Bassett relayed the information to the others. Adam and Lawrence Fisher received the news in silence, knowing very well what fate would be in store for them if their attempt failed and they were captured by the Japanese.
‘We can’t leave!’ Elizabeth protested urgently to Adam. ‘Not until Raefe catches up with us.’
Bassett and Fisher were hoisting their rucksacks on to their backs. The young Hakka boy was showing no signs of returning to his village but was standing with the guerrillas, obviously intending to stay with them.
‘We have to go,’ Adam said as the guerrillas and Bassett and Fisher began to file out of the camp.
‘We can’t go! I won’t go!’ Her distress tore at his heart.
‘You have to, Beth,’ he said, knowing that the terrible moment could be postponed no longer. ‘Raefe isn’t going to join us. He was injured when we came under fire from the coastal battery. He’s staying behind at Mirs Bay so that he won’t slow us up.’
‘I don’t believe you!’ She took a step backwards. ‘I don’t believe you! It isn’t true! Oh, please tell me that it isn’t true!’ Her eyes were frantic, her face bloodless.
‘My dear, I’m so sorry,’ he said compassionately, reaching out to take her in his arms. ‘Raefe knew that if you were told you wouldn’t leave him, and he wanted you to leave him. He wants you to be safe.’
‘No!’ she said, pressing the back of her hand against her mouth. ‘Oh, no!’ And then she turned, beginning to run away from the guerrillas and Fisher and Bassett, running in the direction they had come from. Running towards Raefe.
He sprang after her, seizing her wrist, swinging her violently towards him. ‘It’s no good!’ he protested desperately. ‘You can’t go back! There are Japs on the road!’
‘I don’t care!’ She was fighting him, struggling to get free. ‘I’m not leaving him to face capture alone! I’m going to him! There’s nothing you can do to stop me!’
‘He won’t be there when you return!’ he shouted at her, and then, hating himself for his brutality, he said as gently as he could: ‘He was dying, Beth!’
She sucked in her breath, staring at him unbelievingly, and then she began to scream.
He had never struck a woman in his life and he would have thought himself physically incapable of striking Beth. His hand caught her savagely at the side of her face, stunning her into silence. ‘He’s dying and there’s not a goddamned thing anyone can do about it!’ he roared savagely. ‘Now, for God’s sake, don’t make his dying alone worthless! Don’t bring the Japs hurtling down on men who are risking their lives to help us!’
She was sobbing hysterically, the tears streaming down her face. He tightened his hold of her, dragging her in his wake. ‘Come along,’ he said brokenly, his rage dying, tears scalding his own eyes. ‘We have to catch them up, Beth. We mustn’t be left behind.’
Chapter Thirty-One
She remembered very little of the long arduous journey to Chungking. They crossed the Tah Shui Shao road, narrowly escaping being sighted by a convoy of Japanese trucks. From there on the way became very steep, and Henry Bassett began to suffer acutely from the heat. Adam relieved him of his rucksack, carrying it along with his own as they trudged over rough ground, each day and every day. A week later they reached Waichow and then, for a blissful few days, they were able to travel by barge up the East River to Leung Chuen.
Only the conviction that Raefe was still alive sustained her. The people in the village where they had left him had been friendly. They would have taken care of him and they would have hidden him from the Japanese. One day they would be reunited. So sure was she of it that it gave her the strength she needed to cope with the lack of food and the lice-ridden blankets that served as bedding and the constant never-ending weariness.
At Leung Chuen they were given a lift to Kukong in a truck driven by a captain in the Chinese Nationalist Forces, and from Kukong they travelled by rail to Chungking, with money loaned to them by the staff of Kukong’s Methodist mission.
‘I never thought we’d make it,’ Henry Bassett kept saying. ‘Truly, I never thought we’d make it.’
Adam smiled at him wearily. There had been times when he, too, had doubted that they would ever reach Chungking. The two-month trek had broken his health, and he knew it. He would never be robust again. He scarcely recognized himself when he entered the luxury of a bathroom at the British embassy and looked at himself in the mirror. He had become an old man. His still thick hair was no longer grizzled, but pure white, and his luxuriant beard made him look like a grotesque and semi-starved Father Christmas. He began to clip it and then to soap the stubble, razoring it off, marvelling at Beth’s constitution. She looked so delicate and fragile, and she had proved to be so tough. She was still carrying the baby, her thickening waistline visible witness of its continuing existence.
