I’ll do it. I’ll do whatever he wants.’
‘There,’ Phyllis said.
Later, Jack watched his father sitting in the doorway to the wooden house with his long, safe legs tucked up under him. His dad was pumping the Primus until flames lapped up the sides of the kettle. In a tin box which he called his tinder-box there was a piece of thin metal, spoon pale with a wire in it which his father took and poked into the middle of the flames. The Primus roared suddenly, and hissed, and the fire turned blue so they could see holes in rows. The flame was a blue flower that never went away.
‘There we go.’ His father smiled at him and pumped the pump again. The metal had the same shine as the ring on her finger. Jack loved the hot smell of the Primus, the heat on his cheeks.
Much later still, when the sky was colouring up, he was clutching a piece of wood like a stick. His mother was sitting on a box drinking a cup of tea. Jack must get the wood into the cut on his mother’s head. Needing both hands, he tried to bring it down from above in one clear swipe but she was too big, too high above him for it to be right. His stick was too heavy and he couldn’t reach.
She smacked him hard and put him in the side-car. Then it was getting dark. Her shorts were next to him, moving. The sound was the hum, hum, of the tandem back to Ripple Road. The cars had their faint lights on. Up high were stars.
CLARICE RETURNED FROM Singapore to Seremban in December. Both the monsoon and the Robin Townely affair were virtually over, and she intended to stay for Christmas. Now the sun beat down each day and the rain confined itself to half an hour every teatime. In the intense mid-afternoon, she and her father were inspecting the back garden. She wore a loose white linen dress, and her broad-brimmed straw hat was trimmed with a violet ribbon. The straw matched the raffia colour of her heeled sandals. As medicine for her feelings she held a whisky tumbler.
Glass also in hand, her father stared in silence at a large bougainvillaea plant. Then he turned and looked back at the bungalow. Clarice followed his gaze. The house appeared so old-fashioned, such a relic of the last century. The stilts pushed up and the rectangular bonnet of fringey palm thatch hung down. Sandwiched in between was her home, the only one she had. Its blue canvas awnings were pulled along most of the veranda; as far, in fact, as the servants’ cottage, which was tacked on to the back with poles and more thatch. Through the one gap in the blinds was disclosed a shaded region like a winking eye next to the back steps. Clarice could see Ah Sui, her belated amah, moving about inside – a busy shimmer.
‘I’m allowed to make up my mind,’ Dr Pike said at last.
‘Have you mentioned the idea to anyone else?’
‘No.’
She gave an irritated laugh and surveyed him, as though for the first time in his own right. He had put on his old khaki bush hat, the item he tended to brood under whatever the weather. Despite his customary brown boots and gaiters, his great shorts and the loose, pocketed, sweat-stained shirt worn outside his belt, he looked anything but familiar, suddenly ineffectual.
‘And this is all on my behalf?’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘Why is it? I’m grown up, aren’t I? Do you think I can’t take care of myself in the world?’ She felt cheated. ‘I’ve had to enough times.’
He wouldn’t meet her eye, but swung his attention away now, out beyond the orchids and the young banyan tree which the turbanned gardener was busy pruning. Once again Clarice shared the prospect, past the fat-leafed succulents, the red pepper bushes and frangipanis at the fence, as far as the plantation compound, and right to the tall wild trees. Freighted with greenery, the trees reached up behind the rubber plantation towards the ridge; and would then stretch, she knew, to the next ridge, and the next, and onwards unbroken to the remote hill country. Malaya was a place of endless fruits and hardwoods, with their vines and hangers-on. She was a hanger-on herself, to the strange country that had offered her anonymity, given her a freedom she hadn’t managed to claim for herself in England.
But bears and tigers and pythons dwelt in the forest, and all manner of legendary animals. Just now, near at hand, a troupe of monkeys was feeding, high up, and shooting back glances amid a continual discard of twigs, peel and droppings. The sky was streaked with fishbone cloud, growing tarnished as if baked from above. And where was truly home? Averting her eye from the stunning view, she made herself watch instead how her father shot the remainder of his whisky back into this throat. Eventually he turned to her.
‘All right,’ he conceded. ‘It would be my last chance.’
‘Your last chance at what?’
‘At being a father to you.’
That made her gasp, and she sipped her own Scotch, taking it neat, as he did. Its grainy sting helped with the tears that sprang suddenly to her eyes. ‘Don’t be bloody silly. You’ve always been that.’
‘Technically.’
‘But why?’ She dug at the lawn with the toe of her sandal like a child. ‘And why England, for heaven’s sake?’
‘Where else is there?’
‘Most of the globe, I should say. Shouldn’t you, Daddy? Most of the globe would be a darned sight safer, just at the moment. Hmm?’
When she was a girl, England had just meant boarding-school, and before that a place with a train journey inside it. At one end of that railway line was the country practice in Suffolk with her mother and father. At the other was London and her cousin Phyllis. Then she’d grown up; and there had been Vic. England would force her to open up all that heartache again. In order to protect herself she was desperate to stay, and yet – dare she admit it – she also ached to see him. In her heart she was all but ready to collude with her father’s wishes. The matter was beyond endurance. She half wished Robin Townely would write and take her mind off the subject of Vic Warren; for, since she’d held Phyllis’s letter in her hand, she’d hardly thought of anything else.
‘You’ve nothing to live on and most of the world’s turning nasty,’ Dr Pike said. ‘Haven’t you been reading the papers, Clarice?’
‘Nothing’s happened since Poland!’ Exasperation filled her tone.
‘Oh, nothing!’
She clicked her teeth. ‘You know what I mean.’
Once, after a party at Port Dickson, a convoy of Clarice’s friends had driven with her up into the villages. There she had seen her first shadow play. The performance had been done under the stars by means of a large stretched sheet. But the boozy young crowd she was with hadn’t understood the formalities. The language had been poetic, a far cry from the basic chat the English had to master for their servants.
She’d been mystified by the play, its lengthy preambles, and the hesitancy about committing to the action, but had grasped there was a reason. To the accompaniment of drumbeats and the clash of cymbals, the drama had lasted late into the night, by which time most of her party had fallen asleep. Even then the story had been only half told. It was the ancient epic of the Ramayana: of the lovers, and the forest; of the hermitage, the war, the wickedness of the abductor; and of the great bridge across which the avenger went forth upon the sea. It occurred to her that the new war might have the same self-indulgent pace. The thought chilled her.
She stooped now to poke at a web in the flower-bed. The cords were strung thickly under the great speared arch of a leaf, and the spider came running out into the sun. It stopped. She agitated the threads again. ‘I’m being a butterfly. Look. Come on, then. Can’t get me, can you?’ The spider raised one minutely furred leg, in suspicion. It failed to budge. ‘Can’t be bothered, after all.’ She straightened up. ‘Just like men.’
Her father’s laugh was brief and