A CHANCE to get to know the Chens better arose. Not that Claire felt she wanted to.
It had been an odd circumstance. Locket’s mother had come into the room after the lesson, looking rather harried. There was something about her that was different these days. She spent most of the time locked up in her room, it seemed, as she was now almost always home when Claire came for Locket’s lesson. And she had lost so much weight she was gaunt.
She started when she saw Claire.
“Oh, Mrs. Pendleton,” she said. “How are you?”
“Fine, thank you.” Claire started to put away her things. It was the end of the hour. Locket had scampered off as soon as Claire had leaned back from the piano.
“I say,” Mrs. Chen began. “You wouldn’t be free for dinner tonight, would you? You and your husband? I know it’s terribly short notice.”
Claire didn’t know what to say. Her mouth opened but nothing came out.
“It would be lovely to have you. Victor and I are having a dinner party, you see…”
And then Claire did see. It was a last-minute invitation. Someone had dropped out and they needed two people without other obligations.
“I’m afraid…”
“Oh, please say you’ll come,” Mrs. Chen cried. “It’s a nice group of people. Government officials as well, so I would think Mr. Pendleton would be interested.” She dangled this before Claire.
“Well…” she said. She knew Martin would want to go.
“It’s settled, then. It’s at The Golden Lotus, a Cantonese restaurant in Central at eight. We have a private room.”
“Thank you so much for the invitation,” Claire had said.
“Do you think they’ll expect us to eat caterpillars or chicken’s feet?” Martin asked at home when told about their sudden plans.
“Who knows what they do,” Claire said. “I won’t eat anything like that.” She watched Martin wet his comb and draw it through his hair.
“What shirt should I wear?” he asked.
“I don’t know why we’re going to this dinner, I really don’t,” she said, but Martin had already left the room to rummage through his shirts. She stared at her face in the mirror. She looked drawn. She powdered her nose and pinched her cheeks for color.
The dinner did not go well. It was difficult to have a conversation with people who talked on a scale Claire was unused to. And they talked about themselves so much!
They had arrived on time, so they were the first other than the Chens, who were standing in a corner having a drink.
“Oh, I’m so glad you could make it,” Melody said, coming toward them. Her gaunt body was enclosed in a fantastic outfit of green silk chiffon with bell sleeves, and she had on emerald chandelier earrings and the most enormous emerald ring Claire had ever seen. She couldn’t take her eyes off the stone.
“Melody,” Claire said, feeling the unfamiliar name on her tongue. She had thought about what she was going to call Mrs. Chen and decided on the way to the restaurant it would be appropriate for her to call Mrs. Chen by her first name since it was a social occasion. “Melody, this is my husband, Martin Pendleton. We met briefly at the beach club.”
Martin and Mr. Chen shook hands.
“I understand you’re in water,” Mr. Chen said. He took Martin over to get a drink from the bartender.
“Your dress is lovely,” Mrs. Chen said of the simple shift Claire had also worn to the Arbogasts’ party on the Peak that day ages ago, when she first met Will. “I adore white, so fresh.” She seemed sincere. Her once-pretty face reminded Claire of a bony chicken, the flesh thin but sagging.
They were perfectly pleasant-ideal hosts, entertaining and engaging, introducing them to every single person who arrived, and yet Claire felt more and more uncomfortable as the night progressed.
She was seated next to a Mr. Anson Ho, who operated textile factories in Shanghai and was setting up new ones in Hong Kong. He made it very clear that the scale was large, and that the British had nothing to do with his success.
“Chinese are very entrepreneurial,” he kept saying. “We will find a way to make money anywhere. The old government did not give enough chances to the local population. The British are very arrogant but they need to realize it is a new age now. The Chinese in Hong Kong need to govern themselves.” He had a red, bulbous nose that suggested too many nights of Cognac. He drank his wine roughly, swirling it around in large circles, gulping it down. She nodded and smiled.
Martin was seated away from her, and was talking to an attractive Brazilian woman. He had drunk a fair amount and his gestures were becoming more animated. Around the table they spoke of Red China, the Koreas, “Rhee is playing with fire,” and what was going on in Myanmar. Opposite Claire was Belle, a woman from America, a journalist, she said, and she declared the harbor in Hong Kong to be inferior to the ones in Sydney and Rio. Belle smoked theatrically and asked Claire’s opinion about the harbor matter and Claire wiped her mouth with her napkin and excused herself to go to the powder room.
There, she found Melody Chen washing her hands nervously, wringing them again and again in the water, looking at herself in the mirror. She jumped when Claire came in. The ring rested on the basin.
“That’s a beautiful stone,” Claire said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“I have to take it off before I wash my hands,” Melody said, drying her hands. “Emeralds are very fragile and I’m afraid I’ll do something to it. It keeps slipping off my finger too.” She picked it up gingerly and slipped it back on. “Such a bother!”
