Indeed we were, I said, and we chatted amiably for a few minutes, catching up on the years that had intervened between our two encounters.
“By the way,” I said, “I’ve often wondered what became of the young couple who were married that day. Tommy and Adele, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, yes,” he said. “Tommy and Adele.” He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out a cigar. “Do you mind?” he asked. I shook my head and he prepared and lit the end before continuing. Perhaps he needed the time to recollect the events he would relate to me.
“Very sad,” he said, finally, slowly shaking his head. “I’m afraid it all ended rather badly.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. I’ve thought of them over the years and always hoped it had worked out for them.”
“Fever,” he said. “Poor chap died quite soon after and she was left with very little once she’d paid his debts. He’d told her he had enough money to live on for five years, but that was a lie. He barely had enough for five months. And when that was gone, he’d got himself tangled up with the damnable Chinese moneylenders, and that’s a life sentence, let me tell you. But what was she to do? It wasn’t five minutes after she buried him that they came after her for the money. She couldn’t leave and she couldn’t stay. It wasn’t as if she could go out and get a job. Poor girl. Poor, poor girl.”
I remembered that he’d been half in love with her at the wedding, but I didn’t know how to broach the subject. I needn’t have worried; he brought it up himself.
“I wanted so badly to help her. I cared for her, you know,” he said, looking at me through the smoke of his cigar. “Would have married her myself if I could have. But the Company, you know, wouldn’t allow it. I hadn’t finished my two terms yet and they were very strict about that sort of thing. I did what I could,” he said, shaking his head, “but it wasn’t enough. I couldn’t save her.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Drowned herself,” he replied. “At least, that’s what they said it was. Suicide. But I never believed it. Didn’t want to believe it, I guess.” He flicked the ash from his cigar into an elaborate Venetian glass ashtray that a footman had placed on a nearby table. “Nearly left Guthrie’s over it,” he continued. “Blamed them and their stupid, stupid rules. I could have saved her, I believed. Believed it for a long time. But now I’m not so sure. Time and all that, makes a man think differently.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, looking at me with those same eyes that I had looked into so many years earlier, except this time the redness, I suspected, was from tears.
“She didn’t love me, did she?”
Chapter Seven
Maris had no trouble finding information about Edward Sutcliffe Moresby at the public library. Moresby was a British novelist and short story writer who was born in 1887 and died in 1965. He led a fairly peripatetic life due to a small independent income left to him by his grandfather. His travels took him to the Orient, including Thailand, Malaya and Singapore, India, and Ceylon. He eventually settled in Monte Carlo, in a seventeenth-century villa, but never gave up travelling. He wrote twenty-five novels and a hundred short stories that were based on his travels and the people he met. He usually cast himself in the role of narrator and most of his stories were variations on real events in his own life.
His father, a well-known barrister, died when Moresby was nine. He was raised by his mother Maud, with whom he had a close relationship until her death at ninety-one. He never married and, although he had friendships with both men and women, he seems not to have had any lasting attachments except the one with his mother. There was much speculation regarding his sexuality, but no cache of hidden love letters or confessional autobiographies ever settled the matter one way or the other.
Maris recalled reading one of Moresby’s novels in high school. It was his most famous and, it was believed, the most autobiographical of his books. The Heart’s Prisoner was the story of a young man who becomes an Anglican minister like his father because his family pressures him into it. The church was to have been the calling of his elder brother, but that brother died from a weak heart when he was just fourteen. The character becomes involved with a woman of ill repute when he tries to save her from a life of prostitution. She nearly destroys him, but he escapes by deciding to leave the church and leave England. Moresby had studied law at university in an effort to follow in his illustrious father’s footsteps and please his mother, but he discovered he hated the profession and didn’t have the temperament for law. He wanted to be a writer.
Maris couldn’t remember Peter’s ever mentioning Moresby or his books, and was no closer to knowing why he’d left her the first editions. Except perhaps because they were first editions and therefore valuable. But still, why did he collect only Moresby’s books? Surely there were plenty of more valuable first editions he could have acquired.
Maris could find no connection between Edward Sutcliffe Moresby and someone with the initials AS, which was odd because they were the two sole occupants of the trunk Peter had left her. Why? There must be a connection, she thought. But Peter hadn’t left any clues. Maybe he would have told her about the bequest if he had lived long enough. He would have thought there was plenty of time for that — and why not? What forty-five-year-old man expects to die suddenly after drinking a glass of his favourite aperitif?
Maris looked around the library. There was hardly anyone there on a Tuesday afternoon and she was overcome by a feeling of loneliness as powerful and frightening as suffocation. She was afraid that if she closed her eyes, someone would push a pillow onto her face and smother her. It was as if something was slowly sucking the air from the room, the way her mother had taught her to use a straw to pull the air out of a plastic freezer bag before sealing the contents. “It needs to be airtight,” her mother said, “because nothing lives in a vacuum, including bacteria.”
Living in a vacuum. That’s what her life felt like right now: an airless, colourless, germ-free void where nothing was happening. Why couldn’t she shake this funk that had been gripping her since Peter’s death? Shouldn’t she have recovered by now? Had Peter’s death been such a blow that it could send her to this place of virtual stasis? She thought she was made of sterner stuff than that, thought she was more resilient. Yet when faced with tragedy — it was the first time she had experienced the death of someone she cared about — she had folded in on herself. Granted, it was murder, and a seemingly irrational, unexplainable, and senseless death, so she gave herself that. Her grief had another layer of difficulty piled on top of it, one that robbed her of solace every time she thought of it. Who had the emotional toolkit to deal with the trauma of murder?
Should she talk to a shrink? Ray thought so, and even Dinah had mentioned it before Maris left Singapore. But every part of Maris resisted taking that path. She didn’t want to say it was because she was an artist — that seemed so pretentious, like a hoity-toity cop-out. She was who she was and who she was raised to be: a stubborn, independent person who expressed herself creatively through painting. That was central to her existence. Otherwise, what was the point? Without art, what was the point of getting up every morning? Of breathing? It all just seemed like waiting for death. Getting through the day was simply moving closer to death. When had getting through the day become a reason for living?
Chapter Eight
Francis and Sutty watched as the Narkunda steamed into the port of Singapore. As always, when a ship arrived from England, there was a sense of excitement on shore that exceeded the anticipations of Christmas morning and the giddiness that resulted from betting on a winning horse at the races. It seemed as if all of British Singapore turned out to welcome the arrival of the ship and everything on it, including the passengers, the crew, and the long-awaited cargo. What if the newspaper headlines were more than a month old? The jams and the tinned puddings and the salted hams would be as fresh as the day they were packed. The young women would be spirited and beautiful, and