China Seas

by John Harris

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘Buying food. You can eat now, it seems. You look dreadful!’

  ‘How long before we can go home?’

  ‘They say another week before you’ll be fit to move. But you’re over it now.’ Brassard’s face changed and a sly smile crossed his smooth features. ‘William, old chap, I shall be eternally grateful for bringing me here. I’ve picked up enough to make a fortune. I’ve got crates of stuff.’

  ‘I hope you enjoy it.’

  Despite the encouragement, Willie found his lips were so swollen he could swallow only one drop of water at a time. Some time later a man in a black frock coat came to see him and introduced himself as being on the Consulate staff. ‘I have a message for you,’ he announced. ‘From Sir Arthur Mallinson, at the Foreign Office. It says “Thank you. Message enabled us to pull out ahead of disaster.”’

  ‘That all?’

  ‘That’s all.’

  ‘I hope he’s satisfied.’

  When Nadya appeared, her face was strained with anxiety. Seeing him awake, she knelt by the bed. Brassard stood behind her nervously and Willie gestured to him to make himself scarce.

  ‘William,’ Nadya whispered. ‘You’re going to be all right.’

  ‘They say I can go aboard ship in a week or so.’

  ‘You’ll have to be carried.’

  He clutched her hand. ‘Come with me, Nadya.’

  She said nothing and he went on trying to persuade her. ‘I can help you set up afresh. Somewhere like Hong Kong. Or India. There are other Russians there. Or Constantinople. The place is full of them, setting themselves up in business.’

  ‘Some of them.’

  ‘Some of them,’ he agreed, because there were some who hadn’t the intelligence or the drive to start again.

  The question he dreaded formed on his lips. ‘Did he turn up again, Nadya?’ he asked. ‘Your husband.’

  ‘No. I think he must be dead. He was with Kolchak when he was captured, I was told.’

  ‘Yes, he was. But he’s not dead. I saw him in Mysovaya long after we passed Glaskov.’

  ‘How did he look?’ The concern in her voice was unexpected.

  ‘For God’s sake, Nadya, surely you don’t care?’

  ‘No, no, I don’t,’ she said, but suddenly he wasn’t sure, uncertain how great was the hold Zychov had on her. Women were strange creatures, sometimes unable to throw off a love for a man who had treated them appallingly. He felt she had to be given some security.

  ‘Come with me, Nadya,’ he said again. ‘You’ll be all right. I can back you.’

  ‘I don’t need backing,’ she said quietly. ‘I have money, and I’ve been sending money to the Bank of China in Shanghai, just in case.’

  ‘Then come.’

  She shook her head and kissed his hand. ‘No. I’m Russian. And I’m safe. My family was driven into exile here. I shall be all right.’

  ‘You might not be.’

  She held his hands in hers. ‘William,’ she said earnestly, ‘I can’t give up everything. Too much is at stake. I have a good business built on a solid foundation.’

  ‘Businesses can be transferred.’

  ‘William–’ her words were still soft but they were firm in a gentle reminder ‘–you are married and, I think, to a good woman. She doesn’t deserve that.’

  He was silent, knowing she was right. Abigail was a good, unselfish woman and he could never have Nadya near her.

  ‘We could be friends,’ he suggested weakly.

  ‘I don’t think so, William. We have been lovers.’

  ‘Abigail doesn’t know.’

  ‘I suspect she does, William. Women have an instinct. They know these things. You can inflict no more punishment on her. Let her simply be happy to have you back, to know that her husband has survived typhus and Kolchak’s disaster. Was it terrible, William?’

  ‘There’s no word to describe it.’

  ‘I think you were brave. Your consul tells me they were very pleased with your message.’

  ‘They didn’t get their gold back. That’s gone forever.’ He held her hand silently for a while, then he said simply, ‘Nadya, I love you.’

  ‘You love your wife.’

  ‘Yes, I do. Isn’t it possible to love two women?’

  She sighed and managed a wry smile. ‘It’s something novelists make much of,’ she said. ‘But it’s very impractical.’

