The White Pearl (23 page)

‘They have the RAF to reckon with. Our boys in their Brewster Buffaloes will blast them from the skies.’

All wanted to have their say.

Connie rolled her eyes at Harriet who was eating with grim determination, demolishing a plate of choux pastries. Food was
always her first haven when nervous.

‘That’s not what Johnnie Blake says,’ Connie told her in a low voice. ‘Johnnie says we don’t have nearly enough planes in
Malaya, and that the Brewster Buffaloes are poorly built and ill equipped. He informed Nigel that there are inadequate spare
parts and support staff here for the pilots to fight a war.’

‘Oh, Christ!’

‘And that antagonism between the RAF and the Royal Australian Air Force is making more trouble. Nigel was furious when he
heard that.’ Connie returned her gaze to the cluster of men arguing under the ceiling fans. ‘He points out that we all have
to work together now, whether we want to or not.’

They had listened to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s address to Congress, declaring 7 December 1941 to be a date that would
live in infamy, and they had read in the
Straits Times
about Prime Minister Churchill’s missive to the Imperial Japanese Government, announcing that ‘a state of war exists between
our two countries’.

A state of war.

The four words were so huge. Massive great boulders that could crush them all. It was at that moment that the drone of an
aeroplane up in the skies above the Club made all eyes turn towards the ceiling, hearts racing. But a lone figure standing
just inside the french doors and smoking a cheroot called out with dry reassurance, ‘You can relax. It’s one of ours, a Blenheim
bomber. Our boys will protect us. Like they protected Penang.’

Connie swung round, irritated by his tone, and saw the mockery in the
twist of his mouth. He inclined his head to her in greeting across the room, and she gave a brief nod of recognition. It was
Fitzpayne. Everyone knew that the island of Penang, which lay just off the west coast of Malaya, was being hammered day after
day by Jap fighters and bombers, up to eighty aircraft at a time blackening the skies above Georgetown. Hundreds of civilians
were wounded or killed, just as had happened in Singapore. The airfields had been bombed, as well as the railways.

‘Who’s he?’ Harriet paused to ask, a cake fork hovering in front of her mouth.

Connie looked away. ‘No one. A boat buyer.’

Harriet nodded, but didn’t take her eyes off him.

‘An outsider,’ Connie murmured.

One of the other plantation owners, an impatient man, was on his feet. ‘Sir,’ he addressed Fitzpayne, ‘I can’t say I like
your tone. Our pilots are doing everything they can, risking their lives for …’

‘Are you aware,’ Fitzpayne said flatly, ‘that there is not one single tank in Malaya? How can you expect to fight against
modern warfare methods without tanks?’

‘That just shows how little you know about the terrain of this country. No tanks could penetrate the jungle. No army will
ever attack that way, and we have guns pointing out to sea at Singapore. I assure you that’s where the real threat will come
from.’

There was a general murmur of agreement.

Fitzpayne smiled, a tightening of his mouth into a straight scornful line. ‘Gentlemen, that just shows how little you know
about the Japanese.’ He shrugged and drifted out of the french windows into the garden outside.

‘Christ!’ Harriet stuffed an eclair pastry wrapped in a napkin into her handbag for later. ‘Who knows anything about the Japs?
They are a law unto themselves.’

Connie jumped to her feet. ‘I must go, I’m afraid. Got a few things to do before I pick up Teddy from school.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

Connie’s mind was leaping away from her. It quivered on the edge of somewhere she didn’t want to go. She started to walk towards
the door, but suddenly stopped and turned back to Harriet, speaking in an
undertone. ‘Harriet, we have our boat ready to go. If you and Henry want to join us, you’re welcome to come.’

Harriet blinked in shock. She drew a sharp breath and squeezed Connie’s hand. ‘Thank you.’ Her gaze strayed across the room
to her husband. ‘I’ll talk to Henry. But what about Nigel? Surely he would never abandon Hadley Estate. It’s his life.’

‘I’ll persuade him.’

‘How?’

‘I know the one thing he loves even more than he loves the estate.’

Harriet smiled enviously. ‘You?’

Connie flushed. ‘No. It’s Teddy.’

‘The Japanese are a determined and disciplined nation.’

