“THERE ARE now two women in my life,” Daud said in a distracted way one evening in his room as he put down the clarinet on which he had been trying out some variations almost absentmindedly as Philippa lay on the bed.
She loved those moments of lying on the bed cool, naked and unwashed after it was all over when Daud roamed among rainbows and strange dark weeds and rocks under the sea with his clarinet in sotto voce, bringing a deep calm to himself and to her. But his words startled her from the brink of sleep.
“YOU have been holding out on me!” she said in a half-jocular, half-urgent tone.
“Why the stress on you? Have you been holding out on me?”
Philippa laughed.
“Because Vicky shot those very same words at me the other day. I’ll tell you about it. But, tell me now, if it pleases his lordship, who in tarnation is the other woman?”
Daud grinned, his eyes not telling as he sat on the bed.
“Your mother?”
“No, no, no.”
“Who then?”
“Mrs Sunha.”
Philippa relaxed. “Hah. At least that’s no competition to me.”
Mrs Sunha had been the subject of much discussion between them soon after Philippa had moved into her Wilkie Road flat. Daud’s landlady was a widow of “more or less my mother’s vintage”, as Daud first described her. Her husband had left her the little house on East Coast Road near the Telok Kurau Road junction. She was a Muslim. It suited Daud. He rented a room there.
“It’s not that I need the money,” she had made clear to him when he went there to look over the flat and found himself being scrutinised as though he has asking for a daughter’s hand. “It’s just that I think there should be a man around the house. And some company now and then.” Now and then became every night after he moved in but petered out to bearable and sometimes even enjoyable conversation twice or three times a week.
Her late husband, a phrase of hers preceding all conversation, seemed to be a stickler for detail and for thinking things out, which had set the pattern of the Sunha household. Mrs Sunha explained this to Daud in small doses that appeared inexhaustible.
“You need a good thick round handle for your kitchen knife. See, like this one. Here. Hold it. Feel it. It feels full in your hand, doesn’t it? That’s why a thick handle is important. When your hand, your palm, I mean, is full you have more control. You can cut finer. Your hand tires less when cutting two katis of red onions.”
Daud knew he would never have to cut two katis of little red onions but he listened obediently.
“My late husband used to tell his golfer friends … you know he did business with Europeans at times … that they would be able to hit a longer drive if they wrapped a towel around the golf-club grip. And they proved it.”
Logic behind little habitual details seemed to be part and parcel of the legacy the late Sunha had left his widow.
She was specific over the rental conditions. He could use the kitchen. Certain utensils she designated as common utensils which they both would use. He had a small wall shelf for his things and a part of the meatsafe — “where the paper lining is brown”. Once a week the room had to be in thorough naval shipshape fashion for her to clean. Friends were allowed in his room. “With discretion, Inche Daud,” using the Malay for mister until she got to know him.
Later, after he had found out that she was a strict Muslim, she had said, to his surprise, while chatting easily with him one Sunday morning, “You know, I really don’t mind you asking lady friends in. But not prostitutes.”
“Please, Mrs Sunha, I …”
“I know, I know … you seem to be a very fine young man, but …” She cleared her throat with a hrrumph. “What I mean is … er … my late husband used to discuss the problems of bringing up children after they have passed the puberty flowering. Shortly after we got married. He was a man who looked far ahead. He said we must always let our children bring their friends home. Even the other sex. In many ways my late husband was a very open-minded man. And so much ahead of his time. Better they sit here and talk instead of sitting on the beach and touching, he said. He was right.”
She anticipated Daud’s question.
“As it turned out, we had no children.”
Daud related that conversation to Philippa when she insisted her flat was taboo. They talked about it night after night for three weeks and finally, with much reluctance, she agreed to go to his place now and then. The mosquitos on the beach were terrible on days after it rained.
They tiptoed in and left on tiptoe.
