The sun is retreating behind the mountains when I go out onto the stoep. I sit in my wicker armchair – the same pair from our verandah in Cassowary House – and pour myself a full glass of red wine. And then, as I have done every evening since Robert died, I fill his glass as well and set it on the table between us. This is the time of the day when I feel his absence most keenly, when I remember how we would sit here side by side and drink and talk about the books we were reading. More than our conversations, I miss our shared silences as the wick of another day is lowered behind the mountains.
They look different this evening, the mountains – they seem further away, their outlines blurring into the sky. I think of the mountains across the sea from my old home.
Over the course of the day I had drilled down deep into the layers of strata, all the way into the bedrock of my memories, recollecting my life in Penang, the people I had known there – Arthur and my brother and Sun Wen. But most of all I had been reliving the two weeks when Willie Maugham and his lover had stayed with us.
‘I received a book today, Robert,’ I say to the empty chair next to mine. ‘One of Willie’s old books. The Casuarina Tree. You remember it?’ I sip my wine, feeling it warm my insides. ‘Forgive me – it was a stupid question. Of course you’d remember it. It wasn’t one of your favourites, was it?’
The vastness, the emptiness of the Karoo countryside made me want to weep when we first moved here. Everything was so bleak – the land, the light, the faces of the people. I was a child of the equator, born under monsoon skies; I pined for the cloying humidity of Penang, for the stately old angsana trees shading the roads, for the greens and turquoise and greys of the chameleon sea. I missed my garden in Cassowary House – the trees I had planted, the flowers and shrubs I had tended. I pictured the bright, high-ceilinged rooms in the house, their curtains lifting in the breeze. On the farm, whenever I heard the rumour of thunder, I would stop what I was doing and go out onto the verandah. Seeing the hulls of the heavy clouds rising from the edge of the world, I would silently beseech them to sail towards us and give us rain to revive the earth’s scents and quench my soul. But more often than not those cloud caravels would sail further away from me, trailing echoes of fading thunder in their wake.
With time I adjusted to my new life in Doornfontein. People here didn’t give two straws about who I was related to, which committees I sat on, or which wives of important men I had had tea with. After a while I realised that I too no longer cared about those things.
The skies were not crowded with dragons, but here I discovered the stars. They were so bright and clear, so different from the constellations above Penang. Every night, after Robert had retired to his bedroom, I would lie on the patch of kweek grass in the garden, searching the night sky with my field glasses, a thrill bolting through me whenever I saw a dislodged star streaking across the heavens. I learned their names and their shapes: the Southern Cross; Auriga; Coma Berenices; Horologium; Orion; Circinus; Apus; Andromeda. I soon knew them all, these constellations in the night sky, constellations that had, since the beginning of the world, been sinking into the earth each morning, to rise again the next night.
Despite my scepticism, as the months passed Robert’s lungs unclogged and loosened up; his breathing grew less tortured. His appetite flourished, and with time he grew strong enough again to ride a horse. Following a few lessons from one of Bernard’s stable hands, I started going on rambles with Robert around the farm on horseback; it was something we had never done together before in all the years we were married. He cut a dashing figure on his horse and I was reminded of why I had fallen in love with him twenty years ago.
In the waning breaths of autumn we decided to ride out to the farm’s northern fences. We set out early one morning, when the air smelled of the rested earth and the day was still just a glowing filament stretched taut across the horizon.
We were high up on an escarpment when there came, from the edge of the world, a soundless explosion of light as the sun rose. We halted our horses and watched the light spreading across the veld: it crisped the peaks of the mountains, then lit up the lower hills and ridges; it blew across the kopjes and the valleys, the kloofs and the stony plains. The world had never seemed so immense to me as during those fleeting moments when the earth was turning its face towards the sun.
We resumed riding, heading down the escarpment onto the plains. The landscape was always the same unchanging dun, dusty emptiness. I was four or five paces behind Robert when I saw him raising his hand carefully, at the same time reining-in his horse. The land was flat and scrubby, broken by narrow reefs of rocks. Mindful of jackals, I reached down for my rifle strapped to the saddle, but I stopped when I saw what had arrested his gaze.
A pair of ostriches was pecking at the ground about ten feet away. The larger bird’s plumage was black with patches of white on the lower half of its body; the smaller ostrich was drab and dusty brown all over. They curled up their necks and stared at us, their eyes big, glassy orbs fringed by thick, long lashes. Deciding we were harmless, they lowered their heads and returned to their pecking.
