Miss Seetoh in the World (11 page)

Never mind if this many-splendoured thing,
enjoyed in the imagination only, was but a pale version of the real thing. I’d
rather spend my time with my unreal books, thought Maria. The Botanic Gardens
with their lovely quiet walks, shady corners, their twittering birds and
humming insects right in the midst of a bustling city, was a favourite place to
bring a book during the weekend and enjoy at least a full hour of solitude.

‘Hey, that’s an interesting title,’ said a
young man in jogging gear, looking at her book as he wiped off the perspiration
from his face with a towel. ‘Hmm, Jane Austen. I had to do her in my first year
at the university. Never could take to her!’ He recommended himself instantly
to her, quite unlike the other fellow, also in the Botanic Gardens, who had
said, by way of introduction, ‘My name is Professor S.Y. Yong, and I’m Head of
the Neurology Department of Raffles Hospital.’

She had responded silently, with a teasing
twinkle in her eye, ‘Go on, tell me about your salary, your next promotion,
your new Lexus.’ The jogger was infinitely preferable company. She had chatted
with him for a few minutes, but the next time he saw her again in her favourite
shady nook, she chatted less and smiled less, afraid to appear encouraging.

A curious thought occurred to her: Meeta and
Winnie were close friends by default only. The tenuous bond of their similarity
in status would break as soon as one found a partner and waved a cheery goodbye
to the other. The co-dependence would sunder even more dramatically if one
stole the boyfriend of the other. Then another thought occurred and made her
smile, in the gratification of vanity: the supreme irony, part of the
hunter-hunted paradox, of eager women being ignored and completely indifferent
women, like herself, being pursued.

Both their unhappy affairs behind them,
Meeta and Winnie turned to a new subject of interest, eliciting much noisy
protestation from Maria. ‘No, no! I don’t want to hear of it!’ she said,
stopping her ears against their remarks about the reasonably good-looking
Bernard Tan Boon Siong who, from his first seeing Maria in the compound of the
Church of Eternal Mercy, had eyes for nobody else.

‘There he is, under the tree, looking in our
direction. He’s coming towards us,’ said Winnie.

‘Alright Maria, prepare for another display
of gallantry from your knight in shining armour,’ said Meeta. ‘Shall Winnie and
I make ourselves scarce?’

‘No, no!’ cried Maria in alarm. ‘You stay
right where you are. Don’t you dare go away!’

The situation had taken on the childishness
that grown women, in a group, sometimes displayed in the invigorating game of
the hunted leading the hunter on a lively chase, and mobilising the help of
their friends to form a phalanx of protection against the persistent pursuer.
Meeta and Winnie were geared for the fray.

They sometimes helped out in the sale of
breakfast food for a charitable fund-raising activity in the compound of the
Church of Eternal Mercy, after the Sunday morning mass, seeing themselves,
non-Catholics, as doing a favour to Maria who saw herself, already beginning to
move away from the childhood faith, as doing a favour to her fervidly religious
mother who was in charge of the fund-raising. Maria, to preserve the peace at
home, accompanied her mother to the Sunday mass, as well as managed the
fortnightly breakfast stall for which, from the beginning, she had recruited
the help of the dependable Meeta and Winnie.

The two women, ever on the look-out for
interesting males even in church compounds where they were notably scarce, had
plenty of opportunity to observe Maria’s admirer who had as good as openly
declared himself. From the start, he featured in their lively debate about the
relative merits and demerits of the direct, unabashed male approach as opposed
to the deliberately hesitant, elusive one, both concluding that perhaps this
Bernard Tan Boon Siong was making himself too available, and hence less
desirable. He spoke amiably to all of Maria Seetoh’s friends and deferentially
to her elders, even the weak-minded Por Por who was sometimes brought along to
church, to give the maid some respite, but it was clear that all the attention
to others was but a hurdle to be quickly got out of the way to reach the prize
at the end. As soon as he managed to secure Maria Seetoh’s attention, or
whatever semblance of it was required by civility, all his senses were
galvanised into a state of fascinated concentration on that one object alone.
Everybody and everything else faded away into the background. This is most
embarrassing, thought Maria, I wish he would go away.

