The Pearl of Penang

by Clare Flynn

  As if summoned by magic, Aunty Mimi appeared with a tray of canapés, followed by Benny, who set about mixing the drinks. The men accepted their usual stengahs, Veronica, a gin sling, and Benny was about to mix a gin and bitters for Evie.

  ‘No gin for me, thank you, Benny. I’ll have a lime and soda.’

  ‘What on earth’s wrong with you, darling? It’s Christmas Day for goodness sake.’ Veronica turned to Benny. ’Stick a large gin in there.’ She indicated Evie’s glass.

  ‘No!’ Evie jumped up and stayed Benny’s hand. No gin for me thank you, Benny.’ Addressing Veronica she apologised, ‘I just don’t fancy alcohol much lately.’

  Veronica looked her up and down then glanced towards Douglas who was still occupied with constructing his little piece of suburbia with Arthur and Jasmine, before fixing her gaze on Evie. ‘Surely you’re not in the Pudding Club?’

  Jasmine looked up. ‘What’s the Pudding Club?’

  Quickly, Evie said, ‘It’s for people who eat too much Christmas pudding.’ She was damned if Jasmine was going to find out about her condition from Veronica Leighton. She’d tell her herself in her own good time.

  Arthur looked mortified. He threw an apologetic glance at Evie and said, ‘That’s enough, Veronica.’

  Jasmine, oblivious, said, ‘Mummy’s not in it as she hardly had any pudding at all.’

  ‘Mummy?’ Veronica’s eyebrows shot up. ‘I say!’

  ‘Veronica!’ Arthur’s voice was low but the anger in his tone unmistakeable.

  Douglas, evidently bored with the Bayko kit, got up and flung himself into a chair. ‘Mrs Leighton’s right, Jasmine. It’s time for bed.’

  Jasmine picked up Shirley Temple and asked Evie, ‘Will you come up and read me a story, Mummy?’

  Relieved to escape, Evie took her step-daughter’s hand, asked the guests to excuse her, and left the room with Jasmine.

  As she went up the stairs she could hear Veronica begin her inquisition of Douglas and she hoped he would tell her nothing. She didn’t want news of her pregnancy to be spread around George Town by the malicious Veronica.

  Half an hour later, after Jasmine was asleep, Evie ventured back downstairs, full of trepidation. The drawing room was deserted and she could hear the murmur of voices coming from the garden. She picked up the scattered pieces of Bayko from the floor and put them back in the box, moving the half-finished house onto a side table, ready for Jasmine to finish tomorrow. Her back was turned to the garden when she felt a hand on her arm. Spinning round, she came face-to-face with Arthur. Her heart thumped inside her ribcage.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ he said. ‘About everything. Her behaviour yesterday at the tennis club and just now. She promised me that if I agreed to come tonight she would apologise to you, but she hasn’t and instead she’s made matters worse.’ He glanced behind him. ‘Is she right? Are you having a baby?’ His face looked stricken.

  She nodded. ‘Please don’t tell her.’

  His mouth was a tight line. ‘She’ll have wormed it out of Doug by now.’

  ‘No, she won’t.’ She said it with certainty.

  Arthur frowned.

  ‘I think we should go outside and join them.’ She realised her voice sounded clipped, abrupt.

  ‘Evie?’ Arthur looked at her pleadingly. ‘I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you. Why have you been avoiding me? I–’

  She cut him short. ‘Look, Arthur, I don’t want to hear it. You went straight home and told Veronica about what happened at the beach. I thought I could trust you. Did you both have a good laugh at my expense?’ The suppressed anger rose up inside her.

  He looked aghast. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I said nothing to her. Why, in God’s name, would I tell her?’

  ‘She warned me to keep away from you. It made me feel cheap and tawdry. And now I’m ashamed of myself for trusting you in the first place.’

  ‘Evie, I promise you. I don’t know what the heck you’re talking about. Is that why you’ve been avoiding us? Is that why you haven’t been near the pool or the beach? When did she say all this? What exactly did she say?’ He seemed to be avoiding using his wife’s name.

