The White Pearl (15 page)

Sit in your empty kitchen and starve?

She pulled open the top drawer of the chest-of-drawers in her dressing room and lifted out a pile of neatly folded scarves
made from finest Chinese silk.

Or arm yourself and fight to survive?

‘Yes, Mr Fitzpayne,’ she admitted in the privacy of her own room, ‘you are right. Whether it’s a country or an individual,
it doesn’t matter; we fight to exist. For Teddy, I intend to survive.’

She slid her hand to the bottom of the drawer and her fingers brushed against something hard. She curled them around it and
drew out an object that glinted in the shaft of sunlight, sending a rainbow shimmering up the wall. It was a silver cigarette
case. She clicked it open and regarded the cigarettes inside it with distaste. A year ago, when she first hid it under her
scarves, it had contained ten cigarettes and now only three remained. She removed one and snapped the case shut. The small
metallic sound made her heart flip and her hand tremble. Her eye could not resist the pull of the elegant engraving in pride
of place in the centre of the lid – the initials
S.T.,
initials branded on her brain. Shohei Takehashi.

Why could she not hurl it in the bin even now?

‘Caught you.’

Flight Lieutenant John Blake laughed and threw himself down in the rattan chair beside Connie’s. She was seated on the veranda
finishing her cigarette, inhaling the smoke in long cool threads, exhaling it abruptly to
dispel the clouds of insects that hummed around her head. All the time she was watching the quiet figure of Razak as he raked
the azalea bed on the other side of the lawn.

‘I thought you’d given up smoking, Connie.’

‘I did.’ She laughed, the tension trickling from her as she stretched her limbs on the bamboo chaise-longue. Why did Johnnie
always have that effect on her? ‘So don’t tell Nigel.’

Johnnie put a finger to his lips in a pact of silence. He had good fingers, long and capable. Trustworthy hands. She could
imagine them on the control column of an aircraft, holding the lives of others in their grip. He grinned at her, blue eyes
bright with amusement, and drew out a pack of Dunhill cigarettes from his top pocket. He was in uniform again, and it suddenly
struck her as ominous.

‘Not leaving are you, Johnnie?’

‘’Fraid so. My Brewster Buffalo calls.’

She sat up, swinging her feet to the floor. ‘Why? What’s happened?’

‘Oh, you know, a bit of a flap on. Rumours flying around.’

‘What rumours?’

‘Nothing to take a blind bit of notice of, I promise you.’ But he rubbed a knuckle over his chin.

So it was a lie. Under the Flight Lieutenant’s easy charm lay a quiet intensity that he was trying his best to hide, a darkness
in his blue eyes that held an awareness of something much more sombre than the pleasant garden in front of him, the yellow-breasted
sun bird sipping at the russelia flower, and the comfortable haven Connie always offered him. She sensed that his mind and
soul were already up in the sky, strapped into his Brewster Buffalo. But still he had come to Hadley House.

She stood up and pulled him to his feet. ‘Come on, let’s take a stroll.’

‘Where’s Teddy?’

‘He’s at his friend Jack’s birthday party, eating mounds of jelly and showing off his Interceptor, no doubt. It was very generous
of you. He will be so disappointed to have missed your departure.’

‘He’s a fine boy.’

She smiled and slipped an arm through his as they walked along the path, past the tulip trees with their fleshy orange flowers.
Everything was damp and clammy after an earlier downpour, which had encouraged the cicadas to give vent with frenzied energy.
She let her footsteps fall into rhythm with Johnnie’s, his polished shoes crunching the gravel, his
blue-grey trousers hanging crisp and freshly pressed on his long limbs, lean as sticks. He always had the knack of making
her feel he would prefer to be here than anywhere else on earth.

She enjoyed the warmth of his arm against hers as they strolled, her body starved of such contact, but she never betrayed
it by even a fraction of pressure beyond what was correct between friends. ‘Take care. You know I’ll worry. Nigel too, of
course.’

He stopped suddenly, pulling her up short. They had wandered through the archway in the hedge and entered the vegetable garden,
but she had a feeling that he was looking inward rather than outward. When he raised his hands and wiped them over his cropped
blond hair, it was with a lurch of misery that she realised what was happening. He was wiping away the fear that lay on him
like sweat.

