Leila

by Robin Jenkins

  ‘That could be the intention,’ said Harvey, ‘to gain sympathy.’

  Sandilands got to his feet. Protocol demanded that he must not leave without permission. Fuck protocol. ‘Are you sure your intention isn’t to provoke an uprising as an excuse to call off the elections? Could it be you’re not all that certain your side – the undemocratic side, remember – will come out on top?’

  ‘There is no need to adopt that tone, Sandilands,’ said Sir Hugo.

  ‘Good evening.’ Sandilands marched out.

  Maitland came hurrying after him.

  They stood by Sandilands’ car.

  A soldier whistled cheerfully. A bird joined in. The stars were brilliant. Yonder was the Southern Cross.

  ‘If I may say so, Andrew, you didn’t handle that very well.’

  ‘I don’t trust those buggers. If it’s a choice of siding with them or with Leila do you think I’d hesitate for a minute?’

  ‘No, but let me say this as a friend, as a fellow Scot, and not as a policeman; you don’t know Leila all that well, do you? You can’t. Her background’s so different from yours. You got married so suddenly.’

  ‘What are you trying to say, Alec?’

  ‘I don’t really know, Andrew, to tell you the truth. But here’s my advice. Take some leave – they’ll give it to you like a shot – and go and stay with David Anderson in Malaya for a week or two, till these damned elections are over and done with. Take Leila with you. You’re her man. She’ll do what you tell her.’

  ‘I couldn’t ask her to do that. Besides, she’s got this woman to defend.’

  ‘Aye, so she has. She’ll not be able to save her, though. And the penalty here for murder is hanging. For rebellion, too; only in that case it’s done in public. Goodnight.’

  Maitland then turned and ran up the steps into the house.

  It was the Glasgow soldier who opened the gate for Sandilands.

  ‘I heard on the wireless it’s snawing in Scotland,’ he said, ‘but whit wouldnae I gie to be walking doon Sauchiehall Street wi’ my muffler up ower my ears.’

  Eight

  HE WAS so eager to get home, to take Leila in his arms and tell her how he had stood up for her, that it was a bigger disappointment than it should have been when he found that she wasn’t there to welcome him. Saidee, reluctant clype, said that she had gone off in her car with two young Chinese men. That had been half an hour ago.

  He found himself trembling. It was stupid, there was no reason for it. As he poured himself a whisky he whistled jauntily, or tried to, but his hands were shaky. He stared at himself in the mirror, despising what he saw there, and asking what kind of love it was that was so willing to find fault. She had taken the youths to Lo’s home. That was it, the simplest of explanations. Yet doubts, black as leeches, clung to his mind, sucking out trust. Why had they not waited till he came home? Were they deliberately avoiding him? Had he not remarked once, more or less facetiously, that Lo in particular was the kind of idealistic young Chinese who would have accompanied Mao on the Long March and considered it an honour to be allowed to wash the great man’s feet?

  Into Sandilands’ mind then, sucked dry of trust, came a vision so horrible that he could not bear it, though he could not get rid of it either: a row of bodies dangling from ropes, Leila’s among them.

  It could happen. No special mercy would be shown because she was a woman.

  The Resident would be shocked in his gentlemanly way but he would do nothing to save her. The British government would express regret but point out that since Savu was no longer a colony it had no authority to intervene. One or two Members of Parliament, eager to sustain their liberal reputations, would ask questions but would easily be put off with the polite evasive answers.

  But it would never happen. There was no secret band of suicidal rebels. Leila was in no danger. She was more likely to become a member of His Highness’s government.

  Misgivings and doubts, though, persisted. Only Leila could rid him of them. Why was she not there to do it? What was keeping her? In the past few weeks whom had she associated with, behind Sandilands’ back? No, that was unfair. They had agreed that it would be better for him, a foreigner after all, not to be seen taking part in the elections. Therefore she had conferred with men whose trustworthiness he had had no opportunity of judging.

