Miss Seetoh in the World (31 page)

Maria thought, this man bears a charmed
life. The goddess who presided at his birth must have left at his cradle a mega
gift of luck. The classic Byronic hero was said to be mad, bad and dangerous to
know, except that in his case, the madness, badness and danger were all on the
side of the poor pursuing woman. If she wrote a book about him one day, she
would call it ‘The Man Who Loved Women’, a generous euphemism for that
insatiable lust ranked high among the Seven Deadly Sins, depicted sometimes as
a horned, goat-footed, bright-eyed man playing a merry pipe. A man’s lust,
unaccompanied by a brilliant mind and an engaging manner, turned women off;
dressed in both, it brought them scrambling over each other to his bed. Olivia
Phang, young and beautiful and wealthy after a very profitable divorce from her
first husband, with her impeccably manicured nails, must have clawed her way
right to it, shredding the competitors along the way. Now she, Maria Seetoh, by
no means as young, beautiful and wealthy, was being courted by this man. Vanity
made the thought alone intoxicating. Was hers the next scalp he would wear on
his victory belt?

She was glad that Olivia Phang and her
mother were helping her in the drawing of the line, the first through her
vigilant monitoring of her husband’s activities, like a small animal with
sharply quivering nostrils, and the second through simply being in the house
virtually all the time, thus ruling out a major trysting venue.

Sometimes Anna Seetoh sat by the table with
the phone, in a form of self-inflicted punishment that required picking it up,
hearing the hated interloper’s voice and saying to her daughter, ‘It’s for
you,’ without being able to add, ‘You’re playing with fire.’

‘You’re playing with fire,’ said Meeta.

‘I’ve only seen him once,’ said Winnie, ‘and
I must say he’s a charmer. No wonder you’ve fallen for him, Maria!’

‘He must be such a refreshing change from
that awful husband of yours and that boring, childish Mr Chin,’ said Meeta.

‘Oo-oh, now you know what it’s like to be in
love,’ said Winnie. ‘But he’s so much older! Not old enough to be your father,
but definitely so much older. Think, Maria, when you’re forty-five, he’ll be an
old man already!’

‘Winnie, you’re being your usual silly
self,’ said Meeta. ‘Don’t you know that the older some men get, the better they
look, the sexier they become?’

She mentioned a gentleman at the Polo Club,
seventy-three years old, and as dandy and debonair as ever.

‘I’ve never heard you speak with such
feeling about any man before,’ said Winnie. ‘Oho, our cold, detached Maria
Seetoh in love at last!’

‘I understand his Hong Kong wife is a shrew.
I tell you, Maria, you’re playing with fire!’ cried Meeta.

‘Dearie,’ giggled Winnie, ‘have you slept
with him yet?’

‘Tell you what,’ said Meeta suddenly, in a
display of that supreme female illogicality that could turn a warning in an
instant into its total opposite of enthusiastic encouragement. ‘If you have no
place to meet your beau, we could lend you ours occasionally. Winnie and I
could spend an evening at my sister’s, and we’ll take the maid with us as well
as Singapore who may bark too much and spoil your fun. You can have the whole
place to yourself. And shut the windows; the couple opposite are real nosy
parkers.’

A birth, a death, an affair: St Peter’s
Secondary School, being society’s microcosm, duly replicated its human events
with all the attendant human feelings of joy and sorrow. Mrs Kee, one of the
maths teachers, had given birth to a baby boy after a succession of four
daughters, and Sister Elizabeth, the chemistry teacher who had been diagnosed
with womb cancer a year ago, had passed away.

The birth and the death could be talked
about at St Peter’s; the affair would have to remain secret to avoid society’s
censure, even if it was only at that stage when the strict technicality of the
uncrossed line put it beyond the censure. But society could still warn. It had
its favourite metaphor of playing with fire, the imagery simultaneously
capturing the consuming flame of foolish passion and of the other kind of
flame, eternal and seasoned with brimstone, that folly deserved. Maria was
sure, if she could read the mind of Brother Philip or the sharp Mrs Neo or even
the principal who sometimes gave her quizzical looks, she would see the
question in vivid letters rolled out in a scroll of judgement for all to see:
‘Maria Seetoh, barely a year after your husband’s death, are you having an
affair?’

