Once upon a time in Chinatown

by Robert Ronsson

  I consulted a builder and we made plans to modernise the parts of the house that hadn’t been touched for nearly twenty years.

  What about me? Could my love life be renovated? The office had provided romantic opportunities in the past but being part of the branch’s management meant those days were over. I tried to imagine myself haunting the local nightspots, but all I could picture was a circle of laughing youngsters watching me uncle-dancing on the strobe-lit floor of Waterloo’s infamous disco-nightclub Southern Electric. The answer, according to agony aunts, was always to ‘develop new interests’ and ‘meet new people’. Easier said than done.

  The 1990-91 football season was approaching its mid-point and I decided to resurrect my support for Chelsea. Not as a way of meeting the opposite sex, obviously, but more to create a fixed point on alternate weekends that would take me out of the house. Most boys adopt the same football team as their dads and they usually know which team it is before they go to primary school. I arrived on my first day handicapped by ignorance and unable to answer to the basic question, ‘Which team do you support?’ Most of my glory-hunter contemporaries had chosen Arsenal, the most successful London team at that time.

  The more my peers pressured me to join them, the more I resisted, and in 1955, the year I moved up to the grammar, Chelsea won the Division One Championship. Knowing that, in the new school, I would be asked the same old question, I prepared by choosing the Champions as my team. It was an own-goal. Chelsea never repeated the 1955 success while I was at school and the club and I suffered the ultimate humiliation of relegation. I stuck with my choice even though it gave the playground bullies yet another reason to taunt me.

  Chelsea were back in Division One in 1990. One Saturday, with workmen knocking seven bells out of the house interior, I joined the crowd for the mid-table clash against Norwich City. Despite an uninspiring draw, I decided I’d go back.

  It’s difficult to describe, but Luis’s existence gave me the confidence to feel that friendship and even love might come my way. Loneliness begets solitude and this, in turn, begets exclusion and I felt that I had snapped out of that spiral. It was important not to lose touch with him. Consequently, I sent notes to his office email account from time to time using Scotia’s system. I told him about the changes to the house and renewed the invitation for him to come to London. I suggested he come over in the spring so we could explore Scotland together and find our ancestral home in Elgin.

  One of Luis’s replies explained that he was preparing for his trip to Malaysia. He was very excited and described how his research had revealed that the family home – the Scottish castle – was near a city in the north called Ipoh. He had booked accommodation and had telephoned ahead asking for information.

  A later e-mail said: After our grandfather died in 1926, the romantic castle became the centre of rumours and mystery. The local people think it is haunted and there are secret rooms and tunnels underground that nobody knows about. These are where the ghosts are thought to dwell.

  I had started out wanting to know no more than who my father was. Thurslow had turned up a cousin and he, in turn, had revealed the existence of a castle. In my imagination, I recalled Mum’s Christmas shortbread biscuit tin with a picture of Loch Ness and Urquhart Castle on the lid. This is the image I transposed into a Malaysian plantation landscape. The building’s crumbling castellated walls loomed above, not the loch’s placid waters, but rows of tropical trees.

  Luis had given no clue as to whether our house was occupied but I could picture a very un-Caledonian verandah where the owner and his wife, both British and, anachronistically, sporting 1930s colonial safari-wear, sipped gin and tonics as they looked out over their demesne. I was beginning to regret my decision to stay in London and I made up my mind to see Luis immediately on his return so he could tell me all about it.

  His last e-mail from Lisbon: I leave for Malaysia on Friday. If the hotel has Internet connections I will send e-mails. If they do not I will send faxes to your office. I replied, wishing him a safe journey and looked forward to hearing what he made of Malaysia and our family’s connection.

  On the following Monday afternoon, Tracy came into my office with the first of his handwritten faxes: I am in Ipoh! It was a long drive from Kuala Lumpur. Malaysia has a strange atmosphere with people of Malay and Chinese heritage. The hotel has found a local guide who will take me to the castle. The business centre has Internet but I am not able to access the company email account. Who knows why? It is most complicated. This is why the fax. It is best for you to reply by fax also. It is very interesting here. The castle is abandoned. The surrounding plantations are being worked and I am trying and find out who owns it all. Perhaps I do!

