The Black Isle (23 page)

After nineteen years of fits, starts, and multiple disruptions, my
real
life was finally beginning in earnest. To mark my rebirth, I decided to give myself a new name. Selecting one was trickier than I thought. I started with Pandora—but this was Odell’s name for me, not one that I found for myself. It had to go. Then came Miranda and Cassandra, both ringing of hubris, and Scarlett (as in O’Hara), which on me would have sounded too significantly red, too crushingly Oriental. So I considered ordinary names—unobtrusive, forgettable names like Susan and Sarah and…

Exhausted by their drabness, I returned to Cassandra. Cassandra, the girl of Greek myth who saw things nobody else did. Since no one on the Isle knew much about the Greeks, I thought this could be my own little private joke. And lo, Cassandra I became.

Daniel liked it. In fact, he liked it so well he soon asked me to be the future Mrs. Cassandra Wee.

As expected, both Li and Father refused their invitations to our engagement party, offering the most unimaginative excuses. Both insisted they had to work. I was relieved. What if Li threw one of his tantrums? Or made remarks about “the rich”? But their tacit disapproval did weigh on me. I had cast off my old life—meaning them.

Daniel and I decided on a quiet, understated get-together at home because Mr. Wee felt that anything grander—a champagne-laden banquet at the Metropole, say—would be inappropriate, considering the anxious political mood. He had already begun to ration our restaurant feasts. We dined out just once a week, and only in private rooms, away from prying eyes.

Amidst talk that Japan was about to invade the Dutch Indies, our Isle was seeing an influx of blond settlers who’d fled their plantations in Batavia. They felt they would be safe from the Japs here—the place the British called their “indomitable fortress”—but our locals weren’t so sure. Everyone had read about the atrocities happening in Nanking. To calm the nervous populace of Chinatown, the government held practice air raids. There were no bomb shelters, of course, but it was hoped that these calls for lights-out would keep the masses busy until the rumblings of war went away.

I barely noticed what was going on in the city, let alone the world, because there was another major change in my life, as monumental as my engagement to Daniel: I had stopped seeing ghosts. I didn’t know exactly when the shift occurred, so preoccupied had I been with joy. I can only guess it was soon after he proposed.

Until I stopped seeing them, I never fully realized how much their presence had oppressed me. Privacy was something I had rarely taken for granted, even when alone. Until I could ascertain that no ghost was present—hovering silently in the corner of the bathroom while I washed or standing over my shoulder in the library while I read—I carried with me a constant, low-level awareness of being watched.

It might have been true once that seeing these souls made me feel less alone, but I was no longer lonely. I had Daniel. Now every excursion I made was filled not with quiet apprehension but unbridled joy—an adult innocence.

We took romantic strolls along the banyan-shrouded trails of Forbidden Hill, where not so long ago, I had seen the ghosts of two centuries. We spent nights in expensive old hotel rooms that a year before would have made my hair stand on end and found nothing there to impede our lovemaking but our own exhaustion. We even coupled in a Christian cemetery in the isolated west, the only visible creatures around us being sparrows, crickets, and butterflies. Bit by bit, I was reclaiming the benighted Isle, with pleasure as my beacon of light.

I burned to begin a new chapter as a conventional young wife. Mrs. Cassandra Wee. I believed that love had saved—nay, cured—me and I looked upon Daniel as the source of my salvation. Sweet, devoted, and refreshingly uncomplicated, he was the antidote to all the darkness that had come before. By earning his love, I had truly freed myself from my past.

At our garden party, we served tea, lemonade, three types of éclair, four types of cake, and champagne for the friends—Daniel’s friends, that is—who knew where to look for it. I’d like to blame my peripatetic past for my lack of friends, but to be honest, after Dora Conceição, I had not cared to make any new ones. I had my books, my matinees, and my ghosts, and they seemed like more than enough.

About thirty or forty guests attended, mostly Daniel’s old schoolmates and his father’s colleagues, serious men who used the occasion to discuss politics as they distractedly pushed slices of chiffon cake into their mouths. Violet had been encouraged to invite her classmates, but she spent the entire afternoon sitting by Agnes’s cage, alternately sulking and giggling at some private joke only she and the awful dog shared. She, too, as far as I knew, was friendless.

