Willie was adamant that he did not want an elaborate farewell party, so I invited only Geoff and his wife Penelope. After some thought I dispatched the houseboy with an invitation to the Chinese lawyer Peter Ong and his wife too.
Robert was in his study writing a letter when I went to inform him. He put down his pen and looked at me. ‘Why did you ask him?’
‘You haven’t seen him for years,’ I said. ‘You used to be very fond of him, didn’t you?’
My husband continued to regard me, but I could not read anything in his eyes. ‘Is there anyone else you’d like to invite?’ he asked.
‘There is no one else, Robert.’
It took me much longer to dress and to do my hair than I had anticipated. Before leaving my bedroom I gave myself a final look in the full-length mirror. I almost succumbed to the doubting voices in my head and changed my clothes, but I was already running late.
Robert and the guests were chatting away in the sitting room when I came downstairs. His words broke off in mid flow when he caught sight of me. The others followed his gaze as I, with tiny, languid steps, walked across the room to join them
‘My God, Lesley,’ Gerald said, putting down his drink, ‘how utterly exotic and alluring.’
I was in the full Straits Chinese ensemble: the kebaya, the manik-manik shoes, and I’d done up my hair in the Nyonya style, pinning the bun with a row of jewelled hairpins.
‘It’s the same one you wore in the … photograph, isn’t it?’ said Willie. ‘What’s it called now’ – he snapped his fingers in the air – ‘a “kebaya”.’
‘The very same one,’ I said, accepting a pahit from the houseboy.
Geoff took my hand and spun me around in a slow, small circle. ‘It looks beautiful on you, Les.’
‘Oh, Geoff. A gentleman would have said …’ Our smiles were stained with the sadness of shared memories.
The Chinese man standing next to Robert stepped forward. ‘My wife sends her regrets, Mrs Hamlyn,’ he said. ‘She’s visiting her sister in Singapore.’
‘Peter Ong! My goodness, I nearly didn’t recognise you,’ I said. ‘You’ve become rather … ah … prosperous-looking, haven’t you?’
The lawyer chuckled, smacking his large paunch affectionately. ‘Growing old, Mrs Hamlyn. And too much work.’
He had aged, but he still spoke beautifully. He was four or five years younger than myself, if memory served. He had married well, I had heard. One of the daughters of Towkay Yap. I thought of the first time I had met him, all those years ago.
‘Robert was extremely peeved with you when you left him to start your own firm.’ I wagged a finger at him. ‘And after all that he’s taught you, the long hours he spent training you.’
‘The memsahib’s right,’ said Robert. ‘But you’ve made me very proud.’
The dinner gong summoned us into the dining room. In the corridor Geoff drew me to one side, letting the others pass us by. ‘Interesting guests tonight, Les,’ he murmured, nudging his head at Peter Ong’s back.
‘It was so long ago. What does it matter any more?’
My brother shook his head. ‘Sometimes I have this feeling that I don’t know who you are at all.’
The windows in the dining room were open to the evening breeze. Robert and I sat facing each other at opposite ends of the long damask-covered table, with our guests on either side of us. I had placed Peter Ong on Robert’s left and Gerald on his right. Willie sat next to me, with Geoff on my left and his wife between him and Gerald.
Sometime during the evening I noticed Robert murmuring into Peter Ong’s ear; a smile bloomed over his florid face and he touched Robert’s wrist lightly. I looked away from them and gazed around the table. Geoff had put on a great deal of weight in the last few years; he was looking more and more the spitting image of our father. These days he spent most of his evenings at the bar in the Penang Club, avoiding his wife. I watched him pass a bread roll to Penelope, a woman I had never warmed towards, and who felt the same way about me. Robert and Gerald were laughing at something Peter Ong said. And Willie, well, Willie’s eyes were, as always, on Gerald.
For the first time in many years I felt a sharp, painful longing for Arthur. Eleven years of silence lay between us. He had kept his word, as I had asked him to – no messages, no letters.
‘Are you all right, Lesley?’ Willie asked quietly.
