Shanghai

The evening stretched out before him, stale, lonely, and empty, and the dark crushing swell of his depression rolled over him once more.

22

IN NOVEMBER THE HEAT at last began to weaken, like an iron hand slowly loosening its grip on the city. Denton could wear his uniform without immediately sweating, even at midday. The evenings were cool, and at night he slept now beneath a light cotton blanket. The mosquitoes were less troublesome too, as if the drier, cooler air was too thin to carry them.

Mr Brown seemed moderately satisfied with his progress, though not to the point of inviting him to dinner again, and not long after the Moon Festival, when the Chinese wandered through the street with coloured lanterns hung on springy twigs, Denton had been able to write proudly to his parents that he was no longer merely a training probationary inspector, but a probationary inspector in his own right, inspecting vessels in his own section of the wharves, often without any supervision at all. His Chinese, too, had been improving, and Mr Wei, who always perched on the edge of the same chair in his room, his head alertly cocked like an eager little bird, was able to hold simple conversations with him in the language.

It was in November, too, that the Shanghai Race Club held its annual meeting. A party of officers went on the last day, when the best horses and riders were competing.

'They're gentlemen riders, of course,' Johnson explained to Denton, as they stood by the paddock watching the horses being led round. 'They don't have professional jockeys or anything like that here.'

Denton nodded, moving a little away. His coolness towards Johnson had begun to turn into a mild revulsion, as though Johnson were always standing too close to him, brushing his sleeve, or accidentally nudging him. Besides, he was irritated by Johnson's quiet, smug assumption that he was in all things Denton's guide and tutor. He turned to Jones, who was discussing with Mason which horses to bet on. 'Whose colours are they?' he asked, pointing to a pony that had just come in.

'Jardine's. And that's the Bank's. Moller's over there. That's Moller riding himself.' Jones raised a quizzical eyebrow. 'You a betting man?'

Denton shook his head deprecatingly. 'I've never been to a race before.'

'I'd put twenty dollars on Jeremiah, Jonesy,' Mason said confidently, looking up from his card.

'Do you know a lot about horses?' Denton asked with grudging respect. Horses had always signified gentlemen and aristocrats to him.

'Used to be in the cavalry,' Mason threw out as he moved away.

'Really? Where?'

But Mason didn't answer, walking towards the stands as though he hadn't heard.

Jones leant towards Denton confidentially. 'One thing it doesn't do to ask too much out here is where people were before they came,' he breathed in Denton's ear. His breath smelt of beer. 'You going to bet?'

Denton shook his head. 'No money to spare,' he said with a show of regret, although in fact it was his moral scruples that prevented him. Noticing that Johnson had clamped onto someone else now, he edged away, strolling with Jones towards the stands. Crowds of jostling Chinese thronged the stalls. Hawkers were selling tea and bottled drinks that lay in metal boxes of slushy, melting ice. Bookmakers bawled out the odds while their assistants took money from the men and women who clamoured round them. A melon-seller was deftly slicing the great round fruit with a long thin-bladed knife into perfect half-moon segments. 'That's what they stab people with,' Jones said nonchalantly. 'Goes right through and out the other side. Sharp as a razor.' Denton thought of Johnson's informer with his twenty-two wounds.

They sauntered on, past the mounted Sikh policemen to the Europeans' enclosure. Denton gazed up at the taipans in their boxes, their finely-dressed wives and daughters twirling their parasols in gloved hands or playing with the ribbons of their hats. One of the girls looked a bit like Emily, he thought, except, he conceded reluctantly and only half-consciously, she was prettier and far more elegantly dressed.

'No good looking that way, old man,' Jones said, tilting his hat forward over his eyes. 'They're not for the likes of us.'

Denton flushed again. 'I'm engaged to a girl in England,' he said stiffly.

'So we've heard, so we've heard,' Jones smiled, stroking down the silky ends of his moustache. 'But what the eye doesn't see the heart doesn't grieve over, eh?'

Denton had had only five letters from Emily, each a little shorter than the one before, each somehow a little more constrained, as though the miles and the months that separated them had laid an autumn coolness on their feelings. But the changes were so gradual and Denton himself so unwilling to acknowledge them, except in unguarded moments of loneliness, that he hadn't yet realised what they might mean. He was re-reading the letters, his imagination supplying the glowing colours which they lacked in reality, when Mr Wei arrived one day, out of breath and uncharacteristically late for his lesson.

