Shanghai

24

WHEN EMILY' S LETTER CAME at last, he felt a little quiver of fear as though he knew already what it would say. She hadn't written for nearly two months and Christmas was only three weeks away, so when he saw the slim small envelope peeping out of his pigeon-hole that morning as he left for duty, he tried to tell himself it must be her Christmas greetings. But there was an unbelieving anxious tremor about his fingers as he tore the flap open.

He read it in the rickshaw that was taking him to the Lower Section wharves. It was only one page long, and when he saw that, he felt his illusions fluttering away like plucked feathers. She was very sorry, she wrote in that clear large hand without a sign of emotion, but she did not think she could ever be his wife. She had come to realise that she could not bring herself to leave everything in England to live in Shanghai. And he ought to know from her first, because people would be bound to tell him anyway, that she had met someone recently, nobody he knew, to whom she thought she was better suited. But she would always have the fondest thoughts of him and hoped that he would not blame her too much, and might even one day be able to think of her kindly.

He read the letter through twice, the first time with his heart thumping unsteadily, the second time with it still as a stone. Then he folded it carefully in the same creases, slid it back into the envelope and buttoned it away in his tunic pocket - the very pocket in which he'd put her first letter, close to his heart. The air was cold, although the rising sun was warm on his face. He gazed dully at the alleys and streets, the cold dark waters of the canals, at the rickshaw coolie's back with its bony wing-like shoulder-blades sticking up under the torn cotton jacket, at the pyramid of mandarin oranges on a hawker's stall, and at the cabbages and spinach lying higgledy-piggledy on another stall while a woman with torn grey hair and a hunched back sprinkled water over them to make them look dewy and fresh. For some minutes, it seemed, he thought of nothing but what passed before his eyes, as though her letter had slid straight through his mind without leaving a trace. Then, slowly, her words began to recur, as if they hadn't disappeared at all, but had only been taking their time to sink into his brain, to take root. They began to echo in his ears, as though she were quietly speaking to him, to form themselves in her handwriting across his eyes, and he felt a blank, numb chill stealing over him that set the muscles of his face into a rigid, grim mould. I knew it, he thought bitterly, staring at the great stolid walls of the godowns coming into view along the quayside. I knew it all along.

But then, after those few minutes of bitterness, he boarded his first ship and had to force himself to work. And he started checking the manifest with a determination that closed his mind down as if with metal shutters and left it bare of any thought or feeling except the details of tax, likin, seals and signatures.

He went through the morning without once opening his pocket and re-reading her letter - without even touching it through the cloth of his uniform. At tiffin in the mess, he deliberately sat next to Johnson, knowing that Johnson's stream of banalities would flow on unprompted and distract his own mind with its soothing trivia. He even shared a rickshaw with Johnson back to the wharves, the first time in weeks, and listened to his detailed, unhurried account of the hikes he planned to make round Hankow over Christmas.

His last inspection of the day was of a small opium cargo from Bombay. At the head of the gangway a European stood beside the ship's Chinese agent, a man whose sallow face and dapper appearance seemed vaguely familiar to Denton.

'Good afternoon,' the European greeted him with a slight accent. 'I am the owner of the cargo if you have any questions. This is the ship's agent, but they never know anything.' His voice was smooth yet tense, as if it might grow warmer or cooler suddenly, without warning - the nervy voice of a volatile temper. Looking through the manifest, Denton briefly, hazily, tried to recall where he'd seen the man before, till the spidery figures and letters, inscribed, in ink that was almost brown, by some clerk in Bombay, took over the forefront of his mind.

He examined the opium without comment and computed the tax and likin, accepting the cup of coffee which the owner impatiently told the agent to bring before they had even reached the saloon.

'How long have you been here, Mr...?' the owner asked, sipping coffee himself.

'About six months.' He thought of Emily's letter and looked away from the man's face, which was peering at his across the table. Six months - in just six months she could forget him and take up with someone else! He felt his eyes darkening with self-pity.

'I have been here six years,' the owner declared proudly.

