Miss Seetoh in the World (23 page)

As soon as she had the time – even in her
thoughts, she skipped direct reference to the awful reality of death and its
concomitant hassles, from the funeral arrangements down to the last details of
administrative and legalistic procedures regarding something she had no
knowledge of or inclination for, known as the deceased’s estate – she would set
about this supreme, defining task. She would begin by looking into the heaps of
notes and drafts of stories she had written and put away over the years, and
see if they could provide the beginning of a collection of short stories, or
even a novel. Might she not do a course or two on creative writing, perhaps
even go abroad for the purpose? She had heard of summer schools in universities
that offered such courses. Brother Philip’s words of encouragement came back to
warm her heart.

One thing was certain. She could never write
a story, even if heavily disguised, about her husband. If writing was a form of
escapism, there was no world greater than the one she had shared with him for
three years that she wanted to escape from. She thought of his ring lying in a
dark forest, its brilliance lost under layers of mud and dead leaves. Perhaps
years hence, as an old woman for whom the years would have softened the
terrible guilt, shock, pity and anger and transmuted them all into one
overpowering desire to tell a story, she would be able to sit down and begin it
with the words: ‘This is the strange story of a man who loved a woman, and
bought her a diamond ring so expensive he was in debt for years. She did not
want it, so he flung it away where it could never be recovered. Nevertheless,
she married him, and had a greater debt to pay, because she did not love him.’

When she told Dr Phang about her secret yearning
to be a writer, was that smile one of encouragement too, like Brother Philip’s?
Images of the boyish grin on the different occasions when she had witnessed it,
causing a flurry of friendly crinkles around his eyes, came flooding into her
mind; she sorted them out in the order of the pleasure they had given her,
beginning with the one in the restaurant when she had stood before them all,
blushing furiously in her new look, her face expertly made up by Maggie, her
hair tumbling upon her shoulders, a multicoloured silk scarf draped around her
neck. That smile of admiration was precisely replicated only a short while ago,
when he had briefly referred to the new look; was it to deflect the admiration
that he had to make mention of his wife’s name?

She kept the best image for the last, like a
child delaying the opening of the most cherished present while all the time
looking longingly at it. For years it would remain in her memory, his
comforting her in his arms while the healing warmth of his simple assurance
permeated her whole being: You’re okay. She would remember vividly the pattern
of lines on his shirt on which her face was pressed, the very smell of his
closeness. The image would remain free of the angry taint of scandal that her
mother, increasingly watchful of them, seemed determined to daub it with: he’s
married, you’re married. He has a second wife, your husband is dying. Just what
do you think you are doing?

She would ever remember his head thrown back
in laughter at the funny plague joke, their turning quickly to look in her
husband’s direction to make sure they had not disturbed him, and then
continuing to laugh together.

‘What was that smile about?’ Her husband had
awakened, and was looking at her. Apparently he had been looking at her for a while;
his voice was very weak, but he spoke slowly, enunciating every syllable, as if
to make sure she heard. She suddenly realised with horror that she had been
smiling to herself for at least a full five minutes, a wifely obscenity by any
standard. But she could still answer his question truthfully, and say, with an
attempt at smiling casualness, ‘It was the funniest misspelling but nobody
noticed it,’ and went on to describe the gaffe in detail.

‘Tell me about that smile.’

Numbly she clung to the rejected
explanation, saying in a bathos of desperation: ‘If you don’t believe me, I’ll
show you the proof’ and went at once to get the plaque. She held it before his
eyes, drawing attention to the misspelling, hating him and herself all the
while for the hideous pretence of a casual tone against the cold ruthlessness
of his judgement.

‘Take it away,’ he said, ‘and come and sit
here.’ She pulled up a stool and sat beside him.

‘No, here,’ he said, and indicated the bed
itself, ‘so that you can hear me better.’ She sat beside him, looking down,
weighed down by misery.

‘No, look up, look at me.’ He was preparing
for some important proceeding that had all the marks of climax and finality in
his judgement of her. White, wan, sunken, he already looked like a spectre returned
to exact revenge in full measure. ‘I want you to listen to me and not ask any
questions until I allow you to. It is important business I have to settle. Very
important, and it can’t wait.’

