China Seas

by John Harris

  They were stopped once by a policeman. Behind him, Willie saw two Nationalist soldiers and a man in a dark suit and white spats looking like a Chicago gangster.

  ‘What’s the trouble?’ he asked.

  ‘Looking for troublemakers, Mr Sarth,’ the policeman said. ‘Have you had any trouble near your house?’

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘One of my ships, the Lady Roberts, is due to leave in an hour. I have to see the captain.’

  The car was waved on and twenty minutes later they had arrived alongside the Lady Roberts. Her square bow looked blunt and ugly. Many times Willie had decided she’d have to go, but when it came to the pinch, he’d always backed away from the decision. The Lady Roberts had been his first maritime acquisition and he realised he was more sentimental about her than he had imagined.

  A ship was loading in the river, clusters of lights flaring over the junks and barges alongside, but there was no one about to see them go aboard. Yeh met them as they headed up the gangway and the two Chinese were spirited out of sight without a word. As Willie stood by the car in the shadows watching the ship, Thomas took his hand. ‘Thank you, Father. They asked me to tell you that one day perhaps they might be able to help you.’

  ‘Just don’t involve me in politics again, boy. The one thing I want to be at the moment is uninvolved.’

  ‘That’s what I thought, Father,’ Thomas smiled. ‘That’s why I’m saying goodbye for a while.’

  ‘Goodbye? Where the hell are you going?’

  ‘With my friends. I remembered your advice about the Nationalists. A man was making enquiries about me at Fan-Su’s. Fortunately I wasn’t there and she said I was at the university. She knew I wasn’t and she got a message to me.’

  ‘Is Fanny a Communist?’

  ‘Let’s say that, like me, she sympathises with China. Keep an eye on her, Father.’

  ‘Where do you expect to end up?’

  Thomas smiled. ‘Wherever my friends end up.’

  Giving his father a hug, he turned and ran lightly up the gangway. Almost at once the winches began to clatter and within ten minutes the Lady Roberts was on the move. Willie stared after her as she moved away into the shadows in midstream.

  The world, he decided, was in a bloody mess.

  Six

  It was the unexpected retirement after a heart attack of Julian Brassard that took Willie to London again.

  Brassard was looking old and feeble when Willie called on him at his house in Esher. He was sitting in front of the fire with a blanket round his legs, looking pale and white and close to death.

  ‘They say I’ll get over it,’ he said, ‘but it seemed to me it was time I sold the business. Since you had a large hand in building it up I felt you ought to be the first to know.’

  Willie shrugged. There hadn’t been a lot of business with Brassard’s since Abigail’s death. He had tried for a time to keep up an interest in the antiques she had bought and sold but he had made a few bad mistakes and had finally come to the conclusion that he really knew little about them and, without Abigail, couldn’t carry it on. Polly had said she thought she’d like to try and, indeed, she had learned a little about it, but her interest wasn’t really in it and there was talk now of Wissermann’s pulling out of China.

  ‘Nothing seems worth while these days,’ Brassard mourned. ‘What with this idiot, Hitler, in Germany, shouting the odds and sucking up to Mussolini. He’s after another war. You mark my words.’

  Seeing no future in Abigail’s business, in the end Willie had turned everything over to Nadya in Hong Kong and, with the big cruise liners now calling in more often, she was finding she had no need to send things to London or the States and could sell them to the wealthy passengers coming ashore for the day.

  There was a conference and shipping business to be done in London but not very much. Markets had run wild in America and it was affecting things too much and, with too little money chasing too few investments, there were too few jobs and no expansion, and the irony of it was that, with falling prices, people with money found they were actually better off. Shipping was on its beam ends however. The Japanese merchant fleet was expanding rapidly and snatching business, so that it became a struggle to maintain profitability with the adverse trading. There were a dozen things that touched it – unrest in India, Yangtze floods, the depression in Europe, all of them having their effect on exports and imports, and, for lack of cargoes, vessels were being laid up in all the rivers and creeks round England, gathering weeds, one caretaker looking after half a dozen ships.

