The Parasol Flower

by Quevillon, Karen;

  “That date works for me,” I wrote. “Happy to make the trip!” I was almost certain I didn’t sound like an American citizen journalist.

  Bob returned from hospital before long, his infection having cleared up sufficiently enough to be on oral antibiotics. He looked quite weak to me. Shrunken. Yet his tolerance for Daphne’s help had grown. So too had his desire to talk. Hospitals, I imagined, were both very boring and very stimulating. Whatever the reason, Bob was newly and keenly interested in my future.

  Daphne chided him one night after Jeopardy. He’d been questioning me from his La-Z-Boy about my marital and career prospects; I’d been lobbing noncommittal answers back at him from where I sat working at the table. “Leave the girl alone,” she cried, “I’m the one what does the meddling, and you’re the one who stops me!” She was folding a dark load of our laundry and stacking the clothes in piles on the couch beside her.

  “I’m not meddling,” Bob replied gently. “I’m letting Nancy know I respect her.”

  “You are?” said Daphne, voicing the same surprise I was feeling.

  “Here she is, working away on so many important things, uncovering this famous artist. The discovery of a new flower species. She’s taking good time to see it all. Through. Properly.” He nodded with satisfaction. “Which is just what the world needs. It’s all too slapdash these days. Young people, you’ll excuse me, are all so slapdash these days. And here you are, my dear, taking the time to cultivate your knowledge. Working on something until you get it right.”

  “Sorry, what does the world need?” I asked. “See what through properly?”

  “Your book,” said Daphne. “He’s referring to your book.”

  “What book?”

  Bob said, “Your book about this artist woman.”

  “Hannah Inglis,” said Daphne. “Her avante-garde artwork and then the trekking through Malaysia in search of a parasol flower…”

  “And these sinister benefactors, the Peterboroughs,” Bob chimed in. “Who knows what they’ll do to her.”

  “It’s all very romantic!” said Daphne.

  I considered whether Bob could be experiencing some sort of delusion or emotional overload as a side effect of his medication. (Daphne needed no explanation.) True, I’d lied to a few people that I was writing a dissertation on pioneering women artists. But I’d lied. I had no plans for a book. I was having a hard enough time writing an email. I’d started a draft message that I returned to periodically. It was addressed to Kenneth. In it, I told him Europe was my oyster, that I was making good progress on my dissertation, that I’d learned of his recent move. How I should go forward, I would ask him. (Would I?) I hoped that he could still advise me. (Did I?) And if so, would I need to transfer to Loyola for this to happen?

  I told the Plewetts I was not writing a book.

  “But you’re doing all of this work!” Daphne exclaimed, ever a gauge on efficiency.

  “Yes, well, more fool me,” I said sulkily, flipping my laptop closed. “I’m…I guess I’m just exploring.”

  Bob was quiet. He waited until Daphne stood up with an armful of folded laundry and chugged away with it. “Why not?” he asked me.

  Why not write a book? I could remember the feeling when the words were flowing, when my dissertation project had made sense and given me purpose, a voice. It was the same feeling when, as a kid, you threw up your kite and the wind finally caught it and swooped it aloft. From a practical perspective, it was true that I now had plenty of notes to work from on a bounded subject. With no particularly challenging conceptual apparatuses to square, confront, or niftily sidestep. No requirement that I make a “unique contribution” to display my prowess.

  “I’m not an artist, Bob. I’m not an art critic, or an art historian. I have no special expertise about, like, post-expressionist art and the Ashcan School, or the rise of the avant-garde and how that transformed the critical reception of works by the general public in relation to forms of mass consumption.”

  “You don’t say?”

  “It wouldn’t have to be a book for the art community, I suppose. Or about the art in any technical sense. I could make it explicit I’m not a painter. Sometimes I think the viability of a project is truly all about the delimitations, if you see what I mean? But…I don’t know.”

