by S. P. Hozy
“I think I see her,” said Francis, wishing he had brought a pair of binoculars. “Over there,” he told Sutty, pointing to a section near the ship’s stern. “See?” Sutty couldn’t make out anyone, let alone a young woman travelling alone. But he went along with Francis’s sighting to keep them both occupied.
“I think so,” he said. “Bravo.”
He followed Francis, who was moving closer to the landing dock, but the surge of people ahead of them was almost impenetrable.
“Damn!” said Francis. “I hope she can see me.” He started waving his arms and calling, “Annabelle, Annabelle” at the top of his voice, but it was an act of futility. The din was almost deafening, and it escalated with each new activity from the direction of the ship. When the gangplank was finally in place, and the first of the passengers began to descend, Sutty watched Francis’s face change expression from expectant, to joyful, to disappointed, and back to expectant again every time a young woman stepped onto the gangway joining ship to ground.
Sutty closed his eyes and muttered a silent prayer. Please, please be here.
Francis, too, was saying his own prayer. For if Annabelle had come and wanted only to turn back, he would be at his wits’ end. He would have no solution to offer. He would be beaten, brokenhearted, bottomed out, and buggered. It would mean going back to England, getting a job he would hate, and giving up his dream of being a writer. He couldn’t stay on in Singapore without her. He’d learned that much in the few months they’d been apart. He’d made a few friends. There were the boys from Guthrie’s he’d met at the weekend cricket matches. They’d had some good times and were a jolly bunch. And there was Sutty, of course, who was always there to pick up the bar tab or pay for the laundry before they brought it up to the room. Sutty, trying to make his, Francis’s, life a little easier. And maybe he was also trying to help a struggling young writer, like he had once been. Of course, he hadn’t struggled so desperately, so despairingly. Sutty had an income, in perpetuity, so there was no fear of starvation on the horizon. No sense of time running out. No one he loved and couldn’t live without. Sutty was a self-contained man of purpose who never seemed to have doubts, although they must have been there in the beginning. All writers have doubts about their ability. Francis knew that. All writers questioned their talent, convinced themselves they had none, and then convinced themselves equally that they had an abundance but nobody appreciated the fact and they would die in obscurity.
But Annabelle believed in him and that was what mattered, even when he didn’t believe in himself. Or did she? I’m a hopeless romantic, he thought. Nobody wanted him to be a writer, especially Annabelle. Not even Sutty. He was alone in this game — completely and utterly alone. There wasn’t another soul in the world who knew the kind of hopelessness he felt when he faced the wall of rejection and tried to scale it without any support, any assistance, any —
“Francis!” He heard his name being called and his mind snapped out of its downward spiralling reverie. At last! She was here, throwing herself into his arms. All was well. The world was set right again and he could breathe a sigh of relief. He could begin to write again.
Sutty breathed a sigh of relief, too, and gave a silent prayer of thanks to whatever gods had granted his first wish. Annabelle had come. And what a lovely thing she is, he thought, She was small and slender, with a magnificent head of thick, auburn-coloured hair that reminded him of the sun setting in Somerset. Her skin was exquisitely pale and clear. It, too, reminded him of England, where dewy complexions were often seen and admired. Sutty had no great fondness for the Oriental complexion. Although he could appreciate its beauty on an aesthetic level, it didn’t cause his heart to swell or his loins to heat up. He didn’t think it was a racial thing, just a male to female preference.
He suddenly understood why Francis couldn’t live without Annabelle. He had forgotten how alluring, unpretentious, fresh, and adoring she was. She had flung her arms around Francis’s neck and squeezed her eyes shut with relief at finding him waiting for her. He was all that mattered at that moment. She had waited for this moment for months. And all the trauma and turmoil, the worry and indecision, the unknowing that had tormented her since he’d left, melted away as she held him, melted like ice cream on a hot day, leaving only sweetness and delight.
“Francis, Francis,” she whispered. “I’m here. At last.”
After a few minutes, they unwound their arms from each other and Francis turned to Sutty. “Annabelle,” he said, “you remember my good friend, Edward Sutcliffe Moresby? Sutty?”
Sutty smiled and took Annabelle’s hand. “Delighted,” he said, “to finally see you again. Welcome to Singapore.”
Annabelle smiled warmly at Sutty and noted that he had a few white hairs in his well-trimmed beard that hadn’t been there before. Otherwise, he was the same. His blue eyes almost twinkled as he shook her hand. He seemed genuinely pleased to see her. Annabelle looked around for the first time and surveyed her surroundings. Sutty noted that her lovely pale complexion was already turning pink from the heat and a light sheen of perspiration covered her face.
“My, it’s hot,” she said, laughing at her discomfort and fanning her face with her gloved hand. “Is it always like this?”
“Yes, my dear,” laughed Francis, “I’m afraid so. It takes some getting used to.”
