Return to Mandalay (22 page)

He’d only be tidying a book away or hanging up his dressing gown. Nothing really. But he realised that she wanted to do those things, it was important to her. She wanted to feel useful. So he let her.

She wouldn’t stay, though. He knew she wouldn’t stay because she didn’t live here anymore. He was sure of that,
but for a moment it had slipped his mind where she had gone to.

And then Eva had telephoned from Burma. She had found her and Maya was alive and well. Lawrence had sunk his head back into his pillows that night and he was back there. Simple. He was back there and he could smell once more the jasmine in the porch outside her father’s house, the coconut oil in her hair.

Upper Burma, 1937

Lawrence had returned to the camp. It wasn’t much more than a forest clearing, a few huts with bamboo screens and thatched roofs for the timbermen surrounding the rear of the
tai
, a wooden house erected on a wooden platform and built on stilts, where, as Forest Assistant in charge of the camp, Lawrence lived. But he couldn’t get her out of his head. Maya. She was the lightest of shadows in his daytime and his compelling silhouette after dark. And he could have stayed longer in Mandalay, because still the rains didn’t come.

It had only been one night but their love-making had been a revelation. She had kept a lamp burning low and she had made him wait while she massaged his neck and shoulders with oil and kissed a trail from his lips down to his belly.

At last, with a groan, he could stand it no more and he had held her tightly and entered her with a passion he could barely control. The connection between them was immediate, electric.

‘Touch me with your lips,’ she said. And Lawrence remembered
something Scottie had said to him,
there’s no Burmese word for ‘kiss
’.

So he kissed her throat, her hair, her mouth. Deep liquid kisses such as he had never experienced before. Lawrence had shuddered as he held her and he had felt her shudder too.

Later, he watched her sleep and it seemed her whole body was bathed in peace. Already he wanted her again and she opened her eyes as if she knew. Lazily, she arched her back like a sleek cat, moved towards him, her gaze fixed on his face.

‘Maya,’ he whispered.

*

Before Lawrence had left Mandalay, he had tried again to tell Maya about his life in England and Helen, about what was expected of him. He didn’t want to pretend with her, he didn’t want to simply leave one day and for her father to say:
I told you so. He never meant to stay. He just wants to seize all our country’s riches and then leave, like all the rest
.

She turned on him, almost fierce. ‘You owe me nothing,’ she said. ‘Nor I, you.’

‘But Maya—’ That wasn’t what he had been trying to say.

‘We have lain together in my bed,’ she said. ‘And we have talked. That is all.’

He took her arm. ‘That is not all.’

She acknowledged this with a small nod. ‘We are from different lives,’ she said. ‘And we do not have to say that we will always be together. We are together now. That is all that matters.’

‘Are we together now?’ He felt eager like a child. Because
he could hardly bear to have her like this and then leave. ‘Are we? Can we be together again?’

‘I will come to my aunt’s house in Sinbo,’ she said. ‘Do not fear.’

Do not fear
. With her, he had no fear. Better than that. With her he had a hope, more than he had ever known.

*

Now, Lawrence paced the
tai
and he walked around the camp. He climbed up the ladder and stood on his verandah, which gave him a very good view of the surrounding area, shaded by the vines grown around the structure for that purpose. As the sun set across the distant valley, he poured himself a whisky, sat on his chair outside, lit a cigarette and tried to relax. But he could not.

Desperate for something to take his mind off his need for her and his need for rain, he decided to visit a small village upstream from the camp where the logging of next season’s out-turn was going on. He would go tomorrow to check on progress. Why not? There was nothing he could do here for now. And he was on a knife-edge just waiting.

He arrived the following day to find that the logging there was going to schedule. It was soothing to discover this, despite the heaviness of the heat and the tension of anticipation.

‘The rain comes,’ one of his men told him.

What was so different about tonight, he wondered. It was hot, as usual. The insects were persistent, as ever. There was no cloud to be seen, just a haze of heat that lifted only at sunset. And what a sunset. Even Lawrence, with so much
on his mind, had to admit that the view was glorious. The darkening sky seemed shot with gold and amber as the blush filled the entire heavens over the forest. He sat there with his whisky long after he should.

