Читать книгу If the Invader Comes - Derek Beaven - Страница 6

CLARICE RETURNED FROM Singapore to Seremban in December. Both the monsoon and the Robin Townely affair were virtually over, and she intended to stay for Christmas. Now the sun beat down each day and the rain confined itself to half an hour every teatime. In the intense mid-afternoon, she and her father were inspecting the back garden. She wore a loose white linen dress, and her broad-brimmed straw hat was trimmed with a violet ribbon. The straw matched the raffia colour of her heeled sandals. As medicine for her feelings she held a whisky tumbler.

Glass also in hand, her father stared in silence at a large bougainvillaea plant. Then he turned and looked back at the bungalow. Clarice followed his gaze. The house appeared so old-fashioned, such a relic of the last century. The stilts pushed up and the rectangular bonnet of fringey palm thatch hung down. Sandwiched in between was her home, the only one she had. Its blue canvas awnings were pulled along most of the veranda; as far, in fact, as the servants’ cottage, which was tacked on to the back with poles and more thatch. Through the one gap in the blinds was disclosed a shaded region like a winking eye next to the back steps. Clarice could see Ah Sui, her belated amah, moving about inside – a busy shimmer.

‘I’m allowed to make up my mind,’ Dr Pike said at last.

‘Have you mentioned the idea to anyone else?’

‘No.’

She gave an irritated laugh and surveyed him, as though for the first time in his own right. He had put on his old khaki bush hat, the item he tended to brood under whatever the weather. Despite his customary brown boots and gaiters, his great shorts and the loose, pocketed, sweat-stained shirt worn outside his belt, he looked anything but familiar, suddenly ineffectual.

‘And this is all on my behalf?’ she said.

‘Yes.’

‘Why is it? I’m grown up, aren’t I? Do you think I can’t take care of myself in the world?’ She felt cheated. ‘I’ve had to enough times.’

He wouldn’t meet her eye, but swung his attention away now, out beyond the orchids and the young banyan tree which the turbanned gardener was busy pruning. Once again Clarice shared the prospect, past the fat-leafed succulents, the red pepper bushes and frangipanis at the fence, as far as the plantation compound, and right to the tall wild trees. Freighted with greenery, the trees reached up behind the rubber plantation towards the ridge; and would then stretch, she knew, to the next ridge, and the next, and onwards unbroken to the remote hill country. Malaya was a place of endless fruits and hardwoods, with their vines and hangers-on. She was a hanger-on herself, to the strange country that had offered her anonymity, given her a freedom she hadn’t managed to claim for herself in England.

But bears and tigers and pythons dwelt in the forest, and all manner of legendary animals. Just now, near at hand, a troupe of monkeys was feeding, high up, and shooting back glances amid a continual discard of twigs, peel and droppings. The sky was streaked with fishbone cloud, growing tarnished as if baked from above. And where was truly home? Averting her eye from the stunning view, she made herself watch instead how her father shot the remainder of his whisky back into this throat. Eventually he turned to her.

‘All right,’ he conceded. ‘It would be my last chance.’

‘Your last chance at what?’

‘At being a father to you.’

That made her gasp, and she sipped her own Scotch, taking it neat, as he did. Its grainy sting helped with the tears that sprang suddenly to her eyes. ‘Don’t be bloody silly. You’ve always been that.’

‘Technically.’

‘But why?’ She dug at the lawn with the toe of her sandal like a child. ‘And why England, for heaven’s sake?’

‘Where else is there?’

‘Most of the globe, I should say. Shouldn’t you, Daddy? Most of the globe would be a darned sight safer, just at the moment. Hmm?’

When she was a girl, England had just meant boarding-school, and before that a place with a train journey inside it. At one end of that railway line was the country practice in Suffolk with her mother and father. At the other was London and her cousin Phyllis. Then she’d grown up; and there had been Vic. England would force her to open up all that heartache again. In order to protect herself she was desperate to stay, and yet – dare she admit it – she also ached to see him. In her heart she was all but ready to collude with her father’s wishes. The matter was beyond endurance. She half wished Robin Townely would write and take her mind off the subject of Vic Warren; for, since she’d held Phyllis’s letter in her hand, she’d hardly thought of anything else.

‘You’ve nothing to live on and most of the world’s turning nasty,’ Dr Pike said. ‘Haven’t you been reading the papers, Clarice?’

‘Nothing’s happened since Poland!’ Exasperation filled her tone.

‘Oh, nothing!’

She clicked her teeth. ‘You know what I mean.’

Once, after a party at Port Dickson, a convoy of Clarice’s friends had driven with her up into the villages. There she had seen her first shadow play. The performance had been done under the stars by means of a large stretched sheet. But the boozy young crowd she was with hadn’t understood the formalities. The language had been poetic, a far cry from the basic chat the English had to master for their servants.

She’d been mystified by the play, its lengthy preambles, and the hesitancy about committing to the action, but had grasped there was a reason. To the accompaniment of drumbeats and the clash of cymbals, the drama had lasted late into the night, by which time most of her party had fallen asleep. Even then the story had been only half told. It was the ancient epic of the Ramayana: of the lovers, and the forest; of the hermitage, the war, the wickedness of the abductor; and of the great bridge across which the avenger went forth upon the sea. It occurred to her that the new war might have the same self-indulgent pace. The thought chilled her.

She stooped now to poke at a web in the flower-bed. The cords were strung thickly under the great speared arch of a leaf, and the spider came running out into the sun. It stopped. She agitated the threads again. ‘I’m being a butterfly. Look. Come on, then. Can’t get me, can you?’ The spider raised one minutely furred leg, in suspicion. It failed to budge. ‘Can’t be bothered, after all.’ She straightened up. ‘Just like men.’

Her father’s laugh was brief and preoccupied. She plucked a thought. ‘Did you send Phyllis anything? Dear Phyllis and … Victor. And their brat. What was its name, I forget?’

‘Not pregnant, are you?’

‘For heaven’s sake, Daddy.’ He astonished her. ‘Just because I mention … How dare you!’

‘A girl without a mother. Someone has to ask. Once in a while.’ He was embarrassed amidst his red mottle and doctor’s manner.

