A Different Sky (54 page)

‘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.