World of Suzie Wong : A Novel (9781101572399) (21 page)

For she had paused to wait for me a few yards along the quay in a pool of pale livid light from an electric street lamp—a light that had the same mysterious quality as the shaft of light that thrusts like some heavenly illumination through a gap in a thundercloud, and that, shining on her face and hands and her legs below the skirt of her cheongsam, invested her with a complete unreality; and the sight of her provoked in my mind some shadow of a memory, like a flitting bird that for a moment or two I could not catch to identify. Then all at once I trapped it: it was the memory of a picture from my childhood—a rather sickly colored plate in the illustrated Bible that I had been given when I first went to school, showing a miracle performed in a street of Jerusalem. In the foreground was the shoulder and lifted hand of Jesus, and beyond him a white wall with a barred window, with two ragged lepers squatting at its foot, their bodies disfigured and eaten away by disease, and in front of them a third begger who a moment ago had been like them, but who now stood straight and whole—and illumined by this same livid, unearthly light in which Suzie stood under the street lamp.

And I was momentarily seized by the fantastic notion that another miracle had occurred; that Suzie, who had wanted to love as a virgin, had had her innocence restored, that she now stood there in perfect purity, miraculously cleansed of her uncle's rape and the contamination of her trade as the leper had been cleansed of disease. For her face was luminous, it shone with a virginal beauty; and she seemed to wear that same expression that I remembered on the face of the beggar, an expression partly of humility, partly of wonderment.

And I was so moved with wonderment myself that for a while I could only stare. She did not move, but watched me as if she understood.

And then I went to her and held her, and began to kiss the white upturned virginal face, and she accepted the kisses without returning them, holding her face still and smiling a little—until a sudden loud resonant burping from the ferry's hooter made us both glance over toward the pier, and reality returned, and I knew that there had been no miracle, no physical restoration, no super-natural cleaning of the slate.

Yet as we continued along the quay, out of the lamplight and into the shadows again, I was still aware of some luminous quality about her, some radiation. And then, as if her own thoughts had been following some similar train to mine, though I had not once spoken since I had turned to see her under the lamp, she said:

“Robert, you know something? I have been pretending all day that you are my first man. I know it is not true—but I feel it is true.” And she added with a shy little laugh, “And I feel scared. Isn't it funny? As if it was the first time, and I didn't know what to do.”

I said, “I feel rather scared, too.”

“I am very scared.”

And I thought: there has been a miracle after all. Not a miracle in her body to make her intact again, but a miracle in her heart. Because love is a miracle: a miracle that rubs out the past, cleanses the heart, fills it with a virginal mystery and wonderment. It is Suzie's own miracle, the miracle of belief. And because she wants me to be her first man, I am the first, and for me, too, the past is nothing.

We crossed the road towards the Nam Kok. We walked a little apart. For now that we were soon to become lovers our old sense of familiarity had gone: we seemed almost strangers to each other, as familiar houses will seem strange when approached by new paths. We entered the hall, and I saw thankfully that it was empty: our mood was so delicately balanced that I was scared of it being upset, and as we stood waiting for the lift I prayed that no sailors or girls would come out of the bar, and that we should get upstairs without meeting any dull-eyed love-emptied couples coming out of rooms—without any reminders of Suzie's past. I only wished now that I had thought of taking her to another hotel, where we would have avoided all such risks.

The lift came down, the gate opened—it was empty except for the liftman. I breathed a sigh of relief and followed Suzie inside.

And then to my anguish, as we clanked past the first floor, we heard the sound of raised angry voices. The noise grew louder and more jarring as we rumbled upward—until the gate opened on the third floor and we were hit by the full force of it, and stepped out into the midst of the most violent and impassioned scene that I had ever witnessed at the Nam Kok.

The row involved, of all people, Wednesday Lulu, who was struggling to free herself from the grasp of the bar manager and two other girls, who were only just succeeding with their combined efforts in keeping her pinioned. Her face was ugly with rage as she screamed abuse at a sailor. The sailor, who was also purple-faced with rage and half drunk, was trying to shout her down with a methodical repetition of that single four-letter word which means simply love-making, and yet which for some reason is commonly used for the most violent expression of insult or contempt.

