The Black Isle (20 page)

“Mrs. Wee,” I said neutrally. “Can I explain about the earrings? I didn’t steal them.”

“Oh, don’t fret over those things. They’re nothing—nothing!” She smiled for the first time, and I saw that she looked nothing like Mother.

She walked back to the chair and sat down, sighing, her face now bearing a sudden gravity for what I sensed was her imminent departure. Her eyes combed the room, taking in its contours for one last time, before returning again to her own lifeless form.

“Do you want me to convey any last words to your family?”

She mused for a second and said, with surprising finality, “No.”

“Nothing?” I looked back at the body and thought of the unfinished sentence that had tried to escape her lips. “Are you sure?”

“It’s all nothing!” She had already begun to evaporate. A twinge of regret crossed her features, but she waved it away. “None of it matters. None of it.”

And then she was forever gone.

“Apology accepted,” I said to the empty chair.

I turned back to the body. Her face seemed different—calm, even benevolent. I removed the Bible from her neck, and this time her mouth stayed closed.

The peace didn’t last long. A fly buzzed in from the doorway and landed boldly on my late employer’s nose. For some reason, this moved me to tears.

When Mrs. Wee was properly arranged, I went to Mr. Wee’s study as Little Girl had instructed and knocked on the door. The widower was eating a slice of toast at the desk as he listened to an ominous report being read on the wireless. I thought his hair looked whiter than before, but this was more likely a trick of the morning light. Listening to the news and eating breakfast—was this how he mourned his wife? He looked up as I entered.

“The forecast is not good. War is coming down the Pacific. I can feel it.” He spoke remorsefully, as if he had a hand in preventing damnation. He looked at me and sighed, perhaps about to apologize for my days of imprisonment. I cast my eyes away to make it easier for him, but he simply wiped the sides of his mouth with his napkin and stood up to hand me the breakfast tray. “I’ll wake the children.”

As he passed me in the doorway, he muttered, in a tone of sincere, if sublimely understated, gratitude, “Your help is very much appreciated.”

Later, while I was emptying the pail of soap water into the courtyard drain, Little Girl came up behind me, disgruntled, refusing to look me in the eye. I expected yet more bad news, but no.

“Mr. Wee says you’re free now,” she said, then added in a poisonous key as she strode away, “even though you may still be a thief, for all we know.”

My bitterness toward the old man vaporized. Once more I had the future to think about. I needed to speak to Odell: at the Metropole, on the last Sunday of the month! Why did it have to take a shocking hallucination for me to think of him?

“What’s the date today?” I asked Saudah, the washerwoman.

“Tuesday, the seventh.”

I dried my hands on my skirt and sprinted to my room. On my calendar, I marked out the special Sunday with a secret pencil dot. It was less than three weeks away.

That evening, after a full day spent making funeral arrangements, Mr. Wee invited me to join him and his children for dinner out. The news was again relayed to me by Little Girl, and from the way she spat the words out, it was obvious she had never been asked on such excursions.

To show my respect, I wore dark clothes and was startled to see that the Wee children had dressed exuberantly—not a stitch of black between them. Daniel shot me a bashful smile while his sister studied her unsightly, chewed-on nails, actively avoiding my gaze.

“I’m so glad you could join us,” Mr. Wee said, gesturing for me to squeeze into the Bentley alongside his children. “We’re going to my favorite restaurant.”

Mitzi’s was an unfussy eating house in Chinatown that specialized in boiled chicken and rice—food wholesome enough to be consoling yet not so extravagant that gossips could accuse Mr. Wee of celebrating his wife’s passing. It was a place even Father could afford to go—that is, if he hadn’t lost all his spare change to loan sharks and gangsters. Knowing that Mr. Wee liked eating at Mitzi’s humanized him in a way that his odd reticence could never do.

Issa the Bugis chauffeur drove us in the silence that seemed to be his trademark. I was wedged between Daniel and the car door and felt a spark of static when his silk pants rubbed against my nylon stocking. With equally swift reactions, we quickly pulled ourselves apart.

At the crowded restaurant, I watched Mr. Wee’s eyes scan the room. There was nobody here that he knew, and his mood relaxed. He sat back in the booth and sucked in the oily fragrance of chicken and ginger-garlic sauce that was swirling around us.

