by Dawn Farnham
But, in truth, other women ate at Noan’s mind. Their own father had a new concubine who was barely seventeen. The prospect of Zhen taking a concubine terrified Noan. She would rather he was with some white woman than bring a concubine into the house and lie with her, make children with her, three rooms away. She was always very careful not to show any jealousy or give him cause to stay away.
Lilin, too, had heard. He would be with her sister tonight. She stopped smiling.
Ah Teo opened the package. It was a book. He turned the pages and read.
Among the skills possessed by men, a knowledge of women is indispensable.
When one has a woman, only the skilful are equal to the task.
Do not be too generous, or too controlling.
Do not be too taxing, nor too apprehensive.
One must be slow and patient; one must be gentle and sustained …
Ah Teo sat down hard on the chair, amazed. It was a pillow book. He had heard of such books but never seen one. He read on.
This is called the art of yin and yang; the principle of male and female.
If one practises this without success, the fault lies in insufficient mastery of the art.
The essence of dalliance is slowness.
If one proceeds slowly and patiently, the woman will be exceedingly joyful.
She will adore you like a brother and love you like a parent.
One who has mastered this tao deserves to be called a heavenly gentleman.
Ah Teo had never thought of such matters before. The book was filled with pages of Taoist sexual techniques. He turned the pages quickly. At the back were drawings of men and woman in positions he had never dreamed of. How he was to transfer such knowledge to the beautiful body of his rebellious wife was a mystery.
28
Charlotte read the letter again. Tigran would be coming to Singapore to take her home. He had been away for three months. Too long, but what else could he have done? Miriam had been in great need of him. Josef had died after a very long and distressing illness, and the burial had taken place at the Tanah Abang cemetery. Miriam had been distraught, but her spirits were gradually improving. She was staying at Brieswijk for the moment; it was healthier for her than her own home. Tigran was taking care of the official business which follows any death. Then he expected to be in Singapore at the beginning of March. She must prepare herself to come back to Batavia. He missed her and loved her.
She put the letter down and looked into the mirror. One week. He would certainly be here in one week. She felt the baby suddenly move violently, churning inside, and put her hand to her belly. She was seven months pregnant and was feeling unwell. She had not seen Zhen for two nights, but that was not what was preoccupying her mind. They had both accepted the fact of her departure. They were both much calmer now.
The concern was not Zhen. It was George.
For months, Takouhi had not wanted to see Maria or the child, but finally, on an impulse, she had called. As soon as she picked up this little boy who was the very image of George, she told Charlotte, she had known that she must leave. Memories of Meda’s face flooded her mind.
She had told George he must reconcile himself to this new life and family. This little son needed him. George had forbidden it: this time Takouhi was not to leave him. Charlotte had heard his raised voice, his fury. He had slammed the door and left the house. Charlotte knew from Billy Napier that he had told Maria of his plans for divorce. Maria was beside herself, Billy had said.
George had come to Takouhi last night, and this morning she had been too tearful to come to breakfast. Charlotte had taken a tray to her.
“I must leave. But George will not allow it. The worst is over, he said. Maria knows everything. He talk about building new house for us.”
Takouhi took Charlotte’s hand.
“I do some bad things in my life. Maybe I lose Meda because I do bad things. I think about this many times. Maybe I bring curse on my child.”
Takouhi looked down, pain etched on her face. “This baby need a father for happy life. George is wonderful father.”
She burst into tears. Takouhi rarely cried, and Charlotte knew she was thinking of Meda, of his love for their daughter, of her love for George, of giving him up, doing the right thing. All these thoughts and emotions were churning inside her.
Charlotte left her, took up her hat and walked across the road to George’s home.
When Maria came into the sitting room, Charlotte was taken aback at her appearance. She was stick thin and ghostly pale. Charlotte rose from her chair and went up to Maria, putting her arms around her. “I am sorry, Maria.”
Maria sat on the edge of a chair shaking her head, her hands twitching nervously. “It is so unfair. What have I done to deserve this? Oh, Charlotte, he was so cruel. Out of nowhere, he tells me he is going to petition for a divorce. He does not love me. The woman he loves is across the road. My God. It is Miss Manouk, Charlotte, he has loved her his whole life. This is what he said to me. Why did he marry me?”
She looked at Charlotte, anguished. “Why in the Lord’s name did he marry me?”
Charlotte knew she owed Maria an explanation. “He did not expect ever to see her again,” she said gently. We did not know he had married. She wanted to leave as soon as she saw you, but George would not allow it. It is all a dreadful mess.”
Charlotte told Maria of George and Takouhi’s years together until the death of their daughter, about Takouhi’s departure for Java. George had not been at Meda’s side when she died, and Takouhi had felt guilty. She had agreed to stay until he was ready to let her go. No one was to blame for this situation.
Maria rose suddenly and began to walk backwards and forwards across the room, twisting a handkerchief in her hands.
