The Harbour

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The Harbour Page 13

by Francesca Brill


  ‘I know he’s perfectly charming and extremely useful to you.’

  ‘He’s one of the best men I’ve ever known.’ Harry couldn’t look at her but he didn’t have to, he knew her eyes were wide with astonishment. She didn’t say anything.

  ‘You’re not crass enough to dismiss an entire nation because of the actions of a few individuals, are you? I don’t suppose you feel personally responsible for the wholesale slayings of the Red Indians? Or do you perhaps secretly hold against me the atrocities of the Boer War?’

  ‘Of course not. That’s not the point.’ Stevie struggled to explain her discomfort around Takeda, who had always been kind and considerate to her. Not being able to articulate her unease she settled on another tease.

  ‘Go on, admit it, you’re just trying to get rid of me. Well, guess what, it’s too late, buster.’

  But he didn’t reflect her lightness. He was firm and intense. ‘Listen to me. This is an island, Stevie. You need to know. We won’t be able to hold them off and there’s no reason to suppose that they’ll behave any differently here. You saw them in Shanghai.’

  She had seen them. But the pitiful swagger of those soldiers who strode through the International Settlement had been no indication of the unique kind of hell that they were wreaking elsewhere in China. She had read the eyewitness reports and would never forget them.

  Stevie took a deep breath. ‘It doesn’t scare me, whatever you say.’

  She held her arms up to the sky. Through her fingers the stars were slipping.

  ‘You’ve been practising running away all your life. Well, here’s your chance to put it to some use.’ He reached up and took one of her hands. ‘Promise me that when I say it’s time, you’ll go.’ She looked at him. ‘It’s not just your life you’re playing with.’

  That was below the belt in every sense, and he knew it. She pushed his hand away and clumsily drew herself up to sit. She had to lean back against the brick wall of the balcony to make room for her unfamiliar bulk. The sound of traffic hummed in the heavy air. The bricks still held the warmth of the day and were soothing on her aching back. There was a kick from inside.

  Harry sounded equable. ‘We’ll never be alone again, you know. What with little Winston or Mabel or whoever.’

  ‘Will you resent it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

  She shifted again, uncomfortable. ‘When we met you were spying on me, weren’t you?’

  Harry said nothing, which was eloquent in itself.

  ‘You can’t tell me what to do.’

  He sighed. ‘And don’t I know it.’

  There was another small silence between them. And then her hand sought his again. ‘All right.’

  ‘All right what?’

  ‘All right, if the time comes I’ll go to Yang’s boat.’ She glanced at him. ‘Happy now?’

  He grinned. She could see his teeth pale in the gloom.

  She shook her head. ‘God, what’s happened to us. We used to have such a good time.’

  Chapter Fourteen

  April 1941

  She could hear a scream but it took her time to realise it was her own.

  It was the inevitability of it that had frightened her as the massive muscular contractions filled her torso and she realised she had no dominion over them. And once the fear had taken control she lost herself. She had changed her mind, she said, bent double as she clung to Lily’s skirt, she didn’t want the baby after all. It was all a terrible mistake. Then the darkness and absoluteness of her body and the primitive battle for life was her universe. There was nothing beyond.

  Harry wasn’t there. It was Lily who paced the room and dampened the cool cloths and massaged the small of her back as she moaned. And it was Lily who called the ambulance. Lily who was pacing the corridor. Lily who had to endure the screams, the urgent swishing of the door. Open. Closed. Open. Closed. The running of the doctor. The shine of metal instruments. The piercing red on white linen bundled in a nurse’s arms.

  ‘Get away from me. I’ll kill you,’ she shouted, but Lily in that corridor was relieved. One thing was for sure, Stevie was alive.

  Opening her eyes after another eternity abandoned to the shadow world behind her eyelids, Stevie was astonished to see, distorted by the reflection in the chrome of the overhead light, what looked like a raw, red animal being peeled out of her. A living blood clot.

  ‘Look! He’s perfect. Your baby son.’

  The slimy, slippery thing was brought to her for a moment and then taken away. Her whole body was shaking now, a quake of shock waves.

