The Life and Loves of Lena Gaunt

by Tracy Farr

  The pasar was crowded with buyers and gossipers, young mothers with naked brown babies slung in sarongs astride their hips; vendors of sweet drinks, Chinese coolies drawing heavy handcarts loaded with coconuts and bamboo. The Chinese laboured hard and breathed heavily; the Balinese chattered and giggled; an occasional Arab swept by in a long cloak – and ourselves, white skin red with sweating, buttoned up and staring – all of us in the early morning sunlight in the lee of the towering peak. We bought fruit, we became confused with the unfamiliar coins; I tried my notebook Malay on the stall keepers, who laughed and seemed not to understood a word of it. We loaded up with rambutan, bananas and heaven knows what, after the inevitable haggling which, so Uncle Valentine told me, all Orientals love. A fleet of pony carts carried us back to the jetty with our treasures, then on to a sampan and back aboard the Koolinda, sweaty and hot in our heavy clothes in the heat of the day, ready for the cook to ply us with lunch, and to steam ahead to Singapore.

  FATHER

  We pulled slowly into the thick heat of the port at Singapore, the Koolinda’s crew milling and busy. Uncle and I leaned against the guardrail, shading our eyes, watching the strange place approach. Uncle Valentine grabbed my arm.

  ‘There he is! Look!’ He shouted, waved both arms in the air. ‘Hi! Charles, hi there! Hi!’

  A tall man, strange to me, looked up at the sound of my loud uncle. He peered through narrow eyes, raised his hand briefly in salute. We watched each other without further signal – my uncle and I from the ship, the thin man from the shore – while the Koolinda was made secure. When, some ten minutes later, we were allowed to disembark and make our way down the gangway, he appeared from the busy crowd, and stood waiting to meet us where we stepped onto land. He shook my uncle’s hand, then turned and clasped me briefly to him, announcing himself as my father.

  He stood back to assess me, as I assessed him. He was immaculate in white ducks, white socks and shoes, and white topee, smoking a fragrant cigar. He did not look like a man who had just two months before buried his wife, but then, what did I know of how such a man should look? He did not speak to me of my mother, so I in turn kept my silence.

  My father waved down two rickshaws to take us from the port. I rode ahead with him; I looked back at Uncle Valentine perched on the seat of his rickshaw, his arm around the waist of my cello case next to him, leaning into her shoulder like a lover. As our rickshaw toiled up a steep hill, Father gave the boy loud directions that sounded to my ears as Go to Tangling Kechil. It was, he told me, the house of an old friend from his Singapore days.

  The McKenzies’ house was a brick bungalow three steps off the ground, its verandah rich with glazed pots planted with masses of maidenhair ferns and other tropical plants I could not name. The glossy leaves and strange flowers seemed faintly familiar, perhaps recalled from early childhood, from faded memories of the garden I had played in.

  The front door opened as we stepped onto the verandah, and a thin, ginger-haired man appeared. He led us into a room filled with bowls of tiny white flowers, exactly like tiny birds hanging onto a spire of woody stem by their beaks. Their fragrance filled the air, made it heavy.

  ‘Pigeon orchid day today,’ Mr McKenzie told us, by way of welcome. ‘These wee white flowers. According to native tradition, anything that happens on pigeon orchid day is blessed. I’d say that augurs well for your journey.’

  The McKenzies made us comfortable. Mrs McKenzie fussed over us and brought us tea and cakes and fruit on lovely china. She sat down next to me, pressed her hand onto mine and whispered to me, ‘Your mother was a very fine woman,’ then patted my hand twice before withdrawing it to pour the tea. She asked me about school, and fashions at home, and I answered her nicely but I barely knew what to say, and sat in silence, speaking only when I was spoken to, smiling and sipping my tea. I caught my uncle’s eye over the teapot, and he smiled at me, wiggled his eyebrows in his silly way. I wished we were back at his house by the beach. Father turned his chair towards Mr McKenzie and spoke of rubber prices and officialdom and of people I did not know. He spoke with a voice like a whip, cracking but turning back on itself, swallowed into the back of his throat. He clipped his words tight from his tongue, and he did not smile, unless the straightening of his lips into a thin line when Mrs McKenzie offered him cake could be termed a smile.

