The Painted Cage (3 page)

Their baggage had arrived, the wedding presents, books and pictures, and these when arranged about the house gave some semblance of identity. But nothing could cover up the archaic sanitary arrangements, nor the pungency of incredible smells that assailed her nose. The musky smell of the smooth-skinned servants who moved silent and barefoot about the house. The smell of mud and rotting fish, of ripe fruit and open drains, of bat droppings and old rattan. And everywhere the peppery dankness of the jungle and the nauseous, stinking durian, like a decomposing body. But there was also besides these the sweet scent of the pigeon orchid and the beautiful frangipani flowers, and in the evening the tang of joss sticks and the fragrance of wood fires. Her eyes, too, slowly became used to the cursed sun that at noon in a pitch of white heat drained everything of colour. She got up early for the dawn and later watched the heavy sunset streaming like blood across the sky. She filled the house with scarlet hibiscus and flaming cannas. Everything
seemed made in excess here, in colour, in texture, in substance. To observe it became in the end fatiguing. She waited for the rain, for the break it brought in the sky and in emotion, but before it stopped was already tired of its relentless, uncontained pouring. The balance of things was different here, obeying an alien rhythm.

Sometimes now she sketched and painted as she had in Somerset; she was said to have a talent. She did this secretly at first, wishing to face alone this bridge to her past life. She painted a liana climbing a tree outside her window, lighting the dark greenery with its flaming
blossoms
. The industry of her eye and brush was little compared to the immensity of transporting with each stroke the person she had been in Somerset to the
strangeness
of Sungei Ujong. But it seemed at the end of the exercise that some link had been established, and yet there was only a group of crimson petals upon the page. That evening she showed it to Reggie, shyly expecting his praise.

‘I did it for you,' she told him. She had wrapped it up carefully and watched him extract it from tissue paper.

‘It's a pretty thing you've done, Kitten,' he appraised it at arm's length and gave a laugh. ‘I've a talented wife into the bargain.' There was condescension in his voice, as if she were a child. Soon he put the picture on the table by his whisky and picked up an office report. ‘Three men killed in Serembang today in another clash of those Chinese societies.' He took a gulp of his drink, and when he replaced it on the table the base of the glass covered part of the painting.

‘Don't you like it? I wanted to do something for you. I thought you might hang it near you, in the office,' she suggested. Reggie considered the painting again. He gave Amy a kiss.

‘Good idea, but the Resident won't have that kind of stuff on the walls and it's a bit wild for the drawing room, don't you think? Try again, Kitten, it will give you something to do.' He smiled and returned to his report. ‘There's going to be more Chinese trouble in the gaming
houses tomorrow, mark my words. We'd better be prepared.'

‘Is it so bad?' she asked.

‘It won't be if we are vigilant,' Reggie replied, thinking she spoke of the Chinese troubles. Amy bit her lip. She could not blame him, he might be right; her talent was meagre, but the hurt spread deeply through her. Beyond a question of dexterity it seemed a rejection of herself. And yet later the Resident's wife, seeing the painting, praised it in delight. Accepting it from Amy, she framed and hung it upon her wall to Reggie's great surprise.

Before long, inevitably, between the heat came the fever and shivering that without warning took Amy in its grip. Her terror, so far from doctors, was not lessened by the Resident's wife's calm diagnosis of malaria, as if she had a cold. She was dosed with quinine and the fever fell. In the rush to follow Reggie illness or discomfort had been as distant in her mind as was the actuality of Sungei Ujong. The only terrain of any substance then had been her relationship with Reggie. And she wondered at the naïvety that could have brought her so far in every sense without a single question, living only in each moment. Yet then as now, deep within that secret part of herself, nothing had changed. And of what Reggie gave her there was never enough. He knew how to fan a madness in her until she no longer knew herself. Until she was ashamed, for in her mind the only relief and the only reality were those hours upon their bed.

