A window shutter kept knocking against the wall. The sound seemed to have been travelling to him from far back in time. He sat up on the edge of his bed, knuckling the sleep from his eyes. Geoff’s book had fallen onto the floorboards. He picked it up and placed it next to his mother’s photograph, then went to secure the loose shutter.
Clouds were pulling across the sea, trailing long tassels of rain. No walking on the beach this morning.
After breakfast he returned to his room to write down what Lesley had told him, making a list of questions he wanted to ask her. He tried out some ideas of how he could structure the story, but he was frustrated and restless. If only it were night already so she could resume her tale. He was not unhappy for his work to be interrupted when Gerald came in and flopped onto the bed.
‘Sodding rain,’ said Gerald. ‘It’s bucketing down, isn’t it? Reminds me of that time we were stuck in Pago Pago. You need anything typed?’
‘Not yet.’
Gerald crossed his hands behind his head and disgorged a luxuriant yawn. He seemed to have made peace with Willie’s new-found poverty. Willie was grateful for that.
‘Lesley has been telling me about her story,’ he said.
Gerald laughed coarsely. ‘So who was she fucking? That Chink Sun? I’d wager a packet on it.’
For a while Willie said nothing. He felt, in a strange way, that he would be betraying her if he revealed her secret to anyone else. Yet she must know that there was a great probability that he might write about it – what other reason could she have for confiding in him? She could not be unaware that her reputation would be torn to tatters and her marriage ruined if he were to publish the story she was telling him.
‘Robert had an affair a few years ago,’ said Willie. ‘With a Chinaman.’
‘Oh, Robert’s been eyeing me from the day we got here,’ said Gerald. ‘Very, very discreetly, mind you, but he’s been eyeing me all right.’
‘Robert? Are you sure?’
‘Our memsahib finds people like us repulsive, you know. She hides it well, but she doesn’t fool me. To think she married one of our kind.’ Gerald laughed. ‘Oh, the sweet irony of it.’
Willie still had grave doubts about it. He thought back to the old days he had spent with Robert: their regular evenings at the theatre and the opera, their weekly dining at Robert’s club.
‘If Robert’s homosexual, then he’s camouflaged it better than anybody I know.’
‘Oh, darling Willie … and to think the critics say you’re cynical.’
‘You’ve been wrong-footed before. Need I remind you about Father Bailey and the deuced mess you kicked up? And that widowed planter in Johor? He was going to shoot you.’
‘Oh, those damned old pederasts just couldn’t admit to themselves they were lusting after me,’ Gerald said.
‘According to you every man is homosexual, and every one of them wants to sleep with you. Especially those you fancy.’
‘I wasn’t far off the mark with you, was I?’
Willie swivelled a lazy circle in his chair. ‘Robert intends to sell Cassowary House and move to the Karoo.’
‘He’s crazy.’
‘He’s not. The desert air might give him half a dozen extra years, perhaps more. Lesley’s none too pleased about it, though.’
‘Well, I don’t blame her,’ said Gerald. ‘I know what it feels like – forced to leave your home and never allowed to go back again.’
Willie sighed. Here it came again, the old tiresome problem. ‘I did everything possible to help you. I spoke to every person I could think of who had any influence.’
‘Well, obviously you didn’t try hard enough. Or you’re not taking it seriously. I can’t go back to England, Willie. Do you understand that?’
‘You know … bloody well it was your reckless behaviour that got you banished,’ said Willie. ‘Picking up men in a … public lavatory – sooner or later you were going to … get arrested.’
‘Yes, yes, it’s all because Gerald couldn’t keep his cock in his trousers again.’ He sat up against the headboard, curled his knees and wrapped his arms around them. ‘I don’t carry my mother’s photograph with me everywhere I go, Willie, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think of her. I want to see her again. I miss her terribly. If she falls ill, I won’t be able to visit her or look after her. You realise I’m not even allowed to go back for her funeral when she dies?’
Gerald seldom talked about his mother, and Willie had never heard him speak about her with such intensity of feeling before.
‘We’ve roamed the world together, my dear boy,’ he said, ‘and I’ve always been grateful for your presence by my side. You know that it would give me only the greatest of joy if you could be in London with me.’
‘It’s Syrie. It’s her doing. Your bloody wife’s made sure I can’t return to England. The cunt’s not going to share you with me, oh no.’
Willie frowned; really, Gerald could be appallingly crude at times. ‘I’ll make enquiries again when I’m back in London. I’ll speak to someone at the highest level.’
‘When we get back – when you get back to London, I mean – I’ll be going to America.’
‘Don’t be hasty, Gerald. I’ll find you something closer – Paris, or Amsterdam. We can still see each other once a month.’
‘I’ve done some thinking in the last few days. I know people in New York. I’ll get a job easily there. Oh, don’t look so put out, Willie – it’ll only be until you’re back on your feet again.’
So it had already begun, Willie thought, contemplating his young companion. The thing he had feared the most.
