The Harmony Silk Factory (20 page)

Johnny returned and kissed me lightly on the forehead.

“Looking forward to our trip,” Peter called out as they got on their bicycles and pedalled away.

Another thing: this evening I noticed that the photographs of our ancestors which father keeps in his study have already become hazy and indistinct in their frames. In a few more years we shall not even remember who those people were.

LATE THIS AFTERNOON, as I was returning from a walk along the river, I heard Father conversing with someone in his study. The door was closed; the talking stopped abruptly when I entered the hall. I wondered if the visitor was Honey, but the tone of the voice seemed wrong. Curious to find out who the other person was, I hesitated for a moment before proceeding to my room. I closed my door firmly, making sure it made a noise as it shut.

After a considerable length of time I heard Father’s study door open. I went to the window to see who the visitor was. It was Kunichika.

WE SET OFF IN THE DARK, dawn still an hour away. Five silent bodies in that huge black car: Honey at the wheel, Kunichika next to him in the front seat, and at the back, Johnny, Peter, and me.

“What do you think of my new car?” Honey said in an attempt to spark conversation. No one answered. In the twilight I saw Peter trying to blink sleep from his eyes; he rubbed his face with both palms in the manner of a small child. Johnny remained quiet too, but I could see that his eyes were clear and lively.

“It feels like a tomb,” I said.

“Oh,” said Honey softly.

“I think it’s frightfully grand,
splendidly
vulgar,” Peter said. “There’s nothing quite like a Rolls. I adore it, Honey.” He paused and coughed to suppress a giggle. “You wouldn’t mind if I called you by your Christian name, would you, Frederick?”

Honey merely grunted. He seemed determined not to exchange a single word with Peter.

From where I was sitting I had a perfect view of the nape of Kunichika’s neck. His hair ended in a neat line halfway up the white stretch of skin. For most of today’s drive that was all I could see, Kunichika’s neck positioned right in front of me—rigid, smooth, and perfectly straight. At times, if I stared at it for too long, it seemed not to be human.

In the brightening morning, we drove past oil-palm and rubber plantations. The dew-damp air was quickly burnt away and a hot, gritty breeze blew through the windows, drying our lips and tongues. Johnny spent much time gazing back at the large clouds of dust rising up in swirls behind the car, chasing us as we sped along.

“We’re being pursued by djinns!” Peter wailed before collapsing into his cackling laugh. “Sandstorms, the Devil’s red dust! God save us!” Johnny broke into a gentle laugh every time Peter made a comment; he stuck his head out the window, his fine hair ruffled like the feathers of a small bird. He glanced at me, smiling broadly. He seemed a mere child. It hurt me to look at him because I knew that I would soon bring this fleeting happiness to an end, and all traces of the child in him would die, completely and forever. I wished Peter would stop. I wanted to take hold of his wildly gesturing arms and bind them to his body.

“I say,” Honey called out, “this is the right road, isn’t it?”

We had come off the main road just south of Taiping. The car moved along slowly; the ground beneath us felt bumpy, full of rocks and potholes.

Kunichika said, “We are heading due north.”

“Are we? Well then I suppose we should still be alright,” Honey said.

I looked at Johnny. “Stop the car, Frederick,” I said. “Johnny will know.”

We got out of the car, shielding our eyes from the glare of the sun. Johnny looked around us. By some strange instinct, he seemed to know exactly where we were. “Yes, this road is OK,” he said. His voice was clear and flat. No one questioned him. We climbed back into the car and continued to jolt along.

“You seem to know this part of the country intimately,” Kunichika said, turning around in his seat to look at Johnny.

“I have spent my whole life here,” Johnny said, looking out the window.

“So have many people, but I am sure not all of them have the familiarity with the countryside that you do.”

“Johnny’s a country boy at heart, isn’t he?” Peter said. “Just like me.”

Johnny shrugged.

“The jungle is a strange place,” Kunichika said. “It changes all the time, shifting in shape and colour. It swallows whole villages in an instant. Once you move away from it you may never return, not truly. Only those who keep coming back to the trees and vines may sense their changing rhythms. I am sure Mr. Lim will tell you that.”