They were married the following week in the chapel of St. Andrew’s church, with a small reception dinner in the bar at the Raffles Hotel. The ceremony was attended by Francis’s cricket-playing chums from Guthrie’s and a couple of Sutty’s friends who he played bridge with on Sundays. Sutty was best man and the vicar’s wife played matron of honour to the bride. Annabelle wore the same grey wool suit she’d worn on her arrival, along with white gloves because her hands always felt moist in the heat and this embarrassed her. She wore a smart little cloche hat in a shade slightly darker than her suit that was rimmed in white velvet, and she carried a small bunch of white orchids that Sutty had paid for. Her ivory silk stockings and cream-coloured kid leather shoes she had brought from England. She looked lovely but was clearly feeling the effects of the Singapore heat. She frequently dabbed at the beads of perspiration on her forehead with a white linen handkerchief, one of a dozen that her best friend Jean had given her as a wedding present and going-away gift.
Francis was nervous throughout the ceremony and kept tugging at his collar. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down every time he swallowed, and he swallowed deeply each time he spoke. He’d lost weight since coming to Singapore, and there was enough room between his collar and his neck to allow all four of his fingers to rest comfortably.
Fortunately, the vicar kept the service brief and they were soon able to adjourn to the hotel bar for the reception dinner. A sit-down dinner for twelve had been arranged and paid for by Sutty — “Call it a wedding gift,” he’d told them — with the Guthrie’s men occasionally returning from a trip to the bar with a full bottle of wine or whisky. They ate English-style roast beef with carrots and potatoes and gravy, thick hunks of Yorkshire pudding, and a wedding cake that tasted like coconut with lots of pink-coloured frosting. Francis and Annabelle laughed a lot and listened to speeches that the guests insisted on making as the evening progressed and the bottles emptied. It was a wedding in the spirit of all weddings — a celebration of love and hope. Even the vicar’s wife, a dour-looking woman in funereal brown crepe, made a misty-eyed declaration that love and marriage were gifts from God and that two people couldn’t be more fortunate than to embrace the Christian values of marriage and family. “Hear, hear” and “Amen” were heard around the table and Francis and Annabelle thanked everyone for sharing their wedding day. The vicar then chimed in with his blessing and all glasses were raised in a toast to the happy couple.
Sutty joined in the festivities but a small part of his heart was heavy and he wasn’t sure why. Did he have misgivings about the success of the marriage? Did he wonder if Francis could write his book? Was he fearful
for the delicate English bride, Annabelle, who already showed signs of discomfort in her new surroundings? Or was he just being pessimistic in a writerly way, looking too hard and seeing what wasn’t really there?
Sutty knew that all things took time. Not everyone adapted to or thrived on change the way he did. He looked around at the young men from Guthrie’s who lent the party exuberant energy as only young men can. They shared a camaraderie that encompassed both their joys and their disappointments. These young men had all signed on for an adventure, the experience of a tour of the Far East, hoping it would give them a leg up on the future. They seemed continually to be on the brink of that future, building something that seemed intangible in the present, but that would someday be measurable — wealth, success, property, possessions: the things that came with time and hard work. Sutty knew that not all of them would achieve this, but that didn’t matter now. What mattered was the dream.
When he looked at Ronald and Maurice, his two bridge companions, Sutty saw what some of the Guthrie’s boys would become. “Lifers,” they would be known as. Men who were mired in the mud of the East and who would never leave until forced to by retirement, when they would return to a drab, dreary life in a one-room bedsit in England. They would realize that the dreams they had had twenty years earlier had not come to be. These men had become drudges, drones in the hive of trade and commerce. Time and opportunity had slipped away with each identical year and they hadn’t noticed that they were getting older and their enthusiasm was diminishing along with their energy. They had forgotten to marry somewhere along the line and forgotten about friends and family on the other side of the world. Their companions were other lifers, transients, and Orientals. Some had “gone native,” as their more mobile friends liked to say; they’d got stuck in Singapore or Kuala Lumpur or Calcutta.
Sutty shook himself out of his thoughts. This would not be Francis’s fate, nor would it be his. They had chosen to document life, not to be swallowed up and trapped in it. As artists, they could soar above the mundane; in fact, they had an obligation to avoid the commonplace at all costs. For a writer to have his feet firmly planted on the ground was a curse on creativity. He hoped Annabelle understood this because if she didn’t, she would be waging an uphill battle for the rest of her life. He didn’t wish that for Francis, and he especially didn’t wish it for the lovely Annabelle.
Chapter Nine
“I think I need to go and stay with Spirit for a while,” Maris told Ray about a week after she’d arrived in Vancouver. “It’s not that I don’t like staying here, I do, but I feel trapped. No, that’s not the right word. I feel like I could get stuck because it’s too easy. Being here. Hanging out with you. Am I saying this really badly?”
“Yes,” said Ray, “but I get it. You think that your basic lazy, uninspired, torpid” — torpid? thought Maris — “nature will take over and consume you like a giant octopus and you’ll be enmeshed in the tentacles of indolence forever. Am I close?”
“Whoa,” said Maris. “You’re, like, so right on, brother. I’m just blown away by, like, your total clarity. It’s awesome, man.”
“Shut up. So when are you leaving?”