I couldn’t help grinning with childlike wonder: I had never seen these birds in the flesh before. They looked like creatures from myth, neither fowl of the air nor beast of the land.
The ostrich with the black feathers fanned its wings. ‘That’s the male,’ said Robert. ‘He’s on heat – his legs are pink, do you see?’
‘They’re much bigger than I imagined.’
‘They look quite like cassowaries, don’t you think?’ said Robert.
I studied him from the corner of my eye. He sat upright and motionless, his attention fixed on the birds, the top half of his face shadowed by the wide brim of his felt hat.
‘A little bit, I suppose,’ I said.
Robert spurred his horse onwards, and I followed him. We had been trotting for about ten or fifteen minutes when the ostriches sprinted past us, soundlessly, weightlessly, their thick, luxuriant tail feathers shaking like trees in the wind. Their clawed feet seemed never to touch the parched, rocky ground, not even to lightly graze it. Looking at them, I understood why ostriches couldn’t fly – they had no need to.
We watched the two birds run on and on, into the horizon, into eternity.
Geoff wrote and told me that Willie had visited Malaya again three years after he had first travelled there. The Casuarina Tree, the book he had published after his stay with us, had made him more famous than ever. But the people he had met in the Straits Settlements were furious with the stories he had written about them; he had betrayed their trust, and he had not even taken the trouble to disguise the names.
But what had they expected, after all, I said to myself as I read Geoff’s letter, when they had revealed to him the secrets interred in the darkness of their hearts?
They stayed three months on their second visit, the writer and his secretary. Willie had asked my brother for our address, but if he did write to us, we never received his letter.
Robert bought a copy of The Casuarina Tree. He read it and passed it to me, not saying a word. I opened it with more than a little trepidation. After I turned the last page of the final story, ‘The Letter’, I remained in my armchair by the windows, watching the sun move over the mountains. I marvelled at Willie’s ingenuity and the leaps of imagination he had taken with Ethel’s tale. He had woven it into something that was familiar to me, yet also uncanny; factual, but at the same time completely fictional. After a while I opened the book and read the story again.
Later that evening, when I carried our gin pahits out to Robert on the patio, he said, ‘Rather impertinent of Willie to put us in his stories, don’t you think?’
‘Well, he’s your friend, Robert.’
Willie had crafted a compelling story about Ethel Proudlock, but he had not written about Sun Wen, and there was nothing in any of his stories about my affair with Arthur; in the end he had not betrayed his friendship with Robert. I was disappointed, but in truth I was also glad.
‘I just wish he had described me accurately.’ Robert looked down at his seated form. ‘I’m not “baldish” and “stoutish”, am I?’
I laughed. ‘He didn’t think much of my looks either.’
‘We got off lightly, I suppose – even if he did cast you as a murderess. The bloody cheek of the man.’
Reading ‘The Letter’ had brought back to me Ethel’s strange remark in the garden of Cassowary House on that balmy afternoon before she left Malaya for ever, and I mentioned it to Robert.
My husband turned his head slowly towards me. ‘She said that to you? “He made me do it”?’
‘What do you think happened between them? I always thought they had a contented marriage, if not a happy one.’
Robert stretched his bare foot and rubbed Claudius’s belly. The dog thumped his tail on the floor; he was getting on in years, but Robert had refused to leave him behind in Penang. It suddenly struck me that since we moved here I had not seen Robert feeding him any cheese, not even once.
Robert took a sip of his pahit and shifted in his chair. ‘What I’m about to tell you, Lesley, must remain strictly between us,’ he said, looking directly into my eyes. ‘You can never reveal it to anybody.’
‘I’m your wife, Robert.’
He continued to look at me, and I could see that he was uncertain of what I really meant. He put his drink down on the table and began to tell me a story.
‘After Ethel was found guilty and while she was in gaol awaiting the Sultan’s pardon, Pooley, the more senior of her lawyers, went to see Sir Arthur Young, the High Commissioner for the Federated Malay States. Certain facts had come to his knowledge during the trial, Pooley informed the High Commissioner, facts which indicated that William Steward’s death was premeditated.
‘Pooley told Sir Arthur that he had no evidence,’ said Robert, ‘and that his conclusion was based on facts that he couldn’t divulge due to his professional duty.’
