In the Mouth of the Tiger (104 page)

‘Why are you telling me all this?' I asked. ‘What if I were a traitor too? What if I told Denis what your plans are?'

‘That's what I meant when I said I'm taking the greatest gamble of my life. I trust you, Norma. I'd trust you with my life. I realise that you once loved Denis, but I'm taking the gamble that you could never love a traitor.
You won't let me down, will you?'

I didn't say anything, but shook my head against his shoulder.

‘Slip away before midday tomorrow,' Malcolm said. People had followed us out onto the terrace and we were no longer alone, so he spoke softly and quickly. ‘The children will be at school so all you need to do is think of yourself. Take a taxi down here to the hotel. Or better still, just walk down – you don't want to risk tipping Denis off. There's a cottage attached to the hotel, ideal for you and the children. It's called the Honeymoon Cottage. I'll book it in your name. Just ask for the key at the desk, then go up to the cottage and lie low until I see you there. I'll arrange for the children to be picked up and brought to you. And I'll make sure they treat Denis properly.'

Just listening to the man, not flinching away from him in horror, was sheer agony. I suddenly realised exactly why Malcolm Bryant would never be a success, for all his brains, presence, and good looks. The man was mad. Not barking mad, not mad in the normal way. But he fashioned the world to fit his own desires, regardless of reality. He wanted me to betray the man I loved and to follow him. He wanted it so badly that he had convinced himself that was how things were going to be.

When I got back to our table Pinka clutched at my sleeve. ‘Where in God's name have you been, Norma?' she asked. ‘Denis is worried you might be going down with something. He even asked me to look for you in the ladies.' She looked at my face and clicked her tongue. ‘You're as white as a sheet, darling. Are you all right?'

‘I was on the terrace,' I said. ‘I needed a breath of air. Bit stuffy in here, don't you think?' Actually, I wanted to turn her towards me, look into her eyes, ask her how she had coped when she had found that the man she loved was a traitor. But of course I couldn't do that so I lit a cigarette and leaned back in my chair as casually as I could.

But my pretended nonchalance fooled nobody. Denis and Horace must have been looking for me, and when they joined us a moment later Denis put my wrap around me without a word. ‘Home, my poor darling,' he said softly. ‘And we won't spare the horses.'

I waited until we were driving up to the hill to Starlight, and then I touched him on the arm. ‘There is something awfully serious I need to tell you,' I said. ‘It's going to be difficult so please bear with me. And remember that I love you.'

Denis yawned. ‘If it's important, darling, let it keep until tomorrow. You're not a well girl, and I want you to go straight to bed.'

‘It's something you
must
know tonight,' I said. ‘Please let me talk to you.'

Denis turned and put a gentle finger against my lips. ‘Not another word. Not tonight. Particularly if it's important.' We had stopped outside Starlight and Denis was around to my side of the car in an instant, helping me out as if I were an invalid.

‘I'm not sick!' I almost shouted. ‘I just need to tell you something awfully, awfully important and you're not letting me!'

Denis swept me off the ground as if I was a child, smothering my face against his dress shirt, and carried me towards the house. I was about to really throw a fit, to kick and scream until he put me down, but Ah Khow was suddenly there, materialising like a phantom out of the gloom. He opened the front door and stood aside with a polite smile while I nodded good evening. Almost as if Mem was quite used to being carried home like a sack of potatoes.

‘Mem is unwell,' Denis said cheerfully. ‘I think it's probably the flu, Ah Khow. Perhaps you might bring us some tea and an aspirin?'

Alone in our room at last I gripped Denis's lapels and forced him to look at me. ‘I'm not sick,' I said desperately. ‘I'm probably in shock, but I'm not sick. I spoke to Malcolm Bryant tonight. He knows that you are working with Chin Peng. He knows what's happening up at Moonlight. He's going to bring Gurkhas up here tomorrow to arrest us all.' I hated having to say it so baldly, and I searched Denis's face, looking for the hurt and anger he must feel because I had found him out.

But he just smiled and put a hand on my brow. ‘Poor little thing. I think you might have a temperature. Let's get you straight to bed.'

