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‘Terima kasih.’ Stan Pike fished a small coin from his pocket, and then remembered himself. ‘May your deeds also be blessed.’
The newspaper contained flashed accounts of the Russians going into Poland from the east, together with more evidence of German barbarities as they’d made their way through from the west. The letter was from Phyllis, Mattie’s niece, whom he hadn’t seen since she was a scrap of a kid.
Then Clarice arrived in the town’s ancient taxi.
‘DON’T BE RIDICULOUS, Daddy.’ Ensconced in a cane chair, Clarice held her cup and saucer balanced in one hand and brushed with the other at the rain splashes on her shoulder and sleeve. Dr Pike was proud of his daughter’s looks: Clarice had Mattie’s features, fine and regular. Her hair, though, had always tended towards his own sandy colour. It was now further bleached and streaked from her trip up-country. Today, she wore it pinned, visibly ridged with the traces of a perm.
He was proud, too, of her dress sense. She’d put on a cool, belted day dress in pale grey crêpe de Chine. Leaning back somewhat languidly, with her legs elegantly crossed, and conducting a minute rhythm with the toe of one slim black shoe, she appeared more assured and sophisticated than he’d ever seen her; more mature, certainly, than her twenty-three years. As for himself, he stood facing her from the doorway to the dining-room, holding the teapot, with sweat already sopping the armpits of his shapeless tropical kit. ‘I’m not ridiculous,’ he said.
‘Who in their right mind would choose just now to up sticks? And England of all places. Even if they’re not bombed to bits, I certainly don’t want to go back to England. What was it you said once? Malignant middle class, beaten working class, and Mummy’s relations. I thought you never wanted to.’ She squinted at him, with a puzzled expression.
‘There comes a point when one thinks of retiring,’ he muttered.
She chided him. ‘And don’t be lame, either. There’s years in you yet. You’re not the retiring kind. Anyway, Malaya’s your life. Weren’t you planning to go up to the hills? Gunung Angsi, buy a little place?’
He changed the subject. ‘What about this young man of yours? You might have brought him with you.’
‘Oh, Robin,’ she said, airily. ‘I would have done. But he said he had some business at the club. You can meet him when he comes to pick me up in the morning.’
‘A nice trip?’
‘Fine, thanks. Absolutely fine.’
Clarice got up, still holding her tea. ‘Daddy, you’re looking terrible. I didn’t like to say it as soon as I came in, but honestly … What is it?’
‘It’s nothing.’
She placed the back of her hand on his brow. ‘Hadn’t you better sit down? I’ll get your medicine, shall I?’ Taking charge, she moved past him into the dining-room. ‘And what on earth have you been doing here?’
He saw her put down her cup on the strewn table. ‘Don’t do that,’ he said.
‘Why not? I’ll just see if I can find a sponge for you – and some water, too.’
‘No!’
But she went off despite him towards the bedrooms. He sat down to mop his own brow.
He sometimes wondered how much Clarice had suffered, lacking a mother, trailing about the world alone like a lost soul, sometimes at school in England, at other times mured in this old-fashioned colonial bungalow, back and forth. Her mother’s death had come when she was fourteen and she’d taken ship directly back to Malaya for a period of mourning with him. Selama had moved discreetly out.
Then Clarice had gone home to finish her schooling and Selama was reinstated. Clarice had returned once more, and, once more, he’d kept up appearances. Now Clarice moved in higher social circles than his own. Singapore was a fortress.
But even if he could maintain her there indefinitely, he wasn’t sure what her place was in the scheme of things. Daughters were supposed to be married off. Or she should have some career? Whatever, there was some strong element in it of a father’s duty; though Clarice had shown little sign of knowing for herself what she wanted.
At times she’d thrown herself into helping him on his rounds, like a devoted nursing auxiliary. Dr Pike had distrusted her motives; they smacked of spinsterism, possibly of religion. In any case, if he’d wanted a nurse he had Selama, and Clarice muddled his drug cabinet. But now she seemed the composed one, while he sat baffled, ghostly, and afraid of his decision.
