I
I would never know how I survived the rest of that evening, how I didn’t turn into a raving lunatic just thinking about Robert’s affair with Peter Ong. And yet I must have slept soundly that night, because the next morning I woke up filled with a sense of clarity I had not felt in many years. I knew what I had to do.
After I had fed my sons and handed them over to Ah Peng, I asked the houseboys to bring out my camphorwood chest from the storeroom. Lifting out the layers of old clothes and sheets, I found what I was looking for at the bottom. I unfolded it and took it to the window, holding it up to the light. The kebaya was creased, but I was relieved to see that its colours had not faded. I sniffed it – the smell of camphor was pungent, but an hour or two in the sun should get rid of it.
Ever since I was a girl I had envied the Nyonyas their kebaya, but Mother had never allowed me to wear one. I used to draw them in my sketchbooks and create my own designs for them.
The Nyonya kebaya, like the Straits Chinese themselves, had absorbed influences from the Malays, the Siamese, the Javanese, the Chinese, even the Europeans. The long-sleeved blouse narrows at the waist and reaches down to the hips, giving a curvaceous shape to a woman, yet at the same time also ensuring that she looks elegant, refined. The voile blouse is worn over a camisole and matched with a sarong. After I married Robert I had one made by a widow in Kimberley Street who sewed for the old Straits Chinese families. It was based on one of my own designs. ‘You look like a bloody native,’ Robert had said when he saw me in it. In the end, after having worn it only a handful of times, I had put it away.
My kebaya was the shade of young bamboo. Embroidered flowers of darker green and yellow bloomed at the lapels; ferns sprouted from the ends of the sleeves and curled up from the hem. I matched it with a pale cream camisole and a dark green sarong I found in the chest.
I held the clothes against my body, smiling to myself when I saw that they still fitted me. From inside the chest I dug out the cotton bag containing a pair of cloth shoes hand-stitched with hundreds of tiny colourful glass beads – manek-manek, the Malay name came back to me.
I called Ah Peng to my room and asked her to air the kebaya and the matching garments in the sun before she pressed them. ‘I’m going to a tea party for Sun Wen this afternoon,’ I said. ‘We’re helping him raise money.’
‘Wearing this?’ She held up the garments. ‘Lu siau-ah?’
‘Yes, yes, I’ve gone mad, my head is full of wind,’ I answered in Hokkien, shooing her out of my room.
After lunch I put on the outfit. I pinned the front of the kebaya together with the kerongsang, a trio of silver orchid brooches linked by a slender chain. The sarong was cool and smooth against my thighs, but it also narrowed my stride, and the manek-manek shoes were so dainty that I was almost afraid of pressing my full weight onto their soles. Once fully attired, the clothes compelled me to move with a languid grace, as befitted a Nyonya with nothing to fill her days but pua’ chiki card games and gossip and scolding her daughter-in-law.
It was too complicated to do my hair in the Nyonya style – pinned up with a circle of long jewelled hairpins – so I gathered it into a simple chignon instead. When I finished I studied myself in the full-length mirror. I liked what I saw.
On my way out of the house I stopped by the nursery to give my sons a kiss. James gawked at me. ‘You look pretty, Mummy,’ he said, but Edward hugged his stuffed rabbit and started wailing when he saw me. Ah Peng picked him up and, rocking him gently in her arms, handed an envelope to me. I gave her a questioning look.
‘Me and Ah Keng and houseboys, we collect money give Dr Sun,’ she said.
I thanked her and kept the envelope in my purse. As I was leaving, she added, ‘No man can cause you sorrow. Only yourself.’
The road outside Arthur’s townhouse on Leith Street was lined with gharries and traps. Their syces squatted in the shade of the trees, smoking kretek or reading newspapers. I felt their eyes on me as I walked up the short straight path to the front entrance, and a crude comment or two in Hokkien from them singed my cheeks. Arthur was at the doors welcoming his guests. His eyes widened ever so slightly when he saw me before him.
‘I changed my mind,’ I said.
He smiled, performed an elaborate salaam and led me into his home. There were twenty to thirty people already gathered in the guest hall, talking and laughing among themselves. Sweeping my eyes around the room, I realised that I was the only angmoh there. A woman with the soft hands and the hard face of the wealthy eyed me from head to toe. I clutched my purse against my stomach and smiled at her; she gave me a cool nod and turned back to her friends’ conversation. Ah Peng was right, I was mad to wear the kebaya. I was mad to come here.
I turned to leave, but Arthur stopped me. ‘Sun Wen will be here soon,’ said Arthur, ‘and your brother’s coming too.’
‘Where’s your wife? I’d like to meet her.’
‘She took our daughter to my parents’ house. I didn’t want her disturbing us.’ His attention was distracted by another arrival at the front doors.
‘Go on.’ I gave him a reassuring nod.
