by S. P. Hozy
She reached over and raised the lid of the trunk. There were the Moresby books, the paintings of Chinese women, and the bundles of letters. What could they mean?
She untied the ribbon around one set of letters and opened the first one. It was dated 1923 and addressed to “Annabelle Sweet” at a London, England, address.
My dearest Annabelle. I have arrived safely in Singapore and pray that this letter gets to you quickly so that you will not worry one minute longer than you need to. It was what the seasoned passengers called “an uneventful crossing,” which I assume means there were no terrifying storms, encounters with pirates, or deadly icebergs. I met an interesting assortment of people, including young, single, or betrothed females heading east to find romance and marriage in the Orient. I can tell you I was never at a loss for a dance partner, although none of them caught my fancy or captured my heart. (Are you jealous? Don’t be. You are the only one for me, Annabelle, and I shall continue to say it until you believe it with all of your heart and agree to join me here in S’pore.)
Speaking of Singapore, my God, it’s hot here! But don’t let that discourage you — it’s a wonderful, bone-warming heat after the chill of England. I love it and so will you. I’m sure of it. But I get ahead of myself.
Sutty was there to meet me when my ship docked, and I was never so glad to see a friend. I had forgotten how tall he is and he stood head and shoulders above everybody else. He looked cool and handsome in his white linen suit and he wore a white straw hat to protect him from the sun. He was every inch the colonial gentleman. The port was tumultuous with noise and activity and I could barely think straight, let alone gather my luggage, get a rickshaw, and find my way to the Raffles Hotel. I suppose, given enough time, I would have accomplished it, but I would have been so much the worse for wear. Sutty, bless his soul, was able to cut through all the chaos and deliver me safe and sound to the Long Bar of the hotel, where I drank cold (yes, cold) beer, and feasted on bangers and mash — seriously! I was able to leap over culture shock with one bound and ease into Oriental life with a full stomach and a fairly clear head.
I will write more about the city in my next letter. I want to get this into the post before it’s collected.
I miss you, my Sweet Annabelle, and begin to count the days until I see you again.
All my love,
Francis
The next letter was dated three days later and began “My Sweet Annabelle.”
I have settled in a bit now and must tell you my impressions of Singapore. My first were seaport impressions of bustle and noise, heat and salty smells, people calling out in a strange sounding language: Chinese? Malay? I heard no English, so knew I was in a foreign place for the first time in my life. I felt like a boy in a Conrad novel who has been thrust into a seafaring life and arrives at his first port: he could be anywhere and the new place is full of promise, for he has seen nothing but the ugliness of an impoverished childhood, felt nothing but hunger all his life, and now he is delivered to a place that could be the making of him. He sees that anything is possible. If he has made it this far, he will only keep moving forward. Life for him is no longer filled with nothingness. It is no longer only shades of black and grey. Life is suddenly filled with possibilities and colour. It is no longer about who he must be, but about who he can be. This is exhilarating stuff; the stuff of adventure for a boy who was orphaned early or who fled a life of dismal predictability or one of unpredictable violence and danger.
“What lies ahead?” he asks himself, when before he only asked: “When will this misery end?” “I am reborn,” he says, when before he only said, “When will I die?” Imagine his excitement, the anticipation, the hope. It is a gift; the first in his life.
No, I am not that boy, but I feel — I live! — his exhilaration. I don’t want to close my eyes for a moment. I don’t want to miss a thing because any minute can bring something that has never happened before, something that in the blink of an eye may be lost. No, wait, precious moment! I cannot lose you. I must have you. This is how my life begins, my real life, the one I never dared imagine for myself. Now there are no second impressions. Everything is a first impression; everything is new to my eyes. Trees are not just trees but giant monuments of nature that bloom with furious colour and shade with great arching branches of green. A road is not just a road, but a promise of something interesting, something never seen before.
I am inspired, Annabelle, to be something I have only dreamed of being. A writer. A real writer. Someone who lives the life of a writer and gains his inspiration from that life. I don’t want to write about what I already know but about what I discover. I don’t want to dredge the past; I want to mine the future. I want to move out and up and away from the mundane, to go to a place that most people never get to. I want to be the messenger who brings news of such earth-shattering experience that everyone will want to hear it.
You see how I am flying after only a few days here? This was meant to be, Annabelle, I am sure of it. It is my destiny, and I want it to be our destiny. I want to share it with you because you deserve to experience this kind of wonder at the opportunity that life holds. We can be pioneers, my darling. Singapore is not a new place, but it is new enough. It is barely more than a hundred years since Raffles purchased this island of swamp and rainforest from the Sultan of Johor. One hundred years. Newer even than America. It is still becoming. I am still becoming. We are still becoming. This can be our place, yours and mine.
I’m sure I’ve quite exhausted you, Annabelle, so I will seal this letter with a tender kiss and write to you again when I have eaten three meals and slept one night. Just so you know I am not losing my mind, but, indeed, finding it. I eat, I sleep, I dream.