Affair, liaison, relationship, infatuation,
amour – it was happiness, by any name, thought Maria with defiant joy. She
could not recall a time in her life, whether as a young girl or as an adult,
when she had been so happy. Mentally she applied to her happy state the
modifying adverbs she had taught her students to use instead of the overused,
unimaginative ‘very’, selecting only those that went beyond mere modification
to scale the greatest expressive heights: so she was supremely, ecstatically,
phenomenally, indescribably happy. Never mind if it was happiness of the
dubious kind that would not stand up to the moral scrutiny of Father Rozario or
her mother or the principal. Or of the inferior kind celebrated in popular love
songs and Valentine cards that relied exclusively on cheap rhyming words such as
the fervid ‘true’-‘you’-‘blue’, ‘moon’-‘June’-‘soon’, ‘kiss’-‘bliss’-‘miss’
clusters of silly juvenilia. A teacher of creative writing who sternly forbade
her students to use those dreadful clichés, she now recognised that the
happiness she was experiencing was translatable into exactly the cheap
banalities of the airy walk, the singing heart, the starry eyes.

Meeta said, looking at her with eyes
narrowed in intense probing, ‘How come you’re looking younger?’

Her mother was less kind.

‘Maria, don’t think I don’t know. I heard
you singing in the bathroom just now. And your mind seems far away, like it’s
thinking of something else.’ She could not resist tagging on the fire warning.

Being in love, it was said, was something
purely chemical, a throwback to life’s primordial origins, back even to
ancestors that were rough and scaly, crawling out of mud in response to the
mating call, or that were delicately winged and beautiful, flying unimaginable
distances on a pheromone-scented trail. Love, raw and pristine, unabashed and
unstoppable, was well before the time of thinking and calculating, giving rise
to the only explanation for unaccountable attraction between two people: love’s
chemistry. In Nature’s grand scheme of things, its only purpose was procreation
and its strategy was to offer a reward in advance for all the pains. Human
beings soon dispensed with the procreative burden but cleverly kept the reward.
So a woman in love was buoyed up on a tide of wondrous chemicals, with no price
to pay. A clichéd happiness was still happiness, to be savoured as long as
possible.

Being in love and loving were not the same
thing, the first being a temporary and intense state of suspended reality, the
second, in its firm rootedness and commitment, being the exact opposite. The
apportionment of reward was unfair: the loving woman, guided only by devotion
and loyalty, was often weighed down by sadness and disappointment, while a
woman in love, ignoring all duty and responsibility, had a face that radiated
happiness and walked with a light step. Did Por Por, meeting her lover secretly
in the shadows of a temple, sing and dance to that kind of love? Even her
mother, while being courted by her father who was handsome and generous both
with words and gifts to women, must have felt that tremor of heart and limbs.

As a young girl she had overheard her mother
telling a fellow worshipper from the Church of Eternal Mercy how disgusting it
was that a couple living in sin could dare sit in the church pews and look
happy. The thinking modern woman who was clandestinely in love dispensed with
morality altogether and just needed to say to her head, ‘Hush, be quiet; just
leave me alone for a while.’

A moral vacation – that was what every one
of those pious worshippers of the Church of Eternal Mercy needed, she chuckled
wickedly.

‘That’s right,’ said Meeta. ‘Stop thinking
for a while and enjoy, enjoy! You’re no longer young, you know.’ According to
her mood of the moment, Meeta encouraged, warned, lectured, empathised,
scolded. Her mood depended very much on the elusive Byron of the Polo Club,
whom, according to Winnie, she was still intently looking out for each time she
dined at the club.

‘Seize the day, girl!’ she would urge.
‘Carpe diem!’ Or ‘They’re all alike, those bastards. Only thinking of
themselves.’ Or ‘ You be the one in control. You play hard to get, and they get
harder! Ha! Ha!’

In love, one could be amoral but not
apolitical. She whispered to Maria, ‘You know, our Winnie the Blur is so blur I
have to explain the joke to her.’

There was no blurring in Winnie’s keenness
of observation.

‘Our Meeta talks too much. She’s pining for
that guy who doesn’t care too hoots for her. One little look of encouragement
from him, and she’ll jump into his bed. Just you see!’

