The Ghost Bride (3 page)
With a thrill, I slipped out. The house was built in a series of courtyards with rooms looking into them. I passed a small sitting room, and then one with a marble table, half laid for a meal. Hearing voices, I turned hastily down yet another passageway into a courtyard with a small pond, where lotus flowers tilted their creamy heads amid green stalks. A sultry, dreamlike stillness settled over everything. I knew I ought to go back before I was missed, but still I lingered.
While I was examining the lotus seedpods, which resembled the nozzles of watering cans, I heard a faint silvery chime. Perhaps I was near the clock room after all. Wandering over, I peered into what looked like a study. One door was thrown open to the courtyard, but the interior was dark and cool. Momentarily blinded by the difference in the light, I stumbled against someone working at a low table. It was a young man, dressed in shabby indigo cotton. Cogs and gears scattered on the table and floor, rolling away into the corners.
“I’m sorry, miss. . . . ” He glanced up with an apologetic air.
“I heard the chiming,” I said awkwardly, helping him gather the pieces as best I could.
“You like clocks?”
“I don’t know much about them.”
“Well, without this gear, and this one, the clock stops completely,” he said, collecting the shining innards of a brass pocket watch. With a pair of tweezers, he picked up two tiny cogs and laid them together.
“Can you fix it?” I really shouldn’t be having this conversation with a young man, even if he was a servant, but he bent over his work, which put me at ease.
“I’m not an expert but I can put it back together. My grandfather taught me.”
“It’s a useful skill,” I said. “You should open your own shop.”
At that he looked up quizzically at me, then smiled. When he smiled, his thick eyebrows drew together and his eyes crinkled at the corners. I felt my cheeks grow hot.
“Do you clean all the clocks?”
“Sometimes. I also do a little accounting and I run errands.” He was looking directly at me. “I saw you beside the pond earlier.”
“Oh.” To hide my discomfort I asked, “Why are there so many clocks in this house?”
“Some say it was a hobby, perhaps even an obsession with the old master. He was the one who collected all of them. He could never rest until he had acquired a new specimen.”
“Why was he so interested in them?”
“Well, mechanical clocks are far more precise than water clocks that tell time by dripping water, or candles where you burn tallow to mark hours. These Western clocks are so accurate that you can use them to sail with longitude, not just latitude. Do you know what that is?”
I did, as a matter of fact. My father had explained to me once how the sea charts were marked both horizontally and vertically. “Couldn’t we sail with longitude before?”
“No, in the past the great sea routes were all latitude. That’s because it’s the easiest way to plot a course. But imagine you’re far out at sea. All you have is a sextant and a compass. You need to know exactly what time it is so you can reckon the relative position of the sun. That’s why these clocks are so wonderful. With them, the Portuguese sailed all the way from the other side of the world.”
“Why didn’t we do that too?” I asked. “We should have conquered them before they came to Malaya.”
“Ah, Malaya is just a backwater. But China could have done it. The Ming sea captains sailed as far as Africa, using only latitude and pilots who knew the local waters.”
“Yes,” I said eagerly. “I read that they brought back a giraffe for the emperor. But he wasn’t interested in barbarian lands.”
“And now China is in decline, and Malaya just another European colony.”
His words had a faint tinge of bitterness, which made me curious because his hair was cut short with no shaved pate or long hanging queue, the braided hair that many men still maintained even after leaving China. This was either a sign of extreme low class, or rebellion against traditional practices. But he merely smiled. “Still, there’s a lot to learn from the British.”
There were many other questions I wanted to ask him, but with a start I realized I had been gone too long. And no matter how polite he seemed, it was still improper to talk to a strange young man even if he was only a servant.
“I must go.”
“Wait, miss. Do you know where you’re going?”
“I came from the mahjong party.”
“Should I escort you back?” He half rose from the desk and I couldn’t help noticing the ease of his clean-limbed movements.
“No, no.” The more I thought about my behavior, the more embarrassed I felt and the more certain I was that I had been missed. I practically ran out of the room. Darting down several passages, I found myself in yet another part of the house. Luck was with me, however. While I was standing there undecided, the same servant who had escorted me to the washroom reappeared.
