Miss Seetoh in the World (22 page)

There had been no time to remove the
make-up; she would realise its treachery only later. Right now, as she entered
the private room in the Pavilion Hotel and everyone looked at her with
surprise, all was good-natured jocularity.

Mrs Olivia Phang cried out, ‘Oh my, oh my,
how beautiful you look! I could hardly recognise you!’ She turned to her
husband and said teasingly, ‘Darling, if you keep looking at Mrs Tan like this,
I will get very jealous!’

Her mother said, ‘What happened, Maria?
You’ve never worn make-up in your life’, to which Mrs Phang said very loudly,
‘But don’t you think she looks simply beautiful? I’m glad she’s taken my advice
at last to pretty herself up for her husband.’

Then she said to Bernard, ‘You’ve got a very
glamorous wife, Bernard – beats all those socialites in the glossy fashion
magazines! All the more reason for you to get well and keep an eye on your
wife. Otherwise, all the men will be chasing her!’

Carried away by the gratification of her
useful advice to Maria, and unmindful of the constricted smile on Bernard’s
face, she laughed merrily into her perfumed handkerchief. Maria briefly
acknowledged the presence of the two other guests for the lunch: Bernard’s
colleagues at the Ministry, whom she must have previously met but could not now
recognise; they were staring at her as much as decorum would allow.

She had to get the explanation out as
quickly as she could. Mrs Phang said, ‘Well, your students have certainly done
a good job. Tell you what, Mrs Tan, I can introduce you to my beautician and my
hairstylist. He can do wonders with your hair. Bernard, you lucky man!’

Without looking into her husband’s face,
Maria knew the damage was already done; she could hear the words screaming
inside his head: what are you trying to prove? Why have you chosen to taunt me
publicly, on my birthday? Indeed, to the outsider, the radiantly beautiful wife
could only increase the pity towards the husband and fuel speculation about a
very merry widowhood.

‘Come, time to cut the cake!’ said Mrs
Olivia Phang. ‘Mrs Tan, you come and hold your husband’s hand while he cuts the
cake, just like a bridal couple. Here,’ she called to a waiter, ‘you take a
picture of all of us.’ And she led the others in the birthday song.

Days later, Dr Phang brought the birthday
picture to show her and her husband. It showed both of them with wan smiles,
their hands clasped over a beribboned knife held over a large chocolate
birthday cake. Together with other photographs of themselves, it would have no
place of remembrance in her heart.

Back home, she went straight to the bathroom
and scrubbed off every bit of paint and powder.

‘I see you’ve removed that make-up,’ said
her husband, as she got ready to massage his legs. ‘So it wasn’t for me that
you went out of your way to make yourself beautiful.’

It would have been futile to remind him
about that silly student caper; in his mind, the image of her flaunting her
beauty in public was yet more fuel for his unquenchable self-pity. ‘Go and put
it on again.’ The peevish perverseness to goad her all the way provoked, for
the first time, a sharpness of tone in the sickroom. She said, ‘But I don’t
have make-up. You know I never use it.’ Maggie had actually slipped the stuff
into her handbag with the words, ‘You try it yourself. Very easy. Practise. You
look better than some of our TV stars.’

‘There you are, you see,’ he said, ‘you
never do what I want you to.’ And it was then that despite her determination to
submit to all the torments with unremitting patience and kindness, she lashed
out bitterly, ‘Why are you so unreasonable, Bernard? I’d already explained that
it was all some silly students’ whim. Why are you so bent on making me
miserable?’

He said, closing his eyes, ‘I’m tired, I
want to sleep. Leave me alone now.’

Dr Phang said, ‘I had to tell you all that
because I think he wished it.’ A reluctant messenger with an accusatory message
from a dying man to his wife, he kept his imperturbable demeanour but dispensed
with the engaging smile.

