The Harmony Silk Factory (34 page)

“We should go,” he said.

We walked slowly, descending once more into the foothills. The early sunlight had given way to mist, which settled thickly in the tea valleys. The air I breathed was so densely humid that I felt I was drinking it. The path disappeared under my feet. I could hardly see where I was stepping. Only a blind trust in Johnny’s judgement kept me going, and I stumbled along in his wake, desperately following the blurred outline of his body ahead of me. “Look,” Johnny said, pointing to the sky. A hawk wheeled over the valley, vanishing into the mist. Several times it did this, falling from the cloud in a slow, tilting arc above our heads before disappearing once more into the ether. I could not keep track of its movements; I did not know if I could trust my eyes.

It was not an ideal introduction to Johnny’s home. Many times before, I had imagined myself arriving dressed in perfectly pressed clothes and a fetchingly elegant cravat: witty, engaging, and adored. Instead, I found myself staggering up the stairs to the verandah at the front of the house, holding a blood-streaked cloth to my neck. My legs began to buckle and I felt a burning sensation at the back of my throat.

“Water,” I heard Johnny call.

All this time, I was acutely aware of how ridiculous I must have looked. I saw various people pass before me, and I wanted to explain to them that this was a ghastly aberration. My behaviour is entirely inexplicable, I wanted to say; and as for attire, well—I had been caught unawares; no one had told me I would be invited here. And yet, curiously, I could not speak. My throat had seized up and I found it difficult to articulate even the simplest words.

“Calm, calm,” Johnny repeated.

I’m not certain how long my embarrassing little turn lasted, but slowly I began to regain my composure. My breathing became more even, and when I coughed I felt my voice vibrate once more at the back of my throat.

“I’m awfully sorry,” I said, looking around. “You must think I’m terribly vulgar.” I stood up and offered my hand in greeting to the people now assembled: a frail, frightening old man, whom I recognised instantly as the one saved by Johnny from the fire; an equally stern-faced woman with grey-black hair piled in a thick bun; and finally a timid girl, a maid of some sort, who stood tentatively behind an enormous rosewood armchair.

“You have been bitten by a snake, I hear,” the old man said, without offering a handshake. I didn’t know what to do with my still-outstretched hand.

“This is not surprising,” his wife said. “Ever since Johnny came here we have seen many snakes. Cobras. Even in the house.” When she said “Johnny” she seemed to spit the word, as if getting rid of an unpleasant and unexpected piece of food from her mouth.

Johnny stood in silence, his head hung as though in shame.

“What do you mean?” I said. “Johnny had nothing to do with it.”

The woman laughed, looking at me as if I were a recalcitrant child. “This man comes from out there,” she said, waving her hand. She spoke in the tones of a tired schoolteacher. “The jungle is part of him. It follows him everywhere.”

“It
is
everywhere,” I said.

“Not in our house.”

Johnny spoke quietly. “It’s the hot season. The snakes are following food and water. There is plenty of that here.”

“No, they are following
you,
” the woman said, casting a sideways look at Johnny.

“Mother, you exaggerate,” a voice called. “There have only been two snakes in the house all year, and one of them was a mere baby.” I looked up and saw a woman walking towards us, emerging from the shadows of the house.

After all these years I can still see her walking barefoot on the polished hardwood floors. Time has fixed her image in my head, and now, half a century hence, I tell myself, with great certainty and little embarrassment, that my pulse quickened rapidly on first seeing her. But is this really true? If I stop for a moment and close my eyes—as I sometimes do, just before drifting slowly into my geriatric’s nap at two o’clock every afternoon—I am able to transport myself back to that precise moment in time. Not for long, though: the sensation is fleeting, and I cannot hold on to it. I am in the cavernous sitting room at the house of T. K. and Patti Soong, on the outskirts of Kampar, at half-past-five in the afternoon on 31 August 1941. When this woman—this person—walks into the room, am I certain it
is
a woman? The truth is that I am not. At this moment, I am somewhat lightheaded but otherwise perfectly
compos mentis.
I see everything with utter lucidity, but somehow there is a disconnection between my brain and my eyes: I behold what stands before me, but I cannot compute what I see. I know she is a woman, but her body has the straight lines of an adolescent boy, flat-chested and slim. She is taller than any woman I have seen in the Orient; her face is almost level with my collarbone. When, some months after this first moment, I hold her to me, I find I can rest my chin on the top of her head, and I will remark that nothing has ever felt so comfortable, so right. But that comes later, after I knew that I
loved
her—yes, that too is a word I can now utter with alacrity. At that first meeting, however, I feel nothing but a spreading numbness. The delicacy of her complexion is cut, savagely, by the lines of her cheekbones. Her eyes are dark as agate. Still I cannot respond. The room feels airless around me. The gorgeous breathlessness and thrilling pulse—those are sensations that the years have layered on top of the initial emptiness, like sheet after sheet of silk covering a bare table. More than fifty years later I can see only the cloth; the table has been obscured.

