Pearls

by Celia Brayfield

  ‘Selambaram! I can’t believe it – you still here?’

  ‘Where else, tuan?’ The round eyes of his old conductor gleamed with happiness.

  ‘My God, it’s good to see you! How are things?’

  ‘Pretty good, I think you will find. Bukit Helang was a lucky place because it was so difficult to reach that the Japanese mostly left us alone. You will see nothing much has changed, although with so few people to work we could keep only a small area of the estate properly cultivated.’

  James beamed with pleasure as they drove through the kampong. The dark hardwood houses with elaborately carved eaves seemed far more prosperous than the simpler houses of the Pahang village. Instead of the light green of the padi fields, the background was the rich emerald of half-tamed vegetation – palms, glossy banana trees, durians and fruit bushes.

  He noticed that the road was rutted, and as they approached the uphill sweep which led to the coolie lines and the estate buildings there were more definite signs of neglect. The jungle grass had invaded the old rubber, and the young plantings were completely overgrown. Half the coolie shacks were derelict and the handsome square pillars of the estate house were no longer as white as cricket flannels, but stained with the red-dust. Many of the shutters at the windows were hanging loose and the signs of care upon which Douglas Lovell had insisted – the orchid pots, the well-swept steps, the furled bamboo blinds – had gone.

  As the only conductor who had remained during the Japanese occupation, Selambaram had run the estate by giving priority to the clerkly observances of administration, which he understood, while holding blind faith that the forces of nature would cooperate. As a result, James found an immaculate record of chaos. Getting things to rights was to be a long, hard slog.

  The rubber trees which had not been tapped had benefited from the rest, and yielded generously. Labour began to return, old workers and new appearing daily, as the word spread that the estate manager was hiring once more. James had the telephone lines and electricity cables restored. For a while he would be the only European on the estate, and he elected to lodge in the estate house rather than go to the trouble of setting up home in a bungalow. His former residence was now roofless, with creepers probing the wooden shingles of the walls. Gerald’s bungalow was occupied by a new Malay assistant, and the house used by Anderson, the doctor, was now Selambaram’s home.

  The greatest change was not in the overgrowth and decay which had seized the estate in three years, but the subtle shift in James’s status – in the status of all white men – in the same period. The day the tuans ran, the years of rule by another Asian race, had cracked belief in white superiority. The colonial government was making grudging moves to Malaya’s independence and James found that although his authority was accepted and he himself viewed with affection and respect, he was no longer looked upon as a permanent feature of the scene.

  For the first time in his life he suffered loneliness. Not only was he isolated and exhausted at the end of each day by his work, but the growing uncertainty about the country’s future distressed him. Needing always a mould in which to shape his responsive character, he found it difficult to be in such fluid circumstances. His visitors were few. Dr Anderson, who was now responsible for the health of the workers on nine adjoining estates, came once a month to hold a clinic. He was thinner, with sunburned skin wrinkled at his knees and elbows, and the horseshoe of hair around his bald crown was no longer brown but grey. James welcomed his company, and kept the doctor’s old Gilbert and Sullivan records and his wind-up gramophone, which had survived the war with only one breakage, in the sitting room to entertain him.

  Occasionally a company inspector would appear to tell James he did not need another assistant. Bill Treadwell came, when, his new duties as adviser to a state ruler allowed. ‘I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be advising him on exactly. Seems to be everything from diseases of oil palms to the likelihood of war with the Communists.’

  ‘How bad is it?’ James asked him, narrowing his eyes in the brilliant sunlight as they drove up the road from the railway.

  ‘As bad as it could be. Our old friend Chin Peng has been off to China to train with Mao Tse-tung and he’s stirring his boys up like hornets. I never thought that all these months we wasted listening to him indoctrinate his men would be so useful. Once you’ve a few lessons on Lenin from Chin Peng it’s quite clear what they’re going to do. Attack the British. Start terrorizing the country the minute they’re in a position of enough strength.’ He looked with approval around the estate.

  ‘You did get off lightly, and no mistake. Business as usual already.’

