Barnaby had been imagining the physical dimensions of the situation. “It must have been quite the pile of mail to not send,” he pointed out. “Think of what we loaded into the minicab.”
We thought about that for a minute.
“Maybe,” I offered, “whoever was stopping them from reaching Godot was doling them out to someone else? Eva?”
“Eva watched her friend pining for a response from her teacher all those months, knowing that she herself was the cause of that agony? I can’t imagine her being quite so cruel.”
She was cruel enough to the natives, I thought to myself. But the fact was I agreed with him; Eva wouldn’t have let Hannah or her art suffer for what seemed like no good reason. Our path leveled off, and we emerged from the forest into a sort of rocky clearing. Bracketed between slabs of sedimentary rock, transparent green-blue water coursed across the clearing. Two planks of lumber had been hauled into place as a simple bridge.
Danish knelt and put his hand in the water. We followed suit. It was silky smooth and tepid. The current tugged at my hand. With no more than a word to each other, we abandoned the trail and began moving along the shoreline, stepping on the creased and divotted stones, the crowns of giant rock molars. I headed past a stretch of jostling rapids to a place where the river leveled and broadened into a little lagoon. Out of the gloom of the forest, now, the sun felt baking warm on my face and the backs of my legs. Barnaby was nearby with Danish, pointing at a butterfly that had just landed. We would be here a while. I tugged off my hiking boots, stripped my feet free of their socks, and swung my legs into the gentle flow of the river.
Closing my eyes, I returned to Kuala Kangsa’s post office of 1896. Random snippets of Barnaby and Danish’s conversation floated past me: technicalities about moth migration, something about bowler hats, somebody (a mountaineer?) who’d died from an infected blister. I thought of the effort Barnaby and I had made in Hampstead, unloading boxes of paintings from the minicab and walking them into Celia’s home. Ten months of “failure” to send on the parcels to Godot had to have been deliberate. Someone must have asked for Hannah’s mail to Godot to be held aside. Someone who had paid for this service, most probably. Someone who wanted to thwart Hannah.
I nearly kicked myself off the lip of rock and into the eddying water. George was the one responsible. In conjunction with the manager of the post office, or whomever could have promised him to keep his wife’s art stashed in a closet or under a desk. It was George who had wanted Hannah to grow frustrated, isolated, discouraged. To give up painting. My hands stirred excitedly in the pristine water. Perhaps he’d even thought that eliminating Godot from her life would be a way of reinforcing their relationship, or her dependency.
Clambering to my feet, I shook each wet leg. George himself wouldn’t have wanted to keep the paintings or the letters. He couldn’t have kept them, could he? Hannah would likely have found out. Whereas Eva, who had supported her friend’s painting, might have at least appreciated the studies. So George gave them to Eva? Eva must have found out, somehow, that they were sitting there. And took them.
“And didn’t tell Hannah,” I said.
Eva Peterborough had read her friend’s letters. They were personal, intimate, addressed to somebody else. I had read them, too, of course. Neither of us had been entitled to invade Hannah’s privacy. I could understand, then, if Eva Peterborough had kept quiet about what she’d done. Just what I would do, I wasn’t sure. My current theory—an idea I’d come to in my travel journal—was that Hannah had kept writing letters to Godot all those months, without any reply, because she needed to believe in him. Or rather, to have his faith in what she was doing. If this made any sense, then perhaps she’d stopped writing letters to Godot when she no longer needed him. Had she started believing in herself? Or had she stopped painting?
“You’re talking to yourself again,” said Barnaby.
“Yes, and it’s working,” I replied. I didn’t bother trying to explain.
He put his binoculars to his face and swiveled in the direction of a bird call. Danish, I saw, was waiting nearby, his backpack propped at his feet.
“Are we heading out, then?” I reached for my socks and right-sided them. “On or off the path?”
“Off the path,” said Danish. “We’ll head toward the summit by following this little river upstream. A good way to bushwhack. Less undergrowth.”
