In the Mouth of the Tiger

by Lynette Silver

  ‘What could we see?’ I asked, temporising.

  ‘Well, The Little Minister is playing. Katherine Hepburn. They say it’s pretty good.’

  I still hesitated, half teasing, half worried my mother might not let me go. It would be too awful for words to accept and then have to explain that my mother had prohibited me going. I glanced across to Mother’s table and was pleased to see that she and Tanya had been joined by a couple of other ladies and were deep in conversation.

  ‘I’d love to come,’ I said abruptly. Then I hesitated. I’d never been out with a man before and I didn’t know the protocol. Did I offer to meet him at the cinema, or should I ask him to call for me?

  ‘I’ll pick you up at seven-fifteen precisely,’ Tim said with a happy grin, solving the problem. ‘Where do you live?’

  As I feared, Mother was not at all happy with the arrangement. It led to our first serious argument in KL. ‘You are still just a schoolgirl!’ she shouted. ‘Little more than a baby! He is a beast to try this on just because Tanya and I were not there to protect you!’

  ‘I am sixteen this year,’ I retorted. ‘I think it very unfair of you to call me a baby. In the Middle Ages, a woman would be well and truly married at my age.’

  ‘We are not living in the Middle Ages. Now, no more nonsense, Nona.’

  I went to my room and sulked for half an hour, still determined to get my way but giving Mother time to calm down before I tried again. I saw her again just before dinner.

  ‘I’m going, Mother, whether you like it or not,’ I said in as calm and mature a voice as I could muster. ‘You can’t live my life for me forever.’ I was on my way to the laundry to iron the dress I intended to wear, a rather short pastel creation which I had been keeping for just this occasion. For my first ‘date’, as the Americans called it.

  Mother looked at me coldly. ‘If you dare to wear that skimpy thing, you will not be allowed back inside this flat,’ she said, flicking the dress with her hand contemptuously. I sighed with relief: we were no longer arguing about whether or not I would be allowed to go, but about what I would wear.

  As it transpired, I did wear the pastel pink dress that night. Tanya had remained strictly neutral during the first part of the argument, but when the style of my dress was the only issue, she came in heavily on my side. ‘She’s young, after all, Julia,’ she said. ‘If you can’t wear something chic when you’re Nona’s age, when can you?’

  I’d smiled my thanks across the dinner table.

  Tim picked me up in a green Triumph two-seater, and as we spun through the night towards the Plaza Cinema he told me all about it. ‘Bought her this afternoon from Mickey’s Cars in Batu Road,’ he said proudly. ‘She’s had an owner or two but I think she’s sound enough. I needed something reliable to get me to and from Sungei Slim, so I took the plunge.’ He paused and shot me a glance. ‘In a way, I bought her for you, Nona. I needed something appropriate to collect you in tonight.’

  I blushed with pleasure.

  I can’t say I remember much about The Little Minister, except that John Beal, the male lead, looked a bit of a drip. But I do recall that I was just a little disappointed when Tim took me straight home. I had rather expected a fight of some sort, with Tim trying to convince me to sit with him under the moon. But as we pulled up at Parry Drive he explained. ‘This is the first time I’ve taken you out,’ he said. ‘A girl’s mother always worries the first time, because the fellow could be an axe-murderer for all she knows. So one brings her daughter home almost before the dinner things have been put away. That concerns mother, who thinks that her lovely daughter might not be quite the hit with the fellows that she should be. So next time, mother actually hopes her little dear will come in late, to prove she has what it takes to win a man.’

  ‘You absolute beast!’ I said, almost angry. ‘Do fellows really play games like that? I think it’s horrid!’

  Tim chuckled. ‘All’s fair in love and war, Nona,’ he said. And then, quite unfairly, he gave me a quick but emphatic kiss on the lips.

  Tim’s tactics worked almost too well. ‘For why you are home this early?’ Mother demanded, looking at me closely. ‘It has not yet turned ten o’clock! You have had a row, perhaps? The man is a pig not to appreciate a girl like you!’

  I slipped my shoes off and sauntered towards my room, turning round with a cheeky grin. ‘You only have our word for it, Mother, that we went to the cinema at all.’

