The Parasol Flower

by Quevillon, Karen;

  She shifts tins, inspecting labels. Has he always eaten in needy forkfuls, plowing into second and third helpings as she sits in agonized silence? No wonder his stomach ails him. Could he be overeating deliberately, so that she’s forced to spend every penny on household staples? No. Why bother to go to such lengths when he could just reduce her stipend further if he wished.

  Hannah finds the syce in the back room he and Suria use as a lounge. “Has the colonel mentioned anything to you about his tiger hunt?” she asks.

  Anjuh pops to his feet. “No, mem. Mention, mem?”

  “Does he mean to go on with it. That’s what I want to know. If I had some sense of how long we… What do you think, Anjuh? He’s killed one tiger.”

  The servant doesn’t raise his eyes.

  “I’m sorry. Why am I asking you such things?” Looking at the old man’s lined forehead, she decides it doesn’t matter when or whether the colonel stops the hunt. She must do things differently. Making art is a way of living. “Prepare the cart, please,” she instructs.

  In the side garden, Suria is throwing clothes over the line and swatting greenflies. They have just come into season.

  “Oh dear,” Hannah says. The midge-like flies have settled over the wet laundry. It will be a devil of a job removing their tiny carcasses from the fabric. “Suria, I’d like to come to market with you.”

  “Huh?”

  Hannah smiles. “Or you can come with me, whichever way you’d prefer to think of it.”

  The housemaid spits a fly from her lips. “Why?”

  Cheeky thing. Hannah sighs. “To purchase food for meals. Well?”

  “Oh, uh-huh,” says Suria, nodding. She goes back to wrestling with the laundry.

  “Right now,” Hannah adds. “So, you finish up here, and I’ll meet you at the cart.”

  This isn’t how it’s done, of course. Servants are sent to market for the fresh items; wives order supplies from the dried goods catalogue. At a financial loss in both cases, Hannah surmises. And for what? So that people have Atmore’s and Brown’s in the pantry. So ladies may be spared the hustle of the natives and the “overwhelming” scents and sights at market. She and the ayah sit in the cart together, a stack of woven baskets sliding back and forth between them as they descend to the village.

  “I’ll follow your lead,” Hannah says to Suria as market stalls come into view up the road. “Just do what you normally do.”

  Suria holds out a small, cupped hand and Hannah fishes coins and a couple of folded bills from her purse before thinking better of it. “No. I will keep hold of the money.”

  “How I know what to spend?”

  “Ah! Spend what is a fair price for the item.”

  Suria looks blankly back at her.

  “Imagine.” Hannah taps her forehead. “Imagine you are buying for only you and Anjuh.”

  The old woman squeals. “House for me on Street of Big Bosses!”

  “No, no, that’s not what I mean.” They have come to a stop outside the marketplace. A gang of bare-legged children emerge from nowhere to surround the bullock cart. “Run along,” Hannah urges them, waving them away. But they smile so deliciously she laughs and tosses a few pennies in the air. Cheering, the children scrabble for the coins before sprinting off.

  “Imagine you are purchasing for your own selves,” she tells Suria. “For a house on the river.”

  Suria wrinkles her nose. “A stilt house, mem? Or can we get a bungalow?”

  “A stilt house.”

  Suria shrugs and climbs out of the cart. Slinging the empty baskets over one shoulder, she plods across the dirt road. Hannah tucks her purse away and follows, scolding herself for feeling nervous. It is only a market. One she has passed by many times.

  From the wide central aisle—where Hannah is already drawing furtive glances—they enter a much narrower one flanked with pails of shrimp and squid and river fish. Overhead, ducks dangle by their webbed feet. Hannah is tall enough to risk striking them with her forehead so she veers to her left and right, at one point struggling not to topple onto a pile of leathery kelp. The housemaid pokes at various watery wares, stealing backward looks at Hannah, before coming to a stop beside a huge bass. They do sometimes eat bass. The fishmonger, catching sight of Hannah, hurries over. He exchanges several words with Suria in Malay, and the two seem to come to quick agreement.

