by Martin Booth
Sandingham found companionway four and descended the steep incline of the steps. At the bottom, in the bowels of the ship, he found himself in a corridor into the walls of which were set heavy steel-plate doors. The nearest was labelled ‘TWO/2’, the next ‘THREE/3’ – both numbers and letters made it simple for the military uneducated. He walked down the dimly-lit passage until he reached ‘SEVEN/7’ and wrenched the retaining levers down. The bulk of the door swung open. He twisted the switch and low wattage bulbs came on in the refrigeration compartment.
He lifted his leg over the door sill and looked about him for the sides of ham.
The metal shelves, six high, reaching as far as he could see ahead and to left and right, were loaded with corpses sewn into canvas sacks, each one stencilled in black – the one by his elbow was marked ‘PEARLMAN: KEVIN/342688’.
* * *
They steamed past Corregidor Island, into the Bay of Manila, the sun set astern of the ship with a vast godly blaze of yellow, orange and red. The sea was a smooth, dark green and the tropical undergrowth on the island was already so lush as to cover over the scars of the intense fighting that had taken place there. The bay itself was strewn with sunk or scuttled ships and minefields, indicated by brightly painted buoys, were scattered either side of the shipping lane.
On the quayside, US Red Cross girls were dispensing Coca-Cola and coffee, doughnuts, packets of peanuts and chewing gum, cigarettes and copies of Life magazine.
Peering down on them from the deck, Sandingham realised that they were the first European women he’d seen since the week before Christmas, 1941.
PART ELEVEN
Hong Kong: Christmas, 1952
THE HOTEL LOUNGE was bedecked with paper-chains, tissue Chinese lanterns, silver and gold tinsel and fairy lights. After the guests had retired for the night the first-floor roomboys had taken the decorations out of storage and hung them. When they had completed the lounge they moved down to the main lobby. The square wooden pillar by the reception desk was spiralled with red, white and blue crêpe, the bar was surrounded by blinking lights, each bulb the shape of a distinctly oriental Santa Claus, the ceiling was criss-crossed with more paper-chains and, on the main glass doors, there was a matching pair of wax-paper and plastic holly wreaths. The younger children, coming down for breakfast the following morning, were entranced by the translation of the business-like lobby into a pseudo-grotto of magical proportions.
Up in his parents’ room, David studied his diary. It was nearly full. His grandmother had sent it to him from England the Christmas before and he knew that she would send him another this year. She had said she would in the letter that had accompanied her birthday card to him in September.
Thumbing through the entries, he relived bits of his and the world’s year. After a few pages, he read sections out loud, pretending he was the BBC World Service announcer recapitulating upon 1952:
‘February: King George VI of England dies; the nation and the Empire mourn. 22 June: I have a cholera jab; very painful. 7 September: my birthday; I have a party and Andrew gives me a BRM Dinky, godfather gives me a fountain pen with a solid gold nib…’
He stopped reading. His finger was in the page on which he had written of his encounter with barmy Hiroshima Joe in his room. The meeting had scared him, though at the time he was not so scared as puzzled and apprehensive. It had taught him that adults were certainly not all to be trusted to behave rationally, and Hiroshima Joe in particular seemed to have a code apart from his parents, from Jonty and Margaret, Biddy and Major Binniss, Sally and Mike Prentice and others of his parents’ friends.
Adults, he concluded, were utterly unpredictable and not to be relied upon. The one exception was in areas in which experience or tradition governed them – such as at Christmas: then they were safely predictable. In the run-up to Christmas Eve they would secrete parcels in cupboards (heavily taping or tying them against tampering); they would become jovial – sometimes falsely so – and free with praise; or alternatively they would become threateningly strict at odd moments when they knew they held the whip-hands of present-withdrawal or Father-Christmas-absence.
