In the Mouth of the Tiger Read online

  I hadn’t told her about my dream of Denis. I don’t know why. It was probably some sixth sense that told me that she would see Denis as her replacement.

  We had said goodbye after my last piano lesson. I had played all her favourite pieces – Claire de Lune, Fur Elise, In a Persian Market. And finally, as the shadows deepened in the Convent garden outside the music room windows, The Wedding of the Painted Doll, a piece we both loved. Tears had streamed down her face but surprisingly I had not cried. It seemed part of growing up that Sister Felice would leave my life at this time. I was moving on, preparing for the next phase of existence.

  ‘Why so serious?’ Mother asked as our taxi bowled through the rainslicked streets of KL. ‘Are you missing Penang already?’

  ‘Penang was yesterday,’ I said. ‘I’m looking forward to KL now.’ Which was quite true. At first I had rather dreaded leaving the familiar, crowded clutter of George Town but in the past few weeks my imagination had ranged beyond its narrow boundaries and I was looking forward to my new life. Mother had sent me letters – a small miracle in itself – full of references to afternoon teas at the Selangor Club, dining at the Colosseum Restaurant, and watching polo at the Riding Club.

  We passed the Secretariat Building with its distinctive copper domes, where sharply uniformed officers and bureaucrats administered the Federated Malay States. This was no provincial town, I remembered, but a capital city, the hub of a nation. I was young enough to feel a thrill. I was certain I would like KL.

  We had a flat in Parry Drive, a jacaranda-lined residential street only a mile or so north of the city centre. I fell in love with our flat at first sight. It was small and bright, with no room for heavy furniture or ghosts. I had my own room, as befitted my new status in the family, while Tanya slept on a verandah enclosed by bamboo blinds. I was gracious and asked her if she would like to share my room with me. A toss of the head was her only reply: clearly the allocation of rooms had been an issue and Mother must have insisted on my being given preference. I felt a little guilty, but it was a guilt that lay lightly on me and was heavily mixed with the joys of victory.

  Tanya had joined our small family when she first arrived in Malaya from China as a pretty blonde twenty-year-old in 1931. Her antecedents were obscure. She claimed that her family had been landowners from Perm who had been murdered by the Bolsheviks, and certainly she had been exposed to terror in some form or another. It showed in her brittle reserve and in the prickly, defensive manner she exhibited to almost everyone. The Russian émigré community in Penang had taken her in and matched her up with Mother. Her exact role had always been ambiguous: part foster-child, part companion. But whatever its nature, the relationship obviously benefited them both and had survived the years.

  We went out that evening to dine at the Colosseum. Over the meal, Mother explained to me that the success of Salon Tanya, as our hairdressing business was called, depended on our being accepted by the highest levels of society in KL. ‘That means we always dress up when we go out, and we are always, but always, beautifully groomed,’ she said. ‘Our business depends on being seen at the very best places. The races, the clubs, the theatre, the good restaurants.’

  ‘A hard life,’ I said dryly. But in truth I was young enough to feel a thrill at the thought. It seemed like every romantic schoolgirl dream come true.

  And then the thought had struck me: this was fate’s way of making sure that I met Denis. Surely he must be someone important in the Colonial Service, or a wealthy planter, or perhaps an East India merchant with a firm so big it had to have its head office in the capital city. Someone who would inhabit the circles to which I was being introduced. That was why I was in KL, I told myself. That’s why I’m not stuck in provincial George Town.

  The next day acquainted me with the other side of the glamour business. My job in the salon was to wash the customers’ hair before the real hairdressers got to work. It was a messy, repetitive task, and a little embarrassing to someone unused to providing that kind of personal service. The other apprentice was a bright Chinese girl, pretty and dainty, who chatted with those whose hair she washed as if they had been friends for years. I admired her and studied her technique the whole time we worked together, but I never managed to achieve anything like her competence or acceptance. I was always tongue-tied and a little embarrassed, and I know people asked to be washed by Lily rather than the dour, heavy-handed Nona.