“Bite me, Philippa, don’t groan …”
“I don’t groan …”
“Well, there’s no word in English or Malay for it …”
Daud insisted she explain why Vicky had said to her that she was “holding out on her”, and she told him Vicky had said she was glowing like a woman in love. And stopped there.
Then they went to a stall on a small road in Geylang and ate satay and tahu goreng, soft white cakes of soya bean with a delicious gritty-ground chilli-hot peanut sauce, to round off a perfect evening.
She brooded on his insistence that night. And also about his mother.
Auntie May used to advise her, “Before you marry any man, you have to find out about his mother.” Auntie May was not Eurasian but a Nonya, a third-generation Chinese immigrant. Thinking of her, Philippa said, “I thought the other woman was your mother.”
She asked him about his mother one evening.
“Ah yes … I told you she was a Serani, a Eurasian.”
“Yah. On New Year’s Eve …”
“Her maiden name was de Deus.”
Philippa knew the name was Latin for ‘of God’. The holy mass ritual was all in Latin.
Scraps of aunts’ and uncles’ conversations, of the way Ma and Pa referred to old man de Deus rushed at her. The man of God who was the very devil incarnate, they’d said. Daud’s mother, his daughter. Daud with de Deus blood in his veins.
“She was a very strong woman, Philippa. A wonderful person … but not in all ways … I think I got her brains, but only a bit of her power over people …”
“I don’t know what you mean, sweetheart.”
“I mean pushing her intentions.”
“Getting around them? Around people?”
“Yah. She also had the fire and the internal conviction to break the ties of her community and religion and embrace Islam to marry my father in the face of the whole village disapproving …”
Philippa saw the way he said it.
“You really admire and love her, Daud?”
“Admire, yes. She is my mother and I guess there’s that sort of filial thing. She was my boss.”
“And love her?”
“Yah,” embarrassed. They ate in silence for a few minutes.
“Sometimes I think I didn’t leave Malacca. I left her.”
Philippa went over his statement many times in the dark, curled in the mosquito-net cocoon of her bed.
“But, Phillie, although I have Eurasian blood in me, I am truly orang Melayu; truly Malay. My mother did not bring anything of her ways of the old Portuguese life with her.”
“She must have consciously suppressed it …”
Philippa remembered how the Malacca Eurasians had marked the de Deuses as all bad and ached to think that the woman had stamped out her past, tearing out parts of her flesh. Perhaps to escape from shackles with a heart clean of black memories, blinded with love, accepting all from her man, yielding all of herself.
“I need her strength now,” Daud muttered, almost inaudibly.
“So do I, Daud.” It’s you or me was on the tip of her tongue, but left unsaid.
The next night, while she was almost smacking her lips, Chinese style, in the Officers’ Mess (something Ma had drilled her not to do), over the wonderful trifle they called sherry trifle at home, Duncan brought up the same subject.
“Why call it sherry trifle? It is plain to me trifle has sherry in it. But as I was saying, I see so many of our chaps falling for the lassies here and wonder who will give in to who.”
“Whom.”
“Isn’t love a compromise? Shouldn’t it be so?”
Philippa saw it wasn’t a rhetorical point. His eyes were searching hers for an understanding of the message behind his words.
“That’s only between equals, Duncan.”
“Capitalist to capitalist. Nazi to Nazi?”
“Here the issues are black to white. Or uncoloured to coloured.”
“Cultures, Philippa. Minds set by political reference frames.”
They talked it through. He in the channels of his religion, his politics, but desperately trying to find the common humanity of it all while she watched the turns and pace of his thinking, fascinated with how different his psyche was from hers. She had expected Duncan to be one with her; she with her colonial British education, steeped in English literature, feeling it, but now she saw she was incorrect in believing she had understood the ways of the people with whom she had felt such an affinity.
“I’m amazed how well you know us.”
“I’m not fazed at how little you know of us, of Asia, me. Because, after all, you don’t really know your neighbours, the French.”
