The traffic heading into town was still heavy when I left home. Motor cars honked at us whenever my rickshaw strayed from the edge of the road. ‘Sorry, mem,’ my rickshaw-puller called over his shoulder.
‘Ignore them, Ah Leck,’ I said.
Just a few years ago the only vehicles you’d see were bicycles and horse-drawn gharries and carriages, but the rubber boom had drawn countless motor cars onto the roads. The Chinese towkays, they had to have the largest and most expensive motor cars, naturally, and everyone thought nothing of speeding around at fifteen, twenty miles an hour. Twenty miles! Sheer madness.
Any other day and I would have been lulled by my rickshaw’s steady, lilting rhythm, but my thoughts continued to linger on Willie Maugham as I was conveyed into town. The fact that he knew something about Sun Yat Sen had surprised me. The letter he was reading had obviously rattled him – the poor man had looked positively bilious. I just hoped he wasn’t going to have a relapse while he stayed with us.
The writer’s travels had been documented in detail by the newspapers from the moment he arrived in Singapore. A few weeks ago Robert announced to me that he had cabled Maugham in Singapore, inviting him to stay with us.
‘Is that wise?’ I asked. We hadn’t had any house guests since Robert came home from the war.
‘I haven’t seen Willie in twenty years,’ Robert said. ‘It’d be marvellous if he comes, absolutely marvellous.’
The house did feel empty ever since our boys returned to England for their new term. The writer’s presence would certainly liven things up.
‘Does he know you’re here?’ I asked.
‘I doubt it – we lost touch after I moved to Hong Kong. But he’ll be delighted to see us, I’m sure of it.’
Robert’s invitation to the author elicited no response, and I thought the matter had all been forgotten, but a few days ago at lunch he had waved a telegram at me. ‘He’s replied. Willie’s replied. I knew he would. He’s astounded to hear from me, he says. He couldn’t believe it. Anyway – he’s coming to stay.’
‘He certainly took his time replying.’
‘He was in Sarawak, that’s why he didn’t get my letter. And he’s been awfully ill.’
‘How long is he staying?’ I asked. Cookie had made Robert’s favourite: deep-fried chicken chop swimming in a thick brown gravy of Worcestershire sauce and served with peas and a banana fritter.
‘Two weeks.’
‘That’s rather long, isn’t it?’
‘Stop fretting, my dear. He won’t be a difficult guest. We shared rooms for a year, did I ever tell you?’
His eyes were shining, and there was an excited note in his voice. I had not seen him in such high spirits in ages. ‘I’ll prepare a room for him.’
‘He’s travelling with his secretary. Chap by the name of—’ He checked the telegram again. ‘Haxton. Gerald Haxton.’
‘Oh. Two rooms, then.’
Robert looked up at me. He blinked slowly. ‘What? Oh, yes. Two rooms. Yes. Of course.’ He withdrew into his own thoughts, chewing his food. A moment later he lowered his knife and fork. ‘Just one thing, my dear.’
‘What is it?’
‘Watch what you say to Willie. He’s my friend, but he’s also a writer, and there’s nothing he loves more than snuffling out people’s scandals and secrets.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘During the war there was talk that he was working for the Secret Service.’
‘You mean … he was a spy?’
‘The word was that he ran a network of agents in Geneva.’
I found the notion of a spy staying with us – snooping through our cupboards and drawers and prying into our lives – not at all pleasant.
‘All this constant travelling of his – it’s probably a front for gathering information, spying for the government,’ Robert went on. ‘I wonder if he still stammers. He used to, you know. Quite painfully.’
‘Like Clive Featherstone.’
‘Clive doesn’t stammer. He stutters.’
‘Is there a difference?’
‘Clive tuh-tuh-tuh-talks luh-luh-luh-like th-th-this. A stammerer doesn’t. A stammerer battles … to squeeze … the next … word in his sentence out of his mouth. Verbal constipation, you could say.’
‘We should’ve had the rooms repainted.’ I cut off a small piece of chicken and swirled it through the thick gravy. ‘They’re looking tired and shabby. And we must get new furniture for the house, darling. And new cushions and curtains and rugs. Too late to do it now, but we must do it after Maugham leaves.’
‘I’ve been thinking,’ Robert said, ‘about Bernard’s offer.’
I swallowed and set down my knife and fork carefully on the edge of my plate. ‘I’m not leaving Penang, Robert.’
‘Dr Joyce feels strongly that the desert air will work wonders for me.’
