In the Mouth of the Tiger (68 page)

One morning Margaret called round with her two boys in tow, dressed for town and with a frown of concentration on her face. ‘Alec and I had a talk last night,' she said firmly, in her ‘no nonsense' tone, ‘about the need to get the children out of Singapore while we can. We decided that I should take Mark and Rory out on the
Duchess of Bedford
, which is leaving tomorrow. Apparently there are places for nine hundred people, so I'm going to go down to get our tickets straight away. But I'm not going unless you come with us.'

I smiled at Margaret and shook my head. ‘I think you are doing the right thing,' I said. ‘I really do. But Denis and I have decided to stick it out.'

Margaret sat down in the chair opposite me. ‘I don't understand why Denis wants you to stay,' she said with sudden venom. ‘I know he loves you. I know he cares. But you can't help by staying here, Norma, and I don't know why he wants you to. And you have responsibilities. To Tony and Bobby, and to the baby you are carrying. And to yourself, for heaven's sake. You know what the Japs will do when they get here. They'll kill you and the children in the most horrible way. They were unspeakably cruel when they took Hong Kong – and when they took Penang. I don't think they are really human. They're monsters. Does Denis really want you all to be at their mercy?' Margaret suddenly put her hand over her mouth, aware that the children were listening wide-eyed. ‘I'm sorry, Norma,' she said. ‘I'm a bit overwrought.'

I shook my head, smiling. ‘You don't understand, Margaret,' I said quietly. ‘I'm not staying because Denis wants me to. I'm staying because
I
want to stay. I know things look black at the moment but I really do think we can pull through.'

‘What are the Japanese going to do if they come here?' Tony asked seriously, and I hoisted him on my lap.

‘They won't come to Whitelawns,' I said. ‘We won't let them.'

‘We'll kill them if they try,' Bobby said with satisfaction. ‘Daddy has a gun. It's in the cupboard. It's a real gun that kills people.'

‘Don't you dare touch it,' I said with mock anger, happy to change the subject. ‘Please promise me you won't ever touch it.' I turned to Margaret. ‘I really do appreciate the way you care. It is so sweet of you to worry about us.'

‘We've been through so much together,' Margaret said. ‘We are the best friends in the world, aren't we? It just seems so awful, me going off and leaving you behind. Her voice turned wistful. ‘Please come with me down to Agency House, Norma. Even if you just get tickets and never use them. It'll give you a chance to change your mind if you do decide to come with us.'

‘I couldn't take tickets I didn't intend to use,' I said softly. ‘Too many people are after them. But you really should go in as early as possible, Margaret. There's an awfully long queue out there, and you don't want to be still there when the lunchtime raid is on, do you? Why not leave the boys with me?'

‘I think I have to take the boys with me,' Margaret said getting up. ‘I don't think they'll give me tickets for them unless they're with me.' She gave me one last look of appeal. ‘Please won't you change your mind?'

Denis came home early that afternoon and we drove over to visit friends who lived out on the Serangoon road. Jock Gilmore had been a customs officer who had lasted only one winter in Scotland after retirement before returning to the warmth of Malaya, and he and Georgette had built a modern-style bungalow overlooking the Johore Straits. We parked under a grove of casuarina trees and crunched up to the house across the pebble turning circle. I couldn't see a car and it was so quiet that for a moment I thought they might have left on one of yesterday's evacuation ships. It was the nature of life on Singapore at this time that one never knew whether one's friends had left or not. Departure was often a spur-of-the-moment thing, a matter of jumping on a decent ship when an opportunity presented itself.

‘Come in, come in, come in!' boomed Jock, suddenly emerging from the shadows of the verandah with a cumbersome elephant gun under one arm. He looked down and smiled apologetically. ‘Sorry about the hardware, but the Army came around this morning warning us that there are fifth columnists in this area, preparing the ground for a Jap invasion.' The Gilmores' bungalow
was on a deserted stretch of Singapore's north-east coast, overlooking the island of Pulau Ubin. Beyond the island there loomed the hills of Malaya, a long blue line half-hidden in the afternoon haze. If the Japanese were not there already, they soon would be.

