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