“No one is to blame, but I am to be punished. Me and that innocent baby. Divorced!” She spat the word out. “Do you know what it means? Billy has explained it to me. I must be at fault, not he. I must be the one cited as adulterer, for only the woman can be at fault, since I am his goods and have been defiled. No blame falls to him. Though I have done nothing, these are the slanderous grounds upon which I am to be a divorced woman, the scandalous butt of everyone’s jokes, condemned to a life of spinsterhood. For who would marry a divorced woman, an adulteress? And his child must perforce be a bastard, for an annulment by the church would mean we had never married. I have never heard of such a thing. Is he demented to shame me so? To ruin me? In the meantime, I must simply put up with him living openly with his half-breed whore!”
Maria’s face was suffused with fury, and Charlotte rose, alarmed.
“Get out!” snapped Maria. “You are her friend. You, and everyone, knew about this and no one told me. Not even Billy, whom I trusted. It is too much! How you must all have laughed when I professed my love for him. Stupid girl, stupid girl!” She came up to Charlotte and pushed her towards the door.
“Get out, and may the Lord strike you all!”
Charlotte left, shame-faced, for Maria was right. They were all complicit in this silence.
When George came that evening to Tir Uaidhne, Takouhi would not see him.
“George,” Charlotte began. “Leave her for the moment. She needs some time alone. She is deeply ashamed of what has happened. She knows a divorce will ruin Maria and cannot think what will happen to your son.”
George sat, his face in his hands. “I know. I have handled this very badly. When Takouhi talked of leaving, I just saw a red mist. Not again, I thought, and just went at it like a bull in a china shop.”
“George, you cannot divorce Maria. It would ruin her. And what of the child? Where would he live? Maria could not stay in Singapore with the whole town talking about her. The child would have no father. Think of it.”
George rose and went towards the door. “Yes, I have to think.”
Charlotte, too, knew she had to think.
That evening she went to Zhen’s house. When she could come to him, she sent him a note t
o the godown in the afternoon. Tonight, as soon as she entered, she moved into his arms.
“My husband will arrive soon,” she told Zhen. “I will be going back with him.”
Zhen nodded and held her tightly. Then they went to the kitchen, and he began to make her tea. Charlotte sat at the square table and watched him moving slowly, setting out the cups, rinsing the tiny brown pottery teapot he liked to use, with a monkey lid, taking the tea from the shelf next to the Kitchen God’s altar, pouring the boiling water until it bubbled frothily over the side. She watched every simple gesture. He had a grace of movement in everything he did. Not just in lovemaking or when he practised the flowing movements of the tai chi, but even in these small domestic chores. This grace was inside him. For a big man, he had elegant hands, and she watched them as he poured the fragrant tea which smelled of jasmine blossom. When he concentrated, he opened his eyes wider, as if his almond eyes could not quite take in the whole scene.
I love you, she thought. He sensed her eyes on him and turned his head and smiled at her. She would always wonder at the effect he had on her. He was so solid, yet so like air, so simple, yet so complex. He was filled with richness. He made her fly. She rose and floated into his arms, pulling his lips to hers, stealing his kisses.
“It is fortunate that the Kitchen God is still out of house, or he would certainly report me for such things. I do like Zhang Dan. Kissing a woman not my wife!”
He smiled as he said it. She knew he was not in the slightest bit superstitious. In his life he adopted, for his health and his body, aspects of the Tao-chiao, the religious school, but for his mind he followed the Tao-chia, the philosophical school, and especially the writings of Master Chuang. In his bedroom he had a black-and-white brush painting of the Seven Sages in the Bamboo Grove. It had an ethereal quality. The tiny figures were seated in a misty grove, drinking, playing instruments, under the towering bamboo trees. Charlotte did not think much about art, but she liked the peaceful, other-worldly effect the painter had made, so unlike anything she had ever seen in Scotland, where paintings favoured hunting scenes and dogs holding poor dead birds in their mouths. There was writing on this painting: a poem, he said, but he could not read the old Chinese. Between lovemaking, lying in each other’s arms, he had explained something of these things to her, asked her about Western philosophies. He liked the sages’ playful and irreverent attitude to life, the qing tan, a freedom of conversation and action, a love of nature, a harmony with the universe.
She looked up above the stove now and saw that the paper effigy of the Kitchen God had disappeared. He had long ago told Charlotte about Zao Jun, the master of the stove.
Zao Jun had once been a mortal man named Zhang Dan, who was married to a virtuous woman. However, Zhang Dan fell in love with a young girl and left his wife for her. From that day, he was plagued with bad luck. He was struck blind, the young girl left him, and he had to resort to begging.
One day, while begging for alms, he came across the house of his former wife. Being blind, he did not recognise her. Despite his shoddy treatment of her, she took pity on him and invited him in, gave him a sumptuous meal and tended him lovingly. He related his story to her and began to cry. As he did so, his eyesight was miraculously restored and he recognised this benefactress as his wife. Overcome with shame, he threw himself into the kitchen hearth. His wife tried to save him, but he was consumed by the fire, and all that was left of him was his leg.
His wife lovingly created a shrine to him over the fireplace where he had died. Heaven took pity on Zhang Dan’s tragic story and instead of becoming an undead Jiang Shi, the usual fate of suicides, he was made the god of the kitchen and reunited with his wife.
Still today in China, Zhen had laughed, raising his eyebrows and brandishing the fire poker, we call this Zhang Dan’s leg.
