by Jean Chapman
‘Did you doubt it?’ Liz asked.
He glanced at her and away so quickly that she wondered if her failure to comply to the letter with his instruction had permanently offended him.
The surplus guns were wrapped and stowed in a wardrobe in the spare bedroom, where her mother decided the detailed inspection of their home would stop. There were differences, dilapidations, but also areas where her father had already made some way towards restoring their home to comfort and elegance. For example, a rather splendid new tiled floor had been laid in the kitchen and dining room.
Blanche had looked but said nothing until the moment she was alone with her daughter. Then it was as if she demanded of Rinsey rather than Liz, ‘Where in God’s name is Neville? No one here at all — his car gone, his manager gone, his workers gone.’
‘We’ll find him!’ Liz was convinced it was true. ‘He’ll be back.’ Hadn’t he always come back from the war, from sea battles, the dangers of which she could only guess at? ‘We certainly can’t do anything more tonight. Tomorrow’s another day,’ she heard herself say.
‘Very profound.’
‘Perhaps you should have a drink.’
‘There are times when I believe you think I’m an alcoholic; either that or you’re trying to make me one.’
‘Perhaps we’ll both have one.’ Liz wondered how much of her mother’s daughter she was.
‘I would have time to drive you back to Bukit Kinta first thing tomorrow,’ Sturgess said as they returned to join him in the lounge.
Blanche shook her head. ‘We’re home for good. Will you have a drink? Coffee?’
He refused. Taking one of the rifles, he left them to go and sit on the verandah, where he said he intended to spend the night.
Liz uncharitably thought it was a pity they hadn’t got a sheriff’s star he could pin on. She still could not reconcile the images Sturgess was making her consider with the laughter she remembered echoing through these same rooms as she and Lee — and Josef, if her mother was not about — played hide and seek. It had been peek-a-boo when they were younger; with Anna, her gentle, smiling Malay amah, leading the game. Barefooted, the lithe young Anna would surprise her charges from all directions, stopping only when they giggled so much she was afraid it might harm them. Liz curled her arms around her waist, remembering the ache of childhood laughter.
She left her mother with a gin in bed and went to her room. It was so much smaller than she remembered. She had grown, and got used to the spacious rooms at Pearling.
She spread one of the clean sheets they had found over the mattress, but before she could rest there was still something she must do — she felt she must really get to grips with Rinsey again. Perhaps she needed to address it as her mother had done. There had to be some communication or perhaps even just some solitary standing and listening, some reaching out of the severed ends of threads towards each other.
There were many impressions of their return she wanted to sketch, a visual record of emotion — the peninsula and islands as they flew in; the bumboats crowding Singapore river; a hand reaching to steal a cake; an oriental dragon on a shop front — but her home was still an enigma she could not begin to put on to paper.
She left her room quietly, having no wish to be challenged by their watchman.
In the back doorway, she listened to the generator thudding like a heartbeat, always a sign of life in remote bungalows. One day the electric wires would travel even as far as Rinsey, her father had written that and about improvements he was making — ‘from the ground up’ had been his words. She smiled, they knew what he meant now. She clenched her fists, lifted her face to the sky and wished, breathing a message quietly into the soft damp night: ‘We’re here! Come home soon.’
She listened to all the noises that would cease only with dawn. Near to her ear the high-pitched whine of the mosquitoes, deep in the jungle the whooping communication of orang-utans, the high-pitched scream of lesser monkeys, the booming of great frogs, and so many other noises told of a teeming life that none but the sakais — the aborigines, the real jungle dwellers — could even guess at.
Not too far away a colony of monkeys was disturbed; their sudden screams of alarm momentarily chilled Liz’s spine. Then, in the beluka nearer the garden, there was a different noise, the heavy sound of something big coming through the jungle fringe.
She held her breath to listen and the perspiration on her body felt suddenly cold. On the untreated overgrown lalang grass at the edge of what had been garden Liz was aware of a figure, no more than a blacker shape on blackness — but a man, she was sure.