  I set my files aside and pored over Luis’s text looking for the meanings between the words. I had never heard of Ipoh. I looked it up in the office copy of Encyclopaedia Britannica and read that it was the capital city of the state of Perak in the north of the country. There was nothing about our castle. Now I knew it was abandoned, I updated my vision of it with a version based on the ruinous House of Shaws in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped. I answered straight away: It’s good to hear from you. The house sounds interesting. I think you were joking when you said that we might own it! Excited to hear more. Every day now I looked forward to hearing from Luis, wondering what he might uncover next.

  Later in the week, on the day the office was buzzing with the news that Margaret Thatcher had resigned as Prime Minister, another fax arrived after lunch – bed-time in Malaysia: Thursday: I have found out who owns the house and hope to have a meeting soon. I feel sad for my grandfather. He never saw his dream house become reality. I wonder if his wife in Scotland or my mother came back to see it after he died? It is very unhappy.

  The handwritten reply I gave to Tracy said: I’m intrigued by your descriptions of the ‘castle’. Let me know how your meeting goes. Its neutral tone far from reflected my mood. Hardly an hour went by without one of my pictured versions of our castle interrupting what I was doing. In all of them, whether he was negotiating the treacherously tumbledown spiral staircase of Shaws or striding across a cannon-scarred battlement in Urquhart, Luis, cigarette in mouth, was planting his Kellie-Smith feet and metaphorically reclaiming our birthright.

  The next day’s fax arrived later in the afternoon. Unlike the others, this one was typewritten, presumably at his dictation: Interesting meeting with the family who own the castle land and palm oil plantations. They bought the land from our grandmother some time in 1930s. I’m happy that grandfather has such a fine monument. The owners will continue to maintain the house and will put up a memorial to him if I pay for it. Leaving for home on Monday. He hadn’t bothered to append his signature.

  My flights of fancy could return to earth. There was no drama. It was comforting to know that the owners recognised their responsibility as custodians of our family connection to the place. I decided to work diligently for the rest of the afternoon and think of a response at home that evening. I would word something carefully so that Luis didn’t think I was too disappointed by the outcome. Why had I invested so much in the news from Ipoh? Our family had built a grand house and now it was owned by someone else. What had I expected?

  It was only on my way home that evening that I realised that it was Friday and that a fax from me on Monday wouldn’t reach his hotel until after he’d left. I could have gone into the office over the weekend but I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t know how to work the fax machine. Any further news would have to wait until I could call Luis when he was back in Lisbon. I assumed this would be on the following Tuesday at the earliest.

  In the weekend that followed, Chelsea, who had made a bad start to the season, unexpectedly won away at Old Trafford. It was always good to beat Manchester United and it served to take my mind off events in Malaysia. The match was broadcast live on television. I watched it at home, amid the smell of drying plaster, enjoying a bottle of Young’s Special Bitter during each hal
f.

  When I hadn’t heard anything from Luis by the Wednesday lunchtime, I picked up the telephone and dialled his office number. It rang and rang, the sound hollow. A recorded voice speaking Portuguese cut in followed by the beep to signify that I should leave a message. ‘Hi Luis,’ I said. ‘I hope you had a safe journey and I’m desperate to hear how you got on. Call me.’

  That day, the Conservatives, against the odds, elected John Major as leader of their party and he automatically became Prime Minister. Like me, John Major was a south London, grammar-school boy whose first job had been an insurance clerk. Watching him on television, it struck me that our voices betrayed that background in the words we used and the cadences of our speech. We both had an unassuming manner and it was hard to picture our new Prime Minister as a heroic figure. Indeed, he had once been described as the sort of person who tucked his shirt tails inside his underpants and was depicted this way by a cartoonist. Did people see me in the same light, I wondered.

