LITMIR.BIZ

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seas. He’d been a wretched parent, if the truth were told. Booting her out once more would be to fail her utterly. The whole thing was repeating itself. Supposing England were more fire than frying-pan, and he were deliberately hurrying his daughter under a cloudburst of bombs. Then, as her father, he should at least go with her. But he couldn’t take Selama. Nor could he leave her. Every delay made the seas more perilous. The fever beat up and up; and then broke in another drenching sweat.

      In the morning, in the lull, he put on a brave face. A sultry sky showed the monsoon weather, and Clarice maintained, over breakfast, her refusal to discuss change. By way of diversion, he read Phyllis’s letter. It had been weeks delayed.

      Dear Uncle Stan,

       I know you will have forgotten all about me. In fact when Auntie Mattie passed away you probably thought you would have got rid of us Tylers for good, and here we are turning up again like a bad penny. I’m sure I did write on the occasion of my marriage and again on the birth of our little boy, Jack, but unfortunately received no reply. Normally I wouldn’t trouble you except Victor, my beloved husband, has lost his job, he is a shipwright at the boatyard, and is finding it hard to get another start. If there was any way you could see your way to help us through this difficult time, I can assure you we would be very grateful. I hope this letter finds you well. I always remember how kind you and Auntie Mattie were to me when you used to very kindly have me to stay with you in your country house in Suffolk.

       I remain

       Your loving niece

       Phyllis Warren (Tyler as was)

      ‘“I remain”,’ Dr Pike quoted, sighing. ‘She wants money, of course.’

      ‘Who?’

      ‘Phyllis. Her husband’s lost his job.’

      ‘Phyllis! Your letter’s from Phyllis.’

      ‘Yes.’

      Her father saw the blush come to Clarice’s cheeks; and I can feel it too, as I describe it.

      ‘Is anything the matter?’ he said.

      ‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’ She struggled to compose herself. ‘Will you send her some? Money, I mean.’

      ‘Not sure I’ve all that much left.’ Dr Pike eyed her meaningfully.

      ‘May I see?’

      She took the letter, stood up, and hurried out to the veranda. The blush still prickled violently in her cheeks. Her hand was unsteady, and her knees had gone to rubber, making the short walk feel like a lurch into unsupported space. Outside, by a gap in the chick blinds, she read the letter over twice, three times, and then stared intently out at the sweep of countryside and rain forest – as if she could see all the way to England. Victor, my beloved husband …

      No, I’m not Jack, the ‘little boy’ of Phyllis’s letter. I am not yet born. I must draw up this landcape of privilege and make my portrait of the woman who should have been my mother, though her world has nothing to do with me. The past is a fable of desire, a romance, an illusion.

      Why then, curled as I am, tucked away in the story, do I make these imaginative stitches, pulling Clarice Pike and my father together again? Why linger with the family connection, suturing a gash in time? And why, like my great-uncle, Dr Stan Pike, do I tackle certain monsters? Because of the hope for love, of course.

      Clarice held on to the timber pole that propped the veranda roof. She tried to reinstate Robin Townely, her man of the moment – who ought to have been here by now to pick her up. But with the letter in her hand all she could think of was Vic, and London. Three years and she could still be visited by these heart-racings and shakings, these physical clichés. And still she couldn’t tell whether they were genuine, or merely symptoms of her own dislocation.

      On her mother’s side was East London and a poverty she’d lived protected from. That was the London out of which her father had rescued her mother. That was also the London where her cousin, Phyllis, had grown up, so distressingly unrescued. But there, paradoxically, Clarice had found Vic. And what was Vic but an ordinary working man, a dockside shipwright …

      Vic had been engaged to Phyllis; and yet instantly, shockingly, Clarice and he had been drawn to each other. They’d met for concerts, been to lectures together, stolen hours in cheap cafés. Staying at her grandmother Tyler’s house, Clarice had not had long before her return to Malaya. There’d been a secret affair; then a realisation, followed by renunciation. She’d left for Southampton and her ship. He’d consented to his marriage.

      Now in her mind’s eye he was caught by cross-hatchings, staring hopelessly back at her out of darkness, trapped back in that Dickensian ménage of cobwebs and candlelight that Phyllis’s letter evoked for her. She pictured too, unwillingly, the marital bed, with its creaking springs, the couple panting at each other, Phyllis something triumphant, and the man who had so startled her with a meeting of minds made weak and run of the mill, ruined.

      From the distance, somewhere in the plantation compound, there came the chime of gongs and a burst of drumming. She guessed there was a rehearsal for the festival to mark the end of Ramadan. Later there would be a shadow play. She turned back into the house. All the while, as she was collecting her things to meet Robin, a faint metallic music hung about her efforts. It seemed the moist air finely shook, and took on almost discernible curlicues, insinuating tendrils of sound.

      

      AT THE COAL HOLE night-club in Betterton Street, people were ready to dance again. The band was coming back after its break, and the spotlight waited, a large empty moon half-way up the spangled backdrop. From a table beside the dance floor Victor Warren stared into the illumination. Shortly, his wife would occupy it; tonight’s chanteuse. It was her lucky break.

      Since he’d last seen Clarice, my father was not at all ruined in features. At first glance, his looks appeared quite dashing. Some negative quality, however, had certainly leaked into the rest of his appearance, and sitting with Tony Rice and Frances, the girl, he looked badly out of place. His grey flannel jacket was disreputable, his tie was skewed, and his shirt collar had too obviously been turned.

      On closer inspection the face, which was thinnish with slightly Slavic lines, revealed a brow contracted and a mouth tightened. He wore his brown hair slicked away from his face, so that his dark moustache gave him a worn and dangerous cast. It belied his earnest eyes – and his twenty-six years.

      He had good reason to look grim. The feeling all along that he’d been playing for the very highest stakes seemed entirely borne out. Having done his best with Phyllis, he was sure she was trying to destroy him. In fact, it could have been the circle of his own death that glittered back at him from the stage. He, like Dr Pike, felt mightily scared. As he touched his drink to his lips he tried to convince himself he was being irrational.

      The club was full. In one of Covent Garden’s least promising streets, the Coal Hole was something of a find for a certain set. Or it was stumbled upon by theatre-goers after a meal at Monty’s or L’Escargot, who told their friends. From a narrow, sandbagged door in the face of an old tobacco warehouse, a staircase led down to the cellars, where there was not only late-night alcohol but a resident dance band of four black jazzmen. If it hadn’t been for the war, people said, the Coal Hole would have been set to ‘take off’. In the absence, so far, of bombing or gas attacks, it was still open, still defiantly humming. For once, thank God, the idiotic situation across the Channel could be shoved firmly to the back of the mind – so long as the band proved authentically rhythmic, the singer sufficiently charming.

      At the Coal Hole it wasn’t a requirement to be dressed to the nines. Ordinary suits mingled with evening wear; there might be artists, addicts, a boxer or two, even an obstinate Blackshirt. There were types of unescorted girl. The Saturday-night clientele was unpredictable, and a frisson of intermixture ran in the smoke-filled air. The only real entrance qualification was a little spare cash, a commodity Vic clearly lacked. It was Tony Rice who’d brought him and Phyllis along, and it was Tony Rice,

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