by S. P. Hozy
“Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I love the life here. You know, the adventure, the experience, and all that. Something to remember in my old age, for sure. But you give up a lot when you come here: marriage, family, they all have to wait. Not many women are willing to chuck it all in and take a chance on love in the Far East. And the Company …” and here he hesitated before continuing, “… frowns, shall we say, on employees marrying before they’ve been here long enough to save up a nice tidy sum of money. So, female companionship, at least of the English kind,” he chuckled again, “is scarce as hen’s teeth.”
“Come, come,” I said. “Are you telling me all of you want to settle down with a wife and children? Because if you are,” and I raised a skeptical eyebrow, “I can only conclude you’ve been spending too much time in the sun without a hat on.”
Rodney threw back his head and laughed. “Right,” he said. “It does sound a bit daft. I guess it’s just that you always want what you can’t have. If the place were teeming with available young women, we’d probably ignore them half the time, and complain about their meddling the other half.”
“Agreed,” I said, and smiled. “I guess it’s human nature.”
We contemplated for a moment, and I looked over at Rodney. He was watching Adele, who was chatting with the only other female at the party, a thin, matronly woman in a dark green crepe dress with a white collar. Her dull brown hair was severely pulled back into a small knot, and a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles sat on her nose. She looked to be about forty-five, but was probably in her early thirties. She was the wife of the vicar who had married the young couple, and was no doubt giving Adele some sound advice on how to manage married life in Singapore. Adele occasionally nodded her head in agreement and once even laughed at something the vicar’s wife said.
“She’s lovely, isn’t she?” I said to Rodney.
“Yes,” he said, “she is.”
“Do you think she’ll be all right?” I asked. “From what you’ve told me, it’s not much of a life for a woman out here. Especially a young woman, newly married.”
“That’s right,” he said. “She probably won’t find too many friends here.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Not connected,” he said matter-of-factly. “Her husband’s not in business and he’s not in the M.C.S. His only friends are bachelors like me.”
“Ah,” I said. “I see the problem.”
“It won’t be easy for her, that’s for sure. I doubt she has any idea what’s in store for her. And she’s left everything she cares about behind in England. Except for Tommy, of course,” he added, almost as an afterthought.
“Yes, of course. Tommy,” I said. “Think he’ll do right by her?”
Rodney chuckled. “He’d better,” he said quietly, “or he’ll have to answer to me.”
I thought it best not to comment and waited for him to go on.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he said, pouring more whisky into our glasses. “I like Tommy. He’s a good chap. But writing’s not a real job, know what I mean?”
I nodded my head. Indeed, I did know what he meant.
“You can’t eat dreams. And words and sentences, no matter how brilliant, don’t pay the rent.” He laughed at this, as if he’d made a joke. But it was an uncomfortable laugh, as if he’d recognized a profounder truth than he’d intended.
“But he has money enough for now, hasn’t he?” I asked. For hadn’t someone said that Tommy had come to Singapore with a stake that would last him five years?
“Yes,” said Rodney, “it’s what I’ve heard. What we all believe. But what if he isn’t willing to give up this writing thing if it doesn’t pan out? What if one of them gets sick, God forbid, or there’s a baby? Then the five years becomes two or three, right? Things don’t always work out the way we plan them. Am I right?”
“Yes,” I said. “You’re right. You can’t plan for the unexpected.”
“Exactly,” he said. “My point exactly. And I wonder if Tommy’s thought about that and thought this thing through to all its possible conclusions.”
By this time, Rodney and I had consumed a fair amount of the whisky his generosity had provided. We were both a good way into our cups, I must say, and when that happens, one doesn’t always think of how wonderful the world is and how lucky we are to be inhabiting it. I’m sure we each imagined a dismal fate for the unsuspecting young couple, who had only been married a few hours at this point. Rodney lifted his right arm and dropped it heavily on my shoulders.
“Just between you and me,” he said, focusing his reddening eyes on mine, “I think she’s too good for him.”
