by Ann Bridge
Chapter Twenty-two
IT was some time before Amber could get over M. Bruno’s party. The certainty which had come to her there, that Rupert had once been in love with Mrs. Leicester, was alone enough to keep it in the foreground of her thoughts. In theory of course she had always recognised that Rupert must have loved other people, but to be brought face to face with the fact, and the actual object of his late affection, caused her a distress which surprised her. She watched Lydia now when they met with a painful intensity, as if there must still be about her some visible trace of Rupert’s love. She read the poems again, looking for her there; ashamed of so pitiful a curiosity, she could not refrain from dwelling on Mrs. Leicester in conversation, and piecing the results together. Rupert had known her in London, before he went to China—the “pale room” might be hers; her lapses into vagueness fully justified “but half the time you are not there at all.” Though then he didn’t know about Chinese villages, reflected Amber, innocently unaware that dates mean little to poets; and that woman he had called a shifting tease—surely this was not the Mrs. Leicester she knew? But she had shifted; she had changed to loving Bruno, incredible as this seemed to the girl. And had Rupert suffered then as she suffered over Arthur? And was he, too, feeling “safety first” about anyone else? Was that why he was so changeable, said so many things which might mean all she hoped and might, again, mean nothing but general amiability? Ignorant and innocent as she was, the theory, sharpened by this new distress, took on an edge which cut pretty near the truth.
Besides this, she was profoundly disconcerted to find that she and Rupert should have attracted attention. Waking early, she would lie staring into the glacial darkness of her bedroom—Uncle Bill, like the Chinese, did not believe in overheated houses in winter—tormented by those flashes of preternaturally clear and remorseless vision which assail the undefended mind at 5 A.M.—thinking, that to be affiché with her like that might well frighten and irritate Rupert, and drive him away. She found it hard to reply with easy unconcern when the ladies of Peking said to her—“You see a good deal of Mr. Benenden, don’t you?” Often they said she saw a good deal of Mr. Hawtrey, it was true; but though she minded that less, she disliked it, as she disliked all the misplaced archness of the T’ai-t’ais. No one in Gloucestershire had ever commented on her and Arthur to her face like that.
She was really rather glad when chance gave her an occasion to speak of it all to Joanna. She had been lunching with the Grant-Howards; Mrs. Schroff made some joke to her about Hawtrey in Joanna’s hearing, and even her dear Touchy, when she asked some small favour of him just as he was leaving, said—“Why not ask Joe? Isn’t he your devoted slave? I’m sure he can’t refuse you anything.”
“Damn the man!” exclaimed Amber when the door shut behind him, and she was left alone with her hostess. “Joanna! You heard Touchy, and you heard that inane Mrs. Schroff. People talk like that all the time here—they never did at home! Does it matter? Is it my fault, or are they being silly fools?”
“The standard of gossip is higher in Peking, and the standard of”—she nearly said “decency,” but changed it to “manners”—“lower, than in any other place on earth, I should say,” replied Joanna, with unwonted energy. She realised a number of things that Amber had not said—how much the girl wanted a lead, how very little use Aunt Bessie would be in such matters. And her resentment about Peking manners was quite unfeigned. She had been there long enough to understand the causes of that curious intellectual and social disintegration which affects so many white women in China. With servants so abundant and so excellent, even on the narrowest income, as to make housekeeping a pleasurable trifle, with no duties to the poor or to dependants, with few books, and in many cases with no children to occupy them, they are left with vast tracts of leisure, which they fill with bridge, flirtations and rather malicious gossip.
“You can write off four-fifths of what they say,” she said. “But actually, though it’s natural that you are thrown together a good deal with those two, I have thought lately that you were seeing rather a lot of George Hawtrey, myself.”
Once again the secret had to be sacrificed. “Well, you see, Joe and I have got a joint stable,” Amber said. “That’s why.”
