Shanghai

20

SITTING AT HIS DESK one evening, learning his vocabulary for his next Chinese lesson, Denton kept letting his eyes stray to the photograph of Emily propped against the wall in front of him, next to the picture of his parents. After he murmured each word aloud three times in what he hoped was the right tone, he would try to write the character, then allow himself to gaze at the misty, sepia-coloured portrait in its oval frame. He would purse his lips in an imagined kiss on Emily's, which he couldn't see properly as the photograph was taken in profile, and imagine the moist fresh pressure of her mouth as she responded. Sometimes his eyes would close and he would imagine her body pressing against his, soft and round and giving. Then, before his imagination had stirred him too far, he would open his eyes and check the strokes of the character he'd just drawn.

He was drawing the character for 'like' when there was a cheerful double-knock on the door.

'Come in?' He half-turned, brush in hand.

It was Johnson. Denton's brows rose slightly in surprise. Since that week at the forts, there had been a faint coolness between them, though more on his part than on Johnson's. Denton had started to avoid him except when others were there as well, feeling a slight, but distinct and solid wall inside his chest which he had to surmount whenever Johnson approached him with his affable benevolence.

'Hello.' Johnson closed the door and smiled blandly. 'Busy?'

'I'm learning my Chinese.' Denton dipped his brush in the ink and waited, his hand poised.

'Ah.'

'For tomorrow's lesson.'

'I didn't know you were working at it.' He came across to the desk and looked over Denton's shoulder.

'Just one lesson a week.' Denton held himself rigid, as though afraid Johnson was going to touch him. He gazed steadfastly at the moist, pointed tip of the brush.

'Jolly good,' Johnson said approvingly, yet absently. He leant further over to examine the character; yet, again, he seemed to do so absently. 'It rather looks as though we've got an unpleasant job to do,' he said, straightening up.

'Oh?' When Denton glanced round he saw that Johnson was smiling his usual equable smile, whatever the unpleasant job might be.

'Yes. That fellow that gave us the information about the salt-smugglers - remember him?'

'Yes?'

It wasn't 'us' when you were talking about the bounty, Denton thought with a fleeting sense of recollected smart. It was all 'me' then.

'It looks as though he may have been murdered.'

'Murdered?'

'Mm. They want us to go and identify the body.' Johnson went on dispassionately. 'Won't take long.'

'Us?' Denton exclaimed in alarm. 'But I hardly even saw him!'

'Well, it does help if there are two of us,' Johnson insisted amiably. 'It's a bit difficult to identify them if they've been mutilated, as I gather this one has. I mean, you might've noticed something about him that would help.'

Denton felt, a tide of sick fearfulness washing up his stomach. 'I didn't even look at him,' he protested weakly.

'The police are downstairs waiting,' Johnson went on as if he hadn't heard. 'Won't take half an hour. The mortuary's just round the corner. You'll be back at your Chinese in no time.'

Despite his unwillingness and his squeamish apprehension, Denton tamely pushed back his chair, slipped on his tunic and began silently buttoning it. Johnson leant over the desk again, gazing at the photographs.

'Your parents?' he asked equably.

'Yes.'

'And your sister?'

'I haven't got a sister.' He compressed his lips, then surrendered under Johnson's smiling, innocently inquiring eyes. 'It's my, er, fiancée, actually.' He looked away uncomfortably.

'Oh, fiancée?' Johnson strolled towards the door. 'Very nice' he added perfunctorily.

An English inspector and a Sikh constable were waiting downstairs, the inspector sitting in a cane chair, impatiently slapping the arm with the flat of his hand, the Sikh standing monumentally by the main door. 'Ah, there you are,' the inspector said gruffly as he got up. 'Shall we go?'

The Sikh led the way through the narrow streets, the others followed three abreast. Hawkers were selling from their stalls beneath hissing paraffin lamps - tea, food, fruits and vegetables - and a fortune-teller sat against the wall beside two old men squatting over a Chinese chess board, while a silent crowd stood round them, watching each move. Denton glanced at them all abstractedly and scarcely heard the strident, bargaining voices all round him, his mind tremulously foreseeing every kind of mutilation that a body could suffer; but Johnson was as undisturbed and detached as ever; talking on in that monotonous, faintly twangy voice of his. The inspector merely grunted noncommittally while Denton walked slightly apart, as though an invisible film separated him from both the street and his companions. 'Old Derek's all right,' he remembered Jones saying as they left Johnson picking his teeth in solitude at the dinner table one evening. 'Only he does drone on and on, doesn't he?' That droning jarred on him now more than ever.

