The Rice Paper Diaries

by Francesca Rhydderch

  She started on one of her lists, and Elsa waited, knowing better than to interrupt. The shop smelled of Nannon, the way she smelled first thing in the morning when she’d splashed her face with lavender water and combed her hair out and put it up in a bun on the top of her head. She smelled of camphor and roses and freshly baked biscuits.

  ‘The average bride will also need three to four house dresses,’ – Nannon’s forehead wrinkled up again as she read aloud from the book – ‘two or three tea aprons, and one large apron for kitchen work. The bride who expects to entertain women friends extensively and who moves in an extravagant set should also have a tea gown or lounging pajamas.’

  ‘Lounging pajamas it is, then,’ she said, setting her chalk down on the counter decisively. ‘Whatever they might be.’ She sniffed, reaching for her tape measure.

  Elsa didn’t wear the pajamas, or the aprons. In Hong Kong everyone had a cook for lunch and went out for dinner. The aprons hung on the back of the kitchen door. Nannon had made them out of one of their mother’s old dresses, one of Elsa’s favourites, a pale blue gingham, serviceable and summery, intended Elsa knew to remind her of their mother without recalling the dark, frozen memory of losing her.

  When Elsa, trying to distract herself, told her Hong Kong friends that at home men dressed up for New Year in sheets and ribbons and carried a horse’s skull from house to house, as a kind of prank played on neighbours to add to the evening’s entertainment, they forgot their manners and let out huge belly laughs. ‘Yes, they call it the Mari Lwyd, the horse,’ Elsa said, getting quite carried away, enjoying her audience, and they tittered again, and she realised they weren’t laughing with her, and she stopped talking.

  And she remembered that when her mother was ill no one had told her what was happening, at first. She sat in the kitchen excited because it was New Year’s Eve, listening to Megan, the girl who came in to help with the washing and scrubbing, talking about the Mari Lwyd.

  ‘Is it a real horse?’ Elsa asked. ‘Or a ghost?’

  Megan laughed, stirring a pot on the range.

  ‘Neither. It’s men dressed up, it is. They put a big white sheet over their heads and one of them carries a horse’s skull hung with ribbons all colours, and when you open the door they want to give you a fright. Just for fun.’

  Megan had been too cheerful, far more cheerful than usual. Usually she had a face like a mangle, their father said, but on that day she’d been making an effort to appear lively, perhaps under orders. Everything in the kitchen was too cosy and warm. In Elsa’s memory every surface shines: the table, the row of pans hanging over the range, the little coffee pot from Mexico that Elsa loves so much. And their mother, lying back in bed upstairs, her cheeks flushed and her hair out around her on the pillow, making her look young, not like someone about to die.

  But still Elsa had no idea. Her father had been home for longer than usual, it was true, so she’d had time to get used to him again, to the English words that he scattered like seeds through the tilled rows of his Welsh, and to wonder what it meant, some of it, that was too quick for her. All she knew was that their mother was out of sorts, and that she was in bed.

  And then, in her memory of it at least, Megan is gone, and her father is gone and she is sitting alone in the kitchen, listening to the cawl bubble in its pot. There is a knock at the back door and she rushes to open it, looking forward to the fun and the surprise and the pretty ribbons, and calling Mammy, Mammy, everyone, come and see, what fun, and then the door is open and the dressed-up horse looks like a real dead horse, his teeth gnashing in his skull and she is terrified and screams and screams and her father is crying out harshly upstairs in a voice she has never heard before, and Nannon, too tall and thin, comes downstairs and puts her finger to her lips and takes Elsa to see their mother lying still with her eyes open and the windows shut and their father with his back turned away from them. Her mother’s face was flat on the pillow, and her lips had ridden up a little back off her teeth, showing a perfect row of white pearls with serrated edges.

  That was the last time anyone called at Gwelfor on New Year’s Eve. Nannon made up their black dresses from one of her fashion magazines with Elsa at her side, passing her the pins and thread, neither of them saying a word. Although Elsa was only nine, she understood well enough. How could Nannon even begin to prick the surface of their loss? There was no manual for that.

