Chapter Eight

Lesley
Penang, 1910

I

If I were a novelist, Willie, I would tell you that I woke up on the morning of April 25th with a sense of uneasiness, a feeling that my life would never be the same again after that day. That’s what a novelist would do, isn’t it? But truth be told (and I intend to be completely truthful here), I felt nothing of the sort, nothing at all, when I got up that morning. I opened my eyes, as I usually did, at half past six. I lay in bed for a while, listening to the drowsy waves as the light outside changed, the ink of night diluting to dawn. On my way downstairs I looked in on my sons in the nursery. They were still fast asleep in their cots, curled up like piglets under the mosquito net, but my old amah Ah Peng was already up and garbing herself in her Sor Hei uniform: black cotton trousers and a starched white blouse buttoned up to her neck. Her hair was pulled back from her brow into a glossy bun. These women of the Sor Hei sisterhood had taken vows to remain unmarried and celibate, to live together and look after one another in their old age. Ah Peng’s exact age was a mystery; I guessed her to be in her sixties, but even she herself wasn’t certain.

Robert was at the breakfast table on the verandah, dressed for the office in a starched white Turnbull & Asser shirt and a striped tie, his hair combed and pomaded. After four years of marriage I thought he was just as handsome as the first time I had laid eyes on him. He was also regarded as one of the best-dressed men in the Straits Settlements and the FMS. He had grown heavier now – over the years he had acquired a taste for the local food, which was usually sweet and oily – but he was one of those fortunate men for whom a thickening waist only gave him an added gravitas, like a majestic tree with a wide, solid trunk.

He glanced up from his mail, smiling at me. ‘Morning, my dear,’ he said.

‘Good morning, darling,’ I said.

I paused at the top of the verandah steps and cast my eyes over the garden. Bulbuls darted around the lawn. The tall hibiscus hedge dividing our property from the Warburtons’ was pinned with corsages of red flowers; in the beds below the verandah a sparrow thrashed its wings among the leaves, bathing in the dew. Down at the beach an old man was walking his terrier. I breathed the morning deep into my body. This was my favourite time of the day, when the world was cool and fresh.

‘Cantlie’s asked me to meet his former pupil when he arrives from America,’ Robert said as I took my seat. ‘A Dr Sun Yat Sen.’

‘A Chinaman?’

‘Worse – a revolutionary. The Chinese government has put a bounty on his head, a sizeable one too.’

We had entertained all sorts of characters in our home over the years – MPs and diplomats, writers and actors and singers and artists – but a revolutionary would be a first for us. ‘He’s not dangerous, is he?’

‘Cantlie knows better than to send a madman our way – at least I hope so. But it’ll be interesting to hear what this chap has to say about China.’

‘When’s he arriving?’

He checked the letter again. ‘Any day now.’

I spread a thick layer of homemade kaya on my toast, bit off a corner and picked up the Penang Post from the pile of newspapers. The news was, as usual, dull and inconsequential: a list of men and women who had fallen ill or who had injured themselves; people who had gone back on Home Leave; the names of shipboard passengers who had disembarked in Penang; the latest books now available on the library’s shelves.

I was about to turn the page when a small headline on the bottom left corner caught my eye. ‘My goodness!’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Ethel’s been arrested!’

Robert peered at me over his mail. ‘What on earth did she do?’

I skimmed over the cramped, small lines of text in the article. ‘She killed a man.’

‘Mousy Ethel Proudlock?’

‘He tried to rape her.’

‘Good Lord. There’s no accounting for tastes, eh?’

‘That’s not funny, Robert.’

‘Who’s the poor chap?’

‘His name …’ My voice stalled, and I had to try again. ‘His name is William Steward. She shot him two nights ago.’

A hundred thoughts were jostling about in my mind. I was only half aware of Robert pulling the newspaper gently from my hands. ‘“Mrs Ethel Proudlock’s appearance in the KL magistrate’s court yesterday morning lasted less than five minutes”,’ he read aloud. ‘“She was released after her father paid sureties amounting to a thousand dollars. An inquest will be held in the Police Courts next week to determine if she is to be charged with murder.”’

The clamour in my head was silenced – at least momentarily. ‘Murder? But she was only protecting herself.’

‘If she’s admitted to killing him, then they have to decide if she is to be charged. That’s the law.’

‘The man tried to rape her!’

‘Do calm down, my dear. The inquest is purely a formality, that’s all. She’ll get off with nothing heavier than a slap on the wrist.’

‘I must go to KL,’ I said.

‘Cable her first. Visitors might be the last thing she wants right now.’

Robert slipped his jacket on and came around to kiss me. A trace of his Floris cologne lingered in the air after he left. I had always loved that scent on him.

Robert and I had been introduced to the Proudlocks at one of Bennett Shaw’s dinner parties in Kuala Lumpur three years ago. Bennett was the headmaster of Victoria Institution, one of the oldest schools in KL. He and his wife lived in a spacious bungalow in a secluded corner of the school grounds.

Ethel was born in KL. She was a year younger than me. Her husband William had come out from London to take up a teaching post at VI. They had been married for less than a year when we met them. Robert found the Proudlocks insipid and unsophisticated, but Ethel and I warmed towards each other. After that evening we wrote weekly to each other and met whenever I was in KL. On their infrequent visits to Penang she and William stayed with us. The wives of Robert’s friends were quick to enlighten me that Ethel’s father, the chief of the fire brigade, was a person of no consequence, but I ignored them.

Earlier this year the Shaws returned to England on Home Leave. They would be away for ten months. In Bennett’s absence William Proudlock was appointed acting headmaster, a position which allowed the Proudlocks to move into the Shaws’ bungalow. Ethel never said it, but we both knew that her husband’s new appointment was a big rung up the social ladder for them.

Sitting at my breakfast table on that April morning, the newspaper still in my hand, my thoughts went back to the last time I had spoken to Ethel. It had been about a month ago, when I had followed Robert down to KL for one of his trials. I recalled what she had told me that morning in Whiteaways’ bustling tea room. I had sat there, growing increasingly appalled as she talked. I had warned her that she was acting recklessly, and that there’d be terrible consequences, but this was worse than anything I could have ever imagined. Far, far worse.

Later that morning I was coming out of the George Town Pharmacy on Beach Street when I saw my brother strolling down the pavement, hands shoved into his pockets. He stopped to admire something in a shop window. I waved to him, and he came over to me.

‘I’m dying for a cup of tea,’ I said. ‘Tiffin Room?’

‘Sorry, Les, I can’t,’ he said. ‘Deadlines. I’ve just spent the morning interviewing the president of the Anti-Opium Campaign and I have to write it up.’

Ever since we were children I could always tell when he was lying. ‘You didn’t look to be in much of a hurry to me,’ I said. ‘I haven’t seen you for weeks, Geoff. Come along now.’

I marched us up Beach Street to the Tiffin Room on the corner. The tea room was the latest place for the mems to meet up after a morning’s shopping. The owner, a Hainanese former chef who had never been to England, had decorated the place according to his idea of how a café in London would look. Watercolours of Big Ben and Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square and St Paul’s hung on the walls. I nodded to one or two people I knew as the waiter showed us to our table by the front windows.

‘What have you heard about Ethel Proudlock?’ I asked my brother after we had ordered.

‘You haven’t spoken to her?’

‘I sent her a cable this morning.’ I leaned in closer. ‘What’s the story, Geoff? Do you know?’

Throughout the whole morning everyone I had met in town had wanted to talk about nothing else but the killing, but no one had any details of what had actually happened between Ethel and William Steward that night.

‘The police and Ethel’s lawyer are as tight-lipped as Freemasons,’ said Geoff. ‘William Steward was buried this morning. There were only a handful of people at the funeral. Poor chap.’

‘Was he a planter?’

‘Manager of a mine in Salak South till it went phut. He got another job with a firm of engineers, driving out to mines and rubber estates to fix their machinery.’

Our tea and scones arrived, and I kept silent while my brother filled our teacups.

‘What did he look like?’ I asked after I had taken a sip of tea.

‘Big, burly man. Balding, although he was only thirty-four years old.’ Geoff stirred three spoons of sugar into his tea. ‘A formidable rugger player. Quiet and shy, I was told. Not many friends. Not too fond of a—’ Geoff made drinking motions with his hand. ‘Perhaps that’s why.’

There were fewer than eight hundred Europeans living in KL, so I would probably have seen William Steward at the Selangor Club at some time or another, but if I had, then it had left not the faintest impression on me. ‘Was he married?’

‘Bachelor,’ garbled Geoff through a mouthful of scone. ‘He was sending money home to his mother and sister in England every month. God knows how they’ll cope now.’

For the first time since I had read about his death, William Steward was becoming real to me, coalescing into an actual human being, not merely a name in a newspaper. He had been alive – eating, thinking, chaffing his friends and being chaffed by them – until Ethel had taken all of that from him.

Geoff set down his teacup. ‘How’s Robert?’

Something in his voice made me wary. ‘He’s extremely busy. Old Stephen Mayhew died—’

‘Heart attack, yes, I know. Two months ago.’

‘Well, Robert’s the most senior now, so he’s had to take over his cases. He’s been slogging away late every night.’ I stopped buttering my scone and set it down on my plate. ‘Oh, what is it, Geoff?’

‘He’s having an affair.’

For a second or two his words made no sense to me. Then the shock hit me. ‘For heaven’s sake, Geoff.’ I shot a furtive glance at the other tables, but nobody else seemed to have overheard my brother. I asked quietly, ‘How do you know?’