“You’ve lost such a lot of weight,” Claire said. “Are you all right?”
“Fine, yes, fine,” Melody said, not meeting her eye. “I must take better care of myself. Victor says I run around too much.”
Claire didn’t move although she was blocking the way to the door.
“Are you having a good time?” The Chinese woman stepped around her. “Victor and I were so glad you could join us on such short notice. We’re delighted with Locket’s progress-you’ve been a real boon to her musical education.” She held the door open for a moment. “It’s a nice evening, isn’t it?” The door closed behind her.
Claire took one of the cloths carefully folded on the restroom shelf and wiped all the moisture off the basin. It looked pristine again.
When she returned to the table, people were reminiscing about the war and the aftermath.
“What I found extraordinary,” Melody was saying, “was how, after the war, Hong Kong was so friendly then, and there was so much good feeling toward all and sundry, and then when everyone starting coming across the border, that lasted awhile. But now, of course, if someone manages to come over, they’re no longer greeted with such enthusiasm. There are just too many of them, and too many sad stories. Our sympathy has a time limit. You know Betty Liu had some six relatives staying with her for a year. She finally managed to pack them off to Canada but it took some doing. She had to hire three more maids!”
“That must have made for a busy ‘Arrivals and Departures’ column,” Belle said, speaking of the much-read column in the Post that marked those leaving Hong Kong by aircraft, and those who had arrived and were staying at the Gloucester.
“It’s like the tide, the Chinese come and go from China to Hong Kong depending on what turns history takes,” said Victor. “But nothing ever changes too much.”
“Where were you?” Belle asked Melody. “Were you here when the Japanese were?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “Victor saw what was coming far before it did, and he packed me off to California to stay with my college room-mate, who lives in Bel Air. I was pregnant at the time.”
“Very clever of him,” Belle said. “But he’s always been clever.”
Everyone seemed to have history, as if they had all grown up together, although they hailed from all corners of the world. Their language was the same.
“Yes, I’m very lucky,” Melody said. “Victor has always thought ahead.” Her face was still as she said it. There was a slight pause.
“Well!” said Victor. “My prescient self thinks we should play games. Isn’t that what you English love to do at dinner parties?”He directed this question to Claire. “I’m always being forced to play charades and act like a horse. For some reason, that’s viewed as entertainment by your countrymen.”
Claire opened her mouth but nothing came out. Everyone waited for her rejoinder. All she could think of, absurdly, was the phrase “The Communists are coming, the Communists are coming.” It ran through her mind like a jaunty little ditty.
“You should be one to talk, Victor,” Belle said finally, rescuing her. “I’ve seen you crack a monkey’s head open and eat the brains, and think that’s a fine way to spend the evening.”
“Well said!” said a Frenchman. “Good defense is always a good offense!”
As the conversation drifted on, successfully defused by the others, Claire sat quietly, trying to tamp down the flush of pure panic that had enveloped her when everyone’s attention had been mercilessly focused on her for that brief moment. She wished desperately for the evening to be over, even as she felt Melody Chen’s eyes, not unsympathetic, on her, and managed a wan smile.
When she and Martin returned home, he garrulous with wine, she silent, they went to bed upon washing up and changing into their nightclothes.
“Did you find there were a lot of awkward moments tonight?” she asked.
“I didn’t notice, no,” he said.
She wanted to beat him then, for his dumb, unknowing nature, beat him with her fists against his stolid, ignorant chest.
He laid a questioning hand on her shoulder. She turned away and he fell quiet.
“Claire,” he started.
“Martin, I’m exhausted.” She cut him off. “Please.”
He was silent. Then he settled into the sheets and pulled up the blanket. After a pause, a gentle “Good night, dear.”
She didn’t know whom she hated more at that instant: Martin or herself.
The next day she told Will about the ring, how beautiful it was. A strange look came over his face. “It is unforgettable,” he said. “I’ve seen it before.”
“Are emeralds very costly?”
“Some might say that one is without price,” he said.
“You know that particular ring? Has she had it long?”
He laughed, a short, violent laugh.
“You women and your baubles. All the same.”
And he refused to be drawn out further.
“I was at Edwina Storch’s for lunch the other day,” she told him finally. “Do you know her?”
A shadow passed over his face. They were lying in bed together.
“I’ve known her for a while. She’s been in the colony just about longer than anybody else. She’s pleasant enough, I suppose, although she managed to keep herself out of Stanley during the war under very murky circumstances. A survivor, to be sure.” He paused.
“Did you enjoy yourself? The din at these hen parties must be as loud as blazes what with everyone chattering away about their latest frock.”
