Turtle Beach

by Blanche d'Alpuget

  She lay back, dreaming, watching the transparent lizards stalking overhead. The windows were open to the hot peace of the afternoon. Traffic sounds did not reach this part of the house; the only noises were the low hum of an airconditioner let into the wall below, in the guest suite, and an occasional croak of ‘chick-chak’ from the lizards. Clouds were banking, great folds of whipped egg-white; the storm was still a long way off. Hobday turned to Minou to hear the rest, but she was already asleep. Contented. Mama had not sold her; Mama loved her. Mama was now proving her love by risking death to join her. What else can a child of twelve whose mother sells her believe, except that it is done for her own good?

  He took her in his arms to lift her limp body under the sheet and to move the wad of pillows from behind her so that she could lie flat. She did not stir.

  I’ve lost you, he thought.

  Miz Wilkes, as he called her with a smile in his eyes, chose brandy and ginger ale as her sundowner, but although it was an hour before the sun actually would set, any hopes of sitting out in the garden long enough to admire the sky’s full display were threatened by the coming storm. Hobday took whisky as his evening drink; Minou would have a lime juice when she did come down.

  Unable to sleep, he had crept out of the bed and spent the afternoon working on a dispatch to the Minister, warning him of the inevitability of a harder line by the Malaysian government, and the danger of ‘a Palestinian situation’ in the refugee camps. He had told Aunt to wake Minou at five-thirty, since Minou was possessed by the common South-East Asian superstition that to sleep through from daylight to darkness was to leave the body open to evil spirits. There was something solid to this fear. He had himself known the uneasy bump into consciousness and the suspicion of having been somehow cheated that came when one slept too late at the siesta in these sodden climates. Glancing up at the sky he wondered if, at five o’clock, it were not too dark already. The Wilkes girl was at him again now with a barrage of precisely worded questions, preventing him from going upstairs to wake Minou himself.

  She had a sharp mind, Miz Judith Wilkes. The pleasure of verbal sparring with a buxom young woman – out here in the garden’s soft greenish light, which sharpened up the luxuriousness of everything that grew so that the very grass seemed to be celebrating the vitality of its juice, where in the quietness their voices seemed like cords bonding them … The pleasure brought back Hilary. She’d had a sharp mind, too, and would debate with him on autumn evenings, after lectures. She’d lost it, of course. They all did, those clever university girls who married External Affairs men. There was the assumption of blinkered dedication for diplomatic wives in those days, dedication to husbands’ careers, to children, national prestige, to anything but themselves. Satow’s guide to diplomatic practice even stated it, he recalled – ‘a wife is absorbed in her husband’s role’. Hilary had ended like the others. Life-and-death melodramas over the servants and furniture shipments, that tone of friendly instruction she’d developed when speaking to any junior man’s wife. And her resentment towards him! Because of a system that they had both at first so enthusiastically, so innocently, accepted as being proper and natural, like the laws of gravity. Resentment, hostility. The children, pressed to feel awe for him, had become timid in his presence and later, cold. His closest friends were unwelcome in the house, turned away by lack of those necessary small gestures of admiration rather than by anything more definite, any insult. In the end she had acquired that battle-axe tone and spoke of ‘my wives’ – ‘My wives will arrange the fete’. He’d cringed for her when he’d heard it but the reserve between them was by then too ancient to be breached. If cruelty were the greatest sin, perhaps ridiculousness was the worst misfortune.

  They’d said: ‘You’re a fool if you marry this girl. Not a chance of being Secretary after that, twenty years of work down the drain, Hobday’; and ‘Don’t expect your friends to go on seeing you as if nothing has happened – people respect Hilary.’ Socially reckless, but the most sober act of his life. He’d not believed, he’d refused to believe, that Minou would ever make contact with her family again. He had made a rational choice, a judgement on the needs of his spirit. When old Crabbe-Wallace had said, ‘Good God, man, sex is not that important to you, surely?’ he had come closest to releasing the secret. But his reply, ‘The gymnastics of it? Not at all. But the symbolism …’ had caused Crabbe-Wallace to cock an eyebrow, as briskly as a dog cocking its leg, and the secret had retreated back inside him.