‘I saw him.’ He kept his eyes on the world going about its business outside the windows. ‘I saw them.’

‘Who is she? Who’s the bloody bitch?’ Before he could answer I gripped his wrist. ‘No, don’t tell me. It doesn’t really matter, does it?’ I let go of him. ‘Just some bored and unhappy wife, I suppose. No shortage of them here.’ I sat back into my chair. ‘Is this why you’ve been avoiding me?’

He looked relieved to be freed from the burden of his secret. ‘I didn’t know how to tell you,’ he said.

‘Who else knows?’

‘I haven’t heard anything. Not a whisper.’

‘I suppose I should give him top marks for keeping it so discreet.’

‘Even so, you know what Mother always said: “Penang is a kampong—”’

‘“—and everybody knows everyone’s secrets.”’

Gharries and rickshaws and bullock carts and traps clattered up and down in the street outside. From where I sat I could see the dome of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, black on a white stone turret. The dome was visible from almost every part of town; its topmost half could even be glimpsed from the beach outside my home. Robert’s chambers were in the building just next door to the bank.

‘So what are you going to do?’ asked my brother.

I turned away from the street. ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Geoff – I’ve only just found out. I don’t know.’

‘You have to do something, Les.’

I cocked an eyebrow at him. ‘What would you have me do? Shoot him?’

‘I meant confront him.’

‘What if he doesn’t deny it? What if he says it’s true? And it leads to a divorce?’ A middle-aged matron at the next table twisted around to stare at us. I lowered my voice. ‘There’d be a terrible scandal.’

‘It’ll blow over.’

‘It would never be forgotten. Never. No – I can’t do that to my boys. I can’t.’ I had to get out of the place, away from my brother, away from everyone. I rose to my feet. ‘I must go. Lots of chores still on my list.’

‘And you have to look glamorous for the Pyketts’ anniversary party at the E&O tonight.’

‘You always know everything, don’t you?’

‘An essential requirement of my job.’ He moved to get up as well. ‘I’ll take you home.’

‘Stay and finish the scones,’ I said. ‘Don’t waste them.’

‘Yes, Mother.’

I gave his shoulder a tight squeeze. His hand came up and clung to mine for a moment, and then he let go.

I felt Geoff’s eyes on me as I flagged down a rickshaw. Thank God the first one stopped immediately. I gave my brother a smile, threw my shopping bags onto the seat and instructed the puller to take me home. He hefted the shafts of his rickshaw and set off. I lowered the canvas screen, hiding my face beneath it, and then, finally, I allowed my dammed-up tears to spill down my cheeks.

When I reached home I avoided Ah Peng – her dozy eyes seldom missed a thing – and stole down to the beach. I walked barefoot over the burning sand. At the end of the bay I crossed the cool ankle-deep stream and climbed to the top of the highest boulder.

I sat there, staring out to sea. The water was clear, the shoals of rocks on the seabed stark as bruises on skin.

My eyes were sore, but dry: I had done all my weeping in the rickshaw. Despite what I had told my brother, I was now filled with an overpowering urge to confront Robert; I wanted to slap his face, scream at him, but he would only deny my accusations. I knew him only too well. Divorcing him would be supremely satisfying, but then I remembered Mrs Logan – she was a lodger in my mother’s boarding house, recently divorced from her husband. In my mind’s eye I saw again the despair in her face, the bitterness contorting her mouth as the months passed; I remembered how she continued to wear her wedding ring, clinging on to it for dear life, like a lifebuoy. My mother had had to ask her to leave when she couldn’t pay her rent any more. I had seen how divorce diminishes a woman: I would be pitied at first, tolerated, but eventually I would be shunted out of the world I had married into, and the doors would be shut and bolted behind me. Other women would avoid me, fearful that I would steal their husbands. I would be forced to relinquish my position as my sons’ mother, and then one day another woman would slip in and replace me. Oh yes, I knew what would happen to me if I divorced Robert.

I had met Robert for the first time at one of Mrs Millicent Skinner’s Friday musical evenings. Her regular pianist had been thrown off his horse that morning, and she begged me to accompany a visiting lieder singer from Singapore (normally that woman would barely deign to nod at me when she saw me in the shops – she was a surgeon’s wife, and I was, after all, merely an inconsequential junior music teacher at the Light Street Convent School).

The evening’s programme was not taxing – Schumann for the lieder singer, some Gilbert & Sullivan and a selection of Chopin’s ballades – I could play them all with my eyes closed. We were about a third of the way through our recital when the Skinners’ Burmese cat sauntered into the room and jumped onto the piano. The cat made himself comfortable in front of my face and, pointing one hind leg into the air, started licking his nether parts in complete absorption. Shaking with suppressed laughter – exacerbated by the sight of Millicent Skinner’s flushed and mortified face in the front row – I played on valiantly. I became aware of a tall, stocky man in his forties at the back of the drawing room – he was rocking with silent laughter as well. At the end of my recital I picked up the Burmese and the three of us – the lieder singer, myself and the cat – bowed to enthusiastic applause and a good deal of merriment from the audience. I was packing away my music when the man came up to me and introduced himself.

‘You played marvellously – the cat thought so too,’ he began, but before we could chat further Millicent Skinner swooped in and dragged him away to be introduced to the other mems and their unmarried daughters. Later in the evening Robert approached me again and invited me for tea at the E&O Hotel the next afternoon.

He was waiting for me at his table on the seaside terrace when I arrived. He put down the book he was reading – John Galsworthy’s The Man of Property – and helped me into my chair. Couples and families were chattering and eating at the tables around us. Tall pinang trees lined the terrace, their long spiky fronds combing the breeze. Ships and tongkangs and steamers chalked thin white lines across the water.

‘Reminds me of Hong Kong,’ Robert said, drawing my attention to a Chinese junk heaving into the harbour. ‘Ever been there?’

‘I was born here,’ I replied. ‘Singapore’s the furthest I’ve ever been.’

Our tea and scones came. As we ate I found out that he had been a barrister in London before moving to Hong Kong, where he had worked for a few years before deciding to move to Penang. He had arrived just over a week ago.

‘And no doubt the mems have already staked their claim on you for their daughters,’ I said, taking a dainty bite of my scone.

He laughed. ‘Penang’s not so different from Hong Kong.’ He smoothed his palm over his temple. His black, pomaded hair was greying, adding to his worldly aspect. ‘I picked up a fair bit of Cantonese in Hong Kong, but that doesn’t help me at all here, as I’ve found out.’

‘The locals here are Hokkien.’

‘You speak it?’

‘My amah taught me. I speak Malay too.’

‘Well, then, you’ll have to teach me, won’t you?’

My face flushed. I glanced away from him, thrilled that he wanted to ask me out again. ‘Why did you leave Hong Kong?’

Everyone had fled Peking for Hong Kong when the Boxers went on their rampage, he explained. They brought with them stories of what the Boxers were doing to the foreign devils. ‘The way I see it, there isn’t much of a future for us whites in China.’

I had only the faintest notion of what he was talking about, but I nodded sagely anyway. Not having much interest in China, I pressed him to tell me about his old life in England instead. ‘Ever since I was a girl,’ I said, ‘I have wanted to live in London. Oh, to be far, far away from Penang. Where I could become a different person, with no ties to the past, or to anyone.’

There was a silence. Robert, I saw, was gazing at the Chinese junk again, its sinister bat-winged sails flexing in the wind. His eyes, so blue and penetrating, were dusked by some emotion I could not decipher.

‘“Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt” – They change their sky, not their soul, when they speed across the ocean.’ He looked back at me. ‘A Roman poet wrote that.’

So why did you travel halfway around the world, and what part of your soul were you seeking to change? I wanted to ask him, but I did not. Years later, whenever I recalled our conversation on the E&O’s terrace that afternoon, I wondered what answer he would have given me if I had asked my question. Would my own life have turned out differently?

In the weeks that followed, whenever he took me out – for evening strolls on the Esplanade, to a play, to dinner at the E&O – I would teach him phrases in Hokkien and Malay. He was a quick learner, with an absorbent memory.

We were married in St George’s church two months after we met. He was forty, and I was twenty-two, but I derived great pleasure from being the young wife of an older man. Under Robert’s cultivated eye I learned to dress and carry myself in a style that played down my shortcomings and accentuated my strengths. Robert was knowledgeable about books and music and theatre, and he knew a lot about politics and history. He introduced me to Flaubert and Tolstoy, de Maupassant and Dante and a long list of writers I had never heard of. He taught me to lose myself in the operas of Donizetti and Bellini (Robert couldn’t tolerate Puccini; he particularly loathed Madame Butterfly, and so did I – such an idiotic and improbable tale, even for an opera). I read widely and kept myself informed of events around the world, but I did not exhibit my knowledge at any social occasion unless the conversation required the sparkle of a mot juste or two. It warmed my heart to see the pride on Robert’s face when his friends broke off from their conversations to look at us whenever we entered a room. And I relished the nights when he slipped into my bed. He was a considerate lover, and he never outstayed his welcome.

I gave up my job and threw myself into the activities that were expected of the wife of a barrister: dancing and tennis, the Penang Amateur Dramatics Society and the Women’s Shooting Club. I volunteered in the church choir and sat on the committees of various charities; I organised ‘at home’ musical evenings, which were, I must say, always better-attended than Millicent Skinner’s.