  The next morning, we departed once again – this time by land – for Malacca. Father had booked us first-class passage on the train from Singapore, across the bridge that connected the island to the mainland of Malaya. In contrast to my voyage by sea, I would retain in my mind little of that unpleasantly hot and sweaty journey up the coast, by train and by truck. I clutched my cello to me the whole way, staring from the windows at the hot green land we passed, a tangle of jungle too solid for sound.

  Our house, Lanadron, was much like the houses of other Europeans in Malacca: built of wood, high off the ground for the cooling effect as much as to avoid the occasional flooding that accompanied the monsoonal rain. The house had two storeys above the ground. The living rooms, the kitchen and scullery, the dining room and the big verandah were downstairs, and our bedrooms upstairs, up the wide dark staircase that bisected the house. My bedroom overlooked the verandah at the front of the house, facing onto Jalan Kuching. It was my vantage point on the world of Malacca as it passed by our front gate on its way to Town, to the wider world.

  After only two months in Malacca – hot, quiet months – I had come to know and hate the house, the unchangingness of life within it. I understood Mother’s letters, their constancy. I was, it seemed, expected to be the woman of the house in Mother’s place, to manage Cook and the boy who brought the water and the man who did the garden, while Father did his work, talked to men at the Bank and at the rubber sales. Uncle Valentine disappeared when he could, to tend his business interests, he said, but in truth I wondered if it was the dullness of the house he was escaping. I understood that Father’s intention must have been that my education and care in the hands of the Misses Murray would prepare me for the role as his helpmeet and house manager. All prospect of my taking work, of teaching, was seemingly dismissed since Mother’s death.

  It was stultifying. My mind was dulled by the boring routine of the very air around me. I could not match this boredom with the excitement I had felt on the journey here, up the coast, the glorious fervour of Bali. I could barely even rouse myself to play my cello. The languor upon me was heavy, enervating. No wonder Mother had died.

  In the two months I had lived in Malacca with my father, doing the job my mother had done not so very long before, he had not mentioned her. He was distant, my father, hard. I did not think that my mother had been the same; but I could not clearly recall. There was just one connection – one moment, one gesture joining Mother, through Father, to me. On the morning after our arrival at the house in Malacca, when I appeared for breakfast, a royal blue shantung-covered box rested on my plate. Father, at the head of the table, sipping his tea, nodded at me without his eyes meeting mine.

  ‘Those are yours now. Take care of them.’

  I opened the box. Within it rested a circle of jade beads, each the size of a pea, the whole string joined with a silver clasp. Drop earrings, looped with silver, nested in the centre of the circle of beads; my mother’s jewellery, just barely remembered, milky green against fine skin at her throat, the sound of marble-hard beads against china on her dressing table.

  Lying stretched to my fullest length on the polished wooden floor next to my bed, relaxing my back into the cool dark, I could feel the sound from the party below me – voices, music, the clat of fans, the tink of glasses – vibrating the wood and transmitting itself up through my skin to my breastbone, feel it echo in my skull. It wasn’t possible to pick out detail, to distinguish one sound from another. Rather, sounds merged in an undulating wave, low, oscillating to match the pattern of my heart. I rolled on to my side, pressed my ear to the floor in an effort to get better definition to the sound, but i
t remained a hum, a long, low hum, undefined, blurred at the margins.

  I rolled onto my back, drew my knees to my chest, and swung myself to my feet. My dress felt hot, heavy in the humid night; I lifted its light cotton skirt in my hands, as if to make a dainty curtsey as the Misses Murray had taught me, but instead I wiggled the cotton fabric in my hands, wafting it to make a breeze to cool my legs, my bare underneath. The air licked light and luscious up my thighs. I let the dress’s fabric drop. I sat on the chair at my dressing table by the open window. From the drawer of the table I took a blue enamelled dish, paper, tobacco in a tin, and matches, and rolled myself a cigarette. I lit it, drew in deep to fill my lungs with the sweet smoke, then hoisted myself up onto the table, the closer to send the smoke outside. I picked a shred of tobacco from my lip, flicked it from my fingers out through the window into the night, into the garden, drew in hard again on the cigarette, and ashed it into the little blue dish perched in my hand.

