The White Pearl (16 page)

‘Don’t worry, Tunku,’ she told him. ‘Once you’re waving your little ass in their faces, no one will even notice the spots
on your chin.’

‘I look a wreck.’

She paused in the process of oiling her small breasts. ‘Tunku, you look good enough to eat. They’ll gobble you up.’

He giggled, blew her a kiss and scuttled out of the door. She pulled on her skimpy costume and followed him. The air in the
club was as grey and thick as rabbit’s fur, cigarette smoke hanging like a shroud above the tables. The mood was rowdy tonight.
Most of the bawdy shouts at the
boy with veils were coming from a table of British soldiers right at the front. She would have to watch out for them. They
might try to touch. At the side against the wall, on his own as usual, sat the man with the sad eyes, hunched over his whisky,
and right in the middle of the club sprawled two fat men at a table with a bottle of gin on it, almost empty. In the dim light
she could see the sweat in the folds of their skin and the hunger rippling across their greedy eyes.

She closed her eyes tight. This was the last time. She swore it under her breath. Never again. She cursed The Purple Pussy.
She cursed Hakim to a thousand tortures in hell for eternity, and roasted by devils with more gold teeth than he could cram
into his mouth in five lifetimes. She had to get away. Had to get Razak away. Somewhere safe.

The tall boy shimmied off the stage, naked now and dashed past her, his veils clutched in one hand trailing behind him.

‘You’re on,’ he hissed.

This was the last time
.

Johnnie Blake and Connie walked out of the Empire cinema smiling. It was impossible not to smile after a film like that, impossible
not to laugh when a tipsy Katharine Hepburn was carried up to the house in the arms of the glamorous James Stewart, and Johnnie
had leaned close to whisper, ‘It must be like carrying a scrawny giraffe, all legs and teeth.’

Afterwards Johnnie walked Connie to the Sequin Club, where a band called The Silver Stars blasted out syncopated rhythms on
trumpets and saxophones, and the strummer of the double bass rolled his eyes at Connie each time Johnnie swept her past on
the dance floor. He danced well. He talked well. He listened well. He held her lightly in his arms as they performed a foxtrot,
and neither of them breathed a word about what had taken place in the vegetable garden earlier that day. Instead, they talked
of jazz and Fred Astaire’s films and whether King George VI would ever let his brother, Edward, take over a useful role in
England now that he had abdicated for the American divorcée, Mrs Simpson. They talked of many things, but they didn’t mention
Nigel. Not once.

They drank a bottle of champagne between them, and Connie tried hard not to enjoy herself so much but she noticed the way
they leaned nearer to each other across the small round table till their heads were almost touching. The way their fingers
skimmed the other’s sleeve or bare
arm, feeling the imprint on their skin, and the way gaps started to open up in their conversation. Small, dangerous holes.

She made herself stand up. ‘I should be getting home.’

‘Must you? It’s only eleven o’clock. Those planters’ dinners of Nigel’s go on into the early hours, and I don’t have to make
a move until …’

‘No, Johnnie. I’m tired.’

He knew she was lying, but he jumped to his feet with an unexpected burst of energy, a wide smile in place.

‘Of course, I’m being selfish. You must be dead on your feet after …’

Words drifted from nowhere into her head.
Dead on your feet. Dead in the air. Shot out of the sky in a ball of flames.
‘Johnnie,’ she said quietly, ‘don’t take any risks, will you?’ She took his hand in hers and held it.

‘Don’t you know, Connie, that the whole of life is a risk?’

For a moment in the middle of the crowded, smoky nightclub with lights glittering on diamonds and music blaring out a seductive
beat, they stood totally alone. Their eyes locked together. Finally, with an effort, she dropped his hand and moved aside,
denying herself something that would fill the empty place in her chest.

‘Connie.’

She made herself smile.

‘Let’s drink,’ he said, scooping up their champagne glasses from the table, each with a mouthful at the bottom. It was flat
but it didn’t matter. ‘To our future.’ He pressed the stem of the glass into her hand.

She raised the rim to her lips. ‘To
your
future,’ she corrected in a gentle tone, ‘a safe and happy future.’

They stared at each other, then drank.

