The Parasol Flower

by Quevillon, Karen;

  “It’s not exactly charity,” I corrected her gently. “The payments were in return for Hannah’s artwork.”

  But I’d done a quick tally of the ledger entries. Depending on the price per work, ostensibly the Peterboroughs had commissioned Hannah for something like seventy-eight paintings. At minimum. “Well, the Munks certainly don’t have seventy-eight paintings by Hannah Inglis,” I said.

  “Perhaps they were resold?” suggested Daphne.

  “If the Peterboroughs sold any, it must have been after 1914. I don’t see anything on the black side of this ledger relating to Inglis paintings.”

  I had already planned to revisit Fulgham House before leaving for Malaysia. It was so close, after all, and I wanted to compare Murdo and Jane to Tommy’s paintings. I wanted to see the engraving once more. And perhaps, I thought now, there was a way to speak to Miranda Buckley about this ledger.

  By the time I arrived at Fulgham House the following day, I’d developed a strong hunch: Eva Peterborough had been supporting Hannah financially. What I still didn’t comprehend was why. Had Maikin’s speculation been right—the two were lovers? Sheer generosity was another option. As was, on the other end of the spectrum, some sort of blackmail. There remained, of course, the more straightforward possibility that Hannah was creating paintings for the Peterboroughs on a regular basis, thus earning the income. The family did end up with a handful of Inglis paintings, though certainly not thirteen years’ worth of output. And we couldn’t count the cache of paintings intended for Monsieur Godot. I was hoping that Miranda Buckley would be able to shed some light on the matter.

  Miranda’s small windowless office at the estate might originally have been a closet. It was odd, I confessed to her, to imagine Eva and Charles Peterborough actually living at Fulgham House. Taking their hats and coats off, having them stashed away as they brushed down their elegant outfits. Miranda cocked her head at me. “How can I help, Miss Roach?”

  “Did the Peterborough’s own, let’s say, one hundred Hannah Inglis paintings at any point in time?”

  “Oh, I don’t think so!” she exclaimed. “They had rather a large collection of art, generally, but…”

  “And the ledger,” I said, “Tommy sent me a digital copy, as I think you know.” I paused until I saw the recognition on her face.

  “Yes, I scanned it for him.”

  “That ledger shows all of the paintings the family sold at auction, or sold to a gallery, and the price received?”

  She nodded. “Unless they were given away, I suppose.”

  “And so what I’m seeing there is correct? The family didn’t sell any works by Hannah Inglis?”

  She screwed up her face. “I’d have to take another look at the ledger after 1910 to be…”

  “1914,” I said, “is how far the PDF goes.”

  “Okay,” she agreed.

  “Perhaps I could see the rest of the ledger? Save you bothering.”

  “I can’t remember if any Inglis paintings were sold, but I can safely say that it wasn’t hundreds of paintings. I would have remembered that.”

  I winced at Miranda Buckley, a wince full of longing and gritty determination. It was an expression I’d perfected on the librarians at Richelieu. Five minutes later I was sitting on the floor of her office with the ledger on my lap, delicately flipping pages. Sure enough, there were no entries showing sales of any H. Inglis paintings, right up until the sale of the estate to the National Trust.

  During my review, Miranda came and went from her desk, practically stepping over me. Apparently “the system had gone down.” She’d been on the phone all afternoon with a software company called The Edge. Since the software was only installed on the check-in ticket machines in the lobby, and the only line Miranda could allow to be tied up was in her closet-office, the situation meant for a lot of “backing” and “forthing.”

  “You’ll be over the edge soon,” I punned to her, feeling that we’d developed a good rapport by then.

  “God, I wish I was still in graduate school,” she replied. “I thought that was a special kind of torture.”

  “Oh, it is,” I said. “Don’t worry, we’re both circling hell.”

  The thought of clicking open the pink file I’d labeled NEW DISS! made me want to vomit. Kenneth was all over my notes, my research, my lists and outlines. His name was literally all over the annotated bibliography I’d developed. Kenneth had passed my dissertation prospectus, but told me my ideas needed to be “redirected.” It was understood that my pass was conditional and exceptional—at least, that’s how I understood it. And that redirection would be in the direction of his theory. “New diss,” I murmured. “Nudist. Ha!”