Denton felt a new soft, squelchy quiver of fear as the Sikh led the way past a blue-glazed gas light into the mortuary. A few Chinese in white overalls were gossiping loudly at the back of a large hall, in which were several rows of almost empty benches. At the other end of the hall, guarding a gloomy corridor, a clerk sat at a high wooden desk, making entries in a register. The inspector spoke to him curtly and the clerk ran his finger up and down the columns of one page after another.

A wailing noise started abruptly at the far end of the corridor and everyone glanced round, except the clerk, whose finger was still running up and down the columns in his register. A frail old Chinese woman in black tunic and trousers was led out by two younger men who held her by the arms. She was throwing her head about and shouting wordlessly, yet her eyes seemed quite dry. Some of the attendants gossiping at the back looked incuriously round at her as they talked without any change in their voices. The police inspector glanced sharply at her, frowning.

'Number thirty-four,' the clerk said at last.

The inspector and Johnson followed an attendant while Denton went along behind them, clutching at every delay.

The air in the corridor seemed cool although there were no windows. The attendant opened a door and they walked into a cell-like room, in the walls of which were little tunnels with cloth flags hanging down in front of them, each cloth with a number stencilled on it in black paint. Here the air was really cold and for the first time since he'd come to Shanghai, Denton shivered. The attendant looked slowly and lazily for the appropriate flag, and Denton felt his heart thudding softly, his fingers clenching as, with a bored sigh, the man lifted the cloth and pulled out a stretcher on silent, rubber wheels. A naked body lay on the stretcher, packed in ice, with many congealed stab and slash wounds on its waxen face and chest. Denton shuddered as he looked at the arms. Both hands had been severed at the wrists.

'Twenty-two wounds,' the inspector was reading from the card pinned to the stretcher at the mutilated head. 'Hands missing, face seriously disfigured. Found in Soochow Creek near Garden Bridge, seven fifteen this morning. No identification marks, about thirty to thirty-five years old.' He turned to Johnson, laying the card down and wiping his fingers fastidiously. 'This your chap? How long's he been missing?'

'I haven't heard from him for two or three weeks,' Johnson reflected in his detached, twangy voice. 'But this chap's in such a mess it's really hard to tell.'

'I suppose we've got his finger-prints,' the inspector grunted. 'Otherwise they wouldn't've bothered to chop his paws off. Looks as though they didn't like the look of his face much, either.'

Denton gazed at the corpse while the other two talked. Strangely enough, now that he'd seen it, it wasn't so terrible after all, he felt with a surprised, buoyant sense of relief. The rigidity of the limbs, of the feet stiffly sticking up, the waxy pallor of the skin beneath its almond surface, the blocks of ice on which it lay, and which were packed round it, even between the legs, all seemed to dehumanize the corpse. It was hard to conceive of that lifeless marble thing as the living, breathing, furtively swift informer he'd seen a few weeks before in Johnson's room. Denton's gaze moved a little guiltily up the legs to the genitals, dropping from a little triangular patch of black fur between the spread thighs like a piece of limp gristle with a thick, crooked blue vein in it. So the Chinese weren't entirely devoid of body hair, the thought came to him, as though that were the issue he'd really come to settle. The belly was flat, the ribs starkly visible beneath the skin. Finally he gazed at the stumps where the hands should have been, blue round the skin and red inside, with jagged-edged faces of white, crushed bone. Instead of the horror he'd felt at first, now he felt only a distant repulsion, as if he were in a butcher's storeroom. The stab wounds in the chest were blue round the edges too, and he thought with what force the knife must have been driven into the flesh. The wounds' mouths were crusted with dried blood.

It's like a piece of meat, he thought. It's just a piece of meat. And although his heart was thudding steadily against the hollow wall of his body, he no longer feared he would faint or throw up. The face had been slashed all over. The confusions and ridges from the cuts made it almost impossible for him to compare the lifeless, disfigured visage with the dimly-remembered face of the informer. Besides, the lifelessness seemed so absolute that he couldn't really believe it had ever been alive. That was what took the horror away. At the actual moment of death, with terror gripping the muscles and screaming through the eyes, it might have been different.

