No Peace for the Wicked

by Pip Granger

‘So,’ she breathed, eyes dancing with merriment, ‘you have taken T.C. as your lover at last. You must tell me everything. Is he passionate? Is he big? Is he inexhaustible? Most importantly, does he satisfy you?’

  The woman was incorrigible, but infectious. I laughed like a teenager and answered, ‘Yes, I’m not telling you, I’m not telling you again and yes. And how did you know?’ I knew for a fact that she hadn’t seen Sugar since my afternoon with T.C., so how did she know?

  Brilliant gave her tinkly laugh and clapped her hands together in delight. ‘I knew it! I knew it! I knew it the moment you walked into the Ritz. You had little clouds under your feet and you glowed like a perfect pink peony on a dew-kissed morning. Only one thing makes a woman look like that at four o’clock in the afternoon and that is beautiful lovemaking at two.’ She cocked her head and eyed me narrowly. ‘But what is this? The glow is fading. You have not been loved since. Why is this?’

  How did she do that? I was to learn over the years that, to Brilliant Chang, I was as transparent as a recently washed window, whereas I never knew what she was thinking or doing from one moment to the next, unless she chose to tell me. I explained that I had Peace staying with me until the wedding and T.C. and I didn’t want to set a poor example. After all, we weren’t married.

  Brilliant was appalled. ‘You have your lovely man at last and yet you don’t? That is ridiculous. There is his home: isn’t his wife safely with her ancestors?’

  ‘Yes, she is, and I think that’s it really … that neither of us feels right about … you know, doing it, in her home.’ It sounded a bit lame as I said it, but it was the way we felt. Surprisingly, Brilliant understood.

  ‘That is simple. Use hotels. Use hotels until Peace is married. Hotels are fun, they make you feel racy, sexy and very, very naughty. It is very exciting.’ It was an idea that, I have to admit, had not occurred to me. You don’t think to stay in hotels when you live in a place.

  ‘Sugar and I use them all the time. Sometimes for an hour only and sometimes for a whole night. Now Douglas is in Hong Kong, we plan a week in Nice, at the Negresco.’

  We drank fragrant jasmine tea and gossiped and shared confidences like old school friends. I believe it was that Saturday afternoon that cemented our friendship once and for all, and we made a point to meet often after that.

  ‘About Douglas trying to arrange this marriage with Cousin Philip’s boy,’ I began, and felt my friend stiffen slightly. ‘It’s like royalty, isn’t it? They arranged marriages for dynastic reasons. You know, alliances and so on. Is it usual in China?’ I felt her relax again.

  ‘Oh yes. My own marriage was to cement a relationship between two rival families. It works very well sometimes.’

  I took a big gamble and asked, ‘Did it work for you and Douglas?’

  ‘It worked well for our families, but personally, not so well. Douglas and I, we did not truly like one another, but it was our duty,’ Brilliant explained. Then she laughed. ‘That is why I took a beautiful lover.’

  ‘Do you think Douglas knew?’ I asked, noticing as I did so that Brilliant and I were talking as if Douglas had ‘gone before’, as the aunts would have said, which in a way I suppose he had.

  ‘What, that I did not like him? Of course! He did not like me much either. But there was tolerance. There had to be. But did he know about Sugar? I do not believe so, because if he did, I think …’ Brilliant hesitated, ‘I think we would not be having this conversation.’ She smiled. ‘And now, it is time to talk about weddings.’

  The rest of the afternoon disappeared in a blizzard of menus for the obligatory feasts, as she explained what had been chosen. ‘Henry knows that feasting goes a long way with a Chinese. He knows that this is a controversial marriage, so the feasting must be the most wonderful the community has ever known. He knows that full bellies can smother tongues that wag with disapproval,’ Brilliant explained. ‘And he knows that handing out contracts for all that is needful for feasts, weddings, ritual gifts and, indeed, the small matter of creating a restaurant, to the local businessmen and paying them well for their labours, will ensure that memories are lost also. Peace and Lucky will be all right in Soho. You need have no further worries about that, Elizabeth.’

  We had a bottle of champagne back at the club to celebrate not only that Peace’s safety was guaranteed, but also that Sugar was a lot safer, too. Poor Sugar. He must have loved his Brilliant very much to risk dying for her for all those years. It occurred to me that night, for the first time, that she must have loved him too, to risk so much.

