If the Invader Comes. Derek Beaven
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perm.
He was proud, too, of her dress sense. She’d put on a cool, belted day dress in pale grey crêpe de Chine. Leaning back somewhat languidly, with her legs elegantly crossed, and conducting a minute rhythm with the toe of one slim black shoe, she appeared more assured and sophisticated than he’d ever seen her; more mature, certainly, than her twenty-three years. As for himself, he stood facing her from the doorway to the dining-room, holding the teapot, with sweat already sopping the armpits of his shapeless tropical kit. ‘I’m not ridiculous,’ he said.
‘Who in their right mind would choose just now to up sticks? And England of all places. Even if they’re not bombed to bits, I certainly don’t want to go back to England. What was it you said once? Malignant middle class, beaten working class, and Mummy’s relations. I thought you never wanted to.’ She squinted at him, with a puzzled expression.
‘There comes a point when one thinks of retiring,’ he muttered.
She chided him. ‘And don’t be lame, either. There’s years in you yet. You’re not the retiring kind. Anyway, Malaya’s your life. Weren’t you planning to go up to the hills? Gunung Angsi, buy a little place?’
He changed the subject. ‘What about this young man of yours? You might have brought him with you.’
‘Oh, Robin,’ she said, airily. ‘I would have done. But he said he had some business at the club. You can meet him when he comes to pick me up in the morning.’
‘A nice trip?’
‘Fine, thanks. Absolutely fine.’
Clarice got up, still holding her tea. ‘Daddy, you’re looking terrible. I didn’t like to say it as soon as I came in, but honestly … What is it?’
‘It’s nothing.’
She placed the back of her hand on his brow. ‘Hadn’t you better sit down? I’ll get your medicine, shall I?’ Taking charge, she moved past him into the dining-room. ‘And what on earth have you been doing here?’
He saw her put down her cup on the strewn table. ‘Don’t do that,’ he said.
‘Why not? I’ll just see if I can find a sponge for you – and some water, too.’
‘No!’
But she went off despite him towards the bedrooms. He sat down to mop his own brow.
He sometimes wondered how much Clarice had suffered, lacking a mother, trailing about the world alone like a lost soul, sometimes at school in England, at other times mured in this old-fashioned colonial bungalow, back and forth. Her mother’s death had come when she was fourteen and she’d taken ship directly back to Malaya for a period of mourning with him. Selama had moved discreetly out.
Then Clarice had gone home to finish her schooling and Selama was reinstated. Clarice had returned once more, and, once more, he’d kept up appearances. Now Clarice moved in higher social circles than his own. Singapore was a fortress.
But even if he could maintain her there indefinitely, he wasn’t sure what her place was in the scheme of things. Daughters were supposed to be married off. Or she should have some career? Whatever, there was some strong element in it of a father’s duty; though Clarice had shown little sign of knowing for herself what she wanted.
At times she’d thrown herself into helping him on his rounds, like a devoted nursing auxiliary. Dr Pike had distrusted her motives; they smacked of spinsterism, possibly of religion. In any case, if he’d wanted a nurse he had Selama, and Clarice muddled his drug cabinet. But now she seemed the composed one, while he sat baffled, ghostly, and afraid of his decision.
He dabbed at himself with his handkerchief. The core of his fear was the subject no one at the club would discuss: that the Japanese would come as they had to China, and there’d be nothing anyone could do. People at the club said he was being alarmist. They seemed to lack the imagination to grasp the meaning of what had gone on in Nanking. Dr Pike had been left alone with the vision culled from his newspaper cuttings: of the Japanese Army occupying a Malaya left defenceless because Britain was suddenly locked into a struggle on the other side of the world – of the merciless rape of the two women in his life over his dead body. Nobody believed it could happen, yet for the two weeks since Britain had declared war on Germany he hadn’t been able to shut the thought off.
He wondered whether he really was in for a bout of his fever. His preoccupation might be delirium. He tried thinking of Selama, of all his familiar textures, the closeness of his house, the rattan chairs, the boxed discs of chamber music for the wind-up gramophone, the pictures on his walls, his specimen cabinets, his rack of Dutch cigars.
Clarice returned with the sponge. ‘Call yourself a doctor, Daddy? I can’t leave you, can I? Thought you’d have known better. And why have you left those wretched pieces all over the dining table?’
Eyes screwed shut, he tilted up his face for her. How he wished he could put aside the buzz in his ear which said, Take Clarice away from Malaya, go now while you can. Or was it in his bones, his blood, this gathering intuition of crisis?
‘I’m not being ridiculous, Clarice,’ he repeated. ‘I really think we have to leave.’
‘I’ve no intention of going anywhere except Singapore,’ she said. ‘Now take some of this.’ She held out the quinine bottle.
Later, he staggered out of his bedroom just as Musa was serving Clarice’s dinner over the arrangement on the table. He did try to explain. He picked up a cutting from the Times. Dated 18 December 1937, it was by C. M. Macdonald, the only British correspondent to have remained in Nanking during the Japanese army’s entry into that city. He scanned past the descriptions of murder to the part of the report which glared by its tale of omission, But it is a fact that the bodies of no women were seen.
Clarice was firm with him. ‘Daddy, I’m terribly tired, actually. Would you mind awfully if we did the political lecture another time. I know you’ve probably got something gruesome to demonstrate, but to be honest I’d rather not hear it just at the moment. I’ll have to make an early start tomorrow. You won’t be offended if I call it a day, will you? Just go back to bed. Come on. This way.’
‘We have to get out.’
‘You have to get some sleep.’ Stifling a yawn, she kissed him good-night. ‘And so do I. Now you’ll take care of yourself, won’t you?’ She turned to go.
‘Of course,’ he said, submissive now. ‘Sorry. Sleep well, darling.’ He still held the cutting in his hand but was glad, after all, that he didn’t have to explain to her how the missing women hadn’t been chivalrously spared.
IN THE NIGHT he got up. He was very frightened. His desire to put things right, to do his duty at last as a father – that was what had turned him into this parody of a supreme commander, pacing agitated, solo, around his dining-room table as if it contained the relief map of the theatre of operations. If he could assess the situation accurately, the enemy’s strength and disposition, then and only then would he know how to act. The evidence was laid out before him. Thousands of miles away, Poland, a fully functioning European state with a considerable army and a fine cultural history, had been reduced to rubble in a week or two. Some terrible permission had been given. Reports confirmed both the astonishing German tactical brilliance and the brutality of the assault. He tapped his foot on the floorboards. Rain outside drowned out the sound. What if Britain and France got drawn in and bogged down? If America stayed on the fence? What of the imperial supply lines if the thing really got going? Any ship between Singapore and the English Channel would increasingly become fair game for a U-boat.
He rummaged for Selama’s sharp sewing scissors in the sideboard drawer and cut out a piece from the newspaper that had just arrived. It counted the total sinkings as two dozen British ships, so far. No such announcement had come through on the short-wave radio. The liner Athenia had been torpedoed by a submarine.
If his vision was right, Clarice must not stay. But he couldn’t