'Have you?' How would he spend the evening? The long empty hours? There was the weekly Christian Youth Fellowship meeting, but - 'In six years I have made myself rich,' the man was saying, peering closer into Denton's abstracted face and smiling with almost boyish pride. 'I came from Russia with nothing, and now I have a business, a house on Jessfield Road, servants, money in the bank ... Jessfield Road, you know? Only rich people.' He opened his hands, palms up, as if he were a magician performing a trick. 'You wait and see, I will be a millionaire. My name is Ephraim, Jacob Ephraim. How do you do? One day you must come to dinner with me.' He thrust out his hand, his brown eyes glowing with friendly warmth.

Denton shook it stiffly, distrustfully.

'And what is your name, may I ask?'

'Mine? Denton.'

'Denton? Are you from England? Yes, I thought so. One day I am going to buy a ship from England. John Brown makers. Secondhand. I will start a fleet.'

Denton nodded inattentively, returning to the report he was writing in his book. And just as he was writing down the time of his inspection, he remembered suddenly where he'd seen this talkative little man before. It was on that Saturday, a couple of months before, after tea with Mr Eaton, when the rickshaw had taken him into the French Concession. This was the man who'd come out of that house with the green shutters and the gross Chinese at the door. This was the dapper man who'd greeted him and walked casually away as if he'd done nothing to be ashamed of. Denton frowned in disapproval at the memory and a moment later thought. Then I was still engaged to Emily, she hadn't written that letter yet.

'What is the matter?' the man's voice broke in sharply. 'You don't like to talk to me? Because I am a Jew?'

'What?'

'Because I am a Jew? You despise me, is that it?' Ephraim's eyes had suddenly grown fierce with resentment and his sallow skin was heavily flushed.

'Not at all!' Denton answered hastily. 'I was busy, that's all.'

'You think, he's a Jew, he's only interested in money, don't you?' Ephraim went on as if Denton hadn't spoken, his eyes burning brighter.

'No - '

'Well, I was a teacher in Russia. In Odessa. Not for money, for love of learning!' He rapped the table imperiously with his knuckles, to compel Denton's attention. 'The Cossacks killed my father, so I came to Shanghai, and yes, I said, yes, I will make money now, because money is security. That is why.' He nodded emphatically several times. 'Money is security for us, Mr...?'

'Denton.'

'Denton. Money is security and power, and we have been without it. That is why Jews make money. Not greed, but safety. We have to survive!' He nodded emphatically again. 'There is only one safety for a Jew: get rich. I have learned my lesson, Mr Kenton - '

'Denton.'

'Denton. I have learned my lesson and I am not ashamed. I am making money and nobody can harm me. I feel safe. That is why I make money. You have no need to. So you have no right to look down on me. I tell you I would rather be a schoolteacher - '

'I was going to be a schoolteacher too,' Denton said drily, closing his report book.

'What? A schoolteacher?' Ephraim's indignant flood ebbed as suddenly as it had risen. The angry light drained from his eyes and was replaced by one of sympathetic curiosity. 'A schoolteacher? Why are you here, then? Why did you stop?'

'For money too. I didn't have enough to carry on with my training. I had to give it up.' He thought bitterly of what else he'd lost.

'A teacher?' Ephraim shook his head wonderingly. 'In that case you cannot have any prejudices against the Jews. Your country had Disraeli for prime minister.' He announced that as if Denton himself might not know it. 'But in Russia they think we are all bad, evil, cheats, robbers, murderers. Do you know they believe we kidnap Christian children and sacrifice them? Russia!' He wrinkled his nose distastefully. 'Barbarians! They think we are all Shylocks, you see? They are still in Shakespeare's times, so backward!'

Denton nodded uncertainly.

'They think our religion is superstition,' Ephraim was saying excitedly, his moist lips smiling derisively as he spoke. 'But what about Christianity? Three gods in one - absurd! Whereas Jewish customs are good ones. Circumcision, for instance. You think it silly? Well, a famous German doctor has proved it prevents cancer of the sexual organ!' He paused to gaze directly into Denton's eyes, as if expecting to see astonishment and admiration there instead of confusion and embarrassment. 'I have a copy of his paper in the Zeitschrift für Chirurgie at home, I will lend it to you. You will be interested to read.'

'I don't know any German,' Denton said quickly.

'Never mind,' he waved the difficulty aside. 'You can make it out. I will lend it to you. Where are you going now - after this ship?'

'I've finished for the day now.' Again he thought of his empty room and the letter in his pocket. A disconsolate, self-pitying tone had slipped into his voice.

