When a Flower Dies

by Josephine Chia

  He was her soul mate, and now he is gone.

  Pansy goes up close to the daffodils that are planted on raised banks in the Flower Dome. She wants to smell them, as if in smelling their gentle scent she can be transported back to England, to her life with George. Smells are such profound triggers of emotional memories, taking one back to one’s childhood or adult experience. Like the scent of the bunga rampay, the Peranakan and Malay floral potpourri always reminded her of Kim Guek, though the Malays called it bunga rampai. Or the tiny creamy bunga melor which Kim Guek used to thread into her sanggul for special outings. Pansy remembered watching her mother comb her long hair, then twist it into a chignon, inserting the string of bud-like flowers to complete her ensemble with the elegant sarong kebaya. So many things link Pansy back to her past. Is this what it is like to be old? To recollect the past as if it has only just happened and yet forget what you did minutes ago? The two people she had loved so strongly are appearing in her daydreams more and more until she sometimes feel as if they had not died. It is still an uphill task to disassociate herself from the memory of George. There were so many more flowers that made her think of him. He never failed to buy her flowers for her birthday—long-stemmed roses and irises, tiger lilies, stocks and camellias.

  “Darling, look!” George had said on one of their outings in England, pointing in the direction of the water’s edge, under the chestnut trees.

  They had gone to the lake on their regular walk the last spring they shared, though she hadn’t known then that it would be their last one together. If we knew that something was going to be our last, how differently would we have done things? Would we treasure the moment with greater intensity? Pansy tried to bottle up the precious memory, though she was becoming aware that it was already slipping from her. It is this that distresses her the most. That she might forget George, the shape and texture of him. Now she sets out with steadfast purpose to recall the memory so that she can stitch it into her decrepit brain.

  Both George and she knew that the secret of enjoying the outdoors was to dress appropriately for the weather. The wind was still bracing, so George and Pansy had worn their down anoraks and thick gloves, their necks covered with woolly scarfs. If you were born in the equatorial belt, you never get used to the bone-chilling English cold. The trees were starting to come alive, fresh green buds unfurling from their branches. In the distance they could hear the bleating of the sheep birthing spring lambs. Everywhere in the animal and plant kingdom was evidence of new beginnings and cycles. It was such a thrill to be part of it all.

  People who have lived only in the tropics cannot know the anticipatory feeling that fills the heart when the long, grey winter is over, and the arrival of spring and all the new life it heralds is in the air. It is simply magical to see the first crocuses push their colourful heads out from the frosty ground; the dainty snowdrops, appearing shyly, small, white and bud-like, clustered against fresh, verdant green.

  “Oh, daffodils!” Pansy had clapped her hands in delight when she followed George’s pointing finger. His smile was broad. He was the glass-half-full type, always managing to see something positive in everything. He had the kind of manner most suited for a doctor, hardly ever losing his cool. The only time that Pansy could remember him getting angry was when he thought the fishermen in their seaside village in Bedok were unfairly treated. He raised hell with the authorities.

  “How do you expect people who spent a lifetime by the sea to cope with living in high-rise HDB flats?” he challenged. “How are these fishermen going to earn their livelihood? What? You expect them to dangle fishing lines from their tenth floor?”

  “George, George!” the Medical Registrar had said. “This is 1970s Singapore. A period of great change. You have to learn to go with the flow if you want to survive. Don’t talk so loud. Walls have ears. Just calm down. Why are you getting involved? It’s not as if you have any relatives who are fishermen…”

  George. Her George would not simply toe the line. He couldn’t be apathetic, unconcerned. Was he foolish? Still, it was too late to matter now. Every spring, no matter how many times Pansy had chanced upon a host of daffodils on their walks, she was filled with the same unadulterated joy as if it were a first encounter. Flowers had this effect on her, wild ones particularly, strewn across the woods or beautiful English meadows, bluebells, forget-me-nots, foxgloves, even dandelions and cow parsley. English people thought she was a bit loopy, hiding their smiles at her, picking cow parsley and dandelions to put in vases indoors when she first came to England. How could Pansy explain that she loved the delicate white tracery of the cow parsley, even if it was a path and roadside plant, considered a weed and fodder for cows? And that the golden dandelions reminded her of the golden marigolds that grew wild in her youth in Singapore? Any display of nature’s abundance made her deliriously happy, made her feel connected to life. But the English were right. It was no good trying to put weeds indoors, as they needed the fresh outdoor air and suffocated indoors, dying rapidly as soon as they were picked.