  The green light and the greenness of everything around glowed so strongly that Judith’s white clothes were tinged, as if she were underwater. Even her face and her blonde hair looked green, he noticed. Like a drowned corpse.

  Hobday stirred suddenly and Judith leant forward, eager for a reply which had been so long in coming. He said, speaking as he so often did, as if dictating a report, ‘Some of the people of this region still have the Graeco-Hindu-Buddhist tradition of tolerance of belief. We are witnessing the final stages, after five millennia, of the defeat of tolerance by intolerance – by the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition to which Communism is also heir. A direct result is the persecution of non-believers – capitalists – in Vietnam. I’m no longer a Christian; I suppose, like others in times of change, I’ve returned to the ancient gods, to concepts of Oneness. So, no, I cannot agree with you that the Thaipusam practices should be banned, any more than you can agree with the Church’s dogmatic stand against abortion – a subject dear to your heart, I hear. We should recognize when our most intimate prejudices have been aroused, and know we are reacting to prejudice.’

  ‘But there’s a huge gap between tolerance and indifference. The Hindus appear …’

  Hobday sighed. ‘Is there a huge gap? It seems to me the tragedy of India that the gap is so small, a mere crack.’

  ‘So if horror is a commonplace … ?’

  ‘It will become more of a commonplace. A new war is coming. Its origins, I believe, were in 1969 when the Americans outraged a tenet of Islam by putting a man on the moon. In tweaking the Russian nose, the Americans startled the Islamic world awake and into self-defence. And now we are beginning to see some of the results. In the West, Islam will be pictured as the new, monolithic enemy. Inevitably, a new McCarthyist era will come, with all that that entails.’

  ‘What do we do? What do you do?’ Judith asked.

  He smiled, gazing up at a tree whose leaves, in this strange light, were black-green. ‘I get very tired. Then I go into my greenhouse. Would you like to see it?’

  They went past the regimented stands of hardy mauve orchids, behind which were the swimming pool and badminton court, towards the far left-hand side of the garden. This was an unplanned area, growing wild with vines and banana palms on which hung dull green chandeliers of fruit. The palms and vines gave way to forest trees. Hobday took Judith’s elbow to help her across the tangled ground.

  Beyond the palms the light was permanently dimmed by the large trees and the air was dank with leaf rot, the tropical smell of living-and-dying in unbroken balance. It was hotter and more clammy in here. Hobday saw kraits sometimes, a sudden flash of sulphur yellow which would disappear into the bedding of leaves. They were not as aggressive as cobras, and their fangs were not grooved for efficient injection, but their venom was more deadly, and he always moved slowly, placing each step deliberately into the decaying sponge. Previous high commissioners had laid baits of poisoned eggs, released mongooses and engaged snake charmers, to rid themselves of the kraits. But after success had been announced, the snakes always reappeared, seemingly invulnerable against anything short of total destruction of their territory – felling all the trees and concreting the ground. ‘We must destroy this village to save it.’ Oh, yes, he’d gone along with that logic, once.

  He smiled at Judith, noticing – he still found it difficult to notice details of dress and so forth, except in Minou – that she was wearing open, high-heeled sandals, unsafe for this area.

  ‘Not far now. T
here’s an easier way round, from the front drive through the garages, but I thought you might like this wilder track.’ It was not true: he himself had wanted to delay. He rarely invited people to see his lilies, and once the offer was made, always wished to retract it. Once he had become so agitated with a guest that he had pretended to have lost the key to the greenhouse, and had shooed the man away, saying ‘They’re not in flower, anyway. There is nothing much to see.’

  ‘It’s not a large greenhouse. I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed if you were hoping for gorgeous orchids. My nextdoor neighbour, a Chinese chap, he’s an orchid man. Perhaps I should take you next door?’ He was fiddling with the lock.