  My friendship with Tim blossomed over the next few months. He was generally down in KL on the weekends, playing golf, or cricket, or both, and staying at the Dunlops’ chummery in Ampang Road. We went out together most Saturday nights, either to see a film at the Colosseum or the Plaza, or to watch a play at the Prince’s Theatre. On Sundays we usually joined Mother and Tanya for curry tiffin at the Selangor Club, or at the nearby Club Annex because its prices were a little cheaper.

  Little by little, we became accepted by those who knew us as a couple. I rather liked the feeling of being one of a couple. It meant joint invitations to parties at the chummery, and occasionally to one of the formal Dunlops dinners. However, at least as far as I was concerned, there was nothing serious or permanent about our relationship. I think Tim would have liked more, but he was still young and quite prepared to bide his time.

  And then, in the middle of the 1936, I met the man who had visited me in my dream nearly two years before.

  Tim and I were at the Selangor Club, watching a cricket match between Selangor and Perak. Or at least Tim was watching the match – cricket bored me and I had my head in a book by Somerset Maugham. It was a hot, cloudless day, I remember, and from where we sat in the deep shade of the club’s upstairs verandah the padang looked like a bowl of glaring light. A bowl in which tiny white figures dashed to and fro in irrational, spasmodic bursts of activity.

  Tim was a little annoyed that I didn’t appreciate the significance of what was happening before our eyes. ‘You realise, of course, that Selangor are fighting back like tigers?’ he asked. ‘And that what’s happening here today will be talked about up and down the Peninsula for months to come?’

  I looked up into the glare, gave a grunt that I hoped sounded like one of appreciation, and then looked down again into Lisa of Lambeth.

  Tim sighed in exasperation. ‘You realise that the chap doing all the damage for Selangor is Denis Elesmere-Elliott, the chap I told you had gone off shooting seladang for the Sakais?’

  I put my book down and made a determined effort to watch the play. ‘Which one is Denis?’ I asked.

  Tim pointed to a figure who seemed to be doing nothing more exciting than stand nonchalantly beside the pitch, hands on his hips.

  ‘How is he damaging Perak?’ I asked reasonably.

  ‘You silly little girl. He’s bowling from this end. Wait until it’s his turn again.’

  I put my dark glasses on and studied the play, trying to get an idea what was happening. After a moment or two somebody threw the ball to Denis. He sauntered back from the wicket, then turned and lined himself up. I couldn’t make out his features but he carried himself with a relaxed, confident grace that rather impressed me. Then he ran in, gathering speed with every step, and released the ball with an athletic flourish.

  From our distance his bowling didn’t seem particularly fast, but he was obviously causing the batsmen a lot of difficulty. Twice the man facing him seemed to flinch as balls caught him by surprise, and then one ball clean bowled him, scattering the stumps. A burst of cheering came from the crowd around the fence beneath us, muted by distance but exciting nevertheless.

  ‘So you actually saw a wicket fall!’ Tim said with glee. ‘That was Denis’s sixth wicket this innings. We need only one more wicket and the match is ours.’

  Tim suddenly got to his feet. ‘Come on, Nona. The way Denis is bowling this’ll be over in a minute or two. Let’s get down to cheer the lads off the field. They’ve made history here today.’

  I was suddenly as keen as T
im to be in at the death, and we scurried back through the deserted club rooms, down the staircase, and out onto the padang. Quite a crowd had gathered, perhaps a hundred or so, and I could feel electricity in the air. Only moments before everybody, including most of the players, had seemed to me to be half asleep. Now every movement on the field was invested with drama and significance. Someone failed to field a ball cleanly, allowing the batsman to score a run, and the whole crowd groaned with despair.

  We worked our way through the crush of people to the fence just in time to see Denis begin his next over. This close to the action, everything seemed to be happening much faster. When Denis bowled, the ball flickered down the wicket like a red sun-flash, and I felt quite sorry for the poor batsman. He managed to keep the first few balls out of his wicket, but then one rose sharply off the pitch, catching his bat high on the blade. The ball sprang back down the wicket, seemingly clear over the bowler’s head. But Denis leapt up and backwards to take the catch, dragging the ball down clutched in his left hand. The crowd about us went wild, even Tim doing a jig, then catching me up in his arms and swinging me around in glee.

