The Nicholas Linnear Novels (10 page)

Yet Nicholas’ history lessons were to begin in another country.

On February 15, 1942, his father told him when he was ten, the British garrison had surrendered Singapore to the attacking Japanese. They held the city for three and a half years until September 1945, when the British reoccupied it. There his father had met his mother, a kind of refugee in the war-torn city. She had been married to a Japanese garrison commander and seeing him blown to bits during the last days of that humid trembling summer perhaps unhinged her for a time.

The first of the British forces were already infiltrating the outskirts of the city and the commander had moved his garrison east to outflank them but, overextending his position, had found himself outflanked. Caught in a murderous crossfire, he had cut down six English soldiers with his
katana
before the rest had sense enough to step back and loft the volley of grenades. There was nothing left of him, not even bones.

Years later, in an old battered shop selling
ukiyo-e
prints in a tiny Tokyo side street, Nicholas had come across a certain print titled
The End of the Samurai.
It depicted a dismayed warrior’s death, his great
katana
flung from his hands by a blast of gunpowder. In that print Nicholas saw, perhaps, the redemption of his mother’s first husband, recognizing the historical imperative of that enemy.

His mother had always been a totally apolitical woman. She had married out of love, hardly out of convenience. But with the eventual defeat of the Japanese in Singapore, with the death of her husband, she found that her entire world had exploded into a wilderness that frightened her. This she found utterly consternating. Life, she firmly believed, was for the living. One mourned one’s losses and moved onward. Karma. She believed in that above all else. Not a predestiny—she was no fatalist as many Westerners might mistakenly dub her. She knew, rather, merely how to bow before the inevitabilities of life. As the death of her husband.

But this was a time of momentous changes and, like a beautiful flower caught up in an inexplicable maelstrom, she felt adrift in the riot of chattering gunfire and mortar explosions.

She met Nicholas’ father, ironically enough, in the very office where her dead husband had carried on the command of his defeated garrison. She had wandered in there as if it were some Buddhist temple, sacrosanct from the flames of war that rose all about her. Perhaps she had come there because it was one of the only places left in Singapore now that was at all familiar to her. Oddly enough, the thought of fleeing the city never entered her mind. Rather, she wandered the lethal city with little regard to her personal safety.

So much of the city had changed that she was confused, no longer certain where the business district was or where her old apartment had once stood. Piles of rubble were everywhere and the streets were flooded with a tide of children, surging and calling, as if in the aftermath of war’s bleak nightmare they had been released from some hideous bondage. It recalled to her the happiness she had felt at New Year’s festivals when she had been a girl—liberated for a time from the cares and restrictions of the world. And this, too, confounded her.

Thus for many days she had walked the steaming streets, whirling into dark doorways instinctively as she heard the heavy tramping of the approaching soldiers—she was beyond differentiating one side from another. Miraculously, she avoided serious misadventure. Karma, she would say later.

She survived at the sufferance and the pity of those Chinese folk who spied her and fed her almost as if she were a baby, spooning the thin rice soup between her slack lips, wiping her chin every so often, for she could not do even this simple act herself. She relieved herself in the gutters and forgot what it was like to take a bath. Those times when she came across running water, as in the fountains still intact which she stumbled across by chance, she thrust her fingers into the spray, staring at it as if it were something she had never seen before. When it rained, she stood still and stared upward at the billowing clouds, seeking, perhaps, a glimpse of God.

The morning she staggered into the garrison office, Nicholas’ father was in the middle of an administrative crisis. Not only were his troops obliged to mop up the last outlying pockets of Japanese opposition but now orders had come down urging him to see to it that his men policed the metropolitan area in an attempt to quell the increasingly violent outbreaks between the Chinese and the Malays who lived constantly in an uneasy half-peace. That left perhaps an hour and a half each day for his men to sleep; it was clearly a situation he could not tolerate and he was in the process of seeking some conciliatory alternative to actively disobeying a direct order. He had, in fact, been sitting in this same wooden slatted chair—the one that had, for the last three years, been the sole property of the dead Japanese garrison commander—since the morning of the previous day.

