China to Me (38 page)

Indirectly the situation was responsible, too, for Ursula's protracted absence. She had gone to Australia all right, according to plan, where she stayed with Charles's cousins and didn't like it at all. As soon as she could she started back to Hong Kong. When she arrived in Singapore, however, the blow had already fallen and the evacuation had taken place. If Ursula had been in Hong Kong at the time she would no doubt have managed to stay, as so many of her friends did. She might even have gone with her friend Vera Armstrong as far as Manila and then come back again, as Vera did, full of rage at the idea of being cut off from her house for any longer period. (“My husband's a lawyer,” stormed Vera, “and he says they can't make me go away; they can't.”) But as it was, she was in Singapore. Singapore, too, was having evacuation troubles. Ursula decided not to risk being sent back to Australia. She quickly grabbed a job with a government department which entitled her to stay put, and sat down to wait for a later chance to get back to Charles. Well-meaning females began to write hinting letters to her, and Ursula hastily wrote Charles, asking him what mischief was afoot.

Now we can go back to Mrs. Lee and the Chinese restaurant. “Babies are dear little things,” she said, “though I did have too many meself. … Have you any babies, madam?”

“No,” I said, solemnly shaking my head. “No, I can't have any children.”

“Oh, isn't that a pity!”

Over on the other side of the table, Charles pricked up his ears and looked at me.

“Yes,” I said to Mrs. Lee, “I'm sorry too.”

“Nonsense,” said Charles crisply. “Of course you can have children.”

“As it happens, I can't,” I said, and I thought I was telling the truth. “I've been told so, often, by doctors. I can't.”

“Of course you can. I'll bet you anything you like.”

“What is this nonsense?” he demanded in the taxi, after we had sent the guests off to the ferry. “Is that why you carry on so about children, weeping at Wu Teh-chen's and keeping gibbons and all that?”

“Oh no. I don't want children. I never did.”

“All women want children,” said Charles with amusing certainty. “But see here; do you really want a child? If so, I'll let you have one.”

“Huh?”

“Let's have one,” he said. “I'll take care of it. It can be my heir. Just to make things all right, if I can get a divorce and if it all works out, we might even get married. If we want to, that is, and after a long time for considering.”

“Do you mean it?” I asked after a pause. I knew already, though, that he did. He was being flippant, but that is the way Charles is; he just is flippant. It didn't alter the fact that he meant it.

“I never heard such nonsense,” said Charles indignantly. “Can't have children! Whatever will Mrs. Lee think of me?”

“All right,” I said, “let's try.”

“And you can turn in your steamship ticket,” he said. “You had better do that tomorrow.”

Chapter 30

Whenever I think back on September 1940, which is often, I am freshly surprised at the simplicity that marked our deciding. It was an important decision, but we settled it all in a few sentences; we must have been thinking it over, each of us, in a hidden way for a long time. If you are a writer you know how your brain seems to work sometimes all by itself, unbidden, and on company time. Then all of a sudden out comes a finished piece of work, well turned and neat and a complete surprise to the conscious level of your brain. That's how Carola was planned, and though I may not have much in my life to be smug about, I recommend the method. I found it thoroughly satisfactory. It must have been right, too, because for the next year and a bit of time over I was happy. I have been happy before, but not like that, in such a solid way.

I don't know how Charles felt. I don't understand him at all and I don't try to, because that is an impertinence I resent between lovers — poking and prying around in one's emotions. But if I had worried on his behalf I might have been less selfishly happy. British folklore and Charles's family history are rich in examples of women who were noble, who understood their men, and who denied themselves love when it was necessary for their mates' careers thus to deny. I'm afraid I didn't give it so much as a thought until my doctor scolded me, much later — too late. Even then I didn't care as I should. I suppose like the young savage I was I felt that it was his career and his lookout. If he didn't care, why should I? The doctor wouldn't believe that Carola was Charles's idea to begin with. Most people won't believe it. Most people, naturally, think she was an unavoidable accident. They don't know from nothing!

