To All Appearances a Lady

by Marilyn Bowering

  Fan, still holding the gruesome relic of bone, says nothing.

  “What happened next, then, Fan?” I ask her, trying to be patient and determined to get to the end of the tortuous path down which I’d been led. “I imagine that you and Sing Yuen arrived on the island and found—what? This?” I indicate the bone she holds and the mound that must contain the rest of the skeleton. “You’ll have to explain it, Fan. I still don’t know whose grave this is.”

  She shakes her head, but at least breaks her silence. “I had found these bones long before, Robert Lam. Sing Yuen never saw them. In any case it doesn’t matter. It’s not a grave exactly, you see,” she says, almost shyly, “but a hiding place.

  “It was in midwinter, about six months after the Tai June robbery, that I came here for the first time by myself. Your mother had disappeared, and my life….” She pauses as if searching for a suitable word, sighs again, and starts over. “My life, for various reasons, as you shall see, had become quite difficult. Sing Yuen had grown preoccupied with his business, and he blamed himself for sending India to the factory on that terrible Sunday. I paid a man to bring me here, and he dropped me off not far from the spot where you and I left the Rose.

  “It was there,” she goes on, “that I saw Oung Moi Toy for the first and only time. He had terrible wounds on his body that were healing badly. And so, when he asked me to help him leave the island, I said yes.”

  “But Fan!” I exclaim. “How could you!”

  “I knew nothing of what he had done!” my stepmother protests. “I did not know until your mother told me herself, long after!”

  “He was a leper! You must have known that! Surely you had some responsibility there. You knew he should be in quarantine.”

  “He did not look like a leper,” she says defensively. “He told me he was there by accident and that the lepers had attacked him out of jealousy.”

  “And you felt sorry for him and, out of the goodness of your heart, decided to help him. Come on, Fan, I don’t buy it. You’d better tell me the rest.”

  She looks around uncomfortably. “All right, Robert Lam, I have already said that I would, but let me tell it my way. Don’t rush me.”

  —

  And so another journey, eight years after the one she has just told me about, in which she helped Moi Toy escape from D’Arcy Island. This time my stepmother travelled in a Japanese fishing boat with her husband, Sing Yuen; and with Robert Haack’s letter burning a hole in the pocket of her overcoat. It was bitter winter weather in the first year of my life. And the Japanese fishing boat in which they travelled tilted and rocked and shipped water as they moved through the thick swirling snow and approached the rocky coast of D’Arcy Island.

  “We cannot land you at the colony,” said the skipper to them, “the wind is too strong. I will drop you off at a more sheltered spot and return in the morning to pick you up.”

  And so it was that my stepmother and Sing Yuen landed where Smiling Jimmy had dumped my mother after the Tai June robbery, and where Lam Fan had come ashore alone to find a giant of a man encamped in the forest; and at the same place, too, where I had secured the Rose and stepped ashore with my stepmother.

  “We were not sure which way to go, Sing Yuen and I, when we went to the island in response to Robert Haack’s letter,” Lam Fan says quietly. “Although I had been there before, many times, as I have said, I had never seen any sign of the colony. All we knew was that it was to the south, for so the skipper had told us. I suggested that we try to make our way across the interior of the island so as to be out of the way of the wind and the blizzard.”

  And so they came to a meadow, one that Fan knew well, and ploughed their way through the drifts; they sheltered in the lee of the rock that dominated that clearing to catch their breath, and then Lam Fan told Sing Yuen that she had to go into the woods to relieve herself.

  He waited while she pushed her way through the trees and found the path that she was looking for. And when she stopped, it was not to gather her skirts up, not to stoop near the stump of a fallen tree to empty herself, it was to push aside the snow-dusted broken branches that lay atop a rock heap; branches with swatches of cloth attached; branches that were not branches at all but the weathered bones of men.

  “But why, Fan?” I interrupt, appalled that now we are talking not about one, but about the bones of a number of men. “What could make you do such a thing? Why not go back even then and tell Sing Yuen what you’d found?”

