I
One of Sun Wen’s supporters had lent him a bungalow not far from our house. He became a regular visitor, dropping in on us once or twice a week in the evenings. We enjoyed his company, and he provided Robert the opportunity to keep his Cantonese honed. He relished his robust debates with Sun Wen about the political situation in China. I tried to keep up with them, but their discussions – which often turned into heated verbal jousting – were usually lost on me.
He always stayed long enough for just one drink. When his tumbler of whisky was empty he would click open his pocket watch, squint at it, and take his leave. He had work to do, he would announce, people to address at the local business associations and clanhouses and guilds; or he was needed at the Philomatic Union on Armenian Street, the reading club set up by a group of Chinamen to provide books and magazines for its members.
‘They named it wrongly,’ Robert remarked one evening after Sun Wen had just left. ‘A philomatic society is for people interested in the sciences. And reading club, my foot – it’s nothing more than a front for his party.’
As I had expected, it didn’t take long for my brother to catch wind of our friendship with Sun Wen: nothing seemed to happen in Penang – or for that matter in the rest of the Straits Settlement, not to mention the FMS – without Geoff knowing about it. At his request I arranged for him to meet Sun Wen at our house one rainy evening.
‘Things all right?’ my brother asked when he stepped into the vestibule.
‘Oh, I’m quite fine.’ I had not spoken to him since that morning in the Tiffin Room. In those three weeks my old, comfortable life had been turned upside down. ‘Robert’s working late this evening,’ I said, and I couldn’t refrain from adding acidly, ‘He sent his peon to tell me at the last minute.’
‘You haven’t talked to him about—’
‘Good Lord, no.’
‘Maybe it’s better you don’t,’ Geoff said. ‘You were right – it’s none of my business. I shouldn’t even have told you.’
Not for the first time I wondered if he had been mistaken about Robert. For weeks now I had been waiting for some well-meaning mem to draw me aside and with barely concealed glee whisper into my ear the gossip about my husband’s infidelity. I had been hardening myself for that moment, but nobody had said anything to me. Not a single person. Surely I would have heard something by now; there were no secrets on this little island of ours.
‘Any news about Ethel?’ I asked. The newspapers had been muted about her since she was sent to Pudoh Gaol.
‘Still refusing to speak to us lowly reporters. She refuses to see anyone except her husband.’
‘How awful for her, locked up in that horrible place.’
‘She’s in the European women’s wing, Les. Granted, it’s not quite the E&O, but it’s clean and, under the circumstances, comfortable enough. They’re allowed to cook their own meals, and they’re encouraged to spend their time sewing and knitting and reading.’
‘All the things Ethel finds tedious,’ I said. ‘I just wish there was something I could do for her.’
‘You write to her, don’t you?’
‘She hardly ever replies, and when she does write back, she doesn’t tell me much.’
In one of my first letters I had pleaded with her to inform her lawyer Wagner of what she had told me (without explicitly mentioning what it was, as I suspected the warden was probably reading her mail), but she never once alluded to it.
‘Her story sounds plausible,’ my brother said, ‘but a number of things about it just don’t ring true …’
‘Come along, Sun Wen’s waiting,’ I said.
Sun Wen sat drooped in his chair on the verandah, nursing a whisky. His eyes, when he looked up at us, seemed lifeless. I had never seen him looking so defeated.
The fundraising had not been going well, he admitted under Geoff’s questioning. ‘They’re – what’s that word in Hokkien – kiam-siap, as your sister had warned me.’ He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. ‘Even the rich ones. Especially the rich ones.’
‘Or maybe they don’t think much of your chances of success,’ Geoff pointed out. ‘These people didn’t make their fortunes backing the wrong horses.’
‘Don’t be cruel, Geoff,’ I said, although I felt a twinge of vindication – I was still bitter at Sun Wen for what he had said about a man having multiple wives.
Geoff held up his palms at me, then turned to Sun Wen again. ‘Your own people in Singapore didn’t think you’d succeed either. They wanted you out of your party, that’s why you washed up here, isn’t it? Fact is, you’ve been deported from every place you’ve set foot in – Hong Kong, Japan, Siam, Singapore. Penang’s the last haven that’s still open to you.’
Moths flew around the lamps, flirting with the light. Sun Wen shifted in his chair to face Geoff directly. ‘Do you know how many times I have tried to bring down the Manchu government?’ The light in his eyes, which a few minutes ago had been low and dull, had intensified. ‘Seven. And every one of those uprisings failed, every single one. Thousands of people died for our cause.’ His hands, resting on his knees, curled into fists. ‘But I won’t give up. I cannot.’
The anguish in his voice seemed to silence the usual sounds of the evening. Gradually I became aware again of the cicadas’ tintinnabulation in the trees, the waves hissing on the shore. From within the house drifted the faint clinking of silverware and china. The servants were setting the dinner table.
‘You’ve been throwing all your efforts into winning over the Chinese-educated locals,’ Geoff said. ‘What about the Straits Chinese? Why haven’t you enlisted their help?’
‘Those people? They have no loyalty to the motherland. They cannot even speak their own tongue. They side with the English; they think England is home. And your English newspapers here – they have no interest at all in my country unless it’s to pour scorn on it.’
‘Ah yes, what was it the Straits Echo said today?’ Geoff foraged in his pockets and pulled out a page from a newspaper. He unfolded it. ‘“With Dr Sun Yat Sen it is money, money, money all the time, and never anything to show for the stream of gold that has flowed his way. As a revolutionary he doesn’t revolute.”’ He handed the piece of newspaper to me. ‘I never knew that “revolute” was a word.’
‘We do not have a newspaper, we cannot fight a polemical war,’ said Sun Wen. ‘I am a foreigner here, it is easy for them to say whatever they want about me. It has always been so, everywhere I go.’
I felt sorry for him. ‘Geoff, why don’t you interview him?’
‘Nipped the idea right out of my head, sis,’ said Geoff. ‘How about it, Sun Wen?’
The revolutionary looked sceptical. ‘The Straits Chinese read the Post,’ I said. ‘You can explain your cause to them, tell them what you want to achieve.’
