by Meira Chand
‘You’re inviting trouble, nothing more,’ Sarah said after a tennis match in which Amy and Reggie Redmore had beaten Sarah and a visitor. The court filled up with another quartet, Sarah and Amy poured lemonade into glasses for spectators.
‘Don’t be so silly,’ Amy scolded, turning her back on Sarah.
‘Are you sure Mr Redmore is in love with you?’ Sarah inquired. ‘Has he said anything yet?’
‘No, but he will,’ Amy decided, her smile untouchable.
Soon Sarah saw them, apart from the crowd yet near enough for decorum, sipping at glasses of chilled lemonade, Amy graceful in white muslin. There was something Sarah could not describe that made her immediately recoil from Mr Redmore. She could not understand why Amy had lost her head to such an unsuitable man.
‘Its some time since I played a game of tennis,’ Reggie said. ‘I have to admit you’ve exhausted me.’ He laughed, his eyes suggestive of experiences private to themselves. There was nothing he said or did that overstepped propriety in an open way.
Amy smiled and then, as no one was near to hear her audacity, she asked, ‘Have you seen the mynah birds in the summerhouse?’
They walked the few steps to the summerhouse, still in view of people. There were ways to find themselves alone even within a crowd. There had been an afternoon of boating upon the lake in which they found themselves together, lost upon an island. There were woods in which the search for berries divided people easily. But throughout their courtship they barely touched. Reggie behaved as a gentleman, his control persuasive and commanding. He knew what he wanted, he manipulated Amy to a situation for his own advantage.
There was the musty smell of earth and old wood in the summerhouse and the odour of the birds, their feathers black and glossy, stalking their perches restlessly within an enormous cage. A wall of shuttered windows gave a sudden privacy. Amy walked up to the cage and cooed to the birds. They looked at her silently from grim little eyes.
‘They’re being perverse, they won’t talk.’ She turned to face Reggie, who seemed to fill the delicate structure with his tall, muscular frame.
‘I’d rather talk with you,’ he smiled. ‘We could sit on that seat over there.’
They were shielded from view. The voices of the tennis crowd, the slap of balls, the clink of glass were the noises of another world. He was close to her on the seat, closer than decency allowed. His knee was partly covered by the muslin of her dress. She stared at the darkness of his trouser leg beneath the flimsy fold. At times she felt she could not wait to feel his touch upon her. Once, upon the island, he had taken her hand as if to pull her to him, then released her abruptly again. He seemed to watch her, observing the fire he had lighted burn its way within her, and made no move. It drove her to distraction. If Frank had stirred vague dreams, the violence Reggie unleashed seemed to fill her with depravity. The need for his touch was as painful as a bodily affliction. She was exhausted by waiting for a relief that never came. She was aware in herself of a brazenness, different from the feelings of a girl like Sarah. The genteel refinements of cultivated love for romance or convenience, so appropriate to their age and status, were not a world Amy seemed to know. To her it was a distant land; she spoke a different language, a language never mentioned. She observed the pull of Reggie’s coat upon his shoulders, the swagger of his stride. Beside him she was close to his breathing and the short, curling hairs on his neck. She was no more than the shape he gave her, obedient to his will. Within her the intensity of feelings grew, waiting. Waiting.
‘Amy,’ he turned suddenly to her, taking her hand, his face close as when they had danced. He had not called her by her name before. ‘You know what I wish to ask, do you not?’
She shook her head as if mystified, and yet she had hoped when they entered the summerhouse, that he would clarify his feelings at last. His voice sounded unreal, his breath touched her face.
‘Marry me, Amy. Say you will. I have not your father’s consent yet. I wished to ask you first.’ Her hand lay in his; as he spoke he raised it to his mouth. ‘People may remark upon the difference in our ages, but you mustn’t let it worry you. I’ll make you happy.’
‘I’m already so happy,’ Amy whispered. ‘People may say what they like, I won’t listen to a word.’ She was brilliant with love, aware of nothing but the moment, selected by her wilfully to alter destiny. The words she had practised so often in dreams to accept his imaginary proposal she could not now remember. She laughed in confusion as he took her suddenly in his arms. He gripped her tightly, his body pressed to her, his lips upon her neck. Over his shoulder she saw the birds staring curiously, heads to one side.
