Twyford brought him the list of internees who had passed through the camp, methodically divided into army and civilian, British, European and Asiatic, living and dead. In every division the list of the dead was four or five times longer than that of the living.
‘We checked our list against the records in the main camps,’ he explained. ‘It was damn difficult to keep track. You’d see a division on the way north come through in eight trains, then a few months later they’d only need two trains to take what was left of them back. If a camp was hit by cholera, men would be dying so fast there’d be no one to record their names. Unless a man’s mates survived to remember him, we’d lose all trace of him.’ He talked on, explaining the minutiae of the sad task with which he had filled his time for two years. When Twyford had gone, James started to read through the list, written in pencil in Twyford’s meticulous, clerk’s handwriting on several different qualities of paper.
‘Rawlins, G. A., Capt.,’ he read at last. The record showed that Gerald had travelled north with his battalion in April 1943. The only other observation beside his name read: ‘Dec’d Burma railway? 1944.’ In his mind’s eye James tried to imagine Gerald, emaciated, half-naked, his honest eyes staring in his fleshless face like those of the other men in this isolated pocket of hell. His own robust limbs reproached him. He felt ashamed.
‘Douglas Lovell, C. Major.’ That name was a recent entry. The old estate manager had travelled north with the last group of prisoners to be sent from Changi. James gathered up the papers and went to find Twyford in his makeshift dispensary, sorting through the newly opened Red Cross supplies of drugs with the help of two Indians.
‘I know this man – I worked under him before the war. Is he still here? There’s nothing written against his name.’
‘He’ll be next door.’ Twyford handed one of his orderlies a large, blue paper packet of lint dressings. ‘The last lot who came through were in terrible shape – all old and sick. They weren’t fit to travel, but the Japs were getting desperate and sending out anyone who could hold a shovel. Here,’ he indicated to the Indians that they should continue the unpacking, ‘I’ll show you.’
They found the old man in the adjoining hospital building, lying on the rusty remains of an iron bed without a mattress. The once vigorous, commanding figure was a shrivelled carcass whose breath came slowly and noisily from its sunken mouth. Twyford left him; James, now accustomed to squat instead of sit, watched beside the dying man in silence.
‘Can you do anything for him?’ he asked one of the Indians who appeared with some of the new supplies and began dabbing red sulphonamide on another patient’s ulcerated legs.
‘There would be no point, sir. We were very surprised he did not die last night.’
‘What’s he dying of?’
‘Everything, sir. It’s no good for a man of his age to do hard work and eat bad food. They had no drugs also. We needed this,’ he gestured with the swab of antiseptic, ‘months ago but there was nothing. Nothing to buy even if we had money. He was a strong man, sir. Very strong heart. His men told us he had cholera and survived. This is a malarial seizure, Captain Twyford says.’
‘I knew him, before the war. I’d like to sit with him for a little while.’
‘Yes, sir.’
James put his hand on the wrist, as thin as a bundle of sticks, and felt for a pulse. It was weak and halting. Tears pricked painfully at James’s eyes and he let them fall.
Later it grew dark; the orderly brought in a hissing kerosene lamp and James watched the cloud of insects circulate around it, making faint sounds as they collided with the hot glass. In the deep stillness of night, he registered the moment at which the faint breath and the fluttering pulse stopped. James leaned over to listen for the heartbeat, retching with disgust at the smell of the body. The old man was dead.
James got up and left the building. He walked out of the camp gates, his mind numb. In the deepest night the jungle was nearly silent. All he could hear was a few churring insects and water dripping quietly from a million leaves, trickling in a thousand hidden channels.
That was all he ought to have heard. James’s acute sense of hearing registered something else, he hardly knew what, something stealthy and metallic. Into his mind flashed the equation a more experienced man would have computed instantly – five hundred internees, hundreds more in transit, and they had found only a handful of Japanese.
James ran back to the gates, yelling to the guards to close them as the first shots rang out. The firing settled quickly into a regular pattern and bullets ricocheted off the camp’s blank concrete walls.
