And so Cathy came back from a shopping trip one afternoon to find another note saying, ‘I’m sorry,’ and her husband gone. She waited for the inevitable agonized telephone call, but it never came. Instead a letter from a flashy Mayfair law firm arrived, announcing Charlie’s intention to divorce her.
‘I can’t seem to sleep, but I feel as if I’m ready to drop, I’m so tired,’ she told the doctor, who gave her some tablets.
‘These will help you sleep,’ he said, handing her a bottle of large, white pills, ‘and these are for the day, in case you need something to keep you going.’
She endured another six weeks with nerves as tight as bowstrings. Monty was concerned; she noticed that Cathy’s hair was falling out, and she seemed to have no patience with Jamie whereas before nothing the child did irritated his mother. Cathy had become desperately thin, and Monty saw her hand shake as she poured them tea. Lifting the Georgian silver pot was not easy for her, but then, it was very heavy.
‘Are you really OK, Big Sister?’
‘Of course I’m OK. Why does everyone keep asking me that?’
Monty realized she would need to be cautious. ‘What do you weigh now?’
‘Don’t nag, please, Monty. I’ll never get Charlie back if I lose my figure.’
‘But your ribs are sticking out.’ Above the deep plunge of her raspberry cashmere sweater, Cathy’s collar-bones were sharp as knives.
‘I just can’t eat very much, that’s all. Food makes me sick.’
‘Have you told the doctor?’
‘No, I only see him for the pills. I’ll get well when Charlie comes back, I know I will.’ She saw the warning look in her sister’s wide, black eyes. ‘I’ll get him, Monty, in the end. I know it. He’s seeing that whore April again. Lisa won’t be able to take it when he starts his old tricks.’
‘How do you know he’s seeing April?’ Monty demanded.
‘I just know,’ Cathy replied, for an instant sounding the note of crazy dismissal that was characteristic of their mother. She had no intention of confiding to her sister that she sometimes sat in her car outside the house where Charlie and Lisa were living, and spent a whole night watching the lights go on and off in the windows and waiting to see if Charlie would come in or go out.
At last the gossip columns discovered that the Earl and Countess of Laxford were living apart, and Cathy saw her name in the newspapers, and pictures of herself alone and Charlie with Lisa. She stared at the newspaper for half an hour, realizing that she had to accept the failure of her marriage.
‘Nanny Barbara,’ Cathy said the next day, ‘why not take Jamie down to the country for a week? His grandparents haven’t seen him for ages and they do love him so. I can’t go, I’ve got something on in London.’
She gave the servants the week off, and on Friday went to Elizabeth Arden for a top-to-toe beauty treatment. Back in the empty house, she locked the doors, then went to her dressing room and put on her wedding dress, which lay pristine in white tissue paper, with all its accessories, in a special mahogany chest.
‘Alcohol,’ she said, ‘I must drink something.’ She went down to the pantry and found a bottle of champagne, and drew the cork as her father had taught her. Then she went back upstairs.
At three o’clock on the following Monday morning Monty braced herself against the bulk of the Juice’s amplifier as Simon swung their van into Sloane Square. The band had played a gig in a distant northern suburb. The Juice were very much a Monday night band, not big enough to justify the Friday or Saturday gigs, but with enough following to half-fill a bar on a slack evening.
They were all running on speed, and the landlord had given them a bottle of vodka which they were drinking neat. Rick handed it back to Monty from his seat in the front.
‘No thanks.’ Monty passed the bottle on to Cy.
Rick looked at her at length in the fitful light from the street lamps. Monty had been quiet all evening, which was unusual. Whenever she was upset, she always shook it off when the band went on stage. ‘What’s up with you tonight? You’ve hardly said a word all evening.’
With a squeal of tyres, Simon hauled the van out of the square and into King’s Road. ‘It’s her sister – Monty reckons she’s cracking up because her old man’s run off with some Lolita. She’s been moping like a wet hen for days.’
‘I have not,’ snapped Monty, angry that Simon should intrude on the special bond which she and Cathy shared.
