Enchanted Evening

by M. M. Kaye

  The remainder of the summer was a repetition of the previous one: sailing picnics and parties with young naval officers off the ships that took it in turns to put in at Pei-tai-ho. There were expeditions to the temples in the Lotus Hills and the Great Wall and Chin-wang-tao, lazy afternoons under the shade of our pang on the sands of the small bay where the diving platform was anchored; and lunches and tea parties with the Grand-dadski and a variety of aunts, uncles and cousins at the Bryson house overlooking the bay.

  I made several friends and collected one serious admirer among the Navy men. Roger was, as far as I remember, Number Two of a destroyer, and one of the nicest of men, the kind that parents take to on sight. Mine were no exception. Like Tacklow, he was a ‘quiet’ man, and also very much like him both in height and looks. I can’t think why I did not fall in love with him, for if there is any truth in the theory that girls who dote on their fathers invariably choose husbands who are exactly like them, I ought to have done. Particularly as he was also a dear. Perhaps it was because my mind still held a picture of a tall, ugly-attractive man who laughed a lot and had come to my rescue at one of the most miserably embarrassing moments of my school years, and turned it into a triumph.1

  The fact, as I learned later, that my unknown knight-errant was a famous actor, Sir Gerald du Maurier, added considerable glamour to the memory. Dear Roger, though a good-looking man, was only an inch or two taller than I was, and in no way spectacular. On the other hand, he was a Navy man, and from an early age I had thought highly of the Navy.

  The uniform had a lot to do with it, and the fact that during my school years my reading had included several books of short stories by a retired naval officer who called himself ‘Taffrail’. I used to think how romantic it would be married to a Navy man and go sailing all over the world to strange and glamorous ports, where one would never stay long enough to get bored. If I couldn’t marry someone in one of the Indian Services – and Tacklow, who foresaw the Second World War very clearly, was always warning me that the Indian Empire would not survive it, so that like it or lump it I would have to leave that dearly loved country some day in the not too distant future – my second choice would be a husband in the Navy.

  I’m afraid it was that uniform, and the glamour of Taffrail’s stories, that attracted me to Roger more than anything about the man himself. But because of him, I had a wonderful summer in Pei-tai-ho.

  I’m afraid Tacklow did not. He had wanted too much to come back to this little town where he had spent his honeymoon and been happier than he could ever have imagined. But I think it must be almost impossible to recreate something like that over thirty years later. And though he was still deeply in love with Mother, and always would be, I think she was a good deal less so with him, and was finding it difficult to behave as though she was still a deliriously happy nineteen-year-old bride on honeymoon.

  They hadn’t quarrelled, or at least I don’t think so. But there was a faint trace of impatience in Mother’s manner towards him, and Tacklow had lost the high spirits of the previous summer and seemed unnaturally subdued. He still spent a lot of time walking alone along the wet sands when the tide was going out, selecting shells of the right size and shape to add to his collection, while Mother would sit chatting with her brothers and sisters and the Dadski on the verandah of the Bryson house, and Bets and I would be partying with the Navy or discussing life in general with Bobbie Aldington and Evelyn Young in our secret sandpit a little way behind the beach houses.

  * * *

  I don’t think Tacklow minded the lack of entertainment; he had never minded solitude. But I think he had hoped to have Mother more to himself when he planned this repeat performance of his idyllic honeymoon and, though it had worked the previous summer, it wasn’t going to work again. Mother preferred, or pretended to prefer, the company of her kith and kin and endless Bryson-family gossiping (which must have bored him rigid – it certainly bored Bets and me); and the news, which was largely rumour, and unreliable, worried him. He was not having a happy summer.

  The only other thing I remember about that second summer in Pei-tai-ho is that towards the end of it we had a sudden plague of ladybirds that flew in by the million from somewhere on the far side of the Gulf of Liao-tung in the direction of Port Arthur. It was disconcerting to wake up one morning and find the waves depositing layer after layer of scarlet, black-spotted bodies, the majority of them dead, in long red lines at the sea’s edge. I like ladybirds, and I encourage them on to my roses. But I admit I didn’t like to find them crawling all over me by the hundreds.