On Christmas Eve itself they were particularly jolly. The anticipation of giving, which David himself appreciated as a momentary warm and pleasing glow, affected them as much as receiving did the children. They invariably spent the morning shopping or going to work where little work was done. At lunchtime they went to office parties and in the evening they drank with friends, went out to other friends’, had friends visit them or a mixture of all these. Their children either accompanied them, which was uncommon, or stayed at home in the charge of the amah, which was commonplace. During the night, as David now knew, one of them stole into their children’s bedrooms and filled their stockings; later they would giggle as they arrayed presents under the tree. The following morning Father, a majesterial head-waiter-cum-master of ceremonies, handed out the spoils to Mother, children and, in David’s case, the roomboys who serviced their hotel rooms.
This year, he mused, Christmas would be different for him, at least. His father was not going to be there. He was in Korea, and would not be back from his tour of duty until the second week in January.
David’s mother told him that his father would telephone on Christmas Day, but she was not sure when, for the lines were always busy at Christmas with people ringing their loved ones. He pointed out that they were loved ones, which his mother indeed assured him was so, but he also understood that there were lots of men in the war who wanted to talk to their wives and children, too. And parents.
Recalling this conversation as he looked at his diary reminded him of his letter. He pulled it out of the flap at the back of the book, next to an old map of the London Underground and Southern Region commuter lines. Somewhere, surrounded by pastures of grazing kangaroos and wallabies and dingoes, Mr and Mrs Kerrins would not be getting a phone call. This no longer gave him the sad ache that it had, but it did still hurt him a little to think that the call would not be connected.
The door opened and his mother came in, carrying in her arms two large brown-paper bags.
‘What’s in them?’ He looked from one of them to the other.
‘Specialities,’ she said mysteriously.
He knew better than to ask, for at Christmas ‘specialities’ could cover a multitude of items, many coded ‘Top Secret’ until the day itself.
‘Don’t you want to know what they are?’ she asked. This went further to prove David’s theory of adult unpredictability. ‘It’s not like you to be uncurious.’
He had done suffixes and prefixes at school in the last week of term. With Christmas drawing nigh, however, he considered it would be unwise to correct his mother’s grammatical error which, he reasoned, was in any case probably made to check his knowledge. Whenever David caught his father out over such mistakes he would first scowl, just for a split second, then cheer up, saying, ‘Just testing you, David. Well done!’
‘What is there, then?’ he replied, causing his mother to smile indulgently.
She lifted the articles free of the bags one at a time and laid them on the coffee table.
‘Walnuts,’ she began, ‘hazelnuts and almonds; crystallised fruit; dried figs; dates; a bottle of gin, a bottle of whiskey, a bottle of rum’ – she winked at him – ‘a bottle of vodka; some maraschino cherries – green and red – not,’ she emphasised, ‘to be eaten by others beforehand – and stuffed olives; crisps and prawn crackers, cashew nuts and peanuts…’ She opened the second bag. ‘And decorations. We’re going to decorate this room.’
‘We haven’t a tree,’ David pointed out with the unmoving logic of his age.
There was a knock on the door. With perfect timing the duty roomboy entered carrying an artificial tree. It was not very large, and when he stood it on the suitcase shelf by the bathroom door it did not reach to the ceiling. But it was a tree, and it delighted David.
‘On Christmas Eve we’re going to have a party. And on C
hristmas Day we’re going over to Commander Fisher’s for lunch. You’ll like that, won’t you?’
‘Yes,’ David answered truthfully. The Fisher boys were friends of his and they lived on Hong Kong Island with a wooded hillside right behind their bungalow. They had found a dead cobra there in the summer. ‘But what about Daddy’s phone call? He won’t know where we are.’
‘That won’t matter,’ his mother said. ‘We’re going to ring him on the way. We’re going to stop off at the Cable and Wireless office in Central District and call him ourselves. I’ve got the call booked for Christmas morning. We’ve got three whole minutes.’
She busied herself putting away the Christmas fare and, together, they spent the rest of the afternoon decorating the room.