“Oh, miss,” she said. “I just stepped away and when I came back you were gone.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, smoothing my dress. “I went astray.”
W
hen we got back to the mahjong room the game was still underway. I slipped into my seat, but Madam Lim hardly seemed to notice. From the number of tokens piled in front of her, she had been on a winning streak. After a while, I made my polite good-byes, but to my surprise Madam Lim rose to see me out.
On our way back to the front door, we passed a servant arranging funeral goods to be burned in one of the courtyards. These were miniature effigies of wire and brightly colored paper that were burned for the dead to receive in the underworld: paper horses for the dead to ride on, grand paper mansions, servants, food, stacks of hell currency, carriages, and even paper furniture. It was a little unusual to see these goods laid out now, as they were usually only prepared for funerals and Qing Ming, the festival of the dead. The devout could, however, also burn them at any time for the use of their ancestors, for without such offerings, the dead were mere paupers in the afterworld, and without descendants or proper burial, they wandered unceasingly as hungry ghosts and were unable to be reborn. It was only at Qing Ming, when general offerings were burned to ward off evil, that these unfortunates received a little sustenance. I had always thought it a frightening idea and looked askance at the funeral goods, despite the gay-colored paper and beautifully detailed models.
As we walked, I studied Madam Lim covertly. The brightness of the courtyard revealed shadows under her eyes and the loose flesh of her cheeks. She looked unutterably weary, although her posture denied such weakness.
“And how is your father?” she said.
“He is well, thank you.”
“Has he made any plans for you?”
I ducked my head. “Not that I know of.”
“But you are of marriageable age. A girl like you must already have many offers.”
“No, Auntie. My father lives quite a retired life.” And we’re not rich anymore, I added to myself.
She sighed. “I would like to ask you a favor.” My ears pricked up, but it was strangely innocuous. “Do you think you could spare me that ribbon in your hair? I was thinking of matching it to make a new
baju
.”
“Of course.” I pulled the ribbon loose. It was nothing special. The color was a common pink, but who was I to gainsay her? She grasped it with a hand that trembled.
“Are you well, Auntie?” I dared to ask her.
“I’ve had trouble sleeping,” she said in her small, feathery voice. “But I think it will soon pass.”
A
s soon as we were ensconced in the rickshaw, Amah began to scold me. “How could you behave like that? Eating so much and mooning around—I couldn’t tell which was larger, your eyes or your mouth! They must have thought you a goose. Why didn’t you charm her, tell her clever stories and flatter her?
Cheh
, you behaved like a
kampung
girl, not the daughter of the Pan family!”
“You never said I was charming before!” I said, stung by her remarks, though I was secretly relieved she had been helping in the kitchen when I took my extended walk-around.
“Charming? Of course you’re charming. You could cut paper butterflies and recite poems before any of the other children on our street. I didn’t tell you before because I didn’t want you to be spoiled.”
This was typical Amah logic. But she was bursting with gossip from the kitchen and easily distracted, particularly when I told her about Madam Lim’s request for my ribbon. “Well, it’s a funny thing to ask. She hasn’t had new clothes made for months. Maybe when the period of mourning is over, they’ll arrange a marriage for the nephew.”
“He’s not married yet?”
“Not even betrothed. They said that the master should have arranged an alliance for him earlier, but he held back because he wanted to make a better marriage for his own son.”
“How unfair.”
“
Aiya
, that’s the way of this world! Now the son is dead, they feel guilty for not doing so. Also they probably want to get another heir quickly. If the nephew dies there’ll be no one left to inherit.”
I was somewhat interested in this story, but my thoughts roamed back over the afternoon. “Amah, who looks after the clocks in that house?”
“The clocks? One of the servants, I should think. Why do you want to know?”
“I was just curious.”
“You know, the servants say that Madam Lim is very interested in you,” she said. “She’s been asking lots of questions lately about you and our household.”
