The Persimmon Tree (6 page)

‘Oh, Nicholas, we are going in seven days! I cannot be here for your birthday!’ she cried, distressed.

‘I’ll be at sea, silly!’ I joked. ‘We’ll celebrate it together in Australia.’ I hesitated, then added tentatively, ‘It can be sort of our engagement?’ Then with my heart in my mouth I asked, ‘After the war… will you… er… marry me, Anna?’

To my surprise she giggled and kissed me smack on the mouth. Like whack! Then pulled back. ‘Of course!
Mijn
papa says after the war I must find a man just like you, Mr Butterfly,’ Anna said, laughing.

I don’t suppose I knew what her reaction might be, but her ingenuous response came as a surprise. I guess I still had a lot to learn about women. Still do, as a matter of fact. In an attempt to recover I said, ‘Well then, it will have to be me. I don’t suppose there are too many butterfly collectors in my age group.’

Anna clapped her hands, delighted. ‘Then I can be Madam Butterfly!’ she laughed, rising suddenly and plonking herself onto my lap, hands clasped around my neck as she kissed me all over my face.
Oh, Jesus, she’s going to feel it!
Here I was at the happiest moment in my young life and I had a hard-on that could have demolished a brick wall. I could feel it pressed against her thin cotton dress. It was pressing right on the spot it shouldn’t be!
Oh God, what if I come? I have to get her off my lap!

I pushed gently at her shoulders. ‘Anna, I… ’ But suddenly her bottom started to press downwards and her lips closed over mine, her tongue inside my mouth. ‘Oh, Jesus!’ I cried. It was too late! I was gone! All over, red rover! I was no longer in control. It was simply marvellous! I had never, of course, done the real thing, but every young bloke ‘took himself in hand’ from time to time, yet this was different, quite different; if doing it was even better I couldn’t imagine how. I had disgraced myself. The next few minutes were going to be hell. There would be a wet patch the size of a football at the front of my khaki shorts.
Oh shit!
What do I do next?

Anna withdrew her lips from mine and kissed me lightly on the forehead.

‘Anna, I’m… ’

‘Sssh! Now you are feeling better, Nicholas. That is good,
ja
, I think so.’ She rose from my lap, her hands placed on my shoulders, smiling down at me. ‘I love you, Mr Butterfly,’ she said softly.

‘I’m sorry, Anna.’ I looked down into my lap, shaking my head ruefully. I could feel the hot blush infusing my face. If the damp patch wasn’t quite the size of a football, it certainly wasn’t possible to conceal in the lamplight.

‘You have some other?’ Anna asked, her voice suddenly practical as she pointed to my shorts. ‘I can wash, in the morning they are already dry.’

‘Yes, no, I’ll do it, wash them, excuse me,’ I mumbled, panicking, then pointed in the direction of the door. ‘The washroom, it’s outside.’ I reached to the end of the cot and took the towel hanging from the iron rail that made up part of the foot of the iron bedstead.

Anna touched me lightly on the shoulder and I turned to face her, the towel held to my front. She looked at me, her face serious. ‘Nicholas, I want to make love to you very much. But we cannot. We must not make a baby.’

‘Oh, Anna, of course, I understand. I never thought… I can wait… I… I
want
to wait!’ I added with some emphasis, giving her a sincere look. I loved her and although I don’t deny that I’d fantasised about making love to her from the first day, I was still a virgin. My father was an Anglican minister. I’d always known I’d have to do the right thing.
Wanted
in my heart to do the right thing. God says you must. It’s just that nature is such a bastard sometimes. I took a fresh pair of shorts from my knapsack and prepared to go to the outside shower-cum-washroom and laundry.

‘Nicholas, I must go home now,’ Anna said, moving forward to embrace me.

‘Anna, no, please, can you wait until I get back? I’ll run home with you. But first there is something I need to say to you.’