‘This is no time to be shy, Sun Wen,’ said Geoff.
Sun Wen left his chair and walked over to the balustrade. He stood there looking at the shadows in the dripping garden. After a minute or two he turned around again.
‘I want full approval of what you publish,’ he said.
‘Forget it. That’s not how we do things, old chap,’ Geoff said.
‘Then there will be no interview.’
‘He’ll be fair to you, Sun Wen,’ I said. ‘Fair and objective. I’ll make sure of that. I promise you.’ I turned to my brother. ‘You will show him what you’ve written before you publish it. If there’s anything he disagrees with, you will include his counter-arguments in the final article. You will let him clarify things from his point of view.’
‘Fair enough,’ Geoff said. He raised his tumbler of whisky. ‘To the revolution?’
Sun Wen looked at him, and at me. He picked up his glass from the coffee table and held it in the air. ‘The revolution.’
For the next hour Geoff asked Sun Wen questions and recorded his replies in his notebook. At length Sun Wen stopped talking and looked at his watch. ‘I must go.’
‘Where’re you off to?’ asked Geoff. I could almost see his nose twitching.
‘I’m speaking at the reading club.’
‘The Philomatic Society in Armenian Street?’ Geoff got to his feet as well. He stood a head taller than Sun Wen. ‘I’d like to tag along.’
‘You won’t understand a word.’
‘Doesn’t matter. I want to see how you say it.’
‘All right.’
‘I’m coming too,’ I said.
‘Robert won’t like it,’ Geoff said.
‘Robert’s not here to like or dislike anything.’
‘What about the boys?’
‘Ah Peng will feed them and put them to bed.’
‘It’s raining.’
‘I won’t melt.’
Geoff appealed to Sun Wen. ‘It’s not proper, not proper at all.’
‘We have women members too in the Tong Meng Hui,’ Sun Wen said.
Trundling through the rainy streets of George Town in our rickshaw, Geoff and I couldn’t help grinning at each other. I knew the same memory was bobbing around in our heads.
‘Did Ah Peng ever win the lottery?’ my brother asked as our rickshaw turned down into another street.
When we were children Ah Peng would sometimes take us to the Chinese quarter. In a smoke-filled temple she would get down stiffly onto her knees before the blackwood altar in the main hall, clasp her hands together and beseech the resident deity to grant her some lucky numbers. We had to promise not to tell our mother, a promise bought with a glass of cold sugarcane juice from the hawker outside the temple. All morning she would go from one temple after another, repeating the same prayer to different gods.
‘She always vowed she’d go home to China if she won, don’t you remember?’ I said.
We followed Sun Wen’s rickshaw down dark, quiet streets hemmed in by two-storeyed shophouses. Blackwood signboards perched above door lintels, their carved, gold-leafed Chinese calligraphy glowing in the shadows like candle flame glimpsed through clouds of smoke. Through doors and windows thrown open to catch the cool evening air I glimpsed families seated around tables eating their dinner. At a crossroad junction my ears caught the lines of a Chinese ballad from a gramophone.
We stopped outside a shophouse at the upper end of Armenian Street. Geoff helped me down from the rickshaw and we joined Sun Wen on the goh kaki. A signboard carved with four Chinese ideograms hung above the doors, and nailed to the centre of the lintel was a small oval brass plate embossed with ‘120’. Sun Wen knocked and tilted his face to the porch ceiling.
‘What’s he looking at?’ I whispered to Geoff.
‘A spyhole.’
I peered at the ceiling, but I saw only tattered cobwebs in the shadows.
The lock turned, a bolt was pulled back and then one side of the double doors opened, just wide enough for a person to enter. Sun Wen went in, followed by Geoff. I hesitated, then, gathering my skirt above my ankles, I stepped over the threshold.
The front hall was lit only by the frail glow of an oil lamp. I could just about make out the shapes of armchairs and a few low bookcases huddled in the murky corners.
We followed Sun Wen behind a folding screen into the dining hall. The hall was open to an air-well paved in granite and overlooked by the shuttered windows of the rooms upstairs. A dark flag – black? Blue? It was impossible to tell in the sallow light – with a yellowing sun in the centre hung on one wall. Milling around the hall were thirty or forty people, women as well as men. They were in their twenties and thirties, many of them in Western clothing. Seated at a long, rectangular rosewood dining table were more people. Everyone fell silent as they became aware of us.
Sun Wen introduced us, then added to me, ‘Ah, here comes Arthur – he will interpret for you.’
I recognised the man from the evening on the E&O’s terrace. He smiled at me and led us to the back of the room. The people standing there shifted aside, making space for us.
Sun Wen stood at the head of the table. The room was silent as he cast his gaze over the members. Then he began to speak. Arthur whispered to us, but his voice soon fell away as he struggled to keep up with Sun Wen’s torrent of words. But Sun Wen’s fury needed no interpreter. I was swept up by his passion, by his towering, implacable conviction. And so was Geoff, I thought, glancing at him. My brother was watching Sun Wen with total absorption, his pen and notebook forgotten.
Everyone in the hall clapped and shouted Sun Wen’s name the instant he finished speaking. He stood there in the storm, his eyes seeking out each and every person around him. For just a second or two he and I looked at each other, and in that eye-blink of time I felt that he was binding all of us to a covenant, a covenant for a future he would sacrifice everything for, even his life, to bring into existence.
Robert had not come home yet when I got back to Cassowary House. I tried not to think where he was, or who he was with. I went around the rooms downstairs putting out the lamps, leaving one burning in the vestibule for him. I wound the grandfather clock outside the sitting room and corrected its hands. I looked in on my sons in the nursery, checking that there were no gaps in the mosquito netting over their cots. Ah Peng was snoring away thunderously in her bed, her head resting on her porcelain brick. Long ago I had given up trying to convince her to sleep on pillows – she complained they gave her a sore neck.
Before going to sleep I wrote in my journal all that I had seen and heard at the reading club. What a tempest Sun Wen’s words had roused in the hearts of his audience. He was going to transform the world, I was sure of it. I was witnessing a turning point in history, and this evening I had even been a part of it. It was all very thrilling.
