by Peter Tonkin
But their room was so full of him, of his things, that it simply overwhelmed her. ‘I can’t stay in here,’ she said, keeping her eyes fixed firmly on her own reflection in the long mirror on the wall opposite the door. His wardrobe door stood a little open. His suits hung limp and empty. His shirts lay flat and lifeless. His slippers lay on the floor at his bedside like rowing boats beached on the shoal of the bedside rug — of a size with that precious shoe which was all she would ever have of him and his last moments. His dressing gown lay across the foot of the bed like the skin of a departed snake. His being seemed to fill the atmosphere. It was as though he was just behind the door which stood ajar into their bathroom. The very air was full of the dear, departed smell of him.
Suddenly it seemed that the cry on Su-lin’s shoulder had eased nothing whatsoever. Robin turned and went out of that haunted room. Like a robot, only just in control of herself, she walked along the corridor to the top of the stairs. ‘Su-lin!’ she called.
‘Wai?’
‘Go into my bedroom. Get me underwear, a blouse and one of my business suits. I don’t care which. Bring them to me in the guest room, please.’
Ten minutes later she was making excuses to get rid of the sympathetic amah, worried about what she would say if she saw the scald marks on her bottom. Fortunately, Su-lin’s solicitude fell short of dressing her employer and the simple request for a cup of tea was enough to send the young Chinese girl down to the kitchen. This also gave Robin the chance to take Charles Lee’s secret list out of her breast pocket and hide it in the nearest drawer. She was in no condition to commit such important stuff to memory now, and she was unlikely to be able to use much of the information within the foreseeable future in any case. Why on earth would she wish to contact an anti-government underground in any case? Far better to fold it small and slip it in among the soft silk of her spare knickers.
By nine, when Gerry phoned to see whether she wanted a lift into town, Robin was dressed in a white blouse, cut deep at the front with narrow lapels which met just beneath the curve of her breast, black stockings and high heels — she would need all the consequence she could manage today — and a black silk business suit with just the faintest white pinstripe no wider than a thread. This suit was Robin’s most severe. It was cut like a Savile Row business suit and its lines were so severe that only the fact that Robin had lost several pounds in weight since Saturday made it a realistic option at all.
At Gerry’s call, Robin was sitting before Richard’s big old roll-top desk, trying to decide what she would need to look at first. The extra sleep had stoked up her restless energy — and had given her extra motive for employing it fully and quickly. Having your solicitor as closest friend and next-door neighbour had some compensations. Asking how best to handle a dead husband’s estate was an extreme one but a welcome one now as she was so keen to press on. While Gerry drove his old Daimler — the maiden aunt of Richard’s gleaming Jaguar — down towards Xianggang Central, the two of them had a gloves-off, no-holds-barred chat about the Mariner family’s legal and financial standing in Xianggang and the processes they would have to go through if they wanted either to arrange matters and settle here or to sell up and run. Gerry, for all his ‘cheerful old duffer’ image, was nobody’s fool and he knew Richard’s business inside out. He made assumptions which stretched Robin’s understanding to the limit — occasionally past it — so that she wished she had paid more attention to the files of details about Xianggang and the China Queens. But she need not have worried. The legal and financial maze Gerry described remained resolutely closed to her, because entry depended upon the possession of one simple key: Richard’s death certificate.
One of the most frustrating days of Robin’s life began with the realisation that she was likely to remain on the horns of a dilemma for some time to come. Losing a day in drugged sleep made no difference — she could have lost a week! As far as the investigating authorities were concerned, Captain Richard Mariner had perished with the rest of the passengers and crew on the jetcat. Proof of their deaths was now coming slowly to light in the form of wreckage and personal effects such as the captain’s shoe. As far as the civil authorities were concerned, however, the possibility of death, even the strong probability of death, was not the same thing as actual, legally proven death. Without a death certificate, Robin could begin none of the processes she so poignantly wished to get over and done with.
