"The House of Doors"

Tan Twan Eng's novel also mixed the real and the imagined, like the writer at the center of this story, Maugham.

• There was no return address, but the postmarks, smudged like aged tattoos, told me that it had been mailed from Penang sometime in September 1946. The tangle of overlapping addresses by different hands had somehow managed to pick up my wind-blown spoor: the package had been sent to Robert’s old chambers in London, before being forwarded to our solicitor in Cape Town and, almost half a year after it had been posted from Penang, it had found me on this sheep farm fifteen miles outside Beaufort West.
• It was high summer when we arrived, the sun smiting the earth. Everything was so bleak – the parchment landscape, the faces of the people, even the light itself. How I ached for the monsoon skies of the equator, for the ever-changing tints of its chameleon sea.
• * But – sail home … to what? And to whom? Everyone I had known in Malaya was either dead or had disappeared into distant lands and different lives. And then war had broken out all over the world and the Japanese had invaded Malaya. So I had remained here, a daub of paint worked by time’s paintbrush into this vast, eternal landscape.
• He hadn’t recognised his old friend’s voice either – the resplendent baritone he used to envy had shrivelled to a querulous, fissured tone.
• Penang: The island was Britain’s first outpost in South-East Asia and the capital of the Straits Settlements (‘Britain’s most important Crown Colony in the Far East’, his Bradshaw proclaimed). From Penang they had extended their reach down to Malacca, Singapore and, eventually, into the Federated Malay States and the Unfederated Malay States. In the eighteenth century, tin mining attracted coolies from southern China, while indentured Indian labourers were shipped in to work in the rubber plantations.
• Trippe & Company had collapsed, his lawyers regretted to inform him. He had lost all his money, every penny of it. <> A hot, acidulous nausea flooded his stomach, searing his throat.
• * ‘Clive doesn’t stammer. He stutters.’
  ‘Is there a difference?’
  ‘Clive tuh-tuh-tuh-talks luh-luh-luh-like th-th-this. A stammerer doesn’t. A stammerer battles … to squeeze … the next … word in his sentence out of his mouth. Verbal constipation, you could say.’
• A squall of coughing buffeted Robert. I sprang to the teapoy by the sideboard and hurried back with a glass of water.
• The monarchy in China was dead, but the revolution had only pushed the antique land into a civil war that seemed to have no end. In the last few years I had stopped reading about the news from there – I found it too upsetting, too painful. China slipped out of my thoughts, out of my dreams, like a cloud pulling away to another sky below the horizon.
• Built at the turn of the eighteenth century, these buildings blended elements of southern Chinese and Indian architecture. With their exteriors limewashed in a variety of bright colours and embellished with detailed and eye-catching features, they are an artist’s dream. Their first floor formed a narrow porch, creating a connected walkway about five feet wide, what the Hokkiens called ‘goh kaki’. This five-foot way is usually laid with brightly patterned terracotta tiles, while the front doors – often a two-leaf comb door opening up to reveal a plain and more sturdy pair of inner timber doors – are flanked by shuttered windows on both sides. Above the windows usually sit a pair of air vents, shaped to symbolise bats and secured by thin vertical iron bars. The façade of the second floor is taken up by timber louvred shutters and, more often than not, a strip of parapet wall perforated with a row of jade-green ceramic air vents.
• ‘I should be going with you. I’m your wife – although you seem to forget that all the time.’ <> ‘My dear Syrie, I assure you that I find it … extremely difficult to forget that you’re my wife.’... She mustered her next words and fired them off in a broadside. ‘I feel more like your widow than your wife.’
• * or we get a divorce.’ He cupped his hands on his knees. ‘It’s up to you. But make your decision now.’ <> For three or four seconds her expression remained frozen. Then slowly, with almost a tragic grandeur to it, her face collapsed. It was like watching a heavy flank of ice calving from an iceberg into the sea, Willie thought.
  the languorous climate was working its powers on him, and he felt his health improving, like a warm, rich tide replenishing a depleted lagoon. <> Gerald’s body, he saw, was filling out again too, his skin varnished to a glossy teak by the sun.
• * Gerald was right, thought Willie – there were days when husband and wife barely exchanged more than a handful of words to each other. But that wasn’t at all uncommon in many marriages, was it?
  ‘There’s something about her,’ said Willie, ‘something clenched up …’
  ‘Just another woman in the colonies stuck in an unhappy marriage,’ said Gerald,
• My brother gave me a shrewd look. ‘Somerset Maugham wants to write a book about Sun Wen? That’ll be a tremendous coup for him. A book by Willie Maugham, a book that’s sympathetic to Sun Wen could persuade more influential and high-ranking people in England to give their support and assistance to him, to his dream of China.’
