The Man in the Wooden Hat

CHAPTER ONE

There is a glorious part of England known as the Donheads. The Donheads are a tangle of villages loosely interlinked by winding lanes and identified by the names of saints. There is Donhead St. Mary, Donhead St. Andrew, Donhead St. James and, among yet others, Donhead St. Ague.

This communion of saints sometimes surprises newcomers if they are not religious and do not attach them to the names of village churches. Some do, for the old families here have a strong Roman Catholic tinge. It was Cavalier country. Outsiders, however, call the Donheads “Thomas Hardy country” and it is so described by the estate agents who sell the old cottages of the poor to the rich.

And not entirely truthfully, for Hardy lived rather more to the south-west. The only poet celebrated for visiting a Donhead seems to be Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who came to see a local bookish bigwig but stayed for only one night. Perhaps it was the damp. The Donhead known as Ague seems connected to no saint and is thought to be a localised Bronze Age joke. Even so, it is the most desirable of all the villages, the most beautiful and certainly the most secluded, deep in miles of luxuriant woodland, its lanes thick with flowers. The small farms have all gone and so have the busy village communities. The lanes are too narrow for the modern-day agricultural machinery that thunders through more open country. At weekends the rich come rolling down from London in huge cars full of provisions bought in metropolitan farmers’ markets. These people make few friends in their second homes, unless they have connections to the great houses that still stand silent in their parks, still have a butler and are now owned by usually absent celebrities. There is a lack of any knockabout young.

Which makes the place attractive to the retired professional classes who had the wit to snap up a property years ago. Their children try not to show their anxiety that the agues of years will cause the old things to be taken into care homes and their houses to be pounced upon by the Inland Revenue.

In Donhead St. Ague there is a rough earth slope, too countrified to be called a driveway, to the left of the village hill. Almost at once it divides into separate branches, one left, one right, one down, one up. At the end of the left-hand, down-sloping driveway stands the excellently modernised old farmhouse of Sir Edward Feathers QC (retired), who has lived there in peace for years. His wife Elisabeth — Betty — died while she was planting tulips against an old red wall. The house lies low, turned away from the village, towards the chalk line of the horizon and an ancient circle of trees on a hilltop. The right-hand driveway turns steeply upwards in the other direction to be lost in pine trees. Round the corner, high above it, is a patch of yellow gravel and a house of ox-blood brick; apart from one impediment, it shares the same splendid view as Eddie Feathers’s house below. The impediment is Feathers’s great stone chimney that looks older than the house and has a star among the listed glories of the area. Maybe the house was once a bakery. The people in the ugly house above have to peep round the chimney to see the sunset.

There have been the same old local people in the ox-blood house, however, for years and they are even-tempered. The house has become a sort of dower house for elderly members of a farming family who don’t mix and, anyway, farmers seldom look at a view. They have never complained.

One day, however, they are gone. Vans and cars and “family members” whisk them all away and leave Eddie Feathers to enjoy the view all by himself. He is rather huffed that none of them called to say goodbye, though for over twenty years he has never more than nodded to them in a chance encounter by the road. He wonders who will be his new neighbours. But not much.

The village wonders, too. Someone has seen the hideous house advertised for sale in Country Life at an astounding price, the photograph making it look like a fairy palace, with turrets. And no chimney in sight.

But nobody comes to visit it for some time. Down by the road a London firm of estate agents puts up a smart notice which Edward Feathers fumes about, not only because of the vulgarity of having to advertise a house in the Donheads, especially in St. Ague, but because someone might just possibly think that it referred to his.

Weeks and months passed. The right-hand driveway became overgrown with weeds. Somebody said they had seen something peculiar going on there one early morning. A dwarf standing in the lane. But nothing of any newcomer.

“A dwarf?”

“Well, that’s what the paper boy said. Dropping in Sir Edward’s paper down that bit of drainpipe. Seven in the morning. Mind, he’s not what he was.” (The paper boy was seventy.)

“There are no dwarfs now. They’ve found a way of stopping it.”

“Well, it was a dwarf,” said the post boy. “In a big hat.”

CHAPTER TWO

Rather more than half a century earlier when cows still came swinging up the Donhead lanes and chickens sat roosting in the middle of their roads, and there were blacksmiths, and the village shop was the centre of the universe, and most people had not been beyond Shaftesbury unless they’d been in the armed forces in the war, a young English girl was standing in the bedroom of a second-class Hong Kong hotel holding a letter against her face. “Oh,” she was saying. “Yes.”

“Oh, yes,” she told the letter. “Oh, yes, I think so!” Her face was a great smile.

And at about the same moment, though of course it was yesterday for the Orient, an unusual pair was sitting in the glossy new airport for London (now called Heathrow) in England (now being called mysteriously the UK) waiting for a Hong Kong flight. One of the men, pretty near his prime, that’s to say just over thirty, was English and very tall, and wore a slightly dated hand-made suit and shoes bought in Piccadilly (St. James’s Street). He was a man of unconscious distinction and if he’d been wearing a hat you might think you were seeing a ghost. As it was you felt he had been born to an earlier England.

His companion was a Chinese dwarf.

That at any rate was how he was described by the lawyers at the English Bar. The tall man was a barrister; a junior member of the Inner Temple and already spoken of with respect. The dwarf was a solicitor with an international reputation, only notionally Chinese. He preferred to be known as a Hakkar, the ancient red-brown tribe of Oriental Gypsies. He was treated with even greater respect than the barrister — who was, of course, Edward Feathers, soon to be known as “Old Filth” (Filth an acronym for Failed in London Try Hong Kong) — for he held a gold mine of litigation at his disposal all over the world wherever English Law obtained. The dwarf could spot winners.

His name was Albert Loss. It was really Albert Ross, but the R was difficult for him to pronounce in his otherwise flawless English. This annoyed him, “I am Loss” being not encouraging to clients. He claimed to have been at Eton but even to Feathers his origins were hazy. He worked the name Ross as near as possible to the Scottish nobility and hinted at Glamys and deer-stalking in the glens. Sometimes he was jovially called “Albatross,” hence “Coleridge” or “Ancient Mariner,” to which he responded with an inclination of the head. He was impossibly vain. To Eddie Feathers he had been, since the age of sixteen, a wonderful, if stern, friend.

Below the waist, hidden now by the table in the airport’s first-class lounge at which he was playing a game of Patience, Ross’s sturdy torso dwindled down into poor little legs and block feet in Dr Scholl’s orthopaedic sandals. The legs suggested an unfortunate birth and a rickety childhood. No one ever found out if this was true.

Like a king or a prince he wore no watch. Eddie Feathers had, in wartime, as bombs were falling about them on a quayside in Ceylon and Ross had decided to make a run for it, presented Ross with a watch, his most precious possession. It had been Eddie’s father’s. The watch, of course, had long disappeared, bartered probably for food, but it was not forgotten and never replaced.

On Ross’s head today and every day was a size 10 brown trilby hat, also from St. James’s Street. Around the feet of the two men stood two leather briefcases stamped in gold with Eddie Feathers’s initials. It was the class of luggage that would grow old along with the owner as he became Queen’s Counsel, Judge, High Court Judge, perhaps Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, even Queen’s Remembrancer, and possibly God.

Feathers would deserve his success. He was a thoroughly good, nice man, diligent and clever. He had grown up lonely, loved only by servants in Malaya. He had become an orphan of the Raj, fostered (disastrously) in Wales. He had been moved to a boarding school, had lost friends in the Battle of Britain, one of whom meant more to him than any family and whom he never spoke about. Sent back to the East as an evacuee, he had met Ross on board a leaky boat and lost him again. Eddie returned to England penniless and sick and, after a dismal time learning Law at Oxford, had been sitting underemployed in a back corridor of ice-cold Dickensian Chambers in Lincoln’s Inn (the Temple having been bombed to rubble) when he was suddenly swept to glory by the reappearance of Ross, now a solicitor carrying with him oriental briefs galore, a sack of faery gold.

Directed by Ross, Eddie began to specialise in Bomb Damage Claims, then in General Building Disputes. Almost at once Ross had him in good suits flying about the world on the way to becoming Czar (as the saying is now) of the Construction Industry. In the Far East, there began the skyscraper boom.

And now, during the lean Attlee years post-war, Eddie was being discussed over Dinners in the Inns of Court by his peers munching their whale-meat steaks. Most of them had little else to occupy them. Litigation in the early 1950s was as rare as wartime suicide.

But there was no great jealousy. The Construction Industry is not glamorous like Slander and Libel or Crime. It is supposed to be easy, unlike Shipping or Chancery. Indeed, it comes dangerously close to Engineering, ever despised in England. It is often referred to as Sewers and Drains. Hence Filth? No — not hence Filth. Filth was an entirely affectionate pseudonym. Eddie, or Filth, who always looked as if he’d stepped out of a five-star-hotel shower, was immaculate in body and soul. Well, almost. People got on with him, always at a distance, of course, in the English way. Having no jealousy he inspired none. Women. .

Ah, women. Well, women were intrigued by him. There was nothing effete about him. He was not unattractive sexually. His eye could gleam. But no one made any headway. He had no present entanglements, and there was no one to hear him talk in his sleep in the passionate Malay of his childhood.

His memory was as mysterious and private as anybody’s. He knew only that his competence and his happiness were at their greatest in Far Eastern sunlight and the crash and rattle of monsoon rain, the suck and grind and roar of hot seas on white shores. It was in the East that he won most of his cases.

His only threat was another English lawyer, slightly younger and utterly different: a man who spoke no language other than English, had a degree in Engineering and some sort of diploma in Law from a Middlesbrough technical college often called a “night school,” and was bold, ugly and unstoppable, irrepressibly merry in a way a great many women and many men found irresistible. His name was Terry Veneering.

Terry Veneering was to be on the other side in the Case Edward Feathers was about to fight in Hong Kong. He was, however, on a different plane, or perhaps staying in Hong Kong already, for he had a Chinese wife. Eddie was becoming expert in forgetting about his detested rival, and was concentrating now in the airport lounge on his solicitor, Ross, who was splattering a pack of playing cards from hand to hand, cutting, dealing, now and then flinging them into the air in an arc and catching them sweetly on their way down. Ross was raising a breeze.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” said Filth. “People are becoming irritated.”

“It’s because hardly any of them are able to,” said Ross. “It is a gift.”

“You were messing with cards the first time I met you. Why can’t you take up knitting?”

“No call for woollens in Hong Kong. Find the Lady.”

“I don’t want to find the bloody Lady. Where’s this bloody plane? Has something gone wrong with it? They tell you nothing.”

“It shouldn’t. It’s the latest thing. Big square windows.”

“Excellent. Except it doesn’t seem to work. The old ones were better last year. Trundling along. Screws loose. Men with oilcans taking up the carpets. And we always got there.”

“We’re being called,” said Ross. He snapped the cards into a wad, the wad into a pouch, and with some Gypsy sleight of hand picked up both briefcases and thumped off towards the lifts. From above he looked like a walking hat.

Filth strode behind carrying his walking stick and the Daily Telegraph. At the steps up to the plane Ross, as was proper, stood back for his Counsel to pass him and Filth was bowed aboard and automatically directed to turn left to the first class. Ross, hobbling behind in the Dr Scholl’s, was asked to set down the hand luggage and show his seat number.

