The Other Side of Paradise (31 page)

‘How nice?’

‘As nice as you were in the Alexandra when I made all that stupid fuss. But you’ve probably forgotten about that.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I haven’t forgotten.’

She craned her neck to see more stars.

‘When I couldn’t sleep at night in the camps, I used to pretend other things, too. Make them up. We all did. Mostly to do with food because we were always so hungry. We’d lie there, making up menus and choosing our favourite dishes. Other times some of us would dress up in our best clothes, curl our hair, put on powder and lipstick and go out to dinner. I went out with you, one night.’

‘You don’t say! Where did I take you?’

‘Back to that Hawaiian place up on the hill with the band and no food. I ate all the fruit in the cocktail and I was still starving.’

‘Sorry about that. How was the rest of the evening?’

‘Not a big success. We argued and you were very rude about my shoes, as usual.’ She stuck out her foot. ‘What do you think of these? I bought them in Sydney.’

‘You’ll break your ankle one of these days.’

‘That’s what you keep telling me. How about this frock? I bought it in Sydney, too.’

‘You look beautiful in it.’

‘I didn’t look very beautiful in the camps.’

‘Nobody did.’

‘That’s true. I don’t think I’ll ever look like I did before.’

‘None of us will.’

‘And we’ll never get back the three and a half years we lost.’

‘They weren’t totally wasted.’

She understood him. ‘I suppose not.’

After a moment, he said, ‘I used to take you out at night, too. Lots of times.’

‘Oh?’ It was her turn to be surprised. ‘Where did we go?’

‘Different places. All with good food.’

‘You were lucky. What did we eat?’

‘All kinds of stuff. Indian, Chinese, French. Sometimes we went where there was a band so we could dance. We got on like a house on fire. You’d be amazed.’

‘Yes, I would. Very. Are you sure we did?’

‘Dinky-die, as we ex-convicts are so fond of saying.’

‘It wasn’t like that in my version.’

‘Well, you got it wrong.’

She said, speaking to the stars, not to him, ‘I’ve always been wrong about you, Ray. I want you to know that. And wrong about Australians. And about Australia. As a matter of fact, I like all three of you quite a lot.’

‘Enough to stay?’

‘I’m not sure. I don’t know what to do. Do you think I should?’

He stubbed out the cigarette. Came over to the verandah rail where she was still staring at the stars; turned her towards him.

‘You know bloody well what I think, Susan. Verity told me she’d spilled the beans.’

‘I didn’t believe her.’

‘Why not?’

She looked up at him. ‘How could I, Ray? We’ve always squabbled, you and I. You’ve always seemed to disapprove of me – you said I was spoiled, remember? And I’ve been pretty foul to you. How could I possibly believe it?’

He smiled slowly. ‘My word,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to do something about that.’

They stopped the horses at the top of the hill. The land stretched away for miles and miles under the hot sun and the blue Australian sky decorated with puffy white clouds – red earth, green grass, yellow wattle, silvery gum trees, the smudged purple distance.

‘Well, what do you think of it all, Miss Roper?’

‘It’s pretty amazing, Captain Harvey.’

‘Worth staying for?’

‘On balance, I think so. Yes.’

‘Dinky-die, as we say?’

‘Dinky-die.’

‘Spoken like a true Aussie,’ he said. ‘You know, I always reckoned you’d come round to us, in the end.’

Epilogue

Ray and I were married in Sydney by the end of that year. He had already returned to work at St Vincent’s Hospital, where he later became a consultant surgeon. We moved, with Sweep, into a house at Mosman on the northern side of the Harbour and our children grew up there.

My mother went back to England and eventually married a rich and charming widower. Grandmother returned to her home in Penang with Zhu and stayed there until she died. Hector went back there too, recaptured by Soojal and shipped off to Penang, protesting loudly all the way. He outlived Grandmother and, in spite of his unsociable ways, we gave him a home with us in Sydney. The children taught him to sing snatches from ‘Waltzing Matilda’.