  ‘To hold a ship for years is murder,’ Willie growled. ‘Ships are for sailing, not for collecting all the stinking mud from a river bed.’

  With capital short, once again it had crossed his mind that he might find a buyer for the Lady Roberts, which was surely reaching the end of her long life, but, with captains unable to find berths and going to sea as mates, mates as bosuns, and bosuns as ordinary hands, no one was interested, so he allowed sentiment to take over, forgot his plans and decided to leave her to operate in Far Eastern waters.

  It was a sorry period of volatile trade and ephemeral solutions, and Hitler, as Brassard had prophesied, seemed to offer nothing but hostility. A demagogue with a spellbinding oratory and a propaganda machine that might well, Willie felt, have been copied from the Chinese Communists, he was getting away with murder, while the League of Nations, designed for no other reason than to stop aggression, seemed hopelessly inadequate.

  After the brilliant colours of the Far East, with the Depression absorbing all the spirit of the people, and the streets full of unemployed, Europe was overpoweringly grey. In China Chiang K’Ai-Shek was firmly in the saddle now. There was still fighting, but he was clearly running the show these days and had even discarded his wife and family to marry a daughter of the Soong family, which seemed to have made a speciality of producing girls who were femmes fatales. For one of them Sun Yat-Sen had also repudiated his wife. A second had married the scion of a famous banking house, and now Chiang had married the American-educated third, for whom he had also abandoned his religion and become a baptised Christian.

  His methods were also often American, and he was surrounded by a cohort of smart young generals who knew exactly where they were going. Chiang had quarrelled with his older supporters and many of the new men had been students not long before, and they were clever and educated enough to see a bright future for China, even if they had to indulge in a little treachery on the side to achieve it. Prominent among them was Zychov, wearing the uniform of a military and naval adviser, always close to Chiang in the photographs that appeared in the newspapers, as if he were making sure of the protection of the most powerful man in the country. Chiang’s assault on the Communists had totally alienated them from him and he had quarrelled with the Russians sent by Moscow to back him, but Zychov, who had been in the ranks of those who had opposed Lenin and the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, was more than acceptable and, according to Thomas, who always seemed to learn from his Leftist friends exactly what was going on behind the scenes, was doing very well out of it, too.

  Despite Chiang’s hold on the country, however, politically it was in a mess. It was impossible to assess the chaos that was China. ‘How do you?’ Willie asked. ‘When there are three – sometimes four – governments, all claiming to be in control.’

  Since Chiang was causing little trouble to the Europeans, he was being backed by Gerald Honeyford and his friends of the pro-Chiang China Friendship Group as the man most likely to bring China out of the anarchy into which it had sunk and, above all, as the man to look after their personal interests. With their encouragement he was even being supported now by London and Washington as the only man with whom the Western powers could deal.

  Perhaps it was Shanghai’s acceptance of Chiang that turned Willie against the place. He considered Chiang dangerous and distrusted him, if only for his protection of Zycho
v. He was also too much in the hands of people like Gerald Honeyford and Yip’s friends, though Willie had heard that the secret societies who had removed his Communist opponents considered they had had a raw deal because money promised to them for their efforts had not materialised. Suddenly there were too many complications and he was glad he had diversified his business. With the loss of Abigail, Shanghai seemed suddenly to hold little for him.

  He had watched it grow from the beginning of the century, revelling in the enormous strides forward it had taken, enjoying its prosperity, its building programmes, even its bold self-confidence, feeling that somehow it reflected his own life. But now, unexpectedly, he saw that, as it had grown, it had acquired a pompous and purse-proud arrogance. Great banks towered above streets where the Chinese were still – even now – little more than beasts of burden, a contrast as vivid as that between the painted and polished warships and the shabby Chinese junks and sampans that clustered, noisy and impotent, around them.

