I
After the trial, whenever I went to the reading club the people there would dart warning looks at one another and drop their voices. The atmosphere was taut with tension and paranoia. I suspected Sun Wen was cobbling the final plans together for another attempt to overthrow the emperor, but I never asked Arthur what they were up to.
Sun Wen had formed a committee to publish the Tong Meng Hui’s first newspaper in Penang. They had set up a printing press in one of the rooms near the kitchen. I joined the others already gathered in the dining hall to witness the first issue rolling off the press.
‘The Kwong Wah Yit Poh,’ Sun Wen declared, the newspaper held high over his head like a victory banner. ‘From today our voices will be heard, loud and clear.’
The Glorious China Daily was sold in shops sympathetic to the Tong Meng Hui, but most newsagents in George Town would have no truck with it. Paging through it with Arthur when we were alone, I came upon a photograph of Ethel Proudlock accompanying a long article. It was disorienting to see her face hemmed in by the vertical bars of Chinese writing.
‘I wrote it,’ said Arthur.
He read the article aloud to me, translating it into English. I thought he had been fair and objective to Ethel, sticking to the facts and never divulging what I had told him about her affair with William Steward.
It was hard to believe that three weeks had passed by since Ethel was sentenced to hang. There were many who felt that she had got what she deserved, but there were letters in the newspapers every day criticising the court’s decision – Ethel had been defending her honour, they wrote, and to sentence her to death for this was a gross travesty of justice. It shouldn’t be allowed to happen to a European woman.
Ethel’s lawyers had filed an appeal the day after her fate was laid down. William Proudlock wrote to the Secretary of State for the Colonies requesting a royal pardon, and the European Women’s Club in KL and Penang sent a cable to the Queen, imploring her to persuade the King to grant it. When the Secretary of State rejected William’s request and informed him that the appeal for leniency should be sent to the Sultan of Selangor, hundreds of us in Penang, KL and Singapore signed petitions to the Sultan. We were informed that he would only consider our petitions when the result of Ethel’s appeal was made known. All we – and Ethel – could do now was wait for the date of her appeal to be set down.
I went to see her. I had to. A guard led me deep into the gaol, down long, chilly corridors hollowed by the echoes of our footsteps. I had lost my bearings by the time we stopped outside her cell. She was lying on her bunk, staring at the ceiling. The Sikh guard nodded to me and went to stand at the end of the narrow corridor.
‘Ethel.’ The thick, damp walls dulled my voice. She didn’t move, and I called to her again, louder.
Slowly, like a heavy stone being lifted, she turned her head towards me. She stared at me for a long time. Eventually she pushed herself up, brushed the strands of hair from her brow and trudged barefoot across the grey cement floor, stopping a few inches from the bars of the cell. I had been warned against any physical contact with the prisoner, so I kept my hands at my side. Ethel’s cheekbones were sharper, her hair greasy and tangled. Pouches hung beneath her eyes. She was dressed in prison uniform: a loose grey cotton blouse and long skirt. She seemed to have aged twenty years.
‘Oh, Ethel …’
‘They’ve put me here. This place, this is where they keep the condemned,’ she said. ‘I’m not allowed to mix with the other women; I’m locked up day and night. The guards watch me all the time.’ Her laugh sounded like a death rattle. ‘They think I’ll kill myself.’
‘Be strong, Ethel. It’ll soon be over. The appeal will overturn the judgement. You’ll be acquitted. Robert says so. Everyone says so.’
‘I’ve asked Pooley to withdraw my appeal.’
I stared at her, my hands gripping the bars. ‘Are you mad? Why on earth would you do that?’
She began to pace up and down her cell: four steps to one wall, then four steps back to the opposite wall. ‘I can’t stand it here, Lesley. I hate it. I hate it! It’ll be another month before they hear my appeal. I have to get out, immediately. Today. Now. I can’t bear to stand in court again and have everyone staring at me, judging me again. I can’t. I just can’t.’ She stopped. ‘I’ve asked the Sultan to pardon me.’ She started her mindless pacing again.
