Fragrant Harbour (19 page)

I thought about paying her a compliment here, something along the lines of, I can think of a reason why someone would want to watch you, Amanda. I managed not to say it.

‘So this went on for a while. One day I got a copy of the
South
China Morning Post
with a line drawn under the name of a horse on that weekend’s card at Happy Valley. I thought, the hell with it,’ blushing slightly as she said that, ‘I’ll have a bet. But I didn’t know what to do so I got Sally’, her friend, ‘to ask Tony’, Sally’s boyfriend, ‘to put ten dollars on for me. The horse was called Starboard View and it won at 8–1. Tony was impressed and I was speechless. Two weeks later, Fever Heat, 12–1, same thing. And then again, and again, but always at irregular intervals. By now I was beginning to feel I was going mad. I couldn’t tell anybody. It had got too serious.

‘Then last week I had a tip, the first for a few weeks. Underlined in black ink. Helpful Secretary and 9–1. I put twenty dollars on, and in my mind I’d already spent it on that tea chest
we saw, do you remember the one? Saturday came, I listen out for the results and it not only hasn’t won, it’s come last by ten lengths. Bye bye twenty dollars.

‘Well, I thought it was funny, but I also thought it was bizarre. Couldn’t work it out. Then I came into the office today and there’s a copy of the paper sitting on top of the filing cabinet. Then I remember the horse’s name. That’s when I realised …’

She was beginning to choke again. I reached for her hand. ‘It was the filing cabinet. Mr Grafton’s files. Obviously some of them are quite important. Company secrets, that sort of thing. And I should always lock the cabinet, but I don’t always bother,
especially
during the week, because it’s a sort of complicated double lock, and there’s another lock on the door, and … anyway, that’s it, I’d get the presents when I left the cabinet unlocked. I suppose the size of the gifts was to do with how useful the secrets were. They realised I hadn’t worked it out, and so they decided to teach me. And now I’m sick of Jardines and sick of Hong Kong, and I …’

I took her other hand. I said:

‘Welcome to Hong Kong.’

That came out wrong. I meant it to be wise, comforting,
consoling
, mature; but it sounded pompous and smug. Amanda now burst into tears. I tried to comfort her. By the end of the
conversation
we were engaged.

I had more or less given up expecting it, but that same year, a week before Christmas, Maria arrived back in Hong Kong. The first I knew of it was when she simply turned up at my office, my secretary Ah Wing knocking and then opening the door with an odd expression on his face. I had a small mountain of papers on my desk to do with staff wages and was grumblingly making my way through them. I looked up and behind Ah Wing saw Maria, looking at first glance wholly, frighteningly identical to the last time I’d seen her, eight years before.

‘Thank you, Ah Wing,’ I said. The ability to disguise curiosity was not one of his virtues but he left us anyway. I came round the desk. It was somehow clear we were not going to touch, but Maria was smiling broadly, and as if despite herself.

‘Well, well, well.’

At close range there were fine lines at the corners of her mouth and at the ends of her eyes: not deep cracks, but tracework. She might have been five pounds lighter. Someone who did not know her would have been able to tell that she had known some
difficult
times. That was new. She was again wearing some kind of modified habit, like a nurse’s uniform.

‘You are older, Tom. But you look in good health.’

‘Virtuous living, wholesome thoughts. You look more or less the same. That’s a compliment.’

‘It is not necessary to compliment a sister on her appearance,’ she said, still smiling as she sat down. For a brief moment I thought: she’s turning into Sister Benedicta.

There was a knock at the door. Ah Wing, without waiting to be asked, had brought tea. I was both irritated and grateful to regroup.

‘Sister Maria is an old friend from before the war,’ I said to him. ‘She taught me Cantonese.’

That did the job of letting everyone in the Empire know. Ah Wing left, and I poured the tea.

‘So what are you going to do now?’ I asked Maria. ‘Prospects in China must be pretty bad.’

‘It is more complicated than that. The Communists are in some ways more easy to deal with than the nationalists were. Less unpredictable and less corrupt. This is already evident in many areas. So we are not pessimistic about the years ahead. At the same time the change of regime coincided with work which
needed
to be done here. And the order felt my presence in Hong Kong was advisable.’