Sun Wen. How strange his name looked on the page: Sun, the brightest star in our firmament, emitting waves of life-giving heat and light, with all the other planets circling it for eternity in their invisible grooves.
The excitement of the evening was still fizzing in my blood. I tried to read the new Somerset Maugham novel but put it down after a page or two. Why were his stories so frequently about adultery and unhappy marriages? I was about to switch off my bedside lamp when I heard Robert’s trap coming up the driveway. I caught his ‘Selamat malam’ to the syce, and then I heard him coming into the house. My ears tracked his footsteps creaking up the stairs. A long silence followed – he would be checking on James and Edward; he never missed doing it, however late he got home. Moments later I heard his quiet rapping at my door.
‘I’m still awake,’ I said.
He opened the door and stood there, his body a black void against the light from the landing.
‘Have you eaten?’ I asked.
‘Ate at the club. I took Peter Ong there. Mutton curry tonight. Tough and gristly. Might’ve been dog, for all I know. We had a swim too. How did Geoff and Sun Wen get along?’
‘Geoff’s going to write about him.’ I was reluctant to tell him anything more, but he would find out about it eventually. Nothing was secret on this island. ‘We went to hear him give a speech at his reading club.’
‘That was bloody reckless – and stupid. Geoff should know better than to take you there.’
‘I never felt unsafe, Robert, not for a second. You ought to go and listen to him sometime. He spoke with such power, such fury, he was like a typhoon.’
‘Typhoons often leave destruction in their wake.’
‘Goodnight, Robert,’ I said.
‘Goodnight, my dear,’ he said, and shut the door.
The susurrations of the sea filled the night. A nightjar called out, like a stranger knocking at the door. A long time passed before the waters of sleep closed over me.
II
Over the years of living in Hong Kong Robert had built up an extensive collection of books on Chinese history and philosophy and literature. I had never been interested in them, but the next morning after he left for work I raided our library for them, pulling out volume after volume from the shelves.
More than two thousand years ago, I discovered from my reading, the ruler of Ch’in unified several warring states into a single powerful empire, with him as its first emperor. To keep out his enemies, he started construction of a wall that would stretch for hundreds of miles. I followed the glories and defeats of the Ch’in empire’s subsequent dynasties; I learned about its emperors, its cities and states, its poets and philosophers, its artists and writers, and its gods and demons. The Middle Kingdom’s present decay could be traced to 1644, when the Manchus vanquished the Ming emperors. And in 1839, more than forty years before I was born, England went to war with China to enforce its right to sell opium to the Chinese.
How utterly outrageous, I thought, using arms against another nation to force it to buy opium. No wonder the Chinese called us barbarians.
Defended by an outmoded army and incompetent military leaders, and undermined by a corrupt civil service, it was hardly surprising to anyone that China lost. The defeat saw its territories carved out by the victors – England and Germany and France – and it was made to pay millions of silver dollars in indemnities. Instead of modernising itself, however, the Ching monarchy retreated further into its dream world behind the walls of the Forbidden City, while the country outside descended into turmoil and chaos. But even as China was struggling to recover from the crippling wounds of the Opium Wars, a rebellion erupted in the south and rapidly spread north, inching its way to the capital.
The Taiping Rebellion. I wondered why it sounded familiar, and then I remembered Robert’s remarks during Sun Wen’s first visit to our home. Hong Siu Chuan, the leader of the Taipings, a scholar who had failed his Imperial Examinations, not only believed he was the brother of Jesus, but that he had been commanded by their Heavenly Father to overthrow the emperor and found a new Jerusalem. I had thought he was mad, and in all probability he was stark raving, but as I read more about him I discovered that in just two years Hong and his half a million converts conquered Nanking and made it the capital city of the Kingdom of Heavenly Peace. Hong proclaimed himself the Heavenly King, and for fourteen years they had controlled Nanking. Missionaries and bible-printers from the West had visited the city, hoping to form alliances with them and spread the gospel to the whole of China. Some of them stayed in Nanking for years, but in the end they were repelled by Hong’s warped ideas of Christianity. The Kingdom of Heavenly Peace fell to the imperial army in 1864. Hong died of food poisoning, and his son and thousands of his supporters were executed by the emperor.
The Taipings, I was happy to find out, viewed women as the equal of men. From the earliest days of the rebellion their women had been fighting shoulder to shoulder with the men against the emperor’s troops. I couldn’t think of the last time in history, and in any other place in the world, when a similar thing had taken place.
My burgeoning interest in China delighted Robert, and we spent many an evening discussing its convoluted history, although he thought I was becoming too obsessed with the Taipings. But it had been a long while since we shared something that engaged us; it gave us something safe to argue about, something to hold back the tide of silence that had, unknown to us, crept into our marriage.
‘We must help Sun Wen,’ I announced to him one evening.
‘That unrepentant, incorrigible polygamist?’
I ignored his chaffing. ‘Just imagine if he succeeds – a society where everyone is equal – the rich and the poor, the educated and the illiterate. Why, once he’s achieved that, the women would no longer be powerless.’
‘There will always be inequality, Lesley. That’s the way of the world.’
‘So we should just do nothing?’
‘I strongly advise it,’ Robert said. ‘The authorities will be keeping an even more attentive eye on him after that piece your brother wrote, mark my words.’
Geoff’s interview with Sun Wen had been published the day before. With its details of his turbulent, rootless childhood, his family and three children (Sun Wen had allowed mention of just his one wife), the interview had painted a sympathetic portrait of the revolutionary. Pleased by the interview, Sun Wen had invited my brother to follow him around and write a series of articles about his cause.
During his next visit to our home Sun Wen mentioned that he was translating the Tong Meng Hui’s pamphlets and articles into English so they could be disseminated among the Straits Chinese.
‘Your translations had better be up to scratch,’ I warned him, ‘or the Straits Chinese will laugh at you.’
‘Arthur – you’ve met him, you remember? – Arthur does as much as he can to check the translations, but he can’t really spare us the time.’
‘I can look them over for you,’ I said.
