Chapter Eleven

Maris closed the book of Edward Sutcliffe Moresby’s short stories she had been reading. This one, “The Happy Ending,” stayed in her mind as she closed her eyes and tried to fall asleep. A tragic love story set in Singapore in the 1920s, it made her wonder if any of it were true. She had been to what was left of the old Christian cemeteries in Singapore and had read the gravestones of people who had probably come to the Far East to find their fortune, but had succumbed to illness and infection within the first year. Many had been soldiers not yet twenty years old. Or young women dying in childbirth, their babies, often unnamed, buried with them. She thought of poor Elsie Townsend and wondered what she would have done in her position.

Would I have come home, as I’m doing now? she wondered. Probably. And what did that say about her? That she lacked courage? But she had set off for Singapore almost on a whim and without a second thought. Hadn’t that taken courage? Or maybe she was an emotional coward, lacking a different kind of courage. The shock and pain of Peter’s death had sent her scurrying into a protective hole, a hole like the ones they’d tried to dig to China as children … only this one led straight back to Canada. Was she looking for the comfort of home, the kind that came with no effort, the kind that didn’t require her to stretch herself? Was she looking for the easy way out? She could become like Emily Dickinson, never leaving her room, never taking another risk. Except that Emily Dickinson had a whole world of imagination in her head that she explored fearlessly, brilliantly. Have I closed my eyes to that world? she wondered. Is that why I can’t see colours?

Finally the sleep that had been eluding her came, but it didn’t last for long. She woke up well before dawn and her eyes felt dry and scratchy when she opened them. She got out of bed and found the eye drops she always carried in her kit bag. She squeezed two drops into each eye and stood with her eyes closed for a minute. Then she splashed some water on her face and headed back to the bed. But she knew there would be no more sleeping that night. It was a little chilly in the bedroom so she dug around in her still unpacked suitcase and pulled out a dark green sweatshirt and a pair of sweatpants. Her eyes went to the trunk that she and her mother had dragged into the corner of the room. Surely Peter had not planned on an early death, but had he known that his death, whenever it came, might leave her bereft not only of his guiding hand but also of her own confidence in her abilities as an artist? Was that why he had left the contents of the trunk to her in his will rather than giving them to her while he was alive?

She reached over and raised the lid of the trunk. There were the Moresby books, the paintings of Chinese women, and the bundles of letters. What could they mean?

She untied the ribbon around one set of letters and opened the first one. It was dated 1923 and addressed to “Annabelle Sweet” at a London, England, address.

My dearest Annabelle. I have arrived safely in Singapore and pray that this letter gets to you quickly so that you will not worry one minute longer than you need to. It was what the seasoned passengers called “an uneventful crossing,” which I assume means there were no terrifying storms, encounters with pirates, or deadly icebergs. I met an interesting assortment of people, including young, single, or betrothed females heading east to find romance and marriage in the Orient. I can tell you I was never at a loss for a dance partner, although none of them caught my fancy or captured my heart. (Are you jealous? Don’t be. You are the only one for me, Annabelle, and I shall continue to say it until you believe it with all of your heart and agree to join me here in S’pore.)

Speaking of Singapore, my God, it’s hot here! But don’t let that discourage you — it’s a wonderful, bone-warming heat after the chill of England. I love it and so will you. I’m sure of it. But I get ahead of myself.

Sutty was there to meet me when my ship docked, and I was never so glad to see a friend. I had forgotten how tall he is and he stood head and shoulders above everybody else. He looked cool and handsome in his white linen suit and he wore a white straw hat to protect him from the sun. He was every inch the colonial gentleman. The port was tumultuous with noise and activity and I could barely think straight, let alone gather my luggage, get a rickshaw, and find my way to the Raffles Hotel. I suppose, given enough time, I would have accomplished it, but I would have been so much the worse for wear. Sutty, bless his soul, was able to cut through all the chaos and deliver me safe and sound to the Long Bar of the hotel, where I drank cold (yes, cold) beer, and feasted on bangers and mash — seriously! I was able to leap over culture shock with one bound and ease into Oriental life with a full stomach and a fairly clear head.

I will write more about the city in my next letter. I want to get this into the post before it’s collected.

I miss you, my Sweet Annabelle, and begin to count the days until I see you again.

All my love,

Francis

The next letter was dated three days later and began “My Sweet Annabelle.”

I have settled in a bit now and must tell you my impressions of Singapore. My first were seaport impressions of bustle and noise, heat and salty smells, people calling out in a strange sounding language: Chinese? Malay? I heard no English, so knew I was in a foreign place for the first time in my life. I felt like a boy in a Conrad novel who has been thrust into a seafaring life and arrives at his first port: he could be anywhere and the new place is full of promise, for he has seen nothing but the ugliness of an impoverished childhood, felt nothing but hunger all his life, and now he is delivered to a place that could be the making of him. He sees that anything is possible. If he has made it this far, he will only keep moving forward. Life for him is no longer filled with nothingness. It is no longer only shades of black and grey. Life is suddenly filled with possibilities and colour. It is no longer about who he must be, but about who he can be. This is exhilarating stuff; the stuff of adventure for a boy who was orphaned early or who fled a life of dismal predictability or one of unpredictable violence and danger.

