Could it really be that Charlotte’s babysitter, barely more than a child herself, managed to foil the entire operation? And where is the young Malay girl now, who was once Charlotte’s playmate? And Charles’ assistant: what experiences does that word conceal, she wonders, in order for “revenge” to tally? Where are all the other servants who were at Idlewyld? Perhaps they’ve been sent home. Just as likely, they are still there at the great house, keeping up with the cleaning and gardening. Think twice about whom you choose to defend.
“Mem? You okay?” Suria is peering at her through the bars of the staircase, stooped over on the landing.
Hannah hadn’t noticed she’d wandered halfway up the stairs. “Yes,” she replies. Despite everything, or maybe because of it, she feels expansive. That expansive, hopeful stirring that tells her she should be painting. She can’t ignore it any longer.
Suria has plodded down the stairs and stands with her hands on her hips. “You want me make lunch?”
“No, no, this is fine.” Hannah takes her last bite of the banana and folds the peel.
The housemaid holds up one palm for the refuse.
“Suria, do you know anything about this fire at Idlewyld?”
She shrugs, her palm still raised.
“Of course you do. Servants talk as much as anybody else. But we can’t talk about it together, can we?”
Suria shakes her head.
Hannah turns over the peel. But the ayah doesn’t leave. “What is it?”
“You look…strange, mem.”
“Why, thank you, Suria. Trust you to be honest. I must admit, I feel a little off-kilter. In point of fact, though, it’s this town that’s off-kilter. But one can’t say that and be believed. One can’t say, ‘It’s not me, it’s you.’”
She’s stashed her paint box and portfolio in the room they set aside for a nursery. She will lock the door and paint. George must still be out, trying to manage this mess with the natives.
A commotion outside the front door sends Suria to look. “Miners!” she cries. “Mem!”
Two miners are jabbering at each other as they seize and lift the stiffened tiger head onto a stretcher. In no time, they hoist the stretcher by its handles and scamper away with their loot. Hannah watches it all through the translucent drapes of the sitting room window.
“Mem!” Suria shuffles over. “They take tuan’s head.”
“Yes,” she agrees. “They do.”
Dismissing Suria, Hannah walks to the colonel’s office and tests the doorknob, letting herself in. Alone, she has only ever stood in the doorway. Now she shuts the door behind her. The desk draws to her to it, and she moves smoothly around to the chair and, with a stutter of hesitation, sits down in it. The surface is mostly uncluttered. Only a few piles of paper that have nothing to hide and a paperweight with a skim of dust upon it. The entire room smells faintly of his shoes and shoe polish. On the wall facing there is a print of a Titian’s Venus. Titian’s Venus, of all things! Plump and bare and unabashed. So passive. So much in control. What could the colonel understand about Titian’s Venus?
She opens one desk drawer, then the others. Some sort of shipping files are stacked in the bottom one. Biscuits and a flask of gin in the middle. Pencils, a straight rule, a tin of dominoes in the shallow top drawer. She falls to her knees, groping for the catch for the slender secret drawer that pops open sideways. There, next to a billfold, is the photograph. Hannah takes it and pushes the drawer back onto its catch.
George has not set foot in the men’s club since “the incident,” as he mentally refers to it. There was “the incident,” as well as “the betrayal,” although he is unsure quite which came before which or why it bothers him that he cannot settle on a satisfactory order. (There is no answer to the question of the chicken or the egg, is there?) The fact is both events were humiliating, both took place, and he lives on in disgrace and discomfort. All of the staff manning the club, such as the boy who is showing him upstairs now, appear unusually welcoming. Laughing up their sleeves, the bastards.
Slipping into the smoking room, George is surprised to find a crowd gathered. Edgar Swinburne, Minister Watt, and several other members who are not normally part of Finch’s inner circle. Charles Peterborough sits in a striped wingback, looking as he tends to: distracted and somewhat pained. Effingdon-Watts is present, too. Indeed it is E.W. lecturing to them all, speaking softly and firmly, one hand gripping the mantelpiece.
