Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  ‘The thing is, you’ve got to be feminine, of great beauty, lithe and supple…’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘But it’s also quite important…’

  This is getting quite embarrassing. After all, I am talking to a whore.

  ‘The thing is, I want you to project – well – purity.’

  ‘Purity. Why d’you think I can’t project purity?’

  ‘Well, er…’

  ‘Believe me, whores are good at nothing so much as projecting purity. It’s what every client wants. The thought that this girl is so innocent and so pure and that this is the very first time they have ever, ever fucked. Or even known what fucking is. I can do purity so well I make Hu here look like a tuppenny up-against-the-wall whore.’

  Hu dissolves into giggles. I look a bit embarrassed. Intelligent Whore deals briefly with an aesthetic question from her son then confers with her musicians.

  She starts to dance. It is noble dancing. Striking. Heroic, even. But it is also feminine. The hips sway. There’s a liquid flow to her body. As a woman, as China, she’s unafraid, unapologetic, all-conquering.

  I take some time to recover. I remember myself. Panic slightly.

  ‘You will of course be paid,’ I assure her.

  ‘Of course I will. And handsomely.’

  ‘Intelligent Whore,’ I say, stepping forwards to shake her hand, ‘I really look forward to working with you, and can I say…’

  She cuts across me.

  ‘There is one other condition to my working with you.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I want my son to be on stage with me. I want him to be part of my act. He and I will arrange between ourselves what he is going to do.’

  *

  It is an extraordinary thing – life. You sort of come from nowhere, nothingness, and suddenly you are here, in motion, in momentum, crashing through. You don’t know what you are, who you are, where you came from, where you’re going – but you’re going, have impetus, things come at you, people, situations, events, and it’s amazing, terrifying, far beyond any sort of analysis. And then, suddenly, you are no more.

  George Hogg wasn’t thinking about any of this kind of stuff. Even though he was in the midst of it all. In fact he was so in the midst of it all that he had absolutely no time to think about it.

  He had still not managed to deal with his anger. It was still there – simmering within him, likely to erupt into flames at any moment like a fire on a peat moor. He still, poor torn Quaker, had visions and fantasies of doing to the Last Ditch warmongers what Joe Louis did to poor Max Schmeling.

  He so much missed the quiet provincial life of Harpenden where every Sunday the whole community gathered in the Friends Meeting House where they could discuss things like this. State your problem and they would gently and wisely counsel you, point you to the path of righteousness – the steady, calm light of God’s reason, which would enable you to sit through all the taunts and dishonesties and lies of the Last Ditch Club without a smoulder of anger.

  But Harpenden was Harpenden and Wuhan was Wuhan, and in Wuhan George had a problem to solve. It concerned the children, the orphans he worked with and had come to know and care for. Deeply. He needed a solution.

  He checked in with his boss at the news agency, who told him there weren’t any important stories at the moment. George asked for the day off – a very rare event for the conscientious Quaker – and his boss said that if he kept in touch during the day in case any big stories broke or there was a major air raid, then he could have it off.

  George spent the whole day scurrying from government office to government office, speaking to responsible official after responsible official, trying to discover what plans they had to evacuate his orphans to a place of safety before the Japanese arrived. Everyone knew that Wuhan was about to fall. Already in the distance artillery fire could sporadically be heard.

  Ever since the temporary government had been set up in Wuhan nearly a year ago it had implemented a large scale and generally successful evacuation of orphans – of whom there had been so many – upstream to safety in the far-off provinces of South-West China. He saw the crocodile processions of neat and shorn and fumigated orphans, hand in hand, singing their patriotic songs, wending their way every day along the Bund to their awaiting ships. Why not his?

  He asked this question again and again to the ever fewer civil servants he could access – they too were being filtered away upstream. Who was going to rescue his orphans? Who was going to take care and responsibility for them?

  And gradually it dawned on him that no one was. That his orphans were probably too crazy and unhinged and wild for anyone to want to take care of in these circumstances. The few nurses and assistants who were still present in Wuhan were probably far better employed looking after and organizing better-behaved and more docile children than his own, who would take many staff to control and manage. He at last realized that his orphans were going to be left for the Japanese to take care of. With bullets.

  Who would look out for Chin, who was always whining? Liang, who protected Hua? Would anyone be able to stop Heng and his bullying? Perhaps talk to him long enough so that one day Heng would understand why he did it and stop? And what about the mysterious, silent trio – Cong and Xingfu and Wen – would they ever talk again? Or Bojing? Each in their own private world of torment.

  *

  Spider Girl had settled into a routine of nursing her father. She watched him during the day and woke every two hours to check him during the night. Donald and Hu, when they returned exhausted from work and just before they returned for their next shift, would inspect him and advise Spider Girl on how he should be treated while they were away.

  Three times each day Spider Girl swabbed and disinfected his wound and changed his bandages and when it was necessary gently replaced his soiled sheets and bedclothes and bathed him with a sponge. All the time cawing to him and crooning in a low, loving voice.

  She boiled his bandages and clothing to disinfect them.

