The Parasol Flower

by Quevillon, Karen;

  It is Malu’s third discovery, of the incurable, that fuses the other two discoveries together. The third discovery makes them all into discoveries. It is a miracle that each night, as she lies in her hammock, no one can tell she is divining her own fate.

  By chance, the next moonless night is a cloudless one. No rain to douse a fire. Although the September air is still lukewarm, Malu shivers in her hammock, listening to the servant women breathing and snoring. She keeps one hand pressed to the sleeve of matches she’s wrapped inside her sarong. If she is caught sneaking out, she’ll say she’s going to the privy. If she is caught past the privy, she’ll say she’s on an errand for tuan.

  As it turns out, nobody is there to question anything.

  Once she locates the loose plank, she pushes it in with little trouble. Water has rotted out the board. Malu squeezes inside, right under the examination table, and lights the lamp to work by. She hurries from the one corner of the room to the next, dribbling kerosene along the floor. Around the camera on its stand. Look up! Don’t move! she told them all. Malu tears down the sheet, strikes the jar of green liquid, tipping it off the counter where it smashes it to pieces. Spilling more petrol, she rushes over the places sahib lingered. Near the entrance that she’s torn open, Malu lies on her belly for a while, breathing the heady fumes.

  Her plan is to stay. But she isn’t brave enough. Choking, she turns and wriggles backwards out of the hole. Then she lights three matches, one after the other, and tosses them in.

  Malu hears the shouting and twists in her hammock, thudding onto the floor. Pain flashes up her back. Other women are rousing. Soon they crowd up through the doorway and spill out into the yard. One of the water boys sprints past, nearly knocking Malu over as he dashes up the pathway toward the main house.

  His arms flail. “Fire! Fire!”

  Malu stares. Has it all been a dream? Where the cabin had been, bright yellow flames are leaping into the sky, billowing streams of black smoke. The little box is so consumed it looks like a funeral pyre. Nothing will be left of it. Nothing. Around her, women begin muttering prayers and bending to touch their foreheads to the dewy ground. Allah save us, Allah in your mercy.

  “No rains tonight!”

  “A miracle.”

  At least that is the word that Malu thinks she hears. She hasn’t noticed Roki come up, hasn’t prepared her ears for Roki’s broken speech. Roki’s red-rimmed eyes are leaking.

  One of the stable boys arrives and begins herding the women away from the servant’s quarters toward the front of the house. “Come this way! Police will come soon,” he tells them.

  “Police will ask questions,” Cook says. A murmur of concern goes through the group.

  Manang runs by in the opposite direction, Hakim, the syce, on his heels.

  “Manang!” Malu calls out. Where is he going?

  He slows, locating her in the crowd. Then he gives a little bow before the two men break hard toward the flaming studio.

  “No!” she shouts.

  Roki frowns hard at Malu, then at the backs of the men.

  “Why are they going there?” says Malu. “No one is in there.”

  “Come,” urges the stable boy.

  “We’re staying here, you old fool!” snaps Cook. “We’re in no danger.”

  As a compromise, they shuffle toward the scullery entrance, never letting the blazing building out of their sight. What of sahib and the mem, two stories up? Are they pulling off their crisp bed sheets, coming to watch from a window? An empty pail of kerosene lies under a bush, as far into the black jungle as she dared to stumble. The rest, God willing, will be burnt and gone. Their shame will be burnt to white feathers.

  Malu holds her shaking hands behind her back, straining to find Manang’s form. The smoke stings her eyes, cleansing them.

  “Allah protect him,” she whispers.

  She prays so hard for Manang that she doesn’t notice the police carts bouncing up the long driveway, or the light rain that has begun to fall.

  Thirty Seven

  Hannah’s art was being kept in a self-serve lock-up in the Hampstead Village area of London. Celia Munk paused, key in the lock of Unit 33, to look back at me. “I’m afraid they’re not as impressive as you’ve been imagining, my dear.”

  Celia had turned out to be a petite, upright septuagenarian with a meticulously coiffed jet-black head of hair. I’d met her only fifteen minutes earlier and already I was irritated. Her manner was patronizing; she seemed to speak only in clichés and backhanded compliments. But Celia did, quite literally, hold the key.

