In the Mouth of the Tiger (109 page)

Denis half-lifted his glass, then let his hand drop. ‘Do you mind not?' he asked. ‘To be perfectly frank, Norma, I'm not proud of what I did. In fact I rather think that what I did was wrong.'

There was a moment of silence, a moment that grew and grew until it engulfed us. It was so still that I could hear sounds from the restaurant below us, the clink of glass and cutlery, the gentle hum of conversation, the tinkle of a laugh. I wanted to break the silence, to say something positive, but nothing came to me however hard I tried. Because, in my heart of hearts, I agreed with Denis completely. Operation Maugham may have saved Malaya from Communism, but it had also led directly to the death of countless innocents, including many of our dearest friends. And what victory could possibly be worth that price? A Japanese saying came into my mind: On the scales of Heaven, the weight of a single human life is heavier than the weight of the whole world.

I
had
to say something, and finally I found my voice. ‘You did your duty,' I said as forthrightly as I could. ‘You can't do much wrong by doing your duty.'

‘I think you can,' Denis said. ‘I think sometimes you can invest too
much in an abstract idea, and forget your duty as a human being.' He paused a moment, frowning down at his untouched champagne. ‘I was angry after the war, you know. Dreadfully angry. At the cruelty and unfairness of it all. All I wanted to do was to strike back somehow. I can see now that in that state of mind it was all too easy to convince myself that the ends in this business justified the means.'

I came around the table and put my arms around him. ‘I knew you weren't yourself,' I said. ‘At times you almost seemed a stranger. A very angry stranger. I was frightened that the war might have stolen away your soul. But it hasn't. You are you again, and I love you more than ever.'

We left Cameron Highlands the next day, just as the morning mist was lifting and the sun was rising behind Mount Brinchang. There had been no ambushes on the Tappah road for over a week so we didn't wait for the daily convoy but drove down by ourselves, as we had before. This time I felt no apprehension at all, but sat back and enjoyed the cold, sharp air and our silent speed through the green jungle. We reached Tappah at nine o'clock and stopped for petrol and ‘provisions' for the children (bulls-eyes and toffee, and cold bottles of Coca-Cola), and then we were off again, driving north through the lowland heat and the sameness of grey, regimented rubber trees.

And then it happened, as it had happened so often in my worst imaginings. Denis began to slow the car and I glanced up to see logs drawn across the road. Simultaneously there was a rattle of gunfire and a sharp ‘clang!' as a bullet struck the right front mudguard. I wanted to scream but knew I mustn't for the childrens' sake, and then Denis was out of the car and strolling forward, shouting in Cantonese.

The shooting stopped, and Denis paused and took out his silver cigarette case, lighting up in the stippled shadow of the rubber trees as if he were in the smoking room at the Ritz. I think it must have been amazement more than anything else that stayed the Communists' hands.

Denis took a long draw, and then began again, his Cantonese crisp and certain even to my untrained ear. There was one answering shout, then Denis climbed back into the car. Two men ran out from the shadows between the trees and dragged the logs aside, and we were through, the car purring like a sewing machine, the children shouting for an explanation.

The whole business had lasted less than a minute.

I turned around to the children and stilled their clamour with a hand. ‘Daddy told the bandits to go away or he would set you lot on them,' I said.
‘They ran away like rabbits.' I said that despite the scream I was holding in, and the vision of all five of us lying dead in the wreckage of the Wolseley still before my eyes. But of course it all came out a little later, the shock and the stifled anguish. First the shaking, then the tears. We didn't stop – we dared not stop – but as the children dozed in the back seat Denis hugged me close with his left arm and promised me so much. That I'd never again hear the sharp, flat crack of a gun aimed my way. That never again would I fear for all our lives. That from now on everything would be a bed of roses.

Impossible promises, and of course he couldn't keep them.

I don't know what saved us from being killed on that lonely road that day. Perhaps it was something that Denis said. Perhaps the Communists took pity on us, because it is now known that about that time Chin Peng issued a general order not to target innocent families. Or perhaps the ambush party simply decided to wait for a more important target.

