The Scarlet Macaw

by S. P. Hozy

  There was only one way to find out. A week later he asked her out to dinner. Not her and Dinah, just Maris alone. When Maris accepted, Axel made a reservation at Imperial Treasure Super Peking Duck Restaurant. He had been wanting to try the Peking duck, which was reported to be excellent.

  Maris met him at the restaurant, in the Paragon Mall on Orchard Road, and they ordered drinks. Maris was nervous but tried not to let it show. She hadn’t been on a “date” in years — funny how she hadn’t even thought about it until Axel phoned — and it felt like a first-ever date. Silly, she told herself. After all, she and Dinah had been out with Axel on a couple of occasions and she hadn’t felt the least bit nervous. Maybe because she hadn’t thought Axel was interested in her; he had paid her and Dinah equal attention, even though she’d told Dinah otherwise. And maybe this wasn’t about dating and Axel’s liking her at all. Maybe he wanted something else. Maybe he was going to pump her about the business, confirming Angela’s suspicions. She was speculating, she knew, just in case it (whatever “it” was) didn’t work out. Just because he was good looking and eligible didn’t mean she should fall for him. Nevertheless she had dressed extra carefully, choosing a periwinkle blue shirt with a scoop neck that was very flattering, and pairing it with flared white pants, also flattering. She wore her favourite earrings, long and dangly, in blue and silver, with four silver bangles on her left arm. She decided not to wear her watch. She would not think about time tonight.

  While they waited for the Peking duck, they talked about a lot of things. Axel didn’t like to talk about his work, she discovered. (“I do nothing but work all day. In the evening I like to forget about work.”) So they talked about art (which he said he didn’t know much about) and collecting (about which he said he was learning, thanks to her and Dinah), about travel (he was a more experienced traveller than her, but it was mostly for work, so he couldn’t claim to be adventurous), and about food (he liked to cook as well as eat).

  “Women find it attractive when a man likes to cook,” said Maris. “But then you probably already know that.” She laughed and so did he.

  “Well, I don’t always cook for women,” he said. “Mostly it’s for my pals when we play cards. Then I cook up a big pot of something, like pea soup with pork or maybe some meatballs with potatoes. Swedes love potatoes. We have many potato dishes, like Jansson’s Temptation, my specialty.”

  Maris laughed. “What’s Jansson’s Temptation?” she asked.

  Axel smiled. “It’s potatoes and onions baked in cream with sliced herring or anchovies on top. Very delicious. Maybe I’ll make it for you sometime.”

  “Sounds good,” she said, but her face said otherwise. “Tempting.”

  Axel laughed. “Trust me. It’s very good. I cook it the way my mother did.”

  “Your mother was a good cook?”

  “Still is,” said Axel. “Especially her kåldolmar: cabbage rolls stuffed with beef and pork. Nobody makes them like her.”

  “My mother’s a pretty good cook, too,” said Maris. “We never had much money so she had to use her imagination. We grew a lot of our own food, so it was always fresh and wholesome, but there wasn’t much variety. We ate a lot of brown rice and vegetables,” she laughed. “That’s why Singapore is food heaven for me.” She told Axel a bit about growing up in British Columbia on a hippie commune, and about how her father had split for another life. “My mother says it shows he doesn’t know who he is, but he’s been living his ‘new’ life for almost thirty years, so maybe that’s who he really is. A car salesman.”

  When the duck came, it was perfection. Nice crispy skin with a thin layer of fat between the skin and the meat. It came with shredded green onions, sticks of raw cucumber and hoisin sauce. The pancakes were as thin and delicate as crepes. The rest of the duck meat was taken back to the kitchen and turned into a tasty noodle dish.

  “I’m glad I wore loose clothes,” said Maris. “I’m stuffed.”

  “Me, too,” said Axel. “I couldn’t eat another thing.”

  “Not even your mother’s cabbage rolls?”

  “Please, stop,” said Axel, holding his stomach. “I may never eat again. Ever.”