She had not married in ignorance. In the fields about Cranage she had often watched the coupling of animals, but vague and poetic images of love obscured the nature of this act in marriage. It was also distorted by a
whispered
knowledge that men were gross in their desires. She had been advised to dread, ignore and stoically endure the carnality of love. Her mind was full of these warnings, but deeper in herself she sensed a hunger that came from no clear point. She had stood before Reggie on their wedding night without the trepidation she had expected. He observed her silently in her white
nightgown
. His eyes, usually so cool, held an expression she
did not recognize. They reminded her of Frank. She stepped forward and offered him her mouth, surprised at herself for so boldly initiating everything she had been warned against.

‘You're not afraid of me, Amy, are you? he asked, looking down at her. She was unsure from his tone whether the question was a reassurance or an accusation.

‘Should I be afraid‚' she asked, worried at the apparent absence of this emotion in herself. She was filled by suppressed excitement but she could find no fear.

He kissed her then, his hands moving to caress her body and spread upon her hips, pressing that part of herself to him, hard. She felt his teeth. As he kissed her he began to undress her, pulling at the nightdress and his own clothes. The gown fell about her and she was left naked and vulnerable before him, still held fast upon his mouth. He half-carried her to the big carved bed and spread her there upon it. She wished he would lower the light, but instead he drew back to observe her. The expression she saw in his face filled her with a feeling his kisses had not stirred. She was frightened then, not of him, but of what was happening to herself. She was lost, possessed by a swollen, voluptuous feeling. She closed her eyes. His hands touched her, his mouth followed over her body. He laid his naked weight upon her. She did not know what he wanted from her. She lay passive, wishing to open to him, wider, deeper, to the very core of herself until she enclosed him entirely. He began to whisper to her, do this or that. She felt no shame, nothing but obedience, the beating of her heart and the wish to follow avidly to wherever it was he led. She was surprised at the urgency of the whole thing. She had imagined a slow and dreamlike sequence without definite
destination,
not this race towards some destructive end.

In the light she saw his eyes were glazed and his face disfigured and knew she was aflame with the same expression. She wanted him soldered to her, so that there was no division between them, so that the crazed energy that escaped him would enter her and flow back into him. She did as he told her but was unprepared for the sudden
wall of pain that arrested all the strange currents of pleasure. She tried to thrust him away, but he was pushing deep into her flesh with a violence that suffocated her. She thought it would never end, that she would die, and screamed for him to stop. And suddenly he did, falling upon her breast, obediently still. Without moving he fell asleep.

She lay wide-eyed, reliving the strange experience, at one moment shameful ecstasy and at another pain. Beneath the shock her nerves were naked, her body seemed in turmoil. In spite of hurt and confusion she still desired Reggie. She wished she knew what end it was her feelings pushed her to, what her body sought to know. She tossed beside him until he roused himself and looked at her, a strange expression on his face, almost of disapproval, as at a discovery he wished he had not made. Then he laughed.

‘I never heard of a wife as willing as you. I've been told good women don't feel like that. Come here then, Kitten. I'll put you out of your agony. I'll show you your true self.'

He was gentle now, kissing her, caressing her
knowingly
until her body was caught in a wild race with itself. Then pleasure broke through her and she cried out. She opened her eyes and looked at him. She felt drugged. He was smiling, but there was something she did not like about his smile, something that made her draw away.

‘You're a born mistress, you know, little Kitten,' he laughed. ‘They say a husband shouldn't give his wife that knowledge, to keep her in her place. And I can tell you, most good women wouldn't want to know.'

‘I'm sorry.' she whispered and covered herself with the sheet, ashamed. He laughed again.

‘But you're mine and there's much I can teach you.' He spoke as if the thought of such corruption brought him further pleasure. She tried to find the horror her mother would demand she feel, but at his words she felt instead only new excitement.

In the weeks ahead her mother's words did sometimes return, from some far place. ‘One must strive to rise above
the animal in our nature, for our true selves to flower,' Mrs Sidley always warned and blushed. But Amy found she wanted only to sink into that very state, the sweet, heavy languor of it filling her limbs. She wanted never to wake from it. She enjoyed the polite society of the day only to reach each night. A ravenous, insatiable appetite seemed aroused within her. All her thoughts were centred about those moments alone with Reggie. He taught her things she would have died from shame to learn about before. But each new learning seemed only to incite her. All she knew termed as depraved she felt only as an ecstasy.