By evening the rainclouds had crept inland, leaving the skies clear again. Cooped up in the house all day, Willie agreed without a second’s hesitation when Robert suggested a visit to the Protestant cemetery.
They parked the Humber in the forecourt of the E&O Hotel and crossed the busy road to the cemetery. The Tamil jaga was about to lock up, but Lesley spoke a few words to him in Malay, slipping a handful of coins into his palm. The watchman opened the gates and let them in.
The noise of the world outside dropped away, kept out by the cemetery’s high walls. In the dripping banyans a koel fluted out its three-note question at regular intervals, deepening the silence. To Willie’s eyes the graves were laid out in no particular order. Further inside the cemetery were baroque-looking tombs and imposing monuments decorated with neo-Classical urns on their roofs. The light seemed aged by the grey, weather-beaten headstones.
Robert jabbed his walking stick at a grassy aisle between the graves. ‘Follow me, chaps,’ he cried, and stalked off.
‘Be careful, Robert,’ Lesley called after him, ‘the grass is slippery.’
‘Look after him,’ Willie murmured to Gerald.
There were about four hundred graves in the cemetery, although no one seemed to know the actual numbers, Lesley informed him as they followed Robert a few paces behind. Frangipani trees, their branches clotted with creamy white flowers, leaned into the path.
‘Perhaps new ones spring up by … themselves in the night,’ said Willie.
‘What a horrible thought, Willie. Now I’ll be awake all night.’
The earliest graves dated from the eighteenth century, the final resting places for missionaries and the men of the East India Company. Many of the weathered slabs were inscribed in English, but Willie also noticed French and German and Dutch carved into a number of them.
A memory of his Aunt Sophie buoyed to his mind’s surface. He used to accompany her to the graveyard behind the Whitstable church. She was an austere, reticent woman, and he was hobbled by his stammer, so the boy and the woman seldom spoke. In the beginning he had walked self-consciously by her side through the cemetery; then one day he had reached up and taken her hand. She had glanced down at him, a slightly startled expression on her face, and then she had given him a quick, almost shy smile. From that moment on he would hold her hand wherever they walked – in the cemetery, along the high street, or when they went down to the sea to watch the fishing boats returning on the tide.
Now, decades later and a world from his boyhood, he curled his fingers over his palm. He had a sudden longing to feel, for just the briefest moment, her bony, gloved hand in his again, but his fingers closed over only emptiness.
‘Not a place for happy memories, is it?’ Lesley had turned around and was looking back at him. He was not even aware that he had stopped walking. ‘We haven’t come here since Robert returned from the war. We used to bring his friends from abroad here – especially if they were writers.’
‘Are there writers buried here?’
‘You’ll see in a moment; I don’t want to spoil his fun.’
Willie helped her over a tangle of angsana roots thrusting out from the earth. His feet crushed the frangipani blossoms strewn over the ground, and he imagined them sighing one last fragrant breath into the air. He bent down and picked up a flower. It was perfectly formed, but its white, silky petals were already browning at the edges.
Seared by the unforgiving air, he thought. While we are living, the air sustains us, but the very instant we stop breathing, that same air immediately sinks its teeth into us. What keeps us alive will also, in the end, consume us.
He dipped his nose into the frangipani and inhaled deeply from its yellow-daubed heart. He offered it to Lesley, but she made a face and leaned away from him.
‘My amah used to warn me that if you smell a whiff of its perfume in the evening, it means there are ghosts close by.’
‘Well,’ said Willie, ‘we are in a cemetery, after all.’
They had stopped at a tomb guarded by a marble angel, his opened mouth singing a voiceless, eternal lament. Lesley’s eyes searched the granite crosses and petrified cherubs. She seemed to locate what she was looking for. Beckoning him to follow, she struck off along a half-hidden track between the graves. Once or twice the track disappeared completely and they had to climb over a grave or two. They came to an ancient banyan tree, its broad spreading branches supported by thick columns of roots. Willie would not have been surprised to see a fakir with legs contorted into the lotus position meditating beneath the tree, roaming through space and time in the universe of his mind for the secrets of eternity. Resting in the shade of the banyan were half a dozen graves. They were small and modest, the vertical lines of Chinese ideograms etched on their headstones precise as a surgeon’s stitches.
‘I told you the other night how Sun Wen and Robert were talking about the Taiping Rebellion,’ said Lesley.
‘Their leader was the madman who believed he was Jesus’s younger brother, wasn’t he?’
She nodded. ‘When the rebels were defeated, many of them had to flee for their lives. Some of them found their way to the Southern Seas, to Penang. They planted new roots on the island; they made new lives here.’ She stopped before one of the headstones. ‘This one here is Madam Cheah. She was a soldier in the Taiping army.’
‘A woman?’
‘Why not? The Taipings believed a woman was just as good a soldier as a man.’ She glanced behind them – Robert and Gerald were some distance away, studying the inscriptions on a chest tomb – before adding quietly, ‘She was Dr Arthur Loh’s grandmother. When Sun Wen heard about her, he asked Arthur to bring him here – he wanted to pay his respects to the rebels. Geoff and I came with them.’