But it was Ross who saw the cases safely stowed, changed their seats for ones that could accommodate Filth’s long legs, the plane being as usual half empty, and Ross who commanded Filth’s jacket to be put on a hanger in a cupboard, declined to take off his hat and who demanded an immediate refill of the complimentary champagne.

They both sat back and watched England gallop backwards, then the delicious lurch upwards through the grey sky to the sunlit blue above.

“This champagne is second-rate,” said Ross. “I’ve had better in Puerto Rico.”

“There’ll be a good dinner,” said Filth. “And excellent wine. What about your hat?”

Ross removed it with both hands and laid it on his table.

A steward hovered. “Shall I take that from you, sir?”

“No. I keep it with me.” After a time he put it at his feet.

The dinner trolley, with its glistening saddle of lamb, was being wheeled to the centre of the cabin. Silver cutlery — real silver, Ross noted, turning the forks to confirm the hallmark — was laid on starched tray cloths. A carving knife flashed amidships. Côtes du Rhône appeared.

“Remember the Breath o’Dunoon, Albatross?” said Filth. “Remember the duff you made full of black beetles for currants?”

Ross brooded. “I remember the first mate. He said he’d kill me at Crib. He wanted to kill me. I beat him.”

“It’s a wonder we weren’t torpedoed.”

“I thought we were torpedoed. But then, I have been so often torpedoed—”

“Thank you, thank you,” roared out Filth in the direction of the roast lamb. He was apt to roar when emotionally disturbed: it was the last vestige of the terrible stammer of his Welsh childhood. “Don’t start about torpedoes.”

“For example,” said Ross, “in the Timor Sea. I was wrecked off. .”

But vegetables had arrived and redcurrant jelly and they munched, meditating on this and that, Ross’s heavy chin a few inches above his plate. “You ate thirty-six bananas,” he said. “On Freetown beach. You were disgusting.”

“They were small bananas. This lamb is splendid.”

“And there’ll be better to come when we’ve changed planes at Delhi. Back to chopsticks and the true cuisine.”

After the tray cloths were drawn and they had finished with their coffee cups they drowsed.

Filth said that he’d have to get down to his papers. “No — I’ll fish them out for myself. You look after your hat. What do you keep in it? Opium?”

Ross ignored him.

Hot towels were brought, the pink tape round the sets of papers undone, the transcripts spread and Ross slept.

How he snores, thought Filth. I remember that on the old Dunoon. And he got to work with his fountain pen and a block of folio, and was soon deaf, blind and oblivious to all else. The sky that enwrapped them now blackened the windows. Below, invisible mountain ranges were speckled with pinpricks of lights like the stars all around and above them. Before long, seats were being converted into beds — not Filth’s; he worked on — and blankets and warm socks were distributed. Night already.

“Brandy, sir? Nightcap?”

“Why not,” said Filth, pulling the papers together, taking off his cashmere pullover and putting on a Marks & Spencer’s. A steward came to ease off his shoes.

I have seldom felt so happy, he thought, sipping the brandy, closing his eyes, awaiting sleep. I wonder if I should tell the Albatross why? No. Better wait till after Delhi.

But then: Why not? I owe him so much. Best person, just about, I’ve ever met. Most loyal. My salvation. I’ve had other salvations but this one looks like lasting.

He watched the strange sleeping face of the dwarf, and Ross opened his eyes.

“Coleridge?”

Albert Ross looked startled.

“Coleridge, I have something to tell you.”

At once the playing cards were flying. Ross began to shuffle and deal them.

“Will you put those bloody things away?”

“Do I understand,” said Ross, setting them carefully down, “that there is to be some sort of revelation?”

“Yes.”

“Much better find the Lady,” said Ross, beginning to deal again.

“I have found the lady, Coleridge. I have found her.”

There was silence; only the purr of the plane.

The silence lasted until Delhi and all through the stopover, the pacing in the marble first-class lounge, the buying of trinkets in the shops — Ross bought a case of blue butterflies — the resettling into Air India. Along swam the smiling painted girls in their cheongsams. The final take-off for Hong Kong.

“So,” said Ross. “You are about to be married. It is a revelation all right, but immaterial to your profession. Wait until you’ve done it as often as I have.”

Filth looked uneasy. “You never told me any of that, Albert.”

“I consider that they are my private affairs. Who is she?”

“She’ll be in Hong Kong when we get there. Waiting. Today.”

“She’s Chinese?”

“No. No, a Scottish woman. But born in Tiensin. I met her — well, I’ve been meeting her off and on for a year or so. Whenever we come out East. The first case you got for me. In Singapore.”

“So that I’m to blame?”

“Yes. Of course. I’m very glad to say. You will, I hope, be best man at my wedding. Without that hat.”

“Her name?”

“She’s called Elisabeth Macintosh. Betty. She’s a good sort. Very attractive.”

“A good sort!” The cards again were flying. “A good sort?” He was wagging his weird Johnsonian head from side to side.

“She hasn’t actually accepted me yet,” said Filth. “I’ve only just asked her. In a letter from Chambers sent to her hotel and marked ‘To await arrival.’ She’s just passing through with a friend. They’ve been in Australia — or somewhere. She has had some sort of work — I’m not sure. Rather hush-hush. She’s a natural traveller but not at all well off. She’s at the Old Colony Hotel.”

“Never heard of it.” Without apparent volition the cards rose like liquid into a circle, and subsided.

“Look, Albert, on the whole perhaps not mention it yet. I think she may accept me. Seems quite fond of me. She hasn’t actually said—”

“I’m glad that she seems fond of you. It is the usual thing.”

“And I’m really very fond of her. What’s the matter?”

“You haven’t slept with her then?”

A steward looked away but went on listening.

“No,” cried Filth, loud and unaware. “No, of course not. She’s a lady. And I want to marry her.”

“How young?”

“I’ve never asked. She’s a young girl. Well, she can’t technically be a girl. She grew up in the war. Japanese internment camp in Shanghai. Lost both parents. Doesn’t speak about it.”

“Have you ever asked her about it?”

“One doesn’t intrude.”

“Edward, what does she know about you? That you ought to tell her? What have you talked about? Will she stay with you?”

“She’s good at birds and plants. So am I. My prep school. She’s very lively. Infectiously happy. Very bright eyes. Strong. Rather — muscular. I feel safe with her.” Filth looked at the throbbing structure of the plane. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I would die for her.”

“Yes, I will,” the girl was saying in the shabby hotel in the back street, and street music playing against the racket of the mah-jong players on every open stone balcony. The overhead fan was limp and fly-spotted. On the beds were 1920s scarlet satin counterpanes with ugly yellow flowers done in stem stitch. They must have survived the war. Old wooden shutters clattered. There was the smell of the rotting lilies heaped in a yard below. Betty was alone, her friend Lizzie out somewhere, thank goodness. Betty would have hated not to be alone when she read Edward’s letter. What lovely handwriting. Rather a shame he’d used his Chambers writing paper. She wondered how many rough drafts he’d made first. Transcripts. He was wedded to transcripts. This was meant to be kept.

And she would. She’d keep it for ever. Their grandchildren would leave it to a museum as a memento of the jolly old dead.

Eddie Feathers? Crikey! He does sound a bit quaint. (Would you consider our being married, Elisabeth?) Not exactly Romeo. More like Mr. Knightley, though Mr. Knightley had a question mark about him. Forty-ish and always off to London alone. Don’t tell me that Emma was his first. I’m wandering. I do rather wish Eddie wasn’t so perfect. But of course I’ll marry him. I can’t think of a reason not to.

She kissed the letter and put it down her shirt.

Over the South China Sea Albert Ross was saying, “Do you know anything about this girl? Do you think she knows a bloody thing about you?”

“I’d say I was pretty straightforward.”

“Would you! Would you?”

The plane lurched sideways and down. Then again sideways and down. It tilted its wings like a bird that had suddenly lost concentration and fallen asleep in the dark. Though, thought Filth, the prep-school-trained ornithologist, they never do.

“Elisabeth,” he said, “makes me think of a kingfisher. She glitters and shines. Or a glass of water.”

“Oh?”

“A glass of clear water in a Scottish burn rushing through heather.”

“Good God.”

“Yes.”

“Has she ever seen heather? Born in Tiensin? Is she beautiful?”

Filth looked shocked. “No, no! My goodness, no. Not at all. Not glamorous.”

“I see.”

“Her — presence — is beautiful.” (It must be the glass of champagne that had been served with breakfast.) “Her soul is right.”

Ross picked up the cards. “You are not a great connoisseur of women, Edward.”

“How do you know, Coleridge? We didn’t talk about women on the Breath o’Dunoon.”

“So what about the Belfast tart?”

“I never told you that!”

“The shilling on the mantelpiece. You talked of nothing else when you were delirious with poisoned bananas.”

Filth in his magnificence pondered.

“You’d better tell Miss Macintosh the outcome.”

“How did you hear the outcome?”

“Oh, I know people.”

“Look here, I’m cured. I have a certificate. ‘VD’ they called it. Peccadilloes up there on the frontier. Old as soldiers. Old as man. Mostly curable.”

“You weren’t on the frontier. You went to bed with an Irish slag in a boarding house in Belfast.”

“I was sixteen.”

“Yes. Well. You were curiously unperturbed. I’m worried about your. .”

“What?”

“Fertility.”

“For the love of God, Ross! I’m not sure I can go on knowing you.”

“Think, Eddie. Nobody knows you like I do.”

Below them the sun was rising from the rim of the globe. Mile-high columns of mist stood about in the air. Curtains of a giant stage. Stewardesses were clicking up the blinds letting in one bar of sunlight after another. The canned music began. Chinese music now. Ting-tang. Sleeping bodies began to stir and stretch and yawn, and Edward Feathers smiled. Looking out, so near to landing and yet so high, he waited for the first sight of the three hundred and twenty-five islands that are called Hong Kong.

On one of them Betty Macintosh would be reading his letter. He saw her smiling and skipping about. Sweet child. So young and dear and good.

What would she have made of him on the Breath o’Dunoon? Young, ravaged, demented, shipwrecked? She’d have been a child then. He’d been a gaunt, sick boy, just left school. With an Adam’s apple. Though women had never been scarce, from the start.

Isobel.

Nowadays women looked at him as if he were a cliff face. I’m not attractive, he thought, but they’ve been told there’s a seam of gold about. Called money, I suppose.

“We’re here,” said Ross and Kai Tak airport was waiting below.

They swung round the harbour: the familiar landing pad that stuck out over the water like a diving board. During the war a plane a week had been lost there. Since then only one had tipped over into the harbour. But passengers on beginning to land always fell quiet for a moment.

“And so, Edward,” said the bright-eyed girl that night, as the red sun dropped back into the sea, “Eddie, I will,” and she took his hand. “I will. Yes. Thank you. I will and I will and I will.”

Somewhere in the archipelago her friend Lizzie would be drinking in a bar.

All morning she had been saying, “Betty — you can’t. It’d be a dreadful mistake.”

Finally, she had said, “All right. I’ll tell you something. I know him.”

“You never said! How? You know Edward?”

“See this pinhead? It’s the world. The middle classes. The Empire club. It’ll all be gone in a few years and I suppose we should be glad.”

“You know Eddie?”