Then too I felt that as a career the Army wasn't really very close to Charles's heart. Not that he neglected the Army; he was supposed to be damned good at his work. But he hadn't exactly picked it out for himself. It was foreordained. All his paternal ancestors were service people, just like those families we make fun of on the stage: Charles's brother was in the Army, they meant Charles for the Navy, but he was too nearsighted and so he went to Sandhurst instead. It was taken for granted. Otherwise his tastes and talents would have made him a don in a university. Even after he had his commission, universities offered him fellowships, and he had to reject them, though reluctantly.

At the age of fourteen Charles was deeply immersed in Portuguese and Japanese. It is a combination that led him inevitably to sixteenth-century studies in the Far East. A great-uncle was captain in the Opium Fleet and lies buried now in Macau. Charles read a paper to the Royal Asiatic Society when he was seventeen, and no doubt his interest in Asia is the direct result of that uncle and of the library that the family collected afterward, based on Nunky's exploits. Decidedly he isn't a straight military type, and I should be excused that I have never thought of him in that way. Yet he looked it, God knows, even when he wasn't in uniform. He walked and talked and drank like an Army officer.

We never talked about his career. He would have snorted and spat if I used the word. He didn't think much of the British setup out there. “Hong Kong is the dumping ground for the duds,” he said. “Including me. Any old fool who can't be used elsewhere is dumped out here in Hong Kong. Look at them!”

Naturally we didn't announce our decision to the city, but when I canceled my passage to America the word went around, as such things always did in that little gossiping community, and people wondered why, or, less delicately, who. Visitors from Shanghai were puzzled, too, and did a good deal of sniffing, trying to locate the rat. I embarked on a long series of cables home, asking my brother-in-law to find out how difficult it was, after returning to the States, for a woman to get permission to get out again. He knew what I meant, of course; none of the family had any illusions that I would want to stay home once I had got there. He looked it all up and answered frankly that my chances of getting back to the Far East, unless things cleared up a good deal, were slim. All of that correspondence softened the disappointment Mother felt when a letter came at last, putting off my return home yet again. For the first time, now that it was irrevocable that I was not going, I felt genuinely homesick.

I made plans. No bride could have gone about fixing up her home more calmly. The more I recall it the more I wonder now at the utterly natural way I went into the proposition. Maybe there are times in our lives when, in spite of all our civilization, we are capable of following instinct blindly. There was only one time I know of that Charles pulled back and took a look squarely at the difficulties of the situation.

He was always busy. You must think of the following year as one of hectic activity on his part. He had to be within reach of his office all the time, all day and all night, and he tried to arrange the week so that nothing would be neglected. On his free evenings he did his own work, reading and writing historical articles, and he wanted to be absolutely quiet and undisturbed at those times. He allowed himself one or sometimes two parties a week. When he was busy I did as I liked, but it was understood that Saturday was the one afternoon and night that he could spend with me without office work or any treatises on sixteenth-century Japan interfering. And Wednesday afternoon. Charles was always methodical.

This was on a Saturday evening. We were dining out and I was waiting for him, though it wasn't time for him yet, when he called up. (I was still living in the Gloucester.) “I'm coming ten minutes early,” he said with a false sort of briskness. “There's something I want to talk over before we go out.” It was just like him, and like the pressure of his work, that he had to plan hours in advance for ten minutes. He came in looking impossibly picturesque in his uniform mess jacket, strapped trousers, and cap. Hong Kong was full of such pleasant frippery in those days, when we were at war and yet we weren't. I probably looked picturesque myself; I can remember how I loved that dress. It had a full, full skirt; it was a printed chintz, with enormous poppies sprinkled around it. The two of us looked like a scene in Cavalcade, but I don't think we sounded like it.

“About this baby,” said Charles. He was walking up and down the room, not looking at me because he was embarrassed.

“Yes?” I said. I was sitting on the bed, looking straight at him for the same reason.

“Have you thought,” he said, “that if we have this baby it'll show?”

I replied, after a short pause, that the idea had, as a matter of fact, already occurred to me.

“But then you can't go to cocktail parties,” he said, very worried. “You can't go around looking like that.”

I said, “I don't have to go to cocktail parties when it comes to that point. I won't want to.”