‘If that’s what you mean by being a better father …’

‘Sorry. I don’t know how a woman would go about it. Doesn’t someone have to? Keep tabs, I mean?’

‘No, they damn well don’t. And I’m not – as far as I know.’

He coughed and adjusted his hat. ‘Jack. I sent him a suit of clothes.’

‘All right, then.’ She found herself putting her arms around her father’s neck, hugging him more fiercely than she could understand. Then she broke away. ‘All right, Daddy. It won’t be “over by Christmas”, as all the barroom experts have been predicting. It has that in common with last time. And all right, there’s an expeditionary force in France. But nothing’s going on. That’s why they call it “phoney”, Daddy. It isn’t happening.’

‘It’s happening to the Poles.’ He shamed her. ‘And something’s happening to the Finns, the Jews, the poor benighted Chinese.’

‘But it’s not happening to me. Is it? It isn’t happening to me.’

‘For God’s sake, Clarice!’

She bit her lip. ‘It’s just I don’t understand you. There’s always something going on in the world. Always something awful being done to someone. It’s not like you to come over like this. You’re not yourself. You always said, didn’t you, look after the next man and the world will get better. I thought that’s what you did, as a doctor. That’s how I imagined you, Daddy. I admired you. I thought we were safe here. I thought you were happy. Aren’t you?’

‘Happy enough.’ He looked sharply at her.

‘Well then. Why ruin it all because of some potty idea – about me? What’s making you like this?’ She felt Singapore slipping away, Malaya itself receding. Terrified – and piercingly glad – she seized on the next unkind remark that came to mind. ‘Not the Scotch, is it? You’re not going the way of all white men?’

Yet he seemed in such a pinch, and she was sorry. She caught the implication of something serious going on; sensed almost his impotence. Was he in love, she wondered? Had some affair at the tennis club gone awry?

‘What troubles me is that I’m probably too late. I’ve failed you.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. This is where we live. You’re needed, Daddy. You can’t leave.’ She checked her emotions again, but knew he’d seen her.

‘You sound just as though you were six.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said.

This time he put his arm around her. ‘Look, darling. Take it on trust, will you? There’s nothing for it. I’ve got to take the risk now. If it all goes well and everything calms down … You know? If there’s a stand-off of some kind … Well, I can come back easily enough, can’t I?’

‘Can you? Can we?’

‘Just another leave, eh?’

‘If you say so.’ She stood quite still. ‘If you say so, Daddy.’

‘Tuan!’ Musa called to them from the veranda. Her father went to enquire. Then he came back, black bag in hand. A company employee had sent about a sick child.

‘Sorry,’ he said. She watched him stride up the garden and thought how he was growing old. ‘Probably shan’t be long,’ he called over his shoulder. Then he disappeared round the side of the bungalow to get the car started.

BUT HE WAS a long time. And, yes, I do hold matters too much in abeyance, lingering here in Malaya, in paradise, because of the payment that was demanded later that evening. It was a sacrifice in return for a fair wind, so to speak, and it was Selama who chose to make it. We try to avoid coming to the pain of such things; for if Vic and Phyllis were bitterly joined in England, Dr Pike was anchored to his spot by a supreme tenderness.

It had rained and was dark before he returned, and he brought with him the Malayan nurse, Selama Yakub, whom Clarice had met several times before. She watched from the veranda as her father helped the woman out of the car and past the puddles; then she went down in the glow of the lantern to greet them.

‘My assistant, Mrs Yakub,’ her father said. ‘Working on a case at the hospital. Of course, you know each other, don’t you.’

The nurse wore a neat, white uniform, but had exchanged her headgear for a scarf. She clutched it around her face as she entered, then threw it back. ‘How are you, Miss Clarice? So nice to see you again.’

‘Oh fine, thanks. Nice to see you.’

‘So kind of Dr Pike to invite me – after so long.’ Mrs Yakub darted a piercing glance at him, then looked straight at Clarice. She seemed about to say more, but turned away instead.

Their meal of lamb curry was conventional, and the conversation strained. Selama Yakub sent the kuki away. She served as though she were the mistress of the house, but hardly touched her food. Clarice felt uncomfortable. The inkling of disturbance she’d felt earlier continued in the air. She hadn’t known such an atmosphere for years – in fact since her mother was alive. Selama’s lack of appetite did not help.

Clarice’s mother had used to excuse herself from table, saying she felt a little ill; and when she thought no one could see her out beyond the veranda, Mattie had a method of making herself sick, leaving most of her meal in the back of the flower-bed – where by morning, the younger Clarice had noted with interest, all evidence of distress had been eaten by less troubled creatures.

After dinner they sat, she and her father, in the study, playing old-fashioned dance tunes on his wind up gramophone. They were alone. Selama Yakub had claimed she wanted to dispense some of the doctor’s prescriptions; but when Clarice went to use her bathroom she bumped into the nurse bringing in a tray of cups from the veranda. And someone had obviously been tidying the sitting-room.

On her return Clarice said nothing about it. With the Aladdin lamps aglow in the study, the various insects constantly getting in to crash at the flame, the air fugged and prickly with cigar smoke, she thought neither of Selama nor her mother, but of Phyllis, because of the dance tunes. She saw more vividly that leggy girl in plimsolls who, out of her element on visits to the house at the end of the railway line, would cling to the gramophone and put on certain records again and again.

She had always hated her cousin. Older than she, Phyllis claimed to know everything, to have done everything. When they’d played together Phyllis had been unremittingly spiteful. Yet Phyllis had loved the cheap songs – because a gramophone, indeed music of any kind, represented more luxury than she could imagine.

Clarice broached the subject of her father’s fever again. Like his drinking, it was a touchy one. ‘Has it really been troubling you?’

‘Turning jaundiced, am I?’

‘Why are you so difficult?’

‘Clearly not wasting away.’ He slapped his stomach. ‘As you can see.’

‘All right, Daddy. Don’t take it out on me. You still enjoy work, don’t you?’ Ambrose and his Orchestra finished their quickstep. She got up, rewound the clockwork motor, changed the needle and set it back on the other side of the disk. A crackly tango emerged. Her father refreshed their glasses.

