“Yes, of course, you’re the first girl, and I’m the first man, and the world has only just begun.”
Chapter Six
I woke in the morning at nine o’clock. Suzie was still asleep and I stretched over her to the bedside table for a novel and started to read, but I could not concentrate because I was too happy, so I laid down the book and watched Suzie sleeping. Her face was as peaceful as a child’s, and the lids smooth over the eyes, and the lashes spread like little Japanese fans so that I could count each hair. I wondered if she was dreaming, and what Chinese dreams were like. I hoped they were like Chinese poetry, full of wicket gates and rock pools and chirruping cicadas, and warm rice wine and love.
She did not move for an hour. Then she stirred and sighed and rolled over and settled herself comfortably in another position.
“Come on, Suzie darling,” I said. “Wake up.”
She purred like a sleeping kitten and said, “‘Darling.’”
“Wake up.”
She rolled over again and snuggled against me. She giggled and shivered deliciously, and said, “Very beautiful.”
“What’s beautiful?”
“‘Darling.’ Deep voice very beautiful. Boom-boom!”
“I’m going to get some tea. Watch Ah Tong’s face when he comes in.”
I rang the bell by the bed. Suzie pulled the sheet up to her chin without opening her eyes. Ah Tong knocked and came in with the teapot. He saw Suzie and stopped, his eyes like saucers. Then he remembered himself and crossed to the bedside table, averting his eyes from the bed and struggling to keep his face wooden. He exchanged the new teapot for the old pot in the padded basket. I decided that I had tortured him enough and said, “That surprised you, didn’t it, Ah Tong?”
He looked up and saw me laughing. His face exploded into grins of relief.
“Yes, sir. I am happy, sir.”
I knew that Ah Tong was really happy because it had worried him that I did not have a girl. He had suspected either that there was something wrong with me, or else that I was an agent of the police; but now I was in bed with a girl like anybody else, and so all was well. He poured out two glasses of tea, happily grinning, and left the room. Suzie had not opened her eyes.
“‘Darling,’” she purred. “Boom-boom!”
At eleven o’clock Ah Tong came in again with my laundry. He was still grinning. He reported that Rodney had asked him if Suzie was still with me, and that he had tactfully pleaded ignorance.
“How did he know she was here in the first place?” I asked.
“Number Two floor boy told him last night, sir.”
He went out. Suzie sat up and said, “Hey, what’s the time? I must go and see my baby.”
“Can I come with you?”
“No!”
“Why not?”
“Because you didn’t say ‘darling.’”
“Can I come with you, darling?”
“Boom-boom! Yes, all right.”
We dressed and walked round to her room. Her white evening cheongsam and embroidered jacket were conspicuous in the morning, especially as we entered the narrow teeming back streets. Suzie’s room was in a corner building at the intersection of two streets, above a paper shop selling paper articles for providing dead relatives with the wherewithal for the next world. The gaily colored paper models were hung out for display over the pavement like Christmas decorations: paper clothes, houses, junks, cars, and bundles of million-dollar notes for financial provisions, which could be transmitted to dispossessed spirits by the simple expedient of burning. There were more paper shops in Wanchai than grocers. Suzie thought it possibly unlucky to be living over one, though it was better than living over the shop next door, which sold coffins.
The entrance to her house was between the coffin shop and the paper shop. I followed her up the steep narrow stairs. The house was rickety and old, and the landings littered with rubbish. There was a smell of cooking and urine and close-packed humanity. The rooms on the two lower landings were each occupied by ten or fifteen people, and through the open doors I could see children shoveling rice into their mouths from bowls, mothers suckling their infants, old listless bearded men lying like corpses. There was a din of voices and quarreling. We climbed the last dark staircase to the top where the two rooms were both let to single tenants, and the landing swept. We entered Suzie’s room. It was small and fastidiously clean, but the walls and little balcony were stacked high with nameless junk. The Chinese were collectors, and Suzie typically could not bear to throw anything away: not an empty bottle, not a tin, not an old cardboard box, not a piece of string.
