The White Pearl (2 page)

‘I’m here,’ Connie squeezed her hand. ‘And your children are here.’

‘Listen, white lady.’

‘I’m listening.’ Her ear was almost brushing against the struggling lips and there was a long pause, during which the heat
of the day seemed to gather itself and launch an attack like a blow on the back of Connie’s neck. ‘I’m listening.’

‘I curse you. You family. You children. And you. I curse you all.’

Words sharp as a cobra’s bite, but Connie did not release her grip on the small hand. The blood-filled eyes opened wider,
flashed at her full of malice, and then abruptly closed. Her fingers grew limp.

‘No!’ Connie cried. ‘No, don’t go. Curse me again, curse me as much as you wish, call your evil spirits down on my head, but
don’t go.’

A policeman stepped into her field of vision. ‘Mrs Hadley, the ambulance is here. They’ll take over.’

Men in white uniforms gently moved Connie aside. She rose to her feet, tremors grinding up through her body and jamming her
mind. Soft voices spoke to her, careful hands guided her, treating her as if she were glass and might shatter. When she realised
she was being ushered off the street into the shade of a nearby building, she broke free and searched the crowd for the woman’s
son and daughter, but they had vanished.

‘Sit down, Mrs Hadley.’

‘Drink this, Mrs Hadley.’

‘You’ve had a nasty shock.’

‘It wasn’t your fault. We have witnesses.’

Policemen, with questions and notebooks, brandished their sympathetic smiles in her face and told her she could go home, they
would drive her home, but she shook her head.

‘No, thank you. I have to pick up my son from school.’

The building that had given her refuge was a British bank with thick stone walls to keep out the heat, and a vast, cooling
fan that stirred the leaden air with brisk efficiency in the small office where she was seated. The bank manager had a sunburned
bald head and a kind smile.

‘Take your time, my dear,’ he said. ‘Take all the time you need.’

She sat there alone, listening to the sounds in her head. The screech. The crack. The thud.

How do you tell your seven-year-old son that you have killed a woman in the street?

Connie’s fingers gripped the steering wheel, her knuckles chalk-white. She didn’t say anything at all in case the wrong words
spilled out of her dry mouth. Heavy insects blundered against the windscreen as she drove out of town with her son, Teddy,
on the front passenger seat, swinging his legs and chattering about the different colours of a python’s skin.

Did children in England talk of such things? How many told their mother, as Teddy did, that a king cobra could move as fast
as a galloping horse? Was this normal?

In Malaya, nothing was normal.

They were heading back home along the eight miles to the Hadley Estate. It was a vast tract of land that had been in the Hadley
family for three generations, hacked by hand out of the raw jungle at the end of the nineteenth century, and was now the largest
rubber plantation in the region, just to the north-east of Kuala Lumpur. It stretched in shimmering layers of dense green
for over five thousand acres towards mountains that reared up blue and hazy in the distance, and employed nearly seven hundred
labourers, a mongrel mix of Malays, Tamils and Chinese.

Nine years ago when Connie, full of youthful excitement, first stepped off the boat into the sweltering heat of Malaya, she
had been astounded not only by the size and lush extravagance of the beauty of the estate, but also by the power of an estate
owner – the
Tuan Besar
– over his work-force. It seemed to her that Nigel was like a god, a father, a judge, a bank
manager, a doctor and King Solomon all rolled into one. If he put a black mark against a labourer’s name, then that native
would find work nowhere else in the district, but if a man was a skilled rubber-tapper or a diligent finisher of the rubber
sheets in the packing sheds who buckled down to the tough discipline of plantation life, he was highly valued and treated
well.

Nigel knew nearly all his workmen by name. That fact alone had stuck in Connie’s mind, and impressed her enormously when he
had mentioned it as she danced in his arms to a slow foxtrot at the Dorchester Hotel in London. Out here in the tropics, swamped
by a never-ending tide of brown and yellow faces, she had found it even more incredible.

‘Why are you driving so slowly, Mummy?’ Her son’s voice was impatient.

‘I’m being careful, sweetheart.’

‘But it will take ages to get home.’

‘There’s no rush.’

Teddy swivelled to face her on the front seat of the Chrysler. ‘Yes, there is, Mummy. I have to build my aeroplane again.’

