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

the eyes of the world, she had in truth
broken them all in the privacy of her own. The outward pretence could not be
long maintained; soon he, alert, proud, sensitive, would have to hold her to a
true accounting: did you love me at all? Why did you marry me?

Six
     
    The silence continued all the way in the car
as he drove her to school, and was broken twice, very briefly, by a grievance
that was mounting by the day. The car had stopped at a traffic junction that
faced a row of rundown shophouses that would soon be demolished to make way for
a shopping mall. In an unguarded sharing of secrets very early in their
marriage, she had pointed out one of the shophouses as the scene of a silly
girlhood romance, where a young man named Kuldeep Singh used to take her for
ice cream after school. Her husband had said nothing then, but retrospective
jealousy, summoning back the past for present accounting, could be even more
fearsome. Thereafter, each time the car stopped at the traffic junction in full
view of the offensive house, she would look down, to her left through the car
window, into her handbag, anywhere but in the direction of the shophouse, aware
of the sideways glance that he was casting at her. Every small act of hers
became a test of wifely propriety, subjected to the merciless analysis of a
love turned forensic.
    That morning, her thoughts being very far
away, her eyes inadvertently rested on the forbidden object of the shophouse;
worse, the thoughts suddenly took a turn for tender recollection as in her mind
appeared an image of herself and Kuldeep Singh in their school uniforms,
perched on high stools at the ice cream bar, foreheads almost touching as they
sipped, through two long straws, a single glass of ice cream soda. Kuldeep had
confessed to being completely broke, but a riffling of the pocket of his uniform,
and then of hers, had produced a small handful of coins that was enough to pay
for one soda. Out in the bright sunshine, Kuldeep suddenly had an idea, his
eyes shining with mischief. He pulled out a small penknife from his pocket.
    ‘See, I’m leaving a mark of remembrance of
our happy day.’ He carved a large X sign on a corner of the wall near the bar
entrance, and had another idea. ‘Come here,’ he said to her. ‘Here, hold the
penknife. Like this. Now I’m holding your hand, and we carve together.’
    He was duplicating the supreme wedding
moment when, in smiling union, groom and bride cut the bridal cake together.
‘You’re crazy,’ she giggled but complied. ‘Look out,’ she hissed, and they
fled. The sign could still be seen, twenty-three years later.
    The tiny smile at the recollection had
escaped too quickly for her to stop it. Her husband said, ‘What was that smile
about?’
    There was a vast stock of student howlers
that she could resort to, and she said, ‘I was just thinking of that awful
student I told you about, Maggie, and her atrocious grammatical mistakes –’,
and hated herself for the lie. The stock was cooperatively inexhaustible but
was rapidly losing its usefulness.
    Her husband said again, more pointedly,
‘What was that smile about?’ and she lapsed into wordless misery which, in the
few minutes before they arrived at her school, became large tears filling her
eyes. She made no attempt to wipe them off.
    ‘What are you crying about?’ he said, in the
closest to a snarl that his habitual politeness would allow. ‘One would think
that it’s you who’s the victim in this marriage.’
    At the school gate, as she got out of the
car, the tears having been hurriedly blinked back, she made a feeble attempt at
normalcy. She said, ‘There’ll be a staff meeting that will probably last two
hours or longer. I’ll be late home. Shall I call you at your office?’ and he
said, ‘You do whatever suits you,’ and drove off.
    That night the lovemaking was horrible for
the intrusion of the afternoon’s jealous suspicion which worked itself into
what seemed like a manic