  “Sorry?” said Miranda.

  “Nothing. Just talking to myself.”

  Soon I was scribbling furiously, taking down all the names that, I was beginning to realize, referred to art galleries. Were these places the Peterboroughs had sent Hannah’s paintings? Beginning in 1922, there were names that showed up repeatedly on the ledger in association with income rather than debt. Baird-Carter, Tooth, Goupil, Lefevre. Had I in fact been a graduate student of art history, I probably would have recognized them definitively.

  “Miranda,” I said, “I think they might have been placing her paintings in galleries.” I listed the motley collection of surnames. “I think people must have bought her work!”

  I looked up to see her with the phone to her ear, nodding and listening to some techie on the other end of the line. She set the phone down. “Thank Christ. The system’s up.”

  “Aw, that’s wonderful,” I told her. I scrambled to my feet, eager to repeat my own good news.

  Fifty-Two

  When Malu arrives home to the tippy hut, Uncle Nito shoves her back out the door. So hard she almost falls from the ladder.

  “You are arrested by the police, girl, you bring deep shame on this family, and you expect a welcome from us?” Nattie follows her outside, hand raised to strike. “So hard on her,” she adds with venom, jabbing her thumb behind her, “my sister who loves you.”

  “But I wasn’t convicted,” Malu says, desperate, frantic to see Umi. “Why do you think they released me?”

  Nito looks out at her from the window, stone-faced. Nattie curls her lips and spits. “Get! Too much shame. Go away. Go! Go! Go!”

  “Auntie Nattie, I need to see Amah,” she begs. “Please. Then I’ll go. And I won’t come back.”

  Her mother, propped up on her bedroll as usual, seems much worsened. Her eyes lie deep in their sockets and her mouth twitches soundlessly. “Amah,” Malu cries, running over to her and holding her close. She is as light and hard as bone; her cold hands move by themselves and won’t stop to be squeezed, won’t stroke Malu’s in return. Malu weeps into this bundle of rags. Incurable.

  “I did do the fire,” she whispers in her mother’s ear. “I did it, Amah.”

  The words have no effect.

  Scrambling to her feet, Malu is unable to contain the rage that roars through her. She staggers toward Nito and Nattie; he puts an arm up to shield himself and his wife. Malu backs away, her eyes filling. She snatches the money tin and empties it into her spreading hands and fingers. Then, thinking better of it, throws the coins to floor and runs.

  Down by the river, she hides in the tall grasses, doubled over in pain. The only relief is to imagine walking out through the rushes and sinking into the cool water. Lord guide me, she prays, over and over.

  Until she sees Sergeant Singh walking along one of the pathways through the grassland. Heading for home? Malu stays put to begin with, unconvinced that he won’t drag her back to the police station. But then it occurs to her, he is Allah’s answer to her prayers. She must talk to him. Ask him if she can still go to the orphanage. She would at least be fed there. Maybe she will be able to find work in Kuala Lumpur? In this town, nothing good will ever
come of her.

  Just as she rises to show herself to him, she spies the two English officers coming from a nearby building. The same mustache men who came to the police station, she decides. Though they are not wearing their uniforms. They walk together, swiftly, so focused on Sergeant Singh that Malu is able to keep up without anyone noticing.

  Where one street meets another, the sergeant turns, looks far enough around to discover the officers rushing him, now, each one pulling at an arm and wrestling it behind his back. The sergeant is bigger and stronger than either of the men on their own, she can tell. And if she came to help him? No sooner does the thought cross her mind than one of the longos puts a knife to Sergeant Singh’s throat. He stills.

  Malu presses her eyes closed. She will never forget the sound that starts her running.

  Fifty-Three

  Hannah knocks at the front door of her house. She and Lucy wait on the step until Suria receives them and ushers them inside. “Oh, mem,” Suria cries, squeezing Hannah by the hands, ignoring Lucy’s icy stare. “Good now, mem?”