Our firstborn arrived, and we named him James, after Robert’s father. The birth of Edward, our second son, was fraught with complications, and the doctor warned us that I would not be able to have any more children. Robert’s nocturnal visits to my bedroom tapered off and eventually ceased completely. I missed him in my bed, but I had a handsome and loving husband and two beautiful sons, and we lived in a house by the sea. What more could I ask for?

The tide was pulling out. I climbed down from the rocks and walked the length of the bay back to the house. That evening when Robert came home he found me lounging on the rattan sofa on the verandah, pretending to be engrossed in a book.

‘Darling, you’ve burnt yourself,’ he remarked, unknotting his tie and draping his jacket over a chair.

‘Yes, I have.’

He gave me an odd look, but I ignored it. We chatted idly about our day before we went upstairs to bathe and change for the Pyketts’ party. It was just another evening in the life we had made together.

The ballroom of the Eastern & Oriental Hotel was packed with the Pyketts’ guests. Even with all the French windows opened onto the garden, it was stifling. I nursed my glass of wine and eyed the women around me. I knew almost everyone there, and they knew me too. I groaned inwardly when I saw Mrs Biggs, the wife of the director of the Rickshaw Department, making a beeline for me. In a booming voice that could be heard over on the mainland, she asked me if it was true that Ethel Proudlock had been having an affair with William Steward.

‘Absolute bunk,’ I told her sharply. ‘People should keep their mouths shut when they don’t know anything.’

‘Well, no need to take it out on me, my dear Lesley.’ She spread her fingers over her mountainous bosom. ‘But you know what they say – “No smoke without fire.”’

Watching Mrs Biggs waddle away, Robert said, ‘Everyone at the office can’t stop talking about it, you know. The poor devil, shot like a rabid dog. Awful way to die.’

‘What on earth is wrong with you and Geoff? “Poor devil” my foot! In case you’ve forgotten, the “poor devil” tried to rape Ethel.’

‘We don’t know what actually happened, do we?’ He peered at me. ‘Are you all right, darling?’

I was saved from having to come up with a reply by a Chinaman greeting Robert. He was in his late twenties, slim and bright-eyed, dapper in black tie.

‘Darling,’ said Robert, ‘my new assistant, Peter Ong Chi Seng.’

‘I hope you’re helping out my husband,’ I said. ‘He’s working far, far too hard these days.’

The man’s smile squashed his eyes into slits, making him look like a sleeping cat. ‘He has very exacting standards, Mrs Hamlyn.’ His English was beautiful, each word emerging from his lips with angular precision. ‘I am acquiring a great deal of knowledge from Mr Hamlyn.’

The Chinaman had read law at Gray’s Inn, he replied to my questions, and in a month’s time he would be marrying a Nyonya girl his parents had arranged for him. A few minutes later he made his excuses and wended his way across the ballroom to another group of people.

‘He seems competent and industrious,’ I said.

‘He’s still wet behind the ears,’ said Robert, ‘and he needs to pay more attention to his drafting. I only took him on because I owed his father a favour.’

People were still filing into the ballroom. Noel Hutton and his wife Emma joined us in our corner. We made small talk, but all the while I was aware of Robert’s gaze roving casually around the ballroom. I watched his face covertly for a sign – a hesitation, a gleam in his eye, a gaze that lingered a fraction too long on a particular woman – but there was none. In truth I had not the faintest idea what I was looking for.

With no warning at all the faces around me blurred; I felt invisible hands squeezing my throat tighter and tighter. Pressing my wine glass into Robert’s hand, I mumbled some excuse to Noel and Emma and shoved my way through the crowd out into the garden. Barely even aware of what I was doing, I took the gravel path that wound between the pinang trees, past the row of cannons mounted on concrete plinths pointing out to sea. I kept walking until I reached the sea wall at the end of the hotel lawn. I pressed my hands on the edge of the sea wall and forced myself to breathe slowly.

Robert caught up with me a few seconds later. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing. I needed some air, that’s all.’

From here I could almost catch a glimpse of our house. At that moment I wanted nothing more than to go home and hold my children tightly in my arms.

The waves slapped weakly at the rocks below the wall, the evening breeze tousling the tops of the pinang trees. I leaned against the wall and gazed at the low buildings of the hotel. On the terrace a waiter was lighting the candles on the tables; and there, beneath the pinang trees, was the very spot where I had first met Robert for afternoon tea, barely five years ago.

Robert fussed with his pipe until he got it going. I noticed him gazing at the terrace as well, a distant look in his eyes. Was the same memory also drifting through his head?

‘Those two over there.’ I jerked my chin at a couple of Chinamen striding across the lawn, making directly for us. ‘I think they want to speak to you.’

Robert exhaled a thin plume of smoke, studying the two men. ‘Never clapped eyes on them before.’

The two Chinamen had stopped in front of us. ‘Mr Robert Hamlyn?’ the younger one said, extending his hand to Robert. ‘Dr Arthur Loh. And this gentleman here’ – he presented the man beside him – ‘is Dr Sun Yat Sen.’

The man touched his palm against his stomach and gave us a brief little bow. He was in his mid to late forties, dapper in a grey suit, with a waistcoat of the same colour buttoned over a white shirt, and a dark blue bowtie. He had refined features, with bright, intelligent eyes and a nose that was narrow and well-shaped for a Chinaman. His moustache was neatly trimmed, his brilliantined hair cut short and meticulously parted on the side. I thought he looked more like a diplomat – and a handsome one at that – than a revolutionary hunted by his government. Our eyes met. I held his gaze for a heartbeat longer, then I looked away.

‘When did you arrive?’ asked Robert.

‘I came in from Singapore this afternoon. Dr Cantlie asked me to look you up. He sends his regards.’

‘You’re taking a grave risk, aren’t you?’ Robert waved the stem of his pipe at a huddle of Chinamen staring openly at Dr Sun. ‘From your legation. And I’m sure I saw the Chinese Consul somewhere inside too.’

‘This is British territory. They would not dare lay a finger on me here.’ Dr Sun curled a contemptuous smile at the Chinamen; they continued to watch him, their faces expressionless.

Dr Sun chatted with us until Dr Loh touched his elbow. He broke off and pulled out a gold pocket watch. ‘Please excuse us, Mr Hamlyn. I have to give a talk at the Khoo clanhouse.’

‘A political talk?’ Robert asked with feigned innocence.

‘I’m sure you are well aware that I would be deported immediately if I did anything of the sort here. No, no – my talk tonight is on Chinese literature and history, nothing seditious in it at all.’

‘With, no doubt, Romance of the Three Kingdoms featuring prominently,’ Robert said.

‘Well, it is one of the great novels of China, after all.’

‘Your audience will certainly lap up its stirring tales of rebellions and plots to overthrow emperors,’ said Robert. ‘Come for drinks tomorrow. You too, Dr Loh. We’re at Cassowary House, Northam Road. Shall we say half past five?’

Dr Sun gave us another quick bow, and the two men left. I noticed the Chinamen from the legation were also watching them as they strode through the grounds out to the road.

‘A revolutionary,’ Robert said. ‘I hope he doesn’t stir up any trouble here.’ He tapped his pipe against the sea wall and pocketed it. ‘We’d better trot back inside, my dear,’ he said. ‘Charles is sure to give one of his long-winded speeches and I’ll need a big glass of wine to survive it.’ He shook his head. ‘Thirty years of marriage. Which one of them do you think deserves a medal more?’

II

The Chinaman revolutionary showed up at our home at precisely half past five the following evening, and the houseboy brought him out to the back verandah. Robert had just got home and was still in his shirtsleeves, his collar undone, his tie coiled on the coffee table.

That morning, after he had left for his office, I sent the boy around town to cancel my engagements, pleading a cold. I couldn’t bear the thought of facing my friends, all the while wondering if they knew about Robert’s affair. I stayed home and played with my sons, but their fussing and crying only made me more irritable than usual. I found fault with everything the servants did. I banged out loud, tempestuous chords on the piano, and when that didn’t dull my anger I switched to rambling, melancholic pieces. I decided I would confront Robert; a while later I told myself I would not; half an hour after that I changed my mind again. This went on until I felt I was going mad. I escaped to the beach and swam up and down the bay, losing myself in the pounding of the sea. When I eventually stumbled out of the waves, I collapsed onto the sand and lay there. Exhaustion numbed my thoughts, and I welcomed it, but the moment I stepped inside the house they came screaming back at me again. So it was with a warm and grateful smile that I welcomed Dr Sun – his presence would make the long evening easier to endure.

‘Dr Loh sends his regrets,’ Dr Sun said. ‘His daughter is not feeling well.’

‘Your English is faultless, Dr Sun,’ Robert said. ‘Where did you study?’

He asked us to call him Sun Wen. He was born in a small village by the sea in southern China, less than thirty miles north of Macau, he told us that evening. At the age of twelve he was sent to live with his older brother in Honolulu. For five years he stayed there, attending one of the top schools, but his brother, alarmed by his growing interest in Christianity, decided to send him back to their village in China.

‘Having seen the world, I was appalled by my own country. I found my village backward, our people shackled by their superstitious beliefs,’ Sun Wen said. ‘I caused some … problems … at home, so my parents sent me to Hong Kong to further my studies.’

A tendril of smoke rose from the mosquito coil at our feet. ‘What sort of troubles?’ I asked.

‘I broke into the village temple and desecrated the statues of the deities,’ Sun Wen replied. ‘And for good measure I smashed the villagers’ ancestral tablets as well.’

