In the Mouth of the Tiger (3 page)

I tried the chair but my skinny frame could not make it squeak the way Denis had. Sitting there, looking at my talisman, I half-closed my eyes and let the waves of relief and happiness wash over me. I was going to escape from the malicious, shallow and pretentious world around me, to the clean, real world that I had sometimes glimpsed. When I'd been with Robbie, my stepfather. Listening that morning to the young men at the chummery, planning a day of innocent good fun. In the books I read.

I let myself think about Robbie, something I rarely allowed myself to do because it caused me so much pain. Ernest Roberts had married my mother just before Christmas in 1927, at the Anglican Cathedral in Kuala Lumpur. I had been seven or eight at the time and the event had changed my life. I remembered the three years Robbie had been my stepfather as magic years. He had treated me not as an encumbrance but as a treasured child, and shown me a very different world to the one I had lived in, and to which I had returned when he died of malaria at his gold mine deep in the jungles of Pahang.

I felt the familiar prick of tears, and glanced at my talisman. Denis would have liked Robbie. They were both English gentlemen, and there had even been something in Denis's face and demeanour that, now that I thought about it, reminded me of my stepfather.

It began to rain, the heavy tropical downpour that came so often in mid-afternoon in Penang. I thought of the picnic party, perhaps laughing under one of the atap shelters a thoughtful Administration had erected near most popular swimming beaches, or staying out in the rain because it was a day at the beach and you expected to get wet anyway. I moved to the window and breathed in the cool fragrance of tropical rain on a lush garden. What a funny afternoon it was proving! I was happy despite the tears beneath my lids: a soft sadness, made bearable by the fact that I was no longer alone.

I decided to finish a blue dress I was making for the dinner party, and carefully laid out the remaining pieces, each pinned to its paper pattern, on the polished timber floor. Within minutes I was absorbed in my task, pedalling away on the Singer sewing machine my mother had left with me, measuring and adjusting as I went, my mouth full of pins and my mind focused.

I have always loved sewing, particularly making dresses to my own designs. My mother encouraged my interest, which is why she had left the sewing machine with me. A kindness, but, like all things Mother did, a calculated kindness – she had also left a long list of things to sew for her and for Madam Tanya, her companion, a young woman only a few years older than I was.

It was getting dark before I finished the dress and tried it on. Like all my things it was simply cut, with a demure, square neckline and long pleats falling to the floor. I twirled in front of my mirror, seeing the pleats fall open gracefully as I moved. It looked lovely.

‘Are you going to grace us with your company, Nona? Our guests are nearly here.' Irma had stolen silently to my door, as she always did. But her
tart comment had no effect on my mood. I ignored her, curtseyed towards the chair where Denis had sat, then swept past her into the upstairs gallery. Tonight, I promised myself, I would dedicate to the man who cherished me, and I would be beautiful and charming just for him.

The dinner party was not held in the breakfast room where we normally ate but in the gloomy dining room, which always looked to me like a set for a Dracula movie. A huge mahogany sideboard occupied a full wall of the overcrowded room, and the dining table itself was a monstrous affair with elephantine legs and an awful mother-of-pearl design set into its centre. Copies of Flemish paintings in heavy gold-leaf frames covered most of the wall surfaces, and dark red velvet curtains covered the rest. To add to the general air of gloom the electric lights had not been turned on, the only illumination coming from three giant brass candelabras that sprouted from the table like grotesque growths. The chairs were terribly uncomfortable, with thin red cushions on solid mahogany bases and upright backs so ornately carved they were painful to rest against.

‘So very English!' gushed Molly Tan as we settled ourselves around the table. Molly was Jack Van der Staaten's secretary and had become his social companion since his wife's death a few years before. She was an intelligent, no-nonsense person so I glanced at her sharply to see if she was being ironic, but her thin features were set in a bland smile.

‘Thank you so much,' Irma responded. ‘We do try to keep up the standards of Home.' It struck me as an absurd statement. There was not a single drop of English blood in the room and yet so strong was the British Colonial ethic that everyone pretended that they were English outcasts stranded in a foreign land. The Ulrichs were Belgian, the Van der Staatens were a Dutch-Eurasian family from Junk Ceylon (now Phuket), Molly Tan was from a Straits Chinese family, and of course I was Russian. Of all of us only Molly had any real connection with England. As in many well-to-do Straits Chinese families, the Tans had a tradition of sending the brighter boys to Oxford or Cambridge, and Molly herself had spent a year at an English boarding school.

