His home was in Hove, a ten-minute drive from his office and about the same distance from the bed and breakfast we’d found, though it took us thirty minutes to locate it and find a parking spot. Daphne and I had given ourselves extra time. Nonetheless, we arrived ten minutes late and flustered.
“Thank you again for allowing us to see Nude House Girl,” I said to him, having apologized at least twice for our tardiness.
“We’re only fashionably late!” Daphne had been hissing as we came up the steps.
“It isn’t a dinner party!” I’d been hissing back. “He’s a busy man.”
“Not a problem,” Tommy replied, pulling out his phone to check the screen. “Well. I’ll show you up to it.”
The bright, semi-detached home had a tidy playroom in place of a dining area. He led us upstairs as Daphne and I took turns complimenting him on the stone flooring, the natural light, the sturdy banister. The upper hallway featured a gallery of white-framed family photos. A woman with long wavy hair and large dark eyes, smiling professionally into the camera. Tommy and the woman alternately romping with a poppet of a child in various ages and stages. A Scottie dog made frequent appearances.
“And it’s so nice and quiet, this neighborhood,” Daphne said, giving me a look.
As we walked past an upstairs bathroom, I glimpsed an alligator toothbrush in a holder. Where had he mounted this painting? I was beginning to wonder.
“It’s an unusual work,” Tommy said over his shoulder, as we entered the master bedroom. Cardboard boxes lined one side of the room, most of them full and taped. An enormous mirror above the bed’s headboard gave me my first view of Nude House Girl. The painting itself was hanging at the opposite end of the room, in an alcove that led onward to a balcony.
“Oh, are you moving house?” I heard Daphne say behind me. “That’s such an ordeal, isn’t it, packing everything up.”
Thomas Munk didn’t respond. He’d arrived at the painting and was clearly more interesting in explaining that. The work, to my surprise, was double-sided. That is to say, two paintings had been created on one loosely rectangular strip of canvas. It was mounted, quite ingeniously, to stretch between a floating frame, sandwiched by glass so that one could view both sides of the canvas. And, in order to facilitate this dual viewing, Thomas, or someone in the family, had suspended Nude House Girl from the ceiling. I walked around the hanging artwork as he spoke, marveling first at this engineering of perspectives. The mirror over the bed, as well as a second upright mirror, positioned against one angled wall of the alcove, meant that almost wherever you walked in the room, her large dark eyes were watching.
The paintings themselves might have been called portraits, though they were non- representational in style. They were, I thought, vaguely cubist-looking, with many angles and curves and sharp corners. The color work was muted, in a palette of ochres, dark purples, and the occasional dart of red or spidery fringe of black. Although there were differences between the two portraits, they seemed, in my opinion, to be versions of the same subject. She was naked, and the naked parts of her body did not fit together. Her face looked as if bruised, her mouth, broken. A cleft palate? Fireworks were exploding in my brain.
On the upper torso, one nipple and one breast were clearly visible, the rest of her chest being skeins of color. As if she had twisted out of her skin to turn toward the painter. On both versions, the woman’s legs were small and crossed and crowded into the bottom of the page, like a child’s drawing when she has suddenly run out of space. Between the legs, in both works, and which you have might have first taken for background, sat an upturned black-brown oval surrounding a slash of clitoris. Once I understood this feature as the woman’s genitals, the curved legs transformed into fleshy mounds of mons veneris. And the woman’s eyes became portals of defiance. You will not own me.
I searched but did not see a signature. Had I not known the provenance, I might have wondered if they’d been accomplished by the artist who had painted Murdo and Jane and The Parasol Flower. I said this to Thomas, who readily agreed. He told me he preferred Nude House Girl, though it was obviously unfinished and “too raw for most people to enjoy it,” as he put it.
“There is something very tender about them,” he said.
“And fierce.” I glanced at Daphne, who had a politely disturbed expression on her face. I asked, “Did you always have the canvas framed like this? It’s ingenious.”