“Ah, yes,” I said. “I see.”
“She could have any man in this room,” he said, waving his left arm in a sweeping motion that took in the small party of seemingly unconnected individuals, including the good Reverend, a few other Guthrie’s fellows, and a couple of Chinese waiters. “Any one of them,” he repeated.
“I’m sure you’re right,” I said, “but she’s chosen Tommy. For better or for worse.”
“Better or worse,” he mumbled.
I did not hear how things turned out for Tommy and Adele for many years. By that time I was living in Monte Carlo and was a frequent guest at the salon of Lady Brett Winstone, a woman of exceptional beauty and intelligence who liked the company of writers and artists and who entertained those travellers who passed through the small kingdom of Monaco when heading for eastern and western destinations. At one of these affairs, I found myself chatting amiably with a gentleman who had spent nearly two decades in Malaya in the employ of Guthrie’s.
“Guthrie’s?” I queried. “I met a chap several years ago in Singapore who was employed at Guthrie’s. It was at a wedding, as I recall. At the Raffles Hotel. He and his mate were generously picking up the tab for the young couple. The groom was a writer or, at least, aspired to be a writer.”
The man, well into the encumbrances of middle age — paunchy, slightly balding, and of a florid complexion — threw back his head and laughed. “Yes, yes,” he said, “that was me. Rodney Sewell, it is, and glad to see you again.” We shook hands and I re-introduced myself. “We put away a good amount of whisky that day, didn’t we?” he said. “I cursed you the next day, I did. But we were both much younger then, weren’t we, old chap?”
Indeed we were, I said, and we chatted amiably for a few minutes, catching up on the years that had intervened between our two encounters.
“By the way,” I said, “I’ve often wondered what became of the young couple who were married that day. Tommy and Adele, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, yes,” he said. “Tommy and Adele.” He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a cigar. “Do you mind?” he asked. I shook my head and he prepared and lit the end before continuing. Perhaps he needed the time to recollect the events he would relate to me.
“Very sad,” he said, finally, slowly shaking his head. “I’m afraid it all ended rather badly.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. I’ve thought of them over the years and always hoped it had worked out for them.”
“Fever,” he said. “Poor chap died quite soon after and she was left with very little once she’d paid his debts. He’d told her he had enough money to live on for five years, but that was a lie. He barely had enough for five months. And when that was gone, he’d got himself tangled up with the damnable Chinese moneylenders, and that’s a life sentence, let me tell you. But what was she to do? It wasn’t five minutes after she buried him that they came after her for the money. She couldn’t leave and she couldn’t stay. It wasn’t as if she could go out and get a job. Poor girl. Poor, poor girl.”
I remembered that he’d been half in love with her at the wedding, but I didn’t know how to broach the subject. I needn’t have worried; he brought it up himself.
“I wanted so badly to help her. I cared for her, you know,” he said, looking at me through the smoke of his cigar. “Would have married
her myself if I could have. But the Company, you know, wouldn’t allow it. I hadn’t finished my two terms yet and they were very strict about that sort of thing. I did what I could,” he said, shaking his head, “but it wasn’t enough. I couldn’t save her.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Drowned herself,” he replied. “At least, that’s what they said it was. Suicide. But I never believed it. Didn’t want to believe it, I guess.” He flicked the ash from his cigar into an elaborate Venetian glass ashtray that a footman had placed on a nearby table. “Nearly left Guthrie’s over it,” he continued. “Blamed them and their stupid, stupid rules. I could have saved her, I believed. Believed it for a long time. But now I’m not so sure. Time and all that, makes a man think differently.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, looking at me with those same eyes that I had looked into so many years earlier, except this time the redness, I suspected, was from tears.
“She didn’t love me, did she?”