They were outside the sickroom, standing
near the door that was only half closed to allow her to hear any movement from
her husband who appeared to be sleeping peacefully. She looked down, with a
heaviness of heart, while Dr Phang looked anxiously into her face. Her mother
passed by; she threw them a sharp, angry glance on behalf of a dying man whose
wife and best friend were talking together in unseemly intimacy just outside
his room. Later she would say to her daughter, ‘Why does he come so often? Is it
to see Ah Siong or you? You want to have people talking?’

Dr Phang’s conveying of the message was as
brief as he could make it, the chief point of which, in Bernard’s own words,
was her culpable encouragement of him all along, leading to the enormous commitment
of the Tiffany ring. He would never, ever have flung it away if he had not been
so devastated by her sudden inexplicable change of behaviour. And she would
never have changed her mind about him if it had not been for that Brother
Philip. A Christian brother in charge of moral education in a Christian school?
He had as good as seduced her. There was proof. She talked in her sleep. She
uttered his name. Not once but a few times. Dreams never lied. Dream-talk was
incontrovertible proof. He had never confronted his wife with the proof of her
sinful liaison out of sheer shame and respect for the Church and Father
Rozario.

Oh Bernard, Bernard.

As Maria listened, she was swept up by
immense waves of anger alternating with pity, pulling her in different directions,
a helpless marionette between two maniacally competing puppeteers. It was
heartbreaking that near the end of his life, her husband’s tormented mind
should be further visited by hallucinatory demons who viciously scrambled
together past and present – he had not known about Brother Philip till after
their marriage. The fiends smeared the line as well between truth and suspicion
– she never talked in her sleep, and if she did, he would have awakened her to
fling the incriminatory evidence in her face. The faintest shadow of proof had
been sufficient to unleash his anger; the cry of a lover’s name in sleep would
have discharged it like a cannon and crushed her without mercy. She thought she
was done with anger, but it rose to wrestle with the pity, and left her
exhausted and numbed. Angry on behalf of Brother Philip, now co-villain, she
thought: a person on the brink of death should not feel licensed by that fact
alone to make wild accusations against the living.

She was aware of Dr Phang looking intently at
her, as if waiting for an explanation: what was he thinking? What thoughts was
he forming about her? It no longer mattered; she had no more strength for
explanations. She said nothing, still looking down.

He reached for her hand and said, ‘You’re
okay,’ and it was at this point that the tears, held back with great effort,
burst forth, and were instantly suppressed, making her body tremble all over.
He had needed no explanation to continue to believe in her. You’re okay. A
commonplace banality of assurance, it comforted her as no avowal of trust and
regard could. She made no effort to wipe the tears that were now freely
coursing down her cheeks.

He reached out to hold her, and she rushed
into his arms, pressing her face on his shoulder, like a frightened child
desperate for protection and comfort after a long pretence of brave whistling
in the dark. You’re okay. In her confused and confusing little world, her
husband, her mother, her brother, all looked at her and thought her mad,
perverse, wilful, difficult, obdurate, selfish. They would never have said to
her, ‘You’re okay.’

By the time they appeared at Bernard’s
bedside again, she had wiped away all her tears and appeared calm and composed.
A deep peace, such as she had not felt for a long time, filled her heart.
Bernard was still asleep. They sat on two chairs in a corner of the room and
began talking, in whispers, so as not to disturb him. Dr Phang had more to say;
he was done with the tiresome message of the dying man and was now concerned
with practical matters: would she need his help for the onerous matters that
had to be attended to upon the death of her husband which, according to the
doctors, would be quite soon? The mere mention of the eventuality still brought
on a sense of surreality, still sent little shuddering chills through her body.

The church people – they were very kind –
would see to all the funeral arrangements. Her brother Heng was efficient and
would also be at hand to take charge of other matters. She saw Dr Phang’s
hesitancy in bringing up a sensitive point: yes, financially she would be
alright. She had some savings and if necessary would sell their apartment which
had seen a huge jump in price since its purchase, pay off the rest of the
mortgage, and move with her mother and Por Por to live in her mother’s small
apartment now being rented out with the approval of her brother Heng, who
jointly owned the property with her.

