Normally he would have instructed Gerald to do it; instead Willie quietly asked the Number One Houseboy to go to the telegraph office in town and wire a message to his lawyers in New York. Number One Houseboy Ah Keng was in his fifties, and he had appointed himself Willie’s personal servant, looking after all his needs. He accepted the task – and the tip Willie slipped into his palm – with a sacerdotal demeanour.
‘I have read your book, Mr Willie,’ said Ah Keng.
‘Oh, which one?’
‘The one about the bad woman, the whore.’ Ah Keng wagged an arthritic forefinger at him. ‘It is not a story for decent people. You must write decent stories, Mr Willie. Nice stories.’
‘I shall bear that in mind, my good man,’ said Willie drily.
After breakfast with the Hamlyns, he and Gerald headed down to the beach with their books and towels. Lying in the restless shade of the coconut trees, Willie tried to read, but his mind kept wandering off the page.
‘For God’s sake, Willie, stop fidgeting,’ Gerald complained. ‘What the hell’s the matter?’
Willie laid his book on his stomach. ‘I haven’t … been sleeping well, that’s all.’
‘It’s Syrie – again – isn’t it?’ Gerald’s voice was muffled by the straw hat covering his face. ‘What does the bitch want this time? A new sable coat? A new house? Or – dare we even hope – a new husband?’
‘It’s this … bloody illness – it just won’t let go of its grip.’ He watched the coconut fronds high above them stabbing at each other. ‘And don’t call my wife a bitch.’
He picked up his book, but it wasn’t long before his attention drifted away again. Finally he clapped his book shut and struggled to his feet. ‘I’m going inside. Do some work.’
Gerald raised his hat off his face and squinted up at him. ‘You’re supposed to rest. The doctor said—’
‘I’m just going to scribble down some ideas,’ said Willie. ‘Stay here – don’t get up.’
‘Not a bloody chance,’ Gerald said, dropping the hat back on his face.
Back at the house he found Lesley in the dining room conferring in low, insistent tones with a portly man in a brown suit. They broke off when they saw him.
‘Dr Joyce is here to see Robert,’ Lesley said.
‘Mr Maugham.’ The doctor cranked Willie’s hand as though he were trying to start a reluctant automobile. ‘An honour to meet you. A great honour indeed.’
‘Is Robert all right?’ Willie asked.
‘It’s the humidity – plays havoc with his lungs. I’ve given him a sedative, but there’s not much else I can do for him, I’m afraid. Now if we were in London I might be able to rig up an oxygen tent.’ He angled a reproving look at Lesley. ‘And as I’ve advised before, a dry climate will certainly ease his suffering.’
She received his words with a tightening of her jaw and turned to Willie. He asked for a writing desk and a chair to be placed in his room. She told him to give her fifteen minutes. He thanked her and, on the way up to his room, decided to look into the library.
The room, located on the eastern side of the house, was spacious and bright. The oil landscapes and the photogravures, the floor-to-ceiling teakwood bookshelves and the pair of studded leather wingback chairs made him think that he was back in the Athenæum’s reading room. The illusion was marred only by the Straits Chinese porcelain displayed in corners and niches around the room: lidded pots and plates and vases in gaudy pinks and greens and yellows, decorated with dragons and phoenixes and peonies.
He searched for his books (the first thing he always did whenever he stepped into a bookshop or someone’s library) and was gratified to find them – he was even more happy to see them shelved prominently at eye-level. Robert had acquired every single title he had ever published – his ten novels and two collections of short stories. There were also, unsurprisingly, works by Shakespeare and Hazlitt and Dickens and Scott and H. G. Wells; translations of French and Russian and German novels; Robert’s Classical passions – Horace and Homer and Virgil and Cicero – and an impressive selection of books on Malaya. But what caught his curiosity was the extensive collection of books on China, the shelves of Chinese history and art, poetry and fiction.
He pulled out a thick volume bound in Morocco calfskin. The Taiping Rebellion. Printed on the frontispiece was Lesley’s name and a date: 30 May 1910. At random he picked out more books about China – books on the Taiping Rebellion, the Opium Wars, the Boxer Rebellion. Every one of them was inscribed with her name in a neat, elegant hand. All of them were dated from April 1910 or after.