  The men’s voices lifted up to me from the verandah, hummed and ebbed, clear in the warm night air. They were all Europeans, of course – they were always all Europeans when there was a do at Lanadron. I could hear Mr Holland, my father’s business partner, among them, and Mr Williams from the Bank, and Uncle Valentine; thank God for Uncle Valentine. Their voices were fragments, deep and low, carried on waves of whisky fumes volatilising from their wide crystal tumblers, peaty on the hot air. Smoke from their cigars mixed with the thinner smoke of my own cigarette.

  ‘Well.’ Uncle Valentine’s voice drifted on fragrant smoke, up and through my open window. ‘Music time, Charles, eh. Rally the troops.’

  The men shuffled; there was a sound that was surely a hand slapping a back, matey. The door squeaked, as it always did, then closed with a click as the men moved inside the house.

  It was time for me to join the party downstairs, where Father expected me to play. He was proud of his cellist daughter, of what I had learned while I had been away from him. My skill, my talent – and my perfect, contained demeanour – reflected well on him.

  I took up my cello to tune it before going downstairs. In the heat and moisture of the tropics, even my aluminium cello slipped and slid out of tune with each passing moment, with each note played. I turned the pegs, stretched and tightened the strings, the cello’s endpin firmly on the floor, wedged in the gap between floorboards. Happy with the tuning I’d restored, I took a cloth from the case and wiped fingermarks and rosin specks from the metal, polished it to gleam and shine.

  With both hands I drew my hair back from my face, twisted it into a tight knot at the nape of my neck and secured it with two tortoiseshell slides. I clasped Mother’s jade beads around my neck, slipped the silver hooks of her earrings through new, raw holes in my earlobes, dusted my face with powder from a silver case on my dressing table. I picked a pinch of coloured cachous and fragrant fennel seeds from the dish on my dressing table and popped them into my mouth to freshen my smoky breath. Then I took up my cello and bow, ready to join the party.

  I played in the dining room. The table had been moved to one side, the chairs rearranged for the older ladies, the younger ones standing behind them. The men stood towards the back of the room, spilling out into the hallway.

  I seated myself, settled my cello in front of me, wiped my hands back over my forehead as if to sweep back hair that had escaped from its clip, but none had; all was in place. I took up my bow, and looked at the audience. Their murmurings had settled to quiet, and they all faced front and centre, towards me.

  And so I played, and they held their breath, as they heard the beauty of the music, so like a human voice, yet so beyond it. I drew the bow across the strings. The first notes of the Bach Sarabande sounded in the room and I felt the sound waves travel through me, through the body and guts of my cello, through the endpin and into the wood of the floorboards and through the feet of the audience and up through their skeletons to their hearts and into their brains and the music reached their brains and their hearts at the same time – each of them, it hit their heart and their brain at exactly the same time, for sound travels according to the laws of physics, and I saw the light behind their eyes catch fire and heard them intake breath as they felt the rush of the music take over their bodies, aethereal and corporeal combined.

  Even Father, at the back of the room, even Father’s eyes lit up in response to the music. I felt his eyes upon me, as all the eyes in the room were upon me, as the cello leant warm against me.

  THE PYTHON IN THE FOWL HOUSE

  As the months passed, I felt chained to the house on Jalan Kuching, unable to leave. My days in Malacca developed a pattern. As soon as I heard the front door slam behind Father in the morning, I would lock myself in my bedroom and play, cramming the precious hours with music, not so much stretching my skills as maintaining them; the heat seemed to drain me of the very will to do anything more than that. I would become lost in the music, locked in my room, sound reverberating. When I heard the footsteps, the creak of the front door, that signalled Father’s return from the office for lunch or at the end of the day, I would lay down my bow and retire my cello to her case. A quiet, biddable companion was what my father wanted, and each day, when he returned to the house, I put my true self aside – returned like my cello to her case – and played the role required of me, reporting quietly, demurely on the running of the house, speaking when spoken to.

  I ingratiated myself with Cook, offered to run little errands for her, to go to the market, to do anything to break the pattern of my days. She wouldn’t trust me at the market, but she let me collect the eggs for her from the fowl house by the kitchen door.

