Oriental Hotel (7 page)

For a moment she could neither move nor speak, then her breath came out on a whispered sigh.

‘Brit!' she said.

And on that summer afternoon, in the heart of the Gloucestershire countryside, it seemed that the years were rolling away, bearing her back through timeto another life when she had been young, frightened yet determined, and alone amid the ravages of a war-torn world.

‘I'm sorry, Mrs Sanderson. It is quite out of the question for you to return to Hong Kong. This is wartime. You simply cannot go rushing about the world as if you were going to a tea party.'

Frederick Langley, Vice-Consul at the British Embassy in Cairo, leaned forward over his elegantly padded desk, his rotund face pink and exasperated.

‘I would have hoped I had made myself clear by now,' he added, glaring accusingly at the young woman who sat opposite him.

‘And I hoped
I
had made it clear that I am not rushing about the world, as you put it. Can't you understand? I just want to go home!'

With a decisive movement she snapped her crocodile clutch-bag down on the table and almost unconsciously he priced it. Expensive, like the matching crocodile pumps and deceptively simple dress of blue shantung silk. Expensive, like her gold jewellery and the sapphire that sparkled above the wedding ring.

But even he, sceptic that he was, had to admit that the first thing one noticed about Elise Sanderson was not the trappings of wealth but her face: features finely chiselled and tanned to a warm gold beneath the crowning cap of honey-coloured hair; beautiful amber eyes and a mouth which though softly curving seemed somehow oddly determined. Just now the eyes were narrowed, desperation making them sparkle behind their fringe of thick, dark lashes, and the mouth was set in a firm line. Looking at it, Frederick Langley sighed.

Why in heaven's name had he joined the Diplomatic Service, he wondered. As if it were not bad enough to be banished to an arid, Godforsaken country like Egypt where the heat, the dust and the flies made it a full-time occupation to hold on to a modicum of good temper, in addition he was expected to deal with foolish expatriates who could not, or would not, understand the simple facts he had to set before them.

It was 1941 and the world was at war. England and Germany were bombing the hearts out of one another's cities and most of Europe was occupied by Hitler's armies. Here in North Africa the Italians had chanced their arm, attempting to invade Egypt, though General O'Connor had been ready for them and was pushing them westwards towards Cyrenaica; while in the Far East, Japan was an ever-constant threat.

Already the Japanese were in China; if they decided to move, the whole of Malaysia would fall to them and the first place to fall would be Hong Kong.

The Government had realised this. They had begun evacuating women and children the previous summer and sending them to safety in Australia; although public outcry had caused the evacuations to halt, the Secretary of State for the Colonies was adamant that it was not safe for those who had left to return.

Yet however often he explained the situation to her, Elise Sanderson refused to understand and his patience – never his strongest quality – was fast running out.

Frederick Langley sighed again, mopping at his brow with a monogrammed handkerchief and composing himself for another onslaught.

‘Mrs Sanderson, Hong Kong is greatly at risk from invasion by the Japanese and the women and children were evacuated for their own safety. You must realise …'

‘But the evacuations have stopped now.' The young woman leaned forward, one small tanned fist pressed on the padded desk top. ‘And in any case, I wasn't evacuated. I left of my own accord, for personal reasons, before the evacuations started.'

‘And now, for personal reasons, you want to return.' Langley's face assumed a bland, disapproving look.

At some time during one of their interminable interviews he felt sure she had explained to him why she was so anxious to return to Hong Kong – and why she had left to travel to Egypt in wartime in the first place. Had it been to visit the bedside of her dying mother? Yes, he rather fancied that was so. But now the reason seemed to him totally irrelevant.

‘I am sorry, Mrs Sanderson, but the Secretary of State for the Colonies still believes Hong Kong to be at risk,' he said, speaking slowly as if to a child. ‘And I personally happen to agree with him.'

He saw the quick flash of exasperation that momentarily lit her face.

‘I've heard all this before and it makes no difference. I have to get back to Hong Kong.'

