The Parasol Flower

by Quevillon, Karen;

  The sergeant snaps the last breadstick in two. “Actually, that is all rather frightening.”

  “I suppose the spoon worms present a case of natural selection at work. See, I’m getting the hang of it!” Hannah says.

  “Here is an idea, Mrs. Inglis. I will run down the roadway to the estate—it cannot be too far to the laneway—and come back with the horse to collect you. Or of course the Peterboroughs may wish to send their carriage for you.”

  She imagines him bringing word to Eva. Mrs. Inglis has overheated and is stranded at the side of the road with the roast turkey. “Carriage! Pssht.” Hannah gets her feet under her, trying to ignore the ache that radiates as soon as she puts weight down. “I don’t want them thinking I’m a liability on the first day they let me loose.” Nor, come to think of it, is she keen to be left at the roadside. “Please, don’t leave me here alone.”

  He studies her face.

  “I’m serious, Sergeant. I can manage.”

  “You are certain?”

  “I’m no delicate flower, am I?”

  He begins packing away the picnic basket, a strangely determined look on his face. “May I, madam, may I, uh, let you know that my name is Darshan Singh. I would be pleased for you to address me by name rather than my title.”

  After all, he’s not on duty, is he? Nor is he in her employ; they’ve made that very clear.

  “Dar-shan,” she tries. “Right, then. I shall call you ‘Darshan.’ Darshan Singh. And you may call me—”

  “Mrs. Inglis,” he interrupts her. “I could only ever call you Mrs. Inglis. Or madam.”

  “God, not madam! I’ve told you how I feel about that. Haven’t I?”

  Gently, he helps her on with her satchel, then takes up the rest of her gear himself, as well as the picnic basket. “Well then, Mrs. Inglis. If you are fit to walk, overland is a more direct route.”

  She follows his sightline into the dense, sun-dappled jungle. Mossy boulders dot a crowded forest floor that rises and falls unevenly.

  “And a more scenic route,” she says gamely.

  Twenty One

  Miss Charlotte is not allowed to touch the brown bottle of chloroform. Charlotte nets the butterflies, all the colors of the rainbow, and it is Malu who kills them.

  The insect in this bottle has pale, veiny wings that remind her of the petals of lilies. With tweezers, Malu draws the body from the jar and rests it lightly on a square of towel. Taking up a straight pin, she works it through the brittle abdomen.

  “Good butterfly. Good girl.” At the nearby corkboard, she presses the pin carefully until it catches in the cork.

  In the beginning Malu tended to grip the tweezers too tightly and sliced some of the butterflies in half. More commonly, a wing is ripped. She rubs her bleary eyes with her knuckles before closing the clasp on the case. The quiet of the nursery is pleasing, so she takes her time corking the bottle of poison and boxing the equipment, all the while practicing her request inside her head.

  Malu takes the request to Slow Roki, who is loading up sahib’s tray for delivery.

  Roki listens and says, “Where’s the kid?”

  With her broken mouth, it sometimes hard to hear the words Roki speaks. Malu concentrates, then answers, “With Tutor.”

  “And you want extra work? You’re coconuts.” Roki honks like a goose and swings her arm toward the tray on the counter, her bangles chiming theatrically. “Sure, half-breed. Be my guest.”

  “What are you doing?” asks Manang, when Malu walks past him at the rosebushes.

  “Taking sahib his tray.”

  The tray holds a squat jug of water and two empty goblets. She brings it all with care to the door of the little cabin, knocks, and waits. Looking back across the grounds of the estate, she makes out Roki lounging on the balcony, her feet up on the rug she is supposed to be beating out. The sun shines hot into Malu’s hair and upon her shoulders. She is doing her best for her mother. Dr. Peterborough will know what to do. He probably has expert medicine right in there, on the other side of this door.

  Just as her arms begin to burn from the weight of their load the cabin door swings open. Sahib doctor leans toward her, studying her face through slitted eyes. “Ah,” he says. “Wait here.” He takes the tray by opposite sides. “Wait here.”