“In the grand scheme of things, what’s one pair of earrings, right?” he said, urging me to dig into the communal platter of chicken. “There are more important things in life, like family and food.”

I took the meal to be his apology.

Daniel kept shooting me little smiles when our gazes met. His sister, however, hadn’t softened a bit. She spent the evening studying my every move with narrowed eyes, ready to see nefarious intent in every little thing I did.

The strange thing was that neither Mr. Wee nor his children seemed particularly upset by the loss of Mrs. Wee. Perhaps they had shed their tears in private and were now putting on a brave public face as a group, or perhaps the woman had been ill for so long that her death had come as a relief. Which it was, I couldn’t tell.

I would later learn that this was how most upper-class Chinese—especially Island-assimilated ones—behaved in the aftermath of a tragedy; theirs was a cultural marriage between Confucian reserve and the British stiff upper lip. They had a pathological reluctance to show emotion in front of others and would sooner appear heartless than chance the smallest loss of face.

In spite of Mr. Wee’s insistence that I take the most succulent piece of chicken thigh, I gravitated to the boniest parts—the wing tips and neck—not out of deference to my hosts but out of familiarity. They were what I’d always eaten. Violet watched my choices, doubtless suspecting me of calculated modesty, while Daniel appeared charmed by what he took to be my provincial ways.

“There’s more than enough to go round,” he said, putting a plump drumstick on my plate with his chopsticks.

Violet began muttering about her exams. She hurried her father to finish so she could return to her books. Plus there was Agnes. The dog had been having trouble breathing since morning.

“Bad things are happening all at once,” she said, looking pointedly at me. “It’s as if a plague is upon us. The Black Plague.”

“Oh, stop it,” snapped her father. “Now you’re sounding like Aunt Betsy, God rest her acrid soul.”

“Well,” the girl replied, “
you
married her.”

We arrived home to see Subramaniam’s arm jammed down the throat of the whimpering, shuddering Rottweiler in the daredevil style of a lion tamer. Violet’s scowl melted into worry and her eyes pooled with tears.

“The dog wheezing all day,” Subramaniam told us. “I thought sure must be something stuck inside.” With the improvisatorial zeal of a former plantation worker, he had force-fed her a chalky cocktail of Saudah’s bleach while the family was out.

The poor beast had retched, and the first ruby earring materialized. Getting the other one was more work—its hook was caught in the flesh of her esophagus, and it was this that Subramaniam was now rooting for, his brows knitted in anguish as his fingers plumbed the mucilaginous well. When he surfaced with the second earring, hand and treasure both coated in slime, Agnes belched so loudly it even made me blush. Wearily, Subramaniam flung his find onto a white towel next to its vomit-encrusted twin.

Violet’s face crumpled. “Who fed these to her? Agnes would never eat them!” She lunged instinctively to embrace the dog, then stopped herself, clearly not wanting to display any weakness while I was present.

“Actually, I remember seeing Agnes run into the house one afternoon,” said Daniel. “It’s quite possible she went upstairs.”

“What? And rummaged through Aunt Betsy’s drawers?” The indignation in her voice returned. “Agnes
never
goes inside the house. Even you know that.”

“Vi, you weren’t there, so you can’t possibly—”

“Daniel,” Violet growled, her eyes darting to me, “don’t you be a fool.”

“Vi, darling.” Mr. Wee sighed. “Nobody cares about the earrings. They’re back. No harm done. All right, my dear?”

“I’m not talking about the damn earrings, Daddy. I’m talking about the
truth
! Have you
all
gone mad?”

Her pride intact, Violet charged into the house, flinging off her patent-leather shoes like a petulant child.

“Don’t worry, it’s not your fault,” Daniel said, and gave my elbow a firm squeeze. “My sister always overreacts; it’s just her way. Aunt Betsy affected her more than she cares to admit. She’d been crying all afternoon. Besides, in the grand scheme of things…”

In the grand scheme of things, I had my reunion with Odell to look forward to—and the date was getting closer by the hour. But in the smaller, more immediate, scheme of things, my thoughts kept returning to Daniel’s fib about Agnes and the way he had touched my elbow.

