Francis and Annabelle huddled together under an umbrella as the skies opened and the drenching rains began to fall. They were enjoying a brief honeymoon and had decided a day at the Botanic Gardens would be relaxing and recreational at the same time. According to Sutty, the orchid display was worth exploring. Apparently, Singapore’s climate was ideal for the natural growth of the graceful and luxurious flowers. It was also a fact that torrential rainfall was a trigger to the flowering of these exotic plants.
“Just think,” said Francis, “while we’re here getting soaked and cursing the rain, hundreds of orchid flowers are preparing to display their lovely faces.”
Annabelle laughed. Francis had told her about the rains in one of his letters, but she hadn’t imagined herself standing in the middle of them with only an old umbrella to protect her. Oh well, she thought, it’s only rain and not the black plague. Now that she and Francis were married, they could meet any adversity together and that would make it easier.
There was a shelter about fifty feet away and they debated whether or not to run for it. How much drier would they be if they stood under the open shelter’s roof? Running up the pathway and crossing to the other side would be like fording a small stream at this point. However, standing in one place and being pelted on all sides was no better. They decided to run for it, and in minutes they joined about fifteen other drenched comrades to wait out the storm in the garden. It lasted a good twenty minutes, during which time they chatted with one another, mostly about rain and other weather in Singapore and in England. Weather is such a common ground for people, thought Annabelle. Everybody experienced it everywhere, and everybody had an opinion about it. It helped to pass the time.
And then, just as suddenly as it had started, the rain stopped. The result was a steamy mist that rose from the well-soaked ground and hung in the air like vapour from a boiling kettle. In time, the sun came out and burned the mist away, leaving the heat just as intense as before the storm.
“Welcome to Singapore,” said Francis. “Isn’t it lovely?”
“Yes,” said his new wife. “It’s almost like England, only wetter and hotter.”
Francis laughed and believed that Annabelle had just told a joke, which he took to be a good sign. She was in high spirits and had been since their marriage. He guessed it was because she felt more secure now. Her apparently unsettled life was, in fact, more settled. She had a role to play and, as a wife, she had a purpose. She had been stubbornly opposed to his plan for so long, but now that it was a reality, she seemed to accept it as inevitable and was determined to make the best of it. She has hidden resources of strength, Francis thought. She’s the picture of English womanhood — delicate as a rose on the outside, but tough and resilient as a leather boot on the inside. He believed this and he also believed she would be able to handle any adversity that fell into their path. She’ll bend, he told himself, but she will not break.
If Annabelle had known what her husband was thinking, she might have been pleased, or she might have thought, “Pray that we never have to find out, my dear.” The last thing she wanted was to deal with more adversity. It was true that she felt more secure being married to Francis, but she would have felt a lot more secure had they been in England. Annabelle preferred the familiar for all that Francis preferred the foreign and exotic. She would let him have his five years — all the while praying that it would be less — and then it would be time to be sensible: back to England, back to reality.
In the meantime, she would look for more suitable lodgings for them. Much as she enjoyed staying at the Raffles Hotel with Francis and Sutty, it was costing too much money and it wasn’t really a home. Annabelle wanted a few pieces of her own furniture to polish and a hob where she could do her own cooking. It wasn’t much to ask for and she knew Francis would go along with it. She would get him to ask around among the boys who worked at the hotel to see if anyone knew of a place, or even a neighbourhood, where they could look for a place.
They had reached the orchid gardens by now and they turned all their attention to the multihued variety that spread out before them.
“It confirms one’s belief in God, doesn’t it?” Annabelle asked her husband. “Who else could have designed such a perfect thing?”
They were looking at the Vanda Miss Joaquim, which had been discovered by Agnes Joaquim in her garden in Singapore in 1893. She took what she thought might be a new hybrid to the Botanic Gardens’ first director, Henry Nicholas Ridley, who confirmed that, indeed, she had discovered a new, natural orchid hybrid. The flower’s colouration ranged from pale mauve on its frilly outer petals to rosy violet surrounding a centre of fiery orange. The orchid Agnes Joaquim had discovered was in full flower when Francis and Annabelle saw it.
