Unable to sleep, he has been watching China Central Television. His father’s death was announced quickly, along with a declaration from the Board of CantoCorp of business as usual. All this was necessary to end the uncertainty, the kind that shareholders, stock markets and governments fear.
Tributes had immediately been paid to the man who had been such an inspiration to so many, an asset to the People’s Republic and the engine of its economy.
“Walter Yeung will be afforded the rare honour,” the CCTV anchor woman had intoned, “of a lying in state, before he is laid to rest beside his wife and baby son who died so tragically over twenty years ago.”
They had showed a thirty-minute special: Walter Yeung — Man of the People — that told, in breathless, unflinching reconstruction, the cobbled-together story behind the ‘most important’ episodes of Walter’s life, including, of course, the most important episode of Jeffrey’s life.
Jeffrey watched, despite himself, as his mother’s car was swept off the road and tumbled down the ridge in slow motion, a screaming mouth superimposed over the dramatic scene. To an accompaniment of swirling strings, a torrent of CGI flowers burst out of the container lorry, down, down, down, covering the upturned car.
Finally, over the soft-focus image of a baby lying on a bed of pink blossom, haloed by the flowers, the voiceover speculated on the whereabouts of Walter Yeung’s surviving son, Jeffrey, not seen for many years: “It is to this already fortunate young man that Walter Yeung has bequeathed his business, his fortune, his spectacular art collection. What now,” the commentator asked, “for the future of CantoCorp and all those whose livelihoods depend on it?”
They’d interviewed people in the street, just as they had after Gor Gor’s death. Each of them described Walter as a ‘great man’, a ‘true hero’, as someone who inspired them to work hard and achieve their dreams of wealth and material things.
The reporter then asked one of a group of young women if she had a message for the ‘mysterious Jeffrey Yeung’. She paused before looking directly into the camera: “Will you marry me?” she’d said, and her friends erupted into giggles.
Now, he presses his keyboard and the door to his suite slides open. Yo Yo enters and he keeps his back to her, takes a deep, deep breath and says, “So. Tell me.”
Yo Yo’s reply comes quiet and steady. “Everything went as planned.”
Jeffrey spins round in his chair. “Then where is it? The real Cézanne? You were supposed to bring it to me. That was our arrangement.” Jeffrey tries to hold himself in but his exasperation spills over. “You do want more money,” he spits, “is that it?”
“I told you,” Yo Yo snaps, “exactly why I agreed to this. Money has nothing to do with it. I went to fetch the painting, as I said I would. I took hold of the frame” — she brings her hands up, reconstructing the scene Jeffrey had already envisioned — “and the canvas shone, filling my field of vision. It — it spoke to me.”
“It — spoke?”
“I know it sounds strange — but these are emotional times for all of us. It told me that, if I brought the painting here, it would be as good as buried — sealed in the living tomb you’ve made for yourself. That too would be a — a murder — wasn’t that how you described it?”
“You would never speak to my father in this way,” Jeffrey shouts. “If he were here — ”
“He is not here,” Yo Yo interjects.
She puts a hand to her face and Jeffrey recognises the gesture from when Walter struck her on his birthday, as if the memory has made itself physically present. This is her revenge for that and all his other slights, Jeffrey thinks. She is defying him now. “Yo Yo,” he whispers, urgently, “I know you hated my father too. You must understand how I feel?”
“No. I felt sorry for him. And for you. Fools, both of you. Utter fools.”
It’s as if his mother’s chastising voice echoes through her, transmitted through time. It is unbearable.
“You are just like him,” Yo Yo continues. “The great Walter Yeung only ever wanted one thing — the love of his remaining son — and you denied him that. You could have had everything and you threw it all away to stay in this — this luxurious pit — and become the Lone Wolf.”
Jeffrey gazes in astonishment on hearing her say his other, secret name.
“How could you think we didn’t know, Jeffrey? Did you really suppose you could do all that without Walter Yeung’s knowledge, without his permission? He knew. He knew the whole time. And he was proud of your work. Proud of you…”
“Did he — did he say that?”
