If the Invader Comes. Derek Beaven
sacrificed my own daughter?’
‘What?’ She threw back her slug of whisky.
There was a knock at the door. It was Mrs Yakub. ‘No need to hurry, Dr Pike. Paperwork to do,’ she added with a tense smile at Clarice as if to account for her continued presence. ‘Is it all right if I sit at the dining-room table? You don’t mind? None of those newspaper cuttings now, I see. In your honour, no doubt, Miss Clarice. He’s promised to run me to my home. My son’s house. So kind, Dr Pike. You don’t mind, do you? Perhaps I’d better look after this, however.’ She gave another knowing grimace at Clarice and darted in to pick up the whisky bottle from beside her father’s chair. Then she left, almost apologetically.
‘You are overdoing the booze.’
He grunted. ‘No more than usual. Not to excess, if that’s what you mean.’
‘If that’s the truth then why was she so keen to take it away? And what newspaper cuttings? Did she mean all that mess I saw before?’
‘Perhaps the bloody woman likes to boss people about. Perhaps she’s got it in for me. I don’t know. Bloody natives. Nothing feels right. Everything’s out, askew.’ His hand lifted suddenly, and sliced at the air, startling her. ‘This war … Everything that’s happening now seems to me so cleverly … planned, Clary. Down to the details. I don’t know what that means but it troubles me, a scientific man. It scares me rigid. There’s nothing to counter it with, no case notes, no precedent, nothing.’ The gramophone needle hissed round and round in the groove at the record’s end.
‘I simply don’t follow, Daddy. Do you go to the club? Do you speak to people? That woman, Mrs Yakub …’ She twitched her head in the direction of the dining-room. ‘Your assistant. Do you talk to her?’ Under her breath, she added, ‘What’s she doing here? What was she up to in the sitting-room? She’s been putting things away in the sideboards.’
He grunted. ‘Oh, Selama likes to keep me in order. Bored, I expect. Waiting for me to drive her home. Salt of the earth, though. Damned good nurse.’
‘Selama? Is she your …? Daddy?’ Clarice remembered another scene, of her parents by her piano. The Broadwood he’d shipped over for her had lasted only two months. From the moment of arrival its sound had become more oriental by the hour. Rust and mould had attacked it with dullness, and then excrescence. The hammers warped and the felts rotted. Whole octaves of its keyboard refused to play at all, while small lizards made homes in the soundbox. She recalled there’d been an argument.
‘Good Lord, no. I’m past all that. Past all that sort of nonsense. Just good friends, I can assure you.’
‘Does she often come here, then? And keep an eye on your drinking? And take a proprietary interest in your housekeeping? Do you talk to her?’
‘Not much. My grasp of Malay isn’t up to the subtleties of things I can’t even put into English. And her grasp of English …’
‘So there is something the matter!’
‘Nothing special, I assure you. Nothing special.’ But the sigh appeared only partially to discharge his feeling. She watched his lip quiver. She watched, too, as he got up and went to his desk. He took up a piece of paper and handed it to her. It was a photograph, an Associated Press cutting of the Emperor of Japan. It showed a young gentleman in a perfect Western suit and high collar posed next to Lloyd George outside a country house. And I cannot but allow my great-uncle to make his fatal speech, though the minutes were slipping away.
‘Britain and Japan, Clarice. People say they’re wily Orientals, inscrutable yeller fellers. People at the club explain the war in China as the Asiatic mind. They say we’re safe, it’ll never touch us. As though we’re almost a different … species. As though they hardly see us, or see us as gods. Think about this, child.’ He crossed the floor and turned abruptly to face her as he reached the jardinière. The potted palm on its mahogany stand fountained up next to him, and loomed over his balding head. He looked like some famous old anatomist discussing the organs.
‘Two insulated, legendary pasts,’ he was saying. ‘Two similar knightly traditions; of kingship, honour and reticence, of the obsession with class distinctions and “the decent thing”. Think, child. Isn’t Japan an extraordinary mirror, as though the map of the world could be folded on to itself? The Japanese aren’t like the British; no. But very like them. That small off-continental cluster’s need for industrial strength … And sea power – Nelson is as sacred in Yokohama as he is in Portsmouth. Did you know that? Think. Each of us has the same absolute conviction of racial superiority. What then? Is there truly a new order in the universe? Is there something bloodstained and Darwinian? Or have we just been mistaken about the old?’
Clarice stared at him. Now he was wry, disturbing; his delivery was enigmatic. She couldn’t follow him.
He strode back to the far side of his desk, and swung round again to rest his hand on the narrow top where a lamp stood, smoking slightly from its glass. ‘Japan wants the British out of the East. She hates us. The only reason British nationals were relatively safe in Shanghai was through the difficulty of murdering them. If Japan is to strike for dominance she’ll need oil, rubber and tin.’ He gestured at the walls of the bungalow. ‘If they come …’
She wondered if he wanted Mrs Yakub to hear. Was he trying to tell her something? ‘Robin says it’ll never happen.’ She bit her lip. ‘As for the new order. There’s something in it, isn’t there? I thought it had been proved scientifically. Hasn’t it?’
‘People become ill,’ he said, ‘when they’re told things that aren’t true. The power of words, of suggestion – it’s up to us to use it … lovingly. The more I practise, the more I believe that medicine is a kind of charm. Influenza! My mother – your granny – died of it. They all did. It means influence – an evil spell. Clinically, they died of magic. How primitive. It puts the doctor on the side of the angels, Clary.’ He smiled, and she was relieved. ‘Take my fever? Malaria means wicked air, you know. I confess to you I have such a feeling in my bones. These words, these names. You need to pay close attention. You should question what your Robin says.’
‘He’s not my Robin any more,’ she blurted.
‘Then we’re in the same boat, darling.’
‘I see,’ she said, although she didn’t.
‘Except I have made up my mind.’ Then he took a brown envelope from under the stand of a heavy brass microscope. ‘I bought these. They came this morning in the post. We’ve simply got to get away.’
From the brown envelope he took out a slip of paper and showed it to her. It confirmed the booking of two cabins on the Dutch liner Piet Hein from Penang to Marseilles. The tropical night rasp seemed to force a way in through the blinds.
‘You’ve left me no choice,’ Clarice said. ‘No choice at all.’ Her voice was icy, but the secret yearning sprang up in triumph. ‘What time do you have to drive Mrs Yakub home?’
‘Oh, in a little while. Finish your drink. Put another record on, why don’t you.’
She did as she was told.
But when they found Mrs Yakub in the dining-room she was already dead. She was slumped at the table, her head right against the wood. An arm dangled uselessly beside her chair, and the weight seemed to drag at her neck, stretching the skin and blurring the features lopsidedly into a gap-toothed mask. The head, at its awkward angle, had its hair partially wrapped over again, where the scarf had fallen forward. Scattered about it, there were pages torn from an opened account book. In the centre of them all, close to a fold in the fabric, lay the empty whisky bottle and the remains of the practice’s digitalin supply. The keys to the drug cabinet lay in the hand that reached across the table – as if to say, by way of note, Here you are, Tuan Doktor. I’ve put everything in order.
DECEMBER. IN BARKING, in the flat, their breath was like smoke. His father sniffed at the piece of haddock on the larder shelf. Then he lit