I gulped, feeling my eyes dampen.
‘Would you like to tell me about your mother?’ Sister Ruth wrung out a flannel in tepid water and ever so gently put it on my forehead, then sat quietly, hands clasped together in her lap.
I wondered why she was asking about Mum, and thought about what I ought to say. But then I felt pleased she’d asked, because I never got the chance to talk to anyone about Mum.
‘She’s beautiful, and her name is Lydia.’ I thought for a moment. ‘She’s always singing, and she makes brilliant fancy dress costumes. At least she did. My little sister, Fleur, was Miss Muffet, and I was a snowman.’
‘That must have been fun.’
‘Yes. I won a prize. And Mum and Dad won too, for Peter Pan and Captain Hook. She learnt to sew at the convent. But it was sad for Mum to be there.’
‘Why was that?’
‘Because she never knew her own mother, only her name. Emma. I’m named after her.’
She looked at me and smiled. ‘Do you know what happened to her mother?’
‘No. Mum was actually born in the convent you see. She was at school there and the nuns brought her up.’
‘Do you know which convent it was?’
‘I’m not sure. It might have been St Joseph’s. Or was it St Peter’s?’ My face must have been glum because Sister Ruth kissed me on the cheek.
‘If it is the same place, there is a St Joseph’s not so very far from here. Though they run Christian retreats, not a school. Now I think that’s enough talking. You need to rest.’
I looked in her eyes and knew that in Sister Ruth I had a friend.
She became my registration teacher and, when well, taught us Religious Education and History. When ill, she appeared thin and nervous with bright red spots on both cheeks, and light shone in her eyes. If Sister Ruth was ill, Mrs Wiseman took over. She was a dwarfish Welsh lady with black eyes, straight salt and pepper hair and a stubbly chin. She had a red nose, and an accent so strong it took me weeks to understand it. But now with Susan Edwards and Sister Ruth on my side, I was happy that at least I wasn’t completely alone. They weren’t Mum, but nobody was.
20
Lili had been like a mystical flower. Even sober how could Lydia compete, and today she was sober. While she waited for Jack, she heard laughter, and went to the window. Channa was pushing Maz on the swing that Jack had fixed to the strongest branch in the garden. She pushed gently at first, and Lydia suspected it wouldn’t be enough to satisfy Maz.
‘Higher, Channa. Higher,’ he shrieked.
Channa ignored his pleas. But he went on shouting. ‘Higher. Higher.’
She gave in, pushed him higher, and he squealed with excitement. ‘More. More.’
‘No more,’ she said, and stood back.
Annoyed, he tugged at the ropes, pushed back his legs to lever himself higher, and with a yell, slid from the seat.
‘Don’t let the swing come back and hit him on the head,’ Lydia shouted.
Channa ran round to keep him down on the ground. ‘Crawl out slow,’ she said, and held out a hand to catch the swing.
He crawled out and sat on the ground, nursing his knee.
Channa squatted beside him. ‘Just little cut,’ she said, and kissed it better.
When Maz got up, he wandered round the garden with a basket. Lydia watched him select small stones and pebbles. He glanced across at her.
‘For protection,’ he said, with a small smile, and started to line the stones up in a circle round the tree. ‘Nasty swing cannot get me now.’
When Jack came in late, he stood in the doorway, hands on hips, and swayed. Something about the overpowering smell of gin on his breath brought back the night she had come clean and confessed the affair to Alec.
They’d been sitting covered in strong insect repellent, out on the covered veranda. She could smell it now, along with the gin, and the slight breeze full of dust. In the distance they could hear the tapping of the tok-tok bird and the rumble of the sea. She’d been twisting her hair in a topknot, while struggling to find a way to speak. Alec was relaxed and wore his tartan dressing gown. He was talking about his Indian assistant, and how he was unreliable since his demotion. In a lull she took a breath.
‘Alec, I have something to tell you.’
There was a pause. He avoided eye contact and she sensed he wasn’t going to make this easy.
‘I’m so sorry, but I’ve been seeing someone –’
‘You think I didn’t know?’ he broke in. ‘You must think me very stupid.’