“What lies ahead?” he asks himself, when before he only asked: “When will this misery end?” “I am reborn,” he says, when before he only said, “When will I die?” Imagine his excitement, the anticipation, the hope. It is a gift; the first in his life.

No, I am not that boy, but I feel — I live! — his exhilaration. I don’t want to close my eyes for a moment. I don’t want to miss a thing because any minute can bring something that has never happened before, something that in the blink of an eye may be lost. No, wait, precious moment! I cannot lose you. I must have you. This is how my life begins, my real life, the one I never dared imagine for myself. Now there are no second impressions. Everything is a first impression; everything is new to my eyes. Trees are not just trees but giant monuments of nature that bloom with furious colour and shade with great arching branches of green. A road is not just a road, but a promise of something interesting, something never seen before.

I am inspired, Annabelle, to be something I have only dreamed of being. A writer. A real writer. Someone who lives the life of a writer and gains his inspiration from that life. I don’t want to write about what I already know but about what I discover. I don’t want to dredge the past; I want to mine the future. I want to move out and up and away from the mundane, to go to a place that most people never get to. I want to be the messenger who brings news of such earth-shattering experience that everyone will want to hear it.

You see how I am flying after only a few days here? This was meant to be, Annabelle, I am sure of it. It is my destiny, and I want it to be our destiny. I want to share it with you because you deserve to experience this kind of wonder at the opportunity that life holds. We can be pioneers, my darling. Singapore is not a new place, but it is new enough. It is barely more than a hundred years since Raffles purchased this island of swamp and rainforest from the Sultan of Johor. One hundred years. Newer even than America. It is still becoming. I am still becoming. We are still becoming. This can be our place, yours and mine.

I’m sure I’ve quite exhausted you, Annabelle, so I will seal this letter with a tender kiss and write to you again when I have eaten three meals and slept one night. Just so you know I am not losing my mind, but, indeed, finding it. I eat, I sleep, I dream.

I love you,

Francis

Maris picked up the next letter in the pile. Who were these people? she wondered. Her eyes no longer itched with fatigue. She wanted to know more of the story that was unfolding, had unfolded, in Singapore more than eighty years ago.

Let me tell you about the rain. It can come without warning and when it comes it falls in torrents, in sheets, in great walls of water so that you think there is an unending supply of water in the sky. It obliterates whatever view you might have had of trees, hills, mountains, tall buildings — anything farther than ten feet from your eye. There is a wetness to this rain that surpasses the wetness of rain anywhere in England. And England is a wet country. The rain is often referred to as “the rains,” in the plural, and that is fitting. These rains pound the surface of the earth as if they were made of steel instead of water. It is hard rain — unkind, uncaring, and murderous. I have seen the streets fill with water to the height of a man’s knees in less than thirty minutes. Sutty tells me that it rained like that once for five days straight and a hundred people drowned on one street alone.

It is frightening and yet it’s thrilling, Annabelle, to see such power in nature. Once I was caught while walking and could only stop and wait under the nearest awning along with everyone else. We were forced to give in because to go forward or to go back was impossible. Mother Nature stole a piece of time from each one of us — a piece of time she had no intention of giving back. We stood and watched as a dead rat floated by. My companions in captivity appeared not to notice but I couldn’t take my eyes off the little beast. I use the word “little” in a relative sense. It was a very large rat but it seemed small in the scheme of things. It was no match for the fast moving rush of water that had filled the sewer pipes in seconds. I suddenly realized why the sidewalks are built up so high and the gutters dug so deep. It’s all because of the rains.

As Maris read through some of Francis’s letters, she realized how he had captured the timelessness of the human struggle with nature. She, too, had witnessed these same blinding, hard rains of Singapore. They were a fact of life, just like the trees, the weeds, the dogs, the babies, and the old men and women who sat in front of shops or in cafés and remembered.

The memory of Singapore’s rain was sensory, full of sounds and smells that could still drench you even if you stood in a shelter. It would ricochet off the sidewalk like a hail of bullets and soak you from the ground up. In Singapore you didn’t go anywhere without an umbrella between December and March and from June to September. The two distinct monsoon seasons, the first from the northeast and the second from the southwest, kept the land lush and the vegetation profuse. It was a garden city that maintained a tropical rainforest within its urban confines.

She missed it, she realized, and believed she would go back there. But it wasn’t time yet: that was an intuition, not a fact. It was just something she knew but couldn’t explain. She had come back to British Columbia on intuition, too, because she needed to be refortified, reminded, and restored. Restored to what, she wasn’t sure. She could never be the Maris who had left Vancouver nearly five years ago, nor did she want to be. She had grown so much in those years, as an artist, yes, but also as a person. It was Peter who had helped her grow as an artist, and coming to terms with being an artist had helped her discover who she was. But all of that seemed so vague now and seemed to be dissolving the way one scene dissolves into another in a film. She was in the middle of the dissolve, struggling to find a perspective and to hang on to what she knew.