by M. M. Kaye
‘That’s because you’ve been here too long. You’re blasé,’ said Copper, her eyes on the glowing horizon: ‘After that endless London fog and rain and drizzle, I don’t believe I could ever have too much sun, however hot and sticky.’
‘You wait!’ retorted Valerie. ‘I may have been in the Islands too long, but you haven’t been here long enough. Two more months of the Andamans and you’ll be thinking longingly of expeditions to the North Pole!’
* * *
Valerie Masson, born Valerie Ann Knight, was the stepdaughter of Sir Lionel Masson, Chief Commissioner of the Andamans. A childless man, Sir Lionel had been a widower for close upon seventeen years; during which time he had paid school bills and written cheques at frequent intervals but, since his visits to England had been infrequent, had seen little or nothing of this stepdaughter who had taken his name. He knew that the child was well looked after in the home of a couple of devoted aunts, and his only anxiety on her behalf (in the rare intervals in which he thought of her at all) was the fear that in all probability she was being badly spoiled.
His appointment as Chief Commissioner to the Andamans had coincided with Valerie’s nineteenth birthday, and it had suddenly occurred to him that he not only possessed a grown-up stepdaughter, but that it might be both pleasant and convenient to install a hostess in the big, sprawling house on Ross. The idea was well received. Valerie had welcomed it with enthusiasm and for the past two years had kept house for her stepfather, played hostess at Government House, and enjoyed herself considerably. Which last was not to be wondered at, for although she could lay no particular claim to beauty, her dark hair grew in a deep widow’s peak above an endearingly freckled face in which a pair of disturbing green eyes were set charmingly atilt, and these assets, combined with an inexhaustible supply of good humour, had worked havoc with the susceptibilities of the male population of Port Blair.
Her present house-guest, Miss Randal — Caroline Olivia Phoebe Elizabeth by baptism but invariably known, from an obvious combination of initials, as ‘Copper’ — had been her best friend since their early schooldays, and at about the time that Valerie was setting sail for the Andamans, Copper had been reluctantly embarking upon the infinitely more prosaic venture of earning her living as a shorthand typist in the city of London.
For two drab years she had drawn a weekly pay cheque from Messrs Hudnut and Addison Limited, Glass and China Merchants, whose gaunt and grimy premises were situated in that unlovely section of London known as the Elephant and Castle. The weekly pay cheque had been incredibly meagre, and at times it had needed all Copper’s ingenuity, coupled with incorrigible optimism, to make both ends meet and life seem at all worth supporting. ‘But someday,’ said Copper, reassuring herself, ‘something exciting is bound to happen!’
Pending that day she continued to hammer out an endless succession of letters beginning ‘Dear Sir — In reply to yours of the 15th ult.’, to eat her meals off clammy, marble-topped tables in A.B.C. teashops, and to keep a weather-eye fixed on the horizon in ever-hopeful anticipation of the sails of Adventure. And then, three months previously, that sail had lifted over the skyline in the form of a small and totally unexpected legacy left her by a black-sheep uncle long lost sight of in the wilds of the Belgian Congo.
A slightly dazed Copper had handed in her resignation to Messrs Hudnut and Addison Limited, cabled her acceptance of a long-standing invitation of Valerie’s to visit the Islands, and having indulged in an orgy of shopping, booked a passage to Calcutta, where she had boarded the S.S. Maharaja — the little steamer which is virtually the only link between the Andamans and the outside world. Four days later she had leaned over the deck rail, awed and enchanted, as the ship sailed past emerald hills and palm-fringed beaches, to drop anchor in the green, island-strewn harbour of Port Blair.
That had been nearly three weeks ago. Three weeks of glitteringly blue days and incredibly lovely star-splashed nights. She had bathed in the clear jade breakers of Forster Bay and Corbyn’s Cove, fished in translucent waters above branching sprays of coral from the decks of the little steam launch Jarawa, and picnicked under palm trees that rustled to the song of the Trade Winds.
It was all so different from that other world of fog and rain, strap-hanging, shorthand and crowded rush-hour buses, that she sometimes felt that she must have dreamed it all. Or that this was the dream, and presently she would awake to find herself back once more in the cheerless, gas-lit lodgings off the Fulham Road. But no: this was real. This wonderful, colourful world. Copper drew a deep breath of utter contentment and leant her head against the window-frame.