• He shook his head. ‘Most of them were captured or killed.’ <> I could still recall some of their faces, if not their names. I remembered how young and determined they were, those men and women of the Tong Meng Hui.
• ‘Legend has it that Hutton & Sons was founded by one of his ancestors who had been with Francis Light when he landed in Penang. They say it was this Hutton who had given Light the idea of firing silver dollars from the ship’s cannon into the interior – a way of spurring the men to clear the jungles.’
• Willie could not get enough of Cookie’s famous choon pneah – deep-fried crab meat spring rolls served with a dipping sauce that he had concocted himself, a blend of soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, some cinnamon and cloves and star anise, and finely chopped red chillies.
• ‘It’s the left leaf of a pair of doors,’ I said. The paintwork was faded, leaving blank patches in the mists. Emptiness swirling within emptiness. ‘Taken from a clanhouse in Penang. Late eighteenth century.’ <> ‘Lesley picked it up in an Armenian Jew’s shop in town.’ Robert flicked a questioning glance at me. ‘Got it for a song too, didn’t you, darling?’
• The sitting room had the faint, medicinal scent of the old teakwood floors mingled with the fragrance of the star jasmine from the garden. All these smells, blended by time into a sillage that could never be replicated in any other house.
• * We asked the villagers about Gauguin, and they directed us to a house on a slope. The place was falling to pieces, but right before our eyes was the Gauguin. On the door.’
  I leaned forward. ‘Painted on the door?’
  ‘Painted on the glass panel.’
• * ‘No one can, Robert. All we ever get is the incomplete picture,’ said Willie. ‘A writer’s job is to fill in the gaps. And he decides how the story ends.’ <> It was something that had never occurred to me before: we all had the power to change our pasts, our beginnings – or our perception of them, at least – but none of us could determine how our stories would end.
• Willie’s words had polished the lens through which I had always viewed my husband, and yet, at the same time, they shifted him slightly out of focus
• The sea was emerald and turquoise, chipped with a million white scratches. In the garden below the kebun was resting in the shade of the casuarina tree, puffing on a kretek and scratching his groin through the folds of his shorts with an abstracted, canine pleasure. Looking at him, a longing for the man’s simple life gripped Willie. <> Envious of a native fiddling with his balls under a tree, he thought. How the mighty have fallen.
• It was just past noon, that time of the day when the wind swelling off the sea seemed to have been transmuted into the hot, searing light itself, but even in the full flood of the midday sun the casuarina’s foliage had a brooding, corvine aspect.
• ‘I loathed boarding school.’ Willie hawked up a gob of disgust in his throat. ‘The … beatings and the bullying, the hundreds of imbecilic rules …’
• * He shook his head. ‘We will be remembered through our stories. What was that poem? The one written on your door? A bird of the mountain, carrying a name beyond the clouds. Well, a story can carry a name beyond the clouds, beyond even time itself.’... The corners of her mouth curled downwards. ‘Infuriating, isn’t it? For a woman to be remembered, she has to either be a queen or a whore. But for those of us who lead normal, mundane lives, who will remember us?’
• ‘Your fastidiousness over your clothes.’ She tapped the skin above her lips. ‘Your perfectly groomed moustache. The deceptively disinterested air you give off when you observe people from the corner of your eye.’ She leaned back at a slight angle, taking the measure of him from head to toe. ‘And you’re about the same build.’ A new thought struck her. ‘And you were both doctors too. Fancy that.’ <> ‘First time I’ve ever been likened to a Chinaman.’
• ‘You know what … money really is? Money’s the sixth sense. If you don’t have it, you can’t make … the most of the other five.’
• * ‘James Brooke founded the only European royal family in the East, and that family’s still on the throne today, seventy years later. Why, his life must’ve been chock-full of adventures and escapades.’
• ‘It was an eventful life – but it lacked one essential element.’.. There’s no love interest in his life. And a story without love … well, it just wouldn’t work.’
• She let his words steep in her thoughts for a while. ‘So,’ she said eventually, ‘a life without love is a life not worth writing about? I don’t know whether that makes you a cynic or a romantic.’
  I had stayed by Willie’s side, a smile starched onto my face,
• ‘This strange-looking symbol you put in your books,’ I said. ‘What is it?’
  ‘It’s called a hamsa. It’s a Moorish sign to ward … off the evil eye,’ Willie said. ‘It symbolises a sword breaking open the … darkness to let the light shine in.’