‘Oh, Johnnie,’ she murmured, and circled her arms around him.

She could feel him shaking, tiny little vibrations rippling through him as he stood, ashen and silent. For less than a minute
he buried his face in her hair and she could hear him inhale deeply, then he stepped back and turned his head away.

‘My apologies, Connie,’ he muttered. His voice was under control.

‘Will it be bad?’ she asked quietly.

‘No, far from it.’ He straightened up. ‘Can’t think what’s up with me. Damned embarrassing.’ He shook himself and swung back
to her with a smile on his face, which she pretended not to notice wasn’t quite straight. ‘Nothing to get into a tizz over,’
he added. ‘Just that a convoy of Japanese troopships has been spotted out in the Pacific with battleship protection.’

‘Is it coming here?’

‘Highly unlikely. Cloud cover is so extensive and so low that the sighting was only brief. Don’t look alarmed.’ He tucked
an arm around her waist and they continued their progress past the melon bed. ‘They’re probably heading for Saigon on a routine
exercise. General Percival is being cautious, that’s all.’

‘But you have to go out looking for them?’

He nodded. ‘That’s the idea. Like finding a pin in a haystack, but my squadron boys have eyes like hawks.’

‘I wish you luck, Johnnie.’

‘Thanks.’ He paused awkwardly, and she wondered what was coming next. ‘I heard in the club that you had a bit of an accident
yourself the other day.’

She blinked hard. The yellow melons seemed to swell into suns. ‘Yes.’

‘Sorry about that.’

She didn’t want to discuss it. ‘Nigel is over in the smoke-sheds,’ she told him.

‘Right.’

‘Will you say goodbye to him?’

‘Of course.’

He removed his arm from her waist and his shadow separated from hers. ‘I don’t have to ship out till late tonight, so I was
thinking of going to the cinema.’

‘Oh, what a shame, Nigel has a white-tie gathering of the planters’ council to attend this evening.’

He leaned over and inspected a row of onions with exaggerated concentration. ‘I know.’ Without shifting his attention from
the onions, he added casually, ‘It’s Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in
The Philadelphia Story
. Supposed to be a stunner. I wondered whether you would like to come with me.’

She hadn’t expected that, and as she glanced up she found the figure of Razak in the archway, watching them. Slowly Connie
let the breath out of her lungs.

‘Are you sure you don’t mind?’

Nigel asked the question as Connie was in the middle of tying his bow tie. She liked to do this small task for him. It was
one of the rare times he invited her to touch him.

They were standing in his dressing room where the tall mirror reflected an elegant couple, one in his new white dinner jacket,
the other in a cool eau-de-nil linen frock that left her arms bare and made her throat look soft and delicate. If she had
caught sight of the two of them in a mirror, the woman attending to her husband’s tie in such an intimate and familiar manner,
the man looking down at her with concern creasing his brow, she would have thought,
What a happy couple.

‘Are you sure you don’t mind?’ he asked again.

‘Of course not. I’ll enjoy it.’

‘Thanks, old thing. I just can’t get out of this blasted dinner, and I hate to think of Johnnie spending his last night alone.
You’d be doing me a favour.’

‘I told you.’ She manoeuvred the fingers of silk back over on
themselves with precision. ‘I will enjoy the film. It’s ages since I’ve been to the pictures.’

‘So you won’t be bored?’

‘No.’

‘Johnnie is good company,’ Nigel pointed out.

‘Yes, he is.’

‘So have fun.’

She put the finishing touches to the tie, straightened it and patted the front of his dress shirt with the palms of both hands.
‘You are a good-looking man, Nigel Hadley.’

‘Don’t be daft.’ But he was pleased, she could tell.

The wireless was playing, Jack Hilton’s dance band, but there had been no mention of a convoy of troopships. Presumably they
didn’t want to cause panic, but she resented the silence, the bureaucratic and military secrecy that assumed the public were
nitwits who deserved nothing but dance bands. Palur had a harbour, admittedly small but still a harbour, and harbours were
bombed in wartime. Even she could work that one out.

‘Nigel, don’t you think we should build some kind of underground shelter, like they have in London? An Anderson shelter, I
think they call them.’

He had moved over to a small teak cabinet from which he had taken a silver hip flask, but he looked round at her with a frown,
making his long face even longer, the flask poised halfway to his lips. She was sorry that she’d spoiled the moment.

