‘The girl is seasick,’ he said, ‘and we haven’t even reached the sea yet.’
Maya squatted down in a patch of shade. She was sitting on the warm boards with her back propped against the side of the boat, feeling its leaps and shudders and shakes as it stamped its feet on the waves. Her chin was perched on her knees and her arms encircled her waist, holding herself delicately together. Death wasn’t dancing so close any more, so she studied the boat and its passengers through half-closed eyes.
It was no different from The Purple Pussy, she decided. A huddle of people pushed together, eyeing each other uncertainly, while above them the giant white wings of the boat muttered and talked to each other like an audience, even clapping lightly at times. Except that in The Purple Pussy the hunger in the room was for sex, but here on this water-house the hunger was for something far more dangerous. It was for a future. Didn’t they know that you had to get through today first, and then tomorrow? And before you knew it, the future was behind you. So what was the point of worrying about it?
Maya tipped her head forward and let her hair fall across her face in a long black curtain. She knew the other passengers were casting suspicious glances at her, as if they wanted to rummage around in her head: the golden-haired one with the bandaged shoulder and the mask of laughter, the stocky one with the red cheeks who didn’t like boats but liked his own voice. Only Tuan Hadley wouldn’t look at her. But he had summoned Razak from her side, and was teaching him a game played with flat round counters on a black and white board. The little son, the one who wore his young heart on a thread around his neck for all to see, was standing next to Razak’s shoulder, whispering urgent advice. All three spoke in Malay. She felt left out.
But it was the man with the iron eyes of a hawk that made her nervous. He stood at the large flat wheel, in control, and seemed to grow bigger and bigger the more she looked at him, until he filled the whole boat.
‘Biscuit?’
The boy was holding out a small brown rectangle. Maya looked at it with distaste.
‘It’s a Bourbon,’ Teddy said. ‘They’re my favourite.’ He noticed her reluctance to take it and added shyly, ‘If you don’t have one now, Mrs Court will eat them all down in the saloon.’ He gestured towards the black hole, and steps that led downstairs.
Dimly Maya recalled a woman when mem had hauled them out of their hiding place and through the shiny wood room. The laugh of a monkey had fluttered from the table and a face, with dark hair cut like a helmet, had stared at her with the look that Maya was used to from Europeans. As if they’d just stepped off a clean pavement into horseshit.
‘She eats,’ the boy said.
‘Don’t you?’
‘Not like she does.’
What did he mean? That this woman eats with tiger teeth, or rips her food apart with her fingers?
He squatted down in front of her and balanced the biscuit where her chin had lain on her knee. ‘So you’d better eat it now. Understand?’
‘Yes.’
She had no idea what he was talking about, but took the biscuit anyway. It had writing on it that she couldn’t read. She sniffed its edge and it smelled sugary. The thought of eating it made her stomach turn.
‘You like the boat?’ she asked, to take his mind off the biscuit.
‘Yes, she’s beautiful.’
‘She?’
‘All boats are called she.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’ He frowned, creating the same crease between his eyebrows that his father wore. ‘Maybe because they’re pretty.’
Maya stared around her. ‘Pretty? How is it pretty? It is wood and rope. And white sheets. It does its job. Like a servant.’
‘Some servants are pretty.’ Teddy grinned at her. ‘You’re pretty.’
She scowled at him. Either he didn’t know what pretty was, or he was lying. ‘Razak is pretty,’ she said, and for some reason she didn’t understand the boy laughed till he tumbled over on his back. He righted himself again and started telling her what everything on the boat was called: the bow, stern, aft, hatchway, anchor buoy, cabin, bilge, galley, boom, sheets, forestays, hawsers, halyards, a hank and a hound and a helm …
She put her hands over her ears. He laughed and tugged them away.
‘A yacht can be gaff-rigged or bermuda-rigged – The White Pearl is bermuda-rigged.’ He pointed up. ‘See? A triangular sail without a top spar.’
She covered her eyes.
‘There’s the bobstay and the bowsprit,’ he told her, turning away to point forward.
