The Parasol Flower Read online

  “Memsahib? Mem?”

  The color work, she likes. Also the brushwork. The way she has created a spiralling movement for the eye. Yet there is something unbalanced…which perhaps should be unbalanced, given the strangulation occurring…but which she finds herself fighting. She considers this fighting feeling. Is conflict an acceptable effect for a painting? A desirable one? Strangler Fig Upon Kapok, although she has not quite decided at this moment in time, will be her submission to the Kew Gardens Amateur Botanicals Art Competition.

  Knocking on the door. Bare feet shuffling. “Please, mem!”

  She wipes her brush and stabs it into her French knot. As she opens the door he says, “Come please, mem. Come.” Anjuh, their syce and groundskeeper, is a particularly dark-skinned Malay. The whites of his eyes are shining in his troubled face.

  “Good morning, Anjuh.”

  He motions with his hands and scurries away.

  Hannah blinks for a moment at the empty door, considering the kapok and its cage of fig branches, like an exoskeleton. “Oh, all right. I’m coming,” she mumbles, undoing her smock. The colonel is a heavy sleeper. No chance he would have heard anyone calling for him. Underneath the smock she is wearing her favorite silk day gown. Drawing its creamy lapels to her chest, she tightens the sash and glances one last time at the painting.

  Anjuh is waiting by the back door. To her surprise, he opens it and steps outside.

  “Oh! Wait.” She veers into the foyer to fetch her rain cloak and garden shoes.

  The Inglis’ little barn, for this is where Anjuh appears to be heading, sits at the end of a long lawn that dips then rises steadily over its length. Her servant hurries on, stiff-kneed. Hannah follows at a slower pace, taking in the once familiar surroundings. Where the forest halts at the edge of the property, a milky mist is lingering, giving the areca palms and the ferns an enchanting prehistoric aura. Why has she never thought of painting the dawn?

  Inside the barn, an odious smell assaults her. She sputters, “Anjuh! What on—!” All he does is beckon yet again, leading her to the roomy stall where Cleopatra the cow is tethered, a rope looped firmly around one of the Jersey’s hind legs. The rope holds a stump. The leg has been severed at its hock and lies like a tossed dog’s bone.

  Gorge rises in her throat. A mess of entrails and lumps of flesh are strewn across the sticky floorboards.

  “The barn wasn’t locked? The pen wasn’t locked?” she demands.

  “Yes, mem. Everything locked.”

  The door, she then sees, has simply been pushed off its hinges.

  Anjuh wrings his small hands. “Tiger, see.”

  Hannah pinches her nostrils and bends over the severed leg, her pulse thrumming in her ears.

  Back in the kitchen she lights the stove and puts the kettle on it. How long to leave the crime scene intact? Typically, the colonel wakes late. Would he want to see any of the mess? He ought to see it, his beloved cow.

  Anjuh’s wife Suria, their housemaid, ambles into the kitchen as the water is coming to the boil. She takes the teapot from the cupboard, checks inside it for spiders, and reaches past Hannah for the fluting kettle. “Poor thing, mem.”

  “Oh, I’m fine, Suria, thank you.”

  “The cow, mem.”

  “Yes, yes! Poor Cleopatra. Although I think she must have had rather a lonely life here, don’t you?”

  Suria shrugs. Eyes Hannah’s hair.

  Hannah puts a hand to her head and feels for paintbrushes, sliding three free and lining them up on the counter. She watches the old Malay complete the preparations for tea. “There’s not much in the way of clean-up,” she tells her. “So, I think you and Anjuh can manage it. You two together. That is to say, alone.” She’d really rather not ask anyone at the Residency for help.

  Suria grunts.

  “Find yourself a bucket. Two buckets. And a scrub brush and some hot water. I suppose use the washing crystals, though I’m not really sure what’s called for…and take a few rags from the cupboard. We’ll have to pitch them afterward but that can’t be helped. You may take your time with it, of course. There’s no rush.”

  Hannah cracks her knuckles, thinking. “In fact…don’t begin the cleaning until I ask you to. Suria? Leave it all be for now. Yes?” She waits for Suria to make eye contact.

