‘Shall we turn in?’ he murmured after an eternity of swaying back and forth. In the bedroom he left her to change into her night-clothes alone, as much to mask his own nervousness as out of consideration for hers. ‘For heaven’s sake, go easy on the girl,’ his mother had commanded, and Gerald, who had never had sex with a woman who was not a prostitute in his life, was now in a storm of confusion at the prospect of deflowering his wife. He loved Betty so much, he thought; her sweetness and shyness wrenched his decent soul. He wanted sex, sex was what men did with their wives – except that it was a filthy, shameful thing he had only done with those creatures at Mary’s. Oh God, why had he ever had anything to do with all that? He was ashamed and he felt drunk, far drunker than he should have been on a few glasses of whisky.
In bed, he held Betty in his arms and kissed her, feeling his desire wavering, like the moonlight until finally it subsided. Then he fell asleep, and later so did Betty, content that her duty as a wife had been accomplished.
She opened her eyes in complete darkness, aware that her nightdress was being dragged up above her knees and a weight was crushing her chest so that she could hardly breathe. In terror, she flailed her arms and legs, but the weight was not dislodged and she heard Gerald urgently whispering, ‘Betty, oh Betty, I love you.’ There was a wave of stale whisky vapour from his mouth, and Betty lay inert as he pressed his lips on hers with force.
Her husband’s body rolled back and forth on hers, and then to her horror his leg shoved between her knees, and he pushed apart her thighs and pulled at the nightdress, baring beneath the sheet that nasty part of her body for which she had no name. Why did he want to expose the place where disgusting bodily functions were performed? Revulsion paralysed her. She felt as if she were going to choke.
Then he half-rolled off her; she drew a gasping breath, then there was something else, some hot, hard, rubbery thing stabbing and hurting at that awful place. Sharp flashes of pain shot up towards her belly. The thing was tearing against her dry flesh. Sweat poured from Gerald’s face and dripped on to her, adding its acrid smell to the stink of liquor. In the darkness, her husband was grunting like a beast possessed by demons. Then the crushing weight of his body was on her again, there was terrible burning pain, then Gerald cried out, stopped rolling and lay still.
Betty lay shaking under his body, crazed with panic. Was he dead, or ill, or mad? Why had he done that revolting thing to her? What had he attacked her with? Gerald rolled off his wife and drifted obliviously towards sleep. At the back of his fuddled mind he realized that something had not been the same as doing it with the girls at Mary’s, but perhaps, he reasoned, white women were different.
From Gerald’s descriptions Betty had imagined the rubber estate like the plantations in Gone With The Wind, a vast acreage of orderly vegetation dominated by a gracious white house. She saw herself, like Melanie Wilkes, with a pony and trap and a loyal native servant, performing charitable deeds among the plantation workers.
At first her expectations were fulfilled. After the Malay kampong with its dark wood cottages like gingerbread houses, the red dirt road to Bukit Helang curved between attractive fields of saplings and broadened at the hilltop into a spacious compound. Some amiable brown cows grazed in front of the plantation house; the buildings were spacious, pillared and shuttered, and shaded by a row of royal palms. But the ox-cart which carried them and their belongings continued past the main settlement and on to a single-storey, tin-roofed bungalow a quarter of a mile beyond, on the edge of the towering jungle.
Two young Asiatics in starched white jackets stood beside the front steps to welcome them. ‘Ah Kit, my – our – boy,’ Gerald presented him, ‘and Hassan is the gardener.’ They bowed and Betty nodded at her servants.
Jungle she had conceived as a kind of endless flowering shrubbery. Instead, it was an impassive, grey-green wall all around them, tall and dark and full of unseen life which gibbered incessantly, by day and night. It sounded to her as if a million banshees were cackling with glee at her unhappiness. There was no animal ever to be seen, and few birds. No flowers ever bloomed, except some unearthly dead-grey orchids flopping from a high fork of a tree.
