Kon shrugged, and pointed to his shirt. “Maybe because I like wearing white.”
“And the Tiger?”
He looked put out at my question, and I held out my palms. “I can guess. I don’t wish to know.”
“Eat your food,” he said.
“Why is that woman smiling at us?” I asked. A young Chinese woman in a red
cheongsam
waved her handkerchief to catch my attention. She stood outlined in a doorframe, the light behind her making her look older.
Kon turned to look. “She’s a whore, and she wants you in her bed.”
“Oh, I thought she was just an old friend of yours.”
The food came, and we ate hungrily. The
yew-char-kway
was crunchy and steaming hot and tasted wonderful soaked in porridge. “I’ll have another bowl of porridge,” I shouted to the hawker. Trishaw pullers came and parked their trishaws by the road, and then sat around us, and suddenly the atmosphere was noisy and filled with their friendly curses.
“You should sit like them,” Kon said.
“What? How?” I studied the men, noting that they pulled one leg onto the bench when they sat, and kept one knee protruding over the table like the peak of a hill as they shoveled food into their mouths.
“Maybe at the next Resident Councillor’s Ball,” I said.
We both stood up at the same time as a commotion came from the brothel. A rough male voice rose over the noise of the tables. “Get out! Out!” The swinging doors clapped open and a middle-aged Englishman tumbled out onto the passageway and crashed into a pillar. He rolled around as a Chinese youth came out and kicked his head.
“Enough of that!” Kon said and blocked another kick. The Chinese pulled back his hand and clenched his fists, but then he recognized Kon.
“Master Kon, I apologize. But this
ang-moh
was making a nuisance of himself.”
“Leave him to me,” Kon said. The man obeyed him without another word, and went back inside. The trishaw pullers around us went back to their food.
Kon led the drunken Englishman to our table and gave him a cup of tea. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, yes. Pretty girls . . . Oh yes, we’ll have a good time ...” the man mumbled. Kon forced the tea into him and after a moment he seemed to sober up. “I think you saved me there. But who the hell are you?”
“Two friends out having dinner,” I said.
“Can you take me back to my hotel?”
I shouted for our bill and the Englishman eyed me with a calculating look.
In the car he told us his name was Martin Edgecumbe. “What were you doing in that part of town?” I asked.
“You seem to speak the local dialect well for a European,” he said, ignoring my question.
“My mother was Chinese,” I said.
I told him my name, and he narrowed his eyes. “Noel Hutton’s son?”
“That’s correct.”
“And you?” He looked to Kon, who told him his name.
“Are you going to say you know whose son he is?” I said with a touch of sarcasm.
“Towkay Yeap’s son,” Edgecumbe said.
“I think it’s our turn to ask—just who the hell are
you?”
I said.
“Take me to the E & O,” Edgecumbe said, once again ignoring me.
As befitting the grandeur of the legendary Eastern & Oriental Hotel, Balwant Singh, the Sikh hall porter, seemed unperturbed when we supported Edgecumbe, his nose bleeding, upstairs to his room.
Kon cracked some ice, wrapped it in a towel and gave it to Edgecumbe. The room was luxurious and a balcony opened out to the swimming pool and the sea below. The night wind blew from shore to sea, streaming through the coconut fronds. The surf glowed white where it edged the beach and the moon, full and round, appeared so close and hard.
“What other languages do you two speak?” Edgecumbe asked as he patted his nose with the packed ice. Kon, shaking his head at such feeble attempts, snatched the ice and pressed it hard into Edgecumbe’s nose. He shouted in pain. “Bloody hell! Let go!”
“Stop struggling; this will make the bleeding stop.”
I turned away to save him face, suppressing my laughter. He asked the question again and I said, “I speak Hokkien, English, Malay, some Cantonese, but none of the Indian dialects. My friend here speaks all the languages I speak, as well as Mandarin.”
“And both of us speak and write Japanese,” Kon added.
I wondered why I had left that out. Perhaps deep down I felt it was a shameful admission, not a wise thing to reveal. But I also knew that I had become so close to Endo-san that I hardly thought of his nationality now and, when we conversed, I was not aware that we spoke Japanese or English or a mixture of the two, but only that we spoke and understood each other so well. Hearing Kon state that I was fluent in Japanese sounded surprising even to myself.
“That’s unusual,” Edgecumbe said. “Then perhaps fate decided we were to meet tonight.”
Kon and I looked at each other, wondering what the man meant.
“You wouldn’t have heard of Force 136,” Edgecumbe went on, “so let me tell you what it’s all about. I must warn you that this is all classified and once you leave this room you are prohibited from discussing it with anyone else. Is that clear?”
I wanted to leave the room. I wanted no knowledge of what he was going to tell us, but Kon said, “Yes, we understand.”
“It’s a unit formed by the British military. We’re quite aware that the Japanese
may
intend to invade Malaya, although the Foreign Office doesn’t think it probable. We haven’t been sitting on our backsides, however. We’ve begun recruiting selected people to form groups of ‘stay-behind parties’ to counter the Japanese,
should
they declare war on us.”
“An organized resistance campaign,” I said, seeing the picture with immediate clarity, marveling at the audacity of the plan, at the same time feeling a sense of betrayal. So the British government already suspected that an attack would come, that Malaya would fall, and still they maintained daily that it would not, that the guns of Singapore would repel any such attempt.
“We’re looking for people who can speak Malay, Tamil, English, and any of the local Chinese dialects,” Edgecumbe continued.
