Miss Seetoh in the World (41 page)

‘I live for my children,’ Anna Seetoh had
said dolefully, and her daughter had callously retorted, ‘Let us do our own
living, Mother. And for goodness’ sake, be happy, for no one can do that for
you!’

What was Por Por’s one single unmitigated
joy? It surely had to do with the secret lover. Who had initiated that act of
love in the warm hiding place provided by the temple? When Por Por stood before
the mirror, laughing and smiling at herself in those gaudy trinkets, was she
seeing a pretty young girl with her hair in plaits wearing the cheap plastic
earrings that had been a secret gift from her lover? The clothing that young
village girls wore in those days, comprising cloth trousers tied at the waist
with string and a cloth jacket with a row of tight frog buttons, was surely a
challenge to the lover’s trembling fingers, impatient to touch the pure, white
young body inside. Between Por Por’s moment of sweet daring in the distant past
and her own, to be experienced in the very near future in a hotel room in
Europe, lay her mother’s long blameless, joyless womanhood. Had her
imagination, incurably romantic, invested Por Por’s experience with a false
radiance when it had only been the squalid ground of a rundown temple, full of
muddy patches and chicken droppings, followed by the greater squalor of a
faithless love, ruthless parents and a ruined life?

One day, she thought, she would write a
story about her grandmother’s life. It would be a very short story: She was
born, was brought up in a poor village in China, was taught to be obedient, was
threatened with punishment if she dared to disobey and be different from the
other girls in the village. Then one day, she dared to disobey and be different
– she secretly met the man she loved in a temple and experienced the happiest
moment of her life. But it was exactly that – a moment only. Soon she was
brought back in disgrace, punished by her parents, married off to an opium
addict, bullied by all her in-laws in the household, brought to Singapore,
despised by everyone including her own daughter as being stupid and incompetent
and burdensome, and was finally devastated by the madness of old age.

The whole of Por Por’s life could be written
in the passive voice, since she was lived, not living, except for that one
moment of glory, one third way through the story, when the active voice proudly
proclaimed that she rose in rebellion, dared to defy society and secretly went
to meet the man she loved.

Por Por could not take her eyes off her
grand-daughter, the bright red silk dress she was wearing, nor the pearl
earrings, the pearl necklace, the beaded handbag, the high-heeled shoes. She
touched each item reverently with her hands, her eyes wide with wonder. Then
she looked at Maria’s carefully made-up face and gently pressed two fingers on
her bright pink lips.

Rosiah laughed and said, ‘Miss Maria, Por
Por wants to go to the party with you!’ Even Anna Seetoh smiled in amusement,
without losing the usual frown of worry and despondency.

Maria said, ‘Por Por, if you behave and eat
up your dinner, I will take you to the party.’

She had the idea to amuse the old one the
next morning by letting her wear the pearl earrings and necklace and carry the
beaded purse. Even small indulgences could add up to a happy life for the old
one in her few remaining years.

Prepared for an evening of mild diversion at
the Polo Club Ball, she had no idea of the shock that awaited her. It should
have been no shock that Dr Phang was there, for the ball was a grand public
event and he was known to be a much desired presence at many glittering
functions, having once casually remarked to her that he and Olivia had more
invitations than they could accept.

Meeta, suddenly noticing him, whispered to
her, ‘Hey, look, there’s your beau over there.’

Winnie turned to look and whispered, ‘He’s
with his wife and other couples, but I’m sure he’ll come up and ask you for a
dance, just to have the chance of holding you! Let us know!’

She turned to say to Freddie who, Maria had
concluded within five minutes of meeting him, was unbearably boring: ‘You mustn’t
get jealous when a handsome man comes up and asks Maria for a dance!’ Then both
Meeta and Winnie, lost in the pleasurable company of their respective partners,
forgot about everyone else.