‘Denis,' I said as forcefully as I could. ‘They know you're a Communist.
I
know you're a Communist. I saw you talking to Chin Peng last night. I heard you talking to Chin Peng.'

Denis led me across to the bed and took my nightgown from under the pillow, thrusting it into my arms. ‘We'll talk tomorrow,' he said firmly. ‘Now be a good little girl and pop into bed.' Denis could employ a particularly infuriating tone on occasions such as this, and I stamped my foot.

‘I am not going to bed until we talk about this,' I said. ‘For Heaven's sake – we have got to decide what we're going to do tomorrow. What we're going
to do with the children. We can't take them into the jungle with us.' I had it firmly in my mind that we would have to go down the Sakai trail to Krani Hondai's village. Long, desperate years in the jungle stretched ahead, with no end in sight. But it would be better than seeing Denis dragged off. And then shot, as Heenan had been shot.

‘The children can go to the Battens,' I said. ‘We can leave a letter for the soldiers. I know Aunt Batten will have them . . .'

Denis sighed. ‘We are not going into the jungle, Norma.' He sat down on the side of the bed and patted the spot beside him. I sat down like an obedient schoolgirl.

‘I'm not going to talk about Chin Peng tonight,' he said. ‘But we will talk about all that later, I promise you. As for running off into the ulu because Malcolm Bryant is going to trot up here with his Gurkhas, you can forget it. We've got absolutely no reason to run away from anyone.' His face was now deadly serious, and immediately I felt the fire of panic inside me banking down. It was the measure of the trust I had in this man that despite everything, despite the patent evidence of his guilt, I could still believe in him.

‘What are we going to do?'

I asked. ‘We are going to bed.'

It was inevitable that I would dream that night, and dream I did. I was in the strangest jungle I had ever seen, with pot plants and waiters amidst the lush foliage. There were tigers, and men in evening dress, and Chin Peng was trying to explain something to me but I didn't want to listen. ‘He is a Communist,' Chin Peng said finally. ‘He has been a Communist since he was a schoolboy. That's why they will have to shoot him. They don't want one of their own fighting against them.'

I woke up to hear gentle rain splashing on the balcony. The room was pitch dark, the moon obviously obscured by cloud, and I reached instinctively for Denis. He was awake too, and we turned towards each other and nestled in each other's arms.

‘Are you a Communist?' I asked.

‘I wish I were,' Denis said. ‘Or rather, I wish I could believe in something so completely that it made life simple. But I can't.'

I dozed and dreamed again, this time a friendly dream. We were in the bamboo cottage down in the Telom Valley, listening to rain on the atap roof.
But we were not alone. The children were there, and Ah Khow popped his head in too see that everything was all right.

A hundred miles away, the same rain that was falling on Starlight was falling on the manager's bungalow at the derelict gold mine at Kuala Rau. Catherine Koh heard it, lying in bed beside Wu Sing. But as commander of the 6th Tiger Regiment of the Malayan Races Liberation Army, it meant more to Catherine than it did to me. It meant that the sentries she had posted to guard her camp would not be at their posts but in their bamboo sleeping huts, probably asleep. More importantly, it meant that the detachment she had posted five miles away on the junction with the Kuala Lipis–Bentong road could not warn her of an approaching enemy. They had no radios, only flares, and flares would be blotted out by the downpour.

Some instinct made her get up. She did so quietly, so as not to disturb the man sleeping beside her, and as she shrugged herself into her khaki uniform she stared down at his face.

She loved Wu Sing, but had never told him so. Perhaps because it was not the correct thing for a Communist leader to say to her deputy. Perhaps because there was no need to say it. She had demonstrated her love for him in a thousand ways, as he had demonstrated his love for her.

But this morning, in the murky light of a monsoonal dawn, she felt she wanted to say the words.

‘Wake up, Wu Sing,' she said so softly that he would not hear. ‘I love you, comrade. Did you hear what I said, Wu Sing? I love you.'

Wu Sing stirred, almost as if he had heard the words she breathed, and then he turned on his left side, his right arm reaching out for her in his sleep.

Catherine took up her submachine-gun and checked that it was loaded. There was a silence beneath the sound of beating rain that worried her. At dawn the jungle was usually alive with birdlife, even in the rain. Today the bird calls were absent.

