The White Pearl (33 page)

Her mind wouldn’t keep still. It was as if the waves had washed through her brain and stirred up her thoughts with their salty
fingers. For no reason at all she kept seeing Shohei Takehashi’s face as clear as the full moon, leaning over her shoulder,
not open-mouthed with teeth streaked with scarlet, as it had been when she had enclosed it in a pillowcase. No. It was smiling,
respectful and patient, as when he first said to her, ‘Will you dance?’ Quiet, silken words that had tempted her soul.

What if she had said, ‘No. Thank you, but no’? Would she be different now? Would she be a person without an iron spike in
her chest, maybe even one who could sleep at night? She couldn’t remember what that felt like. A person who could talk and
laugh without …

‘Here, this will calm you down.’

Fitzpayne placed a glass of amber liquid in front of her. It immediately started to slide sideways as the table tilted with
the movement of the sea, and Connie wrapped a hand around it to keep it steady. She hadn’t
been aware of him descending the steps, but when she looked up at his brooding figure, she had a feeling he had been standing
there for some time, watching her.

‘Drink,’ he said. ‘It will help you sleep.’

How did he know?

Connie woke. Her neck was stiff, her shoulders ached and for one alarming moment she had no idea where she was. A wet tongue
licked her cheek, and Pippin’s unwholesome breath puffed encouragingly in her face.

‘All right,’ she groaned, and with eyes narrowed to slits she struggled to sit up, which only encouraged the dog to perch
on her lap and sweep its warm tongue over her chin. She fondled his little head and recognised that she was still in the saloon,
though her brain seemed to be performing some kind of thumping war dance. Christ, she must have fallen asleep on the bench
in her wet clothes. Her mouth tasted like sand, dry and scratchy and riddled with salt. Daylight was streaming down on her
from the hatches above, but it was a dull, leaden light that told her the storm clouds still lingered, the creek water choppy
under the boat. Where was everyone?

There was no clattering on the hatches, which meant the rain had ceased, so at least that was something. She meant to stand
up. To find where Teddy was, and to see if Nigel’s leg needed attention. But instead she let her forehead drop to the table,
the wooden rail digging into her ribs, her hands curled around Pippin on her knees, and she lay like that without moving while
her thoughts tried to rearrange themselves. Everything had knotted into a confused tangle but slowly, thread by thread, she
started to tug them apart.

‘More whisky?’

She jerked upright. ‘What?’

‘I thought you might need a hair of the dog.’ It was Fitzpayne. He was holding out the bottle and trying not to smile too
much.

‘What?’

He sat down on the bench opposite her and the boat swayed. Only then did she notice the empty glass at her elbow. It had a
dry amber crust at the bottom. He tipped an inch of whisky into it.

‘Drink up,’ he ordered. ‘You’ll feel better after that.’

Dimly she recalled sitting here on the bench last night after the others
had gone to bed. Images, blurred and watery, started to come into focus: Fitzpayne’s broad features opposite her, his weathered
hand pouring whisky after whisky into a glass. How many times? Once? Twice? More? His thick eyebrows rising when she confessed
to him she had once swum naked across the river in Palur and back, at night under the stars. Why, oh, why on earth had she
told him that? His grey eyes had been fixed with amusement on hers, and he had started to ask questions.

What questions? What answers had she given?

Damn the man! And damn herself!

‘No more whisky,’ she said huskily.

‘As you wish,’ he responded with a chuckle, and drank it down.

‘I shouldn’t drink.’ She rubbed her throbbing temple.

‘Why not?’ He laughed, but softly, as though aware of the shooting pains in her skull. ‘You had been working damn hard all
night. Whisky relaxes you, and that’s exactly what you needed.’

She sat up straight, and studied the face of this man who thought he knew what she needed. It lacked the handsome charm of
Johnnie’s, and was not distinguished like Nigel’s. But now that his bad-tempered scowl had been banished ever since he set
foot on
The White Pearl
, there was an energy in the alignment of Fitzpayne’s face, a strength in the set of his wide jaw that gave his appearance
an unusual kind of attraction. But the complex layers of his grey eyes worried her, the watchful intelligence behind them.
What had made him go out of his way last night to get her drunk when she was too weary to resist? What was his purpose? And
what had she told him?

