The White Pearl Read online

  Her son shook his head adamantly, the waves of his thick brown hair ruffling in the breeze from the open window. As fast as he had his hair cut it seemed to grow again overnight, framing his small face and sticking out over his ears.

  ‘No,’ he said. But he was no good at lying.

  ‘Jack is your best friend,’ she said gently.

  ‘No, he’s not.’

  ‘Oh, Teddy, what was the fight about this time?’

  His slight seven-year-old body slumped back into his seat and he picked in silence at a scab on his leg. Connie gave him time, as immaculate straight lines of plantation trees slid past the window. It was Field 16, a fine stand of hundreds of young rubber saplings planted in rows thirty feet apart, as far as the eye could see, the trees ten feet from each other. The Rubber Research Institute of Malaya recommended an initial planting of 240 trees to the acre, reducing to 100 trees an acre once they were grown and ready for tapping for their white flow of latex. But Nigel insisted he kept the land so well fed with fertilizer and rock phosphate that he could get away with 120 trees per acre and still produce a top-class yield.

  The sun hung directly overhead, so that shadows formed in dark balls at the base of the trunks making the young trees look squat and vulnerable. School started for Teddy at eight o’clock in the morning and finished at one o’clock, to avoid the worst of the exhausting heat of the afternoon. In the car the air was as oppressive as Connie’s thoughts.

  Listen, white lady. The words hissed through her brain, skidding into the sounds of the car’s engine.

  ‘Nothing lasts here.’

  She hadn’t meant to say it out loud. She felt Teddy’s gaze turn to her, and he tucked his hand between the seat and her damp back, something he did only when he was worried. She could feel his knuckles curled up as warm and needy as a kitten.

  ‘Won’t we last?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course we will, sweetheart. So will your friendship with Jack. I only meant …’ Oh Christ, what did she mean? ‘I only meant that the tyres wear out quickly on these rough roads. Cars break down easily.’

  ‘Is that why you had the crash today? Did the car break?’

  ‘No, darling. It was an accident caused by another nasty car, but don’t worry about it. We’ll get the dents mended and we’ll be fine. Now tell me what happened with Jack.’

  ‘His Brewster Buffalo shot down my Fairey Battle.’

  Connie’s heart sank. Her young son had spent all of last weekend building the aeroplane out of balsa wood with painstaking care, the tip of his tongue clamped between his small white teeth. Now Jack had destroyed it in a rough game. That was typical. Jack’s father built his model aeroplanes for him, which made Jack careless about how he treated them because he could always ask for another. Whereas Teddy insisted on cutting out each wing or tail fin himself, cementing them together with a dogged patience that amazed her. The results were sometimes a little rough and ragged at the edges, but they were all his own work and Connie was immensely proud of his sticky little fingers.

  Since the war in Europe started two years ago in 1939, her son had become obsessed with aeroplanes, his bedroom walls covered in recognition charts. He could name every aircraft in the sky the way other people named birds.

  ‘Don’t worry, Teddy, I’ll help you build a new one.’

  His cheeky smile made her tap his bare knee with mock annoyance. ‘Just a minute, young man, I may not be as nimble as you with balsa,’ she admitted, ‘but I can squeeze out balsa-wood cement with the best of them.’

  He giggled, and she was pleased to hear the carefree sound inside the car. She pulled over to the side of the road and dropped ten cents into her son’s hand. This was one of their rituals. Each day on the journey home from school Teddy bought a slice of fruit from the roadside stall. It stood next to a small shrine that was constructed out of brightly painted stones and adorned with frangipani flowers, a small blue statue of a Hindu goddess and a bowl of coloured rice.

  A rat, fat and bold, sat on its haunches beside the shrine, munching on stolen rice grains. Teddy skipped over the ruts to the fruit stall and pointed at two large slices of watermelon. She watched him chatter away to the man serving on the stall – Teddy’s command of the Malay language was far superior to her own. He seemed to absorb the strange words as readily as her pillow absorbed her strange dreams at night. He had lived here all his short life, and had no fear of this alien and exotic country. He wasn’t afraid of snakes the way she was, a gut-gripping terror that paralysed her, nor did he shiver at the thought of one of the Communist agitators in the workforce slitting Nigel’s throat in bed at night.

