The Parasol Flower

by Quevillon, Karen;

  He was right, it was a striking portrait. Warm greens and amber-browns with highlights of yellow and orange on a 24’ x 30’ inch canvas, I reckoned. Someone had had it framed in brushed gold. The Sikh’s stance was open, angled toward the corner of the canvas, though he was looking at the viewer with an expression I would characterize as loving concern. The stance, the way the man’s head was turned, gave the portrait a casual feel. As did the fact that he wasn’t in uniform. He wore dark shorts and a light, almost filmy shirt, a tight topknot of mocha brown crowning his head. There he was, in his element, idly swinging a machete. Perhaps he was clearing away the nearby vines? Harvesting one of the fruits? He looked thoughtful, comfortable, happy. It was amazing, I marveled, what could be conveyed by a few strokes of paint. The tree in the background was garlanded with what looked like glowing orbs of light and looping lianas. It made for a festive mood and gave lovely movement to the work. While Strangler Fig Upon Kapok had made me feel almost claustrophobic, this painting opened me—to a world, a moment—and offered…was it hope? Renewal? I looked for long minutes, entranced.

  “It’s called a cannonball tree,” said Barnaby. “Couroupita guianensis. They’re quite remarkable. The flowers smell incredible—the flowers are not depicted here, mind you—and then it grows these very big fruits, that hang so heavily before they drop.”

  I told him I’d mistaken the branches for lianas.

  “Yes, well, people consider it a rather a messy-looking plant, on the whole. In actuality, the fruit is a dingy grey-brown color rather than this orange.”

  “Aha. Whereas everything here seems to be glowing,” I mused. “This man must be the Sikh policeman she hired to help her trek.” I told Barnaby that several of Hannah’s letters reprinted in Coles concerned her decision to paint en plein air and that this trekking, in my opinion, had really been the start of her own voice, her own style. And Hannah’s long love affair with the jungle wilds.

  With Barnaby’s permission, I took several photos of his painting. I made plans with him to visit Celia in the near future, though he promised to email her first to “soften her up,” as he put it. He also promised to connect me with Tommy. As I set out for the Oxford train station, I was feeling on top of the world.

  Thirty

  Idlewyld is not as George remembers it in the days of the Boonstras. Ten years, God, how they pass in the blink of an eye. The orchards are a mess now. The plum trees flanking the long laneway have suffered, too. As they come into the almost blinding sun at the front, west-facing entrance, he tells the driver to stop.

  “I won’t be long,” he tells the man. He’s had to borrow Finch’s cart and syce. “Just wait here.”

  But the Malay is looking anxiously about him and talking gibberish to the oxen.

  “Well, take them to the stables, then,” he says loudly. “Let them have a drink.”

  Alone, and looking up at his task, George reconsiders his initial impression. The mansion is just as imposing as ever.

  A house girl answers his knock. She is confused by his request to see Hannah.

  “What about Mrs. Peterborough?” he tries. “Memsahib? Is she here?”

  “No. She no here.”

  The girl has a cleft palate and he can hardly understand her speech. He wants to shake her by the neck. “Well then, where on earth are they?”

  “Forest,” she says.

  “The forest? Is that what you said? Look, can I speak with somebody who knows what’s what?”

  Abandoning the useless house girl, he heads around the side of the house, where the syce is still in the process of unhitching the bullock. George walks past him into the cart house. Inside the shelter sits the Peterborough’s ostentatious blacktop carriage as well as his own family bullock cart. So she is here somewhere. Crossing back through the stable his curiosity is further aroused. In one of the stalls a police mount sways its collared head.

  George strides back across the lawn, already drenched in sweat. He will not sit and wait for his wife—his goddamned wife!—to emerge from the jungle. “Where is sahib?” he demands of the idiot house girl, having rapped on the front door again. “Tuan? Where is he?”

  “Caarrin?” she says.

  “Is that an answer, or a question? Do you not know anything? Can you not find out? No! Wait!” he corrects himself, as she starts to shuffle away. If she goes searching he’ll be stuck waiting, and he’s not interested in waiting. He is interested, come to think of it, in seeing firsthand what the precious doctor has in his laboratory. “Take me. Take me to him.”

