‘Next week, I shall be in Dr Phang’s team on a very important and sensitive mission to Jakarta,’ her husband said, his voice a constricted mix of pride in the bestowed honour and disappointment in the certainty that his wife was not going to be impressed or to miss him.
Other wives waited eagerly for their husbands’ return from trips abroad; his wife seemed glad of his absence. He suspected that she would have been unhappy if he had decided to extend their honeymoon and delayed her return to school by even a few days. Already, for Bernard Tan Boon Siong, the returns he had expected from his marriage were not at all commensurate with the vast effort he had put into it; everyday he saw evidence of his horrible miscalculations.
‘I can see you’re going to relish three days on your own,’ he said with a sharp little laugh. He came home that evening to announce something for which he watched her reaction keenly: ‘Dr Phang’s wife and the other wives will be going. There will be a special programme for the wives because of Dr Phang’s status. I would like you to come along too.’
There could be one thing he could salvage from his marriage: its public face. In public, by his side, with her pretty looks and gentle demeanour, she was the perfect wife and he was in charge.
‘They don’t have to work, I do,’ she said with some spirit.
‘You don’t have to work, you know that very well,’ he said. ‘How do you think I’ll feel, being the only man not accompanied by his wife?’
‘If you like, I’ll apply for leave,’ she said wearily.
‘Not if you go reluctantly. Do you know,’ he added, and she knew that the angry frown and the taut white forehead would remain for the rest of the evening, ‘that you do everything reluctantly where I am concerned?’
In bed that evening, she had tried, for the sake of keeping the peace for her mother, Por Por and the maid, to induce a good mood in her husband. But pretence always took a toll on both spirits and physical energy, and turned everything into a fiasco.
He snapped, ‘You don’t have to pretend you like that thing and wear it just to please me. I’m not stupid, you know. I can see through falsehood straightaway.’
It was an item of lingerie as ridiculous in its mystique of lace, straps and strings as it must have been in its price. She had no doubt her husband had bought it upon the insistence, and with the help, of the incorrigible Mrs Olivia Phang: she could never wear it with a fraction of the seductive eagerness which that happy woman, never happier than when she was by her husband’s side, must bring to her entire wardrobe of foreign-made lingerie.
The sight of the black lacy item on her body suddenly infuriated him. ‘Take it off,’ he said. ‘Give it to me.’ He got up from bed and flung it out of the window. She would remember to get up early and retrieve it before anybody found it.
Maria thought, relieved at not having to hide her relief since her husband had already left for the trip, ‘Three days. I shall have time to look at my story again, maybe write another.’
She was turning more and more to the world of her imagination for solace, to balance the bleakness of the reality. There was a price to pay; the imagination sometimes spilled over into the dreams at night and heightened the terror.
She was somewhere in the Botanic Gardens, in a secluded spot hidden from sight by bushes and trees. ‘That’s a nice nightie you have on,’ said Dr Phang, and he made to touch the lacy straps on her shoulders. ‘Why, you’re crying. Tell me,’ he said gently and laid her head on his shoulder. ‘It must be that Bernard. He’s such a pain in the ass. You are completely mismatched. I saw that in Cameron Highlands, on the first day of your honeymoon. Do you plan to leave him?’
She said, ‘I can’t! I can’t!’
‘Why not?’ he demanded, but she could only continue weeping and repeat, ‘I can’t!’
He bent down to kiss her. ‘You know, beneath all that docile exterior lies so much unused love. You were never meant for a life of solitude, my dear.’
They heard the sound of approaching footsteps. Bernard was shouting, ‘Alright, come out, wherever you are. I’ve caught you. I’ve got grounds for divorce now. Caught you in the act, you bitch, you slut!’ For she was standing before him, naked, the lingerie on the grass.
‘Who was that with you?’ He pulled somebody out of the bushes, yelling triumphantly, ‘Got you! I knew it was you all along. I’ll set the police on you for seducing my wife.’
‘Yes, go ahead, you bastard,’ said Brother Philip, also naked. ‘She came to me for comfort because you never gave her any!’ and knocked him to the ground.
