Forty-Nine

The next thing Hannah remembers is the smell of lavender. Steam rises from the bath they have drawn for her. A house girl waits in an alcove, a human towel rack. Choose a bar of soap. Step in.

After, she stands in front of a mirror staring at someone pink she doesn’t recognize.

“Hannah? Are you listening to me? George is very worried about you,” Lucy is saying so earnestly. “I’m very worried about you.”

She looks down to see that she is clothed, thank goodness. In a robe and a set of nightclothes that couldn’t be Lucy’s, for when she holds her arms up, the cuffs lie perfectly at her wrists. They are in a dining room. Not the main one of the house, she thinks. A plate of cured meats and cheeses sits in front of her, along with a cup of broth.

“What are you doing?” says Lucy.

“Whose clothes are these?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she answers snippily. “I took them from the provisions assembled for the Peterboroughs.”

Hannah laughs—for too long, by the look on Lucy’s face. It’s the first true laugh she’s had in… Yes, she remembers she has already demanded to see her satchel. She checked through it. Had anything been taken? Her clothes, they told her, were being washed.

Lucy is going over the story of Hannah’s “capture.” Makes her sound like a rabid dog. It seems the colonel sent Anjuh out to look for her at some point. Later, Anjuh enlisted two friends from the lower town. It’s incredible, she thinks, how much better one can feel from a bath and three bites of cured pork. Except she’s so tired. As if her very soul were weary.

“Why was I brought here?” she interrupts Lucy.

“Because you screamed at your houseboy that you wouldn’t go home.” Lucy is using the slowed-down speech she reserves for servants and clerks. “Hannah, you were kicking and shouting so loud you woke the Tallymans. You struck their servant in the face.”

She feels her cheeks pinking. Can she make out three men approaching in the gloom? A feeling of being cornered. “Poor Anjuh,” she says.

“Poor Anjuh! Hannah, you’ve had some sort of breakdown! You’ve been behaving…”

Hannah reaches for the cup of broth and sips at it until she’s certain Lucy has shut up for good and is ready to listen. “George burned my belongings, Lucy.”

She looks confused. “Your belongings?”

“All of my paintings, my portfolio, my notebooks.”

“Ah.”

She pushes her chair back from the table. “I’m just going to check on them.”

“Wait, Hannah! Stay here. We’re talking, you’re eating. No one’s done anything with—”

“My satchel. That’s what I need.”

Lucy’s eyes narrow. “Why did George burn your paintings?”

“Because he’s a hateful, mean-spirited man!”

She inspects her fingertips. “Because he’d told you not to paint, isn’t that why?”

Hannah folds her fingers over her cuffs and extends her arms wide and high. A barred eagle-owl, soaring. “Why can’t I wear my own clothes?”

Lucy ignores this and says, “In your satchel, I found…an unfinished painting, I suppose it is. It appears to be of a naked woman.”

“Yes.” She lets her arms fall.

“Yes? Doesn’t this strike you as problematic?”

Her head feels thick and her thoughts are taking too long in coming. “Are you familiar with the history of art?”

“Of course,” mutters Lucy.

“The naked female form…is a classic subject.”

Hannah clutches her torso, all at once remembering the photograph of Roki. She’d planned to stuff it into her corset but the men were coming at her too fast, pulling at her, circling her in that bouncing cart, wherever it was taking her. Here, to the Residency. Was the photograph still in the pocket of her satchel?

“When I arrived, what happened…?” She can’t recall undressing. “Who helped me out of my clothes? Where is my satchel?”

“One of my girls. I’ve told you, we left everything of yours in the yellow bedroom. Hannah, are you all right?”

“I was working backwards, from death to life,” she tells Lucy, remembering, feeling as if she’s swum into a pocket of clarity. “All of the secret places need to pulse with life, in a portrait. You see it’s not about exposing her body. Our bodies. Who owns them, Lucy? But. George destroyed the original.” This last she can’t help but speak viciously.

“He probably found it disturbing.”

“We come here and we bully them into doing what we wish, and we don’t even admit we are bullying. We call it governing or employing or scientific research.”

Lucy is stunned for a moment. Then says, “Hannah, I’m afraid you simply don’t know what you’re saying anymore.”

“I want my painting back. And my clothes. And all of my property you’ve pawed through!” She rises from the table, pushing the plate of meats away. It strikes the mug of broth, overturning it, and oily brown liquid sploshes across the table, dribbling into Lucy’s lap.

Lucy says quietly, “I’m going to recommend that you see a medical doctor.”

“What?”

“If George wants an opinion.” Lucy takes a napkin and begins dabbing it on her crotch and thighs. “If he can’t manage to…”

“What do you mean? God! Is this why you’re here with me, asking questions? To observe me for an ‘opinion’? I thought you were being friendly, Lucy, in your own…pretentious way.”