Looking around the hall again, I recognised a young woman from the Tong Meng Hui seated at a table in a corner. She gave me a shy wave, as heartened to see a familiar face as I was. Pamphlets and booklets were arrayed in neat rows on the table, and a ledger lay invitingly open for the guests to record their pledges.
‘How much have you collected, Ah Ying?’ I asked her.
She swept her hand in disgust over the blank pages of the ledger. I handed her the envelope of money Ah Peng had given me. I watched her print the names of the donors and the amount in her careful script, and then I asked for her pen. I wrote Robert’s name and mine on the page and put down a figure that made her mouth gape.
‘That should kindle the fire,’ I said.
I retreated to a corner of the hall with a glass of wine. The windows were open, the late-afternoon breezes swelling the curtains. Arthur’s home was similar to the houses of Robert’s Straits Chinese clients, reflecting the Eastern and Western worlds they lived in. Bentwood chairs and half-moon tables inlaid with mother-of-pearl were lined against the walls, which were decorated with dados of ceramic tiles. Dominating the hall was a large, round, marble-topped table, a glass epergne in the shape of a swan in its centre. The Stoke-on-Trent floor tiles were laid out in a repeating floral design. Set close to the timbered ceilings were ventilation holes – shaped to symbolise bats because their name in Hokkien sounded similar to ‘wealth’, one of Robert’s clients had once explained to me – allowing the air to circulate and cool the house. The guest hall opened off to a sitting room on either side; one would be furnished in the Eastern style for their family and their Asiatic friends; the other sitting room would be European, used when they entertained their angmoh friends.
A pair of framed photographs on a half-moon table caught my eye. One was of Arthur in a dark waistcoat and tails, standing behind his wife; she was sitting in a blackwood armchair, dressed in her wedding gown, her oval face heavily powdered, a circle of silver pins moulding her hair into an elaborate chignon. The other photograph showed them holding their infant daughter. She had had her fifth birthday a few weeks ago, I remembered him telling me.
From the fragments of conversations I caught around me, everyone here seemed to move in the same circles, travelling regularly to Singapore and London and Europe. Like Arthur, they spoke without the local accent, and it made me think of how my mother had frequently scolded us so that Geoff and I would grow up speaking with the proper accent and not sound like Asiatics. If I closed my eyes I could have been in a room full of Tuan Besars and mems exchanging the latest news about what they had done during their Home Leave.
I was glad to see Geoff. I waved to him and he wended his way between the guests towards me. My brother towered over everyone in the room, and he was not oblivious to the admiring looks from the women; it had always been like this ever since we were young.
He gave me a peck on the cheek, leaned back and cocked an eyebrow at me. ‘What’s this? Dressing like a native now? I almost didn’t recognise you. It does look ravishing on you, I must say.’
‘A gentleman would have said, “You look ravishing in it.”’
‘Well, you look … different. And I don’t mean the dress. You seem … clearer, somehow. More defined. Sharper. How odd.’ Geoff lit our cigarettes and cast his eyes around the hall. ‘Robert here?’
‘KL. Left yesterday.’ Cigarette smoke veiled my face. I added quietly, ‘He took his lover with him.’ I sucked on my cigarette and released another cloud of smoke. ‘His Chinaman lover.’
My brother eyed me warily, as though he was only just beginning to realise that he was in the presence of a feral animal. I liked it – it made me feel potent, someone not to be trifled with.
‘How did you find out?’
‘His catamite left him a note. A rather sweet one, actually.’
Geoff winced. ‘I wish you wouldn’t use that word.’
‘What’s so objectionable about “note”?’
Despite himself, he burst out laughing. ‘Sometimes I think Mother was right – a woman shouldn’t be given too much education or have a large vocabulary.’
‘Idiot.’ I punched him lightly on his arm.
‘I’m shocked, utterly shocked, that you even know a word like “catamite”. What unsuitable books have you been reading, young lady?’
‘I followed the Wilde trials, you know, just like everyone else.’ Robert had been engrossed by the trials, reading the newspapers avidly every morning, and now I understood why. ‘The thought of Robert in bed with another man …’ I shuddered. ‘And a Chinaman too.’
‘Now that you know, your grounds for divorce have just become much stronger. Unassailable, I’d say.’
‘Are you mad? I don’t want my sons to grow up knowing that their father is a …’ I couldn’t utter the word aloud, not even to my own brother.
‘I’m sure he wouldn’t want them to know either, so it’s highly unlikely he’ll contest the divorce.’
‘Word will get out, Geoff. It always does. The mud will stick to us. It’ll never wash off. Never.’
‘So what are you going to do, then? Stay locked up in a dead marriage for the rest of your life?’
I blew gently on the glowing tip of my cigarette; the ring of fire brightened, eating up the paper. ‘Locked up? Not at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. I feel that I’ve been released from a prison I’d never realised I had been placed in. Strange, isn’t it? Do you know how liberating it is, to finally understand that it’s not my fault my marriage is a failure?’
