The Red Pavilion (9 page)

‘But at least you
know
.’ She gritted her teeth for a second to stay the tears, lifting her chin as she had been taught. Shoulders back, chin up, don’t slouch. She remembered being stood in the school gymnasium, her shoulder blades and the small of her back pressed against the wall, to teach her deportment. ‘Are you a regular soldier?’ she asked.

‘No, just your run-of-the-mill conscript.’ He tossed the empty glass in the air and caught it. ‘But I wish our drill sergeant at the Guards’ depot could hear you ask me. He used to say I was “as upright as the bleeding Tower of Pisa!”’

The imitation made her laugh. Then she heard herself say, ‘I think my father’s dead. Now I do think he’s dead. It’s just not knowing where he is, what happened to him.’

He gave her time to take control again. ‘He was in the war, I expect.’

‘He was in the navy. He was always away, always in danger — but I thought when the war was over ... ’ She looked around as if scanning not just the lounge but the whole terrorised countryside. ‘But we’ve just swopped one battle for another.’

‘That was another thing my mother took so hard, my being sent out to a battle area when her husband and first son had fought all through until 1945. She wrote to her Member of Parliament.’

‘Did she have an answer?’

‘He came to Southampton to see the troop ship off.’

They both laughed. Looking in each other’s eyes they saw the rueful understanding and laughed again but softer, like echoes of people in old age talking of lost loves.

The sound was that of a man presented with an intriguing emotional problem he wanted to solve, but was totally unsure how to tackle it.

Liz studied him as he now tossed the glass in a series of rapid arcs from hand to hand, thinking of the sketch she had made of him. How strange that
he
should come to Rinsey! She weighed what she now knew, weighing the sadness in his life with her impression, and yet there was still more, some quality that she could not name in words or drawings — not yet, anyway. She felt she might well have echoed his ‘Hmm’ for she was just as fascinated.

He held the glass suddenly still and caught her studying him. They both smiled again, very carefully.

‘I think I can hear your mother coming.’ He rose to his feet and, backing away, looked once more a young, tall, awkward soldier in jungle green. Desolate was how
she
felt as he moved away towards the door.

Blanche came in quickly, anxiety making her forgetful of her own exhaustion. She noted the glass in the young man’s hand and the complete lack of vagueness in her daughter’s face. ‘No wonder you felt faint going off after Chemor! What did that achieve?’

*

All the whole expedition achieved was related to the police inspector from Ipoh and his sergeant early the next morning. Liz was surprised when all those who had visited the fails, and Alan Cresswell, were interviewed separately by Inspector Aba. ‘As if we’re suspects,’ she complained.

After her interview she admitted to herself she had told far more about the missing Josef than she would had her mother been present, even going back to her first sighting of him coming through the back garden.

Chemor also spent a long time with the police and afterwards led them off through the plantation. She was helping her mother prepare a curry tiffin for everyone when they returned by the back way.

‘The inspector’s uniform looks a bit worse for wear.’ She drew her mother’s attention to the window.

They watched as George joined the police and Chemor. A serious conference seemed to be developing and the guardsman was beckoned over.

Liz wondered about going out to join them, but judged it looked like a closed circle of men making decisions.

‘Men only, I think,’ Blanche said, as if reaching the same conclusion.

‘And it’s not about where the perimeter wire is going to be,’ Liz was certain. ‘They look as if they’ve got their hands tied to their sides, they’re keeping them so still!’

‘They know we’re watching.’

The serious talk went on for some time, then the inspector seemed to reach some decision and all of them nodded.

‘That was unanimous, anyway,’ Blanche commented with dark irony.

‘I’ll go and see what they’re discussing.’

‘They’d stop. Just watch.’

The inspector stepped back as if leaving his final words for approval. George nodded several times and moved forward, hand outstretched as if ready to help. Instructions now from inspector to sergeant, who saluted his acceptance, then more tentatively to the soldier. He rubbed his chin speculatively, then seemed to make a suggestion that rather spoiled the momentum. The men went back to the circle. The inspector spoke rapidly again; George put his hand on the young man’s shoulder.

Liz saw Alan glance towards the kitchen window where they stood, then he made the dismissive open-handed gesture of one who has tried to help but has been turned down. She would ask him what it was all about. She was deciding to go and tell him about the spare charpoy in the old nursery at the first opportunity, as the inspector nodded himself away from the others and came towards the kitchen door.

‘Mrs Hammond.’ He bowed himself into the kitchen. ‘More men are being detailed to come immediately so we can make a thorough search both around the jeep and around your house.’ He paused, then pronounced in more serious and ponderous tones, ‘Also farther afield for the son of your former manager.’

