by Meira Chand
‘Oh, Amy.’ She struggled in his grasp but eventually let him hold her, rocking her to silence. Turning her head she saw his eyes in the lamplight watched her, unmoving. She was frightened then of what more she might discover in his face, and quickly looked away.
‘Money,’ she said. ‘She wants money from me, did you read? Did you decide this with her?’ Her mind was full of suspicions. ‘She says you have paid nothing for the child since you married me. She says she will go to my parents. It would kill them. It’s blackmail.’ She screamed at him again. He was silent. She was like a wild creature that must wear itself out before it could be touched. He waited for her to quieten.
‘Tell me, did you marry me for my money? Be honest now, no lies.’ Her voice was cold; it sought to destroy. He took time in replying, sitting back in the chair. The worst was over, she was prepared to negotiate a compromise, he knew how to handle her now. He had no wish to hurt her, and certainly she had attracted him, of that there was no doubt.
He began to speak as truthfully as he dared. ‘Amy, you know me now, know the man I am. Of course I liked the thought of your money, and the advantages it could bring us. But it is untrue to say I married you for money. I love you more than your money, little Kitten.’ His voice was soft. ‘You do my affection for you an injustice. I could not marry you against your will, your parents tried hard enough to dissuade you. Have I asked for anything but your affection? Have we not been happy these past months, in spite of this God-forsaken place? Annie is something from the past. Your money does not come into the matter, that’s just Annie’s bitter spite.’
‘But much of it happened after we met. You decided to leave her with a child and marry me. It’s as if you lied.’ She was not wrong; she felt a new and colder feeling listening to his explanation. His words were the tightrope between truth and lies. Her tears dried with emotions she wished she could push away.
His voice was sad when he spoke again. He saw she wished to be lightened of a burden that had fallen too suddenly, and would be relieved to agree it was not entirely his fault. And as he hoped, she lay at last, exhausted against his arm, her face blank as she listened to a boat glugging up the river.
‘We must silence her,’ Reggie murmured against her ear. A faint smell of whisky lingered with him. She stared numbly at the insects about the lamp. Behind the light the night was black, the jungle close. It stirred with the calls of nocturnal birds, inhuman as lost spirits. She let him tell her what to do. Her mind had shut down when she needed it most.
‘You have private means of your own, don’t you?’ He spoke softly. She did not know she had told him this, she was too tired to remember. ‘My salary and your allowance together barely cover expenses here. I have no means to stop Annie going to your parents.’
Amy sat up in agitation. ‘But I cannot handle that money except through my parents. They would have to know.’ She twisted her rings. How could expenses be so high in a place like this? She managed the house on what Reggie gave her, a little at a time. The allowance from her marriage settlement went straight to Reggie from her father in two half-yearly instalments. She did not know what he did with it.
‘Well,’ Reggie said slowly, ‘perhaps you could tell them I have a poor widowed cousin, whom you would like to help. They could send a regular amount to Annie. That should settle her. Money is all she wants. We must write at once, to your father and Annie.’
She hated to hear that name, dropped familiarly from his lips again and again or the satisfaction in his voice. She nodded, only wanting the thing neatly packaged now and put away from her. She seemed too tired to get out of the chair. He picked her up and carried her to bed. He called the maid, Puteh, to undress her. At the door he paused and watched the woman as she bent over Amy, her hips slim as a child’s within her sarong, showing each muscle. Then he turned abruptly back to the verandah, and sat listening to the jungle until the woman came out of Amy’s room. He signalled to her silently.
Later, he showed Amy copies of the letters to her father and Annie Luke. She had only a vague memory of writing them, for the malaria came upon her again, more virulent than before, throwing her into a nightmare world consuming days without her knowledge. At last it was over and she woke, to see beyond the mosquito net, a lizard on the wall. Puteh washed her with cool water and brought hot broth to drink. Soon Reggie appeared solicitously, his face patchy with heat and a midday drink, his smile lopsided in apprehension, as if to gauge his ground. She remembered Annie Luke and looked away. Exhaustion seemed to wash her clean of the ability to hate. What choice did she have? The stigma of divorce or returning home, thoughts that had flooded her mind, could ruin the political career of her father. She had married with stubborn perversity; she could not forget her pride. Reggie, standing hesitantly in the doorway, appeared in need of forgiveness; a furtive expression implied such things. It would be months before a reply came from her father or Annie Luke. Why should she destroy herself?