“Could it be about the ghost marriage?” For some reason, the piles of funeral effigies rose to my mind and I shuddered.
“Nobody knows about that!” Amah was indignant. “It was a private conversation with your father. Maybe he even misunderstood. All that opium he smokes!”
However much Father smoked, I doubted that it had clouded his understanding that day, but I merely said, “Madam Lim has been asking me questions too.”
“What sort of questions?”
“Whether I have a sweetheart, whether I’m betrothed yet.”
Amah looked as pleased as a cat that has caught a lizard. “Well! The Lim family has so much money that perhaps a good upbringing matters more than family fortune.”
I tried to point out to her that it seemed unlikely they would pass up this chance to acquire a rich daughter-in-law in favor of me. It also didn’t explain the unease I felt around Madam Lim. But Amah was happily off in her own daydreams.
“We should show you off more. If people know that the Lim family is interested in you, you may get other marriage offers.” Amah was so shrewd in some ways. She would have made an excellent poultry dealer.
“We’ll buy some cloth tomorrow to make you new clothes.”
T
hat night,
I went to bed early feeling tired and overexcited. It was hot and I tugged at
the wooden shutters. Amah did not like me to open the windows too wide at night.
Something about the night air being unwholesome, but when there was no monsoon
it could be stifling.
When the oil lamp was blown out, the moonlight
slowly strengthened until the room was filled with a pale, cold radiance. The
Chinese considered the moon to be
yin
, feminine and
full of negative energy, as opposed to the sun that was
yang
and exemplified masculinity. I liked the moon, with its soft
silver beams. It was at once elusive and filled with trickery, so that lost
objects that had rolled into the crevices of a room were rarely found, and books
read in its light seemed to contain all sorts of fanciful stories that were
never there the next morning. Amah said I must not sew by moonlight; it might
ruin my eyesight, thus jeopardizing the chance of a good marriage.
If I were married, I wouldn’t mind if my husband
was like the young man I’d met that day. Endlessly, I replayed our brief
conversation, remembering the tones of his voice, the quick confidence of his
remarks. I liked how seriously he had spoken to me, without the avuncular
condescension of my father’s few friends. The thought that he might share my
interests or even understand my concerns caused a strange flutter in my chest.
If I were a man and found a serving girl who pleased me, no one would stop me
from buying her if she was indentured. Men did so every day. It was far more
difficult for women. There were stories of unfaithful concubines who had been
strangled, or who’d had their ears and noses sliced off and were then left to
roam the streets as beggars. I didn’t know anybody personally to whom these
atrocities had happened, but I could not meet this young man or, worse still,
fall in love with him. Even my father, lax as he was, was unlikely to allow a
match with a servant.
I sighed. I barely knew him, it was all hope and
conjecture. Though if I did marry, my husband was likely to be a stranger to me
as well. It was not necessarily so for all girls of good family. Some families
had an early betrothal, others entertained often enough that young people could
meet and even fall in love. Not our household, however. My father’s withdrawal
from the world meant that he had sought out no friends with sons and had
arranged no match for me. For the first time I began to fully comprehend why
Amah was continually angry with him on this subject. The contrast between the
realization of his neglect and the fondness I had for my father was painful. I
had few marriage prospects, and would be doomed to the half-life of
spinsterhood. Without a husband, I would sink further into genteel poverty,
bereft of even the comfort and respect of being a mother. Faced with these
depressing thoughts, I buried my face in my thin cotton pillow and cried myself
to sleep.
T
hat
night I had a curious dream. I wandered through the Lim mansion though all was
still and silent. It was bright, but there was no sun, merely the whiteness that
comes from a fog at midday. And like a fog, parts of the house seemed to vanish
as I passed, so that the way behind was shrouded in a thin white film. Just as I
had that very day, I passed through artfully planted courtyards, dim corridors,
and echoing reception rooms, although this time there was no distant murmur of
voices nor servants moving about. Presently, I became aware that I was not
alone. Someone was following me, watching from behind a door or peering through
the balustrades of the upper level. I began to hurry, turning down passage after
passage as they began to resemble one another with a dreadful sameness.
