The Devil's Garden by Nigel Barley Page A

wind blew across, Little India still managed to reek of curried mutton and hot fat. He dodged around Bugis Street with its volatile, patrolling transvestites and headed towards Beach Road where shading trees tempered glittering views of the sea. There stood the arrogant Raffles Hotel, now renamed the Syonan Ryokan, still off-limits to other ranks—but Japanese other ranks now—and still striking attitudes behind its luxuriant Ravenala madagascariensis, Traveller’s Palm—though not, of course, a true palm but related to the banana—its undaunted leaves shuffled by a hot but pleasant wind that buffeted in from the ocean and perhaps reminded it of home. Rickshaws with specially scrubbed pullers were ranged outside—the acceptable face of the East—as large cars purred up under the glass awning, disgorging sleek Japanese of both military and civilian stamp. On the ground floor, the bars and restaurants still hummed with cheerfully non-partisan profit and, in the upstairs rooms with their white telephones and soft furnishings—as was common knowledge—Korean ‘comfort women’ were deferentially available to officers around the clock beneath pink lightbulbs It occurred to him that the entire British Empire was really nothing more than the biggest whorehouse in the whole of Asia—one enormous ethnographic seraglio—where the very idea of ‘a good time’ was a sad but powerful delusion. And right on cue, the doors flew open and Erica Rosenkranz came clumping down the steps with a young Japanese officer on her arm making that characteristic grimace that, for her, replaced a smile, an opening wide of the mouth with simultaneous peevish crinkling.
    As the wife of the erstwhile Austrian ambassador, Erica had officially progressed, in the course of the war, from ‘neutral’ to ‘enemy alien’, following the Anschluss . But the British had dealt kindly with both her and her husband, regarding them as sinned against rather than sinners, arguably innocent victims of a hostile invasion, thereby still allies of a sort, so that her enthusiastic embracing of ‘friendly belligerent’ status under the Japanese now smacked of ingratitude. After the Fall, her husband had answered the summons and returned circuitously home to what was now Nazi Germany’s new Ostmark province but, since doubts remained over their reception there, they had chosen that Erica should stay just where she was. In age too she had long sought to remain exactly where she was, dressed too young, wore too much makeup, dyed her hair too optimistic a shade. All this went hand-in-hand with a wardrobe of gestures and mannerisms that someone had unwisely told her—at the age of twelve—were winsome. As she approached her fiftieth birthday like an unexploded mine, they were no longer so.
    At first, she had filled her dowager time with ladylike shopping and gardening, the delicate sécateur-wielding-in-white-gloves type that fiddled and fussed, more hairdressing than horticulture. Then she had conceived a fancy for botanical drawings, the cultivation of Nepenthes pitcher plants, the collection of botanical ephemera and gardening hats. Then she had started coming to the museum and gardens at all hours, seeking out Pilchard and demanding the identification of whatever bunch of leaves she happened to be clutching in her liver-spotted hands. In vain, the resident botanists told her, without conscious irony, that only her fruiting parts were diagnostic. Dr Post quailed before her aggressive femininity and before long, by a series of outflanking manoeuvres, she had wormed her way into becoming a patron of both museum and gardens. Within any public institution, a patron is a ‘friendly belligerent’ of the most feared kind for all learned institutions fear the public, as the staff inevitably come to run them exclusively for their own convenience. From there, she had moved triumphantly