by Peter Tonkin
‘Your husband?’ asked Mrs Hip, her eyes and pen still busy as she balanced strength of recommendation against price per litre.
‘Yes. Richard Mariner.’
‘Aiyah! What do you say? This is the man in latest edition South China Morning Post! Here, you see.’ Pushing the scrap paper into her handbag, Mrs Hip pulled out a flimsy print-out sheet. ‘My son-in-law get it off the Internet this morning. Is front page.’ Mrs Hip passed over the paper.
And, sure enough, on the bottom right of the page was a little box of a story. ‘Passenger list of missing jetcat published,’ said the headline. And there, just before it said ‘Continued inside’, was his name. Captain Richard Mariner, Director, China Queens Company.
*
Robin had got one of the last seats available on the flight. Choice of class at this stage was out of the question. After Calcutta, the hostess at the door assured her, there would be room in first class. She should just consult the chief stewardess, who was in charge of her seating section in any case. In the meantime, she was wedged in an aisle seat near the tail.
Robin tightened her seatbelt and looked a little forlornly up and down the packed aisle and tried to disregard the sound the child on her right was making and the smell being made by the fat teenager beyond him. As the plane began to lumber down the runway, Robin set her watch seven hours ahead and thought of Concorde. It had been on Concorde that she had sped out to Hong Kong two and a half years ago summoned by news that Richard was being charged with mass murder. But those had been the waning days of empire. Concorde, replete with the Foreign Secretary and his retinue, had been speeding out to the official opening of Chek Lap Kok and the dignitaries aboard it lingering to observe the handover of the Crown Colony. Now the colony had been handed back and those days were gone. Perhaps all the good days were gone. If Richard was dead, then Robin could not see how she would ever quite be happy again.
As the plane levelled out of its take-off climb and the hieroglyphic signs which meant ‘Fasten Seatbelts’ went off, Robin pulled the flimsy copy of the front page of the South China Morning Post out of the plastic bag and began to read it, sidetracked out of the routine she had promised herself that she would follow. The story which gave Richard’s name on the passenger list rather took for granted that the reader had had access to yesterday’s paper, and would have access to the continuation of the story inside. Robin pulled out the Telegraph and on page five under foreign news she found the bland details of the case. The jetcat had left the Macau ferry pier on time as usual. There had been some concern about the deteriorating state of the weather but, correctly as it turned out, the forecasters in Xianggang and Macau had both advised that foul weather would not hit the Pearl River delta until three hours after departure time, one hundred minutes after expected arrival time.
The last that had been seen of the jetcat was when it went to full speed off Fan Lau point on Lan Tao Island. When the vessel had not arrived as scheduled, an alert was called at once and an aeroplane had overflown the route. There had been no sign of anything. Then the weather had closed in. Again, twenty-four hours later, nothing whatsoever was sighted when the search was renewed. Robin breathed in until her chest hurt then she noticed that the boy by the window was sneaking sideways glances at her breasts and she breathed out again and caught his eye. She held his stare until his cheeks mottled and he looked away with all the hauteur of a maharajah.
Right, she thought. Time to get to grips with Charles Lee’s list. But when she went to get it out of the bag from the bookshop, it wasn’t there. Her heart seemed to stop with the horror of the realisation. Then, just as she was really beginning to feel faint, it lurched into motion again. An errant thought came: almost as many women as men die of heart disease. She wouldn’t outlast Richard by long if she kept this up. And what would become of the twins then?
Focus! she said to herself fiercely. It has to be here somewhere! It took her fifteen minutes of increasingly frantic searching, but there was no doubt in the end. It was nowhere to be found. She had lost it.
After that frantic fifteen minutes, she had to sit and force herself to be calm. She stared at the back of the seat in front of her and focused all her mental energy on emptying her blood vessels of the various chemical messengers which were tearing her apart inside. She needed to clear her mind, cool her cheeks and still her beating heart. Also, ideally, she should do something about the fact that her palms were moist, her hands were shaking and beads of perspiration were running down that very valley where the hot-eyed boy by the window had been trying to look.
At last, a kind of hard-won calm arrived and she pulled out of the plastic bag the first set of papers that she still needed to read.
By the time the first meal arrived, she was as up to date on all things Chinese as the combined wisdom of all the sources Heritage Mariner had accessed could make her. And all of those sources, it seemed to her, had every reason to be very nervous indeed. In terms of military, political and economic strength, China was going from being a giant to being a titan. Before the beginning of the next century, an event mere months away, there was every chance that the Chinese would simply walk into Taiwan, whether or not that beleaguered island got the nuclear warheads it had offered almost any price to buy. And no one could do anything about it. America would not go to war over it, and that was what it would take to stop it. Russia was out of the diplomatic game, for the moment anyhow. Europe could not reach consensus on one currency, let alone a concerted effort in defence of Taiwan. And in any case, even had those powers been guided by military hawks with massive political muscle, they would do nothing because China would simply stop playing ball with them and pull the economic plug. For there was no doubt that everything from plastic peashooters to Pentium processors could be made in China more cheaply, more effectively and in greater numbers than anywhere else in the world. There was nothing China could not reproduce in vast quantity if she wanted to; and the international copyright laws were, in the final analysis, only as strong as her willingness to observe them.
