Текст книги "The Red Pavillion"

Автор книги: Jean Chapman

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 1 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

THE RED PAVILION

 

JEAN CHAPMAN

© Jean Chapman 1995

Jean Chapman has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

First published in 1995 by Piatkus Ltd.

This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

 

Acknowledgements

This book could not have been written without the constant help of my husband, Alan, who as an eighteen-year-old conscript served with the Scots Guards in Malaya from 1948 to 1951. He passed on to me not only his experiences but also opportunities to know and admire the peoples and country for myself. I also found Noel Barber’s book ‘The War of the Running Dogs’ and F. Spencer Chapman’s book ‘The Jungle is Neutral’ especially helpful.

Chapter One

The house stood in the middle of broad acres of lawn, a solid Victorian country property with aged walnut and mulberry trees edging the back gardens, copper beeches and limes, fragrant in the June sunshine, gracing the front.

Elegant without being pretentious. The ‘To Lease’ advertisement in the 1948 New Year edition of Country Life had been quickly answered and the offer taken up. Six months later the personal possessions of the Hammond family had been packed and Pearling House generally depersonalised ready for its tenants.

Elizabeth watched and waited as her mother lingered under the front portico. Finally she switched on the engine of the Riley and revved it. ‘Come on,’ she breathed through clenched teeth. Her patience had long ago been exhausted by the frustrations of convincing her mother that the expense of the new BOAC flight from England to the Far East was more practical than four weeks on a liner.

‘We’ve not that long,’ she called finally. ‘I have to take the car to the garage. I want to make sure it’s going to be properly stored.’

Blanche’s swift glance at her elder daughter, accompanied by nothing more than a flutter of a handkerchief across her face, seem to symbolise more a wish to wave goodbye than to undertake the journey. Not for the first time Liz wondered whether her mother did not care more for Pearling than for her father and the distant Rinsey estate that had been their home for fifteen years. Liz yearned to join her father, to be back with her friends.

Eight years ago the war had torn her from all she held dear in upcountry Malaya – her amah, her pet monkey, most of all the Guisan family – and now every minute’s delay seemed intolerable.

‘Goodbye, civilisation,’ her mother muttered, climbing into the car at last. ‘And hail Shangri-la.’

The sniff of disapproval was followed by the judgement, ‘Your sister has the right memories – screaming monkeys and the water always hot in her paddling pool.’

Liz’s recollection was that her mother used to wave her umbrella aggressively at the garden leaf monkeys, stirring them into chattering excitement and mischievous retaliation as they shook the branches of the trees, showering suspended raindrops on to the gesticulating woman. Not wishing to give cause for any further anti-Eastern sentiments now Blanche was actually in the car, Liz limited herself to the reply, ‘Wendy was only four. I was fourteen.’

‘The war got you out of the benighted place just in time.’

Liz opened her mouth to argue merits, but contented herself with, ‘I hope to make my life out there, teaching ... drawing.’ She added the last word quietly, that ambition meant much to her and she did not want it pilloried.

‘You didn’t need a degree for that!’

‘“I ran up against a Prejudice, That quite cut off the view”,’ Liz quoted. She knew that to have come down from university with a first-class degree rather than a wealthy upper-class husband was failure in her mother’s eyes.

‘What is that supposed to mean?’

‘I thought you considered a good education the supreme advantage?’

The weekend before they had paid a farewell visit to her twelve-year-old sister. Wendy’s efforts to keep back the tears had been flattened by her mother’s capacity to steamroller through any emotion, anyone else’s feelings, for what she thought was ‘the best for all concerned’. Blanche almost literally tearing her sister from her arms, had managed to combine a pat on Wendy’s heaving shoulders with a directional urge towards the hovering mistress as she told her, ‘When I know Rinsey is suitable, you can come for holidays.’

‘Isn’t that why we’re leaving Wendy here at boarding school?’ Liz asked, keeping her voice a short note below irony.

