A Visit From Voltaire

by Dinah Lee Küng

  An Australian sub on the China Mail propositioned me in the crudest possible three-worded question my second night at the Hong Kong Journalists’ Club. I declined. He shouted down the length of the bar, ‘How I hate American women!’

  The Scottish sportswriter returned from a drunken lunch at the Royal Hong Kong Jockey Club, knelt beside my desk in full view of our colleagues, and burred in an opera whisper that an illness had left him only one testicle, ‘but ah ashurrre ya, it wurrrks.’

  The newsroom was chaos even at its calmest. One night an Irish political writer tossed his typewriter across the newsroom and screamed, ‘I’m going home to Belfast for some peace and quiet!’

  Not all of my encounters were with the wordsmiths of the Post. Since I came from a family in the entertainment business, I pulled the celebrity beat, as well as the drug rehabilitation beat, hotel and tourism, and relations with the American community. My UC Berkeley MA in Chinese Studies went ignored.

  Robert Mitchum drunkenly scrawled obscenities on my notepad through a lunch on the Repulse Bay Hotel veranda while traveling pal Richard Egan looked on. Francis Ford Coppola pondered out loud to his production designer Dean Tavoularis and me about how well Heart of Darkness served as a starting point for his Vietnam War movie in progress. George Plimpton came looking for ‘Sex in Asia,’ for Esquire magazine. He pronounced my tour of live nude strip shows too mundane. Barry Humphries nervously aired his Edna Everage evening dresses in a banal Hilton suite, quizzing me for local gossip and peccadilloes that would spice up his dinner cabaret.

  President Omar Bongo suggested we do the interview in an aide’s bedroom at the Mandarin Oriental, and thought the best place to do it was sitting on the end of the bed. When he started to finger my underwear, it took me a few seconds to register that, although I had never worked in Africa, this was unlikely normal interview behavior anywhere in the world. My editor protested to the Governor’s Chief of Protocol—who, I recall, indicated that this was not the first phone call he’d received that week regarding His Excellency’s visit.

  Far from home and family, I was cutting my teeth as a journalist on ‘Daily Diary’ pieces, Vietnam refugee news, and women’s features. I was spending nights with the Royal Hong Kong Police rounding up under-age whores from the brothels. I dined by day with a truculent Paul Bocuse or a nervous Sylvia Kristel promoting Emanuelle.

  Finally, tiring of seeing the British in this crazy-mirror colonial version, I decided to visit the real thing. I boarded a plane for London, invited by Charles, a BBC producer who had passed through Hong Kong a year before on assignment. I used my last paycheck to get to Heathrow . . .

  V. waits for me behind the crowd around the luggage carousel. He’s thumbing his tiny leather-bound English dictionary, full of spellings like ‘musick,’ and ‘rouze.’

  His enormous trunk tumbles and crashes off the conveyor belt.

  ‘At least when I arrived in London, I spoke English. How did you ever manage?’ I ask.

  ‘Bolingbroke was married to a French woman, the widowed Marquise de Villette, whom he adored. She was older than he, but her charm endured past youthful beauty. Their marriage was an inspiration. But once I moved beyond their French-speaking circle, I was in trouble.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  He rolls his eyes slightly. ‘Désastre. I was invited to sit by Alexander Pope’s mother at dinner in Twickenham. I told her about the buggering Jesuits and she nearly fainted.’ He reflects, ‘It must have been my choice of words. Happily, I saw Pope himself many times after that.’

  ‘He was a hunchback, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Oui. I was shocked by the deformity, that grotesque torso laced into a harness all day. The suffering was obvious, but I was amazed by his sharpness of mind. At first we could hardly communicate. I fled back to the countryside and devoted myself to study for three months until I could converse and write in English.’

  I feel embarrassed that my progress in French after three months has been so slow.

  ‘I told you before,’ V, scolds me, ‘go to the theater every night, and always learn the dirty words first. Ah, voici la belle Katherine, non. . .?’

  Katherine and my beanpole goddaughter Rebecca are waiting for us at Arrivals. Chattering in a flood of sunshine, Katherine drives us into the countryside. Their mutt, Sushi, is sitting on V. who’s too busy reading Time Out to protest while checking out his old haunts—-the Drury Lane and the Haymarket Theatres.

