The Orientalist and the Ghost

by Susan Barker

  About the Book

  Malaya 1951, a jungle resettlement camp: young colonial adventurer Christopher Milnar falls passionately in love with a Chinese nurse Evangeline – a fierce flame that ends in tragedy when their camp is attacked by Communist guerrillas and Christopher is violently beaten up.

  London: half a century later the ghosts of that time return to haunt Christopher, triggering vivid memories of colonial misconduct and lost love. Forced to confront his past, Christopher agonises over the fate of his beloved Evangeline and the disappearance of their daughter, Frances.

  Moving from present day London to the heart of the Malayan jungle in colonial times, THE ORIENTALIST AND THE GHOST is a stunning portrayal of human frailty and lost love.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Part II

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part III

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part IV

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Read more from Susan Barker

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Susan Barker

  Copyright

  I

  1

  I AM A man who lives in the company of ghosts. They have me under constant surveillance. They watch me cook my bachelor suppers of processed peas and boil-in-the-bag cod. They watch me take out my dentures and drop them in the tumbler fizzing with Steradent. They watch me undo my fly and tinkle in the lavatory. Some ghosts I loathe and some I fear with horripilation and cardiac strife. Others I quite look forward to seeing. The silent ghosts are preferable to the noisy, garrulous ones. Aren’t you a lonely old so-and-so? said Marina Tolbin, the hawk-visaged missionary (who elected to remain sanctimoniously mute in life, but is strangely loquacious in death). If only that were true, I sighed, but you lot never leave me alone. Charles Dulwich, who drank the hemlock at the age of forty-six (romantically inspired, it seems, by the death of Socrates), crows of his eternal youth and my irreversible decline. Where have all your teeth gone, old boy? He chuckles. Be careful now! That cup of tea might overstrain your bladder! I can only sigh and say: Do you think I can help this decrepitude? Not all of us have been blessed with an inclination for suicide, you know.

  Such merciless scrutiny! Worse still is when the ghosts relive the last anguished moments before dying (Why? Heaven knows! Perhaps to break up the monotony of being deceased). Nothing is more harrowing than watching Mrs Ho fall to her knees on my bedroom carpet, beating her chest in a masochistic frenzy (Save my baby! Save my baby! she screams as the flames devour her). Charles tends to lie quietly on my bed as the poison hastens his departure from the world. It is hardly the most riveting of performances, but if I ignore him he gets upset and goes about slamming cupboard doors and clattering my ironing board.

  Sometimes I wonder how all the ghosts came here from Asia. Did they fly across together, soaring over continents and oceans like a diamond formation of migratory geese? Did they book flights on some airline of the paranormal? They complain about the factory greyness of the council estate, the many flights of stairs up to my flat, and of the syringe-strewn public urinal of a lift. Oh, quit your moaning! I tell them. I never invited you here to invade my privacy!

  Three weeks ago Adam and Julia came to stay. They are not ghosts, but grandchildren. When they came, flooding my flat with energy and juvenescence, I was not sure if they and the ghosts would see eye to eye. I thought the defiant youth of the children would frighten the ghosts away (or that the ghosts would frighten away the defiant youth – which would prove tricky to explain to social services). Fortunately neither child seems to have noticed all the phantoms flitting about. Not Julia with her shy, orthodontic smile and the handstands that flaunt her belly. Nor Adam, a teenager monstrous with acne, who locks himself away in the bathroom for hours on end to mourn his dead mother. However, in a flat as small as mine, it is impossible to keep hidden my dealings with the world of the dead. The children overhear me sometimes, talking in Cantonese or Hokkien or English as I converse with Ah Wing or Lieutenant Spencer. They have learnt not to interrupt, and quietly retreat to the bedroom they share. Julia saw me once, tearful in the kitchen as my beloved Evangeline threw crockery and flayed me with her tongue. Julia came and put her hand on my arm (for at twelve she has not yet learnt the selfish ways of a teenager). The poor child believed the tears were for her mother.