She threw the biscuit overboard behind her.
‘And the lavatory is called the head.’
He turned back, noticed the biscuit had vanished, so produced another for her from his pocket. It had a coating of fluff.
‘Good, aren’t they?’ His eyes were bright with friendship.
She put the biscuit in her mouth. He watched her chew and swallow it, but was called back to the black and white board by his father, so scampered off. Maya clamped both hands over her mouth to hold everything in and heard a deep chuckle up ahead. It was Iron-eyes. Standing beside the wheel – what did the boy call it … a hank? Or was it a helm? – he was laughing to himself and watching her.
The boat gave a sudden lurch. Maya leaped to her feet and vomited the biscuit over the rail, then sank to her knees, head in her hands, and moaned. A gentle hand started to stroke her back and mem’s voice murmured something soft and comforting that made the clenched muscles of her stomach start to relent. The pain eased, but the stroking of her back continued and she let it go on and on, despite the howls of protest in her ears from her mother’s spirit.
In the tropics, the sun sets like a stone. The sky can be on fire with scarlet flames torching the clouds, but the next moment the blaze has been doused and only grey ash remains. It was a daily disappointment to Connie that the display was so brief. On the water it was even more spectacular, the way the waves caught fire around the boat. She leaned over the rail, feeling the wind freshen, watching them flicker and fade. A flock of large bats darted over her head and swooped low over the water on the port beam. She followed them, mesmerised by their agility through the air, and tried to imagine what it must be like to possess that kind of effortless freedom.
‘You’ll get bitten by mosquitoes if you stay there,’ Fitzpayne’s voice warned her.
The other passengers had gone below for their evening meal of fresh fish, mushrooms and fried rice prepared by Harriet, but Connie wasn’t hungry. She was too on edge. Fitzpayne stood at the helm in front of the tiny open-ended chart-house – she was beginning to think he was welded to it – letting the boat run downriver. The staysail, mainsail and mizzen were set close-hauled to the easterly wind, and as she glanced at him over her shoulder, his broad shoulders were silhouetted against the darkening sky.
‘We could heave to,’ she suggested. ‘It would give you a rest.’
‘I thought you hired me to get you to Singapore as fast as possible.’
‘I did.’
‘So we sail on.’
She didn’t argue, but neither did she go below.
‘She’s a delight to handle,’ he told her with a smile of pleasure, as his experienced eye scanned The White Pearl’s sails. ‘In a reasonable wind like this she is lively and fast, light on the helm.’ He laughed, an intimate sound that she knew was meant for the boat, not for her. She could see how much he loved it, the way he ran his hands over the wheel.
The silence of the approaching night hung over the water like mist, with just the soft hiss of the bow through the waves and the rustle of the rigging above. For a while she didn’t speak, letting the tranquillity of the evening and the gentle motion of the boat seep into her mind. For the first time in a year that had been savaged by nightmares and self-recrimination at what she had done in a hut in the jungle, she felt a thin membrane of peace wrap around her thoughts.
‘He won’t go any further. You must know that.’
Fitzpayne’s voice broke into her thoughts.
‘Pardon?’
‘Your husband,’ he explained.
As he hardened up on the wind, she set about tightening the sheets. ‘You think Nigel doesn’t want to sail any further? Of course he does, he’s going to sail to Singapore, all of us are. I know the city is still being bombed, but at least the Japanese will never be able to invade it because it is too well protected. We’ll all be safe there. We can start again, and wait for this dreadful war to be over.’
In the yellow rectangle of light thrown up on deck from the saloon below through the glass of the coach roof, Connie saw his wide mouth take on a sceptical tilt.
‘You have no more intention of staying in Singapore than I have,’ he said.
‘I don’t believe I’ve ever discussed my intentions with you.’
He laughed at that, a low sound that was swallowed by the descending darkness. ‘Your husband won’t leave Malaya.’
‘You don’t know my husband.’
‘I assure you that I’ve known men like him. They are wedded to what they are, and they regard themselves as indispensable to the Empire.’
