The Black Isle (52 page)

“There, there,” he said.

I broke out of his arms. “If you wanted to get away from me, if you wanted for us to end, all you had to do was tell me.”

“For us to end?” He looked astonished. “I want no such thing. What would I do without you? What would the Isle do without you? We’ve been through thick and thin together. You and I, we’re a team.”

A team
. That was stunningly unromantic, even for Kenneth Kee.

“Look, why don’t we go out for a drive? Some fresh air would do us good. This Black Forest cake…maybe there’s a reason why Germans are always in a foul mood.”

“I told you. I don’t want to see your bloody apartment.”

“Nobody’s going to make you. Let’s just take a little spin.” He smiled, his cheeks flushed from champagne. “Humor me.”

Kenneth led me to his car, a three-week-old 1962 MG convertible in seaweed green. He adored it more than anything. Perhaps I should have taken its purchase as a portent of changes to come, but having no interest in motoring, I’d only seen his car as a car and little more.

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

“That’s what the scoundrel always says before flinging his fiancée off a cliff.”

“Hah!” he said happily. “It is, isn’t it?”

We sped with the top down, headed not toward the Gardens but east toward the sea, the car radio blasting “Bali Ha’i” from
South Pacific
. It was an apt anthem—an incantatory ode to the tropics, all trilling flutes and lush, watery harps mimicking the wind and the waves. The best part, of course, was the unearthly banshee chorus:
Here am I, your special island,
Come to me, come to me
…

Just as Bloody Mary’s voice swelled to a bewitched crescendo, coconut palms began popping up in the horizon. Goose bumps blossomed on my arms. We were driving, it seemed, into somebody else’s fantasia.

When I saw the silhouettes of the casuarinas, Kenneth’s motives became clear. The looming lighthouse only confirmed it: We were hurtling toward the Wees’ old beach house.

Kenneth knew full well that I never wanted to see it again. Not the ruins, not the boulders where I sought shelter, and certainly not the ghosts. If I ever saw Taro among them, there’s no telling the lengths to which I’d go to cause his ghost a moment’s pain.

“Why’ve you taken me here?” I must have sounded enraged; in truth, I was much more unsettled than angry.

Kenneth shut off the radio. “I want to show you something.”

“Turn back right now! You know I don’t want to be here.”

“Calm down. I want you to see what I’ve been working on—for
you
.”

“I hate you.”

“Ah, so you finally admit it.”

We slowed down at the mouth of the old road, which had benefited from new construction. No longer private, it was now two lanes, each wide enough for a bus and very freshly paved. Ahead of us, a young Malay family of five traipsed along, the father carrying the youngest on his back. Kenneth gave them a friendly wave when they turned, momentarily stunned by our headlights. Grasping that we meant no harm, the father waved back, with a wide, easygoing smile. Slung over the wife’s shoulder was a rattan bag with two long protrusions: badminton rackets.

“So?” Kenneth asked me. “Still want to turn back?”

I didn’t answer. He drove on, a grin tickling the edge of his lips. We came upon other families walking by the side of the dark road and slowed down as we passed them. The luxurious beach houses had been flattened, as had most of the casuarinas that once lined the lane, leaving no trace of the gentlemen’s retreat the coast had once been. To my relief, the Wee property, including its papaya trees, was completely gone.

Now it was a clear shot from the road to the surf.

The beachfront had been transformed into a kind of futuristic playground. Jutting out of the sand like gargantuan mushrooms were concrete barbeque pits. A dozen light posts stood, tall as telegraph poles, with bulbs so bright that the beach appeared to be made of snow, not sand. Between the posts, youths had stretched out nets and were playing badminton. Others kicked balls. Everyone looked happy; the light was so intense that it gave them all halos. I couldn’t help but find the scene eerie and jarring, especially coming upon it after miles of unlit road.

“I convinced the Ministry to let me turn this place into a workers’ paradise. The official opening’s not till next week, but I was told people have already been finding their way here. You know me—I had to see it for myself.” Kenneth turned off the engine and we sat in the shadows, surveying the beach. He was beaming. “This is only the prototype. If my plan goes through, we’ll have one of these in Woodlands, Kampung Klang, Taman Seletar, and then someday, maybe even in place of that awful slum next to Wonder World. People are tired of the dark.”