“Or the Welsh. Not just neighbours, brothers.”
Skimming over waters they both did not know. But through her study of English literature she had the edge over him.
Funny, she thought that night, hot, sweating, tossing in her bed with the heat of the stagnant air and the wine in her body, how Duncan talks about these things with a passion to find whole solutions and Daud reels it out just because it’s there, with a fatalism of acceptance, only exploring how it would inevitably go.
But Duncan keeps at it. Searching the insides of me.
“That was abso-bloody-lutely scrumptious,” Duncan purred as he squeezed the dark green lime into the warm water and washed his fingers in the small enamelled basin on the table.
“I knew you would love them.”
It was one of those very special Singapore nights. After a hot steamy day the temperature had dropped and it was cool by the sea. Philippa had taken Duncan to the open-air stalls at Bedok on the southeastern coast for the treat of cockles she had promised.
The little boys who rushed up when the jeep slowed down had found them a good parking place, and tried to joke with them in their scrappy English. Duncan had been persuaded to try beer poured into a glassful of ice and loved it, and above all the pounded chilli and vinegar sauce seemed to be especially good tonight.
“I think they’ve put some pounded garlic in too,” Philippa said.
The moon was almost full. A gentle breeze blew in with the rising tide, keeping the mosquitos away and leaving a fine layer of salt on one’s skin, only just detectable running your tongue along your lips.
Duncan looked into her eyes. She saw the contentment and the faint smile on his face and looked out to the sea.
“Doesn’t the moonlight make everything beautiful …” he paused. “It’s laying a glint of gold on the world tonight.” And in the same nervously distracted way with which he had toyed with his cylindrical tin of Churchmans earlier, he put his hand on Philippa’s. She let his hand remain there for a few brief seconds, then drew it away slowly.
“We’ve got a job to do, Duncan. Let’s not overpower the cake with the icing.”
She paid up and they left.
“Got to do this again, Philippa,” Duncan said as they walked to the jeep, feeling in his pocket for ten cents to pay the jaga kereta, the boy guarding the jeep.
“Next time I’ll take you down the road. By the sea edge too. Cold beer and roasted pigeons. Crisp and dry with their wings, elbows and knees slightly burnt.”
“Mmmm. Sounds even better than the cockles. And will you arrange for a full moon too?”
As they drove off in the jeep she sensed someone’s eyes on her and, turning around, saw Vicky with Gus and Tessie at a table not far from where they had sat.
Duncan drove back to the town very slowly, talking about various things, trying to avoid anything personal.
“You’re driving very carefully tonight. We didn’t have that much beer, did we?”
“I always drive carefully when you’re in the jeep.” And he went on without a pause, “I believe one can tell something about a person if you ask him to stop and think whether he drives more carefully when he’s alone or when he has company in the car.”
“So. What does that show?”
“It shows up the bloke who wants to impress with his handling the car at speed. Or the fellow concerned with the responsibility of his passengers.”
“That’s with young people only, Duncan.”
“Us?”
“No. Well … we’re in between, like …”
He smiled to himself, knowing she was looking at him. “In between. Between the starting point and the finish, I presume.”
“TOO PROUD to even nod at me, huh?” Vicky teased when they met the following night. “Or too dazzled by the man and the moonlight?”
“Didn’t see you till we were leaving.”
“You should have come up to say hello. I wasn’t spying on you, sweetie.”
“Not that time, Matahari.”
“I’m dying to meet lover boy.”
“Hey, get it straight, he’s not my lover boy,” Philippa responded blandly. “Even if I had seen you earlier I wouldn’t have come up to you. We’ve got to keep our contacts isolated as far as the White Y is concerned. You know, I thought of getting up a steamboat party at my place and asking the Pereras and you. But I thought better of it … Duncan calls it Chinese Fondue.”
She didn’t say she had thought the steamboat dinner would be one way to stop Duncan’s periodic hints about being invited up to her flat.