FORTUNE COOKIE

by Bryce Courtenay

  I told myself I was a weak shit, that I ought to take the initiative and confront her, ask for a reason and be prepared to end the relationship if I didn’t get one. I told myself I’d let it go on a little longer, postponing the confrontation for a while before I took the bull by the horns. I confess, my heart completely overpowered my willpower. I simply loved her too much.

  There was no one I could talk to. Chairman Meow was besotted with Mercy B. Lord, but if I told her about Thursdays and my suspicions, she’d immediately conclude they were correct and the shit would hit the fan in a big way – or, worse, she’d make it impossible for us to stay together. Chairman Meow on the warpath on behalf of her son and heir didn’t bear thinking about.

  I couldn’t confide any further in Molly, who had her own agenda concerning Mercy B. Lord. Besides, she’d received an official warning to let the matter drop.

  Neither was Dansford a likely shoulder to cry on. He had to work with the Wings, and while I knew there was no love lost between him and the three brothers, I didn’t want to compromise him any further. He’d married Chicken Wing and built up a lifestyle he couldn’t have maintained anywhere outside of Asia. Furthermore, as far as I could speculate, he intended to remain in Singapore permanently, or at least until the grog finally caught up with him.

  Two days after the tremendous publicity around and excitement of the announcement of Mercy B. Lord as the first Singapore Girl, Beatrice Fong, while praying at her office shrine at the end of the day, suffered a massive heart attack. Mohammed, waiting in the Buick outside the office, became concerned when the old woman was late. Beatrice Fong never deviated from her routine. Not daring to enter her office or even call out, he phoned Mercy B. Lord, who had only just arrived home from a Tourist Promotion Board briefing. We immediately took a taxi to the Beatrice Fong Agency, where Mercy B. Lord hesitated in the foyer. ‘Oh, Simon, I know it’s stupid, but I feel …’

  ‘Don’t worry, darling,’ I said. ‘Most people are troubled by the sight of the dead. If that’s what’s happened, well, I’ll be here with you.’ Chairman Meow had insisted that once I was an adult I understand the family funeral business, and so my sisters and I were exposed to the deceased on several occasions. I put my arm round Mercy B. Lord’s shoulder and we went in together.

  The old crone lay dead on the carpet in front of the shrine, the incense she’d lit before the statue of Tsai Shen Yeh, the god of wealth, still burning alongside a large luscious peach she would have been offering as a sacrifice. Even in death, she had piercing black eyes, undimmed by age. I stooped and closed them. Then I waited a moment while Mercy B. Lord paid her silent respects.

  Outside, she sent Mohammed to fetch Beatrice Fong’s physician, Dr Foy, a man in his early eighties who had attended her for half a century. Although she distrusted the Chinese banks, the old woman was ambivalent about medical matters and had chosen a young doctor who practised both Chinese and Western medicine. They’d grown old together.

  While we waited for the old man to arrive, we sat in the foyer, where Mercy B. Lord explained that Beatrice Fong had long since made provisions and arrangements for her funeral and had charged her with carrying out the arrangements.

  Mercy B. Lord hadn’t reacted in any way to the old crone’s death and this seemed surprising to me. She wasn’t an unemotional person and had reason to be grateful to Beatrice Fong.

  ‘Darling, are you okay?’ I asked carefully.

  She nodded. ‘It wasn’t as bad as it could have been, seeing her like that. In fact, it was the first time I didn’t feel slightly apprehensive in her presence. She started briefing me on her death five years ago. Every Monday morning she’d call me in to her office. Tonight is almost an anticlimax. I’m so completely brainwashed I daren’t mourn her until I’ve done my job, followed her wishes to the letter. Right now I don’t know what to think. She was an enormously irascible old lady; it wasn’t always easy.’ She paused. ‘Of course, she may have changed her previous arrangements, but I’m not sure she’d have had time.’

  ‘Why would she do that?’ I asked.

