Wuhan

by John Fletcher

  Agnes had her own plans for the future and had offered Spider Girl her freedom and a substantial sum of money so that she could arrange her – and presumably her father’s – exit from Wuhan. Provided her father was still alive. But Spider Girl turned her down. Quite decisively. Agnes needed her money to spend on the good things she spent it on and Spider Girl would look after herself.

  Donald had volunteered to stay in Wuhan operating until almost the end. As an invaluable – and innovative – surgeon he had been allotted a seat on one of the last planes leaving Wuhan for Chungking. He had also been told that there would be a spare seat on it for his most valued assistant. Donald had privately offered Hu the seat. Hu had thought about this a lot – all the lives she could help save – but turned him down. She felt her loyalties must be with Spider Girl. Spider Girl, who had rescued her from the air-raid shelter. She should be ready to do the same. But Spider Girl had given no sign of what she intended to do.

  While Hu worried Spider Girl scoured the markets on the Bund, searching for the most nourishing and antiseptic honeys in China to treat her father’s wounds. She went from stall to stall, comparing different honeys, talking to the stall owners. Eventually she settled on two. A rare, pure honey from China’s far northern province, Jehol – renowned for its nourishing properties when fed to the patient – and a honey from Mangshi in the far south-west, gathered off the sides of mountainous cliffs by men clinging precariously to long ladders, which, blended with white peony roots, liquorice, cinnamon and dried ginger and when smeared on the patient, could provide relief from abdominal pains. Spider Girl would feed it into his wound, alternating with the chloride solution, through the rubber bicycle valve.

  These rare honeys were not cheap. Much of the money that she spent on them was money obtained by less than honest dealings. But that was why Spider Girl was dishonest. So that honest people would not have to be dishonest.

  At the moment she had a lot on her plate. In addition to nursing her father and keeping Donald’s bow tie in a state of perky immediacy and visiting a nearby temple to pray for things and cooking and doing the housework for an ever-changing menagerie of visitors, she also had to buy the food and other household necessities in the market as well as all the bicycle parts demanded by Donald’s surgery. She also still put in stints at the workshop producing traction units for the hospital – though the workmen were slowly being sent away to work in a new prosthetics factory opening upstream in Chungking.

  Within the apartment, because of all Spider Girl’s extra activity, The Drab was being slowly promoted – although she was unaware of this herself. Now not only did she have to prepare all the vegetables, but she also had to do some of the cooking and housework – none of which tasks she did well. Agnes and Hu and even Donald helped her out when they had time, though Donald was even more clumsy than The Drab.

  *

  I pay my daily visit to the central post office to once more to ask if there is any letter from my wife and family. The answer is, as always, no.

  I wander distractedly along the Bund. There are fewer and fewer people in the city. I sit down at an outside table of my usual tea house. Attempting to look cheerful, the average boulevardier, I sip my tea and watch the passers-by pass by. At least Defend Wuhan! is finished. Now I can return to more exalted pursuits, such as rewriting Seven Chinese Virgins Sink a Japanese Torpedo Boat. Lao Xiang’s advice on the subject – ‘Fuck ’em’ – has not proved helpful.

  As I gaze around I notice the only other figure sat outside the tea house, a rather strained English gentleman sitting at a table quite close to me. He is of course immaculately attired. He has that common English air of self-sufficient aloofness. Except that suddenly he winces. And suddenly in his face I glimpse an ocean of pain, before he wriggles and almost immediately manages to reassert his mask of indifference.

  What private agony is that poor soul passing through?

  *

  Peter Fleming was all facade. What else can an upper-class old Etonian be but that? That is all he had.

  He was brought up in a vast and vulgar banker’s mansion in the Chilterns. (With a quick train connection to central London to get away from it all.) The bathrooms were as big as tennis courts and you could set up home in the fireplaces. His father, thanks to the nearby station, spent most of his time in London. His very beautiful mother in her colour-clashing discordant clothes wandered like a lost soul through the endless halls ignoring her children.

