A few shoppers gave them a bemused glance and made a detour round them, but one particular shopper stood rooted to the spot, staring at them in stunned disbelief.
Miriam Gresby had been about to enter Robinsons to meet a woman friend for coffee in the new air-conditioned restaurant Denholm was in Singapore on official business and was, that morning, meeting Sir Shenton Thomas, the island’s governor. She far preferred shopping in Singapore to Hong Kong, and so she had accompanied him, and now she stood, hardly able to believe her eyes, as the cool, beautiful, exquisitely mannered Elizabeth Harland threw herself publicly into Raefe Elliot’s open arms.
It was disgraceful behaviour for anyone, but Elizabeth Harland! She watched as the fervent embrace came to an end and he took her hand, leading her across the pavement and towards an open-topped Chrysler. Her mouth, which had at first dropped open in amazement, closed like a trap. There would be no more dinner invitations issued to the Harlands, and she would certainly see to it that none would be accepted from them.
As the Chrysler pulled away and into the main stream of traffic, she remembered the other occasion when she had thought she had seen Elizabeth Harland with Raefe Elliot. It had been outside the Peninsula Hotel, but the idea had been so ridiculous that she had assumed she had been mistaken. Her eyes narrowed as the Chrysler was lost to view. She knew now that she hadn’t been. The flagrant affair was one of long-standing duration. She marched into Robinsons, her rocking-horse nostrils flaring, eager to share her outrage with the friend who was waiting for her.
He had never taken any of his Singaporean girlfriends to his house at Holland Park on the outskirts of the city, and Melissa had never visited it. It was a large sprawling white bungalow and it had been his childhood home. Perhaps, subconsciously, that was the reason he had never used it as a cheap love-nest. Whatever the reason, as he lay beside Elizabeth’s creamy pale body on the large brass-headed bed, he was supremely glad that no woman had lain there before her.
They hadn’t drawn the blinds, and there were no curtains, but outside the window there was a vine sifting the sunlight so that the walls of the bedroom were delicately patterned with the moving shadow of leaf and tendril.
‘Slowly,’ he said, his rich dark voice full of love as she turned towards him, pressing the length of her body against his, her breasts soft against his chest. ‘This time, my love, there’s no need to hurry.’
Teasingly his lips played with hers as his hands caressed, aroused, explored. She had a tiny mole beneath her left breast, a small scar on her hip, and her pubic hair was golden-blonde, crisply curled.
‘You’re so beautiful,’ he breathed as he held himself in firm control, his hands running over the silky flesh marvelling, fascinated, enchanted.
‘Aaah, Raefe …,’ she sighed deeply beneath him, her fingers curled in the ram’s fleece of his hair, filled once again with that fierce chaotic tumble of urges to unite with him, to be part of him, to complete herself by joining with him.
‘I love you, Lizzie, I’ll love you always,’ he said passionately, his mouth open on hers.
She arched herself towards him, aching for him to take her. ‘I love you,’ she whispered against the heat of his flesh.
He looked down at her, his dark face brilliant with an expression of such fierce love that it was transfigured. ‘Always?’
‘For ever.’
They pressed themselves close to each other, savouring each moment of their leisured lovemaking, and then, at last, he entered her and she gasped and then purred with pleasure, her body melting boneless into his. He took her to the very brink of sexual convulsion, holding her there with infinite skill, teasing, tantalizing, until she begged and pleaded for release.
He refused to acquiesce, withdrawing until she thought she would die, and then plunging deeply into her, his eyes tightly closed, a look of agony contorting his features. ‘Now,’ he uttered harshly. ‘Now!’ And she cried out beneath him, brought to an orgasm so stabbing, so victorious that it filled her with joyous terror. Their bodies were slippery with sweat, the sheets tangled around them as they lay intertwined, the sunlight streaming golden across the floor.
Colonel Landor put down Raefe’s latest report and said, with a note of weariness in his voice: ‘It would seem that every photographer and barber in South-East Asia is a Jap spy!’
‘Mr Mamatsu, the photographer who plies his trade behind Raffles Hotel certainly is,’ Raefe said grimly. ‘He makes a feature of giving cut rates on soldiers’souvenir photographs to send back to wives and sweethearts, that sort of thing. His shop is crammed with military personnel at all hours of the day and night.’