Without a death certificate, Captain Mariner’s demise could not be registered. His will could not be executed. His estate could not be touched. His holdings — business and property — could not be disposed of, even by the co-owner. Without a death certificate, the newspapers were loath to accept notices for the announcement pages, even though their news pages took it for granted he was dead. Without a death certificate there was no possibility of arranging a resting place, even a notional one, or a monument.
By teatime, Robin, trembling on the verge of tears and on the borders of uncontrollable rage, was seated in the office of the Reverend Bamabus Chan in his office in the cathedral on Garden Road. ‘Of course we can mention the captain in our prayers — have done so already with the other poor souls, in fact. But an official memorial service — well, there are legal implications, you see. More tea? Macaroon?’
‘Don’t worry, Reverend. You’re not alone. Just another voice in a swelling chorus, in fact. It’s bloody ridiculous, though, isn’t it? The one person who is most damaged by a man’s death is the one person who has to go around repeatedly proving that he is actually dead in order to get anything done!’
‘You are in an unusual situation, Captain Mariner, after all. What you are doing is normally the province of relatives.’
‘Oh, don’t tell me, I’ve had it all day. Aiyah, little woman, why you doing this unsuitable thing? Why you not ask your sons to do this thing? Why you not send your father, haih?’
Her bitter mimicking of a Cantonese official was telling. But the Reverend Chan was not a suitable audience. He gave a smile which was little more than a grimace. ‘Perhaps you should be with your family even so, Captain. Certainly, if you asked my advice, I would suggest that your place is actually with your children at this time.’
Robin very nearly told him what to do with his unsolicited advice. But then she remembered where she was.
Gerry Stephenson was just thinking about going home — he no longer worked the hours he had when Balfour Stephenson was the hottest team in the Crown Colony — when Robin arrived like spit on a hot plate. She fizzed around his office, sparking with enraged frustration. ‘I came out here to get things done!’ she snarled at him. ‘And now I discover that all I’m doing is keeping every jobsworth in Chinese City Hall employed — and giving them an unrivalled opportunity to tell me I should be at home minding the babies!’
‘Maybe you should think of going home, Robin. I’m sorry, but with the best will in the world it looks as though our hands are tied until the authorities get around to declaring Richard officially dead.’
‘And how long will that take?’
‘I don’t know. It’s Basic Law. Edward Thong is our expert in that.’
‘And where is he?’
‘In court.’
‘Ye gods, Gerry. This is a nightmare. In English law how long would it take?’
‘Depends on circumstances, of course, but six months at least. Could be three years. Maybe five.’
‘Five years! Gerry, that’s for ever!’
‘Some cases it’s seven years. Go home, Robin. Be with the twins for a while. Let us son this out for you.’
‘Like hell will I go home! There’s a fair amount needs sorting out that even you and Edward Thong would find hard to handle, Gerry.’
‘Like what, Robin? What can’t we handle that you can?’
‘Those bastards on the Sulu Queen for a start!’ Robin crossed to Gerry’s desk, leaned forward belligerently, and gave him a cold stare. Had he been younger and more susceptible, the neckline of her blou
se would have given him more than that. ‘If I’m stuck here waiting for the law to catch up with the news, then I might as well use the interim to sort out the China Queens once and for all. If I can’t bring my husband back then I’ll resurrect his company for him instead.’
She slammed out of the office then, leaving a dazed Gerry in no doubt whatsoever that she would bring anything she wanted back from the dead.
Anything, that was, except the man she loved.
10
Robin’s blazing, frustrated anger, combined with the increasing shock that the reality of her situation as Richard’s widow was engendering, made her even more tunnel-visioned than usual. She, like many people who get things done, could be blinkered and insensitive at times. She was driven rather than selfish, single-minded rather than a prima donna. These facts and circumstances were at the root of several things she overlooked within the next few hours. Overlooked or simply did not notice. Taken individually, these small omissions of her usual lively sensitivity would have meant little. Taken together, they built up into a situation which could have had very nasty consequences on all sorts of levels.
