Текст книги "The Red Pavillion"

Автор книги: Jean Chapman

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Much later in her room, when everyone had been retired for hours, Liz took out a sketchpad and pencil and confronted the atrocity that would not leave her. She worked quickly, barely looked at the sketch when she had finished, then turned the leaf and began to rediscover the young soldier. This she took more slowly, the problem more elusive. It was always easy to recreate horror. Horror pictures used a low mental budget.

There had been a weary tension in the young man’s shoulders, a capacity for endurance beyond the normal in the gunholding pose. He would, she thought, looking at the first sketch, make a good figure for a Far Eastern war memorial. The thought made her rise agitatedly, putting the sketch block aside. She wasn’t wishing death on the man – it was just something she had seen. She strongly denied apportioning death as the unknown soldier’s lot. ‘Oh, God!’ she exclaimed aloud. ‘I must stop this. I need a drink, or coffee or something – mustn’t get like my mother.’

She went quietly to the lounge and was startled to see a figure at the window outlined by the lights thrown up from the floating dredgers below.

‘Who is it?’ the startled figure demanded.

‘Only me, Mother.’ She went to her. ‘Can’t you sleep either?’

‘They should have built this bungalow on the other side of the hill,’ she said, ‘away from this bloody continuous noise.’

‘1 suppose it’s like living next to a railway, you hardly notice it after a time.’

‘Huh!’ Blanche grunted disbelievingly.

‘Nevertheless it’s true.’

They both started as George Harfield came into his lounge. ‘If you pull the shutters to, I can put the light on. No point in making ourselves targets.’

The three seemed irresolute as they were discovered in dishabille. Harfield was wearing only a pair of light cotton shorts, while Liz and her mother had on cotton pyjamas and mules.

‘You know what’s the matter with us all,’ Blanche decided, ‘we’re hungry. Come on, I’ll scramble us all some eggs.’

‘Just what the doctor ordered.’ George bowed, eclipsing his powerful torso with an even more powerful pair of shoulders. ‘I take my hat off to you, ma’am.’

Liz looked at her mother, who widened her eyes dangerously and said, ‘Unless too many cooks spoil the broth, let’s adjourn to the kitchen.’

George laughed, and Liz wondered if he trotted out the trite phrases just to annoy ‘because he knows it teases’. She also wondered at people’s capacity for going on with the normal tasks, like having meals, even in the most awful circumstances. It was just as she remembered the war in England, girls at school losing brothers and fathers, everyone rallying round.

She watched her mother as she beat eggs in a bowl and turned chapattis on a flat griddle, competent, controlled. The truth was that they were both so used to not having a man in the house, it could be easy to forget as events continually overtook them that they should be at Rinsey with her father. He had rarely been around for the last eight years.

‘I wondered if you thought you were being specially targeted,’ Blanche asked as they began to eat.

‘It’s possible.’ Harfield, bending over to his plate, ate ravenously once begun, talking rapidly between mouthfuls. ‘During the war I made no secret of the fact that I knew certain red-star merchants in our own units were burying the guns and ammunition air-dropped to us, ready for their own purposes after the Japs had gone. I told them I’d bury the first one I caught at it.’

‘So ... ’ Liz’s ghastly sketch loomed in her mind. ‘So aren’t you afraid?’

He paused, piled fork suspended. ‘No,’ he said, ‘bloody angry. I was fond of Rasa, he had real pluck. He defied the Japs during the war and now the bloody Red Chinks have got him.’ He threw the fork down on his plate. ‘It sickens me to the pit of my stomach!’

Blanche pushed his drink towards him, then indicated his half-eaten eggs. ‘We need you on top form.’

He sipped the brandy and soda, then, without further comment, finished the meal, wrapping the last scraps of egg in a chapatti. ‘I feel like a traitor, being hungry.’

‘Soldiering back up the hill of routine,’ Blanche said as if to herself, then looked directly at George. ‘The trouble is people see routine as ordinary – instead of often the most difficult thing we do in our lives.’

‘Keeping the boat steady,’ he said, looking at her and nodding his approval of the sentiment. ‘The most admirable thing most of us do in our lives.’

