MEI LAN LAY IN her bed and could not sleep. Outside the rain continued, cascading from guttering, running off leaves, silencing the bullfrogs in the garden; water was everywhere, while her eyes were dry. In the darkness she heard the occasional voice, a running of feet, the creaking of pipes. Ah Siew slept as always on a pallet at the foot of her bed and Mei Lan listened to her light, intermittent snoring.
There was the sound at last of the doctor’s car drawing up on the gravel outside. Careful not to wake Ah Siew, Mei Lan left her bed and crept to the great staircase of Lim Villa, peering over the banisters into the darkness below. A servant opened the front door and Mei Lan drew back into the shadows as the doctor passed, climbing the stairs with laboured breathing; a light caught his pocket watch and a saucer of baldness in his thick greying hair. A nurse appeared and he followed her to the sickroom. As the door shut upon him a wave of fear swept over Mei Lan, her breath caught in her chest and her hands became clammy. At the bottom of the dark and empty stairwell the marble flagging and Blackwood chairs of Lim Villa’s great entrance hall, illuminated faintly by a single lamp, appeared part of a spectral world.
Returning to bed she dozed intermittently but at 4.30, in the black light of early morning, Mei Lan was awoken by JJ, his eyes wide and frightened, hair tousled, the stubborn tuft waving about like a weed in water. Ah Siew was not to be seen. Mei Lan ran behind JJ up the corridor to their mother’s room. There, Boon Eng now stood beside the bed, head sunk despairingly upon his chest; Mei Lan let out a cry and rushed to her mother. Ei Ling gave a low groan as Mei Lan pulled on her arm. Then Ah Siew was at her side, steering her away to where JJ stood miserably in a corner. Mei Lan saw then that chairs were arranged along the wall and Second Grandmother and Lim Hock An were already in the room, sitting on special Blackwood seats with marble insets, composed and silent as Ancestor Portraits. She met her grandfather’s eye and he nodded, his face creased in distress. Mei Lan bit her lip and held his eye, finding some strength from his presence. With further despair she saw that Second Grandmother had already changed into an appropriately dark samfoo with an embroidered collar, ready for any eventuality; there was an expectant look in her eye. Beside her Lim Hock An sat glumly on his chair wrapped in a purple silk dressing gown bought in Paris many years before, his body slack, hands folded, contemplating the bill for a funeral he knew he could ill afford. Mei Lan was surprised to see that Little Sparrow was also present, sniffing into a lace-edged handkerchief. Second Grandmother flashed her rival a steely glance that Little Sparrow took care to avoid.
‘We could not risk moving her to hospital. The dengue must run its course. We can only hope now,’ Boon Eng told his children in an unexpectedly contrite voice.
Mei Lan stared bitterly at her father; anger churned inside her, but when she opened her mouth to speak only a sob of pain emerged. In equal distress JJ turned and strode to the door, unable to stand any more, but his father called to him.
‘What kind of a filial son are you? It is your duty to sit by her side, to wait with her.’
‘You did not wait,’ JJ burst out, tears in his eyes.
‘Earlier the doctor expected improvement,’ Boon Eng answered in a low voice, accepting his son’s admonition.
They waited in the meagre light from a pink satin lampshade, silent but for a clearing of the throat, the odd whispered order or exchange. Mei Lan stared at a framed photograph on a bedside table of herself as a two-year-old: in it she sat beside Ei Ling, arms about her mother’s neck. Ei Ling wore a sarong and embroidered kebaya, her round eyes and the lift of her nose indicating a mix of origin as a Peranakan Straits Chinese. Her hair was fashionably coiled, pearls hung from her ears, diamonds encircled her fingers but her beautiful face wore a wistful expression, as if life held back its true harvest. In distress Mei Lan returned her gaze to her mother; the hollow-cheeked invalid labouring to breathe bore little likeness now to the real Ei Ling. Mei Lan found she was breathing in time with her mother, willing her own energy to her, willing the breath through her body. She had no words to shape the knowledge that had surfaced in her recently: that her mother had made a poor bargain in life. Mei Lan pushed the thought away, concentrating on her breath, her eyes focused on her mother’s exhausted body. At last, through the window she saw the first streak of pink crack open the sky. In that moment Second Grandmother stirred and let out a piercing wail. Little Sparrow followed with a loud cry of her own and Mei Lan knew the waiting was over.
