The Parasol Flower Page 6

  “Charlotte doesn’t need an ayah. She’s too old for that now. But…this girl,” she points at Malu, “has always seemed to me to be…tenacious and reasonably articulate. I think she might prove a suitable playmate.”

  “Genduk,” Nattie names the Malay work for such care. “Aw, she is so good, my Malu. Sensible. Very valuable for me, see?” Nattie puts her hands on Malu’s shoulders.

  Bird Mem’s eyes narrow slightly. “I will pay the ordinary wage for a genduk, whatever that wage happens to be. No more special prices.” She adjusts her crumpled hat. “If it suits you, I can take her back with me when I come for the birds. My name is Mrs. Peterborough. We live out of town, on the former Boonstra plantation.”

  “Ah. Yes, memsahib,” agrees Nattie. “Excellent girl. Clean, very friendly.” She continues to haggle as if Malu were one of her caged pets. “Half-breed bastard,” her aunt says brightly, tapping the side of her forehead. “Good thinking.”

  “Excuse me?” says the lady.

  “Two dollars a week,” Malu interrupts them. “That is the ordinary wage.” In fact, she has no idea about genduk pay, but this number is at least more than Malu and her mother’s portion of the menagerie profits.

  “Well, I will make inquiries as to the ordinary wage.”

  “I don’t leave for less,” says Malu quietly.

  Nattie growls at Malu and shoves her out of the way. Pivoting toward Bird Mem, she says, “We will settle price. We all happy together. So we settle price, eh? Price can be settled. You come back, mem.”

  Malu is red-faced—hopefully Omar has not seen any of this—as she watches the crumpled hat bob away with the dark heads of the native shoppers. She doesn’t like Auntie Nattie, but to work out there, so far out of town on that abandoned plantation? To have to make play with an English girl she’s never met? It’s all as strange as the lady herself, with her tangly words and her special requests.

  Her pay could go for her mother’s medicine. English medicine. Somehow, inshallah, with this new work, she will make sure of it. Incredible, Malu says to herself. Three-fifty per bird. Then two dollars a week! Was it the manuk dewata who’d brought her some courage? She is still lost in thinking this through when the white-suited officer limps past their stall.

  Nine

  The parcel postage for the art competition, not to mention the entry fee, must be deducted from Hannah’s diminished stipend. She decides therefore against placing a March order to Schlauerbach’s. “It is really no way to work,” she writes to Godot, “when the practical part of your brain measures each blob that hits the palette and demands to know that it is going to be put to good use.” Confining herself to the most developed version of Strangler Fig seems to bring her further and further from its completion, maddeningly. Whereas Tethered she finished in a day!

  Even if she manages to purchase supplies next month, what will she paint? Rehash old studies? Or else “the figure,” as she put it to the sergeant so pompously. Well, it is one thing to draw a paid model indoors. Quite another to approach Malay villagers on the street.

  In the end, bulging vines fill the plane of the canvas until it looks as if the canvas might torque and rupture. Contrary to her expectations, the excess of vines makes the mostly hidden kapok appear even sturdier and stronger.

  “Yes,” she says at last. “Yes, I think so.”

  The timing is tight. If the painting had been able to dry before she needed to ship it, she could have rolled it into a cylinder. As it is, Hannah nails lined crate boards over the stretched canvas and binds the entire thing in strips of old linens, all of which she encases in brown parcel paper and twine. Her entry form is sealed in an envelope, stuffed within. Checking at the window, she sees their bullock cart is gone. A walk, then, to the post office.

  But the sandwiched crate boards are awkward, the parcel too deep for her to hook under one arm and too heavy to hold out in front of her. After some fumbling on the front lawn, Hannah decides to balance it on her bare head. By keeping her posture erect she can at least move steadily.

  Out on the road, the air is warm and fragrant with the scent of kemuning. As she nears the acacia, Roderick comes running, chittering and squealing.

  “Hello, Roddy darling! Yes, I did bring one,” she says. “Hold on.”

  Hannah concentrates for a moment before carefully removing her left hand from the parcel and even more carefully inserting it in her pocket while keeping her upper body, neck, and head perfectly still. Withdrawing the biscuit, she flings it, not daring to look down.

