Return to Mandalay (19 page)

‘That’s very practical of you.’ Though not terribly romantic. Eva recalled what he’d said before. ‘You mean your plans to leave Myanmar?’ She ducked to avoid a low branch.

‘Perhaps.’ He shot her a quick glance. ‘And you?’

She shook her head. ‘A couple of near misses,’ she said. Though in truth they hadn’t even been that. She thought of Max. Felt for the first time a sense of relief. She wouldn’t have to try so hard anymore to be what he wanted her to be. She could just be herself.

Once again, she drew level with him. ‘You will know when the right man comes along,’ he said, the hint of a smile in his voice.

‘Maybe I will.’

Now, he seemed to move a little closer to her as they walked along the path. She felt a sudden strand of tension between them, seeming to pull them closer still. It took her by surprise. In another time, she thought. In another place. But not here. And not with a man like this.

He pushed aside another branch hanging low over the path, so that she could walk through, and as she did so, her arm brushed against his. The jolt she felt almost stopped her in her tracks. Where had that come from?

‘Eva?’ he said.

‘Yes?’ She glanced up at him. His dark hair had once again
fallen across his forehead and he was looking at her intently. He wasn’t moving. He stood perfectly still, as if he were waiting.

For her? Eva felt herself hovering on the edge. She felt as though she could move just a few centimetres closer and her body would be touching his. What would happen then? Would he kiss her? Did she want him to? If he did, she had the odd feeling that there would be no going back.

Once again, the thick, cloying fragrance of the frangipani wafted towards her, filled her senses like a drug. What was she thinking of? He was attractive, yes. Was it just that? Or was it the seductive scent of the flowers, the smooth darkness of the night?

She moved on, deliberately stepping away from him and he let the branch fall behind them. The moment was gone. And gone so completely that she half thought she’d imagined it. But she knew she hadn’t. And she knew why she hadn’t taken that extra step. It might mean nothing to him, but for her, there would be far too many complications. Her experience with Max was still fresh in her mind. She wasn’t interested in any kind of one-night stand, and that was all it could ever be.

Their footsteps crunched on the gravel as they turned into the sweeping driveway of Pine Rise.

‘Why did you come here, Eva?’

Had he felt it too? She had no idea. If he had, nothing in his voice, manner or body language betrayed the fact. His emotions seemed to be fully under control.

‘To find out the truth of my grandfather’s story.’ She
looked up at Pine Rise gleaming at her in the moonlight. ‘To see this country for myself. And to do my job, of course.’

‘Your job?’ He folded his arms and looked at her.

‘I’m an antique dealer,’ she told him. ‘My company buys from your country.’

His lip curled. ‘So the plundering continues,’ he said.

‘Well, hardly …’ But before she could say more, he had already begun to walk away.

‘Goodnight, Eva,’ he called. And in seconds he was gone, swallowed up by the night.

It isn’t like that, she wanted to say. They didn’t take items of cultural or religious significance from the country. They were careful to check provenance. It was all above board. But … Eva sighed. For the first time, she felt a needle-prick of doubt. About her job, about what she was doing here.

She needed a good night’s sleep, she decided. And she needed to get
her
emotions under control. In the meantime … She was left alone with only the soft sound of his footsteps on the gravel fading into the distance, the heady intoxicating scent of the frangipani and a long, pale sliver of moonlight.

*

Back inside Pine Rise she collected her key from reception. ‘Is it possible to make an international call?’ she asked. ‘To the UK?’

‘Yes, madam.’ The girl lifted the telephone receiver and spoke to the operator. She looked back at Eva. ‘The number, please?’

Eva told her. She waited.

‘There is no answer,’ the girl said at last.

‘Are you sure?’ Eva made a quick calculation. It would be around 7 p.m. Her grandfather was always home at this time. He would have just had his dinner. ‘Can you try again?’

‘Of course, madam.’ Again, she went through the motions. Nothing.

‘Thank you.’ Eva walked away. It was probably nothing to worry about. Maybe he just hadn’t heard the phone ring. She’d try again tomorrow. And if not … But she pushed the ‘if not’ away. Tomorrow, as Ramon had told her earlier, was another day.

Lawrence could smell something metallic and unfamiliar. The bed he was lying on was narrow and hard and the sheets seemed to be clamped tightly to his body as if he were in danger of falling out. It wasn’t his bed, which must mean that he wasn’t at home.