“Yes. In the biblical sense, too. I was wild for him. Wild. He had this quality. I don’t know what it was. Probably still is. But you can’t forget Teddy Feathers. He doesn’t understand anyone, Bets, certainly not women. Something awful in his childhood. He’s inarticulate when he’s not in Court and then you hear another voice. As you do when he’s asleep — I know. He speaks Malay. D’you know he once had a horrible stammer? He’s a blank to everyone except that dwarf lawyer person, and there’s a mystery. Bets, you will be perfect for him as he becomes more and more boring. Pompous. Set in stone. Titled, no doubt. Rich as Croesus. But there’s something missing. Mind, he’s not sexless. He’s very enjoyable. It was before I was the other way—”

“Did you ever tell him about that?”

“Good God, no! He’d be disgusted. He leaves you feeling guilty as it is, he’s so pure. But there’s something missing. Maybe it’s his nanny — oh, Betty, don’t.”

She said, “Lizzie-Izz, you’re jealous!”

“Probably. A bit.”

All day Betty had walked about, crossing and recrossing the city, changing twice from Hong Kong to Kowloon-side. It was Sunday and she went into St. John’s Cathedral and took Communion. She got a shock when the Chinese priest changed from Cantonese to English when he administered the Bread to her. She always forgot that she was not Chinese. She walked afterwards towards Kai Tak. Planes were landing and taking off from the airport all the time. She had no idea when Eddie’s would arrive. The planes shrieked over the paper houses of the poor. The people there were said to be deaf.

Not noticing the noise, she wandered on among the filthy streets and came to a blistered building four storeys high with rubbish on every cement stair. She climbed up and up, noise bursting from each doorway and gallery, like feeding time at the zoo. The dear, remembered childhood chorus, the knockout smells of food and scraps. She clambered over boxes and bundles of rags and birdcages and parcels guarded by immobile individuals glaring at nothing. Rice bubbled thick on little stoves. On the third floor some Buddhist monks were chanting, and there was the smell of lamp oil, spices and smoke. On the top floor there was an antique English pram, inscribed Silver Cross, nearly blocking the apartment door, which her friend Amy opened when Betty knocked, a blond and rosy child on her hip and another child imminent. She had a Bible in one hand and was holding the place in it with her thumb. Schoolfriends, they hadn’t met since Amy became a missionary several years ago. She had been a dancer then.

Amy said, “Oh. Hullo, Betty Macintosh. Come on in. There’s a prayer group but there’ll be some food. Can you stay the night?” Behind her the corridor was packed with noisy people.

Inside the apartment there appeared to be no furniture except a piano where a very old Englishwoman was going hell for leather at Moody and Sankey hymns, as children of several nationalities were being fed, cross-legged on the floor. The old lady began to sing to her own accompaniment. “She’s a missionary, too,” said Amy. “But she’s got Depression. We have her round here every day in case she jumps into the harbour. She lives towards the New Territories behind barbed wire and guard dogs — she has some antiques — and does it stink!”

A chair was found. Betty sat on it and was given the baby to hold while Amy went off to dollop out rice from a black pot. The old lady stopped playing and singing and began to cry, and a different surge of wailing Buddhist chant rose from the floor below. From a sort of cupboard burst a young Englishman who ran out of the apartment, leaned over the Harrods pram on the landing and began to shout down to the monks that they could damn well give over. He was trying to work. If they wanted food, here it was, but they could stop chanting and let God have an alternative for half an hour. His Cantonese was very good. In a moment several monks in orange robes had negotiated the pram. They came into the apartment where they stood about, smiling in a row, awaiting rice.

Amy, ladle in hand, took the baby from Betty’s knee and dumped it on the knee of the Depressive. It immediately began to cry, which made the Depressive stop, and Amy, holding two dishes of rice, squeezed herself down on the floor near Betty, and said, “So?”

“Hello, Amy.”

“So, when did you get home?”

“Home? I’ve not had a home for years.”

“Oh, get on,” said Amy.

“I’m on holiday. Passing through. I’m drifting.”

“Alone?”

“With a girlfriend. Lizzie Ingoldby. D’you remember? Older than us, at school. Where’s Nick?”

“That was Nick, yelling at the Buddhists. He’s trying to write a sermon on Submission to God. He’s upset. They all fall in love with him out here and he hates to disappoint a woman. By the way, we’re having another.”

“I can see.”

“It will make four. And we’re broke. Have you any spare money?”

“Not a bean. I’m coming into money when I’m thirty. My parents thought I might be flighty. Instead, I’m hungry.”

“Well, don’t become a missionary. We’re not hungry but we’d like a sideline. We’re not allowed a sideline. A rich one who puts his arms round me would be nice.”

The old lady, a Mrs. Baxter, had now silenced the baby with Hymns Ancient & Modern, and called out, “Oh, I do agree! I am not a nun.” And began to dab her eyes. Amy passed her a very small cup of rice wine.

“We’re just about all she’s got,” said Amy. “She hasn’t the fare to England and there’s nobody she knows there now if she even got there. So what sort of sideline have you got, clever old Elisabeth of the Enigma Variations and always top of the form, star of St. Paul’s and St. Anne’s?”

“I think — well, I think — I’m going in for a husband.”

“Oh? Really? Oh, very, very good. Who is it?”

“You don’t know him. Well, I don’t think you do. I don’t know him very well, either. I came to ask you if I should do it. He’s flying in tonight. I’ll have to make up my mind. I’m sick of fretting on about it. By tomorrow. Maybe tonight.”

“What is he? English or Chinese? Is he Christian or ghastly agnostic? Your eyes have tears in them.”

“He’s English. Christian. Not Christian like you are, full time. More like I am. Doesn’t talk about it. Oh, yes, and he’s already pretty rich. He’ll get very rich. He’s got the touch. He’s an advocate. He’ll be a judge.”

“Oh, he’s in his nineties. Does he dribble?”

“No. He’s quite young. He’s brilliant. And he’s so good-looking he finds he’s embarrassed walking down the street. Thinks they belong — his looks — to a different man. He’s very, very nice, Amy. And he needs me.”

“So?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have you slept with him?”

“He’s not the sort. I don’t even know. .”

“He’s a virgin?”

“Oh, no. Not that. I’ve heard. In the war he was close to Queen Mary.”

“He had an affair with Queen Mary?”

They stared at each other and began to howl and laugh and roll about, as at school.

“He must be very grand,” said Amy.

“No. Oh, no. He never knows who anyone is. Social stuff doesn’t interest him.”

“And you? You, you, you? D’you love him?”

“I don’t know. I think so. I suppose I should but you see I’m retarded. I want the moon, like a teenager.”

“You should want the moon. Don’t do it, Bets. Don’t go for a forty-watt light bulb because it looks pretty. You’ll get stuck with it when it goes out. You are so loyal, and you’ll have to soldier on in the dark for ever afterwards.”

Mrs. Baxter announced that Jesus was the Light of the World.

“That’s right,” said Amy. “Have some more wine.”

“And Him only shalt thou serve,” said Mrs. Baxter.

“Amy, I must go. He may already be here. At any minute.”

“But come back. You will come back, won’t you? Bring him.”

Betty tried to see Edward standing in the pools of rice in his polished shoes, the Buddhists chanting, Mrs. Baxter weeping.

“I’d love your life, Amy.”

“So you say,” said Amy.

CHAPTER THREE

And so, a few hours later, into the sea dropped the great red yo-yo sun and darkness painted out the waters of a bay. Then lights began to show, first the pricking lights under the ramparts they stood on, then more nebulous lights from boats knocking together where the fishermen lived in houses on stilts, then the lights of moving boats fanning white on black across the bay, and then across faraway bays and coastlines of the archipelago; lights of ferries, coloured lights of invisible villages and way over to the south dim lights staining the darkness of Hong Kong itself.

Edward Feathers and Elisabeth Macintosh stood side by side, looking out, and a drum began to beat. Voices rose in a screech, like a sunset chorus of raucous birds: Cantonese and half a dozen dialects; the crashing of pots and pans, clattering pandemonium. Blue smoke rose up from the boats to the terrace of the hotel and there was a blasting smell of hot fish. Behind the couple standing looking out, waiters were beginning to spread tablecloths and napkins, setting down saucers decorated with floating lights and flowers. The last suggestion of a sun departed and the sky was speckled with a hundred million stars.

“Edward? Eddie — yes. Thank you. Yes. I will and I will and I will, but could you say something?”

Some of the older waiters would respond to Elisabeth’s voice in the slow English of before the war. It was beginning to sound Old World. Proud, unflinching, Colonial. Yet the girl did not conform to it. She was bare-legged, in open-toed sandals with clean but unpainted toenails. She was wearing a cotton dress she had had for years and hadn’t thought about changing to meet her future husband. The time in the Shanghai detention centre had arrested her body rather than matured her and she would still have been recognised by her school first-eleven hockey team.

Edward looked down at the top of her curly head, rather the colour of his own. “Chestnut,” they call it. Conker-colour. Red. Our children are bound to have red hair. Red hair frightens the Chinese. Our children’ll have to go Home to England, if we settle here. If we have any children. .

She said, “Edward? Please?”

At last then he embraced her.

“We must get back,” he said and on the ferry again across the harbour they sat close together, but not touching, on a slatted seat. Nearby sat a pasty young Englishman who was being stroked and sighed over by a Chinese girl with a yearning face. She was plump and pale, gazing up at him, whispering to him, kissing him all the time below the ear. He flicked at the ear now and then as if there were a fly about, but he was smiling. The ferry chugged and splashed. The Englishman looked proud and content. “She’s a great cook, too,” he called in their direction. “She can do a great mashed potato. It’s not all that rice.”

At Kowloon-side Edward and Elisabeth walked a foot or so apart to his hotel, climbed the marble steps and passed through the flashing glass doors. Inside among the marble columns and the lilies and the fountains Edward lifted a finger towards the reception desk and his room key was brought to him.

“There’s a party now.”

“When? Whose?”

“Now. Here. It’s tomorrow’s Judge. It’s going to be a long Case and he’s a benevolent old stick. He likes to kick off with a party. Both sides invited. Leaders, juniors, wives, girlfriends, fiancées. And courtesans for flavour.”

“Must we go?”

“Yes. I don’t much want to, but you don’t refuse.”

When he looked down at her she saw how happy he was.

“Have I time to change?”

“No. It will have begun. We’ll just show our faces. Your clothes are fine. I have something for you to wear, as it happens. I’ll go up and change my jacket and I’ll bring it down.”

“Shall I come up to the room with you?”

The new, easy, happy Edward faltered. “No. I don’t think they care for that here. I’ll be back in ten minutes. I’ll order you some tea.”

“It’s a strange betrothal,” Betty told the lily-leaf-shaped tray, the shallow cup, the tiny piece of Battenburg cake and the cress sandwich so small that a breeze from the fountains might blow it away. A trio behind her was playing Mozart. Two Chinese, one Japanese, very expert and scornful. She remembered how people in England used to say that no Oriental would ever be able to play Mozart. Just like they used to say that there would never be Japanese pilots because the Japanese are all half blind behind dark glasses. She was all at once overcome by the idiotic nature of mankind and began to laugh. God must feel like me, she thought. Oh, I love Hong Kong. Could we live here? Could Edward?

Here he came now, washed and shaved in a clean shirt and linen jacket, loping over from the lift, smiling like a boy (I’m going to be with this person all my life!) and he dropped a little cloth bag into her lap and she took out from it the most magnificent string of pearls.

“Yours,” he said. “They’re old. Someone gave them to me. When I was sixteen. In the war. Just in time. She died a few minutes later. She was lying next to me under a lifeboat on deck. We were limping Home up the Irish Sea — everybody sick and dying. She was very old. Raj spinster. Whiskery. Brave. Type that’s gone. She said, ‘One day you can give them to your sweetheart.’”