She risked taking her eyes off the dirt road for a split second. It was full of potholes and gullies where monsoon rains had
scoured channels in the red earth that could crack a car’s sump if you weren’t alert. Teddy’s young face was so earnest, his
eyes as round and bright as chestnuts, and there was an added eagerness in the way he regarded her today. She noticed that
his school uniform of white shirt and grey shorts was streaked with grass stains, the collar torn, and there was a telltale
scratch on the tip of his chin.

‘What is it, Teddy?’ she asked, before returning her attention quickly to the uneven road surface. The car still worked despite
the damage to the bumper and mudguard, but she steered it around a deep rut with caution. ‘Have you been fighting with Jack?’

Her son shook his head adamantly, the waves of his thick brown hair ruffling in the breeze from the open window. As fast as
he had his hair cut it seemed to grow again overnight, framing his small face and sticking out over his ears.

‘No,’ he said. But he was no good at lying.

‘Jack is your best friend,’ she said gently.

‘No, he’s not.’

‘Oh, Teddy, what was the fight about this time?’

His slight seven-year-old body slumped back into his seat and he picked in silence at a scab on his leg. Connie gave him time,
as immaculate straight lines of plantation trees slid past the window. It was Field 16, a fine stand of hundreds of young
rubber saplings planted in rows thirty feet apart, as far as the eye could see, the trees ten feet from each other. The Rubber
Research Institute of Malaya recommended an initial planting of 240 trees to the acre, reducing to 100 trees an acre once
they were grown and ready for tapping for their white flow of latex. But Nigel insisted he kept the land so well fed with
fertilizer and rock phosphate that he could get away with 120 trees per acre and still produce a top-class yield.

The sun hung directly overhead, so that shadows formed in dark balls at the base of the trunks making the young trees look
squat and vulnerable. School started for Teddy at eight o’clock in the morning and finished at one o’clock, to avoid the worst
of the exhausting heat of the afternoon. In the car the air was as oppressive as Connie’s thoughts.

Listen, white lady.
The words hissed through her brain, skidding into the sounds of the car’s engine.

‘Nothing lasts here.’

She hadn’t meant to say it out loud. She felt Teddy’s gaze turn to her, and he tucked his hand between the seat and her damp
back, something he did only when he was worried. She could feel his knuckles curled up as warm and needy as a kitten.

‘Won’t we last?’ he asked.

‘Of course we will, sweetheart. So will your friendship with Jack. I only meant …’
Oh Christ, what did she mean?
‘I only meant that the tyres wear out quickly on these rough roads. Cars break down easily.’

‘Is that why you had the crash today? Did the car break?’

‘No, darling. It was an accident caused by another nasty car, but don’t worry about it. We’ll get the dents mended and we’ll
be fine. Now tell me what happened with Jack.’

‘His Brewster Buffalo shot down my Fairey Battle.’

Connie’s heart sank. Her young son had spent all of last weekend building the aeroplane out of balsa wood with painstaking
care, the tip of his tongue clamped between his small white teeth. Now Jack had destroyed it in a rough game. That was typical.
Jack’s father built his model aeroplanes for him, which made Jack careless about how he treated them because he could always
ask for another. Whereas Teddy
insisted on cutting out each wing or tail fin himself, cementing them together with a dogged patience that amazed her. The
results were sometimes a little rough and ragged at the edges, but they were all his own work and Connie was immensely proud
of his sticky little fingers.

Since the war in Europe started two years ago in 1939, her son had become obsessed with aeroplanes, his bedroom walls covered
in recognition charts. He could name every aircraft in the sky the way other people named birds.

‘Don’t worry, Teddy, I’ll help you build a new one.’

His cheeky smile made her tap his bare knee with mock annoyance. ‘Just a minute, young man, I may not be as nimble as you
with balsa,’ she admitted, ‘but I can squeeze out balsa-wood cement with the best of them.’

He giggled, and she was pleased to hear the carefree sound inside the car. She pulled over to the side of the road and dropped
ten cents into her son’s hand. This was one of their rituals. Each day on the journey home from school Teddy bought a slice
of fruit from the roadside stall. It stood next to a small shrine that was constructed out of brightly painted stones and
adorned with frangipani flowers, a small blue statue of a Hindu goddess and a bowl of coloured rice.

