The Devil's Garden (28 page)

‘Always remember, Yoshi, whatever happens, I do really care for you.' Hadn't she said much the same the other day? ‘It's this war. Things could have been so different. Be careful. It makes everyone act like someone else. None of us are ever free to be ourselves. I have lived my life backwards. Your love is the curl-up-and-die innocent love that eats you up like a flame on paper, the sort every schoolgirl should have before the other, more reasonable kinds that are always a compromise. There must be a better place, a better way even if it cannot be together. You will always be my special, my first
real
love.' She pressed her lips to his with soft sadness then kissed him with sudden fierce adhesion. He had protested his bewilderment, tried to hug her, but she was already moving away down the track, sobbing.

‘So Captain. My name is Chen Guang. I am in charge here.' Oishi was distracted. The man was perched on a fallen tree trunk and Orchid was sitting on his lap, stroking his face with every sign of devotion, looking completely composed apart from the risk of falling between his parted legs. She had introduced the man as her husband. Chen Guang nodded over his shoulder at the barberous scene. ‘You are intrigued? You would be surprised that personal vanity is the last thing men give up. Have you come just for a proper haircut or is there something else?' He, himself, was quite immaculately shaved and trimmed. ‘Ah, I see.' He gripped Orchid's thigh through the thin stuff. ‘Lily and I have no secrets. She is a loyal servant of The Party. Sometimes she brings me people—a bit like a cat that brings you its catch once it has finished playing with it.' Captain Oishi blinked back tears. Orchid looked at him with big, sad eyes and shook her head. He coughed through a choking throat.

‘No. No. It is not for a haircut that I have come.' He took a deep breath and spoke quickly, looking at his own feet, like a man afraid he would change his mind. ‘I should like to join the Malayan Peoples' Anti-Japanese Army please.' A silence. Then Chen Guang threw back his head and roared with laughter so that Orchid bounced up and down on his lap. It rang out over the mud. A flock of startled birds took flight. The men, standing around across the water, smiled sympathetically as the platform rocked under their feet from the wave they made.

‘You are Japanese and you want to join the anti-Japanese army?' He looked around for support in his incredulity but the men were too far away to hear so he laughed in Orchid's taut, unhappy face. His arm curled tightly around her waist. ‘I don't know whether you are a Simple Simon or a Smart Alec. Why would you want to do that?' Orchid climbed to the ground and walked away towards the hut with downcast, unfocused eyes.

‘Because, now that the war has ended, I think that quite soon the Malayan Peoples' Anti-Japanese Army will become the Malayan Peoples' Anti-British Army. This war has been ended by the Americans, not the British. Your fight with them, I believe, is not over. Neither is mine. To surrender is shameful, to kill myself is stupid since we are not truly beaten and our cause remains, even if I have even less to live for than I thought. Therefore I have no alternative. I must fight on, like my honourable, ancient namesake. It is not a matter of professional pride. We must be what we are.'

Chen Guang looked at him hard—the soft, downy cheeks, the gentle, chestnut eyes. ‘I think you should go home, Captain. Your mother would not like it if you stayed.'

Oishi set his lips in a firm line. Orchid had gone round the other side of the hut and now she was walking alone down the path on that bank, her features made invisible by the light behind her—become a mere shadow—and slowly fading away into the glare of bright sunlight that bleached her out of existence like a stain on fine linen.

‘That is correct. She would not like it but women are … they …'

‘You mean perhaps that the way of the world is that “men must fight and women must weep”?'

‘Possibly … Exactly! Women are a distraction. They are a dream that disappears in daylight. Then perhaps men weep too but then they must fight again.' He looked dreamily after Orchid but she was nowhere to be seen. The sun, his own mythical ancestor, had eaten her up like that fireball at Nagasaki, turning the tears in his eyes into rainbows.

‘Captain. It is true that the Brutish once put me in jail but now they are our friends—for the moment at least. Recently some of their POWs were shot up not far from here. It was some misguided nationalists, of course. But we have since taken care of that with our Brutish comrades. We work very hard to stay friends with them. Governments don't really mind their subjects getting killed, it's just that they feel they should have the monopoly rights on that—a matter of deference, then. You have to ask yourself what one Japanese captain could do for us that would be worth all the bother and difficulty he might bring. He might upset the Brutish. He would certainly upset certain Chinese. What have you got to offer that could possibly counterbalance all that?' He shrugged and raised his brows in question.

