Miss Seetoh in the World (32 page)

 Thoughts of a discomfiting nature could not
be permitted to stay at a time when the heart was allowed its ascendancy. They
were easily swamped out by the new happiness that continued to cast a benign
glow around everyone in the classroom, the staffroom, the canteen, along the
corridors, down the staircases. It wanted to shine most warmly on the person
who seemed most in need of it, but was rejected all the way.

Maggie, for the first time that Maria could
remember, looked troubled and unhappy, avoiding her when usually she would seek
her company and attention, sometimes very obtrusively, such as cornering her on
her way to or out of the staffroom, or out of the school gates. The girl was
now frequently absent from school and had stopped attending the creative
writing classes.

‘No, nothing’s wrong, I’m okay, okay!’ she
would say with a sharp laugh and proud toss of her hair when Maria sought her
out on one of the days she had turned up.

‘Maggie, something’s wrong, you must tell
me,’ she said solicitously, recollecting all the rumours of her mysterious
family background that she determinedly kept secret.

‘I tell you, nothing wrong, so stop asking!’
she said sullenly and walked away.

Her troubles were probably related to the
beloved younger sister Angel who, oddly, accompanied her to school on some
days, and spent the time at a table in the students’ canteen, reading her books
and comics and writing in copy books, before Maggie picked her up after school
and they went home together. On one occasion during recess, Maria had seen the
two of them eating from a plate of noodles in the canteen. The sister was
thirteen, but Maggie was coaxing her to eat and even fed her a few mouthfuls,
like a child. The canteen woman whom everybody called ‘Auntie Noodles’ was
generously re-filling their plate.

Maria watched, deeply moved. When she walked
towards them, Maggie looked up sharply, instinctively put a protective arm
around the bored-looking Angel and assumed a cold hard defiance to beat off any
question.

‘Maggie,’ said Maria. ‘Shouldn’t Angel be in
her own school? Why is she here with you?’

A sudden thought occurred to her, causing
her eyes to dart all over the young girl’s body in a search for marks and
bruises: was the older sister protecting her from parental abuse? It broke her
heart to think that the student who liked and trusted her most of all, had
suddenly stopped doing so. Her concern came up against a wall of chill
resistance: ‘Miss Seetoh, I appreciate very much if you not interfere in my
affairs.’

She spoke to Brother Philip.

He said, ‘Maggie once told me that it was
unfair you were giving all the attention to Yen Ping in your creative writing
class. She said you always used Yen Ping’s stories as examples, never hers.’

‘Oh my God,’ said Maria and a load
immediately lifted off her chest. Here was a problem with an easy solution. For
a while she had feared having to make a police report about child abuse, going
through those dreadful formalities she had heard about, such as having
photographs taken of the bruises cleverly inflicted only in hidden places,
including the chest, stomach, upper thighs, working out with the principal, the
discipline master and other relevant staff about how to keep the matter from
the inquisitive Chinese language newspapers, to protect Maggie’s privacy, and
worst of all, testifying in court. She was so glad she did not have to be part
of that huge, messy, pitiful, detestable world out there that she caught
glimpses of in the newspapers and on TV.

She grasped Brother Philip’s hand in a rush
of relief so great it had to be instantly expressed in light-hearted sharing
and laughter. She told him that Maggie’s stories were so ridiculously,
fantastically sexy that they could not be used as examples in the creative
writing class; otherwise the principal, receiving complaints, would send him to
investigate.

‘Well,’ said Maria, once more in a happy
mood, ‘I’m prepared to use them now, to make the girl happy. And if you come
investigating, dear Brother Phil, I’ll make you sit down with the rest of the
class and join in the discussion!’

She told him that she was once tempted to
pass on to him one of Maggie’s boldest attempts, a very risqué and amusing
story about a businessman and his karaoke lounge visits, in case the moral
education teacher of St Peter’s needed diversion from his many onerous duties.

