by Denton Welch
In the days that followed I would rush down early to the pool in my black cotton bathing-suit and let the water slowly envelop me. I would swim and turn and feel the hot sun burning on me. Wooly always made me wet my hair.
The Aliens took us for wonderful walks. They bought me a long carved staff, brightly painted. I would run and pole-jump with it as they walked. My staff was a sort of talisman and I wanted it always with me. I loved its gnarled end, with the face of the old man and the peaches and bats.
They also gave me an umbrella of oiled skin, covered all over with flowers and symbols. I would sit under it in the mountain rain and let the trickles seep into the moss all round me. There was a strange smell from it, of linseed and paint and dirty human hair.
When the mists came down, the house lay there, a little lump on the mountainside; damp streamed from the windows and Ethel would serve tomato soup with the sickly rich lumps of cream in it.
Our bedroom was dark and Wooly would sit in the shadows, taking Kruschen salts or rummaging in her trunk.
The Aliens taught us to play mah-jong, and on these long wet days we would sit above the chattering blocks, shuffling them together on the green baize table.
Wooly also taught me to knit. I could never cast on or off, but would do rows of purl and plain with delight. I became absorbed. I did not even want to leave it when the sun came and an expedition had been planned to the valley.
On these occasions there would be much preparation, much mixing of salt and pepper into a sort of pale pumice-powder, and much wrinkling of greaseproof paper.
If it was a long way, we would start out down the mountain in sedan-chairs. Whenever I got into one, the Offenbach ‘Barcarolle’ would sound again in my ears. To this tune, rocks, pools, bamboos would pass by. I would sway from side to side and feel the straining of the coolies as they bore the chair. We always moved in a cloud of garlic. The blue of their faded cotton trousers was always before me.
When they set us down, we would walk a little further to a river-bank or pool; then we would undress and stand in the water, our toes curling round the smoothed pebbles. Miss Allen’s head, in a rubber cap, would emerge and her face would shine, a dull purple under the coating of talcum powder which she must have used. Her nose was big and the pores were large. There were many snowy mountains and craters.
Ethel would be on the shore, spreading the lunch, unwrapping the drumsticks and taking the lid off the Russian salad.
Then we would all rise out of the water like wet seals and lie on the rocks which were hot, like hearth-stones.
We all dressed before lunch, in the nooks our modesty had discovered. Wooly would tell me to rub myself hard with the towel. After our meal we would wander in search of interesting things. Once we found a monastery, set about with ancient ginkgo or maidenhair trees. There was a ruined well, with an elaborate stone balustrade in front, and we saw the yellow-robed monks, their shaved heads shining, pass in and out of the arched gates.
Miss Allen asked one about the well and he told her some strange heroic story which I cannot remember properly—only that some martyr died there for his religion. Then he took us all into the guest-hall, which was dark and heavy with old smells. The courtyard through which we passed was paved with flat stones, between which long shoots of grass waved like feathers. The coloured tiles were slipping from the roofs.
Another time, when we had not gone so far, we came on a European house which had been deserted. This was much higher up the mountain, and looking down from the broken windows I saw the paddy fields like a glistening draught-board below me.
The roof had fallen in and all the glass had gone from the windows, but there were the sagging iron beds, the crockery and the books, each standing dreamy sentinel, until they finally decayed.
The scene roused an echo of Miss Allen’s parents’ missionary zeal, and she exclaimed, ‘How honest the peasants must be to leave it all here!’
‘How honest!’ I copied fervently as I fingered a frying-pan which seemed to reek of the greasy living of the cities.
We once went too to the empty house of a friend of Miss Allen’s. We had with us a girl of about twenty. Everyone thought her very pretty and clever. She wore her hair in two curled-up discs over her ears. I was told I had to take off my sun helmet to her when we first met; I grudged doing it very much.
She was supposed to be very good at bridge and I thought of her, unaccountably, as I would now think, in the abstract, of the head of a women’s college at a university.