Captain Oishi showed neither surprise nor disappointment but Chen Guang froze on the spot as he said very quietly, ‘I have one thing I can bring you, one thing that might make you let me stay. I have General Yamashita's gold.'

* * * 

Admiral Lord Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas George Mountbatten admired his distinguishedly greying temples in the cheval glass and smoothed them appreciatively. The Windsors generally did not age well—big Saxe-Coburg noses and premature balding. Alone amongst them, he found himself turning most satisfactorily from blank matinee idol to devilishly handsome silver fox. He knew he was exactly what was required at this stage of the war, a tall, haughty figure with a gritty jaw that could stride up and down lines of much shorter colonial troops, barking encouragement and being photographed saluting outside pillared, gubernatorial buildings. The decorations on his chest looked very well, a multi-hued tickertape of achievement. It was lucky they had picked up on the surrendering Japanese wearing the British Distinguished Service and the Allied Victory medals left over from their role in the last WW, and plucked them off in time. That would not have done at all, clouded the issue—also incongruous, like a man taking a shit while wearing a hat. He pondered picturesquely. Shifting fate, ebb and flow of the tide of fortune. He, himself, had had the odd bit of bad luck, the suicidal sacrifice of Canadian troops on that senseless raid he had organised on Dieppe. Failure was deeply unglamorous. Then project Habakkuk, the exciting plan to build a huge mid-Atlantic aircraft carrier of the revolutionary material, pykrete, a boffin's mixture of ice and woodpulp. Now
that
had turned out very badly with a ghastly year of secret experiments in some frozen meat depot underneath Smithfield market before it had all been torpedoed with a single irritable stroke of Churchill's pen. It had not helped that he had attempted to save the project by a dramatic, last-minute demonstration of the qualities of this material, as opposed to pure ice, by firing a bullet into a block of each before the reluctantly-assembled members of the general staff. The ice had shattered gratifyingly while the resistant pykrete had sent the bullet ricocheting amongst the leaping senior officers and ripped through the trousers of one of them. In vain, he had protested that that was exactly his point. ‘Indubitably suitable for the crust of NAAFI pies,' Churchill had quipped in the lethal report's margin. It would have been enough to sink the career of anyone who did not happen to be so closely related to the king. As it was, he was punished by promotion, a technique whose benefits for a commander he, himself, fully appreciated. God knows, there would be enough of it in the giant cock-up that was Singapore. Churchill, it was said, had cried hot tears of shame and rage at the news of the yielding up of his eastern fortress.