She thought: He’s not cold at all. Then, Oh, OH!! The pearls are wonderful. But they’re not what matters.

“There’s a condition, Elisabeth.”

“About the pearls?”

“Certainly not. They are yours for ever. You are my sweetheart. But this marriage, our marriage. .”

“Hush,” she said. “People are listening. Later.”

“No — NOW,” he roared out in the way he did; and several heads turned. “This marriage is a big thing. I don’t believe in divorce.”

“You’re talking about divorce before you’ve proposed.”

Mozart behind them sang out, Aha! Bravo! Goodbye! And the trio stood up and bowed.

“Elisabeth, you must never leave me. That’s the condition. I’ve been left all my life. From being a baby, I’ve been taken away from people. Raj orphan and so on. Not that I’m unusual there. And it’s supposed to have given us all backbone.”

“Well, I know all that. I am an orphan, too. My parents suffered.”

“All our parents suffered for an ideology. They believed it was good for us to be sent Home, while they went on with ruling the Empire. We were all damaged even though we became endurers.”

(“May I take your tray, madam?”)

“It did not destroy me but it made me bloody unsure.”

“I will never leave you, Edward.”

“I’ll never mention any of this again.” His words began to stumble. “Been sent away all my life. Albert Ross saved me. So sorry. Came through. Bad at sharing feelings.”

“Which, dear Eddie, if I may say so, must be why you haven’t yet proposed to me.”

“I thought I had—”

“No. Your Chambers stationery has. Not you. I want to hear it from you. In your words. From your lips.” (She was happy, though.)

“Marry me, Elisabeth. Never leave me. I’ll never ask again. But never leave me.”

“I’ll never leave you, Edward.”

A waiter swam by and scooped up her tray though she called out, “Oh, no!”

Bugger, she thought, I’ve had nothing all day but that rice at Amy’s. Then: I shouldn’t be thinking of cake.

In the lift on the way up to the Judge’s party, her bare toes inside the sandals crunching the sand of the distant sunset harbour, she thought: Well, now I know. It won’t be romantic but who wants that? It won’t be passion, but better without, probably. And there will be children. And he’s remarkable and I’ll grow to love him very much. There’s nothing about him that’s unlovable.

They stood together now at the far end of the corridor where the Judge had his suite. They could see the open doors, gold and white. The noise of the party inside rose in a subdued roar.

Edward said, “Unclutch those pearls. I want to put them round your neck.” He took them, heavy and creamy, into both hands and held them to his face. “They still smell of the sea.”

She said, “Oh, ridiculous,” and laughed, and he at last kissed her very gravely in full view of the waiters round the distant door. She saw that his eyes brimmed with tears.

Why, the dear old thing, she thought.

CHAPTER FOUR

The Judge was standing just inside the doors of his suite to welcome his guests and ostentatiously waving about a glass of Indian tonic water to make clear to everyone that tomorrow morning he would be in Court. He was a clever, abstracted little man with a complexion pale and freckled like cold porridge. He had been born in the East and his skin still didn’t seem to know what to make of it. His wife, Dulcie, much younger and here with him on a visit, was vague and dumpy in paisley-patterned silk. The arrival of the up-and-coming Edward and the unconventional-looking young woman appeared to mean little to either of them. The Judge was looking everywhere around.

“Aha, yes. Eddie Feathers,” said the Judge (he was known as Pastry Willy). “Well done. Arrived safely. Good flight? Well, don’t let me monopolise you. We’ll be head-on for months. Sick of the sight of each other. I’ve said exactly the same to the other side for the same reason. They’re all over there.”

Gales of laughter were arising from across the room and there was the impression of someone bigger than the rest buffooning about. He had a flap of flaxen hair.

“I can’t remember how well you know Veneering?”

“Quite well.”

Pastry Willy quickly looked away. Something about a mutual and inexplicable loathing.

“May I introduce Elisabeth Macintosh?” said Edward. “She is about to become my wife.”

“Delighted, delightful,” said the Judge, and his wife Dulcie blinked at the gingham dress and pearls.

Elisabeth leaned forward and kissed Pastry Willy on the cheek. “Hello, Uncle Willy. I’m Betty Macintosh.” She kissed him again on the other cheek.

“Oh, my goodness! Little Betty! Joseph’s girl!”

“Father died,” she said and disappeared into the crowd.

“But this is splendid! Splendid, Feathers! I used to read fairy tales to her on my knee.” Edward was hurrying after her. “In Tiensin!”

“Elisabeth!” He caught up with her. “You kissed Willy?”

“Well, I knew him when I was seven,” she said.

In the heart of the throng Edward, looking joyous, began to declare to left and right, “Hello, my — my fiancée.”

The room became more crowded still, the talk all London Inns of Court and how the Colony was awash this month with English lawyers. A drift of excited wives just off the plane surged by in new silk dresses they’d already had time to buy, their hair and lipstick all in place and shiny. A lovely Chinese woman in pale yellow with chandelier earrings was reclining on a chaise longue. She had a face of perpetual ennui. From the corner of the room where the noise was wildest the flaxen-headed man separated himself from his friends, roaring with laughter. He was wearing khaki shorts and a khaki shirt, which made him seem not eccentric but ahead of fashion and in the sartorial know. “No, not that way,” Edward commanded Elisabeth, and the man with the bright hair cried out, “Oh, God! It’s Old Filth!” Then he saw Elisabeth in the pearls and gingham and stood perfectly still.

“I’m Veneering,” he said to her, “Terry Veneering.” His eyes were bright light blue.

Elisabeth thought: And it is just one hour too late.

“Come and meet—” Edward was steering her away. “You must meet my clerk and — I don’t see Ross anywhere yet. I hope you’re going to like him. I’ll tell you — oh, hello! Hello! Tony, Desmond. Safe here, all of us. This is—”

But Elisabeth had slid away. Through some glass doors on to an airy balcony she had spotted a glitter of dishes. Her holiday money she’d used up in Australia, and for the past week she and Lizzie had been eating nothing much except noodles and deep-fried prawns off the market stalls. At the end of this frugal day of celebration (when she’d thought there’d be a feast, looking out over the sunset harbour), she was ravenous and — with a percipience she would keep and be thankful for throughout her coming life — she’d noticed that Edward hadn’t mentioned dinner. And she knew that after the party he would find urgent work to do for the next day.

Belshazzar’s feast was laid out on white cloths on the balcony, a row of robotic waiters standing behind.

“I’m your first customer,” she said, and with faint disapproval one of them handed her a plate and she passed down the buffet alone, helping herself hugely to crab and lobster mayonnaise. Oh, glory!

She sat down alone at an empty side table with a long white cloth to the floor, stretched her sandy feet beneath it and touched something that squeaked.

Putting her chopsticks neatly down, she lifted a corner of the tablecloth and saw a boy cross-legged on the marble, crunching a lobster. He had black Chinese hair that stood up spikily in an un-Oriental way. His eyes were blue.

“Good evening,” said Elisabeth. “Do you usually eat underneath tables?”

“Sometimes they let me in ahead of time. I get hungry at my father’s parties, too.”

“Oh, I’m always hungry,” she said. “But I’ll stay in the open tonight. Who are you? I’m Betty Macintosh.”

“Like a raincoat?” He licked each finger thoroughly before holding out his hand. “I’m Harry Veneering. I’m an only child. My father is a very famous barrister. He works out here a lot of the time but I’m at school in England. I’m flying back to school tonight.”

“Is the lobster then altogether wise? Do you think?”

“Oh, yes, thanks. I’m never sick. I can eat anything. I’m like my father. My mother eats just about nothing, ever.”

“Where are you at school in England?”

“Near London. It’s a prep school. For Eton, of course. My father being who he is.”

“Is he the one in the shorts?”

“Yes. He says if you are anybody you can wear what you like anywhere. Some lord or duke told him. Or maybe it was a prime minister. He’s a terrible, terrible inside-out snob, my dad, and he’s very, very funny.”

“Ought you to discuss your father with a stranger?”

“Oh, yes. He’s fun. He’s just a joke. And very, very brilliant.”

“I’ve seen him. Yellow hair?”

“Yes. It’s gross. But it’s not dyed. I’ve got my mother’s hair. She’s the one with the long earrings.”

“You have your father’s eyes.”

“Yes.” He looked at her from across the small table where he was now attacking the crabmeat. “He’s a hypnotist. That’s why he wins absolutely every one of his Cases.”

“Oh, no,” she said, “Oh, no. I am about to be married to another barrister and he wins Cases too and some of them against your father. And he never boasts. And he wasn’t at Eton. And he’s not a snob of any kind, ever. How old are you and why are you arguing about matters beyond your understanding?”

“I’m nine. I’m small, but I expect to grow. My dad says boys grow to their feet and my feet — look at them — they’re vast. I suppose you’re going to marry Mr. Feathers. Did you know he’s called Old Filth? It’s because he’s so clean and so clever. Well, of course he is fairly clever.”

“You don’t need to tell me about my future husband. It’s pert. Now then, come over here and bring that big table napkin with you. I’ll clean you up. And remember you are talking to the new Mrs. Edward Feathers.”

“‘Mrs. Feathers’ sounds like a hen.” And the child came over and shut his eyes, presenting his silky Chinese face to her as she dipped the dinner napkin in cold water and mopped up the mayonnaise from round his mouth. He opened his blue eyes and said, “I know, I absolutely know I’ve seen you before. I didn’t mean to be rude. I love hens.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t believe we’ve met before.”

“If you’re ever back in England,” he said, “would you like to come to my school sports days? I’m very good. I win everything and there’s never anybody to see me because my parents are always somewhere else. Such as out here.”

“I should have to ask their permission.”

“Oh, it’ll be all right. The school won’t mind. I could say you’re my nanny.”

She looked at him.

“What’s the matter? You’d look exactly right. My mother’s supposed to be the most beautiful woman in Hong Kong, you know.”

“That must be very difficult for her,” said Elisabeth.

The languid Chinese woman of the chaise longue was all at once standing behind them, holding a champagne glass round its rim in the tips of her fingers. The fingers of her other hand balanced her against the wall.

People were now crowding in for the buffet and the waiters were coming to life. Behind Elsie Veneering stood Veneering. Veneering was looking at Elisabeth’s unlined face, his wife at Elisabeth’s unpainted sandy toenails.

“Harry,” said Elsie. “It’s time to go. Introduce me to your friend.”

“She’s Miss Macintosh, she belongs to Mr. Feathers. She’s going to marry him. This is my mother.”

“Marrying?” Elsie’s eyes were black and still. “What secrets! We all rather suspected. . How kind of you to talk to Harry. Have you children already? Grandchildren?”

“Oh yes,” said Elisabeth. “I have twenty-seven grandchildren and I’m only twenty-eight years old.”

Elsie looked out of her depth but Harry laughed and fell on Elisabeth like a puppy. “You will come, won’t you? Come to my school? On sports day?”

“Only if your mother and father will let me.”

“There’ll be no sports days at all if you don’t tuck your shirt in your shorts and get smartened up. We’ve not finished your packing yet and the plane goes at midnight. Your mother needs a rest.” Veneering’s voice was all right. O.K. Just a trace of elocution lessons, maybe?

“Aren’t you taking me? Dad? You always take me to the airport.” The boy who had looked as if he could outface a battalion crumpled into a baby and began to cry.