  Six

  It was a haggard, subdued and thoughtful Willie whom Abigail met from the ship. He was gaunt and grey-faced, his head shaved, his lips still cracked, his face drawn in lines of strain, tiredness and illness. Seeing the grey that was appearing in his hair, it dawned on her for the first time that he was no longer young and neither was she, that they now had children almost as old as they had been when they’d first met.

  ‘Willie,’ she cried, her arms round him, tears in the eyes of both of them. ‘What have they done to you? I thought it was some sort of diplomatic mission they sent you on.’

  ‘It was,’ Willie agreed slowly. ‘But it turned out to be more than just that.’

  He told her a little of the facts, of the journey from Omsk to Vladivostok, leaving out the horrors. By this time the exodus from Vladivostok was in full swing and with him on the ship south had been wild-eyed Russian aristocrats, suddenly aware that their titles no longer counted for a thing and that they were penniless and had no idea how to earn a living. With them were their wives and children, all scared and wondering what the future held, and dozens of their soldiers who by espousing the White Army’s crusade had given up all hope of ever returning to Russia.

  Brassard was all officiousness, making it sound as though Willie’s life had been saved entirely by himself. Willie let him go on because he’d made him swear not to mention Nadya Alexsandrovna or the fact that he had recovered in her house by the sea, as if he had spent all his time after his return to Vladivostok in a British military hospital. From what Brassard said, it seemed that Willie owed his lift to Brassard’s initiative, that he had been rescued against all odds and cared for by no one else but Brassard. Willie was terrified he would talk too much and was glad to see him disappear to England.

  The whole business of intervention had failed ignominiously. The last Allied troops had sailed from Archangel in September, and from Vladivostok in November. The remnants of the South Russian armies had been evacuated the following year. Wherever they had left, the vacuum had been filled at once by the advancing Red troops and, to the surprise of the politicians and soldiers who had advocated the intervention on the grounds that nobody wanted the Reds, they had been received with cheers. The tears in the eyes of the departing British soldiers were not of compassion for a martyred country but because quarantine regulations prevented them taking with them the hordes of dogs they had adopted, whose howls of distress as they were abandoned on the quayside had been too much.

  The commanders had departed and Kolchak was dead, betrayed by the Czechs he had tried to incorporate into his army. He had been taken to Irkutsk, where he had been shot and his body pushed through a hole in the ice over the frozen River Ushakovka. Mallinson’s bullion had never been recovered.

  There were sheepish looks and red faces among those who had insisted the Russians did not want Communism, and a certain amount of nervousness in Shanghai as a source of trade disappeared. With the complete conquest of Russia by the Red Army, all news had ceased and it was no longer possible to enter her boundaries. Russia was building a wall round herself, determined to keep out the influence of the hated Allies until she had completed the revision of her political system.

  Willie brooded on the complete absence of news. He had spent the last days with Nadya quietly and she had been with him as he had been carried aboard the ship to return. She had seen him to his cabin, provided him with a few titbits she had salvaged from her dwindling store of luxuries, and kissed him gently on the forehead.

  ‘Is that all?’ he had asked.

&
nbsp; ‘Yes, William. You’re going back to your wife. It’s up to you to forget me.’

  But it was impossible. Beautiful, intelligent, gentle Nadya couldn’t be shut out of the mind as easily as that. Yet there was too much to do to dwell on the past. The Spanish ’flu epidemic that was ravaging a world weakened and impoverished by the war and was reputed to be killing people like flies in Germany and Russia had now reached Shanghai and everybody seemed to be standing in for someone who was sick or dead.

  They heard that Henry Moberley, Emmeline Wishart’s husband, had been one of the victims, but he had recovered and was now said to be drinking himself to death, while Emmeline had taken up with a new chief clerk, who was running Wishart’s for her.

