There was a substantial pause. Then I said:
“After this convenient arrangement, do I take it Wang Ku continued to co-operate with your scheme?”
“Don’t be cynical, Puffin.”
“But did he?”
“As it happened, he did. Taking your mother satisfied him. He did as we wished him to do, and I dare say, his contribution was a factor in the companies’ eventual decision to end the trade.”
“So my mother was, you might say, sacrificed for a greater cause.”
“Look, Puffin, it wasn’t anything any of us had a choice about. You must understand that.”
“Did you ever see my mother again? After she was abducted by this man?”
I saw him hesitate. But then he said:
“Yes. As a matter of fact, I did. Once, seven years later. I happened to be travelling through Hunan and accepted Wang’s invitation to be his guest. And there, in his fortress, yes, I did see your mother one last time.”
His voice was now almost a whisper. The phonograph downstairs was no longer playing, so that a stillness hung between us.
“And . . . and what had become of her?”
“She was in good health. She was, of course, one of several concubines. Under the circumstances, I’d say she’d adapted well to her new life.”
“How had she been treated?”
Uncle Philip looked away. Then he said quietly: “When I saw her, she asked about you, naturally. I told her what news I had. She was pleased. You see, until I saw her that time, she’d been utterly cut off from the outside world. For seven years, she’d only heard what Wang chose to have her hear. What I mean is, she didn’t know for certain that the financial arrangement was working. So when I saw her, that’s what she wanted to know, and I was able to reassure her that it was. After seven years of torturous doubt, her mind was put at rest. I can’t tell you how relieved she was. ‘That’s all I wanted to know,’ she kept saying. ‘That’s all I wanted to know.’ ”
He was watching me now very carefully. After another moment, I gave him the question for which he was waiting.
“Uncle Philip, what financial arrangement?”
He looked down at the back of his hands and studied them for a time. “Had it not been for you, her love for you, Puffin, your mother, I know, would have taken her own life without a moment’s hesitation before allowing that scoundrel to lay a finger on her. She would have found a way, and she would have done it. But there was you to consider. So in the end, when she saw the situation for what it was, she made an arrangement. You would be financially provided for in return for . . . for her compliance. I saw to much of it myself, arranged it through the company. There was a man there at Byatt’s, didn’t have a clue what it was all about. Thought he was securing safe passage for his opium. Ha ha! He was a fool, that man!” Uncle Philip shook his head and smiled. Then his face darkened again, as though he were now resigned to the course our conversation would take.
“My allowance,” I said quietly. “My inheritance . . .”
“Your aunt in England. She was never wealthy. Your real benefactor, all these years, has been Wang Ku.”
“So all this time, I’ve been living . . . I’ve been living off . . .” I could not go on and simply stopped.
Uncle Philip nodded. “Your schooling. Your place in London society. The fact that you made of yourself what you have. You owe it to Wang Ku. Or rather, to your mother’s sacrifice.”
He stood up again, and when he looked at me I saw something new in his face, something almost like hatred. But then he turned and moved away into the shadows, and I could see it no more.
“That time I last saw your mother,” he said. “In that fortress. She’d lost all concern for the opium campaign. She only lived for you, worried for you. By that time, the trade had been made illegal. But even that news meant nothing to her any more. Of course I was bitter about it, as were the others of us who’d given years to the campaign. We’d finally achieved our goal, we thought. Opium trade abolished. It only took a year or two to see what abolition really meant. The trade had simply changed hands, that was all. It was now run by Chiang’s government. More addicts than ever, but now it was being peddled to pay for Chiang Kai-shek’s army, to pay for his power. That’s when I joined the Reds, Puffin. Your mother, I thought she’d be devastated to know what our campaign had amounted to, but she no longer cared. All she wanted was for you to be looked after. She only wanted news of you. Do you know, Puffin”—his voice suddenly took on a strange edge—“when I saw her that time, she seemed well enough. But while I was there, I asked others in the household, people who would know. I wanted to find out the truth, find out how she’d really been treated, because . . . because I knew that one day this moment, this meeting we’re having now, was bound to come. And I found out. Oh yes, I found out. Everything.”
