The White Pearl (11 page)

‘Let it go, Constance. The Japs have no backbone and no aircraft worth a damn against our Brewster Buffaloes. They don’t stand
a chance and they know it, so don’t get yourself upset about it. People like Johnnie know what they’re talking about. Take
no notice of Fitzpayne and his like. They’re spineless.’ He patted her shoulder and climbed into bed, lowering the mosquito
net around himself like a bridal veil.

Connie perched on the edge of the bed. ‘But we should still be prepared.’

‘For heaven’s sake, Constance, even if by the remotest chance they did somehow get through the mountains and the jungle, they’d
have more sense than to harm people like us. They need our rubber. They need me to make it for them. So,’ he smiled at her
reassuringly and patted her pillow, ‘come to bed and stop worrying.’

She walked into her own dressing room and dropped her clothes on the floor, inspecting her naked body in the Cheval looking-glass
with a critical eye.

‘But they don’t need me,’ she murmured. ‘Or Teddy.’

‘I want to make love to you, Connie.’

The words made the lines blur on the page of the book she was reading. Even now, two years later, she recalled it. It was
The Big Sleep
by Raymond Chandler. Sho had brought her high up into the hills, miles away from anyone or any place she knew. The clarity
and the coolness of the air made her giddy with relief. They were seated on a patch of grass in the shade, back to back, reading
their books, propping each other up like bookends.

I want to make love to you, Connie.

She’d put down her book and kissed Sho’s mouth. Slowly she unbuttoned his white shirt and kissed his heart. Her hands caressed
his chest, fingering each muscle, each rib, each rise and fall as his breath came fast. His skin tasted as warm and spicy
as cinnamon toast.

They made love in the open air, something she had never done before, with only a gibbon monkey booming somewhere in the distance
and the sound of crickets all around them. It felt extraordinary. The beat of her own heart thundered in her ears and her
body stretched its limbs and abandoned itself like a cat in the sun. She knew she had jumped off a cliff but instead of falling
to earth, she was flying.

*

It was still dark when she woke, but at least the rain had stopped. She could hear it dripping from the trees outside like
tears. She lay flat on her back, remembering. Once when she and Sho were naked on the bed in a hotel room in KL popping tiny
wild strawberries into each other’s mouths and laughing as he painted one of her nipples with the pink juice, he had asked,
‘When were you last held by your husband like this?’ He wrapped his arms around her, trailing sticky fingers down her shoulder
blades and over her hip bones.

‘Years ago.’

He dipped his head and licked her nipple, and she moaned.

‘And when did you last make love with your husband?’

‘Years and years ago.’

Four years and three months ago, to be exact. Her eyes struggled now to find her husband’s shape in the darkness. In the first
months of their marriage everything had been normal, or as normal as she imagined other newlyweds to be, which meant a kiss
goodnight before Nigel turned out the light every weekday and sex on Saturdays and Sundays. He worked damn hard on the estate,
she told herself. He was too tired during the week. It was normal.

But the way Harriet Court went on about her demure and running-to-fat husband, Henry, pestering her in bed several times a
night – voracious was her word for him – Connie did wonder how
normal
was
normal
? After Teddy was born Nigel didn’t touch her for a year and then only because she instigated it. It was when she suggested
another baby that his interest in her was rekindled, but the sex became perfunctory. No lingering. No licking of nipples.
No mouth-to-mouth kissing. Outwardly she smiled and kissed his cheek, inwardly she screamed.

For whatever reason the second baby didn’t happen, and Nigel looked at her as if he’d been stabbed in the stomach each month
when the first treacherous spots of her period started.

‘I’m sorry,’ she used to say. Because she
was
sorry. Sorry for both of them.

‘That’s all right, old thing. Next time, I expect.’

But his brown eyes looked muddy and his mouth had that tightness to it that Teddy’s had when he was determined not to cry.
Eventually he’d stopped hoping. Stopped trying. He left her alone on her side of the bed and lay alone on his, politely rebuffing
any advances from her. That was when the chasm spread down the centre of the sheet and Connie had
watched it widen. Night by night, year by year. Bed became a place that she dreaded because it was a place of … Her throat
hurt. Of failure. Of frustration. Of loneliness. Take your pick. Some nights she would sit outside on the veranda braving
the mosquitoes, reading her book until the early hours of the morning. Nigel never mentioned that she was missing from his
bed. Sometimes she wondered if he noticed.

