The Parasol Flower

by Quevillon, Karen;

  At the moment, Hannah sees only the boys as she turns down her lane. Two skinny black-haired things, kicking a ball back and forth. She avoids them, glancing over once or twice to see what they will do about her and smiling pleasantly at them. The taller one stops the ball under his foot and stares openly. Hannah moves ahead to the squashed-looking little home and its shuttered front door. Surely the Singhs would be fine if she installed a mesh one.

  Tomorrow, perhaps, she could find Suria and Anjuh to say hello. Though perhaps not. They might feel…and she might feel…unsure of what to say, under the circumstances. Something strikes her hard in the rump, making her stumble forward. It is the ball, of course. Hannah pauses, brushes the dust from her backside, then turns to face the boys. The taller one is covering his laughing mouth. The smaller one looks terrified. She grips the arms of her satchel, feeling foolish. The ball, dirty and cracked, has not rolled far. Hannah walks over to it, lines up, and swings her boot, sending it high and, to her surprise, quite far up the lane.

  “That felt lovely,” she tells them. “I can see why you enjoy it.”

  But the pair of them are already off and running, either to flee her or to fetch the ball. It doesn’t really matter. No doubt they’ll be back.

  Inside, she stands for a minute, wrestling with the unreality of the situation before wrestling a towel from her tangle of belongings. Clutching the towel, she surveys the drab lounge, the tiny cooking area in an alcove out back, the shadowy bedroom where there is a fist-sized hole in the uneven floorboards. It is perfect. It is a space that is all her own. Though there is nothing in the house, she soon sees, resembling a bathtub. Or water. She laughs. Up the street, she passed a well where people must draw their water for cooking and cleaning. She will have to buy a basin, or a jug, something for carrying water. My god, she is so ill-prepared. Who or what, really, does she need to be prepared for?

  Hannah tugs open the one shuttered window on the back wall of the lounge. It looks out toward the Perak river, broad enough in this area to resemble a lake, shining in the late-day sun. A boggy shoreline of stilted huts clutters the foreground of the prospect. One of the huts looks tippy, precariously so, as if at any moment it might crash into the sparkling blue.

  “Goodness,” she says, “now that one’s going to wring my nerves out.”

  Shutting the window, she fishes her bathing costume from her suitcase. A little further upstream it may be quite pleasant as a point of entry.

  In fact, it is just as she imagines it, a wedge of shallows where the river meanders eastward. Where, during the day, it turns out, the women of the lower town come while their men are out fishing. Hannah wades into the blue, a dark phthalo blue with streaks of Veronese green, and washes herself clean.

  Fifty-Seven

  I went alone to the library, leaving Barnaby to his topographical map and an episode of Strictly Come Dancing that he’d managed to find on the satellite TV programming. (What was it with the over-60s and that television program?) At the largest branch of the municipal library, there were a few Malaysian patrons leafing through the local newspaper and using the computer terminals for internet access.

  I searched the government records area and was pleased to locate the 1892 and 1902 censuses. The first of these showed one Lieut. Colonel James Finch, Resident, to be living at the Residency, Kuala Kangsa. Wife: Mrs. Lucille Finch. The other inhabitants of the addresses along the Ridge Road did include Colonel George Inglis (age forty-three) and his wife, Hannah (age twenty-seven). I wrote down all of the other names, too: Mr. Edgar and Mrs. Hazel Swinburne, Mrs. Myrtle Cudmore, etcetera. I skimmed the list of names in the other kampongs, but did not see the Peterboroughs on record. In the 1902 census, there was a new Resident, one Arthur Effingdon-Watts, listed as ‘widower,’ and no Colonel George or Hannah Inglis living at #26 Ridge Road or anywhere else in town. They’d left, it seemed.

  Invigorated, I went on to look up local history books by local authors. The database suggested a particularly promising volume, Our Colonial Past: the British families who took Malaya as their home 1867 - 1907, by one Amalaka Singh. Disappointingly, the book was not on the shelf. The librarian told me their records showed the book as missing.

  “Missing?” I said.

  “Yes. Could be lost by somebody, could be stolen.”

  “So, not just on loan. Gone.”

  “Yes,” she said with a little pout. She had a pretty face, framed by a glossy black bob. “Sorry for this,” she added.

  To be helpful, the girl printed out the book’s bibliographic information while I waited at the check-out counter, book-less, craving something more, and looking blankly into the reading room at the microfiche reader. “Is that a…? What is that?” I asked her, pointing.

  “The reading room?”

  “That machine.”

  “Oh, the microfiche!” she exclaimed, looking a little fearful.

  The Malay Mail, founded in 1890, had been run from Kuala Lumpur but took contributions from across the peninsula. Miraculously, it seemed to me, Hannah’s Kuala Kangsa had had press coverage. While the librarian powered up the old machine, I scooped cassettes from the drawer.

