Pearls

by Celia Brayfield

  ‘When?’ she asked him at once. He was taken aback.

  ‘As soon as we’ve got enough money.’

  ‘Haven’t we got enough now?’ Her eyes were hard; Ayeshah knew that the bank account stood at over ten thousand dollars, and in addition Philippe had a box of large gold coins buried under the bungalow.

  He laughed uneasily. ‘Paris is an expensive place, you know. I don’t want to crawl back there like a pauper and have my brothers laugh at me.’

  ‘Why don’t you write to your brothers, at least, and they can look out for a place for you? Oh please, Philippe. Let’s go to Paris. Just think what we can do there. Our club could be famous all over the world; we could entertain film stars and royalty; we could make so much more profit in a really big city. I hate Singapore and all these army people. You’re right about them, they’re just nobodies in flashy uniforms. Let’s go, darling, please.’

  Her eyes gleamed with ambition and Philippe, who was by and large content to be a minor celebrity in Singapore, was annoyed to find himself levered into action by his own words. He was also unable to refuse Ayeshah anything when she curled her tensile limbs into his arms like a kitten and pressed her warm, sculptured lips into his neck, as she did now. She played ceaselessly on his senses, deliberately keeping him in a permanent state of yearning for the erotic fulfilment of their relationship, and she had only to offer a hint that this ecstasy might be within his grasp to make Philippe her abject slave.

  Philippe agreed to write to his two brothers, full-blooded Vietnamese who ran a small restaurant on the Left Bank. A few weeks later they wrote back, full of enthusiasm for his arrival but quoting astronomical prices for the kind of premises he needed. Ayeshah frowned and said nothing. She never nagged him, but her will was like a demon’s curse which compelled his obedience.

  The day after the letter came from Paris, Singapore city was almost brought to a standstill by the largest anti-British demonstration to date, which swiftly degenerated into a full-scale riot. By nightfall, there were rumours that more than fifteen Europeans had been killed, but the announcements on Radio Malaya referred only to minor disturbances; the area around the club was quiet and people were going about their business as usual.

  ‘Shall I open up?’ Ali, the barman, asked Philippe as darkness enveloped the teeming streets. Philippe considered the question, smoothing down his pomaded hair with the palm of his hand. From the next room came some random saxophone phrases and the soft chink of maracas as the Filipino band took their seats.

  ‘Why not? It’s quiet enough around here, there won’t be any trouble. There’s no curfew, is there? Why should we lose business because there was a riot this morning? Who’s fighting, anyway?’ He took a sip of the tepid black coffee which he always drank throughout the early evening.

  ‘The Malays, they’re enraged over this business of the Dutch girl.’ Ali flicked imaginary specks of dust from the gleaming array of bottles on the glass shelves. ‘The case was in the Supreme Court this morning, and that’s where the crowd gathered first.’

  ‘What Dutch girl?’

  ‘Who cares?’ Ayeshah was dismissive. ‘It’s only some boring political nonsense, nothing to do with us – until they’re outside throwing stones through our windows.’

  She was wearing a tight strapless dress of gathered white silk, and sat awkwardly on a tall stool in front of the bar, a black, high-heeled shoe swinging from the toes of one foot. On the bar in front of her was a day-old copy of the Straits Times, which she had been half-heartedly trying to read. Her wide, smooth forehead furrowed as she struggled to follow the type.

  Ali went on, proud as always to show off his education, ‘It had nothing to do with politics until the authorities screwed things up. Look, here she is.’ Ali turned the newspaper over and pointed to a picture of a blonde girl with an open, sun-reddened face. ‘The famous Nadya. She was born of Dutch parents who abandoned her when the Japanese invaded, and a Malay family brought her up as a Moslem and married her to a Malay schoolteacher – but now her parents have decided they want her back and brought a petition in the courts.’

  Philippe drained his coffee cup. ‘It doesn’t sound like much of an excuse for a battle to me. There must be a dozen cases like this every year in this crazy place.’