They had been greeted by embassy officials as husband and wife, and treated as such, both of them too weary to face the inevitable confusion that would follow if they stated that they were separated.
‘This is much easier,’ Adam had said to her, ‘especially in view of your condition.’
Elizabeth had been uncaring as to whether it was easier or not. Her one concern was how soon she would be able to receive confirmation that Raefe was alive.
‘There’ll be official lists of all prisoners of war captured, won’t there?’ she had said to him, her eyes harrowed, her face ivory pale.
‘Yes,’ he had answered, wondering if the Japanese would be mindful of the Geneva Convention, ‘but it will be months, possibly longer, before the Red Cross will have access to such information.’
‘Then, I’ll wait,’ she had said quietly, her hand passing lightly over her rounding stomach. ‘But Raefe is alive, Adam. I know he is.’
Within hours of his arrival he had been asked to make an official report to the military authorities. He did so, giving all the information he could about the situation in Hong Kong. He also told them of the atrocities that had taken place at the dressing station, giving an estimated number of the dead and of the way they had died. He also told them of how Raefe had been gravely injured and of how he had stayed behind rather than hamper the others’escape chances.
Colonel Lindsay Ride, who had been commander of the Hong Kong Volunteers’ field-ambulance and who had escaped from Shamshiupo, reaching Chungking only days before them, said quietly: ‘In your opinion, could Captain Elliot still be alive?’
Adam hesitated for a moment, thinking of Beth and of her fierce insistence that Raefe had survived, and then said quietly: ‘No, sir. Captain Elliot knew that his wounds were fatal. He knew that he was dying.’
There was a small silence, and then Lindsay Ride said: ‘Thank you, Captain Harland. That will be all.’
Adam had known there would be no further posting for him. He was physically unfit for active service of any kind.
‘We can’t get you back to England, old boy,’ a colonial officer had said to him regretfully. ‘The best we can do is fly you and Mrs Harland to Rangoon. Rangoon is still safe. From there, with luck, you might be able to get a flight out to India.’
Elizabeth had refused to leave until official permission was given for her to take Jung-shui with her.
‘If you want to adopt her, the Methodist mission will help,’ Adam said, appalled at the prospect of leaving the little girl behind. ‘Have I to go and see them for you?’
‘Please,’ she had said, squeezing his hand gratefully. He was looking after her as he had always done, with infinite tenderness. But, even though they were living outwardly together as man and wife, it was inconceivable to either of them that sexual relations should be resumed between them.
In April they left for Rangoon, taking Jung-shui with them. The international situation had worsened. Singapore had fallen to the Japanese, and even Rangoon was no longer secure. A week after their arrival they were hurriedly ferried on an army flight to Calcutta.
‘Which is where we’ll be s
taying for the rest of the war, I expect,’ Adam had said resignedly.
Elizabeth had watched the earth falling away beneath them and had wondered where Helena was, and Li Pi, and Alastair and Tom and Ronnie. She was sure that she knew where Raefe was. He would have recuperated from his wounds now and would be leading Chinese guerrilla units into the New Territories in the fight to oust the Japanese. And if he wasn’t, if he had been captured, then he would be in an internment camp, and she had only to wait for the war to end and for him to be released.
British officials in Calcutta made them as comfortable as possible, putting a bungalow at their disposal. Adam found something reminiscent of Hong Kong in the colonial way of life still being clung to by their European neighbours. Elizabeth was vaguely surprised when he mentioned it to her. She noticed very little any more. She had withdrawn into herself. Waiting for the baby to be born. Waiting for the war to end. Waiting for Raefe to return to her.
He had moved heaven and earth to find a piano for her, and on the day it was moved into their large drawing-room he knew that his fears about her mental health were groundless. The old discipline soon claimed her. She practised for seven or eight hours a day, remembering all that Li Pi had taught her, striving for perfection in order to be worthy of him.