  The sound of the little creature’s crunching makes her smile. Hannah proceeds, both hands once again gripping the painting. Roddy, she knows, is scampering along beside her. By the time they turn onto the avenue of the high street, her neck and arms are aching. She halts, releases first one arm and the then other to let each fall loose and rest for a minute. The post office is another three or four blocks away, nearer the other end of the downtown.

  “Best get on then, hadn’t we?” she says.

  Roddy chitters and dashes ahead, nearly tripping her. The barbershop, no doubt.

  As she passes, Hannah calls out, “Good morning, Mr. Lim.”

  In the final block, her forearms begin to burn and her scalp goes prickly. Meantime, the sounds of hooves and rolling wheels grow louder behind her.

  “Hannah?”

  “What on earth does she have on her head?”

  “Driver, slow down.”

  “Goodness, is that monkey…wearing shaving lather?”

  The cart slows to a stop just in front of her. Hannah tilts the crate board carefully to confirm the speaker is Lucy Finch, the Resident’s wife. She and Hazel Swinburne, another Ridge Road neighbor, stare down at her from their bullock cart, eyes goggling. Roderick scampers over and begins flicking shaving lather at them from his fingers.

  “Shoo, you little beast!”

  “Roddy,” Hannah commands. “Stop that! Go home now!”

  “Good morning, ladies,” she adds before she sets off again, moving past their cart as fast as she is able. The postal office is only twenty yards away.

  “Hannah, let us help you!” the women cry after her. “Driver, go! Go!”

  “Ask one of the police officers to help you,” Lucy calls out loudly.

  The Sikh police officers have a habit of gathering on the shallow steps of the postal office. Ahead, she hears them arguing with each other in vociferous Punjabi. She’d forgotten about the Sikhs, with whom she ordinarily exchanges a few friendly words. No doubt they will be laughing at her now as well. At least that mischievous gibbon is no longer in sight.

  Deputy Onkarjeet rushes over. “Madam, madam,” he says. “I will carry this for you.”

  “Thank you, Deputy, but I’m delicately balanced,” she replies, continuing to mount the stone steps. Sergeant Singh, amongst the officers she passes, is smiling broadly.

  The deputy bounds ahead to hold open the door.

  “Wonderful, thank you kindly.” Hannah slips in sideways as elegantly as she can manage.

  Vast and dimly lit, the foyer of the postal office has always put her in mind of a harem courtyard. Its grandiose, three-story ceiling is held up by numerous embossed pillars. Two shriveled punkah wallahs pull the ropes for the two enormous ceiling fans. The tidy Eurasian clerk, behind his far-off counter, is serving three or four customers who twist to look behind them.

  “Morning,” Hannah says under her breath. She raises the parcel in her tired arms and with a groan ducks out from under it, levering it against her hip to bring one end down carefully against the polished floor. Moments later, Lucy and Hazel burst through the door. The three women stand catching their breath and letting their eyes adjust.

  Hazel loosens the chin strap of her sun hat. “Hannah, I can’t believe you walked all the way here with this monster.”

  “More difficult than I
expected,” she admits. She is still breathing hard. “Although, I do love the walk.”

  “At least it was downhill,” Lucy says. “It’s a painting, I take it?”

  “Yes.” Hannah discreetly attempts to fix her hair, after the look Lucy has given her. “For the Kew Gardens competition, actually.” Her bun is squashed and multiple pins have been pushed out of place. Lank strands of dark hair droop over her ears.

  Hazel tugs up one end of the painting, prompting Hannah to take hold of the other. “Best get out of the doorway.”

  As Lucy shepherds them toward the queue she says, “You’ve been a stranger lately, Hannah.”

  “Have I?” Having been greeted with fervour by the small community of expatriates and drawn firmly to their perspiring bosoms, she had wanted to please. She’d fooled them all for far too long by acting sociably. Which is to say, normally. There’s nothing more suspicious than an unsociable woman. At the end of the queue, they set down the painting. “I’ve been rather occupied lately.”

  With a start, she feels fingers moving over her head. Lucy is unpinning and re-pinning her braids. The other customers, mercifully, have turned back to their business.

