Relentlessly, her mind finished his sentence for him: And you, Roxanne, are not helpless. You can stand anything. You have. With a bleak expression, she turned away. “Of course you must go, Leighton,” she heard herself say in a mechanical voice. “Of course you must.” And then with a little break in her voice, “When—when are you leaving?”
“Tomorrow.” He sounded drained. “I’ve already bought my ticket, Roxanne . . . I’ve deposited money to your account in the bank. It will be enough to live on, enough to take you back to the States if you want to go.”
“Thank you,” she murmured.
He seized her by the shoulders, turned her around to face him and stared down into her woebegone countenance. “Oh, Roxanne,” he said huskily. “If I had known you first, loved you first . . .”
“I know,” she said softly, bright tears glimmering on her long lashes. She had thought herself a wife, but . . . there was a real wife who had surfaced once again, a woman with a prior claim. And she, the make-believe wife, was to be cast off. Bitter tea indeed. . . . She straightened her shoulders. “Then since it’s our last night,” she tried to smile, “we must make the most of it. Have you eaten?”
He had not. Roxanne clapped her hands. Swiftly food was prepared—but neither of them was hungry. They sat on cushions in friendly fashion on either side of a low carved teakwood table and toyed with their food, and afterward lounged on the balcony and drank. They spent the entire evening together in misery, while Leighton—as if he owed it to her—told her the whole heartrending story of his long love affair with the reckless girl in Georgetown who had at last come to grief.
Leighton talked about Allison—but Roxanne did not hear him. She let the wind from the South China Sea blow her hair and looked out at the ocean that would take him away from her, and listened to the sound of his rich voice with its undertone of tragedy—Allison’s tragedy that had seared him too. Through his tortured eyes, Roxanne could see Allison standing there, lovely and shallow and spoiled. Wanting her golden giant, but wanting other men too. Unwilling to give up a single iota of her sparkling life to make her marriage work.
Roxanne dropped her lashes to her cheeks, lest Leighton see this stark accusation in her eyes. He was blind to his Allison’s faults—let it be so, now that she would never walk again. Perhaps Allison would change, perhaps she would love him now. Desperately, Roxanne hoped so. Leighton deserved love.
It was a long evening, awash with champagne. And at the end of it Leighton did not make love to her. She wished he had. Instead he kissed the top of her fair head and then, almost reverently, her lips.
“If it weren’t for Allison . . .” he said.
Her sapphire eyes big and dark with suffering for them both, Roxanne nodded wordlessly. She understood. Suddenly she flung herself against him and clung to him. “I wish you all the luck,” she whispered against his deep chest. “I hope Allison gets well and that everything works out for you.”
The sky in the east had turned to gold and she realized they had talked all night.
Still feeling it could not be true, she dressed in the thin blue linen dress that was his favorite and set atop her fluffy pompadour a wide-brimmed straw hat topped with tulle and linen bows. In brilliant sunshine, she went with Leighton to the docks. He had already checked out of his hotel; his luggage was waiting for him at dockside. Seabirds wheeled overhead; the docks were crowded, full of strange sights and smells; and the sounds of a dozen languages swirled about them. Bending down from his great height, Leighton gravely kissed her good-bye, a lingering kiss full of sweetness . . . and gratitude for the time they had spent together. But even as he kissed her, she knew his heart and mind were elsewhere, with a woman who lay in a hospital bed and who had beckoned him back across the miles.
Roxanne drew back from him and stood quietly, back straight and head held high in the wide straw hat, and watched him ascend the gangplank. From the top he turned to wave. Roxanne swallowed and waved back. With the wind whipping her bell-like skirts and fashionable leg-o’-mutton sleeves, she stood and watched as the ship steamed away from her, watched until it was only a distant speck that disappeared across the horizon and the smudge of its smokestacks was lost in the blue cauldron of the sky.
