Dead in the Dog

bullet holes, a legacy of the last terrorist attack on Gunong Besar, earlier that year. Thank God she had been away on a shopping trip in Singapore – at least, that’s what she had told James.

If she had been here and survived, nothing would have stopped her from getting the next Blue Funnel boat home from Penang. As it was, her dear husband had had a tough job persuading her to stay, even though no one had been hurt – apart from a couple of rubber-tappers being killed down in the worker’s lines across the road. A pity that bitch next door hadn’t stopped a bullet, she thought vindictively. If the CTs hadn’t been disturbed by the chance arrival of an armoured patrol on night exercises from Brigade, maybe she would have been. So might James and Douglas, she supposed, but somehow that possibility didn’t tug too much at her heart strings.

As it was, the attackers must have been a pretty small bunch, as they scarpered as soon as the Aussies poured out of their Saracens – she had thanked the good-looking captain personally a week later, in the back of his car behind the club. The two planters had blasted off a few rounds into the darkness just before the troops arrived and certainly James had basked for weeks afterwards in The Dog, as the hero of Gunong Besar – fighting off the Communist hordes like some gunslinger in a Western film. Secretly, when her initial terror had subsided, she rather admired him for a while, until she saw the extra attention that his fame gained him from the women in the club, which soured her back to her normal dislike of her husband.

Downing the last of her tepid drink, she walked barefoot back into the lounge to retrieve her shoes, one from under the settee, the other from near the unused piano, where it had come to rest after bouncing off her husband’s neck.

Going through another door at the rear of the lounge, Diane went into a corridor which led to the dining room, guest bathroom and two spare bedrooms. She turned left to reach their own at the farther end. Like the rest of the rooms, it had no ceiling, the partition walls stopping eight feet up. The high, raftered roof was common to all the rooms, to allow as much circulation of air as possible – though privacy was a problem on the rare occasions when they had visitors staying, especially ones who became vocally amorous in bed.

She dropped her shoes on the floor and walked past the white tent of their mosquito-netted bed to reach the bathroom at the back. Inside there was a white-tiled floor and a washbasin against one wall. Opposite were three doors, one to a toilet, the other to a cubicle with a chipped cast-iron bath and the third a shower. Anxiously, Diane went to the damp-spotted mirror over the basin and stared at her face while she fingered her cheek. No doubt about it, there was faint blue bruising within the reddening – she could even make out two lines where the swine’s fingers had struck her. As the sarcastic bastard had suggested, tomorrow would require some careful adjustment of her make-up, before she went to the club that evening.

With a sigh, she stripped off her dress of cream raw silk and dropped it into the straw laundry basket, along with her white bra and pants, ready for the dhobi-amah to collect. Going to the shower door, she opened it cautiously and stared at the bare cement floor, which sloped down to a drain pipe in the centre, emptying on to the ground beneath the house. Once she had been confronted by a snake which had crawled up the pipe – her screams had brought Siva running, who had been greatly impressed by her nudity, especially the blonde pubic hair, which he could hardly believe. As she dived for a towel to cover herself, the Tamil had calmly picked up the serpent and thrown it through the window.

‘Only wolf snake, Mem. Not poisonous,’ he had said, but ever since she had peered suspiciously around the door before venturing in to stand under the lukewarm spray that came from a tank of rainwater behind the roof.

When she had finished, Diane put on a light dressing gown from one of the wardrobes and went to get another drink. She flopped back on to the settee to sulk and wonder if that bastard would come home in time for dinner that evening.

Sometime after six o’clock, that particular bastard was sitting on a bar stool in the Sussex Club, drinking his fourth Tiger beer and reading yesterday’s Straits Times. He concentrated on the rubber prices and the reports of CT activity, topics which were studied here as seriously as the football results and weather forecast were in Britain. Turning back a page from the commercial news, he read that two days ago there had been an abortive attack on a train down south in Johore which had been fought off by the escorts, but thankfully there had been no incidents up here in Perak for over a week. Maybe Chin Peng was getting the message, thought James, as the supply lines of the terrorist chief were being progressively strangled by General Sir Gerald Templer’s policy of fencing-in all the villages in the Black Areas, depriving the CTs of food and local aid.