  “Yes, thank you, Suria.” She is good. Though her ankle still requires her to limp a little. Being considered an invalid of sorts, a damaged person, has turned the ladies’ hostility to pity, or at least, pity has been the only appropriate social response. Pity sent from a distance. Which has suited Hannah fine. Mostly, she’s had space and time to herself.

  She humps in after Lucy, who has noticed the colonel in the front parlor. What is he doing there, just sitting by himself? Waiting for them, she supposes.

  “Hannah’s been seen by Dr. Peterborough,” Lucy reports, making the words seem cozy. As if she’s said, “Hannah’s been given a mug of warm cocoa.”

  George is frowning at a patch of air near their heads.

  “Hello, George,” Hannah says.

  “Hello,” he mumbles, eyes shifting.

  Lucy delivers him the written report from the doctor. Two pages, folded into quarters. Hannah has not read it. The colonel immediately unfolds the paper, fishing his spectacles from a pocket, and they watch him reading. After a moment or two, Lucy pats Hannah’s back. “Well, I’ll leave you now, dear. Do take care.” They embrace lightly. “I’m just next door,” Lucy reminds her. She gives a last glance at George, who hasn’t looked up from the page. “I’ll see myself out.”

  When the colonel is finished reading, he removes his spectacles and comes over to where Hannah remains standing. She clutches the straps of her satchel. She’s kept it on her back.

  “How are you?” he asks. “You look well.”

  “I’d like to read the doctor’s report, please.”

  “Of course,” he mumbles, fetching it and handing it over.

  Hannah takes the pages with her upstairs to the guest bedroom.

  At breakfast the next morning, the Colonel enters the dining room with the biggin and two beakers and pours them each a cup. Hannah has been leafing through a catalogue and has a cup of coffee already. When Suria brings in the tinned milk, George adds a dash to his coffee, catching her eye.

  “Perhaps an old dog can change its spots,” he says.

  “It’s a leopard,” she replies, “that doesn’t change its spots. An old dog can’t change its tricks.”

  George chuckles happily. “What are you going to do today?”

  She shrugs. The last thing she wants to do is chat to him. To have to talk blandly to the colonel is to risk being consumed again. She is already much at risk, walking in the old places, drinking from the old beakers, as if nothing has changed. Just above her sternum, where her heart should be, is a muscular knot of enmity and frustration and bitterness. She imagines it churning, in place, like a little engine. The anxiety is about how she will manage with this new installation, this new technology. If she were strong enough to pry open her own rib cage she might rip the whole thing out and fling it at him.

  Instead they drink coffee in silence, eating two fried eggs each. She can tell he is pleased with her appetite. He feels compelled, it seems, to tell her about how terribly he’s gotten on in her absence. Then describes, once again, the entire horrendous scene at Finch’s retirement party: George’s nauseated boredom, the dressing down by Swettenham, the surprise of James’ announcement, his stomach coming up and onto his shoes as all of the guests looked on. Perhaps, she thinks, the colonel means for them to go on by recommencing their life from that night forward. And she would tell him about her feverish aches and her walk to the lower town. Of wading through the ditch to knock on Darshan’s door, drinking his Indian tea, and instead of falling asleep on his chesterfield, interrogating the poor man about an imaginary flower.

  On the second night after her return, the colonel pads to the guest bedroom in the evening. She is reading a cookbook in bed, and this, too, he seems pleased to discover. He asks if she will consent to return to the marital bed. “The marital bed.” She wants to laugh at this ancient formulation and his formal, nervous choice of phrases. His face looks ruddier than ever.

  He adds hastily, “I won’t…touch you. You have my word.”

  On the third night, she does return to their bedroom. It is an effort of forgetting. As promised, the colonel does not touch her. In the sleepy haze of the early morning, though, he forgets himself and nestles into her like a boy with his teddy. She does not move away. Later, when she is stirring, he wakes and whispers an apology for being a jealous fool, for overreacting, for calling her a horrible name. It is a secret, sleep-drunk apology, delivered in fragments. He does not seem to care about a reply, and she gives none.