“The Malays have a history of going amok. Killing sprees and such.”
Finch grumbles a little at this, the sounds from his mouth not quite forming words. Others murmur to each other.
“This is not something any one of us likes to come face to face with, gentlemen. I have the benefit of fresh eyes,” E.W. waxes on, “and I can see all too clearly that the community in Kuala Kangsa is suffering a loss of innocence. Like the colonial experience around the globe. I’ve seen it in Africa, in India, the Americas…and I tell you, they won’t stop at one fire.”
“Now, Arthur,” Finch grumbles. He’s caught sight of George. “We’ve usually relied on diplomacy. Colonel Inglis has made great inroads with the local sultan, for instance.”
E.W. glares at George and seems prepared to object. Instead, he shares his own fresh-eyed impressions of Izrin, formed during a recent stroll through the lower town. George turns away, occupying himself with the familiar plaques and the group photographs mounted on the wall. Hunting, cricket, cart racing. When he came to Kuala Kangsa, it was little better than a swamp, and they’d busied themselves with making houses, making roads, making order out of chaos. It was, in retrospect, a genesis not unlike the biblical one. It certainly seems a miracle from where he is standing now. E.W. tells them how poorly the sultan comes off, followed by that pack of stray dogs.
George wanders away to the billiards room. It’s a scant few minutes before Finch comes through to find him. “He’s a wally,” George says. “Didn’t anybody tell him about the dogs?” The sultan is bound by his religious tradition to offer charity to all homeless creatures, human and animal alike.
“Arthur’s only just lost his wife, you know. To the African yellow fever.”
George smacks his hand to his forehead. “Yes, I do remember his tale of woe.”
A pet bird trills suddenly in its cage in the corner.
“Look. I’m sorry, old boy. Did you get my note?”
The letter was classic Finch, the better portion of it spent trying to convince himself that Kuala Kangsa would be in good hands after he left, a much smaller portion spent on sympathy for George. Well, the province fucking won’t be in good hands, not with E.W. at the helm. Surprisingly, though, George doesn’t harbor any hostility toward Finch. He’ll miss him, the fat old bugger. In any case, even Finch couldn’t have gone against the wishes of the Resident-General. The question is, only, what to do about the rest of his life? Perhaps nothing.
“What are we going to do about the arson?” George asks, setting the billiard cue back in its rack. Finch pushes his lips into a thoughtful pucker. “Baldy doesn’t know what was in that cabin, does he?” says George.
“No. I would like the whole damn thing to go away.”
“Well, you’re still the Resident,” George says, “for a few weeks yet. And I’m still your deputy.” He can’t resist adding, “If Baldy hadn’t got involved, the whole damn thing would have gone away by now.”
Finch shakes his head. “I don’t know about that. She-Peterborough is pushing quite hard.” Conscious of the various ears in the adjoining room, they agree to reconvene at the office later.
“Didn’t think the place would be overrun like this,” he mumbles.
“Have a smoke, old boy,” Finch suggests. “Do you good.” He puts an arm around George and George surrenders to it.
“Maybe I won’t be far behind you.”
“Eh?”
> “I’m thinking of going home. Take Hannah home. Start over again.”
Forty
To begin, Hannah sits with the canvas on her lap and draws directly onto it in pencil. Working fast, almost in gestures. Then breaks from this to arrange her palette and test colors. It is a pleasant kind of empty in the nursery. Cracking open the window, she hears birdsong. She touches her brushes, selects one, two, three different sizes and draws one, dry of paint, along the main lines of the portrait. Reds and ochres. Richness. Impoverishment. The barest dirt that nonetheless sustains. The earth and its bounty, mined for pigments. And she is no longer “mem,” and in truth she never has been. She is an insect on the wing or one crawling up the wall, some minor hand of the divine—a witness who feels all of the doing in her being. A witness to sing to them in shapes and colors.