‘I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a failure.’
‘The enviable Mr and Mrs Hamlyn, with their perfect marriage.’
‘No marriage is perfect, Les.’
‘I suppose you know lots of husbands who cheat on their wives.’
‘I know wives who betray their husbands too.’
‘But not many instances where the husband is sleeping with another man, I’m sure.’
‘It’s not common, I grant you that, but it’s not unheard of either.’
I gave him a penetrating look. ‘You’re not unfaithful to Penelope, I hope?’
‘Me? God forbid. The memsahib would geld me with a parang if I ever cheated on her with a woman – or a man, or a coconut tree.’ His voice hardened. ‘I detest – absolutely detest – people who are unfaithful. Look how our dear father used to hurt Mother.’
‘Yet I don’t hear you objecting to Sun Wen’s infidelity.’
‘He’s not hiding Chui Fen from his wife, is he? And anyway, he’s a Chinaman, it’s their way, having many wives. It’s polygamy, not adultery.’
‘Splitting hairs.’
He sighed. ‘Look, Les, I don’t approve of it – but there are much bigger issues at stake, important issues.’
‘He’s here,’ I said.
There was a stirring in the hall as the guests parted for Arthur and Sun Wen. The two men stopped beneath the chandelier in the centre of the hall and took in the faces around them.
‘My dearest friends,’ Arthur announced. ‘The man we’ve all come to meet – Dr Sun Yat Sen.’
Arthur retreated to the sidelines, leaving Sun Wen alone in the circle. The revolutionary acknowledged the genteel applause with a brief smile to a woman here, a nod to a man there. He was in his customary dark grey suit and matching waistcoat, his hair pomaded and parted precisely at the side, his moustache meticulous. His face, however, looked gaunter than I recalled; the flesh of his cheeks seemed to have been scooped out by a spoon.
An expectant silence settled over the hall, but still he waited, stretching out the anticipation. And then he began to speak. It was the first time that I was hearing him give a speech in English. He had a natural assurance and conviction, his words carrying us on a voyage through China’s troubled history; he described how his country had fallen to its present state; and he ended his speech by setting out the vital role the Overseas Chinese had to play in restoring the glory of China, the motherland of every single Chinese man and woman all over the world.
‘For the sake of our beloved China, for the sake of our motherland’s very life, I appeal to all of you – no, I beg you: give as much as you can. Our comrades overseas, people like you here today’ – Sun Wen’s eyes seemed to blaze at the faces before him – ‘they sacrifice their money. But our comrades in China, they sacrifice their lives.’
A round of respectful applause broke out again, but I wondered, as I discreetly wiped the tears from the corners of my eyes and looked around me, how much sympathy he had succeeded in rousing in the hearts of these people.
The servants were bringing out more wine and food, and the atmosphere livened up. They could easily pass as brothers, I thought as I observed Arthur introducing his friends to Sun Wen.
‘How graceful you look, Lesley,’ Sun Wen remarked when they eventually joined us. ‘Everyone can’t stop staring at you. Doesn’t she look beautiful, Arthur?’
‘You haven’t visited us for a while,’ I said, conscious of the warmth flushing my cheeks. ‘I must apologise for what Robert said. I hope you don’t bear us any ill will.’
‘Of course not. You are both constantly in my thoughts, but there are hundreds of urgent matters that require my attention. Did I tell you that we are going to publish our own newspaper? No? It will be called Kwong Wah Yit Poh – the Glorious China Daily. And what is more’ – a huge smile transformed his face – ‘for the first time in twenty years, my family are together again.’
‘I’m over the moon for you, Sun Wen,’ I said.
His wife and two daughters had arrived in Penang a few days ago. The whole family, including Chui Fen, were living in the bungalow on Dato Kramat Road. Only his son, still in Honolulu, had been unable to complete the family reunion.
‘A part of me wishes things would move faster, but another part wants to slow down time, even stop it completely, so we can stay together for longer.’ He sighed. ‘My daughters, they grow up so quickly.’
A thin, stylish woman elbowed her way into our little group. ‘Stirring speech, Dr Sun,’ she said, waving an ivory cigarette holder pinched between her fingers. ‘Diana Chua, David Chua’s wife. Tell me – what are your views on the Suffragettes? Will women in your new China be allowed to vote?’
‘I have always believed that men and women are equal.’ Sun Wen flicked a sardonic look at me, as if daring me to contradict him. ‘And in our new China, our new republic, they will be.’
‘You’re certainly more enlightened than our dear Queen Victoria. Do you know what she said? Women’s rights are a “wicked folly”. Can you believe that?’
‘Well, then, Diana,’ said Arthur, ‘you’d better make sure David gives generously to us.’
