LITMIR.BIZ

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or so from the back of the burgled house.

      Jack wasn’t dreaming when he heard the motor bike. He was in his bed, listening, waiting. He recognised the sound of it and knew how it stood revving in the street at the front of the shop. Then it stopped. He got out of bed and went into the front room. His mother and someone else were coming up the stairs. He heard their voices.

      ‘Where is he, then?’

      ‘How should I know?’

      Jack retreated to his bedroom and stood just beside his door.

      ‘For heaven’s sake, Tony, he is my husband!’

      ‘What?’

      ‘What’s happened? Where is he?’

      ‘I’m not his fucking keeper. All right. Maybe he slipped up. Maybe there was just a weensy bit of a fucking hitch.’

      ‘A hitch?’

      ‘Yeah.’

      ‘What do you mean? I want to know. Where’s Vic? Tell me!’

      ‘Shut up, woman! Leave me alone, you stupid bitch. I don’t know. Maybe he’ll get back later. Maybe he won’t. Knowing him he’ll run smack in the wrong direction. And if the shite get him he’d better not open his bloody trapdoor, that’s all.’

      ‘Tony! What do you mean? What do you mean, Tony?’ She was almost screaming.

      ‘Some old Jew got fucking damaged. Rabbit was careless, that’s all. All right? What’s it to you, anyway?’

      ‘Oh, Tony. What am I going to do?’

      ‘You’re going to keep quiet. That’s what you’re going to do, Phyllis. You’re going to keep quiet for Tony, aren’t you, dearest? Aren’t you? Rabbit’s going to keep quiet. And you’re going to keep quiet. Aren’t you, darling Phyllis? Poor old Bun, eh? Poor old Bunny Rabbit. Maybe he’ll show up after all. And maybe not. Eh, Phyllis? Come here, then, you bloody halfwitted bitch.’

      ‘Don’t call me that.’

      ‘I’ll call you what I like.’ Then Tony’s voice changed. ‘Come on, Phylly. You know I don’t mean it. Come on, eh? There’s my girl. That’s what you like, isn’t it? That’s what you want. Eh, baby? Just like it used to be. Eh?’

      Jack left the door with its rim of light. He sneaked back to his bed, touched the bristly wool of his stocking, and pulled the covers over him because he was cold, and because of the noises. He sang her song in his head to shut them out. That there was a man and his lady, on Christmas Day. It was on Christmas Day. His father would take him down to Creekmouth. Swinging their great brown sails, the three ships would come in on the tide. On one of them, the wounded lady would be standing, her arms stretched out for him.

      THEIR BOAT HEADED from Penang out of the Straits of Malacca on the voyage she’d made too often before. The gesture of Selama’s suicide, the pure speechless act, had drawn out from her father the story of his private life, of the dilemma of duty that had led to his buying the tickets home, and of the consequent betrayal of his lover. Clarice felt angry and let down by what had been going on behind her back; and which had come to so violent a termination.

      Her own affair had drifted to its inevitable end. Robin had received his posting and with it a promotion to captain. He’d gone back to his wife, leaving Clarice only his Christmas gift of some scented notepaper. Now she saw Robin Townely just for what he was: a fairly ordinary and not particularly attractive army officer with a roving eye and stronger arms than hers. She wanted to punish both the men in her life.

      But there was that triumph, too, inside her. How her heart raced every time she thought of Vic. In England her feelings would be heightened only to be mocked by the fact of his marriage. It would be a torment. Yet part of her longed to arrive. Another regretted that she would put herself through it all again.

      Upon the high seas, the contradictions in her emotions made her listless. She suffered from want of spirits, putting on a brave face. She also drank and played poker for pennies with Ted Crow and Alf McCoy, two superannuated planters trying to get home. They were both absurdly indulgent and amusing but beyond that made few demands – upon either her feelings or her conversation. On tropical evenings the three of them hung over the piano in the ship’s saloon. She played popular songs: ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’, ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’, and ‘Blue Moon’. They sang together, ‘She went to heaven and flip-flap she flied’, and ‘One man went to mow, went to mow a meadow’, and laughed, and walked about the deck under the huge stars.

      More obviously distressed, Dr Pike drank to anaesthetise himself. Then he would stand on deck for hours, it seemed, watching the horizon. Clarice struggled to forgive him, with all his former talk of medicine as love and charms – and of honesty. How he’d pulled the wool over her eyes, how he’d kept up his affair behind her back. And the woman, the suicide had, yes, been very shocking; but then she’d hardly known her, Selama Yakub. Once the body had been taken away she’d cried, uncontrollably, all night in her room. She was annoyed with her, too, taking herself off like that before she even knew she might have had a stepmother.

      There were U-boats in the Atlantic, which was why the Piet Hein ended its run at Marseilles. From there Clarice and her father made the last part of their journey across France. What should have been a fine adventure began well. She loved Marseilles the port. But the skies beyond were lacklustre. A change occurred during the rail journey up the Rhône valley; after Lyons everything grew tedious and craven cold. She saw herself and her father as two poor insects scuttling right under a web of fear and bad weather, stretched across the gloomy north from Siberia to Connemara, from Scapa Flow to the Caucasus. Her own nerve suffered, and a sense of foreboding began to preoccupy her. If Malaya had been spoiled for her, this headlong scamper over thousands of miles was pure folly.

      The hotel they found in Paris had damp beds. The staff scowled, or sneered, pretending to find difficulty with her schoolroom French. Her father was even harder to manage. When there was no suitable train leaving the Gare du Nord until quite late the next morning, she had to ration his alcohol. At eleven forty-seven, an engine dawdled northwards through the Paris banlieux before at last getting up steam enough to tackle the countryside. By then he’d sobered up, but after Amiens and at an almost wilful snail’s pace, the train turned to reconnoitre the lines of the old British trenches. She saw Albert, Bapaume, Arras, Vimy, Loos and Béthune, all under traces of snow. Trees had regrown, the broken villages had recovered; yet against an eerie little sunset framed by the train window the ordinariness of those places gave her another sharp taste of anxiety. Calais was windswept, and the Channel crossing no more than a choppy dash under the cover of night.

      The final stage, from Dover to London on the morning boat train, ran them up through snow-covered hop gardens under dirty skies. The Kentish suburbs were house backs, coal dumps, or overgrown depots; and Victoria Station, heaped up with sandbags and slush, showed no interest in their arrival. Clarice noted with disbelief the air-raid shelters, the slit trenches, and the government posters about how to behave. Overcoated guns in Hyde Park looked upwards at phoney skies. Any patriotic nostalgia she’d concocted on the way evaporated. The old country was profoundly uninspiring. As for the English, how unlovely they were. After the ease and colour of the tropics, everyone looked shabby.

      And would Vic look shabby too, she wondered, if by chance she ran into him – as around every turning, almost, those first few days, she was sure she would? Would she even know him, remember his face? Perhaps she’d already passed him in the street. Urgently and involuntarily, she stopped in her tracks where she and her father were walking along the Bayswater Road, and looked behind her. Nothing – of course, nothing. But suppose he should appear; would she feel the same about him?

      Her father lectured her on Disraeli’s two nations. ‘At least the Malayans know how to take a pride in themselves.’ He held forth from Marble Arch, staggering slightly amid the traffic. ‘In England there are the Privileged and the People, Property or Population. Each hates the bloody sight and sound of the other.’

      ‘And which

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