At the bottom of the trunk, she found a few PG Wodehouse novels, a couple of volumes of Shakespeare plays, and a few 78 rpm gramophone records of crooners of the 1930s, Al Bowley and Bing Crosby.
Underneath all this lay a dinner jacket. She had almost missed it. It was camouflaged against the dark lining of the trunk. A card protruded from the pocket. She pulled it out: ‘Sir James and Lady Millicent Atherton request the pleasure of your company at High Tops House, Georgetown.’ She held the jacket up to her nose. The fabric smelt musty, but she thought she could detect the faint tang of lemon verbena. She half closed her eyes and tried to picture the function at High Tops. She could imagine her father dancing under chandeliers, with a slim woman in a sequinned dress.
She looked in vain for some clue about the war, but there was nothing else in the trunk. All she had was the jumble of bric-a-brac she’d found in the box in the study – the badge of the Straits Settlements Volunteer Force, and the one from the Northumberland Fusiliers, the signet ring, and the shrivelled flowers. What did they all mean? Would she ever find out?
She went to bed alone again, but this time her anxieties about Luke were replaced by anguished thoughts about her father and what might have happened to him during the war. Had he suffered like the men whose accounts she had read? Had he starved, been beaten by the guards?
The next day she went back to the museum. She asked the assistant to show her the records of the Northumberland Fusiliers. She looked down the lists of men. Hundreds were killed in action in Malaya or Singapore, and hundreds more had died as prisoners in camps in South East Asia. She looked down the columns for the initials IFR. Her heart stopped when she found only one: ‘Ian Frances Ryan, Private. Died in captivity, Thailand, 1943. Believed executed.’
Executed? Had Dad known that? They must have been friends. Was this the IFR who had given him the signet ring? Was he buried there in Thailand?
She closed the book and sighed. What was the point of all this now? Dad had died with all this knowledge that he had kept from her all those years. Why did she need to know about it now? She wondered if she was simply trying to distract herself from her reality, from the pain of her loss, from worrying about what she should do with her life now. She thought about returning to finish her stint in the Paris office, to the tense meetings with men in suits, to the painstaking hours spent drafting documents and dictating letters, to the lunches with colleagues, and to the predictable flirtation with Adam grinding on to its inevitable conclusion in a hotel bedroom.
As she walked back towards the Lambeth North tube station, she suddenly realised that she didn’t need to go back to that life. With the money Dad had left her, she now had enough to do what she wanted. Perhaps she could even make a journey to Thailand herself. The accounts she had read in the museum had awakened in her a need to find out about what had happened to Dad during the war. Perhaps there were documents or records in those museums near the Bridge on the River Kwai. Perhaps they could tell her something of the life he had lived there. She could go to the very place where her father had suffered, could see the railway first hand, find some connection with the place and with the time. She couldn’t articulate clearly to herself yet why she had to go there and what she hoped to find there, but she knew that making such a journey would somehow bring her closer to her father. Perhaps it could help make up for the fact that she had not thought to ask him about those years properly while he was alive. Even though he was no longer with her, it did not feel too late to do that. In fact it felt as if it was the right thing to do, the only thing to do. Perhaps she could go to Malaysia too, to Penang, to follow in his footsteps and see if there was any trace of the mysterious Joy de Souza there.
There was nothing to stop her after all. She had no one to take care of in London anymore. She could just pack her bags and leave today if she wanted. She wondered fleetingly what Joy might look like now. Would she even remember Dad? If Laura could track her down, she would make sure she found a way of telling Joy about the letter, even though it might be decades too late. At least that might make up in some small way for throwing it on the fire all those years ago.
By the time she emerged from the tube station at Highbury Corner she’d made up her mind. Tomorrow she would go down to the bucket shops in Earls Court, look for a flight to Thailand, and start to plan her trip.
She was smiling as she pushed open the front gate, fishing in her bag for the front door key. When she looked up she noticed a dark figure sitting on the step. She froze in surprise. He stood up and came towards her.
‘Luke. You frightened me.’
‘I came here to say that I’m sorry.’
‘Where have you been?’
‘I went to stay with the guys at the new squat. I’m sorry. Things were getting a bit heavy around here. I just needed to be on my own for a while.’
‘You could have said. I would have understood. But you didn’t even phone. It’s been three days.’ She