Part of his mind registered with relief that he could hear only rifle fire, no heavy guns or even a machine gun. In a blind panic James tore into the hut where his men were billeted and roused them. The Gurkhas had slept in their clothes and, as the small, round-faced men snatched up their weapons and darted into positions along the concrete perimeter fence, he blessed the fact that they were seasoned troops from the finest fighting race in the world.
‘Lights!’ he ordered. ‘Get the generator going!’ Within a few moments there was a groan as the camp’s primitive dynamo began to turn, and weak yellow illumination flooded the railway track. Half a dozen Japanese soldiers on the far side of the line hit the ground and crawled rapidly back into the cover of the vegetation beyond the embankment.
The Japanese outside the gates fired a ragged crackle of shots which died away as the defenders turned on the powerful searchlights mounted on the camp’s two watchtowers. Without being ordered, the radio operator was calling their base.
‘They’re sending up reinforcements, sir,’ he told James, who nodded, thinking with dismay of the hours it had taken him to find the camp in daylight, and wondering how long the relief force would take to trace them, travelling along the winding jungle tracks in the dark.
Twyford appeared at the door of his dispensary, a puzzled expression on his hollow-cheeked face.
James barked, ‘Get the arms store open and issue weapons to every man who’s fit to fire a gun. Hurry, man!’
‘What’s happening?’ The Medical Officer was plainly confused. ‘The Japanese can’t attack us, they’ve surrendered.’
‘Go out there and tell ’em, why don’t you?’ In panic and desperation, James was looking for a scapegoat for his own inexperience. He pushed Twyford’s gaunt frame backwards with an accusing finger. ‘You let us march into an ambush, you bloody fool,’ he snarled. ‘Why didn’t you tell me the Japanese numbers? Didn’t you realize what they were up to?’
‘They all marched off yesterday,’ Twyford made a feeble gesture with his sticklike arms. ‘There were a couple of hundred of them. We thought they’d be going into K. L. to lay down their arms.’
‘Well that was the last thing on their minds, by the sounds of it. What arms have they got?’
The exhausted man shook his head helplessly. ‘I don’t know, rifles … small arms. We’ve seen nothing big. Maybe they’ve got some explosives.’
‘Let’s hope you’re right – then we can hold them off for a few hours.’
They could see nothing beyond the harsh glare of the camp lights, beyond which the jungle lay in darkness. There was no more shooting and the handful of soldiers waiting with weapons ready and fingers on their triggers shifted nervously in silence.
James decided to order the lights to be shut down, hoping to draw the enemy out into the open. Clouds covered the moon, and in the darkness he strained his ears to catch the smallest sound of men moving outside the camp’s walls.
Suddenly there was screaming and some gunfire from the Japanese. Immediately light flooded the area once more and James’s men fired rapidly, killing two of the enemy who had been tempted out under cover of the dark. One Japanese succeeded in hurling a grenade over the wall, but it fell in the centre of the parade-ground and exploded harmlessly.
Silence returned and they waited. James ordered the lights to be kept on, knowing the enemy would not
fall for the same trick twice. There was a sudden crash of breaking wood, and an uproar of voices as the seventeen Japanese imprisoned in the camp broke out of the building where they were held and ran howling forward across the parade ground to attack the soldiers with their bare hands. His Gurkhas shot them down before James could even take aim with his pistol.
An hour later, the noise of a vehicle engine ripped apart the quietness and an armoured car tore down the road, skidding and floundering on the irregular muddy surface, firing rapidly as it accelerated towards the gate. James’s men opened fire. The vehicle began to weave crazily from side to side, bucking over the deep ruts until the driver lost control and it shot off the roadway and overturned. An instant later it exploded, and shreds of metal sliced the air.
‘Suicide squad,’ James muttered to himself, blinking to keep his eyes straining past the glare of the burning car and into the dark jungle, searching for signs of another attack. He tried to put himself in the Japanese commander’s position and guess what his enemy would do next, but his mind was crazed with fear and exhaustion, and could produce no coherent idea.