  And then surrender again. More invasive meddling. More mopping. More, different pain.

  Later she forgot the world beyond this one. She forgot the visceral urgency of the pains. But she never forgot the dislocation of self. It tore something out of her and remade itself. Like internal scar tissue, hardening and reinventing. A new and, it would prove, invaluable survival tool.

  Meanwhile Harry was in a jeep somewhere on the mainland. The primitive suspension throbbed in his aching bones. Every rut was an ordeal. The binoculars pounded on his chest at every jolt. His feet were too hot in the heavy boots. They had worked hard to make contact with this man, a renegade Communist agitator prepared to give details of their campaign against the Japanese in so-called Free China beyond the border of the British New Territories. Harry hoped he might get some new insight into the state of affairs in the Japanese army.

  In the glimmer of the headlights he could make out a shack on the edge of the paddy field. He was amused momentarily to recognise a version of medieval fortification in its slit windows. He was a ten-year-old boy again at Cardiff Castle. It was raining, of course, but he was enthralled by the grassy mound that led directly to the sheer, windowless and featureless walls of the castle keep. Somewhere else Roger, his brother, was shouting for him. But he was alone under the vast wall, his fingers touching a brick that had been laid centuries before. He was touching history. He was happy.

  ‘Bugger!’ Suddenly blinded by a bright light aimed directly at him, he felt Ken lunge at the brakes. The tyres spun. Glancing at Ken, he saw the sweat shining on his face.

  ‘Is he our man?’

  ‘Can’t tell.’

  ‘Here goes.’ Harry checked for his revolver as the crude metal door of the jeep closed behind him. The ground was heavy with mud. He could feel Ken’s solid presence a few steps away. He muttered for both of their benefits, ‘Every piece of information counts.’

  It was a fundamental tenet of faith. Their lives were at stake for it.

  It was hard to relate the peachy creature peering out of its tight cotton wrapping to the slippery, nightmare thing of hours before. Stevie was aware that she was enjoying the effects of a medical shot of morphine. The sun shone lazily through the white net curtains and the entire ward was bucolic and sunnyside-up. There was a dull throbbing through her body and every muscle ached as if she’d sprinted up a mountain. But nothing mattered.

  The baby was right now in Harry’s awkward hands. The mud from the paddy field swathed the soles of his boots and his skin was rough from lack of sleep. He had a bemused and softened look that she had never seen before. She gazed at him while he peered at the tiny boy.

  ‘He’s awfully small.’

  ‘He’s perfect.’

  Harry nodded. ‘Yes.’ And he gave her a glance of such extreme amazement that she laughed out loud.

  ‘He looks just like you.’ She stroked his face. ‘Only not so well read.’

  ‘Hmm. I think he looks exactly like an angry toad.’ He looked back at the boy. ‘What about Richard, for my father?’

  ‘No. I’ve been thinking and I’ve got it.’ A smile. ‘Paris. Short for parasite.’

  He snorted before offering, ‘Benjamin, for your father.’

  ‘No. Henry. For his father.’

  He looked at her properly now and they smiled hugely at each other. He decided against mentioning to her the hard time he had been give
n by the Matron. She had stood, self-appointed guardian to the new mothers in her care, at the door to the ward and refused him entry. In no uncertain terms she had made clear that as his wife was not one of her patients he had no right to go in. He had been forced to pull rank and mention the name of the colony’s chief medical officer, Dr Clarke-Russell, as his close personal friend. Reluctantly, she had stepped aside. He glanced towards the nurses’ station at the end of the long room. The Matron was glaring at them, even now. It seemed that her own moral standing was being challenged more deeply with every tenderness that passed between him and Stevie. Her very bearing shouted, ‘What’s the world coming to?’

  From the nurses’ station the tinny sound of piped mellow jazz, an instrumental version of ‘Fools Rush In’, was interrupted by a radio announcer.

  ‘President Roosevelt has communicated to Emperor Hirohito of Japan a strong warning in an attempt to avert war in the Far East.’

