‘Ah!’ he breathed out his understandings. He wanted to leap to her side, comfort and hold her, to be close in their mutual disappointment, but felt inhibited by the chance of being seen from the bungalow — yet why should he care now? He compromised by moving to her side and taking her hand into his discreetly while it still hung by her side.
By mutual consent they turned and walked from the garden along the path towards the wireless hut.
‘Did he say anything else?’ he asked.
‘It was George who spoke to him. George is a bit upset because the army won’t let him go “on this one”. In any case there’s some trouble at his mine, the daughter of one of his foremen has gone missing — that’s all I know.’
It was enough. A few moments ago Alan had stood with his heart lifting at the mere sight of this girl, now his time with her was curtailed, condemned to a quick end. Two days. It would be so easy for this time, this emotion, this love all to pass away without being marked. He was afraid of the curious inertia an allotted span could inflict; one could watch the feeling go like a tropical sunset, blazing, glorious, unbelievably beautiful, and be left blinking in the dark at dazzles existing only inside one’s own eyes.
‘What are you thinking?’ she asked.
‘That we shouldn’t waste any time.’ He felt his colour rise at his own words, they sounded apt but plain and crudely put after his thoughts. ‘I mean,’ he tried to express himself more elegantly, ‘we must use every minute to get to know each other properly.’
She gave him a long, curious look, as if she was both looking at him and beyond him. ‘And to plan how to keep in touch when you do have to leave,’ she said.
They neared his hut and could hear the chopping of bamboos and the chatter of the men.
‘They’ve started rebuilding their quarters,’ she stated. ‘I didn’t realise.’
‘Came at first light to tell me,’ he confirmed, ‘the four tappers who came to the funeral … ’
She nodded. ‘The police have exonerated them of any involvement with the terrorists. They want to bring their families inside the security fencing as soon as possible.’
‘Pity they couldn’t wait another two days,’ he said ruefully as they reached the doorway of his hut and two of the tappers came by carrying the parangs they used for cutting the thick bamboos.
A third man called to the first two, who turned back and acknowledged his request for a greater quantity of wood, then smiled and nodded to Alan and Liz, friendly, deferential to Liz — and intrusive.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘we are going to have to use our initiative. What time do they all stop work and go to bed?’
‘I’ve a better idea,’ she told him. ‘You know the place to the east where George has made a concealed exit under the wire?’
He nodded but wondered if she knew quite what she did to him standing so close, looking so cool and determined, a smaller, darker, more compact, infinitely more lovable version of her mother, like a dryad.
‘Can you meet me there in an hour?’
He nodded, then, unable to resist her nearness, he took her arm and gently pulled her the last few paces so they were out of sight inside his hut. He pushed the door to with his foot and kissed her quickly. She had not expected the swift kiss and her mouth was slightly open, he felt her teeth under his lip.
‘I feel as if I’ve joined the Secret Seven on
Children’s
Hour
or something,’ he whispered. Something in the ineptitude of the kiss made him feel so very young, gauche, but he delighted in her laugh.
‘Alan, I ... ’
‘I love you,’ he breathed.
‘And I love you.’
A greeting was called nearby and George Harfield answered. A moment later they were standing discreetly apart as George came to the hut door.
‘Oh, you’ve beaten me to it,’ he said to Liz, then paused and added, ‘I mean, coming to tell this young man his breakfast’s ready.’ He hooked a hand on Alan’s shoulder. ‘Look, I have to leave after breakfast, but I’ve organised a twenty-four-hour guard roster. You’ve eighteen men back now,’ he told Liz. ‘They’re fair flocking back.’ He grinned and winked before slapping the young guardsman on the shoulder. ‘You’ve got a brave chap here,’ he said, before turning and leaving them.
‘Did he see?’ Liz wondered.
‘Even if he guessed, I don’t think he would say anything to anybody else, not even to his friend Robbo. I think he’s too straightforward for that. He’d tell me off to my face if anything.’
An hour later he felt sure a court martial would be his fate if anyone did say anything about this liaison, this planned jaunt beyond the bounds of safety.
He took his rifle; if they were going out beyond the wire he was not risking being caught unarmed. He still felt uneasy about the man he had seen jumping down through the flames of the hut. He’d had the luck of the devil to escape, and Alan had an illogical fear that Josef Guisan might somehow make his way back to Rinsey. He had come before, several times, it seemed.
Alan wondered just what Liz had in mind; the waterfalls were too far for such a tryst. What they needed was somewhere secluded, safe and nearby.