The meal itself was depressingly English. Irma clapped rather theatrically and the boy came in with a huge tureen of bland Brown Windsor soup. A bad start, and I knew it was not going to get any better: the sickly smell of overcooked roast mutton had pervaded the house for the past hour.
I wondered yet again why Penang ‘society' insisted on second-rate English food when the local cuisine – particularly the spicy Nonya cooking that I loved – was available in abundance.

‘Off your food again, Nona?' Irma asked, nodding pointedly at my barely touched soup bowl.

‘Oh no, Irma . . .' I began, but then remembered my new resolve. ‘Actually, I'm not that keen on Brown Windsor. But it's very nicely cooked.'

Irma's eyebrows had risen almost to her hairline. ‘How delightful of you to tell me that it's nicely cooked!' she said, her mouth twisting as if she were biting into a lemon. ‘So what sort of soup do you like, Nona? Borsch, I suppose. That awful stuff made from beetroot and sour cream.'

A small, awkward silence was broken by Molly. ‘What lovely paintings you have on your wall, Irma,' she said. ‘Are they originals?' Now I knew she had her tongue in her cheek – Molly would know as well as I did that the painting were products of Ah Chong's Art Emporium. Ah Chong had a production line, using students from the Penang School of Arts – even artistic school children – to mass-produce copies of the Old Masters. Emporium paintings were almost famous in the Far East, being so obviously bad that it was quite fashionable to have one or two in the house as talking points.

‘Actually, I think they are mainly by the Masters' students,' Irma said, mollified. Even Ronnie Van der Staaten rolled his eyes. I think he might have done piecework for Ah Chong in his time.

Jack Van der Staaten was in a mellow mood, probably due to Molly's deft social skills that smoothed over every rough moment and kept the atmosphere light and cheerful. He had some good stories to tell about Penang's earliest days and he told them with vigour and style. His ancestors had come over from Junk Ceylon with Francis Light in the 1790s, and the stories he told us of those early days made my hair stand on end. Pirates, robbers and assassins figured in the tales, which he embellished with graphic dialogue and the occasional heavy slap on the table with an open palm.

Captain Ulrich added one or two stories of his own, about his exploits during the Great War when he had been attached to a British regiment in Flanders as a tunnelling engineer. He was cool but impeccably polite towards me, and when the subject of my black eye came up, as it was bound to, he actually had the grace to look ashamed. Or it may have been merely a trick of the uncertain light: the guttering candles made us all look a bit odd at times.

Once or twice Irma turned her malicious tongue on me, but each time
Molly came to my rescue. I warmed towards this gracious lady, who smiled so nicely at me from behind her heavy, horn-rimmed glasses. It seemed so unfair that despite all her intelligence and charm, and her high status within the Straits Chinese community, she would never be accepted as a member of Colonial society because she was not European. The Swimming Club, the Golf Club, the Penang Club were all barred to her, and though she would be received at Government House it would only be on official occasions, as a representative of one of the lesser races of the Empire.

Several bottles of South African red wine were opened, and not being accustomed to alcohol I was quite muzzy-headed by the time the soggy breadand-butter pudding came round. It was quite a pleasant feeling, as if I were floating gently above the table, and when Irma wound up the gramophone on the sideboard and played some popular English airs I felt so moved that tears threatened behind my eyelids. It was so unusual, this feeling of actually being accepted as an adult.

I even smiled at the incongruity of listening to the latest London musichall songs while huge Malayan frogs croaked in the tropical garden outside and in the far distance sounded the faint clash and drumming of a Chinese band.

Don't misunderstand me – I was not anti-English. Far from it. I had grown up reading English books and all my heroes were English. Bulldog Drummond, Sanders of the River, Sir Percy Blakeney, Rudolf Rassendyle, Richard Hannay. During the three years my mother had been married to Robbie I had actually thought of myself as English. Robbie liked people to think I was his daughter, and he called me Norma in public, an Anglicised version of Nona. Initially only in public, but towards the end, when he was sick and I used to sit with him, he called me Norma even when there were only the two of us. At those times I convinced myself he was my real father, and we talked about going ‘home' to England, and smelling new-mown grass as we walked together in Richmond Great Park on a Sunday morning.