  “All right,” said Maris. “Best meal ever. What’s yours?”

  “That’s a tough one,” said Axel, “but I think it’s got to be a grilled salmon I had once in Norway. It was rubbed with lemon and vodka and some tarragon, and was cooked over a fire on a cedar plank. Exquisite. They told me it was a Norwegian Viking recipe.” He laughed.

  “Mmmm. Sounds delicious. My sister would love that. I’ll have to tell her about it.”

  “And what about you?” asked Axel. “What’s your best meal ever?”

  “I had a lobster once in Old Montreal that I actually dreamed about, it was so good.”

  Axel laughed. “Only women dream about food.”

  “What do men dream about?”

  “Women. Or nothing. I don’t think men dream much.”

  “Everybody dreams,” said Maris. “Not everyone remembers their dreams.”

  “Perhaps. I remember very few dreams.”

  “Maybe you wake up too fast. I think you have to wake up slowly so the dream doesn’t escape your consciousness.”

  “It’s true. I do wake up fast. I open my eyes and that’s it. I’m ready for the day.”

  “Not me,” said Maris. “I linger.”

  At one point during the evening, Axel’s mobile rang. He answered with a terse “Hello” and listened for a moment. “Oh, hi,” he said, and turned to Maris. “I’ll just take this call, if you don’t mind. I won’t be long.”

  “No problem,” she said.

  He got up and walked away from the table, toward the entrance to the restaurant. He seemed to listen more than he talked, nodding and occasionally making a brief comment to the caller. When he came back, he apologized and said it was business. Because of the time zones, he sometimes got calls at odd hours and was obliged to take them.

  “I don’t mind,” said Maris. “Business is business, after all. And that’s why you’re here. Right?”

  “Right,” he said, and smiled. “But next time I’ll turn the phone off.”

  “Not on my account,” she said. “I really don’t mind.”

  Axel took a sip of his drink. “I’d like to sleep with you,” he said.

  Maris laughed, startled. “What? Because I don’t mind if you take business calls during dinner?” Axel smiled. “It’s okay,” she said. “You’re under no obligation to sleep with me.”

  “Okay,” he said. “But I still want to sleep with you.”

  She looked at him. “Maybe,” she said, “but not tonight. I’ll need a little more time.”

  “How about tomorrow?” he said.

  She laughed. “No. But next week is a definite possibility.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Good,” she said.

  When she told her the next morning what Axel had said, Dinah nearly choked on her coffee.

  “Get out,” she said. “He didn’t.”

  “He did.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I said okay. But not till next week.”

  “Get out. You didn’t.”

  “I did.”

  “Get out,” said Dinah. “That’s crazy.”

  “I know,” said Maris. “I have to tell you, that Peking duck was incredible.”

  In Matters of the Heart

  A Short Story

  by

  E. Sutcliffe Moresby

  If there is one thing I have learned in life, it is that it doesn’t pay to be dishonest in matters of the heart. Where love is concerned, honesty must be the first principle. Any lie told at the beginning of a relationship, even the smallest lie, and even if it only seems to be a chance meeting, will surely catch up with the teller at some point.

  I met a man once on the crossing from Malacca to Calcutta who told me his story. The weather was foul for most
of the trip, so there was nothing to do but sit in the bar, drinking beer and swapping stories. As I am something of a collector of stories, I kept him entertained for a short time. But when he began to speak of recent events in his life, I knew he would better me. His tale was far more interesting than any of mine.

  He had been living, he told me, for some years in the back of beyond in the Malayan jungle, managing a rubber plantation. It was the most unappealing sort of work that required one to rise at four in the morning, drink a cup of tea, and then make the rounds of the plantation on foot to inspect the trees and select those ready for tapping. This would take a good four hours, at which time he and his men would return to the kampong for a hearty breakfast before resuming the rest of their work. For his part, this involved a lot of paperwork and settling disputes that arose among the Malay workers. By mid-morning the heat would be brutal, murderous, and partnered most effectively by the stinging insects and the poisonous snakes.