  Despite its race clubs and the great artistes who appeared in its theatres, the place was really still only an outpost and had nothing but its money and its fear of losing it. It was now four cities, all so close you merely crossed the street to move from one to another, and he knew that everyone – police, Customs and government officials, reformers, preachers, even diplomats – dirtied their fingers occasionally in their attempts to take advantage of the get-rich-quick atmosphere. It was not only the centre of European evangelism, it was also a centre of the opium trade and, as Willie had personally discovered, of piracy. It was big and brash and filled with a collection of the world’s shrewdest men. In Hong Kong it was said that Shanghailanders were always easy to spot because they had too much money and too-loud voices. But it was an exciting place, it had to be admitted – one of the wickedest cities in the world, where two civilisations met, where morality was irrelevant, where the atmosphere was exactly right for making money – and he had always enjoyed it, but now, abruptly, he wondered if he still did. Cowering behind its barricades against the growing threat of Chinese nationalism, it exhibited human nature without dignity or generosity. The evacuation of the upriver concessions had infuriated the old China hands and, though the impossibility of hanging on to them in the growing tide of nationalism had been clear, they had still selfishly expected their countries’ soldiers and sailors to risk their lives to help them to do so.

  It was Emmeline’s remarriage more than anything else that seemed to highlight the place’s determination to hang on to its ill-gotten gains. To Willie’s surprise, she had not disappeared to England after the incident at Yangpo. Wishart’s had vanished, bought up by one of the big trading houses, but she had remained in Shanghai living on her capital, which was said to be dwindling rapidly because she hadn’t drawn in her horns a great deal. He saw her occasionally, driving about in a chauffeured car, large and gaunt now but somehow still attractive, then he heard she had married old Honeyford, whose wife had died the previous year. At first he was surprised, then, as the thing sank in, he gave a great shout of laughter.

  ‘Honeyford!’ he yelled. ‘God’s great green footstool, Honeyford!’

  Honeyford’s first wife had been a drab little woman who was noted throughout Shanghai as never having said anything original in her life, and the idea of the old man having to cope with the determined and forthright Emmeline was just unimaginable. With his dull wife and his little Chinese mistress, Gerald Honeyford, he had always considered, had never seemed to have both oars in the water, but now, with Emmeline behind him, it looked very much as if he were going to be totally adrift.

  ‘Good God,’ he said to Da Braga. ‘There’s no end to that woman. She’s like one of those Kelly dolls. Knock her down and up she comes again. It’ll be God help Honeyford, because she won’t sit back and talk in clichés like his first wife. She’ll want a hand in the business and he’s old enough to be pushed out if she’s clever.’

  Sure enough, almost immediately, they heard that Emmeline had installed herself in an office alongside Honeyford’s at Mason and Marchant’s and was beginning to take work off his hands. It seemed to highlight Shanghai’s frenetic pace; its indifference, its lack of finesse or concern for decency, for what was going on around it, in the need to go on making money; its apparent blindness to what was happening and what was clearly going to happen in the future. To Willie it was as if he had suddenly started seeing the place through a magnifying glass and finding he didn’t like it very much. More and more he used his ships to move about the Far Eastern waters. He enjoyed the forthright bluntness of the Australians and New Zealanders, the cleanliness of the Dutch in their clusters of islands, the soft French atmosphere of their Indo-Chinese possessions and Singapore’s languid self-assurance. But Singapore was still a foreign city, whereas Hong Kong was the China he loved. You could stroll for no more than a minute from its centre and you wouldn’t see a European face among a teeming, jostling populace in an atmosphere tingling with activity, excitement, movement and confusion.

  Following his plans to develop his business, he sold two old ships, opened a small office in Sydney to handle the cargoes he was carrying across the Pacific, and arranged for agents in Auckland, New Zealand, Singapore, Soerabaya in the Dutch East Indies, and Saigon in French Indo-China. Agents were important. Hamburg-Amerika had over three thousand in the United States alone.