‘My poor David would be horrified if the day comes when his wife is considered his equal. And so would I – we all know I’m the superior one, don’t we, Arthur?’
‘That’s what you always tell us, Diana,’ said Arthur.
An approaching thunderstorm provided Arthur’s friends the excuse to take their leave. Most of them walked past the pledge table without even giving it a glance. Geoff had promised to meet his wife at the Penang Club. ‘And the memsahib doesn’t like to be kept waiting,’ he said apologetically. Within a few minutes Sun Wen and I were the only ones left. The servants began clearing up, so we moved into the sitting room – the European one, I gathered from the style in which it was decorated. I could hear Arthur chaffing his guests as he saw them out.
‘A waste of time, coming here,’ said Sun Wen.
‘Oh, don’t say that. You convinced many people today.’
‘The situation in China is worsening every day, and I’m stuck here, begging for crumbs from these rich, spoilt people.’ He paced restlessly around the sitting room. ‘These people – they feel nothing for China, for her pain. All they care about is England, bloody England.’
‘At least your family’s with you again,’ I said, trying to lighten his black mood.
He picked up a book from a side table, then set it down again. ‘I have a favour to ask, Lesley.’
One thing I had learned about Sun Wen: he was never shy when he wanted something. ‘You know I’m more than happy to help in any way I can.’
‘I wish to enrol my daughters in a school here, the best one.’
‘Well, you really can’t do any better than Convent Light Street,’ I said. ‘I’m an old girl, and I used to teach there.’
‘Will you put in a word with someone?’
‘I’ll speak to the headmistress – Sister Mathilda will want to know for how long they’ll be enrolled.’
‘I want them to complete their schooling here.’
‘But what happens when you return to China? You’re leaving your daughters here?’
‘The government is on its last legs. One powerful, concerted push, and it’ll come crashing down,’ he said. ‘But a dying animal will use every ounce of its remaining strength to fight, to fend off the killing blow. It will be at its most desperate. My life is in greater danger than ever, but I know my daughters will be safe in Penang. We have friends here – dear friends, like you and Robert.’
Arthur came into the sitting room. ‘That’s the last of them. Anyone for another drink?’
‘Did you speak to your father?’ Sun Wen asked.
‘He’s still perched firmly on the fence, I’m afraid.’
‘Tell him we will grant him exclusive rubber import rights for three years if he gives us sixty thousand dollars.’
Over the past few weeks I had begun to realise that Sun Wen viewed the Overseas Chinese largely as a source of money to be milked. I tried not to judge him, but his mercenary attitude made me uncomfortable.
‘I must go,’ Sun Wen said. ‘No need to see me out, Arthur.’ He gave a short bow to me and left.
I went over to the bookshelves. I had always enjoyed the mild voyeuristic thrill of seeing what other people read.
‘Quite an impressive collection of Somerset Maughams you’ve got here.’ I pointed to a row of books on one of the shelves. ‘As good as Robert’s.’
‘Everything he’s written. When I was studying in London I would go to all his plays. I remember one season he had four plays running in the West End at the same time. Four different plays. No one had ever achieved that before.’
‘He’s an old friend of Robert’s.’
‘You’ve met him?’
‘He wasn’t in London when we were there.’
Arthur ran his fingers across the spines of the books. ‘Which one’s your favourite? Mrs Craddock? Or The Merry-Go-Round?’
‘I’ve gone off him, actually.’
‘Sun Wen was right, you know.’ His voice was soft, but I could hear it clearly. ‘Everyone here couldn’t keep their eyes off you.’
My body felt very light, almost weightless, as I turned towards him. In the silence we looked at each other, each waiting for the other to speak, to move.
‘The House of Doors,’ I said softly.
We took separate rickshaws. The streets were deserted, the wind roiling up the fallen leaves, driving grit into my eyes. In the low, black clouds thunder prowled like a ravenous god. Many of the shophouses across town were already shuttered against the storm.
Having left first, I arrived before him. I inserted the key he had given me into the lock – I had to jiggle it a few times before it turned – and slipped inside, shutting the doors behind me. Faint spores of dust drifted around in the pallid light. In the dining hall the doors creaked discreetly as they turned in the air. The guzheng was still resting on its stand. I plucked at a string, flexing a solitary note – an E – into the stillness. I plucked it again and again; the notes sounded harsh. I stopped abruptly, clenching my hands. This is wrong. I should not have come here. I must leave this place, now, immediately.
But I did not move; I stayed there, watching the doors spinning above the tiles. The sky ripped open and the storm roared down into the air-well, the deluge so heavy, so mighty that I could have been standing at the foot of a cataract, its spray misting my arms and face.