As after the last attack she was weak. She was annoyed to find, in spite of all the bitterness he had worked upon her, that she still waited for Reggie to leave his office across the compound and stride towards the house at lunchtime or for dinner. She wished she could ignore him. But Reggie was careful to be kind and loving. He had his meals on a tray in her room, he presented her with a ginger kitten, he told stories to amuse her and played numerous hands of cards.
He came into the room as the sun set one evening and she lay gazing vacantly at the sky. He bent to kiss her and placed a small box covered with a handkerchief in her hands.
‘What is it?’ she asked, excitement filling her voice before she could prevent it.
‘A special gift for a special lady,’ Reggie beamed. Amy lifted the handkerchief.
‘Oh!’ she exclaimed in delight. The last strong sun of the day flooded the room. In a tiny gauze cage was a massive blue butterfly. The sun lit it to phosphorus until its brilliance was like a gem upon the bed.
‘Look,’ Reggie sat down and opened the door of the little box, then extracted the butterfly carefully. Amy was surprised at the gentleness of his big hands. A silk thread was tied about the insect’s body, and as it flew up was pulled easily back. Reggie placed the thread in Amy’s hand, the creature alighted on her wrist to flex its fantastic wings. Amy drew a quick breath.
‘Like it?’ Reggie asked.
‘Oh, yes. But is it not cruel?’ she replied.
‘No, it has not been maimed and when you wish you may let it go. It will come to no harm for a little. I’m happy it has pleased you.’ He leaned forward and pinched her cheek. ‘You’ll soon feel yourself, my Kitten. I want us to be as we were before. Nothing should separate us.’ It was as near as he had come to an apology. Feeling for him welled up in her as she had thought it might never again.
‘I too want it to be like before,’ she said, shy to meet his eyes. Reggie squeezed her arm. It was as if they could begin anew.
But that night, when Reggie’s hand upon her implied a different purpose, she drew back instinctively. ‘Please Reggie, I’m not better yet.’ But Reggie was insistent in his needs. She lay beneath him passively, his hands worked no more miracles. Instead his touch seemed only to shut that dark core of herself against him. She saw his eyes watching her detachedly, no longer disfigured by the strange expression that had stirred her own blood before. Something was broken, something was gone. She turned away then without desire, unable to help that one change within her, to face what she had welcomed before. She begged fatigue again.
‘Please, Reggie. Please, no,’ she whispered. Reggie smiled, turning down the corners of his mouth, shrugging affably as if untroubled.
It was a question of time, she thought. Soon she would recover feeling, health, desire. She would push down the thought of Annie Luke; all women learn such things. She remembered novels about such situations that had seemed at the time the culmination of passion and romance. In those books wise heroines bravely transcended such traumas. She too in time wou
ld do the same, if only time would wait.
She slept fitfully through the night and woke to the early morning. Before the window hung the gauze cage. Within it the butterfly stirred, silver and ghostly in the half-light, as if not of this earth. She watched its weary fluttering until the sun filled out its wings and the colour burned the room. She got up then and let it free, releasing it from the cage and the thread. It flew up into the still, pink sky. She watched it from the window, standing before the growing day, reborn as surely from the night as she hoped her own life was now.
