She found to her astonishment tears running down her cheeks. This beautiful land, this land where she had thought all her dreams for the future lay ...
‘My Shangri-la!’ she whispered to the fading glory. ‘Still the same — but I’ve changed. You are the distant, brilliant land of my childhood.’
She turned to look from sea to land, dark now, menacing to the ignorant or the unwary. But westward, the sea seemed to hold its own light, as if having drowned in it the sun gave up light from below its waters. ‘Ever more wonders!’ Looking towards the headland, she was surprised to see how close its blackness loomed, how far she had walked. With a start, she saw a dark figure at the sea’s edge outlined by the pale-green phosphorescence — a figure lifting an arm high in eager greeting. ‘Ever more wonders,’ she repeated.
They met running. He caught and swung her round so she felt on a carousel of pale sky and shining water.
They hugged and kissed and threw little remarks at each other, mere asides, banter to ride the excitement of reunion, the thrill of touching.
‘You’ve shaved your beard.’
‘I was on duty until five.’
‘I had a mad taxi driver ... ’
‘Today’s duty sergeant thinks he’s still at Caterham Barracks.’
‘I think my mother will marry George.’
There was a pause, a kind of calming in this news. ‘Good,’ he said with gentle emphasis. ‘Good, best thing that can happen.’
They were silent then, content to link arms and stand lifting their faces to the slight breeze coming from the sea. Its passage feigning coolness.
‘It was getting late,’ she said after a time. ‘I thought you might not come.’
‘I’ll be here every night and most days,’ he told her. ‘The camp has steps down to this beach. There’s a fence and a gate but ... but I’m billeted with two good guys.’
She gave his arm a squeeze and immediately he folded her in his arms. ‘Don’t get into trouble.’ she whispered.
‘Do I care?’ he asked, wrapping the words around her like a message of undying love.
‘Don’t want them sending you somewhere else. I would like the whole month here.’ She laughed suddenly. ‘You know honeymoons are going to mean nothing to us.’
‘We’ll just make it one long celebration,’ he told her and they began walking slowly back towards the bungalow.
‘I love you,’ she said, ‘for ever.’
‘You’ll be able to stay until my furlough is up?’
She nodded. ‘And I’ll travel with you when you go.’
‘I hope,’ he said, treading into the wet sand at the sea’s edge, ‘we’re not talking metaphors, or some of George’s proverbs here.’
She laughed. ‘No, I’m talking planes and ships, or whatever will take us back to England.’
‘You’d be happy to leave your mother behind? That is, if she stays.’ It was easier to ask these questions as they walked.
‘Oh, she’ll stay, I know that. She may not know yet, but they’ll marry and live at Rinsey and I’m sure eventually George will take over the plantation.’ Predictions felt like certainties as they strolled, arms around each other. ‘I feel closer to my mother than ever before in my life. It’s like finding you had another best friend or older sister.’
‘There is your sister.’
‘Wendy? Wendy’s like my mother, self-sufficient. She’ll make her own decisions, no use trying to second-guess for Wendy. She’ll make a life, and it’ll never be dull.’
‘At home either East or West,’ Alan mused, then lifted his head. ‘You know, I can smell rain coming just like you can in England — and the sky’s darkening.’
‘It won’t be like English rain,’ Liz had hardly warned when the first spots began to crash down.
‘Like being pelted with jellyfish,’ Alan gasped as he caught her hand and they ran and leaped up on the bungalow’s platform under the crude porch.
They were both soaked and the rain was already running from the roof in a unbroken sheet. ‘Makes you feel shut off, doesn’t it?’ Alan said as he turned to her. ‘The darkness, the rain.’
She thought how strange it was that rain, waterfalls, a lake with a legend, now an ocean featured in their love. ‘There is a lot of water in Malaya,’ she said while remembering there was also a trout stream running through the land of Pearling House.
‘We should have taken our clothes off — like at the lake,’ he said.
‘Why not? Let’s just stand out there.’ She began to pull her saturated clothing off and stepped out into the downpour.
‘Oh! lovely’ she shouted above the din. ‘Come on in — no, out!’
Alan pulled off his clothes and hung them on a chair which stood at the back of the verandah. He lifted his hands above his head and let the water stream over him, remembering the home-made shower at Rinsey when he had first dined in the house, first known Liz loved him.
They came together, letting the water stream over their entwined bodies. Liz had a mental picture of how they must look, how she could draw them, Art Nouveau style, sensual, with a background of wild Rousseau jungle. She would avert the faces so the picture could hang on the wall of their home, so only she and Alan would know the real significance.
All through the night their lovemaking was accompanied by the pounding beat of rain. But the morning dawned clear, gleaming with all the cleanness of a land new-scrubbed and polished by the storm. She felt him move from the bed, heard him go to the window, heard a faint gasp of amazement and, seeing her awake, he said in an awed voice, ‘Come and look!’
She knew by the dancing of the light from the window what he was seeing and went to stand, her arm around him.
Raindrops still hung sparkling in huge prismatic drops from every leaf and over the steaming track hovered a myriad gaudy butterflies, like a curtain screening jungle from beach, screening them from the world.
‘I wouldn’t have believed it,’ he whispered, ‘if I had not seen ... ’
‘It often happens after rain,’ she told him.
He stood and admired them as long as they remained, turning to her as the last few began to drift away, the wonder of it still in his eyes.
*
Four months later George and Blanche stood, arms linked, on the Jardine Steps of Keppel Harbour, looking up at His Majesty’s Troop Ship Lanshire. Having loaded its returning troops, officers, wives, nurses, other personnel and Liz, the ship was preparing to leave for the month’s journey home to England.
Both searched the ship’s rail until Blanche squeezed George’s hand. ‘There they are! Together, look! Under the fourth lifeboat from the front.’
They waved energetically back to Alan and Liz, who had obviously spotted them some time ago.
‘Goodbye, my love,’ Blanche called. ‘Goodbye! Give my love to Pearling. Let me know what’s happening there. All the news.’
‘They can’t hear.’ George shook his head at her efforts.
‘I know, I know!’ Blanche said, waving hectically.
The hawsers were slipped from the bollards, splashing down into the dock, and a tug moved in to nudge and nurse the troop ship out into the channel.
From the rail, pressed close by Alan’s side, Liz waved and waved, feeling unutterably separated from her mother as clear water appeared between boat and land.
Adrift. She felt she ought to try to explain to someone that life had somehow mixed up their journeys. She was the one who was supposed to stay and her mother to return.
Alan took her hand and held it very hard. It felt as if he brought her hovering heart finally aboard for the journey, anchored not to a place but to a person.
“What needest with thy tribe’s black tents, who hast the red pavilion of my heart?”
Liz was never sure whether it was she who whispered the words.