Later, from her window Mei Lan looked down on the broad gravel drive and saw that already the servants had hung a white banner over the door, announcing the death; they must have had it ready, Mei Lan thought in horror. Now that it had happened she was numb, no tears came and her mother’s delirious words of the night before echoed insistently in her head: I will not. I will not, the broken sounds wrenched up from deep within her. Mei Lan could not understand why the words stayed with her, or sounded so familiar.
The door opened and Ah Siew appeared with the new white mourning clothes the tailor had made in just a few hours, and the xiao, the mourning pin she must wear now for one hundred days; already the rituals of death had overtaken them. It was then that she remembered standing once outside her parents’ bedroom door and listening with dread to the quarrel within. Her mother’s voice came back to her, I will not. I will not put up with it any longer. At last the sentence completed itself. Mei Lan realised in new distress that Ei Ling had screamed out the words to Boon Eng as he strode away from her, dressed as always for a promiscuous evening, slamming the door behind him. He had not seen Mei Lan, who hurriedly flattened herself behind a tall cupboard beside the door. At this memory her tears welled up again and Ah Siew stepped forward. Mei Lan bent to sob on the amah’s birdlike shoulder.
Within a week of the funeral JJ was gone. Second Grandmother had protested that he must fulfil his filial duty and stay for the required mourning period of one hundred days, but the boat was sailing and at Oxford the term would start. In the end Lim Hock An decided JJ should go as long as he observed some required rituals.
A week after JJ’s departure the family moved from Lim Villa into Bougainvillaea House, squeezing into a home that seemed the size of a box after their previous palatial residence. A dividing fence was immediately put up along one side of Bougainvillaea House, cutting it off from Lim Villa’s grounds. Soon, in the distance, across manicured lawns, workmen were seen divesting the mansion of its ostentation and turning it into a school.
In a strange room, in a strange house, bereft at one blow of her mother and brother and also her home, Mei Lan woke often at night. Sometimes, hearing the crack of thunder or the splash of rain, she knew she would never again listen to these everyday sounds without remembering that night of waiting beside her mother’s bed. Life was now full of missing parts: her mother, Lim Villa, JJ – all familiarity was gone. The solitariness she felt was not new to her, but was compounded by the suddenness of the change in her life. At school other girls talked about family outings and shared emotions but Mei Lan could only recount the formality of her home, each person locked into a life of their own, each separate from the others. She was never part of the giggling knots of girls who invariably fell silent when she appeared; teachers spoke of her as self-contained and possessing an exceptional brain. Each year on Mei Lan’s birthday her mother had arranged a party, and all her class was invited. The great ballroom of Lim Villa had been festooned with decorations, while magicians and jugglers and dancers were called to entertain the children. Mei Lan had hated the fuss and tried to fall ill, but was always forced to attend her own party. It was useless to tell her mother that although everyone waited for the event, it only helped distance her further from her classmates. In the end she immersed herself in the solitary world of study, placing herself amongst the elite in a more effective way.
The school holidays had begun as Ei Ling fell ill, and without her mother the time lay heavy upon Mei Lan. Although usually unavailable, during school holidays Ei Ling had always taken care to arrange a special treat for Mei Lan and herself. They sometimes went to the cinema, shopped at Robinsons or visited the Botanic Gardens where concerts were performed on the bandstand; sometimes they visited an aunt in Penang. Mei Lan found herself missing these holiday treats almost more than she missed her mother, yet, she thought guiltily, if it had been Ah Siew who had died she would have been inconsolable.
