Jubilee (28 page)

Noi seemed to have turned to marble in their grasp. Now I understand what being petrified means. More men came towards us. The mango seller and more guards. He nodded towards me and muttered
something. ‘Tell them,’ I pointed at Noi, ‘tell them she’s not involved.’

He mumbled at the guards. One of them laughed. In a movement so casual it might almost have been accidental he aimed the gun at the trader and pulled the trigger while the man was still
finishing his sentence. For a second the trader stayed on his feet, looking no more than mildly surprised, before he crumpled to the ground. Noi screamed. The guard holding her gave her a push
towards the body on the ground, just as it gave a final twitch.

I saw something small and bright fall from her pocket. The wooden doll I had made for her. Above our heads the frightened gibbons were still screeching a protest and I could hear the urgent
flaps of hornbill wings. My lips were still moving in pleas.
Noi was looking towards me in appeal, lips opening as she begged me to help her. I was
seeing her as I’d first seen her on that barge and also seeing you, Evie, as I’d first set eyes on you, standing in that village hall, a small frightened evacuee, gas mask round her
neck. Still Noi called to me and now her voice was yours. But the guards held me tight. I don’t think I even heard the shot: my mind was so full of images and memories. Her body was so light
there’d have been no sound as she dropped to the ground.

I pulled myself from my captors and ran to her where she lay on the forest floor.
The red mark on her chest was like a single ruby. It didn’t
seem enough to have done its terrible work.
Her eyes were still open and for a second they shone with the last of her life. ‘Noi.’ I held her in my arms. But already the eyes had
lost their brightness. I wanted to tell her I was sorry, that I’d never meant this, that I should have looked away from her that day I first clapped eyes on her on that painted barge.

The gibbons stopped their screaming and I could hear the insects again, very loud now, as though someone had turned up the volume. Even as they were dragging me off I wanted to put my hands
over my ears to block out the sound.

The last thing I saw was the doll, lying among the ferns and mosses. Still with its perfect little smile.

Later

They haven’t searched me yet and I am writing this quickly before they do. I am waiting now, waiting for them to come for me. First will come the forty-eight hours
standing out in the sun, perhaps extended to three days if they feel like it. Then perhaps I’ll be removed to the town for the Kempeitai to work on me. But more will follow: it is never just
the one punishment. And it could end with a bullet to my neck, I know that.

I didn’t take care of that little girl. I let her down. I can never make up for that.

Evie, I shouldn’t tell you all this, you’re just a kid, just thirteen. You’ll almost certainly never get this scribble, anyway. If I ever do make it home I’m going to
take such good care of you and your brother. And Matthew.
I can tell you what I’m frightened of. Evie, I’m afraid I’m losing my sense
of what’s real. Sometimes you seem to stand in front of me, in this cell. You’re holding Noi’s doll but I know that’s all wrong. I want to hit my head against the floor so
that I force myself back into reality. This cell stinks. I do, too. I can’t write any more, I’m tired.

God bless you all. Watch over the farm for us. And Fly. He’s such a good dog.

I will push this letter through the slats of the . . .

I finished reading. I didn’t know what to say. The picture I’d been building up of Robert Winter as some kind of monster was starting to dissolve. And I saw what? A
sad, almost pathetic man who’d tried hard to cling on to his humanity and optimism. ‘Poor Robert.’ I spoke so softly Jessamy could hardly have heard me but she nodded.

‘He must have known the letters were important. He kept them all. I don’t know if he ever reread them, though. I wish he had, it might have helped. Might have stopped it spilling
into the rest of his life.’

Spilling into
her
life.

She picked up one of the rubber bands and started twisting it in her fingers. ‘Even if he’d shown the letters to Mum in 1945 it might have made a difference.’

‘Didn’t Matthew read them before he gave them back to Robert?’

She shook her head. ‘They were addressed to Mum.’

Reliable, honourable Matthew: not one to read another person’s letters. But perhaps it would have been better if he had done. At least the family would have had some insight into the
disturbed man who’d come back home. Would it have made any difference to the way events unfolded? I couldn’t be sure.

