If the Invader Comes

Dedication

For Peter

If the Invader Comes is a work of fiction. Except for historical figures, all its characters are imaginary, and their names were chosen for no other reason than euphony.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

I A Contract

II People and Property

III The Borderland

IV A Secret America of the Heart

V The Tempter

VI The Comforter

VII Remedy

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

I A Contract

IT OPENS IN paradise, with my great-uncle. He was woken by a thud from the ceiling directly over his head, followed by a flurry of squeals, as the little cobra that seemed to have got into the roof caught another rat. In the darkness of the bedroom, Dr Wulfstan Pike lay under his mosquito net and listened to the drench hitting the bungalow thatch and the cascade of rivulets from the eaves on to the garden outside his window. He could distinguish, too, the pelt of huge globes of water into the puddles in the compound. The steamy rot smell from the old carpet mingled with the flavour of his own sweat.

He felt under the sheet for the woman lying at his side. Selama stirred in her sleep and turned over towards him; his palm traced the child-stretched skin of her belly to rest on the prominence of her hip. He smoothed the curve to her waist, and, as he bent his head near her hair on the pillow, he caught both the savour of the food she prepared, and the deeper note of her body’s secretions. The spicy confluence in his nostrils was so tender that he woke her with his kisses.

Later, they slept until dawn. When he got up, he felt confident, as if the world these last two weeks really had not been shifting under his feet. Outside, on the veranda, the view towards the coast showed each leaf for miles rinsed and urgently viridescent. The huge sky was mottled with pearl.

He stood, taking it in, still hardly believing after so many years the sublimity that lay around him – until a waft of fresh coffee announced that Musa, the kuki, was up and doing. A queue of patients had already begun to form on the other side of the front steps.

The coffee pot, on its Chinese tray, had been served neatly to the sideboard in the dining-room. Dr Pike took his cup and clomped in his boots and dressing-gown to the teak table. Its top was completely covered with cut-out newspaper stories; but as if they were no more than a scrapbook in process he was at pains not to notice them.

Most mornings Selama sent the cook, Musa, off to do housework or buy groceries, and made breakfast herself in an old shirt she’d taken a fancy to, a frayed blue one with cooking splashes down the front. Most mornings during the last fortnight she had begun the meal by objecting to Dr Pike’s mess of papers all over the breakfast table.

Today, however, she wore the red kimono he’d bought her once in Kuala Lumpur. And, seeing her like that, he wished he could hold time still with Selama sitting opposite him just as she was, her brown eyes looking up for a second, her quick smile showing the missing front tooth, and her fine, slightly greying hair spilling down on to red silk.

Isolated words from the expanse of print caught his attention: Blitzkrieg, cathedral, armour-piercing, Bydgoszcz. They flicked up at him with venom. He felt Selama watching him. She guessed exactly what was in his heart – of that he was certain. She knew he thought of quitting Malaya, of simply failing to return from his next leave. Part of him wished they could discuss his dilemma, another was relieved they never did. She knew he could never take her with him.

Neither spoke over a breakfast of last night’s rice pancakes, heated up again and buttered. When they’d finished, he rose and went to kiss her cheek. ‘Dear, you know how I need you.’

‘I know and I don’t know.’

‘You know.’ In the haven of her neck, breathing her, he was overcome.

‘No, Stan.’ She stood up, crossly, and rearranged her lapel. ‘Haven’t you got patients to see?’

My great-uncle sighed. Taking his quinine from the sideboard, he went to get dressed.

As always, he stood in front of the long mirror in his wardrobe door. It showed nothing youthful, nor romantic; merely an ample, red-and-white Englishman with grizzled body hair. He was no more than his reflection, and age had caught up with him.

How strange not to notice. Sag had occurred in several regions quite recently taut. And how thoroughly bald he’d grown. Only the eyebrows and moustache appeared to flourish, sprouting ever whiter and more luxuriant. Wrinkles he’d rather thought of as charm were bunched under the pale blue eyes. Surely his nose had enlarged while he slept. The jowls, simian; the ears, elephantine – it all added up to little more than roguishness.

