Shanghai

'Would anyone have known he was to be on the launch at that time?'

Denton's chest caught suddenly with the awakening of the thought that Lolly Kwai had left to sleep in his mind. 'He wasn't supposed to be there at all,' he said slowly. 'He only came along because his boat had broken down.'

Everett glanced up at him, then continued writing. 'Looks as though they were after you, then,' he said as he closed the book. 'Shall I take that?' He took the cloth which Denton had been absently holding in his hand and dropped it in a rattan basket.

'They?' Denton repeated. 'Who?' 'In Your line of business,' Everett shrugged, 'there are bound to be people it's dangerous to offend. As in mine.'

Denton thought of Ching scratching his pallid cheek with that talon of a nail in Mason's office. Obviously Mason was taking bribes and Ching had wanted him to buy Denton off too. They were both put out by his refusal perhaps, but this.... He shook his head incredulously, and yet he kept seeing Ching's face, his faintly ironic smile, mocking his unbelief.

'I think it was only meant as a warning,' Everett was saying soothingly. 'It probably just went too far. They hit him too hard, that's all.'

'Unless they knew I can't swim.'

'Oh no, if they wanted to finish someone off, they could do it quite easily. But they don't like drawing too much attention to themselves by killing a foreign devil.' He paused as the stone-eyed Chinese came back down the corridor followed by the corporal, who was noisily clearing his throat and looking for somewhere to spit. The man's eyes were perhaps a little stonier, his mouth a little more stiff. 'It'd be different for a Chinese, of course,' Everett went on. 'They don't mind killing them - nobody takes much notice. Know anyone who might have a grudge against you?'

'I may have got on the wrong side of a ship's agent called Ching - '

Everett's eyebrow's rose. 'There are all sorts of stories about him,' he said with a note both of respect and of warning. 'I should watch your step if I were you.'

Denton felt suddenly as though his back was exposed - he even glanced round over his shoulder at the patient yet hopeless relatives waiting on the benches. 'How? What do you mean?' he asked uneasily.

'Well, just don't run any risks, that's all,' Everett said coolly. 'I'll have this statement copied out,' he went on at once, before Denton could answer. 'And then if you'd come to the Central Police Station to sign it....'

'It was Ching,' Su-mei said simply when he told her that night. She pulled the long, gold pin he'd given her for her birthday out of her hair and held it between her teeth while she reached up for the smaller ones.

'How do you know it was?' Again he felt that feeling that his back was exposed, vulnerable.

She shook her head. He took the pin from her mouth. 'How do you know?'

She shrugged. 'He is high up in the Red Triangle. You made trouble for him and he got Mason to try to bribe you.' She shook her hair loose. It fell down in a loose glossy mass round her shoulders. 'You must be careful.'

He felt sure she was right, but still he didn't want to believe it. 'How can he be so dangerous? He is only a ship's agent! And Mason - '

'He does many things,' she interrupted matter-of-factly, gazing at her face in the mirror. Her eyes switched to his reflection beside hers. 'Every Chinese in Shanghai knows about Ching. You foreign devils never look behind things.'

He made a dismissive gesture with his hand. 'Stories, that is all,' he tried to scoff. 'Only stories.'

She shook her head, watching his reflection with cool eyes. 'He is not like Pock-mark Chen. He is an important man. You foreign devils never understand.'

32

JOHNSON WAS THE FIRST EUROPEAN to be murdered in Shanghai for two years, and the North China Daily News carried a report of the inquest on its front page. The verdict was murder by persons unknown. The next day the paper's editorial, recalling the atrocities of the Boxers, urged the foreign powers to consider stationing a permanent garrison in the city. There was an announcement on the same page that the Shanghai Volunteers would welcome recruits from every foreign nationality and every walk of life.

Customs officers were authorised by Mr Brown to carry revolvers at all times when on duty, instead of merely when going on a raid. Denton learnt to shoot accurately with his on the police firing range and began to feel heroic. But often he felt that exposed feeling, as though someone were creeping up behind his back.

Johnson's possessions were auctioned in the mess. There were fewer people there than usual, and Jones, in his last week as mess treasurer, began the auction in a voice that was strangely subdued. There wasn't much to buy, but as the last item, Jones announced, with a little smirk, that some unusual paintings had been found in the bottom of a sea chest that Johnson had kept under his bed. 'Always tightly locked,' he added, stroking his slim moustache.

