Fifty-Six

Hannah finds the colonel is at the desk in his office, surrounded by bare walls and crates. He is skimming over what appears to be a shipping log.

“I’m not coming,” she tells him.

“What?”

“You heard me. I’m not coming to England with you.”

“That’s…” He presses his palms into the desk, looking intently at her before rising to his feet. “I won’t pay for you to stay here, Hannah. I warn you.”

“Of course not. I wouldn’t expect that.”

They eye each other, exhibits of themselves. It is late in the morning. The air is fresh and dry enough to feel through her pores that the rainy season is coming to an end. Her satchel waits by the front door.

“What’s the matter with you?” he blurts out. “What will you do, Hannah? You’re simply not well. You must be…you must be bewitched,” he accuses her bizarrely.

“I will be fine,” she says. She feels calm, quite calm, in fact.

“Good god, you’re incredible! You know you won’t earn anything. How could you earn anything? You’ll be put on the streets. You’ll destroy your reputation, our reputation. And your health. I hope you don’t think I’m having that on my conscience. I’ll let it be known that you—”

“Be quiet please, George. You can let whatever you want to be known be known. I don’t care. What will you do, have my throat slit as well?”

The mask drops over his face. “You think I am responsible for—? I assure you, I am not.”

Looking at him, she doesn’t feel assured. She’s had plenty of time to think everything through. Hannah says, “It’s what you do, George. Or rather, who you are. You would have killed every last tiger in the bush. And for what purpose? Cleo was long gone.”

The colonel appears transfixed, caught within his clothes. Hannah doesn’t wait any longer.

Later, the colonel finds her in the public gardens. Who knows how long he would have been looking, to come across her here. He’s likely never set foot in the gardens. She sees him walking up the gravel path and fights the impulse to gather up her tubes of paint and her palette and clutch everything to her.

She is painting the south gate itself: the honey-colored stone wall where it curls into an arch over the delicate wrought-iron door. A glimpse of the wild greens beyond. As he approaches, Hannah lifts her brush and slides it behind her ear.

The colonel looks for a long time at the unfinished painting propped on her lap. He appears to have been crying. His face is somber as he hands her a fold of bills.

“For the first while,” he says. “To tide you over.” He clears his throat. “I redeemed your ticket.”

Hannah takes the money, knowing at once there is more there than the price of a steamship’s passage. A terrifying abyss seems to fall open beneath her. The depth of the Pacific Ocean itself.

“Thank you,” she tells him.

He half-shrugs, nods. Then he cups her shoulder a little roughly. “Take care of yourself, Hannah.”

“You as well, George.”

Later still, she hears the great horn sounding and resounding on the steamer as it exits the harbor. The silence that comes after is profound.

George, James, Lucy, so many others who’ve come and gone, inevitably, sliding along toward their destinies. Eva and her family have already left for a place called Darwin, fittingly. And yet it feels as if she is the one who has pushed out to sea, the familiar features of the coastline diminishing and blurring before her eyes.

Hannah picks at her fingernails, digging out the dried paint. A good wash is what she needs. She packs up her paints and belongings and is halfway up Cinnamon Hill before she remembers that her suitcases are in the opposite direction, at her new house. Amalaka Singh, it turns out, is landlady to half the townspeople in the lower village. Young as she is she knows her business, and most of the village’s business as well. “Anybody give you trouble,” she told Hannah, and her elder brother and father would “apply the muscle.” The sort of trouble, Hannah imagines, that women who live alone are expected to encounter.

Amalaka had conducted the transaction. She’d brought Hannah into the sitting room of her family’s home, the men looking on. “Three bungalows are available at this time.”

“I don’t want his,” Hannah said immediately, her voice choking on itself. “I couldn’t. I’m sorry.”

She took a deep breath and pressed the soles of her feet into the thatch flooring. There were pictures of the Sikh gurus on Amalaka’s wall as well. Everything else felt quite different: the light in the room, its vaguely sweet smell, like clover. Hannah could hear the child gabbling at somebody in an adjacent room.

Amalaka’s brother said something in Punjabi, she supposed, and the three of them had a brief discussion.

“How long?” Amalaka asked her.

Hannah shook her head. “I don’t know. Indefinitely.”

