The Seventh Room

Book by Gabriel Marius

1941
Ipoh, Malaya

Francine looked down into Ruth's face. The child was sleeping peacefully. The morning was sultry, monsoon weather that threatened drenching rain at any moment.

Her mother's sisters squatted on the bamboo mat in a circle, all talking at once. Francine was not listening properly because she was focused on Ruth; but one word kept exploding like a gunshot in the talk: Nippon. The Cantonese phrases rose and fell around it like flocks of birds, fluttering up in sudden fright, settling gingerly, fluttering again. Two nights ago, the Japanese had attacked the American base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, doing extensive damage to the Pacific Fleet. America was now at war with Japan.

At the same time, the Japanese had struck much closer: at Kota Bharu, a town on the other side of the Malay Peninsula, a mere 150 miles away. The official British line was that the Japanese had been repulsed. But wild rumors, brought on the monsoon winds, were blowing around the kampong.

"Don't worry, Aunt," one of the younger women said, "the English will make sambal out of the Japanese." She mimed the way nonya women pounded chili paste. The others laughed.

But Aunt Yin-ho, who was the undisputed matriarch of the clan, cleared her throat and spat out of the door. "England's day is done."

"Auntie!" several of the women exclaimed in dismay. They were all peranakan: born in the Straits, educated in English, loyal to the English crown.

Yin-ho lifted a finger. "The Japanese are coming, Yu Fa." That was Francine's Chinese name. "They are the new lords of Asia. Tell your husband. You and he should go away. Tell him."

Francine nodded. The aunties were all much older than she was. And the details of her birth and marriage (English father, English husband) gave her a low status here, even though she was now mistress of the handsome general manager's bungalow at the Imperial Tin Mine. "Yes, Auntie."

Francine came in to Ipoh every week, bringing little Ruth. She left with baskets of fruit and food prepared by the older women. For the past few weeks, she had also been entrusted with dire warnings about the Japanese to carry to Abe. Abe had laughed and asked, what did a load of nonyas know about war and international politics? But Francine had been born in the kampong, and she knew the kampong voices were wise.

She touched the face of the child sleeping in her lap. Francine had married Abe at seventeen, and Ruth had been born nine months later. She was just four years old.

Ruth was a baptized Methodist. But on all the important occasions of her life, Francine had taken Ruth to the Buddhist temple where the devout burned joss sticks and pasted gold leaf to statues already thick with gold. Abe disapproved of the idea of Ruth being taken into "heathen temples." If, when he took Ruth in his arms when he came home in the evening, he caught a snatch of incense in her dark hair, or found a flake of gold leaf on her little fingertips, he would be angry.

The eyelids of the child in her arms fluttered. "Mama?"

"Mama's here," she said softly. Ruth was arrestingly beautiful. Her skin was pale gold. Her hair was thick and gleaming brown. She had inherited Francine's oval face and full mouth. Her eyes were almond-shaped and dark-lashed, set over high cheekbones, yet their color was not brown but silver-gray.

Even at her tender years, Ruth could pass neither as fully Chinese nor as fully European. Like Francine, Ruth would stand uneasily between two races, despised by the British, only tolerated by the Chinese. She would be enriched by two cultures and yet she would be excluded by both.

What hurt Francine most was when the aunts predicted that she was no more than a temporary wife, that one day Abe would marry a European woman and have European children and that they would never see him again.

That was what Francine's father had done to her mother. She remembered her father as an affectionate, generous man. Yet when his contract had ended, he had gone back to England, and apart from the twenty Straits dollars a month that always came, they had never seen or heard of him again. Once, when she had asked her mother for the thousandth time where her father was, her mother had banged her fist on the box where she kept the receipts, and had replied bitterly, "He is in here," and Francine had known that the twenty dollars a month was all she would ever know of him from then on.

And that was the unspoken theme that underlay almost all the aunts' nagging. Since the death of Francine's mother, they were her moral and spiritual guardians. Though Francine knew there could not possibly be any truth in what they said about Abe, it filled her with terror nonetheless.

She heard a car engine and checked the pretty little gold wristwatch, Swiss and expensive, that Abe had bought her when Ruth had been born. It was time to go back. The taxi threaded its way through the trees toward the house. In its wake ran a throng of naked children, to whom a car was still a marvel.

The aunts came down the rickety steps to say good-bye, five middle-aged Chinese women in creased pantsuits, puffing on small metal pipes or rolled cigarettes. The chatter did not cease. It was Chin Yin-ho's voice that rose above the others: "Yu Fa, tell your husband to send you away." She pinched Ruth's flushed cheek. "Let him take you and the child to England, to stay with his family." Her lined face took on a hard cast. "But of course, he is too ashamed to show you to them!"

For once, either because she was nervous or because she was exasperated, Francine was impatient with an older relative. "Abe isn't ashamed of anything!"

Yin-ho sniffed. "Then let him take you. You know what the Japanese do to Chinese women who marry white men?"

They crammed the baskets into the taxi and waved from the back window as it drove away. Ruth nestled up against her mother. "Are we going away, Mama?"

"Auntie sees bad people behind every bush," Francine said irritably.

"Are the Japanese bad people?"

"Don't worry, my darling. Mama will look after you. Perhaps we'll all take a holiday in England."

Not understanding, the child smiled her beautiful smile. Abe came home early. The food was still on the stove, the table unlaid, the servants chattering.

As soon as he got out of the car, and walked up the drive, she knew something was terribly wrong. She knew his face. She hurried to meet him as he came in.

"What is it?" she asked urgently.

"Bad news, darling," he said, kissing her.

Abraham Lawrence was a tall, rangy man in his late thirties. He looked older because his face was weather-beaten. His eyes were a deep blue, the whites slightly yellowed by the chronic malaria from which he, like so many other mining engineers, suffered. Squinting against the sun had etched deep crow's-feet at his temples and had bracketed his wide mouth with two curving lines.

"What's the bad news?" she asked in dread.

"The Prince of Wales and the Repulse are gone. Sunk by Japanese torpedo bombers."

Francine's hand went to her mouth. "It can't be." She felt a sinking in the heart. "It must be Japanese propaganda."

"Afraid not. It's been announced on the radio. Turn it on."

She obeyed. As the valves warmed up, announcers' voices faded in from the ether, drawling in that strange idiom known as MBC English, after the Malayan Broadcasting Corporation. Her eyes were wide and anxious as she tried to follow the commentary.

Ruth was clamoring for her father's attention, calling, "Dadda! Dadda!" Abe picked up the child and hugged her. "Have you come home to play with me, Daddy?" Ruth asked.

"That's right, honey," Abe said, kissing her.

Francine listened to the handsome teak-boxed radio, stunned. Two great ships, indeed, the whole Royal Navy presence in Malaya, had gone. The news had the impact of a vast natural disaster, a flood, a chasm opening in the earth.

Francine could feel the pounding of her heart. "The aunties say the Japanese are coming."

"Yes," Abe said, looking at her over Ruth's shoulder. "That much is true. The MBC says they're being driven back into the sea. But I've heard other stories."

The voices on the radio, like Abe's, sounded calm, but vibrated with tension. "What stories?"

"They've established a beachhead."

"What does that mean?"

"It means the landing was a success. They're pouring troops into the country." The Malay kitchen staff had stopped clattering around the stove, and were standing in silence. They were listening intently to what the tuan was saying. Becoming aware of this, Abe took Francine's arm and led her away from the kitchen door. "We're going to have to do something, old girl," he said in a low voice.