Текст книги "The Red Pavillion"

Автор книги: Jean Chapman

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Текущая страница: 15 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

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.’

‘And missed?’ Liz asked.

He shrugged apologetically. ‘I think he big man.’

Chemor, who had opted to stay at Rinsey after his boss’s arrest, came from outside the gates. ‘We’re looking all around, miss. There was someone, been here some time by the look of the tracks, but he gone now.’

‘Good,’ Liz said, ‘and thanks, Chemor, all of you. We must all stay alert.’ But as she went back to the bungalow she thought that, as for herself, she did not much care what happened to her.

She reported to her mother and Anna, then went to her room. She could settle to nothing, wandering aimlessly around. When she turned to the sketches she made of Alan, she felt the most exquisite sadness. There were also sketches of her father and Wendy. Oh, God! How could I be so selfish? Even when you’re old it must be a terrible pain, Liz thought. She left her bedroom and went to try to make amends.

From the kitchen window she could see her mother and Anna sitting close together on the seat by the grave. It looked almost as if they were engaged in a three-way conversation, so closely did they concentrate on the mound at their feet.

Older women were right to comfort each other, but she wondered if they did not forget what it was like to feel deprived of all that made life worth the trouble. They had a grave to grieve over; she wanted flesh-and-blood arms around her. She needed life, not death – unless death brought reunion.

She must get away, out, leave the house or she’d suffocate. She had to go, walk out, just be free of this compound with its grief and panicking guards – outside was her country, too. She picked up her rifle and left by the front door, then made off to the side and the tunnel. Even as she went she knew it was foolish with possible prowlers about.

At the far end of the tunnel she carefully recovered the trapdoor, then moved away from the path that led to the burned-out bungalow and towards the cleared section of the plantation, where now the tappers were daily cutting and collecting phenomenal yields. Beyond sight or earshot of their own guards, she knew where she wanted to be: in a beautiful place she had shared with Alan.

As she drew near to the falls she also remembered tracking her father’s car to the edge and beyond. On the second visit she recalled running to the edge and how she had alarmed Alan – how he had caught her and held her close.

He had tried to still her weeping, afraid the depth and ferocity of her sobbing would make her ill. She had touched the depth of mourning for her father that day, but now there were no tears. Her grief seemed sterile, without a physical centre. She felt a sudden great pang of pain for all the women who had lost their men in the war, men with no known grave. For the first time she began to know what that meant. It was like having a terrible pain you could not locate; there was no focus, only the pain.

Reaching the flat platform of rocks above the falls, she recalled how awed he had been by the beauty of the place. ‘War in paradise,’ he had said, and she had said, ‘Love, too.’

The falls were much swollen by the recent heavy downpours. She guessed the path they had walked on the far side would be under the swirling rush of white water. The flat tables of rock they had walked across so easily were covered by a swift-moving deep slide of water. She longed to go to the cavern under the falls and sit on the shelf of rock, drowned in the sound and the memories.

She knelt down by the edge, watching, feeling stupefied by the ear-filling crash of the waters and pulled forwards by the sight of the speeding torrents. After a while it seemed easier to think of just slipping over into the water, into oblivion, than to walk all the way back to Rinsey, to explain where she had been, to go on living.

It would not be painless, there were rocks she would strike and she guessed that even in extremis her body would still make frantic and futile efforts to breathe – but it should not last long. She felt it a sin, was vaguely afraid of divine retribution – felt exasperated by some stubborn streak of life force that still held her to the rock refused to accept being thrown down, extinguished before its time.

‘Some part of my mother in me, deep down,’ she mouthed, sitting back on her calves. ‘A lot of Daddy, the outside bits, the arty bits, but perhaps the core is Mother.’ She sighed and sat down with her legs outstretched, put her arms straight behind her and leaned back, head turned up to the sky.

She tried to review what she was certain of. It would certainly grieve her mother – and poor Anna – if she killed herself. No, she supposed, like Hamlet, she had to go on, haunted by almost the same ghosts – the murdered father, the lost lover. She rose, quickly aware she must move away from these falls; like Hamlet, she should put the temptation behind her.

As she turned and her eyes adjusted from the glare of the sun, her eyes scanned the fringes of jungle and the plantation in front of her – and a movement caught her eye. Someone or something? Someone, she decided and instinctively her hand sought her abandoned rifle. She raised it towards the rubber trees.

Then she caught a second movement – two people at least. Her heart began to thud and she recognised the irony or hypocrisy of her self-indulgence – one minute seeking a way to end her life, the next panicking to save it.

She sighted the rifle rapidly and instinctively, finger curled ready to press the trigger, as a figure stepped out from the trees directly in front of her. Liz saw it was a girl and did not fire, but nor did she lower her sight.

The girl stood very still, then called, ‘Elizabeth! Is it Elizabeth? Elizabeth, it’s me, Lee.’ The girl began to move towards her, slowly at first, then running.

‘Lee?’ Liz repeated, then recognised her beyond doubt. ‘Lee!’ She threw down the rifle and ran towards the girl, struggling like someone in dream or nightmare on ground that seemed less than solid and legs that hardly obeyed.

They threw themselves into each other’s arms crying, disbelieving, each examining the other, stroking, hugging, unable to speak, unable to let go each of the other for long, long minutes.

‘Lee! Where have you been all this time? I don’t understand.’ Liz held her at arm’s length and saw how gaunt and pale she looked, how torn were her clothes.

‘You, Liz, you ... ’ Lee looked but could not find words for how gaunt, pale and sad her friend looked. ‘You ... ’ Tears drowned the words. ‘You have to come ... ’ She swallowed, trying to stem the tears. ‘You have to ... ’ She turned and called, once, twice. In the trees Elizabeth saw the native.

‘You’ve been in the jungle travelling with the Sakais,’ Liz guessed, seeing all the evidence in Lee’s appearance.

‘The soldier with your photograph – ’

‘Alan!’ She felt as if every hair on her head rose at the words, her skin was ice cold. ‘Alan! You’ve seen him. But how ... I ... is he?’ She could not go on. ‘Lee, tell me.’

‘It’s not good news, Elizabeth,’ she said, tears streaming from her eyes as if the fault was hers. ‘I’m so sorry. He is very ill – ’

‘He’s not dead? You mean he’s not dead!’

‘The Sakais have been nursing him since the raid on our camp. But he is in a coma, Liz, I don’t think there’s much hope.’

‘I must go to him,’ she said, almost laughing with relief, with hope. No one could deny her that if he was alive! ‘Lee ... ’ She shook her head at seeing the girl she thought of as a sister restored to her. ‘Your camp? I don’t understand! I can’t believe all this – but I must go to him.’

‘This is why we have come.’