The amah, the Chinese woman who’d first looked after his daughter and still remained with the household, had left a jug of tepid water on the bedroom floor. A large enamelled tin bowl was the apparatus he generally used for washing his privates. Planting his feet either side of it, he would lower himself on to its rims and then work up a good lather by the action of his hands, diving all about, leaving no crevice of his life unexamined. But for some reason this morning found him too picturesque for his own good and he left the mirror. He went instead to the little bathroom which adjoined, in order to sluice himself from the monumental earthenware jar kept permanently there. The cool water slipped deliciously from his back and belly and disappeared through the slats in the floor.

As he returned, dripping, to rummage in a drawer for underwear, Selama knocked at the door. ‘Stan! What’re you doing? It’s getting late. Are you lazy?’

‘Just thinking.’

‘You think too much.’

Dr Pike’s old thatched bungalow was on stilts. Standing next to the bedroom window as he hauled on his khaki shorts and snapped his braces over his shoulders, he looked down on smiling faces. A child waved. He recognised her. Under his care, she’d recovered from a paralysis, which the mother had insisted was caused by an ill-wisher. On such matters he kept an open mind, for he’d proved the abracadabra of medicine himself, countless times. The body might be decently addressed with an instruction to heal – and quite often it really would, throwing off even the most tenacious bug. Therefore, he allowed, in wickedness it could be told to become sick, and might comply.

Shaving, he reminded himself that his daughter, Clarice, was arriving at teatime.

‘They’re waiting for you. Hurry up, dear!’

‘All right, woman! D’you want to make a chap cut his bloody throat.’

HE LEFT THE bedroom as soon as he’d finished, and carried the little desk and cane chair out from the study to the veranda. There he called up the first patient to stand before him, and without more ado began examining the sore in a plantation worker’s leg. With its ring of ooze, it was a bad wound to come across first thing. It lay beside the shin-bone, an obscene, pointless crater in the structures just below the knee.

In fact, his head swam at the sight of it. He actually felt as though he were going to pass out – something that hadn’t happened since the day Clarice broke her arm. That had been on her seventh birthday, in England. His pale daughter had stood before him holding the shocking misalignment with her good hand and he’d fainted against the bookcase corner, the one by the door in the Suffolk house, and almost knocked himself out. Little use it would have been then to her, having a doctor for a father. All at once the plantation worker’s lesion meant nothing to him. His brain refused to focus, and he lacked any notion of the routine treatment called for. The only thing he could sense was that the sufferer seemed unusually sullen and unco-operative.

Dr Pike was an intuitive. As a healer, he relied on the inner ‘click’ – that moment when body responded to body – by which he’d know how to begin. Just now, its absence was unnerving, and, while the sweat broke out on his brow, his skin grew incomprehensibly cold. The sore mocked him. It threatened to widen and erupt before his eyes. He felt his other patients waiting, watching from the garden. A fly settled on the raw flesh; a couple more. His relationship with Selama was racially illicit. It was September 1939. The paradise was altering around him.

There had once gone out in that world an imperial edict, the Concubine Circular. After its issue, ‘native women’ had become less and less permissible in a government or company bungalow, no matter how unpretentious. While new men sat at the famous long bar at the club in Seremban, older Malaya hands would describe the passing of the Romance of the Orient. Before the Great War, most white officials had Malayan mistresses; the practice had been so ordinary as to be beyond comment.

Nowadays, men brought out their wives from England. There were roads, cars, telephones. Among the English there was a polite society of sorts, an urban sentiment, and with it a heightened racial feeling, for white women looked on the natives as unfair competition. Dr Pike brushed the flies away. The accumulation of fester was already dangerous. Tentatively, he began cleaning the mess with a spirit swab, trying to gather his wits.

He hadn’t set out to take up with a Malayan woman – nor was he the typical imperial servant I might already have led you to suspect. He’d left England in desperation because his young wife Mattie’s family couldn’t be trusted, and would never suffer her to be free of them. From London the couple’s first escape had been to East Anglia with the child, Clarice. When Suffolk failed to lighten the marriage, my great-uncle had prescribed this more drastic relocation and trained for the tropics. But Mattie had taken sick: of climate, of separation from home, of jungle fever or falling fever, or perhaps wilfully of some yet-to-be-identified complaint.

