Lawrence thanked him and told him that he and his men would be ready to move whenever the Brigadier chose. He then spoke to his own operator, told him to leave the line plugged through to his room and to go at once to his unit, alert his second-in-command and bring a car round to the hotel for him. That done, he hastened back to her room. Thank heaven she was still asleep. . . .
Quickly he collected the rest of his things, went back to his own room, dressed and took out his dispatch book to write her a letter. Hardly had he got his indelible pencil to the paper when he heard faintly but clearly in the distance the sound of gun-fire, spasmodic at first but soon continuous and swiftly gathering in volume. But this as clearly as he could remember was what he wrote.
‘Dear, beloved child of life, the attack has started and I have to go. Here below is the address of my mother in England. Please communicate with me there when the war is over if we do not meet before. In case you should lose this write to me as soon as you can care of the War Office, Whitehall, London. Should I be killed please go to my home and see my mother. My only regret is that I have had no time to tell you all I feel and think about you and how deep my sense of our belonging to life. I take the thought of you wrapped around me like a warm blanket on a cold winter’s night. Please make haste to get away from this place today – I too shall see what I can do to that end before I go. Somewhere in life there will be a dimension wherein we shall be together again. Until then, as you said last night, to God – À Dieu, my dear – John.’
Short as the letter was it was almost too long because the last sentence was scribbled to the sound of the telephone ringing again. He hurried to pick up the receiver.
It was the Brigadier himself this time: ‘That you, Lawrence? Good. Note this map reference. I’ll have an officer waiting for you there. He’ll give you your orders. Get there just as soon as you can.’
Lawrence put the receiver down. The sound of distant fire was much heavier and more sustained.
He went back to her room. She was still asleep. He placed his note carefully on the worn little suitcase, placing one of her sandals on top to prevent some draught from blowing it away. Should he wake her? No. His instinct was emphatic. She would be woken soon enough. Let those subtle partners, chance and circumstance, which had brought them so mysteriously and accurately together now also separate them unaided. Separation coming then would be kinder than if he made his own words of farewell accessories to the fact. But it was not easy. In fact it was about the most difficult thing he had ever had to do. His last look showed her deeply asleep, a flush as of dawn in her cheeks, and the light of the expanding morning new in her hair. He had not seen such a look of fulfilment on a human face before – and he did not see it again until he saw it on the face of our own daughter asleep upstairs with her doll in the bed beside her twin brother.
Down below Lawrence found the proprietor just stirring. ‘Look,’ Lawrence ordered the man who was more frantic than ever now with drink and premonition. ‘Before you do anything else get on to that telephone to your authorities. I don’t care what you say or how you do it but you’ve got to get the last of the women away from here at once. Tell them if you like that it is an immediate order from the Australian General. Should this fail you, get the women on the main road walking inland as soon as possible. They’ll pick up a lift before the day is out. But get them away. And as soon as you’ve telephoned get the women up and breakfasted. The Japanese are attacking down the road and I promise you you’ll be lucky if they are not here by nightfall.’
As he was watching the alarmed proprietor obey these orders his car drew up outside. He gave one last look at the big red-faced man and was reassured to see him talking with determination into the phone. Then he stepped into the car and drove off. At the gates he glanced back at the window of her room. All he saw in it was the sunrise burning in the glass.
What happened to him afterwards then was of no importance to his story except for one thing. He had not driven far, in fact had not even reached his unit before he realized that despite his own desperate personal feeling of separation from the woman, it was a sense of separation designed to make him aware of a feeling of greater belonging. Gone was his terrible feeling of meaningless and despair. He no longer felt trapped. The earth, sparkling like a rounded deep-sea jewel below the opening shell of the day, no longer appeared indifferent. In the night he had been reborn native to it all. He had come home again to life, and in the days that followed, grim as they were, these feelings grew. He would only have to think of the woman and their brief encounter to find the most bitter of circumstances relieved with a living and poignant distillation of sweetness. Yes, even when he was kept in solitary confinement for months in a Japanese cell, tortured, and then condemned to death, the sweetness of the memory would be so acute that it outsmarted the agony and misery of mind and body. The sense of continuity derived erased the effect of what seemed then to be his own inevitable end. Without what that woman had given him out of her own prophetic intuition of life he could not have come through; would not have been sitting by the fireside on a Christmas night speaking to us as frankly as he had done. He had felt that she, too, had found their meeting healing; he only wished it could be more than a feeling.
Lawrence stopped, not so much as one who had reached his conclusion as one not knowing how to continue.
We waited in silence for a while in the hope that he would resume. Then afraid lest he might not do so unless encouraged, my wife asked a question. I had been back so much with Lawrence in Insulinda that I had become impervious even to the voice of the great storm outside now reaching its peak. But as my wife spoke I heard it again and I leant forward to make certain I did not miss anything of what she was saying.
‘Does that mean that you didn’t see her again?’ she asked.
‘I have never seen her since,’ Lawrence replied.
My wife remained silent for a moment. Then she said slowly: ‘So she might have had a child by you?’
‘Yes, of course,’ Lawrence replied looking straight into the fire. There was a long pause before he added, ‘But I am afraid she did not.’
‘Why do you say that?’ my wife asked quickly. ‘Did you have news from or of her?’
‘No, I never had news from or of her,’ he answered. ‘But I feel certain that if she had had a child I would have seen or heard from her again.’
‘I don’t wish to be brutal,’ my wife said gently. ‘But she might have had a child and died under the Japanese before she could let you know. After all, thousands of women and children died in prison camps in those islands.’
‘I don’t think she died,’ Lawrence answered confidently.
‘Then what do you think happened to her?’ my wife insisted. ‘And what did you do to find her – for I can’t imagine that you didn’t try to do so at the end of the war.’
Lawrence answered the last part of her question first. Yes, he had tried to find her but his effort had everything against its success. We must remember he did not even know her name. He did not even know what happened to her after he left her that early morning asleep in the hotel. It was nearly three and a half years later when he himself came out of a Japanese prison. He went straight back to the hotel to find that the proprietor had been killed by the Japanese, the Eurasian operator vanished, and the old servants who might have remembered them both were either dead or gone. Even so he had visited all the women’s camps possible but many of them were already half-empty because after the surrender of the Japanese in 1944, although the situation was still perilous, numbers of women had left the camps without waiting for official permission or assistance. He knew enough of her not to doubt that her urgent spirit would have made her one of the first to go. He had interrogated one emaciated woman camp-commander after the other, and they were all desperately anxious to help but without her name, without even a photograph or snapshot to help his description she had sounded like that of many others. His only hope was that she would write to him. He had warned both his home and the War Office to that effect but as the months passed and he did not hear, he despaired. For long he thought the only explanation was that she was dead, but gradually the certainty grew in him that she was alive and had come through as he himself had done.