  “I wandered lonely as a cloud…” George started to recite and they both completed the poem together, holding hands and swinging them as they walked, as if they were still young lovers. Although George was largely pragmatic, he had an artistic side too, and loved poetry as much as Pansy.

  In the Flower Dome, Pansy walks slowly, in search of more daffodils. Her hips and knees ache; age and the harsh English winters had exacted their price, chilling bones and weakening cartilages. If her mother was still alive, she’d probably prescribe a dose of jamu beras kencur—a pounded mixture of a special type of galangal, rice, rock sugar, salt and tamarind, made into a drink, which was Kim Guek’s antidote for rheumatism, sore muscles and joints. Pansy herself had found that some of the Asian herbal drinks were too pahit or bitter, so in her work in England, she had treated patients with local homeopathic cures and flower essences like Bach Flower Remedies. Jamu would have been too foreign for the English. Homeopathy and alternative therapies became popular in the UK only in the late 80s and 90s, fuelled by the New Agers. In medieval times, women who used herbs as remedies were often accused of witchcraft and burned at the stake. Now, women happily declare themselves as witches and practise Wicca. Seen in this light, perhaps Kim Guek was a White Witch too because she had been so capable of healing others. Whatever magic she wielded was always for the good of others.

  There the daffodils are, and their small cousin, the narcissi, planted in pots, on banks and in the flower beds, scattered under the arched, giant glass sky of the Flower Dome. To piece this brittle, curved jigsaw together must have been an engineering feat. Opposite to the Eden Project in Cornwall, the purpose of the conservatory here is to keep the hot air out and the cool air in. The energy for the cool air-conditioning and the lighting comes from burning lopped branches, shrubs, leaves and grass; the whole system is eco-friendly, with a giant chimney hidden in one of the ‘supertree’ structures, steel conduits with a frame that house real plants and exude changing coloured lights at nightfall. These structures have now become an iconic feature of Singapore’s new city seafront landscape as much as the lotus-shaped ArtScience Museum and the three pillared Marina Bay Sands hotel. Spread across the grounds of the Flower Dome are yellow daffodils, some sienna coloured, others white. There are single-tiered and double-tiered varieties, ordinary ones and tiny ones in clusters, like bright stars. She loves them all and can pretend she is in an English country meadow. Except that she can no longer share them with George.

  A year after George’s death, she had fallen in the woods and broken her hip.

  “You see,” Anthony, who was now an eminent architect in his late fifties, complained. “I had to rush all the way from Singapore. I was in the middle of an important project. Told you, you should have come home straightaway after the funeral, as dad had suggested. But you’re so stubborn lor…”

  Curious, the way married people have the propensity to echo their partner and even morph into each othe
r.

  On that fateful day, Pansy had walked the usual trail through the beech woods that she and George had taken often. The slim, tall trunks of the trees with their silver bark were like friendly sentinels, so she did not feel lonely. There is an energy in trees that revitalises the heart, mind and body. Ancient druids whose names came from the oak tree, paid homage to their spirit. Like them, Pansy was a tree hugger, putting her arms around the trunks to absorb their life force, or sitting on the ground, resting her back against the tree. In Singapore, as a teenager, she had leant against the banyan and tembusu trees. She had two favourite banyan trees which used to grow near her seaside village. What names did she give them? She struggled but couldn’t dredge their names from her teenage years. After she had arrived in England, she resonated with the tall oak tree and loved hugging it and leaning her back against it. She had thought of Sister Catherine the first time she saw an oak tree because it was Sister Catherine who had first told her about it in her letters from England.