Nightly, I pray for that blankness, that fragile tabula rasa, to return. I try to hold on to that moment when I had not yet loved her, when I stood before her a clean, innocent man. There I go again. Innocent? I was never innocent, nor even clean. Traces of poison ran through my blood that afternoon, as they have from the day I was born. I should have known that soon my bitterness would seep into her world and rot it slowly to the core.

“You’re hurt,” she says. Her first words to me. She walks towards me, and it feels as if hers is the only movement in the room. The others are perfectly still; it is only Snow who moves amidst this curious
tableau vivant.
She leads me by the hand across the floor, and I become aware of the darkness of the rafters above us. At both sides of the house there are tall shuttered windows that allow a breath of wind to stir the air in the house. Mother-of-pearl shines luminescent from the chairs and tables as I go past them into the kitchen. Snow—I know it is she, despite the fact that we have not been introduced—pours hot water from a flask into a large porcelain cup. She brings this to me; I see tea leaves unfurling, slowly sinking to the bottom of the crackled base of the cup. She puts one hand on my forehead, and then pulls at the skin below my eyes—what she is searching for I do not know.

“Did Johnny see the snake?” she says.

I nod.

“Then you should recover in a short while. It doesn’t look serious.” She smiles and leaves me with my cup of tea. I drink the tea, finding it pleasantly hot at the back of my throat. When I finish, I press the bulbous curves of the empty cup to my swollen neck, feeling its warmth creep over my skin.

Of course the poison soon wore off, and my limbs regained sufficient strength for me to cycle back to my lodgings. Johnny accompanied me, cycling beside me in the murky darkness.

“I hate them,” he said quietly.

“I know,” I said.

“All of them.”

“They’re not the easiest people to be with, I must say.” I raised my voice into a laugh, but it elicited no response.

“If I can just be alone with my wife, everything will be fine.”

I could think of no reply to this—nothing that would not sound false.

As we approached the guest house Johnny stopped cycling. “Peter,” he said, looking at me; he wore a crumpled-up expression of such seriousness that I began to laugh. “I have a secret to tell you.”

WHEN I WAS IN MY TEENS, I was once taken on holiday to France by the sympathetic family of a school friend. One day we walked from Compiègne to Pierrefonds,
sans parents,
strolling blithely through the Royal Forest. It was May, but the infant summer was already ferocious in its aridity, and the fallen branches snapped easily when we stepped on them. I was in one of my Italian phases, I recall, having recently been introduced to Mozart’s glorious Da Ponte operas by a pederastic housemaster who was, the other boys tittered, “sweet on me” (
nota bene:
that is another story, to be ignored for the present). I began to devise a kind of pidgin Franco-Italian throughout this walk, delighting in my friend’s growing irritation as we tramped merrily along
sous les alberi.

“It’s a bloody desecration,” he said. Pritchard was his name; he was an earnest boy. “The purpose of a holiday in France is to imbibe its culture and its language,” he continued. “You don’t take anything seriously, Wormwood.”

I was humming the tune to “Voi che sapete,” squeezing my larynx to make as high-pitched a squeal as possible.

“That’s horrible,” Pritchard said. “Stop it.”

“Tremo senza le vouloir,”
I replied, falsetto.