The house we went to was in a wood and the swimming-pool in which we bathed was dank and dark with rotting leaves. It was ghostly and horrible and exciting.
Miss Allen had started a conversation about what she would do if she were very rich, and everyone was joining in. Nobody but myself mentioned jewels, lapis lazuli baths and gold taps. Everyone was being extremely puritanical and saying that they would give most of it away and live on the rest in a Tudor cottage in Sussex with their spaniels.
All the way home I argued, with myself, the senselessness of taking one’s hat off to strange women who played bridge and wore their hair in rolled-up plaits.
I was soon to have my revenge, for one day I was to hear with wild excitement that my mother had returned from Java and was coming to Mo-kan-shan in a few days. I waited with terrible impatience, until one evening, as we were sitting on the terrace and the valley was filling with mist, we heard the strange sing-song of the coolies and saw the twinkling lights they were carrying.
Nearer and nearer they came, winding up the mountain; I wanted to go and meet them, but was not allowed in case I should get lost. At last the chairs were at the door and I was kissing my mother frantically. Her luggage was being unloaded from the other chair and we all trooped into the hall, which smelt of the oil lamp which flickered in the draught from the open door.
I rushed upstairs with my mother and she took off her hat. I held her hand all the time, only letting go when she knelt down and undid her dressing-case. She took out several parcels and put them on the bed in front of me.
‘They’re for you,’ she said.
I stared at the tissue-paper and then undid them wildly. There was a pig made out of a coconut, with red eyes and sharp, pointed, coconut ears. It was a money-box with a slit in the back. Then there was a bird made out of a polished buffalo-horn. Its beak was a long, sharp point and it was streamlined, like water poured from a funnel. The last parcel was flat and I could not think what it might contain. As I unwrapped it, the joints of it wriggled and I saw that it was a marionette in two dimensions. It was made of thick parchment and mounted on a horn stick. It was a terrible Javanese dancer with a red mouth and black pointed eyes. The jointed arms were painted with great bracelets. I made it dance and it seemed like a devil.
There was tomato soup and pumpkin pie again that night. They were Ethel’s favourites and she made them perfectly.
The next day we moved my mother’s things up to the hotel, as there was really no room for her to sleep at the Aliens’. That night we had a typhoon. I knew nothing about it until I was told. I quickly went up to see my mother. I met her on the doorstep and she told us all with laughing eyes how the plaster on her wall had suddenly decided to leave its moorings in the middle of the night and how she had woken up with her mouth full of dust and the bed smothered in bits like icing sugar. She fled just before the rest of the plaster fell.
Even on this exciting morning Wooly made me do my lessons and I felt that nothing could be more cruel than keeping a son from his mother.
That night the Aliens had planned a moonlight picnic by the pool. The little lawn was hung with lanterns and I was allowed to stay up.
After the lovely chocolate ice-cream, we talked and sang, and my mother told us about Java. Then gradually we rose to our feet, one by one, and went to the edge of the terrace and watched the moon rising. Soon we were holding hands and dancing slowly and rhythmically round the pool. My mother was next to me and on her other side
was the girl with the earphones. Suddenly my mother gave her a wicked little push. I gasped—there was all that cleverness and bridge playing, those curled plaits and that proudness; there it all was, floundering in the water. This was the thing I had to take my hat off to. The water made the thin dress stick to her and she looked like a naked bird whose skin sticks to its bones. I was horrified at my mother’s behaviour; I did not know how she could have been so wicked.
The girl’s head appeared, gurgling and smiling self-consciously. She did a graceful side-stroke across the pool, got out and then went on dancing in her wet dress, like some schoolteacher doing a revived Greek dance in classical folds.
My mother was a little red and shamefaced at her foolishness, but the girl, I think, enjoyed it all.
The next morning I got up early to bathe. My mother came with me and I danced about with nothing on—Wooly would never allow me to do this—I rolled in the water, feeling it hug me closer without the cotton suit between. It was glorious freedom.