'You have finished work? Good! We will have some tea at the Central Hotel. Or the Astor House. You know the Central? It is near my office. The Astor House is the most expensive. I go there too. Which do you prefer?'

'I'm afraid I can't.'

'Another time, then, I will bring you that article, you will be very interested.'

Denton retreated under the barrage of Ephraim's words. The little man kept bringing his face closer to Denton's, gazing at him searchingly so that Denton had to keep drawing back. As Ephraim was ushering him towards the gangway, still talking and gesticulating volubly, he suddenly checked himself and stared harder at Denton's face. 'We have met before, haven't we?' he asked almost suspiciously. 'I have seen your face.'

Denton hesitated. 'Was it in the French Concession once?' he asked pointedly. 'I think I may have seen you coming out of a house there.'

'Ah!' Ephraim's eyes widened with recognition. 'I remember, you were just going in as I was leaving. Yes, I remember very well. What a good house it is, isn't it? How did you find it?'

'Oh, I wasn't going in!' Denton protested hotly. 'I'd never go to such a place.'

'But you were going in!' Ephraim declared. 'You were just getting out of your rickshaw!'

'No, it was a mistake. The rickshaw took me there by mistake. I'm - I was engaged then. To someone in England.' He looked quickly away, his cheeks and lips setting hard.

'You were engaged?' Ephraim's voice warmed with sympathy. 'What happened? Your betrothed has died?'

'No, no,' Denton waved his hand. 'Nothing like that. We, er, well, we broke it off.' He couldn't bring himself to admit that he'd been jilted, but Ephraim seemed to understand anyway.

'She let you down? Then you must go!' He followed Denton nimbly down the narrow, springy gangplank. 'Otherwise you will have bad blood - spots, pimples, acne.' Denton, averting his face, imagined him scrutinising his impure complexion. 'The girls are all clean, I know for a fact. All the girls there, every one.'

Denton nodded coldly at the bottom of the gangway. 'I must be going.'

'I'll walk along with you. My chair's over there. Oh my friend, you must not be miserable and dull over a love affair.' He gripped Denton's arm suddenly with surprising strength and held him still a moment, gazing earnestly into his eyes. 'Why, I lost my betrothed in the pogrom of ninety-five. And what did I do? I went to a house, I chose a girl that looked as much like her as I could find - not that she was like one of those girls, you know,' he qualified hastily, 'but the general features - and I cried all night with her. And in the morning - pouf! I was better.' He blew out his lips, kissed his fingers as if bidding his fiancée farewell, and then stroked his thin black moustache complacently. 'So you must not be miserable about a love affair Mr...?'

'Denton,' Denton said reluctantly, unwilling to allow this strange, immoral man even the intimacy of knowing his surname. He looked down at Ephraim's hand still gripping his arm.

Ephraim relaxed his eager grip at last and walked beside him till they reached his sedan chair. 'We will have tea together, Mr Denton, we have so many interesting things to talk about.' And he shook Denton's cold but unresisting hand before turning to the bearers squatting idly in the last warm patch of fading sunlight. 'Chop-chop!' he shouted peremptorily. 'Central Hotel! If no chop-chop, me makee muchee bobbery!'

At the Christian Youth Fellowship that evening, after a discussion on the furthering of missionary work in China, the Reverend Eaton made a brief announcement about the new movement for young boys that had been started by Colonel Baden-Powell. The fifteen young men and women - Denton had counted them to prevent himself from thinking about Emily - listened respectfully while Mr Eaton, his eyes glancing more and more often at Denton, explained what the new movement was. The little congregation nodded their heads piously. They were all schoolteachers at the new municipal schools, or the sons and daughters of missionaries; and Denton couldn't help feeling guiltily that their piety was tedious and insipid. The truth was, he had been growing more and more uneasy at the Christian Youth Fellowship and somehow Emily's letter had intensified his unease.

'A truly Christian idea, worthy of the heroic defender of Mafeking,' Mr Eaton concluded sonorously, 'with great possibilities for attracting young native boys to the right ideals, while at the same time giving them valuable training in, er, in practical affairs and so on. Boy Scouts, Colonel Baden-Powell suggests these associations should be called. And I hope that some of you' - he glanced at Denton again - 'will consider giving up some of your time to promoting a Boy Scout troop here in Shanghai. Who knows, perhaps Colonel Baden-Powell's service to the empire will be matched by a corresponding service to the Christian religion?'

