LEON’S PLAN

The pain in Leon’s eye, great though it was, didn’t dismay him quite as much as the temporary loss of his beauty. When he looked at himself now, discovering the shiny purple swellings on his face, he decided that he looked like an insect, and he couldn’t bear to let himself be seen, except by his mother.

Taminah stayed in his room with him, sleeping on a mat, bringing him food and water and arak, letting him rage by banging his fist against the wall. When the rajah came to his door he told Taminah not to let him in. Leon felt that his terrible resemblance to a fly would take from him all his sexual power over Sir Ralph and he was not prepared to let this happen.

So the two men stayed apart, both haunted by the arrival of the miners, both trying to work out how the usurpers might be sent away and neither of them finding a solution to something they had never predicted. If Leon let himself imagine different ways of killing them, these reveries soon enough fell apart. From their very appearance, Leon could tell that the gold diggers were anxious, watchful people, used to a life where danger always lurked, where vigilance was second nature to them. To kill one man, an element of surprise was needed; to kill a group of nervous, armed desperadoes much more than this was required. There would need to be a plan.

The plan soon enough formed in his mind, as he knew it would. By his nature and by his cunning, he was a man who found solutions to problems which eluded others.

When the swellings on his face had subsided a little, he tied a silk scarf round his head and around his wounded eye and rode to Kuching. He chose the best of the rajah’s horses and the exertions of the ride put Leon into a strangely euphoric frame of mind. Though the sun burned down upon him and the dust cast up from the narrow highway threatened to choke him, he saw himself as he always longed to be seen: a man travelling through the world at capricious speed, ignoring danger, a brave and undaunted man who would overcome whatever adversity life placed in his path.

He refused to think about his failures. He’d believed in his fish cannery and he knew he had designed good housing for the factory he’d seen in his mind. It had not been his fault that the British engineer had been such a trembling fool. And now, though his plan for a hospital was also threatened, he believed he had seen how he could save it. Urging his stallion to an ever-faster gallop, he arrived soon enough at Kuching.

He dismounted and led the sweating horse through the bazaar which overlooked the Sarawak River. He had silver in a purse concealed round his waist. He passed a stall selling baby parrots in cages and noticed that the little birds were all huddled in one far corner of their prisons, with their backs turned to those who passed by. And he thought, this is how human life must be led if a man does not assert himself; he has to crouch in a dark place, with his face turned away from the world. But that man will never be me.