He was quite out of sight of the workers and the huts as he approached the section of the wire which had been underrun by a short, reinforcement tunnel. This emergency escape route in case of out-and-out siege ran out into the undergrowth beyond the cleared area immediately beyond the perimeter wire. It was just like an escape tunnel from a prisoner-of-war camp, the only difference being that these ‘prisoners’ had voluntarily built their own compound.
‘Alan.’
The soft voice behind him made him spin sharply round. ‘You’ve gone by.’
He turned back to the small store hut which contained the bungalow end of the tunnel. ‘I was looking for you.’
‘I’m here.’ She looked solemnly up at him from where she had moved the boxes covering the trap door, raised it and was standing with her feet on the rungs of the home-made ladder leading down into the roughly wood-lined tunnel. ‘come on before I’m missed,’ she urged. ‘We won’t have too long today.’
‘Is outside the wire going to be any better than inside?’ he asked as he followed, closing the trap behind himself. ‘It could be more dangerous.’
‘And more exciting,’ she said as she switched on the small torch she carried. Bent low ahead of him she made rapid progress while he was somewhat hampered by his height and the rifle.
‘Hold on,’ he whispered. ‘I feel like Alice and this rabbit hole’s not big enough.’
‘No, I’ll be Alice,’ she hissed back at him, ‘the hair ribbons will suit me better. You can be the White Rabbit.’
‘OK’ he said in a mock-resigned tone, ‘but you know what rabbits are like.’
He bumped into her as she came to a halt, gasping with sudden laughter and for some reasons switching off the torch.
‘This is an emergency situation,’ she told him. ‘We’re not supposed to be ... giggling.’
‘I’m not,’ he said truthfully, ‘just stating fact, ma’am.’
‘Are we saving the batteries? It’s not that far, is it?’
He heard her tut. The torch was switched on again and they went another twelve paces.
Seeing solid earth in front of them, he caught her arm. They had reached the end of the escape route. Holding his rifle ready before him, he eased up the trap very carefully. Between the vegetation, sunlight seared into their darkness. He peered all around but could see nothing but soil and ferns. A real rabbit’s-eye view, he thought, but it was not the moment for more quips; he did want her to take him seriously.
When he could neither see nor hear anything untoward he pushed the trap right up and found they had emerged in a patch of thick undergrowth some fifteen yards beyond the fortifications. He could just see the high barbed wire stretched between the tall posts, the lights high on the corners and inside the long, low bungalow, quiet but embattled. He leaned down, took Liz’s hand and helped her up. Together they closed the exit and re-covered it with soil and ferns.
‘Come on, this way,’ she said. She led the way out of the undergrowth, careful not to tread down more than was essential to their passage, and quickly led him to where an overgrown but still plain path crossed their way. She turned away from the direction of her home.
He stayed her once to listen, but the busy noise of parrots and other birds in nearby trees suggested that no one had been around for some time.
They soon came in sight of a building he had not seen before. She ran up the rickety steps to the verandah and turned back to him with the air of an estate agent displaying a prize property.
‘Our old manager’s home,’ she explained. ‘No one will look for us here.’
To Alan the place looked as if it had grown up with the vegetation, some parts even seemed supported by the trees that grew pressed right against its walls. The jungle soon claimed back its own spaces, he thought. In the same instant he remembered the terrorists who had melted from path to
beluka
in seconds. Bounding up to the verandah, he silently indicated she should stand aside and he would go first.
‘But ... ’ she protested.
He put his fingers to his lips and went slowly forwards, rifle at the ready.
By the time he had made his way over the creaking timbers and was inside, he was convinced that no one was hiding there nor had anyone been there very recently. He had learned from listening to Chemor that it was the smell that gave men away as much as anything. All this place smelled of was of man’s neglect and of nature’s busyness.
There was much debris blown in by the monsoon winds and rain. The dust had been piled in some corners and fanned out like raised ribs on old wood in others, and a banana palm intruded its leaves through a window frame.
A movement at another window made him lift his rifle again, but it was no more than a breeze moving the remnants of a blind in a single flap like a derogatory dismissal. It did not endear the place to him. He wondered if he wouldn’t have been prejudiced anyway because presumably the Guisan family had lived here.
He had certainly not expected such privacy. This wasn’t going to be anything like the stolen moments in a shop doorway or by a field gate, which was all most young people back home managed. If he had known Liz several years, courted her for one or two and been engaged for another, then, he felt, it would have been all right.
He glanced at her covertly, thought of his own homely mother compared with Blanche, and wondered if people of Liz’s class were more free in their lovemaking. There had always been stories of the antics of the wealthy leaked by the disgraced maid or sacked man-servant.
Not that he was sure the Hammonds were quite in that class, but he wondered if
he
could handle this situation, this place. At the same time he was aware that he had pushed into his pocket the rubber sheaths the army supplied before jungle patrols as a protection against the ever invasive leeches.
