The White Pearl (36 page)

‘It will be dark soon.’ What she meant was that it was dark inside her head.

‘Your husband has his torch, and the rest of us have candles.’

‘Candles? This wind will blow them out in seconds.’

He smiled at her, a warm, interested smile. ‘Then your husband will be the only one fortunate enough to possess a light,’
he said.

She felt her cheeks grow warm, and was grateful for the gloomy light. He was studying her, amused.

‘Do you have a cigarette?’ she asked.

He offered her one and cupped his hand around the match for her, his head so close to hers she could smell the brine in his
hair. The wind was whipping it around his face.

‘Is
The White Pearl
all right?’ she asked as she inhaled the smoke and nicotine into her lungs. ‘She’s taking a pounding out there.’

‘She’s in good shape. Strongly constructed.’

They gazed out through the veil of rain across the small bay, where the yacht’s white hull flashed like a dolphin rising from
the water. Together in silence they admired her, thankful for the spit of land that gave her protection from the worst of
the wind.

‘Thank you for bringing her – and us – to safety here,’ Connie said.

He looked at her sharply. Shadows draped themselves over his face, so that she could barely see his expression. He spoke in
a low voice, despite the wind.

‘Don’t think we are safe, Mrs Hadley.’

‘The Japanese will be marooned by the storm, just as we are, surely?’

‘The danger is not just outside.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘That there is danger within.’

For a moment she thought he meant her. That she was the danger. She shook her head mutely.

‘Morgan Madoc,’ he murmured. ‘I advise you not to trust him.’

Her pulse kicked into life again. ‘Why do you say that?’

But before he could reply, a cry came from behind them in the shelter. Harriet had vomited all over her own lap and was mopping
at her mouth with her new lace handkerchief. Connie went to her at once, and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. Tremors
shook Harriet’s frame and she released a visceral moan like a sick animal, her hands clutching her stomach. She stared accusingly
at Kitty, who was bringing a wet cloth to her.

‘What the hell have you done to me?’ Harriet demanded.

Kitty stood flat-footed, cloth in hand. ‘What?’

‘You’ve poisoned me.’

‘Of course she hasn’t.’ Connie moved quickly. She took the cloth and started to clean up the mess. ‘The rest of us aren’t
sick, and we all ate the same food. You must have eaten something else, or you’ve caught a chill.’

The men watched helplessly, as uncomfortable as cats in a dog kennel when it came to sickness.

‘Harriet,’ Connie soothed, pushing back a damp lock of hair from her friend’s forehead, ‘it’s just a stomach upset, maybe
even a delayed kind of seasickness …’ It didn’t sound convincing. There were smears of blood on the lace handkerchief
in Harriet’s hand.

The sound of the wind rose. The shelter shook and the tarpaulin threatened to tear loose. Connie’s ears filled with a roaring,
and too late she realised it wasn’t the wind.

No, no, no, no.

Maya crept from her corner and squatted on her heels beside the dark-haired
mem
. She took the woman’s limp fingers between her own and crooned a lilting Malayan melody under her breath, as she would to
a child.

‘No sick,’ she muttered, ‘no be sick.’

It was the wrong one. The wrong
mem
was sick. They must have swapped plates. There was so much noise in the shelter, the
tuans
shouting and the wind bellowing, that it made Maya’s thoughts cramp into a tight ball.

‘No be sick,’ her lips mouthed again.

The woman bent over and retched miserably. Maya saw the telltale traces of leaves in the trail of curry that spilled onto
the ground, the shiny green shoots she had torn up, so small they could hide themselves inside a curry and no eyes would spot
them. She stared accusingly at
Mem
Hadley – why wasn’t she sick? Why wasn’t she the one vomiting her guts out?

‘
Mem
,’ she muttered to the sick woman, ‘I sorry.’

But the sounds outside and the panic inside snatched her words and threw them away. The woman’s skin had turned the colour
of chicken shit, and her eyes were starting to roll in her head.
Oh no, no, no. It wasn’t meant for you. Why you swap plates with Mem Hadley?