  My stepmother draws the dignity of her years around her like armour. The look she gives me is a challenge. “You must take me as you find me, Robert Lam,” she says. Then she pushes the rock and earth and remaining bones aside to reveal what the mound contains.

  Wind and weather and falling leaves and branches, the growth of new trees, the decay of old, the vegetable turning and regeneration of the earth have altered the scene from what it was. But then, even with a sprinkling of snow filtering down through the trees, the glint of metal beneath the bones and shreds of flesh of the long-dead men was obvious. A heap of fins, stacks and cases of them, some split open, some gaps where Fan had already removed a quantity. But all stamped “Tai June” and displaying the rooster emblem. It was the opium, cached on the island after the robbery and never retrieved by Smiling Jimmy.

  “And the dead men, Fan,” I say, tears again blinding me as I watch the casual way in which she shunts their remains aside. “Who were they?”

  She shrugs. “Smiling Jimmy’s crew, I think. He killed them here after the opium was stored. He wanted it all for himself. As well,” she goes on, “he had been betrayed once before by a crewman. Jimmy never forgot a lesson once learned.”

  “And you, Fan, what did you want and what did you learn?”

  She is silent.

  “Tell me then, Fan,” I say, having wept myself dry, “how did you come to know of it? Please tell me now, although I am almost afraid to ask.” I put out a hand to touch the bones of these poor wicked murdered men. They lie as if there had never been a scrap of humanity in them; with their brave, wind-lifted flags of cloth their only testament; and a stash of unopened tins of opium, perhaps a hundred or so, that’s all, as their witnesses.

  Fan closes her eyes, then opens them. “It was an accident, Robert Lam, I swear it. I had nothing to do with the robbery. I knew nothing at all until the day Smiling Jimmy died. He had been badly injured in a fight in Chinatown in a saloon a few doors down from the shop of my uncle, Lum Kee. They brought Smiling Jimmy in for Lum Kee to treat him, and while my uncle was preparing some medicines I was alone with him.

  “Smiling Jimmy opened his eyes and said to me, ‘I know you, Lam Fan.’ I did not know what to say. I had never met him before, but I knew his reputation. He was as vile a man as ever lived in the city.

  “ ‘I know you, Lam Fan,’ he said again, and a shiver of fear went through me. He smiled at me, Robert Lam, then he closed his eyes.

  “A few hours later, when it was clear to all of us that he was dying, I was left once more for a minute on my own with him. I was holding his hand out of pity for his suffering. ‘Come closer,’ he whispered to me. ‘I have something important to tell you.’

  “I bent near him, Robert Lam, I did it out of feeling for his plight as a human being. I could never have guessed what he would say, or made a worse mistake in my life. ‘I know you, Lam Fan,’ he said very softly. ‘I know everything about you. I even know what you will do.’ And then he laughed. Not loudly, of course, he was far too weak for that, but as if this were the world’s greatest joke. ‘You will deceive your friends,’ he said to me. ‘You will betray everyone you love.’ Then he started to cough. I thought he was out of his mind. But then Jimmy recovered himself and went on. ‘You will do all these things, Lam Fan,’ he said, ‘because of the opium I have left on D’Arcy Island for you to find.’ ”

  “And then what, Fan?” I say to her, saddened.

  “And then,” she answers me softly, “he told me exactly wher
e it was, and then he died.” Her face is a mask. She touches it carefully with her fingers as if to test if it is frozen. Then her hands drop to her lap.

  “You didn’t tell Lum Kee?” I ask her, numb with the magnitude of her sins and with compassion for the hell of remorse she has lived.

  She shakes her head.

  “It never occurred to you to tell Sing Yuen, your husband, whose opium it was?”

  Tears, scant as drops squeezed out of an onion, form in the corners of her eyes. “I tried not to think about it,” she whispers. “I tried and tried, but I couldn’t get it out of my mind. And I didn’t know for sure that the opium was his. I didn’t really believe it until I saw it for myself.”

  “And what about Toy, Fan? Tell me the rest of that.”

  Oung Moi Toy. Who had raped my mother and been left for dead. Who had hidden himself away until my stepmother—an orphan addicted to opium, who thought that opium was her one true friend, and who could not forget the evil words that Smiling Jimmy, out of the blackness of his heart, had spoken on his deathbed—had come to rescue him.