‘Did reading the letters change the way you thought about Robert?’ I asked as gently as I could. I sensed my cousin had almost reached the limits of her ability to discuss her
past.

‘Yes.’ She blinked. ‘And I feel disloyal to Mum just saying that. But it did. That little girl in the jungle, I think what happened to her haunted him. They broke his mind in
jail and he could never come back, not properly.’ She’d twisted the band as far as she could and now she let one end go and it spun in her fingers.

‘She was about nine or ten, same age as you were when you disappeared.’ I felt a headache coming on and pressed my fingers against my temples, trying to push it away.

‘Robert regained consciousness just before he died. He was actually quite lucid for about an hour. He told me about Noi. After he’d written that letter they took him outside again
and made him stand outside the officers’ mess in the heat for two days and nights. He wasn’t allowed to sit or lie. He was given no water. And all the time he was grieving for the
little girl, for Noi. And worrying about his brother. He thought the letters would be safe in the hollow but perhaps it had been risky to tell Matthew where they were.’

She shifted her position on the hard kitchen chair. ‘Lucky for both of them that the Japanese didn’t find that last letter he wrote, either. When the two days and nights were up they
took him off to the town, to the headquarters of the Japanese security police. They put him in a hutch, that’s literally what it was, a hutch, for another day. Still no water or food. Then
they started torturing him: half drowning him in a bath. Beating the soles of his feet. They were convinced he was part of a spy ring but obviously he could tell them nothing about it. Finally they
gave up and they sent him all the way back to Singapore Island, to a jail so awful that Changi was a holiday camp by comparison. There was more forced labour: breaking boulders, and more torture,
and some attempt at a show trial in front of a Japanese judge. But he was so sick they had to let him go to Changi for hospital treatment and he managed to string out his stay there until the
atomic bombs fell on Japan and the war ended.’

‘And he came back here to the farm.’ And found that life was impossible.

‘He couldn’t shake off the memories. At night he had bad dreams. Things would set it off . . .’ Her voice trailed away. ‘There was this awful time in Brisbane when he
came to take me out of school for the weekend. We were walking along the street. I had an ice cream, a Blue Ribbon Heart, my favourite. There were lots of Japanese businessmen in that part of the
world and two of them came out of a hotel. They’d probably been drinking in the bar but they didn’t mean to bump into me. The ice cream fell onto my shirt. It was chocolate and the
shirt was white. I was upset. They started to giggle. They were just drunk and embarrassed, that was all. Harmless. But Robert . . .’ She put her knuckles to her mouth.

‘What?’

‘He knocked them both down and wouldn’t stop kicking them. They were screaming at him to stop and I was trying to pull them off. “Don’t you touch Noi!” he was
screaming. “Don’t you touch her!” Someone called the police and they wanted to take him down to the station and charge him. But the Japanese men were really decent about it and
said they wanted to let it go. I was crying by them and trying to explain that it wasn’t them, it was something that had happened in the war, in Thailand. One of the men told me his brother
had been killed in some battle near the Burmese border. He’d travelled along that damn railway that Robert had helped build. “I hate railway,” he said. Then he was patting Robert
on the back and telling him again and again how sorry he was. And Robert was just standing there, completely baffled, as if he didn’t know where he was. “You dropped your doll,”
he told me. “I don’t have a doll,” I said.’

She retreated into herself, not speaking for a while.

‘It must have been so hard for you,’ I said, as gently as I could. ‘Not knowing what would act as a trigger. Your life must have been so . . . difficult.’

She forced a smile. ‘I grew up,’ she said, her voice shaking slightly. ‘I had a decent education and I was able to go off to college in America and meet my future husband. That
marriage was good for quite a long while and it gave me my kids. My business has gone well, too, and that’s kept me sane.’

I studied her face, still watchful and closed, and wondered. But perhaps it had only been the events of the last month which had forged that expression. Her eyes still sparked in a way that
reminded me of her younger self. But that was perhaps the only sign of Evie in her. In maturity Jessamy had grown to look less like her mother and more like her father: the Winter genes had
asserted themselves.