  Then came the First World War. His father suddenly reappeared in immaculate officers’ uniform tailored by Turnbull & Asser of Jermyn Street. He looked very tall and very brilliant and very distant as he puffed on his Davidoff cigars. Peter stood as close to him as he dared with a very straight back and tried to look military.

  His father went away to war and was killed in May 1917. Winston Churchill wrote his obituary in The Times.

  His mother broke the news to her nine-year-old son, informed him he was now head of the family, then totally ignored him.

  Peter took long walks, wandering alone through the nearby hills and woods. He became a keen ornithologist and observer of nature. He loved to be alone, in the Chilterns or on family holidays in the Highlands. He became an excellent shot and hunter.

  Meanwhile his mother took a lover. Not just any lover. The ageing lecher and daubist Augustus John. Naked sketches of his mother with her legs open soon started to adorn the soulless mansion. Peter got sent away to school, then to Eton.

  Eton is based on bullying. From the day you arrive, you are bullied. Fagging, flogging, buggery. Your education consists of learning how to avoid bullying. Excellent preparation for surviving and then thriving within the London elite. You can evade bullying by blaming others, inventing influential friends, toadying, clowning, superb and multi-layered lying, criminality, treachery, or, best of all, by becoming a bully yourself – while all the time exuding smooth-as-silk charm.

  The fact that his mother insisted on turning up for sports day dressed in garish emerald and purple or yellow and magenta dresses did not help matters. Nor did the fact that, by Augustus John, she produced a child, Amaryllis, the noted cellist.

  Peter went through Oxford, served in the Bullingdon, then stepped into The Spectator magazine with its faux rural airs set plumb in the middle of London’s greasiest fleshpots. From which he needed to escape very quickly. He embarked on an eccentric voyage into the Amazonian jungle, followed by a 5,000-mile trek across the tundras and deserts of Central Asia, followed by a hike over the Himalayas, after which, he announced, his buttocks were ‘taut enough to crack a walnut!’ He wrote nonchalant bestselling travel books about his frolics. Englishman meets lots of funny foreigners!

  And then he got mixed up in all this nonsense. In an odd sort of way he actually supported those animals back at the Last Ditch. Appeasement was almost certainly a fraud. A gamble. What would happen when Hitler had swallowed Western Russia and Hirohito Eastern Russia? Would they then say, ‘Thank you so very much for allowing us to fight these wars on your behalf, now you can go back to ruling us all?’ Or would they – armed with all Russia’s vast natural resources and industries – then turn their guns roaring and blazing on us? But, he reflected, the game must be played – spying on colleagues, writing editorials – to its bitter end. Duty is duty.

  The only thing that kept him going, kept him sane and functioning, was his beloved wife Celia. And, thug that he was, he could not bear to be anywhere near such a good and natural person.

  Floreat Etona!

  *

  This strange Englishman sitting near me on the Bund suddenly convulses into tears and then even more suddenly convulses out of them and, hastily wiping away all trace of them, sets his face, straightens his back, arises, glares at me – a mere Chinese – and marches off.

  Oh the horrors and burdens of empire!

  I too must go. I promised the director of my Wuhan cavalcade that I would pop in to thank everyone in the production before they all dispers
e. Yu Liqun will almost certainly give me one of her saucy winks. Which reminds me so painfully of my wife.

  *

  At the hospital Donald Hankey and Bob McClure were the last surgeons in Wuhan. As the fighting steadily got closer and closer soldiers in all states of disfigurement and pain continued to present at the hospital, but most were being sent immediately upstream. Surgeons and doctors and skilled staff and nurses were similarly being transported to Chungking. Unskilled staff, including Hu, were being given ever-greater responsibilities.

  One morning Donald and Bob and Hu were sitting in the side room. There was a lull in the arrival of patients. One of the Bunsen burners which had been used to heat the pressure cookers in order to sterilize their instruments was now being used to brew tea.