Connie felt foolish. Foolish and embarrassed, but worse, she felt a sick churning in her stomach.

‘Mr Fitzpayne,’ she said quietly, ‘I trusted you.’

‘I know, and I value that.’

‘So please tell me, why are you really here?’

‘Mrs Hadley.’ He leaned across the table, and for the first time she could make out the tiny lines of exhaustion that crept
around his eyes. ‘I am here because you are trusting me to sail you and your boatload to Singapore. No other reason. Don’t
worry, I’ll get you there, come hell or high water.’ He laughed, a strange, disturbing sound, less of a laugh than a collision
of thoughts. ‘I think we experienced both hell and high water last night, but we’re still here. Still in one piece. That’s
what you want, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘So relax. Everyone is relieved this morning just because they’re still alive. You should be, too.’

She rose to her feet, pausing while her head went for a spin around the room. ‘I must find my son.’

‘He’s fine. Your husband has got him gathering firewood on shore.’

She nodded, a wary movement, and made for the stairs. She suddenly realised she was still wearing her oilskins, so she peeled
them off and felt an urgency to climb up into the fresh air, but halfway up the stairs she ducked her head and looked back
at Fitzpayne. He was still seated, his muscular forearms resting on the table, her empty glass in his hand. His eyes were
on her, but it was impossible to read their carefully guarded expression. She wondered if he saw on her face that same curtain
that was drawn tight, protecting the secrets that flitted like shadows behind it.

‘Fitz,’ she said, ‘thank you.’

‘For what?’

She smiled at him and headed up on deck.

‘I hate this fucking jungle.’

However much Kitty moaned or mutinied, cried or cursed, Madoc didn’t let her stop. He made her walk every hour of daylight.
Only when the very last glimmer had spilled from the sky and the darkness of the jungle erupted into life, did he allow her
to collapse in a shuddering heap on the tarpaulin that he spread on the saturated earth underfoot.

‘Madoc,’ she hissed at him through clenched teeth, as he lit a strip of bark with one of their last matches, ‘if I have to
spend one more night in this bloody jungle, with no food and no dry clothes and no bed and no shelter, with no relief from
the bloody mosquitoes, I swear to God I will start cooking you limb by limb, and will eat your heart while it’s still beating,
because I can’t …’

‘Hush, Kitty,’ he murmured as he lowered himself down on the tarpaulin, lifted her thick legs one at a time on to his lap
and started to hunt out and scorch the plump bodies of the leeches that were buried in her flesh.

‘A fire tonight, Madoc. Please, just a small one.’ She gripped the back of his neck with a hand that was infected and shook
his head back and forth. ‘Please. To cook something. To dry my clothes, as well as to scare off the animals that come so close
I can smell their greedy breath.’

‘No.’

‘Please.’

‘No.’

‘Blast you.’

Gently, by the flimsy light of a burning length of bark, he dabbed antiseptic on the bleeding holes in her skin. She didn’t
wince and didn’t
moan, just kept her finger and thumb digging into his neck like a death grip. She was shivering. He felt terrible for her,
but he wouldn’t relent.

‘No fire, Kitty. The Japs could be close behind us.’

She leaned her head heavily on his shoulder. ‘You’re crazy. They couldn’t have got this far south yet.’

‘Don’t underestimate them. They move fast.’ He gave a tight grimace that he was glad she couldn’t see. ‘They have bicycles,
don’t forget. They will be advancing relentlessly, invisible in the jungle until they slide a bayonet into your guts.’

‘Shut up, Madoc!’

‘I’m sorry, Kitty.’

Abruptly she released her grip on his neck. ‘One measly bloody fire, that’s all I ask.’ She collapsed onto her side with a
defeated groan and lay silent.

Around them, the noises of the night were deafening, a vibrating rowdy crescendo of chirrups and whistles, roars and growls,
booms and squeaks. God knows what creatures were out there, what animals made such a cacophony of sound, but it acted like
a drum inside Madoc’s head, deadening his thoughts. As he pulled a small bundle from his pack, large-winged moths swarmed
around his torch, fluttering against his cheek and blundering into the flame. He unwound the cloth that was wrapped around
the bundle and took out two items.

‘Here, Kitty.’ He held them out to her on his palm, like he used to offer an apple to the milkman’s horse when he was a child.
‘Eat something.’