  Mercy B. Lord was silent, her eyes averted. ‘Simon, when I resigned and told her I was going to be the Singapore Girl, we had a dreadful row. If she’d survived, you can be sure she’d have blamed her heart attack on me. We’d already had a row when I told her I wanted to attend the dinner in Hong Kong and to accept the offer to be the Singapore Girl. Then we had another about my moving in with you. The first row was the day after we had dinner at the Ritz.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me, darling?’

  Mercy B. Lord shrugged. ‘You had enough on your mind. Besides, it was what I had expected. The old lady has always thought she owned me, and when I came the very first time to be with you, she was furious and barely spoke to me, sending me messages and directions through the switch. That’s how Beehive Freda became her new office servant and intimate.’

  ‘But she didn’t fire you?’

  Mercy B. Lord looked surprised. ‘No, she couldn’t do that.’

  I knew not to question her further, other than to say, ‘And you didn’t …’

  ‘Resign?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And when you returned? That first time?’

  Mercy B. Lord smiled. ‘As the prodigal daughter, it wasn’t easy. She isolated me. I didn’t know about your letters and flowers. At the orphanage, when we did something wrong the nuns isolated us; we were “sent to Coventry”, to use their expression. Beatrice sent me to the Chinese equivalent. But first she told me that if I ever saw you again, she would see to it that a great harm came to you.’

  ‘Is that why you warned me? You do know Ronnie warned me just after I arrived? He said my arse wouldn’t bounce until I landed beyond the Singapore border if I had anything to do with you.’

  ‘Oh, Simon, all those months I thought you hated me!’

  I grabbed her and held her tight. ‘Darling Mercy B. Lord, I love you! I was devastated. I told you that before, how I’d painted your portrait to convince myself I hadn’t lost you completely. And then, when the weeks and months passed and it seemed you were never coming back, and Ronnie told me that you wanted nothing further to do with me, I thought that sending the painting away, entering it in a competition I could never hope to win, would allow me to finally say goodbye to you. It was a final act, like a funeral. You know, after the burial, while you may never be the same again, eventually you have to recover and get on with your life. When the painting won and I sent you the letter of apology and it came back mutilated with the word ‘Bastard’, and Louie da Fly told me what had transpired, I realised that it wasn’t you but Beatrice who had intercepted all my flowers and letters. I decided that if I could just reach you, there might still be a tiny chance of … well, reconciliation. So I used the invitation, in the hope I might get it to you personally. I told myself that if you rejected me yourself, I’d know you didn’t love me and that there was no further hope. Molly Ong had phoned me with her idea of the Singapore Girl and I realised that it was a great opportunity but one that you might just reject because of our past. I didn’t want that to happen, to deny you the opportunity because of what had gone on between us. Then when I didn’t or couldn’t give Karlene Stein your name and suddenly they were saying you didn’t exist …’ I stopped. ‘Well, you know the rest.’ Like survivors from a disaster, we told and retold the story of our ordeal to reassure ourselves that we were, at last, safe.

  ‘Oh, Simon, because of the reason for our parting, I told myself I wasn’t allowed to love you. That it wouldn’t work. That I must stop. But I couldn’t. It wouldn’t go away. It just wouldn’t. I’d never been in love before. I’d never even been loved. I didn’t know what to expect, how to behave. All I knew was the orphanage, and then Beatrice, who took me out at fifteen and gave me a home. That was seven years ago. I think she honestly believed she owned me.’

  ‘You lived with her?’

  ‘Yes.’

 
‘Oh, I see. She sort of adopted you? Became your surrogate parent … er, grandparent?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t quite like that. As I said, I think she honestly believed she owned me. I was her personal property. I was given a room in her mansion, at the back. Not in the servants quarters, although I always used the back entrance. But she didn’t say I had to, Simon,’ she added quickly, ‘use the back entrance, I mean; I just did, and she never invited me to use the front. After the girls’ dormitory in the orphanage, having a room all to myself was an unbelievable luxury, almost as good as being loved.’

  ‘And she never showed you any affection?’