  ‘Has the Lincoln’s Inn Field Theatre closed?’ he asks of no one in particular.

  In the front seat, Katherine is catching me up on Allen’s schedule. He’ll arrive on his normal ‘commute’ from Bahrain tomorrow morning. I am being sent to shop in London all day tomorrow and here is my train ticket. There will be a dinner party on Saturday night.

  ‘I see that Othello is still playing,’ is the next comment from the back seat. ‘Unbelievable,’ V. bitches to himself, ‘how a woman can make an entire speech after she has been thoroughly strangled never made sense to me. Well, Shakespeare never had a spark of good taste or knew one rule of drama.’

  The Worthys’ rectory is a Jane Austen vision, a large, square, two-story house, its foyer painted a bright and historically correct egg-yolk color, with Allen and Katherine’s Japanese and Chinese statuary standing guard on the landings.

  ‘So very modern,’ V, whispers with approval. He is even happier with the enormous guest room lined with books, and a chaise longue for his bed.

  ‘Very elegant, The Bolingbrokes couldn’t have done better. Is the toilet indoors or is that hoping for too much?’

  That was not my worry when I first saw Charles’ London apartment overlooking Chalcot Square that spring afternoon in 1977. The sunshine streaming into the living room through tall narrow windows hurt my eyes reddened by the all-night flight from Hong Kong. Within a week, it was obvious to me that Charles was absolutely too happy to see me, like a puppy with a new toy mail-ordered from America. He took me everywhere with him on his filming shoots. Within days, I had been introduced to two Members of Parliament, a future Foreign Secretary, the Prime Minister’s son-in-law and numerous television producers. The week ended on Friday at a BBC cocktail party.

  I felt very raw, very gauche, and very lost, until suddenly crossing the room, I saw a familiar face. I made out the soulful brown eyes and rotund figure of The Times’ Hong Kong correspondent crossing the room, rescuing me from my oblivion. A sensitive and brilliant soul, David drank too much for his own good, but held a double first from Cambridge in Chinese and modern languages. By taking difficult and isolating postings in Cold War Moscow and Cultural Revolution Beijing, David ensured his professional reputation but by the time he reached his assignment in Hong Kong, he’d sealed the fate of his genius in a liquor bottle.

  He and his Australian wife Judy hosted me along with young ‘journos’ in their antique-filled living room in Hong Kong’s leafy Pokfulam district. Judy’s pretty face was framed by chin-length brown hair and windshield-wiper eyeglasses. Her delicious food and rippling laugher sustained a gaggle of David’s admirers through obvious and hidden stresses.

  In the presence of this couple, I was an awe-struck twenty-seven-year-old admiring a pair of well-matched intellectual and social talents, perhaps not unlike V.’s first glimpse of his Bolingbroke friends. It seems a small miracle to find David amid all these unfamiliar faces.

  ‘Do you plan to stay in England?’ this thoughtful man inquires as we survey the gathering from the margins.

  ‘Yes, I’d like to stay on for a while,’ I reply.

  David makes a call to the editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong and within a few days, I become the Review’s London-based stringer, making editorial trips to Italy and Holland to review their relations with Asia. For his part, Charles urges me to write a letter to an executive producer at the BBC’s Kensington House and within a few months, I’m also the ‘Beeb’s’ television coordinator for filming in China. Over the coming year
and a half, I’m invited to become a member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. I’m lunching at Chatham House listening to famous China scholars debate the future of the Communist Party. I’m filing ‘voicers’ to Toronto for the Canadian Broadcasting Company. I write a piece for the Guardian on Chinese family life.

  How has all this happened to a foreigner? Like Voltaire, I discover new opportunities in England.

  I loved England. Unfortunately, I did not love Charles as much as he perhaps deserved. Of medium height and finely built, his features were handsome enough, but I found his wit and generosity offset by an over-anxious gait and ingratiating style.