‘Don’t she live around here, in one of them posh houses?’ demanded Rick, taking back the depleted vodka bottle for a final swig.
‘We’ll pass it any minute,’ Monty told him, grateful that Rick at least was taking her anxiety seriously.
‘Drive past the house,’ Rick ordered Simon suddenly. ‘We can’t have Monty getting hung-up like this. Let’s check things out.’
‘Don’t be daft, it’s the middle of the night.’ Simon held his watch out for Rick to see the time.
‘Don’t matter – we won’t stop unless there’s lights on. If it’s all dark we’ll drive on, no harm done. This is it, ain’t it, love?’
Gratefully, Monty said yes, and Simon, unwilling to appear callous or to provoke an argument, slowed the van and turned into the narrow side-street which led into Royal Avenue. As soon as they turned the comer they saw Cathy’s house, every window ablaze with light. Alarmed, all five of them tumbled out of the vehicle and stood gazing at the bright façade while Monty pressed the bell.
‘No answer.’
‘Gone away for the weekend, has she?’
‘She should be back by now, she’s always back by Monday. Anyway, the housekeeper should be there. And all the lights are on.’
Simon strode up the steps and opened the brass letterbox to peer inside. ‘There are letters on the mat. No one’s picked up the mail.’
Simon, Rick and Monty went down into the basement, where Rick suddenly assumed command. He rattled the handle of the servants’door, which was also locked, then hammered the panels with authority, calling out, ‘Anybody there? Anybody home?’ A gust of raw, spring wind blew some dead leaves into the basement area, but there was no sound from the house.
‘On holiday, maybe?’
‘There’s always someone here. And if they were all away, they’d pull the burglar grille down.’ Monty looked towards Rick for help, full of fearful premonitions about her sister.
‘Good thing housebreaking was part of my education, innit?’ In the orange glow of the street lights Rick smiled at her with sympathy. Then he turned and aimed a careful kick at the glass panel of the basement door, reached through the shards, and released the locks. With Monty leading, and Rick and Simon behind, they made their way through the orderly house. In the drawing room Monty pulled the curtains across the naked windows. Simon picked the letters off the doormat and piled them on the marble console in the hallway. Rick kept his eyes intently ahead, scorning to seem impressed by the opulence around him.
In silence they climbed the staircase and Monty pushed open the door of the master bedroom, at once recognizing her sister’s wedding dress, apparently flung across the bed. Then she saw Cathy, and instinctively clutched Rick’s arm as she stepped back, shocked.
‘Oh, my God, look at her.’ Inside the crushed silken folds of the dress, Cathy lay half on the bed and half on the floor, her left leg twisted beneath her, her face already bluish where the skin was most delicate. At the same instant Monty and Rick leapt forward to the inert body.
‘Like Marilyn Monroe,’ said Simon, pointing to the blue patches.
‘No.’ Monty felt her sister’s wrist, Rick’s strong fingers probed the neck. How did you take someone’s pulse? There it was – a pulse, the merest flutter, but it was there. ‘Not like Marilyn Monroe. She’s still alive.’
Chapter Thirteen
All Singapore called Philippe’s establishment simply ‘the French club’. It had an air of prosperous comfort and an anonymous ambience which appealed to Singapore’s new élite. They
were young, hedonistic and cosmopolitan; the war was already a childhood memory, something their parents used to reproach them for their brazen materialism.
Apart from the exotic beauty of the women who worked there, the French club could have been situated in any big city in the world. At the end of the first year the club had been so successful that Philippe decided to buy the premises next door, combine the two buildings into one complex, and redecorate. Instead of the old, garish plastic, he introduced heavy sofas upholstered in dark red leather, red café curtains dividing the seating into intimate clusters and brass lamps with green shades which cast pools of soft light. Instantly the rooms acquired something of the atmosphere of a European club, but with a bright, contemporary edge that proclaimed a new order.
It proved a little sophisticated for the taste of the older colonial types, who did not care to sink their liquor in the company of Malay princelings or the sons of the Chinese tycoon class, however luxurious the surroundings. For the city’s wealthy newcomers, who behaved as if Singapore were the South of France and roared through the new suburbs in open roadsters, it was a perfectly congenial environment.