  We left Pei-tai-ho earlier, I think, than we had meant to. Peking was still uncomfortably warm, but the pangs had come down from over the courtyards, since by now it was not hot enough for us to need them.

  * * *

  Tacklow had a habit of singing to himself: generally in the bath and usually a song from Gilbert and Sullivan. So I was not surprised when returning from some expedition or other one evening I found my darling parent strolling around the Reception Courtyard in the dusk, singing to himself. It was ‘Ol’ Man River’, a song from Show Boat, and, pausing to listen in the shadow of the gate between the courtyards, I heard him repeat two of the lines almost under his breath, almost as if he were talking to himself. They were the lines about ‘getting weary and sick of trying’ and being ‘tired of living but scared of dying’.

  There was something personal about that repetition, and the way in which he had sung it, that disturbed me, and I ran down the steps into the courtyard and said, ‘You sound very gloomy tonight, Tacklow darling! Couldn’t we have something a bit more cheerful?’ I had expected him to laugh, but he looked at me for at least half a minute – which is a very long time if you count it off to yourself in seconds – and then said without smiling, ‘I don’t feel cheerful. And anyway, it’s true.’ I didn’t ask what was true, because I didn’t dare. I was suddenly so scared that I couldn’t say anything at all, and he turned and walked away into the house where the Number-One-Boy was switching on the lights.

  We had guests to dinner that night and I remember that Tacklow seemed to be in excellent spirits and Mother was as cheerful as ever. Nothing wrong there, I thought; and when, the next day, Tacklow was his usual self I persuaded myself that he had merely been pulling my leg or else I had misunderstood him. I think now that that incident in the courtyard coincided with the day on which he had come, at last, to the painful conclusion that China was not, and never would be again, the enchanted and enchanting country in which he had found such unexpected happiness and romance in the early years of the century. He was not going to be able to settle down and spend the rest of his days there after all, for with China and Japan at daggers drawn it was going to be too dangerous a place in which to leave Daisy and the girls. The sooner they left it the better: he had been mad to bring them here in the first place!

  Poor Tacklow. He had pinned such hopes on retiring in the one-time Celestial Kingdom, and on returning there with his Daisy. But the Celestial Kingdom had become a far from celestial Republic; and, worse, the second honeymoon had not proved to be an unqualified success. Mother, to whom Chinese had once been a second language, had forgotten most of it, and made no attempt to learn it again; she thought nothing of the social life of a foreigner in North China as compared to that of India and the Raj – and said so at frequent intervals. And now there was the threat from Japan. And with it an even darker threat: that of another World War …

  Japan had been our ally in the war that had ended only fifteen years before. But if there should be another, whose side would she be on? Then there was Russia to be considered – Russia, whose agents were busily at work trying, with alarming success, to convert young China to what the West still thought of as ‘Bolshevism’. And in Germany an ex-house-painter, one Adolf Hitler, who during the war (it was still ‘the’ war in those days) had served in the ranks of the German Army, had invented a party of the extreme right which had come to be known as the Nazis, and had alrea
dy attracted the adherence of most of Italy under the leadership of a short, stout and bald-headed rabble-rouser by the name of Benito Mussolini.

  Peking being full of foreign legations, most of whose languages Tacklow could speak, he had come to know and get on friendly terms with many of their consuls and staffs, as well as with a number of well-to-do Chinese. And what he learned in the course of many long ‘off-the-record’ conversations after small, men-only dinner-parties in Chinese homes or the Legation Quarters of a number of other foreign countries had reinforced his fear that Europe was moving nearer and nearer to the edge of a precipice that could only lead to another war.

  The last one had ended to the accompaniment of hysterical scenes of rejoicing and innumerable solemn ceremonies at memorials to those who had fallen. Yet Tacklow had come to believe that we had learned nothing from the lessons it should have taught us, and that here we were again, advancing blindly towards the same cliff edge like lemmings. If the worst came to the worst and there was another war it was by no means certain that there would be the same allies. North China, with Japan having bombed Chapei and annexed Manchuria, menacing her borders, would be no safe place for his family, and the sooner he moved them elsewhere the better.