*
Reggie had left that day after a noontime nap. He insisted on returning early to the office, to prepare for an excursion to collect rent from a village. He left and the heat felt thick upon her, she longed to wash it away. The bathroom was airless; its windows, small for privacy, looked over the servants’ quarters. At this time of day the heat stopped work and drugged the mind. Bony dogs and servants slept, chickens picked about the yard. On her flesh the sluice of cold water made Amy draw breath. Looking through the wooden slats of the window she suddenly saw Reggie appear upon a path that led from the back of his office to this part of the compound, unseen from the front verandah. He scanned the house briefly but did not see her. Almost at once the woman Puteh stepped out from behind a flowering bush. Reggie stopped without surprise, as if her appearance was expected. He nodded, taking her briefly by the elbow, pushing her before him. The bush shielded them from view of the servants’ quarters. They walked back a distance until they reached a building that served sometimes as a guest house. Here they left the path, a clump of trees hiding them from sight.
She stood still, sweat forming in the small of her back. Then, pulling on a wrap, she ran back up into the bedroom, calling brusquely to the servant who dozed in the corridor to tug harder at the string that worked the fan above her bed. Obediently there came a new burst of activity and the air began to move. She threw herself upon the bed. The dent in the pillow where Reggie had slept was beside her still, a fair hair or two upon it. The odour of his pomade came to her as she stared into the fan.
She had taken no notice of the woman, a native, a servant. Little more seemed necessary than a command, a complaint or a commendation. The fan creaked on above. In the corridor outside the servant coughed and hawked. Above humiliation, she was filled suddenly with an overpowering anger that stretched beyond the woman Puteh, beyond distant Annie Luke whom she now supported. It stretched to fill a universe that could not contain it and returned to press her into a terrible darkness. She could neither scream nor cry. Something unbreakable transfixed her. For Annie Luke and her child, for the woman in Sarawak suckling half-caste babies at her breast, she felt suddenly now an unpredictable empathy. In animosity she had been glad to see with Reggie’s eye, to dismiss those women whom circumstance rejected. It had shut the gate upon her fears. But now she knew her own nature, she could no longer condemn or reject. Anger thumped through her until she pummelled the mattress beneath her. She realized now that what had disturbed her most on her wedding night was Reggie’s arrogant condescension. He had shown her the workings of her own body for his pleasure and use. Her own sensuality was of no matter to him. She could centre no real feelings upon Puteh. It was Reggie who aroused such fury she would have murdered him gladly as he slept, if he lay beside her still. Instead there was only a dent in the pillow and a few fair hairs upon it.
*
It was raining and he was ill.
‘I have never had malaria,’ he said in reply to her question. He spoke with pride. ‘My prevention is to take quinine at the best of times, to keep the damn plague away.’ He turned to her, his face grey with distress. ‘It’s old troubles playing up. My liver, and that damn pain in the bladder. Been with me for years, but I know what to take. You learn how to treat yourself, living in these parts.’ He directed her from where he lay in bed to the medicine cabinet, to a small bottle of pale coloured liquid she knew was not quinine. He was always interested in medicines, new treatments or patent remedies. She looked upon this as a knowledge essential to life so far from civilization. She poured out the medicine and took it to him. She did not think to question what it was he took.
‘We could send for a doctor from Malacca.’
He cut her short. ‘I never go near the scoundrels. Kill you before you can kill yourself. I always dose myself.’ He made a scornful noise and groaned again, indicating impatiently for the fan to move faster.
It was dark and airless in the room. A storm had broken with the morning and thundered upon the roof, rattling in drainpipes, cascading from gutters. The windows were closed against the deluge but a fine spray came in through cracks, soaking the perimeter of the room. A broken door banged somewhere in the house, water dripped from the ceiling into metal buckets. Amy called to the servant, and a creaking began that accelerated until the flapping of the fan was like a hysterical bird.
She huddled on a chair beside Reggie’s bed. The sheets gave off a stale odour although they had been changed that morning. Reggie’s face was rough with pain and sweat. Soon, as she expected, he asked for a brandy and soda. She went to the decanter. There was the stench from her hands of sugar of lead, a pungent liniment he insisted she rub upon his belly over that part where the pain was the worst. She poured out the brandy. He drunk it down in gulps, then lay back. The rain hammered on; the room was steamy and suffocating. Outside was the water, sluicing and beating, inside were smells of illness, damp thatch and the fetid odour from the chamber pot beneath the bed. She rang for a boy to dispose of it. Her clothes stuck to her damply. She had taken off her corset, she did not care how she looked.