  He sat out on the verandah, among his orchids, heedless of mosquito bites. Because of the din the cicadas were making he did not hear her car until it was almost at the house. He did not, this time, hurry down the steps to open the door for her and kiss her as she stepped out.

  She came up the steps slowly. Was it simply because she was tired, or was she hesitant about facing him?

  She was wearing a red kebaya, with sarong to match. Though tired, she was as affectionate as always.

  She came over and kissed him on the head. ‘You’re back earlier than I thought,’ she said, smiling.

  ‘Yes.’

  He should have been on his feet, embracing her, but he sat there dourly.

  ‘For goodness’ sake, Andrew, let’s go in,’ she said.

  She took his hand and pulled him into the house. ‘You’re covered with bites. Is anything the matter? What had His Excellency to say?’

  ‘Where were you?’ he muttered, more huffily than he’d intended. He was in danger of losing control of himself.

  ‘At my father’s. Albert and Richard came to visit me. I took them to my father’s.’

  ‘Lo’s people live here in Savu Town. Why didn’t you take them there?’

  ‘They’ve got hold of a small printing press. They’re turning out leaflets for us.’

  The three printing firms in Savu Town had refused to print leaflets for the People’s Party. According to Leila they had been threatened with having their businesses shut down.

  ‘It’s very warm tonight,’ she said. Sitting under the fan she took off her kebaya. ‘I expect Saidee’s gone to bed.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She pulled her sarong up over her knees. Her legs were bare. ‘Am I not shameless?’ she said, laughing. ‘Could you please get me a drink of cold lemonade, Andrew?’

  He went into the kitchen.

  ‘Aren’t you going to tell me what was said at the Residency?’ she called. ‘Or were you sworn to silence?’

  He came back with her drink. ‘I gave no promises,’ he said.

  ‘Who were there?’

  ‘Harvey, Alec Maitland, and Sir Hugo. That’s all.’

  ‘Ah. So it wasn’t just a social meeting. What important and urgent matters were discussed?’

  ‘Harvey said it was very imprudent of you to visit Dr Wong in Singapore.’

  He had never seen her so haughty. ‘What business is it of his whom I visit?’

  ‘That’s what I told him.’

  ‘Did you, Andrew? Thank you. I suppose those secret police told him.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’ve got secret police here too. Not very secret really, for we know who they are. They attend our every meeting. There were two outside my father’s house. Do they think we’re a gang of dangerous terrorists?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what they think.’

  ‘You’re joking.’

  ‘No. Maitland said there had been break-ins at some police posts. Guns and ammunition were stolen.’

  ‘What posts?’

  ‘He didn’t say.’

  ‘Because it was a lie. Why wasn’t it reported in the newspapers?’

  ‘That’s what I asked him.’

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘Nothing. He didn’t seem comfortable about it.’

  ‘Because he’s an honest man and it’s a lie. They must be desperate. They must realise they’re going to lose.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s it. He said Chia and Lo were implicated.’

  ‘What rubbish! What despicable rubbish! You see how easily Savu could become a police state. It is almost one already, and the British government approves. Wh
at about me? Was I accused? And my father?’

  ‘Not your father.’

  ‘But I? Did they accuse me of being involved in a plot to steal guns?’

  ‘Maitland said you probably didn’t know anything about it.’

  ‘So if I’m not a terrorist I must be a credulous fool? And what did you say, Andrew? Did you defend your wife?’

  She undid her brassiere and dropped it on the floor.

  What did it mean? Were her breasts to be witnesses of her innocence? Was she reminding him that he was her husband to whom she had given herself body and soul, because she loved him and because she thought he loved her?

  He remembered Maitland’s advice to order her to give up politics. Would she obey him? For a few shameful moments he was tempted.

  Then, in a moment, all doubts vanished and he felt wonderfully cleansed and happy.

  There were no words to express his relief and love.

  He went over and, on his knees, kissed her breasts.