'Let's see them!' Mason called out, but Jones, still smirking coyly, said the committee had decided they should not be publicly exhibited. Any officer who was interested could examine them on the table, where they were at present placed face down.

There was a snickering, yet still constrained, pause for viewing. Only Mason seemed unaffected by Johnson's death, and he was soon giving a loud, lewd commentary, while the others merely chuckled. The paintings were all crude erotic pictures of women, each done in great detail, but in violent colours, as if Johnson had hated what he so carefully depicted. Johnson had never been known to have a woman in his room and Denton, gazing with fascinated disgust, wondered what he might have done to one if he had. He tried to imagine what it must have been like to live through the furtive turbulence and twisted rage that the pictures represented. But he couldn't. All he could visualise was that bare room of Johnson's, with the carefully made but empty bed. And the picture of the sailing ship he'd seen on the wall, with those realistic woman's breasts on the figurehead, breasts which now seemed so significant. He could hear the note of pride in Johnson's voice when he'd said he painted the picture, and that too seemed significant now. But what was it like to have lived his remote, distorted life - to have been him night after night alone in his room? That, he couldn't imagine.

Mason bought all Johnson's pictures for two dollars each. A week or two later, he claimed to have sold them to a Chinese brothel-owner at a two hundred per cent profit. 'If you ever go there, it'll remind you of the poor old blighter,' he declared at the bar, his eyes for some reason straying blankly over Denton's as he spoke, without a glimmer of acknowledgement.

The murderers were never found, but there were no more attacks on Customs officers and gradually they all forgot Johnson's death, or put it safely away in the past, in history. Ching disappeared from the docks, no longer acting as the Russian line's agent. In any case, Russia and Japan were at war, and no more Russian ships called at Shanghai. Su-mei said he was living in Chapei, in a house surrounded by bodyguards.

The heat of summer slowly eased. On the afternoon of the autumn lantern festival Denton went into the street of the silversmiths to buy some earrings for Su-mei. He wandered in and out of the long, cave-like shops until eventually he found an old silver pair of rings, shaped like heavy tear-drops, which the bald, bowed shopkeeper with crafty little eyes said had come from Peking. Usually, in spite of Ephraim's repeated strictures, he paid by chit, but this time he had a fair amount of cash on him. The shopkeeper squinted at each coin and rang it sharply on the counter before he wrapped the earrings in red paper and gave them to Denton.

As he left the shop, the usual swarm of beggars clustered round him, stretching out their hands and whining with quiet, insolent insistence. Most of them, he knew, were professionals, especially the ones with babies in their arms - at least they were all living infants this time - carefully calculating how to work on the guilt of the sentimental rich. But one man was so mutilated, professional or not, that the callous of indifference that had gradually hardened over Denton's natural sympathy was abruptly softened. The man's legs had been cut off high above the knees, and the stumps were covered with worn leather patches. He was dragging himself along by his hands, trailing his stumps behind him, and his arms and shoulders had become large and powerful. He glared at Denton with an accusing, bitter stare, as though he were personally responsible for his amputated legs. Yet, he is a professional, Denton thought detachedly. But what else could he be? He gave him a dollar. The beggar rang the coin suspiciously against the cobble stone and then dragged himself off without a word, as if he thought he'd got no more than his due. And perhaps it is his due, Denton thought, half-guiltily feeling the expensive earrings in his pocket. Perhaps it's even less than his due. The other beggars crowded round him more thickly now, waving their hands determinedly under his face and fixing their eyes demandingly on his. He pushed his way through them. 'No, no more,' he said curtly, striding on. He couldn't give them all money. Was he responsible for all the suffering in the world? 'No!' They took no notice, shuffling along beside him, whining and plucking his clothes. 'No more!' He was shouting now. And then abruptly, involuntarily almost, he had stopped and was dropping the rest of his change into their outstretched hands, young, old, clean and dirty, ashamed at the same time of his weakness, his sentimentality. As if those few cents would solve any problems! As if charity was the answer! But then what was? All the money was gone; but still the soft, plucking hands reached out and the whining voices cajoled and coaxed him. He shook his head again and brushed through them, climbing into a waiting rickshaw. The coolie regarded him with a sly, calculating look. Good for a big tip, his eyes seemed to say.

