Number One Houseboy Ah Keng brought the cable to his room around mid-morning. Willie pushed aside his exercise book and contemplated the thin brown envelope lying there on his desk. Now that it had finally arrived, he dreaded what its innards augured.
He picked up his letter opener, disembowelled the envelope and drew out the piece of paper inside.
The message was brief and to the point. There were no legal recourses for him to recover the money from his stockbroker, his lawyers informed him. It was imperative that he return to London immediately to consult his accountants. Arrangements had to be made – he would have to mortgage his house in Wyndham Place, perhaps even sell it, not to mention auctioning off his works of art and antiques.
He slapped the cable on the desk. Mortgage his home and sell off the paintings he had spent his life collecting from around the world. How the bloody hell had the situation descended to this?
The room seemed to list when he stood up. He lurched for the back of his chair, clinging tightly to it. After a minute or two, feeling steadier, he made his way gingerly to the windows.
The sea was emerald and turquoise, chipped with a million white scratches. In the garden below the kebun was resting in the shade of the casuarina tree, puffing on a kretek and scratching his groin through the folds of his shorts with an abstracted, canine pleasure. Looking at him, a longing for the man’s simple life gripped Willie.
Envious of a native fiddling with his balls under a tree, he thought. How the mighty have fallen.
He swore softly at himself. The wisest thing to do would be to sail home immediately and confront the disaster, salvage what he could from the wreckage. Returning to his desk, he tore a clean page from his exercise book and began making a list of instructions. The most immediate task for Gerald would be to change their travel arrangements.
Halfway down the page he stopped writing. He could already hear Syrie shrilling at him, blaming him for this catastrophe and the public humiliation she would suffer. The scenes she would make swilled through his mind: the recriminations, the rows and – most horrifying of all – the torrents and torrents of tears. He shuddered.
There was, of course, another thing he had to consider, the only one he truly cared about: this trip with Gerald was probably the last one he would be able to afford for the foreseeable future. He wanted to postpone, for as long as he could, the moment when they would have to part and go their separate ways – he to London, Gerald to Europe or America or wherever his fancy took him. Who knew how long it would be before they could be together again?
A few weeks ago, while he was recovering from his illness, he had made a decision: once he returned to London he would inform Syrie that he would be moving out of their home. She could keep her married name and continue living there; he would provide her with a generous allowance. Naturally Elizabeth had to stay with her. A child needs her mother.
It would be costly, but it would be worth it. It would all be worth it. The veil of their marriage would not be pulled aside; there would be no divorce and no scandal, not even the faintest whiff of it, but he would be free again. Free. The very sound of the word itself seemed to shift a huge weight off him. He would move to the south of Europe, he would buy a villa high up in the hills where the air was saturated with sunshine, and Gerald would come and live with him.
All his plans, all his dreams, swept away. He was penurious now, and he was trapped, with no choices, no escape. Most of all he feared he would lose Gerald: after seven years with Willie, he was accustomed to the very best in life. He would not take kindly to the news that Willie was broke.
A familiar set of rapping at the door pulled him back from his thoughts. He slid his lawyers’ cable under his exercise book and spun around in his chair.
‘Come in, Gerald.’
His secretary entered, nudging the door shut behind him with his heel. Willie crossed his arms over his chest and scrutinised him. Gerald was dressed in a short-sleeved cotton shirt and blue bathing shorts. In his hands were a rolled-up mat, a towel and a straw hat. A scab, translucent as rice-paper, was beginning to form over the cut on his cheek. A vivid bruise blotched the skin above his left jawline.
‘I’m going down to the beach,’ said Gerald, ‘put some colour in me.’
‘Your face looks colourful enough already, wouldn’t you say?’
Gerald stroked his jaw tenderly. ‘Sorry about yesterday. Abominable behaviour. Won’t happen again. Swear to God.’
Both of them knew that oath would be broken again and again, as it had been before. There was no point pursuing the matter.
‘I found out a few more things about Lesley last night,’ Gerald said. ‘Her father was a clerk in the Chartered Bank. Douglas Crosby. A well-known womaniser. Died of a heart attack when Lesley was just twelve. Her mother had to turn their home into a boarding house. The old lady – the talk was she had some Chinese blood in her family – died in her sleep a few years later. Our memsahib had just started teaching at a school in town.’
‘She doesn’t look Eurasian to me,’ said Willie. ‘And Sun Yat Sen? Did your friends tell you what she got up to with him?’
Gerald shook his head. ‘Nothing interesting, really. She helped publicise his cause, raised a bit of money for him. Speaking of which …’ Gerald held out his palm.
Willie gaped at him. ‘I gave you twenty … pounds just two days ago.’