He had newly joined the parish, a single
eligible male clearly not averse to begin the chase and had, from the very
start, settled on Maria Seetoh. Maria’s prettiness, freshness of countenance
and openness of demeanour gave her the special attractiveness of a girl-child,
though she was already thirty-five. Bernard observed her keenly through her
every activity at the church: as she sat with her mother in the pew, as she
moved down the aisle, row by row, with the collection box, midway through mass
(he invariably dropped a large note into the box), and as she walked behind her
mother to the communion rail, returning to her seat with bowed head and clasped
hands, arousing no suspicion whatsoever that within that body supposed to be
housing the divine presence was already forming a secret wish to be free from
it.

Once he watched her help Father Rozario
conduct some catechism lessons for small children. Her earnest sincerity of
tone as she told Bible stories to the row of small faces turned up towards her,
impressed him; it would only be much later that he would learn that the
earnestness was even then already being claimed by the secret unholy stories of
her imagination. Bernard saw a purity he had never seen before, a complete
absence of the vanity and pretentiousness he had noticed in some of the women
he had courted and abruptly dropped. It was as if he had an evaluation sheet in
his head in which, one after another, women were systematically scored and
eliminated.

He watched Maria Seetoh with increasing
satisfaction. The absence of make-up on her youthful-looking face, her simple
pony-tail, her slenderness, her sensible blouses and skirts pleased him
enormously. In a short while, indeed within a fortnight, she not only passed
the elimination test but rendered it no longer necessary. Bernard Tan was
convinced that he had at last found the woman who would make him happy for the
rest of his life. After a quick, discreet check with the parish priest Father
Rozario who had nothing but good to say of Maria Seetoh and her mother Anna
Seetoh, he was convinced of divine endorsement of his choice. The only thing
left to do was to hasten the pursuit and bring it to a fruitful conclusion. He
did not believe in wasting time.

Such single-mindedness resulted in a
purposefulness of approach that no observant parishioner of the Church of
Eternal Mercy could miss. Everyone whispered that Maria Seetoh was a lucky girl
because Bernard Tan Boon Siong was eminently eligible, not only because of his
academic credentials as a first class engineer from the Singapore University,
and professional standing as a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Defence,
but, most important of all, as a fine Catholic with sterling moral qualities.
For it was known that he had postponed marriage to take care of his sickly
parents who died within a year of each other. Even the age was right; he was
six years older than Maria. Anna Seetoh’s god-sister, a very amiable woman also
named Anna, enumerated the good qualities on the fingers of one hand, then the
other.

‘You are a very lucky woman,’ everyone said
to Anna Seetoh who had been trying for years to get her daughter married.

‘Yes, I am, thank God for His mercy,’ said
the devout Anna, and did not think that her daughter’s feelings mattered in the
least. ‘You do not know your own mind,’ she scolded, ‘you have been too long on
your own, doing exactly as you like. Who will take care of you when I’m gone?
Now, thank God, there’s someone,’ and she thanked the good God again.

‘Help, he’s approaching,’ whispered Maria to
Meeta and Winnie, as they wrapped up the unsold pies and sandwiches to take to
an orphanage. ‘If he offers us a lift again, I’m going to say we’ve already got
transport. So you back me up.’

But Meeta, who was looking forward to
witnessing yet more of love’s melodrama being played out, had uncooperatively
left her car behind, so the three of them, including Anna Seetoh, piled into
the back of Bernard’s brand new Toyota, leaving Maria to sit in front with him.
That was her assigned place; any other arrangement would have been the most
impudent disregard of the man’s obvious purpose when he offered the lift. Later
he took all of them for lunch in an Italian restaurant. During the meal, Meeta
was her loquacious self, Winnie a silly echoing voice, Anna Seetoh too much in
awe of the soft-spoken Bernard Tan to say anything, and Maria acutely
embarrassed by it all. She now had the dubious honour of being solely
responsible for any act of generosity coming from this noble man at the end of
his search.

That evening Meeta and Winnie took turns on
the phone to give Maria their impressions. Meeta said with self-deprecatory
humour, ‘Aiyah! Winnie and I, and for that matter, your mother, Por Por,
everyone else, are just around on sufferance only. We are just pathetic
wallflowers!’