A rat, fat and bold, sat on its haunches beside the shrine, munching on stolen rice grains. Teddy skipped over the ruts to
the fruit stall and pointed at two large slices of watermelon. She watched him chatter away to the man serving on the stall
– Teddy’s command of the Malay language was far superior to her own. He seemed to absorb the strange words as readily as her
pillow absorbed her strange dreams at night. He had lived here all his short life, and had no fear of this alien and exotic
country. He wasn’t afraid of snakes the way she was, a gut-gripping terror that paralysed her, nor did he shiver at the thought
of one of the Communist agitators in the workforce slitting Nigel’s throat in bed at night.

This year, there had been numerous labour strikes in the tin mines up at Gambang and in the gold mines at Raub, and now the
unrest was spreading to the rubber plantations up and down the length of the Malay Peninsula. The demand for rubber for tyres
and waterproofing had increased in a steady climb ever since the war had started in Europe, and rubber had been designated
priority cargo for the war effort. America and Britain were clamouring for it. Inevitably the price
had sky-rocketed. From five pence a pound to twelve pence a pound, and now the labour force that helped to produce it was
demanding a hefty rise in their meagre wages. She could see their point. It was the Chinese workers who were the troublemakers,
stirring up the easygoing Malays, but Nigel assured her it would blow over eventually. It was the Japanese, not the Chinese,
they should be worrying about, he said.

Connie and Teddy sat in the car together eating the red flesh of the melon, spitting the black pips out of the open windows
with expert aim, a brief moment of normality in a day that was anything but normal. When she’d finished, she tossed the green
rind out onto the roadside and within half a minute it was covered in a shiny black coating of ants, their huge jaws capable
of reducing it to nothing in the blink of an eye. This was a country in which the jungle and its voracious insects smothered
and devoured everything. Especially tender-skinned white people.

She wiped her hands on her handkerchief and dabbed at Teddy’s face with it. She smiled at him. ‘Come on, Pilot Officer Hadley,
let’s go and build you a new Fairey Battle plane.’

‘I think a Blenheim will be better. It carries more bombs.’

She tweaked his chin towards her and inspected the scratch. She must remember to put antiseptic on it. If not, in a day or
two she could be picking tiny white maggots out of it with tweezers.

‘Very well, a Blenheim it shall be.’

She eased the car forward, filling her mind with concerns about nursing her tyres over the ruts, and with images of miniature
aeroplane parts clinging precariously together, the smell of cement and the feel of dope flowing smoothly from the brush onto
the tiny fuselage. Anything to block out the other thoughts. Anything to keep out the sight of a woman on her back on the
pavement, the soles of her feet streaked with red dust.

‘Mummy, why are you crying?’

‘I’m not crying.’

‘Yes you are.’

‘No, sweetheart, it’s just that my eyes are watering because I broke my sunglasses.’

‘Will Daddy mind that you broke the car?’

Oh hell, Nigel loved the Chrysler.

‘Don’t worry, Teddy, it can be easily mended.’

Unlike the dusty feet. Or the pair of bloodshot eyes.

Connie sat in the bungalow in silence. All white men’s houses were called bungalows, however many floors they possessed. Darkness
squeezed like oil between the wooden slats of the shutters and flowed into the room, filling the slender gap of time that
lay between day and night in the tropics. The air scarcely grew cooler, but it stopped growing hotter, which gave some sort
of relief. Outside in the garden and in the lush jungle that skirted it, the night creatures started their endless cries and
squeaks, booms and chirrups, so loud that they drilled into her mind and splintered her thoughts.

‘Just block the noises out, old thing,’ Nigel always told her cheerfully back in the early days when she used to complain.

Block the noises out. Like she could block out breathing. Cicadas hurled their grating sound into the sultry evening air with
a frenzied energy, and frogs croaked with relentless monotony. She closed her eyes and thought about the woman who wouldn’t
hear the cicadas any more, about her daughter kneeling on the pavement, about her son with the black, angry eyes and the long
lashes. Voices in her head echoed the ones in Palur that had assured her so positively, ‘You are not to blame’, and ‘It was
the other car’s fault. A reckless driver.’