Blinking my eyes a few times, I dredged up a smile from deep inside me. ‘Some more belachan brinjal, Willie?’
The house had fallen silent. I lay in my bed, listening to the sea.
I had been devastated with grief when Arthur went to China to join the revolution, but, if I were to be honest, a large part of me was also relieved. It was better that way, I had said to myself, much better. It was only a matter of time before we were found out and exposed. We had achieved the impossible – we had kept our affair a secret. Nobody knew about us, nobody suspected a thing. Over the years my memories of all that I had shared with him did not fade, but their sharp outlines gradually softened and blurred, so that there were often moments when I felt as though our affair had never taken place, that it had all been just a story I had read once too often until I could not tell where fiction became memory, and memory, fiction.
And yet sometimes it grieved me that no one would ever know the joy he had given me, and the sorrow I had had to conceal from the eyes of those around me when I lost him. He had given me the strength to remain in my marriage, to endure it. I wanted to tell someone about us, to fill the void of his name, but I couldn’t. So I talked about Sun Wen instead. To utter Sun Wen’s name was, for me, a way of keeping Arthur alive and vivid in my memory.
I had even tried to write all of it down – how we had met and became lovers, the many hours we had spent together in the House of Doors. But when I read the words on the pages it had felt even more invented to me, even more like a story from a book. In the end I had torn up the pages and scattered them in the sea.
I put on my dressing gown and went downstairs to the verandah. The night was still, lying at anchor. A full, white moon rested on the top of the casuarina tree, bleeding its cold, metallic light over the garden. I was not alone: Willie was leaning against the balustrade, smoking a cigarette.
‘Shouldn’t you be in bed?’ I said.
‘I can never sleep the night before a … journey.’ He blew out a feathery quill of smoke. ‘Wonderful party tonight.’ He paused. ‘It was interesting to see Robert and Peter Ong together.’
‘Whatever happened to Verlaine and his lover?’ I asked.
‘Rimbaud?’ He rummaged through his memory, found the pieces he was searching for. ‘Verlaine shot him during a drunken quarrel, shot him in the left wrist. Rimbaud filed … charges against him. Attempted murder. He withdrew the charges later, but Verlaine was sent to prison for two years anyway. Their … relationship … never recovered from it.’
‘Poor Verlaine.’
I thought about Robert and me, and about Robert and Peter Ong. I thought about Arthur and myself; and I thought about Willie and Gerald.
‘We fell in love with the wrong person,’ I said. ‘You and Gerald. Robert and Peter Ong. Arthur and myself.’
‘I did not fall … in love with the wrong person, my dear Lesley. I only made the mistake of … marrying the wrong one.’
‘How cynical, Willie,’ I said.
‘What you’ve told me – your affair with Arthur – it will ruin your marriage if I were to write about it.’ Willie took one last drag on his cigarette and flicked it into the garden. ‘It will ruin you.’
‘That’s never stayed your pen before, has it?’ I said.
‘Is that what you want? To blow your … marriage to smithereens?’
I pressed my palms lightly on the balustrade. At dawn the stranger in my parlour would depart from my home; but the day would soon come when I too would no longer be living here.
‘I’m tired of the silence between us, Willie. I’m so very, very tired.’
‘What about Robert’s affair?’
‘You must have heard stories like that over the years. Yet you have never written about a homosexual affair in any of your books. You’ve never even alluded to it in all your stories, not even once.’ I looked at him. ‘And I think you never will. Why risk drawing the beam of that particular light onto yourself?’
His fingers tapped on the balustrade, reminding me of the flicking of an annoyed cat’s tail. All at once his fingers stopped moving. ‘And Arthur’s marriage? Do you have the right to destroy that?’
I unfurled a silky smile at him. ‘My dear Mr Maugham, surely you didn’t actually think I would have used his real name?’
His face remained tight, then abruptly it slackened. He shook his head, half ruefully but also, I liked to think, half in admiration. ‘You’ve thought everything through, haven’t you?’