The corridor was blocked by girls and sailors who had emerged from their rooms to watch in various states of undress. It was impossible to get past to my room, and we stood outside the lift gazing at the scene in dismay. I had never before seen Wednesday Lulu anything but quiet and self-controlled, nor heard her speak other than gently. And now, as her rage rendered her almost inarticulate, she resorted to that same four-letter word as the sailor, hurling it back at him with the same methodical repetition.

The manager was also shouting in his effort to make peace, but his voice was drowned by the other two. The four-letter word flew senselessly between them, slashed harder each time, like a tennis ball between two demented, epileptic players.

The sailor began to move away, still shouting the word. Just then Wednesday Lulu broke free and threw herself at him. He staggered under her unexpected assault: she battered wildly at his face with her hands. The manager and girls and a couple of matelots grabbed at her, ripping her cheongsam. They dragged her off. The sailor spat and brushed himself disdainfully. Little Alice, who was watching from the doorway closest to the lift, suddenly broke into giggles. She pulled at the hand of her matelot, a small crook-boned youth with darkly tanned chest, saying, “Hey, come on, Jackie, what's so interesting?” She pulled him back into the room. The matelot began to close the door, but noticed Suzie and stuck out his grinning face again.

“Hey, Suzie!”

Suzie turned and looked towards him, her face expressionless.

“Jack,” he grinned. “You remember me—Jack. Jackie Boy.
Athene
, last June. Well, be seeing you, eh?”

He closed the door. Suzie turned her expressionless face back to the scene in the corridor. The sailor was moving off again. He stopped and hurled his parting shot over his shoulder, to the effect that so far as he was concerned Wednesday Lulu, the manager, the whole mucking lot of them, could go and make love to themselves in four letters. He went off down the stairs.

The spectators began to disperse. The manager and Wednesday Lulu and a few others stood in a group in the corridor holding a post-mortem, angry and red-faced and shouting. We pushed past. I followed unhappily behind Suzie, feeling jarred and soiled, and wondering if we should ever recapture our mood.

But I had no sooner closed the door of my room, muffling the voices in the corridor, and turned to see Suzie standing there in the middle of the room, white-faced and half shy as though she had never been in the room before, than I knew that we should quite easily do so, and that the scene outside had not been the disaster I had feared; for there was still that luminous quality, that wonderment about her, that meant that the miracle had withstood the assault: that it had survived the ugly rage-distorted face of Wednesday Lulu, the half-dressed sailors, the four-letter word, the encounter with Jack from the
Athene
last June: that her feelings were still intact.

I rang the bell and the No. 2 floor boy brought tea. We took our glasses out onto the balcony and leaned on the balustrade. Across the harbor lights glowed in the windows of the Peninsula, and hung in garlands on the cruise ship. The neon name on the funnel was a smudge of green.

“That ship is still there,” Suzie said.

“Yes, I think it goes tomorrow.”

She said, “I am still scared.”

“So am I. But we'll be all right, won't we?”

“Yes.”

“Let's go to bed, Suzie.”

She did not move, and presently I went inside and pottered for a while and then got into bed myself. Suzie was still at the balustrade. She came in without looking at me and stood at the dressing table, idly touching my hairbrush, my books, the new ash tray with which Ah Tong had replaced the one she had broken yesterday. She picked up the brush and pensively brushed her hair, looking at herself in the mirror. Then she put down the brush and began to undo the hooks and eyes of her collar; and after she had freed the collar, she felt for the zip-fastener under her armpit. She drew down the zip a short way and then stopped.

“Robert, please put off the light.”

I laughed. “You aren't shy about undressing?”

“Yes, shy—with you.”

I turned off the switch over the bed. I could see Suzie's silhouette against the sky in the open balcony door—the sky over the mainland, the sky of China.

She stepped out of her cheongsam. Her hair fell forward across her face as she leaned to remove her stockings. She came and slipped into bed beside me. Her body was cool and unknown, and nobody had touched it before, because it had been cleansed by a miracle and remembered no touch. And I thought: this is the moment of beginning, and it is the loveliest moment of all. And then the two imperfect halves had come together again to make their whole.

And then a strange thing happened; for at the moment of perfect unity, the moment at which there is no self-consciousness and no division of joy, Suzie burst into great sobs, so violent and cataclysmic that it was as though she was being shaken by some force outside herself; and I was half afraid, for her body seemed too tiny and fragile to be able to bear it.