Except for several hurried trips to the washroom to relieve himself, Colonel Denis Linnear had been right where he was when the dazed woman wandered into his sanctum sanctorum. How she had managed to slip past the three sets of guards he was never able to ascertain to his satisfaction. Yet that particular point only manifested itself to him much later. At the time, he was concerned only with her appearance and, as he jumped up from behind his littered desk, his aides seemed more startled by his movements than by the fact that there was an unannounced woman in the room.

“Danvers!” the Colonel called to his adjutant. “Get a cot in here, on the double!”

The man rushed out and the Colonel was reaching for the woman when she began to fall. Her eyes fluttered closed and she collapsed into his arms.

“Sir?” Lieutenant McGivers said. “About this—”

“Oh, for pity’s sake, man, get me a cold cloth,” the Colonel barked irritably. “And get Grey in here.”

Grey was the garrison surgeon, a tall angular man with a bushy mustache and sun-reddened skin. He arrived just as Danvers was mishandling the cot through the doorway.

“Give him a hand, McGivers, there’s a good lad,” the Colonel said to the reappearing lieutenant. And together they maneuvered the cot into the room.

The Colonel lifted the woman up, noting her fine Asian features under the layers of dirt and dust, lowered her gently onto the cot.

He let Grey take over then, going back behind his desk, working on the tail end of his problem with one eye cocked across the room until, at length, the surgeon stood up.

“All right, Lieutenant,” the Colonel said wearily, “get everyone out of here. We’ll reconvene at 0800 hours.” He stood up, passing his long fingers through his hair, and crossed to where Grey stood looking down at his patient.

When they were alone in the room, he said, “How is she?”

The surgeon shrugged. “It’s hard to say until she comes around and I can run a few more tests. She’s obviously suffering from shock and exposure. Several good meals will fix her up, I shouldn’t wonder.” He wiped his hands on the cloth he had used to clean her. “Look here, Denis, I’ve a lot of young boys to see. If you suspect a problem when she comes round, have Danvers come and fetch me. Otherwise, I think you know what she needs as well as I do.”

The Colonel summoned Danvers and sent him to scrounge up some hot soup and any pieces of boiled chicken he could find. Then he knelt beside her, watching the soft pulse along the long column of her neck.

Thus the first thing Cheong saw when she opened her eyes was the close face of the Colonel. What struck her immediately, she recalled later in recounting the story to Nicholas, were his eyes. “They were the kindest eyes I had ever seen,” she said in her light singsong voice. “They were the very deepest blue. I had never before seen blue eyes. I had been outside the city when the British had first come, prior to the outbreak of the war.

“I often think that it was those blue eyes which so startled me, brought me around. Suddenly I remembered the long days after Tsūkō had been killed as if they were part of a film being run off whole for the first time; the pieces at last had knit together. I no longer had gauze in front of my eyes and cotton wool stuffed into my head.

“With that, it all began to pass away from me—as if I were recalling events from some other person’s life—the dark terrible last days of the war.

“That is when I knew that your father was part of my karma, in that first moment I saw him, for I have no remembrance of entering the garrison house, of encountering any British soldiers there before him.”

The Colonel took her home at the day’s end, in the midst of the long shimmering emerald and lapis lazuli twilight, with the city choked with swirling dust, Jeeps clattering down the streets and soldiers running quick-time along the sidewalks while the Chinese and the Malays paused in their homeward journeys, standing quite still, resolute and quiescent and eternal in their cotton drawstring pants and sloping reed sedge hats.

As usual it was teeming, and the Colonel had the Jeep brought around, though he was often fond of walking. It took him twenty minutes on average to make the journey from the garrison, located near Keppel Harbour, almost due north through the city to the house he now occupied. As may be imagined, the command was not overly fond of his making this trek on foot and thus he was perforce obliged to be accompanied by two armed men from his garrison as escort from door to door. The Colonel found this a hideous misappropriation of precious manpower but he seemed to have no choice in the matter.

