The Shallow Seas (17 page)

11

Life at Buitenzorg flowed at a comforting and steady pace. Tigran was sometimes away, and she was always glad when he came back. Gradually she grew used to his kiss on her cheek in the morning, his hand in hers when they walked on the estate, his arm on her waist when he helped her from the carriage. When they returned to Brieswijk, she had grown comfortable in his undemanding and attentive presence.

Despite her longings for Zhen, as time went by and she assumed the mantle of the mistress of Brieswijk, a gradual change came over her.

But there had been a time when she thought she would never recover.

No word ever came from Zhen. Irrationally, she thought he might find a way to send her a message.

Art thou gone so? love, lord, ay, husband, friend!

I must hear from thee every day in the hour
,

For in a minute there are many days
…

How she felt them, those days in the minutes. She finally asked Robert to give her news, but he simply replied that he rarely saw Zhen, had merely heard that a child was to be born, a first grandchild to Baba Tan. Doubtless, Robert said, Zhen knew of her marriage, for it was in the newspaper and had been the talk of Singapore for some time. This news, so casually announced, broke her heart, and she took to her bed and, when she was alone, cried until she was exhausted. She had hideous dreams of dark woods and seeking him. She thought she might as well be dead for all the pleasure she could derive from life. Only the life inside her kept her from the darkest thoughts.

The doctor thought it was fever. He gave her sleeping draughts. But Tigran could see she was heartsick. She refused to see him or Takouhi, refused to eat. Tigran grew anxious; he had burned the other letters he received. The most recent one was in English, translated somehow, and he kept it. He took it out and read it, examining his choices. The man knew of Charlotte's marriage, loved her still, understood. There was a poem. Even Tigran felt its power and this man's enduring and infuriating love for Charlotte.

No flocks of geese thither fly

And she … ah, she is far away

Yet all my thoughts behold her stay

As in the golden hours gone by

The clouds scarce dim the water's sheen

The moon-bathed islands wanly show

And sweet words falter to and fro …

Though the River rolls between

If he gave it to her, her spirits would rise, of that he had no doubt, but then it would all begin again. And would she ask then to communicate with the man in Singapore? How could he agree to such a thing?

Finally, at his wit's end, he had sent for Louis. In these dark hours, Louis came every day to make her drink soup and cheer her. Louis was dark-haired like her, with limpid brown eyes, slight figured with long-fingered, perfectly groomed hands. He had an actor's grace, an actor's voice, which he could alter at will. His family, he said, had not approved of his life; he had joined the acting troupe and, like most of the flotsam and jetsam of the Old World, had eventually washed up on colonial shores. He was entertaining, honest and charming. It was easy to open her heart to him.

She told Louis everything, in a long, exhaustive tale. Zhen had arrived in Singapore, the poorest coolie, and, because he was pure-blood Chinese and had an education, was selected by one of the richest Chinese merchants in Singapore to be the husband of his eldest daughter. He had had no choice for his, and his family's, entire survival depended on the match. Charlotte told Louis how she had been Zhen's teacher of English; he had saved her life and virtue from an attack in the jungle, and they had fallen in love. Their meetings, their love, had been doomed in advance.

Louis had understood, and she, overcome, had turned her heart to him as he told her of his passion for a handsome Danish soldier in the Dutch army, now married to a rich widow, for whom he had become an occasional amusement and usually a nuisance. The visits to Tong and Chinatown, the liaisons with Javanese boys: simply a search for oblivion. Charlotte held his hand and thought no more of this love as natural or unnatural. It was simply love, and Louis suffered as she did.

Louis adored Byron and had learned English expressly to revel in his poems. He quietly voiced his own emotion through Byron's words.

“ …
he lov'st me not, and never wilt
,

Love dwells not in our will
.

Nor can I blame him, though it be my lot
,

To strongly, wrongly, vainly love him still
.”

Love dwells not in our will. “What a wonderful line,” they murmured, and wept, their dark heads together. She ate to please Louis, and gradually she grew well.

Nathanial came, too, with old copies of the
Java Gazette
from Raffles's time, which he could always plunder for titbits to confirm his disdain for the Dutch.