  They are hard to decipher, these orphans. They are mysterious in their grief. Julia has hysterical fits of giggling, seemingly over nothing at all, and Adam is enamoured of the locked door and avocado-tiled interior of the bathroom. Sometimes they talk in a language I do not understand, like sparrows twittering in Latin. Adam wants me to buy a television and Julia trains to be an Olympic gymnast in the hallway. When they fight it seems as though they want to murder each other, though hours later I open their bedroom door to find the siblings in bed together, weeping in their underclothes (I fear there have been omissions in their upbringing; serious moral omissions). They both wrinkle their noses at the food I cook and they hate boil-in-the-bag cod. I cannot quite believe that they will stay here until they are old enough to leave. That seems like so many years from now …

  And what of Frances, the daughter for whom I do not mourn?

  Frances has yet to join the band of spirits that haunt my flat. But I know she is coming. Some nights I hear her, as spry flames leap in the hearth and her children sleep in the bedroom next door. I hear her as the residents in the block go up and down, up and down, troubling the lift cables into a rhapsody of creaking. I hear her over the wind, going berserk, like a mad dog let loose at the windowpane. I hear her over the howls of Lieutenant Spencer, his slimy intestines surging from his stomach in a re-enactment of the bayonet attack.

  Frances Milnar, go away! I whisper. Leave me alone!

  For heaven help me, the girl must be bent on revenge.

  2

  LET US GO backwards. Quickly backwards. Let us reverse the decline of this ageing body. Let my liver spots fade, my follicles regenerate and my hairline unrecede. Let my skin tauten and tug my wrinkles out of sight. Let my teeth once more submerge themselves in my gums. Let the enamel calcify and fortify. Let my molar abscesses – the evil downfall of my dentition – heal and cast out decay. Let us reverse the crumbling of bones and correct my sinuosity of spine, so I stand tall and erect once more. Let my dying cells heal. Let my dormant member reawaken, and let Eros back in to torment me with libidinous throbs and urges. Let all that is grisly and slack revert to the aesthetics of wondrous youth. Oh, let there be youth! Let us keep going backwards; anticlockwise fifty years. I am a young man again. Do you see me? Gallant, broad and six feet tall. Fine sandy hair and handsome in the conventional, matinée-idol way. I am the one in the panama and linen suit, limp and undone in the Turkish-bath heat. The lone Caucasian, lost in the chaos of Kuala Lumpur airport. It is July 1951 and all around me Tamils, Chinese and Javanese are bustling; heaving weather-beaten suitcases and carrying parcels on heads; a sweltering hubbub of exo
tic noise. Malaya is three years into the Communist Emergency and seven long years from Independence. I am twenty-five – such abominable youth! – and an infatuated scholar of Chinese; an infatuation that led to the learning of three Chinese dialects before venturing beyond European soil. An infatuation that led me to the Crown Agencies for the Colonies, and to the Far East.

  The airline had lost my trunk, and a Sumatran in a songkok and turquoise pyjamas informed me it had been left in Dubai. He scribbled down the telephone number to call, should I desire to reclaim it, and sent me on my way. All I had were the clothes on my back, my travel-bag (containing flannel, toothbrush and a well-thumbed copy of The Handbook to the Emergency) and a heinous throb in the Romanesque cartilage of my nose. The throb was ten days old and was acquired in Richmond-upon-Thames, when I broke off my engagement to the feisty Marion Forte-Cannon. Oh, Christopher, you are a bore! Marion had sighed, before launching her small fist into my face. I deserved it. Disgraceful of me to have kept up the whole engagement façade when I knew I was just waiting for the chance to escape. But what’s a chap to do? Fate had more excitement up its sleeve than a life of domesticity and high-tea at Forte-Cannon Hall.

  I’d been sent to Malaya to help in the Emergency, a Communist insurrection started by the Chinese, who wanted a Red Malaya under their control. That was out of the question, of course. The British were still there and would never let them. Not because the British wanted to preserve their rule (indeed, I had entered a colonial service in terminal decline), but to get everything nice and orderly for Independence. As Charles used to say, Englishmen never like to leave a mess. But defeating the Communists was not as easy as everyone thought. They hid in jungle camps, surfacing only in guerrilla warfare. Because of these terror tactics the Emergency went on for over a decade, the Communists running amok, murdering and pillaging and tearing the country apart.

