Miss Seetoh in the World (49 page)

About what was going on in Maria’s life, she
showed little interest, about Meeta’s, even less. It would only be a matter of
time before the three friends whom Meeta once called ‘The Terrible Trio’, ‘The
Golden Girls’, ‘The Three Misses Who Missed’, ended all communicaton with each
other and disappeared into the darkest corners of memory.

Maria called her mother a few times in her
new home in Malaysia. ‘We’re all doing well, praise be to the Lord and His Holy
Mother,’ said Anna Seetoh. ‘Heng will be baptised next month. His new name will
be Vincent, after St. Vincent de Paul. His godma will be Francesca Low. I must
have told you about her, a truly pious lady who’s been to Lourdes three times.
Heng’s a completely different person now.’

Anna was anxious to know about Por Por who
was getting to be more unmanageable, refusing to eat or have her bath. A few
times she had grabbed Rosiah’s hand and bitten it. Maria had bad news.
‘Rosiah’s leaving in six weeks’ time. She says she’s getting married, but I
suspect it’s an excuse. I don’t blame her. She’s no longer able to manage Por
Por and can’t wait for me to come home everyday to take over.’ ‘What are you
going to do?’ asked Anna anxiously and Maria said sadly, ‘I’m going to put Por
Por in the Sunshine Home.’ She wished it could have been the Silver Valley Home
which had better facilities and round-the-clock medical care, but it was too
expensive. She wished, with all her heart, that she had more money.

‘Oh no, you can’t do this to me,’ gasped
Maria when Brother Philip told her the bad news: he was going on long leave to
Ireland after which his superiors there would decide on his next posting which
would likely not be Singapore again. ‘Oh no, dear Brother Phil, you can’t leave
me when I need you most. You know that I need you, don’t you?’

‘Of course, Maria. I know that.’

‘Then why are you leaving me?’

‘I have no choice, Maria.’

‘This is nonsense, Brother Phil. Of course
you have a choice. Don’t you love me at all?’

‘Of course I do, Maria. Now stop behaving
like a spoilt child.’

‘No, you can’t love me if you’re abandoning
me like this!’

It was strange that they were using the language
of lovers when they were not, nor could ever be. If it was true that real,
lasting love between a man and a woman went through a number of stages,
beginning with the heat of passion, then a tumultous power struggle to see who
would be in control, followed by a period of painful accommodation and finally,
the ultimate reward of perfect soulmateship, then she and her colleague in St
Peter’s Secondary School, worlds apart in temperament and chosen way of life,
had co-opted the entire process and made it their own; they had dispensed with
all the burdensome stages of the journey and leapt directly to the golden
reward at the end. They had managed this magical flight, like two winged
creatures, precisely because they carried no lovers’ baggage.

After she had fully opened up her heart to
him about the painful dilemmas of a near love affair, she had learnt to trust
him completely and relish the pleasure of his wise, witty company; it did not
matter if the gossips in the school were wondering why Maria Seetoh and Brother
Philip were seen so often together. Once she had asked him, ‘There’s a rumour
going on about us. Does it bother you?’ and he had said, ‘Only if it’s true.’
She had thought, ‘Dear, dear Brother Phil. He makes me feel what no man has
ever made me feel – comfortable.’

She made him promise that he would write to
her from Ireland and let her know what was going on in his new life.

‘Nothing much happens. Long hours of study,
prayers, walks in my favourite fields and downs. Maybe an occasional visit to a
pub for beer and Irish music.’

‘I wouldn’t mind that kind of peaceful,
uncomplicated existence! But no, dear Brother Phil, you must still write, I
want to know.’

As a parting gift, she gave him a pen with
his name inscribed. ‘Remember you had once wanted to collaborate with me in the
writing of a play?’ she asked. ‘Maybe one of these days, should you get a
re-posting to Singapore, we could still do it.’