Ever since, Zao Jun went annually to heaven to report on the activities of the household to the Jade Emperor. To speed him on his way, offerings of sticky rice cakes and sweets were made and firecrackers lit. A little melted sugar had been put to his lips to sweeten his words and his paper image burned. He had left a few days ago and would stay away until New Year. Charlotte could see his shrine had been cleaned by Ah Pok, Zhen’s servant.
As they sipped the tea, Zhen rose briefly and took a package from the shelf. He put it in front of her. It was a box covered in black silk, closed with a Chinese toggle of scarlet cords. She opened the case and inside there was a book, a Chinese paper book which unfolded like a concertina. It had a dark blue damask silk cover, and the stitched binding was of white silk cord. She opened it and read what was written there in Chinese and English.
Union is bliss, parting is woe,
Agony is boundless for a lovelorn soul.
Sweetheart, give me word,
Trails of clouds drifting by and mountains capped with snow
Whither shall my lonesome shadow go?
As he saw her reading it, he said the words in Chinese. She opened the pages of the book. Each of the ten pages contained a poem. He sat down next to her, his arm touching hers, her head against his shoulder, and read the verses to her in Chinese as she followed the text.
“Wa ai lu,” she said.
“Yes, Xia Lou, wa ai lu,” he repeated, correcting her tones and grinning.
Smiling, she finished her tea, entwined her fingers in Zhen’s and led him up the stairs to the bedroom.
29
Charlotte stood on the steps of the old Police House which had been her home. The view from here was still breathtaking, especially now as the golden evening was drawing in. The rocks in the mouth of the river had changed shape. She had remembered them as long and pointed, one rising like a swordfish from the waters which swirled with eddies and whorls like green snakes. On the opposite bank, cleared of trees and growth, she could see the place where formerly a huge red stone covered in ancient text had stood like a sentinel. She had visited this stone with George. The rock had been hewn in two, the two sides facing each other, some distance apart, but leaning in towards each other as if to whisper some age-old secret.
Their inscriptions on the interior side were faded and worn. She had run her fingers over this antique script. He had told her that many had tried to decipher their meaning but none had succeeded. The stone had stood as a mute witness to an older time. She had watched it from this verandah, changing in aspect and colour as the sun moved around the sky, a massive shadowy presence in the moonlight. It had felt like an old friend.
There was a legend about this stone in the Malay Annals. She tried to recall it. It was about a man granted great strength by a ghost of some sort. What was his name? His fame spread to the Rajah of Singhapura where he became the king’s champion. He had won a contest of strength for his lord against the champion of the Rajah of Kling by lifting a mighty stone and throwing it into the mouth of the river. When this Herculean hero finally died, he had been buried here, and the admiring Kling Raja had sent two stone pillars to mark his grave.
Now all of this was gone: the stone, the grave, the legend, and Charlotte felt a deep dismay. Abdullah had spoken of it to her, for he had been incensed at such destruction. The engineer of the settlement, Captain Stevenson, had ordered it blown up a year ago to widen the passage to the river and make space for an extension of Fort Fullerton. A piece, she had heard, had been taken to Govenment House and was being used as a seat for the sepoys. She shook her head and sighed. Now no one would ever know who had dwelt here. Shelley’s “Ozymandias” entered her mind; it had been words only before she had seen the stone, but now so potent as she stared at this annihilated place.
“Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
She looked up to the flagstaff on the hill. It announced the arrival in Singapore waters of the Queen of the South, signalled from Pulau Blakan Mati to Government Hill. She had watched for days and finally seen Tigran�
��s flag raised. The ship would not anchor in the harbour until after dark and would not disembark until morning.
Charlotte took a last walk around the old house, its rooms now standing empty. It had stood for almost the entire duration of the settlement, but now was to be demolished to widen the mouth of the river. A coal store was to be built. How hideous, thought Charlotte. A coal store in such a lovely place. But the new steamers, which appeared increasingly in the harbour, were hungry for this fuel. She thought it ironic that the coal for the steamers came in sailing ships! But she had been on one, the Victoria, a strange mixture of sail and steam. Tigran had booked cabins, out of curiosity and because he thought these ships might be the future and was considering adding some to his fleet. It had been the inaugural voyage to Penang, stopping in Malacca, an experiment to see if there was interest enough to establish a permanent steam line between the three ports of the Straits Settlements. It was enjoyable: the ship could travel in any direction, against the wind, against the tide; it was comfortable and reliable. But they were ugly things, and dirty, with their noisy engines and paddles and their squalid sooty noses. Nothing, she felt, equalled the beauty of sail.
Some old chairs and an ancient table stood forlornly on the verandah. Robert wanted to send the house off with a little celebration with his policemen. She watched the sunset falling rapidly.
Robert lived in a large old house on Beach Road. The really wealthy merchants now all owned estates in the surrounding countryside. Robert had done well for himself, investing wisely in land leases, a coconut plantation and a house on the beach at Katong, which he rented for holiday weekends and honeymoons. He wanted two or three more, for nothing matched the peaceful and pretty seclusion of this part of Singapore. He planned to marry Teresa before the year was out.