‘The role of the good wife,’ Liz contributed.

‘Never sure, dear, whether you’re being sarcastic or supportive to the argument.’

‘She’s young,’ George said.

She didn’t answer her mother because she really wasn’t sure either. The conversation went on, disregarding her.

‘I wondered whether any of the military were ever actually billeted at plantations, or went for a few days’ rest?’ Blanche asked.

‘Sort of busman’s holiday,’ George commented. ‘Not a lot in it for the troops at Rinsey right now, I wouldn’t have thought, except guard duty and they can do that anywhere.’

‘No, I meant when we’re living there and properly organised, we could give them a few home comforts, good meals ... while their presence – ’

‘What you need is a couple of resident Gurkhas! They’d put the fear of God into the commies.’

‘You don’t take it as a practical proposition.’

‘I think it is – for you.’ He grinned. ‘Not sure what the army would get out of it. Some of the men go to safe areas where couples entertain them for a meal and a swim in their pools and I have known them leave a wireless operator at a bungalow, or in a kampong, while they go on a jungle sortie. They’re not overmanned, it would all have to relate to a military operation, or recreation for those that have been on long operations.’

‘Rinsey hardly falls into the rest-and-relaxation category,’ Blanche agreed.

‘Self-sufficiency is what we need. This could be a long campaign. My men will be working round the clock as from tomorrow to fortify Bukit Kinta, then we’ll go to Rinsey and secure that.’

Liz caught the older man’s eye and he read the unspoken question. ‘I have to protect my people here first. There is, after all, no one at Rinsey at the moment, no workers – ’

‘There’s Josef, and he may have found some of the tappers by now.’

‘Josef.’ He paused, sniffed and hummed speculatively under his breath. ‘Told Major Sturgess he helped us during the war. Shall have to see.’

‘He would only have been a teenager, I don’t suppose he could have done much.’ Liz pressed excuses for Josef, as was her old habit.

‘A teenager’s grown up out here and I’ll remember him if he ever helped.’

There was a certainty in his voice, a confidence in his own ability, as there was when he went on to say, ‘One thing, once we start on your bungalow there’ll be no delay. I’ve requisitioned plenty of barbed wire, electric cable and powerful lamps.’

‘I wonder if our old generator will stand the strain,’ Blanche said.

‘No. Robbo didn’t think so, he’s sending up a mobile army genny on permanent loan.’

Chapter Six

The work at Rinsey started four long days later, days without news, days when the two women talked to each other less and less as they exhausted every possibility, every speculation of hopeful things that could have prevented Neville Hammond from contacting someone.

Blanche stood in her lounge watching as the work of unloading the four lorries was begun by the drivers and their mates. The Malays worked as hard as usual, the muscles in their brown arms and legs shiny hard balls of willing power, but their smiles were missing. The death of their headman, and the manner of it, would weigh on them all for a long time – but not a single one of George’s men had deserted him. He was too positive in his determination to beat the CTs and there was not a man at Bukit Kinta who doubted his ability to do it.

He directed them now. Rolls of barbed wire, fifteen-foot poles, electric cable and powerful lamps were quickly and neatly piled to one side of the clearing. Blanche saw George take the smallest and darkest of the men aside; he seemed to be instructing him to walk the perimeter where the defences should be erected.

She wandered outside, still holding the triptych of photographs which always travelled with her or stood on her dressing table. Arriving at Rinsey once more to find it totally deserted had sapped her energy. When Liz wasn’t in evidence, Blanche wondered what she was doing there. Without her man by her side, this uneasy country was unbearable.

George Harfield came over to her. Nodding after the man, he explained, ‘Themor, he’s the best tracker I’ve ever had. I think he must be related to Dyak trackers from Borneo. he can tell whether it’s man or beast that’s been along a path and how long ago. I’ve sent him to look around for any particular sign of activity. It might make a difference to how we arrange the lights.’

Blanche knew she should feel more involved in all this, be vitally interested. She was more aware of the leather photograph folder she held and how comforted she felt to have this other Englishman by her side.

