WILFRED DROVE SLOWLY, CONCENTRATING hard. Although his physical health had recovered in the years since the war, his nerves were still bad and he found driving a strain. In the chaotic traffic conditions of the rutted Singapore roads, he was always afraid of killing someone. The car was third hand, but in good condition and served his purpose. Some mornings he dropped Cynthia at the General Hospital and then, if it was necessary, drove to the Reuters office in Cecil Street.
He had not returned to The Straits Times when his health improved but had instead joined Reuters on a freelance basis. He had also agreed to be the Malaya correspondent for the Observer in London, writing a weekly column for the newspaper. He was working mostly from home where he could break off and rest as the doctor insisted. His back and legs never stopped troubling him after the experiences in the Japanese camp. There were also headaches, and frequent shivering fits that were the remains of malaria. He still could not sleep without a pill; but generally he was better, and refused to complain.
Although the city was still battered in appearance, life in Singapore had returned to normal, and food was once more available. Except for a remaining couple of families living in makeshift huts in the garden, the squatters were long gone from Belvedere; the house looked much as before, if shabbier. They had reclaimed their old room and Cynthia had somehow managed to buy new curtains and a spring mattress for their bed. Now that Wilfred was stronger and earning money again, he and Cynthia had decided to move out of Belvedere and look for a home of their own, much to Rose’s distress. They had also decided to try for a child; they were full of plans and Cynthia had agreed to give up work if they had a family. She held a responsible position at the General Hospital, involved with the training of young nurses at a newly established nursing school. Although this absorbed her, it was disheartening to find that on their return the British had brought back all the old structures; senior nursing staff were again European and Cynthia, as a local, was once more second-rung personnel. Once Wilfred’s health had improved, he encouraged her to return to full-time work, knowing she missed it. It was impossible also for Wilfred to tell Cynthia how much he wanted to be alone; sometimes he did nothing but lie on the bed all day, staring up at the whirling fan.
That morning he had dropped Cynthia not at the General Hospital, but at Joo Chiat Hospital where she had a matter to discuss with Dr Wong. From there he planned to drive to the Reuters office. The Joo Chiat area was less familiar to him than the central roads in town, and trying to take a short cut he was soon lost. By the many roadside stalls and kampong-style houses and the preponderance of Malay faces, he knew he was in Geylang Serai. On the narrow street the traffic was unusually thick and he wondered if there was an accident ahead. The strong rotting smell of durian from the many fruit stalls along the road drifted to him through the open car window.
Soon he was forced to draw to a halt behind a thick mass of stationary traffic; in the distance he heard shouting. Although he pressed the car horn, nothing moved and the driver of the bullock cart ahead glanced over his shoulder and gesticulated angrily. Already, exhausted by the stress of driving on a strange road, Wilfred’s hands were trembling on the steering wheel. He could not move backwards or forwards for the press of carts and trishaws now piling up around him. A group of Malay youths rushed by waving their arms and yelling aggressively. Usually, it was the Chinese communists who ran around shouting and agitating; the Malays were a peaceful people and Wilfred stared out of the open window in surprise, noticing in alarm that several of the young men were carrying lethal looking parangs. He decided to make an attempt to turn the car around and drive back in the direction he had come to find an alternative route.
Slowly, after much tooting of the horn, room was reluctantly made for him to edge the car out into the opposite lane. Another group of excited Malays appeared, shaking their fists. At the sound of Wilfred’s impatient honking the youths halted, staring angrily at him as he peered anxiously out of the window. With a shout of fury, one of them stepped into the traffic as if he would approach the car, but then decided otherwise and ran on behind his friends. Wilfred saw with further alarm that all the young men carried an assortment of knives, as if prepared for violence. Everyone had now turned to observe him, and he realised with a throb of panic that he was the only white man in the vicinity.
With difficulty, he completed the turn and felt relieved as he began to drive back along the road. After a short distance an acrid smell of burning rubber came to him, and he saw that a car ahead of him had been overturned and set on fire. Flames shot up as the petrol ignited. The young men who had passed him earlier were running around the burning car, shouting wildly. Wilfred’s heart leapt in fear. Quickly, he turned into a narrow unpaved road to his right, hoping his car had not been seen. His head thumped painfully, and his hands now trembled so violently he was afraid he would lose control of the vehicle. The narrow dirt track was deserted; filled with relief, he stopped the car beside some kampong houses, mopping his brow and bending to retrieve the water flask that had rolled off the seat on to the floor. Before he could straighten and take a drink, shouting welled up around him. Out of the back window he saw a crowd of men racing towards him. In panic he reached for the ignition, fumbling with the key.
