‘And I’m going to have barbed wire and lights all around this place and all around Kampong Kinta. The bastards have caught me napping three times now, it’s cost me two payrolls and now the life of my headman. No more!’
Li Kim cast a glance out towards the teeming jungle night. ‘I stay with you, tuan. You want dinner?’
George shook his head. ‘Our guests — ’ but both women were shaking their heads now.
‘I give it to the — ’ Li Kim began.
‘Burn it!’ Harfield ordered. ‘It does not leave this kitchen. I’ll make bloody sure not one grain of rice from this mine finds its way into communist bellies.’
Much later in her room, when everyone had been retired for hours, Liz took out a sketchpad and pencil and confronted the atrocity that would not leave her. She worked quickly, barely looked at the sketch when she had finished, then turned the leaf and began to rediscover the young soldier. This she took more slowly, the problem more elusive. It was always easy to recreate horror. Horror pictures used a low mental budget.
There had been a weary tension in the young man’s shoulders, a capacity for endurance beyond the normal in the gunholding pose. He would, she thought, looking at the first sketch, make a good figure for a Far Eastern war memorial. The thought made her rise agitatedly, putting the sketch block aside. She wasn’t wishing death on the man — it was just something she had seen. She strongly denied apportioning death as the unknown soldier’s lot. ‘Oh, God!’ she exclaimed aloud. ‘I must stop this. I need a drink, or coffee or something — mustn’t get like my mother.’
She went quietly to the lounge and was startled to see a figure at the window outlined by the lights thrown up from the floating dredgers below.
‘Who is it?’ the startled figure demanded.
‘Only me, Mother.’ She went to her. ‘Can’t you sleep either?’
‘They should have built this bungalow on the other side of the hill,’ she said, ‘away from this bloody continuous noise.’
‘1 suppose it’s like living next to a railway, you hardly notice it after a time.’
‘Huh!’ Blanche grunted disbelievingly.
‘Nevertheless it’s true.’
They both started as George Harfield came into his lounge. ‘If you pull the shutters to, I can put the light on. No point in making ourselves targets.’
The three seemed irresolute as they were discovered in dishabille. Harfield was wearing only a pair of light cotton shorts, while Liz and her mother had on cotton pyjamas and mules.
‘You know what’s the matter with us all,’ Blanche decided, ‘we’re hungry. Come on, I’ll scramble us all some eggs.’
‘Just what the doctor ordered.’ George bowed, eclipsing his powerful torso with an even more powerful pair of shoulders. ‘I take my hat off to you, ma’am.’
Liz looked at her mother, who widened her eyes dangerously and said, ‘Unless too many cooks spoil the broth, let’s adjourn to the kitchen.’
George laughed, and Liz wondered if he trotted out the trite phrases just to annoy ‘because he knows it teases’. She also wondered at people’s capacity for going on with the normal tasks, like having meals, even in the most awful circumstances. It was just as she remembered the war in England, girls at school losing brothers and fathers, everyone rallying round.
She watched her mother as she beat eggs in a bowl and turned chapattis on a flat griddle, competent, controlled. The truth was that they were both so used to not having a man in the house, it could be easy to forget as events continually overtook them that they should be at Rinsey with her father. He had rarely been around for the last eight years.
‘I wondered if you thought you were being specially targeted,’ Blanche asked as they began to eat.
‘It’s possible.’ Harfield, bending over to his plate, ate ravenously once begun, talking rapidly between mouthfuls. ‘During the war I made no secret of the fact that I knew certain red-star merchants in our own units were burying the guns and ammunition air-dropped to us, ready for their own purposes after the Japs had gone. I told them I’d bury the first one I caught at it.’
‘So ... ’ Liz’s ghastly sketch loomed in her mind. ‘So aren’t you afraid?’
He paused, piled fork suspended. ‘No,’ he said, ‘bloody angry. I was fond of Rasa, he had real pluck. He defied the Japs during the war and now the bloody Red Chinks have got him.’ He threw the fork down on his plate. ‘It sickens me to the pit of my stomach!’
Blanche pushed his drink towards him, then indicated his half-eaten eggs. ‘We need you on top form.’
He sipped the brandy and soda, then, without further comment, finished the meal, wrapping the last scraps of egg in a chapatti. ‘I feel like a traitor, being hungry.’
‘Soldiering back up the hill of routine,’ Blanche said as if to herself, then looked directly at George. ‘The trouble is people see routine as ordinary — instead of often the most difficult thing we do in our lives.’
‘Keeping the boat steady,’ he said, looking at her and nodding his approval of the sentiment. ‘The most admirable thing most of us do in our lives.’
‘The role of the good wife,’ Liz contributed.
‘Never sure, dear, whether you’re being sarcastic or supportive to the argument.’
‘She’s young,’ George said.
She didn’t answer her mother because she really wasn’t sure either. The conversation went on, disregarding her.
‘I wondered whether any of the military were ever actually billeted at plantations, or went for a few days’ rest?’ Blanche asked.
‘Sort of busman’s holiday,’ George commented. ‘Not a lot in it for the troops at Rinsey right now, I wouldn’t have thought, except guard duty and they can do that anywhere.’
‘No, I meant when we’re living there and properly organised, we could give them a few home comforts, good meals ... while their presence — ’
‘What you need is a couple of resident Gurkhas! They’d put the fear of God into the commies.’
‘You don’t take it as a practical proposition.’
‘I think it is — for you.’ He grinned. ‘Not sure what the army would get out of it. Some of the men go to safe areas where couples entertain them for a meal and a swim in their pools and I have known them leave a wireless operator at a bungalow, or in a kampong, while they go on a jungle sortie. They’re not overmanned, it would all have to relate to a military operation, or recreation for those that have been on long operations.’
‘Rinsey hardly falls into the rest-and-relaxation category,’ Blanche agreed.
‘Self-sufficiency is what we need. This could be a long campaign. My men will be working round the clock as from tomorrow to fortify Bukit Kinta, then we’ll go to Rinsey and secure that.’
Liz caught the older man’s eye and he read the unspoken question. ‘I have to protect my people here first. There is, after all, no one at Rinsey at the moment, no workers — ’
‘There’s Josef, and he may have found some of the tappers by now.’
‘Josef.’ He paused, sniffed and hummed speculatively under his breath. ‘Told Major Sturgess he helped us during the war. Shall have to see.’
‘He would only have been a teenager, I don’t suppose he could have done much.’ Liz pressed excuses for Josef, as was her old habit.
‘A teenager’s grown up out here and I’ll remember him if he ever helped.’
There was a certainty in his voice, a confidence in his own ability, as there was when he went on to say, ‘One thing, once we start on your bungalow there’ll be no delay. I’ve requisitioned plenty of barbed wire, electric cable and powerful lamps.’
‘I wonder if our old generator will stand the strain,’ Blanche said.
‘No. Robbo didn’t think so, he’s sending up a mobile army genny on permanent loan.’