The Parasol Flower

by Quevillon, Karen;

  And then there is the colonel. How can one man be so intelligent and yet utterly dense at the same time? Monsieur, it so hard for him. Everything in his life is so difficult, and I am sure he would say I am one of the chief troubles.

  I am no Master. I intend that my paintings ask forgiveness of their audience, forgiveness for their roughness, while still offering something. Some small thing that deserves and requires to exist—and exist NOW!— and the matter cannot wait until one woman’s arsenal is complete or her conceits are clear and thorough. As you said in one of your lectures, even the Masters were not masters in a strict sense. I would say that Art, the exquisiteness of it, lies in how it records the attempt to take stock of a moment.

  I am enclosing a revised version of the lotus flower to show you how I have taken to heart your comments on colour—viz. for colour to be used for its building power, as a tool. So, I have remade the water in hues of grey and green, mostly, and now I think the petals simply glow, do they not? They now have an aura, in the water. How is it I had not appreciated colour as a technical element in quite that way?

  As always, I await any comments you may have with keen interest. Do please write. The academic session will soon be done…and then what are your plans for summer? Will you be traveling?

  As ever,

  your student, H.I.

  Eleven

  In Malu’s judgement, Miss Charlotte does not need a playmate. She needs a pet ape. Memsahib could have bought Bad Boy at the menagerie and taken him home instead. The best games are simple ones like hide-and-seek and kite flying. Anything that involves making up rules, or speaking, is a chance for the Miss to order Malu around using fancy words.

  Except the doll house. This is Miss Charlotte’s special toy, and the girl is barely willing to have Malu involved at all. She is supposed to look on without saying or doing anything, often for an hour at a time. “Good evening, Mr. Jeremiah,” says the Miss, steering the dolls in and out of their rooms. “Good evening, Mrs. Cornelia. Would you like to take supper with, or without, the children? The children are outside having their…”

  Malu turns and glances out the window. Manang, the gardener, is pulling up tiles from the earth, just as he has been doing every day since she arrived at the estate. His chest is bare and glistening with sweat. His face turns like a dial as he heaves a block upward onto its side and struggles to turn it end over end until he can lever it into a wheelbarrow. He is strong and young, only a little older than she, but why don’t they have some help for him? The job would be faster and easier for two or three people.

  “Not another vocabulary lesson, Mr. Jeremiah! Next you’ll be telling me they…”

  “What is in that cabin in the orchard, Miss?” Malu asks. Charlotte seems to know everything, so why not ask her. Malu has seen house girls coming and going, though mem was very strict about keeping Charlotte away.

  “Papa’s studio.” The girl rises from her knees and joins Malu at the window. “Where he does his experiments and writing and thinking.”

  Out there? Malu wonders.

  “I’m going to start collecting butterflies this summer. Papa promised.”

  It’s silly to collect butterflies, she wants to tell the girl. Catch a bird that sings, maybe. Catch a monkey you can train to fetch coconuts. From what she can tell, the girl has been promised many silly things.

  “What does it mean, ‘vo-cabulary?’” Malu looks at the doll in Charlotte’s hand.

  “Why, words.” Miss Charlotte springs to the bookshelf and returns with a thick book whose pages are edged with gold. “Every day my tutor tests me on the words in the dictionary.” She sighs. “Their spelling and their sense, including the provenance. I wouldn’t mind if it were just the meanings. But I have no time for spelling. Spelling is such a formality.” She flips open the book and searches its pages. “There it is, you see: vocabulary. ‘From the medieval Latin vocabularis, from Latin vocabulum. One. The body of words used in a particular language. Two. Words used on a particular occasion or in a particular sphere. Example: The term became part of the medical vocabulary. Three. The body of words known to an individual person. Example: He had a wide vocabulary. Four. A range of artistic or stylistic forms, techniques, or movements. Example: Folk dances have their own vocabularies of movement.’”