He moved away from the bookshelves to a camphorwood sideboard crowded with silver-framed photographs. They showed the Hamlyns and their two sons, taken over the years, the boys pallid-faced and unremarkable-looking. There were also photographs of Robert and Lesley with glamorous-looking people on the verandah of Cassowary House and on the lawns of other homes. His eye was drawn to a photograph tucked right up against the wall. He picked it up by a corner of its frame, careful not to send the others toppling. Lesley, looking ten or fifteen years younger, stood in front of a mirrored dressing table staring at the camera, her chin tilted up slightly, her left hand resting on the back of a Chinese rosewood chair. She was dressed in a long-sleeved blouse which draped over the curve of her hips, matched with a long, plain skirt that reached to her ankles. Her hair was styled in a chignon. He had seen the Straits Chinese women attired in the same type of outfit in Singapore, but never a European lady. She had retained her figure over the years, he noted with approval. She looked regal and, in an unconventional way, even beautiful.
Ah Keng appeared at the door and informed him that mem was asking for him in his room. Willie replaced the photograph carefully and hurried upstairs. Lesley was directing a pair of houseboys as they positioned a writing desk at the windows.
‘A view of the garden and the sea.’ She clasped her hands at her chest and beamed at him. ‘That should inspire you when you’re writing.’
‘Thank you. However …’ Willie pointed to the opposite corner. ‘I would prefer it there.’
‘But … you’ll be facing the wall.’
‘It’s how I work.’
‘If you’re sure …’ Still looking doubtful, she fired off a short burst of instructions in Chinese to the houseboys. They hefted the desk and the Windsor chair over to the spot he had chosen.
‘I’ve been scribbling down some ideas,’ said Willie, ‘for my book about Sun Yat Sen.’
‘Knowing your reputation, I don’t suppose it’ll be completely flattering to him, will it?’ she said. ‘But I hope you’ll at least be … fair … to him?’
‘My characters are never completely beyond redemption, Lesley.’
She weighed his words for a moment or two. Then, indicating to him to wait, she went across the landing to her own room. She returned with a book and handed it to him.
‘It’s about Dr Sun’s activities when he was in Penang,’ said Lesley. ‘You might find it useful.’
The book was slim, hardly even eighty pages. A Man of the Southern Seas. ‘Southern Seas?’ he asked.
‘That’s what the Chinese call this part of the world – Nanyang.’
He studied the photograph of the man on the cover. The revolutionary was dressed in a dark three-piece suit and seated in an antique Chinese chair. He had a sensitive, scholarly face, and his eyes, large and round for a Chinaman, gleamed with intelligence. ‘Handsome chap.’
‘That was taken in Penang, in his party’s headquarters. He was already in his mid-forties.’
‘How long did he stay here?’
‘Five or six months.’
‘I’d still like to hear what he was like from you.’
She looked around the room, her eyes alighting on the framed photograph on his bedside table. She picked it up and studied it. ‘Your mother?’
‘Yes.’
‘You look like her. What was her name?’
‘Edith.’
‘She has such sad eyes.’ She placed it back on the bedside table. ‘Do you have a photograph of your wife?’
‘I don’t carry one with me.’
‘Oh. I see.’ She continued to stand there. It was obvious to Willie that she wanted to ask something of him. ‘Your book, the one you showed me the other morning … I’d like to borrow it. Robert would like to read it too.’
He took the book from his bedside table and gave it to her. ‘I’m sorry to … hear that he’s feeling … poorly. If it’s all right, I’ll pop into his room afterwards.’
‘He’d like that. Perk him up a bit.’
‘Poor Robert. Perhaps we shouldn’t have come.’
‘Oh, don’t say that, Willie. He was terribly keen for you to visit, couldn’t stop talking about it.’ She smiled. ‘Your presence here is the best tonic for him. He’ll be right as rain in a day, you’ll see.’
‘I have not the slightest doubt.’
He sat at his desk after she left and thought about what she had said. Her words, sanguine as they were, could not hide the knowledge in her eyes – Robert would recover after a day’s rest, true, but his bad spells would only worsen. And soon the day would come when he would no longer be able to breathe at all. He would drown in the very air that had given him life.
Willie opened his journals and began reading the anecdotes and character sketches he had recorded over the months of travel around the Federated Malay States, panning them for nuggets he hoped could be smelted and hammered into stories.