I filled the three-feet-deep concrete tub that was set on the floor with water and washed my pants and underpants, then emptied it, refilled it, stepped in and ladled the water over me, the cold water refreshing in the humidity. I placed the offending garments over a line in the yard to dry. In all, I guess I couldn’t have been gone much more than ten minutes. Anna was sitting on the three-legged stool as pretty as a picture, her basket packed. So much had happened between us, including my disgrace, that she seemed suddenly like a different person, a part of me, a loving, familiar part from which I felt I couldn’t ever be separated.

I kissed her. That was a part of the new feeling. I could kiss her whenever I wanted. My mother had died when I was five when we’d lived in Japan. My father, always a pretty stern man, wasn’t big on affection and had consequentially turned from being the headmaster of the International School in Tokyo to become an Anglican missionary in New Britain, where, at the age of eleven, I’d moved with him and then been sent to boarding school in Australia. He was a solitary man and I don’t know whether it was the grief over my mother’s death or what, but he never remarried. I guess I’d been short of my share of female kisses, even of the maternal kind. Women, even the feel of them, were a complete mystery to me.

‘Anna, I’ve made a decision, I’ll sail the
Vleermuis
to Australia. But I don’t want your father to give it to me, only to sign the papers over to you. Put them in your name. If I get through the war, well, then it will be ours anyway. But I want him to grant me just one favour.’

‘Nicholas, I don’t want you to sail
Vleermuis
without me,’ she said, alarmed. ‘It is too dangerous!
Mijn
papa say, if you want, you can have that boat. It is only to say he is sorry. You know, what happens last night. It’s okay. You do not have to take it!’

I took both her hands in mine, our faces close. ‘No, listen, Anna, it’s a good idea. I’ve been down to the harbour today. It’s going to be difficult to get a working passage to Australia or home. Papua is expecting the Japanese to invade at any moment. It’s a mad panic down at the docks, the cost of a deck space is now twenty-five pounds.’

‘I will ask my father, he will lend —’

‘No, no, I don’t want that!’ I cried in alarm, not wishing under any circumstances to be in the Dutchman’s debt. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that he was to be my future father-in-law. On the last occasion we’d been together he’d threatened to shoot me. ‘It’s a good boat and rigged for the open sea.’ I smiled. ‘I’ll enjoy the adventure.’

‘What favour? If you sail
Vleermuis
, already that is doing
mijn
papa a favour.’

‘No, this is different, when I get back to Australia I want to change the name of the boat.’

‘You don’t like
Vleermuis
? In English it hard to say,
ja
?’

‘Yes, true, but that’s not it. I want to call her
Madam Butterfly
. It’s your boat and it will be a sort of… like a promise between us.’

‘Oh, Nicholas!’ She pulled her hands from mine and clapped them happily. ‘Mr Butterfly and
Madam Butterfly
.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, a little embarrassed, suddenly conscious that to anyone else it might sound pretty corny, but nonetheless still liking the idea a whole lot.

‘Wonderful! It is beautiful idea. We will do it,
ja
.’ She suddenly gave a little squeal. ‘It is a sign, that butterfly I caught!’

‘The Clipper?’

‘
Ja
, Nicholas, it’s so beautiful! When I am catching it you say to me, “See, the wings they look like a sailing boat.” It is a sign! A good sign!’ she repeated emphatically.

‘Your father may not like the name change,’ I ventured.

Anna pouted prettily. ‘So? Now it is
mijn
boat. He cannot say.’

‘We’ll do it when we get back to Australia and the boat is registered in your name. You can mention it to your father then.’

The Dutchman came to the restaurant the next day and expressed his delight, and even if he didn’t offer his apologies for the insulting manner in which he’d propositioned me in his home, his manner indicated that he wanted things to remain cordial between us. His voice had recovered and was at its booming best so that the whole bar could hear him. ‘After the war, when Anna is older, by me, I am happy she is with you, Nick. You will marry,
ja
!’ It wasn’t a question and he stuck out his huge paw. ‘
Ja
, also
mijn
boat,
Vleermuis
,
now it is hers.’ He laughed. ‘A
goed
marriage present,
ja,
I think so!’