According to Pooley, when William Proudlock was away in Hong Kong, Ethel had gone for drives with Steward, and she had made frequent visits to his bungalow. William Proudlock found out about it when he came home. He began to blackmail Steward. Steward, afraid that he would be publicly shamed for being involved with a married woman, gave him the money at first, but then William Proudlock started demanding more, and finally Steward put his foot down. He was supporting his mother and sister in England, he couldn’t give Proudlock more money. He asked Proudlock to return the money he had given him or he would go to the police. William Proudlock refused to return the money, so Steward started pressuring him. If Proudlock did not give him back his money, everyone in the FMS would know his wife had slept with him.
‘Rather ironic, isn’t it – the victim turning the tables on the blackmailer,’ said Robert.
Who would ever have suspected William Proudlock of being a blackmailer, and what was more, blackmailing another man about his own wife’s affair? After all these years, I finally understood the reason for Ethel’s loathing of her husband.
‘What did William do?’ I asked.
‘He consulted a lawyer in KL. He wanted to know what the legal consequences were, if …’ Robert paused. ‘If a woman were to shoot a man who was trying to rape her.’
‘If she were to kill him,’ I said.
‘If she were to kill him.’ Robert nodded. ‘William told Ethel what he wanted her to do. He also warned her that he would divorce her if she refused. He hatched a plan for her to invite Steward over one night, and he arranged for himself to be out of the house.’
‘But … why didn’t she refuse? She could have left him. She could have gone back to her father.’
‘She couldn’t ask her father for help,’ Robert continued, ‘because William Proudlock had approached her father with his plan, and he agreed to it. If she didn’t go along with it, they warned her, William would divorce her, and her father would refuse to take her in. So you see, Lesley, she had nowhere to go and no one to turn to.’
I felt sickened. ‘How do you know all this?’
‘Sir Arthur asked for my advice – unofficially, of course. You remember that time I had to rush down to KL? He asked to see me urgently. He had written a confidential report of what Pooley told him and wanted my advice before sending it to the Colonial Office in London.’
‘Was anything done about it?’
‘I told him that, in my opinion, nothing could be done unless Ethel confessed to what she had been forced to do. Nothing at all.’
‘Poor Ethel …’ I said. ‘Poor, poor Ethel.’ No wonder she couldn’t wait to leave. They forced her to kill Steward. They forced her – her husband and her own father. Bastards.
‘Pooley also mentioned that, based on what he was told, Ethel is illegitimate. Her mother – her real mother – was her aunt, the sister of her father’s wife. There was also talk that her mother was Eurasian.’
Ethel had once confided in me that she had had an unhappy childhood, and that she had never felt she belonged in her father’s house. I thought that she was just being overly dramatic. Now I wished that I had been more sympathetic to her.
‘Willie sailed very close to the truth,’ Robert said. ‘If he only knew just how close.’
One day in the June of 1925 I received a letter from Geoff. He had included the obituary for Sun Wen that had been published in a Hong Kong newspaper a few months earlier. Sun Wen had died of liver cancer. He looked distinguished in the photo that accompanied the obituary. He had divorced his wife and married the daughter of one of the richest men in China. There was not a single reference to Chui Fen in the article; I wondered what had happened to her. I wondered too if Arthur had returned to Penang, to his wife and his daughter.
Over the years Geoff continued to send me newspaper cuttings about Willie. He had lost a great deal of money in an unwise investment, but with the success of The Casuarina Tree – a success propelled, I’m not at all too modest to say, by what I had told him over the course of those many nights – he had managed to recoup his losses. In another newspaper article I read about his divorce from Syrie. He was photographed standing by a plain, stuccoed wall painted with ‘Villa Mauresque’, the name of his new home on the Cap Ferrat; set above its name was his Moorish symbol, as large as the top half of his body. He was as elegantly dressed as always, a cigarette in a long-stemmed ivory holder clamped between his fingers. He had found his house by the sea. I was happy for him.
In the winter of 1938, sixteen years after we had moved to Doornfontein, Robert suffered a heart attack while at his desk. He lived for another five days. Before he died, he told me, his voice weak but insistent, to go home to Penang after his death. I took his hand and kissed it, but I said nothing. To my surprise I found my face wet with tears.
I buried him in the family cemetery on the east of the farm. He had asked that his headstone be engraved with his favourite line from Horace: ‘Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt’. Once, long ago, he had told me what it meant.
I continued to live in Doornfontein, far from the world beyond the mountains. My sons grew up, became men. Edward read law at Oxford and became a King’s Counsel, as his father had wanted for him. James found minor success as a novelist in London. Another war came; James enlisted in the army and was posted to Malaya. He died there, his body ploughed into the earth of an unmarked grave, in the land where he was born.
