The Parasol Flower

by Quevillon, Karen;

  The letters reprinted in The Late Godot were quite short and straightforward, and now I wondered if Coles or somebody before him had excised portions. These later letters were generally longer, a good deal more rambling, and more intensely personal. I pointed out some of the differences to Barnaby; he seemed intrigued by my observations. He sat down to read the letters in my photocopy of Appendix A.

  “My impression,” I told him, “is of a lonely, embattled person who is…well, joyful. Intensely joyful. Is that a contradiction?”

  He looked up, pulling his reading glasses aside. “Possibly. But aren’t we all?” I could tell by the guarded look on his face that he was coming to care for Hannah, too.

  As we ate, he asked me about patterns in the letters. Had I noticed any? Timing, themes, events? I don’t think my responses satisfied him, because after we’d boxed up the leftovers he hunted down a magnifying glass—a great round one, like something Sherlock Holmes would have used—and began inspecting the pages. We spent another hour or so, he and I, simply reading and rereading, studying the documents from opposite sides of his table, swapping out letters and putting them back in place, maintaining their chronological order.

  “Things get worse for her,” I said, struck by a line I’d just read. “They just grow worse and worse, somehow, no matter what she tries. Is that a pattern?”

  “And yet…as you say, she grows somehow fuller,” he replied. “More human, for lack of a better way to put it. However, I am still struck by your original question.”

  “What was my original question?”

  “How on earth these letters to Godot the artist ended up in my family’s possession.”

  My eye fell on the magnifying glass, resting on a corner of the table. “You don’t think they’re reproductions?”

  “And the originals went to Godot,” he said. “It was a thought. But, no, I don’t think so. Why would anyone transcribe someone else’s letters?”

  “Well, to keep a copy.”

  “But doesn’t that seem odd? And then of course to transcribe them, this individual would have had to have them in his or her possession for a time, at least. Which sends us back to the original question: why was someone who was not the addressee in possession of so many of her letters?”

  “Someone who was not the addressee,” I repeated. “Wasn’t that someone likely to have been Eva Peterborough? The Peterboroughs are the only connection between Hannah and your family. And, of course, Hannah mentions Idlewyld and Eva throughout these letters.”

  “Yes,” Barnaby said absently. He was mulling something over himself. “So the letters never reached Godot.”

  I thought of what I’d read, considering this hypothesis. “I suppose not,” I agreed. “I mean, that has to be the case if these are the originals. They never reached Godot. It’s true, Barnaby, it’s absolutely true that she doesn’t make reference to receiving anything from him. She keeps asking him to write.”

  He was skimming letters furiously. “She makes reference to his lectures, to things he has told her before she left—”

  “To old letters, too,” I interjected. “Maybe that explains the change in tone, from the Coles’ letters to this group? She’s on her own. It’s not a true correspondence.”

  “And, as you say, in increasingly difficult circumstances. Difficult circumstances change people.”

  We each picked up a letter to peruse.

  “But there are, what, twenty-five or twenty-six letters,” I said.

  “Mmm. Over a roughly nine-month period.”

  “Why did she keep writing? If Godot wasn’t replying, why did Hannah keep writing to him? Barnaby?”

  He was rubbing his eyes. “I haven’t the foggiest. Hope? I suppose if we had the envelopes we could see whether they were posted or had a ‘Return to Sender’ or whatnot.”

  “Good point!”

  He stifled a yawn.

  “I’m so sorry.” I saw that it was nearing ten o’clock. “I shouldn’t have taken up so much of your time with this!” The moment I had been mentally preparing for had arrived. I took a breath in preparation. “Look, I can take the letters with me…if you don’t mind. I’ll photocopy them in the morning and bring the originals back to you.”