Again, they spoke. Stealing glances, Hannah interpreted the father as reticent, the brother and sister more sanguine. All three must have considered her move unusual. If they had any qualms about her friendship with Sergeant Singh, they voiced no objections to her. Part of her ached for them to complain. They should castigate her for ruining his life. Rake her over the coals. Demand to know: how was anything ever going to be put right?

The family seemed to reach a resolution. Amalaka said to her, “So of the remaining two bungalows, one is fresher and one is older. Unfortunately, the fresher one is next door to the missionary family.”

“Oh,” said Hannah, “you mean Mr. and Mrs. Watts?”

“Yes,” the three of them said at once.

The Watts children, apart from Jane, were known to be a rambunctious crew, it was true, and Mr. Watts came by his fire-and-brimstone reputation honestly. Yet Beatrice, for all her faults, was a kind woman. Without Lucy and the LAP members to goad her on, she might even take on some original qualities. “I know the Watts,” Hannah said.

“Yes, and do they not know you?” Amalaka replied, translating for her father.

In an instant, Hannah realized how wrong she’d got it. The question was not whether she could put up with the Watts, but whether they could put up with her. Would their god-fearing family be content with a sinner, a rebellious and broken woman, in their midst?

Hannah said, her chest tightening, “By all means, I am content with the older bungalow. I don’t want to cause trouble.”

She heads there now, to the smaller, older bungalow situated at the end of one of the lanes running toward the river. It is less desirable because of its proximity to the stilted homes clustered along the river. The poorest of the village live in the stilted huts, whether Malay, Chinese, Indian, or people from the hill tribe who ventured out of the forest. The stilted community throws its kitchen choppings out its windows, and they urinate and defecate out them, too. Depending on which way the breeze is blowing, especially at low tide, the smell can be intense. Because of the kitchen choppings, there are dogs that make their homes in the tall grasses. They pace and whine and occasionally choke themselves on fish bones. Noisy carrion crows visit, too.

At the moment, Hannah sees only the boys as she turns down her lane. Two skinny black-haired things, kicking a ball back and forth. She avoids them, glancing over once or twice to see what they will do about her and smiling pleasantly at them. The taller one stops the ball under his foot and stares openly. Hannah moves ahead to the squashed-looking little home and its shuttered front door. Surely the Singhs would be fine if she installed a mesh one.

Tomorrow, perhaps, she could find Suria and Anjuh to say hello. Though perhaps not. They might feel…and she might feel…unsure of what to say, under the circumstances. Something strikes her hard in the rump, making her stumble forward. It is the ball, of course. Hannah pauses, brushes the dust from her backside, then turns to face the boys. The taller one is covering his laughing mouth. The smaller one looks terrified. She grips the arms of her satchel, feeling foolish. The ball, dirty and cracked, has not rolled far. Hannah walks over to it, lines up, and swings her boot, sending it high and, to her surprise, quite far up the lane.

“That felt lovely,” she tells them. “I can see why you enjoy it.”

But the pair of them are already off and running, either to flee her or to fetch the ball. It doesn’t really matter. No doubt they’ll be back.

Inside, she stands for a minute, wrestling with the unreality of the situation before wrestling a towel from her tangle of belongings. Clutching the towel, she surveys the drab lounge, the tiny cooking area in an alcove out back, the shadowy bedroom where there is a fist-sized hole in the uneven floorboards. It is perfect. It is a space that is all her own. Though there is nothing in the house, she soon sees, resembling a bathtub. Or water. She laughs. Up the street, she passed a well where people must draw their water for cooking and cleaning. She will have to buy a basin, or a jug, something for carrying water. My god, she is so ill-prepared. Who or what, really, does she need to be prepared for?

Hannah tugs open the one shuttered window on the back wall of the lounge. It looks out toward the Perak river, broad enough in this area to resemble a lake, shining in the late-day sun. A boggy shoreline of stilted huts clutters the foreground of the prospect. One of the huts looks tippy, precariously so, as if at any moment it might crash into the sparkling blue.

“Goodness,” she says, “now that one’s going to wring my nerves out.”

Shutting the window, she fishes her bathing costume from her suitcase. A little further upstream it may be quite pleasant as a point of entry.

In fact, it is just as she imagines it, a wedge of shallows where the river meanders eastward. Where, during the day, it turns out, the women of the lower town come while their men are out fishing. Hannah wades into the blue, a dark phthalo blue with streaks of Veronese green, and washes herself clean.