‘My dear Brother Phil,’ she said warmly,
liking the sound of her new form of addressing him, ‘you could learn from
Maggie’s rich vocabulary of sexual terms! Maybe you could even use them for one
of your delightful limericks.’

She had grown very fond of Brother Philip
with his ready wit and quiet, gentle wisdom, and was not above teasing him in a
way that would have appalled the prim and proper principal. She paid him the
supreme compliment: ‘Never, never ask to return to your native Ireland. I’ll
miss you.’

‘Why are you looking at me like that, you
mischievous girl?’ he once said, and she liked the mischievous twinkle in his
own large, kindly eyes.

He would never know the chilling thought
that had for a moment gripped her: what if her dying husband, in his wild
delusions and suspicions, had actually scribbled a note of complaint to the
principal of St Peter’s Secondary School, accusing his moral education teacher
of having an affair with his wife? Past that danger, she could see its humorous
side: Brother Philip in the white brother’s cassock, looking puzzled, and
herself, in bright unseemly red for a widow, with explanations at the ready,
standing side by side in the principal’s office, while he stood facing them,
his hands tightly clasped behind his back, clearing his throat with elaborate
deliberation before saying in a very precise, formal tone: ‘It has come to my
attention – ’ There were many things she could share with dear Brother Philip,
but not those shocking suspicions, nor the shocking dream she had had, of them
together in the Botanic Gardens, discovered naked by her husband.

When she next saw Maggie, she said brightly,
‘Maggie, write me a story. I miss reading your stories,’ adding, ‘Hey, Maggie,
what about coming over to my place for lunch this weekend? Here’s my new
address. I moved a while ago. You can bring Angel if you like.’

The girl said, ‘Thanks,’ without enthusiasm.
She received the slip of paper bearing the new address with a limp hand and
looked away.

Maggie was in school the next day, and was
passing Yen Ping along the corridor when she did something that quite shocked
Maria: she spat at her rival.

Yen Ping, with the help of the ever devoted
Mark, had recently won a prize in a short story competition, and Maria had
enthusiastically read out the prize-winning story in the creative writing
class, unaware of driving the thorn of rivalry even deeper into poor Maggie’s
side. Maria was to learn later from Yen Ping that it was symbolic spitting
only, not full expectoration, but it was shocking enough in its crude malice to
warrant a rebuke.

She strode up to Maggie and said sternly, ‘I
saw that. You have to apologise to Yen Ping. At once.’

Maggie looked down sullenly; Yen Ping looked
upset and tearful. Maggie, probably thinking of Miss Seetoh’s kind invitation
to lunch, a unique enough gesture from a teacher, relented and said, ‘I’m
sorry.’ ‘Now I want both of you to shake hands.’ In her days at school, the
nuns made every quarrelling child, whether the offender or victim, extend a
hand of reconciliation. Maggie and Yen Ping shook hands, neither looking at the
other. Maria had a sudden thought: she too should be extending a conciliatory
hand to all those she had upset or wronged in her life: her dead husband, her
mother, Mr Chin, Olivia Phang, the great TPK himself for her intense dislike of
him, despite all that he had done for Singapore. Only for Olivia Phang would
the apology entail an assurance and a promise: ‘Don’t worry. There isn’t any
affair. It’s a silly little flutter that will run its course, like a fever.’

She told Dr Phang about Maggie the next time
he called her on the phone. He listened with chuckling interest, as he had to
the comical incident of the plaque. One story led to another; Maggie’s life,
even the little she knew of it, was a rich compendium. It was weird; there were
a hundred questions she wanted to ask him, and she was instead telling him
school stories and gossip. What exactly did her brother Heng say when he called
to tell him not to attend Bernard’s funeral? What else had Bernard confided in
him that he had not told her? And Olivia? Surely it was without his wife’s
knowledge that he was making all those private calls inviting her to join him
for lunch in town? What if she saw them, or somebody saw and told her? How did
he elude those ferociously vigilant eyes? And his feelings for her? Exactly
what did he want from her? What about all those rumours she had heard about the
smitten women in his life? His ex-wife? The daughter he seemed to love most of
all? His standing with the great TPK? The promise of a political career? The
rumour that he had actually made a secret donation to V.K. Pandy when the poor
man was ordered by the courts to pay the great TPK three hundred thousand
dollars for defaming him? If he had political ambitions, surely he was also
playing with fire. But he had privately disclosed to her, before Bernard’s
death, that he was thinking of leaving his high position in the Ministry of
Defence. What were his plans now? He had confided in her then that he needed change
and adventure. Was his present affair-in-the-making with her now part of that
adventure?