Ayeshah began to emulate the rich Europeans, who wore white clothes to give themselves the illusion of coolness in the stifling tropical climate. She bought Western fashion magazines at the big hotels, and from them sketched simple, fitted white dresses which she had made by a Chinese dressmaker. She wore her glossy black hair in a fashionable chignon with a single starlike frangipani flower as the only visible reminder to her clientele that they were still in the East.
On the mainland the Communists attacked the British with increasing ferocity. Shortly after Philippe opened his club, the British High Commissioner was killed in an ambush on a mountain road as he was being driven in his Rolls Royce to a hill-station for the weekend. After that more and more British soldiers flooded into Singapore, and British statesmen followed them to begin negotiating independence for the Malay States once the war was over.
In the beginning, the war on the mainland was far away and good for their business, but by 1952 the city itself was full of tension and armed Communists had been flushed out of the villages in the rural parts of Singapore Island. In the daytime there were frequent, angry demonstrations, and when darkness fell to offer cover to an assassin there were killings in the city’s thronged alleys. The Malayan police in armoured cars patrolled the streets at night, futilely chasing small groups of rioters who vanished into the deep darkness below the crossed washing poles.
There was an atmosphere of violence and instability which seemed to make everyone want to live for the instant and grab what they could while the going was good. Once again, the port at the crossroads of the world’s trade pandered to the momentary perversities of its visitors. Old women sidled through the native quarters with children to sell. Bugis Street became a brightly lit gully of vice, through which swooped flocks of gaudy transvestites, shrieking in raucous flirtation with the crowds of seamen.
All this Philippe observed with amused detachment. ‘I’ve seen it all before,’ he told Ayeshah. ‘Saigon went the same way. Every city gets rotten when an army moves in. And they will never defeat the Communists; they have the jungle on their side.’
Ayeshah sensed the changes, but did not see them because she rarely left the club to set foot in the streets at night; Philippe had rented a handsome square bungalow for them in a new suburb, and when they drove home in the pale hours before dawn few people were about. Moreover, she was fiercely singleminded, and no external event concerned her until it affected the flow of clients past her desk.
News of the trouble outside the club’s handsome studded doors came to her from Philippe, who spent more and more time at the opium parlour or with his friends, leaving her in charge.
‘People come here to see you, not me,’ he told her, when she suggested he should spend more time in his club. ‘You are a great beauty, ma chère, but I am just a chop chung kwai and not important.’ Chop chung kwai was the Cantonese expression for a Eurasian; its literal meaning was ‘mixed-up devil’.
There was resentment in what Philippe had said, and in the way he pressed Ayeshah to accept the invitations their regular clients would sometimes extend to her to swim at the Tanglin Club or watch the Maharajah of Jaipur’s polo team play the British army officers. With a white man to escort her, she was accepted at these exclusive occasions where he would have been shunned as a half-caste, even though he had been born in Paris.
Philippe was instantly conspicuous in colonial society. His navy-blue blazers, double-breasted and brass buttoned, fitted his narrow hips too well and their colour was slightly too bright; his clothes alone marked him out. Nothing could disguise the Oriental cast of his features, and in his lean, wedge-shaped face his narrow eyes, triangular like those of a Byzantine icon, gleamed with the predatory intelligence of a man who lived on his wits.
The echelon into which Philippe had a guaranteed entrée was the topmost social stratum of the drug trade, and it was this business which had bought them their bungalow, their servants and the shining Austin Healey sports car which darted like a dark-green dragonfly around the city. Ayeshah, who had always considered opium the exclusive vice of elderly or simple-minded Chinese, was surprised when she discovered that Philippe was procuring the drug for the fast-living, wealthy socialites of every race. He also dealt in cocaine, which was smuggled into Singapore aboard the huge, rusty freighters that were registered in Panama and brought South American beef to the Orient. His merchandise was of high quality, and his service discreet. In a business in which no one could be trusted, Philippe was a safer contact than most, because he was too much of a snob to exploit his customers. He wanted their social patronage more than money.
