Yet she was not dead. Or even injured.
Hannah tiptoed back and unpinned the photograph. Hastily she grabbed her gear and snuck back down the rise. Thoughts tumbled through her unheeded as she continued her descent, following the light and the forest markers she’d noted on the way in, not slowing until she’d broken into the clearing by the road. There she came to a stop on the shoulder to suck back water from her canteen. Coward! Who can’t manage a few hours in the woods on her own? Who can’t manage a night in her own home? Walking back down Ridge Road during waking hours, now, she was conscious of the wives’ eyes upon her and their mouths snickering behind gauze curtains.
She wanted to tell Eva that at least she’d discharged her debt. She’d asked the police to interrogate a troubled young servant. Good fortune, she thought bitterly, that they’d already begun. Was Eva looking out at her now, from her new vantage point at the Residency? Watching a frightened, sweaty woman, lugging the remnants of her life upon her back. Hannah reminded herself that she was supposed to paint. That was all she had to accomplish. There was no point trying to string words together, no point trying to fight. She must paint Roki’s portrait before it was too late. It had been so good, so perfect. She must recreate Nude House Girl and show it to them. Show them what they’d done.
In the public gardens, it did not go well. Here, on the quiet hill overlooking Kuala Kangsa’s harbor, it is not going well, either. She tries, and there is something, some glimmer of life, but it is not enough. And down below, the shrimping crews flit back and forth, coming and going and coming and going, so industrious. There is a never-ending supply of shrimp to be taken. She tries, and she has no easel, and she has to make do without a gesso. Not that these excuses matter. No time for excuses.
“Let’s go,” she tells the gibbon. “Let’s go!” Hannah hoists her satchel onto her back, picks up her stool, and heads downhill, Roddy tripping on her heels. Ahead, the harbor slowly sinks into the peaked roofs lining the streets. River water is making everything swim before her eyes.
There is nothing romantic or mysterious about it at all. The lesson is this: she should stop painting. As one might stop eating a food that disagrees with one’s bowels.
Monsieur Godot had supported her for a time because she was once his student. He’d felt honor bound to teach her; after she’d left, he’d gone on shining on her a little longer. Part of her had even imagined his silence as a new way of caring. He was encouraging her to fend on her own or to become accustomed to her instincts. He was guiding her to become her own arbiter, to resolve her own technical dilemmas about what worked and what didn’t. He was confident she was strong enough to answer her own questions and make original art. Really, that was all in her imagination.
“Special bird for nice lady,” sings the clerk at the menagerie. “Special bird for nice lady.”
The songbirds hop and twist in their cages, preening. So tiny! Some are feathered in flamboyant pinks and yellows, others in neutral browns and taupe. They cock their little heads as she moves down the row; they seem to tick like clocks.
“I love you,” she tells them.
“Yes! So special!” the clerk exclaims. Embarrassingly, the woman has heard her.
At the end of the row is a little owl whose eyes are tightly closed. He clings, upright, to a bough that is propped in the cage. A barred eagle-owl, an unmistakable jungle bird. This one looks to be a juvenile. Had it fallen out of its nest? On the other side of the table, the clerk is following Hannah along the row. “So special!” she says again.
Surely nobody wants an owl as a pet. Without song, with a need to kill. Poor thing. Hannah tugs her hat down and turns toward the flower seller.
“Moon orchid, memsahib? Angel’s Trumpet?”
It’s not the prostitute who is usually at the booth. Today it is a man she does not recognize, likewise petite and dark, with large ears and a firm voice.
“Have you ever sold a parasol flower?” she asks him.
He cups a hand behind one of his ears.
“A parasol flower. Big,” she says, holding her hands out wide, then slicing a circle in the air. Her satchel shifts on her shoulders, knocking her sideways a little.
His forehead ripples delicately. “Ah! Stink flower.”
“No, no. Never mind.”
He pulls a stem of moon orchid from one of the buckets and bows to her, offering it. “No cost, madam.”
“No, thank you,” she says curtly, backing away.