They were Sho’s words. She thought of them now as she queued to buy cans of kerosene oil. The people of Palur were just starting
to panic, stockpiling basic necessities so that some shops were already rationing the amount allowed per customer for staple
goods such as tea and sugar, rice and flour. The kerosene queue consisted mainly of men and servants who raised their hats
politely to Connie, surprised to see the wife of Nigel Hadley here in person, but she ignored their curious glances. When
her hands at last clasped two large metal cans of kerosene, and Ho Bah trailed behind her with another two, only then did
she feel safe.

She recalled Sho had been sipping warm saké, eating thin slivers of raw fish as he sat cross-legged on the floor in their
jungle hut. He was wearing a black and purple kimono wreathed in the coils of a dragon, its colours as vivid as the flowers
of Malaya itself. He looked fragrant, his skin cool despite the sultry heat and the intermittent thunderstorms that shook
the fragile building.

‘I believe you,’ she had replied.

‘That we are determined and disciplined.’

‘Yes. If you are a typical example of the Japanese mentality.’

That pleased him. His black eyes shone in the dim light, and his lips parted in the way they did when he wanted something
from her. Usually it was a kiss or a caress somewhere new, but today he had been acting strangely, his manner more formal
from the moment she’d made her way up the front steps. He had brought silk kimonos for both of them, when usually they spent
every moment naked and he laid a square of white silk
no bigger than a headscarf on the floor as their table. As she sat opposite Sho on her side of the white square, she badly
wanted a cigarette instead of a thimbleful of saké. She had grown to dislike the hut. She would prefer to meet anywhere but
here. Sho had hung a scroll of Japanese writing on the walls and strung carved wooden charms of peculiar mean-faced animals
from the roof beams. It had begun to feel like a cage, a rough, ill-kempt bamboo one, but still a cage, just as much as the
elegant mansion of Hadley House with its dark brooding staircase was a cage.

‘Sho, why don’t we go up to one of the hill stations next week? It’s so much cooler there. I can arrange for Teddy to be picked
up from school by his friend’s mother, and we …’

‘I like it here.’

‘It’s time for a change.’

His gaze fixed on her. ‘You are right. That is why today I want to start to prepare you for coming to Japan.’

Connie’s heart gave a vicious kick. Abruptly she realised that this was the end of the affair, and it saddened her.

‘Sho, don’t be foolish. I can’t leave Malaya.’ She smiled at him to soften her words, and reached forward to touch the smooth
pale skin of his chest where the kimono hung loose, but he swayed backwards out of reach.

‘A person can do whatever he or she wants,’ he said.

‘Sho, I have a son.’

‘A fine boy.’

‘I would never leave him.’

‘You must bring him to Japan too.’

‘No. I respect your country, but I have no wish to live there.’

Silence swirled into the hut, rippled around her ankles, cold and clingy as if the nearby river had overflowed its banks.
The silence had the same dank smell, the stink of something rotten inside it. Sho rose to his feet, walked once around the
tiny room and knelt down again immediately behind her. He placed his hands on either side of her head, cupping her ears, so
that she couldn’t turn to look at him.

‘Connie,’ he said in an odd, soft voice, ‘you are my life.’

She lifted her fingers to his hands to prise them away but they held firm, making the rush of blood in her ears echo through
the bones of her head.

‘Sho, let go of me.’

His breath brushed the side of her neck. ‘I won’t ever let you go. You are my life, you are my love, you are my reason for
being on this earth.’

Connie felt a flutter of fear touch her throat. She stroked his hands. ‘This isn’t one of those affairs,’ she told him. ‘Not
a life and death
grand amour.
It’s …’

‘What? What is it, then?’

She tried to shake her head and laugh, but still he insisted on holding it in a firm grip. ‘It’s a wonderful moment of pleasure,
an interlude of delight which we both longed for in our lives and for which I am grateful. But you don’t love me, Sho. You
just love the excitement and the secrecy. You are a man born to crave excitement.’ She tapped his fingers, keeping her voice
as light as possible. ‘Now let’s forget the saké and go to bed.’ She slipped the kimono from her shoulders and immediately
his hands released her head, unable to resist the allure of her skin.