He and Selama had met at the cottage hospital. A ward sister, she had been recently widowed. In the way of doctors and nurses, they’d worked together over a period, brought close by several problem cases and their shared determination not to give up on them. Gradually, they’d become attracted enough to risk love. Both had been gratified. He’d immediately found a happiness, which had lasted.

But their liaison broke rules and crossed boundaries. Even after Mattie died, they thought of themselves as an embarrassing throwback, a white man and his ‘keep’. They were inadmissible among either his or her people, tolerated only so long as they kept on the very edge of society.

Now his daughter was a grown woman, and only last month a Mrs Christopher, a Perak District Officer’s wife en route northward through Seremban, had sent in a complaint about him: that Dr Pike’s liaison made his daughter’s social position impossible. Everybody knew about it except the girl herself. The plantation worker flinched at the swab’s touch. There was a dull hatred in his eyes, as if this tuan doktor were cause rather than cure. Dr Pike pressed into the weeping tissue, trying to do the right thing. Or was even this called in question, he asked himself? Had one person ever the right to intervene in the condition of another? It was his duty, surely, at least to clean up the damage. The man groaned and muttered through clenched teeth.

A whole region of clotted blood and pus finally came away. In the exposed corner of the sore, just under a film of partially healed skin, Dr Pike spotted a blue-grey shape, like a gaping comma, sharply defined. He stared at it in surprise. It was the head of something. ‘There’s a good chap,’ he told his patient. ‘You’ve been very brave.’

He finished off with the swab and rinsed his hands. Then, as if the treatment were complete, he prepared a fold of powder at his desk. ‘I’d like you to take this, three times a day after meals.’ He repeated the formula in his best Tamil, and handed over the paper.

The patient relaxed, visibly.

‘Oh. One thing. Sit down here.’ He stood up, and gestured to his own chair.

The man complied, and, apparently half-amused, settled himself in.

Dr Pike picked up one of the sharp slivers of bamboo he kept ready and split it to make a springy clip. He returned almost casually, before pain could be anticipated, knelt down, and inflicted one deft but absolute stroke.

A sharp scream echoed round the compound. It was still dying away as the doctor stood, triumphant. From the bamboo in which its head was trapped, a strange marbled worm hung curling like three inches of theatrical macaroni. ‘Found you, rogue. My God, but you’re an altogether different kettle of fish.’ And it was true: he had not seen the like before.

Laughter and applause broke out in the queue below the veranda. He could have sworn he felt the thing twitch at the sound; and he called over his shoulder, ‘Selama! Come and look! Tell me if you’ve seen one of these!’

The plantation worker darted a strained glance behind him towards the bungalow’s interior, from which Selama’s voice came back, high and still irritated, ‘Whatever it is, I don’t want to see!’

‘Don’t be silly. Come here, woman. Just take a look at this.’

There were calls for Selama from the lawn. At last she came out, an apron round her fine red kimono and a feather duster in her hand. ‘You’re dreadful, Dr Pike. Get away with you. My, my, a very bad animal.’

Everybody laughed, except the worm’s host, who looked offended. As for doctor and nurse, it was imperial farce, and the incident restored them. Dr Pike made up a dressing, sent both his patient and his lover away, and found himself able to proceed.

BY TWELVE THIRTY he’d finished. He’d treated three vitamin deficiencies, a lethargy, a broken toe, the child with the paralysis, two toothaches, two animal bites and a knife wound; advised one man to smoke less, another to smoke more; and monitored, through their husbands, the progress of several pregnant women. His last patient left a chicken in a bamboo cage which would answer for tomorrow’s dinner, and which also reminded him of East Anglia, where a parish doctor might find a brace of dead pheasants on his doorstep in lieu of payment.

The worm lay in a dish, faintly convulsing. He spoke to it. ‘What have you been up to, eh? Don’t imagine I don’t know.’ He took his trophy to the larger, mahogany desk in the den, poured himself a Scotch, and turned to his books to attempt identification.