  I found nothing of much interest until the May 1902 edition, Perak Supplement. The article, titled “We Saved the Best for Last,” referred to the region’s final gymkhana festival ever to be held. Queen Victoria had died over a year before, in January 1901, and it was somewhat awkward, the reporter implied, to continue celebrating her birthday. The article was comprised mostly of elaborately captioned photographs. One of them was a group photo of a weather-beaten assortment of people, some of whom were children holding up frogs or homemade boats. An Englishwoman wearing a sun bonnet and a joyful smile stood in the second row, looking over at the children. The caption read, “Off to the races!” The names of the participants were listed, along with “race convener” Mrs. Hannah Inglis, center back. Hannah, the woman wearing the sunbonnet.

  The very same, yet so very different, woman from the anatomy class photograph. I sat at the microfiche reader feeling Hannah’s enthusiasm, wanting to put my own boat in her race. In that near-empty and slightly musty-smelling library, I sat loving a person I’d never met, someone who had never and would never know me.

  The photograph proved she was here, in Kuala Kangsa, in the spring of 1902. Before the census record had been taken? Had she moved away after that, or somehow escaped being counted? I checked the time chart I’d made. It had been five years since Hannah stopped writing to Godot. Five years since she’d written about the diagnosis and treatment advocated by Charles Peterborough, namely, that she return to England and give up painting. It would be another six years until the publication of The Descent, in 1908, with its etching of the parasol flower. And, for eight more years after this photograph was taken, Eva Peterborough’s accountant would be recording his little notes, Comm. for ptg. H. Inglis, before those mysteriously vanished too. What exactly to make of all of this, I didn’t know.

  Hannah looked happy, though.

  “I’m glad,” I told her quietly. “I’m so glad you were happy.”

  Fifty-Eight

  Danish agreed to drive us to the Cameron Highlands.

  “You understand that we want something off the beaten path,” Barnaby reminded him. We loaded our rucksacks into the trunk of our rental car. It was six o’clock in the morning; we’d asked for an early start.

  “I understand, sir,” Danish replied patiently.

  We had explained everything to him one evening in the resort’s Meeting Room B, reviewing the topographical maps Barnaby had brought with him. Danish had mentioned he was quite familiar with the highland hiking trails. His family had often taken him for outings there as a child.

  As spry as Barnaby was for his age, and as much technical gear as he’d brought for us both, I was still a little nervous about going “off the beaten path.” Inviting Danish to come alo
ng had been my idea, one that I probably should have discussed with Barnaby in advance. He’d been cool with me since Meeting Room B. Offended, possibly. Maybe he thought Danish would cramp his style.

  We had described to Danish the flower we were most interested in finding, without actually calling it a parasol flower. Unassuming foliage, growing on the forest floor, enormous flower head, only rarely in bloom.

  “The Rafflesia plant?” he said.

  “No!” Barnaby and I screeched at the same time.

  I showed the poor man the photograph of The Parasol Flower painting on my phone.

  Danish glanced at it and said in a low voice, “No, never heard of it.”

  “Take note of the details,” Barnaby commanded.

  Danish had looked again, delicately taking hold of the phone and even zooming in on the image.

  Now we were heading up, up, up, for an outing that, I reflected from the backseat, had several hazards. The weather was iffy; it was unseasonably cold, and rain was forecasted for that afternoon. Barnaby was already irritable. And then there was fact that, however much we’d downplayed it, we’d come halfway around the world in search of a flower that no one who lived here had ever seen. Today was the day we would very likely prove we were fools.

  On the other hand, the countryside was breathtaking. Across every horizon, heavily-forested mountain peaks rose toward the glowing sun. Verdant tea plantations covered the undulating hills between. So early in the morning, the highlands felt like ours alone. Occasionally a pickup truck or compact car zoomed by us in the opposite direction; each time, Danish swerved and slowed, and I clutched the door handle a little more tightly. When we went around a sharp corner, he beeped the horn of the Toyota.

  We were heading to trek a peak called Gunung Berembun. Using the trail system, it was a four- or five-hour loop. Since we wanted to spend some time bushwhacking, we were factoring in an extra two hours.

  Danish veered to the right at an intersection with a stack of signposts. Some of them had been spray painted over with black lettering I couldn’t make sense of. “That way is Gunung Jasar,” he told us. “There are two orang asli villages and some very nice viewing points.”

  “What happened there?” I asked. Craning to look behind me, I could see something wasn’t right. The road onward look widened and rutted.

  “Protests,” Danish said. “Developers bulldozed part of the mountain.”

  “Oh no!”

  “I thought it was a nature reserve,” said Barnaby, who had of course done his research.

  “It is. Nature reserve means state-owned land. State decided on condominium developments and strawberry farms.”

  “Huh?” I said. It sounded like an odd combination to me.

  “For tourists. The Cameron Highlands is becoming a very popular tourist destination for Malaysians and Thai.”

  Once popular only for the English, I appended mentally.

  I looked at Danish to see if I could judge what he thought about this change. He seemed to be simply concentrating on the way forward.

  We parked the car where the road ended. Several small tour buses were lined up in what passed for a parking lot. Barnaby threw menacing looks at the empty buses as he rearranged his gear, pulling his binoculars out of one pocket and stuffing them into another.

  I caught his eye. “Don’t worry. I think we’ve got to at least start on the beaten path.”

