A Visit From Voltaire

by Dinah Lee Küng

  I raise myself up from the pillows on one elbow, my eyes narrowing suspiciously at his prostrate form. A loud theatrical snore fools me not at all.

  ‘What do you mean, things went awry that last time you were here?’

  The snores subside and become more convincing. I’ll give him a reprieve, but only until morning.

  Chapter Nine THE FROTH AT THE TOP

  We scurry through beating rain from Katherine’s car towards the Stowmarket platform.

  The train is delayed by a recent history of deadly crashes due to unseasonal inundations and antiquated equipment.

  A few feet from where V. and I cower from the storm, a burly-bellied man in a shirt of loud pinstripes, red regimental tie, and gray flannels is braying into a cellphone.

  Voltaire is riveted by every trading order this boor is barking down the line.

  ‘He could be the son of a butcher, or the brother of a Lord,’ V. marvels. ‘That’s what I love about England. A blue-blooded Frenchman of my day could never appreciate the merits of the market or the worthiness of trade.’

  I’m less impressed. ‘He’s just a bad mannered loudmouth who works in the City,’ I retort.

  V. is indignant at my under-appreciation. ‘Which is the more valuable citizen? A powdered and polite French lord who knows to a minute when the king gets up, goes to bed or even to the toilet, and who gives himself airs of grandeur while slaving in the antechamber of some minister —’

  ‘Or this?’ I glance with distaste at our neighbor.

  ‘—Or this English merchant who enriches his country, and from his counting-house sends orders to Surat or Cairo, thereby contributing to the felicity of the world?’

  ‘At least a well-mannered Frenchman wouldn’t be waving his phone in everyone’s face. Furthermore, our host Allen is an oil merchant in Bahrain, your absolutely ideal Englishman. He would never, ever, blather quotations of prices per barrel in public like that.’

  V. cuts me off, hovering over the conversation. ‘Shhh. He shouldn’t sell Hewlett Packard just because the merger with Price Waterhouse is off,’ he whispers. ‘Tell him!’

  ‘Stop shushing me. Since when did you become such a market maven?’

  ‘I told you last night I’ve been catching up. I signed my first promissory note at the age of thirteen. I read the financial pages you toss away.’

  ‘Is that where my Economist disappeared this week?’

  He shrugs.

  It is hard to believe now that I have to fight with a phantom for my Economists, hard to believe that I even pay for them, since the last time I visited England in 1986, it was as that reputable journal’s Hong Kong correspondent. I had come full circle; fleeing California for Hong Kong, Hong Kong for England, England for Singapore and then transferred in 1983 back to Hong Kong.

  I suppose I should read it as a gesture of faith that an English institution entrusted its coverage of Hong Kong’s handover to China to the hands of an American. I would be foolish, however, to credit them with over-generosity. The Economist never paid much and my talents, such as they were, came rather inexpensively. There was also the unspoken understanding that anything unacceptable I wrote would be changed by the self-assured and witty editors in St. James’ Street.

  Nevertheless, the years 1983 and 1984 in Hong Kong gave me a rare opportunity to witness the brilliant footwork executed by advisors loyal to the Hong Kong Governor Sir Edward Youde, a man of integrity so loyally devoted to the interests of the Hong Kong people that he died while on the job of fighting both Beijing and colleagues in the Foreign Office. I also observed the efforts of the Beijing-oriented Foreign Office mandarins to sell Hong Kong more cheaply than it deserved in the interests of Sino-British trade.

  Two versions of the English character.

  V. and I hustle ourselves into the train. I’m the last to join a foursome that includes a woman in a knitted cap and tweed skirt. She’s on her cellphone, complaining to a friend about a book she’s reading.

  ‘ . . .I’ve got ‘bout halfway through, That’s the one . . .right . . . but it’s still all about this girl and boy who fall in love, marry the wrong people, and after that, they all go mad. I don’t know what you saw in it! Why did you tell me to read it? It’s dire.’

  The cover of her paperback announces Wuthering Heights.