“Nonsense,” Peter said, turning to Johnny.

Johnny hesitated. “No, it is true.”

The car swayed like a boat as Honey carefully negotiated the potholes.

“It is not unreasonable for me to be curious about Mr. Lim’s familiarity with the countryside,” Kunichika continued, “for it is exceptional that a shopkeeper should have such knowledge.”

“I disagree with you, Professor,” I said, raising my voice above the rough clatter of the engine. “We never lose what we are born with. Even if we try—if we move away from our homes, as my husband has done—we are still part of the worlds of our birth. We can’t ever escape.”

No one spoke. We continued to roll in and out of dips in the broken road.

Peter seemed to have shrunk into his seat, his head lolling pathetically to one side, gasping for air at the window. “I feel seasick,” he said.

It felt as if many hours had passed before we rejoined the coast road and reached our destination for today, the Formosa Hotel. We arrived two hours ago. The others are downstairs having a drink before dinner. I am, of course, forbidden to enter the bar. I had heard from father about the strictly observed etiquette in such grand British establishments; in one club in Kuala Lumpur, he says, there is a sign at the entrance to the smoking room that reads NO WOMEN OR DOGS. I looked out for these cold reminders, determined to be proud and unflinching, even humorous, before them. In the end I could see no such notice, but the cold stare of the bartender spoke clearly of the well-entrenched customs of this place, and I decided not to test my bravado.

To tell the truth, I am grateful for this moment of solitude. After a day spent in the close company of those four, I find it strangely comforting to be alone. I enjoy the times I have to myself. Mother would be shocked to hear me confess this. It would be no use trying to explain. Women are not often on their own: they are constantly surrounded by men—fathers, husbands, sons. Those are the people we live for, whose lives press into ours at every moment. We obey, nurse, nurture, and love. But in the end, we are and always have been alone. That is why I am glad for moments such as these. They are, I have realised, the only times I am truly myself.

WHEN I ARRIVED at dinner, I found Honey in the middle of telling a story. He was facing Kunichika as he spoke, but he had assumed his Public Speaking voice, so I deduced that his intention was to impress.

“. . . my men had to quell a veritable uprising. The whole thing was most unpleasant.”

“Not the ‘Murder at the Mine’ story again, Frederick,” I said as I approached.

Peter got up from his chair, but as he did so he managed to nudge the table with his thigh. The small vase of drooping, nearly dead orchids toppled over, spilling its contents onto Honey’s part of the table. The smell of stale flower water filled the air. “Clumsy fool,” Honey muttered under his breath, not looking at Peter.

“Good evening,” Kunichika said, smiling as he pulled my chair back for me. “This is the effect you have on men, you see.”

“Effect? Rubbish. The man’s an idiot, that’s all,” Honey grumbled.

“Sorry,” Peter said in a tone which suggested he was anything but.

“Continue with your story, Frederick,” I said, even though I had heard it several times before. The life of a tin miner, even one of Honey’s grandeur, is hardly filled with excitement, and their few noteworthy stories tend to become repetitive.

“Thank you—I was nearly finished anyway. As you may have guessed,” he said, turning once more to Kunichika, “our man died. A year and a week after he was stabbed by the Chinaman. Well, plainly, it was murder. However: English Law is a strange creature. I’m not sure if you can understand this, but . . .”

“. . . the accused could not be convicted of murder because the length of time between
actus reus
and death was greater than a year and a day,” said Kunichika.

“Well, yes,” said Honey, eyeing Kunichika with a faint frown. “So they let him off. We have one dead manager on our hands and a homicidal Chinaman on the run.”

“It was such a long time ago, Frederick, long before your time. People aren’t still talking about that, are they?” I said.

“When I took over as the head of Darby Mines a year ago, I found that many people were still fascinated by this story. It had become a legend. What is it, now, eight years since it happened? Thing is, no one knew who this guy was. His name was probably an alias, he had no family, no home—nothing. And then he simply vanished into the jungle. He’s still out there, this murderer.”

“Except he isn’t a murderer in the eyes of the law,” Kunichika said.