‘I do. Except that lately …’

‘You are needed, Daddy.’ Something was definitely up. She wanted to pre-empt it. ‘You’re needed … to make people better.’

‘How simple you make it sound.’

‘I’m not naïve. I’m not.’ Her fingers tapped the armrest of her chair.

He put out an awkward hand to touch them, smoothed her wrist and then drew back. ‘Self-sacrifice, Clary. Yours and mine. We think if we sacrifice ourselves we can have what we want. Eh? Or have I unwittingly sacrificed my own daughter?’

‘What?’ She threw back her slug of whisky.

There was a knock at the door. It was Mrs Yakub. ‘No need to hurry, Dr Pike. Paperwork to do,’ she added with a tense smile at Clarice as if to account for her continued presence. ‘Is it all right if I sit at the dining-room table? You don’t mind? None of those newspaper cuttings now, I see. In your honour, no doubt, Miss Clarice. He’s promised to run me to my home. My son’s house. So kind, Dr Pike. You don’t mind, do you? Perhaps I’d better look after this, however.’ She gave another knowing grimace at Clarice and darted in to pick up the whisky bottle from beside her father’s chair. Then she left, almost apologetically.

‘You are overdoing the booze.’

He grunted. ‘No more than usual. Not to excess, if that’s what you mean.’

‘If that’s the truth then why was she so keen to take it away? And what newspaper cuttings? Did she mean all that mess I saw before?’

‘Perhaps the bloody woman likes to boss people about. Perhaps she’s got it in for me. I don’t know. Bloody natives. Nothing feels right. Everything’s out, askew.’ His hand lifted suddenly, and sliced at the air, startling her. ‘This war … Everything that’s happening now seems to me so cleverly … planned, Clary. Down to the details. I don’t know what that means but it troubles me, a scientific man. It scares me rigid. There’s nothing to counter it with, no case notes, no precedent, nothing.’ The gramophone needle hissed round and round in the groove at the record’s end.

‘I simply don’t follow, Daddy. Do you go to the club? Do you speak to people? That woman, Mrs Yakub …’ She twitched her head in the direction of the dining-room. ‘Your assistant. Do you talk to her?’ Under her breath, she added, ‘What’s she doing here? What was she up to in the sitting-room? She’s been putting things away in the sideboards.’

He grunted. ‘Oh, Selama likes to keep me in order. Bored, I expect. Waiting for me to drive her home. Salt of the earth, though. Damned good nurse.’

‘Selama? Is she your …? Daddy?’ Clarice remembered another scene, of her parents by her piano. The Broadwood he’d shipped over for her had lasted only two months. From the moment of arrival its sound had become more oriental by the hour. Rust and mould had attacked it with dullness, and then excrescence. The hammers warped and the felts rotted. Whole octaves of its keyboard refused to play at all, while small lizards made homes in the soundbox. She recalled there’d been an argument.

‘Good Lord, no. I’m past all that. Past all that sort of nonsense. Just good friends, I can assure you.’

‘Does she often come here, then? And keep an eye on your drinking? And take a proprietary interest in your housekeeping? Do you talk to her?’

‘Not much. My grasp of Malay isn’t up to the subtleties of things I can’t even put into English. And her grasp of English …’

‘So there is something the matter!’

‘Nothing special, I assure you. Nothing special.’ But the sigh appeared only partially to discharge his feeling. She watched his lip quiver. She watched, too, as he got up and went to his desk. He took up a piece of paper and handed it to her. It was a photograph, an Associated Press cutting of the Emperor of Japan. It showed a young gentleman in a perfect Western suit and high collar posed next to Lloyd George outside a country house. And I cannot but allow my great-uncle to make his fatal speech, though the minutes were slipping away.

‘Britain and Japan, Clarice. People say they’re wily Orientals, inscrutable yeller fellers. People at the club explain the war in China as the Asiatic mind. They say we’re safe, it’ll never touch us. As though we’re almost a different … species. As though they hardly see us, or see us as gods. Think about this, child.’ He crossed the floor and turned abruptly to face her as he reached the jardinière. The potted palm on its mahogany stand fountained up next to him, and loomed over his balding head. He looked like some famous old anatomist discussing the organs.

‘Two insulated, legendary pasts,’ he was saying. ‘Two similar knightly traditions; of kingship, honour and reticence, of the obsession with class distinctions and “the decent thing”. Think, child. Isn’t Japan an extraordinary mirror, as though the map of the world could be folded on to itself? The Japanese aren’t like the British; no. But very like them. That small off-continental cluster’s need for industrial strength … And sea power – Nelson is as sacred in Yokohama as he is in Portsmouth. Did you know that? Think. Each of us has the same absolute conviction of racial superiority. What then? Is there truly a new order in the universe? Is there something bloodstained and Darwinian? Or have we just been mistaken about the old?’

Clarice stared at him. Now he was wry, disturbing; his delivery was enigmatic. She couldn’t follow him.

He strode back to the far side of his desk, and swung round again to rest his hand on the narrow top where a lamp stood, smoking slightly from its glass. ‘Japan wants the British out of the East. She hates us. The only reason British nationals were relatively safe in Shanghai was through the difficulty of murdering them. If Japan is to strike for dominance she’ll need oil, rubber and tin.’ He gestured at the walls of the bungalow. ‘If they come …’

She wondered if he wanted Mrs Yakub to hear. Was he trying to tell her something? ‘Robin says it’ll never happen.’ She bit her lip. ‘As for the new order. There’s something in it, isn’t there? I thought it had been proved scientifically. Hasn’t it?’

‘People become ill,’ he said, ‘when they’re told things that aren’t true. The power of words, of suggestion – it’s up to us to use it … lovingly. The more I practise, the more I believe that medicine is a kind of charm. Influenza! My mother – your granny – died of it. They all did. It means influence – an evil spell. Clinically, they died of magic. How primitive. It puts the doctor on the side of the angels, Clary.’ He smiled, and she was relieved. ‘Take my fever? Malaria means wicked air, you know. I confess to you I have such a feeling in my bones. These words, these names. You need to pay close attention. You should question what your Robin says.’

‘He’s not my Robin any more,’ she blurted.