  ‘The Malays have taken over the tennis court for badminton, but I’ve no one to play against anyway.’

  ‘Have you got any sandbags?’ James looked at his friend with surprise. ‘I’m serious, Jim. You blokes on the isolated estates are going to be very easy targets. I’d think about digging in and defence, if I were you.’

  The Times arrived, as it had always done, three weeks late. It brought the news, before his brother’s letter, of the sale of Bourton House to the National Trust. The Straits Times also arrived every day, discussing in its awkward English the demands for the Malayanization of key industries, for national independence and for action against the Chinese bandits who were terrorizing rural areas.

  Seeking action to cure his unease, James wrote to Pasterns asking for clarification of his father’s will. Their reply did little more than restate the document’s words. In the same post came a letter from the rubber company announcing that the widow of Gerald Rawlins would be visiting the estate with Dr Anderson in the near future.

  At the quayside in Georgetown, Betty recalled her first sight of Penang. She felt a lifetime older than the girl who, seven years before, had stood beside an elderly missionary and scanned the multicoloured crowd on shore for the half-forgotten face of her fiancé.

  Now she was looking for another barely remembered face, the round, sun-reddened face of Dr Anderson, which at first she overlooked in the throng because he was so changed by his years as a prisoner-of-war. He was thin and stooping, no longer robust, but at the sight of him she felt a warm, enveloping rush of security. Changed as he was, his presence reassured her with an impression of continuity.

  ‘Good trip?’ he asked as his driver held open the door of his Rover.

  ‘Not too bad. I’m not a very good sailor, I’m afraid. No sea legs at all.’

  ‘Good to be back to dry land again, eh?’

  They continued in pleasant, trivial conversation until they reached the E & O Hotel, and took tea on the terrace in the shade of a pink-and-white awning. They were both coming to terms with the horror of the past and the uncertainty of the future, and the only way to begin this work was with meaningless pleasantry.

  Neither wanted to discuss what they would be obliged to discuss, sooner or later. In the women’s internment camp in Sumatra, Betty had sat by Jean Anderson through long days in which she had talked distractedly for hours of her husband before she died of swamp fever; under a canvas canopy in the area called Cholera Hill in the labour camp on the Burma railway, the doctor had seen Gerald lose half his remaining weight in a day and then die in violent convulsions as his emaciated body hurled out all its fluid in vomiting and diarrhoea.

  They ate together in the crowded dining room, while a Chinese string trio played Franz Lehar waltzes very slowly. Neither of them was hungry. Betty’s pink and white bloom of freshness had subtly changed into overall pallor with patches of high colour on her cheeks. She wore a simple, blue crépe dress. Her hair curled crisply, gilded with a strong, new permanent wave and her blue eyes were more misty than ever.

  At last the doctor decided to breach the wall of silence. ‘Tell me about Jean,’ he asked simply.

  ‘She was terribly, terribly brave,’ Betty began in a rush of embarrassment. ‘I’m sure she saved my life half a dozen times. I was dreadfully ill after I had the baby. It didn’t live, you kno
w. And she …’ she paused, groping in the emptiness of her memory. Betty dealt with trauma by erasing it from her mind, and now she could recall very little of what had taken place in the women’s camp, although it was only a short time ago. It was beyond her emotional strength to remember that she had sold Jean’s wedding ring for three eggs and a pair of wooden pattens, and so the incident had been edited from her memory. ‘She was always so cheery,’ she finished vaguely. ‘She talked of you a lot … Arthur.’ It seemed unduly intimate to use his Christian name.

  ‘I thought of her too, of course.’ There was a heavy silence. ‘Gerald …’ he began, but Betty interrupted at once.

  ‘Don’t tell me. I can’t bear it, please. Don’t tell me anything. I know that he’s dead, that’s all I need to know.’

  He nodded with understanding, touched by her frailty. ‘Have you any plans?’

