China Seas

by John Harris

  Henry Moberley had never mentioned Vladivostok to him again and when they met at the Club he merely nodded and passed the time of day. But Willie was under no delusions that he had failed to notice Nadya and how she had clung to Willie’s arm and kissed him goodbye. What was he up to? What was he waiting for?

  Wishart’s, he heard, was sinking and he gave them only another few years before someone offered to buy them out. He wouldn’t have minded buying what was left of the firm himself, but he knew Emmeline would never sell to him and, anyway, he wasn’t sure there would be much left beyond the buildings.

  Leaving the office, for the first time in his life he found he didn’t want to go home. Instead, he went to the wharves, where one of his ships was washing deep tanks where coal had been carried, so she could take on a cargo of copra, sugar, spices, tobacco and gum for Java. He itched to go with her. He enjoyed Java, with its bumboats of turbaned, saronged Malays – barbers, tailors, dhoby men, cigar sellers, bootmakers, fruit hawkers and money changers. The scarlet mouths of the betel chewers gave the place a barbaric look and he always brought things back – battak, carvings, a decorative kris, all of which, as usual, Abigail immediately consigned to the spare room.

  When he finally arrived home, she was in the garden toying with a trowel. The garden had always been one of her delights and she spent a lot of her time there. When she saw him, she straightened up. ‘Jossman?’ she asked, and returned to the house to mix him a gin. She seemed quiet and uncertain and he was nervous. They had been talking for some time before she came into the open.

  ‘Willie,’ she said slowly. ‘Emmeline Wishart came to see me.’

  His heart thumped inside his chest and he tried to make light of something he knew was not going to be light.

  ‘Wanting us to buy her out, was she?’ he asked. ‘I wouldn’t have thought she’d ever have offered to us.’

  ‘Willie, it wasn’t about selling,’ Abigail said.

  ‘It wasn’t?’

  ‘No. Her husband saw you in Vladivostok.’

  Willie swallowed his drink and bent over the bottle to mix himself another one so she wouldn’t see his face.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘I saw him on the ship. Can’t stand the damn man.’

  ‘She tried to tell me that it wasn’t all business you were up to while you were there,’ Abigail said quietly.

  ‘What? What did she try to tell you?’

  ‘She said he saw you with your friend, Nadya Kourganova–’

  ‘Our friend, Abigail,’ Willie said quickly. ‘It’s you she sends things to.’

  ‘Yes, Willie.’ Abigail’s face was solemn and there was no hint of amusement. ‘Emmeline said he told her that you stayed at her home.’

  ‘He did?’ Willie’s heart went cold. Here it came. The denouncement. The scene. The threats. Divorce? Oh, God, no, not that! He drew a deep breath, trying to speak. But the words stuck in his throat. ‘What did you say?’ he managed at last.

  ‘I told her not to talk nonsense.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘She was very insistent, though.’ Abigail’s voice was gentle but very steady. ‘I said you often stayed with clients when business was involved. I said that I did a lot of business with Kourganov’s also and that you were doubtless looking after my interests.’

  Willie held his breath. ‘What happened?’ he asked.

  ‘She continued to insist, but I just laughed at her. I think she went away disappointed.’

  She put down her glass, crossed to him and kissed him on the cheek. ‘And now I’d better get back to the garden,’ she said. ‘There’s a lot to do.’

  She left him standing alone as she disappeared through the French windows. For a moment he hardly dared breathe. Did she know? Was it a warning she was giving him, uttered in Abigail’s own special way, quietly, without hysteria, knowing everything and offering him another chance.

  It was a long time before he dared move.

  Four

  Shanghai had done well out of the war. It had not been much touched and its taipans had kept the flag flying by using their profits to lay the foundations for huge new businesses.