I wore a pale pink sheath dress—again, not too showy, at Mr. Wee’s insistence—but Daniel’s friends arrived in elaborate fashions imported from Paris and London, and eyed me with polite bemusement. None were unkind, yet I felt unsteady in their swirl. They were a tight, air-kissing clique who had been mingling since birth and ran with the same moneyed frames of reference. Had I seen the Italian leather pumps just in at Robinsons? Had I heard how disgracefully the sultan’s son behaved at so-and-so’s soiree? What’s to become of the poor horsies at the Turf Club if the Japs rolled in? These bright young men and women chain-smoked and abandoned their plates on the bushes for the servants, leaving a trail of ash and crumbs as they sauntered from hedge to hedge. Daniel hadn’t seen most of them since secondary school at St. Patrick’s and, to his credit, moved among them shyly, like an awkward newcomer shaking their hands for the first time. One would never have guessed he was once rugby captain two years running.

Thinking that some champagne would help ease my nerves, I slinked into the library, where Mr. Wee had left a magnum chilling on ice.

A young man had beaten me to it. I caught him drinking straight from the bottle as he stared at the calfskin spines on the shelves, his nose almost touching them. He was wiry in the Cantonese manner, his features slightly epicene, and he reeked of hair oil; I could smell him all the way from the door. I cleared my throat loudly to make him jump. He didn’t.

“Too much Dickens, don’t you think?” he said coolly, flaunting an English accent that sounded freshly clipped. “Picturesque paupers, benefactors with hearts of gold, funny names—we mustn’t forget those funny names—all adding up to a formula of one hundred percent pap.”

When I didn’t answer, he raised the bottle. “Am I disgracing the vintage or myself by guzzling it like this?”

“A bit of both, I should imagine.”

“Fair enough.” He saluted me and went bottoms up again. Champagne frothed down his chin, but before I could worry about the carpet, he wiped himself on his sleeve. A provocateur, apparently.

“Who are you?” I demanded.

“The question is”—he smiled mockingly—“who are
you
?”

I was offended, and flustered. “Why, I’m Daniel’s fiancée…”

“Only joking! Of course I know who you are.” He snatched my hand and kissed it like a deranged knight. The drink gave his lips an icy, reptilian edge. “Felicitations. My name is Kenneth, Kenneth Kee. Dan’s great chum from school.”

Kenneth Kee? I couldn’t remember Daniel ever mentioning him. But then Daniel hated talking about his childhood, which was another reason we got along—I didn’t talk about mine either. Was it possible they’d really been “great chums”? I could hardly imagine two less similar boys. Daniel was all smooth predictability, and this Kenneth Kee was anything but. He moved as if he answered to a different, more restless god, as if he breathed in different air from those around him, myself included. And, strange in the tropics on a warm afternoon, this young man did not sweat.

“Why aren’t you outside?”

He shrugged. “I don’t mix well.”

“Well, I grant you you’ve an outlandish accent.”

“As do you. Been studying at Miss Hepburn’s academy, have we, Cassandra?”

He hissed out my name like a snake, making it sound desperate and cheap, as if he were embarrassed on my behalf. I found his manner deeply irritating and thrust him my empty flute so he wouldn’t try to finish the bottle on his own. He filled it to the brim, daring me to spill. I didn’t, sipping steadily as he watched.

“I’m on loan to Oxford, on loan
from
Oxford…whatever it may be. Hence the aggravated lisp. God help me if I not only looked funny but spoke funny, too. You see, people over there have no imagination. Were I to speak with a foreign accent, they’d immediately assume I was unable to think or write intelligently in English. So in order to save myself the trouble of dealing with
my
fury about their lack of imagination, I decided to speak in the only way they understand, which is to say, like them. Does this answer your question, the one you’re too polite to ask?”

“Y-yes…I think so.” Silly me, I was stuttering.

“This would have been my third year if it hadn’t been for the bloody war. Didn’t Dan tell you? It should have been him who’s over there at Balliol, but he sent me off in his place.”

In fact, Daniel always refused to discuss why he hadn’t gone to England. He’d never even struck me as the Oxbridge type.

“Why didn’t he go?” I asked. “I mean, I’d like to hear your side of it.”

“’Cause he’s a timorous bastard, that’s why.” This provoked wild laughter in him and he took another swig. “Seriously, the boy’s a sentimental fool. Couldn’t bear to leave the old homestead. Though I suppose it’s worked out all right for him. He caught you.”

Our eyes met, and during that moment I thought he wasn’t so bad.

“Lucky for me, then, he’s a sentimental fool,” I said.