  A minute later he reappears in the doorway of the cabin. “Fetch my extra pair of spectacles. I’m missing my spectacles.”

  “Yes, sahib.” She darts off toward the great house. Not knowing where he keeps his extra pair of spectacles, and being too proud to ask Roki, it is some time before she locates them and returns to the cabin. He opens the door at once and extends his arm.

  But Malu keeps the spectacles to her chest. Her heart pounds. “Tuan sir, I need to ask you a question.”

  His mouth drops open. “To ask me a question?”

  “My mother is very ill, tuan. She cannot walk and she…shakes. She is sometimes, um, mad,” Malu says, following the English words she has practiced. “Like a demon is waking inside her.”

  He stares.

  “Please can you help her, tuan sir?” Malu pushes on. There is nothing to lose now. “You are a doctor, sir. Can you please check her for what is wrong?”

  “Ah, well, I am not practicing here as a medical doctor. I am occupied with my research.”

  Malu pleads, “But it will not take long for you. And there is so much benefit for her. I am sure you do not forget your powers of medicine.”

  “Benefit?” he says, tilting his head.

  Malu is almost certain the word is correct. She has been studying it, and others, from Miss Charlotte’s books.

  “No. Decidedly not,” he says, though something crosses his face that gives Malu hope. He does look interested. “Spectacles,” he says, pointing.

  Unsure what else to say, Malu hands them over and trudges up the hill to the scullery.

  That night, she sits with Manang under a full moon for their evening meal.

  “What did you want from tuan?” he asks. He hands her a banana leaf.

  “Help for my mother.” Like everyone else, Manang knows of Umi’s sickness. In the lower town, Manang’s family has a stilt house not far from her own.

  He scoops a handful of rice onto each of their leaf plates.

  “Tuan didn’t want to help,” she admits. Saying it out loud makes her feel sick. She pokes finger holes into her sticky rice, ignoring Manang’s frowny face.

  “May be for the best,” he says.

  “How can that be for the best?” she cries. “Yes, better to waste my time playing hide-and-seek and killing butterflies than to help amah. You’re so stupid, Manang!”

  She chews a mouthful of rice ferociously, watching his face grew stony and his shoulders slump. Other people call Manang unintelligent, witless; he is slow to learn and slow to say his thoughts. So she is only saying the same. But he is also kind, and he works hard. She remembers the way his muscles strain along his backbone as he digs his spade into the earth and each time he lifts the handles of the wheelbarrow. There’s no reason it should be easy to get sahib’s help.

  “Sorry,” she mumbles.

  Now it seems she will have another chance. After Miss Charlotte went to her tutor, Malu was summoned to the kitchen.

  “Mem’s orders: starting now, you deliver sahib’s trays!” Roki honks.

  “Mem’s orders?” Malu is amazed.

  “You heard me, half-breed. Not my idea!”

  Why is Slow Roki is so angry? What’s so special about delivering trays?

  “Who will kill the butterflies?” Malu wonders.

  Cook, puttering nearby, snorts. This time, Malu doesn’t wait long before sahib opens the studio door.

  “I’m expecting someone shortly,” he says. “Bring that inside, please.”

  “Yes, tuan.”

/>   He disappears through the doorway and she follows with the tray. Instinctively she heads for the curtained window, trying to make the most of the weak light.

  “Sahib, it is me you were expecting? I was told to—”

  “Set it down. There.”

  A strange smell in the cabin. Like a barbershop and a butcher shop mixed together.

  “I understand you are good at keeping secrets,” he says. “You mustn’t talk to anybody about anything you see or hear in this cabin. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, tuan.”

  “Here.” He hands her a small bottle of what looks like cooking oil. “It’s castor oil. Tell your mother to take three teaspoons each morning until the vial is finished.”

  “Oh, thank you, tuan sir. Thank you!” Malu holds the oil to her chest a moment before twisting it into an inner fold of her sarong.

  “I don’t have great hopes for it, child. But it can’t hurt to try that first.”

  “Thank you, tuan sir.”

  “What are your mother’s symptoms? What precisely happens to her?”