I love you,
Francis
Maris picked up the next letter in the pile. Who were these people? she wondered. Her eyes no longer itched with fatigue. She wanted to know more of the story that was unfolding, had unfolded, in Singapore more than eighty years ago.
Let me tell you about the rain. It can come without warning and when it comes it falls in torrents, in sheets, in great walls of water so that you think there is an unending supply of water in the sky. It obliterates whatever view you might have had of trees, hills, mountains, tall buildings — anything farther than ten feet from your eye. There is a wetness to this rain that surpasses the wetness of rain anywhere in England. And England is a wet country. The rain is often referred to as “the rains,” in the plural, and that is fitting. These rains pound the surface of the earth as if they were made of steel instead of water. It is hard rain — unkind, uncaring, and murderous. I have seen the streets fill with water to the height of a man’s knees in less than thirty minutes. Sutty tells me that it rained like that once for five days straight and a hundred people drowned on one street alone.
It is frightening and yet it’s thrilling, Annabelle, to see such power in nature. Once I was caught while walking and could only stop and wait under the nearest awning along with everyone else. We were forced to give in because to go forward or to go back was impossible. Mother Nature stole a piece of time from each one of us — a piece of time she had no intention of giving back. We stood and watched as a dead rat floated by. My companions in captivity appeared not to notice but I couldn’t take my eyes off the little beast. I use the word “little” in a relative sense. It was a very large rat but it seemed small in the scheme of things. It was no match for the fast moving rush of water that had filled the sewer pipes in seconds. I suddenly realized why the sidewalks are built up so high and the gutters dug so deep. It’s all because of the rains.
As Maris read through some of Francis’s letters, she realized how he had captured the timelessness of the human struggle with nature. She, too, had witnessed these same blinding, hard rains of Singapore. They were a fact of life, just like the trees, the weeds, the dogs, the babies, and the old men and women who sat in front of shops or in cafés and remembered.
The memory of Singapore’s
rain was sensory, full of sounds and smells that could still drench you even if you stood in a shelter. It would ricochet off the sidewalk like a hail of bullets and soak you from the ground up. In Singapore you didn’t go anywhere without an umbrella between December and March and from June to September. The two distinct monsoon seasons, the first from the northeast and the second from the southwest, kept the land lush and the vegetation profuse. It was a garden city that maintained a tropical rainforest within its urban confines.
She missed it, she realized, and believed she would go back there. But it wasn’t time yet: that was an intuition, not a fact. It was just something she knew but couldn’t explain. She had come back to British Columbia on intuition, too, because she needed to be refortified, reminded, and restored. Restored to what, she wasn’t sure. She could never be the Maris who had left Vancouver nearly five years ago, nor did she want to be. She had grown so much in those years, as an artist, yes, but also as a person. It was Peter who had helped her grow as an artist, and coming to terms with being an artist had helped her discover who she was. But all of that seemed so vague now and seemed to be dissolving the way one scene dissolves into another in a film. She was in the middle of the dissolve, struggling to find a perspective and to hang on to what she knew.
* * *
[email protected]
CC:
To: [email protected]
Subject: Can’t sleep
Hi Dinah,
It’s the middle of the night and I can’t sleep, so thought I’d get an email off to you while it’s quiet. And I mean quiet. My mother’s place is kind of out in the boonies, so there’s no traffic, no urban white noise, just the sounds of nature, like chirps and peeps and the occasional screech or howl. I guess the closest thing in S’pore would be the Botanic Gardens, if you were there in the middle of the night. I’m sitting here missing S’pore while right smack in the middle of some of the most beautiful country in the world. Go figure! Maybe I’m just a city girl at heart.
I told you I was brought up on a sixties-style commune and I guess I wouldn’t be who I am if I’d been raised otherwise, but I can’t help but wonder why the three of us (my brother, my sister, and I) turned out so differently. There’s got to be a personality factor in there somewhere. Like we were born with some X-factor that is us, no matter what. I know you and Peter are only half-siblings (the word “only” makes it sound less important, which is not what I mean) and share a father, but I know very little about your upbringings and why you are so different. Is it just personality? Is it culture? Male-female gender stuff? And maybe you’re not as different as I think you are.
If I think about my own brother and sister, I wonder if we’re more alike than I imagine. My sister has tried the hardest to be “conventional.” She married a good man (like, hello, whatever that is!) and has two well-behaved children. Her home is beautiful by magazine decorating standards, and she appears to be “happy.” Or maybe “content” is a better word. Because, whereas contentment seems to be a more consistent state, happiness, to me, seems more elusive, more hit and miss. I think you can have happy moments, but to sustain a state of happiness is probably impossible. (Am I writing a self-help book here that will make a million dollars? Wow! I wish…)
You don’t have to read this whole rambling mess, Dinah, but I seem to need to keep writing it. I guess, with the time difference, it’s the middle of the afternoon for you. You’ve probably had a busy day and are wishing for a nice cup of sweet, milky tea right now and a chance to put your feet up. This would be about the time Angela will call from Germany and set your teeth on edge with some stupid, petty question or demand. Am I right? Well, at least she’s far away and can’t show up, like, ten times a day. We can be thankful for small mercies.
