The Hills of Singapore (6 page)

He closed his eyes, remembering. He knew she was now a widow. The man she had married was dead. He could not count the number of times he had wished for this during their years of separation. Now that wish was tinged with a sadness not only for her but even for her husband, for he had met this man when Charlotte was in trouble, and had liked him despite their rivalry.

This musing was quickly overtaken by the thought of her in Singapore, close by, and of their last meeting. She had faced a choice: to stay with her husband and children or to come with him for her trouble had been opium, the dispeller of misery, and he, who hated it, had cured her of it. He remembered every moment spent with her, the hours of love and learning to talk to each other, the endless desire for her, the misery of separation. But, faced with the reality of his marriage, the sheer impossibility of a respectable life together, she had let him go.

“Then do not come to me again,” he had said, “unless it is forever.”

He turned away. He had been sure then but now he felt a tenderness, a quivering desire for her. He hardened his heart. They would meet; it was inevitable in such a small town as their social worlds touched. He loved her with all his being but it could not begin again: the hiding, the secrecy. He could not cross any further into her world. To be together, she must accept his way. He walked back to Commercial Square.

5

Charlotte had not been a fortnight in Singapore when the invitation from Government House arrived. There was to be a dinner and ball in honour of Sir James Brooke, the Rajah of Sarawak, and Captain Henry Keppel. Captain Keppel's book
The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido for the Suppression of Piracy
, which contained extracts of the Rajah's personal diaries, had been published to feverish interest.

Charlotte knew that the exploits of the Rajah in these far-flung, pirate-infested seas were viewed in England as prodigious and thrilling, filling the chests of young men with pride and longing and the hearts of young ladies with quivering and romantic passions. The thirst for him had become insatiable. Captain Keppel's book was in its third printing. The Rajah had been the toast of London, been received by Queen Victoria who had seemingly also fallen under his swashbuckling spell, and been made a knight of her realm.

Charlotte responded with thanks. She would not miss this event for the world.

She had paid her respects to the Governor and his wife, as decorum decreed, and left her card. She had taken tea with many of her former acquaintances. Evangeline Barbie was still taking care of the priests at the Catholic Parochial House. The army of children of Jose da Silva were still the most populous in the white town. Robert's wife, Teresa, was a da Silva grandchild from his daughter by his third wife, a Chinese-Portuguese woman he had married in Macau. Da Silva was currently into his seventh marriage, the product of which were his twin daughters Isobel and Isabel, whom Charlotte knew well.

An invitation to dinner had arrived from Mrs Benjamin Peach Keaseberry, and this she now held in her hand. Benjamin's first wife had been a close friend. This marriage to Elizabeth had taken place, Charlotte thought, with indecent haste. His first wife was hardly in her grave before the banns had been posted. Benjamin, leader here of the London Missionary Society, was thirty-five and Elizabeth barely seventeen and Charlotte understood, pregnant.

She put the invitation down. She would go of course. She would not snub Elizabeth. Something had changed in Singapore in the last few years. An insidious and creeping respectability seemed to have taken over the town. Not perhaps a real respectability but the trappings of respectability. But then, she thought, perhaps all so-called respectability is mere sham.

In 1839 when she had first arrived, a mere twenty years after its establishment, Singapore was a town of men, had always been a town of men. There were few immigrant women of any sort, either white, Chinese or Indian. The Malay and Bugis villages were always filled with families and children for they were the natives of the island and the surrounding regions. It was then a frontier town, wild and not at all respectable. What women there were, were Indian convict women who became wives and companions to the Indian convict men or other Indian men of the transitory sort who came and went with the tide; boatmen, stall holders, buffalo farmers in Serangoon, guards in the godowns sleeping in the verandahs, milk vendors, water suppliers, barbers, tinkers, syces and peons.