  ‘It was on Doug’s birthday. At the E&O. After you’d left. Douglas went off to speak to someone at another table and she pounced on me. Told me you’d told her about our swimming together at the beach and made it crystal clear that I was to keep away from you. I felt utterly ashamed. Mortified.’ She hesitated. ‘Is that what you two do? Come home and share your extra-marital shenanigans with each other? Is that what your marriage feeds off?’

  Arthur went white. ‘How could you think that of me, Evie?’

  ‘What else am I supposed to think?’

  Arthur shook his head quickly and repeatedly, then he touched her arm again. ‘I promise you, on my honour, Evie. I knew nothing of this. Someone else must have seen us together at the beach. She’s never breathed a word of this to me. And I feel sick that you could imagine I would have gone home and told her about you and me.’

  ‘There is no you and me.’ Evie brushed him aside and went out into the garden. She wasn’t going to offer Veronica Leighton any further reason to suspect her and try to humiliate her.

  The Leightons didn’t linger long. Veronica was clearly annoyed at the way Douglas and Evie were getting along and frustrated at her failure to prise out any information about whether or not Evie was pregnant. Arthur was preoccupied, silent and as tense as a taut spring. Evie heaved a sigh of relief when they left, leaving only the scent of Veronica’s Shalimar in their wake.

  Later that night, as Evie lay beside Douglas in bed, she was starting to drift off to sleep when she heard his voice, barely above a whisper.

  ‘Thank you, Evie. That was the best Christmas I’ve spent since I was a child before my mother died.’

  Evie felt a rush of pleasure.

  The dark, silent room and the fact that they couldn’t see each other appeared to have made Douglas uncharacteristically garrulous. ‘After my mother was gone, my father had no time for me. I was packed off to prep school then Eton.’

  ‘Was it awful? Being sent away from home so young?’

  ‘Not awful. It would have happened anyway. But I missed my mother dreadfully. She was ill for a long time and they wouldn’t let me see her.’

  ‘What was the matter with her?’

  ‘I’m not sure. No one told me what was wrong. I suspect it was a tumour of some kind. They tried to keep her illness from me and when I had to know, my father said she was too ill to be troubled and wouldn’t let me go near her room.’

  ‘Oh Doug, that’s terrible. And you were only ten.’

  ‘According to my father, not too young to develop a stiff upper lip. I made the mistake of shedding tears when I heard Mama had died. My father struck me and told me to show some backbone. After that, I spent all the holidays at school. Even Christmas. He couldn’t bear the sight of me.’

  Evie reached for his hand, but he drew it away and rolled onto his side. ‘Goodnight.’

  After a few minutes he was asleep, but she could find no such solace herself.

  18

  One Sunday in early January, Mary Helston offered to take Evie, with Jasmine and her school friend Penny, to swim in the Jungle Pools at Taiping on the mainland. It was Evie’s first trip across on the ferry since arriving in Penang. Mary had borrowed her father’s motor-car and Evie was glad to escape from George Town and to do so without the company of Benny. Evie felt constantly under a microscope worried that the servants compared her with Felicity and found her wanting. And while the Malayan was always courteous and correct, Evie had never managed to accustom herself to being driven about in a large car by a servant. She felt out of place and uncomfortable, remembering her own years as a paid companion. Today would be a relaxing change, and she approached the trip with excitement and a sense of liberation.

  It took almost two hours to get to the Taiping Jungle Pools. The place was in a magica
l setting in the hills, in the midst of thick rain forest. It was a marvel of Victorian construction – a series of three pools built into the hillside, connected by concrete steps and walkways and fed by a natural waterfall. The colonial administration had created it to keep civil servants, planters and other Europeans entertained and able to relax, away from the suffocating heat of the coastal plain. Up here, the water was cool, in contrast to other swimming pools where it was always tepid at best – although at times it could appear a little murky.

  There was a water chute that older children took great delight in sliding down, diving boards and a third smaller, shallow pool for children where the two little girls could play more safely. Sunlight filtered through the canopy of trees, dappling the lush ferns and glinting off the surface of the water. The joyous whoops of frolicking children and the chatter of adults mingled with birdsong, the trilling of insects and the sound of water rushing over the falls.

