The Painted Cage (5 page)

She stood still, sweat forming in the small of her back. Then, pulling on a wrap, she ran back up into the bedroom, calling brusquely to the servant who dozed in the corridor to tug harder at the string that worked the fan above her bed. Obediently there came a new burst of activity and the air began to move. She threw herself upon the bed. The dent in the pillow where Reggie had slept was beside her still, a fair hair or two upon it. The odour of his pomade came to her as she stared into the fan.

She had taken no notice of the woman, a native, a servant. Little more seemed necessary than a command, a complaint or a commendation. The fan creaked on above. In the corridor outside the servant coughed and hawked. Above humiliation, she was filled suddenly with an overpowering anger that stretched beyond the woman Puteh, beyond distant Annie Luke whom she now supported. It stretched to fill a universe that could not contain it and returned to press her into a terrible
darkness.
She could neither scream nor cry. Something unbreakable transfixed her. For Annie Luke and her child, for the woman in Sarawak suckling half-caste babies at her breast, she felt suddenly now an unpredictable empathy. In animosity she had been glad to see with Reggie's eye, to dismiss those women whom circumstance rejected. It had shut the gate upon her fears. But now she knew her own nature, she could no longer condemn or reject. Anger thumped through her until she pummelled the mattress beneath her. She realized now that what had disturbed her most on her wedding night was Reggie's arrogant condescension. He had shown her the workings of her own body for
his
pleasure and use. Her own
sensuality
was of no matter to him. She could centre no real feelings upon Puteh. It was Reggie who aroused such fury she would have murdered him gladly as he slept, if he lay beside her still. Instead there was only a dent in the pillow and a few fair hairs upon it.

It was raining and he was ill.

‘I have never had malaria,' he said in reply to her
question.
He spoke with pride. ‘My prevention is to take quinine at the best of times, to keep the damn plague away.' He turned to her, his face grey with distress. ‘It's old troubles playing up. My liver, and that damn pain in the bladder. Been with me for years, but I know what to take. You learn how to treat yourself, living in these parts.' He directed her from where he lay in bed to the medicine cabinet, to a small bottle of pale coloured liquid she knew was not quinine. He was always interested in medicines, new treatments or patent remedies. She looked upon this as a knowledge essential to life so far from civilization. She poured out the medicine and took it to him. She did not think to question what it was he took.

‘We could send for a doctor from Malacca.'

He cut her short. ‘I never go near the scoundrels. Kill you before you can kill yourself. I always dose myself.' He made a scornful noise and groaned again, indicating impatiently for the fan to move faster.

It was dark and airless in the room. A storm had broken with the morning and thundered upon the roof, rattling in drainpipes, cascading from gutters. The windows were closed against the deluge but a fine spray came in through cracks, soaking the perimeter of the room. A broken door banged somewhere in the house, water dripped from the ceiling into metal buckets. Amy called to the servant, and a creaking began that accelerated until the flapping of the fan was like a hysterical bird.

She huddled on a chair beside Reggie's bed. The sheets gave off a stale odour although they had been changed that morning. Reggie's face was rough with pain and sweat. Soon, as she expected, he asked for a brandy and soda. She went to the decanter. There was the stench from her hands of sugar of lead, a pungent liniment he insisted she rub upon his belly over that part where the pain was the worst. She poured out the brandy. He drunk it down in gulps, then lay back. The rain hammered on; the room was steamy and suffocating. Outside was the
water, sluicing and beating, inside were smells of illness, damp thatch and the fetid odour from the chamber pot beneath the bed. She rang for a boy to dispose of it. Her clothes stuck to her damply. She had taken off her corset, she did not care how she looked.

Reggie turned in bed, pulling the sheets with him. ‘I was invalided home for this before, just the same but worse. I know the pattern well.' He put out a clammy hand in comfort. ‘Not much of those drops of mine left. Better send for more from the Chinese chemist. Can't do without them. I go through them at a rate.'