‘How now, me beauties?’ The bird’s throat moved but the voice was that of the gardener. The other bird responded with a peal of laughter. The sound filled the summerhouse. Amy tightened her grip upon Reggie and offered him her mouth. The monstrous laughter rattled about them, she closed her eyes, unheeding. She had made her choice, although no reason could explain it.
Reggie acted quickly then. He did not waste a further day, he approached her father formally. In her room above her father’s study, Amy waited for the storm to break. It was as if she could feel his shock reverberate through the house. She was summoned at once after Reggie had gone.
‘Have you taken all leave of your senses, miss? Have you no shame?’ Mr Sidley shook with rage, his nails pressured blue about a paperweight. She feared he might throw it at her.
‘Mr Redmore has acted with propriety and I with decorum, Papa. There is no reason for talk of shame.’ She held her head up until he lowered his eyes on the excuse of rearranging a paper.
‘It is too bad of you, Amy. You’ve had good offers already and refused. This Redmore, we know nothing of him. He’s misled you for his purpose. He’s unsuitable in every way. And what about his age?’ His voice was unsteady, he cleared his throat. He spoke to her stony face. Nothing seemed to change her.
‘Would you have me marry someone I did not love, Papa?’ She tossed her head to incite him.
‘Bah!’ Mr Sidley exploded and took a step forward in rage. ‘Go to your room until I say you can leave.’
‘I shall marry only Mr Redmore,’ she repeated as she closed the door.
Some part of herself felt sorry for her parents. Reggie was a man without background, without money and fifteen years older than herself. An adventurer, her father fumed, whose life was tied to lands whose preposterous names their mouths could barely shape, whose heaving seas and pagan saints, whose naked populations of dust and sweat and dirt were good only for a shudder or a story, for a painted vase or a bale of silk. And yet, in one unthinkable stroke, that whole unknown universe rose up in insolence to threaten them. But nothing could dissuade her, something corroded her that consumed all need for obedience.
Upstairs she grew calm. She refused to eat or speak, lying in bed with her face to the wall as if sick in the last prostrations. She lost weight and grew frail in a couple of days. Determination added fierceness to her.
‘There must be another way to make her change her mind,’ Mrs Sidley sobbed until her husband strode into her daughter’s room and ordered her to eat.
‘I’ve been to see Jenkins. Redmore will be gone by tomorrow if he knows what’s good for him.’ Mr Sidley shouted. Amy started up in shock.
She breathed fire, she breathed soul, and when her father was gone she composed herself for death. The letters she left swam in easy, flowery words from her without the anguish of a backbone. Before a coming storm she set off that night to the lake near their home, harnessing the drama of the elements conveniently to her own. She made sure they heard her leave. Their voices pursued her and she was dragged from the water no sooner than she had calculated.
‘The minx,’ she heard her father say. ‘If it has come to this we are left with no choice. But I’ll be damned if I help that bounder feather his nest at the expense of Amy. He’ll not get what he expects in the way of a settlement from me. I must look to her p
rotection.’ She opened her eyes. It seemed only right they should know she lived, now she had her way. Throughout the drama, Reggie stood back in watchful silence, content to see the machinery he had started work its way to a final order. An order of his making, to his best advantage.
She remembered their wedding as she would a funeral; long faces and some sobs. Except for herself, the gaiety had the brittleness of thin icing on a cake. They married with haste, for Reggie, recovered from whatever had been wrong with him, had received a new posting. He had been promoted to Acting Resident in a small town up country on the Malay coast in the state of Sungei Ujong. It took her some time to get her tongue around the name, to enunciate it properly.
*
Reality was stranger than the imagining of exotic lands. Exotic, Amy found, was a word to be used only in ignorance or retrospect. There was nothing exotic in tropical living. Each day was a battle with a weariness that seemed to soak deeper and deeper, making pap of body and mind. Sungei Ujong was hot and silent with the intensity of cunning. The dull red soil of Somerset, the cool hills and hedgerows of hawthorn soon became a constant mirage filling her mind.