Later in the rickshaw on the way back from the Botanic Gardens, Annabelle was feeling quite relaxed and almost at home as Francis chatted away about the gardens and how they would go there often and picnic in the years to come. Then, glancing past him, Annabelle saw an elderly Chinese woman lying by the side of the road, apparently dead. Annabelle turned her head and looked back to confirm that she’d actually seen what she thought she had seen. At first it hadn’t registered that the woman was dead, if indeed she was, and Annabelle wondered why she would be lying on the road in such a fashion. When it struck her that the woman must have either fainted or died, she thought of her own mother, dying in a hospital surrounded by white sheets and antiseptic, while the nursing sisters bustled about, attending to her needs and telling her she was going to be fine, even though it wasn’t true. Death, she thought, doesn’t care if you’re in a hospital or on the road. He takes you when he’s ready and damns the consequences. The indignity of dying in the road was embarrassing to Annabelle. She wished she hadn’t seen the woman and hadn’t stared at her in her private moment of humiliation. She couldn’t imagine anything worse than dying in the street. How long will the woman lie there, she wondered, before someone takes her away? An hour? A day?
Annabelle looked at Francis, who apparently had not seen the woman, and a shiver ran down her spine. I can’t protect you, she thought, and you can’t protect me. What will happen will happen and we will be at the mercy of strangers.
When they returned to the Raffles, Sutty was in the bar having a whisky. They joined him and Francis ordered a beer while Annabelle asked for tea.
“How was your day?” Sutty asked.
“Splendid,” said Francis. “Absolutely beautiful. It is such a lovely, peaceful place that I think it will be our own private sanctuary, even though we’ll have to share it with every Johnny, Mary, Chin, and Chan who’s also decided it’s his own.”
Sutty laughed. Francis had been in high form since Annabelle had arrived, and he was glad to see his friend so happy. But Annabelle, he noted, seemed a little distracted, even a little sad, and he wondered why. Maybe it was just the heat that was getting her down, but this seemed more like melancholy than fatigue. He hoped she wasn’t regretting her decision to come to Singapore and marry Francis. He had seen it happen before: young women joining their men, filled with enthusiasm and promise, only to slip into a kind of lethargy, sometimes within a few weeks. One such young woman he remembered in particular. Her name was Olive and she had arrived brimming with excitement at the prospect of marrying her long-time fiancé, Ted. She was an attractive girl with a pretty heart-shaped face, dark wavy hair, lovely round hips, and a bosom a man would want to rest his head on. But within weeks she had started losing weight until, after three months, she was as thin as a rail. The colour had gone from her cheeks and her thick, shiny hair was dull and flat.
Ted had taken her to doctors who had given her potions and powders, both to lift her spirits and bring her weight back up, but to no avail. Eventually she became too weak to travel back to England on her own and she was hospitalized. Sutty had visited the distraught Ted, who told him that nobody could figure out what was wrong with Olive: she had just lost the will to stay alive. It was as if something had punctured her surface and the vitality had gradually leaked out. In six months she was dead.
Sutty had seen others simply linger in a state halfway between vigour and exhaustion, slowly and imperceptibly edging toward the latter until, one day, they just gave in or gave up. Some returned to England before it was too late and maintained long-distance marriages with their colonial husbands. He rarely saw couples who shared the same enthusiasm for the expatriate life. One or the other always got the shorter end of the stick, whether it was the woman who was forced to make a home, deal with hostile servants, and raise a family in isolated and unfamiliar conditions, or the man who faced the drudgery of a dreary job in less than ideal circumstances, usually working under a petty tyrant or a mountebank who would never have reached such a position of authority at home.
Whatever the case, it usually started with a dream, a wish, a whim, or a desire for something different, something better in a faraway place filled with the possibility of adventure. How easy when we dream not to include the unpleasant parts: the heat, the unfamiliar food, the waves of loneliness and longing for home, the diseases that wait to infect the unwary, and the fear, always the fear. For Sutty, there was no end to the stories he could tell. And no need to make anything up, it seemed.