  “I don’t know what to expect,” I replied cheerfully. “I’m not even sure they were completed paintings. Hannah refers to them as ‘sketches’ and ‘studies’ most of the time.”

  Celia let the three of us in to a space so dark that the only light came from the open doorway behind us. She flicked on a pocket flashlight and sliced the beam along the wall. Her beam illuminated a switch, which I pressed, and the fluorescent lighting flickered to life.

  “It’s mostly a great deal of claptrap,” she said, leaning toward me in confidence. “Whatever Teddy and Barnaby didn’t want.”

  “And yourself, Celia,” said Barnaby. He stumbled over a hat rack. “Good heavens, I don’t remember half of these things.”

  She produced a pair of plastic surgical gloves and took her time tugging them into place over her fingers. Not knowing where to start, I followed her through the maze of furniture and stacks of boxes. “No, sorry,” she would mutter, whenever we arrived somewhere, before setting off in another direction.

  “How long ago did you remove the paintings from the letters?” I asked. “Or rather, the letters from the paintings?”

  “I suppose it was when we were going through Alice’s estate.”

  Celia was stooped over a stack of wooden frames, parting them with her hands. “No. Someone else’s paintings.”

  So she knew enough to recognize Hannah’s work on sight. Or at least, what wasn’t Hannah’s work. “You have a good memory,” I observed. Alice Munk had died in, when was it, 1988?

  “Ha. Not so good that I know where they are!” She moved off to another stack of boards, this one lying horizontal on a chest of drawers.

  The possibility of having to systematically sift through the contents of the lock-up was discouraging but not off-putting. I broke from Celia to rummage through an oversized box.

  “Here,” said Barnaby. “Here they are. I believe.”

  By the time I made it over to him, he was propping one up against a dismantled headboard and blowing away some of the dust. I peered at the bottom corners of the canvas. No signature I could see. The work was a dark composition of what looked to be orchids, hovering like tiny luminescent aliens in a shadowy field of ochres and sage greens. I took a step back. Looking at it felt invigorating, like a layer of ordinariness had just been scrubbed from me. “Yes, it’s hers,” I said.

  Barnaby was already moving his way down the stack, propping each painting wherever there was a horizontal surface to be found. They were all stretched canvas on wooden frames and seemed to be completed paintings. A vendor selling coconuts. Fishermen. A boathouse with Malay women in sarongs, huddled together in secret conversation. The severed head of a tiger, sitting on a veranda.

  “Wow,” I said.

  Barnaby was standing on the other side of the enormous desk where he’d found the stack of paintings, gazing down into one of them.

  I said, “Is that…?”

  “Clouds.”

  I came around the desk and we stood side by side, staring into her sky. A thundercloud was forming, or was it dissipating? Warm yellows and pinks spread in broad strokes, while blues and greys were accumulating in narrower, surer lines. A bottomless, shifting sky that left me suspended between hope and despair. All we had was time, and such little time we had. I wa
nted to tell Hannah that I couldn’t make sense of it either. To let her know that, somehow, she’d understood me—and maybe that could be enough?

  “It’s almost…simple,” I said. “You wouldn’t expect it could do what is does to you. It’s…but you have to give it time, and your full attention.”

  “Yes, fine art is not like a bus shelter advert,” Barnaby said. “Probably why it tends to fare rather poorly in this day and age.”

  “Ha!” I snorted. I might have asked him what had got up his nose, but I knew it was Celia. She’d moved into our range, along with the citrus-sweet scent of her perfume, and was gazing witheringly at the paintings on display.

  “I can see that you two dreamers would spend the rest of the night here. Without a care in the world!” She pinned Barnaby with a knowing look.

  As Celia had predicted, there were blankets, empty boxes, and a dolly in the locker. She and Barnaby wrapped and loaded the works while I looked on helplessly. Our minicab arrived before we even reached the sidewalk.

  “I’ll return the dolly,” Barnaby said dutifully. He caught my eye as he grabbed its handles. “You’re right, all of her works are realistic.”