  They may have been safer with Douglas Chang back in Hong Kong, but their affair still had to remain a secret to everyone except a small inner circle. Brilliant was charged with maintaining the Changs’ authority in London and that would have been difficult, if not impossible, if rivals had realized that Sugar was the great Brilliant Chang’s Achilles’ heel.

  And she was great. Under her leadership, the local Chinese businesses prospered and grew. Unlike her husband, who had always used fear as his weapon, Brilliant used her charm, her powers of persuasion and sheer guile in the main, to achieve even better results.

  As Bandy pointed out, ‘Douglas was never the brains of their outfit, Brilliant was. And now, without him, she’s got rid of her main liability, because he was always wilful, that one, no discipline to speak of, even as a boy. I remember my father talking about him, because it’s so unusual for a Chinese. For them, duty to the family and the Triad is almost everything. Balls that up or rebel against them and you’re in deep trouble, as Douglas has proved all too well. Henry won’t forget, little brother or no little brother. He won’t forget and Douglas knows it. He’ll have to spend a lifetime watching his back – that’s if he’s not dead already.’

  ‘Just as well the bugger’s well away from Brilliant, then,’ Sugar observed.

  Bandy looked at him with something approaching tenderness, I thought. ‘Yes, it’s just as well,’ she said sadly. ‘It is just as well.’

  44

  The wedding was approaching fast and there was lots to do. One day, Bandy handed Peace a large number of crisp five pound notes and told her she must go shopping for her dowry.

  ‘Under normal circs,’ Bandy explained, ‘it’d be the bride’s family who supplies household stuff like crockery, bedding, pots and pans, that kind of thing.’ Bandy smiled ruefully. ‘But, as you may remember, a lot of our china got caught up in the Malcolm wars and I don’t think Sugar would be happy to see his kitchen stuff disappearing either, so you’d better buy it all.’

  Peace and I went shopping with a will. We had a lovely time haunting the department stores in Oxford Street and the Chinese emporia in Soho and Limehouse. We turned these shopping sprees into outings, and took lunch or tea out while we were at it. I learned a lot about Chinese food and Peace learned a lot about department stores and pretty soon we had a modest mountain of household items in the corner of my small living room. Finally, there was the chamber-pot. Brilliant was adamant about the chamber-pot.

  Peace and I were bewildered. What was the point of a chamber-pot in a time and a country that was amply supplied with flushing WCs?

  ‘It must be filled with fruit, sweets and strings of money when it is presented, with the rest of Peace’s dowry, to the groom’s family,’ Brilliant informed us when she joined us on one of our jaunts as our chief adviser. ‘It’s symbolic. Of what, I am not sure, but it’s important. Every bride must have her chamber-pot.’

  After much discussion and laughter, we settled on a trip to Bermondsey Antiques Market at the crack of dawn one morning. If she had to have a chamber-pot, we decided we’d go the whole hog and get a splendid Victorian one, complete with fruit or rosebud decoration. In the end, Peace found a set that included a large washing bowl, a jug and a matching chamber-pot and was enormously pleased with herself for getting three items in one go and at a bargain price.

  She’d haggled with the good-natured stall holder like a pro and got him down by a whole poun
d. The decoration was a rich mix of cherubs, fruit and full-blown roses, all of which were auspicious, said Brilliant, if you took the cherubs to be plump, healthy babies, that is.

  ‘I’m going shopping with Lucky tomorrow,’ T.C. told me after work one Friday as we lay snuggled up in Manzi’s Hotel, which had rapidly become our favourite of all the local hotels. It was small, friendly and had a homely atmosphere, which suited us fine.

  Brilliant had been right about sneaking off to a hotel being exciting. It felt deliciously wicked, especially when I allowed myself to think about what my mother would have had to say on the matter. Thoughts of mother and the aunts at such moments just seemed to increase my ardour somehow, much to T.C.’s surprised delight.

  ‘When I was young and fancy free, the lads used to say it was some of the convent girls who had the loosest knicker elastic,’ T.C. told me, ‘but I’m beginning to think you lapsed chapel types could take the title.’ He laughed as he moved in closer. ‘Where was I?’ he asked with a mock leer.

  ‘Going shopping with Lucky,’ I answered promptly.