Across the table, her host looks genuinely miserable. Lucy’s reaction, the way in which she wilted so quickly and completely, will haunt Hannah in the hours to come, as she regains some clarity of mind and purpose. And when the subject is broached again, she decides to co-operate for a medical examination. Perhaps there is something wrong with her if she’s flinging punches and toppling soup.

The gardens at the Residency have an old and impressive traveler’s palm, one of the original specimens, most likely. It is planted toward the middle rear of the grounds, surrounded by bright, jagged stands of Codiaeum and Cordyline. Past Residents have interspersed subtler, less conventional tropicals here and there, including blue pea and a climbing vine called a porcelain plant. A plot for vegetables is tucked in behind two white Romanesque statues, and one section, along the eastern flank of the garden, appears to be dedicated to samples of tropical trees. There, a rubber sapling stands alongside eleven different species of palms, all of them extensively labeled. On the night of the gymkhana festival, the last time Hannah wandered through the grounds, it was too dark to read the tags.

She is tipped slightly over, doing just that, when Brigadier Effingdon-Watts comes toward her through a stand of bamboo. They exchange greetings, if a little warily. He seems on edge, in a bouncy sort of way, and she expects him to move on. Instead, he invites her to comment on the bamboo.

“It’s quite striking,” she says. “I do love the great thick stems. Also the swishing sound when the wind is moving through a grove.”

There are, he tells her, over eight hundred uses for the bamboo plant. Bamboo, in his estimation, is the future. He grins at her under his safari hat.

“How are you finding Kuala Kangsa?” she asks in return.

“Still getting a measure of it. To be honest, Mrs. Inglis, I’ve come into rather a mess here. No offense to your husband!”

“Oh, none taken,” she says lightly. Knowing how George detests the man, she feels like she might burst into laughter at E.W.’s eager, sunburnt face.

Perhaps she looked coy, suppressing this humor, for the man’s eyes begin to crinkle warmly as his gaze travels down the front of her dress. “Tell me, Mrs. Inglis, what sort of entertainment is there in Kuala Kangsa?”

“Entertainment?” The idea of fashionable leisure activities in Kuala Kangsa makes her smile harder.

E.W. smiles back, somewhat tenderly. What have they told him about her? That she’s an invalid to be pitied? Perhaps his compassion is making him over-emotional. She remembers the man’s dead wife and feels a stroke of sympathy herself. She must stop teasing the fellow.

“I suppose there’s the gymkhana festival,” she says. “The way we celebrate it here I’ve always found entertaining. There are the horses and their show, of course—poor creatures. Music. Plenty of music. The Ladies Association sells home baking to the few who prefer treacle tarts to shaved ice. And the Chinese miners come over from Ipoh to run several of the games for the children. Frog races, boat races, bobbing for pears. All the women come wearing their brightest keftis and scarves, which doesn’t stop them from bobbing for pears. Oh, the Sikhs host an exciting tent-pegging competition with competitors from Kelangor and Ipoh. There is our elephant, Elmira, who will take you up on her back. She walks along at the bottom of the slope. The cadets pitch a handsome tent right in the middle of the green and will stand in their plumed hats all morning, waiting proudly for you to enter. Inside, a full course lunch is served on silver platters. And no doubt you’ll see Sultan Izrin and his family touring the meadow in their finery, with a pack of skinny kids tiptoeing after them, hoping for a stray penny. It will pour, absolutely pour, from four o’clock to a quarter past. So that everyone will run, helter-skelter, screaming and dancing and giggling and pulling each other here and there. Peacocks vibrating and crying like fallen angels. Ladies, shoveling treacle tarts in their mouths before they go soggy. And then the rain will stop as abruptly as it started, and the entire village will laugh at itself for forgetting just how wet rain can be. Between you and me, Brigadier, the most fun is simply to wander with a kebab in one hand and a pair of binoculars in the other. Sightseeing.”

He nods politely after she has finished all of this and says something stiff and witless about her charity toward the natives. He must have given her the wrong impression, he says, using the word “entertainment.” “In point of fact, I’m less interested in play, Mrs. Inglis, than in having this village start working.”

She nods, tells him she should be heading back inside, and they part ways. Later, she spots him rapping on the trunk of the traveler’s palm as if he were testing it for its timber yield. Whatever else the colonel is, he’s not such an idiot as this man. George decided long before he ever met her to accept Malaya on its own terms.