The new and improved surrender ceremony had gone as well as could be expected. The real treaties had been signed in Rangoon and Tokyo. The Singapore chapter was pure theatre, an appendix to the Mikado, a public act of military masturbation. The Japanese delegates had turned up right on time but he had made them cool their heels for an hour to make the point that Singapore time had now been shifted back from Synonanto time which had been set to the same clock as Tokyo. The whole takeover was a great bluff, all ‘fur coat, no knickers,' since the British warships in the harbour would have been sitting ducks and his troops were heavily outnumbered and outgunned by the Japs had they decided to make a fight of it. The fact that it was armed Japanese soldiers, ‘surrendered personnel'
not
POWs therefore not subject to the Geneva Convention—important legal distinction—that held back the cheering crowds outside, showed how matters stood all too clearly, as did the absence of that absolute shower, Percival, who had surrendered Singapore in the first place. Couldn't run a bath, that johnnie, let alone a war. The very same Union Jack of that surrender, worn and faded from secret deployment on each coffin in Changi, had been hoisted back over the Municipal Building to cleanse it of the dishonour. That story had brought a tear to the eye. The bugles had been good. Bugles were always good though they, too, tugged at the heartstrings. There had come that breath-stopping moment when General Itagaki had hesitated, pen in mid-air for a full thirty seconds—will he, won't he?—milking the moment—before signing the surrender document and then having the nerve to quibble over the placing of the other signatures. Mountbatten snorted and fluffed up his gold epaulettes. Then the victory parade. Trooping down the front steps to the podium amidst a firestorm of popping flashbulbs, with the crowds cheering and some angry Eurasians shouting at the Japs, ‘
Baka, baka
. Bloody fool!' He groaned. But at least that had been better than the moment when the crowd got the Chinese Nationalist and the Japanese uniforms confused and booed the wrong side. Ranks of jolly tars and stout Indian chaps, all well turned out. No one falling down the hastily filled trenches on the Padang. Intimidation by white linen, whiter than the flag the Japs were carrying, and enough white faces rounded up to show whose victory this was. And the mighty noise of the Sunderland seaplanes thundering low over the Padang, like the wrath of god, shaking the ground under their feet. Oh, and those terribly smart young men of the MPAJA who had turned all heads, kitted out with shiny new uniforms, three red stars on their caps, and the very latest automatic rifles, crashing down the road in unaccustomed boots and slightly wobbly ranks that alone betrayed the fact that they had come, not from Sandhurst, but straight out of the stinking jungle. This place could never do without the British to keep everyone in line, facing in the same direction. They'd simply tear themselves apart. There was a perfunctory knock and Wells, his ADC, slid his head round the door, sidling in with a sheaf of loose papers and a school exercise book.

‘Come in Rupert.'

‘Sorry to bother you, Sir.' He was careful not to come between Mountbatten and his mirror image. ‘Just a few things for your signature and sayso.' Poor Rupert Wells had spent time at the mission in Washington and carried the stigmata in his speech. He would be spying on him, of course, and reporting directly back to Churchill. When they had first met, he had asked, ‘Wells? Are you one of the Somerset Wells?' ‘No Sir. I rather think I'm one of the Ne'er Do Wells.' He had taken to him at once. Rupert understood the need for chumminess in an organisation dedicated to the killing of complete strangers. But now it was time for a little mature reflection, for drawing the conclusions of the past. It always came as a shock, the way the tangled mess of the present became the neat, little blocks of history. Rupert would be writing his memoirs soon, completing that packaging process, and Mountbatten threw a pinch of dreamy, visionary quality into his voice that would look well there.

‘Do you suppose, Rupert, that the natives will ever be able look us in the eye again, without blaming us for all this?'

‘I don't know, Sir. Will
we
?' Mountbatten laughed and saw Rupert's cynical reflection smile back, then look briskly down. ‘Right, Sir. A few gongs for natives and such to be handed out, subject to your and London's approval, of course.' He placed the papers on the desk. ‘Would you like me to run you through them quickly or would you like to have more time to go over them later, yourself?' Mountbatten threw up his hands, staggered under the burdens of office and rolled his eyes eloquently. ‘Right, well, won't take a jiffy then, Sir. First thing is the Jap currency, banana money. Word is we should declare it illegal tender, except for the largest denomination notes, and release Straits dollars through the banks right away. There are a couple of crates of fresh cash standing ready on the
Sussex.'

Mountbatten pouted. ‘Surely that's a civilian matter that can wait. And won't that mean all the little people will lose everything while the black marketeers and collaborators will make a fortune?'

Rupert grinned. ‘Just so, Sir. Very perceptive of you. We have to be careful not to make powerful enemies at the moment. That can come later. Until the civilian admin's up and running it seems we're the only channel of lawful authority, so we have to do it. A note from London. We should avoid loose usage of words like “citizens”. Malays kick up a stink if the Chinese get official recognition as even existing, so they're all undifferentiated “loyal subjects of the King Emperor”. A few awards and sweeteners. The big show is over and it's time for some applause—a bit of confetti to throw in people's eyes. General theme is last time it was the lads who swam to Australia, gripping knives between their teeth, to carry on the fight, were the heroes. This time, it's the loyal locals who stayed behind to face the foe.'

‘You know. When you talk like that, Rupert, I wonder whether you quite believe in our civilising mission East of Suez.'

‘I believe in
your
civilising mission, of course, Sir.'