Towards the end of the night, after his guests had departed, Noel showed us around his house, finishing the tour in his library where a set of Willie’s books – from Liza of Lambeth to The Trembling of a Leaf – lay waiting on a table. Willie obliged Noel by signing and inscribing every one of them.
Robert had had a jolly time at the party – being Somerset Maugham’s old friend had given him a huge amount of face – and he nattered on about the evening as Gerald drove us home. Sitting in the back of the car, I stared out of the window into the darkness, adrift on the currents of my memories.
Gerald dropped us at the front door before speeding off into town. Willie helped an unsteady Robert to his room while I went around the house locking up the doors and windows. For most of the evening at Istana I had stayed by Willie’s side, a smile starched onto my face, and it was with a great sense of relief that I finally stepped into my bedroom and shut the door behind me.
One of the houseboys had placed a note on my dressing table. It was from Geoff, informing me that he had not been able to obtain Sun Yat Sen’s address for me. I crumpled up the paper and threw it away.
I changed and climbed into bed, propping myself against the pillows. A large, pale moth fluttered around the room and alighted on the rim of the lampshade, imprinting its shadow on the wall. I reached over to flick it away, but my hand was stayed by a voice in my head. They’re the souls of the people we once loved, come to watch over us.
I picked up Loh’s copy of The Trembling of a Leaf and opened it to the title page. My fingers mused over the spidery crawl of Willie’s inscription. In my mind I replayed my conversation with the old Chinese man earlier that evening.
Noel never failed to invite the pillars of the local communities to his parties, and Willie’s presence there would undoubtedly be irresistible. I was certain to see Loh Swee Tiong at the party – even though the old philanthropist’s name had disappeared from the pages of newspapers over the years. I kept my eyes peeled for him from the moment we arrived at Istana and as Noel introduced his guests to Willie I let myself lag behind them. At the first opportunity I slipped away into the crowd to find Loh. He has to be here, I said to myself as I searched the faces around me. He has to.
I did not see him, and I was resigning myself to the fact that he wasn’t there when, through a momentary gap in the crowd, I caught a glimpse of him. I pushed my way through the throng and found him in conversation with an Indian couple. I knew he would be an old man now, but he had aged even more than I had expected; his face was drawn, his cheeks sunken. I took a flute of champagne from a passing servant and waited nearby. The band launched into another jaunty tune, but I paid scant attention to what they were playing. My patience was fast wearing thin when, at long last, the Indian couple moved away. Loh craned his neck and searched the terrace, looking for somebody, probably his wife. I was about to go over to talk to him when, with the timid movements of a man fearful of falling, he made his way down the steps.
The minutes crawled past. Finally I set down my glass and followed him. At the bottom of the steps I continued along the path, going around the promontory. The music from the party faded as the path led me further and further away from the house, until there was only the flapping wind and the waves below. I passed a flight of steep, wooden steps that descended all the way down to the beach, but I was sure the old man would not have attempted them. I kept walking and soon came to a wooden deck. The old man was there, staring at the horizon. Sensing my presence, he half-turned from the view and gave me a polite nod.
‘Good evening, Mr Loh,’ I said, then went on quickly, ‘we’ve never met. My name’s Lesley, Robert Hamlyn’s wife.’
‘Hamlyn … the engineer?’
‘Barrister. He’s with the George Town Chambers.’ I indicated the book he was holding. ‘You came to meet Willie Maugham too?’
‘I was hoping he would sign this for me’ – he showed me the front cover – The Trembling of a Leaf – ‘but I could not get anywhere near him.’
‘You enjoy his books?’
‘It is for my son, actually.’ A forlorn smile crumpled his face. ‘Somerset Maugham is his favourite writer. Every time a new book by him comes out, I buy a copy and keep it for him. For the day when he comes home again.’ His smile shrivelled away, leaving a residue of sadness to stain his face.
‘Where’s he now?’ I asked.
‘He followed Dr Sun Yat Sen to China a few years ago.’
It was so easy; I didn’t even have to tack the conversation towards the direction I wanted. ‘How is he? What’s the latest news?’
‘Dr Sun?’ It was undoubtedly the last question he had expected from me. ‘He’s very sick, I was told.’
I took a hesitant step towards him. ‘What’s the matter with him?’
‘His liver, according to the rumours. They say he has a year – maybe two if he’s lucky. You have not heard about this?’
‘Our English papers here have little interest in him or what’s happening in China, Mr Loh.’