  But disappointment at finding myself to be a pretty poor apprentice hairdresser was far outweighed by the delights of my new life. Parry Drive was within walking distance of the salon and I used to walk home every afternoon. Initially I used to detour to the well-stocked bargain shops of Petaling, the bustling Chinese sector of KL. It was a heady feeling to have money in my purse and I simply couldn’t resist buying trinkets, or pieces of fabric for my dressmaking, or records for the wind-up HMV gramophone player we had at home. But as the months rolled by, my focus during these slow walks home began to change. I began to visit the public buildings in the city centre. First of all the Art Gallery, with its richly coloured Turners and its restrained Gainsboroughs. Then the Selangor Public Library, said to be the most comprehensive library east of Suez. As well as popular acquisitions – the latest Lord Peter Wimsey detective novels, or the popular Denis Wheatley thrillers – I began to borrow serious books. Histories and biographies, reference works and compendiums. Books about art, books about philosophy, books about books and writers. I may have left school but the love of learning that Sister Felice had cultivated within me still burned strongly.

  And then I discovered the Botanical Gardens. Visiting the Gardens meant quite a detour but was well worth the few cents of a rickshaw ride. Most of the area was laid out in a very formal way, with an artificial lake, broad, gracious lawns, clipped flower-beds and ornamental trees. I used to stroll down the gravel paths in the cool of the evening, my sunhat hanging down my back on its ribbon, pretending I was in Richmond Great Park.

  But there was another side to the KL Botanic Gardens. A few acres of original rainforest had been fenced off and preserved to show visitors how Malaya had looked before the arrival of humans. A gate opened to a narrow path that wandered into what was apparently virgin jungle. Ferns brushed one’s feet, the jungle trees blocked out the sky, and creepers as thick as one’s arm dangled down from the gloomy heights.

  I would go into the very middle of this dark green maze and stand quite still, imagining myself to be Jane waiting for Tarzan’s call. I would even call out softly ‘I’m back from the City, Tarzan, come to rejoin you as I promised I would!’

  The jungle would answer with its myriad sounds, sending shivers down my spine and making me suddenly frightened. I’d stand there, hands clenched, fighting the urge to run pell-mell out of the gloom to the civilised beauty of Richmond Great Park just a few hundred yards away. And then I would walk out slowly, sedately, forcing one foot in front of the other as my back crawled with a million unnamed fears.

  That, of course, was the whole point of the exercise.

  Towards the end of 1935 our business began to prosper as the Depression lifted and tin and rubber regained their value on world markets. The change in KL, from the gloom of Depression to a new, brash confidence, was palpable. The improving economy was reflected in a quite dramatic rise in bookings at Salon Tanya. To cater for the increased clientele, Mother extended our closing time from five o’clock to five thirty, then to six o’clock. It cut into my free time, but the reward was more money in the bank and a steady increase in our standard of living. We bought new furniture for our flat and employed a daytime amah to do the washing, to tidy up, and to cook our evening meal.

  We lived as a family, as we never had before. Even Tanya seemed to be thawing, and more than once she did little favours for me such as buying fabric she knew I wanted for one of my sewing projects, or taking my library books back if I forgot. Mother had always insisted that I call her Madam Tanya, but one day she asked me, in front of Mother, to c
all her simply Tanya. ‘We are no longer in the Tzar’s Russia,’ she said, ‘so let us be egalitarian.’

  Mother was as good as her word and took us out for at least one grand social outing each weekend. Tea at the Selangor Club, dinner parties at fashionable restaurants, Saturday afternoons at the Racing Club. But while we were with the social elite of KL at these functions, we were not of them. I always felt a little uncomfortable, as if we were there on sufferance, or as specimens on display. I used to imagine that after we had left someone would be bound to ask: ‘Who on earth were those extraordinary people? Bit foreign, don’t you think?’ And I would imagine the answer: ‘Oh – they’re those Russian women who run Salon Tanya, don’t you know. Not quite our sort, of course, but its best to keep them on side. Might need one’s hair done at short notice one day.’

  I particularly hated it when Mother handed out her business cards over coffee, or when everyone was just about to leave. I used to slip away at those moments, pretending I needed to powder my nose. ‘Don’t be too high and mighty, Nona,’ Mother would say. ‘We are here on business, not for our pleasure. We are selling our services. No more, no less.’ But I would still shudder with embarrassment.