Beside her, Valerie who had also fallen silent, was leaning out of the window, her head cocked a little on one side as though she were listening to something. There was a curious intentness about her that communicated itself to Copper, so that presently she too found herself listening: straining her ears to catch some untoward sound from the quiet garden below. But she could hear nothing but the hush of the glassy sea against the rocks, and after a minute or two she said uneasily: ‘What is it, Val?’
‘The birds. I’ve only just noticed it. Listen____’
‘What birds? I can’t hear any.’
‘That’s just it. They always make a terrific racket at this hour of the morning. I wonder what’s come over them today?’
Copper leant out beside her, frowning. Every morning since her arrival in the Islands she had been awakened by a clamorous chorus of birds: unfamiliar tropical birds. Parrots, parakeets, mynas, sunbirds, orioles, paradise fly-catchers, shouting together in a joyous greeting to the dawn. But today, for the first time, no birds were singing. ‘I expect they’ve migrated, or something,’ said Copper lightly. ‘Look at that sky, Val! Isn’t it gorgeous?’
The cool, pearly sheen of dawn had warmed in the East to a blaze of vivid rose that deepened along the horizon’s edge to a bar of living, glowing scarlet, and bathed the still sea and the dreaming islands in an uncanny, sunset radiance.
‘“Red sky at morning”,’ said Valerie uneasily. ‘I do hope to goodness this doesn’t mean a storm. It would be too sickening, right at the beginning of Christmas week.’
‘Good heavens,’ exclaimed Copper blankly, ‘I’d quite forgotten. Of course — this is Christmas Eve. Somehow it doesn’t seem possible. I feel as if I’d left Christmas behind at the other side of the world. Well, one thing’s certain: there won’t be any snow here! And of course there isn’t going to be a storm. There isn’t a cloud in the sky.’
‘I know — but I still don’t like the look of it.’
‘Nonsense! It’s wonderful. It’s like a transformation scene in a pantomime.’
As they watched, the fiery glow faded from the quiet sky and the sun leapt above the horizon and flashed dazzling swords of light through the diamond air. Hard shadows streaked the lawns, and the house awoke to a subdued bustle of early morning activity.
The new day was full of sounds: the low, hushing, interminable murmur of the sea; the sigh of a wandering breeze among the grey-green casuarina boughs; a distant hum and clatter from the servants’ quarters; and the dry click and rustle of the bamboos.
‘Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not,’ quoted Copper, who had once played Miranda to Valerie’s Ferdinand in a sixth-form production of The Tempest.
She had been thinking of the contrast between the darkness and terror of the past night and the shining glory of the morning when Caliban’s charmed, immortal lines slipped into her mind, and she had repeated them almost without knowing it: speaking them as though they were an assurance of safety and a spell against evil, and so softly that the words were barely audible. But Valerie’s ear had caught them, for she said with an unexpected trace of sharpness: ‘That’s all very well, but speaking for myself I’m distinctly afeard, and at the moment I’d say Keats was more on the ball than Caliban!’
‘Keats? Why Keats?’
‘“La Belle Dame sans
Merci”. That place by a lake, where “no birds sing”. Well, there are still none singing here this morning and I don’t like it — or that red sky either! I don’t like it one bit!’
Copper stared at her: and puzzled by her uncharacteristic vehemence, turned to lean out of the window again and listen intently. But Valerie was right. The isle was still full of noises. But in its gardens no bird sang.
2
The Andaman Islands, green, fairy-like, enchanted, lie some hundred miles off the Burmese coast in the blue waters of the Bay of Bengal. Legend, with some support by science, tells that their hills and valleys were once part of a great range of mountains that extended from Burma to Sumatra, but that the wickedness of the inhabitants angered Mavia Tomala, the great chief, who caused a cataclysm which separated the land into over two hundred islands, and marooned them for ever in the Bay of Bengal.
For close on a hundred years a small part of the Andamans had been used by the Government of India as a penal settlement. The only important harbour, Port Blair, lies on the south-east coast of South Andaman, with its harbour guarded from the sea by the tiny triangular islet of Ross, the administrative headquarters of the Islands.
