Jubilee (27 page)

‘Of course I bloody want answers.’ The rage was starting to build now. She stood. ‘Why?’ Her mother: baking her cakes, reading her stories, taking her into her own bed in
the night when she’d had bad dreams to stroke her hair and talk gently to her, her mother, stolen from her. The farm. Rachel. The games in the farmyard. All taken away. Replaced with the year
in the dusty outback with the growling farm dogs. The remains of her childhood spent in this humid, distant township and a stuffy boarding school.

‘What were you thinking?’ Her hands were clenched into fists. She could have smashed them into his face. The blood was steaming inside her head now. He didn’t flinch.

‘I don’t know. I saw things. Perhaps they weren’t there. I thought you were in danger.’

‘Who from?’

‘Your mother.’

She tried to speak and choked.

‘I can’t explain, Jess. It’s as though I was possessed. And Martha told me you were in danger.’

She was shaking now. ‘You thought my mother would harm me? Why in God’s name did you believe that bitch?’

‘It’s a funny thing, Jess, but the pain clears my head. It’s like a probe which forces me to see what’s true. I can see now that I was deranged. Insane. I haven’t
known what was real and what wasn’t since they stood me in the blazing sun for all those days. You think I’m making excuses? Of course you do. You hate me.’

‘Yes, I hate you.’

‘You want to kill me. I don’t blame you.’

‘I’m not going to bloody kill you. I’m not going to make this easy for you. Even if you’re about to die, you can face what you’ve done. You can face it and you can
give me answers. And then I’m going to consider whether I ring the police.’ She heard herself and gave a bitter laugh. What would be the point? What could the law do to him that illness
wouldn’t accomplish within the next day or so?

‘Your mother wasn’t harming you, was she?’ He sounded sad. ‘Poor little Evie. How could I imagine she’d hurt a fly? Always such a gentle child, good with the
animals, too. Yet Martha told me your mother couldn’t manage the animals, that they were getting sick and she was finding it hard to look after you alongside everything else. Martha said you
were suffering. I had to trust her. She’s always been part of my life. She’s known me from the day I was born.’

That wrinkled face with its staring eyes, always coming upon them while they were playing, talking of the old days, when Robert and Matthew helped their father and Martha was such an important
part of their lives.
It’s not for me to say but I know that old Mr Winter depended on me for the sheep . . . During the war I was there to keep an eye on things . . . I never liked to
leave the farm after your father died, Jess. I know he’d have wanted me to stay . . .

‘The evil old cow.’ Jessamy struck out with her foot, catching the oxygen cylinder and sending it towards the wall. The mask would be out of his reach now. ‘You listened to her
and let her persuade you to do this.’ A group of rosellas outside shrieked a kweet-kweet of panic.

‘In the camp we’d hear birds make a noise like that when something was going to happen. Sometimes I wonder why I ended up back in the tropics.’ He sounded far away now.
‘Sometimes I’m still there, Jessamy. I’m in those forests and I’m trying to run away with Noi but they’re catching up with us.’

‘What’s still happening?’

‘The little girl, Noi. I didn’t look after her properly. But then she had a bad fever and I stayed by her. I think she got well again but I’m not sure. That might have been
Evie.’ He peered at her through his yellow eyes. ‘Or was that you, Jess?’

‘It was me, I had the fever.’ But Jessamy’s thoughts were all with Evie, still thinking her daughter was dead. ‘I could ring her.’ She glanced at the phone.
‘I could pick up that receiver and find out her telephone number and ring her. Right now.’

‘I wanted to protect you, Noi.’

‘My name is Jessamy,’ she screamed. ‘And you stole me from my mother.’ Her heart was going to burst right out of her chest. ‘How the hell could you have ever
thought you were protecting me by taking me from my mother?’

He shook his head and let it slump to one shoulder. ‘Tell her . . .’