“Are you deliberately trying to torment me?”
“It wasn’t just . . . just a matter of surrendering to him in bed. He regularly whipped her in front of his dinner guests. Taming the white woman, he called it. And that wasn’t all. Do you know . . .”
I had already covered my ears, but now shouted out: “Enough! Why torture me like this?”
“Why?” His voice was now angry. “Why? Because I want you to know the truth! All these years, you’ve thought of me as a despicable creature. Perhaps I am, but it’s what this world does to you. I never meant to be like this. I meant to do good in this world. In my way, I once made courageous decisions. And look at me now. You despise me. You’ve despised me all these years, Puffin, the closest thing I ever had to a son, and you despise me still. But now do you see how the world really is? You see what made possible your comfortable life in England? How you were able to become a celebrated detective? A detective! What good is that to anyone? Stolen jewels, aristocrats murdered for their inheritance. Do you suppose that’s all there is to contend with? Your mother, she wanted you to live in your enchanted world for ever. But it’s impossible. In the end it has to shatter. It’s a miracle it survived so long for you. Now, Puffin, here. I’ll give you this chance. Here.”
He had taken out his pistol again. He came from the shadows towards me, and when I looked up, he was looming above me, much as he had done in my childhood. He flung back his jacket and pressed the pistol into his waistcoat near his heart.
“Here,” he said, bending down and whispering so I could smell his stale breath. “Here, boy. You can kill me. As you’ve always wanted to. That’s why I’ve stayed alive so long. No one else should have that privilege. I’ve saved myself, you see, for you. Pull the trigger. Here, look. We’ll make it appear as if I attacked you. I’ll be holding the gun, I’ll fall over you. When they come in, they’ll see my body collapsed over you, it’ll look like self-defence. See, here, I’m holding it. You pull the trigger, Puffin.”
His waistcoat was pushing against my face, moving up and down with his heaving chest. I felt a revulsion, and tried to move away, but his free hand—the skin felt indescribably parched—had grasped my arm in an effort to draw me to him. It occurred to me he would pull the trigger himself if my hand so much as touched the pistol. I pulled back violently, unbalancing my chair, and staggered away from him.
For a second we both glanced guiltily towards the door to see if the commotion would bring in the guards. But nothing happened, and eventually Uncle Philip laughed, and picking up the chair, positioned it carefully in front of the desk. Then he sat on it himself, put the pistol down on the desk, and spent some time recovering his breath. I took a few more steps away from the desk, but there was nothing else in that cavernous room, and I simply came to a stop, my back still turned to him. Then I heard him say:
“All right. Very well.” He took a few more gulps of air. “Then I’ll tell you. I’ll make to you my darkest confession.”
But for the next minute, all I could hear behind me was his heaving breath. Then finally he said:
“Very well. I’ll confess to you the truth. About
why I allowed Wang Ku to kidnap your mother that day. What I said before, yes, it’s true enough. I had to safeguard you. Yes, yes, everything I said earlier more or less stands. But if I’d really wanted to, if I’d really wanted to save your mother, I know I’d have found a way to do so. I’ll tell you something now, Puffin. Something I wasn’t able to confess even to myself for many years. I helped Wang take your mother because a part of me wanted her to become his slave. To be used like that, night after night. Because you see, I always lusted after her, right from the days when I came to be a lodger in your house. Oh yes, I desired her, and when your father went off like that, I believed it was my chance, that I was his natural successor. But . . . but your mother, she’d never looked at me like that, I realised it after your father went away. She respected me as someone decent . . . No, no, it was impossible. Not in a thousand years could I put myself forward to her, not in that sort of way. And I was angry. I was so angry. And when it all happened, with Wang Ku, it excited me. Do you hear me, Puffin? It excited me! After he took her away, in the darkest hours of the night, it excited me. All those years, I lived vicariously through Wang. It was almost as though I’d conquered her too. I gave myself pleasure, many many times, imagining for myself what was happening to her. Now, now, kill me! Why spare me? You’ve heard it! Here, shoot me like a rat!”