  Hamsa. I savoured the strange word silently on my tongue, this short intake of breath, followed by its long surrender into the air. ‘I always thought it looks like a casuarina tree – that long straight line down the middle is the trunk, and the two curving lines over it the outline of its droopy foliage.’
• The tentative notes wove themselves into the ribbon of a simple, plaintive melody. The piano had not been tuned in a long time, and the music seemed to emerge from an old, warped shellac disc, with an unsettling, forlorn quality to it. I played the piece all the way to the end. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80Ceh3D6r-g
• * Even the waves outside, fraying away the margins of land since the beginning of the world, seemed to have stilled into stone. In the hallway the weighted heart of the grandfather clock went on beating, as indifferent as an aged monk thumbing his prayer beads on their long and infinite loop.
• ‘“Caelum non animum mutant qui trans mare currunt” – They change their sky, not their soul, when they speed across the ocean.’ He looked back at me. ‘A Roman poet wrote that.’
• * ‘I broke into the village temple and desecrated the statues of the deities,’ Sun Wen replied. ‘And for good measure I smashed the villagers’ ancestral tablets as well.’ <> ‘Following in the footsteps of that chap Hong, were you? The leader of the Taiping Rebellion?’
• ‘I don’t find that funny at all, Robert.’ I turned back to Sun Wen. ‘All night long you’ve been talking about equality.’ I jabbed my forefinger at him. ‘Let me ask you this: after you’ve established your republic, will you allow us women to take as many husbands as we like? Younger and handsomer, more virile ones? It’s only fair, isn’t it? It’s only equal.’
• I sat on the beach, watching my sons splashing in the water as dusk poured its ink into the sea. I couldn’t leave all this behind, I couldn’t walk out of my marriage. I had no choice but to suffer Robert’s betrayal in silence.
• * White egrets spiralled down from the sky onto the exposed seabed, their wings flagging the temporary truce between land and sea.
• Gerald kept walking, heading towards the thin white strip of surf in the distance, until he was nothing more than a small, wavering mirage.
• ‘It was bloody chaos, wasn’t it? That poor bastard …’ <> They stood shoulder to shoulder at the balustrade, their breaths flouring the hard, frosty air.
• ‘“Of Times and their reasons, and constellations sunk beneath the earth and risen, I shall sing.”’
  ‘That’s beautiful. You wrote that?’
  ‘If only I had.’ Willie smiled. ‘Ovid.
• ‘Lesley became close to him, didn’t she?’ <> A careful expression draped itself over Geoff’s face. ‘She supported his cause,’ he said.
• * He recalled reading about the kidnapping in the London papers, but his memory of it was blurry – at the time he had taken no more than a fleeting interest in the story. He had been busy with his practical midwifery training. And furthermore, he and his friends – and countless others in the stratum of London society in which they moved – were reeling from the death knell rung across England by poor Oscar Wilde’s fate. They were all frantically consigning caches of letters and notes to the flames, letters and notes that should never have been written and sent; and how many more men were fleeing across the Channel to the civilised havens of the Continent. What did he – or anyone else – care about the abduction of some Chinaman by his own government?
• The Taipings, I was happy to find out, viewed women as the equal of men. From the earliest days of the rebellion their women had been fighting shoulder to shoulder with the men against the emperor’s troops... we spent many an evening discussing its convoluted history, although he thought I was becoming too obsessed with the Taipings. But it had been a long while since we shared something that engaged us; it gave us something safe to argue about, something to hold back the tide of silence that had, unknown to us, crept into our marriage.
• I charted his coordinates on the map of our social world (it was a habit everyone here – especially the Chinese – indulged in when meeting someone for the first time), and I was fully aware that he was doing the same with me.
• I had expected him to be provoked into anger, but he merely smiled. ‘The Chinese-educated ones here say we chiak angmoh sai,’ he said. ‘“We eat the white man’s shit.”’... He became serious. ‘I’m here because of my grandmother. She was eighteen when she joined the rebels fighting the Manchu emperor.’ <> ‘Your grandmother was a Taiping rebel?’
• ‘You should see the incense he makes for the Hungry Ghost Festival,’ Arthur said as we continued on our way down the street. ‘Six feet long and thick as a telegraph pole, each one of them, with dragons and phoenixes twisting up and down the whole length. They burn for a whole week.’
• The walls, however, were hung with wooden doors painted with birds and flowers, or mist-covered mountains. The upper halves of some of the doors were decorated with intricate fretwork of dragons and phoenixes. <> ‘I got them from shophouses and temples that were about to be torn down,’
• We walked between the rows of painted doors, our shoulders and elbows setting them spinning slowly. Each door pirouetted open to reveal another set of doors, and I had the dizzying sensation that I was walking down the corridors of a constantly shifting maze, each pair of doors opening into another passageway, and another, giving me no inkling of where I would eventually emerge.