  Often he thought of Abigail, but the pain had finally gone and he found his thoughts turning again to Nadya. Occasionally he heard of her but hadn’t seen her for two years now. Without Abigail his life was empty and, with his children now adult, he was more alone than ever. Edward was back in England, unmarried but a lieutenant-commander and executive officer in a cruiser. Thomas, back from his self-imposed exile, was a lecturer at the university and married to Fan-Su, still a dreamy man of ideals, entirely different from his brisker elder brother, whose career came before everything, even marriage. Polly was in Singapore now, because Wissermann’s had not changed their minds about pulling out of China and had transferred all their Far East business to the British colony. She had a growing family of three and, with his father dead, her husband, Elliott, was running the firm.

  Almost without conscious effort, Willie found his way back to Hong Kong. He told himself it was because he had business there and because the Lady Roberts was due to sail south and he felt like being aboard. But he knew it was more than that. He needed to see Nadya. Once she had meant a great deal to him. But so had Abigail. He was still at a loss to explain how it had happened that he could have loved them both. But he had. He had.

  He hadn’t heard anything from Nadya for some time, but he knew she was still in business. She had expanded her properties and was now running a large antique store in the centre of the city. There were always plenty of buyers among the wealthy taipans, and always cruise ships and visitors from Australia, on business or pleasure, on the look-out for things to beautify their homes.

  The warm air that lay over Hong Kong’s anchorage as the Lady Roberts arrived seemed to indicate a storm. The air was still and reminded him of the time when he had arrived in a typhoon just before he had received the brush-off from Nadya, just before the attempt had been made to take over the Tien Quan and he had shot Yip, just before – he drew a deep breath – just before he had gone to Yangpo to return with the body of his wife.

  The hard brassy sun held the white buildings in a shimmering haze and even the narrow streets, crammed with surging humanity, crouched in a stifling pressure of heat. He attended to business but his mind wasn’t on it and eventually he headed for the new premises of A N Kourganov. It was a shop with a frontage far wider than normal for Hong Kong and it seemed to be crammed with exquisite furniture. The interior had been decorated with all Nadya’s taste and, he noticed, she seemed these days to be concentrating on pictures. He could only assume that the fashion had changed or the flow of saleable jewellery and objets d’art had dried up and, like himself, she had diversified.

  The girl w
ho came forward looked like the same one who had been with her when she had first moved to Hong Kong, but he couldn’t be certain and she showed no sign of recognition.

  ‘Mademoiselle Kourganova hasn’t been in today,’ she said.

  ‘Away, is she?’

  ‘No, she’s at home.’

  ‘Anything wrong? Is she ill?’

  ‘I don’t think–’ the girl stopped. ‘I remember you, sir,’ she went on, finally acknowledging that she knew Willie. ‘And I’m a little worried. She telephoned yesterday to say she wouldn’t be in and I haven’t seen her since and no one answers the telephone.’

  Willie frowned. ‘Let’s have her address,’ he snapped.

  The address was on the Peak, the Mayfair of Hong Kong, a district of good-sized bungalows set around with flame trees. They were crowded closely together because Hong Kong was always short of space, but clearly Nadya had moved into a good area. As the cab drew near, Willie was fidgeting restlessly on the rear seat. As it climbed, another cab passed, heading down the hill. In the back was a tall figure wearing a white tropical suit and a straw hat whom Willie recognised at once.

  ‘Zychov, by Christ,’ he said aloud.

  ‘Sir?’ The cab driver slowed and turned his head.

  ‘Nothing, nothing! Hurry, please!’

  All the old hatred came back, all the old feeling of treachery and betrayal that dated back to Shantu. Since the Tien Quan incident nothing had been seen of Zychov. He had vanished into thin air after Yip had been killed because he knew the police were looking for him and so, it seemed, were the Communists after the disaster to the Party when Chiang had set the Shanghai gangsters on them. They had established themselves now in Kiangsi Province under the leadership of a man called Mao, whose face appeared occasionally in the Chinese newspapers, with that of his second-in-command, Thomas’ friend whom they had spirited away from Shanghai in the Lady Roberts. He called himself Chou En-Lai and he was now one of the major figures in the Communist hierarchy which, according to Thomas, would never allow themselves to forget the treacherous attack on them in Shanghai or Zychov who had engineered it with Kuomintang money.