  ‘There wouldn’t have been any trouble if the British had not insulted the Malay leaders; now they have taken the side of the foster parents and are stirring up the whole community. There was a very big crowd this morning and the Gurkha soldiers came to break it up, and there was shooting …’ Ali shrugged again. ‘I heard that twenty or thirty people have been killed at least.’

  Philippe reached for his creamy panama hat. ‘Nonsense. We didn’t see any sign of any trouble on our way here; by now everyone will have gone home.’

  Ayeshah quickly shook her head. ‘The worst fighting is always at night. Once it gets dark people think they can get away with anything, and all the hooligans and looters come out to join in. Let’s not open tonight, Philippe. We won’t be very busy on a Monday, anyway. Better to lose one evening’s business than get involved in any trouble, don’t you think?’

  He shook his head, glancing down the reservations book by the telephone. ‘There’s a big party booked in, we can’t possibly put them off. Once you do that to people, they never come back. And people stop coming to a club if they are never sure if it’s going to be open or not.’ He stretched an arm behind the bar and began to snap on the lights. ‘Business as usual. I’ll be back later, ma chère.’

  Anxiously Ayeshah watched him leave by the back entrance, while Ali went to open the steel gates at the front. She knew Philippe was paying his usual evening visit to the opium parlour, and would return in an hour or so in a bland good humour. The place was in the middle of the Chinese quarter, but to reach it Philippe would have to pass close to the mosque by North Bridge Road; if Ali was right, the mosque would still be surrounded by crowds listening to speeches broadcast from the loudspeakers.

  She was reassured a few hours later, when the club was full of chattering, dancing people and the street outside seemed to have every sports car in Singapore parked in it. Beyond the line of gleaming Jaguars and MGs were half a dozen limousines and a small knot of white-uniformed drivers who stood smoking cigarettes at the street corner.

  The event that had filled the club so early in the week was the birthday party of an English girl, the daughter of a senior British army officer. Ayeshah, temporarily idle but poised like a swallow at the corner of the reception desk, watched the girl as she sat demurely between the imposing figure of her father in his dress uniform and her mother in a fluttering, yellow silk gown. She was an ideal European beauty, with golden hair sleek under a velvet head-band and a small, pink mouth drooping in a pout of boredom.

  The soothing hum of conversation and the unctuous flow of the dance music obscured the noise from the street until a sudden squeal of tyres penetrated from outside. Two army drivers burst through the club door with pistols in their hands, and an instant later Ayeshah’s sharp eyes saw three or four Chinese clients vanish behind the bar, making for the back door.

  ‘Get the shutters down!’ one of the drivers ordered. ‘There’s two hundred people at the end of the road!’

  The band faltered into silence and one or two musicians surreptitiously put their instruments into their cases. The few remaining Asian clients made for the back door, and Ayeshah saw some of her girls move sinuously towards the toilets, clutching their purses.

  The tall white figure of the British officer stood up.

  ‘Keep calm, everybody. There’s nothing to worry about. Just a little local disturbance.’

  He signed to the bandleader to continue playing and the music began again, although it sounded thin and uneven because some of the musicians had also left.

  One or two couples continued dancing, but the rest shamefacedly quit the floor. There was an air of suppressed panic and Ayeshah heard the clamour of angry voices growing louder as
the mob approached in the street outside. Ali ran back through the door; he had succeeded in running down the steel shutters over the windows, but there was no protection for the door. The panels, thin wood under their covering of buttoned, wine-red, imitation leather, soon began to shudder, pounded by boots and sticks.

  ‘Better get down, everybody,’ the British officer commanded in an uneasy tone. The rest of the party hesitated. Four sharp pistol shots sounded from the clamouring crowd outside and bullets tore through the door, leaving jagged exit holes in the fabric. The English rose gave a shriek of panic and her mother pulled her down below the edge of their table.

  ‘Everybody under the tables – for heaven’s sake get down!’ her father shouted again, and this time everyone obeyed.