When the lamps were lit at night, great bugs would blunder into the bungalow unless the long rattan blinds were pulled securely down around the balcony rail. Even so, Betty at first saw a spider under every cushion and a scorpion in every corner. She suffered tortures of continence in the night because the bathroom floor was slatted and she could not look at it without fearing that a snake would slither through the gaps.
There was only one other white woman on the estate, Jean Anderson, the spare, middle-aged wife of the plantation doctor. They were a kindly couple who took Betty under their wing at once. Dr Anderson was short and plump, with round cheeks that flamed rosily through his deep tan, and thinning, fair hair. They had a gramophone and a selection of lovingly preserved recordings of popular ballads and light opera, and in the evenings they preferred to sit quietly enjoying each other’s company and the music, rather than join the boisterous company of the other planters. Betty sometimes heard snatches of Gilbert and Sullivan wafted through the trees on freak currents of air.
The Andersons’bungalow was the nearest and every morning, when her husband had left after his breakfast, Betty would hear the rattle of Jean’s bicycle and her brisk greeting to Ah Kit.
‘There’s a sort of tradition that we speak Malay to the servants,’ she told Betty after watching her struggle in vain to tell Ah Kit how to use the refrigerator. This luxury had been Gerald’s parents’ wedding gift to them, but the houseboy cooked complete meals for a week and stored them in the whirring white box, distressing Betty’s notions of hygiene. ‘I’ll write down some of the basic phrases and, if you get into a pickle, it’ll help you out. Don’t be disturbed, they all think the fridge keeps food indefinitely.’
‘He looks so – well, so sneering and superior,’ Betty confessed.
‘The Chinese are always sure that they are very, very superior people, which makes them first-class servants. You can be great friends with them, and there’s never any need to nag them because their standards are terrifically high.’
‘But whenever I go to tell him something he acts as if I’m insulting him.’
‘What do you do – go out to his quarters?’
‘Well, of course.’ Betty answered with blank surprise.
‘Never do that, dear. We don’t. You just don’t go out to the servants’quarters. That’s their home and you don’t invade. Call him, always, and he’ll come out smiling.’
And Betty did as the older woman counselled, and saw Ah Kit run out of his hut, buttoning his immaculate, starched jacket as he did so. He cooked in the open between the two dwellings, on a charcoal fire in a kerosene tin, first chopping his ingredients with a cleaver on a tall wooden block. Betty was quite glad that Ah Kit’s domain was out of bounds; once she was sure she had seen him put a frog on the chopping board.
She looked out one morning and saw quantities of their rice and flour spread out on table cloths on the lawn of coarse jungle grass. She ordered Ah Kit to put the stores back in their tins at once but he fired off a torrent of Malay then tried to explain to her again, speaking slowly, before giving up and walking away.
‘He’s quite right,’ Jean told her when she came over. ‘When it’s a nice, hot, sunny day and set fair they ought to take the chance to put the dry goods out in the sun. You can’t stop the weevils and maggots breeding in this climate, but if you spread the stores in the sun then the creatures crawl away, and you can sieve it all and put it back in the containers. Housekeeping out here is an eternal battle with the insects, you’ll find. I used to think Malaya was built on an antheap when I first came out.’
Her friendly neighbour could help with household hints, but not with the physical discomfort. Betty soon became accustomed to feeling a band of sweat-soaked fabric behind the belt of her dress, and to changing her clothes completely three tim
es a day. If she wore cool, sleeveless frocks, her pale arms were smothered with an itchy heat rash, and if she covered them up, she sweltered. Her toes blistered and her eyelids puffed, the delicate membranes irritated by the brightness and the dust.
Worst of all, much the worst, were the nights. By the time they arrived at Bukit Helang, Gerald had realized that he could not penetrate his wife – at least, not without inflicting an inhuman degree of suffering on her – and Betty had recognized that the revolting thing Gerald did to her in bed at night was what a husband had a right to ask of his wife. She willed herself not to mind, but it was not enough. Gerald fussed with her and tormented her and only stopped if she cried or told him she couldn’t bear the pain any more. Her deeply instilled ideals of duty made it impossible to hate her husband, and instead she gave way to apathy.