But Robbie had died and reality had re-imposed itself. I was not, after all, ‘dust who England bore, shaped, made aware, gave once her flowers to know, her ways to roam'. I was a little Russian girl, an alien, trying to make my way in a world fashioned for the English.

‘Ronnie, you can waltz very well. Why don't you ask Nona for a dance?' I was saved from my maudlin thoughts by Irma's clumsy interference, and I was almost grateful to her.

‘No. Thank you all the same, Ronnie,' I said more forcefully than I had intended. Ronnie's instant look of gratitude told me that there was no risk of heartbreak. He had been deeply involved in a conversation with his elder brother about the recent Bodyline cricket tour of Australia, a subject that had set the minds and tongues of young men on fire throughout the Empire.

‘The boys prefer their cricket to women at the moment, I'm afraid, Irma,' Jack said comfortably. ‘But give them a few more years and girls like Nona will have to run pretty fast to keep out of their clutches.'

The boys and I blushed scarlet, and another awkward moment descended on the table. An awkwardness which Molly once again stepped into to dispel. ‘So you have at last found a buyer for Burnbrae?' she said turning to me. ‘It could be a sign that the Depression may be lifting.'

I had no idea what she was talking about. Burnbrae was a tea plantation up in the Cameron Highlands of Malaya that Robbie had once owned. It had been swallowed up by debts at his death, just as had ‘my' gold mine. I called it ‘my' gold mine because Robbie had left it to me in his will, a lovely and romantic gesture that had meant nothing as the mine had been worked out and was worthless.

Irma turned greedy eyes on me. ‘What is this about Burnbrae, Nona? I had no idea your mother owned any property.' She said it almost accusingly, as if mother had been cheating her in some way.

‘Burnbrae is not Julia's,' Molly said quietly. ‘It's Nona's.'

I was astounded by this remark, and must have looked it, because Molly abruptly changed the subject. ‘So the youngsters won't dance, eh?' she said. ‘Does that mean that nobody is going to ask me? Am I to remain a wallflower all evening?' And she turned such winsome eyes on Jack that he simply had to scrape back his heavy mahogany chair and lead her to the small parquet dancing space in front of the gramophone.

I had only a short reprieve. As soon as Jack and Molly were away from the table Irma started in on me again. ‘And what is this about finding a buyer, Nona? Does this mean that you will be able to pay some of the arrears your mother has run up on your behalf? There is a considerable amount owing, and while I did not press you when I thought your scatterbrained mother was to pay, this does change everything.'

I was totally unable to respond, staring back at her with wide, shocked eyes. Molly Tan's brother was a partner in my mother's firm of solicitors, Mayhew, Jones & Tan. Peter Mayhew had been the executor of Robbie's will,
a careful old man with thin grey hair who had patiently explained to me why I would not be getting a cent from my bequest of a gold mine in the jungles of Pahang. But he had not mentioned anything about Burnbrae.

I had loved Burnbrae. We had stayed there once when Robbie had been alive. I had only the vaguest memories of the house itself – a long, low bungalow on a ridge overlooking a broad sweep of hillside covered in tea. Crowded, because Robbie's manager, George Fortin, had been living there with his Chinese wife and lots of children. But I did remember ‘Happy Valley' very clearly. Happy Valley was of course a valley, and unsuitable for tea, but it would have made a delightful little farm. Robbie and I had explored it, walking down to the small, green meadow through a gully full of ferns and jungle trees.

Robbie had suddenly dropped on one knee and turned to me, his hands on my shoulders. ‘Happy?' he had asked.

I had nodded solemnly, overcome with happiness.

‘Then we will call this our Happy Valley. And when we set up a farm here, we will call it Happy Valley Farm.'

‘Cat got your tongue?' Irma asked. ‘Or is it that Molly has let the cat out of the bag?' She laughed unpleasantly at her accidental witticism. ‘I think you and your mother should come clean about your means, don't you? I've been letting you stay here on a charitable rate of board because your mother told me she was in straitened circumstances. Straitened circumstances indeed!'