'The rickshaw coolie, very stupid,' his gold tooth glistened in his apologetic smile. 'He bump a foreigner. Very angry. Indian policeman hit him for his clumsy.' He laughed, a nervous, breathless little giggle, but behind his glinting, steel-rimmed glasses, Denton detected a gleam of resentment and humiliation.

Where are you going? the first exercise began. I am going to the tea-house. Denton paused before saying the two sentences, mentally rehearsing the different rising and falling tones that he so easily confused.

'No, no, Mr Denton,' Mr Wei chirped spryly, his habitual alertness recovered, 'You must do by feeling, not think before say.'

'I've never been to a tea-house,' Denton said irrelevantly, abruptly taken by the realisation. 'Can you take me to one?'

'A tea-house?' Mr Wei giggled. 'You will not quite like it, I think.'

'Why not?'

Mr Wei's hands fluttered deprecatingly, 'Foreigners do not go to such place. Only for Chinese.'

'But I'd really like to go.'

'You like to go?' Mr Wei's voice, his whole face, expressed polite disbelief. 'I do not think.'

'Really I would,' Denton insisted.

Mr Wei shook his head, chuckling to himself at the very idea as if it were the naive illusion of an eager but uninformed child. Yet at the end of the hour he referred to it again, as though he'd been silently reflecting on it during the interchanges of I am going to a tea-house. Is your brother in the tea-house? 'You want to see Chinese tea-house?' he asked circumspectly, as if Denton couldn't really have been serious.

'Yes, I'd like to very much.'

He scratched his cheek lightly with his long, curved fingernail. 'When you are free?'

'Yes, when I'm free.'

Mr Wei looked puzzled. 'When you are free?' he repeated less -confidently.

'Oh, when am I free?' Denton raised his hands. 'Any time. Now?'

Mr Wei cocked his head. 'I am going to a goo' one after my lesson. If you wish, we can walk. It is not far.'

But outside the building he hailed a rickshaw, deciding, over Denton's protests, that it would be too far for him to walk in the sun. His manner to the rickshaw coolie was curt and decisive. To Denton, accustomed to his fluid courtesy, it seemed almost arrogant. He hadn't suspected that frail little man was capable of such authority.

The coolie ran them along the bank of the Soochow Creek, the waters thick with sampans and barges, then over a little wooden hump-backed bridge, past the out-stretched hands of the beggars who rose in a swarm at the summit where the coolie could hardly pull the rickshaw. Mr Wei's face, normally so expressive, assumed a stony impassivity as the beggars' hands clutched at their feet, their clothes, their hands, with limp, pleading gestures. It was as if he didn't want to recognise even their existence. But then his mouth and eyes relaxed as they left the murmuring beggars behind and passed along an unfamiliar street. 'Mr Denton, are your parents still live?' he asked. 'How many brother you have?' His eyes shadowed sympathetically when Denton told him his only brother had been killed in the Boer War. 'Where is he bury?' he asked solicitously. 'You have made arrangement for bury in family grave with your ancestor?'

'No, he's buried in South Africa. It would have cost too much to bring his body home.'

Mr Wei's eyes opened wide in pained astonishment at Denton's answer, and he was silent for some time, as if out of deep but puzzled delicacy for his family's humiliation.

They came to the tea-house. It was an old stone building with gold characters painted on a faded red background over the carved wooden entrance. Here too beggars and rickshaw coolies crouched, watchful for prey, while unkempt dogs prowled in the gutter for scraps of food. Denton's adventurous enthusiasm sagged. On his own he wouldn't have given the building a second glance, it was indistinguishable from the seedy slums on either side. Now he'd have to go in, and probably get food-poisoning as well!

There was a wooden screen just inside, facing the doorway. 'To keep bad spirits out,' Wei explained. 'Chinese people think ba' spirit' only fly straigh' line. So bounce off screen and go out door.' He smiled, as if he didn't believe it. Behind the screen a large hall opened out, full of round wooden tables in partitioned areas, while at the back were stairs leading to private rooms. The place echoed with the clatter of crockery and the exuberant noise of shouted conversations, orders called to the scurrying waiters, greetings shouted, and above everything else, like a castanet continuo, the clacking and scraping of mahjong tiles. Mr Wei led Denton to a table in the corner. He was the only European there, and his back tingled under the frankly curious gaze of a hundred eyes while the hubbub continued round them without pause.

