Read Miss Seetoh in the World for Free Online Page B

assuaged:
never had any wish to be free of her husband included, or could ever include,
the wish for his death. Not even injury of any kind. It was just a general wish
to be free of her marriage, as understandable as a child’s wish to be free of
over-strict parents, a student’s wish to quickly graduate to the next level and
be free of an unreasonable teacher. That terrible image of the aboriginal
chief’s curse in the rain, of the woman conjuring help from a ghost in a
cemetery, would never disturb her again.
    ‘Maria, what are you doing?’ cried her
mother in alarm. It was odd that her mother, witnessing a clear return of good
spirits so soon after her husband’s death, should worry about her each time she
locked herself in her room. ‘Maria, I smell smoke! Open the door at once!’
    It was only the burning smell of Maggie’s
tantalising band of paper, now curled around the rim of a basin. Maria Seetoh
watched with a little frisson of wonder as the small flame crept through the
first half of the band, leaving a tiny pile of black ashes, and then most
unaccountably fizzled to a halt at the second, leaving it intact and whole,
surely a foretaste of her new life.

Five
     
    Neither marital curse nor vengeance, thank
goodness, had been part of their world; it was too civilised to permit even the
raised voice, the crude invective. The husband’s clenched fist, the wife’s
desperate attempts to avoid it and hide her bruised eyes behind dark sunglasses
the next day – these would have been both alien and alienating to the world
they inhabited. They were the perfect couple, he the epitome of gentlemanly
courteousness and gallantry, and she of wifely gentleness and docility. They
were said to be inseparable, the ultimate tribute to marital commitment.
    The word had a bitter flavour for her. For
he expected her to be with him everywhere he went; her physical presence by his
side was for him a solid reminder of his control, for her of her subjugation.
He liked her to hold his arm or hand tightly, to reinforce the reminder. Her
husband had obeyed, with perfect literalness, holy matrimony’s call to continue
to be joined in one flesh beyond the marital bed. If she got her artistic
student to do a cartoon of them, it would probably have the dark humour of
painfully conjoined twins. Bondage, not bonding. Marriage, mirage.
    As he waved to this or that friend in
greeting, as he nodded to this or that fellow churchgoer in Christian
solidarity, he exuded husbandly pride. A mere inch taller than herself, he
towered with proprietorial satisfaction. If I wrote a book of short stories
about married couples, she thought, there would be several on the Owning
Husband. In one, the Owning Husband itemised his ownership: these beautiful
eyes are to look at me only, these delicate hands are to do my bidding only,
these beautiful breasts... In another, the Owning Husband staked his ownership
in a roundabout way: see these beautiful jewels that belong to my wife? Well,
the diamond earrings were a reward for her obedience, the jade pendant for
her...
    There would be at least one story about the
Trophy Wife. The Trophy Wife cried out, ‘Hey, I’m alive, proud warts and all.
I’m not to be burnished and polished to perfection!’ The Trophy Wife cast
gracious smiles all round but looked surreptitiously at her watch to see how
soon each loathed outing by her husband’s side would end, and she could retire,
even if for a short while, to her private world.
    He invaded it relentlessly. ‘Maria, where
are you?’
    He made the maid look for her. He would pick
up one book after another, from her private store, and read out the titles
slowly and deliberately, making a show of mispronouncing the polysyllabic
words. Pe-dah-go-jeee, nooro-psycho-lor-jeee, fun-day-mental phi-lor-so-pheee.
Each book, taking time away from him, became an adversary. He knew about her
secret longing to return to the university, to do a postgraduate course.
Intellectual