‘Your aim, dear, always seems to be to make me feel guilty about events over which I have no control. Ooh!’ Her mother’s drawn-out exclamation held the exasperation of a woman frustrated in all her efforts.

Spurting the gravel from under the wheels of the Riley as she swept it out of the drive, Liz had a sudden, vivid memory of her mother at Rinsey. She remembered the garden fought for inch by inch by her mother and various garden boys, of her chopping at the liana creepers in fury with a Malayan parang belonging to the cookie – and the Chinese boys laughing behind her back.

She had been a younger, far slenderer woman then, but the passionate exclamation was the same. Liz wondered why she had inherited the passion and not the tall blonde slenderness. She felt she was physically mid-everything – height, brownness of hair, looks ...

‘At least the Guisans won’t be there, something to be thankful for.’

‘They may be.’ Liz recognised the hurt-for-hurt tactic, but stonily rejected the prospect of Rinsey without her friends. ‘They may be. Father may have traced them all by the time we get there.’ She pondered the stories of internment and torture by the Japanese but added, ‘People are still turning up.’

‘The girl and boy probably have five or six children each by now,’ Blanche went on as if Liz had not spoken, ‘and God knows what they’ll be like!’

‘Why do you say such things?’

‘Because the Guisans summed up two things: your father’s lack of judgement in employing the man in the first place, and the danger of interbreeding in a hot climate.’ Blanche opened her handbag and stood a silver drink flask upright before closing it again. ‘I just hope this time your father finds the climate too enervating after England and the navy. He was much too previous in letting the house.’

The bitterness edging the voice and the tight folding of the leather handbag strap left Liz in no doubt that if her mother’s will had prevailed she would have stayed at Pearling, continuing to work on the market garden she had created during the war. Funny really, Liz thought. Blanche had fought to wrench a flower garden from the jungle, then worked herself to exhaustion digging up lawns at Pearling to grow food. Now, as Blanche had already surmised, they would be re-grassed.

For the first mile of their journey the lanes twisted towards the village of Pearling, through farmland Liz’s paternal great-grandparents had owned and her grandparents had sold to invest in the Far East. She was aware of her family’s deep roots in this green and moderate land, but her heart ached for the excesses of the tropics.

She turned a corner and confronted a boy on an overlarge bicycle riding near the middle of the road. He swerved violently to the side, wobbled, caught his pedal on the grass and described a fair dive into the lush verge. Liz slowed automatically, peering back through her rear-view mirror.

‘You’re not stopping!’ Blanche exclaimed.

‘I think it’s the post-office boy who delivers telegrams,’ she said as she saw him stoop to pick up a cap, which he hesitantly raised in their direction.

‘Oh! he’s fine!’ Blanche decided, glancing back. ‘I thought we hadn’t much time,’ she added when Liz did not immediately drive on.

Liz looked in her mirror again and decided he was unhurt and time was short though she resented her mother’s dismissive attitude. This time at Rinsey she might not be able to be quite so like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, issuing her orders, autocratic to the point of despotism.

The Chinese cookie and office clerks, the happy contented Malay houseboys, the Tamil rubber-tappers would perhaps have different attitudes after having seen their English lords and masters run before the Japanese. Leaving them to the severity of a culture which saw confession as a necessary precursor to guilt and so torture as a weapon of justice. No wonder her father had found his workforce at first scattered and then organised by extremists into rebellious groups demanding higher wages.

A swift intake of breath by her side alerted Liz a second before Blanche shouted: ‘Lights! There’s traffic lights ahead!’

‘I see them, mother,’ she said.

‘You’d gone off into a dream.’

‘I can think and drive at the same time.’

‘No,’ Liz agreed, for the first time rather dreading the journey herself. It would be a couple of days even after landing at Singapore before they could reach Rinsey, though her mother would undoubtedly be an asset back at her father’s side. Motivating unwilling workers had become quite a speciality of hers during the war – and Father, though Liz would admit it to no one but herself, was not good at business, it seemed to embarrass him.