They spoke softly, their heads almost
touching. There were still a few moments of talking together before he needed
to take his leave, and their conversation, even if unseemly in a room of the
dying, took a lighter turn. ‘Olivia has been talking of nothing but your new
look at the restaurant lunch; you looked stunning,’ he said smiling. It would
have cheered her more if the compliment had made no attribution to a third
person. The vanity of memory years on would preserve only the latter part of
his statement. Now she felt light-hearted enough to want to extend the cheerful
sharing; she told him the joke about the students presenting her with a plague
for all her good work for them. He laughed out loud. She felt impelled to tell
him a few more. There was one about the great TPK, and she told it before
realising the horrible faux pas: Bernard had spoken several times of his being
a protege of the prime minister, of being earmarked for political grooming and
high political office. She apologised, and he held out a hand to stem the
effusive apology. No need for that, he said, for he liked the joke very much
and could himself produce a few, even more irreverent, ones.

Then he confided in her a secret which
nobody, not even Olivia knew: he was seriously thinking of leaving the Ministry
of Defence for another job. There had come a point in his life when he wanted
change. ‘I might start another political opposition party, to keep V.K. Pandy
company,’ he said, and when he saw her eyes round in astonishment, laughed again
and said, ‘Just joking. Political life is not for me!’

Oh, how she wished for them to be in
circumstances where they could talk freely with each other, share views, reveal
private dreams. Now there were these awful barriers between them. ‘You know, I
would love to be a writer,’ she confided in her turn, and told him of her ever
active imagination already filling itself with lively people and incidents that
were just waiting to be spilled out upon the pages.

The conversation could not be allowed to go
along its dangerously light-hearted path in a house soon to be visited with
death; both dragged it back to the sombre decorum it had begun with.

He said, ‘Don’t forget. Let me know if you
need help.’ He gave her hand a reassuring squeeze and rose to take his leave.

She did not even dare say, as she normally
would, ‘Thank you, and please come again,’ fearing to betray a greater need
than her husband for the comfort of this man’s presence.

Her husband stirred but continued to sleep
peacefully. For the first time in many days, she had leisure to allow her
thoughts to roam. Powered by her imagination, they took on a life of their own,
bounding off in all directions like small animals let out of their cages or
pens, eager to explore every corner of an exciting new world. Her new world had
not yet taken on any clear shape, but in leaving behind the old one of
confusion, distrust, anger and misery, it was already bright with promise. For
one thing, she was looking forward to returning to the regularity and comfort of
her life at St Peter’s. Into her memory a hundred images of recent events
crowded and competed for attention – the Teachers’ Day celebrations, Maggie,
Yen Ping and Mark, the astonishing make-over, Maggie’s young sister Angel, even
the unappealing Mr Chin, coming up awkwardly to make courteous inquiries about
her husband, Brother Philip and his kind words when they met along the
corridor. That man’s image would be dearer for being connected with a special
pain: how could he have been dragged into the sordidness of her husband’s
suspicions? Had she, in fact, inadvertently done him a disservice by talking
about him with so much affectionate regard, as to place him in that unsavoury
light?

Meeta and Winnie – she would be happy to
re-connect with them, get into their world of man-hunting and gossip and
superstitious nonsense, and as quickly get out of it back to her own.
Meanwhile, she was grateful to them, during this difficult period, for having
Por Por over at their house for part of the day and taking her mother out for
occasional lunches. Kindness everywhere! Her new world would be full of it. You
could go so wrong with love, but never with kindness.

If she could train her thoughts to steer
clear of her husband, they could be exclusively directed towards a future that
beckoned with hope. So great were those little flutterings of anticipatory
excitement that they carried their own seeds of guilt. They coalesced around
one wish that lit up everything around it. She would write a book, and another
and another. Her world would be centred on her life, and her life would be
centred on her writing. There would be a neatness, an order, a peace in her
world as could never be found outside it, in the madding crowd of husbands and
wives, men and women constantly misunderstanding each other.