Separation, The

by Jefferies, Dinah

  ‘No,’ I mumbled. ‘I enjoyed it.’ But I couldn’t make it sound like it was true.

  He sat at the end of the bed, looking cut to the bone. Please don’t let him cry, I thought. My motives were complicated and not even clear to me, so how could I explain them to him? Boys didn’t understand how you could really wish for something to happen, but when it did, you found you didn’t want it after all. Mostly they supported their football club and went to matches with their dad. Billy did all that too, but he was different from the others, or so I thought.

  ‘Billy,’ I started off, in an attempt to defend myself, though the way he looked at me, so mistrustful, almost silenced me. ‘I want to be a writer, so in a way everything I do has two levels.’

  He looked steadily at me, hurt showing in his eyes. ‘That’s not the way it works, Em.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You need to live your life for the sake of living it. Write about it later. You can’t live your life just to write. It won’t work, Em.’

  ‘But can’t I do both?’

  He shrugged. ‘You used me, Emma, and made me think you really liked me.’

  ‘I did … I do.’

  He sniffed, and shook his head with a more distant expression, as if he’d made a decision. ‘You can’t treat people like that. It was dishonest.’

  He stood up straight and went to the window.

  ‘Better make the bonfire safe. I’ll see myself out.’

  He had such an openly hostile expression on his face, I couldn’t hold back the tears.

  ‘Your tears won’t work on me, Em. Never had you down as a calculating bitch. Tell your dad to find another gardener.’

  After he left, I stood at the window. He patted the fire until it was only smouldering, and I watched him leave the garden and walk out of my life with his head held high.

  I looked at my face in the mirror: at turquoise eyes rimmed with red, and blotchy pale skin. More like Bertha Mason than ever, and scarcely a dazzling beauty. Billy was my one true friend when I came home from school, and I’d made him hate me. I felt ashamed and didn’t know how I could ever make things right again. I didn’t like myself and felt out of my depth, as if by dipping my toe into something grown up, I’d stirred up feelings I couldn’t handle. And it wasn’t as if what I’d written was even true. I did like being with Billy. I just wasn’t ready for things to go any further and I was too stupid to say.

  I needed to do something to make myself feel better, take myself in hand, make a fruit jelly or a blancmange for Fleur, clean up the kitchen for Dad. It wasn’t much and it wouldn’t make me a good person, but it might make me feel not quite so bad. Every time I thought about Billy, I had to wipe my eyes. I couldn’t bear that I’d hurt him. Most of all I wondered how long it would take to sell a house, and whether I’d have time to make my peace with him before it was too late.

  46

  The memorial service was to be held in the park. Lydia, breathing lightly and full of nervous energy, drummed her fingers on the windowsill. Who was it who said that staying alive in Malaya was like trying to stay alive on swampland? If you struggled it swallowed you; if you hung on you died from heat and dehydration. Was it something Alec used to say? Or Jack? She closed her eyes. The dark green hell of Malaya still terrified her, yet the beauty of it had crept under her skin: the firewalkers, the snake charmers, the villages hidden away, the mists over the jungle.

  She let her coffee grow cold as she stared out of the window at wind blowing litter and dust about. She had once needed Alec, Jack too. Times had changed. She’d changed. She checked her watch. It was time to leave and she’d decided to go alone. And when it was over, she’d have to find herself another job, and an apartment of her own, but it would be in Malacca, not Singapore. She wanted to be nearby but could hardly stay at Adil’s for ever.

  In the park, Lydia stood apart from women dressed in subdued colours, and gathering in knots of three or four. They fanned themselves with wide-brimmed straw hats, heads close together, and behind their hands they spoke in whispers. The men had already congregated around Ralph, who strutted in a stiff linen suit, then signalled for silence.