  All of nature offered its healing vibrations for free. Her mother and Sister Catherine had taught her that. Whenever she felt lonely, Pansy would go into the woods. She also wanted and needed to walk the familiar trail so that she could recall George’s presence, the way his breath would come out in cloudy swirls, or the manner in which his coat or hip sometimes brushed hers as they walked, his hand clasping hers tightly as if he could not bear to let her go. She loved the pressure of his hand, its shape, just as she loved the presence of the length of his warm body next to hers in their cold bed.

  “Oh, George, why did you have to go before me?”

  The loss was still so raw. The tears ran unbidden.

  Fortunately it was not a particularly isolated spot, as it was within the National Trust’s commons. Historically, the royalty owned huge tracts of land in the UK for their hunting and their pleasure, so it had been decreed that some land should be set aside for the common people to enjoy. The National Trust had taken over the care for such places, besides heritage homes and buildings. Within National Trust ground, rangers were likely to be out and about, so Pansy had not worried about being alone. The sprawling English countryside still offered a sense of safety and trust that so far had not been violated.

  A pheasant had called out in its distinctive creaky-gate call so Pansy had followed the sound, hoping to catch sight of a male with its plume of colours, unlike the dowdy brown of the female. Sighting a butterfly, bird or animal in the wild was still a delightful treasure. Her stout boots crushed the undergrowth and inevitably alerted the pheasant. In fright, it had flown up from its hiding place—it was a male pheasant. But its large wings flapping, so close to her, had startled and disoriented her, and she had tripped over a fallen tree. She had lain there on a blanket of damp moss in the woods for hours, knowing that she had broken something, unable to get up. If she still had Rusty, their golden-haired collie, he could have barked and alerted someone. But Rusty had succumbed to old age even before she and George had.

  Of course, Pansy had not remembered to carry her mobile phone. Luckily, as was her habit, she had a vial of Bach’s Rescue Remedy in her rucksack—it was perfect for dealing with shock and fear. Edward Bach, an English homeopath, had believed that dew found on flower petals absorbed the healing properties of the flowers. Kim Guek would have been delighted to know about this as she had often harvested flowers for their healing capacity. Alas, Pansy could no longer tell her. Pansy squirted a few drops of the potion on her tongue to calm herself, closed her eyes and allowed the surrounding environment to relax her. She imagined George standing by and looking after her. She simply lay there till help arrived.

  “You look so peaceful there, I would be tempted to think you’re lying down there on purpose,” said an Englishman, with typical English humour.

  If he had not been walking his dog, who knows what would have happened. The incident persuaded Pansy that it would be wise for her to return home to the small island of Singapore, where every place was within reach and medical facilities and family were within easy call. Without George by her side, she didn’t find it as easy to do the things they had loved to do together. Especially at her age. Her decision made practical sense—but her heart had bled.

  The daffodils in Flower Dome stand almost upright with their green stems, though many are bending over as if bowing in humility. Modern technology and new scientific expertise have made it possible for these flowers to be birthed in tropical Singapore. But still, it would be lovely to see them in their full expression of joy, fluttering and dancing in the breeze outdoors. Suddenly out from nowhere comes a light wind. Is it possible for this to happen in an enclosed dome? Pansy is puzzled. She looks around as if trying to see where it might have surfaced from.

  Other people in the dome give her side-long looks as she frowns, looking this way and that, this woman—slightly stooped, with grey hair, looking a bit lost. The breeze caresses the back of Pansy’s neck and it raises goose bumps on her arms. For a wild moment, it feels like George’s breath. He had a habit of blowing into her nape whenever he was in an amorous mood. Had he come to console her?

  But alas, he is nowhere near. She is standing alone.