  The house girl looks even more uncertain than before.

  “Listen to me.” He grabs her flimsy forearm. “I am Colonel George Inglis, Deputy Resident of the Province of Perak. Take me at once to Dr. Peterborough.”

  She leads him through the house—an incredible house—to the back of the property and walks him to the edge of an expansive patio lined with palms. A wooden cabin is just visible where the lawn ends and the orchards begin. Perhaps, in plantation days, it was an overseer’s hut.

  “Caarrin,” she says.

  “That—? He’s in there?”

  “Nnnh,” the girls says emphatically, almost viciously, before turning back to the house.

  George puts a hand to the now pulsing pain in his gut and resumes walking. At the cabin he knocks loudly, reminding himself that he has good reason to interrupt the doctor’s work. His administration has made that work possible; he, personally, continues to make it possible. A little due diligence is to be expected given Izrin’s recent protestations.

  “Dr. Peterborough?”

  There is no answer. George squeezes the catch and pulls. “Hello? Doctor?”

  His first impression is of an old wardrobe. The room is heavy with private, worn-in smells, the overlapping odors of bodies and their habits. Shaving ointment, tobacco, and lemongrass mingle with the nutty smells of palm and coconut creams. Underneath these, like a chord being constantly played, is the sour scent of female sweat.

  What windows the little building possesses are rectangular gaps left under the eaves. As his eyes adjust, George sees that counters line the room on two sides. Directly opposite him, on the wall facing the door, a bed sheet has been tacked up by its edges and pulled taut, like a blank canvas. A three-legged stool sits in front.

  He drifts to a table that holds a tall bottle of green liquid. Two scalpels and a long-handled pair of scissors stand inside the bottle. Next to the antiseptic, laid out meticulously on a checkered cloth, is an arrangement of steel tools. Measuring tape, calipers, a doctor’s hammer, a tongue depressor, various thermometers. Then a series of things he cannot identify: thin metal sticks like cake testers, probes that thicken into paddles, and a double-paddled device that hinges in the middle. He picks up one of the tools—two pointed legs joined by a screw—and twists the pea-sized knob at its middle. The legs spread slightly wider.

  “Certainly well-outfitted,” he remarks.

  Looking up, George notices two anatomical maps tacked to the wall in front of him. The first is a hand-drawn profile of a headless, naked woman. He shivers. In firm, looping penmanship, someone has written all over her body. Elongated dorsal muscle slender calves narrow hips… Dozens of phrases tattoo the skin; others are attached to the body’s contours with ruler-straight threads. Good grief. This business is uglier than he imagined.

  The next map is titled “External Genitalia.” And there it is, fully and completely exposed, split open and pricked with dozens of needle-fine lines affixed to labels. Words frame the margins of the chart paper: outer labia aubergine pigment anus downy hairs Mons Veneris hair thick straight Clitoris swollen overdeveloped Vagina often freckled.

  George checks behind him. If Charles Peterborough were to return? The thought makes his knees buckle and he steadies himself against the counter. He should not be here. He should never have entered. What was that hou
se girl thinking of, leading him here?

  Map of the Secondary Characteristics: (i) the Breasts small. Aureola light burgundy to burnished black, of varying size (largest at 3 and 1/4 inches d.). Secondary Characteristics: (ii) the Face. Eyebrows fine to none. Lips: protruding…

  An uncomfortable stiffness is slowly spreading inside his chest. He turns away, kneading his forehead with his hand. This is the man’s science?

  Scanning the outer walls more carefully, he finds a second door he had not noticed, on the other side of the tall cabinet. This door, he realizes, faces away from the main house. Could it be that the doctor exited as George knocked? Is Charles Peterborough hiding in the fucking forest too? George remembers their formal introduction in his office, how the man had looked askance at the furniture before he’d deigned to sit in it. How he’d pressed George about Izrin’s reliability. Yet the man isn’t ashamed of this, this wreckage. Blue-blooded scum.