The other Indians, the indispensable Chettiars, the moneylenders, rarely settled here. They came and set up their low desks in Change Alley or Market Street and their sole purpose was to get rich as quickly as possible and depart. The Indians who settled were the Chittys, who came from Kalinga, merchants and traders who married local women, dressed in Malay style and ate Malay food but were staunch Hindoos.

The local Chinese of the Straits, too, were settlers. They had long inhabited the port towns of the region. Towns like Batavia, Medan, Malacca, Penang and now the youngest, most ambitious of them all—Singapore. The first sailors and merchants had married local non-Mohammedan women, brought as slaves from Siam, Sumatra, Bali, the far Eastern provinces of the archipelago—for love perhaps, for companionship certainly. When they returned to China, they left these “number two wives” in charge of business until their return on the next monsoon. Their wives in China would have little inkling of this secondary home away from home. Gradually, as years passed, the Chinese men stayed and made families, marrying their daughters and sons amongst themselves. A hybrid culture had sprung up. The men may have forgotten how to speak Chinese; their sons never learned. The language became a mixture of Hokkien mostly, the language of the maritime south of China from where most of these men came, and Malay, the language of the women. They spoke Baba Malay and the men were called babas and the women nonyas.

These Peranakan families kept their women under tight control and their daughters locked up. They were merchants, clever and quick, who learned the language of the colonial masters and acted as the indispensable go-betweens for the whites and the natives of whatever town they found themselves in. No colonial city in the East could survive without these compradores. They married amongst themselves or, when they needed new blood—men for their daughters—they chose them from amongst the thousands of poor Chinese coolies who flooded into Singapore with every fleet from China.

No respectable Chinese women came from China to marry. It was forbidden. Women who came were smuggled out and sold to be prostitutes, enslaved by their own fathers who valued only sons, and had too many mouths to feed. Even though this trade was brisk, the number of Chinese girls and women in Singapore was always a tiny percentage of the male population. Life for the enslaved Chinese prostitute was usually short and brutish. She had to serve the thousands of Chinese and Indian coolies, the soldiers of the army stationed in Singapore and the constant stream of sailors who washed up onshore. Death was often preferable, opium suicide common.

The white men might talk of home, of going home for years, but most stayed. Life was easy and free in the East. As for white women in Singapore, there had been a few wives of the officers, officials and missionaries, the many young girls of the da Silva family and the occasional arrival, like Charlotte herself. Men who did not care to risk the dangers of disease in the brothels or the dispiriting anonymity of loveless encounters took native girls as “wives”,
nyais
as they were called. Robert, himself, had had his
nyai
, Shilah, for many years before his marriage to Teresa. She had not yet had enough time to talk to him on this subject.

Nothing had changed for the local communities. It was in the European community that the change had come. The previous governor, Samuel Bonham, had been a bachelor; he paid no heed to how the young men spent their time, content to invite them into his bungalow for convivial evenings and otherwise leave them to their devices. He was old school, a man raised in ruder times when liaisons with native women were considered normal and because they kept one from whores and the attendant diseases, even healthy.

The arrival of Colonel William Butterworth, Companion of the Order of the Bath, had brought an insidious change in attitudes. He was a decorated soldier, where almost all governors before him had been civilians. He was newly come to the Straits, where most had spent all their lives here. He was married and his English wife brought a certain social expectation to the settlement. He was, in addition, a prig. His attitudes were those, she supposed, of a Great Britain which had never been in so close contact with its Eastern settlements as now. The sailing ships of the previous centuries were slow. Mail, orders, attitudes, were a year away from Singapore if they came at all. Men did as they pleased, made decisions and acted on them without thought of “back home”.

Now, steamships could travel at unheard-of speeds, and the new Egyptian Overland Route carried mail and passengers from Southampton via Gibraltar and Malta to Alexandria, up the Nile to Cairo, eighty miles by camel overland to Suez, down the Red Sea to Bombay and on to Singapore. A newspaper printed in London could now be read only forty days later in Singapore. It was unimaginable. The connection to “back home”, so long severed, was quickly being reestablished and with it, the feelings and attitudes of the mother country.