Outside, the world was dark and damp. A fine drizzle was falling from a bank of low cloud, but the day’s heat still radiated
off the buildings and wafted along the pavements like something alive and venomous. As they walked along Alexandra Parade,
heading towards the Victoria Club where her Chrysler was parked, with Ho Bah probably stretched out across the front seats
fast asleep, she made a point of avoiding the bank where she had sat answering the police questions after the accident.

They walked with a discreet distance between them, their footsteps echoing on the deserted pavements. Street lamps cast yellow
triangles like stepping stones across the road, and the storm drains gurgled contentedly. They hurried, heads ducked against
the raindrops, but suddenly Connie
felt Johnnie’s hand under her elbow and he was steering her down a side street away from the reach of the occasional car headlights
that slid down the main road.

‘Johnnie, what is it?’

He drew her into a doorway to shelter from the rain. ‘I have a bad feeling, Connie, about this mission that I’ll be flying.
I have a nagging sense that something is going to go wrong.’

‘Oh, Johnnie, I’m sure you’ll come back to us safe and sound.’

‘I want to say goodbye to you properly, not in front of all the others hanging around the Club car park.’

‘It’s been a wonderful evening. Thank you, I …’

He leaned forward and kissed her lips. She shot backwards as if she’d been burned. ‘No, Johnnie, I’m married. And my husband
is your good friend.’ She stepped out into the rain, hurrying blindly towards the lights, but Johnnie caught up with her just
before the main road. He swung her round to face him.

‘Connie,’ he breathed, ‘don’t.’

This time when he kissed her she couldn’t make herself pull away, and without reference to her wishes her limbs entwined around
him. Relishing the texture of his hair, the softness of the skin below his ear, the muscular strength of his arms gripping
her and the crippling need that fused her together with him. She was shamed by her body. By its refusal to let him go. By
its blatant desire, by the pulsing heat between her legs and the eagerness of her mouth to open to his.

Neither of them heard the footsteps approaching out of the darkness.

‘Good evening, Johnnie.’

Connie and Johnnie leaped apart.

‘Good evening, Nigel,’ Johnnie said.

‘It meant nothing, you know, Nigel,’ Connie insisted.

‘Did it?’

‘We were saying goodbye, that’s all.’

They were in Nigel’s SS Jaguar, bumping over the rough road out to the estate after saying goodnight to Johnnie at the Club.
Somewhere in the distance lightning flashed once, splitting the night sky in half, and the rain fell harder. The wipers squeaked
each time they swept across the windscreen. On the road behind, her Chrysler’s headlights bobbed in and out of their rear
window as the
syce
negotiated the ruts in their wake.

‘If it was nothing, Constance, just a goodbye, why did you both hide in a backstreet to say it?’ He didn’t look at her. Eyes
straight ahead on the road.

‘We weren’t hiding.’

‘Weren’t you?’

‘No. It was more private there than in the Club’s car park, that’s why. Johnnie is nervous about tomorrow.’

‘Is he?’

‘Yes. He needed someone to hold onto for a moment, to steady him. Nothing more.’

‘I see.’

She swivelled in her seat, so that she was facing him. His profile was picked out by the lights behind, and she could see
that something wasn’t right in the set of his jaw. It looked crooked, as though someone had hit it.

‘Do you see, Nigel? That sometimes a person needs physical contact with another, to remind them that life is more than . .
. ’

‘I know,’ he interrupted curtly. ‘Is that why he had a hand in your hair? His mouth on yours? Is that why you looked as though
you were trying to climb inside him? Just to say goodbye?’

‘Yes.’

She heard his teeth click together sharply in the darkness. She slumped back against the passenger door to get as far from
him as possible in the narrow confines of the car, and to inhale the waves of tepid air that billowed through the open window.
It ruffled her hair the way Johnnie’s fingers had done. For a long time neither of them spoke, and the roadside palm trees
loomed down, rustling their fronds, unseen in the darkness. They listened to the perpetual croak of the frogs and the song
of the cicadas because it was preferable to listening to each other’s quietly controlled breathing.

‘Why were you in that backstreet, Nigel?’ Connie asked at last, when they could make out the lights of Hadley House up on
the black hillside ahead.

‘I’d had enough. Of the speeches and the cigars, and the never-ending arguments. I needed some air, so I went down to the
river.’

