‘Kampung Ulu?’ A gust of wind ruffles my hair and sends the bougainvillaea stalks chattering against the wall.
Alice looks impatient. ‘Something like that. She’s got him driving her out there every month.’
‘I’m sorry …’
Alice’s nose wrinkles like a cat given food it won’t eat. She sighs. ‘I’ll tell him you came by.’
She’s already turning away. The cloth of her dress pulls tight against her haunches as she steps over her flowerpots. Anyone else would tug it down, with the embarrassed shuffle of a fat woman seen from behind. Not Alice. She swings her legs out, her thighs slapping together, and climbs the house steps without a single glance back.
I feel battered, as though I’ve been in high seas or a rolling barrel. I walk slowly back to the car, letting Tom’s bag fall on the passenger seat. I’ve come all the way to Pahang and ended up just where I started. A two-minute Maggi-noodle mistress. Handy at the time. Not like Alice, who fits. Alice, who’s tamed the jungle into terracotta pots and sundress prints. It’ll take more than a flood to get her out; the Jelai and I don’t stand a chance.
18. A Prince and Princess Marry: 1935
Three months after the rumours about Cecelia begin, the satay man turns up at Mary’s house.
‘Cecelia Lim’s left home,’ he tells her. ‘In disgrace.’
Mary, her lips coated with peanut sauce, stares. She thinks he’s joking, at first. But the satay man gazes blandly back at her, hands her a stick of mutton and shrugs his shoulders. The Lim girl or the Panikkar girl; they’re all the same to him.
Because Mary, without knowing it, has started a wildfire of gossip. She didn’t mean to, of course. She’d expected a few whispers in the marketplace, an unkind glance or two sent Cecelia’s way. A few small hurts, enough to get her own back – and Rajan, too, into the bargain. If she’d kept her ears open, if she’d known how bad the gossip had got, she might have stood up for her old best friend. But Mary hasn’t been to the marketplace since it all began, and she hasn’t heard a thing. She’s spent these three months quietly, sewing with the nuns or reading in one of her father’s endless corridors. Mary’s been nestled in lonely, forgiving places, and she’s forgotten how much a reputation matters.
So this news comes as a shock. But she rallies, takes a bite of her mutton and pulls herself together. She knows better than to give in to her feelings.
‘Best thing that could have happened,’ she tells the satay man sturdily.
Sometimes, she thinks, you have to be cruel to be kind. And when the satay man’s news spreads, Mary’s glad to have heard it first. Cecelia and her growing stomach, it turns out, have boarded a bus to KL and they won’t be looking back. The market ladies lick their lips over it, of course. They blame Cecelia’s mother, Cecelia’s friends and her schoolteacher and even Solomon Varghese and his brother-in-law Amir. Solomon and Amir are regarded doubtfully anyway; they take long walks hand-in-hand through the jungle, and exchange hot-eyed whispers through keyholes. After steadfastly making love to each Varghese sister, it seems Amir’s finally found peace in the arms of the brother. Typical, the market ladies huff; the only faithful lovers in Lipis are the boys.
But Mary can’t bring herself to be completely sorry Cecelia’s gone, not quite. Because since Cecelia rode away on that bus, Rajan’s been paying Mary some definite attention. He turns up every day with his curling moustache and split-legged stethoscope and gives her confident, unregrettable kisses. Rajan moves quickly, and he’s certainly got over Cecelia. Like everyone in Lipis, he’d heard the rumours about her, and he dropped her like a stone. Rajan, unlike Mary, believes in being cruel to be cruel.
And so Mary isn’t surprised to spot him waving at her one sunny morning soon after she turns twenty. She’s climbed into the casuarina tree to be alone with her thoughts. Mary’s fined down over the last few years, and there’s a suggestion of something needle-like about her. Something hard, like a casuarina, and breakable. Liable to draw blood.
‘Mary, darling! How are you?’ Rajan pulls himself up from the ground to the branch Mary’s sitting on. ‘Marooned between earth and sky …’
Mary rubs her forehead irritably. Rajan’s been doing this a lot, lately, coming out with snippets of poetry and lines from plays. Asking her what she thinks of T. S. Eliot, of women’s rights and the state Europe’s in. He’s filling her mind with education, and Mary doesn’t like it. Poetry reminds her of her failed Junior Cambridge exam, and any mention of women and their rights brings back the image of Cecelia, giggling on a convent hilltop.
‘I’m well, thank you,’ she says. Despite all her regrets, Mary still wants Rajan very, very much. It’s partly the musk of sex he exudes whenever he moves. It’s partly the thought that something good has to come out of Cecelia’s exile, otherwise what was the point? And it’s partly Mary’s own father, who’s put up the sort of opposition that makes Mary wild with rage.
‘No daughter of mine,’ Stephen has thundered, ‘is going to marry the son of an Indian quack!’
Stephen’s become thinner over the years, his eyes are redder and these days he barely bothers to finish building new rooms in his house before tearing them down. He’s disintegrating rapidly, becoming a remittance man whose Manchester family want nothing more than for him to stay in Malaya out of everybody’s way. The only person who still loves Stephen is fourteen-year-old Anil, who loyally sleeps in one new room after another as his