It could mean anything. A predator in the jungle: a tiger, or a panther. Perhaps even a sun bear, one of the mountain bears that sometimes penetrated this far down from the Main Range. But whatever it was, it had to be investigated.

Catherine stepped out of the bungalow and surveyed the scene with wide, clear eyes. The bare yellow tailing dumps with their scattering of weeds. The row of bamboo huts where her soldiers slept. The rusting lumps
of machinery from the days Kuala Rau had been a working gold mine. And around it all the heavy presence of the jungle, almost black behind the curtain of falling rain.

Her eyes went automatically to the road that ran back through the jungle to Kampong Rau and ultimately to civilisation, and for just a second she wished she and Wu Sing might take it, and run away to the sort of life she had once known. A vivid picture came to her mind of her uncle's house in Bukit Timah, full of people, full of laughter, full of music because Koh Soong loved the banjo. And then she remembered Robert, and April, and why she was here, and gripped her Sten gun so tightly that it hurt.

At first she walked through the rain briskly, without purpose, keen to get back to bed. Then she squared her shoulders. She had got up for a reason, she told herself. To make sure her Tiger Regiment was safe in its jungle hideaway. She decided that she would walk to the kampong and wake up the sentries she was sure were fast asleep. The rain pelted down, making her hair look like a black cape about her shoulder.

She had gone perhaps a hundred yards when she heard the first sound. It was soft and some way in front of her, probably half a mile or so, which would put it near the kampong. She tried to work out what it might have been but couldn't. Perhaps it had been metallic. A village bicycle falling over, or one of her men adjusting his weapon.

The second time she heard the sound there was no mistake. It was the sound of something heavy being dragged across a metal surface. She knew of no such surface in Kampong Rau.

She was close to the kampong now, far from her troops back at the mine, and seriously worried. It had dawned on her that the sound could have been the sound of a truck being unloaded, which would mean that there were British troops in the kampong. Her heart began to thump, but she kept moving forward, slowly now, with extreme caution.

She had to know who, or what, had made that sound.

And then she heard another sound: the squelch of footsteps in the mud. Instinctively, she plunged into the thick jungle beside the road and flung herself flat, her Sten gun protruding in front of her. Almost immediately they came into sight through the curtain of rain: British soldiers advancing in a silent double line toward the mine.

She had a number of options. She could lie where she was, and avoid the ambush altogether. But that was not really an option at all because the
British would catch her people unprepared and kill the lot. Including Wu Sing. Her second option was to wait until the soldiers had passed, then alert her people with her whistle. They would have a chance, and so would she. The third option would be to open fire when the British came abreast. That way she would kill several of them before she herself was killed, and at the same time alert her troops. In the bad old days that would have been her choice, but not today.

Because now she loved Wu Sing.

She felt for the whistle on its cord around her neck, waiting for the soldiers to pass. She wondered who had betrayed them, and thought it could only be Chin Peng. It suddenly seemed clear to her: he was betraying them all, one by one, the very best of his fighters. Chin Peng was a traitor! The thought flared in her mind, distracting her.

And then she saw Wu Sing, ambling down the road, peering shortsightedly at the men advancing towards him through the rain. Clearly he had discovered her absence and come after her, as was his way. The leading British soldier dropped to one knee, his Sten gun aimed at Wu Sing's midriff, and Catherine saw him disengage the safety-catch.

Wu Sing ambled on, oblivious to the danger. He really was a rotten soldier.

Catherine stepped onto the road, her submachine-gun chattering, and all hell broke loose. She shot two men, the only casualties ever suffered by Ferret Force, the crack British deep jungle penetration unit. Then she died, hit by sixteen bullets to the head and upper body. Wu Sing charged like a madman, but he had forgotten to unclip his safety-catch and he was cut down before he had taken half a dozen steps, falling just before he reached Catherine.

They died together on the muddy road at Kuala Rau. Wu Sing, whose poetry is still read in the Chinese schools in Singapore, and Xiao Lao Hu, ‘Little Tiger', who despite everything is still revered as a hero for her resistance against the Japanese.