The White Pearl (10 page)

‘Good God, Constance, who the hell is that?’ Nigel demanded, pointing with his fork at the french windows behind her.

She blinked. The lunch party was still in progress. An untouched pudding of papaya and vanilla custard stood before her. She
had no recollection of it being placed there. Everyone had turned to look at what Nigel was indicating and sweat, as sticky
as oil, broke out on Connie’s palms. She was sure it was Sho. So sure, she lifted the cheese knife that lay next to her plate
and wrapped her fingers tightly around its handle. Slowly she turned.

At first she saw nothing, blinded by the dazzle of the sun. The shutters were half closed over the other windows, but the
french doors stood wide open to allow any breeze to flutter in and for Pippin to wander out. They framed a rectangle of peaceful
green lawn sloping gently up to the house. She could hear Nigel breathing hard through his nose at the other end of the table.
Three wide, semicircular steps ran down to the lawn and at the bottom of them stood a figure. It was male. She squinted against
the light and made out a patterned waist-sarong and a black sleeveless shirt. She frowned. Sho would die rather than wear
a sarong. The figure moved and relief crushed her throat. She couldn’t swallow.

‘Masur,’ Nigel shouted out. ‘Get rid of this person.’

Connie leaped to her feet, knocking over her chair in her haste. ‘It’s all right, Nigel, I know him. It’s Razak. Sai-Ru Jumat’s
son, the woman in the accident.’

Razak was staring straight at her. For a moment the intensity of his dark gaze made her skin crawl, but then he dipped his
head shyly and smiled.
How beautiful he is
, she thought.

‘Come in, Razak,’ she called.

As lithe as a gazelle, he leaped up the steps.

Connie showed Razak around the garden. He had requested work at Hadley House, wanted nothing to do with the rubber estate.
She explained carefully that he would earn more if he became a skilled tapper than he could as a gardener, but he was adamant.
He had shaken his head and kept his eyes firmly on his feet, on his dusty sandals, the kind with a thong between the toes.

‘How old are you, Razak?’

‘Sixteen.’

‘And your sister?’

‘Sixteen.’

‘So you’re twins. How lovely.’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Maya.’

‘Does she have a job?’

A faint frown. ‘She dances.’

‘Malay dancing is beautiful, I’ve seen displays of it. I must watch Maya dance one day.’

He looked embarrassed, so she dropped the subject. She couldn’t blame him for not wanting her prying into his life. Instead
she continued with the garden. He didn’t seem to know much about plants but as they walked past the shrubs, she liked the
way he touched the petals of the bird-of-paradise blooms, as though they were something to be valued, and brushed the back
of his hand over the shiny green leaves of the
jejarum
. The rest he’d learn.

‘Come,’ she said.

She drew the young Malay along a path that ran round to the rear of Hadley House where a tall cypress hedge formed the edge
of the separate part of the garden.

‘This is the veg patch,’ she told him, and led him through an archway cut into the hedge. ‘This is probably where Malik, our
head gardener, will keep you working first of all.’

It was just a vegetable garden. That’s all. Nothing special. She liked to grow vegetables even more than flowers, and performed
much of the planting and picking herself. It was just something that was always there, a part of her life she took for granted.
Until she saw Razak’s reaction. His eyes were huge and his mouth hung open in astonishment.

‘Very, very big,’ he murmured.

Was it? It seemed a normal size to her. ‘We manage to eat everything,’ she commented.

He held up three fingers. ‘You,
Tuan
Hadley and boy.’

‘And the servants, of course.They eat the produce as well. It’s only fair, as they are the ones that have to chase off the
monkeys and parrots. I swear there is one particular monkey with a bald tail who believes I grow all the melon and squash
just for his personal use.’

He laughed. For the first time something relaxed in this young man’s stance, and he no longer seemed ready to run off like
one of the small deer that ventured into the garden occasionally. They would flee if you so much as blinked at them. She didn’t
want Razak to flee.

‘Would you like to take some vegetables home with you?’ she offered.

‘I not a monkey. Not parrot.’

Connie blushed. ‘I know.’