Damn that meddling old quack. ‘Your doctors are here. Your clients. All our friends. And what about the boys? This is their home.’ I drew in a long breath and exhaled heavily. ‘It’s completely mad to abandon everything here and move to the other side of the world, to a … to a sheep farm, for goodness’ sake, in the middle of nowhere. At your age?’
‘We’ll have to sell the house, naturally,’ he said.
‘Sell the house? You didn’t think you should discuss it with me first?’ I stared at him; he looked evenly back at me.
For the rest of the week I barely spoke to him. I would not put it past him to have cunningly timed his announcement. He was probably hoping – calculating – that my anger would dissipate during Maugham’s stay. After fifteen years of marriage, it wasn’t hard to see right through him.
The syce was dispatched to meet Somerset Maugham at the harbour on the afternoon he arrived. I was making a few final adjustments to the lilies in the sitting room when I heard our old Humber rumbling up the driveway.
‘They’re here!’ Robert shouted, limping from his study, Claudius at his heels.
I checked my appearance in the vestibule mirror before joining him under the porch. ‘Come along, darling,’ he said, tapping his walking stick on the ground. ‘Come along.’
A thick, hot breeze was thrusting in from the sea, ripe with the smell of the tidal flats. The Humber stopped beneath the porch. Hassan got out of the car – at close to sixty his movements were stiff but dignified, the black songkok on his head adding to his distinguished appearance – and opened the back door. A man of medium build climbed out, eyes blinking against the afternoon glare. His cream tropical jacket hung slackly on him, and his dark hair, glossed back from his brow with pomade, was beginning to grey. The earliest hint of jowls weighted down his cheeks, heightening his pugnacious jaw and giving his face a turtle-like aspect.
Robert’s smile spread open almost as wide as his arms. ‘My dear, dear Willie – welcome to Cassowary House.’
I caught the flash of dismay in the writer’s eyes before he masked it smoothly. ‘Robert, how … good to see you,’ he said, his nasal voice compressing his words. ‘You haven’t changed … a jot.’
‘My wife, Lesley,’ said Robert.
Maugham shook my hand and turned to the man who had come around from the other side of the car. ‘Gerald Haxton, my secretary.’
He was about twenty years younger than Maugham, a slimmer and more handsome version of the writer, with the same slicked-back hair and small, neat moustache. Their close resemblance to each other was heightened by their sickly pallor.
The houseboys untied the luggage from the Humber’s roof and carried it into the vestibule: two metal trunks and a long, bulging canvas and leather bag. The larger trunk had SOMERSET MAUGHAM printed in large letters on its side.
How vulgar, I thought. ‘The rest of your luggage will be sent here, Willie,’ I said.
We had tea before I showed them to their rooms. I had given Willie the larger and better appointed one; Gerald’s room was further down the landing. In the evening they came downstairs and joined us for drinks on the verandah, looking fresh and dapper in their white dinner jackets.
‘Well, Willie,’ said Robert. ‘You must be awfully glad you didn’t end up a ship’s surgeon after all.’
‘A narrow—’ Willie’s mouth opened and closed a few times, like a fish; the muscles in his neck strained visibly. ‘Escape,’ he finally managed to expel the word from his lips.
‘But why a ship’s surgeon?’ I asked.
‘Years ago,’ Robert said, leaning in towards me, ‘just before Willie’s first book was published, he vowed that if he couldn’t make it as a writer, he’d take a job as a ship’s surgeon.’
‘That was the only way’ – the writer’s stammer reared up again; it was painful watching him grinding the words out – ‘a man with no money is able to … see the world. I was desperate to travel to the East – China, Siam, the Malay … Archipelago. I wanted to leave my footprints on every island in the South Seas.’
He offered us a cigarette from a silver case, but I shook my head. ‘I’m afraid Robert can’t have people smoking anywhere near him,’ I said. ‘His lungs, you see.’
He snapped the case shut. ‘Terribly sorry. Of course. Utterly thoughtless … of me.’
‘I breathed in something I shouldn’t have in the Belgian countryside,’ said Robert. ‘I even had to give up my pipe. You were in the war too, I believe?’
‘Red Cross ambulance driver in France. So was Gerald.’
‘That’s where we met – in a makeshift hospital set up in a chateau,’ the younger man said, giving Maugham a sleek smile.
The realisation jolted me. Why had I not seen it sooner? The two of them were lovers. They were homosexuals. We had a pair of bloody homosexuals under our roof. I shot a look at Robert – he knew; of course he knew.
I said, ‘Willie, how did you and Robert first meet?’
‘It was at a Sunday … luncheon in Edmund Gosse’s home, wasn’t it, Robert?’ Willie said.
‘I believe so. It was about a month after your first book came out.’
