Noble House

by James Clavell

  “He’s not invited to my house. Any of my houses.”

  “Isn’t it time you relaxed a little, let bygones be bygones?”

  “No, I know him, you don’t. Robin has his life and we have ours, that’s what he and I agreed years ago. No, I’ve no wish to see him ever again. He’s awful, dangerous, foul-mouthed and a bloody bore.”

  Dunross laughed. “I agree he’s obnoxious and I detest his politics—but he’s only one of a half dozen MPs. This delegation’s important. I should do something to entertain them, Penn.”

  “Please do, Ian. But preferably not here—or else tell me in good time so I can have the vapors and see that the children do the same. It’s a matter of face and that’s the end of it.” Penelope tossed her head and shook off her mood. “God! Let’s not let him spoil this evening! What’s this Marlowe doing in Hong Kong?”

  “He’s a writer. Wants to do a book on Hong Kong, he said. He lives in America now. His wife’s coming too. Oh, by the way, I also invited the Americans, Linc Bartlett and Casey Tcholok.”

  “Oh!” Penelope Dunross laughed. “Oh well, four or forty extra won’t make any difference at all—I won’t know most of them anyway, and Claudia’s organized everything with her usual efficiency.” She arched an eyebrow. “So! A gun-runner amongst the pirates! That won’t even cause a ripple.”

  “Is he?”

  “Everyone says so. Did you see the piece in this afternoon’s Mirror, Ian? Ah Tat’s convinced the American is bad joss—she informed the whole staff, the children and me—so that makes it official. Ah Tat told Adryon that her astrologer insisted she tell you to watch out for bad influence from the East. Ah Tat’s sure that means the Yanks. Hasn’t she bent your ear yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “God, I wish I could chatter Cantonese like you and the children. I’d tell that old harpy to keep her superstitions and opinions to herself—she’s a bad influence.”

  “She’d give her life for the children.”

  “I know she’s your gan sun and almost brought you up and thinks she’s God’s gift to the Dunross clan. But as far as I’m concerned she’s a cantankerous, loathsome old bitch and I hate her.” Penelope smiled sweetly. “I hear the American girl’s pretty.”

  “Attractive—not pretty. She’s giving Andrew a bad time.”

  “I can imagine. A lady talking business! What are we coming to in this great world of ours? Is she any good?”

  “Too soon to tell. But she’s very smart. She’s—she’ll make things awkward certainly.”

  “Have you seen Adryon tonight?”

  “No—what’s up?” he asked, instantly recognizing the tone of voice.

  “She’s been into my wardrobe again—half my best nylons are gone, the rest are scattered, my scarves are all jumbled up, my new blouse’s missing and my new belt’s disappeared. She’s even whipped my best Hermès … that child’s the end!”

  “Nineteen’s hardly a child,” he said wearily.

  “She’s the end! The number of times I’ve told her!”

  “I’ll talk to her again.”

  “That won’t do a bit of good.”

  “I know.”

  She laughed with him. “She’s such a pill.”

  “Here.” He handed her a slim box. “Happy twentieth!”

  “Oh thank you, Ian. Yours is downstairs. You’ll…” She stopped and opened the box. It contained a carved jade bracelet, the jade inset into silver filigree, very fine, very old—a collector’s piece. “Oh how lovely, thank you, Ian.” She put it on her wrist over the thin gold chain she was wearing and he heard neither real pleasure nor real disappointment under her voice, his ears tuned to her. “It’s beautiful,” she said and leaned forward and brushed her lips against his cheek. “Thank you, darling. Where did you get it? Taiwan?”

  “No, here on Cat Street. At Wong Chun Kit’s, he ga—”

  The door flew open and a girl barreled in. She was tall and slim and oh so fair and she said in a breathless rush, “I hope it’s all right I invited a date tonight and I just had the call that he’s coming and he’ll be late but I thought it’d be okay. He’s cool. And very trick.”

  “For the love of God, Adryon,” Dunross said mildly, “how many times do I have to ask you to knock before you charge in here and would you kindly talk English? What the hell’s trick?”

