The Red Pavilion

by Jean Chapman

  ‘If I’m sure ... ’ she said.

  ‘Why should a man hold back, but … ’

  ‘I’ve never done it before,’ she said quickly, ‘not gone the whole hog — but I know what to expect.’

  He slid a hand up under her breast and saw her lips part as if in shock. He pulled her to him as he felt her nipple respond tight and hard under his gentle fingers.

  He looked at her face, her eyes closed slowly in a kind of gentle acquiescence. He wanted to say something frivolous, like ‘This might be the last stop this side of heaven’, but it was already too late.

  In what afterwards seemed like a frantic rush he pulled off his shirt and laid it on the floor, sweeping the branches, everything, aside like some kind of sex maniac. He nearly ejaculated into the sheath as he put it on, and was amazed that she looked at him with such adoration afterwards.

  ‘I love you,’ he whispered, seeking reassurance.

  ‘And I love you,’ she replied, her voice so full of an emotion that went beyond the soon accomplished act, that he leaned down to kiss her neck, hiding his face, and fought the mundane words he understood were said at these times, ‘It’ll be better next time.’

  After they had lain a time together, it was.

  ‘We must go back,’ he said at length but made no move as they lay close, her head cradled near his shoulder.

  She sighed deeply. ‘“What needest with thy tribe’s black tents, Who hast the red pavilion of my heart?”’

  ‘The red pavilion,’ he breathed.

  ‘I remember it because,’ she paused to swallow, ‘I was hiding behind the lilacs at Pearling and overheard my father quote it to my mother. Later I looked it up. Francis Thompson 1859-1907.’

  She sat up suddenly. ‘I must have been an awful pest, always around when they wanted to be alone! You don’t realise when you’re a child.’

  He rose and pulled her to her feet, held her tenderly as grief at the loss of her father threatened to engulf her again.

  ‘It says a lot about my mother really, because she did follow her heart rather than stay with her people in England.’

  He wanted to ask if she were like her mother, would she follow her heart? Instead he said gently, ‘Come on pest, I’d better take you back before we’re missed.’

  ‘I shall think of this as the love tunnel now,’ he told her as holding hands they made their way back to the main bungalow.

  She paused to laugh and again put out the torch.

  ‘My Lord!’ he exclaimed and his voice thrown back to him by the walls he thought sounded just like his father’s. ‘No wonder rabbits breed like they do,’ he murmured as he found himself close behind her stooped form with his free hand on her buttock.

  ‘Promise,’ she whispered, ‘that you will always make me laugh. In the worst, worst ever circumstances we ever find ourselves in.’

  ‘You promise to be there and I’ll always be able to raise a cheerful word.’

  ‘Promise to write to me when you’re away.’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘And always to come back.’

  ‘Always. And I never break a promise made in a dark tunnel.’

  She put on the torch and slowly raised it so she could see his face.

  ‘Or in torchlight.’

  ‘What about tomorrow morning at the same time — and I’ll wait for you at the love end?’ He was silent blinking as she raised the light higher. ‘Alan?’ she prompted.

  ‘Yes.’ Her final words had quite taken all rational speech from him. ‘Yes,’ he repeated, while somewhere in his brain there was a question he never asked about why they shouldn’t meet at the beginning of the tunnel.

  She was already making plans as they parted. Convention still had a role to play as she went back towards the bungalow first.

  She turned to look at Alan once more. He was leaning in the hut doorway watching her go. She stopped, stood quite still looking back at him and it was as if a great, almost biblical sense of contentment came over her. He was the subject of her eye, the object of all her love. In response to her regard he straightened in the doorway, tall, filling the space. She would make a sketch of him standing so, in jungle-green issue holding his rifle — but in the doorway of an empty room, the light coming from a window framed with banana leaves.

  There was no need for any hand lift or nod of the head, the feeling was between them, a sense of completeness, of knowing that they had each found their perfect partner. She walked on out of his sight, but already she was planning their return.