He dabbed at himself with his handkerchief. The core of his fear was the subject no one at the club would discuss: that the Japanese would come as they had to China, and there’d be nothing anyone could do. People at the club said he was being alarmist. They seemed to lack the imagination to grasp the meaning of what had gone on in Nanking. Dr Pike had been left alone with the vision culled from his newspaper cuttings: of the Japanese Army occupying a Malaya left defenceless because Britain was suddenly locked into a struggle on the other side of the world – of the merciless rape of the two women in his life over his dead body. Nobody believed it could happen, yet for the two weeks since Britain had declared war on Germany he hadn’t been able to shut the thought off.
He wondered whether he really was in for a bout of his fever. His preoccupation might be delirium. He tried thinking of Selama, of all his familiar textures, the closeness of his house, the rattan chairs, the boxed discs of chamber music for the wind-up gramophone, the pictures on his walls, his specimen cabinets, his rack of Dutch cigars.
Clarice returned with the sponge. ‘Call yourself a doctor, Daddy? I can’t leave you, can I? Thought you’d have known better. And why have you left those wretched pieces all over the dining table?’
Eyes screwed shut, he tilted up his face for her. How he wished he could put aside the buzz in his ear which said, Take Clarice away from Malaya, go now while you can. Or was it in his bones, his blood, this gathering intuition of crisis?
‘I’m not being ridiculous, Clarice,’ he repeated. ‘I really think we have to leave.’
‘I’ve no intention of going anywhere except Singapore,’ she said. ‘Now take some of this.’ She held out the quinine bottle.
Later, he staggered out of his bedroom just as Musa was serving Clarice’s dinner over the arrangement on the table. He did try to explain. He picked up a cutting from the Times. Dated 18 December 1937, it was by C. M. Macdonald, the only British correspondent to have remained in Nanking during the Japanese army’s entry into that city. He scanned past the descriptions of murder to the part of the report which glared by its tale of omission, But it is a fact that the bodies of no women were seen.
Clarice was firm with him. ‘Daddy, I’m terribly tired, actually. Would you mind awfully if we did the political lecture another time. I know you’ve probably got something gruesome to demonstrate, but to be honest I’d rather not hear it just at the moment. I’ll have to make an early start tomorrow. You won’t be offended if I call it a day, will you? Just go back to bed. Come on. This way.’
‘We have to get out.’
‘You have to get some sleep.’ Stifling a yawn, she kissed him good-night. ‘And so do I. Now you’ll take care of yourself, won’t you?’ She turned to go.
‘Of course,’ he said, submissive now. ‘Sorry. Sleep well, darling.’ He still held the cutting in his hand but was glad, after all, that he didn’t have to explain to her how the missing women hadn’t been chivalrously spared.
IN THE NIGHT he got up. He was very frightened. His desire to put things right, to do his duty at last as a father – that was what had turned him into this parody of a supreme commander, pacing agitated, solo, around his dining-room table as if it contained the relief map of the theatre of operations. If he could assess the situation accurately, the enemy’s strength and disposition, then and only then would he know how to act. The evidence was laid out before him. Thousands of miles away, Poland, a fully functioning European state with a considerable army and a fine cultural history, had been reduced to rubble in a week or two. Some terrible permission had been given. Reports confirmed both the astonishing German tactical brilliance and the brutality of the assault. He tapped his foot on the floorboards. Rain outside drowned out the sound. What if Britain and France got drawn in and bogged down? If America stayed on the fence? What of the imperial supply lines if the thing really got going? Any ship between Singapore and the English Channel would increasingly become fair game for a U-boat.
He rummaged for Selama’s sharp sewing scissors in the sideboard drawer and cut out a piece from the newspaper that had just arrived. It counted the total sinkings as two dozen British ships, so far. No such announcement had come through on the short-wave radio. The liner Athenia had been torpedoed by a submarine.
If his vision was right, Clarice must not stay. But he couldn’t just send her away – to nowhere, to Mattie’s family – cast her adrift as she’d been set to drift already, this time on dangerous seas. He’d been a wretched parent, if the truth were told. Booting her out once more would be to fail her utterly. The whole thing was repeating itself. Supposing England were more fire than frying-pan, and he were deliberately hurrying his daughter under a cloudburst of bombs. Then, as her father, he should at least go with her. But he couldn’t take Selama. Nor could he leave her. Every delay made the seas more perilous. The fever beat up and up; and then broke in another drenching sweat.