The night wore on, the silence filled by the mechanical pounding of the generator. James barely moved. At length he heard the jungle insects begin their insistent chorus, and the first rounded notes of the gibbons calling in the forest canopy fell like bubbles of soft sound through the shrill cacophony. The black sky lightened imperceptibly to the east.
As dawn approached there were new sounds, a distant, muffled thud of gunfire which grew louder and closer, then ceased. There was a far-away roar of vehicles. Then there was silence. At last, to his immense relief, James saw a truck like his own bumping slowly towards the camp on the rutted dirt road. There were others behind it, and as they advanced James saw that they were crammed with armed men.
‘Thank God, you got here in time,’ he said to the American major.
‘We’ve been on the road all night. I knew you had trouble the minute you told us there were only a few Japs in this place. There must have been more. They had to be planning an ambush. We tried to raise you on the radio, but there was no answer, so we figured they’d attacked you already. You did well to hold them off, boy.’
‘What … was that …’ James suddenly felt a blanket of exhaustion envelop him.
The American clapped his shoulder in reassurance. ‘We got them, sure. Just as the sun came up we ran straight into them back on the road there. They weren’t expecting anything to come down that track. A few of them tried to put up a fight but when they realized how many of us there were they just threw down their arms. It’s all over.’
James was suddenly aware of a pain like a bruise in his chest, and a dry taste in his mouth reminding him of the dentist. His tongue was sticky with blood.
‘Is there a doctor can take a look at you?’ He heard the American ask, then sinewy arms caught him as he fell forwards into blackness.
Although it always seemed to him afterwards that the night had been a confusing, inconsequential sequence of events, which had made no more sense than a hallucination, the citation for his decoration insisted that Captain James Bourton had courageously remained at his post and commanded his men with two broken ribs and a punctured lung. He had held off two hundred attacking Japanese, with a loss of only one of his own men.
Inwardly, James felt himself to be a sham. He recalled his panic and disorientation clearly and they did not correspond to his idea of heroic behaviour. He had no recollection whatsoever of the shot that wounded him. But when Bill came to his hospital bedside in Singapore with news of the decoration, he did not voice his doubts, judging it better to be a phoney hero than an outright failure.
‘We’re going to London,’ Bill told him, looking out of the hospital window at what had once been a garden; the muddy ground was covered with row upon row of tents where sick and wounded men had been treated. The troops were moving out now, and the rain-streaked canvas flapped heavily in the wind over deserted ground. ‘Then we’ll be demobbed. Jesus, you look strange now you’re a white man again.’
James nodded and grinned as he rubbed his pale face from which all trace of the drug’s brown tint had faded. In the hospital he had even lost his normal weatherbeaten suntan. ‘It gives me a shock when I look in the mirror,’ he admitted. ‘What are you going to do when the army’s finished with you, Bill?’
‘What am I going to do? Come back, quick as I can. No offence, but I don’t want to stay in good old England longer than I have to. Can’t stand the climate. I’ll see if I can get my old job in Perak again, or something else. There’s bound to be a use for a guy with my background somewhere in this country. More important, what are you going to do?’
‘Live off the family for a bit, I suppose.’ James was never in the habit of thinking very far ahead, and had passed his weeks in the hospital in a pleasant mental limbo. ‘It’ll be strange to come home after all these years.’
The Australian eyed him with anger and resignation through his new, steel-framed spectacles. ‘What about the woman, Jim?’
‘What woman?’
‘The woman you married. You remember you married some woman in Kechil? You remember you’ve got a kid?’
‘Of course I remember.’ James fidgeted, feeling uncomfortable under his friend’s hard stare. The truth was that he had not thought of Khatijah or their child at all for weeks. ‘I’ll send her some money, she’ll have nothing to worry about. That sort of native girl can always get herself a new husband when it suits her.’