  Disencumbered of trunk and possessions, I hailed a taxi for Yong Peng, or The Village of Everlasting Peace. In that old rattletrap of a cab I saw the rainforest for the first time; miles and miles of it, colossal and brilliant green. Great craggy limestone cliffs and rubber plantations of tyrannous uniformity. The taxi gasped and sputtered through a valley township, a government building at its hub, with a terrace of bougainvillaea and troops in string vests, playing cricket on the padang. We plunged back into dense jungle for a treacherous mile or two, and as we neared The Village of Everlasting Peace we passed fields where Chinese farmers crouched, tending to sweet potato and tapioca crop, babies dangling in slings around their necks. The resettlement camp was seven months old when I got there and had one thousand and fifty villagers. The perimeter fence was seven feet high and looped with barbed wire. Beyond the fence I saw slattern huts, barefoot children and a sickly clump of banana trees. The village stretched for a quarter of a mile, ending at the ascent of a steep jungly hill on the far side.

  The Village of Everlasting Peace was one of thousands of resettlement camps built to quarantine the Chinese squatters from the Communists. The government wanted to cut the terrorists off from the supporters who supplied them with money and food. So they rounded up the Chinese squatters in army trucks, burnt down their jungle settlements and brought them to live under government supervision in New Villages. It was a frightfully sad business. None of the squatters wanted to leave their homes and they cried and made a fuss. But the War against Communism was no ordinary war and could not be fought in an ordinary way. We had to hit them where it hurt.

  The taxi halted at the village gates and the driver, a Tamil gentleman, asked me for the fare. We had attracted the attention of a Sikh guard, standing at the gate with a rifle slung over his shoulder. The guard wore a turban, a khaki jacket and shorts, and long woollen socks pulled up to his knees. He had tremendous, unkempt sideburns and his face was unctuous with sweat. Slamming the taxi door behind me, I went up to him and introduced myself as the new Assistant Resettlement Officer. I asked him if he’d be kind enough to show me to the office of Resettlement Officer Charles Dulwich. The Sikh guard adjusted his rifle, suspicious and taciturn. Sun-dizzy and unsteady on my feet, I repeated my introduction, taking care to speak very slowly. I was interrupted, however, by a great cockerel scurrying, shrieking, down the track towards us and thrashing its feathers in terror. Two Chinese boys scampered after the bird, beating the air with sticks and making war sounds. They halted when they saw me, and I said hello in three dialects. They stared and whispered and the cockerel scuttled and squawked to freedom. The boys then shouted a few words of Malay to the Sikh guard, who laughed and showed off his fine-looking teeth as he waved them away with the butt of his rifle.

  Gesturing that I should follow, the guard led me through the gates. And as we journeyed deeper into the resettlement camp my stomach began to weigh more than a stomach ought. During my training for Colonial service I’d seen slide shows of the prototype New Village. The standard was basic, but the huts clean and functional, the villagers camera-shy but good-natured. The Village of Everlasting Peace fell atrociously short of this ideal. It were as though I’d passed through a looking-glass, held up to the prototype to reflect back poverty and filth: a shantyland of cheap huts knocked up from plywood, corrugated iron and palm leaves – huts likely to collapse if the occupants so much as sneezed. Rubbish was heaped in stinking piles as though monuments to the spirit of squalor. Poultry strutted on the hard-trodden earth, indiscriminate about where they pecked and defecated. I heard the dying squeals of a pig as it was slaughtered. The village, I thought, was ripe for disease.

  Rubber tapping had finished for the day, but most villagers had gone to work in the vegetable gardens, leaving only the elderly and children behind. The elderly shuffled about, wattles quivering, toothless and sunken-cheeked. Urchins sweeping with brooms taller than they were themselves stared at me out of solemn moonchild eyes. A lame man spat betel-nut juice. An old crone with the wicked glint of dementia crouched in a doorway, throwing scraps to her ducklings. On the door frame hung lucky charms of red and gold, blessing her hovel with sons and prosperity.

  ‘Are you a government spy sent to find out which of us are Communists?’ she called out in Cantonese.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I work for the government but I am not here to spy.’

  ‘Hah!’ said the woman, ‘that is what all the government agents say.’

