If the Invader Comes

‘But it’s not happening to me. Is it? It isn’t happening to me.’

‘For God’s sake, Clarice!’

She bit her lip. ‘It’s just I don’t understand you. There’s always something going on in the world. Always something awful being done to someone. It’s not like you to come over like this. You’re not yourself. You always said, didn’t you, look after the next man and the world will get better. I thought that’s what you did, as a doctor. That’s how I imagined you, Daddy. I admired you. I thought we were safe here. I thought you were happy. Aren’t you?’

‘Happy enough.’ He looked sharply at her.

‘Well then. Why ruin it all because of some potty idea – about me? What’s making you like this?’ She felt Singapore slipping away, Malaya itself receding. Terrified – and piercingly glad – she seized on the next unkind remark that came to mind. ‘Not the Scotch, is it? You’re not going the way of all white men?’

Yet he seemed in such a pinch, and she was sorry. She caught the implication of something serious going on; sensed almost his impotence. Was he in love, she wondered? Had some affair at the tennis club gone awry?

‘What troubles me is that I’m probably too late. I’ve failed you.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. This is where we live. You’re needed, Daddy. You can’t leave.’ She checked her emotions again, but knew he’d seen her.

‘You sound just as though you were six.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ she said.

This time he put his arm around her. ‘Look, darling. Take it on trust, will you? There’s nothing for it. I’ve got to take the risk now. If it all goes well and everything calms down … You know? If there’s a stand-off of some kind … Well, I can come back easily enough, can’t I?’

‘Can you? Can we?’

‘Just another leave, eh?’

‘If you say so.’ She stood quite still. ‘If you say so, Daddy.’

‘Tuan!’ Musa called to them from the veranda. Her father went to enquire. Then he came back, black bag in hand. A company employee had sent about a sick child.

‘Sorry,’ he said. She watched him stride up the garden and thought how he was growing old. ‘Probably shan’t be long,’ he called over his shoulder. Then he disappeared round the side of the bungalow to get the car started.

BUT HE WAS a long time. And, yes, I do hold matters too much in abeyance, lingering here in Malaya, in paradise, because of the payment that was demanded later that evening. It was a sacrifice in return for a fair wind, so to speak, and it was Selama who chose to make it. We try to avoid coming to the pain of such things; for if Vic and Phyllis were bitterly joined in England, Dr Pike was anchored to his spot by a supreme tenderness.

It had rained and was dark before he returned, and he brought with him the Malayan nurse, Selama Yakub, whom Clarice had met several times before. She watched from the veranda as her father helped the woman out of the car and past the puddles; then she went down in the glow of the lantern to greet them.

‘My assistant, Mrs Yakub,’ her father said. ‘Working on a case at the hospital. Of course, you know each other, don’t you.’

The nurse wore a neat, white uniform, but had exchanged her headgear for a scarf. She clutched it around her face as she entered, then threw it back. ‘How are you, Miss Clarice? So nice to see you again.’

‘Oh fine, thanks. Nice to see you.’

‘So kind of Dr Pike to invite me – after so long.’ Mrs Yakub darted a piercing glance at him, then looked straight at Clarice. She seemed about to say more, but turned away instead.

Their meal of lamb curry was conventional, and the conversation strained. Selama Yakub sent the kuki away. She served as though she were the mistress of the house, but hardly touched her food. Clarice felt uncomfortable. The inkling of disturbance she’d felt earlier continued in the air. She hadn’t known such an atmosphere for years – in fact since her mother was alive. Selama’s lack of appetite did not help.

Clarice’s mother had used to excuse herself from table, saying she felt a little ill; and when she thought no one could see her out beyond the veranda, Mattie had a method of making herself sick, leaving most of her meal in the back of the flower-bed – where by morning, the younger Clarice had noted with interest, all evidence of distress had been eaten by less troubled creatures.

After dinner they sat, she and her father, in the study, playing old-fashioned dance tunes on his wind up gramophone. They were alone. Selama Yakub had claimed she wanted to dispense some of the doctor’s prescriptions; but when Clarice went to use her bathroom she bumped into the nurse bringing in a tray of cups from the veranda. And someone had obviously been tidying the sitting-room.

