Pearls Read online

  The nannies – and there were so many of them that the two boys could never remember any by name – were tyrannized by the Duchess, who would descend from London with an avalanche of petty impositions. ‘Hugo must always wear green, it suits his complexion,’ she would command, ‘and the children must learn Italian. I shall take them to Venice in the spring.’ Then she might light on some extravagance. ‘Why on earth is the nursery fire so high? Are you trying to burn the house down, Nanny? No more than one bucket of coals a day, if you please.’

  Stinginess was followed by generosity. ‘Nanny, your hands are simply blue with cold. Ask my maid for my old muff as soon as we get back.’ In another two days, she would forget and accuse the bewildered servant of having stolen the muff, often in vulgar terms that advertised the blatant greed of her own nature.

  Davina, Duchess of Witherham, could never have enough of anything that gave a woman status. She pestered her lovers for flowers and her husband for jewels, wrecked the estate’s accounts by requisitioning sums for a swimming pool or a rose arbour, stuffed whole rooms with clothes which she seldom felt flattered her enough. She bought hunters which she could not ride and took lavish holidays in Europe on which she inevitably fell ill, saw nothing and was a whining burden to her companions.

  Most of all, she could not have enough of men. Without her husband, the highest echelons of society were closed to her. Instead she joined the vivid coterie of adventuresses around the Prince of Wales. Denied fame, she chose notoriety. Other bright young things might dance on the tables at the Embassy Club, but Davina was to be found underneath, riding her latest conquest with shrieks not sufficiently stifled to preserve their privacy. One bold man who refused her at the last fence almost died of shame when she bit off his fly buttons. It was rumoured that at her bedside she kept a silver sugar shaker filled with cocaine, which she sprinkled on her lovers’erections to make them last longer.

  When Davina heard this story she played it up to the hilt, carrying a tiny sugar shaker in her purse. What was important to her was not to make love, but to be seen to be made love to – was not that the greatest tribute a woman could collect? As a great beauty, Davina was entirely her own invention. She demanded that Cecil Beaton photograph her; the session was lengthy and unsuccessful. ‘You can’t catch the beauty of a woman’s soul if she hasn’t got one,’ he said afterwards.

  Without her repertoire of erotic blandishments she was nothing but a woman with thin brown hair and muddy green eyes, the size of whose hips was accentuated by the sway-backed stance she imagined was regal posture. She had fine breasts in the twenties, when it was fashionable to be flat-chested, and by the early thirties, when a soft swelling below the crépe-de-chine was again desirable, her bosom had deflated. Nature, at least, would not be ordered to her own ends.

  She looked upon her sons as merely two more males whose sexuality could be turned to her advantage. She conducted coquettish enquiries into the progress of their adolescence. Hugo, a naturally prudish creature, found her embarrassing before he was old enough to know why.

  James, as an infant, offered her the purest love she would ever inspire. His earliest memory was of standing in adoration beside his mother’s dressing table, handing her maid the hairpins as she dressed Her Grace’s hair around a glittering tiara. He was about four years old, and if her lovers had noticed a slight wattling of the skin of her eyelids, she was still as beautiful as a goddess to her younger son.

  Hypnotized with wonder, James reached up to touch the tiara. His mother, infuriated, seized a pin from the maid and stabbed it into her son’s pudgy hand, then ordered the nursemaid to remove him and pulled her silken skirts away from the bleeding child. Accustomed to such female treachery, James never felt safe with any woman.

  When he was about to go to Eton, Davina ordered his hair to be cut and had him dressed as a boy at last. For the first time she noticed that her younger son had a great deal of charm, and worshipped her as lavishly as her overbred Pomeranian puppy.

