The Harmony Silk Factory (39 page)

I hurried up the stairs but saw no sign of her. I ran along the darkened hallways, pausing every so often to listen for her footsteps: nothing. With an air of mild deflation I made my way back to the foyer, quietly humming the insidious, sickly-sweet tune to “J’attendrais.” It was then that I saw her, slipping quietly into the shadows out on the balustraded verandah. I walked on tiptoe to stop my shoes from clicking loudly on the floor, and made my way towards her. I hid behind a screen and then shielded myself with a pillar, waiting for the right moment to approach her. In half-profile her features seemed finer than before, yet touched by a gentle muscularity. Her short hair revealed the smoothness of her neck; every time she turned her head the skin stretched to reveal a flash of white amidst the dark. She moved with slow, certain movements, utterly in control of every part of her body. Crouched in the shadows I felt clumsy and foolish. I straightened my posture and began to walk towards her, lifting my feet so that they did not crash awkwardly on the cold tiled floor. I had barely progressed beyond the pillar when she turned around and stared at me with hot, dark eyes.

“Hello,” I said gently, assuming as quiet and masculine a demeanour as possible. “What are you doing out here?”

“Looking at the garden,” she said.

My ears pricked. “Garden?” I said. “Where?” What luck. I was in my element now. I could engage her in conversation all night on the subject of gardens. Fate had presented me with a perfect entrée into her world. All her likes and dislikes, her sense of aesthetics, her memories of childhood—everything was there for me to discover now. I peered into the darkness beyond the faint circle of light cast from the hotel, but I could see nothing except the amorphous shapes of the jungle that surrounded us. The sharp angles of a ruined structure protruded from this shapeless mass, silhouetted against the night sky, but otherwise there was nothing—nothing I could identify as a
garden.
My hopes of finding my Eden were dashed.

“Aren’t there any beds or borders?” I said. “There is at least an ornamental pond somewhere, surely?”

“Perhaps,” she said. “This was once the most famous garden in the Federated Malay States. It had a European-style garden, whatever that means. It’s all still there—though now it’s part of the jungle, I suppose.” She stood with her hands resting on the balustrade. Her face was clear and untroubled.

“What a shame,” I said, leaping up to sit on the wide stone ledge. I had not even settled properly when she bade me an abrupt “Good night,” leaving me stranded on the balustrade. I sat there for a long while, listening to the call of cicadas. The nebulous remains of that once-fabulous garden lay before me, but still I could see nothing.

The dining room was empty by the time I made my way back to my room. The quartet had disbanded and the tables had been stripped of their linen. The lights, too, had been turned off, and the shadows of the palm leaves cast tiger stripes across the floor. I had just begun to walk up the stairs when I realised there was someone standing on the landing, leaning against the wall with a drink in his hand. I knew, of course, it was Honey.

“You went missing for some time, Wormwood,” he said.

“Yes, I thought I’d lurk in the shadows for a while, rather like you’re doing now.” I continued walking without looking at him.

“Here’s some advice,” he said as I went past him. “Watch your step. You think you can just breeze into the Valley to the sound of trumpets? Think again. No one appreciates your behaviour. There are things an Englishman can do and things he can’t do—that’s just the way it is. I told you before. The same rules don’t apply out here. We have to behave in a certain way, otherwise everything falls apart. You think you’re special? You’re not. No one is. Let me tell you one thing: nobody likes you. Take this as a gentle warning from someone who knows.”

“Thank you—sahib is most kind,” I said, and I continued on my way. My face felt hot with anger and shame. I kept on walking, closing my eyes to the harsh prick of tears. I took a deep breath, then another, then another, until finally I reached the top of the stairs. “That tin miner of yours, the one who was murdered,” I said, turning around. “He got what he deserved. He had it coming.”

I proceeded slowly to my room. In the end, we all get what we deserve, I thought.