* * *
Sandingham had been staying more and more in his room, raiding the cardboard cartons of canned food on the back stairs and going down to the hotel dining room for a meal every other day, so as not to arouse suspicion. Much of the stolen food was wasted and he flushed it down the toilet: he was seldom hungry, and losing weight. A week before Christmas he had risked venturing out after dark to obtain as much opium as he could; he managed to purchase enough to keep him going for a few days, but no more. The word was out that he was a marked man.
Living almost entirely in his room was rather like existing in a more luxurious eiso. There was no one to talk to, no one to confide in, no one with whom to share his troubles. On the Friday before Christmas, when the telephone rang, it made him jump and shake. He had not used it for more than two months. He let it jangle for a full minute before lifting the receiver. It was the hospital: an orderly had been instructed to ask after his health and to invite him to attend the doctors’ surgery that afternoon.
‘I’m afraid I can’t make it until after Christmas at the earliest,’ he lied.
‘Dr Gresham is most anxious to see you, sir. He asked me to say that if you were too ill to cross the harbour then he would be willing to visit you.’
Sandingham looked about his room. He was ashamed of it and would not want to display it to another European. But there was no escaping the fact that, one way or the other, the doctor would get to see him.
‘I think I can possibly make it. This afternoon? What time?’
‘Two-thirty, sir. And could you please bring a urine sample, sir?’
The festive atmosphere around the hotel bar did not impress or exhilarate Sandingham very much. He was struck initially by a sense of revulsion at its hearty seasonal bonhomie, then by a feeling of deep nostalgia. He shrugged this off as he pushed through the glass doors to the waiting hotel shooting-brake.
As the vehicle swung right along Waterloo Road a black Ford Prefect slipped out of a parking place and followed it at a discreet distance. This did not fool Sandingham. He had known it had been standing guard over him for three days.
‘Nat’han Low?’ enquired the driver.
‘Star Ferry,’ answered the American who was sitting with his wife next to Sandingham in the seat by the window. ‘And you, sir?’
Sandingham could trace no irony implicit in the ‘sir’ and guessed that its utterance was the result of a good mid-western upbringing rather than a hint of New York smart-assedness.
‘Star Ferry as well, please.’
‘Clayton Sellers, Junior.’ The American offered his hand and Sandingham shook it once. ‘My wife Blanche. We come from Omaha, Nebraska.’ Sandingham tipped his head to her. ‘You residin’ in the hotel?’
‘Yes.’
‘Been here lawng? I mean, you live here in Hawng Kawng?’
The rhyme caused Sandingham to smile. Few things did these days, but this ludicrous man struck him as funny and, for that reason, Sandingham liked him.
‘Since the war, more or less.’
‘That’s a helluva time, sir.’
His wife chipped in, ‘Can you recommend any sights for us to see? We are just passing through, you understand. My husband is on business. He works for…’
She named a big corporation, but Sandingham missed it. The black Ford had come alongside the hotel bus at the traffic lights on Nathan Road. A man in the passenger seat was speaking rapidly to the hotel driver in the Shanghai dialect of which Sandingham was ignorant. The driver made a reply and the lights changed. He shuffled the steering wheel through his hands and the bus shooting-brake turned left. The Ford continued across the junction. Sandingham could tell the driver was worried.
‘What’s the matter, Ah Cheong?’ he asked in Cantonese so that the American couple could not understand.
‘That is a bad man. He speaks bad things.’
‘What sort of bad things?’
Ah Cheong cast a quick glance over his shoulder.
‘He says you a wicked man. He says I should not take you in the hotel bus again. I told him that I had to because you are a hotel guest. He said if I do that, he will make trouble for me and my family.’
‘Don’t worry about it, Ah Cheong. I’ll not use the bus after today. Not for a while.’
The driver looked relieved and thanked him. Sandingham put the problem to the rear of his mind.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘Places to visit? How much time have you?’
‘Until January two. We fly out Pan American on January two.’
‘Ample time. You must visit Hollywood Road – they call it “Cat Street” – and the temple there. Then you must go out to Repulse Bay and to the floating restaurants in Aberdeen. You should do a tour of the New Territories, too. Don’t miss Kam Tin: it’s a walled village, centuries old. Have you been up The Peak?’