Two years ago he had journeyed to the Far East for the first time. Departing from London on a dull winter’s morning, he had sailed to Chicago, where Gerald was waiting for him. They took the train to San Francisco where they boarded a ship bound for Hong Kong. They lingered a week there before catching another ship for Shanghai. With guides and porters organised by Gerald they had set off into the hinterlands of the Middle Kingdom, travelling on riverboats and rice barges, tottering on pack ponies up narrow footpaths etched into the sides of vertiginous gorges. Willie had revelled in every minute of it. They spent a few months in China before he sailed home to London, his trunks bulging with presents for Syrie and Elizabeth: porcelain and silks and jade and artworks and books. But they weren’t all that he brought home: teeming inside his head were the stories he had been told on his travels.
‘You missed Liza’s birthday,’ Syrie reminded him barely half an hour after he had stepped inside 2 Wyndham Place, his four-storey Regency house in Marylebone. ‘I threw a party for her, with thirty children. I wrote you about it. Didn’t you get my letter?’
The familiar irritation pricked at him: he always called their daughter Elizabeth, but Syrie preferred Liza.
Their daughter was looking up at him, her eyes wary. She hasn’t seen you in eight months, he told himself. She’s probably forgotten who you are. He knelt on one knee and smiled at her. ‘Elizabeth, my darling, look what I got … for your birthday.’ He took out a dark blue coolie suit from his trunk and presented it to his daughter.
She reached out a shy hand for the suit, but Syrie pulled her arm away. ‘No, Liza darling, you’re not wearing that. Really, Willie – do you want her looking like some Chinaman coolie?’
‘Oh, I think Elizabeth … will look utterly charming in it, utterly charming.’ He pressed the clothes gently into his daughter’s tiny hands and kissed her cheeks. ‘Don’t you … think so, my darling angel?’
He relished being home again. Settling back into his routine, he began working on a book about his travels in China. Each day from morning till noon he wrote in his study on the top floor of his house. No one was allowed to disturb him. Submerged in his writing, he was oblivious to the bells from St Mary’s church up the road rippling the hours over the quiet neighbourhood. But occasionally, when he became aware of them, he would lift his face from the page and pause in his writing, and a deep feeling of peace would spread through him like a warm summer breeze.
The invitations came, and he resumed the rounds of socialising with Syrie, attending opening nights at the theatre and the opera where he caught up with their friends. In the mornings they went riding in Hyde Park. He spent time with Elizabeth, taking her to the little park in Bryanston Square in the evenings; he read to her at bedtime (for some unfathomable reason he never stammered during those occasions). She wore the blue coolie suit day after day, refusing to change out of it, much to Syrie’s annoyance.
For a while he was content, even happy. But, as always, it wasn’t long before he felt the walls pressing in. He missed Gerald, who had remained in America. As much as Willie enjoyed London, the urge to escape England, to leave everything behind, was always lurking inside him, gnawing into his bones, into his soul. Syrie sensed it too – she had been keeping her eyes peeled for it, ready to pounce on it the moment it stuck its head above ground. She constantly sought assurances from him and made frequent demands for sexual congress. Willie resisted all her attempts, and their old, familiar quarrels boiled over again. He barricaded himself in his study and worked; and when he wasn’t writing he found refuge in the Garrick Club, or he wandered the streets, letting the hours seep away in his favourite bookshops and art galleries, anything to postpone the inevitability of going home. He just could not cope with the scenes Syrie made.
He had assumed that they had an unspoken understanding when he married her: she wanted a rich and famous husband and a father for her child; he needed a glamorous wife who could make sparkling conversation at parties and who was at home with the fashionable people of London. In the beginning it had satisfied them both, but their marriage had soured into a marriage of inconvenience. ‘Like many unhappily married women I’ve known,’ Willie once remarked to a friend, ‘Syrie had made the … mistake of falling in love with her husband.’
Their rows grew more frequent and stormy. After another quarrel, he told himself that the situation could not go on. That evening, after he had tucked Elizabeth into bed and read her a story, he asked Syrie to join him in the sitting room.
‘Oh, don’t look so terribly grim, darling,’ she said. ‘You’re not still angry with me, are you?’
He edged away from her kiss and went to the sideboard to make their drinks.
She sat down on the Regency sofa she had bought the previous week, crossed one leg over the other and lit a cigarette. He gave Syrie her gin and tonic and, settling into his Chesterfield armchair, sipped his drink as he studied his wife. Her face was growing fleshy. She was forty, five years younger than himself. Her grey silk dress warmed the creamy lustre of the pearls he had given her after her divorce from Henry Wellcome. Her hair was styled into flat, elegant curls. Her dark brown eyes, shrewd and inquisitive, remained her most striking features.