  In her bedroom were loose cushions she could take from her chairs and a rug from the bedside; those would probably take two trips through the tunnel.

  She was surprised at her own deviousness when, in order to move the soft furnishings on their way towards the other bungalow, she took them first to the front porch and established herself with a kind of office: plantation books on the table, the rug and a large string bag folded under the cushions.

  There was much paperwork to be done, new rubber yield and payroll books to be drawn up. During the late morning and early afternoon she worked there fairly solidly, and if anyone later saw her carrying away the cushions, no one ever said anything.

  She took them in two self-conscious journeys to the hut at the top of the tunnel, trying to ignore the thought of what she might say she was doing if discovered. Then, feeling distinctly more like the villainous Red Queen than either Alice or the White Rabbit, she lowered them all down into the tunnel and pulled them after herself in the string bag.

  She managed to be back on the right side of the wire only just before night fell. Later, at dinner, she could hardly contain her wish for Alan to see all that she had achieved. But even had she been tempted to tell him in a whispered aside there was not the opportunity, for her mother was particularly restless.

  They all missed the stabilising influence of George Harfield. Blanche had taken a large gin before the meal and another after. Then, instead of, as Liz had hoped, taking her third drink to bed, she asked to see the account books her daughter had been working on all day.

  ‘If we’re going to run this bloody place, better get it right from the start.’ She cleared a businesslike space in front of herself at the dining table. ‘Right!’ she said, looking up at her daughter. ‘Let’s get started.’

  ‘I’ll leave you two to work,’ Alan said, rising. ‘Goodnight to you both. Thank you for the meal, Mrs Hammond.’

  There was no answer; Blanche concentrated on making the tablecloth perfectly wrinkle-free for the books. Liz went with him to the back door and they were exchanging a brief hand squeeze as Blanche followed. He wondered if she saw or suspected anything, but it seemed she felt she had dismissed him too brusquely.

  ‘Goodnight to you,’ she said. ‘See you for breakfast, same time.’

  ‘Same time,’ Liz repeated with a remarkable degree of innocence.

  Liz was at the dilapidated bungalow well before time, complete with vase and orchid sprays and some of the flame-red frangipangi blossoms.

  She arranged them and put the vase near the mat and cushions she had placed in the middle of the old lounge which she had first swept clean with a bunch of banana leaves.

  She stood back and imagined Alan there, the two of them together, and moved the flowers a little farther away. Like any other housekeeper, she did not want her efforts spoiled!

  She smiled, imagining his arrival. He would look astonished and say, ‘But where did all this come from? How did you possibly manage?’

  ‘I did a few trips yesterday,’ she’d say casually, ignoring the sheer hard labour it had been pulling the four cushions and the mat through the tunnel.

  He would take her into his arms ... She tried to find words for how safe she felt in his arms — unassailable, invulnerable, impregnable, a charmed life ... She laughed silently at her own game, wrapping her arms around herself. Then, thinking she heard a sound, she held her breath listening, waiting for his next footfall — but she was wrong
. There was no one.

  She gave herself a consolatory squeeze. He would soon be there, and he loved her, he cheered her. When the awful time came and he did have to leave, he had promised he would write; and when the army released him from his national service, they would plan a future together. She had never felt so sure about the rightness of anything in all her life.

  She listened again. The appointed time had come; she bit her bottom lip with eager anticipation. She had a last look around the room as every enthusiastic hostess does before the keenly awaited guest arrives.

  She noticed now that since the day before several leaves had blown into the far corner. Everything must be as near perfection as she could achieve. Just as she was about to dispose of them through the window, a spectacularly large white butterfly flirted in the air just outside, then fluttered in with all the hesitation of the uninvited. It had brilliant red quarters on its upper wings, the red outlined and with interstices of black making the sections look like old-fashioned red feather fans.