  ‘I didn’t say anything about orchids,’ Judith replied. She had a bold, quizzical look on her face.

  ‘No, of course you didn’t. Well, here we are. Nothing much to see.’

  The greenhouse, recently built in clear glass, had the raw look of any new building unsoftened by use. Shiny new gardening tools and packages of fertilizer lay on a bench in front of the door. Behind, stretching the length of the shed – about four metres – was a central aisle of cultivation boxes, each holding a young plant, fifteen centimetres tall, with spiky, radial leaves. At the end of the row of boxes were two large plants, apparently full-grown. At the apex of one was a single, magnificent bloom, a great scarlet and white trumpet. Judith gasped as she saw it for it dominated the greenhouse as a live tiger would dominate a drawing-room.

  ‘The Lily of the Sultan Who is Navel of The Universe,’ Hobday said. ‘It used to be sacred to the rulers of the Majapahit Empire. I first saw it back in the fifties in a palace greenhouse in central Java. The colours, you know, the way they fit together on the petals … ’

  The configuration of each petal was extraordinary, Judith saw, like a gestalt drawing which, if the eyes relaxed on it, changed from a face in silhouette to something different as the white background became foreground. Each petal was differently patterned in scarlet and white and each one brought on this strange optical illusion of jumping backwards and forwards, red-on-white, white-on-red.

  ‘In China it’s known as the Yin-Yang flower and in Ceylon as the Buddha’s Lily, or the Flower of the Unborn and the Born. The Japanese call it the Lily of Life.’

  He was fidgeting with the soil around the plant’s base, sinking his fingertips into it and rubbing the crumbs of earth between thumb and index finger as if he were testing silk. Having dragged her through the soggy patch of jungle, he seemed suddenly impatient with her presence, his eyes flinching away from her as he spoke.

  ‘Does it have a Western name as well?’

  ‘Hmmm? Oh yes.’

  He was now, with a handkerchief, wiping dust specks from each spiky leaf. If I were interviewing you, Judith thought, I’d think you were telling lies. Politicians set up these distracted, fiddling routines when they’re cornered.

  ‘This is a male plant. That one without the flower is the female. They’re like papaws – you need male and female. But only as primary stock. The next generations become ordinary hermaphrodites.’

  Hobday continued fingering the shiny, sharp leaves; he had lapsed into silence again. The greenhouse had been growing darker. Glancing up through the roof Judith saw that the sky was about to splinter open. There was a piercing crack of thunder and lightning combined, which shook every pane of glass, then a thump. Her eyes winced shut. One huge rain drop had hit the roof above her upturned face. But still the cloud would not break – it was as if, momentarily, a weight had been lifted off their heads while the storm paused. In this moment of waiting Hobday said, ‘It’s known as Lilium amoris, the Lily of Love’, and suddenly he grabbed her arm. ‘We’ll have to be quick!’

  He was dragging her after him, slamming the door, then sprinting through the grass into the gloom of the patch of forest. The rain was belting on the leaves above as together they dashed past the first tree trunks into pitch dark. Then Hobday stopped and let her go. Judith could barely see his face, but she could sense his agitation. ‘Your sandals,’ he said. ‘There are snakes here.’

  He seemed unable to decide whether to go back or forward. Cool rivulets were running down her arms and neck. She hugged herself and ducked her head low as a second crash of thunder shook the ground and the tree trunks suddenly flamed white. ‘We’ll be struck if we stay here,’ she shouted. The whole place was rocking. Hobday grabbed her wrist, shouted something, and, half-crouching, she was dragged after him through the rest of the jungle area, her feet sucked down in the foul-smelling decay. As she concentrated on keeping her balance a thought raced into her mind – that, in some obscure, obsessive way, Hobday identified himself – and Minou? – with his lilies.

  Abruptly they were in the open again, running across the lawn to the lamp-lit patio into the shelter of which the servants had already moved the tables and chairs, and their half-finished drinks. Minou was standing there, her left arm making a triangle from shoulder to waist, and tapping her foot.