‘Piss off.’

‘You have to eat.’

‘Cook them first and then I’ll eat.’

Madoc looked at the two pale grubs as big as white mice on his hand. They had soft, glistening bodies that tasted foul, but
they were food and they weren’t poisonous. In his pack lay a large dead lizard that would taste like chicken if it were cooked.

‘I’ll eat one if you eat one,’ he urged.

She didn’t reply. The black mound of her bulk – that, back home, could fill a room: her boisterous breasts and carthorse hips
and her wide, enticing smile – seemed diminished here, and Madoc experienced a strange feeling that he was losing her to the
jungle. It was eating her, devouring her damp, creamy flesh, sucking the life out of her the way the leeches did. The thought
distressed him. Since the destruction of his bar
and his home, he had kept them travelling south day after day, endlessly hacking their way through dense forest, avoiding
trails and any
kampong
s, the native villages that they stumbled across.

‘They will have food,’ Kitty had wailed.

‘When the Japs come,’ he told her, ‘they will hunt down any whites hiding out in the forest or in the villages, and if they
hear that we have been in the area, we won’t stand a chance.’

She looked at him with a solemn expression, her face caked in muddy streaks. ‘They really frighten you, these Japs.’

‘They scare the shit out of me. You saw what they did to Morgan’s Bar. They want me dead.’

She had kissed him smack on the mouth. ‘They’ll have to kill me first.’

Now she was threatening to kill him herself if he didn’t light her a fire and roast the lizard. Softly he stroked her dirty
hair.

‘Sleep,’ he whispered. When she was rested, she might eat.

He knocked out the stub of flame. Instantly all existence vanished, and there was only the total darkness of the grave. He
shuddered, unable to see his hand in front of his face. He curled up behind Kitty, his stinking body merging with hers, and
pulled the tarpaulin over them, tucking it tight to keep out the spiders and snakes and the bugs, and whatever else stalked
through the trees. In one hand he clutched his knife. He didn’t expect to sleep, but just the familiar warmth of his wife’s
flesh next to his relaxed him a fraction. But his throat was dry and tense, the taste of anger in it, bitter as the grubs.
Christ, he would kill his own mother for a cigarette.

That was when the rain came.

‘Kitty! Kitty! Wake up.’

Madoc held a hand over her mouth to keep her quiet. Her eyes popped open, and for a moment her sleep-sodden brain must have
thought she was at home in bed because she smiled and reached for him.

‘Kitty, come and look,’ he whispered.

Realisation turned her eyes the colour of dirt. She nodded and he removed his hand, flicking flies off her. Without a word
she dragged herself to her feet and followed him along a path he had hacked through the undergrowth earlier with the
parang
, snaking up a steep hill. Everything was saturated. The earth was slippery beneath their feet, and it was tough going. He
held her hand and pulled her over the roots and
mud slides, puffing and panting, as the sky turned from unrelenting black to a dull, lifeless grey and a silvery mist crept
up the slopes like a sneak-thief.

Near the top of the hill, a rocky outcrop covered in moss and lichen was home to a whole colony of bright green lizards waiting
patiently for the heat of the day to warm their blood. They were as sluggish as snails in their movements, and Kitty eyed
them with interest, hoping for breakfast, but Madoc drew her around the outcrop to the other side.

‘Look!’ he said, and pointed.

In the distance beyond the trees lay the sea, whipped up into rolling breakers by last night’s storm. But much nearer, on
the edge of the shoreline that was hidden from them by the forest, a thin grey ribbon rose above the canopy of the jungle.
It was smoke.

‘The fools have lit a fire.’

Madoc could almost hear Kitty’s brain clicking into life beside him.

‘Breakfast,’ she murmured. ‘Cooked breakfast.’

But it wasn’t the fire that Madoc was staring at as they stood under cover among the palms on the forest ridge. He had eyes
only for the boat. She was a two-masted yacht with elegant lines, riding at anchor and lifting her bow in the rough waters
like a racing hound sniffing the air, eager to set off. Madoc clenched his fist as excitement screwed up his gut.

He snorted into the early-morning mist. ‘Fuck me if there isn’t a God in heaven after all!’

‘Let me take a look at you.’