  “Good, great, cool, trick. Sorry, Father, but you really are rather square because cool and trick are very in, even in Hong Kong. See you soon, have to dash, after the party I’m going out—I’ll be late so don’t—”

  “Wait a min—”

  “That’s my blouse, my new blouse,” Penelope burst out. “Adryon, you take it off this minute! I’ve told you fifty times to stay the hell out of my wardrobe.”

  “Oh, Mother,” Adryon said as sharply, “you don’t need it, can’t I borrow it for this evening?” Her tone changed. “Please? Pretty please? Father, talk to her.” She switched to perfect amah Cantonese, “Honorable Father … please help your Number One Daughter to achieve the unachievable or I shall weep weep weep oh ko …” Then back into English in the same breath, “Mother … you don’t need it and I’ll look after it, truly. Please?”

  “No.”

  “Come on, pretty please, I’ll look after it, I promise.”

  “No.”

  “Mother!”

  “Well if you pr—”

  “Oh thanks.” The girl beamed and turned and rushed out and the door slammed behind her.

  “Jesus bloody Christ,” Dunross said sourly, “why the hell does a door always happen to slam behind her!”

  “Well at least it’s not deliberate now.” Penelope sighed. “I don’t think I could go through that siege again.”

  “Nor me. Thank God Glenna’s reasonable.”

  “It’s purely temporary, Ian. She takes after her father, that one, like Adryon.”

  “Huh! I don’t have a filthy temper,” he said sharply. “And since we’re on the subject I hope to God Adryon has found someone decent to date instead of the usual shower! Who is this she’s bringing?”

  “I don’t know, Ian. This is the first I’ve heard of it too.”

  “They’re always bloody awful! Her taste in men’s appalling.… Remember that melon-headed berk with the neolithic arms that she was ‘madly in love with’? Christ Jesus, she was barely fifteen an—”

  “She was almost sixteen.”

  “What was his name? Ah yes, Byron. Byron for chrissake!”

  “You really shouldn’t have threatened to blow his head off, Ian. It was just puppy love.”

  “It was gorilla bloody love, by God,” Dunross said even more sourly. “He was a bloody gorilla.… You remember that other one, the one before bloody Byron—the psychiatric bastard … what was his name?”

  “Victor. Yes, Victor Hopper. He was the one … oh yes, I remember, he was the one who asked if it was all right if he slept with Adryon.”

  “He what?”

  “Oh yes.” She smiled up at him so innocently. “I didn’t tell you at the time … thought I’d better not.”

  “He what?”

  “Don’t get yourself all worked up, Ian. That’s at least four years ago. I told him no, not at the moment, Adryon’s only fourteen, but yes, certainly, when she was twenty-one. That was another that died on the vine.”

  “Jesus Christ! He asked you if he co—”

  “At least he asked, Ian! That was something. It’s all so very ordinary.” She got up and poured more champagne into his glass, and some for herself. “You’ve only got another ten years or so of purgatory, then there’ll be the grandchildren. Happy anniversary and the best of British to you!” She laughed and touched his glass and drank and smiled at him.

  “You’re right again,” he said and smiled back, liking her very much. So many years, good years. I’ve been lucky, he thought. Yes. I was blessed that first day. It was at his RAF station at Biggin Hill, a warm, sunny August morning in 1940 during the Battle of Brita
in and she was a WAAF and newly posted there. It was his eighth day at war, his third mission that day and first kill. His Spitfire was latticed with bullet holes, parts of his wing gone, his tail section tattooed. By all the rules of joss, he should be dead but he wasn’t and the Messerschmitt was and her pilot was and he was home and safe and blood raging, drunk with fear and shame and relief that he had come back and the youth he had seen in the other cockpit, the enemy, had burned screaming as he spiraled.

  “Hello, sir,” Penelope Grey had said. “Welcome home sir. Here.” She had given him a cup of hot sweet tea and she had said nothing else though she should have begun debriefing him at once—she was in Signals. She said nothing but smiled and gave him time to come out of the skies of death into life again. He had not thanked her, just drank the tea and it was the best he had ever had.