  Mercy B. Lord looked surprised. ‘I keep forgetting you never met her. Beatrice Fong wasn’t capable of affection, Simon. It just wasn’t something she felt. She loved money, not people.’ Mercy B. Lord pointed to the door of the dead woman’s office. ‘She died worshipping it. Instead of affection, she trained me in money matters. It’s not something I talk about, but I can read a balance sheet upside down, prepare a profit and loss sheet and an investment brief on my ear. It was the closest she got to showing me she cared, teaching me how to do my financial homework, how to handle numbers, calculate the value of an investment in terms of return. She believed people existed to be used. According to her, there are only two kinds of people: those who make money and those who labour to make it for them.’

  ‘But, having trained you, she never allowed you the capital to make any money of your own?’

  ‘No, she didn’t believe in handouts. If I couldn’t make it starting from scratch, she wasn’t interested. The training came first – that was her gift to me – the nearest she came to affection. She was giving me the key. I had to find the lock that opened the door to creating wealth myself. By falling in love with you I betrayed her. I had made the wrong choice – love instead of money. You had, in effect, destroyed her creation before she was ready to let me go, and she wasn’t a forgiving woman. She believed her time had been wasted. The Singapore Girl was the final straw. I was to become a glad-handing beauty queen. She thought you had completely corrupted me, or that’s what Sidney Wing told her, backed up by his vile brother Johnny. They told her it was a conspiracy between you and Molly Ong.’

  ‘Yeah, that figures. What about Sidney? Was he a part of your apprenticeship? He was pretty bloody proprietorial about you.’

  ‘If any of them, it was Johnny who had most to do with me. But it was strictly business. I was a connection in a business relationship. Beatrice never got close enough to anyone for sentiment to enter into a relationship. But if she trusted any of the Wing brothers, it was Johnny. Having said that, she was a woman wholly and completely concerned with money. Everyone had a specific part to play. She had no morals, no scruples. “Money doesn’t have a conscience,” she once told me. It seems they’ve been business partners a long time. “Sidney the numbers man (he always had to be watched), Johnny the fixer, Ronnie the girlie man,” was how she’d occasionally refer to them. It certainly wasn’t affection that held them. No, correction, she obviously had a soft spot for Johnny Wing. But it started long before I came on the scene, so I don’t know how it all came about.’

  ‘And you never thought, in all that time, of leaving the job or her home? I mean, you’re clever, capable, well trained and intelligent. Getting another job wouldn’t have been hard. For instance, I’d have killed to have someone like you as an account executive in the agency, and you have already proved you would make a wonderful market researcher. You just told me you’re well trained in financial matters, in business. Any of these skills would have given you a career and earned you more than your present salary.’

  ‘Simon, a single Chinese girl without family, without guanxi, doesn’t live alone, unless she’s a whore. Now, under the PAP government, it’s a little easier to be a single woman, but not before. Besides, when it began I was fifteen, an orphan, accustomed to rigid unbending discipline.’ She shrugged. ‘If Beatrice threw me out, I had nowhere to go except back to the orphanage. They would have let me go at sixteen anyway. She didn’t beat me, she gave me a small room at the back of her mansion, the food from her kitchen was good and plentiful, and she clothed me until I earned enough to buy my own clothes. I was being trained at her expense and I loved learning. If she wasn’t kind or loving, well, I didn’t expect her to be.’ She looked directly at me. ‘There is precious little kindness and love in a Catholic orphanage. Irish nuns, ours, anyway, usually came from impoverished slum families with drunken fathers and abused mothers worn out from the effects of poverty and childbirth. There were always too many mouths to feed, and their excess daughters, those who couldn’t catch a man by sixteen, were given to the church to become brides of Christ, placed in a convent to be trained in the basics and sent to the ends of the earth, never to see their families again. Many of them are harsh, bitter, ignorant women who have no concept of being loved or of loving, except for the love you are told you’re constantly receiving but never actually feel coming from Mary, the holy mother of God. As a child I thought love was learning your catechism off by heart.’

  I’d never heard Mercy B. Lord talk like this before. ‘But … but, darling, what about Sister Charity? You know, finding you on the doorstep, all that tear-jerking stuff on Karlene’s People, the TV, the cheque you gave her? I mean … was that all pretend?’