I saw Arthur come into the dining hall. He slipped his way between the floating doors to me, appearing and disappearing as they opened and closed. And then he was before me, his hair dripping, rain plastering his shirt to his body. We did not speak, did not murmur even a word – we would not have heard each other above the storm anyway. I watched his hand rise from his side and reach past my face. I felt the heat of his palm as it curved over the nape of my neck. He drew me towards him and kissed me on my lips.
Time stopped. Eventually I opened my eyes and pulled away from him. I was conscious only of my heart’s stuttering rhythm, and the hard, rapid pounding of my breath. I ran my tongue over my lips; they had a flavour there I had never tasted before, a flavour so different from Robert’s. Then I realised that I could not remember what Robert’s mouth tasted like any more; I had forgotten it years ago.
I followed him up the spiral staircase, into a room lit only by thin slits of light cutting through the window shutters. In the centre of the room stood a double bed, the brass bedframe stark as the bones of a shipwreck that had come to rest on the ocean floor. In the watery half-light we undressed and reached for each other.
I opened my eyes, disoriented by the absence of sound. The rain had stopped a while ago, and the shadows in the corners of the room had thickened. My eyes were closing again when a sudden panic jolted me – I had been away from home all afternoon.
I got out of bed and hurriedly began to dress. My fingers fumbled with the kerongsang, dropping them. I cried out in frustration. Arthur placed his hands on mine, picked up the brooches from the floorboards and with a few deft movements pinned them on my kebaya lapels.
At the front doors I held out the key to him, the long thin key I had used to enter the house. He glanced at it, then looked at me. I opened my purse and dropped the key into it.
People were already emerging from their houses, families taking their evening stroll in the street, enjoying the cool, crisp air. I hesitated on the goh kaki, weighed down by a reluctance to leave. The world still looked the same, yet the pattern of its weave seemed different now. A lifetime had slipped past since I stepped into the house. Everything had changed, and it could never be undone.
I set off down Armenian Street. Passing a photographer’s studio on the corner of Victoria Road, I stopped to study the wedding portraits of the Straits Chinese couples in the window – the Nyonya ladies regal in their kebayas and the Baba men solemn in their Western suits. I pushed open the door and went inside. The Chinese man behind the counter looked up from his newspaper, his bored expression not changing the slightest as he took in my appearance.
He posed me in front of a dressing table with three adjustable mirrored panels to show off the jewelled hairpins worn by the Nyonya women. He motioned to me to sit in the bentwood armchair in front of the dressing table, but I chose to stand beside it. I waited while he developed the plate. When it was ready he put the print and the film into an envelope and gave it to me.
The lights of the shophouses had already come on when I left. Hawkers were firing up their charcoal stoves and setting out tables and stools on the pavements. A night market was springing to life, men and women chaffing one another with coarse jokes and insults as they set up their stalls. I flagged down a rickshaw and told the puller to take me home.
In spite of my newfound knowledge about my husband, I surprised myself by greeting him calmly when he returned from KL, even pressing my customary kiss on his cheek when he stepped into the house.
‘Did you win?’ I motioned to the houseboy to take his bag upstairs.
‘Of course. Trounced Harrison soundly. He was livid, absolutely livid. His client didn’t look pleased with him either.’ He glanced around him. ‘Where are the little rascals? Let’s take them for a swim, shall we?’
We played in the shallows until dusk fell. Robert grinned at me whenever he made our sons squeal with delighted terror, and I couldn’t help but think back to the earliest days of our marriage. They felt like another lifetime ago.
If Robert detected any change in me, he made no mention of it, not even obliquely. I felt … irradiated … by my afternoon with Arthur, as though I had fallen asleep in the sun too long, and I was certain it was visible to everyone around me. I was an adulteress now.
II
Two mornings a week I would go to the reading club. It was purgatory, sitting at the long table in the dining hall with the others and feigning interest in my work, when I was burning to be in bed with Arthur. Around mid morning I would leave the reading club and stroll down the street to the House of Doors, trying not to give anyone watching the impression that I was in a mad rush to get there. Arthur and I never arrived together and, except for our mornings at the reading club, I was inflexible that we were never to be seen together in public.
‘No letters or written messages, no little notes that might fall into the wrong hands,’ I warned him. ‘No one must ever find out about us.’
‘You’re being unduly cautious, aren’t you? What if something happened and I couldn’t meet you?’
‘I will wait here for you. If you can’t come, I’ll know something’s keeping you. I won’t be upset.’ I remembered the note I had found in Robert’s pocket. ‘No letters, Arthur.’
At the birthday dinner of one of our friends I glimpsed a face in the crowd I did not expect to see. I nudged Robert. ‘Isn’t that Wagner over there?’
It was less than a week before Ethel’s trial; I would have expected her lawyer to be busy preparing for it in KL instead of attending parties at the Penang Club.
Wagner waved and squeezed his way over to us. ‘Hullo, Robert, looking well,’ he boomed. ‘Wonderful party, what?’
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.
