difficult. I understood you were away, so we presumed you would not have been able to get back in time for the funeral. Mother is weepy but coping, and Caroline and I are here to help her. It was a short illness, and unexpected, though he wasn’t a young man. But the main thing is he didn’t suffer. He left everything to Mother, naturally, so I presume that is all right by you. Mother will continue to live in the house, and sends her best wishes. She hopes you remember your father as the good man he was.

Margaret

Bette felt tears trickle down her cheeks. Sadness for her father, then guilt that she had never been back to see him, and then anger and hurt at learning about his death and funeral in such a casual manner.

She showed the letter to Tony. ‘Can you believe Margaret?’

‘I am sorry, darling. I know that you wanted to go home for a visit.’

‘This is my home!’ said Bette vehemently. ‘I wonder who Margaret spoke to?’

‘Does it matter who it was? At least she and Caroline are there in Brisbane, so your mother is being looked after. But you’re right. She should have tried harder to contact you when it happened,’ said Tony.

Bette nodded. ‘I wonder if she told Philip. Not that he ever knew his grandfather.’ She pushed thoughts of Margaret aside and sat down to reflect on her father. Tony asked one of the servants to bring them some tea and then he sat beside her, ready to listen.

‘He was a quiet man. That generation didn’t talk a lot. You had to get them on their own. Mother could be a bit bossy. She called the shots, around the house anyway, but Father had the final word on outside things, like spending money, going away, making the big decisions. I remember one holiday we had, we rented a holiday cottage and he let us go out with him prawning and fishing at night. We lit a little fire on the beach. Mother was convinced we’d get washed away in the surf in the dark, or that a shark would grab us by the ankles, and she refused to go down to the beach at night. Margaret didn’t like the dark, so she went back to the cottage. Father caught a couple of small fish and we cooked them on the fire and picked them clean with our fingers. Tasted wonderful. We pretended we were castaways.’ Bette smiled. ‘I sometimes thought, even when I was older, that I’d like to go back to the beach with Father but we never got the opportunity again.’

‘So you have happy memories. He was kind and loving and proud of you,’ said Tony.

Bette straightened up. ‘Yes. I think he was. He once told me that he was proud of what I had done for Philip. He used to say, “You’ll be all right in this world, Bette.”’

‘Hang onto that,’ said Tony softly.

‘I know I should have made more of an effort to visit, but I can’t forgive the offhand way Margaret has told me. As though he’s not my father, too. As though she deliberately wanted to hurt me.’ She looked at Tony, her eyes filled with anger and pain. ‘You know, I don’t think that she will ever forgive me for being the one to save her son, strange as that sounds.’

Tony put his arms around his wife. ‘Bette, I’m sorry that you weren’t there for your father’s passing or the funeral, but you know that he admired you. Remember that.’

Bette buried her head in Tony’s shoulder and the tears fell. She looked up at him. ‘You won’t ever leave me, will you?’

‘No.’ Tony kissed her. ‘You are more to me than every breath I take.’ He stroked her hair. ‘I will always be here for you and when I’m not, my spirit will watch over you, be close to you.’

Bette felt calm and a warmth spread through her. She drew a slow healing breath. ‘Is that a Buddhist thing?’

‘No. Just a Tony Tsang thing. Because you and I are one,’ he said lightly.

Bette smiled. She felt a great sense of peace and comfort. No matter what happened, Tony would always be there for her.

Changes began to sweep through the country. In 1957 Malaya gained independence from Britain and became the Federated States of Malaya. Bette and Tony’s marriage continued to be happy and harmonious, and Tony’s business interests continued to prosper.

One evening three years after independence Bette sat alone in the cool twilight of the side courtyard and heard Tony returning home. She burst out laughing when she saw him trot along the pathway in white baggy shorts, a white T-shirt and soft tennis shoes. His hair was awry and his face shiny with exertion.

‘What have you been doing? Trying to look like Marlon Brando?’

‘I’ve been talked into joining the Hash House Harriers. They’ve restarted a club here. They go for runs around the waterfront.’

‘Who are the Hash House Harriers?’

‘The group was started in KL before the war by a group of crazy British officers. The idea was to run to get rid of a hangover while building up a thirst for the next one.’

‘It sounds insane, darling, running for miles in this hot climate, but if it makes you happy,’ Bette said laughingly as she looked at her enthusiastic if somewhat unfit husband.

‘I’ve come home to change and to take you out for dinner with some of the harriers and their wives.’

‘That’s fine, and remember we have dinner plans for tomorrow night,’ said Bette.

‘As if I could forget.’ He sat beside her and put his arm around her. ‘Ten years together. And every day a joy.’ He kissed her. ‘What would you like me to give you for this special milestone?’

‘No more expensive gifts,’ said Bette. She looked at him, and suddenly her eyes filled with tears.

‘Is everything all right?’ he asked softly.

‘Yes. It’s just that before you came in, I’d been sitting here and thinking … about the camp. I think that I would like to go back to Sarawak and see what has happened to the POW camp.’

‘Settle a few ghosts, perhaps?’ said Tony.

Bette nodded. ‘Sort of. I can’t explain why, I just feel drawn to it.’

‘Then we must go. I will make arrangements,’ he said firmly. ‘We shall make it our wedding anniversary trip.’

Bette wasn’t sure exactly why she wanted to return to Sarawak. Part of her wanted to revisit the place where the prison camp had been just outside Kuching. But as they flew over the dense jungle canopy and she saw the broad, brown, snaking sweep of the Sarawak River, its protective mangrove wetlands stretching inland, and the pretty township of Kuching strung out along its banks, she felt a great sense of delight.