‘What are you expecting to find?’ Blanche asked.

‘Well ... ’ The inspector paused to put his finger ends together as if steadying himself against this English mem and her disconcerting directness. ‘We cannot afford to overlook anything. Mr Harfield’s man found much on his own, so my trained men may find ... much more.’ He smiled disarmingly.

That afternoon there was a message from Bukit Kinta for George to return immediately — some difficulties with one of the dredgers.

‘Shall I try to ring back,’ Blanche asked.

‘No, I’d better go. It’s getting on for time and I’ve a mechanic whose favourite tool is a big hammer if I’m not there to restrain him.’

It seemed to Liz that hardly had the mine manager left Rinsey than his men digging holes for the fencing and lighting posts became severely hampered by the police, whose search was closing around the bungalow. Some of the officers were working slowly over the area just looking, others with stout bamboo poles prodding and poking the ground.

‘I wish they’d hurry up,’ Liz exclaimed, thinking she had spent most of her day watching men take decisions and do things, while she and her mother wandered around the bungalow from window to window, as if the mental seige they felt under also restricted them physically.

Blanche came to her side, inhaling on yet another cigarette. ‘Those poles!’ Liz exclaimed. ‘Is that all really necessary? What
are
they doing?’

‘I just know enough about gardening to know a cane goes into the ground much easier where it has been dug.’

She had hardly screwed out her cigarette in the ashtray on the kitchen windowsill, and Liz just begun to put together the possible implications of what her mother had said, when one of the men shouted. Those nearby hurried that way, then the inspector arrived at a run.

The two women watched as the inspector took a pole from his man and gently probed into the earth under the great tree.

In a curious kind of flashback it seemed to Liz she saw her father sitting under the tree, with herself as a child reaching up and begging to look at a sketch he had made of her as she sat at his feet. It was like looking into a picture containing a picture of the original and on the picture another representation of the same scene. She felt a strange conviction that if only her mind had been capacious enough to hold all the images together, it would have been possible to go back in time to the original, to that very time.

So was the image confirmation of the worst possible scenario? Never had she felt so vulnerable, so unprotected.

The kitchen window seemed suddenly like a proscenium arch, with overgrown lawn as theatre apron, the trees a backdrop with policemen and poles. Friendly guardsman entering and coming towards front stage, while lesser players entered stage left, carrying spades.

Chapter Eight

Some of the police had begun digging while others rigged tarpaulins. The very discretion of the screening sheets added to the anxiety. The noise of the spades and the quiet talk of the men went on, it seemed to Liz, endlessly.

Blanche went to the study at the far side of the bungalow where it was quiet. She sat at first looking haphazardly through the desk drawers. Liz stood and watched for a time, leaning in the doorway.

‘I’ll write to your aunt Ivy,’ her mother suddenly decided, pulling out air-mail notepaper. ‘I shall write what is happening now and ... ’ She paused, then added quickly, ‘add the result of the ... police activity. If necessary I’ll ask if she’ll go and see Wendy, take her home with her for a time.’

‘Good idea,’ Liz agreed huskily. ‘She’ll need some spoiling.’ Blanche’s sister, married but childless, had always been more like a second mother to the girls than an aunt. She left her mother writing with some degree of fevered concentration — while she seemed doomed to spend another day wandering aimlessly about.

A man emerged from the tarpaulins, his mouth and nose shrouded in a tightly knotted scarf. Without the slightest conscious intention she found herself outside and heading for the screens.

Someone called and she began to run.

She peered over: the police were in special overalls; the hole was deep — and the smell appalling. She registered no more as voices were raised in protest and arms waved her away. She turned, gasping, staggering into the path of the young guardsman hurrying to her side. They caught each other, but she snatched free to retch dryly. The smell felt lodged for ever in her throat. ‘I had to see if ... if there was anything to see. What have they found?’

His height made it possible for him to support her closely, tucking her under his arms as it were, then turning and walking her slowly away. ‘They won’t tell me, obviously, but something’s been buried quite deep there, by someone strong, according to Chemor. Look.’ He stopped and turned her round to look back at the scene. ‘Themor pointed out how the leaves on the big tree, there way above the tarpaulins, have died. He says it is because someone has cut the main roots. I understand he told them to dig there.’

The turn had lessened his supporting hold, and for a moment she wanted to lean back again just for the sheer comfort of a man’s strength. Pride made her resist the urge — he’d be thinking she did nothing but faint away. ‘I’m all right now,’ she said. Then, as she looked from tree to screens, either a breeze or her memory resurrected the smell. ‘No, I’m not.’