He called his customers his friends, and they in turn treated Philippe with as much generosity as they could without drawing attention to their relationship. Ayeshah, at first awestruck by the glamour of this hedonistic cadre, clung to his arm at garden parties and cocktail parties. Soon she was able to see the pleasure-seekers as the colonial élite saw them – wealthy, dissipated and of no consequence. Nevertheless, she was fascinated by their expertise in frivolity. Avid for luxury, she learned to tell natural pearls from dyed, modern jade from antique, Iranian caviar from Russian and a French seam sewn in Paris from a French seam sewn in Hong Kong. Philippe enjoyed developing her taste, but her hunger for fine things had a desperate impatience which puzzled him.
In their third year he decided to observe the French custom of a fermeture annuelle, and closed the club in August. He took Ayeshah to an island which had been put at his disposal by a Malay princeling, a pearshaped atoll some three hours by launch from the south-east coast of the peninsula.
Ayeshah was instantly enchanted by this miniature kingdom. They had the run of a tiny pink-stone palace, a little yacht, glorious gardens, brilliant white coral beaches, stables and a private zoo. The bathrooms, opulently panelled in yellowish marble with massive gold fitments, pleased her most.
‘Whatever are you doing?’ he asked, discovering her seated on the edge of the tub on their first day, her olive-skinned shoulders smooth and bare above the thick white towel. She had been in the bathroom for most of the morning.
‘I’m thinking,’ she said, with her catlike half-smile, leaning back to trail her fingers in the fragrant, foamy water. She looked satisfied, which was unusual.
‘What about?’
‘About washing in the river,’ she replied.
‘When did you ever wash in a river?’ He sat beside her, full of curiosity. ‘Come, tell me. I want to know.’
‘It isn’t important.’ He was irritated. She never talked to him about her past life, her family, or her home; at first, Philippe had thought this was merely delightful, naive reticence, but now, after a few years, he knew Ayeshah was hiding something from him, a secret so large that it was present in her mind all the time, casting a shadow over all her actions.
‘It must be somethi
ng important if you’ve been thinking about it in here all morning. Why are you always so secretive? I’m tired of all this mystery. Maybe I’ve taken up with a beautiful ghost.’ He smiled, teasing her and stroking the back of her neck lightly with his long ivory fingers.
She shook her head obstinately and stood up. ‘I am who I am now. It’s none of your business, my life before I met you. I have put it away in a box because I can do nothing about it, and if I ever open that box and look, it will be because it is time for me to do something, and then … you will see. You will not like me then.’ She turned towards him, pulling the towel with its massive red monogram more tightly around her. ‘I’m not interested in the past, Philippe. I want the future, and I want it to be like this.’ She looked around the opulent room, full of precious ornaments, kept sweet-smelling and spotless by diligent servants; she paused to admire herself in the pink glass mirror, in which her complexion appeared rose-beige like that of a white woman.
He moved forward to embrace her, but halted. Ayeshah never needed embraces. She never refused them, or showed any distaste, but after months of the most skilful loving of which Philippe was capable he sensed that while her body responded, her soul was inert. The warmth of her passion in his arms had exactly the same quality as the professional friendliness with which she greeted the club’s customers.
This knowledge had bred bitterness in Philippe which he had focused elsewhere, on his equivocal racial status. He had begun to reject the city that saw him as irredeemably inferior because of his mixed blood, and had started to talk about Singapore as if it were merely a provincial port in a country whose capital was Paris.
‘When we’ve got enough money in the bank this lousy town won’t see us for dust,’ he promised her. ‘These people are nothing – nothing.’ He waved his arm around the steamy cool of the bathroom, indicating its owner, his tin-pot court and beyond him their entire acquaintance, British and Asiatic. ‘They think they’re the most important people in the world but they are just barbarians in smart clothes. When you meet le tout Paris then you will know what I’m talking about. In Paris, they wouldn’t let men like that clean their shoes, you’ll see.’
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