‘I'm sorry,' he repeated, scraping back his chair to indicate that the interview was at an end. ‘I cannot help you, and even if I could there would be no way you could get a passage. Virtually all shipping is requisitioned by the Ministry of Transport. My advice is to resign yourself to remaining here until this wretched war ends, or else to put your energies into getting yourself to Australia, whence the other expatriates have been evacuated. And now …'

He extended his hand but she ignored it, pushing back her chair and rising. She was not a tall woman, five feet four inches at most, but her anger seemed to add inches to her stature.

‘I'm sorry to have taken up so much of your time,' she said stiffly. ‘ But I think I should give you fair warning that I intend to get back to Hong Kong. And if I cannot do it your way, then I will find another. I'll go on and on until I drop if I must, but I promise you, Mr Langley, that I will succeed eventually.'

She turned abruptly so that the honey-gold hair swirled for a moment against the nape of her neck and he watched her stalk, straight-backed, out of the room.

What a woman! he thought. Totally blind to the realities of the situation. Yet for all his exasperation, he had to admit that there was something about her which commanded admiration. A fool she might be, but often enough in his clashes with her he had seen that she had spirit. And to fight as she was fighting for what she wanted, demanded more than a little courage.

Sighing, he mopped his brow once more and turned his attention to the pile of papers on his desk. Perhaps when this wretched war was over he would get a more congenial posting – always assuming that England emerged victorious, of course. At the moment, here in North Africa, things were looking good. But the news from other parts of the world was not so cheering. On reflection, perhaps Cairo was the most comfortable place to be at the moment, however unpleasant the climate, and it was high time the lovely but stubborn Mrs Sanderson came to the same conclusion.

When Elise marched out of the Embassy office, the flame of anger within her made it easy to keep her head high. How dare that stuffed shirt of a Vice-Consul talk to her as if she were a child? she asked herself furiously. How dare he patronise her and tell her what to do?

But out in the streets of Cairo, where the bright sunshine glanced off the white-painted buildings with a sharpness that hurt the eyes and the sky stretched clear and blue from horizon to horizon, desperation was once more predominant – spreading and gradually consuming the healing anger until she felt the whole of her body weighed down by it.

Her steps slowed, her feet leaden on the hot pavements, and in her throat a knot that she knew heralded tears threatened to choke her. With a small, characteristic grimace she swallowed at it; tears would do no good, although sometimes the temptation to give in to them was almost unbearable.

For four months now she had fought these wooden, emotionless bureaucrats. She might as well have battled with the Sphinx itself, for always, no matter how she argued and pleaded, the answer was the same: that women and children were being evacuated from Hong Kong for their own safety and she could not be allowed to return there. The Colony was much too vulnerable.

Why in the name of heaven did I leave? she asked herself for the hundredth time as she raised a hand to summon a horse-drawn gharry to drive her back to Shepheard's Hotel. Why didn't I foresee what might happen? But in the bustle of Hong Kong's business world and the gaiety and gra-ciousness of the colonial social whirl, war had seemed an empty threat – virtually an impossibility. In June, when she had left, nothing had changed. There were still orchestral dinners nightly on the open-air terrace at the Peninsula Hotel and dancing in the Rose Room. And if Gordon, her husband, had experienced any reduction in the business he was able to generate from his small new electronics factory on Hong Kong Island, he had said nothing to her about it.

As for the war in Europe, that had seemed a world away and if there were any warning signs of trouble from Japan, she had been unaware of them. Or perhaps she had wanted to be unaware, she thought; for when the letter had arrived from Cairo telling her that her mother was dying of lung cancer, nothing had been important but that she should go to her.

‘I must, Gordon, I must!' Her voice had trembled with the shock that ran through her in chilling waves, and Gordon had held her hand in his – wanting only to ease her stricken look, yet reluctant to let her go.

‘It's a long way, Elise; she wouldn't expect it.'

‘I don't care what she expects. She's all alone, Gordon.'

‘She has her husband.'