  By the time the crowd had settled down the players had reached the little gate in the fence beside us, and were standing back in a half-circle to clap Denis off the field.

  So that’s how I first saw him in real life. Striding towards me, his dark red and blue Selangor cap in his hand, his hair tousled and his shirt half open.

  I knew him immediately as the man from my dream, and stared into those level grey-blue eyes I knew so well. For just a moment our eyes met.

  And then he looked straight through me, unrecognising, and was gone.

  Chapter Five

  Denis’s failure to recognise me came as a huge shock. I recall that I stood gaping after he had passed, quite unable to believe it, and that the feeling of unreality persisted for the rest of the afternoon. I had tea with Tim on the verandah, enthusing with him over the Selangor victory. I drove home with him, making bright conversation. I kissed him goodbye with affection and promised to meet him the following weekend. But all the while my head had been whirling and my heart tearing itself apart in my chest. As soon as the green Triumph had pulled away I rushed inside to my room, buried my face in my pillow and burst into tears. I must have cried for hours because I recall looking up eventually and being surprised how dark it was outside. I looked across at the pressure lamp I had kept on my bedside table since Penang, and at my little ivory tiger, and was caught by another storm of tears.

  I had built my new, confident life around a firm belief that someone fine loved and believed in me. I had seen that man, recognised the familiar level blue-grey eyes, the line of his mouth with its hint of a smile, the angle of his shoulders – and he had looked straight through me.

  I remember being so angry at one stage that I sat on the side of the bed and stamped my feet so hard they hurt. Rat-a-tat, rat-a-tat – I had to keep pounding to mask the pain and disappointment. I took up the little ivory tiger, tried to break it from its black onyx stand, then flung it from me with all my strength.

  The next thing I remember was my mother sitting on the bed by my side, looking at the thermometer. ‘One hundred and two degrees. You are a very sick girl, Nona. I must call Dr Lowe at once.’

  My fever reached one hundred and four that night, and I heard them talking, as I lay pretending to be asleep, of calling an ambulance. But in the early hours the fever broke, and I fell into a light doze as a fan cooled my sweat-drenched body and the morning light seeped into the room. It was not the dreaded blackwater fever, which Mother had feared, or even malaria. ‘Just a good old-fashioned dose of influenza,’ Dr Lowe pronounced. ‘Lots of fluids for her, Mrs Roberts. Lots of bedrest. And nothing solid to eat until at least Tuesday.’

  Influenza indeed. I knew precisely what it was I suffered from: my heart had been cruelly broken.

  I don’t know to this day whether the shock brought on the fever, or whether I had been succumbing to something all Saturday without knowing it, so that my disappointment on the padang hit me all that much harder. Whether it was cause or effect, the incident kept me away from work for a week.

  On Tuesday afternoon, after I had eaten my first solid food, I was well enough to feel melancholy. I found my tiger and replaced him on my bedside table, reinstating him as my talisman with a kiss. Then I went looking for all the sad and lovely gramophone records I could find.

  Our flat was on the first floor, with an open verandah overlooking Parry Drive. I dragged Mother’s cane chaise longue out there, set up the gramophone, and lay listening to my favourites over and over again: ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, ‘I Wish I Had a Talking Picture of You’, ‘Love Has Gone’ and ‘You Made Me Love You’. As I lay there, listening to the music and surrounded by the vivid lilac-blue of the jacaranda trees, my pain was transmuted into gentle, healing tears.

  I didn’t quite know what I was crying for. How could I grieve for the loss of a love that I had never really had? I suppose, I said to myself, I was really crying at the shattering of my illusions.

  That week at home not only healed my wounded heart but also gave me time to do things I had forgotten about in the hurly-burly of life in KL. I wrote letters again, to Sister Felice, to Molly Tan, to my closest friends at the Convent. I designed an exciting new evening dress, all white like a wedding dress but in the Empire line, and trimmed with gold at the neck, arms and hem.

  And I began to read the newspapers again, not just to find out what was on at the KL cinemas or the Prince’s Theatre, but to find out what was happening in Malaya and the rest of the world.

