Separation, The

by Jefferies, Dinah

  ‘I’m sorry. Just that from now on he’d be using a different bank. He left fifteen dollars, and instructed me to close the account after it was withdrawn.’

  Lydia took a deep breath, and let it out very slowly through her mouth.

  ‘So he left no other instructions?’

  The man shook his head.

  Finely balanced, she managed to keep hold of her temper. The important thing was to get to her girls. But fifteen dollars to get all the way to Ipoh? It wasn’t the teller’s fault, but what was going on?

  5

  Dad told us not to budge, but to wait beside some metal stairs on the deck, while he went down to talk to one of the ship’s stewards about our cabins. I stood still and listened to the sounds.

  ‘Shush,’ I said to my sister as we leant against the damp rails and looked into the stairwell. ‘Can’t you hear them?’

  Fleur pulled a face. ‘No.’

  I frowned. It wasn’t difficult to hear footsteps that echoed in the salty gangways below.

  ‘This ship is haunted,’ I whispered, and made a scary face. My sister rolled her eyes and turned away.

  ‘Sorry. Come on, Mealy Worm, let’s run.’

  Mum’s favourite name was Emma. Her lizard earrings had the letters E and M engraved on the back. It was my name, but also Fleur’s second name was Emilia, sometimes known as Floury Millie, or Mealy Worm by me.

  We ran up and down the deck shouting to each other, and when we were out of breath we doubled over and held our sides. Then stood to watch the ocean, as the red sun dropped into the water, and the day was gobbled up. Spots of pink and yellow bobbed up and down in water as dark as liquorice, and the sound of sea birds carried all the way from the harbour to our deck.

  ‘See the traders, sailing across in sampans,’ I said.

  ‘What’s sampans?’

  ‘Little boats, silly. Can’t you see?’

  We shrieked as they ducked out of the way of bigger boats to come alongside our ship, their reflected lantern lights wobbling in the water. Men stood up and shouted, then passed stuff up in large baskets. We got told off by the sailors, but not before we saw sparkly oriental slippers and strings of glittery beads. To Fleur and me, running up and down, the ship felt like fairyland – until we saw our father.

  ‘I don’t want to spoil your fun,’ he said, as he marched over. ‘But you can’t run wild out here.’

  ‘But, Daddy!’

  ‘No buts, Emma.’

  ‘We won’t go too close,’ Fleur pleaded.

  ‘Nice try, sweetie, but no dice. Only with an adult, out here, especially at night. Never on your own. And I thought I told you to wait by the stairs.’

  ‘Not fair,’ I grumbled under my breath.

  ‘I mean it, Emma. Anything could happen.’

  I didn’t say a word, but listened for ghostly voices behind the deck chairs, and imagined a shadowy figure creeping up to tip me over. And if not that, the sea would pull me from the deck and into the place where Orpheus danced with water sprites. I’d learnt about Orpheus at school.

  ‘Emma?’

  ‘Okay.’

  We went inside with him, but I crossed my fingers behind my back. I couldn’t help myself. I loved the ocean as the world turned purple and then darkest inky black.

  In secret, I pretended it was an adventure, and waited until Fleur was asleep. Then I slipped out of the cabin, crept up the narrow metal staircase to the deck, and waited until nobody was about. I ran across to one of the lifeboats. It was quite high off the deck, but I found a crate someone had left behind, stood on it and hauled myself over, head first into the boat. I rolled on to my back and looked up at the sky. The air was still warm, and all the stars were out. The little boat shook if I moved, so I kept very still, just like the sea.

  It reminded me of lying on the grass in our garden, and watching clouds fly over like puffs of sherbet lemon. I had to remember as much as I could, because I didn’t know when we were coming back. When a little voice in my head said if you’re coming back, I sat up and stared at the sea. I hugged myself and took a deep breath of salty air. I wanted to jump into the water and swim back to the place where Mummy was. But the quiet sea made me feel calm, and I stayed in the lifeboat until I got too cold.

  We shared our dining table with Mr Oliver and his sister. Her name was Veronica, and his was Sidney. Veronica was tall and thin, nearly as tall as Dad, with soft swishy skirts, tight blonde pin curls and a quiet voice. She patted her hair to keep it tidy. Both of them had white skin, as if they’d lived hidden away from the Malayan sun, though her cheeks were pink, as pink as the tiny glass beads that sat round her neck. She seemed to like us, especially Father, smiling with pretty blue eyes and giggling at his jokes.

