The Shallow Seas (5 page)

Takouhi's tone had changed again. Now she was just telling a story as if it was about someone else.

Charlotte put out her hand to her friend's, but Takouhi curled her hands into her lap.

“He hurt me a lot inside, I very small, must call doctor. When I am sick he don't touch, but as soon as I well, he come again. I fight, but he beat me. One time he tie me to bed and leave me, two days, no food, no water. When he come he lie on me, heavy, put hand inside me, beat me, have sex with me. Blood everywhere. I think I die that time, really. Maids save me, give water, clean mess. When he go out, they free me, care for me though very dangerous for them. They are slave girl, he can kill them, anything, and no one care. When he see I no fight anymore, he let me go. I live like slave. Cannot go out, live with his other women in house. When Valentijna try to see me, he say no. I am pregnant, get very sick. Then he let her come. She see my arms and face, cry for me. He beat a lot, all the women. I think he hate women. She tell father but he do nothing. Doctor tell Pieter don't touch me, but he don't care. Thank all gods, I lose this baby. Pieter want sex too much, beat too much. Then I understand, just survive. Other women help me, all slave women, I never forget them. But I lucky, after six months he lose interest in me. Always he want new girl. So I stay very quiet, away from him, far away.”

Charlotte was listening, horrified. Takouhi rose and, taking Charlotte's hand, led her off the terrace and they began to walk to a thick grove of tamarind trees, beyond which lay the small chapel and the graveyard.

“When Tigran born, Valentijna ask father please let me come back to help with him. Father want son, so happy to have son that he agree. Pieter don't care then. He forget about me. Go to be Resident in Makassar. We all hope he die there, of drink, of fever, of anything, but somehow bad man always live. When I am eighteen, Pieter come back. He see me. I pretty—how you say—grow up. He want me come back. My father order this. But I not fourteen anymore. I clever girl. Think about this moment long, long time. Learn many things. I go back and first night he come to me, I smile and give him drink of Madeira wine.”

They had entered the deep shadow of the tamarind trees, with their feathery, lime-coloured leaves and thick clutches of long, brown pods. Takouhi stopped and turned to face Charlotte.

“Listen, Charlotte. I kill Pieter. Give
upas
, poison, understand. I put a little in drink every time he come to me. He get little sick and soon cannot come anymore. But I give poison to him, little bit every week. Sometimes I stop, then start again. He take long time, have pain. Everybody very sad for me, poor young wife. When I am twenty, he die. I am widow, I have his money. That day I decide never marry again.”

Charlotte looked into Takouhi's eyes. She gazed steadily back at her friend. So many things fell into place: Takouhi's refusal to marry George, though he asked her many times, even after the birth of Meda. Her separate residence at Tir Uaidhne, the mansion George had built for her in Singapore, her independence.

With a soft swish, a sudden breeze swept through the leaves of the fecund trees around them, rattling the pods and moving the supple branches like long, tender arms. Charlotte nodded and put her arm through her friend's. They walked on through the dark grove and out into the sunshine. In front of them was the chapel. They sat on the grass by Meda's grave.

3

Charlotte began to discover the immense beauty of Brieswijk.

The house had been built over seventy years before by a Cornelius van Riejmsdijk, a senior merchant in the VOC. His initials and coat of arms adorned several of the inner doors. Over the main portal stood the great open fanlight, with the carved initials of the VOC, the V huge, overlapping the smaller O and C. On either side were fanlights depicting Asia and Europe, surrounded by garlands and fruits. Tigran had explained a little about the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie which had established the town of Batavia over two centuries ago.

From its trading origins, the United East India Company had grown to be a mighty force, controlling the agriculture and all trade between these Spice Islands and Holland. Establishing the tiny fort at Batavia, the VOC had not sought territory. With territory came responsibility, and responsibility was expensive. Java was merely a great storehouse waiting to be sacked, to the profit of their investors. Gradually, though, the Company had acquired territory, and the armies of the VOC were called on to wage battle for and against the ever-feuding local kings and princes, ceding rights and land to the Company each time. Slowly and inexorably, the royal families gave away all of Java to the VOC, whether the Company wanted it or not. For two hundred years, to belong to the Company was to be part of the greatest enterprise on earth.