  As a senior administrator in the new Malaya, he began an impassioned speech about the sacrifice of lives lost to terrorist atrocity throughout the years of the Emergency. He glanced in Lydia’s direction but she avoided his eyes. She didn’t want to be there, but as this was the final link in the chain since the night when insurgents set fire to the rest house, she owed Emma and Fleur her presence. After the speeches, she nodded at people she knew, moving swiftly past their guarded looks of sympathy, not caring to hear the platitudes that made her feel so hot and angry. She sidestepped Cicely, and shook hands only with Ralph. She had no need of condolence.

  Relieved that the ceremony had passed without incident, she was headed for the exit when Cicely approached with a determined look. Lydia guessed there’d be no escape.

  ‘I know you may not want to talk to me even a teeny bit, but there is someone you absolutely have to meet. No arguments, darling.’

  Lydia sighed. ‘For God’s sake Cicely, don’t you ever give up?’

  Cicely ignored her, and taking hold of an elbow, marched her across to a tall, blonde woman, who stood alone, smoking a cigarette. Cicely rattled through the introductions. The woman’s name was Clara and she was American. She and her sister had been in Malaya since the war and had both worked for the British Administration. They’d come in search of her sister’s husband, who went missing in the war, and then both had stayed. Sadly, the woman’s twin sister was one of the secretaries who had been living at the rest home at the time of the fire. After the introductions, with a farewell sweep of her arm, Cicely slipped away.

  ‘You live here?’ Clara asked, in a west coast drawl, looking closely at Lydia.

  ‘Here now. I was in Singapore.’

  ‘Cigarette?’

  Lydia shook her head. ‘I don’t want to be rude but …’

  The woman held up her hand. ‘I’ll get to the point. Do you have pictures of your daughters?’

  Lydia took a breath. ‘Yes, but I don’t see …’

  ‘Please. It will only take a minute.’

  She removed her locket and held out the images of her girls.

  The woman studied them, then looked up. ‘And you say your girls were there on the night of the fire.’

  ‘The records were all destroyed, but yes.’

  Clara paused while she examined the locket again. ‘I was there the night of the fire.’

  ‘You must have seen them then.’ Lydia bit her lip.

  There was a long pause.

  Was this why Cicely had introduced them? So she could talk to someone who’d been there, someone who could bring her a little closer to her daughters, let her into their last days. She found her voice. ‘How were they? Did they seem happy?’

  Clara hesitated. ‘Thing is. I don’t recognise them. I –’ She stopped suddenly.

  Lydia stared over her head and frowned. The sounds in the park grew louder. Insects hummed, traffic accelerated, and as the steady drone of voices wrapped itself round her, she wanted to be somewhere else.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, holding out her hand for the locket. ‘I can’t do this. I have to go.’

  Clara looked at the photos again, shook her head and handed the locket back. ‘A family with two girls was staying before the fire happened, but they moved into a house a week before. There were a couple of other kids.’

  Lydia stopped in her tracks. ‘Girls?’

  ‘Just two boys.’

  There was a long pause. Lydia placed a hand on her heart. ‘Can you be sure the family with girls had moved?’

  The woman smiled. ‘Absolutely. Even though it was pretty wild that night. My sister had lived there for three months, but quite a few people moved in straight after the warning that the offices in Ipoh were under threat. Luckily the place had been fairly empty up until then.’

 
This was crazy. The ground beneath her feet was shifting. ‘No other girls at all?’

  Clara shook her head.

  ‘Tell me about the family with girls.’

  ‘There was the man … two daughters.’ She paused and appeared to be remembering.

  Lydia folded her arms across her chest, felt her throat thicken, more nervous than she’d ever been.

  The woman’s eyes lit up. ‘I remember. The wife was heavily pregnant. That’s why they left, to be in their own home before the baby came. Like my sister, they’d been at the rest house two or three months. Oh, yeah, the husband was as big as she was. I remember thinking she wasn’t the only one eating for two.’

  Lydia thought of Alec, skinny as a rake. ‘So there were no other girls?’

  ‘It was way past midnight when I left. I signed the book and noticed the last arrivals were at six, just a middle-aged couple, no kids. The party wound up, everyone drunk, sleeping on camp beds in the recreation room. The porter locked up after me.’