Chapter Seven
Maris had no trouble finding information about Edward Sutcliffe Moresby at the public library. Moresby was a British novelist and short story writer who was born in 1887 and died in 1965. He led a fairly peripatetic life due to a small independent income left to him by his grandfather. His travels took him to the Orient, including Thailand, Malaya and Singapore, India, and Ceylon. He eventually settled in Monte Carlo, in a seventeenth-century villa, but never gave up travelling. He wrote twenty-five novels and a hundred short stories that were based on his travels and the people he met. He usually cast himself in the role of narrator and most of his stories were variations on real events in his own life.
His father, a well-known barrister, died when Moresby was nine. He was raised by his mother Maud, with whom he had a close relationship until her death at ninety-one. He never married and, although he had friendships with both men and women, he seems not to have had any lasting attachments except the one with his mother. There was much speculation regarding his sexuality, but no cache of hidden love letters or confessional autobiographies ever settled the matter one way or the other.
Maris recalled reading one of Moresby’s novels in high school. It was his most famous and, it was believed, the most autobiographical of his books. The Heart’s Prisoner was the story of a young man who becomes an Anglican minister like his father because his family pressures him into it. The church was to have been the calling of his elder brother, but that brother died from a weak heart when he was just fourteen. The character becomes involved with a woman of ill repute when he tries to save her from a life of prostitution. She nearly destroys him, but he escapes by deciding to leave the church and leave England. Moresby had studied law at university in an effort to follow in his illustrious father’s footsteps and please his mother, but he discovered he hated the profession and didn’t have the temperament for law. He wanted to be a writer.
Maris couldn’t remember Peter’s ever mentioning Moresby or his books, and was no closer to knowing why he’d left her the first editions. Except perhaps because they were first editions and therefore valuable. But still, why did he collect only Moresby’s books? Surely there were plenty of more valuable first editions he could have acquired.
Maris could find no connection between Edward Sutcliffe Moresby and someone with the initials AS, which was odd because they were the two sole occupants of the trunk Peter had left her. Why? There must be a connection, she thought. But Peter hadn’t left any clues. Maybe he would have told her about the bequest if he had lived long enough. He would have thought there was plenty of time for that — and why not? What forty-five-year-old man expects to die suddenly after drinking a glass of his favourite aperitif?
Maris looked around the library. There was hardly anyone there on a Tuesday afternoon and she was overcome by a feeling of loneliness as powerful and frightening as suffocation. She was afraid that if she closed her eyes, someone would push a pillow onto her face and smother her. It was as if something was slowly sucking the air from the room, the way her mother had taught her to use a straw to pull the air out of a plastic freezer bag before sealing the contents. “It needs to be airtight,” her mother said, “because nothing lives in a vacuum, including bacteria.”
Living in a vacuum. That’s what her life felt like right now: an airless, colourless, germ-free void where nothing was happening. Why couldn’t she shake this funk that had been gripping her since Peter’s death? Shouldn’t she have recovered by now? Had Peter’s death been such a blow that it could send her to this place of virtual stasis? She thought she was made of sterner stuff than that, thought she was more resilient. Yet when faced with tragedy — it was the first time she had experienced the death of someone she cared about — she had folded in on herself. Granted, it was murder, and a seemingly irrational, unexplainable, and senseless death, so she gave herself that. Her grief had another layer of difficulty piled on top of it, one that robbed her of solace every time she thought of it. Who had the emotional toolkit to deal with the trauma of murder?
Should she talk to a shrink? Ray thought so, and even Dinah had mentioned it before Maris left Singapore. But every part of Maris resisted taking that path. She didn’t want to say it was because she was an artist — that seemed so pretentious, like a hoity-toity cop-out. She was who she was and who she was raised to be: a stubborn, independent person who expressed herself creatively through painting. That was central to her existence. Otherwise, what was the point? Without art, what was the point of getting up every morning? Of breathing? It all just seemed like waiting for death. Getting through the day was simply moving closer to death. When had getting through the day become a reason for living?