We had tea on the verandah, Georgette fussing with scones and cake, Jock lounging back in his cane chair puffing his pipe and telling stories from his years in the FMS Customs Service. He was a roly-poly man with twinkling blue eyes and a halo of white hair around his ruddy face. ‘Pulau Ubin,' he said gesturing towards the island with his pipe. ‘I could tell you a tale or two about that island.'

Denis looked surreptitiously at his watch. He and Jock went back a long way, to when Denis had first arrived in Malaya and Jock had been something of a mentor. Normally when we got together it would be a time for stories of Jock's earliest days in the colony, of the halcyon days before the Great War. But these weren't normal times, and I shared Denis's itch to get back home. This was a duty call, to friends stuck out in one of Singapore Island's remotest corners.

‘Tell us about Pulau Ubin,' I said. ‘But then we'll have to make a move, Jock. I'm always a little worried about the boys when we're away.'

Jock filled his pipe. ‘There's a house on one of its islets built by opium money,' he said. ‘A lovely place, built in the Tudor style, with rustic bricks and imported leaded windows, and false chimneys to make it look homely. It was built by a man from the Customs service. Peter Durham, as fine and friendly a man as you could wish to meet.'

‘How did he get mixed up in opium?' I asked. Denis was looking a little bored and I suspected he knew the story.

‘He was great friends with a Chinese towkey, a man of his own age called Ah Chong. They met under extraordinary circumstances. There was a storm and Ah Chong's house was struck by lightning and burnt down. Peter lived next door, and rescued the whole family, dashing into the house time after time to pull out people overcome by the smoke. To cut a long story short, Peter and Ah Chong became the best of friends, and one day Ah Chong gave Peter some advice. He said that every successful Chinese merchant allowed himself one illegal act to get himself started. Just one – and then he had to become an honourable man or he was letting the side down. The way Ah Chong put it, this one illegal act broke the constraints that keep all normal people comparatively poor all their lives. It gave one the money to get started.'

‘Sounds a little bit like special pleading,' I said.

‘Be that as it may, the thought stuck with Peter. He became obsessed with it. So when he was offered a bribe – a very large bribe – to turn a blind eye on a shipload of opium, he accepted. The bribe was duly paid into his account and Peter turned to his friend Ah Chong for advice on what to do next. Ah Chong told him to buy a shipload of tinned food that was en route to Singapore from San Francisco. The merchant who had ordered the stuff was facing bankruptcy if he couldn't raise a certain sum in connection with another deal he was involved in. The price was a good one and if Peter had taken Ah Chong's advice he would have made a small but tidy profit. More importantly, it would have set him on his way to becoming a proper merchant.'

Jock's pipe had gone out, and when he paused to get it alight again I saw Denis shifting impatiently in his chair, keen to be up and away. But I was now interested in the story. ‘Why didn't Peter do as Ah Chong had suggested?' I asked.

‘Peter was a dreamer,' Jock said. ‘And his favourite dream was to build a mansion on his own island. There was an islet for sale just off Pulau Ubin at the time, and Peter bought it. And spent the next five years building one of the finest houses in Malaya. Of course, his project caught the official eye. How, they asked, could a humble Customs officer afford such a lavish home on his own private island?'

‘So they caught him?' I asked.

‘They arrested him one week after he moved into the place. The house has been empty for ten years now. The garden is full of lallang, bats have made their homes in all the rooms, and most of the windows are broken. But from a distance it still looks quite marvellous. Like some Tudor manor house back home in England.'

On the drive home I wondered why the story had affected me so powerfully. Perhaps because it made the point that while a businessman, a towkey, might be able to build an empire on the shaky foundations of something illegal, a dreamer could not. A dream is too fragile to rest on anything but firm foundations. A dream achieved by sleight of hand or deception was no more than an illusion. A castle in the air.

We were nearly home when we saw smoke rising above the coconut trees, and my heart leapt into my mouth. We had heard the sirens and the dull concussion of the bombs five miles away, but we'd had no idea the raid had been so close to Changi.