  ‘Not really. I must sort out our things, of course, that’s why I’m here. But I’ve no home now, you see. Nothing to go back to in England. Our house was bombed, a direct hit.’ She looked wistfully away across the dance floor where two or three couples circulated below the languid ceiling-fans.

  He intended to pat her hand in sympathy, but found himself holding it, a small, soft thing that lay limply in his palm like a sick bird, with the wrist pulse fluttering under the pale skin. Betty was comforted by his touch. It reminded her of the early days of her pregnancy, when the doctor alone had understood her fears.

  ‘You’re so good to me,’ she murmured. ‘I feel so lost without my husband. I just don’t know what to do. Gerald was my whole life, you see.’ She had returned to Malaya for one very simple reason. She not only felt lost without a man in her life, she also felt poor, and the prospect of returning to a life of genteel destitution on a small army pension dismayed her. It had seemed as if Britain were full of brassy, striding women who were thoroughly accustomed to competing for male attention. In the Crown Colony, Betty knew, women were more than ever in the minority and a husband should be easy to catch.

  ‘It’s been a rough time for us all,’ he consoled her, wanting very much to make sure that this dear, timid creature should never suffer again in her blameless life. She gave him a small grateful smile, sensing that she had secured a suitor.

  The next day they began the day’s journey to Bukit Helang, and Arthur Anderson escorted her on to the ferry to Port Swettenham, the mainline train to Kuala Lumpur and the smaller train upcountry, from which they were driven to the estate in Gerald’s old Model T Ford.

  ‘Welcome, Betty, my dear, welcome. How very good to see you,’ James greeted them, noting the doctor’s protective stance at once. ‘Isn’t the old car magnificent? She started at the first turn of the handle when we got her going again.’ He patted the vehicle’s dusty black roof.

  ‘What has happened to our bungalow?’ she asked him, anxiety pinching two vertical lines between her eyebrows. ‘I must arrange for all Gerald’s things to go back to Georgetown. If there is anything left, of course. There’s been so much theft and vandalism, hasn’t there, even on the estates the Japanese didn’t bother with.’

  ‘We’ve got off lightly here. Selambaram says the Japs came, ordered him to continue production, then vanished. They shot a couple of men for show, that’s all. We were very lucky.’

  ‘You’re always lucky, aren’t you, James?’ It was a guileless observation. ‘You must have been born under a lucky star.’

  The three of them dined together, with a cluster of oleander blooms in a jampot on the table and a new boy to bring out the soup, the curry and the icecream.

  ‘Your silver!’ Betty exclaimed. ‘Dear Ahmed buried your silver. I can see him in my mind’s eye now, I know exactly where it is. We’ll go to find it tomorrow.’

  ‘It’ll be gone by now, sure as eggs is eggs,’ Anderson observed, stretching his legs in the rattan lounger. ‘If you saw the hiding place, plenty of other people probably did, too.’

  Betty and James fell easily into something like their old relationship, he courtly and charming, she happy in the security of his care. She mentally compared the doctor with the runaway aristocrat; Arthur would mean quietness and security, which she craved, but James, although the war had taken the edge off his fine youthful confidence, could still dazzle her with his charm. He still had about him the glow imparted by a wealthy background. Above all, perversely, she wanted James more because he seemed less interested in her.

  Next morning Betty demanded a boy and set off in the direction of James’s old home. A mere half-hour later she burst in on him in the bare stone-floored estate office. ‘There!’ she cried, dropping a canvas bundle caked with moist, red clay on his blotter. ‘Absolutely untouched. Please open it, James, I can’t wait. It’ll be like having all the lovely days of the past to look at.’

  Amused at her enthusiasm, he called for scissors and cut the half-rotted covering. Insects streamed away from their adopted home. ‘Watch those red ants,’ he cautioned, pulling her back with his arm. ‘They bite like fury.’

  The sugar-caster, the salt, pepper and mustard pots, the coasters and the napkin rings and cutlery were all tarnished blue-black.

  ‘I shall clean them myself!’ she announced. ‘You’ve got some methylated spirit, haven’t you? They’ll be shining like new by supper time.’ And so they were, though it took her the whole afternoon to rub off the discoloration which clung stubbornly to the decoration and the engraved Witheram crests.