‘You’re not going there, Lesley,’ Robert said.
‘There are other women there too, Robert,’ Sun Wen said, ‘even some young ladies from Penang’s finest families. And I will be there, of course.’
‘That may be the case, but I forbid it.’
Sun Wen’s smile withered away. ‘Ah, yes. Of course. Your wife should not be seen in the company of us Chinamen.’
‘You know quite well that the rest of Penang isn’t as … accepting … as we are.’
Sun Wen put down his half-finished tumbler of whisky. I felt awful for him. How often did he have to choke back his rage and swallow his pride, all for the sake of his cause?
I said to Robert, ‘I can collect the papers tomorrow morning. I’ll do the work at home.’
‘It’s very kind of you, Lesley, but …’ Sun Wen shook his head. ‘You must obey your husband.’
‘Tomorrow morning,’ I repeated firmly.
Sun Wen got to his feet and gave us a clipped bow. ‘Thank you, Robert, and Lesley, for welcoming me into your home.’
I rounded on Robert after he left. ‘Write him a note and apologise.’
‘I’ll do nothing of the sort.’
‘What he’s trying to achieve will end the suffering of millions of people, Robert, millions. I – we – have to do whatever we can to help him.’
‘You find him attractive, don’t you?’
It was the last thing I had expected him to ask me. I fumbled for an answer. ‘He has attractive qualities, yes,’ I said finally. ‘But I’m not attracted to him.’
A sour smile distorted Robert’s lips. ‘A perfect lawyerly answer.’
I stared at him. Robert – Robert of all people – accusing me of having feelings for another man. All at once I was fed up with the pretence. I was tired of it, tired of not knowing. For weeks now I had been standing on the edge of a precipice, wondering what lay waiting beneath the bank of mists.
Enough. No more. I stepped off the ledge and into the void.
‘Are you having an affair, Robert?’ I knew, even as those words left my lips, that my marriage would be irrevocably changed by them.
In the middle of lighting his pipe, he froze, his hands rigid in the air. ‘Am I what?’
Time stopped; a roaring noise flooded my head; my voice sounded muffled in my ears, hollow. ‘Are you sleeping with another woman?’
He struck his match in one sharp stroke and cupped the flame to his pipe-bowl. He sucked in his cheeks a few times, puffing out smoke.
‘Is this why you’ve been acting oddly – because you think I’m having an affair – with another woman? Where the hell did you get this, this lunatic idea from? Those dried-up hags at the club? Pykett’s barren wife and her mahjong coven? Or Mrs Biggs? That bloody woman’s mouth is as big as her arse.’
‘Somebody saw you with …’ I wished I hadn’t confronted him, but it was too late now. ‘With another woman.’
He stared at me; and then he started to laugh. The sound of it was horrible – harsh and frightening. I had never heard him laughing like that. ‘And who’s this woman, this seductive siren?’
‘They didn’t say.’
‘Of course they didn’t. Typical, isn’t it? Bloody cows. You remember how their malicious – and need I remind you, ultimately baseless – tittle-tattle scuppered the Fitzpatricks’ marriage?’ He took a couple of long, lazy draws on his pipe and looked directly into my eyes. ‘I am not sleeping with another woman, Lesley.’
III
Standing outside the house on Armenian Street, I studied the black signboard above the doors. My eyes followed the thick, fluid strokes of the Chinese characters carved into it. These signboards were common all over town, but on this morning the ideograms with their tarnished gold leaf felt oppressive to me, alien.
Robert had been aloof towards me during breakfast, barricading himself behind his newspapers. When he left for his office he didn’t come around the table to kiss my cheek.
I knocked on the doors and checked the ceiling boards. If there was a spyhole, it was well-camouflaged. A minute later the bolt was pulled back and a man peered out from a partly opened door.
‘Dr Loh,’ I said, relieved to see a face I recognised. ‘Lesley Hamlyn. I’m here to collect—’
‘Yes, yes. Come in, come in.’
He bolted the door behind us. He was in a crisp white shirt, grey trousers and a blue-and-red striped tie. He had a narrow, almost rectangular face, with a thin, well-shaped nose, and his eyes were alert with humour and intelligence.
‘Come along,’ he said. ‘And call me Arthur. We’re all on first-name terms here.’
The dining hall looked more salubrious in the morning sun flooding into the air-well. Half a dozen people were seated around the long rosewood table, books and sheets of papers spread out before them. One or two glanced up from their work, giving me a nod. Telling me to wait, Arthur hurried to a pile of boxes taking up a corner of the dining hall. I looked around me. The walls were blistered with damp; documents were stacked high on tables or jammed into overflowing shelves. An empty bamboo birdcage hung by the air-well. From the dining hall a short passageway led to a pair of rooms at the back. To the right of the passageway was the kitchen where a blackened kettle was brooding on a charcoal stove, steam whispering from its spout.
Arthur came back and handed me a bundle of papers. ‘The printers need them by noon tomorrow.’
‘I’ll bring them back before then.’
‘You’re already here. Why not just stay and finish it here?’
I looked at the documents and then back at him. ‘I’ll need a pen and writing paper.’
The work was not as easy as I had expected. The documents – articles and pamphlets and editorials describing in histrionic tones the corruption of the Chinese government, the abuses of power, the sufferings of the common folk – were riddled with errors and mangled grammar. I frequently had to ask Arthur to clarify phrases or names as I tightened the meandering sentences, sheared the paragraphs and did the best I could to make them coherent. Arthur also asked me to remove anything that could be construed as seditious or critical of our own government, however vague it was.
We chatted during a short break for tea. He was thirty years old, and he was a GP sharing a clinic in Campbell Road. Through a series of questions – who his parents were; to whom he was related – I charted his coordinates on the map of our social world (it was a habit everyone here – especially the Chinese – indulged in when meeting someone for the first time), and I was fully aware that he was doing the same with me. I had heard of his father – a tin merchant and the president of the Chinese Anti-Opium Association; his mother was from an old and prominent Straits Chinese family.
‘Is that the party’s flag?’ I nudged my chin at the flag displayed on the wall behind him; in the full daylight it was dark blue, the sun blazing from its centre an empty white circle.