  ‘We’ve got to buy the bridal bed. It’s Lucky’s job to see to that, so while we were at it, I thought I’d buy a new bed for when I move into the flat. What do you think?’

  ‘Can you afford it? I know I can’t at the moment, I’m still paying for all my new clothes and then there’s Peace’s wedding and everything,’ I answered doubtfully. A new bed would be nice. The old one had a nasty dip in the middle, which was all right when I was alone, but a nuisance when I wasn’t.

  ‘My posh lady client coughed up when I made my report on her wandering old man.’ T.C. lay back on the pillows, his arm firmly around me. ‘She was generous. Seems she was itching to divorce him and proof was all she needed.’

  It had been an extraordinary thing, but solving the case of Bandy’s missing pearls had also solved the case of the posh lady’s roving husband.

  ‘I knew I’d seen her old man before, the minute I looked at that photo, but I simply couldn’t place him. I’d just seen him the once at the club, then only briefly,’ T.C. explained.

  But once Peace had gone missing, he’d left the watching the roving husband to Bobby and Pansy, and they’d never seen him before, so they didn’t twig either. As luck would have it, their various paths simply hadn’t crossed at the club until the night of the pearls. It shook everyone rigid that Cassie’s Harry was the same bloke they’d been following, not least of all Harry.

  I smiled contentedly as I remembered once again that it was during that time that T.C. and I had changed from being friends, to being more than friends, and finally to being lovers. I had a lot to thank Peace for, in a funny way.

  Quickly I touched wood, to ward off the possibility that she, or my happiness, could disappear again. Hanging around with Chinese persons was making me as superstitious as they were. They seemed to see portents and omens everywhere. Either that, or feeling joy once again had made me desperately afraid of losing it.

  ‘Buy the bed,’ I said, ‘it’ll bring us good luck.’

  45

  The wedding day finally dawned in September, soon after Peace’s seventeenth birthday. The bride was up with the sun. There was such a lot to do before her groom arrived to carry her back to his home.

  ‘Shall I run your bath?’ I sang out happily. Peace’s joy at her coming wedding was infectious and my own excitement had been growing with hers until I thought we both might burst with it. I had learned so much about Chinese customs over the past months and I found it endlessly fascinating. Superficially, some of their wedding customs seemed to be remarkably similar to ours, but with the Chinese, there’s always a wealth of symbolism invested in each act. For example, most brides like a nice bath before they dress in their wedding finery, but a Chinese bride-to-be must add a kind of grapefruit essence to hers, to purify her ritually.

  While Peace wallowed in her steamy bath, I prepared our final breakfast together in the kitchen. A lump formed in my throat the size of one of those damned grapefruit. I was going to miss her, even if she was just moving around a few corners.

  ‘Just think, tonight you and Uncle T.C. can be together at last, just like Lucky and me. I am so happy for you.’ Peace paused. ‘Do you mind very much that you may not marry Uncle?’

  ‘I do mind, rather. I was brought up to be respectable, but I’d mind being kept apart from him more. I have never been so happy, except when Jenny was a tiny baby.’

  ‘It is very sad,’ Peace said, but I wasn’t sure to what she was referring: my inability to marry T.C. until I’d found and divorced Sid, or the loss of my beloved Jenny. Possibly she was talking about both.

  I stood in the kitchen for a long moment, caught up in a vision of Jenny’s wedding, had she lived to have one. She’d always so loved to play at being a bride, with her granny’s old net curtains draped cunningly around her hair and from her little shoulders to form a bridal veil and a long train. I often acted as train bearer, mother of the bride, and bridesmaid all at once. Teddy, Bunnyface and her doll, Joyce, were the guests gathered at the table laid with her pink plastic tea set, ready and waiting for the wedding breakfast of rock cake and Marmite sandwiches or whatever I had in the larder. It had been a favourite game for rainy days, when playing out with Rosie hadn’t been an option.

  It was the hot tears streaming down my face, dripping off my chin and landing on the back of my hand, that brought me round. I heaved my shoulders back, stiffened my spine and drank a glass of water slowly, in an effort to pull myself together. I would not ruin Peace’s day by bringing my sorrows to it – even if it killed me. Peace’s wedding day was a time for joy and not for wallowing in self-pity. I could almost hear my mother’s voice telling me so. I made a supreme effort to sing out my reply as cheerily as I could.