‘Then we’re in the same boat, darling.’

‘I see,’ she said, although she didn’t.

‘Except I have made up my mind.’ Then he took a brown envelope from under the stand of a heavy brass microscope. ‘I bought these. They came this morning in the post. We’ve simply got to get away.’

From the brown envelope he took out a slip of paper and showed it to her. It confirmed the booking of two cabins on the Dutch liner Piet Hein from Penang to Marseilles. The tropical night rasp seemed to force a way in through the blinds.

‘You’ve left me no choice,’ Clarice said. ‘No choice at all.’ Her voice was icy, but the secret yearning sprang up in triumph. ‘What time do you have to drive Mrs Yakub home?’

‘Oh, in a little while. Finish your drink. Put another record on, why don’t you.’

She did as she was told.

But when they found Mrs Yakub in the dining-room she was already dead. She was slumped at the table, her head right against the wood. An arm dangled uselessly beside her chair, and the weight seemed to drag at her neck, stretching the skin and blurring the features lopsidedly into a gap-toothed mask. The head, at its awkward angle, had its hair partially wrapped over again, where the scarf had fallen forward. Scattered about it, there were pages torn from an opened account book. In the centre of them all, close to a fold in the fabric, lay the empty whisky bottle and the remains of the practice’s digitalin supply. The keys to the drug cabinet lay in the hand that reached across the table – as if to say, by way of note, Here you are, Tuan Doktor. I’ve put everything in order.

DECEMBER. IN BARKING, in the flat, their breath was like smoke. His father sniffed at the piece of haddock on the larder shelf. Then he lit a match and touched it to the top of the old gas cooker. There was a small dull sound under the brown saucepan; but Jack was alert to his mother. He ran to watch her singing in the bedroom as she changed her clothes. She’d seen three ships come sailing in. On Christmas Day, on Christmas Day.

Then she whispered something, and the words confused him. One light bulb hung from the ceiling, and the yellow altered her skin. The bulb filled the wall with her outline.

She put on her girdle, and then a slip; only then did she shoo him away for looking. He listened outside her door. Her stockings brushed, one against the other, her dress faintly slithered. The knock on the boards was her heels as she turned herself about in front of the mirror, and when the handle rattled he stepped back against the banisters. She came out tense; he could feel the fierceness in her body. She spoke to his father in the kitchen, demanding his attention, until there was another flare-up and suddenly she was leaving again.

Down in the shop the dusty display of weighing scales was lit only from the stairs. The faces of the machines were like shadowy fish eyes. In the dark his mother kept her hand on the catch and the door was half open. Jack was cold for a long time even though he was four, now. When they all came back up, the kitchen was full of steam and the potatoes had boiled dry. His father laughed as he always did, and made a joke; but at last there was the sound of a motor bike outside in the street, and Jack remembered the words she’d used: Tony Rice was taking his father up Waltham to do the job.

Tony wore a belted mac with the collar raised. He carried his goggles in his hand as he came up the stairs. Behind him there was another man, fat and red-faced, who was unslinging the large satchel he had over his shoulder. Jack knew his name; it was Arthur Figgis.

‘Don’t mind if I bring Figgsy, do you?’

Arthur Figgis winked. Jack hated him. He tried to hide. His mother held him.

‘All right, Tony.’

‘Like a bad penny.’ Tony laughed. ‘All right, sonny? You’re up late. What’s the score? Couldn’t wait?’ He laughed at his rhyme. His smooth cheek hurt Jack in a way his father’s rough one didn’t. ‘You coming with us, Jacky boy? Eh? Coming to screw a bit of swag with your old man and his old mate?’

‘Tony. Keep it shut in front of the boy.’

‘What’s the matter, Phylly?’

But his father spoke. ‘Tony! I wasn’t expecting … It’s been so long. I thought …’

‘Thought I’d forgotten, did you, Rabbit?’

‘No, I … Well, yes, as a matter of fact. It can wait, can’t it? I’d no idea. Tonight of all nights. Of all the bad times.’

‘No time like the present. Eh, Figgsy?’

His father said, ‘Tony, I …’

‘Yes?’

Arthur Figgis said, ‘Deary me.’ He took his hand out of his coat. It had three heavy rings on it. Jack saw his father’s face was pale. His eyes had opened wide. He’d become smaller. Tony Rice always made his father look as though he were someone else, as though Jack too should call him Vic, or Warren, or Rabbit. Tony Rice had a glitter about him, like a decoration, with his wit and sharp voice.

‘Figgsy’s walking home, Vic. You’re coming with me.’

Jack’s father was a grown man wearing his apron at the stove and holding a fish-slice. His wife’s face had the faintest of smiles.

‘Are you coming, or what? Eh, Rabbit. I’m talking to you.’

‘Yes, Tony. I’m coming.’

‘Attaboy.’

Jack saw Vic Warren put a hand in his trouser pocket and give some coins to his mother. He saw him get his raincoat from the stand and go meekly out of the house behind the other two men. When Jack ran into the front room, past the decorated tree, his shoes clumped upon the floorboards. He watched the men from the window. Vic Warren on the back of the bike was hugging Tony Rice. It was the same person doubled. The motor bike roared, and the streak appeared from the headlight, a white finger pointing the way between the lightless gas lamps on either side of Ripple Road. Vic Warren had the large bag strung over his shoulder. Gone to fetch a rabbit skin. To wrap the baby bunting in.

The bike swung and roared until he lost all sense of where they were, or how long they’d been going. In every corner the back wheel threatened to go away from under him, and all Vic could think of was that his fingers would be frostbitten and useless when he hit the ground. Then, though the road was unlit, he recognised the fringes of Epping Forest. Old crookbeams rose up on either side of them. Their bare branch tops hooked and clawed at the streaked cloud. He clung to Tony Rice’s greatcoated body, sheltered his eyes from the iced and blinding wind behind the nape of Tony Rice’s neck. The band of the goggles made a blank strip in Tony Rice’s neat, clipped hair. The bike roared on.