  Breathless, she lists all of Umi’s struggles, careful not to forget any details, even though her mother’s health has been poor, she explained, for several years. Malu tries to quiet the hum in her mind that threatens to jumble up her spoken English. Dr. Peterborough has selected her to wait on him, and now he is going to help Umi!

  As she is speaking, he walks to one of the counters. For there is a high counter, she observes, running all the way around the cabin, like a shelf. Underneath it in some places are cabinets. In the center of the room stands a dining table, at least in shape and size, laid over on one side with soft blankets. She comes to the end of her rambling description of Umi and sees that tuan is nodding.

  As he looks over what lies on the counter in front of him, he selects things. Tools? Metal tools that clang when he sets them on a metal tray. Tools whose names she will come to learn and never to forget.

  “You speak very good English indeed.”

  Malu curtsies. Realizing his back is turned she adds, “Thank you, tuan.”

  “And I’m sure you understand even more. You see, I find that I have need of an assistant.” He takes the metal tray to the center table. “An extra pair of hands. Truthfully, I am told they are not permitted to be alone with me.”

  “They, sahib?”

  “And if it turns out that you could translate, that would be even better.”

  There is a soft knock at the cabin door.

  “For today,” he says, “I want you simply to watch what I do.”

  He opens the door to let in a small very dark woman Malu recognizes from mosque. Seeing Malu, she lowers her chin even more. Dr. Peterborough greets her politely and offers her a glass of water from the tray. He invites her to sit on a stool in the corner that Malu has not noticed. Behind it, a white bed sheet is tacked to the wall.

  Afterward, Malu runs up the hill to the house. She darts past Manang, busy laying new tiles.

  “You okay?” she hears him call out behind her.

  Inside, Cook and Roki fall upon her instantly.

  “Where you been?” Roki demands.

  Cook snatches the tray. “We didn’t see you out there.”

  Malu secretly runs her fingers over the vial of castor oil, as she has been doing all afternoon. God is good, God is merciful.

  “The tutor left an hour ago,” says Roki.

  Malu feels no concern for this. Only tiredness. God is good, God is merciful. She is almost out of the kitchen before she thinks to ask, “Where is Miss Charlotte?”

  “How should we know?”

  “You’re her genduk!”

  Chasing butterflies, expects Malu. Outside chasing butterflies.

  Twenty Two

  Barnaby invited me home with him to read his letters. It was no more than a ten-minute walk from the pub, and he passed that time badmouthing his sister-in-law, Celia, whom he believed to have driven his brother to an early grave. The best I could make out was that Barnaby’s elder brother, and thereby Celia, had inherited Hannah’s letters with the rest of their mother’s estate when she passed away in the late 1980s. Surely Barnaby had gotten some of what must have been a huge inheritance? I didn’t ask how these decisions came to be made.

  Arriving, Barnaby fetched the letters directly. They were on loan from Celia; he’d borrowed them, I gathered, in anticipation of showing me. Inside a plastic Marks & Spencer’s bag, the letters were tied together with a strip of brown velour. (Celia had recalled they were re-upholstering a couch in that velour at the time Alice Munk’s “worldly possessions were dumped upon them.”)

  “And this is my mother she’s talking to me about,” Barnaby marveled.

  I stood with the bundle in my hands, somehow hesitant to pluck at the soft knot with Barnaby watching. I imagined both he and Celia had read the letters, on separate occasions, and returned them to their original wrapping.

  “I’ll put the kettle on.” He nodded at a sofa behind me. Dutifully, I sank onto it.

  There were perhaps two dozen letters, all addressed to Henri Godot (“Dear Monsieur Godot”), written in a sloping script of middling size. Occasionally, generous loops and capitals obscured letters on the lines above and below. But it was all legible, and wonderful, so much more than reading the typeset, justified passages prepared by Coles and his publisher. A distinctness, uniqueness, in the bunching and leaning and inky pools. What minute control of her pen! There were a few mistakes that went unnoticed, and some that she’d noticed and corrected. Other crossings-out and slithery additions were not corrections but rather adaptations after the fact. I could almost feel Hannah’s hand moving across the page, her eyes skimming along behind it. She had a tendency to resort to dashes and the word “meanwhile,” and she had so much to say—there were so many layers to her ideas about art—that she circled back to a subject again and again, making something fresh from it. All the while, it seemed to me, revealing more about herself than the coconut palm or the horizon line or the need to use tones of red in certain shadows. Did she know how revealing it all was? I grew very conscious—especially in the places where Hannah faltered and flailed around and threw darts at herself and others, or when she wrote from one of those black smothering holes we dig ourselves into—that she never meant for me to see her like this and would not have allowed this intimacy, most likely.