His dreams which he never told her must have had their own share of terrors; she would wake up suddenly to long drawn-out groans, incoherent bits of angry conversation, an arm suddenly flung out in the darkness, and would instantly sit up to soothe him, stroking his forehead, rubbing his chest, bringing him a cup of hot water, whispering calming words into his ears, as to a child in delirium. Kindness was no substitute for love either, and retreated at once if mistaken for passion.
As soon as he sat up, looked around, realised it was only a bad dream and saw his wife beside him, all gentle solicitousness, he would break into something like a sob and pull her towards him in a return of hope and yearning, and she would inwardly recoil, in a return of guilt and desperation. It was an impossible situation they were in, the dreams at night being now an extension of their torments by day. Through her own fault, she had become the best exemplar of that warning about marrying in haste and repenting at leisure: only the haste she had married in had nothing to do with passion, and the long, grey vistas stretching endlessly ahead were not of repentance, since she had done nothing wrong, but of regret for an act of sheer folly and stupidity.
On the first anniversary of their marriage, he said with a wry smile, ‘Why don’t we give each other the best anniversary present ever?’
She dreaded the sarcasms that often followed the statements or the questions delivered with slow deliberateness for effect. ‘Why don’t we see a marriage counsellor, since we’re going nowhere?’
She knew his pride and sensitivity would never allow a full unburdening of secrets, whether to strangers or family, whether to professional counsellors or close friends. Only his sharp-eyed Third Aunt, on a visit sixth months into their marriage had pulled her aside to say, in a poignantly brave attempt at English, ‘My Ah Siong. He so thin. He not happy. You got take care of him?’
He liked to come up with unusual statements and suggestions for the sole purpose of provoking a reply from her, of breaking into her long silences: ‘Why aren’t you pregnant yet? Maybe the fault’s all on my side. Why don’t we seek medical help? Should we think of adopting?’
She wondered why desperately unhappy women continued to stay on in their marriages, and concluded that it was not the oft claimed folly or lack of self-esteem. It was simple calculation: every unhappy woman had an abacus in her head in which she constantly did the sums of gain and loss, of continuing in the marriage or walking out. The most daunting cost lay in taking the initiative: suddenly she would have to face and justify her decision, not only to her husband but the entire support system of relatives, friends, colleagues, fellow church members. When a woman married, it was not just to an individual but a whole community. Even the much steeled woman would quail before the hideous prospect of facing the shock and disapproval, disappointment and sorrow of such a force whose first duty would be to argue her down and help her save her marriage. Think of your children, they would urge. Think of this. Think of that. What would people say.
Then of course there was the question of money. She had heard of couples who continued to be under the same roof because they could not afford another. One couple had had separate bedrooms for decades, communicating through their two children or notes stuck on doors.
In the end, it was easier for an unhappy woman to simply give up and resign herself to her lot in life. Taking stock of that lot, she could improve it in small ways – focusing on the children, going out mor
e with her girlfriends, taking up community work. One woman she knew took up mah-jong and in the end came to rely completely on its compensatory solace. The tiny light at the end of a very long blistering tunnel would come when the children were grown up, started working and give her the financial independence she needed from her husband. But by that time, she would be an old woman, like the poor woman who suffered for thirty years in her marriage and revealed the truth in the sorrowful inscription on her tombstone: ‘She died at thirty, and was buried at sixty.’
The daunting problems of children and money were not hers, yet there was no lightening of the heaviness of heart. Maria thought sadly: I would have no support whatsoever in my decision. Do I have the strength to stand all alone? An act of adultery, constant abuse, wastrel habits, a serious dereliction of husbandly duty – all these would be comprehensible because they were in the expected order of things, and be given due consideration. But lovelessness?
‘Why, Maria,’ everyone would exclaim, ‘you’re such a good, loving wife, always tending to your husband’s needs. And Bernard’s such a good husband. Anyone can see he loves you with his whole heart and soul!’
Her mother would be hysterical: ‘Are you mad? He bought this apartment for you! He doesn’t drink, gamble or womanise. You are his whole world. Do you know how many women would be glad to have Bernard as their husband? Why must you be so difficult?’
