Pearls
Page 72
So Joe took Monty to Arizona and they spent six months finding a site for their house and working with the architect to build it. His recording company offered her a new contract. The day her contract with Biffo expired, they went to Los Angeles to prepare her first album, and then make the video to promote it. It was a very simple film, with Monty in a black suit and white shirt, her hair cut short, and the band in their normal clothes, playing against a plain, white background.
The company were nervous of ‘Broken Wings’, saying it was too downbeat; instead they released ‘Man Beats Woman’as her first single. It climbed quickly to number three, and stayed in the top thirty for six weeks. In Britain, ‘Broken Wings’was a smash. Monty was called the new Joan Armatrading, the new Carly Simon, the new Annie Lennox and a great new rock original. When the Grammy awards were announced, she won the category of the Best New Artist. The following year she won the Best Vocal Performance by a Female Artist; then it was Best Contemporary Female Solo Vocal Performance.
The next year, she was accused of dominating the award categories for female artists. Two years later she was asked to host the awards ceremony, but declined because she was expecting her baby. That year also she won her copyright action against Rick, the Juice and Excellent Music, and got her songs back at last.
Three months after Paloma was born, Monty telephoned her sister in London.
‘Hello,’ said Cathy’s voice, ‘CBC Investment Corporation.’
‘What’s the matter, Cathy – switchboard operator got the sack already?’
‘Monty! What are you doing on the line?’
‘Calling you, dummy, what do you think I’m doing?’
‘Do you know what time it is?’
‘Oh no – have I fouled up again? I’m sorry, Cathy, I never can remember all the time changes.’ Cathy smiled to herself. Monty could remember the most complex musical notations but the implications of time zones were beyond her.
‘Good thing I was working late, huh? So how are you?’
‘Terrific – why aren’t you coming over to see your niece?’
‘I meant to, Monty, honestly I did. I’ll be over at the weekend, OK? It’s just been so hectic lately, the dollar’s gone mad, and …’
Monty smiled to herself. Cathy always seemed to be busy. She had mailed Cathy articles from magazines about overcommitment and overwork being characteristic of the female tycoon, but it didn’t do any good. Cathy only said they were characteristic of male tycoons as well. Monty had begun to suspect her sister must be happy working.
She arrived for the weekend as promised, and admired Paloma, who was three months old, feeling with a pang of regret all the long-forgotten emotions of early motherhood as she coaxed a wavering smile from the tiny red mouth, and watched the big, blue eyes focus slowly on her face.
What was the right thing to say about babies at this age – ah, yes, Cathy remembered. ‘How is she at night?’ she asked.
‘Not too bad,’ Monty said with caution. ‘She sleeps about six hours, then wakes at five or six.’
At 5.30 the next morning Monty was sitting up in bed feeding Paloma, the pair of them pillowed comfortably against Joe’s chest. She shifted uncomfortably. ‘Something’s fallen into the bed, darling,’ she told Joe. ‘It feels like one of her toys or something. Can you get it? It’s digging into me.’
He slipped his hand over the surface of the sheet and pulled out the antique silver rattle attached to an ivory ring which Cathy had brought as a gift for the baby. ‘Just a minute, there’s something else.’ He felt under the pillow, and withdrew a small, white leather jewel-box, which he put on the shelf by the bedside.
When Paloma was asleep again, Monty noticed the box. ‘What’s this?’ she asked.
‘Isn’t it yours?’
‘You know it isn’t. I don’t have any jewels except the ones you gave me.’ She looked at him with curiosity. He had already given her a huge heart-shaped diamond ring to mark Paloma’s birth. ‘It’s not from me,’ he said.
Monty opened the box. On a nest of black velvet sat an immense pink pearl.