  The Sikh guard had moved on and to catch him up I dashed across a perilously wobbly plank bridging a ditch. On the other side of the ditch a girl was bent by a standpipe, washing potatoes dug out of the soil. The girl was pretty and wore her hair in plaits. When she saw me she blushed and a potato leapt from her hand, as though petrified by her strength of attraction to me. Gosh! I thought as the girl scrabbled about after the leaping potato. They aren’t bad, these Chinese girls. And I felt the unhappy throbbing in my nose subside.

  The Sikh guard led me to a wooden bungalow, the only building in the village fit for human habitation. He went up on the veranda and shouted: ‘Tuan, Tuan!’

  ‘No need to shout,’ came a voice. ‘I’m right behind you.’

  I turned round and saw Charles Dulwich for the first time. Good old Charles; pink and steaming with perspiration, and built like a grizzly bear. He beamed and shambled towards us as though the heat had him in shackles. He took my hand in his huge damp paw and shook it.

  ‘Resettlement Officer Charles Dulwich. You must be my new assistant. Splendid.’

  Charles had the physiognomy of a dissolute aristocrat. He had a magnificent, meandering nose (broken twice while he was a POW in Singapore) and an alcoholic’s complexion, jaundiced and spidery of capillary. When he smiled, the skin around his eyes gathered into deltas of a thousand and one tributaries. He was forty-four when I met him and at the time I thought he was terrifically old.

  Charles showed me inside the bungalow, to the rudimentary office with desks and chairs, concrete floor and chicken-wire windows. We each sat down in a rattan chair, or, rather, Charles sat and I collapsed. Two days of air tr
avel and the trauma of separation from my trunk had left me fatigued. Furthermore I was depressed by conditions in the village and had to summon the best of my acting skills to hide this. In a bright, inquisitive manner I asked about the villagers and the day-to-day running of the resettlement camp. Charles confessed he was more of an administrator than a ‘friend of the people’ and attributed this failure to language barriers.

  ‘That’s why you’re here, old chap,’ he said, ‘to build bridges between us Foreign Devils and the Chinese.’

  Charles dabbed his brow with his handkerchief and told me frankly that my predecessor, the late Ah Wing, hadn’t been much of a bridge-builder – in fact, his cold imperious manner had infested the waters with crocodiles.

  ‘Is that why he was murdered?’ I asked.

  Charles said it may have been a factor.

  ‘Well, I shall do my best to avoid the same fate!’ I joked, fatigue robbing me of taste.

  Charles apologized for the mess on my desk, cluttered with the late Ah Wing’s unfinished paperwork, a green Olivetti and a portrait of a fierce little Chinese lady. The table legs stood in china cups of kerosene and water, ant death traps full of their little black carcasses. It was late in the afternoon and the villagers were returning from the vegetable gardens, jangling bicycle bells and calling to one another, voices rising and falling in colloquial scales. I heard a woman shouting: ‘Second daughter! Where are you? Tell third brother to fetch water from the well!’ I heard notes faltering from a bamboo flute and the bleating of a goat in its pen.

  Let me stop here and confess: my memory is not what it used to be. The events of this morning are already lost in the mists of vagueness. Did I return my library books? Did I go to the town hall and register Adam and Julia for free school dinners? Other resources have to be consulted. So how can it be that the dull, plaintive, half-century-old bleats of a goat are sharper in my memory than a news bulletin heard on the radio not twenty minutes ago? The ether amasses into a finger of blame and points to all the ghosts, the spectral émigrés of my days in Malaya. I often wonder why I’ve only acquired ghosts from the bandit-ridden end of the Colonial era, and not from any other time in my life. I can’t puzzle it out. Old Smythe across the hall died of natural causes in February (God rest his soul) and I’ve not seen hide nor hair of him since. Resettlement Officer Charles Dulwich, on the other hand, committed suicide forty-eight years ago, but was in my kitchen only last night, smoking opium and reminiscing about the evening we sat on the veranda drinking whisky stengahs, as the gramophone trumpeted out ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ and the villagers cooked Humphrey the Saint Bernard on a great fire. Do you remember the smell of roast dog? Charles said. I drool at the memory. I’d been terribly fond of Humphrey and didn’t care to remember. But eau de charred canine filled my nostrils anyway. Just as Charles, the beast, wished it to.