  He had been doing this for nearly ten years when he decided he would like to experience the companionship of marriage. He was nearly forty and didn’t expect to live past sixty, given the hardship of his working life, the fevers he had suffered, and the toll of too much loneliness and too much drinking. The question was, where to find a woman who was willing to share the life of a plantation manager? He had a decent enough house and a couple of servants, but there wasn’t a woman around for miles, except for a few natives who cooked and washed for the local workers.

  So this chap, George, decided to advertise for a wife in the British newspapers, hoping that some equally lonely woman would respond. He sat up nights trying to write an ad that would be appealing and not too far from the truth. He knew that if he were completely honest, no woman in her right mind would consider his proposal. Finally he settled on the wording: “Single white male, Birmingham-born, age 39, seeks single female of similar age and interests to join him in Malaya, where he is manager of a large rubber plantation. Good income, spacious house, servants provided. Must be someone who enjoys nature and can adapt well to surroundings. Good health, intelligence, a love of reading and music will be reciprocated.”

  What he neglected to mention was that the climate was beastly, he worked long hours and was usually exhausted at the end of the day, there was no one else around for miles, nothing to do, and it was six hours travel on a bad road to get to the nearest town. Of the insects and snakes, he also remained mum. He hadn’t exactly lied, he told himself, he had merely omitted certain facts. If someone was interested and responded to the ad with a list of questions, he would answer them as honestly as he could. But until and unless that happened, he would say no more.

  It was two months, in fact, before he had a response: two responses to be exact. One was from a woman named Adelaide from Manchester, who asked if he was a Christian. She had a friend, she said, who was a missionary in Sarawak, and she wondered if she would be far from her friend. He replied that yes, he was a Christian (although he had a feeling he wasn’t as devout as Adelaide would have wished) but that Sarawak was several hundred miles away and he doubted she would have a chance to visit her friend very often, as travel in this part of the world was difficult.

  The second reply sounded more promising. A woman called Rose wrote from Yorkshire to say that she preferred a warmer climate — she was tired of English winters and would welcome the change — and that she did, indeed, enjoy reading and music and thought they might be compatible. The difficulty, of course, was that she was reluctant to agree to anything as serious as marriage without first meeting him, and since the journey was a very long one and involved some expense, she did not see how they could get to know each other. Would he, by any chance, be returning to England in the near future? She understood that people working overseas were given leave once in a while, and if his was not too far off, perhaps they could wait and meet when he was on British soil.

  As it happened, he told me, he was to have a leave of three months before the end of the year. If Rose agreed to wait, they could get to know each other and have a courtship of sorts if she was interested in pursuing the possibility of marriage. She wrote back to say she would wait, and, in fact, she looked forward to meeting George and finding out more about him.

  He became quite excited at the prospect of getting together with Rose, and he even pictured them married and returning to Malaya at the end of his leave. In order to keep their expectations of each other realistic, he suggested they exchange photographs so that they might at least know what the other looked like. Rose agreed and sent him a formal portrait of herself taken just six months earlier. It was a good likeness, she said, although she didn’t always look so elegant. She had had her hair done before the photo session and they had applied some makeup. She didn’t want him to think she was always dressing up and swanning about, but that she could “muck in,” as she put it, when required.

  The photograph showed a pretty woman with large eyes and a small mouth whose lips were slightly pursed to make them seem plumper. Her nose was long, which kept her from being beautiful, but it added character to her face and she was not unattractive. Her hair appeared to be a medium dark colour and was waved softly around her face. Although it was a head and shoulders portrait, she did not appear to be either overweight or underweight. In fact, she looked quite ordinary, which was a good thing because it meant she would not be vain and foolish and would probably have a fair amount of common sense. As he spoke, I wondered how George had gleaned all this from a posed photograph, but this was the way he described her to me.