As we climbed higher on the mountain, the river diminished, and the conifers multiplied. Afternoon sunshine leaked through the trees, revealing a tangle of ferns, vines, and palms rising from the earth, but no parasol flowers. We met several ancient and enormous trees, one whose trunk was buttressed by roots too tall to step over. Almost all but the smallest saplings, it occurred to me, would have been here when Hannah was trekking and painting in the region. Even the mossy logs were so thick they probably took a century to decay.
Danish found us a pitcher plant. Nepenthes alba, Barnaby clarified. The tubular flower head, with its curled lip and bulbous shape, appeared to me like an animal organ. An esophagus or some part of the colon, perhaps, or even an inverted birth canal. This one was striated lipstick red and kelly green. Hannah had been struck by the pitcher plant’s alien appearance when she’d first started trekking. Coles published a letter in which she described the plant’s tubular body as “a gizzard masquerading as a bulb of blown glass.” She’d painted several different Nepenthes variants that she’d sent to Godot for comment.
In a way that I hadn’t appreciated on paper, hiking at altitude was dispiriting. I felt that I was down to one lung. For all our bushwhacking efforts, we’d uncovered nothing more exotic than the Nepenthes alba, and we now had very wet feet. Like me, I was sure, Barnaby had started looking a little worse for wear. His hair was slick with sweat and his stride lopsided. Only Danish seemed carefree. The view from the top of the Gunung Berembun allowed us a unique vantage on the other peaks in the highlands. It was stunning, we told each other. It didn’t feel like much of a prize.
As we came around to the west side of the summit, we encountered twenty or so spandex-clad tourists, posing for a group photo using an enormous lofted selfie stick. Danish waved happily at them and began chatting to them in Mandarin.
“I’ll tend to my blister,” Barnaby informed me, flinging off his pack and rooting in pockets.
“Shall we rest for a while?” I suggested. I wanted to head back down on the main trail, whatever the other two thought. The idea that we would turn a corner and blunder upon a flower as special and unusual as the parasol flower seemed a ridiculous fantasy. “I suppose you’ve seen some amazing sights in your travels,” I said to Barnaby.
He nodded as he squinted at his bloodied heel.
It emerged that Barnaby and Danish were just as happy as I was to descend along a quicker and easier route. We followed in the wake of the spandexed tourists, giving them a long head start.
I asked Danish if there were still tigers in Malaysian jungles.
“Not very many,” he said. “It’s extremely rare to see one.”
“What about birds of paradise?”
He told me about a National Geographic crew who had come to the area two years prior to try to film the birds in the wild. The crew had camped out overnight in a tent they’d camouflaged with boughs of foliage in order to fool the birds. The crew masked their human scent by painting their limbs and torsos with mud every few hours. Apparently, they ate nothing but odorless granola-bar-like meal replacements. After sixteen days of such vigilance the photographers were rewarded when they spotted a male bird of paradise tottering along a nearby log, dancing to impress his mate.
“What hard work for a few minutes of footage,” commented Barnaby.
“You should see the video,” said Danish. “These guys are so cute! So weird and so cute! Somebody put all the dancing bird videos together, you know. Added the music: Michael Jackson, Ace of Ba
ss…and it went viral. Prime minister was very excited about that.”
“The prime minister?” I said.
“Good for tourism. They say 1.2 million tourist dollars over the next five years for ecotourism. Direct from the dancing bird video.”
“Wow.”
“Why do I feel like a walking punch line?” Barnaby muttered.
“Oh, Barnaby,” I said, “we haven’t come because of some silly bird-dancing video.”
By early evening we’d returned to the Sayong Resort safe, over-hungry, and over-tired. I lay on the bed for a while looking at my photographs in the viewer. The sloth had been endearing. The waterfalls, picturesque. Now that I’d showered and had four walls around me, I felt a growing sense of accomplishment: we’d trekked a jungle summit at altitude. But my mood ran deeper than self-satisfaction. All of my anxieties and expectations had been scrubbed away by the forest, with its astonishing and peculiar abundance. By nature’s way of being any which way, without having to do anything. I closed my eyes for only a moment before sleep overtook me.