He knelt on the red earth, plucked a yellow pepper from its stem and took a bite out of it. She could imagine it warm and
sunny on his tongue. He looked up and he smiled at her, and in that moment she knew he would stay.

‘Welcome to Hadley House,’ she said.

‘Thank you.
Terimah kasih.
’

‘Where did you learn to speak English?’

‘I was houseboy. In Palur.’

‘Really? Well, if you prefer, you could be a houseboy here, and …’

But she could feel him withdraw. As if she’d suggested he step into a snake pit. He shook his head and sank his teeth into
the yellow flesh of the pepper once more.

‘I like
veg patch.
’

She laughed. ‘So do I.’

Maya stomped up and down her shanty street, bubbling with impatience. Where was he? Why wasn’t he back? Had the white lady
silenced him? Had she taken one look at him and let her husband put him to work with the coolies in the rubber forest? That
was hard work, brutal on the hands and the back, and she’d heard whispered tales of men who had spent so many years in the
forest that their hearts had been stolen by jungle spirits. Their hearts were strung up in the canopy of the trees at night,
flashing and dancing like fireflies, crying out in pain. She hadn’t seen them herself, but others had. She didn’t want that
to happen to her brother.

She slunk into her tiny hovel, threw herself down on the floor and sat with her knees tucked tight under her chin. It was
stifling in here, and a giant millipede was wriggling its fat body towards the doorway. She lifted one foot and thumped the
back of her bare heel down on the creature. She was supposed to be out selling flowers for Hakim, but couldn’t think of anything
right now except seeing her brother come home safely. She’d pay for it later when Hakim and his cubs got their paws on her.
But so what?

She’d never owned a watch and couldn’t tell the time even if she did, but she could see shadows move. That’s how she told
the hours passing, and today the shadows moved slowly across the rattan mat. Her hair hung damp and clinging around her small
face, and she flicked it back, twisting it up on the top of her head in a black coil, pinning it there with a split piece
of bamboo. She struggled to shut down her thoughts, to let them drift in the heat that clogged the room, but it was impossible
because her mind was like a rat, scurrying from place to place, seeking out dark holes. When Razak finally appeared in the
hut, she jumped to her feet.

‘Where have you been all this time?’

His arms were piled high with vegetables, with melons and aduki beans and other greenery stacked all the way up to his chin.
She laughed and pinched a cucumber.

‘I went to Hadley House,’ he said. ‘Like you told me.’

He moved over to the corner, opened his arms and dropped the heap of produce on the floor. Dust rose in the air.

‘Give it all to Salid for his pigs,’ Razak muttered. ‘I will eat nothing that
she
has grown.’

Maya sat him down on the mat, poured him a cup of
chaya
and waited cross-legged on the floor for her brother to come back to her.
The white lady has stolen him.

‘I asked,’ he said at last, ‘to work in the garden. Like you told me.’

‘Good.’

‘She took me over it.’ He paused, and Maya saw something of pleasure in his eyes. ‘It is a beautiful garden. So much space
for just three people.’

They both looked at their own tiny room and said nothing.

‘Then?’ she prompted.

‘The vegetable garden is huge. She calls it her
veg patch
. It is five times the size of old Grenya’s plot, remember him? He used to feed his family of ten off it, and still have plenty
left over to sell in the market.’

‘I remember.’

‘She said it was grown for her family and her servants. But the servants must be selling it in the market and she doesn’t
realise.’ He shook his head in bemusement. ‘How could she be so stupid?’

‘All whites are stupid about understanding anyone but themselves. What happened after that?’

‘She left me with the head gardener. He comes from Penang, and talks as if the garden is his own. I think he may be turning
into a plant himself because he has strange growths on his feet that look like roots and his tongue is as loose as an ageing
leaf.’

Eagerness sharpened Maya’s voice. ‘What did this old leaf say?’

‘He told me that she takes the boy to school in Palur each morning and collects him when the sun is high. She no longer drives.
Their
syce
drives her instead.’

Maya frowned. That wasn’t what she wanted to hear.

‘At the weekend,’ he continued, ‘she rides her horse early when the morning is still cool. The
Tuan Besar
leaves when it is still dark and doesn’t come back until the sun has set. Sometimes they drive out to friends in the evening.
The gardener says the
syce
takes them. That is because the
Tuan
likes to drink and the roads are rough.’

