‘All I can say is I’m glad we’re nearly home. You totally oversteered there. We’re no use to anybody dead.’
Not sure I’m much use to Alan alive, she thought.
‘Did you see anyone on the corner?’ she asked. ‘I thought ... ’
‘No!’ Her mother’s stony response seemed to indicate she thought her daughter was just looking for an excuse.
‘No, missy,’ a shaky voice came from the back of the car. Some instinct, some premonition stopped her from saying more. Perhaps it had after all been some trick of the light on wet leaves, the shape of trees or ferns?
She restarted the car with shaking hands and went at a cautious twenty miles an hour the rest of the way to Rinsey’s barbed-wire gates.
She was relieved to find all quiet, the gates properly manned, even pulled a face at her mother as the guard literally fell out of the back of the car with comic haste — while inside the telephone was ringing.
Anna greeted her in the hall on the way to answer the telephone.
‘I’ll get it,’ she said, asking, as John had done when he arrived home, ‘Everything all right here? Your little one safely tucked in?’
Anna nodded and went to the door to greet Blanche. Liz picked up the telephone.
‘Liz?’ Joan Wildon’s voice asked. ‘I promised to ring as soon as I knew. I’ve just spoken to John Sturgess on the telephone.’ She paused as if apologising for doing it all so quickly, then asked, ‘Is your mother there?’
‘Yes,’ and Liz with the same unmoving tone her mother had used only minutes before, and clamped the handset harder to her ear.
‘I’m afraid, darling, the two guardsmen lost were among those who stayed with you.’ Joan went on, ‘The man killed was a Daniel Veasey and the one missing ... is your Alan Cresswell.’
There was a pause as Liz stood rigid, knowing but not accepting.
‘Liz! Darling! Are you all right?’
She made some kind of murmur of confirmation.
‘Let me speak to your mother.’
Without a word Liz passed the telephone to her mother.
Blanche, who had followed her daughter in and watched as she took the call, took the receiver quickly and asked, ‘Who is this? Joan?’
Liz walked away into the kitchen. She heard Anna and her mother exchange a few words, then she supposed her mother was listening intently to all Joan had to say. She guessed that because Joan would be concerned for her she might tell her mother everything.
There was something she had to do and quickly.
She went to her bedroom and took the torch she had used to go through the escape tunnel from her bedside table. Hurrying to the kitchen, she took a box of matches from the kitchen drawer, then left the bungalow by the back door before anyone should try to stop her.
She could do nothing for Alan but grieve, but she could stop Josef, the traitor, the murderer, the man she was convinced she had seen momentarily in the jungle opposite the rock, from finding any sanctuary near Rinsey.
She started the fire in the room where they made love. It began with the symbol of their passion for she fed the first match strike with the dried red frangipangi blossoms and the stalks of the orchid sprays. They made a brave, quick show. Anxious that they should not go out, she ran to fetch the twigs and dried leaves that still lay in other rooms, then she carefully applied the raffia mat so she did not exclude the air from the flames. When that was well established, pyre-shaped and blazing, she added the cushions.
‘Only the butterfly escapes,’ she said as the room blazed around her. She felt the heat of the flames easier to bear than the new sorrows life had brought. The opposite wall suddenly caught fire in a sheet, lapping hungrily, roaring out of the windows and up, up into the butterfly sky. She lifted her face and listened; she could hear the timbers of the roof crackling over her head. It felt like a cleansing. Now Josef would never sully this place with his presence.
She wondered if her mother and Anna could see the flames from the main bungalow yet. In this thought outside her own grief came the guilty knowledge that what she was doing would only heighten the sorrow for them. Any further deprivation would be another victory for Josef. He had always been greedy for more, gathering childhood triumphs around himself with the speed of these swift flames that scoured the room for new conquests, reaching out for her so she must snatch her dress to her legs.
But no more, Josef. No! Her amah’s home had been destroyed, her father murdered, her love destroyed — now surely was the time of retribution. She fled the place, the heat swirling after her, flames shooting as far as the verandah as if in a last bid to take her.
She turned back, awed by the blaze — hotter than the tropical night, bright as the tropical sun and, like the jungle, dangerous to those who misused it.
Once convinced her place was back with her mother and Anna, she ran as if the flames pursued her even into the tunnel. She left the far end of the tunnel gasping in the closeness as if the heat of the flames still took her air.
She was almost back at the bungalow when she saw her mother on the back porch. Blanche saw her at the same moment and came out to meet her, staggering as if her legs were stiff with long standing, long watching. She held out her arms wide and there were no questions. Just a silent coming-together of the two women, embracing as if they would never release each other again.