  Mr Oliver and Veronica were late for lunch, and we were alone at the table. While we waited, Dad told us she had a flat in London but used to live in a place called Cheltenham, not far from where we were going. He said hers was an unhappy story, and that we should be kind to her. She didn’t have any children of her own, and her husband had been a schoolmaster, a man who’d died from a sickness called cholera.

  ‘What’s cholera,’ I asked. ‘Does it make your eyes pop out?’

  He sighed heavily. ‘No, Emma, it does not. It just makes you very tired and grey until you get worse.’

  ‘And then you die.’

  He nodded. ‘Probably.’

  In the background, Doris Day was singing one of my mum’s favourites: ‘Secret Love’. I felt sad when I thought of Mum’s pretty oval face and her shining eyes. The hazel colour was speckled with green and blue like the tail of a peacock-pheasant, and one of her eyebrows was a bit higher than the other. I liked to sit and watch her try to make them level. She never could.

  It was a Malay meal for lunch, with the sweet smell of kaffir lime leaves, which I loved. The pudding table wasn’t great, but I still ate too much peach melba and had a tummy ache. I asked Daddy if I could leave the table and go to my cabin to lie down.

  Veronica smiled at him. Tanned from being outdoors so much, Father was lined and kind of dry, and he wore round tortoiseshell specs. I noticed he’d made even more of an effort than usual to look smart.

  ‘I’ll look after Fleur if you like,’ Veronica said, in a bubbly voice. ‘Then Emma can have an undisturbed sleep and wake up feeling better.’

  In the cabin, I lay on top of the blue candlewick bedspread, ears buzzing. I was on the bottom bunk, Fleur’s, because I didn’t want to climb a ladder with my stomach hurting. Our tiny cabin smelt stale and salty. You could hear the ship hum, and the waves thump against its sides. I shut my eyes and the noise of the engine quickly sent me to sleep.

  A little later, a tap at the door woke me, and Mr Oliver came in. I suspected Dad must have sent him to see how I was, though I was surprised he came, and not his sister.

  He sat on the edge of my bed, out of breath and puffing.

  ‘Shove over a bit, love,’ he said, with a grin.

  His face was so close I could see broken red veins in his nose.

  ‘Close your eyes, my dear,’ he said, and started to stroke my forehead ever so softly. I forgot it was him and at first it was nice. It reminded me of Mummy. I drifted in a sickly sort of dream. I missed her so much and Dad wouldn’t say when she was coming. But then I had a funny feeling in my tummy and my legs. Something didn’t feel quite right, and I let out my breath when Mr Oliver left me on my own.

  When we entered the Bay of Biscay, silver clouds rushed across the sky, and at lunch the boat was rolling. Mr Oliver squeezed in next to me, and beneath the table put a sweaty hand on my bare thigh. I didn’t like it. I shuffled my body away from him, and pushed myself back in the seat. He winked at me and my cheeks burnt. Everyone was busy talking about the weather, so no one saw my face.

  After lunch, I stayed on deck to watch the world turn black. Lucky for me, Mr Oliver wasn’t a good sailor, and was first to disappear to his cabin. Then Fleur was sick, so Dad and Veronica took
her down too. Dad told me to follow them, but it made me feel better being out on my own, so I stayed. It was for the best. The water leapt higher and higher, the deck shuddered and shook, and even some of the sailors were sick.

  I found my sea legs, and shrieked as huge waves flew over the deck, knocking me from side to side. Birds screamed, the wind roared, and I forgot Mr Oliver’s hot hand, even forgot that we’d left my mum behind. I stayed out to breathe great gulps of salty smelling air, and afterwards, ran my hand over the crusty handrails and licked the crystals from the tips of my fingers. They tasted as fishy and salty as they smelt.

  The rest of our journey passed quickly, and on the last day I woke up before it was light. I climbed on a chair to look through the cabin porthole, and could just make out a long dark shape in the distance. My first sight of England. When the ship tied up later that morning, I scrambled up the stairs and on to the slippery deck. For a minute I looked at the pale sky. Then I closed my eyes, said a prayer for my beautiful mother, blew her a kiss across the sea, and asked her to get here soon.

