by Jean Chapman
She felt the span and pressure of his fingers on her waist increase, comforting. ‘I don’t have to be on network call again until eighteen hundred hours,’ he said, then paused as they came to the front of the bungalow, ‘but unless we kidnap a police vehicle …
He felt her body straighten from him and tentatively he released her again. She had walked a few paces when a voice from the site of the digging was raised in a tone of alarm.
They both strained to hear. Another man pacified and ordered mildly, then the sound of the spades slicing into the ground was heard again.
The incident had caught Liz mid-stride and so she remained until it was over. Then a long shuddering groan escaped her and she grasped her head with both hands as if the thoughts inside might well burst it open.
Alan moved swiftly to hold on to her again as she screwed her fingers into her hair. He was alarmed by the violence of this grief, this biblical rending and tearing, afraid it might be doing her actual harm.
‘Please ... ’ As he restrained her, she gestured towards the plantation, beyond the shy, worried glances of the Malays digging out the post holes.
Alan took her gently forwards, both arms shielding and supporting, taking her into the trees, into the privacy of mazing trunks and patches of neglected undergrowth. When he would have stopped, she took the lead and kept walking, following a kind of path which had obviously been walked quite recently.
She walked quicker and quicker, like one trying to escape a nightmare. He went along with her, keeping pace, not attempting to hold her back. He was aware that this was unwise, this was terrorist country; he was supposed to be a soldier, a guardsman. He was aware that his rife was back by the transmitter — but army training was a veneer quickly bloomed by the present needs of this young lady, this girl, he found so disturbing.
If she had been a fellow student back at college, he admitted to himself that he would have pursued her, wooed her without mercy, never have taken no for an answer. But those had been mad days — free days after the war, when the lights had gone up and the lid had come off all the pent-up joyous emotions of the young. Then came conscription, his father dying and this new campaign.
‘It’s my father,’ she sobbed, as if the word had been plucked from his mind. ‘It is my father — that’s who they’re digging for ... who they’ll find.’ She caught her shoulder on protruding branches and her dress tore but she paid no heed, hurrying on until finally she could go no farther as they came to where waterfalls edged the rubber trees.
The unexpected change of terrain as well as the sheer beauty of the spot made him momentarily forget his charge until he saw she was running full tilt across to the edge of the rocks and the falls. He leaped after her, his heart pounding, convinced she intended to throw herself over.
‘My God!’ he panted, his forbearance banished now by fear, as he caught first her arm, then her shoulders, securing her, half holding, half shaking. She was limp under his hands, passive, a willing victim. ‘No, no,’ he told himself, ‘this is not right.’ He folded her close, one hand cupping and holding her head, gently trying to stay the shaking and the sobbing. All he could offer was a kind of paternal shushing, he could think of no comforting words. Nothing would alter the truth.
As she stood shuddering in his arms with her head pressed to his chest, she could hear and feel the great thudding of his heart. She realised how she must have frightened him, just as Wendy had frightened her parents so long ago in the past. She gave herself up to crying, for Wendy, for her mother, for herself — for the loss of her father.
This was the full time of mourning. She knew beyond any doubt the outcome of the search. Clinging desperately to this young man, she saw her tears make the jungle green of his shirt even darker. She remembered the clean-shirt smell of her father on Sunday mornings when she sat next to him in church. She remembered how white his handkerchiefs looked against his brown hands. She remembered him twirling her and Wendy round and round, one on each arm. She remembered how she and her father had mourned the passing of an old dog who on his last day had dug himself ever deeper into a hole under a japonica bush, waiting to die. He had known — as she knew now.
She thought how strange it was that the young man she had drawn as a figure symbolic of mourning held her now at this time.
He remembered he had held his mother like this when finally she had cried. His brother had been at home, but when she had seen him coming unexpectedly through the door on special leave, only then she had given way — sobbing as this girl was sobbing, realising the depths of loss.
He had to tighten his jaw and grind his teeth to stem his own emotions. He felt she sensed his emotion for she suddenly slackened the grip on his shirt, then spread her hands and pushed them flat on his chest as if trying to reassure herself, break herself of the habit of such clinging.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said between sobs, ‘hanging on your neck … ’
‘Don’t worry about it.’ In a less tense situation he might have quipped that he was enjoying it anyway. ‘You just hang on as long as you like.’
She lowered her face and leaned the top of her head against him, trying unsuccessfully to bring the crying under control.
He yearned to be able really to comfort her, to find the lotus and make her forget, then perhaps the amaranth and make her remember him for ever. He felt stirrings in his groin that he felt very uncalled for and ashamed of at that particular moment. He held her away a little. ‘Ssh!’ he breathed. ‘You’ll make yourself ill. That’s enough now.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated, as if his movement away confirmed she had taken too many liberties, and would have stepped away from him altogether had he not held her.
‘No, I’m sorry, I found you too disturbing to hold close any longer.’
She wiped her hands across her cheeks. ‘What, looking like this?’ Then she endeared herself to him more by offering him her hand. He reached for it and she drew him again to the edge and pointed out where her father’s car was. When he spotted it, he told her he had overheard the police inspector saying it would not be practical to raise it and there was nothing more to be learned from it anyway.