Chapter Eight
Francis and Sutty watched as the Narkunda steamed into the port of Singapore. As always, when a ship arrived from England, there was a sense of excitement on shore that exceeded the anticipations of Christmas morning and the giddiness that resulted from betting on a winning horse at the races. It seemed as if all of British Singapore turned out to welcome the arrival of the ship and everything on it, including the passengers, the crew, and the long-awaited cargo. What if the newspaper headlines were more than a month old? The jams and the tinned puddings and the salted hams would be as fresh as the day they were packed. The young women would be spirited and beautiful, and the wives and soldiers returning from a visit home would be full of stories of family and friends. The break from the monotony of life in a colonial outpost and the drudgery of a strictly regulated military or commercial routine was more welcome than a cool bath at the end of the day and a gin and tonic before dinner at the club.
Francis, who clutched a small bouquet of flowers, had been beside himself for days. While he had been anticipating Annabelle’s arrival, at the same time he was dreading that she would be disappointed and would want to turn around and head straight back to England. Sutty had tried everything to keep him distracted from his own thoughts, including playing gin rummy for toothpicks, reading aloud back issues of the London Times as well as David Copperfield, the only one of his books Francis had professed not to have read. But he couldn’t be with him every hour and Francis had turned up for breakfast the last three days looking like he’d been out all night on one of the ubiquitous fishing boats that brought in the night’s catch as the sun was rising.
“Can you see her yet?” Francis asked, standing on his toes and craning his neck to add another couple of inches to his height.
“No, not yet,” replied Sutty. “But I’m sure she’ll be in your arms within the hour.” He silently said a prayer that Annabelle was on the ship. It was entirely possible that she had decided at the last minute not to come, and had not written Francis to let him know. She had been so reluctant that Sutty was more surprised than Francis when she had agreed to come. They had both been counting the days since then, Francis because he wanted so much to be with her again, and Sutty because he wanted Francis to finally set aside his disquiet a
nd come back down to earth. He didn’t know a man could sustain such a degree of anxiety without succumbing to something worse, like catatonia or fever, or even suicide. She’d better be on that ship or she’ll be hearing from me, Sutty thought, silently composing the cable he would send straightaway.
“I don’t see her,” bleated Francis, like a lost sheep. This must be what the poets meant by “lovesick,” Sutty thought. Francis was literally sick with love and longing.
“The ship hasn’t docked yet,” he said, trying to sound patient and reasonable. “Maybe she’s finishing her packing and hasn’t come up on deck yet. Or maybe she’s there and you just haven’t spotted her.”
But he might as well have saved his breath. Francis wasn’t listening and there wasn’t anything he wanted to hear from Sutty except: “There she is. I see her now.”
The business of docking a ship is a slow one, and Sutty wished he’d delayed their arriving at the port by at least another hour. Standing here with Francis, watching and waiting, was excruciating. It would have been easier to have a tooth pulled.
“Why don’t we go and have a drink?” he suggested. “It’s going to be a while before they start letting the passengers off, and then there’s customs and all that nonsense. No point standing out here in the hot sun.”
“No,” said Francis. “She’ll be expecting to see me and if I’m not here she’ll be frightened. I’d better wait. She’s never been outside England before, let alone in a place as foreign as this. I mean, it’s not like going to France or Germany, is it? She won’t know what to make of it.”
“All right,” said Sutty, giving in to the inevitable. “But let’s at least wait in the shade.”
They found some shelter from the blazing sun beneath an overhang and watched as the giant passenger ship slowly slid into port, guided by a couple of stubby-looking tugs. It was a thing of beauty to see and it brought back to Sutty the urge to travel that ships and the sea always gave him. How many passenger ships and freighters had he boarded, with nothing but a portmanteau and a satchel of books, to search out some distant outpost in the jungle, some place he had heard about from captain or crew, where almost nobody ever went but where there was always a story or two to be heard from lonely men sent to the outer reaches of the Empire? If Francis suffered from lovesickness, did Sutty suffer from wanderlust? Absolutely, he thought. Sometimes he ached from it, longed to be on the move, to feel the miles moving under him, taking him further away from where he was and bringing him closer to wherever he was going.