  Later, when he comes downstairs for breakfast, it is as if this confession never happened. Except for something lingering in the colonel’s air—humility, perhaps? Good sportsmanship?

  She is wondering at all this, when he says, “I’ve booked us berths on the November steamer to London.”

  “Why?”

  “You need to get well, don’t you? You cannot be well in a place like this.” He glowers at a spider which has frozen in its tracks on the ceiling. The spider sets off again. “You read the doctor’s letter.”

  They look at each other across the table. You no more think me mad, than I think you mad, her eyes tell him.

  The colonel’s announcement is not unexpected, given the doctor’s prescription. Given what passed for conversation at the Residency, as she convalesced. Her own reflections on the incompatible positioning of the colonel and the brigadier have led her in the same direction.

  She says, “I can understand why you don’t want to work for E.W.”

  He taps his teeth. “Nnnh, quite.”

  “But what about—”

  “As I’ve said, there’s your condition to think about.”

  “I don’t have a ‘condition’ worth thinking about, George. What Charles has written it’s…it’s not what happened, is it? I’m fine.”

  London? They’d tried to sell her on the wrong things, of course, for what did she care about frocks or George’s family? The promise of London is its position in the tides of art flowing to and from Europe. The Thames had come to seem to her, in daydreams, like it was made of paint rather than water. From London, Monsieur Godot or Madame l’Espagne would be close enough to visit; they might offer suggestions or put her name forward to collectors and galleries. And there must be others she’d not met yet, people who cared just as genuinely about what could be done with art, with life.

  But she had nothing to show those people.

  London, without making art? With the colonel pattering around their house, placing his perfectly reasonable demands upon her? No, with each exhalation. No, said the soft chime of her pulse. Not that. The clanging of a warning grows louder inside her each time she tries to imagine that London.

  “I can’t go,” she says.

  He flounders, apparently unsure what strategy to pursue. Insist that she leave? Agree to stay on? “W
hen can you go? How much time do you need?” The colonel’s freckled forearms push against the table, his eyes are down. When she doesn’t answer, he adds, “You are still feeling fragile?”

  “No.”

  “So you simply discount everything Dr. Peterborough has recommended?” His color is rising; he twists in his chair, throwing one leg over the other. “I mean, hell, let’s just say it doesn’t matter what Peterborough recommends, does it? Let’s just say that. We need to go home. We need this, Hannah.”

  “My art,” she says, faltering.

  “It’s gone.” He crosses his arms. As if this is all he can say about it.

  “My paintings are gone, yes. My art is not the same as my paintings.”

  This is the lesson of their destruction, and it was Darshan who helped her to see it. You must not stop. It’s not about what she creates, but that she is creating. And didn’t Suria save her paints and brushes for that very purpose? Suria understood before Hannah herself could appreciate it. She needn’t, and couldn’t, recreate any single moment, any one subject or vantage point. Yet if she lets go, there will be more. Always. The world is full of future paintings.

  “What are you on about?” he demands.

  Before she can consider how to reply, the front door bursts open. Lucy Finch is standing in front of them, panting and apologetic. “I’ve only just heard! Oh my, had you heard, George?” She seems to seize up, looking from one of them to the other, unsure whom to address, or how.

  The colonel’s face is white.

  “What’s wrong?” Hannah prompts her.

  “Sergeant Singh.”

  “What?”

  “He’s been killed. He’s been killed! He’s been killed.” Lucy clamps a hand over her mouth.

  “I don’t understand,” Hannah says.

  “God help us,” Lucy says softly. “Murdered in the street.”

  Hannah lies in bed with her satchel. After a few nights, she dares to put the bag on the floor between the bed and the wall. (She has dragged the bed from the center of the room toward the far wall.) Not once, however, does the colonel seek to step inside her room. He appears to be quite productive, whether at the Residency or at the government office, helping Finch to hand the reins over to Effingdon-Watts. She hears his voice, his footsteps, his wardrobe doors opening and closing.