  He liked to insert Cockney phrases into his speech—much as King Louis XIV’s royal courtiers affected peasant accents for a joke, V. tells me—but with Charles there was a catch. Other BBC producers affecting East End accents were products of Oxford or Cambridge. Their pose as ‘lads’ was a gesture of equality cutting across class lines. Charles came from a warm family of East Enders but his background complicated the ambitions of the working-class achiever with a ‘redbrick’ degree mixing with members of the Oxbridge elite affecting East End speech. These English class tensions confused and distanced me from the prospect of a life together. Although I wore Charles’ ring, I was increasingly aware of my emotional fraud.

  My reputation as a correspondent, thanks to David’s introduction to the Far Eastern Economic Review, was growing and my trips to China for the BBC more frequent, extending my contacts in the China-watching world ever more distant from Charles.

  One afternoon in Beijing, I discover David drinking alone in the cavernous dining room of his residence, The Beijing Minorities Hotel. At the table next to ours sits a well-known British trader who prides himself on having broken the 1950s’ trade embargo with the Chinese Communists. We overhear him describe me to his companions in a whisper, ‘She claims she’s a reporter.’

  This riles David, not so much for its aspersions on my modest talents, but as a slur aimed at a lady in his presence.

  The English gentleman in David rears his head.

  ‘Oh, what would you know about reporting, Edwin?’ David retorts across the parquet. ‘You’re hardly an authority. First you ran with the Poles, then you ran with the Russians, now you’re running with the Chinese. You’ve never been anything but a running dog!’

  Then to the astonishment of everyone in the dining room, this senior correspondent of The Times starts barking, yelping, and growling in the direction of Edwin’s party. It gives new meaning to the phrase, ‘Mad dogs and Englishmen.’ Edwin and his guests flee their table in disarray. I don’t know whether to laugh or sink under the table in embarrassment. Lao or ‘Old’ Wang, the senior waiter, serves David a free brandy as the hubbub subsides. David downs the tiny glassful, but his fury isn’t spent yet.

  The dining room closes, so we continue the conversation in his shabby two-room suite on the sixth floor. Suddenly, David hoists himself up to stand tiptoe on an overstuffed chair and starts howling like a wolf into the heating-vent in the wall.

  ‘Why are you doing that, David?’ I ask wide-eyed. ‘Oh, Edwin lives in the room next door,’ he replies.

  ***

  Katherine breaks into my reveries of Englishmen I Have Known.

  ‘Have you thought of looking up Charles?’ She leans across the wooden kitchen table, offering a towering loaf of hot bread and monumental Stilton.

  ‘We lost touch,’ I answer.

  I finally fled to Singapore from England with credentials to string for the Economist and the Washington Post. I offered to return Charles’ diamond, but he refused, and tonight it hangs on my goddaughter Rebecca’s virginal neck, an English gem adorning an English jewel.

  ‘Who in God’s name is Charles?’ Voltaire pipes up. He has descended from the guest room and joined us wearing his English country outfit, predictably tweedy and only slightly less fussy than his usual brocades. He’s gone for the Scottish look in plaid scarves.

  ‘None of your business,’ I reply.

  ‘No harm intended, I’m sure,’ Katherine responds. Happily my rude retort doesn’t dampen her good spirits. She serves up the hot, soft slices of bread and the blue veins of the cheese melt into the grainy clouds.

  Rebecca and I set off for a walk through the broad, regular rows of beet poking through the frosty fields surrounding the house and its new tennis court. It is a relief to escape the snow, Switzerland, school commutes and French.

  Sushi fetches the sticks we throw into tranquil ponds, their surface ice tinkling into glistening shards. Guinea hens strut down country lanes. Squawking pheasants streak out of bushes at our approach. The farms are prosperous; the landlords’ children attend private schools.

  Rebecca has just appeared in Macbeth at school, in the opening witches’ scene.

  When shall we three meet again,

  In thunder, lightning or in rain,

  When the hurly-burly’s done,

  When the battle’s lost or won.

  We chant in happy unison.

  ‘Still reciting lines by that drunken savage?’ V. asks acidly, professional jealousy in evidence. ‘That Shakespeare’s talent for fantasy is like plum pudding. It could only please the English.’

  I gape at his harsh estimation of the Bard, so he adds, ‘Well, and maybe Canadians.’

  Rebecca and I talk of her class’s exploration of life in Ancient Rome. And this is the child described by her own mother as a hopeless television addict! What do mothers know? Maybe my cerebral Alexander sings Bow Wow rap lyrics on the train to school.