Colonel Landor rose from behind the desk and walked thoughtfully across to the window, staring out across a green-lawned square. It irked him that his best intelligence officer was an American and not British. He disliked Americans. All Americans. They were too cocky, too self-assured. And with Elliot he could never rid himself of the feeling that he was being held in contempt. ‘As long as we know who these beggars are, and as long as we can intercept and decode their messages, I don’t think too much damage is being done,’ he said coldly.
Raefe’s mouth tightened. He hadn’t expected the Colonel’s view to be any different. It had been a while since his last visit to Fort Canning, and the five Japanese seconded from the Japanese army for the supposed purpose of learning English were still happily ensconced in Hong Kong, as was the barber at the Hong Kong Hotel. ‘I beg to disagree,’ he said tightly.
Colonel Landor turned reluctantly away from the window. The sun was shining and the grass was green, and it was a perfect day for cricket.
‘It isn’t your position to agree or disasgree, Major,’ he said, holding on to his patience with difficulty.
Raefe’s eyes smouldered furiously. Landor was a Whitehall wallah. Following the official line laid down by men in pinstriped suits, thousands of miles away. Men who had no real understanding of the East or the Eastern mind.
‘With respect, Colonel,’ he persisted, ‘we’re being too complacent. I’ve travelled the length and breadth of Malaya, I know the country like the back of my hand. Whitehall’s boast that it is unassailable is misplaced.’
Colonel Landor picked up his swagger-stick and slammed it against the four-foot-nigh map pinned to the wall. ‘A backbone of granite mountains rising to seven thousand feet, zig-zagging the length of the country! Four-fifths of the land covered with dense tropical jungle, with rainforest. How can it be?’
‘Despite what army intelligence would like us to believe, the Japanese army is highly trained, and it is highly trained in bush warfare. They’ll land on the coast and they won’t be deterred by jungles or by rainforest. They are accustomed to those conditions in a way none of our own troops are. They’ll use enveloping tactics rather than a head-on assault, and they’ll be at the Johore Straits before we’ve had time to blink!’
Colonel Landor’s nostrils were pinched and white. ‘I find that kind of talk defeatist, Mr Elliot. The Japs have to be so sure of our military superiority that they will never dare to attack! Our belief in ourselves and in our ability is crucial!’ He strode back to his desk. ‘Your report about Mr Mamatsu will be dealt with. Good day, Mr. Elliot!’
Elizabeth sat in a wicker long-chair on the glass-covered veranda of the hotel, a notepad on her knee. She was writing her regular monthly letter to Princess Luisa Isabel, but was not filling the pages up as rapidly as she usually did. She looked down at what she had written. ‘Singapore island isn’t mountainous or as magnificently beautiful as Hong Kong, but the city is far lovelier and Adam is enjoying himself hugely, making friends with rubber-planters and tin-miners, and brushing up on his poker-playing.’
The words were innocuous, accurate, and very misleading. She was conjuring up a picture of an idyllic vacation, and she was giving no hint at all of the cataclysmic turn that her life had taken. She put down her pen, staring out across the gardens. At the frangipani trees. At the hibiscus.
Voluptuous pleasure licked through her. Hibiscus, and Raefe rounding the path in the darkness, and their shameless fevered lovemaking. She picked up her pen again. ‘There is so much I would like to talk to you about, Luisa. So much has happened that is hard to put down on paper.…’ She paused, knowing that she could not be more explicit, that it would not be fair to Adam.
A small bird with jewelled coloured wings darted down from a nearby tree, and as she watched its flight she knew with sudden certainty that, if and when she told Luisa about Raefe, Luisa would not be surprised. That she would have been expecting such an event for a long time. ‘The East has brought me to maturity,’ she wrote, her pen beginning to flow more easily across the paper. ‘I have been a little girl in a woman’s body for too long. I am so no longer.…’
She saw Raefe only once more before he flew back to Hong Kong. Adam had fixed up a game of singles with the ex-stockbroker from Brighton, and she had left him on the tennis-courts and taken a yellow Ford taxi-cab to the padang on the waterfront, where Raefe was waiting for her.
