Not all the guests had arrived and there was a small group—about six people in all—admiring the pond. A short, wide Scotsman in an expensive jacket—the investor, I suppose—skipped a stone across the pond. He got it to skip ten times and I was rather thrilled to see a grown-up do something which was against my mother’s rules. I turned to check if she had witnessed this outrage and there she was, directly in front of the tent, slobbering over John Slater, her hands pulling his face into her mouth.
Daddy was being rather naughty? I said, outraged. I had finished all the shrimp. Slater made a gesture and a fat woman in an apron came to the table. He then had one of his conversations with her. I don’t know what it was about. I did not care. I told him I didn’t see how he could possibly dispute what I had seen.
You know, darling, do you really think it is sensible to involve yourself with matters behind your parents’ bedroom door? Do you really want to know?
We never had any horses in the first place. We had no horses to show to anyone.
Is that yes or no?
I was more than a little nervous, but I would not be bullied. Please don’t tell me lies, I said. I can bear whatever it is so long as I know it’s the truth. You must swear.
I solemnly swear I will tell the truth, if that’s what you really want.
I do.
Very well, darling. Let’s just say your father had rather catholic tastes.
What does that mean?
It means he did not discriminate. He was very fond of women, as we all know, but he liked young men as well. Your mother knew this. She always thought I was doing it with him.
Hearing this, I did not imagine myself at all upset. Yet at the same time it was not a thing I had ever suspected. I asked John Slater if my mother’s suspicion had been well founded.
Not my sort of thing, but your father did love me and she knew it. And when he took Roberts up to see the horses, I suppose she imagined that everyone knew what was going on. She was humiliated. That’s why she kissed me, you see? And I failed her because I was embarrassed, and I should not have been. I should have participated—that is what I’ve thought ever since. But I freed myself, and she was completely furious.
You did no such thing.
Oh yes I did, dear girl. That you must believe, for it has stayed with me all these years. Do you know the last words she said to me? She said: You bastard, Jacko, you total cunt.
My mother never spoke like that.
She did that day, Micks.
24
We had been drinking, he said, which may explain why none of us were excessively concerned at first. In fact, I distinctly remember wondering how the Armstrong Siddeley’s motor kept on turning. It was a large and eccentric beast, given to running rough and stalling on the sunniest day. But here, in the middle of the pond, it just kept blowing big fat bubbles out its exhaust pipe as if it never planned to stop.
I could see your mother through the narrow rear window. She was sitting behind the wheel. She didn’t even move her head. Who could imagine what she was thinking? She had wound down the windows and rolled back the hatch in the roof, presumably to accelerate the sinking, but the car, while being pathetically underpowered, was very well made, and the damn thing floated. It seemed almost comic at first, this great tank of a motor floating in a lovely pond and all of us in our best tatt, champagne glasses in hand. But finally the engine stopped and the royal old beast began to list. I saw then that something unfortunate might occur. Yet even when I plunged in, I was rather more worried about my new plus fours than anything else. I swam out to get her but the weight of water against the door was too great and it simply would not budge.
Through all of this your mother clung to the wheel, staring straight ahead as if I weren’t there. When I tried to get in through the window, my weight made the car list even more, so I headed for the hatch up on the roof, clambering over the radiator and walking along the bonnet. Then I saw she was crying and it began to dawn on me what a bad state she had got herself into. I climbed up on top and hauled her—a little brutally I fear—out through the roof. She did not like me, not at all, but she did not use those horrid words again.
Boofy, meanwhile, had been up at the stables with his friend and he looked down to see his beloved Armstrong Siddeley sinking in the middle of the pond. He quickly finished whatever he was doing and came striding down. He had a riding crop, I seem to remember, and was swishing it in what might have seemed a jaunty way. He did not know your mother was inside the car.
John, that’s not right, I said to Slater.
You were not there, Micks. You had already run away.
But you cannot have pulled her out. She drowned.
He hesitated. Don’t you remember where you were?
I was in the house, but I know she drowned. She was my mother, for God’s sake.
Darling, the pond was too shallow. The water never rose above the door handle. Don’t you remember where the car was next morning?
Actually, I did. The gypsies from below the Oxford Road came and pulled it out with a rusty old Ferguson tractor. They charged a lot of money and left horrible ruts and skid marks on the lawn my mother loved. She would have had it top-dressed and reseeded before the day was out, but she was lying in a funeral parlor and the house was so wretchedly empty without her. I don’t know what the servants were doing, though I do recall that the flowers in the hall were left to die and that I was surprised they could’ve gone so quickly.
Yes, but where did you go when you ran into the house?
To my room, I suppose.
You were under the kitchen table, said Slater.
I had not the least memory of this.
You poor little thing, he said, you were shivering. You must have been there for a very long time because it took a while to get your mother out through the roof and carry her onto the lawn. The pond had always looked absolutely gorgeous but it had a good foot of silt on the bottom and was filled with bright-green algae that now clung to both of us. Who can say what she really felt? Sheer mortification, I would guess. She stood so very straight and squared her lovely shoulders, but her clothes were sodden and her underwear was showing and there was weed clinging to her knees. She had lost her shoes in the mud and walked past her guests with bare feet and a rather terrifying smile. Boofy was in a total fright, but he did his best to help her through this humiliation.