  Mercy B. Lord’s eyes welled with tears. ‘Sister Charity is no different. It’s not their fault. They don’t know any better and they learn to show the outside world an entirely different face. It’s part of their training, the compassionate and caring front that some nuns adopt as a secular mask. Of course it can’t be true of all nuns, but my lot were poor women from the slums of Ireland who often lacked even a rudimentary education and who were sent to alien places like Singapore because they couldn’t or wouldn’t complain. They had to be tough to survive and I assure you they were. Oh, Simon, I wasn’t being a hypocrite. What you did was the loveliest thing anyone has ever done for me. You paid off my obligation, you set me free. How can I ever repay you for that?’

  ‘Darling, you already have. You defied the old woman and we’re together. She’s dead now and can’t harm you. By the way, who is going to tell the Wing brothers?’

  ‘I’ll send Mohammed around after he takes the doctor home. I’ll give him a note. He can go there from the doctor’s house. Johnny lives in the same area. After the doctor’s issued a death certificate, we’ll call an ambulance to take Beatrice home.’

  ‘You don’t think you should call Sidney now?’

  ‘No, Simon, this is women’s business. I’ll get the doctor to lay her out and then I’ll take her home and prepare her properly, in a dignified manner. She’s Chinese and “face” still counts. She must look suitably dignified when the priests and funeral people come to cleanse her body and dress her and ready her for the rituals to come. All I can do tonight is prepare the front door for them to enter in the morning. The house is full of images of the various gods as well as several mirrors. I must cover the statues and have the servants remove the mirrors before anyone arrives.’

  ‘Why the mirrors?’

  ‘If you see a reflection of the coffin or the deceased in a mirror, it means you will have a death in the family. The ambulance men won’t take her into the house unless the mirrors are removed beforehand. I must also hang a white cloth over the front doorway, with a gong to the right, and white lanterns around the outside of the house.’

  I nodded my head towards the closed door behind which Beatrice Fong lay dead. ‘I was expecting to have to comfort you but you haven’t shed a single tear. How do you feel?’

  Mercy B. Lord looked directly at me. ‘It is a sign of respect, Simon. I am a Christian. If I followed Chinese practices I would, as a matter of ritual, have started to wail at the top of my lungs when I discovered her. But she wouldn’t expect it from me. We’ve discussed it. She wants everything done by the experts, priests and professional funeral organisers and, because she has no fam
ily, by professional mourners. In Chinese funerals there are strict rituals; every step for the mourners and the participants is preordained. She has left her instructions and has forbidden me to mourn for her. I was not brought up in any of the Chinese faiths – I’m not a Taoist or a Buddhist – and she doesn’t want anything to go wrong, to intrude.’

  ‘Personal emotion is an intrusion?’ I asked, trying to keep the surprise out of my voice.

  ‘In her case, yes, very much so. She wanted to think that she had made me in her own image. She would often say, “Child, I would not mourn publicly at your funeral and I do not wish you to do so at mine. Cry for a lost business opportunity, nothing else.” If I am to obey her instructions, then all I can do is prepare her house for the morning when the priest and organisers arrive, then place a notice in all the Chinese newspapers and the Straits Times. That’s my job done. For the rest I must follow her instructions. These are in a vault in the main branch of Barclays Bank and I will retrieve them in the morning. She would often repeat, “You will see that all is done correctly, but you must not become involved.” ’

  The old Chinese doctor arrived, a small elderly man with his grey hair parted in the middle and plastered down with Brilliantine. He was dressed in an old-fashioned black linen suit, complete with waistcoat and looped watch chain, white shirt with starched detachable collar and black tie. His shoes were twenties-style, pointy and high-gloss black, and he appeared somewhat myopic in his gold-rimmed glasses. He bowed deeply and offered his felicitations, adding in Cantonese, ‘She has waited a very long time before going to her ancestors, a long life worthy of respect. They have waited impatiently to welcome her. She will make a venerable ancestor. It is most appropriate.’