The Red Pavilion (21 page)

Lee raised her hand slowly in greeting. The Sakais were timid people at best, though kindly. So quickly had this Sakai come to their help, Lee realised these jungle dwellers must have known of the camp and of the movements of the communists, though they had kept well hidden for at no time had there been any talk of any Sakais living close by. Yet once the men had gone this man had come with aid for the two distressed women.

She put her hands together Chinese-fashion and bowed respectfully. She warmed to anyone who could outwit Heng Hou. He grinned and mimicked her movement, coming forward offering the leaves.

Inside was a grey powder. He took a small flat stick and divided the powder in half; he pointed to her mother, then to where the sun would set and one half of the powder, then to where the sun would rise and to the other half.

‘Night and morning,’ Lee said in Malay. She felt he understood what she said, but he never spoke.

The Sakai tribesman gently took the leaf back and mixed the one half in a cup of water, nodded and smiled, looked at her mother and nodded and smiled again.

I do hope you’re right, she thought, then, pointing to herself and her mother and back to the Sakai, indicated that they might all go the way he had come.

He looked at her mother, pursed his lips in the same manner as prescribers of medicine the world over, then nodded but shrugged at the same time.

‘And?’ She made the sign that had come to mean the soldier to them both: a stroke across the top of her head which indicated the deep passage of the bullet over the top of the man’s head.

Now the purse of the lips was more positive and the eyes looked into hers with concern. He frowned, then gave a low whistle like a bird call, and from the jungle came a tiny, beautifully proportioned young woman wearing just a waist sarong. He spoke to her rapidly. The girl nodded, then came forward and in perfect but slow Malay said, ‘My father says the man is very ill. They have taken him to Pa Kasut in the hills where cooler, better for patient. But he thinks needs own kind to talk to him, bring him back ... ’

She struggled now for the right word.

‘ ... to consciousness,’ Lee supplied, then, as the girl looked puzzled, added, ‘from coma, from deep sleep?’ The girl nodded gravely while her father spoke again to her.

‘Father says if want to see should come quick or may be too late.’

Lee realised the meaning of the young girl’s presence. It seemed the effort and peril of dragging the soldier out of the sight of the retreating terrorists might well have been in vain. They had not saved his life, merely prolonged it.

‘Pa Kasut, all Sakais, done all can,’ the girl added earnestly.

‘I know and I thank you, my mother and I both thank you,’ Lee assured them both. ‘Without your help the man would certainly have been shot dead and we would have starved.’ She smiled and accepted the length of thick tapioca root, staple diet for the Sakais, the girl now held out to her.

This was the first time Lee had been able to communicate with the Sakais directly and she was anxious not to let the girl go until she had dealt with this new problem.

‘The man,’ she said, ‘is a soldier and carries in his pocket a picture of my friend Elizabeth Hammond. She lives at the plantation Rinsey, north of Bukit Kinta — ’

‘Along the Sungei Woh,’ the girl said.

‘This I do not know. Would you or your Sakais take us there so then we could bring the girl Elizabeth to the man? She could talk to him — before it is too late.’

The girl turned to her father and they talked together for a long time.

Lee saw her mother move and went to reassure her, but when she saw that Josef was gone and only the tribespeople were there she rested back content.

‘He has brought a powder for you to take — ’ she began.

‘Give it to me.’ Ch’ing reached for the cup. ‘I must be strong soon. We must go before communists come back.’ She reached for the cup and drank it down.

‘The girl speaks good Malay I can understand,’ Lee told her.

Ch’ing called her thanks.

‘They say the soldier is very ill, unconscious.’ She sat on the end of the long chair and spoke quietly. ‘I think if he is Miss Liz’s boyfriend we should try to take her to see him — very quickly, they think. I’ve asked if they would guide us to Rinsey.’

The old lady’s mouth opened and a look of such eagerness came to her face that the girl spoke to her father and pointed to Ch’ing.