  He made another yawn-filled noise that seemed to signify consent, and he didn’t object as I began to stack them carefully. As I gathered up my own items I made sure to mention the second cousin Tommy and ask for his contact details. This may or may not have been the Tommy to receive the paintings, but there was no harm in asking the fellow. I added, a little glumly, “I’d be happy to be in touch with Celia directly. Then I wouldn’t have to bother you any further.”

  “No, no,” he said quickly. “I—I quite like the bother.”

  That night I lay in my narrow bed at the hostel pretending to sleep—most of my roommates arrived in the wee hours, loudly and staggeringly drunk—while contemplating the many oddities surrounding Hannah, the Peterboroughs, her letters to Godot, my lunch with Barnaby at the White Horse. Why had he not mentioned the letters in the first place? Was it something to do with this Celia woman? Was there something Barnaby wasn’t telling me? Yet he’d been a great help, after all.

  I fell asleep with Hannah’s letters tucked under my pillow, one forearm raised to protect them. They were so close I could smell the musty-sour scent of the paper.

  Twenty Three

  Some days, she and Eva play chess. This is Eva’s idea. Hannah herself has played only three or four times in her life, and she’s uncertain of the rules. She’d rather just talk. Eva has plenty of stories and ideas for the both of them. But that’s just it, thinks Hannah. The woman is so intelligent, so knowledgeable, her companion does not offer enough in return. The chess set is magical, though. Quirky little pieces carved clumsily from ebony and ivory. She strokes a rook, whose turret has somehow grown out of the head of an elephant.

  “Yes, don’t forget that you can castle,” says Eva. And after another moment, “Tell me, darling, why did you marry the colonel?”

  “Oh my. Do you want the long answer or the short one?”

  Eva parts her lips into something resembling a smile. “Both.”

  Hannah castles, then says, “The short answer is that my father obliged me to do so.”

  “Really? How terribly old-fashioned.”

  “Actually, it wasn’t about fashion, so much. My mother and father were estranged when I was born. The truth is he never married her. He was already married. And highborn, as Mum would have put it. He had a family. My mother was an innkeeper.” Eva’s eyes widened, as people’s usually did. Hannah added, “Maybe you’ll think this odd, but I believe they were deeply suited, my parents, in their own way.”

  “I don’t think it odd at all.”

  “He doted on her when they were together.”

  “And how often was that?”

  “Several months of the year, I suppose. Off and on, a week here, a week there. A whole month, sometimes. It changed over the years. He stayed at the inn, you see, whenever he was traveling through his constituency. And I suppose his family was in London, though they owned a great home in the area. I-I won’t tell you which one. You know I’m not sure how he managed to avoid them so much.”

  “Men like that are practiced at it,” Eva says drily.

  “Sometimes he would enthusiastically renounce his situation, declare to hell with ‘society,’ that he’d disappear with us and they’d buy a farm on the Isle of Man, or an olive grove in Spain, or some such fantasy.”

  “And so she, or rather the two of you, waited for him to make good on his promise?”

  “Not really. My mother had no illusions; she was a very practical person. I think she must have considered her situation mostly a beneficial one. She advocated for us, for me in particular, and she knew how to get what she wanted. He provided everything she asked for an
d more, as far as I knew. And I do think he believed in his love for her, at least when he was with us. He was genuinely caught.”

  “And he wanted you to attend Julian? He must have seen something special in you.” There is an edge to Eva’s voice that Hannah remarks upon only later. What rankles her in the moment is the presumption it was Father who wanted her educated, who saw what the academy might open up for her.

  “I’m not sure how I learned of the academy,” she demurs, “whether he planted the idea with Mum, or whether this was from her own ‘research.’ She was always talking to somebody, a guest at the inn, someone in the village. She was always scheming.” Hannah laughs nervously. “I applied, and I was accepted.” As if it were as simple as all that. It was a mountain, she thought to herself; it felt like she had climbed a mountain, one that put her childhood irretrievably out of view. “I remember that afternoon as if it were last week.”