Mr Eaton had turned directly to Denton. 'John, you've been very quiet tonight. What do you think about it?'

'I don't know,' Denton answered disconcertedly. 'I think, er, perhaps one of the schoolteachers here might be the best person to organise something like that.' He stood up abruptly. 'Excuse me, I have to go. A very interesting evening. Sorry I can't stay longer.' He hurried out of the church hall and hailed a rickshaw, anxious to be gone before anyone could follow him.

Later, when he sat in his room gazing at the bare walls, after he'd read Emily's letter again, he began to feel a kind of peace, as if he'd known all along that it was going to happen, but was only now ready to acknowledge it. As though a long anxious time of waiting for bad news had ended with the relief of certainty. And after all, he had to admit, perhaps he'd been growing cooler himself. Was it really only his pride that was hurt? He got up, put the letter together with her photograph and her other letters, tied them all tightly with a piece of brown, coarse-fibred string, and put them away in the top drawer of his desk, the only drawer that locked.

And soon, within a week, he began to feel free and detached, as if the tie that had bound him to Emily had really been a restraint, a bond that he'd unconsciously wanted to be released from all the time. Without her photograph in its oval frame to remind him, he forgot about her for days on end. At first that disturbed him. Did it mean he was heartless? Then even that ceased to worry him. She belonged to England and a part of his life that was finished. He never replied to her letter.

When Wei asked, self-deprecatingly and with elaborate apologetic suggestions that it wouldn't really be worth his while, whether he might like to visit another tea-house, Denton asked instead to be allowed to pay for a meal in a restaurant. After many courteous demurrals, Wei gave in and took him to a restaurant by the river in Hongkew. The place was richly decorated, though in colours that Denton found garish, and every table was partitioned off by bamboo screens over which the laughter and voices of the other guests came in boisterous gusts of noise. They ate spicy dishes garnished with hot peppers and drank sticky, burning rice wine - Denton soothed his uneasy Band of Hope conscience by telling himself that he drank it as a social duty, not for pleasure; and indeed he didn't like the slightly nutty flavour or the burning in his mouth. Wei's eyes grew a little bloodshot and his pale cheeks were flushed. He insisted Denton should hear a sing-song girl, and this time Denton didn't refuse.

After a few minutes a slight young girl was escorted in, with a blind fiddler who found his way uncannily behind her. The fiddler sat cross-legged on the floor and began to play the two-stringed violin while the girl sang. At first the music seemed shrill and unmelodious to Denton's ear, the girl's voice flat and toneless. But the longer he listened, while Wei drank glass after glass of the clear rice wine, the more he was captivated by the plangent sounds of the girl's voice and the charm of her lowered, oval face. Wei gave her some money and she left while Denton was stumblingly asking in Shanghainese for the bill.

'Mr Denton,' Wei asked as they left, 'Do sing-song girls sing in English dinner parties?' He promised to teach Denton to play mahjong and to take him to the best Chinese opera in Shanghai.

They went to the same restaurant the next week and the week after, and each time Wei engaged the same sing-song girl to sing her plaintive songs, while the hubbub of voices and laughter, the clack and slither of mahjong tiles sounded exuberantly round them. Denton watched her while he listened and began to know the expressions of her child-like face, the way she tilted her head when she sang, even the curls and vortices of her delicate ears. He drank the rice wine too, almost with enjoyment, and was scarcely troubled by his Band of Hope conscience.

25

AFTER CHRISTMAS THE WEATHER HARDENED. The winds that blew off the Siberian ice swept southwards over China all the way down to Shanghai, and the nights were frosty, though the days, as Wei had promised, glittered under bright blue skies. Beggars, coolies waiting to be hired, and drifting opium addicts clustered on the sunny sides of the streets now, wrapping themselves up in rags and newspapers to keep out the cold. These with money wore thick quilted jackets that made them look like clumsy animals as they moved. The girl-babies exposed on the rubbish heaps during the black-ice nights and the homeless street sleepers who gave up in the cold were often half-frozen in the morning when the municipal cart came round to collect them. The mosquitoes and flies vanished, though, and the decaying summer smells in the rank little canals were bitten back by the cleansing cold.