They cornered sharply, leaning over together, and there were houses again, sedate black shapes, in the rushing air. Tony pointed a gauntletted hand at one of them, in a spacious row set back. It was large, detached; the bike’s exhaust note rattled at its moon-glazed windows. They passed some villas, timbered and countrified. Then round in a side road, they came to a halt. Tony killed the engine. They turned the bike and left it ready, kick-start cocked.

Vic’s guts churned. The side road ended in deeper darkness topped over by the shapes of trees. Tony led him into a path through the murk. Rime had formed on the iron kissing gate; it glistened. They scouted along, the two of them half crouched, feeling the leaf mould and fallen twigs through the soles of their shoes, picking their way by the flash of a torch beam. A branch creaked overhead in the trifling wind. Tony sniggered.

The way was overgrown. So long since the Coal Hole, one part of Vic had counted on Tony forgetting the deal. But another had prepared for this moment all along, dreading it, knowing with certainty that it would come to pass. It had lain between him and his wife. She’d sung at the club while he’d remained uninvited. Cash had appeared; he had no work. Though the cabin was finished he had little energy, for the child would wake in the night, twice, three times, and he would get up to calm him, or sit up with him. He and Phyllis camped out in the wastes of marriage – when she was at home. Nothing else would shift. There was only the continued ritual of her threats.

In the freezing glitter the forest hinted at its past. Twisted, silhouetted limbs took on a desperate, sardonic nature. The two men came to a fence. Five feet high, the larch strake tops wobbled underfoot. Vic landed in a vegetable patch. Among sturdy brassica stalks he stood ashamed. The tilth crunched minutely as his shoes broke the forming crust, and there rose a smell of cabbage rot. He caught the sweaty whiff of his own coat, heard his own heart. His stomach cramped him. He looked ahead and saw the black bulk of Tony ten paces further on, his breath steaming.

Vic was amazed at himself. His life was a fairy-tale. Only the bombs, when they came, would make sense of it. Who’d stolen him and brought him here – the apprentice boy, hoicked out of his grammar-school place at fourteen because of his dad’s lungs? That boy had once ridden off each morning wearing his too-manly flat cap, his jacket, waistcoat and clipped-up long trousers – as his dad had gone before him along the marsh track. Who’d picked him out – pedalling over the Roding at the Abbey Works, and then down the River Lane to the wharf to earn the family living?

As a young man he’d made cross-London voyages night after night on buses and tubes in hope of some engineering degree. He’d attended cheap concert halls, libraries, public lectures. Who had crippled his almost superhuman effort to lift himself out of the dockside backstreets?

His marriage had put a stop to it. Between lust and marriage there’d been Clarice. But he’d done the decent thing. And then Jack had been born. So why couldn’t Vic Warren be left alone to make his way, bring up his family? He reminded himself that it was because of the child he was here. It was Jack who was at stake. Phyllis couldn’t help herself. Nor was it the threats of violence from Tony, or Figgsy. Not really. It was what would happen to Jack, his son, if he didn’t go along with her.

My father wasn’t deluded. Phyllis had grown up the plaything of criminals. Now, unless Vic acted, the same fate would befall Jack. It was almost inevitable. The only chance he had of bringing Jack and even his wife out of it was to take all the guilt of the situation upon himself. The predicament was real; the trap – like all such traps – was cunning.

Therefore Tony led the way. The moon’s edge slipped into a cloud, and then out again. Before them roofs, copings and chimney stacks showed up sharp against the streaked, star-pocked sky. A path cut through the garden; it led under a trellis arch and then across the lawn. There was a shed and an outbuilding. Listening for the first shake of a chain, listening for the interrupted snort of canine breathing, they stood completely still, waiting a full minute. A snuffling sound from next door made them both start.

‘Nothing. Couple of hedgehogs at it, most likely.’ Tony shook his head and laughed under his breath. ‘Spiky fuckers. Supposed to be asleep, aren’t they?’

A cat screamed in the next garden, electrically loud. Vic jumped again. Again Tony shook his head. ‘Not scared, are you? Don’t you worry about a thing, mate. You’ve got your Uncle Tone to look after you.’ They carried on. The french windows were right in front of them ‘All right. Give me the doings.’

Vic had the brown paper and glue; he fished for them in the bag he’d taken over from Figgsy. The moonlight caught the fine teeth in Tony’s elegant smile. He was grinning, holding the glass cutter. ‘Nice, eh?’ He indicated the house. ‘Hope they’ve all hung up their stockings.’

There came the gritty score of the cutting wheel on the pane. Vic looked up at the dark building and nodded. He stood back a step, even as Tony was easing the glass. He held the two torches, ready. It was only a second or two’s work to get the door open.

STRAIGHT AWAY, TO the right of him, Vic’s torch beam picked out the smoked-gold frame of a painting that hung from the picture rail. Then the light sweep opened up the interior. There were several more pictures along the wall – large canvases, and some smaller. The place was lined with a distinction quite unexpected. Between and around the pictures the flickering, searchlit wallpaper showed up a drab floral blue; but a great polished table was dressed with silver furnishings. It had carved upright chairs tucked beneath, and it filled much of the centre space, though there were smaller tables and a sideboard in the distance. All the surfaces were cluttered with objects, many of them glittering, cut glass, silver. There were no Christmas decorations.

Embers glowed in the grate. The torch showed the chimney breast with a poor brick fireplace, yet over the mantelshelf an astonishing high gilt mirror was mounted. Vic looked up from the eerie reflection. The ceiling had plain mouldings, but from the central rose hung a vast glass chandelier. The signs of wealth reminded him of the time when a kindly foreign professor had invited the external students to Prince’s Gate for drinks. A tang of cigar smoke drifted in the air.

Chest high under the pictures ran shelves of books, so many in the torch’s beam. He moved closer. The spines showed old-fashioned letter shapes which he couldn’t read. Tony, gone ahead once more, was already about his own concerns.

‘Come on then, brains. Finger out. No use standing here gawping. See that clock. And this bloody sideboard.’