  I still had an awful lot of growing up to do.

  It was during a charity luncheon at the Golf Club early in 1936 – I remember that it was the day after my sixteenth birthday – that I met Tim Featherstone again. An American golfer – I forget his name – was touring Malaya promoting a brand of golf clubs, and he had been invited to talk at a Red Cross fund-raising luncheon. It gave him a chance to promote his clubs, and his name guaranteed a good roll-up. Mother, Tanya and I were on a table near the door, and I saw Tim come in very late, looking exactly as he had when I first met him in Argyll Street. The American golfer had already started to speak, so Tim hesitated by the door, eyes roaming the room for a spare chair. Mother saw his predicament and gestured him imperiously to a spare seat at our table. Mother would never let an opportunity pass to introduce Tanya to any man who looked remotely suitable.

  ‘Norma!’ Tim said sotto voce as he sat down beside me. ‘I knew I’d run into you again one day!’

  ‘For why you call her Norma?’ Mother snapped. She hated me using the name, probably because Robbie had given it to me.

  ‘Nona!’ I said quickly. ‘It’s Nona! You must have misheard me . . .’

  Tim seemed to realise that he was on sensitive ground. ‘Nona, of course! I’m sorry, Nona. What an ass I am!’

  Mother glared suspiciously at me but Tim affected not to notice. ‘And so how are you, Nona? Do you live in KL now?’

  ‘I’ve been here since Easter,’ I replied, ‘and I’m just loving it. What about you? Are you stationed in KL too?’

  ‘No such luck,’ he said. ‘I’m stuck out at the Sungei Slim Estate. That’s about sixty miles north of here. But KL is my local town. I come in most weekends, for golf or cricket if nothing else.’

  ‘Nona has just left school,’ Mother interposed suddenly. ‘Isn’t it so, Nona?’ She smiled coldly at Tim. ‘So hard to believe she is only fifteen years old.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Mother!’ I expostulated. ‘I’m sixteen! Not that my age has anything to do with anything.’

  ‘Age is always important,’ Mother went on relentlessly. ‘Don’t you agree, Mr . . . ah . . .?’

  ‘Featherstone,’ put in a bemused Tim. ‘Tim Featherstone. But no, ma’am, perhaps I don’t entirely agree with you. I believe that age can often be irrelevant. One is as old or as young as one feels.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ Mother burst out. ‘You can’t have older people marrying younger people. They must be about the same age. Or perhaps the man can be just a little bit older . . .’

  ‘Merde! How have we got onto the subject of marriage?’ Tanya suddenly snarled. She had been listening to the American golfer, and came in on the tail end of Mother’s extraordinary comments. ‘But I can guess! I am twenty-six years old so everybody feels it is their right to matchmake me! I am sick of being treated as if I am a cow or a pig to be auctioned off to the highest bidder!’

  Tanya’s outburst had been loud enough to catch the American’s attention and he stopped in mid-sentence, staring at our table with disbelief in his eyes. I could imagine his thoughts: ‘I knew Malaya was pretty barbaric, but by cripes this is rich! Are they really auctioning off that young lady to the highest bidder?’

  Mother was never any good in a social emergency. In fact, I suspect that at some stage in her mysterious past she must have taken a university degree in hamfistedness. Seeing our whole table if not half the room staring at us, she scrambled hurriedly to her feet. ‘It is not as it sounded,’ she insisted in a loud, sibilant whisper, leaning across the table. ‘I was not auctioning off Madam Tanya! I was trying to save my baby from being snatched out of her cradle by an older man!’

  Tanya and I blushed to the roots of our hair and even Tim grinned with temporary embarrassment. Thank God nobody laughed, though I could see several faces straining to remain neutral. We laugh about it now, Tim and I, but at the time I thought I would die of embarrassment. I was just about to make my traditional retreat to the powder room when I realised that if I stalked off at this moment it would only make things worse.