The only real area of potential weakness in China’s situation as the tiger of the twenty-first century lay in the possibility that it would tear itself to pieces internally, as the Soviet Union had done. And that hope had died at Tiananmen Square. It would take at least one full generation more to raise a set of dissidents like those again — as Charles Lee knew better than most. He had been thrown out of Hong Kong for sending millions of dollars of secret support to the student body crushed that terrible day. The old men in Beijing realised how near they had come to being taken over by Hong Kong and her young friends, rather than the other way round.
The title ‘Canton Airways’ should have alerted Robin to the likely orientation of the in-flight service. She had been concentrating on the first bundle of papers so much that she hardly paid any attention to the bright musical in-flight movie with its ravishing old-world Bombay settings, elegantly wavering soundtrack and bold Cantonese subtitles.
The first meal was not so easy to put aside, however, for she was genuinely hungry. The stewardess who brought it turned out to be the woman she had had the clash of wills with at the check-in desk; the one who had declared her weekend case too big to bring in the cabin. Robin could not stop herself blaming the sour-faced jobsworth for the loss of Charles Lee’s precious list. Something about the woman put Robin in mind of vinegar and lemon juice. This was as much because of her physical appearance as because of her peculiar odour and actual nature. She wore a yellow cheongsam which emphasised her natural colour and the unnatural blackness of hair rivalled only by that of Mrs Hip. Also she seemed to have vinegar running in her veins and over her tongue. And she gave the impression that she spent the interim between each patrol sucking lemons in the galley. Robin’s earlier reading made her wonder whether this woman, so completely unsuited to the job she was doings might actually be working for the newly expanded Social Affairs Department — the Chinese Secret Service.
The range of
dim sum looked appetising enough, but the fact was that they needed to be fried or steamed to a certain temperature unobtainable in the pressurised cabin, and microwaving was simply no substitute. They were half raw, leathery and tasteless. Two or three served to turn Robin’s stomach. They were removed as though they had been cooked by the stewardess’s favourite granddaughter and the whole family was now insulted by the gweilo lack of manners.
Robin asked the stewardess for a simple cup of tea and took it with all the courtesy she could muster when offered it with pointed ill grace. But it was no better than the dim sum, and not much hotter either. Robin had spent many years getting on very well with all sorts of people from a range of different ethnic backgrounds, but the stewardess on the Canton Airlines flight defeated her. Perhaps it was the fact that she was under so much stress; that she was too tired, too shocked, to handle things with her usual aplomb. On the other hand it might have been that the stewardess was a sour-faced bat with no sympathy of spirit or understanding of nature; and social skills registering just below autistic in the ability bracket. Whatever the case, the two women took an instant and abiding loathing to each other.
After the dim sum and the tea, Robin tried to get some sleep, but another film was being offered to the passengers, a kung fu movie in Cantonese, this time with some kind of Indian subtitles. Either the fat boy understood them or the child beside her did, for they kept up a running translation complete with sound effects which took no account of her need for repose.
After a couple more hours she decided to try and get through the next section of her research. She had just become gripped by a perspective on Xianggang’s new position within China when the film ended and the lights went down. In her head it was 7 p.m. and the need for sleep had dissipated. In Xianggang it was 2 a.m., however, so she thought she had better get into the swing of things for when she arrived. It would be 5 p.m. tomorrow, Monday 13th. Realistically, she would get nothing actually done until Tuesday morning, but there were still people she could contact and facts she could firm up if only she could hit the ground running. She knew herself well enough to realise that if she stopped pushing herself forward then she would fall to pieces. And of all the places she wanted to fall to pieces in, alone and so far from home, Xianggang was just about the last. She realised, just as she began to drift off, that she was actually very scared indeed to be going back. But was it the place, or was it what she expected to learn there that terrified her so much?
Robin was rudely awakened by her stewardess bearing a kind of bastard kedgeree with an expression which said, ‘You won’t like this either, you gweilo bitch.’ She was right. As the tray, still laden, was removed again, the intercom spoke in a range of dialects none of which was translated into English. But Robin didn’t need to be fluent in Gujarati to work out that they were beginning their descent into Calcutta.
She was offered the opportunity of a couple of hours exploring Calcutta airport but all she could remember about it was that it used to be called Dum-Dum because this was the place where the British Army ordnance people had invented the dum-dum bullet. That didn’t appeal to her at all and so she spent the two hours reading the Xianggang file while the aircraft was tidied up. When it took off again for the final six-hour hop across to Chek Lap Kok, her section was very much emptier. She moved to the middle seat of the unoccupied threesome and spread herself out a little. The stewardess glared, sniffed and left her be.
As they levelled off above the great brown outwash of the Ganges, so similar in its own way to the outwash of the Pearl River off Macau, Mrs Hip hove into view. There were several seats available in first class, she announced happily. One of them was just next to her own seat. Robin should avail herself of this opportunity to upgrade for the rest of the flight. Robin was quite tempted. At the very least it seemed likely that the food would be more edible in first class and she was beginning to get hunger cramps just below her ribs. She had eaten almost nothing since that excellent dinner at Amberley School on Saturday evening.
