‘Elphil?’ she guessed, remembering visiting that other remote estate with her father, travelling the seemingly endless jungle roads. Neville Hammond had described Elphil with those same words.
‘Yes.’ He looked at her with slightly more interest. ‘You surmise correctly.’
‘That’s terrible,’ she said, but resented the primness of his remark. ‘But perhaps just an incident? We knew there had been labour troubles.’
‘No!’ The denial was harshly emphatic. ‘I’m afraid not. There have been other incidents. Most of the planters in the north have seen this trouble coming since the end of the war. The chief Chinese communists held a huge gathering at Sungei Siput about a month ago … ’
Liz lost some of what he was saying as she remembered Sungei Siput, one of the chief towns of the state of Perak, as a place for shopping and the occasional cinema trip. Rinsey was in the same foothills as Elphil though some ten long jungle miles further southeast. ‘But you said bandits?’ she interrupted.
‘Bandits was the official line at first, but bandits don’t shoot people and leave two thousand dollars in the office safe with the key under their noses and not a damned soul who dare intervene.’
‘So what do they want?’
He gave her a strange agonised look which seemed to contain a personal hurt, as if he had been intimately betrayed, and said briefly, as the waiter came towards them, ‘To make Malaya a communist republic.’
The implications were left unsaid as the Chinese waiter came to take their order with all the polite attention, lack of servility and inscrutability of his race.
‘But how? How they can hope to — ’ She stopped short, then added her own answer, ‘By killing the English? But they couldn’t ... ’
‘Not in the towns. It’s the classic Mao Tse-tung stuff. Guerrillas attack lonely estates, tin and coal mines ... ’ He pulled the fork from his roll, then used it to chip away at the edges of the bread. ‘As well as the English they will attack the police, government officials in small towns and terrorise villagers into supplying them with food. They believe if they control the sources of wealth in the countryside the cities will eventually be starved to submission. Make no mistake, they’re already well organised ... ’
For a few seconds they both looked at the exposed white middle of his bread, before he put down his fork and pushed the side plate away.
She waited for him to go on with a growing sense of alarm. She remembered enough to know that the tin mines of eastern Malaya or the opencast coal mines of Batu Arang were no more than holes in the ground, lonely as any rubber plantation and just as jungle-surrounded.
She felt suddenly very curious. Whatever he was saying, however impassive his features, he was emotionally as involved in all this as she was.
‘Do you have someone living upcountry?’
‘No! I have no one.’ The denial was too sharp, too decisive, implied loss rather than the never had. ‘I lived in Malaya before the war,’ he said, adding with finality, ‘but that’s all over long ago.’
‘So what is your role?’ she asked. ‘I mean, you’re obviously official even if you’re not in uniform.’
His spoon stopped between bowl and mouth. She thought for a moment she had committed some social gaffe, but then very briefly he smiled. ‘Is it that obvious?’
She kept her face impassive, remembering that her Malayan amah had said there were times when silence brought the most answers.
‘I became a major after the war, after I’d stayed behind in the jungle during the Japanese occupation. I . .’ Pausing, he looked up at her and for the first time she felt it was an ordinary flesh-and-blood man who sat opposite her, for she could see the hurt in his eyes. ‘I helped train the Chinese — we knew a lot of them were communists — to harass the Japs. I lived with them in their jungle often not far from Elphil and Rinsey. I’m seconded back because I know where these camps are and how these Chinese terrorists think.’
So this was his bête noire; he had helped train men who had turned on his own race. She wondered if her mother would agree to stay at Raffles while she took the train to Ipoh, hoping to find or be contacted by her father. ‘So you’re travelling up to Perak?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’ He paused and looked at her sharply. ‘But I don’t advise you to — the police have enough on their hands. Stay here and news will come, I’ll see to it.’
‘I shall travel up by train tomorrow,’ she said simply. ‘Rinsey is my home.’
Chapter Two
‘Oh! Certainly not! We’ve come this far ... ’ Blanche’s reaction to the suggestion that she should remain in Singapore had been as determined as Liz’s to John Sturgess the night before. Once Blanche, rested and showered, had been told of events at Elphil, she took over organising their immediate departure.
‘They don’t want us to go,’ Liz felt she should warn. ‘Two more Englishwomen to look after is exactly what they don’t need.’
‘And bungling bureaucrats we can do without.’ Blanche pushed her toilet bag into her case. ‘There were enough people chasing their own tails during the war. We know what we want, where we want to go.’ She paused, hands pressing down the clothes in her case before she added, ‘And who we want to find there when we arrive.’
‘And we do not need looking after,’ Liz affirmed. The two exchanged looks which acknowledged their mutual resolution and their fears.
‘So what is this major like?’
‘A man shut up with his own problems,’ she judged sharply, recalling his brusque, uncompromising comment, ‘Childhood is soon over,’ when she had said how badly she wanted to reach the home where she was brought up. ‘He’s travelling today, we’re sure to meet him before we reach Ipoh. He’ll probably have a delegation on the platform to try to stop us going — that was the feeling he left me with last night.’
John Sturgess was in fact standing alone when they reached the platform. He nodded briefly but remained aloof.
Hardly had their luggage been carried to their compartment and the boy tipped when they were startled by a shout.
‘Mr Sturgess, sir! Robbo!’ A well-built man perhaps a little older than Liz’s father advanced on Sturgess with arms outstretched.
‘Harfield! George! My God! It’s good to see you!’ The two men slapped each other on the back and gave out cries of greeting and surprise as they performed a kind of spontaneous jig together.
Liz thought what an ill-assorted couple they made. Sturgess was tall and spare, pale with a triangle of shadow under his fine, high cheekbones, his manner off-putting and unsmiling until he greeted the older man. George Harfield looked like a healthy British butcher who might still give a good account of himself on the rugby field as one of the bigger forwards.
‘Thought you were in England.’
‘Thought you were in Australia!’ the big man countered, laughing hugely. ‘Thrown you out of there, too?’
‘Something like that. And I knew you’d never stay in Blighty!’
Liz and Blanche exchanged speculative glances and lingered outside their compartment, looking at the two men. Instead of bringing the second man over to introduce him, Sturgess took George Harfield’s arm and led him away along the waiting train. It seemed to Liz that she and her mother were being discussed.
‘He wouldn’t know anything anyway,’ Liz concluded, watching them go, ‘not if he’s just come from England.’
‘Don’t think much of your Robbo’s manners,’ Blanche said, fidgeting with their luggage on the overhead racks to ensure it was safely stowed. ‘You did dine with him last night, after all. Extraordinarily rude — though he’s damned good-looking in a ravaged sort of way, might have a bit of breeding about him.’