  Her haughtiness was gone; humour took its place. She laughed. She pressed his face against her breasts.

  ‘Now that the elections are so close,’ she said, ‘and I don’t have to consider my figure, we could have a child. What do you say?’

  Nine

  THE DAY before the elections a public holiday was declared throughout the country. To encourage a carnival atmosphere beer was free in the bars between certain hours: His Highness was meeting the considerable cost. It was not a bribe, no one was to think that, it was simply a gesture of appreciation for the interest that his people had shown in his elections, for he always spoke of them as his. Luckily the alcoholic content of the beer was low, otherwise half the male population might have been drunk, though never quarrelsome, before the fireworks display in the evening.

  What most impressed the foreign journalists who had flown in was that, on that day before the first free elections in the history of the country, nobody seemed to be bothering about politics at all. This could have been because the result was known in advance – triumph for the Sultan and annihilation for the People’s Party – but it was obviously also because the people, though a mixture of Malays, Chinese, Indians, Filipinos, Dusuns, and Muruts, were too mild-natured and too well-disposed towards one another. ‘Civilised’ was the word that occurred to the journalist from the Guardian. Nowhere was to be seen a bitter scowling face, or to be heard angry words.

  The town was thronged with happy smiling people. Women wore their best clothes, kebaya-sarongs of various bright colours, with necklaces, bangles, anklets, rings (in noses as well as on fingers) and earrings. The older men wore native dress, long white tunics and baggy white trousers, with round tasselled hats. Younger men, more European in their taste, wore white shirts and dark trousers; their oiled black hair shone like helmets and attracted insects. Children, like flowers in their gaudy clothes, delighted the foreign observers with their mannerly behaviour.

  Entertainments were put on all day in the padang besar, the great town square. The Gurkha pipe band gave two recitals of Scottish tunes, both stirring and sentimental, one in the morning and one in the evening, just before the mosquitoes came out. Native bands played their gongs, and slim rapt men and women performed native dances, so stately and slow as to be almost somnolent; in great contrast to an exhibition put on, at His Highness’s special request, by the Savu Scottish Country Dance Group, whose hectic performances of the Eightsome Reel and the Duke of Perth amazed the spectators and exhausted the participants.

  Some descendants of headhunters were brought from the interior to give an exhibition of shooting darts through blowpipes. Their accuracy seemed to indicate that they still kept their hands in. Taking heads in the old days, the reporters were told, had really been a religious act, to appease the spirits of the jungle. Well, those spirits still lurked in the trees and had to be appeased. Were heads still hunted? Savu was indeed, thought the journalists, a strange country, where a man might one day be out hunting heads and the next queueing to vote in a democratic election.

  As one of their nimblest dancers Sandilands was asked to take part in the country dancing, but had to decline because he had promised to take Leila for a sail to one of the off-shore islands. She wanted to get away from the excitement.

  Dressed in a red top and white shorts, she attracted the attention of some British journalists who had been invited to the Club by members. Drinks in hand, though it was only ten in the morning, they watched from the verandah as Sandilands and Leila, with the help of some local youths, struggled to launch the G.P.14. As there was no jetty the boat had to be pushed into big breakers that kept pushing it back. It took nerve and skill, as well as determination.

  The members discussed them.

  ‘He can handle a boat. You have to give him that.’

  ‘He’s a lucky big bugger.’

  ‘The fellow in the boat, you mean?’ asked one of the reporters.

  ‘Yes. That’s Sandilands.’

  ‘In what way is he lucky?’

  ‘Well, he’s a great golfer. Six times champion of the Club. Holds the course record.’

  ‘Gets invited by His Highness to play with him.’

  ‘Principal of the Teachers’ Training College, a cushy job if ever there was one. Hard-working well-behaved students, not like the louts at home.’

  ‘You should see the house that goes with the job. Huge.’

  ‘And the grounds are like a tropical garden.’