Twilight was foxing the margins of the sky as they retraced their path and caught up with Robert and Gerald waiting by a rectangular tomb.
‘Come along, you two. Stop dawdling,’ Robert cried. He laid his hand on the top of the tomb. ‘Here he is, old Francis Light himself.’
‘Who’s he?’ asked Willie. The block of granite was about five feet by two and a half feet and came up almost to his shoulders. Withered leaves and twigs and frangipani flowers littered its coping, and a snail was oozing down its side.
‘One of a pair of men who made Penang what it is today.’ Robert made a half-hearted attempt to sweep the leaves off the tomb with his stick. ‘Francis Light was the clever chap who leased the island from the Sultan of Kedah to build a victualling station for the East India Company’s clippers.’
‘“Who first established this island as a British Settlement”,’ Willie said, reciting the inscription chiselled into the side of the tomb. ‘Who’s the other fellow, then?’
Instead of replying, Robert set off further into the cemetery, pointing his stick to the gravestones on either side as they skirted past them. ‘Settlers, nutmeg-planters, missionaries, sailors, soldiers, traders, scoundrels,’ he said. ‘You can trace the history of the island here. This one here is a chap called Thomas Leonowens. Low-level clerk of some sort, I think. His widow took a job as governess to the King of Siam’s brood. People said she was a half-caste – mother was Anglo-Indian, apparently. We have a copy of her memoir, if you’d like to read it, Willie. Rather dreary and insipid, I must confess. But this is what I want to show you, in answer to your question.’
He tapped his walking stick on the side of a tomb. It was only a little smaller than a hansom cab. On its top, perched in the middle like a knob on the cover of a butter dish, was a stone urn.
‘James Scott, Francis Light’s business partner.’ Robert’s eyes glided appreciatively over the tomb. ‘Together they founded Penang. He’s the cousin of Sir Walter Scott. And one of my great-great-great-uncles. I told you about him in London, Willie, you remember? I grew up hearing about his exploits. Made me long to go out to the East. You could say he’s the reason I ended up here.’ He smiled sadly. ‘I remember what Waverley meant to you, Willie.’
Willie circled the tomb. The last thing he had expected to stumble upon in a graveyard in Penang was a link, however tenuous, to the Scottish writer. He recalled his unhappy childhood with his uncle and aunt in Whitstable. As a boy, as an orphan, he had found solace in books, reading at every opportunity he could steal, even secretly on Sundays, which Uncle Henry had forbidden. Waverley was the first novel he had ever read; by the age of twelve he had devoured all of Scott’s novels.
‘It’s twice the size of Light’s tomb,’ said Willie as he completed his perambulation.
‘Well, Scott was the largest landowner in Penang,’ Robert remarked.
‘Tell them how he became the largest landowner,’ said Lesley, but then continued on before Robert could speak. ‘Light sired a family with a woman he never married, Martina Rozells. She was Eurasian – Portuguese-Siamese, it was said. Scott cheated her of the properties Light left her in his will, Willie. She fought him in the courts, but of course they ruled against her.’
‘It was a different world in those days,’ said Robert.
‘I don’t think it’s changed much,’ said Lesley. ‘Do you?’ She went over to a small, plain grave beneath a raintree. ‘See if you can make out what this says, Willie,’ she called over her shoulder.
The roots of the raintree had prised the headstone halfway out of the earth. Blotched with florets of lichen, it had a simplicity that appealed to Willie. Many of the letters and numerals were already drowned beneath the stone, and what remained lay faint on the surface.
A NA HAMM ND 1 97 – 18 1
H R SU I GO E DO N WH E IT WA YE DY
He traced the shallow indentations with the tip of his forefinger, stroking the blank spaces between the letters. ‘The name’s easy enough,’ he said. ‘Anna Hammond.’
‘And the second line? I haven’t been able to solve it.’
He studied the headstone again. The answer came to him after a minute, the ghosts of the runes materialising once more in the blank spaces.
‘“Her sun is gone down while it was yet day”,’ he said. ‘Jeremiah 15:9.’
‘“Her sun is gone down while it was yet day”,’ Lesley said. ‘You do know your way around words.’
‘I told you – my uncle was a vicar. I wasn’t allowed to read anything on Sunday except the Bible.’ Willie gripped the corners of the headstone and pulled himself stiffly to his feet.
‘All that remains of a woman’s life, a woman’s story – a few fading lines of missing words,’ said Lesley, running her palm over the edge of the headstone. ‘A cemetery isn’t where the dead are remembered, but a place where they are to be forgotten.’
Robert cocked his head in the direction of the cemetery gates. ‘The jaga’s calling. We’d better leave before he locks us all in here for the night.’
Watched over by the cataracted eyes of the stone cherubim, they filed back to the entrance. Willie turned to take one last look. The jaga bolted the iron gates, locked them and hung the rusted key around his neck. It lay on his chest like an amulet. Then the old man turned away and walked to his shack under the banyan trees.