Late that night, hunger seized us and we hobbled to a nearby Korean barbecue to eat. The possibility remained of trekking in other areas of the region, notably the Belem Forest Reserve, a nature preserve that crossed the Thai border. It was one of the largest untouched reserves on the planet, and was said to still support large animals like tapirs, rhinoceroses, and elephants.
“It did look amazing in the pictures,” I said.
“Which ones were those?” quipped Barnaby. “From the Belum Rainforest Resort?”
Strange as it sounds, it was just like that, that we gave up the search for a parasol flower, without naming what we were doing. Other people, I consoled myself, may be inspired to go further. We ate for a long while in silence. Easy for Barnaby to have scruples, I thought. He’d spent a lifetime venturing through virgin wilds; he’d collected plenty of memories. And in his case, he’d built a career on it. I suppose I felt a little regretful.
“I think, based on the Malay Mail photograph, that Hannah stayed in Malaya,” I announced. “Maybe she lived in the lower town for a time. Maybe she moved out of Perak to another area of the peninsula. I almost wonder if she went to live in the forest that she loved so much.”
Barnaby laughed at me. “What, with her Sergeant Singh? The two of them, living off the land. You romantic, you!”
I looked away, a little embarrassed, a touch indignant. There were aborigines in the peninsula who lived off the land, plenty of them, and their villages existed to this day. They weren’t a figment of anyone’s “romantic” imagination. I wanted Hannah and Darshan to have made an escape; I was too much of a realist to believe that they had.
He yawned and rubbed his eyes. “Nancy, I meant no disrespect,” he said. “Come, now.”
“Oh, none taken,” I assured him. “I was just…thinking of something.”
“Or someone?” His eyes twinkled.
“Yes, someone,” I admitted. An image of Kenneth had popped into my head, leaning back in his chair at the head of our class seminar table, on a day that I’d arrived conspicuously late. It was the morning after the first full night we’d spent together, and we’d made a point to arrive on campus separately. I had dallied and considered skipping the class entirely, feeling like my face was emblazoned with his fingerprints, his kisses, his cum. When I showed up, heart thumping in my chest, and quickly slid into my seat, I saw that Kenneth was perfectly at ease. In fact, he was entirely self-assured, proud, even cocky. And that, back then, had made me want him all the more. “Someone that I’m glad is gone,” I told Barnaby.
“Ah,” he said. He looked at me fondly for a time, then hooked his thumb toward the buffet. “I’m going back for seconds.”
My life seemed to be a collection of items and endeavors and people that I had left behind as I moved on, gave up, moved away. Zoe and Chris, for instance: were we really going to keep in touch? This was what people did, wasn’t it? Make traces that amounted to nothing. In Hannah’s case, her letters undelivered, her art undocumented. Her spirit seemed to be scattered around the globe. Although there was nothing unusual about that, and she herself would not have hoped for anything better than to do what she loved, I realized I was in a position to make something of her contributions. I was alive.
The names of the galleries I’d transcribed from the ledger—most of them were no longer in existence, probably, but they were a place to start. There were other people who may have bought Hannah’s art and enjoyed it. Or people who’d inherited it, knowing nothing about her. There were the works themselves to find and appraise, perhaps other letters, the descendants of Hannah’s colleagues at the academy, Godot’s inheritors; there were communities to infiltrate, a public to inform, so much sharing to be done. Or, more strategically put, a brand to create.
Hannah hadn’t painted The Parasol Flower while the Peterboroughs were in Malaysia. I felt sure she would have mentioned it to Godot. So the question was whether she’d painted The Parasol Flower in the jungle, where she’d found it, or from some place in England, for instance. At the asylum Charles had recommended? Or, with the help of some ether, holed away in one of the back rooms of the colonel’s country estate?
Barnaby returned with a pile of meat slathered in orange sauce. “You’re contemplative this evening, Nance.” He took a few slippery bites before wiping his mouth. “I really should renovate my bathroom when I get back. It’s begging for an update.”
I said, “I’m exhausted. I miss my family.”