• he found a solution: he ordered his court artist to paint the likenesses of the two generals on his doors, one on the left, the other on the right. And from then on he was never disturbed by evil spirits again. <> ‘Over time, this practice spread across the land. General Qin and General Yu became known as the Gods of the Doors.’
• ‘“Evanescent path of dreams/in the summer night/O Bird of the mountain/carry my name beyond the clouds.” A poem by Shibata Katsuie, a sixteenth-century Japanese samurai, a warrior.
• ‘Oh? So she’s his concubine?’ <> ‘You’d better not let her hear you. She’s handy with a gun, and she knows martial arts – she’s roughed up a few men in her time. Chui Fen’s been by his side for twenty years. As far as he’s concerned – as far as we are concerned – she’s his wife.’
• My darling Robert. Impudent, addressing his superior like that, I thought as I read the note again. The realisation coalesced slowly, and then, like a coffin slotting into a grave, everything fell into place. My darling Robert.
• Now, decades later and a world from his boyhood, he curled his fingers over his palm. He had a sudden longing to feel, for just the briefest moment, her bony, gloved hand in his again, but his fingers closed over only emptiness.
• * its white, silky petals were already browning at the edges. <> Seared by the unforgiving air, he thought. While we are living, the air sustains us, but the very instant we stop breathing, that same air immediately sinks its teeth into us. What keeps us alive will also, in the end, consume us.
• Twilight was foxing the margins of the sky as they retraced their path
• ‘Yes, yes, I’ve gone mad, my head is full of wind,’ I answered in Hokkien, shooing her out of my room.
• the manek-manek shoes were so dainty that I was almost afraid of pressing my full weight onto their soles. Once fully attired, the clothes compelled me to move with a languid grace, as befitted a Nyonya with nothing to fill her days but pua’ chiki card games and gossip and scolding her daughter-in-law.
• I realised that I was the only angmoh there. A woman with the soft hands and the hard face of the weathy
• ‘His catamite left him a note. A rather sweet one, actually.’
  Geoff winced. ‘I wish you wouldn’t use that word.’
  ‘What’s so objectionable about “note”?’
• catamite”. What unsuitable books have you been reading, young lady?’ <> ‘I followed the Wilde trials, you know, just like everyone else.’ Robert had been engrossed by the trials,
• When I was studying in London I would go to all his plays. I remember one season he had four plays running in the West End at the same time. Four different plays. No one had ever achieved that before.’
• I hesitated on the goh kaki, weighed down by a reluctance to leave. The world still looked the same, yet the pattern of its weave seemed different now. A lifetime had slipped past since I stepped into the house. Everything had changed, and it could never be undone.
• guzheng: his fingers plucking and pressing down on them, summoning up mournful songs from dynasties long crumbled to dust. The notes shimmering from the strings sounded like condensed drops of tears; they echoed in the air, distilling into the silence.
• * ‘Reynaldo Hahn, L’heure exquise,’ he replied. ‘The words are from Verlaine’s poem. He wrote it for his wife.’ He translated the poem into English for me. The words had the chill glaze of moonlight on the surface of a frozen pond.
  ‘He must have loved her very much,’ I said.
  ‘Perhaps he did – at least in the beginning.’
  ‘What happened to them?’
  ‘Just before she gave birth to their first child, he invited a young poet to stay with them. When the child was born, a son, Verlaine left her – and their new-born son – and travelled around Europe with the young poet. Rimbaud was his name. Arthur Rimbaud.’
  It cut too close to home, this tale.
• ‘Ridiculous? If you can seek gratification elsewhere, why can’t she? You and Sun Wen,’ I said, ‘forever pontificating about fairness and equality, but when it comes to your own wives …’
  ‘It’s not the same.’
  Arguing about it with him – or with any man, for that matter – would be as fruitful as trying to push back the wind.
• Willie’s reply, when it came, was silted with the sorrow of the world. ‘What other choice do we have?’ <> ‘No one would think it the tiniest bit out of the ordinary at all if men like you remained bachelors all your life.’
• I came upon a photograph of Ethel Proudlock accompanying a long article. It was disorienting to see her face hemmed in by the vertical bars of Chinese writing.
• I was glad of his absence as it allowed me to spend my days with Arthur. How ironic that Robert and I each had our own Chinese lovers. We had this unusual thing in common, but we could never discuss it. Between us lay this great, heavy silence, accreting over the years, layer upon layer, hardening like a coral reef, except a coral reef was a living thing, wasn’t it?