‘Following in the footsteps of that chap Hong, were you? The leader of the Taiping Rebellion?’ Robert said. ‘He started out just like you too, didn’t he? Smashing the idols and tablets in his village temples.’

‘My teacher in the village had fought with the Taipings. He used to entertain us with stories about them,’ Sun Wen said. ‘Unlike Hong Siu Chuan, I assure you that I am not the younger brother of Jesus.’

The two men realised that they had lost me completely. ‘Sorry, my dear – Hong Siu Chuan was a scholar in a village in the Kwangtung province,’ Robert explained. ‘His ambition was to be a court official, but he kept failing the Imperial Examinations. Following his third – or was it fourth? – anyway, following another failed exam, he was struck down by a fever. In his delirium he dreamed that he had been taken up to Heaven to speak to God, who told him He was Hong’s father, and that his elder brother was Jesus.’

‘When Hong recovered,’ Sun Wen said, picking up the story, ‘he told everyone in his village that he was now a Christian, and he had been commanded by God, his father, and Jesus, his elder brother, to end the emperor’s reign and to found a new Jerusalem.’

‘Surely no one took him seriously?’ I said.

‘Oh, but they did. Hong began to study the Bible intensively, and he travelled around the countryside converting people to Christianity – or rather, his version of it.’ Sun Wen gave me a wry smile, and I smiled back at him. ‘Within a year he had hundreds of followers, then thousands, then tens of thousands.’

‘You’re a Christian too?’ Robert asked.

‘I do not belong to the Christianity of the churches. I belong to the Christianity of Jesus, who was a revolutionary himself.’

I didn’t have to look at Robert to know that his eyes were rolling upwards. ‘Sun Wen,’ I said hurriedly, ‘how do you know Dr Cantlie?’

‘He taught me at the College of Medicine in Hong Kong. I was his interpreter whenever he went out to the leper villages for his research. But more than that, I wouldn’t be sitting here now if it weren’t for him. I owe my life to him.’

‘He cured you of some rare disease?’ Robert asked, smiling.

‘If only everything in life were so simple,’ replied Sun Wen.

‘How did he save your life?’ I asked.

It happened a few years after he finished his studies. Sun Wen had gone back to China and organised an uprising in Canton, but it had failed. He fled the country and travelled the world – San Francisco, New York, Hawaii – to raise funds for the Revive China Society. In the autumn of 1896 Dr Cantlie invited him to London, where they found him lodgings in Gray’s Inn. It was his first time in the city, and he knew no one except the Cantlies, to whose house he paid daily visits. He was strolling up Portland Place one morning on his way to the Cantlies’ on Devonshire Street when a pair of Chinamen accosted him on the pavement. They started talking to him and before he knew what was happening he had been manhandled into an impressive-looking house just off the street.

‘The moment I was inside they slammed the door shut and barred it,’ said Sun Wen. ‘Fear gripped me when I saw the large number of Chinese inside, all of them in mandarin attire. Too late, I realised I had been trapped inside the Chinese Legation.’

‘If I recall correctly, Cantlie lives just around the corner from the legation, doesn’t he?’ said Robert. ‘Surely he’d have warned you to give it the widest possible berth?’

‘He did warn me, but I didn’t think they’d dare do anything to me in England. They were going to smuggle me back to China, where I would be tried for treason.’ Sun Wen paused. ‘They would have judged me guilty, and they would have cut my head off.’

‘So what happened?’ I asked.

They locked him in the basement. The windows had been boarded up so he couldn’t shout for help. Days passed, but no one knew what had happened to him. He was starving but, terrified of being poisoned, he didn’t touch the food they gave him. Finally he managed to persuade the guard to deliver a note to Dr Cantlie. A week passed, and he had given up hope, when one afternoon the door opened and three men came down into the basement. They dragged him upstairs and threw him out onto the street.

‘Dr Cantlie was waiting there with a crowd of photographers,’ said Sun Wen. ‘I had never been happier to see anyone in my whole life. Back at his home, he told me he had approached Scotland Yard and the Foreign Office with my note, but they were not interested. So he went to The Times. After that every newspaper in London printed the story of my kidnapping. The legation had no choice but to let me go.’

‘What a terrifying experience,’ I said.

Sun Wen pulled out his gold pocket watch and showed it to Robert. ‘A present from Dr Cantlie, to mark my narrow escape. I carry it with me everywhere I go.’

Robert examined the pocket watch and passed it to me. The Breguet was slightly warm from his touch. I rested it on my palm for a moment before returning it to Sun Wen.

‘That all happened fourteen years ago,’ Sun Wen said. ‘Since then I have been travelling the world raising money for my party, the Tong Meng Hui.’ He slipped his watch back into his waistcoat pocket, patting the slight lump it made. ‘In all these years I have never returned home to China. Not even once.’

‘What is it you hope to achieve with your revolution?’ I asked.

‘The revolution is not mine alone,’ he said. ‘It belongs to all Chinese people, all over the world. We are going to establish a republic, a republic where everyone is equal, where everyone is free – men and women.’

‘And for that they would sentence you to death?’

‘To bring down the emperor is to go against the natural order of Heaven, Lesley. But the emperors have stolen China’s wealth. Piece by piece they have sold my country to the West. My people are dying of hunger, they have no future to look forward to. The dynasty is corrupt and decaying.’ His hand reached up and grabbed a fistful of air. ‘The time has come for us to take back our country.’

‘Take back China?’ I said. ‘But China’s ruled by your own people.’

‘My dear,’ said Robert, ‘the Manchus are not Chinese.’

‘What do you mean, not Chinese?’

‘The Manchus stormed down from the northern plains three hundred years ago, breached the Great Wall and vanquished the Ming emperor,’ said Robert. ‘They’ve been the rulers of China ever since.’

‘They forced all Chinese men to tie their hair in a queue,’ Sun Wen said, ‘the symbol of my people’s enslavement to the Manchus.’

‘But you don’t wear it,’ I said. Strange, but I had never questioned why some of the Chinamen I saw – even our houseboys – wore pigtails.

‘I cut it off when I left China.’

‘The Straits Chinese here already did that,’ said Robert. ‘Ages ago.’

‘These Straits Chinese of yours – they speak only English, they ape your customs, your traditions.’ A derisive grunt crawled out from Sun Wen’s throat. ‘They think England is their motherland.’

Dusk rouged the sky. Inside the house, the servants were going around lighting the lamps. Ah Peng brought James and Edward out to the verandah; my boys were fragrant from their evening bath, their neatly combed hair still damp. James curled his arm around my leg and goggled at our visitor.

‘Good evening, young man,’ the Chinaman said. ‘My name is Sun Wen. What is your name?’

‘James.’

‘A strong, noble name. How old are you, James?’

‘Four.’

‘My goodness, you are a big boy already.’

Robert dandled Edward on his knee. ‘Tell Dr Sun how old you are.’ Edward buried his face in his father’s chest. Robert kissed the top of his head and smiled at me. In that brief moment I felt I could forgive him anything. ‘This little rascal here’s three,’ he said to Sun Wen.

I caught a glimpse of pain in the Chinaman’s eyes. ‘You have children, Sun Wen?’

‘I have a son and two daughters. Sun Fo is nineteen. He is studying in Hawaii. Jin Yuan and Jin Wan are sixteen and fourteen. They are with my wife in Hong Kong.’

‘It must be hard on your wife, all this travelling around the world.’ I kissed my sons and handed them back to Ah Peng, indicating to her to take them inside.

‘They accept it.’

‘They?’ I asked.

‘Both of my wives.’

Having more than one wife was an acceptable, even admired custom among the wealthy Chinese, and it was none of my business how many wives Sun Wen had, but all evening I had sat there listening to his talk about equality and freedom and modernising China; I had even begun to sympathise with his cause.

‘I’d have thought,’ I said, ‘that you of all people would be against something so backward.’

‘How many wives he has is none of our concern, Lesley,’ Robert said. ‘Another drink, Sun Wen?’

‘One is enough for me,’ Sun Wen replied.

‘You should apply that rule to wives as well,’ I said.

‘Darling!’ said Robert.

‘It’s all right, Robert,’ said Sun Wen. ‘My first marriage was arranged for me when I was a young man, Lesley. The second one was of my own choosing.’

‘A prettier – and younger – woman, no doubt,’ I said.

‘I’ve yet to meet a man who’d choose differently.’ Robert laughed, slapping his knee. ‘Have you, Sun Wen?’

‘I don’t find that funny at all, Robert.’ I turned back to Sun Wen. ‘All night long you’ve been talking about equality.’ I jabbed my forefinger at him. ‘Let me ask you this: after you’ve established your republic, will you allow us women to take as many husbands as we like? Younger and handsomer, more virile ones? It’s only fair, isn’t it? It’s only equal.’

‘What you are demanding, Lesley – it goes against the natural order of Heaven,’ said Sun Wen.

‘So does rebelling against your emperor – or at least that’s what I’ve been told.’ The anger I had been holding in check ever since I found out about Robert’s affair was threatening to spill out of me. I felt lightheaded, reckless. The life I had built with Robert seemed so fragile; I could so easily smash it all to smithereens with just a few words.

‘Your talk of equality means nothing,’ I went on. ‘You men, you can have all the women you want, but for us women – oh no. We have to stand by our husbands. We have to tolerate you marrying another woman, tolerate you rutting with anyone you like—’

‘You’re ranting, Lesley,’ Robert broke in. He was crouched forward in his chair, his palms pressed onto the armrests, his feet planted firmly on the floor; he seemed ready to spring at me.