‘But, Ethel …’ My mind fumbled through the ramifications of her decision. ‘You know what that means, don’t you? If you withdraw your appeal? Yes, the Sultan might pardon you, but you won’t be exonerated of your crime – you’ll remain a convicted murderer. You’ll carry that stain with you for the rest of your life. It’s not fair to Dorothy – or William. Oh, for heaven’s sake, Ethel, will you please just sit down! You’re making me dizzy.’
She stopped abruptly, flinging me a sullen look. ‘I’ve already told Mr Pooley, and I’ve written a letter to the Mail.’
She fell back onto her bunk bed and turned her face to the wall. I called out to her, but she ignored me.
Robert went down to KL for an urgent meeting with his client. He took Peter Ong with him. I was glad of his absence as it allowed me to spend my days with Arthur. How ironic that Robert and I each had our own Chinese lovers. We had this unusual thing in common, but we could never discuss it. Between us lay this great, heavy silence, accreting over the years, layer upon layer, hardening like a coral reef, except a coral reef was a living thing, wasn’t it?
‘All everyone could talk about was your friend withdrawing her appeal and asking the Sultan to pardon her,’ Robert remarked when he came home a few evenings later. We had just sat down to dinner. ‘People are furious that she’s putting her fate in the hands of the Sultan. You should hear how they’re tearing her to pieces. It’s absolutely vicious.’
‘I warned her that she’d still be a convicted murderer even if the Sultan pardoned her.’
‘The implications are much more calamitous than that.’
‘What are you talking about, Robert?’
‘Ethel Proudlock has damaged our prestige among the natives. “How can we allow an Asiatic potentate to exercise the power of life and death over a European, an Englishwoman?”’
‘They wouldn’t care two pins about any of that if it were their own necks in the noose.’
Robert wiped his lips carefully with his napkin. ‘Sun Wen gave a speech at a Chinese Club in Macalister Road last week,’ he said. ‘He attacked British rule in Malaya. Openly. Someone reported it to Sir John.’
‘What’s he going to do?’ I was worried, but I tried not to let it show. The governor of the Straits Settlements was the god who ruled over our lives.
‘He’s signed the orders expelling Sun Wen from Penang. He’s to be put on the first ship out tomorrow.’
Images of bedlam at the Tong Meng Hui headquarters flooded my mind. I forced down the urge to warn Arthur. No letters, no notes; no messages. There must be nothing tangible to link us, no crumbs dropped along the trail.
‘What will happen to his family?’ I could hear the faint tremor in my own voice. ‘His daughters have just started school.’
‘The deportation order applies only to him, but they’ll pack up and follow him later, I suppose. Oh, don’t look so distraught, my dear. It was only a matter of time before he was asked to leave, you know that.’ Robert turned his whisky tumbler around in his hand, volleying shards of light onto the walls. ‘You’ll want to see him off tomorrow. Do convey my farewell to him. I don’t think we’ll ever see him here again.’
He still suspected that I had been having an affair with Sun Wen. My dearest husband might have his lover, and we might not have shared the same bed in years, but I was still his wife.
We sat there in the silence, our true thoughts camouflaged from each other. What sustained a marriage, kept it going year upon year, I realised, were the things we left unmentioned, the truths that we longed to speak forced back down our throats, back into the deepest, darkest chambers of our hearts.
II
Over a hundred men and women were gathered around Sun Wen and his family when I arrived at Swettenham Pier at dawn. A group of pigtailed officials from the Chinese Legation stood at the sidelines, observing. I pushed my way through the sombre, restless crowd to Sun Wen. Chui Fen’s arm was curled around the drooping shoulders of a much older woman. It was the first time I had seen Sun Wen’s wife. The short, stocky woman was weeping, her two daughters comforting her.
For a moment or two Sun Wen and I just looked at each other. I thought of the first time I had met him. I thought of how I had been changed by that meeting. He bowed to me and pressed his palm on his heart. ‘For all that you’ve done for our revolution, Lesley, I thank you. My family thanks you. China thanks you.’
‘Where will you go?’
‘England, and then onwards to America, always onwards.’ He glanced at his wife, his daughters and Chui Fen. ‘My family will remain here. I shall send for them when the future has been determined.’