‘You’ve been away for quite some time,’ I said, trying and
failing
to keep an edge of bitterness out of my voice.

‘Under the circumstances, not all that long,’ Maria said. ‘A world war both preceded and followed by a civil war, in
conjunction
with the demands placed by total obedience to a
religious
order, make this gap of eight years not a very surprising one.’

‘It’s obviously very stupid of me to expect anything else.’

‘It is not a question of stupidity. Our perspectives are merely different,’ she said, more gently. And then, more gently still, ‘Eight years is a long time.’

I said: ‘I’m engaged.’

‘Ah. May I know the name of your … your fiancée?’

‘She’s Amanda Howarth. Works at Jardines. Lives with her aunt and uncle on the Peak. Plantation Road. Nice view when it’s not foggy. Been out here two and a bit years. We met on a boat. She’s … she’s a very nice girl.’

Maria sat perfectly silent and still through this, and then for a moment or two afterwards. ‘Well, it has been a pleasure to see you and renew our acquaintance,’ she said as she got up to go, and then did, leaving me feeling that something I had been depending on had gone badly wrong.

‘You think of here as being home, now, don’t you?’ said Amanda, on our way to the nativity concert.

‘I hadn’t thought about it. I suppose so.’

‘I don’t think I’d ever feel entirely at home here. It’s too –’ She looked around and made an outward sweeping gesture with her palm. I took it to mean something like too Chinese, too foreign, too far away, too subtropical.

‘Too stinky,’ she said. I laughed.

‘I know what you mean,’ I told Amanda. She put her arm through mine.

We arrived at the mission hall. It was the same building I came to when frantically looking for Maria on the day the war broke out, and for a moment I felt a kind of vertigo at being back there. That seemed to have happened ten minutes ago; yet when I added up everything which had subsequently taken place, it felt like a hundred years had elapsed. The feeling eased when we entered the hallway. It had been decorated with two huge Christmas trees made of felt, with tinsel stars and hand-painted fairies strewn through the branches. There was something Chinese about the trees; they were perhaps modelled on Chinese firs rather than European ones. I could see the hall beyond was crowded with people sitting on folded chairs facing the stage. Father Ignatius, who was greeting guests at the hall door, recognised me.

‘A happier occasion than our last meeting, Mr Stewart.’ That was at a funeral he had conducted in camp.

‘It certainly is, Father. You’re looking well.’ Which was true. He had filled out, and had the fleshy look which often belongs to priests in mid-career. He was holding my hand in a double clasp and gave it an additional sincere squeeze.

‘Please go through and take your seats. Maria reserved them for you at the front,’ he said.

We did as we were told. Father Ignatius, or the Catholics in general, certainly could turn out a crowd. A surprising number of Hong Kong’s great and good were in the hall. I recognised the Lancastrian head of the electricity utility, an Irish-born judge, a French businessman. In the front row, one of the Governor’s senior economic advisers was looking at his watch. There was a smattering of Portuguese, Macaunese, and Mr Yamashita, a Nagasaki Catholic who had emigrated to America in the twenties and spent the war in an internment camp in Arizona. Always on the lookout for a friendly face, Mr Yamashita caught my eye and nodded as we made our way to our seats. He had been sent to Hong Kong with supreme tactlessness by his employer, an oil firm, and was at this point the only Japanese civilian in the colony. I liked him and he was a good customer; he needed to do a considerable amount of entertaining for his work, and the Hong Kong Club still had a race bar. He could not go to our competitor, the Hong Kong Hotel, because its pre-war barber had turned out to be a Commander in Japanese naval intelligence.

A sheet of paper on each of the chairs announced that we would be treated to some singing, some magic tricks, and then a Christmas play. A note scribbled on my sheet said, ‘See you afterwards!’ in Maria’s handwriting.

