Miss Seetoh in the World (30 page)

‘Mother, I didn’t mean to upset you,’ said
Maria, giving her a hug which she brushed away. ‘But I’m happy, at least for
now. Aren’t you happy that I’m happy?’

‘There’s no future with a married man,’ said
Anna Seetoh stiffly. ‘One of these days his wife will find out. How do you know
she hasn’t already set a private detective on you? And Ah Siong has not been
dead a year. For God’s sake, Maria, do you know what you are doing?’

Maria hated it when she was dragged down
from the soaring clouds of a vertiginous joy and pinned to the ugly realities
on the ground. ‘Mother, please leave me alone,’ she said with firm finality. ‘I
know what I’m doing.’

‘I certainly hope so!’ snapped Anna Seetoh,
and in the next breath whimpered, ‘I shall pray for you.’

It was a happiness rich and brimming, once
guilt and anxiety were banished with the simple decision not to cross the line,
and it spilled over into a cheerful disposition towards everyone.

‘You look very happy,’ said Brother Philip
with shrewd perceptiveness.

‘I don’t know whether I have a right to be
so happy,’ said Maria with a cryptic evasiveness that only increased the good
man’s curiosity. ‘Perhaps one of these days I could unburden myself to you.’

‘Unburden? You’re sure that’s not a Freudian
slip, my dear?’ He had taken to using that little endearment when talking to
her, and she was not sure whether it was simple avuncular geniality or
something else.

Dear Brother Philip, she thought. Of all the
inhabitants in her world of St Peter’s, she enjoyed his company most. If he
were not protected by that vow to be ever chaste, would he too have been drawn
into her increasingly rambunctious world?

A beneficiary of the new, light-hearted
magnanimity was Mr Chin. Meeta said what he had done to her was so disgusting
nobody should take it sitting down. The man had one morning during recess, when
he happened to be sitting beside her in the school canteen, invited her for
lunch in a newly opened restaurant in town that was famous for its dim sum. He
spoke at unnecessary length on the excellence of the dim sum to cover his
embarrassment at having plucked up enough courage to ask her for a date, and
she apologised, with unnecessary effusiveness, for declining it. She saw the
deep flush of shock and humiliation spread on his face and had an instant
inspiration to save it.

‘Won’t you join me for a cup of coffee in
the staffroom later?’ she said sweetly, assuring him that there was enough in
her flask for two. Colouring even more deeply, he declined, walked away and
never spoke to her again.

Within a week, he had launched his own
face-saving campaign. He spread the story that Maria Seetoh, out of sheer
loneliness in her newly widowed status, had invited him for coffee; he had
politely turned her down and had been avoiding her since, fearing to get
involved with someone who, since her husband’s death, was no longer the same
person. Besides, she had lost all her fresh beauty and looked haggard and worn
out. The story accreted all manner of tantalising details along the way: Miss
Seetoh had invited him for dim sum, Miss Seetoh had invited him to her home for
coffee, Miss Seetoh was clearly setting her sights on him.

‘The cheek of him!’ Meeta had exclaimed.
‘Maria, you should have countered his story with the truth. How can you let him
spoil your reputation like this?’

Brother Philip, the only one to whom Maria
cared to tell the truth, responded with a silly limerick scribbled on a scrap
of paper during a staff meeting and surreptitiously passed to her:

There’s this man who, ahem,

Fell for a lady called M,

     But she only sniffed

     And he was so miffed

He wished her a life of mayhem!

Maria scribbled back a response: ‘Laughter
postponed. Coffee after meeting?’

 Winnie told the story of a Mr Beh, a
Chinese language teacher, who mistook her kindness in making coffee for him
every morning in the staffroom, for infatuation.

‘I wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole!’
she giggled. ‘No looks, no personality, bad teeth, a worse gossiper than a woman!’

