“Is everyone at home all right?” I asked. My first thought was of British Grandfather back at the palace. But then why would Geoffrey be smiling and leaning?
Geoffrey steered me away from the gaping crowd. “Do they always stand around with their mouths open?” he asked.
I decided the best approach was to lie. No use feeding his vanity. “Yes,” I said.
We walked together along Queen Street in silence for about a block. He was clearly agitated about something.
“Your grandparents don’t approve of me,” he burst out at last. “They detest me.”
This was not the first time we had discussed the matter. Nei-Nei Down made her opposition clear each time Geoffrey came near the palace.
“Not Grandfather,” I said. I could not argue about Nei-Nei Down, but then my grandmother was stubborn and unreasonable, irrational about a hundred things. Geoffrey was a nearly perfect human being. He was kind, thoughtful, and, whatever his background may have been, a thorough gentleman. Look at how my classmates had reacted at the sight of him. Geoffrey Brown had a magnetic effect on perfect strangers.
“I’m not from Singapore,” he said.
“But my own grandfather is British,” I pointed out.
“We’re not from the same Britain,” Geoffrey said. “I don’t come from your grandfather’s Great Britain. I come from a rat-infested, coal-filled hole in England called Newcastle. My people were all miners, domestics, and dung shovelers.”
“You’re saying my grandfather is a snob,” I said. “I don’t believe it. He married my nei-nei, and she is ordinary Chinese.”
“Which makes it all the more unfair,” he said, “that they would try to keep us apart. But it often turns out that way, from one generation to the next. Your grandmother has practically barred the doors against me.”
I could not deny it. “She’s beside herself with worry. And Grandfather is really ill—he is in no condition to receive guests, Geoffrey. It’s not personal. ”
Geoffrey was immediately all tender concern. Despite his harsh words, I knew he felt deeply attached to my grandfather. His face turned almost gray with worry. “I was afraid of this,” he said. “My God, that’s bad news. I’m so sorry,” he added, pressing my hand. “I shouldn’t be pressuring you at a time like this. —It’s just that I have to see him one more time. I need—I need his blessing.”
This was so old-fashioned and unexpected that I was left speechless for a moment, and I admit, I felt a little afraid. Did Geoffrey really intend to ask my grandfather for my hand in marriage? We had only known each other a few months. Everything seemed to be happening so fast, both the good and the terrible things hand in hand. I was only seventeen. I was not yet done with school. I was not yet fully formed.
But perhaps he wanted my grandfather’s blessing in a more general way—a word or two of encouragement and approval. Geoffrey never spoke of his own father. I wasn’t sure if Mr. Brown was dead or simply absent from Geoffrey’s life. Because British Grandfather had protected Geoffrey’s brother, Geoffrey seemed to regard him as almost a second father. Perhaps he had in mind a very long engagement. These were not uncommon in Singapore. Couples remained engaged for three or four years sometimes. I felt the knot in my stomach begin to loosen.
“Trust me,” I said. “Let me see what I can do.”
“Truly? Will you?” he said. So full of consideration himself, he always seemed surprised by kindness in others. He turned the full bright blue of his gaze upon me. Not for the first time, I noticed how the color of his eyes was like no one else’s I had ever known. A deep blue, like the butterfly pea vine my grandmother sometimes used for dye. An intense, dark blue, like a blue orchid. Who else had eyes like that? I pressed his arm, and we walked on together toward the palace. And when Nei-Nei Down swung the front door open to greet me, as she did every day after school, I stood there defiantly holding Geoffrey’s hand. Nei-Nei pretended not to notice. She gazed over both our heads.
“I have finally got him asleep,” she said.
“That’s all right, then,” I said. “Another time.” Then I turned my head and kissed Geoffrey on the lips. It was a short, matter-of-fact kiss, but I was aware of the momentousness of the gesture.
Geoffrey seemed to melt away. I was not aware of the instant of his going, only that he was gone. And it was just me, Agnes, towering over my tiny maternal grandmother.
