“WOULD YOU marry a younger man?”
Duncan shot the question at her as they put down their menus in the Officers’ Club. Philippa had had two B.G.A.’s.
“Like one of my students, pink and pimply with green fingers, brutally carnal and desperate and all thumbs?” she replied with a wide grin.
She saw his face change.
“Sorry, Duncan. I didn’t see the bigger hook on your line. Yes, I would. I’ve got no inferiority complexes where love is concerned.”
“Inferiority complex?” with surprise in his voice.
“Feeling old is feeling inferior.”
“Huh! But that is an honest-to-God feeling. There’s nothing complex about it.”
“Yah, wrong phrase. Sorry. Should have said social inhibitions. You know Malay men wouldn’t hesitate to marry a much younger woman.”
He searched her eyes with intense concentration.
Daud walked into her consciousness but Duncan’s searching for her innermost feelings brought her back to him. Hell, he’s dead serious, she thought. What have I done? Should I give him the hand-off now? Is it the loneliness of his life here away from home?
She switched into a veiled attack, the billboards on her mind.
“Tell me, did you leave a girl back home?”
“Yes … in a way … but that was years ago now, Philippa. We’ve stopped writing. It fizzled out …”
“Would you dare to bring home an Indian girl?” hitting first with colour, “Or a Chinese wench who smacks her lips and belches?” softening it with culture, then going below the belt, “Or a Muslim, a Malay woman?”
Duncan reeled at her questions.
“She won’t be a wench. She’ll probably be a teacher like you …”
God, what am I doing? I invited that didn’t I? Leading him like that.
He raced down the lines she had cut clear of undergrowth.
“No. To all three of your questions …” She saw it coming. “But I’ll be proud to bring home a wife wondrously beautiful, speaking my language better than I do, direct as we are, yet with some of the coyness of the east, a sweeter, neater maiden from a cleaner, greener land.”
Something stirred inside her. Then she swung away from the surge his words had excited with a cacophony in her head.
Oh God! What am I doing to him? To myself. Does he know where he is? Oh shit. I hit myself when I slung the Muslim thing at him. I don’t want another man. I have one. Have I really? Cripes, where am I? Where Vicky was, running with the hares and the hounds? Isn’t Keh a hare, a rabbit? Was the Jap guy of hers a hound? A dog looking for a bitch? Bloody Jap.
Duncan sensed her confusion. It pleased him, in an obtuse way. He had struck the blow he meant to deliver. But she was not reacting the way he had expected. That disturbed him.
He put his hand on hers on the table. She didn’t flinch.
He started to speak. “Philippa, I … I er …” then he tripped over his emotions, his fears, his doubts and his voice dropped away in a pitiful smorzando-decrescendo.
He took his hand off hers.
They sat in silence, avoiding each other’s eyes for some time because they had come to a closeness over the months which understood and accepted many things.
The day her cousin Casmir, Uncle Fernao’s boy, broke the deep friendship of their teenage in Malacca floated up like a stinging jellyfish emerging suddenly from the dark green of the sea. They had swum together when the tide was high with the surf buffeting their bodies, run on the beach with their kites when the afternoon breezes blew in from the west across the water, traded Siamese fighting fish from the paddyfield ditches, kicked the rattan-basket ball at each other near the periwinkles at the beach-edge where the coarse grass gave way to greyish-yellow sand, run down to the frothing water with a certain reckless daring because he was a boy and she a girl, until the night he grabbed her at the Carloses’ wedding party and kissed her full on the mouth before she realised what he was doing.
It was as though he had hurled a beautiful pot of biscuit-pink clay against a rock, smashing it into a thousand little pieces; a pot which they had made together from soft grey pliable clay, with his foot kicking the wheel and her fingers forming the shape like the old Chinese potter near Terendak, his varicosed-veined calves moving over the spinning circular stone and his gnarled hands, wet and glistening, moulding magic from a lump of mud.
She had thrilled at the tingling of her whole body that night but had stifled her sobs on the mat so that Antonio would not hear her crying, knowing that Casmir had betrayed her by leading her into the sinister dark of the mountain jungles always there behind them, as the padre kept saying, away from the sun-swept open sea.