“Indeed. I’m a fried egg.”
A server, passing by with a jug of water, did a double take.
“What?” I said.
“Something my mum used to say. Spent, is all I meant.”
We chuckled. Moms and their sayings.
“To all the parasol flowers out there, wherever you may be hiding,” he said, and we tapped drinks.
“Barnaby, do you think your family would cooperate if I were to write about Hannah? About finding her art?”
“Hmmm. Perhaps if we vetted your final draft,” he said.
Sixty
On a summer day in 1907, when the cicadas are crying and the British residents are hiding inside from sunstroke, Hannah packs her satchel with a wineskin of water and takes the remaining mangosteens from the fruit bowl. She tucks in a lump of rosemary bread, Suria’s old recipe, and plods to the upper town. Her pace is not quite what it used to be, her hips have begun to ache in their sockets, yet her endurance is better than ever.
Where she and the colonel once lived there is a second new family, she has heard tell. A young lady from Brighton and her colonel. The couple has an infant, by the sounds of it. Hannah crosses the stiff grass at the side of the property, marveling at herself for coming so close and striding right under the shuttered window at the side, which is the window of the master bedroom.
When mosquitoes land on her neck she ignores them and keeps walking. If she had to swat at every insect that bothered her, she’d never make it anywhere. There is a tea that takes the itch away and she’s had her two cups that morning. Crossing the lawn in the back garden, she walks on past the stable, with its ever-festive fringe of bougainvillea, and on into the jungle.
Here, it is much more difficult to walk without tripping over a root or vine or nettle, practiced as she is. Hannah has never visited these closest woods. The sergeant slashed no footpaths here. She picks up her skirts and perseveres, struggling along for a hundred yards or so until allowing herself a drink of water. The deep quiet is broken by the sound of her swallowing and by the occasional trilling bird. She surveys the terrain. The woods are always different from slope to slope, bend to bend, hour to hour. Here, in this moment, life is close and dark and dripping with moisture. Teak trees predominate: a layer of marvelous ferns. Already she has noticed several unfamiliar mushrooms sprouting from the detritus, but she can never be bot
hered to document anything, not like the sergeant did. There may be liparis orchids, perhaps, some kind of shade flower. If she doesn’t come across any flowers she’ll pick an interesting patch of foliage and sit down to that. She’s already remarked on an ancient camphor tree, its mottled bark a kaleidoscope of warm greens and pinks and browns.
Looking back now toward that enormous tree, she glimpses something floating, it seems, above a bed of fledgling nipa fronds. Hannah backtracks, picking her way toward the flash of color. The object is both farther away and larger than it first appears. And what an incredible tint—the effect is a sort of glow. As when you close your eyes against the sun and the light seeps in. She stumbles, coming down on one knee, grunting her surprise. “Heedless woman,” she chastises herself even as she quickens her pace, pulling herself forward with saplings. Her boots plant into the spongy black earth and moss. She dodges rocks.
It is just as he’s promised, as big as a ladies’ parasol. She inhales the mild fragrance, which reminds her of cardamom, in fact, not vanilla and citrus. But it is the exquisite color of the blossom that captivates her. She’ll spend days just trying to get the color. Hannah’s hands shake as she reaches for the long stalk, as smooth and vivid green as a young bamboo.
“My god,” she murmurs. Then shouts, “I’ve found it! Darshan, I’ve found it!”
A wave of grief surges inside her, leaving her with such a depth of longing that she stands bewildered for several minutes. She has not thought of him as often, lately. His name, she’s not spoken for years.
The petals are as thick as a tabletop. They curl together, locking perfectly around a central hole—a dark, seemingly bottomless cup that is growing, she realizes, from the inverse of the stem. Around this cup, the petals form a basin streaked violet by some pigment of nature. Ultramarine blue and Alizarin crimson? The underside of the bloom is a sturdy, spiraling network of veins that appear prickly or perhaps hairy. She is not inclined to touch. The edges of the petals ripple a little where the flesh thins. She laughs. Quite like the frill of a parasol.
The Parasol Flower Page 37