‘Not yet. We’re on our way there now. Going up the mountain railroad.’
‘It’s often best to travel up by taxi and down in the Peak Tram, as they call the mountain railway.’
In that way, Sandingham obtained his escort across the ferry and up to the hospital.
* * *
‘How have you been, Joe?’
‘Not so well. The shakes are worse and I’m off my food a bit. My throat’s a bit worse. It still hurts to pass water.’ He handed Gresham a beer bottle with an inch of urine in it. ‘Best soak the label off before leaving it around. Especially near Christmas,’ he joked.
Gresham chuckled and said, ‘What are you doing over the holiday?’
‘The usual, I suppose. Stay in my room, have a drink or two. Listen to the radio. Be a Queen’s speech this year.’
‘It’s a lousy time, Christmas, when you’re single. I remember it from when I was a medical student. My parents were killed in the war so I had no family.’
Sandingham made no reply.
Shuffling through the medical papers on his clipboard, Gresham added, ‘And chase a dragon?’
‘Probably. Yes – chase a dragon.’
Lying on the couch, the white sheet under him, seemed to accentuate Sandingham’s illness. His legs, with their rough sore patches, appeared more starkly diseased against the blue-white of the hospital linen. His hand shook more visibly and his thinning hair was somehow thinner with the overhead spotlight shining through it. Gresham picked up Sandingham’s right hand and pressed the fingernails. The quick was white and remained so after the pressure was released.
‘That hurt?’
‘A bit. Not a stabbing pain. More a throb.’
The doctor held an ophthalmoscope to Sandingham’s eye, the thin pin-beam of light making Sandingham dizzy. He tightened his fist on the rim of the couch.
‘The light bother you?’
‘Yes. Strong light has been affecting me for some months.’
‘Let me see … sit up, will you?’
Sandingham sat up and dropped his legs over the edge of the couch: they did not reach to the ground and he felt like a child in too high a chair. Gresham felt under his jaw, under his arms and around his sides. He prodded his liver. He pulled Sandingham’s eyelids down and studied the faintly pink mucosa. He took his pulse. He depressed Sandingham’s tongue with a wooden spatula and peered
into his pharynx with a pen torch.
‘Glands bothering you?’
‘I don’t think so. I have noticed blood passing out with my faeces.’
Gresham weighed him, wrapped a sphygmometer around his arm and pumped up the rubber bulb. The mercury column rose and bobbed in its tube. Gresham made notes.
‘Your diverticulosis – the blood in your faeces – how long has this been happening?’
‘A while. I can’t be sure.’
‘As long as your easy bruising?’
Sandingham’s arms and shins were mottled with bruises in various stages of discolouration. Around them his skin had a shiny white pallor to it which was flaking.
‘I suppose so, yes.’
He scratched at his thigh, a dust of himself gathering under his nails. He sucked them clean.
‘I seem to have dandruff all over,’ he remarked.
The doctor made no comment but pressed into his back and listened to Sandingham’s lungs through a stethoscope. When he pulled the black nipples of the instrument from his ears his face was grim.
‘I’ll not beat about the bush, Joe. I don’t think it is fair for me to do so. I’m going to lay it on the line, as the Yanks say. I could try to fool you, but you know and I know that is wrong and I think I should spell it out to you. Frankly, I’ve bad news and Dr Stoppart will confirm it.
‘Your samples have been tested here but we’ve also had some of them flown back to the UK for analysis and a second opinion. They have better testing facilities there than we have here.
‘It’s not dandruff you have but a kind of skin cancer. There is no cure for it, but we can slow it down with a new ointment from the USA. We’ve got some of that…’ He picked up a tube from his desk. It had yellow and black printing on the label. ‘… And want you to use it. It’s still experimental in that it’s going through clinical trials. You’re one of them, a guinea pig, so I need you to be on hand for testing in the future. Will that be okay?’
Avoiding Gresham’s eyes, Sandingham said that it would. Leung’s private army permitting – but that he did not add. A murder charge on top of all this was not something to relish.