The Garden of Evening Mists. Tan Twan Eng

shame. But stay here. For as long as you want. The air will do you a world of good.’ His eye searched the crowd. ‘Didn’t Frederik remind him about the braai?’

      ‘He has work to do,’ I said. Magnus picked up a pair of metal tongs. ‘Were there reprisals against him when the Occupation ended?’

      ‘By the anti-Japanese guerrillas?’ He wiped his lips with his hand. ‘Of course not.’

      ‘He told me he was arrested.’

      ‘Well, the Brits couldn’t charge him with anything,’ Magnus replied. ‘And I vouched for him.’ He turned the boerewors over and fat dripped into the coals, sending up a cloud of fragrant smoke. ‘He made sure we weren’t sent to the camps. At one point in the war he had more than thirty people working for him. All of them – and their families – survived the war.’

      ‘We should have come here to wait out the war.’

      He stopped rearranging the sausages on the grill and looked at me. ‘Weeks before the Japs attacked, I told your father to bring all of you here.’

      I stared at him. ‘He never said anything about it.’

      ‘He should have listened to me. I wish he had.’

      The noise of the party behind me seemed to recede into the distance. I felt a sudden fury at my father’s obdurate pride. Magnus was right – things would have turned out differently: I would be unharmed, my mother would not be lost inside her mind, and Yun Hong would still be alive.

      ‘You knew early on that the Japanese would attack us?’ I asked, watching him carefully.

      ‘Anyone with half a brain looking at a map would have realised that,’ Magnus replied. ‘China was too big for Japan to swallow – all it could do was nibble at the edges. But these smaller territories in the southern seas were easier meat.’

      Frederik came out with another tray, this one filled with lamb chops. ‘Buy a donkey,’ Magnus said to him.

      ‘Buy a what?’ I wondered if I had heard him correctly.

      ‘I’m trying to make this young man here speak more Afrikaans,’ Magnus said. ‘He’s been mixing with the English for so long he’s forgotten his own language. Tell her what it means.’

      ‘Baie dankie,’ Frederik said, and I asked him to spell it out for me. ‘It means “Thank you”. I’ve been taking lessons in Malay too,’ he added. ‘It’s funny, how many words they both share: pisang, piring . . . pondok.’

      ‘It’s because of the slaves taken from Java to the Cape,’ said Magnus. He poured his beer into the coals and asked the two of us to follow him. He introduced us to the guests. In spite of the chill in the air, I was the only one wearing gloves.

      ‘Meet Malcolm,’ Magnus announced. ‘He’s the Protector of Aborigines. Be careful of what you say when he’s around – this man speaks Malay and Cantonese and Mandarin and Hokkien.’

      ‘Malcolm Toombs,’ the man said with a warm smile. He was in his late forties, with a guileless face I immediately took to. It probably helped in his work, looking after the welfare of the Orang Asli.

      ‘Not a grave person, in spite of his name,’ Frederik whispered to me.

      We piled our plates with food from the buffet table and were about to start eating when Toombs asked us to stand in a loose circle. Magnus’s mouth tightened, but he said nothing. We closed our eyes in a minute’s silence in memory of the High Commissioner. Only now did the full import of Gurney’s death strike me. Despite what the government had been telling us, things were getting worse.

      ‘How’s the boerewors?’ Magnus asked once everyone had sat down and begun eating.

      ‘They taste much better than they look.’ I chewed, swallowed and said, ‘How did Gurney die?’

      ‘Terrorists ambushed his car and shot him. Happened yesterday afternoon on the road up to Fraser’s Hill,’ Magnus said. ‘They were going on holiday, apparently – he and his wife. Travelling in an armed convoy.’

      ‘And yet they managed to kill him,’ said Jaafar Hamid, the owner of the Lakeview Hotel at Tanah Rata. He pulled his chair closer to us.

      ‘Why was the bloody news kept back until today?’ Magnus asked.

      ‘Everything’s censored these days,’ I said. ‘But, by now, there’ll hardly be a wireless anywhere in the world that isn’t broadcasting what has happened. They must have already killed him when you were bringing me here from the station. That’s why there were so many army vehicles on the road.’

      ‘That’s possible. . .’ Toombs said, quietly. ‘It’s quite a coup for the Reds. They’ll be dancing and singing in the jungles tonight, I’m afraid.’

      ‘Gurney’s wife?’ I said, looking at Magnus.

      ‘The wireless said the CTs fired at the vehicle in front first. When they started shooting at his Rolls, Gurney got out from the car and walked away from it.’

      ‘That was reckless of him,’ one of the European women spoke up.

      Magnus corrected her immediately. ‘He was drawing fire away from her, Sarah.’

      ‘Poor woman. . .’ said Emily.

      Magnus squeezed his wife’s shoulder. ‘I think it’ll be good for us to look at our security measures again, come up with some suggestions to improve them.’

      ‘There’s not much more we can do, is there?’ a middle-aged man said. Earlier he had introduced himself to me as Paul Crawford, telling me that he owned a strawberry farm in Tanah Rata, and that he was a childless widower. ‘We’ve put up fences around our homes, trained our workers to be sentries, and formed a Home Guard in the kampongs. But we’re still waiting for the Special Constables we asked for.’

      When the war ended, I had hoped I would never have to experience something like that again. But here I was, in the heart of another war.

      ‘Those few weeks after the Japs surrendered,’ Emily said, ‘we kept hearing about the communists killing the Malays in their kampongs, and the Malays taking their revenge on the Chinese. It was frightening.’

      ‘The Chinese squatters I’ve spoken to still believe that it was the communists who defeated the Japs,’ Toombs remarked.

      ‘My first week in Malaya,’ Frederik said, ‘a soldier told me he had been with the first batch of troops coming back to take control of the country. He thought the communists had won the war. Every town his regiment drove through had buntings and posters celebrating the communists’ victory against the Japs.’

      ‘Malaya, Malaya,’ Hamid grumbled. ‘None of you find it strange that what you English so carelessly named ‘Malaya’ – my tanah-air, my home – didn’t officially exist until only recently?’

      ‘This is my home too, Enchik Hamid,’ I said.

      ‘You orang China, you’re all descendants of immigrants,’ Hamid retorted. ‘Your loyalty will always lie with China.’

      ‘That’s nonsense,’ I replied.

      ‘Oh, I’m sorry. You’re a Straits Chinese aren’t you? Even worse! The whole lot of you think home is England – a place few of you have ever seen.’ Hamid rapped his chest with his fist. ‘We Malays, we are the true sons of the soil, the bumiputera.’ He looked around at us. ‘Not one of you here can be called that.’

      ‘Please-lah, Hamid,’ Emily said.

      ‘Old countries are dying, Hamid,’ I said, keeping a grip on my anger, ‘and new ones are being born. It doesn’t matter where one’s ancestors came from. Can you say – with absolute certainty – that one of your forebears did not sail from Siam, from Java, or Aceh, or