He kissed her shoulder blade. ‘I don’t want your gratitude,’ he whispered. ‘I want your love. You are part of me now, and
you belong to me. You and I are meant to be together …’

She turned and put her hands in his hair, her lips on his mouth. ‘Hush.’ She removed his dragon kimono and inhaled the warm
musk of his body. She had told him from the start that she would never leave Nigel or Teddy. She hadn’t lied, hadn’t deceived
him. She had been straight with Shohei Takehashi. But all the time he had been lying to her, pretending their romance was
a light-hearted affair, when in his heart he was hoarding little pieces of her. How could she not have noticed? He was trying
to steal her and whisk her back to Japan. She didn’t want to hurt him, but she knew now that she couldn’t avoid it. She rose
to her feet and led him to the bed, her fingers entwined with his.

This would be their last time.

Sho’s arm was wrapped around her throat, the weight of it heavy on her windpipe. But Connie didn’t move. She waited, still
and silent in the bed. She breathed with a shallow rhythm, matching it to Sho’s in case he was deceiving her in this as well.
Eyes tight shut, aware of the whine of flies and the spidery touch of a thread of sunlight on her bare leg. It reminded her
of lying in bed beside Nigel, the same rigid wakefulness, and it made her skin quiver at the irony of it.

She didn’t trust Sho. Not any more.

When she was absolutely certain he was fast asleep, exhausted by their earlier passionate exertions, she slid out from under
the possessive grip of his arm and padded over to her clothes. They had been neatly folded by Sho and placed on a clean sheet
he had laid in one corner for the purpose. He was a precise man with precise habits. She had become one of them, without realising
the full impact of what that meant to a man like Sho. She experienced a wave of sorrow for him, and for the loss of what they’d
had together. Why is it that men feel the urge to control women in the same way they feel the urge to control a country? Can’t
they let things be?

She needed a cigarette. Ridges of anger seemed to have formed on her tongue, not anger at Sho, nor anger at Nigel. But a sharp
rage at herself. She stepped into her underwear and reached into Sho’s attaché case that he always brought with him, from
which he produced sugary sweet-meats for her with a flourish. She couldn’t see his cigarettes, so lifted out the manila folder
of papers in the case and spotted the pack of Dunhill at the bottom. She removed one, lit it with his lighter and drew the
smoke deep into her lungs. She must leave now. No goodbyes. But a sheet of typed paper slid from the folder that was still
in her hand and drifted in a spiral to the floor.

Connie picked it up and saw that it was in English. She started to read.

Madoc lay wide awake in bed, listening to the wind and the river trying to out-roar each other, the sound deep and resonant,
vibrating the roof of his house above him. He hadn’t slept well, but then he never did. Kitty always blamed it on the sharp
angular cries from the jungle and its incessant heavy breathing, but he knew it wasn’t that. There was too much in his head.
Too much of the past stomping around in his brain, keeping him awake with its heavy boots.

He had told Kitty about the bicycles, and she hadn’t liked it. He wasn’t sure he liked it himself. But the Jap had handed
over payment in advance, and he had taken it. The deal was done, and he had more sense than to back out of an agreement with
the Japanese Army. With a sigh he rolled over onto his side, so that he could insinuate an arm around the folds of the black
mountain that was Kitty, and think about what kind of profits he expected from the new casino. He’d paid for the gaming tables
now. That was a weight off his shoulders.

Last night, the poker games in the dingy little backroom of the bar had got out of hand when a crowd had slouched in and wanted
to liven the place up, when they found there were not enough blackjack tables or roulette wheels to feed their habit. It had
grown nasty. The Tokarev TT-33 pistol had come in useful to dent a few skulls. He’d summoned a bunch of girls from upstairs
and got them to flash their thighs at the men until everyone had calmed down.

Madoc slid his hand down the silky pillow of Kitty’s hip. Though her face and hands displayed the skin of the tropics, tanned
and leathery, the secret places of her thighs, her stomach and her breasts and shoulders had the soft, smooth skin of a young
girl. He loved their paleness
and their translucence. The way the fine veins beneath the surface showed like ghostly threads of blue ink. Gently, so as
not to wake her, he touched the dense wiry bush of curls between her legs and felt them tickle his palm.

Since meeting Kitty, he’d never lusted after other women. She had been tall and statuesque as a girl. He smiled when he remembered
the wild hair and restless eyes that caught his attention when he had gone into a draper’s shop in Putney in London to buy
a reel of white cotton. He needed to sew buttons back onto his shirt – they had been torn off in a fight. In those days he
was always getting into fights. Afterwards, he waited for her outside the shop at the end of the day and walked her home in
the rain.