A jealous woman, it was said, had multiple,
all-seeing eyes, so that even if she sat still and never moved once, she could
see every small action of her man in every part of the room. A woman’s jealousy
was always born of a deep sense of personal outrage: the man who ought to be
paying attention to her was ignoring her and attending to another woman.
Jealousy turned its sharpest focus on the rival, noting her every small
response, every small look and gesture, to assess the seriousness of the
rivalry. A jealous woman was the most tormented woman, her body sprouting a hundred
quivering antennae to catch the warning signals to respond to the humiliation
of being completely ignored, even of being ridiculed by the laughing, flirting,
cavorting pair.

Suddenly aware of this most unmanageable of
emotions swelling dangerously inside her, Maria struggled to maintain a calm
outward presence, trying to listen politely to Freddie who was talking
endlessly about his two teenaged children and their school activities. They
were at present on holiday with their mother, and he would join them as soon as
his work commitments allowed him.

‘I’m going to make a call to them,’ he said
looking at his watch and rising from the table. ‘This is about the right time.
They shouldn’t be in bed yet.’ Maria wished that his phone call would last the
entire evening, so that she could concentrate on dealing with this new feeling
that was threatening to overwhelm her. It filled her with rage and shame, with
hatred directed outwards toward the whole world, and inwards toward herself.
Never in her life had she been in such a maelstrom of conflicting thoughts and
feelings, which was threatening to toss her around like a small helpless
creature in a whirlwind, and then smash her to the ground.

She had no right to be jealous of Olivia
Phang. Indeed, how could she, how dared she? The head could only whisper its
reproaches which were instantly drowned out in the roar of the heart’s anguish.
It was the anguish of something even more primitive, because more sexual, felt
in one’s very groins, linked to the deepest core of one’s very survival and
sense of being. If all life forms were born competitive, surely Nature designed
jealousy as the most effective tool against the competitor?

She watched, without appearing to be
watching as she desultorily took sips of wine and fanned herself, Dr Phang
looking affectionately into his wife’s laughing face during the dancing,
twirling her, pressing his cheek against hers, at one stage pressing her body
to his with both arms so that, with eyes closed, they seemed to have drifted into
some intimate dream-sleep together while swaying sensuously to the music.

As she watched, she experienced sharp pangs
of a feeling hitherto alien to her. She had seen it in her own husband as he
lay on his deathbed and hurled wild accusations at her, and had dismissed it as
pure hallucination. She had seen it in Meeta when Byron paid gallant attention
to the pretty women in the Polo Club dining room, and had dismissed it as
childish nonsense. Now jealousy, provoked by a man dancing with his own wife with
the loving intimacy expected of happily married couples, was unaccountably
gripping her like a vise and causing sharp pangs that would be relived again
and again in painful solitude. No pain was greater than when a woman reproached
herself for it.

Mixed with the jealousy was a growing anger.
While she was on the dance floor with Freddie, he had waved to her, and that
was all the recognition of her presence for the entire evening. He did not even
have the courtesy to come up to their table to greet her, much less ask her for
a dance. ‘Hey, maybe he doesn’t like your new look,’ giggled Winnie. ‘Next
time, change your look. Those pearl earrings make you look older.’ Meeta
returned to the table with Byron, panting, fanning herself and laughing after
their wild gyrations to rock music, and was immediately pulled up by him to
return to the dance floor once more. She whispered into Maria’s ears as she
rose from her seat, holding Byron’s hand, ‘Just watch your beau with that
beauty. No wonder he’s not paying any attention to you!’

The beauty was not Olivia but a woman friend
from his table who had come with her own partner, a portly, moustached
Caucasian. The jealousy she had felt towards Olivia was suddenly transferred to
this woman and surged with every moment of watching her as she danced with the
man who had whispered into her ear, in the parked car only a week ago, ‘I’m
looking forward. You have no idea!’ Outwardly she was holding a conversation
with the dull Freddie by simply timing her nods and smiles to the pauses in his
interminable boasting about his accomplished children, but her gaze never left
the boisterously happy dancing pair. She detected a special quality in his
attentiveness to this woman that she had not seen in his behaviour towards his
wife. The woman looked in her forties and was extremely attractive. Perhaps it
was her imagination, now in full speculative mode, that saw a secret mutual
delight lighting up their faces as they danced, laughed, clapped and hugged
each other, as if flaunting a secret liaison in a public place, right under the
noses of his unsuspecting wife and the Caucasian partner. Olivia was herself
dancing with merry abandon with different dance partners, and for the time
being, was too busy enjoying herself to be bothered with the usual vigilance.