  She stood perfectly still as it found the flowers and settled. How she wished Alan would come just at that moment! She listened, tense with excitement, then slowly she stretched out an arm and dropped the leaves out of the window. Still the butterfly found nectar in the blossoms and gently so as not to disturb it, she walked around the room to the door.

  ‘Look,’ she would say, ‘everyone can arrange flowers, but not everyone can arrange to have a butterfly.’

  She glanced at her watch; he was late, a little late, fifteen minutes past nine. She wondered if her mother was up yet, whether she had been missed and how her mother might see this liaison. Like the squire’s daughter meeting the proverbial gardener behind the pigsty, probably. An old-fashioned view, now the war had, she thought, largely levelled out the class structure — a levelling for the worse and downwards as far as Blanche was concerned. Liz could not, she reflected wryly, have imagined such as George Harfield among her mother’s invited company before the war. The war had changed values, made people, even young people, aware of their brief lives.

  After a few more minutes she fetched the bundle of banana leaves which she had stowed in the old kitchen and brushed the front step so she could sit down to wait. The revolver she had carried in her slacks pocket she placed on the step beside her and listened. She knew by the behaviour of the birds and the monkeys that there was no one about. She watched a chameleon, green as the leaves it stood among, as it waited for the insects to come within reach of its swift, long tongue.

  What could possibly be making him late? Had someone like the major come to see him? Tomorrow perhaps — but not today! This was only their first full day of life as lovers.

  She picked up the revolver and went back to the lounge. The butterfly rose as she entered, circled the flowers but then settled again. She went back to the step.

  He was three-quarters of an hour after the time they had arranged. How long should she wait before going back? She remembered him being called to the phone just before they sat down for breakfast, but this was not unusual. It had happened several times, routine instructions regarding his radio watch, usually. When he came back to the table that morning he had merely smiled and said, ‘More red tape.’

  She listened to the lesser sounds of the jungle — the birds, the insects. She peered around as she had not had time to do since she was a child here. It was like renewing acquaintanceship with old friends. She could make out the brilliant blue fluorescence of dung beetles under the leaf mould, the angular green praying mantis and along the old path to Rinsey an awesome column of soldier ants. Anna had taught her a healthy respect for these red, nearly inch-long carnivores. They marched in a meticulous line down the trunk of a tree, across the path and up a tree trunk on the other side, like guardsmen under orders — she wondered if their leader’s name was Sturgess.

  Where are you, Alan? What is keeping you? She wondered if Anna had woken yet. If her amah had been anything like her old self Liz would certainly not have been able to slip away like this. But Anna, like her mother, had been sleeping in, while her grandson at George’s suggestion had been taken by one of the tappers, who had a son the same age, to join the school run by Kampong Kinta.

  She finally allowed herself another look at her watch. It was an hour and twenty minutes after their appointed time. She rose and went back into the lounge.

  The butterfly was fluttering along the walls looking for a way out. It panicked as she entered banging itself with audible thumps at its prison. She watched for a moment or two, then went over and, as it settled momentarily within her reach, gently cupped her two hands around it.

  She could feel it struggling in the dark of her palms. She held it for a second or two longer, knowing it was like her heart, dark with fear of the unknown. Then she took it to the window and opened her hands. For a moment it rested before taking to the air, rising up into the clear sky.

  ‘Gone,’ she breathed.

  Liz went first to Alan’s hut. She felt her heart burst in anguish as she stood in the doorway. It was as if no one had ever been there. All the bedding was gone, the wireless was gone and even as she stood there some of the tappers came, carrying pieces of furniture.

  ‘We have best hut now,’ one of them told her with a broad smile.

  ‘But the soldier?’ she asked.

  ‘Gone, miss.’ The grin was wider. ‘Have our home back now.’

  Her heartache was such that she wanted to lash out and on the tip of her tongue was the sentiment that they could have their bloody country back too.

  Fighting hard to discipline tears of disappointment and anger, she approached the kitchen door, determined to find out exactly when Alan had been sent for, where he had been ordered to go and by whom — though the last was not too much of a problem.