‘But you know of him? Not many angmohs here can say that.’
‘My husband and I knew him,’ I said. ‘We became friends when he was in Penang.’
‘That was a long time ago. Yet you still remember him.’ His ponderous nodding loosened a knowing smile over his face. ‘You still think of him.’
I refused to look away from his gaze. ‘He’s a remarkable man.’
‘Many people would agree.’
‘But not you.’
‘He stole my son, Mrs Hamlyn. He stole our sons and our daughters.’ The old man’s face hardened, as though it was chiselled from granite. ‘I wish that man had never set foot in Penang.’
‘But you gave money to his party,’ I said, ‘you were one of the biggest donors to the Tong Meng Hui.’
‘Money? Money is easy to give, Mrs Hamlyn. I would give away every cent I have for my son to return to us, safe and unharmed, for my granddaughter to have her father back again.’ His voice fissured. ‘I would give everything I own just to know he is still alive.’
‘You haven’t heard from him?’
All at once he looked frail, as though the scaffolding that had been propping him up all this time was breaking apart at the joints. ‘We haven’t heard any news from him in two years. Nothing. Not a single letter. Not even a word.’
I wanted to reach out and touch his arm, to comfort him, but I held back. ‘Did you ask Dr Sun?’
‘My contacts in China have no idea where Dr Sun is. All they can tell me is that he’s constantly moving from one place to another – there have been a number of attempts to kill him, apparently.’ The old man’s body seemed to sag. ‘Even so, I hope my son is keeping close by his side – it’s probably still the safest place for him to be.’ Loh pulled out his pocket watch and brought it to his eyes, squinting at it. ‘I must go home. My wife is very ill, but she insisted I had to get Mr Maugham to sign our book. She’ll be very upset that I failed.’
‘Give it to me.’ I held out my hand. ‘I’ll get him to sign it for you.’
‘I can’t make you go to all that trouble, Mrs Hamlyn …’
‘It’s no trouble at all. Willie’s staying with us.’ Loh didn’t resist when I tugged the book gently from his fingers. ‘I’ll deliver it back to your house.’
‘You know where we live?’
‘Who in Penang doesn’t, Mr Loh? Your son will be home before long, I’m sure of it, and he’ll have Willie’s books to catch up on.’
His eyes sharpened, turned astute. ‘The money I gave to the Tong Meng Hui, Mrs Hamlyn, it was never allowed to be made known to the public, it was never reported in the newspapers. That was my condition to Dr Sun. I wonder – how did you know about it?’
He did not wait for my reply, but gave me another nod and walked away. I watched him until he disappeared around a bend, and the path was empty once more.
I shifted in my bed, staring into the shadows above me. Sleep was far away. After a while I got up and went over to the windows. The moon was smothered in cloud, and the sea was fretful, stirred by the restive currents in its depths.
I slipped into my dressing gown and padded downstairs with The Trembling of a Leaf. I had intended to go into the library, but a weak spill of light drew me to the sitting room. Willie was slouched in his usual armchair, reading by the glow of a table lamp. He looked up from the page when I sat down across from him.
‘Can’t sleep either?’ He squinted at the book in my hand. ‘Well, some of my critics would say you’ve picked the perfect … soporific.’ He showed me the book he was reading: A Man of the Southern Seas.
‘Any good?’ I asked.
‘Competent prose, if superficial. But it hasn’t made me nod off yet.’
‘My brother’s rather proud of that book, you know.’
He checked the author’s name on the cover. ‘Geoffrey Crosby’s your brother?’
‘The very chap who’s so eager to interview you.’ I smiled. ‘Don’t worry – I won’t tell him what you said.’
‘Please don’t. The last thing I need right now is a … bitchy article from someone eager to … bury an axe into my … back.’
The despondence in his voice seemed uncharacteristic of him. ‘You’ve been looking strained since you got here,’ I said. ‘What’s troubling you?’
His face closed up. ‘Nothing at all.’ A moment later he appeared to relent. ‘Just a bit of unwelcome news … from my lawyers. I made an, ah, unwise … investment. It’s nothing too serious, but I do need to come out with a new book as soon as … possible.’
It was obvious that he was more worried than he let on. ‘So that’s why you’ve shackled yourself to your desk every day. How many stories have you written?’
‘A couple …’ His eyes sidled to the book on my lap.