Before he could start the engine, they were around him. The door was tugged open and he was pulled out. All he could see was a mass of dark angry faces, wet mouths, white teeth. He was thrown to the ground and kicked. Other blows followed, hurled down viciously at him. Beyond the pain and shock of attack was the knowledge that these men were prepared to kill him. He saw the flash of kris and parang and prayed he would not feel the sharp blades.
A man in the camp had been beheaded because he was too sick to lift a stone and, no longer caring, spat at the Japanese guard. He was pushed to his knees and the guard’s long sword came down upon the man, severing his head in a single stroke. It rolled down the slope like a football, while blood fountained out of the fallen body. Wilfred remembered the rushing sound of the blade as it cut through the air before slicing into the man. Now, holding up his arms to fend off blows, he did not see the iron bar coming down until it cracked sickeningly upon his head. His mind floated over the black edge of consciousness, just as it had many times before in the camp.
When Wilfred opened his eyes the first thing he saw were the blades of a fan turning lazily above him. Everything was white and light. There was silence, and the louvres of a half-shuttered window threw slatted shadows on to the wall. A smell of flowers came to him, and when he turned his head in the direction of this perfume he saw Cynthia sitting on a chair a short distance away, a vase of flowers beside her. She came to him immediately, and put a cool hand on his head.
‘The police found you. Luckily you had identification on you and they called us,’ she told him. He saw she wore her nurse’s uniform, and that he was in a hospital ward.
‘I cannot feel my legs,’ he said, trying not to sound desperate.
‘You have been in and out of consciousness for three weeks.’ Cynthia pulled a chair up beside the bed and wiped tears from her eyes with the back of her hand; she had requested Matron to take her off her usual duties so that she could nurse Wilfred privately.
‘I cannot feel my legs,’ he repeated, trying to remember what had happened and seeing only confused images.
‘You’re lucky to be alive,’ Cynthia admitted in a low voice. He realised then that his head was heavily bandaged and his limbs were weighted down with plaster. Cynthia’s voice was calm and professional but he saw tears spring again to her eyes. Both his legs were broken and the doctors said he might have difficulty walking again, the blow to his head had fractured his skull, Cynthia told him. All their plans must be put on hold.
‘There was Muslim rioting; it was that custody case,’ she told him later, mentioning the court case everyone had been following in the paper, of a Dutch girl, adopted by a Muslim woman when the Japanese had interned her parents during the war. The girl had been brought up as a Muslim but the Dutch mother now wanted her back and returned to the Catholic faith. The Muslim community had gone mad, massing in front of the court, indiscriminately attacking white people and property.
It took many months for Wilfred to recover from the vicious attack but slowly he regained some use of his limbs; his head wound healed without the predicted dire consequences. Eventually, he was discharged from hospital and returned to Belvedere. Then, every day with Cynthia’s help he hauled himself out of the wheelchair and, supported on each side, attempted to walk, his legs buckling painfully beneath him. Although his body responded to rest and care, he had fallen again into depression, speaking little and erupting often into uncontrollable anger. Cynthia was distraught. It had taken so long for him to return to physical and mental health after his experiences as a POW. When he joined Reuters she had been happy to see him interested again in life. Now, in a stray moment of violence, everything was wiped out and the struggle back to health must begin again.
Yet, once he was free of the plaster casts and his wounds had healed, she sensed the difference in him. She caught not sorrow, but the hard fist of his anger. He railed at her continuously, and even when he apologised began almost immediately shouting again over things she thought were trifling. She knew he could not help himself, and that his anger must be taken as a positive sign.
‘I do not want to sit with your mother,’ he told her sharply one morning, as she pushed the wheelchair across the red Malacca tiles of Belvedere’s dining room to where Rose sat crocheting on the old chintz sofa.
‘Two invalids keeping each other company. You know she misses Mavis.’ Cynthia laughed to humour him. Mavis had returned to Penang some time before, and Rose was surprised to find how lonely she felt without her. She had aged suddenly and now suffered from angina that required her to rest.
‘I’m a wreck,’ Wilfred admitted to Rose, as Cynthia settled the wheelchair beside the sofa and drew up a chair for herself. Ah Fong brought coffee and they sat together before the open windows facing the orchard. In the war a shell had landed in the middle of the mangos-teens and many charred and leafless trees still clustered lifelessly about the crater.