“I’m happy for you, Ken, really I am. But I don’t see how this has to do with me.”

He unbuckled his seat belt and leaned close, staring into my eyes. “You don’t say.”

“Stop being so bloody obscure.”

“You don’t see them, do you?”

“What?”

“Ghosts. I don’t see them in your eyes.”

I stepped out of the car and scanned the shoreline for the eternal martyrs, those rebels I once resented for ignoring my cries of help. I expected to find them frozen shoulder-deep in the high tide, oblivious to the changes that have come to the beach. But the beach appeared to be pristine.

I strained my eyes some more, bracing for the sight of Taro—Taro, my shame and sorrow—whose soul, I was sure, would never have surrendered quietly to the night. But under the glare of the blazing lights, as waves frothed in and out across the sand, the most I saw were hazy, powdery shadows.

“Well?” said Kenneth, grinning with great mirth. “Very
clean
, isn’t it?”

“Yes.” I couldn’t bear to crush his joy with the more nuanced truth—that they weren’t actually gone, only nicely hidden.

“Now do you realize how silly it is for you to question our bond? We are bound, Cassandra. You and I. Darkness and light.”

“How did you do this?”

“Experimental bulbs, from Japan. Nobody there’s even given them a go yet. They burn much brighter than traditional bulbs and last much longer. We got the first shipment to leave Hiroshima. The chap who developed it said he was inspired by the blast.” He chuckled bleakly. “The extreme brightness, you see, alters the landscape, thereby wiping out all the old associations people might have with a certain place—erasing its memory, in other words. With nothing for us to remember them by and nothing for them to remember us by, the dead cease to exist. Or that was my theory, in any case—a theory now proven positive, thanks to you.”

“And the Japanese invented this?”

“Don’t be small-minded. They, too, want to move on with their lives. They’ve become experts at reinvention. In the end, it’s good business for everyone.”

I squinted at the blazing white beach. I saw more shadows amongst the fun-seekers. Faint and vague, probably harmless, yet undeniably still there. Loitering.

“Do these bulbs create a kind of visual”—I searched for the word—“sieve?”

“No, no. It’s just light, pure light.” He sighed, contented. “You and I, we’ve never just sat around, passively accepting the hand fate has dealt us. You and I, we’ve always fought for our own destinies. It’s the same principle here. Strip away the darkness, the negativity, and even the worst places will forget their wounds. They’ll begin to heal. The Isle shouldn’t have to stay dirty. Ghosts don’t have to live forever.”

We watched the badminton players for a while. Could he not see that the lights turned them into paler, grayer—ghostlier—versions of themselves?

“Feeling sentimental?” He reached over and fondled my chin.

“Not at all.”

“See?” he said, leaning in for a kiss. “I told you fresh air would do you good.”

One of the many things I learned about Kenneth over the years was that he was at his most treacherous when he seemed at his happiest.

In retrospect, I must say I’m glad I learned about his impending nuptials by reading it in the papers. This allowed me to digest the news alone at home. If he’d told me in person at a restaurant, say, I would have had to rein in my shock and fury, offer congratulations, et cetera. He would’ve had the pleasure of watching me flail as my act wore thin—and I would have had to plunge my steak knife into him.

The cruelest stroke, alas, was that the winner of his hand should be a particularly horrible ghost from the past, one I hadn’t seen returning: Violet Wee. Was she the “old friend” he’d run into, from “prehistoric times”? Probably.

I remembered how violently Kenneth once recoiled at the very mention of her name—and the frisson of delight I’d felt at having found someone who felt about her the way I did. How we had laughed together at the plump sourpuss and her demonic dog; our mutual dislike for Violet was the
first
thing that had united us.

The half-page announcement Kenneth had bought in the pages of the establishment
Tribune
was every bit as gaudy as the advert for facial blotters that ran beneath it, its cursive font mimicking the twirls of a villain’s mustache. It answered a few of my questions about Violet, though not all. After the war, she’d apparently fled to family friends in Belgravia, London, and had stayed there all this time. It appeared likely that this London connection might have sealed the deal for our Anglophile Mr. Kee.

