Noble House

by James Clavell

  “Yes, yes it is,” Dunross said, barely covering his surprise.

  Bartlett walked over and looked at it. “This the original?”

  “Yes. You know much about art?”

  “No, but Casey told me about Quance as we were coming out here. She said he’s almost like a photographer, really a historian of the early times.”

  “Yes, yes he is.”

  “If I remember this one’s supposed to be a portrait of a girl called May-may, May-may T’Chung, and the child is one of Dirk Struan’s by her?”

  Dunross said nothing, just watched Bartlett’s back.

  Bartlett peered a little closer. “Difficult to see the eyes. So the boy is Gordon Chen, Sir Gordon Chen to be?” He turned and looked at Dunross.

  “I don’t know for certain, Mr. Bartlett. That’s one story.”

  Bartlett watched him for a moment. The two men were well matched, Dunross slightly taller but Bartlett wider in the shoulders. Both had blue eyes, Dunross’s slightly more greenish, both wideset in lived-in faces.

  “You enjoy being tai-pan of the Noble House?” Bartlett asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know for a fact what a tai-pan’s powers are, but in Par-Con I can hire and fire anyone, and can close it down if I want.”

  “Then you’re a tai-pan.”

  “Then I enjoy being a tai-pan too. I want in in Asia—you need an in in the States. Together we could sew up the whole Pacific Rim into a tote bag for both of us.”

  Or a shroud for one of us, Dunross thought, liking Bartlett despite the fact that he knew it was dangerous to like him.

  “I’ve got what you lack, you’ve got what I lack.”

  “Yes,” Dunross said. “And now what we both lack is lunch.”

  They turned for the door. Bartlett was there first. But he did not open it at once. “I know it’s not your custom but since I’m going with you to Taipei, could you call me Linc and I call you Ian and we begin to figure out how much we’re gonna bet on the golf match? I’m sure you know my handicap’s thirteen, officially, and I know yours’s ten, officially, which probably means at least one stroke off both of us for safety.”

  “Why not?” Dunross said at once. “But here we don’t normally bet money, just balls.”

  “I’m goddamned if I’m betting mine on a golf match.”

  Dunross laughed. “Maybe you will, one day. We usually bet half a dozen golf balls here—something like that.”

  “It’s a bad British custom to bet money, Ian?”

  “No. How about five hundred a side, winning team take all?”

  “U.S. or Hong Kong?”

  “Hong Kong. Among friends it should be Hong Kong. Initially.”

  Lunch was served in the directors’ private dining room on the nineteenth floor. It was an L-shaped corner room, with a high ceiling and blue drapes, mottled blue Chinese carpets and large windows from which they could see Kowloon and the airplanes taking off and landing at Kai Tak and as far west as Stonecutters Island and Tsing Yi Island, and, beyond, part of the New Territories. The great, antique oak dining table which could seat twenty easily was laid with placemats and fine silver, and Waterford’s best crystal. For the six of them, there were four silent, very well-trained waiters in black trousers and white tunics embroidered with the Struan emblem.

  Cocktails had been started before Bartlett and Dunross arrived. Casey was having a dry vodka martini with the others—except for Gavallan who had a double pink gin. Bartlett, without being asked, was served an ice-cold can of Anweiser, on a Georgian silver tray.

  “Who told you?” Bartlett said, delighted.

  “Compliments of Struan and Company,” Dunross said. “We heard that’s the way you like it.” He introduced him to Gavallan, deVille and Linbar Struan, and accepted a glass of iced Chablis, then smiled at Casey. “How are you?”

  “Fine, thanks.”

  “Excuse me,” Bartlett said to the others, “but I have to give Casey a message before I forget. Casey, will you call Johnston in Washington tomorrow—find out who our best contact’d be at the consulate here.”

  “Certainly. If I can’t get him I’ll ask Tim Diller.”

  Anything to do with Johnston was code for: how’s the deal progressing? In answer: Diller meant good, Tim Diller very good, Jones bad, George Jones very bad.

  “Good idea,” Bartlett said and smiled back, then to Dunross, “This is a beautiful room.”

  “It’s adequate,” Dunross said.

  Casey laughed, getting the underplay. “The meeting went very well, Mr. Dunross,” she said. “We came up with a proposal for your consideration.”

