Authors: Martin Booth
Clambering over the heap of loose bricks was not difficult and, once outside the confines of the barracks, they slowed to a walk, heading westward along Kennedy Road.
‘Paradisiacal,’ said Sandingham.
‘What was?’
‘Repulse Bay. You asked about it. The hotel’s set on a curving sandy bay. Shade trees. Flowering bushes. A superb bar. Before…’
He wanted to say ‘before the war’, but with it all around him he couldn’t. He didn’t want to think of it. The less he accepted there was a war on the less it might accept him as a part of it. Illogical, he knew; but it was part of the escape mechanism he had built up inside himself.
‘Before … 1939, it must have been heaven. Film stars lying on the beach, getting a tan. Not quite like that now, of course. Packed out with civil servants and their families. Soldiers and children and amahs. Refugees. Nurses and nuns.’
Another shell came over but they did not duck. Experience told them that this was a wild aim and, sure enough, it burst four hundred feet up the mountainside above them, harmlessly exploding in the steep wooded slopes.
‘Know why nuns always go round in pairs?’ asked Bob, suddenly.
‘No. Why do nuns always go round in pairs?’
The patter, the play-off of line against line: they could have been in their school dormitory or in the mess near Salisbury, sipping scotch and soda after a day’s exercise out on the Plain.
‘So one nun sees the other nun gets none.’
It was intended to be corny, and Sandingham laughed with deliberate half-heartedness.
Just before reaching the Peak Tram line they turned left up a stepped pathway through trees and low houses and blocks of flats. Stray artillery fire had hit some of the buildings; the path was strewn with debris and, at one point, a fallen tree. Halfway up the pathway that led to Macdonnell Road, the next terrace-like level of buildings on the mountainside, Bob stopped and pushed open a door in the shrapnel-scarred wall of a block of flats. It was dark inside but he evidently knew the way; Sandingham followed him up the stairs. Three storeys up Bob stopped again. Another door was opened, this time with a key. Bob had fitted a padlock to the hasp.
They entered the apartment. It was still furnished but it had been looted for valuables.
‘Wait here,’ said Bob before disappearing into the kitchen and servants’ quarters.
Looking around him, Sandingham saw that the owners of the flat had been wealthy. The furniture that remained was of the expensive cane variety. A set of shelves held porcelain ornaments and curios: some lay smashed on the floor. Everything made of ivory or jade had been removed but he could see from the dust circles where they once stood. Along a wall of the sitting room were bookshelves which the looters had ignored.
‘Who owned this place?’ he called.
‘Somebody working for one of the big banks,’ shouted Bob from a back room. ‘They left a month before the Japs came in. Had a tip-off. Got windy. Who knows? Probably safe in Sussex by now, playing a round of golf on the nearby course.’
‘Hardly.’
‘Hardly what?’
‘Hardly playing golf. It’s the middle of the night in England. Besides, they’re more likely to be in Calcutta or Bombay, swigging sundowners in the club and sorting out the finances of the local branch there.’
Sandingham had wandered into a bedroom. It was small and the single bed was covered with children’s books. On the floor a clockwork train set was half laid out. He wound the locomotive up and set it on the track. It rushed forward, left the rails where they ran out and trundled across the wooden floor until it hit the skirting board and fell on its side. The wheels spun and slowed to a halt.
He walked back to the main room and started to look through the books. Some were leather-bound and, even in the winter chill, had started to mark with mould.
He took down a copy of the 1777 edition of Young’s
Night Thoughts
and, opening it at random, read to himself:
Absurd Longevity! More, more, it cries:
More Life, More Wealth, more Trash of ev’ry kind.
and
While Man is growing, Life is in Decrease;
And Cradles rock us nearer to the Tomb.
Our Birth is nothing but our Death begun;
As Tapers waste, that Instant they take Fire.
He stopped reading. Bob was standing in the doorway holding two fine china coffee cups and a full bottle of champagne cognac. He placed them gently on a table in front of a cane settle and poured out two large measures of the brandy.
‘Just look at us, Jay,’ he said. ‘Dressed in dirty uniforms, in a ransacked flat on the coast of southern China with you reading eighteenth-century poetry out loud while I pour French cognac into Noritake coffee cups made by Japanese potters for the European market, while under howitzer fire from the aforesaid craftsmen. How bloody ironic!’