“No. Until…fairly recently, as a matter of fact, I didn’t have the painting up at all. Gemma always thought it hideous.”
“Funny, isn’t it, how different peoples’ tastes can be,” Daphne commented.
There was a long silence.
“So…um…why did the artist paint on both sides?” asked Daphne.
Thomas Munk appeared to be deferring to me. I replied, “It’s not uncommon, actually. Lots of artists have done it. Or even painted right over other paintings. Van Gogh, for instance. Usually it’s to make use of the canvas. For instance, if you’ve run out and don’t have more handy. Or can’t afford more.”
“Oh,” said Daphne. “So she must have been shorthanded.”
“Presumably. An artist typically wouldn’t prefer to paint on the back of the canvas. It’s rougher and doesn’t take the paint as easily, and it won’t hold up as well over time.”
“Oh,” Daphne said again, keeping her expression neutral. I smiled to myself. She was trying to imagine being quite so desperate as to need to paint that.
I considered the situation in which Hannah Inglis had come to the end of her stock of canvas. By the dates on her letters, I knew that Nude House Girl was not her last work. Whatever the problem, she’d surmounted it and managed to obtain more canvas.
Tommy’s phone buzzed, and he left us alone in his bedroom to complete our viewing of the two nude house girls. Daphne nosed around the room while I tried to swim through the layers of consciousness surrounding the art before me; I shifted my focus from the artist to her muse, who might well have been the same woman who’d posed for the photograph I’d stolen. Who was she, this one looking back at me with quiet defiance? And her twin—slightly more elongated, slightly more melancholic in aura. How were we all related? I agreed with Tommy, there was something very tender in the portraits.
He reentered the room, apologizing. So-and-So had called, and Tommy needed to leave for the office.
“Of course!” Daphne exclaimed. She pulled me away and we followed him downstairs.
He chatted to us as we put our shoes back on—now that we were leaving, he was very chatty—asking me about my investigation and where it was leading me. Word had gotten to him that I was heading to Malaysia with his uncle. I told him I was excited to see what we could find in and around Kuala Kangsa. There were still so many unanswered questions.
“If I have any follow-up questions, may I contact you?” I asked him.
“Of course,” he said unenthusiastically. He threw on his coat.
“Yes, actually, there are a number of things I’m still trying to piece together. How your great-grandmother wound up with these two paintings, for instance.”
He looked startled. “Didn’t she purchase them?” he asked, ushering us on to the porch. We descended and waited while he set the alarm then locked up carefully.
“How the other half live,” Daphne mouthed to me.
“Follow the money,” Thomas said, coming down the stairs after us. “I would think the art executor has a record of payments. Perhaps the family accountant may even have a ledger from that era or some records he can share.”
Yes, follow the money! And who were these people, I wanted to ask him. The art executor. The family accountant. “That’s a great idea,” I said. “Thank you!”
He pointed toward his garage to signal his path. Then he leaned in to shake Daphne’s hand, my hand. I expected him to bolt for his car. Instead he sucked his b
ottom lip for a moment, squinting in the morning sun. “This is a bit awkward. If you wouldn’t mind doing me a favor?”
We agreed readily and he said, “Don’t mention anything to my mother about Gemma and Blake. You know, the fact that they’ve moved out.”
“Right,” I said with authority. “Of course not.”
Forty-Seven
Malu is moved to the interrogation room when two other men, both servants at Idlewyld, are brought to the station. She hears their feet moving in the dirt and straw. She puts her face to the crack of the door. Somebody has allowed the men betel paste and a tin spittoon, though they’ve done most of their spitting on the back wall of the cell, now streaked blood red.
All these months she has been so witless and young, keeping herself away from Amah, playing at being brave. Now she’s stuck and can’t go anywhere. What will happen to her? The lash? There is a new prison, she has heard say, in Kuala Lumpur. How many more days will she be waiting to know? She decides to ask the sergeant. When his footsteps pass in the corridor, she bangs on the door.