  “Mm. Sahib woan like.”

  Won’t like his cow dead, she means. No, he won’t, Hannah silently agrees.

  “Good you doan hear her. Last night.” Suria shakes her head slowly from side to side. “Screamin’.”

  Hannah had heard nothing. Had she heard nothing at all? For a minute or two, the women cultivate their own thoughts, Hannah’s straying to strangler figs, Sergeant Singh, and cobalt blue before returning to the tethered stump of leg.

  The ayah pours them tea.

  “And. I’ll tell sahib,” Hannah says on the third sip.

  She walks back out to the barn on her own, carrying the three-legged stool she uses on her forest treks. First, though, she stands, stooping over the severed leg. Carefully she pivots and crouches, examining it from several angles. She makes little forays like this, into the foul haze of the scene, holding her handkerchief over her nose and mouth, then sits just outside the pool of blood to sketch. The hoof is terribly poignant. Why is that? Why does she have more compassion for the bothersome creature now that it’s been reduced to a single body part?

  She swabs different blue-reds and black-reds and pink-reds onto a palette, searching for something dark enough to serve as a background. The background will be blood. The foreground, a foreshortened stump of leg culminating in a dirty hoof. The blood must serve the hoof in its complexity, not flatten it out. She will return to the work in the studio, paint it up properly. There will be no second chances there, only memory to rely on. The time to play is now. Quite enough time. George won’t wake for a time yet; he came home late, reeking of tobacco and opium smoke.

  Early on, the colonel made his expectations plain when it came to whores; they were and they will be part of his life. Hannah’s life—somehow, incredibly, now contained in his—involves these women. For the better, she’s come to believe. George wants children, though neither of them would cope well with a child’s mess or a child’s noise, if you ask her, not to mention the extra expense. Besides which the children of Ridge Road are sent home to boarding school by age five or six, before they have a chance to grow too Malayan. It’s cruel, she tells the colonel when he tries to bed her. Cruel to be parted from such dears when they are so young and so tender. She couldn’t possibly.

  Hence his reliance on whores. Their reliance. On nights like last night, when he comes from one, he snores like a warthog and sleeps even longer than usual. Hannah checks her pocket watch. Bright light is leaking into the little stable.

  With a number two brush she adds a few veinous lines for the ruptured sinews. Then, separately, a dry brush to try pushing back the hide. Compares how it folds, naturally, where it meets the hoof. Even in familiarity, there is mystery. Such as how the colonel will react to losing Cleopatra, something she cannot completely foresee even after four years of marriage. The back of a vase, the interior of a mountain. What remains unseen generates the effect of depth. The bone of the cow’s leg taking shape by her brush, shrouded in stiffened muscle and skin. Or rather, the effect of bone.

  She throws everything into her paint box, replacing the handkerchief to her face as quickly as possible, and heads back to the house.

  Three

  In their bedroom, the colonel stands before her dressing table mirror, massaging his swollen stomach. He has always complained of stomach aches and indigestion, along with a constellation of symptoms the military doctor calls climate fatigue.

  “How are you feeling, George?”

  He turns and grunts.

  “Sit down perhaps. Have a sip of water,” she advises. A full gla
ss is sitting on the table by the bed. “Is it very painful this morning?”

  He pinches his eyebrows together. “As a matter of fact it is very painful this morning.” He shuffles toward the glass she holds out to him. “You’ve not been in that thing all day, have you?”

  The colonel dislikes the shapelessness of her dressing gown. The gown is marvelous—oyster-coloured, smooth as a dream, and meticulously embroidered with designs of pine trees and snow-capped mountains. James, the Resident, bought it for her while on a trade mission in Singapore. It served as a sort of welcome present, or perhaps a wedding gift, for she and George had arrived in Kuala Kangsa during the Resident’s absence.

  “It’s early yet,” she protests lightly. “Besides, women should be exempted from corsets in this climate. Do you know they’re protesting them in London, Edith tells me? They’re quite unhealthy.”