Soberly she stared out at that empty ocean that had swallowed him up and then turned back to her rickshaw with a sigh. She had lost her golden giant. Whether Allison lived or died, she knew he would never come back to her. That part of her life was over, gone like precious jewels tucked away in a velvet box to be taken out and wept over in remembrance.
It was a sad woman who closed her dainty parasol and wended her way by rickshaw back to an empty house filled only with yesterday’s flowers and impassive servants who spoke Chinese. She looked about her gloomily. She had felt herself married and now, without warning, she found herself divorced.
Chapter 33
Leighton’s going did not pass unnoticed. Word was whispered around Singapore soon enough of an injured wife who had managed to call Leighton back to her bedside. Quietly Roxanne found herself dropped from the garden parties and the balls. No longer did she take tea in rose gardens with diplomatic wives. Her calls were not returned. Those on whom she called, ones whom she had thought friends, were unaccountably out. She was no longer received in polite society.
She was not without friends, of course. Men flocked around. And if Roxanne on many occasions felt the hurt of being cut dead by women with whom she had taken tea only a short time before, she refused to show it. Although she might have collapsed in her house in silent misery, this sudden ostracism stiffened her spine. Determinedly, she appeared in public, wearing her best, her brightest clothes, her most spectacular hats. Let them talk—she would not skulk in corners!
Soon she began to take spiteful amusement in luring away the husbands of her former friends—even though she did not want them. She surrounded herself by men, admiring men attracted by her beauty, her sparkling wit. But her bruised heart found little solace in her newfound popularity. Many men pursued her. She had brief affairs with several of them.
The first was a British colonel who bragged about her in the officers’ mess, who escorted her proudly about the city by rickshaw and squired her to such parties as Roxanne was now invited to—parties given by women who, like herself, had been dropped for various scandalous reasons, some of them mere unfortunates, some the genuine demimonde. Roxanne did not much like these parties, but they were noisy and crowded and they filled in the time before she had to go home to face an empty house—so empty without Leighton. She lost her colonel when his wife came out from Hampshire, bringing with her their two charming children.
Fiercely, Roxanne told herself she did not care. Her Chinese cook was stabbed in an altercation in the marketplace, and Roxanne got herself a new cook—an Indian one, and switched from Cantonese dishes to chutneys and curries. They were very hot, but no hotter than her burning pride. She would not give up!
During the winter, she began going out with a British civil servant, a quiet mustachioed widower who had bided his time in the hope of catching the beautiful American widow on the rebound. He squired restless Roxanne about Singapore’s noisy Chinatown, with its wayangs, Chinese opera, puppet shows and nerve-wracking percussion musical instruments. Because he loved her too much and she was afraid she would hurt him, she brought the affair to an abrupt halt in early spring and took up with a rubber planter.
The British civil servant went back to Liverpool, and the rubber planter began to educate Roxanne by enlarging her view of the Malay Peninsula. Along with other friends, a raffish lot, he took her on excursions into the interior of Johore to see palaces and temples that seemed to her Western eyes older than time itself. Together they explored Singapore in depth. Joss Houses, even opium dens—they saw it all. But somewhere, he too had a wife, one who loved the isolation of a plantation and never came to town. To Roxanne that woman was a shadow wife, unreal. But she was made aware of her presence forcefully when the rubber plan
ter returned to his trees and was never seen again.
A woman alone, she found herself once more at loose ends, and during the next months she played the field, refusing to ally herself with any of the interested and amorous gentlemen who found pleasure in her company. Most of them, she knew, regarded a liaison with her as something to be remembered later, reckless and romantic evenings to be recalled for the telling when they journeyed elsewhere. In officers’ quarters, in men’s clubs, in casinos, over cards and dice and after-dinner brandy. ... Ah, let me tell you about the blond I knew in Singapore. . . . Thinking about that, her sapphire eyes hardened. At their jokes she smiled, their gifts she regarded lightly. The men who gave them were to her but ships that passed in the night and meant little to her.