“Not up to me,” he tells her. He closes the door and sits on the stool in the room. It looks silly because his legs are long and the stool is low. He adjusts himself, pulling a book from his back pocket and putting it instead in a front pocket to be more comfortable.
“Your book,” she says, keeping her back to the wall, “is it the book of the rules? For punishment?”
He tells her it is a book of notes. Notes of incredible things that he has discovered in the forest.
“Incredible things,” she says. “Like waterfalls?”
He smiles at her. “Exactly. Like waterfalls.”
“What does it feel like to read?” she asks. She can read some words, but reading whole pages of them, she is sure that brings a different feeling. “Good?”
Sergeant Singh nods slowly. “Good, yes. Sometimes sad or frightening. Many different things at once.” He looks at her a long while. “Malu, I think I understand what you were doing for Dr. Peterborough. In the cabin.”
At that, she makes her eyes dead to him. Her bottom lip does not behave itself as well.
“I’m not going to ask you about it,” he says. “What good will that do now, eh?”
“My mother is very sick.” After she says this, she realizes how out of place it sounds. To her, Umi is the center of day and night. To other people, Umi has nothing to do with anything.
“I know,” he says, surprising her again. “Your friend has been telling me a few things.” The sergeant turns toward the holding cell.
Manang? Manang! After all his warnings for her to keep quiet in front of the police!
The sergeant says, “They want to send you to an orphanage in Kuala Lumpur.” His gaze floats away. “In place of a punishment. You will be clothed and fed there, schooled even. And I suppose it may only be for a year or two, or three. Until you are grown.”
In place of a punishment? Malu searches the room for something, anything to grab onto, but this floor is wood planking, not the straw and dirt of the cell. There is only her pallet bed and a chamber pot. She leaps on the bed, bashing her fists into her mattress. Then, grabbing the pot, she flings it across the room, and begins tearing at the bedsheet they’ve given her. Beating against the man’s big arms as they come to restrain her. She would tear at his deep voice, too, if she could, and rip it to shreds.
One day, the soldiers come in and take Manang and the two others. They chain each man’s wrists behind his back. Malu begins banging on the door of her locked room.
After the men are gone out of the station, the sergeant unlocks her door and looks in at her. “What do you want?” he says in Malay. “Stop banging.”
“I made the fire at the doctor’s cabin. Me. I did it.” Sergeant Singh does not blink. “Manang didn’t do it. None of those men did it. I did that fire, I promise you.” Still, he says nothing and does not move. “Tell the soldiers to stop! Stop them from…where they are being taken, sir? Make them free Manang! I lit three matches. I poured the kerosene. I—I knocked over the jar with the long scissors.”
He coughs and shakes his head, letting the door swing fully open. “I cannot, Malu. Even if what you say is true.”
“It is true.”
He puts his hands on his hips, looking inward. “They have confessed. And the administration…wants what it wants.”
“What? No! I am the one, I swear it!”
The administration, who is that? The two English officers with waxed mustaches? They had come once before and argued with Sergeant Singh. This last time, the sergeant barely said a word, from what she could make out. And after the visitors left, he paced the hallway not blinking and not seeing. Just like he was doing now.
When Sergeant Singh leaves she comes to the doorway. He has left the door to her room wide open. Malu stops at the threshold. In his office across the hall, he is bending over his desk. Glancing at her, he takes a pistol from a drawer, tucks it under his belt, and walks past her out of the station.
“Where are you going?” she asks.
Seconds pass. Malu inches into the entry room. No one. Her eyes lock on the empty entranceway. Inching forward, she darts out of the police station, tearing down the street as fast as her wobbling legs can take her.
Forty-Eight
When Hannah awakens, there are a dozen tree caterpillars treading her blanket. Instinctively, she kicks her legs, causing the insects to bounce into the air and rain down on her. “Ugh!” Scrambling to her feet, she picks off their fuzzy, squirming bodies. Roddy, her companion of late, jumps into the fray, pinching the fallen bugs one by one and popping them in his mouth. It would be handy to enjoy the taste of insects. In the past two days, she’s eaten little more than fruit.