Robin stood in the lift of Gerry’s office building at 116 Johnston Road and checked her hair in the little mirror on the back wall. The mirror was high — especially for a Xianggang lift designed for the Oriental physique. It ended halfway down her throat and did not, therefore, reflect her cleavage, nor the fact that her little spat with Gerry had pulled the clothing wider than she would usually have worn it. She did not feel the need to pull the lapels of either suit or blouse together.
As soon as the lift hissed to a halt, she turned and strode out, across the lobby and into Johnston Road. She did not hesitate as the fetid heat of the evening closed around her. She pushed into the thronging mass of humanity oozing along the pavement behind the Wanchai, heading for the nearest MTR entrance. Having driven up with Gerry, she had to rely on the underground. She was only going one stop, however, to her office. There she planned to enlist the aid of Mr John Shaw. She needed an escort at the least if she was going out to Kwai Chung tonight. She knew she could make it easily on the MTR up to Lai King and walk on through to the container terminal. She had in her practical but capacious black leather handbag all the documentation she needed to get to her ship, to get aboard — and to sail the bloody thing to the pool of London if she wanted. But she would be happier on the railway and on the walk, not to mention on the ship itself, if she had an escort she knew she could trust.
Robin strode up to the comer of O’Brien Road and swung left past the Southron Centre. A few more moments of heaving against the throng of people brought her to the MTR entrance and she was all but swept in by the mass of humanity on its way home after a day’s work. Since Chinese rule had returned, the number of workers taking to bicycles had more than doubled — Guangzhou was the bicycle production capital of the south in any case — but the MTR still remained packed and the main roads snarled with traffic. Robin reached into her handbag and fed a ticket machine, then she pushed through the barrier with the rest.
Part of the stature which turned so many Oriental heads as she swept past was due to the height of her heels. Now one of those slim feats of personal architecture became trapped in the slat of a step. One moment Robin was striding purposefully and confidently forward. The next she was tottering helplessly sideways, overlooking the busy abyss of the steep escalator. The danger lasted only a moment. She was rescued by a firm hand on her elbow which steadied her while she pulled the trapped heel free. But there was a small disaster of another kind. The seam at the top of the slit in her skirt had split. What had been a modest little opening designed to facilitate purposeful walking — the only kind she did — and to reveal, perhaps, that soft fold at the back of the knee, became something altogether more.
Robin paid it scant attention. She looked around for her benefactor in order to thank him or her, but no one nearby seemed to have been involved. Her mind in any case was preoccupied, so she sank back into her brown study and rode the moving stairway down. Unaware of the stares of the crowds behind her, especially from those young men of staid communist upbringing who had never before stumbled across the concept of self-supporting stockings, Robin rode the escalator up into Swire House fifteen minutes later. And ten minutes after that, having negotiated the elevated sections of Alexander House and the Prince’s Building and lingered a little in the old Mandarin Hotel — her favourite in all the world — she crossed to the Connaught Centre and into Jardine House. Here she took the elevator to the sixteenth floor and the offices shared by Heritage Mariner and China Queens.
John Shaw, senior shipping clerk of the China Queens Company, was thinking of going home now. Business was slow. Seram Queen was working her way laboriously down the Philippines, slowed by the weather there, and Sulu Queen was still being held in Kwai Chung. There was very little for John Shaw to do at present. Mr Feng his manager had departed to the bosom of his wife and family half an hour earlier. John himself had little to call him home to his tiny flat in the mid-levels behind the old Cat Street market — which was closed now in any case — other than a collection of pornographic magazines and video tapes. His membership of several nightclubs-cum-brothels had lapsed now that the authorities were clamping down on the strip joints. Even the old Mermaid Club had been closed at the end of last week, just like the old market. Aiyah! Dolefully, he reached for a cigarette.
