Lawrence Osborne - Hunters in the Dark

“Simon, so here you are! Allow me to introduce—”

The wife was younger, much younger. She had a peering, inquisitive face, half Chinese maybe, the eyes full of hope.

“My husband has been talking about you nonstop. Now the power is out.”

“Sit down, please,” the doctor cried. “Sophal!”

They sat and the girl at the piano rotated on the stool, hesitated and then got up and walked over to the coffee table and the fabric sofas.

Mrs. Sar asked Robert if he would like a glass of brandy.

“It’s the best warm drink, isn’t it?”

He accepted and the girl, small and willowy, alighted like some human-shaped moth on the padded arm of the sofa on which her parents sat.

“This is our daughter,” the doctor said. “She knows all about why you are here.”

The family laughed, as if among themselves.

And in a moment the soft eyes of the girl were upon him, made even darker by the lack of electric light, made quietly bolder by this artificial privacy of candlelight. Her hair was immensely wavy for some reason and it reached down to her waist, its volume exaggerated by shadows. The hands folded on her lap, the feet unshod and loose in her own home. She had an effortless confidence in the hearth of her father. He couldn’t see any trace of the illness to which her father had referred, her hands rested perfectly still, the eyes were also as still as magnetic needles pointing north. She was dressed in cut-off jeans and a white T-shirt with the image of a Burmese pop star — Chit Snow Oo.

“Did you get a tuk-tuk here in the rain?” she asked in perfect English.

“I managed all right. I think the guy is waiting outside for me.”

“Shall we tell the maid to get rid of him?” the doctor asked, obviously amused.

“No, keep him,” his wife objected. “It’s going to rain all night and we’ll never find someone else.”

“So be it,” from the doctor. “Now, shall we have some home-made prawn crackers?”

Sophal turned to Robert more fully, perhaps as a matter of politeness. Robert had the sense, already, that she was playing a game with her father.

“Daddy says you are living in Colonial Mansions. Are you?”

“Yes, I took a small unit.”

“I think they changed the name to Central Mansions. New owners from Hong Kong. I have some friends in there, maybe you know them. Mary O’Neil at the embassy?”

“No, I haven’t met anyone yet.”

She smiled archly. “Oh, you’re too busy, just like her. Maybe you’ll run into her.”

“I might, yes.”

“I love the pools there.”

“You know it then?”

“I know it very well. I sometimes go in pretending to be a guest and use the pools. No one’s ever stopped me.”

Her English was indeed quite perfect — it was too awkward to bring the matter up, but how was he going to improve it?

It was baffling.

“I wonder how much you’re paying,” she went on. “The city is getting so expensive for barangs. Do you find it expensive?”

“It’s all right for me.”

“They say it’s more expensive than Bangkok now. For the real luxury.”

“It’s Asia rising,” the doctor said with firm jollity. “The Chinese are pouring their money in here. Not that we’re rich yet. But they are.”

“People say,” the daughter continued, “that barangs are also pouring into Asia looking for jobs these days. Do you think that’s true?”

“I don’t know,” Robert said. “It might be.”

The maid now brought in dishes and set them on the dining table.

“One can see the way the wind is blowing,” her father said. “For our generation it’s a remarkable thing to witness. All we knew was poverty.”

“It’s true,” said Mrs. Sar.

“Everyone in the army’s rich,” the girl laughed.

Robert upended the brandy glass. He would go along with this. There was money in it. The house was obviously an old French mansion. Teak floorboards from the old days, high windows and airy rooms. The doctor had filled it with antiques. With the rain sliding in sheets down the windows and with the candlelight it was cave-like and yet charming. The small family seemed almost lost inside it, like dolls in a doll’s house, but the doctor had put his medical certificates on display on a mantelpiece and the two servants were not deferential.

Before long, the doctor rose and they rose with him and they went to sit at the table, where a French dinner had been laid out.

“Chicken Dijon!” he said mysteriously.

The doctor chattered with his anecdotes of the Khmer Rouge years, during which time, as a very young doctor, he had been posted to a small town near the Thai border.

“They asked us to do terrible things, Simon, but you would hardly believe me if I told you what they were. It was like life on a different planet.”

“You’ve been to the genocide museums?” his wife asked.

Robert shrugged, and he said that he hadn’t wanted to go since everyone else did.

“But they’re our biggest tourist attractions,” Sophal said. “Don’t you find that cheerful and exotic?”

“That’s why I didn’t go. It’s so tiresome, all that.”

“I quite agree,” the doctor said. “It was all right for twenty years and then, suddenly, one gets tired of being an atrocity circus. You should go once, however. I am sure Sophal will take you if you want to.”

“Daddy, that’s a terrible idea.”

“You can discuss it between yourselves. Meanwhile, do you like our Chicken Dijon? Don’t look so surprised. It’s a dish I invented myself. It has a secret ingredient — entirely French, you see, but for a single component from the Cambodian forest.”

“He’s always inventing dishes,” Mrs. Sar put in. “I can’t stop him. If it’s disgusting please don’t eat it. We have plenty of bread.”

It was strange-tasting but Robert soldiered on, mumbling a few compliments to its inventor. Sophal, however, wanted to know about him. He had expected this all along and had prepared his speech carefully in advance. His invention now flowed thicker and faster than the one he had offered to Dr. Sar the previous day. He depicted his new imaginary parents, a disgruntled stockbroker father and a mother who wrote radio plays, giving them appearances that roughly matched the real ones but also giving them backgrounds that were vaguely upper-class. He borrowed traits from his real parents to keep it realistic and then went off into elaborate riffs which he knew were really inventions based on what he thought Simon’s parents were like. But how strange it was that he should even have a conception of what Simon’s parents were like. He described detestable garden parties and weekends in Istanbul and clubs in London that he had no idea about. He said that his father was a member of White’s, because he had read about White’s in a novel and it sounded appropriate. On it rolled, musical and rushed.

“White’s?” the doctor exclaimed to his wife. “He says there’s a club called White’s.”

“Is there a Black’s?” she asked innocently.

Soon he realized that as he talked he was holding his knife in his right hand with a clenched fist. He quietly put it down and told a silly joke.

“Your father,” Sophal said, “is he one of those typical English guys?”

“He used to wear a bowler hat on the train, if that’s what you mean.”

“I love that idea,” she laughed.

“What school did you go to?” the doctor suddenly asked.

Robert didn’t have to think, he simply plucked from memory the name of a random village in Sussex.

“Chalvington,” he said. “It’s a small school — no one’s ever heard of it.”

He had made the calculated risk that Sar would not look it up online later that night.