  It was Tim who saved the situation. ‘Well, I’m quite prepared to be auctioned off,’ he offered to the table at large. And he winked so outrageously at the dowager sitting opposite us that she burst into good-natured laughter. The rest of the table followed suit and the moment was over.

  The rest of that lunch passed surprisingly well. Mother had been quite chastened by what had happened and tried to make up by being pleasant to Tim. Tim for his part was magnificent, acting as if nothing at all untoward had happened.

  After lunch, the guests gathered on the first tee to watch the American demonstrate his clubs. There were ‘Oohs!’ and ‘Aahs!’ as drive after drive sent the glittering white balls out of sight.

  ‘Damn fine golfer!’ Tim said. ‘You know he’s ranked about number two in the world?’

  I admitted demurely that I didn’t, which gave Tim just the opening he needed to escort me to the terrace bar, plonk me down in front of a lemonade, and regale me with international golfing lore.

  ‘Do you play much golf yourself?’ I asked, trying to turn the conversation away from names I’d never heard of to something I was remotely interested in.

  ‘Just a bit. I generally play a round or two on a Saturday morning. It’s a long trip in from the estate, but worth the effort.’

  ‘Do you win?’ I asked with careful naivety.

  He grinned. ‘I’m about the weakest of the bunch I play with. Though actually, I did pretty well this morning. Managed to birdie the fourth, which is the trickiest on the course.’

  ‘Who is the best of your bunch?’ I asked, determined to keep the conversation going. I could see Mother out of the corner of my eye, watching us through a cloud of cigarette smoke from a strategically placed table she had requisitioned with Tanya.

  ‘The best of our bunch?’ Tim mused. ‘Probably Denis. At least, he has the lowest handicap. He’s down to two. Should have been here for lunch today but he’s gone off to shoot some seladang up in the Telom Valley.’

  That was the first time I heard Denis’s name. Of course it meant nothing to me at the time. But nevertheless this Denis interested me. Not because he had a golf handicap of two, but because he was presumably at this moment deep in the ulu hunting the huge and unpredictable seladang, the wild ox of the Malayan jungle. The ulu was the interior, the real jungle, where elephants and tigers and seladang roamed free, and pythons up to sixty feet long slithered through the leaf-mould. Something altogether different and much scarier than the tame few acres I frightened myself with in the Botanical Gardens.

  ‘I’d love to go into the real jungle,’ I said. ‘It would be terrific fun. Is your friend on an elephant?’

  Tim shook his head. ‘You’re probably thinking about India. Denis hasn’t gon
e off with a Rajah’s hunting party. He was asked by a Sakai headman to stop a herd of rogue seladang raiding his crops.’

  ‘I didn’t know the Sakais had crops,’ I said. Sakais are the original aboriginal inhabitants of the Malayan Peninsula, a gentle people who hunt small jungle animals and birds with blowpipes and poison-tipped arrows.

  ‘They clear small areas of the jungle, called ladangs, and plant them with stuff they need to balance their diet,’ Tim said. ‘Things like tapioca, hill rice, bananas and so on. It’s a very serious matter if the local seladang take it into their heads to raid the plots.’

  I sipped my lemonade thoughtfully. ‘Why does he do it? I mean go off into the jungle just because some Sakai asked for his help?’

  ‘I rather think he does it for the adventure. I’d go like a shot myself given half a chance.’ Tim suddenly leaned across the table. ‘What’s all this nonsense of your mother’s about our ages being too far apart?’ he asked seriously. ‘I’m only twenty, for heaven’s sake. What is wrong with a difference of four years?’

  ‘Don’t worry about Mother,’ I said. ‘She was just disappointed that you weren’t interested in Tanya. Tanya is in her twenties and so Mother thinks she’s already on the shelf.’

  ‘Will you come to the pictures with me tonight?’ Tim asked. He held up a hand before I could say anything. ‘Now, before you answer, remember your solemn promise on the quay in Penang. You’re simply not allowed to say you have something better to do.’

  I laughed. ‘I made no such promise,’ I said, looking into his eyes. He had a nice face, prevented from being good-looking only by the awful carrot-coloured hair and protruding ears. But the set of the mouth, and his eyes, were rather attractive.