‘Of course, it wants cleaning up.’ She kicked a few dry fern fronds away to the side of the room.
He saw her disappointment at his negative reaction to this place she had brought him to.
‘We’re not exactly going to set up house here,’ he said gently.
‘No, but if we’re to meet here just ... ’
‘For a day to two.’ He propped his rifle against the wall and went nearer to her.
‘It might not be just for a day or two. Just because John Sturgess is coming, doesn’t mean you’ll go immediately.’
‘It means ... ’ he paused, reaching for her to ease the sudden desolation in her face. She came to him quickly, clinging around his waist.
‘It means — ’ he began again.
‘Sssh! Don’t think about meanings.’
‘But ... I ... I ’ He was quite unable to express either meanings or feelings as she held him so close he felt moulded to her delightful curves. He had a vague feeling that he might be drowning for a million thoughts were trying to crowd in before he was utterly lost.
‘People don’t do this kind of thing,’ he heard himself say. ‘It should all take time.’ He had a picture of village courtship as he knew it, the self-conscious separate stroll beyond the houses, the first holding of hands, touching of arms, the kiss, the attempt of the hand towards a budding breast. Even students had intellectual discussions as they eyed each other. ‘Not so quickly,’ he added, throwing the words out like a last lifeline, and was glad none of his peers could overhear such a lame remark.
‘Things do happen like this, love at first sight. In wartime and on the films all the time.’
‘The films!’ He gave a humph of indulgent laughter, then was very serious. ‘This is real life.’
‘Very real,’ she said just as solemnly. ‘I know — and neither of us knows how long it will last.’
‘I feel as if you’re saying my lines.’ Every throb of his heart, every pulse pressure, every nerve ending, was urging him to make love to this girl.
‘If I’m sure ... ’ she said.
‘Why should a man hold back, but … ’
‘I’ve never done it before,’ she said quickly, ‘not gone the whole hog — but I know what to expect.’
He slid a hand up under her breast and saw her lips part as if in shock. He pulled her to him as he felt her nipple respond tight and hard under his gentle fingers.
He looked at her face, her eyes closed slowly in a kind of gentle acquiescence. He wanted to say something frivolous, like ‘This might be the last stop this side of heaven’, but it was already too late.
In what afterwards seemed like a frantic rush he pulled off his shirt and laid it on the floor, sweeping the branches, everything, aside like some kind of sex maniac. He nearly ejaculated into the sheath as he put it on, and was amazed that she looked at him with such adoration afterwards.
‘I love you,’ he whispered, seeking reassurance.
‘And I love you,’ she replied, her voice so full of an emotion that went beyond the soon accomplished act, that he leaned down to kiss her neck, hiding his face, and fought the mundane words he understood were said at these times, ‘It’ll be better next time.’
After they had lain a time together, it was.
‘We must go back,’ he said at length but made no move as they lay close, her head cradled near his shoulder.
She sighed deeply. ‘“What needest with thy tribe’s black tents, Who hast the red pavilion of my heart?”’
‘The red pavilion,’ he breathed.
‘I remember it because,’ she paused to swallow, ‘I was hiding behind the lilacs at Pearling and overheard my father quote it to my mother. Later I looked it up. Francis Thompson 1859-1907.’
She sat up suddenly. ‘I must have been an awful pest, always around when they wanted to be alone! You don’t realise when you’re a child.’
He rose and pulled her to her feet, held her tenderly as grief at the loss of her father threatened to engulf her again.
‘It says a lot about my mother really, because she did follow her heart rather than stay with her people in England.’
He wanted to ask if she were like her mother, would she follow her heart? Instead he said gently, ‘Come on pest, I’d better take you back before we’re missed.’
‘I shall think of this as the love tunnel now,’ he told her as holding hands they made their way back to the main bungalow.
She paused to laugh and again put out the torch.
‘My Lord!’ he exclaimed and his voice thrown back to him by the walls he thought sounded just like his father’s. ‘No wonder rabbits breed like they do,’ he murmured as he found himself close behind her stooped form with his free hand on her buttock.
‘Promise,’ she whispered, ‘that you will always make me laugh. In the worst, worst ever circumstances we ever find ourselves in.’
‘You promise to be there and I’ll always be able to raise a cheerful word.’
‘Promise to write to me when you’re away.’
‘I promise.’
‘And always to come back.’
‘Always. And I never break a promise made in a dark tunnel.’
She put on the torch and slowly raised it so she could see his face.
‘Or in torchlight.’
‘What about tomorrow morning at the same time — and I’ll wait for you at the love end?’ He was silent blinking as she raised the light higher. ‘Alan?’ she prompted.