  Every English word is in that book? It seems too good to be true. Malu says, “Will you teach me, Miss? English vocabulary?”

  “Me?” Miss Charlotte starts. A grin fills her face. “I would be pleased to teach you, Malu.” She heads straight for the table in the center of the room, sweeping aside its contents, abandoning her dolls to their imaginary lessons. “I’ll teach you all the idioms, too. Those are the sayings that don’t make sense if one simply adds up the words.”

  “Oh. Thank you,” Malu says. She attempts to pronounce the word “idiom.”

  “It’s like when I’m tired because I’ve stayed up past my bedtime. Mummy asks me if I’m a fried egg yet.”

  Malu frowns. “A fried egg?” This was going to be trickier than she thought.

  “I say, ‘I’m a fried egg.’ It means, ‘I’m tired out.’”

  “Ohhh.”

  “But I don’t know if everybody says this.” Charlotte taps her chin to think. “Maybe that one is just for me and Mummy.”

  This idea Malu likes: she will keep aside some words to share only with Amah.

  The Idlewyld servants are allowed to return home on Sundays until suppertime. It seems like the whole neighborhood comes out to greet them as the carts roll to a stop. In the midst of many welcomes and questions, Malu bows her head and starts walking, desperate to see Umi. Auntie Nattie and Nattie’s sister Roula hurry to catch up.

  “How is tuan with you?” Nattie asks.

  Malu doesn’t bother to answer. Silence shows how little this question matters.

  “Well?” Nattie puffs. “Speed walker!”

  “Tuan? I barely see him. Fine. They’re all fine.”

  Roula adjusts her blouse and looks knowingly at Nattie.

  “Truly, aunties, I have nothing to complain about.” Malu has always found something stifling about the aunties in the neighborhood. They squint at her when she speaks, as if no good could ever come from her mouth. Here are Roula and Nattie now, expecting bad news when Malu has discovered good. Sahib is a doctor. An English doctor, of course. Of all the people she could have gone to work for, this man is the one who will cure her mother. It is up to her to convince him to do it.

  “How is my mother?” she asks them, slowing as their stilted hut comes into view.

  “Same.”

  “Still with the demon in her.”

  Although Malu managed to catch the manuk dewata birds and pocketed three dollars for each one, she hasn’t had a chance to visit the chemist on the high street. It’s bad that Umi has to wait. But if Nattie looked after the extra money she’d only spend it on fortune tellers and betel paste. Malu concentrates on looking responsible and grown-up as she enters the house. When Umi calls out a greeting from her bed, she runs over and starts blabbing about everything. They ask her about being a genduk. What is the Miss like? What sorts of things do they do together? Malu lists the games they play. Yes, while the Miss is at her tutor, Malu must also do some cleaning.

  “Ah,” each of the women say in turn.

  “Dusting, tidying,” says Malu. “There are so many decorations.”

  They look at her with wary eyes.

  “And I am learning English vocabulary,” she adds, pleased to have this as a topper. She is already known as a good English speaker. “It means I am learning three new words every day! I am learning many more from listening to the Miss. But there are three new words each day from something called a ‘dictionary.’”

  “Dix… That is a new word! Are you counting that word?” Nattie bursts out laughing.

  “I am learni
ng how to print the letters too.”

  “Amazing,” Umi says in her soft voice. “Tell us your study words this day.”

  Malu thinks for a moment. “I have none for today, being Sunday. But yesterday’s were… anodyne, bassinet, and cardiac.” Then she tells them what each one means.

  Twelve

  One of the places Hannah goes to paint is the harbor quay. She enjoys the atmosphere here, amplified by the light on the water. There are shrimping boats, long lopsided crescents that cut through the river. There are the shrimpers themselves, with their grasping fingers and lean brown bodies. On the wharf she paints hawkers, a customs official, children fishing, but mostly she paints the prostitutes who have made the wharf their unofficial headquarters. They wait near one of the paths to the lower town, talking together and spitting blood red betel paste over their shoulders; they take catnaps curled upon the huge coils of dirty white rope that is used to hold the steamships that come into port. The prostitutes make good subjects because they spend so much time waiting around. Plus, they are used to being looked over.