Geoff didn’t survive the war, although his wife did. Her last letter to me informed me that she had remarried and moved to Australia. After that we stopped writing to each other.
Night has fallen, and the chill is stealing into my bones. There is no moon tonight. My glass of wine was empty long ago, and I have been sipping from Robert’s. I go inside the house to cook my dinner, but I pause before the wooden door hanging in the corridor. The paint has faded even more over the years, but the bird of the mountain is still there, still drifting above the misty gorge, carrying the warrior’s name beyond the clouds.
Willie Maugham must be in his seventies now, if he is still alive. I suppose if he had died I would have heard about it, even out here in the middle of nowhere. Does he still write? Does he still think of us – of me – sometimes?
It has been many years since I last read The Casuarina Tree. After dinner I open the copy I received that morning and begin to read it again. When I come to the last story, ‘The Letter’, I don’t rush through it. I take my time, opening myself to the echoes Willie’s words summon up. And as I read, I have the strange sensation that I am looking down from a great height at Cassowary House. I see the garden and the trees – the pinang, the casuarina, the angsana, and that venerable raintree with its great girth. I see the white arc of the crescent driveway on the front lawn. In a rushing silence I descend, down and down, passing through the terracotta roof tiles and the plastered walls like wind through silk. Unseen and unheard, I glide through the corridors and the rooms of my old home. I see Robert coming out of his study, laughing at something he had read and calling for me to share it with him. I stop to watch myself reading a story to my sons in the nursery. I chuckle at the sight of Ah Peng chaffing our syce Hassan in the kitchen. I follow the salty breeze billowing through the house out to the verandah and onto the sunlit lawn. I am on the beach, empty except for the sky and the mountains on the mainland. And then I am swimming with Willie in the darkness of night in a sea of blue fire.
‘The Letter’ had been made into a film, and Robert and I had gone to watch it at the bioscope. If it had felt unsettling to read the story, it had been disconcerting to sit in the darkened theatre and watch Bette Davis play Ethel; to watch, my hand pressed to my lips, as she shot her lover on the verandah. Six bullets fired into his body as he was fleeing from her into the tropical night.
I wonder where in the world Ethel is. Is she still alive? Is she happy? If she has read the story, or more probably – she was not one for reading books, I recall – if she has seen the film, there would be not the tiniest shred of doubt in her mind that I had been the one who had revealed the private details of her affair to Willie.
True, I had betrayed my friend, but in doing so I had prevented her from being erased from history. I refuse to feel guilty. Because of Willie’s story, Ethel Proudlock will never be forgotten and, in a smaller way, neither will I. What he had worked into his tale was merely a shard he had broken off from the larger story I had given him. It is a small shard, but it is enough for me.
My eyes return to Willie’s symbol on the page. With my forefinger I trace the additional lines that had been inked-in by a later hand. They frame the symbol in a rectangle, the line in the middle cleaving it in half, dividing it into the twin panels of the front doors guarding a house, a house with many more doors within it, each one of them turning slowly in the air, turning like the silent cogs of some great mechanical clock.
It is almost forty years since I last saw Arthur. He has kept his word, even after all this time. No letters, no notes. Instead he has sent me this message in a book, a message that only I could decipher. The doors, which have been closed for so many years, are now open again.
Pressing my finger on the hamsa, I think about the past, my past, but most of all I think about new stories that have not been written by anyone yet.
I get out of bed and put on my dressing gown. In the sitting room I sit at my piano and stare at the yellowing keys. A minute passes, then another. I bring my hands up from my lap and start to play Reynaldo Hahn’s L’heure exquise. I play it slowly, pressing down the keys with careful precision, sending each note out into the night.
When I finish I play the same piece again, one more time. Then I close the piano and go out into the garden.
The night is vast and still. My breaths hang in the air like clouds of moondust. I lift my face, searching out the familiar patterns sequined into the night sky. For a long time I stand there in that great hall of the temple of stars. I should go back to sleep, I tell myself. I have to get up early. There are many tasks to do in the coming days and weeks – travel arrangements to make, things to hold on to, and things to let go of.
But first there is a letter I must write and send, a letter to Arthur, waiting for me in the House of Doors.
Here, on the margins of the desert, it is just gone midnight, but as I turn towards the east, turning with the rotation of the earth, I know that, on an island on the other side of the world, it is already morning.