Vic tiptoed to the far end of the room, and made himself lift the old gilded clock from its shelf. But the light from his torch was fading – the batteries must have been dud. With one hand he unhooked the long pendulum and tried to wriggle it free. The lever flicked back and forth like a live thing. He silenced it. The torch went out. He shook it back to life. A wonderful engraved bowl lay on its own tray on the sideboard. On either side of it, among the rest of the silver, stood two fine twisted candlesticks. They felt weighted by more than metal, clanking wretchedly against the clock. He imagined Tony’s laugh. Ten quid, maybe. Even twenty, the lot. Something told him what he knew already – that, financially, Tony had no need of this job, or his help. A sound of ripping filled the dark beside him.

The sideboard drawers hung open, revealing cutlery in disorder. Now Tony’s shape, the torch gripped under his chin, stood at a small bureau in the corner. ‘Get me your light on this lot,’ he whispered.

Vic shone his weakening beam on to a riffle of letters and bills. There were storage envelopes too, and a wadge of personal papers, with a passport, nipped up in a bulldog clip. Tony shook out the envelopes and snatched at the papers. ‘Not this, you bastard. Where’s your bloody ill-gotten? Come on.’ He flung the documents on to the floor and snickered. ‘Who knows, eh?’

Vic felt a movement behind him, and smelt a trace of hair oil. His torch beam suddenly caught Tony, slipping his fingers around the edge of a long drape. The door behind it gave a moaning swish. ‘Tony!’ But Tony had disappeared from view, and Vic stood rooted to the soft rug by the sideboard.

Character, Perce had so often said, was about not cracking up. Vic’s father had seen men crack up: men who couldn’t move – either towards the enemy, or back. Those buggers, Perce had said, were sitting ducks. A picture by the tapestried door hanging was caught in the beam. From it a man of property in sober seventeenth-century dress stared dimly back at Vic. There was reproach in the painted eye. Beside the figure were brown water scenes with boats and houses.

He heard noises in the hall beyond, as if Tony were trying to prise something away. ‘Tony!’ He turned and, in the dark, inadvertently swung his own bag against the back of one of the dining chairs. The rattle was deafening. Now his torch came to rest on the large canvas above the sideboard he’d just looted. Bold smears of red might be lips, or nipples; and there were eyes, gilded, female eyes, pale, laquered skin.

It was slashed, and the hardened paint near the bottom had come off in chunks, revealing the canvas. Below the cut Vic caught a signature in the bottom corner which he couldn’t read. It was as though he’d brushed up against Clarice’s naked body, there in the room. He stretched to feel for the table and began backing towards the french window.

‘Tony!’ His nerve failed. ‘Tony. I’m going back to the bike.’

‘That’s what you want, isn’t it, Vic.’ Like a tinkling whisper, out of nowhere.

He plunged after Tony into the hall where the wrenching sound had come from. A floorboard creaked above him. Across a vast chequerwork of tiles, he could just make out a front door and a large newel post at the foot of the staircase.

His torch went out and he groped for the banisters. And then holding fast on to them, he stepped sideways, several paces, still feeling for the woodwork. Above, in the stairwell, there was the faintest of gleams, the merest sense of outlines, no more.

Then a thump, and a woman’s scream and footfalls overhead. Vic panicked, his arms outstretched. He heard a man’s gruff voice upstairs and the sound of a door handle being turned. Something on the landing went over with a crash and there were footsteps on the stairs. Tony rushed past him in the hall and Vic turned back to follow. In the dining-room he clattered into the heavy chairs, and fell against a small table, dashing the glassware.

He was at the french windows. As he burst his wrist through a pane, a light switched on. He heard a run behind him, felt a blow to the back of his head and he swivelled, enraged, hitting out at the pyjamaed figure, raining and pummelling blows with his strong fists against the righteous protective arms, the plump sides, the grunting, wet, tobacco-smelling face, feeling the glass of spectacles against his bare knuckles, and its give.

He was escaping down the garden, his ludicrous sack bouncing and jingling on his back. A low wall tripped him. He crashed through stalks, was whipped by branches. He scrambled at the fence. Next he was paralysed and the forest was a sightless chaos. His chest was scraped and his foot hurt. A motor bike in the distance kicked into life: once, twice and then the roar. He inched his way towards the trace of its sound, shuffling with his feet for the path, feeling for tree trunks with his hands, but there was only the unexpected ditch, the unremembered scrub, the wicked bramble thorns. The back of his head ached with a dull, throbbing pain and he put his knuckles in his mouth, tasting blood.

Someone was shouting. He attempted to retrace his steps. But he could find no fence, no house. The ground was dropping away and frosted spines rose up and stung his hands. He straggled back again. Then he plunged in a different direction, and again.

He was relieved when they arrested him. His nails were torn and his shins were barked, but the blood on his hands showed up quite dry in the flash beams, only ten yards or so from the back of the burgled house.

Jack wasn’t dreaming when he heard the motor bike. He was in his bed, listening, waiting. He recognised the sound of it and knew how it stood revving in the street at the front of the shop. Then it stopped. He got out of bed and went into the front room. His mother and someone else were coming up the stairs. He heard their voices.

‘Where is he, then?’

‘How should I know?’

Jack retreated to his bedroom and stood just beside his door.

‘For heaven’s sake, Tony, he is my husband!’

‘What?’

‘What’s happened? Where is he?’

‘I’m not his fucking keeper. All right. Maybe he slipped up. Maybe there was just a weensy bit of a fucking hitch.’

‘A hitch?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What do you mean? I want to know. Where’s Vic? Tell me!’

‘Shut up, woman! Leave me alone, you stupid bitch. I don’t know. Maybe he’ll get back later. Maybe he won’t. Knowing him he’ll run smack in the wrong direction. And if the shite get him he’d better not open his bloody trapdoor, that’s all.’

‘Tony! What do you mean? What do you mean, Tony?’ She was almost screaming.

‘Some old Jew got fucking damaged. Rabbit was careless, that’s all. All right? What’s it to you, anyway?’

‘Oh, Tony. What am I going to do?’

‘You’re going to keep quiet. That’s what you’re going to do, Phyllis. You’re going to keep quiet for Tony, aren’t you, dearest? Aren’t you? Rabbit’s going to keep quiet. And you’re going to keep quiet. Aren’t you, darling Phyllis? Poor old Bun, eh? Poor old Bunny Rabbit. Maybe he’ll show up after all. And maybe not. Eh, Phyllis? Come here, then, you bloody halfwitted bitch.’