‘I got here yesterday,’ he explained. ‘I had a full day of meetings today. I’m heading back to KL first thing in the morning. Just the person I wanted to see, Lesley. You’ll be attending Ethel’s trial, I presume?’
The canny gleam in his eye made me tread warily. ‘She needs the support of all her friends,’ I said.
He slapped his palms together. ‘Excellent. In which case you’d have no objection if I were to call you as a witness?’
‘You want me to testify?’ My mouth went dry. ‘What … what about?’
‘Well, what she was wearing that night, for one thing. You know – the fact that it’s not at all out of the ordinary that she should be in her fancy tea gown when Steward showed up. I really must thank you again for bringing it to my attention.’ Glancing quickly around the room, he dropped his voice. ‘The thing is, well, you being her closest friend, I’d like you to testify as to her character too. You could help us scotch the rumours flying around – you know, about her and Steward …’
My immediate instinct was to refuse. ‘You’ve discussed this with Ethel?’
‘She’s very stubborn. She’s adamant that we mustn’t bother you. Quite adamant.’ He shook his head in wonder. ‘With all the problems she’s facing, she feels it’d be highly inconsiderate to trouble you. I told her you’d be coming for the trial anyway.’ He looked hard at me ‘It won’t harm her prospects at all to have a woman on the stand testifying in her defence. In fact, I am of the opinion that it would strengthen her case considerably. Pooley thinks so too.’
‘You’ve got James Pooley helping you defend Ethel?’ asked Robert.
‘William and Ethel wanted him.’
‘Well, the odds of her getting off scot-free have improved tremendously’ – Robert patted Wagner’s shoulder – ‘not that I ever doubted your abilities, old chap.’
‘I haven’t really made up my mind if I want to attend her trial.’ I was conscious of Robert’s eyes on me. ‘Have you asked her other friends? Kathleen Simpson? Or Frances Reed?’
‘Every one of them told me they won’t do it. Look – we’re all aware that Ethel’s never really endeared herself to the other ladies in KL,’ Wagner said. ‘You’re not just her closest friend, Lesley, you’re her only friend now.’
The House of Doors was the first property Arthur’s grandmother had bought in Penang. Born to a family of printers in a village in southern China, she had been conscripted into the Taiping rebels’ army when they conquered her province. She was twelve years old. A year later, in the spring of 1853, the rebels took Nanking and established it as the capital of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and she was assigned to work with a Scottish missionary in the city, helping him typeset and print the bibles that carried the Heavenly King’s warped teachings of Christianity. She learned the technique of letterpress printing from the missionary, who also taught her to read and write English. When the Heavenly Kingdom fell to the emperor’s forces in 1864, she fled China with the help of the missionary, who told her she would find a haven in Penang in the Southern Seas. Within a few years of arriving on the island she had saved up enough money to start her own business printing calendars and – something which I found ironic – bibles for the local missionaries – the King James Version, of course, and not the version of the Heavenly King. Over the years she acquired a string of shophouses and larger houses in more salubrious addresses, but she always kept that first shophouse in Armenian Street where she had started her printing business. When she died she had left it to her favourite grandson, with the stipulation that he was never to sell it.
The house was long and deep, its interior cool even on the most scorching of days. I liked its dark chengal-timber floorboards and the bright floral patterns of its encaustic floor tiles. A feeling of timelessness hovered within its four walls, as if the sun had slipped behind the moon and remained there, fixed in a permanent eclipse.
The House of Doors became my sanctuary. I went there even when I wasn’t meeting Arthur, just to be by myself and, for a few hours at least, to forget everything outside its walls, forget that I had a husband, and yes, forget even that I was a mother with two young sons. Inside I could become a different woman, living a different life.
I brought little items to the house every time I went there – flowers and pot plants and books. We didn’t always spend our time in bed; sometimes we would sit in the dining hall and drink tea and talk. We spoke about many things: our childhoods, the books we were reading, China, Ethel’s trial, and always, Penang. From him I discovered so many stories about our home. He had a deep, intense love for the island, a love which I soon learned to share.
Sometimes he would play the guzheng for me. I enjoyed watching the way his hands skated over the strings, his fingers plucking and pressing down on them, summoning up mournful songs from dynasties long crumbled to dust. The notes shimmering from the strings sounded like condensed drops of tears; they echoed in the air, distilling into the silence.
On one of our visits to the house he played a song I had never heard before, singing the lyrics – in French, to my surprise – in his clean, if unremarkable, tenor.
‘What was that?’ I asked when he finished.
‘Reynaldo Hahn, L’heure exquise,’ he replied. ‘The words are from Verlaine’s poem. He wrote it for his wife.’ He translated the poem into English for me. The words had the chill glaze of moonlight on the surface of a frozen pond.
‘He must have loved her very much,’ I said.
‘Perhaps he did – at least in the beginning.’
‘What happened to them?’