Since the 1760s, though, the Company had been in financial difficulties due in part to abuses, corruption and smuggling by its senior servants, including the Governor-General himself. The initials became known everywhere as
Vergaan Onder Corruptie
, “ruined by corruption”. When war between Holland and England broke out in 1780 over support for the American Revolution, it sounded the death knell of “Jan Company”, as it was commonly known. The English blockaded the Channel, bringing VOC ships to Amsterdam, destroyed the Dutch fleet and ruled the seas. By 1790, the Company had debts amounting to 85 million florins. The VOC colonies in Guinea and Bengal, Ceylon, the Coramandel coast, Malacca and the Cape were lost to English domination. The Dutch state was obliged to step in to prevent the total collapse of the VOC and the loss of the India trade. Finally, the Company was disbanded in 1800, but not before Holland itself had fallen to the French emperor Napoleon, through the army of Marshal Herman Daendels, amongst others. When Louis Napoleon was made king of Holland by his mighty brother, Daendels was named Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies, and the French flag flew over Batavia.

Tigran showed Charlotte a pair of golden candelabra which stood on a long sideboard to one side of the formal dining room. Winged victories, in Greek dress, held aloft a long floral wreath, from which ten candle sockets sprang, decorated with fluting, acanthus leaves and spirals.

“My father bought these from the effects of Marshal Daendels after he left. They are said to have been a gift from Napoleon himself, although no one knows for sure. He paid a hefty price for them, so I am certain he believed it to be so. In those days, like him or loathe him, anything touched by the great Frenchman was like gold.”

Tigran smiled wryly. He was taking her on a tour of the house. It was a veritable repository of the recent history of the Dutch East Indies and Batavia. Tigran had begun the tour in the downstairs study, where a portrait of Riejmsdijk and his family hung on one of the walls. The grand merchant stood, thin and rather humourless, in his embroidered velvet coat, ruffled shirt and buckled shoes.

Next to him was a small woman also dressed, Charlotte presumed, in the Dutch style of the 1760s, covered in pearls. She was Javanese, Charlotte supposed, but, just as the thought came into her head, Tigran said, “Riejmsdijk's wife was Japanese. He brought her and his children when he left Deshima, the VOC's trading station in Japan. Smuggled them out, actually. All Japan trade is still Dutch and still comes through Batavia. Two vessels per year go for copper, and we sometimes trade in lacquer wares and fine porcelain.”

Charlotte examined the portrait more carefully. She was not sure where Japan was, had had no idea that the Dutch traded there. Now she could see, emerging from its darkened paint, the figures of a boy and two little girls.

“When we ride down to the river you will see a bridge over the Kali Krukut which leads to the villages on the other side. It is a Japanese-style bridge. It, and some of the trees around the bank, are all that remains of a Japanese garden he built for his wife. I understand she and the children all died before him.”

When Riejmsdijk himself had died suddenly, Tigran told her, the estate was put up for auction by the Orphan's Chamber to find funds to support his vast number of illegitimate children. Riejmsdijk had kept over fifty concubines. Charlotte marvelled at this Eastern profligacy. The Dutch in Holland were Calvinist. Something happened to the men, she thought, when they arrived on Asia's shores. They forgot their upbringing and in short measure fell into Asia's sensual and tempting arms and became sometimes more immoderate than even the Asian princes and potentates who surrounded them. There was, thought Charlotte, a bizarre contradiction between the almost prudish seemliness of the selected or legitimised wife and the base attitude to other native women, who could be abandoned at will; the white man's own progeny by them callously sold and forgotten.

Charlotte looked at Reijmsdijk. He must have loved his wife and children, for he had risked smuggling them out of Japan. He had built her a garden that she might feel, in some measure, less homesick. He must have suffered at their loss. Yet he had been able to abuse and discard other women in equal measure. Charlotte shook her head.

