The Rice Paper Diaries (6 page)

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’

‘No, not at all. It’s very kind of you to ask.’

‘I was so very sorry about… your baby,’ he said.

She realised he was still holding onto her hand and she wanted to cling onto it, this firm, truthful grip on her loss. She watched him as he tried to readjust the tenor of their conversation to something more in keeping with the social niceties people were supposed to exchange over drinks and dinner at the Peninsula.

‘I’m surprised to see you still in Hong Kong,’ he said.

‘Why should you be surprised?’

‘So many of the wives have left already. Gone home, or to Australia.’

‘Oh, that,’ she said, waving a hand, realising that her movements were exaggerated and that she really had drunk too much champagne. ‘Tommy says it’s nothing to worry about. It’ll all blow over, he says. He knows a lot of journalists, and they keep him in the know.’

‘Does he?’ Oscar said. ‘In any case, it’s very good to see you.’

He seemed so stiff and formal that she couldn’t help smiling as he moved off. He had a quick, long stride and within seconds he had disappeared around the corner.

She loitered at the top of the staircase. A string quartet was playing on one of the balconies. The lobby below seemed a long way away. People who were sitting at the tables in small groups had split up and joined different groups, or had their tables moved together to make one big one. Everyone was laughing and shouting to make themselves heard. Elsa listened to their voices, mainly English, but also French and Dutch in places, rise to the ceiling and mix into a noisy babel where she was standing.

She could see Ronnie still slumped back in his chair. Liz was sitting up straight, both hands on her handbag, as if she was ready to go.

Tommy’s seat was empty.

She looked all around the lobby, at the sea of black dicky bows and evening dresses punctuated by the white jackets of the waiters.

There was a couple standing by a tall potted palm between the lobby and one of the corridors leading off it. If you were sitting down at one of the tables you would hardly know they were there, much less who they were. But Elsa knew Tommy’s wide jaw, and his big hands. She knew the thick, flat fingers that were running their way down the back of Mimi Forsyth’s dress before coming to rest on her behind. She knew how it felt to be pressed against him like that, feeling the rush of blood pulsing under her skin.

Groups of people in the lobby below were still swirling around, connecting into clumps of shifting colour: from up here they looked like a marked
-
out territory that was constantly changing. And then the wind battered against the windows again, so loudly that there was a hiatus in the noisy conversations below, and Elsa wondered if it would all turn to sea under her eyes, if this group of people would disappear under the water forever, somehow complicit in their own undoing. Just like the story her mother used to tell her when she was little, about the gatekeepers who got drunk and forgot to close the sea gates on the low
-
lying land of Cardigan Bay. The whole village was flooded while its inhabitants lay sleeping. Except when her mother told her the story, stroking her hair while the wind shook the windows in their sashes, she had felt safe.

Tommy said it was important for him to mix with the right people. That was what he had said when Elsa asked about Mimi.

She saw a shock of red hair moving through the crowd below. Oscar. It looked as if he was going from group to group, telling them something. People started to gather their belongings and make their way to the main doors.

Tommy and Mimi came back to the table where Liz and Ronnie were sitting. Ronnie had fallen asleep with his mouth open, and Tommy had to shake him to wake him up.

Elsa went down to the lobby and walked towards the table.

‘Elsa, we have to go.’
Tommy looked hot in his dinner jacket and he was speaking too quickly. ‘There’s a storm coming in.’

Elsa watched the water surge in a dark mass around them.

‘What if we go under?’ said Liz.

Elsa stared straight ahead at the lights of
Victoria, thousands of them against the black sky
.
A cruiser passed by in a hurry, causing a sudden swell that lifted the
sampan
up like a buoy. She could hear Tommy next to her telling her to hold on tight. Mimi was sitting on the other side of him. She looked green.

‘I think I’m pregnant again,’ Elsa said to Tommy, half
-
shouting over the sound of rushing wind and water.

Tommy said something, but there was too much noise and Elsa couldn’t catch what it was. Mimi put her head down, still clinging to the wooden back of the seat in front.

‘I feel so ill,’ she groaned.

‘It’s sea legs you need,’ Elsa said under her breath.

6

Elsa didn’t pass any of this on to Nannon when she wrote. Elsa told her the due date and sent her a list of the things she needed.

Something to look forward to!
Nannon wrote back, underlined twice.
I’ll be ticking off the weeks. Tommy must be thrilled.

Elsa hadn’t seen Tommy like this before, distant and hungover. When she’d first met him in New Quay, he’d been home on leave between postings, sitting at the kitchen table with his collar unfastened, eating all his favourite foods, which his mother Sara had made specially:
cawl
, home
-
baked bread, damson wine. When Elsa had walked in under the low beam of the door that led straight from the
buarth
into the kitchen, Sara was standing over him, arms folded across her chest, watching him eat. He’d glanced up with the soup spoon held halfway between the bowl and his mouth, and kept it there, looking at her as Sara came over to her, taking her coat and basket, and telling her to take a seat at the table. The bench had creaked as she’d sat down – Tommy had joked about that later on, how could the bench have protested under her weight, and her a bag of bones? – and by the time she’d got up from the table again, her stomach still warm from the
cawl
, it was understood that he would take her on a tour of the farm, although she’d been there many times to collect eggs while he’d been away at sea. They went to the milk shed to see the cows, and he told her about his work on the coast off mainland China, capturing pirates, confiscating contraband and taking it ashore. She’d listened while the tails of the cows slapped against their soft behinds, and looked away as the boy on the stool pressed their udders until milk squirted into the bucket at his feet. When Tommy said ‘
Hwyl
,’ to him, the lad had kept one eye on the stream of warm milk as he tipped his cap at Elsa.