  V. must stand for a good part of the journey, as I couldn’t very well defend a seat for The Invisible Man. from time to time, I see him consulting his little notebook He has steadfastly refused my offer to take him shopping. His itinerary includes checking out some French refugee haunt called the Rainbow Cafe in Marylebone that I am sure closed its shutters by the time Napoleon took office. He also wants to attend a Quaker service to ensure that those plain folk are still a thriving antidote to the Vatican. Then he will haunt a session of Parliament to check out the state of free speech,

  His passion for British free speech recalls a press conference in Hong Kong in early 1984 when the outlines of Hong Kong’s diminished future under Beijing’s thumb were starting to surface. Respectfully if timidly, the Hong Kong Cantonese reporters put their polite questions. I watched as they were fobbed off with carefully phrased half-answers concealing half-truths.

  At the back of the press pack, I spotted a familiar figure . . .emboldened by a largely liquid lunch. It has been some years now since he and I bumped into each other at the BBC in London. With those sad, dark-ringed eyes, David glares at the podium of visiting ponces from London. The drink is starting to tell on David since that afternoon six years before. Diabetes and a damaged liver have bloated his good looks.

  ‘One country, two systems.’ ‘Elections but not necessarily direct elections.’ On and on it goes, the Foreign Office jargon obfuscating their raw political capitulation. The language is too finely crafted for Cantonese reporters to publicly challenge, but David was trained by the same tutors as these pinstriped apologists.

  ‘Shame,’ he suddenly intones in a low voice, seemingly at no one and at everyone at the same time. Heads swivel briefly to look with some embarrassment at David whose eyes are glistening with anger.

  ‘SHAME,’ David repeats, ‘SHAME, SHAME,’ again and again, like the bellwether ringing the knell of a true Englishman’s conscience, while the red-faced spokesman behind the mike stammers on through his prepared statement.

  I finish my story as V. and I make our way through Liverpool Street station.

  ‘I must say that was light treatment for such lèse majesté. He would have suffered for a fraction of that insolence in the France of my day. I’m surprised he wasn’t drawn and quartered, or at least whipped. In fact, were he French, I would not have been surprised to see your friend David’s head impaled on a spike. But, there, you see! The French imitated the English in everything except liberty.’

  V. is momentarily distracted by a very pretty redhead, carrying two big Monsoon shopping bags, who ricochets unknowingly into him.

  ‘It just proves my point that the English are free men. In comparison, everything French is rotten with frivolity and reaction. The English are true and orderly. The French are enslaved by superstition, tyranny, and unreasonable laws—’

  ‘But surely—’

  ‘Compare the French, locked by their assumptions of Descartes’ principles into a ridiculous definition of the universe swirling around in an invisible mass, with Isaac Newton who started out from his practical observations of the real world and developed his ideas of gravitational force only from what he could see and measure.’

  ‘I gather you’re very keen on Newton.’

  ‘Madame! I introduced Newton to France! My own Madame du Châtelet was the genius who translated his work, no less. I stood here in London, awestruck at thirty-three years of age as I watched dukes and earls follow the coffin of that great thinker as he was borne away to an honored burial site. The French had forgotten how to think and almost as bad, how to honor their thinkers and artists. The English are greater philosophers and possessed of more courage
than we.’

  ‘You actually witnessed Newton’s funeral?’

  ‘Indeed, I watched in awe, then hurried to meet his disciple, Samuel Clarke, and his niece, Mrs Conduit. Newton was the star of one of my Letters Concerning the English Nation that made my fame as an essayist! Surely you’ve read those at least?’

  ‘I’m sorry, no.’

  Voltaire stops short in his tracks. ‘Exactly who do you think reported the story of the falling apples that gave Newton the idea for gravity?’

  ‘I should have guessed,’ I mutter.

  ‘But you miss my point,’ V. says, resuming his steps. ‘Compare the homage paid here to Newton with our attitude in France, where Molière’s body was interred under cover of night. Madame Molière had to scatter money to a howling mob to distract them from impeding his burial even then. The English buried their greatest actress Anne Oldfield in Westminster Abbey, while we tossed Adrienne Lecouvreur in a lime pit without a single blessing.’

  We bustle with hundreds of commuters through the tunnels that lead toward the Central Line.

  ‘You aren’t coming toy shopping?’