  How American to come out with it like that—no finesse! Doesn’t she know business is for after lunch, not before. “Yes. Andrew gave me the outline,” Dunross replied. “Would you care for another drink?”

  “No thanks. I think the proposal covers everything, sir. Are there any points you’d like me to clarify?”

  “I’m sure there will be, in due course,” Dunross said, privately amused, as always, by the sir that many American women used conversationally, and often, incongruously, to waiters. “As soon as I’ve studied it I’ll get back to you. A beer for Mr. Bartlett,” he added, once more trying to divert business until later. Then to Jacques, “Ça va?”

  “Oui merci. A rien.” Nothing yet.

  “Not to worry,” Dunross said. Yesterday Jacques’s adored daughter and her husband had had a bad car accident while on holiday in France—how bad he was still waiting to hear. “Not to worry.”

  “No.” Again the Gallic shrug, hiding the vastness of his concern.

  Jacques was Dunross’s first cousin and he had joined Struan’s in ’45. His war had been rotten. In 1940 he had sent his wife and two infants to England and had stayed in France. For the duration. Maquis and prison and condemned and escaped and Maquis again. Now he was fifty-four, a strong, quiet man but vicious when provoked, with a heavy chest and brown eyes and rough hands and many scars.

  “In principle does the deal sound okay?” Casey asked.

  Dunross sighed inwardly and put his full concentration on her. “I may have a counterproposal on a couple of minor points. Meanwhile,” he added decisively, “you can proceed on the assumption that, in general terms, it’s acceptable.”

  “Oh fine,” Casey said happily.

  “Great,” Bartlett said, equally pleased, and raised his can of beer. “Here’s to a successful conclusion and big profits—for you and for us.”

  They drank the toast, the others reading the danger signs in Dunross, wondering what the tai-pan’s counterproposal would be.

  “Will it take you long to finalize, Ian?” Bartlett asked, and all of them heard the Ian. Linbar Struan winced openly.

  To their astonishment, Dunross just said, “No,” as though the familiarity was quite ordinary, adding, “I doubt if the solicitors will come up with anything insurmountable.”

  “We’re seeing them tomorrow at eleven o’clock,” Casey said. “Mr. deVille, John Chen and I. We’ve already gotten their advance go-through … no problems there.”

  “Dawson’s very good—particularly on U.S. tax law.”

  “Casey, maybe we should bring out our tax guy from New York,” Bartlett said.

  “Sure, Linc, soon as we’re set. And Forrester.” To Dunross she said, “He’s head of our foam division.”

  “Good. And that’s enough shoptalk before lunch,” Dunross said. “House rules, Miss Casey: no shop with food, it’s very bad for the digestion.” He beckoned Lim. “We won’t wait for Master John.”

  Instantly waiters materialized and chairs were held out and there were typed place names in silver holders and the soup was ladled.

  The menu said sherry with the soup, Chablis with the fish—or claret with the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding if you preferred it—boiled string beans and boiled potatoes and boiled carrots. Sherry trifle as dessert. Port with the cheese tray.

  “How long will you be stay
ing, Mr. Bartlett?” Gavallan asked.

  “As long as it takes. But Mr. Gavallan, since it looks as though we’re going to be in business together a long time, how about you dropping the ‘Mr.’ Bartlett and the ‘Miss’ Casey and calling us Linc and Casey.”

  Gavallan kept his eyes on Bartlett. He would have liked to have said, Well Mr. Bartlett, we prefer to work up to these things around here—it’s one of the few ways you tell your friends from your acquaintances. For us first names are a private thing. But as the tai-pan hasn’t objected to the astonishing “Ian” there’s not a thing I can do. “Why not, Mr. Bartlett?” he said blandly. “No need to stand on ceremony. Is there?”

  Jacques deVille and Struan and Dunross chuckled inside at the “Mr. Bartlett,” and the way Gavallan had neatly turned the unwanted acceptance into a put-down and a loss of face that neither of the Americans would ever understand.

  “Thanks, Andrew,” Bartlett said. Then he added, “Ian, may I bend the rules and ask one more question before lunch: Can you finalize by next Tuesday, one way or another?”