  Yip Hsao-Li, all smiles and twinkling patent leather shoes, was still dancing, and the Chinese politicians were still watching to see what the Russians would do, delighted that, in contrast to the other powers, they had freely abandoned the privileges extorted from China by the Tsarist regime. The voluntary repudiation of this humiliating insult to China’s sovereignty did not pass unnoticed and the Russians didn’t fail to take advantage of the fact by getting in touch with Marxist students in China and offering help in the formation of a Chinese Communist party. Within months the party was holding its first general meeting and soon afterwards allied itself to Sun Yat-Sen’s nationalist Kuomintang Party, which was pledged to give China back to the Chinese.

  By this time, the homeless Russians were being absorbed into Shanghai society. The very first of them had arrived in style with their clothing, furniture and personal treasures. Their money had been safely transferred long before and all they had left behind them were the things they could not carry. They had brought their motor cars, their favourite horses, their pianos, their servants, but this stream had dried up quickly as the revolution had advanced and those who had followed had brought only their treasures, and what money they could carry, because what was in the banks had gone for ever as the Russian rouble lost its value. Then two dimly-lit steamers, the Okhotsk and the Mongugai, had swung into the East China Sea carrying the remnants of the Far Eastern White army, together with the band of an officers’ mess which played as they passed liners and grey warships and reached Shanghai, to mark the end of the voyage from Vladivostok.

  They remained in the river for months. But many of the men aboard sneaked ashore and sold their weapons. The warlords were always eager for weapons and the soldiers could raise 500 Chinese dollars for a Mauser pistol and fifty rounds of ammunition. There were enough gangsters in Shanghai to push the prices up even further, and the arms were often carried ashore by the women who were aboard. The Russians also brought church ikons, silver candelabra and sackfuls of Russian coins, most of which found their way eventually through Abigail’s hands. For the most part, they didn’t stay long in Shanghai because the members of the old aristocracy considered it beneath them to hobnob with what they called ‘shopkeepers’ and others in trade. Those with money took apartments in the French Concession because the restaurants there were better and they could entertain in their old style, while the women, unlike the British women who always assessed your income, preferred to assess what you were capable of after the lights had been turned down. It was a place alive with touts, pimps, white slavers, thieves and pickpockets, and the Russians lived by selling their jewels one by one.

  Those who decided to remain in Shanghai drifted together and an area called Little Moscow grew up along the Avenue Joffre. As the Russians increased in numbers, forced to beg, to sell newspapers, even to try rickshaw pulling to keep body and soul together, their women, with their high-boned faces, were prepared to sell their bodies as well as their skills as hostesses, and the Europeans suffered tremendous loss of face as a result.

  Because they had to make a living somehow, one of the Russians hit on the idea of introducing cabarets to the city. Starting in slum tenements round the Nanking Road, they knocked down walls to make bigger rooms, draped them with coloured streamers and cut the lighting to nothing, and immediately, with Chinese owners and Russian entrepreneurs, the city found it had a night life. Filipino bands played for dancing because the Chinese could never make sense of Western music and it was said the clubs were so small that if you were thrown out of one you landed in the one next door. But the hungry Russian girls, wearing cheap tinselled dresses lent to them by the club owners, were prepared to dance for drinks at fifty cents a time and commission, and there were so many fights the area was known as The Trenches. But, though the clubs lowered the moral tone of a city where it had never been high, the night life shifted relentlessly from staid hotel ballrooms to clubs with names like the Alhambra, the Winter Garden, the Carlton, where you bought dance tickets to acquire a partner and watched floor shows of Cossacks and Salomes in spangles. Willie found his daughter, Polly, was frequenting them with her friends and Yip Hsao-Li was in his element.

  ‘They’re terrible places,’ Abigail said. ‘The women are no better than they ought to be!’

  ‘They think the same of English women,’ Willie grinned. ‘They say they’re flat-chested, flat-footed from playing hockey, and worn out with the hunting and golf.’ He dodged as Abigail threw a magazine at him. ‘There’s one thing. At least we’ve learned to eat zakouska and caviar washed down with vodka.’