  This year, there had been numerous labour strikes in the tin mines up at Gambang and in the gold mines at Raub, and now the unrest was spreading to the rubber plantations up and down the length of the Malay Peninsula. The demand for rubber for tyres and waterproofing had increased in a steady climb ever since the war had started in Europe, and rubber had been designated priority cargo for the war effort. America and Britain were clamouring for it. Inevitably the price had sky-rocketed. From five pence a pound to twelve pence a pound, and now the labour force that helped to produce it was demanding a hefty rise in their meagre wages. She could see their point. It was the Chinese workers who were the troublemakers, stirring up the easygoing Malays, but Nigel assured her it would blow over eventually. It was the Japanese, not the Chinese, they should be worrying about, he said.

  Connie and Teddy sat in the car together eating the red flesh of the melon, spitting the black pips out of the open windows with expert aim, a brief moment of normality in a day that was anything but normal. When she’d finished, she tossed the green rind out onto the roadside and within half a minute it was covered in a shiny black coating of ants, their huge jaws capable of reducing it to nothing in the blink of an eye. This was a country in which the jungle and its voracious insects smothered and devoured everything. Especially tender-skinned white people.

  She wiped her hands on her handkerchief and dabbed at Teddy’s face with it. She smiled at him. ‘Come on, Pilot Officer Hadley, let’s go and build you a new Fairey Battle plane.’

  ‘I think a Blenheim will be better. It carries more bombs.’

  She tweaked his chin towards her and inspected the scratch. She must remember to put antiseptic on it. If not, in a day or two she could be picking tiny white maggots out of it with tweezers.

  ‘Very well, a Blenheim it shall be.’

  She eased the car forward, filling her mind with concerns about nursing her tyres over the ruts, and with images of miniature aeroplane parts clinging precariously together, the smell of cement and the feel of dope flowing smoothly from the brush onto the tiny fuselage. Anything to block out the other thoughts. Anything to keep out the sight of a woman on her back on the pavement, the soles of her feet streaked with red dust.

  ‘Mummy, why are you crying?’

  ‘I’m not crying.’

  ‘Yes you are.’

  ‘No, sweetheart, it’s just that my eyes are watering because I broke my sunglasses.’

  ‘Will Daddy mind that you broke the car?’

  Oh hell, Nigel loved the Chrysler.

  ‘Don’t worry, Teddy, it can be easily mended.’

  Unlike the dusty feet. Or the pair of bloodshot eyes.

  2

  Connie sat in the bungalow in silence. All white men’s houses were called bungalows, however many floors they possessed. Darkness squeezed like oil between the wooden slats of the shutters and flowed into the room, filling the slender gap of time that lay between day and night in the tropics. The air scarcely grew cooler, but it stopped growing hotter, which gave some sort of relief. Outside in the garden and in the lush jungle that skirted it, the night creatures started their endless cries and squeaks, booms and chirrups, so loud that they drilled into her mind and splintered her thoughts.

  ‘Just block the noises out, old thing,’ Nigel always told her cheerfully back in the early days when she used to
complain.

  Block the noises out. Like she could block out breathing. Cicadas hurled their grating sound into the sultry evening air with a frenzied energy, and frogs croaked with relentless monotony. She closed her eyes and thought about the woman who wouldn’t hear the cicadas any more, about her daughter kneeling on the pavement, about her son with the black, angry eyes and the long lashes. Voices in her head echoed the ones in Palur that had assured her so positively, ‘You are not to blame’, and ‘It was the other car’s fault. A reckless driver.’

  How on earth could it not be your fault when you run a woman down on the pavement? Were they blind?

  I curse you.

  The words pinned her to the guilt.

  I … the woman’s hot breath smelled of cardamom.

  Curse … her broad nostrils had flared, scenting death.

  You … the blood in her eyes was drowning the fury in the dark pupils.