  At the Liverpool dock, crowds of people blocked the way, and there was an oily smell in the air. Men in cloth caps coiled ropes round heavy metal stops on the quay, and the air was full of the jangly sound of bells, wheels, newspaper sellers, and swinging crates that banged and thumped on the ground. Most of all it was people shouting. You had to jump out of the way, because nobody could see you through the mist. Smog, Dad called it.

  I felt very small, and took a deep breath while I waited, as if the bright future Dad had promised would be there to meet me. It wasn’t. It was smelly, cold and grey. I never knew what grey was until then, and wanted to slip my hand into Mummy’s, for her to smile at me and say, ‘Everything’s going to be fine. You’ll see.’

  When he saw me looking upset, Dad did say it, but it wasn’t the same.

  We had to kiss Veronica and a green-looking Mr Oliver goodbye. I screwed up my face, and as soon as it was over, ran off down the edge of the dock. It was a freezing February day, and the run warmed me up.

  ‘Don’t go too close,’ Dad shouted.

  I didn’t go far. My feet hurt. Fleur and I usually played in flip-flops or barefoot, Dad laughing and calling us savages. Now we’d been forced into brown shoes with a strap and a button. And long itchy socks. We both complained loudly, though we showed off the red jackets that Mum had knitted ready for the next home leave. There’d only been one leave that I remembered, which had left me with a fuzzy idea of this place called England.

  Thinking of Mum hurt my heart so much.

  So far Dad had given no reason for her delay but I asked again at the dockside.

  He took off his specs, wiped them on his sleeve, puffed out his cheeks and simply said, ‘She’s not here at the moment. I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you.’

  ‘But when is she coming?’

  ‘Emma, I don’t know.’

  ‘You did leave her the letter I wrote?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Mum’s probably held up, I thought. Maybe Dad won’t say because he doesn’t want to make a promise, and have to disappoint us, if he gets it wrong. But it didn’t stop my imagination. And I saw my mother everywhere we went. Even in the big draughty waiting room where we waited for a porter, and where the smell of soot and smoke made your eyes smart. And though Mummy wasn’t really there, I imagined a fine line that wound halfway round the world. It was the invisible thread that stretched from west to east and back again; one end was attached to my mother’s heart and the other to mine. And, I knew, whatever might happen, that thread would never be broken.

  6

  Lydia looked back over her shoulder, as a jeep of khaki-clad Malay police armed with machine guns drove by. Since MNLA guerrillas had killed the British High Commissioner, Sir Henry Gurney, in 1951, nobody felt safe. She placed a hand on her throat, then tapped at the door of Cicely’s Portuguese town house, a beautiful pale pink building with decorative arched windows and a colonnaded walkway beneath. Moments later she was shown through to an airy room at the back, painted pale blue, a through draught lending some relief from the scorching day.

  She wheeled round as Cicely entered the room, hands outstretched, nails shimmering in icy pink to match her pale shift dress.

  ‘Darling. What an unexpected pleasure,’ Cicely said, her voice low, the vowels elongated.

  An elegant beauty, with swinging platinum hair, a light tan and deep plum lips, she tucked her long limbs under with implicit boredom as she sat. One dyed calfskin shoe with a high, ultra-thin heel hung from her toe.

  ‘I’m sorry … but I need your help. It’s very awkward.’ Lydia hesitated and straightened her back, trying to find a way to say it without arousing pity.

  Cicely coolly raised one, expertly plucked, arched eyebrow. Neither of them was the kind of colonial wife absorbed by digestive disturbances or household tittle-tattle, and it had been inevitable they’d become friends, of sorts.

  Lydia resisted the urge to tidy her hair and forced herself to speak. ‘I’m sorry to have to ask this, but could you lend me some money?’

  Her friend’s sparkling eyes, somewhere between topaz and emerald green, flared with delight. ‘Oh, darling, what on earth has happened?’

  Lydia proceeded cautiously. Cicely wasn’t malicious exactly, but was, so Alec had it, caught in a loveless marriage, and living with tales of her husband’s affairs. There was a pause. Only the drone of the fan stirred the air, as Lydia wondered how much to reveal.

  In the old Chinese quarter, they elbowed their way through the flowing current of people and dodged an army of bicycle-pulled rickshaws. Cicely led her through a backstreet market, where mah-jong players provided a clickety-clack chorus to bright blue birds singing in bamboo cages.

  Cicely nodded and smiled, rubbing shoulders with Chinese shopkeepers and Malay street hawkers. She stopped beside a bucket of live deep-sea crabs, and came away with packets of food. Lydia’s eyes widened, acutely aware of the sour sewer smell drifting across.