They disembarked from the ship at Singapore, but did not stay long in the town. From the first moment her senses reeled at the kaleidoscope of colours, the perennial sunblaze and bright-winged birds. When she left the bustling city with its shops and botanical gardens, with its balls and social events, its neat villas and spreading lawns, she did not realize she left the last bastion of Britishness. Left it in the millinery department of Spicer’s and Robinson’s and the promenade of showy equipages that each evening revolved with their memsahibs slowly round the esplanade; left it in their cool room in the Hotel d’Europe.
People shook their head at the mention of Sungei Ujong, an area of tigers, crocodiles, rogue elephants and savages. Some had never heard of it. They looked at Reggie askance for taking a woman there. It was not even on the coast, where steamers from Singapore brought human contact and supplies.
‘Nonsense,’ said Reggie. ‘She’ll be all right. We’ve a bungalow, a cook and an amah.’
They journeyed to Malacca on a cargo ship crammed with coolies seeking their fortunes in Perak. They could not sleep. Their cabin was a hot and dirty hole of eighty-eight degrees, tenanted by cockroaches and rats, but Malacca raised their spirits. The Portuguese town of St Francis Xavier, with its ruined cathedral on a hill and a race of half-breeds, still exuded the atmosphere of fables, dreamy and antiquated. They pushed on in an untrustworthy launch, crawling slowly along a palm-fringed shore until they met the Linggi River. Here they entered a world Amy came to know too well.
For miles from the mouth of the river was the slimy shade of mangrove swamps, trees sitting at low tide like evil nesting birds on the tortured cradles of their roots. They formed, said Reggie, huge breeding grounds for alligators and mosquitoes. He was cheerful about these things, happy to point out all he could. He had lived in similar parts before. Amy listened in silence, wishing she was better prepared. To her it seemed the great knitted roots of the mangrove trees closed in like a cage about them.
The journey up-river followed endless bends. The heat in the tiny boat destroyed even the terror of alligators plunging into the turbid river, breaking the silence about them. At times they left the boat and took to paths hacked through vegetation that only waited to close behind them, to cut off any hope of retreat. However much Amy minimized her clothing the residue of boots and corsets, puffs and frills impeded motion, health and comfort. She tottered on or sank back, half-expiring, her limbs swollen and sore from the bites of endless mosquitoes. Nothing on the journey was helped by the fact that Reggie had admitted upon reaching Singapore that his promotion was not as Acting Resident, but only as assistant to the Resident. This surprise, in the midst of so much that was strange, was dulled of impact. So great was the explosion of colour and light, horror and joy that absorbed her every moment, it was struggle enough merely to survive.
Serambang, the capital of Sungei Ujong, was a dusty village with a few Chinese shops. Its import was opium, its export tin. The Residency and its dependent houses were on a hill defaced by tin diggings. The ponies pulling their buggy refused the last mile and they had to walk in the fierce noon sun. Amy stopped on the path ascending the hill and stared in disbelief. She swallowed hard to suppress her shock. Reggie appeared unmoved before the scene; he had lived too long with improvisations.
‘I suppose those must be the servants’ quarters?’ Amy suggested, looking about for a house she could recognize as her own. There were some brilliant flowers and a lawn divided by a tennis net, but no sign of a solid house, only a group of flimsy huts.
‘No, my Kitten, those are our quarters. This is our new home.’ Reggie began to laugh at Amy’s expression.
‘That is ….’ she echoed. Faced at last by reality, she could no longer hide distress and Reggie’s laughter cut her deeply. Before her was a rickety wooden structure with an attap room and wide verandahs, like the sketches of a native longhouse she had seen once in a magazine. It was raised off the ground upon stilts and ascended to by a ladder.
‘There is no front door,’ she said weakly at last. ‘Oh Reggie, it’s not possible.’
‘Cheer up, Kitten, it’s not so bad.’ Reggie grinned. Amy felt a sudden hatred for him.
‘There’s a door of sorts at the top of those steps,’ Reggie continued hurriedly. ‘You’d have a tiger in your front parlour if the house wasn’t raised up high on those stilts. It’s well suited to the climate, cool and not uncomfortable. Take heart,’ he said more kindly, seeing her dejection. At his change in tone tears filled her eyes and she thought she might faint with exhaustion; they had travelled sixty terrible miles in thirty-three hours.