She rolled onto her side, facing her husband’s back, listening to his steady breathing and the murmur of the wind ruffling
the leaves of the coral tree outside. For a long time she lay like that, eyes wide open. Then she moved forward and gently
wrapped herself around his body, moulding her curves to his, her arm draped across his waist. He didn’t move. Didn’t break
the rhythm of his breath. But she was certain he was awake and, what was worse, that he was aware that she knew he was awake.

She remained like that, unmoving, for what must have been half an hour, breathing quietly against the back of his neck, inhaling
the scent of him again. When she finally rolled away onto her own side of the bed, he made no sound. The silence in the room
belonged to a grave.

Swimming is like crying. It flushes everything out into the water. The water wasn’t cold in the Victoria Club’s outdoor pool,
but nonetheless it was cooling to Connie’s skin and when her skin was cool, she could think better. She needed to think. To
work out how best to protect her son from the war that was coming to Malaya. If her husband was too damn stubborn, too stiff-necked
to admit that the country was about to have a gun thrust in its face, then she would have to do it on her own.

She flipped onto her back and did another ten lengths of crawl.

‘Connie, aren’t you
ever
coming out of the pool?’ Harriet Court called.

Above her, the sky arched in a white colourless sheet. It looked as though it had been burned by the sun and healed in a shiny
bleached scar. Connie closed her eyes to shut it out, and did another fast twenty lengths.

‘Connie! If you don’t get out of that water right now, you’ll be all shrivelled.’

Didn’t Harriet realise that it was when she was out of the water that she shrivelled?

Connie loved Harriet because of her laugh. It was a raucous, witch-like cackle that had a tendency to silence a room, but
it always gave Connie the giggles. Harriet wore her dark hair in a sharp bob at jaw level and possessed strong, almost masculine
features in total contrast to her dreamy brown eyes and soft little chin which she often propped in her hand, as if her head
and all it contained were too heavy for the narrow stem of her neck.

‘Tell all, dearest Connie,’ Harriet declared when Connie finally joined
her in the shade on the veranda. A tall glass of iced lime juice awaited her but Connie waved a hand at one of the boys to
bring two coffees as well. ‘A little bird with a handlebar moustache,’ Harriet continued, ‘informed me that the gorgeous Flight
Lieutenant John Blake blew into town and headed straight for the Hadley Estate without so much as a nod to anyone else.’ She
grinned at Connie. ‘Now I wonder why that was.’

‘Tell your Uncle Jasper that he’s got it all wrong. Johnnie arrived here with a friend from KL and Nigel invited them over.’

‘Honest truth?’

‘Cross my heart.’

‘Very well, I’ll believe you.’ Harriet leaned forward, eyes curious. ‘Is he still as handsome as ever?’

‘Handsomer!’

They both laughed and fell into discussing arrangements for the next charity event they were organising, a dance to raise
more money for the Buy-a-Bomber-for-Britain fund. All the colonial wives were engaged in similar activities. It made them
feel they were doing their bit for the war effort back home, while their husbands beavered away shipping out rubber, tin and
rice for the troops. Patriotism was worn like a badge, despite being so many thousands of miles away from their homeland.

‘Elspeth Saunders is organising the raffle,’ Connie reminded Harriet, and they both rolled their eyes at each other.

Elspeth was a dainty elfin woman who had more children than she knew what to do with. She was mother to Teddy’s best friend,
Jack, and to his six other siblings. She always insisted on taking control of the raffle at these functions, but she had a
tendency to roll up on the day while the prizes were left at home on the kitchen table where they were demolished by the family’s
Labradors.

They both groaned, and Connie took the moment to slip in a question. ‘Harriet, what does Henry say about the war?’ Henry Court,
Harriet’s husband, was a top-level accountant, constantly closeted in smoky offices with the colonial ruling echelon. ‘He
must have some inside knowledge, surely.’

‘The war in Europe, you mean?’

‘No. Here in Malaya. Does he believe it will happen?’

‘Good heavens, no.’ Harriet’s broad nose flared, reminding Connie of her horse when it baulked at a fence. ‘That’s an absurd
idea.’