Now, it shocked her to find that already, within days of her death, she could not clearly remember her mother’s face, could only sense her in fragments of memory. She recalled the intoxicating smell of her perfume and the strains of the dance music that Ei Ling played on a gramophone with a great brass ear. There were the flounces of gauzy Western clothes, and the silks of her form-fitting sarong, kebaya or cheongsam. Her mother had flitted in and out of the day always unreachable in those moments when Mei Lan needed her most. Through an open crack of door or through the banisters on the stairs, Mei Lan observed her mother from a distance as Ei Ling turned before a mirror at the fitting of a dress, span on her toes in the arms of her dance instructor in the ballroom of Lim Villa, or laughed with her friends at the mah-jong table with its constant clack of ivory counters.
Her father was now rarely seen. As a residence, Boon Eng considered Bougainvillaea House shamefully mean, and he preferred to stay away, living at his club, pursuing his usual diversions with ever more reckless vigour. Lim Hock An and Second Grandmother could be heard quarrelling continuously, for they found the close proximity in which they must now live distasteful. Both knew it was in these very rooms that Lim Hock An had lain with Little Sparrow to the pique of his Senior Wife. His huge Blackwood bed with its mother-of-pearl inlay and Second Grandmother’s red and gold phoenix bed were fitted with much difficulty into the tiny rooms.
Without direction to the day, Mei Lan felt by turn anger, abandonment and grief as much for herself as for her mother. Rules of mourning forbade her to leave the house and, restless, she looked for diversion. Bougainvillaea House was not a place Mei Lan had ever explored, and its terrain was different from the cultivated dignity of Lim Villa with its army of gardeners forever pruning trees and weeding lawns. Bougainvillaea House had been left half wild with papaya trees, mango, wild orchid, spider lilies and an abundance of the bougainvillaea after which the house was named. At the back was a wide storm canal that channelled torrential rain and prevented flooding. The canal also harvested a nearby underground stream and was usually half filled by a sluggish flow of water. Its grassy banks ended in coarse lallang upon which monitor lizards sometimes sunned themselves. A metal service ladder descended into the water to one side of the house. Mei Lan had seen minnows, and crabs and crayfish stalking about amongst the weeds.
Sometimes, on those first days in Bougainvillaea House, Mei Lan heard a saxophone playing down by the canal; a volley of scales, a sad wail of sound or a fragment of melody floated to her. The notes echoed through her, capturing the sense of solitariness that deepened in her day by day. Leaning out of her second-storey window, she tried to discover who played the music. Across the canal she saw only the overgrown garden and orchard of mangosteen trees that belonged to the rambling house, its shutters closed against the sun, which sat at the top of the slope beyond the water. In the evening shouts of laughter and the soft thud of balls from a tennis court could be heard. Ah Siew said it was a boarding house for European men run by a Eurasian woman, and added sternly that Mei Lan should not look in its direction as curious male eyes might rest upon her.
Each afternoon Mei Lan took a walk or sat beside the canal, which she now regarded as her own private stream. One day she found an old wooden chair by the kitchen door and pulled it up to the edge of the canal. The fusty odour of the water came to her, golden orioles flitted between the trees and their sweet song in the dying afternoon filled her with emotion. A kingfisher flashed by, paused on a branch and was gone, disturbed by a sudden splashing. Mei Lan looked up in annoyance to see a man, his face hidden beneath a wide straw hat, wading about with a long-handled net. She wondered if he was one of the lodgers in the boarding house Ah Siew had warned her about. All at once, the man gave a cry and began hopping comically around on one foot.
‘I’ve been bitten by a crayfish!’ he shouted in annoyance when Mei Lan began to laugh, hobbling towards her through the water. Scrambling up the bank, he sat down on the grass near her chair to examine the bite. He wore a white shirt and old patched shorts and his long narrow feet gleamed wetly, a few drops of blood smudging the wounded toe. Mei Lan saw that in spite of his height he was no more than eighteen or nineteen, no older than JJ.