‘Yes.’ Her final words had quite taken all rational speech from him. ‘Yes,’ he repeated, while somewhere in his brain there was a question he never asked about why they shouldn’t meet at the beginning of the tunnel.
She was already making plans as they parted. Convention still had a role to play as she went back towards the bungalow first.
She turned to look at Alan once more. He was leaning in the hut doorway watching her go. She stopped, stood quite still looking back at him and it was as if a great, almost biblical sense of contentment came over her. He was the subject of her eye, the object of all her love. In response to her regard he straightened in the doorway, tall, filling the space. She would make a sketch of him standing so, in jungle-green issue holding his rifle — but in the doorway of an empty room, the light coming from a window framed with banana leaves.
There was no need for any hand lift or nod of the head, the feeling was between them, a sense of completeness, of knowing that they had each found their perfect partner. She walked on out of his sight, but already she was planning their return.
In her bedroom were loose cushions she could take from her chairs and a rug from the bedside; those would probably take two trips through the tunnel.
She was surprised at her own deviousness when, in order to move the soft furnishings on their way towards the other bungalow, she took them first to the front porch and established herself with a kind of office: plantation books on the table, the rug and a large string bag folded under the cushions.
There
was
much paperwork to be done, new rubber yield and payroll books to be drawn up. During the late morning and early afternoon she worked there fairly solidly, and if anyone later saw her carrying away the cushions, no one ever said anything.
She took them in two self-conscious journeys to the hut at the top of the tunnel, trying to ignore the thought of what she might say she was doing if discovered. Then, feeling distinctly more like the villainous Red Queen than either Alice or the White Rabbit, she lowered them all down into the tunnel and pulled them after herself in the string bag.
She managed to be back on the right side of the wire only just before night fell. Later, at dinner, she could hardly contain her wish for Alan to see all that she had achieved. But even had she been tempted to tell him in a whispered aside there was not the opportunity, for her mother was particularly restless.
They all missed the stabilising influence of George Harfield. Blanche had taken a large gin before the meal and another after. Then, instead of, as Liz had hoped, taking her third drink to bed, she asked to see the account books her daughter had been working on all day.
‘If we’re going to run this bloody place, better get it right from the start.’ She cleared a businesslike space in front of herself at the dining table. ‘Right!’ she said, looking up at her daughter. ‘Let’s get started.’
‘I’ll leave you two to work,’ Alan said, rising. ‘Goodnight to you both. Thank you for the meal, Mrs Hammond.’
There was no answer; Blanche concentrated on making the tablecloth perfectly wrinkle-free for the books. Liz went with him to the back door and they were exchanging a brief hand squeeze as Blanche followed. He wondered if she saw or suspected anything, but it seemed she felt she had dismissed him too brusquely.
‘Goodnight to you,’ she said. ‘See you for breakfast, same time.’
‘Same time,’ Liz repeated with a remarkable degree of innocence.
Liz was at the dilapidated bungalow well before time, complete with vase and orchid sprays and some of the flame-red frangipangi blossoms.
She arranged them and put the vase near the mat and cushions she had placed in the middle of the old lounge which she had first swept clean with a bunch of banana leaves.
She stood back and imagined Alan there, the two of them together, and moved the flowers a little farther away. Like any other housekeeper, she did not want her efforts spoiled!
She smiled, imagining his arrival. He would look astonished and say, ‘But where did all this come from? How did you possibly manage?’
‘I did a few trips yesterday,’ she’d say casually, ignoring the sheer hard labour it had been pulling the four cushions and the mat through the tunnel.
He would take her into his arms ... She tried to find words for how safe she felt in his arms — unassailable, invulnerable, impregnable, a charmed life ... She laughed silently at her own game, wrapping her arms around herself. Then, thinking she heard a sound, she held her breath listening, waiting for his next footfall — but she was wrong. There was no one.
She gave herself a consolatory squeeze. He would soon be there, and he loved her, he cheered her. When the awful time came and he did have to leave, he had promised he would write; and when the army released him from his national service, they would plan a future together. She had never felt so sure about the rightness of anything in all her life.
She listened again. The appointed time had come; she bit her bottom lip with eager anticipation. She had a last look around the room as every enthusiastic hostess does before the keenly awaited guest arrives.
She noticed now that since the day before several leaves had blown into the far corner. Everything must be as near perfection as she could achieve. Just as she was about to dispose of them through the window, a spectacularly large white butterfly flirted in the air just outside, then fluttered in with all the hesitation of the uninvited. It had brilliant red quarters on its upper wings, the red outlined and with interstices of black making the sections look like old-fashioned red feather fans.