‘We’ll have a few days at Raffles,’ her mother mused. ‘Your father said he would meet us in Singapore ... no point in rushing upcountry. We’ll have some cotton dresses and slacks made.’

What Liz wanted was a complete reunion with her father and the Guisans; Joseph, her first heartthrob, and his sister Lee, her best friend. Contemplating an even longer delay, she frowned. She wanted to travel straight on to greet them all, find them all safe, not to stay poncing about at Raffles for days.

‘You’re doing it again!’

‘Yes.’ She admitted the loss of concentration, but, pleased to be distracted from more dour thoughts, turned to her mother with a grin. ‘I was about to order you a gin sling in Raffles.’

Blanche tutted but laughed. ‘You always have to make life as bearable as you can.’

*

Liz felt it was the numerous sips from the flask, refilled several times as they flew in the new Constellation via Lisbon, Colombo and out over the Bay of Bengal, that kept her mother going at all. Once the journey was begun, her mother confined her criticisms to the odd ironic remark. A stoical quality surfaced on these occasions. Blanche might raise Cain if her wishes were not carried out, but never continued grumbling once the inevitable had happened. She metaphorically closed her eyes to the situation, and on this protracted flight spent much of the time feigning sleep.

The final leg of their journey from Rangoon to Singapore drove all weariness from Liz’s eyes. As the plane came in from the north of the island, she peered down and saw the luxuriant jungle of Malaya bordered by white sandy beaches. The tiny island of Sentosa could be seen off the coast of the larger island of Singapore, and she caught a glimpse of the causeway to the mainland as the plane turned.

The sky was deepening from orange to red as the rapid tropical dusk accompanied their arrival. Blanche, the taller of the two, strained to see over the heads of those waiting but could not see her husband. Any second Liz expected a raised arm and a shout, and held her own greeting ready in her throat, joy and the cry pent up – but as the small crowd cleared she felt choked with childlike disappointment.

Anxiety for her mother took over as she turned to see Blanche slumped on the edge of a bench, head in hands, in the last stages of exhaustion. Leaving her in charge of their bags, Liz walked out into the full heat of the night beyond the reception area. She had forgotten it was quite this hot, to the uninitiated like stepping into a bakehouse with the ovens at full blast. The cicadas were loud in every verge and patch of the coarse-leaved lalang grass.

She looked past the hopefully loitering trishaw boys, trying to push away a growing sense of desolation. After all, so much could delay a person in Malaya. A single train breakdown on the one line that ran the length of the west coast, or a landslip from the rain-soaked, jungle-clad hillsides could hold him up for hours, even days.

She strained to look at every man who loomed taller than the Malays and Chinese, but soon decided that for her mother’s sake they would go to Raffles and wait there. It was the obvious solution.

She beckoned a Chinese boy to find them a taxi. He ran swiftly off, then helped to porter their cases, trying to carry them all at once, all smiles and eager for the dollar note she held.

Blanche caught her breath as the heat outside greeted her. ‘My God! We’re back,’ she said to no one in particular.

The teeming life of the city slid by the open car windows, the chattering bustle of some million Chinese, a quarter of a million Malays, half that again of Indians and Pakistanis and tens of thousands of Europeans – all making a living from the island and the peninsula of Malaya.

They travelled across the island from Seletar airport along the river front lined with godowns – the warehouses, piled with goods as if for a gigantic auction sale. The lights of the many bumboats and houseboats were bobbing about like a multitude of fireflies.