In July the baby was born, and the hospital staff, taking it for granted that her attentive husband was the father, were astounded when she asked that the name of Raefe Elliot be entered on the birth certificate as the father.
‘What are you going to call him?’ Adam asked her, standing at the foot of the bed as she held the dark-haired shawl-wrapped baby close against her breast.
She smiled up at him, her hair falling loosely around her shoulders so that she didn’t look a day older than the eighteen-year-old girl he had married. ‘Nicholas Raefe,’ she said, her cheeks flushed with happiness, her eyes so full of love that his heart twisted within him. He felt no jealousy, no bitterness, that the child she was holding was Raefe’s. Those emotions had all died within him when his respect for Raefe had been born. But he did feel almost unbearable regret. If only the child she was nursing was his child. If only he and Beth and Jung-shui and the baby could be a family together.
‘Why Nicholas?’ he asked, knowing that it was a dream that would never come to fruition. She was living with him now, quite contentedly, as a sister might live with him. But she would not stay with him. Not when the war was over.
‘Because I like the sound of it,’ she said, and her joy was so deep that it had reached out and touched him and he found himself smiling, saying tenderly, his heart full of love for her: ‘So do I, Beth. So do I.’
In September, Colonel Ride forwarded them the information that Tom Nicholson was a prisoner of war in Shamshuipo Camp, in Kowloon, and that Mrs Helena Nicholson was a civilian prisoner in Stanley internment camp and that her two children were with her.
‘Thank God,’ Adam said, time and time again. ‘Oh, thank God that they are safe!’
In October they received the news that Alastair Munroe had died in the fighting at the Shingmun Redoubt. There was still no news about Ronnie or about Raefe.
‘And we’re damned lucky to know about Helena and Tom and Alastair, and to have Ride as a source of information,’ Adam said sombrely. ‘There must be thousands of families not knowing if husbands and fathers and sons are alive or dead.’
‘Raefe is alive,’ she had said with quiet confidence. ‘I know he is. I can feel it in my blood and in my bones. He’s alive and he’s going to come back to me.’
He hadn’t argued with her. He was sure that she was wrong, but to tell her so would be to rob her of the hope that was sustaining her.
In January of the following year came the news that Ronnie Ledsham was dead. The information from Chungking was far more explicit than normal official information would have been. ‘He died at the Gap.’ Adam said bleakly. ‘God alone knows what he was doing there. He was supposed to be at Sai Wan Hill.’ He put down the telegram, his hand trembling slightly. ‘He was by himself and there were over a dozen dead Japs scattered around him.’
Tears slid down Elizabeth’s face. ‘He must have known about Julienne,’ she whispered, all the old grief surging through her. ‘He did what Derry did. He went out and fought the bastards by himself.’
In early 1944 they returned to England via Portugal, and Elizabeth travelled down to Four Seasons with Jung-shui and Nicholas Raefe. Adam remained in London. He had known that she had not wanted him to accompany her. Four Seasons had once been their marital home. Returning to it together would have meant that she wanted their lives to continue together. And she didn’t. Now that they were back in England she wanted him once more to begin divorce proceedings. She wanted to be free in order that she could marry Raefe.
Jung-shui stared out of the train window at the neat fields and the woods and the rolling splendour of the Downs. ‘It’s very pretty, isn’t it?’ she said with gentle gravity.
Elizabeth had hugged her tight. ‘Yes, darling, it is very pretty, and it’s your home now. I do hope that you will like it.’
Jung-shui had given her an accepting smile. ‘Nicholas has never seen it before, either, has he? Do you think Nicholas will like it, too?’
‘Yes,’ Elizabeth had said, tears glittering on her eyelashes. She looked out over the familiar countryside, wondering if Raefe had ever seen Sussex. He had been educated in England, but that had been at Harrow. Probably he had never had any reason to travel south to the Downs and to the sea. It was difficult to imagine him in the Sussex countryside, tall and lean-hipped and olive-skinned. She wondered what the villagers in Midhurst would make of him, and she wondered how much longer she would have to wait before she could share a drink with him in the village pub and walk with him on the Downs and by the sea.