My dear, he said. And he held out his arm, offering to escort her to the house. She seemed to consider this for a moment and then she pushed him very violently in the chest, so hard that he staggered backwards on his heels, and then she ran up to the house. Boofy lumbered after, but she’d ducked into the kitchen, a place he would never have thought to find her. And that was where she did it, darling. Not in the pond.
How?
Please, Micks. You don’t want me to do this.
How?
Knife, I’m afraid.
Where?
Throat.
She cut her own throat?
I’m sorry.
So why did everyone lie to me? Why did they tell me she drowned inside the bloody car? She was my mother.
Who said this, do you imagine?
They all did, I cried. I was exceedingly angry. I slammed my glass down so hard that everyone in the sordid restaurant turned to look.
Darling, don’t make a scene. Please. Would you like to take a walk?
No, I bloody well would not like to take a walk.
Who told you this story, darling? Was it poor old Boofy?
I couldn’t remember who told me. It was just something I had always known.
But you see, dear old Micks, it makes no sense that they should lie to you.
On the contrary, it’s so like my fucking father. He was such a coward about death.
He was not a coward, dear, but I think he was rather ashamed of the way he carried on at funerals.
He didn’t have the spine to tell me the truth.
Micks, he would’ve t
hought you already knew the truth. After all, he did find you beside her body. She had fallen next to the table, and you’d crawled out and taken her hand and all that blood soaked the hem of your frilly white dress. It was so ghastly. I do not doubt that you have very properly forgotten it. I wrote a poem about it once, you know. ‘Blood Poppy’
I believed him then, not because I remembered the poem but because I recognised the fuzzy outlines of the event, as one might recall a childhood nightmare that contains no more than the dregs of terror. It was a horrid feeling, a kind of nausea. I saw John Slater watching me, his bright eyes dulled by his own distress.
I should never have told you, he said.
But all I could think was how wrong I had been in hating him almost all my life. When I rose from my chair I felt the whole noisy restaurant go quiet. I did not care. I squatted beside the great seducer, took his hand, and held it against my lips.
I’m so sorry, I said. I have been so unfair to you.
I laid my cheek against the hand.
Come now, Micks, he said, everyone is staring.
I don’t give a bugger.
No, but I do.
I don’t recall him paying, though of course he must have. I had no idea where we went walking, only that it was down by the river where there was a grand old mosque. Then we passed the cricket ground and that famous club the English called The Spotted Dog because its early members had included non-whites like Sultan Abdul Samad.
It was along this street beside The Spotted Dog—it was actually Jalan Raja—that we now continued, in a close, companionable way, joined by the awfulness of a past which by now had seeped into us so deeply, leaving us with a sadness which would always ache and never properly mend.
You know, Micks, for years and years I’ve had this rather pathetic notion that Malaysia is my home. In fact there are instructions in my will that my ashes should be scattered in the South China Sea off Kota Baru. But of course I don’t know a soul here. Looking at mad old Chubb made me see how pathetic a gesture that would be. They can bury me in Highgate—I’ll be happy enough there. But the women are so beautiful, don’t you think? And I would have liked to fall in love just one more time. It was the only thing I was ever any good at, you know. No good at life at all.
Perhaps that is life.
No, it isn’t.
We turned onto Batu Road and then up Jalan Campbell, past the shops that now, thirteen years on, are so familiar to me: the doctor with the photographs of hemorrhoids, the kopi kedai, the two tailors and, of course, the bicycle shop. Here Slater paused, producing first a fat envelope and then a pen with which to write on it.
The money for the suit, he said. I’m just sorry I won’t be here to see the little prig looking dapper. I do not doubt that a good suit will make him appear even more insane.
This plan was frustrated by the shop’s steel roller door, with no slot through which the envelope could be safely slipped inside.
We can send him a cheque, I suggested.
Instead Slater took my hand and led me first down a side street, then into an alley filled with puddles and unsanitary smells.
Couldn’t the hotel look after this for us?
Certainly not. He moved confidently through the maze of little lanes, then stopped and took me by the shoulder. We were looking down a passageway no more than three feet wide.
He pointed at a lighted window. That’s it.
How could you know?
As we watched a second window lit up on the floor above and there, as clearly illuminated as on a stage, stood a young woman, perhaps twenty years old. Neither Chinese nor Malay, she may have been Indian, but not Tamil, for her skin was far too fair. She had very large eyes, wide lips, and was startlingly, achingly, beautiful.
Slater squeezed my shoulder far too hard. There it is, he said.
No.
Yes, that’s it, he repeated. God damn it.
The girl was peering at the glass, studying her reflection.
It’s Noussette, he said.
At that moment I was scarcely paying attention. I was filled with sadness, for many reasons, not least that I was leaving in the morning and would never get my hands on that poetry.
It’s her child, Slater said. Micks, look at her. There must have been a child.