  Connie didn’t even know her name. She shivered, her hands shaking on her lap. Was this what Malaya had done to her? Turned her into a person who went around killing others, who took lives as carelessly as the houseboys stamped on cockroaches? Another memory surged forward into her mind, one that she had fought to bury under a daily avalanche of committee meetings and tennis matches, of estate concerns and childish laughter over model plane construction. Anything to drown out the sound of a human head bumping down wooden steps. Thump, thump, thump. A soft, insidious noise that woke her up night after night, thumping through her dreams when her sheets were drenched with sweat and the song of mosquitoes was whining on the other side of the mosquito net.

  ‘What on earth are you doing, sitting here in the dark?’

  The overhead light flashed on, blinding Connie and she blinked. She hadn’t heard Nigel arrive home.

  ‘Didn’t the good-for-nothing houseboy switch the lamps on for you?’ he demanded in a disgruntled tone.

  ‘Yes, he came but I sent him away.’

  ‘Whatever for, old thing?’

  ‘I felt like …’ she paused. Seeing what it was like to exist in the darkness of a grave. She smiled up at her husband. It never failed to amaze her that even after a long, hot day that started in the dark at five-thirty in the morning when he set out for the daily muster of field coolies, Nigel could still look crisp and fresh in his white shirt with rolled-up sleeves and khaki shorts.

  How did he do it? Others wilted and their clothes looked like wet rags hanging on them. She experienced a ripple of pride in him. He wasn’t exactly good-looking, with cropped brown hair and rather long features, but he possessed a certain presence. It was the kind of self-assurance of an Englishman who believed he had a right to own and civilise other countries, without questioning whether they wanted to be civilised.

  ‘I felt like,’ she said, ‘enjoying some peace and quiet.’

  ‘Bad day?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mine too. Absolutely bloody.’ He walked over to the cocktail cabinet, a stylish piece of modern furniture made from sycamore and shipped over from Maple & Co. of London. He opened its curved front to reveal shelves of pale green glass and a row of bottles. ‘Let’s have a drink,’ he suggested. ‘Gin sling?’

  ‘Why not?’

  Why not? Why not drown in gin slings? Why not pour them down her throat until the noises in her head blurred into a dull, unrecognisable murmur that had no meaning? Why not? Well, for one thing she didn’t have much of a taste for alcohol, and for another she had a son to watch over. She had to make certain Malaya didn’t get the chance to choke him the way it was choking her.

  ‘Thank you, Nigel,’ she said as she accepted her glass. ‘So tell me, why was your day so bad?’

  ‘It’s the damned Restriction Committee.’

  ‘Oh? What are they up to now?’

  The Restriction Committee was an international organisation set up to restrict the supply of rubber onto the market to prevent the price dropping through overproduction. The scheme allotted each country – Malaya, Dutch East Indies, Indo-China – a specific tonnage, declaring that they could export that much and no more. Their dictats were a constant thorn in the flesh of plantation owners, who preferred to work in cartels that set their own agreed limits.

  ‘I received a cable today. They are refusing to raise the allocation,’ he grumbled, and sank into a battered old rattan chair that was his favourite.

  ‘But that’s absurd. Don’t they know there’s a war on?’ She meant it as a joke to lighten his mood, but he set his jaw and took it seriously.

  ‘It doesn’t look like it, damn fools. But a young officer from the American attaché’s office flew up from Singapore to see me today, and admitted that America and Britain are stockpiling the stuff like mad in case the supplies get cut off by Jap warships and …’ He stopped. ‘What’s the matter, old thing? You’re shaking. Not going down with fever, are you?’

  ‘No, of course not. It’s just that the word gives me the shivers.’

  ‘Warship? Can’t say I blame you.’

  No, not warship. Jap. She experienced a flash of memory, of long, narrow eyes staring intently into hers, lean male shoulders and an exquisite neatness in the incline of a shapely Japanese head in greeting.

  Nigel lifted his glass to his lips and studied her over its rim. ‘What’s up? You look a bit peaky, old thing.’

  Old thing. Old thing. Old thing.