• * ‘I warned her that she’d still be a convicted murderer even if the Sultan pardoned her.’... ‘Ethel Proudlock has damaged our prestige among the natives. “How can we allow an Asiatic potentate to exercise the power of life and death over a European, an Englishwoman?”’
• A month later another uprising erupted, this one in Wuchang. It would collapse like all the others before it, I remarked to Arthur. But week after week the neighbouring provinces rose up against the government. The rebellion caught fire and flared across China. Sun Wen, in America raising money, was caught unawares by events and rushed back to Canton on the fastest ship. He had not organised the latest insurrections himself, but naturally he had to be seen to be taking the lead.
• Now is the time for us to act, Lesley, to give all that we can give.’ <> ‘You’re just bloody selfish,’ I said. ‘Just like every man I’ve ever known: Robert, Sun Wen, my father. Even Geoff. Always thinking about your own needs, your own pleasures.’
• He sat down at the guzheng, resting his hands on the strings. Then he started to play L’heure exquise, more slowly than I had heard him play it before, as though he didn’t want the song to end. The music seeped through the air, into the house, seeped into me, and my heart, beating in its ark of bones, expanded and collapsed with every breath I took, each one heavier than the last. All the exquisite hours we had shared between us – where had they disappeared to?
• ‘He made me do it, Lesley.’ Her voice sounded dead, as dead as her eyes. Despite the cloudless sky I felt cold all of a sudden. ‘I had no choice. He made me do it. He made me kill William.’
• * The Republic of China had come into being: But as I looked at the men and women around me – so young, so fired up with purpose – I knew that I did not belong there any more. Perhaps I never did. A small fragment of the larger world, which for a brief moment had extended its hand to me, had moved on, leaving me behind.
• The winds of old longings blew my sails down the street to the House of Doors. Its window shutters were closed up,
• There was no moon, and the air was sticky and warm; there was not even the slightest breeze to twitch the black fabric of the night.
• * We breasted far out to sea, the earth sloping away beneath us into valleys and chasms and broad silent plains untouched by the sun since the beginning of the world. I couldn’t make out the coast of the mainland in front of me, couldn’t tell where the sea joined the sky. I turned to look back, but the house and the beach had been folded into a crease of the night. Only the distant, faintest hiss of surf effervescing on sand told me that the land was still there behind us, still existed.
  All at once we were swimming in cobalt fire, every kick and stroke igniting the tempests of plankton swirling around us. I laughed, the sound rupturing the quiet, windless night, and then Willie joined me as well. We dunked our heads under the blazing sea and came up again, spluttering fire from our lips. Rivulets of blue flames streamed down Willie’s hair, his face. I touched my own cheek, felt it glowing; I scooped up handfuls of the sea, marvelling at the fire-snakes writhing down my arms. We grinned at each other with stupid, childlike glee.
• I lay on my back and floated in the flat, glowing sea. After a moment Willie followed me. That night, side by side, we drifted among the galaxies of sea-stars, while far, far above us the asterisks of light marked out the footnotes on the page of eternity.
• ‘Horseshoe crabs,’ said Lesley, grinning at his repugnance. ‘Their eggs are a delicacy. My old amah couldn’t get enough of them.’
• He reached out his hand and touched the wood, his fingertips following the curve of the lines – they were no deeper than the thickness of a leaf. It was, he thought, like a watermark concealed in a sheet of paper, its shape coalescing before your eyes only when you caught it at a certain angle in the light.
• The air felt as if it had been painted on his skin with a hot, dripping brush.
• Over the years my memories of all that I had shared with him did not fade, but their sharp outlines gradually softened and blurred, so that there were often moments when I felt as though our affair had never taken place, that it had all been just a story I had read once too often until I could not tell where fiction became memory, and memory, fiction. <> And yet sometimes it grieved me that no one would ever know the joy he had given me, and the sorrow I had had to conceal from the eyes of those around me when I lost him. He had given me the strength to remain in my marriage, to endure it. I wanted to tell someone about us, to fill the void of his name, but I couldn’t. So I talked about Sun Wen instead. To utter Sun Wen’s name was, for me, a way of keeping Arthur alive and vivid in my memory.
• We halted our horses and watched the light spreading across the veld: it crisped the peaks of the mountains, then lit up the lower hills and ridges; it blew across the kopjes and the valleys, the kloofs and the stony plains. The world had never seemed so immense to me as during those fleeting moments when the earth was turning its face towards the sun.