And then he felt something change. There was a weightlessness in the air, a sharpening of the senses and he knew what this meant. His man had been right. Lawrence was impressed. He went inside as the sky grew black, the wind blew and he could hear the thunder beginning to rumble. At last. Lawrence went to bed, still with the ache that he’d felt since meeting Maya, but at least feeling optimistic. And the rains came.

Even as he was falling asleep, he heard it. Rain, welcome rain, pattering at first on the roofs, getting louder and louder, sending him off into a deep sleep which included dreams of great rivers rising, logs tumbling and crashing downstream. And Maya.

In the morning the coolness of the temperature was another welcome relief after the heavy oppression of the past weeks. But now Lawrence had to get back to camp urgently. The paddy fields were awash and the two men he had sent ahead rushed back to tell him the news. There was flash flooding. The road back to camp was already impassable. Bloody hell. The rains had remained ferocious all through the night and even now they hadn’t eased. Talk about one extreme to the other. The men were saying that the rivers had risen quicker than they’d ever known before.

He waited another day, but the rains didn’t even stop to
catch breath. The incessant croaking of the bullfrogs was unnerving him. Lawrence took stock. He only had stores for a few days, but he mustn’t panic. Still, the bungalow was built on low-lying ground and reports were already reaching him that all streams were in full spate so that not even elephants could ford them and that houses were being washed away, so great were the sudden floods. It was looking serious. Was he going to be marooned here? Or was the very water that he’d longed for going to snatch everything away? Nothing else for it. They had to get back – and fast.

The usual way back to camp involved crossing two large streams and it was clear this would be impossible. They’d have to go the long way round. There were still
chaungs
, but they were small ones, at least for the moment.

Not so small, it turned out. The first one was almost waist deep as they waded across and the current was swift. But they did it. The second fazed even the elephants. They screeched and bellowed at the sight of the raging torrent which was already uprooting trees and crashing them into the banks. Jesus. Lawrence shouted the order to the
oozies
, the elephant handlers, and the others to move upstream, though it was hard to even make himself heard with all the racket going on, and eventually they found a safer place to cross.

It was still hairy and there was only one way to do it. Halfway across, clinging on to his elephant, hoping they could avoid the debris being flung by the wild waters of the river into their path and praying they’d make it across, the elephant stumbled and Lawrence slipped and almost fell from its
back. The driving rain was in his face, in his eyes, in his ears. He could barely see and all he could hear was the thundering of the river, all he could feel was the ponderous movement of the great beast on whom his life depended, trudging through the mud and waters of the
chaung
. Lawrence clung on with wet, numb fingers, regained his position on the elephant’s back, thought of Maya’s father. He was going to get his hands dirty today, alright. And more.

But at last they were over. Luck had been on their side that day. They stopped for breakfast, completely done in. They scraped the leeches off their legs since the puttees hadn’t stopped the buggers getting through. But they had no choice. They had to go on. And on they went. At times the path wasn’t visible and there was a lot more wading to be done before they eventually arrived back at the camp, wet through and exhausted.

Only then could Lawrence relax. He thought of Maya. She would be coming up to Myitkyina to her aunt’s house in Sinbo in a few days and he would see her again. She seemed to want that as much as he. And then perhaps, he told himself, the ache would go away.

The Emporium’s contact in Mandalay was the main agent for all their dealings in Myanmar; his other men in Yangon and Bagan were apparently answerable to him. This, Eva found out within five minutes of arriving at his ‘office’, a dusty shack in downtown Mandalay on Eighty-fourth Street near the stone carvers’ workshops in Kyauksittan. His name was Myint Maw, he talked very fast and he was extremely full of his own importance. Jacqui had warned Eva in her latest email.
You can be firm with him … But don’t push him too far. If he gets at all funny with you, just walk away
. Funny with her? It sounded to Eva as if Jacqui were expecting her to walk a tightrope as far as diplomacy and tact were concerned.

‘Now, what I can show you? What I can show you?’ He shuffled through the heap of papers on his desk. ‘What we have? What is to view?’

He seemed very disorganised. ‘This is what I am expecting to see,’ Eva said resolutely, consulting her own paperwork. ‘Figures and statues, carved and painted.’ She showed him the pictures of the delicately carved angel, the nats, the monk sitting on a lotus flower and the Buddhas.