In the morning, in the lull, he put on a brave face. A sultry sky showed the monsoon weather, and Clarice maintained, over breakfast, her refusal to discuss change. By way of diversion, he read Phyllis’s letter. It had been weeks delayed.
Dear Uncle Stan,
I know you will have forgotten all about me. In fact when Auntie Mattie passed away you probably thought you would have got rid of us Tylers for good, and here we are turning up again like a bad penny. I’m sure I did write on the occasion of my marriage and again on the birth of our little boy, Jack, but unfortunately received no reply. Normally I wouldn’t trouble you except Victor, my beloved husband, has lost his job, he is a shipwright at the boatyard, and is finding it hard to get another start. If there was any way you could see your way to help us through this difficult time, I can assure you we would be very grateful. I hope this letter finds you well. I always remember how kind you and Auntie Mattie were to me when you used to very kindly have me to stay with you in your country house in Suffolk.
I remain
Your loving niece
Phyllis Warren (Tyler as was)
‘“I remain”,’ Dr Pike quoted, sighing. ‘She wants money, of course.’
‘Who?’
‘Phyllis. Her husband’s lost his job.’
‘Phyllis! Your letter’s from Phyllis.’
‘Yes.’
Her father saw the blush come to Clarice’s cheeks; and I can feel it too, as I describe it.
‘Is anything the matter?’ he said.
‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’ She struggled to compose herself. ‘Will you send her some? Money, I mean.’
‘Not sure I’ve all that much left.’ Dr Pike eyed her meaningfully.
‘May I see?’
She took the letter, stood up, and hurried out to the veranda. The blush still prickled violently in her cheeks. Her hand was unsteady, and her knees had gone to rubber, making the short walk feel like a lurch into unsupported space. Outside, by a gap in the chick blinds, she read the letter over twice, three times, and then stared intently out at the sweep of countryside and rain forest – as if she could see all the way to England. Victor, my beloved husband …
No, I’m not Jack, the ‘little boy’ of Phyllis’s letter. I am not yet born. I must draw up this landcape of privilege and make my portrait of the woman who should have been my mother, though her world has nothing to do with me. The past is a fable of desire, a romance, an illusion.
Why then, curled as I am, tucked away in the story, do I make these imaginative stitches, pulling Clarice Pike and my father together again? Why linger with the family connection, suturing a gash in time? And why, like my great-uncle, Dr Stan Pike, do I tackle certain monsters? Because of the hope for love, of course.
Clarice held on to the timber pole that propped the veranda roof. She tried to reinstate Robin Townely, her man of the moment – who ought to have been here by now to pick her up. But with the letter in her hand all she could think of was Vic, and London. Three years and she could still be visited by these heart-racings and shakings, these physical clichés. And still she couldn’t tell whether they were genuine, or merely symptoms of her own dislocation.
On her mother’s side was East London and a poverty she’d lived protected from. That was the London out of which her father had rescued her mother. That was also the London where her cousin, Phyllis, had grown up, so distressingly unrescued. But there, paradoxically, Clarice had found Vic. And what was Vic but an ordinary working man, a dockside shipwright …
Vic had been engaged to Phyllis; and yet instantly, shockingly, Clarice and he had been drawn to each other. They’d met for concerts, been to lectures together, stolen hours in cheap cafés. Staying at her grandmother Tyler’s house, Clarice had not had long before her return to Malaya. There’d been a secret affair; then a realisation, followed by renunciation. She’d left for Southampton and her ship. He’d consented to his marriage.
Now in her mind’s eye he was caught by cross-hatchings, staring hopelessly back at her out of darkness, trapped back in that Dickensian ménage of cobwebs and candlelight that Phyllis’s letter evoked for her. She pictured too, unwillingly, the marital bed, with its creaking springs, the couple panting at each other, Phyllis something triumphant, and the man who had so startled her with a meeting of minds made weak and run of the mill, ruined.
From the distance, somewhere in the plantation compound, there came the chime of gongs and a burst of drumming. She guessed there was a rehearsal for the festival to mark the end of Ramadan. Later there would be a shadow play. She turned back into the house. All the while, as she was collecting her things to meet Robin, a faint metallic music hung about her efforts. It seemed the moist air finely shook, and took on almost discernible curlicues, insinuating tendrils of sound.
