Elsa wanted to ask Lam what she did on her day off, if she came to places like this with men like that, but she knew that Lam would be embarrassed, and would say nothing, covering her mouth with her hand.
‘Do you get homesick sometimes?’ she said instead.
All around them, the dribs and drabs of conversation on other tables were starting to slow down. At the wedding party table a small child sat curled up on a woman’s shoes, one thumb in his mouth and the side of his cheek pressed against her leg.
‘Homesick? What’s that?’
Lam tidied the bamboo pans, putting their lids back on and setting them at the edge of the table ready for the waitress.
‘I mean, do you miss your home? Where is your home?’
Elsa put a ten-dollar note next to the dirty dishes.
‘Keep the change,’ she said to the waitress.
The waitress bowed her head and slipped the note into her apron.
‘Canton? I haven’t been there for three years.’
Lam’s answer was just what Elsa had come to expect: neither a yes nor a no, and yet there was something complete and self-contained about it, like Lam herself.
It was cooler on the street, but the pavements were still crowded. Elsa followed Lam as she stepped round men pulling trolleys and rickshaws, and wide, shallow dishes of chickpeas drying in the sun. She tried to move as lightly as Lam did, balancing her weight in order to skip round all these hurdles in one graceful movement. They were about to cross the road to a tram stop when a car pulled up.
‘What on earth are you doing here on your own?’ Lizzie called over. Ronnie sat next to her in the driver’s seat, wearing sunglasses and looking straight ahead.
‘I’m not on my own,’ Elsa said.
‘Hadn’t you better hop in? We’ll run you home.’
Elsa turned back to Lam.
‘Don’t rush back. I won’t need you until six.’
Lam looked pleased, then, for the first time that day. Elsa got into the car and they pulled away down Des Voeux Road, overtaking the trams. Lam was still standing on the pavement, a blank look on her face again. Everything around her was moving and gathering pace backwards as the car sped off: the triangles of the bamboo hats in the shop behind her, the yellow mangoes on the fruit stall on the other side, the long dark alleyway to her left that ran the length of the block. For a moment they came together like a symphony, a final chord, and then Lam turned to go and they fell away from her again.
‘You look tired,’ Liz said.
‘I’ve had a busy day, that’s all.’
‘You don’t have to come to this do if you don’t feel up to it.’
‘I’ll be better by the end of the week. I wouldn’t miss your birthday for anything, Ronnie.’
‘Thank you, honey,’ he said, blowing his cigarette smoke out of the window. ‘It’s going to be a good one.’
Liz laughed, looking sideways at herself in the wing mirror. ‘There’ll be plenty of people and plenty of fizz; I’ve made sure of that.’
The car stopped for a moment at a junction. Alongside them a man stooped over a grave in the steep-sided Chinese cemetery. He had a small brush in one hand and a pan in the other. Then Ronnie put his foot down again, turning up onto the road for the Peak, and everything around them disappeared into a blur of trees and sky.
5
‘What’s wrong?’ Tommy was looking in the mirror, adjusting his bow tie.
‘Nothing. I fell asleep after lunch and had a bad dream, that’s all.’
‘We’d better get going.’
Victoria Harbour was calm under a grey sky. No one would guess at the storm Elsa had dreamed of, the waves rising up out of the harbour and crashing over the hotels and shops and people all along the waterfront. She’d dreamed they were sitting in the Peninsula when the water rolled into the big windows, making them crack and splinter into jagged pieces that came rushing on a wave of water towards her, cutting her hands. She shouted and screamed and held her arms up, the blood running, but no one took any notice. They carried on just as before, as if this was only happening to her. And then she woke up and realised that it was.
Elsa hesitated before stepping off the quay onto the boat. There was a moment when she felt everything moving beneath her, the gangplank under one foot and the quay under the other, but then Tommy took her hand and the feeling of panic was stilled.
As the sampan turned back on itself to face Kowloon the evening sun caught its pewter-coloured sails, opened out symmetrically like butterfly wings. Elsa was struck by how flat the land was on the waterfront. It wasn’t inconceivable that the Peninsula Hotel or any of the other smart places on the other side of the harbour should be flooded one day, but no one seemed concerned when the tides were high, as they were today, the sea almost running over onto the pavements on the quay. She mentioned it to Tommy as they made their way with Ronnie and Liz past the waxed bonnets of the cars parked up outside the Peninsula, but he just laughed and said she took her mother’s folk tales too seriously.
‘What tales are those?’ Ronnie asked, raising his eyebrows, ready to be entertained, watching as Tommy held out a chair for Elsa before taking a seat himself.
‘Gloomy Welsh myths, Ronnie boy,’ Tommy said, opening his eyes wide, and they both laughed, and Tommy slapped his big hands against his thighs. Elsa loved Tommy’s hands. She’d married him for them. A farmer’s hands like shovels, with blunt-edged fingers, they reminded her of where she came from and what her people did, either farming the land, or travelling the world as merchant seamen or a little of both, as Tommy’s family had always done. When she turned his hands over, she could trace the lines in his palms, as if they made a map of New Quay that she carried with her everywhere. When she took him to bed, he spoke to her in Welsh and ran his farmer’s hands over her breasts. She remembered the day he asked her to marry him, the red round perfection of the sun on the water at Cwmtydu’s deserted cove, and the gritty feel of sand in her underwear afterwards, and being glad that she wouldn’t be considered a child any more, now that she had a fiancé.
