A Gentle Occupation Read online

  Emmie looked blank. Pullen caught the look instantly.

  ‘Flap. Umm … fuss, would you say, Clair? Yes, a fuss then. One of the chaps I had to meet in this morning, remember I told you? Getting frightfully high … drunk … rather funny in a sad sort of way. Nice chap as a matter of fact, but he’s only been here twelve hours and the whole place has got him down already. Worried about having to go down to Pangpang. Can’t say I blame him. They were all filling him up with champagne when I left. I suppose it is a bit of a shock to end up in the middle of another war just when you think you’ve done your whack. We all thought so. Still do. Never mind. But the fuss is rather good. Suddenly the powers that be have taken us seriously; realize we really can’t cope alone here. Mountbatten is shuttling about the islands promising all kinds of support and morale boosters. Arrives here shortly with some bloody Labour MP to have a look at things. That’s the Fuss. The Old Man is out of his skull with worry … having to entertain. Of course, as the way things stand here, he is the Governor, until your fellows arrive and take over.’

  ‘And when will that be?’

  ‘Well, not until we’ve got everyone out of the camps and sent off home, otherwise there really would be a full-scale war, and Heaven alone knows how long that’ll take. Anyway everyone is very jumpy this evening up in “A” Mess. I was damned glad to get away.’

  Emmie drew circles on the table with the handle of a fork. ‘The officer who came with you to the Club this morning, you remember? Was he the one who is getting drunk?’

  Pullen looked vague and then remembered. ‘Of course. Yes. So I did. Yes, Rooke his name is, nice enough chap. Why?’

  ‘Who is Noah Howard or Coward, do you know?’

  ‘Noah Howard?’

  Pullen looked puzzled for a moment, and then smiled.

  ‘Do you perhaps mean Noël Coward? An actor fellow, playwright too; rather good.’

  Emmie drew wider circles with controlled irritation. ‘I don’t know. Whoever he is he says a little English is not quite enough. And just before the interview.’

  ‘I don’t suppose he meant to be rude, you know. Perhaps you’re taking it a little seriously.’

  ‘It was a serious thing.’

  ‘Oh! Come now! I imagine he was trying to be amusing, you know. He’s a pleasant enough chap, I think. A gentleman, I have a feeling, even though he is an actor … you get all sorts in a conscript army. When do you start work for us?’

  ‘On Monday week. The British don’t like Eurasians, do they?’

  ‘Beg pardon?’ Pullen looked up swiftly; this time Clair saw the blush.

  ‘Eurasians. Half-bloods. I think you call them chichis, don’t you?’

  ‘Never used such a filthy expression in my life.’

  ‘Ah, not you. No. Not you, but an English woman in the camp. She escaped from Singapore just before the Fall and got caught here. Mrs Bethell-Wood. An English lady, from Surrey.’

  ‘Contradiction in terms,’ said Pullen mildly.

  ‘Well, that’s what she said. I don’t know.’

  ‘I can’t believe she ever used that revolting expression.’

  ‘Never to our faces, oh no! But that was her name for us. She was brave, I suppose, quite old. She never really complained, very … British, I suppose.’

  ‘Brought up on a farm, you see,’ she had said one morning in the camp while they were moving in a long serpentine trail slowly towards the only water tap which was working that day. ‘So this sort of thing doesn’t shock me. Cope pretty well. My father was a very progressive man; insisted that we children did our bit. Carrying, fetching, even making our beds occasionally. “You’ll appreciate your servants better,” he would say, “know how to handle them.” He was right, as it happened. My name is Bethell-Wood. We haven’t spoken before, have we? Are you Dutch?’

  Emmie had nodded. ‘Dutch—Javanese.’

  ‘Ah! I see.’ Mrs Bethell-Wood had grey-blond hair and white eyelashes. ‘I wondered. Thought perhaps Spanish? Italian? That pretty olive skin. The Dutch are so white, aren’t they? And all that blond hair.’

  ‘They don’t all have blond hair.’

  ‘No, of course. I understand it is quite accepted in the NEI …’

  ‘What is accepted?’

  ‘You do speak excellent English. Mixed marriages.’

  ‘Quite accepted. It bound the Colony together.’

  ‘We found the reverse was true in India and Malaya. Rather unwise, we thought.’

