Miss Seetoh in the World

by Catherine Lim

  A moral vacation – that was what every one of those pious worshippers of the Church of Eternal Mercy needed, she chuckled wickedly.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Meeta. ‘Stop thinking for a while and enjoy, enjoy! You’re no longer young, you know.’ According to her mood of the moment, Meeta encouraged, warned, lectured, empathised, scolded. Her mood depended very much on the elusive Byron of the Polo Club, whom, according to Winnie, she was still intently looking out for each time she dined at the club.

  ‘Seize the day, girl!’ she would urge. ‘Carpe diem!’ Or ‘They’re all alike, those bastards. Only thinking of themselves.’ Or ‘ You be the one in control. You play hard to get, and they get harder! Ha! Ha!’

  In love, one could be amoral but not apolitical. She whispered to Maria, ‘You know, our Winnie the Blur is so blur I have to explain the joke to her.’

  There was no blurring in Winnie’s keenness of observation.

  ‘Our Meeta talks too much. She’s pining for that guy who doesn’t care too hoots for her. One little look of encouragement from him, and she’ll jump into his bed. Just you see!’

  She had her own advice for Maria.

  ‘A woman needs a man, whatever she may say. There is nothing like love,’ adding dreamily, ‘love is a many-splendoured thing.’

  Winnie’s head, even as she was standing in front of her class and teaching her subject of history, throbbed with romantic definitions and pronouncements picked up from the movies and popular literature that came out more easily than the dates of wars or imperial dynasties. Alone in her room she listened for hours to the mellifluous voice of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin celebrating or bemoaning love; she had seen the movie Love Story four times and made the proclamation that love meant never having to say sorry so many times that Meeta forced her to stop.

  Maria thought, it must be real happiness. For it was of the abundant kind that spilled over into goodwill for all around her, even the contemptible Mr Chin who either met her smile with a very constricted one or looked away. It made her listen patiently to Mrs Kee’s story about her baby boy, a tale that had become tiresome to the others in the staffroom who swore they had heard it, and seen the photograph of the baby, at least half a dozen times. Mrs Kee, normally talkative, became doubly so with the birth of the precious male child whom she and her husband had given up hope of having after the four daughters, telling anyone who would listen how they had tried everything, from special medicinal herbs imported from Taiwan to special times and conditions for making love. One of her listeners took prurient interest in Mrs Kee’s intimate revelations and himself revealed a certain traditional technique, amazingly gross and involving the ubiquitous ginseng, about how to make a male child.

  While Mrs Neo rolled her eyes upwards and quietly left the staffroom, while Teresa Pang smiled forbearingly and continued marking her students’ exercise books without looking up once, Maria Seetoh not only listened but said the appropriate things to add to Mrs Kee’s pride and joy.

  ‘Miss Seetoh,’ gushed Mrs Kee, ‘I know you are very good with English. Can you think of very nice words for my son’s birthday?’

  The first birthday of the only male grandchild in the Kee family would be celebrated in style in one of Singapore’s best Chinese restaurants, and there would be a huge birthday cake on which only the most illustrious words, in both English and Chinese, would be inscribed.

  ‘I will get special Chinese translator to translate your words,’ said Mrs Kee by now quite breathless. The whole event would be videotaped.

  Maria obliged, but declined very politely to be among the guests at the celebration.

  Out of deference to Mrs Kee’s superstitious fears, she kept from her the fact of the visit to Sister Elizabeth’s wake in the funeral parlour of the St Francis’ Hospice. Mrs Kee’s eyes would have dilated in horror, for any connection with a house of death, even if many stages remote, would have been an evil impossible to risk in the protection of her newborn. There were malignant spirits everywhere, and they were most potent if associated with a corpse. Mrs Kee even avoided the mention of Sister Elizabeth’s name, and had nervously waved away the staff member who had gone round collecting money for a joint wreath and message of condolence in The Singapore Tribune.