  “I didn’t know,” Lam Fan says, shaking her head stiffly like an automaton. “I swear I didn’t know. I only helped him to leave because he was camped so near to the place where the opium was hidden.”

  Lam Fan. With enough opium for a lifetime put away where no one but she could find it. Oh how many occasions had she returned here by herself? How many lies had she told to Sing Yuen, and to me, later on, her stepson, to get away with it?

  I take both Fan’s hands in mine. I rub them, towards the heart, the way blood should run, as I used to long ago, to warm them. “And my mother, Lam Fan, did you know she was on D’Arcy Island as well?”

  “Oung Moi Toy told me,” she says in her almost voiceless whisper. “I guessed at once when he mentioned a woman.”

  “But because of the opium…?”

  “They would have thought I’d been in on the robbery. Even Sing Yuen. No one would have believed I was innocent.”

  I sigh a sigh that travels through the wasteland of my being. I pull Lam Fan to her feet. “We’ve got a lot to do in the next few hours,” I say to her, “and I’ll need your help.”

  We bury Smiling Jimmy’s crew as they should have been buried sixty-six years earlier. Then I gather up the tins of opium, and laboriously, taking several trips, carry them to the shore. And there, with Lam Fan’s help, I place them on board the Rose.

  We are sitting in front of a beach fire. We have cooked some fish and some mussels. We are drinking tea.

  —

  And so it was that Lam Fan returned to her husband, Sing Yuen, explaining how she had lost herself and walked in circles, then they both made their way down the coast to the leper’s colony. They gazed up at the cedar planking of the cabin, and at the snow-speckled roofing and the smoke issuing from chimneys, and at snow melt running from gutters. At a front door opening, and at the man who came to stare at them. He held one hand crooked close to his chest to carry his axe, and he wore a broad-brimmed hat. He stopped where he was, forgetting to close the door behind him.

  While, from out of the room he’d just left, out of the dark of the cabin, came the sound of a baby’s crying. For it was my father, Ng Chung, who had stepped out for a load of firewood, and found, instead, my mother’s sister and her husband.

  Does it matter that my mother wept, or that my father held me in his arms for one last time while Lam Fan and Sing Yuen turned their backs and examined the frosty horizon? Does it add to the scene to know that my mother promised to visit Ng Chung, and to give him frequent news of his son? Does it signify at all that I stopped crying and smiled my way through my parents’ parting, or that Lam Fan carried me all the way to the Japanese fishing boat, which had returned to the cove to wait for them, while Sing Yuen supported my mother as she stumbled over rocks and kept half turning back in the direction from which she’d just come?

  Nothing was said about the missing years, about robberies or vanished husbands, about babies born on islands, until the two sisters were safely at home upstairs in Lam Fan’s bedroom in the Fisgard Street home. There Fan made certain promises, which she afterwards kept: to preserve my mother’s secrets, and to have the child—me, Robert Lam, grow up in blessed ignorance.

  —

  Thus we have come full circle. To the first reading of my mother’s papers, found in her diary, on board the Rose at the start of our journey as we anchored off D’Arcy Island. There was the divorce decree, signed and passed by Parliament; the account of Robert Haack’s tragic death by shooting in Los Angeles; and the newspaper account of my mother’s death by drowning.

  “There’s still an unanswered question, Fan,” I say to my stepmother as she warms her hands on her tea mug, and as we watch the sun go down. “Did my mother drown by accident or not? It seems strange to me that she—used to climbing on rocks all over an island—would slip to her death. Moreover, it was stupidity, was it not, to put the rescuer’s rope around her neck instead of beneath her arms? There is also the note in her diary, about kissing me goodbye and giving me to you to look after. It bothers me, Fan. But on the other hand, why would my mother, after all her grief and trouble to take me to safety, suddenly abandon me? I didn’t get the impression, from what you told me, that she was the type to give up easily. I just can’t imagine her committing suicide for no reason at all.”