  This is all very refreshing. I utterly failed my first godparent assignment in my twenties to a charming toddler in west L.A. now a yoga instructor in Dublin. I’m tackling the godparent challenge for a second time in middle age. What does a godparent do? I’m still not sure. Free from the responsibility of raising a child with measured discipline and the yeast of sober example, one is merely asked to frost the cake with presents, contrarian ideas, and private confidences. The gamut of possible role models runs from Don Corleone to Auntie Mame.

  Rebecca’s little sister, the ebullient Molly, comes home from school, all refinement in a blue uniform, white blouse and regulation hat. For a minute, I feel sorry for my little Eva-Marie, wrapped in jeans and snow leggings, surrounded by the coarse-mouthed kids of her class in St-Cergue. Katherine’s lasagna is delicious, even though one rarely goes to England for the food. I retire well fed and exhausted to ‘our’ grand room.

  ‘Looking forward to tomorrow? We’re taking the 9 a.m. London train from Stowmarket. I think Katherine wants to unload us for the day so that she can prepare for the dinner party in peace.’

  ‘I think we should lunch in the City,’ V. suggests. ‘I’d like to look into some investment opportunities there.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. We’re going to buy Christmas presents in Oxford Street, and stop at John Lewis for wool gabardine.’

  ‘I want to go to the City.’

  He stamps his foot like a spoiled child. ‘I loathe Christmas and all organized religion. On the London Stock Exchange, Jews, Mohammedans and Christians meet as if they had a common religion and the only ungodliness we recognize there is the filing of a bankruptcy claim.’

  ‘Well, apart from worshiping at the altars of filthy lucre, exactly what can you do there?’ I press him.

  ‘I intend to invest in Euro exchange-rate futures contracts,’ he says with an absolute straight face. ‘They’re at an all-time low.’

  This is a new and worrying facet of his personality.

  I burst out laughing nervously. ‘You can’t invest, Monsieur Voltaire. You’re dead. And I won’t lend you any money, so don’t bother asking.’

  ‘Well, there’s ‘dead’ and then there’s dead,’ V. says, laying his wig on the top of a desk lamp and finger-fluffing it to look even more unruly. ‘I’ll never be too dead to see a good opportunity when it exists. You’re a fool if you think writing pays. I never made tha
t mistake, and I was a millionaire by the age of forty. I always cultivated bankers who used me as a middleman. I made a tidy sum selling provisions and munitions to the army.’

  ‘A war profiteer?’

  He glares at me, ‘A patriot, je vous prie. You don’t think I lived on those puny family annuities and royal pensions, do you?’

  I ponder this while brushing my teeth in the girls’ bathroom—a huge room scattered with rugs, a standing tub, and an enormous basket of hotel soaps gathered by Allen on his oil-buying missions. When I return to our room, V. is in his nightshirt, picking his teeth decorously with a little ivory stick.

  ‘You know, I’ve never imagined you as a financial type.’

  ‘Oh, I always lent at a healthy interest rate and was usually paid back on time. I even traveled from Paris to Nancy—that’s one hundred and fifty miles—in two nights and a day to buy shares in a public fund issued by the Duc de Lorraine. I once made a killing of 500,000 francs on a lottery by using the mathematician Condamine’s calculations to borrow from the bank and buy up the required number of tickets. The Comptroller sued me, but the courts backed me up.’

  I relent only a jot. ‘O.K., I’ll buy you one lottery ticket for old times’ sake—wait, don’t look so pleased—you can forget futures, stocks, warrants, commodities—’

  His brightening expression slumps. ‘Not even un petit thirty day certificate of deposit?’

  ‘No. N.O. I mean it. N.O.N.’

  He heaves a discouraged sigh. ‘Well, then I’ll just have to do my trading on margin. I don’t see why I should stop being an investor now. Just because things went slightly awry the last time I came to England—’

  He turns away, cutting off his sentence and reddening in the cheeks. I stare at him as he turns his face quickly towards the wall and stretches himself out for the night under the window. My black cashmere coat from New York serves as his blanket. Within seconds his head has disappeared under the collar.