  Looking upon Sister’s body in her coffin, her hands gently folded upon her chest, with a rosary entwined round the fingers, Maria instantly thought of her dead husband in exactly the same prayerful pose in his coffin, almost a year ago. What a long way her feelings had travelled since! She must have gone through the entire human gamut – bitterness, anger, pity, shock, sadness, despair and then relief, hope, surprise, excitement, wonder, joy. Head and heart had made the journey together in mutual reliance, whatever the tumultous conflicts along the way. Thinking with the heart, feeling with the head: the line that separated them was constantly being blurred.

  She was suddenly struck by the irony that had attended each death, as if the powers out there, whether they had a habitation and a name among mortals or remained unidentified and distant, sometimes acted like malicious mortals themselves and wanted the last laugh. Poor Sister Elizabeth dying of womb cancer when her womb had been chaste all its life; and poor Bernard, dying in the bitterest of beliefs that the friend he most trusted had betrayed him with the woman he made most sacrifices for, beside his very deathbed, before his very eyes. Was it a continuation of the irony that it was precisely his hideous accusation that had drawn their attention to each other, who else might have gone their separate ways and never have bothered to see each other again after his death?

  Thoughts of a discomfiting nature could not be permitted to stay at a time when the heart was allowed its ascendancy. They were easily swamped out by the new happiness that continued to cast a benign glow around everyone in the classroom, the staffroom, the canteen, along the corridors, down the staircases. It wanted to shine most warmly on the person who seemed most in need of it, but was rejected all the way.

  Maggie, for the first time that Maria could remember, looked troubled and unhappy, avoiding her when usually she would seek her company and attention, sometimes very obtrusively, such as cornering her on her way to or out of the staffroom, or out of the school gates. The girl was now frequently absent from school and had stopped attending the creative writing classes.

  ‘No, nothing’s wrong, I’m okay, okay!’ she would say with a sharp laugh and proud toss of her hair when Maria sought her out on one of the days she had turned up.

  ‘Maggie, something’s wrong, you must tell me,’ she said solicitously, recollecting all the rumours of her mysterious family background that she determinedly kept secret.

  ‘I tell you, nothing wrong, so stop asking!’ she said sullenly and walked away.

  Her troubles were probably related to the beloved younger sister Angel who, oddly, accompanied her to school on some days, and spent the time at a table in the students’ canteen, reading her books and comics and writing in copy books, before Maggie picked her up after school and they went home together. On one occasion during recess, Maria had seen the two of them eating from a plate of noodles in the canteen. The sister was thirteen, but Maggie was coaxing her to eat and even fed her a few mouthfuls, like a child. The canteen woman whom everybody called ‘Auntie Noodles’ was generously re-filling their plate.

  Maria watched, deeply moved. When she walked towards them, Maggie looked up sharply, instinctively put a protective arm around the bored-looking Angel and assumed a cold hard defiance to beat off any question.

  ‘Maggie,’ said Maria. ‘Shouldn’t Angel be in her own school? Why is she here with you?’

  A sudden thought occurred to her, causing her eyes to dart all over the young girl’s body in a search for marks and bruises: was the older sister protecting her from parental abuse? It broke her heart to think that the student who liked and trusted her most of all, had suddenly stopped doing so. Her concern came up against a wall of chill resistance: ‘Miss Seetoh, I appreciate very much if you no
t interfere in my affairs.’

  She spoke to Brother Philip.

  He said, ‘Maggie once told me that it was unfair you were giving all the attention to Yen Ping in your creative writing class. She said you always used Yen Ping’s stories as examples, never hers.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ said Maria and a load immediately lifted off her chest. Here was a problem with an easy solution. For a while she had feared having to make a police report about child abuse, going through those dreadful formalities she had heard about, such as having photographs taken of the bruises cleverly inflicted only in hidden places, including the chest, stomach, upper thighs, working out with the principal, the discipline master and other relevant staff about how to keep the matter from the inquisitive Chinese language newspapers, to protect Maggie’s privacy, and worst of all, testifying in court. She was so glad she did not have to be part of that huge, messy, pitiful, detestable world out there that she caught glimpses of in the newspapers and on TV.

  She grasped Brother Philip’s hand in a rush of relief so great it had to be instantly expressed in light-hearted sharing and laughter. She told him that Maggie’s stories were so ridiculously, fantastically sexy that they could not be used as examples in the creative writing class; otherwise the principal, receiving complaints, would send him to investigate.