'What do you think, John?' Johnson used his Christian name for the first time, with a familiar little smile.

Denton shook his head slowly. 'I don't know....' He felt them both glancing at him for some sign of weakness, but he pretended not to notice, looking thoughtfully down at the head again, the sightless eyes, dead and pebbly, the skin all round them lacerated and swollen. Then he noticed a little whitish line from an old scar across the temple, and instantly recalled seeing the same mark of Johnson's informer when the man had hurried past him to the door.

'Yes, it is the same man,' he said suddenly and decisively. 'That scar on his forehead - I noticed it in your room that night, just as he was leaving.'

They both bent over the head, while the attendant hawked loudly and impatiently behind them.

'This one, you mean?' the inspector pointed.

Johnson pushed out his underlip consideringly. 'Well, it could be,' he pronounced almost grudgingly at last. 'I can't say I really remember exactly, but ... yes, it could be.'

'I'm sure it's the same scar,' Denton said coldly, as if his words had been doubted.

The inspector stood back and gestured to the attendant, who was now belching quietly. With a bored, disdainful shake of his head, the man rolled the corpse back into its grave-like slot.

'Well, we can try and locate some next of kin, then,’ the inspector said briskly. 'You haven't got any ideas, I suppose? No? Just let me have his name and any address you've got for him, would you? Chilly in here, isn't it?'

As the inspector opened the door, Denton saw a little grey shape scurrying along the wall. It ran over the inspector's shoe and disappeared into the corridor.

'God damn it! A rat!' the inspector shouted with sudden intensity, as though for all his apparent unconcern, his nerves had really been stretched taut in there. The attendant slammed the door after them, chuckling in his phlegmy throat. 'Him too cold,' he muttered. 'Him not likee cold.'

'Pity about that, if it really was my chap,' Johnson ruminated evenly on the way back to the mess. 'He was quite a useful informer. Don't know if I'll find anyone as good to take his place. Still I suppose something'll turn up.... If it really was him, of course.'

'I'm quite sure it was the same man,' Denton said shortly, nettled by Johnson's persistent doubt.

Johnson didn't reply. He had stopped to bargain with a grey-haired woman hawker who was squatting beside a basket of oranges.

'Here you are, have one,' he said as they walked on. 'Yes, I didn't know you were engaged. Of course a lot of people are when they first come out here, but then it often all falls apart.'

Denton cupped his palm round the globe of the orange without answering. Johnson's voice had seemed to express satisfaction, relish even, about the disintegration of engagements.

'What are you doing next Saturday, by the way?' Johnson asked obliviously as they turned towards the steps of the mess. 'I was wondering whether you'd like to come for a little stroll, see a bit more of the place. Bit too hot still for a real hike, of course.'

Johnson had avoided looking at him while he spoke, perhaps to make the invitation seem more casual. But there was almost a pleading note in that flat, monotonous voice as he ended.

'I'm afraid I've got another invitation,' Denton excused himself thankfully. 'I'm going to tea with the Dean of the cathedral,' he added with a touch of pride.

'The Dean?' Johnson repeated with an indifference Denton felt sure was feigned. 'Well, some other time then, eh?'

It was not until he was going to bed that Denton thought of the rat again and imagined it nibbling at the frozen corpses in the mortuary. Apprehensively, with a suddenly shivering back, he looked round the skirting board of the room before he turned out the light.

21

THE REVEREND GEORGE EATON had an emaciated, ascetic looking face, but the cakes his amah set before Denton in the Deanery were rich and plentiful. And it wasn't till the plate was empty, Denton having politely declined the last cake - which the Dean promptly popped whole into his mouth - that with preliminary throat-clearing he broached spiritual matters.

'Well, John,' he said as he dabbed his thin, crumb-laden lips with his napkin, 'Shanghai is very interesting of course, but it does offer many ...' his lids lowered tactfully '... many temptations. Which it is often hard for young men to resist out here. Immorality, particularly in relations between the sexes, is, I'm afraid, a byword.' He paused to confront Denton uncompromisingly with his deep-set hazel eyes. 'A byword,' he repeated sternly. 'As I expect you may have noticed.'