Earlier someone had given him water and he’d drunk it through a straw. Was he in hospital? He hoped not. Everyone knew the food was bloody awful and the nurses woke you up every five minutes to take your temperature or your blood pressure or ask you if you needed to empty your bladder. But he had the feeling that someone had mentioned something about hospital.

What had happened? His head hurt when he tried to think about it. Had he collapsed? Had a heart attack? Was he dying, was that it? He hoped someone would tell Mrs Briggs. She’d be worrying if she came in to clean and he wasn’t even there.

This thought almost made him chuckle but the chuckle turned into a cough and suddenly he couldn’t breathe. That was it then. He’d choke to death. In a bloody hospital.

But she was there. Someone was there and she lifted him
slightly, enough to clear his lungs. ‘Do you want to sit up?’ she whispered.

But he was too tired to sit up. Too tired even to answer her. So instead he thought of Helen.

*

There had never been that spark between them, though they had been together for so long, shared good times and bad times and had a child together. They had rubbed along, one might say, and for most of his life with her, Lawrence had been contented enough. Contentment though, was flat, like a plateau. It didn’t flow like the mountain streams of Burma in which ran both force and passion.

Lawrence also knew that he had not tried hard enough to forget, that Helen knew his thoughts and his heart lived elsewhere, in a country very far away. Many times he had tried to get close to Helen, to make some recompense perhaps, or to discover with her something that was more precious, more intimate than what they already shared. But he could not. She protected herself against him with the armours of prudery and convention, with the conservatism which grew more and more brittle inside her, until he felt she might break rather than let herself go.

Of course it was his fault. If he had been strong, Helen would have attached herself to some other man who would have made her so much happier. But it was too late for such regrets. He had done what he had done, rightly or wrongly. And he respected Helen, as both a wife and a mother. He
believed that she too had tried her best. And even that was a sadness to him.

When Rosemary was born, it was almost a relief to hand the reins for his daughter’s emotional welfare to Helen. Rosemary could give Helen what Lawrence could not. Helen could have all of Rosemary; he wanted her to have it all. He took a back seat and focused on making a living to provide for them, to give them a good life. Lawrence loved his daughter and would have liked to give her more. But he would not. He watched from the wings.

Now, he tried to remember when he had first felt an obligation to Helen, which was hard, because he felt as if it had always been there. Was it when his mother began hinting and his father began to slap him on the back as if he were a friend and contemporary, rather than a son? Was it when Helen’s parents fussed over him and treated him as if he were one of their own? Or was it even earlier?

Helen was twelve the first time he kissed her. Or, he should say, the first time she kissed him. Lawrence was just thirteen.

His family had gone to a weekend lunch party at her house and it had drifted into late afternoon. They had a small swimming pool and even a tennis court; the family had money then, both families had money. Unlike others, they had benefited from the financial recession of the thirties; they had made some canny investments at the right time and now they were reaping the benefits.

Lawrence and Helen had been swimming in the pool, length after short length, racing each other and laughing and
splashing and when they’d got out, she had taken his hand and pulled him towards the summer house. ‘Come on. I want to show you something.’

It was a perfect summer’s day, cloudless and blue, the way summer days often were in England back then, no breeze, bees idly buzzing around the clumps of lavender bordering the path. They sat on the decking of the summer house, which was hot from the sun, and stretched out their bare legs already dried from the pool. Helen’s blonde hair was dripping on the bleached boards of the decking, the water almost sizzling as it landed. She moved close to him as if she might whisper in his ear and then shook her hair like a dog.

He laughed. ‘What do you want to show me, Helen?’

‘This.’ And she’d pulled him close, put her lips against his and kissed him. Not just on the mouth, but prising his lips apart with hers until he felt her tongue, warm and moist on his.

He felt the stirring in his groin. ‘Give over, Helen.’ He half pushed her away, his hands on her shoulders, her wet hair trailing over his fingers.

‘Why?’ Dreamily, she looked up at him, batting wet eyelashes. Kissed him again, lightly this time. Her lips tasted of chlorine.

‘Because.’ He lay down and stared up at the sky, through the corrugated leaves of the apple tree next to the summer house, into the blue. Truth was, he didn’t know why.

