Pearls

by Celia Brayfield

  ‘Really – you men act just like infants at times,’ Jean protested, glancing uneasily at Betty in case this cruel entertainment upset her; such was Betty’s confidence in a professional man that she was looking with fascination from the birds to the doctor, showing no sign of repulsion.

  The first chicken was by now visibly affected by the rum and aimed inaccurate pecks at the latecomers as they struggled for more bread. By the time the loaves were finished, all three birds were flustered and noisy.

  ‘My grandfather used to do this back home,’ the doctor observed, delighted. ‘The real joke is when they start thinking they can fly.’ He walked down the steps and the birds scattered frantically as he began driving them forwards with outstretched arms. ‘Shoo, shoo, chick, chick chick.’

  ‘Chick- chick- chick- chick- chick- chick- chick- chick- chicken!’ sang Gerald. Betty began to giggle as the birds scrambled unsteadily forwards, flapping and squawking as they went. Anderson lunged for the nearest one, which evaded him with a frantic cry, then fell over its own feet in a drunken panic. Gerald and Betty laughed aloud as he grabbed the intoxicated birds and perched them on the bamboo fence bordering James’s garden. They flapped crazily and plummeted to the ground in untidy heaps, then staggered on to their feet and lurched forward, one dragging a paralysed wing on the ground.

  One bird flapped up to the fence of its own accord and evacuated messily over the doctor’s boots, an act which looked so much like defiance that Gerald and Betty fell back in their chairs, wiping their eyes with mirth. Below them Ahmed appeared, doubled up with laughter and holding his sides.

  ‘Pass me my rifle, Rawlins,’ Anderson commanded, ‘time to get on with the lunch.’ From the steps he took aim and succeeded in hitting two of the birds. The third flapped in a frenzy of fear towards a length of fallen palm trunk, jammed itself head first into a narrow gap between the billet and the fence, struggled and was still.

  Anderson walked over and prodded the inert bundle of feathers with his rifle.

  ‘Died of fright.’ He pulled out the body and held it by his neck, then picked up the remaining corpses and handed the three birds to the boy. ‘There you are. Start cooking and tuan Bourton’ll be back before they’re ready. That’s the trouble with chickens,’ he tramped up the verandah steps once more, ‘no guts. Lie down and die at the minute anything scares’em.’

  ‘Chicken-hearted.’ Gerald put down his empty glass. ‘Boy! More pahits!’

  Half an hour later the distant purr of James’s motorbike sounded through the perpetual churring of the jungle insects and he bounced into the shade of the bungalow, apologizing and calling for Ahmed and galvanizing them all anew with his energy. Betty brightened immediately as he fussed over her, enquiring at length about her health.

  ‘What kept you?’ Gerald demanded.

  ‘Bad business.’ James took a gulp of his drink. ‘Man down in the village came to the police house with his son – real bad hat, off smuggling buffalo over the Siamese border most of the year. Anyway, the boy had been over the border on some shady business or other, and came back swearing that he’d seen the Japs clearing airstrips in the jungle up in the north east. The old man insisted he tell his tale to the authorities and they got me down to show the flag and put the fear of God in him.’

  ‘Do any good?’ Bill took out his glasses and began to polish them slowly with his handkerchief.

  ‘Hard to tell. I’m inclined to believe the boy was telling the truth, but it doesn’t make any sense, does it? If the Japs come, that’ll be the last route they’ll choose. It’s virgin jungle all the way, right down to the beaches. Totally impassable.’

  ‘Monsoon’s starting anyway,’ Anderson, who had lived on the east coast a few years earlier, spoke with authority. ‘Landing from the sea would be out of the question – forty-foot breakers pounding the beaches from now until Christmas.’

  ‘Fellow was a fifth-columnist. You should have had him shot.’ Gerald stood up with indignation.

  ‘Good old Gerald.’ Bill pushed his spectacles back into position. ‘Pax Britannica at any price. Just what we need to turn the Malays against us at the wrong moment.’

  ‘What’s your reading of the situation, Bill? Are the Malay leaders going to back us? And what’s the word from above – any orders for us in case of in …’ he checked himself from saying the word ‘invasion’ ‘… if the worst came to the worst?’