A woman’s questions for a man she was
interested in were voraciously retrospective and prospective; like a hundred
probing tentacles they stretched beyond his present to dig into the smallest
crevices of his past and reach for the most elusive hiding places of his
future. If she was wise, she would keep all the questions locked up in her head
and never permit any to roll out upon her tongue. For she would never be
satisfied with his answers; she would, when alone by herself, examine each of
them in its every detail and nuance, under the relentless microscope of
suspicion and jealousy, and then come up with even more questions to ask.

A man hated a woman’s questions; it always
made her querulous and unreasonable, bringing out the worst in her. The
answering of a mere fraction of the questions would set in motion an
intolerable deluge of explanation, argument, confrontation, taking them round
and round in tortuous circles. Above all, a woman’s tears unnerved a man; if he
was helpless against them, he hated them even more.

Dr Phang, the undamaged Teflon Man, had a
simple solution: if the questions arose, he dismissed them with that alluring
boyish grin or put a genial male finger on the protesting female lips; if they
did not, he pre-empted them permanently with his cool, relaxed demeanour that
said, ‘No, please don’t; they will spoil everything for us.’ A woman was
mollified if her mouth, opened wide for recriminations, was stopped with a
gentle kiss, if her arms, ready to flail in rage, were grasped and locked in a
tender embrace. Even abusive, battering husbands could get away with the
strategies of appeasement. Women themselves admitted they were their own worst
enemies. They seldom admitted that they were guilty of the worst double
standards – condemning other women for illicit liaisons, excusing their own as
something unavoidable, fated.

Some of the women accused him of being a
coward, of being in denial, of taking the exasperating ostrich head-in-the-sand
approach; the majority actually preferred the unreality of the silencing
manoeuvres to the reality of an open, shouting match. They said the first left
happy memories long after everything was over, the second only a bitter taste
in the mouth. The first might not solve the problem, the second always made it
worse. Talk it out, said the counsellors, let everything come out in the open,
shout, scream at each other, and you will feel the better for it. They did not know
how wrong they were; most men and women felt exhausted and drained, not purged
and cleansed.

Emily had told her that she once wrote out
all the questions she wanted to ask her wayward husband and forced him to
answer them, one after the other, screaming if he demurred or hesitated, even
making him go down on his knees and swear on the Bible. The experience took
such a heavy physical, mental and emotional toll on her that she went into deep
depression soon afterwards. ‘Nothing changed really,’ she said bitterly
afterwards. ‘I wasn’t at all proud of what I did.’ Her husband had something of
Dr Phang’s cool unflappability; all her screams and curses and tears simply
washed over him, like water off the proverbial duck, and he emerged from the
storm to go out of the room and bring back a glass of water to stop her fit of
coughing.

At their very first lunch together, some
months, after her husband’s death, he made it clear to Maria, in that famously
effective strategy of deflection and silence, that their presence together, so
precious because it would be necessarily limited to quick lunches in one of the
lesser known restaurants and coffee-houses in town, would brook no intrusion to
detract from its pure pleasure. ‘Precious’? Why? How? Her vanity cried out to hear
the reasons. He had once said to her, ‘You know, I enjoy listening to your
stories! You are a born story-teller!’ But surely he sought out her company for
more than her story-telling prowess? Again her vanity wanted to hear more.
‘Necessarily’? Why so? Did his wife already suspect something? What would he do
if she did? Suppose she had already engaged a private detective?