  No wonder my poor darling parent was in such low spirits. The last thing he wanted to do was move house again; for in spite of the dangerously unstable conditions that prevailed in China, the mess and the muddle, the banditry and the blatant corruption, he was still fascinated by this country which, in spite of all he had seen and knew of it, he still saw through rose-coloured spectacles. The same rose-coloured ones through which he continued to see Mother. If it had not been for her, and the fact that he had never stopped being besottedly in love with her, I believe he would have stayed in China, in which case he would have ended up in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, like too many of Mother’s friends and relations. So I suppose it was just as well that he didn’t. And since Mother, Bets and I all wanted to go back to India, back to India we went, but by a slow and circuitous route.

  With Japan cast as the villain of the piece, you would have thought that any father of a family would have avoided that country like the plague. Not so my darling Tacklow. If we had to move, then let us move to Japan. Not permanently, of course. Just for a time. Long enough to see something of the country and learn a little about its people. Anyway, he had always wanted to see Japan, and this was an ideal opportunity to do so …

  Well, as it happened I too had wanted to see Japan. Not for ‘always’, but ever since my schooldays when Tacklow had given me a book by H. de Vere Stacpoole, an author who had made his name with a crashing best-seller called The Blue Lagoon. This one, also a best-seller, was a very short novel set in Japan in the early years of the twentieth century. It was entitled The Crimson Azaleas, and I suppose I must have been about fourteen at the time that I read it. When I handed it back to Tacklow I remember saying with the utmost fervour, ‘I’ve got to see Japan one day. I’ve simply got to!’ Tacklow laughed and said: ‘Yes. That’s the way it took me, too – I have got to go there myself one day.’

  * * *

  Once again there was the packing to be faced. But this time it was far less trouble than it had ever been before, for on the advice of China-side friends we hired a team of professionals to do the job for us. The result was a bit like watching a troupe of expert gymnasts at work. Mother, who rather prided herself on being a good packer, watched open-mouthed, and was betrayed into an unladylike shriek when, having urged a man who was wrapping up a much cherished cut-crystal bowl to be careful how he handled it, he finished turning it into a ball of dried grass and string, which he then flung across the room to demonstrate how well it would travel.2 And how right he was. The team stowed all our breakable goods and chattels in barrels, not packing cases, and when, months later, they were unpacked in Delhi, nothing had suffered so much as a crack, let alone been broken.

  Considering how China and the Chinese had scared me, and how reluctant I had been to go there, I was surprised to find how sad I was to see the last of Peking and that fabulous house on the Pei-ho-yen. I suppose it was because I knew that I was seeing the last flicker of the China that Tacklow had fallen in love with. Soon there would be nothing left of that world.

  There was a round of farewell parties in Peking, and more of the same in Tientsin, where we stayed for a few days to say our goodbyes to all Mother’s relations before embarking on the SS Kaizan Maru for Kobe. And China, the country that I had known from the first I would never feel comfortable in, and whose people scared me stiff, forgave me for it and presented me with one last lovely parting present, something that has stayed with me always as another ‘white stone’…

  We had stayed on the open deck of the Kaizan Maru to see the last of the land, and by the time we crossed the Taku Bar and headed for the open sea, dusk had fallen and an apricot-coloured harvest moon, impossibly large in the dusty, golden-brown twilight, drifted slowly up out of the darkening sea. The sea, which only moments before had appeared to be as empty as the palm of my hand, was all at once full of ghostly silver shapes, as the strengthening light of the rising moon caught the lateen sails of the fishing fleet and laid a glimmering carpet across the waters of the Gulf of Pei-chih-li.

  Years ago, when I was a very small girl, I had looked down at sunset from the then tree-covered slope of Bombay’s Malabar Hill, and seen another fishing fleet sail out to meet the gathering night – its sails bright in the last rays of a sinking sun. It had seemed to me then, and still does, one of the most beautiful sights I had ever seen, and I have never forgotten it. Now China had repeated it for me. And again it seemed incredibly lovely, and, for some reason that I can’t explain, more than a little sad.