He had small hope. There was such great variety in the forest, so much speciation. Manson’s Tropical Diseases, he knew, was both limited and soggy: the pages clung one to another at this time of year. Usually, he didn’t mind – the rubber company got him new volumes whenever the print started actually coming away. Today, however, it put him out. He unpeeled the relevant chapter and read. For large worms there was always the Hippocratic method, whereby nematodes such as Dracunculus were teased slowly out of the human lymphatic system, poulticed, rolled week by week around a piece of stick. Manson also listed a biblical technique for them: Moses had once nailed a brazen snake to a pole. Though Dr Pike lamented the lack of such kit from his issue, he dismissed these findings as irrelevant. In this part of the world Dracunculus was not a problem.

His own specimen began in a sightless head, was bloody, much shorter, and fringed with liverish stalks. It had visible segments. He imagined sharing his own body with such a thing, while it strove and grew. The sweat broke out again, this time soaking his collar and the armpits of his shirt. He prescribed himself another whisky.

With the usual filariases and helminth infestations, the difficult ulcerations, the mysterious wastings and crippling diarrhoeas, Dr Pike was generally more successful than science alone could have made him. Obvious incurables were packed off to the government hospital in Seremban, but where there was a chance, flair could tip the scales. He did see strange cases, and story-book monsters of the kind that lay in the dish seemed to long to be understood. Sometimes he had literally to wrestle with them; at others they required a long and teasing dance. Dr Pike was prepared to entertain the notion of a medical borderland, and was unconventional enough to meet the jungle half-way.

It was a far cry from an English surgery. The little lurking ticks, the mischievous snails, the local threadlike Wuchererias and Brugias concealed themselves within the abundant Malayan woodland, glued under leaves, afloat in pools, suspended from threads, or cunningly ciphered in the bodies of insects, waiting only to hide yet again in the tissue of a passer-by. They reproduced by threading species and air, being and space in the most ingenious stitchwork. Parasitical colonisation was the defining disease of Malaya, and Dr Pike felt both the worm’s malice, and its repulsive yearning to find a place for itself. Nature, so secretive, so abundant, so enterprising, actually craved attention. The worm desired a name. Dr Pike spluttered into his glass.

The creature was beginning to dull into a mass. There was already a putrid stink to it. It made his gorge rise again, as if today he lacked all stomach for research. To stretch it out and examine it thoroughly, to take the omens, how revolting. Thankfully the Scotch was always in good supply. In the heat it went straight in at the mouth and out at the pores, hardly touching the bloodstream. He splashed in another couple of fingers.

Now Selama knocked on the study door. ‘Stan! I’ve made lunch.’

She served him neat vicarage sandwiches filled with spiced egg. Afterwards they went to the bedroom. He undressed her, and the kimono cascaded round her feet in a silken rush; but when she responded to his embrace and huddled herself close, the room suddenly emptied for him, as though a plug had been pulled, and he was left afloat on nothing. He recalled his lapse of mind on the veranda, that feeling of being lost, disconnected.

‘Sorry. Sorry, dear.’ Horrified, he turned away from her. ‘The bloody Scotch, I expect.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘No. Sorry.’

‘Stan. It doesn’t matter.’

‘No. I expect not. Sorry. I’m so sorry.’ He couldn’t think. Her body, always so desirable, like a home, a flame, a frontier, had become strange. Because of his failure, she was almost unbearable to him. ‘Must be getting old,’ he said. The forced chuckle sounded like a rattle. His mind offered him only the image of the worm.

She held out a hand. ‘Come. Lie down.’ He obeyed, and allowed himself to be led to the bed and settled. Naked, she lay beside him.

He tried again, pouncing on her, almost; capturing her breasts and kissing them, pressing her belly, prising her legs apart.

‘Stop it! Stan, you pack that up!’

‘Yes, of course. Sorry.’

‘What are you playing at?’

‘Well … Hasn’t done any good anyway.’ The bedroom seemed far away, tinged with a juiceless aerial light, her anger terrible, but so remote. ‘Hasn’t done any bloody good.’

