I sat in a tearoom and thought again about my grandfather. I wondered what sort of a man he was to cut my mother off so completely. What was so wrong with marrying someone outside your own people? Why was the world so concerned with such matters?
The owner of the tearoom came for my order, asking in English what I wanted. I saw the expected look of surprise and barely concealed disgust when I answered in Cantonese. That was my burden—I looked too foreign for the Chinese, and too Oriental for the Europeans. I was not the only one—there was a whole society of so-called Eurasians in Malaya—but even then I felt I would not belong among them. I felt as Endo-san and the Japanese people here must feel: they were hated by the locals as well as by the British and Americans, for their exploits in China were now becoming daily topics of debate from the street peddlers to the Europeans drinking their ice-cold gin in the Spotted Dog. Yet I had seen another side of them—I had seen the fragile beauty of their way of life, their appreciation of the sorrowful, transient aspects of nature, of life itself. Surely such sensitivities should count?
I thought back to the conversation with Saotome. There had been a hidden layer of meaning, I was sure. Did the Japanese wish to set up a company to compete against ours or did they intend to make my father an offer of purchase? I knew we would never sell. In his own way, my father was as Oriental in his thinking as the people of Penang. The company was to be held only by the family. Graham Hutton would not have allowed its sale. The only way the Japanese could obtain Hutton and Sons was to take it by force and there was no way that would be condoned by the British.
* * *
At the railway station I telephoned Aunt Mei. The platforms were busy, the early morning sun gilding the onion-shaped domes on their tall minarets, finding its way through the gaps in the Moorish cupolas and arches. The station was one of the loveliest buildings I had ever seen. Endo-san sat on a bench, reading a file from Saotome. A shaft of sunlight spilling through a roof window made him seem to glow.
I told Aunt Mei that I would get off at the station in Ipoh, and I obtained the address of my grandfather from her. “Please let him know I’ll visit him, Aunt Mei.”
“Yes, yes, of course I will tell him that. I am glad you wish to.”
“I want to tell him he was wrong to have treated my mother so badly. There was good in their marriage.”
There was a short silence and then she said, “There were indeed a lot of good things. You are one of them.”
Endo-san waved to me and I hung up the phone after thanking her, and we boarded the train.
* * *
The journey was pleasant, the scenery a rushing blur of greenery broken by clumps of little villages near the tracks. Whenever we slowed down at these villages a cluster of naked children ran alongside the train and we pulled down our windows to buy food and drinks from them. I pointed out water buffalo lying in muddy rice fields and once we had to stop as an elephant and her calf crossed the tracks. Near the town of Ipoh the train went across a vast lake, its surface smooth and reflective, so that for the ten minutes required to cross it I felt we were skimming across a pool of mercury. Herons flew alongside us and rose over the carriages, circling to land at the reed-covered edges of the lake. When I saw the gray-white limestone cliffs of Ipoh grow nearer I said, “I’ll have to get off soon.”
“Will you be all right?” Endo-san asked.
“I think so. It shouldn’t be too hard, seeing someone who has never meant anything in my life before.”
“You must not be bitter, or judge him before you get to know him,” he said.
“I don’t know if I’ll get to know him,” I said. The thought of establishing a connection, an understanding between my grandfather and myself, did not appeal to me and I was starting to regret my decision to see him. We would have nothing in common to bind us.
“Do not turn back now,” Endo-san said. “I have no doubt in my mind at all that it will be your grandfather who will make sure you get to know him. And I am certain the means he will use to achieve this will be quite unusual.”
“You’ve met him, haven’t you?” I asked, making a guess.
“I have,” he said. When I remained silent he became curious. “You are not going to ask me when and why?”
“I’m sure you had good reasons,” I replied. I thought back to that day on the ledge up on Penang Hill when I decided to trust him completely. I told him that now, and a shade of sorrow darkened his eyes.
“
Sumimasen.
I am sorry,” he said, after a while.
I was about to ask him what he was apologizing for when the train slowed down and we entered Ipoh station. I tidied the table in the compartment and threw away the little packets of food.
“You have to go,” he said, pulling my bag from the overhead rack. He opened his wallet. “Do you have enough money?”
“Yes,” I smiled, touched by his concern. “My grandfather is one of the wealthiest men in Malaya, you know.”
“Take some money anyway. I will see you in Penang. Come to the island when you return home.”
“I will.” I gave him a quick hug and got down on to the platform. I turned and waved to him once and then walked out of the station.
Chapter Ten
I was not surprised to find a car waiting for me. The old Indian driver leaning against it straightened when he saw me come out into the sunshine. “Mr. Hutton?”
I gave him a quick nod.
“Your grandfather’s house is not far away,” he said as he opened the door for me.
I had never been to Ipoh. My father had never brought us here, even though we owned mines in the Kinta Valley surrounding the town. Ipoh was originally just a little tin-mining village, fought over by the warring princes of the Perak Sultanate until the British intervened to prevent the succession of wars from spilling out into their neighboring protectorates. Chinese coolies were soon imported to work the mines, and by their ingenuity and hard work the village grew into a sizeable if charmless town with its own railway station, schools, courts, and wealthy residential districts. Ipoh was well known for the caves in the limestone cliffs that surrounded it. Many of them had been used by hermits and sages seeking to meditate in seclusion from the world. After they died or disappeared, temples were built in these caves to deify them.
The town was hot and dusty, almost bare of trees, and the limestone cliffs reflected the glare and heat of the sun. We left the streets of the town and turned into Tambun Road. The mansions along this road were owned by the Chinese mining tycoons, most of whom had begun as shirtless coolies in the mines. When they had made their fortunes they built their houses in the European style, so for a while I felt as though I were back in Northam Road in Penang.