Reggie turned in bed, pulling the sheets with him. ‘I was invalided home for this before, just the same but worse. I know the pattern well.’ He put out a clammy hand in comfort. ‘Not much of those drops of mine left. Better send for more from the Chinese chemist. Can’t do without them. I go through them at a rate.’
That was the first she had heard of his association with the Chinese medicine shop. She drew back in surprise from wiping his neck with a sponge soaked in lavender water. The shop was full of strange roots, dried and unspeakable parts of animals and snakes in jars of brine. She was overcome by the thought that the mysterious liquid Reggie copiously downed might be a similar repulsive brine. It struck her then how far she had travelled from that distant ballroom in Somerset.
‘The Chinese know a thing or two our doctors don’t. I’ll give them that much.’ Reggie changed positions painfully. ‘Call Ah Seng. He knows where to get the medicine.’
‘How can you buy stuff from that place, all those snakes and horrid things?’ She shuddered. Once on a visit to the town with the Resident’s wife, she had looked inside the shop.
Reggie snorted through his pain. ‘Don’t you fancy a man who drinks snake juice? It’s arsenic, Kitten, arsenic I take.’ He laughed again at her further alarm.
‘Poison?’ She was relieved about the snakes.
‘If you don’t know how to use it. But I have a tolerance, a remarkable tolerance,’ he boasted. ‘I’ve taken it for years. It’s my remedy, it’s my cure, the only thing that touches this pain. An old Chinaman put me wise, years ago in Sarawak. I can take amounts that would kill other men.’ His pride was swallowed in a groan. ‘Be a good girl, call Ah Seng.’
Later, she sat upon the verandah. The rain had eased and she felt she would die if she could not have air. A servant dried a chair and changed a cushion for her. The verandah was a pool of water, but the rain fell now in an exhausted sheet beyond the eaves, all violence gone. The muddy compound would dry smooth and hard, and crack again as soon as the sun came out. A fine spray blew in upon her; the hem of her skirt was sodden as she sat immersed in thought. She was married to a man who drank each day, with no more trepidation than he swallowed brandy, massive amounts of arsenic. He lived when others would have died.
She shivered on the damp verandah. If only they could leave. Her life was in limbo. Boredom alone
might kill her in Sungei Ujong, a boredom circumscribed as disease, so heavy she dreaded each new day. Death pervaded everything here, insinuating itself into nightmares to wake her sweating in the dark. She sensed it in the blaze of noon, waiting with the silent cunning that lies at the base of all tropical life. The stinking fruit of the durian, full of virile flesh, the bottomless swamps and brilliant flowers and the jungle, alive with eyes and vines as thick as bodies, waited for nothing but to claim her. She shivered again. If only they could leave.
Each day was endless. Her memory was bad. Happiness or pain seemed much the same. Annie Luke was something long digested. She watched Puteh come and go, accepting the woman’s slim fingers upon her own body, helping her dress, hooking a blouse, pulling tight the strings of her corset; she saw and felt without emotion. In the anger before this lethargy she had thought of sending the woman away, but she said nothing. And she said nothing to Reggie. Women like Puteh were interchangeable; soon there would be another. She blamed herself. If she had not been ill things might be different. All those dark and terrible feelings that had carried her to this place were gone. Her own body had left her stranded, cast up upon an unknown shore. She had lost direction, she had lost herself, and worst of all she had lost Reggie. And yet she felt nothing, could only stare at the thatched roof of the guest house beyond the oleanders where each afternoon beneath the hot sun, Reggie possessed the woman Puteh. She imagined their bodies moving together, the woman’s breasts the colour of roasting coffee, her slim, dark limbs wound like vines about Reggie’s belabouring parts. One erotic image upon another pursued her without release until she saw Reggie’s head bent over his desk in his office again. Her body felt only relief to be free of Reggie’s embrace, but that she could be touched by imaginings of him with another woman seemed the most perverted punishment of all. She understood nothing any more.