The whole populace seemed to be in the streets, bustling around the street hawkers’ stalls, eating at the many charcoal barbecues that sprang up each evening. Japanese-made trishaws now outnumbered the local rickshaws, Liz ironically noted as they swung between carts and bicycles piled high with produce. Monkeys trained to pick coconuts rode the back of their masters’ bicycles, tethered by thin cords attached to the animals’ collars. She pushed to the back of her mind the other things they did with monkeys and other animals in the meat markets. England had coloured her outlook in that respect, but for the rest she wanted to lift up her arms and embrace the whole palm-fringed tropical island.

The car pulled up on the drive between the fan-palm trees and hedges screening the entrance to the Raffles Hotel from the seafront Beach Road. The driver carried their cases in to the reception desk, where an undermanager, immaculate in his tropical suit, stood ready to greet them. Blanche collapsed wearily into a large basket chair and waved Liz on to make the enquiries.

Liz went back to her, shaking her head. ‘No news and no reservations made in the name of Hammond.’

‘God!’ Blanche breathed. The journey and now the heat had drained her face of its last vestige of colour and her usually silky blonde hair hung dark and lank. ‘This damn country is bad enough but without Neville it’s intolerable.’

‘I’m managed to get a double room for you and Daddy when he comes and a single for me,’ she said as a couple of bellboys came smiling to take their luggage to their rooms. ‘I’ll come to your room first and we’ll telephone Rinsey, see what’s happened.’

While Liz hung on for the call to be put through, she wondered at the slight hesitation in the softly spoken Chinese voice when she had requested the upcountry number from the hotel switchboard. Then she heard a swift exchange in Cantonese between the hotel and a telephone exchange farther north. She heard the word ‘Rinsey’ repeated and the slight hissing intake of breath from an operator.

She listened more intently to the odd words from one operator to the other, the clicks and the whirrs as the call was passed from exchange to exchange upcountry. An odd feeling of suspicion and concern came over her. Voices could hardly be inscrutable but she had the definite feeling that something was being kept from her. Finally a voice burst on to the line, Chinese words but with an accent.

‘Kurt? Mr Guisan?’ she asked. ‘Is that you?’

There was a listening silence, then the same voice asked in English, ‘Who is this?’

‘It’s Elizabeth, Elizabeth Hammond. Is that you, Kurt?’

‘There is no Kurt here.’ The voice was stony with rejection.

‘Then could I speak to Mr Hammond, please? This is his daughter speaking. I’m in Singapore with my mother.’

The silence at the other end seemed to hold a different quality and another thought struck her; was she through to the office instead of the bungalow? ‘Am I speaking to the Rinsey estate office?’

The line went dead.

She tried again and again, but now no one answered even when she checked and rechecked that all the links were dialling the right number. Finally an abrupt operator at Bantang Kali advised, ‘Try again tomorrow, please?’

By this time Blanche was bathed and in bed lying inert, looking beyond the point of being able to lift her arms from the single sheet on the bed. ‘I’ll order you that Singapore Sling with a side order of iced tonic and some sandwiches,’ Liz told her, lifting the receiver to ask for room service.

‘Good girl.’ Blanche gave a grateful half-smile.

‘I don’t think there is much more we can do tonight.’

Liz found her single room at the far end of the same corridor. The ceiling fans moving the light curtains gave an illusion of coolness. After she had bathed she felt desperately hungry and tired, but was unable to quell a curious mixture of anxiety and anger. She knew she could neither rest nor eat until she had made some further attempt to understand her father’s absence.

More than anything the voice from Rinsey – if it had been Rinsey her call had reached – disturbed her. She dismissed the feeling that it had been Kurt on the other end, the tones had been too hard, too unsympathetic – and would she recognise his voice after eight years? Could it have been his son, Josef? Her heart lifted ridiculously at that sudden idea. But why had the call been cut off so abruptly? Had something happened suddenly at the other end? The questions churned endlessly. And why wasn’t her father here?

This last thought was like a great shout in her mind. She remembered their arrival and a group of men talking earnestly together in the foyer, men discussing a serious problem, an emergency even, certainly not chatting. If anyone knew anything, she must find out.