'Where to, master?' he asked in pidgin.

'Chinsan Road.'

'Long way, master. You pay one dollar?'

Denton shrugged. He'd given so much away, why bother about fifty cents more or less now? 'This time I will pay one dollar,' he said in Chinese. 'But don't think I don't know it should be fifty cents.'

'You speak Chinese? Very good.' The coolie grinned, put out his half-smoked cigarette, placed it carefully in his pocket then lifted the shafts.

As the coolie pushed his way through the still hopeful beggars, shooing them gruffly and scornfully away, Denton noticed two people gazing at him from across the road. They were a man and a woman, both taller than the average, dressed in faded black cotton trousers and jackets. The woman wore a peasant's wide-brimmed dun straw hat. The man had slung his by its cord over his back. They were gazing at him with a solid, disconcerting stare, but it wasn't until the rickshaw had passed and he'd turned back to look at them again that Denton recognised them. It was the woman who'd been hit by buckshot that day they'd gone shooting with Henschel outside Soochow - she and her husband. They were still gazing after him with that disconcerting stare, neither hostile nor friendly. The memory of the shooting revived his obscure sense of shame about it and he turned away uncomfortably. What had brought them to Shanghai? he wondered. Had they lost their land, or sold it, as so many of the peasants flooding the city had done, and come in search of work? Their unnervingly dispassionate stare stayed in his mind while he fingered Su-mei's present in his pocket. Were they too blaming him for their fate whatever it was? But their gaze hadn't been accusing. It had been a curious one, rather, as if he were some brilliant exotic fish displayed in a tank, interesting but useless. And that too made him uneasy. Sometimes he felt he never knew where he was with these people. So many of them seemed to have the Great Wall in their eyes, even the humblest of them, from which they could look down at you with cool indifference as mere barbarians, foreign devils. Even Wei. And Su-mei? He pushed the question aside. He didn't want to think like that about her, especially not tonight.

Su-mei had brought an orange lantern with her for the festival. She lit the candle inside it and hung it from the veranda railing. Denton had ordered dinner in his room and they sat across the little table she had bought him, their knees touching, teaching each other new words in Chinese and English. When they had finished eating and were sipping the last of her favourite strong green tea, he laid her present on the table beside her.

'T'ank you,' she said in the high, level tone in which she spoke English, tilting her head and smiling faintly. If he hadn't known her better, he might have thought she was hardly pleased at all. But he understood now that she would have found it demeaning to be more effusive. She leant forward across the table to let him put them on her. 'If I wear them tonight, you will not dare bite my ears in case you swallow them,' she said simply, in Chinese now.

He smiled, but her face was still, as though she'd meant it seriously. She put her hands up to feel the earrings hanging from her small pink lobes. They looked like two little silver tears tugging gently at them. He took her hands as she leant back. 'Su-mei?' be began.

'I want to look at them in the glass.'

'Wait a minute.' He held her wrists tighter. His tanned hands, with the dark hair sprouting at the knuckles, seemed enormous on her smooth slender wrists. How odd, too, that her skin was actually paler than his. 'If I moved out of the mess, we could find a place to live together in.'

She glanced up him with a sly smile in her half-lidded eyes. 'You want to marry me?' she asked mockingly.

'You know what I mean.' Of course he hadn't thought of marriage. He too smiled at the idea.

She eased her wrists out of his slowly slackening grip and went to the mirror in the bathroom, turning her head from side to side. The silver gleamed, dangling in the shadowy hollows beneath her ears.

'Well?' he asked.

'Very beautiful.' She raised her hands to adjust the earrings.

'What do you say about finding a place to live together in? Several people here have done it.'

She held up the hand with the little dark mole on it. 'Do you know Chinese people think this is very good, this mole here? When my father sold me, he got a better price because of that.'

'Su-mei!'

She went back to the veranda and leant over the rail. Below, orange, red, blue and yellow lanterns jogged and swayed along the street as children carried them towards the little hill that was the highest point nearby. The children were shouting and laughing as though there were no such thing as poverty and starvation and the selling of children.