  Dreadful things were happening, some of them terribly close to home. There was a worldwide campaign being waged by the Communists to extend their power, and in Malaya they had arranged a series of ‘softening up’ strikes throughout the country, designed to destabilise the government. Chinese labourers, usually the most disciplined of workers, were going on strike en masse, badly disrupting tin and rubber production.

  And then the unthinkable happened. Nearly six thousand labourers seized Malaya’s only coal mine at Batu Arang, and set up an illegal government with its own army and system of courts. I read the report in the Malay Mail with a sense of disbelief: Batu Arang was only twenty-six miles from Kuala Lumpur, and the declaration of a Communist government so close to home, and in the middle of Colonial Malaya, seemed inconceivable. The uprising didn’t last twenty-four hours, but that it had happened at all upset Mother and Tanya deeply.

  They had reason to be upset. After all, they had fled for their lives from the Bolsheviks in Russia, and to find Communism rearing its head on our doorstep, on the other side of the world from Russia, seemed the ultimate irony.

  ‘So now you know why Tanya and I have been so worried,’ Mother said. We were sitting out on the verandah, I in my housecoat with the Malay Mail over my knees, Mother and Tanya eating dinner from trays on their laps. ‘Perhaps we should be thinking of leaving this country. If the Bolsheviks take over here they will kill us. We are White Russians after all, and the Bolsheviks never forget who their enemies are.’

  ‘Nonsense, Mother,’ I said brusquely. ‘This is a British colony. Has a British colony ever fallen to the Bolsheviks?’

  ‘There is always a first time,’ Mother said. ‘For myself, I believe that we are surrounded by Bolsheviks who are just waiting to pounce.’ She gave a huge Russian sigh before shovelling another spoonful of mee hoon noodles into her mouth.

  That night, I dreamed of Denis again. He was as he had always been in my imagination, solicitous, comforting and loving. In my dream we were in a car driving down a narrow jungle road, and I asked if there were any danger of our being ambushed by Bolsheviks. ‘Here in Selangor?’ Denis had chuckled. And then we had turned a bend in the road to see a line of dangerous-looking men with guns. They had pointed them at us but not fired, and Denis had even seemed to wave in greeting as the car slid past. As usual in these dreams, I felt invincible, surroun
ded as I was by a nimbus of love.

  The next morning was Saturday, precisely a week since I’d seen Denis at the Selangor Club. I woke with a sense of peace and lay staring out of my window at a bright blue sky bisected by a spray of jacaranda. I was no longer hurt by Denis’s rejection on the padang, but I was puzzled. What was the meaning of these dreams I had of him if they did not portend that we would spend our lives together? Were they merely the products of wish fulfilment? Creations of my mind designed to give me courage in an indifferent world?

  Or were they – and my heart suddenly leapt at the realisation – not so much guarantees of what was to be but signposts pointing me towards my destiny? Good God, I told myself, what arrogance to think that Denis would be handed to me on a plate! I would have to meet him, talk to him, win the love I knew he had for me.

  I got out of bed burning with happiness and resolution, and went straight to my wardrobe looking for a dress fit to kill. I had agreed to go on a picnic to the Batu Caves with Tim that afternoon, but of course those plans would have to change. I needed to be at the Selangor Club, and I needed to be seen hanging on Tim’s arm.

  Surely Denis would be there, if for no other reason than to receive the plaudits he had earned on the cricket field?

  Tim was not happy about the change of plans. He had arranged for a special hamper to be made up at the Cold Storage, and was inclined to argue. ‘We can go to the Spotted Dick any old Saturday,’ he said. ‘But today’s special. We’ve got a really super lunch waiting for us. Club sandwiches like the Americans make, cakes, a salad – even a cold bottle of bubbly. And don’t forget I cut golf to be here early.’

  ‘I’d really and truly love to come on your picnic,’ I said bravely, one hand on my brow. ‘But the doctor was awfully firm. He said I’ve got to stay out of the sun for another week or I might faint. Apparently the fever has got into the brain or something . . .’

  Tim took me in his arms, contrition all over his honest, sunburnt face. ‘You should have told me that straight away,’ he said, crushing me to him. ‘What a beast I’ve been, Nona. I’m so awfully sorry.’