‘I suppose there’s so many Jap tanks lying about from the war, one more wrecked vehicle doesn’t matter much,’ he added.
‘No,’ she replied, so resignedly it made him feel heartsick. Holding her hand tight, he looked around with a deep sense of wonder at the jungle-clad hills, the steep ravine, the exotic birds and extravagant butterflies. ‘War in paradise,’ he said.
‘Love, too. Well, years ago,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know until yesterday that my parents used to come to these falls when they first came to live here. My mother showed the police a path down and under the falls — right down … ’
‘You must show me some time.’ He looked eagerly out over the expanse of jungle and waterfalls.
‘Why not now?’ she said and suddenly it seemed like something she should do — a kind of pilgrimage to a time when her parents were happy together, just the two of them, without children to distract their enjoyment, or war to tear them apart. The tears fell again, just flooding from her eyes, and she began to walk in front of him across the rock table so he could not see. ‘I’d be glad of some way to pass more time.’
He saw the sudden spring of grief again, but these tears fell more easily, and he wondered if she might have plumbed that awful first depth of mourning for her father — even without the final confirmation. He hoped so.
He allowed himself to be led until they came to the steep rocky flood-water course, then he went first, supporting her down.
She had been surprised how easy it was to remember the way, almost as if she had walked it many times over years instead of just once the day before. In front of her Alan slipped and for a moment, instead of supporting, nearly dragged her over into the final steep descent.
They both laughed with that topsy-turvy reaction to possible disaster people often have — then in the same instant b
oth felt guilty and averted their eyes to the track.
The moment was quickly forgotten for Alan as he realised he could no longer see an obvious way. He was astonished when, taking the front again, she led him under the falls.
Liz noticed other things on this second visit, saw rocks set like a dry shelf where they could sit. She touched his arm and pointed rather than shout in his ear over the echoing roar of the water.
Rather like two people in a fantasy they sat down and stared at the endless sheet of living water before them.
‘My father sat here,’ she said quietly, knowing no one could hear, ‘and my mother. I feel him here now — I know he’s dead, and I feel his ... concern for us.’ She let the feeling run over her mind, unhindered by concepts of belief or unbelief, just knowing them as every rock and every bordering fern knew the rush of the waters.
After a time she turned to Alan and saw he had his head leaning back on the rock, looking up to the very apex above them where water leaped from rock at the top of the fall. His lips were moving too as if noise gave freedom to talk aloud to oneself, like ladies under hair dryers, she thought. After a few seconds he sensed her scrutiny and looked down at her.
‘What did you say?’ she asked close to his ear.
He shook his head but then cupped a hand to her ear. ‘I said if lovers had trysting places ... and we were lovers ... this would be ours.’
He felt her head nod against him and she said into his ear, ‘Yes, a very special place.’
A wonderland, he would have said, had it been just a meeting place for lovers and not mourners. He watched her looking all around and felt such a rush of affection he was sure she should have known, was surprised the force did not physically move her — but when she did turn back to him she smiled and nodded as if she had found some deep satisfaction, some calming influence there, while he felt he had come to grips with the very elements: bedrock, fire and water.
After a few more minutes he felt her shivering. He rose and indicated he thought they should go back. She nodded reluctantly.
The heat, the climb and the stifling humidity after the coolness beneath the water made conversation difficult, but even when they reached the top and paused to catch their breath they did not speak, though their silence was that of a couple with too much to say and no easy way to start.
‘What are you thinking?’ she asked at last as they began to walk into the plantation again.
‘That I feel different,’ he said hesitantly, ‘that I feel maybe we’ve been down to some underworld, to some emotional depths, and found ... ’ He thought it would have been impertinent to voice what he had really discovered. ‘And found it has somehow helped.’
‘It has helped.’ She took up the words quickly but did not add that she felt they had become curiously linked in some strong, sad, tacit bond. ‘I’ve spent my tears — I feel almost it’s been an indulgence. Now it’s time to go back to my mother, but I’ll be more help now. Thanks for putting up with me.’
‘It would be a pleasure to put up with you an awful lot more.’
They stood for a moment under the pretty, sunlit canopy of the delicate leaves of the rubber trees. She looked at him quizzically but saw it was not a skit or a remark to raise spirits, just a statement of fact.
He held out a hand to her and both knew that if she took it now it would mean far more than the clinging in paroxysms of grief, or the helping hand on a steep path — this was quite a different offer.
When she slipped her hand quickly into his, a phrase from some biblical text came to him. ‘I am blessed among men,’ he told her. She looked so astonished that he grinned and raised her hand to kiss it. ‘I did go to Sunday school and I was in the village choir.’
‘Really?’
His turn now to glance sharply at her, but the look that accompanied the word was of wonder and interest, as if she was trying to picture him back in his surplice processing with the other white-robed boys and men up the church aisle. ‘Really,’ he said gently.
‘Some time you must tell me,’ she said as they began to walk back. They heard the noise of a vehicle arriving as they approached the bungalow.