On her return Clarice said nothing about it. With the Aladdin lamps aglow in the study, the various insects constantly getting in to crash at the flame, the air fugged and prickly with cigar smoke, she thought neither of Selama nor her mother, but of Phyllis, because of the dance tunes. She saw more vividly that leggy girl in plimsolls who, out of her element on visits to the house at the end of the railway line, would cling to the gramophone and put on certain records again and again.

She had always hated her cousin. Older than she, Phyllis claimed to know everything, to have done everything. When they’d played together Phyllis had been unremittingly spiteful. Yet Phyllis had loved the cheap songs – because a gramophone, indeed music of any kind, represented more luxury than she could imagine.

Clarice broached the subject of her father’s fever again. Like his drinking, it was a touchy one. ‘Has it really been troubling you?’

‘Turning jaundiced, am I?’

‘Why are you so difficult?’

‘Clearly not wasting away.’ He slapped his stomach. ‘As you can see.’

‘All right, Daddy. Don’t take it out on me. You still enjoy work, don’t you?’ Ambrose and his Orchestra finished their quickstep. She got up, rewound the clockwork motor, changed the needle and set it back on the other side of the disk. A crackly tango emerged. Her father refreshed their glasses.

‘I do. Except that lately …’

‘You are needed, Daddy.’ Something was definitely up. She wanted to pre-empt it. ‘You’re needed … to make people better.’

‘How simple you make it sound.’

‘I’m not naïve. I’m not.’ Her fingers tapped the armrest of her chair.

He put out an awkward hand to touch them, smoothed her wrist and then drew back. ‘Self-sacrifice, Clary. Yours and mine. We think if we sacrifice ourselves we can have what we want. Eh? Or have I unwittingly sacrificed my own daughter?’

‘What?’ She threw back her slug of whisky.

There was a knock at the door. It was Mrs Yakub. ‘No need to hurry, Dr Pike. Paperwork to do,’ she added with a tense smile at Clarice as if to account for her continued presence. ‘Is it all right if I sit at the dining-room table? You don’t mind? None of those newspaper cuttings now, I see. In your honour, no doubt, Miss Clarice. He’s promised to run me to my home. My son’s house. So kind, Dr Pike. You don’t mind, do you? Perhaps I’d better look after this, however.’ She gave another knowing grimace at Clarice and darted in to pick up the whisky bottle from beside her father’s chair. Then she left, almost apologetically.

‘You are overdoing the booze.’

He grunted. ‘No more than usual. Not to excess, if that’s what you mean.’

‘If that’s the truth then why was she so keen to take it away? And what newspaper cuttings? Did she mean all that mess I saw before?’

‘Perhaps the bloody woman likes to boss people about. Perhaps she’s got it in for me. I don’t know. Bloody natives. Nothing feels right. Everything’s out, askew.’ His hand lifted suddenly, and sliced at the air, startling her. ‘This war … Everything that’s happening now seems to me so cleverly … planned, Clary. Down to the details. I don’t know what that means but it troubles me, a scientific man. It scares me rigid. There’s nothing to counter it with, no case notes, no precedent, nothing.’ The gramophone needle hissed round and round in the groove at the record’s end.

‘I simply don’t follow, Daddy. Do you go to the club? Do you speak to people? That woman, Mrs Yakub …’ She twitched her head in the direction of the dining-room. ‘Your assistant. Do you talk to her?’ Under her breath, she added, ‘What’s she doing here? What was she up to in the sitting-room? She’s been putting things away in the sideboards.’

He grunted. ‘Oh, Selama likes to keep me in order. Bored, I expect. Waiting for me to drive her home. Salt of the earth, though. Damned good nurse.’

‘Selama? Is she your …? Daddy?’ Clarice remembered another scene, of her parents by her piano. The Broadwood he’d shipped over for her had lasted only two months. From the moment of arrival its sound had become more oriental by the hour. Rust and mould had attacked it with dullness, and then excrescence. The hammers warped and the felts rotted. Whole octaves of its keyboard refused to play at all, while small lizards made homes in the soundbox. She recalled there’d been an argument.

‘Good Lord, no. I’m past all that. Past all that sort of nonsense. Just good friends, I can assure you.’

‘Does she often come here, then? And keep an eye on your drinking? And take a proprietary interest in your housekeeping? Do you talk to her?’

‘Not much. My grasp of Malay isn’t up to the subtleties of things I can’t even put into English. And her grasp of English …’

‘So there is something the matter!’