AT THE COAL HOLE night-club in Betterton Street, people were ready to dance again. The band was coming back after its break, and the spotlight waited, a large empty moon half-way up the spangled backdrop. From a table beside the dance floor Victor Warren stared into the illumination. Shortly, his wife would occupy it; tonight’s chanteuse. It was her lucky break.
Since he’d last seen Clarice, my father was not at all ruined in features. At first glance, his looks appeared quite dashing. Some negative quality, however, had certainly leaked into the rest of his appearance, and sitting with Tony Rice and Frances, the girl, he looked badly out of place. His grey flannel jacket was disreputable, his tie was skewed, and his shirt collar had too obviously been turned.
On closer inspection the face, which was thinnish with slightly Slavic lines, revealed a brow contracted and a mouth tightened. He wore his brown hair slicked away from his face, so that his dark moustache gave him a worn and dangerous cast. It belied his earnest eyes – and his twenty-six years.
He had good reason to look grim. The feeling all along that he’d been playing for the very highest stakes seemed entirely borne out. Having done his best with Phyllis, he was sure she was trying to destroy him. In fact, it could have been the circle of his own death that glittered back at him from the stage. He, like Dr Pike, felt mightily scared. As he touched his drink to his lips he tried to convince himself he was being irrational.
The club was full. In one of Covent Garden’s least promising streets, the Coal Hole was something of a find for a certain set. Or it was stumbled upon by theatre-goers after a meal at Monty’s or L’Escargot, who told their friends. From a narrow, sandbagged door in the face of an old tobacco warehouse, a staircase led down to the cellars, where there was not only late-night alcohol but a resident dance band of four black jazzmen. If it hadn’t been for the war, people said, the Coal Hole would have been set to ‘take off’. In the absence, so far, of bombing or gas attacks, it was still open, still defiantly humming. For once, thank God, the idiotic situation across the Channel could be shoved firmly to the back of the mind – so long as the band proved authentically rhythmic, the singer sufficiently charming.
At the Coal Hole it wasn’t a requirement to be dressed to the nines. Ordinary suits mingled with evening wear; there might be artists, addicts, a boxer or two, even an obstinate Blackshirt. There were types of unescorted girl. The Saturday-night clientele was unpredictable, and a frisson of intermixture ran in the smoke-filled air. The only real entrance qualification was a little spare cash, a commodity Vic clearly lacked. It was Tony Rice who’d brought him and Phyllis along, and it was Tony Rice, the perplexing, charmed and upwardly mobile gang boy, whose hand lay over Phyllis’s career.
Yet it wasn’t Tony of whom my father was afraid – it wasn’t a physical fear at all. His desperation lay deeper. He was permanently wrought up, on edge.
He picked his wife out as she emerged from a side door. Her slim figure made its way towards the light. The stage was a shallow pedestal, no more than a foot high, and he watched her pause in front of it as her long dress threatened to trip her. Clutching the slink out of harm’s way, she stepped up. The gown’s plunge back exposed nearly the whole of her spine.
All week she’d been crippled with nerves. She despised her looks. She believed she was disfigured by a shame no amount of make-up, no glittery evening get-up could conceal. Her vocal cords, if she could force them open, would only humiliate her. All week he’d coaxed her through it, reassuring her that it was the actions of others that had left her so insecure; privately reminding himself that he’d put aside his feelings for Clarice in order to do what was right. Now he willed himself to believe that for once Phyllis could be straight with him.
When eventually she faced her audience he knew he’d been outwitted. She was completely at home, and the long wait seemed calculated. Her eyes glittered wide under plucked and pencilled brows, the cheeks were a rouged mask, the mouth a bait. For her sheer knowingness he was unprepared. She looked sly. When she let her head droop, he held his breath.
Light fell on her close-waved dark hair, the silver threads glinted in her gown, and the few bars of introduction poised on the arpeggio of a suspended chord. Chatter from the tables subsided. She lifted her eyes, childlike; and then the voice launched itself high, virginal, and with a fashionable flutter.
Think of what you’re losingBy constantly refusingTo dance with me
From behind her a saxophone and muted trumpet picked up the phrase, and the bass threw a squib of rhythm. It was a safe number. After the success of the Branksome Revue, everyone was singing it again. The lover needed encouragement; she delivered it. With her one gloved hand on the edge of the piano, she seduced.