  One of them, a girl with high cheekbones and an asymmetrical mouth and eyes, Hannah finds particularly striking. The girl poses without being asked. Motions with her arm, then stands against the side of a shed and lowers her chin demurely.

  “How old are you?” Hannah asks her, but gets no reply.

  She makes several studies. Her favorites are the paintings with two or three of the girls standing together against a wall of a boathouse, whispering and smiling. Do they know who she is? To whom she is married?

  Generally, her new experiments with the figure have been more rewarding than she expected. On the first day out she was mortally afraid. Of what, exactly, she couldn’t say. She uses a restricted palette, partly because she’s run out of colors and hasn’t the money for more. Fewer colors, though, means she can work faster and more freely, without dithering about “getting it right.” Fewer colors also make for brighter, bolder combinations. Like this white sarong she’s turned a tomato red. Hannah concentrates on the folds—what they conceal, what they reveal—and where they move the eye. Taking her number five brush, she continues strokes of red across the girl’s forehead and, more heavily, on her bottom lip. The Malay’s feet are characteristically wide and bare, scuffed, with the toenails caked in dirt. In the portrait, Hannah accentuates the feet, lifting the sarong over them like a rising theatre curtain.

  Lost in her labor, she doesn’t notice Sergeant Singh watching her from one of the stairways to the pier. Until he clears his throat.

  “Sergeant! Hallo!” she calls and waves, then lays down her brush.

  “Good evening, Mrs. Inglis.”

  “How are you?”

  He seems to be stuck on the final stair. “Thank you, I am well. Uh, they…they have your parasol.” He indicates the other girls who are playing at the mouth of the shed, around the corner. Teasing each other, poking and preening, and gossiping (she supposes) in their language. Hannah leans over and spies one of the Malays twirling her parasol and strutting coquettishly. Another holds her hands out to receive a turn.

  “Yes. I let them borrow it. Can’t balance a parasol while I am painting.”

  He says, “I suppose not.” Sergeant Singh, she notices, is not in uniform. The turban he wears is smaller and mocha in color.

  “What time has it gotten to, Sergeant?”

  “Half past five.” He checks his pocket watch. “Five thirty-one.”

  Her girl in the sarong is picking at her fingernails now and bumping her rear gently against the shed. Business must pick up in the evenings, thinks Hannah. How else could they possibly feed themselves, poor things. Sergeant Singh has not moved. Is he waiting for her to come over, perhaps? Something in the way he is looking at her makes her put her brush down. The four natives turn at once to see Hannah rising from her stool. The smallest rushes over with the parasol.

  “Thank you.” She receives the lace-trimmed umbrella, folds it, and sets it down next to her paint box, intending to join the sergeant. When she looks up, however, he is gone.

  It’s not for several days, on a morning when she happens to be in the public gardens, that she has an opportunity to speak with the sergeant. Hannah is working at a wilted Camellia japonica that has somehow escaped deadheading, playing with her brush to recreate the damage and the fraying of the blossom, when she happens to look across the center oval. On a bench facing the stone birdbath, Sergeant Singh is referring to a small notebook. As she watches, he slips the notebook into a breast pocket, checks his watch, and starts off across the lawn.

  “Like Alice’s White Rabbit!” Hannah giggles to herself. She gets to her feet. By the looks of it he is heading for the south gate. Their gate, as it used to be. Moving quietly and swiftly along the pathway that encircles the outer ring of flowerbeds, she emerges at the stone archway just prior to his arrival.

  “Madam! Mrs. Inglis!”

  “I’m sorry to startle you, Sergeant Singh. I was painting over there…and I noticed you on your way.” Again he is sashless, without his machete, and wearing the smaller brown turban. “On your way where? If you don’t my…?”