  The sound of John Sturgess’s voice as she approached the back door infuriated her and banished immediately any tears. How dare he still be here if he’d sent Alan away? She was about to burst into the kitchen and confront this Jekyll-and-Hyde character when she heard her mother’s raised voice.

  ‘Rape! For God’s sake!’

  Liz stood transfixed, hand raised in the act of opening the door. Inside, her mother had also paused as if to try to understand what she herself had exclaimed, then repeated with terrifying anger, ‘Rape!’

  Liz stepped away from the door. Is this what they believed? Was Alan in prison? Had he been arrested? Was that where he had gone? ‘No!’ she exclaimed and went quickly in, ready to defend and absolve her lover.

  Her mother and John Sturgess both turned to look at her, but their eyes had that look of being focused elsewhere. She felt she just caught Alan’s defence in her teeth, as she realised there was no accusation for him, or for her. This was some quite other problem.

  As if to reinforce her impression Blanche turned sharply away, walked across to the sink and threw the glass she held with some force into the washing-up bowl. Liz heard it crack. John Sturgess winced and held his teeth askew, obviously not quite sure what to say next for the best.

  ‘Rape? Did I hear the word?’ Liz asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Sturgess frowned and looked at his feet. ‘I’m sorry about that — ’

  ‘George Harfield has been arrested in Ipoh for rape!’ Blanche burst out. ‘Did you ever hear anything so bloody senseless in all your life?’

  Chapter Thirteen

  The extraordinary news so overwhelmed them all that Liz knew her own misunderstanding had passed unnoticed. She took hold of a chairback to steady herself as John Sturgess revealed the reason for his swift reappearance in full jungle-green kit and laced jungle boots.

  ‘The trouble is time. I have to make a quick visit to my headquarters, then we need a final briefing before our next operation, which must begin promptly or we’ll lose all the advantages of the raid on your amah’s village. We have more information than we dared hope for. I just cannot take time to go and see George, but neither can I just leave things — we go back too far tog
ether.’

  ‘How can we help?’ Blanche asked.

  ‘All I know is the charge and that he was taken to Ipoh police station. I … ’

  In the pause Liz thought he looked like a man doing his duty against the odds. An honourable pose? She wondered.

  ‘I know it’s an awful presumption, particularly at this moment,’ he went on, ‘definitely not a good time.’

  ‘Shouldn’t think there’s ever a good time to be charged with rape,’ Blanche retorted; then, looking at Liz, she nodded and confirmed, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll go. We’ll sort it out!’

  ‘Find out all you can. I didn’t know who else I could ask … ’

  ‘We’ll be glad to do something for George,’ Liz replied. With unplanned swiftness and dishonesty she added, ‘Could you do something for me in return? I have a book belonging to the guardsman who was here. Could I ask you to return it for me?’

  ‘Cresswell!’ There was something between censure and surprise in the exclamation. ‘I do have to leave straight away.’

  She nearly commented that he often seemed to have to rush off — when duty called — and take his men whether they were willing or not. ‘I’ll fetch it from my room at once,’ she said, turning away so he should not see her satisfaction. At least she had extracted the tacit information that the major was going to be seeing Alan again, so presumably they were going on the same operation.

  Liz went to her room, her mind racing over what she could send to him and what it might mean if she did. Picking up a slim book titled New Zealand Poets, she found a clean flyleaf and swiftly in bold outlines she sketched the figure of an anonymous guardsman in jungle gear with rifle, standing in a far from anonymous empty room. As an afterthought she added, ‘Waiting to hear’ as a kind of caption. She dared do no more and take no more time. She slipped the book into an envelope and took it back to the kitchen where the major was preparing to leave.

  She held it out. ‘Of course, if Mr Cresswell was coming back here, I need not trouble you?’

  He reached for the book. ‘There will be no call for any of my men to be at Rinsey now you have your own guards organised.’