With an effort I took hold of myself; after a moment or two my breathing began to slow down, became normal again.

Sun Wen dug into his pocket and drew out his watch again. ‘I must go,’ he said. ‘I’m expected at the Chinese Chamber of Commerce.’

‘Another edifying talk on Chinese literature?’ Robert asked.

‘Yes, and to convince people to part with their money, to … ah … help us purchase more books for our reading club. Perhaps you would like to make a donation?’

My joints seemed rusted with fatigue when I stood up. I felt I had been trekking across an endless desert. ‘I should warn you, Sun Wen: Penang Hokkiens are great misers. The wealthier they are, the tighter their fists.’ I rubbed my thumb and forefinger together. ‘They’re kiam-siap, and proud of it.’

‘I will make them change their minds.’

Robert showed him out of the house. I left the verandah and went into the garden. Twilight was roosting in the trees. I stood beneath the casuarina and stared out to the narrow sea. I can’t continue like this, I told myself; I can’t keep pretending that everything is fine between me and Robert. I’ll crack; I’ll shatter. I must get away from him.

The light was fading from Mount Jerai, the highest peak in the mountain range on the mainland. Closer by, a fisherman was setting off from the beach. A lantern hung on the sampan’s prow, spreading its light on the darkening waters. I watched him rowing, his movements slow and fluid, ploughing his sampan further and further away from the shore. Somewhere out at sea the fisherman would stop rowing and cast his nets into the water. Beneath his boat they would bloom open, and as night thickened, the glow from his lantern would mesmerise the fish from the deep and into his nets. It was all as timeless as the circuits of the tides.

Robert was finishing his drink on the verandah when I walked back to the house.

‘I’m going to KL tomorrow to see Ethel,’ I said. ‘I’d like to attend the inquest.’

‘I’ll cable the Hubbacks.’

The thought of having to be sociable, to pretend to our friends that everything was going swimmingly in my life, was more than I could bear. ‘I prefer to stay at the Empire.’

‘By yourself?’ He saw the set expression on my face. ‘All right, fine. If that’s what you want.’

I turned back to look at the sea again. The fisherman had shrunk to a tiny silhouette, and on the far side of the channel the mountains had already dissolved into night.

III

A dusting of stars still clung to the sky when Robert helped me down from the buggy outside the railway station, but the streets around Weld Quay were already busy with trams and bicycles and bullock carts piled high with sheets of smoked rubber and tin ingots.

‘Safe journey, my dear,’ Robert said, kissing my cheek.

I had to restrain myself from turning my face away. ‘Remember to cable Ethel.’

No causeway tethered Penang to the mainland, yet it had always tickled me that we had our own railway station (we couldn’t very well lose face to KL or Singapore, could we? After all, we were the first British settlement in the East). I bought my ticket and crossed the road to the landing platform to board the railway ferry. I found a spot by the gunwales – ever since I was a schoolgirl I have preferred to stand on the open deck, my spirits always invigorated by the sight of the activities in the noisy, teeming harbour.

Tongkangs and sampans and launches and prahus were moored four, five vessels deep. Seabirds dipped and wheeled above the swamp of riggings and swaying masts. Gangs of shirtless Chinese coolies, bent double beneath huge, bulging gunnysacks, clambered from vessel to vessel to unload them onto the bullock carts queueing on the pier. A crane was lowering pallets of smoked rubber sheets into the hold of a Norddeutscher Lloyd ship; scrawny Indian labourers disembarked from a rusting hulk of a steamer, their worldly belongings in a knotted bundle on their heads; and further down the dock, a line of Mohammedan pilgrims were boarding a vessel bound for Jeddah.

I held on to the gunwales as the ferry churned its way across the busy channel, slipping between tongkangs and Malay schooners and Bugis ships with sinister-looking eyes painted on their prows. At Butterworth the Eurasian stationmaster took my valise and escorted me to the first-class carriage. The train steamed out of the station punctually at a quarter past seven. The godowns and factories soon gave way to kampungs and endless paddy fields, the new shoots of rice fluorescent green in the early morning sun. And then the thick jungle pressed in, so close that I could have reached out my hand and stripped a handful of leaves from a branch flashing past.

The sun had dropped behind the Moorish domes of the railway station when my train drew into KL. It was much busier here than Penang and I had to queue for a rickshaw. At the Empire Hotel the Ceylonese concierge hurried out from behind his desk to welcome me into the high-ceilinged lobby.

‘Ah, Mrs Hamlyn.’ He looked past my shoulder. ‘Mr Hamlyn will be joining you later?’

‘Mr Hamlyn will not be joining me, but he has reserved a room for me. Has it been prepared?’

A middle-aged planter reading his newspaper beneath the flapping punkahs peered at me as I was signing the register. It struck me that I had never stayed in a hotel on my own before – I felt I had been caught red-handed in an unseemly act.

The clerk handed me my key. There was also a handwritten note from Ethel, informing me that she was expecting my visit.

The headmaster’s bungalow stood at the western end of VI’s sports field, by the banks of the Klang River. A tall dense hedge of bamboo shielded the bungalow from the eyes of the school. Going around the hedge to the entrance gave one the feeling of being out in the countryside, a feeling heightened by the lush jungle crowding down to the banks on the other side of the river.

The houseboy showed me into the sitting room. A heavy, late afternoon stupor lay over the house. Looking around the room, I tried to recall the last time Robert and I had been here: it must have been three months ago – at the Shaws’ farewell party before they departed for London. By now the news of William Steward’s death would have been reported in the London dailies. How would they feel when they found out that a man – someone they would have known, given how small the European community in KL was – had not only been killed in their home, but had been killed by the acting headmaster’s wife?

The sitting room opened onto the verandah. I went out to take a look. Built on four-foot-high concrete piles, the house had an unimpeded view of the river crawling past. The bamboo chicks beneath the eaves had been lowered partway down, cutting out the glare from the water. I recognised the Shaws’ rattan chairs and sofa and their prized teapoy from Japan on the verandah; their teakwood bookshelf was now filled with the Proudlocks’ yellowing issues of London Illustrated News and Punch. Peering around the corner of the verandah, I spied my rickshaw coolie squatting under a tembusu tree, smoking a kretek. The sickly-sweet clove scent of his cigarette wafted over on the hot breeze.

Below the verandah the well-tended lawn sloped gently down to the river. It was difficult to imagine the low and sluggish river bursting its banks during the monsoon. Bennett had once regaled us with the story of how during the rains he and his wife had had to paddle in a sampan from the bungalow across the flooded school field to High Street, with him at the oars while his wife stood on the prow with a rifle, scanning the turbid waters for crocodiles.

Footsteps from the corridor inside sent me scurrying back into the sitting room. Ethel entered a moment later. We stood facing each other, and then I took her hands and pulled her in, kissing her cheeks.

‘Oh, Ethel. What an awful, awful thing for you.’ We sat down across from each other. ‘Where’s Will?’

A vague, distracted air hovered about her, as though she had just awakened from a drugged slumber. ‘Still in his office, I suppose,’ she replied, finally. ‘Strange, isn’t it? The man who … who attacked me … has the same name as my husband.’

What an odd thing to remark upon, I thought, sweeping my eyes over her. She had lost weight but not her sense of style. Her peach-coloured skirt and cream long-sleeved blouse were tastefully matched, and her dark brown hair was knotted into a chignon.

‘Are you coping?’ I asked.

‘Will’s been an absolute pillar – but, oh! I just wish the whole deuced thing were over and done with.’

‘It’ll all blow over in no time. Your lawyer’s Wagner, isn’t he? You’re in capable hands. Robert thinks very highly of him.’

‘How is he? And the boys?’

‘They’re growing up so quickly. And Robert …’ My fingers dug into my palms, then uncurled open again. ‘He’s …’

‘What is it?’

I felt an overpowering urge to tell her about Robert’s infidelity. My mouth opened, but I clamped it shut again. It would be utterly selfish of me to burden her with my problems; she had more serious troubles to worry about. And there was another thing which had silenced me, which I had not expected: for some reason I couldn’t explain, I did not feel comfortable confiding in her.

‘He’s working too hard as usual,’ I said crisply.

She leaned forward, squinting closely at me; she always did have a sensitive nose for truffling out gossip. ‘Is everything all right, Lesley?’

I flicked open my fan and began flapping it vigorously. ‘KL’s always so humid, isn’t it? I don’t know how you can stand it.’

The houseboy came in with a tray of tea. His black, glossy queue dangling down the back of his starched white tunic made me think of a long stroke of Chinese calligraphy brushed onto a sheet of paper.

‘We met someone terribly fascinating a few days ago.’ I continued to fan myself. ‘He’s a revolutionary, a Chinaman. Born in China, but speaks perfect English.’

I started telling Ethel about Sun Wen, but very quickly I realised that she wasn’t listening to a word I was saying. My gaze strayed to the verandah doorway.

Ethel pounced on my lapse in attention. ‘You’re wondering what happened that night, aren’t you?’

‘I was thinking—’ I cleared my throat. ‘I was thinking of the first time we met. Bennett had asked us over for dinner, do you remember? We all sat out there that evening …’ My eyes slid to the verandah again.

‘They’re saying that I was sleeping with Steward,’ Ethel said, her voice dull, emotionless.

‘Was William Steward the man …’ I faltered. ‘Was he …?’