  He leaves the question unanswered long enough for her to recant and confess that it is none of her business. It’s obvious enough where he is going. They both know the south exit leads into the forest via a brief expanse of scrubby meadow. There is nowhere else he could be going but the forest. She gazes through the stone archway. “I thought perhaps you had wanted to speak with me, the other day at the dock.”

  “I recall that I did speak with you.”

  “I meant at greater length.” A disagreeable lump of emotion slides down her spine. What is the matter with her? Let him be. Save your twiddle twaddle for Hazel and Lucy. Only, they had rather gotten along, she and the sergeant. Probably because there’d been no need for twiddle twaddle. Absurdly, she feels her eyes tearing. Hannah backs away. “I’m sorry to have disturbed your, uh—”

  “No, no—”

  “Please! You, you be on your way!”

  “I’m going into the forest.”

  “Yes, of course. I mean, why shouldn’t you be? As a matter of fact, I’ve been told it is not a man-eater, the tiger that killed Cleopatra.”

  He nods. “I would agree with this. I have seen the results of a man-eater before. Back home.”

  She clears her throat. “You don’t have your machete.”

  “Oh. I use that to clear a path for you, Mrs. Inglis. I myself have always managed with an unclear path.”

  Hannah smiles. Thinking of his notebook, she says, “And do you…are you documenting something? Is that what you are doing?”

  “I record specimens of interest. This I have always done, ever since coming to this country.”

  “Oh, really! Have you?”

  “It is one of the reasons I wished to assist you with your own excursions. Another opportunity to explore.” He takes his notebook, turns to a dog-eared page, but thinks better of opening it. “For example, I am keeping a record of undocumented botanical specimens. Those which are not listed in The Almanac.”

  “May I?” she asks. “Please?”

  She looks at the page he holds open for her, skimming over his neat handwriting. Each entry appears to have a brief description, a basic sketch, and measurements. There are symbols as well: blacked-in triangles and Latin alphabeticals. “Are there many specimens, then, not listed in The Almanac?” Whatever The Almanac is, it must be the authority on jungle botanicals. “How do you know what to call them if they haven’t been documented?”

  “Good question, madam! You will see that I have suggested some Latin names.”

  She takes a second look. “Carnivorus empiriosa,” she reads out. “My goodness!”

  “That one you decided not to paint.” He points to a black triangle in the margin.

  “I had no idea
you were cataloguing wildlife, Sergeant Singh.”

  He leafs through the book. “You had your own aims. Rightly so.”

  “I’m most impressed,” she says. Evidently he is not about to stop because of a rogue tiger. “Are you planning to write to the editors of The Almanac, then? And tell them about these new specimens?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Or you could prepare your own book, Sergeant. A Guide to Malayan Forest Botanicals. And here I thought you were a police officer.”

  “I am still a police officer.”

  “I’m quite serious. Did you think I was poking fun? No, I think it’s admirable, and fascinating, and I… Well, I suppose you know already how I feel about the jungle. I’m the last person in the world to question the time you spend there. If none of these species has ever been discovered, then you ought to be given due credit.”

  “Mrs. Inglis, you are the friendliest Englishwoman I have ever met.”

  Hannah laughs. “‘Friendly’ is not the received opinion, I’m afraid.” She holds up her hands. “Do you see these stains? The colonel thinks there is something wrong with me, and I pretend not to notice him. And Lucy and Hazel and the others… Well, I pretend not to mind what they say about me. Sometimes I think they are genuinely concerned.

  “Then I consider: they don’t have a creative bone in their bodies, do they? Absolutely no scope for the imagination. No openness! Monsieur Godot used to say that artists are people who open the book and show that more pages are possible. Others try to close the book. They are closed people. But anyone who has an artist’s spirit…” She falters. It’s obvious that he’s listening intently, but of course how can he possibly comment? “I must admit, though, I sit on my hands during dinner parties. Actually sit on my hands. Unless I’m eating.”