“Can’t this time,” said Veneering, “Work to be done for tomorrow. Sorry, guv’nor.”

“Why didn’t you do the bloody work instead of coming to this awful party?” And biffing everyone out of his way, the child kicked out at his yellow-headed father and ran from the Judge’s apartment.

Veneering stood looking at Elisabeth and Elsie drifted away.

“He must learn to travel alone,” said Veneering. “Hundreds of them still do. Hardens them up. It’s in the British genes.”

“What rubbish you talk,” said Elisabeth.

“They travel first class. Well looked-after. Met at the other end. We take a lot of trouble. Not like in your old man’s time.”

“It’s a fourteen-hour flight. And there’s a change of plane in India.”

“He’s a self-reliant little beast. He’s done it before.”

“If you ever need anyone to meet him we’ll probably be living in London at first. I should like to. Please.”

“I hear you’re marrying Old Filth. It’s the sensation of the party. “Who is she, my dear?” No — he’d never let you have anything to do with a son of mine. We don’t get on. He thinks I’m common. So when did he get rid of his stammer and manage to ask you?”

“About three hours ago.”

“Is he weighing up your acceptance? Considering your sentence? I can see that you are.”

She stood up. “You are as vulgar as they say you are.” She handed him her empty plate, crumpling his son’s dinner napkin on top of it as if he were a waiter, and walked away.

CHAPTER FIVE

She had been right about dinner. A junior in his team had asked Edward for a consultation after the party. It might make a vital difference to the Case. Edward would of course walk her back to her hotel first.

“Will we meet later?”

“I never know how long—”

“Edward, we’ve not been engaged for a day yet. Can’t you even stop for some dinner? I didn’t see you eating anything. We’ve said so little—”

“Not hungry. My clock’s not settled yet, it’s the middle of the night, I think.” He took her arm above the elbow and said, “Anyway, I’m too excited.”

“Oh! Oh, well. Eddie, come to my room afterwards. At the Old C. It’s number 182. I’ll be alone. Lizzie’s out.”

“Rather not promise. The end of the week will be ours for two full days. Then we have all the years we’re going to live.”

He dropped her outside her hotel, which was pulsing with lights and screeching music.

“Well, goodnight, my future husband who doesn’t ever kiss me.”

“Well, certainly not here. You know I love you. I always will. Thank you. Please live for ever. Stop me from being a bloody bore. I can’t help working. It’s been a safety valve since school. Device for not thinking. But I’ll be all right now. Always. We’ll have a long, long honeymoon when this Case is out of the way.”

He kissed her like a brother.

Her room was unlocked and she had to turn out four uniformed room-boys who were lying on the floor and on the beds watching her tiny flickering black-and-white television. Lizzie must have turned the Room Free label the wrong way round instead of to Do Not Disturb. Lizzie’s reading of Cantonese was getting hazy. There was a musky smell in the room and Elisabeth opened the window, turned off the television and the lights and the air-conditioning. Warm harbour smells floated in. The water pipes along the walls clanked to the rhythm of somebody’s shower above. She took off the pearls and put them on a chair. She picked up the yellowing finger-marked breakfast menu and then thought, no, she’d order in the morning. She only needed sleep.

About midnight she woke in panic. The sky above was throbbing with planes. The boy Harry would be at the airport now. No, he’d already be in the air, sitting in his first-class seat. “Flying out at midnight.” To be hoped that the mother. . The mother had looked drunk. You’d think the father would have cancelled that Con. An only child. Will Edward cancel a Consultation for a child? She decided, no. But there will be me.

Our children will always have me.

Where’s Lizzie? Secret life. Always had. All these secrets. She thought of the codes at Bletchley Park in the mild English countryside. We took it so lightly. Secrets. Elisabeth slept now against the madhouse clamour of Kowloon. Blank. Jet lag. Still partly in Sydney. Hole in the air, c’est moi. Ought to be better at all this. Calmer. I am getting married. I’m twenty-eight.

In a dream she was informing her long-dead and always shadowy parents not to worry. She was back on the blistered floor of the Camp. The dust. Her father’s voice suddenly boomed out at her, “There’ll be money when you’re thirty. Do nothing hasty.” His ribcage had stuck out. His nose sharp in the skull. “I’m quite safe,” she shouted. “I’m doing all right.”

In the morning she woke to Lizzie’s radio playing beside the other bed and sat up bleary and tousled blinking across to where Lizzie lay prone. The radio rattled on in Cantonese.

“Lizzie-Izz! You’re back! Where were you? I’ve something. .”

“Shut up a minute. There’s terrible news.”

“Oh. What news?”

“Plane crash. Early this morning. Over the Indian Ocean. It broke in two.”

Elisabeth was out of bed and dressing, “Which?”

“Which what?”

“Plane. Airline. Going where?”

“British Airways, to Heathrow. The new design. A lot of children flying home to boarding school. What are you doing?”

Elisabeth was in her clothes. She did not do her hair or wash or look in the glass. She felt for her sandals by the bed, ran into the bathroom, ran out again, pulling up her knickers. She left the rope of pearls lying on the chair. She did not look for her purse. She ran from the room.

“I think actually they said it happened after it had left Rome,” Lizzie called, but Elisabeth was out of hearing.

Elisabeth ran into the street, on to the quay, ran across the roads in the drumming relentless Monday morning crowds that marched to work in their thousands, not looking at her, not speaking, not touching, not stumbling, and nor did she. She ran up the marble steps of the Peninsular Hotel and the bellhop boys in their white uniforms and pillbox hats pulled back the glass doors and blinked as she passed by.

Beside the fountain she stopped. The white piano on the dais was covered with a cloth and the gold music stands were folded up. She ran to the lifts and eyes turned from her in embarrassment, two immaculate men at the reception desk looking pointedly away. Somewhere above her in the hotel Edward would be getting up, thinking of the coming day in Court. It never occurred to her to ask for him.

She didn’t know the number of the Veneerings’ rooms and asked the lift boy who said “Suite Number One” but looked uncertain about taking her there. “It’s urgent,” she said. “It’s about a legal Case in the Courts.” He looked at her wild hair and crumpled dress.

But the lift rolled up, the gates slid open and she was running towards the double doors of Suite Number One and ringing the bell. She rang and rang.

The door at last was opened by a maid — no, by a nanny. One of the old amahs in black and white, her face gaunt. Behind stood Terry Veneering. And beside him stood Harry.

“We missed the plane,” the boy shouted. “I’m still here. Mum passed out and we missed it. And one just like it crashed in the Med.” He flung himself on Elisabeth.

The amah vanished and Veneering said, “Harry — quick. Go and tell them, Miss Macintosh needs some coffee. Go on. Go on.”

Then he stepped forward and took her hands and led her inside.

“No, no, I won’t come in,” she said. “It’s all right now. I don’t need to come in.”

His clownish face of the night before looked thin and white, his blue eyes exhausted. His hands holding hers shook. “I thought so, too,” he said. “But it wasn’t his.”

“Must go back,” she said. “Find Edward. Tell friend. Isobel. All right now. I’m all right now.”

“Stop crying.”

“I must be mad,” she said.

“I’ll send a car for you tonight. Your hotel the Old C? I’ll send a car at six-thirty. Look. Stop. He’s all right. It wasn’t his flight. Sing Te Deum and Laudamus. Elisabeth, it was a different plane.”

“Yes. Yes, I will sing — I’ll sing for ever.”

“You met him — shut up or I’ll shake you — you met him for about half an hour. He’s mine, you know, not yours. Soon you’ll have your own.”

“Yes. I can’t understand. It must be hysteria. I’m never, never — Oh, but thank God. Thank God, Terry!”

“Six-thirty,” he said, shutting the door on her.

CHAPTER SIX

She went out. She did not telephone Edward or wait for him to ring her, or explain anything to Lizzie who had again vanished. She went to a small, expensive shop and with the end of her money, labelled “emergencies,” she bought a dress.

The girl selling was shivering with cold because of the new, Western-style air conditioning. She looked ill and resentful. Elisabeth moved the ready-made silk dresses along the rails and found her fingertips covered with oil. She showed them to the sneezing girl, who at first looked away in denial. Then, when Elisabeth said in Cantonese, “Please take a cloth to the rails at once!” went to get one and at the same moment Elisabeth saw a sea-green silk, the dress of a lifetime. She held her black oily fingers out to let the girl clean her hands and when the girl had finished said, “I would like that one.” The girl shrugged and moved her hands in a disenchanted gesture that Elisabeth might want to try it on and Elisabeth said, “No, thank you. It will be perfect. Have you shoes to match?” She paid for it (a price) and walked back towards the hotel room. It was still empty of Lizzie and there was no message light on the bedside telephone. She stood the stiff paper bag on her bed and went to find a hairdresser.

The hairdresser preened above her head.

“Is it for an occasion?”

“I don’t know. Well, yes, I’m going out tonight.”

The hairdresser smiled and smiled, dead-eyed. Elisabeth had the notion that somewhere there was dislike.

“Would you like colour?”

“I don’t know.”

“Would you like to be more seriously red?”

“No. No, not at all.” (Am I making sense?) “Just wash my hair, please. Take the aeroplane out of it.”

“Aeroplane out of it.” Silly giggle.

High on the wall above the line of basins, probably unnoticed for years, was a studio photograph, from before the war, of an English woman of a certain age, her hair sculpted into marcel waves, her ageing manicured hand all rings. And she was resting her cheek against it. Her mouth was dark and sharp with lipstick, her fingernails dark with varnish. Her smile was benevolent but genuine and sweet, and she had signed her name across the corner with I shall remember you all. She was so like Elisabeth’s mother’s Bridge-playing friends in old Tiensin that for a moment Elisabeth smelled the dust of her early childhood that had settled on everything without and within, covered her mother’s dressing-table mirrors, the long parchment scrolls on the walls, the tea tray with cups and silver spoons, the little grey butterfly cakes, the cigarette cases and cigar lighters and dried grasses in china vases. Memory released an instant image, and sound too, for she heard her mother’s laugh as the amah carried her into the room to sit quietly at her mother’s feet for half an hour as the four ladies gazed at their cards and smoked their cigarettes. Her mother would look at her sometimes to check that she was tidy, and she would smile back, at her mother in the silk tea gown, silk stockings, the boat-shaped silk shoes, a diamond ring (where had it gone?) glinting through the dust in the shaft of sunlight through the blinds.

“Who is that woman?”

The hairdresser looked up at the photograph. “Oh, it will be a client from before the war. Long ago.”

“Can you read her name?”

A long giggle. “No, no! We must take it down. It is old. The frame is very old-fashioned. The salon will be modernised soon.”

“She must have liked you all. The frame is expensive. Was she the Governor’s wife?”

All the girls laughed. The embarrassed, tinkling laughter.

“There are fly spots on it. We must take it down.”

“I think she gave it to you before she left for Home. Maybe when the war began. Before the Japanese.” They laughed again, watching her. She saw that one girl was Japanese. Elisabeth’s hair was being dried by a new-fangled hand-held blower, like a gun. The woman would have sat for over half an hour under a metal helmet that roared in her reddening ears while she wrote letters on her knee or drifted among copies of Country Life or The Royal Geographical Magazine or John o’London’s—happy, loving her warm unhurried life, sure of the future, certain that she and her country were admired. She would always have left a tip, but unostentatiously, and at Christmas — but not at the Chinese New Year — she’d arrive with little presents for everyone wrapped in paper printed with mistletoe and holly, which none of the girls had ever seen. Little Christmas puddings and mince pies that would all be thrown away. How do I know all this?