  She paused.

  ‘Please go on.’

  ‘The terrorists surrounded the entire building with accelerants you know, blocked the exits. With so much wood it went up in moments. It was the last time I saw my sister.’ She sighed, but didn’t lower her eyes.

  Lydia touched her arm in sympathy. ‘So my girls could only have been there if they arrived in the middle of that night.’

  ‘Nobody ever arrived by night. There was a strict curfew and it was far too risky. I was only able to leave because I had a lift in a police car. They reckon the fire started about one or two a.m.’

  ‘If they were there, they’d have already been there for a couple of weeks anyway,’ Lydia said, remembering George telling her how they’d gone ahead to the rest house. And that was before she left Malacca. ‘You’d be bound to have seen them.’

  ‘I saw my sister every day for three months, and apart from the family who’d already moved on, there were no other girls during that time. We used to talk about who was staying there.’

  ‘In that case –’ Lydia’s legs went to jelly. She reached out her hands and Clara took them, held them firm, but Lydia couldn’t finish her sentence, the lump in her throat preventing words.

  Clara’s face became very serious. ‘I know it’s a shock, but I’m absolutely sure your daughters were nowhere near the rest house the night of the fire.’

  Lydia closed her eyes and felt the breath sucked right out of her. Her heart was roaring in her ears, distorting the sounds in the park as they melted into the background. Clara hugged her, patting her shoulder as she did. Lydia tried to catch her breath again, drew back, kissed the woman on the cheek. The woman smiled.

  ‘Thank you. You’ll never know how grateful I am,’ Lydia managed to say and walked off into Malacca, her mind shooting off in a million directions.

  In the town, babies cried, men shouted their wares, and women gossiped as they walked arm in arm. Yet she didn’t register the distinct noises of the world: the rickshaw bells, the kids playing in the gutters, the music floating down from open windows. She only heard blood pounding in her ears as she fought her way through the current of pedestrians, arms held out, ready to clasp her daughters to her, ready to feel their heartbeats thump. Their heartbeats! Their soft living flesh. In her mind her children’s voices surged and faded. She saw Emma sitting at her desk in Malacca, writing in her journal and smiling in that intense way she had. And so practical, even when Fleur fell in the storm ditch. Dear sweet Fleur.

  Whenever the memories came, she felt her eyes smart and had to wipe away the tears. To think that all this time they’d been alive. So accustomed to thinking they were dead, it was impossible to grasp that they were not – that they might not be. They’d always kept their place in her heart, but it was a place that had hurt too much. And she was so used to thinking each day was a step further away from them, that she could not comprehend the turnaround, and that now, every day might be a step closer. She dug a nail into her flesh. This wasn’t a dream. She was wide-awake and getting wet in fine silvery rain.

  When the wind got up she thought of Emma, who at the age of three had whirled round on a blowy day and asked in a loud voice, ‘Where does the wind come from, Mummy?’ Lydia told her it came from a giant’s breath. Emma looked at her with narrowed eyes, head on one side. ‘Don’t be silly, Mummy. There’s no such thing as giants.’

  When it sank in, she wanted to stand in the street and shout. Give vent to an explosion of joy that set blood pounding through her heart and tears to spill unrestrained. She felt unhinged and ecstatic at the same time, transported to a place where nothing was the way it had been, where life was changed beyond anything she could ever have imagined. A place where your children died and were alive again. Only at the very beginning could she have believed such a thing. When she would wake after dreaming and for one heartbreaking moment believe they were still alive. When the smell of fire in her head had sparked madness in her mind. But now that it had happened, had really happened, she wanted to see Adil. Needed him to convince her it was real.

  Only when the town darkened and lanterns were lit did she let herself into his apartment. Her hands shook as she made herself a coffee. If they were alive, as Clara seemed certain, where were they, and what had Alec been up to all this time? It didn’t make sense. Why would he take her daughters and just vanish? It couldn’t have been about Jack. She’d promised it was over and had been certain Alec accepted that. She longed for the sadness to come to an end, and now it might, it really might. But there was an undercurrent to her joy. What if Clara was mistaken? Or if she was right, what if she never found Emma and Fleur?

