After all these years I can still see her walking barefoot on the polished hardwood floors. Time has fixed her image in my head, and now, half a century hence, I tell myself, with great certainty and little embarrassment, that my pulse quickened rapidly on first seeing her. But is this really true? If I stop for a moment and close my eyes — as I sometimes do, just before drifting slowly into my geriatric’s nap at two o’clock every afternoon — I am able to transport myself back to that precise moment in time. Not for long, though: the sensation is fleeting, and I cannot hold on to it. I am in the cavernous sitting room at the house of T. K. and Patti Soong, on the outskirts of Kampar, at half-past-five in the afternoon on 31 August 1941. When this woman — this person — walks into the room, am I certain it is a woman? The truth is that I am not. At this moment, I am somewhat lightheaded but otherwise perfectly compos mentis. I see everything with utter lucidity, but somehow there is a disconnection between my brain and my eyes: I behold what stands before me, but I cannot compute what I see. I know she is a woman, but her body has the straight lines of an adolescent boy, flat-chested and slim. She is taller than any woman I have seen in the Orient; her face is almost level with my collarbone. When, some months after this first moment, I hold her to me, I find I can rest my chin on the top of her head, and I will remark that nothing has ever felt so comfortable, so right. But that comes later, after I knew that I loved her — yes, that too is a word I can now utter with alacrity. At that first meeting, however, I feel nothing but a spreading numbness. The delicacy of her complexion is cut, savagely, by the lines of her cheekbones. Her eyes are dark as agate. Still I cannot respond. The room feels airless around me. The gorgeous breathlessness and thrilling pulse — those are sensations that the years have layered on top of the initial emptiness, like sheet after sheet of silk covering a bare table. More than fifty years later I can see only the cloth; the table has been obscured.
Nightly, I pray for that blankness, that fragile tabula rasa, to return. I try to hold on to that moment when I had not yet loved her, when I stood before her a clean, innocent man. There I go again. Innocent? I was never innocent, nor even clean. Traces of poison ran through my blood that afternoon, as they have from the day I was born. I should have known that soon my bitterness would seep into her world and rot it slowly to the core.
“You’re hurt,” she says. Her first words to me. She walks towards me, and it feels as if hers is the only movement in the room. The others are perfectly still; it is only Snow who moves amidst this curious tableau vivant. She leads me by the hand across the floor, and I become aware of the darkness of the rafters above us. At both sides of the house there are tall shuttered windows that allow a breath of wind to stir the air in the house. Mother-of-pearl shines luminescent from the chairs and tables as I go past them into the kitchen. Snow — I know it is she, despite the fact that we have not been introduced — pours hot water from a flask into a large porcelain cup. She brings this to me; I see tea leaves unfurling, slowly sinking to the bottom of the crackled base of the cup. She puts one hand on my forehead, and then pulls at the skin below my eyes — what she is searching for I do not know.
“Did Johnny see the snake?” she says.
I nod.
“Then you should recover in a short while. It doesn’t look serious.” She smiles and leaves me with my cup of tea. I drink the tea, finding it pleasantly hot at the back of my throat. When I finish, I press the bulbous curves of the empty cup to my swollen neck, feeling its warmth creep over my skin.
Of course the poison soon wore off, and my limbs regained sufficient strength for me to cycle back to my lodgings. Johnny accompanied me, cycling beside me in the murky darkness.
“I hate them,” he said quietly.
“I know,” I said.
“All of them.”
“They’re not the easiest people to be with, I must say.” I raised my voice into a laugh, but it elicited no response.
“If I can just be alone with my wife, everything will be fine.”
I could think of no reply to this — nothing that would not sound false.
As we approached the guest house Johnny stopped cycling. “Peter,” he said, looking at me; he wore a crumpled-up expression of such seriousness that I began to laugh. “I have a secret to tell you.”