‘If they need anything, Sun Wen, anything at all, they must tell me.’
‘Come to China when we have created our republic, Lesley.’ Beneath his calm demeanour I sensed he was putting up a heroic front for his family and his followers; and, perhaps, most of all, for himself. ‘Come and see for yourself the dawn of the new country you helped bring into existence.’
He gripped my hands, then let them go. I went to stand beside Arthur. He leaned slightly into me, his arm brushing against mine. I kept my arm there, feeling the warmth radiating off him.
A pair of Sikh policemen escorted Sun Wen to the end of the pier, where the SS Edinburgh was waiting to cast off. At the foot of the gangplank Sun Wen stopped and thanked the policemen. He straightened his shoulders, and then he ascended the gangplank, moving at a stately pace. At the top he removed his hat and turned around to look back at the crowd below, his eyes searching for his wife and daughters. He raised his hand in a farewell to them and to every one of us, holding it aloft for a long moment.
The ship sounded its whistle, and the tugboats rumbled into life, pulling the vessel out into the shipping lanes. We lined the pier, Arthur and I and Sun Wen’s family and the people of the Tong Meng Hui, and we watched the ship carry Sun Wen away from Penang.
Sun Wen’s deportation lit a fire under his supporters. The men and women of the Tong Meng Hui travelled around Penang and Malaya making speeches and spreading Sun Wen’s calls to rise up against the Ching monarchy; they raised funds by organising Cantonese and Teochew opera troupes to perform in villages and tin mines. I continued to visit the reading club twice a week, working at the long table for an hour or two before slipping off to the House of Doors.
This morning as I stepped onto its five-foot way, something made me look twice at the doors. They were plain and bare, no different from how they had always looked, yet there was something different about them, something I couldn’t put my finger on. I took a step back, but found nothing out of the ordinary. I took another half-step back, at an oblique angle. I tilted my head slightly to one side, and I saw it.
Faint lines on the face of the wood, forming an arcane design. The pattern looked familiar, but for the of life of me I couldn’t remember where I had come upon it before. I took half a step forward. The lines disappeared, like dust wiped away by a piece of cloth.
‘What is that odd-looking symbol on your front doors?’ I asked Arthur later when we were lying in bed. ‘It was never there before, was it?’
‘I asked Pak Musa across the street to carve it last week,’ he replied. ‘Somerset Maugham put it on every one of his books. He said in an interview that it’s a sign to keep away bad luck.’
Of course. Now I remembered where I had seen it before.
‘I’ve always liked it,’ said Arthur. ‘I thought: Why not put it on my front doors? I want it to protect this house.’ He shaped his palm to my cheek. ‘Our house.’
III
In the dying days of August an insurrection broke out in Canton. We held our breath, wondering if this was the spark that would ignite the powder keg. But two weeks later the rebellion was savagely put down by the imperial army. More than seventy revolutionaries were executed – one of them a schoolteacher from Penang. The mood in the reading club was bleak; quarrels broke out among the members, some criticising Sun Wen’s weak leadership, others voicing their unwavering support for him. Listening to the arguments raging around me, I remembered that evening on our verandah, Sun Wen listing his many failures on his fingers. I feared that he would never succeed.
A month later another uprising erupted, this one in Wuchang. It would collapse like all the others before it, I remarked to Arthur. But week after week the neighbouring provinces rose up against the government. The rebellion caught fire and flared across China. Sun Wen, in America raising money, was caught unawares by events and rushed back to Canton on the fastest ship. He had not organised the latest insurrections himself, but naturally he had to be seen to be taking the lead.
IV
One afternoon Arthur and I were sitting by the air-well in the House of Doors, sipping tea and listening to the patter of the falling rain.
‘We had a meeting last night,’ Arthur began. ‘Thirty members from the KL Tong Meng Hui volunteered to go to China. Twenty from Penang.’ The water in the air-well had already risen to our ankles. ‘I was one of them.’
I put down my cup and stared at him. ‘But … how long will you be away? When will you come back?’
‘Until I’m not needed there.’