‘Whatever for?’ he asked.

‘In case we need … well … protection.’

He took a quick swig from the flask. Brandy, probably. ‘No,’ he said sternly, ‘don’t talk like that, Constance. It’s defeatist.’

She let it go. Instead, she walked over and kissed his cheek before he could escape. His skin smelled of a musky cologne that
she wanted to linger over but she stepped back, patted his chest once more and smiled.

‘I wish you were coming to see the film with us,’ she said.

‘Don’t worry. You’ll be in good hands with Johnnie.’

Oh, Nigel. Don’t you see? It’s not Johnnie’s hands I’m worried about. It’s my own.

Dead meat.

The words thudded dully inside Madoc’s aching skull. Where the hell had he heard them before? His mind was all over the place,
his thoughts fractured into a thousand parts that wouldn’t join up. He opened one eye
a crack. He was in his own bed. Twilight outside. Morning or night? He had no idea. He could smell the river. He could smell
his own body. He tried to move but everything hurt, every part of him. Some hurt real bad. Bats flitted outside the window,
jerky and bewildering, and his cloudy mind became convinced they were gathering to drink his blood. He tried to open his other
eye but it was swollen shut.

‘Awake at last! About bloody time. I’ve never known anyone so determined to stay asleep.’

Kitty was standing next to his bed, a cup of something in one hand, a wash cloth in the other. He made his one eye focus on
her face. It was plump and lined and angry, but right now it was the most beautiful face in the whole damn world.

‘Kitty, what happened?’

‘How the hell do I know?’

‘I don’t remember coming home.’

‘I daresay.’

Slowly images were trickling back into his mind.

‘Fuck the bastard!’ He licked his teeth and his tongue caught on a broken tooth.

‘Who was it?’ she asked.

‘Bull Chan.’

‘You stupid, imbecilic oaf ! I told you to watch yourself.’ She leaned over him and peered closely into his eye. ‘Is it bad?’

He made the mistake of shaking his head, and strange coloured sparks burst into life inside it, explosions numbing his ears.

‘No. How did I get home?’

‘When you weren’t back here by nightfall, I took the canoe and went looking for you.’

‘You paddled all that way in the dark?’

She shrugged. ‘You were just lazing around on the riverbank. I brought you home.’ She frowned sternly. ‘Next time I promise
I’ll leave you there for the rats to chew on.’

‘There won’t be a next time.’

‘There had better not be.’ She started to wash his face. She wasn’t gentle. ‘When will you learn not to tread on Bull Chan’s
toes?’

Madoc closed his good eye and submitted to her vigorous ministrations. When she’d finished he forced his aching body to sit
up, feeling the jagged ends of his ribs grating on each other.

Kitty shook her head slowly. ‘How would I ever finish building our casino without you?’

Madoc spat out part of a tooth. ‘Is that all I am to you? A fucking bricklayer?’

‘Yes.’

But she wrapped her arms around him, breathing hard against his skin and held him close.

The Purple Pussy’s doors opened onto a backstreet of the town, the kind of street where bets were laid on cock fights and
men with the whites of their eyes smeared yellow by opium led their lives in a fog of lies and fantasies, eyes rolling like
marbles in their head. It was a street of pimps and prostitutes, of short tempers and long hatreds. Fights flared and knives
flashed. Sometimes men cried out in that street, sometimes they died.

Maya hurried on silent feet through the darkness, alert for one of Hakim’s stray wolf cubs. They had a tendency to hang around
outside, wanting to finger the merchandise before it went on stage, but tonight she reached The Purple Pussy’s dressing room
unscathed. She didn’t feel sick any more. Whatever evil eye the white lady had inflicted on her had vanished soon after Maya
had fled the boat. Hah! So much for the lady’s power! Maya was pleased with herself. She had overcome the sickness and only
retched once when she reached home, eager to tell her brother about the floating house that had whispered in her ear with
its rattles and creaks and moans, sending shivers down her spine.

In the cramped and crowded dressing room she dropped her
kebaya
and sarong on the floor and started to oil her limbs so that they would gleam under the stage lights. An extraordinarily
tall Malay boy with eyes outlined in kohl like a woman’s and wearing a dress of seven veils, was biting his long, painted
nails nervously. He was next on stage.