  ‘Oh, I think not. I’ve heard of an interesting establishment of ladies with a talent for, well, just say a specialty in—’

  ‘You’re going WHORING?’ I explode.

  ‘Doing research, like any writer visiting a foreign land,’ he protests.

  ‘Do you intend to make a habit of prostitutes while we’re visiting my friends?’

  ‘Mais, non, non, Madame. Once, out of curiosity, is understandable. Twice would make me a pervert. Adieu.’

  He dives into the crowd. I don’t wish to keep him from his reunion with eighteenth-century phantom French refugees in their Huguenot hideout, or rouged English tarts, if he can possibly find them. Years of working with male journalists in Hong Kong taught me just to avoid those avenues of experience.

  As V. rounds the last curve of the tunnel, I see him pulling from under his greatcoat a marvelous hat with plumes that brush the low ceilings of the Underground. Even with those hand-cobbled shoes, his gait is steady and firm. Despite his constant petty ailments, he’s in his prime this morning. He’s lost that hounded expression. It must be the cassia purges he takes twice a week.

  I’m surrounded by strangers yet curiously free for the first time in weeks, with time on my hands to splurge at Hamleys. After two hours of weighing the merits of baby dolls that really piss versus those that really burp, I emerge with two enormous bags of Christmas gifts and an empty purse. At a bank only a few feet away, a Bureau de Change is ready to relieve me of more Swiss francs. Ahead of me in the queue an African father juggles his Playstation 2 purchases, trying to count out his wad of Zimbabwean dollars. I’m transported back to that week in Hong Kong when London friends asked me to introduce a Rhodesian-born editor around Hong Kong on a whistle-stop tour of Asia. I lined up the usual contacts—brokers, China-hands and bankers—who briefed him willingly, but the interviews didn’t go smoothly. We lurched uncomfortably from one appointment to the next, me silently wondering why he bothered if he knew everything already. On the final day of his visit, we arrive for an interview with the deputy chief of the New China News Agency, but our taxi driver refuses to wait for us outside the sinister new office tower that houses the Communists’ headquarters.

  ‘No parking, no parking,’ the wizened Cantonese insists, pointing at various traffic signs and barriers that protect the Party enclave from protesters and suicide car bombs.

  ‘Just tell the man to wait here,’ the Rhodesian editor barks.

  ‘No stop. Lose license.’ The driver shakes his head.

  Being a product of British colonial Africa, my boss doesn’t like insolence from natives. He clearly thinks me inept for not being able to handle one.

  ‘You tell him I’ll pay his fine.’ He pulls out a HK$100 note and tosses it at the man behind the wheel.

  ‘There,’ he shouts at the old man, and points at his watch. ‘One hour. You be here.’ The Cantonese shifts calmly on his bamboo-beaded seat cover and delicately picks up the money covered in Imperialist cooties. He places it in front of our noses. He speaks to me with a serene smile in deliberate Chinese, meant for careful translation.

  ‘Lady, tell your white devil big boss Englishman to go jerk off on his mother’s dirty underpants.’

  There is no point in trying to explain in this steamy diesel cab in the middle of Queen’s Road East that my guest has possibly less claim as a ‘Zimbabean’ to English status than the Colony-residing Chinese himself.

  It’s a pity (I reflect in the tube heading back to Liverpool Street laden with Christmas presents), that Voltaire didn’t have a chance to enjoy the full influences of the English whom he so idolized—the Antipodean editors, the Indian sub-editors, the Zimbabwean ex-colonials, the ‘British’ Cantonese.

  That very day of the taxi argument, I returned nauseous with depression to my Hong Kong apartment to find Allen and Katherine Worthy visiting from Tokyo. They were expecting a baby who would become my goddaughter. Katherine spent a lot of her time as my guest making me, the hostess, cups of tea.

  Some things don’t change.

  ‘I’ve made you tea and I’m putting you to work,’ Katherine warns me cheerily as Voltaire and I descend to the kitchen in Suffolk on Saturday morning. Katherine has laid out squid, tofu, beef, and vegetables to be sliced for tonight’s Mongolian Hot Pot dinner. Molly and I slice frozen bits until our numb fingers turn blue—while Katherine studies a cookbook on the other side of the table.