It was no accidental brush but a surprisingly hard squeeze, as if he had no idea how strong his grip was, or else he did and was trying to convey more with one caress than propriety allowed. That firmness, coupled with his deep, gentle voice—the voice that carried a chivalric lie in my defense—proved to be a seductive combination. As he removed his hand, his fingertips had grazed my forearm, leaving in their wake a trail of tiny goose bumps.

That night in bed, I imagined Daniel with me, unbuttoning my top and fondling my breasts. I let his hands run down my belly to the core of my longing. I felt his phantom lips lock with mine, the both of us gasping in tandem as our tongues probed and clashed. I hadn’t had such craving in years; I’d forgotten how hungry I was, how starved for love. Li had been my first and only, and that misadventure had left me so confused that I tried to expel all such feeling, but it hadn’t diminished my desires. On crowded trams and buses, brushes against good-looking men would reignite it in me, but they were mere sparks, always extinguished by the next stop.

With a single touch, Daniel unlocked my deepest need. I tussled with my amorous mirage all night, eventually drifting off as the blue shadow of dawn broke.

Hours later, a knock on my door woke me. I sighed, dreading the appearance of Little Girl and more of her sour insinuations. But it was Daniel.

“’Morning.” His eyes lingered on my pajama top before turning bashfully away. “Oh, pardon me.”

“It’s fine. I’m awake.”

“I have some good news for you, or what I think is good news.” He turned back to face me, smiling. “Father said you can move into the main house. We have a spare room. Not Aunt Betsy’s room, of course, but another one we keep aside for guests. You can stay there until you find new employment…not that there’s any real hurry.”

“Why’s he doing this?”

“I’d hate to speak for the old man, but I think he feels terrible about the whole earrings debacle. It’s his way of making it up to you. He’ll also continue paying your wages until you’re ready to leave.”

This sounded overgenerous for Mr. Wee—or any employer. The rich were notoriously stingy here, and the Island was still recovering from the Depression. “You talked him into it, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t do a thing,” Daniel said, his blushing cheeks belying his words. “Anyway, the room’s ready, anytime you want to move over. It’s the one next to mine.” He turned to leave, and my books stacked by the door triggered a new thought. “There’s a bookshelf, too.”

“Thanks.” I’d already begun mentally packing my things—and undressing him.

“Father means well, you know. He really does. We all do.”

“And thanks for what you said about Agnes being in the house.”

“Anything to calm Vi down. She can be a bit too much.” He beamed me a look of affection, then quickly glanced away.

Once he was gone, I was mortified to find that my pajama top had been unbuttoned, revealing my breasts to Daniel in all their naked glory.

Seconds later, this shame grew into pride: I want that boy. I shall win that boy and change my life.

I moved into the house that afternoon. Over the following two weeks, defying the watchful suspicion of both Violet and Little Girl, Daniel and I grew close—if not physically, then magnetically. It was a mysterious evolution because we had nothing in common; a boy like Daniel really had no business spending time with a girl like me.

There were the obvious differences in class, but the personal divides were greater still. Unlike me, he was supremely gracious. I’d never heard him raise his deep, mellifluous voice against anyone. And except for his one white lie, which I carried with me like a verbal valentine, he was free of secrets and intrigue. One read him easily, not like an open book perhaps, but more like a weather vane. His thick eyebrows registered every little change in mood; his cheeks flushed at the slightest moral discomfort. Also unlike me, he looked like a movie star, a bona fide matinee idol. He had fairer skin than I did; deep-set, expressive eyes; a high nose; and succulent, kissable lips. His head was crowned with lustrous hair that curled naturally at the ends, a prized coiffure in a society where most had hair that was dull, straight, and as black as the night.

Daniel cut a dashing figure doing the most mundane things—walking down the hall, nodding to the servants, even reading the sports page. He was a magnet for female adoration. I saw this in Little Girl and in the waitresses at Mitzi’s—all the more so as he was oblivious to his own appeal. For although he looked the part of the
shaoyeh
, or a pampered young master in the old Chinese custom, there was an air about him that seemed distinctly unworldly. One could imagine that he might suddenly forsake everything and give himself to the rescue of Arctic seals.