Joanna’s eyebrows said “The devil you have!” but her mouth merely observed “Oh, have you? What fun!”—which made it all the more startling when the next moment she asked, “Do they propose to you much?”
The colour flew into Amber’s face, even while she could not restrain a laugh. “Well—yes and no,” she said, rather hesitatingly; “not much,” she ended, more firmly.
“Well—” Joanna reviewed the girl’s colour, her laughter and her hesitation, and decided that it was the wrong one, from Amber’s point of view, who had proposed; whichever that might be! “Yes, I think you’ll have to publish your stable,” she said with decision. “It won’t stop these women talking—nothing will do that, but it will give you a good answer about Joe. Do the Harrisons know?”
“Oh yes—I had to tell them, because Auntie B. fussed,” said Amber.
“One mark to Auntie B.!” said Joanna amiably. “I shouldn’t worry about it if I were you,” she pronounced finally. “Young men have no reputations, and there’s no question of your being silly enough to risk yours. Riding is intensely respectable, thank goodness! But come to me if there’s ever anything you want to ask, won’t you? Now I must go and ride.”
Amber left the Legation a good deal comforted, and set off in her ricksha for an afternoon’s Christmas shopping. She was having some crystal trees made for the Grant-Howards, at Tai’s in Morrison Street, and the alabaster pots for them had to be chosen. This done, she went on to the bookshop, housed among the coiffeurs’ establishments on the ground floor of the Peking Hotel, to choose a novel for Uncle Bill. Which led to another knotty problem. What about Joe and Rupert? It would be awful, if they were to give her presents, to have none for them; on the other hand it would be even more awful to butt in with presents to them if they had not thought of giving her any. Poor Amber—these Victorian scruples complicated life for her greatly. In the end she bought Toi et Moi, which she wanted badly for herself, to give to Rupert at a pinch, and a new horsey book on the Forward Seat, to which the same applied, as an emergency gift for Joe. Dickie was having a party on Christmas afternoon, and if her presents were needed, she could take them then, she reflected, as she sat huddled in a ricksha, driving up the Hata-mên to the French Confiserie to get Dickie’s chocolates, and some red caviare for Aunt Bessie’s dinner that night. The Confiserie was crowded—there was paper holly on the counter, and a general Christmassy feeling about the place; Amber felt a little thrill, half home-sickness, half pure happy excitement, as she stood waiting to be served. One has to be much more than twenty-two to lose that peculiar thrill of expectation, the wonder as to just how affection will manifest itself tangibly in gifts. Surely he would give her one? And Joe, too?
Amber need not have worried—they did. Her place at the breakfast-table on Christmas morning was piled with packages and flowers. Peking society goes rather a burst over Christmas; pot-plants and chocolates are cheap and non-committal, and Amber was much more popular than she knew. “But how extraordinary!” she kept on saying, as she turned up the cards of her various acquaintances, like Major La Touche, Mulholland, Mimi de Bulle, M. Leopardi, the Rothsteins and Countess Anna, on rose-trees in pots, on baskets of glacé fruit, on bottles of French perfume. But when she had carried her presents off to her sitting-room, flitting to and fro, singing, through the bright cold courtyards, it was over three in particular that she at last sat smiling by the stove. A T’ang horse from Joe, which Uncle Bill said was a real beauty, a collector’s piece; Pirandello’s plays in translation, from Nugent Grant-Howard; and Rupert’s present, a bird in black crystal on a little carved wooden stand—a lovely piece of craftsmanship, with that indefinable amused sophistication about it which is so intensely Chinese. She studied the card which came with
it, reading it over and over again—“To wish you all the luck in the world, in real things. From R. B. B.” Of course, the bird was a crow—he was reminding her of that evening at the gate of the Forbidden City after she had won the Ladies’ Hunt, and their argument there; he was having a dig at her love of horses. How like him! But was that really all? “All the luck in the world”—it was a warm, a comprehensive wish, she thought, reading it once more—seeking, the gift received, to draw the richest possible treasure of assurance from the manner of its sending, as older people have been known to do.
