THE RED PAVILION
JEAN CHAPMAN
© Jean Chapman 1995
Jean Chapman has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published in 1995 by Piatkus Ltd.
This edition published in 2015 by Endeavour Press Ltd.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Acknowledgements
This book could not have been written without the constant help of my husband, Alan, who as an eighteen-year-old conscript served with the Scots Guards in Malaya from 1948 to 1951. He passed on to me not only his experiences but also opportunities to know and admire the peoples and country for myself. I also found Noel Barber’s book ‘The War of the Running Dogs’ and F. Spencer Chapman’s book ‘The Jungle is Neutral’ especially helpful.
Chapter One
The house stood in the middle of broad acres of lawn, a solid Victorian country property with aged walnut and mulberry trees edging the back gardens, copper beeches and limes, fragrant in the June sunshine, gracing the front.
Elegant without being pretentious. The ‘To Lease’ advertisement in the 1948 New Year edition of Country Life had been quickly answered and the offer taken up. Six months later the personal possessions of the Hammond family had been packed and Pearling House generally depersonalised ready for its tenants.
Elizabeth watched and waited as her mother lingered under the front portico. Finally she switched on the engine of the Riley and revved it. ‘Come on,’ she breathed through clenched teeth. Her patience had long ago been exhausted by the frustrations of convincing her mother that the expense of the new BOAC flight from England to the Far East was more practical than four weeks on a liner.
‘We’ve not that long,’ she called finally. ‘I have to take the car to the garage. I want to make sure it’s going to be properly stored.’
Blanche’s swift glance at her elder daughter, accompanied by nothing more than a flutter of a handkerchief across her face, seem to symbolise more a wish to wave goodbye than to undertake the journey. Not for the first time Liz wondered whether her mother did not care more for Pearling than for her father and the distant Rinsey estate that had been their home for fifteen years. Liz yearned to join her father, to be back with her friends.
Eight years ago the war had torn her from all she held dear in upcountry Malaya — her amah, her pet monkey, most of all the Guisan family — and now every minute’s delay seemed intolerable.
‘Goodbye, civilisation,’ her mother muttered, climbing into the car at last. ‘And hail Shangri-la.’
The sniff of disapproval was followed by the judgement, ‘Your sister has the right memories — screaming monkeys and the water always hot in her paddling pool.’
Liz’s recollection was that her mother used to wave her umbrella aggressively at the garden leaf monkeys, stirring them into chattering excitement and mischievous retaliation as they shook the branches of the trees, showering suspended raindrops on to the gesticulating woman. Not wishing to give cause for any further anti-Eastern sentiments now Blanche was actually in the car, Liz limited herself to the reply, ‘Wendy was only four. I was fourteen.’
‘The war got you out of the benighted place just in time.’
Liz opened her mouth to argue merits, but contented herself with, ‘I hope to make my life out there, teaching ... drawing.’ She added the last word quietly, that ambition meant much to her and she did not want it pilloried.
‘You didn’t need a degree for that!’
‘“I ran up against a Prejudice, That quite cut off the view”,’ Liz quoted. She knew that to have come down from university with a first-class degree rather than a wealthy upper-class husband was failure in her mother’s eyes.
‘What is that supposed to mean?’
‘I thought you considered a good education the supreme advantage?’
The weekend before they had paid a farewell visit to her twelve-year-old sister. Wendy’s efforts to keep back the tears had been flattened by her mother’s capacity to steamroller through any emotion, anyone else’s feelings, for what she thought was ‘the best for all concerned’. Blanche almost literally tearing her sister from her arms, had managed to combine a pat on Wendy’s heaving shoulders with a directional urge towards the hovering mistress as she told her, ‘When I know Rinsey is suitable, you can come for holidays.’
‘Isn’t that why we’re leaving Wendy here at boarding school?’ Liz asked, keeping her voice a short note below irony.
‘Your aim, dear, always seems to be to make me feel guilty about events over which I have no control. Ooh!’ Her mother’s drawn-out exclamation held the exasperation of a woman frustrated in all her efforts.
Spurting the gravel from under the wheels of the Riley as she swept it out of the drive, Liz had a sudden, vivid memory of her mother at Rinsey. She remembered the garden fought for inch by inch by her mother and various garden boys, of her chopping at the liana creepers in fury with a Malayan parang belonging to the cookie — and the Chinese boys laughing behind her back.
She had been a younger, far slenderer woman then, but the passionate exclamation was the same. Liz wondered why she had inherited the passion and not the tall blonde slenderness. She felt she was physically mid-everything — height, brownness of hair, looks ...
‘At least the Guisans won’t be there, something to be thankful for.’
‘They may be.’ Liz recognised the hurt-for-hurt tactic, but stonily rejected the prospect of Rinsey without her friends. ‘They may be. Father may have traced them all by the time we get there.’ She pondered the stories of internment and torture by the Japanese but added, ‘People are still turning up.’
‘The girl and boy probably have five or six children each by now,’ Blanche went on as if Liz had not spoken, ‘and God knows what they’ll be like!’
‘Why do you say such things?’
‘Because the Guisans summed up two things: your father’s lack of judgement in employing the man in the first place, and the danger of interbreeding in a hot climate.’ Blanche opened her handbag and stood a silver drink flask upright before closing it again. ‘I just hope this time your father finds the climate too enervating after England and the navy. He was much too previous in letting the house.’
The bitterness edging the voice and the tight folding of the leather handbag strap left Liz in no doubt that if her mother’s will had prevailed she would have stayed at Pearling, continuing to work on the market garden she had created during the war. Funny really, Liz thought. Blanche had fought to wrench a flower garden from the jungle, then worked herself to exhaustion digging up lawns at Pearling to grow food. Now, as Blanche had already surmised, they would be re-grassed.