‘I’m managed to get a double room for you and Daddy when he comes and a single for me,’ she said as a couple of bellboys came smiling to take their luggage to their rooms. ‘I’ll come to your room first and we’ll telephone Rinsey, see what’s happened.’
While Liz hung on for the call to be put through, she wondered at the slight hesitation in the softly spoken Chinese voice when she had requested the upcountry number from the hotel switchboard. Then she heard a swift exchange in Cantonese between the hotel and a telephone exchange farther north. She heard the word ‘Rinsey’ repeated and the slight hissing intake of breath from an operator.
She listened more intently to the odd words from one operator to the other, the clicks and the whirrs as the call was passed from exchange to exchange upcountry. An odd feeling of suspicion and concern came over her. Voices could hardly be inscrutable but she had the definite feeling that something was being kept from her. Finally a voice burst on to the line, Chinese words but with an accent.
‘Kurt? Mr Guisan?’ she asked. ‘Is that you?’
There was a listening silence, then the same voice asked in English, ‘Who is this?’
‘It’s Elizabeth, Elizabeth Hammond. Is that you, Kurt?’
‘There is no Kurt here.’ The voice was stony with rejection.
‘Then could I speak to Mr Hammond, please? This is his daughter speaking. I’m in Singapore with my mother.’
The silence at the other end seemed to hold a different quality and another thought struck her; was she through to the office instead of the bungalow? ‘Am I speaking to the Rinsey estate office?’
The line went dead.
She tried again and again, but now no one answered even when she checked and rechecked that all the links were dialling the right number. Finally an abrupt operator at Bantang Kali advised, ‘Try again tomorrow, please?’
By this time Blanche was bathed and in bed lying inert, looking beyond the point of being able to lift her arms from the single sheet on the bed. ‘I’ll order you that Singapore Sling with a side order of iced tonic and some sandwiches,’ Liz told her, lifting the receiver to ask for room service.
‘Good girl.’ Blanche gave a grateful half-smile.
‘I don’t think there is much more we can do tonight.’
Liz found her single room at the far end of the same corridor. The ceiling fans moving the light curtains gave an illusion of coolness. After she had bathed she felt desperately hungry and tired, but was unable to quell a curious mixture of anxiety and anger. She knew she could neither rest nor eat until she had made some further attempt to understand her father’s absence.
More than anything the voice from Rinsey — if it had been Rinsey her call had reached — disturbed her. She dismissed the feeling that it had been Kurt on the other end, the tones had been too hard, too unsympathetic — and would she recognise his voice after eight years? Could it have been his son, Josef? Her heart lifted ridiculously at that sudden idea. But why had the call been cut off so abruptly? Had something happened suddenly at the other end? The questions churned endlessly. And why wasn’t her father here?
This last thought was like a great shout in her mind. She remembered their arrival and a group of men talking earnestly together in the foyer, men discussing a serious problem, an emergency even, certainly not chatting. If anyone knew anything, she must find out.
The two men behind the reception desk were the same ones who had denied they had any information when Liz checked in. Could she rephrase the same questions without feeling a fool? She approached somewhat circumspectly, but was purposefully greeted.
‘Ah! Miss Hammond, I was just calling your room. There is a gentleman here to see you.’ The receptionist indicated a tall man, in his late thirties perhaps, certainly of white origins but whose skin had the permanent colour of one who had been long in the tropics rather than the swift and impermanent tan of a mere visitor.
‘Miss Hammond?’ he queried. His voice, she decided, was English but as complex as that cut off over the telephone. It was deep, welcoming to a degree, but held a tone of reserve. ‘Miss Elizabeth Hammond?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’ She took the proffered hand. ‘Have you a message from my father?’
‘Is Mrs Blanche Hammond, your mother, with you?’
‘She’s tired from the journey.’ She questioned him by her stillness as he indicated a seat at the far side of the foyer.
‘I have no direct information of any kind for you,’ he told her, ‘but we have mutual friends — the Wildons — who told me you were expected today.’
‘I do remember the Wildons,’ she agreed. ‘But we’ve tried to telephone to our estate.’ She felt suddenly aggressive towards this man with his shuttered expressions. How could she make him see her desperate concern? ‘We ... I ...’
‘Yes.’
The single word implied he knew. She decided he could be nothing but some kind of civil servant, some bureaucrat, his words were more official jargon than conversation.
‘So what’s going on? What’s happened at Rinsey? Do you know? And where’s my father?’ The shout that had been in her head was moderated to a piercing stage whisper — which paralysed all the foyer conversation.
‘Look,’ he said, rising from the seat and offering his arm to steer her away from the now silently watching group in the far corner. ‘Come and dine with me. I can tell you everything I know. It’s not simple — ’
She withdrew her hand from his arm. ‘Don’t bloody patronise me,’ she hissed at him, and thought with immediate penitence that she sounded like her mother.
‘I wouldn’t dream of it, Miss Hammond. In any case I really haven’t time.’
‘Then tell me what you know now!’ They had taken a few steps in the direction of the dining room. Liz felt she stayed upright only because she was taut with anger and exhaustion.
‘We both need to eat, don’t we?’ The extreme ends of his lips may have quivered upwards a little, but not so as anyone more than an arm’s length away would have noticed.
She thought, God, don’t let me cry when I sit down. To relax even that much might be a catalyst.
‘John Sturgess,’ he said when they were seated. ‘John Robson Sturgess.’
She stared at him, waiting for the information he had.
‘My mother’s maiden name,’ he added, mistaking her stare. ‘A lot of people call me — ’
‘Now we have the important things out of the way ... ’ She stopped and shook her head. ‘No, I’m sorry, Mr Sturgess — but for God’s sake put me out of my misery, if you don’t want me to start having hysterics. I’m too tired for tact. What do you know?’
He lowered his gaze to the table, taking time, she thought to censor what he had to tell, and to avoid her reading anything extra in his eyes. She noted the compression of the lips, the jaw tightening. The silence went on to complete abstraction as he picked up a fork and slowly impaled the bread roll on his side plate. He made it look like murder, like a commando making a deliberate and silent kill.
A sudden nervous laugh escaped her at the disparity between the idea and the action that evoked it. He looked up at her and then at the roll with equal surprise as if he had forgotten one and been quite unaware of the other. Briefly, she wondered if the problems that haunted him were not even greater than her own.
He cleared his throat as if ridding himself of such petty things as emotions. ‘The only hard news I have about your father is that he sent you a telegram on 18 June telling you and your mother not to travel, but to stay in England.’
She stared at the fork piercing the bread and remembered the telegram boy they had put in the ditch.
‘On the 16th Chinese bandits went to one of the loneliest rubber estates in Perak — not Rinsey, Miss Hammond,’ he reassured her, ‘and shot the English manager and undermanager.’