‘Nothing special, I assure you. Nothing special.’ But the sigh appeared only partially to discharge his feeling. She watched his lip quiver. She watched, too, as he got up and went to his desk. He took up a piece of paper and handed it to her. It was a photograph, an Associated Press cutting of the Emperor of Japan. It showed a young gentleman in a perfect Western suit and high collar posed next to Lloyd George outside a country house. And I cannot but allow my great-uncle to make his fatal speech, though the minutes were slipping away.

‘Britain and Japan, Clarice. People say they’re wily Orientals, inscrutable yeller fellers. People at the club explain the war in China as the Asiatic mind. They say we’re safe, it’ll never touch us. As though we’re almost a different … species. As though they hardly see us, or see us as gods. Think about this, child.’ He crossed the floor and turned abruptly to face her as he reached the jardinière. The potted palm on its mahogany stand fountained up next to him, and loomed over his balding head. He looked like some famous old anatomist discussing the organs.

‘Two insulated, legendary pasts,’ he was saying. ‘Two similar knightly traditions; of kingship, honour and reticence, of the obsession with class distinctions and “the decent thing”. Think, child. Isn’t Japan an extraordinary mirror, as though the map of the world could be folded on to itself? The Japanese aren’t like the British; no. But very like them. That small off-continental cluster’s need for industrial strength … And sea power – Nelson is as sacred in Yokohama as he is in Portsmouth. Did you know that? Think. Each of us has the same absolute conviction of racial superiority. What then? Is there truly a new order in the universe? Is there something bloodstained and Darwinian? Or have we just been mistaken about the old?’

Clarice stared at him. Now he was wry, disturbing; his delivery was enigmatic. She couldn’t follow him.

He strode back to the far side of his desk, and swung round again to rest his hand on the narrow top where a lamp stood, smoking slightly from its glass. ‘Japan wants the British out of the East. She hates us. The only reason British nationals were relatively safe in Shanghai was through the difficulty of murdering them. If Japan is to strike for dominance she’ll need oil, rubber and tin.’ He gestured at the walls of the bungalow. ‘If they come …’

She wondered if he wanted Mrs Yakub to hear. Was he trying to tell her something? ‘Robin says it’ll never happen.’ She bit her lip. ‘As for the new order. There’s something in it, isn’t there? I thought it had been proved scientifically. Hasn’t it?’

‘People become ill,’ he said, ‘when they’re told things that aren’t true. The power of words, of suggestion – it’s up to us to use it … lovingly. The more I practise, the more I believe that medicine is a kind of charm. Influenza! My mother – your granny – died of it. They all did. It means influence – an evil spell. Clinically, they died of magic. How primitive. It puts the doctor on the side of the angels, Clary.’ He smiled, and she was relieved. ‘Take my fever? Malaria means wicked air, you know. I confess to you I have such a feeling in my bones. These words, these names. You need to pay close attention. You should question what your Robin says.’

‘He’s not my Robin any more,’ she blurted.

‘Then we’re in the same boat, darling.’

‘I see,’ she said, although she didn’t.

‘Except I have made up my mind.’ Then he took a brown envelope from under the stand of a heavy brass microscope. ‘I bought these. They came this morning in the post. We’ve simply got to get away.’

From the brown envelope he took out a slip of paper and showed it to her. It confirmed the booking of two cabins on the Dutch liner Piet Hein from Penang to Marseilles. The tropical night rasp seemed to force a way in through the blinds.

‘You’ve left me no choice,’ Clarice said. ‘No choice at all.’ Her voice was icy, but the secret yearning sprang up in triumph. ‘What time do you have to drive Mrs Yakub home?’

‘Oh, in a little while. Finish your drink. Put another record on, why don’t you.’

She did as she was told.

But when they found Mrs Yakub in the dining-room she was already dead. She was slumped at the table, her head right against the wood. An arm dangled uselessly beside her chair, and the weight seemed to drag at her neck, stretching the skin and blurring the features lopsidedly into a gap-toothed mask. The head, at its awkward angle, had its hair partially wrapped over again, where the scarf had fallen forward. Scattered about it, there were pages torn from an opened account book. In the centre of them all, close to a fold in the fabric, lay the empty whisky bottle and the remains of the practice’s digitalin supply. The keys to the drug cabinet lay in the hand that reached across the table – as if to say, by way of note, Here you are, Tuan Doktor. I’ve put everything in order.