  “I’m quite unhealthy.” He eases himself back onto the bed with a moan. “Far too fat.”

  “No, you’re not,” she replies dutifully. “Perhaps you should wear a corset.”

  The colonel laughs. “And smart as a whip she is, too, ladies and gentlemen.” He looks up at her fondly, expectantly.

  With a pang, she realizes she doesn’t bother much with humour any more. “I’m afraid I have some bad news, George.”

  He sits forward at this.

  “Cleopatra has been killed.”

  “But. She was...I thought she was perfectly healthy.”

  Hannah bows her head. Such a waste. “She was healthy, yes. But she was killed, George. A tiger, it seems. Anjuh and Suria are cleaning the…remains from the pen.”

  Hannah studies him a moment as this news settles in. The colonel is not one to think on his feet. Nor is she, and she respects his need for time and deliberation. When he doesn’t respond, she turns to her wardrobe and the day ahead, her hands moving shakily over her clothes. The smell, that horrid smell, has attached itself to her insides. Look at her arms; they are no more than bone twigs, waving about uselessly in front of her. And her legs, hiding under the gown—such flimsy, pluckable things, really. Pluckable petals.

  She presses her feet into the floorboards. Shush. You need those legs to stand.

  Behind her he is stirring, she notices vaguely, creaking the bed. Will the colonel even think to thank her? Thank you, Hannah, for gently bearing and bringing me the news of my beloved cow. For dealing with the foetid mess she became. For tramping out to the barn at five o’clock in the morning, interrupting your—

  “This is outrageous!” The colonel has pushed himself off the bed. “Outrageous!” he repeats, mustache squirming.

  “George?”

  He shuffles and turns and shuffles and turns, kneading his bearded chin in his hand, a smile slowly transforming his face.

  “What is outrageous?”

  “The poor thing,” he says with fervor.

  “Well. Yes.” She closes her paint-stained fingers into fists. “George, I’m not sure it’s worth trying to keep a cow, do you? I don’t mind the tinned milk. Everybody settles for the tinned milk here, don’t they?”

  “I despise tinned milk.” His smile broadens. “And I like cows. I like them, Hannah.”

  It is an unkind thought, but it occurs to her that he might go mad in his old age. She says, “Yes, I know. You find them soothing.” If he’d been in the barn and smelled her rotting innards… She shivers.

  “Tigers are fifty dollars a head now,” he says.

  “What? Do you mean the bounty?” Even then she doesn’t see where he is heading. She is caught in her own chain of thoughts—one that usually leads to her ceasing, for an unspecified period, her jungle outings. And then the anxious, regretful feeling follows. Not that she and the sergeant ever went west of Ridge Road. But a tiger’s territorial range is known to be expansive, is it not?

  “I’m going to shoot our way to a new cow,” the colonel says.

  “What do you mean shoot? You are—”

  “Oh, not I, Hannah. I’ll pay some coolies to do it for me.” He glances at the shuttered window. “I’ve told you, it’s suicidal to wander around in that diseased wilderness. For any reason.”

  “You’ve not said that before,” she mumbles. “Suicidal? You’ve not said that, have you?” She’s aware of course that he is not in favor of her jungle trekking. Lately, admittedly, she’s not cared to be too aware.

  “Well, I’m sure you have already considered it. With a man-eater like this around, it’s simply not prudent. It’s not reasonable.” He clasps his hands together. “No, it’s simply not reasonable, Hannah, for you to continue to do what you are doing.”

  She is taken aback for a moment. Recovering, she says, “Anjuh fetched me this morning and took me to the barn to see for myself. So, as it happens, I’ve been forced to consider this tiger. Intimately.” No response. “As for the treks, I do have Sergeant Singh,” she ventures to explain, “although—”

  The colonel explodes. “Oh, you have Sergeant Singh! You have Sergeant Singh! Excellent. And Sergeant Singh follows you about, gun cocked.” He sets himself laughing.

  “You make him sound like a lunatic.”

  “Look. I’ll save your sergeant the trouble. Here you are, putting him to trouble. And I’ll save him the trouble. Do you see? I’ll save you both. I’ll keep you both safe.”