  Elsa listened to the rhythmic turn of the fan above the light. She looked at the top of the doctor’s head, as he moved over to a small side table with a glaring spotlight above it. She turned to see what was going on, but the nurses told her not to.

  In the room next door a baby yowled. Cars passed occasionally on the road below that led to Repulse Bay. Footsteps hurried along corridors with polished linoleum floors.

  The fan hanging from the ceiling cut through the air a few more times, and then stopped. Someone had switched it off. The doctor and two nurses were standing over at the small table, looking into a towel spread out under the light, like a half-opened package. No one was saying anything.

  She counted without breathing. She hadn’t expected this.

  Seven, eight, nine.

  Silence.

  2

  When her mother had died, Elsa had spent days sitting at the kitchen table. She’d read books, practised her looped handwriting and looked at the food that Nannon made. Sometimes she fell asleep there, elbows pushed out and her head resting on her forearms, so that her face felt creased and uncomfortable when she woke up. Nannon understood, and said nothing. She took the food away and left Elsa to sit at the table. Their mother had called herself a proper New Quay woman (although she had always smiled when she said ‘proper’: Let the men travel to Peru, or round Cape Horn, or to Australia and back, she said); her four-cornered world was this Pembroke table, with a drawer in its side for cutlery, and flaps that could be folded away. It wasn’t a kitchen table, not really, it was too delicate and portable for that, but their mother had made it hers. She kept the flaps propped open and used it to pluck chickens, roll out pastry, make apple jelly, and to do the accounts. When they needed to eat she took a fresh tablecloth out and unfolded it and flicked it open so that its corners flew up into the air before landing on the table, and Elsa used to set out the cutlery, big pieces of silver with heavy handles. If there was ironing to be done, her mother put an old blanket over it while the iron heated up on the range behind her. When their father came home (once, maybe twice a year, like other ‘proper’ New Quay men, except that sometimes the proper New Quay men didn’t come back at all, not if they contracted yellow fever in Mauritius or malaria in Africa), it was on this table that his presents were tumbled out for them to pore over: wooden elephants from Kenya the size of Elsa’s dolls, with tusks made of real bone, Japanese tea sets, music boxes with lacquered tops.

  After the funeral the kitchen table became Elsa’s centre of gravity too. While Nannon went for long walks, collecting wild flowers to take up to their mother’s grave, Elsa ran her hands over the scored surface of the table, reading its bleached cracks like the lifelines on a handprint that became more difficult to distinguish as time went on, but never disappeared entirely.

  When she came to Hong Kong with Tommy, she wanted to bring the table with her, to get it shipped over with the rest of her things, and Tommy said yes, anything she wanted she could have and that he would arrange it, but in the end she was afraid of something happening to it, and she left it behind with Nannon. It would have been too big for their apartment, anyway. The kitchen here had a formica table that rippled like marble, but Elsa couldn’t sit at it now, in any case, because Wang was having his lunch.

  She sat on the terrace watching the skiffs down in the harbour. Everything seemed very small from up here. The spacious grounds of their apartment were studded with trees which muffled the sounds that rose up to the Peak from the city below. She had found it suffocating when they first moved here – she was used to New Quay’s terraces of
houses set close to each other with no room for trees, unless the gardens behind had been levelled into the hill. She liked seeing and hearing the sea up close. But she was glad to be hidden away here now; she didn’t much care about their smart address, but she could stay away from the whist drives and parties and shows, and wait for the empty feeling inside her to recede.

  But it didn’t. Every day she felt more lethargic. Every time she moved, she felt the weight of herself as a single human unit, and the echo of something that wasn’t there. It was easier to stay still.

  ‘We can have another one as soon as you like,’ Tommy whispered to her in bed at night, but she pulled away.

  He tried other tactics, like asking Wang to sort out the nursery, turn it back into her dressing room while she was downtown having her hair done, but they had all ended badly.

  ‘Meet me for lunch?’ he’d said, before Wang drove him down to the customs building that morning.