But Mrs Hip had reckoned without the stewardess. It was not possible for passengers to move classes, the pair were icily informed. There was no facility to alter tickets or seating on Canton Airlines. This woman should not even be occupying the seat beside the one she had been assigned. If the honourable Mrs Hip was particularly desirous of accompanying her friend, perhaps she would like to come back here.
That, thought Robin, was straining a travelling friendship far too far. Mrs Hip, however, her sense of natural justice outraged, wavered — until Robin described the food and the tea. As Mrs Hip fussed grumpily away back to her seat, Robin wearily looked out of the window. Chittagong fall away far below and then the dark canopy of the Burmese rainforest closed over the land.
The day swiftly revolved beneath the belly of the labouring jet as it rushed sunwards through the sky. Morning and noon came crowding together. Sesame toast smelling as though it had been fried in rancid fish oil lay untouched on Robin’s plate. In due course she also got to refuse soggy spring rolls which had burst their white paper sides to reveal something suspiciously like maggots within, and cold fried rice with nondescript pieces of Crustacea lying in it. The one thing the unfortunate shellfish seemed to share was a black line down the back which Robin’s careful mother had warned her to avoid as surely as a cockle which did not close when caught.
Robin studied the spreadsheet which recorded and projected Heritage Mariner economic performance in sections so that each concern could be compared. The China Queens only rarely peaked out of the red. Each projected line tended relentlessly downwards. The only thing that kept it on the graph was the fact that the paper ran out. As well as whatever processes she had to go through with regard to Richard’s disappearance, it looked as though she was going to have to see about selling on or closing down the whole company. Certainly, with Richard at the helm, the company looked OK on paper. Without him it was bound inevitably for the sharpest financial reefs — and sailing at flank speed. The weight of all this crushed down upon her like a suit of lead.
The intercom spat a range of Chinese announcements and fell silent. Robin looked through the window but could see little except glare. She looked at her watch. It was four thirty. They must be coming near. Even as the thought came and she sat, wondering what to do about it, the sound of the engines dropped and the long cabin began to tilt forward and down. Working in a kind of dazed slow motion, she cleared all her paperwork away and just about managed to have everything under control as the plane swooped into the short finals over the South China Sea. Ten minutes later its tyres were grumbling up the runway at Chek Lap Kok and the weight on Robin’s shoulders was, if anything, heavier.
She pulled herself out of the seat and exited the plane. She passed through the remnants of a massively hot afternoon — it had been thirty-five degrees again, said the temperature gauge on the wall of the arrivals building. Robin was old hand enough to realise that this had sinister implications. There was another monster brewing down in the Mindoro Strait, she thought.
Halfway to the baggage hall, she realised that, among all the sorting out and preparing for landing, the one thing she had failed to do was to go to the toilet. If Canton Airways continued to live up to the reputation it had established so far, there would be a long wait for the baggage — always assuming it wasn’t still in Dum-Dum or on its way to Karachi.
Robin was just looking out for the familiar sign when Mrs Hip closed in again. This time she actually took Robin by the arm. Clearly the air of her home city had added to the good lady’s feeling of consequence. Her goodwill was offered in an irresistibly motherly way, however, so Robin dismissed the imprecations of her bladder and allowed herself to be guided into the baggage hall. ‘You look so tired, my dear. Are you being met? If not then I will have Mr Hip drop you home before he takes me up the Peak. Where do you live again?’
‘Away down in Repulse Bay. It is too far out of your way, Mrs Hip.’
‘You must call me Rose, my dea
r. Everyone does.’
Rose Hip. That did give Robin pause. But she kept her voice level, without a tremble of the hysteria which threatened to overcome her. ‘I am being met, Rose. My old friend Gerry Stephenson should be waiting. He lives very close to me — we’re next-door neighbours actually. And he’ll be on his way home from the office.’
‘Very well, my dear. But now that we’ve met we mustn’t be strangers. Quite apart from anything else, you must let Mr Hip thank you for your help in the selection of his whisky! Now, where’s that piece of paper?’ From her capacious handbag, Rose Hip produced the piece of paper she had used to record the whisky prices on. In a space left on the bottom of it, she scrawled her name, address and telephone number, then she passed it to Robin with a little glitter of triumph. Courteous to the last, Robin pocketed the paper and passed Mrs Hip one of her Xianggang business cards. They all said Captain Mariner — she and Richard both used them. It gave the China Queens office address in the old Jardine Matheson building and the phone in Repulse Bay.
Rose Hip’s baggage was waiting for her on the carousel and she had no trouble in catching the eye of a dolorous porter. She swept on into customs and immigration, leaving Robin standing listlessly, waiting for her little weekend case to appear. Bored, listless, prompted by some motivation she would never understand, Robin pulled out the piece of paper to have a closer look at Rose Hip’s address. She had been holding the crinkled sheet of paper for perhaps five seconds before she realised what it was.