‘How?’
‘I heard you on the phone. It isn’t me you call sweetheart.’
He hissed Jack’s name.
‘I love him, Alec. I’m sorry.’
His smug look vanished, and the distress in his eyes silenced her. Aware she’d disappointed him, her cheeks burnt. No more words.
The long pause was broken by his intake of breath. ‘Sex isn’t love, Lydia. You’ve seen enough planters legless in the bars.’
‘Alec.’
‘And their tarts, “all fur coat and no knickers”.’
She flinched at the coarse RAF slang. He crunched an ice cube between his teeth, and a vein began to throb in his neck.
‘Stench of the whorehouse. Jack’s no different.’
She felt her heart race. It wasn’t true.
‘You fucked up, Lydia. Face it.’
Her breath caught – the place went quiet.
‘Obviously, I’d want you to go on seeing the girls,’ she said.
‘You imagine I’ll let you go to a rubber planter.’
She bristled. ‘You have no choice.’
‘Is that so? It might have been a life before the war, but now when guerrillas kill, they rope a man up then slice him open with a parang. Is that what you want?’
She felt sick. She’d seen the gardener use one to slash the long grass.
He rubbed his jaw with his finger, a muscle there starting to twitch. When he spoke, his chin jutted out. ‘In any case, with your mucky little affair you’d never get custody.’
‘Jack will look after us. We’ll go back to England.’
‘Risk breaking his contract?’
‘He’s saving to buy his way out.’
Alec paused. ‘In any case, you’d never get custody.’
‘I’ll get a job.’
‘With no education, no experience of work. No home. No visible means of support. And at fault. Take off the rose-coloured specs.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t set out to hurt you. It just happened.’
‘No, Lydia,’ he snapped, his Adam’s apple rising and falling. ‘These things do not just happen. You made a choice.’
‘I’ve tried to be honest with you. You know how we’ve been. You can’t be happy.’
‘Happiness! This isn’t about happiness, Lydia. It’s about duty.’
She’d hoped to appeal to his heart, but saw, as he turned away to grip the railings, it was impossible. Alec never spoke of feelings. When he turned back his knuckles were white.
She listened to the sounds of the night. ‘Well, are you happy?’ she asked.
Unblinking, gazing at her with steel hard eyes, he ignored her question and just curled his lip.
‘Here’s another choice for you,’ he said. ‘You stay, or, if you decide to leave, you leave without Emma and Fleur. The choice is yours.’
She held back tears. He couldn’t, could he?
‘And make no mistake, Lydia.’ He paused to wipe his glasses with a handkerchief. ‘Make no mistake, I will see to it that you never set eyes on either of your daughters again.’
Stunned into silence, she wrapped her arms around her middle, as if protecting herself from a punch. Then she swallowed hard and straightened her back.
‘You can’t do that.’
‘Yes, Lydia, I think you’ll find I can. Why don’t you have another gin while you decide.’
Rattled by his tone of voice, she felt a flash of anger, picked up the bottle of
gin and hurled it at the veranda railings. For a while neither spoke.
He sniffed at the overpowering smell of gin. ‘So am I to take it that you’ll stay?’
She looked past his weary face. There was no choice and Alec knew it. Connected to her children in the way that mothers are, he knew she’d never leave them. With a twist of her heart she thought of Jack. His golden skin, his vitality. Not expecting to fall in love, she hadn’t imagined her heart would jump just at the sight of him. She didn’t even care if Alec was right. Didn’t care if Jack screwed around. Didn’t care if he’d been stringing her along.
She leant her head against the back of the chair. ‘You never talk to me, Alec. I never know what you’re thinking.’
‘So it was about talking, was it? That’s what you did with Jack.’
She sat bolt upright, knew she shouldn’t say it but couldn’t help herself. ‘No, Alec, for once in my life I had a bloody good fuck.’
They locked eyes.
‘No dice, Lydia. I’m not carrying the can for this. You knew what you were taking on when you married me.’
‘You needed me then.’
‘Is it so hard to go on? I still need you.’
‘To look after the girls.’
He shrugged and turned away. ‘We were happy once, Lydia. But you’re impulsive. It gets you into trouble.’