“Help you, mem?” says the vegetable grocer, for she has come to a stop in front of him. Between the two of them are little heaps of zucchini and green beans. A bucket of rambutans. “Shoo!” He lunges for his duster and waves it menacingly at Roderick, who sits calmly at her feet.
Hannah searches her purse and finds nothing.
The grocer is squinting at her. He looks kind, she thinks. Concerned. Somehow old and young at the same time. He holds up a pear. “Pay later,” he says.
“Oh. No! That’s not what I meant. I—no, thank you.”
If she goes home, she would be fed. Truthfully, her stomach is beyond hunger, now. Food is important for steadying her hands. The tremors will make it more difficult to paint. But she cannot paint if she goes back, only if she goes forward.
And is she already forgetting? The lesson is this: she should stop painting.
No. She won’t bother the sergeant. He is so very busy. She has burdened him enough. She can find him After. “What do I do now?” she might have asked him. “It is done,” he might have answered. “Do you not see its light, Hannah? Fierce and white.” Like the stars overhead. She searches the stars, trying to make out what is coming for her. Something is coming that she cannot quite see, something to divide the “After” from the “Before.”
Is this the true problem, that her head is likely to explode? Her neck hurts, her teeth hurt. Her head is going to… She taps at her chest in disbelief. There is a dog trotting along with a rat between its teeth. She is the rat between the dog’s teeth. Her teeth hurt, her bones crunch. These pruney, useless hands that cannot paint a true painting. A “contribution.”
“What do I do now?” she asks Roddy, but Roddy is gone.
Covering her face, unseeing, Hannah staggers ahead for a time before she stumbles and lands on her hands and knees. She struggles to breathe, hating herself. Hating herself for being unwilling, even now, to ask the colonel for mercy. You must keep going, Darshan advised her. You must let nothing stop you. “But why?” She laughs at herself. “If I’m just…not…going anywhere.”
She sits down where she has fallen. And, because the sky has started spinning, closes her eyes. Like a parade of ghosts, they come to see her off—each misshapen, imperfect attempt at true art. When she arrives at the last page of her portfolio, she wrings her hands and prays for the strength to see life. To truly see it. Because there are plenty of people who can paint anything, he told them. Technically competent, even technically perfect, but lacking the seeing power, they paint nothing worthwhile. Nothing. “Let me have the seeing power.” Squeezing her eyes tight. “Please, God, tell me it’s worthwhile.”
A sudden crack of thunder.
Her eyes open. “Very funny.”
The drumming of rain, unhurried and almost random at first, then quickening, like applause. In no time, she is wet through. With a surge of alertness, she memorizes the shape of the sprawling honeysuckle bush in front of her, and, behind that, the outlines of a pretty clapboard home. There is no point trying to move. The old tenderness in her ankle throbs hotly. Cool rain is good. This cool rain and this quiet street…somewhere near the Perak Club? It’s not so bad a place.
Sit for a while. Try to rest.
Forty-Nine
The next thing Hannah remembers is the smell of lavender. Steam rises from the bath they have drawn for her. A house girl waits in an alcove, a human towel rack. Choose
a bar of soap. Step in.
After, she stands in front of a mirror staring at someone pink she doesn’t recognize.
“Hannah? Are you listening to me? George is very worried about you,” Lucy is saying so earnestly. “I’m very worried about you.”
She looks down to see that she is clothed, thank goodness. In a robe and a set of nightclothes that couldn’t be Lucy’s, for when she holds her arms up, the cuffs lie perfectly at her wrists. They are in a dining room. Not the main one of the house, she thinks. A plate of cured meats and cheeses sits in front of her, along with a cup of broth.
“What are you doing?” says Lucy.
“Whose clothes are these?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she answers snippily. “I took them from the provisions assembled for the Peterboroughs.”
Hannah laughs—for too long, by the look on Lucy’s face. It’s the first true laugh she’s had in… Yes, she remembers she has already demanded to see her satchel. She checked through it. Had anything been taken? Her clothes, they told her, were being washed.
