Алистер Маклин - South by Java Head

She had got rid of her hat and belted bush-jacket, Nicolson saw. She wore only her stained khaki skirt and a clean white shirt, several sizes too large for her, with the sleeves rolled far up the slender arms. Vannier’s shirt, Nicolson felt sure. He had sat beside her all the way back in the lifeboat, talking in a low voice and most solicitous for her welfare. Nicolson smiled to himself, sought back in his memory for the days when he too had been an impressionable young Raleigh with a cloak always ready to hand, a knight-errant for any lady in distress. But he couldn’t remember the days: there probably hadn’t been any.

Nicolson ushered Vannier into the room ahead of him – Findhorn’s reactions to Miss Plenderleith’s request would be worth watching – closed the door softly behind him, turned round and checked himself just in time to stop from bumping into Vannier, who had halted suddenly and was standing motionless, rigid, not three feet from the door, his clenched fists by his side.

All three had fallen silent and turned to the door as Nicolson and Vannier had come in. Vannier had no eyes for Findhorn and Willoughby – he was staring at the nurse, his eyes widening, his lips parting in shock. Miss Drachmann had turned so that the lamplight fell full on the left hand side of her face, and that side of her face was not pretty. A great, long, jagged scar, still raw and livid and puckering up the cheek where it had been roughly, clumsily stitched, ran the whole length of her face from the hairline of the temple to the corner of the soft, round chin. Near the top, just above the cheekbone, it was half an inch wide. On anyone’s face it would have looked ghastly: on the smooth loveliness of hers it had the unreality of a caricature, the shocking impact of the most impious blasphemy.

She looked at Vannier in silence for a few seconds, then she smiled. It wasn’t much of a smile, but it was enough to dimple one cheek and to whiten the scar on the other, at the corner of the mouth and behind the eye. She reached up her left hand and touched her cheek lightly.

“I’m afraid it’s really not very nice, is it?” she asked. There was neither reproach nor condemnation in her voice: it was apologetic, rather, and touched with a queer kind of pity, but the pity was not for herself.

Vannier said nothing. His face had turned a shade paler, but when she spoke the colour returned and began to flood all over his neck and face. He looked away – one could almost see the sheer physical effort it cost him to pull his eyes off that hideous scar – and opened his mouth to speak. But he said nothing; perhaps there was nothing he could say.

Nicolson walked quickly past him, nodded to Willoughby and stopped in front of the girl. Captain Findhorn was watching him closely, but Nicolson was unaware of it.

“Good evening, Miss Drachmann.” His tone was cool but friendly. “All your patients nice and comfortable?” If you want banal remarks , he thought, Nicolson’s your man .

“Yes, thank you, sir.”

“Don’t call me ‘sir’,” he said irritably. “I’ve told you that once already.” He lifted his hand and gently touched the scarred cheek. She didn’t flinch, there was no movement at all but for a momentary widening of the blue eyes in the expressionless face. “Our little yellow brothers, I take it?” His voice was as gentle as his hand.

“Yes,” she nodded. “I was caught near Kota Bharu.”

“A bayonet?”

“Yes.”

“One of these notched, ceremonial bayonets, wasn’t it?” He looked closely at the scar, saw the narrow deep incision on the chin and the rough tear beneath the temple. “And you were lying on the ground at the time?”

“You are very clever,” she said slowly.

“How did you get away?” Nicolson asked curiously.

“A big man came into the room – a bungalow we were using as a field hospital. A very big man with red hair – he said he was an Argyll, some word like that. He took the bayonet away from the man who had stabbed me. He asked me to look away, and when I turned back the Japanese soldier was lying on the floor, dead.”

“Hooray for the Argylls,” Nicolson murmured. “Who stitched it up for you?”

“The same man: he said he wasn’t very good.”

“There was room for improvement,” Nicolson admitted. “There still is.”

“It’s horrible!” Her voice rose sharply on the last word. “I know it’s horrible.” She looked down at the floor for some seconds, then looked up at Nicolson again and tried to smile. It wasn’t a very happy smile. “It’s hardly an improvement, is it?”

“It all depends.” Nicolson jerked a thumb at the second engineer. “On Willy here it would look good: he’s just an old sourpuss anyway. But you’re a woman.” He paused for a moment, looked at her consideringly and went on in a quiet voice:

“You’re more than good-looking, I suppose – Miss Drachmann, you’re beautiful, and on you it looks bloody awful, if you’ll excuse my saying so. You’ll have to go to England,” he finished abruptly.

“England?” The high cheekbones were stained with colour. “I don’t understand.”

“Yes, England. I am pretty sure that there are no plastic surgeons in this part of the world who are skilled enough. But there are two or three men in England – I don’t think there are any more – who could repair that scar and leave you with a hairline so fine that even a dancing partner wouldn’t notice it.” Nicolson waved a deprecating hand. “A little bit of powder and the old war-paint, naturally.”

She looked at him in silence, her clear blue eyes empty of expression, then said in a quiet, flat voice: “You forget that I am a nurse myself. I am afraid I don’t believe you.”

“ ‘Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know’ ” Willoughby intoned.

“What? What did you say?” The girl looked startled.

“Pay no attention to him, Miss Drachmann.” Captain Findhorn took a step towards her, smiling. “Mr. Willoughby would have us think that he is always ready with apt quotations, but Mr. Nicolson and I know better – he makes them up as he goes along.”

“ ‘Be thou chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shall not escape calumny.’ ” Willoughby shook his head sadly.

“Thou shalt not,” Findhorn agreed. “But he’s right, Miss Drachmann, in that you shouldn’t be quite so ready with your disbelief. Mr. Nicolson knows what he’s talking about. Only three men in England, he said – and one of them is his uncle.” He waved his hand in a gesture of dismissal. “But I didn’t bring you here to discuss surgery or to give me the pleasure of refereeing a slanging match. Mr. Nicolson, we appear to have run out of–”

He broke off abruptly, fists clenching tightly by his sides, as the klaxon above his head blared into sudden, urgent life, drowning his words as the raucous clangour, a harsh, discordant, shocking sound in a confined space, filled the dining-cabin. Two longs and a short, two longs and a short – the emergency action stations call. Nicolson was first out of the room, Findhorn only a pace behind him.

To the north and east thunder rumbled dully along the distant horizon, sheet-lightning flickered intermittently all round the Rhio straits, on the inner vortex of the typhoon, and, overhead, the half-seen clouds were beginning to pile up, rampart upon rampart, the first huge, tentative raindrops spattering on the wheelhouse top of the Viroma , so heavily, so slowly, that each single one could be heard and counted. But to the south and west there was no rain, no thunder, just an occasional flash of lightning over the islands, half-seen, half-imagined, far off and feeble flickers that left the darkness more impenetrable than before.