Thinking of the Chinese girl in Mason's room, Denton blushed, as though he himself were guilty. Perhaps he was guilty, the thought occurred to him as Mr Eaton finished, for his recollection of the girl was somehow fascinating and thrilling. 'Well, yes,' he said uneasily, 'I have noticed something of the kind.'

'A byword.' The Dean nodded emphatically, his eyes still probing Denton's. 'Our Christian Youth Fellowship is a bulwark against that kind of temptation.'

Denton recalled the high, rouged cheekbones of the Chinese girl, her pale, slim legs beneath Mason's hanging tunic. Were Emily's legs as pale and slim? He caught himself blushing again under the Dean's disconcerting unblinking gaze. 'Er, as a matter of fact I'm engaged,' he muttered defensively.

'Already?' The Dean's white brows arched in disapproving incredulity.

'Oh no, not out here,' he spluttered hastily. 'I mean before I left home. We got engaged before I left.'

'Ah, I see.' The Dean's eyes relaxed their grip, and slowly let him go at last. He leant back with a sigh of relief folding his hands behind his back. There were damp sweat marks under the arms of his white cassock. 'And when is your fiancée coming out to join you?'

'Well, she has to finish her course first - she's training to be a teacher - and then it's, er, well, a question of money really.'

The Dean nodded understandingly, then, glancing up at the failing punkah over their heads, called out in an unexpectedly sharp voice. Slowly the punkah's wing-like flapping quickened and the cooler air fanned their faces in continual draughts once more.

'These people are really incorrigible, you know, John,' he smiled resignedly, shaking his head. 'Always going to sleep. One mustn't blame them too much of course, but it's most irritating. The heat has affected their pulses over the centuries, you see. Their pulses are slow and languid now, they are completely enervated. But we are making gradual progress.' He held up his hand when Denton nodded, as though warding off any interruption, however sympathetic. 'We are making gradual progress. My friends in the out-stations tell me, for instance, that more and more of the natives are joining their churches. We may yet see a truly Christian China in the not too distant future. Not I, perhaps,' he smiled a theatrically wry smile, shaking his grey head again in rueful recognition of his years, 'but you may. And it is people like you who must set the example, John. The white man, the Christian in China. We are all of us missionaries in our way, not just the clergy.'

The Dean turned to look at the amah, sleek and plump in her white tunic and wide black trousers. She was calling in a quiet, sibilant whisper from the door, smiling widely.

'Master, the man come.'

The Dean rose with sudden energy and went to meet a tall, thin Chinese in a long grey silk gown who was already gliding into the room. The amah's whisper, and the Dean's haste, as if he didn't want Denton to see his visitor, suggested something confidential, or even secret, and Denton stood up awkwardly, ready to leave.

'Good afternoon, Reverend,' the Chinese said loudly, his eyes smiling behind his rimless glasses. Then, after only a moment's hesitation. 'Good afternoon, Mr Den-tong. How is my friend Mr May-song?'

Denton frowned in puzzlement, then, noticing the man's long, curved nail, suddenly remembered. It was Mr Ching of course, the agent from the Russian ship.

'You know each other?' the Dean asked, on a note of almost displeased surprise.

'I have met Mr Den-tong in the lines of duty,' Ching answered, smiling gaily. 'If I may have a few words with you, Reverend, I will not intrude on your pleasant chatting any longer.'

The Dean ushered him out of the room without a backward glance, closing the door behind them. Denton sat down again, gazing up at the white-washed ceiling, where the punkah, as if on a signal, was wearily slowing and resting. He felt his nerves slackening and resting too, and realised how tense he was with the Dean, as tense as he was with nearly everyone, he thought sadly.

When the Dean returned a few minutes later, the punkah at once began its regular sweep again. 'A little business matter,' he apologised. 'A little property I am negotiating to buy in Hongkew. If you ever have the opportunity to invest in land in Hongkew, John,' his voice strengthened, losing that faintly disconcerted and embarrassed tone it had had when Ching was in the room, 'I strongly advise you to do so. I understand that property prices are bound to appreciate there as Shanghai continues to expand.'

'Oh I see.'

'Yes indeed. And now that you're contemplating matrimony,' he wagged his finger genially, 'You have an obligation to think of the future, eh?'

'Yes, I suppose so,' Denton smiled sheepishly.