And in the heat and strangeness of Sungei Ujong, so far from society or convention, the lush raw jungle that surrounded them, sensual in vision and in smell,
unfiltered
and untouched, seemed to release her to herself, destroying the conditioning of a lifetime. The heat, she had heard, brought all manner of madness. There was nothing she would not do for Reggie, she learned quickly what he liked. Yet slowly she became aware that the fire that held her mesmerized in an endless voluptuous state did not permeate Reggie to the same degree. She judged it first as the boredom that must come from a life of repeated erotic experience. Experience that was new to her. Yet once, when she bent to pleasure him in the very way he had taught her to, he flung her from him suddenly in anger.

‘God, woman,' he growled, his face flushed with contempt. ‘Have you no shame, no sense of yourself? You're not a common whore!'

She drew away from him in consternation, flooded by the coldness of his disapproval. ‘But you yourself…. You wished it before,' she whispered in confusion, unable to discern how she had repulsed him.

‘That was before. I had had too much to drink. I had no right. Did I not apologize?' he barked.

She felt suddenly guiltily aware of her nakedness before his sullen eyes. ‘I sought only to please you. To me there seemed no shame in love between a husband and a wife,'
she said. Her throat was hard, she bit her lip to stop the tears.

‘Well, there are limits any wife can recognize. You'd better watch your appetites,' he threatened.

She turned away, unable still to determine how she had invited such a vitriolic attack. She had thought the submission she readily made would bind his love the more to her. Instead, when she lay beneath him now in those moments they were closest she felt the beginning of a distance as his passion cooled. It was as if he sought to break the wantonness of her love for him. She did not understand that the very essence that had drawn him to her appeared, when possessed shameful, grotesque, unexpected and dangerous in a wife. The very thing he would pay to have cheaply simulated he feared to have free in the palm of his hand.

It was their fourth month in Sungei Ujong. A boat coming up from Singapore brought them the usual long-awaited post. Before that day she had not heard of Annie Luke.

They were clearing the house of bats after breakfast. Amy huddled for safety beneath a tent of netting in the lounge. One servant chased the creatures upstairs with a mop tied to a broom, another swiped them with a tennis racquet Reggie had provided. Within an hour they had killed fifteen. A boy sent by Reggie from his office across the compound arrived with her bundle of letters. She opened them quickly. Behind the bamboo blinds, beneath the squeaks and thumps of injured bats and the creaking of the fan, the landscape of her former life appeared incongruously, like reflections in old glass. She was in the breathing presence of her mother, Sarah, her father, her brother. Each addressed her in a rush then faded
irretrievably
. No second reading achieved resurrection. They fell dead, their touch became thick and depressing in the fierce noon sun before the dense wall of jungle. What was there she could answer that would not alarm or distress?

At last she came to the letter whose writing she had not recognized, redirected from her home address. This did not die after reading but stood up, raw and alive,
almost to throttle her. It held her all day within its constriction. Only in the evening, upon the verandah, could she force herself to show Reggie Annie Luke's letter, pushing words into her mouth.

‘Read it,' she said bitterly. ‘I'm waiting for an
explanation.
It had better be a good one.' Reggie took the letter from her.

Beyond the garden the dark jungle rose, alive with ghostly stirrings. The crickets about them rasped, a huge moth settled peacefully on her wrist. There was a moon and there were stars. It seemed Reggie had lived for a time with the woman Annie Luke. He had promised to marry her, she had borne his child. It was all in the letter she had written to Amy.

Reggie did not turn his head, there was only the creak of basketwork as he shifted in his chair. After some time he shrugged, as if rousing himself from sleep. He placed his hand upon Amy's. The moth flew up and sought the lamp, joining the frantic circle of insects smashing at intervals against the hot glass. She looked down at his hand upon hers on the arm of the rattan chair and wondered what moist secrets it had uncovered in a life beyond her grasp. She threw it away and stared ahead, shock and humiliation mounting in her like blood beneath a tourniquet.