  Ayeshah crouched behind her desk with one of the uniformed army drivers, who drew his gun from the burnished leather holster at his belt. Outside in the street she heard a violent argument break out in the crowd. A group chanted ‘Kill the British’over and over again in ritual Arabic, their voices harsh with fanatical hatred. There was a violent rattling noise and she realized that the crowd were trying to tear down the metal shutters protecting the windows.

  ‘The shutters! They’re trying to pull down the shutters!’ Desperately she turned to the man beside her, her heart leaping with terror inside her chest. ‘Shoot back! Stop them! They’ll pull the whole wall down!’

  The driver raised himself awkwardly so that he was half-leaning against the desk, able to take aim at the window. The crowd gave a roar of triumph as one sheet of hinged metal slats gave way and crashed to the pavement, and the man fired a shot into the air. He was a sturdy corporal in his thirties, whose skin was leathery from the tropical sun.

  Stones began to thud on the walls, there was a crash and she saw the men’s contorted faces as they began to smash their entry into the club. The pistol was fired again outside and the men at the back of the crowd screamed, ‘Kill! Kill! Kill!’ The driver fired steadily at the window and hit a man who was already halfway across the window sill. He fell back with a yell, blood spurting across the floor from a wound in his neck.

  While the driver was reloading, Ayeshah heard another disturbance behind her, and turned to see a stream of Malay police in khaki and black running through the door at the back, their rifles held ready for action.

  ‘Thank heaven, thank heaven!’ she stammered over and over again, ‘Thank heaven you got here before they broke in. They’re mad! They want to kill everybody!’

  The leading constable ignored her, dragged her back from the entry area and took cover behind her desk before opening fire. The rioters fell back in panic, yelling abuse and climbing over each other as they fled down the street.

  Then the club was crammed with police and soldiers, orders were shouted and vehicles began to roar up to the splintered door. Within a few minutes all the Europeans had climbed into the police cars or their own vehicles and left, most without even settling their bills.

  As the last four police climbed into their jeep and drove away, Ayeshah looked round the club in bitter amazement. None of the officials had taken the slightest notice of her, or of any of the Asiatics in the club. The safety of the Europeans was their sole concern. In their rush to leave, the clients had overturned tables and smashed glasses. The floor was smeared with blood. The door and window were shattered, the protective shutter lay uselessly outside where it had been trampled and she could hear the roar of the mob as they continued fighting a few streets away.

  Without waiting to be told, Ali and the bandleader went out to see if the shutter could be fixed, but the stout metal grille had been buckled and the steel fixings bolted to the wall outside were hopelessly twisted.

  ‘We must close the building up somehow,’ Ayeshah wailed, feeling close to tears as she stood in the wrecked doorway. ‘There’s nothing to stop them coming back and burning the place down.’

  At the end of the street she saw a familiar slender figure in a pale suit, his panama hat in his hand.

  ‘Philippe! You’re ail right! Darling, what are we going to do, the place has been absolutely destroyed, they’ve torn down the shutters …’ she paused, realizing as he sauntered towards her up the street that he was insulated by the effect of his drug from any real appreciation of the situation. Philippe had strolled back through the riot-racked streets with complete lack of concern, no more anxious than if he had been walking down his precious Champs-Elysées.

  Ayeshah, now that she had no immediate cause for fear, was equally without emotion. A woman with less bedrock hatred in her heart would have been dismayed, resentful or panic-stricken; instead, she was calmly practical.

  ‘Ali, go down to Victoria Street and pull some planks off that building site. You know, where they’re working on that old, bombed building. Not bamboos, we need good solid wood to nail up the front here. No one will stop you in all this chaos – take a couple of boys from the band with you. Philippe, darling,’ she walked forward to greet him and took his arm with a managing air, ‘go and get the car, then as soon as the club is closed up safely we can go home.’

  But the Austin Healey, which Philippe had prudently parked in a side alley, had been rolled on to its side and set alight, and was now nothing but a burned-out shell. This event succeeded in penetrating Philippe’s detachment.

  ‘They knew! They must have known my car – everyone in Singapore knows my car! The bastards!’ He stood and trembled beside the charred wreck, and for a moment Ayeshah thought he was going to weep.

