another year.’ He stopped to examine a row of heliconia flowers. ‘There are some new ideas I want to realise.’
‘That seems a long time just to finish a garden.’
‘Then it is clear that you know very little. Rocks have to be dug up and moved. Trees have to be taken out and replanted. Everything has to be done by hand – everything.’ Aritomo snapped off the twigs of some low-hanging branches. ‘So you see, I cannot accept your commission.’
I was wracked by bitter disappointment. ‘I’m willing to wait a year,’ I said eventually. ‘Even two years, if that’s what you need.’
‘I am not interested in your proposal.’ He strode to a large boulder hulking by a hedge; I followed him a second later. The stone came up to my hips. Set into its flat surface was a hollow the size of a small washbasin. Water trickled from a bamboo flume, filling the hollow before overflowing down the sides. A bamboo dipper lay beside the natural basin. Aritomo scooped it into the water and drank from it, passing it to me when he was done. I hesitated, then took it from him.
The water was icy, tasting of moss and minerals, of rain and mist. Bending to replace the dipper, my eyes were drawn across the water’s surface to a gap in the hedge, through which a solitary mountain peak in the distance could be seen. The sight of it was so unexpected, so perfectly framed by the leaves, that my mind was momentarily stilled. The tranquillity in me drained away when I straightened up, leaving me with a sense of loss.
‘A tea master horrified his pupils by planting a hedge in his garden, blocking the view of the Inland Sea for which his school was famous,’ I said, half to myself. ‘He left only a gap in the hedge and set a basin before it. Anyone drinking from it would have to bend down and look at the sea through the hole.’
‘Where did you hear that story?’
For a moment I considered telling him that Yun Hong had read about the tea master in a book, but somehow I knew he would not believe me. ‘A Jap told me,’ I said. ‘In the camp.’
‘A soldier?’
‘He wasn’t in the army. At least I never saw him in uniform. I never knew what he was. His name was Tominaga. Tominaga Noburu. He told me that story.’
Something flickered in Aritomo’s eyes, fleeting as a moth risking a candle flame; it was the first time I had seen any hint of uncertainty in him. ‘I have not heard his name in years,’ he said.
‘You know him?’
‘That tea master was his great-uncle,’ he said. ‘Why do you think he planted the hedge to block out the famous view?’
‘Tominaga explained it to me,’ I said. ‘But I’ve only just really understood it now – the effect of seeing the view is much more powerful than if the sea has not been obstructed.’
He observed me for a few moments, then nodded.
We were approaching his house when the housekeeper came out with a tall, sandy-haired European. ‘Afternoon, Mr Nakamura,’ the man said. He turned to look at me. ‘And you must be Yun Ling. I’m Frederik.’ His accent was unlike his uncle’s, more English. I guessed him to be about two or three years older than me. ‘Uncle Magnus sent me to drive you home. He’s worried there might be trouble.’
‘Has something happened?’ asked Aritomo.
‘You haven’t heard? It’s been on the news all morning – the High Commissioner’s dead. The CTs killed him.’
Aritomo glanced at me. ‘You must go.’
At the weathered door of the front entrance Frederik stopped and said, ‘Oh, Mr Nakamura – Magnus asked me to remind you about his party. Why don’t you come with us? We’ll wait for you.’
‘I have work I must finish,’ Aritomo said.
He unlatched and opened the door. I hung back, letting Frederik squeeze past me to his Land Rover parked across the road. Aritomo bowed to me but I did not return it: it brought back too many memories of the times when I had been forced to do it, how I was slapped when I did not bow quickly or low enough.
I opened my mouth to speak, but Aritomo shook his head. I stepped through the doorway and then turned to look at him. He bowed to me one more time and shut the wooden door. I stood there for a moment longer, staring at it. I heard the latch drop and the key turn in the lock.
Chapter Five
Every child longs for a larger-than-life uncle and, because I had none, Magnus Pretorius became a figure of fascination to me, although he was hardly anything more than a vague presence in my life when I was growing up. What I knew of him I heard from my parents and from the things they left unsaid, the broken-off twigs of conversations I picked up whenever I walked in on them, and from what Magnus told me after I got to know him better.
Arriving in Kuala Lumpur from Cape Town in 1905, Magnus worked as an assistant manager in one of Guthries’s rubber estates in Ipoh. He liked to tell people that he had been employed only because the interviewer discovered he could play rugger. It was during this period that he became friendly with my father. They went into business together, buying up a rubber estate, acquiring a few more over the years.
Outstation planters lived in isolation among the rubber, with the nearest European neighbour usually twenty miles or more away. Growing up in Penang, I had heard stories of planters drinking themselves to death, or dying from snakebite or malaria or a variety of other tropical diseases. Hemmed in by the neat, unending lines of rubber trees, Magnus came to hate the life and began searching for better prospects. Drinking at the FMS Bar in Ipoh one weekend, he overheard a government official talking about a plateau three thousand feet high on the Titiwangsa mountain range. The man spoke of plans to turn it into an administrative centre of government and a hill station resort for senior officials of the Malayan Civil Service.
Magnus, who had once hiked up one of the mountains in that region, saw the potential of the plans immediately. A week later he obtained a concession of six hundred acres in the highlands from the government. He sold off his shares in the rubber plantations to my father just before the Great Slump, an act which my father would always hold against him.
A government surveyor, William Cameron, had mapped out the highlands in 1885. He had come upon the endlessly unfolding misty mountains and valleys while traversing the ranges on his elephants, charting the borders of Pahang and Perak. ‘Like Hannibal crossing the Alps,’ I would often hear Magnus tell visitors during my stay in Majuba.
Magnus brought in seeds and tea plants from the hills of Ceylon. Labourers were shipped in from Southern India to clear the jungle. In the space of four, five years, the slopes and hillsides in his estate were covered with tea bushes. The tea trees eventually became stunted from the workers’ constant picking, like the bonsai trees maintained by generations of Japanese nobility. A few years after he started planting, two other rival tea estates were also established in Cameron Highlands, but by that time the Majuba label had taken root in Malaya.
It was the only brand of tea my father prohibited in our home.
Frederik tried to engage me in conversation on the short drive back to Majuba House, but my thoughts were on Aritomo and on my failure to convince him to design a garden for me. Staring out of the window, I paid scant attention to the terraced slopes of the vegetable farms outside Majuba, or the occasional bungalow we passed. It was only when