‘I’ll bring some Mercurochrome,’ Mei Lan said in apology, standing up abruptly, embarrassed. She turned her cheek away from him in an effort to hide the birthmark.
He raised his head and smiled, his face open to her as if they already knew each other. Beneath thick and untidy brows his dark eyes regarded her quizzically. When she returned from the house with the antiseptic he was lying stretched out with the hat over his face to shade himself from the sun, but sat up as he heard her approach.
‘We haven’t introduced ourselves; I’m Howard Burns. I live over there, in Belvedere. We’re neighbours,’ he said and pointed to the dilapidated house across the canal.
‘We used to live over there in Lim Villa, but now we’ve moved into Bougainvillaea House,’ Mei Lan explained pointing to the distant shape of Lim Hock An’s mansion and then to the small house behind her. Howard looked gravely from one residence to the other with an expression of query; Mei Lan felt bound to reply.
‘Changed circumstances; Grandfather crashed in the Depression.’ She was surprised at how easily she could admit this to him.
Howard nodded sympathetically. When he had moved to Belvedere after his father died, Lim Villa had just been built. He knew something about the wealthy family with its two wives, and its numerous cars and rickshaws parked in a garage that he could see from a window of Belvedere. His mother was always commenting on the careless wealth of their neighbours and the ugliness of their great home. She had pointed scornfully to Bougainvillaea House, ‘the Second Wife’s house’, and described its polygamous use as wilfully immoral. Howard had regularly watched the children of Lim Villa being taken to school in a private rickshaw or one of the many cars in the garage. He did not tell Mei Lan now of the absorbing hours spent studying her home and its comings and goings, or the way he had kept her in view. One birthday, he remembered, he had asked for a pair of binoculars with which to see her better.
He stared at the girl before him, and marvelled at the reality of her: the feathering of her brows, the fullness of her upper lip and the birthmark on her jaw that she was trying to hide. Seeing his eyes settle upon the hated mark, Mei Lan was sure he would be repulsed.
‘It’s my lucky mark, my protection,’ she told him, pushing up her chin defiantly, remembering Ah Siew’s fong and Yong Gui’s pronouncement so many years before.
‘You shouldn’t worry about it,’ he shrugged, brushing the flaw aside with such certainty that she suddenly felt no need to hide it. Her hair was thick and straight and burnished by the sun that emptied down upon them. She held the small bottle of Mercurochrome forgotten in her hand. Howard remembered a recent funeral hearse.
‘My mother died a few weeks ago,’ she replied quietly when he asked about it. Her face saddened, and he was distressed that he should have been so blunt.
‘I don’t mind telling you,’ she said and looked down at the grass, preferring not to see the sympathy in his eyes. The death of his father and the painful move to Belvedere was imprinted for ever on his memory. How much worse it was for her, he thought, left almost bereft of everything familiar.
‘It makes you feel ill,’ he said, hoping she would know he understood and was rewarded by the emotion that shadowed her face. Hurriedly, to cover the awkward moment he began to explain about his life and how they came to Belvedere. As he spoke he glanced across the canal, hoping his mother was not at one of Belvedere’s windows to see him.
‘Must have been horrible for you,’ she said, handing him some wadding at last and the bottle of Mercurochrome.
‘No more than for you,’ he answered, as he knelt to dab the crimson antiseptic on his wounded toe. She looked down on the bent head of dark hair that curled with a life of its own, and felt that something was sealed between them.
‘Don’t you have a brother?’ he asked, remembering a boy who had darted about Lim Villa’s tennis court with his friends.
‘He sailed for England last week, to go to university, to Oxford,’ Mei Lan replied.
