The tide had lured the sea away when Willie went down to the beach. Under the morning sun the mudflats, corrugated by the currents, seemed to stretch all the way to the shores of the mainland.
He had completed only three stories. He would need to write three or four more of them when he was back in London – a satisfying collection, to his mind, required half a dozen stories at the very least. He had written down Lesley’s tale of her affair with a Chinaman as she had told it to him, but he had not worked out how he would craft the shape of the story. It would make him a goodly sum of money, of that he was certain – not enough to pay off his debts, but hopefully sufficient to keep the ravening wolves beyond the walls for a few months. Her marriage, however, would be ruined if he published the story. He would change a few details here and there to camouflage her identity, of course, but people in the Straits would know who he was really writing about.
He looked around the beach and saw Lesley with a Malay woman at the tideline. The Malay woman was digging in the sand with a stick, a bucket by her side. He went over to them and peered into the bucket. He jerked his head back, then looked again. Clambering over one another were the oddest-looking creatures he had ever seen. Their smooth, olive-coloured carapaces reminded him of the helmets worn by soldiers in the trenches; and their tails, long and stiff and tapering to a sabre’s point, looked more than capable of inflicting a mortal wound. One of the crabs had flipped onto its back, exposing its gaping mouth, soft, pulsing gills and five pairs of little legs scrabbling desperately at the air.
‘Horseshoe crabs,’ said Lesley, grinning at his repugnance. ‘Their eggs are a delicacy. My old amah couldn’t get enough of them.’
The Malay woman had dug up another crab burrowed in the sand; she yanked it out by its tail and dropped it into her bucket.
‘I told her to give six of them to Cookie,’ she said. ‘Oh, don’t look so alarmed, Willie – they’re for the servants, but you’re most welcome to try them.’
Side by side they walked along the beach, sitting down on the sand when they came to the end of the bay. A fish eagle skimmed low over the gleaming mudflats.
‘Last night …’ he began, then stopped, trying to find the words.
Never before in his life had he ever stepped into the ocean after dark, and certainly not with a naked woman, but it had turned out to be one of the most transcendent experiences of his life. Floating in the sea of light, he had felt untethered from the bonds of time, eternal. And after they had emerged from the water and walked home, he was convinced a faint blue glow was fluorescing off his body.
In the end he just said to her, ‘I’ll carry it in my memory to my dying day.’
‘It’s rare these days,’ she said, ‘but when Robert and I were first married we’d see it almost every month. We couldn’t run fast enough into the sea whenever we saw it all lit up.’
He wondered what had mesmerised her down there in the deep last night. Fearing the worst when she did not resurface, he had dived in after her and had found her far below, enclosed in a bulb of dimming, wavering light, a lantern adrift in the currents of the sea.
‘I was glad when Robert signed up in the war. That sounds terribly heartless of me, doesn’t it? But those few years he was away, I didn’t have to pretend to be fine. I didn’t have to pretend to be happy.’
‘Why did you lie for … Ethel at her trial?’
‘How could I not, when I was in the same situation myself?’
The mountains on the mainland were emerging from the night, hardening once again into their eternal forms.
‘They seem so near, don’t they?’ said Lesley. ‘So near, but at the same time as distant as myth, or a memory.’ She paused for a moment, then went on. ‘They always remind me of a poem I had learned at school: ‘“What are those blue remembered hills …”’
‘“That is the land of lost content/I see it shining plain/The happy highways where I went”,’ Willie said, ‘“And cannot come again.”’
A P&O liner was steaming past, heading out into the Andaman Sea. It was probably making for India and down the coast of Africa, to round the Cape of Good Hope and sail towards Southampton. The sight of it filled Willie with despair – in three days’ time he and Gerald would also be on a ship, for their long voyage home.
‘The last time you spoke to Ethel,’ Willie said, as they strolled back to the house, ‘what did she mean when she told you “He made me do it, I had no choice. He made me kill William”?’
‘I haven’t a clue, Willie. For a long time I kept thinking about it, trying to understand what she meant, but …’ She shrugged.
‘We’ve travelled around Malaya for months, but no one’s told me anything about Ethel Proudlock. I’ve never heard her name … mentioned.’
‘It happened so long ago. And people here are ashamed of her. She had let the side down, you see. They wanted to forget about her, erase every trace of her.’ She brushed away a leaf from his shoulder. ‘And they did.’
‘You never heard from her again?’
She shook her head. ‘William left KL less than a year later. I don’t know if he ever joined her.’
‘I’d like to see the house where Sun … plotted his revolution.’ Willie paused, then added, ‘And the House of Doors.’