Fourteen
The owl’s cry in the dead of night – she had heard it only once as a child, and it had remained a terror ever since, despite the weaning from the ancestral superstitions starting from the girlhood years in school, despite even the strong, enlightened stance of reason in adulthood. In the morning her mother asked her, then the maid, if they too had heard it, to confirm the final sign in a long series of an imminent death in the house.
Por Por had not been behaving like herself, a welcome sign only in the case of very old and sick people, that their release was in sight. Watching Por Por suddenly becoming quiet and subdued, sitting by herself in dark corners for long hours, she remembered the many tales she had heard – of the kindly, gentle old neighbour, aged eighty, who turned nasty and cursed everyone in the household for a whole week before he died, of the nasty mother-in-law who suddenly stopped scolding her long-suffering daughter-in-law and died actually holding the young woman’s hand. It was as if they needed to give warning of their approaching death in the most conspicuous way possible – a total reversal of personality and temperament. External signs like the owl’s cry, a sudden discharge of scent into the air of pale nocturnal flowers, even the sound of knuckles knocking on coffins, were all but secondary warnings.
She bent down and looked into Por Por’s face, offered to take her shopping, to the playground, to the White Heaven Temple, and watched in dismay as the old woman silently and resolutely shook her head, like a dispirited child, to each offer. Bernard, whose kindness in searching for and bringing her grandmother back home almost three years ago she would never forget, joined her in trying to break through the thick silence that the old one had wrapped round herself, like a warm, comforting blanket. Both were able, just for a while, to step out of their world of silent conflict, growing more fearful by the day, to stand side by side as a pair in a unity of concern and compassion for another.
The pleasant thought was interrupted by a sombre one: could tension between two persons in a household spread outwards, like a dark and pestilential cloud, to infect others? Could even very young children in their cribs and cradles succumb to slow, silently spreading adult poison?
She spoke about the owl’s cry to Bernard, and he dismissed it, as he regularly dismissed the superstitions of elderly relatives like his Third Aunt, as just so much of the traditional nonsense forbidden by the Church. Nowadays he turned every statement, every question, no matter how innocuous, into yet one more painful reminder of the hopelessness of their marriage, a continuing supply of fuel for an angry furnace that needed to be fed constantly. She waited with weary resignation and it came as expected, accompanied by a bitter laugh: if the owl’s cry was a sign of his impending death, it would be no bad thing. She thought grimly: wallowing in self-pity only made a person sink deeper in the regard of others.
She wondered how much her memory had been influenced by her ever active imagination to fix permanently in her mind the recollection of a little girl who had died the morning after an owl’s cry was heard. The girl and her mother had rented part of a room in a large rundown house with many rooms, endlessly partitioned by a greedy landlord, to take in as many as possible of the near destitute that regularly came with small children and belongings hurriedly stuffed into baskets or wrapped in sarongs. To this house her father had once taken her, her mother and Por Por in one of his frantic attempts to escape the loan sharks. She vividly remembered the thin, sickly-looking, sad-eyed little girl who was about the same age as herself, always wearing ragged, oversized clothes and rubber sandals, and sleeping with her mother on a dirty mattress in a tiny corner of a room.
In the middle of the night, at least six people woke up to the long, drawn out cry of the owl, and in the morning they looked upon the cold stiff body of the little girl on the mattress, and the mother squatting beside her, crying softly. She remembered her parents quickly packing up to leave, her mother pressing some money into the hands of the weeping woman; within a day, the house of death had been emptied of all its tenants.
No, it was nonsense. No bird’s cry would take her Por Por from her, and no change of behaviour in an old woman who habitually swung from one mood to another, like a temperamental child, should be cause for alarm.
Then Por Por suddenly emerged from her solitude to launch upon a series of activities that were alarming, not for any portentousness but for sheer danger to her life. She managed to slip out of the house several times, displaying the cunning of a sly caged prisoner intently watching for the smallest slip in vigilance of the prison keeper. She was on one occasion found near a Hindu shrine and on another, near her favourite haunt, the White Heaven Temple. ‘Por Por, you could have been killed by all those cars and buses, don’t you understand?’ said Maria in tears, examining her for injuries. Bernard had once suggested putting her in a home, the best and most comfortable in Singapore, but spoke no more on the matter when he saw his wife’s distress.