  Hu turned the conversation to Spider Girl.

  ‘Donald, Bob, I’ve been thinking,’ said Hu.

  ‘Gee!’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Spider Girl. I’m worried about her.’

  ‘Is she all right?’ asked a surprised Donald.

  Hu decided not to mention Spider Girl’s black moments. There was nothing Donald could do about them, anyhow. So she concentrated on the things that could be done.

  ‘Well – she doesn’t show it of course, but she is worried about how she’s going to get out of Wuhan. With her father – if he is still alive. I’ve said I will go with her. But if she’s going to get away then she’s going to have to be able to walk more easily. Even the shortest distances cause her pain with her rickets.’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Donald, ‘I should have thought about that.’

  ‘Yep,’ said Bob, ‘we should.’

  ‘I was just wondering if there was anything you two could do for her. To help her walk better.’

  There was a silence, which went on for quite a not inconsiderable time. Hu, who’d been thinking deeply on this, prompted them.

  ‘Perhaps it could involve bicycles?’

  ‘Ah ha,’ said Donald. ‘Yes.’

  ‘See what you mean,’ said Bob.

  They all turned to look at Bob’s bicycle leaning against the wall.

  Bob felt a bit perturbed by this. He was very fond of his bicycle.

  ‘Holy moly, when’s all this cannibalism of innocent bicycles going to stop?’ he lamented. ‘Seems that more and more we’re replacing vital bits of the human body with bicycle parts. Handlebars for shoulders, tubes for arms, legs for wheels! Half man, half bicycle!’

  Donald walked over to the bicycle, looking upon it vulturously, especially its forks.

  18

  Spider Girl’s father had been awake and fretting for most of the night. Spider Girl had just managed to get him asleep and was doing some cooking. Hu was reading her Bible, Agnes was in her room quietly working on the fifteenth chapter of the Battle Hymn of China and Donald was sitting at the table feverishly doing calculations on the backs of several envelopes, when suddenly, into their midst, strode a near-hysterical Freda.

  Spider Girl ground her teeth.

  ‘He’s left me! He’s left me! He’s abandoned me! Again I’ve been abandoned by a man! A damned man!’

  She exploded into fountains of tears.

  ‘What is the matter, Freda?’ Agnes enquired from her room in a rather commanding voice.

  ‘He’s betrayed me. That smarmy Vernon Bartlett. He asked for everything I could give him and then ran away. I’m alone again. With a three-year-old child!’

  Donald was from a rural background and so was not accustomed to sudden hysterical outbursts such as this. Such disturbing phenomena seemed to occur mainly in cities, especially among women, and at that dreadful public school he’d had to attend. Furtively folding the envelopes into his jacket pocket he sidled out of the door to continue his work in some quiet tea house. In doing so he forgot to put on his bow tie, which Spider Girl had spent a considerable amount of last night primping for him.

  This put Spider Girl in an even worse mood. Not only was this Freda woman likely to waken her father when he needed to sleep, but now she’d robbed Donald of his bow tie. She banged several pots and pans.

  Agnes emerged from her room. She’d been struggling to pin down the exact date of the Battle of Pingxingguan (25 September 1937) and had only just located it.

  ‘Freda,’ she said, ‘what is the matter?’

  ‘Well…’ sobbed Freda.

  ‘Sit down,’ Agnes ordered her. ‘And Spider Girl, get her some soothing tea. Now,’ said Agnes, sitting down beside Freda, ‘tell us precisely what has happened.’

  Everyone still in the room earwigged in – Hu, Spider Girl (as she banged around looking for the pu-ehr soothing tea) and even The Drab. Hu quietly provided a translation for them all.