The office door slammed open. John looked up, surprised that anyone should be coming here at this time of night. When he saw who it was, he rose and bowed courteously, with a slight smile on his face. To be in the company of his gweilo woman employer was an endless pleasure to John. She was the stuff of which the most enjoyable of his fantasies were made. He had even gone to the lengths of substituting her head on the bodies of some of his favourite models at home. He had been particularly careful to ensure that her bright golden curls were matched elsewhere on the pictures. He lived in libidinous speculation about the real body that accompanied that head. It was a joy which even the looming prospect of unemployment could not dim. If any lips were to utter the dread words, ‘We are closing the company, here is your severance pay,’ he wanted them to be her lips.
‘Mr Shaw, I am pleased to find you here.’ She gave that little Oriental bow which she thought courteous, and so revealed to his lowered eyes the inner swell of her breasts. John Shaw bobbed another bow and rushed to fetch her a chair, calculating what more he would be able to see as she sat down with him standing solicitously at her shoulder. The warmth of her tone promised as much as this display of her person. Perhaps, now that she was a widow, she might need some energetic consolation. The thought was so uplifting that John was not dashed or insulted when she waved the chair away.
‘No, thank you, Mr Shaw. I do not wish to sit down. I have come here to enlist your help. I wish to go up to Kwai Chung and go aboard Sulu Queen.’
‘Of course, Captain. Anything.’
‘Thank you, Mr Shaw. A phone call first, I think. I want the captain — ’
‘His name is So Chin-leung.’
‘Thank you. I want Captain So and his lading officer ready to talk. I want to know also what the position with regard to outstanding charges is likely to be.’
‘Mr Fuk is likely to be on board. I am sure he will talk to you also. He was happy to talk to Captain Mariner when he was still alive.’
‘Thank you, Mr Shaw. Make the call please. I’ll just go and freshen up.’
Half an hour later, they were seated side by side on the long metal benches which stretch unbroken down each side of the MTR trains. The carriage was packed and claustrophobic. Robin was still miles away, wrapped in her cocoon of hyperactive plans and trying to envisage what she was actually likely to achieve at Kwai Chung. John Shaw was busily countering the stares of the other passengers, turning them aside from their speculative exploration of the parts of his mistress’s body exposed by the unusual state of her barbarian gweilo clothing. John Shaw was
much more wide awake than Robin but he lacked her sensitivity and intelligence. So that, with one of them preoccupied and the other fiercely but narrowly possessive, neither of them realised they were being followed.
Immediately after it pulled out of Admiralty, the train turned left into the north-bound tunnel and plunged under Aberdeen Harbour. The change in tempo somehow shifted Robin’s speculation from the immediate future to her immediate present. Blinking once, unaware that there were tears on her cheeks, she looked around the crowded carriage. The bulk of the passengers were men and most of them were young. They had for the most part that intensity which comes when an addict is forbidden his drug — there was no smoking in the MTR — and they sat tapping their fingers frenetically, John Shaw among them. Most of them were thin, with shocks of blue-black hair even darker than Richard’s had been. Women of various ages sat and stood among them. Teenagers and young women were in a marked minority, but there were some fat matriarchs like Rose Hip dressed in tight black pyjama suits, and a number of stick-like grandmothers, white-haired and fearsome.
Every stratum of society except perhaps the highest was represented here. Businessmen, not so different from Rose’s Mr Hip, sat with bags and briefcases. Beside them sat and stood a range of men falling step by step down the social ladder until on one or two skeletal faces the spectre of destitution was visible, as if they were one of the hungry ghosts roaming the city at this season. One would have thought that, just as the richest did not need to avail themselves of this swift, efficient and cheap mode of transport, the poorest would not be able to afford it. Not so, clearly, for there were several men in this carriage alone, of varying age and aspect, who were clearly among the poorest. The MTR was not the London Underground; this society was far removed from the no-society of Mrs Thatcher; these poor men were not the out and out tramps who could still be found in London. But among the fierce neatness around them they were obvious by their unkempt and ill-shaven appearance. Robin wondered what circumstances had reduced them to this, but her thoughts were distant and her emotions uninvolved. Her cheeks itched and she rubbed them. Her fingers came away wet.