‘You should clear them away,’ Wilfred advised, staring critically at the trees as he picked up a copy of The Straits Times that lay folded across his knees.
‘They’re not yet dead,’ Rose insisted calmly. Wilfred shook the newspaper open with an angry flourish.
‘Sometimes it’s hard to die. Nothing seems to finishes you off – it only leaves you half alive.’ Wilfred spoke so fiercely that Rose fell silent and returned her attention to her crocheting. Cynthia looked down at her hands and for once had no words of comfort to offer. It pained Rose to see her daughter suffer, always caring for others, her own life not yet begun; now, tied to the routine of nursing an invalid husband again. And Rose herself was now added to Cynthia’s burden.
Because of her angina Rose was forced for a good part of the day to rest on the old sofa, her feet propped up on a cushion. When they eventually got rid of the squatters, the sofa had been discovered in a far corner of Belvedere, its springs broken, its stuffing regurgitated but with its frame intact; she had it reupholstered in the usual pink chintz. Its condition was similar to her own she thought; the war had taken its toll on them all.
Beside her in his wheelchair, Wilfred was locked into a world of silent misery. She stared at his angry profile, the uneven bridge of his nose, the gaunt cheeks and the sensitive lips, clearly revealed now that he had shaven off his moustache, and felt for him. She observed his hand on the arm of the chair, permanently callused from forced labour on that terrible railway, and now crookedly healed after the riot when his fingers had been smashed.
‘Why don’t you write about that time in the camp?’ Impulsively, she voiced an idea that had occurred to her earlier, but then regretted her words. The subject of Wilfred’s ordeal as a prisoner of war was taboo. She saw his jaw tighten immediately and lowered her eyes to the crochet hook, working it in and out of the lacy threads of a growing tablemat. Cynthia looked at her mother in surprise, struck by the idea, and dared to say what Rose could not.
‘That’s what you must do. You need to tell the world about it. People need to hear. And the dead would be happy if you spoke for them; how else can their story be known? If you can do this, then all those poor men will not have died in vain.’
There was a gruff intake of breath from Wilfred and then a noisy folding up of The Straits Times. In fury he placed his hands on the wheels of the chair and propelled himself back to his room. Cynthia sighed deeply, staring down at her hands, while Rose looked after Wilfred in sad perplexity as he slammed shut the door of his room.
‘Perhaps everything here is too old or broken to recover,’ Cynthia remarked, looking up at the cavernous Belvedere ceiling. Once the squatters had gone the true state of the place had been revealed. There was no money to repair the damage but they had patched it up as best they could over the years since the Japanese departed.
‘We’ll advertise again for lodgers,’ Rose said in false brightness.
‘You know that’s useless. Who will want to lodge in a place like this?’ Cynthia replied, observing the peeling paint and splintered, lopsided blinds. A three-legged planter was propped up with a stone; on the dirty wall was a pale square where a picture had once hung.
Although the British had returned to the island, Rose soon discovered that young men with fresh faces and a spring in their step ignored Belvedere’s run-down accommodation. Only two ancient Eurasian widowers, and an old British major who could afford no better, had been installed as lodgers. And worst of all, Howard had gone to Australia.
Against her advice he had got himself a place at the University of Sydney to study politics and economics. It was pure madness, she thought, throwing up a good job at the Harbour Board for an unknown future, but he had refused to listen. He had even put himself in debt to a wealthy Indian who Rose was sure would squeeze every penny of interest from him. It was after he left that the angina started and, although he wrote regularly, Rose had not told him the pain she suffered or her loneliness without him.
It was some weeks later, when he could hobble by himself upon a stick, that Wilfred asked Cynthia to set up his typewriter in their room. For the next few months, when he got up each morning he went to his desk and was seen thereafter only at mealtimes. He wanted nobody near him, not even Cynthia. She tiptoed about as quietly as she could, observing Wilfred in a frenzy of anguish as he ripped half-written pages out of the typewriter, throwing them in the waste paper basket at such a rate that she wished she had never suggested he write about his experiences.
‘I can’t find a way in,’ he shouted at Cynthia, dropping his head in his hands, his memories, although so vivid within him, seeming inaccessible. He had tried first to write down his experiences in the form of non-fiction, then as autobiography, then in diary form but nothing worked; he could not find the voice that would lead him to himself. Then, one night in the early hours he shook Cynthia awake.
‘Help me to the desk,’ he said urgently. After settling him there, she returned to bed.