  Danish said, “You’ll see, it gets very quiet, sir. Especially the distance we’re going to go.”

  He was right. At first the trail was slim but obvious, swerving endlessly, it seemed, through an enclosed forest of ferns. We crossed several boggy patches and rivulets. Later, the vegetation opened up to reveal the tops of the trees towering over us. Epiphytes and lianas dangled almost to within reach. I thought of Hannah in a place like this, lugging her paints and her three-legged stool. There was not much color here that I could distinguish, just green on green on green.

  I slowed, deliberately taking a pause, and noticed a huge black worm slithering along the path beside me. The thing was big enough that when I listened closely I could hear it making a noise as it disturbed the forest floor debris. “What is that?” I asked. But the others were too far ahead to hear me.

  I bounded to catch up and learned that my companion had likely been a millipede. “The size of a bracelet!” I marveled. “Not that I’d want it to touch me.”

  On our first leg to Robinson Waterfall, we spotted not only the millipede, but an orchid and a brightly colored bird called a black and yellow broadbill. The waterfall was breathtaking, or rather, would have been breathtaking. It was near a road and attracted a good deal of attention. A bridge had even been built at the base of the falls to allow people to view the falling water at an optimum angle. However, the bridge obscured all other angles. Onlookers here, Danish told us, were usually heading to and from Tanah Rata, the city that was now home base for the highlands. We took a few photographs but didn’t linger.

  He led us onward until our path joined with another, a signposted trail that looked overgrown and in poor repair. I could feel Barnaby’s spirits rising. As we walked on, I scanned the uneven jungle floor for unusual flora. In most places, it was next to impossible to see further than a few steps in front of us, given the density of the undergrowth and the rocky hillocks that formed the terrain. A pack of tourists on a guided hike passed us by and we exchanged hellos. One of them informed us of an interesting mushroom up ahead. For all the use the trail was getting, it certainly wasn’t being maintained. Raised roots frequently obscured our path, as did fallen trees. I checked my phone and discovered to my surprise that there was still cell reception. Ever since the path had forked, back by the waterfall, the trail had been steadily rising.

  Barnaby clipped along in front of me, impressing me by showing no signs of fatigue. Once in a while, he directed my attention to birdsong, or a plant, or a patch of groundcover, usually by coming to a full stop and holding up his index finger to catch my attention. He was the one who spotted the sloth, high in a tree. We gathered around below the creature, staring at its hairy, motionless body. After the excitement of the sloth, we decided to eat lunch at the next decent resting place.

  As my legs cycled onward, so did my thoughts, revolving around the mystery of Hannah’s letters to Godot. Did she know that the Peterboroughs had wound up with the art and the letters she was addressing to her mentor? No, I thought not. At least, not at the time. For as much as Hannah must have lost hope in receiving a reply from Godot, the paintings were still arriving in France. Or were they? What if the letters and the paintings had never been shipped? That would certainly account for why Godot, who had corresponded with Hannah up until 1896, (in the exchange that was documented in Coles), abruptly stopped writing to her. What if everything had remained in Kuala Kangsa? After all, the Peterboroughs were located in Kuala Kangsa at the time. Might they have somehow intercepted Hannah’s art before it ever left town? But how? And why?

  “I’ve been thinking about the letters,” I said to Barnaby as we were packing up lunch. I shared my newest thoughts on the puzzle.

  “Let’s focus on the how,” he advised. “Why the Peterboroughs should have taken them seems impossible to know.”

  “It’s all speculation. But okay. Let’s focus on how it could have happened. And let’s just say it was Eva, not Charles, who was directly involved. We know she was the one who was friends with Hannah. It was Eva who cared about Hannah’s paintings, in my opinion.”

  “Good. Now, if Eva intercepted the art and letters… Let’s think. If the letters started at point A, with Hannah, and then they didn’t make it to point G, Godot, we must ask: where else are they along the way?”

  “Ha! It’s like when you misplace your favorite pen and you have to backtrack to think of all the places you’ve been using it.”

  Barnaby laughed. “Ah yes, my you
ng nerd.”

  We had set out again by this point, but Danish, I noticed, had purposefully slowed his pace. He was glancing back at us frequently; no doubt he thought the two of us a curiosity.

  I considered the steps involved in posting a letter. “The only other people involved are postal workers, right? The clerk who accepted her parcels. Maybe somebody else who sorted them in the back room into the ‘Europe’ or ‘France’ pile or whatever. Then, after that, the person who delivered them from the post office to the steamship.”

  “But we’d said they never made it to Europe,” he reminded us, “so they never made it onto the steamship.”

  “True. Unless the steamship sank.”

  “All of the steamships?”

  “Point made.”

  “I think we say the clerk at the post office must have accepted her parcels. Because Hannah seems to have believed they were posted. She kept writing.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, “and she even writes about posting them. So she definitely handed them over to the clerk.”

  We were silent for a long minute or two, each of us roaming through the back room of Kuala Kangsa’s post office. Where it must have gone awry. Hannah’s parcels must have been stopped there, at least temporarily. I said, “So it’s either the clerk or one of the workers in the back room—a manager in the back office?—who failed to move her mail onward to its destination.”