‘George! You’re here — good! Keep down, away from the windows. There’s something on the line.’ He crouched by the window and raised the shutter a fraction, scanning the bordering jungle with rapt concentration.
Towards the front of the motionless train a shrilling escape of excess steam stopped. A child crying fretfully farther along the corridor was stilled so abruptly it sounded as if a hand had been clamped over its mouth. Then an eerie silence and stillness fell over the train and the
beluka
, the jungle fringes. In every compartment the breath-held tension of people listening intently could be felt.
She watched Sturgess, as much intrigued as frightened as she realised that this was probably an ambush, not a rail accident. He had immediately taken charge, motioning George to keep her and her mother well down in the middle of the compartment. The distant manner had vanished and with his jacket off, his short-sleeved shirt revealed a lean and muscled man with the alertness and suppleness of a fighter, a jungle fighter, like a tiger she had once seen — swift, quiet, deadly. There was nothing starchy about him now. He looked, she thought, almost hungry for action.
She started as he went unexpectedly from complete immobility, staring out of their window, to swift, smooth action as he moved back towards the corridor.
‘Stay here, I’ll go and see what’s happening,’ Sturgess said. ‘Don’t want anyone doing anything damned silly.’ His glance took in the two women. ‘Stay down!’ he ordered and motioned his friend to his former post by the window.
‘Remember the tricks
we
got up to in the war,’ George warned as he left.
Sturgess nodded abruptly. ‘Don’t panic,’ he told Liz in passing.
I wasn’t intending to, Uncle Robbo, she thought and wished she dared say it aloud. Women brought up in wartime, who had practised air-raid precautions since they were in their teens, did not panic! Her heart might be thumping a bit but that was it, and her mother looked breathless but quite calm.
They heard the major going quickly away towards the front of the train, then silence, then a shout, and silence again. ‘What’s he doing?’ Liz asked.
George drew in a hissing breath. ‘He’s out to the left and beyond the train now, weaving, running.’
‘Pushing his luck,’ Liz conjectured.
‘Not his style,’ George answered.
Liz lifted a small case from the floor to the seat and felt she could have argued the opposite about his treatment of herself and her mother.
‘Nothing happening,’ George reported. ‘He’s dropped in the bushes for another recce.’ He half rose as if he wanted to follow.
‘We’d be all right,’ Blanche assured him.
‘No, better do as I’m told,’ he said, resuming his post at the window.
‘Do you always?’ Liz was really curious about their relationship. ‘Was he your officer?’
George nodded, not once turning from his observations as he added, as if to himself, ‘And he should remember all about booby traps on roads and railway lines — we laid plenty.’
Along the train one or two anxious voices began questioning and it sounded like the same fretful child complaining again. The next moment Harfield reported Sturgess walking back along the tracks.
‘No trouble,’ he called, reassuring people who, responding to the flat, even sweep of his hands, pushed up their shutters and leaned out of the carriages. ‘Water buffalo on the line. All clear now.’
There were some huffs of exasperation as the calming message was relayed, some puffs of irritation and much relieved, nervous laughter.
‘Water buffalo?’ Blanche queried when he re-entered the compartment. ‘Why didn’t the driver just hoot or something, instead of throwing everyone all over the place?’ She brushed irritably at the knees of the beige slacks she was wearing.
‘I seem to remember he did, but in any case the animal was stuck. It had been tethered to a small tree at the edge of some paddy, pulled to reach better grazing and dragged the sapling along until it became entangled with the track. The driver thought it was a trap. The farmer was hiding in the
beluka
, terrified because his animal had stopped the train.’
Liz reflected she was not the only one giving herself over to imaginings of the worst kind; the whole country was jumpy.
‘It shows how unprepared we all are,’ George said, slapping the dust from his own trousers. ‘I come here with green coconuts — ’ he picked up the shells from the floor — ‘but my gun’s in my hand luggage.’
‘Mine’s strapped in my case,’ Sturgess admitted.
‘And ours are at home.’ Liz watched Sturgess for reactions as she mentioned their destination.
‘Which is why you must be accompanied to Rinsey — if you insist on going,’ he said immediately but without looking directly at either woman. ‘I have twenty-four hours before I must report to my unit.’
‘Thank you.’ Blanche accepted.
Liz wondered if they would ever be rid of the man — Harfield at least smiled occasionally.
Whatever objections they might have made about Sturgess driving them on from George Harfield’s mine had somehow all been cancelled by the incident. Nothing had really happened, Liz reassured herself, and yet so much had been revealed by everyone’s reactions.
George had a jeep at Ipoh station and drove them to his bachelor bungalow on the slopes of Bukit Kinta, the hill after which the mine was named. His home was comfortable with cane easy chairs and low tables, though sparsely decorated. A small fridge stood in the corner of his lounge.
‘You do like your cold drinks,’ Blanche commented.
‘It’s a necessity for me these days,’ he agreed and dispensed them all cold beers. His Chinese cook-cum-houseboy came to greet them all and was soon off again to make
hokkien
mee
, a quickly prepared meal of rice with fish, prawns and vegetables. There was little time if they were to be anywhere near Rinsey before six o’clock, when night-time would come like a slow theatrical curtain drop.
From the front windows of the elevated bungalow they could see vast opaque green disused pools, as well as the muddy churned tracts of water where two rusty dredgers floated. The vessels were bedecked with an uneven array of bare electric bulbs already lit. The circles of huge buckets scooping up the tin ore and dross washed down from the hillsides by great powerful hoses created a racket which was a constant accompaniment to life there.
By the time they had eaten, George had been off supervising the temporary erection of small-meshed chicken wire stretched taut over an open jeep. It was, he told them, a hand grenade that had been used to ambush his last payroll. ‘If one gets lobbed on that, it should bounce off. It’s a quick, rough job,’ George apologised, ‘but better than nothing. I’ll refine it later.’