  Bob pursed his lips in the way he did when he concentrated on a crossword. “Why would a painter be any better at telling the story?” he asked. “Painters are good at painting.”

  “Plus I’m not English!”

  “You speak English.”

  I rolled my eyes at him. “I’m serious. I wouldn’t be able to properly convey her nineteenth-century English sensibilities.”

  “Neither would I,” he said. “Got no imagination, me. Least that’s what all my teachers told me, and lo and behold, I ended up as an accountant. Go figure.” He winked at me. “Now this David Maikin fellow. He’s English and you told us what a dog’s breakfast he’d made of everything. Didn’t you?”

  “In my opinion. I suppose—I suppose he was entitled to…no,” I rallied, “he wasn’t entitled to come up with a bunch of self-serving lies and pretend they were the truth.” I picked a shirt off the top of the pile and refolded it less neatly. “But the thing is, I’m better than David Maikin. I know life is more complicated. I know it’s—”

  “You’d be doing it for the right reasons,” Bob said.

  “—too complicated.”

  Daphne came back into the room, heading for the other piles of laundry. Her face stretched comically when she noticed the refolded shirt and she looked sideways at the two of us. “Far too quiet in here. What are you two hatching?”

  Thirty Five

  Already a poor sleeper, since his visit to Idlewyld George now wakes for two or three hours each night. One thing he arrives at fairly quickly; talking the matter through with Hannah was a poor decision. Now he feels her scrutiny, too, and her disappointment. He should have realized she’s too childishly principled to recognize the benefits of lying low. As a mature adult, one is entitled, indeed one is often required, to evade responsibility for the actions of others. At least she appeared to have given up on approaching Eva Peterborough about the matter. When he gently broached the subject again, after sex, Hannah surprised him. “Oh, don’t worry,” she replied hotly, “I have no intention of returning to Idlewyld.”

  Hannah is not the only one urging him to take action. An alligator, his mother, and a talking pair of scissors appear in his dreams. His mother, God love the woman, suggests he raise the matter with Lucy Finch. “Clearly she is the moral seat of authority, Georgie, if not also the actual one.” The alligator proposes a confrontation with Charles Peterborough. This ends, in several versions of the dream, with the two men tearing strips of flesh from each other’s naked bodies and pinning them to a corkboard. As for the long-handled scissors, they warn him to document the matter thoroughly and bring it to the attention of higher authorities in the administration. The natives won’t stand for this, the scissors intone in their distorted, metallic voice. Speech that is not unlike the hare-lipped house girl’s, a hollow sawing of syllables.

  On the other hand, George’s dream father appears on occasion—dressed as a butler—to remind him there is nothing to be gained by intervening. Andrew Inglis, delivering a tray of drinks, reminds George that he has already consulted with Oakeshott and Dennison. In actuality, he has done no such thing, though George’s sleeping mind remembers this as a conversation that took place in front of a primitive-looking mural of trees and animals painted on the side of the government building. (As vivid as this “memory” is, there is no such mural; George takes the time to check.) The lads say: “stay the course,” “follow the plan,” “keep it to yourself,” “nobody wants to listen,” “Finch won’t bail you out.” His father the butler reports these phrases, over and over again, with professional aplomb. As if the man we
re in a sort of trance, thinks George. But of course he is: a dream trace.

  With so many nights of interrupted sleep, George’s stomach ailment flares up and his headaches worsen. He is in bed when Suria delivers the message that the Resident-General has entered the village. “Big boss at the Residency,” she shouts from behind the door.

  “Come in, come in,” he directs her.

  She shuffles to the bed to hand him a folded card. The message is in Lucy’s handwriting. An invitation to attend a “welcoming soirée” for a new British resident, one Brigadier Arthur Effingdon-Watts. Swettenham will apparently be in attendance.

  “Swettenham? Tonight?” George groans loudly. “How long have you had this card?”

  She looks meekly at the footboard.