  ‘Suddenly he appeared. In the hotel room. I didn’t have a stitch on. He had had a telegram. From some vicar in Somerset. On Exmoor! The Reverend Cresswell someone or other – what a name! And this vicar – who Vernon had been in the trenches with – was the chairman of the Minehead Labour Party. Somehow this priest had managed to wangle a by-election in his constituency, Bridgwater. But instead of candidates from all the different parties – Labour, the Liberals, the Communists – all standing against each other against the appeasement-supporting Tory candidate, he had somehow managed to wangle it so that only one candidate would stand against the appeaser candidate. They call themselves the Popular Front candidate. And this vicar on top of Exmoor wanted Vernon to be that candidate. And Vernon agreed, shouting, “At last the provinces have a chance to strike back!” Then he jumped on a plane and was gone. I stood there without any clothes on. Abandoned!’

  ‘Well,’ said a slightly flummoxed Agnes, ‘well…’

  Meanwhile Spider Girl, unable to locate the pu-ehr tea to soothe Freda’s nerves – probably because The Drab in her attempts at cooking had misplaced it somewhere – relieved her own fury by giving The Drab a stout cuff round the ears.

  Seeing this Freda leapt to her feet and redirected all her pent-up fury at Spider Girl.

  ‘This is what I mean,’ she screamed. ‘This what I mean! This peasant girl, dirty, scruffy, striking innocent halfwits, stealing my bath water and selling it to God knows who… Sack her. Agnes, you’ve got to sack her!’

  Everyone stared at Agnes.

  Slightly bemused, Agnes rose to her feet. Bloody upper middle-class Englishwomen!

  She was about to speak when something quite extraordinary happened.

  Someone else spoke.

  Usually totally incoherent, mumbling, talking to herself, crooning annoyingly on occasions, The Drab spoke. Spoke almost quite clearly, almost quite coherently. She addressed Freda.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘I am not very bright, and I don’t usually talk at all, but I want to speak about Spider Girl.’

  Agnes was so amazed at this intervention – like everyone else – that she started translating The Drab’s words so Freda could understand.

  ‘I want to say,’ said The Drab, ‘that I am alive because of Spider Girl. Without Spider Girl I would be dead. She picked me up off the street, where I was dying. If I lost Spider Girl and went back on the street I would die very soon. Because no one would need me. I am not very clever. In fact I can understand very little. And I forget things. Very easily. But Spider Girl helps me remember things. When I forget something she cuffs me and it hurts so that that thing I am meant to remember I remember because of the pain before I forget it again and Spider Girl has to cuff me again to make me remember it again. I am so grateful to her for this. She makes it possible for me to work, to be useful. If I lost Spider Girl – which I fear above all else – I would be back on the streets and would die very soon.’

  There was a silence.

  Spider Girl found the black pu-ehr tea and decided to make a bowl for everyone to calm them – except for The Drab, who might get so calm she’d fall asleep.

  Agnes looked quite sternly at Freda, who’d sat down again.

  ‘Freda,’ she said, ‘you�
��re an upper middle-class Englishwoman. Isn’t it about time you started behaving like an upper middle-class Englishwoman and pulled yourself together!’

  Freda meekly pulled herself together. She even apologized to Spider Girl.

  ‘And Freda,’ continued Agnes, ‘a bit of advice. You’re a foreign correspondent. Here today and on the other side of the world tomorrow. If you’re offered sex and want it, then have it. Enjoy it while it lasts – which won’t be long. Then get on with the next bit of your life.’

  *

  Next morning, before Hu left for work, she asked Spider Girl if she could call in at the hospital at about eleven. Spider Girl assumed it was likely to be a request for yet another bicycle part, agreed and thought no more of it.

  She bathed her father, changed his bandages and his bed clothing and put them to boil in the pot she used for sterilizing them. She dosed him with some opium and then chatted with him until he fell asleep. She then asked Agnes, who was working at her book, if she could keep an eye on her father while she was out and left.

  She did her shopping on the Bund – food and bicycle parts – dropped the food off at the apartment (telling The Drab which vegetables to cut) and then carried on with the bicycle parts to the hospital.