‘Maybe,’ said Brother Philip, looking at her
very affectionately. She had wanted to give him a hug then, but desisted. There
was only one time he had held her, but that was because she was crying over her
failure to reach Maggie and he wanted to console her. Here was a life that was
undamaged and happy, and she, with a life still to recover from damage, a
happiness still to be found, had no right to come knocking on the gates of his
Eden.

 The school gave him a farewell dinner in a
restaurant. That evening, she tossed about in fretful sleeplessness, drifting
into a troubled sleep at dawn, heavy-hearted at the thought that only his
vacated desk in the staff common room would greet her every morning. The true
test of a woman’s feelings for a man, it was said, lay in how much he was
missed. By that reckoning, she must have loved Dr Phang a little, and her
husband not at all. Brother Philip’s departure hollowed out a huge part of her
inner self, leaving an emptiness shockingly alien to her sense of independence
and love of solitude. It frightened her. Perhaps she was confusing need with
love, only this time it was not the need for the warmth of a man’s body in a
parked car or on a silken bed, but of something superior and subtler – his
unconditional friendship. If she was now confusing love with friendship, it was
no bad thing, for indeed, at their best, they were one. Was love an ersatz
friendship, or was it the other way round? The need to hear from him grew sharp
and insistent with each day of his absence, making her wait for a letter that
she had told him there was no need to write, for a call that would never be
made as he could not afford expensive overseas calls and she had been too
embarrassed to tell him, ‘make it a collect call.’

A card showing a church in the lovely Irish
countryside arrived nearly two weeks after his departure. ‘To my dear Maria,’
it said and was signed, ‘With love, Philip.’ Yearning women, holding a gift or
card or letter, did a thorough search for signs of love, looking up and down,
around and through, inside and out, so that no sign of the love whether already
lost or still unclaimed, would be missed. Sometimes yearning embellished truth,
turning morsels into a feast to feed the hunger. Maria was ready to believe
that the little postcard with the usual inquiries about her health, family,
schoolwork, etc was some kind of love note, emboldend by distance and absence,
until she realised that it was the exact reciprocation of her own endearments
in a card she had written to accompany the gift of the pen. It would be the
first of many cards, cheering her, also filling her with deep melancholy.

As soon as she entered Mr Ignatius Lim’s
office, the woman who had been talking to him, swung round in her chair to face
her. She was Mark’s mother; in front of her, laid on Mr Lim’s table were a
number of sheets of paper which Maria instantly recognised to be the pale blue
paper that Mark and Yen Ping favoured for their poems to each other. The woman
had a look of intense hostility which was accentuated by her heavy make-up and
the long jade earrings swinging from her ear lobes.

Mr Lim said, ‘Miss Seetoh, this is Mrs
Gloria Wong, the mother of Mark Wong.’

Preparing for a confrontation between the
silently fuming visitor and the difficult maverick teacher, he assumed the look
of the consummate peacemaker and mediator, and said with slow deliberation,
‘Miss Seetoh, Mrs Wong has drawn my attention to a certain – ahem – issue,
problem which I have no doubt we can all solve peacefully together.’ The
principal then showed her the love poems and notes that Yen Ping had been
writing for Mark, apparently during her creative writing classes; indeed one of
them referred to a time when they were together, sitting side by side in the
class.

Impatient with the principal’s slow dilatory
way of communicating her complaint, Mrs Wong took over, saying in a voice shrill
with anger, ‘Miss Seetoh, I must protest! I had understood that the staff of St
Peter’s had the responsibility of making sure their students behaved properly,
and yet you have allowed this girl to write love poems to my son! Luckily, my
sister found them in his room.’ She launched into a bitter tirade against
school laxity allowing young boys and girls to indulge in nonsensical behaviour
when they should be studying hard and making their parents proud of them. ‘Miss
Seetoh,’ she said standing up and holding up a warning forefinger. ‘I want you
to promise me that in future you will not allow this girl to write love poems
to my son! I don’t know how she manages to smuggle them to him because he’s on
twenty-four hour surveillance!’

‘I make no such promise,’ said Maria coldly,
and made to leave.

