Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

Easier, that was, until 1954, when everything about Benny changed.

By now, Louisa was going on fourteen, too composed and concerned about others — about her father — to dare remark on the frenzied interest Benny had begun to take in the world again, the way he would often rise from his chair in the middle of supper and mumble something about needing to meet so-and-so for a drink. Johnny, at nearly twelve, was openly defensive on Benny’s behalf (“It’s too boring here — with too many girls!”). And Molly, not yet six, still treated her father with little more than wary curiosity. Only Gracie, at nine, seemed to be extinguished by Benny’s increasing absences. When he happened to be out late, the girl refused to be put to bed, begging Khin to be allowed to light a lamp and wait up by the window for him. If Gracie was still awake when the lights of his car flashed up the drive, her eyes shone with a renewed happiness that Khin tried not to be unsettled by (why did the girl love Benny so much more than anyone else — only because he’d been missing for so much of her life?), just as she tried not to concern herself with the thought of what Benny was actually doing during these excursions: whatever that was, she told herself, it must be keeping him going.

But one July night, as she sat on the sofa with Gracie sleeping beside her, she heard the car stop out by the portico, and then there was a long pause before the creak and slam of its door. The delay told her that Benny was reluctant to return, and she had the sudden, old impulse to hide, to evade a collision with the future that would cause them pain. The sight of Gracie’s precious and defenseless sleeping face on the worn seat of the sofa — the face of Saw Lay in softened form — held her there. Then the front door was opening and Benny was standing in the entryway. He must have expected to find her there — the lamp was lit, as whenever she and Gracie waited for him. With his hat in his hand, he looked at them across the glowing living room, and she saw something powerful and aroused in his eyes. He could have just emerged from a bracing mountain lake, or from a bed in which he’d plunged into an unexpected passion. And there was something ferocious in his stare, something never before directed at her: the scorn of a man seeing his wife, whom he’d thought noble and beautiful, with fresh disappointment.

“Are you in love with her?” she found herself saying, not with spite, but with genuine hurt and a need to understand.

He seemed confused, then irritated. Then that awful, killing disappointment washed over his face. “It’s not what you think,” he said.

She thought that he was finished — he turned and proceeded to the staircase.

But he stopped and looked around, almost with resignation. “Someday,” he said, “not now — I really couldn’t stand to hear anything else now. you’ll have to tell me about Lynton. If you know where he is. If that’s why you leave the house so often.”

Someday . The closest they came to it — to coming right out and addressing the subject of Khin’s former affair and present blamelessness — was about a week later, on an early morning just past dawn, when she was sitting in the kitchen with Hta Hta, drinking coffee before the commotion of the school day.

Unexpectedly Benny appeared in the kitchen doorway, fresh from the shower and dressed with care, and bringing with him the scent of cleanness and something like estrangement. He stood surveying the women at the table and the contours of the small room, where so much life happened in his absence. Then he turned his defended eyes to Khin and said, very matter-of-factly, “It strikes me that it was unfair not to tell you how I learned of Lynton.” He’d swallowed down Lynton’s name, and maybe to recover his nerve he went on very swiftly: “The point is I’m not at liberty to say. Though I can tell you that my source had his information from Saw Lay, who must have had it from one of his men. And I shudder to think what the news did to our old friend.”

She couldn’t react for a moment. Something twisted in her chest, and she was so immediately breathless that she heard herself beginning to pant. That Saw Lay had suffered because of her — that the embarrassment she’d suffered in Bilin should have reached him, should have caused him hurt — that Benny should want to inflict this on her — that he should be so hurt. As though to prove that her own sudden suffering didn’t exist, she said, with a calmness and viciousness that astonished her, “I wish I did know where Lynton was, because I’d run to him.”

The expression that this put on Benny’s face was pinched with injury, with dismay. But gradually a smile of satisfaction spread across his face. It seemed to tell her, that smile, that he suspected as much of her. He closed his eyes, though, and then he said, with genuine feeling, “One’s treachery is such a difficult thing to admit.”

What she wanted was to come clean about it all, to tell Benny everything, to say something about their time being short: now all of that was over — what had happened with Lynton, the various breaches that had hurt their marriage over the years — now they were together and there was no excuse for them not giving each other all of their forgiveness and all of their affection. Lynton had been a means of survival, she wanted to say, whereas Benny was her sense of significance — and wasn’t she his?

Fifteen years had passed since they’d met on the Akyab jetty, nearly half their lives, and she still vividly recalled the surprise of Benny’s hungry eyes, the smell of the dense salt air, the sound of the waves smacking against the floats of a seaplane, the way he’d smiled tenderly at her and the boy who was her charge. Now when she saw Benny across a room and noticed how rigid he’d become — as though his back were hurting, or as though he hadn’t been softened by a loving touch in years (whereas, until recently, she’d supposed he’d resumed his love affairs) — now when she remembered her first startling impressions of him in Akyab, she thought he’d grown more dignified because he carried more evidence of having lived and suffered. And she was flooded with remorse for having kept her physical distance from him since his release from prison. Shame had held her apart, fear of how he would look at her once he saw what had become of her body, of her breast. It struck her that to care about him, to continue to ask for his care, would be to accept the damage that the future would bring them. And she understood that she loved his damaged body, loved it with her own damaged one. She wanted to take off her clothes and lie in bed with him, to press herself close to his skin, to give him everything she had to offer.

But other times, when he shouldered past her up the stairs, or returned to the house without bothering to greet her, she found his coldness to be desolating. It was as though he’d forgotten she was the same person who had shown him so many years of warmth. She tried very hard to proceed without expectations, to remind herself that what she thought of as the normal attentions owed to a wife by her husband were meaningless, that as long as she fixated on her disappointment she was doomed to live an unhappy life. She tried very hard to take the gifts as they came — when Benny gave her a strained smile, say, or took a few minutes to laugh with the children. But as many times as she set out on any given day to shower him with gifts of her own — to make a loving remark, or even, perhaps, to take his hand — that terrible twist of resentment and humiliation would stop her, and in spite of herself she would remain aloof with him, and in her thoughts she would cough up recriminating words. How dare you hold Lynton against me after all of your cheating years? You’re the one who took those women to bed right under my nose, whereas I didn’t know if you were alive or dead when I was with Lynton. You can’t imagine what that man made me feel — the pleasure he took in the wife you spurn!