Then we heard a rustle in the bamboos and the hateful girl appeared, her earpieces guarded by green rubber. All my shame fell on me like a coat and I crouched, clutching my knees, looking fiercely nonchalant. My mother brought my bathrobe and I slipped up through the bamboos, hating the awful girl more than ever for seeing me naked.
After breakfast I saw her sitting on the terrace, her thick, reddish hair covering her face and shoulders. She was drying it in the sun. My mother only stayed a few weeks with us and then returned to Shanghai. We were to follow later. The day she went, I sat in the bedroom looking at the coconut pig and longing to go back too. The holiday was never quite the same again. I wandered disconsolately in search of beetles and dug little ferns up and planted them in other places. I dammed the streams with mud and stones and watched small lakes forming.
A woman called Auntie Mary came to stay. She was nobody’s aunt that I knew of, but she was always called this.
She was fairly young, with a flat face and very restless eyes. She would lie in bed late and take aspirin, although she was a Christian Scientist. In her house in Shanghai she would jump off the opium couch on which she had been sprawling and run to the piano, where she would rattle the keys in a frenzy as she sang ‘Three o’Clock in the Morning’. Just as she got to ‘Nothing to do’, she would fling her hands down with a hopeless gesture and slouch on the stool, looking far away, with a sort of twisted mouth. One never quite knew if her behaviour was genuine or theatrical.
At the Aliens’ she was given the best room, in which all the furniture was green bamboo. She would make fun of it and the Aliens too when I went in to see her in the morning, and I would join in and enjoy this malicious gossip with a grown-up.
I was joyful on the day that we left. I wanted to get back to my garden, my mother and my treasures, as I called my collection of curios.
I left the beetles with the Dutch consul and anxiously watched his face to see it light up when he discovered the very rare one which I felt that I must have found. But he was only very polite and jovial.
When we were nearing Shanghai, Wooly told me that in about ten minutes we should be there. I knew that if you counted to sixty, a minute had passed, so I laboriously started to count the seconds. Then I had a brainwave: the time would pass far quicker if I counted in fives!
I began this labour-saving method. Five, ten, fifteen, twenty—the minutes flew. Soon the whole ten were done. I rushed from the corridor into the compartment where Wooly was, to ask her why the train hadn’t stopped.
VII
My mother was in the cool, dark drawing-room when we arrived. It was early autumn and the Venetian blinds were half down. She was dressed in a strange tea-gown of cherry-satin ribbons and white-dotted muslin. It was split up the sides and there was a tunic top. She held out both her arms and I ran into them. There were other friends there and we all began talking while my mother showed things from Java: the tawny sarongs that looked as if they had been embroidered with silver and gold and then dyed in stale blood; a wonderful beaded belt that was thick and constricting as a corset; a set of brass utensils for chewing betel-nut; and more marionettes, stranger and fiercer.
As soon as I could, I ran toward the stables, to see what my garden was like. There were weeds, the bird-bath was dry, with cracked slime at the bottom. Everything was choked and neglected.
Something went stiff inside me and I hated everybody for not caring about my garden and not looking after it. I was down on my knees. I weeded and watered furiously. I fetched the little rock-plants that I had brought from the mountains. They looked like the dried bottoms of artichokes.
When I had finished I went into the house and up to the nursery, where I opened the drawers of the little chest in which I kept my treasures. I rubbed and fingered the painted snuff-bottle, I made the facets of the rock-crystal lumps shine in the light. I played with the filigree box inlaid with kingfishers’ feathers. I rubbed my amber bead so that it picked up paper, and pretended that the small ivory netsuke was really alive. My father called these things junk and the very thought of this insult made me turn red.