  Instantly the currents in the room reversed. Lim and the other servants hesitated, shocked. All eyes went to Dunross. Bartlett thought he had gone too far and Casey was sure of it. She had been watching Dunross. His expression had not changed but his eyes had. Everyone in the room knew that the tai-pan had been called as a man will call another in a poker game. Put up or shut up. By next Tuesday.

  They waited. The silence seemed to hang. And hang.

  Then Dunross broke it. “I’ll let you know tomorrow,” he said, his voice calm, and the moment passed and everyone sighed inwardly and the waiters continued and everyone relaxed. Except Linbar. He could still feel the sweat on his hands because he alone of them knew the thread that went through all of the descendents of Dirk Struan—a strange, almost primeval, sudden urge to violence—and he had seen it almost surface then, almost but not quite. This time it had gone away. But the knowledge of it and its closeness terrified him.

  His own line was descended from Robb Struan, Dirk Struan’s half-brother and partner, so he had none of Dirk Struan’s blood in his veins. He bitterly regretted it and loathed Dunross even more for making him sick with envy.

  Hag Struan on you, Ian bloody Dunross, and all your generations, he thought, and shuddered involuntarily at the thought of her.

  “What’s up, Linbar?” Dunross asked.

  “Oh nothing, tai-pan,” he said, almost jumping out of his skin. “Nothing—just a sudden thought. Sorry.”

  “What thought?”

  “I was just thinking about Hag Struan.”

  Dunross’s spoon hesitated in midair and the others stared at him. “That’s not exactly good for your digestion.”

  “No sir.”

  Bartlett glanced at Linbar, then at Dunross. “Who’s Hag Struan?”

  “A skeleton,” Dunross said with a dry laugh. “We’ve lots of skeletons in our family.”

  “Who hasn’t?” Casey said.

  “Hag Struan was our eternal bogeyman—still is.”

  “Not now, tai-pan, surely,” Gavallan said. “She’s been dead for almost fifty years.”

  “Maybe she’ll die out with us, with Linbar, Kathy and me, with our generation, but I doubt it.” Dunross looked at Linbar strangely. “Will Hag Struan get out of her coffin tonight and gobble us up?”

  “I swear to God I don’t like even joking about her like that, tai-pan.”

  “The pox on Hag Struan,” Dunross said. “If she was alive I’d say it to her face.”

  “I think you would. Yes,” Gavallan laughed suddenly. “That I’d like to have seen.”

  “So would I.” Dunross laughed with him, then he saw Casey’s expression. “Ah, just bravado, Casey. Hag Struan was a fiend from hell if you believe half the legends. She was Culum Struan’s wife—he was Dirk Struan’s son—our founder’s son. Her maiden name was Tess, Tess Brock and she was the daughter of Dirk’s hated enemy, Tyler Brock. Culum and Tess eloped in 1841, so the story goes. She was sweet sixteen and a beauty, and the heir to the Noble House. It was rather like Romeo and Juliet—except they lived and it made no difference whatsoever to the blood feud of Dirk against Tyler or the Struans versus the Brocks, it just heightened and complicated it. She was born Tess Brock in 1825 and died Hag Struan in 1917, aged ninety-two, toothless, hairless, besotten, vicious and dreadful to her very last day. Life’s strange, heya?”

  “Yes. Unbelievable sometimes,” Casey said thoughtfully. “Why is it people change so much growing old—get so sour and bitter? Particularly women?”

  Fashion, Dunross could have answered at once, and because men and women age differently. It’s unfair—but an immortal fact. A woman sees the lines beginning and the sagging beginning and the skin no longer so fresh and firm but her man’s still fine and sought after and then she sees the young dolly birds and she’s petrified she’ll lose him to them and eventually she will because he’ll become bored with her carping and the self-fed agony of the self-mutilation—and too, because of his built-in uncontrollable urge toward youth….