Charlotte felt almost like “old school” herself. She had been only nine years in the East, but her experiences had made her wary of this newfound “respectable” Singapore. She did not like so much the changing attitudes to the mixed marriages which had been so common only a few short years ago. Then a white officer or official would have sought a wife, with pleasure, amongst the mixed-race girls—the children made as a result of married liaisons between white men and native women.

Now that was not always the case. Isabel da Silva, a plain young woman, had had the great misfortune to turn down marriage to a lieutenant in the Madras Regiment in the hope, as she told Charlotte, of a more handsome prospect. She now found herself in a position of less good circumstances for, within the space of two years, an officer of the regiment who had hopes of promotion would find such a union an insurmountable obstacle to advancement.

Her dark brothers and sisters, the offspring of Jose da Silva's six previous marriages, counted against them. Isabel was now engaged, at her mother's urging, to the son of a Spanish merchant and his native wife from Manila. She did not care a fig for this man, she had told Charlotte, and despaired of her life with him. She envied her sister Isobel, who had caught an Englishman, a merchant from Prince of Wales Island.

Perhaps, mused Charlotte, I am sensitive to these changes because of my own life: a child born of the love of a Scottish man and a Creole woman, I love a Chinese man and am the widow of an Armenian Dutchman whose mother was the child of a Dutch–Indian marriage. She shook her head. It all seemed so pointless. Her own children were half this and that. All this blood nonsense gave her a headache and she disliked these insidious attitudes which she felt creeping like a shadow over the town.

Doubtless if Butterworth had the slightest inkling of any of this, he would have ripped up the invitation in a trice. This thought gave her a small moment of pleasure, and she stopped her musings and returned to the tasks of the next few days, one of which was enrolling her beloved little half-Chinese boy in the best school in Singapore.

Charlotte picked up her parasol and set out through her gardens. It was early and the air held a comparative coolness that only the dawn and the dusk can bring in a tropical climate. She was going to the blessing of the Church of the Good Shepherd.

Charlotte greeted Evangeline and sat amidst the considerable congregation, both European and Chinese, gathered for the event. The activity and vitality of this Catholic community stood in stark contrast to the benign indifference of the Protestants.

She had been to St. Andrews many times over the years and always remarked on the general absence of the population, the sleepy and indifferent attitudes of the few who were there. One rainy Sunday, long ago, when Tigran was alive, she, Robert and John Thomson, the Surveyor of the Straits Settlements, had gone to a morning service.

“If the English be the true church, it is evident the East India Company do not think so,” John Thomson had murmured.

St. Andrew's seated perhaps four hundred people, but around them there had been but twenty worshippers. Three emaciated young ladies had occupied one pew, an old man with his dark wife behind them. A corpulent bald gentleman fanned himself, a pretty blonde sat with her old mother. Men from the garrison had occupied other pews. Above them the punkahs waved like the wings of birds in flight.

In the dusty silence, suddenly the organ had pealed forth. The Reverend White and his clerk entered. The service was read, the responses made by the clerk flippant and indifferent. The congregation played no part. Psalms were given out, the organ boomed, a pagan native boy exerting himself mightily pumping air, but neither the clerk nor the worshippers had sung. The sermon had been tedious platitudes. No charity was asked, and the congregation roused itself and departed.

As they had walked through the extensive gardens which commanded the finest sea view in Singapore, Charlotte was moved to ask John his opinion on this.

“It is a mystery,” he had said. “The Company pays its chaplains magnificently but what for, it is difficult to discern. The curate does not visit his people, good heavens no, he plants nutmegs. For the Company forbids him, under the heaviest penalties, to be an apostle to the heathen, and John Company is more powerful here than his heavenly Master. He is the
burra padre
, you know, the great man's priest, not the
coolie padre
, ministering to the poor.”

“So why build such churches John? Look at this place, magnificent, on the finest piece of land in the whole town.”