“I keep telling him he should disappoint people once in a while. It’d make his life much more interesting. In fact, it’d make
him
much more interesting.” He paused, realizing he might have said the wrong thing to me. “Bubbly?”

I let him refill my glass.

“Shall I show you what I brought him from England?” Reaching into his trouser pocket, he pulled out a tiny stack of cards held together with a rubber band. “He’s going to be so cross with me. He’s probably expecting either a hunting cap or a basket of jam from Fortnum and Mason. But I spent six months collecting this set, I did.”

“What are they?” The cards were two inches long and an inch wide, and each sported a different drawing printed in color. Some had soldiers operating searchlights and dousing fires; others had civilians trying on gas masks.

“Cigarette cards. They put one in each pack of fags so fools like me would murder our lungs just to collect all fifty. It’s a mania, I know. Once I found two in a pack and I was so thrilled I couldn’t sleep for days. That’s undergraduate life for you! But I told myself there’s at least some philosophical value to this set. The theme is Air Raid Precautions—a little prenuptial humor.” He laughed blackly. “The set with the blond bombshells I kept for myself.”

I liked his sense of humor. I even liked the cards. But I doubted that Daniel would appreciate them—he’d have preferred the hunting cap.

“Well, I should get back outside,” I said. “It was lovely meeting you.”

“Wait.” He plucked a random book from the shelf and, like a magician, brandished from behind it a green hat with comical earflaps. He cackled triumphantly—he had brought Daniel a hunting cap after all. “I, too, am a bit of a sentimental fool.”

The peculiar boy decided to follow me outside and rejoin society. But one glimpse of Violet and Agnes from the doorway and his face turned ashen.

“Actually, I may stay inside for a bit.”

I laughed. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of dogs!”

“No, no, it’s not Agnes that I’m afraid of…That horrible girl’s been chasing me for ten years. She can be a bit relentless.”

“Violet? After you?” This tickled me even more. “Well, she can be okay at times.”

“I’m sure even Herr Hitler’s okay
some
times. Please, don’t even say her name in my presence.”

“Violet! Violet! Violet! Shall I call her in here?”

“Stop it! You’re too cruel!” He ran maniacally along the main hallway of the house until he spotted the folding screen in the far corner of the sitting room. Making a beeline for it, he reached behind the lacquered panels, grimacing until I heard the unlatching of a stiff bolt.

“Voila.” He grinned, pulling the screen aside to reveal a hidden door to the garden. He clearly relished surprising me with his privileged information. I followed him outside and caught up with him on the flagstone path hugging the side of the house.

“When I was a youngster, I always made a point of visiting these.” He pointed to the slabs lining the footpath. “I pretended each one was a tombstone for a forgotten pet. Dan always said I was being morbid.” He went on one foot and hopscotched his way along a line of them. “Cat, cat, dog…rat, rat, dog. Goldfish. Hamster.” The drink had compromised his balance and he tripped, giggling. Riding the momentum of his stumble, he careened like a fighter plane until he crashed into a rambutan tree. Flopping down on the grass, he emptied the last of the champagne into his mouth and set the drooling bottle upside down in a broken flower pot.

“So when’s the big day?” he asked.

“We haven’t quite decided. There’s no hurry, not really. We talked about going on a holiday first. Maybe Paris.”

“Paris? Perhaps, my dear, you’ve heard about the war?”

“I know. I said maybe. We’ll go when it all ends.” I giggled frivolously. The champagne had gone to my head.

I joined him in the rambutan grove, the massive house casting us in shadows. We watched the guests in the back garden, standing around in genteel little groups, not missing us a bit. Sunlight glinted off bracelets, necklaces, and luxurious Swiss watches. These people were as pretty as a postcard—more picture-perfect perhaps because I wasn’t in frame to spoil it.

“Daniel must have had an idyllic childhood here.” I’d only seen photographs. Here was hope that his old chum might tell me a story or two.

Kenneth smirked. “There was no way a happy childhood could have occurred in this house. His father was generous to a fault yet distant. Mother was temperamental and insecure, followed by a stepmother even more temperamental and even more insecure. Not to mention the hideously needy sibling with the name I shall not let pass my lips. On top of all this, our Dan’s cursed with a ridiculous sense of guilt. I say ridiculous because, though he always felt miserable about lolling around in air-conditioned comfort reading adventure yarns while some of his classmates had to go to work, he never once lifted a finger to right the injustice. All he did was wallow in more guilt. In fact, guilt is the very essence of our Danny Boy’s character, as you may or may not know.”