He stopped talking and studied his sister closely from under his long dark lashes. ‘You are satisfied?’

She smiled at him. ‘I love this gardener as if he were my own father.’

‘More than our own father, you mean.’

They both laughed, but it was a fragile ripple of sound in the hot room. Their father was a tin-mine worker. He used to beat
them and his wife whenever the mood took him, but one day he vanished. Gone to live with his brother snakes, their mother
used to say with venom.

Maya gestured towards the pile of vegetables in the corner. ‘Let me sell them.’

Razak shook his head. ‘They are fit only for pigs.’

Maya sighed but didn’t argue. Instead, she laid out before him a meal of lamb curry with rice, and a Tiger beer to wash it
down.

‘I had a good day with the flower-selling,’ she lied.

She didn’t tell him about the envelope she’d found behind the pots on the shelf.

Connie was restless. It rained that night, a fierce, shuddering downpour that seemed to shake the house and rattle the roof.
She checked on Teddy but he hadn’t stirred. She liked to look at him in his sleep, even through the mosquito net, his cheek
warm and flushed on his pillow. Nightly she tracked the blunting of his baby appearance and the sharpening of what would become
his adult features: his jaw, his brow, the width of his nostrils. She told herself that if she watched him closely like this,
it would never come as a shock when suddenly he stood before her as a young man, legs the length of his father’s. The child
hidden away deep inside him.

She lifted the net and kissed his damp forehead, brushing the strands of hair from his face. ‘Sleep tight, sweetheart,’ she
whispered and stroked his chest. It was a habit she couldn’t break out of, this feeling for the feathery beat of his heart.
She crept out of his bedroom and when she reached her own, Nigel was sitting on the bed removing his socks. He had nice feet,
smooth and elegantly shaped.Which was just as well because his lower legs and lower arms were about all she got to see of
his person, these days. For a moment she wondered what he would do if she walked over to him and started undoing his shirt
buttons. Flap her away probably, the way he flapped at moths that sneaked in through the shutters.

‘I didn’t think much of that Fitzpayne fellow,’ Nigel commented. ‘Don’t like his ideas.’

Connie sighed and stretched out on her side of the bed, arms above
her head. The murmur of the fan on the ceiling was as incessant as the rain.

‘No,’ she agreed. ‘I didn’t take to him. But he’s a friend of Johnnie’s, so we couldn’t exactly throw him out on his ear,
could we?’

Nigel grunted and departed into his dressing room. She raised both legs straight in the air. Her skirt tumbled around her
hips and she enjoyed the pleasure of having naked thighs, the breeze from the fan brushing against them, warm as someone’s
breath. She closed her eyes.

‘Constance, I don’t think you should employ that native boy.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘No good will come of it.’

She could hear him puffing, his breath strained. He performed fifty press-ups every night in his dressing room.

‘Nigel, I just want to help them. After what I did, it’s the least I can offer.’

‘It wasn’t your fault, Macintyre said so. You don’t owe them anything.’

She said nothing. Her hand stroked the curve of her calf and the soft underside of her knee.

‘Better not to get involved, old thing.’

Old thing.
She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and jumped to her feet. She walked over to his dressing room and leaned against
the door frame. He was forcing himself through his press-ups, elbows shaking now, his cheeks vermilion. A vein clicked in
and out at his temple.

‘Nigel, what if he’s right?’

‘Who?’

‘That Fitzpayne fellow. What if the Japanese do come down through the jungle from the north? We’ll be right in their path.’

‘There’s no chance …’ he struggled to straighten his arms, ‘… of that.’

‘But shouldn’t we be prepared? Just in case. I mean …’

‘No need.’

‘But it seems to me that …’

‘Don’t fret so.’

She bit her tongue and waited against the door frame while he finished his exercises. God, she needed a cigarette. She always
did when she was annoyed. Nigel eventually stood up and headed straight into the bathroom, splashing water around like a hippo.
It was the same every night. When he emerged, wrapped in his silk robe, she was still waiting. He looked at her and frowned.