‘My men,’ he was saying if he had already asked her a question and was now repeating it, ‘I would prefer them all to sleep here until the job’s done, if you don’t mind. They’d sleep on the verandah, just the four of them, and take turns on watch. I must go back to Bukit Kinta each evening, particularly while they’re all so jumpy.’

‘We should have heard by now if my husband was safe,’ she stated, opening the folder and displaying the central photograph of Neville, posed in a formal portrait, flanked by family photographs of herself and the two girls, and the four of them in a sailing dinghy.

He took the folder and, as the two of them looked down at the English scenes and English faces, she added, ‘No one can be missing or held up this long. He’s either been captured and held for God knows what purpose – or he’s dead.’

He gently took hold of her forearm. ‘People do disappear. The most extraordinary things do happen.’

‘Not that often.’ She stared down at his hand and thought it was a long time since a man had made her feel that supported. Then, as if he took the protracted gaze for criticism, he released her. She told herself she was glad, too much kindness sapped her resolve. She had long ago realised she needed to maintain her aggressive veneer to face the world.

‘No, but we must hope.’ He indicated Liz in the photographs. ‘Your elder daughter is like her father.’

‘In many ways,’ Blanche agreed. ‘Wendy is more like me. I hope so, anyway, we need some practical people in this family.’

‘This Josef – Liz seems to have faith in him?’

Blanche took the album and closed it as the clatter of the drivers putting up the tailgates of the lorries diverted them. One of the drivers called something in Malay and George indicated his permission for them to go back to the mine, leaving only the wired-in jeep.

‘Josef,’ Blanche repeated, her voice starting low and sinking lower. ‘An example of how much like her father she is – much too eager to think well of the wrong people. Sometimes I think because Neville is in large part saint-like he expects everyone else to be the same.’

‘Life must be a great disappointment to him then.’ George took a retractable tape measure from his pocket and tossed it in his hand as if weighing its worth before beginning to use it.

She laughed briefly and admitted, ‘Often true.’

‘If you have to be on your own ... ’ George gently posed the possibility.

‘God forbid,’ Blanche breathed and held the leather folder close to her breast, crossing her arms over it. ‘I’ve had my war alone. I only came to Malaya to be with Neville … ’

‘That’s right, m’dear. God forbid. Meantime we take precautions against the troubles we know you’re likely to have. So what about this Josef? Where is he?’

‘We did ask him to contact as many tappers as he could. I presume that’s where he is.’

‘Hmm! There’s a lot here that doesn’t add up,’ he mumbled, then lifted his head, listening as the sound of more traffic coming towards them was heard.

A few seconds later an army lorry towing a trailer and a cloud of dust came into view. As it pulled up alongside them, the air was replete with the smell of hot metal and evaporating petrol.

‘The generator! As good as his word,’ George said with satisfaction as he went forward to greet the corporal who sprang down from the driving seat. From the passenger’s side a taller, younger man climbed down. ‘Corporal,’ he greeted the driver.

‘Morning, sir. Mr Harfield? One genny and one guard stroke radio operator for Rinsey. One on permanent loan’ – he nodded towards the generator – ‘and one sort of temporary.’ Blanche raised her eyebrows in surprise as the corporal introduced her to Guardsman Alan Cresswell.

‘I’ve seen you before,’ she said. ‘On a truck coming out of Ipoh station.’

‘That’s right.’ He shook her proffered hand. ‘There were two of you.’

‘My daughter, Elizabeth, she’s around somewhere.’ Blanche thought his gangling height and gaunt features made him look more like someone who needed a few good meals and mothering than like a soldier. ‘So you’re going to be billeted here for a bit. That’ll be good.’

When he smiled down at her she noticed the cleft chin and the dark-brown eyes. He was the kind of man who would wear well, she thought, probably be far more attractive in his middle years than he was as a young man.

‘Seems to me you’re going to have an accommodation problem,’ George said. ‘One minute the place is like the Marie Celeste, the next it’s bulging at the seams.’