‘Yes. And one day it will fly over the whole of China.’ He looked at me. ‘Have you ever been there?’
‘No.’
‘I thought as much.’
The disdain in his voice stung me. I suddenly realised how I appeared to him: just another bored memsahib slumming with the locals, looking for a bit of excitement in her humdrum, unsatisfying life.
‘Why do you care about China?’ I flung the question at him. ‘You Straits Chinese, you all went to English-speaking schools, you all speak English at home, dress like Europeans. You kowtow only to England.’
I had expected him to be provoked into anger, but he merely smiled. ‘The Chinese-educated ones here say we chiak angmoh sai,’ he said. ‘“We eat the white man’s shit.”’
‘I know what it means.’
He became serious. ‘I’m here because of my grandmother. She was eighteen when she joined the rebels fighting the Manchu emperor.’
‘Your grandmother was a Taiping rebel?’
‘You know about them?’ Surprise tussled with doubt on his face. I gave him a quick summary of what I knew of the rise and fall of the Taiping Rebellion. He seemed quite impressed with me when I concluded.
‘What happened to your grandmother?’ I asked.
‘She grew disillusioned with the Taipings after they took Nanking, after they founded their Kingdom of Heavenly Peace. She had been assigned to work for a Scottish bible-printer there. He helped her escape. He had contacts in Penang, and he gave her money to come here. She worked for a small printer in Bishop Street – she bought the business from him after a few years. It’s still operating, my second uncle runs it.’
‘Is she still alive?’ I wanted to meet her.
He shook his head. ‘She died when I was fifteen. She used to fill my head with tales of her life in China when I was a child. When I was old enough I decided to go there, see it for myself.’ He seemed to be addressing the flag on the wall. ‘I was shocked by how bad it was there – the poverty and the misery, the corruption. China must be saved, and every one of us Chinese in the world must play his part.’
‘Until I met Sun Wen, I had hardly any interest in his country,’ I said. ‘But that night when we came here, when I heard him speak …’
He looked at me, and I felt he understood what I was trying to articulate. ‘Every one of us would have willingly marched off to war for him,’ he said.
I finished editing the last article and handed the whole bundle back to him. He checked a few of them, then put them aside.
‘Can you come again next week?’ he asked.
IV
Every Tuesday morning, after Robert had left for work, I would take the rickshaw to the house on Armenian Street. Arthur was usually there already, helping out for an hour before he departed for his clinic. In the beginning I felt out of place, sensitive to the curious glances from the other members, but they soon lost interest in me after a few visits.
Robert’s late nights became less frequent. He would often find me lying on the verandah sofa when he got home, lost in a book. We would chat over stengahs before we went in for dinner, but he never asked me what I was doing at the reading club, and I never mentioned anything about it. My eyes raked him covertly for signs – a long curlicue of hair on his clothes, or a trace of perfume – as to where he had been, and whom he had been with, but I never found anything incriminating.
By now Ethel had been locked up in Pudoh Gaol for a month. I couldn’t imagine the awfulness of her predicament. I wrote to her regularly, hoping to lift her spirits; I sent her novels and the latest issues of the Illustrated London News, even though she wasn’t much of a reader. The warden and the other prisoners were decent to her, she told me in one of her infrequent letters, and William visited her without fail every day, but she missed her daughter terribly. People seemed to have forgotten about her, but as the first day of her trial loomed her name surfaced on their lips again. Like everyone I knew, Arthur was intrigued by her case, often airing outrageously slanderous speculations about her and William Steward when we were working at the long table.
‘Your prurient interest is unbecoming,’ I scolded him on one occasion. We had fallen into the habit of speaking in a rojak of English and Hokkien. ‘You’re worse than anyone.’
‘It’s not prurient.’
‘Oh, of course not.’
‘No European woman in Malaya has ever been on trial for murder, do you know that? Ethel Proudlock’s the very first one. And she didn’t just kill any man, Lesley – she killed someone of her own exalted race. You angmohs have always taken pride in telling us natives that “everyone is equal before the law, white or brown, black or yellow”. Well, now with one of your own on trial – with her very life at stake – how will you angmohs mete out justice? That is what I find compelling.’
‘She’ll be judged fairly, like you and me, like every one of us.’
‘Oh, of course she will.’ He mimicked my sarcastic tone perfectly. ‘The judge will put on a show of impartiality and fairness, but in the end the verdict will be “Not guilty”.’
‘That’s because she’s not.’
Realisation pulled up his eyebrows. ‘You know her.’
‘She’s my closest friend.’
‘So was she sleeping with him?’
‘Arthur …’ I warned him.
He raised a pair of mollifying palms to me. ‘Well, even if they find her guilty,’ he said, ‘they’ll fashion some loophole for her to slip out of the noose. They’ll say … oh, she had amnesia, or that she blacked out temporarily; or they’ll say that she was hysterical, she didn’t know what she was doing. They’d never hang a white woman. Never.’
He was wrong, I thought. I held my tongue and returned to the work at hand, but I couldn’t help remembering what Robert had said – that Ethel had shot William Steward with the intention of killing him.
I glanced at the clock on the wall when Arthur began packing his pens and writing pads into his doctor’s bag.
‘Patient’s appointment?’ I asked. He was leaving earlier than he normally did.
‘My doors are being delivered.’ He hefted the leather bag in his hand. ‘Would you like to see them?’
‘I know what doors look like.’
He grinned. ‘Come on – it’s not far, just down the road.’
He seemed so terribly keen for me to go with him that I could not refuse. I made one last amendment to the essay I’d been working on and handed it to one of the women down the table.
‘All, right, Arthur,’ I said. ‘Let’s go and look at your doors.’
It was not yet mid morning, but the sun was already ferocious, and I was grateful for my parasol as we followed the gentle curve of Armenian Street towards the harbour. A boy no older than nine or ten sped past us on a bicycle too big for him, one tiny paw on the handlebars, the other hand balancing a tray with a bowl of steaming wonton noodles; a rickshaw weighed down with a pair of stout Nyonyas chased us out of its path. Nobody looked twice at me – the people here had become used to the sight of this angmoh woman.