Someone seized her wrist, pulling at her, shouting something urgent in her ear. So much sound in the shelter, it deafened
her. And the dog yapping. Without seeing or hearing, she knew it was her twin tugging at her, but she didn’t meet his eyes.
He would know. He would realise what she had done, that she had slunk into the forest in the rain and found the plant with
the hard shiny leaves that her mother used to use to put an end to sick animals or to old people with milky eyes who were
ready to escape this world. She didn’t look up at him. She didn’t listen to his words. Instead, she bowed her forehead flat
to the ground and begged forgiveness for her mistake.

That was when she felt the sick
mem
give a small jerk, as if she had been kicked. Maya lifted up to look at her face. The woman’s eyes were wide open, tears
on her dark lashes, strings of vomit trailing from her chin and her mouth shaped into a perfect circle. But in the middle
of her forehead lay a tiny scarlet petal. Maya couldn’t understand for a strange, twisted moment where it had come from, and
then she started to scream.

Teddy! Connie’s first thought was for her son.

But she saw him safe on his father’s shoulder, racing out of the shelter as it exploded to shreds around them. Rain flooded
in, while a noise like a giant buzz-saw tore at her eardrums and rattled the ribs of her chest.

‘Harriet,’ she whispered to the woman leaning against her.

Connie still had her arm around her friend’s shoulders, but the dark head lolled in her direction as if trying to listen to
her quiet words beneath all the blast of sound.

‘Harriet,’ Connie said again, ‘we have to go.’

But she knew her friend wasn’t listening. She’d seen the neat bullet hole in the centre of her forehead, and the dark underbelly
of the aero-plane that had strafed their camp on Christmas Day. But her eyes seemed to have disconnected from her brain. So
she continued to sit beside her friend, talking to her, urging her to stand, refusing to believe. Dimly she was aware of the
native girl, a small, silent presence, hunched up on the floor in a tight ball, her hand clutching Harriet’s. Everyone else
had vanished.

‘Come on, Harriet,’ Connie whispered, ‘let’s get out of the rain.’

Arms suddenly wrenched Connie to her feet, so that Harriet tumbled flat on her back on the ground, rain instantly washing
her face clean, flooding her open eyes like tears.

‘Leave her!’ Fitzpayne’s voice yelled in Connie’s ear.

‘No!’

‘It’s too late.’

‘No, she might still be alive.’

He pulled at her arm. ‘Quickly, the plane is coming back.’

The rattle of machine guns spitting bullets was charging down the beach.

‘Run!’ Fitzpayne shouted.

‘No.’

With a curse he bent, threw Harriet Court’s limp figure over his shoulder and yanked Connie’s arm almost out of its socket
as he started to run. They scrambled into the dense tangle of trees where the jungle offered safety, the native girl shrieking
at their heels like a terrified puppy. In the deep gloom of the forest Connie knelt on the sodden earth, rocking Harriet in
her arms, only releasing her when Henry Court pushed her away roughly with the words, ‘Stay away from my wife. You caused
this. We would never have been here in the first place if it weren’t for you.’

Connie bowed her head and remained on her knees at a distance. He had said out loud the words that were already in her head.

Five days.

Five days pinned on this slender spit of land. The daylight hours were spent out of sight under the trees, no one – not even
Pippin – allowed to venture onto the beach. The hours of darkness were passed in a single rickety shelter of branches and
fronds combined with what remnants of the tarpaulins could be salvaged.

A fierce argument took place about whether to bury Harriet now or to wrap her body in a blanket and take it back to Singapore
for her funeral in consecrated ground. In the end, the Malayan climate won. The body had to be buried immediately before the
heat and humidity set to work on it. The ceremony was short and simple, conducted with dignity by Nigel in the pouring rain,
and a wooden cross that had been constructed by Fitzpayne was hammered into the earth to tell the worms where she was. Carved
into the crosspiece of timber were the words
Harriet Arabella Court 1905–1941
.

It started on the evening that Fitzpayne rowed back from
The White Pearl
with Johnnie and Morgan Madoc. Still on board the yacht, Nigel and Razak were leaning against the rail awaiting their turn
to be ferried ashore, small figures in the distance. That’s how it was in Connie’s head now: everything in the distance. All
five men had been working on the yacht since daylight. She stood in the dark line of trees and watched the oars dip in and
out of the waves with an easy rhythm as evening shadows created deep troughs around them. A flight of swallows swept low over
the creek, while the sun painted the sky a triumphant gold that spilled onto the men in the boats.