  The next day Philippe willingly withdrew all their money from the bank, bought a money belt for his gold and purchased their passage to Marseilles aboard an Italian liner.

  Before she left, Ayeshah secretly made an appointment with a lawyer. He was a sharp young Anglo-Indian, the junior partner in a practice which occupied a floor in a new eight-storey building on Victoria Street, but his eager interest faded rapidly as she explained what she wanted to do. He was not optimistic about her chances of success.

  Paris terrified Ayeshah, as Singapore could never have done. The cold, clammy air at once withered her courage. Kilometre after kilometre of macadamed streets, extending further than the eye could see, awed her with the arrogance of their conception. The vast spaces of the Etoile, the Place de la Concorde and the area around the Eiffel Tower made her feel cowed.

  She had an immediate sense of the overweening pride of the French, and their contempt for all foreign modes of civilization. At the moment of her arrival the great iron arches of the railway station made her aware that the race who inhabited this land had no fear of natural forces, and saw them only as energy to be harnessed by their omnipotent intellects.

  Philippe had taught her a few phrases in French, but the jabber of talk in the streets was incomprehensible. Worse was the dismissive arrogance with which strangers greeted her attempts to talk to them. The French gave shorter shrift to the disadvantaged than even the Chinese.

  They lodged first in an apartment of four crowded rooms above the restaurant owned by Philippe’s brothers, a dilapidated, ageless building standing crookedly in a winding, medieval alley in the Latin Quarter. In this space lived seven adults, including Philippe’s grey-haired grandmother, and a large number of children. The grandmother, sensing at once that Ayeshah’s attitude to Philippe was less than ideally loyal and submissive, persecuted her with coldness and shrewish observations about her lack of domestic gifts.

  Almost immediately Ayeshah fell ill, with a feverish chest infection the grandmother dismissed as la grippe, something all foreigners contracted as soon as they arrived in France. For a few days Ayeshah was smothered with misery, and clung pitifully to Philippe’s arms, too proud to ask to go back to the East but nevertheless devastated by the strangeness of their new environment.

  Her healthy young constitution soon began to fight off the illness, and at once fortune dealt them an ace.

  ‘Superb! What could be better!’ Philippe sat on the edge of their ancient mahog
any bed where Ayeshah lay huddled under all the covers she dared appropriate. ‘The old shoemender next door is retiring and he has offered my brothers his shop. It’s perfect – perfect situation, perfect size, an enormous basement …’

  ‘What about the price?’ she murmured, pulling the blankets around her as she sat up.

  ‘My brother says it’s fair, more than fair, very good. The old boy hasn’t any idea of the market value of his premises so we’re getting a real bargain. We’re on our way again, ma chère.’

  The news acted like a tonic to Ayeshah who quit her sickbed at once and, dressed in black slacks, woollen stockings and one of Philippe’s grey chequered pullovers, accompanied him next door to look over the cobbler’s dusty shop.

  ‘I’m going to fit the whole place out in bamboo,’ Philippe told her as they stood on the cobbled street outside looking at the building. ‘It’ll cost almost nothing and we can create a marvellous oriental atmosphere for a few hundred francs.’

  Ayeshah looked at him with surprise. ‘Can’t we make it like our old club, European style?’

  He shook his head. ‘What you don’t understand, little flower, is that a nightclub is a place where people come to perform their dreams. It’s a fantasy world where they can take off their inhibitions with their coats at the door. Yes, you must offer comfort, relaxation, luxury – but you must take your client out of his daytime life, so he can become another person for a little while. Here in Paris we have an advantage in being orientals, and we will have a much greater success by offering our clients a few hours in the mysterious East than in trying to compete with the French style of sophistication.’

  ‘But I thought you hated being classed as an oriental?’

  ‘So I do, but one should never confuse business with emotions. And in Paris it’s different: the French despise every other race, the Parisians despise everyone else in the world, but it’s nothing personal, you see. They think you are inferior but they concede that it’s not your fault. But the British think belonging to another race is some kind of insult to them.’