She took her two books off to Dickie’s party that afternoon. Dickie had insisted on a battle as his celebration of the season of peace and good-will, and the entire personnel of the Legation, male and female, marshalled themselves in two armies, whose objectives were to defend a hundred green flags in the “forpress,” and to capture a hundred red flags from the Chancery Porch, the G.H.Q,. of the opposing force, nearly a quarter of a mile away—and vice versa. For over an hour the grown-ups reverted to childhood; the compound rang with shouts and cries, and with startling reports from a huge supply of Chinese crackers, imported by La Touche, and let off by privates at intervals; prodigies of valour and cunning were performed by everyone. The Bishop, hotly pursued by the Military Attaché, eluded him by leaping into a car on the Square and out again by the other door; Sir James executed a brilliant coup by driving up to the Chancery porch in his own car, snaffling a dozen flags, and driving off with them to the Leroys’, whence, concealed in an umbrella, he took them by way of the shrubbery and the septic tank to Dickie’s stronghold. Drawn by the noise, a crowd of curious Chinese gathered in the Jade Canal Road, in the hope that another raid like that on the Soviet Embassy might be taking place in the Ying-kuo-Fu—they melted away, regretfully, when the k’ai-mên-ti informed them that the foreign devils were merely having a difference-not-big strike-shoot (the Chinese version of a sham fight). Amber’s military exploits were negligible—she was generally, Joanna noticed, being chased by either Joe or Rupert, or both, so hotly as to make her a useless combatant. But she enjoyed herself prodigiously. Rupert was in a heavenly temper, and when she was periodically captured, and marched off to imprisonment at the Chancery headquarters, there were intervals of conversation in which to tell him how much she liked his crystal bird and—rather ostentatiously—to praise Joe’s T’ang horse.
That night there was a small dance at the Legation, after Sir James’s dinner to his staff. “Who in the world put you on to Geraldy?” Rupert asked Amber, when he had thanked her for his present.
“Oh, you hadn’t got it already?”
“No no—but I’d seen it. It’s damned good—I’m frightfully pleased to have it. But how did you know of it?”
“Why shouldn’t I know of it?”
“Because it’s not exactly a livre de chevet forjeunes filies” said Rupert.
“Nugent lent it me. I think you’re being rather Victorian,” said Amber, a little affronted.
“Come on and dance and don’t be silly!” said Rupert, putting his arm round her as the music started again. “You know perfectly well that if there is an unshorn Victorian lamb in Peking it’s you, you blessed child.”
This, as a matter of fact, was perfectly true—and truer then than it had been six weeks before. The shock of the Bruno episode had driven the girl back on to the old conventional preoccupations from which contact with Rupert had begun to free her, and had roused into activity a latent reaction against the moral carelessness about her. These influences, too, blew like an east wind on the confidence which Nugent had tried to create, and revived her natural uncertainty. But that night, dancing and arguing with Rupert, she could even forget Lydia Leicester, and she finally went to bed in that very rare state of human blessedness, of thinking that it was hardly possible to be happier than she had been all day.
In that she was wrong. There was a night, a few weeks later, when she lay down in such a blinding extremity of rapture that for hours she could not sleep. At the Great Cold, that year, snow fell in unusual abundance. It fell on a Friday, and riding was impossible over the week-end; on the Saturday morning Rupert sent a chit round to the Hei Lung Hu-t’ung to ask Amber if she would care to go for a walk on the Wall that afternoon, to see the city under snow. Without waiting to write a note, she scrawled a rapid “Yes, rather—2 o’clock,” against her name in his well-known green chit-book.