  ‘I’ve just sent Singapore a report saying the best help we’ll get is probably from the Communists. They’re violently anti-British now, of course, but my guess is they’ll swing round if the Japs’do invade.’

  Gerald snorted with contempt. ‘Handful of barmy Chinese troublemakers.’

  ‘More than a handful, and they can make trouble for the Japanese just as well as for us if it suits them. The Malays will just sit in their kampongs and grow rice, and keep themselves to themselves like they do now.’

  Ahmed at last announced lunch and they sat down to a table set with a few small articles of silver from Bourton House and gaudy tropical flowers arranged in jampots.

  ‘Surely, you don’t really think the Japanese will come?’ Betty asked, putting down her fork. She had no appetite.

  ‘They wouldn’t dare,’ Gerald reassured her at once, reaching out to pat her hand.

  ‘Malaya’s impossible to invade,’ Dr Anderson spoke with his usual confidence. ‘Mountains, jungle, swamps – the country’s a natural fortress. Nothing to worry about, my dear.’

  ‘What do you think, James?’ Bill was really asking whether they could decently say what was on their minds in front of Betty.

  James smiled at her, his wide, frank, irresistible smile. ‘I’m absolutely certain the Japs will try it,’ he said gently. ‘Won’t you let us send you away, Betty? This will be no place for a woman when the fighting starts.’

  Her brow puckering in anxiety, she turned to the fourth man. ‘Do you think so, Bill?’

  ‘Yup. I’ve always said it was only a matter of time once Tojo the warlord took over. Malaya’s too valuable – they want the rubber, the tin, the rice, everything; to starve us as well as to supply themselves.’

  ‘But they say on the radio that the defences of Malaya are impregnable.’ Betty looked from one man to another for reassurance.

  ‘They’re only trying to keep morale up,’ James explained. ‘It’s true, no one will ever conquer the jungle. But they will have a damn good try. You see, if the Japs control Malaya, they will control almost all the rubber in the world, which means they can virtually stop any army in its tracks and knock the bottom out of our automobile industry as well. And what’s bad for General Motors is bad for America, don’t you see?’

  Gerald regarded his friends with contempt. ‘What’s the matter with you two – going off your heads? The Japs aren’t at war with America, they’ll never be at war with America. You’re crazy.’

  They ate on in silence, then dispersed for the afternoon lie-off while James remained at the table to write a report of the morning’s interrogation. Soon the even rise and fall of Gerald’s snores filled the house.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Betty, wan and in stockinged feet, reappeared in the doorway.

  ‘Just a report on this morning’s activities.’ He blotted the page neatly and reached for an envelope. ‘I’ll send it down to Singapore tonight.’

  ‘Then you don’t think that boy was a fifth columnist?’

  ‘No I don’t. He’s not the type. It seems to me if you’re going to hire an agent to spread alarm and despondency in the population, the last sort you’d go for would be a virtual bandit.’ She nodded, marvelling at his astuteness; men knew such a lot of things, especially James who was never ill at ease in any situation.

  ‘You’re right, I suppose.’ Betty sat on the edge of the nearest chair and watched as he sealed the letter.

  ‘Can’t you sleep?’ he asked. She shook her head and smiled apologetically. ‘I’ll get Ahmed to make you some barley water, that’ll p
erk you up.’

  ‘No, please, I don’t want to be any trouble.’

  ‘It’s no trouble. Come and make yourself comfortable on the verandah. You’re not just putting a brave face on things, telling us you feel fine?’

  ‘I haven’t got a brave face to put on, James.’ She ran her fingers through her hair with a weary gesture. She pinned up her curls carefully every night, but the heat and humidity of the climate invariably relaxed them, so that by the evening her hair was a mess of lank, brown locks which embarrassed her with its disorder.

  She need not have worried on James’s account; having found extraordinary sexual satisfaction with native women, he no longer had any desire for females of his own race, of whom he had a disabling fear. He treated Betty with all the chivalrous attention he had been trained to show to a woman, enhanced by a neurotically exaggerated respect. This alone, in comparison with Gerald’s hearty insensitivity, was more than enough to make Betty half in love with him.