‘Just before she gave birth to their first child, he invited a young poet to stay with them. When the child was born, a son, Verlaine left her – and their new-born son – and travelled around Europe with the young poet. Rimbaud was his name. Arthur Rimbaud.’
It cut too close to home, this tale. Nevertheless, there was a stark beauty flowing through the song, an icicle purity, and I often asked him to play it for me.
In addition to collecting doors, Arthur was also a tea connoisseur. On one of my visits to the House of Doors he came out of the kitchen with a tray of tea. He said nothing, but from his bearing and expression I knew that it was something special. He filled two tiny Straits Chinese porcelain teacups with the thin, almost translucent liquid, picked up one cup with both hands and set it down on the table before me.
I brought the cup to my nose. ‘It smells’ – I tried to put my impressions into words – ‘it smells of the first drops of rain falling on the lawn on a scorching day.’ I took a sip and closed my eyes, letting the tea pool on my tongue for a moment, as he had taught me. ‘It has a melancholic taste.’ I looked at him, taken aback. ‘How strange – that a tea can taste of loss.’
‘“The Fragrance of the Lonely Tree”,’ he said. ‘I bought it from a tea merchant in Tokyo a few years ago.’
It was raining, thin sparkling cords of water running off the eaves, flooding the air-well.
‘All you need is a few carp swimming in it and it could be a pond,’ I said. ‘You should have the drains looked at, they’re probably blocked.’
He gave me an indulgent smile. ‘They’re not blocked. The air-well is designed to swirl the water in a clockwise flow before it runs out of the house.’
‘Whatever for?’
‘To retain wealth and good fortune inside the house, of course.’
Whenever he uttered something like that, or whenever I watched him in a heated discussion with the others at the reading club, a sudden realisation would strike me: But … he’s Chinese. And then a second later the shock would fade away, and he would be just Arthur again, just a man I knew.
Later, lazing in bed after we had finished making love, I asked him to tell me his Chinese name. He told me, and added, ‘It means “To Engrave a Record of Aspiration”.’
I repeated his name a few times, trying to get the tones right. Knowing the meaning of his name made me see him in a slightly altered way, as though I had been given a glimpse of him that was only visible to those who were literate in Chinese.
A moth flaked down from the rafters and settled on the sheets. I reached out to brush it away, but Arthur stayed my hand.
‘Don’t harm it,’ he said. ‘They’re the souls of the people we once loved, come to visit us, to watch over us.’
That disconcerting lurch again, even after I thought I had become used to him. ‘Who told you that?’
‘My grandmother. The one who left me this house.’
‘So it could even be Grandma watching us now?’ I gave a cheeky little wave to the moth. ‘Ah Mah,’ I said in Hokkien, ‘I hope you averted your eyes earlier.’
He laughed nervously. ‘Don’t be disrespectful to my Ah Mah.’
The question that had been lurking in the depths of my mind broke the surface. ‘Am I the first angmoh woman you’ve ever slept with?’
He stared into the rafters, stroking my hand in a slow, distracted way. ‘There was a girl in London … when I was doing my internship.’
‘Were you two in love?’
‘We liked each other very much, but no, we weren’t in love. She married an Anglican minister in Colchester.’ He kissed my hand. ‘I went past Cassowary House yesterday afternoon. I stood outside your gates, looking at it.’
I pulled my hand away. I felt I was swimming in the warm sea and had entered a patch of icy current. If I had parted the curtains in the sitting room and looked out at just the right moment, I would have seen him standing at the end of my driveway, and the two worlds I had been determinedly keeping apart would have intruded into each other.
‘You shouldn’t have done that.’
‘I just wanted to see where you live.’ He was taken aback by my anger. ‘I want to picture you going about your days.’
‘I don’t ever think of you in your home, Arthur; I don’t think of you with your wife and your daughter,’ I said. ‘I think of you here, only here. If you want to picture me, then picture me here, in this house, our house.’
He sat up against the headboard and looked at me. ‘Why are you here, Lesley?’
What could I tell him? Eventually I settled on the truth – a partial version of it, at least. ‘Robert stopped sleeping with me years ago.’
‘It happens in a lot of marriages.’
‘Yours too?’
‘My wife doesn’t enjoy it. She’s never said so, but, well …’
‘Perhaps she just doesn’t enjoy it with you,’ I said. ‘Perhaps she has a lover too.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Ridiculous? If you can seek gratification elsewhere, why can’t she? You and Sun Wen,’ I said, ‘forever pontificating about fairness and equality, but when it comes to your own wives …’
‘It’s not the same.’
Arguing about it with him – or with any man, for that matter – would be as fruitful as trying to push back the wind. ‘I accepted Robert’s lack of interest.’ My mind groped for the right words. ‘I … accustomed myself to it.’ I had never spoken to anyone about the rot in my marriage before, and the words I wanted to use were rusted from lack of use. ‘I told myself that he’s much older than me, he probably doesn’t need … intimacy … any more. But I like it, I enjoy it.’