The amah was squatting on the floor mending one of Suzie’s cheongsams. The baby was playing with an old tin. It saw Suzie and beat the tin on the floor, grinning and dribbling ecstatically. Suzie gathered it into her arms, indifferent to the dribbles that smeared her white silk dress. She chattered to it adoringly in Chinese.
“He’s looking marvelous, Suzie,” I said, though it always hurt me to see that sallow pathetic little Eurasian face. And it still seemed to me very underdeveloped for its age.
“He still coughs, you know,” Suzie said. “Cough-cough-cough! Hey, why you cough, my naughty baby?” She tickled its ribs so that it spluttered afresh. “Yes, my beautiful! My good-looking! You speak nicely to my boy friend, and maybe one day he will take your picture.”
I remembered that I had once promised to take her baby’s photograph, but my camera was broken and not worth mending. So I suggested that we should take him to a professional photographer’s; I had been trying all morning to think of some present I could give her, and this was the ideal solution.
Suzie was delighted by the idea, and spent several minutes over the choice of cheongsam in which to be photographed with the baby. She changed for decency’s sake behind a blanket held up by the amah. The amah was also to come along, and the old woman showed her pleasure at this prospect with great broad silver-toothed grins. Her brown old peasant’s face was finely matted with wrinkles, but her little black beady eyes were as clear as a girl’s. She wore a blue jacket, black baggy cotton trousers, and black felt slippers; her gray hair was knotted in a bun held by a big cheap plastic comb. Suzie was very fond of the old woman but thought her stupid, and often impatiently snapped at her. The amah accepted her scoldings without resentment, because although Suzie was such a slip of a thing, she had made money, wore beautiful silk, and could afford a room of her own. She felt great admiration for Suzie’s success in her job with the foreign sailors.
The amah folded the blanket, then put the baby into a carrier-sling on her back. The baby promptly fell asleep sucking its thumb.
“You ready, good-looking?” Suzie said. “All right, we go now.”
We walked down the narrow alleyway to Hennessy Road, the amah shuffling behind. There were several photographers in the locality, and we stopped before the first. The central showpiece in the window was a tinted portrait of a young English sailor with straw-colored hair, washy-pink cheeks, and angelic blue-tinted eyes. The surrounding pictures were all of Chinese couples sitting in stiff conventional European poses, the girls with crinkly newly permed hair, and the young men with their hair smarmed and glossy, and their ties and white collars and breast-pocket handkerchiefs all neatly in place. Only the Chinese physiognomy of the sitters distinguished the window from its many counterparts around the main-line railway stations in London.
“This looks very nice,” Suzie said, and we went inside.
The photographer was a self-important Chinese youth with patent-leather hair, an American twang, and a bullying professional manner. Suzie, however, knew exactly what she wanted, and she firmly put him in his place. She arranged the poses herself, told the offended young man when to press the button, and scolded him when he was not ready.
“What’s the matter? You expect my ba
by to sit still while you fiddle? No, wait now. I must make him laugh again.” And she quickly did so—for she seemed able to produce almost any expression on its face to order, making it laugh, smile, look solemn, or furrow its brows in concentrated thought.
The photographs were all taken against a sentimental crudely painted back-cloth of terrace, balustrade, flower-urn, and marble pavilion. Suzie arranged several poses of the baby alone, then of herself and the baby, then of the baby and amah. Finally I was roped in, and made to stand behind the chair while Suzie seated herself with the baby on her lap.
“But it’ll look as if I’m the father, Suzie,” I protested.
“Yes. You mind?”
“No, I’d be very flattered.”
She giggled. “And I will tell my baby, ‘That man is your father. That’s why you’re so good-looking!’”
“You’ll have to say it with more conviction than that. Now stop making me laugh, or I’ll spoil the picture.”
