My wife is alone at home.’
The others got up too, and I realised that the High Commissioner’s murder had frightened them more than they cared to admit. Magnus and Emily showed the guests out while I remained in the garden. I walked past the statues of the two sisters and stopped at the low stone balustrade, leaning over it. On the terrace below lay a formal garden where oak leaves were scattered on the lawn like pieces of an uncompleted jigsaw puzzle. A peacock chased its mate across the grass and their tail feathers raked over the leaves. To one side of the lawn was a rose garden, the bushes planted in a spiral pattern.
At first I thought the noise was coming from a lorry struggling up a steep road somewhere over the next ridge. It grew louder within seconds, exploding into a bone-penetrating rumble as an aeroplane flew over Majuba House, circling the tea fields.
‘A Dakota,’ Frederik said, coming out from the house to join me.
The door near the plane’s tail opened and a brown cloud spilled out from it, breaking into pieces an instant later. For a second I thought the aircraft was disintegrating, its body flaking away. ‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘Safe conduct passes and notices, urging the CTs to surrender,’ Frederik said. ‘Hell of a mess to clean up when the wind blows them over the tea, Magnus says. The coolies complain bitterly.’
The Dakota banked around a hill, the noise of its passage gradually sputtering away. Sheets of paper eddied towards the house. I went to the far end of the lawn and plucked one from the air. I had heard about these notices issued by the Psychological Warfare Department, but I had never seen one till now. Printed on it was a pair of photographs, placed side by side. The first showed a bandit at the moment of his surrender, scrawny and malnourished and dressed in rags, his face all cheekbones and buckteeth. ‘Comrades, my name is Chong Ka Heng. I was once a member of the Fourth Johor Regiment,’ I read aloud. The other photograph was of the same man, grinning and well-fed, looking like an office clerk in a smart white shirt and black pressed trousers, his arm around the waist of a plain but smiling young Chinese woman. ‘The Government has treated me well since I surrendered. I urge you to think of your family, of your mother and father, who all miss you. Give up your struggle, and return to the people who miss you.’ The offers of amnesty and rewards were repeated in Malay, Chinese and Tamil. The paper was thin and light brown in colour, as though it had been soaked overnight in the dregs of tea. ‘Odd choice of colour to use,’ I said.
‘It’s deliberate. Makes it less conspicuous for a bandit to pick it up.’ Frederik cleared his throat. ‘Magnus lets me use one of the bungalows. It’s on the other side of the estate.’ He added, after a pause, ‘Come and have a drink?’
‘The curfew’s on.’
‘We’re already inside the estate.’
‘Not today, Frederik,’ I said, crumpling up the notice. ‘But thank you, for driving me back this morning.’
Pain started up in my left hand when I returned to my bedroom, throbbing in time to my pulse. My fury at Aritomo, which had abated during the party, resurfaced. The nerve of the man, making me come all the way from KL only to turn down my offer so quickly and with hardly any serious thought given to it. Bloody Jap. Bloody, bloody Jap!
Opening the bedside drawer, I took out my notebook. It was heavy, thickened by the newspaper clippings I had pasted in it. I turned the pages without really looking at them; I knew their contents by heart. When I had worked as a research assistant in the war crimes trials, I had collected newspaper reports about the trials in Tokyo and other countries the Japanese had occupied. I knew intimately the offences the Japanese officers were charged with, but I still read the clippings regularly, even though I had long ago accepted that there wasn’t a name that I recognised or a familiar face in a photograph. There was never any mention of the camp where I had been imprisoned.
Inserted between the pages at the back of the notebook was a pale blue envelope, the address written in Japanese and English. It was light as a leaf when I held it up. The envelope marked the page where I had recorded the last conversation I had had with a convicted war criminal, a week before I left for Cambridge. I remembered the promise I had made to the man, the promise that I would post his letter for him.
Slowly, the pain in my hand subsided. But it would return. The servants’ voices came faintly from somewhere in the house. One of the peacocks called to its mate. I slotted the envelope back between the pages, closed the notebook and went out to the terrace.
I stood there for a long time, looking towards Yugiri. I stood there until evening submerged the foothills of the valleys and Aritomo’s garden sank away from sight.
Chapter Six
Following the High Commissioner’s murder, Magnus and Frederik went about supervising the workers as they repaired the fence protecting the house. They set up a pair of spotlights along the fence, facing them outwards. Having heard from someone at the Tanah Rata Golf Club about an incident in Ipoh where CTs had lobbed a hand grenade into the dining room of a rubber estate manager’s bungalow as his family was sitting down for lunch, Magnus decided to have the windows covered in a thin wire mesh.
‘Emily said you haven’t seen our clinic,’ Magnus said, while I helped him nail a sheet of wire netting over my bedroom windows. The netting made the room gloomy, and I switched on the light. Two days had passed since Aritomo had turned me down, but I was still resentful about it. ‘Go take a look,’ Magnus went on. ‘Our nurse quit last year – said it was too dangerous to work here. Emily decided to run it herself. She trained as a nurse, you know, before she saw the light and married me.’
I was reluctant to visit the clinic, but I knew I had to, if only to give Emily face. The whitewashed bungalow was a short walk from the workers’ houses. A Tamil man slouching on a chair grinned at me when I entered the waiting room. Emily sat behind a low counter, her lips moving soundlessly as she counted out pills into a bottle. Through an open doorway I saw a room with two beds behind a partition. The bare legs of a woman were sticking out from one of the beds.
‘That’s Letchumi,’ Emily said, glancing at me.
‘Bitten by a snake.’
Emily tilted her head to one side. ‘Oh, yes, it was the night you arrived. She’s doing fine now. Dr Yeoh gave her an injection. Maniam, eh, Maniam! Ambil ubat.’
The coolie in the chair stood up and came to collect the bottle of pills from her. She made him repeat her dosage instructions in Malay before she let him leave. Turning back to me, she pointed at the boxes of medicines stacked in a corner. ‘These came in today. I ordered more, in case the CTs attack us.’ She shook her head. ‘Ironic isn’t it, that Gurney was killed by them?’
‘In what way?’
‘That man sat on his ka-chooi for days after the CTs attacked that estate in Sungai Siput. He did nothing.’
‘He did declare a nationwide state of emergency.’
‘Only because the planters made him do it. Magnus got everyone here to sign a petition. You people living in the cities,’ she hawked a derisive noise up her throat, ‘I don’t think you even realise there’s a war going on.’ There was some truth in her allegations. ‘One thing I’m happy about,’ she went on, ‘at least Magnus no longer wastes his Sundays running around in the mountains with his friends.’
‘What do they do, hunt wild boar?’
‘Have