‘Maybe they are.’
‘Their beloved Empire is about to come crumbling down around their ears, and they are blind to it. You are right to want to return to England.’
‘Who says that’s what I want?’
‘Isn’t it?’ He laughed easily, not expecting an answer, but his grey eyes remained fixed on hers. ‘Isn’t it?’ he repeated in an undertone designed for his own ears rather than hers.
‘Mr Fitzpayne,’ Connie flicked out her hand at a greedy mosquito that was dancing around her head, ‘did you know that the mosquitoes that make that horrible whining noise are harmless? It’s the silent ones you have to watch out for, those that make no noise at all. They’re the ones that can give you malaria and make you sick. They are the danger, the ones you have to beware of.’
He regarded her intently. ‘No, Mrs Hadley. I didn’t know that.’
Below deck, The White Pearl’s interior was arranged into three cabins, all fitted out to the same high standard as the saloon. The large master cabin was used by Nigel and Connie, the next one further forward also had a double berth and was allocated to Henry and Harriet. The third one lay aft and contained a pair of bunk beds. Teddy had scrambled eagerly on the top one and dumped his satchel of possessions on it, marking it as his territory. Johnnie Blake would be occupying the lower berth, but when Connie went to settle her son down for the night it was still empty because Johnnie was with Nigel and the Courts, playing bridge in the saloon. Connie hated bridge. It was an activity that seemed to her to be spitefully designed to cause friction and avoid real conversation.
Aft, there were two more narrow bunks tucked into an alcove behind a curtain, where the crew or servants would normally sleep. Fitzpayne had opted for one of these, but clearly had little intention of making use of it, and the other one Connie had offered to Razak. Maya wouldn’t venture down the stairs, so Connie had provided a blanket and a bucket for her up on deck.
‘Thank you, terimah kasih,’ Razak said politely, but lowered his long eyelashes so that she couldn’t see what thoughts shimmered behind them.
Connie climbed up onto Teddy’s top berth, knocking her shin on the wooden lip along the edge of it, designed to keep its occupant from falling out in rough seas.
‘Look what I’ve brought for you,’ she said when she was crouched beside him. There was little headroom up here. She waved a book and a pencil at him. ‘It’s a diary.’
Teddy examined it, running a finger over the naked lines inside.
‘There’s a page for each day,’ she encouraged. ‘For you to write whatever you like.’
‘What should I write?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Anything that comes into your head. You could list what you’ve seen on the river each day and …’
‘And the spider that made Mrs Court scream?’ Teddy giggled.
‘Exactly!’
‘It has a leather strap.’ He tested its buckle around his thumb.
‘That’s to fasten around the diary when you’ve finished each day, so that no one else can read it.’
‘Not even you?’
‘Not even me.’ She nodded seriously. ‘A diary is private.’
He slipped his young arms around her neck and kissed her cheek. She hugged him, inhaling the sweet, warm scent of her son, then read him a chapter of White Fang. His eyes were closed, the rhythm of his breathing slow, when she finally climbed down from the bunk and crept to the door.
‘Mummy,’ he whispered after her, ‘when I grow up I want to be a pirate.’
Connie unwound the bandage from her husband’s leg and gently removed the dressing. It was stained with yellow pus. She smiled in the hope of making him think the injury was improving, and proceeded to bathe it with antiseptic. Nigel was lying flat on his back on the bed, feigning indifference, but in the yellow glow from the gimballed kerosene lamps on the wall, she could see the strain in his face.
‘Johnnie’s on deck with Fitzpayne at the moment. The wind has backed a little south of east. But don’t worry,’ she said, ‘you’ll be leaping around up there too in no time.’ A stupid comment. But she wanted to see the muscles of his cheeks relax.
Nigel didn’t even lift his head off the pillow. ‘Don’t patronise me, old thing. I’m not Teddy. How is it?’