Tommy had said goodbye to her at the gate onto the road from Capel y Wig down to New Quay, the sharp edge of the wind giving him red cheeks.

In Hong Kong all the men were pale and languid, and on the mornings when Tommy didn’t go into work until lunchtime he looked wan and listless too; he sat in the apartment in his dressing gown, reading the newspaper
and eating a second breakfast. But this was what she had chosen, Elsa thought, watching the Bentley easing its way down the hill, and closing the door behind him. That’s what Nannon had said to her the morning she and Tommy had got married at Llanina Church, which was so far out on the headland that the water had almost lapped at their ankles when they came out into the sunshine for their photographs. Nannon had been standing behind Elsa, fixing her hair for her, and she’d said that when you get married you don’t just choose a man, you choose a life. Elsa had felt a flicker of irritation when she’d said that, playing the older, sensible sister. What was Nannon to know about marriage? She was nearly thirty and wasn’t even engaged. It had been cold, and on the road back to New Quay for the reception at the Penwig the first primroses had winked their yellow eyes at her from the high hedges. Perhaps Nannon was right, though. She thought of Sara, who’d stood over the table that day at Pwllbach while she and Tommy had talked and eaten, watching them together, a satisfied look on her face.

Elsa missed Nannon. She missed having someone to talk to, someone to tell her the baby would be fine this time. She wiped her eyes on a clean handkerchief and went to put it in the laundry for Lam. She went back to the terrace and sat in her usual place, watching the sun moving from one end of the sky to the other, counting the days.

II

Li
n:

Hong Kong, 1941

1

I arrived in Hong Kong at daybreak. I stood on deck and watched the sun split open over the harbour, spilling light like a silkworm pushing its way out of a cocoon.

I was taken to the port office with the other girls. People came to collect them, but no one came for me.
There were two men sitting behind a desk, one in a black uniform with gold brocade at the cuffs, the other in a linen suit. The man in uniform took off his white peaked cap and put it down next to his notebook; each time he asked me a question in English, the man in linen started translating it into Cantonese straightaway, too quickly, each voice drowning out the other, and I could make neither head nor tail of what was being said. If you had been there with me, Third Sister, I might have smiled inside, but you were far away and I was nervous.

I’d had plenty of time to prepare my answers, sitting with the others, talking as the mountains glided by, until we got to the junction of the three rivers. No one knew then what would come next, and we were all quiet until we reached Victoria Harbour.

I showed the men my piece of paper, and told them I had a sponsor coming to meet me, but they didn’t believe me.

‘Where is she?’ they asked.

That question I couldn’t answer. Lam had said she would be here.

‘Perhaps she hasn’t yet finished work,’ I said.

The man in uniform behind the desk laughed then, and lifted his pen, shaking drops of ink off the nib. It wasn’t a nice laugh.

‘What did he say?’ I asked the Chinese man in the English suit.

He said, ‘What is her job, that she is out walking the streets until dawn?’

‘She is a
ta chup
in a rich household, and now they need an amah to look after the baby, and she has sent for me.’

They put me to sit on a bench in the corridor. While I waited, I watched the pieces of paper pinned to the cork board opposite flutter as people came in and out of the main door to the building, sending a hot draught of air up the stairwell. Each time the door opened, I could hear sounds from the harbour outside, crates being dragged down gangplanks, men’s voices shouting instructions, the chugging of engines, and heavy coils of rope being flung onto the jetty. When it was closed I could be quiet in myself again, my thoughts accompanied only by the mechanical humming that filled the air around me: not dragonflies, nor Mother singing to herself as she walks out into the fields when she wakes, but the rhythmical whirring of a fan hanging from the ceiling.

They called me back into the office.

‘We will have to make other arrangements,’ they were saying, when Lam came into the room. She looked as if she had been in a rush to get here.

‘
Mui mui
,’ she said.

Her face was gleaming with sweat and her plait was coming loose. She was wearing a red
cheongsam
with a slit up the side, and lipstick. So this was what she looked like now she was a Hong Kong girl. Maybe soon I would look like this too. The English man glanced at me as if he was thinking the same thing.

‘Your sister,’ he said through the interpreter. First Sister, I wanted to add.

It was only once we were out on the street that Lam pulled me to her. She looked just as she always had, with a dimple to one side of her mouth when she smiled, but the expression in her eyes wasn’t the same as before, not as bright and cheeky.

‘It’s my day off,’ she said. ‘I’ll take you to the
kongsi fong
and then I have to go.’

‘Where?’ I said, but she pressed her shiny lips together and didn’t answer.

I followed her. She hadn’t offered to take one of my bags, and my arms were dragged down as I walked behind. There were men pulling rickshaws, and women standing at open stalls pointing at fish darting about in shallow containers filled with water. People were all around me, the rising heat of the day coming off them. It wouldn’t have surprised me if I’d heard their hearts beating underneath their skin in time with the clip
-
clop of their clogs against the pavement. I saw men glancing at Lam as they passed us. She kept her head still and stared straight ahead, which only made them look again.

‘Keep up,’ she said to me.

I wanted to ask how far we had left to walk, but I was afraid to speak out loud, knowing that my accent would give me away to these strangers, that even the sound of my own voice would make me homesick.

‘We’re here,’ she announced, turning round and taking one of the bags.

She waved her arm towards a door propped open by a bicycle between a fruit seller’s and a laundry. The paint was peeling off the frame and the rush mat on the other side of the threshold was worn through.