Howard listened, feeling a pang of envy at the mention of Oxford. He had hoped to go there himself or to Cambridge for further study; Rose dreamed of her son becoming a doctor or a lawyer. At St Joseph’s Institution he was near the top of the class, and had been encouraged to try for the Queen’s Scholarship which allowed a handful of bright local boys to continue their education in England at the government’s expense. When the scholarship had gone to someone else, Howard felt wounded by the disappointment, felt he had failed his mother. Without a Queen’s Scholarship he had no hope of paying for higher studies, even locally at Raffles College, let alone a university abroad. Although they lacked nothing, they lived on Rose’s careful accounting, and luxuries were few.
‘When you finish school you will just have to work like everyone else,’ Rose told him firmly, struggling with her blighted hope.
His mother’s sorrow weighed upon him, for his success would have proved her sacrifices worthwhile. Observing the European lodgers who passed through Belvedere, Howard did not miss the condescension shown his mother. He saw her swallowing her pride, ignoring the endless daily humiliations that must be braved as a landlady. She was a woman alone in the world and he knew it could not be easy for her. Mei Lan’s brother had no need of a scholarship, Howard thought bitterly, his fees at university would be easily paid by his wealthy family.
‘After all that has happened, we can’t afford the fees at Oxford. A friend of Grandfather’s is helping us.’ She felt as if she read his mind, seeing herself as he must see her, and to her own surprise preferring to denigrate the House of Lim rather than risk his disapproval. He smiled again and his presence swept through her, filling her with amazement that, although for so many years he had been so near, she had had no knowledge of his existence.
From then on, each afternoon during the school holidays, Mei Lan stole out to the canal to meet Howard. They found they could squeeze through a gap in the new fence that now divided Bougainvillaea House from the Lim Villa estate. Mei Lan led him to a clearing amongst a copse of trees, to the cast-iron gazebo that Lim Hock An had once imported from Glasgow. She saw that although gardeners visited the place to trim the grass and keep down snakes, the gazebo was forgotten, with vines twisting thickly around its supporting columns above a wrought-iron bench. However, nothing could ever be hidden from Ah Siew, no matter how careful Mei Lan was. As she prepared to make her way to the canal one afternoon, Ah Siew barred her way.
‘I know,’ Ah Siew screamed. ‘I know!’ The amah shook a finger, incensed in a way Mei Lan had never seen before. ‘Girls of good family do not behave like this, running out to meet boys. Remember who you are.’ Mei Lan tried to protest but Ah Siew was not yet finished.
‘He is not of your race; you are Chinese and he is Eurasian. If the elders find out I cannot protect you,’ she warned.
‘You are not to tell anyone,’ Mei Lan instructed her angrily and for a moment Ah Siew hesitated, used, however grumblingly, to obeying Mei Lan’s orders.
‘You are my servant,’ Mai Lan shouted. Reminded so forcefully of her position, Ah Siew drew back, lips pursed to contain her fury.
‘You will do as I say,’ Mei Lan demanded imperiously, the thought of Howard waiting for her overriding every other emotion. One way or another, she would see him; she would have her way.
‘You are a wilful girl. The world will not be kind to you,’ Ah Siew replied bitterly before turning away, slamming the door behind her.
‘What do you know, you’re only a servant,’ Mei Lan shouted after her, tears filling her eyes.
Sometimes, he brought his saxophone with him and played for her, modern music of the kind her mother had danced to in the ballroom of Lim Villa. The music, although sometimes broken by a lack of breath or a squawking trail of notes, curled through them both. He told her interesting, irrelevant things such as how the rain tree had come to Singapore from South America or that a jellyfish was not really a fish and was without a brain. He always carried a book, was always reading. Sometimes he brought fishing nets with him and they kicked off their shoes, scrambling down into the shallow water of the canal. Tucking her dress into her knickers, unashamed, Mei Lan stalked crayfish with him amongst the weeds and slippery lichen. They always took care to keep to that part of the canal that was hidden from Bougainvillaea House by overhanging trees. Peering into the green and aqueous world at her feet Mei Lan watched minnows brush her ankles. He stood close, showing her how to net the shelly, long-legged crayfish and tip them into the lidded basket he carried; she felt his breath on her cheek. Later, they drank the soft drinks and ate the biscuits she had stolen from the kitchen of Bougainvillaea House. He added mangosteen from the gnarled Belvedere trees and thick slices of his mother’s sugee cake. In the gazebo on the bench she sat close to him, their bare legs touching while he told her about himself.