Tigran was explaining something about the Orphan Chamber, and Charlotte abandoned her musings. The Orphan Chamber had been set up long ago to address the problem of the vast number of children born out of wedlock to native women and abandoned to their
kampong
lives when the men either died or returned to Holland. The VOC had early on decided to bring these light-skinned
kampong
children into the church, baptise them and support them. Thus, the girls could serve in the houses of Dutch men, and become acceptable half-white wives or companions. Dutch women had been forbidden to come to Batavia since 1659, for they rarely flourished in the climate and simply caused rank discontent among the men. Even the wife of the present Governor-General, Tigran explained, had her origins in this manner. She was a legitimised daughter of a Balinese slave girl. The boys were groomed to be soldiers for the VOC's ever-needful army or minor clerks in the government. Where the girls might, through judicious marriages to white men, rise to the highest rungs of this closed society, the boys of low-ranking officers and officials were forever locked into low status and poorly paid jobs. For boys to succeed, they had to be raised and sent to school in Holland. Only the wealthiest men in the land could afford it.

Tigran looked at Charlotte. He knew Takouhi had mentioned his family with Mia and was not sure how she felt about it.

“I, too, was supposed to go to Amsterdam. I did not go, my father told me, for when I was of the age the seas were terribly dangerous for Dutch ships. England was at war with Napoleon, you know, and Holland had been annexed and become simply a French province. Batavia flew the French flag, and invasion was inevitable—the more so as the exiled Dutch prince placed the colonies under English protection. I had Dutch tutors and, after Raffles came, an English one. For my sons, a Dutch education was no longer useful. Everything had changed. When Napoleon was defeated and the English returned Java to the Dutch, the new Netherlands government appointed only men born in Holland, loyal to Holland, who brought their Dutch wives. People like my sons are
mestizo
, like me: not white, not Dutch. High office is out of their reach. They must make their lives in commerce and on the plantations.”

Charlotte was listening to him and looking out of the window. Impulsively she asked,

“Did you love your
nyai
, Tigran?”

Tigran was nonplussed. He had not expected this question. He frowned. Charlotte turned to face him, waiting somewhat nervously. There was a silence. Had she gone too far? Did she really want to talk about love to Tigran?

“Love her? I cared—care—for her. She was the first woman I ever had, for a long time the only woman. She was sent to change me from a boy to a man. That was her role. Possibly I thought I loved her when I was very young.”

He took Charlotte's hands in his and looked directly into her eyes.

“We always love in some measure the woman, or man, who awakens powerful feelings. Don't we? Is that real love? I don't know.”

As he said this, he felt again a deep regret at not having been Charlotte's first man—truthfully, her only man. Now he would always stand in comparison to this other who had awakened such feelings in her. But never mind, he thought, time will pass. She will forget, as those feelings have faded for me. I will make her forget. I will seduce her as this man did, but I will give her everything he could not.

He gripped her wrists and pulled her towards him, putting her hands under his coat, against his chest, holding them there. She could feel his heart beating. It was the second time today she had found herself so close to him.

“Do you want to talk about love, Charlotte, and passion? I know you know these things. I too. Do you want me to tell you how I feel about you, or shall I show you?”

Charlotte could not hold his gaze. She wished she had not asked him this question. She looked down. Tigran smiled and released her hands, glad he had made her heart beat faster, glad to see the confusion on her face.

After a moment he said, “Come and let me show you treasures.”

He walked over to a large carved wood cabinet and unlocked the doors.

“Reijmsdijk brought many things from Japan.”

Charlotte was grateful for the change of subject and peered inside. On one shelf lay four boxes. Tigran took one out. It was a double-layered box of black lacquer, with gold images of clouds and mountains. In between pictures of trees and elegant halls were little figures carrying boxes on their backs and staves in their hands. It was delightful. Tigran saw the look of pleasure on Charlotte's face and brought all the boxes down from the shelf. He himself had never really looked at these things; they had simply been left for years in this cupboard. Charlotte tried to analyse their appeal; perhaps it was their perfect detail, their orderliness. A chaotic world made simple through art.