Her eyes were just as bright, just as sharp as mine. Unlike Geoffrey’s, they were like two mirrors in which I saw myself clearly reflected. I suddenly felt rather foolish.
“Come inside and sit down,” she said without preamble. “We need to talk.”
She brought me not into the kitchen where I usually sat but into the blue parlor, the one with a long, deep crack in the marble floor. I thought of it as the Divided Room for that reason; for many years we had been waiting for the room to simply split in two.
She sat in one of the old blue upholstered chairs, with high French-style backs, the stuffing spilling out underneath, and I sat in the other. I was puzzled. We seldom used this room. Its only advantage lay in the fact that it was far from the most-used rooms of the house, so I had occasionally used it as a child, when I wanted to play especially noisy games. I didn’t even know where to put my hands, because the chairs had no arms.
“Now, then,” said Nei-Nei Down without preamble. “I see that I must tell you a few things.
“First of all,” she said, and held up one bony finger. “Your Raffles uniform is too short. You are not some modern American flapper. You are good Singapore blood. You come from royalty. Even my people lived within the Imperial Court. We do not show our knees to the world.”
I relaxed. As long as we were going to talk about the length of my skirts, I was on safe, familiar ground. I kept looking at the crack on the floor. Later on, if I would remember that conversation at all, it, too, would seem to have a crack running straight through the middle of it.
“Also,” she said, holding up a second finger, “you are too skinny. You do not eat enough nourishing food, and you run around like a crazy person. It is unhealthy for the blood and the wind in your body. You need to drink more water. But most of all, you need to eat more meat and vegetables. I wish I could have your word on this,” she sighed.
“You have my word,” I said, smiling.
Nei-Nei did not return my smile. “I wish I could count on your word, but you are only seventeen and you will forget to drink water, you will sneak off to eat food in cellophane packages. Also, the man you think you care for is a liar and a thief.”
She did not bother to hold up a third finger. I tried to rise and make my escape. Geoffrey had been right all along. Nei-Nei hated him. She was a terrible snob, worse than I thought.
“Sit down, sit down,” she said mildly. I kept my eyes fixed on the crack in the middle of our floor. Did it look like a snake? A dragon?
“He is a liar and a thief, and he blackmailed your British Grandfather into signing away the rights to the Kampong Glam Palace. All he lacks are a few final papers. That is why he keeps sneaking around here like a lovesick cat.”
“That is not true,” I said, but there was no feeling in my middle. Everything went numb. I opened my mouth to argue, to shout. I closed it. Already I knew better. Everything suddenly clicked into place like the hands of a clock, the gears moving, numbers pointing to midnight.
The little things that had been nagging at the back of my mind suddenly made sense, and I saw them in a different light: the way Geoffrey Brown hovered over my grandfather; the beatings at the Chinese Protectorate; British Grandfather in the doorway, holding his hand palm out as if to stop Brown; all those photographs that Geoffrey kept taking, room after room in the palace. But still—
“Grandfather has nothing to hide,” I said. “You cannot blackmail an honest man. Why would he agree?”
“To save the life of
a stranger,” Nei-Nei said bitterly. “That glass boy Chinese engineer, Wei.”
I felt as if I had been kicked. “Wei,” I echoed.
“Did you think Brown let Wei go out of the goodness of his heart?” she demanded. “Every month, you hear about another Chinese radical executed. They publicize this.”
“Wei was not a Chinese radical.”
Nei-Nei shrugged. “They had sufficient evidence. Brown is greedy. He saw his chance. —You think he is a gentleman, but he is rotten to the core. A brute. He would throw us all in the street without another thought—and one day he would break you, too.”
“You are making this up,” I said. But she just looked at me steadily, out of those bright black eyes. My grandmother had never once lied to me about myself. If she could not bear to tell me something, she remained silent. If she could not remain silent, she spoke the truth. She had not lied when she came to me and said that my mother and brother had died in one night. She had not lied two weeks later when she told me that my father had decided to join them.