Sandingham picked up his cup and sniffed the scent of the liquid.
‘I went to Cognac with my father once on business,’ continued Bob idly. ‘The smell of brandy was so strong in the streets that it made one heady just to breathe in the air. Wonderful!’
‘You know, Bob, I think you sons of brewers could find a good bottle of hooch at a dried-up oasis.’ He drank. ‘And Arab countries ban booze.’
His cup refilled, Sandingham walked out on to the balcony. He was masked from view by a tree but could see through the leafless winter branches. As he looked at the tip of the Kowloon peninsula he saw a puff of smoke appear. Directly afterwards an explosion erupted near the naval dockyard. The Japanese had installed some of their artillery in the compound of the Tsim Sha Tsui police station that was on a rise behind the Star Ferry pier.
They sat together, side by side, on two of the cane chairs on the balcony. The cold breeze was abating, merely stirring the curtains in the glassless windows. They did not speak but drank slowly and meditatively.
Several more desultory puffs of smoke eddied or ringed out from the peninsula. The shells either hit the dockyard buildings or fell short into the harbour, sending up columns of grey spray.
They’re trying to range their guns, to hit the defences on the shore, Sandingham thought, preliminaries to an inevitable assault on the island.
Bob was sitting stretched out, his feet pressing on the balcony rail and his head lolling against the bamboo chair-back. His eyes were lightly closed, the cognac balanced in his cupped hands just under his nostrils. Sandingham watched him breathe in the fumes and hold them before letting them escape from his lungs with a barely audible sigh. Every breath, he knew, was taking Bob away through the singing years to France and Italy, to Provence and Tuscany, to public houses he’d known as a boy, to leafy English lanes and Welsh hillsides, to illicit school drinking and weekend parties in his parents’ country house, to private thoughts and secret dreams that Sandingham could not share.
In his turn, Sandingham shut his eyes and let the warmth of the cognac take him as far away as he could from the present; but he could not make the journey as far as his home. His dreams ended in Malaya with Bob.
One sight kept recurring, one wonderful sight. It was of a deep verandah-ed, colonial-style house with the fans of travellers’ palms spread wide as green peacock tails on either side. A lawn led up to the building and the verandahs were in heavy shade. There was a slight and humid wind coming off the jungle. On the verandah stood Bob, bare to the waist, except for his identity tag, with a pristine white sarong lapping at his shins. As if projected on the screen of some cinema of the mind, the scene cut to a close-up of Bob grinning. He waved, and the motion of his hand disturbed a gekko flattened on the verandah railing.
Sandingham opened his eyes and looked about him like a man waking early. The balcony upon which they now sat had no gekkos on it anywhere.
When Bob had waved to him that day, from a house on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur lent to him by friends of his parents away on home leave, Sandingham had parked the Morris beside one of the palms and entered the cool vault of the building. The ceiling fans rotated slowly and the plank floors glistened with polish between the rugs. Printed batik tapestries hung on the walls. Later, they had made love, not for the first time and yet, it now seemed, perhaps for the first time. Afterwards, it had rained in the typically Malayan manner, the drops huge and bouncing on the lawn, the noise like a vast hissing in the ears of the whole world. It had lasted an hour until, spent, the clouds had dispersed to reveal the sun shining so hotly that the steam rose not only from the jungles but also from their own skins. The houseboy, he remembered, had served them gin and lime from a jug surrounded by crushed ice.
After a while, Bob Bellerby broke their silence.
‘Well?’ he asked.
‘It’s all so bloody foolish,’ replied Sandingham. ‘We don’t stand a monkey’s chance. We’ll hold out for another week or so, but the ammunition’ll dwindle and then we’ll be left with broom handles and saucepan lids.’
‘Already has,’ replied Bob. ‘That box on the table was all that the sergeant could find.’
‘So what now?’
‘We fight. We try. We go down in the history books as the gallant defenders of a little bit of Empire. Names in lead on a monument erected on a traffic island. On a village green. Visited annually and otherwise ignored except by the publican’s dog. Forgotten.’ He swallowed another measure of cognac. ‘Unmarked graves or a pile of dust. “Some corner of a foreign field that is forever England.” Because we’ve fertilised it. Rupert Brooke was a stupid bastard. He got what he deserved – a lost grave on a Greek island. God save us from jingoistic poets.’