She had her own advice for Maria.

‘A woman needs a man, whatever she may say.
There is nothing like love,’ adding dreamily, ‘love is a many-splendoured
thing.’

Winnie’s head, even as she was standing in
front of her class and teaching her subject of history, throbbed with romantic
definitions and pronouncements picked up from the movies and popular literature
that came out more easily than the dates of wars or imperial dynasties. Alone
in her room she listened for hours to the mellifluous voice of Frank Sinatra
and Dean Martin celebrating or bemoaning love; she had seen the movie Love
Story four times and made the proclamation that love meant never having to say
sorry so many times that Meeta forced her to stop.

Maria thought, it must be real happiness. For
it was of the abundant kind that spilled over into goodwill for all around her,
even the contemptible Mr Chin who either met her smile with a very constricted
one or looked away. It made her listen patiently to Mrs Kee’s story about her
baby boy, a tale that had become tiresome to the others in the staffroom who
swore they had heard it, and seen the photograph of the baby, at least half a
dozen times. Mrs Kee, normally talkative, became doubly so with the birth of
the precious male child whom she and her husband had given up hope of having
after the four daughters, telling anyone who would listen how they had tried
everything, from special medicinal herbs imported from Taiwan to special times
and conditions for making love. One of her listeners took prurient interest in
Mrs Kee’s intimate revelations and himself revealed a certain traditional
technique, amazingly gross and involving the ubiquitous ginseng, about how to
make a male child.

While Mrs Neo rolled her eyes upwards and
quietly left the staffroom, while Teresa Pang smiled forbearingly and continued
marking her students’ exercise books without looking up once, Maria Seetoh not
only listened but said the appropriate things to add to Mrs Kee’s pride and
joy.

‘Miss Seetoh,’ gushed Mrs Kee, ‘I know you are
very good with English. Can you think of very nice words for my son’s
birthday?’

The first birthday of the only male
grandchild in the Kee family would be celebrated in style in one of Singapore’s
best Chinese restaurants, and there would be a huge birthday cake on which only
the most illustrious words, in both English and Chinese, would be inscribed.

‘I will get special Chinese translator to
translate your words,’ said Mrs Kee by now quite breathless. The whole event
would be videotaped.

Maria obliged, but declined very politely to
be among the guests at the celebration.

Out of deference to Mrs Kee’s superstitious
fears, she kept from her the fact of the visit to Sister Elizabeth’s wake in
the funeral parlour of the St Francis’ Hospice. Mrs Kee’s eyes would have
dilated in horror, for any connection with a house of death, even if many
stages remote, would have been an evil impossible to risk in the protection of
her newborn. There were malignant spirits everywhere, and they were most potent
if associated with a corpse. Mrs Kee even avoided the mention of Sister
Elizabeth’s name, and had nervously waved away the staff member who had gone
round collecting money for a joint wreath and message of condolence in The
Singapore Tribune.

Looking upon Sister’s body in her coffin,
her hands gently folded upon her chest, with a rosary entwined round the
fingers, Maria instantly thought of her dead husband in exactly the same
prayerful pose in his coffin, almost a year ago. What a long way her feelings
had travelled since! She must have gone through the entire human gamut –
bitterness, anger, pity, shock, sadness, despair and then relief, hope,
surprise, excitement, wonder, joy. Head and heart had made the journey together
in mutual reliance, whatever the tumultous conflicts along the way. Thinking
with the heart, feeling with the head: the line that separated them was
constantly being blurred.

She was suddenly struck by the irony that
had attended each death, as if the powers out there, whether they had a
habitation and a name among mortals or remained unidentified and distant,
sometimes acted like malicious mortals themselves and wanted the last laugh.
Poor Sister Elizabeth dying of womb cancer when her womb had been chaste all
its life; and poor Bernard, dying in the bitterest of beliefs that the friend
he most trusted had betrayed him with the woman he made most sacrifices for,
beside his very deathbed, before his very eyes. Was it a continuation of the
irony that it was precisely his hideous accusation that had drawn their
attention to each other, who else might have gone their separate ways and never
have bothered to see each other again after his death?