Afterwards I only just managed to snatch her bag out of her hand in time to stop her paying the deposit. I took the receipt and we left the shop. The amah shuffled off with the baby once more asleep in the sling. We stood on the pavement, the trams rattling past in the brilliant sunshine.
“What shall we do now, Suzie?”
“Cinema?”
“No, let’s just get on the top of a tram and stay there until it stops.”
“All right.”
We boarded a tram for Shaukiwan, the junk-building village, but a few minutes later I remembered that it was Saturday and that there would be a race meeting in the afternoon. Suzie had never been to the races and said she would like to go, so we got off the tram and took another tram going back into town. We got off in the Central District and had lunch in a big Cantonese restaurant where a succession of girls came round the tables with trays of dishes and you helped yourself as you pleased. There were thirty or forty girls with as many different dishes, including sliced chicken and duck, shark’s-fin soup, pork pieces, fried prawns, and a variety of Cantonese specialties in circular wooden steamers, and the girls were passing all the time.
We had a dozen dishes between us and afterwards a girl came and counted the empty plates and steamers and made out the bill. I had known this sort of restaurant to be inexpensive, but the total came to even less than I had expected.
“That leaves all the more to lose on the horses,” I said. “Come on, Suzie, let’s go and try our luck.”
The racecourse was in Happy Valley, behind Wanchai. It was overlooked by big new apartment blocks, and by squatters’ huts clinging to every ledge of the escarpment. Inside the circular track were football fields with games in progress. The first race had finished when we arrived and women in black trousers and wide conical straw hats were spread out in line across the track, pressing down loosened turf with their bare feet. A brass band with uniformed Chinese bandsmen was playing Poet and Peasant.
The grandstand and enclosures were packed. There were many English businessmen and their wives, and army officers with hacking jackets and shooting sticks, but they were swallowed up by the Chinese crowds. Many of the Chinese were very rich. They wore high-necked Chinese gowns or well-tailored English suits, and their wives wore pretty cheongsams and trailed tantalizing whiffs of Paris perfume.
“Too many pretty girls,” Suzie said. “I am scared to lose you.”
“Nonsense, Suzie. You knock them all into cocked hats.”
“I keep hold of your hand, in case you turn butterfly.”
There were no bookmakers on the course and we went over to the Tote. I had no difficulty in explaining the betting to Suzie because gambling is in the Chinese blood, and she had often gambled at mah-jongg and fan-tan and other games. We each put five dollars on a horse. I backed a horse called Misgiving, because it exactly described my state of mind in parting with the five dollars, and Suzie backed No. 7, because seven was her lucky number for the day.
We left the Tote and made our way toward the rail. Suzie suddenly tightened her grip on my hand.
“That butterfly man!”
I saw Rodney coming towards us, absorbed in his race card. He wore a pale green sharkskin suit, a green-spotted bow tie, and suede shoes. He had evidently just paid a visit to the barber for his hair was freshly cropped—cropped so short, in fact, that it looked as if his skull had been painted with gum arabic and the hair sprinkled on from a little packet.
“Quick, Suzie, he hasn’t seen us,” I said.
However, just then Rodney glanced up from his race card. I tried to look as if we had not been hoping to avoid him, and said, “Well, hello!”
Rodney walked past, cutting us dead.
“He is no good, that man,” Suzie said.
“Never mind, we’re not going to let him spoil our day.”
We stood behind the crowd at the rail, waiting for the race to begin. Suzie, with a woman’s intense interest in other women, absorbed herself in a study of our female neighbors. She examined their faces, their hair styles, their jewels, their dresses, their shoes. Presently there was a shout from the crowd.
“Here we go, Suzie!”
She reluctantly withdrew her gaze from a pretty Chinese girl with diamond clip and urchin-style hair; but soon the horses had diminished into a stream of moving specks beyond the football fields, and so she resumed her study.