She flushed and studied his leg. ‘The top half of the wound is healing well,’ she told him cheerfully, ‘but the bottom half – that’s where the parang cut to the bone – is still swollen and infected. But less inflamed than yesterday.’ The last part was a lie.
‘Good.’ That was all. He waited for her to bind it up again.
She cradled his calf in the palm of one hand as she put on a clean dressing and bandage, and thought about the fact that until this accident, she hadn’t touched his leg for – she had to think back a long way – probably eight or nine years. She’d forgotten the feel of it. The strength of the muscle, the springiness of the hairs on the skin of his shin in contrast to the silkiness of those on his calf. The skin tanned from all the years spent in shorts.
‘I think that we should put off the girl.’
Connie almost dropped his leg. ‘You mean Maya?’
‘Yes.’
‘No, Nigel.’
‘She hates sailing. Damn sick all day. Time to tell her to bugger off – in the morning.’
‘Nigel, don’t be ridiculous. She’s miles away from home now. We can’t make her disembark in the middle of nowhere and just dump her on a stretch of beach. What on earth is the matter with you? Why do you dislike the girl so much?’
‘She’s trouble, Constance. I can feel it. I don’t want her on my boat.’
‘On my boat,’ she said quietly. ‘You gave The White Pearl to me as a wedding gift, remember?’
He gave a stiff nod, but made no comment. She finished the bandaging and patted his knee.
‘I feel responsible for the pair of them,’ Connie explained as she blew out the lamp on his side of the bed. ‘I was very touched when I found that they had stowed away on my boat, because it means they feel they can come to me when in trouble. In place of their mother.’
She left her own light on, intending to read awhile, and hung her robe on a hook behind the door. She was wearing a flimsy nightdress. It would be heaven to wear nothing in bed because the air was stifling down here in the cabin – all portholes were secure when sailing – but she knew Nigel would hate that. The bed was far smaller than the one at home … God forbid that he might be forced to touch her in its narrow confines. She slid into the bed, and felt her husband shift his body nearer to the far edge.
‘Tell me what the matter is, Nigel,’ she murmured.
They had both been speaking in low tones because the walls within a boat’s hull were notoriously thin. Any raised voice immediately became audible to everyone. She heard footsteps above her he
ad – probably Johnnie or Razak on deck – and felt an overwhelming desire to be up there with the mosquitoes and the bats and the cool night breath of the river. She had confidence in Fitzpayne’s decisions at the helm.
‘I know,’ she added, ‘that you’re unhappy at leaving the estate, but your manager, Davenport, will run it as best he can until you’re back.’
‘Until we’re back,’ he corrected.
‘Of course.’
There was a pause while they listened to creaks and rattles as The White Pearl flexed her joints in response to a change of tack. Connie could picture Maya hanging her head over the black waters.
‘But you like the boy,’ she said, dropping her voice further. ‘You don’t object to Razak.’
To her surprise there was a long silence, and she saw Nigel close his eyes as though the lids were too heavy and he was drifting into sleep. Yet after several minutes he spoke again.
‘The boy is a decent enough fellow, and means no harm. I believe the girl does.’
‘But if Maya were put off the boat, Razak would go too.’
‘You think so? I’m not so sure. He likes it here on the yacht, and is excited about seeing Singapore. He told me so. Teddy likes him too.’
‘Nigel, Razak is her twin brother. Of course he won’t desert her.’
‘That’s a damn shame. I hope you’re wrong.’
The flatness of his tone made it clear that the conversation was ended.
‘Sleep well, Nigel.’ She picked up her book.
‘Fat chance of that.’ He suddenly twitched his head on the pillow so that he was looking directly up at her. ‘What is your real interest in the girl? It’s not just because you killed her mother, is it?’
Killed her mother. It was the first time he’d said the words so brutally. Connie felt somewhere raw open up inside her.
‘It’s about having choices, Nigel. We all like to feel we can choose. Poverty robs people like Maya and Razak of that chance to make choices, Maya most of all because she’s a girl. She may reject education or my help to find a job, but I want to show her that she has the right to …’
The White Pearl Page 23