  They have stopped tending to the chess pieces. Eva looks entranced. So much so, Hannah worries the other woman is somehow inhabiting her own favorite memory: of Father arriving and ducking straight into the kitchen at the inn, where she is kneading dough, and silently and inexplicably shaking her floury hand very formally before embracing her. The smell of his skin and the roughness of the stubble on his neck against her forehead; her mother looking on at them with watery, smiling eyes. Hannah could not recall another time when he had held her like this. Mum must have already known the good news and agreed to let him tell her. For the two of them had been in the process of making the very tarte tatin they would eat that night in celebration.

  “It probably never occurred to my father that Mum would die before him. He was a fair bit older than her, you see.”

  “I’m sorry,” Eva says with feeling. “I didn’t realize. And you, so young.”

  “Yes, well. I suppose I took it rather hard. Such a stupid phrase, that. How else are you supposed to—?” She blinks to clear her eyes. “But when you are young and away from home already…you don’t have the capacity to…weather things.”

  Eva looks thoughtful. “Ah, so you were in Paris when she passed on?”

  Hannah nods. Practically the only time in her life she’d not been at her mother’s side.

  “Did you tell the school what had happened?”

  “Oh, yes, of course. Madame Julian was wonderful. The girls—the ones who were not too scared themselves by the news—they were kind to me as well. And I pretended to manage for a time.”

  “For a time?”

  “There was a boy, a student at the college, with whom I became involved.”

  “Oh, darling.”

  “I think now that perhaps loving him felt like a way to counteract her death. To counter death itself. Silly, of course.” Turning to the chess board, she plunges her knight forward then surveys the result. “You know, I’ve never talked about any of this. Not even with George.”

  Eva’s eyes seem to glow a tiny bit brighter. “And so what of George? In all of this…?”

  “Oh, I suppose George was generous to agree to me. Father could dispense with me before I had a chance to sully his name or show up on his family’s doorstep demanding attention. He’d only really wanted my mother, I suddenly saw quite clearly. Not me.” She laughs shortly again, feeling uncomfortable with this old line of thinking. “I’m not sure that’s a fair assessment. I imagine he wanted me to have some status, some kind of life, but whether that was for my own sake, or his, or hers for that matter, I don’t know. And relocating to the end of the earth, well that was a fresh start for all of us, wasn’t it?”

  “And was it?”

  “No.”

  “No,” Eva agrees. “I don’t believe in fresh starts.” Sliding her bishop down the board, she scoops up Hannah’s knight. “The past remains part of us.”

  “The evolutionary past, you mean?”

  “Even more broadly, our choices, our situations. The situations and choices of others. They are sedimentary. Like rock.”

  “I’m not following, sorry,” Hannah says, feeling fatigued.

  “Consider it in the restricted case of your art, darling. Or my scientific work. I could not do what I do if Mr. Darwin had not studied and contributed as he did. And he could not have done what he did had he not relied on von Humboldt, who in turn relied on Wildenow. Now, I happened to have studied very little Wildenow, but when I address Mr. Darwin’s premises, I am also in a way addressing Mr. Wildenow. His work is a part, a hidden part, if you like, of my own body of work.”

  “A hidden part. I think I see what you mean. Although nobody has written a book before about the genealogical descent of woman.”

  Eva bows her head, almost shyly. “No, this is true.”

  More and more lately, Hannah feels an enthusiasm about Eva’s ideas. How cleverly, how solidly they have been built. Eva often spoke quite humbly, but she and Charles had met Mr. Disraeli and so many other famous and learned people, it turned out. In the company of these influential men she had spoken her ideas, had stood behind them as their champion even with so many dissenters, as Eva called the horrible ones—the ones who banged on their desks and pulled on their collars and told her she was a menace, a distraction, a perversion, a “female Napoleon.” Eva and Charles had responded to these dissenters in writing, patiently, thoroughly, in such painstaking detail, over and over again. There could be no doubt Eva Peterborough was making a true contribution.