And then the sobs had passed, and we had fallen apart into our halves again, and she was lying alone and abandoned and gently crying.

Later she stirred and felt for my hand. She said, “Robert, that was funny, I never cried like that before.”

“It was rather wonderful.”

“But of course, I forgot—I never had a man before, did I? You are my first man.”

“Yes, no wonder you cried.”

“I was all right for a virgin, wasn't I?”

“You were marvelous for a virgin.”

“The best virgin you ever had?”

“I never had a virgin before. I never had any girl before.”

“I'm the first girl you ever had?”

“Yes, of course, you're the first girl, and I'm the first man, and the world has only just begun.”

Chapter Six

I
woke in the morning at nine o'clock. Suzie was still asleep and I stretched over her to the bedside table for a novel and started to read, but I could not concentrate because I was too happy, so I laid down the book and watched Suzie sleeping. Her face was as peaceful as a child's, and the lids smooth over the eyes, and the lashes spread like little Japanese fans so that I could count each hair. I wondered if she was dreaming, and what Chinese dreams were like. I hoped they were like Chinese poetry, full of wicket gates and rock pools and chirruping cicadas, and warm rice wine and love.

She did not move for an hour. Then she stirred and sighed and rolled over and settled herself comfortably in another position.

“Come on, Suzie darling,” I said. “Wake up.”

She purred like a sleeping kitten and said, “‘Darling.'”

“Wake up.”

She rolled over again and snuggled against me. She giggled and shivered deliciously, and said, “Very beautiful.”

“What's beautiful?”

“‘Darling.' Deep voice very beautiful. Boom-boom!”

“I'm going to get some tea. Watch Ah Tong's face when he comes in.”

I rang the bell by the bed. Suzie pulled the sheet up to her chin without opening her eyes. Ah Tong knocked and came in with the teapot. He saw Suzie and stopped, his eyes like saucers. Then he remembered himself and crossed to the bedside table, averting his eyes from the bed and struggling to keep his face wooden. He exchanged the new teapot for the old pot in the padded basket. I decided that I had tortured him enough and said, “That surprised you, didn't it, Ah Tong?”

He looked up and saw me laughing. His face exploded into grins of relief.

“Yes, sir. I am happy, sir.”

I knew that Ah Tong was really happy because it had worried him that I did not have a girl. He had suspected either that there was something wrong with me, or else that I was an agent of the police; but now I was in bed with a girl like anybody else, and so all was well. He poured out two glasses of tea, happily grinning, and left the room. Suzie had not opened her eyes.

“‘Darling,'” she purred. “Boom-boom!”

At eleven o'clock Ah Tong came in again with my laundry. He was still grinning. He reported that Rodney had asked him if Suzie was still with me, and that he had tactfully pleaded ignorance.

“How did he know she was here in the first place?” I asked.

“Number Two floor boy told him last night, sir.”

He went out. Suzie sat up and said, “Hey, what's the time? I must go and see my baby.”

“Can I come with you?”

“No!”

“Why not?”

“Because you didn't say ‘darling.'”

“Can I come with you, darling?”

“Boom-boom! Yes, all right.”

We dressed and walked round to her room. Her white evening cheongsam and embroidered jacket were conspicuous in the morning, especially as we entered the narrow teeming back streets. Suzie's room was in a corner building at the intersection of two streets, above a paper shop selling paper articles for providing dead relatives with the wherewithal for the next world. The gaily colored paper models were hung out for display over the pavement like Christmas decorations: paper clothes, houses, junks, cars, and bundles of million-dollar notes for financial provisions, which could be transmitted to dispossessed spirits by the simple expedient of burning. There were more paper shops in Wanchai than grocers. Suzie thought it possibly unlucky to be living over one, though it was better than living over the shop next door, which sold coffins.

The entrance to her house was between the coffin shop and the paper shop. I followed her up the steep narrow stairs. The house was rickety and old, and the landings littered with rubbish. There was a smell of cooking and urine and close-packed humanity. The rooms on the two lower landings were each occupied by ten or fifteen people, and through the open doors I could see children shoveling rice into their mouths from bowls, mothers suckling their infants, old listless bearded men lying like corpses. There was a din of voices and quarreling. We climbed the last dark staircase to the top where the two rooms were both let to single tenants, and the landing swept. We entered Suzie's room. It was small and fastidiously clean, but the walls and little balcony were stacked high with nameless junk. The Chinese were collectors, and Suzie typically could not bear to throw anything away: not an empty bottle, not a tin, not an old cardboard box, not a piece of string.