  “I got a Messerschmitt,” he had said when he could talk, his voice trembling like his knees. He could not remember unsnapping his harness or getting out of his cockpit or climbing into the truck with the other survivors. “It was a 109.”

  “Yes sir, Squadron Leader Miller has already confirmed the kill and he says to please get ready, you’re to scramble any minute again. You’re to take Poppa Mike Kilo this time. Thank you for the kill, sir, that’s one less of those devils … oh how I wish I could go up with you to help you all kill those monsters….”

  But they weren’t monsters, he thought, at least the first pilot and first plane that he had killed had not been—just a youth like himself, perhaps the same age, who had burned screaming, died screaming, a flaming falling leaf, and this afternoon or tomorrow or soon it would be his turn—too many of them, the enemy, too few of us.

  “Did Tommy get back, Tom Lane?”

  “No sir, sorry sir. He … the squadron leader said Flight Lieutenant Lane was jumped over Dover.”

  “I’m petrified of burning, going down,” he had said.

  “Oh you won’t, sir, not you. They won’t shoot you down. I know. You won’t, sir, no, not you. They’ll never get you, never never never,” she had said, pale blue eyes, fair hair and fair of face, not quite eighteen but strong, very strong and very confident.

  He had believed her and her faith had carried him through four more months of missions—sometimes five missions each day—and more kills and though she was wrong and later he was blown out of the sky, he lived and burned only a little. And then, when he came out of the hospital, grounded forever, they had married.

  “Doesn’t seem like twenty years,” he said, holding in his happiness.

  “Plus two before,” she said, holding in her happiness.

  “Plus two be—”

  The door opened. Penelope sighed as Ah Tat stalked into the room, talking Cantonese fifty to the dozen, “Ayeeyah, my Son, but aren’t you ready yet, our honored guests will be here any moment and your tie’s not tied and that motherless foreigner from North Kwantung brought unnecessarily into our house to cook tonight … that smelly offspring of a one-dollar strumpet from North Kwantung where all the best thieves and worst whores come from who fancies himself a cook … ha! … This man and his equally despicable foreign staff is befouling our kitchen and stealing our peace. Oh ko,” the tiny wizened old woman continued without a breath as her clawlike fingers reached up automatically and deftly tied his tie, “and that’s not all! Number Two Daughter … Number Two Daughter just won’t put on the dress that Honorable First Wife has chosen for her and her rage is flying to Java! Eeeee, this family! Here, my Son,” she took the telex envelope out of her pocket and handed it to Dunross, “here’s another barbarian message bringing more congratulations for this happy day that your poor old Mother had to carry up the stairs herself on her poor old legs because the other good-for-nothing servants are good for nothing and bone idle….” She paused momentarily for breath.

  “Thank you, Mother,” he said politely.

  “In your Honorable Father’s day, the servants worked and knew what to do and your old Mother didn’t have to endure dirty strangers in our Great House!” She walked out muttering more curses on the caterers. “Now don’t you be late, my Son, otherwise …” She was still talking after she’d closed the door.

  “What’s up with her?” Penelope asked wearily.

  “She’s rattling on about the caterers, doesn’t like strangers—you know what she’s like.” He opened the envelope. In it was the folded telex.

  “What was she saying about Glenna?” his wife asked, having recognized yee-chat, Second Daughter, though her Cantonese was minimal.

  “Just that she was having a fit about the dress you picked for her.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Ah Tat didn’t say. Look, Penn, perhaps Glenna should just go to bed—it’s almost past her bedtime now and sh—”

  “Dreamer! No chance till hell freezes over. Even Hag Struan wouldn’t keep Glenna from her first grown-up as she calls it! You did agree Ian, you agreed, I didn’t, you did!”

  “Yes, but don’t you th—”

  “No. She’s quite old enough. After all she’s thirteen going on thirty.” Penelope calmly finished her champagne. “Even so I shall now deal with that young lady never mind.” She got up. Then she saw his face. He was staring at the telex.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “One of our people’s been killed. In London. Grant. Alan Medford Grant.”

  “Oh. I don’t know him, do I?”

  “I think you met him once in Ayrshire. He was a small, pixyish man. He was at one of our parties at Castle Avisyard—it was on our last leave.”