The rickshaw dropped them outside the squat, grey-stone building of the Chartered Bank and they strolled down Beach Street with its European shops: watchmakers and wine merchants, cafés and tearooms, gentlemen’s outfitters and shoemakers. Willie was starting to feel as if he was in Cheltenham on the equator when Lesley led them into the Asiatic quarter. The labyrinthine streets held a trove of Chinese and Hindu temples and mosques; he even saw a forlorn-looking synagogue. The shops sold a bewildering variety of goods – brassware and cloth and biscuits and sesame seed oil and nutmeg and silks and sacks of spices and dried fish hanging on hooks – but there were also mysterious stores where he saw nothing being sold, just one or two old people sitting in the dim and empty interior, gazing out into the street.
Never before had he seen so many races of Asiatics in one place: Malays and Chinamen and Javanese and Bengalis, Siamese and Tamils and many others he couldn’t identify. Itinerant vendors shouted out their wares, piling onto the din of motors and buses and rickshaws.
He removed his linen jacket, draping it over his arm. Perspiration fused his shirt to his back. They squeezed their way between rattan baskets heaped with mounds of salted fish and dried shrimp and shallots on the five-foot ways, Lesley giving him the histories of the clanhouses they passed. Strolling down Love Lane she filled his head with lurid tales of the wealthy Chinamen who kept their concubines in the upper floors of the drab little shophouses. They stopped for a few minutes to admire the Kapitan Keling mosque before turning right at a small crossroad junction into Armenian Street.
He had been hearing so much about the street from Lesley, but to him it appeared indistinguishable from the other streets and lanes. As in the other sections of town the shophouses were gaudily painted, the lower half of their front walls cladded in porcelain tiles, their window frames and shutters picked out in blue or yellow, green or red. Bicycles and pots of flowering plants and bamboo stood on some of the houses’ five-foot ways. The smell of frying spices from a kitchen somewhere watered his eyes and set him coughing.
‘Belachan,’ Lesley said, enjoying his discomfort. ‘Fermented dried shrimp.’
‘Thank god the Huns … didn’t use it against us in … the war.’
Old men and women sitting on low wooden stools chatted on the five-foot ways; small children giggled and cupped their hands over their mouths when Willie waved at them. From within a shophouse gusted out the hailstorm of a mahjong game in progress.
‘Just like every town in China,’ said Willie. ‘Always at their … mahjong tables, the Chinese.’
Lesley walked ahead, then halted at a shophouse, waiting for Willie to catch up with her.
‘The Tong Meng Hui’s base,’ she said.
Willie crossed his hands behind his back and took in the whole house. Above the lintel hung a rectangular blackwood signboard carved with a pair of Chinese ideograms covered in gold leaf. Over each of the barred windows flanking the doors was an oddly shaped ventilation hole that made him think of bats. Through the open doors he glimpsed a pot-bellied Chinaman in tatty white shorts and a singlet sitting in a rattan chair, picking his nose as he read his newspaper.
‘The house doesn’t … draw attention to itself.’ Willie looked up and down the street. A few yards to their left was a small playground. Beyond it ran another street, lined with more shophouses. ‘It’s a stone’s throw to the docks, with convenient escape routes if they were raided by the authorities. I can’t fault Sun’s choice of Penang for his HQ – British banks here to move their funds around the world, a telegraph service, and an … extensive transport network.’
‘You sound like quite the spy,’ said Lesley, giving him a sidelong glance.
‘So this is where you used to come?’
‘Twice a week. Mondays and Thursdays.’
‘You played a role in his revolution too. You’re part of the history of China.’
‘A tiny, insignificant role, long forgotten already.’
They walked back to the junction and crossed to the opposite side. ‘We’re still in Armenian Street,’ Lesley said. ‘It goes all the way down to the harbour.’
They strolled in the middle of the street, stepping aside for the odd rickshaw or a pushcart hawker. They followed the street to the last shophouse in the row. The expectant look on her face told him that they were standing outside the House of Doors.
He studied its façade, imprinting its every detail into his memory so he could describe it accurately later. The windows on the ground and upper floors were shuttered. The space above the lintel was bare, and the main doors themselves were plain, their wood weathered and smooth.
‘Have you been inside … since Arthur left?’
‘No.’
‘But you have the key.’
‘I will only enter the house again when he comes home.’
She beckoned him onto the five-foot way. He touched the doors, examining them, but he saw nothing out of the ordinary. He tilted his head to the left, and then to the right, feeling slightly foolish. And then he saw it.
Embossed on the doors’ surface was a network of lines, each one about an inch wide and spanning the breadth and height of the doors. He reached out his hand and touched the wood, his fingertips following the curve of the lines – they were no deeper than the thickness of a leaf. It was, he thought, like a watermark concealed in a sheet of paper, its shape coalescing before your eyes only when you caught it at a certain angle in the light.