  His son stirred in his swaddling. The cartoon-length eyelashes fluttered and he opened his eyes. It was the life in them that delivered to Harry the jolt of revelation. This was a person. A small one but a person nonetheless. It was a miracle. He turned back to Stevie, overwhelmed with a new respect for her. Just then, even the stampeding hooves of the four horsemen wouldn’t have budged him. The whole world and everything that mattered was contained between them. The rest could go hang.

  It had been decided that they would set up home in Stevie’s apartment. There were obvious reasons why Harry’s place wouldn’t do, although it was more comfortable with its brand new kitchen, fitted with every convenient appliance money could buy. Sylvia had been bored and unhappy enough to apply the full force of her energies to the renovation of her home. It showed. But Harry had never felt relaxed there and Stevie didn’t want to live in the glare of Sylvia’s interior decorating. The formality of the apartment seemed to reflect the fact that the whole thing had been an exercise in sublimation for Sylvia. And anyway there was something disrespectful in bringing another family into the shell of a failed one.

  In contrast, Stevie’s apartment couldn’t have been less ideal as a place to bring a new baby home. There was limited and unpredictable hot water in the building. The walls were thin and the domestic arrangements and disarrangements of her neighbours were all too audible. The neon of the street signs meant that absolute darkness never fell. And then there were Lily and Victor, each in their own way displaced by the new arrival.

  Lily surprised herself by not being drawn into the role of mother’s help. She thought the baby was fine and she appreciated his dark eyes and vulnerable bald head. But she was not his mother – she was his mother’s friend. Besides, she was busier than ever. The secretarial job she had taken at her uncle’s furniture emporium was occupying more and more of her time. Aware that the war and the Japanese occupation had compromised all business on the mainland, he was doing what all conscientious entrepreneurs would do in the same position – he was taking advantage. By importing goods from the carpenters and upholsterers of the mainland on to the island for next to nothing he was then re-exporting the same chairs, tables and wardrobes back into Free China with an astronomical mark-up for his trouble. They might have been Communists but they still needed chairs for their backsides and tables for their dishes, he argued. Consequently, Lily left the apartment early and often didn’t come back until very late.

  Victor was another matter altogether. He had come with the flat. The previous tenant, a Russian girl, had left him behind when she went back to Shanghai. The relationship she had made with a prominent Chinese government adviser had turned sour over her allowance and she had decamped overnight. The government adviser had given her the baby monkey as a gift on her arrival and she clearly felt no obligation to take him back with her. She had also left behind a short, swingy ocelot jacket which Stevie was sure she must have regretted as soon as she was on the plane and which Stevie had enjoyed inheriting.

  When Jishang had first opened the door, having collected the keys from the rental agency, Victor had been so hungry that he hadn’t even had the energy to attack him as well. Stevie, standing behind Jishang, had pushed him aside and run to where Victor was curled up on the tatty sofa. She had fallen in love with him instantly. He had survived by drinking water from the kitchen tap which conveniently dripped, but he was thin and lethargic and depressed. The flat smelt rank and bitter. The rental agent hadn’t even checked the inventory when the Russian girl had left a fortnight previously, so he had languished forgotten and alone. Stevie took it upon herself to nurse Victor back to health. She had lavished attention and exotic foodstuffs on him. And he had returned the favour by focusing all his simian passion on her.

  The new baby had to be kept away from Victor. A wary eye was necessary at all times to ensure Victor didn’t repeat his initial welcome of sitting on the baby’s face.

  Those first few days were a blur of fear and awe in equal measure. Harry was hardly ever there. He didn’t talk about what he was doing when he was at work but he carried a sense of urgency with him. He was almost always in uniform. The amount of information on the wires and coming from their contacts was increasing every hour. It was all he and Ken could do to read all the reports. Everything pointed to military movements on the mainland. The Japanese army was on alert but it was far from clear what the activity might mean for the island of Hong Kong.

  A fortnight after they had brought the baby home, Harry, aware that his uniform shirt was badly in need of a wash, answered the phone. It was in the hallway on a side table which was missing a leg. It swayed dangerously as he lifted the receiver.

  ‘Yes?’

  He heard Ken’s anxious voice. ‘The department of public health wants to know what the routine should be when –’ he stopped himself ‘– if the Japanese make a move on us.’