The amah was squatting on the floor mending one of Suzie's cheongsams. The baby was playing with an old tin. It saw Suzie and beat the tin on the floor, grinning and dribbling ecstatically. Suzie gathered it into her arms, indifferent to the dribbles that smeared her white silk dress. She chattered to it adoringly in Chinese.

“He's looking marvelous, Suzie,” I said, though it always hurt me to see that sallow pathetic little Eurasian face. And it still seemed to me very underdeveloped for its age.

“He still coughs, you know,” Suzie said. “Cough-cough-cough! Hey, why you cough, my naughty baby?” She tickled its ribs so that it spluttered afresh. “Yes, my beautiful! My good-looking! You speak nicely to my boy friend, and maybe one day he will take your picture.”

I remembered that I had once promised to take her baby's photograph, but my camera was broken and not worth mending. So I suggested that we should take him to a professional photographer's; I had been trying all morning to think of some present I could give her, and this was the ideal solution.

Suzie was delighted by the idea, and spent several minutes over the choice of cheongsam in which to be photographed with the baby. She changed for decency's sake behind a blanket held up by the amah. The amah was also to come along, and the old woman showed her pleasure at this prospect with great broad silver-toothed grins. Her brown old peasant's face was finely matted with wrinkles, but her little black beady eyes were as clear as a girl's. She wore a blue jacket, black baggy cotton trousers, and black felt slippers; her gray hair was knotted in a bun held by a big cheap plastic comb. Suzie was very fond of the old woman but thought her stupid, and often impatiently snapped at her. The amah accepted her scoldings without resentment, because although Suzie was such a slip of a thing, she had made money, wore beautiful silk, and could afford a room of her own. She felt great admiration for Suzie's success in her job with the foreign sailors.

The amah folded the blanket, then put the baby into a carrier-sling on her back. The baby promptly fell asleep sucking its thumb.

“You ready, good-looking?” Suzie said. “All right, we go now.”

We walked down the narrow alleyway to Hennessy Road, the amah shuffling behind. There were several photographers in the locality, and we stopped before the first. The central showpiece in the window was a tinted portrait of a young English sailor with straw-colored hair, washy-pink cheeks, and angelic blue-tinted eyes. The surrounding pictures were all of Chinese couples sitting in stiff conventional European poses, the girls with crinkly newly permed hair, and the young men with their hair smarmed and glossy, and their ties and white collars and breast-pocket handkerchiefs all neatly in place. Only the Chinese physiognomy of the sitters distinguished the window from its many counterparts around the main-line railway stations in London.

“This looks very nice,” Suzie said, and we went inside.

The photographer was a self-important Chinese youth with patent-leather hair, an American twang, and a bullying professional manner. Suzie, however, knew exactly what she wanted, and she firmly put him in his place. She arranged the poses herself, told the offended young man when to press the button, and scolded him when he was not ready.

“What's the matter? You expect my baby to sit still while you fiddle? No, wait now. I must make him laugh again.” And she quickly did so—for she seemed able to produce almost any expression on its face to order, making it laugh, smile, look solemn, or furrow its brows in concentrated thought.

The photographs were all taken against a sentimental crudely painted back-cloth of terrace, balustrade, flower-urn, and marble pavilion. Suzie arranged several poses of the baby alone, then of herself and the baby, then of the baby and amah. Finally I was roped in, and made to stand behind the chair while Suzie seated herself with the baby on her lap.

“But it'll look as if I'm the father, Suzie,” I protested.

“Yes. You mind?”

“No, I'd be very flattered.”

She giggled. “And I will tell my baby, ‘That man is your father. That's why you're so good-looking!'”

“You'll have to say it with more conviction than that. Now stop making me laugh, or I'll spoil the picture.”

Afterwards I only just managed to snatch her bag out of her hand in time to stop her paying the deposit. I took the receipt and we left the shop. The amah shuffled off with the baby once more asleep in the sling. We stood on the pavement, the trams rattling past in the brilliant sunshine.