A minute or two later the bobbing jockeys reappeared over the heads in front of us and passed between the winning posts. Suzie’s horse, No. 7, was towards the back.
“Who won?” Suzie said. “Your horse?”
“I haven’t spotted mine yet.” But just then Misgiving came frisking past without his rider, looking very naughty and pleased with himself. “No, mine’s last. I think his jockey’s given up racing and gone to join the footballers.”
Suzie pulled my arm and nodded towards the girl with the urchin hair. “Smart,” she said. “Don’t you think that girl’s hair is smart?”
“Yes, but don’t start getting ideas, because I’m not letting you cut yours off.”
“She smells beautiful, too. That is very beautiful scent.”
“Now, what do you fancy for the next race?”
“Number Seven.”
She stuck to No. 7 all afternoon and won twice. The first time her horse was second favorite and the gleanings small, but the second time it was an outsider and she won two hundred dollars. I had one winner and ended up only ten dollars down. We managed to avoid running into Rodney again, except once when I found myself jostled against him in the crowd. We both kept our eyes averted, like secret agents in a film when they meet accidentally and pretend not to recognize one another. We did not see him again.
Suzie’s second win was in the penultimate race, and after we had collected her winnings we left to escape the stampede. We walked back to Wanchai because there were already queues for the trams. On the way I went into a shop for cigarettes and when I came out Suzie had vanished. I looked round for several minutes, half anxious and half piqued because she had gone off without telling me. Then I saw her come out of a shop.
“I thought I’d lost you,” I said testily. “What were you doing?”
“I just bought myself some scent.”
“Scent?”
“Like that short-hair girl.”
She held up her little parcel. She looked so pleased with herself that I laughed and forgot my anger. We crossed Hennessy Road and walked down to the water front.
As we turned the corner to the Nam Kok a taxi stopped outside and Rodney got out. We waited, giving him time to go up in the lift, and then followed. When we got upstairs his door was ajar, so we tiptoed past and let ourselves quietly into my room. I rang the bell for tea, and we took the pot onto the balcony.
“You like to see my scent?” Suzie said. She handed me the p
arcel. “You open.”
I removed the string and brown paper. It did not contain scent after all, but a little silver box.
“It’s beautiful, Suzie,” I said. “But I don’t understand. Why did you say it was scent?”
“For surprise. It’s for you.”
“Me? Suzie, don’t be ridiculous!”
“Yes, it is a present.”
“Suzie, you’re mad! You must have paid a fortune for it!”
“I paid nothing. Number Seven horse paid.”
“I don’t know what to say, Suzie. I wish you hadn’t done it.”
“Look, I bought it to match hairbrush.” She took the box and I followed her inside, where she laid the box beside my hairbrush on the dressing table. “Both silver.”
“But the hairbrush isn’t really silver at all.”
“No? Then good thing Number Seven horse gave you this box. Because you are a big, important man—you need proper silver.”
“Suzie, bless you.”
“You can use this box for cigarettes. Or buttons. Yes, I think for buttons—when a button falls off you can put it inside this box, then I will come along and sew it on. You understand?”
I kissed her, feeling terribly touched. Then I broke away and went over to the door to lock it, but stopped with my hand on the bolt. The bottom part of the door was a ventilator with downward-sloping slats, so that you could see out but not in—and now through the slats I saw the bottom of a pair of green sharkskin trousers and a pair of suede shoes. They remained perfectly still. I waited a moment, then closed the bolt sharply and walked away. Just then there was a knock. I returned to the door and opened it.
“May I come in?” Rodney said.
“Yes, if you want.”
He entered with set face and glazed eyes and went out to the balcony. He dropped into a chair with his face in his hands. Suzie and I stood watching him.
“If you’d known, you’d never have done it,” he said. “You’d never have been so unkind.”
“If we’d known what?” I said.
World of Suzie Wong : A Novel (9781101572399) Page 21