  “Ayeeyah, there’s no aphrodisiac in the world like youth,” old Chen-Chen—Phillip Chen’s father—Ian’s mentor would always say. “None, young Ian, there’s none. None none none. Listen to me. The yang needs the yin juices, but young juices, oh yes they should be young, the juices young to extend your life and nourish the yang—oh oh oh! Remember, the older your Male Stalk becomes the more it needs youth and change and young enthusiasm to perform exuberantly, and the more the merrier! But also remember that the Beauteous Box that nests between all their thighs, peerless though it is, delectable, delicious, unearthly, oh so sweet and oh so satisfying as it also is, beware! Ha! It’s also a trap, ambush, torture chamber and your coffin!” Then the old, old man would chuckle and his belly would jump up and down and the tears would run down his face. “Oh the gods are marvelous, are they not? They grant us heaven on earth but it’s living hell when you can’t get your one-eyed monk to raise his head to enter paradise. Joss, my child! That’s our joss—to crave the Greedy Gulley until she eats you up, but oh oh oh …”

  It must be very difficult for women, particularly Americans, Dunross thought, this trauma of growing old, the inevitability of it happening so early, too early—worse in America than anywhere else on earth.

  Why should I tell you a truth you must already know in your bones, Dunross asked himself. Or say further that American fashion demands you try to grasp an eternal youth neither God nor devil nor surgeon can give you. You can’t be twenty-five when you’re thirty-five nor have a thirty-five-year-old youthfulness when you’re forty-five, or forty-five when you’re fifty-five. Sorry, I know it’s unfair but it’s a fact.

  Ayeeyah, he thought fervently, thank God—if there is a God—thank all gods great and small I’m a man and not a woman. I pity you, American lady with the beautiful names.

  But Dunross answered simply, “I suppose that’s because life’s no bed of roses and we’re fed stupid pap and bad values growing up—not like the Chinese who’re so sensible—Christ, how unbelievably sensible they are! In Hag Struan’s case perhaps it was her rotten Brock blood. I think it was her joss—her fate or luck or unluck. She and Culum had seven children, four sons and three daughters. All her sons died violently, two of the ‘flux’—probably plague—here in Hong Kong, one was murdered, knifed in Shanghai, and the last was drowned off Ayr in Scotland, where our family lands are. That’d be enough to send any mother around the bend, that and the hatred and envy that surrounded Culum and her all their lives. But when you add this to all the problems of living in Asia, the passing over of the Noble House to other people’s sons … well, you can understand.” Dunross thought a moment, then added, “Legend has it she ruled Culum Struan all his life and tyrannized the Noble House till the day she died—and all tai-pans, all daughters-in-law, all sons-in-law and all the children as well. Even after she died. I can remember one English nanny I had, may she burn in hell forever, saying
to me, ‘You better behave, Master Ian, or I’ll conjure up Hag Struan and she’ll gobble you up….’ I can’t have been more than five or six.”

  “How terrible,” Casey said.

  Dunross shrugged. “Nannies do that to children.”

  “Not all of them, thank God,” Gavallan said.

  “I never had one who was any good at all. Or a gan sun who was ever bad.”

  “What’s a gan sun?” Casey asked.

  “It means ‘near body,’ it’s the correct name for an amah. In China pre-’49, children of well-to-do families and most of the old European and Eurasian families out here always had their own ‘near body’ to look after them—in many cases they kept them all their lives. Most gan sun take a vow of celibacy. You can always recognize them by the long queue they wear down their back. My gan sun’s called Ah Tat. She’s a great old bird. She’s still with us,” Dunross said.

  Gavallan said, “Mine was more like a mother to me than my real mother.”

  “So Hag Struan’s your great-grandmother?” Casey said to Linbar.

  “Christ no! No, I’m—I’m not from Dirk Struan’s line,” he replied and she saw sweat on his forehead that she did not understand. “My line comes from his half-brother, Robb Struan. Robb Struan was Dirk’s partner. The tai-pan’s descended directly from Dirk, but even so … none of us’re descended from the Hag.”

  “You’re all related?” Casey asked, feeling curious tensions in the room. She saw Linbar hesitate and glance at Dunross as she looked at him.

  “Yes,” he said. “Andrew’s married to my sister, Kathy. Jacques is a cousin, and Linbar … Linbar carries our name.” Dunross laughed. “There’re still lots of people in Hong Kong who remember the Hag, Casey. She always wore a long black dress, with a big bustle and a funny hat with a huge moth-eaten feather, everything totally out of fashion, and she’d have a black stick with a silver handle on it with her. Most times she was carried in a sort of palanquin by four bearers up and down the streets. She wasn’t much more than five foot but round and tough as a coolie’s foot. The Chinese were equally petrified of her. Her nickname was ‘Honorable Old Foreign Devil Mother with the Evil Eye and Dragon’s Teeth.’”