At last, I came into a courtyard with a lotus pond,
very much like the one I had visited that day, although the flowers here had an
artificial air, as though they had been stuck into the mud like so many sticks
of incense. As I stood wondering what to do, someone sidled up beside me.
Turning, I saw a strange young man. He was grandly dressed in old-fashioned
formal robes that came down to his ankles. On his feet, curiously short and
broad, he wore black court shoes with pointed toes. His clothing was dyed in
lurid hues, but his face was quite undistinguished, being plump with a weak chin
and a smattering of acne scars. He gazed at me with a solicitous smile.
“Li Lan!” he said, “How I’ve longed to see you
again!”
“Who are you?” I asked.
“You don’t remember me, do you? It was too long
ago. But I remember you. How could I forget?” he said with a flourish. “Your
beautiful eyebrows, like moths. Your lips, like hibiscus petals.”
As he beamed, I was struck by a lurch of nausea. “I
want to go home.”
“Oh no, Li Lan,” he said. “Please, sit down. You
don’t know how long I’ve been waiting for this moment.”
As he gestured, a table appeared laden with all
kinds of food. Boiled chickens, melons, candied coconut, cakes of all possible
varieties. Like his clothes, they were intensely and unappetizingly pigmented.
The oranges looked like daubs of paint, while a platter of
pandan
cakes were the sickly hue of the sea before a typhoon. Piled
up in rigid pyramids, this largesse looked uncomfortably like funeral offerings.
He pressed me to have a cup of tea.
“I’m not thirsty,” I said.
“I know you’re shy,” said this maddening creature,
“but I’ll pour myself a cup. See? Isn’t it delicious?” He drank with every
evidence of enjoyment.
“Li Lan, my dear. Don’t you know who I am? I’m Lim
Tian Ching!” he said. “The heir of the Lim family. I’ve come to court you.”
The queasiness continued to build until I felt
light-headed.
“Aren’t you dead?”
As soon as I said that, the world contracted as
though it had wrinkled. The colors muted, the outline of the chairs blurred.
Then, like the snap of a gutta-percha string, everything was back the way it had
been. The white light shone and the food on the table positively glowed. Lim
Tian Ching closed his eyes as though pained.
“My dear,” he said, “I know this is a shock to you,
but let’s not dwell on that.”
I shook my head doggedly.
“I know you’re a delicate creature,” he said. “I
don’t wish to distress you. We’ll try again another time.”
He tried to smile as he faded away. I was forcing
myself awake with all the will I could muster. It was like struggling through a
mangrove swamp, but slowly the colors bled away until, gasping, I was aware of
the moonlight spilling over my pillow and a numbness in my hands from where I
had pressed my forehead.
I could hardly sleep the rest of the night. My body
was covered in sweat, my heart racing. What I really wanted to do was to go down
the hallway and crawl, like a child, into Amah’s bed. I used to sleep next to
her when I was small, and the pungent smell of the White Flower Oil she daubed
on her temples against headaches comforted me. If I went now, however, Amah
would be worried. I would get a scolding and she would force all sorts of
nostrums on me. Still, the loneliness and terror I felt almost drove me to
disturb her until I remembered that she was an incorrigibly superstitious woman
and any mention of Lim Tian Ching would upset her for days. Toward dawn, I
finally fell into an uneasy torpor.
I
meant
to tell Amah about the dream, but my fears seemed less consequential in bright
sunlight. It was a result of dwelling on the Lim family, I told myself. Or
eating too much rich food. I also didn’t want to admit to Amah that I had been
thinking about husbands before I went to bed. The whole encounter with the young
man who fixed clocks made me feel guilty.
