Fragrant Harbour (9 page)

‘Agreed.’

‘I think I must be missing something here,’ I said. ‘The part where someone asks me if I’m willing to go along with the bet? Or doesn’t my view matter?’

Sister Benedicta gave me what I think is usually described as a ‘winning smile’.

‘We were merely seeking to be clear about the terms on which we were soliciting your invaluable help,’ she said.

My spirits were rising and sinking at the same time. The prospect of a six-week cruise playing shovelboard and reading bad books about the mysteries of the Orient had a lot of appeal. On the other hand, I knew right from the start that I was
interested
in Sister Maria. Could Benedicta have already seen this? I said:

‘It’s a heavy responsibility. If I fail –’

‘With God’s grace we can have every confidence,’ said Sister Benedicta.

I gave in. I left the table slightly shell-shocked and, thanks to
Marler ordering claret to toast the bet, which he clearly thought of as a sure thing, a little drunk. The two nuns had gone to bed an hour before. Sister Maria’s last words to me were:

‘We’ll start work in the morning.’

‘You must not drink so much coffee,’ Sister Maria told me. ‘Just one cup. It is bad for the memory. I learnt this in France.’

We were sitting in the library, which we had decided to
commandeer
. No one ever seemed to use it much. The
Eastward-bound
did not seem to be great readers. Sister Benedicta had come and fussed around us while we were arranging two
armchairs
on either side of a table on which Sister Maria had put an ominous pile of what looked like reference books. For a moment I thought queasily that we were going to be chaperoned all through the next weeks. But the older nun left after satisfying herself that the room had been set up correctly.

‘It helps wake me up,’ I said. Through the library window I could see a perfect patch of bright, clear Mediterranean blue.

‘The best way to wake up is to exercise the brain. Now,’ she said, opening a large spiral-bound notebook and picking up her fountain pen with a flourish, ‘let’s see. Do you speak any foreign languages?’

‘No.’

‘Not at all? Fragments of French, German, Latin studied at school?’

The truthful answer was yes, at school, where languages had been my best and favourite subject. Speaking to foreign visitors was one of my reserved occupations at The Plough. I was feeling irritated and in low spirits, so I said:

‘Not a word.’

‘Excellent. Of course the very best thing would be if you were a trained and gifted linguist, a scholar, ideally with experience of learning a non-Indo-European language. But to have no
experience
at all is second best. It means you have less to unlearn. Now. What do you know about Chinese? Nothing? Don’t be
embarrassed
, it’s only to be expected.’

I indicated by gesture that I was not embarrassed but that I did indeed know nothing about Chinese.

‘Chinese is for our purposes two entirely separate sets of
languages
,
one of them written and the other spoken. The written
language
is everywhere the same, and the spoken languages are
everywhere
different. The written language allows a scholar from Fukien to correspond with a scholar in Peking even though the words they pronounce when they look at the characters are entirely different, just as a mathematician in Moscow and a mathematician in Paris can read each other’s equations even though they cannot
understand
each other’s speech. But the written language is complex, allusive, and has no bearing whatsoever on spoken Cantonese, so I propose to leave it entirely apart. Except for one thing.’

She sketched a pair of crossed lines on her pad with a quick, light pen stroke.

‘Can you see a man walking?’

I could, sort of. I said so.

She complicated the figure with a cross stroke and a prow-like line.

‘He is kneeling?’ she asked.

‘Sort of.’

‘No – he is a woman.’ She laughed – the first time I heard her laugh, and at one of her own jokes.

‘Of course.’

‘The position of women in traditional Chinese society is
subordinate
. Now this character means son. Put the woman and the son together and you have – guess.’

‘Family,’ I said.

‘A reasonable guess – but where is the father? No, it means “good”. Or, in other senses, “to love”. I’m not going to talk any more about Chinese writing, but I wanted to show you, so that you can bear it in mind over the next days, that some things are universal and belong to all languages. People everywhere share the same creator, and therefore people everywhere are
essentially
the same.’