‘What – what, how dare you –’ she turned to
the principal who, realising that a noisy quarrel between two women was the
last thing he wanted in his office, began to pacify her.

The last words that Maria heard as she
strode out were those of earnest assurance which rose above the woman’s noisy
protestations, ‘Yes, yes, I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again.’

How she wished Brother Philip were around
for her to share the angriest thoughts and feelings she had ever experienced:
‘The detestable man is closing down the creative writing class, with immediate
effect, as his letter says. It doesn’t mention Mrs Wong at all, only the need
to cooperate with the National Productivity Campaign.’ More fervently than ever
did Maria utter an increasingly felt need: how I wish I had more money. Into
her mind came the deeply gratifying image of herself sweeping into Mr Ignatius
Lim’s office, laying a letter on his table, saying nonchalantly, ‘Mr Lim, I
resign, as of now,’ and then sweeping out.

She had done some quick sums, which only
cast a pall of gloom. Even if she gave up her dream of buying that studio
apartment, she would not have enough money, without her monthly salary, to
continue with her mother’s monthly allowance and the cost of keeping Por Por in
the Sunshine Home. Resignation from her job was not an option.

‘Hey God,’ she said, feeling that humour was
necessary to dispel the growing gloom, ‘if you’re still there, and itching to
work a real miracle, I have a suggestion. Tomorrow, when I pass that newsstand
that sells the National Jackpot lottery tickets, could you guide my hand to
pick the winning one? The first prize, nothing less, God, that will enable me
to buy my dream apartment and pay Mother her monthly allowances and transfer
Por Por to the Silver Valley Home.’

It was said that there was a one in a
million chance of winning that jackpot in the National Lottery, a one in a five
or even ten million chance of winning the mega millions in those amazing super
lotteries in the US and the UK. That meant that God only answered one out of
the millions of beseeching, bombarding prayers from hopeful punters. It was as
good as saying that God was merely following the laws of probability by which
there would always be someone, somewhere who would hold the winning ticket.
‘Well, God, may I call you Chance, or Randomness, or Luck or Probability,
whichever is the truest,’ said Maria, ‘and if you are so kind as not to mind
this rude reduction of your name to the mean calculations of science, then you
could still listen to my prayer!’

The jesting put her in a light mood that
lasted long enough for a single, smiling thought. One of these days I could
write a humorous book and call it ‘God and Me (Not our Real Names)’. She would
invite Brother Philip to contribute some witty limericks that would still be in
keeping with his vocation; the irreverent humour would be all from her side.
She imagined Brother Philip in Ireland reading a copy of her book, rolling on
the floor with laughter, and then writing her a reply: ‘You prodigal daughter,
you,’ ending with ‘Still praying for you, Love, Philip.’

About a month later, Yen Ping waited for her
at the school gates after school to say, almost choking with tears, ‘Miss
Seetoh, Mark will be gone. In two days’ time.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Maria.

‘His mother has arranged for him to study in
London. His air ticket’s bought, he’s all packed. She will go with him.’

‘How do you know, Yen Ping?’

‘He told me yesterday. He managed to make a
quick call when his mother was upstairs.’

Mrs Gloria Wong had stopped the maths
tuition, suspecting that her son had been making use of the trips to and from
the tutor’s home for his secret meetings and exchange of love notes and poems.

Yen Ping was inconsolable. Maria could only
remind her of the promise she had made to herself some time ago, and turn it
into both advice and consolation.

‘Yen Ping, you told me once that you and
Mark would study hard and prove yourselves. Once Mark’s mother and your parents
realise how serious you are about each other, how responsible you are, they
will cease their objections. It has happened before.’

And Maria told some stories of young,
thwarted lovers that had happy endings, creating one or two of her own.

Yen Ping wiped her tears and said, ‘Thank
you, Miss Seetoh. I will do as you say,’ adding in such a wistful voice that
Maria felt a little catch in the throat, ‘he leaves so soon, and I can’t even
say goodbye to him.’