‘Those bloody Chinks stole all my winnings.’ He pointed to the bruise on his face. ‘In case you’ve forgotten?’
‘Can’t you just …’ Willie bit back his words. ‘Just be more … prudent, will you?’
‘Fuck it, Willie, I’ll win back whatever I’ve lost. Fortune favours the bold – I’m one of the boldest men around, and you’re one of the richest.’
For days now he had wanted to tell Gerald about the financial disaster he was facing, but then he remembered how close he had come to losing Gerald in Kuching. Life without Gerald was too bleak to even contemplate. Sighing inwardly, he found his money clip, peeled off a handful of notes and handed them to Gerald.
‘Sod the work, Willie,’ Gerald said, tucking the money in his shorts. ‘It’s a bloody crime to chain yourself to your desk on such a perfect day.’ He peered more closely at him. ‘What’s really bothering you?’
‘Just a knot I’m trying to … unravel in my story. Now bugger off. Some of us have to work for a living, you know.’
Gerald dropped his towel and his hat on the floorboards and bent towards Willie. He curved his palm around Willie’s nape and kissed him hard on the lips. Willie closed his eyes, all his doubts and frustrations and irritations disintegrating, obliterated in the kiss. He was aware of Gerald’s hand sliding up between his thighs. His excitement surged, and then, unbidden, thoughts of his money problems breached his mind, and seconds later – he could actually pinpoint the precise instant – he felt himself wilting rapidly.
He pressed his hand over Gerald’s and gently pushed it away. Gerald stopped kissing him. He looked at Willie. ‘You’ve never had this problem before – at least not with me.’
He felt his face flushing. ‘I’m just … preoccupied …’
Gerald continued to study him. Then he pressed a tender kiss on Willie’s lips. ‘It’s only a temporary thing.’ He winked at Willie. ‘It’s like a cat – it’ll come back when it wants to come back.’
He collected his towel and mat, jammed his straw hat on his head and left the room, closing the door quietly behind him.
Willie took out his lawyers’ cable and read it again. After a while he picked up his fountain pen, moistened the nib with the tip of his tongue and, with the bitterness of ink seeping across his mouth, tried to slip back into the story he had been labouring over.
Half an hour later he put down his pen. He had barely filled two pages after Gerald left. Over the past week he had written only one story. Re-reading it, he found the writing inert, the characters flat. His well of stories had always brimmed over, but now, while the well had not run completely dry, the water was brackish. For the first time in his life, the irresistible inclination to write – his companion, his solace, his sustenance for as long as he could remember – had deserted him.
He screwed the cap on his pen, put away his exercise book and his lawyer’s cable in the drawer and plodded downstairs.
The house was silent, the servants resting in their quarters. Wandering through the corridors, he caught himself assessing how much the William Daniell paintings on the walls were worth. He had started doing this recently – unable to fall asleep at night, he would mentally list all his works of art in Wyndham Place, all his jewellery and the expensive trinkets he had acquired over the years, and estimate how much each one of them would fetch at Sotheby’s.
On the verandah he fixed himself an ice-cold martini and sipped it in the shade of the casuarina tree. It was just past noon, that time of the day when the wind swelling off the sea seemed to have been transmuted into the hot, searing light itself, but even in the full flood of the midday sun the casuarina’s foliage had a brooding, corvine aspect.
His thoughts crept back to the mortifying failure with Gerald. It’s just tension, that’s all, he told himself, and besides, his health was still on the mend. Gerald’s right – the bloody cat will slink home when it feels like it. And to hell with work – I’ll write when I get home.
He was just finishing his martini when Lesley joined him under the tree. She was dressed in a pale green chiffon blouse and a yellow skirt. She removed her toque with its plume of white egret feather.
‘Had your hair done?’ he said. ‘Very fetching.’
‘What sharp eyes you have, Willie. I’ve been meaning to ask you – my brother would like to interview you for the Penang Post. Geoff owns the paper.’
‘Interview?’
‘Oh. It’s an imposition.’ Her face fell. ‘I do understand. I’ll tell him you’re not interested. It’s just that – and please keep this to yourself – but his paper isn’t doing well, you see …’
Don’t be a fool, he scolded himself. An interview will help sell your books, particularly your latest one. And Christ knows you need to sell as many books as possible. Every little bit helps.
‘I’d be … delighted to talk to him,’ he said. ‘Tell him it’ll be an exclusive.’
‘I say, that’s very generous of you. Geoff will be terribly chuffed.’ She indicated his glass. ‘A top-up?’
‘I allow myself only one drink before lunch when I’m working.’
‘You’re slaving away like a coolie – I thought you came here to recuperate?’
‘A writer never … stops working.’ He did not want to talk about his work. ‘How long have you two been married?’