He shook his head and the girl turned back. ‘My father said too far for old lady and too dangerous, Sungei Woh in great flood from hill storms.’

‘But you must go,’ Ch’ing insisted, ‘You go! Go!’

‘We take mother to our village first,’ the girl said. ‘Father says no time to waste.’

Chapter Eighteen

The tea chests were already half full of George Harfield’s possessions when Liz paused and said reflectively, ‘You know, as soon as things could be arranged I’d like to go back to England. I could find a flat and a job and keep house for Wendy at holiday times. I just feel a kind of aching despair here.’

Blanche reflected that ‘aching despair’ exactly summed up how she too felt, and how she had felt ever since Neville’s murder and George Harfield being committed to prison. Two things occupied her mind; bringing Josef to justice and procuring George Harfield’s release. She had no doubt of the former’s guilt or the latter’s innocence.

She found herself calculating how old she would be on George’s release if he had to serve his full sentence. Even making allowance for an early parole, she would be well into her middle fifties. She supposed just making the calculation proved how furious she still was at the efficiency of the trap and showed how much she cared about their complete failure to find any witness or anything that could have helped George at his trial.

‘Will you go back ... ?’ Liz began.

Blanche rose from her knees where she had been folding George’s underwear and putting it neatly into a leather suitcase. She went to look out of the window at the mining complex laid out below. The muddy green waters, the dredgers with the noisy buckets, the jungle down to the water’s edge, sliced into here and there to make room for the wooden workplaces and office — and Kampong Kinta. All safe behind the virtual stockade George had ordered built and supervised, but she had come to be certain that there were as many communist sympathisers within the barriers as without.

Some thirty feet below in the roadway she could see the new and unfortunately spotty young manager the company had sent out. He had already been to see the Hammonds and officiously instructed them that the furniture in George’s house went with the job. Watching him pointing and gesticulating to the men on the dredgers, she decided they would take the American refrigerator from the lounge — she was sure
that
did not belong to the company.

‘After all, you didn’t want to leave Pearling,’ Liz added.

‘Perhaps going back is not what I’m about.’ Blanche spoke slowly, almost as if discovering the truth of the words as they came to her lips.

After a moment she turned to look at her daughter, remembering how George too had lost weight. In the dock he had looked as if years, not weeks, had passed. He had appeared dignified, pale, tense — and angry. Anger under control had been more awesome at that moment than the passion that screams and rails against fate, but it was also, she knew, the kind of anger that ate into a man like a canker. She turned back to the window; somewhere within her view at that moment there must be some shred of evidence that would prove his innocence.

She thought it a pity they did not still have the rack. She could quite easily have stretched that girl until she told the truth. What made it all worse was that Li Min was back in the village, her family drawing wages from the company — George’s former company.

Blanche had seen the bitch and talked — crossed swords — with her several times, each time remembering what George had described as the look of triumph in the girl’s eyes. Blanche had seen that same gloating look and after several infuriatingly useless confrontations had said to her, ‘Your eyes tell the truth.’

The girl had sniggered. ‘Eyes do not talk,’ she replied in a low, malicious tone.

Blanche had stepped closer to the girl and said, ‘Just look into mine.’

The girl had raised her eyes, a supercilious expression of scorn on her face. A second later her mouth had dropped open and she had taken a step away from the Englishwoman. The moment had been satisfying, but had achieved nothing, Blanche reminded herself.

Then, as if conjured by her thoughts, she saw the girl walking towards the new young manager, Ira Coole, who swept off his hat as he saw her approaching. My God! You’ve got a lot to learn, she thought and, looking at the girl, promised, I’ll get you. If it takes all the time I have left, I’ll get you.

The girl was laughing like a coquette. She had reason to feel pleased; a smart cookie, making up to the new young manager. Having seen the last imprisoned, this one should be a pushover! Avoiding clichés did not seem so important these days, Blanche admitted to herself.