Sturgess’s instruction that the back should be kept bolted and shuttered while he watched the front suddenly seemed very sensible. Was this a terrorist coming for the guns?
Without any visible movement she pushed herself farther back into the doorway, melting into the shadows as the figure approached.
Chapter Three
There had been spectres protruding from the curtains at her first boarding school, and howling voices in the cold winter winds, but there had been no bogeymen here at Rinsey — but childhood is soon over.
She thought about screaming for Major Sturgess, but felt guilty about having unlocked the back doors. If only she could slip back inside without being detected! She kept her eyes riveted to the black shape, fearful that once she lost sight of the man she wouldn’t be able to relocate him in the jungle night or guess his intentions.
Her heart gave a great leap of anticipation as the thought occurred to her that it might be her father. He would be cautious, of course he would, seeing a strange vehicle in his drive. She breathed quickly and silently through her mouth, gripping the door frame behind herself. She must be sure. The figure paused between the fan-palm trees at the far end of the overgrown garden and she could have sobbed aloud with disappointment, for the man was much too tall and too heavily built.
She watched his bulk pass between the trees one way, then come back again, lingering, irresolute, it seemed. Could it possibly be Kurt Guisan, her father’s manager? He had been tall and burly, and there was something familiar ... In the moment of speculation, she lost sight of the figure. Then a movement far out to the left made her realise he was moving more purposefully now, going on as if he intended to skirt around the garden, around the whole property perhaps.
Was he making his way round to the front? She slipped back into the dark house, ran swiftly through kitchen and hallway. Her hand was poised to push open the verandah door as she heard Sturgess challenge — and a voice farther out reply.
‘Walk in slowly,’ Sturgess commanded, adding, with an authority that Liz certainly believed, ‘I have you covered and can kill from this range.’
‘Is it ... Mr Hammond? You’re back, sir! It’s me, Josef.’
‘Josef!’ Liz whispered to herself. Of course, grown-up, he had the same burly figure as his father. ‘Josef!’ she called, bursting from the door. She would have run to him, but Sturgess caught her arm for the second time that night. This time his grip was quite unrelenting as she tried to prise open his fingers.
‘Walk in slowly,’ he ordered again as behind them the bungalow lights went on and her mother came out carrying her revolver.
‘It’s Josef, Mother!’ Liz called. ‘Josef Guisan!’
The man was at the bottom of the verandah steps. Blanche turned back into the hallway and snapped on the verandah lights.
‘Let me go!’ Liz demanded. ‘He’s our friend, our manager’s son. Mother, tell him!’
Blanche came forward, still holding her revolver slightly raised, looking over the tall, fair young man who advanced another step, arms and hands spread to show he was quite unarmed, smiling a greeting. For a second Blanche appeared to raise her revolver.
‘Mother?’ The word was low, almost disbelieving, as Liz questioned an action that looked more instinctive than intentional.
‘Mrs Hammond, you like to shoot me?’
The revolver was lowered to
her side but reluctance was the only word that matched the action as Blanche nodded. ‘It is Josef,’ she admitted. ‘No one else could look that much like his Swiss father, sound so Chinese, and turn up at Rinsey.’
Released, Liz held out her arms as Josef bounded up the steps. ‘Now it begins to feel like home,’ she said, her head level with the open V of his shirt — even, she thought, her mother’s antagonism towards her childhood friend was the same.
He hugged her, stooped to kiss her on the cheek, and exclaimed how she had changed. ‘A lady,’ he said, bowing with mock solemnity, totally Chinese.
Then he became formal and quite European again as he offered his hand to Blanche, expressing his pleasure that she was home. She shook hands but Sturgess only nodded as he introduced himself and asked, ‘You expected Mr Hammond to be here?’
‘He is not with you?’ Josef frowned. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘You know where he went?’
‘Where did he go — and when?’
Sturgess and Blanche questioned together.
‘To meet you. To Singapore.’