She was almost certain that Dr Phang and the
woman he was taking repeatedly to the dance floor were having or were about to
have an affair. Here was a man who, while planning to meet up with her secretly
in Europe in a week’s time, was bestowing undue attention on other women,
reducing her to one more casualty along his trail of selfish pleasure. In a
single moment, the fires of enraged jealousy had reduced all the happiness of
the past few months to dust and ashes in her mouth. They could have been
instead the sweet spring waters of deep contentment increasing her eagerness
for that secret meeting in Europe. If, in the midst of all that open intimacy
with Olivia, all that flamboyance with the attractive woman, he had managed to
slip to her table for a moment, to touch her hand furtively, to say a word or
two from their shared stock of code words, such as ‘silken bed’ and
‘Sheherazade’, and then quickly gone back to his carousing with his wife and
other women, she would have felt truly happy. Her sense of self would not only
have been intact, but strengthened, their understanding of each other richly
deepened. As it was, she rose from a scene of such devastation that she
surprised herself by her calm, matter-of-fact voice as she gathered up her
shawl and handbag and said to Freddie, ‘I’m not feeling too well, and would
like to go back.’ Freddie rose too with a look of concern, but she stopped him
saying with a smile, ‘It’s alright, Freddie. Just a headache. Meeta and Winnie
know I get it often. Don’t let me spoil your fun. I can easily get a cab back,’
and she was gone. Inside the taxi, she thought angrily, ‘He will not even
notice my absence.’

The pain of jealousy cried out for a salve
which would be denied. Tossing about on her bed, she thought of what must at
the same time be taking place in the fun-filled Polo Club with its music and
merry-makers, its myriad gold and silver balloons decorating the ceiling, that,
at the end of the ball, would be pulled down by the men to give to their ladies
or playfully burst against their glittering dresses, bejewelled fingers,
stiletto heels. Meeta and Winnie would already have been told by Freddie about
her sudden departure; they might have looked meaningfully at each other, and
then forgotten her completely in the resumption of happy dancing, drinking and
laughing with their partners.

Had he noticed her absence? The situation
might have been saved even then. If he had excused himself from his table and
gone to make a quick secret call – ‘Hi, Maria, why did you leave? I was going
up to claim a dance from you!’ – the darkness stifling her heart would have
lifted, and she would have turned off the lights and gone to sleep peacefully.
As it was, she lay awake listening to the relentless ticking of the clock by
her bed. She must have drifted into a deeply troubled sleep, for when she woke
up suddenly and looked at the clock, it was already 3 am, two hours past the
official closing time of the ball. He would have gone off home with Olivia;
could he already have made plans with the attractive woman to meet for a quick
tryst before his trip to Europe, and if he had, could he already be planning,
with ease and flair, to make her his new, proud conquest?

Sexual jealousy was more destructive than a
simple green-eyed monster that could be searched out and destroyed; it was a
flame that consumed from within.

‘Well?’ he called to ask, a few days before
he left for Europe. ‘So are we all set for the great adventure?’

She could hear his shock when she said, ‘I
think not.’

‘What?’

‘I’m not going after all.’ There was a brief
silence when the man must have wondered what was the next best thing to say
without initiating the argument or confrontation he had always avoided. His
quick thinking mind could have grasped the reason for her sudden change of
mind, for in his time, he must have had much experience of women’s jealousies.
If it did, his cheerful nonchalance would have dismissed it as just so much
inconsequential behaviour expected of females. In any case, the few minutes
allowed for the surreptitious call from his office when the spying clerk had
left the room for something, permitted only the usual hurried exchange.