  ‘Why unwise?’

  Mrs Bethell-Wood’s hair had straggled out of its hastily pinned up bun, a long dry strand dropped round her neck. Impatiently she dragged it up and tucked it back with expert fingers. ‘It’s different here. But there is a prejudice. Anyway where I come from. The children, you know. They never belong on either side, you see. Very hard on them, so difficult to place them. They usually managed to find a job in the shops or the railways, that sort of thing … and that made the social acceptance even harder. And then resentment grows. Do you follow? Frightfully thoughtless of the parents. “Marry in haste, repent at leisure”.’

  The straggling line shuffled slowly under the blazing sun; some women had tin cans with wire handles, old buckets, petrol tins, saucepans. Mrs Bethell-Wood changed her canvas bucket from one arm to the other. ‘Of course it’s quite different here, one sees that clearly just by looking about. But it isn’t the same in India or in Malaya. We were Government. So we saw a good deal of, shall I say, Social Problems. One really mustn’t break the code, must one? Leads to such a lot of unhappiness and misunderstanding. Stick to one’s own kind, much the best.’

  ‘I never found that here. We were all our own kind.’

  ‘No? Well, of course, as I said, it’s different here.’

  ‘It must be difficult for you in the camp, not to be with your own people, the English.’

  Mrs Bethell-Wood laughed shortly, scratched her neck nervously. ‘Mosquitoes. Frightfully bad in our house. No … no, no. I’ve always been a good mixer. I quite like foreigners. Well I mean, one has to, doesn’t one? It takes all sorts to make a world. This camp really is a melting pot, isn’t it? A very good lesson in mixing. I learned that during what my husband used to call laughingly my “busy times”. The Bible Classes, Sunday Schools, Red Cross … I was very involved in all those things. One tried to help them, poor dears … they really can’t quite manage on their own, can they? Haven’t come down from the trees yet, my husband used to say: of course, many of them hadn’t even gone up into them. But it’s all patience … patience and no prejudice. The two “p’s”. Useful to remember. And patience is what we need here this morning. One water tap for the whole camp. So ill-organized. On purpose, I suppose. Teaching the whites a lesson. However,’ she laughed resignedly, ‘that’s one great advantage you have over us. You can take the heat so much better than we can. Never mind, put a good face on it. I really should have brought a handkerchief with me to put over my head.’

  Emmie very nearly beat the head in with her bucket. She suddenly laughed at the memory and wiped out all the circles which she had made on the table top.

  ‘It’s such an awful name,’ Pullen said. ‘I almost can’t believe it. But I do know the sort of woman. Convinced that they were doing right, and absolutely doing wrong. They were the worst things to happen to India; caused far more trouble than greased bullets, the mem-sahibs. It makes me furious …’

  Emmie smiled across at his suddenly angry face. The little moustache, the wide angry eyes, the line of sweat across his forehead, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his shining brown throat. His indignation.

  ‘Please don’t be angry. It didn’t matter. It doesn’t.’

  ‘It did matter, and does. Bloody woman. You know, we were perfectly all right until they arrived, really managed frightfully well.’

  And so did Adam before Eve tempted him, thought Emmie, with her wicked apple the guilty lump of which rides up and down in your kind, brown throat. Complicity. Clair started to clear the table, stacking plates and cutlery onto the tin tray. ‘It’s all over now,’ she said, ‘and anyway she died finally, last year. No one liked her, but I don’t think she ever knew. She meant well.’

  Pullen snorted angrily and handed her his plate. ‘People who mean well cause the most awful mischief, I think it must be one of the saddest epitaphs a man could have engraved upon his gravestone. “He meant well”.’

  ‘Like missionaries, or Hitler or Gandhi, and the Americans with their bomb. I suppose they all meant well: for their countries anyway.’ Emmie had taken up the bowl of pineapple chunks and was prodding the last three chunks slipping about in their syrup. ‘You could even say that Dora Foto meant well. For herself.’

  For a moment there was, for the first time in the evening, a neat, total silence. As small, as clear, as precise and well cut as a diamond. From the dark verandah Wim suddenly snapped it with a plunk, plink, plink, plunk and a smothered word of irritation. Clair continued on her way to the kitchen, Pullen looked at his watch; Emmie called out into the darkness.

