The Glass Palace (56 page)

Later in the day Arjun borrowed an Alvis staff car and drove into Sungei Pattani. He went to a Chinese restaurant where he and Hardy had eaten a couple of times. He asked for Ah Fatt, the proprietor, and showed him the address.

The proprietor took him outside into the shaded arcade and pointed across the street to a red roadster. That was Alison's car, he told Arjun, everyone in town knew it by sight. She had gone to her hairdresser's and would be out in a few minutes.

‘There she is.'

She was wearing a
cheongsam
of black silk, with a slit that ran from her instep to her knee. Her hair framed her face like a polished helmet, its deep black sheen contrasting brightly with the soft glow of her skin.

It was several weeks since Arjun had spoken to a woman, and a very long time since he had beheld such a strikingly attractive face. He removed his cap and began to turn it over in his hands. He was just about to cross over, to introduce himself, when the red car pulled away from the shop and disappeared down the road.

Now the periodic disturbances of the mountainside did indeed become auguries of Alison's arrival. The rising of the birds from the canopy was a sure sign for Dinu to go hurrying down to the gap to look below—and often enough it really was Alison, dressed in one of the sombre black dresses that she wore to the office. Knowing that he'd be there, she'd look up and wave, and even as she was crossing the stream she'd begin to unbutton her blouse and unfasten her belt. Her clothes would be gone by the time she stepped into the clearing and he would be waiting, with his shutter primed.

It seemed that the hours he had spent attuning his eye to the mountainside had been an unconscious preparation for this—for Alison. He would spend long stretches of time thinking of where to place her, against which wall, or which part of the plinth; he'd imagine her seated upright, leaning against a lintel, one leg stretched straight in front of her and another bent back at the knee. In the gap between her legs he would glimpse a striation in the pitted surface of the laterite, or a soft mound of moss, as visual echoes of her body's fissures and curves. But the materiality of her presence would quickly disarrange these carefully imagined schemes. Once her body was placed where he wanted it, something would prove to be not quite right; he would frown into his square canvas of ground glass and go back to kneel beside her, sinking his fingertips softly into the tensile firmness of her thighs, teasing out minute changes in the angles of her limbs. Coaxing her legs further apart—or closer together—he would run a finger through the triangular swell of her pubis, sometimes combing the curls down,
sometimes raking them back. Framed within the unnatural clarity of his viewfinder, these details seemed to assume a monumental significance: kneeling between her legs, he would wet his forefinger to draw a thin trail of moisture, a glistening hairline.

She would laugh at the intent seriousness with which he executed these intimate caresses, only to go hurrying back to his camera. When the reel was done, she would stop him before he could load another. ‘No. Enough. Come here now.'

She would tug impatiently at his clothes—the shirt that was tucked carefully into his waistband, the undershirt beneath it. ‘Why don't you just take these off when you come here—as I do?'

He would turn gruff. ‘I can't, Alison . . . it's not my way . . .'

She would make him sit on the stone plinth and then peel away his shirt. Pushing him back, she would make him lie prone upon the stone. He would shut his eyes and knot his fingers under his head while she knelt between his legs. When his head cleared he would see her smiling at him, like a lioness looking up from a kill, mouth glistening. The lines were as perfect as any that could be imagined, the horizontal planes of her forehead, her eyebrows and her mouth, perfectly balanced by the verticals of her black, straight hair, and the translucent filaments that hung suspended from her lips.

She would see, reflected in his eyes, exactly what he beheld. Laughing out loud, she would say: ‘No. This is a picture you'll never see anywhere but in your own head.'

Then afterwards, quickly but methodically, he would dress himself again, tucking his shirt carefully into his trousers, fastening his belt, kneeling to tie the laces of his canvas shoes.

‘Why bother?' she'd challenge him. ‘You'll just have to take them off again.'

He'd answer seriously, unsmiling: ‘I have to, Alison . . . I have to be dressed when I work.'

Sometimes she would grow bored with the length of sitting. Often she would talk to herself while he was adjusting his
camera, throwing in words of Malay, Tamil and Chinese, reminiscing about her mother and father, thinking aloud about Timmy.

‘Dinu,' she cried one day in exasperation, ‘I feel I have more of your attention when you're looking into your camera than when you're lying here with me.'

‘And what's wrong with that?'

‘I'm not just a thing, for your camera to focus on. Sometimes it's as if you have no other interest in me but this.'

He saw that she was upset and he left his tripod to sit with her. ‘I see more of you in this way than I would in any other,' he said. ‘If I were to talk to you for hours I wouldn't know you better. I don't say this is better than talking . . . it's just my way—my way of understanding . . . You mustn't think this is easy for me . . . I never do portraits; they frighten me . . . the intimacy . . . being in someone's company that long— I've never wanted to do them . . . nudes even less. These are my first and it's not easy.'

‘Should I be flattered?'

‘I don't know . . . but I feel my pictures have helped me know you . . . I think I know you better than I've ever known anyone.'

She laughed. ‘Just because you've taken some pictures?'

‘Not just that.'

‘Then?'

‘Because this is the most intimate way that I can know anyone . . . or anything.'

‘Are you saying you wouldn't have known me if it weren't for your camera?'

