The Night Tiger(102)

The first person on his list is Leslie. If anyone has gossip, it will be him.

“Lydia?” says Leslie, looking up from his slice of pineapple. They’re on tea break at the hospital canteen. “Are you finally interested in her? I’ve always thought the two of you were a good match.”

William hides a grimace. Apparently Lydia isn’t the only one with this impression. “Why is she out here?”

“Isn’t she looking for a husband?”

“I wouldn’t think she’d have trouble on that front.” Lydia is attractive and there’s a bigger pool of men in London than in a small town in Malaya. It’s not even like Delhi or Hong Kong, where she could meet the rising stars of the Civil Service.

Leslie rubs his nose. “Well, there’s some talk about why she left. A broken engagement—apparently he died.”

“What did he die of?”

“Drowning. A boating accident.”

William thinks that he ought to be more sympathetic to Lydia, but the memory of her sharp eagerness, the way she said that the two of them were alike, still unnerves him. There has to be more. He can feel it.

Next is the wife of one of the plantation managers, a friend of Lydia’s mother. It’s easy enough to run into her in town when she’s buying groceries on Saturday morning with her Chinese cook. William suspects her cook is cheating her; the bill sounds far too high.

“Poor Lydia’s had a hard time,” she says as she writes down figures in her housekeeping notebook. “Such a pity about her fiancé.”

“I might have known him,” says William, lying through his teeth. “Andrews, was that his name?”

“No, it was a Mr. Grafton. A gentle, scholarly man—her parents were so fond of him.”

“Did he drown?”

“Oh no. It was heart failure, on a train of all places. Apparently he was quite sickly. Such a disappointment to the family.” And there’s nothing else she has to add, despite William enduring another half hour of chitchat.

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.