'Now where were we? Oh yes, the Christian Youth Fellowship. We're having our next meeting on Thursday. A little talk about the doctrines of Dr Pusey and the position of the Church of England with regard to the sacraments.' His voice, alert and energetic when he talked about property, was taking on its stately, pious tone again now. It put Denton fleetingly in mind of a man changing into his stiff best suit after work. 'Mr Fenton will start the discussion. A missionary near Hankow. A deep thinker, I believe, as well as a tireless missionary. And his topic is of fundamental importance, of course.'

Leaving the Deanery half an hour later, so unlike, in its white, lofty spaciousness, the cosy picture that the word drew in his English mind, Denton wandered aimlessly down the narrow, unpaved alleys towards the Bund. He held his hat in his hand and walked in the shade that the walls threw from the sloping afternoon sun. Rickshaw coolies hailed him importunately, hawkers eyed him appraisingly from their stalls, women labourers heaving heavy stones on their backs staggered past him towards a new building, sweat oozing down their cheeks and straining necks. It was too late for the concert in the park and too early for dinner in the mess. He felt a slow, heavy swell of dejection rolling over him as, reaching the Bund, he watched fashionably-dressed men and women sauntering away from the park gates and climbing into cabs or sedan chairs, to be carried laughing and smiling away into the evening. It was a nameless dejection that had been growing quietly inside him while talking to the Dean, a depression that seemed to crush him silently with its suffocating weight. An old beggar-woman accosted him, mumbling words he couldn't understand and insistently shaking a scratched and dented red tin box in which a few copper cents rattled together. Her wretched little box, symbol of the hopeless, dreary life it represented, seemed suddenly to epitomise his own life too, although he couldn't have said why. He took out a dollar and recklessly dropped it in the box, as if he could buy off his own depression with such extravagant generosity. At once more beggars appeared, women, children, men without arms, blind, deaf, dumb, diseased and deformed, young and old. He stood helplessly, gazing at the seething, beseeching, clinging little crowd, shaking his head against their insistent whining murmur, while the homeward stream of Europeans flowed steadily past him from the park, their eyes stiffly unseeing or ironically amused. He knew that he ought to go back and practise his Chinese or write another letter home. But the image of his silent empty rooms, of the mess where the rest of them would be drinking, playing billiards or vacantly lying back in the cane chairs of the lounge, yawning with boredom, only added another dark weight to his depression. He ploughed impulsively through the softly plucking hands of the beggars and stepped into a waiting rickshaw.

'Where to, master?' the coolie asked, lifting the shafts. He was a young man, not much older than himself, with a wispy moustache that gave him a sardonic, mocking expression.

Denton didn't know. He pointed vaguely along the Bund.

The coolie nodded, heaved against the bar and trotted off. Watching his sandalled feet slap on the hard uneven road. Denton looked away over the river a trifle guiltily. A long white liner was swinging slowly round in the middle channel, turning to sail downstream away from Shanghai. The setting sun glowed on its side, gleaming brokenly on the portholes and washing the white paint with a faint rosy hue. The sight of the liner leaving, perhaps for England, sent a pang through him and he suddenly understood his dejection. He was lonely, that was all. The letter he'd been waiting for from Emily hadn't come and there wouldn't be another mail ship for a week. It was Saturday afternoon. If he were in England, he'd be walking with her beside the Lea perhaps, or going to her parents' for tea. For a moment he wanted just to talk to someone, just to tell someone about Emily and him - he even considered going back to the mess and calling on Johnson. But no, that wouldn't be any use. He stared at the river, where the liner had completed its turn. A deep, mournful bellow from its siren tore the hanging stillness of the air. He wished longingly that he could be on board, sailing home. The coolie slowed his steps and glanced back over his shoulder, as though divining Denton's thoughts. But Denton waved him on, and the man grunted as he quickened his pace again. The back of his shirt was dark with sweat.

They came imperceptibly to a part of the city he hadn't seen before. The change was subtle but definite. The streets seemed even narrower, the canals more filthy, the smells stronger and more rotten. Then the rickshaw swung under an arch into a main street, and he saw the name - rue Molière. He was in the French Settlement. He looked about him wonderingly, and even a little anxiously - the French Settlement was full of crime, so people said. But there was something appealing about it. French names appeared on the shops, a French sailor with a red pompom in the middle of his hat was strolling along the street, and he heard the rapid, voluble murmur of the French language being spoken behind him. Looking round, he saw that it was a lady and a little fair-haired girl in a rickshaw. The lady was holding a parasol slantwise against the last rays of the sun and the little girl was peering round its scalloped edge as she talked. There was something calm and peaceful about them that caught his heart and he kept secretly looking back.