The photograph itself, this mesmerizing arrest of time, is not the living reality. Yet the painted portrait is alive, or it can be so. Hannah imagines she is working backwards, then, from death to life. Until the blood is pumping under the woman’s skin, until the thoughts are lurking behind the eyes, and the words come like wrens, twitching and alert but caught behind her teeth. Until the whole of her feeling life, bounding and fluttering beneath the ribs and breasts, is present. Her brushes bring all this to view by providing the right forms of concealment—it is paradoxical, of course—so that life can establish itself. Not only the living body, but one person’s unique awareness of her days.
Coming to the open window, Hannah lifts her face to the sunlight and lets the anticipation build like a symphony of strings. Then begins again.
With certain close strokes, she feels as if she is opening the woman up. Others, suturing her shut. She makes one ear nothing more than a gash. The left eye becomes swollen-lidded, almost bruised. She turns the woman’s shoulder slightly into the center, rounding her upper back. As her brush strokes the thighs she can feel the weight and resistance of the flesh. The breasts will hang, unconcealed. The collarbone is jagged. The broken mouth opens, perhaps to object. There is more, the woman says to her. More than this.
Between forays at the easel, she chews at her fingers and shifts her weight back and forth. Sometimes, a floorboard creaks. Time flows away.
Forty-One
On the way home, George feels freer, younger, for having said it. He needn’t worry any more about gaining the Residency. He needn’t worry about having to work under this preposterous, bloodthirsty E.W. Perhaps he needn’t work much at all, depending on what Finch and the Home Office could arrange for him. And then, God willing, they could finally start a family.
He enters the house with a bang of the screen door. Shrugs off his outerwear, props his umbrella in its stand. “Memsahib?” he asks Suria, who has ambled out to greet him.
The ayah points upward, an anxious look on her face.
He takes the stairs faster than he has in weeks. He’ll bed her, then tell her his plan. It’s enough to have the plan; dates and times and details can be sorted later. The plan is solution enough.
Hannah is not in their bedroom or bathroom. Nor the guest bedroom. The only other room, what would have been the nursery, is shut and locked. “Hannah?” he calls through the door. “Are you in there?” Floorboards creak. “Why have you locked yourself in there?”
Another long minute passes. At last the door swings open.
Cautiously, he steps inside. She has not bothered to conceal the tubes of paints and rags strewn over the bare floor. Brushes, a palette, lying on the top of the dresser. A canvas in progress is on an easel facing them. He can’t quite parse what he is seeing as he walks toward it, trying to decipher the colored shapes and forms. Finally, he recognizes a face—a scarred, ugly, swollen face with a cleft palate—sitting upon a heap of limbs and breasts and body parts. The girl on the canvas stares back at him, daring him to believe.
“Disgusting,” he says.
His wife is standing, observing him, a long brush between her fingers. Her sultry eyes lower to his chest. They are weapons—hostile, single-purposed things. Her chin is smudged with red-brown paint. Her feet and hands are bare. Strands of her unwashed hair have come unpinned and lie lank upon her neck.
“Disgusting,” he repeats, pointedly this time.
What in God’s name is she doing painting! He asks her this.
“I’m doing…what I must do,” she stammers. She doesn’t appear remorseful at all. Dazed, more like.
He then notices the postcard photograph propped in front of the canvas. She must have stolen it from his study! Seeing it transports him back to the doctor’s cabin: the fermented scents, the tools and maps, the drawer of faces. Before that, this very house girl shoving him off like a boat from a dock. And earlier still, hurrying through the Peterboroughs’ stable, finding his family’s bullock, as expected. Seeing the police mount—unexpected. The chestnut mare with its white marking. The chestnut mare with its white marking.
“He was there that day,” George realizes. “Sergeant Singh.”
Hannah listens, her eyes luminous, her whole being luminous.
“And you spent so much time away… So much time.”
She continues to study his face.