Connie had never realised it before. That Nigel felt suffocated too. Slowly, Hadley House – with all its responsibilities
and inherent duties – drew closer.

‘What was the name again of that Jap who used to hang around here?’ Nigel asked abruptly.

Her heart jumped to her throat. ‘Shohei Takehashi.’

‘That’s the one. Do you know what he told me?’

‘No.’ It came out as a whisper.

‘He told me that we Brits couldn’t keep Malaya for ever. He claimed that we’d milked the country dry, had made ourselves rich
and now it was someone else’s turn. He boasted that the
someone else
would be the Japanese.’

Her tongue licked her dry lips. ‘Did he?’

The conversation seemed to stop as abruptly as if it had run out of petrol, and she heard Nigel release a long sigh. ‘Constance,’
he said dully, ‘if the war comes to Malaya, it will wreck everything.’

It was two days later that Maya turned up at Hadley House. Connie watched the young girl trudging up the long white gravel
drive at ten o’clock in the morning, her limbs dusty, her turquoise
kebaya
top and sarong skirt as bright as a peacock’s tail. This was a country where people may sometimes run short of food, but
they never failed to feast on colour. It was obvious that she had walked the eight miles from Palur.

Connie was pleased to see her. She surprised herself with the strength of her pleasure at seeing the small, lonely figure.
She was concerned for Maya, even more than for Razak. He arrived at five o’clock each morning in the big open-backed lorry
that trundled into the workyard every day, bringing a portion of the labour force from town. Most of the labourers lived in
the work-village that existed on the Hadley Estate – it provided large, airy barracks for the hundreds of single men and individual
shacks for the married ones.

Nigel kept a well-equipped infirmary for his labour force, and had them all checked over once a month by Dr Rossiter from
Palur. Nigel always claimed that a healthy workforce was a happy workforce. Connie wasn’t so sure. She suspected that it was
more likely that a
well-paid
workforce was a happy workforce, but she didn’t argue. The rubber estate was Nigel’s business, and he didn’t like her to
interfere. Her job was to ensure that the women were not maltreated by the menfolk, and she had arranged for a full-time midwife
to live in a special hut of her own with a clean delivery room, so that she was always on call when needed.

It never failed to astound Connie how many babies were born on
the estate every year – dozens of them peering out at her with huge bushbaby eyes from the folds of their mother’s colourful
shawl. She had set up a school of sorts, but attendance was poor and Nigel told her she didn’t understand the Malay native
mentality. They were a people that used their hands, not their heads. Connie pointed out the number of Malay lawyers and doctors
and businessmen flourishing in the cities, but he just laughed at her and reminded her that you give the average Malay a good
curry, a pipe to smoke and a hammock to lie in and he would be content to dream the day away, telling stories of the monster
fish he’d wrestled to the riverbank with his bare hands, or of the jungle spirit who came and danced for him naked while he
slept.

She knew Nigel to be right, but she didn’t admit it. Any more than she admitted she had betrayed him with his best friend.
Strings of guilt and shame knotted around her throat and silenced her tongue. She and Nigel had barely spoken to each other
since that night, Nigel working long after suppertime in the evenings and rising hours before dawn. This morning when he drew
aside the mosquito net to switch on his lamp and climb out of bed, she had slid out her hand into the warm patch where his
body had lain.

‘Connie.’

She looked up, startled by the force of it. On the other side of the net he was standing like one of the hazy figures from
her dreams, observing her stray hand. For a moment she thought he might be angry, that she was trespassing – which in a way
she was – but in his striped pyjamas with his hair awry and his face still heavy with the residue of sleep, he looked anything
but angry. He looked like Teddy would look in thirty years’ time.

‘Nigel,’ she murmured, ‘I’m sorry.’

Still his gaze remained fixed on her hand, not on her face. ‘I know,’ he said sadly, and walked away.

Throughout the morning, Connie had been sitting at her desk and thinking about that moment, frightened by its solidity, knowing
that it was something too heavy to push out of their bed. And that was when she noticed Maya on her front drive. The strange
thing was that the girl was carrying a dead chicken in her hand, gripped by its scrawny neck and swinging at her side as she
walked. Connie rose from her desk and went down the front steps to meet her.