That was the first she had heard of his association with the Chinese medicine shop. She drew back in surprise from wiping his neck with a sponge soaked in lavender water. The shop was full of strange roots, dried and unspeakable parts of animals and snakes in jars of brine. She was overcome by the thought that the mysterious liquid Reggie copiously downed might be a similar
repulsive
brine. It struck her then how far she had travelled from that distant ballroom in Somerset.

‘The Chinese know a thing or two our doctors don't. I'll give them that much.' Reggie changed positions painfully. ‘Call Ah Seng. He knows where to get the medicine.'

‘How can you buy stuff from that place, all those snakes and horrid things?' She shuddered. Once on a visit to the town with the Resident's wife, she had looked inside the shop.

Reggie snorted through his pain. ‘Don't you fancy a man who drinks snake juice? It's arsenic, Kitten, arsenic I take.' He laughed again at her further alarm.

‘Poison?' She was relieved about the snakes.

‘If you don't know how to use it. But I have a tolerance, a remarkable tolerance,' he boasted. ‘I've taken it for years. It's my remedy, it's my cure, the only thing that touches this pain. An old Chinaman put me wise, years ago in Sarawak. I can take amounts that would kill other men.' His pride was swallowed in a groan. ‘Be a good girl, call Ah Seng.'

Later, she sat upon the verandah. The rain had eased and she felt she would die if she could not have air. A
servant dried a chair and changed a cushion for her. The verandah was a pool of water, but the rain fell now in an exhausted sheet beyond the eaves, all violence gone. The muddy compound would dry smooth and hard, and crack again as soon as the sun came out. A fine spray blew in upon her; the hem of her skirt was sodden as she sat immersed in thought. She was married to a man who drank each day, with no more trepidation than he
swallowed
brandy, massive amounts of arsenic. He lived when others would have died.

She shivered on the damp verandah. If only they could leave. Her life was in limbo. Boredom alone might kill her in Sungei Ujong, a boredom circumscribed as disease, so heavy she dreaded each new day. Death pervaded everything here, insinuating itself into nightmares to wake her sweating in the dark. She sensed it in the blaze of noon, waiting with the silent cunning that lies at the base of all tropical life. The stinking fruit of the durian, full of virile flesh, the bottomless swamps and brilliant flowers and the jungle, alive with eyes and vines as thick as bodies, waited for nothing but to claim her. She
shivered
again. If only they could leave.

Each day was endless. Her memory was bad.
Happiness
or pain seemed much the same. Annie Luke was something long digested. She watched Puteh come and go, accepting the woman's slim fingers upon her own body, helping her dress, hooking a blouse, pulling tight the strings of her corset; she saw and felt without emotion. In the anger before this lethargy she had thought of sending the woman away, but she said nothing. And she said nothing to Reggie. Women like Puteh were
interchangeable
; soon there would be another. She blamed herself. If she had not been ill things might be different. All those dark and terrible feelings that had carried her to this place were gone. Her own body had left her stranded, cast up upon an unknown shore. She had lost direction, she had lost herself, and worst of all she had lost Reggie. And yet she felt nothing, could only stare at the thatched roof of the guest house beyond the oleanders where each afternoon beneath the hot sun, Reggie
possessed the woman Puteh. She imagined their bodies moving together, the woman's breasts the colour of roasting coffee, her slim, dark limbs wound like vines about Reggie's belabouring parts. One erotic image upon another pursued her without release until she saw Reggie's head bent over his desk in his office again. Her body felt only relief to be free of Reggie's embrace, but that she could be touched by imaginings of him with another woman seemed the most perverted punishment of all. She understood nothing any more.

There were times when she could not escape, when Reggie was insistent in his need for her, when he was drunk. Then her whole being closed to him. Reggie, she sensed, was pleased with this change in their intimacy, the new frigidity in herself. It fitted his conventions of a wife better; she had found her place, he saw nothing sick about her. And suddenly now, upon the verandah, she wondered in confusion if she had not really been sick before. The feelings Reggie had unleashed within her were those no well-bred woman might feel. Everybody knew that. Why was she not happy to be free of them, to feel at last the decorous distaste society demanded? She looked down at her hands on the wet verandah and thought of the madness that had once possessed her. Perhaps, indeed, instead of being ill she was only getting better. Perhaps she should be glad, a monster had left her body. She shivered in the damp and sneezed. If only they could leave.