At 6 am, Cathy stretched out like a starfish under the white comforter, and the fingertips of her right hand encountered a hard object under her pillow. It was a white leather box, lined with black velvet, containing another very large pink pearl.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Cathy flew to Singapore at the beginning of September, for a conference called by the International Tin Federation. It was an exhausting three days of seminars in a featureless modern hotel, at which the four hundred delegates addressed the likelihood that the tin cartel would shortly collapse and the world price of the metal would fall drastically, a catastrophe for both its producers and the traders.
The seminars had been tiring, and the knowledge that nothing could be done to avert the disaster gave her a sense of frustration. It should have been a relief to fly north to Penang to begin exploring her father’s past, but Cathy could not shake her sense of foreboding as the small 350-seater Fokker left the white skyscrapers of Singapore below and flew out of Changi airport. In less than an hour they would be in Kuala Lumpur.
Cathy was always intrigued that within so short a distance two cities could be so different. Singapore was a place with no memory, only a future. Among the mountain ranges of highrise development only Raffles Hotel had retained an aroma of the past. The fanshaped traveller’s palms and the pleasing, white-pillared balconies were dwarfed by the sixty-storey towers at either side. Now Raffles, too, was unhurriedly preparing for the twenty-first century, and the shabby suites, which had reminded Cathy of the dank boxrooms at Bourton, were being refurbished by David Hicks.
Forty minutes away from this anonymous international trade centre, Kuala Lumpur had a sturdy sense of continuous time; respect for the past was part of the Malay national character. The city was dusty and chaotic, a sprawl of harsh modernity and Hollywood-Moorish monuments surrounded by endless green jungle.
Night fell quickly as she arrived, and there was nothing to do but check into the Hilton and plan the next day. She called her offices in New York and London, feeling restless and anxious. Finally she put through a call to Monty in Arizona where it was early in the morning. ‘What’s the matter?’ her sister asked at once, sensing a note of agitation in her voice. ‘Are you all right, Cathy?’
‘I’m OK,’ she said slowly, listening to her voice echo on the line. ‘I’m just not sure what we’re doing here. Do you think we’re going about this the right way?’
‘Who knows? We’ve got to do whatever we can. I wish I was with you, Cathy.’
‘Paloma needs you more than I do right now.’ She could hear the baby cooing in the background and guessed that Monty was holding her while she talked.
Cathy hung up and turned over in her mind the reasoning behind the trip, but felt the logic of it crumble. How could the pearls be connected with her father? She tried to talk herself into a more positive frame of mind. You’re on your own, thousands of miles from home, dealing with the kind of problem you hate because it’s formless and smells of irrationality: you’re bound to feel anxious, she told herself.
Finding Treadwell had been simplicity itself. Her mother, as she expected, had been unable, or unwilling, to help. Bettina’s physical and mental deterioration was accelerating, and Cathy now paid for a nurse to visit her every day, to keep her and the flat tidy and clean, and to insist that her ulcers were dressed and the prescribed tablets were taken. She still visited the bridge club two or three times a week, apparently retaining enough mental clarity to play the game and enough self-control not to appear drunk in front of her companions. The rest of the time, however, she lived in a state of complete alcoholic oblivion. Cathy occasionally tried to persuade her to move to a nursing home, but the old woman stubbornly refused.
When Cathy asked her about William Treadwell, all her mother said was, ‘We knew nobody of that name in Malaya.’
‘But Daddy told me about him.’
In her London office, Cathy’s secretary acquired a set of Malaysian telephone directories in which she had no trouble finding a William Treadwell listed in Penang with the title Haji added to his name, which Cathy knew indicated a Moslem who had made a pilgrimage to Mecca. Feeling that there could not be too many Moslems with Anglo-Saxon names on the island, Cathy had dictated a letter, which had been answered at once, and then had arranged a meeting for the day following the end of the Singapore conference.
The next day she took another small plane to Penang, flying over the tops of the jungle trees, then the glistening aquamarine sea of the Straits of Malacca, until they touched down on Penang Island.