  ‘It must be so nice to have a real family.’ Wistfully, she ran her rounded fingertips, grey with polish, over the heraldic device on a knife-handle. ‘You know I have no one now, James? There’s Gerald’s family of course, but it isn’t the same as your own kin, is it?’

  ‘I suppose not.’ He felt tenderness as he leaned over her bent head, watching the humble, stained hands put the finishing polish on their work. He was unaware that she had come to this house because of a shrewd female instinct for finding a provider, and had determined to ensure her future by fanning the ashes of their former closeness. James was also, for once, unaware of his own vulnerability. He never suspected that this little brown mouse of a woman had developed a capacity for selfish artifice quite comparable with that of his mother.

  As the days of her visit passed, James lay awake at night, reasoning at random. If he stayed in Malaya, who better for a companion than Betty? If he returned to England, a wife would ensure his fortune, and Betty, dear, little Betty, would never be the sort of managing minx he loathed. He would like to take care of Gerald’s widow, as a kindness to his dead friend. He would like an outlet for his betraying sexuality, which had so often endangered his security in the past. The only obstacle was Arthur Anderson, who had grown irritable with jealousy as soon as he sensed that he had lost his place in Betty’s affections. However, the doctor had to continue his round of clinics elsewhere in the state, and within a few days he would be gone.

  At the other end of the building, Betty also postponed sleep. Betty Bourton, she said to herself. Lady Betty Bourton – no, that would not do. Lady Bettina Bourton – much better. He will just have to call me Bettina, she resolved.

  They were married three months later in the Register Office at Kuala Lumpur with Anderson, who-appeared to have accepted defeat gracefully, as a witness. James wrote at once to Pasterns advising them of the marriage and anticipating his legacy.

  In due course the reply was delivered. ‘As you are no doubt aware, the codicil relating to his bequest was drafted in your father’s individual style rather than the legal form which is always preferable in such documents in the interests of precision. Taking into account that the will as a whole is drawn up in keeping with the trust documents existing in your family, it is our opinion that the true beneficiaries of this bequest are intended to be your offspring, rather than yourself. It also appears to us that your father intended this provision to apply only to your own natural children, since the wording precludes inheritance by any adopted heir.’ The writer then offered James
congratulations on his marriage and assured him of the firm’s best attentions.

  They moved from the estate house into a large, newly built bungalow, with a room for a nursery and an amah to care for the child for which James now hoped. Bettina, as it amused him to call her, bustled around arranging the furniture and drilling Ah Ching, the new boy, in the use of their new luxury, an electric stove. She clung to James as she had clung to Gerald, wanting him back in the bungalow for every meal and interpreting every absence as a deliberate unkindness.

  To James’s dismay their sex life degenerated swiftly through a spiral of misunderstanding to the status of a disaster. Every element in his life combined to render him impotent. His work exhausted him. The clear fact that he needed to conceive a child to assure their future frightened him. Bettina’s manipulative dependence angered him. Worst of all, the memory of sweet, golden flesh, of kittenish sensuality and artless pleasing welled up in the darkness and he felt distaste for Bettina’s passive white body and pursed-lipped tolerance of his attempts on it.

  He drank too much, which made his flesh yet more wayward. He went to bed with dread in his bowels, frightened that he would not be able to achieve an erection, which was more and more often the case. Worse was to come. If he mastered his tiredness and distaste, and achieved ejaculation, a fierce pain flared up in his loins, and persisted for some hours afterwards.

  On Anderson’s next visit to Bukit Helang, James consulted the doctor about his sexual difficulties. Anderson reacted with swift embarrassment. ‘Pain of that kind is very unusual in men,’ he said, as if he doubted James’s word. ‘In women, it’s quite common of course. Any trouble with your water, at all?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ever had any – ah – venereal disease?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about during the occupation, when you and Treadwell were living rough in the jungle – anything with the waterworks then?’