She had never lied to me about my looks, my prospects, my gifts, or my likeability. “You are a hard child to raise,” she used to tell me. “I hope one day you will have a granddaughter like yourself.”
Even when it made me love her less, she never smoothed the way or told me half-truths. She had earned this moment. Perhaps she had been working toward it all our lives together.
“Brown is stealing the palace for the Chinese Protectorate?” I said. I had already stopped thinking of him as Geoffrey.
She laughed—two quick barks, like the sound of a fox. “For his own use,” she said. “This deal was struck, you might say, robbing the beams to put in the pillars.”
“How do we stop him?” I was my nei-nei’s offspring, I came straight to the point.
Nei-Nei looked at the door, as if the answer stood behind it. “I do not know,” she said. “Your grandfather has not confided in me. I know Brown is lacking a few papers. A few important signatures. They must be important or he would not be so persistent. He has tried to use his guanxi, his connections, to move ahead without them. —But your grandfather has escaped. He has gone down . . . below”—she pointed downward to show me—“where Brown and his men cannot find him. Even I cannot find him,” she added in a broken voice. “He has escaped me, too.”
“I did this,” I said bitterly. “I asked him to save Wei’s life, and now it is killing him. Oh Grandmother, Grandmother, it is all my doing.”
I went to where she was sitting, and sank down on my knees in front of her little blue upholstered chair, with its ripped seams and broken stitches, and I hid my face in her long dress.
Her wiry arms went around me. “No. Shhh,” she said sharply. “Your grandfather would have come to that decision himself. I know. He told me himself, ‘We must save those two young men. We cannot sit tight in this palace and watch them die.’ I only tell you this, to save you from that man. —I could bear to lose the Kampong Glam but I could not bear to lose you.”
We rocked back and forth, hugging each other. I reached up and brushed the tears from her cheeks. They had grown so hollow lately. Her skin was soft as only the skin of infants and old people can be. But something was gnawing away at me.
“Why?” I said. “Brown already had what he wanted. Why did he need me, too?”
Nei-Nei pushed the bangs out of my eyes. “Great heart,” she said in Chinese. She had never used this endearment before. “Perhaps he thought you came with the palace, like a fine carpet or a chandelier.” She stroked my hair, tracing the curve to my chin, where the bob ended. She smiled ruefully. “And of course, it would smooth things over—to inherit the palace of your own wife. No one would ask questions. He is a clever fellow, that one.”
I thought of how he used to pose me in one palace room after another. How he kissed me for the first time with the moon rising behind my shoulder, gleaming silver off the parapets. And I thought how sometimes love and hate are just inches apart.
“He will never have it,” I said. We, Nei-Nei and I especially, would sooner burn the palace to the ground. For one wild moment, I allowed myself to imagine it—the Kampong Glam Palace in flames, British Grandfather and the others somewhere green and far away where they could not even smell the smoke. Perhaps at that instant I understood Omar Wahlid better than ever before. At least he was ready to destroy the palace for the glory of God. For me, it was a question of revenge. Yet Omar was the enemy of Singapore, and I was just a lovesick girl. If you asked a politician or a police officer, that is what they would have told you. This is how little we understood one another in this world. Everything important was upside down and backward.
Once upon a time, I lived in a palace like a poor princess in a fairy tale and thought I had everything I wanted or needed—the turrets and winding staircases, the gleaming marble floors, the wooden parquet and the gardens. I even believed I had found a prince to rescue me. Now it was all in pieces, like a nest that had been kicked to bits. I might try to attack Geoffrey Brown the next time I saw him—throw myself against him with my fists and the pointy toes of my boots. I was full of regret, full of the sense of my own vanity, my stupidity, of the uselessness of life itself. As if she could hear those ugly thoughts roiling around in my head, Nei-Nei clutched me to her. I was shivering as if with the ague. She rocked me back and forth in the chair. I rocked with her. We mourned for all that we had lost, all that we had still to lose. We keened together, like two women of old Singapore.