Princess Luisa Isabel was waiting on the station platform to greet them, as Elizabeth had known she would be. She had written to her from Calcutta and from Portugal, and that morning, when she had telephoned her from London and told her that she was travelling down to Midhurst on the two o’clock train, Luisa had been almost incoherent with delight.
Now she ran along the platform towards them, a slightly plumper Princess Luisa than Elizabeth remembered, but still with a ridiculous little hat dipping coquettishly over one eye, and still with fox furs swinging.
‘Luisa!’ she cried, running towards her, Nicholas Raefe held in one arm, Jung-shui clinging to the hand of her free arm. ‘Luisa!’
Fox furs and an exotic fragrance enveloped Jung-shui and Nicholas Raefe, the tiny pillbox hat and its veil tilting more precipitately than ever.
‘What beautiful children!’ Princess Luisa Isabel crowed, cupping Jung-shui’s golden face in her gloved hand, winning the little girl’s heart at once. ‘And is this your brother? My, isn’t he a big boy? I thought he would still be a baby!’
‘Not a baby,’ Nicholas Raefe said as Elizabeth set him down on fat little legs. ‘Can walk. Babies can’t walk.’
Laughing and crying, Elizabeth threw her arms around the older woman. ‘Oh, I’m so glad to see you again. Luisa. I’m so glad to be home!’
Luisa had driven them through the high-hedged winding Sussex lanes in a splendid Rolls-Royce that attracted the attention of everyone they passed.
‘However do you manage to get the petrol for it, Luisa?’ Elizabeth had asked incredulously. ‘I thought everything was rationed to the hilt?’
‘It is,’ Luisa had said mischievously, ‘but I have my contacts. The worst thing about the war has been that I have been without a chauffeur. Every time I obtained one, the Army commandeered him for what they termed “essential war work”.’
Elizabeth hugged her arm, laughing at her silliness. ‘Oh, Luisa, if only that was the worst thing about this horrid, horrid war!’
Luisa stayed with her for two weeks. An advertisement for a housekeeper was inserted in The Times, and a pleasant, middle-aged Scotswoman applied for the job. Her husband had died in the fighti
ng as British troops had fallen back on Dunkirk, and Elizabeth immediately engaged her, impressed by the woman’s quiet courage as she set about building a new life for herself, alone.
When Luisa had reluctantly departed, the house had seemed oddly empty. She had wandered through the rooms, looking out of the windows at Jung-shui and Nicholas Raefe romping together on the terrace. They, at least, were safe. She thought about Helena’s children, wondering if they had suffered during the long years of internment, and she thought, as she always did, about Raefe. Whether he had been free or a prisoner, he, too, would have suffered. Four Seasons would be a haven for him when he returned to her. A place where he could rest and recuperate and where their lives together could begin anew.
She busied herself in transforming a sunny ground-floor sitting-room into a study for him, decorating and furnishing it herself. She planted roses along the south wall of the house, Zephirine Drouhin and Ophelia and Madame Alfred Carriére, so that the house would be clothed in blossom. She worked hard at her music, knowing how eager he would be that her dreams of the concert platform should be speedily fulfilled.
It was a rain-washed April day when her first visitor, apart from Adam and Luisa Isabel, arrived. She was on the terrace dressed in an old violet-shaded tweed skirt and a lavender jumper, with her hair pulled away from her face and tied at the nape of her neck with a hair ribbon borrowed from Jung-shui. She was lifting and dividing the clumps of Michaelmas daisies that grew along the edge of the terrace by the house wall when she heard the sound of a car approaching.
She put down her trowel, taking off her gardening-gloves and walking along the terrace to the shallow stone steps that led down, to the drive. Adam hadn’t telephoned to say that he would be visiting her but, then, their relationship was so close that there was no reason why he should have done so. The car swung round the curve in the drive and she stood still, rocked by surprise. The car wasn’t Adam’s carefully polished Daimler, but a battered old Morris that reminded her, with a sudden pang, of the little battered old Morris that Julienne had driven in Hong Kong. It surged to a halt twenty yards or so away from her, and a big bear of a man in RAF uniform removed himself with difficulty from its cramped interior.
A Multitude of Sins Page 56