This was his favourite section of town, Arthur said. The neighbourhood had seen fierce fighting between the Ghee Hin and the Hai San in the riots, he told me. They had been outlawed afterwards, but they were still here, the secret societies, thriving in the shadows.
I could see why: the lanes and alleys provided convenient escape routes to the harbour, and I wondered if Sun Wen had this in mind too when he chose this neighbourhood for his base.
A man sitting on his haunches outside his shop and kneading a lump of almond-brown dough in a basin called out to Arthur. ‘Loh loke-kun, chiak-pah buey?’
‘I’ve eaten already, Ah Tong,’ Arthur replied in Hokkien. ‘Eh, your wife’s stomach better or not?’
‘No pain any more, no pain any more. Your medicine very best-lah.’ Ah Tong throttled off a fist-sized lump, worked the dough into a long thin roll and skewered it on a thin wooden stick. He stuck it in a tray with the dozen or more he had already made; they looked like rows of sausages. ‘This morning she even told me she wanted to eat roast pork. I said to her, “Roast pork? Siau-ah? Ah Lan, you think you married a rich man’s son like Dr Loh-ah?”’
‘Tell her I’ll buy her a plate of sio-bahk, but she must keep taking her pills.’
Ah Tong laughed. He chose a stick from the tray and presented it to me. The dough was still moist and soft. I brought it to my nose. The smell of sandalwood pulled me back to the smoky temples my amah used to take me to when I was a girl. I handed it back to the incense-maker, but he motioned me to keep it.
‘Tell her a few hours in the sun and they’ll be as dry as biscuits,’ the incense-maker told Arthur.
‘Kamsiah,’ I said. I smelled it again. ‘Very fragrant,’ I said in Hokkien, grinning at him as his eyes widened.
‘You should see the incense he makes for the Hungry Ghost Festival,’ Arthur said as we continued on our way down the street. ‘Six feet long and thick as a telegraph pole, each one of them, with dragons and phoenixes twisting up and down the whole length. They burn for a whole week.’
He stopped walking when we came to the last shophouse in the row. It stood on a corner next to an alley, as unremarkable as every other shophouse we had just gone past. The front doors were plain, with no glass insets or fretwork, and the windows were shuttered. A wooden bench and a flowering purple bougainvillea in a terracotta pot stood on the five-foot way, which was tiled in a green-and-white geometric pattern.
From a ring Arthur selected a key, spindly as a twig, and unlocked the doors. He didn’t invite me inside, but nodded at something behind me. Peering over my shoulder, I saw a coolie coming down the street pushing a handcart stacked with a pair of doors wrapped in grubby jute sacking. He grunted a greeting at Arthur and hefted the doors into the house. He emerged again, accepted his payment and disappeared with his cart back to wherever he had come from.
Arthur held out his hand to me. I took it and stepped over the shin-high threshold.
It was cool inside, the leaded windows casting a milky light into the guest hall. Except for a Coromandel screen at the opposite end, the hall was bare of any furniture. The walls, however, were hung with wooden doors painted with birds and flowers, or mist-covered mountains. The upper halves of some of the doors were decorated with intricate fretwork of dragons and phoenixes.
‘I got them from shophouses and temples that were about to be torn down,’ Arthur said. ‘It always made me so sihm-tnhia’ – he used the Hokkien word for ‘heart-pain’ – ‘knowing that they were going to be chopped up into firewood. One day I thought: why don’t I buy them? My grandmother had left me this house, and it was standing empty. It’s a place to store them.’
I went over to the pair closest to me. They were carved with vertical, sinuous strokes of Chinese calligraphy papered in gold leaf. Carefully I lifted the lower corner of one of the doors half an inch away from the wall. I knew I wouldn’t see anything of course, but I was disappointed when I found only the limewashed wall behind it, and not a doorway leading into another room, perhaps into another world.
‘Let me show you my latest acquisitions,’ said Arthur.
He was waiting for me by the Coromandel screen. I hesitated – it suddenly occurred to me what people might say: I was a white woman alone in another man’s house, and not just any man, but a Chinaman.
He looked across the length of the hall at me, and then, without uttering a word, he walked back to the front doors and flung them wide open, exposing the interior of the house to the street. The thought struck me that perhaps he was more worried about what people might say about him being alone in a house with an angmoh woman.
I followed him behind the screen and down a short corridor. Emerging into the dining hall, I pulled up abruptly.
‘Goodness …’ I said, my voice hushed.
The walls here were also covered with doors. And hanging from the ceiling beams were more doors, carefully spaced apart and suspended on wires so thin they seemed to be floating in the air.
We walked between the rows of painted doors, our shoulders and elbows setting them spinning slowly. Each door pirouetted open to reveal another set of doors, and I had the dizzying sensation that I was walking down the corridors of a constantly shifting maze, each pair of doors opening into another passageway, and another, giving me no inkling of where I would eventually emerge.
We came to the back of the dining hall. A wrought-iron spiral staircase twisted upstairs, like the remains of a giant nautilus shell. By the foot of the staircase was a Chinese zither resting on its stand.
‘You play this … what is it called?’ I asked. The zither was about five feet long and a foot wide.
‘A guzheng.’ He strummed the strings, stirring up a liquid arpeggio. For some inexplicable reason the sound made me think of a cold, clear stream flowing down a bare and rocky mountainside.
I looked at the doors; they were still turning languidly from the ceiling beams. ‘How many of them do you have?’
‘Oh, thirty or forty pairs.’ His laugh sounded embarrassed, but it was also tinged with the pride of the true collector. ‘I’ve lost count. These two here’ – he showed me a pair of doors hanging on a wall – ‘they’re the oldest set in my collection. I bought them from a temple on the day before it was demolished. Eighteenth-century. Painted by an artist from a village in the Hokkien province.’
Each of the doors was painted with a crimson-faced, fierce-eyed man in military garb. The figure on the left door brandished a great, lethal-looking axe while the one on the right wielded an intimidating halberd. The paintwork was weathered, and in some places the colours had completely faded.