  10

  I called Luis Escobar’s office again on the Thursday. There was no answer and I didn’t bother leaving a message. I sent an e-mail asking him to call me.

  When he didn’t respond, I could only assume that he was still in Ipoh. I re-read his last typewritten fax. Could it be he had learned something after his meeting that meant he decided to stay? If so, why hadn’t he told me?

  It was the memory of Luis’s first fax from Ipoh that blew a hole in my easy acceptance of the outcome, the one where he had said something about him owning the house. Could he have been following up a lead that he didn’t want me to know about? The fragile bridge I had constructed out of my world’s few certainties cracked under the strain of Luis’s lack of faith, betrayal even, and threatened to cast me into the river of self-doubt that always burbled beneath. I needed to confront him. Before I left for home, I gave Tracy a fax to send to his hotel in Ipoh demanding an explanation. She came back saying that it had not been accepted at the other end. Either the fax machine in the hotel wasn’t working or the operator had declined the transmission.

  It was easy to organise a few days break from work to deal with a ‘family emergency’. In the wake of Mum death, the regional manager fell over himself to grant me a few days, longer if I needed it. My reluctance to take on the rigours of the longer flight meant that I had decided to go to Lisbon first. When London ground to a halt in an unseasonable November snowstorm that weekend, my flight was cancelled. There wasn’t another until the Monday. I re-booked, still hoping that I would hear from Luis in those two extra days.

  The taxi dropped me at the end of Rua Sao Julião and I covered the fifty yards or so with my umbrella tilted into the cold, driving rain. The ground floor passage was darker than before and any sounds from within the offices either side were drowned by the percussion of the rainfall and the gurgling of gutter pipes. My footsteps on the iron staircase sounded like the toll of a church bell. I ducked inside, shook and furled my umbrella and hurried to the door marked Agência de Investigação Escobar. I knocked. There was no sound. I looked for a letterbox to peer through but the door had no openings. I retraced my steps.

  I directed the taxi driver east of the Avenida to the Fado restaurant and from there I was able to scramble on foot around the corner to Luis’s door, the spine-ends of my umbrella nearly touching the walls on either side. The cobbles were loose and uneven and I had to dodge deep puddles where they were missing altogether.

  At the house, with water streaming through the narrow gap between my umbrella and the wall, I rang the bell for the top apartment ‘Escobar’. There was no response. Should I return to his office? I buzzed for the apartment below. A woman answered and I could hear a child chortling in the background. We established who I was looking for and that she spoke English – a little. ‘Mr Escobar not here.’

  ‘Is he at work? In his office?’ I was on tiptoes so I could speak into the microphone on the security panel and the water splashing off a ledge soaked my face.

  ‘No, not office. Feriado… holy day.’

  ‘He has not come back from his holiday?’

  ‘Diga isso de novo?’ The intonation in her voice told me she hadn’t understood.

  ‘His holiday is finished, I think.’

  ‘No not finished. He is gone holy day.’

  If this was true he’d either been away for three weeks or he’d come back briefly and I had missed him.

  ‘Did he come back after ten days? He was supposed to be away for only ten days.’

  ‘Diga isso de novo?’

  It looked like I had exhausted the neighbour’s English so I thanked her and turned back into the street. I looked at my watch. It was too late to return to Luis’s office to see if anybody in his building knew where he was. There was nothing for me to do except return to my hotel.

  The rain showed no sign of letting up so I stayed in the room scanning the television channels until I found one showing the movie Crocodile Dundee with Portuguese sub-titles. I ordered a bottle of red wine and a burger and chips from room-service. Like a tongue that can’t stop itself probing a broken tooth, I returned again and again to Luis’s whereabouts. He wasn’t in Ipoh and it looked like he hadn’t returned home. Wherever he was, he was ignoring me.

  Next morning, I left the hotel so that I would arrive at Luis’s office shortly before 9 o’clock. There was a blue sky above and a chill edge on the breeze carried an ozone freshness from the Tagus estuary.