  The city was expanding rapidly now, making money fast, indifferent to what the future might bring, ruled not by a governor-general from England but by the very businessmen who had created it and were not anxious to introduce any rules that would handicap their efforts to make money. It had a magnificent geographical position because it not only had access to the China Seas and all the countries around it but also to the hinterland of China via the Yangtze, to which it was completely bound, a river which cut its way through mountain and plain, from snow to desert, through the gorges of Szechwan and rocky Chungking, before finally flowing through a rich fertile plain dotted with farms, towns and cities to the sea. It was the most prosperous area in Asia.

  It was an extraordinary city, stiff-collared Europeans selling to Chinese merchants in flowered silk gowns and black skull caps who sat at their doors shielding their eyes from the sun with a fan. It was a city of contrasts in which nothing was done in moderation. It was already rich and had the biggest houses, offices and commercial establishments in the East. But the corpses of starved Chinese were regularly picked up in its wide streets and the narrow alleys of the poor ran within a stone’s throw, while penniless prostitutes and Chinese courtesans living like princesses existed cheek-by-jowl with self-important European housewives.

  No one could call it beautiful, but it was alive, the bund the centre, the heart with the great trading houses, among which suddenly Sarth’s was beginning to be noticed. It was an area of offices and godowns, and pavements crowded with messengers, businessmen, clerks, hawkers offering cold drinks or cooking meals on their portable stoves to bring the spicy smells of food from every province of China. There were people selling silk; professional letter-writers with their tiny desks, ink and brushes, dashing off decorated ideographs on crinkly paper for lovesick youths; shoeshine boys; coolies gambling away their wages; story-tellers, beating a little song at the end of every sing-song line, their heroes’ fortunes obvious in the face of the listeners. Though there was the constant sound of money changing hands and enormous deals taking place, they were still incredibly on the edge of the Middle Ages, with beggars of every category – blind, diseased, legless on little platforms. Among them plodded the indifferent coolies with their carrying poles that raised huge callouses on their shoulders calling out a warning to the people ahead. Electric tramcars had arrived now, grinding round corners, usually towing a trailer in which the poor, separated from the prosperous, carried their chickens and pigs and vegetables. Motor cars, appearing in large numbers now, pushed their way among the older traditional wheelbarrows, pedicabs and rickshaws, while round the jetties that projected into the river swarmed every kind of vessel imaginable, from sampans and junks to three-tiered ferries, great steamers heading hundreds of miles inland up the Yangtze, huge naval vessels and the flat-iron-shaped gunboats which kept order round the foreign concessions upstream.

  To its European inhabitants, Shanghai was considered unique. It was never quite sure what nationality it was supposed to be, because it celebrated Empire Day, St George’s Day, St Andrew’s Day, St David’s Day, the Fourth of July, Bastille Day, Washington’s birthday, Garibaldi, Burns Night and Hallowe’en; there was every kind of currency from Mexican silver dollars to Maria Theresas; with every adventurer in the world there to spend them and every man with a nose for business anxious to make a fortune. You arrived in Shanghai either to make money or to dodge something you dreaded. That was enough, and nobody asked questions because it didn’t pay. There were too many nefarious undertakings going on in the place, which was not only the centre of all missionary work in the Far East but also the centre of the drug trade. At night, the place reeked of the smell of opium and the perfume of the sing-song girls and the women who haunted the street corners. In addition, it was the known centre of piracy and now, with the passing of the Volstead Act
in the United States banning all alcohol, it had, like Canada, immediately become a source of illegal booze, which made its way in fast ships across the Pacific.

  It had never been a quiet place and there was always violence on its streets – to Shanghailanders, Hong Kong was considered tame – but to Willie Sarth, despite its faults it had become home. The Sarth fleet had been made up in numbers as the ships of former enemies, taken as reparations for the war, became available. Two former Turkish ships, the Sivrihisar and the Yuzbasi Hika, neither very salubrious but both in good mechanical condition, had been acquired and, with the Dahinda, her near-mortal wounds repaired, back in service, the fleet now stood at eight ships, while, under the intelligent guiding hand of George Kee, Sarth’s trading had increased its business enormously. Setting the company’s store room beneath its office, Kee had made it possible to superintend everything easily, from the invoices and the contracts to the loading of the ships with the produce of the Yangtze basin. Coolies merely had to cross the road, picking their way to the water’s edge between the thronging cars, carts and the ancient buffalo waggons, laden with sacks, cotton bales, hides, silk, tea, peanuts, sesame seed and wood oil for the manufacture of paint.