Connie envied them. But it was better this way. She needed to remain in the forest each day, watching over Henry. Together
they sat next to his wife’s grave in the rain and the wind, while the other men of the group worked on repairing the damage
to the yacht. During a second low pass by the Japanese fighter, its guns had ripped holes in the hull of
The White
Pearl below the waterline. Despite the heavy weather, Fitzpayne had laboured hard to keep her seaworthy, patching up the
damage with fresh timber and the pitch and oakum they carried on board. Razak was kept busy pumping out the water that had
flooded her below deck. It pained Connie to see the yacht so forlorn and listing like an old man, but her grieving was for
Harriet, for her friend who had trusted her enough to join them in a race against an advancing army.

This evening the sun had at last beaten back the clouds, and the temperature took a sharp jump so that the trees were wreathed
in sinuous trails of mist that made the barks and cries that echoed in the forest sound eerie and disembodied. Connie found
herself listening for the rising whoop of Harriet’s laugh among the
che-che-che
calls of the drongo birds and the long, piercing whistles of the mynahs. It was only the sight of Teddy that kept her alert
and watchful.

Ever since Christmas Day, her son had been withdrawn and had focused a hundred per cent of his attention on his jam jars of
spiders and beetles and moths, studying them through the magnifying glass. Like a miniature professor with his brown curls
sticking out at wild angles, bits of leaf and fern caught in his hair, and all the time he jotted down notes in his diary.
But the expression on his face looked baffled, tired of the complication of people, and hungry for the simplicity of the creatures
in his jars.

Connie sat and talked gently with her son, but he wasn’t ready to communicate with anything more than a mute shake of his
head or a nod of his chin. When his father invited him to join himself and Razak on
The White Pearl
with Fitzpayne, he turned it down with an indifferent shrug of his narrow shoulders. That gesture, so adult and so unlike
Teddy, made tears spring to Connie’s eyes. Equally he ignored Kitty Madoc’s efforts to draw him out with snippets of rice
cake and honey. It was the little native girl who seemed the only one able to get through to him. She brought him a snake.
A dead one, but still a snake. Teddy was crouched under a banana palm, watching an army of a million red ants mountaineer
over a branch he had laid across their path, when she came up
to him and dropped the dead reptile at his feet. It was three feet long with red flower markings along its green back. He
handled it delicately and told her it was a paradise tree snake.

‘It’s a flying snake. It flattens its ventrals and glides from tree to tree.’

‘Full of poison?’ the girl asked.

‘No, it’s harmless. It feeds on lizards. It’s beautiful,’ Connie heard him say. ‘But what I’d really like is a king cobra.’

‘King cobra eat you,’ Maya told him.

Neither of them laughed. Solemn young faces. It was as if they already knew perfectly well that life was about creatures devouring
other creatures. About men killing other men. It came as no surprise. And when the rowing boat approached, dipping and bobbing
through the sheet of gold that the setting sun had spread out over the water, Connie felt a change in the group of survivors.
It was then that it started, the sense of time running out. As though a clock were ticking inside her head.

‘Kitty, I’m in love,’ Madoc confessed.

‘I can see that,’ Kitty chuckled as her head swivelled back and forth, inspecting the elegant fittings of the saloon. It was
the first time she had been on board
The White Pearl
.

‘Isn’t she the most desirable creature you’ve ever seen?’

‘Stop drooling. It’s a rich man’s boat, so what else do you expect?’

‘A rich woman’s boat, apparently.’

‘You mean it’s hers?’

‘Yes.’

‘Nice work.’ Kitty pulled a face.

‘That Jap plane did some nasty things to her.’

‘Do you mean to Mrs Hadley, or to the boat?’

They exchanged a look. ‘That’s debatable,’ he muttered. ‘She’s taken the death of Mrs Court hard.’

‘It just goes to show,’ Kitty said as she inspected the tiny galley and patted the gimballed stove with approval, ‘that money
doesn’t buy you happiness. What that woman needs is a damn good …’

‘Ssh, Kitty.’ He put his fingers to her lips and raised his eyes meaningfully to the hatches above. ‘On a boat,’ he said in
an undertone, ‘nothing is secret. The walls are paper thin. Everything can be overheard.’