‘Don’t call me that.’

‘I’ll call you what I like.’ Then Tony’s voice changed. ‘Come on, Phylly. You know I don’t mean it. Come on, eh? There’s my girl. That’s what you like, isn’t it? That’s what you want. Eh, baby? Just like it used to be. Eh?’

Jack left the door with its rim of light. He sneaked back to his bed, touched the bristly wool of his stocking, and pulled the covers over him because he was cold, and because of the noises. He sang her song in his head to shut them out. That there was a man and his lady, on Christmas Day. It was on Christmas Day. His father would take him down to Creekmouth. Swinging their great brown sails, the three ships would come in on the tide. On one of them, the wounded lady would be standing, her arms stretched out for him.

THEIR BOAT HEADED from Penang out of the Straits of Malacca on the voyage she’d made too often before. The gesture of Selama’s suicide, the pure speechless act, had drawn out from her father the story of his private life, of the dilemma of duty that had led to his buying the tickets home, and of the consequent betrayal of his lover. Clarice felt angry and let down by what had been going on behind her back; and which had come to so violent a termination.

Her own affair had drifted to its inevitable end. Robin had received his posting and with it a promotion to captain. He’d gone back to his wife, leaving Clarice only his Christmas gift of some scented notepaper. Now she saw Robin Townely just for what he was: a fairly ordinary and not particularly attractive army officer with a roving eye and stronger arms than hers. She wanted to punish both the men in her life.

But there was that triumph, too, inside her. How her heart raced every time she thought of Vic. In England her feelings would be heightened only to be mocked by the fact of his marriage. It would be a torment. Yet part of her longed to arrive. Another regretted that she would put herself through it all again.

Upon the high seas, the contradictions in her emotions made her listless. She suffered from want of spirits, putting on a brave face. She also drank and played poker for pennies with Ted Crow and Alf McCoy, two superannuated planters trying to get home. They were both absurdly indulgent and amusing but beyond that made few demands – upon either her feelings or her conversation. On tropical evenings the three of them hung over the piano in the ship’s saloon. She played popular songs: ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’, ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’, and ‘Blue Moon’. They sang together, ‘She went to heaven and flip-flap she flied’, and ‘One man went to mow, went to mow a meadow’, and laughed, and walked about the deck under the huge stars.

More obviously distressed, Dr Pike drank to anaesthetise himself. Then he would stand on deck for hours, it seemed, watching the horizon. Clarice struggled to forgive him, with all his former talk of medicine as love and charms – and of honesty. How he’d pulled the wool over her eyes, how he’d kept up his affair behind her back. And the woman, the suicide had, yes, been very shocking; but then she’d hardly known her, Selama Yakub. Once the body had been taken away she’d cried, uncontrollably, all night in her room. She was annoyed with her, too, taking herself off like that before she even knew she might have had a stepmother.

There were U-boats in the Atlantic, which was why the Piet Hein ended its run at Marseilles. From there Clarice and her father made the last part of their journey across France. What should have been a fine adventure began well. She loved Marseilles the port. But the skies beyond were lacklustre. A change occurred during the rail journey up the Rhône valley; after Lyons everything grew tedious and craven cold. She saw herself and her father as two poor insects scuttling right under a web of fear and bad weather, stretched across the gloomy north from Siberia to Connemara, from Scapa Flow to the Caucasus. Her own nerve suffered, and a sense of foreboding began to preoccupy her. If Malaya had been spoiled for her, this headlong scamper over thousands of miles was pure folly.

The hotel they found in Paris had damp beds. The staff scowled, or sneered, pretending to find difficulty with her schoolroom French. Her father was even harder to manage. When there was no suitable train leaving the Gare du Nord until quite late the next morning, she had to ration his alcohol. At eleven forty-seven, an engine dawdled northwards through the Paris banlieux before at last getting up steam enough to tackle the countryside. By then he’d sobered up, but after Amiens and at an almost wilful snail’s pace, the train turned to reconnoitre the lines of the old British trenches. She saw Albert, Bapaume, Arras, Vimy, Loos and Béthune, all under traces of snow. Trees had regrown, the broken villages had recovered; yet against an eerie little sunset framed by the train window the ordinariness of those places gave her another sharp taste of anxiety. Calais was windswept, and the Channel crossing no more than a choppy dash under the cover of night.

The final stage, from Dover to London on the morning boat train, ran them up through snow-covered hop gardens under dirty skies. The Kentish suburbs were house backs, coal dumps, or overgrown depots; and Victoria Station, heaped up with sandbags and slush, showed no interest in their arrival. Clarice noted with disbelief the air-raid shelters, the slit trenches, and the government posters about how to behave. Overcoated guns in Hyde Park looked upwards at phoney skies. Any patriotic nostalgia she’d concocted on the way evaporated. The old country was profoundly uninspiring. As for the English, how unlovely they were. After the ease and colour of the tropics, everyone looked shabby.

And would Vic look shabby too, she wondered, if by chance she ran into him – as around every turning, almost, those first few days, she was sure she would? Would she even know him, remember his face? Perhaps she’d already passed him in the street. Urgently and involuntarily, she stopped in her tracks where she and her father were walking along the Bayswater Road, and looked behind her. Nothing – of course, nothing. But suppose he should appear; would she feel the same about him?

Her father lectured her on Disraeli’s two nations. ‘At least the Malayans know how to take a pride in themselves.’ He held forth from Marble Arch, staggering slightly amid the traffic. ‘In England there are the Privileged and the People, Property or Population. Each hates the bloody sight and sound of the other.’

‘And which are we, Daddy?’ she asked, steadying him. He looked her blankly in the eye, and then they crossed back to the corner of Park Lane, jinking their way by inches out of the path of a bus.

There was no relief from the cold. A bone-invading chill came in from the streets and sat down with them in their hotel, unchallenged by any of the stoves in the corners of drab rooms, the puttering gas fires or the lukewarm pipes. Ice patterns on the inside of windows persisted all day, and wherever Clarice went she took the frosty trace of her own breath. Outdoors, its shapes dissipated against the grey; inside, it mingled with the various odoriferous steams caused by boiled cabbage, by brown soup, and by the chamber-pots borne along corridors by clumping maids. Again, she wondered what on earth they’d set out upon, the two of them.