You and me, Cassandra. We’re a team.
I had been numbed by his peculiar brand of pillow talk into thinking we were two solitary people who saw eye to eye enough of the time to render us soul mates. I had to laugh at that notion now. More than rage at his betrayal, I felt shame at myself for having been so weak, so
blind
.

Of course, I hadn’t been invited. I was glad for this, for it spared me the agony and the expense of a wedding present. But that didn’t mean I couldn’t attend.

How could I not? I had to see for myself how Violet looked in her wedding finery and whether Kenneth had acquired, just for one day, the sense to go easy on the pomade.

I went in the guise of a church mouse. I tucked myself into the stony folds of the St. Andrews graveyard, far from the parade of celebrants, dressed in a button-down cotton dress the same shade of gray as the headstones among which I stood. Lest anybody mistook me for part of the party, I brought along white chrysanthemums, the pompons of grief. I looked every bit the part of a woman mourning a death, which in a way I supposed I was. I was a widow many times over.

There appeared to be two very different sets of guests: doddering Peranakan towkays in batik shirts with their long-faced wives, emanating prestige and entitlement, likely the old associates of the late Mr. Wee, and a more modest group united by familial traits—birdlike in build and touchingly unaccustomed to having car doors opened for them. I lumped this latter lot with the groom and tried to guess which of the elderly women was his mother. Surely the monthly recipient of his cash-stuffed envelopes, the silent witness to her son’s mounting successes, had to exude an unmistakable leonine pride? But men and women, young and old, Kenneth’s people all seemed cowed, overwhelmed, even grateful to be included in the occasion. I found their humility unexpectedly moving.

The last sedan delivered two familiar faces—Cricket and Issa, looking self-conscious and stiff in their white, tailored suits. Issa’s movements had an added awkwardness because he was lame and had to be helped out of the backseat by Cricket. His impatient scowls told me that this disability shamed him. Also in this car were two women, both Indian, who I assumed from their pale purple dresses were Violet’s bridesmaids. It was only on closer observation that I realized they were Cricket’s wife and teenage daughter.

Finally, a black Rolls-Royce drew up, the only such mastodon on the Isle. The Balmoral loaned it out at famously extortionate rates, and I was curious if Kenneth had managed to talk them down or if he paid full rate. Or did Violet foot the bill? From it the bride- and groom-to-be finally emerged. There were no flower girls, no fawning legions, and as much as I wanted to mock them for it, no hubristic fanfare.

Despite their chariot, it was a quiet, unfussy entrance that they made. Kenneth in a tasteful, if plain, white suit and Violet, almost unrecognizably slim, in the most chic wedding dress I’d ever seen. It was something Audrey Hepburn would have gladly worn: a white shoulderless, figure-hugging bustier ending in a loose, flowing silk skirt. Her arms, once so rubbery, were sheathed in elbow-length silk gloves. In mien, this strange woman was essentially still Violet, but in physique she had become elegantly frail in the way only the rich knew how.

They appeared cheerful, yet not overly so. I hated them for having such a surplus of joy that they could afford to rein it in on this most immoderate of days.

They paused for a few photos by the Rolls-Royce and then for a few more at the church door. That was it. They disappeared inside. The only glaringly false note to this theater of reticence, the only tell-tale smudge of immodesty, was the adornment on Kenneth’s left wrist. Even from where I stood, I could see his outsize gold watch—as loose and ungainly as the heirloom he’d once so cherished and in all probability the one and the same.

The transfiguration of Kenneth Kee was now complete.

Standing in the St. Andrews churchyard, I was more than mildly tempted to call forth the denizens of its small collection of graves. But I did no such thing. I had too much respect for the dead to send them on the petty errands of a spurned woman.

Beating my own unfussy retreat, I left the bouquet of white chrysanthemums on the step of the church, just as the old pipe organ began to moan.

When I glanced back at the graveyard, I realized I hadn’t been alone. The dog-man had been leaning on a tomb a few feet behind me. And there he lingered. Unlike me, he seemed not to understand it was time to go.

WAS HE STILL MY FRIEND
? Was he
ever
my friend? We never had time for labels. We had been content to be lovers, if never in word; we were phantom companions.