‘The Brigadier!' Elise had snorted, her dislike for her stepfather evident in her tone. ‘You know what he's like as well as I do. He arranges everything to suit his own convenience. Please, Gordon – I wouldn't stay long. If she's as ill as she sounds, it will all be over very soon anyway. But I must see her; I must try to put things right.'

A muscle had moved in Gordon's cheek. He knew he had played his part in things not being ‘ right' as Elise phrased it.

‘All right, Elise, go to Cairo. We'll manage here. Only don't be away too long.'

‘I won't,' she had promised.

But things had not worked out that way, for in July, just a few weeks after she had left Hong Kong, invasion by Japan became too real a possibility to be discounted and the British Government had begun evacuating women and children to Australia.

At first, involved with her dying mother and exhausted by emotion, Elise did not realise the significance of what was happening east of Cairo. Her days were a procession of hours when she sat beside her mother's bed, chained as much by guilt as by the iron grip of the painfully thin fingers around her wrist, listening to the harsh rasp of breath in diseased lungs and wishing there were something – anything – she could do to relieve the suffering. Leave her she could not. But at last, when merciful release came and after her mother had been buried beneath Egyptian soil, Elise found her return to Hong Kong blocked.

In panic she explored every available channel. ‘I must get back – I must!' But always the answer was the same: no expatriates were to be allowed back into Hong Kong by order of the British Government.

In November her hopes were raised when the lonely husbands of the Colony formed a Protest Group to demand the return of their wives; under the pressure the forced evacuations were stopped, but still the Government refused to allow the women back.

The Japanese were on the Hong Kong/Chinese border, Elise was told, and she must realise for her own safety …

She returned to the present with a jolt as a gharry stopped in answer to her summons, the driver eyeing her with curiosity when she instructed him to drive her to Shepheard's. He did not care for European women who walked the streets alone with their faces and legs exposed for all the world to see, but anyone who gave their destination as Shepheard's automatically earned his grudging respect.

Shepheard's was the most exclusive hotel in Cairo. Since the days when it had been the headquarters of Napoleon's commander-in-chief, it had acquired a reputation for splendid service which was second to none and more than one crowned head had passed through the palatial doors. Cairo might be a sprawling hotch-potch of wealth and poverty, of river-bank villas, soaring minarets and priceless antiquities, of mud-brick houses and dirty tenements. But Shepheard's was Shepheard's and its standards had remained unchanged since the days when the founder, whose name it now bore, had first opened his New British Hotel a hundred years earlier.

Not even the war and the fighting on the North African coast had affected its reputation. Bell-boys still ran to attend to every whim; dancers dressed by the haute couturiers of the world and decked with expensive jewels twirled beneath the chandeliers to the accompaniment of a six-piece orchestra, and the champagne was permanently on ice.

All this the Egyptian driver knew and in anticipation of a fat tip he nudged the horse to a trot.

Though it was mid-afternoon the streets were busy with soldiers everywhere and Elise remembered that Cairo was the Middle East GHQ of the British Army. This was why her mother had been here, of course. The Brigadier, a cold, ambitious career soldier who had taken the place of Elise's much-loved father, had been posted to Egypt. Until her mother's death Elise had stayed with him in his villa at Zamelek, a pleasant residential area, but when the ordeal was finally over there had been no reason to continue the armed truce and Elise had moved to her suite at Shepheard's.

If he had wished, she felt sure the Brigadier could have used his influence to help her to return to Hong Kong, but typically he had not done so. For that alone she thought she would probably never forgive him.

An army lorry overflowing with soldiers rattled past the gharry, raising a cloud of white dust and causing the horse to break into a short, unrestrained canter. With the familiar depression returning to settle in on her, Elise scarcely noticed. For all she had said to Vice-Consul Langley, she knew there was a limit to the number of times she could clamour at his door and a limit to what she could expect from him. If the British Government refused her entry and there were no ships to take her in any case, how could she ever get back? But if Hong Kong was in danger …