But it was a miracle nevertheless, and I give the credit to our Talisman, Ah Khow, whose magic I like to think lingered on to protect us one last time.

We sailed for England a week later from Penang.

As the MV
Ruys
threaded its way through the ships lying in the Penang Roads, I stood by the rail with Denis, watching the outline of the island merge with the hills of Kedah on the mainland. It was a poignant moment. The first memories I have are of Penang. It is where I ran wild as a child, and where Mother abandoned me after Robbie's death. It was where I had grown up, from a gangling, uncertain schoolgirl to the person I had become. It was where I had met Denis for the first time, in a dream, when I lived in a tall, dark house on Argyll Road.

Denis put his arm around me. He was sharing my thoughts, as people often do when they love each other. ‘It's important to me, too,' he said. ‘My first sight of Malaya was of Penang. They called it the Pearl of the Orient, and when I saw it for the first time from the deck of the old
Kalian
it looked just like a pearl, turned pink by the rising sun. When we got closer I saw the beaches and the coconut trees, and people moving about with the lazy grace of the Orient. You would have been there then, of course. Funny, isn't it? We'd spent our lives half a world apart but on that day, my first in Malaya, we were as close as dammit. Right from the beginning, someone up there had their eye on us.'

The light was fading before we left the rail, and as I turned away from the darkening shore I threw a kiss at all those we were leaving behind. The living and the dead.

Tim Featherstone was not amongst the dead. A couple of days before we sailed I had received the most extraordinary news from the Alexandra Hospital in Singapore. Tim had woken up from his coma, simply opening his eyes one morning while the nurses were washing him and staring at them unblinking as if to say: ‘What on earth are you all doing?' He had been able to talk after a fashion before the day was over, and the chances of a full recovery were apparently very good. ‘He doesn't remember a thing about what happened at Bentong,' the ward sister told me over the phone. ‘But he does know that his wife and the twins are dead. It knocked him flat for a while, as you can imagine, but he rallied well and he's now very positive. Dunlops have been terrific, and Tim's even talking about going back to Bentong.' Tim's mother had come out to Singapore a month before, and had sat at his bedside day after day, talking to him, encouraging him, even scolding him. I am quite sure it was her faith and her determination that reached out to Tim in his darkness and pulled him back into the light.

I was happy that Tim had pulled through, and happier still that he was being so positive and looking to the future. It meant that a little bit of the Malaya in which I had grown up still survived, and it also showed that however capricious fate might be, the human spirit could always triumph.

The
Ruys
docked at Tilbury on a cold, overcast morning about a week before Christmas 1948. Dirty grey snow was falling on the decks and on the drab wharves alongside, and my excitement at arriving was tempered by the realisation that I was going to have to adjust to a whole new world. I wrapped up warmly in my brand new camel-hair coat, pulled on my brand new fur gloves, wrapped my brand new cashmere shawl about my shoulders and ventured out on deck. The people waiting on the wharf looked pinched and cold and the cars lined up behind them old and battered. There were gaps in the Tilbury skyline where bombed buildings had not yet been replaced. I shivered, gripped by a sudden, powerful yearning for the warmth and colour of Malaya.

But then I remembered that this was where Elizabeth the First had rallied her troops in the face of the Spanish Armada, and I stuck out my chin determinedly. ‘Not very prepossessing, I grant you,' Denis said, coming up
behind me. ‘But there's more to England than a set of docks in the snow, I assure you.'

There
was
more to England than a set of docks in the snow, and I began to find that other England later in the day. We had booked into one of London's best hotels and I remember our arrival as if it were yesterday: the taxi dropping us off at the revolving front door, the plush lobby with its warmth and smell of leather and beeswaxed timber, and the uniformed bellboy who escorted us to our rooms. Once we'd unpacked we went for a walk. Snow was falling on the streets, colourful tinsel adorned the lamp posts and and there were Christmas trees in all the shop windows. We went as far as Buckingham Palace, and came back through Green Park, where the ponds were frozen and there were Christmas lights strung amongst the tracery of winter trees. Even the children, cynical little savages though they might have been, were impressed and took in everything around them with wide-eyed wonder. It must have seemed a bit like fairyland to them, I supposed. To them? It was a bit like fairyland to me, too: Robbie had given me A. A. Milne and J. M. Barrie to read as a child, and this was magic territory for me as well.