  “I don’t want to attend any fucking welcome party.” He scans the paper again. “Effingdon-Watts,” he snarls. “Why does that name sound familiar? Where is memsahib? What does she say about this?”

  “Ill, Colonel Sahib.” The housemaid shakes her head, then points through the wall. “Other bedroom.”

  Arthur Effingdon-Watts went to the same public school as the Resident-General and is in fact a personal friend. A soft-spoken man, he turns out to be bald under his safari hat, but sports a thick and meticulously groomed auburn beard and mustache as compensation. Inside this nest of hair, his rosebud mouth moves now as he relates the plodding tale of the death of his wife. Trapped beside Resident-General Swettenham, George is forced to stand by and wait.

  “Are you feeling quite well?” Effingdon-Watts interrupts himself to inquire of George.

  Swettenham peers at George, looking displeased.

  “Yes, certainly,” he assures them. Though he takes the opportunity to excuse himself for a glass of water.

  “Pinky, you look as sick as a skunk!” James Finch exclaims when they run into each other in the hallway. He gestures at the staircase. “Have a lie down upstairs.”

  “I’m not going for a nap now, Finch. Good God.”

  Finch grimaces.

  “I’ll just…maybe I’ll just take a moment alone.” George trudges up the stairs. “Colossal bore, anyway,” he says under his breath.

  The evening has been mainly an elaboration of the many exploits of Resident-General Swettenham—which is to be expected when the Resident-General is in town. The Brigadier, E.W. as they all call him, is effusive in his praise of Kuala Kangsa, Swettenham, and Finch, something about which George can’t help feeling suspicious. Most travelers prefer to commiserate with those who live there more permanently.

  He stops at a mirror in the upstairs hallway. Eyeing his reflection, he adjusts his new cravat. He does look unusually pale. They must have the same sickness, he and Hannah. Some sort of flu. He’d thought these were the old symptoms flaring up but, no, these are new ones. He pictures her in the guest room, the bed sheets twisted around her ivory ankles and her dark hair, wild and unbrushed, fanning from her troubled face. His heart melts again at that moment, despite himself. When he goes home he will visit her in her bedroom and kiss her brow and wrists.

  He could send Hannah back to London, just as soon as he’s taken over the Residency. Why hasn’t this occurred to him before? Once he is Resident he could afford both homes. She would be safe there. She appears not to be fertile in any case. Then, after he’s served the few years remaining on his ticket, he’ll join her.

  “Good!” he says to his reflection. “That’s settled.”

  The colonel wanders on down the hallway, considering how he might put his own stamp on the place. Yes, if she doesn’t care for him, just as well to have her in London. He squeezes the frilly sash of a drape.

  In the wood-paneled study, George gravitates to the pedestalled globe in the corner. It was a gift from one of the local rajas, one of Izrin’s competitors in the decades before British involvement. The miniature earth is a solid, deftly carved ball of mahogany and the continents are worked in gold and secured with thin screws to the dark wood. When George spins it the shiny formations blur together before regaining their familiar coastlines. The globe, he feels sure, is considered government property. Finch would be leaving it behind. He spins it faster, enjoying the optical illusion.

  “Colonel?” Swettenham is standing in the doorway, fists planted on his hips.

  George draws himself up. “Resident-General, sir.” What on earth is he doing up here? Following him? The globe squeaks to a stop.

  “E.W. has just told me something astounding. You’ve made some sort of deal with the sultan, is that so? You have promised not to tax ‘his’ opium.”

  “Er…that is not precisely the case, sir,” George stutters, discouraged to be on the defensive. The brigadier must have spoken in confidence with Finch. Or Izrin himself? The man had been in town two days! “What I told the sultan was that the chandu, ah, in fact would be taxed. He…he was to assume control of the taxation for a period of—”

  “Stop waffling,” Swettenham declares. “That amounts to the same bloody thing.”

  “Does it?”

  “I spoke with Izrin yesterday when I came in.”

  “You did. Ah.”