She shared the rumour she had heard of a
prim and proper minister who wanted to be introduced to a beautiful woman at a
glittering function, and for propriety’s sake endured the introduction to a
dozen unattractive women before achieving his purpose. There was also the
memorable episode from a novel, where the hero heroically carried four stranded,
rather stout and plain-looking girls, across a river, one after the another, in
order to reach the fifth, the prettiest in the group.

Maria laughed merrily at the tales, but
dissociated herself from their message. ‘Please,’ she would say and instinctively
put her hands to her ears.

‘Winnie, you and I from now onwards should
leave poor Bernard to woo Maria in peace!’ The contrast with their own
situations produced a momentary bitterness: if only their men had shown but a
fraction of Bernard’s devotion.

‘Look, Mother, I’m not going to church
anymore, I’m not helping you with the breakfasts anymore, I’m not helping
Father Rozario with the Bible stories classes anymore; everything’s getting
just too ridiculous for words,’ cried poor Maria.

She was beginning to experience some of the
revulsion of the pursued against the excessive pursuer, and every act of
kindness and magnanimity on the part of Bernard increased the desire never to
see him again. In every encounter, there was the obligation of gratitude to clothe
her words and demeanour with a polite civility that the man was clearly taking
for encouragement.

I will say a direct ‘No’ the next time, she
thought, rubbing the sides of her forehead against an onslaught of headaches.

The determination was, alas, betrayed again
and again by the combined impact of her mother’s eagerness, Father Rozario’s
smiling approval, her friends’ manoeuvres and her own sense of civil
reciprocity.

‘Why can’t I learn to say ‘No’?’ she moaned.
She might have rephrased the rhetorical lament: why couldn’t he be less
thick-skinned and see that she was simply not interested?

Invariably each nervously smiling response
was seized upon as acceptance of the countless offers to give her and her
mother a lift home in his car, to take over whatever heavy parcel or bag they
happened to be carrying, to hold an umbrella over her head in the hot sun. Her
mother, used only to years of abuse and neglect by a worthless husband, could
only break into little effusive cries of gratitude.

‘How can you blame him,’ said Meeta. ‘You’re
encouraging him!’ ‘No, I’m not!’ protested Maria. ‘Anyone can see I’m in fact
discouraging him.’ ‘Well, clearly he does not,’ said Meeta. The alarm bells
screamed in her head, as she sensed the encroachment, so soon to grow into a
stranglehold, upon the precious world of private thoughts and dreams that had
been hers from childhood. Back then it was a little hiding space on a mat
behind door curtains, or on the cool floor under a table, enclosed by a large
tablecloth, where, with only her comic books and her dolls for company, she
spent long happy hours until dragged out by her mother or Por Por.

Maybe I should write him a note, she
thought, a polite note to say I’m not interested. But always, something would
happen to paralyse her energies and cause her to be swept further along the
powerful stream of his determination. Once or twice, as she was carried along
the relentless current, there was a saving branch growing out of the bank that
she could grab, a tiny outcrop of rock to leap on to; in failing to save
herself, she had created her own dooming fate.

‘See, we told you, it is fate,’ said Meeta
and Winnie who, despite their different religious affiliations, subscribed
overwhelmingly to a common belief in an ineluctable force shaping human lives.
‘Everything in life is fated. You are fated to meet this man, he is fated to
follow you to the ends of the earth, you are both fated to marry each other!’

‘It is God’s will,’ said Anna Seetoh who had
been praying for years for her daughter to be suitably married. Two things had
happened that confirmed her belief. In a dream just a week before Bernard’s
first appearance in the Church of Eternal Mercy and his first sight of Maria,
she saw herself and her daughter, after Sunday mass, being told by a lady in
white, very like the Virgin Mary, to go along a strange road that would lead to
their happiness. Then a few days after the dream, Bernard appeared, exactly on
the anniversary of the feast day of one of Maria’s patron saints, Saint Bernardette.
Since then, a multitude of significant coincidences had strengthened her
conviction, among them the perfect match between the number on Bernard’s car
plate and the number sequence, when reversed, of the day, month and year of
Maria’s birth. ‘God’s ways are strange,’ said Anna Seetoh in awe.