He backed away from the doors. Now that he knew the lines were there, he could clearly see the pattern stamped into them; opening either one of the doors would cleave it precisely in half.
How strange to come upon his own symbol here; he felt off-kilter, as if the humidity had affected him.
‘Does it work for you?’ Lesley traced the lines of the hamsa with her fingers. ‘Has it protected you from danger?’
He detected no hint of scepticism or mockery in her voice; on the contrary she sounded genuinely interested in his answer, hopeful even.
‘I’ve escaped death many times.’ They sat down on the dusty bench by the doors. ‘When I caught TB the doctors said I … wouldn’t recover, but I did. Before the war I did something … unofficial … for the government. I was often in danger; I nearly got killed a few times. And once, during the war, I … drove out to a field in my ambulance to look at a building. I was standing right next to it, having a smoke. As I was walking away from it a shell … flew across the sky and exploded against the wall, bringing the whole thing down on the very spot where I had been standing just seconds earlier.’
‘The tidal bore in Sarawak,’ said Lesley. ‘What happened there?’
He cupped his hands on his knees. A woman came out onto the five-foot way in the shophouse across the street, three joss sticks in her hands. She closed her eyes, her lips moving in a long soundless prayer. When she finished she inserted the joss sticks into the ash-filled brass bowl of a small red altar hanging on the wall. Smoke unthreaded from the joss sticks, plaiting and dividing as it climbed into the bright sunlight.
‘Shortly after we arrived in Singapore,’ Willie began, ‘I received an invitation from the Rajah Brooke to visit … Kuching. I was keen to go – I’d heard so much about the Kingdom of the White Rajah. I liked Kuching – it was small and peaceful after the hurly … burly of Singapore. We stayed in the Rajah’s palace, on a hill overlooking the town. We wanted to travel up one of the big rivers into the interior, so Gerald hired us a boat. It was crewed by four strapping … Dyaks.
‘We set out at dawn. The river was brown and smooth and wide. Our boat was a long and narrow sampan, sitting low in the water. During the day we’d recline on cushions under a … canvas canopy, watching the riverbank gliding past, or the egrets rising off the banks in white, silent drifts. Monkeys shrieked from the thick trees. Gerald asked the boatmen about … crocodiles, but he was immediately shushed – it was bad luck to even mention them when we’re on the river.
‘At sunset each day we’d moor our boat on the banks of a Dyak village. We were guests of Rajah … Brooke, and we were invited to stay with the villagers. Thirty or forty families lived in those longhouses built high on stilts, while underneath them chickens pecked and pigs rooted. We feasted with them. There was usually wild boar on a spit, and muddy-tasting fish steamed with ferns in … bamboo tubes. Gerald would get legless on toddy with the village men. I retched my guts out at my first taste of it and I never touched it again.’ He smiled. ‘They were gentle and friendly, the Dyaks, and sometimes I even forgot that they’re headhunters.’
He recalled the clumps of black, round objects hanging from the low roof beams of the longhouses. At first he had thought they were some strange bulbs of dried garlic, but then with a jolt of shock he realised that they were human heads. Throughout the long night, as the Dyaks entertained them with their music and their birdlike dancing, he would glance up at those shrunken heads. Media vita in morte sumus. He could feel their gaze on him even when he looked away, and long after he and Gerald had left the longhouse they continued to leer at him in his dreams.
‘How many days did you travel upriver?’ Lesley asked.
‘A week,’ Willie said. ‘On our last night, before we turned back … downriver to Kuching, I couldn’t sleep. I went out to the riverbank and gazed at the night sky. The moon was full, the largest I had ever seen, tinted the colour of rust. Like dried blood, I remembered thinking to myself then.
‘We left the next morning. The journey was pleasant, the day bright and hot, windless. I was reading under the canopy when I sensed a change in the movement of our boat. The boatman, standing on the … prow with his oars, shouted and pointed downriver. The water was … suddenly choppy, rocking the sampan. Gerald and I squinted into the distance ahead, but I couldn’t make out anything unusual. And then I saw faint white … lines on the water.
‘A second later I realised they were waves, heading rapidly upriver. The wind had stiffened, and that was when I heard the sound – a low roar, like a distant waterfall. The waves surged towards us, and the roaring grew louder. The … sampan was rocking wildly now. The waves reared up, almost ten feet high. I shouted to Gerald as the first wave folded over us and swept us all overboard. I was spun round and round in the water, dragged … down into the muddy depths. I couldn’t see anything at all. I felt my shoulder slamming against something … hard and jagged. Pain ripped through me. I knew I was running out of air. I kept my mouth clamped tightly shut, but the crazed urge to open it, to breathe, was impossible to fight.