  Chapter 2

  Pansy wakes up agitated. A fuzzy dream clings to her like cobwebs. In the first few moments of opening her eyes, she is unsure of where she is, which country she’s in. Automatically, she reaches out for George beside her, as she has done for over fifty years, the first thirteen in Singapore. But he is not there. She is not overtly alarmed. Perhaps he has risen and has gone downstairs to make her a cup of tea. Any minute now, he will walk in through the bedroom door bearing her mug and some plain McVitie’s digestive biscuits. He knew that occasionally, she liked to be decadent and stay in bed, the bedclothes pulled round her to keep warm, to look out the window at the huge expanse of sky. She could spend hours watching the clouds take on different shapes and density. They sometimes look like fairies streaking lightly across the sky. Or she would watch the seagulls wing by as they screeched. She loved lying back against her pillows to listen to the waves crashing onto the shingled beach, whilst sipping her tea. Some people, like George, can spring out of bed and be fully awake, even whistling as he takes his morning shower.

  Once, Pansy had been like that too, but her habits had changed as she got older, and she gradually took to returning gently to wakefulness, especially when it was freezing cold. George was attuned to her idiosyncrasies; he knew her moods. There is a deep comfort that comes from this, knowing that one has the latitude to be oneself in another’s company. On some weekends, he might even cook up a full breakfast, sometimes Maggi Mee, sometimes bacon and eggs. He would bring it up to her on a breakfast tray-table, together with the Weekend Independent.

  “Room service, Madam,” he would say playfully.

  He might even snuggle back into bed with her, to have his breakfast as they share the newspaper in easeful companionship, erupting with a comment every now and again about some article or story, their feet touching, and warming each other under the duvet. At times like that, William Blake’s poem came into Pansy’s mind:

  Love seeketh not itself to please,

  Nor for itself hath any care,

  But for another gives its ease,

  And builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair.

  “Where am I?”

  As the fuzziness in her brain clears, Pansy is hit by the realisation that she’s in a bed that George has never slept in, and never will. That he will never bring her breakfast in bed ever again. The terrible certainty whips her like a cat-o’-nine-tails, drawing blood in her. George is truly gone. Never to return. She is deflated, all the oomph squeezed out of her. What is the point of getting up?

  “Stop being so self-indulgent!” she tells herself off.

  Yes, it is a new challenge for her, to adjust to an existence when she’s not a priority in anyone’s life, nor anyone in hers. People who have spouses and family living with them cannot fathom this utter sense of a
loneness. The hours in the day stretch too long. But she is not the only one singled out for this fate. There are many, old and lonely, who feel imprisoned in the solitude of their own company. Here in Singapore, the ageing population from the Pioneer Generation are increasingly in focus; it is strange that before this, no one had considered that the once broad base of young people would someday become old. The only hope for those living on their own is to go out and mingle with the crowd in the bus, food centre and supermarket, and pretend that one is not alone. It’s a horrible feeling when you know that there will be no one coming home to you, no cheerful calling out, no voice. Pansy who used to hate the TV being turned on in the day puts the TV on just so that she can hear voices, to have virtual people having conversations in her living room to ease the stark silence.

  When George first died and she hadn’t got used to the idea that he was truly gone, she continued the habit of looking out for things she could treat him to whenever she was out—a good butter croissant, Thornton chocolates, a new pair of gardening gloves, a plant from the nursery, fresh minced lamb for a shepherd’s pie, or moolie she had found in an Asian supermarket to grate, steam into a cake then fry with eggs, to make his favourite chye tow kway. It pleased her when he was happy. He gave her life meaning, made it purposeful. She saved morsels of her day to hand them to him when she got home: “You know who I bumped into today, sweetheart?” “Hey, you won’t believe what I did!” “Guess what, George? I saw a flock of geese flying in formation today…”

  But after his death when she got home, the house was still, empty, devoid of his presence and spirit. It was her first huge blow. He was gone and wouldn’t be back. She had no one to share her day with. Of course she had friends she could phone. But it was not the same.

  “Time will heal,” one friend said to her.

  “You’ll adjust,” another said.