“You were painting there,” he suggests. “You were trekking there. That very day I visited. With that Kling.” He laughs; something odd has popped into his head. “You know, Finch once tried to tell me those darkies were debating metaphysical matters, out there on the high street. The truth is our police force has nothing better to do than stand about and scratch their balls. Or, or, or...ingratiate themselves with our women.”
“Ingratiate themselves.” She seems to have woken. “‘Our women.’ So you’ve figured everything out for yourself, then. Do I get to speak, George?”
“Why should you? You say whatever serves, then do as you please.”
This jab seems to register.
He moves closer. It’s like toeing an abyss. “Here is a question for you, Hannah. Have you and that sergeant been alone together?”
Her eyes fall to the photograph for a moment before she raises her head, drawing herself up almost regally. “Yes,” she says. “I was painting at Idlewyld all summer. In the house, with Eva’s permission. And on their property, out of doors.” The reek of paint must be getting to him. He puts his sleeve to his nose. “In the forest, with Darshan Singh.”
Darshan Singh. In a blink the two of them are fording a stream, pulling off each other’s clothes, lying in each other’s arms. George’s own arms are numb at his sides. “Is that…well, is that…all you have to say for yourself?”
“No,” she murmurs. “I called off your hunt.”
George backs out of the room, his chest burning. When he reaches the stairwell, the fury hits him. He marches back to the nursery. “Get out!” he shouts into the room. “Get out of this house! Whore!”
Forty-Two
The two police officers, the sergeant and his deputy, are arguing again. Malu keeps splitting straw. Manang is splitting straw, too. They squat beside each other in the holding cells, saying nothing. Last night he gave her both of the scratchy blankets that the officer slipped between the bars. She thinks of Umi at home, wondering about what her daughter has done. “I’m sorry, Amah,” she whispers.
“Stop,” Manang commands.
“I’m so sorry. Manang, I—”
“Shhh. Say nothing.”
She should have stayed inside that cabin and let the flames swallow her up. In the place after this life, the bad place, she and Amah could be together. Instead she scuttled away like a rat.
Manang’s fingers are splitting a husk. “Cry if you like,” he says. “Say nothing.”
Crescents of dirt are under his fingernails. She thinks of all the hot summer days his hands worked the black earth as he built and tended their gardens, turning tiles, hauling stones, mixing the air into the soil by pitchfork and mou
nding it to plant shrubs and herbs. Honest, useful work. “You shouldn’t be here,” she says. “You did nothing wrong.”
“I did nothing.” There is anger twitching, just under his skin.
He knows. He knows. He knows. The heartbeat of this new life.
“And I tell you,” Manang goes on, “don’t speak like that again. Big ears in police stations. All of the time they listen. Even—” he glances at the bickering officers, “even when their big mouths are going.”
“But, Manang, I don’t care. Big ears, big mouths, I don’t care anymore.”
She flinches when she sees the disappointment on his face. Some kinds of shame will never fade, will they? Being close to a good man like Manang is only making her shame grow.
“Hear me, Malu. Say nothing. To nobody.”
She looks at the Sikhs, trading angry words and angry silences. They seem to have other problems on their hands.
Forty-Three
“I’m going out,” Hannah informs Suria, who has come to the bottom of the stairs. “To the police station.”
“No, mem,” Suria answers, hushing her voice. “Mem, where you go?”
“To the police station, I’ve just told you.”
She’s not afraid of the colonel overhearing this news. Somehow, strangely, she’s no longer concerned for what he thinks at all. For the first time in a long time, she feels at peace or, at least, emptied of worry. Ironic that George commands her to leave when he’s just complained she’s been out too much. He commands her to leave as if this weren’t her home. She runs her fingertips over the textured wallpapering. Perhaps it isn’t. “I can stop by the market afterward if we need anything. Do we need anything?”
“Don’t go.” Suria glances toward the study, faltering. “Sahib, he…”
“Sahib, what?” Hannah strains to imagine what the old woman wants her to understand.
The Parasol Flower Page 27