Now the tears came, for both — and they finally could stand no longer and sat, arms around each other, on the back-porch steps, watching the pulsating reds and oranges in the sky.
Liz was numb with loss. Blanche was dumb with the shock of all Joan had told her, of how little she really knew about her daughter. Then tears began again as she remembered Harfield had said he had not thought of her as a back-doorstep frequenter. Neville, Liz’s Alan ... George.
‘If Alan is dead there is no one here for me anymore,’ Liz said very quietly.
It was the kind of thing daughters say and mothers have to bear. Blanche reminded herself that these unthinking rejections were easier provided the mothers still had things of their own to do in life. She told herself she had a lot of very immediate things to do — she had a burning ambition to see justice done. Justice in and out of courts.
She remembered her grandfather, not too far from Pearling, shooting a rogue dog which had led several murderous attacks on his flocks of sheep. One spring afternoon she had stood with him watching the lambs playing together, crossing a little bridge over a stream in the follow-my-leader games they love, when the dogs came in, teeth bared, romping, excited for the kill.
‘Get behind me, Blanche,’ he had ordered as he raised his gun. She remembered how the great rogue dog screamed and reared up into a sky across which was written a scrawl of blood. The pack of village dogs had howled and whimpered as if they had been hit. Her grandfather had shot again over their heads, then had turned to find his granddaughter looking up at him.
‘They won’t come and kill any more lambs, will they, Grandfather?’
‘No, luvy, rough justice — but it had to be done, you understand that?’
She remembered nodding solemnly and walking home hand in hand with her grandfather.
Josef was as a rogue dog, she had known that since she had found him stealing as a little boy. Neither her family nor the one she had married into, nor their children, shirked their perceived duty, she thought as she watched the Guisans’ bungalow in the distance blazing still like a second sunset.
From the unburned section of the jungle camp’s main bungalow, Lee watched her brother approach. She glanced at her mother, who lay on the long chair they had salvaged from the unscorched end of the verandah.
He kicked at a few pieces of charred wood as he drew near but greeted neither her nor his mother.
‘So where were you when the soldiers attacked?’ Lee demanded, resentful of the ease with which her brother always stayed out of harm’s way, turning up when the worst was over. He would never ask how they had survived in the intervening weeks, or where the food she was cooking came from, or how long their mother had lain sick with fever.
He sneered but did not speak.
She must, she reminded herself, be discreet. She stared fixedly down at the food she was preparing, trying to control her tongue. There were some questions it was much better he did
not
ask.
‘Got wind of the raid, did you?’ she demanded as his silence continued. ‘Went off to bury some more arms to keep in favour with
your
friends
?’ She was quite unable to stop herself goading him, voicing her guesses to pierce his selfish vanity.
He had been helping himself to a pan of cold rice; she saw his fingers pause loaded with the grains.
She laughed. ‘
That’s
what you’re doing!’ she exclaimed. ‘I knew you couldn’t still be finding arms from the war. There had to be an end.’
‘You bloody hellcat!’ Josef foolishly approached his sister as she began shredding vegetables to make a soup with the rice for her mother.
She raised the knife, her firm intention of using it in her eyes.
‘No, no, no! You not fight!’ The old woman’s voice rose in protest, making her cough so it racked her small frame. Lee went to give her a drink of water.
‘And why — ’ the old lady raised a finger at her son — ‘you not tell us the Hammonds back at Rinsey?’ Tears fell from her eyes and ran down her cheeks, their copiousness seeming too great for her frailty. ‘You leave us here … ’
‘Stop crying, Mother,’ Lee said firmly. ‘Don’t waste tears on your ... son.’ She spat the word as if it were distasteful, then turned to him as if he were a child, not a towering, dishevelled, bitter man. ‘Bad apple!’ she cried, picking up the knife again and waving it. ‘Bad apple! Mrs Hammond, she knew. Always she knew.’
‘Why you not tell us? We could have gone home.’ The workworn Chinese lay back despairing, tears still welling from beneath her closed eyelids. She had become sick after hiding in the jungle from their communist masters. By the time they had dared to return, the British had fired the camp and left.
Lee threw the knife to the table and knelt by her mother, gathering her into her arms, terrified her mother had given too much of her energy and too much information with her questions.
‘Who
said
the Hammonds were back?’ he asked stonily.
‘You think the communists are your friends,’ Lee scoffed, ‘but when you’re not here they gossip and laugh about you. They say now the Hammonds are back you are “out on your ear, boy”.’