Soon the lady's rickshaw stopped outside a large house, set back behind a white-washed wall, through which streaks of an older, darker, colour showed. Denton watched the lady step gracefully down, holding her bunched, grey skirt in one hand, resting the parasol on her shoulder with the other. The little girl followed her, skipping through the arched entrance in the peeling wall. He felt a sudden impulse to tell his coolie to stop, to take him back, so that he could watch the two of them walking along the drive to the house that lay concealed behind the peeling wall. But he said nothing. He let them float away like some vision - what sort of vision he couldn't say. A vision of serenity, perhaps? He felt some perceptible lightening of his self-pity, as though the lady and the little girl had left a promise of comfort for him as they slipped so peacefully away.

After a short time the coolie's pace slackened again and he stopped outside a tall narrow house with green-washed walls, lowering the shafts expectantly. Denton looked from the coolie to the house. The door was open and a very large Chinese sat toad-like beside it in a cane chair on the shaded porch. At first Denton thought he was asleep, but then one lid slowly opened, followed by the other. The man regarded him unwinkingly from under the wide brim of his straw hat.

The coolie gestured Denton to get down, panting lightly. 'What is this?' Denton asked in his lame Shanghainese. The coolie replied unintelligibly, gesturing again. The huge man on the porch heaved himself ponderously out of his chair, and Denton heard the wood creak and groan. He was grossly fat and rolled from side to side as he walked, his whole body quivering at every step. He glanced from the coolie to Denton, his face immobile except for the flickering of his little brown eyes. 'M'sieu'?' he asked in a calm, even voice. 'Vous d‚sirez?'

Denton shrugged. He had never heard a Chinese speaking French before, and it seemed outlandish. At the same time there was something insolent in the fat man's examining, undeferential gaze. 'Do you speak English?' he asked.

The fat man turned his head slowly to the coolie, ignoring Denton, and spoke to him quietly. Then he turned slowly back, gazing unblinkingly into Denton's eyes again. 'Vous désirez une jeune fille?'

'I don't understand,' Denton said blankly, in English, then in Shanghainese.

The man sighed impatiently and brought his round, heavy face closer, speaking slowly and distinctly as if to an idiot. 'You ... want ... this?' he slapped his groin suggestively.

'What? No!' Denton pulled back indignantly, as if he'd been hit.

The gross man turned away, shrugging his massive shoulders indifferently. He muttered something to the coolie, at which the coolie, glancing back at Denton, gave a short, derisive laugh, then waddled quivering back to his chair, where he slowly subsided. Again the chair creaked and groaned.

'Go back,' Denton said weakly, but the coolie laughed, gesturing again to the open door. At the same time footsteps sounded down the dark, wooden stairway inside the hall and a man came out into the light. He was a European, dark-haired and sallow, about thirty years old, with a slim, black moustache. He walked swiftly down the path and away, glancing momentarily at Denton. 'Bonsoir, m'sieur,' he nodded casually, raising his elegant straw hat with a brown silk band round it. There was a white carnation in his lapel.

The coolie was gesturing encouragingly again, but Denton adamantly shook his head. 'Bund!' he said tensely, making a turning movement with his hand. 'Bund!'

The coolie shrugged at last, and picked up the shafts wagging his head slowly in amused disbelief.

The rickshaw lurched into a pot-hole, as if the coolie was no longer bothering how he pulled such an unworthy passenger, and Denton glanced stealthily back at the house. Beneath his almost panicky abhorrence, he was secretly enticed by the allure of that open door with its vague carnal promise. His heart was beating more rapidly as he felt a guilty sense of regret and self-reproach that he hadn't dared enter. He tried resolutely to think of Emily, of the Reverend Eaton's exhortation, of the Christian Youth Fellowship and Dr Pusey's doctrines, but all the pure and earnest images that he summoned up seemed pale and drab against the forbidden excitement of that open door beside the gross and sensual Chinese. In a quarter of an hour, he thought bewilderedly, he'd passed from the serenity of the lady with the little girl to the sordid turmoil of lust - how was such a thing possible?