  ‘Well,’ said Maria, once more in a happy mood, ‘I’m prepared to use them now, to make the girl happy. And if you come investigating, dear Brother Phil, I’ll make you sit down with the rest of the class and join in the discussion!’

  She told him that she was once tempted to pass on to him one of Maggie’s boldest attempts, a very risqué and amusing story about a businessman and his karaoke lounge visits, in case the moral education teacher of St Peter’s needed diversion from his many onerous duties.

  ‘My dear Brother Phil,’ she said warmly, liking the sound of her new form of addressing him, ‘you could learn from Maggie’s rich vocabulary of sexual terms! Maybe you could even use them for one of your delightful limericks.’

  She had grown very fond of Brother Philip with his ready wit and quiet, gentle wisdom, and was not above teasing him in a way that would have appalled the prim and proper principal. She paid him the supreme compliment: ‘Never, never ask to return to your native Ireland. I’ll miss you.’

  ‘Why are you looking at me like that, you mischievous girl?’ he once said, and she liked the mischievous twinkle in his own large, kindly eyes.

  He would never know the chilling thought that had for a moment gripped her: what if her dying husband, in his wild delusions and suspicions, had actually scribbled a note of complaint to the principal of St Peter’s Secondary School, accusing his moral education teacher of having an affair with his wife? Past that danger, she could see its humorous side: Brother Philip in the white brother’s cassock, looking puzzled, and herself, in bright unseemly red for a widow, with explanations at the ready, standing side by side in the principal’s office, while he stood facing them, his hands tightly clasped behind his back, clearing his throat with elaborate deliberation before saying in a very precise, formal tone: ‘It has come to my attention – ’ There were many things she could share with dear Brother Philip, but not those shocking suspicions, nor the shocking dream she had had, of them together in the Botanic Gardens, discovered naked by her husband.

  When she next saw Maggie, she said brightly, ‘Maggie, write me a story. I miss reading your stories,’ adding, ‘Hey, Maggie, what about coming over to my place for lunch this weekend? Here’s my new address. I moved a while ago. You can bring Angel if you like.’

  The girl said, ‘Thanks,’ without enthusiasm. She received the slip of paper bearing the new address with a limp hand and looked away.

  Maggie was in school the next day, and was passing Yen Ping along the corridor when she did something that quite shocked Maria: she spat at her rival.

  Yen Ping, with the help of the ever devoted Mark, had recently won a prize in a short story competition, and Maria had enthusiastically read out the prize-winning story in the creative writing class, unaware of driving the thorn of rivalry even deeper into poor Maggie’s side. Maria was to learn later from Yen Ping that it was symbolic spitting only, not full expectoration, but it was shocking enough in its crude malice to warrant a rebuke.

  She strode up to Maggie and said sternly, ‘I saw that. You have to apologise to Yen Ping. At once.’

  Maggie looked down sullenly; Yen Ping looked upset and tearful. Maggie, probably thinking of Miss Seetoh’s kind invitation to lunch, a unique enough gesture from a teacher, relented and said, ‘I’m sorry.’ ‘Now I want both of you to shake hands.’ In her days at school, the nuns made every quarrelling child, whether the offender or victim, extend a hand of reconciliation. Maggie and Yen Ping shook hands, neither looking at the other. Maria had a sudden thought: she too should be extending a conciliatory hand to all those she had upset or wronged in her life: her dead husband, her mother, Mr Chin, Olivia Phang, the great TPK himself for her intense dislike of him, despite all that he had done for Singapore. Only for Olivia Phang would the apology entail an assurance and a promise: ‘Don’t worry. There isn’t any affair. It’s a silly little flutter that will run its course, like a fever.’