But there were still more months before this happened, months of illness, boredom and frustration in which each grew more listless, like weary insects under glass,
imprisoned
in a vacuum. A terrible depression seized Reggie once his liver cleared. He continued to take his strange remedy in large doses every day. Amy got over her first troubled shock. He had not only survived, he was better. It seemed he knew what he was doing. She learned from Reggie that the taking of arsenic was not without its following as eccentric fashions went. It was not uncommon in England, where it was secretly used as a stimulant. And any doctor could tell of its use in a variety
of illnesses. For Reggie its convenience ranged further. It helped his liver and the bladder complaint, it helped ward off malaria and treated those cursed and intimate diseases men were exposed to in a life of any full-bloodedness. It was marvellous stuff, said Reggie, not a household should be without some. When Amy was low again with malaria, he suggested she try arsenic. At first she refused,
frightened.
He leafed through a battered old medical book of tropical diseases to prove to her its use in malaria in conjunction with quinine. He gave it to her sparingly, a drop or two in plenty of water. She smelled and tasted nothing, and was surprised to find it helped more than quinine. But afterwards she felt depressed, apprehensive of its use. In spite of knowledge and assurance, Reggie was no doctor. What worked for him might kill her. She refused to take another dose.

Reggie became more and more morose. He poured out his first drink after breakfast. He raged at the climate and his work, he quarrelled with the Resident. A terrible change came over him. He turned against the Foreign Service. He said he and Amy would only rot for years in backwaters worse than Sungei Ujong; their own Resident was an example. He would find a new life in business. He discussed the situation with the Resident, who knew too well the character needed to survive places like Sungei Ujong. He accepted Reggie's resignation and advised him to go to Singapore and look for something there. If nothing turned up he could buy tickets home. But things were not easy in England, the Resident demurred.

The thought that they might return to England revived the life in Amy and stirred her to domestic action. She started with the packing. She tied her hair in a different way. She painted some greater moth orchids to remind her later of the jungle. When Reggie returned, bright and cheerful, she ran to greet him eagerly. He sat her down and explained his good luck.

‘It all happened at the bar of the Singapore Club. There was this fellow Cooper-Hewitt there, on leave from
Yokohama.
Good kind of chap, full of tales of the place
overtaking
Shanghai as the Paris of the East. It seems they've
need of a secretary there, at the Yokohama United Club. Cooper-Hewitt said I was the sort they wanted. He was on the club's committee. He telegraphed my application himself. He thought I'd be accepted. And if not, according to him there's no place like Yokohama for opportunity or fortune.'

Reggie stood in new clothes of sophistication against the backdrop of the jungle. The verandah creaked beneath his agitation, a storm gathered in the sky. Amy stared at him. She had heard of Yokohama, a name so strange she closed her ears to it whenever it was mentioned. It was further than the end of the world, further still than China. She had an image of it clinging to the perimeter of the Earth, nearly falling off. She looked up at Reggie's towering form in growing realization.

‘Oh Reggie, it's not possible. Please do let us go home. How can we go on to more strange lands and all their horrid deprivations?' She gave a moan of sudden pain. The deadness in her cracked; she began to sob and could not stop. Reggie tried to cheer her up.

‘Yokohama is nothing like Sungei Ujong. There are shops full of things from home, fashions from Paris and a social life like nowhere else. And of course, there is money. I can see it waiting in a pile for us, if we will only claim it. We'll be rich, Amy. We can always go home. Is it not braver first to push forward?' His voice was soft, his eyes feverish; there was no distracting him. He looked at Amy tenderly and put his arms about her. ‘At least we shall leave Sungei Ujong. No fate could be worse than remaining.' And with this fact Amy had to agree, using it like a compass to navigate the future. Reggie stroked her hair.