‘When?’ Sturgess snapped in the manner of cross-examination.
Josef frowned as if perplexed. ‘Several days, two or three — I am not sure.’
‘Which day of the week, then? You must remember that,’ Blanche said impatiently.
‘I’m surprised he remembers anything with both of you snapping questions at him like that,’ Liz remonstrated. ‘Let’s go inside and sit down like civilised people, friends who’ve just met again after eight years.’ She wanted to know about her father, but she wanted to hear Josef’s story too. These two were spoiling it all, putting Josef at a distance, Sturgess behaving as if he were tuan of Rinsey.
‘Where’s his jeep? It’s not at Ipoh station.’
‘Did he drive to Sungei Siput?’
It was only Liz who made any move towards the door as the other two continued their questions.
‘No … no ... ’ Josef shook his head, frowning. ‘Ah! Yes!’ he exclaimed. ‘I remember! He said he was going to drive all the way — said it would be easier with the luggage.’
The silence this statement created had its own presence. ‘All the way to Singapore?’ Sturgess asked.
‘It’s only like driving to London from — ’ Liz began, only to be swiftly interrupted as her mother vetoed any such calculations.
‘Your father would know I would not undertake such a drive in the heat and knowing the state of the roads. I can hardly believe ... ’ Her gaze questioned Josef more directly.
‘This is only what I remember, I did not see him leave.’
‘Mother! Are you doubting his word?’ She knew the answer. Blanche had always doubted Josef’s word. Liz had always had to defend him. ‘Surely it’s the answer! Daddy could have broken down anywhere and not been able to reach us.’
‘It is possible,’ Sturgess had to admit, for the telephone services were in many places widely spaced.
‘And if the local shop had sold out of petrol.’ Liz remembered that the supply of petrol was often a stack of cans outside a village store.
‘He could have had other reasons for driving, I suppose,’ Sturgess added, seemingly lost in thought. The next moment, he demanded of Josef, ‘And where have you just come from?’
The younger man appeared stunned by the abrupt delivery of the question and flung an arm vaguely towards the plantation behind him. ‘I thought I heard a vehicle, I came to see if Mr Hammond was back. I was,’ he added with an incline of the head, ‘at home.’
Liz rushed forward and took his arm, determined now to extract him from their questioning. ‘Come and have a beer, Josef. Is your father at home? And I want to know about Lee and your mother. What has happened to them in all this time? Are they all at your bungalow’?’
Her spirits lifted a little at the thought of her friends so close by, just some two hundred yards along a track lined with bananas and bamboo. ‘Would your father know more about my father?’ There were a million questions to ask. ‘When he comes home we must have a party — all of us.’ She led him inside, beaming at the idea of all her loved ones together. Turning, she saw his face was solemn, hard.
‘The old days can never come back, Miss Hammond.’
Perhaps it was the sudden formality that gave her some inkling of what was to come. ‘Liz!’ she corrected, waving him to a chair, but his reciprocal smile was brief.
‘My father is dead, I think. When he tried to sabotage the Japanese plans for taking over the estate, they took him away. I’ve never been able to trace even where he was taken.’ He tightly interlaced his fingers as he added, ‘I think they just shot him out in the plantation and left him for the ants to eat. There were many bodies when the Japanese came.’
Sturgess and Blanche had joined them in the lounge. ‘Neville never said any of this in his letters,’ Blanche stated. ‘You must have told him what you thought.’
Josef smiled ruefully. ‘Mr Hammond still thought we would find him.’
‘Your mother and Lee?’ Liz asked, fearful of his answer. ‘My mother and sister, they live far away, and I am pleased because they helped the Japanese — they were traitors.’
‘Oh, Josef!’ She was devastated to hear such a condemnation. ‘Lee was only a child, you were only a child, your mother probably collaborated to save you both — and with your father being taken away ... You must forgive them, they must come back to Rinsey. We need you all here.’
He shook his head. ‘I think not.’
‘We must make things as much like they used to be as we can,’ she urged.