‘I haven’t got long,’ she warned as she slid into the Chrysler’s front passenger-seat beside him. ‘Only an hour or two.’
‘Then, don’t waste time talking,’ he said practically, pulling her towards him and covering her mouth with his.
They had driven to Holland Park and made love and then they had gone down to the river, walking along its banks, their arms around each other’s waist, painfully conscious of the sun sliding away to the west and the precious minutes ticking rapidly away.
‘How long will it be before you return to Hong Kong?’ he asked, hating the thought of leaving her, acquiescing only because he understood her feelings towards Adam and respected them.
‘I don’t know. A week, perhaps two weeks.’
‘And you will be sailing back?’
‘Yes.’
‘So it could be over a month before I see you again.’
She was silent, knowing how much he wanted her to leave Singapore with him, knowing how impossible it was for her to do so. The river wound through the heart of the city, narrow and alive with sampans.
‘What will you do when you return to Hong Kong?’ she asked, her head resting against his shoulder as they walked.
He flashed her a sudden down-slanting smile. ‘I shan’t be seeing Alute, if that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘I wasn’t,’ she said gently, utterly sure of him, as she knew he was of her.
His smile faded. ‘I shall probably be spending most of the next few weeks with Melissa,’ he said, a slight edge to his voice. ‘She needs all the support I can give her at the moment.’
‘Is it very bad for her?’ she asked curiously. ‘I don’t know anything at all about heroin.’
‘It’s a killer,’ he said briefly, ‘a by-product of opium. In wine-drinking terms, if opium is regarded as a light hock, heroin is a mixture of brandy, methylated spirit and cyanide.’
A light breeze from the sea blew coolly against their faces, heralding a tropical shower.
His profile was grim. ‘It’s been hellish for her. She isn’t a person who has ever had to fight for anything. Whatever she has wanted, some man has supplied. Her father always indulged her, her boyfriends indulged her, and, God help me, I indulged her. Instant gratification was what she always demanded and to hell with the consequences. If you’d asked me six months ago if she could have fought a nightmare like heroin addiction, I would have laughed in your face. But she is, and she’s doing it with more guts than I ever gave her credit for.’ He stared out towards the sampans, so closely packed together that children were jumping across from one to another. ‘I’ve come to respect her in a way I never did when I lived with her. She’s.…’ He sought for the word and then said with a crooked smile: ‘She’s gallant. And she’ll win through, in the end.’
The next morning, just after dawn, he flew from the airfield, piloting his Northrop himself. She had slept restlessly, and as morning sunlight seeped through the shutters she slipped out of bed and dressed, being careful not to disturb Adam. She wanted to breakfast by herself. She wanted just a little time of privacy in which to come to terms with the knowledge that Raefe was once again thousands of miles away from her.
The dining-room was nearly deserted, except for a few planters up early to catch a flight north. She could never in her life remember missing anyone so badly. Not her father; not Adam. She ordered papaya with fresh limes, and the porridge that was a Raffles speciality, and toast with Cooper’s Oxford Marmalade and coffee. Even as she ordered, she knew that the only thing she wanted was coffee. The rest was just something to toy with, an excuse to remain in the dining-room, to delay returning to Adam.
The fruit and the porridge were returned to the kitchens untouched, but she ate a slice of toast and sipped her coffee and became aware that she was not only feeling heartsick, she was feeling physically sick. She took another sip of coffee and put down her cup. It tasted foul.
A middle-aged American couple, looking as if they were tourists, sat down at a nearby table.
‘… and so I thought we could take a rickshaw this morning and buy some silks,’ the wife was saying.
Elizabeth took a deep breath and swallowed. It was no use. She had only eaten a slice of toast and drunk half a cup of coffee, but incredibly she was going to be sick. She rose abruptly to her feet, running from the room.
The Americans stared after her with raised eyebrows. ‘I wonder what’s wrong with her?’ the husband said. ‘She looked white as a sheet. Where did you say we could buy the silks?’