‘All these years you’ve never considered sleeping with someone else? Never thought about having an affair?’
‘Now you’re the one who’s being ridiculous.’
‘What changed your mind? I know I’m charming and devastatingly handsome, but still …’
‘Do you remember that evening at the E&O when you brought Sun Wen to meet Robert?’
‘The very first time I met you. How could I forget?’
‘Well, just that very morning I found out that my husband had been unfaithful.’
The smile was blotted from his face. ‘So this’ – he swept his hand over our bodies, over the bed – ‘all this is just to get back at him?’
If only I could tell him it was much more than that. Once I had discovered that Robert preferred men in his bed, I understood that nothing I did would bring him back to me, to the intimacy I craved.
‘Who’s he sleeping with?’ Arthur went on when I didn’t reply. ‘One of your best friends? Some pretty young lady from a committee you’re on?’
I weighed up what I could say, how much I was willing to reveal. ‘It doesn’t matter who she is,’ I said in the end. By sleeping with Arthur I had betrayed my husband, but I would not betray his secret; I would not shame him.
‘You still love him,’ said Arthur.
Wings clapping soundlessly, the moth floated back into the shadows of the rafters.
‘Every marriage has its own rules,’ I said.
Voices drifted up from the street below, only to lose themselves in the canyons of silence between us. Attempting to lighten the mood, I said, ‘I’ve always wondered why it’s called Cassowary House.’
He brushed his foot slowly down the side of my leg. He had narrow, well-formed feet. ‘It’s because of your casuarina tree,’ he said. ‘The Malay name for them is “kasuari”.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they say their leaves resemble the cassowary bird’s feathers.’
‘It’s an ugly tree, isn’t it?’
‘No tree is ugly, Lesley. Each and every tree has its own charms, its own kind of beauty.’ He remembered something. ‘The Malays also call them “whispering trees”.’
‘I’ve never heard that before.’
‘They say that if you stand under a casuarina during a full moon, you can hear its leaves whispering to you, whispering all the things you want to know about your future.’
‘The whispering tree,’ I murmured. How strange, that with just a few words something which I had always found unattractive was now transformed into a thing of beauty.
‘I’ve just finished a missionary’s account of his experiences in the Taiping Rebellion,’ he said. ‘It’s horrific, but utterly engrossing. I’ll bring it next time.’
‘I can’t see you next week,’ I said. ‘I’m going to KL for Ethel’s trial.’
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘You’ll stick out like a sore thumb at the Empire.’
‘There are other hotels in KL, you know.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, Arthur.’
Couldn’t he understand that it was too risky for us to be seen together? Sooner or later someone would find out about us. I lived in fear of it. I took care to dress plainly and conceal my face beneath a bonnet or a wide-brimmed hat whenever I was in Armenian Street, but I was a European woman, and even though the people here were used to the sight of me by now, I still stood out. The most sensible thing to do was to end my affair with Arthur, but I didn’t want to do it. I couldn’t.
‘Ethel’s lawyer has summoned me to be a witness,’ I said. ‘The prosecutor will probably cross-examine me as well, and there are certain things concerning Ethel I don’t want to be interrogated about.’
‘She was sleeping with him, wasn’t she?’
‘Since December last year.’
‘Now it all starts to make sense.’
‘She had ended it last month, but he couldn’t get it into his head that it was over. That evening she shot him – he had gone to see her, to change her mind.’
‘But she wouldn’t budge.’ He assembled the pieces in his head. ‘He got angry and tried to rape her. So she shot him.’
‘That’s what she told me.’ I recalled the various scenarios Robert had laid out a few weeks ago. Would the truth, the real truth, ever emerge? ‘I begged her to tell her lawyer, but she wouldn’t even consider it.’
‘It would certainly make her defence more believable. The judge would be more sympathetic to her plight.’ Realisation turned its wick up in his eyes. ‘Ah, of course. Her affair with Steward is just gossip now, but if she told her lawyer, and if he used that in court …’
‘She’d be tarred and feathered as an adulteress, whatever the verdict.’
‘Well, don’t go to KL,’ said Arthur. ‘It won’t matter in the end, you know. I told you: even if they find her guilty, they’d never hang her.’
If only things were so simple. ‘Robert would find it suspicious if I didn’t go. I’ve been so supportive of Ethel right from the start. That bloody tea gown – I wish I’d kept my mouth shut about it.’
‘There’s more to the episode than meets the eye,’ said Arthur. ‘It’ll make for a gripping story.’
‘Nobody will give two hoots about the trial – or Ethel – once it’s over,’ I said. ‘By the end of the year they would have forgotten about her. She could return to her old, normal life. And that’s how it should be.’