Lucy is going over the story of Hannah’s “capture.” Makes her sound like a rabid dog. It seems the colonel sent Anjuh out to look for her at some point. Later, Anjuh enlisted two friends from the lower town. It’s incredible, she thinks, how much better one can feel from a bath and three bites of cured pork. Except she’s so tired. As if her very soul were weary.
“Why was I brought here?” she interrupts Lucy.
“Because you screamed at your houseboy that you wouldn’t go home.” Lucy is using the slowed-down speech she reserves for servants and clerks. “Hannah, you were kicking and shouting so loud you woke the Tallymans. You struck their servant in the face.”
She feels her cheeks pinking. Can she make out three men approaching in the gloom? A feeling of being cornered. “Poor Anjuh,” she says.
“Poor Anjuh! Hannah, you’ve had some sort of breakdown! You’ve been behaving…”
Hannah reaches for the cup of broth and sips at it until she’s certain Lucy has shut up for good and is ready to listen. “George burned my belongings, Lucy.”
She looks confused. “Your belongings?”
“All of my paintings, my portfolio, my notebooks.”
“Ah.”
She pushes her chair back from the table. “I’m just going to check on them.”
“Wait, Hannah! Stay here. We’re talking, you’re eating. No one’s done anything with—”
“My satchel. That’s what I need.”
Lucy’s eyes narrow. “Why did George burn your paintings?”
“Because he’s a hateful, mean-spirited man!”
She inspects her fingertips. “Because he’d told you not to paint, isn’t that why?”
Hannah folds her fingers over her cuffs and extends her arms wide and high. A barred eagle-owl, soaring. “Why can’t I wear my own clothes?”
Lucy ignores this and says, “In your satchel, I found…an unfinished painting, I suppose it is. It appears to be of a naked woman.”
“Yes.” She lets her arms fall.
“Yes? Doesn’t this strike you as problematic?”
Her head feels thick and her thoughts are taking too long in coming. “Are you familiar with the history of art?”
“Of course,” mutters Lucy.
“The naked female form…is a classic subject.”
Hannah clutches her torso, all at once remembering the photograph of Roki. She’d planned to stuff it into her corset but the men were coming at her too fast, pulling at her, circling her in that bouncing cart, wherever it was taking her. Here, to the Residency. Was the photograph still in the pocket of her satchel?
“When I arrived, what happened…?” She can’t recall undressing. “Who helped me out of my clothes? Where is my satchel?”
“One of my girls. I’ve told you, we left everything of yours in the yellow bedroom. Hannah, are you all right?”
“I was working backwards, from death to life,” she tells Lucy, remembering, feeling as if she’s swum into a pocket of clarity. “All of the secret places need to pulse with life, in a portrait. You see it’s not about exposing her body. Our bodies. Who owns them, Lucy? But. George destroyed the original.” This last she can’t help but speak viciously.
“He probably found it disturbing.”
“We come here and we bully them into doing what we wish, and we don’t even admit we are bullying. We call it governing or employing or scientific research.”
Lucy is stunned for a moment. Then says, “Hannah, I’m afraid you simply don’t know what you’re saying anymore.”
“I want my painting back. And my clothes. And all of my property you’ve pawed through!” She rises from the table, pushing the plate of meats away. It strikes the mug of broth, overturning it, and oily brown liquid sploshes across the table, dribbling into Lucy’s lap.
Lucy says quietly, “I’m going to recommend that you see a medical doctor.”
“What?”
“If George wants an opinion.” Lucy takes a napkin and begins dabbing it on her crotch and thighs. “If he can’t manage to…”
“What do you mean? God! Is this why you’re here with me, asking questions? To observe me for an ‘opinion’? I thought you were being friendly, Lucy, in your own…pretentious way.”
Across the table, her host looks genuinely miserable. Lucy’s reaction, the way in which she wilted so quickly and completely, will haunt Hannah in the hours to come, as she regains some clarity of mind and purpose. And when the subject is broached again, she decides to co-operate for a medical examination. Perhaps there is something wrong with her if she’s flinging punches and toppling soup.