  When at last I awoke to my surroundings I noticed a cold cup of liquid on the low table near me and the soft clickety-clacking of fingers on a computer keyboard.

  “Professor?”

  “Barnaby,” he grumbled in response. The clacking ceased after another moment and I heard a chair leg squeak against wood flooring. He entered the lounge, eyebrows raised. “Will they be useful for you, then?”

  Useful for what, I thought? What was I going to do with the traces of this woman’s life? All I could sense, in that moment, was something like the opposite, a countermotion, was occurring. That Hannah was going to do something with me. That maybe she’d already started.

  “They’re lovely to read,” I said. “She writes such a lot about the art she is creating. It’s quite exciting, isn’t it, how conscious she is of her process. The experimentation. The struggle.”

  “Mm.”

  “And I find her…” I searched for a useful word. “She’s more, like, open in these letters. They read differently.”

  Barnaby scratched his chest. “You mean…these are not the same letters? As were published?”

  “Oh, no!” I lunged for my briefcase and pulled out the photocopied packet I’d made of Appendix A from The Late Godot. “No, they’re not.”

  “Well. I suppose that makes sense, does it?”

  I flipped to Coles’ last published letter of Hannah’s, dated March 11, 1896. Then spot-checked the letters on my lap. “These are slightly
later. They’re all written later, I believe, but…Why are they here?” I asked him, struck with the thought. “How did her letters to Henri Godot end up with your family?”

  “Jolly right,” he said. “For God’s sake, I’d hadn’t thought of that.”

  We looked through each other for a moment or two.

  “Shall I order some takeaway?” he said. “There’s a nice Thai place I get sometimes.”

  Barnaby allowed me to lay out the letters on his dining room table, having cleared and stacked the bills, cat treats, newspaper clippings, travel magazines and The Lepidopturus article reviews on a nearby credenza. The room smelled of cat, and I soon spotted the culprit perched on a spare dining chair in the corner, squinting at me skeptically. Never the mind the cat’s odor; I was conscious of my own. An aggravating fuzz covered my teeth and my armpits stank, quite frankly, ruined from a long day of nervous excitement. I promised myself that as soon as I’d eaten supper I’d leave the poor man alone and head for my hostel.

  I skimmed back over the letters with my pen and notebook handy, interested in documenting the enclosures that were mentioned. For in almost all of the letters Hannah referred to “a sketch” or sometimes “a study.” I showed Barnaby my list.

  “No Parasol Flower,” he said.

  “No Murdo or Jane, either. But this could be the same still life, potentially. And there are two or three letters in which she mentions working on either a Naked House Girl or Nude House Girl.”

  His eyes flicked away from mine. Good grief, I thought, surprised at what I took to be Barnaby’s prudishness. Wait until he heard my idea that the parasol flower was an enormous Georgia O’Keefe-style vagina.

  “What size do you think these paintings would have been?” I wondered.

  “I suppose they could have been any size,” he muttered, poking apart the blinds to peek out at the road. “She could have mailed them in tubes or between boards or some such. They sent all sorts in the post, in those days, it was really quite extraordinary.”

  “And then the letters could have been attached, physically attached. Rather than the other way around. ‘Enclosure’ is a misleading word,” I said. “It could be that the art was the main thing she wanted to ship to Godot, and she was adding notes to personalize the shipments.” I had been asking myself this question already, of the letters Coles had reprinted: had Hannah written the letters as a point of context, or explanation, for the art she was sending Godot? Or was their written communication the primary purpose, and the art a happy addendum?