‘It was at that moment that I felt my feet sinking into something soft and … slimy. I didn’t know what it was, but some rapidly dying part of my … conscious mind told me I had touched the riverbed. With a last flicker of willpower I kicked myself upwards, up to the surface. I felt I would never get there. But finally, after what seemed like … eternity, I broke through the surface. I sucked in the air hungrily, I didn’t care that I was swallowing … water from the waves.’
Willie pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his neck and face. The air felt as if it had been painted on his skin with a hot, dripping brush.
‘Where was Gerald?’ asked Lesley.
Willie folded his handkerchief but kept it in his hand. ‘I trod water and looked frantically around. There was no sign of him or any of the crew. The … waves were still coming, one after another, pushing me under, but each time I clawed my way to the surface again. I caught sight of the sampan; it was overturned, but still afloat. I ducked under another wave and swam towards it. I grabbed its … keel but it was too slippery. I tried again and again until finally I managed to cling on to it. I saw Gerald’s head breaking the surface, but then I lost sight of him. I shouted at him, but all that emerged from my throat was a rasping … noise.
‘A moment later Gerald’s head breached the surface again, closer this time. He flailed about in the currents, saw the sampan and started swimming towards me. I reached out and … hauled him to the sampan. We clung to it. We were in the middle of the river; the banks were far away. My strength was fading, and my shoulder was in agony. The sampan’s keel was slippery; I kept losing my … grip and sliding beneath the water.
‘“I can’t hold on,” I said. “We have to swim for the bank.”
‘“We won’t make it”, Gerald said, buoying me up with one arm. “It’s too far. Just hold on, Willie.”
‘We heard shouting. One of our Dyak boatmen was drifting past us, clinging to a plank and … kicking himself towards the riverbank. He waved, shouting at us to join him.
‘“Come on,” Gerald said. He held me tightly to him and we swam to the boatman. We hung on to the plank. The waves were still coming. I didn’t know how much time had passed before the river started to settle again. Still clinging to the plank, we kicked our way to the … riverbank. I was about to give up when I felt our feet touching the bottom. We crawled out of the river. We grabbed at the tree roots, and Gerald helped me up the muddy, slippery bank. At the top we collapsed on the ground and lay there, gasping for air. We were covered in mud – our legs, arms, bodies, our faces and hair – but we were … alive and safe. Or so I thought. Gerald tried to stand up, but then he fell back onto the ground. He was shaking, his fingers rigid, his face … contorted with pain.’
Willie stopped talking. The joss sticks on the altar had burned halfway down, powdering the air with the fragrance of sandalwood.
‘What was wrong with him?’ Lesley asked.
‘He was having a heart attack. I recognised the signs. I shouted to the … boatman to get help, that my friend was dying. The Dyak looked at me, panic all over his face. And then he turned and … ran off into the jungle, disappearing behind the tall grass.
‘I was too exhausted to do anything. I cradled Gerald’s head in my lap. “You’ll be all right,” I told him. “Help’s coming. You’ll be all right.”
‘I didn’t know how long I sat there, stroking Gerald’s head, murmuring to … him. Finally I heard shouting from the river. A sampan rounded a bend and came into sight. Standing at the prow was our Dyak boatman; he pointed to us on the bank, urging on the rowers. They … loaded Gerald onto the sampan. I held tightly to his hand, refusing to let go. We were rowed downriver to a … longhouse.’
Lesley nodded slowly. ‘No wonder you two looked so sickly when you got here.’
‘Gerald’s one of the toughest … men I know, but I was sure I was going to lose him. If you had seen him then, Lesley … But thank God after a few days he recovered. As did I. The headman said the full … moon had made the river angry. Except for one boatman, all our crew drowned. It was a … miracle we survived.’
‘The idea of drowning …’ Lesley shuddered.
‘You know what’s the best thing to do if you’re … drowning? Don’t fight it. That was what one of my professors told me. Just open your mouth wide and swallow the water, let it fill your lungs, and you’ll lose consciousness in less than a minute.’ He gave a mirthless bark. ‘Easier … said than done, of course.’
‘The hamsa protected you.’ She nodded, almost to herself. ‘It kept you safe all your life.’
She seemed desperate to believe it, Willie thought. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps his father’s symbol, the same colophon he put on every one of his books, had kept him out of harm’s way.
But if the hamsa did shield him from harm, what was the price for its protection? Was he cursed to live a long, long life, only to watch all his friends and loved ones fall by the wayside? To outlive everyone, even his enemies; to witness his popularity wane, his books forgotten. Perhaps at the end he would beg to be released from life; he would open his mouth as wide as he could and let the water roar down his throat; he would swallow it all in.
Before stepping back into the street Willie looked at the hamsa again. As they walked away from the House of Doors he and Lesley, by some silent agreement, both turned back at the same time to take one last look.
The hamsa had disappeared back beneath the wood, and the cyphered doors were blank and impassive once more.