  ‘He speaks Malay fluently.’

  ‘And has some Chinese.’

  ‘But above everything else he’s got that marvellous woman as his wife.’

  The reporters had been taking turns at looking at Leila through binoculars.

  ‘She’s a beauty all right,’ said one.

  ‘Who is she?’ asked another.

  ‘You must have heard of her. She’s Leila, Dr Abad’s daughter, the brains of the People’s Party.’

  ‘Ah, so that’s who she is. She’s half-Scottish, isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes. She’s a lawyer. Brilliant, they say.’

  ‘They say too the Sultan’s offered her a job in his government.’

  ‘But isn’t she on the opposite side?’

  ‘Sure, but everybody knows the People’s Party hasn’t a hope. She’s ambitious, our Leila. She could end up as Prime Minister.’

  ‘And she’d do this country a lot of good.’

  ‘What she sees in Sandilands is a mystery.’

  ‘She could have been the Sultan’s missus if she’d wanted.’

  ‘She’d have had to share him with a dozen others. She would never have stood for that. Can be as haughty as hell.’

  ‘Be fair. She can also be damned gracious. Remember how decent she was to old Mrs Wilkinson.’

  ‘In what way was she decent to Mrs Wilkinson?’ asked a reporter.

  ‘Her kid, a little girl of ten, was killed by a car driven by the old lady. She was married before, you see. Her husband died young. Leila was magnificent.’

  ‘We’ll all drink to that.’

  They drank to it.

  ‘This Sandilands chap that’s married to her, is he involved in Savu politics?’

  ‘What politics?’

  There was loud laughter.

  ‘No, he isn’t. Sensible of him, really. The result’s a foregone conclusion.’

  ‘You all think so?’

  ‘Damned right we do. It’s just as well.’

  ‘You want the Sultan to win?’

  ‘Too bloody true we do.’

  ‘But he’s an autocrat, the other lot are democrats.’

  ‘They’d either boot us out or lower our salaries.’

  ‘And they’d bugger up the country in no time.’

  ‘Mind you, even His Highness would like to be able to manage without us. He put out a decree a while back. All top jobs were to be filled by native Savuans or Malays. He had to withdraw it of course, but it showed the way his mind is shaping.’

  ‘I would say
we’ve got another five years and then we’ll be booted out.’

  ‘A golden boot, though.’

  Again there was loud laughter.

  ‘But this fellow Sandilands that’s married to Leila, he’ll not be booted out.’

  ‘No. He’s here for good.’

  The yacht was now far out, well on its way to the islands.

  ‘He is lucky,’ muttered the journalist who was then looking through the binoculars.

  Ten

  SANDILANDS KNEW how lucky he was and had never felt more humble or grateful or happy than during that sail to the island with Leila. She threw overboard all her cares as politician and lawyer and became an agile and cheerful sailor. As she sat in the stern, holding the rudder, with her hair streaming in the strong but odorous breeze, he just could not believe his luck that this strange woman was his, well, no, not quite his, for if ever a person belonged to herself it was she, but his, in the sense that as his wife she was more his than anyone else’s. Those watchers on the verandah would be thinking and probably saying that they couldn’t understand what she saw in him. He couldn’t understand it himself, but if he was to deserve her he must from now on show all his best qualities. That lightening of his heart, that cleansing of his mind, must have been a religious experience of some kind.

  There was no one else on the little island. They were alone with lizards, crabs, and birds. They swam, naked, in water that sparkled and was lukewarm. They climbed to the top of the hill and looked towards Savu Town, two miles away, far enough for the buildings and the derricks of the oil wells to seem like parts of the jungle.

  After their picnic, shared by some small red-breasted birds, they lay side by side in the shade.

  ‘Have you ever noticed, Andrew,’ she said, in a teasing tone, ‘how we dusky ladies like to keep out of the sun? We do not want to become any duskier, you see. Among us it is considered more beautiful to be pale.’