Treadwell met her at his office in Georgetown, an anonymous stone box in a stuffy Victorian building on King Street. The faint scent of cloves emanated from his lightweight fawn suit: he was now the proprietor of a small spice-trading business. The gold lettering on the door announced the Oriental Spice Company. He was a thin, stooped man with spectacles who looked more like a professor than a businessman. His hair was white, his face and neck red from the tropic sun. The hand which shook hers was bony, but its grip was strong.
‘So it’s not just your father that brings you out East?’ he asked her.
‘I had to come for a conference on the tin crisis in Singapore. It seemed a good opportunity.’
‘Mn. That’ll be a bad business for Malaysia. You’re in that world are you?’
‘I’m in finance, yes. It’s going to be a bad business for all of us, by the looks of things, but the producers are the ones who’ll suffer most, you’re right. The world’s very small; you can’t pretend we aren’t interdependent.’
His faded blue eyes looked at her keenly. ‘Some things never change do they? Here I am exporting spices just like the young men from the East India Company who came this way in the 1860s. In your father’s day, of course, it was the price of rubber everyone got excited about down at the club. Now rubber’s on the way out and they want everyone to produce palm oil, diversify the economy a bit.’ There was a silence and Cathy knew she had to smooth the way for a conversation about her father.
‘I expect you heard about my father’s death,’ she began. ‘I was seventeen when it happened. There was a terrible fuss, because he’d left so many debts. And we felt terrible, my sister and I, because we simply couldn’t understand why a parent would commit suicide. It took us a long time to get over it. I still can’t believe it was more than twenty years ago.’
An elderly Chinese secretary brought in a tray set with a garish tea set, and poured them two cups of strong Indian tea. Bill looked at the woman sitting across his scarred wooden desk and saw both strength and beauty. She had, he recognized, none of her father’s weakness and all of her mother’s beauty; he had not expected this. He had prepared himself for a typical, upper-class Englishwoman in early middle age, perhaps with finer features than the norm, but with only the blundering force of the British temperament, not this clear-eyed, intellectual toughness which he sensed like a core of steel in her character.
The Australian had anticipated this day for almost forty years, and had turned over and over in his mind the moral imperatives which ought to direct his conduct. He had at last resolved that he would assess the character of the woman who sought him out – if she ever did so – and then decide how to act. It would be wrong to ruin two good but limited lives, if that was what they proved to be, with truths which time had made irrelevant.
‘I’ve always felt as if I hardly knew my father, because he died when I was so young. Now I feel the time is right to get to know him, as much as I can.’
‘He was remarkable.’ Bill took her lead gratefully. ‘A remarkable man in every way. A cut above most of the fellahs who came out East. Marvellous mind he had, when he chose to use it. Very amusing, a lot of charm, extraordinary gift for the Oriental languages. Never met anyone quite like him.’
So far, just a standard eulogy. She couldn’t expect more over a cup of tea from a perfect stranger.
‘He said you taught him to play chess?’
‘When we were guests of the Chinese Communists in the occupation. We used to play on a board scratched in the dirt, with the tops of beer bottles and little bits of bamboo for the pieces.’
‘Who won?’
‘He did, when he put his mind to it.’
‘He taught me to play, when I was a little girl. He could never concentrate though, so he always lost.’
‘That was about the size of it, yes. Always alert, you see, so he was easily distracted.’ Bill’s hands, the fingers crooked with age, carefully removed his hornrimmed spectacles, which he put down on the desk-top in front of him.
‘And is the rubber estate he worked on still producing? I’d love to see it.’
He hesitated, looking at her with curiosity, collecting his thoughts. ‘We could drive out there tomorrow, if you like. I wouldn’t mind seeing the place again myself. I’m told there’s a road now, it’ll be a day trip.’
‘Terrific.’
