Miss Seetoh in the World (35 page)

Maria said, ‘Brother Phil, thank you for
telling me about the rivalry with Yen Ping. To think I could have been so blind
all along.’

Brother Philip said, ‘So despite her
campaign of resistance, she’s given you a story. It must mean something.’

Maria sighed, ‘Totally horrible. On a
subject I wouldn’t tell you about, dear Brother Phil, because it would make you
blush. And written in the worst clichés. But I think I understand Maggie better
now.’ It was her last hope to restore the girl’s mood. Perhaps then she would
open up and allow her teachers to help her and her sister.

They were in his car parked in a deserted
area outside the Botanic Gardens. It was the first time they had met in the
evening; the question as to whether Olivia Phang was away on one of her visits
back home to Hong Kong could not be asked. She thought, with some amusement,
about the classic ‘one-thing-led-to-another’ explanation that men and women
gave for the best intentions gone awry, when lurking passion, beginning with
something as innocuous as a sip of wine together, a smile, a sharing of a joke,
could escalate into the breathless rush into the bedroom. But men and women
were ever disingenuous about that first one thing that had led to all the
others: the choice of a venue away from all prying eyes.

Here they were, in a car, in a dark isolated
area marked by tall trees and bushes, with nobody in sight except other parked
cars at discreet distances, all united in a delicious conspiracy of amatory
intent. It had begun with a dinner in an obscure café outside town.

‘A ride?’ he had suggested, ‘If you like,’
she had said, with no idea where he was going. It was amazing how much of their
exploration of each other’s intentions and sensitivities were in casual, crisp
monosyllables.

When she was thirteen, she went on a church
outing by the sea and one of the picnickers, a good-looking boy of sixteen, had
issued an invitation of a vaguely clandestine nature. He said, pointing to a
cluster of rocks a short distance from shore, ‘There are interesting shellfish
to pick there. Would you like to come with me?’ The boy spent at least ten
minutes searching for non-existent shellfish, all the while holding her hand
tightly, but he had accomplished his purpose of being alone with the prettiest
girl in the picnic group, and she had experienced a special thrill in stealing
away from her mother’s side for a secret rendezvous. Now, thirty years later,
she was feeling something of that girlish sense of adventure.

It was a situation that was bringing her
closer to the line which she knew she would be crossing at her peril, but how
many women had not succumbed to the thrill of a peril? One thing led to
another. Before I knew it. It all happened so fast. I really didn’t know what I
was doing. Women would afterwards wonder at how easily they gave in and learn
that passion had its own unstoppable momentum. Now she understood why the nuns
in the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus where she had her education, and the Christian
brothers in the boys’ school just next to the convent, were always warning
their respective charges: stay away from temptation. Better still, stay away
from the occasion for temptation.

Their occasion, in a locked car in a dark
isolated spot, completely safe from a prying world, was replete with both
promise and peril. The line to be crossed had become an edge on which she was
standing and looking down tremblingly into an abyss. For Dr Phang, there was no
tremor, only the sense of an exhilarating free fall. He was as far removed from
those loud, uncouth males boasting of their conquests in bars and locker rooms,
as an Ariel playing a romantic tune on a harp was removed from a slouching,
slobbering Caliban. While having his morning shave or combing that handsome
head of hair in front of the mirror, he might just pause for a while, look hard
at himself and allow a quick self-congratulatory smile outside the range of his
wife’s detecting eyes. For him the mirror moment of honesty had only to do with
keeping faith with life’s instincts for pleasure and joy.

He was all for making use of the stolen
moments to do what the open daytime meetings at the restaurants and
coffee-houses forbade. He said, wrapping her in his arms as soon as they were
parked and had only the faint light of a few stars in the sky to show the
outlines of their faces, ‘What’s with that pensive look?’ If she insisted on
asking irksome questions, he was ready with a quick answer about Olivia being
away in Malaysia and returning in two days. There was clearly something
troubling her, and he sat back and prepared to listen, a firm hand on her
thigh.