‘Ah.’ He pressed his skinny hands together. ‘So special, yes?’

‘I hope so.’ Eva picked up her bag. ‘Shall we go?’ She was determined to be businesslike and, with this in mind, had worn loose linen trousers and a smart silk jacket for the encounter. But she was getting awfully hot already.

The goods turned out to be in a storeroom several doors along. Between them the stone-carvers, their workshops so small that they worked by the roadside, sculpted Buddhas and other iconic images up to three metres high, working in white stone, marble and even jade for the smaller pieces. Men in
longyis
scurried around fetching and carrying and the noise of angle grinders and drilling throbbed dull and monotonous in the hot and dusty air.

‘Who are their customers?’ Eva asked.

Myint Maw dismissed customers and stone-carvers with a wave of his hand. ‘Local business people,’ he said. ‘And foreign buyers perhaps.’ He leaned towards her, so that Eva had a too-close-for-comfort view of the hairy mole on his chin. ‘But as you know, most money in the old, not the new.’

Last night Eva had been happy enough to chill out at her hotel and take a walk alongside the Palace moat before finding first the nearest internet café and then a restaurant in the evening for dinner. She had tried to call the number Klaus had left for her.
Dear Eva, Sorry to miss you. Give me a call when you return to Mandalay …
But it wasn’t available and there had been no sign of him at the hotel. It didn’t matter. When you travelled alone, you grew accustomed to eating on your own. And after everything that had happened over the last
few days, it was actually quite a relief to be alone with her thoughts and have an early night.

She’d also made an appointment with Myint Maw for 11.30 a.m. and so before coming here she’d taken the opportunity of visiting the silk weavers, where she watched, fascinated, as the Burmese women worked the looms, deftly threading the different colours of silk from their spools into intricate patterns with nimble fingers whilst working the pedals with their feet. They were so fast. Eva had moved from the factory at the back to the front of the shop and it hadn’t taken much persuasion for her to add a silk scarf in delicate lavender to her growing collection of Myanmar souvenirs. Her mother, she’d decided, would just have to love it.

Now, they arrived at their destination and Myint Maw showed her into the storeroom. There were wooden objects crammed on to every dusty shelf and they were not, she saw immediately, quality goods.

‘What’s all this?’ she asked.

But he hurried her through. ‘This not for you,’ he said. ‘No, no.’

‘Is it yours?’ He seemed a little edgy. Eva paused to take a closer look but he pulled at her arm and she was forced to follow.

‘No, not mine,’ he said. ‘It is shared storeroom. Do not worry. Come with me now, please.’

And that was a relief because it looked like cheap tat, very far from the sort of pieces she and the Emporium were interested in.

‘Here.’ Myint Maw led the way into a smaller room. He got a large box down from a shelf. ‘This what you are here to view.’ He nodded energetically. ‘Yes, yes. I remember. I know. This is what you must see. Please.’

Eva took the first figure from the box. It was about thirty centimetres high, a female nat statue carved from wood with painted headdress, red lips and porcelain eyes, her expression regal but sad. Eva examined it carefully, using her eyeglass. The patina on the face was extraordinary, the glaze so cracked that it made her look like a very old lady indeed.

‘Nan Karaing Mei Daw,’ Myint Maw told her. ‘Yes, yes. Beautiful nat, yes?’

‘Part human, part buffalo.’ Eva had done her homework. She knew the history. This particular nat destroyed her enemies when given offerings of fried fish. Like most of the other Burmese nats – there were thirty-seven in total – she had suffered a violent death and had become the Burmese equivalent of a martyr.

‘You like?’ Myint Maw rubbed those skinny hands together.

‘I like.’ It was nineteenth century, in excellent condition and perfectly genuine in Eva’s opinion. Jacqui would love it.

Slightly taller was the seated Bhumisparsha Buddha in lacquered teak. As Eva knew from her studies, the style of Buddha images, from Mon to Taungoo and beyond, differed according to date and dynasty. This Buddha was, she recognised, from the Mandalay period with his youthful and innocent face, the hair tightly curled, the robes decoratively
folded, the hand making the
mudra
gesture of touching the earth.