‘Suppose she’s sitting there pining, waiting for you to come marching back down the road to take her away with you.’
‘Don’t talk soft – more likely she’s got a new boyfriend and they’ve already been down to the mosque to get her divorce all fixed.’ James propped the telegram containing the news of his decoration against the empty waterglass on the table beside his bed and looked at it with satisfaction. ‘We never fooled those peasants for a minute, you know. They only helped us because they wanted to come out on the winning side and they knew they were on to a good thing. And they were right – the whole village would have starved if it hadn’t been for our money. They knew we’d leave when the war ended.’
A month later the ribs were still painful. James lowered himself into the narrow seat in the Dakota and winced. Out of the window, he saw the jungle-covered hills of Malaya slipping away below, the crown of each forest tree distinct even from the aeroplane’s height. The sea sparkled in shades of turquoise, then the black expanse of Sumatra appeared and he sat back.
‘Where are you going?’ Beside him, a Flight Lieutenant held out a cigarette case.
‘London. Thanks. And you?’
‘Colombo. Looking forward to going home?’
James nodded uncertainly. ‘Haven’t really thought about it.’
‘Wish I was in your shoes.’ His companion put away his cigarettes and brought out a wallet. From it he took a photograph, neatly wrapped in cellophane, of a woman and a boy. ‘Haven’t seen Junior here since I took that. He’s in long trousers now, the wife says. You got family?’
‘My father’s very ill. I got a letter just a couple of days ago.’
‘Sorry to hear that. And kids?’
‘No – I’m not married.’ James spoke the truth, as he saw it. He did not regard a liaison with a woman of another race, contracted under a heathen religion, as having any genuine status.
‘Well, you’ll be able to take your pick now, old boy.’ The other man gave the photograph a last look before replacing it in his worn, black leather wallet. James suddenly felt lonely. Ahead of him lay England, his family, his social position and the emotional desert laid waste by his mother. Behind him, although he had stifled the memory, he knew he was leaving a woman to whom he meant the whole world. And a child – nothing but an inanimate bundle, but a new life which he had created. When he thought of them he had an awesome sense that the child, the accidental product of his gratified carnal appetite, was the fin
est creation of his life.
Chapter Nineteen
‘I know I should not be saying this, My Lady.’ In the nursery at Coseley, a spacious low-ceilinged room with a view out to the park which was half-obscured by the grey-stone colonnade which decorated the upper storey of the house, Nanny Barbara spoke to Cathy with embarrassment, as she finished getting Jamie ready for his pony ride. ‘I do think it’s a terrible shame you can’t have Jamie with you. The poor mite just pines for you all the week. And your face is a sight to behold on a Friday when you go up to kiss him goodnight. I think that judge was very hard on the both of you.’
Cathy sighed. ‘I know, Nanny. But at least Jamie’s here and I can see him at weekends – his father might have wanted to take him off to New York now that he’s married again.’
‘I suppose it is a mercy that he didn’t, My Lady.’ She brushed the child’s glossy dark hair, which was cut very short in an old-fashioned style, and carefully put on his hard, black velvet riding hat. ‘But Jamie cries as if his little heart was breaking every single week after you’ve gone.’
‘No I don’t, Mummy. I’m very brave, I never cry. Nanny’s telling fibs.’ Jamie turned and hugged Cathy around the knees, his vivid blue eyes pleading for her to believe him. ‘Nanny, you’re horrible. You promised you’d never tell.’
Cathy picked up her son and hugged him, feeling a miserable wrench of frustration. The truth was that she also wept at every parting, and struggled through week after dreary week behind her typewriter at the Migatto Group offices living for the moment when she would again be able to feel Jamie’s small arms clutching her happily around the neck.
‘I’m glad Nanny told me, darling. I miss you, too, you know. Come on, let’s go and find your pony now – he must have been waiting for ages.’
‘But can I come and live with you soon, Mummy?’
‘I hope so, darling. But you wouldn’t be able to have your pony in London, would you?’
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