Ross covers less than a mile in area, and into its narrow confines are packed over forty buildings that include a clubhouse, barracks, two churches, a hospital and a native bazaar. Topping this heterogeneous collection of dwellings, and set among green gardens, stands the residence of the Chief Commissioner: a long, rambling two-storeyed building that for some forgotten reason is known in the Islands as ‘Government House’, and whose windows look down on roofs and tree-tops and out to sea where the lovely, lost islands stray away on either hand to the far horizon like a flight of exotic butterflies.
On this particular Christmas Eve morning the Massons and Miss Randal were breakfasting as usual in the dining-room of Government House. It was not yet nine o’clock but the day was unusually hot and close for the time of year, and the electric fans were whirring at full speed as Valerie filled in the details of the day’s programme — an all-day picnic to the top of Mount Harriet followed by a large dinner party at Government House — to an inattentive audience.
The Chief Commissioner, normally an amiable though somewhat absentminded man, was frowning over a letter that had arrived half an hour earlier with a batch of official correspondence, and which he had already read at least twice, while Copper’s gaze had strayed to the open windows that looked out across the harbour mouth to the pink, Moorish-looking walls of the cellular jail and the little town that some homesick Scot had named Aberdeen, which lies facing Ross on the mainland of Port Blair. A ‘mainland’ that is in fact only the largest of the Islands, though always referred to by the inhabitants by the more imposing title.
To the right of the town the land curves in a green arc between Aberdeen and North Point, embracing Phoenix Bay with its boats and steam-launches and lighters rocking gently in the blue swell; tiny Chatham Island with its sawmills and piled timber; Hopetown jetty where, in 1872, a Viceroy of India was murdered; and rising up behind it, on the far side of the bay, the green, gracious slope of Mount Harriet.
For once, however, Copper was not alive to the exotic beauty of the view, her attention at that moment being centred upon the slim, gleaming lines of a cruiser that lay at anchor far up the reaches of the harbour.
His Majesty’s Ship Sapphire was paying a fortnight’s visit to the Andamans; to the delight of the British denizens of Port Blair, for the problems of an enclosed society are many. It becomes difficult to infuse much enthusiasm into entertaining when every dinner, dance, bridge party or picnic must of necessity be made up of combinations and permutations of fifteen or twenty people, all of whom have lived cheek by jowl for months past — often for years — and whose individual interests and topics of conversation have become so well known that any form of social gathering is apt to become a routine performance. Which explains why the arrival of H.M.S. Sapphire had been welcomed with relief as well as pleasure.
Copper’s thoughts, however, were not concerned with the Sapphire either as a social saviour or a decorative addition to the scattered collection of seagoing craft reflecting themselves in the pellucid waters of the bay. To her the cruiser existed solely as the ship which numbered among its company of officers and men, one Nicholas Tarrent R.N.
There was a certain electric quality about Nick Tarrent that had nothing whatever to do with his undoubted good looks, for possessing it a plain man or an ugly one would have been equally attractive, and Copper had been in love with him for precisely eight days, seven hours and forty-two minutes. In other words from the moment she had first set eyes on him, two hours after the arrival of H.M.S. Sapphire in Port Blair.
‘— and some of them,’ continued Valerie, ‘want to sail from here to Hopetown jetty, where a lorry will meet them and take them up to the top of Mount Harriet. Charles had the boats brought across from Chatham last night so that they can start from the Club pier. The rest of us will take the ferry to Aberdeen and then go on by car. Harriet is only just across the other side of the bay, and I don’t suppose it’s more than two or three miles from here as the crow flies. But to get to it by road it’s over thirty miles and — Copper! you’re not listening.’
‘I’m sorry,’ apologized Copper in some confusion. ‘I was looking at the view. It’s fascinating.’
‘Yes, I know: but if I’d realized you’d be able to see him at this range I’d have had the blinds drawn. Really, Coppy, you might pretend to take some interest. Here have I been going over all the arrangements for your benefit, and you haven’t bothered to listen to a word. If you could just stop thinking about Nick Tarrent for five minutes, I’d be deeply grateful!’