  We climbed into the middle bench of seats, leaving the shotgun spot for Barnaby, and for a few moments Celia chewed the corner of her burgundy lips. The cabbie was racing through his playlist, sending a sequence of jarring first chords through the stereo system.

  “Celia, I forgot to ask you about The Descent of Woman. The book? Barnaby mentioned that some correspondence existed between the Peterboroughs and their publishers and the engravers. Hannah’s art was used for at least one engraving in the book. As you probably know. So…if you happen to have anything that could shed light on why her artwork was chosen, that would be really helpful for me.”

  “Well,” she said, without a glance in my direction, “it’s obvious you’re not from the tabloids.”

  I wasn’t sure if that implied something about me or my outfit, but I was pleased she seemed prepared to trust me. “I read David Maikin’s article. I’m so sorry he…he used you in that way.” Not that his disingenuous muckraking exculpated the Peterboroughs, I replied to myself. I could nuance my position later, once I got my hands on their correspondence and research notes.

  “Once bitten, twice shy,” she muttered. “But all right. It’s not like any more damage can be done, I suppose.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t Worry Be Happy” burst into life on the car stereo.

  She touched a hand to her hair. “Oh, he’s frightfully slow, isn’t he?”

  I ducked and looked back toward the storage building.

  “They’re at home,” she said. “After it broke, I took personal control of any contentious documents. From Fulgham House, from the lock-up. Irrational, I realize, as the cat was already out of the bag. I even persuaded the university to give me the Peterborough materials from their archives.”

  I was incredulous. “How did you manage that?”

  “The weight of moral authority,” she said icily.

  That night, I slept in Celia Munk’s guest bedroom. Barnaby stayed on, too, assigned one of the couches in her lounge. She owned a red brick conversion whose showroom minimalism felt surprisingly soothing. The guestroom was decorated in a palette of greys and whites, accented with dashes of fuschia; there was strategically placed glassware, decanters, stoppered perfume bottles, and candy dishes; the surface of the armoire was covered by a shallow, tentacled bowl, something like a Chihuly sculpture or a miniature alien spacecraft.

  Exhausted, I dropped my backpack, stripped off my jeans, and jumped in bed. I fell asleep looking at clouds.

  In the morning, I nearly collided with Celia as she was coming out of the washroom.

  “You’re awake!” she said in a raspy voice.

  “Yes! You, too.”

  She stood there looking bewildered, unguarded, un-coiffed.

  I smiled. “Going for a run,” I told her, inching by.

  With the slightest of flinches, she turned and padded off in her silk pajamas.

  All night I’d dreamt of paintings, and as I ran through Celia’s imposing urban village, these dream sequences came to me like puzzle pieces for a jigsaw. I’d dreamt of Hannah painting in Rome’s Coliseum, with tigers prowling the arena and a capacity crowd making a soccer-match-style din. She kept the tigers occupied by throwing mussels at them. The great cats hooked the tips of their claws sideways into the shells to crack them open, then speared each tiny knot of flesh and brought it to their whiskery lips. Party guests popping hors d’oeuvres from toothpicks. All the while Hannah was deliberately, meticulously stroking paint on canvas. I remembered the nape of her neck. Her long hair was up, several brushes poked into it. I remembered her feet planted wide apart, the way she would lean forward, absently, to pick another mussel from the pail and fling it. I had the distinct and ridiculous thought: this is not the way Victorian women handle themselves in the movies. “Mrs. Inglis!” I called. “I can help!” The supply of mussels was running low, the tigers closing in. Across the dusty stadium I sprinted, carrying a huge, tentacled glass bowl—somehow this bowl was meant to help—and laid the empty vessel at her feet. “Mrs. Inglis! I can help!”

  I sprinted the last fifty meters to Celia’s door. Then took a few minutes to stretch before letting myself in quietly, only to find Celia and Barnaby knocking around in the kitchen.

  “You’re up,” I said, still breathing a little roughly as I came through.

  Though un-coiffed, Celia looked herself again. “When you left, my dear, you set off the alarm.”