He lay back on his pillows exhausted with
the preparations of settling this business that he had been clearly working out
in his mind in the last few hours. Conserving his energy for the final stage of
his deathbed campaign, he lay very still, his eyes closed. When they opened,
they shone with a preternatural brightness that frightened her. Such a
brightness, she was told, was a deathbed phenomenon, a final flare of energy
and affirmation before death took over and reduced the body to a lump of cold,
rigid matter. She reached out to touch his hand, but he moved it away from
hers. One of the most painful recollections of their married life would be his
moving away his hand each time she stretched out hers. Perhaps that was her
instinctive expression of pity and he had learnt to loathe it.

‘I was ready to forgive you everything, even
the fact that you never loved me.’

She cried out in agitation, ‘That’s not
exactly true, Bernard! I loved you in my own way –’ She was prepared to get as
close as possible to the truth he desired without violating the truth she lived
by. I loved you in the way I knew how. I wanted so much to make you happy. I
tried to do everything you wanted me to.

He said, ‘I told you not to interrupt,’ and
went on, ‘I was ready to forgive you your affair with Kuldeep Singh –’ She
opened her mouth to let out a cry of protest, and he put up a warning
forefinger. ‘Don’t think I didn’t know about your secret meetings at that old
shophouse, to look over that love sign you carved together.’ Oh my God. So this
is what’s eating you up. The delusions that the dying mind feeds itself on! Not
content with the present, it forages the past. Why didn’t you ask me? But then,
would that have been of any use?

‘A friend saw you both at Hoot Kiam Road
together and had the kindness to tell me.’ Just what is it, for goodness’ sake?
You can’t be hallucinating, for you’re speaking with a clarity and
purposefulness I’ve never seen before!

‘But I was ready to forgive you your
infidelity. Even with Brother Philip.’ Oh no, oh no, don’t bring in Brother
Philip!

‘You will understand how painful it is for
me to know that my wife is committing adultery with a man committed to serve
God with a vow of chastity. Now I know why you spent such long hours in school,
why he made those phone calls to you in my absence, why you called out his name
in your sleep.’ It was impossible not to break into the outrageous accusations
with her own outrage.

‘How dare you, Bernard,’ she cried out, ‘how
dare you even think of that? Are you mad –’

It was no use. He was past listening to her.
If a hundred voices had broken in on her behalf, they would have simply washed
over him uselessly. He was launched on a mission of saving himself that must
begin with emptying himself of all the grievances that had accumulated in his
system; he was now pulling them out, in a continuous stream, black and
poisonous, determined not to leave behind the smallest residue. Exhausted, he
fell back again on his pillows, but managed to gather enough energy for the
climax of the purge.

‘I didn’t think I could forgive you this –
you cannot have an idea of the pain it’s causing me – but since I’m going back
to my God, I will. I forgive you your affair with Dr Phang.’ She let out a
scream, but only an inward one which, like the flapping wings of some monstrous
bird, beat furiously upon her ears, mouth, eyes, suffocating her. I’m not
having an affair with Dr Phang! If you saw anything just now, he was just
comforting me. Why don’t you let me explain? Oh my God, how can this be
happening to both of us? What have we done to deserve all this pain?

‘Give me a drink of water.’

It was bizarre, she, the accused, carefully
spooning water into the mouth of her accuser, moistening his dry lips, wiping
the stray drops on his chin, waiting for him to revive, to go on to the next
stage of accusation and deliver the final judgement. To the outside observer,
it was the universally touching sickroom scene of unstinting wifely devotion,
the wifely arms propping up the dying husband. She saw her mother standing
anxiously at the doorway and waved her away.

‘I want you to answer each of my questions
with a Yes or No. No buts. No explanations. Just Yes or No.’ He had turned the
sickroom into a courtroom, and stood over her as the ruthless prosecutor armed
with the most deadly questions, like arrows in a quiver, to be fired one after
another in quick succession.