‘That must have been around October ’97. Liza was only … modestly successful,’ Willie directed this to me, ‘but enough people found its subject matter offensive, so I was in great … demand by London’s … fashionable hostesses.’
‘Henry James was there too, remember?’ said Robert. ‘I simply can’t understand why people think so highly of him. The man writes like a fussy old spinster.’
‘He uttered barely a dozen words all through lunch.’ Willie turned towards me again. ‘Robert and I were … both young bachelors.’
‘Hard to believe, isn’t it? A quarter of a century ago. Why, I remember that day when you—’ A squall of coughing buffeted Robert. I sprang to the teapoy by the sideboard and hurried back with a glass of water. I held it to his lips, rubbing his back in long, hard strokes. He drank half his glass and patted my hand, thanking me with a look.
‘We continued to meet up regularly after that luncheon,’ Willie said as I arranged myself into my chair, ‘usually at White’s.’
‘I’m still a member,’ said Robert.
‘We shared a flat for eight months,’ Willie went on. ‘The arrangement was very … much to my advantage: during the day he’d be working in his … chambers, so I would have the flat all to … myself to write. In the evenings we would go out, catch the latest shows, have dinner with our friends.’
‘Wonderful times,’ said Robert, his eyes hazy with memory. ‘Just wonderful.’
‘And then both of you got married,’ Gerald broke in. ‘You, Robert, to a lovely, gracious woman’ – a lopsided smile and a piratical wink at me – ‘and you, Willie, well, you married Syrie.’
I stole a glance at Willie; his eyes were half-lidded, his face placid. ‘A top up, Gerald?’ I said, reaching for the bell.
‘No need to summon the slaves, Lesley.’ Gerald got up and ambled over to the sideboard.
‘A great shame our boys’re away,’ Robert said. ‘They’d have loved to meet you.’
‘Where are they?’ asked Willie. ‘KL? Or Singapore?’
‘Reading, actually,’ Robert said. ‘Boarding school. Edward’s thirteen; James is fourteen. They’ll be going up to Oxford in a couple of years, we hope. Follow in their old man’s footsteps. What about you, Willie? Any sprigs from the old branch?’
‘A girl, Elizabeth. Six years old and a delight.’
‘Your wife – Syrie? – does she ever travel with you?’ I wondered if the poor woman knew her husband slept with men.
‘Syrie and I have … different interests; we like to go to different places, see different things. I travel … luxuriously when I can – it’s senseless to rough it just for the sake of it – but I’m also quite willing to put up with the most insalubrious conditions if I have to. Syrie, on the other hand … simply can’t live without her creature comforts. My wife has many admirable … qualities but’ – the writer gave a rueful, indulgent smile – ‘she’s not the … most intrepid type. She doesn’t even relish going over to the Continent.’
His articulate reply gave me the impression that he had been asked that same question many times.
‘Oh, sweet darling Syrie wouldn’t have lasted fifteen minutes.’ Gerald flopped back into his chair, a replenished drink in his hand. ‘We’ve sailed on rusting tramps, on liners and schooners; we’ve travelled by train, by car, by sedan chair. We’ve hiked up narrow mountain passes, slept on straw pallets in cow sheds. We’ve gone on foot, ridden ourselves sore for days on mules.’ He took a big swallow from his crystal tumbler and jerked his chin at the Dyak shield hanging on a wall. ‘We saw plenty of those in Sarawak, in their longhouses. We nearly lost our lives there too, you know.’
Willie shot a cautioning frown at his secretary. ‘Gerald …’
‘What happened?’ Robert asked.
‘We were sailing downriver from the jungle, heading back to Kuching,’ Gerald said. ‘It was a bright, hot day, cloudless, the river flat as day-old bubbly. And then, suddenly, with no warning at all, this massive wave came roaring towards us.’ He drained half his glass in one gulp and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘I’d never seen anything like it. It was terrifying. It swept all of us overboard, flipped our boat over like a leaf. And still more waves came rushing in, each one just as huge. The river was like the Atlantic in winter, I tell you.’
‘You were caught in a tidal bore,’ Robert said. ‘Alexander also nearly lost his life to one.’
‘Friend of yours?’ asked Gerald.
‘I may be ancient, my dear boy, but I’m not that ancient. Alexander the Great.’
‘I don’t know that story,’ said Willie.
‘Quintus Curtius Rufus recorded it in his Historiae Alexandri Magni,’ Robert said. ‘Alexander dreamed of expanding his empire to the ends of the world, but after failing to conquer India, he turned his exhausted, homesick troops around.’
Robert started coughing again, and he had to take a few sips of water before he was able to resume his tale.