  ‘Wim, three pieces of the fruit left. Would you like to have them?’

  Pullen got to his feet. ‘Must be on my way. Relieve the Duty Officer in half an hour. I did enjoy myself.’ He patted his pockets for his pipe and tobacco. ‘I only hope to Heaven there isn’t another case of rape while I’m on. It really is very distressing. Three in the last two weeks … it’s getting quite a matter of course. Indian troops, no women, curfews and the perimeter. I do so hate having to ask the medical questions, you know. I’m not a doctor; not my style at all. Oh dear. It all is a rumble bumble, I’m afraid.’

  The moon had risen, a shadowy garden; still. He looked up at the starry sky. ‘You take care, both of you. Lock the doors and the shutters. The patrol
s are out, but don’t risk a thing, and thank you both once again.’ He turned suddenly to Emmie and took her hand. ‘And thank you for joining us. I hope you’ll be happy, I think you will. And we are really most grateful. I don’t know what you’ll have to do just at first … interpreting, of course, as you know, but I expect they’ll find you something more definite as soon as we all get sorted out. And don’t hold that Bethell woman against us, will you? Just put her out of your mind.’

  Emmie pressed his hand. ‘I have already. Honestly.’

  ‘That’s excellent,’ he said.

  They stood for a moment and watched him bump through the potholes of Brabantlaan. Wim had started to bolt the shutters.

  Her room, for which Clair had modestly apologized, was simple, sparse, and cool. Luxury after her own room in Chung Ling’s little wooden hut in the Chinese sector, with its wooden boards, walls papered with old newspapers and magazines, a bamboo bed and the tin trunk which contained her few worldly possessions. Here the tiled floor was cool to her bare feet, the large brass four-poster draped in mosquito net like a separate, secret room. A chair, a table and, best of all, a wash-bowl in the corner with a large tin jug of water. She put out the dim light, opened the bolted shutters. Moonlight flooded in across her as she leaned over the balcony rail. It was high now. A steady white plate in the star-studded sky. To her left, the distant city, indicated only by the dull red glow of the still burning rubber dumps. Ahead, beyond the ragged silhouettes of frangipani, palm and bamboo, the hillside slipped down to the blackness of the plain where the arrogant moon reflected itself in a thousand broken fragments on the paddy fields; and rising high beyond them the mountains, a long row of knuckled fists thrusting against the stars. To her right, shining silent and deserted, the high tiled gables of the other villas in the street. There was no wind, no sound. The only sign of the war was the dull, wavering glow of the fire over the city. Everything else appeared to be at peace.

  It had been a long time coming. She could mark the end of it by that humid February Sunday in 1942 when they heard on the radio that the British had surrendered Singapore. The unthinkable had happened, even though there had been warnings enough brought by the first shattered British women who, with hastily packed suitcases and frightened children, had managed to reach the Island, en ronte for Ceylon or Australia, by the last of the big ships able to leave the doomed peninsula. In exhausted voices they spoke of the amazing speed of the Japanese advance, of the air raids, the vicious looting, the collapse of morale and the disarray and incompetence which reigned in Singapore. But nothing, it seemed, had shocked them as much as the cunning and might of the enemy.

  A younger Mrs Bethell-Wood said, with three crying children and all her worldly goods in a couple of pillow-cases, ‘There are millions of them. They came on bicycles! They simply swarmed down the peninsula like ants … no one prepared us for that. No one knew they were so strong. No one told us.’ And no one told us, Emmie thought, that they would arrive so soon, landing so swiftly in the dark, taking us by surprise, not least the Saturday Night dancers at the Planters Club who, like the British in Singapore, had refused to believe that normal life could not continue and that They would be dealt with long before they could set foot in Java or Borneo or the Island itself. That the Island could be occupied was unthinkable until the unthinkable happened two weeks later.

  At first they had been very polite and insisted that life in the city should continue as before. They appeared very fond of the children, surprised and delighted by blond hair and blue eyes, handing them sweets and fruits, correct behaviour towards the women, no raging, raping invaders, apparently; disciplined soldiers behaving less like the conquering Enemy than an efficient, if firm, Police Force. And then the first rumours that the slum area towards the dock was being evacuated, that wire was being strung around it, that a Reception Area was being made. A reception area for what, for whom? And then the orders to assemble in Rembrandt Plein one morning, one piece of hand baggage per person. The Male Europeans to the North area, women and children, ‘male children up to fifteen’, to the South area. It took all day to sort them out, the men into trucks, the women into lines, the men to camps far across the Island, the women walking through the silent city to their prepared camp at Molendijk, haggard, hot, exhausted and numbed with terror and grief. Even the children silent, subliminally aware of a deep despair.