The last time we had seen each other, in the tea room of Whiteaways, Ethel had been uncharacteristically fidgety. She kept turning her silver bracelet round and round on her wrist. ‘You look as if you’re bursting with news,’ I said, wondering if she was expecting again – there was a self-satisfied glow about her. After some prodding, and after swearing me to secrecy, she told me that she was having a mild flirtation with a man. Those were the very words she used: ‘a mild flirtation’. It had started in December the previous year, when her husband was away in Hong Kong. In his absence she had gone for drives outside KL with the man, and had occasionally even spent nights in his house. She did not tell me his name, and I did not ask. I was appalled, and I didn’t care to know too much about it.

‘Who else do you think it was?’ Ethel snapped at me now, her eyes narrowing. ‘You think I sleep with every man I meet? Is that what you think of me?’

‘Oh, don’t be silly, Ethel.’ She seemed touchier than usual, and I chided myself for not being more sensitive to her plight.

‘“People will find out,” you said. “People will talk.”’ She dropped her head and buried her face in her hands.

‘Oh, Ethel … what a mess. What an awful mess.’

She looked up, her eyes spearing mine. ‘You didn’t blab to anyone, did you? You didn’t tell Robert?’

‘I promised you I wouldn’t, didn’t I?’ I reached across the coffee table and took her hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. ‘Why did William Steward visit you that night? Did you invite him?’

‘Of course not. I had told him that it was over between us, I told him a month ago. But he couldn’t accept it. He just couldn’t. The miserable wretch was utterly besotted with me, you know, utterly besotted. He kept writing me letters; he sent me flowers and presents. I told him to stop. He tried to see me, many times, but I avoided him.’

‘So what was he doing here that night?’

‘What was he doing here? He came to beg me to change my mind, of course. Oh, how he begged and pleaded. But when I still refused, he … he flew into a rage and attacked me. He was like a … a monster. Oh, Lesley, I had never been so terrified in my life.’

Pity for her, for what she had endured, wrenched my heart. ‘What will you tell the inquest tomorrow?’

She looked evenly at me. ‘I don’t have to tell them anything, Lesley.’

For a second or two I did not know what to say, but then I realised that she was right, of course. The inquest was purely a formality to determine if there was a need to hold a full trial for murder; Ethel would not be required to present her side of the story in tomorrow’s proceedings.

‘I’m awfully tired, Lesley.’ Ethel’s gaze wandered around the sitting room. ‘I must give Dorothy her bath. Will should be home soon – and Mr Wagner wants to go over some matters with us for tomorrow.’

I folded my fan, returned it into my handbag and stood up. ‘Of course. I must go. I haven’t even unpacked yet. I’ll see you at the inquest tomorrow.’

Ethel rang the brass bell by her side. I wanted to offer her some words of comfort as the houseboy showed me out, but whatever words I wanted to say stalled on my lips when I looked at her. When I left she was still sitting there in her chair, staring out to the verandah, a void behind her eyes.

IV

The next morning I left the hotel just after eight. My solitary presence in the hotel’s dining room at breakfast had drawn disapproving looks from the other guests. I ignored them, taking my own sweet time over my meal. I had slept fitfully; sometime during the night I had jerked awake, convinced that I had been firing my revolver at someone, a man whose face was hidden from me.

It was a short and easy stroll into town. At the Selangor Club I stopped to watch a group of elderly Chinamen practising tai chi on the padang. They seemed to be dancing to the music of the spheres audible only to themselves, and their rooted yet fluid movements reminded me of the fisherman I had watched rowing his sampan out to sea the other evening.

To the left of the padang stood St Mary’s cathedral, its English Gothic architecture half hidden by its colonnade of fan palms. Ethel had told me that she and William had been married in that church. What she did not tell me was that they had rushed off for their honeymoon in England just a few hours after the ceremony. People had whispered that it was because she was already pregnant; naturally I paid no heed to the gossip, although I couldn’t help but wonder when I heard she had given birth to their daughter in England during their honeymoon.

Facing the black-and-white Tudor frontage of the Selangor Club directly across the main road were the Government Buildings. The sight of their salmon-pink stonework and domes and pointed arches never failed to make me think of A Thousand and One Nights, a book my father had often read to me when I was a child. As I waited to cross the road, I looked at the clock tower, wondering if, just this one time, I might catch a glimpse of Prince Hussain on his magic carpet, whizzing around the clock tower’s gigantic onion-shaped dome.

The air inside the Government Buildings had a damp, subterranean chill that seemed to have seeped in from the river behind the buildings. Signs on the walls directed me through the labyrinth of passageways to the Police Court. Every courtroom is the same, the one indistinguishable from the other, I thought as I looked around me. They even have the same stale, dusty smell. The public gallery was empty but for a handful of Europeans, including a young man who I guessed was a junior reporter from the Malay Mail or the Straits Times, and four or five Asiatics chatting quietly among themselves in the Natives section.

In the early days of my marriage I had often attended court whenever Robert was arguing a case. How my heart had swelled with pride to witness him in his black robes and wig; how it had thrilled me to hear him wielding his authoritative voice with an actor’s art as he methodically and ruthlessly demolished his opponents’ arguments into rubble.

That morning, as I sat there in the public gallery, it occurred to me that it had been years since I had watched my husband in a courtroom. When did I stop doing it?

At a quarter to nine Ethel, flanked by her husband William and her lawyer E. A. S. Wagner, entered the courtroom. The murmurings in the public gallery ceased. She looked stylish in a pale blue dress with a narrow collar and fitted sleeves that came down to her slender wrists. Her face was lightly powdered, her lips rosy, and I marvelled that she had found the time to have her hair done. Her artfully assembled façade of self-possession made her appear older than her twenty-three years. She received my smile with the slightest of nods as William pulled out a chair for her. He kissed her cheek, murmured something to her, and then sat down in the front row of the gallery.

The older man next to William leaned over and whispered something to him. He was slight and dour and dressed in a badly tailored brown suit. He looked vaguely familiar, but it was only after a moment or two that I recognised him as Ethel’s father. Ethel never told me much about him, nor her mother; she had once mentioned how wretched she had been growing up in their house, but when I pressed her for details she had changed the subject.

The clock in the tower began tolling. The sound chiming in through the thick walls seemed to have travelled from some distant hilltop. The Sikh bailiff motioned us to our feet as the magistrate entered the courtroom. The magistrate, Daly, looked to be in his mid forties, thin and balding.

The punkahs above the bench and the lawyers’ tables began flapping languidly. Ethel was asked to step into the dock. Magistrate Daly looked at her, then murmured a few words to the bailiff. A chair was carried in by a guard and Ethel was invited to step out of the dock and sit below the bench, facing the magistrate.

It boded well, I thought. She would be cleared of any wrongdoing by the day’s end; she wouldn’t be charged with any crime. Just a slap on the wrist, as Robert had assured me.

Wagner commenced proceedings by requesting the magistrate to exclude members of the public from the inquest. ‘There will be delicate and sensitive matters raised in the hearing,’ he said, ‘matters that carry a certain amount of … indecency … that would certainly cause great embarrassment to Mrs Proudlock.’ He half swivelled his tall, angular body to cast a meaningful look at the Natives gallery. ‘There are a great number of persons in court who have no business here, and this would adversely affect Mrs Proudlock.’

Disgruntled murmurings came from the Natives gallery, only to be muted by a scowl from the bailiff. I had a clear view of Ethel’s profile from where I was sitting. She held herself erect, and she did not look around her.

Paul Hereford, the Deputy Public Prosecutor, raised himself to his full height; the DPP was a narrow-shouldered man with thinning grey hair and a lean, handsome face.

‘Your Worship,’ his voice rang across the courtroom, ‘rightly or wrongly, English law stipulates that persons having no interest at all in a trial or an inquest are entitled to attend. This is a fundamental principle of our legal system.’

The magistrate rejected Wagner’s application and ordered DPP Hereford to present his case for the police. An expectant hush fell over the courtroom – this would be the first time we heard what had actually taken place the night Ethel shot William Steward.

‘On the night of 23rd April, Sunday,’ began Hereford, ‘William Crozier Steward was dining with two friends at the Empire Hotel. Halfway through the meal, and announcing that he had another appointment, he excused himself and left for the Proudlocks’ bungalow.’

Only the accused and the cook were at home that night, Hereford went on. Ethel’s husband William was dining with his friend, and the amah and the houseboy had been given the evening off. When William Steward arrived at the Proudlocks’ bungalow he told his rickshaw coolie to wait a short distance away. Steward then walked the rest of the way to the bungalow. The coolie made himself comfortable in his rickshaw, his back turned to the verandah. About ten minutes later he heard two or three gunshots. Startled, he left his rickshaw and crept warily up to the bungalow. The light on the verandah, which had been shining when he arrived, had been extinguished and the house was in darkness. Moments later he saw the Tuan who had hired him staggering down from the verandah, pursued closely by a European mem. He saw that she had a gun in her hands. Frightened, he ran back to his rickshaw and sped away with it. Pausing at the High Street gates to catch his breath, he heard three more shots being fired.

‘The rickshaw coolie, Tan Ng Tee, identified Ethel Proudlock as the woman he had seen pursuing the deceased,’ said Hereford.

The cook, Hereford continued, was smoking opium in his room behind the bungalow when he heard a man shouting. Seconds later he heard gunshots. He did nothing, but went on smoking his pipe until he heard Ethel Proudlock calling him from the side of the bungalow. There were no windows in his room. Ethel asked him to fetch William Proudlock from his friend’s house. The cook went out by the side entrance. He did not see Ethel Proudlock, but she sounded upset.