  Half an hour later I was still alone by Luis’s office door. I had expected somebody to arrive at the solicitor’s office across the passageway, but they were clearly not early starters. Finally, a heavy tread on the stairway indicated that somebody was coming. When the man reached the top, his bulk blotted out the light through the doorway. He was as tall as Luis and at least twice the weight. An Orson Welles of a man. He said something in Portuguese.

  ‘Do you speak English?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. His voice was a bass growl emphasising the similarity with Welles.

  ‘My name is Cross,’ I said.

  ‘I am Doutor Ardiles,’ he said, indicating his name on the polished plaque. ‘How may I help you?’

  ‘Actually, I am looking for Luis – Luis Escobar.’ I pointed to the nameplate on my side. ‘It’s a family matter.’

  ‘Come in. Come in. Escobar is away.’

  I followed him into a single room, the same size as Luis’s and furnished in a similar manner with two desks and the usual office equipment. Here though the desks and chairs matched, were more modern in style and the teak was polished. The main desk by the far wall was clear and there were side tables for current files. The antique telephone was ebony with ivory detailing. It looked heavy. There was an oil-painting portrait hanging behind the desk and the sitter was none other than the gargantuan man who stood before me.

  He placed envelopes he was carrying on the desk nearest the window and then lumbered across to a sideboard by the opposite wall. ‘My assistant will be here soon. She will bring a pastry for me. I will ask her to go out and purchase the same for you if you would like it?’

  I could tell from the tone of his voice that he expected me to decline. ‘That’s very gracious of you. But no thank you. About Mr Escobar – you say he’s away?’

  Ardiles started fiddling with the filter coffee machine. ‘I’m sorry but I must make coffee while we talk. It is our routine, you understand. I like to have it ready when my assistant arrives.’

  ‘Of course.’

  He spooned coffee into the filter. ‘Yes. Escobar went on holiday… two or so weeks ago.’

  ‘Is this his trip to Malaysia?’

  ‘To Malaysia, yes.’ He switched the machine on.

  ‘He’s actually been away for nearly a month.’

  The big man grunted back to his desk, opened the top drawer on the right-hand side and took out an A4 week-to-a-view diary. ‘Let me see—’ he flicked back three, then four pages ‘—yes, over three weeks. Time flies, I think
you say.’

  ‘Indeed. Do you know any more about his visit to Malaysia?’

  He shook his head. ‘Sorry. But you didn’t say who you are.’ He shifted his bulk back to stand alongside the coffee machine that had begun to hiss.

  ‘I’m his cousin. I live in London.’

  ‘I didn’t know Luis has family.’

  ‘Nor did he, until a couple of months ago.’ I could see he wanted me to say more. ‘It’s a long story, to be frank.’

  ‘Are you worried because you think he should have been back by now?’

  ‘Yes, I am. I sent a fax to him at his hotel and they refused to accept it. I assumed that he had checked out.’

  There was a flurry of activity behind me and I turned. A woman stood at the door with a handbag dangling from her shoulder. She held two paper bags, the pastries, in her hand.

  Ardiles, suddenly light on his feet, sashayed across to where I still stood, relieved her of one bag and set it on his desk. He spoke to her in Portuguese including the word ‘Cross’. The woman nodded. She went over to stand by the coffee machine and Ardiles settled himself behind his desk. He indicated the seat opposite and I sat down. We waited, neither speaking, while his assistant poured two mugs of coffee and placed one on a coaster in front of him.

  ‘Are you sure…?

  ‘No, I’m fine. Thank you.’

  Ardiles sipped his drink, and held it high while he turned to one of the side tables to retrieve a coaster.

  His assistant sat at her desk and opened the morning’s post.

  After another sip, Ardiles smacked his lips and gave a nod of appreciation towards his assistant. ‘You could say that I am Luis’s friend as well as his lawyer. He has been able to pass cases my way, usually divorce and, in my turn, I have been able to give him business. I have also looked after his affairs when he has needed legal help. It is my concern also that he has not come back as you expected. But if he has reasons to stay in Malaysia…’