  She put the coffee down, unable to drink. Was Alec somewhere in Malaya? Somewhere across this seething jungle-cloaked land.

  Adil’s building, creaking and squeaking, seemed as restless as her. She opened a window and occupied her mind by watching an old woman shuffle along the narrow sidewalk opposite. But the room began to close in, her skin prickled and her head started to thump. She sat on the floor, knees against her chest and looked out at three stripes of pink cloud that lay across the sky. She thought of the brightly coloured Malayan birds, the shiny fish, the glittering insects. Were her children still somewhere here? Somewhere in Malaya? A zigzag of gold appeared in a space between the clouds and she took it as a sign. They were. She felt sure they were. She stood up. Stared in the mirror. Saw the fear and excitement, placed a palm to her heart, and took several deep breaths.

  Adil will know what to do, she thought, and waited, calmer now.

  An hour or so later, she turned her head as the door clicked open. He came across to sit beside her. He held her hand and allowed her to sob. When she tried to speak, her voice was muffled by tears that would not stop. But when she finally finished telling him, she looked in his eyes and saw herself reflected there.

  ‘This is very good news,’ he said.

  ‘It’s wonderful news.’

  She sniffed once or twice and couldn’t keep from grinning. Then, though she was thirsty and her eyes were raw from crying, the tears turned to unstoppable laughter.

  He pulled her closer to him. ‘I will do whatever it takes to help you find them,’ he said.

  ‘What would I do without you?’

  ‘You’d find a way, but you don’t have to. We will succeed. That’s a promise.’

  He lowered his head and kissed her on the lips for the first time.

  When he sat with his arms around her, the loneliness that she’d felt for so long dissolved. With a pounding heart, she realised it had been replaced by a sensation of belonging, and for the first time since the terrible day when she believed her girls had died, she felt safe.

  47

  She began the next day full of hope, though tired from lack of sleep. Once Adil voiced doubt that they were still in Malaya, she didn’t know what to think. He was certain they’d have heard something; she wasn’t so sure. She watched the merchant ships load up from huge warehouses: ru
bber, wood, silk. And further out to sea, distant liners slid like great white whales. Had one of those carried her girls? On her way to the shipping office on the busy wharf, she pictured their life on a liner. The excitement, the shivery thrill at night when lights flickered on the water, and the fishy smell of the ocean followed you about as water thumped the depths of the ship.

  But at the shipping office, there was no record of Alec boarding a ship with two girls. The sweat grew cold on her skin. No ship bound for Australia, Borneo, England, or anywhere else. Afterwards, she walked slowly back along the dockside, and held back her tears. Not even the low-slung Sumatran boats that rocked in white tipped waves could raise a smile.

  She called at the offices of The Straits Times where a journalist waited to interview her for the woman’s page. Telephones rang, typewriters clattered, and the radio was turned up too loud. A group of chain-smoking men with nicotine-stained fingers whistled and stared openly at her legs. She felt their eyes on her back, but held her head high, hope returning a little. It was a long shot, but if Adil was wrong and the girls were still in Malaya, someone’s memory might be jogged. A woman who believes her kids are dead finds out they’re alive, but doesn’t know where they are; our female readers will love that, the journalist said, and lit another cigarette.

  Afterwards Lydia stopped off to send a telegram. She stood in the queue for half an hour, feeling the familiar prickling in her neck and chest. Alec had always insisted that whatever happened, nothing would entice him back to England, and although he was not in contact with his parents, could there be a chance they might know where he was? Alec’s father refused point blank to have a phone installed, though she checked with International Directories just in case. But no, so a telegram or letter it had to be and a telegram was faster. She thought of addressing it to Alec’s parents, but on a sudden hunch addressed it to Emma, at their house. Her heart flipped over at the thought of Emma reading it.