For their fourth date, Maris invited Axel to the Jurong Bird Park. It was one of her favourite places in Singapore and she wanted to share it with him. They had been out to dinner a couple of more times and each time had been better than the last. Something had clicked between them and they were both being cautious, as if whatever this thing was, it was fragile and they didn’t want to drop it.
“This bird park,” she told him, “is truly one of the wonders of the world. You can’t spend time in Singapore and not go see it.”
“Okay,” he agreed. “I can’t argue with that kind of logic.”
“This isn’t logic,” she said, “it’s passion, pure and simple. I love this place.”
“If you love it, then I’ll love it,” he said.
That’s what she liked about him. Axel was always willing to go along. And his enthusiasm wasn’t faked. He was genuinely interested in what she said, what she liked, and what she wanted to do. How often did a man like that come along? Even Dinah agreed: you didn’t meet a man who shared your interests every day.
And Axel was encouraging her to paint again. He suggested she bring her sketchbook along to the bird park. Maybe she’d be inspired by all the magnificent plumage to express herself with colour again.
The day started out bright and sunny but by midday the whole of Singapore was under heavy cloud. The threatened rain arrived a few hours later with a familiar force. There was nothing to do but run for cover. Even the birds headed for shelter. But at least Maris and Axel had seen the best the park had to offer: almost a hundred species of the gregarious parrot, including colourful parakeets, macaws, and cockatoos, exotic birds of paradise, elegant (and screeching) peacocks, playful hornbills and toucans, odd-looking pelicans and penguins, and even the graceful black and white swans.
And she had been inspired. One bird had caught her eye — a scarlet macaw — and it was as if a light had gone on. He was magnificent; his plumage was blazing at her in red and yellow and blue. She did several sketches of the bird and couldn’t wait to paint him in oils where the true intensity of his colours could come through. It was the first time since Peter’s death that she’d felt this kind of excitement. It was as if some dormant part of her had been wakened. She had forgotten what it was like to feel this urge — no, it was more than an urge, it was a surge — and she sparkled. Axel was moved to comment on the sudden change.
“My God,” he said. “I didn’t realize that you were operating on such a low battery all this time. I thought you were luminous before, but now you’re positively incandescent.”
Maris laughed. She felt incandescent. She had been switched on after months of living in a gloomy half-light of depression and loss. That’s what she had been experiencing, she realized, a huge sense of loss that nothing could replace. Peter had been irreplaceable in her life. And now Axel was here … and the magnificent scarlet macaw to re-inspire her. Life was good again.
That night she and Axel had made love for the first time. Even though they had talked about it on their first date, it was spontaneous, the two of them going to his room at Raffles for a drink after a day of bird-watching, drenching rain, the excitement of Maris’s new-found creative vision, and plates of hawker noodles. As Maris later told Dinah, it just happened, even though it had been all around them for weeks, the anticipation of it, the knowing it would happen.
For Maris, that day had been like the end of one road and the beginning of another. Her direction had changed in a matter of hours and it felt right. Everything about it felt meant to be. She wouldn’t have used the word destiny, but what Maris felt that day amounted to a sense of destiny — that somehow this was fated. She was meant to go back to Singapore, to meet Axel, to go to the bird park on that day and see the macaw. It wasn’t something she would say to just anyone, but Peter would have understood. He believed she had a destiny; it was why he had never given up on her, why he had encouraged her to work and grow and find herself artistically.
She spent the night with Axel, and even though he got one of his awkward business calls and went out into the corridor to take it so as not to disturb her, her happiness was uninterrupted. She would always think of this as her “night of nights.” Corny, she knew, but Maris believed you did not get many days and nights like this in one lifetime.