‘That could take years.’ I could not believe what I was hearing. ‘You can’t do that to your parents, Arthur. What about your wife? And your daughter? You can’t do that to them.’ And most all, I thought, but did not say aloud: You can’t do that to me.
‘If all of us felt like that, there would be no revolution, no change for the better, would there? Now is the time for us to act, Lesley, to give all that we can give.’
‘You’re just bloody selfish,’ I said. ‘Just like every man I’ve ever known: Robert, Sun Wen, my father. Even Geoff. Always thinking about your own needs, your own pleasures.’
‘We’re this close to succeeding.’ He pinched a sliver of empty air in front of our faces. ‘This close, Lesley. Sacrifices have to be made. Sun Wen accepted it long ago. So must I.’
‘Why is it that when you men make sacrifices it’s always we women who must suffer the most?’
I got up and walked to the end of the hall, my wet footprints following me across the tiles. I touched one of the doors hanging from the ceiling, set it spinning slowly. ‘She will break your heart.’ I turned around and looked back at him. My footprints were already evaporating from the tiles, as though I had never existed, had never stepped foot inside this house.
He did not understand my words. ‘China,’ I said. ‘China will break your heart.’
We saw each other only one more time before he sailed to Canton. In the dining hall, witnessed only by the spiralling doors, I gave him a maroon velvet pouch.
‘Open it,’ I said. ‘Go on. I won’t think you rude.’
He loosened the drawstring and pulled out a silver chain from inside the pouch. Hanging from the end of the chain was a silver amulet in the shape of the lines he had had carved on his doors. I had traced the symbol from one of Maugham’s novels on a sheet of paper and given it to a silversmith in Kimberley Street.
I took the chain from Arthur’s fingers and looped it over his neck, adjusting the amulet’s position until it hung exactly at the centre of his chest. With my palm I pressed it firmly against his shirt, pressed it into his skin.
‘To protect you,’ I said. ‘To keep you safe.’
He took my hand and gripped it. ‘I’ll write to you,’ he said. ‘You’ll always know where I am, what I’m doing.’
I shook my head. ‘I told you from the first day, Arthur – no letters.’
‘Everything’s different now.’
‘No letters,’ I repeated firmly. ‘I will wait for you here, in Penang. I won’t leave. I won’t go anywhere.’ I nodded at the guzheng in the corner. ‘Will you play a song for me?’
He sat down at the guzheng, resting his hands on the strings. Then he started to play L’heure exquise, more slowly than I had heard him play it before, as though he didn’t want the song to end. The music seeped through the air, into the house, seeped into me, and my heart, beating in its ark of bones, expanded and collapsed with every breath I took, each one heavier than the last. All the exquisite hours we had shared between us – where had they disappeared to? And would we ever hold them in our hands again?
The song came to its end. The final note dissolved into the silence. We embraced and kissed, and I turned to leave. But then I remembered there was still one more thing left to do. I took out the key from my purse and gave it to him.
He placed it back on my palm, folded my fingers over the key, and then pressed his lips on them.
IV
A week after Arthur sailed to Canton, an item was delivered to the house. The servants had propped it up in the vestibule when I returned from town. I stood there, looking at the leaf of a pair of doors, at the hawk drifting over a misty crag and the four lines of a poem by a Japanese warrior from long ago.
When Robert came home from work that evening he told me that the Sultan of Selangor had announced that he would be pardoning Ethel, but only on one condition – she had to leave Malaya, and never return.
‘That’s harsh,’ I said.
‘Harsher than a rope around her neck? No, my dear. The Sultan is right – it’s better this way, better for her that she leave and never come back again.’
‘Better for her, or for everyone else?’
‘The Sultan may have pardoned her, but her own people – us whites – will never forgive her,’ said Robert. ‘All everybody wants now is to forget that she ever lived here, forget that she ever existed.’
One of the first things Ethel Proudlock did when she was released from gaol was to give interviews for the newspapers. I found it hard to understand after her steadfast refusal to have anything to do with the press during her trial. She continued to maintain that she was innocent, but her words found no room in the hearts of the people who had once given her all their support, who had written letters to the newspapers and signed petitions demanding that she be freed.