‘When William Proudlock arrived home,’ said Hereford, ‘she told him that she had shot a man.’ He pursed his lips. ‘Mrs Proudlock, the accused, does not dispute that she killed the deceased. However, she claims that she had killed him in self-defence.’ He paused, then repeated, ‘Self-defence.’ In a clear, steady voice he said, ‘Ethel Proudlock shot William Steward six times – one shot went into his chest, another shot went into the back of his neck, and four shots into his head.’

Gasps and shocked whispers filled the gallery. I was stunned. Six times. She shot the man six times.

‘Your Worship,’ said Hereford, ‘we are here today to determine if Mrs Ethel Proudlock is to be charged with murder. And to that objective, we begin by stating that we doubt that she was telling the truth when she said that she was not expecting William Steward’s visit on the night of the 23rd of April.’

I looked hard at Ethel; she was gazing with unruffled calm at Hereford. Not once did she look to her husband or her father. She gave the impression that, for her, there were no other people in the courtroom except Hereford.

‘As stated earlier, the deceased, Mr William Steward, was dining at the Empire Hotel that evening,’ said Hereford. ‘Halfway through dinner, and announcing to his companions that he had an appointment with a lady, he left. He must have known that Mrs Proudlock would be alone at home. But how could he have known this, unless she had told him? There must have been some communication between them before that fateful night; they must have made some arrangement to see each other.’

There was also the question of the timings, the DPP went on. William Steward left the Empire Hotel at approximately 8.50 p.m. It was drizzling and he was in a hurry, so he took a rickshaw; nevertheless he would only have arrived at the accused’s bungalow by about 9.10 p.m. at the earliest. After the shooting Ethel Proudlock’s cook had rushed to summon William Proudlock from his friend’s home. The cook got there at 9.25 p.m. At the most, William Steward could not have been with Mrs Proudlock on the verandah for longer than ten minutes.

‘It is highly improbable that the deceased would have gone straight into Ethel Proudlock’s house and proceeded immediately to assault her on the verandah,’ said Hereford. ‘The fact that he was there for such a brief period of time also makes her story hard to swallow. Inspector Wyatt discovered the deceased’s body lying on the grass, and on examination found his clothing to be entirely intact. He was still wearing his mackintosh, and his trousers were buttoned up.

‘Mrs Proudlock claims that she was dining alone at home that evening,’ Hereford continued, chiselling away at the rock face of Ethel’s story, ‘yet she was attired in a tea gown, a tea gown that was cut very low.’ He cleared his throat ostentatiously. ‘Why was she dressed to entertain, unless she was expecting a caller? We have to ask ourselves whether it does not indicate that she was expecting a visit from Mr William Steward.’

I had to restrain myself from leaping up from my chair to correct Hereford – it was entirely probable, I wanted to shout at him. Ethel adored wearing beautiful clothes; she would often dress up for the most trivial of occasions at home. I made a mental note to raise this with her lawyer.

‘… and what is more, the signs of struggle on the verandah were minimal,’ Hereford was telling the court. ‘A Japanese teapoy had been overturned, scattering a pile of books onto the floor; the rug was only slightly ruffled up. There were no bloodstains on the verandah.’

In her statement to the police Ethel Proudlock had said that she shot Steward once, when he was attempting to rape her on the verandah, Hereford told the magistrate. Then her mind had gone blank, she averred. She could not remember what had happened subsequently until she found herself standing over William Steward’s body on the lawn a few yards away from the house.

‘If it were the fact that the revolver had only been fired on the verandah,’ said Hereford, ‘the case would carry a very different aspect, but the evidence will clearly prove that this is not so.’

Ethel’s face had grown more and more taut during Hereford’s presentation. When the proceedings were adjourned for lunch, William Proudlock spirited her home before I could have a few quick words with her. Disinclined to eat at the Selangor Club – I was bound to bump into Robert’s lawyer friends there – I walked down the tree-shaded Embankment behind the Government Buildings and crossed the bridge over the river into Old Market Square. In Whiteaways’ tea room I found myself a table and had a bowl of mulligatawny soup.

The inquest reconvened at two o’clock and went on until Magistrate Daly adjourned proceedings for the day at a quarter to four. He ordered Ethel to stand.

‘The accused,’ he announced, ‘is hereby ordered to be taken to Pudoh Gaol.’

I felt sick; I could not believe what I was hearing. Ethel swayed slightly on her feet. She gripped the edge of the box, steeling herself with a visible effort of will.

Wagner shot to his feet. ‘We wish to apply for bail, Your Worship.’

‘Denied, Mr Wagner.’

Detective Inspector Wyatt, the man in charge of the investigation, offered to drive Ethel to Pudoh Gaol in his own car. I was glad for her sake – at least she was spared the humiliation of being transported there in a police van. I offered her words of encouragement as she was led out of the courtroom, but she did not look at me, did not even seem to have heard me. Her face was blank, a mask.

The next morning I was again one of the earliest to arrive at the courtroom. Having told no one I was in KL, I had spent the previous evening alone in my room, writing the details of the inquest in my journal.

People were taking their seats in the public gallery. I nodded to a few I recognised from the previous day, but there were also more new faces this morning. The low chatter around me broke off when a pair of policemen brought Ethel into the courtroom.

Her hair was still done up in a chignon, although it was not as immaculate as it had been the day before. Faint half-moons hung under her eyes, and her clothes, the same ones she had worn yesterday, had lost their crispness. She glanced at her husband in the front row; if she saw me, she gave no sign of it.

Wagner nodded at me. I had dropped by his office yesterday afternoon. ‘This will be helpful,’ he had remarked after I had explained to him about Ethel’s habit of dressing up at home. ‘Will you testify to this if there’s to be a trial?’

‘Surely it won’t go as far as that? The inquest’s just a formality, after all.’

‘Well …’ He spread his palms over his paunch and regarded me across his desk. At that moment I realised that Ethel was in grave trouble.

No chair was provided for Ethel below the bench this morning; instead she was ordered into the dock. For his first witness DPP Hereford called William Proudlock to the stand.

The DPP established a few preliminary facts about William Proudlock, then asked, ‘Can you tell us what happened on the evening of the 23rd of April?’

‘I had been invited to dine with my friend Goodman Ambler at his house. I went alone. Ethel stayed at home. Shortly after dinner Cookie turned up at Ambler’s house. He was visibly agitated, but he refused to tell me what was wrong. He would only say to me, “Mem panggil lekas-lekas balik.” Fearing that something had happened to Ethel, I rushed home immediately. What time was it?’ He stared at the punkahs, turning the DPP’s question over in his mind. ‘Oh, about half past nine. Ambler went along with me.’

‘What happened when you arrived home?’

‘It was dark, and it was raining softly. I saw Ethel walking down the road, coming towards me. She was swaying on her feet and she looked … at first I thought she had had one drink too many, but then I noticed that her dress had been torn below her waist.’

‘What happened next?’

‘We – Goodman and I – helped her back to the house. She was incoherent; we couldn’t make head nor tail of what she was saying. I gave her a sherry to calm her nerves. I waited a few minutes and then I asked her to tell me what happened.’ William stopped and glanced towards Ethel. His wife’s face was impassive.

‘Please continue,’ said Hereford.

As William described it, Ethel told him that she had been writing letters onto the verandah when she heard a rickshaw pulling up the driveway. She was surprised to see William Steward coming up into the verandah moments later. Thinking that he wanted to speak to her husband, she told him that he was dining at Goodman Ambler’s. William Steward said it wasn’t important. They sat on the settee and chatted for a while. When she got up to the bookshelf to get a book she wanted to show him, he went and switched off the light. Suddenly he lunged towards her and started assaulting her.

‘She screamed for Cookie,’ said William Proudlock. ‘She fought Steward and tried to put on the light. That was when her fingers came upon the gun.’

‘Where was it?’ asked the magistrate.

‘The light switch is set into the bookshelf,’ William explained. ‘Just under the switch is a small recess. We sometimes keep the gun there.’ He waited for the magistrate to write down his words. ‘She grabbed the gun and shot Steward. That’s all she remembered. At this point she started shaking and gibbering away again. I gave her another glass of sherry and made her drink it all down.’

William paused, running his tongue over his lips.

‘Once she had calmed down again,’ he resumed, ‘I asked her where Steward was. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” she said. “He ran. He ran.” I went out into the garden to look. I stumbled upon the body about thirty or forty paces from the bungalow. The man was lying face down on the ground. I did not touch him, but it was obvious that he was dead.’ William paused, arranging his thoughts. ‘I left Ethel with Goodman and hurried to the High Street police station.’

Proceedings were adjourned for lunch. When we resumed an hour later Hereford called Dr Thomas Cooper, who had conducted the post-mortem on William Steward. Under Hereford’s questioning he stated that he had found four bullets embedded in Steward’s skull and another one in his neck, but the fatal wound, he declared, was a bullet that had penetrated Steward’s heart and gone into his spine.

For the first time since hearing about Steward’s death, I thought: the poor man. Robert was right – cut down like a rabid dog.

At the close of the inquest Ethel was ordered to her feet. She gripped the brass railing of the dock, pulled herself up stiffly and raised her face to the bench.

A slap on the wrist, I repeated to myself. Nothing more than a slap on the wrist. She’ll go home today, back to her husband and her daughter, back to her life.

Magistrate Daly peered down at her over his pince-nez. ‘After listening to the facts of the case,’ he said, ‘I have decided to refer the matter to trial.