  A logbook is open on the desk, a pen resting next to its inkpot. George bends over the page …remarkably similar sexual characteristics. Her musculature is slender and she presents with sleek dark hair, which though nearly absent on the body is yet abundant on the Mons Veneris. Together with her flattened pelvic contour, this elegant structure suggests a racial typography well-suited to sexual pursuit. Observations of the permanently engorged state of the clitoris confirm… On the page facing, the even, looping penmanship comes to an end. Stratz has characterized the Javanese type as indolent, fearful, and without initiative. I have as yet been unable to corroborate his findings in the case of the Malay female.

  So Charles is making the maps, not just consulting them. Probing these girls’ bodies with those steel tools. Testing their flesh. As the scents of skin and anxiety intensify around him, he feels his bile rising and some shame over his squeamishness. For others might call him that, squeamish. No better than a woman.

  Yet he has objections, hasn’t he? Logical, grounded objections, and it seemed he’d always had them. Finch should bloody well materialize this instant. Like a fat genie from a bottle. Let him see if he can stand for it. “I don’t want this to become a problem for Peterborough,” Finch grumbled, when some of the natives began complaining to Izrin. George looks around. Some problems are not so easily put right. Should he take something with him to show the Resident? Some sort of evidence?

  His fumbling fingers locate the catch for the desk drawer and it releases. A jumble of dark-skinned, straight-mouthed women stare back at him, every one of them stark naked. Photographs. He was hoping for a mickey of whiskey. A girl barely older than Peterborough’s own daughter, cupping her budding breasts. A grandmother with her wrists crossed behind her head. Another woman stands with her brown back and naked pinkish rear to the camera, peering quizzically over one shoulder. Yet another woman is obviously pregnant. Legs splayed, her hands rest at her side.

  George stirs the cards in the drawer. He pauses when he recognizes the house girl who greeted him at the front door, the hare-lipped dolt. In the image, she is sitting on the three-legged stool, her work-worn hands pushing her knees wide apart. Dark eyes glistening with the same dumb certainty. George pockets the photo card and shoves the drawer shut.

  Fat drops of rain have begun striking the tin roof. He fights his way free from the cabin and jogs toward the big house as the heavens open.

  Thirty One

  In 1896, the northeast monsoon season breaks hard on the Malay peninsula. Whether it has broken early is a matter of debate in the Inglis household.

  “You’re unprepared,” the colonel accuses. “You’ve never been quite this unprepared.”

  Hannah and George are standing in the mostly empty pantry. Even without food, it is a squeeze for two people. Around them, the outer layers of the house—shutters and screen doors, roofing and eavestroughs—rattle and thump as the rain and gale winds lash the building.

  “The storm’s come early,” she replies. “Over a week early, I’ve heard some say. I’m not a fortune-teller, George. I can’t predict the onset of a monsoon.”

  “Ha! You could be prepared two weeks in advance. That’s what preparation is!”

  Catalogue goods are the only kind that keep for any period of time. The local stuff goes off almost the same day she brings it home, even the cooking oil. She and Suria swap out their market visits, now going three and four times a week, because most of what they buy is fresh, not meant to be stored. The ants and rodents would only take what’s left over.

  Knowing none of this is acceptable, she says simply, “I don’t purchase that far ahead.”

  This sets him off again. For it is precisely her work to manage the pantry and the meals and the general state of preparedness in the household. Lucy Finch and Hazel Swinburne, even Beatrice Watts, would never allow their homes to become such barren, haphazard places, he tells her. And she is ashamed. And it is shocking—how poorly organized she has become, how little she cares! There is no comfort for either of them to be had from this pantry.

  Tender, numbed, she would flee except the colonel is blocking the doorway. He’s summoned her in there to trap her and make her steep in her negligence. To rub her nose in it. To hit her? To force her to admit she’s spending much of her stipend on pigment and canvas? He doesn’t know I am painting, she reminds herself. Knitting her fingers together and bowing her head, she waits for him to finish. If he hits her, so be it.

  “I was at Idlewyld yesterday,” George says grimly. “Make us a pot of tea. If there are any bloody tea leaves left. We’ll talk in the parlour.”