‘On their journey home Alexander and his army camped by the banks of the Indus River. He took some of his men on boats downstream to find out how far they were from the sea; he nurtured the hope that they could sail home by sea instead of travelling over the high mountains. After a few days on the river they discovered it was running upstream – and what was more promising, the water smelt strongly of salt. Alexander’s men rejoiced, believing that they were nearing the sea.
‘But a second later their cheers were cut off. They saw towering waves thundering upriver towards them. The waves hit them and smashed Alexander’s flotilla to pieces. More than half of his men drowned.’ Robert stopped abruptly. ‘Do forgive me rather for going on and on – I’m sounding like a tidal bore myself.’
Willie and his secretary laughed. Even I, who had heard that story more than once, couldn’t help smiling. Robert and Willie fell back into the remembered rhythms of their old friendship. From the easy manner they chaffed each other, it was obvious that they had once been close friends. Occasionally Gerald stepped into their conversation, but mostly he kept silent and drank, and drank. At one point, as I observed Robert laughing heartily, it struck me that I couldn’t remember when he had last done that with me. Or for that matter, I with him.
The garden was receding into twilight, trailing the fragrance of flowering jasmine and frangipani. The houseboys went around switching on the electric lamps, and I winced at the sudden glare. Within a minute or two moths were flaking around the lamps, hurling themselves again and again at the fire sealed inside the glass. Less than a decade ago the only illumination after sundown came from oil lamps and candle-flame. Recalling those days, I was flooded with a powerful yearning to sit in the shadows again, like a Buddha in an abandoned temple at nightfall, remembered only by the flame of a guttering candle lit by a passing pilgrim. Another evening from ten years ago buoyed to the surface of my memory, an evening when another traveller from a distant land had visited us, an exile from China, Dr Sun Yat Sen. Sun Wen, as he had asked us to call him. That particular evening seemed so far away in time, irretrievable.
The monarchy in China was dead, but the revolution had only pushed the antique land into a civil war that seemed to have no end. In the last few years I had stopped reading about the news from there – I found it too upsetting, too painful. China slipped out of my thoughts, out of my dreams, like a cloud pulling away to another sky below the horizon. But ever since Robert had announced his intention to sell our house and move to the other side of the world, the urge to find out what was happening to Sun Wen had begun to tug at me.
A letter. I must write a letter to him. But to where in the whole of China could I send it? With the collapse of the old empire the Chinese Consulate had been abandoned, and even the Tong Meng Hui had dissolved its reading club. But perhaps there was still someone at its headquarters in Armenian Street I could speak to, someone who might be able to dig up Sun Wen’s address from their records.
I felt the cold prickle of Willie’s gaze on me; I had the unpleasant sensation that he had been observing me for some time. I looked directly into his eyes. He turned his face away.
‘Cassowary – that’s a bird, isn’t it?’ Gerald was asking Robert. ‘Rather strange name for a house.’
‘Nobody has a clue why it’s called that,’ Robert said, ‘but we decided to keep the name when we bought the house.’
‘It’s named after the casuarina tree – that big tree by the fence.’ My throat felt rusty, and I took a sip from my drink. ‘The Malays call them “kasuari”, because their leaves look like the cassowary’s feathers.’
‘Where did you hear that from?’ Robert asked.
A chichak on the ceiling spat its disapproving clicks over us. The dinner gong rippled from inside the house. ‘I hope you’re all hungry,’ I said, rising to my feet. ‘Cookie’s laid out a feast.’
‘Ravenous,’ Gerald said.
As I led the men across the verandah into the house, I heard – and felt – the soles of my shoes crushing the bodies of the moths and flying ants that had fallen to earth, their wings scorched when they flew too near to the electric suns.
Ah Leck dropped me off at the gates of St George’s church. I waited by the gatepost until the rickshaw had disappeared around a corner. A breeze swelled up, tearing the tiny yellow flowers from the angsana trees lining the road. A blizzard of petals blew past me, scattering themselves on the church grounds and crumbing the dome of Francis Light’s memorial.
A tram rattled past, its bell clanging. Opening my parasol, I joined the pedestrians going into town. Outside the Goddess of Mercy Temple I waited for a gap in the traffic. Rickshaw-pullers, their ribcages hollowed by opium, squatted over games of Chinese chess played on grids chalked on the flagstones of the forecourt. The temple’s terracotta-tiled roof reared over them like a black wave in the sea. Four stone dragons pranced on the edges of the roof’s upturned eaves, a familiar sight on the island. ‘The skies of Penang are crowded with dragons,’ my youngest son once remarked to me.