Sometimes as she regarded herself in her teakwood mirror, silently gazing at her figure, clad in the light silks, the drifting organzas that suited this hot climate—a figure that was the envy of every woman in Singapore—she would ask herself why it had all turned out so badly. Why, she wondered, had her startling good looks not brought her happiness? Why on hot restless nights, did a man’s face float accusingly before her so that she could find no peace.
Then, with a sigh, she would turn and give an order to her watchful servants in her worldly, throaty, sophisticated voice and get ready to go out. She was always going out. For the round of parties continued like a merry-go-round that never stopped and from which nobody ever got off—except to die. Like the others—those exiles who had begun the slow terrible slide down into the dark depths of the East—she needed parties and frivolity to raise her flagging spirits, to assure her that the final inevitable degradation was not going to happen.
At a party given by a down-at-the-heel Russian countess whose husband had long since cast her off, celebrating the Festival of the Chinese Moon, Roxanne met Jan van Vlynen, a Dutch planter from Sumatra on holiday in Singapore.
It was a breathless night, starless, with the promise of rain in the air. The French windows of the countess’s living room were thrown open to the night, and from the garden outside the heavy scent of tropical flowers reached her guests. Wearing a daringly low-cut black lace dress, which exhibited the full lines of her white bosom, and the pearl necklace that had been a gift from Leighton the Christmas before, Roxanne sat on a teak and cushion sofa toying with a stemmed glass of champagne. Around her, conversation buzzed and laughter rippled as the decaying oddments of exotic Singapore—proud outpost of a British empire on which the sun never set—laughed and flirted and drank themselves into oblivion.
Beside her, his glittering eyes fixed lasciviously on her white shoulders and softly rising and falling bust, sat a cashiered Army officer who managed to swagger even when he was seated. Roxanne was only half listening to his bragging tale about having shot fifteen tigers during his recent stay in India, when she turned to see across the crowded room a deeply tanned man of medium height with dark brown hair and brown eyes. He was looking at her with the mute beseeching intensity of a drowning man grasping at a straw. As she met his gaze, that expression instantly left his face, to be replaced by a look both courteous and bland. But she had seen it for a flashing instant, that raw naked need, and she responded to it with a touch of pity.
She gave him a vivid smile of encouragement and lifted her glass, meaning by that slight gesture to say: Take heart. Life is not yet over for either of us.
Taking her smile as an invitation, he came over to meet her.
Their hostess, the Russian countess, standing nearby, introduced them with an arch look. The cashiered Army officer stiffened with irritation as van Vlynen gave him only the barest of greetings and, bending, formally kissed Roxanne’s hand. Immediately, the Dutchman seated himself on her other side and engaged her in conversation, to the fury of the officer. This amused Roxanne, who hated tiger-hunting and thought it too bad to see the beautiful beasts brought down to make a stuffed head or a fur rug for someone’s feet. She turned an insolent white shoulder to him and concentrated on van Vlynen. After a few seething moments, the officer leaped to his feet and transferred his attentions to their hostess, a woman who was glad enough to receive them.
Roxanne hardly noticed his defection. Something about the Dutchman’s weathered leather-like face held her attention. Perhaps it was the quality of his concentration; she had the odd feeling that they were alone in the room as he told her in his fluent but accented English that this hot evening was “cool compared with Sumatra” which lay directly under the equator.
Sumatra . . . Roxanne thought of steaming jungles. She asked him about it and listened attentively as he told her of his pepper plantation in the interior.
After the party, van Vlynen drove her home to her rented house in the carriage he had borrowed from his own host, a former Sumatran planter now residing in Singapore. The stars were out, brilliant against the blackness of the sky.
“I will see you again, yes?” he asked earnestly when the carriage stopped.
Roxanne, alighting with his help, smiled up at him, her eyes reflecting the brilliance of the myriad stars that floated above the city. “If you like, Mr. van Vlynen.”