  Hotels for the businessmen from Europe had sprung up, but all the time there was always that special smell known to the old-timers as the Bouquet d’Orient, the smell of the foo-foo boats that carried away what was delicately known as ‘night soil’, the smell of refuse, of drains emptying into the muddy water of Soochow Creek, of spices and Chinese cooking. A cathedral had sprung up with all the adjoining ecclesiastical buildings, where Anglican officials pushed past hawking, spitting Chinese, and the homeless huddled together in groups at night to keep warm.

  Only half a mile away lay the old Chinese city, a labyrinth of narrow potholed streets with horrifying slums and open drains peopled by blue-clad coolies and grave-looking merchants in the traditional silk gowns; artisans working in open shops at ivory, jade, brass or gold; coffin makers; cross-legged tailors; bold-faced girls aware of their value; a barber shaving a customer in the street with a triangular razor that looked like a paint scraper, cleaning ears, eyelids, nostrils, and working arms, necks and spines like an osteopath. Among the floating red and yellow banners that announced the owner’s trade, every street was festooned with laundry, the vividness of the colours incongruous against the smell of the sewers.

  Brand new houses, bought from the profits of the war, were springing up in the area near the Bubbling Well Road and the Avenue Joffre, each one with its huge American automobile. To serve the people who lived there, new European shops had opened and in the hotels had arrived a new phenomenon, tea dances at which Willie’s old enemy, Yip Hsao-Li, regularly appeared with twinkling patent leather feet. He still seemed to make money. Opium, Willie wondered. Could it be opium? Girls? There was always a traffic in girls in Shanghai from the day when they were given away as babies. It couldn’t be gold because prices had fallen a lot since the war and there was little to be gained. He often wished he knew what Yip dealt with so that, if it were honest, he could deal in it himself. But Yip never seemed to think of anything but dancing. With his slim, slight figure, he was good at it, twirling his partners in the waltz, the foxtrot, and the veleta, which he particularly enjoyed. They were never professional dancers and it was said that they were always selected from the numerous concubines he supported.

  Europe seemed a whole world away and the ecstatic letter from Edward describing the surrender of the German fleet at Scapa Flow made it seem even farther. Since the early days when German raiders had operated in eastern waters there had never been any threat, and to be in touch with someone who had actually seen them was exciting. Edward’s ship, the Cardiff, had been among those which had escorted the German High Seas Fleet to its humiliating surrender. ‘We rigged a kite balloon,’ he wrote, ‘with a fellow in a basket watching for any sign of treachery. I saw them all come in. Hindenberg, Derfflinger, Seydlitz, Moltke, Von der Tann. It made up a little for not getting into the fighting.’

  He now wore two medal ribbons, he said, but modestly pointed out that they meant nothing except that he had served in the war – just – and that everybody in uniform had received them. He had noticed the sullenness of the German crews and how they had insulted and ignored their officers, and was concerned with the effects of Communism which had spread from Russia, where it had been fostered by Germany to take Russia out of the war, to destroy Germany itself and continue westwards to become the threat which had led the Allies to intervene in the civil war in Russia.

  The papers were full of the intervention in the north. The White armies had been advancing steadily for some time now and there had even been hope that the Tsar and his family, imprisoned near Irkutsk, would be rescued. But then had come the news that they had all been murdered and the advancing troops had found only the pathetic remnants of their life in Ekaterinburg. No bodies had been found, just a few fragments of bone and clothing and the body of the Tsaritsa’s dog, nothing more.