Then she played the man’s role. Setting her head at just the coy angle, she scolded the audience with an artful smile.
Not this seasonThere’s a reason.
They held up with her, and she hit the refrain:
I won’t dance! Don’t ask me;I won’t dance! Don’t ask me;I won’t dance, madame, with you.
The brash denial swelled out. The band swung, the bass player’s free fingers vaulted the board to the springy dub-dub of the beat, and couples got up to dance. From the tables all around rose that buzz of relief which comes when the entertainment will do. Parties returned safely to their concerns: cigars were lit, and corks were popped. Aproned staff holding their trays high slid once again between casual encounters and established liaisons.
Where Vic sat a waiter hovered.
‘No more, thanks.’
‘I said I’ll get them, Victor. We’ll need three more of these, mate.’ Tony indicated the cocktail glasses in front of them. ‘No, make it four. Have one ready for Phylly when she comes back. Should really.’
Tony Rice was clean shaven, fleshy. He had the street looks of certain cruel young men and sported black silk lapels and neat white bow with all the sharpness Vic lacked. ‘A winner, isn’t she? You think so, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’ My father glanced at his wrist-watch again: half an hour after midnight. Every passing minute ticked up feelings he couldn’t cope with, costs he couldn’t cover. ‘She’s divine,’ he said. ‘It’s turned out a success. But I think we’d better leave as soon as she comes off. If you don’t mind, Tony. Thanks so much and a bad show to break up the party, but …’ He looked up at the waiter. ‘I’d like the bill, please, actually.’
Tony cancelled him and signed the man to leave with his order.
‘But our boy,’ said Vic. ‘Jack’s on his own. We really must go.’
‘Don’t throw it back in my face, Vic.’ There was an edge to Tony’s voice, a hint of the dockside razor. He held Vic’s gaze with narrowed eyes, then backed off. ‘It’s Phyllis’s night and she deserves a break. Doesn’t she, mate?’
Vic lit a cigarette, and looked over to where Phyllis was beginning her next number. Her body, such a battlefield in their marriage, seemed at ease. There, on the miniature stage, she was the idea of enchantment. There was no denying it – she was a good performer.
So he was being churlish; he was turning everything into melodrama. Tony was right, she deserved her break. Her pretty mouth, the nakedness of her neckline and arms … While she sang, while the music flowed, he could see her as if in a movie, briefly disentangled.
‘That’s more like it, Vic.’
FEMININITY FLICKERED EVERYWHERE in the smoky club. Vic’s gaze wandered. There were more attractive women than he’d ever seen, wearing less. Out of his element, at home neither with his own class nor the posh one, he was wretchedly alert to them. The flash of one braceleted wrist caught him like a blow. Voices, laughing or languid, tempted at his ear; they underscored the chirruping of his wife. Everywhere he looked he mustn’t look, at the eyes he mustn’t meet. The place scandalised and fascinated him.
‘You’re a lucky bloke, Vic. You’ll want to hang on to a skirt like her. I should like to have one, just the same as that.’ Tony chanted softly as if all Phyllis’s melody wanted was a secret fight. ‘Where’er I go they’ll shout hallo where did you get that … tart.’ He grinned. Vic saw his hand under the table squeeze the thigh of the girl; he also saw the wince that crossed her face. He was momentarily excited. ‘She deserves better, Phyllis does,’ Tony said.
Vic tried to smile. ‘Better than what? Better than the Coal Hole? Or better than I can give her? That what you mean?’
‘I don’t know what you’re playing at, Rabbit Warren, keeping a woman like that in the manner you do.’
‘Thanks.’
But Tony compelled him, turning to his female companion. ‘Eh, Frankie? The boffin and the songbird. What do you think of that?’ The voice was level, the grin emotionless.
Frances opened her mouth disbelievingly at Vic. The drinks arrived. She took hers and held it in front of her with her little finger raised. He looked back. Thickly made up, she might be about twenty, the same age as Clarice Pike when they’d met, and fallen in love. …‘Are you, though? A boffin?’ Frankie giggled.
‘So I heard.’ Tony’s grin became a sneer.
‘Evening classes,’ said Vic. She even looked a little like her, like Clarice, he thought.
‘Can’t you just see him, duckie, with his chemistry bottles and tubes?’