Dr Phang soared above the dull, mean-minded
Mr Chin and the unprepossessing, gossip-mongering Mr Beh as Olympus above
dung-hill, as white knight on horseback above the lowly, load-bearing minions
on foot. He was bad news because his extraordinary charm broke the calculating
machines of self-protection inside women’s heads, and caused them to throw all
sensibility and caution to the winds. If asked why they had succumbed to his
charms, knowing full well he was married and had had affairs throughout his more
than thirty years of marriage to a good, decent, home-loving wife from a good
family, they would have said, ‘I don’t know,’ meaning that they were unable to
explain the huge gap between the astutely deliberative apparatus of head and
the hopelessly unreliable apparatus of heart. If the situation had been
reversed, and it was a woman who had cut such a huge swathe through swooning
men, she would have had the charge of witchcraft laid at her door: she must
have had recourse to time-tested charms and potions for making men fall
desperately in love with her, for making them increase their potency in her
company and losing it as soon as they climbed back into their wives’ beds.

Dr Phang’s charm was as far removed from the
dark forces of tradition as his abundance of wavy silver hair, gentle eyes,
beguiling smile, witty speech and permanently relaxed air were from the
artifices of the poseur at cocktail parties, or in glossy advertisements. Women
ever loved the au naturel in a man; Dr Phang, in his looks, bearing and
demeanour, down to the last endearing mannerism of running a hand, in moments
of puzzlement, through the film-star locks, or throwing back his head in a
hearty laugh, had it in abundance. Women who did much thinking about how best
to give excuses, offer explanations and present arguments, loved Dr Phang’s
habit of dispensing with all three. He is so spontaneous, he makes you feel
completely relaxed, they said. He behaves like a gentleman even to the office
boys and the cleaning women, they said, and instantly contrasted him with those
arrogant high-fliers and top-achievers in the civil service whose arrogance
only showed their insecurities.

In a note after Bernard’s funeral, he had
asked why Heng had told him not to attend it, but when he met her for the first
time, months later, over lunch in a restaurant, he never referred to the
subject and instead plunged straight into the sheer enjoyment of her company.
She had been prepared for a lengthy, tedious time of endless questions and
explanations, of their moving cautiously around each other’s sensitivities, of
saying something and then, for answer, listening to what was not, could not be
said. To her utter surprise and delight, the lunch was all pleasant,
light-hearted talk and laughter.

The note asking for an explanation could not
have been a stratagem, as the man was incapable of any. All he had was his
enormous self-confidence and brimming exuberance to turn a potentially
discomfiting situation into a completely enjoyable one. Dr Phang, she concluded,
was the true hedonist who never let the intrusive why of the past and the
tiresome what if of the future intrude upon the pure enjoyment of the present,
whether it was playing golf, hiking with his daughter in Europe, drinking with
his buddies in a pub or trying to seduce a woman over a meal in a restaurant.
It was said that as an undergraduate he would spend much time, during the
examination season, playing the drums in a band, while his friends swotted,
despaired and lost weight, and then, to their disgust, emerge with top grades.

At work, his massive intellect, which had
impressed his superiors right up to the Minister of Defence and the great TPK
himself, came up with such brilliant ideas that the leadership, ever
conservative and austere, was prepared to overlook his philandering ways and
invite him to get into politics. It was said that at some time or another,
every ministry had sought his views on this or that major national project.

‘I don’t know, let me think about it,’ he
would say, settling himself comfortably in his chair with his feet on the table
and closing his eyes; shortly afterwards, he would come up with the most
insightful ideas.

Head, heart, the libidinal urge: each, kept
apart from the others, had its own vibrant energy because all were governed by
a prodigious, unapologetic lust for life.