  ‘It’s all in the manual.’

  ‘Yes, but now they’re worried that the game might have changed. Somebody’s spreading rumours that the manual is out of date.’

  ‘Of course it’s out of date. It was written last year.’ Harry shifted his weight to his other foot. ‘Look, just tell them that their first and most important job remains containing any panic.’

  There was a yell from the bathroom, followed by the appropriately panicked voice of Stevie.

  ‘Help! Help! Quick!’

  Harry excused himself. ‘Sorry old chap, got to go,’ and failing to contain his own panic, he abandoned the phone and ran to the bathroom.

  Stevie was on her knees by the side of the bath. Tears ran down her face as she sobbed. The tiny naked boy was cradled in her hands, which were hovering over the water.

  She shouted, ‘Take him. Please take him.’

  Harry leaned down and carefully picked him up. Stevie sat back on her heels.

  ‘I can’t do this. What if he falls in the water? What if my hands are too slippery to hold him? What if he doesn’t like it?’

  Harry glanced at the oblivious smile on his son’s face. ‘He’s fine. Look.’

  ‘You don’t understand. I mean, I really can’t do this. Any of it.’ She felt the tightness in her throat like a garotte. ‘I’m not the mother type. It’s not fair on him.’ She was almost wailing now. ‘You should have stayed with Sylvia, she’d know what to do with a baby.’

  The phone was ringing again, echoing along the hallway, shaking the table with every ring. Harry transferred the baby on to his shoulder and, holding him with one hand, he offered the other to Stevie.

  ‘Come on, come with me.’

  Stevie, blurry with unaccustomed tears, let him pull her to her feet.

  In the living room, Harry laid the baby in his basket. Stevie blew her nose.

  ‘I’m sorry. It was all a terrible mistake. I thought I could do everything and now I see that right here there’s something everybody else can do but I can’t. He’s so small, Harry. I look at him and can hardly believe it’s possible for him to breathe through that tiny nose. How can I keep him alive?’ She
was crying again, exhaustion freeing her. ‘I’m useless. I’m sorry. And my mother had four of us.’

  The phone was ringing again, bringing with it a fresh sense of doom. Ignoring the beckoning of his other life, Harry put his arms around Stevie’s sobbing body.

  ‘Four? No time to lose then.’

  And Stevie found she was laughing and that he was kissing her. And that she felt safe again.

  Chapter Fifteen

  December 1941

  It was a Sunday night and the hotel ballroom was full. It felt as though they were dancing on the Titanic. There was an air of defiance and anticipation everywhere in the colony these days, and nowhere more so than in this glittering jewel-box. The closer the Japanese army came, the more defiant people grew. It was as if they had already been serving a sentence for too long and the long-awaited execution might actually bring some relief. At least they would know what their fate was to be. Waiting for the inevitable was torture in itself. The only thing that was still a matter of opinion was whether the defence would last long enough for help to come from elsewhere.

  The official line was that Hong Kong would hold out for weeks. The plan in the event of an invasion was for an evacuation from Kowloon on the mainland to the island, which would then defend itself as a fortress until ships arrived from Singapore to see the Japanese off once and for all. The optimists among them held that Hong Kong would not only be successfully defended but would also become an offensive base for attacks on the Japanese in China. Great faith was put in the line of redoubts which ran east to west across the New Territories about twelve miles south of the border. Minefields had been laid as protection from an aggressive approach by sea and seventy-two pillboxes had been built in a string across the centre of the island. The plate-glass windows of the department stores were criss-crossed with shiny adhesive strips like spiders’ webs to prevent them shattering. The optimists also pointed to the recent arrival of two battalions of Canadian soldiers. Raw and young and untried they might have been, but surely they represented a real intent on the part of Churchill to defend the island and not abandon it to its fate? Yes, they were French-speaking and yes, they had arrived without any extra motor transport but only a very few, Harry among them, knew that these troops had officially not been recommended for operational consideration owing to their extreme youth and lack of experience. The people of Hong Kong were encouraged to believe that the reinforcements constituted a warning from Britain to her enemies.

 

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