Then Por Por’s escapades took on a strange focus and urgency that only later Maria understood, in a return of all the old fears of tradition she thought she had left behind. Heng had managed to track the old woman down at the White HeavenTemple where she seemed to have gone with a special purpose. ‘What’s that? Show me,’ he ordered, but she insisted on hiding something behind her back. It turned out to be nothing alarming, only a joss stick that she must have taken from one of the many urns in the temple.
‘Por Por, what are you doing?’ Anna Seetoh asked as she saw the old woman stirring some ash in a cup of water with a spoon. The maid said it was ash from the joss stick; she had been trying to make a mixture for some time, like a small child engrossed in make-believe cooking.
‘Por Por, what on earth –’ Maria had opened the bedroom door in response to the frantic knocking.
The old woman was holding the cup of joss stick water and walking towards Bernard who had sat up, fully awake.
She put the cup to his lips, saying clearly in her dialect, ‘Drink this, it will cure you.’
The strange incident could have been dismissed as yet one more harmless eccentricity of demented old age if it had not been followed by a similar one, this time while they were having breakfast. Por Por walked straight up to Bernard, removed a packet of something from her blouse pocket, and said, ‘The gods have blessed this. Wear it close to your heart. It will save you.’
The packet contained some dried marigold petals which Maria instantly recognised as those from a garland that Por Por had some time ago removed from a stone god in a Hindu shrine and which she and the maid had hastily put back.
If Bernard exp
erienced any frisson of terror in being singled out as one in dire need of supernatural help, he showed no sign of it, merely receiving the packet calmly and murmuring something to humour the old woman. Por Por watched with keen intensity; when he did nothing with the saving gift and continued eating his breakfast, she burst into a frenzy of scolding and had to be led away. Maria watched with mounting anxiety.
The ancient fearful world of darkness and owls and portents had come back to trouble her, and distilled into a single deadly chill that froze all power of speech and thinking, exactly a week later, when she had a call from the office of Dr S.K. Chiang to whom her husband went for his regular medical check-ups.
Dr Chiang said, ‘I need to speak to your husband; it’s urgent.’
She said, her mouth suddenly very dry, ‘What’s wrong? Could you tell me, Doctor?’
Dr Chiang said, ‘I really would like to speak to your husband personally. Tell him to call me as soon as he can.’
She made a frantic call to his office where he was having an important meeting and could not be interrupted. ‘Please tell him it’s extremely important,’ she begged the secretary. He came on the phone, none too pleased about having to leave a meeting that he was chairing. ‘Alright,’ he said when she told him. ‘I’ll call Dr Chiang after the meeting.’
‘Will you let me know as soon as you can?’ she asked, and he could not resist the opportunity to say, with the habitual hard-edged cynicism, ‘Why this concern for me all of a sudden?’
‘Please let me know,’ she pleaded. ‘Alright,’ he said in a softened tone.
She did not want to share her fears with her mother, in case they turned out to be unfounded: her imagination, in a wild flight of hope, pictured her husband coming through the door talking with unaccustomed good humour about wrong prognoses and alarmist doctors.
If she could, she would have shared her fears with Por Por, to draw out the explanation for those weird actions that now seemed like some dreadful portent. She looked at Por Por who was looking at her with the quizzical half frown of someone trying hard to remember something. An old woman rapidly losing her mind, who had suffered much in her youth, who must have a huge store of secret hopes, dreams and passions that would finally go to the grave, unknown and unfulfilled, together with that frail body: were women like Por Por, at the last stage of their bitter lives, given the gift of the owl, the harbinger of death? Were they also given the power to avert doom? The image of Por Por offering Bernard the saving joss stick ash from her temple, and later, the holy flower petals from an alien shrine would not go away. In different circumstances, could Por Por have become like the powerful Venerable Mother in the White Heaven Temple, dispensing hope to the hopeless? The dark forces of tradition that modernity’s vanguards of education and technology claimed they had routed, were unroutable.
Miss Seetoh in the World Page 13