‘Is it Whitelawns?' I asked, my throat suddenly so tight I had to squeeze the words out. Denis didn't answer, but the car leapt forward, the engine racing. The next few minutes were some of the longest I have ever experienced. The sky was darkening with the evening so it became harder and harder to work out exactly where the smoke was coming from. But it was clear that it was coming from the general area of Whitelawns, and when I glanced at Denis's face it was a rictus of concern, the lips drawn back in a snarl, the eyes staring forward through the tiny windscreen.

Then we were on Tanah Merah Besar Road, the car kicking up red dust as it bucked and swayed over the laterite surface. We would have been a mile from Whitelawns when I saw the planes, three Japanese Zeros banking in tight formation low above the palms, long lines of tracer flickering from their machine-guns. We didn't hesitate but plunged on, roaring into a depression, screaming out the other side, all four wheels leaving the road as we topped a rise – and then there was Whitelawns, untouched, peaceful amongst its gardens.

But the Deans' home was engulfed in flames, a huge fire that seemed to swell up even as we looked. Then a fireball – a gout of naked flame fifty feet tall – rolled up into the sky, its brightness blinding us even though we were a quarter of a mile away.

The car had stopped and we were outside, Denis screaming at me and pointing behind me to our air-raid shelter. But I had seen the Deans' car in the driveway and I knew Margaret and the children were inside. Nothing on earth would stop me running with Denis towards the conflagration.

It was quite useless, of course. The heat was so terrific that I felt the hair on my head frizzling when we were still a hundred yards away, and then the air was too hot to breathe and we turned away involuntarily, retching and gasping desperately for oxygen.

We heard the Zeros making another run at the house, their guns hardly audible above the roar of the flames, but for long seconds neither of us could move. We just stood there, clinging to each other, shaking and crying as clouds of glittering cinders swept over us. And then we were stumbling back from the intolerable heat, stumbling and then running hard towards our air-raid shelter: the thought had struck us simultaneously that the boys might have been over at the Deans'. They often were at this time of the day. After they had been showered and changed, Agatha and Christine would often allow then a half-hour to play with their friends before bed.

But they were in the air-raid shelter, each being hugged by his nurse, Bobby with his eyes shut and his hands over his ears to keep out the noise, Tony looking up at us wide-eyed. ‘Are Mark and Rory dead?' he asked quietly. ‘Their house was blown up, wasn't it?'

Chapter Twenty-Five

T
he fire brigade from Changi arrived well after dark, when the fire was no more than a glowing mass of embers. They had been busy elsewhere, of course, and the Deans' fire had been a low priority: even if they had arrived earlier they could have done nothing. But it was comforting to have them finally turn up, tape off the site with their official-looking red fire brigade tape, and take charge looking for the bodies. They found them immediately, in the air-raid shelter, which had collapsed under a direct hit. ‘They would have been dead by the time the fire started,' the brigade captain said kindly. ‘They would have felt nothing once the earth caved in on them. The bodies have not been badly damaged – they are quite presentable.' He would have seen hundreds of bodies over the past weeks and by now could say such things almost without emotion.

They laid the bodies out on our side lawn and covered them with sheets. There was Margaret, the two boys, and the amah, all looking as if they were merely asleep in the harsh light of emergency lanterns. Alec was missing. He was obviously on duty at the Seletar Airfield, and Denis immediately put on his uniform and set off in the Marvelette to break the awful news.

Margaret had called in to Whitelawns after her trip to town and left me a note and a bunch of flowers from her garden. It was so like her. How often in the past had I returned home from a trip, or a walk, or a ride, to see a small bunch of flowers on the hall table and a note in her characteristic sprawling hand: ‘Come over for cards – see you at 8?' or ‘Taken the boys into Changi. Love M.'

This time the note was slightly longer: ‘I couldn't leave you to face the Japs alone, my dear. Came to my senses standing in the queue and came straight home. We'll see this business through together. Love M.'

Of course I couldn't sleep that night. I lay through the long, silent marches of the hours staring into blackness. Replaying my last conversation with Margaret over and over in my mind, grieving that I hadn't said or done things differently. Perhaps if I had gone with her into Cluny, even if only to give her company, things might have been different.