When Blanche and Liz had arrived for George’s possessions, the acned new recruit had made them feel like pariahs. He had spoken of how much George had cost the company and ‘now there is the matter of compensation for the girl and her family’. Liz had caught her mother’s arm as she seemed about to hurl herself at the young man’s throat. ‘I think you should go about your business,’ her daughter had advised the nervous bureaucrat.

She watched as the Chinese girl went off waving cheerily back to the raw young American, who then glanced nervously up the hill. Probably wondering what we’re taking and if he dares come and see. She felt certain that Bukit Kinta would not be attacked again; the girl’s presence plus the ease with which the new manager could be duped probably ensured that.

‘It feels as if it is what I am about.’ Liz seemed to lay the words on top of the clothes she was smoothing, layering them gently. As her mother looked at her questioningly after the long silence, she added, ‘Going back — being defeated.’

‘Not defeated,’ Blanche said firmly. ‘We’re never that until — ’

‘We’re dead,’ Liz supplied and sighed. ‘That’s what I mean: defeated, finished, extinguished … ’

‘Liz!’ her mother said sharply to stop the run of negatives, then softened her voice to add, ‘I wish you would stay on.’

She paused, ‘sick at heart’ were the words that came to mind when she studied her daughter. It tore her heart to see her daughter so stricken, so enervated. She tried to lighten the mood. ‘And it was you who wanted to come back!’

‘All my loves have gone now,’ Liz said.

Blanche wanted to say, ‘But not all those who love you’, but she knew exactly what her daughter meant. Her relationship with her father had been special for many reasons, probably because when he returned on leave he came as a cross between a hero and Father Christmas. During the war they had all lived from leave to leave rather than observing the normal calendar festivities. This new beginning in Malaya was supposed to have been permanent, a final settling.

And to this young man, Blanche could not forget him sitting, his rifle propped between his knees, on the back of the lorry coming from Ipoh station. Seeing him there had been like a kind of recognition. She remembered how Neville had haunted her after she had seen him for the first time at a friend’s house playing tennis, in white with a red striped scarf for a belt. She should have recognised the omens too; tropical whites on a hot summer’s day, the arty scarf, the sunny unbusinesslike nature.

‘I need you, you know.’ Blanche closed her full suitcase, ending her dreams, with a businesslike click of the locks.

‘You?’ Liz looked at her with surprise.

She nodded. ‘I really do. I’d feel very alone ... ’ She did not elaborate. It occurred to her that she ought to present a plan, as she had done in school holidays: today we’ll go to the park, tomorrow you can help hoe the onions — it was expected of mothers.

‘Your aunt Ivy has written to say she feels Wendy should be allowed to come out. She says Wendy should have the opportunity to come to Rinsey, to put flowers on her father’s grave, to mourn at the place. Ivy says the girl is ... all right though not quite herself. She thinks Wendy should be with us for a time at least.’

She paused but when Liz made no reply she went on. ‘I have decided that in spite of any danger she should come out for the Christmas holidays. She should see her father’s grave, Liz, don’t you think?’

Liz had picked up a handful of pens and pencils from George’s desk and tapped them into an orderly bundle. The mine’s books had been rather ostentatiously whisked away when they entered the bungalow. She reflected that she had kept the rubber accounts ever since work had restarted at Rinsey — but that could easily be taken over by one of the foremen.

She patted the points of the pencils into line. She had sketched nothing, nor wanted to, since Alan had been reported missing, presumed killed. Drawing had been part of her life for as long as she could remember. Her first memory of her father was sitting on his knee and being helped to draw a monkey hanging from their tree. There was no more sketching, no pleasure in her life any more. She was just amazed that they went on doing things like getting up, going to bed, dealing with the business, eating. ‘You’re asking me to stay until after Christmas,’ she stated.

‘And you don’t want to?’

Liz imagined that distance might ease her grief, that she might leave behind this tortured creature she had become. ‘You have Anna and her grandson,’ she said.

