Angela was profuse in her apologies for having dragged Mee Kin along to the house, to the old musty room, where upon entrance the two women, suitably attired in T-shirts and slacks and with their hair covered with headscarves for the task ahead, were hit in the faces by a cloud of dust and the smell of decay and death.
Mee Kin said, “You know I wanted to come along. I told you long ago that it would be foolish to leave these things to rot. A lot of them might be valuable.” It turned out that none was worth picking up, except the old carved bed with the four posts around which writhed the ferocious dragons or serpents; it was difficult to tell which.
“This is a treasure worth restoring,” said the knowledgeable Mee Kin. “Mine isn’t half as handsome. And this is even better than Dorothy’s. It may look ugly to you now, dear, but once it’s come back from the antique restorer’s shop – voilà! – you wouldn’t believe your eyes!”
“Our first task is to get rid of those dreadful layers of dust and cobwebs,” said Angela. She looked round the room with a shiver. “This room really gives me the creeps. We’ll have to spend the whole morning cleaning it up.”
Mee Kin had good-naturedly brought along her maidservant to help clear up the mess; Angela could not spare Mooi Lan who had to see about the children’s lunch as well as Boon’s lunch, if he came back from the clinic. “All these old chairs and things – we’ll have to get rid of them,” said Angela. “My God, who would believe that the old one could have accumulated so much rubbish? Look, even empty biscuit tins and paper bags. They’ll all have to go.”
Angela brought Mee Kin to have a good look at the altar cups and jars. Mee Kin’s eyes lit up with recognition.
“Yes, they’re genuine antiques,” she said with mounting excitement. “They’re worth keeping, Angie. Dorothy has a few pieces exactly like these and she keeps them in a special show-case.”
“I can easily replace them with the pretty tea-cups and jars being sold at S K Han’s,” said Angela, delighted by the new acquisition. “My mother-in-law won’t mind, as they’ll hold the tea offerings and whatnot just as well.”
The small piercing eyes in the framed photograph above the altar again compelled her to look up. She looked up quickly, then averted the gaze.
“Isn’t it creepy,” she later whispered to Mee Kin. “The old man’s eyes seem to follow me everywhere.”
“My father-in-law’s photo gave me the same eerie feelings,” confided Mee Kin. “My mother-in-law was, in many ways, more eccentric than yours. She talked to the photograph for hours, in the last months before her death.”
“If only these old ones were like your mother!” cried Angela, who really liked the easy-going affable old lady of 67. Mee Kin said she had just returned from a holiday in Australia to visit Mee Kin’s brother and wife there.
“Do you know,” said Mee Kin, “she came back and left off the old taboo of beef! Now she’s eating beef – even beef hamburgers – like any of us. ‘If you don’t eat beef, there’s nothing to eat in Australia,’ she said, and proceeded to enjoy herself at those Sunday barbecues at the park that my brother and sister-in-law took her to.”
Angela marvelled at the contrast between Mee Kin’s mother and her mother-in-law. “The old one won’t even come near butter,” she said, “and is averse to leather goods like leather handbags and belts. Would you believe it? I daren’t imagine what it’s going to be like now that she’s coming to stay with us. Mark must have his steak a few times a week. Michelle adores Mooi Lan’s beef patties. We’ll just have to see how things go. What to do?”
The bed again took up their attention. “I think it was their marital bed,” said Angela. “My mother-in-law was married at the age of 18, though she didn’t have children till she was in her 20s. She was virtually raped on her wedding night. You know what it was like in those days.” She looked at the bed and laughed. “This bed probably has a rich and colourful history of rape, incest, debauchery! I read somewhere – was it in Pearl S. Buck? – about the rich lords of mansions and their young sons taking turns to carry young bondmaids to their beds to deflower! My mother-in-law once told me of a grand-uncle who was like that. My Mark is too young. If he were older, he would probably write a colourful history of this bed!”
The history was less enchanting than the tangible reality. Angela paid a visit out of curiosity to the antique restorer while he was still in the process of restoration and gasped in pleased astonishment at the transformation taking place before her very eyes. They were serpents, not dragons; the original splendour of their superbly carved scales, the open mouths with the long protruding tongues, the expressive eyes were coaxed out by the patient skilful hands of the restorer.
“How marvellous, how simply marvellous,” breathed Angela, already seeing it in the master bedroom in her house. It would have pride of place in the new house. She thought of suitable silken drapes for this magnificent bed. “And to think,” she said, “it could have rotted away, have become a heap of dust!”
Old Mother had handed over her jewellery in the old blue cloth bag for safe-keeping. Angela had bought a pretty lacquer box from S K Han’s to replace the ugly old blue cloth bag. In the privacy of her room she emptied the contents of the cloth bag on to her bed, wanting to see if the foolish old one had lost any of her jewellery besides the gold chain.
It gave her a deep sense of satisfaction to identify many pieces of jewellery as gifts from her and Boon over the years. The diamond ear-studs, a gold ring with an oval piece of jade, a gold bracelet with a row of six round pieces of jade, a gold bar. The worth of these items must have tripled, quadrupled. She saw the gold ring given by Wee Tiong and Gek Choo; she studied it closely, convinced it was not gold. There was a long thin gold chain, which she could not remember having previously seen. She had never seen Old Mother wear it. Then she recollected: it had belonged to her late father-in-law; the old man had worn it right to the moment of his death.
There were four small metal cylinders, like the one that the idiot wore round his neck, containing the charm bought for $200 from the swindling temple priests. Why were there so many charms among the jewellery? Or perhaps each contained a small piece of jewellery? Angela took one up, pulled it apart easily. Something fell out, a rolled-up piece of yellow paper with Chinese words on it. There was something inside the little roll of paper; Angela unrolled it carefully, afraid to tear the frail paper. A small withered coil, as of dried skin or flesh fell out, tied round in the middle by a piece of red string.
Angela stared, not knowing what it was; moments later, she walked rapidly to the bathroom to retch for she felt quite ill.
The umbilical cord – now she remembered. Boon had once told her that his mother kept the umbilical cords of all her children, as was the custom among superstitious Chinese, as a symbol of the bond between parent and child.
So the four little metal cylinders carried within them the umbilical cords of the four sons. Angela wondered with a tremor of terror, whose umbilical cord she had inadvertently unrolled, and which was now lying on her bed?
She pulled out a piece of tissue paper from the box of Kleenex in the bathroom, strode with grim determination to the bed, threw it on the dried, shrivelled little coil of flesh, hastily picked it up and put it back with the roll of yellow paper into the cylinder. She would never touch these things again. She would return them to the old one, and keep the jewellery in the lacquer box for her in a safe place. And she would never tell Mark. It would be unfair to add to the burden that the boy already carried, of the dreadful irrationalities and weirdnesses of his forbears.
Angela went to the bathroom a second time, to wash her hands and rinse her mouth. There was a horrible taste in it.