“Is that what you think we do? Talk about dresses and how to make preserves?”
“Isn’t it?”
“I’ll have you know,” she said, “we have very serious discussions about politics and reparations for war.”
“And amahs,” he said, biting her shoulder. “And where to find the best leg of lamb, and how to entertain your…”
She covered his mouth with hers.
“Do shut up, darling,” she said, thrilling to the notion of being a woman who would say such a thing.
Afterward, she turned to him.
“There was something interesting. Someone said they were going to be digging up all the people who had collaborated with the Japanese during the war and prosecuting them. Do you know anyone who did such a thing?”
“What is it with you today?” he asked. “I feel like I’m being interrogated. Where does this sudden curiosity about everything come from?”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I just want to know. They say war does awful things to people, and I wanted to know if you knew anyone who had really done terrible things and got away with it.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t, and I’m glad of it.”
“Must be awful to live with secrets like that.”
“It must be,” he said. “I imagine you’d want to die sometimes.” He paused. “I say, I don’t know if you would agree but I need to go to Macau to take care of a few matters. Would you think about going with me? Do you think you could make up an excuse to get out for a night?”
This Will, suddenly shy, touched her. It was so rare he asked something of her. He was usually not very kind to her.
Claire couldn’t rest the night before the trip to Macau. She had coasted on the edge of sleep for most of the night, and when she finally got out of bed, she felt light-headed and silvery with exhaustion. She had told Martin the Ladies’ Auxiliary was going bird-watching in the New Territories and making a trip out of it at a member’s weekend house out in Sai Kung.
When she met Will at the terminus, she felt him look at her and imagined he found her sallow. When he wasn’t looking, she pinched her cheeks and bit her lips to bring the color back.
They walked to the pier where the ferry would take them to Macau. There was a crowd forming around the entrance. Policemen were standing around, preventing people from entering. Will went to ask what was going on. He came back while Claire waited by the ticket office, nervous that she would see someone she knew.
“Very unfortunate. A man has jumped off the pier. Apparently he had just lost his job as a cook. He’s being taken to the hospital now, but he’s dead.”
“How awful.”
“Yes. It’s all getting cleared up now, and they’ll be resuming the service.”
The sea was green and brackish. When she stepped onto the gangplank, she could see rubbish floating on the water below. Someone died there today, she thought, and could not reconcile the momentous thought with the dirty surface that had paper wrappers and orange peel floating on it.
Once on the boat, her motion sickness and nervous apprehension merged and made her unable to speak. She sat, trying to focus on one spot on the faraway horizon. Two weathered men in singlets and grimy trousers clambered around the deck, winding and unwinding the thick sea rope around various posts, and pushed the boat off the dock, chattering loudly all the while. Their skin had the texture of brown leather and their teeth were yellow and cracked as they spoke.
Around them were locals, a couple with a baby, the woman exhausted-looking, the baby wailing. Claire’s stomach flipped and she looked away. The baby cried on and on, sickened by the waves. A man dressed in an undershirt read a newspaper. The front page carried a photo of two English sappers who had been lately much in the news for murdering a local woman. They had been sentenced to death yesterday, the first Europeans since the war to get such a punishment.
“Their faces are so young,” she said to Will.
“They’re getting what they deserve,” he said. “Too much the old attitude. They think they can treat the locals like animals. It’s a different world now.”
“The woman was an amah at the barracks.” Claire was not sure if she meant it as innocently as she said it. She had been around Will enough to know it was throwing something down.
“And?” Will said. It was the first time he had been sharp with her.
Later, he told her a story. A family had had their amah follow them while they were being interned during the war. She was to bring them extra food and supplies whenever she could to Stanley camp, which she did, in a large picnic basket. She had been with them for sixteen years, from when she was a young girl, and the family had been very kind to her, so, when they were interned she was determined to show them her loyalty. The amah brought food faithfully, every week, until one week she had not appeared. The day after she was to have come, the family received the same picnic basket. Inside was a small hand, wrapped in dirty towels. “They thought it a funny joke. Of course,” he said, “the truly sadistic Japanese were the exception, but they were all we could think about and all we ever remember. We never knew what happened, whether she had offended someone or done something wrong or was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The story was his apology. She knew he didn’t owe her one. This was how she knew his affection.
At Macau Station there was a portrait of the governor, Commodore Esparteiro, with mustache and white hat, waiting to greet the visitors.
“He looks very distinguished,” Claire said.
They stepped outside passport control to instant chaos. Clamoring men pressed up against the steel fences, waving their hands, shouting.
“Taxi, taxi.” “Car, car, drive you.”