  It did bother me. In fact, the fear—rational or not—that I’d been responsible in some way for my mother’s death had plagued me from the very first reading of the account.

  “You see, Fan,” I continue, voicing my concern out loud, “she would have stayed with my father if it hadn’t been for me. I could never have taken his place, of course…”

  I glance at Fan, looking for reassurance. I want her to say that I’m wrong, that my mother didn’t kill herself; that it was an accident; that nothing on earth could have made her leave me behind on purpose.

  But Fan, watching the Rose, which is lifting on the incoming tide, says instead, “It was no accident, Robert Lam. She did what she intended to do. I am only sorry that those men came along to trouble her. At least she was able to make them believe that they had done their best to help her. She wouldn’t, for all the world, have wanted to hurt their feelings.”

  A feeling of utter desolation washes over me. To be unloved, or not loved enough at the outset to give my mother a reason to stay alive. To have been, instead of a lifeline, an unbearable burden…

  “No,” Fan goes on, running her bitten nails round the rim of her teacup and looking into a past that excludes me, “she only wanted to do what was best for your future.

  “You see,” she adds gently, as if by her voice to avoid giving hurt, “we found on your mother’s skin, shortly after her return, the first signs of leprosy.”

  “But why, Fan,” I ask when I find my voice, relief and dismay contending equally within me, “why didn’t she just go back to D’Arcy Island? At least she could have been with my father; and I could still have stayed with you. That seems to me the simplest answer.”

  Fan shakes her head. “No, Robert Lam. You didn’t know Ng Chung. He would have blamed himself for the rest of his life for India’s illness. Far from a consolation, their being together, in those circumstances, would have been constant bitterness. In her sickness he would only see his failure. Your mother told me that’s how it would be, and I believed her.”

  I move my feet back and forth in the sand, turning up a baby crab, some wood lice, and a score of shells. And try to fathom these parents I never knew. The wind blows smoke from the bonfire into my eyes, and my eyes sting with tears.

  “Your mother didn’t want him to know about it, Robert Lam,” says my stepmother. “Please try to understand. I went to visit him several times while I was on my other errand, and I never told him.”

  “You mean your trips to the cache of opium,” I say to Fan, my anger rising. She nods agreement sorrowfully.

  “Yes, that is so,” sh
e says. “I killed two birds with one stone.”

  “It must have made the perfect story to tell Sing Yuen,” I say sarcastically. Hoping that she’ll start to argue, that I’ll have someone to blame. But even as I recognize the thought, I see that it’s all at an end. My need to hear the story and Lam Fan’s to tell it. Slowly, solemnly, she nods again.

  “I told Ng Chung that India had returned to Hong Kong with you. That she had work in her father’s old firm of Jardine Matheson. That she was happy, although she missed him, and that you were thriving. I told him that she would write when she could.”

  My father: alone on the island despite the company of the other exiles, waiting for Lam Fan to bring him a letter that would never arrive. My father, abandoned.

  For somewhere, inside—it would be better this way—he must have known that my mother was no longer alive.

  I sigh, get up, and throw wet sand on the fire, then help Lam Fan to her feet.

  “Well?” I say to her. “Are you ready?”

  She smiles at me her smile of infinite sweetness. “Is there wine, Robert Lam? Are there chickens and cakes to give me a send-off?”

  I shake my head. “Not at your first funeral, Fan, nor at this one either. But I think what we’ve got is better.”

  “All the opium?” she says as I lift her in my arms and wade out to the Rose. “Every single tin? You’re sure they’re all onboard?”

  “Positive, Fan,” I say as I lift her feather weight on to the deck and pull myself up by a rope. “I checked more than once.”

  There is nothing more to say, and so she gives me a final embrace, then seats herself on the hatch cover and begins to prepare her pipe.

  I make a pile of all the paper in the wheelhouse—charts, documents, photographs, all of it, except for one last scrap, which I put in my pocket—and set the whole bundle alight. I throw the stool on top and add frayed rope, oily rags, all the flotsam and jetsam we’ve gathered over these weeks. I stay for a moment to coax the flames. The Rose is old, dry, and brittle. She won’t take long to burn.