“As you lie on your couch in this lovely room with the breeze wafting through the window, consider how the Dutchman lived in times gone by,” he said and began to read.

“
The beds of Batavia were large and spacious and provided with as many as ten cushions and pillows including the “stomach pillow” which was used to protect the lower body against cold. There was such a general horror of catching cold, partly because of the fantastic notion that this originated noxious fevers, that the sleeper not only surrounded himself with a mass of pillows but often wore a night neckerchief and a woolen nightcap. When to that is added that the bed curtains were not usually made of gauze or muslin but of cotton, linen or costly thick textiles, and that the bedroom was on the ground floor and stuffy from absence of ventilation, then one begins to get some idea of the ambrosial nights passed by the well-to-do in Old Batavia
.

“
The Dutchmen at Batavia disdained rice and always preferred their costly, difficult-to-get, half-sour or rancid, ill-preserved European foods. From Holland came pickled meats and salted bacon, cheese, ham, smoked salmon, sausages, herrings, smoked tongue and meat. Jan Pieterszoon Coen wrote, “Our nation must drink or die,” and for hundreds of years his nation seems to have done its earnest best. Everybody drank a bottle of wine a day as a matter of course, quite apart from beer, sake and spirits
.

“
When one considers the mode of living, it seems that Batavia might well have been built to show exactly how not to live in the tropics. The city was built on marshy land—what Stavorinus called one of the most unwholesome spots upon the face of the globe
—
with the houses built close together on the edges of ditches and canals. The doors and windows were kept closed, and light and air excluded as far as possible. Curtains were hung to keep the sun out, and even then one often sat behind a screen. Exercise was almost never taken, and baths only occasionally, whilst it was de rigeur to overeat grossly of heavy foods and to regard spiritous liquors as a splendid and indispensable medicine against fever. Morning, noon and evening, the Hollander drank gin, rum and cognac. Only too common were pale, wan and bloated faces, shaking hands, red and watery eyes, a foul breath. In the evenings it was customary to sit smoking and drinking gin by the side of a stinking ditch or canal, after which a heavy supper was taken, after which one passed out, half seas over, behind the thick curtains of the heretofore mentioned beds
.”

“How perfectly delightful! It is no surprise,” Nathanial concluded with something approaching a macabre glee, “that, in no other country did people hear of the death of a friend with more nonchalance or less surprise and concern. Batavia could boast of screeds of widows of the best kind—young, pretty, ignorant and rich.”

To draw her out of Brieswijk and herself, Nathanial took her on long carriage rides around the city. One day they set out north on Molenvleit and turned into the Sawah Besar, which ran, as its name revealed, between vast wet rice fields. They turned south onto the Groote Zuider Weg, which would take them eventually to Buitenzorg, Nathanial explained, but which, here, ran along the canal of Gunung Sahari to the market at Pasir Senen. Today was not a market day, so they did not stop but carried on, going west into Perapatan, over the Ciliwung River. Bamboo rafts laden with bricks were negotiating the long curve of the water. With their high, pointed bows, fat bodies and curled tails, they looked like scorpions. The water in Batavia was omnipresent and adorned by a seemingly infinite array of native craft.

They called for tea with Reverend Medhurst and his wife, for hidden behind a thick forest of palms was the English church, white columned and cool. The road from here ran along Kebun Sireh, a large plantation of betel trees, crossed the little Menteng stream and emerged at another large country residence at the southern end of Tanah Abang.

“Much of the land we have just traversed,” Nathanial said, “was once the most famous private estate in Batavia, from which this part of the city takes its name, Weltevreden. The man was Justinus Vinck, and he owned, incredible as it may seem today, all of Weltevreden, had a house bigger and finer even than Brieswijk, established both the market at Pasir Senen and that at Tanah Abang and made the Kebun Sireh road to join the two. The estate was home to three Governors-General and finally passed into government hands when Daendels purchased it; it was gradually broken up.”