  The hens were tiny colourful things, not like the sturdy, bosomy hens at the Misses Murray’s. They scratched in the garden during the day, and would roost in the fowl house at night. I liked the Malacca hens as little as I had liked the bigger hens in Lesmurdie, with their flustered ways and their pecking and scratching. As I unlatched the half door that led to their roost I would coo to the hens, as I had learned to at the Misses Murray’s, coo under my breath, chook-chook-chook-chook, and they would chortle back at me, flustered at the interruption. I would collect the heavy, chalky eggs into a tin bowl, then sit on the back step and clean away the hen dirt using an old cloth before handing the bowl to Cook.

  One day though, when I chook-chook-chooked and unlatched the door that would let me reach in to collect the dappled eggs, there was silence, a sour silence, a dry rustling. As my eyes adjusted to the lack of light, I saw the piled sinuous muscle of a python coiled in a great fat pyramid in the centre of the fowl house. Its triangular head lifted, slowly, directly, its tongue slipped from it to taste me in the air, then its head dipped back slowly, slowly, slowly, coiled in on itself as I had seen a kitten tuck its head under its tail to sleep.

  I stared for some time, perhaps a minute, perhaps longer. I realised that I had not breathed. I closed the door, latched the latch. I sat on the back step to the kitchen door, with the empty bowl on my lap, the old cloth in it, nothing to polish; I sat there, and I smiled. Finally, something interesting, dangerous, had happened.

  I didn’t tell anyone I’d seen the python in the fowl house. Later that day, the boy who tended the gardens came shouting to Cook that half the chickens were gone. The cause was never determined; Father said we would simply make do with fewer birds. I never saw the python again. I imagined it sliding down to the bank of the canal that ran behind our house, sleeping there in a damp hollow while it digested our runty chickens and their soft, unlaid eggs.

  It was soon after I saw the python that I took to wandering the streets and bridges of Malacca at night, to escape from the feeling of the house, its dry rustling, the heat trapped inside it, the slow, squeezing death it seemed to offer. As Father slept – as the whole household slept – I’d slip my cigarettes and matches into my pocket, and step out through the kitchen door, past the downy scratching of the chickens settling, and out onto the street, seeking cool air, seeking music,
seeking escape.

  I’d walk past the night market, the pasar malam, past silk merchants cheek by jowl with dried fish shops with bags of rice on the footway, rice from Siam, rice from Patam and Saigon, shark fins and dried fish livers, leopard skins, bags of dried chillies, shallow boxes of eggs encased in lampblack, kettles, pots and pans from Germany; past tinsmiths, and herbalists, and shops with wall scrolls of paper depicting devils, josses and other characters in Chinese lore; past shoe shops and boot shops and shops selling nothing but wooden clogs, green clogs, yellow clogs, clogs by the thousand.

  The Chinese merchants, the men, wore a towchang, a queue, a pigtail, and these were as varied as the wearer, some plaited with black thread, some with blue thread, some red; men in mourning plaited theirs with white. Even little toddlers had their few inches of pink woollen yarn plaited through tender hair standing up off the back of their heads, the hair too short and soft to hang down. The Chinese women kept their hair long, its glossy black glistening with coconut oil, pulled back tightly from their foreheads and secured in a bun at the nape of their neck, held in place by big pins of silver or ebony or jade or wood.

  I too would sweep my black hair back tight from my forehead, copying the Chinese women’s style, feeling the pull on my eyes and my cheeks. In the cool of the night, in the busy pasar malam, I felt indestructible, invisible, although I was not. Eyes watched me constantly, but Father’s friends would never walk here, would never see me where I should not be, sitting at the Chinese stalls and drinking cold beer, rolling my cigarettes, blowing smoke into the night.

  I’d cross the bridges that joined the western bank of the river to the eastern, follow the tide of people across the Old Market Bridge to Kampung Hulu, follow the river for part of its course, past houses leading down to it, houses packed together; and then back over the Chan Boon Cheng Bridge, its steel ringing under the clogs and bicycles that crossed it. I’d turn near the point where Christ Church rose up, the building’s glorious red showing dark in the night, the solid squat Stadthuys my signal to retrace my steps and return home, shuffling past the chooks in their house, in through the back door to the kitchen, then up the stairs, quietly, and into my bed, to sleep, to dream.