  2

  Interlude: Japan

  Chapter 12

  We were not alone on our trip to Japan. John and ‘Teddy Bear’ and ‘George Blank’ (another of the British Legation’s ‘stupid interruptors’) had decided to join our party, and had wangled enough leave in order to do so. This proved to be a godsend, because although none of us spoke a word of Japanese, Tacklow and all three of the interpreters could write it – a curious anomaly that arose from the fact that the two languages, though totally different when spoken, are the same when written. I have no idea when, or how, this curious split came about, but I suspect that Japan had no written language for long after China had invented one, and that when their people at last decided that they must have one too, they couldn’t be bothered to invent one – they merely appropriated the sign-writing of China, and that was that.

  The weather was perfect and the sea so clear that you could see a dazzling variety of fishy life fathoms deep below the surface. Above them schools of porpoises accompanied us, leaping, diving and frolicking in the bow waves – and sometimes there would be a basking shark. And the islands…! Oh, to be able to stop the ship and go ashore and spend a whole day on one. Oh, to own one, and have it all to yourself …

  Coming from a family whose mother was second generation ‘China-side’, and whose father had lost his heart to that country many years ago, I had been familiar with Chinese and Japanese art from an early age. The houses of the Bryson aunts and uncles, and ours too, were full of Chinese or Japanese bowls, vases, willow-pattern plates and wall hangings. And now here I was, sailing past the real thing. Here were the very same islets that I had seen a hundred times painted on scrolls. And they were real. The artists had not exaggerated. They had painted exactly what they saw, no more and no less. And in this calm weather the tiny, rocky islands, carved into a hundred decorative shapes by centuries of wind and waves and topped by old, old pine trees, swept and bent sideways by the prevailing gales, were duplicated for us by their reflections on a mirror-smooth sea.

  Mother and Bets rushed down to their cabins to fetch their cameras, but as soon as they appeared on deck with them one of the ship’s officers swept down upon them and, hissing politely, took them firmly into custody (the cameras; not Mother and B
ets). It was forbidden, said the officer, to take photographs in Japanese waters. The same went for Mother’s and Bets’s sketchbooks. No photographs. No sketches. I went down to my cabin and took several photographs with my Box-Brownie and wondered why, when they were so fussy about visitors sketching or taking snapshots of their shoreline, they hadn’t the sense to close or black out the portholes. Unfortunately, the snapshots turned out to be a total failure, for the little islands were too far away. Just small spots on a waste of sea.

  Later on, when we cannot have been too far from Kobe, the Kaizan Maru slowed down almost to a stop as we approached a narrow strip of sea between an island on the right and an arm of the mainland to the left. A launch with several uniformed Japanese aboard came out to meet us, and a ladder was put down for them to come aboard. I presumed that they were were port officials, or from the pilot boat; and possibly some were. But two or three of them had come out to interview and meet my father. Tacklow, looking slightly surprised, was introduced to them by the Captain, after which they and Tacklow were ushered into the Captain’s quarters, from where they did not reappear for some time.

  I learned later that they knew almost everything there was to know about my dear parent – probably, since they are a thorough race, down to his taste in ties and the colour of his pyjamas. Tacklow had emerged wearing what I used to call his ‘innocent as an oyster’ expression when he and the reception committee came out on deck again just before we docked at Kobe, and they all appeared to be on excellent terms with each other. But after that – courtesy of the Japanese Government – we had an official guide attached to our party, presumably to keep an eye on us, because Tacklow said they were convinced that because he had been head of the CID he must have come to spy out the land – or something of the sort. The top Indian in the terrorist line, a dyed-in-the-wool anti-British Communist, one Subas Bose,1 who had escaped jail by sliding out of India, some time back in the days of the First World War, had taken refuge in Japan where he had been welcomed with open arms. It was on his behalf that the reception committee had come aboard to interrogate Tacklow and find out what he was up to, and I can’t think why they did this, since it was perfectly clear that they weren’t prepared to believe for a moment that Tacklow had retired years ago. Even less that he no longer had any connection with (or interest in!) the Intelligence Service, but was merely visiting their islands as a tourist. Still, as long as it made them happy to think he was on some secret spying mission it was no skin off our collective noses, and we all found the official guide most useful in any number of ways. He not only spoke excellent English, but was a mine of information, while as for his effect on shop-keepers, it was electric: one look and a brief word from him, and inflated ‘tourist prices’ tumbled – he must have saved us quite a lot of money.