  “Painting can be such a struggle, I must admit,” says Hannah. “There is something about completion that is ever so difficult to gauge, I find. With this one, I was desperate to be done with it, ten times over.” She half-swats at Lucy’s hands. “But I couldn’t finish with it. Well. Until it was finished with me!” She laughs heartily at her own joke. “And how are you both?”

  “Never mind about us,” says Hazel.

  “I’ve nearly fixed it,” says Lucy. “There. Passable.”

  “Of course she doesn’t have a hat for the return trip,” Hazel remarks. “In this sun…”

  Lucy takes back her packet of letters from Hazel. They stand together for a minute or two, watching the clerk process and release his customer, punching his stamp loudly.

  “I hear the colonel has hired a hunting party.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “A hunting party? Whatever for?” Hazel asks disingenuously. There is no news Lucy wouldn’t have told her already. The two of them are thick as thieves.

  Lucy answers on Hannah’s behalf. “There’s been a tiger attack. A man-eater.”

  “A man-eater!” Hazel repeats, loud enough for the word to echo.

  “Really, it’s more of a cow-eater,” Hannah says. She addresses the women in the queue who have turned in alarm, adding, “Our Jersey was taken recently.”

  “In her pen. At night,” says Lucy. “Hello, Beatrice. Jane.”

  Beatrice Watts is the minister’s wife and Jane, her eldest daughter. Hannah does not recognize the other person whose back remains to them as she deals with the clerk. A tall, angular woman, wearing a crumpled felt hat.

  “And now,” Lucy tells them all, “the colonel is going to hunt the beast down.”

  “He’s hired a hunting party,” Hazel marvels.

  “Can one hire a hunting party in Kuala Kangsa?” asks Beatrice.

  “Apparently.”

  Fifteen-year-old Jane squirms at the prospect. “How exciting!”

  “They’re natives,” Lucy informs them. “Off shift from the mines.”

  “Malays?” asks Beatrice.

  “Apparently a certain strain of them are quite expert hunters.”

  There is a lull as they separately consider what off-shift Malay miners know or do not know about the sport of hunting.

  “Well, I don’t like the thought of a man-eater on the Ridge Road,” Beatrice tells them. The Watts live on the other, poorer, side of town, though her sympathy is obviously heartfelt.

  “At least your husband is doing something about it,” Lucy says to Hannah.

  “One dreads to think,” says Beatrice, “if the children are out playing…”

  The Watts have seven children ranging in age from fifteen to infancy. One or two to spare, is what Hannah thinks.

  “This tiger is not a man-eater.”

  The contribution, the pronouncement, is made by the woman in the crumpled hat. She has turned toward them to reveal a bare, freckled face of perhaps forty-five. Pulling on her gloves she says, “A man-eater is an animal who has incorporated human flesh into its diet. Human flesh is a distinctive taste. A tiger who is bold enough to poach a cow from a stable, or a chicken from its coop, is not the same animal as a man-eater.”

  The women grimace and freeze, unsure how to respond. Hannah realizes this is the biologist, Mrs. Eva Peterborough, the woman who refuses to have anything to do with the Ladies Association of Perak. Lucy, chairwoman of the LAP, has been pursuing Mrs. Peterborough’s membership for years, and it occurs to Hannah that, however awkward, Lucy might take this opportunity as well.

  It is Hazel who speaks, belatedly. “So you don’t think we should be worried?”

  Eva Peterborough moves past them with her collection of letters. “If you keep a cow, yes.”

  They all watch her exit the building, silent until the heavy door thuds shut.

  “‘Human flesh is a distinctive taste!’” Jane bursts into giggles.

  “Next, please,” the clerk announces.

  “That is the most I have ever heard that woman say.” Hazel tugs Lucy’s arm.

  Lucy murmurs approvingly, “So pretentious.”

  “Next, please.”

  “Oh, I suppose it’s our turn,” Beatrice says, awakening and nodding vigorously at the clerk. She pushes her daughter toward the counter.

  As they are waiting, Lucy inquires about Hannah’s painting. “Come now,” she insists, when Hannah politely demurs. “If you’re submitting it for a competition, you must take some pride in it.”

  “Pride? Why, yes, of course!”