We had tea and cakes in the downstairs tearoom at Fortnum & Masons before returning to the warm embrace of our hotel. As we entered the subdued glitter of the lobby I gripped Denis's hand. ‘I think I'm going to be very happy here.'

‘You'd be happy wherever you were,' Denis drawled. ‘I suspect you'd be perfectly happy in the wastes of Siberia. That's why I love you so much. You're so easy to please.'

We had worked out a rough plan of campaign: spend Christmas in London while the Wolseley was offloaded, then set off for a tour through the countryside while deciding where we were going to settle. Denis favoured somewhere close to the city, perhaps Kent or Surrey, while my preference – no doubt influenced by too much Daphne du Maurier – was for somewhere further west. Devon or Somerset, perhaps even Cornwall. We spent hours during those first few days in the Regents Palace Hotel with maps spread out on our bed and estate agents' lists on our laps. The whole of England was our oyster, and we were determined to take our time making up our minds.

We had never spent Christmas in a hotel and I had feared that the children might feel deprived, but in the event we had a perfectly happy day. We unwrapped presents in the children's room, and walked up to Hyde Park to hear the carols and to watch the buskers – jugglers and acrobats, clowns and
magicians – performing under a gentle sprinkling of snow. Then a magnificent Christmas dinner in the dining room, followed by the traditional Christmas message from the King, relayed by loudspeakers in the lounge.

We began our house-hunting in earnest a few days later. We were almost certain that we didn't want a house in London itself, but to be completely sure we arranged to see a few properties in the Kensington Park area. A smart young man with Italian shoes picked us up and drove us to the first one, a three-storey townhouse of distinctly Georgian style.

‘The owner is only asking eight thousand,' the young man said, as if eight thousand pounds sterling was a mere bagatelle. ‘That's very good value in these times. The London market has been rather flat since the war but now it's beginning to bubble. You would be wise to get in as quickly as you can.'

It may have been a very fashionable townhouse in a very fashionable area, but we found it dark and the bedrooms poky, and when we emerged Denis gave me a small, wry grin. ‘We'll look at one more place,' he said, ‘then I vote we write London off.'

The next place was rather nice. It had an unassuming front to Victoria Road, but behind its modest exterior there was space, and light, and a pleasant air of subdued opulence. It had a large garden out the back, with mature elm trees impressive even in winter, and plenty of lawn for the children to play rambunctious games. But easily its best feature was the staircase, which swept up from the marble hall to serve two spacious landings. Ancestral portraits in ornate gilt frames lined the staircase, proud emblems of an old and noble house.

‘I know it's traditional to have one's home lined with portraits,' I said to the young man flippantly. ‘But the best Denis and I could do would be to hang up a couple of snaps from the Box Brownie.' It was perhaps a silly thing to say, but I didn't realise then that there is a particular type of English snob against whom one can never afford to let down one's guard.

The young man eyed me with contempt. ‘
My
people have family portraits on the walls of our place in Norfolk just like these. I thought most people did.' He suddenly looked resentful, almost sullen. ‘It's all wrong. Why the Hell am
I
showing
you
around?'

This was so breathtakingly rude that I was speechless for a second. Denis had gone on ahead and hadn't heard, which left things up to me. So I reached out and took hold of the young man's collar, forcing him to face me. ‘In a hundred years' time some silly young man in foreign shoes will be looking up
at paintings just like these, but they will be of my husband and me. I think it's better to be the founders of a great house rather than the degenerate product of one, don't you?'

We didn't look at any more places in London. London was not for us. We wanted the open countryside where the air was fresh and one could keep a horse or two, and walk muddy lanes with a dog. That afternoon our county maps were out again and we began to plan our trip in earnest.