‘When we were in the Cameron Highlands
walking through some gardens with Dr and Mrs Phang, was there a time when he
and you broke away to have a private conversation on your own, well away from
myself and his wife?’

‘Yes’. But I was only telling him about the
ring incident which in any case you had already told him about. There were
certain things I just had to tell him.

‘During the birthday celebration at the
Pavilion Hotel, did he, at any time, admire your new look?’

‘Yes.’ But so did everyone else. It was all
in good fun.

‘Did you put on the make-up for him?’

 ‘No.’ I had already explained that my
students did it as a joke. Why don’t you ever listen to me?

‘You’re lying. But never mind. Next
question: this afternoon, when you and Dr Phang were standing together outside
the door, thinking I was sound asleep, did you embrace as lovers?’

‘No’. So you were only pretending to be
asleep, to spy on us? My God, what sort of a person are you?

‘You’re lying again. When you both returned
to the room and sat over there talking, were you already planning to meet as
soon as my funeral was over?’

‘No.’ Bernard, you are mad, raving mad!

‘Final question. When you smiled just now,
looking so happy, not for an instant, but for a long while, were you thinking
of Dr Phang?’

‘Yes.’ But not as you think, Bernard! I was
thinking of a whole lot of other things as well – my students, my friends –’

‘That’s all I need to know. I will instruct
Heng to tell Dr Phang that he’s no longer welcome here. Now I want to rest.
Leave me alone.’

She burst into hysterical weeping. ‘This
isn’t fair, Bernard!’ she screamed. ‘Hear me out. I insist that you hear me
out!’

But he had put a pillow over his face with
one hand, and was dismissing her with the other.

‘Dear Bernard,’ she wrote in her letter. It
would be the second of two letters she had written to him, both unopened and
unread. The first, on that fateful day when he appeared at her doorstep soaked
in rainwater, she had decided to tear up and throw away; this second one would
be laid beside him as he lay in his coffin, in the funeral parlour of the
Church of Eternal Mercy. She would have to do it quickly and secretly when
nobody was looking, when Father Rozario and the members of the church prayer
group were not around saying prayers for him, when her mother who had since his
death spoken to her only stiffly or angrily, was not watching her.

‘Dear Bernard,’ she wrote in her clear, neat
hand. ‘I wish this could be the kind of letter that I’ve sometimes read about,
written by a wife to her dead husband, full of love and longing, recounting the
tenderest of shared moments, ending with the yearning wish to meet again on
some distant shore. Alas, alas, this is no such letter. As you must have long
suspected, I no longer share the beliefs which comforted you in life and death;
I now stand outside the protection and solace of the Church and must from now
on brave the disapproval and disappointment of Father Rozario, our fellow
parishioners of the Church of Eternal Mercy and my own mother. Your funeral
mass will be the last religious service I will attend. If, as a spirit looking
down and seeing only with the eyes of truth, you are shocked by my having taken
part in all those devotional exercises of the prayer group around your sickbed
while in this secret state of disbelief, I have to beg your forgiveness and say
that I did what I did simply to preserve the peace and harmony in a house
already so melancholic with the sad circumstances of your sickness and
suffering. Hence this letter will have none of the solace that religious faith
brings, and also none of the solace from the loving, longing wife that, to both
our regret and sadness, I have never been.

I have decided to tell you in writing what
it was impossible to tell you in speech during the months of your illness,
indeed, in the three years of our marriage. There was so much that we should
have talked over, but each time we tried to, we reached an impasse almost with
the first sentence, so deep was the problem underlying our marriage, so bad had
things become, right from the beginning. This is my last opportunity to tell
you the whole truth, and although I don’t believe that the dead live on and
know what is happening in the lives of those they leave behind, who knows?
Right now, as I’ve said, your spirit may be hovering about somewhere, and since
death is supposed to open all eyes and remove all falsehood, then I hope that
this letter will open yours to the falseness of your shocking accusations in
the last hours of your life – oh, how I regret that the last time we were
together carries no memory of tenderness and kindness – as well as open mine to
my own falseness in marrying you without that one thing you craved from me till
the end.