Copper had the grace to blush, and Valerie laughed and said contritely: ‘I’m sorry, Coppy. That was abominably rude and scratchy of me. I can’t think why I should be feeling so jumpy and cross this morning. I suppose it’s the heat. I shall be glad when we reach Mount Harriet: it’s always much cooler up there.’
‘It does seem to be a lot hotter today, doesn’t it?’ said Copper, relieved at the change of subject. ‘Or perhaps it’s just because it’s so still? There doesn’t seem to be a breath of air. Who’s coming on this picnic?’
‘Almost everyone. They’re all finding their way there under their own steam. Rendezvous about twelve to twelve-thirty, at the top. You and I are going with Charles.’
‘Who’s Nick going with?’
‘He’s sailing over. He and Dan Harcourt and Ted Norton are taking one of the boats, and Hamish is going in another with Ronnie and Rosamund Purvis, and I think George Beamish is supposed to be taking that gloomy girlfriend of his, Amabel, in the third. Mr Hurridge is having a lorry sent to meet them at Crown Point jetty, so they ought to fetch up at Mount Harriet a good bit ahead of us. Except that there’s no breeze today.’
‘And what about dear Mrs Stock? I suppose she’ll be there — worse luck!’
‘Don’t be catty, Coppy!’
‘Why not? I enjoy being catty about Ruby. I heard her telling Nick in a honey-sweet voice at the Withers’s barbecue that it was “such a pity that dear Copper gave the impression of being just a tiny bit insipid, because actually the girl was really terribly, terribly efficient — a complete blue-stocking in fact — she used to hold a dreadfully responsible executive post in London”!’
Valerie laughed. ‘Dear Ruby! She probably still believes that old story that men are terrified of intelligent women.’
‘And in nine cases out of ten, how right she is,’ commented Copper gloomily.
‘Perhaps. But at a guess I’d say that Nick is the tenth; if that’s any comfort to you. As for Ruby, she hasn’t a brain in her head.’
‘She doesn’t appear to need them! You have to admit that she has what it takes. And I suppose she is rather attractive in an overblown “Queen of Calcutta” way; what with that black hair and those enormous eyes — not to mention her vital statistics. What really defeat
s me is how she ever came to marry someone as depressingly ineffectual as poor Leonard. Whenever I see them together I catch myself wondering why on earth she did it? I suppose he must have had something that she wanted: though I can’t imagine what! Leonard always reminds me of one of those agitated little sand-crabs that pop up out of holes at low tide, and nip back again when they see you looking. An apologetic sand-crab. He ought by rights to have married someone like Rosamund Purvis; they’d have made a marvellous pair — not an ounce of guts or sex-appeal between them. Then Ruby could have married Ronnie, which would have been far more suitable all round.’
‘I expect,’ said Valerie thoughtfully, ‘that Ruby considered one person with sex-appeal in a family to be quite enough. She seems to be allergic to competition.’
‘Unless she is promoting it,’ observed Copper tartly. ‘Anyway, I still don’t see why she has to go after Nick when she already seems to have every other available male in the Islands lashed to her chariot wheels — with the solitary exception of your Charles.’
‘She collects them,’ explained Valerie, helping herself to more coffee, ‘— the way some people collect stamps or matchboxes or Old Masters.’
‘So it would appear,’ said Copper crossly. ‘And I can’t think why her husband stands for it.’
‘Oh, Leonard____! He doesn’t count. And anyway, I don’t suppose he notices it by this time. Or minds any more.’
‘Perhaps not. But I should have thought Rosamund Purvis would. It can’t be pleasant to see your husband dancing attendance on someone else’s wife. Though if it comes to that, I suppose she’s used to it, too. In fact her dear Ronnie and Leonard’s Ruby are two of a kind; except that with Ronnie it’s Old Mistresses! Oh dear — why am I being so bitchy and bad-tempered? What’s the matter with us today, Val? We must have got out of the wrong sides of our beds this morning. I’m feeling all edgy and irritable. Not at all the right spirit for Christmas Eve. Or any other eve, for that matter! “Peace on Earth, Goodwill toward Men” — and Women, I suppose: which presumably includes Ruby Stock. When are we due to start off on this expedition?’