He felt her lips on his. Their tongues touched. Then he was lost. He was kissing her back with the suppressed passion and stifled expression of all his dull, empty years. He felt as though he was suddenly opening up, like a bud flowering to her touch.
After that first time they met discreetly, two or three times a week, sometimes at the club, sometimes at his bungalow. Occasionally, she would turn up in Sir James’s old Bentley, with a picnic hamper on the back seat. She would drive him to a deserted beach near Batu Ferringhi, where they would eat under the coconut palms and swim in the clear water. At first he felt as though every eye in the European community was on him, and that he was being judged, ridiculed. But after a while he ceased to care. No-one said anything to him, except for Henry: ‘I warned you, old boy. Be careful,’ he remarked with an amused glint in his eye.
Life established itself into a round of idyllic days. He was up before dawn and out on the estate when the mist was still rising from the trees and the earth was still cool. His undemanding routine was finished in the afternoon, and he would bathe, rest and then go down into Georgetown to the club most evenings. Sometimes he would play tennis with Henry. Tom’s game even became passable.
It was a blissful life, one he couldn’t even have imagined a few months before. He went through the days in a happy dream-like state, half expecting that one day he would wake up and be back in an office in London, poring over a contract.
On the few occasions that Tom saw Sir James at the club, the older man showed no sign of knowing anything about Tom and Millicent. He remembered who Tom was, though.
‘Have you decided to come back into the legal fold yet?’ he would ask each time they met.
Tom was not in love with Millie, but he felt a powerful physical attraction to her, and he enjoyed her quick wit and entertaining conversation. However, when he was with her, he found himself very aware of the feeling that she was just playing with him, amusing herself, passing the time with him until she tired of the game.
She was a good ten years older than Tom, and close up she looked her age. She was not beautiful, or even pretty, but she made the most of herself. She had arresting grey eyes and strong features. Tom wondered why she had never had children. One day, when he felt the moment was right, he asked her. They were lying under the mosquito net in his bungalow, sharing a cigarette. The heat of the afternoon was stifling, the ceiling fan just stirring the hot air. Beads of sweat covered her naked body.
When he asked the question she turned over quickly, away from him.
‘I’m sorry. Have I upset you?’ he asked, instantly regretting having asked her.
‘I was going to have a baby once,’ she said in a low voice, still turning away from him. ‘Imagine it, I was only nineteen. I was at Oxford, and James was lecturing part-time. He was a barrister then. We fell in love, and I got pregnant. Of course we got married very quickly. He had already accepted this post, and we set off to come out here. I lost the baby on the voyage. It was a girl. And since then I have never got pregnant again.’
‘You were at Oxford?’
She nodded. ‘I was studying History.’
‘I can’t really imagine you as a bluestocking.’
She laughed. ‘I was never one of those.’
‘Do you regret giving it all up?’
‘Not in the slightest. Life out here is wonderful. It might be frivolous, but I could never leave. I could live like this forever.’
She turned onto her back again and stretched her arms out languidly. Her white breasts were flat against her chest.
‘And now, of course, James and I will never have a child because we’ve drifted apart,’ she said casually. ‘I expect he amuses himself in a discreet way when he’s off on trips, but certainly not with me.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. For quite a number of years now.’
‘So you find your pleasure elsewhere. Is that it?’
She smiled.
‘And doesn’t he mind?’
‘He turns a blind eye. I think he is relieved in a way. It eases his guilt.’
She rolled over onto her side, and settled her head on a pillow. She began to stroke his back. ‘Anyway. Let’s not talk about all that. In fact, let’s not talk at all,’ she said.
Tom had been in Penang for a little over a year when news broke that Britain had declared war on Germany.
He was not surprised. His father’s letters had alerted him to the storm clouds gathering in Europe. He was at the club with a group of ex-pats when they listened to the broadcast from the World Service on the crackly wireless in the smoking room. The news was treated with polite interest, but like a story from a far-off land, as if it had no effect upon the assembled company whatever. There was only one voice of concern.
‘It’ll be us next,’ said Barry Cliff, propping up the bar as he had done every night since he had arrived in Penang as a rookie reporter twenty odd years ago. He was now a seasoned hack on The Straits Times. ‘You just wait. The Japs are building up to something.’
‘You’ve got to be joking,’ jeered Douggie Chambers, one of the hard-drinking rubber planters.
‘No. Not at all. Look