TWELVE
The Old Man’s Friend
One January afternoon, I spotted Dawid coming through the door of the jewelry store, and I could tell from the way the light bounced off his broad cheekbones that something was wrong. It is strange how your whole body goes still in such a moment. I watched him walk toward me, past the display of diamond bracelets. “Your grandfather is in the hospital,” he said without preamble.
I had left for school that rainy morning without stopping for breakfast. Had I done so, I might have noticed something lying under the tembusu tree. The gardener mistook it at first for a bundle of rags to be taken away to the garbage dump in Chu Kang.
British Grandfather had managed to make it all the way outside on his own. He thought he heard his mother crying by the door, he explained later. He must have half-walked and half-crawled into the garden, in the downpour, for that is where the gardener found him the next morning.
“Half-drowned and shivering,” the old gardener declared. He came once a month, out of pity and for the sake of old friendship, to trim the undergrowth and keep the landscape from spreading into utter wildness, and to carry away our garbage to the dumps near the rubber plantations. It was sheer luck he happened to come that morning to retrieve a lost umbrella, for Nei-Nei was off visiting a childhood friend who had taken ill. I’d gone straight from school to the jewelry store that afternoon, where Dawid came and found me.
The doctors were not comforting, though I think they meant to be. They took Grandfather’s pulse and listened to his lungs and shook their heads.
“It is pneumonia,” they told Nei-Nei. “The old man’s friend.”
“Not a good friend,” my grandmother told me, after the doctor left the room. “And he is not so old as all that.” British Grandfather’s people were long-lived as a general rule. If the men were not killed in battle, or taken down by influenza, then they went on to live into their eighties and even into their nineties. Grandfather was only seventy-two.
Nei-Nei waited to hear two, three more opinions of my grandfather’s condition and its inevitable outcome, and when she was finally convinced of the truth, she called upon the rest of the family to move British Grandfather back home to the Kampong Glam Palace.
The doctors and nurses were angry and did their best to stop us, but there was nothing they could do. For one thing, we outnumbered them. Many relatives crowded around, all of them polit
e and smiling, all of them pretending not to understand the hospital rules, the rigid visiting hours. And Nei-Nei Down was indefatigable; the hospital staff was not. In the end, she wore them down, and they were relieved to see her go.
I think Grandfather was glad to be back among his own people and things, but he seldom spoke more than a sentence or two. Now and again he had a lucid hour. Grandfather had always enjoyed reading history best, so that is what I read aloud to him. I pulled out a volume of Thucydides and started at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. Over the course of the next several days, I learned more about Sparta and Athens than I ever wanted to know. Like Grandfather, I preferred stories that were true, but this stuff was dry as chalk dust.
I read until he fell asleep, and sometimes even after I knew he was asleep, hoping the flow of words might comfort him while he slept.
People were awfully kind, but we turned most away, as if we could build a fort against death. Bridget was one visitor who was always welcome. Though Irish Catholic, she understood how to maintain a Singaporean silence. Sometimes she sat beside me while I read, staring out the window. With her long, crooked nose and long, flowing red hair, she looked very patrician. In fact, she resembled British Grandfather more than any of the rest of us. Visiting nurses assumed that she was the blood relation and often addressed their comments to her, while she retained that dignified silence and I droned on and on, turning the pages of Thucydides. Like Grandfather, he was a former military leader, one who had survived a plague and lived in exile.
“I’m afraid I may actually bore him to death with this,” I told her, gesturing with the book.
“Nonsense,” Bridget said. “The secret to happiness is freedom—and the secret to freedom is courage.” She kept a small blue notebook of favorite quotes, and had added several from the Peloponnesian War. “We secure our friends not by accepting favors but by doing them.” “War springs from unseen and generally insignificant causes.”
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