‘Major Sturgess said there were some old workers’ quarters at the back. With your permission, Mrs Hammond, I’ll set up my gear there. I can bivouac alongside my transmitter, I’ll have to be on network every few hours. Do you think one of your Malays would take an aerial up a tree for me see what kind of reception I can get?’

‘Let me know where you want to be,’ George said.

The young guardsman nodded. ‘Once I’ve called in I can help with the work. I’ll not be on standby just yet.’

They watched him begin to unload a prodigious amount of equipment from the back of the lorry. ‘A boy in man’s boots,’ Blanche commented quietly.

‘A guardsman’s boots.’ George nodded to the brilliant shine of the toecaps gleaming through the dust as kitbag was added to transmitter and crates of wet batteries at the far end of the bungalow. ‘Spit and polish, drilled across the parade grounds of Caterham Barracks to be a fighting machine in a tropical jungle – and I bet he’d never been farther than Llandudno before he was conscripted.’

‘Putting on a good show then.’ Blanche remembered how he had sat so immobile in the back of the lorry, catching their eye, serious among his wolf-whistling, gesticulating companions. A rather different young man to the general run.

‘Your daughter seems conspicuous by her absence.’ George’s glance moved along the bungalow windows. ‘She’s not likely to go off looking for this Josef on her own, is she? They seem to have been very close as children.’

‘Quite possible, though I think she’s in her room sketching. If my daughter has a problem she usually draws pictures. Don’t worry, I’ll keep my eye on her.’

‘Until we have this perimeter fencing up and a proper secure compound, I wish you would. I want nobody wandering about.’

*

Liz had waited until she saw the men all engrossed in unloading the fencing and lighting equipment. While her mother was talking to Harfield, she took the opportunity to slip out into the back garden and from there to the path leading to the manager’s quarters.

She had been put out to find Josef not around, had again defended him from any criticism – but she wanted to know what was happening. Where were the workers? What had Josef done since they last saw him? Where was he?

She remembered the track to the manager’s bungalow as a broad highway for bicycles and tricycles, but now it was much overgrown, wet and slippery. By the time she approached the other property she was full of doubts. If the path was not used, what should she expect? Nevertheless it was a shock to see the wooden walls apparently locked and latticed in trees. She approached with something of the feeling of one in a fairy tale discovering a long-overgrown realm. The manager’s bungalow had been overrun by a legion of saplings, bamboos and seedling ferns to the very walls.

She moved slowly up the steps. The creaking and groaning of the verandah as she crossed it told of long-neglected and probably unsafe timbers. In the window spaces hung the remnants of rattan blinds, dust and leaves lay thick in every niche of the rotting boards and as she pushed the door it dropped sideways and inwards with a terrible clatter. She stood for a moment so startled she was ready to run, but only a parrot screamed and scolded as it stomped about in a nearby clump of bamboo.

Inside there was only debris – the broken staves of a chair, the disconnected telephone, which lay, receiver and rest wide apart, on the floor. She stepped forwards to look at a calendar hanging on the wall above the telephone, but the pages had been rendered illegible and welded together by the humidity. She thought it looked like 1941, but it was a guess. It was all guesses – she felt sick with a sudden, desperate loneliness – for nothing was the same.

She had come to Rinsey to find her father but instead she had lost a friend, her childhood hero and sweetheart. She had lost Josef not just because he was not there, but because she had found out his lie. He had not been living here. And if the Japanese had commandeered their bungalow, where had he lived in the war? If his father had been killed, where had his mother and Lee gone – or had they been taken away?

Walking through the rooms, she remembered how it had been. She recollected the great solid furniture that Mr Guisan had imported, huge wooden beds like decapitated four-posters, chairs with knobs on their arms like cudgels to an unwary child’s elbows or knees. They had been specially commissioned and treated to withstand the tropical weather and termites. They could not have just disappeared. Even if Josef had.

She stood in the silent house feeling like one in the immediate aftermath of an awful accident, uselessly wishing time back on itself – so that all could be as before. That was how she wanted Malaya, Rinsey, Josef. Now it seemed no more than the petulant wish of a child. She watched a black bootlace snake in the corner of the room: each was wary of the other and anxious to leave the other alone. The only thing she felt would absolve Josef was if he came with news of her father.