  ‘Never mind about me, sweetheart. Just think, this time tomorrow, you’ll have spent your first night as Mrs Lucky Wong. Now there’s something to be happy about.’

  I could smell the grapefruit from her bath as I laid out the pretty, red silk underwear I had had made for her to wear under her beautiful bridal outfit. My mother would have had a purple fit at the thought of scarlet undies, the colour of harlots. Only an irredeemable slut would wear red knickers with black lace and tiny, black ribbon bows. But I happened to know that to the Chinese, red was the colour of joy, and there really couldn’t be enough of it at a Chinese wedding. So red undies it was, and a red bridal outfit to boot, right down to her shoes.

  T.C. and I had agreed that he would move in as Peace moved out, and in my heart, it felt like a kind of marriage to me, even if chapel, God and my mother would not have agreed. So while I was at it, I had a set of daring undies made for myself, only mine were black with red trimmings. They made me feel deliciously like what Mother would have called ‘a slut’, and no doubt that added to the illicit thrill they gave me every time I took them out of their tissue paper to gaze at them. I planned to wear them for T.C.’s first official night in residence.

  Peace and I had had many a cosy evening talking about our men, our hopes and our dreams and she had said that if I was to stand at her side when she stood before the Wong family altar, at the actual moment of the marriage, then I too would be married – in Chinese eyes at least, in a way. I’m not sure that her argument held water, but I was deeply touched that she should want to share her day with T.C. and me.

  Once she’d completed her preparations we sat down to wait for the bridegroom to come to claim his bride. Bandy, Sugar, Bobby, Pansy, Freddy, Antony, Maggie, Bert, the Campaninis and Madame Zelda convened in the club and we all waited together. There was definitely no mistaking Lucky’s arrival, because it was accompanied by the hisses, crackles and loud bangs of fireworks being set off by his gorgeously dressed attendants. Chinese bridegrooms certainly know how to make an entrance.

  ‘Remind me, that if ever I decide to get married, to do it Chinese style,’ Sugar murmured in my ear as we stood watching the spectacle. ‘Any old excuse to slip into
a little silk number.’

  We drew a fine old crowd on the way to Lucky’s home where the ceremony was to take place. After the months of ritual betrothal, the feasts, the gifts, the dowry, the bed-buying and installation, the marriage itself was an understated, brief affair in front of the Wongs’ family altar. Here, the happy couple paid homage to Heaven, then to Earth, to the family ancestors and to Tsao-Chün, the Kitchen God and, having done this, the couple bowed to each other and that was more or less it for the formalities.

  To make sure that the couple were also married in the eyes of British law, a second marriage ceremony was set for a little later that afternoon. Peace, Rosie, Bandy, Brilliant, Bubbles and I disappeared back to my flat and, once again, wedding preparations began.

  Freddy and Antony had gone to town on Peace’s wedding dress. It was absolutely gorgeous with its antique lace, seed pearls and yards and yards of train for Rosie and Bubbles to carry. Sugar and I spent many happy and secret hours embroidering discreet dragons and phoenixes, as well as Peace’s and Lucky’s names in self-coloured silk all over the bodice and skirt. Rosie and Bubbles had also been dressed by my employers, in a reddish pink, to bring in the joy theme once again. All the dresses were ankle length.

  I was to be maid of honour, and wore a silk two-piece in blue, with my secret black undies beneath and little hat perched at the back of my head. As our procession entered the dark doorway of the beautiful Wren church, the organ began to play the triumphant wedding march. The bride and her maids looked so stunning standing there. Rosie’s blond curls contrasted beautifully with Bubbles’s glossy black hair and Peace looked enchanting. Each of them had a bouquet of pink roses and baby’s breath clutched in their white-gloved hands.

  I looked up the aisle and there was T.C. standing proudly beside the groom, ready to do the honours as best man. Everyone was there. The Chinese contingent had turned out in force, as eager to enjoy an English wedding as we had been to enjoy the Chinese one. I could see the Campanini clan, grinning widely. Madame Zelda sat with Maggie and Bert, whose chests were swelled with pride, along with T.C.’s, to see Rosie looking so pretty and attending to her bridesmaid duties so well.