I’m not sure what I’ll do next, but I know that I have to begin painting again before I can come back to S’pore. And I’m not sure why, but I believe my “inspiration” lies here. Inspiration being a fancy word for jump-start-kick-in-the-ass. I need a jolt of something to get me out of the doldrums. (God, I’m even starting to bore myself — hope this helps you sleep tonight!)
Anyway, my friend, answer when you have time and give me the latest. In the meantime, I’ll keep pushing this particular rock up the hill, all the while hoping it doesn’t roll back and crush me. (Hmmmm … forget self-help. I think I’ll write a bestselling novel.)
Hahahaha. I’m going back to bed.
Lovya,
Maris
Chapter Twelve
Francis and Annabelle huddled together under an umbrella as the skies opened and the drenching rains began to fall. They were enjoying a brief honeymoon and had decided a day at the Botanic Gardens would be relaxing and recreational at the same time. According to Sutty, the orchid display was worth exploring. Apparently, Singapore’s climate was ideal for the natural growth of the graceful and luxurious flowers. It was also a fact that torrential rainfall was a trigger to the flowering of these exotic plants.
“Just think,” said Francis, “while we’re here getting soaked and cursing the rain, hundreds of orchid flowers are preparing to display their lovely faces.”
Annabelle laughed. Francis had told her about the rains in one of his letters, but she hadn’t imagined herself standing in the middle of them with only an old umbrella to protect her. Oh well, she thought, it’s only rain and not the black plague. Now that she and Francis were married, they could meet any adversity together and that would make it easier.
There was a shelter about fifty feet away and they debated whether or not to run for it. How much drier would they be if they stood under the open shelter’s roof? Running up the pathway and crossing to the other side would be like fording a small stream at this point. However, standing in one place and being pelted on all sides was no better. They decided to run for it, and in minutes they joined about fifteen other drenched comrades to wait out the storm in the garden. It lasted a good twenty minutes, during which time they chatted with one another, mostly about rain and other weather in Singapore and in England. Weather is such a common ground for people, thought Annabelle. Everybody experienced it everywhere, and everybody had an opinion about it. It helped to pass the time.
And then, just as suddenly as it had started, the rain stopped. The result was a steamy mist that rose from the well-soaked ground and hung in the air like vapour from a boiling kettle. In time, the sun came out and burned the mist away, leaving the heat just as intense as before the storm.
“Welcome to Singapore,” said Francis. “Isn’t it lovely?”
“Yes,” said his new wife. “It’s almost like England, only wetter and hotter.”
Francis laughed and believed that Annabelle had just told a joke, which he took to be a good sign. She was in high spirits and had been since their marriage. He guessed it was because she felt more secure now. Her apparently unsettled life was, in fact, more settled. She had a role to play and, as a wife, she had a purpose. She had been stubbornly opposed to his plan for so long, but now that it was a reality, she seemed to accept it as inevitable and was determined to make the best of it. She has hidden resources of strength, Francis thought. She’s the picture of English womanhood — delicate as a rose on the outside, but tough and resilient as a leather boot on the inside. He believed this and he also believed she would be able to handle any adversity that fell into their path. She’ll bend, he told himself, but she will not break.
If Annabelle had known what her husband was thinking, she might have been pleased, or she might have thought, “Pray that we never have to find out, my dear.” The last thing she wanted was to deal with more adversity. It was true that she felt more secure being married to Francis, but she would have felt a lot more secure had they been in England. Annabelle preferred the familiar for all that Francis preferred the foreign and exotic. She would let him have his five years — all the while praying that it would be less — and then it would be time to be sensible: back to England, back to reality.
In the meantime, she would look for more suitable lodgings for them. Much as she enjoyed staying at the Raffles Hotel with Francis and Sutty, it was costing too much money and it wasn’t really a home. Annabelle wanted a few pieces of her own furniture to polish and a hob where she could do her own cooking. It wasn’t much to ask for and she knew Francis would go along with it. She would get him to ask around among the boys who worked at the hotel to see if anyone knew of a place, or even a neighbourhood, where they could look for a place.
They had reached the orchid gardens by now and they turned all their attention to the multihued variety that spread out before them.
“It confirms one’s belief in God, doesn’t it?” Annabelle asked her husband. “Who else could have designed such a perfect thing?”
They were looking at the Vanda Miss Joaquim, which had been discovered by Agnes Joaquim in her garden in Singapore in 1893. She took what she thought might be a new hybrid to the Botanic Gardens’ first director, Henry Nicholas Ridley, who confirmed that, indeed, she had discovered a new, natural orchid hybrid. The flower’s colouration ranged from pale mauve on its frilly outer petals to rosy violet surrounding a centre of fiery orange. The orchid Agnes Joaquim had discovered was in full flower when Francis and Annabelle saw it.