He sat down uncomfortably. Before they came to the place, he'd expected something cool, refined and with a quiet, gracious air, but this was as noisy as the street outside, as pulsing with raucous energy and life. And the floor looked none too clean, either. What about the cups they were carelessly slapping down on the table? He rubbed his finger surreptitiously along the edge of the table and was relieved to see it was reasonably clean. He looked round warily, regretting his rashness. The Chinese here had none of that submissive deference his experience of them so far had led him to expect, and the lack of it disturbed him. It was almost as if they were deliberately flouting his western superiority. Even Mr Wei himself seemed to have changed. He called for tea in a loud, sharp voice that meant to be obeyed and exchanged shouted greetings with customers at nearby tables. They kept calling out questions about Denton that he couldn't understand, but which he could tell were bantering and familiar. Their eyes, meeting his, smiled or stared without flinching.

An old man in a long blue gown, with glasses resting on the tip of his nose sat down beside Mr Wei, asking him curiously about the foreigner and throwing smiling, unabashed glances at him. Soon he was joined by another, younger man, then by a third. Smiling at Denton with candid interest, but never addressing him, they plied Mr Wei with questions about him that his beginner's Chinese could only help him guess at. It was like being discussed as a boy by his uncles and aunts round the kitchen table. When he tried to answer a question one of them asked him directly - an easy one about his age - they nodded and smiled at him encouragingly, commenting loudly to each other about his ability while Mr Wei's eyes shone with proprietary pride in his pupil.

The tea arrived. Remembering Mr Wei's instructions in Chinese etiquette, Denton tapped the table with his middle finger when the waiter poured the steaming green liquid into his rice-patterned cup. The watchers murmured in surprised approval, turning to the nearby tables, from where steady eyes had been observing him too, and recounted his proficiency in Chinese customs as well. Before long there were several more men sitting at the table, ordering food, testing Denton's Chinese, and discussing it uninhibitedly amongst themselves. Their warm, congratulatory smiles seemed to be touched with a jesting, patronising surprise that a foreign devil could make anything at all of a civilised language like Chinese.

Although he felt uncomfortably on show, Denton was dimly aware of a new dimension forming in his mind as he sat amongst these inquisitive, lively people. Already, after only a few months, he'd come to expect the Chinese to be subdued and deferential towards him, to call him 'master' and to wait on him, to empty his toilet box and pour his hot water. When they didn't conform, as the fat man outside the brothel hadn't conformed, he'd been shocked, as if by a subordinate's insolence. But there, amongst Wei's genial friends, who plainly thought of him as no more than an outlandish, if good-natured, barbarian, he felt the brittle mould in which Shanghai had cast his ideas beginning to crack. Perhaps these people weren't so different from himself? Perhaps they weren't naturally inferior? Beneath their unabashed and curious gaze, he began to wonder, to doubt. It was hard to assume superiority when you were yourself being regarded with patronising benevolence by those who were supposed to be your inferiors.

Gradually the interest in him diminished and the customers drifted off to their own tables, to their tea and mahjong, as casually as they had first drifted to Wei's. Denton sat thoughtfully sipping the pale, faintly bitter, tea, in which a white jasmine floated round and round, until Mr Wei called for the bill.

'Please let me pay,' he asked, but Mr Wei would not allow it. 'Next time, then?' Denton suggested.

'You would like to come again?' Wei smiled happily.

As they were leaving, a waiter was escorting a sing-song girl through the hall towards one of the private rooms. She had rouged cheeks and black glossy hair that reminded Denton instantly of the girl Mason had pointed out to him on his first day in Shanghai. She glanced with momentary surprise at Denton as they passed and then she was gone. A musician followed her, carrying a two-stringed Chinese violin with a gourd-like soundbox and ornately decorated pegs.

Wei noticed Denton looking after them, and offered to arrange for the girl to sing.

'Oh no,' Denton declined, flustered. 'I wouldn't understand.'

'If you not like, can sen' away,' Wei suggested. 'Never mind understanding. Chinese music only soundings, never mind words.'

'No, really. Another time, perhaps.'

Wei summoned a rickshaw. They travelled back through a maze of alleys Denton had never seen before, alleys in which large houses with tiled pagoda roofs would suddenly appear beside little wooden huts that clung to their walls like sores. With each turn the lanes seemed to get narrower, the crowds more dense. Wei stopped the rickshaw outside a long low brick building with a blue-tiled roof. Trees grew round the entrance, their branches, old and twisted, resting on the curving eaves. A faint sweetish smell came from the heavy wooden doors.