  She’d shaken her head.

  When the doorbell went, Elsa didn’t get up to answer it. She didn’t want to talk to the neighbours. Passing the time of day was something she preferred to do alone now, each breath taking her further away from that moment when they’d lifted the baby out and found that he was dead.

  The nurses hadn’t wanted to let her see him, but Oscar Campbell had.

  He’d looked tiny, and agitated, as if he’d been crying for a long time but no one had come to him. His fists were tightly curled together. She’d reached out and put her hand on his cheek. It was still warm; white mucus covered his features in a sticky web. His eyes were shut.

  She knew Tommy was cross with the doctor for letting her see him.

  ‘What purpose did you think it would serve?’ she’d heard him saying.

  ‘I did what I thought was best.’

  ‘And what makes you think this was for the best?’

  ‘She can draw a line under it now.’

  She could see why Tommy was angry, though. It had drawn a line between them too. She had seen their baby and he hadn’t. She could dwell on things if she wanted to. She’d given him a name, although nobody else knew about it, even Tommy, and sometimes she whispered to herself as if she were talking to him. Come along Harry, time for your nap, or Time for your bath, or Let’s go out for a walk now, Harry. She could sit for a whole morning and reassemble him in her imagination. She could think of what she would have been doing first thing, when he would have had his feeds, or a clean nappy, or been carried up and down the verandah. If she sat here and walked her way through the day in her imagination, it was almost as good as him being there.

  Tommy soon put a stop to that, though.

  ‘Wang says you haven’t moved all day.’

  ‘Wang isn’t my nurse, he’s my driver.’

  ‘He says you haven’t eaten anything either.’

  The doorbell went again. Tommy said that drivers didn’t need to hear, but Elsa wished that Wang wasn’t quite so deaf. She was tired of shouting instructions at him. When she opened the front door there was a Chinese woman standing in the hall. Her eyes looked large in her face, and her hair was plaited elaborately and pinned up around her head.

  ‘Miss?’ she said.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You wanted to see me?’

  Elsa looked at her, shaking her head.

  ‘We have an appointment,’ the woman ventured. ‘Wang said you have a vacancy, and I was told to come today.’

  Trying to remember her way back to a time before the baby was like walking down from the Peak on the one winding road in the dark, getting lost under the candlenut trees.

  ‘Your services are no longer required.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There is no baby, all right?’ Elsa raised her voice. ‘So you can go back down to wherever you came from and leave me alone.’

  She slammed the door and went out onto the terrace. It was a clear day, despite the heat, and she could see over to the other side of Kowloon, where the buildings stopped and a row of hills stood up straight behind. The water in the harbour changed colour through the day, pale and hazy at first, a deep blue by the afternoon, and then a milky yellow just before sunset. If the weather was good and they had a free evening ahead of them, Tommy sometimes got Wang to drive them over the Peak and along the coast a little way. As twilight fell, they would often sit and watch the fishermen set to work. Two junks with a net suspended between them sailed in one direction, and a small sampan carrying kerosene lamps made for the gap between them. The light attracted the fish, Tommy said, and they went straight into the nets. She wanted to go for a spin that way now, with Wang driving quickly through the villages where people would look at her in the car as she passed, and not know anything of her pain, and she could look back at them through the glass, and feel nothing.

  She went to the kitchen.

  ‘Ah Wang?’

  Wang looked up, startled.

  The formica table had been moved against the wall. He was sitting on the bamboo mat in the centre of the room. The woman who’d come to call was sitting with him. She held a patterned china cup between her fingers and sipped, delicately. There was a sweet smell in the air.

  ‘Excuse us, please,’ he said.

  ‘No, it’s fine. Don’t get up.’

  ‘This is my cousin, Lam,’ he said. ‘The captain asked her to come… anyway.’

  ‘I understand,’ she said. She looked at the woman sitting cross-legged on the floor. She felt embarrassed, standing over them like this, but didn’t want to sit down, either.

  ‘Please accept my apologies. I was very rude to you earlier,’ she said to the woman.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the woman said. ‘You lost your baby.’