The two men behind the reception desk were the same ones who had denied they had any information when Liz checked in. Could she rephrase the same questions without feeling a fool? She approached somewhat circumspectly, but was purposefully greeted.

‘Ah! Miss Hammond, I was just calling your room. There is a gentleman here to see you.’ The receptionist indicated a tall man, in his late thirties perhaps, certainly of white origins but whose skin had the permanent colour of one who had been long in the tropics rather than the swift and impermanent tan of a mere visitor.

‘Miss Hammond?’ he queried. His voice, she decided, was English but as complex as that cut off over the telephone. It was deep, welcoming to a degree, but held a tone of reserve. ‘Miss Elizabeth Hammond?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’ She took the proffered hand. ‘Have you a message from my father?’

‘Is Mrs Blanche Hammond, your mother, with you?’

‘She’s tired from the journey.’ She questioned him by her stillness as he indicated a seat at the far side of the foyer.

‘I have no direct information of any kind for you,’ he told her, ‘but we have mutual friends – the Wildons – who told me you were expected today.’

‘I do remember the Wildons,’ she agreed. ‘But we’ve tried to telephone to our estate.’ She felt suddenly aggressive towards this man with his shuttered expressions. How could she make him see her desperate concern? ‘We ... I ...’

‘Yes.’

The single word implied he knew. She decided he could be nothing but some kind of civil servant, some bureaucrat, his words were more official jargon than conversation.

‘So what’s going on? What’s happened at Rinsey? Do you know? And where’s my father?’ The shout that had been in her head was moderated to a piercing stage whisper – which paralysed all the foyer conversation.

‘Look,’ he said, rising from the seat and offering his arm to steer her away from the now silently watching group in the far corner. ‘Come and dine with me. I can tell you everything I know. It’s not simple – ’

She withdrew her hand from his arm. ‘Don’t bloody patronise me,’ she hissed at him, and thought with immediate penitence that she sounded like her mother.

‘I wouldn’t dream of it, Miss Hammond. In any case I really haven’t time.’

‘Then tell me what you know now!’ They had taken a few steps in the direction of the dining room. Liz felt she stayed upright only because she was taut with anger and exhaustion.

‘We both need to eat, don’t we?’ The extreme ends of his lips may have quivered upwards a little, but not so as anyone more than an arm’s length away would have noticed.

She thought, God, don’t let me cry when I sit down. To relax even that much might be a catalyst.

‘John Sturgess,’ he said when they were seated. ‘John Robson Sturgess.’

She stared at him, waiting for the information he had.

‘My mother’s maiden name,’ he added, mistaking her stare. ‘A lot of people call me – ’

‘Now we have the important things out of the way ... ’ She stopped and shook her head. ‘No, I’m sorry, Mr Sturgess – but for God’s sake put me out of my misery, if you don’t want me to start having hysterics. I’m too tired for tact. What do you know?’

He lowered his gaze to the table, taking time, she thought to censor what he had to tell, and to avoid her reading anything extra in his eyes. She noted the compression of the lips, the jaw tightening. The silence went on to complete abstraction as he picked up a fork and slowly impaled the bread roll on his side plate. He made it look like murder, like a commando making a deliberate and silent kill.

A sudden nervous laugh escaped her at the disparity between the idea and the action that evoked it. He looked up at her and then at the roll with equal surprise as if he had forgotten one and been quite unaware of the other. Briefly, she wondered if the problems that haunted him were not even greater than her own.

He cleared his throat as if ridding himself of such petty things as emotions. ‘The only hard news I have about your father is that he sent you a telegram on 18 June telling you and your mother not to travel, but to stay in England.’

She stared at the fork piercing the bread and remembered the telegram boy they had put in the ditch.

‘On the 16th Chinese bandits went to one of the loneliest rubber estates in Perak – not Rinsey, Miss Hammond,’ he reassured her, ‘and shot the English manager and undermanager.’