  But how absurd to remember it all now. In the peace, in the stillness, in the white light of the risen moon. She pushed away from the balcony gently, her hands cupping her elbows, arms tight across her chest. A little breeze riffled through the flametree branches filigreed against the paler sky and the dull glow from the rubber fire quickly lightened, flared gently, edging the lowering, loitering smoke with pink. The breeze dropped suddenly. The tree was still again, the fire waned. Crickets in the dry grass below. Not quite all peace. The fire reminded. Quiet but not yet peace. She closed the shutters slowly, bolted them, and felt her way in the sudden dark, to the folds of her bed.

  Not so long ago there had been a bankruptcy of hope. Wasn’t that the phrase which the El Greco angel had used this morning? His neat cap of tight auburn curls, the long grave face, the fastidious fingers which smoothed the pages of the book from which he dictated to her so precisely.

  ‘What a bankruptcy of hope! I ask a few questions. Bachir is a scullion in a café; Ashour is laboriously earning a few pennies by breaking stones on the roads.’ He had paused and looked up at her with indifferent eyes, closed the book.

  ‘Went too fast for you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Splendid. It’s Gide. The Immoralist. Do you know it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘All I have at hand. You managed the Arabic names?’

  ‘I think so.’ She spelled carefully, ‘B-A-S-H-I-R.’

  ‘No. It’s a “C”.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, no, rather unfair. Let me see.’

  He had taken the notebook and read swiftly through the page, handing it back with a pleasant smile. ‘Excellent. Apart from the two names, and there’s a “c” in scullion, not a “k”. You’ve done this a lot?’

  ‘Not for many years. In England.’

  ‘Oh. Where?’

  ‘At Eastbourne; a convent, and then London with Pitman’s.’

  ‘Goodness me. Very travelled.’

  ‘I wanted to be a journalist. My father was.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here. He owned Het Daag—the biggest newspaper in the Island.’

  ‘How frightfully interesting.’ He folded his arms and leant across the desk. ‘I suppose you know all about newspapers then?’

  ‘Not all about. A little only.’

  ‘You know we have one?’

  ‘No. I didn’t. I’m sorry.’

  He rummaged about among some papers and pulled out a small double-sheet. ‘The Daily Cobra. We just started it. I think you’d do very nicely for it, don’t you?’

  ‘I’d try. I know quite a bit. Type-setting … you know.’

  ‘I think it’s a frightfully good idea! What a stroke of luck, Miss van Hoorst.’ He handed her the blurry little newspaper and told her to take it and look it over. ‘I’m sure you could be very useful. Shall we say you could start work, say … umm … say, on Monday next? You know where the Headquarters are, don’t you? The old Anglo-Dutch oil buildings. Would eight o’clock be all right? Ask for me. Nettles, as in Stinging.’ He laughed a clear, disinterested laugh. Seeing her face, he added, ‘It’s a sort of weed. Never mind. Such a stroke of luck to find you, I really can’t believe it.’

  ‘I think it is my stroke too.’

  ‘Let’s say half and half then. We really are in a hell of a jam here. No one can speak Dutch among us and then this silly boycotting business. We must get things sorted out. I mean after all,’ he ran a long hand wearily over his tight auburn curls and glanced swiftly at his watch, ‘the sooner we are all home and safe the better, don’t you think?’

  It was a rhetorical question and he had already risen offering her his hand. ‘I absolutely don’t blame your people, you know. I imagine I’d feel much the same. However, no one exactly asked the Japs to surrender the way they did, but who else was there with all of you still locked up in your camps and no brave Allies storming the beaches until two weeks later. I am sure they mean well … the Dutch. National pride, anger, bitterness, disappointment, all those things … but really, it is a bit idiotic, doesn’t do much good, does it?’ He had seen her to the door and called ‘Next’ and Pearl Ching had hurried past her.