Mason, Jones and Clark, another officer, had hired a houseboat to take them up the river past Soochow for some shooting at the end of January. But Clark caught the 'flu and the others asked Denton if he would like to go in his place. It was an invitation that had been hanging vaguely about like an unwanted relative since Denton's first few weeks in Shanghai, when Jones had been quite friendly with him. But then Jones, perhaps following Mason's lead, had taken to mocking him slyly for what Denton supposed they thought was his priggishness. Since Emily had jilted him, though, he had relaxed his rigid moral austerity, and though he was never more than coolly amiable, Jones' teasing had grown milder, almost good-natured. Denton sensed he had been asked now only because nobody else was free and they needed someone to share the expenses, but nevertheless he accepted.

Even so, Denton suspected the invitation wouldn't have been revived but for the illusion both Jones and Mason had that he'd lost his virginity after the New Year's Eve party in the mess. Although the ladies of senior Customs and municipal officials had been there, the party had been much more boisterous than a tame Christmas celebration held the week before. And Denton, slightly drunk despite the pledge, had announced that he'd 'broken it off' with his fiancée. It was at the end of the evening, when the ladies had all gone and Denton's head was wobbly, and Jones had suggested visiting a 'house' to mark Denton's 'liberation,' as he called it. Denton had gone along with the crowd of them as far as the entrance of the place, in Bubbling Well Road. But as the others climbed the stairs, he'd slipped stealthily away, trembling with both fear and desire. Then he'd wandered the bitter streets and alleys by himself, all the way down to the docks where the sailors' brothels were, veering between fearful desire and disgusted remorse.

He passed several brothels, his head turned sternly aside at the last moment, while girls chirped at him from the open, dimly-lit doorways. In the end, tired and cold, his eyes sore, his mouth dry, he'd found his way back to the empty mess with its jaded decorations, and gone to bed feeling as guilty as if he really had followed the girls up the seedy mysterious stairways he'd glimpsed as he passed.

The next day was Sunday. He sang in the choir at the cathedral and prayed with a sick empty feeling in his stomach for forgiveness of his craving lust and drunkenness. Yet, while he prayed, the image, not of the sordid places he'd seen the night before, but of that more alluring green-shuttered house on rue Molière, where he'd first met Ephraim, had kept stealing seductively across his mind. And that image had brought another with it, the image of the article on circumcision in the German journal. Ephraim had accosted him on the waterfront one day in the dead of the year between Boxing Day and New Year's Eve, and insisted on lending him the journal with its strange Gothic script. 'I have been looking for you every day,' he exclaimed almost accusingly. 'Now you must have tea with me.' Unable to think of an excuse, Denton had let himself be led into the Central Hotel by the voluble Jew and prevailed on to drink lemon tea in a glass. 'Just like the Russians. Lemon tea and vodka - the only things they have produced in a thousand years,' Ephraim had declared loudly, with a glint in his brown eyes, daring anyone to deny it. Stiffly and hesitantly he'd sipped the tea under Ephraim's quick, warm encouragement, and listened reluctantly at first, to his spontaneous, child-like self-revelation, to his eager offers of friendship, talk, hospitality and happiness, all of which Ephraim was certain were his to give. And gradually he'd thawed, despite his brittle shyness, as he listened to Ephraim's continuous flow of ideas and anecdotes - about his business, Odessa, the Russian pogroms, the rituals of the Jewish religion.... Sometimes, in his enthusiasm, Ephraim had gripped his arm again with that unexpectedly powerful grip. At first Denton had stiffened and recoiled, but by the time he got up to go he'd grown so used to it that he scarcely even noticed it. He'd taken the German journal back to the mess, and although no one could read German there, he'd kept it discreetly out of sight in the top drawer of his desk, beneath Emily's letters and photograph.

The houseboat was a long barge-like vessel towed by a steam launch with a patched, faded, junk sail above its cabin. The three of them sat in the sunlight, protected from the wind, and watched the fields slide slowly past, brown and rich, waiting for the next sowing. The scattered villages they saw, cowering under the bare branches of leafless trees, looked poor and shabby, as if all the wealth of the country went into the land while the people lived like cattle. The huts were dingy, windowless and unpainted, the walls cracked and flaking as though they had mange. Peasants leant on their hoes and gaped at them as they passed.