At first he had been assigned an enormous estate near the western tip of the city but he soon found that it was hard by an equally enormous mangrove swamp and being downwind from it was too much even for him. So he had looked around and eventually moved to this current smaller but infinitely more comfortable place.

It was situated on a hill which the Colonel liked quite a bit because when he faced north he could gaze up at Bukit Timah, the island’s granitic core and its highest spot. Beyond that dark mass, the hump of some great leviathan, lay the black waters of the Johore Strait and Malaysia, the southernmost tip of the massive block of Asia. On the days when it was particularly hot and humid, when his shirt stuck like hot wax to his skin and the sweat poured from his scalp into his eyes, when the entire city steamed like a tropical rain forest, it seemed to him as if Asia’s bulk were sliding slowly downward onto the top of his head, suffocating him in a blanket of endless marshes, mosquitoes and men; the crick in his neck would return, paining him worse than ever.

But this was all before the appearance of Cheong. To the Colonel it was nothing short of miraculous, as if she had come into his room, not from the streets of Singapore, but from the cloud-filled sky. That first evening, when he had turned her over to tiny Pi to be bathed and clothed, and standing by his polished teak desk, taking his first long drink of the day, he felt the tiredness washing away from him like a residue of salt drowned in a hot shower. He thought only that it was good to be home after so long a time at work. Yet perhaps this had been only the most mundane part of it, for when he recalled that time many years later—as he was often wont to do—he was not at all certain of his motivations or his feelings in the matter. He knew only that when she had been brought back to him in his study, when he saw again her face, for the first time since he had left England in the early part of 1940 to come East, he no longer seemed obsessed with Asia. He stood watching her come toward him, feeling like a house bereft of the ghost that had haunted it for so long, now empty, waiting to be filled by new and more substantial tenants. He recognized then his spirit, unchained at last, dancing inside of him and he felt that here before him was his true reason for seeking out the mysteries of Asia.

He studied her face, using the light of the breaking sky, the day’s last light, a spurt before darkness fell completely, with the innate fierceness with which he had applied himself to the destruction of the enemy. This was a most formidable talent in the Colonel, one that was highly respected among the Americans as well as the British military and for which he had been amply rewarded by one battlefield promotion after another.

It was not, he felt, a purely Chinese face. This he derived not from any overt configuration of features but by the overall aspect. There was, for instance, nothing classic about that face. This the Colonel found utterly fascinating, not to mention charming. It was oval, longer than it was full. She had high cheekbones, very long almond-shaped eyes and a nose less flat than one might normally expect. Her lips were wide and full and, with those eyes, were her most expressive feature. Later on, he would be able to tell any nuance of changing mood just by a glance at her lips.

Pi had pulled Cheong’s long hair back from her face and, having first endeavored to do away with the ragged ends, had tied it tightly back with a red satin ribbon so that it hung down across one shoulder in a long ponytail, so thick and gleaming that the Colonel thought of her more at that moment as some mythical creature come to life. She was, he felt, so densely oriental that it was as if she were the living embodiment of that vast flat crowded land.

“How are you feeling?” He said this in Cantonese and, when he got ho response, repeated the question in Mandarin.

“Fine now. Thank you,” she said, bowing.

It was the first time the Colonel had heard her speak and he was somewhat startled, never having heard such a beautiful and musical voice before. She was tall, almost five-nine, with a figure as slender as a willow but as shapely as any man could wish for.

“It is most fortunate that I met you,” she said, her gaze directed at the floor. She tried in vain to pronounce his last name. “I am most ashamed,” she said, giving it up at last. “Pi coached me all through the bath. I am most humbly sorry.”

“Don’t be,” the Colonel said. “Call me Denis.”

This she could manage, pronouncing the
D
sound in a way that had no analogue in the English language. She repeated it twice then said, “I shall not forget it, Denis.”