‘Let’s save some of the cognac. For a rainy day.’
As if to mock him, drizzle began to fall and the breeze drifted it on to their faces and hands. Bob rammed the cork back into the mouth of the bottle with the ball of his thumb.
‘How much longer?’
Sandingham pulled back his cuff to see his watch and said, ‘Have to report back in an hour and a bit. There’s time.’
Bob hid the cognac in a large, cracked vase that had once served as an umbrella stand: no looter would be interested in a damaged antique.
The master bedroom was less disarranged. The wardrobes and the airing room had been ransacked but not everything had been taken. Several fashionable lady’s dresses lay across a chair and the drawers of lingerie and make-up were virtually undisturbed. The dressing-table set had vanished except for a silver-backed nail buffer. Without thinking, Sandingham put this in his pocket. It might come in useful. One day.
The bed had clean sheets on it. The blankets were smoothed and the silk tassles on the counterpane flickered in the air.
Both men stripped. Sandingham was so tired and his fingers ached so badly from wiring and rewiring, from steering trucks and writing curt signals, from pulling a trigger and gripping pliers, that he could not unclasp his belt. Bob helped him with it.
They got into the bed. It was blissful to feel the clean cotton against their skins. The cool material seemed to erase the grime and sweat that clung to them. Sandingham wished that they had been able to bath first, but there was no water or electricity with which to heat it.
Bob took Sandingham’s hand in his and kissed it.
‘I love you, Jay,’ he said. ‘God knows where we’ll be a week from now, but never forget it. Wherever and whatever, I love you.’
‘And I you, Bob. Regardless.’
He felt himself slipping into sleep. He wanted to stay awake, wanted desperately in his soul to make love but he couldn’t gather the energy. The sheets were warming them both and the warmth was acting as a soporific. The cognac more than relaxed his brain. It numbed it and emptied it of all but love, an overwhelming desire to sleep and a distant fear from which he seemed now to be divorced yet with which he was still in touch.
Turning on to his side, he faced Bob.
‘I’m sorry…’ he said. ‘I’m just so tired, so bloody knackered.’
‘It’s all right, Jay.’
He felt Bob nuzzle his lips into his neck and sensed his lover’s hand slipping smoothly down his belly to work its way between his thighs.
And then he was asleep and in his dream two nuns came to him and told him the war was a game in which he must play up and score; a soldier with one arm served him real coffee with cream and he could smell bacon frying, hear it sizzling in a pan …
An hour later Bob woke him roughly, tugging hard on his shoulder. The first sound he heard after Bob’s voice was the high hum of an engine straining against itself. He rolled over and faced the long bedroom windows. The first object he saw past Bob’s strained face was a tall pillar of smoke rising from the waterfront near Causeway Bay. A line of dull flashes through Wan Chai explained Bob’s urgent words.
‘Wake up, Jay! Get up! Air raid.’
* * *
There was a heavy mist upon the mountains. It had come down silently in the early hours, filtering out sounds as effectively as a thick snowfall. The trees dripped eerily upon the winter carpet of dead leaves and on the road surface outside West Brigade headquarters at Wong Nai Chung Gap. As soon as any soldier walked out of the cover of the headquarters, dewdrops clung to the hairs of the serge material of his khaki drill uniform and dampened it miserably.
The Brigadier was pleased. Without doubt, it would slow the Jap advance considerably. They had made good ground during the night and had promised to break through with the coming of dawn. Now the dense fog would hamper them. The Japanese, being on the offensive, would have to guard against attack at every bend in the road, every rock and bush and gully.
At five o’clock he had issued orders that a company of the Winnipeg Grenadiers should go up to Jardine’s Lookout and, clearing it of any enemy troops who might have gained the advantage, should move on and consolidate a hold on Mount Butler. It was hoped that would hold up the Japanese movements westward along the high ground of the spine of island hills.
Sandingham was leaning on the rear mudguard of a Humber Snipe staff car. His driver was in the medical aid shelter thirty yards from the headquarters, obtaining a carton of field dressings. It was barely daylight. He was smoking a cigarette, the smoke exiting from his mouth and nostrils to disappear promptly into the damp air. The mist revived him to a point. He wiped his hand over his forehead and felt the sweat loosen and slip away. The dew was almost as good as a blanket wash.