The next evening, I went to bed with trepidation,
but there were no dreams and so when a few more uneventful nights passed, I put
it behind me. My thoughts were, in any case, more concerned with another. Try as
I might, they kept drifting back to my conversation with the clock cleaner. I
thought about how knowledgeable he had seemed, and what a pity that such a man
should be a servant. I wondered how it would feel to run my hands through his
cropped hair. When I had a free moment, I studied the angles of my face in the
small lacquer mirror that had been my mother’s. Growing up, my father took
little notice of my appearance. He was more interested in my opinions on
paintings and the liveliness of my brush calligraphy. Occasionally, he mentioned
that I resembled my mother, but the observation seemed to give more pain than
pleasure and afterward, he would withdraw. My amah seldom praised and often
found fault, yet I knew she would throw herself under an oxcart for me.
“Amah,” I asked her some days later. “How was my
mother related to Madam Lin?”
We were walking home after buying material for a
new dress. Somehow Amah had found the money for it. Embarrassed, I couldn’t
bring myself to ask from what private store she had scrimped this unnecessary
luxury. All amahs put aside their wages for their retirement. They were a
special class of servant sometimes known as “black and white” because of the
clothes they wore: a white Chinese blouse over black cotton trousers. Some were
single women who refused to marry, others childless widows with no other means
of support. When they became amahs, they cut their hair into a short bob and
joined a special sisterhood. They paid their dues and banked their money there,
and in return after a lifetime of working for others, passed their old age in
the Association House where they were fed and clothed until the end of their
days. It was one of the few options for a woman with no family and no children
to take care of her in her dotage.
I suspected that Amah had been raiding her own
savings for me. It was shameful. If our family really ran out of money, then she
ought to look for another position. Or she could simply retire. She was old
enough to do so. If I married well she might come with me as my personal maid,
just as she had come with my mother upon her marriage. Now as I glanced at her
tiny form trotting beside me, I felt a surge of affection. Despite her
exasperating strictures, which often made me wish to escape her control, she was
fiercely loyal.
“Your mother and Madam Lim were second or third
cousins, I believe,” she said.
“But Madam Lim talked as though she knew my
mother.”
“Perhaps. But I don’t think they were close. I
would have remembered,” she said. “Madam Lim was a daughter of the Ong family.
They made their money building roads for the British.”
“She said they played together as children.”
“Did she? Maybe a couple of times, but she wasn’t
one of your mother’s close friends. That’s for sure.”
“Why would she say such a thing, then?”
“Who knows what a rich
tai tai
thinks?” Amah smiled suddenly, her face wrinkling like a tortoise. “I’m
sure she has her reasons, though. The servants say it isn’t a bad household. Of
course, they’re still in mourning for the son. It was a great loss for them when
he died last year.”
“Does she have other children?”
“Two other sons died in infancy. There are
daughters by the second and third wives, though.”
“I saw the third wife, but not the second one.”
“She died four years ago of malaria.” Malaria was a
scourge for us in Malaya, a constant fever in people’s veins. The Malays burned
smoky fires to keep the disease away, and the Hindus garlanded their many gods
with wreaths of jasmine and marigold to protect them. The British said, however,
that it was borne by mosquitoes. Thinking about insects reminded me of the Third
Wife and her glittering jeweled pins.
“The Third Wife looks difficult,” I said.
“That woman! She was nobody when the master married
her. No one even knows where she came from. Some town far south, maybe Johore or
even Singapore.”
“Do the wives get along?”
Only rich men could afford many wives and the
custom was becoming infrequent. The British frowned on it. From what I heard, it
was the womenfolk, the
mems,
who were most against
it. Naturally they disapproved of their men acquiring mistresses and going
native. I couldn’t say that I blamed them for it. I too would hate to be a
second wife. Or a third, or fourth. If that were the case, I would rather run
away and pledge my life to the Amah Association.
“As well as you could expect. And then there’s all
that vying to see who can produce an heir. Fortunately for Madam Lim, she seems
to have been the only one.”
“And the son, Lim Tian Ching, what was he like?” I
shivered despite the heat of the day, remembering my dream. Amah usually avoided
speaking of him, but I thought I would see what I could worm out of her
today.
“Spoiled, I heard.”
“I think so too.” I blurted this out without
thinking, but she didn’t notice.
“They said he wasn’t as capable as the nephew.
Aiya
, no point discussing him. Better not speak
ill of the dead.”