‘Who are they? Warriors? Or deities?’
‘In the T’ang dynasty, an emperor was harassed by demons and evil spirits outside his sleeping chambers,’ said Arthur. ‘This went on for night after night. The emperor couldn’t sleep, and his health deteriorated. His advisors despaired of finding a solution. Then General Qin and General Yu, two of the emperor’s most loyal men, stepped forward. They declared to the emperor, “In our whole lives, your two humble servants have killed men as they would slice open a melon. We have stacked up bodies as high as mountains. We fear neither ghosts nor demons. We shall stand guard outside your royal chambers; we shall keep watch all through the hours of the night.” The emperor agreed to their suggestion, and that night no ghosts or demons disturbed his sleep. But the next morning he summoned the two generals. “You have kept watch over me all night,” he told them, “but you have had no sleep. This cannot continue.” The emperor thought for a while, then he found a solution: he ordered his court artist to paint the likenesses of the two generals on his doors, one on the left, the other on the right. And from then on he was never disturbed by evil spirits again.
‘Over time, this practice spread across the land. General Qin and General Yu became known as the Gods of the Doors.’
He went over to another pair of doors propped against a sideboard. ‘These you saw carried in just now. They’re two hundred years old.’ He pulled away the jute covering and adjusted the position of the doors. A small brown hawk was painted on the left door, floating over a high, misty gorge.
My fingers hovered above the four vertical lines of Chinese characters brushed over the mists. ‘What do they say?’
‘“Evanescent path of dreams/in the summer night/O Bird of the mountain/carry my name beyond the clouds.” A poem by Shibata Katsuie, a sixteenth-century Japanese samurai, a warrior. He was betrayed in a battle. He composed it moments before using his sword on himself.’
Something stirred inside me, something mournful. How strange that the words of a Japanese warrior from more than three hundred years ago – his last few breaths, given shape – should still exist, inscribed on a weathered door thousands of miles from his home. I murmured the poem a few times, lodging the words in my memory.
‘You collect these painted doors.’ I stroked the powdery wood, thinking of the uncountable number of people who had passed through these doors over the centuries. ‘Yet your own front doors are bare.’
For the first time since I met him, he seemed parched for words. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘it’s never occurred to me.’
‘I like the idea of your plain, unremarkable doors concealing these’ – my hand swept over the painted doors around us – ‘from the world outside.’
He reflected on what I had said. ‘I like it too.’
The doors spun slowly in the air, like leaves spiralling in a gentle wind, forever falling, never to touch the earth.
V
Geoff’s articles about Sun Wen had made him more widely known among the Europeans and the Straits Chinese, but the flood of funds he had been hoping for was still not even trickling in. Arthur decided to hold a fundraiser tea party for all his friends at his house. Sun Wen would give a talk and enlighten them on what he was trying to achieve.
‘It’s this Saturday, three o’clock. You must come,’ Arthur said. ‘Bring Robert too.’
‘He’s going to KL this weekend,’ I said. ‘He has a trial on Monday.’
‘But you’ll come?’
I shook my head. ‘My darling husband’s already none too happy about my being here.’
‘Everything all right between you two?’ He had the perfect bedside manner of a trustworthy GP: sympathetic yet unobtrusive. I had to fight the temptation to confide in him.
‘Couldn’t be better,’ I replied.
The reading club was having one of its rare quiet mornings, with only a handful of people working at the long table. I was getting irritated with a shoddily translated pamphlet when Sun Wen turned up with a woman. I had never seen her before. We put down our pens and gathered around the couple. Sun Wen beckoned me to his side.
‘I have long wanted you to meet Chui Fen, and now she is finally here in Penang,’ he said. ‘Chui Fen is one of our most loyal supporters.’
The woman looked only a few years older than me, but she already had a strong presence about her. Her hair was pulled back into a low bun, revealing a smooth brow and an oval-shaped face. Her eyes were large and intelligent, her nose long and well-proportioned. She had plump, perfectly shaped lips. She took my hands in hers and, with Sun Wen interpreting, thanked me for helping their cause.
‘She’s one of his wives, isn’t she?’ I whispered to Arthur the moment they left. ‘The second wife. She’s young and pretty enough.’
He didn’t lift his head from the document he was checking. ‘They’re not married, actually.’
‘Oh? So she’s his concubine?’
‘You’d better not let her hear you. She’s handy with a gun, and she knows martial arts – she’s roughed up a few men in her time. Chui Fen’s been by his side for twenty years. As far as he’s concerned – as far as we are concerned – she’s his wife.’
Twenty years together. I had been married to Robert for only a quarter of that. ‘Well, I feel sorry for his first wife.’
He scribbled a few words on the margin. ‘You can convey your sympathies to her yourself – she’ll be joining them in a few days.’
‘You mean … they’ll be living together? All three of them under the same roof?’
‘Every marriage has its own rules, Lesley.’
The softness of his voice, the absence of condemnation in it, made me look sharply at him. ‘Was your marriage arranged?’
‘It was, as a matter of fact.’ He raised his eyes from the sheet of paper he was reading. ‘Ah, memsahib thinks it’s a barbaric native custom.’
Were my feelings so transparent? ‘It’s … antiquated.’
‘After I finished my studies and came home, my father told me over breakfast one morning I was to marry his business partner’s daughter. Everything had been arranged.’
‘Did you know her?’
‘Since I was ten years old.’
‘You didn’t object?’
‘Even Sun Wen had to obey his parents.’
‘But do you love her? And does she love you?’
‘Marriage is not only about love. It is the duty of every son to ensure that the family name does not die out. The tree must produce branches. Anna is a dutiful daughter-in-law, a devoted mother, and a good wife.’
‘It’s so … sterile. What about romantic love?’
‘Why did you marry Robert? He’s nearly twice your age. Was it romantic love?’
From the way he was looking at me, I wondered if he had heard something about Robert’s infidelity. ‘You’ll be telling me next that Sun Wen’s got another wife hidden away somewhere,’ I said, ‘a third one, waiting to spring out into the open.’