They emerged from the trees as John Sturgess was getting out of his army jeep. He stopped, his legs half out, as if he could not believe his eyes. Then he shouted:
‘Soldier!’
Alan said something inaudible, but kept holding her hand until she reached the clear ground. Then he asked briefly, ‘You be all right now?’ She nodded.
‘Soldier!’ Sturgess again, his voice full of threat as he came towards them. ‘I thought you were taught to jump when an officer spoke.’
‘Sir!’ Alan came to a halt, saluted and stood to attention.
Sturgess’s gaze went to Liz, registering the torn sleeve of her dress and the obvious distress she had been in. ‘What the hell’s been going on?’
Liz thought what an unimaginative man he was, such stock phrases, such military insularity. ‘Your soldier rescued me,’ she said, ignoring the soldier’s eyes as she continued her story. ‘I was so upset I just ran and ran into the jungle, and your guardsman helped me, brought me back.’ She reached over and for a moment put her hand over Alan’s clenched fingers, thumb down the nonexistent seam of his jungle green trousers, as he remained standing to attention. The action was incongruous, reminding Alan of a visitor touching the exhibits in a museum — and he was the prohibited waxwork.
Alan had learned impassivity if nothing else while being berated by foul-mouthed sergeants on parade grounds. He was impassive now as he saw his officer look nonplussed. Even a major could hardly question the veracity of the daughter of the house. Could hardly discipline her: ‘Keep your fingers off my soldiers! Miss!’
‘Get back to your post, Cresswell. I’ll see you later.’
‘Sir!’ He executed the high knee turn, one two three, stepping smartly off with the left foot, and marched sharply towards the rear. Out of sight he stopped and listened. The digging had stopped.
‘That man behaved ... properly?’ Sturgess asked.
‘That man was a gentleman — a real knight in shining armour, you might say.’ She gave him a stock phrase to chew on.
‘A knight without his armour, I would have said.’ He looked at her more carefully. ‘You’ve hurt your arm.’
She looked first at the wrong arm, which convinced him that the guardsman was probably telling the truth.
‘Oh! It’s nothing,’ she said, surprised by the torn sleeve and the graze.
As they walked together towards the bungalow, her mother came to the front door. Liz knew immediately that she had news — bad news.
‘I’ve identified your father’s body,’ she said.
Chapter Nine
Liz stood arm in arm with her mother at the head of the grave. The sides had been draped with green cloth and given the dignity of tidy geometric lines. Her father too had been tidied — into one of the long rectangular boxes kept stored by the army at their depot at Batu Caves ready for the crating of their dead. Burials were of necessity swift in the tropics.
The red, white and blue of the Union Jack over the coffin against the artificial green field made her think of England. She clenched her teeth hard as memories threatened public breakdown. They had draped flags from all the upper storeys of Pearling House in 1945 when the war was over and put out even more to blow in the dry winds of that December when finally her father had been demobbed.
She remembered the bigger banners cracking like whips in the bitter piercing winds, remembered her father coming at last, the joy, then the feeling of being partly shut out from him, her mother supremely important. Later, as he shivered in the same winds, helping her take in the flags, he had said to her, ‘Let’s got back to our Malaya, Liz.’ They had danced round the attic room. ‘Just like at Raffles,’ she had shouted.
‘Our Malaya’ was a bitter irony now, a bitter country — her heart was sick for this beautiful land. She glanced regretfully at the abundant gre
enness of the garden, the gloss of the fan palms, the delicate leaves of the rubber trees in the middle distance, the hills beyond — high, green, cool — as near to paradise as Mother Nature could get on this earth.
There would be no more memories of her father to add to her store. There is no easy funeral except one’s own — she had heard those words as a child standing at her mother’s side in silent respect as a young boy’s funeral had passed. He was a classmate who had been bitten by a sea snake. The sentiment had meant little to her until that moment.
Where now were the carefree children who had played and laughed in this garden? Wendy far away, mourning a father she had known for less than half her lifetime; Lee, her gentle friend, banished for war crimes never of her doing; and Josef, whom Liz had loved so loyally, defended so regularly — exactly that was Josef guilty of?
A movement to the rear of the ranked guardsmen caught her eye and she saw Anna there, hands clasped, head bowed. Fear had after all not kept the bent old amah from paying her final respects. Liz stared at her and Anna saw, nodding her head as if confirming her devotion to a tuan who had often larked with her and her charges until tears of laughter ran down her cheeks — or mem had arrived. Liz remembered the hands clamped over the mouth trying to hide and stifle the laughter while the dark eyes sparkled irrepressibly above them, and she cried for Anna.
The tears splintered the symmetry of the small military funeral. Then worry for the safety of her amah and her grandson changed her grief momentarily to real concern.
A sharp authoritative command reasserted the formal ceremony and the soldiers stamped up dust as they obeyed. None of this ritual surely was right for the man Anna had come to mourn.
She and her mother had been swept along by the advice of friends like the Wildons who rang full of concern and sorrow and recommended leaving ‘their mutual friend John Sturgess’ in charge of all the arrangements. They had arrived from their regularly besieged bungalow as soon as they could.