Every evening the guests in the hotel lounge tuned in to Lord Haw Haw. Londoners claimed the Germans had got what they wanted: Hitler would soon sue for peace, and be accepted by both Britain and France. It was the Bore War, they said, pleased with themselves. They were bored with the blackout and bored with rationing. Some believed the bombing threat had turned out to be an elaborate hoax. The Nazi menace would simply wither away and the kids could all come home. She latched on to the idea, and held it. She shut her mind to newspaper tales of Finnish casualties, or the continuing deportation and savagery in divided Poland. These days, apparently, it was more to enquire about the next fall of snow that Londoners surveyed the skies, than to care about Stuka dive-bombers. The winter, they said, was one of the coldest in memory. Well then, they kept on adding, it would all eventually thaw, even Hitler. About Vic, possibly so near at hand, she began to convince herself that she could feel a touch blasé. She had got through so far without seeing him; now she was perfectly in control.

The family solicitor was visited. It turned out they were Property – and therefore Privileged. By the skin of their teeth the old house in Suffolk still belonged to them. So it came about that Clarice and Dr Pike found themselves running down to the country again, this time north of the Thames through Essex and on into prettiest blanketed Suffolk. She did stare intently out of the window as the train inched through the tawdry environs of Wanstead Flats, Ilford and Seven Kings – having seen on a map how close they were to Barking, the address on Phyllis’s letter. She paid particular attention as the train crossed the River Ripple. Then, past Becontree, her thoughts were a mixture of relief and overwhelming regret.

The train was ice cold, full and filthy, with soldiers sitting on their kitbags in the corridor, and trodden cigarette butts everywhere on the floors. She allowed one of the boys to engage her in conversation but disdained him a few minutes later, savouring his blushes.

After a while, as ever-thickening snowflakes began to race past the carriage, she grew excited, piqued that her window was grimy, and that smoke from the engine billowed past in such smutty reels as to blot out what might amount to a childhood recaptured. The prospect seemed to lift her father, too.

When at last the train drew up at Manningtree, she stepped out into the flickering white with amazement. The platform, the fields, the station roof were blanketed with fresh snow. She was coming to her old house; everything could be beautiful again.

AN ANCIENT MAN with a horse chaise was all the transport there was to convey daughter and father and their travelling cases the last seaward miles. She didn’t mind. She clapped her hands to keep warm, and listened to the slow drawl in which the driver was remembering Dr Pike, no really, from all these years gone. His ‘growen gel’ Clarice smiled and offered herself to be admired. Snow-garlanded, they clopped through the village of Holbrook, after which a dip in the road and a swirl of the miniature blizzard brought them to their destination.

She dashed the snowflakes from her eyes. Pook’s Hill was in the old manor-house style. Under its weight of white, the cat-slide roof seemed at once hoisted by, and sagging from, the off-centre chimney stack. At either end of the property there were gabled wings. It looked quaint as its name, touching as the scene on a card, though smaller perhaps than she remembered, with the mullioned windows of the original modest hall squeezed under the roof’s vast blank perfection, and all the leads and ledges delicately iced in casements of peeling green paint. There was a simple wooden door cut in the left-hand section of wall. Snow-capped weeds had grown up on either side, while great dagger icicles hung from the eaves. Untrained stalks of a snowdrifted, leafless creeper reached away in both directions across the brickwork.

Clarice led her father inside. All at once the long journey caught up with her. The interior was only mould and damage: walls were peeled, areas of ceiling had fallen. There’d been a tenant, but nowhere had been cared for. In one of the rooms a lapse of soot had blackened everything. Her elation was dashed in a pervading smell of fungus and old rags.

A local Miss Farmer was supposed to have laid a fire and left a meal. In a dim, oak-beamed and barely furnished parlour they found a flicker in the grate; and, in the flagstoned region adjoining, a pot of unlikely stew sat on the kitchen range. Eventually, while her father prowled the bedrooms, Clarice brought herself to rummage for kindling in an outhouse. Then she perched on her high heels at the edge of the hearth, trying to revive the embers. The sticks were cold and damp and the flame did its utmost to resist.

Frustration overcame her. She stood up and stamped. Then sobs burst out, and all she could think of was Selama Yakub. Once more she cried secretly, uncontrollably; and when eventually the tears subsided, she was left drained and utterly dismal. The fire sulked. Her father’s footsteps sounded somewhere overhead like the walk of a troubled ghost. Forced out of the compensations of her bright life in Singapore, whisked past any second chance of meeting Vic, she’d been thrust into an agrarian confinement so severe that the prospects of love, freedom and fulfilment were almost infinitely remote.

The phrase ‘a want of spirits’ had first been planted in Clarice’s head by Mrs Christopher, who’d taken her under her wing in Singapore. During the voyage its elegant understatement had fitted her exactly. It reminded her of certain literary heroines she’d admired – the passionate girls held captive by circumstance or relatives, while forbidden by duty to think so.

She’d once wanted to be entirely useful: to save the world, discover radium, inspire a great composer with her playing. She’d gone on to find a man, Vic, whose flashes of warmth and intellectual openness seemed to make such things possible – had he not been trapped himself. Now her father had rushed her to the moated grange. The wooded soil of Suffolk ran away to two rivers on either side of her. Their salt and frozen mouths were only a mile or so away. An old physician and his daughter caught in the snow; it was simply too melancholic. She heard him come downstairs and go out at the back through the kitchen.

But in reality she knew she couldn’t blame him. After Selama’s death and the hasty inquest, her father had had half a mind to tear up the tickets. It was Clarice who’d insisted on using them, and Dr Pike had done what she told him. That was the truth of the matter, and she should come clean about it.

She pulled herself round, and was glad. The fire, too, flicked up around the sticks, the spent char deigning at last to glow. She dried her face and shouted to her father to bring in more coal.

A far-off scraping came by way of reply. Then Dr Pike appeared with the coals held out in front of him on his shovel. ‘Good girl. Good girl. You make everything better.’