She was given a week to pack her things and leave Malaya with her daughter. I asked her to stay with us on her way to England. She took pains over her appearance and made every effort to be gay and talkative, but she never left our house to go into town, not even once; instead she spent her two days with us in the garden or on the beach with Dorothy.
‘I’ll miss KL, and I’ll miss you,’ said Ethel, ‘but oh, I can’t tell you how terribly glad I am to leave.’
It was her last afternoon in Penang, and we were having tea in the garden. The trees luxuriated in the wind, their leaves seeming almost to be purring.
‘You will write?’ I said.
‘Of course. We must keep in touch.’ She reached over and squeezed my hand. ‘You’re a dear, dear friend, Lesley. What you did for me in the trial … I’ll never forget it.’
It was the first time she had ever raised the subject. ‘It didn’t help much at all, in the end, did it?’
‘You didn’t betray me – that’s what matters most to me.’
‘What’s William going to do? He’ll join you in England?’
The light emptied from her eyes; they took on an absence, a void, as if there was no longer anyone behind them. ‘I never want to see him again.’
‘You can’t mean that,’ I said. ‘He’s your husband. He stood by your side all through your terrible ordeal. He adores you.’
‘He made me do it, Lesley.’ Her voice sounded dead, as dead as her eyes. Despite the cloudless sky I felt cold all of a sudden. ‘I had no choice. He made me do it. He made me kill William.’
‘Whatever do you mean? Ethel? What are you talking about?’
She turned her bracelet on her wrist a few times. Then, with a visible lurch, like a motor car jerking into life, she seemed to come back to herself.
‘I’m glad we’re leaving,’ she said, smiling at me.
The next morning I took mother and daughter to the harbour. I was the only one there to wave them farewell as the ship sailed away from Penang, but journalists in every port of call charted her progress across the oceans; I read about her arrival in Colombo and Port Said and, finally, Tilbury. And after that I heard no more of her.
V
One morning in January 1912 I came down to breakfast to find Robert looking oddly at me over the top of his newspaper. He waited for me to sit down before he handed it to me.
‘It’s President Sun Yat Sen now,’ he said.
I read the article. The Ching dynasty was dead. No longer did a Son of Heaven rule over China. The Republic of China had come into being.
I put down the paper and stared out to the sea. He had done it; Sun Wen had achieved his dream. I wanted to cry, but I forced myself to hold back my tears. Not in front of Robert. I prayed Arthur was safe; I prayed the amulet I gave him was casting its protective shield over him.
The moment Robert left for work I quickly changed and rushed off to the reading club. The celebrations were already in full swing when I arrived. People were making extemporaneous speeches and belting out patriotic songs that were regularly interrupted by someone shouting slogans and Sun Wen’s name.
I cheered and clapped along with them. But as I looked at the men and women around me – so young, so fired up with purpose – I knew that I did not belong there any more. Perhaps I never did. A small fragment of the larger world, which for a brief moment had extended its hand to me, had moved on, leaving me behind. I chatted and laughed with everyone around me, but not one of them noticed or cared when, after a while, I left the place, closing the doors behind me.
Out in the bustling street, I paused and looked back at the house. I thought of the first time I had gone there, and I thought of the countless times since that evening. And then, silently, I bade my farewell to it.
The winds of old longings blew my sails down the street to the House of Doors. Its window shutters were closed up, the front doors locked and stamped with an invisible seal.
As I emerged onto Victoria Street, my eyes fell upon a line of Chinese coolies at an open-air Indian barber in a back alley. Curious, I stopped to watch them. One after another of the men perched themselves on the barber’s high stool. The barber pegged a sheet of newspaper around their shoulders, then proceeded to snip their braid off. Without fail every one of the coolies rubbed the back of their head with their palm when they got off the stool. Some of them picked up their severed plait from the ground, coiling it around their wrist or stuffing it into their pocket; but there were also a great number of them who left their cords of hair lying on the ground where they had fallen. Many of the coolies had tears running down their cheeks, but whether from joy or sorrow I could not tell.
On that morning, as I stood in the back lane and watched the coolies cutting off their queues, I was filled with a great sense of envy for them, for the opportunity they had been given to discard their old self, and to start a new life.