“You wouldn't expect me to take you out to the Sheko pool?” he insisted.

“No, I'd much rather swim in the ocean. Anyway, when it's that far along I'll be hiding out somewhere, won't I?”

“Oh, we'll manage,” he said, cheerful now that the problem was off his chest. “We'll take a small house on the Peak or somewhere. By the way, you'll be wanting a flat soon, won't you? This hotel is all very well for a bit, but it would be more convenient if you took a place. Now I just heard that there's a furnished flat going in the building near Abermor Court” — he lived in Abermor Court — “and I think you'd better have a look at it.”

I picked up my handbag and we started out for the dinner party. “And another thing, about the baby,” I said, “remember, I still think I won't be able to have it. The doctors have always said so.”

“Pooh, pooh,” said Charles. “Nonsense.”

Corin and Jacques came to town. My days had been taken up pretty well, ever since my arrival, with other transient friends from Chungking: Gidley had already passed through, and so had a few tenants of the Press Hostel. But these other people heralded their arrival with loud squawks of joy, wasting no time getting in touch with me. Corin and Jacques avoided me for a day or so. After that I wouldn't be avoided, and they couldn't keep it up, because like everyone else they had to come and live at the Gloucester. Corin and I went shopping and she bought some dresses and cheered up under that unfailing tonic. She also borrowed money from me for Jacques. The strangeness that I had felt when they got there melted away after a day of activity, when Jacques had gone on ahead to Shanghai, and I felt that we were back on the old footing.

Charles and I went out for a week end at J. J. Paterson's place at Fanling which is a long way in on the mainland road, the last Chinese village before the border is reached. J.J. is a famous taipan who had been in China all his life, and who preferred to live miles from town, in a bungalow from which he could go out shooting or walking in his garden, or playing golf at the Fanling Country Club. He is a large red-faced man with a sense of humor well above the average, and a style of exhibiting it all his own. Once in a while, when his chosen mode of living all alone palled on him, he sent out invitations to everyone he liked, and had a real bang-up party.

Sunday was a fine hot day. As Charles said afterward, it felt like the last gasp of capitalism, and well worth it. We all met at a swimming beach at Castle Peak in the morning; that is on the mainland. We had sandwiches, and drinks in thermos flasks. Then we drove to the Fanling bungalow and drank some more, and did gymnastic tricks on the lawn. It was brilliantly sunny: there is no weather like that of Hong Kong in autumn. It was perfect. We ate again, and drank again, and played on the lawn or slept in the shade if we wanted to, and the day dragged on with pleasant idiocy until dark.

After supper I found myself mixed up with a captain, name unknown, who had been following me about for a few hours and who was now firmly determined to take me out walking in the garden. J.J.'s bungalow fronts a broad expanse of turf, and a double terrace drops down just below his house-wide veranda. I was unfamiliar with that irregularity in the ground. We must have halted just above the first dip, looking for the moon, when Captain Unknown grabbed me and became violently amorous.

I was startled, and instead of talking him out of it, or calling indoors so that others would join us and scare him off, I just started to push him away. He wouldn't be pushed, and I backed up and fell straight down the terrace, my left foot doubling up under me. I have always been an awkward cow of a woman. The wedge heels of my cork-soled shoes were as much to be blamed as the captain. I thought it was only a turned ankle, and though the pain made me dizzy I put that down to its being a joint injury, and made light of it. The captain made less of it than that. He paid no attention whatever to my foot. He was feeling amorous, not helpful. Under pretense of giving me his arm and helping me to a chair, he led me swiftly further and further away from the house and at last put me down somewhere, I rather think in the vegetable garden, and there resumed his suit. As Charles had said, it was all exactly like a Roman orgy — too much so at the moment to suit me. When all else failed I used force and hurried back to the house, hobbling on my injured foot, with the wicked captain in hot pursuit. It was definitely irritating to find Charles cozily chatting away to some people in a corner, not at all interested in my injury. Nobody was. I stood there in the middle of J.J.'s admirable drawing room wailing, “It hu-u-u-urts!” and nobody evinced the slightest reaction until some man happened to glance at my ankle.