  Eton, like most other great British boys’schools in the thirties, was an all-male community with a hierarchy of sexual domination like that of a troop of baboons. The older boys buggered the younger boys to reinforce their authority. The juniors were required to act as servants to the older boys to make their submission formal. James, good-looking, good-natured and piquantly manly even at the age of thirteen, caused quite a stir. He had no fear of his own sex, and promptly escaped into an affair with Cosmo Flett, a cultivated senior boy who was unpopular because of his brains and ugliness. Cosmo protected him, read him poetry, and got a broken nose in the cause of defending their love, after which they were left alone.

  In the vacations, however, there was no escape from the hall of mirrors which forever disorients young men of precocious sexual allure and stunted emotional growth. His mother was always waiting for him, with presents, new clothes, and teasing compliments.

  ‘My gorgeous boy,’ she murmured, messing his dark hair. ‘I’m too, too jealous of you with all your little friends. Won’t you keep your poor mother company just a tiny bit?’

  He was paraded through her London life of nightclubs and cocktail parties almost as a proof of her desirability, as if to show her disenchanted lovers that she deserved only young flesh of the standard she herself had created.

  This period of favour ended sharply when James fell deeply into calf-love with one of his mother’s friends, a pale, plump woman of forty who hung on his arm, squeezing herself against his awkward elbow and making knowing, I-can’t-help-myself eyes at all their acquaintances. Furious at this double betrayal, Davina raged at the woman, who crumpled before a social force majeure and went back to her husband.

  James, who had believed himself truly in the grip of romantic passion, stayed in bed at Bourton House for a month then made a clumsy attempt to shoot himself, blistering the newly painted library ceiling with lead pellets. His mother was briefly concerned, which restored his cheerfulness.

  He was young, healthy, sensual and driven by an obscure anxiety about women. However, the more time he spent in female company the more he grew aware of the power of his charm, and he began to use it. His seductions were initiated by a desperate feeling that a woman was ‘safe’only if she were squirming helplessly beneath him, gasping that she loved him and begging to do whatever he wanted. Out of bed he was often petulant and jealous, quick to suspect unfaithfulness and eager to make love again to obliterate the suspicion.

  He became engaged, then broke it off cruelly, and the Duke ordered his younger son back to Bourton House, where the housemaids squabbled for the honour of taking up his morning tea. James was becoming more and more attractive to women as hard muscles filled out his small, slim frame and his dark spaniel’s eyes learned to plead from below his tousled forelock.

  Soon there was a pregnant housemaid to marry off hastily and a jealous footman, and Davina, still seething with rejection, began to demand that James be banished. Hugo, his older brother, whose temperament was placid and pompous, supported her and James sealed his own fate by paying marked attention to his father’s mistress.

  His mother manoeuvred him towards the army, but James stubbornly resisted. She launched half a dozen different schemes to find him posts in America, India or Australia. He conspired with Cosmo, now a Cambridge undergraduate with remarkable contacts, to have himself rejected by the Foreign Office.

  Malaya was James’s own idea; he had no idea where it was, but it was somewhere of which his mother had not thought.

  ‘I had an interview yesterday,’ he announced to his astonished family one Saturday at breakfast. ‘And I’ve been offered a job.’

  ‘Marvellous, darling,’ his mother spoke in the threatening tone of voice with which she greeted all bids for independence among her menfolk.

  ‘Exactly what kind of fool has decided to employ you?’ asked his father, piling his plate with slabs of ham.

  ‘The fool who is recruiting staff for the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.’ Ja
mes buttered a piece of toast with precision.

  ‘Does he know you can’t add up for toffee?’ Hugo’s habitual jealousy of his brother had deepened.

  ‘He doesn’t seem worried about that. All they did was give me a hearing test to see if I’d be able to understand Chinese. They said I came out of it rather well.’

  His father grunted as he sat down. ‘We’d better be grateful there’s something you can do, I suppose.’

  Davina commanded the table’s attention with a raised voice. ‘You can’t possibly go to a country like that, James. There’s a civil war and pirates and heaven knows what. The disease! And the East is an absolute sink of iniquity.’

