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

something had to happen, to rescue her from it.
The cage, the net, the bell jar, the dark cave from which no shackled prisoner
could escape into the sunlight – all were feeble images for her desperation for
release.
    At the centre of the tumult was a tiny,
tremulous hope: suppose her husband realised that he could not go on in the
marriage and decided that a divorce was best? His strong Catholicism forbade
that, but suppose his need to be happy was stronger? Beyond the shock of his
fellow churchgoers, the parish priest Father Rozario, her friends and, above
all, her mother, would be all happiness for her. She would wear the scandal
like a badge because it announced the opening of her brave new world.
    There were some Catholic couples in the
parish who had separated, were no longer living together, but who continued to
be devout Catholics. Separation which would still mean the continuance of that
hateful MRS would also mean the end of a hateful life. She did not have the
strength or courage to initiate the move, but suppose he, coming to the end of
the marital tether, did?
    A coward’s wish. She told her students
stirring stories of honesty and courage, and in the privacy of her imagination,
the coward’s dream played out, one after the other. So: her husband told her
they had best live separately, even if the church did not allow them to
divorce; her husband managed to convince Father Rozario that they had married
under unacceptable circumstances leaving the church authorities no choice but
to accept the reason of non-consummation to dissolve the marriage; her husband
had found another woman whom he loved deeply and truly, and quietly made arrangements
for their separate lives, even paying for her to do her postgraduate degree
course at the Singapore University. Each scenario ended with her saying, ‘Thank
you,’ in profound gratitude.
    The coward could be capable of self-blame.
Too late, yet so soon, she had realised the great injustice she had done him in
marrying him. She never loved him, not when she married him, not afterwards. It
was possible – a modern, educated, intelligent woman marrying a man even when
she did not love him, and thereafter drifting along in a one-sided marriage
with all the passion on his side, and all the regret on hers. The modern
woman’s mother or grandmother had had no choice; she abused hers and then found
she had to live with the consequences.
    She remembered a survey in which three
quarters of the women surveyed stated that if divorced or widowed, they would
never marry again. Some gave the most ridiculous reasons for getting married in
the first place, the most common being the desirability of the married state
itself. I wanted children. I wanted to get away from over-strict parents. I was
tired of society labelling me a spinster. All my girlfriends had already got
married. It seemed the right and necessary thing for a woman to do.
    She had a girlfriend who decided to get married
because she had won a beautiful bridal dress in a competition run by a woman’s
magazine, another because the man had a car whereas the other two suitors had
only motorcycles, yet another because as a single woman she would not have
qualified to buy a government-subsidised flat that she very much desired. She
knew of women who got married because they could no longer tolerate the
inevitable nosiness of aunts during the Chinese New Year season when unmarried
women, regardless of age, were still strictly entitled to receive the
traditional gifts of money, ‘So when I see you next year, will you be giving
instead of receiving ang pows?’
    There were any number of substitutes for
love, revealed by the survey. I was grateful to him because he had helped pay for
my university education. He was the handsomest boy in our group and one day he
asked me to marry him, and everyone was so jealous! We were dating for eleven
years and one day he said to me, ‘We should get married before my grandmother
passes away.’