  If I get into the camps it will be in the teeth of her opposition, Judith thought. I’ll have to use Ralph Hamilton. Somehow.

  18

  They drank champagne during dinner, one bottle, then another. ‘To Aunt Cam Binh!’ Minou said, and ‘To iron boats!’

  Her display of irritation earlier, when they were wet through from the storm, had been a joke. She’d yelped with laughter as they’d splashed on to the terrace. The three of them sat together now at one end of the dining table which, extended fully, would seat thirty-two. The table’s surface shone, the candles shone and Minou shone. Her hands reached out to fondle Hobday’s face and to stroke Judith’s fingertips.

  ‘I was so surprised, this morning, when you told me you had children,’ Judith said.

  ‘Of course I’ve got children, la! How would it be possible for an Asian woman not to have children? We don’t lock our bodies up.’

  The servants stood around with the air of having been struck deaf to all speech, except commands. When Minou interrupted, in mid-sentence, a description of her home village in Song Be province to say, ‘I want to play my flute. Where’s my flute?,’ one of the servants left the room immediately. He returned with it as another servant was handing round the gula Malacca.

  Minou pushed her chair back from the table and hooked her right foot over her left knee. The flute was not the silver one Judith had seen before, but a small wooden pipe, a villager’s instrument.

  ‘Quack, quack,’ Minou said. ‘This is a song to call the ducks.’

  Hobday, laying down his spoon beside the creamy pudding, had an air of intense, dreamy preoccupation. The flute’s voice was softly burred; it sang one pastoral tune of tremulous, piercing tenderness, then another. The room was charmed by it, as if diners, servants, table, winking candles and silver had all been detached from the rest of the house and, encapsulated, had fallen back, into an infinitely good past. She played for maybe half an hour, until they were all half asleep and the candle flames, undisturbed, climbed straight. Then she sat with closed eyes like a cat absorbing sunshine, awake but shutting out everything except what she wanted to feel. She still held the flute to her lips but had ceased to breathe into it, caught up in the memory of some tune that made her smile. Hobday, Judith saw, was now watching Minou with an expression of patient gloom. The deaf servants stared into space; the room was returning to earth.

  Minou dropped the flute from her mouth, cracking it hard against the satiny edge of the dining table. ‘Shit! I’ve forgotten it,’ she said. ‘I wanted to play a song about crossing the Pearl River, and I can’t think how it goes.’ She gave a loud sniff, hitching up one nostril. ‘You didn’t know I was a musician, did you?’ she said to Judith, with a vivid, tough grin.

  The two white-jacketed statues turned back into servants and began clearing away the dessert plates.

  ‘They’ (she meant Judith and Hobday) ‘will have coffee on the terrace,’ Minou said to one of the men in her flat, peremptory tone.

  Hobday seeme
d locked inside himself. He paced behind the women from the dining room, his chin sunk on his chest.

  ‘Oh, Papa, you’re like an old bear,’ Minou said to him as they settled into cane armchairs. There was little softness in her tone. She turned from him with impatience and addressed herself to Judith: ‘You and I will go to the Bellfield Camp at six-thirty tomorrow morning. It stinks, la, so the earlier we go the better. You can interview the camp leader. He speaks good English.’

  ‘What about a pass for me to get in?’

  Minou gave a tight smile that indicated her forebearance had been taxed beyond its limits. I’ll get you in, Judith Wilkes. Just relax.’ She glanced around herself, as if the very floor tiles had become displeasing, then stood up. ‘Well, I’m going to bed,’ she said. ‘I’ll leave you two intellectuals to it.’

  Hobday broke his silence. ‘It’s only ten o’clock and you slept three hours this afternoon.’

  She bent over the back of his chair, lifting one leg behind her, a mocking pose. ‘I know, Papa. I want to look into the I Ching. I’ve got lots of questions to ask it.’ She kissed his ear and was off.