Continuing down Pitt Street, I squeezed my way between the fat open gunnysacks of shallots and dried ikan bilis and salted fish that crowded the shaded passageway running along the front of the shops. A yard or two after the Kapitan Keling mosque I turned right into Armenian Street.
I looked around me. It had been years since I was last here, but the shophouses appeared unchanged; even the people in the street seemed cloaked in an air of timelessness. That incense-maker laying out trays of hand-rolled sandalwood incense sticks under the sun – why, I was convinced he was the same man who had given me an incense stick ten years ago. His hair was now completely white, as though it had been dusted by the ash from his own joss sticks.
There is something about the shophouses of Penang I find beautiful and evocative. When Robert had been away at the Front I had spent many a morning with my easel and stool on a street corner in town, sketching and painting watercolours of these shophouses. Built at the turn of the eighteenth century, these buildings blended elements of southern Chinese and Indian architecture. With their exteriors limewashed in a variety of bright colours and embellished with detailed and eye-catching features, they are an artist’s dream. Their first floor formed a narrow porch, creating a connected walkway about five feet wide, what the Hokkiens called ‘goh kaki’. This five-foot way is usually laid with brightly patterned terracotta tiles, while the front doors – often a two-leaf comb door opening up to reveal a plain and more sturdy pair of inner timber doors – are flanked by shuttered windows on both sides. Above the windows usually sit a pair of air vents, shaped to symbolise bats and secured by thin vertical iron bars. The façade of the second floor is taken up by timber louvred shutters and, more often than not, a strip of parapet wall perforated with a row of jade-green ceramic air vents.
I squinted at the house numbers stamped in oval metal tags on the lintel as I walked up the street. I stopped at number 120. A blackwood signboard hung above the doorframe, as it had in my memory, but this one was carved with a pair of Chinese ideograms and not the quartet I remembered. The yellow limewash had been replaced by a coat of pale green, and the red altar of the God of Heaven hanging on the wall next to the doors would have infuriated Sun Wen. The comb doors were open; pasted on each side of the half-opened inner doors – doors which in my recollection had always been unadorned – was a strip of vermilion paper brushed with black strokes of Chinese calligraphy, the usual auspicious words to welcome fortune and good luck.
I stepped onto the five-foot way and peered through the doors into the front hall. A middle-aged Chinese woman with a batik sarong wrapped around her bosom was napping in a rattan lounge chair, a newspaper lying on her fat stomach. I knocked and called out a greeting. She jerked awake, the newspaper sliding onto the floor.
‘I’m looking for the Tong Meng Hui,’ I said in Hokkien.
She sat up, blinking at me in confusion. ‘What? Oh, those people-ah? They’re not here any more-lah.’
‘Do you know where they went?’
Scratching her armpit, she reached down and gathered up her newspaper. ‘They long, long time already left.’
‘Does Ah Lim still own this house?’
She shook her head. ‘He sold it to my daughter.’
I thanked her and walked away. In the shade of a Chinese apothecary’s five-foot way I paused to arrange my thoughts. The old apothecary was busy behind his counter, pinching dried herbs from a wall of labelled drawers and weighing them on a hand-held brass sliding scale. He gave me an enquiring look. I smiled and shook my head. The bitter scents of ginseng and cordyceps and a hundred other herbs I couldn’t name drifted out from the shop, medicating the air, but they couldn’t fumigate the despair from my heart. All this time I had been nursing the weak flicker of hope in my heart that the Tong Meng Hui would still have some link, however tenuous, to that house. But the Tong Meng Hui did not even exist any more.
I shaded my eyes against the glare and studied the street. I should turn left at the junction in front of me into Pitt Street again and make my way back to St George’s church. Before my resolve could falter, however, I changed my mind and dashed across to the opposite side of the road. I continued down lower Armenian Street until I came to the last building in the long row.
This particular shophouse stood on a corner and was separated from the next row by a shady side lane. The front doors were locked, the wall above the lintel bare. Flanking both sides of the doors were a pair of windows, protected by thin iron bars and tightly shuttered. Despite appearing regularly maintained, an air of absence brooded within the house.
Walking right up to the doors, I tugged my right glove off and brushed my bare palm slowly over their surface. The wood was unpainted, with a warm, powdery texture. I pulled my hand away and turned it over. My palm was coated in a skin of soot, the lines of my fate etched out in stark relief.
The sun slipped into a hidden seam in the clouds, and the world faded to monochrome. I wiped my palm, put on my glove and stepped out into the street. Before I left I gave one last look at the doors, and then I walked back the way I had come, back to my own world.