  Even reduced to penury, the Russians were a colourful lot. A few were dukes and counts and barons, and a great many more claimed to be and were not. But they had style. Shanghai was a city where optimism and opportunity were always present and, with almost every other detective on the force having a record and willing to look the other way for a consideration, it was a perfect place to make a living for people who weren’t too concerned with how they did it, and the cry of ‘Maskee’, Shanghai’s very own special word that linked the polyglot tongues and was the very symbol of optimism – Don’t worry – was nothing but ‘Nichevo’, its Russian equivalent, though the Chinese ‘Maskee’ was accompanied by a grin while the Russian ‘Nichevo’ suggested gloomy foreboding.

  The better-class Russians were superb riders and superb actors, liars and boasters. The lesser found it harder to find a niche in Shanghai society and, moving on to other cities where groups of refugees had established themselves, had dispersed to Harbin, Constantinople, Rome, Paris and London.

  A few of them opened restaurants or merely accepted jobs managing them, while their women became hostesses or worse. Among the new restaurants was one called the Balalaika, which, they heard, had the backing of Yip Hsao-Li. Yip was always around, always obvious, still never doing any work. He didn’t use the Stock Exchange and, since he didn’t appear to touch opium or girls, it was difficult to tell where his wealth came from and, though the Balalaika didn’t seem the sort of thing he normally went in for, he had gone into partnership with one of the Russians. With Yip’s contacts and the Russian’s knowledge of how a good restaurant should be conducted, they had turned it into an excellent rendezvous for Shanghai society, and finally Willie decided to try it.

  Certainly the food was excellent, shashli on flaming swords, and blinis with caviare, all served to the sound of balalaika music in a sumptuous Russian décor. Abigail, who didn’t normally like dining in town, thoroughly enjoyed herself, and Willie was egging her on to have champagne when a tall figure appeared from the back of the restaurant and crossed the floor to the door where a new group of diners had just appeared. He was kissing the hands of the women and showing them to their table, a superb maître d’hôtel in a perfectly cut evening suit, the blue ribbon of a Tsarist decoration at his throat.

  Throwing down his napkin, Willie stood up so abruptly he jerked the table and the wine glasses toppled over, flooding the table top and staining the cloth.

  ‘Willie!’

  ‘Come on,’ he said, his face grim. ‘We’re leaving!’

  ‘Willie, why? I’m enjoying myself.’

  He gestured with a trembling hand at the tall figure by the door. ‘Do you know who that is?’ he asked.r />
  ‘Who?’

  ‘Look again. It’s that bugger, Zychov, who left us behind at Shantu! This place must belong to him.’

  Abigail’s eyes turned to the group by the door. ‘It doesn’t look like him.’

  ‘It’s twenty years ago. But it’s him all right. I saw him in Port Arthur. I’ll never forget the sod. I also saw him in Mysovaya with Kolchak’s lot. Bolting for safety, as he always did.’

  She didn’t argue any further. Quietly she picked up her cape and they headed for the exit. As they passed the group at the door, the tall figure straightened and turned. For a moment Zychov’s eyes rested on Willie, then he bent in a short bow, the smile on his face ironic.

  They never went there again.

  Edward arrived soon afterwards to join the Yangtze gunboat squadron. The Yangtze gunboats were the Royal Navy’s hair shirt and everybody had to have a go at them at some time or other during their career. They were painted white with yellow funnels and carried two or three officers, six or seven petty officers and leading seamen and seventeen able seamen. In addition, there was an official Chinese complement of five, which included the chief steward and a wardroom cook, but they all had their makee learns who worked for food and board.

  The life was not hard and they used a Chinese pilot for the gorges of the upper river, but sometimes bandits, Communists or disbanded soldiers removed the buoys and beacons and waited to loot the first steamer that ran aground. Occasionally they had to put down a riot or rescue a missionary or two, and facing a Chinese mob was a daunting experience, though Edward claimed that if you could make them laugh you could get away with it.

  Because of the time he had been away, he noticed immediately the difference from the time when he had lived in Shanghai as a boy, seeing with greater clarity what the city’s European residents were missing: ‘There’s hatred,’ he told Willie. ‘It wasn’t here when I left. Then, everybody thought it had disappeared with the Boxers. But it’s still here, Father, and to me it seems more powerful than ever.’