A peculiarity of these evenings of Father Ignatius’s – over the years, I was to go to many of them – was how variable the
performances
were. One might have thought he would regularly achieve a certain standard, or lack of it, but on the contrary; some productions could have been translated without amendment to the professional stage, while others were so poor that the
audience
could not be confident as to whether it was listening to
Oklahoma
! in English or Cantonese. Happily, I suspect, my
memory
spares me most of the details of that evening’s performance. I remember a Chinese Mary, radiantly beautiful, and genuinely pregnant, attracting all the attention in the play, and a deeply embarrassed Amanda being asked onto the stage to pick a card from the Great Miraclo, a Brazilian Jesuit, real name Father Augustine, who did card and coin tricks at children’s parties. His pièce de résistance involved tearing up the
South China Morning Post
and magically putting it back together as the
Macao Gazette
.

‘Well, that was something,’ I said to Maria afterwards,
backstage
, in the converted classroom and storeroom where people were standing around loudly drinking and talking. She seemed pleased by how it had gone. Amanda was smiling hard and
saying
little.

‘Yes, the performance went well, I think, we had all been rather nervous.’

‘It must have been strange, doing it in the open in Hong Kong, after those years when … when it was more difficult,’ said Amanda, beginning confidently and then running out of steam.

‘What do you mean by more difficult?’ said Maria. Before I could intervene, Amanda said:

‘Oh, you know, China, and the war, and the Japanese, and … you know.’

‘As it happens I do not know.’

‘Maria –’ I began.

‘No, I’m just saying it can’t have been easy, and Hong Kong isn’t perfect, but it must be easier, that’s all.’

‘China has been through a period of great turmoil
encompassing
invasion and defeat at the hands of a foreign power as well as a civil war,’ said Maria. ‘Many people have died. Christ’s passion is being enacted in many places over the world in our lifetime and China is one of them. I do not understand where the idea of ease is relevant. We are missionaries.’

‘Oh, come off it, Maria, it was a perfectly reasonable –’

‘As for the supposed superiority of Hong Kong, I must tell you that to many of us it combines the least attractive aspects of China, specifically the corruption and factional fighting, under a superficial veneer of legality and procedure and obsession with appearance which manages to imitate and surpass the Chinese at one of their very worst vices. At the same time its denial of
dignity
to non-European inhabitants, the attitude embodied in the “no dogs or Chinamen” sign of Shanghai, and the fundamental
self-interestedness
of the British colonial power, make it a unique combination of criminality, hypocrisy, and the death throes of two different empires.’

‘Maria, that is the biggest –’

‘So why don’t you go back?’ said Amanda. ‘If it’s so awful here.’

I saw a glint in Maria’s eye. She said: ‘Do you desire to see people die? Innocent people?’

‘Innocent of what?’ said Amanda. I have to admit I was impressed.

‘We both know what we mean. Hong Kong is in many ways a corrupt and corrupting place but it is physically much safer than China and it is in this respect that our duty to our mission brings us here.’

‘So it isn’t all bad here, then?’

‘As I said, in this respect –’

‘It sounds rather like what I said about it being easier.’

‘I repeat that that it is not a term which I find relevant in
relation
to our mission’s work.’

‘Ladies, ladies,’ I said.

‘Perhaps I may ask you to excuse me,’ said Maria. ‘Señor Pesquera looks as if he is stranded.’ She crossed the room to talk to a man who was drinking punch and looking at his feet.

‘Well,’ said Amanda. ‘So that was your friend.’

‘I, uh, yes,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, she can be a bit …’

‘A bit?’

‘… difficult I suppose is the word.’

She smiled and squeezed my arm.

‘I liked her. Let’s get to the buffet before everybody’s scoffed it all.’

I felt a real warmth for her that evening. I also realised that I was in no state to be engaged to anyone. The longer I kept the attachment going, the more harm I would be doing her. So I broke off the engagement. It is a conversation I prefer not to recall. For three months I heard reports of how broken-hearted she was. Then she took a boat home to England, without my
seeing
her again. On the voyage she met a young Grenadier Guards officer going home from a secondment to the Australian army. They were married a couple of months later. Her Jardines uncle stopped coming to the Empire. He had been a good customer and we missed the business.