‘Today’s the first anniversary of Bernard’s
death,’ she said. ‘Did you look at the obituary pages of The Straits Tribune
this morning?’

‘Yes, I did,’ he replied. She could see him
over his morning coffee reading the words under Bernard’s photo in the ‘In
Memoriam’ notice, exactly as Bernard had dictated them to Heng on his deathbed:
Loved eternally. Forever in my heart. Your beloved wife, Maria. Words of love
and devotion, in a scheme of revenge that would work itself out over the next
ten years.

She had the same urge to correct the
falsehood now, as she had been intent almost four years ago, when they had all
met on their honeymoon in the Cameron Highlands, to do away with the false
impression that Dr Phang might have had about her marrying on account of a
twenty-thousand-dollar diamond ring. A cheap woman, a lying woman – that
impression of her by anyone, let alone that man – would have been intolerable
to her pride.

She told him the ghastly truth about those
words of undying devotion announced to the world, and realised, with dismay,
that she would have to repeat the tiresome explanation to Meeta and Winnie who
would by now have seen the notice and could already have left their shocked
inquiries in the voice mail of her phone. To no one would she reveal the new
truth, something to which she had responded first with disgust and then with
relief, that there would be no more of the remaining nine commemorations
enjoined by Bernard, for Heng had spent all the given money on his gambling.

When her mother told her, she had merely
replied, ‘Tell him to sell the niche next to Bernard’s, if he likes. I have no
use for it.’

In the last month of his illness, Bernard
had bought two niches in the columbarium next to the Church of Eternal Mercy,
the second one presumably for her.

‘Today’s his anniversary. Aren’t you going
to pay your respects at the columbarium?’ Anna Seetoh said. ‘At least go with
some flowers.’

Maria knew that her mother had just returned
home from an anniversary mass for Bernard. She said, attempting a smile, ‘I
think I might as well keep my ‘lost sheep’ status all the way.’

Her mother had told her that in one of his
sermons on lost sheep, Father Rozario had specifically mentioned her. The good
priest and the entire congregation of the Church of Eternal Mercy could have
any ill impression of her; she would make sure that Dr Phang did not.

‘Yes, it was rather odd, but I guessed,’ he
said briefly. ‘Bernard was incapable of any straight thinking at that time.’

Then apparently glad to have disposed of the
talking, he resumed the passion, pulling her to him and nuzzling her with
anticipatory eagerness. His passion had no need of the soft enveloping
darkness, the heavy scent of night flowers, the gentle hum of small insects,
nor the suggestive low moans coming from some of the other parked cars. He was
kissing her ardently and the hand that had been caressing her neck moved down
slowly, tentatively, checking for the slightest sign of resistance. For under
no circumstances would the gallant man force himself on a woman.

‘Well, it’s not my night,’ he said with a
sigh of resignation as she suddenly broke free of his arms with a start and a
small scream. She had heard some rustling sounds in a nearby bush and caught
sight of a moving shadow with a tiny flicker of light that moved with it. There
would always be the annoying Peeping Toms prowling around lovers’ haunts with
their furtive torchlights; she had once read about a sick voyeur who charged
into a parked car and dragged out the couple, injuring the man with a knife and
attempting to rape the girl.

Their evening was over, and they tried to
make light of it. Maria said, ‘You don’t want the papers tomorrow to carry this
headline, do you: ‘Dr Benjamin Phang, protégé of the great TPK, caught naked in
car with teacher from St Peter’s Secondary School!’

He said, ‘Come to think of it, you’ve never
called me by my name.’

He was ‘Dr Phang’ officially, ‘Benjamin’ to
his colleagues, ‘Ben’ to close friends, ‘Benjy’ or ‘Darling Benjy Boy’ to
Olivia, in a rapidly ascending scale of intimacy. Whatever her present
relationship to him, the address should, at the least, have been somewhere
between the formality and the intimacy. Meeta, according to Winnie who liked to
listen at her door or peep through the keyhole, was addressing the holy god-man
Sai Baba as ‘Dearest Baba’ and ‘Darling Baba’ while waiting to use the
endearments on mortals. Winnie herself used all manner of pet names for the
many men who came into her life, which became abusive nicknames as soon as they
got out of it.