She walked slowly back along the overgrown path, hands clenched tightly by her sides. She remembered the joy of first seeing Josef, remembered being held in his arms, the warmth of his chest against her shoulder during the attack. But how had he managed to arrive so smartly turned out that first evening? What was his game?

Josef had always laughed in a kind of maniacal fit of jubilation when he won at one of their games, even if he had cheated. She and Lee had hated him then, with all the fury of childhood.

She thought of George Harfield’s Malayan headman, and of the Chinese stranger holding Anna’s grandson – this was life and death, not children’s games. Childhood was soon over.

The sight of a man coming along the path towards her made her think belatedly that she should have carried her revolver or that she might be wise to dive for cover. He approached half trotting, as if eager to come up to her, and when she could see him properly he raised a hand in greeting.

‘Miss Hammond,’ he called with a slight bow of his head, ‘Mr Harfield says you go to the house at once.’

‘Does he!’ She slowed her pace so she could talk to the very dark-skinned native, but turning back she saw he was continuing in the opposite direction.

She was surprised but hurried on. Where the old path divided, she took the one leading to the rear entrance, but as she did so a movement caught her attention. A tall figure was standing in the trees.

‘Josef!’ She practically hurtled through the trees towards him. He was absorbed in something in the tops of the trees.

‘Josef!’ Even as she said the name she knew she was wrong, for though the man was as tall, he was not so broad and the clothes were a soldier’s jungle green.

He started, turned, dropped a length of wire he was carrying and snatched off his wide-brimmed hat. ‘Miss!’

‘I thought you were someone else. Sorry! Did I startle you?’ She smiled both because she recognised him and because her words and his actions were ludicrous, more like a couple bumping into each other in a peacetime English lane than a tropical track in terrorist country.

‘Don’t tell my commander I took my hat off to you. I mean,’ he said, screwing the hat in his hands and smiling ruefully at his own supposed failure, ‘I should really have shot you – well, challenged you.’

It was a relief to laugh. With his wry expression and his military-cropped, sandy hair exposed, he looked much younger than when she had seen him last. ‘You’re the boy from the lorry.’

‘Lorry, yes. Boy – well?’ He cocked an eye. ‘Just because I didn’t shout after you? I was better brought up, but it wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate … ’

She found herself both blushing and laughing under his approving look. ‘Why are you here?’

He displayed the wire he was holding. ‘I’m looking for a friendly native to shin up one of these trees and fix my aerial to the top. I’m stationed here for the time being.’

‘Really? That seems too good to be true.’

‘Thanks!’ The closed-mouth grin and twinkling brown eyes were so full of good spirits she did not qualify the remark. ‘So you’ll be the daughter of the house, Miss Hammond?’

‘Liz.’ She held out her hand, then found herself swallowing hard as his hand enveloped hers. Looking down at her he stood many inches nearer than he needed.

‘Alan Cresswell. Until now I thought I was going to hate it here by myself.’

They both turned, still holding hands, as Chemor came back along the path portering a heavy coil of new rope. ‘Here’s someone who might help you. He’s one of George Harfield’s men.’

The native glanced at Liz as if questioning the fact that she had not obeyed his employer’s summons. ‘You come now,’ he said.

‘Is something wrong at the bungalow?’ she asked.

‘Something found.’ He smiled and with a gesture indicated that someone else was coming. ‘All going now to look.’

‘What is it?’ she demanded as her mother and George Harfield came into sight, alarmed at their sombre expressions and the fact that George was strapping on his gun and holster as he walked.

‘Themor – ’ he paused to nod to her companion – ‘has found a vehicle in the jungle. A jeep.’

Consternation and anguish fought to take her breath, and though her lips parted the doubts and fears were too many to be put into words.

‘We are going to see,’ Blanche said, her face, her lips, absolutely without colour.

Liz turned like an automaton to accompany them.

‘Can I help?’ Cresswell asked. ‘Come with you?’