‘He has. She’s the one he loves the most.’
‘Who is she?’
‘You already know her.’
I dredged my memory for the faces of the women I had met since I started coming here. ‘Who is she? Tell me.’
Arthur laid his pen on the table. His eyes, I saw, were stained with sorrow.
‘China,’ he said. ‘He is married to China. He loves her the most, and he’s loved her the longest. And of all his wives, however many he will have in his life, she will allow no competition from anyone else. She will demand everything from him. And in the end, after he has given her all that he has, she will crush his heart.’
VI
The monsoon edged closer to the island, bringing heavy afternoon storms that flooded the streets around the harbour when the tide was high. I welcomed the respite from the heat – I have always loved Penang when it rains, when the harsh tropical light softens, and the world feels hushed and cosy.
Returning home from the beach with my sons one evening, I found Ah Peng waiting anxiously on the verandah, her palms bracketing her ample hips. ‘Come inside quick-quick!’ she cried. ‘Sky black-black, want to rain already.’
She dropped a fistful of papers and coins into my palm. ‘Dhobi-wallah find in Mr Robert’s pocket,’ she added as she took James and Edward to their baths.
It was Friday, which meant Cookie’s roti babi for dinner. I was looking forward to it. Robert had taken his assistant Peter Ong with him to KL that morning. They would spend the weekend there preparing for a trial that would run for a whole week. He would have already arrived at the Empire Hotel by now. I pictured him in my head, welcoming his lover into his room, a woman whose face I could not see. I forced that image away; it was becoming much easier to do, I was surprised to discover.
I smoothed out the crumpled pieces of receipts and bills Ah Peng had given me. Among them was a neatly folded piece of paper. I unfolded it. The words were written in a wine-red ink, the handwriting loose but elegantly formed: ‘My darling Robert, I love the book. Thank you. Peter.’
Cheeky bugger. Someone should knock him back into his place. My darling Robert. Impudent, addressing his superior like that, I thought as I read the note again. The realisation coalesced slowly, and then, like a coffin slotting into a grave, everything fell into place. My darling Robert.
I sank onto the sofa, feeling sick. All these years, all the effort to make myself attractive to him, and all the blame I had laid upon myself because he no longer showed any interest in me, wondering what was wrong with me. What a fool I had been. What an utter, utter fool.
The wind had stiffened, rattling the bamboo chicks rolled up beneath the eaves. I ought to have dropped them before the storm came, but I couldn’t move. My body, my heart, felt heavy, so heavy. I slumped on the sofa, barely aware of Ah Peng when she came to call me. ‘Eat rice already.’ She clapped loudly. ‘Oi, Lesley-ah, you got hear me or not?’
I lifted my face to her. She looked at me. Her gaze flicked to the piece of paper in my hand, then back to my eyes again. An age of silence seemed to pass between us.
‘Aiya, so he has another woman,’ said Ah Peng.
‘How long have you known?’
She nodded to herself. ‘Ah, I knew it! All men stray-lah. He’ll tire of her soon.’
‘It’s not …’ I began, but I was too mortified to reveal the complete truth to her. It still felt as if it was my fault, some deficiency, some grave flaw in me that had driven Robert into the arms of another man. At that moment I said to myself: No one must ever know.
‘Ah Peng,’ I said, ‘do you regret taking your vows? Do you ever wish you had married?’
Her sigh, when she sat down beside me, seemed to emerge from somewhere deep inside her entire being. I caught a whiff of the camphor ointment she rubbed into her arthritic fingers, a scent I had known since my childhood. Smelling it now left a hollow of loss inside me.
‘You see this face-lah. Got what man want?’ Ah Peng smiled, but swimming in the depths of her eyes was an old, old pain, refracted through the years of resignation. ‘I join Sor Hei long time already. Regret got what use?’ Beneath her white tunic her mountainous bosom rose with a seismic heave, before settling down again. ‘That morning, I light joss sticks and take vow before Kuan Yin’s altar, my Sor Hei sister, Ah Suan, she say to me, “Ah Peng, from this day on, no man can bring you sorrow, only yourself.”’
The joints of her fingers were knotted with arthritis. Her jade bangle hung loosely on her wrist; it was the only jewellery I had ever seen her wear. Her face was heavily lined, and her hair, gathered into a bun, was completely grey. When had she grown so old?
When I was a little girl she would sometimes take me with her when she visited the letter-writer in town. Outside the entrance of the Prangin Road market we’d sit on low bamboo stools while she dictated the news she wanted to tell her family back in their village in China to the letter-writer, a thin old man with a tidy grey beard down to his chest. And weeks later, when she received a reply, she would take it to the same letter-writer. He would squint at it and give voice to the lines and lines of brush-stroke runes that had been inscribed by her village’s own letter-writer, runes that neither she nor anyone else in her family had been taught to decipher. She would perch on the edge of the stool, her hands tucked between her broad thighs, her face, depending on what the runes reported, ripening into smiles or withering into worry and sadness. Occasionally she would chuckle or even laugh aloud, but such moments were rare; more often than not she would sigh or shake her head in sorrow. She seemed so intent, so focused, as she listened to the letter-writer’s voice, scolding me sharply if I fidgeted or whined, and it was only when I was older that I realised she was trying to memorise the words recited by him, so that she could summon them up again in her mind, until the next letter arrived from beyond the mountains, from across the seas.
Remembering those moments, I said, ‘Ah Peng, do you want to go back to your village? See your family again?’
‘All die already-lah. Mother, father, aunty. My sisters, I don’t know where.’ She patted my hand and stood up, her knees popping. ‘My family now here.’ She walked her stiff, bow-legged gait back into the house.
The wind banged an unlatched window shutter somewhere again and again. I tore up the note and went over to the balustrade to drop the bamboo chicks. Lightning stabbed the clouds on the horizon. The mountains, the sea and then the beach disappeared behind the thicket of rain as the storm came charging in. Like watercolour on paper, the sky, the trees, the shrubs, the garden itself, were all washed away.
For a long time I continued to stand there, staring into the emptiness, only dimly aware of the wind driving the rain onto my arms, onto my face.