She studied Alec’s back. He had his sport and self-admiration. He’d get over the dent to his pride. He came back to her and held out a hand, but she dropped her eyes, too angry to look up.
‘You’d better pull yourself together,’ he said. ‘I don’t want the children upset. We have a wedding to attend in the morning.’
She realised that Jack was still standing in the doorway, eyeing her cautiously, his cheeks flushed. For days the argument with Alec had played out in her mind. It was all her fault. Everything. If she hadn’t had the affair with Jack. If she hadn’t taken Suzanne’s call. She had no one to blame but herself.
She glared at Jack. ‘I thought you had more balls than that.’
He gave her an uneasy look. ‘Lydia?’
‘Alec was right. You can’t tell the difference, can you?’ She looked at the shadow the single lamp cast on his face. He was too thin. Had become too thin.
‘What the hell are you on about?’
She reddened but carried on, looking at his bewildered face. ‘Between love and sex.’
He frowned. ‘So now this is my fault.’
‘How could you not tell me?’
Understanding spread across his face. ‘Oh, that’s it – Lili. What would have been the point? You were going back to Alec, old darling. We had no future. You made that clear.’
‘What about when you were with me. Was it me you really wanted? Or her?’
‘Lydia please.’ He shook his head. ‘I cared for Lili. People do things. Make mistakes.’
She went across to stand in front of his chair. How Alec would have gloated if he’d known Jack had another woman all along. He stood and reached out his arms to her. Instead of accepting him she slapped his face.
He rubbed his jaw. ‘Why are you trying to needle me? This is not my fault.’
He was right. Her children were dead and it was her punishment. ‘I thought you were the only person in the world who knew me. I thought we were meant to be together.’
‘We still can be. For heaven’s sake, come here.’
She stayed where she was, battling the shadows, ‘Did you find her in a knocking shop?’
He spread his hands out, palms uppermost, and shrugged.
Almost unaware of Jack lifting her and carrying her to his bed, she longed for an end. He laid her down, then sat on the edge holding his head in his broad hands. When he looked up, she watched a streak of moonlight fall across his hollow cheeks. She held out her hand and traced the contours with her fingertips. What a bitch she was, not to even consider Jack’s feelings.
He slipped off her dress, then helped her into bed.
She felt such a mix of anger and shame at being alive; she lay awake, conjuring her daughters’ faces, imagining it was all a ghastly mistake, that they were not dead at all. It grew in her mind, the doubt, and in the end, she nudged Jack awake.
He rubbed his eyes, sat up, and frowned. ‘Lyddy, you need to sleep. We both do. What’s the time?’
‘Can you go to Ipoh again? Ask for proof that the girls and Alec were there.’
He sighed. ‘Lydia, you’ve got to stop this. You know what George said. They were there. Nobody has seen or heard from Alec since then. The Administration couldn’t compile a list of people killed in the fire, because the records went up in smoke, and you know there were no survivors.’
Lydia shook her head. ‘I just can’t believe it. Tell me exactly what they said.’
‘You want me to be blunt?’
‘Yes.’
‘They said any remains had been taken by animals in the night.’
She covered her mouth with her hand.
‘And even George said it was a wild goose chase.’
She hung her head, trembled at the memory of Emma’s raucous laugh, Fleur’s snub nose and dimpled chin, and allowed herself to weep. Am I mad, she thought, mad with grief? Or is it just that I don’t know who I am any more?
In the morning they made love. For an hour she moulded herself to him and lost herself in the sensation. She felt his skin and tingled as if it were the first time and when he entered her, she shuddered in shock and relief. For an hour she eased herself into a return of feeling that wasn’t grief. With all her heart she wanted to discover how to be happy with Jack. He’d come to bed without showering, and she ran her fingers through his hair, finding the sticky threads of latex there. ‘Thank you, Jack,’ she said. ‘I’ll try.’