  Suria turns to her expectantly.

  “What about prawns?” asks Hannah, pointing along the bench of wares.

  The seller is visibly deflated.

  “Yes. Let’s buy some prawns instead.”

  After assisting in the purchases of a half-pound of shrimp and two bunches of onions, Hannah asks Suria, “Why aren’t you haggling? You’ve not been haggling, have you?”

  Her eyes pop open. “English not like haggle.”

  “You’re not English.”

  Suria smiles coyly. “No, mem.”

  “Listen to me, please. I am giving you permission to haggle. Don’t be afraid. I want you to do so.” Hannah repeats what she’s said, insisting that Suria be her teacher, and eventually the other woman nods.

  Apart from the aisle dedicated to fish and meats, there appears to be no order to the vendors. The two of them walk from bunches of herbs and vegetables to mounds of sandals, from stands of colored, swaying fabric to a table lined with pineapples and pocket watches. Suria purchases various leafy bundles, Asian pears, a packet of pigeon peas. The bartering is straightforward, from what Hannah can tell, but seems to involve patience and an uncomfortable measure of stubborn silence. One time, Suria points to a defect in a fruit and purchases it and three others at a discount. Another time, they move on without a tub of coconut oil, only to circle back later. Hannah plucks up the courage to ask about some of the unfamiliar wares on display. Brown candle-like cakes turn out to be sugar made from coconut palm.

  There is a flower vendor whose stall is stacked with orchids, heliconia, torch ginger, and other exotic blooms. Hannah drifts there automatically and is greeted by a plain but sweetly-smiling Malayan girl. “Buy flower, memsahib?”

  “They’re gorgeous. Actually, I’m just wondering, have you heard of…or rather, have you ever sold any parasol flowers?”

  She shakes her head slowly.

  “Par-a-sol,” Hannah draws the shape of the umbrella in mid-air, then grasps an invisible handle. “Oh! But aren’t you one of the girls who… We’ve met at the docks, haven’t we?”

  A hostile expression contorts the girl’s face.

  “Perhaps not. My apologies. Well. I don’t suppose you’d be selling something so large. And so rare.” Hannah turns her attention to the flowers. All of them will wither and die before long, and she can’t help but see the shimmering blooms as death masks. To be polite, though, she treads the length of the display table, feigning interest, then nods at the salesgirl. “Thank you for your time.”

  Suria is waving at her from behind a barrel. “Mem? The poison?”

  Rather than trying to eliminate all pests, Hannah has taken to regulating them by leaving out strategically placed substances—a crust of bread, fruit peelings. Although a steady thread of ants travels through the pantry, they have at least stopped invading and spoiling the supplies. She has been keeping up a pretense of hostility, in case the colonel ever wanders into the pantry, by storing empty boxes of poison. “Oh, let’s not bother.”

  Reaching Suria, she says, “Do you ever disobey Anjuh?”

  “Ha!”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Ya, mem.”

  “When?”

  “Nnnh.” The ayah tugs her sarong against her hips. “Whenever he is wrong and I am right.”

  Hannah smiles. “That makes perfect sense.”

  With the woman selling chickens, Suria appears to embark on an extended discussion. Hannah drifts to t
he menagerie next door, peering in the cages at the tiny twittering birds and fending off the blunt saleswoman. An awkward coincidence that the live birds are exhibited next door to the dead ones. The little finches, in particular, are darling. They meet her regard with curiosity, cocking their tiny feathered heads. Looking back to Suria, Hannah sees her and the vendor bowing to each other. “What do you think?” she asks the songbirds. “Better to be bright and caged than a fat dead chicken?”

  “I should have said, I might not have enough money left for a whole chicken,” she tells Suria, coming over. She stirs the coins in her purse. “How much?”

  “Choose,” says Suria.

  Hannah sighs. “Meaning?”

  “Pay her what you want to pay. She is sister to my mother.”

  “She’s your aunt?”

  “Much younger sister to my mother.”