You mean this is Noussette’s child?
Shush! Just look. God. It is her. Exactly.
The girl now began to brush her hair and the pair of us, side by side in the nasty little alley, watched her until she drew a curtain and left us alone in the night.
In Jalan Campbell we caught a cab. We did not speak. Slater seemed to have forgotten all about the money. He looked pale, exhausted, stricken. In the hotel lobby we said good night, arranging to meet for breakfast at six o’clock and depart for the airport an hour later.
25
I went to bed with the disconcerting knowledge that almost everything I had assumed about my life was incorrect, that I had been baptised in blood and raised on secrets and misconstructions which had, obviously, made me who I was.
Yet to finally glimpse my white dress dyed with my mother’s blood was, quite honestly, not much worse than the horror I’d invented for myself. If my life had been shaped by my misunderstanding of John Slater, I was not unhappy with the shape itself. For no matter what crooked road I had travelled, it led me to the moment when I first opened ‘The Waste Land’ and found the laws all broken, and in those dazzling eruptions and disconcerting schisms I saw a world whose dreadful harmonies I never guessed existed. How I fed off it, puzzled at it, peered into it, scratched its scabby surfaces to uncover the coral reef below. I had read poetry before, of course, but nothing that prepared me for this—and no matter why I hated Slater or wished to prick the pretensions of his verse, I arrived at ‘The Waste Land’ and knew that to be both mysterious and true. It is very hard to wish things had happened any other way.
Actually, what had most startled me about the evening’s revelations was my father’s sexual nature. It was this that later stopped me from sleeping. Perhaps Slater had been correct— I should not have looked behind my parents’ bedroom door, for not even three large glasses of Scotch could still the whirling pictures in my head. For hours and hours I put Boofy with all the men I recalled from childhood, one on one, together, getting accustomed to the idea. I mean I mated him. I put him with the Squire to see how that would fit or feel. I put him with our gardener—my father’s moustache to the one side, Wilke’s stubbly chin to the other—but of course it was already too late to learn the truth. Had Boofy prayed to God in Chapel to forgive him? Did he think it a stinky beastly business the moment it was over? That is not at all what I would wish for him. No, I would prefer that he strolled up the hill with a blond-haired actor, just as casually as Slater had said. I wish for them to stroke the horse together, and for Lord Wode-Douglass to move his broad hand from the horse’s flank to between the young man’s legs.
Of course this desire for the happiness of a dead man is not really about him at all. Like my father, I have a secret.
I have said that I do not like sex, and if you say a thing like that clearly enough and manage to make yourself look sufficiently frightful people do tend to believe you. Fortunately or not, it is untrue. And while I had always imagined my secret nature as being perverse and original, I now began to wonder if I was nothing more unique than my father’s daughter.
You must not think me promiscuous, because this is not the case. I live mostly like a monk inside a cell, surrounded by my mess, my manuscripts, cat food, kitty litter, gas fire, and a shilling in the meter. But I am not mild, would never be thought mild by anyone.
I told Slater about my jealous cat, but what I really had was Annabelle—by then my secret for over twenty-five years. We met at the disgusting boarding school they sent me to when Boofy had his breakdown. I was in a fury for years before she finally arrived. They could not control me. If I had not been The Honourable Sarah Wode-Douglass I am sure they would have s
ent me down, for I very quickly became a bad girl and was a very well established bad girl when Annabelle turned up. She was fifteen when I first saw her, such a dazzling creature even then, with very pale skin, very black wavy hair, wide mouth, and the darkest, most mischievous almond eyes. I fell in love watching her play tennis the first week of term. She was really just a little thing but she had such grace and fight and she gave a little ‘uh’ every time she hit the ball. Dear Jesus. Of course she did not mean to set me off. She was not a bad girl at all, which made it particularly difficult for me to get her attention and for her to understand that she would finally like me very much indeed. I am not patient by nature but with Annabelle I had no choice. From the day I was smitten until the moment that we actually kissed was in fact an entire year, a year made lovely with so many tiny successes, and so much longing.
That summer her absent-minded mother let her come to stay at Allenhurst, so in the long days when Boofy was up in London, mostly occupied with not much more than lunch, I had my clever, pretty darling to myself. I shocked her often but delighted her all the more, and there was no part of her that was secret to me.
Annabelle now lives near Kew, where she is terribly respectable, but she does so love to go shopping in Kensington, twice a month if we are lucky. This part of my life is unknown to anyone. The Housewife and I will have a little lunch. She will tell me about the latest crisis with her children and I will complain to her about the magazine. We will shop a little. And some time in the middle of the afternoon I will take her back to Old Church Street.
We are very proper indeed, which is the point. Even when we get to my flat, even when the door is shut, there is not so much as a kiss. I live in a pig sty, it is true, and she cannot bear it. She tidies while I drink her in. She moves around my hovel as she once moved across a tennis court and now my mind is filled with sex and I lie on the sofa just watching. She does like how tall I am, the length of me, and I do stretch myself, point my toes, extend my arms back over my head, releasing myself from all the tension that comes from wishing to be small.