“Ha!” said Honey, lighting a cigarette.

Johnny cleared his throat. He had remained silent throughout Honey’s story—I must say I do not blame him, for these stories are not the most riveting. “I have heard,” he said in an awkward and self-consciously bored manner (learnt, no doubt, from Peter), “that the so-called murderer was a mere boy.”

“Even children can be murderers, you know. Look at the Chinamen in the villages. Most of them are Commies by the time they’re thirteen—nasty little buggers.”

“Are you sure this isn’t some myth, like the ghosts that are meant to haunt Kellie’s Castle or whatever that place is not far from here?” said Peter. “Because it doesn’t sound very plausible to me. Nameless man-child emerges from nowhere, chops leg off sixteen-stone Angus McHefty, gets freed by Lord Justice Snooty, and then vanishes into the jungle, never to be seen again. Perhaps he’s hiding in Shangri-la.”

I found myself smiling at Honey’s bristling silence.

Kunichika said, “It’s always the case that details are lost in the retelling of stories. Sometimes things are forgotten, sometimes things are added. The tale of history is most unreliable. It is, after all, reconstructed by human beings.”

We found that hardly anything on the menu was available. “What on earth can we have, then?” demanded Honey in his VIP’s voice. The old Indian waiter seemed not to understand. In the end, we had mulligatawny soup, devilled chicken with boiled potatoes, and cold English rice pudding.

“Ah, the taste of the Orient,” said Peter.

A LITTLE MORE about last night. (It is raining heavily today so we are confined to our rooms for a while.) There was a string quartet playing while we had our dinner. As we were the only guests in the dining room, we wondered if the hotel had arranged the quartet especially for us.

“We’re a long way from anywhere,” Peter said. “Where on earth would they have found four viol-playing fossils at such short notice? Look at them. . . .”

They were very old Chinese men with bent spines. Their dinner jackets had a greenish hue and were badly frayed.

“To think that the Formosa was, just a few years ago, the place everyone wanted to come to,” Honey said, lighting another cigarette. “Look at it now.”

It was true, the hotel was decaying. In the dining room the chequerboard tiles on the floor were chipped in many places, and a thick trail of dust ran along the windowsills. The palms in their enormous pots were nearly dead. Up above the wide stone staircase leading to the rooms, the great crystal chandelier had long since ceased to work, and the hall was now dimly lit by a few old lamps.

I left the table to go back to my room. I tried to excuse myself with as little fuss as possible, choosing a moment when all four of the men were involved in a mildly heated discussion about the role of the sultan in the affairs of state. I merely wanted to check that my diary was safe. The writing desk in my room (at which I sit writing this) is vast, but its leather surface is dry and scratched—more evidence of the Formosa’s faded glory. More importantly, the lock on its drawer does not work, so I have been forced to hide this diary amongst the clothes in my travelling case. This is not ideal, but I have been careful to make sure that I am never far from it for too long.

All was in order. The diary was just as I had left it, tucked into the folds of a camisole, and I returned to the dining room. At the last minute I decided not to rejoin the men, and made my way instead to the colonnaded verandah at the rear of the hotel. The urge to be on my own was too great to resist. The Chinese lamps suspended from the ceiling no longer worked, of course, and darkness hung heavily over the place. Bats darted uncertainly over my head as I walked to the balustrade and placed my hands on the mossy stone. My eyes became accustomed to the night light and I could make out the outlines of a few objects: an old gazebo here, a small folly there; a small bridge over a dried-out pond, flower beds now reclaimed by the jungle. Things moved in the dark. Indistinct shapes snaking their way into the undergrowth, into the trees.

And then I heard footsteps approach from behind, the careful tread of feet that did not want to be heard. Two or three steps; pause; another three steps; pause. I remained facing the garden, my hands tightening slowly on the balustrade. Nothing to fear, I told myself, those footsteps are Kunichika’s. Slowly, they came closer, until I swore I could feel his white breath on my hair. In a flash, I turned around.

“Oh,
hello,
” Peter called out brightly. “What are you doing here? I was looking for the, ah, lavatory, but I seem to have got lost. Awfully dark out here, isn’t it?”