Peter has written to me regularly over the years and I went to see him once during a visit to my mother in England. He had grown into the fine young man I had always expected him to be. He went up to Oxford and then into the Foreign Office and, as I had predicted, he ended up as Sir Peter Travers. Hua still writes to me, too. She grew up to become an English teacher in a school in Singapore and sends me photos of herself with her Chinese husband and her beautiful children. Stella married a doctor and went off to live happily ever after in Brisbane. I found out, eventually, that Milly had reached South Africa where she spent the rest of the war before returning to England. We wrote to each other regularly for a while until the correspondence dwindled to Christmas cards. She married a solicitor and lives in Yorkshire. I expect that, in time, she forgot all about Geoff.

Many years after the war, I happened to see a photograph of Denys in the
Sydney Morning Herald
. He had become something very high up and important in the police and was on an official visit to Australia. He still had the same toothbrush moustache but he was looking very solemn and serious – quite unlike the Denys from Cads’ Alley that I knew. I wonder if he still remembers.

Even now, the camps return. Nightmares about them wake me in a sweating panic and sometimes they pop up unexpectedly by day, and in the oddest places. A woman in front of me at the supermarket checkout queue puts a bag of rice down on the counter. There is a hole in the corner and a small handful trickles out – about a day’s ration. I stare at the innocent little pile of grains and I’m back in the camps again. I don’t suppose they will ever go away.

I have been back to Singapore to visit my father’s grave and to see the war memorial to the civilians who died during the Japanese occupation, but I shan’t go back again.

The house in Cavenagh Road has been pulled down and replaced by a block of apartments. House, gardens, tennis court, aviary, goldfish pond and the pet cemetery have been erased, so has the surrounding jungle. The bullfrogs and the cicadas croak and chorus there no more.

Singapore has become an ultra-modern Asian city. Where there was green growth there is grey concrete and where there were historic colonial homes there are glass skyscrapers, luxury hotels, shopping malls and international restaurants, all hermetically sealed in air conditioning. Land has been reclaimed from the waterfront for more building and the old labyrinthine streets have widened into ordered highways. The hawkers’ stalls have vanished, the pavements are spotless, the native markets sell foreign tat to tourists.

It’s a very impressive city but it’s not my
Singapura
. My Lion City was creaking fans, tiled floors, rattan chicks, verandahs wide open on to lallang lawns, the lushest greenery, the sweetest scents and the brightest flowers. It was a swarming, clamouring jumble of life, smelling fragrantly of curry and spice and all things nice, and of things not so nice. Chinks, Stinks and Drinks, as the old saying went. Nobody would say that now.

I loved it passionately and it’s gone. And the
tuans
and the
memsahibs
are gone, too. So is their way of life, crumbled to dust along with the mighty British Empire.

The British deserved to lose Singapore to the Japanese – there’s not much dispute about that – and they paid a terrible price in suffering and lives. Where exactly the blame lies for the defeat isn’t so clear. There may be some truth in the theory that the Battle of Malaya was lost in the ballrooms and bars of Raffles and Tanglin. But the stories of arrogance, complacency and incompetence are more than matched by the tales of immense courage, heroism and self-sacrifice.

Whatever her faults, there’ll always be an England. And she’s free.

THE END

About the Author

Margaret Mayhew was born in London and her earliest childhood memories were of the London Blitz. She began writing in her mid-thirties and had her first novel published in 1976. She is married to American aviation author, Philip Kaplan, and lives in Gloucestershire. Her previous novels,
Bluebirds, The Crew, The Little Ship, Our Yanks, The Pathfinder, Those in Peril, I’ll Be Seeing You
and
The Boat Girls
are also published by Corgi.

Also by Margaret Mayhew

BLUEBIRDS

THE CREW

THE LITTLE SHIP

OUR YANKS

THE PATHFINDER

THOSE IN PERIL

I’LL BE SEEING YOU

THE BOAT GIRLS

and published by Corgi Books

TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS
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THE OTHER SIDE OF PARADISE
A CORGI BOOK: 9780552154925
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781407041087

First publication in Great Britain
Corgi edition published 2009

Copyright © Margaret Mayhew 2009

Margaret Mayhew has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

‘There’ll Always be an England’ Words and Music by Ross Parker and Hugh Charles © Copyright 1939 Dash Music Company Limited. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright secured. Reprinted by Permission.

This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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