The last person William speaks to is Rawlings.
“Lydia’s been a bit nervy recently. Says she wants to talk to me, though I’ve no idea why.” He dangles the bait, but Rawlings seems distracted. Perhaps it’s the heat, rising like a wet, suffocating blanket around them.
“Well, she’s always had an interest in you. When she first came out, she asked if you were the same Acton as someone she knew.”
That would be the connection to Iris, William thinks. So she’s known who he is for a while. Has she been investigating him? The thought makes the back of his neck burn. How dare she. He bites down on the thought, says genially, “I had no idea. Perhaps we’ve friends in common.”
“Be kind to her,” says Rawlings. “She’s got a bit of a savior complex, but she means well. And she’s good at what she does. I’ve said before that the hospital ought to be paying her for all that volunteering.”
Yes, Lydia is trying hard, in her amateur way, to connect with him. The question is: how to parlay that into an advantage?
“Why is she in Malaya, anyway?”
“Ah, she was engaged to some rough fellow and came out to avoid him. My wife knows her people—they said it was a bad match.”
William barely recalls that Rawlings has a wife, since she’s back in England with the children. Still, none of the information that he’s gathered about Lydia adds up. There’s no doubt that she’s lost a fiancé, but the facts all contradict each other.
He wants to ask Rawlings more, but Rawlings is preoccupied.
“Do you trust the local staff?” he says abruptly.
William laughs. “I don’t trust anyone.” Except Ah Long in some respects. And, of course, Ren. The boy still isn’t recovering, but William mustn’t think about that right now.
He steers the conversation back to Lydia. “You said she had a difficult relationship?”
“Apparently he tried to assault her during an argument. Poor girl. That’s probably why she’s so highly strung.”
So Lydia has been a victim. Interesting how that term changes the way he views her. Why is she so interested in William? What does she know about him? He thinks rapidly: Lydia’s father runs the rubber estate that Ambika worked on. Yes, he can imagine that in Lydia’s busybody, do-gooding way she might have known Ambika, even counseled her about her alcoholic husband. But she also said she knew Iris. That’s worse. Ambika and Nandani are just two local women he’s been involved with, but the talk around Iris is something that’s hounded him out of England already.
He takes a breath. Has Lydia heard the tale he’s told of how he tried to save Iris? He’s deeply ashamed of it, but it’s too late to retract. Besides, most people seem to believe it. Even he does, most days. Except when those dreams come again, the dreams of Iris by the river, her skirts heavy and dripping with riverweed. Lank hair clinging to her bony white forehead.
What had that girl Louise said when he’d given her a lift? She’d said that she dreamed of a river: like a story that unfolded. William doesn’t want that. He never wants to see what comes next in his dreams of Iris.
40
Taiping
Saturday, June 27th
We took a trishaw to the Anglican graveyard at All Saints’ Church. It was a pretty ride through the low and pleasant town, with its white colonial buildings and shophouses, and great angsana trees in bloom, their golden petals drifting like showers. The thick grey clouds that had swallowed up the afternoon gave the grass on the padang in front of the barracks an eerily vivid green cast. On impulse, I’d stopped to buy a bunch of flowers, white and purple chrysanthemums. It was the second time this month that I’d bought flowers for the dead.
At the graveyard, Shin paid the trishaw man, and I went in, looking for Dr. MacFarlane’s resting place. The church itself was a large wooden building with a steeply pitched roof and carved Gothic arches. Some of the graves were elaborate affairs with carved angels and stonework boxes, while others were simple crosses. They seemed to be placed in a somewhat haphazard order, and I looked about for a newer section.
Shin walked across the clipped grass. “Find it?”
“Not yet.”
There was no one around. Not a bird stirred in the enormous hushed silence, the grey sky a bowl, as though the whole world was waiting for the rain to come.
“Actually, Robert had some information—he said you’d showed him the lists,” said Shin, after a pause. “That’s why he was looking for you.”
“Why didn’t you mention it earlier?”