  ‘You must try this, darling. Utterly delicious.’ Cicely smiled, and stuffed a taste of banana leaf curry into Lydia’s mouth. ‘Come on, sweetie. It’ll be all right. You worry too much. Though I can’t think why Alec didn’t leave enough money for you to follow him. What a shit.’

  At the end of an alley, beside lurid posters advertising Lucky Strike cigarettes, Cicely stopped outside a shop with a dragon painted on a red hanging sign. She leant against the doorpost with willowy sex appeal, ignoring the rigid watchman who sat there with a shotgun on his lap.

  ‘Here we are,’ she said. Her narrow face spread in a wide grin, the single row of pearls at her neck gleaming.

  Next door was a herbalist and snake charmer. He stood outside his shop, a burly Indian, chewing betel. Lydia eyed the snake baskets.

  ‘Don’t worry, darling.’ Cicely laughed, and pushed open the door. ‘The cobras always sleep until sundown.’

  Inside the shop Lydia held her nose, but it reeked only of cheap incense and coconut oil. The Chinaman behind the counter wore an embroidered red gown, and what looked like a hostile stare. Lydia’s eyes slid over to Cicely who, without flinching, emptied a bag of charm bracelets, gold earrings and half a dozen necklaces on to the counter.

  Sweat broke out on Lydia’s forehead, and she felt herself redden. ‘But these are real gems.’

  Cicely shrugged and squeezed her hand. ‘Mainly Chinese tat. Honestly. Don’t worry. Now, have you got photos of your scrumptious girls?’

  Lydia bent her head, reached into her crammed bag and pulled out a purse. Inside were two small photos, one of Emma and one of Fleur, taken in a booth at the zoo. She looked at Fleur gazing out with a slight squint and Alec’s serious eyes, and then at Em’s lopsided grin. The photo revealed her elder daughter’s straight nose and angular face, but fell short of capturing laughing turquoise eyes, and sun shining through flaming curly hair. It can’t show how tall she is for her age, nor how clever, she thought with
pride.

  ‘She’s very grown up,’ Cicely said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Emma, of course. Fleur’s prettier, but hardly speaks.’

  Lydia thought of her younger daughter and her heart skipped a beat. Since having pneumonia, Fleur was more withdrawn than ever. ‘She speaks, but Em loves words. Even when she was only three, she pretended she could read.’

  ‘Seems old for twelve.’

  Lydia blinked rapidly. ‘Nearly twelve.’

  Cicely put a comforting hand on her shoulder. ‘Right,’ she said, picking up a locket on a silver chain from the counter. ‘My present. Round your neck is always safest in this country. And look after the cash. Don’t worry, you’ll catch up with them soon enough. And that lean husband of yours.’

  Lydia nodded, unable to identify the source of her unease. She didn’t like being parted from her girls, ever, and the hazards of a separation during the Emergency were alarmingly clear. But was there something more than that?

  ‘And then you’ll long for a bit of peace and quiet. I don’t know how you do it. Being a mum, I mean.’

  I love them, Lydia thought, that’s how.

  ‘And Jack. How do you feel about him?’

  Lydia felt a flush spread up her chest to her face, and fought off the urge to unburden herself of her essentially unacknowledged feelings.

  Cicely narrowed her eyes. ‘Well, I couldn’t be a mother. Now let’s get that hair chopped.’

  At last, a brief shower brought rain splattering from the gutters, not enough to really cool the sticky air, but enough to freshen her. She struggled to push aside wet purple bougainvillea, encroaching on the garage door. Everything grew so fast. The door squealed as she jerked it open, and she saw the solid shape of the Humber Hawk parked there. She glanced inside, relaxed a little. The keys were still in the ignition. At least Alec had left the car. She slid into the driver’s seat to check the petrol gauge.

  In her bedroom it didn’t take long to roll up some practical clothes into a couple of holdalls. As she slipped out of her damp dress, the emptiness of the house jolted her. In the silence she sniffed the air. It lacked the usual smell of polish and now they were gone it didn’t smell like home. She touched the silk of her Indian dresses, run up by herself in unexpected colour combinations: pink and orange, green and peacock blue, lacquer red with black. Her favourite dress style had an oriental touch, but she decided on a sensible navy dress, less likely to show the dirt. The Indian dresses she left, but packed two sequinned evening dresses, too good to leave behind.