  She, on the other hand, would have seen a somewhat rugged-looking man with a craggy face, the lines etched deeply from hard work and many years in the sun. He was not exactly handsome but he had a certain manly appeal, being square-jawed and big-boned. She probably thought he was honest, straightforward, and decent, which he was, as far as I could tell.

  The day came when George arrived back in England and he immediately took the train to Yorkshire to meet Rose. He would see his mother and sisters later and, if things worked out, he would be able to introduce Rose to them before they married. He was feeling exceedingly optimistic. He and Rose had corresponded during the past five months and had got to know more of each other and their likes and dislikes. Rose liked to cook and, with four brothers, she had been a big help to her mother in the kitchen when she was growing up. Now that she was nearing forty — thirty-six on her last birthday — she, too, was thinking about marriage. She had been working as a teacher for fourteen years and it was well past the time when she might have had her choice of suitors. George’s proposal — an exciting one, at that — had seemed just the ticket. She had started to pin her hopes on this new life in Malaya as the wife of a plantation manager.

  Rose had good reason to feel optimistic. George was a first-rate letter writer. With a mother and two sisters at home, he had been writing cheerful and glowing letters for ten years. He knew how to turn a phrase and tell a joke. His letters were charming and funny. He didn’t want to alarm his aging mother or his sisters, who had led sheltered lives and didn’t know much of the world. They were both unmarried, although Frieda, the eldest, had been engaged during the war, but her fiancé had been killed at Ypres. Daphne, the younger, worked part-time at the post office and had never had a beau. Their mother despaired at times but kept quiet. She had been a widow for five years and enjoyed having her two daughters living with her. She still hoped that her only son would marry and perhaps someday have children.

  At last the day came when George and Rose were to meet. He knew as soon as he saw her that she was the one for him. She was taller than he expected, which was fine because he stood a good six feet. Her hair, which had been a medium dark colour in the black and white photo, was auburn and her skin was fair. Even before she said a word (in a voice that was low and warm and even intimate) he was swept off his feet. And it would only get better as he got to know her. Her chatty letters had not revealed what a wonderful throaty laugh she had, and how s
he enjoyed a good joke. Being raised with boys and having been a tomboy as a child, Rose was comfortable in the company of men. George thought this was a good thing because there were no other women around in his part of the Malayan jungle. But George didn’t mention this. Plenty of time for that later.

  Rose was equally impressed with George but she kept her feelings in reserve. She had told herself she would not be silly about him when she met him, and she would take her time and decide whether or not to marry him based on his character. Was he the kind of man she could spend her life with? At her age, she had to be practical. After all, she was not a foolish young girl, but a woman who had worked for a living and knew a thing or two about life. People often rushed into marriage for the flimsiest of reasons and came to regret it. Rose would not be like that. They didn’t have a long time to get to know each other and make the most important decision of their lives, but she intended to do it properly, with care and sound thinking.

  Nevertheless, she came very quickly to relish the sound of his voice and the endearing way he had of bending his head closer to her when she spoke. She asked him if he was hard of hearing — she was determined not to be blind to his faults — and he assured her he wasn’t. He simply enjoyed the sound of her voice, he said. Her heart beat a little faster when he said this, and it occurred to her that no man had ever uttered those words to her before.

  “Don’t think you can charm me with that kind of talk,” she told him, but she said it with a smile, and he knew he had charmed her. It meant he had a chance. He was staying at a small inn in the village, but he spent most of his time with Rose and her family. He liked her brothers, two of whom were married, one was still a bachelor, and the youngest lived at home with his parents. They were a rowdy lot, but down to earth and kind hearted. They teased him about Rose but he took it all in stride. Nobody asked him any pointed questions about his life in Malaya, other than to ask if he liked it, and to comment on how exciting it must be. George didn’t disabuse them of this notion, and just laughed and nodded his head when they said things like that. He chose not to remind them that if Rose married him, they would not see her for quite a long time. Or that letters often took several weeks to arrive, or that news, good and bad, also travelled slowly. All in good time, he thought. If they were not concerned about these things, he would not burden them.