  It was the first time someone had said it to her, made it real.

  ‘Captain Jones thought I could help. Keep you company until you want to go out again.’

  ‘I’d like that. Please, finish your tea and then we can talk in the living room.’

  ‘Yes, Miss.’ Lam lifted her teacup again.

  Elsa went back to the living room and onto the verandah. She stood in the glare of the sunlight, and let it burn her skin. She looked at the poinsettia flowers glowing red against the blue glaze of their pots, and breathed in the cool smell of the tree shade on the hill behind. While she was waiting for Lam to come and sit with her, she read Nannon’s letter again. They arrived once a week, on the dot. She stared at the neat handwriting, blowsy in places. Rain again this morning, and cool. You’d never say it was June. The rapeseed is out though, big bold stripes of it across the fields, thick as butter.

  3

  Every time they rounded a corner Elsa was swung from one side of the Bentley to the other, although Wang was driving slowly and the road wasn’t busy.

  ‘Surprise for Captain Jones?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, Ah Wang.’

  Tommy had left that morning without saying goodbye.

  ‘All right, if you won’t come with me, I’m going on my own,’ he’d said. ‘Don’t expect me back until late.’

  After he’d gone, Elsa had sat in her dressing room for a long time, next to where the cot had been. The blind was drawn against the sun, and she sat in a half-light, her senses dulled. She pictured Tommy sitting with Ronald and Liz on the terrace at the Jockey Club, lighting cigarettes for the women around the table, smoke and perfume heavy in the air above them. She knew the kind of woman who would come and pull out the empty seat next to him, murmuring ‘Do you mind?’ He would jump up and push her chair in for her and smile and not notice the way she looked at him, because women always looked at Tommy like that. The debutante types would never have the courage even to speak to him: they would just blush and stare, until in the end, feeling watched, he would look round, at which they’d blush again and the sea would glimmer in the harbour behind them and Tommy would smile back without thinking about it. The married ones, who talked to other women about children’s diets and charity dos, would look at him twice too, and the
n back at their own husbands, before picking up the conversation where they’d left off, viciously, as if they were pulling a stray thread out of a skirt. It was the older, single women she had to look out for, the ones who’d kept their figures and their bank balances and had no need of a man, but didn’t mind a little light entertainment from time to time. But Tommy always said there was no other woman for him. He’d turn to their friends round the table and say that there was no other woman in Hong Kong who could speak Welsh half as well as she could. Everyone laughed, and Elsa would let herself tip over into the familiar cadences of the well-worn joke and laugh too, while Tommy would put his hand over hers – ‘Is there, my cariad?’

  But Tommy had stopped making wisecracks, and Elsa had stopped laughing at everything he said. Losing a baby is no joke, she imagined the mumsy women saying to him. She won’t ever be quite the same, you know that, one hand on his shoulder.

  She got out of the car as Wang held the door open for her, the engine still running, and Happy Valley spinning out in a circle around her: the smoothly mown grass, the wide blue sky, the Peak falling sharply away behind.

  ‘Don’t wait for me, Ah Wang.’

  He looked disappointed. Lam said there was nothing Wang liked better than an afternoon spent sitting in the car waiting, polishing the dashboard. She said it with disdain, before remembering that she was Elsa’s servant, and putting her hand over her mouth, and saying that she had work to do. But the last time Elsa had asked her to keep her company on the terrace she had stayed longer than usual, making the afternoon pass more quickly.

  The bar was crowded and hot. Men stood about with a glass in one hand and race lists and a cigarette or pipe in the other. One or two of them eyed Elsa through the smoke. Everyone looked too warm.

  She passed one of Tommy’s friends from the customs building; he smiled at her and she smiled back, watching as the sheen of his skin disappeared into the lines around his eyes. She felt someone’s warm breath on the back of her neck as she untangled herself from one group of people and gently pushed her way through another – ‘Excuse me, please.’ She passed a table of women who were sitting around a low coffee table, passing a lighter round. They spoke in full, authoritative voices.