The half-concocted, half-exaggerated story had a greater effect than she had expected. Josef snatched up the knife and stood holding it over them both.
‘You don’t need knife to kill Mother.’ Although her black eyes were bright with fever, the frail woman’s voice was full of dignity and reprimand as she told him, ‘Your mother died long time ago when you brought us here.’
Lee gasped at her mother’s words but when Josef laughed disparagingly she felt a sudden release of all restraint. A sense almost of freedom, even in that place, came over her: with everyone gone and only her mother and brother to hear she could say whatever she wanted.
‘When you deceived us, Mother means!’ she told him. ‘Sure we ran away from the Japanese, that was right, they killed Father — but after war we should have gone back to our home at Rinsey. But you tricked us, you brought us to the communists and made us their slaves. But now you’re on your own, aren’t you, nobody wants you! Failure here!’ She stabbed a finger towards the middle of the burned-out camp. ‘Traitor there!’ She tossed her head up over the dense jungle to the wider world.
‘Get the meal!’ He gestured with the knife to the pan of rice. ‘I’m hungry.’
She noticed he had on a different wristwatch with a silver-metal bracelet. She wondered if he had stolen it or bought it at a shop? She had not been into a shop since she and Elizabeth had been taken shopping by Mrs Hammond. Her heart leaped at the idea of going back to a world where there were shops and cinemas and people not interested in politics and power. She just wanted to live an ordinary life, have a boyfriend, have fun.
Josef had brought them to this camp and kept them penniless. It was fear — fear for her mother, fear of the terrorist leader — that had prevented her from trying to escape, and fear, she thought, kept many of the young men they recruited there under his domination.
Early in their confinement she had tried to follow one of the men who, she realised, formed a link in a sophisticated postal system, a series of jungle runners who, each keeping to their own section, passed messages across vast and complex territory. She had hidden on the first part of the jungle track she had seen one man use, hoping gradually to build up enough knowledge to take her mother and find a way out of the jungle to a roadway. Once on a road she had been sure she would find someone who would help them.
The smooth-faced Heng Hou had caught her, stepping out of the jungle into her path. His face had been impassive as he came towards her and she felt stricken to stone by his implacable evil. When he took a second step towards her it had felt like a death sentence, and when his eyes moved over her, from face to breasts to sarong and feet, she had felt naked before him and had thought he would rape her and then kill her.
‘If you try run away again,’ he had said gently, ‘I first cut your mother’s toes off, then her feet and so — ’
She had screamed aloud as he suddenly raised and sliced down his hand like sweeping knife.
‘And so ... and so ... and so!’ The hand sliced and sliced again. ‘In small bits, very slow.’ He had smiled, and the smile had widened into a grimace, showing his teeth and the whites of his eyes so he looked like an old threatening Chinese god. Lee had turned and fled back to the camp.
After Heng Hou anyone else was a lesser evil, she had thought. But now, facing Josef, she wondered if his evil was not even greater, for he was working against even his own mother and sister.
She stood up, her lips in a twisted sneer of defiance, and walked around the table towards him until the point of the knife touched her chest. ‘Run out of buried arms to bribe the communists with and run out of credit with the Hammonds? Back at Rinsey, all of them — that’s my guess.’ She looked up at him defiantly.
He laughed at her now, and caught her chin in one great grip while teasing the knife tip across her stretched throat. ‘Now we’re fishing, aren’t we, little sister, because you don’t
know
anything! Do you?’
‘We don’t know truth, that’s for sure! We only know what you told us.’ In spite of the punishing grip on her jaw, her fury drove her on. She threw out a hand, gesturing towards the burned-out huts that had been classrooms as well as offices and dormitories. And what these fanatics tried to indoctrinate everyone with. They need classes in common sense, not dazzling with the mystic powers of communism. They need their eyes opened to see you and Heng Hou are just thieves, gangsters, murderers, making trouble and war for your own ends — gain, money.’ She lifted both her hands in front of his face and drew the fingers of one hand across the palm of the other in a gesture of greed.
He clamped her jaw tighter, closing her mouth completely. ‘You here to do as you told, not talk, not make trouble!’
‘Josef!’ Their mother had pulled herself up and was standing weak and trembling by the table. ‘You leave your sister alone. She good girl — ’
‘Oh! I know, not like me!’ He sounded and acted like a petulant boy as he released Lee but hurled the knife so it quivered upright deep in the surface of the tabletop.
‘I didn’t say,’ his mother denied, looking down at the knife just a handspan in front of her.
‘No, you never say, you good Chinese mother!’ Lee defended her, but, poking herself in the chest, shouted at him, ‘I say!