‘No,’ he endorsed and held her so firmly that even if she had fainted clean away, she would not have fallen. ‘I did suggest you and Mrs Hammond be taken back to Bukit Kinta until this was over and the fencing built. But they didn’t think you would go.’

That was a fair assumption, she thought, considering the performance her mother had put up at the Ipoh police station and the persistence they had shown in returning to Rinsey. ‘Not so sure today.’ She forced herself to smile up at him, she felt that wry quality of it on her lips, but saw understanding in his eyes, intense, total understanding. ‘I feel I wouldn’t mind running away for an hour or two.’

She felt the span and pressure of his fingers on her waist increase, comforting. ‘I don’t have to be on network call again until eighteen hundred hours,’ he said, then paused as they came to the front of the bungalow, ‘but unless we kidnap a police vehicle …

He felt her body straighten from him and tentatively he released her again. She had walked a few paces when a voice from the site of the digging was raised in a tone of alarm.

They both strained to hear. Another man pacified and ordered mildly, then the sound of the spades slicing into the ground was heard again.

The incident had caught Liz mid-stride and so she remained until it was over. Then a long shuddering groan escaped her and she grasped her head with both hands as if the thoughts inside might well burst it open.

Alan moved swiftly to hold on to her again as she screwed her fingers into her hair. He was alarmed by the violence of this grief, this biblical rending and tearing, afraid it might be doing her actual harm.

‘Please ... ’ As he restrained her, she gestured towards the plantation, beyond the shy, worried glances of the Malays digging out the post holes.

Alan took her gently forwards, both arms shielding and supporting, taking her into the trees, into the privacy of mazing trunks and patches of neglected undergrowth. When he would have stopped, she took the lead and kept walking, following a kind of path which had obviously been walked quite recently.

She walked quicker and quicker, like one trying to escape a nightmare. He went along with her, keeping pace, not attempting to hold her back. He was aware that this was unwise, this was terrorist country; he was supposed to be a soldier, a guardsman. He was aware that his rife was back by the transmitter — but army training was a veneer quickly bloomed by the present needs of this young lady, this girl, he found so disturbing.

If she had been a fellow student back at college, he admitted to himself that he would have pursued her, wooed her without mercy, never have taken no for an answer. But those had been mad days — free days after the war, when the lights had gone up and the lid had come off all the pent-up joyous emotions of the young. Then came conscription, his father dying and this new campaign.

‘It’s my father,’ she sobbed, as if the word had been plucked from his mind. ‘It is my father — that’s who they’re digging for ... who they’ll find.’ She caught her shoulder on protruding branches and her dress tore but she paid no heed, hurrying on until finally she could go no farther as they came to where waterfalls edged the rubber trees.

The unexpected change of terrain as well as the sheer beauty of the spot made him momentarily forget his charge until he saw she was running full tilt across to the edge of the rocks and the falls. He leaped after her, his heart pounding, convinced she intended to throw herself over.

‘My God!’ he panted, his forbearance banished now by fear, as he caught first her arm, then her shoulders, securing her, half holding, half shaking. She was limp under his hands, passive, a willing victim. ‘No, no,’ he told himself, ‘this is not right.’ He folded her close, one hand cupping and holding her head, gently trying to stay the shaking and the sobbing. All he could offer was a kind of paternal shushing, he could think of no comforting words. Nothing would alter the truth.

As she stood shuddering in his arms with her head pressed to his chest, she could hear and feel the great thudding of his heart. She realised how she must have frightened him, just as Wendy had frightened her parents so long ago in the past. She gave herself up to crying, for Wendy, for her mother, for herself — for the loss of her father.

This was the full time of mourning. She knew beyond any doubt the outcome of the search. Clinging desperately to this young man, she saw her tears make the jungle green of his shirt even darker. She remembered the clean-shirt smell of her father on Sunday mornings when she sat next to him in church. She remembered how white his handkerchiefs looked against his brown hands. She remembered him twirling her and Wendy round and round, one on each arm. She remembered how she and her father had mourned the passing of an old dog who on his last day had dug himself ever deeper into a hole under a japonica bush, waiting to die. He had known — as she knew now.

She thought how strange it was that the young man she had drawn as a figure symbolic of mourning held her now at this time.

He remembered he had held his mother like this when finally she had cried. His brother had been at home, but when she had seen him coming unexpectedly through the door on special leave, only then she had given way — sobbing as this girl was sobbing, realising the depths of loss.