  James sent the boy away with his letter and returned to sit by her in the cool of the main room.

  ‘I know it’s none of my business,’ he began, looking intently at the polished floorboards to hide his awkwardness, ‘but what are you going to do, Betty? When the baby comes, I mean. I don’t know much about these things, but it’s madness to think of staying here too much longer. Won’t you even go to Singapore?’

  ‘A wife’s place is with her husband, and I shall stay with Gerald.’ She spoke as if he had offended her.

  ‘But we’ll all be called up, all of us volunteers, if there is an invasion.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know what to do without Gerald.’ With maddening stubbornness, Betty avoided James’s eyes and gazed out of the doorway at the heat-shimmering garden and the jungle beyond.

  ‘My dear Betty, you may have to find out in an awful hurry. You need people to take care of you, a doctor …’

  ‘I’m sure Dr Anderson will look after me beautifully.’

  ‘But what if he’s called up? He may well be, you know.’

  ‘I shall manage. I can’t leave my husband. And besides, what if the Japanese attack Singapore?’

  ‘Singapore will never fall, Betty. I’m sure you’d be much safer there.’

  ‘I think you’re being very disloyal, talking like that. There won’t be any invasion. There can’t be.’ And she turned to look at him with calm, crazy defiance. It gave her a perverse sensation of power to have so many people expending their energy on changing her mind – above all James, with his good looks, natural superiority and crested silver cutlery.

  In the months that followed Betty rebuffed many more concerned advisers with the same stubborn irrationality. ‘My mind is made up, I shall stay with my husband,’ she repeated as more and more reports came of Japanese preparations north of the Siamese border. ‘Dr Anderson agrees with me that I mustn’t travel,’ she announced.

  She parroted the official line on every new development. ‘They’re on naval exercises – nothing to worry about,’ she announced with finality when Japanese warships were sighted off the monsoon-lashed east coast, ‘they won’t come near Malaya.’ Gerald was driven to desperation by his conflicting impulses to protect his wife and to uphold morale. She was daring him to admit that the official bravado was false.

  Betty’s vulnerability cowed them all. Even Douglas Lovell had an almost superstitious fear of her, calling her a ‘stupid little mare’ under his breath but never daring to voice his opinions outright. The doctor’s wife, as the only other European woman on the estate, acquired a tacit but compelling moral responsibility for Betty, and so the question of either woman leaving was in the end never raised again.

  Her pregnancy developed, increasing her discomfort as the baby grew. Worse than the weight of it, the aches and strains and violent flushes of heat, was the shamelessness of her condition, the fact that she could not conceal the ugly swelling that proclaimed her state to all at a glance. She tried to think of the baby, the sweet, little mite in its white lace gown, but could not relate that picture to the ugly bulk of her body.

  On December 7th, 1941, the radio announcer at last dropped his tone of fatuous cheerfulness, and announced that Japanese troops had crossed the border in the north east, near Kota Baharu, and were engaged in fierce fighting with the British.

  Next day came the news that the American fleet had been bombed the previous day in Pearl Harbor. A few days later, it was announced that the Malayan peninsula’s naval defence, the two battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse, had been sunk by Japanese warships.

  A profound depression settled on the European community, which deepened as it became clear that the Japanese were advancing steadily down the east side of the peninsula. The radio talked of ‘firm stands’ and ‘strategic retreats’until it became obvious that the defending forces were in chaos and the Japanese army, on foot and on bicycles, using the beaches and the coconut groves, were sweeping down the east coast.

  Then the west coast, too, began to fall. Penang was severely bombed, and the island’s Military Commander at once ordered all the European women and children to be evacuated to safety in Singapore, making no provision whatever for the Asiatic population.

  James walked out of his bungalow for a Sunday parade and did not return; he was ordered to Singapore to join Bill Treadwell in new intelligence work. A week later, Douglas Lovell read out orders for all the planters to abandon the estate and join an armoured car unit bound for the east coast.