“No, but I saw. When one of your works appeared on his computer he feigned indifference, but I saw him return time and time again to the flowers you were sending to the world.”
“And still he never spoke to me?”
“I saw,” — Yo Yo continues, as if Jeffrey has said nothing, has not leaped from the bed, is not now towering above her — “I saw the truth that lay beneath his silence.”
“And what truth was that?”
“Pain.” Yo Yo groaned the word. “And flowers. Do you realise how difficult that was for him? I will never understand your cruelty — that you would want to remind him, and the entire world, of that great tragedy that ruined your lives. Oh, good for you Jeffrey Yeung. Bravo! You made sure that he could never speak to you. You created an insurmountable firewall of flowers, over and over again.”
Jeffrey backs away now.
Yo Yo puts on a mimicking whine: “And still he never spoke to me. Well, I don’t blame him. How could he articulate a combination of such pride and deep sorrow? What words are there for that? He thought your whole life’s work was an effort to punish him for something for which he was not responsible. And all this time you were ignorant, each of you was ignorant of the other’s despair.”
Jeffrey collapses onto his bed, drained of all energy, curls up, unable to speak. She will not bring the painting to him. That’s her revenge for all that’s passed. It will be lost forever, and so his mother is lost, finally, irrevocably.
Yo Yo kneels next to him, speaks softly. “This is what happens when you lock yourself away aged fifteen. You remain an angry child.”
He glares at her, eyes stinging with tears.
“I’m sorry,” she murmurs, “but if you want the painting you must retrieve it yourself.”
With that, she withdraws to the doorway.
The impossibility of what she proposes shocks Jeffrey back into voice.
“What? No. No, I can’t do that!”
Yo Yo nods firmly. “Yes. You must.”
Jeffrey shakes his head and Yo Yo offers him an outstretched hand. “I’ll help you. I will help you through.”
So, not revenge. Instead, a kind of test. Somehow he knows he can do it. He takes her hand, small and pale, her fingernails bitten right down. It is the first he has held for too many years. He pulls himself up.
“You must open the door,” Yo Yo tells him.
Jeffrey turns towards his keyboard but she stops him. “No, not like that. Say it. Say the word.”
Jeffrey croaks into the air: “Open.”
Nothing happens.
“Again,” Yo Yo says.
He clears his throat and uses his father’s bark, “Open,” and the door slides back.
They walk out into the corridor and it is so, so easy.
Yo Yo lets go of his hand and he floats through the space, dizzy for a moment as if tumbling down a ridge, and he can smell flowers, but that’s impossible. Then he recalls the floral scent from Yo Yo’s hair. Did Walter smell it too, all that time she worked for him? Did she wear it deliberately — her own act of cruelty?
“You know the way from here,” she says.
Yes, Jeffrey does know.
Cameras turn to follow his progress down the corridor, though no one will be watching. CantoCorp headquarters has been closed as a mark of respect — today, it is a crystal mausoleum.
Jeffrey calls the elevator, step
s inside, alone, pushes the illuminated B and counts the thirty two seconds, his lips moving as his father’s used to do.
When the elevator comes to a halt, Jeffrey hesitates. Stepping out of its warm, protective cubicle is proving inexplicably harder than stepping out of his room. It means crossing into his father’s domain. But he remembers his vision and his quest to retrieve the painting and mustn’t fail. He pushes through his fear, can almost feel the gilt wood frame in his hands. Soon it will hang in his own rooms.
He strides purposefully to the door, punches in the security code — the date of his and Walter Junior’s birthday — and enters his father’s suite.
It is even worse than he imagined. The ceilings are low, spot lit, the maroon carpets deathly thick, the dark wooden panelling heavy and oppressive. The country-house hotel look he had seen on the screen looks even more like a cheap film set in reality. Taking a gulp of air, Jeffrey plunges towards the sitting room and through the door.
Automatic lights flicker on, immediately.