“She is like my mother.”

“We must take it down.”

The hairdresser brought her some tea.

Back at the Old Colony there was still no message from Edward so the Case must by now be groaning into life: a Case about land reclamation. Edward was for the architects, Veneering for the contractors. The villagers living on the doomed land were for neither, and nobody represented them except the legendary monsters and serpents that lurked in the depths below the site which was at present a marsh where they had always wallowed in the imagination, seeking whom they might devour. The projected dam would produce water for the new Hong Kong which would arrive years and years later, after the handover. The villagers came out after dark to appease the monsters with offerings and saucers of milk. In the morning the Western engineers removed the untouched offerings. Nothing was getting done.

Elisabeth, in her frowsty bedroom, the beds still not made, sent for a room-service lunch and when it came did not want it. She slept, and woke at six o’clock. No phone messages, no word from Edward or Lizzie. She combed her new shiny hair and thought of the photograph of the virtuous woman who looked like her mother. Then she took the sea-green dress and slid it on. There was a small, matching, sea-green purse on a string. She slipped it over her shoulder. Then she put on her evening shoes. Pale, silk, high-heeled sandals. Then she looked out of the window.

(“I’ll send a car. Six-thirty.”)

It had been a time so early in the morning, half in dream, half in nightmare. Perhaps it had all been imagined.

Only hours ago she had been all set to become the next reincarnation of a virtuous woman, like the one in the benevolent photograph. She had stood beside her man — and how her parents would have approved of Edward Feathers — watching the stars in the heavens, thinking that she would tell her children about how she had said “I will” and had meant it. She saw her mother’s face, imprisoned in the emptiness of Empire and diplomacy.

A cab was standing by itself without lights across the road from the Old Colony. She turned the notice in Chinese characters on her door to Do Not Disturb. She left no message. She took the lift down. She carried only the little green purse. It had her passport in it and her final travellers’ cheque ticket strip, but not her return ticket to England.

As she walked over to the dark cab, the driver got out and opened the passenger door. He said, “Veneering?” and she said, “Yes.”

They turned quickly away from the lights and quays, then inland. As they climbed, the traffic and people thinned and they drove towards the New Territories among cities of unfinished blocks of workers’ flats, all in darkness, waiting for the New Age. The road curved and climbed, flattened and then climbed again. It climbed into trees, through trees and then into thick woods.

Woods?

She had not known about the woods of Hong Kong. Woods were for lush landscapes. She had believed that outside the city all would be sandy and bare. The cab plunged now deep into a black forest. The sky was gone and the road levelled and began to drop down again. The cab turned on to an unmade-up track. Small dancing lights began to appear, around them, like a huge entourage, the moving shadows of hundreds of people carrying the lights in their hands.

The shadows did not rest. Sometimes they came up close to the cab. They were moving, sometimes quite close to the cab’s closed windows. They were in twos and threes, not speaking. Not one head turned. They even seemed unaware of the cab which was moving through them now quite fast, but still silent, the driver never once flashing his lights or sounding his horn. Nobody moved out of their way. Nobody turned his head. There seemed to be a white mist near the ground and the cab became very hot.

The strangeness of the crowded forest was its silence.

To left and right in the trees, a little off the road, a bright light would now and then shine out, then vanish, masked by trees and trees. There must be big houses up there, she thought, rich men’s second homes. She had seen the sort of thing long ago in Penang, most of the year empty, shadowy palaces locked inside metal armour lattice and on the gates the warning with a zigzag sign saying Danger of Death, blazing out in English and Chinese and Malay.

The hosts of the shadows paid no attention to the houses hidden in the trees. The shadows swam altogether around the cab in a shoal. They concentrated on the dark. They became like smoke around her in the forest and she began to be afraid.

I want Edward. He has no idea where I am. Nor have I.

The driver’s little Chinese head did not turn and he did not speak when she leaned forward and tapped his shoulder and shouted at him in Cantonese, “Will it be much longer? Please tell me where I am. In God’s name.”

Instead, he swung suddenly off the road, obliterating the moving shadows, and up a steeper track. After a time, a glow appeared from, apparently, the top of some tree. In front of the light the cab swung round full circle and stopped.

The light was glowing in a small wooden house that seemed to be on stilts with tree branches growing close all round it. There was some sort of ladder and a gate at the bottom bore the electric charge logo and Danger of Death. All Admittance Forbidden.

She looked up at the top of the ladder and saw that a wooden cabin seemed held in a goblet of branches. Its doors stood open and light now flowed down the ladder. Veneering was beside the cab. He opened the door and took her hand. He stood aside for her at the ladder’s foot and at the top she looked down at him and saw that behind him in the clearing the cab was gone.

So was the silent, shadowy multitude and so were all the dotted lights of houses among the trees. This house seemed less a house then an organic growth in the forest, sweet smelling, held in the arms of branches. Veneering shut the door behind them and began to take off her green dress.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The next morning Do Not Disturb was still hanging from the door handle of room 182, the beds still unmade, unslept in. There was the untouched chaos of scattered clothes and belongings, the smell of yesterday’s scent. Nobody there. And no light flashing from the bedside telephone. No messages pushed under the door.

Perhaps no time had passed since yesterday morning. The hairdresser, the green dress, the taxi standing waiting, the strange journey, the glorious night, the dawn return with the black cab again standing waiting in the trees, perhaps all fantasy? A dream of years can take a second.

But I’m not a virgin any more. I know that all right. And it’s about time. Oh, Edward! Saint Edward, where were you? Why wasn’t it you? Pulling off the dress, she stuffed it in the waste-paper basket. She made the dribbling shower work and stood under it until it had soaked away the hours of the sweltering, wonderful night, until her hair lay flat and brown and coarse. It’s like a donkey’s hair. I am not beautiful. Yet he thought so. Who was it? Oh! It must have been Edward! I’m marrying him. He hates — she couldn’t say the name. I’ve been bewitched. Then, thinking of the night, she moaned with pleasure. No, it was you. Not Eddie. Eddie was preparing the Case. He had no time. Yet you had time. The same Case.

And it’s always going to be like this. She watched, through the window behind the shower, white smoke puffing up from the air conditioning into the blue sky. His work will always come first. He’ll sign and underline and ring for it to be collected by the typists, before he comes home to me. And where is he? And Lizzie? I’m alone here now. I can’t stand here all day, naked. My new, used, happy body. I suppose I should sleep now. I must need sleep, but I’ve never felt so awake. I’ll ring Amy.

“Yes?”

In the background to Amy’s voice was a hornet’s nest of howling and shouting.

“I must see you, Amy. I have to see you. Please!”

“I’ll come now. I’ll do the school run and then I’ll drive in. What’s wrong?”

“I’ll tell you. Well, not wrong. Well, yes — wrong.”

Amy’s tin-can car appeared in less than half an hour outside the Old Colony, stopping where last night’s cab had stopped. And this morning’s. Elisabeth saw it, put on some cotton trousers and a shirt, and ran out. The alternative had been the crumpled cotton check or the green silk in the trash basket. She fell into the clattering car and, as they drove away, said, “Oh, Amy! Thank God!” Amy had less than an inch of space between herself and the steering wheel. The coming child inside her was kicking. You could see it kicking if you knew about such things. Betty, who didn’t know, sat staring ahead.

“Where are we going, Amy? This isn’t your way home.”

“No, it’s my day for health visiting. New babies. Home births. I’ll say you’re my assistant. You can carry a clipboard. Now then, what’s the matter?”

“I can’t actually tell you. Not yet. I’ve just got in. I was out all night.”

“Sleeping with Eddie Feathers? Well, about time. That I will say.”

“No. No. He won’t do it. He thinks if it’s serious, you don’t do it before marrying.”

“He said this?”

“Not actually. But he sort of indicates.”

“Well,” she said. “It’s a point of view. Mine, as a matter of fact. And Nick’s. But we couldn’t stick to it. So who were you with on the night you became engaged? You’d better tell me. Oh, we’re here. Get out and I’ll tell you how to behave. Then tell me what’s going on.”

They were on a cemented forecourt of what looked like an overhead parking block ten storeys high. “Take the clipboard. Walk behind me with authority. O.K.? We are weighing and measuring babies born at home. Every family will greet us with a glass of tea. If there is no tea it will be a glass of water. If there is no water then it will be an empty glass. Whichever is handed to you, you greet it as if it were champagne. O.K.?”

Inside the rough building among the shadowy wooden joists Elisabeth was reminded of the unseen people of the wood. At doorways they were bowed to, and tightly wrapped babies were presented, unwrapped and hung up by Amy from a hook above a little leather hammock. Like meat, thought Elisabeth. The baby was examined, peered at with a torch, tapped and patted, then measured and returned. The mother or grandmother — it could have been either — bowed and offered the glass. The babies’ eyes shone black and narrow, and looked across at Elisabeth with the knowledge of Methuselah. She caught one proud young mother’s glance and smiled in congratulation. “Beautiful,” she said and the mother made a proud disclaimer.

“That last one will die,” said Amy as they walked back to the car. “We’ll go home and I’ll get you some breakfast. Let me hear your earth-shattering experiences with your substitute future husband.”

“He wasn’t. I told you.”

“Then who was it?”

“Someone else. I’d just met him.”

“Ye gods! Here, help me.” She was unloading the back of the car of the paraphernalia of the maternity run. “Met him here? In Hong Kong?”

“Yes. I think it was hypnosis.”

Weights, measures, bottles were heaped in Elisabeth’s arms.

“Rubbish, it was lust. It was natural desire. Or maybe it was only resentment,” said Amy.

“How do you know?”

“I know because you told me, yesterday, that your marriage frightened you, because it meant you would never know passion. You did it to have something to remember and to have known desire.”

“No, it was love. I’m not excusing myself. Edward will never know. It is love.”

“Elisabeth, what are you doing?”

“Is it so wrong to want a glorious memory?”

“It’s sentimental and obscene. You won’t like yourself for it in the end. You don’t like yourself now.”

“I never thought you were a puritan, Amy.”

“Well, you’ve learned something. I am.”

“After the way you went on at school.”

“That was ten years ago.”

“So you have been purified by Nick?”

Amy was rolling from side to side up the dirty stairwell, trying to support the unborn baby as it kicked to get clear of her ribcage and slide into the world. From above came the wailing of apparently inconsolable children and the voice of a roaring man.

A saffron monk stuck his head out of his doorway as they passed, his hairless shining face determinedly blissful. He asked if he could eat with them. “No,” said Amy. “There’s too much going on,” and the monk blissfully retired.

“Where in hell—” shouted Nick at their open door. “You’ve been hours. We’re going mad.”

Mrs. Baxter, in a rocking chair, held an unhappy bundle. “I’m afraid she’s wet again.” An untouched bottle of formula stood near, untouched, that is, except by flies. “It’s time to get Emily back from school.”

“Well, here’s the car keys,” said Amy, picking the baby out of Mrs. Baxter’s bony lap, dropping the nursing gear, scooping another child out of Nick’s struggling arms. “Oh, and can you give Bets a lift back to the Old Col?”

“Bets?” Nick took a hold, looked at her and switched on the polite. “So sorry. Don’t think we’ve met. Are you new here?”

“I’m passing through.”

“We were at school,” said Amy.