“What shall we do now, Suzie?”

“Cinema?”

“No, let's just get on the top of a tram and stay there until it stops.”

“All right.”

We boarded a tram for Shaukiwan, the junk-building village, but a few minutes later I remembered that it was Saturday and that there would be a race meeting in the afternoon. Suzie had never been to the races and said she would like to go, so we got off the tram and took another tram going back into town. We got off in the Central District and had lunch in a big Cantonese restaurant where a succession of girls came round the tables with trays of dishes and you helped yourself as you pleased. There were thirty or forty girls with as many different dishes, including sliced chicken and duck, shark's-fin soup, pork pieces, fried prawns, and a variety of Cantonese specialties in circular wooden steamers, and the girls were passing all the time.

We had a dozen dishes between us and afterwards a girl came and counted the empty plates and steamers and made out the bill. I had known this sort of restaurant to be inexpensive, but the total came to even less than I had expected.

“That leaves all the more to lose on the horses,” I said. “Come on, Suzie, let's go and try our luck.”

The racecourse was in Happy Valley, behind Wanchai. It was overlooked by big new apartment blocks, and by squatters' huts clinging to every ledge of the escarpment. Inside the circular track were football fields with games in progress. The first race had finished when we arrived and women in black trousers and wide conical straw hats were spread out in line across the track, pressing down loosened turf with their bare feet. A brass band with uniformed Chinese bandsmen was playing
Poet and Peasant
.

The grandstand and enclosures were packed. There were many English businessmen and their wives, and army officers with hacking jackets and shooting sticks, but they were swallowed up by the Chinese crowds. Many of the Chinese were very rich. They wore high-necked Chinese gowns or well-tailored English suits, and their wives wore pretty cheongsams and trailed tantalizing whiffs of Paris perfume.

“Too many pretty girls,” Suzie said. “I am scared to lose you.”

“Nonsense, Suzie. You knock them all into cocked hats.”

“I keep hold of your hand, in case you turn butterfly.”

There were no bookmakers on the course and we went over to the Tote. I had no difficulty in explaining the betting to Suzie because gambling is in the Chinese blood, and she had often gambled at mah-jongg and fan-tan and other games. We each put five dollars on a horse. I backed a horse called Misgiving, because it exactly described my state of mind in parting with the five dollars, and Suzie backed No. 7, because seven was her lucky number for the day.

We left the Tote and made our way toward the rail. Suzie suddenly tightened her grip on my hand.

“That butterfly man!”

I saw Rodney coming towards us, absorbed in his race card. He wore a pale green sharkskin suit, a green-spotted bow tie, and suede shoes. He had evidently just paid a visit to the barber for his hair was freshly cropped—cropped so short, in fact, that it looked as if his skull had been painted with gum arabic and the hair sprinkled on from a little packet.

“Quick, Suzie, he hasn't seen us,” I said.

However, just then Rodney glanced up from his race card. I tried to look as if we had not been hoping to avoid him, and said, “Well, hello!”

Rodney walked past, cutting us dead.

“He is no good, that man,” Suzie said.

“Never mind, we're not going to let him spoil our day.”

We stood behind the crowd at the rail, waiting for the race to begin. Suzie, with a woman's intense interest in other women, absorbed herself in a study of our female neighbors. She examined their faces, their hair styles, their jewels, their dresses, their shoes. Presently there was a shout from the crowd.

“Here we go, Suzie!”

She reluctantly withdrew her gaze from a pretty Chinese girl with diamond clip and urchin-style hair; but soon the horses had diminished into a stream of moving specks beyond the football fields, and so she resumed her study.

A minute or two later the bobbing jockeys reappeared over the heads in front of us and passed between the winning posts. Suzie's horse, No. 7, was towards the back.

“Who won?” Suzie said. “Your horse?”

“I haven't spotted mine yet.” But just then Misgiving came frisking past without his rider, looking very naughty and pleased with himself. “No, mine's last. I think his jockey's given up racing and gone to join the footballers.”

Suzie pulled my arm and nodded towards the girl with the urchin hair. “Smart,” she said. “Don't you think that girl's hair is smart?”

“Yes, but don't start getting ideas, because I'm not letting you cut yours off.”

“She smells beautiful, too. That is very beautiful scent.”