‘Is it?’

‘Why? Did Johnnie Blake say anything?’

‘No. Quite the opposite. He says we have a force of three hundred and thirty-five first-class aircraft defending Malaya. He
thinks the Japanese won’t attempt it.’

‘Well, he should know. He’s the one who sits in on the High Command pow-wows. Henry says it would be impossible. Singapore
is too well guarded, and the rest of the Peninsula’s coast is constantly patrolled by the RAF.’

‘So they say.’

‘Oh, come on, Connie. General Brooke-Popham and General Percival know what they’re doing. Don’t look so gloomy. The Japanese
will never get through that jungle.’

‘Johnnie brought a friend with him who seemed to think it was possible.’

‘Well, tell him he’s bloody wrong,’ Harriet snorted.

Connie wanted to believe her. Perhaps Henry had told Harriet more than she was letting on. Their coffee arrived and she sipped
it thoughtfully in silence, eyes focused on the small Malay figure at the other end of the veranda. The figure was small and
female, polishing the brass fittings on a sea chest that was used to hoard costumes for fancy-dress parties. It was all too
easy for the eye not even to notice the army of native workers who kept the Club running smoothly.

‘Harriet, everyone here claims that the Japanese have no discipline and no backbone. But I don’t think that’s true.’

‘What on earth makes you think that?’

‘Their army has already taken Korea, Manchuria and most of China. Of course it must be disciplined and well equipped to do
that.’

Harriet stared at her, open-mouthed. ‘Are you out of your mind? The Japanese will turn and run with their tails between their
legs at the first shot, I assure you.’

‘Harriet, they have a huge air force.’

‘Who says so?’

‘Someone told me.’

‘Well, your
someone
has got his facts wrong. Anyway, everyone knows the Japs make terrible pilots. They have no sense of balance because they’re
carried about on their mothers’ backs as children. Dreadful habit.’

Connie picked up her sunglasses that were lying on the table beside
her and put them on, despite the fact that they were sitting in the shade. She didn’t want Harriet to see her eyes. Because
she was remembering. Sho jumping from rock to rock as he crossed a river at the bottom of a wooded valley. In the green moist
air his bare limbs looked golden, flashing in and out of the dappled sunlight, his leaps as free and effortless as a flying
fish. There was nothing wrong with his balance. Nothing at all. When he reached the far side he plucked a durian fruit from
high up in the tree and came bounding back with it for her. He presented the thorny husk to her on his knees and bowed his
head to her feet as if the foul-smelling fruit were the keys of his kingdom. She recalled now the feel of his breath on her
toes and the warmth of his hair as she crouched and ran her fingers through it.

In some strange way, he was a man that belonged to the ground, not in the air. She wasn’t quite sure why. Maybe it had something
to do with the way he would pull her down onto the red earth or the hard tiled floor or the tatami mat in the shack in the
forest. The skin of her back became a mosaic of scrapes and scratches and insect bites. Not that it mattered, Nigel never
saw them.

‘I think,’ she said to Harriet, ‘we are the ones who are in for a shock.’

Connie rose to her feet and crossed the veranda to where the servant girl was on her knees polishing a brass table. Her dark
limbs glistened with sweat with the effort she was putting into it. Her back was towards the two women.

‘Maya? It is you, isn’t it?’

The girl looked up. Black fringed eyes, alert and guarded. No surprise in them. So she’d known it was Connie sitting there.

‘Yes,
mem
,’ the girl said. She looked older than she had before, less of a child in her bland white uniform and with her hair pinned
up in a knot with a flower at the back of her head. The tone was polite, no hint of the fury Connie had feared.

‘You got the job then?’

‘Yes,
mem
. Thank you.’ The girl remained on her knees.

Connie had pulled strings to arrange for Maya to be offered a position working two half-days a week at the Club. A silence,
as thick as river slime, slid between them and the girl lowered her eyes submissively to the table once more. A fat glossy
fly settled on the flower in her hair and Connie flicked it away. This was the first time she had seen or spoken to the girl
since the day of the accident, and she felt the weight of it
pressing into her chest. Razak had been their go-between but she realised now that she should have faced Su-Rai Jumat’s daughter
earlier.