  “I do so admire you!”

  Eva has devoted herself to the board again. “The middle game is always the trickiest. Too many options.”

  “Oh. Is it my turn?” Hannah says miserably. She nudges a pawn ahead, then pulls it back. “I feel rather badly, Eva. I’m not a good enough opponent for you.” And she has no patience for it today, she should add.

  “Charlotte is getting rather good.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Concentrate on moving your queen into play, I would say.”

  Hannah concentrates for a minute. “And you? Why did you marry Charles? Was that a case of sexual selection?”

  They laugh a little too hard at this joke.

  “Charles expressed an interest in me as opposed to my family’s wealth. In the end, I got quite good at it, you see. I could spot a pretender during the introductions.”

  “My. That sounds…efficient.” Hannah thinks of the carriages rolling in at Fulgham House, the suited men dropping like swatted flies as they climbed the front steps.

  “The fact is I’m ugly. And beauty is what all men seek, even if they claim otherwise.”

  “No!” Hannah objects. “But Charles doesn’t…” She stops herself, realizing she may be inadvertently affirming Eva’s self-directed insult. She knows nothing about how Charles views his wife.

  “Charles is half-blind.” Eva moves her bishop close to Hannah’s king, clinging to it a final instant. “Checkmate in three moves, darling.”

  On other days, they talk about Charlotte and the difficulties of mothering, about Kew Gardens, corsets, the morally insane, the Boer conflict. Together they solve the political problems of Kuala Kangsa, honing in on improvements to the Ladies Association of Perak, which they delight in poking fun at. Hannah also tells Eva about the jungle acreage surrounding Idlewyld, its limestone outcroppings and delicate waterfalls. It’s an enchanted world, from the tallest towering tree to the tiniest phosphorescent toad.

  Twenty Four

  It is toward the end of a long and typically hot afternoon in an area of the forest they call the Giant’s Playground when Hannah and Darshan first see them. Here, an enormous yellow meranti has fallen, tearing an opening in the forest canopy, and the relatively brighter light in the vicinity causes a jungle riot of corkscrewing vines and a crop of saplings. Several durian trees are making good use of the sun, too, thickening with their spiny fruits. When the “men of the forest” arrive that day, Hannah is paintin
g alongside the fallen trunk: a foreshortened view down its length that geometrizes the grey blades of shelf fungus.

  Darshan moves in behind her, touching her lightly on the shoulder even before she sees or hears anything. It is an extended family—he points out three matriarchs, with several young between them. The orangutans swing down from the tops of the surrounding trees, crashing spindly branches and trunks against each other, until they are well-positioned on two of the durians. She and Darshan are perhaps twenty feet from the closest animals. Close enough that when the smallest one peers directly at her, Hannah can make out the curiosity in its brown eyes.

  The adults are already busy whacking at the heavy fruits and tugging them from branches. Some of the riper fruits crash to the ground with this movement, thudding like great stones into the peaty floor of the forest. The spiky rind of a durian fruit is practically bulletproof; in Kuala Kangsa, the locals axe them open with machetes or beat on them with mallets and chisels. Will these hairy clowns succeed at splitting them open with their bare hands? Stealthily, Hannah slips out her sketchbook.

  To her surprise, the orangutans organize themselves in a production line, the adults calling out with hoots and groans. She and Darshan watch as one of the matriarchs swings into position at the far end of the line, which descends from the trees toward a lichen-dappled boulder. The children dangle in positions along a route that begins at the durian trees, where the remaining adults continue to strip branches.

  One by one, they toss the balls from ape to ape along the line. It is a delight to see the children hanging on so effortlessly with their long fingers and toes, catching and hurling the big treasures as if the whole thing were play—and it is play to them, no doubt! Hannah strains to see what is happening at the end of the line, where the adult female is receiving the durians. She squares up, aims, and throws each one at the face of the boulder.