‘Thank you, darling. This is very special,’ she whispered to Tony.

They settled into the comfortable Aurora Hotel and walked into the centre of Kuching along the riverfront, exploring the township on the way. Bette spotted the Sarawak museum and told Tony that she would like to spend time visiting it. Tony agreed, as he wanted to see someone recommended to him by a business associate in Penang.

When they met later that afternoon by the river, Bette’s eyes were alight. ‘I met the curator at the museum, Tom Harrisson. An extraordinary fellow! And very interesting. I told him I was going to visit the old camp and we got talking about the war. He recognised my Australian accent and told me that he had been parachuted onto a hidden plateau in Borneo with seven Australian special operatives from Z force,’ said Bette. ‘He said that not only did they provide intelligence reports, but they managed to recruit a thousand blowpiping headhunters who killed or captured about one and a half thousand Japanese soldiers.’

‘That does sound interesting,’ said Tony. ‘I’ve heard of this fellow. He’s regarded as being a bit eccentric and very colourful.’

‘He’s lived here since the war and says he’s made some amazing archeological discoveries in the Niah caves. He’s found fossils and skulls which he says date back more than forty thousand years. I would so love to go there and see them. He says the caves are huge.’

‘You would? I’ll look into it if you like. What about visiting the camp? Is tomorrow morning all right with you?’

Bette nodded, her bubbling enthusiasm about the museum curator subsiding at the thought of revisiting the internment camp.

It wasn’t as she remembered, for which she was glad. It was now a peaceful place. Green fields surrounded the original barracks, which were now part of a teacher training college. Grass had replaced dust. There were neat signs, a monument, a flagpole, and some of the occupied buildings were cleaned up and open to the public. There was no sign of the barbed-wire fences or the watchtowers. But the faces of the women and children Bette had seen every day, came clearly to her mind.

She walked alone towards the buildings she remembered as being her world, her home and her prison for nearly four years. When she walked back to Tony, who stood smoking a cigarette in the shade of a tree, she was smiling.

‘Are you all right?’ He embraced her and she clung to him, resting her head on his shoulder.

‘Yes. At last I really am all right.’ She looked up into his face. ‘You are my life now, Tony. Everything that happened before I married you, means very little to me any more.’

He kissed her softly. ‘Then we shall make every day ours.’

Back in Kuching, Tony took Bette’s idle remark about visiting the Niah caves quite seriously. But when he talked to the museum curator, Tom Harrisson told him that the caves were quite isolated and difficult to reach, and the area was off limits because it was a dig site. Nevertheless, Tom invited them both to come to his house in Pig Lane for a drink and to discuss the possibility of visiting other parts of Sarawak.

Bette was fascinated by the cluttered, ramshackle home that Tom shared with his anthropologist wife Barbara, who was currently making a documentary about their work at Niah. The house was like a museum. Walls and surfaces were smothered in the artifacts that Tom had collected over the years he’d been in South East Asia. native woven baskets and hats, ornamental knives, krises, blowpipes and mats were hung everywhere, while the walls were decorated with magnificent, boldly coloured murals. Tom explained that the paintings and carvings in the house had been done by various orang ulu – upriver natives. Bette was intrigued by his collection of pottery pieces and shards of Chinese and Siamese porcelain, which were very much older than the perfect porcelain on display in Rose Mansion.

‘This is amazing,’ said Bette. ‘These artifacts are such a contrast to the things that we have in Penang. Just look at those paintings. Fantastic.’

Seeing her enthusiasm and interest, Tom suggested that since they couldn’t go to the caves, they might like to visit a longhouse, where he had Iban friends.

‘Leonard is one of the assistants working at the museum and he’s Iban. I’m sure he’d help you, if you’d like to go,’ said Tom.

Tom also introduced Bette and Tony to his ‘children’, and Bette was fascinated. Kept in cages out the back of the house and roaming around inside, demanding constant attention, were several baby orangutans. Tom explained that they had been rescued from illegal traders trying to smuggle them out of the country. Barbara was rearing them and trying to prepare them to be released back into the wild.

‘Can they look after themselves if they’ve been hand reared?’ asked Bette, as a small orange-furred creature took hold of her hand and swung into her arms, its saucer-shaped eyes studying her face closely, before it rested its head on her shoulder.

‘We’ve created a small, sheltered camp where the orangutans live in cages for a month. After that we leave the cage doors open so that they can come and go as they like. Hopefully, when they get used to their surroundings, they will mate and live with the wild orangutans,’ said Tom.

‘They are amazing. Aren’t they lovable creatures, Tony?’ said Bette.

‘Yes, at this age, but an adult male might be a different matter,’ said Tony.

Tom was a boisterous, boastful, heavy-drinking, entertaining, knowledgeable raconteur. Bette was not surprised when he was able to arrange for them to go upriver with Leonard to visit the orangutan camp.

Tony was not comfortable roughing it and he was amused at how well Bette took to travelling in the canoe with its clunky outboard motor driven by Leonard at a high incautious speed. They drew up at a small landing on the edge of the jungle. From here they walked through the swampy river fringe into the jungle to Camp Salang. The small clearing contained tents, a hut, cages and a feeding platform for the orangutans. Two Iban women brought fruit each day for the apes. A young German woman was on field duty, making notes, taking photographs and keeping a record of the comings and goings of the primates.

‘This is pioneering work,’ Leonard told Tony and Bette. ‘But it is also sad for me, because I believe that one day these orangutans will have nowhere to live.’

‘But look how much jungle there is!’ exclaimed Bette.

‘It’s being eaten up every day,’ said Leonard. ‘The timber industry and land clearing are destroying it.’