The unfamiliar white streets, stained brown with traffic in the centre, the delicious unwonted dampness in the air, filled her with physical pleasure as she rode in a ricksha to the Legation, where she found Rupert waiting at the entrance. They drove on to the Watergate, and struggled up the ramp on to the Wall. Tracks were visible—someone had been there before them, and as they walked along the huge flagged top, broad enough for two lorries to drive abreast, they presently came on Dickie and Burbidge, engaged in a smart snow-balling encounter with the two or three Marines who guard the American wireless station and the barbed-wire barrier which closes the European section of the Wall at the end nearest the Ch’ien-mên. In theory Europeans are not supposed to pass this barrier; in practice the more enterprising do—Rupert and Amber had already taken several strolls beyond it, along the little paths, used by goats and goat-herds, which wind between the growth of thorny vegetation that has sprung up between the flagstones, turning the neglected summit of the great rampart into a wild pasturage, where hoopoes flit in spring, and where in autumn a crop of “Peking dates,” the stony fruit of a wild thornbush, is gathered, to be crystallised by the sweetmeat-sellers, stuck on wands, and sold to the urchins of the city. After a brisk exchange of snowballs with Dickie, Rupert, to Amber’s great relief, withstood the child’s entreaties to be taken with them, and they squeezed through the barrier and set off by themselves. They passed round under the great crimson pillars of the gate-tower of the Ch’ien-mên and ploughed along the narrow path—the stems of the bushes stood up, brown and bare, above the dazzling surface, with here and there a withered fruit clinging to them, or a frayed brown leaf whipping in the wind; the crenellated parapet, roofed with snow, cut a white mediaeval pattern against the blue of the sky. Amber wanted perpetually to stop and look through the embrasures at the city below, where the roofs, emphasised by their white surfaces and the shadows under their deep eaves, took on a new importance of shape, their strange curves standing out sharply among the faint pencillings of the bare trees.
“They look like masses of sabots!” she said on one of these occasions, gazing down at them.
“What extraordinary things you think of!” Rupert said.
“Well, but don’t they?” she persisted, turning her face, vivid with cold and exercise, back to him.
“Of course they do—only no one but you would have thought of it,” he answered, with one of his sudden brilliant smiles. “Come on, piccclina—I want to get to the corner, and we’ve none too much daylight in hand.”
Happy, stirred by his smile, his use of the pet name, enjoying this common enterprise, Amber pushed on behind him. Out beyond the Shun-chih-mên it was all new to her. They were approaching the south-west corner of the Wall; in the great angle below it, the city thins out vaguely into scattered houses and temples among open stretches of ground, with ponds and thickets—a strange sight within the walls of a town. Amber would have liked to linger and look, but Rupert was talking, and she would not have interrupted him for anything. They had got on to poetry again, by way of a discussion on the peculiar excitement caused by the sight of snow, and Rupert was maintaining that excitement was essential to poetry. “It just depends on whether you are capable of being really moved and excited by the visible world, whether you can write nature-poetry or not. Most people can’t—places only move them in connection with some other emotion; whereas anyone can get excited about a person,” he said, talking with the peculiar brusque roughness which Amber had come to connect with his feelings being roused for any reason. “That’s why good nature-poetry is so rare.”
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“But you get excited about places,” Amber said.
“Yes I do; but I get a damned sight more churned up about people—unluckily!” Rupert answered, as if moved by some recollection. “I wish I knew why one does. My God, what an amount of blood and sweat one puts into it! For months on end you can’t digest what you eat, you can’t do your work properly, you can’t read a book—you’re only really alive for the hour or two in the week when you see her, the rest of the time you’re suspended in a sort of blind craving, like a desert thirst. And you turn your life upside-down, chuck up all sorts of good things, simply to be near her—and then find that it’s all a plant, or that she’s changed her mind and wants someone else!” He took off his hat and rumpled his hair; he spoke with extraordinary bitterness. “And when you’ve died a thousand deaths from misery, and are sane again, you look back and see that you acted like a complete maniac, literally like a case of insanity. God, what a waste of energy it all is!”