She hasn’t slept much, either, in the two nights since leaving the Ridge Road. Trying to catch up on it during the day doesn’t seem to be working. Her head is full of thoughts that won’t obey any sort of order, like these shrimping boats flitting back and forth across the river. What of that pitch-black steamship, immense and sinister by comparison, wedged against the dock? She feels sure the ship is a sign of something…
Hannah crouches and feels inside the satchel she has been using as a pillow, touching each item. Anjuh and Suria salvaged a roll of canvas and her complete paint box. She has also two sponges, a bar of soap, several rags, and her palette knife. The photograph of Slow Roki, which survived unscathed in the pocket of the bag, and is now only a little worse for wear around the edges.
If she could begin the painting again soon enough, she could reproduce it. She’d put her faith in that idea. And as she explained to Suria, “Faith is more important than breakfast.”
“No, mem,” said Suria. “At breakfast time, breakfast is more important.”
To be agreeable, Hannah allowed Suria to slip a boiled egg and two packets of coconut biscuits into her bag before she left the house. “Don’t let anyone follow me,” she insisted, taking the housemaid by the shoulders. “No one. I need peace. I need to be sure that I will not be interrupted.”
“Outside?” Suria sounded incredulous. “Where you go, mem? How long you be gone?”
Hannah didn’t try to explain. Leaving had less to do with being physically interrupted and more to do with a choice, in herself, to make art. And if she no longer had the portfolio Monsieur Godot had given her, she had his words. The real learning will be outside these walls. She had prayed on his statement. What was she supposed to learn from the destruction of her work? All of those paintings, had they not been the learning?
With Suria trailing her to the edge of their yard, Hannah headed further along the Ridge Road, higher into the mountains, eventually breaking from the road. She intended to stay in the woods all day if need be, to repaint the portrait of Roki. At first, the shady green of the forest helped her to breathe more deeply and shake some of the tension from h
er shoulders. The silence, broken only by the softened crunch of her footsteps, took her in. She trod on tiny plants, breaking their spines. Slender branches snapped as she pushed her way through the denser areas. If she had been swinging a machete, as Darshan used to do for her, the forest would accept that cutting and scarring, too. Was she truly welcome there? Or was the jungle so vast and pliable, unspeaking and acquiescent by nature, that it only seemed so?
Where the first rise leveled off and the vegetation thinned a little, she stopped and unfolded her three-legged stool. Though her mind kept moving onwards, pausing at each person it encountered to ask, What am I supposed to learn? What am I failing to see? Her mother, bearing a steaming bowl of soup, a sympathetic and inquiring expression on her face. Jane Hemming from the academy, blowing smoke to the sky and laughing, telling her that Paris was full of surprises. Suria, bowing her head and opening the oven door to reveal glowing embers. None of these people had an answer for her. Neither did Roki, when Hannah fished her out of the pocket and studied her.
With a bobby pin, she fastened the photo card to a glossy leafy so it was available for easy viewing as she painted. As she plunged again toward the satchel, she checked herself. Leaves were moving near her feet. A wide triangular head rose, pulling back into an S.
Hannah knocked her stool backwards, stumbling away. A second later, her body was exploding inside—all breath and blood and sensation. A pit viper! One of the deadliest snakes in the country. Venom that killed. Unless you could cut it out faster than it spread. She remembered Darshan describing victims who had “bled from all orifices”—eyes, mouth, ears, nostrils.
But surely her imagination was getting the best of her? Mightn’t it have been an ordinary rat snake? She stood frozen in place, scanning the leafy forest floor around her feet. She felt a fool. A fool if wasn’t a pit viper, a fool if it was, and she wound up dead so haphazardly, so quickly and purposelessly, like an animal. Where no one would ever find her.
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