In the morning she was surprised to find he was still at the typewriter, the sound of his fingers hitting the keys competing with the morning chorus of birds. He tried to explain that he had been woken by a sentence pacing about in his head. When he had written it down another appeared, followed by yet another, one sentence piling up behind the last. By morning he knew a book was being painfully forced from him, twisting his gut inside out. To his surprise he found he was writing a novel, something he had not thought of doing. Yet, he knew he must follow the invisible thread now offered him and go wherever it led.
From then on, day after day, he refused to move from the desk as he journeyed again through an underworld, falling deeper and deeper into its darkness. Once he could transpose emotion on to another person, even if that other was a creature of fiction, he found he could enter experience. The release this brought him made him ill in a different way, as he fought to transcend and examine the evil that had trapped them all in its hellish world. The fibres of his being were worn thinner and thinner by the effort of reliving, but as the pages piled up he knew in some way he was regaining himself.
Sometimes, he stared at the innocuous words on the page and wondered at the dark universe compressed into those small black letters. If he stared at them hard enough they lost all meaning, appearing an incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo of ciphers. Yet, still he wrote and wrote and could not stop. Lunch, and sometimes also dinner, was taken in swift bites at his desk. Then, suddenly, it was finished, as unexpectedly as it had started. He put a full stop at the end of a line and knew it was done, that there was nothing more to say. For days then, he was drained and listless and sad, and free. He cried unashamedly.
Cynthia went through the manuscript, packed it up and sent it to a publisher in London, for Wilfred was unable to look at it again. Now that it was done, he did not know where the words had come from and immediately recoiled from them. Reading the book, Cynthia was deeply shaken, for until then she had not known the details of his time as a prisoner of war. He had said nothing, and she had not dared to question. Now, she was haunted by what she knew.
The few years in England had passed quickly for Mei Lan and she had stayed longer than intended, passing her law examinations with honours. When, after she had given evidence at the war crimes tribunal, she finally left Singapore for Oxford, she found St Hilda’s College already primed for her arrival. Her tutor persuaded her to see a psychiatrist, an eminent Oxford man who was an expert in the treatment of traumatised minds. She could not say how much he helped her, but she tried to believe that a process of healing had begun; if she believed, then it might happen. At first study had been almost impossible, but slowly she learned to concentrate again, her memory improved, the dynamics of everyday living fell into familiar places; life caught her once more. She managed to form tepid friendships with a few of the other women students, but took such care to seal her past from examination that it was said she was aloof. Men gossiped about how she rejected even flippant advances, drawing back into herself like a threatened animal. The general opinion was that she was academically brilliant but a social misfit; a Chinese oddball, they called her.
During this time letters arrived regularly from Howard, telling her of his life in Australia, the university in Sydney, the work, the beaches, the kangaroos and arid hinterland. Each one reiterated in different words the sentiments he held for her. Once or twice she had replied, but his letters lay like stones in her hands. The effort of correspondence grew too heavy to support, and she turned away in silence, reading but not answering, unsure of her feelings for him, unsure of anything in her life. In one letter he even raised the subject of marriage, suggesting that once they both finished their studies, they consider becoming engaged. She found the idea of marriage confusing. She no longer knew who she was: how could she bind herself to another? Howard’s letters grew less frequent, as if responding to her silence.
Now, she sat at a desk in the office of the law firm Able Long & Swynburne in London. The job at Gray’s Inn had come to her through a contact of JJ’s. Norbert Swynburne, an elderly and benevolent lawyer, had originally been introduced to JJ by Mr Cheong of Bayley McDonald & Cheong, the law firm Lim Hock An used in Singapore. A widower with grown-up children, with a grey beard and ample girth, he had been guardian to JJ when he was studying in England. Norbert was the senior partner in Able Long & Swynburne, and he suggested Mei Lan work for some time with the practice.
‘You’re the only woman here besides Miss Wakefield,’ Norbert had said on her first day, pointing out a thick-waisted spinster with a bolster-breast and spetacles. ‘If the war hadn’t happened, JJ would have worked with us too,’ he added. Her throat constricted and tears pricked her eyes.
She liked living in London, liked the graceful buildings, the sedate introspection of the place; the greyness of it all suited her emotions. The city struggled, as did everywhere else in Europe, with post-war austerity. Memories of the Blitz were everywhere still, in the sudden empty spaces between crowded houses or the occasional mound of bomb rubble sprouting weeds. These scars only pulled her closer to the city, for she knew it shared with her a common trauma. She had rented a small flat in Kensington, just off the High Street, and travelled each day to work by the Underground. The sun was seldom seen and she had not missed it and would have run from its joyful flamboyance had it stayed in the sky for too long. She felt no desire to return to Singapore.