‘I made a decision this evening. I made it at the end of dinner, when we were eating our chendol. When Robert moves to the Karoo,’ I said, ‘I will be going with him.’
He nodded, but said nothing. In his eyes I saw understanding, and pity.
‘Our boys are going to have such a shock when they hear Africa’s to be their new home.’
‘They’ll think it’s a … thrilling adventure. All boys want to go to Africa.’
I cocked my head at him. ‘Did you?’
‘I wasn’t like the other boys, Lesley.’
‘No.’ I said. ‘You were not.’
I reached over and gave him the lightest kiss on his cheek, and then I went upstairs to bed.
We were having our breakfast on the verandah when Robert lowered his newspaper and told me that, while he had not changed his mind about moving to his cousin’s farm in the Karoo, he would be going there on his own. He wanted me to remain in Penang. ‘Someone has to look after the house,’ he said.
I stared at him. ‘You’re not selling it?’
‘Sell the house? And have my wife and my sons living on the streets?’
There were so many things I wanted to say, but in the end I only managed a tentative remark. ‘Money will be tight.’
‘We’ll just have to manage. You can teach again, can’t you? And if we have to, we’ll sell our paintings – the Gauguin’ll fetch a good price. Should’ve asked Willie to buy it.’ His gaze roamed beyond the verandah to the garden, to the sea. ‘I want to come back here, when I’m better again. I want live out the rest of my life here, to smell the wind from the sea.’
He retreated behind his newspaper. I listened to his strained breathing; I studied his hands, his thin, arthritic fingers and his wedding ring, its small diamond winking in the light. What was a diamond after all, but a fallen star that had been buried deep in the earth aeons ago?
‘No, Robert,’ I said.
My husband put down his newspaper again. ‘What’s that, my dear?’
‘I’m coming with you.’ I held up my palm as he opened his mouth. ‘No more arguments, Robert. Please. No more.’
We sold Cassowary House and packed our things into crates: the artworks and the furniture; our books, my watercolours, my piano and my collection of Straits Chinese porcelain. I took down the door with the painted hawk from the wall. I would find a place for it in our new house.
We were invited to a few parties before we left Penang. The last one was held in the mansion of a Chinese tycoon in Leith Street. The man’s father had been the Chinese Consul appointed by the Ching dynasty, and he had built the mansion for his seventh wife. Arthur had once confided to me that the consul was one of Sun Wen’s clandestine supporters. ‘The man might be the representative of the emperor of China,’ he said, ‘but he’s also a pragmatic businessman hedging his bets.’
When the string quartet struck up a waltz, Robert turned to me. ‘Don’t let me stop you, my dear.’
‘I think we’ll leave the dancing to the young people this evening. Oh look – there’s Noel.’
‘The poor chap, he’s just standing there, all alone. Shall I ask him to dance with you?’
‘I don’t think he’d be interested,’ I said. ‘Look again.’
Noel Hutton’s complete focus was pinned to a Chinese woman waltzing with a Chinese man. The woman was in her early twenties, with a strong, narrow face and high cheekbones. The instant the music ended Noel pushed his way through the crowd to the young lady. He said something to her; she arched an eyebrow and looked at him. And then, without a word, she dismissed her partner and took Noel’s hand.
‘My God, I’ve never seen him so brazen,’ said Robert.
Noel took the Chinese woman into his arms as the music started again. They moved awkwardly at first, but quickly adjusted themselves to the other’s quirks. Halfway through the dance she stumbled. Still clinging to his arm, she pointed to her shoe.
‘She’s broken her heel,’ I said. ‘No more dancing.’
But I was wrong. I watched, wide-eyed with admiration as the young lady slipped out of her shoes and flung them over the heads of the other waltzing couples into a corner of the room. Barefoot, she resumed dancing with Noel, both of them oblivious to the censorious looks directed at them.
We left the party shortly afterwards, but the next day we heard that Noel and the young lady had danced with only each other for the rest of the night. Noel invited us to their wedding, but we had already left Penang by then.