‘One day we’ll be doing this all the time.’ She licked her finger and traced a path across his forehead.

‘Doing what?’ He grabbed her hand, held it pinned down by his side.

How stupid was he? Not to realise they had his whole life mapped out for him. His parents. Her parents. Helen.

‘You and me,’ she said.

‘You and me?’ He let go of her hand, leant up on one elbow and watched her. She’d picked a blade of grass and was dissecting it with her fingernail. He understood how it felt. She was a pretty girl. But he’d grown up with Helen. He knew her, warts and all. She was more like a sister.

‘Don’t you know?’ she said, tickling his face with the grass. ‘Don’t you feel it?’

‘Feel what?’ He was scared of what might happen if she kept kissing him that way. Which was precisely why he had to stop her kissing him that way. It didn’t feel right.

‘Me and you,’ she said again. ‘We’ll be married one day. We’ll live in a big house. Maybe this house.’ She waved vaguely towards where all the grown-ups were sitting outside, out of sight: his parents, her parents – colleagues and best friends – eating and drinking and planning someone else’s future.

‘Oh, yes?’ He laughed. She was just a girl. What did she know?

‘We’ll have lots of furniture,’ she said. ‘And children.’

He laughed again, wondering if she’d detected the note of panic.

‘And we’ll have parties just like this one.’

Her parents’ life, he thought. That was what Helen wanted.

‘What makes you so sure?’ he teased. He was still more curious than worried. It was just Helen’s fantasy, it wasn’t real.

She tilted her head towards him. Screwed her eyes up against the sun. ‘It’s what they want,’ she said. ‘So it’ll happen.’

And Helen had been right. It had happened.

The next morning, Eva took the photographs she’d brought from home to show Maya. It was too early to phone her grandfather again, but she’d try later, before she headed back to Mandalay. Fascinating though this trip to Pyin Oo Lwin had been, she mustn’t forget that her contact would be waiting and that she had a job to do, whatever Ramon might think of it.

Eva handed her the first photo. ‘My grandfather.’ As he must have been when Maya first knew him. Had she had a picture of her lover back then? Possibly not. Certainly, her eyes filled.

‘Lawrence,’ she whispered. She held it carefully, as if it were so brittle it might snap.

‘It was taken just before the war,’ Eva said. It had
1939
scrawled on the back in her grandfather’s hand. And he had told her that at the time he’d been on leave from camp.

‘Yes. It was here in Maymyo,’ Maya said. ‘I remember that day.’ She traced a fingertip over the picture. ‘At Pine Rise.’

‘Oh, yes, of course.’ Eva recognised the carvings around the front door behind where he was standing. Now, she had seen them with her own eyes, run her fingers over that same wood …

Her grandfather was standing, legs akimbo, staring straight at the camera. He was wearing khaki shorts and a shortsleeved shirt. His eyes were pale and unblinking in the faded black-and-white shot. A young man ready to go to war. Had he known that? Had he been at all prepared for what he was about to go through? Eva doubted it.

‘And this is Grandpa in the early nineteen fifties.’ She produced the next, an early colour shot. Her grandfather was sitting in the window-seat at home, looking towards the garden, which was long and backed on to the Nature Reserve and the cliffs. The garden had a small pond with a yellow water lily, irises and carp and an old-fashioned crazy-paving path that meandered from the bench up to the vegetable patch. To Eva, it had always been a secret garden, because of the narrow paths that wound behind the sprawling hydrangea bushes, and the many places to hide behind the trellises of sweet peas and raspberry canes. The photo must have been taken less than ten years after he had left Burma. He looked wistful and, yes, a little lonely.

Maya nodded. ‘It is a beautiful garden,’ she said. ‘And Lawrence looks just as I imagined.’

How many times had she pictured him, Eva wondered, thinking of what Ramon had said last night. Maya smiled, but again Eva could see the sadness in her dark eyes. How had she felt when this man whom she loved had gone off to war? Had she known she would never see him again? And how had she felt when he never returned? She seemed to have known that he had gone back to the UK rather than been a casualty
and she must have accepted it long ago. But Eva wondered, nevertheless, how much had she suffered at losing him? She had married and she’d had a daughter. But so had Eva’s grandfather. And yet he’d never stopped loving this woman sitting beside her now.