  “Izrin is under the impression that the chandu will be tax-exempt as of the new year.” Swettenham’s delicate nostrils flare. “I told him that would not be the case. However, until now, I have remained curious as to who had given him this impression.”

  “I must tell you, sir. This ‘research’ of Dr. Peterborough’s is proving to be a…a significant antagonism to the natives. In my opinion, they are likely to revolt if it continues much longer. What I arranged with Izrin, you see, was a stopgap measure, sir, for a difficult situation.”

  Swettenham gives him a patented withering look. “Believe it or not, Inglis, what worries me more than the loss of revenues is a situation in which a glorified tax collector takes it upon himself to rewrite the laws of this land.”

  The laws of his land, Swettenham’s tone implies.

  “Surely—” begins George and then closes his mouth. In the ordinary course of diplomacy, how many laws has he been ordered to bend thus far? How many favors are routinely required to establish a single policy? Besides, Finch is quite as responsible for the chandu strategy, having approved it. “I—I hadn’t considered the matter in quite that way,” he manages to reply. He wipes one sweaty palm against the other.

  The Resident-General fixes his clear blue eyes on George for an uncomfortably long time.

  “Oh!” George remembers, laughing loudly. “You are aware, sir, that I had not planned on following through on the promise?” He is relieved to have discovered this vital ballast of information. “Raja Izrin, sir, has a certain amount of inertia, as it were. Once the arrangements with Dr. Peterborough were in place and the monies distributed, I felt certain there would be no need for something as significant as, uh, taxation diplomacy.”

  Swettenham sighs audibly. “You felt certain, did you? Inglis, do you have any idea how annoying it is to have to play politics in the middle of a party?”

  George nods. Yes, he has an inkling.

  “I know Izrin better than you do,” continues Swettenham, “and I am not certain he would be content with a broken promise. Not in this case.” He picks a fleck of lint from the hem of his navy blazer. “Damn hell, if this thing was to be done, it had to have been done properly!”

  He is seized with spine-racking hatred for Effingdon-Watts. This was absolutely none of his business! If the foul man had only kept his trap shut, Swettenham would have been none the wiser. George clenches his fists, trying to quiet his breathing in case the slight wheeze bothers the Resident-General. But the man appears to have given up on him. Without issuing an order, he strides from the room.

  After a minute or two, George ventures out himself. He’s not the first man to have been dressed down by Swettenham, he knows. Nothing much usually comes of it other than publ
ic humiliation, though this is painful enough. His head is freely pounding now and there is a new throbbing sensation in his abdomen. Has his appendix perhaps burst? Doesn’t that occur in times of great strain? He takes the stairs slowly, concentrating on smoothing the crease from his brow without putting a hand to his face. If he were thinking clearer, he could puzzle out how this E.W. became so involved with everything.

  “—illness after illness. And then there’s the drinking. I’m not one to refuse a tipple, but this goes…”

  George halts in mid-step. Swettenham’s left arm with its familiar tweed elbow patch is poking out at the bottom of the stairwell.

  “No, no, no, you’ve been entirely respectful, James. More than respectful. The man is a loose cannon.”

  “That’s lost its balls!” somebody jeers.

  Laughter follows.

  “We’ve made the right decision,” comes Swettenham’s voice again.

  Finch’s reply is inaudible. The elbow disappears.

  As the colonel slowly descends the final flight of stairs, the nearby rooms vacate. It is all something from a very bad dream. Except for a petite girl in a pink sari, who glides up to him. She holds a tray balancing a single flute of champagne. It strikes him as excessive, even for James, to have gone to such lengths to welcome an old friend to town. George takes the flute. As he stands watching the tiny bubbles cast themselves off the side of the long glass and fly upward, he hears a commotion rising in the great room—the chiming of many forks against many glasses. Feeling nauseous, he makes his way toward the others.

  “Thank you, thank you, gentlemen,” James Finch’s voice booms. “At long last, some of you might say, I’m being put out to pasture.”