  “Well, that’s very kind of her. And of you.”

  Suria holds her head up proudly.

  “Now, I think we’d better stop,” Hannah says. She reserves a few coins and, bowing to the chicken woman, hands the rest over to her.

  They lug their baskets to the main road. This could well be her saving grace, the discovery of the market. For the savings have been significant. To cut down even more, perhaps she could learn a few local recipes… And with the money she will save she can still afford small orders through Schlauerbach’s. Then, too, might there be local materials? Local paint suppliers? She has heard of Oriental artists painting on bamboo boards, on burlap sacking, even on banana leaves… She twists to look behind her as they exit, wondering if she has seen the market after all.

  Anjuh appears mildly impressed as he helps them into the bullock cart. “It went very well,” Hannah reports, setting down her baskets. “Next time, I will try the haggling.”

  They enter into a stretch of scorching hot days where the shutters must remain drawn and the house never seems to cool. Outside, only the faintest breeze blows along the ridge. It is ill-advised, as Lucy would have put it, for any fair-skinned folk to expose themselves during the daytime. Anjuh and Suria, meanwhile, walk up and back from the lower village on a daily basis.

  The colonel has been at home on account of the weather. While he could be, Hannah suspects, squaring the accounts from his home study, instead he spends his days playing dominoes, smoking, and sipping gin—venturing through the house on the occasional rampage to chase away a lizard. Is it her imagination, or is he tacitly keeping track of how she is spending her time? Housework, is Hannah’s emphatic answer. Tidying, dusting, sweeping, mopping, scrubbing, laundering, mending, replacing, unplugging, watering, waxing, fluffing, turning out, turning over, tightening, loosening, darning, ironing, wiping, and polishing. Hannah’s exertions have failed to siphon away the full extent of her frustration. It is nine days since the gymkhana festival, eleven since she’s held a paintbrush. Instead, she’s attempted to create nasi lemak for their supper.

  “So?” she asks the colonel. “What do you think? This one is my sambal.”

  He stirs his rice. “I think it’s bloody hot. What do you mean it’s your sambal?”

  “I prepared it. It’s my proprietary mixture. I may have to reduce the chilies.”

  “You may have to cook proper food!”

  She pours herself another glass of wine. The first one she drank while cooking. “They eat this dish for breakfast, the natives. I thought that might be pushing it a bit.” He grunts. “It’s an interesting…it catches you right at the back of the throat, doesn’t it? Salty.”

  The colonel gives her a strange look. “You are…insufferable. There is always something new for you to learn, isn’t there? Something of new and dramatic interest. Some further boundary to cross.”

  Hannah frowns. She plans to speak to him after a dinner someday soon, after a “proper” meal without spicy sambal, when he is full and relaxed and perhaps smoking his pipe and looking over the Illustrated London News. She is beginning to recognize that she does not manage him, or her situation, well. It takes patience and foresight, and she is short on both. If not management, there is fortitude. How good her mother had been at accepting uncertainty and strife! Even when she was very ill, and Hannah was still protesting, Mum took what she’d been given and made her peace with it. God gave me you, a beautiful girl with a great talent. What right do I have to question Fate? The true talent was in extracting happiness from misfortune.

  In this future discussion she will ask the colonel what she is supposed to do about God and the way He made her. Her nature. Does George truly expect her to close her eyes to what she sees, even now as she moves around the house and the light sways in heavenly parabolas upon the drapes and the puddles on the road turn to blood in the setting sun, and her eyes in the mirror beg so exquisitely. How can these things not be painted? How can all those moments simply be lost? What, she will ask him, is his solution?

  The colonel refills his water goblet and wipes his mouth with his napkin. He is looking at her placidly. Suffering through his time with his insufferable wife.

  “George, I know I am capable of…I am capable of…” She brings her hands to her face. Her fingers smell sharply of bleach. I am capable of greatness.

  What if she were to use the garret? This she could propose. In this heat, three in the morning would be the only feasible time to paint. Not that she would mind three in the morning, nor the heat, particularly, if she were painting. She needn’t wear much of anything, holed up in the garret. When she is painting, anything is possible.