He said, ‘My book will … be finished in a week’s time.’
‘Darling, what marvellous news.’ She tipped her tumbler at him in a toast. ‘Let’s celebrate. We’ll give a big party, we’ll invite everyone.’
‘No parties, no celebrations.’ He raised his palm as she started to protest. ‘After my book is done,’ he went on, ‘I will be going abroad. To … America.’
Syrie frowned. ‘You’ve only just got back.’
‘Paramount’s asked me to work on … the screenplay for Chaplin’s film in Hollywood.’
‘My goodness, how thrilling! I’d love to meet him. I’m sure he’ll be happy to introduce us to the other stars there.’
‘I’m going … on my own, Syrie.’
A long silence fell between them. Eventually she said, ‘I presume that secretary of yours will be there?’
‘It’s a working trip. That’s what I … employ him for. And after I’ve finished the work there,’ he forged on, ‘I’ll be going to the Far … East with him.’
‘I should be going with you. I’m your wife – although you seem to forget that all the time.’
‘My dear Syrie, I assure you that I find it … extremely difficult to forget that you’re my wife.’
Her eyes narrowed, uncertain of what he meant. ‘I’m a writer,’ Willie continued before she could say anything, ‘and to write I … need to find fresh material.’
‘You leave us on our own for months on end. Liza cries herself to sleep every night when you’re away, do you know that?’ She mustered her next words and fired them off in a broadside. ‘I feel more like your widow than your wife.’
‘Listen to me … carefully, Syrie … don’t … interrupt.’ He willed his stammer into retreat. ‘I need to write. And to do so I must have complete freedom to travel anywhere I like, on my own, for as long and as often as I have to. If you can’t accept this …’ He dreaded the inevitable explosion, but he forced himself to go on. ‘If you can’t accept this, then either we separate, or we get a divorce.’ He cupped his hands on his knees. ‘It’s up to you. But make your decision now.’
For three or four seconds her expression remained frozen. Then slowly, with almost a tragic grandeur to it, her face collapsed. It was like watching a heavy flank of ice calving from an iceberg into the sea, Willie thought.
‘You bastard!’ She hurled her crystal tumbler at him. He ducked, the tumbler’s contents splashing his arm as it flew past. It hit the wall behind him. It didn’t shatter, but dropped onto the thick carpet with a dull, lifeless thud.
‘Bastard!’ she screamed again. ‘Bastard!’
He sprang from his armchair and backed away from her. ‘Don’t make … me a scene, Syrie, please don’t make me a scene.’
She hunched into herself, buried her face in her palms and started weeping, her body rocking back and forth, back and forth.
He stared past her to the street outside the windows. A hansom cab clopped past. He envied the houses opposite, with their warm, inviting lighted interiors, but he supposed that anyone looking at his glowing windows would receive the same impression too.
To his relief, Syrie finally stopped sobbing. She straightened herself on the sofa and dried her eyes with his handkerchief. ‘All right.’ She cleared her throat. ‘You must travel. I accept that.’ She coaxed her hair back into place and adjusted her pearls. ‘I can’t go gallivanting around the world with you anyway – I have tons of work to do here, thrilling ideas for the house.’ She looked around the sitting room, taking in the walls and the ceiling and the furniture. ‘It needs more white.’
Willie blew out a silent breath. He was not completely free, but it would have to be sufficient for now.
The next morning he started organising his trip, one that he intended to be longer than any he had ever done before. Once he had finalised his plans he telegraphed his instructions to Gerald and delivered his manuscript of On a Chinese Screen to his agent. Syrie was her usual affectionate self as his departure neared, even buying him a new set of leather trunks from Selfridges and offering advice on what he should pack.
He sailed from Southampton on a grey, misty morning. The crossing was pleasant. Gerald was waiting for him in New York, his broad, familiar smile blazing from the crowds in the harbour when he saw Willie. They caught the train to California and stayed in Hollywood for two blissful months before driving up the coast to San Francisco. From there they boarded a ship bound for Honolulu, then sailed to Sydney before continuing north onwards to Singapore.
Bound to no itinerary, they explored the islands of the Malay Archipelago, tracing coastlines thick with mangroves, their roots stitching land to sea; they travelled upcountry to the Federated and Unfederated Malay States. They stayed in hotels and rest houses and, when those were not available, in the bungalows of Residents and District Officers. The Europeans, many of them living thirty, forty miles from the nearest town, were desperate for any form of distraction, and the wives of planters and out-station civil servants squabbled over the chance to host Willie and his secretary.