“Oh. Excellent. Sorry about the scenes of married bliss. Didn’t see you there, ha-ha. You’ll want to be off.”

“No. I don’t want to go.” She looked at Nick in his plastic dog collar. “Amy, I don’t know what to do.”

“Pray you’re not pregnant,” said Amy, also behaving as if the two of them were alone. “Try prayers. Go ahead with earlier plans.”

“Someone will tell him. You know they will. You know Hong Kong.”

“Oh, probably. If so, I suppose that’ll be it. But I wonder? He doesn’t sound the ordinary old blimp, your future husband.”

“What is all this?”

“It is something, Nick,” said Mrs. Baxter, “that I don’t think we should be listening to. You are making us eavesdroppers, Amy.”

“I’ve more to do than stand here dropping eaves,” said Nick. “I’m teaching a Moral Sciences seminar in twenty minutes.”

Amy and Elisabeth continued to stand in silence and it was (surprisingly) Amy who began to cry.

“You’re — oh, if you knew how I envy you, Bets! You’re so innocent. You’re going to be so ghastly soon. All this will be an uneasy memory when you’re opening bazaars around the Temple church in the Strand, and organising book groups for barristers’ wives. You’ll metamorphose into a perfect specimen of twentieth-century uxorial devotion. You’ll have this one guilty secret and you’ll never forgive me for knowing.”

“I don’t know what the hell’s going on,” said Nick.

“You and I, Bets, will be the last generation to take seriously the concept of matrimonial fidelity. Wait until this lot gets cracking with sex and sin in the — what? — in the sixties.”

“How do you know?” said Elisabeth.

“I know.”

“Are you happy about it, Amy?”

“I am bloody, bloody unhappy about it. Have a child at your peril, Bets. It will hurt you to hell.”

One of the children then began to cry for its dinner and slap, bang went Amy with the rice pot.

“Nick — take Betty now. Bets, see you at the altar? Right?”

Mrs. Baxter began to sing “When I survey the wondrous Cross” as she unwrapped the wet child, who at once spread out its wet legs and went thankfully to sleep.

CHAPTER EIGHT

At last there was a message for Elisabeth Macintosh when she returned to the Old Colony Hotel. She was called over to the reception desk and an official-looking letter was put into her hands. The envelope came from Edward’s London Chambers and it chilled her. Her name was typewritten. So, it was all over.

She took it upstairs — the bedroom still untouched, the two beds a mess, but she found a red light flashing by the telephone. Which first? Face the one you fear.

She opened the letter and inside, in Edward’s beautiful, clear script, read, I have wonderful news. Ross will bring you to the Old Repulse Bay Hotel tonight to celebrate it. I have not had a minute — literally, I mean it — to telephone or write. You will soon see why. I love and long for you, Edward.

She contemplated the message light for a while and then rang down to reception. While they dialled up the message, she sat with the blunt heavy block of the black receiver in her hand. At length, after much clicking, a voice, a recording from somewhere: This is Mr. Albert Ross, consulting solicitor to Mr. Edward Feathers QC. I am to call for a Miss Elisabeth Macintosh this evening to take her to dinner with Mr. Feathers and his team. The dress code will be formal. Six o’clock.

Who is this pompous ass? The famous Loss the Demon Dwarf? So, we shall meet. I’m not going to like him. I’m being played with by all of them. I’ve half a mind. .

And “dress code formal’! What in hell? I’ve no money and nothing clean and Edward must — should — know it. As if he did!

She went to the waste-paper basket and fished out the dress.

No. I couldn’t. I can never wear it again. It feels cold and wet. I can hardly bear to touch it. (But she held it to her face.)

I suppose I could get them to press it. Laundry service? But just touching it, looking at it, makes me want to cry. With happiness, private happiness, not with guilt. Once only. It is a sacred dress. And she pressed her face into it and remembered Veneering’s hands and skin and hair and sweat as the dress lay like a slop of spinach on the wood floor of the weird tree house. I will never wear it again.

Time? It’s still only two o’clock. I’ve over three hours. Food? Not hungry. Perhaps try. Get room service. Get a saté from a stall.

She turned in her cotton clothes into the poor streets again, stepping through litter and ordure. A man without legs sat, his crutches splayed, opening shellfish, the shells thrown about him. She bought a pork saté from a boy yelling “Saté” insolently in her ear. Then she bought a warm, soft prawn fritter and stood eating it all. It smelled sweet and good. Looking up above the street stalls she saw on a hoarding a huge photograph. It was a young European girl naked to the waist and smelling a rose. It was, undoubtedly, Lizzie.

Well, of course not. How could it be? Lizzie was an intellectual. She’d been at Bletchley Park. And she was, or said she was, a lesbian. One didn’t think about it. She was always coming and going to Hong Kong. She told you nothing. There were rumours of her having something to do with the Chief of Police. She had known some terrible people, even at school. But she’d been serious, hard-working. But naked to the waist and a rose! Smelling the rose! Lizzie! Well, she does say she’s broke. No, I’m just tired.

I am wonderfully, deeply tired and I want him again. And again. And for ever. And I don’t mean Edward.

She wandered the street stalls, licking the prawn juice off her fingers. She peered into fragments of looking-glass, demons and cartoon toys. Wherever she went among the stalls were clusters of children eating where they stood, quietly, prodding their chopsticks into thimble dishes of fish and pork. Oh, how could I ever go West again? I’ll stay here. With anyone who wants me. One or the other. With anyone.

She had shocked herself. She had meant it. She’d go with a man who would let her roam in the market. “I’ll go down fast,” she told the poster. The girl with the rose now did not look like Lizzie at all. It was some American film star. Hedy Lamarr. She wondered how much the girl had been paid.

She was in the Old Col Hotel again. It was half past four in the afternoon. Make-up? Borrow Lizzie’s. (God, I look tired.) Dress? Green dress. I forgot to get them to iron it. It smells and I don’t care. I’ll never, never own such a beautiful dress again. And nobody will ever know. He won’t be there. Not at Edward’s party with its “wonderful news’—whatever that is.

When she was dressed she looked — after a little hesitation — out of her window and saw a white Mercedes parked outside, its windows dark and its number plate so short it looked like royalty.

“I shall certainly not hurry,” said the new Elisabeth and sauntered forth, her hair curly again, springy after the shower. I’m walking differently, she thought. They say you can always tell when a virgin is a thing of the past.

The car with the black windows gave no sign of remarking on her non-virginal condition, her walk, or on anything about her. When she stopped beside it nothing happened and she felt snubbed. If there was a driver inside, he was invisible. This was not a car you could tap or try a door handle. It might set off some terrible alarm.

The crowds were surging now from work. They parted around the Mercedes and then came back together again beyond it. Nobody looked at her or noticed her. As Nick had said this morning at the noisy family flat, “You get lonely here, you know. It’s not that they dislike you so much as that they aren’t interested. They just blot you out. Just occasionally they make it plain. You can be sitting on a bus with the only empty seat the one beside you, and there’ll be Chinese standing thick down the middle of the bus all down the centre aisle, and there’ll never, ever, be one of them who will sit down beside you. We are invisible.”

Elisabeth, standing in her green dress by the car, now felt invisible. She decided to turn back. After all, I’m not just anyone. She would go back to the bedroom and wait to be properly taken to Edward’s party. I am a grown woman.

And yet, I’m still telling myself stories. I have not had the courage to throw away childish things. You’d never take me for a linguist and a sociologist and an expert in ciphers, and all of it after being in the Camps. There is something missing in me. I’m empty.

Tears began to come. She knew that it was love that was missing. Edward was missing. She had forgotten all about him. Put him ruthlessly into memory.

“Good afternoon,” said someone behind her and she looked down to see a very short, thickset troll of a man wearing a brown felt hat. He removed it.

“I am Albert Loss. I cannot say my ‘ahs.’ I am the instructing solicitor and almost lifetime friend of Mr. Edward Feathers QC. I am instructed to drive you out to Repulse Bay to dine with him.”

A white-uniformed driver now stood beside the car’s opened doors. She was put behind the driver and Ross next to her on a built-up seat that set them on a level. The air-conditioning after several minutes was cool and silent, and the car slid carefully through the crowds and away.

“You said something—” she turned to Ross. “You said something like ‘QC.’ Edward is too young to be made a Queen’s Counsel.”

“He has just been made one. I mentioned it in my telephone message.”

“No! Has he? I never took it in. Oh, how wonderful! He never told me he’d applied. Oh, I see! Now I see. This is to be a celebration.”

“Not altogether. He has other things to say. I shall leave the rest to him.”

“Oh, and he so deserves it. Oh, I hope he’s letting himself be happy about it.”

“He will never let on,” said Ross, “but he has been frequently smiling.” He removed his hat, turned it over, unzipped a small zip inside the crown and removed a pack of cards. He did up the zip again, dropped the hat to the floor and set up a little shelf. He began to deal himself a hand.

“I like cards, too,” she said. “But will there be time? I thought we were almost there.”

“There is always time for cards and reflection. They are an aide-memoire. I am a compulsive player and I have a magnificent grasp of fact. My memory has been honed into an unbreakable machine. There is half an hour more of this short journey. We have to make a diversion on the way.”

“Won’t Edward wonder? Worry?”

“He knows you are with me.”

“But where are we now?” She looked through the one-way glass window. “You can’t be driving a car like this up here.”

“It will take little harm. I agree that my London Royce would be more appropriate. And the card tray there is firmer.”

“But this is an awful place. Wherever are we going?”

Stretching away were building sites and ravaged landscapes. Squalor and ugliness.

“It is your bread and butter — shall we say our bread and butter? And also our caviar. We are approaching the reservoirs, the sources of legal disputes that will support us all for years to come. Off and on.”

“But it’s horrible! It’s a desecrated forest. It’s being chopped down. Miles and miles of it.”

“There are miles more. Miles more scrub and trees. They will all, of course, have to go in time, which is sad since so much was brought here by the British. Like English roses in the Indian Raj the trees here grew like weeds. It was once a very good address to have, up here, you know. The dachas of the British. I still have a small one here myself, just to rent out — here we are in the trees again — which I intend to sell. The area is not safe now after dark. The reservoir workers begin to frighten people. They troop through the trees at sundown, like shadows. Here we are. My little investment.” And the car stopped in a glade on a mud patch where a dilapidated wooden box of a dwelling seemed to have become stuck up a tree.

“Oh, no!” she said. “Oh, no — oh, no!”

The zigzag notice Danger of Death was in place at the foot of the ladder. The driver lifted Ross out of the car and locked the car again behind him and Elisabeth inside watched the little man unlock the gate, shuffle painfully up the ladder stair, unlock the front door and disappear. When he came out again the driver lifted him back to his seat, relocked the car doors.

Ross sat on his perch and said nothing.

“Can we go? Can we please go now?” she said. “Please, I don’t like it here, it’s horrible.”

“I let it by the hour,” he said. “Night or day. It has been a good investment.”

“It’s disgusting. Vile. Please can we go to Edward? Tell him to start the car. Does Edward know you own this?”

“Certainly not. When I bought it, it was for myself. A haven of peace in my difficult life, watching the cards. But I have let things slide. I live in so many places. I let it, in a very discreet way. And I am getting rid of it now.”

“Yes. Please. Can we go?”

“On one condition,” said the dwarf. “That you will never think of it or of any such place again.”

“Of course not. Of course not. Look, I’m feeling cold—”

“And that you will never leave Edward.”