'Well?' he asked again.

'And still be a sing-song girl?'

'I would have enough money for both of us. You could give up your room in Hongkew.'

'I have given it up already. I have let it to someone.'

'Let it?' he glanced round at her frowning. 'Where do you sleep when you don't stay here?'

'With a friend.' She was looking steadily over the rail, avoiding his eyes. 'I pay her - '

'Him or her?'

'Her,' she repeated sharply. 'I pay her half what it costs her. So I make money out of the other place.'

He paused, trying to visualise this girl who was only sixteen by western reckoning, and who was such a child in some ways, hard-headedly devising profitable schemes that he would never have dreamt of. 'So we can move together,' he said uncertainly, feeling that she had gone suddenly out of focus, acquiring a new dimension. 'You have given up your room already.'

'But if I stop being a sing-song girl, I will lose all my customers,' she went on in a practical voice. 'Then one day you will go away. And what will I do without my customers?'

He felt a sudden doubt that seemed to make something crumble in his chest. 'Su-mei, your customers - you don't...? I mean you only sing for them, don't you?' he asked suspiciously.

'Since I have been with you, yes.' She spoke lightly, as if that was irrelevant. 'But what will I do when you go away? Besides - '

'I will not go away,' he said bravely, and felt he meant it.

'Of course you will,' she answered flatly. 'Foreign devils always go away. One day you will marry a foreign woman. You will have to.'

She was gazing directly at him now, challenging him to deny it. He looked away from her assured brown eyes, down into the street with its nodding lanterns. He wanted to deny it, to take up her challenge, but something cold and heavy blocked his voice. Living with a Chinese girl, a sing-song girl at that - of course it could only be temporary, no matter how much he liked her. He felt the chill hand of reason pulling him back, the same chill hand that was guiding her. It was like a cloud suddenly covering the sky, draining the colour out of everything. She was right. In the end he would go away. Of course she was right. She couldn't rely on him.

Her eyes were still on his face. He glanced up at the earrings glistening against the glossy jet of her hair. 'You could keep on with your customers and still live with me,' he said hesitantly.

She gave a definite little shake of her head that made the earrings quiver. 'You would want a place at least as big as this, and an amah to look after it - it would cost much more than you pay here.' She glanced back over his rooms with a remorseless practical eye. 'Too expensive,' she concluded. 'You would pay more to someone else and you would have to give me less. Then I could not pay for my singing lessons. Or else I would have to send less to my parents.'

'Your parents!' He stared at her. 'But they sold you!' He knew about her singing lessons, her ambition to become an opera singer, and he enjoyed the thought that he was helping her with his money in that, although the only Chinese opera he'd ever attended had seemed a gaudy, clashing cacophony to him. But sending some of his money to her parents - that was different. She'd never told him about that.

Yet she seemed amazed at his astonishment, gazing at him with wide, uncomprehending eyes. 'Of course I send them money, they are my parents!'

'And they sold you!'

'Otherwise I would have starved. And so would they. Now I can send them money.' She spoke slowly and patiently, as if explaining a simple problem to a little child.

He heard several voices laughing and talking suddenly in Mason's room. They sounded boisterous and exuberant, with the shrill, uncontrolled hilarity of drunkenness. 'Shall we go in?' he asked abruptly. He didn't want to see their leers or hear the gibes they'd be bound to make if they saw Su-mei.

She took the lantern in from the veranda and hung it on the wardrobe door in the bedroom. How little he knew about her, he thought, as they undressed. How little he understood. Her parents sold her, and yet she sent them money as a matter of course. She even made it sound as though they'd done her a favour in selling her. Perhaps they had. He shook his head perplexedly.

She lay with her head on his shoulder, and he, on his back, gazed up at the pale shadows on the ceiling looming and shrinking weirdly as the candle flame inside the lantern flickered. He cupped his hand round her shoulder. 'Tell me about your family,' he said slowly.

Her shoulder shrugged lightly under his hand, as if to say, 'Why should you want to know about them? What business is it of yours?'

'How many brothers and sisters have you got?' he persisted.

Again her shoulder shrugged. 'Two half-brothers and a half-sister,' she said expressionlessly. 'Three younger brothers and two sisters.'