  She frowned. “Don’t remember.” She took the offered telex. It read: “Regret to inform you A. M. Grant was killed in motorcycle accident this morning. Details will follow when I have them. Sorry. Regards, Kiernan.”

  “Who’s Kiernan?”

  “His assistant.”

  “Grant’s … he was a friend?”

  “In a way.”

  “He’s important to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, sorry.”

  Dunross forced himself to shrug and keep his voice level. But in his mind he was cursing obscenely. “Just one of those things. Joss.”

  She wanted to commiserate with him, recognizing at once the depth of his shock. She knew he was greatly perturbed, trying to hide it—and she wanted to know immediately the who and the why of this unknown man. But she held her peace.

  That’s my job, she reminded herself. Not to ask questions, to be calm and to be there—to pick up the pieces, but only when I’m allowed to. “Are you coming down?”

  “In a moment.”

  “Don’t be long, Ian.”

  “Yes.”

  “Thanks again for my bracelet,” she said, liking it very much and he said, “It’s nothing,” but she knew he had not really heard her. He was already at the phone asking for long distance. She walked out and closed the door quietly and stood miserably in the long corridor that led to the east and west wings, her heart thumping. Curse all telexes and all telephones and curse Struan’s and curse Hong Kong and curse all parties and all hangers-on and oh how I wish we could leave forever and forget Hong Kong and forget work and the Noble House and Big Business and the Pacific Rim and the stock market and all curs—

  “Motherrrrr!”

  She heard Glenna’s voice screeching from the depths of her room around the far corner in the east wing and at once all her senses concentrated. There was frustrated rage in Glenna’s voice, but no danger, so she did not hurry, just called back, “I’m coming … what is it, Glenna?”

  “Where are youuuuu?”

  “I’m coming, darling,” she called out, her mind now on important things. Glenna will look pretty in that dress, she thought. Oh I know, she told herself happily, I’ll lend her my little rope of pearls. That’ll make it perfect.

  Her pace quickened.

  Across the harbor in Kowloon, Divisional Staff Sergeant Tang-po, CID, the High Dragon, climbed the rickety stairs and went
into the room. The inner core of his secret triad was already there. “Get this through that bone some of you carry between your ears: the Dragons want Noble House Chen found and these pox-dripping, dung-eating Werewolves caught so fast even gods will blink!”

  “Yes, Lord,” his underlings chorused, shocked at the quality of his voice.

  They were in Tang-po’s safe house, a small, drab three-room apartment behind a drab front door on the fifth floor of an equally drab apartment building over very modest shops in a dirty alley just three blocks from their police headquarters of Tsim Sha Tsui District that faced the harbor and the Peak on the tip of Kowloon Peninsula. There were nine of them: one sergeant, two corporals, the rest constables—all plainclothes detectives of the CID, all Cantonese, all handpicked and sworn with blood oaths to loyalty and secrecy. They were Tang-po’s secret tong or Brotherhood, which protected all street gambling in Tsim Sha Tsui District.

  “Look everywhere, talk to everyone. We have three days,” Tang-po said. He was a strongly built man of fifty-five with slightly graying hair and heavy eyebrows and his rank was the highest he could have and not be an officer. “This is the order of me—all my Brother Dragons—and the High One himself. Apart from that,” he added sourly, “Big Mountain of Dung has promised to demote and post us to the border or other places, all of us, if we fail, and that’s the first time he’s ever threatened that. All gods piss from a great height on all foreign devils, particularly those motherless fornicators who won’t accept their rightful squeeze and behave like civilized persons!”

  “Amen!” Sergeant Lee said with great fervor. He was a sometimes Catholic because in his youth he had gone to a Catholic school.

  “Big Mountain of Dung made it quite clear this afternoon: results, or off to the border where there’s not a pot to piss in and no squeeze within twenty miles. Ayeeyah, all gods protect us from failure!”

  “Yes,” Corporal Ho said for all of them, making a note in his book. He was a sharp-featured man who was studying at night school to become an accountant, and it was he who kept the Brotherhood’s books and minutes of their meetings.