The remark cut but Blanche was still stifling the mind’s cry of hurt, balancing it against her daughter’s surprise that she should need her, or anyone. Doggedly she went on with the plan she was devising as they talked.

‘Ivy won’t, of course, leave your uncle Raymond on his own, particularly not at Christmas, so Wendy would have to travel alone. If you stayed until after her holiday you could go back together.’ She paused, wondering what she had to say to reach her daughter. ‘I do believe she has to come, to grieve here, perhaps to hit some kind of bottom — like us — before we can begin to go upwards again.’

‘I never shall,’ Liz stated.

‘Oh, Liz! Believe me.’ Her mother clenched both fists and pounded them silently on the closed case. ‘Believe me, you will! We both will in time.’

‘Thanks for not saying “you’re young”.’

‘Well, you may have stopped me just before I reached it.’

Blanche held out a hand and Liz suddenly came to her and took it, helping her mother to her feet, their grip tight with mutual need and tacit love.

‘Let’s leave Spotty down there to his fate,’ Blanche said, reaffirming her support in an extra squeeze. ‘Come and help me load up. We’re taking George’s fridge, by the way. We’ll put that on the back seat first, and we’ll use it when we get it back home.’

In the end Ira Coole helped them load the fridge. He came protesting up to the bungalow, until Blanche had told him in her most regal manner that it was
her
refrigerator which the previous manager had borrowed. She added that she hoped he did not expect her to leave it for
his
benefit.

‘Mother, you are a liar,’ Liz said as the car cleared the driveway of Bukit Kinta.

‘Right,’ Blanche admitted uncompromisingly. ‘I’ve tried doing things the legal way, but now I’ll use any way I can — just like these terrorists and their molls.’

When everything was unloaded at Rinsey, Liz watched as her mother took the glass of tea Anna had waiting for them and went outside. Most days now she spent some time on the long stone seat she had had placed alongside her husband’s grave. Stirring the ample amount of sugar she liked in her tea, Blanche seemed to sit as one might by the side of a patient’s bed in hospital, leaning forwards exchanging pleasantries and news.

‘Go sit by her, Miss Liz,’ Anna said, coming to stand next to her at the window. ‘She shouldn’t be out there by herself.’

‘No!’ she heard herself say sharply. ‘No, I can’t, Anna, I can’t be a comfort to her when I almost envy her. She’s had her life, her marriage, her children. She’s even got the grave of
her
loved one to sit by, she can talk to him.’

‘Miss Liz!’ Anna was shocked. ‘You young! You know nothing or you would not say such things. Your mother suffering. She need you.’

‘She’s so used to coping alone. I don’t mean to sound heard, it’s just a fact, isn’t it!’

‘Alone is not when expecting someone come back,’ Anna said, slapping her hands together sharply as she used to do to catch her charge’s complete attention.

‘I know,’ she answered, with the ring of such loss in her voice that her amah caught her in her arms.

‘Now all three know,’ she said. Liz held her tight. Their great sorrows seemed as close as the ghosts of their lost ones around them.

‘Perhaps I will go out.’

Liz was looking out and Anna nodding at the correctness of the thought, but just then the sound of a shot came from the front of the bungalow.

‘Oooh!’ Anna wailed. ‘And children not home from school.’

‘The jeep’s not left to fetch them yet so don’t worry.’

Anna held the door open for Blanche as she ran in, leaving her tea on the seat. ‘Must stick more rigidly to this gun rule,’ Blanche said, snatching up the rifles from the corner of the kitchen and handing one to each. ‘Let down the shutters on the windows, Anna. I’ll bar the door.’

‘I’ll do the front,’ Liz said. But as she reached the door and the sandbagged windows and looked out across the wide shadowed verandah, she could see their guards standing in the middle of the drive arguing.

‘What is it?’ she called.

‘This man thought he saw someone prowling around.’

‘I sure. Twice, three times I see man going from tree to tree.’ He made graphic pictures with his hand, half-circles moving rapidly along. ‘He coming closer without coming in the open. So I shoot.’