‘Tigers?’ she repeated. ‘Well, I suppose after all those crocodiles I shall learn to cope with tigers.’ She tried to smile.
‘That’s my girl,’ said Reggie loudly.
He took her arm and helped her forward to the steep ladder before the house. Amy stumbled from the blazing heat into its cool dark rooms that first morning with both horror and gratefulness. It was beyond her to imagine that here she would live, yet after the journey of the last few days any destination was an achievement. There was a bath and then rest and the Resident’s wife bustling kindly about directing a crowd of native servants that Amy dauntingly realized she must soon learn to command herself. She closed her eyes to sleep and the hope that a house like those in Singapore still waited somewhere for her. There, in spite of windows without glass, verandahs and the eternal punkahs, there were still plaster and tiles and stone porticoes, and doors of familiar identity.
Later she woke and stared from her pillow at an accommodation precariously open to the elements, rolled bamboo blinds the only protection against wind and rain, the glare of the sun and insects. She felt numb as she gazed about her; for Reggie she must make the best of it. She cringed as a pale, naked-looking lizard moved across the wall. Worst of all seemed the bathroom, a large grim room at a lower level decended to from a trap in the bedroom floor. There was a hole for drainage in one corner and a large Shanghai jar of cool water for bathing. Behind it a spider stretched enormous limbs across the inside of a window. Amy took a deep breath. There was no going back.
Across the compound in a similar house the Resident lived with the dignity and calm of those who have transcended. He had the respect of the natives and also of the Sultan of Sungei Ujong. Reggie was to assist him in the maintenance of peaceful cooperation between the local peoples and the imperial power. The Resident’s home had a piano, ornaments, books and china. The Resident’s wife was welcoming, her table set with flowers and menu cards in Dresden holders. They dined that first evening with them, yet even with people so English Amy was shocked to discover she had unknowingly eaten stewed elephant trunk.
‘It tastes much like beef,’ shrugged the Resident’s wife, who had lived many years in strange and inaccessible places. She was a tired-eyed woman
whose silence was more than exhaustion. Her old-fashioned dresses and primly tied hair showed her disapproval of the world. She looked at Amy’s fashionable curls, the endless changes of her trousseau and was quick to judge. Still, she was kind, and formalities must be upheld in verandah teas poured from silver teapots. Upheld in crystal, starched linen and lace tablecloths, hauled up jungle paths to Sungei Ujong. They were the only European wives for miles around; few men brought their women here. To Amy these social constrictions were excruciating, and there was still the continuing shock to absorb. Reggie had told her little, and she had not thought to question the conditions of Sungei Ujong in the breathlessness of the first days of marriage. It was enough that she was with him.
At first there was only terror before an uncaged, wild world. The reality of snakes and poisonous centipedes or scorpions in shoes was no figment of the imagination, but a routine of surveillance to be diligently applied. And when she was without this terror, there was the boredom of her life. She helped the Resident’s wife dispense advice and medicines to the local Malays; there was no doctor nearer than Malacca. But the sight of pustules, wounds full of maggots and children limp with fever depressed and frightened her. There was nothing to alleviate dismay.
Their baggage had arrived, the wedding presents, books and pictures, and these when arranged about the house gave some semblance of identity. But nothing could cover up the archaic sanitary arrangements, nor the pungency of incredible smells that assailed her nose. The musky smell of the smooth-skinned servants who moved silent and barefoot about the house. The smell of mud and rotting fish, of ripe fruit and open drains, of bat droppings and old rattan. And everywhere the peppery dankness of the jungle and the nauseous, stinking durian, like a decomposing body. But there was also besides these the sweet scent of the pigeon orchid and the beautiful frangipani flowers, and in the evening the tang of joss sticks and the fragrance of wood fires. Her eyes, too, slowly became used to the cursed sun that at noon in a pitch of white heat drained everything of colour. She got up early for the dawn and later watched the heavy sunset streaming like blood across the sky. She filled the house with scarlet hibiscus and flaming cannas. Everything seemed made in excess here, in colour, in texture, in substance. To observe it became in the end fatiguing. She waited for the rain, for the break it brought in the sky and in emotion, but before it stopped was already tired of its relentless, uncontained pouring. The balance of things was different here, obeying an alien rhythm.