‘I wanted to go to university in England but I did not get a scholarship. Now, if I am lucky I’ll probably get a job at the Harbour Board,’ he informed her resignedly.
‘I want to be a lawyer,’ she admitted.
‘Women don’t become lawyers,’ he replied, disapproval filling his voice. Mei Lan fell silent, unable to explain about Ah Siew, Second Grandmother, her own mother and Little Sparrow and how she did not want to be like them but free in the world, like her brother JJ.
One day Howard came with a gift wrapped in brown paper and secured with old string. She struggled with the complicated knots and at last lifted from the paper a small wooden box. Opening the lid, she saw a compass nestled within.
‘It’s to help you follow your dream. It belonged to my father,’ he said.
Impulsively, she put her arms around him and for the first time felt the moist softness of his lips against her own, smelled the musky odour of him.
‘When I first moved to Belvedere I set the needle in the direction of my old home, so that I would always be able to find my way back there,’ Howard told her as he drew away, embarrassed and aroused. The taste and the feel of her filled him so powerfully that he felt dizzy.
‘How does it work?’ she asked, to cover her own embarrassment.
‘You set the red needle to the Direction of Travel and it’s never wrong.’ As he showed her how to set the compass he noticed the trembling of his hands.
The hours together were filled with a strange expansion she knew he also felt. In the secret clearing under the gazebo with the rustle of insects in the vines above them, she stretched out on the wide iron bench. He lay beside her, pushing her hair out of her eyes and off her damp forehead to kiss her, exploring the hollow of her neck, the slope of her cheek, the soft place between her breasts. She felt the hardness of his arousal against her and understood the control it took to pull away as their emotions grew. Anything more would break the spell, the fragility of what they had; both were conscious of something held back, something that must wait its time. Only when she was away from him did she know that this was happiness. At night she remembered his face and slept.
The school holidays were almost finished when Second Grandmother saw her from a window of Bougainvillaea House, hauling up a large grey crayfish that struggled stiffly in the net. He had his arms about her, helping her hold on to the long-handled net so that she would not drop the creature and she laughed, her cheek against his neck. Then, in a moment Ah Siew came running and through the open windows of Bougainvillaea House Mei Lan heard the sound of Second Grandmother’s voice screeching high alarm.
The next day Lim Hock An had a tall bamboo fence erected along the canal. The view of green water and kingfishers was gone. All Mei Lan could see now above the fence were the distant windows of Belvedere turning gold with the afternoon sun.
‘I warned you,’ Ah Siew told her tartly.
Mei Lan waited to see Howard’s face at a Belvedere window, but he did not appear. Sometimes, in the evening she heard the notes of his saxophone beside the canal and knew he was playing for her, but could see nothing. The fence soared above her, pushing her back, cutting her off from herself. Only the compass remained with her, hidden in a drawer. She held it in her hand and just as he promised the red needle held steadfast, pointing always to Belvedere, her Direction of Travel.
Some days later, through the servants, Rose came to know the reason for the construction of the bamboo fence before Bougainvillaea House and confronted Howard angrily. Tall as he was, he cowered before her.
‘Making a spectacle of yourself, shaming us with your behaviour,’ Rose screamed, her face aflame. Howard hung his head, his heart cracking open as his mother continued to fly at him.
‘If you were smaller I’d give you a caning. Don’t I have enough trouble? It takes years to build a reputation and only moments to break it. Watch yourself, son. Eurasians mix with Eurasians, Chinese with Chinese, Malays with Malays, Indians with Indians; the races keep to their own.’ Rose turned away, speaking to him only when necessary for the next few days.