THEY LAY ON the bed, in the heat of the afternoon. He wished he could be sure she was asleep, but fancied she was merely pretending, lying there hating him. After an hour she got up and stretched in front of the window. Her silhouette, the back he knew he loved, the waist, the fullness of her hips, all struck him with fear.

‘Clarice will be here soon, won’t she?’ she said. ‘I’m going to Ibrahim, then. Straight away.’ Her son’s family lived closer to Seremban itself. ‘I’ll be back tomorrow after dark, when your daughter has gone. Don’t worry yourself, though. He’ll bring me.’ She faced away from the doctor as she tied on a batik skirt, slipped into a brown cotton jacket and left the room.

He followed, useless. He found her by the print-strewn dining table, and struggled for words. ‘He’s good to his mother, Ibrahim.’

‘Yes, Stan. He is.’ She picked up one of the plates left from their lunch and placed it waitress-like on her arm. Then she waved her free hand crossly at the strewn cuttings. Outside, it was about to rain again.

‘So what’s happening? Eh, Stan? You tell me what’s happening.’

He had no answer, but only peered down at the evidence he’d assembled. There were reports out of the Straits Times, the Malay Mail, the Tribune, Planter, and clippings, too, from the English Times, the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Telegraph – in fact whatever of the Fleet Street press had managed to find its way up to Seremban, hot off some RAF plane into Singapore and already quite overtaken by events. Shamed, he shifted his weight from foot to foot like a schoolboy up before the beak. Selama stacked the other plate on top of the first, and disappeared towards the kitchen.

‘Shall I drive you?’ he called after her.

‘No, thank you.’

‘Till later then. Goodbye, dear.’ He handed the umbrella out of the bamboo hall-stand. ‘You’ll need this.’

From the veranda he watched her go down the length of the garden path, the umbrella under her arm, still rolled even though the first warm drops had begun to fall. Musa, the kuki, hovered with a broom in his hand on his way to the back bungalow, pretending not to look. At the mud road Selama turned in the direction of the town, refusing to glance back and wave. Failing her, betraying her, he watched until she was hidden in the tunnel of large, overarching trees at the bend.

Almost immediately out of the same gap a Malayan lad appeared on a bicycle, coming towards him, bringing the latest paper. The boy hurried to where the doctor stood on the veranda. ‘Selamat petang.’ He presented the broadsheet. ‘Tuan.’

There was also a letter, from England.

‘Terima kasih.’ Stan Pike fished a small coin from his pocket, and then remembered himself. ‘May your deeds also be blessed.’

The newspaper contained flashed accounts of the Russians going into Poland from the east, together with more evidence of German barbarities as they’d made their way through from the west. The letter was from Phyllis, Mattie’s niece, whom he hadn’t seen since she was a scrap of a kid.

Then Clarice arrived in the town’s ancient taxi.

‘DON’T BE RIDICULOUS, Daddy.’ Ensconced in a cane chair, Clarice held her cup and saucer balanced in one hand and brushed with the other at the rain splashes on her shoulder and sleeve. Dr Pike was proud of his daughter’s looks: Clarice had Mattie’s features, fine and regular. Her hair, though, had always tended towards his own sandy colour. It was now further bleached and streaked from her trip up-country. Today, she wore it pinned, visibly ridged with the traces of a perm.

He was proud, too, of her dress sense. She’d put on a cool, belted day dress in pale grey crêpe de Chine. Leaning back somewhat languidly, with her legs elegantly crossed, and conducting a minute rhythm with the toe of one slim black shoe, she appeared more assured and sophisticated than he’d ever seen her; more mature, certainly, than her twenty-three years. As for himself, he stood facing her from the doorway to the dining-room, holding the teapot, with sweat already sopping the armpits of his shapeless tropical kit. ‘I’m not ridiculous,’ he said.

‘Who in their right mind would choose just now to up sticks? And England of all places. Even if they’re not bombed to bits, I certainly don’t want to go back to England. What was it you said once? Malignant middle class, beaten working class, and Mummy’s relations. I thought you never wanted to.’ She squinted at him, with a puzzled expression.