  The advance had continued and it had begun to seem that the dream of three armies, one from Murmansk, one from South Russia and one from Siberia, reaching Moscow together was actually going to come true. But the old Russian inability to plan, together with the vastness of the country and the lack of communication which made it difficult to co-ordinate attacks, began to work, and the advances were finally coming to a halt, still well short of Moscow and of each other’s outposts. The fear of a return of the Romanovs in some form or other had been one of the greatest drawbacks to success. No one wanted the old days of privilege, and the Bolshevik leaders had obtained too solid a grip on the country.

  The talk of Communism worried Willie because it was noticeable that the Chinese were taking a keen interest in what was happening, and Chinese intellectuals were intrigued by the way the Russians were putting their house in order. When they noticed that those powers whose greed and ambition had destroyed China were intervening in the civil war, their interest in the Russians warmed even to friendliness, and Willie could see that, if the intervention failed and the Bolsheviks remained in power, the friendliness could even turn to enthusiastic admiration.

  There was talk of treachery among the Chinese delegates to the peace conference at Versailles. Japanese interference was suspected and a spontaneous rising started in Peking. Trying to consolidate his business after the wild trading of the war years, Willie was tired and more worried about what was happening in Russia than he could accept. Desperately uncertain of himself, he decided to put the East behind himself for a while to try to see things from a distance and, fulfilling a promise to Abigail made before the war but never fulfilled because of the difficulties of travel, he took his family to England for a holiday.

  ‘We’ve earned it,’ he said. ‘Fighting the war the way we have for four years.’

  It was meant as a joke because Shanghai had never suffered. A few men had disappeared, an occasional ship had limped in after a skirmish, a few businessmen had given up their time – but not much of it – to form the Militia but had never been called to do much more than down a few drinks. But, with Germany gone, her concessions upriver had been snatched up by the voracious Japanese, and the pavements there were echoing now not to the thump of jackboots but the clop-clop of sandals. The German eagles had lost their paint as if they had moulted and in the Russian concessions the decay was even more obvious because Moscow was uninterested and the only Russians there now were dreaming, shabby and short of money.

  Summer was at its height when they reached London and the madness that had erupted at the armistice had died. Church bells no longer burst into excited peals, steamers no longer gave joyful toots as they passed each other and the roaring trade in the pubs had subsided with the dancing in the streets. Returning soldiers were finding work harder to obtain than they’d expected and disillusionment was setting in. The free drinks and free kisses had finished and bus conductors who had once let wounded soldiers travel for nothi
ng were now demanding fares. Even that most wonderful prize of all – the awareness of having survived – was finally beginning to fade.

  Nevertheless, there were still a lot of foreigners in London’s streets and a lot of hollow-eyed youngsters determined to snatch back a few of the years they had lost in the fighting. Ideals had vanished in a feeling that all the best jobs had been grabbed by men who had managed to dodge the column, while the ’flu epidemic that had gripped the world had killed with ease men who’d managed to stay alive through the four years of slaughter.

  The station was full of uniforms, a few heading for demobilisation, a few, bent under their equipment, returning from leave, and still a large quota of women in mourning who flashed crucified looks at those on the arm of a man.

  To their surprise, Edward was waiting for them, smart in his uniform, the white midshipman’s patches bright at his throat. He looked fit and well and was tall enough to be a man. He was full of what he had seen, and delighted to be among his family again.

  They visited the museums, the parks, the theatres, watched the changing of the Guard, voyaged up the Thames, visited Hampton Court, all things that delighted Willie as much as Abigail, because in his threadbare youth he had never had the time or the money for them. In his splendid premises in Bond Street, Julian Brassard was delighted to see them and insisted on taking them to lunch among the Second Empire gilt and red velvet of the Café Royal. He had done well out of the things Abigail had sent him, but he had been a good agent, honest and straightforward. He had grown fat and more effeminate than ever, but he had never let them down and was grateful for what they had done for him.

  ‘You’ve come a long way, William,’ he said, ‘from the days when we first met.’

  ‘When you thought I’d pinched what I had to offer and wanted to send for a copper.’