  Gradually, bit by bit, Wei started responding to her cradling and coddling. To her gurning and gaping and clucking – like a mother trying to coax a smile from her baby – he’d grunt and moue his mouth, his eyes would flicker, and then suddenly his eyes opened and he looked.

  She looked.

  He recognized her. From profound depths he attempted to dredge up her name.

  ‘Wild… Wild… Wild Pear Blossom.’

  ‘Father.’

  Then he looked away and would not look at her again. For he remembered not just her but everything else that had happened.

  14

  Freda Utley didn’t dress like some glamorous Hollywood star. She had no furs nor diamonds. She wasn’t that sort of upper middle-class girl. After all, she’d been a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain until very recently. But appearances did matter to her. Especially tonight.

  Vernon Bartlett had invited her to dine with him alone in his hotel room.

  She’d taken a bath. Which involved all the usual unpleasantness of having to think of that servant girl greedily bottling all her bath water, her intimate bath water, then selling it to…

  She’d taken the bath in her shared room. (Agnes was away attending the opening of a soldiers’ rehabilitation centre.) She washed herself as thoroughly as she could. She’d earlier had her hair set, quite expensively, in a hair salon in a Western hotel and had wrapped it carefully in a towel while she bathed. She arose from her bath and softly dried her body. She slipped quickly into her clothes. Freda was not a great dresser. She wrote books and was a bit of an intellectual. On occasions her dress could be described as almost dowdy, and she wore spectacles. But she did have one outfit which she wore when she wanted to – well – draw attention to herself. It emphasized her figure – still good – and suggested, especially in candlelight, what might lie beneath.

  She had made no decisions, absolutely no decisions, on what might or might not occur later that evening.
She was a married woman.

  It was time to put on her make-up.

  Mirrors were not that common in China and were particularly expensive in Wuhan, so most people didn’t really bother with them. Agnes and Hu certainly didn’t! But Freda had managed to purchase a very small one on the Bund and it was now balanced precariously above a small table she was using as her dressing table.

  There’s another thing. Women with glasses have quite some difficulty when it comes to applying make up. Glasses cover a fair amount of your face, especially those areas which require the most detailed and delicate attention. So the glasses have to be removed. But then you can’t clearly make out the areas you are having to pay the closest attention to. Short-sighted women have to get very close to the mirror in order to make sure everything is being done correctly.

  Freda muttered to herself, and then started her make-up.

  She applied vanishing cream – not too much – to all her face. She then lightly dusted white powder over this foundation. She decided not to use red rouge – too healthy outdoor – but added a soft topping of apricot rouge to highlight her cheekbones.

  Should she wear her glasses?

  Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses.

  But did she want men making passes at her?

  And if she didn’t wear glasses she might walk into furniture or knock over wine glasses.

  She decided to leave the glasses decision til later.

  Freda had never had her eyebrows tweezed – far too bourgeois. But they were a bit wild – she wished she could. But she didn’t have any tweezers.

  She did have her eyeliner pencil. Should she go for the full Harlow half-moon? Decisions, decisions. She went for a half Harlow quarter-moon. It looked quite good.

  She dabbed petroleum jelly on her eyelids for the shine. And a twizzle of henna across her eyelashes to draw attention to herself when she blinked – Freda would never flutter.

  The lipstick.

  Not too red.

  But red enough to hint at…

  She applied it.

  Why do women have to go through indignities like this?

  Freda stopped still.

  She now faced the really big decision of the night. Not whether to wear glasses or how much red lipstick she should or should not apply.

  She had to decide on her perfume.

  The special bottle of ‘Irresistible’ perfume stood on the table before her. She had bought it in Paris. She had bought it for the night that she and her husband Arcadi would somehow or other be reunited. Her husband, the father of her child, who had been dragged away from their flat in Moscow one night and had never been heard of again. She shuddered. Who had quite probably been shot by Stalin’s secret police. And if he was, by some miracle, still alive, might now be slaving in one of Stalin’s rumoured Siberian death camps. It was for him she had been saving her ‘Irresistible’ perfume. Their ecstatic night of reunion when…

  But that was then. And now is now. Two years had gone by. She had to start making her own life. She had a young child she was responsible for. And she really did like Vernon Bartlett. He might have a white patch on his finger where he’d removed his wedding ring, but she had almost forgotten what the intimacy of two people in a bed was like. And Vernon had a paternalism and gentle manner that soothed and smoothed her eternal fretfulness. And he was intelligent!

  She dabbed the perfume quickly behind her ears and inside her elbows and then in more intimate places. She hid the bottle behind Agnes’s bookshelf – just to hide her shame from herself – then squinted at herself in the mirror. She didn’t look that bad.

  Freda Utley was armed and ready to go. Glasses and all. She marched through the door.

  *

  Wei continued in his mood of shame, of depression. Spider Girl knew that if she did not cheer him, lighten him up, he would die even sooner.

  As she sat beside him on his bed, his face still averted, she reached a decision.

  She spoke to him straightforwardly, matter-of-factly.

  ‘Father, do you remember Fat Yao?

  No response.

  She continued confidently, as though he’d answered.