‘I could tell her that I’m in the same room as my abductor and that he was my own uncle. I could tell her that all the pain she’s felt over the last twenty-five years was
caused by her own brother-in-law.’ Jessamy thought of her twins, how she felt when they spent holidays without her with their father. But to imagine them gone, dead, vanished, to wait for
years without a definite answer . . . She thought she might actually vomit. ‘How could you do this?’ She watched him. ‘Robert . . .?’ He gave no sign of having heard. His
breathing was harsh and there were pauses between each breath. She waited for a minute before going over to him and touching his shoulder. No response. She turned away before her hand could pick up
a cushion and hold it over his face until his lungs gave out. Or perhaps she could just leave the room and let him die: alone, untended, like a wild animal. Would he realize he’d been
abandoned? Serve him right. He was nothing to her, nothing at all. He moaned and muttered something. ‘Noi? Read . . . letters in drawer. Please . . . read.’

‘What letters?’

‘Drawer . . . by bed . . . please read . . .’

She shook her head, picked up her car keys and walked out of the room, letting herself out of the house. She sat in her car and switched on the engine.

Then she switched off the engine, picked up her cell phone and called for an ambulance.

Rachel

2003

‘I was still so angry I didn’t want to read them,’ Jessamy said. ‘I waited a day or so after his death. He’d addressed them to my mother. It felt
. . . weird. As though there was some kind of relationship between them.’

‘Perhaps there was.’

‘She was just a kid back in the war.’ She reached into her rucksack. ‘Here. Want to read them?’ She pulled out a small bundle, held together with a couple of rubber
bands.

The offer was made almost offhandedly. But I sensed my cousin wanted me to look at the letters. I took them from her and undid the bands. The letters were arranged in date order, starting in
1942.

‘You can save some time by going straight to November 1943,’ Jessamy said. ‘That’s when things really started falling apart for Robert. The seeds were already sown but he
might have come back to England a sane man if it hadn’t been for . . .’ She nodded at the pile. ‘Well, you’ll see for yourself.’

Kanburi Camp, 14 November 1943

Dear Evie,

Today. It must be today. There’s word they’ll move us further up into the mountains in another forced march. Matthew will not survive. The malaria has left him so weak and the
ulcer on his leg has poisoned the skin so that the bone is now visible. We need medicines and there are none.

I have saved a large amount of baht. ‘It’s not worth it, Bobby,’ Matthew told me. ‘Don’t take the risk. I expect I’ll do just fine without quinine and
iodine and all those things.’

He didn’t mention the leg. He must know that the stench of the ulcer hits us before we’ve even entered the hut.

‘You’re mad if you chance it, Winter,’ said Macgregor from his mat, where he sat counting his snails in their biscuit tin. Macgregor has been farming snails for their
nutritional value. He does quite good trade. ‘Word is the Japs have paid the guards extra to hunt out spies. Spy being anyone they don’t like the look of.’

‘It might be dangerous for the girl, too,’ said Matthew.

‘Don’t worry about the Thai,’ said Macgregor. ‘Worry more for your own skin. And ours.’ He gave an apologetic cough. ‘If they search this hut and find your
letters it’s the Kempeitai for you.’

We see the Japanese security police, the Kempeitai, as Europeans do the Gestapo.

‘Mightn’t be a bad idea to move the letters, old man,’ said Matthew.

I know a tree stump by the cesspit, a place nobody sane would insert their fingers for fear of kraits.

15 November 1943

Something is happening here. The guards are restless. They search us each time we leave the camp, looking for something. Radios? Three more British officers were dragged out
of their huts today.

Two days later

Still no quinine because there’s no sign of Noi. The traders keep themselves to themselves at the moment. Apparently the Nips are convinced that a spy ring is
operating here. They think POWs use the traders to pass information God knows where. But I look at my brother and I know he will never again see the farm if we can’t get the quinine and
something for the ulcer. He is the eldest Winter, the heir. Dad wanted him to have Winter’s Copse. I’ve always known that and accepted it, too.

Just thinking of the cool, clean, green of the Downs is cruel as I sit writing this on my fetid mat, my skin a mass of sores and insect bites, constantly dripping with sweat. Mum would hang
out the sheets on a breezy day and tell us the wind shooting up from the west, from the Bristol Channel and the Atlantic itself would act as a natural disinfectant. ‘Clean air keeps people
healthy,’ she said. This tropical air is like a germ-ridden damp cloth round the body.

