A Different Sky (60 page)

‘Come and see Mei Lan with me, I'm going over now to Bougainvillaea House,' Cynthia suggested. Howard started at the suggestion, his heart constricting. At first he hesitated but then he allowed himself to be carried along, and stood up to follow Cynthia. Events were already shaping themselves, and he would not prevent them.

He could see the shock in Mei Lan's face when he stepped into Bougainvillaea House, but she recovered and moved towards him. There was flesh on her bones once more, and she smiled; the direct look had returned to her eyes. He saw in relief that the business of living involved her again. The house was full of noisy bustle and crammed with women wherever he turned. A baby screamed, then a child ran by and was quickly followed by another. The old crone, Ah Siew, hobbled past at a sprightly pace but stopped when she saw Howard, to give a toothless smirk.

‘She's still alive?' he asked Mei Lan wonderingly.

They faced each other like strangers and talk was formal. As Cynthia went into the kitchen with her medicine case to attend to a queue of waiting women, Mei Lan offered to show him around and Howard realised that he had never been inside Bougainvillaea House before, only imagined its interior from the windows of Belvedere. When Mei Lan had last resided here, her grandparents had been alive and the fence along the canal divided them from each other.

‘I thought you were a lawyer – how have you got yourself into all this?' he asked, hearing an accusatory note in his voice as two small children bouncing a rubber ball pushed past him.

‘I heard you were getting engaged,' Mei Lan replied, ignoring the question, preferring to verify what Cynthia had told her. He had changed, filled out and had an aura of sureness; he was a handsome man, with a feeling of quiet substance about him. In Australia, she was suddenly aware, experiences of which she knew nothing had claimed him. Would he have thought of other women if she had replied to his letters? she wondered with a stab of regret.

‘It didn't work out,' Howard replied, wishing to place things quickly in perspective. Mei Lan nodded silently, absorbing the information as she turned to the stairs, hiding her confusion in the task of showing Howard Bougainvillaea House.

‘The place is too small and we've had to utilise every corner. I'm
thinking of building an extension,' Mei Lan told him as she walked slightly ahead of him up the stairs and along the corridor. Through every door she opened he saw the same scene: a room full of mattresses or trestle beds, chatting women and some children. There was an atmosphere of cheerfulness and he remarked on it to Mei Lan.

‘They've found shelter; they're no longer living in fear,' she said shortly, opening the door to Lim Hock An's old room. The great Blackwood bed with its inlay of mother-of-pearl, reared up like an island in the small space. A baby slept at its centre, and the now familiar sea of mattresses were laid out around it, filled by Mei Lan's stray women. She shut the door and opened the next.

‘This was Second Grandmother's room. I sleep here. That is her phoenix bed,' Mei Lan said pointing to the ornate throne of worn red and gold lacquer that, like Lim Hock An's bed, had survived the Japanese only because its size and weight prevented removal or sale. When Mei Lan returned from England and reclaimed the house, the sight of these two indestructible monuments still standing in the filthy, empty rooms, holding a world of memory in their old wood, made her break down and cry. Now, each night she slept in Second Grandmother's bed, staring up at the phoenix in its carved bower and asking for its protection.

Howard's mind was already querying the practical obstacles to Mei Lan's enterprise. ‘How are you going to keep this afloat? Have you worked things out properly; is it going to be a permanent thing?' he dared to ask, suspecting that Mei Lan probably ran the house as she would an extended family, stretching her own means to cover the outgoings. He could see by her expression that this was a sensitive point.

Mei Lan was forced to admit that Howard's words held resonance. She had moved forward willy-nilly and knew she could not continue as she did, her direction confused and the money scrounged from here or there, leaching quickly away. Mr Cheong at Bayley McDonald & Cheong had been scathing of the shelter, explaining that goodwill was not enough, that soon things could topple about her, but Mei Lan saw no way to draw back.

‘A foundation with interest generated on a good investment is the way a charity is run,' Howard told her, and was rewarded by the sudden appeal in her questioning glance. For a moment he sensed an unspoken
shift of emotion between them and then it was gone, as Mei Lan retreated into herself again.