  She told Dr Phang about Maggie the next time he called her on the phone. He listened with chuckling interest, as he had to the comical incident of the plaque. One story led to another; Maggie’s life, even the little she knew of it, was a rich compendium. It was weird; there were a hundred questions she wanted to ask him, and she was instead telling him school stories and gossip. What exactly did her brother Heng say when he called to tell him not to attend Bernard’s funeral? What else had Bernard confided in him that he had not told her? And Olivia? Surely it was without his wife’s knowledge that he was making all those private calls inviting her to join him for lunch in town? What if she saw them, or somebody saw and told her? How did he elude those ferociously vigilant eyes? And his feelings for her? Exactly what did he want from her? What about all those rumours she had heard about the smitten women in his life? His ex-wife? The daughter he seemed to love most of all? His standing with the great TPK? The promise of a political career? The rumour that he had actually made a secret donation to V.K. Pandy when the poor man was ordered by the courts to pay the great TPK three hundred thousand dollars for defaming him? If he had political ambitions, surely he was also playing with fire. But he had privately disclosed to her, before Bernard’s death, that he was thinking of leaving his high position in the Ministry of Defence. What were his plans now? He had confided in her then that he needed change and adventure. Was his present affair-in-the-making with her now part of that adventure?

  A woman’s questions for a man she was interested in were voraciously retrospective and prospective; like a hundred probing tentacles they stretched beyond his present to dig into the smallest crevices of his past and reach for the most elusive hiding places of his future. If she was wise, she would keep all the questions locked up in her head and never permit any to roll out upon her tongue. For she would never be satisfied with his answers; she would, when alone by herself, examine each of them in its every detail and nuance, under the relentless microscope of suspicion and jealousy, and then come up with even more questions to ask.

  A man hated a woman’s questions; it always made her querulous and unreasonable, bringing out the worst in her. The answering of a mere fraction of the questions would set in motion an intolerable deluge of explanation, argument, confrontation, taking them round and round in tortuous circles. Above all, a woman’s tears unnerved a man; if he was helpless against them, he hated them even more.

  Dr Phang, the undamaged Teflon Man, had a simple solution: if the questions arose, he dismissed them with that alluring boyish grin or put a genial male finger on the protesting female lips; if they did not, he pre-empted them permanently with his cool, relaxed demeanour that said, ‘No, please don’t; they will spoil everything for us.’ A woman was mollified
if her mouth, opened wide for recriminations, was stopped with a gentle kiss, if her arms, ready to flail in rage, were grasped and locked in a tender embrace. Even abusive, battering husbands could get away with the strategies of appeasement. Women themselves admitted they were their own worst enemies. They seldom admitted that they were guilty of the worst double standards – condemning other women for illicit liaisons, excusing their own as something unavoidable, fated.

  Some of the women accused him of being a coward, of being in denial, of taking the exasperating ostrich head-in-the-sand approach; the majority actually preferred the unreality of the silencing manoeuvres to the reality of an open, shouting match. They said the first left happy memories long after everything was over, the second only a bitter taste in the mouth. The first might not solve the problem, the second always made it worse. Talk it out, said the counsellors, let everything come out in the open, shout, scream at each other, and you will feel the better for it. They did not know how wrong they were; most men and women felt exhausted and drained, not purged and cleansed.

  Emily had told her that she once wrote out all the questions she wanted to ask her wayward husband and forced him to answer them, one after the other, screaming if he demurred or hesitated, even making him go down on his knees and swear on the Bible. The experience took such a heavy physical, mental and emotional toll on her that she went into deep depression soon afterwards. ‘Nothing changed really,’ she said bitterly afterwards. ‘I wasn’t at all proud of what I did.’ Her husband had something of Dr Phang’s cool unflappability; all her screams and curses and tears simply washed over him, like water off the proverbial duck, and he emerged from the storm to go out of the room and bring back a glass of water to stop her fit of coughing.

  At their very first lunch together, some months, after her husband’s death, he made it clear to Maria, in that famously effective strategy of deflection and silence, that their presence together, so precious because it would be necessarily limited to quick lunches in one of the lesser known restaurants and coffee-houses in town, would brook no intrusion to detract from its pure pleasure. ‘Precious’? Why? How? Her vanity cried out to hear the reasons. He had once said to her, ‘You know, I enjoy listening to your stories! You are a born story-teller!’ But surely he sought out her company for more than her story-telling prowess? Again her vanity wanted to hear more. ‘Necessarily’? Why so? Did his wife already suspect something? What would he do if she did? Suppose she had already engaged a private detective?