‘Isn’t it odd that you’re still referring to
him as Dr Phang?’ said Meeta.

‘Even after you’ve slept with him?’ giggled
Winnie.

She had shared her secret with them for no
other reason than that they had always shared theirs with her. Women were a
sorority of incorrigible secret sharers. But she was getting a little tired of
their company, their peevishness and querulousness, and beginning to decline
the invitations to dine with them at the Polo Club.

‘For goodness’ sake,’ said Meeta. ‘Stop all
this playing hard to get! Your dream man will get tired of waiting and leave
you for another less difficult woman.’

She told the crude joke of a Priapus turned
shrink, literally. (‘Have to explain that again to our Winnie the Blur!’)

‘He will have no shortage of women,’ said
Winnie. ‘I take back what I said about his age. Few men in their fifties, look,
oh my, oh my, so-ooh distinguished and sexy!’

They would not be able to understand her
reason. Perhaps she herself could not either. It probably had to do with the
complicated business of calibrating that fine line of the crossing which kept
shifting. The austere formality of ‘Dr Phang’ instead of the casual familiarity
of ‘Ben’ or the surrendering endearment of ‘Dearest’ or ‘Darling’ helped in the
calibration.

Vanity, thy name is woman. For the modern
thinking woman, the name had to be vanity plus caution plus self-preservation
plus control plus a hundred unnamable drives, motives, instincts, intuitions
and what women liked to call their astute sixth sense, forming a Gordian Knot
impossible to untie into its numerous strands. Men liked to tell women that
they were like the caterpillar with its countless legs; as long as the creature
ignored them, it walked along smoothly and happily; as soon as it became
conscious of them, it got itself all tangled up in a knot. Complexity, thy name
is woman. Or simple confusion.

‘Why don’t you ever address me by my name?’
he asked.

‘Alright, I’ll call you Benjamin, if you
like.’

‘You’re a very complex woman,’ he said,
giving her nose a tweak. ‘You think too much. Too much cerebra, too little
viscera.’

She liked his pithy use of language, as he
did hers.

‘Alright,’ he sighed, as they drove away.
‘Next time it has to be a warm room, with a silken bed.’ She liked it when he
remembered all her fanciful expressions and used them when she least expected
it.

‘Well, if we’re not going to do anything,
you might tell me a story,’ he said. ‘I’m like a little boy all over again when
I listen to your stories. You are my Sheherazade.’

Maria said, ‘She nearly lost her life to the
wicked sultan.’

He said, ‘Nearly. But in the end, he married
her because he could not do without her tales.’

‘Alright,’ said Maria, thinking that this
man would never be in such a state of dependence on a woman. ‘I’ll tell you
another one I’ve just made up about poor V.K. Pandy, but I warn you, it’s a
silly story that will go someday into a book of children’s stories.’

She had been inspired by that incident of
Big Bird that day in Middleton Square, as well as a scathing comparison of V.K.
Pandy, to a prancing circus monkey, in a newspaper some time back. In her
story, a crowd of Singaporeans went all out to protect Big Bird from the police
in a big chase which ended with the police catching their target, only to
scratch their heads in bafflement as they at last caught their prey, pulled off
the Big Bird costume and faced a real monkey turning its indecent, reddened
backside to them.

Dr Phang said, ‘I must remember to tell my
daughter that story; she’ll love it.’ Then he said, ‘That man’s supporter will
be allowed to go free this time, but not another time.’

Did the protégé of the great TPK know much
more than he was prepared to admit? Was he among the very few in the inner
sanctum of trust who could put in a word for the much hated opposition
dissident? What did it say of his magnanimity that in addition to secretly
giving money to the much beleaguered V.K. Pandy, he was prepared to risk the
prime minister’s displeasure on his account? For the great TPK was known to
fall into an apoplexy of rage at the mere mention of that despised man.