Miss Seetoh in the World by Catherine Lim Read Free Book Online Page B

dreadful premature dementia,
for her sins of rebelliousness: there were whispers of her once running away
from home to hide in a temple. In a long line of docile females going back to
the ancestral country, the bad trait had surfaced in one member, skipped a
generation and was now threatening to show itself again. Her mother said, as
she would say many times, ‘Why can’t you be like others? Why are you so
difficult?’ A warm affinity with Por Por would grow with the years.
    The reluctance and hatred were multiplied a
hundredfold in the forced visits to his office parties, the lunches given by
his boss, the visits to the hospital for his regular health checks, the Bible
study classes he conducted, where she sat at the back, squirming at his poor
presentation and feeling sorry for him because of the humiliatingly small
attendance of four, then two and finally one. It would be too much of an
ignominy for him to learn from her some of the skills she had honed to
perfection in the classroom. It was a draining, not cleansing pity, and she wanted
to run away and never come back. She had kept alive the girlhood hero of her
imagination: a paragon of strength, intelligence, high-mindedness, courage and
charm, he inspired breathless admiration and respect, never shamefaced pity and
embarrassment.
    In a roomful of people, she was aware of her
husband looking around for her, of his suddenly looking very alert whenever he
caught her in conversation with a man. ‘How he loves you,’ laughed one of her
friends at a party. ‘My husband won’t even notice if I go off home on my own
now!’
    Love carried its own burden of insecurities.
He had won her in marriage at great cost, and he intended that she should pay
for it.
    St Peter’s School with its Christian
strictures should be reassuring even to the most jealous husband, but her many
hours there gave rise to any number of anxieties about what she could be doing
out of his sight.
    She had once, in playful banter very early
on in their marriage, told him about her enormous charm, if the students were
right, for Mr Chin, the maths teacher, and Brother Philip, the moral education
teacher, for indeed, she herself was beginning to notice the many excuses each
made to talk to her. In the midst of a chuckle, she realised her mistake. She
stopped, suddenly looking very foolish, as she avoided the eyes now narrowing
in disapproval and the lips tightening in angry silence. With forced
jocularity, she went on to talk about something else. It had been a disastrous
blunder, calling for the greatest care in its repair. She continued chatting
about inconsequential things, she asked if he wanted his favourite Japanese
tea, she made a few desultory inquiries about his revered boss, the
high-achieving Dr Phang, who he once told her with undisguised awe, was being
considered by the Deputy Prime Minister to join the party and run in the next
general elections. Even that subject failed to draw him out of the sullen
silence. She was aware, with a sickening feeling, of her small voice now
reduced to helpless silence against the chill wall of his displeasure. The
silence continued and she made a mental note never to mention any of her male
colleagues at St Peter’s again.
    She was looking at herself in the
dressing-table mirror, surveying with a smile the lustrous hair shaken loose
from the ponytail now curled upon her bare shoulders. In a school camping trip
before her marriage, as she sat with colleagues and students around a campfire,
Maggie, always seeking to create diversion, crept up behind her back, and
suddenly removed the clip holding her ponytail, unloosing a mass of hair that
tumbled on to her shoulders in further demonstration of her natural beauty.
Everyone cheered and clapped, including Brother Philip. ‘Please, Miss Seetoh,
leave it like this, you look so-oo sexy!’ cried Maggie, holding the clip out of
her reach. There were some minutes of childish fun as the clip was passed from
hand to