  After a leisurely swim, Evie and Mary sat down on their towels on the wood-topped concrete parapet that ran alongside the children’s pool, watching the two girls splashing about. Evie was glad to be in her friend’s company. Mary had never again mentioned the loss of her fiancé. While her eyes sometimes betrayed that her sadness was still close to the surface, she had found a way of keeping it concealed.

  ‘How are you settling in? It must be around six months you’ve been here now,’ asked Mary.

  ‘Five. To be honest, at first I thought I’d never settle. It’s been incredibly hard to adjust. I think I underestimated how much. But now… well, I’ve never been happier.’ She gave Mary a broad smile.

  ‘That’s super news. I’m so pleased for you.’

  ‘It wasn’t just acclimatising, although that’s been hard enough, but getting used to my new circumstances.’ Evie pulled off her swimming cap and ran her fingers through her hair. ‘I’d forgotten what it was like to be part of a family. Years of living and working as a paid companion to a kind but crotchety old lady had narrowed my horizons – not to mention living in a tiny village in Hampshire where nothing ever happened. And now I’ve been catapulted into a whole new world, as well as learning to be a wife and a mother.’

  ‘You and Jasmine seem to get along famously.’

  Evie turned her gaze to watch her step-daughter as she jumped, knees bent under her, into the water, emulating the dive-bombing of the boys in the pool. The eight-year-old emerged, coughing and spluttering and rubbing her eyes. But before Evie had a chance to check that she was all right, Jasmine was clambering out of the pool and getting ready to repeat the manoeuvre. ‘Just look at her! She’s in her element. And I have you and the school to thank for that.’

  ‘No. You have to credit yourself. You’ve given Jasmine the love and care she’d obviously been craving since her mother died.’

  Evie hesitated, before deciding if she couldn’t confide in Mary she had no one to confide in at all. ‘I sometimes wonder if she was craving it even while her mother was alive.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Just something Jasmine once said to me. She told me her mother was mean.’

  ‘Mean? In what way?’

  ‘I don’t know. It was clearly upsetting her so I didn’t press her.’

  ‘Can’t you ask your husband?’

  Evie gave a little involuntary snort. ‘In a word, no.’ Seeing the dismay on Mary’s face, she decided to show the same trust in her friend as Mary had shown to her when she’d recounted the story of her fiancé. ‘What I mean is – that’s been part of the difficulty of adjusting. Doug and I were virtual strangers when we married. We’d met only once. Years ago. He asked me to marry him by letter, completely out of the blue. And it was a very short letter at that.’ She looked down, embarrassed, and kicked her legs back and forth lightly against the parapet. ‘Things are good between us now… I think… but at first… it was jolly hard. I assumed he found it hard to accept me after the loss of his wife and… well…he’s not the kind of man who talks a lot.’

  Mary laughed. ‘Your typical Englishman. You don’t need to tell me. I’ve seen enough of them here. The English public school system has a lot to answer for.’

  Evie nodded. ‘He was educated at Eton. They don’t exactly go out of their way to help boys express their feelings. And I’ve only just discovered that his mother died when he was ten and his father would have nothing to do with him and packed him off to school.’

  ‘That’s a familiar story here. Not necessarily that parents don’t want to have their children around them, but that they send them off to boarding schools back in Britain and only get to see them for a few weeks every year. As a result, most of the men out here have never grown up properly – they behave as if they’re still at boarding school and they haven’t a clue how to talk to women. We’re an alien species!’ Mary cocked her head in the direction of the big pool where a group of young men were horsing around, whooping and yelling while carrying each other on their shoulders and ducking one another under the water. ‘They leave the tender embrace of their mothers and amahs for a regime of ‘six of the best’, tightly reined-in emotions, and playing pranks.’

  ‘Douglas isn’t the prank-playing type.’ Evie laughed lightly. ‘He’s quite the opposite. Rather serious. Apart from business, he has little time for socialising at all. His only real friend is Arthur Leighton and I think they get on because they’re so different.’ She felt an illicit thrill to be mentioning Arthur’s name. ‘Probably because Arthur didn’t go to public school.’

  ‘He’s done extremely well for himself.’