She offered to drive and hired a car, then checked into the E & O Hotel, now much less than the finest hostelry in town, but, like Raffles, full of evocative atmosphere. My father came here, she told herself, following the porter across the cool, chequered marble floor. On the terrace where her father had inadvertently become engaged to foolish Lucy Kennedy, she looked out over the grey-blue waves and watched a fisherman in a narrow wooden skiff pull in his nets.
They drove aboard the slow iron ferry the next morning, and took a route south over a narrow but well-metalled highway, through a landscape ravaged by tin-mining, a succession of dreary grey workings interspersed with a harsh tangle of secondary jungle.
‘This is Ipoh – they called it the town that tin built,’ Bill explained as they drove down the straight main street lined with shop-houses, slowly negotiating a throng of bicycles and trishaws. ‘Government housing,’ he waved his hand at an orderly estate of rectangular bungalows with zigzag ironwork balconies. ‘This was the first of their cheap housing schemes, designed to help people get off the land and into the industrial centres where there was work.’
They sped on through village after village of ornate dark-wood bungalows. Bill explained to her what the daily routine of the estate would have been, how the planters’wives passed their days, and how hazardous life was during the Emergency. She realized that this gaunt, old man was withholding the kind of information about her father which she wanted, and wondered why.
‘When did you become a Moslem?’ she asked him.
‘When the country became independent. After that you couldn’t hold a position of responsibility unless you were a Malayan citizen. I was working as a development officer in the state of Perak, helping to build the new country, give it a sound infrastructure. I loved the place, always have, and I decided to apply for citizenship so I could stay on. Quite a few Europeans did. I decided to take the religion, too. I’m an all-or-nothing type: it appeals to me. There’s nothing left to chance in Islam. And I thought it was not enough just to say you love a country. You have to commit yourself to it.’
‘How did my father react?’
‘He thought I was mad, of course. Going native, he called it. The British thought that was the worst thing a man could do.’
‘I suppose if you believed all that God-is-an-Englishman stuff, you wouldn’t understand.’
He watched her covertly as she reacted to his statement and was satisfied. ‘You don’t buy that line, I take it.’
‘That kind of thinking took the great out of Britain.’ Cathy swerved to avoid a truck full of oil palm kernels which was driving down the centre of the road. Treadwell gave a dry chuckle.
‘Nothing in the Koran about the way a man’s supposed to drive, of course.’
After four hours the road began to climb thr
ough low, wooded hills. It followed a narrow railway line up a valley, then Treadwell directed her down a fork to the right. They drove through a village, slowing down for a group of brown cows being driven down the road by a little girl in a cotton frock who idly tapped their rumps with a bamboo pole. In time, the walls of shimmering green jungle foliage gave way to orderly rows of grey-trunked rubber trees.
‘This was just a beaten track in your father’s day,’ he told her. ‘The rubber used to come down here on ox-carts to be loaded on to the train.’
‘Who owns the estate now?’
‘Fella called Choy. Lives in Penang, great big house on Burmah Road. The manager will be a Chinese, too, I expect.’ They drove slowly past tin-roofed, hardwood houses where the estate workers lived, pausing to let a man wheeling a bicycle loaded with cans of latex cross in front of them. The old estate house still dominated the landscape from the brow of the hill, although its stucco was peeling and the shutters, bare of paint, had lost some of their slats.
The estate manager was an Indian, a fleshy man of about thirty with heavy-framed spectacles, who told them to take their time and look around at their leisure. He had one of his assistants fetch a yellowed photograph album, and showed them pictures of the estate staff in the early days of the Emergency. Cathy had no trouble picking out her father by his beaming smile and energetic posture.
‘I suppose that’s my mother,’ she said, pointing to the figure in a cotton frock beside him, but standing apart.
‘She’s still alive, I take it?’ Treadwell asked.
‘She’s very ill,’ Cathy told him, and although he expressed regret she felt there was something in his manner which suggested he had not cared for her mother particularly.
The old bungalows had long since been razed, and a plantation of oil palms waved feathery fronds where Cathy and Monty had played as babies under their amah’s watchful eye.