He added them together in his head. 'Half-brothers?' he asked puzzledly. 'Half-sisters?'

'My father had two wives at one time. My mother is the number two wife.'

'He must have been rich then, to have had two wives?'

'He was a rice dealer. When the Boxers came, they took all his rice. He was ruined. Then there was no trade for several years because of the Boxers. Everyone was starving. They say the peasants ate their dogs first, then the rats, then the girl babies. My father sold me when I was thirteen, I was the oldest girl. The Boxers killed the number one wife,' she added as an afterthought. 'When they took the town. They raped her and killed her. Many men. But my mother was my father's favourite wife.' She said that as though it somehow lessened the horror of killing the first wife.

All the same she had been speaking in a dull, inexpressive voice - almost grudgingly, as though she resented having to tell him. A loud sally of laughter carried into the room from Mason's veranda, discordant and loutish after Su-mei's bare and unself-pitying words. Unself-pitying and grimly realistic, he thought. She'd mentioned the first wife's death last because it was less important for the family than the loss of the rice. Without rice they starved, but her father had a second wife - and could get another if he was ever able to afford it again. And anyway the second wife was his favourite.

His hand left her shoulder to fondle the earring which lay in the hollow of her neck. He pressed it gently against her skin, rolling its little tear-drop mass to and fro.

'You're hurting,' she said in the same level voice.

'What's happened to your family now?' He was still rolling the earring to and fro. 'The Boxers were all killed in nineteen hundred, weren't they?' He glanced down at her face. She was looking up at him warily, her slanted lids almost closed, as though she thought he might suddenly jerk the earring or tear it off her ear. 'What are they doing now?' he asked again, holding his hand still.

'My father owes a lot of money. He has to work for the people he owes it to, until he has paid it all off. My brothers are working too. They give him money to help pay.'

'And your sisters?'

'Married.' She stirred. 'I send more money than my brothers do,' she said simply, without pride. 'I make more.'

'What does he look like, your father?'

She shrugged, and he felt her cheek move as she smiled.

'Old.'

He imagined her father selling her, taking her to the dealer, showing off her good points, the little mole on her hand for instance, while the dealer smirked into his beard, knowing that hunger would force her father to take his price in the end. He couldn't visualize her father, but he saw the dealer as a bony old man with a straggly white beard and moustache. Did her father kiss her goodbye? No, he wouldn't do that. Did she cry? How did they treat her?

The candle in the lantern went out. The room was dark except for the reflected moonlight filtering through the shutters. Again a guffaw of laughter from Mason's room. In the dark it sounded louder. 'What happened to you when you were sold?'

'The dealer sold me to an opera company. But they broke up, they lost all their money. They wanted to sell me to a brothel, but I ran away. I stole some money from them. It was in Tientsin. I got on a train to Shanghai. It was the first time in my life that I'd been on a train. The only time. I think I was more scared of the train than of being caught. And when I got to Shanghai, I became a sing-song girl.' She sighed, as if telling her story had tired her.

'How long ago was that?'

'Two years. I came because it was a long way off. People said they would not be able to catch me in the foreign settlements. Because of the foreign police.'

He had the sense that she had come to him across some immense plain in which everything was dim and strange. Would his life seem equally strange to her - his banal, narrow and sheltered life in Enfield?

'And did they catch you?' he asked.

'I would not be here if they had.' She raised herself suddenly on her elbows and looked down at him, resting her chin on her hands. 'You send money to your father?' she asked.

He nodded. But they didn't sell me, he was just about to say, but then checked himself. After all they weren't starving either. He gazed up past her head at the ceiling. How did her parents live? What sort of work did her father do? He'd been in Shanghai over a year and he'd learnt the language and yet China seemed just as inaccessible to him now as the day he arrived. 'Do your parents know about me?' he asked.

'No.' She was leaning her head on one side, unfastening the earrings; first one ear, then the other. 'They would be shocked to know I went with a foreign devil. I was frightened myself, only Wei told me it would be all right.'

'Wei told you to come to me?' His voice rose with pique. Hadn't she come of her own accord? What business was it of Wei's?

'Wei told me you would not hurt me.' She rolled onto her back suddenly and opened her arms. 'See? I have taken them off after all. You can bite my ears if you like.'