  ‘He’s a clever man.’ Evie told herself she had to stop this urge to speak about Arthur. She didn’t want to give away her still-present feelings for him. Forcing herself back to the topic of Douglas and Jasmine, where the conversation had begun, she said, ‘Anyway, what I was saying, is that it’s often been quite tricky for my husband and I to understand each other, but things are so much better. Christmas was really special.’

  Mary Helston looked wistful. ‘I find Christmas hard. It reminds me of how much I’ve lost.’ She leaned back, setting her mouth in a firm line. ‘Better not to dwell on all that.’

  Evie had been about to tell Mary that she was expecting a child but decided now was not the best moment. Mary would have to know eventually, and Evie wanted her to be the first outside the immediate family.

  Jasmine and Penny rushed up, full of excitement, bursting with energy and spraying water everywhere as they approached. Evie wrapped a towel around Jasmine and rubbed her dry as Mary did the same for Penny. The two little girls giggled and jostled each other.

  ‘She is!’ whispered Penny. ‘Ask her, if you don’t believe me.’

  ‘She isn’t,’ said Jasmine.

  Penny jerked a shoulder against her friend. ‘I bet she is. My mummy’s always right.’

  ‘Right about what?’ Mary Helston asked, provoking another fit of giggles from the two girls.

  Jasmine struggled free from the towel and put her hands on her hips. ‘All right.’ She faced Evie. ‘Penny says you’re going to have a baby.’

  ‘What?’ Evie could feel her face turning the colour of a beetroot.

  ‘I heard Mummy telling Daddy. She said Mrs Leighton told her that Mr Barrington’s new wife was expecting a baby. Then Daddy said, “That was quick work” and said that Mr Barrington didn’t waste any time. Jasmine says it isn’t true but Mummy told Daddy that Mrs Leighton had it from the horse’s mouth. But that’s silly as babies don’t come from horse’s mouths, they come from ladies’ tummies.’

  ‘No, they don’t.’ Jasmine pouted. ‘That’s just daft. The nuns told me the stork flies down from heaven and leaves them under a gooseberry bush.’

  Scarlet-faced, Evie looked at Mary, unsure what to say or do.

  Mary Helston took charge. ‘Penny Cameron, how many times have I told you not to spread tittle tattle? If Mrs Barrington is expecting a baby it’s up to her to tell whoever she chooses when she thinks
fit. Nothing good comes to people who tell tales and talk behind other people’s backs. If and when Mrs Barrington is going to have a baby she’ll tell Jasmine herself. I don’t want to have to mention this again. What do you say to Mrs Barrington?’

  Penny looked sheepish. ‘Sorry, Mrs Barrington.’

  Jasmine rolled her eyes as if to say I told you so. The two girls took each other’s hand and ran off into the sunshine to join the other children.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Evie. ‘I didn’t know what to say. I was taken aback.’

  ‘Is it true?’

  ‘Yes. But I didn’t tell Veronica Leighton. She waltzed in on Christmas evening and tried to force copious amounts of gin on me. Maybe it’s because of being pregnant but the very thought of drinking makes me feel sick these days, so I refused, and she jumped to conclusions. I neither confirmed nor denied, and I’m pretty sure Douglas wouldn’t have done either.’ Then Evie remembered she’d told Arthur. Had he broken his promise and told Veronica after all? If so, that probably meant he had also lied about not telling his wife about their meeting on the beach. But before she could dwell on this, she felt Mary’s arms enveloping her.

  ‘Oh, Evie, that’s marvellous news! I’m so happy for you. When did you find out?’

  ‘I saw the doctor just before Christmas and I only told Douglas on Christmas Eve.’

  ‘He must be thrilled.’

  ‘Yes, he is. I was going to tell you next. And Jasmine. But as you say, it’s finding the right moment. And it’s still quite early. Less than twelve weeks, the doctor says.’

  Mary glanced at her friend’s stomach. ‘Certainly no sign of it yet.’

  ‘Looks like I’m going to have to get ready for a conversation with Jasmine about the birds and the bees.’

  ‘Not the horse’s mouth!’

  ‘No, not the horse’s mouth. Gosh, don’t children grow up quickly these days?’

  ‘They feed off each other’s curiosity. But it’s probably best to tell them as little as possible. Preserve their innocence as long as we can.’