  ‘Certainly hope so,’ James murmured, reaching for the marmalade. ‘You’re quite wrong, Mother,’ he continued, applying a generous coating of the dark-brown conserve to his toast. ‘There hasn’t been any civil war since Malaya became a British protectorate, in 18 … er, well, a long time ago.’

  ‘Tosh,’ pronounced his brother, asserting his challenged superiority. ‘Own up – you haven’t a clue where you’re going.’

  ‘Don’t you bet on it. Malaya is a pearshaped peninsula slightly smaller than the American state of Florida, which lies to the south of Siam.’ James rattled through the information on the cyclostyled sheet provided by the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. ‘The country produces half the total world production of tin and four-fifths of the total world production of rubber. On the ancient trading routes linking East and West, it is the meeting place of many races where men of all complexions live as friends. Eighty per cent of the country is covered with jungle and …’ At last he paused; the only remaining fact about his destination which he could remember was that there were over two hundred species of dragonfly there.

  ‘You’re completely mad,’ interjected his mother. ‘You haven’t the faintest notion of what you’re doing. I shall telephone this bank tomorrow and tell them you’ve changed your mind.’

  ‘Leave the boy alone,’ his father broke in with unusual ferocity. ‘Let him go to hell his own way. There’s damn all he can do around here. At least he’s shown initiative.’

  Despite his bravado in front of his family, James was nervous of travelling halfway round the world to a new life in a country that was little more than a name to him. When he returned to London he went to the Botanical Gardens at Kew, and walked in wonder from the cool house to the temperate house to the sub-tropical house until finally he stood below the soaring palms of the largest, hottest, most humid greenhouse of all and looked at a small tree with feathery green leaves before which stood a plaque inscribed Federated Malay States. Beside this tree was a banana plant.

  The greenhouse was filled with the murmuring sounds of water which dripped incessantly from a million leaves and trickled away under the wrought-iron covers of the drainage channels. James felt his shirt stick to his back and a collar of perspiration form around his neck. This sample of the environment which lay ahead of him acted as a solemn reassurance that he was making a wise decision.

  Two weeks later, with a steel-lined trunk containing eighteen stiff shirts, thirty-six stiff collars, a solar topee and a padded jacket designed to protect his spine from the burning tropical sun, James embarked on the P & O liner at Southampton with a sense of release that was the nearest thing to total ecstasy he had ever experienced.

  Georgetown, the colonial capital of Penang Island, delighted him as much as if it had been a toy town arranged entirely for his amusement. The grey-stone fort, with its guns pointing seaward, made him imagine distant junks loaded with Arab pirates heaving over the shimmering horizon.

  In the solid buildings of the commercial district he felt the pulse of international trade, and saw himself as an intrepid agent of enterprise. He took a rickshaw down Pitt Street and was thrilled at the sight of the Chinese temple belching clouds of incense, and the Indian temple painted in pastel colours like a vast icecream cassata, and the food-hawkers selling green coconuts or tiny kebabs grilled on charcoal braziers. The exotic-looking crowds enthralled him; the savagery in the town’s air exhilarated him. The sobriety required by his new profession was a welcome yoke. James felt that at last he was living real life.

  At the bank, he supervised a room full of Chinese clerks twice his age. At first he was well thought of, not least because he had an ear for the subtle tones of Oriental languages, and could soon talk enough Cantonese to converse with the clerks.

  Within six months, however, nemesis caught up with him.

  ‘Bourton, you have done well, and I don’t want you to think we aren’t pleased with you,’ began his supervisor, perspiring in the afternoon heat of the ovenlike office on Queen Street. ‘But we can’t have our chaps getting married the minute they come out.’

  ‘I’m not getting married, sir.’

  ‘Well, then what the devil are you playing at?’ James was genuinely perplexed. He knew, of course, that it was a condition of his employment that he should remain unmarried for his first four years in the East.

