“Yes,” she said, clicking the door to and on her way up.
She must have been too fast asleep to hear him rattling at the door, and only woke up while he was undressing. It was a plain room, with yellow walls of orange stippling decorated last by Mullinder in a burst of energy on some long-lost creative weekend, whose memory he had taken to the grave with his bad foot. Apart from the bed, there was a wardrobe, dressing-table, and two chairs, with lino on the floor, and a cupboard in the corner holding Brian’s books. “I didn’t think you’d be in till tomorrow,” she said, when he laid his cold face by her, close in an embrace of kisses. “Get in quick, duck, or you’ll freeze.”
“Why didn’t you have a fire?”
“I didn’t need it,” she said. “It’s warm enough in bed. I filled a hot waterbottle.”
“Well, you wain’t want one any more — not for the next fortnight anyway — because you’ve got me. So sling it out.”
She looked well, an hour of sleep blurring her eyes. “How are you feeling, love?”
“Fine,” she said. “I go to the clinic every week now. I’ve got varicose veins, and the doctor says I’ve got to have something done about them. I’m going to have the baby at home. It should be here in two or three weeks, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it came tomorrow, the way it feels at times.”
“If anything happens while I’m here, I’ll get an extension.”
“I’d like that. That’d be smashing.” He remembered the form that had been passed to all in his class at radio school only a week ago, giving a list of overseas postings and asking for preferences, though not guaranteeing that your choice would be met. The list had so dazzled him during the ten minutes the paper was in his hand (bringing back geography-book memories of fantastic tropical lands and a half-drunken childhood desire to go to them) that he had put an option down for a posting to Japan. He had not filled in the attached application which asked you to state any reason why you might not want to be sent overseas. I’m a nut case, he thought. Maybe I could stay in England, being married and Pauline about to have a kid. But for some unfathomable reason he had left it blank, never knowing what had induced him to do so, neither questioning nor regretting it, except to wonder why he had been sent to Malaya and not Japan.
CHAPTER 27
A couple of fifteen-hundredweight lorries stood by the camp gates, the bursting roar of their engines suggesting that when they finally debouched they would drag the rest of the camp with them. A drop in the noise, and the first one set off at a dangerous speed towards the village, ignored the policeman’s stop-signal at the crossroads, and made for the flat monotonous belt of the Patani swamps.
Before the Dakota was pulled into a belly-dive by some concealed magnet of jungle-soil, its wireless operator had scraped out an SOS — ending his message by the continual buzz of a QTG so that its position was fixed with reasonable accuracy by the wide-awake operators in the DF huts at Kota Libis and Singapore. No message pip-squeaked out of the plane’s emergency set after the crash, so it was uncertain whether anyone had survived. The DF bearings, plotted on Mercator’s North Malaya, crossed on uninhabited terrain of dense forest, between Kedah and Perak.
Brian sat in the first lorry — the wire grid of the earphones chafing his recent haircut — and listened wearily to the crackling of atmospherics, which seemed to be holding boxing-matches on the doorsteps of his eardrums. In some unexplainable way, such noise confined against his ears seemed to blur the distant detail of thin trees and kampong huts set beside the paddy fields on spindly legs. So he put the phones back a little to take in and enjoy the landscape flying by, the wide spaces of hot blue flatlands gently floating in the distance, a sight that made him dread entering the dark forests of the mountains where lurked the dead blood of injured men. The straight road in front, with a ditch and line of thin high trees on either side, looked like a tropically lit version of a Dutch picture he remembered from school a long time ago.
His call-sign crept over in slow morse, preambling a short message giving the position of the army screen moving north from Taiping. He tore off the paper and passed it to Odgeson — who pencilled an acknowledgement for sending back. It seemed like a game, an aptitude test of co-ordination in which groups one and two converge on number three, which has deliberately lost itself in the mountains. He pushed the bakelite from one ear and said: “I expect the bandits are picking up all my morse. It should be coded. Not that I mind: they’re welcome to it.”
Baker lit two fags under cover of his shirt and passed him one: “Don’t worry, the aircrew’s already dead.”
“Dead or not, we’ll have to stay in that jungle till we’ve found ’em. Maybe weeks.” The wind snatched smoke across his face, forced his eyes open. He looked through the cellophane window into the driver’s seat, above which the dashboard needle shivered around sixty. The paddy fields were green, shoots high, lush and cool-looking, unfilled parts reflecting white clouds that hid the blue and green ridges towards which they turned at the next crossroads. The second lorry was a hundred yards behind, and Knotman waved a greeting, clenched his fist in the Communist salute for a lark and a laugh.
So much wind-stream came over the lorry that Brian’s cigarette soon warmed his skin, so he spat it on to the blurred tarmac river of the road. The lorry slowed down and sweat broke from his face, was rubbed dry into his hair. Beyond a village, the undulating and narrow road went through a rubber estate, where a solitary tapper passed, with yoked jerry-cans, from tree to tree like some sober advertisement in one of the trade magazines Brian had often flipped through in the camp library. The manager’s bungalow was fortified with sandbags and barbed wire, and from a rise in the lane a Malayan controlled the approaches with a machine-gun.
Morse. It set up impulses in the brain and got his pencil writing a message from the army platoon to say that their lorry had broken down, and he swore while the last words came through, in the knowledge that such a delay would keep them out longer than necessary. Odgeson gave him a QSL and map reference: “We’ll wait for them there. I hope it won’t be for too long, though.”
“I wish I was on the boat,” he said to Baker, “instead of on this jaunt.”
Baker laughed: “It serves us right for getting mixed up in that Gunong Barat business. I shouldn’t have let you persuade me to go.” His drawn face had lost its inborn English colour and had turned to the first layer of a leathery tan. He’d been on a slow and lonesome booze-up in the NAAFI last night that intensified his usual couldn’t-care-less mood. As the time drew nearer to demob, he drank more and more and took to smoking, while engine manuals and motorbike catalogues lay dusty and forgotten in his locker. “I’d rather be in a brothel,” he said, “than in this four-wheeled oven.”
“You soon will be. Or back in London with your girl. Do you think your motorbike’ll have gone rusty and dropped to bits?”
Being so weary, he took him seriously: “I don’t know, Brian. My brother promised to look after it, so it should be in good enough condition. Not that he’s a very good mechanic, but he keeps his promises.” Odgeson looked up keenly from map to road, his pinkish, oval-shaped face seeming to Brian that it must in some way resemble those of the aircrew they were out to rescue. But the vision of them — college-educated perhaps, certainly skilled to the point of nonchalance and jauntiness — was switched in a second to the foresight of them dead and mangled in the great forks of high, superstrong forest giants. Or maybe wounded, alive and waiting, waiting, being drained of life like a punctured eggtimer.
The lorry was steadier around the curves, with number two only fifty yards behind on the shaded road of the foothills. Brian listened out for other calls from the army, his eyes half-closed at the soporific easygoing purr of the lorry-engine, while Odgeson worked on a time-and-position message for transmission to Kota Libis. They stopped at the occasional roadblock to make a hasty declaration of their mission: “This must be heavy bandit country,” Baker said. “All we need is an ambush at the next turning and the only boat we’ll be on is Noah’s Ark going to heaven.”