The disaster of their intimate life quickly became a secret that the two conspired to keep, and in company they held hands and kissed like model honeymooners. James with his perception, Douglas Lovell with his experience, Dr Anderson with his medical training and Jean with her sympathy, all missed the couple’s reluctance to be left alone together. Gerald took to acting the expansive host, and invited James or one of the other young assistants over for meals. He drank more and more, and his humour became sarcastic, while Betty grew thin and listless, sleeping in until after ten in the mornings and prolonging the afternoon lie-off, until she did little more than get up and dress for their meals.
Three months after their wedding the news came that Britain was at war with Germany, grinding Betty deeper into her despair. Although she hated the notion of displeasing Gerald, she had lately started rehearsing in her mind a speech to him in which she admitted that she was a failure as a wife and asked to be sent home. Now there was no chance of that. She was condemned to this terrible place.
In the end, it was Betty’s feeble temperament itself which saved their marriage. Each evening, the young assistants would play tennis on the two courts which Douglas Lovell had levelled and turfed beside the plantation office. Betty was incompetent at all physical sports, but she came with Gerald for the distraction and usually sat and drank lemonade beside the court in the shade of the casuarina trees. Even here the jungle was barely held back. Banks of ferns crawled towards the clipped lawn like clawing hands outstretched to repossess their territory. Lassoes of blue convolvulus lay over the garden shrubs.
Betty watched Gerald and James play, James darting like a bird across the back of the court while Gerald panted to and fro near the net, joking with his opponent. She felt a tickling at the nape of her neck, so light it could have been a falling hair, and put up her hand to remove it.
With repellent speed a bloated creature clambered down her arm and fell into her lap. Its body was a pallid green bladder covered with spines, its shape so bizarre it seemed to have no head or legs, and to move itself in convulsions. Betty was stiff with fear. Her lips stuck to her teeth and she was unable to cry out. At that moment, the boy came up with her lemonade and she dumbly implored him with her eyes. Laughing, he fished up the vile creature with his napkin and showed it to her on his tray.
‘Leaf insect, madam,’ he told her with pride. The thing was as big as a dinner plate.
Betty leaped to her feet, screaming and scraping at the skirt of her dress as if the animal were still stuck to it. She lost her breath, gasped for air, gasped again, screamed for Gerald, tried to stop, gulped air once more and fell into a chaotic pattern of screaming and gasping which she could not control. Within half a minute she collapsed unconscious.
Anderson the doctor was fetched and Betty was carried home and put to bed. Ah Kit’s wife was instructed to sponge her body with tepid water to cool her, and the doctor gave her an injection.
‘If I’m right, this was just a hysterical thing,’ he told Gerald. ‘She was hyperventilating, which caused her to pass out, but there’s nothing serious amiss. Keep her calm and she’ll be as right as rain tomorrow. I’ve given her a mild sedative, that’s all.’
After the doctor had gone, and he had eaten and drunk dinner alone, Gerald sat on the end of the bed and looked at his wife. Her face was still flowerlike in its innocence, in spite of the weight she had lost in the last weeks. She was loosely wrapped in a sheet, on the doctor’s instructions. Gerald had never seen his wife naked, and among the bewildering turmoil of his thoughts about her and their failed love life was that germ of suspicion that white women somehow were made differently from Orientals.
Slowly he pulled back the sheet. Betty stirred but did not wake. Even in the gold lamplight she seemed as pale as milk and her nipples were the fresh pink of rose petals. With curiosity, Gerald stretched out his hand and felt between her legs. Betty murmured and turned her head, but her eyelids did not flicker. Carefully he felt between each moistening fold, at last deciding that there was no difference. Now he was aroused but perplexed – was it right to have sex with a woman who was unconscious, even if she was your wife?