He had to tighten his jaw and grind his teeth to stem his own emotions. He felt she sensed his emotion for she suddenly slackened the grip on his shirt, then spread her hands and pushed them flat on his chest as if trying to reassure herself, break herself of the habit of such clinging.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said between sobs, ‘hanging on your neck … ’

‘Don’t worry about it.’ In a less tense situation he might have quipped that he was enjoying it anyway. ‘You just hang on as long as you like.’

She lowered her face and leaned the top of her head against him, trying unsuccessfully to bring the crying under control.

He yearned to be able really to comfort her, to find the lotus and make her forget, then perhaps the amaranth and make her remember him for ever. He felt stirrings in his groin that he felt very uncalled for and ashamed of at that particular moment. He held her away a little. ‘Ssh!’ he breathed. ‘You’ll make yourself ill. That’s enough now.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated, as if his movement away confirmed she had taken too many liberties, and would have stepped away from him altogether had he not held her.

‘No, I’m sorry, I found you too disturbing to hold close any longer.’

She wiped her hands across her cheeks. ‘What, looking like this?’ Then she endeared herself to him more by offering him her hand. He reached for it and she drew him again to the edge and pointed out where her father’s car was. When he spotted it, he told her he had overheard the police inspector saying it would not be practical to raise it and there was nothing more to be learned from it anyway.

‘I suppose there’s so many Jap tanks lying about from the war, one more wrecked vehicle doesn’t matter much,’ he added.

‘No,’ she replied, so resignedly it made him feel heartsick. Holding her hand tight, he looked around with a deep sense of wonder at the jungle-clad hills, the steep ravine, the exotic birds and extravagant butterflies. ‘War in paradise,’ he said.

‘Love, too. Well, years ago,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know until yesterday that my parents used to come to these falls when they first came to live here. My mother showed the police a path down and under the falls — right down … ’

‘You must show me some time.’ He looked eagerly out over the expanse of jungle and waterfalls.

‘Why not now?’ she said and suddenly it seemed like something she should do — a kind of pilgrimage to a time when her parents were happy together, just the two of them, without children to distract their enjoyment, or war to tear them apart. The tears fell again, just flooding from her eyes, and she began to walk in front of him across the rock table so he could not see. ‘I’d be glad of some way to pass more time.’

He saw the sudden spring of grief again, but these tears fell more easily, and he wondered if she might have plumbed that awful first depth of mourning for her father — even without the final confirmation. He hoped so.

He allowed himself to be led until they came to the steep rocky flood-water course, then he went first, supporting her down.

She had been surprised how easy it was to remember the way, almost as if she had walked it many times over years instead of just once the day before. In front of her Alan slipped and for a moment, instead of supporting, nearly dragged her over into the final steep descent.

They both laughed with that topsy-turvy reaction to possible disaster people often have — then in the same instant both felt guilty and averted their eyes to the track.

The moment was quickly forgotten for Alan as he realised he could no longer see an obvious way. He was astonished when, taking the front again, she led him under the falls.

Liz noticed other things on this second visit, saw rocks set like a dry shelf where they could sit. She touched his arm and pointed rather than shout in his ear over the echoing roar of the water.

Rather like two people in a fantasy they sat down and stared at the endless sheet of living water before them.

‘My father sat here,’ she said quietly, knowing no one could hear, ‘and my mother. I feel him here now — I know he’s dead, and I feel his ... concern for us.’ She let the feeling run over her mind, unhindered by concepts of belief or unbelief, just knowing them as every rock and every bordering fern knew the rush of the waters.

After a time she turned to Alan and saw he had his head leaning back on the rock, looking up to the very apex above them where water leaped from rock at the top of the fall. His lips were moving too as if noise gave freedom to talk aloud to oneself, like ladies under hair dryers, she thought. After a few seconds he sensed her scrutiny and looked down at her.

‘What did you say?’ she asked close to his ear.

He shook his head but then cupped a hand to her ear. ‘I said if lovers had trysting places ... and we were lovers ... this would be ours.’

He felt her head nod against him and she said into his ear, ‘Yes, a very special place.’

A wonderland, he would have said, had it been just a meeting place for lovers and not mourners. He watched her looking all around and felt such a rush of affection he was sure she should have known, was surprised the force did not physically move her — but when she did turn back to him she smiled and nodded as if she had found some deep satisfaction, some calming influence there, while he felt he had come to grips with the very elements: bedrock, fire and water.

After a few more minutes he felt her shivering. He rose and indicated he thought they should go back. She nodded reluctantly.

The heat, the climb and the stifling humidity after the coolness beneath the water made conversation difficult, but even when they reached the top and paused to catch their breath they did not speak, though their silence was that of a couple with too much to say and no easy way to start.