That afternoon, she watched swollen black clouds billow down the mountain side. The sound of children’s voices reached her. Maz was outside playing chase with Burhan. When the storm came, she called them both in. She read a story in English, in an overbright voice, while Maz sat, cross-legged, on the floor beside her chair. Every so often she ruffled his hair, but he’d grown still around her, no longer commented on everything he saw, and when he counted, he did so quietly. The other boy fidgeted and went out to be with his mother.
Maz got up too. ‘I will go with him, Mem.’
Though she wanted to regain Maz’s confidence, visions of her girls still tormented her, and with a stab of conscience, she realised she’d forgotten how to listen to the little boy.
Only when the gale had howled itself out and the air was still again did her daughters’ little figures begin to fade, no longer leaving parts of themselves behind. The sun appeared and it was over. For now. But the chance to heal hung like a thread. Fine, elusive. And as Lydia attempted to begin the slow process of mending her broken life, Maz came back to join her: pointed at a sunbird piercing through the base of a flower, its metallic blue-black forehead glinting as it hovered to sip the nectar. She smiled at the child. She would try harder. She would.
21
In Malaya, first thing in the morning, strong animal smells crept in from the jungle. Here it was burnt porridge. In Malaya we climbed the rain tree, and hid from the demons that sucked light from the world. Here I wrote lines, but imagined myself on my way home in Malacca, avoiding the frighteners who lurked in cracks, and bit off your toes if you trod on them. I no longer asked Dad when Mum was coming, and he always changed the subject when I asked who the Malayan letter had been from, or said it was none of my business. I gave up asking because it only made him cross, but decided to keep my eyes peeled in case another one arrived.
I was over thirteen and a half now, and in the year I’d been at the school, I’d written lines a dozen times. Usually for Mrs Wiseman. Though that wasn’t much compared with Susan, who held the record. We were still best friends, though we argued like crazy.
I must pay more attention in class and not look out of the window. I must pay more attention … I was
in lunchtime detention again. This time I’d been thrown out of domestic science for chucking flour in Susan’s frizzy hair. She didn’t care, and I hated cookery anyway. Without thinking I drew a little face at the bottom. Oh no! Mrs Wiseman would make me do it all again. Though most of the other teachers were fine, she didn’t like me. My pencil had a hard eraser at one end, so I rubbed to remove the smiley face. When the girls came in, surprise made my hand slip, and I rubbed a hole right through.
There were three, all older than me, but I knew only one. Not her again, I thought. Her name was Rebecca, and she was one of the girls who had hidden my satchel when I first arrived. She had legs like tree trunks and was one of the few fairly local girls, like me. The rumour was that she’d given a teacher at primary school a black eye. Whatever she’d done, she had it in for me.
While she grabbed my paper, one of her friends grasped a handful of my hair, tipped up the chair and pulled me backwards. The other one held me down, and I kicked out at her.
‘Let me go you cow!’ I shouted, as I caught her on the shin.
She laughed a spiteful laugh, tipped the chair back even further, then let go of it for a moment, and caught it again, just as I let out a yelp.
‘Ha!’ she said. ‘Got you.’
I carried on kicking, until I saw Rebecca scribble on my paper. I managed to push the girl off me, and tried to grab the paper back, but Rebecca easily dodged me.
‘Don’t do that,’ I pleaded. ‘My dad will kill me.’
‘Hard luck, and if you tell, we’ll get you again,’ one of the other two said.
‘Not so brave now, are you? Without Susan.’ She laughed. ‘Anyway, she’s only your friend because nobody else likes her.’
The end of lunchtime bell stopped it. They shoved the desks about, whooped and punched the air, slammed the door, then pelted from the room. I still heard their voices and thundering footsteps, even from the furthest corridor. I felt dizzy, imagined myself on the sea again, everything booming and rolling from side to side.
I pulled myself together and stared at what was left of my work. Oh no! Pictures of quite well-drawn private parts leapt across my paper. If I hadn’t been so frightened, I’d have laughed. Instead my head buzzed. I didn’t know what to do. The only thing was to rip up the paper and start again. I looked around the room. There weren’t any extra sheets. What was worse: paper ripped into a zillion bits or these rude drawings? I began tearing and worked quickly. Bits of bottoms, bosoms and a penis or two fluttered to the floor like confetti.
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