  She was more than a thing, and not old. Not yet.

  ‘I’m fine.’ She sipped her gin and let it slide down to her stomach before she added, ‘I had an accident in the car today.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Another car scraped my wing and I lost control of the steering.’

  ‘Oh, Christ! Much damage?’

  ‘I killed a woman.’

  Four small words. Like a bomb going off in the room, deafening them both. Nigel put down his glass and rose to his feet, his cheeks flushed, his lips tight. He ran a hand over his short hair and came to stand directly in front of her. He leaned over her. ‘Constance, my dear, are you all right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. Don’t worry, I’ll ring Tommy immediately.’

  Tommy Macintyre was their lawyer, a big man prone to a stammer unless oiled by Scotch whisky. Nigel moved quickly to the telephone, lifted the earpiece and dialled a number. He was staring back over his shoulder at Connie, and the expression on his face startled her. It was one of such sorrow, of loss, as if he could already see her behind bars. She looked away and finished her drink in a long swallow, feeling its heat scorch her stomach. After a moment of brief conversation, Nigel hung up.

  ‘He’s over in KL tonight,’ he said.

  Kuala Lumpur was the capital of Malaya, originally a small and scruffy tin-mining town set up by Chinese miners in the middle of the nineteenth century, but now it had grown into a bustling city since the British set up business there and put in a Colonial Office Resident to work with the local sultans. Nigel started to pace the room in swift, uneasy steps that made her want to soothe his distress.

  ‘I’m sorry, Nigel,’ she said quietly.

  ‘This is a bad show, Constance. Tell me exactly what happened.’

  ‘I told you, a black car scraped my wing and the Chrysler was catapulted up onto the pavement where it hit a woman.’ I hit a woman. That’s what she meant, not it hit a woman. ‘She died.’

  ‘In the street?’

  ‘Yes. Her son and daughter were there.’

  ‘Dear God, that’s even worse.’

  ‘I know. A thousand times worse. Watching their mother – no older than I am – die in front of them like that. It was horrible.’

  ‘What did the police say?’

  ‘They let me come home.’

  ‘I’ll ring Duffy at once. He’ll know what’s going on and when they are going to charge you.’

  She wanted to say it wasn’t my fault, but she couldn’t bring herself to voice the lie. Duffy was Chief Inspector George Duffery, a cricketing companion of her husb
and’s. He dialled again and spoke in low tones with his back to her. She watched his shoulders change, starting up around his ears and slowly descending as the conversation continued until they slumped and she heard a sigh escaping. He replaced the earpiece on the hook, and took a moment to turn to face her. When he did so it was obvious he was annoyed.

  ‘Constance, what a scare you gave me!’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He picked up his glass, strolled over to the open cabinet and topped up his drink, throwing in a handful of ice from the cork ice bucket. ‘You didn’t tell me the damn woman was a native.’

  ‘Does it make any difference?’

  But she knew it did. She could see it in his face.

  ‘The police are bringing no charges,’ he told her. ‘So we can breathe again.’

  ‘The Malay woman can’t.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘She can’t breathe again.’ Connie stood up and put her glass down on the side-table for one of the houseboys to collect later. ‘I think I’ll take a cold shower.’

  ‘Constance.’

  She hesitated, but he said nothing more. His footsteps sounded on the polished floors as he crossed the room till he was standing close to her, inspecting her face with worried eyes. Brown teddy-bear eyes, she always thought. It was one of the things that had attracted her to him when they first met at a party in Kensington in London. Within a month they were engaged. He had proposed to her in the tropical hothouse in Kew Gardens. It was a long time since she had thought of that.

  ‘It’s all right, Nigel.’ She rested a hand lightly on his tanned bare arm and felt the muscles instantly grow tense under her palm. ‘You can forget about it now, and concentrate on your American attaché.’ She made an effort to smile at him one more time, and resisted the urge to throw herself against his crisp white chest, to beg for some kind of comfort. Instead she removed her hand and watched the tiny muscles around his mouth flicker with relief. He never showed it in his eyes, but he always forgot to control his mouth.