‘Madam Butterfly,’ I said under my breath, both your daughter and your boat.

I resigned from my afternoon job at
De Kost Kamer
and went to live on the
Vleermuis
as it needed a fair bit of maintenance. The gaff-rigged cutter hadn’t been out sailing for nearly five months and I spent the next few days doing all I could to be sure she was seaworthy. The bilge pump wasn’t working properly and I spent a fair bit of time getting it right. Anna spent as long as she could working beside me. The Dutchman was right, she certainly knew her way around a boat and didn’t mind getting her hands dirty painting or using a caulking iron and pitch.

The Japanese invaded Sumatra on the 14th and the following day Singapore fell. I should have scarpered there and then, but there is a passage in the Bible my father quoted to me when I was fourteen and going through puberty. It was, I suppose, as close as he could get to the standard lecture one receives at this time of one’s young life in regard to the birds and the bees. It’s in Proverbs 30 and is known as the Sayings of Agur. ‘There be three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not: The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid.’
Thoroughly mystified at the time he’d sonorously recited Agur’s confession to me, I now finally understood what he’d been getting at. Anna was due to leave on the Dutch passenger steamer
Witvogel
sailing on the evening of the 26th of February and I wanted to be with her every possible minute until that time. She begged me to go when news of Singapore came through, but I refused and declared I would sail out on the evening tide of the day after they’d sailed, catching the offshore wind. I guess I should have left sooner, but there you go, ‘the way of a man with a maid’
.

By this time the locals were plundering the European shops and the Dutch were afraid to enter them. The Javanese shopkeepers and market people were charging extortionate prices for anything they were prepared to part with. Anna had brought whatever was left in the family pantry to the boat. There wasn’t a great deal — several bottles of sauces, a small bag of sugar, coffee, some dried fish — but certainly, with the other provisions, there was sufficient to last the two and a bit weeks it should, with any luck, take me to sail to Australia.

My additional rations consisted of four-dozen cans of tinned fish, mostly mackerel, which is an oily fish and not much to my liking; a dozen tins of canned vegetables, mostly peas and carrots, neither a favourite of mine but beggars can’t be choosers; a ten-kilo sack of rice (approximately twenty-two pounds); a canteen of tea; a jar of salt; and a small bag of curry powder. The last two items were a timely reminder of how bad things were in Batavia towards the end.

Curry powder may seem like a strange thing to single out for mention. I do so only to illustrate how in the last few days prior to our departure the local population had most certainly turned on the departing Dutch. Anna had given me everything she could from her larder but curiously they’d run out of salt, the most common commodity of all. I needed to get a tin of caulking pitch and some oakum, both easy enough to obtain even in these scarce times as it was always plentiful in the market. So I took the opportunity to get sufficient salt for the galley at the same time. Having purchased the pitch and a roll of oakum, I found a woman selling spices and attempted to buy a large screwtop jar of salt, offering her a generous denomination in the local Dutch currency. This she’d promptly refused. Then I proffered an Australian pound, an absurdly large amount for the jar of salt. This too was unsmilingly and with a sullen shake of her head rejected. I turned to go, resigned to a long voyage without salt, when she grabbed my arm, pointed to the silver signet ring on my finger, then reached down and held up the jar.

I’d won the ring of almost knuckleduster proportions at a game of poker in a pub in Port Moresby and it had no sentimental value. I would have given it to Anna but the motif was a human skull and so it would have been entirely inappropriate. I twisted it from my finger, handing it to the spice seller. She placed it between her teeth, tasting to see if it was genuine and, seemingly satisfied, handed over the jar of salt and then, with the mere flicker of a smile, tossed the small bag of curry powder in for good measure, curry having less value in local cooking than any other spice.

The 26th of February finally arrived, the day Anna and her family were due to depart on the evening tide. In the few weeks I’d known Anna, a great deal had changed for the Dutch in Java. Singapore, thought to be the one impregnable fortress, the place where the myopic Japanese moving down through Malaya on their absurd bicycles were certain to be halted by the mighty British, had fallen with hardly a whimper.