Ronnie had drunk too much champagne already and was staring at her.
‘Fabulous dress, Elsa,’ he said.
Liz lit up a cigarette.
‘Thank you, Ronnie.’ Elsa bent over to kiss him on the cheek. ‘Happy Birthday.’
‘Thank you, honey.’ He held onto her hand for longer than he should.
‘Is your husband jolly already?’ said Tommy to Liz, trying to catch the waiter’s eye.
‘He’s been drinking all afternoon,’ she answered, not smiling back.
‘I see we have some catching up to do, Ronnie boy.’ Tommy held his arm up in the air, shaking his big fingers instead of clicking them, and a young Chinese boy in a white, double-buttoned jacket appeared at their table, holding an empty silver tray against his stomach.
‘A bottle of champagne,’ Tommy said. ‘No, make that two.’
The boy bowed. He turned the tray over and cleared the empty glasses from the table.
By the time they’d finished the second bottle of champagne, the marble floor had started to move around under Elsa’s feet and she’d got used to the noise of the wind shaking the windows that opened out onto the front of the hotel.
‘I need the ladies,’ she mouthed to Liz.
‘I’ll come with you.’ Liz reached for her bag.
In the restroom Elsa went straight into a cubicle to tidy up her dress. She heard the door outside open and close and Mimi Forsyth’s voice say, ‘You look nice, Liz.’
‘Starting to fill out now.’ Liz sounded happy again. ‘Lively in here tonight, isn’t it?’ The words were distorted, as if she was frowning at herself in the glass as she applied another layer of lipstick.
‘People are making the most of the good times, I suppose.’
The tiny stitches in Elsa’s dress were jumping around in front of her eyes, but when she looked closely, they were as perfect and close-set as they had been in the Wan
gs’ shop.
‘Where’s Elsa?’ Mimi said.
Liz made a non-committal noise. She must still be at the mirror, applying swirls of lipstick the colour of candy.
‘That dress,’ said Mimi. ‘Don’t you think it makes her look a little… well, you know… as if she’s…’
‘Gone native?’
‘You should talk to her.’
Liz’s reply was lost as the door screeched open and shut. When Elsa came out of the cubicle, they were both gone. Her hands trembled as she washed and dried them. The red walls were crowding in on her, and all she could see were the dulled edges of the mirror frame above the sink where the gold leaf had flaked off. But when she looked at her reflection, she could see that the roundness in her face that used to make her look as if she was always smiling, or about to, had become more angular, more knowing, and there was a soft knuckling of bone across her shoulders.
In the long, windowless corridor running from the restrooms back to the stairs down to the lobby, the people who were walking towards the bathrooms avoided the gaze of those who had just left them. Elsa kept her eyes down too. Her mouth was dry and she had a headache. She wondered how long it would be before Tommy would be ready to go home.
‘Mrs Jones?’
She looked up.
‘Yes?’
She recognised him straightaway.
‘It’s Oscar, Oscar Campbell,’ he said. He reached a hand out as if to shake hers but when she took it and leaned in to accept a kiss, he pulled back.
‘How are you?’
No one had asked her how she was, not since that day at the hospital. Sometimes she hated good manners.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’
‘No, not at all. It’s very kind of you to ask.’
‘I was so very sorry about… your baby,’ he said.
She realised he was still holding onto her hand and she wanted to cling onto it, this firm, truthful grip on her loss. She watched him as he tried to readjust the tenor of their conversation to something more in keeping with the social niceties people were supposed to exchange over drinks and dinner at the Peninsula.
‘I’m surprised to see you still in Hong Kong,’ he said.
‘Why should you be surprised?’
‘So many of the wives have left already. Gone home, or to Australia.’
‘Oh, that,’ she said, waving a hand, realising that her movements were exaggerated and that she really had drunk too much champagne. ‘Tommy says it’s nothing to worry about. It’ll all blow over, he says. He knows a lot of journalists, and they keep him in the know.’
‘Does he?’ Oscar said. ‘In any case, it’s very good to see you.’
He seemed so stiff and formal that she couldn’t help smiling as he moved off. He had a quick, long stride and within seconds he had disappeared around the corner.
She loitered at the top of the staircase. A string quartet was playing on one of the balconies. The lobby below seemed a long way away. People who were sitting at the tables in small groups had split up and joined different groups, or had their tables moved together to make one big one. Everyone was laughing and shouting to make themselves heard. Elsa listened to their voices, mainly English, but also French and Dutch in places, rise to the ceiling and mix into a noisy babel where she was standing.
She could see Ronnie still slumped back in his chair. Liz was sitting up straight, both hands on her handbag, as if she was ready to go.
Tommy’s seat was empty.
She looked all around the lobby, at the sea of black dicky bows and evening dresses punctuated by the white jackets of the waiters.