The cameras, alerted by his movement, bleep and whirr to face him.
He lets out a cry of alarm when he sees Walter Yeung, his father, is standing right there.
Jeffrey’s stomach heaves and he struggles to breathe as his legs give way beneath him. Suddenly an arm is round his back, another under his legs, and he is borne up like a child, placed into a chair.
His bleary eyes come into focus and he sees it’s not his father at all, but the doctor. It was the doctor who carried him, setting him down in a gentle recline with the same tender care he’d shown Walter’s corpse.
“I — ” Jeffrey gasps “ — what are you doing here?”
“I’ve been waiting for you.” The doctor’s voice is deep and soft, just as he thought.
“For me? How did you know I would come?”
“I didn’t, not for certain. But I am following orders from someone who did.”
“Yo Yo.” A flash of cold fear passes through him — fear that he really has been betrayed after all. Who can he trust? He will never get what he’s come for. “That little witch has told you everything?”
“Master Yeung, calm yourself, please.” The doctor kneels next to him, lifts Jeffrey’s wrist to check his pulse. He is wearing, not his customary sharp black suit, but Walter’s dove grey tailored wool and oyster-coloured silk necktie. And are those really the doctor’s fingers, with small dark hairs on his knuckles, nails carefully trimmed and buffed, gripping Jeffrey’s wrist? He smells… he smells of lemon, with black pepper, is that it? Then it comes to him. It’s hair oil, the same brand as his father’s, a scent Jeffrey didn’t even know he remembered.
Jeffrey suddenly starts. He is sitting in Walter’s chair. So then where — where is the painting?
As if reading his thoughts, the doctor moves to one side and reveals Cézanne’s Still Life with Apples and Jug hanging on the wall directly in front of him.
It’s smaller than he envisioned, that’s his first impression. Those funny-looking apples. The wonky table. His mind a blank, he can’t now remember his mother’s words about it, why she’d loved it. He’s no better than his father. “Is this it?” Jeffrey asks. “The real one?”
“This is it,” the doctor affirms. “The real one.”
Jeffrey feels… nothing. Empty. He looks, for the first time, into the doctor’s extraordinary eyes, one dark brown, almost black, the other a lighter green, flecked with amber. How many points of interest such as this have passed Jeffrey by, completely unnoticed, on those bleeping, monochrome, fuzzy screens? He feels nothing for the doctor either, no desire, that is, standing next to him in his tired-looking three-dimensional state, the man whose imagined touch Jeffrey has fantasised about for some time. What to say about the painting or the man?
Jeffrey starts with a simple statement of fact. He says, “She loved this painting.”
“So your father told me.”
“Did I do the right thing by preventing it from being buried with him?”
“What do you think your mother would have wanted?”
“Oh, she would have wanted it to carry on living in this world, I’m certain.”
“So there is your answer. It’s what your mother would have wanted. And your father, too.”
“No.” Jeffrey says. “You know full well what his wishes were.”
“I do. After all, I am here with you now because I’m following Walter Yeung’s wishes.”
“His? I don’t — ”
“He felt you should have someone you could trust with you when you finally came to collect it. After all these years of mutual silence, he still knew you better than anyone.” The doctor speaks as if giving Jeffrey a diagnosis. “Your father knew what you’d do when you saw the painting being copied. That’s why he did it. He knew it was the only way to get you out.”
Jeffrey could laugh, really, just laugh. Even in death Walter was playing games, but he didn’t hate him any longer. He had no energy for it. He didn’t know what he felt. “I should have told him,” he whispers. “I should have told him everything I felt about my mother, and my brother, about Gor Gor, my work, about me — I should have told him…”
“You were not wrong in your assessment of your father. I know what kind of a man he was. He instructed me to wear his clothes when you entered — my costume fooling you into seeing him for a moment, just as it did. He wanted to shock you into life — no, that’s not the word he used — he wanted to astonish you into life. That was it. I didn’t approve, but I agreed because he was like a father to me…”
The doctor slumps down on the footstool, succumbing to exhaustion. He, too, must not have slept much these recent nights, Jeffrey realises, what with all the waiting; not just for Walter’s demise, but knowing it would necessitate the part he was having to play now — explaining the outcome of the game.