“And then what?” Kon asked. His fascination with the plan made me want to take him away from Edgecumbe. I saw now that there was one big difference between Kon and me—he was idealistic and I was not. To me, Edgecumbe was no different from the
mandurs,
those eighteenth-century recruiting agents who had gone from village to village in India, enticing as many people as they could to sail to Malaya as coolies.
“Groups will be placed in the jungles to team up with the villagers and the jungle tribes. They’ll gather information about the enemy, probably even carry out sabotage against the Japanese,” Edgecumbe explained.
“And you’d like to recruit us?” Kon asked.
“I think you two would be perfect for it. You have the linguistic advantage. Christ, you two can even speak Japanese! We’d provide you with training, you know, elementary hand-to-hand fighting, nothing too complicated for you two youngsters. Some instructions in firearms as well and basic jungle survival skills.”
I did not like where the conversation was leading. I stood up and said to Kon, “It’s been a long day and I’m exhausted. How about heading home?”
“We’ll let you know, Mr. Edgecumbe,” Kon said, and the man wrote down his telephone number and gave it to Kon.
“Don’t think too long. There isn’t much time,” Edgecumbe said and, to me at that moment, he sounded very, very sober.
Chapter Eighteen
Kon was quiet during the drive and when I got out of the car at Istana I said, “What did you make of that chap Edgecumbe?”
He turned off the engine. “He sounded genuine. I might consider his offer. You?”
“I don’t know, really. Obviously I can’t discuss this with Endo-san. I’ll have to think it over.”
Edgecumbe’s proposal troubled me. The fact that he already had volunteers meant that there were rational people in Malaya who thought that war was highly probable.
“Let me know,” Kon said and started the engine.
“I will. Remember to come to the party,” I called out as he drove away. I saw him wave and waited under the portico until the lights of his vehicle had faded away.
* * *
Much as I needed to, I did not have the opportunity to talk again with Kon about Edgecumbe. Isabel and I were kept busy preparing for the party and, when I could snatch a quick moment, I was always told that Kon was not at home or that he was with his friend, Ronald Cross.
I let myself be diverted from morbid contemplation of the future. We made trips to the Cold Storage Company and Whiteaway Laidlaw & Co., making gleeful, almost manic purchases of crates of champagne and
pâté de foie gras,
telephoning Robinson’s in Singapore to deliver fresh Australian strawberries, making sure the house was cleaned and every surface dusted.
Due to the amount of work to be done we asked Uncle Lim if Ming would like to help out for extra money. She came a day later and I was happy to see that her stay in the village had removed her customary look of worry and fear. She was betrothed to a fisherman and seemed happy with the prospect.
Isabel gave me the name of a person she wanted to invite. “Put this one on the list,” she said, handing me a piece of paper.
“Peter MacAllister,” I said, eyeing her. “Who’s he? From your shooting club?”
“None of your business. Just put his name down.”
“All right, but you know damn well that the old man won’t approve of any man you bring,” I said. “He’s never liked any of your boyfriends.”
“Peter’s not ‘any man’ and Father will approve,” she said.
“So who’s Peter?”
“He’s a barrister in K.L.,” she said. “He’s forty-seven.”
“Oh dear,” I mocked her. “In that case we
must
put his name down.”
* * *
“I’m really glad we’re doing this,” Isabel said as we came out of Pritchards, where she had been choosing linen for the tables. I had taken the morning off in order to help her.
“Yes, it’s been a long while since our last big party,” I agreed.
“I also meant this,” she circled a hand in the air between us. “Spending time together.”
“It’s enjoyable,” I said. “I have better things to do, though.” I put on a disdainful and bored look but could not sustain it for long, and we both laughed.
It was an hour before lunchtime, and we decided to have drinks at the Eastern & Oriental Hotel. I looked around when we entered, wondering if Edgecumbe was still staying there. It had been almost a week since we had left him holding his ice pack in his room. I had a strong desire to discuss his offer with Isabel but Edgecumbe’s warning had been unequivocal.
She chose a table on the veranda, by the sea. The wooden blinds had been pulled up, and the breeze and the sun on our skins felt like a balm concocted from wind and light.
The E & O Hotel was owned by the Sarkies brothers, two Armenians who also ran the Raffles Hotel in Singapore. It was proud of its guest list, which had included Noël Coward and Somerset Maugham.
“He visited us once,” Isabel said. “You remember?”
“Who?” I said, distracted by the menu and thoughts of Edgecumbe.
“Somerset Maugham, silly. You weren’t listening. Father had a small dinner party for him and I was so disappointed when he never wrote about us. Probably found us too boring for words. You were quite young then.”
“I agree. We’re the most boring family in town!”
We watched a group of children swimming in the sea under the attentive eyes of their
amahs,
who were dressed in their customary black and white
samfoo
and sat beneath large umbrellas. The children’s joyful laughter carried on the wind and I found it was infectious.
“You should always look like that,” Isabel said.
I turned away from the sea. “What should I always look like?”
“Exactly like that,” she said. “You seem more happy recently. I don’t know how to describe it, but you feel more like a part of us.”
“I was always a part of all of you,” I replied, suddenly feeling reticent.
“No, you kept a certain distance. I suppose it was a bit hard, after Auntie Lian’s death,” she said, referring to my mother.
My parents had married in 1922 when Isabel was just four years old, and my mother had taken care of William and Isabel until her death in 1930. Edward had never warmed toward my mother but Isabel had once told me that Yu Lian had been more of a mother to her and William than to me because they at least had been old enough to remember her.