Lessons were getting increasingly difficult with Wooly and one day, after a secret conference, I was surprised and horrified by being told that I was to go to school. Again I cried and implored my mother not to send me, but the next day found me setting out on Whiskers with the old mafoo walking by my side. We were going to Mrs Paul’s house, where she had a school for small children. The schoolroom was at the top of the house and on a wide low table were letters of the alphabet on squares of cardboard. We all sat round, as if we were gambling at a casino. Mrs Paul would say a word and there would immediately be a mad scramble of fingers, ferreting for the right letters to spell the word. Whoever got it right first, won. Mrs Paul always gave me the impression that she had been cooking in front of a kitchen range, or that she had just had a hot bath and dressed in the steamy bathroom, or else been sitting on a terrace in the sun gulping down cups of hot coffee. She had that fatigued, pale damp look, with tails of greying hair that had strayed from their place.
One day she asked me to lunch with her own little boy; we sat in the drawing-room at a small table by the window which, although we were on the first floor, reached to the carpet. This gave a strange, romantic, perilous look to the room, as if the windows were oubliettes, through which one could suddenly push one’s guest after having eaten and drunk with him exquisitely. He would be standing there, watching the moonlight on the rubber leaves of the laurel bushes, the smoke from his fat cigarette circling like apple peel thrown over a shoulder. Then there would be a push and a thud on those same laurels.
For lunch we had curry; the rice was dry and almost brittle and the curry itself was greenish-yellow. We piled peanuts, desiccated coconut and chutney on top. I did not like it because it was not like the curry we had at home.
Mrs Paul was preoccupied and said, ‘Yes, dear,’ to everything.
I only saw Wooly now in the afternoons and early mornings. It made a difference, not having lessons with her, although she still ruled all the rest of my life.
As Christmas drew near she would take me out to parties. I remember one well. It was at the house of a friend of my mother’s whom I had not met. She had just come back from Switzerland with her small daughter who had been at a school there, where they wore no clothes and rolled in the snow. I was shown a picture of her sliding down a chute into it.
We started with a Punch and Judy show. I had never seen one before and thought Punch the most disgusting, criminal type. When he began hitting the baby with hard wooden thuds, I felt its skull crack and knew that none of us were safe while grown-ups thought that this sort of thing was funny. When tea-time came we all trooped into the dining-room and sat round the large oval table. I noticed that there were two cakes: one was big and the other very high. I began to eat some jelly out of a decorated orange-skin, then I noticed that the French governess was fiddling with the biggest cake; she seemed to be cutting it and
at the same time pulling something.
Suddenly the cake fell open into evenly divided quarters. Its centre was a mass of little white bodies. They began to dart all over the table. I saw that they were white mice with pink eyes. There was an uproar and screams of delight. Governesses and Chinese servants were deftly catching them as they jumped off the table and putting them into little cages in pairs. The cages had wire wheels in them and, as the noise subsided, I heard a thin whirring as the small mice pedalled frantically round.
I looked at the cake again and saw that it was made of wood. All the quarters met in the middle and when a string was pulled they fell apart. The outside was iced with real sugar. I immediately thought of the ‘four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie’. I held my mice very close, in their cage, and smelt them. I sat quietly with them until the end of the party, when I could take them home. I gave them bread and water and cotton wool to sleep in. The next morning the bread that was left was hard and dry, and my mice smelt stronger. I cleaned their house and watched them lovingly as they pedalled or slept on the cotton wool.
Just before Christmas Miss Sharp was giving an exhibition at the Town Hall. I was to dance in an Irish jig. I had to have brown knee-breeches, a red waistcoat with brass buttons and a bottle-green coat. My hair was brushed forward.
I remembered the picture of the man with the pig, called ‘The Last Match’. I didn’t want to look like that. The rehearsals were exciting. The Town Hall was almost disused and still held the very spirit of the mid nineteenth century in its cast iron and palms and in the folds of the beef-blood curtains, trimmed with fantastic braid.
Miss Sharp’s voice would echo in the great hall as she told us that our thumpings would bring down the enormous pine rafters. ‘Lightly,’ she shouted, ‘like a fairy.’
The exhibition day was a delicious nightmare. There were the rows of mothers and visitors all round the edge of the room, while under the sickly yellow lights we danced and turned in our romantic clothes.