‘Ethel Proudlock, you are charged that on or about the 23rd of April, 1910, in Kuala Lumpur in Selangor, you, Ethel Proudlock did commit murder by causing the death by shooting of one William Crozier Steward and thereby committed an offence punishable under section 302 of the Penal Code.’

Shouts and cries erupted from the gallery. I sat there, trembling with shock. My best friend had just been charged with murder. Murder.

The trial was set down for the 7th of June in the KL Supreme Court. Once again the magistrate refused Wagner’s request for bail and ordered Ethel to be taken immediately to Pudoh Gaol.

Ethel was weeping as William helped her from the dock. She clung to her husband’s arm, but still he had to hold her up. Her father pushed his way through the throng to her as a pair of policemen led her out of the courtroom. I wanted to say a few words to her, words that I hoped would give her strength, but I was shoved aside by the journalists shouting their questions at her.

Sitting by myself in the hotel’s dining room the next morning, I looked around me as I added a few drops of soy sauce and some white pepper into my bowl of soft-boiled eggs. William Steward had dined here on the night of his death – I wondered which table he had been sitting at, drinking and eating and laughing with his friends before he made his excuses and hurried off to Ethel’s house in the rain.

Outside the hotel the rickshaw-pullers squatting by the road all shook their heads when I told them where I wanted to go. Pudoh Gaol was only a mile away, but it was built on a former Chinese cemetery and none of them wanted to risk a horde of angry ghosts trailing him home. Finally one rickshaw coolie agreed to take me there, but demanded three times the normal fare.

The ride to Pudoh Gaol took me past the cemetery where William Steward had been buried. I looked at the graves, wondering which one of them was his, and what words were carved onto its headstone. Would they tell the world that he had been killed by another person? Or would they merely bracket the brief span of his life with a pair of dates?

The rickshaw stopped in the shadow of the gaol’s high, crenellated walls. Telling the coolie that I’d only pay him when he took me back to my hotel, I brushed aside his protests and entered the gaol through the normal-sized entrance cut into the massive wooden doors. A Malay guard escorted me across a sun-baked quadrangle into the gaol. The warden came out of his office to meet me. Warden Clarke knew Robert, and we had occasionally had drinks with him and his wife at the Spotted Dog. I was too early for visiting hours and I was not a family member, Warden Clarke said, but of course he would make an exception for me.

The room I waited in was furnished with only two wooden chairs facing each other across a narrow table. The windows were open but barred. A calendar with a watercolour print of a Malay kampung hung on a wall; someone had already crossed out the 1st of May. I counted the squares until the 7th of June. Ethel would be locked up here for more than a month.

A bored-looking guard brought Ethel into the room, then sat on a bench in the corridor and watched us. Ethel was dressed in prison garb: a plain beige blouse over a brown skirt that came past her knees. Her eyes and nose were raw from weeping.

‘Oh, my dear …’ I said. ‘Is there anything you need?’

‘I was defending myself – he was going to rape me! Why is this happening to me? Why?’

Glancing at the guard, I lowered my voice to a whisper. ‘Ethel, you have to tell them about your affair with William Steward. You have to. It’s the only way you can explain why he came to the house, why he attacked you – he was furious at you for breaking up the affair. Tell them, Ethel.’

‘I can’t,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I can’t have everyone know that I’m an … an adulteress.’ She reached across the table and grabbed my hands, squeezing them so hard that I winced. ‘You won’t tell?’

I looked at her in despair. Her eyes hardened; she let go of my hands and pushed away from me. ‘If you tell anyone about it,’ she said, ‘I’ll deny it. I’ll deny everything, you hear me, Lesley? I’ll tell them you’re a damned liar.’

‘What does it matter now? Everyone’s saying that you were sleeping with him. For God’s sake, Ethel – just tell them the truth.’

‘It’s nothing more than gossip. Gossip dies, people forget after a short while – they’ll always find something new to tattle about. But if I were to tell them I had been having an affair with William, if I confirmed the stories …’

I saw her dilemma, and I felt a rush of pity for her, but I couldn’t accept that her decision to remain silent was the right one. I just couldn’t. ‘Does Will know?’

‘He doesn’t believe the rumours.’

Recalling how her husband had looked at her when he was being questioned by Hereford, I wasn’t so sure, but I refrained from saying anything. I was glad when the guard announced that it was time for her to return to her cell.

‘Don’t come again, Lesley,’ she said to me as she was led out of the room. ‘I don’t want you to see me inside here. Do you understand me?’

Outside the gaol, I looked up and down the road for my rickshaw-puller, but there was no sign of him. The man had abandoned me.

V

My stay in Kuala Lumpur had given me the space to view the troubled waters of my marriage with more equanimity. There were times when I even forgot about Robert’s affair, but as I stood on the ferry’s deck and watched the green hills of Penang rising over the town, the feeling of oppression returned, pressing down hard on me.

The moment I arrived home I went straight upstairs to the nursery. I swept my sons into my arms and embraced them tightly. ‘Mummy missed you so much. Did you miss Mummy?’

‘This one-ah,’ Ah Peng rubbed Edward’s head, ‘cry all the time.’

‘I didn’t cry,’ Edward said.

‘Cry-baby, cry-baby,’ James said.

‘I’m not a cry-baby!’ Edward’s face trembled with incipient tears.

‘Oh, my darling, it’s all right. James, don’t be mean.’ I took out a pair of brightly painted toy sailing boats from a shopping bag. ‘Look, Edward, look what Mummy got for you.’

I took them down to the beach. At this hour of the evening there were just a few people there – an elderly man walking his terrier; a pair of young and shirtless European males lying side by side on their bamboo mats. The Malay woman digging for horseshoe crabs at the tideline greeted me as we walked past. A sampan, moored to a pole, lay on the exposed seabed, scuttled by the retreating tide.

At a shallow tidal pool I knelt and helped my sons set their boats on the water, showing them how to keep their hands on the sterns.

‘Ready?’ I waved my handkerchief above my head. ‘One, two, three!’

The boys launched their boats even before I had dropped my hand. Edward’s boat surged ahead, but James’s wobbled, listed, then righted itself. We screamed and cheered as the boats glided across the smooth, reflective pool, dragging their overlapping wakes after them.

I sat on the beach, watching my sons splashing in the water as dusk poured its ink into the sea. I couldn’t leave all this behind, I couldn’t walk out of my marriage. I had no choice but to suffer Robert’s betrayal in silence.

At dinner Robert wanted to hear all that had transpired at the inquest. Everybody, he said, was talking about the murder charge.

I observed Robert as I related the events of the inquest to him, a part of me wondering if he had visited his lover while I had been away. On the train coming home from KL I had wrestled with the idea of talking to him about Ethel’s affair, but his unfaithfulness made me reluctant to discuss Ethel’s infidelity – anyone’s infidelity, for that matter – with him.

‘The facts just don’t add up,’ he said when I finished. ‘If I were Daly I would have charged Ethel with murder too.’

‘But Steward tried to rape her. She was in a … a disturbed mental state … she didn’t know what she was doing. She wouldn’t simply accuse Steward unless it’s true – and rape is not easy to prove, is it? You said that to me once.’

‘Rape is very difficult to prove,’ said Robert, ‘but it’s even more difficult to disprove.’ His eyes took on the familiar sleepy look he had whenever he was trying to drill his way into the bedrock of a complex legal problem. ‘If she was sleeping with him, what would drive her to kill him?’ he said, as though he were talking to himself. ‘A lovers’ quarrel? Did he want to end the affair? Or perhaps he was throwing her over for another woman, and she killed him in a fit of jealous rage.’

He was skirting very close along the edge of the truth. But what was the truth? Perhaps Ethel had lied to me, and the events of that fateful night had played out in the manner Robert was speculating.

‘By the way, the Macalisters have electric lights now,’ said Robert, as our new houseboy Ah Keng came and took our empty plates away. ‘They’re giving a party to brag. We’ve been invited.’

‘But … we should’ve got them first. We moved in a month before they did. It’s because Mary’s cousin is in the Public Works Department, that’s why.’

I forgot my annoyance with the Macalisters when Ah Keng returned with, to my delight, two bowls of shaved ice and a brass pot of chilled coconut milk. Floating in the milk were little worms of lentil noodles, dyed green with the juice of pandanus leaves. Chendol, my favourite pudding. I lifted my eyebrows at Robert. He grinned as he ladled the coconut milk into our bowls of shaved ice.

‘I got it from your favourite stall – the fat old Teochew in Swatow Lane. You wouldn’t believe the queue.’

I looked down at my bowl, hiding the sudden heat of tears in my eyes. I blinked them away and poured a lavish serving of gula Malacca syrup over my chendol. The coconut milk was cold and creamy, and the green noodles, fragrant with pandanus, lifted the sticky, smoky sweetness of the gula Malacca.

‘It was worth the queue,’ I said, giving him a smile.

For a while we ate our chendol in silence, and then Robert said, ‘Maybe Ethel was the one who had wanted to end the whole thing. He couldn’t take the insult; he threatened to expose their affair. So she lured him to her house one night while she knew her husband would not be at home, intending to silence him. Half a dozen bullets into his back would certainly do the trick, oh yes.’

A cold-blooded murder. No, it was impossible. I refused to believe that Ethel was capable of it. I refused to believe it, but still I couldn’t help asking, ‘What will happen to her if she’s found guilty?’

The candles had burned down, and the dining room seemed to be shrinking in upon us. The sea sounded far away.

Robert helped himself to another serving of chendol. ‘Then she’ll hang.’