Her desk in Able Long & Swynburne was beside a narrow window in a panelled room of warped beams and creaking, thinly carpeted floor. There was a smell of dampness. Norbert told her the building was of eighteenth-century construction, all its parts huddled excessively together; door frames were crooked, staircases narrow and sewage pipes often blocked. From the window she could see the great dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, and the grey clouds blowing about in the sky, the light changing by the hour.
Norbert spoke Mandarin and some Cantonese and had been born in China, living there until he was seven. ‘My parents were missionaries although, as you can see, I didn’t follow in their footsteps and disappointed them terribly,’ he told her.
He invited her frequently to dinner at a small family run Italian restaurant near the office, with candles stuck into the necks of wine bottles and red checked tablecloths. He liked to talk about China, its history and art, for which he had a great fondness. Singapore was a place he knew well, having lived there when his parents moved from China. Unlike with the students at Oxford or the other bowler-hatted men in the office, there seemed nothing to explain to Norbert and talk flowed easily between them. Mei Lan had never tasted wine before meeting Norbert, who always consumed copious amounts. Although she drank only a glass or two, the charge of release it gave her began to be addictive. Inside, she softened unmanageably, but she liked the feeling; a weight was eased. Norbert was the first person to whom she told anything of her imprisonment by the kempetai. Yet, even to him, she was ashamed to admit how much the shadow of Nakamura still underpinned her life. She could not show him the scars on her back or tell him how, in the red-brick streets of Kensington, on a bus or in the green oasis of Hyde Park, Nakamura might appear, rising up suddenly like an evil genie in an oddly shaped tree trunk, a shadow, or in the image of an innocent man walking briskly towards her. Once, in Oxford, on the calm stretch of St Giles he had stood squarely before her, booted legs apart, and she had stopped, poleaxed, and sunk down on the pavement, hands covering her head. People had rushed to help; an ambulance had been called.
Norbert asked nothing, understanding that the worst was still locked deep inside her. He waited for her to tell him, or not to tell him, as she wished. In the office of Able Long & Swynburne everyone thought they were having an affair. He took her home, to a tall gloomy house in Putney with a garden of ancient rhododendrons dappled in sunlight and shadow. The place had a bachelor smell about it of whisky dregs, old furniture and cold, closed-up rooms.
‘I only use a bedroom and kitchen and this one room downstairs since Diana died,’ he admitted. Their companionship was peaceable. They sat in separate chairs and talked, on either side of a gas fire that resembled blazing logs.
‘We could get married,’ he said wistfully one day across the space between them. It seemed outlandish and she told him so, and in reply he sighed and nodded.
Once, when the opportunity arose, he pulled her to him and she felt the soft, bearish bulk of him and the wiry brush of his beard enfolding her. He kissed her wetly, and she let him. In the second year, on his birthday, she gave him the only gift he wanted. She had not thought it out, had not intended it. The wine they had drunk slowed her impulses, and that night he had been persistent, leading her gently step by step towards the place she dreaded to go. When his hands at last travelled over her body she struggled to pull away, the old terror surging through her, but it was too late. Already the cushioning of his soft body overpowered her, and she closed her eyes and bit her lip as he rocked above her, unresponsive and dead to his touch, enduring. It happened several times again, when wine had got the better of them both. Their relationship was a stately dance of minimal contact and, once the rules were established, it remained that way.
‘Marry me,’ he had mumbled into her neck, still lying upon her, the weight of him pressing the breath from her body before he rolled awkwardly off her and she could breathe again. He had asked her several times before and she made no reply, but now she was tempted to agree. His kindness and strength were becoming addictive, like the wine she looked forward to drinking with him each night. It might be a means of escape, she recognised, but escape was all she wanted.
‘Marry me,’ Norbert pleaded again, lying flat on his back beside her. She turned her head away, her eyes settling on his clothes folded over the back of a chair – the worn, long-sleeved woollen vest, the baggy underpants, the looped braces of his pinstriped trousers – and inhaled the medicinal smell of his hair oil and knew in that moment that there was no escape, and that she would return to Singapore.
‘I must go back,’ she told him. ‘I cannot go forwards unless I go back. I’m just living in limbo here.’ As the words fell from her she knew something inside her must work independently, shaped by a will of its own.