This she said in what I came to call her missionary-miss
manner
, the same one she had used to talk about ‘the gift of tongues’. Because of that I said:

‘I thought “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.”’

‘Your Kipling is overrated,’ she said. ‘Now. I have some good news. English is a complicated language, with many long words.

The favourite example is antidish –’ she made a slip, and gave a quick, girlish giggle – ‘antidisestablishmentarianism. A sensible doctrine, by the way, since it opposes the separation of church and state, which is something of which Confucius would have approved. But these big words are very difficult to learn. In Chinese we have no big words. We have indeed no words of more than one syllable. Do you know how many sounds can be made that are no longer than a syllable?’

She assumed that I knew what a syllable was; I liked her for that. It turned out later that she had guessed that I was lying about my French and German. I said:

‘A couple of hundred, I suppose.’

‘Correct. About four hundred. That doesn’t sound enough to make a whole language, does it?’

‘Um – no, I wouldn’t have said so.’

‘That’s right. In Chinese, because we have only monosyllables, we have extra ways of distinguishing between them. For this we use tones. For foreigners trying to learn Chinese this is often the most difficult thing to grasp, because they convince themselves of its strangeness. But it is not strange at all. Woman and son means good. Everyone is similar and so are languages. The greatest obstacle to learning is fear. Tones you use also in English. Consider. “Here!”’ she said emphatically, ‘is not the same meaning as, “here?” One is a command, the other is a question. The difference is the tone. In Chinese we use these tones in a structured way. The meaning of a word is made by the monosyllable and its tone together. Yes?’

I gestured that I understood, more or less.

‘Every word has for our purposes six tones. So the language consists of four hundred monosyllables and six tones – about twenty-four hundred words. Very very easy, compared to English. We shall win our bet with no difficulties. For instance,
yau yau yau
.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘
Yau yau yau
. Can you hear the difference?
Yau yau yau
.’

I could, sort of. The first was high and level, the second flat and medium pitch, the third clenching and final.

‘
Yau
means worry.
Yau
means paint.
Yau
means twin. You try it.’

And so we began.

Sister Maria and I did eight sessions a day: four in the morning, four in the afternoon. These sessions were forty minutes long, and after each of them I had a five-minute break, which I usually spent standing at a railing or wandering around the deck. My memories of these interludes are vivid. The open sweep of the sea and the salt air and the sun felt like a reprieve.

As news of the bet with Marler became more widely known, people began to smile at me and wish me luck. Or rather, most people did. After about a week, one of the passengers, a red-faced man who was headed all the way out to New Zealand, protested to the Purser about the way we were ‘hogging’ the library. The Purser attempted to calm the man down, or at least said he did, and then asked the Captain to adjudicate. Maria and I and the red-faced man were summoned to the Captain’s cabin.

‘So what’s all this then?’ said the Captain, a large slow man who was filling his pipe as he spoke. The red-faced man
complained
about what we were doing at some length, focusing on the impossibility of ‘getting any serious reading done’ in earshot of me and Maria.

‘These bloody squeaking noises, they’re worse than somebody learning the violin,’ he said.

I explained about my crash course in Cantonese.

‘Trying to learn the old Chinee-speak, eh?’ said the Captain. He then fiddled with his pipe without looking at anyone for about sixty seconds. Finally he said:

‘Good show.’

The subject was closed. We were allowed to use the library. Maria and I kept slogging ahead.

Every now and then Marler would try and raise the subject of the bet with me at dinner, by way of needling the two nuns.

‘How you coming along there, young Stewart? Able to order dog cooked in different ways yet?’

‘It is not appropriate to discuss the wager now that it has been laid,’ said Sister Benedicta. Marler would go quiet, which was the closest he ever came to being tactful.