There was a couple standing by a tall potted palm between the lobby and one of the corridors leading off it. If you were sitting down at one of the tables you would hardly know they were there, much less who they were. But Elsa knew Tommy’s wide jaw, and his big hands. She knew the thick, flat fingers that were running their way down the back of Mimi Forsyth’s dress before coming to rest on her behind. She knew how it felt to be pressed against him like that, feeling the rush of blood pulsing under her skin.
Groups of people in the lobby below were still swirling around, connecting into clumps of shifting colour: from up here they looked like a marked-out territory that was constantly changing. And then the wind battered against the windows again, so loudly that there was a hiatus in the noisy conversations below, and Elsa wondered if it would all turn to sea under her eyes, if this group of people would disappear under the water forever, somehow complicit in their own undoing. Just like the story her mother used to tell her when she was little, about the gatekeepers who got drunk and forgot to close the sea gates on the low-lying land of Cardigan Bay. The whole village was flooded while its inhabitants lay sleeping. Except when her mother told her the story, stroking her hair while the wind shook the windows in their sashes, she had felt safe.
Tommy said it was important for him to mix with the right people. That was what he had said when Elsa asked about Mimi.
She saw a shock of red hair moving through the crowd below. Oscar. It looked as if he was going from group to group, telling them something. People started to gather their belongings and make their way to the main doors.
Tommy and Mimi came back to the table where Liz and Ronnie were sitting. Ronnie had fallen asleep with his mouth open, and Tommy had to shake him to wake him up.
Elsa went down to the lobby and walked towards the table.
‘Elsa, we have to go.’ Tommy looked hot in his dinner jacket and he was speaking too quickly. ‘There’s a storm coming in.’
Elsa watched the water surge in a dark mass around them.
‘What if we go under?’ said Liz.
Elsa stared straight ahead at the lights of Victoria, thousands of them against the black sky. A cruiser passed by in a hurry, causing a sudden swell that lifted the sampan up like a buoy. She could hear Tommy next to her telling her to hold on tight. Mimi was sitting on the other side of him. She looked green.
‘I think I’m pregnant again,’ Elsa said to Tommy, half-shouting over the sound of rushing wind and water.
Tommy said something, but there was too much noise and Elsa couldn’t catch what it was. Mimi put her head down, still clinging to the wooden back of the seat in front.
‘I feel so ill,’ she groaned.
‘It’s sea legs you need,’ Elsa said under her breath.
6
Elsa didn’t pass any of this on to Nannon when she wrote. Elsa told her the due date and sent her a list of the things she needed.
Something to look forward to! Nannon wrote back, underlined twice. I’ll be ticking off the weeks. Tommy must be thrilled.
Elsa hadn’t seen Tommy like this before, distant and hungover. When she’d first met him in New Quay, he’d been home on leave between postings, sitting at the kitchen table with his collar unfastened, eating all his favourite foods, which his mother Sara had made specially: cawl, home-baked bread, damson wine. When Elsa had walked in under the low beam of the door that led straight from the buarth into the kitchen, Sara was standing over him, arms folded across her chest, watching him eat. He’d glanced up with the soup spoon held halfway between the bowl and his mouth, and kept it there, looking at her as Sara came over to her, taking her coat and basket, and telling her to take a seat at the table. The bench had creaked as she’d sat down – Tommy had joked about that later on, how could the bench have protested under her weight, and her a bag of bones? – and by the time she’d got up from the table again, her stomach still warm from the cawl, it was understood that he would take her on a tour of the farm, although she’d been there many times to collect eggs while he’d been away at sea. They went to the milk shed to see the cows, and he told her about his work on the coast off mainland China, capturing pirates, confiscating contraband and taking it ashore. She’d listened while the tails of the cows slapped against their soft behinds, and looked away as the boy on the stool pressed their udders until
milk squirted into the bucket at his feet. When Tommy said ‘Hwyl,’ to him, the lad had kept one eye on the stream of warm milk as he tipped his cap at Elsa.
Tommy had said goodbye to her at the gate onto the road from Capel y Wig down to New Quay, the sharp edge of the wind giving him red cheeks.
In Hong Kong all the men were pale and languid, and on the mornings when Tommy didn’t go into work until lunchtime he looked wan and listless too; he sat in the apartment in his dressing gown, reading the newspaper and eating a second breakfast. But this was what she had chosen, Elsa thought, watching the Bentley easing its way down the hill, and closing the door behind him. That’s what Nannon had said to her the morning she and Tommy had got married at Llanina Church, which was so far out on the headland that the water had almost lapped at their ankles when they came out into the sunshine for their photographs. Nannon had been standing behind Elsa, fixing her hair for her, and she’d said that when you get married you don’t just choose a man, you choose a life. Elsa had felt a flicker of irritation when she’d said that, playing the older, sensible sister. What was Nannon to know about marriage? She was nearly thirty and wasn’t even engaged. It had been cold, and on the road back to New Quay for the reception at the Penwig the first primroses had winked their yellow eyes at her from the high hedges. Perhaps Nannon was right, though. She thought of Sara, who’d stood over the table that day at Pwllbach while she and Tommy had talked and eaten, watching them together, a satisfied look on her face.
The Rice Paper Diaries Page 4