‘But not one of them comes within a mile of “Rain”,’ I said. A pained expression flitted across his face. ‘Surely you’ve picked up a great store of tales on your travels?’
‘It’s not as simple as just going to some place and “picking up” a few stories,’ Willie said. ‘The story must demand to be set down on paper. With my … best stories, I always felt that I was merely their … conduit.’
I nodded slowly. ‘Like a pianist,’ I said. ‘The music doesn’t come from you, but flows through you.’
‘Quite so.’
I showed him the title page of The Trembling of a Leaf. ‘This strange-looking symbol you put in your books,’ I said. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s called a hamsa. It’s a Moorish sign to ward … off the evil eye,’ Willie said. ‘It symbolises a sword breaking open the … darkness to let the light shine in.’
Hamsa. I savoured the strange word silently on my tongue, this short intake of breath, followed by its long surrender into the air. ‘I always thought it looks like a casuarina tree – that long straight line down the middle is the trunk, and the two curving lines over it the outline of its droopy foliage.’
‘I suppose it does, now that you mention it.’ Willie shrugged. ‘We see what we want to see.’
‘How did you come across it?’
‘It was my father’s … he saw it in North Africa. After my mother died, he decided to build a summer house on the … banks of the Seine, a few miles west of Paris. Every Sunday he’d take me downriver to check on it. He had this same device engraved onto … its windowpanes.’ Memory softened his voice. ‘Those boat trips with him down the river on those still, misty mornings, they were the only occasions when the two of us spent any time alone together, the grieving widower and his grieving son. But we never stayed in that house, not … even for one night.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘He died shortly … after the house was completed. But ever since then I’ve adopted the hamsa as my own … symbol.’ His eyes wandered to the Blüthner half-submerged in the shadows. ‘Will you play something for us?’
I had not touched the piano in a long while, but I got up and went over to it. The stool creaked discreetly when I sat down. I opened the piano cover and flexed my fingers above the keys. I began pecking out the opening bars of a Chopin nocturne. My playing was wobbly, but grew more assured as I went on. I missed a few notes here, tripped over a cluster there, but Willie clapped softly when I finished – more out of politeness, I knew, than for my insipid performance.
My shoulders rose and dipped with the long, rolling swells of my breathing as I opened myself to the stillness, to the silence of the long, long years, until it filled me completely. And then, barely aware of my own being, I pressed down a key, and another, and another. The tentative notes wove themselves into the ribbon of a simple, plaintive melody. The piano had not been tuned in a long time, and the music seemed to emerge from an old, warped shellac disc, with an unsettling, forlorn quality to it. I played the piece all the way to the end. I never dropped a note, not even once.
This time Willie did not clap. His voice, when it came over my shoulder, was subdued. ‘What was that?’
‘Reynaldo Hahn,’ I said, my eyes fixed on the keys. ‘L’heure exquise.’
‘From Verlaine’s poem?’
Slowly I swivelled around to look at him. His face was in the light, the rest of his body in the shadows.
‘You know it?’ I asked.
‘When I was a young man – oh, a hundred years ago – I used to … traipse around the hills with a book of his poems. That particular one is, if I recall correctly, from La Bonne Chanson.’ He closed his eyes and in a steady voice that never once stammered, he began to recite:
La lune blanche
luit dans les bois.
De chaque branche
part une voix
sous la ramée.
O bien aimée.
L’étang reflète,
profond miroir,
la silhouette
du saule noir
où le vent pleure.
Rêvons, c’est l’heure.
Un vaste et tendre
apaisement
semble descendre
du firmament
que l’astre irise.
C’est l’heure exquise!
The last word sibilated from his lips, evaporating into the shadows, and slowly his eyes opened again.
The silence around us, the very weave of the night itself, felt denser. Even the waves outside, fraying away the margins of land since the beginning of the world, seemed to have stilled into stone. In the hallway the weighted heart of the grandfather clock went on beating, as indifferent as an aged monk thumbing his prayer beads on their long and infinite loop.
‘Where does a story begin, Willie?’ I asked.
For a while he did not say anything. Then he shifted in his chair. ‘Where does a wave on the ocean begin?’ he said. ‘Where does it form a welt on the skin of the sea, to swell and expand and rush towards shore?’
‘I want to tell you a story, Willie,’ I said. Yes, I thought to myself. Tell him your story. Let him write it. Let the whole world know.
The music I had just played seemed to go on unspooling in the air between us, this song that had no beginning and no ending; the song of time itself.