For a long time, I went on standing in the darkened part of the room, my back to him, listening to his breathing. Then I turned to him again and said, quite quietly:
“You said earlier you believed my mother was still alive. Is she still with Wang Ku?”
“Wang died four years ago. His army, in any case, was disbanded by Chiang. I don’t know where she is now, Puffin. I honestly don’t.”
“Well. I shall find her. I shan’t give up.”
“It won’t be easy, my boy. There’s war raging through the country. It’ll soon engulf the whole of it.”
“Yes,” I said. “I dare say it will soon engulf the whole world. But that’s not my fault. In fact, it’s no longer my concern. I mean to start again, and this time to find her. Is there anything else you can tell me to help with my search?”
“I’m afraid not, Puffin. I’ve told you everything.”
“Then goodbye, Uncle Philip. I’m sorry I’m not able to oblige you.”
“Don’t worry. No shortage of people willing to oblige the Yellow Snake.” He gave a quick laugh. Then he said in a weary voice: “Goodbye, Puffin. I hope you find her.”
PART SEVEN
LONDON,
14TH NOVEMBER 1958
CHAPTER 23
IT WAS MY FIRST LONG TRIP in many years, and for two days after our arrival in Hong Kong I remained quite fatigued. Air travel is impressively fast, but the conditions are cramped and disorientating. My hip pains returned with a vengeance and a headache lingered for much of my stay, which no doubt jaundiced my view of that colony. I know of those who have made the trip out there and returned full of praise. “A forward-looking place,” they always say. “And astonishingly beautiful.” Yet for much of that week, the skies were overcast, the streets oppressively crowded. I suppose I did appreciate here and there—in the Chinese signs outside the shops, or just in the sight of the Chinese going about their business in the markets—some vague echo of Shanghai. But then again, such echoes were more often than not discomforting. It was as though I had come upon, at one of those dullish supper parties I attend in Kensington or Bayswater, a distant cousin of a woman I once loved; whose gestures, facial expressions, little shrugs nudge the memory, but who remains, overall, an awkward, even grotesque parody of a much-cherished image.
I was in the end glad of Jennifer’s company. When she had first hinted she should come with me, I had deliberately ignored her. For even by that late stage—I am speaking of only five years ago—she was still tending to regard me as some sort of invalid, especially whenever the past, or else the Far East, re-emerged in my life. I suppose a part of me had long resented this oversolicitousness, and it was only when it occurred to me she genuinely wished to get away from things for a while—that she had her own worries, and that such a trip might do her good—that I agreed we should travel together.
It had been Jennifer’s suggestion that we try and extend our journey to Shanghai, and I suppose this would not have been impossible. I could have spoken to a few old acquaintances, men who still have influence at the Foreign Office, and I am sure we could have gained entry into mainland China without undue difficulty. I know of others who have done just that. But then by all accounts, Shanghai today is a ghostly shadow of the city it once was. The communists have refrained from physically tearing the place down, so that much of what was once the International Settlement remains intact. The streets, though renamed, are perfectly recognisable, and it is said that anyone familiar with the Shanghai of old would know his way about there. But the foreigners, of course, have all been banished, and what were once lavish hotels and night-clubs are now the bureaucratic offices of Chairman Mao’s government. In other words, the Shanghai of today is likely to prove no less painful a parody of the old city than did Hong Kong.