“He knows. I’ve told him I’ll never leave him. I swear it.”

“If you leave him,” said Ross, “I will break you.”

At their destination the driver got out to open her door, and Ross tossed over to her a green silk purse.

“You left your passport behind,” he said.

CHAPTER NINE

She heard laughter. Cheerful shouting. English laughter and across the terrace saw Eddie’s legal team all drinking Tiger beer. There were six or seven of them in shirts and shorts, and Edward standing tall among them without a tie, head back, roaring with laughter. The cotton dress would have been right.

Edward came striding over to her, stopped before he reached her, held out a hand and took her round a corner of the terrace out of sight of the others. He looked young. He held her tight. He took both her hands and said, “Did you think I’d forgotten you?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know what’s happened?”

“Yes. You’ve got Silk. You’re a QC.”

“No. Not that. Do you know that the Case has settled?”

“No!”

“It’s taken sixteen hours. Sixteen solid hours. But we’ve settled out of court. Neither side went to bed. But everyone’s happy and we can all go home. Ross is packing the papers. The other side’s off already. Veneering left this morning so the air’s pure again.”

“Eddie — you’ve all lost a fortune. How much a day was it? Thousands?”

“No idea,” he said, “and no consequence. I’ve got the brief fee. It’ll pay for the honeymoon. I’ve told Ross and the clerks to get it in, and then that I don’t want any more work until I’m back in London. I’ve said two months. I’ve told him to give everything to Fiscal-Smith.”

“Whoever’s that?”

“Someone who’s always hanging about. Takes anything and pays for nothing. The meanest lawyer at the Bar. An old friend.”

She sat down on the parapet and looked across the sea. He hadn’t asked her one thing about herself. Her own plans. He didn’t even know whether she had a job she had to get back to. If she had any money. About when her holiday ended. She tried to remember whether he’d ever asked anything about her at all.

“We might go to India,” he said. “D’you want a cup of coffee? You’ll have had dinner somewhere, I hope.” He and the noisy group of liberated lawyers had dined very early. Final toasts were now going round. Taxis arrived. Farewells. More laughter. Edward and Elisabeth were alone again under the same stars as before. After a time she said, “I’d like to stay in the hotel here tonight, Eddie. I love this place. And no, I haven’t had dinner.”

“But we have our hotel rooms Kowloon-side. And haven’t you the Australian friend? She’ll wonder where you are. And I haven’t a shirt up here. For tomorrow.”

“She’s left for Home, tonight, I think. We only met up here. We’re old friends. We take it lightly.”

She watched him.

“There’s the wedding to plan.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I keep forgetting. I suppose that’s my job. By the way, I haven’t any money at all.”

“Oh, I’ll deal with that.”

“Not until I’m thirty. I’ll be quite well-off then.”

He smiled at her, not interested.

They hardly spoke on the ferry. At Kowloon the lights of the Peninsular Hotel blazed white across the forecourt. The Old Colony was lit down the side street with its chains of cheap lights and was resounding with wailing music and singing. It was still only nine o’clock.

“It’s only nine o’clock,” she said. “Goodnight then, since you say so,” and at last he seemed to come to himself.

“Yes. Nine. All out of focus. I’m sorry. Come in. Come in to the Pen and I’ll give you dinner. We’ll both have some champagne. Betty?”

She was staring at him. “No,” she said. “I’m going over to some friends in Kai Tak.”

“Kai Tak! Isn’t that a bit off-piste?”

“Yes. So are they. They’re missionaries. Hordes of kids. Normal people. In love with each other. My friends.”

“Elisabeth — what’s wrong? It is on, isn’t it?”

Sitting in the taxi she said, after a minute, “Yes. It’s on. But I need the taxi fare.”

“Shall I come with you?”

“No. I’ll be staying the night. Maybe longer,” and she was gone.

She saw him standing, watching her taxi disappear, and then the hotel’s white Mercedes roll along with all the legal team waving at him, making for the airport and Home. In very good spirits.

He was, in fact, unaware of them, but saying to himself that he’d made some mistake. Had made an absolute bloody bish. I wish Coleridge were here. I’m not good at pleasing this girl.

Betty, bowling along through the alleys round Kai Tak, was thinking: He’s shattered. He looked so bewildered. He’s so bloody good. Good, good, good.

Well, I’ll probably go through with it. I’ll be independent when I’m thirty. I’ll probably put a lot into it. I’ll damn well work, too. For myself. QC’s wife or not. And at least I have a past now. No one can take that away.

CHAPTER TEN

Since the night of celebration at Repulse Bay and the end of the land reclamation Case and the horrible parting outside the Peninsular Hotel, Elisabeth had moved in with Amy at Kai Tak. It was at Amy’s command.

“Have you room for me?”

“Yes. There’s a camp bed. And don’t be grateful, you’ll be very useful. Take the baby — no, not that way. Now, stick the bottle in her mouth — go on. Right up to the edge. She won’t choke, she’ll go to sleep and we can talk before Nick comes in.”

The other children were already asleep. Mrs. Baxter must at some point have been taken up to her barbed-wire fortress. The Buddhists were practising silence on the floor below.

“Now then,” said Amy. “Date of wedding?”

“Edward’s arranging everything. The licence. I expect I’ll have to be there at some point for identification. In case he should turn up with someone different.”

“You’re being flippant.”

“Not that he’d probably notice.”

“Now you’re being cheap. Seriously, Elisabeth Macintosh — is it on? It is a Sacrament in the Christian Church.”

“I’m being told yes from somewhere. Probably only by my rational self. There’s no way I will say no, yet I don’t quite know why. Marriage will be gone in a hundred years in the Christian Church. There’ll be women priests and homo priests. Pansies and bisexuals.”

“You’re tired. You live alone. What does Isobel say?”

“She’s disappeared. As she always did. She was never any help with people’s troubles, was she? She just stared and pronounced — if she could be bothered. She’s burdened with her own secrets but she never lets on.”

“I suppose she must tell someone. Some wise and ageing woman with a deep, understanding voice. And a beard.”

Elisabeth laughed and said, “Can I pull this teat out now? She’s asleep.”

Nick came in. It was very late. Very hot.

Elisabeth, lying on the camp bed near the kitchen sink, listened to the clamour outside in the sweltering streets, the thundering muted lullaby of the mah-jong players in all the squats around.

“I have no aim,” she said. “No certainty. I am a post-war invertebrate. I play mah-jong in my head year after year trying to find something I was born to do. I have settled on exactly what my mother would have wanted: a rich, safe, good husband and a pleasant life. All the things she must have thought in the Camp were gone for ever. Impossible for me, the scrawny child playing in the sand. Hearing screams, gunfire, silences in the night, watching lights searching in the barbed wire. I should be the last woman in the world to recreate the old world of the unswerving English wife. I am trying to please my dead mother. I always am.” She slept.

And woke to Mrs. Baxter flopping about with teacups saying, “I tried not to wake you. Are you staying long? Shall we say a prayer together?”

She and Elisabeth were alone, except for the baby, whom Mrs. Baxter ignored. Nick, Amy and the rest were already about the Colony and the nursery school and the clinics. The noise from the streets was less than in the night and the monks below were still silent. The telephone rang and it was Edward.

“Found you at last. Are you safe?”

“Of course. I’m going shopping.”

“Shall I come?” He sounded afraid of the answer.

“No. Do I have to come and sign things?”

“Not yet. I’m organising it. I’m planning our trip. Oh — Pastry Willy wants us to dine with them tonight.”

“Can’t,” she said. “Sorry. Next week? I must earn my keep here.”

“As to that, are you all right for money?”

“Rolling in it,” she said.

“Unexpected expenses—? Wedding dress and presents for. .”

“You’re the one for presents. First, Eddie, to Amy. She needs them. Don’t dare to give her money; she’ll just put it into a savings account for the children. Look — I’m staying here. They’re my family. Until the wedding.”

“Willy’s wife will be upset.”

“No. I want to be married from Kai Tak with the planes all roaring overhead.”

“Can you — I mean. Darling”—“Darling!” Progress? — “is there anywhere to wash there? A bathroom. To get ready on the day?”

“No idea. I must get on. I have to clean the kitchen.”

“Shall I come over? I think I should.”

“It’s a free and easy place. Don’t come in spats.”

“What on earth are spats?”

“Oh, stuff it, Edward.”

Mrs. Baxter, pale as a cobweb, had been listening at the kitchen table where she was doing something with needle and thread. “Was that a conversation with your fiancé?”

“I suppose it was, Mrs. Baxter.”

She was silent as Elisabeth scoured away at the scum in the rice pot, black outside, silver within. Huge and bulbous. The black and silver raised a sense of longing in Elisabeth, of memory and loss: the outdoor kitchen in Tiensin, the servants’ shouting, the stink of drains and cesspits, the clouds of dust, the drab sunlight and her mother appearing at the veranda door. The amah would come and pick up little Elisabeth, wiping her face with a grey cloth. She saw her mother’s plump arms open towards her as she stretched her own stubby ones up to her mother. They all laughed. Her mother had been a blonde. She had twirled around with glee, swinging her baby. The servants were scouring the rice pots until their silver linings shone.

“You are not looking happy, Elisabeth.”

“But of course I’m happy, Mrs. Baxter.”

“I am not a happy woman, either. I believe that you and I are very much alike. I thought so as soon as I saw you. I thought, She is born to tears and wrong decisions and she will need the consolation of Jesus Christ.”

“You’ve got me wrong, Mrs. Baxter. I was thinking of my mother who never stopped laughing. I was a baby. She was beautiful, loving and hardly ever went to church.”

“Died in the Camps, I hear? Well, I shall pray for you,” and she took out her handkerchief.

“Mrs. Baxter. I am about to be married. I intend to be very happy. I’ll discover no doubt if I need Jesus Christ. And in what form. If it is in the form of sex and married love, then Jesus is for me. But I haven’t much hope.”

Mrs. Baxter sat thoughtfully. Later in the day when the family were all home again, she still sat thoughtfully. When Amy said that it was time for her to be taken home she said, “I was a bride once.”

“And I bet you looked lovely.”

“Yes, Amy, I did. I had a very good dress, and it has survived. Elisabeth could wear it.”

“Thank you, but I. .”

“Yet I feel that I should like to buy her a new one. I know a dressmaker and his wife who can complete it in three days including covered buttons down the back. I shall see to it all if you will draw me a pattern. I still have my wreath of orange blossom that went round my head, but it is rather flat and discoloured.”

“Oh — I’ll get one made for her,” said Amy. “It can be my present. And I’ll get the shoes. Those green ones she has are the shoes of a whore.”

“What I do possess,” said Mrs. Baxter, “and it will be in perfect condition in a tin trunk against weevils, is a veil of Indian lace. It is patterned with birds and flowers. St. Anne’s lace — a little pun — my name is Anne — made by the nuns in Dacca in what was then Bengal. You shall wear it — no, you shall have it. What use is it to me but as a shroud?”

“Betty — you could keep it for the baby,” said Amy, and the baby hiccuped on yet another bottle, and the other children put rice in their hair.

“My wedding day,” said Mrs. Baxter, “was on a green lawn at the High Commission in Dacca and there were English roses.” She wept.

“Accept,” said Amy. “Quick. For God’s sake.”

“Thank you very much indeed,” said Elisabeth. “I believe your veil will bring me happiness.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t count on that,” said Mrs. Baxter.