DECEMBER. IN BARKING, in the flat, their breath was like smoke. His father sniffed at the piece of haddock on the larder shelf. Then he lit a match and touched it to the top of the old gas cooker. There was a small dull sound under the brown saucepan; but Jack was alert to his mother. He ran to watch her singing in the bedroom as she changed her clothes. She’d seen three ships come sailing in. On Christmas Day, on Christmas Day.

Then she whispered something, and the words confused him. One light bulb hung from the ceiling, and the yellow altered her skin. The bulb filled the wall with her outline.

She put on her girdle, and then a slip; only then did she shoo him away for looking. He listened outside her door. Her stockings brushed, one against the other, her dress faintly slithered. The knock on the boards was her heels as she turned herself about in front of the mirror, and when the handle rattled he stepped back against the banisters. She came out tense; he could feel the fierceness in her body. She spoke to his father in the kitchen, demanding his attention, until there was another flare-up and suddenly she was leaving again.

Down in the shop the dusty display of weighing scales was lit only from the stairs. The faces of the machines were like shadowy fish eyes. In the dark his mother kept her hand on the catch and the door was half open. Jack was cold for a long time even though he was four, now. When they all came back up, the kitchen was full of steam and the potatoes had boiled dry. His father laughed as he always did, and made a joke; but at last there was the sound of a motor bike outside in the street, and Jack remembered the words she’d used: Tony Rice was taking his father up Waltham to do the job.

Tony wore a belted mac with the collar raised. He carried his goggles in his hand as he came up the stairs. Behind him there was another man, fat and red-faced, who was unslinging the large satchel he had over his shoulder. Jack knew his name; it was Arthur Figgis.

‘Don’t mind if I bring Figgsy, do you?’

Arthur Figgis winked. Jack hated him. He tried to hide. His mother held him.

‘All right, Tony.’

‘Like a bad penny.’ Tony laughed. ‘All right, sonny? You’re up late. What’s the score? Couldn’t wait?’ He laughed at his rhyme. His smooth cheek hurt Jack in a way his father’s rough one didn’t. ‘You coming with us, Jacky boy? Eh? Coming to screw a bit of swag with your old man and his old mate?’

‘Tony. Keep it shut in front of the boy.’

‘What’s the matter, Phylly?’

But his father spoke. ‘Tony! I wasn’t expecting … It’s been so long. I thought …’

‘Thought I’d forgotten, did you, Rabbit?’

‘No, I … Well, yes, as a matter of fact. It can wait, can’t it? I’d no idea. Tonight of all nights. Of all the bad times.’

‘No time like the present. Eh, Figgsy?’

His father said, ‘Tony, I …’

‘Yes?’

Arthur Figgis said, ‘Deary me.’ He took his hand out of his coat. It had three heavy rings on it. Jack saw his father’s face was pale. His eyes had opened wide. He’d become smaller. Tony Rice always made his father look as though he were someone else, as though Jack too should call him Vic, or Warren, or Rabbit. Tony Rice had a glitter about him, like a decoration, with his wit and sharp voice.

‘Figgsy’s walking home, Vic. You’re coming with me.’

Jack’s father was a grown man wearing his apron at the stove and holding a fish-slice. His wife’s face had the faintest of smiles.

‘Are you coming, or what? Eh, Rabbit. I’m talking to you.’

‘Yes, Tony. I’m coming.’

‘Attaboy.’

Jack saw Vic Warren put a hand in his trouser pocket and give some coins to his mother. He saw him get his raincoat from the stand and go meekly out of the house behind the other two men. When Jack ran into the front room, past the decorated tree, his shoes clumped upon the floorboards. He watched the men from the window. Vic Warren on the back of the bike was hugging Tony Rice. It was the same person doubled. The motor bike roared, and the streak appeared from the headlight, a white finger pointing the way between the lightless gas lamps on either side of Ripple Road. Vic Warren had the large bag strung over his shoulder. Gone to fetch a rabbit skin. To wrap the baby bunting in.

The bike swung and roared until he lost all sense of where they were, or how long they’d been going. In every corner the back wheel threatened to go away from under him, and all Vic could think of was that his fingers would be frostbitten and useless when he hit the ground. Then, though the road was unlit, he recognised the fringes of Epping Forest. Old crookbeams rose up on either side of them. Their bare branch tops hooked and clawed at the streaked cloud. He clung to Tony Rice’s greatcoated body, sheltered his eyes from the iced and blinding wind behind the nape of Tony Rice’s neck. The band of the goggles made a blank strip in Tony Rice’s neat, clipped hair. The bike roared on.