I saw Noi this morning with some other children by a stall in the town. The guards were using their bayonets to flick up the cloths covering the stalls. I had to take a
chance. Noi gave me a half-smile and looked away. I called her. She gave a slight shake of the head and vanished behind the stall. I cursed, I’d scared her. She was just a kid, for
God’s sake, same age as Evie when Evie first came to the farm. Unfair to rely on her like this. But then I thought of my brother, shivering on his mat, too sick to come out on the working
party. Any day the Japs might take him out and shoot him, ‘in mercy’ as they put it. The thought steeled me. I looked around for another Thai trader. Noi had been trustworthy,
wouldn’t someone else be?

A middle-aged man arranging mangoes in a basket made eye contact as I walked past. ‘You want something, mistah?’

I shook my head.

‘You need eggs? Soap?’ I walked on.

‘Medicine?’ He almost threw the line away as though he’d given up the attempt to sell to me.

‘Quinine,’ I said. The word just fell out of my mouth.

‘You pay how much?’

I took most of the baht out of my pocket, keeping some back. He nodded, looking satisfied.

‘On way back to camp tomorrow.’ His eyes dropped down to the mangoes.

18 November

I think the God I prayed to in the cool church back in Craven with the pools of light dripping from the stained glass has left me.

And I deserve to be abandoned. I deserve the broken wrist of my left hand, which I’ve tried to bind with my shirt so that it doesn’t hang loose, and which was the parting present
of the guards before they locked me in this cell. I’ll write what happened.

The day after I spoke to the trader we were working on the line as usual. The sleepers are nearly all laid now and we were sent on ahead about a quarter of a mile to cut
down trees. This work tears the hands. Each cut, each splinter, becomes septic in the tropical heat. Suddenly, from behind one of the carts we use for transporting spoil came Noi, running to me,
her face pale. ‘No buy quinine.’ She glanced over her shoulder and I saw she was scared. ‘Japanese look.’

‘I need quinine, Noi. My brother . . .’

I don’t know if she understood the word, she stared at me
blankly.

I touched my heart. ‘Brother ill.’ I placed my hand on my brow and pretended to wipe it. ‘Quinine good.’

‘No!’ She shook her head again. ‘No go for quinine.’ Then she ran off again.

We finished our shift and walked back to the town along the railway. The stallholders had gone. I looked for the man who’d offered me the quinine. No sign of him. As we reached the teak
trees someone stood out from the shadows and pulled my sleeve. ‘Mistah.’ The mango seller. The guards had gone on ahead, hidden by a curve in the path. ‘Quinine in here, is
safer.’ I followed him into the shade. He was right, we were almost completely hidden from the path, I could buy the quinine unobserved.

He led me on through the undergrowth. ‘Very good iodine. And I have also disinfectant as well as iodine.’

I could stock up, be prepared for the next infectious illness.

‘Not far.’

‘Where are we going?’ I was growing nervous, too much time was passing, if the guards turned round and counted the prisoners on the track they’d soon spot I’d
gone.

‘I have other things, too. You like aspirin?’

My temptation must have flickered over my face because he increased his pace so that I was almost running to keep up with him. The macaques in the branches overhead gave warning chatters and
swung away from us.

Then she was running towards me. Noi. Hand held out to stop me, she was shaking her head, ‘Man bad!’

That chattering in the jungle ahead of me wasn’t gibbons any more. It was the guards. Even the birds seemed to have grown silent.

Noi pulled me by the hand, dragging me along. ‘Back to track.’ Behind us boots pounded. Above us a shot cracked. I pushed Noi towards the trees. Another gun fired. We crouched in
the undergrowth. I could make out the caps of the guards above the bushes. A centipede wriggled on a branch just above Noi’s head and I longed to swipe it away.

The hand on my shoulder sent me flying face-first into the bush. Thorns pierced my skin. When I stood I saw they had Noi and were dragging her off, a tiny figure, face grey and rigid.
‘Let her go,’ I shouted. ‘She’s done nothing.’

‘You spy too,’ the guard shouted.

‘Child, just ten.’ I held up my fingers to show them. ‘Not spy.’ His answer was to swing the butt of his rifle into my solar plexus. When I could rise to my feet again
I was winded.