In fact, Betty was not completely unconscious. She was aware of Gerald touching her as if it were happening far away. She felt no disgust or fear, and no pain when he eventually unbuttoned himself, got on top of her and penetrated her with a brief yelp of triumph. It all seemed like a dream and of no consequence, but she was aware that he seemed pleased with her.
Neither Gerald nor Betty ever referred to this incident, but the next night Gerald again succeeded in having full intercourse with his wife, and the spasm of fright which had closed her vaginal muscles tight against him never returned. He found, in the next few months, that the process was a good deal easier if he felt around between her legs first. Betty never came to enjoy any of this, but she could appear accepting enough to make Gerald feel happy about doing it.
Six months later, the older Mrs Rawlins travelled to Bukit Helang to stay with her son and was reassured by the harmony of his household. Betty spoke creditable kitchen Malay to Ah Kit and Gerald was in high good humour most of the time. On the balcony a pied jumbul bird piped in the morning sun and the gardener tended a new row of bright orchids in pots. Little Betty found herself co-opted into the honourable association of the Mems who coped.
Chapter Seven
Giggling was not on the curriculum at St John’s Secretarial College in Kensington, but it was the only activity to which the students devoted much time. None of the girls really worked. Many flounced late through the door, signed the register and ran straight out again to head for Chelsea and the new boutiques full of skimpy mini-dresses designed exclusively for the near-pubescent figure.
The teachers, embittered petit-bourgeois spinsters with the impossible job of training butterfly-witted debutantes, hounded the more docile through lessons in book-keeping and office practice with grim disapproval. On the days after the big debutante dances the only girls in the college would be the foreigners and one or two from the suburban middle classes.
It was becoming fashionable by 1964 for a debutante to have a job. ‘Hopes to work with children’or ‘already signed by London’s top model agency’was the sort of thing to appear after your name, age and parentage in the caption to your picture in the society magazines, The Tatler or Queen.
The students at St John’s adopted these poses without having the slightest anticipation that they might ever want or need a job. They were content with their destiny as future wives and mothers who would be maintained as their husband’s most expensive status symbols. They expected to spend money – on clothes, jewels, homes and amusements – but never, ever to make money.
This affectation of work was to the aristocracy another amusing pastime, part of the trendy acquisitive spirit of the age. It never occurred to most of them that they might actually need to work one day, at least in the sense of getting up before 11 am on a regular basis.
As they waited every day for the 73 bus to take them down Knightsbridge to St John’s, Cathy, Caroline and Monty saw the signs of the times: when a Rolls Royce drove past them it might as well contain a
chauffeur and a silver-haired, sober-suited businessman as a pop-group manager in his twenties, with a flowered shirt, driving himself. Grimy workmen’s tea bars closed, and re-opened as Continental-style pavement cafés serving frothy cappuccino.
Londoners were longing to sit in the sun. In the entire twentieth century, until that enchanted era, no ordinary person in Britain had lived very far from the threat of poverty or death. War, slump, more war, more slump – now the country was famished for pleasure, frivolity and abundance.
There was wealth for the making, goods to be bought, plenty of everything for everyone. Foreign countries meant holidays, not battle fronts. The streets were clogged with cars, the shops stuffed with clothes. There was no need to save, no need to deny yourself any longer.
Material goods were not the only pleasures which were at last off-ration; sex was to be available too, without guilt, shame or danger. Thanks to the Pill, love would soon be free for all.
The debutante season danced to the relentless rhythm of swinging London. Instead of a dance band, girls were starting to demand pop groups to play at their balls.
Lady Davina was put out to find that, instead of shepherding two demure girls in pastel chiffon through a succession of decorous balls, she must instead release Cathy and Caroline into motley assemblies of men with jewelled cufflinks and girls in cotton frocks – full length, high-waisted cotton frocks, pretty in a Bo-Peep way, to be sure, but nothing which accorded with her notion of glamour.
Each morning she made them visit her bedroom, a stuffier, more heavily scented reproduction of her chintz-swagged quarters at Bourton House. While the Pomeranian wheezed in the folds of her pink satin quilt she lectured them in the art of catching a prize man.
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