THE RAIN LASTED ALL DAY and into the night. It washed mud down from the hills onto the flagstones beneath my window and turned the open drains into angry red rivers. Here in the tropics the rain dominates the landscape, turning everything into strange images of itself. Its pale haziness becomes opaque, even mirrored, and blurs every shape that falls within its shroud, so that you can never be certain where something begins and ends. If you stare hard enough at it, you might even see a reflection of yourself a mere ten paces away. These tropical storms do not leave room for indifference; they wring apathy from your body, electrifying your thoughts. It is often said that the sun makes the white man go mad, but I do not agree. It is the rain that does it. It turns you into a different person.

Solitude, I decided, was the most fitting state for me, and by the time we reached the rest house I had resolved to isolate myself in dignified silence. I barricaded myself in my room, or else strolled through the expansive, attractive grounds of the house, singing to myself in perfect pitch.
“Ich habe genug,”
I sang
molto espressivo,
surprising myself with a sustained low B: I did not think my voice was still capable of such things. Encouraged by this unexpected treat, I moved on to some Mozart arias, and found that the words came back to me easily. I thought I’d lost them when I travelled the seas to these hot lands; where I kept them all this time I do not know, but they must have found a hiding place inside me, for I had never made any attempt to keep them safe. Alone under the damp whispering trees, my voice did not sound at all foreign; it reached out and danced amidst the foliage, as much a part of the jungle as the vines that reached down and brushed my face with faint caresses. My natural singing voice was, of course, a baritone—everyone used to tell me so at Oxford. But why stick with what’s natural, I thought? I always wanted to be a countertenor. I wanted to be able to sing all the roles—Julius Caesar, Tamberlaine, Orfeo; I wanted to be the Count as well as the Countess, to be Cherubino, that amorphous, ardent little creature. I wanted to sing all things to all men—and all women too.

I was about to lift my voice in a violently sentimental rendition of “Porgi, amor,” when I saw a figure disappear into a thicket of trees some distance away. I dropped my body and crept slowly into the bushes, smelling the pungent odour of wet mud under my feet. The person—it was a man, that much I could tell—moved stealthily and with the litheness of a young animal, appearing and disappearing amongst the trees, touching them gently as if he knew each one by name. He kept to the shadows, never venturing into the pools of dappled light that filtered through the foliage onto the forest floor. Out of the corner of my eye I spied another two figures walking slowly across open ground, heading towards a small cream-coloured gazebo that stood on the shoulder of a hill. It was Snow and Kunichika. I looked for the creeping figure in the adjacent woods—nothing. I moved slightly to gain a better view of Snow and Kunichika. He was quite the model of unhurried elegance, leaning against the poles of the gazebo with his hands resting on the frail little banister that encircled them, utterly relaxed in his expensively tailored clothes. He chatted softly, his head dropping and rising in a display of empathy and understanding, his entire body looking soft and accommodating—not at all the man I knew from our humble Kampar rest house. Throughout this time Snow sat facing him; I could not see her face. The strains of my Handelian heroes and Mozartian heroines filled my head in a riotous polyphony, and I became aware of the quickening of my breath. The morning sun was gaining in intensity, and I began to feel dizzy. I leaned back against a tree stump to catch my breath. I pressed my palms to my eyes, and saw, imprinted in phosphorescent hues, the image of Snow and Kunichika laughing in the gazebo. When I opened my eyes, they had left the gazebo and were walking briskly back to the house.

I ran into Johnny as we were preparing to leave the rest house. “Hello, stranger, where have you been?” I said.

“Out walking,” he said, taking his things to the car. His movements were leaden and wrung of enthusiasm, and when he looked at me he did not do so with his usual fondness.

“Is something the matter, Johnny?” I said, grabbing him by the elbow as he shuffled across the porch.

“Of course not,” he said, shrugging. Although he had put on a new shirt, he still looked shabby and tired.

“What’s wrong with you?” I said. “Just look at the state you’re in. You’ve got mud all over your shoes.”

He briefly caught my eye as he squinted into the light. “So do you,” he said.