‘Fifteen years. It was our anniversary last month, actually.’
‘Congratulations.’ He made a mental note to get Gerald to buy them a present – nothing exorbitant, of course.
‘Robert was forty when I met him. He’s changed much, hasn’t he? Oh, no need to lie, Willie – that afternoon you arrived, that look on your face …’
The high surf of the wind through the trees merged with the sound of the waves; it was hard to tell what was sea and what was merely air.
‘We’ve all changed. Age. Illness. The war. And marriage, of course. Marriage changes a … man.’
‘Not as much as it changes a woman.’ They watched Gerald emerging from the sea, his body glossy with saltwater and sunlight. ‘Some men don’t change even after they marry,’ Lesley went on, her eyes following Gerald as he sauntered up the beach to lie in the shade of the coconut trees. ‘Did you?’
He took his time moulding his answer into the shape he wanted. ‘In some ways … yes.’ His stammer was worse than usual. ‘And being a … a father … changed me.’
She looked sidelong at him, the mocking arch of an eyebrow telling him she was fully aware that he had not answered her question. He shifted his feet, shaking out the stiffness from his knees. ‘You must miss your sons awfully.’
‘I wanted them to go to Victoria Institution in KL, but Robert was set on sending them to his old school.’
‘I loathed boarding school.’ Willie hawked up a gob of disgust in his throat. ‘The … beatings and the bullying, the hundreds of imbecilic rules …’
‘At least your parents didn’t have to sail halfway around the world to visit you.’
‘My mother died … when I was eight. Two years later I lost my father.’
Her lips parted slightly, then closed again; she brushed back a sickle of hair from her forehead. ‘Robert never told me. Who looked after you?’
‘I was sent to live with my uncle in … Whitstable.’ He kept his eyes on the coconut trees on the beach as he spoke; they looked like sea anemones waving in the current, he thought. ‘He was a vicar. Uncle … Henry and Aunt Sophie. She was German. They were childless. They had no clue what to do with me.’ He snorted. ‘No clue at all.’
‘You were an only child?’
He shook his head. ‘No, but I felt like one. My two brothers were already at school by the time I … popped out into the world. When I went to live with Uncle … Henry the boys at my new school … mocked my accent.’
‘What accent?’
‘I was born in Paris. I grew up there. We spoke French at home. I was shy and I had no … facility for games. I had no friends. I read all the time.’
He remembered how he used to climb beneath his mother’s blankets each morning, and how she had held him in her arms. Never again had he felt such warmth, such a feeling of security.
‘She was bed-ridden – my mother, I mean,’ he said. ‘She had … tuberculosis. But one morning she slipped out … of our apartment and walked to a photo … studio a few streets away.’ He paused for a moment, then for a longer moment. ‘The effort was too much for her. She died a week later.’
‘Oh, Willie … How terribly awful for you.’
‘The photograph in my room – it’s the one my mother had taken that morning. She wanted me to remember what she looked like. She was afraid of being forgotten.’
‘All of us will be forgotten eventually. Like a wave on the ocean, leaving no trace that it had once existed.’
He shook his head. ‘We will be remembered through our stories. What was that poem? The one written on your door? A bird of the mountain, carrying a name beyond the clouds. Well, a story can carry a name beyond the clouds, beyond even time itself.’
She nodded slowly, as though trying to convince herself of the truth of his words. ‘I suppose you’re right in a way – all those people you put in your stories – the world might know Sadie Thompson as a whore, but because of you, Willie, she will live for ever. She will never be forgotten.’
He was taken aback by the fervour in her voice. ‘You sound as if you envy her.’
The corners of her mouth curled downwards. ‘Infuriating, isn’t it? For a woman to be remembered, she has to either be a queen or a whore. But for those of us who lead normal, mundane lives, who will remember us?’
‘You have your children. They’re a form of remembrance too.’
‘Children?’ She looked unimpressed. ‘They have their own lives; and they’ll leave their own marks, obliterating ours.’
The wind brushed a low-hanging branch across his face. He grabbed it and pulled it towards him. ‘I can see why the … Malays liken it to the cassowary.’ He rubbed the casuarina’s hard scaly leaves between his fingers. ‘Ugly, aren’t they? Not like oaks or raintrees or banyans.’
‘No tree is ever ugly, Willie. But I must say I prefer the name the Malays gave it. Did you know they call it “the whispering tree”?’
‘Really? Why?’
‘They say that if you stand under a casuarina when the moon is at its fullest, you can hear its leaves whispering to you.’
‘And what would they be whispering?’
‘Your future, and all the things you desire to know.’
‘Is it true?’
A wan smile ghosted across her face, then disappeared, as though it had been filched by the wind.
‘I’ve never heard it say anything to me,’ she said.