  “Well?”

  She meets Lucy’s eyes—eyes that, unless she is mistaken, seem to be smiling. “It’s called Strangler Fig Attacking Kapok. Depicting a strangler fig. Obviously. They can grow to enormous size in the forest, these vines. And this one, when we encountered it, was breathtaking. The tree itself was enormous. A mighty old kapok. It was covered in a webbing of vines, for you see the vines can become quite solid, I suppose you’d say. They meld together to become like branches, or rather a trunk, for the vine is literally eating its host and sending the nutrients up and down its length, as required. It’s a parasitical relationship.”

  “Wherever did you learn all this?” Hazel asks. “Not at your art academy.”

  “No. Sergeant Singh explained it to me.” Hannah hurries on. “I was, of course, interested in depicting something of this smothering action, this elegant depravity of one life feeding from another.”

  “Of course,” says Lucy.

  “In portraiture, you see, the artist reveals something of interest about the sitter. There is a definite thing to be said. But in the best portraits, a great deal more can be apprehended by the viewer. It is the triadic relationship of the artist, through the sitter, communicating with the viewer, that allows for such wonderful complexity. In the best portraits.”

  “Portraits? But this is a tree, is it not?”

  “And a vine,” says Hazel.

  The clerk is finally free. A small, pale man with a mustache like a caterpillar, he calls them forward. As Hannah hoists the crate board onto the counter he lunges to receive it, then peers at the address label. “Oh! Good luck, mem.” He winks as if the contents are their little secret. Hannah sighs inwardly.

  Working his measuring tape and scale, the clerk soon tabulates an outrageous postage.

  “Are you sure?” she says to him as discreetly as possible.

  “Sorry, mem. Big size plus big weight equals big price, heh?”

  Hannah pays, fishing out the last of her coins, and he lugs the parcel to a back room. All the while she can hear Hazel and Lucy discussing her jung
le treks in low tones. They agree she will have to stop, with a tiger prowling around. It’s the lighthearted way they reach their conclusion that makes Hannah want to wail.

  “Sorry, there are no incoming letters for you today, Mrs. Inglis,” the clerk reports.

  “Come home with us in the cart,” suggests Lucy, as Hannah turns to go. “We’ll drop you off.”

  “No, thank you. I enjoy the walk.”

  Hazel and Lucy exchange a look.

  “But it’s all uphill in this direction,” Hazel says. “Just the thought of it makes my lungs ache.” She fans her hands over the prow of her breast. “Mind you, I suppose you’re not carrying…anything…anymore.”

  “Leave her be,” sings Lucy. “She’s obviously a lost cause.”

  “Excuse me? What…did you say?”

  “I said that you obviously love to walk.”

  Hazel waves. “Toodle-oo!”

  The ladies step toward the clerk. Hannah pushes open the heavy door and walks into the blinding sun.

  Ten

  Daphne and Bob recognized that they were making great strides with me. By mid-January I’d stayed in Frimley two weeks longer than planned, and I was no longer “hiding,” as they put it, for hours on end behind a screen or a book. I made jokes. I’d learned how to properly watch football—i.e. in the pub, with a beer and a bunch of Bob’s friends. Daphne told me stories about her younger life, when she’d worked as a trauma nurse. No one, she said, had ever asked her the kinds of questions I did, and she meant that as a compliment.

  What the dear Plewetts didn’t know was that as much as I genuinely liked Frimley and their apricot-scented company, I was lingering because of barnabymothballs37. I’d written to Barnaby Munk the very day Miranda sent me his address. I was still waiting for a reply. I’d discovered he was a professor emeritus at Oxford so I assumed, maybe incorrectly, that he was living somewhere nearby and also assumed—in the unfair, exuberant way people do when they are engrossed in their own projects—that the old man would have nothing better to do than to facilitate my quest to find Hannah Inglis’ art. Yet with each day that passed, I was coming to accept that this “line of inquiry”—as the police always said on Daphne’s programs—might well be a dead end. In the meantime, I began familiarizing myself with British Malaysia, Victorian customs, tropical trees, and art movements of the nineteenth century. I’d even tried to trace the Pellingham-Peterborough lineage on a genealogy site.