Jones knew a German businessman in Soochow and he arranged for the houseboat to be moored at a jetty near the house his friend had leased. The jetty was empty except for a few covered sampans in which whole families huddled, gazing at them over their rice bowls with the listless envy of the wretched for the unreachably rich. The street behind the jetty was empty too, although it was early afternoon.

'Funny,' Jones said, feeling his wispy moustache that never seemed to grow any thicker. 'You'd think there'd be quite a lot of people about at this time of day.' They walked down the street to a two-storied Chinese house, the freshly-painted shutters all closed. Jones knocked on the door and a dog began barking inside, loudly and fiercely. After some time, while they glanced up and down the deserted streets, there was the sound of a shutter being unbolted and opened on the first floor. An amah appeared, grumbling and sour-faced, as the shutter swung open and dashed back against the wall.

'Mr Henschel?' Jones shouted up, first in English, then in a Shanghainese that Denton was advanced enough by then to know was very bad. 'Where's your master?'

The woman shook her head peevishly, pointing down the street and shouting down to them in an angry, complaining voice.

'What's the old girl jabbering about?' Mason asked. Jones shrugged.

'Something about some bandits, I think,' Denton said uncertainly. 'I can't understand her accent very well. It must be a dialect.'

The shutters slammed shut and they heard the bolts squealing as she tortured them into their sockets. They stood looking at each other.

'Well, she pointed that way,' Mason said, nodding down the street. 'Why don't we go and take a look?'

They began walking on slowly, uneasy in the eerie silence.

A suspicion began to tug at the corner of Denton's mind. Hadn't the amah used the word for 'kill'? Was it another execution they were going to? Or had the bandits killed someone? The emptiness of the street unsettled him as they strolled along. The silence was sinister, unnerving. He glanced back. The launch and the houseboat looked small and remote at the little jetty.

They came to a canal with a hump-backed bridge over it. The street went on, was crossed by other streets, passed over more canals. And everywhere the place was deserted, except for a toothless old beggar the other side of the bridge, whose head was shaking uncontrollably as he gazed up at them, silently holding out his box. They didn't even bother to question him, it seemed so hopeless.

'Looks a bit rum,' Mason muttered, his normal hectoring tone subdued. He was unsettled, too. 'Where is everybody? The place looks in pretty good shape, they can't have had any trouble.'

It was true, Denton thought, the place was well cared for. The houses were neatly and freshly white-washed, and the little stone steps that led down to the canals were firm and sharp, unlike the crumbling quays they'd passed on their way upstream.

'Venice of China,' Jones murmured. 'That's what they say this place is. Only where the hell are the Venetians?'

Then Denton heard, far away, that sudden yell of a thousand exultations that had haunted his first nights in Shanghai. 'Why don't we go back and wait at the boat?' he suggested quickly, knowing instantly what the sound had meant.

But Mason had heard it too. 'There's a meeting going on somewhere,' he said slowly. Then his eyes brightened. 'By god, I know what it is: they're holding an execution or something. Everyone's gone to the execution, that's what the old girl meant - they've caught some bandits! Of course! Come on, I bet your friend's there, Jonesy, having a grandstand view.'

And Denton followed them. Unwillingly, his stomach already turning apprehensively, he followed them all the same. For against his rising sense of horror, another sense contended, a sense of fascinated awe. Men were about to die today as he would have to die some day or other. And indistinctly, inarticulately, he wanted to learn about death from them.

After some minutes, the streets began to be alive and full again. Everyone was hurrying in the same direction, laughing and excited, in holiday mood. And now they could hear the full throaty roar of the unseen crowd ahead, shouting Kill, Kill, Kill, with delirious joy.

At last they came to the execution ground. It was a square outside the city wall, with fields and little canals stretching out beyond it, and a small, squat temple with some stone huts nearby, about half a mile away on a muddy road. The sides of the square were crammed with people, standing, craning their necks, shouting, talking and laughing light-heartedly, as at any spectacle. Hawkers were calling out their goods in drawn-out chanting voices, more and more people were pushing and jostling their way to the front, and children were climbing the plane trees and clambering up the stone walls, fighting and shoving each other to get a better view.