“I thought you’d be heartbroken over him, but you must be fine since you managed to eat so much.”
I rolled my eyes. “What did he find?”
“Apparently there was a Dr. John MacFarlane in the Taiping area. An old Malaya hand who’d been out here for twenty years; before that he was in Burma. He’d a loose connection to the Batu Gajah District Hospital—subbed in occasionally when needed. A bit of an eccentric with no wife or family. And as we saw from the pathology records, he donated one of his fingers about five years ago, after a trip upriver with Acton.”
“So what was he doing here in Taiping?”
“Not Taiping, but somewhere farther out. One of the neighboring villages.”
“Kamunting,” I said at once. “That was the name on the paper.”
“Out here, he lived a semiretired life with a private practice. Said he’d never go back to Scotland, which he’d fled forty years ago, leaving three assertive sisters behind. And that’s all.”
“What? There must be more.”
Ren had said my master, though the way he had pronounced it, with unthinking fidelity, sent a shiver down my spine. Who was his real master—was it William Acton or this Dr. MacFarlane whose directive he had followed without questioning?
“That’s all the hard information that Robert could find. He did say there was gossip, too, but it could have been slander, etcetera, etcetera. Very conscientious, our Robert.”
“Robert is a decent person.”
“So decent that he dropped you like a hot potato today,” he said bitterly.
I didn’t reply because I’d found it. A fresh grave with a thin fur of grass, the few words on the headstone sharply cut as though they had been chiseled yesterday:
John Alexander MacFarlane
b. July 15th, 1862 d. May 10th, 1931
Deliver us, O Lord.
I stiffened, calculating the dates. Yesterday, Ren had whispered there were only two days left; taking them into account, it added up to exactly forty-nine days since his death. My mother had told me that the soul wandered for those forty-nine days, restlessly weighing up its sins.
“What did he die of?” I asked.
“Malaria, apparently. He’d had it on and off for years.”
I laid the bunch of flowers on the grave, since there was no vase or crevice. They looked naked and forlorn lying on the bare ground, the leggy stems stripped of leaves. There was something peculiar about the grave: a wooden stick had been driven into it at an angle. It was about six inches long and looked like part of a broom handle. I didn’t dare touch it—it looked so deliberate—but I’d never seen anything like this before.
“Pass me the spade,” I said. Shin shook his head warningly. “Why?” Then I saw the elderly Tamil lady, her thin hair knotted in a bun, wearing a deep brown sarong. She was making her way over to us and shouting something. “Does she want us to leave?”
We stepped back from the grave, but the woman kept advancing. It turned out that she was waving a welcome to us. Apparently there weren’t many visitors to the cemetery, and she was pleased that we’d come.
“Tinggal, ya, tinggal!” she said in Malay. “Stay, stay. Do you want water for the flowers?” She was the caretaker’s mother; her son was out at the moment. “Going to rain,” she said, looking at the sky. “How come you came so late? You friends? Patients?”
I didn’t know what to say, but Shin just smiled. “Did you know him?”
To my surprise, she gave a quick nod. “We know who all the orang puteh around here are, though he lived farther out on the Kamunting side. He treated my nephew for ringworm. Such a pity he died. He was younger than me.”
She shuffled off to get some water for the flowers. It seemed to distress her that they were just lying on the grave, so I carefully gathered them up again. Returning with a jam jar, she said, “So where are you two from?”
“Ipoh,” said Shin. “I’m a medical student. I’m sorry to hear that Dr. MacFarlane died.”
“Oh, one of his students. Well, he was sick for a while. In fact, people said he lost his mind. His housekeeper left, you know, and then it was just the old man and that Chinese boy.”
My ears pricked up. “Was his name Ren?”
“I don’t know. A small houseboy, about ten or eleven years old. He was a good boy. Took care of everything in the house when the housekeeper left. Can’t have been easy with the doctor like that. I saw him at the funeral. All shaken up and trying not to cry, poor thing. You know him?”
“Yes, he’s a relative,” I said slowly. Shin gave me a look.