Yet he won’t let her live as she must live, will he? And how must she live? Weaving her way to the westernmost point of the gardens, she hides behind a fruiting tree—a Dillenia, she sees on the label—and looks toward their house. She can see nothing animate, only the bulky blue shapes of the building, with the little barn sitting some distance away. Without Cleopatra to graze it, the stretch of meadow between here and there has sprung up rather recklessly.

Conveniently, but somehow unexpectedly, Charles Peterborough is the physician to assess Hannah. The colonel is prepared to welcome her home, Lucy notes brightly, after she has been assessed by a professional.

“And that’s Charles?”

“Oh, he’s unassuming, I know. We think of him as a shortsighted, rather awkward conversationalist. Pathologically shy,” Lucy whispers behind her hand. “Actually, he’s a prominent specialist in women’s health. He’s not been practicing here as a medical doctor, in favor of focusing on his research.”

Charles is installed in one of the wings on the third floor, quite apart from Eva’s rooms, Hannah remarks, as she climbs the winding flights of the rear stairwell. The air on the upper level is noticeably thicker. In summer, it must be positively unlivable. Though, of course, in summer, Charles had been at Idlewyld.

“You must be pleased by the sentencing,” she says, after they greet each other and he is fussing with his pen.

The news of the day is that three of his former servants have confessed to plotting and committing willful destruction of property by fire. Each will serve three years of hard labor. The new prison in Kuala Lumpur, says The Malay Mail, will provide “suitable accommodation.” Most of the article concerns the prison facility’s construction and modern features.

“Not particularly,” he replies and does not elaborate.

She wonders if he shares Eva’s opinion that the genduk is the true culprit. Charles looks anything but outraged. Saddened, perhaps. His research, she reminds herself, has been destroyed.

Before he begins his formal questioning, she ventures, “I don’t suppose you know, Doctor, but my husband incinerated my artwork. He ordered our servants to cut my paintings to pieces and feed them into the stove. Each and every painting that I have done here, sir. Many of them were botanical specimens discovered at Idlewyld.”

He listens to this keenly, once or twice pushing his spectacles up his nose.

“I thought I might be able to recreate one of the works that…that I considered especially promising. I tried.” She struggles to keep her throat from locking up. “I couldn’t do it.”

Charles nods slowly. “Yes, I understand that when your husband learned of your deception, he lost his temper.” She nods. “And so you left your house. Were you afraid of him?”

She remembers the feelings of release and relief that came after she told the colonel of her summer spent trekking and painting. “No, Doctor. Just the opposite. I wasn’t afraid of George. I left because I wanted to recreate one of the works.”

“Why did you not return? Apologize? Try to patch it up with him?”

All she can think about now is the original portrait of the hare-lipped house girl, waiting on the easel in the nursery. What she had planned to add to it—the shadows to be deepened on the neck and the fine work still needed for the eyeballs, and how she intended to heighten the intensity of the purples in the small of the back and repeat them in the left nipple and the upper quadrant of the background. She says, “I don’t know.”

He asks her several questions about how she is feeling, physically, emotionally. Then about how she was feeling, physically, emotionally, during the duration of “the episode.” This is how he seems to be referring to the time she spent on her own in the village. She answers as truthfully as possible.

“I think,” he says, “that at the very least you feel life too deeply, Mrs. Inglis. Would you agree that you are oversensitive? Do you care about things that others don’t?”

“Perhaps,” she assents.

“And that the artwork you create is contributing to this imbalance,” he continues, “this excess of sensitivity?”

“Yes. I can see that it does.” She asks, “Have you seen the paintings I arrived with, Doctor? They were removed from my satchel.”

He takes a moment to consider this. “Yes, as a matter of fact. Mrs. Finch thought it might give me some insight into your state of mind.” He tells her it is not unusual for artists to succumb to monomania and even certain states of hysteria. These conditions are aggravated by poor eating, poor socialization, and poor hygiene.

Hannah is close to tears, absorbing what he is telling her. She expected to dispute him, to dislike him. “You think I am an artist?” She seizes her knees, knowing that this question and the hope that stirs it will only reaffirm her obsession. Before he can answer, she says, “You do. You’ve said as much.”

Charles Peterborough advises her to stop painting. She must focus on taking care of her own needs properly—washing regularly, brushing her hair and teeth, wearing clean clothing, paring her fingernails and toenails—and that her husband should arrange for her treatment as a day-patient at a new psychiatric clinic in London. Charles Peterborough, it would seem, knew before Hannah did herself that the colonel had plans to relocate them.

He also prescribes ether on the occasions she is feeling particularly anxious to paint. Also, to overcome any qualms about social interactions. She is to build friendships with “decent people” and avoid being alone. Eat more meat. Eat more frequently. Take up a restful hobby such as gardening. And, once she is given a clear report from her psychiatrist, she (and her husband) could greatly benefit from having a child.