“In a couple of days, I guess. I’ve been to every movie, every gallery, and every department store in Vancouver, so I’ve pretty much covered the local culture. But tomorrow’s Thursday and CSI is on. It’s the second part of a two-parter, so I have to see how it ends.”
“Clearly, you have your priorities straight.”
“Yes. Speaking of which, I’ve been here a week and haven’t even phoned Spirit. Do you think she’ll be offended?”
“Offended?” said Ray, raising his eyebrows as high as he could. “No, Terra will be offended that you didn’t call. Mom will be deeply hurt, as only a mother can be, that her firstborn hasn’t had the sensitivity, let alone the courtesy, to phone the person who gave her life.”
“Since when did Spirit care about courtesy?”
“Okay, maybe I went a bit too far. But she might just wish you had thought to call as soon as your feet touched Canadian soil.” He handed her the phone. “Speed dial three,” he said.
“What?” she said. “Your mother is number three? Not number one?”
“Shut up and phone her. My private life is none of your business.”
Maris hit speed dial and punched in the number three. Her mother answered after four rings.
“Hi, Spirit,” said Maris. “It’s me.”
“Maris? Where are you? Is everything all right?”
“Yes, yes, everything’s fine. I’m in Vancouver, staying with Ray. I’ve been here a couple of days getting over the jet lag.” She shot a look at Ray that said, Don’t you ever tell her I’ve been here for a week …
He put up his hands and called out, “Hi, Mom. I’m taking good care of her.”
“When are you coming to see me, Maris?” Spirit asked.
“I thought I’d come up in a couple of days, if that’s all right. Maybe Friday morning?”
“That’s good,” said Spirit. “Have you phoned your sister?”
“Um, no, not yet,” said Maris. “I’ll call her today. Promise.”
“Good. See you Friday.”
“Okay. Bye.” Maris hung up the phone and handed it to Ray. “Whew,” she said. “That went well.”
“A couple of days,” said Ray. “You know there’s a special place in hell for people who lie to their mother.”
“Get a life,” said Maris. “As if you never did.”
“Only once,” he said, “and that was a long time ago.”
“Oh, really,” she said. “And that was when you told her what?”
Ray hesitated. He looked down at the ground. “I told her — you promise you won’t bring this up again?” Maris nodded. “I told her Dad asked me to live with him and Shirley and I said no.”
He looked up at Maris and waited.
“You did not,” she said.
“Did so.”
“Did not.”
“Did so.”
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t want her to think he hated us.”
“But he didn’t hate us.”
“Spirit thought he did. Well, maybe not hate. But that he didn’t want to be bothered with us anymore. He wanted a new life with Shirley and he wanted us to sort of disappear.”
“I think that was Shirley,” said Maris. “She never wanted us. But I think Dad was okay with it, at first, at least.” Did Ray know that Arthur had tried to get Spirit to let Maris come and live with him and Shirley and go to school? It hadn’t happened, of course. Spirit had vetoed it, and so Arthur had started the allowance thing, putting money into bank accounts for the kids’ education. Ray had been so young at the time. Maybe he didn’t know any of it. If that’s true then it’s kind of sad, Maris thought, that he’d felt compelled to make up a story like that to tell his mother. Ray was the only boy. Maybe he’d taken his father’s behaviour as rejection.
“Did you really believe that?” she asked him.
“Of course not,” he said. “I told you it was a lie.”
“So you thought you had to defend Dad. You know how complicated that is, psychologically?”
“You mean, like, youngest child, a boy, at that, is abandoned by same-sex parent at a critical age, therefore sending young male child into a perpetual spiral of negative sense of self, damaging said child’s ability to mature and sustain relationships, and resulting in unrealistic expectations and ending in misery, despair, and drug addiction?”
“You forgot the part about homosexuality.”
“Oh, yeah. And indulging in homosexual fantasies with unattainable, impossibly beautiful, and hot young men.”
“That sounds about right. Are you over yourself yet?”
“Oh, I am so over myself that I don’t even look in the mirror anymore.”
“Well, I can see why,” said Maris.
“Listen. I can’t believe we’re as well adjusted as we are,”
he told her.
“We?” she said.
“Well, me and Terra.” They both laughed. He handed her the phone again.
Maris looked at him expectantly. “She’s not on speed dial?”
Ray scrunched up his face in a pained expression. “I ran out of numbers,” he said. “But I’ve got it written down somewhere.” He went over to his desk and started lifting up stacks of paper and books.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I’ve got it in my book.” She pulled out a red notebook covered in embroidered Chinese silk and started leafing through it. When she found the number, she dialled and waited. “Please be the machine,” she said under her breath.
But Ray heard her and shook his head. “Ah, the ties that bind,” he said.
She was about to hang up when Terra picked up the phone.
“Hi, Terra. It’s me, Maris.”
Ray listened as she exchanged pleasantries with their sister for a few minutes then hung up.
“Well?” he said.
“She wanted me to come for a visit but I told her I was going to see Spirit, so she suggested that she organize a family weekend at Spirit’s place. She’s going to call you about it.”
“Sounds like fun,” said Ray. “I can’t wait.”