The great TPK had seen enough of yes-men to
appreciate his firm No to many a request or invitation. ‘I am not suited for a
political life,’ he had said, and, paradoxically, became rated by the leadership
as the most suitable. Only Dr Phang, it was said, could have got away with
doing what he did some years ago. He had absented himself from a very important
state function because his daughter, who was then studying in London, was
distraught over something and had called him urgently; he had immediately taken
leave to fly to be with her. The Prime Minister, who was known to chastise
those who put their personal concerns above official duties, actually inquired
about the distraught daughter upon his return; perhaps he was thinking of his
own sickly wife needing more of his time than he could spare. The rumours about
his devotion to his wife of thirty years had a somewhat softening effect on the
hard, callous image that he presented to the world. Those severe eyes, that
belligerent jaw, that raised forefinger of threat and warning – they all
melted, it was whispered, into a soft centre of pure tenderness and concern
when he attended to her, covering her feet with a warm blanket, bringing her
the most expensive ginseng brew.

He would deal with Dr Phang’s philandering
in an appropriate way: once he got the man into politics, he would issue him
the stern warning that he invariably issued to all his ministers and members of
parliament, ‘It’s your own business, but once it becomes a public scandal,
there’ll be no mercy.’

At least one wife of an errant minister had
written to the prime minister about her husband’s shenanigans; he was dropped
from his ministerial job soon after and dispatched as ambassador to some
obscure European country. Olivia Phang, if she even remotely suspected an
affair, would likely not just send a letter but ask for a personal appearance
before the prime minister to plead for no less a punishment than complete
disgrace, to be commensurate with the love she had given him.

The man’s unique hold on women must
ultimately lie in his love of them, even if only ephemeral, even if only
physical, but still to be called love, if women so hankered after it. Here was
a man who would unabashedly say he could not do without women, thus paying them
the supreme compliment. Definitely not husband material, one of the women he
had loved and left had sniffed, and then had to admit sadly, but definitely
lover material. No mere rude, crude Casanova, he deserved that epithet which
women used for the ultimate lover: sensitive. And the ultimate tribute was that
he was naturally sensitive to their every mood, need, desire, there being none
of the pretence that women so hated. Effortlessly, Dr Phang made conquests;
only he did not see them as such, but a celebration, on each occasion, of the
sheer enjoyment of the woman’s company, a perfect meshing of male desire and
female need. He put her on a pedestal; it did not matter if she had soon to
vacate it for another. It was said that he had so charmed a French woman he had
met in a plane to Europe that after their single rendezvous in a Paris hotel,
armed with no more than a recollection of his name and appearance, she came to
Singapore to look for him.

Dr Phang had got married at the early age of
twenty-two, for the sole purpose of sex, to a shy young girl of the same age,
chosen for him by his strongly conservative Christian parents who would have
beaten him to a pulp if he had joined his friends in their secret jaunts to
test their manhood in the sleazy haunts of his home town in Malaysia. The
effects of the conservative upbringing did not last long in his marriage:
before long, his shy, intellectual, conservative wife must have been no match
for his enormous energies and the affairs started, first with the pretty girls
in his office, then, over the years, with women who came into his social circle
and women outside the circle who came crashing into it, like his present wife,
a model from Hong Kong whom he had met by the merest chance. It was through
sheer tenacity, or her striking sexuality, that she had got him to divorce his
wife and marry her. Where other men would have floundered through a mess of
emotional and legal wrangling, would have wrestled with guilt, remorse and
shame, Dr Phang simply sailed from his first marriage into his second amazingly
calm and in control, remaining on good terms with his daughter, his ex-wife and
his ex-mistresses. It’s impossible to be angry with that man, they would say.
There is not a single snide, mean bone in his body. He is always generous,
helpful and caring. Other men? They behave much, much worse. They can’t hold a
light to his candle.

The enviable Teflon Man, ever undamaged. If
he had been the president of the most powerful nation in the world, or the
leader of the most powerful religious organisation, the onerousness of office,
and the responsibility of handling crises and calming a nervous world, would
not in the least have detracted from his cheerful imperturbability and joie de
vivre. He would have gone to play a game of golf, or made love to a woman, in
the midst of an international crisis and woken up the next morning to see an
abatement of the crisis. Life was a game which he played with relish by rules
he bent with saucy impunity.