‘Elphil?’ she guessed, remembering visiting that other remote estate with her father, travelling the seemingly endless jungle roads. Neville Hammond had described Elphil with those same words.

‘Yes.’ He looked at her with slightly more interest. ‘You surmise correctly.’

‘That’s terrible,’ she said, but resented the primness of his remark. ‘But perhaps just an incident? We knew there had been labour troubles.’

‘No!’ The denial was harshly emphatic. ‘I’m afraid not. There have been other incidents. Most of the planters in the north have seen this trouble coming since the end of the war. The chief Chinese communists held a huge gathering at Sungei Siput about a month ago … ’

Liz lost some of what he was saying as she remembered Sungei Siput, one of the chief towns of the state of Perak, as a place for shopping and the occasional cinema trip. Rinsey was in the same foothills as Elphil though some ten long jungle miles further southeast. ‘But you said bandits?’ she interrupted.

‘Bandits was the official line at first, but bandits don’t shoot people and leave two thousand dollars in the office safe with the key under their noses and not a damned soul who dare intervene.’

‘So what do they want?’

He gave her a strange agonised look which seemed to contain a personal hurt, as if he had been intimately betrayed, and said briefly, as the waiter came towards them, ‘To make Malaya a communist republic.’

The implications were left unsaid as the Chinese waiter came to take their order with all the polite attention, lack of servility and inscrutability of his race.

‘But how? How they can hope to – ’ She stopped short, then added her own answer, ‘By killing the English? But they couldn’t ... ’

‘Not in the towns. It’s the classic Mao Tse-tung stuff. Guerrillas attack lonely estates, tin and coal mines ... ’ He pulled the fork from his roll, then used it to chip away at the edges of the bread. ‘As well as the English they will attack the police, government officials in small towns and terrorise villagers into supplying them with food. They believe if they control the sources of wealth in the countryside the cities will eventually be starved to submission. Make no mistake, they’re already well organised ... ’

For a few seconds they both looked at the exposed white middle of his bread, before he put down his fork and pushed the side plate away.

She waited for him to go on with a growing sense of alarm. She remembered enough to know that the tin mines of eastern Malaya or the opencast coal mines of Batu Arang were no more than holes in the ground, lonely as any rubber plantation and just as jungle-surrounded.

She felt suddenly very curious. Whatever he was saying, however impassive his features, he was emotionally as involved in all this as she was.

‘Do you have someone living upcountry?’

‘No! I have no one.’ The denial was too sharp, too decisive, implied loss rather than the never had. ‘I lived in Malaya before the war,’ he said, adding with finality, ‘but that’s all over long ago.’

‘So what is your role?’ she asked. ‘I mean, you’re obviously official even if you’re not in uniform.’

His spoon stopped between bowl and mouth. She thought for a moment she had committed some social gaffe, but then very briefly he smiled. ‘Is it that obvious?’

She kept her face impassive, remembering that her Malayan amah had said there were times when silence brought the most answers.

‘I became a major after the war, after I’d stayed behind in the jungle during the Japanese occupation. I . .’ Pausing, he looked up at her and for the first time she felt it was an ordinary flesh-and-blood man who sat opposite her, for she could see the hurt in his eyes. ‘I helped train the Chinese – we knew a lot of them were communists – to harass the Japs. I lived with them in their jungle often not far from Elphil and Rinsey. I’m seconded back because I know where these camps are and how these Chinese terrorists think.’

So this was his bête noire; he had helped train men who had turned on his own race. She wondered if her mother would agree to stay at Raffles while she took the train to Ipoh, hoping to find or be contacted by her father. ‘So you’re travelling up to Perak?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’ He paused and looked at her sharply. ‘But I don’t advise you to – the police have enough on their hands. Stay here and news will come, I’ll see to it.’

‘I shall travel up by train tomorrow,’ she said simply. ‘Rinsey is my home.’