We argued briefly about our route. He wanted to make a detour to the village of Rethondes, to visit the place where the terms of the armistice were presented to the “defeated Hun” in 1918. I, on the other hand, wanted to press on towards the wonderful fairy-tale château in Pierrefonds. In the end, after halfhearted demurrals, I conceded and allowed him to lead me to the Clairière de l’Armistice. I was about to continue with my singing when I saw, dead ahead of me, a vast carpet of lily of the valley spread out on the forest floor, sprinkled with faint pearls of dappled light filtering through the trees. In this hot dry weather, it was the only plant that had survived in the dense shade. I stood perfectly still, drinking of this magnificent sight. It made me think of the woods near Hemscott, my poor dilapidated home. It was enough to make my lip tremble, I am ashamed to admit. I stood gazing at this shaded field of lily of the valley, unable to move, whilst Pritchard marched blindly into them, trampling the tiny plants underfoot. He continued his quiet diatribe against frivolity, accusing me of not having properly appreciated the lessons and sacrifices of the Great War; I did not understand what dangerous times we lived in, he said. Silently, I wiped the moistness from my eyes and followed him, tracing his path through the crushed foliage.

I remember this moment because I have been toying with the idea of planting lily of the valley in this new garden. I think they might just thrive here. That summer in France was exceptionally hot, yet those delicate-looking perennials seemed undimmed in their vigour. In transplanting a foreign plant to these tropical climes, I shall also be following in the footsteps of those intrepid Victorian gardeners who brought exoticism to English gardens and made it part of the landscape there. Of course I shall be re-creating this process in reverse, but if I succeed, my deeds may have far-reaching consequences. Just think: fifty years from now, if lily of the valley does become naturalised in this country, a quintessential English flower will become a tropical plant. Will it then, sometime in the very distant future, be exported back to England, I wonder? Who will consider it exotic where? I tremble at the possibilities.

And not just lily of the valley, but oxeye daisy, foxglove, cranes-bill, snake’s-head fritillary: I will plant them all in this hot earth. I want woodruff, too, so that I can dry its tiny star-shaped leaves and use them to infuse my linen with the scent of new-mown hay. And lavender—I must have lavender. There is a perfect spot for a long, slim bed of lavender, just outside my window, as it happens. Its perfume shall greet me when I wake and mollify me as I fall asleep. No longer will I have to wait for summer to enjoy its scent, for here it is summer all year long. Therein lies the genius of my garden. It captures the happiest months of the year, containing them in perpetual fecundity within its boundaries.

My garden will not stop there. It will travel to China and Japan and other temperate Eastern climes, proudly displaying cloud-pruned Japanese holly, Chinese peonies, pink cherry blossom, bitter orange, tiny gnarled bonsai. Thus I will emulate not only Victorian gardeners but Oriental emperors too, the very ones who created the gardens that first inspired this endeavour. Like the Emperor Chenghua, I will create a microcosm of all that is beautiful here.

Of course I have not told anyone about this idea. It would be entirely wasted on them, and I fear their lack of enthusiasm might escalate slowly into scepticism and eventually into a full-blown revolt. The locals are, I find, very sensitive nowadays to any perceived slight to their national pride. I made the mistake of intimating to Alvaro the nature of my planting scheme, and he looked instantly displeased. That same morning, he approached me after having consulted the sorry collection of books that form the House’s “library.” He said, “Your idea cannot work. It is unscientific.”

“The Victorians achieved more implausible things,” I replied calmly.

“Those plants cannot survive. Maybe you should have a look at the books downstairs.”

“I will do no such thing.
The Reader’s Digest Gardening Weekly
didn’t create Sissinghurst,” I said, turning away. I did not want to become embroiled in a protracted discussion with a simple ignoramus.

He sighed. Before leaving my room he said, “Will you really not use any local plants?”

I didn’t answer. I merely smiled, as if to say, Perhaps I will, perhaps I won’t.

“Crazy,” I heard him say as he closed the door.

I shrugged, my eyes and face feeling hot with anger. He would never have understood. Images of the Forest of Compiègne fluttered in my head once more, the scent of lily of the valley filling my nostrils. I knew that even Alvaro was not truly a friend. Like Pritchard all those years before, he would never be close to me. I was never meant to have “friends.” What happened to Pritchard? He went up to Cam-bridge and then ventured to the Sudan with the Shell Exploration Company; he married a nice girl, I heard, and settled in Rye. He never spoke to me again after our holiday in France.