Elizabeth kneeled on the cool tiled floor of the lavatory, retching over the pan. The toast and coffee came back easily. After that she continued to retch, bringing up dark green bile. At last it stopped, and she staggered to her feet, crossing to the sink and pouring herself a glass of water. Gingerly she sipped it, wondering what on earth could be wrong with her.
The middle-aged American woman came in, putting down her handbag, opening it and taking her make-up purse out.
‘Heavens, what we suffer to become mothers,’ she said, beginning to repair her make-up.
‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand …,’ Elizabeth said, still leaning weakly against the sinks.
The woman laughed. ‘Morning sickness,’ she said understandingly. ‘If men suffered from it, the birth rate would soon fall!’ She pressed her lips together to set her lipstick, popped her lipstick back into her handbag, and said as she walked towards the door: ‘Never mind, honey. It’s worth it in the end. I have three and I wouldn’t be without one of them!’ The door swung to behind her, and Elizabeth was left gripping on to the sinks for support, ashen-faced and trembling.
Chapter Seventeen
She told herself that the American woman had jumped to a ridiculous conclusion. People were often taken suddenly ill in a climate like Singapore’s. She had eaten something, or drunk something, that had disagreed with her.
The next morning it happened again. And the next.
‘Oh God!’ she whispered as she kneeled on the floor, heaving up the scrambled egg she had manfully forced down in an attempt to prove that there was nothing wrong with her. ‘Oh God! What now? What on earth do I do now?’
She had crawled out of the bathroom and sat at her dressing-table, opening a drawer and lifting out a small diary. She had kept it meticulously for over three years. It was the diary her gynaecologist had advised her to begin to keep when she had first become anxious about her fertility. The dates of her monthly menstruation were carefully marked. As were the dates when she was most likely to conceive, and the dates she and Adam had made love. She turned the pages with a shaking hand, knowing what it was she would find.
Her last period had come to an end the day before she had gone to Shek O with Raefe. Guilt had ensured that she had not made love with Adam in the immediate ensuing days, and then they had left Hong Kong aboard the Blantyre Castle for Singapore.
She had been lovingly affectionat
e to him on the voyage, wanting to make up to him for her betrayal of him, wanting to re-establish the firm foundation of their marriage. But there had been no lovemaking. Adam had been tired, suffering from a severe head-cold and a general feeling of malaise. They had held hands, they had danced together, they had stood at the deck-rail with their arms around each other’s waist, but they had not made love.
She put the diary down. She had no need to check the days since their arrival in Singapore. Although Adam had approached her lovingly several times, she had always made a gentle excuse, wanting to give herself more time before she committed what she saw as the final act of treachery – entering his bed with the heat of Raefe’s hands still on her flesh, his kisses still hot on her lips.
She stared at her reflection in the dressing-table mirror. She looked like a ghost, her eyes darkly ringed, her face deathly pale. It had been obvious that she was unwell, and she had told Adam that she thought she was coming down with the virus he had been suffering from on the voyage out. His concern had only made her feel more wretched.
‘Oh, Adam,’ she breathed despairingly. ‘Oh, darling, darling Adam! I didn’t want it to come to this! I didn’t want to hurt you!’
Tears slid down her face. She had thought she could continue to give him all the deep affection she had always given him. That their life together would continue as it always had, unscathed by her passionate love for Raefe. Now she knew that it was not possible. There could be no balancing of the two separate halves into which her life had fallen. She could not have both her calm, steady, sheltered life with Adam and the turbulence and tumult of her love for Raefe. One of them must be lost to her. And she was bearing Raefe’s child. She pressed her hands against her face, and the tears rolled mercilessly down between her fingers and on to her négligé.
‘Damn, damn, damn!’ she sobbed. She had longed for a child for years. She had counted dates. She had waited in a fever of hope and longing month after month. And at last what she had most longed for had been given her. She was expecting a baby. And the father was the man she loved. But it was not her husband. It was not the baby she had dreamed about, the baby that would make Adam so happy. The baby that would be the crowning happiness of their life together. ‘Oh God, Adam!’ she whispered brokenly, lowering her head to her arms. ‘I’m so sorry, darling. So desperately
A Multitude of Sins Page 31