I have heard, incidentally, that much of the poverty—and also the opium addiction against which my mother once battled so hard—has receded significantly under the communists. How deeply these evils have been eradicated remains to be seen, but it would certainly appear that communism has been able to achieve in a handful of years what philanthropy and ardent campaigning could not in decades. I remember wondering to myself what my mother would have made of such a reflection that first night we spent in Hong Kong, as I paced around my room at the Excelsior Hotel, nursing my hip and trying in general to regain my equilibrium.
I did not go to Rosedale Manor until our third day. It had long been understood that I would make the trip alone, and Jennifer, though she watched my every move throughout the morning, saw me off after lunch with no undue fuss.
That afternoon the sun had actually broken through, and as I climbed the hill-slopes in my taxi, the well-manicured lawns on each side were being watered and mown by teams of gardeners stripped to their vests. Eventually the ground levelled off and the taxi pulled up in front of a large white house built in a British colonial style with long rows of shuttered windows and an additional wing sprawling from its side. It must once have been a splendid residence, overlooking as it did the water and much of the west side of the island. When I stood in the breeze and looked across the harbour, I could see right into the distance to where a cable-car was climbing a faraway hill. Turning to the house itself, however, I saw it had been allowed to grow shabby; the paint on the window ledges and door frames in particular had cracked and peeled.
Inside, in the hallway, there was a faint smell of boiled fish, but the place looked spotlessly clean. A Chinese nun led me down an echoing corridor to the office of Sister Belinda Heaney, a woman in her mid-forties with a serious, slightly dour expression. And it was there, in that cramped little office, that I was told of how the woman they knew as “Diana Roberts” had come to them through a liaison organisation working with foreigners stranded in communist China. All the Chinese authorities had known of her when handing her over was that she had been living in an institution for the mentally ill in Chunking since the end of the war.
“It’s possible she’d spent most of the war there too,” Sister Belinda said. “It hardly bears thinking about, Mr. Banks, what sort of place that was. A person, once incarcerated in such a place, could easily never be heard of again. It was only because she was a white woman she was singled out at all. The Chinese didn’t know what to do with her. After all, they want all foreigners out of China. So eventually she was referred here, and she’s been with us now for nearly two years. When she first came to us, she was very agitated. But within a month or two, all the usual benefits of Rosedale Manor, the peace, the order, the prayers, began to do their work. You wouldn’t recognise her now as the poor creature who arrived here. She’s so much calmer. You’re a relative,
did you say?”
“Yes, it’s certainly possible,” I said. “And since I was in Hong Kong, I thought it only right I paid a visit. It’s the least I could do.”
“Well, any news of kin, close friends, any link with England, we’d be very glad to hear about. Meanwhile, a visitor is always welcome.”
“Does she have many?”
“She has visitors regularly. We run a scheme with the pupils of St. Joseph’s College.”
“I see. And does she get on well with the other residents?”
“Oh yes. And she’s no trouble to us at all. If only we could say the same about some of the others!”
Sister Belinda led me down another corridor to a large sunny room—it had perhaps once been the dining room—where twenty or so females all dressed in beige smocks were sitting or shuffling about. French doors were open to the grounds outside, and the sunlight was falling through the windows across the parquet flooring. Had it not been for the large number of vases filled with fresh flowers, I might have mistaken the room for a children’s nursery; there were bright watercolours pinned all over the walls, and at various points, little tables with draughts, playing cards, paper and crayons. Sister Belinda left me standing by the entrance while she went over to another nun sitting at an upright piano, and a number of the women stopped what they were doing to stare at me. Others appeared to become self-conscious and tried to hide themselves. Almost all were Westerners, though I could see one or two Eurasians. Then someone started to wail loudly somewhere in the building behind me, and curiously, this had the effect of putting the women at their ease. One wiry-headed lady nearby grinned at me and said:
“Don’t you worry, love, it’s only Martha. She’s bloomin’ well off again!”
I could hear Yorkshire in her accent and was wondering what tides of fate had brought her to this place, when Sister Belinda returned.
“Diana should be outside,” she said. “If you’d follow me, Mr. Banks.”
When We Were Orphans Page 30