They turned along the wide, red-earthed, rural path of Tanah Abang, where the trees threw shadows into the quiet waters of the canal and they could peer at the goods and curiosities of the ramshackle Chinese shops and
warungs
which dotted the road. The sound of small boys' voices chanting could be heard from a red-roofed mosque which stood behind a low hedge. The mosque was like many in Batavia, a mix of different styles and cultures. Nathanial, whose encyclopaedic interests included mosque architecture, had shown her the Angke mosque at Kampong Bali. The rectangular shape, the small windows with their wooden slats and the two-storey roof were Javanese. The five front steps, the pillars, the double-winged door, the carved fanlight and door frame were Dutch. The roof ends curved like a Chinese house.

Before Tanah Abang joined Riswijkstraat, they turned into Kerkhoflaan to visit the European cemetery. This quickly became a favourite place for Charlotte. The only sound throughout its vast grounds was birdsong. When the day was new, she took the carriage to the gates of the cemetery, where, in the shade of a banyan tree, a flower market sprang up every day. The ground under the tree was set with ancient gravestones, like the floor of an old village church. The blue-grey slabs were emblazoned with worn-out crests and coats-of-arms. Heraldic shapes and long Latin epitaphs were engraved in the curving script of the 17th and 18th century, recording for fleeting posterity the honours and titles bestowed on the deceased by the Lords Seventeen, the rulers of the United East India Company. Nathanial had told her that when the old churches were closed, the gravestones of the first Dutchmen had been moved here. Some had been stolen, some sold to Chinese for their own tombs; some found their way here, now to be daily festooned with heaps of creamy jasmine, stems of lotus buds, bouquets of orchids of every hue, baskets of soft, fragrant petals with tints of ivory and purple mixed with gold. Their customers, village women, their slender figures dressed in bright-hued garments, arrived chattering, bargaining, moving from one flower seller to another. Purchase made, they and their friends sat and twisted orange blossom or jasmine into their coils of glistening black hair. Charlotte always filled a basket with flowers when she came, happy to pay these women for their charming display and happy, too, to adorn whatever headstone took her fancy.

She never tired of exploring the shady lanes of these peaceful grounds. Nathanial had taken her to the white grave and cupola of Olivia Raffles, which lay next to her friend and her most ardent admirer, John Leyden. Leyden, Charlotte knew now, was the very closest friend of Thomas and Olivia. He had died of fever at the conquest of Java. Leyden was one of the most famous of Scottish poets, a friend and colleague of Sir Walter Scott. Though he did not say so, Nathanial felt a little like Leyden, who had clearly fallen hopelessly in love with the wife of his friend. He read Charlotte a poem he had found, written for Olivia:

When far beyond Malaya's sea
,

I trace dark Sunda's forests drear
,

Olivia! I shall think of thee
—

And bless thy steps, departed year

Each morn or evening spent with thee

Fancy shall mid the wilds restore

In all their charms, and they shall be

Sweet days that shall return no more
…

Throughout the grounds, in a disordered profusion, lay all the different tastes and feelings one would find in any graveyard of such antiquity, visible in the writing, styles and sculpture of the tombs. Here a winged marble angel, dazzling white in the sun, a gothic turret, pillars, obelisks; there, sleeping children, mossy marble crosses, baroque coats-of-arms. All the faith and worldly glory which had flitted briefly on the stage of this capital found a quiet remembrance here.

Throughout this time of sadness and recovery, Tigran stayed as patient and attentive as he could. Seeing Charlotte's spirits revived, he walked on the grounds with her and read to her from a book of poetry he had been given by his English tutor long ago, for he understood more than ever her feeling for poetry. He chose carefully, poems of nature and beauty. She recovered her wits and accepted her new place.

12

Charlotte watched her body change and her belly become taut, rounded, uncomfortable … ugly. Sleep was elusive. Up until this night she had not had the slightest inclination to go near the closet and had kept her own door locked. She was far advanced in the pregnancy. The baby was turbulent now. The first movement had been months ago, and she and Takouhi had laughed and hugged each other. Since the loss of Meda, Takouhi awaited the arrival of this baby with a joy which seemed to invigorate her. Somehow Charlotte felt reluctant to share this time with Tigran, despite all his kindness; this was not his child.