  “Oh, shit. Pardon my language. Did the police come?”

  Barnaby laughed. “Yes, we’ve only finally got rid of them. Sent the officers away with some pastries.”

  A rather large plate of pastries was glistening beside the coffee maker.

  “Of course not,” said Celia. “I merely had to come down to the control panel and turn off the blaring ruckus.” She nodded at Barnaby. “He was up by then, of course, but has no clue of the combination.”

  “By then? I was awake half the night,” he grumbled.

  Celia handed him a cup of coffee. “You told me you slept well!” She poured me one, too, asking what I took in it. Then filled me a glass of water from the filter on her refrigerator and told me she was adding a wedge of lemon.

  “I did sleep well,” Barnaby was saying over our conversation. “In the sense that your £5,000 sofa bed is comfortable. That’s what people really mean when they ask if you’ve slept well. ‘Is my bed comfortable? Is it worth the money I’ve spent to host a guest once a in blue moon?’ Yes, your bed is comfortable.”

  “That one was closer to £10,000,” she murmured, carrying the pastries to the table.

  “I was awake”—and here he paused to see if I was paying attention—“because I couldn’t put our Hannah Inglis and her paintings out of my head.”

  “Neither can I,” I said.

  After breakfast we managed to lean all twenty-two of the paintings around Celia’s lounge and match each to the letter that had accompanied it, thereby putting them in chronological order. Having done so, the three of us lapsed into silence, sunk into ourselves, like visitors at a gallery. I’d always considered it a bizarre-looking behavior: humans, drinking in works of art. There was something primitive about it, some sort of animal magnetism in the activity. Like sitting at a campfire or lying under the stars. Like standing before a waterfall, mesmerized by all that ever-changing, ever-remaining matter.

  I said, “When the aliens come and they ask why should they spare our miserable, self-destructive little species…what could they ever have to learn from us? We’ll have to show them some art. Our best works of art.”

  Where on earth had that come from? The words had seemed to speak themselves, and now it was too late to recover and make myself so
und normal.

  Barnaby addressed Celia. “Why didn’t we notice them before? After Mum’s funeral?”

  Celia was examining one of the smaller paintings, of a vine arching over a pergola. She didn’t reply.

  “I suppose I had a lot on my mind,” he mumbled. He saw me looking at him and said, “You’ve got my nomination, Nancy. To speak to the aliens for us.”

  I did blush a bit, then, also because Barnaby looked unabashedly happy. He had one of Hannah’s letters in hand as he stood back from a painting of a lotus flower. A pale pink lotus and trail of lily pads floated on glassy water. The canvas shimmered with pinks and greens and somehow it was all laced together: the shadows on the water, the glow of the slanting sun, the tumble of sky above.

  Hannah had made dozens of versions of the lotus flowers, practicing color and stroke patterns. She’d written to Godot to send one in which “color is used for its building power.” The obscure phrase had stuck with me. I repeated the phrase to Barnaby, knowing it was lying somewhere on the pages in his hand. “She’s building connections, do you think? What does the color build? Is it showing the interrelation of everything?”

  He pinched his nose, making a sort of purring noise. “That would be very Buddhist of her. Did she have any exposure to Buddhism?”

  “It would be very human of her,” Celia interjected, “to be awed by nature. To feel God’s presence in it.”

  I wasn’t convinced that the interconnection, for Hannah, was quite so godly. Her subjects were so vividly themselves, alive in the moment and not a whit beyond it. “This one of the severed cow’s leg,” I said, “I just love that she painted this. The hoof looks like a polished fingernail. So delicate. And sad. But, like, funny. Do you remember that, the morning of their tiger attack?”

  Barnaby came over and had another look. “It’s rather like she painted the tiger at the same time she painted its prey, if that’s possible. Not sure I feel more for the prey or the predator.”

  I chuckled. “Exactly.”

  At some point, Celia entered the room balancing a box of pizza. She picked her way around the rearranged furniture, dodging our notebooks and computer cords. The pizza looked incongruous in her arms. Peasant food. Really, she was being a great sport, allowing us to take over her house.