 

 

 

 

WHEN, SOME YEARS AGO, I began to feel the ravages of middle age, I roused myself from the stupor that had settled over me and began to travel. I gathered my slowly ossifying limbs for one final, tentative peek at the country I had made my home. My spirit of adventure had petrified in the years since the war, and the thought of boarding a bus or a train with a horde of jostling bodies frightened me. Instead, I acquired a car and drove around the country. In the deep north I saw the jewel-green expanses of paddy fields in Kedah and the husks of abandoned villages, emptied by a gathering exodus to the great, growing cities of the newly independent nation. I drove across the mountainous spine that splits the peninsula in two and stayed for some time in Kota Baru, in a motel called the New Tokyo Inn. I wandered through the teeming market, looking at the silversmiths at work with their primitive, intricate tools. The shiny silver boxes they produced were laid out on straw mats on the dirt floor. Massed together in the sunlight, they glinted like beds of crushed glass. I went to the padang where the men threw their giant spinning tops, releasing them violently from coiled ropes as thick as pythons. The tops spun for hours, their painted surfaces a blur of colour on the dry, mouse-brown soil.

As I stood watching the local kite-flying competition, I was befriended by an aged Englishman who was older then than I am now, but alarmingly full of panache. The huge kites trembled in the air; they were tethered to the earth by ropes decorated with small pieces of cloth that fluttered in the wind. Galsworth (that was his name, I think) could tell which kite would win the contest. He pointed it out with a wizened forefinger as it swooned gently in a shallow arc over our heads, the two sickle moons of its body outlined proudly against the ultramarine sky. It came to a rest directly above us, hovering untroubled by the breeze. I had never seen such a thing before.

Afterwards, Galsworth invited me back to his house for a drink. We were attended by houseboys and -girls, all dressed in the gold-woven songket of the North. They waited tremulously as we reclined with our drinks; their smiling presence made me uncomfortable. I asked Galsworth how he came to live there. “I was the sultan’s personal adviser,” he replied simply, smoothing the gilded uniform of one of his androgynous youths with a reptilian hand. He showed me his house, every room sparsely decorated with beautiful things: a bedroom with nothing in it but a mattress on a carved divan and a leopard-pelt rug on the floor; a long shadowed corridor with a single Buddha head in an alcove. Through a window I glimpsed his garden, planted with a single rosebush. It bore no flowers, its branches were spindly, its leaves sparse. It had not taken to the hot winds of the seaside; I knew it would never survive this climate. Galsworth mumbled something about “memory” and “England,” and hurried me along. I smiled as I was meant to, complimented him on his house, and praised his servants. He said, “How nice it is to have one’s things appreciated by someone civilised.” When he smiled, his teeth revealed themselves: sharp and small, whittled away by age and discoloured by cigarettes.

I made my excuses and left as quickly as I could. I walked alone on the Beach of Passionate Love, watching the swell of the waves unfurling as they reached the shore. The sand was grey, not white; the tinge of amber was fading now in the darkening sky.

As I drove back south I knew that trip would be my last. I was ready to surrender to death, and hoped the end would be swift. How could I have known that, thirty years later, I would still be here, still waiting? It is a futile exercise, this contemplation of the end. My lungs still heave and my automaton limbs carry me downstairs to breakfast every morning, but the truth is that I died many years ago, suffocated by my own hands.

THE BOAT WAS CALLED the
Puteri Bersiram,
the name painted in small calligraphic letters barely visible on the rotting woodwork of the bow. As a means of initiating conversation with Johnny, I asked him what it meant. “The Bathing Princess,” he said brusquely, and he disappeared below deck. He had been sullen throughout the day; no amount of cajoling could coax him from his obdurate silence. During the drive, Snow had leant over to me and asked again if I knew what was wrong with Johnny. She whispered close to me and I felt her cool breath on my neck. Trembling, I lowered my head to her ear, and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll get to the bottom of things.” She smiled and placed her hand briefly on my forearm. When I looked up at Johnny, I found him staring at me with a dark-eyed glare. He had the look of a man succumbing to an unnamed sickness.
Malaise en Malaisie.

“Come on, Johnny,” I called down the hatch after him, “some sea air will do you a world of good.”

No answer.

“Please,” I said, “I don’t know what I’ve done wrong, but whatever it is, I’m sorry, alright? If you come up on deck with the rest of us I’ll do something to make it up to you.”

No answer for some time, and then a tentative frown took shape, the corners of his mouth curled in a half-smile.