‘Until now I have been selling off bits and pieces of Second Grandmother's jewellery and the money from the sale of Grandfather's jade will soon come in,' Mei Lan replied, reluctant to admit that the shelter had materialised so suddenly in her life, and involved her so completely, that a basic financial structure was missing. As she stood beside Howard, she was uncomfortable with the unexpected stir of emotion she had felt. In confusion she hurried to tell Howard her news.

‘Grandfather's jade collection has been sold at auction in New York. It's gone to an American investor for an enormous sum of money. All those erotic jade curiosities are to go on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.' As she spoke, she considered this powerful new resource of cash for the first time.

They stood in a recess where she had opened another door, showing him a storeroom she was converting into a further bedroom. A small high window looked out on to the trees in the grounds of Lim Villa next door. Mei Lan stood close to him, her hair falling straight and thick along her cheek, hiding the birthmark on her jaw. The need for her ached abruptly in him, but he could say nothing. Beyond the window, buried within the trees was the gazebo that had sheltered them so long ago. He remembered the kisses with which he devoured her, sliding his lips down her body, lifting her clothes, unbuttoning and she unresisting, offering herself without restraint as they clung to each other as if they were drowning until it was over and he lay still upon her. ‘I love you,' she had said. ‘I love you,' he had replied, and knew it was not a lie. He remembered the trees that had closed to enfold them. In the undergrowth a lizard had stirred. An oriole's sweet warble had filled the clearing.

The emotions he had always struggled to hold in place would no longer obey him and he reached out for her, gripping her hard by the shoulders and drawing her brusquely towards him to kiss her savagely. A familiar panic filled Mei Lan and she pulled away, pressing herself against the wall, trapped in the tiny alcove as he blocked her escape.

‘Get on with your life; forget me,' she whispered, edging past him. The constriction she had felt when Norbert embraced her seemed to paralyse her again. When Norbert had persuaded her to go to bed
with him there had been wine to dull her senses, and she had come to the moment slowly, led there step by step like a frightened animal, relaxing slowly until he had her in his grasp. Norbert had shown urgency, but no passion, and she was required to do little but spread herself beneath him. Now her life lay wide open between darkness and light, and she did not know yet how to cross the chasm before her.

Howard stepped back, and she moved past him into the corridor again. He had thought the time in England, the doctors and medicines, the achievement of her professional dream would heal her fractured life. His mind filled with memories of his mock execution: the excruciating hours of imprisonment, the fear, the constant rhetorical haranguing. It was only later, when he had returned to a normal life, that he knew the true effect on him of long incarceration and indoctrination. It had taken months to slowly reclaim himself, but now flashbacks were rare, the nightmares had faded. If his journey back to wholeness had been so long and troubled, what of she who had suffered so much more: how would she reclaim an identity so thoroughly demolished? He reached out to catch Mei Lan's hand as she turned away and she looked at him miserably, waiting for release. Her sadness filled him. They were different people living different lives, and what had been, he realised at last, could not now be returned to.

Rose leaned back on the sofa and stared up at the ceiling of Belvedere. It was ingrained with dirt and cobwebs, home to geckos and spiders and birds nesting filthily in corners. Bits and pieces of straw were forever floating down upon them. All she could see of the future was decay. It was there in herself with the degeneration of her health and the narrowing space of old age. It was there in the sight of Wilfred limping about on a stick, and Cynthia's struggle to support him. In warped window frames, splintering wood and crumbling stucco, in the overgrown garden, and broken flowerpots, Belvedere too had succumbed inescapably to old age. Even the elderly Eurasian widowers grew more doddering by the day. Rose had shut off the upper floor of the house except for the occasions when Mei Lan had use for it, and at night, listening to the scampering of rodents and the knocking of pipes, she gave in to despair.

