She wondered if her mother and Anna could see the flames from the main bungalow yet. In this thought outside her own grief came the guilty knowledge that what she was doing would only heighten the sorrow for them. Any further deprivation would be another victory for Josef. He had always been greedy for more, gathering childhood triumphs around himself with the speed of these swift flames that scoured the room for new conquests, reaching out for her so she must snatch her dress to her legs.
But no more, Josef. No! Her amah’s home had been destroyed, her father murdered, her love destroyed — now surely was the time of retribution. She fled the place, the heat swirling after her, flames shooting as far as the verandah as if in a last bid to take her.
She turned back, awed by the blaze — hotter than the tropical night, bright as the tropical sun and, like the jungle, dangerous to those who misused it.
Once convinced her place was back with her mother and Anna, she ran as if the flames pursued her even into the tunnel. She left the far end of the tunnel gasping in the closeness as if the heat of the flames still took her air.
She was almost back at the bungalow when she saw her mother on the back porch. Blanche saw her at the same moment and came out to meet her, staggering as if her legs were stiff with long standing, long watching. She held out her arms wide and there were no questions. Just a silent coming-together of the two women, embracing as if they would never release each other again.
Now the tears came, for both — and they finally could stand no longer and sat, arms around each other, on the back-porch steps, watching the pulsating reds and oranges in the sky.
Liz was numb with loss. Blanche was dumb with the shock of all Joan had told her, of how little she really knew about her daughter. Then tears began again as she remembered Harfield had said he had not thought of her as a back-doorstep frequenter. Neville, Liz’s Alan ... George.
‘If Alan is dead there is no one here for me anymore,’ Liz said very quietly.
It was the kind of thing daughters say and mothers have to bear. Blanche reminded herself that these unthinking rejections were easier provided the mothers still had things of their own to do in life. She told herself she had a lot of very immediate things to do — she had a burning ambition to see justice done. Justice in and out of courts.
She remembered her grandfather, not too far from Pearling, shooting a rogue dog which had led several murderous attacks on his flocks of sheep. One spring afternoon she had stood with him watching the lambs playing together, crossing a little bridge over a stream in the follow-my-leader games they love, when the dogs came in, teeth bared, romping, excited for the kill.
‘Get behind me, Blanche,’ he had ordered as he raised his gun. She remembered how the great rogue dog screamed and reared up into a sky across which was written a scrawl of blood. The pack of village dogs had howled and whimpered as if they had been hit. Her grandfather had shot again over their heads, then had turned to find his granddaughter looking up at him.
‘They won’t come and kill any more lambs, will they, Grandfather?’
‘No, luvy, rough justice — but it had to be done, you understand that?’
She remembered nodding solemnly and walking home hand in hand with her grandfather.
Josef was as a rogue dog, she had known that since she had found him stealing as a little boy. Neither her family nor the one she had married into, nor their children, shirked their perceived duty, she thought as she watched the Guisans’ bungalow in the distance blazing still like a second sunset.
Chapter Seventeen
From the unburned section of the jungle camp’s main bungalow, Lee watched her brother approach. She glanced at her mother, who lay on the long chair they had salvaged from the unscorched end of the verandah.
He kicked at a few pieces of charred wood as he drew near but greeted neither her nor his mother.
‘So where were you when the soldiers attacked?’ Lee demanded, resentful of the ease with which her brother always stayed out of harm’s way, turning up when the worst was over. He would never ask how they had survived in the intervening weeks, or where the food she was cooking came from, or how long their mother had lain sick with fever.
He sneered but did not speak.
She must, she reminded herself, be discreet. She stared fixedly down at the food she was preparing, trying to control her tongue. There were some questions it was much better he did not ask.
‘Got wind of the raid, did you?’ she demanded as his silence continued. ‘Went off to bury some more arms to keep in favour with your friends?’ She was quite unable to stop herself goading him, voicing her guesses to pierce his selfish vanity.
He had been helping himself to a pan of cold rice; she saw his fingers pause loaded with the grains.
She laughed. ‘That’s what you’re doing!’ she exclaimed. ‘I knew you couldn’t still be finding arms from the war. There had to be an end.’
‘You bloody hellcat!’ Josef foolishly approached his sister as she began shredding vegetables to make a soup with the rice for her mother.
She raised the knife, her firm intention of using it in her eyes.
‘No, no, no! You not fight!’ The old woman’s voice rose in protest, making her cough so it racked her small frame. Lee went to give her a drink of water.
‘And why — ’ the old lady raised a finger at her son — ‘you not tell us the Hammonds back at Rinsey?’ Tears fell from her eyes and ran down her cheeks, their copiousness seeming too great for her frailty. ‘You leave us here … ’
‘Stop crying, Mother,’ Lee said firmly. ‘Don’t waste tears on your ... son.’ She spat the word as if it were distasteful, then turned to him as if he were a child, not a towering, dishevelled, bitter man. ‘Bad apple!’ she cried, picking up the knife again and waving it. ‘Bad apple! Mrs Hammond, she knew. Always she knew.’
‘Why you not tell us? We could have gone home.’ The workworn Chinese lay back despairing, tears still welling from beneath her closed eyelids. She had become sick after hiding in the jungle from their communist masters. By the time they had dared to return, the British had fired the camp and left.
Lee threw the knife to the table and knelt by her mother, gathering her into her arms, terrified her mother had given too much of her energy and too much information with her questions.
‘Who said the Hammonds were back?’ he asked stonily.
‘You think the communists are your friends,’ Lee scoffed, ‘but when you’re not here they gossip and laugh about you. They say now the Hammonds are back you are “out on your ear, boy”.’
The half-concocted, half-exaggerated story had a greater effect than she had expected. Josef snatched up the knife and stood holding it over them both.
‘You don’t need knife to kill Mother.’ Although her black eyes were bright with fever, the frail woman’s voice was full of dignity and reprimand as she told him, ‘Your mother died long time ago when you brought us here.’
Lee gasped at her mother’s words but when Josef laughed disparagingly she felt a sudden release of all restraint. A sense almost of freedom, even in that place, came over her: with everyone gone and only her mother and brother to hear she could say whatever she wanted.
‘When you deceived us, Mother means!’ she told him. ‘Sure we ran away from the Japanese, that was right, they killed Father — but after war we should have gone back to our home at Rinsey. But you tricked us, you brought us to the communists and made us their slaves. But now you’re on your own, aren’t you, nobody wants you! Failure here!’ She stabbed a finger towards the middle of the burned-out camp. ‘Traitor there!’ She tossed her head up over the dense jungle to the wider world.