Liz and her mother turned to wave goodbye as Sturgess drove them away.
‘I’ll be along to see you quite soon,’ George called.
‘I hope so,’ Blanche called, adding, as they were out of earshot, ‘It’s like leaving another bit of England behind, village cricket and all that.’
Liz noticed how Sturgess’s knuckles stood out white as he gripped the steering wheel. She put it down to impatience with these chatting women. She remembered the bread roll — someone should tell him his actions gave away so much more than his words.
‘Yes,’ she agreed pointedly, ‘all the nice homely bits.’
‘Salt of the earth,’ he said.
Liz found his remark intrusive. ‘Do you know the way?’ she asked, surprised how imperious the remark sounded.
She thought he said he did, but his answer was lost as her mother remarked that she had not expected to travel back to Rinsey in a chicken coop.
The conversation died as the sky changed with dramatic tropical intensity from blue to silver, silver to gold, bronze to fierce red as the sun dropped away, making the huge fern trees stand out and adding gloss to coconut and fan palms.
That he knew the way became more obvious for though the jeep’s headlights were not brilliant, Sturgess drove with what looked like growing confidence, as if he was recollecting the idiosyncrasies of the road as they progressed.
Her throat dry with excitement and anxiety, Liz recognised the last steep rise in the road before they took a sharp left around a huge outcrop of fern-covered rock, where water continually trickled and was ducted under the track. Then, had it been day, they would have glimpsed the bungalow.
‘There should be lights,’ Blanche said as Sturgess swept the jeep expertly around the bend. ‘We should see lights from here.’
‘Unless the trees have grown too big,’ Liz tried to reassure, but she had noticed, before the last of the light went, the neglect in the plantations, how the secondary jungle had begun to creep back under the trees. Some sections had been cleared but there she had seen that the cups on the trees below the tapping scars had run over uncollected; it was a very bad sign. Tappers were paid for the weight of latex they collected, so no worker would tap his section of trees and then not collect his rubber and his dues.
If her mother noticed she said nothing, until they came in sight of their bungalow and Sturgess slowed to walking pace.
‘No lights, no vehicle,’ Blanche said as their headlights touched the front of the property.
‘No boys, no welcome,’ Liz added bleakly as the jeep stopped.
‘Stay in the vehicle,’ Sturgess ordered, ‘while I have a look round, make sure there are no booby traps, nothing wired to explosives or flares.’
Liz found her mother holding her arm as if she well understood her daughter’s overwhelming urge to run up those familiar steps. This was homecoming, after all. The headlights made the wide verandah surrounding the whole bungalow looked even deeper, the roof reaching out to the farthest edges of the steps out of proportion to the building underneath.
She watched as John Sturgess cautiously crossed the verandah, then, almost beyond the range of the jeep lights, flattened himself against the wall. She glimpsed his bare arm reaching out sideways to push open the door. Then he disappeared inside.
After a minute or two there was still silence. Blanche breathed, ‘No one’s blown him up yet.’
‘I feel a bit of a charlie sitting here.’ Liz looked up through the chicken wire to the black velvet sky pierced with huge, bright stars. ‘Shall we go in?’ It was a decision and she was out of the jeep and up the steps before her mother could answer.
As she moved through the open door into the room, she was aware of the generator thudding in the lean-to at the back of the house. If there was no one here now, it had not been deserted for long. She slid an arm along the wall and felt for the light switch. The next moment she gasped as a hand gripped her arm.
‘I could have shot you. Why can’t women do as and be where they’re expected?’
Angrily she took him up on the odd phrase. ‘I
expected
to be able to do as I liked in my own home.’ For a moment the grip on her arm tightened as if in contradiction, then it was released as he said, ‘I’ll close the shutters.’
‘Someone has been here nursing the generator,’ Blanche commented as the lights were put on and she came into her house. ‘It was always temperamental; there was only Neville and the Guisans who could keep it running.’
They separated, going from room to room, switching on lights, flooding every corner, not pausing to exclaim about objects rediscovered or changes made. The front lounge to Liz’s eyes looked the same, but in the dining room her mother’s treasured bespoke rosewood dining suite had gone; in fact, the room was empty.
‘There’s fresh meat and beer in the refrigerator,’ Liz called from the kitchen. ‘Wherever Daddy’s gone, it can’t be for long.’
‘Major Sturgess!’ the formal call from her mother, who had gone to the main bedroom, alerted them to something more untoward. ‘Come and look at this!’
They hurried to her mother’s room, where Blanche stood looking down on a regular arsenal of weapons laid out on her double bed.
‘Are these all yours?’ the major asked.
She shook her head, but then amended, ‘Some.’ She pointed to three rifles and two revolvers. ‘Neville obviously has his revolver with him, the rest ...’ She shrugged.
‘The rest,’ he began, touching them in turn as he spoke, ‘Sten gun, spare magazines, 303 Lee Enfield rifles. Dropped in metal canisters to us during the war, stolen and buried in the jungle by the communists — until they needed them.’
For a moment Liz felt a little compassion for him. Standing there head down as he contemplated evidence of the deceit of former Chinese comrades in arms, he looked like a man whom life had completely betrayed. She found herself wondering if he had also been betrayed in Australia. A wife perhaps? A family?
With that sudden, disconcerting switch from stillness to action, he went to the telephone, snatching up the receiver. Finding it working, he said, ‘I think we should tell the local police you’re here, that you are unsure where your husband is, and what we’ve found. I’ll also speak to George.’
‘Why not speak to George first?’ Blanche suggested. ‘He could do with the guns. The police will only panic, then confiscate them.’
John Sturgess nodded approval. ‘Now I know you’ve lived here before.’