The car entered the driveway of a house that could have been anywhere in Penang, with its standard woodwork, its central portico and pediment. What set it apart was its color. The entire house had been given a coat of light yellow, the sort of color no European would ever use to paint his walls.
When I stepped down I saw Aunt Mei under the porch. “What’re you doing here?” I asked.
“It is only three hours from Penang,” she replied. “I have come to visit my father.”
Despite feeling slightly annoyed with her manipulations, I was glad to see a familiar face. The house was oppressive. Marble lions reared up on pedestals on each side of the doors, which were made of thick wooden horizontal poles set in a sliding frame, and appeared to me like the bars of a cell. It was dark within, but the flowery patterns on the marble floors glowed softly. Large portraits of mandarins with braided queues and sitting on slender, simple chairs hung on the walls. A staircase curled down in the middle of the hall. Doors opened into formal sitting rooms on both sides.
Aunt Mei led me to a sitting room that had only four rosewood chairs, two on each side, against the walls. An old triptych hung on the last empty wall, showing connected scenes from a mandarin’s household. The triptych faced an open courtyard, sunken in the middle, with four large jade-colored jars placed at its corners. A solitary miniaturized tree stood on a wooden stand in the center.
A maidservant served us Iron Goddess of Mercy tea as we waited. The house was still, except for the cries of birds and the flutter of swallows’ wings in the eaves. Far away I heard the sound of water falling over rocks which lightened the atmosphere and seemed to cool the house. There came a movement outside the room and we stood up expectantly.
He entered the room alone, dressed in his mandarin robes. Khoo Wu An was a large stocky man, the robes barely hiding the muscles in his arms, which had once spent eighteen hours a day hauling water and sand from the mines, or so my aunt had said. She had also told me he was sixty years old, but to me, on that day, he was a formidable man, whatever his age.
Meeting for the first time, we studied each other with careful curiosity. He had soft white hair and wide intelligent eyes which blinked rapidly behind his rimless glasses. I was aware of a deep quietness and Aunt Mei’s reined-in natural buoyancy. He indicated a chair. “Please sit down,” he said in English and in a deep rolling voice that was confident and firm. I hid my surprise and returned to my seat. He had a brusqueness to his manner which was softened by his warm and open smile.
“How was your journey?” he asked.
“Uneventful,” I said, hoping he would not catch the touch of irony in my voice.
He poured more tea for me. Then he took out a small piece of jade, a slender pin like a blade of grass, which hung on a thin silver chain around his neck and dipped it briefly into his cup. He looked at it and then inserted the pin back beneath his collar. It was a movement so natural, the result of years of habit, that he and Aunt Mei seemed unaware of it.
He now looked at me without reserve, his graying eyebrows trying to meet, perhaps hoping to find traces of himself in my features. A typical old Chinese man, I thought. But I was mistaken.
“You are very much like your mother,” he said.
“People always say I resemble my father.”
“Then they do not know what they are looking for,” he said firmly.
“And what should one look for then?” I asked.
“Something beyond what the face presents, something obvious and yet intangible. Like breath on a cold night, perhaps.”
He stood up when I had finished my tea, and said, “We are experiencing a dry spell in Ipoh. You must be hot and tired. Go and have a rest and cool yourself. We will talk more tonight.”
He smiled at me again and watched as Aunt Mei took my arm and led me upstairs.
* * *
From the manner in which Aunt Mei led me to my room, I knew. We went up the stairs and walked along a corridor. Its emptiness was filled by small half-moon tables placed against the unadorned walls, upon which rested vases and figurines of three old men which, Aunt Mei later told me, were the Taoist trinity of Prosperity, Happiness, and Longevity.
She opened the door and waited for me to enter. The room was furnished in the European style, and a four-poster bed stood in the middle, the mosquito netting piled high above. There was a dressing table by the windows and in the corner a Balinese teak
almari,
a squat heavy cupboard that overwhelmed the porcelain washbasin beside it. Aunt Mei was about to speak, but I held up my hand and said, “My mother’s room.”
The wooden floorboards creaked as I walked across to the window. High wooden shutters opened out to a narrow balcony, which curled over a garden hidden from the world outside by walls pressed with creepers. In the center of the garden was a fountain, and with a feeling of something shifting I knew I had seen it before, perhaps in the other life Endo-san believed in. I studied it with greater attention and saw it was similar to the one that was in Istana.
My grandfather was correct. The weather was dry and hot and I stepped back with relief into the room. I opened the
almari,
but it was empty.
“Everything was removed after she married your father. Her clothes were given away, her books donated to the Ipoh Library. Everything,” Aunt Mei said. “When I came back one day I found this room as empty as you see it now. I was furious with your grandfather.”
“What did my mother say when you told her?” I asked.
“She never said anything. But your father asked me to describe the fountain you see outside to him, how it looked, even how the water sounded. He told me to be as detailed as I could, and then he built another one so that she would have something from her home, from her youth.”
We sat on the bed, listening to the water running in the fountain, to the birds that so loved it in this heat. “Would you like to sleep here?” Aunt Mei asked.
“Yes,” I said. “I would.”
* * *
I slept well: the sound of the fountain rested me. When I woke the afternoon sun had come in through the slats of the shutters, striping the wooden floorboards. They were burning hot when I walked across them. The fan on the ceiling spun slowly, reflecting fragments of sunlight. Birds whistled and chirped outside and the strong smell of frangipani came in from the garden and sought refuge in the room. I looked at my watch; Endo-san would have already arrived at Penang, I thought.