Before the week was out she was calling him Jan. Before the month was out—and he had overstayed his vacation in Singapore, he told her gravely—they were seen everywhere together. He brought her flowers and little gifts such as one might give a lady, not the expensive trifles that one might give a scarlet woman. She found that very sweet. As they rode through the busy port city, Jan filled her ears with stories of Sumatra—and of Amsterdam, the city of his youth. Roxanne’s mind was full of tulips and windmills as they wended their way past pagodas and Chinese bungalows and huge “godowns,” or warehouses filled with goods from all the countries of the world.
They attended dinner parties and balls in some of the handsome houses they passed in these drives. For although van Vlynen’s credentials were not so overwhelming as Leighton’s, and although aristocratic English did not receive him with open arms, he still had many friends among the wealthy planters. With a bright defiant smile, Roxanne faced the speculative gaze of the men and their wary wives, who were undoubtedly aware of her fast reputation Beside her, a man of leather and steel, van Vlynen was impassive. His cool manner announced to all that Roxanne was a woman under his protection and therefore above reproach. Roxanne, who had suffered so many slights, found her heart softening toward the stern-eyed Dutchman.
She told herself she was tired of the tinsel merry-go-round of her existence, tired of being feted for her beauty alone by people who cared nothing for her. She was ready for the look she saw in the wiry Dutchman’s eyes. But before he had time to present his proposal, Roxanne was on her way to a very different sort of liaison.
It happened on the balcony of her small house over-looking the sea. After a rather stuffy dinner party at the house of one of van Vlynen’s friends, Roxanne, who had been bothered with a slight headache, had sent the Dutchman on his way when he escorted her home. Resting now, sipping a cool drink, she gazed up at the stars and tried not to think of the depressing alternatives her future promised. Half overcome by the oppressive heat and too lazy to get ready for bed, she put her glass on the floor and closed her eyes in the hot darkness.
How long she lay there she did not know, but she came awake to a large dark shape looming over her, a shape that obscured the moon. As she sprang up, opening her mouth to scream, a hand was clamped over it. Then a cloth—a sheet, perhaps—was thrown over her, and she was swept up, kicking and clawing, to be held against a hard body. She could hear padding footsteps, as her captor carried her downstairs . . . and out into the small scented garden at the rear, where she could feel the slap of the lush tropical vegetation as vines and leaves and branches brushed her; but her face, covered by the material, was pressed tightly against a thudding chest, and she could see nothing.
Stifled, fighting for air, and more frightened than she had ever been in her life, Roxanne felt consciousness slipping away. She was jolted to
awareness again when she was set down in an uncomfortably cramped space. As she lay face down, whatever had been thrown over her head was loosened, and a piece of cloth was stuffed in her mouth to prevent her from screaming. Her streaming hair obscured her vision. She struck out, but a pair of arms promptly pinioned her and held her fast as some sort of wheeled vehicle took her and her captor away.
Part Three
The Indian Ocean
1903-1904
Chapter 34
They were moving through the water; she could tell.
Pirates, she thought, half-fainting. I’ve been abducted by the Chinese pirates everybody talks about!
She felt herself being carried up the side of a ship and heaved over the rail. Then she was taken across the deck, a door opened, and she was tossed onto the softness of a bunk. And left there, face down, bound and gagged in the darkness as the door closed behind her. Weakly she struggled for air. Around her she could hear the creaking of a ship, feel its motions as its sails took the wind. They were bound for somewhere, God knew where, on a sailing vessel. In silent terror, Roxanne prayed.
A great deal of time passed and she had the feeling they must be far out at sea.
Although she was bound and turned so that she could not see the door, the shaft of moonlight that came into the cabin when it opened showed her a man’s shadow on the wall. Then the door closed, and there was darkness again until a lamp flared up. Footsteps padded over to her. She was untied and ungagged, and she heard her kidnapper step back away from her.
Like some proud, fierce animal at bay, Roxanne sprang up and whirled to face her captor.
These Golden Pleasures Page 40