  “Hannah? What were you saying?”

  “Sorry, George. This heat is...” She takes a short swallow of wine.

  The colonel sets down his fork and goblet and appears to be concentrating keenly. A great effort is being made on his part.

  Suddenly, she is angrier than she has ever felt in her life. It startles her how quickly the fury invades her senses and propels her from her chair. Hannah strides out of the room, not bothering with the plates. Seething and striding, that is all there is.

  She ignores him calling out to her and sits down by the door to lace up her boots. Then bangs past the colonel and his silly expression, out of the house and into the tepid black evening.

  The surprise is that it’s not George she hates, it is the academy. With its silly debates and “open days” and its high-minded instructors with their pet projects. And every one of her over-confident classmates, including Jane. Especially the ones who are painting and holding shows and arguing with each other about palette knives and Degas and the “new futurism.” How viciously she hates them and their false lives!

  Hannah stomps down the middle of Ridge Road, barely present to her twilit surroundings, not registering the howler monkeys’ chorus across the river, nor the pothole. Her foot lands heavily and awkwardly in it. Over-extending her knee, she topples to the ground in what feels like a circus stunt, pain lacing her shin and ankle. Inadvertently she cries out—a single gasp of protest. On the dusty road she writhes for a time in silence, clutching herself.

  The moon is already high overhead. A pearly eye on her indignity.

  “And what do you know about it?” she scoffs.

  Hannah squeezes the bright orb between her thumb and forefinger as she lies back, letting her breath loosen, feeling the earth where it cradles her body.

  Eighteen

  Barnaby Munk and I arranged to meet in a pub called The White Dog. I’d never been to Oxford and was surprised to find it entirely under construction, my preconception being that it was an unchanging and ancient place. The roads, the bridges, the old stone buildings of the university—everything, it seemed, was framed with scaffolding and hazard tape. I walked in circles under a cool March sun, enjoying the icy boughs of the weeping willows and the yellowed church spires, priming myself for the relief of a cozy pub. (I’d located said pub upon arrival. Out front, the sidewalk was being re-leveled and
two enormous pylons marked a potentially hazardous bump.) I entered at one p.m. sharp, and as I stood looking around me, rubbing my cold hands together, an elderly gentleman rose in one corner, his eyes locking on mine.

  “Nancy?”

  When I nodded, he beamed like the Cheshire cat. The professor emeritus wore a pink cardigan over his rounded shoulders and sported a frizzle of grey hair. He extended a hand to shake mine, but in the process of moving out from behind his little table knocked against it. Over went his pint. The glass crashed to the floor, ale sloshing dramatically. Barnaby apologized to the servers who came running, to me, to the other nearby customers.

  “I drop things,” he told me, when we had settled down together at another table. (The staff needed to mop the floor.) He looked over his shoulder at them. “Oh dear, I do drop things.”

  “I do, too,” I confessed. “Sometimes I drop myself. I sit down and find there is no chair under me.” I told him about the most recent occasion, at Richelieu. And the librarian who’d walked the length of the open floor to shush me like a five-year-old.

  Barnaby laughed. “Ah, les francophones. So,” he said, looking conspiratorial, “have you read The Descent of Woman?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  I held his gaze for a moment. I’d contacted him about Hannah Inglis and her art, and he kept rerouting me to the Peterboroughs’ book. It was true that Hannah’s art appeared there. Did he feel the book provided us with some sort of common ground?

  “It’s an interesting book,” I prevaricated.

  “In what way?”

  “I suppose it’s a sort of systematic hodgepodge, isn’t it? As if they felt they had to include everything they’d ever studied. One of those Theories of Everything books.”

  He nodded cautiously.

  “Or,” and this had just occurred to me, “perhaps the two Peterboroughs couldn’t agree on what to include? There’s something of a mixture of styles, maybe? Something odd. I can’t put my finger on it. Something patchwork about it.”