James Robertson folded his paper and stared at his tall glass, the condensation running down the sides on to the polished teak of the bar. He was trying to decide whether or not to stay here all evening and get blind drunk – or to go home and read the Riot Act to that stupid bitch of a wife. Just because she suspected him of getting his leg over another woman, gave her no right to throw things at him – even if her suspicions were correct.

James was not a very intelligent man, using bluster and his powerful physical presence to swagger his way through life. He depended heavily on his manager, Douglas Mackay, to keep the business solvent. After four Tigers, he was feeling rather sorry for himself and the nagging suspicion that Diane was also playing away did nothing to put him in the mood for reconciliation.

He gulped down the ice-cold lager and slid the glass across the wide bar, rapping with his knuckles for service. A short, chubby Eurasian hurried over, wearing a black bow tie on his white shirt.

‘Another beer, Daniel,’ demanded James. ‘Where’s your barman tonight?’

‘His day off, Mister Robertson. The other silly fellow, who should stand in, fell off his bicycle today, so I have to be bloody barman.’

The manager of the Sussex Club was the son of an Indian mother and a British sergeant, who had been posted home in 1922 and had not been heard of since. Though he had mid-brown hair and fairly pale skin, he had been brought up by his mother and had the sing-song accent of that side of the family. He had worked in a large hotel in Penang for some years and had landed the job of running The Dog when it reopened after the war.

After getting his new beer, James swivelled round on the high stool to look around the club. It was early and almost deserted. A fat Education Corps captain was fast asleep in one of the big armchairs that were dotted around the large room like islands in a lake. The doors to the terrace were open and under a Coca-Cola umbrella at one of the white tables outside, a young man was almost nose to nose with a pretty girl. James recognized her as one of the sisters from the military hospital. The only other patrons were a bridge four, playing with grim determination in a distant corner.

‘Damned quiet in here tonight,’ complained the planter, as if it was a personal insult to him not to have company in his hour of need.

‘Thursday always quiet, Mister Robertson. But later, we get more from garrison, after the officers have eaten their makan.’

Daniel spoke good English, but had the habit of throwing in words of Malay, Hindi and even Hakka or Cantonese, which annoyed James – though almost everything annoyed James, apart from alcohol and an attractive woman.

He began to wonder how long he would stick it out here in Malaya. Though in some ways he enjoyed himself, with this superficially superior lifestyle that suited his snobbish upbringing, the place was beginning to pall, especially since his three-year-old marriage was beginning to crumble. He ate well enough, drank plenty and enjoyed a succession of sexual adventures – but he was beginning to miss English county society, with its pubs and golf and upper-class gossip.

James had actually been born near Cork into a Protestant ‘planter’ family. His father had been an Anglicized gentleman farmer and horse-breeder, but dislike of the founding of the Irish Free State had made him move in 1923 to Norfolk, where he established a successful stud farm. James was sent off to a minor public school in Cambridgeshire, then to agricultural college, where he finished in 1937 at the age of twenty-one. He worked for his father for a year, but they failed to get along and he began looking for a farm manager’s post. However, with war imminent, James volunteered for the navy in ’39, spent a year at sea, then was posted to Ceylon and spent the rest of the war as an undistinguished lieutenant at HQ Trincomalee. Demobbed in 1946, he got a job as an estate under-manager in Gloucestershire, but became restless and wanted to emigrate and set up on his own somewhere. His father had died a couple of years earlier and when his mother sold up the stud farm, she funded his purchase of Gunong Besar. Though he would have preferred going back to Ceylon, the place was cheap, having been run down during the war and in 1948 he moved in. Advertising for a manager, he was lucky enough to have got Douglas Mackay up from Johore, who had long experience of the rubber trade, of which James knew little apart from what he had picked up in Ceylon.