‘I’d rather you stayed here and looked after my men,’ George told him. He hitched his revolver in the holster. ‘You’d best show us what you’ve found, Chemor.’

The scout turned and led the way in the direction of the manager’s bungalow, but after about thirty yards he turned abruptly to the right through part of the plantation. He pointed to the ground, parting ferns so they could see the tracks of a vehicle.

Here and there it looked as if dead vegetation had been deliberately pulled over the tracks. For some distance they walked straight into the trees, then turned abruptly left. Looking round, Liz for the first time really understood how confusing these plantings could be. The rubber trees were set some twelve to fifteen feet apart and whichever way you looked they formed lines, radiating away from you like a fiendish maze. You could go only a short distance into the trees before becoming totally disoriented.

She did remember that in the direction they were going, to the southeast of Rinsey, were a number of rocky waterfalls cascading from the hills and culminating in a steep, jungle-clad ravine. She glanced at her mother’s back as they walked in line – the scout, her mother, herself, George last. Her mother looked like one travelling in a nightmare, dragging her feet wearily free of the encumbering undergrowth, moving only because compelled.

Liz wondered if Blanche remembered the one time they had brought their daughters this way for a picnic. It had come to a premature end as Wendy had ventured too near the edge of the falls. Liz had also found herself the target of parental wrath and anxiety – because she had wanted to stay.

If her father’s vehicle had been hidden, it was by someone who knew the area well. She could think of no other place where it would be possible to drive through the trees and find flat rocks and a convenient ravine on the other side.

Once they came to the edge of the rubber trees they were on solid slabs of rock where water gushed down in wide and pleasant falls – until the fourth downward step was reached, where land and water fell steeply away, down into a deep midnight green mass of dense jungle. Against the dark panorama, parrots in hues of brilliant white, red and unnatural green flashed across like players in an airy theatre.

It was noisy standing above the crash of the water and alarming to see where Chemor had found the continuation of the tyre tracks. Losing them at the edge of the plantation and across the hard table of rock, he had found them again at the lip of the ravine.

‘I can see nothing down there,’ Blanche said, shielding her eyes, then exclaiming, ‘Oh, as the wind moves the bushes … ’

Liz knelt on the rock. She could just make out the back wheels and undercarriage of a vehicle, which seemed to be almost standing on its nose some hundred feet below.

‘Have you been down?’ Liz asked Chemor, who shook his head.

‘No, need rope to climb back up,’ he answered.

‘That – whatever it is – could be from the war?’ George suggested.

Chemor shook his head, pointing to the narrow stretch of earth and vegetation. ‘Tracks through plantation same as here.’

Liz could see where the tyres had dug into the lip, then where the vehicle must have fallen clear and free – down. ‘It could have been an accident?’ She turned an agonised look up to George. ‘My father could be ... ’ She swallowed and turned back, peering down, her ears suddenly singing; she felt very sick. George gripped her shoulders.

‘You stay here with your mother.’ He began unbuckling his holster to leave his gun with her. ‘Chemor and I will go down.’

‘There’s a way down the other side of the falls,’ Blanche said, her voice almost matter-of-fact in its control. ‘It’s not that far, actually.’

‘Would we be able to reach where the vehicle is?’

She nodded at George. ‘Neville and I often came here and explored these falls, long before we had the children.’

Blanche and Chemor changed places and she led them across and down the first two shallow slabs of rock to the other side. The route led down a narrow gully which the falls would wash out when in full spate during the monsoons. The noise of the water grew louder as they proceeded and the path was certainly slippery and dangerous for the unwary. Liz adjusted her view of her mother’s concern for the tiny Wendy.

The gulley the water had cut fell back so the light came to them through a curtain of water, blue at the top of the slope when they could still see the sky but greener and darker as they descended down the rocky course. Liz could imagine her parents younger, carefree with no children to hamper their explorations, discovering this strange and rather awesome pathway with the wonder of living water before them.

A sharp turn to the right and a level stretch of rock, amazingly quite dry behind the falls, made her realise they were actually at the bottom of the ravine. They had crossed the falls at the top through the water, now at the bottom they walked back to the side they started from, this time underneath the falls.