  ‘Time for us to see the little men off,’ he concluded with relish. Only Gerald was allowed leave to return to his home and say goodbye to his wife, the extent of this compassion being justified by the need for one assistant to supervise the burning of the remaining stock of rubber.

  ‘You and Jean had best make for Singapore,’ he told Betty. ‘You’ll be quite safe there until the fighting is over.’

  Dumb with apprehension, but never doubting that this was merely a temporary parting, Betty kissed him goodbye. Jean Anderson stayed with her that night and helped her pack small suitcases with clothes for herself and the baby. The next day they were driven to the railway line and boarded the train, heading first for Kuala Lumpur, where they would transfer to the Singapore express.

  Ahmed wrapped the Bourton silver in canvas, buried it under James’s bungalow and followed the terse order of the British governors to the native population – pergi ulu, go into the jungle. Ah Kit, Gerald’s boy, took the wheels off the Model T and put wood blocks under the axles. He left with Ahmed, the picture of dejection.

  ‘Cheer up, man,’ Ahmed told him as they turned their backs on the plantation. ‘There’ll always be an England.’

  On either side of the train as it crawled southwards, the sleeping green jungle was unchanged, but sometimes they heard gunfire or aircraft in the distance and at every halt more Europeans climbed aboard, bringing with them news of Japanese bombers attacking to the north and district hospitals filling with wounded only to empty again when another evacuation was ordered.

  Betty, in the seventh month of her pregnancy, sat silently by a window and listened as Jean exchanged news with the other passengers. The weight of the baby under her blue-and-white striped smock pinned her down and inhibited her breathing. Occasionally, the baby moved, thrashing like a big fish in a net and making her gasp.

  At Kuala Lumpur, the express was steaming quietly but the platform was a mélée of people cramming themselves and their possessions aboard. There was a lengthy delay. The train driver too had obeyed the authorities’command and fled to the jungle.

  At last two British soldiers climbed on to the footplate, stripped to the waist, and began to stoke the engine.

  Slowly the crammed carriages travelled south, the ominous tranquillity of the jungle all around. Night fell, but Betty, more and more uncomfortable with the heat and pressure of the baby, was unable to sleep.

  At one station a party of footsore Australian nurses boarded. They were drenched from a savage squall of rain a
nd brought with them a crazy selection of supplies; they had carried hundreds of packets of cigarettes, and a complete Christmas dinner, cooked and not yet eaten, down a branch line from the bombed-out station of a coastal town. In the dawn light they heated the meal on the train’s boiler, carved it with a penknife and shared it around the carriage. Jean Anderson produced a bottle of whisky to wash their breakfast down.

  ‘We couldn’t let the Japs get their hands on our mince pies,’ one girl explained. ‘It’s Christmas, after all.’

  The jungle gave way to the houses of the coastal town of Johor Baharu, which was choked with refugees. Singapore lay a few miles away at the end of the causeway and as the train inched onwards, a mood of nightmare gaiety infected the passengers. The nurses stood at the carriage door throwing packets of cigarettes to the huge, disorderly queue of people which shuffled across the causeway to safety in Singapore.

  There were Malay families riding on ox-carts piled with their possessions, Chinese on bicycles with cages of pullets strapped to the handlebars, and a never-ending line of Morris and Ford cars loaded to the gunwales with white faces which smiled in relief as they approached sanctuary.

  Betty slumped against the window, craving air and the coolness of the glass against her burning skin. The baby was still now but her back ached and she shifted heavily to try to find a more comfortable position.

  ‘All right?’ Jean leaned across to pat her hand. ‘It won’t be long now.’

  ‘It’s going so slowly.’ Betty spoke peevishly, as if the train were dallying on purpose to annoy her.

  ‘There’s thousands of people, and they’re all walking on the tracks. We’ll be there soon.’

  Betty stared at her dully, with a detachment that made her resemble a small, stupid cow. Her face was quite expressionless, but she had a stricken look which alarmed Jean.

  Slowly, Betty looked round to the end of the carriage where the toilet was, then struggled to her feet without saying anything and made as if to push through the passengers in that direction. There was a patch of moisture on the seat where she had been sitting.