  Hannah’s mind fidgets as the water comes to the boil. Suria and Anjuh have been sent out to see if they can scare up supplies. Does the colonel plan to confront her about painting? Yesterday, he’d said. When she arrived home yesterday he was locked in his study. Drinking, she’d assumed. And when she knocked, he told her to leave him be. Nor did he emerge for supper. She should have taken more notice of this; it wasn’t normal for him to take a plate of food into his study. Instead, she’d been only too pleased to be left alone with her considerations of the Peterboroughs and whether they’d enjoyed their outing to the waterfall. Had they found it too strenuous? Was Eva angry with her about Charlotte’s escapade at the falls? They had created an exceptional day together, the five of them. At the center of it something troubling shimmered, and Hannah could not release herself from searching for it, circling the events in her memory, hearing each crack of thunder and the girls’ gleeful panic. Was it something about the genduk that seemed out of place? Of course she was shy, and downcast, as ever, but then again she’d bolted after Darshan! And Eva had been so harsh on the girl, and yet so praising of her. For whatever she was doing for Charles.

  The whistling kettle awakens her. She’s done it again! Concentrate: what to say to George? As little as possible, surely. He must have come out to the estate while they were journeying to the waterfall. All right and good, then. She has an explanation, at least. She has Eva to back her up. Hannah rubs her eyes, exhaustion surfacing in a yawn.

  In the parlour, the colonel has chosen the dark wingback. As the tea tray touches down he startles and pops to his feet, then rather formally waits for her to settle in. The way the chairs are angled they can sit for a time looking past each other. Then Hannah pours the tea and adds a splash of tinned milk to her own cup. The colonel now drinks his black.

  “How many tigers have you caught now?”

  “Three.”

  “And…will you be buying a new cow?”

  “Hannah, I’m not sure quite how to begin.” But he does begin. “There is something going on at the Peterboroughs’ estate. Something that I…that I now know about. And it’s causing me some concern to think of you out there.”

  Hold your tongue. Cradle your tea. Say as little as possible.

  “Now, I don’t know what you are doing out there.” His hands seize his thighs.

  “I’ve told you, Eva
and I—”

  “I know what you’ve told me.”

  “We play chess, cards. We talk to each other. The Peterboroughs have quite a large collection of curios from their travels. Eva has a large collection of stories.”

  “Except you weren’t there when I called in yesterday.”

  “No, not yesterday.” She tarries, steeling herself to wait.

  “One of the house girls told me you were out. From what I can tell, she meant out in the forest.”

  It occurs to her that the house girl—which house girl?—might have led him to her studio room at Idlewyld, and her stomach lurches. Looking at the colonel, she senses this didn’t happen. He would be livid. Instead he is nervous and strangely apprehensive about speaking. She tells him she was indeed in the forest, on a walk with Eva and Charlotte Peterborough. They’d trekked to a nearby waterfall for some amusement on a hot day. As simple as that, she says.

  This news doesn’t seem to bring him much relief. He looks at her blankly.

  “What were you doing at Idlewyld, George? George?”

  Abruptly the colonel leans forward, fishes something out of his breast pocket, and holds it to his chest a moment before handing it over to her. It is a photographic postcard of a naked Malay woman—dull-eyed, posing with her knees so wide apart Hannah can see she has been shaved. She is one of Eva’s house girls, unmistakably—the girl with the cleft palate and the bangles. In the photograph, she is still wearing her precious bangles.

  “What is this?” she asks. “Where did you get it?”

  “I found it in Dr. Peterborough’s cabin,” he replies at last. “In the field behind the house there is a cabin where he…where I suppose he is doing his research. There were dozens of photographs in his desk drawer. Forty, fifty images.”

  She cannot take her eyes off it. The light is diffuse, the pale background reinforcing the dark contours of the woman’s limbs and the sheen on her skin. She is exquisitely rendered, dimensional yet flat, hiding beneath or within her own body. How has he achieved such an integration of expression? Her open legs, her open wound; her closed face, her closed mouth. This instant—that such a precise instant can be captured with a camera—it is all a marvel. Is it something about time, such violently stopped time, that causes life to spill itself open for the viewer? She feels as if the camera has pulled her own clothes to her ankles; so strong is the sensation that Hannah puts her free hand to her abdomen and pinches the fabric of her blouse.