“He was?” Jeffrey asks. He could not have foreseen any of this.
“Pardon me,” the doctor says. “I understand that’s an impertinence, but it’s the truth. My own father worked on a CantoCorp construction site and, one day, Walter overheard him and a colleague talking about future hopes for their children. My interest in medicine was likely to lead to nothing because my parents didn’t have the money to send me away to study. The very next day your father sent my father a cheque. Near the end of my first year at medical school my father died — lung cancer — and I thought I would have to leave my career behind, find a job and help my mother, but Walter continued to pay my father’s salary to her. Then, after I graduated, I became his only doctor. I really owe him everything.”
His father really had come to understand the possibilities of looking in his last months. Walter and Jeffrey had really seen inside each other, this whole past decade, even though they never spoke.
And Walter had done this vital thing for Jeffrey — freed him from his grief and astonished him back into the world, as he intended. Ultimately, it was not the painting that had brought him here, it was his father. He really was an extraordinary man. Walter’s true gift to Annie, his wife and the mother of his children, in the afterlife, their life yet to come, would be Jeffrey’s life.
He realises he is crying and the doctor takes a cotton handkerchief — identical to the one he had laid over Walter’s face — from his pocket and hands it to Jeffrey.
Jeffrey covers his own face with it, dries his eyes. The handkerchief carries a light cologne, the reviving scent of tobacco flowers. Walter had denied this pleasure in his lifetime’s state of grief, and Jeffrey yearns, now, to see him again, to press his hand against his father’s hand, even though Walter will never know. Maybe that could be arranged, if it’s not too late.
“Given what you have just told me,” Jeffrey says, “we are practically brothers.” This is the truth of it. As well as leaving him the painting, and freeing him, Jeffrey’s father has bequeathed him a new connection to the past — an older brother. “What’s your first name? I don’t know it.”
“Shen. My na
me is Shen.”
“I’m going to need your help, Shen. All the arrangements are in place, I know. Apparently, Hong Kong is about to witness the biggest funeral it has seen since — well, since Leslie Cheung’s. And a museum opening too, on the same day. Can you imagine? Could you — will you go with me?”
“Of course, Jeffrey. I wouldn’t want to miss it.”
Jeffrey stands up and approaches the painting. “This is the real one? No more surprises?”
The doctor laughs — something Jeffrey has really never heard before. “No, no more surprises.” It really is a warm, gentle voice.
“You strange thing,” Jeffrey says, examining the layers of red and green and brown and purple, all built up by one man. Unexpected colours shimmer in his sight as if after a long period of blindness. He steps back to take in its depth and texture. The surface vibrates, like a living thing. He considers his own creations, his digital versions of dim memories of flowers. Flowers and memories made of numbers and code.
“How do you begin to paint an apple, a tablecloth, or a mountain?”
He asks this aloud, not to Shen who has come to stand beside him, but to the painting, into the air.
You put down one stroke of paint, he thinks, and then another, and then another, and, after a pause, perhaps, another, until you have it. Until you’ve put down colour, light, shadow, and the spaces in between.
Jeffrey will undertake a new project, yes, a biopic of sorts, about his father: A Portrait of Walter Yeung. And it will be a true portrait — there’s no real value in anything else — of the complicated, difficult, terrible and brilliant man he was.
He hopes he can persuade Yo Yo to stay and work for him. If she agrees — and he truly hopes she will — her first task will be to contact J-P McKeown, ask if he would consider a collaboration.
He’ll invite Sophie Greene, too. Bring her and her daughter to Hong Kong. He thinks they might have valuable work to make together, or, if not, she would no doubt like to be away from New York and her ex for a while. Yes, if she wants it, he can do this for her.
Shadow Is a Colour as Light Is Page 20