‘What did you say?’ she asked close to his ear.
He shook his head but then cupped a hand to her ear. ‘I said if lovers had trysting places ... and we were lovers ... this would be ours.’
He felt her head nod against him and she said into his ear, ‘Yes, a very special place.’
A wonderland, he would have said, had it been just a meeting place for lovers and not mourners. He watched her looking all around and felt such a rush of affection he was sure she should have known, was surprised the force did not physically move her — but when she did turn back to him she smiled and nodded as if she had found some deep satisfaction, some calming influence there, while he felt he had come to grips with the very elements: bedrock, fire and water.
After a few more minutes he felt her shivering. He rose and indicated he thought they should go back. She nodded reluctantly.
The heat, the climb and the stifling humidity after the coolness beneath the water made conversation difficult, but even when they reached the top and paused to catch their breath they did not speak, though their silence was that of a couple with too much to say and no easy way to start.
‘What are you thinking?’ she asked at last as they began to walk into the plantation again.
‘That I feel different,’ he said hesitantly, ‘that I feel maybe we’ve been down to some underworld, to some emotional depths, and found ... ’ He thought it would have been impertinent to voice what he had really discovered. ‘And found it has somehow helped.’
‘It has helped.’ She took up the words quickly but did not add that she felt they had become curiously linked in some strong, sad, tacit bond. ‘I’ve spent my tears — I feel almost it’s been an indulgence. Now it’s time to go back to my mother, but I’ll be more help now. Thanks for putting up with me.’
‘It would be a pleasure to put up with you an awful lot more.’
They stood for a moment under the pretty, sunlit canopy of the delicate leaves of the rubber trees. She looked at him quizzically but saw it was not a skit or a remark to raise spirits, just a statement of fact.
He held out a hand to her and both knew that if she took it now it would mean far more than the clinging in paroxysms of grief, or the helping hand on a steep path — this was quite a different offer.
When she slipped her hand quickly into his, a phrase from some biblical text came to him. ‘I am blessed among men,’ he told her. She looked so astonished that he grinned and raised her hand to kiss it. ‘I did go to Sunday school and I was in the village choir.’
‘Really?’
His turn now to glance sharply at her, but the look that accompanied the word was of wonder and interest, as if she was trying to picture him back in his surplice processing with the other white-robed boys and men up the church aisle. ‘Really,’ he said gently.
‘Some time you must tell me,’ she said as they began to walk back. They heard the noise of a vehicle arriving as they approached the bungalow.
They emerged from the trees as John Sturgess was getting out of his army jeep. He stopped, his legs half out, as if he could not believe his eyes. Then he shouted:
‘Soldier!’
Alan said something inaudible, but kept holding her hand until she reached the clear ground. Then he asked briefly, ‘You be all right now?’ She nodded.
‘Soldier!’ Sturgess again, his voice full of threat as he came towards them. ‘I thought you were taught to jump when an officer spoke.’
‘Sir!’ Alan came to a halt, saluted and stood to attention.
Sturgess’s gaze went to Liz, registering the torn sleeve of her dress and the obvious distress she had been in. ‘What the hell’s been going on?’
Liz thought what an unimaginative man he was, such stock phrases, such military insularity. ‘Your soldier rescued me,’ she said, ignoring the soldier’s eyes as she continued her story. ‘I was so upset I just ran and ran into the jungle, and your guardsman helped me, brought me back.’ She reached over and for a moment put her hand over Alan’s clenched fingers, thumb down the nonexistent seam of his jungle green trousers, as he remained standing to attention. The action was incongruous, reminding Alan of a visitor touching the exhibits in a museum — and he was the prohibited waxwork.
Alan had learned impassivity if nothing else while being berated by foul-mouthed sergeants on parade grounds. He was impassive now as he saw his officer look nonplussed. Even a major could hardly question the veracity of the daughter of the house. Could hardly discipline her: ‘Keep your fingers off my soldiers! Miss!’
‘Get back to your post, Cresswell. I’ll see you later.’
‘Sir!’ He executed the high knee turn, one two three, stepping smartly off with the left foot, and marched sharply towards the rear. Out of sight he stopped and listened. The digging had stopped.
‘That man behaved ... properly?’ Sturgess asked.
‘That man was a gentleman — a real knight in shining armour, you might say.’ She gave him a stock phrase to chew on.
‘A knight without his armour, I would have said.’ He looked at her more carefully. ‘You’ve hurt your arm.’
She looked first at the wrong arm, which convinced him that the guardsman was probably telling the truth.
‘Oh! It’s nothing,’ she said, surprised by the torn sleeve and the graze.
As they walked together towards the bungalow, her mother came to the front door. Liz knew immediately that she had news — bad news.
‘I’ve identified your father’s body,’ she said.
Chapter Nine
Liz stood arm in arm with her mother at the head of the grave. The sides had been draped with green cloth and given the dignity of tidy geometric lines. Her father too had been tidied — into one of the long rectangular boxes kept stored by the army at their depot at Batu Caves ready for the crating of their dead. Burials were of necessity swift in the tropics.
The red, white and blue of the Union Jack over the coffin against the artificial green field made her think of England. She clenched her teeth hard as memories threatened public breakdown. They had draped flags from all the upper storeys of Pearling House in 1945 when the war was over and put out even more to blow in the dry winds of that December when finally her father had been demobbed.
She remembered the bigger banners cracking like whips in the bitter piercing winds, remembered her father coming at last, the joy, then the feeling of being partly shut out from him, her mother supremely important. Later, as he shivered in the same winds, helping her take in the flags, he had said to her, ‘Let’s got back to our Malaya, Liz.’ They had danced round the attic room. ‘Just like at Raffles,’ she had shouted.
‘Our Malaya’ was a bitter irony now, a bitter country — her heart was sick for this beautiful land. She glanced regretfully at the abundant greenness of the garden, the gloss of the fan palms, the delicate leaves of the rubber trees in the middle distance, the hills beyond — high, green, cool — as near to paradise as Mother Nature could get on this earth.
There would be no more memories of her father to add to her store. There is no easy funeral except one’s own — she had heard those words as a child standing at her mother’s side in silent respect as a young boy’s funeral had passed. He was a classmate who had been bitten by a sea snake. The sentiment had meant little to her until that moment.
Where now were the carefree children who had played and laughed in this garden? Wendy far away, mourning a father she had known for less than half her lifetime; Lee, her gentle friend, banished for war crimes never of her doing; and Josef, whom Liz had loved so loyally, defended so regularly — exactly that was Josef guilty of?