  “What are you saying, George? What do you mean you’ll keep us safe?”

  The colonel taps his front teeth. “You’d better stay clear of the tiger hunt. That’s what I mean.”

  “Oh, indeed!” She swats away a fly that is encircling them. It could take the colonel weeks, months, to catch a tiger. If he ever does. She has an overwhelming urge to reach out and tear the gauzy netting from their bed. “What good is a tiger hunt?” she demands. “How can you be sure to kill the same animal that killed Cleopatra?”

  The colonel’s eyes run over her as he considers her question. Or else considers her. He replies, “I can’t be sure.”

  “Well then!”

  “Tida apa, as the natives say.”

  Tida apa. So what.

  Yes, Colonel, she has long been thinking about it, the question of What Is Out There. That has always been the question, all these months since she started trekking. Ironically, the only reasonable conclusion is that she should keep visiting the jungle. Especially as she continues to make strides in her art. The cats have been out there all along. And she, after all, is not a tethered cow. Sergeant Singh is armed and ready to protect her; that is his very purpose.

  And yet. Hannah sighs as she bends to tie the laces on her boots. She will ease off trekking for a while.

  “Suria, I’m leaving!” she calls from the front door.

  Ridge Road, what the natives call the Street of Big Bosses, is the highest in Kuala Kangsa and has marvellous vistas of the Perak river valley. As Hannah walks she delights in the river snaking into the distance, the abundance of steep, forested hills, and the village sprinkled below her.

  At the Cinnamon Hill switchback the road plunges toward the town’s high street, and where Roderick, she sees, is perched in his acacia. He swings down and runs toward Hannah, chittering and squealing, then assumes his beggar’s pose on the dusty road, eyes upturned, mouth drooping. The red-banded gibbon is sandy-coloured, with a ring of white hair around its tar-black pensive face.

  “Good morning, Roddy darling! I did bring one. Hold on.” Digging a biscuit from her pocket, Hannah tosses it toward the little monkey.

  He catches it without effort and sits for a moment to nibble.

  “Tell me,” she says, once she’s sure he’s following her. “The colonel is overreacting, isn’t he? I think that’s pretty plain.”

  The gibbon darts forward, performing a forward roll. Where he’s learned this, she’s never known, but Hannah claps and coos on cue.

  “He doesn’t
consider what anything means to me,” she complains. “No, honestly, it was just the one biscuit.”

  Roderick looks at her as they walk, waiting for her elaborate.

  “Oh, listen to me, I sound like a child! Somehow I’m in this position, Roddy, and I’m not sure if he’s put me here or I’ve done it myself. Or someone else again has set this up for the both of us. And I’m playing the part of the wayward child. I’m not a wayward child.”

  Roddy stops and scratches his head, which makes her chuckle.

  “And you’re playing the part of the comical little monkey!”

  Though it is mid-morning, the high street is all but empty. They pause for a moment to take it all in: the shuttered state buildings, the little local shops, the slender sycamores in their iron cages, delicately shading the dirt sidewalks. Kuala Kangsa the outpost, holding itself open to a civilized future, but in no great rush for it to arrive.

  They make it a block further before the gibbon squeals and shoots in through the open doorway of the barbershop.

  “Good morning, Mr. Lim!”

  Inside the shop, Mr. Lim raises a hand in greeting.

  Roddy, she sees, has already stolen a handful of shaving lather and is applying it to his head and chin.

  This, the first Friday of each month, is pay day. Today the colonel is sitting with his pen down when she arrives, as if waiting for her to walk into the room. No shuffling of paperwork. No Miss Wing to be found. As usual, Hannah carries a few letters with her to post, including her most recent order of art supplies. That envelope remains unsealed.

  “Good morning, George. Miss Wing is not in today?”

  He stands. Begins flapping a wallet against his forearm. “In light of recent events, I have decided to reduce your stipend.”

  “Recent events?” she repeats. He must be referring to the tiger attack. Surely that isn’t her doing?

  “I take it you won’t be entering the forest,” he says.