  The custom, he had soon discovered, was for the young British bank employees to work a lot, exhaust themselves in sport, and make forays among the Chinese prostitutes who waited patiently in rickshaws by the port. At the end of their first tour the young men took a six-month vacation in England, during which the more personable ones would succeed in getting engaged. The poorer, shyer and less good-looking ones would have to wait another four years, for their second long leave. James, eager to do well in his new life, had behaved with perfect propriety and was conducting a chaste romance with a girl called Lucy Kennedy, whose father was a senior civil servant.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir, I don’t know what all this is about.’

  ‘You’ve been seeing a great deal of Lucy Kennedy, you don’t deny that, I suppose.’

  ‘No sir, of course not. She’s a very sweet girl.’

  ‘Sweet she may be, but she’s putting it about that you’re engaged. Where d’you suppose she came by that idea?’

  ‘Honestly, sir, I swear I’ve never mentioned anything of the sort to her.’

  His supervisor, a pale Scot with the exhausted look which white men of long residence in the tropics often acquire, questioned James’s sincerity with washed-out blue eyes before giving a grudging grunt of satisfaction.

  ‘I believe you’re telling the truth, but you’d better find Miss Kennedy and get to the bottom of this smartly before I have her father to reckon with. The bank is one of the biggest British establishments in the East, people look to us as an example, and we can’t have a pipsqueak like you muddying the water.’

  ‘Look here, Lucy,’ James said awkwardly, stumbling over a fallen palm-frond as they walked in the garden of her father’s white-pillared mansion, ‘have you said anything about us?’

  ‘Oh don’t be angry, James, I only told Mummy. I was so excited I had to tell someone.’ She skipped with happiness at his side.

  ‘But, Lucy, there’s nothing to tell.’

  Doubt suddenly fogged her adoring eyes. Her plump lower lip quivered and she pulled nervously at her neatly marcelled silver-blond bob. ‘What do you mean, there’s nothing to tell?’

  James stopped walking and took her hands. ‘I can’t get engaged, Lucy, you know that.’

  ‘But you asked me, James.’ Huge tears suddenly appeared in the corners of her grey eyes.

  ‘Lucy, I swear, I never asked you. There’s nothing further from my mind, I promise you.’

  ‘But don’t you love me, James?’ Tears were now pouring freely down her plump cheeks. In another anguished ten minutes the mystery was solved. The previous Saturday James had taken her to the weekly dance at the E & O Hotel, and at the end of the evening they had walked out on the stone-walled terrace above the sea, listening to the soothing splash of the waves and the crickets chirping in the coconut palms.

  ‘I do love the East, Lucy, don’t you?’ he had said taking a deep, happy breath of the fragrant air. ‘I shouldn’t mind if I stayed here the rest of my
life.’ And Lucy had squeaked delightedly and planted a wet kiss on his-uncomprehending cheek. To a girl of seventeen with few brains and nothing but marriage on her mind, his idle words had been a proposal.

  Lucy howled and screamed and cried her eyes out; her father angrily attacked James’s supervisor, who defended James as firmly as he could without implying that the girl was an idiot. James, thoroughly frightened, swore to himself that he would not go near a white girl again for the rest of his four years. He drank a great deal of whisky, played rugger and cricket and a great many games of billiards at the Penang Club and sobered up by long tramps in the cool, jungle-covered mountainside reached by a ratchet-railway from the town.

  His luck did not hold. He lodged in a small villa with three other boys from the ‘Honkers and Shankers’. Next door lived a lanky Eurasian woman, half Russian and half Thai, married to the Dutch purser on one of the steamships which shuttled up and down the Straits of Malacca between Penang in the north and Singapore Island in the south. She was bored, lonely and often drunk while her husband was away, though when he returned to their yellow-painted Chinese house they had screaming arguments which sent the chickens in the garden squawking for cover.

  One evening the four young Englishmen were sitting at their dinner table, gently stupefied with heat, food and drink. The Eurasian woman appeared at their door in a crumpled, pink silk peignoir with a half-drunk bottle of brandy in hand. She sat on the table, began slurring and hiccupping through her life history, then collapsed face down in a plate of melted ice cream.