From where she sat Rose stared out of the window at the familiar
view of the mangosteens. The trees had never recovered from the pounding they had taken during the war, and had decayed with the same stoicism that now engulfed Belvedere. It could not go on, Rose decided; Belvedere must be sold. As the thought appeared she wondered why she had not considered it before. A terraced house, like the one she had inherited from Aunty May in Queen Street, would be more than adequate for her needs. She thought of the day she had first seen Belvedere with a house agent and recalled, in spite of its dilapidated state, her feeling of hope. She remembered her delight in identifying with a road, the thrill it had given her to be Rose of Mount Rosie. She leaned back weak and sad, but seeing at last a way to arrest the downward curve of her life.

H
OWARD FOUND HE HAD
returned to a place of shifting landscapes, regroupings, realignments and new beginnings. Singapore was now a place of strikes, mass meetings and general unrest, stirred up by communist activists and socialist-minded nationalists. Assassinations were commonplace, as was the sight of rioting school children proficient in mayhem as much as in study. Communist rhetoric was everywhere,
The British imperialists' bloody rule of Malaya has squeezed us to the marrow,
was written on a wall in fresh red paint near the building that housed the Social Welfare Department as Howard arrived for work the first day. It shocked him to see such bold defiance. He wondered if Wee Jack was still in the thick of things, gleefully directing this vicious unrest.

Within a few days of his arrival home, Howard had begun his new job. He had written to Raj telling him about his plans to return to Singapore, and his need to find suitable work now that he had earned his degree. It had not taken long for Raj to reply, saying he had spoken to a contact in the Social Welfare Department and that someone with Howard's qualifications would be welcome there. Raj had contacts everywhere and was, Howard learned, involved with more than just business now; politics had claimed him through a back door. He had made large donations of money to the Progressive Party. The British Government was at last allowing the initial steps towards self-government to be taken. In a few months Singapore would hold its first election, which the Progressive Party was expected to win.

Amongst the people Howard now came into contact with, politics was impossible to ignore. Within the Social Welfare Department Howard found a growing breed of politicised civil servants who saw it as their duty to work for the underdog and for a struggling local society. Malayanisation was the call heard everywhere now; the transfer of senior government posts from British expatriates to local civil
servants could not come quickly enough for these men. The Council of Joint Action had been formed with representatives from twenty-one government unions and, as well as squeezing better pay out of their European masters, it forced the process towards self-government to become political. No longer, they vowed, should British expatriate officials be allowed to sit comfortably on their backsides. Some days Howard felt he had walked into a maelstrom: half the office was out demonstrating on the street instead of working. While civil servants were fighting to raise local pay to equal that of British expatriate civil servants, government unions and staff associations organised mass walkouts and rallies. The atmosphere, in this outwardly dull administrative backwater, was charged with hope and anger.

A study of the poverty line, the
Survey on Urban Incomes and Housing
had been published just before Howard joined the department and had involved many researchers investigating hundreds of case studies. Some follow-up material was still being researched and Howard was immediately thrown into this, drawing graphs, editing material, writing numerous reports; even re-checking interviews, which necessitated visits to some of the poorest areas of Chinatown. He walked the crumbling, filthy streets remembering the look on Wee Jack's face all those years ago when, sharing cigarettes in the jungle, the man had tried to explain why he was a communist. Injustice, everywhere injustice, Wee Jack had said, his face filled with emotion. Now, observing the grinding poverty around him Howard felt helpless to make a difference in any way. He knew Wee Jack had real reason to fight, real reason to choose the communist path as the only one that might bring results.

As he walked towards the main road to hail a trishaw to take him back to the office, he looked up at the sky and remembered the Liberty Cabaret and the Malayan Democratic Union. Although the MDU had been forced to disband, the commitment to Independence was now even stronger.
The future lies under a different sky
, a bespectacled Chinese had told him on that first MDU meeting Krishna had taken him to. Perhaps, Howard thought, behind the thin clouds drifting above him, that unknown sky already lay waiting. Perhaps, at last, the crossroads of time before which he now stood, would give him the opportunity to make that difference.