Now, less than a week after coming to Cassowary House, he was forced to resume his working routine again.
Each morning, as dawn began to thin the darkness around him, he would go down to the beach for a brisk walk. The crescent moon was a Cheshire cat’s grin in the sky, fading away into morning. The stretch of the bay in front of Cassowary House was about a quarter of a mile long, lined with four or five mansions spaced far apart and screened from the beach by tall casuarinas. At the end of the bay was a stream, barely two strides across, simmering over the shallow sand bed as it siphoned the rains from the mountains to feed the sea’s unquenchable thirst. Pinned to the banks on spindly stilts was a cluster of fishermen’s shacks. Beyond the stream lay a tumble of big boulders, blocking the access to the next beach. George Town was no more than a mile or two away, and Willie could see the dome of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank poking out above the trees like some strange onion.
At half past seven he would have a quick breakfast with the Hamlyns. After a bath and a shave he changed into a freshly pressed cotton shirt and long trousers. For the next four hours he would remain at his desk, writing. At a quarter to one, even if he were deep in the middle of a scene, he would screw the cap on his fountain pen, keep his exercise book away in the drawer and head downstairs to the verandah for a martini prepared by Number One Houseboy Ah Keng. He had had to show the houseboy how to make it the first time. Following a light lunch with Gerald and the Hamlyns, he would while away the rest of the afternoon on the beach with Gerald. They would read in the shade of the coconut trees and bathe in the sea. Despite his problems, the languorous climate was working its powers on him, and he felt his health improving, like a warm, rich tide replenishing a depleted lagoon.
Gerald’s body, he saw, was filling out again too, his skin varnished to a glossy teak by the sun. It wasn’t long before he started frequenting the gambling dens and the brothels in the Chinese quarter, returning home only in the early hours of the morning.
‘I’m telling you, Willie – you should come with me,’ he said one evening. He lay sprawled on Willie’s bed, watching him dress. The Hamlyns were taking them to the Penang Club for dinner. ‘The boys here are so skilful, so eager to please us Tuans.’
As was usual everywhere they travelled to, he had snuffled out the company of men who shared similar tastes. Willie envied his knack – he himself could never do it: meet someone, a stranger he found attractive, and convey his desires to the man with nothing more than a look exchanged between them.
Gerald grinned. ‘I should bring them back here for you.’
‘Don’t you dare.’ Willie shot his cuffs towards Gerald. ‘Are you listening?’
From the earliest days he had made it clear to Gerald that he was free to do whatever he liked, as long as he did not bring anyone back to their hotel or the houses they had been invited to stay in, as long as he did not cause any embarrassment to Willie. He was a famous writer and a married man; he had his reputation to preserve.
‘Robert and Lesley aren’t stupid, you know,’ Gerald said, working the cufflinks into Willie’s cuffs. ‘Maybe I ought to give them all the gory details.’
‘God forbid. Even I don’t want to hear all your gory details.’ Willie slipped into his dinner jacket and gave himself a final spruce-up in the mirror. ‘Our memsahib’s very curious about the devilries you get up to, have you noticed?’
‘They don’t talk much to each other, those two, do they? He chats more to his dog than to her. Treats it better too – look at all the cheese he’s always feeding that bloody beast.’
Gerald was right, thought Willie – there were days when husband and wife barely exchanged more than a handful of words to each other. But that wasn’t at all uncommon in many marriages, was it?
‘There’s something about her,’ said Willie, ‘something clenched up …’
‘Just another woman in the colonies stuck in an unhappy marriage,’ said Gerald, ‘and we’ve met a fair number of those here, haven’t we? Thank Christ at least she’s not one of those effusive females – you know, the ones who’re always slobbering over you.’ Gerald’s shoulders made an extravagant shudder. ‘One of my poker mates told me she used to be very tight with a bunch of Chinamen rebels. Their leader – that chap called Dr Sun – he stayed here in Penang. Apparently she became close to him.’ Gerald leered. ‘Very close.’
On their travels around Malaya he and Gerald had encountered many memsahibs; a number of them had been eccentric, and a few had been plain barking mad, but in the main they had been ordinary, middle-class, as Lesley had seemed to him. He was beginning to suspect that she was not as conventional as she made herself out to be.
‘When you see your friends again, my dear boy,’ Willie said as they went downstairs to join the Hamlyns, ‘find out what she got up to with this Dr Sun, will you?’