'This is my clan burial house,' Wei said, smiling his winking gold smile. He pointed to the doors. 'In there is the coffin I give my parents.'

'Your parents are dead?' Denton inquired with a sympathetic softening of his voice.

'Not yet. When they die, the coffin ready for them.' He smiled proudly. 'They are very happy for coffin, cost a very lot, very goo' coffin.' While he was speaking four coolies entered the building straining under the weight of a heavy wooden coffin like a moulded, polished tree bole. The same sweetish smell came from that too. The coolies staggered and sighed as they pushed the double doors open and bore the coffin inside.

'When they die,' Wei was explaining cheerfully, 'we bury them here first, then take bones back to home village. Grave is all ready, very ol', goo' outlook.' He nodded satisfiedly several times before sharply ordering the coolie to move on.

'Mr Denton, are you buy coffi' already for your parents? And funeral clothings? No?' He shook his head in amazement at English indifference to their elders' welfare. 'In Chinese we say dying is plucking the flower of life. Do you have such poetical sayin' in England? I think it is very expensive to have bury in your country. How much are you pay, Mr Denton?'

That night in the mess, in a thoughtless moment that he instantly regretted, Denton told Mason and Jones about his visit to the tea-house. 'It was quite interesting, really,' he ended lamely and defensively as he saw a leer forming under Mason's ginger moustache.

'Oho, slumming it with the natives, eh?' Mason mocked. 'You'll be wearing a pig-tail next, I wouldn't wonder. Watch out your eyes don't start slanting.'

23

ON SATURDAY AFTERNOONS, if he wasn't on duty, Denton would write his letters home, a long one to Emily, a shorter one to his parents - he had no one else to write to. He wrote every week, even when he found he had nothing to say. Perhaps it was only to relieve the heavy loneliness of those dull, blank hours after tiffin, perhaps it was merely to cling on to the links with them that he sensed were slowly weakening. Often, ransacking his brains for new bits of information, he would gaze out from the veranda towards the Bund, trying to conjure up their faces - especially Emily's - amongst the forest of masts and funnels, as if the sight of the ships that sailed to England would work some magic on his imagination. But he couldn't picture Emily clearly any more, her face was fading in his memory like an old photograph. He could no longer imagine them taking up where they'd left off with her shy farewell kiss on deck of the Orcades. He could no longer visualise her joining him in Shanghai - not next year, not the year after, not at all, except in some vague fantasy in which her face was dim and misty, the surroundings unreal. Despite himself his letters to her began to sound hollow even as he wrote them. And yet she could be brought back vividly and painfully by some sharp splinter of memory or a chance thought or word. If only she would write more often!

Sometimes he would be disturbed in his writing by the sound of a woman's voice laughing on Mason's veranda. Perhaps Mason's baritone would answer the woman teasingly, and then there might be a silence, a hush almost, followed by a little smothered scream of laughter from the woman. Denton would get up again and pace the floor, muttering indignantly. Yet at the same time he felt a prurient, thrilling desire to peep from his own veranda at the woman on Mason's.

Was it the same woman? What was she wearing? Not Mason's revealing tunic again? But it was when the voices quietened later and there was no sound or stirring for an hour or two in the somnolence of the afternoon that the distraction was, curiously, as its worst. Purge his mind how he would, the same lascivious images would come back again and again in that suggestive silence, images no less sinful for being vague and ill-informed. He imagined the girl he'd first seen there, soft, filmy clothes slithering off her shoulders. He saw her on the bed, a bed just like his, her breasts rippling as she raised her arms to embrace Mason and pull him down on top of her, her lips parting for his, her black hair spread like a fan on the pillow beneath her. Or was it not Mason he imagined sinking down on her softness, but himself? He jerked his mind guiltily away from all these images and forced himself back to the dull dead words on the page in front of him. He could go on determinedly with his letters, and yet his mind would still stray, he would still catch himself gazing dreamily at the wall, his head slightly cocked, listening for the first drowsy sounds of their awakening.

Then at last it would come, the lazy, unhurried yawning of Mason on the veranda again, his languid murmurs followed by the girl's brighter replies. The street below would be throbbing with the usual noises - hawkers, coolies, rickshaw boys and bearers of sedan chairs, servants, cooks, beggars, masters, mistresses and children, all talking, laughing, shouting and complaining in their quick, shrill voices. But in all that clamour, his keen ear unerringly picked out the low, playful or indolent voices of satisfied lust next door.