  V. is reading cookbooks too.

  ‘I’m relieved to see people have abandoned their overuse of ham essence and morels.’

  ‘Disgusting. ‘

  ‘The cooks at Versailles could never use enough essence of ham, pepper, nutmeg and morels. But for the life of me, I can’t imagine eating this stuff to-fue.’

  ‘Oh? I always thought you liked squid,’ Katherine answers me innocently.

  Voltaire’s dressed this morning for ‘hunting,’ probably to do nothing more than shoo pheasants out of hedges with Sushi barking alongside, but old habits die hard. This way, he escapes kitchen duty.

  ‘‘Must make being dead a comfort,’ I mutter, nursing smelly, frozen fingers.

  ‘Considering the to-fue, I’ll stick with hot chocolate tonight.’ V. slides out the back door with Sushi

  Our elusive host Allen lies in state upstairs on the excuse he is recovering from his overnight flight. He’s still asleep when V. returns from his jaunts and entertains himself riffling through Allen’s library. A gasp of appreciation greets the discovery of a yellowed paperback in the lower corner of the shelves.

  ‘A copy of my Age of Louis XIV!’

  ‘I told you Allen was your ideal Englishman.’

  V. reads his own opening lines, ‘It is not merely the life of Louis XIV that we propose to write; we have a wider aim in view.’ He sighs with satisfaction.

  ‘Good lede, as they say in the newsroom.’

  ‘Well, I had practice. In England I started my first history, that of Charles XII. As he had been dead for only thirteen years, I could consult living acquaintances of Charles for a new kind of history, one that recorded the history and thinking of the age, not merely dates and events in a man’s life.’

  ‘I think what you’re saying is that while you were in England, you invented modem historiography.’

  ‘Oh, I have no doubt.’ V. agrees, with typical immodesty. ‘But I really don’t know where there is an argument between your modem micro- and macro-historians. I don’t see how anecdote can replace history, nor can a vast panorama of history be insensible to anecdote.’

  I’m scanning the shelves myself ‘Look! there’s Allen’s Leibniz, over there on the upper shelf.’

  ‘Leibniz! Here IS a man I can talk to! Where is this Alain? Why is he still napping? I held with Leibniz for some time, arguing that a God without flaws cannot make a world with flaws, therefore we must be living in the best possible o
f worlds. By that reasoning, even the most distressing or confusing events must have occurred for a reason.’

  ‘I’ll make sure we discuss it with him.’

  ‘Of course, Leibniz was wrong. He also thought the whole world was composed of monads, little entities with their own souls. I had my doubts but now when I hear about the mapping of the human genome, I’m thinking maybe monads weren’t so far off after all . . .’

  If I thought V. was going to make himself the social center of tonight’s dinner party, I’m mistaken. He wasn’t joking about staying in bed.

  ‘I always avoided small talk and endless evenings,’ he announces. ‘Say I’m not feeling well.’

  ‘I’m sure you dazzled the diners at Versailles while you were in favor. And you were fit enough yesterday to walk the entire City in the rain collecting mutual fund brochures,’ I add. ‘I saw them spread all over your trunk.’

  ‘Well, I’m genuinely unwell now.’ He coughs up some rather convincing phlegm. I worry he’s caught something serious until he adds, ‘Illness has great advantages; it spares one society.’

  Over my protests, he changes into his green dressing gown and settles down to revise his history of King Louis. ‘There are always some little improvements one can make.’

  ‘Your passion for revision, especially two hundred years after the printers’ ink has dried, never ceases to amaze me, but I’m not accepting any excuses tonight.’

  ‘It is simply too cold down there. I’m catching pneumonia.’

  Indeed, I’ve noticed that the Rectory is a tad polar. Always chilled to his fleshless bones, V. has taken to wearing his overcoat, even when standing next to Katherine’s heavy Aga.

  As Katherine and I layout the Extra-Hot Crunchy Bombay Mix, the guests arrive—two couples—the men swathed in woolens and cashmeres, one woman in a long skirt, the other in tight velvet pants, braced for Inuit hospitality. However, Katherine has heeded a small comment I made as to frozen toes in the night.