‘But in all that time before you knew the truth you were never tempted to do what all Australians do and come to England to see the old country and hunt out family? Or visit your
mother’s grave at least?’

‘I thought of the farm, of the village, but I knew that if I came here I’d distress Robert. I wondered about contacting Martha, but something . . .’ She wound her fingers
together. ‘Something stopped me. Robert hardly mentioned her. I wondered whether she’d died, too. Then I married and had the kids and it all started to fall apart. We had to work hard
to keep our house going and the nursery business solvent. There was never time to plan a trip apart from to far north Queensland to visit Robert once or twice a year.’

‘You must have been fond of him.’ I was starting to understand more of the complexities binding the two of them together.

She sighed. ‘I can’t explain the relationship between us. We’d spent so much time together that we were very close, probably closer than most fathers and daughters.’ She
must have caught the look of something on my face. ‘Not close like that, there was never any . . . It wasn’t sexual, Rache.’

I bowed my head. I hadn’t had Robert Winter down as a paedophile but in our erotically obsessed times it was hard not to see sex in every relationship.

‘He was always just like an uncle to me. But we meant everything to one another, God damn him.’ She came to a halt again and put her hands over her face. I wanted to wrap her up in
my arms but didn’t dare do it, not yet. She was like a frightened deer and I was scared too much show of emotion would scare her off.

‘There was another letter, Rachel.’ She took her hands away and reached into her rucksack again, pulling out a white envelope. ‘Written to Mum and dated just weeks before I
went up to see him for the last time. Never posted.’

Cardew Plantation, 1 February 2003

Dear Evie,

I see you and I don’t see you and sometimes it’s you who’s here with me and sometimes it’s Noi. And sometimes it’s Jessamy, too. I think I know which one of you
it is, but I don’t. And then the drug starts to wear off a little and I remember that you’ve all grown up and left me and I’m in this bungalow with just the carer. But Jessamy
will visit me soon, staying until the end, probably. She’s been so good to me.

When I came back from the war you didn’t look like the little girl I’d written to. You’d become a young woman. I didn’t expect that. Stupid, really. I think I melded
your image onto Noi’s and made one child I wanted to save. I scared you so badly, didn’t I, that night up on the Ridgeway when you hid among the old Sarsens? I scared myself, too.
That’s why I left so abruptly. I sound sane to myself when I write these things down. Perhaps I should have carried on writing after I left Thailand. Perhaps it would have helped to clear
my
head.

In 1977 Martha told me that the farm was having problems. She said you were under strain and you were taking it out on the child, Matthew’s only child, and that I should come and get
her. ‘She’s the last of the Winters,’ Martha said. The last of the Winters. All those centuries of grinding hard work to build up the farm, all culminating in little Jess. And
Matthew wasn’t there to protect the girl and look after Winter’s Copse, his beloved farm.

How could I believe that you would harm your own daughter, you will ask? How, knowing you as I did, could I possibly think that was true? Hadn’t I seen you looking after the animals on
the farm, never once losing your temper?

I don’t know. Psychotic episodes. That’s what I have self-diagnosed by reading. I always was a highly strung lad, I think I told you that in one of my letters. Imprisonment by
cruel guards was always going to be particularly hard for me. Not that I’m making excuses. I believe my problems really started in the jungle in Thailand when I saw them shoot Noi. It was as
though all the threads in my mind undid themselves and I couldn’t retie them again. A stronger man would have been able to pull them back into place.

I sound so logical as I read what I have written here but that is because the pain is pulling me back into reality. I won’t take the next dose until I’ve finished this.

I watched you from the down in those weeks before the Jubilee. I watched you with the child and I couldn’t see any problems. But always there was Martha telling me I was wrong, telling
me to look at the bruises on Jess’s legs, telling me the child herself had said that you’d done that to her. And who was I to trust myself? I had been so, so wrong about Noi.