  ‘Yes, the really fat farmer in our village. The one who fell down the well and couldn’t get out? Just stuck there fast? So they tied rope under his arms and tried to pull him out – six or seven of them – but he wouldn’t budge an inch. They tried everything. Nothing. So in the end they had to starve him to get him up.

  ‘He’d always been fat, which was why they called him Fat. But now when Fat Yao walked around the village he was so thin no one recognized him. And even when it was explained who he was no one knew what to call him, since you couldn’t call a thin man fat. He was so thin his wife started to complain, saying that her parents had married her to a fat man because that meant he was healthy and strong and would likely grow rich, but now instead she had a thin and wasting husband who sat around all day lamenting and was good for nothing. So she left him.

  ‘Fat Yao became so desperate he started to eat again, enormous amounts, cooked with love by his mother. And started to put weight on. Pretty soon all his old weight returned. So his wife returned to him and villagers knew how to address him. But ever after Fat-Then-Thin-Then-Fat Yao never went anywhere near his well and employed a young boy to draw all his water.’

  Wei stopped himself from laughing. But he could not contain a swift rictus grin splitting his face.

  Spider Girl saw it was working. She continued her determined wooing.

  ‘Father, remember old farmer Gao, who owned so much land but had no relatives to leave it to? And those two young ambitious farmers – Tang and Dong – both with large hungry families but without the money to purchase Gao’s land?

  ‘So one day Tang goes to his rival Dung and says, “Neither of us can afford that land that Old Gao will sell.”

  ‘“You’re right,” said Dung.

  ‘“You and I will grow old and our children will starve if we do not get more land.”

  ‘“You’re right there,” said Dung.

  ‘Tang was smart and Dung was not.

  ‘“But,” said Tang, “because we’ve both known each other a long, long time and two of our sisters have married into the same family, this means we are good men and can trust each other…”

  ‘“Indeed,” said Dung.

  ‘“…So if we were to put our money together, as one, we would have enough money together to buy Old Gao’s land and then, when we’d bought it, we could divide it up between ourselves fifty-fifty and we’d both have got what we want.”

  ‘“I agree,” said Dung. “You are a good man.”

  ‘“But don’t tell anyone,” added Tang, “or Old Gao will put the price up.”

  ‘So Dung gave the good Tang most of his money and Tang went to Old Gao and purchased the land and paid him the money for it and after all the official documents and everything had been drawn up and signed and so on Dung went to his friend Tang and said “Well, how are we going to divide up this land?” and Tang replied “We aren’t. I don’t think it’s a good idea anymore.”’

  This time Wei exploded at this old village tale. In fact he laughed so much his daughter worried about him and decided her next story should be sad.

  Wei looked at her.

  ‘Daughter,’ he said.

  And thus was Wei, by his daughter’s craft, slowly drawn from his shell.

  *

  Freda and Vernon were dining intime. In his hotel suite. From the balcony there was a wonderful view across the vast Yangtze, moonlight dancing off its waves. The room was lit by only two candles on their small dining table. Freda was still wearing her glasses but wasn’t quite sure about this.

  The conversation had started with a discussion of her book Japan’s Feet of Clay, which had caused quite a stir when it was first published. It was a Marxist analysis of the Japanese class structure. She had argued it was antique and inflexible. The book, researched with great diligence, expo
sed the terrible exploitation of workers in Japanese textile mills, especially those in Shanghai, and argued that this revealed the essential flimsiness of Japan’s whole economic structure. Stable and enduring economies and societies require a sharing of their wealth among all classes.

  The book had caused outrage in Japan and interest throughout the rest of the world, especially in China. Vernon had not read it but intended to do so. So Freda filled him in on its details. Vernon listened fascinated.

  Then the conversation turned to mutual friends. It happened they both knew George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski and Bertrand Russell. Bertie had given Freda quite a lot of help in trying to find out what had happened to Arcadi by writing repeated letters to the Russian ambassador in London.

  This reassured Freda. It meant that Vernon was liked and respected by people she too was close to.

  Finally they got on to the really big subject of the day. Chamberlain’s flight to Munich. What was likely to happen there? Both Hitler and Mussolini were present. Would Chamberlain betray Britain again? Freda hadn’t really been keeping up with the whole crisis – Eden’s resignation, the Anschluss, the Sudetenland. In London she’d been totally preoccupied with the campaign to free her husband. So Vernon now briefed her on what was actually going on. As lobby correspondent for Reynold’s News he’d been at the very centre of the battles within parliament and in Fleet Street.

  He refilled her glass.

  ‘Truth is, Freda, our country’s utterly divided. There’s this tiny elite in London, centred round the City, Downing Street, Fleet Street, the BBC, who are determined, absolutely adamant, they’ll appease Hitler at all costs. And then there’s everyone outside. The provinces, the working classes especially, who are dead set against giving way to him. Who think the appeasers are criminals betraying their country. We’ve never been so divided.

  ‘I’ll give you an example,’ he said as Freda watched him through the candlelight. ‘Ran into Harold Nicolson just before I left. He said he’d been dining at his club the night before and at the next table sat three young peers of the realm all declaring, in the loudest possible voices, that rather than having a socialist government in power they’d prefer to see Adolf Hitler sat in Downing Street.’