‘I think not,’ he repeated and the tone was harder, held a greater note of certainty.
‘Then I must go to see them.’
Josef shook his head. ‘I do not know where they are.’
The stony response sounded like a lie.
‘And what did you do,’ Sturgess asked, ‘through the war?’
‘He was only a boy,’ Liz remonstrated.
‘I helped the Chinese guerrillas who stayed to fight the Japanese.’ For a moment the look he gave Sturgess was like an accusation that the officer belonged to the British dogs who ran.
‘Did you indeed?’
‘Oh, yes.’ Josef looked him straight in the eye. ‘That is what I did.’
‘And is it what you are doing now?’
The innocuous-sounding question had Josef springing to his feet, protesting, ‘I work for Mr Hammond. You are calling me a traitor!’
‘I am asking if you have contact with any of the Chinese still in the jungle,’ Sturgess repeated with a politeness that was curiously threatening. ‘If you knew them up to three years ago it’s likely you know them still now.’
‘No, no. I am no terrorist!’
The denial held fury but Liz was not altogether surprised. She remembered Josef had a temper when roused, and Sturgess was accusing Josef of associating with murderers.
‘Not all communists are violent criminals,’ Sturgess said evenly. ‘I’ve met many who were idealists, who really wanted equality for all people — weren’t ambitious just for themselves.’
‘I do not know any of these people,’ Josef said, sounding stubborn but chastened.
‘No, they are fewer and farther in between,’ Sturgess confirmed, ‘than the villains.’
‘No!’ Josef blazed again. ‘I mean, I did not know — ’
‘I think I can do without any of this shouting in my house, thank you.’ Blanche’s voice was cool, re-establishing the hierarchy.
‘Look at me!’ Josef moderated his voice but displayed his height, his fairness. ‘I was no use in the jungle fighting. I stayed on the plantation — my help was with food and money for the guerrillas.’
‘The kind of help they will be needing now,’ Sturgess persisted.
‘Not from me, tuan, only in the war.’
Liz looked at Josef sharply as he actually called his questioner ‘master’.
‘I have been too busy,�
�� he went on. ‘Mr Hammond will tell you.’
‘Did you sleep here?’ Blanche asked.
‘No, only Mr Hammond.’
‘I mean during the war.’
‘No, Japanese officer and his wife — ’
‘Damnation!’ Blanche interrupted and she eyed Josef as if she might just have preferred him in her home to the Japs. ‘So you’ve not stayed here since my husband left?’
‘Or seen anyone else here?’
Josef shook his head slowly.
‘The bungalow was open when we arrived,’ Sturgess added.
‘Ah! I should have checked, that is bad,’ Josef admitted, then smiled. ‘Mr Hammond was in a hurry to come to meet his lovely wife and daughter.’
Blanche’s facial expression remained pointedly unmoved. Liz smiled as graciously as she could, but realised that the matter of the guns had to be explained. She could imagine no circumstances that would make her father leave guns laid out on a bed, then drive to Singapore. Such behaviour broke every rule he had ever impressed on them all from childhood — herself, Lee and Josef.
The slight obsequiousness in Josef’s tone reminded her he had always been a touch too willing to abase himself to her father and mother — but if she or Lee had tried to put him down, that was another matter and his temper would flare.
The ill-timed pleasantry was forgotten as in the middle distance they heard again monkeys screaming protest at being disturbed. Josef too was listening intently and half turned as if he would go to the back of the bungalow. Seconds later there was a high-pitched single screech. In daytime none of them would have taken any account of it at all.
‘A day bird’s call at night?’
Surprisingly, it was her mother who made the comment. No one answered. Liz had the distinct feeling that her mother and Sturgess were watching Josef closely for any reaction.
‘We’ll play this for safety,’ Sturgess said, picking up his rifle. ‘I have a feeling we have visitors on the way who expect to collect some extra equipment.’
Blanche took her revolver from the table.
‘I’ll fetch my gun,’ Liz said.