He looked down at his hands, frowning. ‘I can tell you this. If I hadn't spent this time with you, here, taking pictures . . . I wouldn't be able to say, with such certainty . . .'

‘What?'

‘That I'm in love with you.'

She sat up, startled, but before she could speak, Dinu continued, ‘. . . And I also know . . .'

‘What?'

‘That I want you to marry me.'

‘Marry you!' She rested her chin on her knees. ‘What makes you think I'd want to marry someone who can only talk to me through a camera?'

‘Don't you then?'

‘I don't know, Dinu.' She shook her head impatiently. ‘Why marriage? Isn't this good enough?'

‘Marriage is what I want—not just this.'

‘Why spoil everything, Dinu?'

‘Because I want it . . .'

‘You don't know me, Dinu.' She smiled at him, running a hand over the back of his head. ‘I'm not like you. I'm wilful, I'm spoilt: Timmy used to call me wayward. You'd hate me in a week if you were married to me.'

‘I think that's for me to judge.'

‘And what would we be marrying for? Timmy isn't here and nor are my parents. You've seen how unwell my grandfather is.'

‘But what if . . .?' He leant over to place a hand on her belly. ‘What if there's a child?'

She shrugged. ‘We'll see then. For now—let's just be content with what we have.'

Without a single word being said on the subject, Dinu understood, soon after the time of their first meeting, that between himself and Ilongo there existed some sort of connection—a link that was known to Ilongo but of which he himself was unaware. This understanding arose gradually, out of their conversations, nurtured by a pattern of questions and occasional oblique asides—by Ilongo's curiosity about the Raha house in Rangoon, by his interest in family photographs, by the manner in which his references to ‘Your father' slowly metamorphosed so that the pronoun disappeared.

Dinu understood that he was being prepared, that when Ilongo judged it right he would let him know about whatever
it was that lay between them. This awareness evoked strangely little curiosity in Dinu—and this was not merely because his attention was wholly claimed by Alison. It was also because of Ilongo himself—because there was something about him that was so transparently trustworthy that it caused Dinu no anxiety to concede to him his superior knowledge.

Except for Alison, Dinu saw more of Ilongo than of anyone else at Morningside: he was dependent on him for many small things—posting letters, cashing cheques, borrowing bicycles. When he decided to set up his own dark room, it was Ilongo who helped him find second-hand equipment in Penang.

One Sunday, Dinu accompanied Ilongo on his weekly trip to Sungei Pattani, with Saya John. They visited Ah Fatt's restaurant, where Saya John handed over an envelope, as always. ‘I do it for my wife,' he told Dinu. ‘She was Hakka you know, on both sides. She always said that I was Hakka too, except that no one could tell for sure, since I never knew my parents.'

Afterward Dinu and Ilongo drove Saya John to the Church of Christ the King, on the outskirts of town. The church was bright and cheerful-looking with a soaring white-washed steeple and a facade that was ornamented with polished wooden rails. Under the shade of a flowering tree, a colourfully dressed congregation had gathered. A white-robed Irish priest led Saya John away, clapping him on the back: ‘Mr Martins! And how are you today?'

Dinu and Ilongo went to the morning show at the cinema and saw Edward G. Robinson in
I am the Law.
On the way back, after collecting Saya John, they stopped at Ilongo's mother's house, for a bowl of noodles.

Ilongo's mother was near-sighted and prematurely bent. When Ilongo introduced him, Dinu could tell that she already knew exactly who he was. She asked him to come closer and touched his face with fingers that were cracked and callused. She said, in Hindustani, ‘My Ilongo looks much more like your father than you do.'

In some region of his consciousness Dinu understood exactly
what she was saying, but he responded to her words as though to a pleasantry. ‘Yes, that's true. I can see the resemblance.'

Apart from this one charged moment, the visit went well. Saya John seemed unusually alert, almost his old self. They all ate several helpings of noodles and at the end of the meal, Ilongo's mother served thick, milky tea in glass tumblers. When they left, they were all aware—in a manner that was not in the least uncomfortable—that a visit that had begun as a meeting between strangers, had somehow changed, in tone and texture, to a family reunion.

On the way back to the house they sat three abreast in the truck, with Ilongo driving and Saya John in the middle. Ilongo looked visibly relieved, as though some sort of hurdle had been crossed. But Dinu found it hard to give shape to the thought that Ilongo might be his half-brother. A brother was what Neel was—a boundary to mark yourself off against. This was not what Ilongo was. If anything, Ilongo was an incarnation of his father—as he'd been in his youth, a far better man than the one whom he, Dinu, had known. There was some consolation in this.

It was on this night that Dinu mentioned his suspicions to Alison for the first time. She'd slipped into his room after dinner, as she sometimes did after settling her grandfather in his bed. At midnight she woke to see Dinu sitting by the window, smoking a cigarette. ‘What's the matter, Dinu? I thought you were asleep.'

‘Couldn't sleep.'

‘Why not?'

Dinu told her about his visit to Ilongo's mother and what she had said. Then he looked straight into her eyes and asked: ‘Tell me, Alison . . . am I just imagining all this—or is there something to it?'

She shrugged and took a puff of his cigarette, without answering the question. So he asked again, more insistently: ‘Is there any truth to this, Alison? You should tell me if you know . . .'