Will went off to the side and negotiated with one quickly in Cantonese. When he spoke the language of the locals, the unfamiliar sounds coming from his familiar mouth, she felt her insides tighten, something more than desire. The driver looked at her, understood instantly. He leered, showing brown, chipped teeth. She looked away and let Will put his arm over her, he instinctively knowing what had just transpired.
“Let’s go now,” she said, grateful for his protection.
“Almost done,” he said, and finished up the bargaining.
In the taxi, the air was thick and it was unbearably hot. Will rolled down the windows. As the car picked up speed, the wind was filled with particles that hit her face, but it seemed churlish to complain at this, the beginning of their romantic escapade.
Here I am, she thought, a woman on an illicit holiday in the Far East with her lover. She looked out at the people on the street. They didn’t know. Her secret was safe with them, their blank Oriental faces, their busy lives unencumbered with her transgressions.
They got out of the taxi at the Hotel Lusitania, off the Largo do Senado.
“This is the center of town,” Will said. “And that over there is Sao Paolo, the white stone façade of an old Jesuit church. It’s just the front that’s left.”
“Was it the war?”
“No, a fire in the 1800s. We’ll go there later. You can still see all the reliefs and carvings. Quite beautiful.”
The lobby was shabby but grand. Will seemed to know his way around.
“Have you been here often?”
“I used to come a fair amount,” he said. “But not in the recent past.” They were shown up to their room by a Chinese bellboy, and when the door closed behind him, they looked at each other, shy once again.
“You look different here,” she said.
“Yes,” he said.
In the waning light of the day, sun streaking through the dusty window, they reacquainted themselves with each other, their displaced bodies somehow new, somehow more thrilling.
Afterward he said, “It’s almost like we’re an old married couple, coming away to a new place together.”
“It’s nice,” she said. His tenderness was new and it unnerved her.
“It is.”
“What is it you have to do here?” she asked.
“I have to pay my respects to someone,” he said.
“Am I to come?”
“If you wish.” He twirled her hair around his fingers. “It doesn’t matter.”
They took a taxi to a cemetery. Will paid the driver and got out. Paint peeled off a dilapidated, vacant guardhouse. A large tin sign with garish red Chinese characters teetered precariously above it.
“A cemetery!” she said. “You know how to treat a girl on holiday.”
“Do you know anything about how the Chinese bury their dead? ” he said, ignoring her.
“No,” she said. “Is it very different from our way?”
“Yes.” He consulted a map on the wall and traced his finger along a route. “Here we go.”
The air seemed thicker here. Claire didn’t want to breathe in, for fear that the essences of the dead would enter into her. She had grown more superstitious despite herself during her time in Hong Kong. In the cemetery, there were tombstones-smallish gray stones with English and Chinese characters interspersed-and paths intricately intercut among the graves, with rough stone steps leading up a hill.
She read the tombstones as they passed.
“ ‘Here lies William Walpole, brother of Henry.’ No other family, I suppose. He died in 1936 at the age of forty-three. And this one, ‘Margaret Potter, beloved.’ I like that one. I think I would want something simple on my tombstone, don’t you?”
Will spoke as if she had not said anything.
“It was very difficult after the war, you know, to catalog the dead. For the most part, they did mass graves. But it was very hard on the families. Not having the body of their loved ones to bury.”
“The ceremony is what comforts, a little, at least, I would think.”
“Yes, these rituals came about for a reason. People need something to focus on, to focus their grief on, and to keep busy. All over the world, rituals are part of death. It makes you hopeful for humans, that they have something in common.”
“In civilized times,” Claire said. “People are different when lives are at stake, not death.”
Will looked up, surprised.
“Yes,” he said. “In civilized times. At other times, all bets are off.”
He grinned.
“My savage mistress,” he said. “You are magnificent today.”
“Can I ask what we’re looking for?”
“An old friend,” he said.
They stopped at the top.
“Chinese like their graveyards to be built on hills. They think it’s more auspicious, and being the class-conscious society they are, they are consistent even in death: the top of the heap is still the top of the heap, as it were.”
The gravestones had given way to small structures, some quite elaborate, with turrets and gates and carved doors, resembling small residences or temples. Some had porcelain urns underneath.
“Do those contain ashes or bones?” she asked.
“Bones,” Will said. “The skull is laid on top.”
He was looking carefully at each little house as he passed. Suddenly he stopped.
“Here we go,” he said.
It was whitewashed stucco, with a wooden door that had an iron knocker in the shape of a dragon. Above the door was a sign with gold Chinese characters.
“We didn’t bring anything,” Claire said.
“We’re not here to give,” Will said. “We’re here to take.”
He pushed the door open and stood outside. He seemed to be waiting for something.
“Will!” Claire said, scandalized. “You’re disturbing the dead!”
“I’m quieting them,” he said, and went inside.