I
say! I say you liar, cheat!’ She sought for more words. ‘Rotten bastard!’
He laughed now. ‘All Chinese when you angry! You know the only thing that’s kept you alive these times is that you’ve amused the men with your bad language and your outbursts.’
‘You know something?’ She poked her chin forward at him. ‘I know that! I work at it! But that over now ... ‘
There was something in her voice, some knowledge she was keeping to herself, hinted at in that touch of self-satisfaction laced in the half-finished sentence.
‘What you up to? What do you know? Have you seen someone from outside?’
‘That’s your problem, isn’t it!
You
don’t know!’
‘I know if you could have found your way out of the jungle after the raid, you’d have gone. When the camp was empty there was no one to stop you, was there?’ He explained their behaviour aloud, made the statement, but watched Lee with narrowed, piggy eyes, ever suspicious.
She stared back straight into his eyes, mocking but revealing nothing of the decision to remain in the camp so Heng Hou would not send his men out searching the area.
‘So,’ he went on, ‘this camp is over, but soon we have another — soon I take you there. Heng Hou, he likes your cooking, your cleaning ...’ His lips began to curl in amusement as he listed their chores, ‘your washing, your sewing, your nursing ... and — this time perhaps I’ll say yes — your fucking.’
‘No!’ The scream startled both of them. ‘No! Never!’
Their mother stood and used the last of her energy on the protest, banging the table with her fists. ‘I kill!’ Crying at the threat she had made, she repeated in an anguished whisper, ‘I kill.’ Then she crumpled to the floor.
Lee was by her side once more, feeling her forehead, cradling the small, limp form. Sure her mother was unconscious, she hissed at her brother, ‘Soon she too will be dead if I don’t get her proper medicine and to hospital. I think she has pneumonia.’
She tried a new ploy, wheedling for more information. ‘Why can’t you take us back to the Hammonds now? Mr Hammond would make you new manager at Rinsey — all would be as before. Mother could spend her last years in some comfort — we would live in our old bungalow. These murdering bandits — ’ she paused to throw a scornful glance around the camp — ‘they hate you, they despise you, have just used you, and you’ve made us serve them, you’ve kept us prisoners here.’
‘I don’t want as before!’ He stooped and spat the words into her face. ‘They — ’ he too indicated the departed communists — ‘Heng Hou himself promised me Rinsey, for mine! I don’t want to go back as before.’ He pranced away, tugging his forelock. ‘Yes, Mr Hammond, No, Mr Hammond — and his wife!’ He spat into the pan of soup his sister had been preparing. ‘I hate! I kill her, too.’
‘Too?’ Lee repeated the word in disbelief.
‘Too, meaning also?’ she asked, thinking he might be like his mother in one way — he too said unguarded things.
‘Everyone kills these days,’ he bluffed.
‘Hammonds, though — if you’ve killed any of the Hammond family! I ask you?’ She paused, desperately trying to remember what the soldier had been saying before the attack came, then added, ‘Even your mother would not forgive that.’
‘Rinsey is finished anyway, burned up,’ he added sullenly, ‘like this camp.’
She knew he was lying. Knew what the soldier had said before he was shot had not meant Rinsey was finished. Anguished she tried to remember exactly what the English soldier with Elizabeth’s photograph
had
said? That the Hammonds were back. He had spoken of Liz. Yes. ‘Liz would never forgive me if anything happened to you two’ — and Mrs Hammond? Lee groaned aloud as she could not remember — and what if he had looted the photograph? There was no way of knowing.
‘Yes!’ He took the groan for despair at his words. ‘Make the most of your next two days of freedom. Then I’ll come and collect you both, take you to the camp. It’s deeper in jungle, far, far away from here — no one will ever find that or either of you again!’
Lee picked up the bowl of stock he had spat into and threw it in his direction. He sidestepped but the splash caught his sleeve.
‘Filthy cat! You’ll pay. I’ll see to that!’ He began to walk away, taking a direction in which she had seen the messengers go. ‘Don’t you try to follow me!’ He turned back and aimed his rifle.
She watched him go. Don’t worry, brother, she thought, I don’t need to.
Hardly had the noise of his progress away through the jungle ceased when a movement at the far side of the former parade ground caught her eye. A small black man wearing only the briefest of loincloths stood there, a small bundle of leaves in one hand, in the other a blowpipe so long and thin it looked twice his height. His physique was that of a slender athlete, though she knew from seeing him at close quarters that his face was lined and the touches of grey in his black frizz showed he was well over middle age.