Sometimes he took Emily's last letter out and read it through, to return his mind to purer thoughts. But while his eyes were scanning the words he now knew almost by heart, his imagination would sidle off to titillating visions of the Chinese girl's swelling breasts, her round brown nipples, the smooth flat paleness of her belly and the exquisite darkness between her thighs.

It was on one of those Saturdays early in December, when the sun was so weak that it was welcome now and Denton would actually seek it in the room, pulling his chair closer to the window, that Ah Koo came in with his laundry. Denton was sitting, unfinished letter in hand, gazing out over the veranda at the paling blue of the sky as the sun went down. He was half-consciously listening for the awakening sounds from Mason's room. After the usual giggles and laughter there had been a silent stillness there for over two hours. Denton had even begun to wonder whether they'd slipped out and stealthily crept away - as if they knew he was listening, or cared if they knew! But then they came, the mutterings and sighs and yawnings, the easy, indulgent murmurs. He looked down at what he'd written with an effort of concentration, but his eyes were soon unfocussed as he strained to hear.

Ah Koo cleared his throat loudly and swallowed. 'Master wantee young gir'?'

'What?'

'Wantee young gir'?' He stood with Denton's pressed shirts neatly folded over his arm. 'You wantee, I bring. Very young. First time gir'.'

'No.' Denton frowned indignantly, his cheeks tingling.

'All same Mr Mason. I bring young gir' Mr Mason, he not likee, send away. I bring you other one gir', very goo'. Mr Mason same same you?'

'Certainly not!'

'Not wantee?'

'No. Not wantee.' His confusion had robbed Denton momentarily of even the simplest Shanghainese and he stumbled into the pidgin he was trying to grow out of.

'Wantee young boy?' Ah Koo's face seemed utterly impassive. Nothing moved in it except his mouth. There was neither disgust nor gloating in his eyes, nothing but the faint shrewd glimmer of inquiry. He might just as well have been asking where the shirts over his arm should go. 'Not wantee gir', not wantee boy?' he asked, shaking his head faintly.

'No.' Denton turned away. A low, throaty giggle sounded voluptuously from Mason's veranda, almost as though the girl had heard Ah Koo and was doing her best to help him corrupt Denton. Mason's voice muttered something, then he laughed.

'You wantee, you say,' Ah Koo said, unabashed, as he opened the wardrobe and put the shirts carefully away. 'All same same Mr Mason. He very likee. Say Ah Koo bring young gir', I bring chop-chop. I bring you same same. Never mind boy or gir'.'

Denton had ostentatiously bent his head over his letter again, but now he turned round and spoke in carefully rehearsed Shanghainese. 'I do not want girl, I do not want boy.'

Ah Koo listened to him from the door, his corrugated face still impassive. 'You wantee, you tell Ah Koo,' he said. 'Japan gir', Chinese gir', Portugal gir'. Ah Koo bring chop-chop.'

A few days later, Mason paused by Denton's table in the mess, where he was sitting with several other young inspectors. 'Ah Koo's a bit worried about your health, you know,' he said, leaning on the back of Denton's chair.

'Ah Koo?'

'Yes. Wonders if there's something wrong with you.' He surveyed the expectant, grinning faces all round the table. 'Says you don't care for girls.'

Denton looked back at his half-empty plate silently, feeling his cheeks beginning to flush.

'Perhaps you prefer boys?' Mason suggested. 'Only Ah Koo said you weren't interested in them either.' He laid his hand companionably on Denton's shoulder.

'You know perfectly well I'm engaged,' Denton said, his voice wavering between a show of amusement and a show of indignation. He wanted to shrug Mason's hand off and yet at the same not to antagonise him - rather to treat his teasing casually, as though he was indifferent to it, or even faintly amused himself. After all, it is only a joke, he told himself uneasily.

'We know perfectly well you say you're engaged,' Mason answered, winking at the others. 'But some of us are beginning to wonder if that isn't an excuse. In any case, even if you are engaged,' he straightened up, brushing his moustache with his knuckles and glancing significantly round the table again, 'you need to get a bit of practice in, don't you? I mean it might be years before she comes out here, mightn't it? You wouldn't want to disappoint her, would you?' And while he basked complacently in the sniggers that rippled round the table, his heavy hand patted Denton's shoulder amicably as if to assure him that honestly, he was only joking.