I was looking forward to Aden. (‘A pure creation of British fears about Napoleon’s extraordinary success in Egypt,’ said Sister Benedicta.) It would be a welcome break. How long we would
have to spend there depended on whether we made good time, so I cheered the boat on as we ploughed across the Med. I got my wish: we made reasonable progress across the sea and through the canal and had a whole day in the city. I wanted to be on my own so I made excuses to my Hong Kong Bank and Jardine
companions
, who were beginning, due to the pressures of the bet, to treat me solicitously. It was their first time out East too, though the fact that all of them had jobs with big companies made them behave as if they were seasoned veterans of life beyond Suez.

‘Chap gets off the boat at Aden. This little Arab man comes up to him. “Go away,” says the chap. “You want girl?” says the Arab. “You want boy? You want picture?” “Go away!” says the chap. “Leave me alone! I demand the British Consul!” “Ah!” says the Arab. “Very difficult! Very expensive! But I can fix!”’

There was a reality underneath our jokes and nervousness. Aden was, for the first time, the East. It was hot, especially once I got away from the docks into the city proper. I had a glass of mint tea at a roadside stall, ordered by pointing at what the other
customers
were drinking. The man who poured it for me was dressed in a djellaba and his teeth were stained black. He crammed sprigs of mint into the glass and poured boiling water from a kettle suspended over a brazier. The smell reminded me of summer in Kent.

All the stalls in the market were busy. People plucked at me wherever I went. I caught a glimpse, down a crowded and
overhung
alleyway, of the Scott-Duncans, sitting on stools
surrounded
by at least a dozen shouting carpet-sellers. A mountain of samples was being brandished and extolled. Mrs Scott-Duncan looked happier and less self-conscious than she ever did on board the ship.

I stopped for a late-afternoon meal in a place called Tommy’s Tea Parlour, with the intention of skipping that evening’s dinner on the
Darjeeling
. The premises were designed to appeal to
half-genteel
travellers. Its walls were decorated with hunting prints and English landscape pastels. The effect was grotesque. I ate an omelette and set off back to the ship feeling dissatisfied. As I came out of the door, a man in Arab dress burst past me, running at a speed made possible only by pure terror. A few seconds later an English voice, out of breath, called ‘Stop, thief!’ The Arab, by
now about fifty feet away from me, turned to look back over his shoulder and as he did so ran straight into a group of four
policemen
who had appeared, as if by telepathy, out of a side alley. I do not mean ‘ran into’ as a figure of speech: he collided with the first two policemen and went over in a heap of limbs. The cacophony, as the policemen all got up, dusted themselves off, seized and shook and shouted at the prisoner, was extraordinary. Meanwhile the victim of the robbery was getting closer. He was a stout fifty-year-old Englishman in white colonial clothes,
breathing
hard and carrying a straw hat by the brim. When he got to the thief, now being held firmly by all four policemen, he stopped. The thief’s expression was of pure animal terror. His eyes were all whites. The Englishman stood still for a moment and seemed to be waiting for something. Then he spat into the thief’s face.

As we sailed through the Red Sea, the heat and, somehow, the density of the air seemed to grow daily. The sun appeared bigger and closer. First-class passengers switched from black dinner jackets to white for the evening meal.

The weather grew even warmer, the sunsets more abrupt, as we sailed south towards the tropics. The novelty of the voyage and of my Cantonese lessons had worn off. Conversations settled into predictable patterns; Marler and Benedicta got into fewer arguments. Maria two or three times gave me leave to compete in quoits tournaments which would otherwise have clashed with our lessons. Once, the Jardines man and I got to the final, where we were defeated, inevitably, by the Purser and his (I was now convinced) catamite. We had engine trouble in the Red Sea, which made the ship three days late into Calcutta – which in turn meant there was time only to load supplies and head off again eastwards. I wasn’t really sorry. Even in our brief view of the docks, after the peace of the long days sailing from Aden, the city looked overwhelming. I was touched by the fact that the artillery officer came down to my cabin to say goodbye; or rather not to say anything, but to give me a very firm and prolonged
handshake
while looking into my eyes, as if we had braved great
tribulations
together. Perhaps, for him, that was what those communal dinners had been.