The Devil's Garden Read Online Free PDF Page B

washing, memories were all one grey blur punctuated by varied injuries. Occasionally, he had done a little banking to fill in between the matches and the rugger suppers that were yet another blur.
    â€˜One darn thing after another, eh, O’Toole? Mmm? What happened? Oh, I see. You mean the beard.’ Pilchard tugged at a few random red strands of hair. ‘Higgins insisted on having a go at it just to keep his cover.’ It was thanks to the beard and the hair that he was no longer at liberty. The occupiers had been glad enough, initially, to retain the academic staff of the museum to keep looters at bay and give a token nod and a wink towards their own cultural pretensions, but shaven-headed Japanese could not cope with the sheer physical indiscipline of Pilchard’s body. The Professor, a suitably eruptive Tokyo vulcanologist appointed Director, had wandered in through the door on his first day and found him, shod feet up on the desk, digging in his ear with one finger while swigging from a mug of tea. Pilchard saw himself as paid to think. So he had been working hard, thinking about rearranging the display of Malay birds—the pose being one conducive to thought. For newly conscripted Tokyo professors, to point one’s feet at a superior was a grave insult in itself. To do so wearing extremely baggy shorts and no underwear, with an insouciant smirk on his face and a finger in his ear, had nearly cost Pilchard his life. But, even in his better days, Pilchard had never ‘dressed’. Rather, he had simply ‘worn clothes’. The Professor had been taken aback and asked to be introduced. Then he had inquired, in his most official, stocktaking voice, ‘Tell me. How many people actually work in the Gardens, Dr Pilchard?’
    â€˜Oh … about half of them,’ he had replied with another casual grin. Of course, the joke had been unwise but also irresistible and he had been somewhat surprised when the Professor hauled a huge old Webley revolver from the sagging side pocket of his suit, ripping it in the process with the front sight, pointed it at him and screamed spittle-spraying words that he did not understand, Japanese words that flew past like shrapnel. An hour later, the soldiers had come for him and dumped him in Changi. Intercultural humour was always a difficult thing to judge. From this, he had learned that respect was not something you had to feel to make the Japanese happy. You only had to ritually show it and, in fact, the more clear it was that you showed it while feeling the very opposite, the better they liked it. Perhaps his present life, the whole war, could have been avoided if he and the Allies had understood that earlier. Anyway, he had offered the old fool a cup of tea.
    â€˜Where’s Manson?’
    O’Toole shrugged. Manson was their talisman, the reason they only had three to the cell. He was a former engineer on the Malay Railways but had never been the same since the attack by the Sikhs. For long periods, he now thought he was one of the steam engines that he had lovingly maintained and he ran around the stairs and landings chuffing and working his arms like pistons and with a beatific expression on his tooting face that was the envy of other inmates. Harmless but irritating, he had repelled several tentative boarders with his whistling and fidgeting and the constant shameless jiggling with his emergency pressure release valve. ‘He’s out shunting—running round somewhere with that stupid smile on his face. Daft as a Christian—as usual. Today, he’s started operating his wet season timetable.’
    â€˜But it’s still the dry season.’
    O’Toole mimed astonishment. ‘You don’t say. Could this be a sign Manson is going round the bend, do you think?’
    Pilchard grinned ruefully. Even in peacetime, his medicine was helpless before afflictions of the brain, the mind, perhaps both. ‘I take your point but