The gardens at the Residency have an old and impressive traveler’s palm, one of the original specimens, most likely. It is planted toward the middle rear of the grounds, surrounded by bright, jagged stands of Codiaeum and Cordyline. Past Residents have interspersed subtler, less conventional tropicals here and there, including blue pea and a climbing vine called a porcelain plant. A plot for vegetables is tucked in behind two white Romanesque statues, and one section, along the eastern flank of the garden, appears to be dedicated to samples of tropical trees. There, a rubber sapling stands alongside eleven different species of palms, all of them extensively labeled. On the night of the gymkhana festival, the last time Hannah wandered through the grounds, it was too dark to read the tags.
She is tipped slightly over, doing just that, when Brigadier Effingdon-Watts comes toward her through a stand of bamboo. They exchange greetings, if a little warily. He seems on edge, in a bouncy sort of way, and she expects him to move on. Instead, he invites her to comment on the bamboo.
“It’s quite striking,” she says. “I do love the great thick stems. Also the swishing sound when the wind is moving through a grove.”
There are, he tells her, over eight hundred uses for the bamboo plant. Bamboo, in his estimation, is the future. He grins at her under his safari hat.
“How are you finding Kuala Kangsa?” she asks in return.
“Still getting a measure of it. To be honest, Mrs. Inglis, I’ve come into rather a mess here. No offense to your husband!”
“Oh, none taken,” she says lightly. Knowing how George detests the man, she feels like she might burst into laughter at E.W.’s eager, sunburnt face.
Perhaps she looked coy, suppressing this humor, for the man’s eyes begin to crinkle warmly as his gaze travels down the front of her dress. “Tell me, Mrs. Inglis, what sort of entertainment is there in Kuala Kangsa?”
“Entertainment?” The idea of fashionable leisure activities in Kuala Kangsa makes her smile harder.
E.W. smiles back, somewhat tenderly. What have they told him about her? That she’s an invalid to be pitied? Perhaps his compassion is making him over-emotional. She remembers the man’s dead wife and feels a
stroke of sympathy herself. She must stop teasing the fellow.
“I suppose there’s the gymkhana festival,” she says. “The way we celebrate it here I’ve always found entertaining. There are the horses and their show, of course—poor creatures. Music. Plenty of music. The Ladies Association sells home baking to the few who prefer treacle tarts to shaved ice. And the Chinese miners come over from Ipoh to run several of the games for the children. Frog races, boat races, bobbing for pears. All the women come wearing their brightest keftis and scarves, which doesn’t stop them from bobbing for pears. Oh, the Sikhs host an exciting tent-pegging competition with competitors from Kelangor and Ipoh. There is our elephant, Elmira, who will take you up on her back. She walks along at the bottom of the slope. The cadets pitch a handsome tent right in the middle of the green and will stand in their plumed hats all morning, waiting proudly for you to enter. Inside, a full course lunch is served on silver platters. And no doubt you’ll see Sultan Izrin and his family touring the meadow in their finery, with a pack of skinny kids tiptoeing after them, hoping for a stray penny. It will pour, absolutely pour, from four o’clock to a quarter past. So that everyone will run, helter-skelter, screaming and dancing and giggling and pulling each other here and there. Peacocks vibrating and crying like fallen angels. Ladies, shoveling treacle tarts in their mouths before they go soggy. And then the rain will stop as abruptly as it started, and the entire village will laugh at itself for forgetting just how wet rain can be. Between you and me, Brigadier, the most fun is simply to wander with a kebab in one hand and a pair of binoculars in the other. Sightseeing.”
He nods politely after she has finished all of this and says something stiff and witless about her charity toward the natives. He must have given her the wrong impression, he says, using the word “entertainment.” “In point of fact, I’m less interested in play, Mrs. Inglis, than in having this village start working.”
The Parasol Flower Page 31