They cornered sharply, leaning over together, and there were houses again, sedate black shapes, in the rushing air. Tony pointed a gauntletted hand at one of them, in a spacious row set back. It was large, detached; the bike’s exhaust note rattled at its moon-glazed windows. They passed some villas, timbered and countrified. Then round in a side road, they came to a halt. Tony killed the engine. They turned the bike and left it ready, kick-start cocked.

Vic’s guts churned. The side road ended in deeper darkness topped over by the shapes of trees. Tony led him into a path through the murk. Rime had formed on the iron kissing gate; it glistened. They scouted along, the two of them half crouched, feeling the leaf mould and fallen twigs through the soles of their shoes, picking their way by the flash of a torch beam. A branch creaked overhead in the trifling wind. Tony sniggered.

The way was overgrown. So long since the Coal Hole, one part of Vic had counted on Tony forgetting the deal. But another had prepared for this moment all along, dreading it, knowing with certainty that it would come to pass. It had lain between him and his wife. She’d sung at the club while he’d remained uninvited. Cash had appeared; he had no work. Though the cabin was finished he had little energy, for the child would wake in the night, twice, three times, and he would get up to calm him, or sit up with him. He and Phyllis camped out in the wastes of marriage – when she was at home. Nothing else would shift. There was only the continued ritual of her threats.

In the freezing glitter the forest hinted at its past. Twisted, silhouetted limbs took on a desperate, sardonic nature. The two men came to a fence. Five feet high, the larch strake tops wobbled underfoot. Vic landed in a vegetable patch. Among sturdy brassica stalks he stood ashamed. The tilth crunched minutely as his shoes broke the forming crust, and there rose a smell of cabbage rot. He caught the sweaty whiff of his own coat, heard his own heart. His stomach cramped him. He looked ahead and saw the black bulk of Tony ten paces further on, his breath steaming.

Vic was amazed at himself. His life was a fairy-tale. Only the bombs, when they came, would make sense of it. Who’d stolen him and brought him here – the apprentice boy, hoicked out of his grammar-school place at fourteen because of his dad’s lungs? That boy had once ridden off each morning wearing his too-manly flat cap, his jacket, waistcoat and clipped-up long trousers – as his dad had gone before him along the marsh track. Who’d picked him out – pedalling over the Roding at the Abbey Works, and then down the River Lane to the wharf to earn the family living?

As a young man he’d made cross-London voyages night after night on buses and tubes in hope of some engineering degree. He’d attended cheap concert halls, libraries, public lectures. Who had crippled his almost superhuman effort to lift himself out of the dockside backstreets?

His marriage had put a stop to it. Between lust and marriage there’d been Clarice. But he’d done the decent thing. And then Jack had been born. So why couldn’t Vic Warren be left alone to make his way, bring up his family? He reminded himself that it was because of the child he was here. It was Jack who was at stake. Phyllis couldn’t help herself. Nor was it the threats of violence from Tony, or Figgsy. Not really. It was what would happen to Jack, his son, if he didn’t go along with her.

My father wasn’t deluded. Phyllis had grown up the plaything of criminals. Now, unless Vic acted, the same fate would befall Jack. It was almost inevitable. The only chance he had of bringing Jack and even his wife out of it was to take all the guilt of the situation upon himself. The predicament was real; the trap – like all such traps – was cunning.

Therefore Tony led the way. The moon’s edge slipped into a cloud, and then out again. Before them roofs, copings and chimney stacks showed up sharp against the streaked, star-pocked sky. A path cut through the garden; it led under a trellis arch and then across the lawn. There was a shed and an outbuilding. Listening for the first shake of a chain, listening for the interrupted snort of canine breathing, they stood completely still, waiting a full minute. A snuffling sound from next door made them both start.

‘Nothing. Couple of hedgehogs at it, most likely.’ Tony shook his head and laughed under his breath. ‘Spiky fuckers. Supposed to be asleep, aren’t they?’

A cat screamed in the next garden, electrically loud. Vic jumped again. Again Tony shook his head. ‘Not scared, are you? Don’t you worry about a thing, mate. You’ve got your Uncle Tone to look after you.’ They carried on. The french windows were right in front of them ‘All right. Give me the doings.’