World of Suzie Wong : A Novel (9781101572399) (27 page)

“Suzie, why don't you come back to the Nam Kok?”

“No, I will never go back. I will stay here in the Happy Room.”

And nothing I could say would change her or make her relax with me; and though I asked her to dance, hoping to rediscover on the dance floor that same magic that had united us once before, she quite firmly refused. However, she did eventually agree to let me accompany her home, and we took a bus to Jordan Road and then a ferry to Wanchai; for she was not living in Kowloon after all, but was back in her old room in Wanchai above the paper shop, which she had prudently kept on when she had gone off with Rodney. She had only told Rodney that she had moved to Kowloon so that he would not come and bother her.

I reminded her on the ferry that this was the scene of our first meeting, and sentimentally took her hand. She carefully withdrew it. She shifted a little farther away along the seat. We walked almost in silence through Wanchai, and as we said good-by outside her house, at the foot of the mean narrow little stairs, she said, “Now we finish.”

“Can't I see you again, Suzie?”

“No, I would rather not. I would rather finish.”

We shook hands formally, and I started back toward the water front through the narrow emptying streets. I had not really accepted the parting as final; and then as I walked, there suddenly occurred to me an excuse for seeing her again. I still had in my drawer those photographs that we had had taken that morning in Hennessy Road: I had collected them after she had gone off with Rodney, and she had never seen them. And as soon as I got back to my room I took them out, removed the duplicate prints that I had ordered for myself, and returned the others to the envelope. I decided to take them to her the next evening at the Happy Room.

The next morning I woke to torrential rain—the first rain since I had come to Hong Kong except for that one evening of drizzle when I had met Betty Lau—and Ah Tong, coming in with tea, said, “The wet has begun, sir.”

I sat up in bed. “Oh, God, Ah Tong! Look!”

Through the balcony door was a scene of devastation. On one side the rain was sweeping right in, and on the other exploding on the stone balustrade in great fountains that spurted everywhere; the floor was swimming, and everything on the balcony, including a dozen canvases and all my pastels and paints, had been deluged. Together we carried everything inside, and I spent the next hour wiping and drying what I could, and rearranging the room to accommodate all the paraphernalia from outside, while still leaving myself space to work. I kept reminding myself, meanwhile, that I must ring up Kay; for I had been supposed to meet her last night, and had put her off in order to go and look for Suzie, leaving a message for her at the hospital without explanation. I did not want to ring her but eventually brought myself to do so, though I did not tell her over the phone about Suzie. I arranged to meet her for a drink at the Gloucester at half-past six before going over to Kowloon.

It was still raining at six o'clock, and since I had no mackintosh I bolted through the rain to a near-by shop and bought a green Chinese parasol for a dollar, which was as good as an umbrella and cheap enough not to matter losing. I arrived at the Gloucester before Kay, and had just ordered myself a drink when I saw her come in. She sailed up cheerfully, saying, “Well, that confirms it.” And when I asked her what she meant, she said, “I had a feeling yesterday that you'd put me off because of Suzie, and now you're looking so sheepish and ashamed of yourself that I was obviously right. So for God's sake cheer up, because I've had plenty of time since yesterday to get used to it.”

I told her all that had happened, and how much I had been affected by Suzie's reappearance. And I asked her if she thought I was mad to go and see Suzie again.

“Do you mean looking at it from your point of view, or mine, or hers?” she said.

“I suppose I really mean from hers,” I said. “Do you think that she honestly doesn't want to see me again? Or does she secretly hope I'll be masterful and break down the barriers regardless?”

“No doubt a lot of women would favor the ‘masterful and regardless' line,” she said. “But from what you've told me about Suzie, I've an idea she means it.”

“Then I shouldn't see her tonight. I should just put these photos in the post.”

“No, you damn well go. Otherwise you'll never be sure, and you'll blame me for giving you wrong advice.”

“Well, anyhow, I've got to go over to Kowloon for the shirt.”

“As if you needed an excuse!”

“Kay, I don't think I should see you again until I've got Suzie out of my system.”

“That's up to you. Anyhow, you'd better let me run you to the ferry in my car, because now it's really coming down in buckets.”

The harbor was gray with rain, and as I crossed in the ferry other boats loomed up through the driving torrent as unexpectedly as through a fog. At the Kowloon pier I decided extravagantly to take a taxi to avoid being soaked before I reached the Happy Room, and on the way I stopped at the Indian shop, where the Indian beamed and shook my hand, and said he supposed I had come for my shirt, and I said that I bet he had still not got it.

“Ah, you lose, you lose!” he grinned happily, his gray round face creased to the ears, and he proudly held up the shirt. Then he wrapped it in brown paper, trying to look sad now, and saying, “But you are too clever a businessman. You are getting this shirt for less than it cost me. I am losing money.”

“Then perhaps you'd rather I didn't take it?” I said hopefully; for although the shirt had looked fine in the sunny weather, the gray pounding rain outside made it seem unseasonable and offensively loud.

“Oh, no, business is business,” he beamed quickly. “I must keep my promise, isn't it?”

I paid off the taxi at the Happy Room and dashed across the pavement to the shelter of the doorway, clutching the parcel with the shirt. I had already lost my dollar parasol somewhere, in Kay's car or on the ferry or in the Indian shop, I could not remember. I went inside. The rain had kept soldiers away, and the place was as empty as before. However, Suzie was one of the few girls occupied: she sat at a table with a gangling young lance corporal, with a smooth polished public-school face that looked too cherubic to have known a razor, and that unmistakable air of the upper class doing its National Service; and when I asked his permission to speak to Suzie for a minute, he politely half rose, standing awkwardly bent between bench seat and table, like a sixth former rising at his desk for the headmaster.

“Help yourself, old chap,” he said. “I say, I hope I haven't pinched your girl or anything?”

“Not at all.”

“I say, I'm awfully glad.”

The light was too dim to look at the photographs at the table, and we went out through the velvet curtain and stood in the toilet-smelling passage under the naked bulb. Suzie was delighted I had brought the photos. She giggled as she came to the pose of her baby on all fours looking up at the camera in surprise. Then she came to the picture in which I stood like the father behind her chair. She studied it in silence, her face noncommital, then without comment put it behind the others and went on to the next. It was another of her baby alone.

“But he looks much better now, after living in that village by the sea,” she said, her eyes sparkling. “Oh yes, he looks beautiful now, with great big fat pink cheeks like an Englishman—look, like this!” She blew out her own cheeks to show me. “And he has lost that cough, you know. Oh, yes, it's quite gone, that cough.”

“Suzie, how marvelous!”

“He never coughs now at all. I think it was that good air by the sea. And bathing. Oh, yes, he bathed every day, you know, in the sea! Only there were too many big waves. They just came whoosh! like that and knocked him over.”

She giggled happily. She was in such a good mood, so much more relaxed with me than yesterday, that I felt all the barriers between us had gone. I was only thankful that I had not taken her at her word and had decided to come. But presently, as she held up a photograph to the light and I placed my hand over hers to lift it higher, I felt such a sudden change come over her at my touch—such a palpable resistance to me—that I withdrew my hand in dismay almost as if I had been stung. And I knew that I had been mistaken before; her pleasure over the photographs had deceived me, and in fact all the barriers were still there. And I thought, Kay is right, she meant what she said. She doesn't want me. I might manage to storm the barriers if I tried hard enough, but it isn't what she wants.

I said, “All right, Suzie. I'll leave you now.”

“Yes.” She held my eyes. “Because one glass of wine is better spilled. You remember?”

“Yes, I remember.” It was a Chinese proverb that she had once told me in another connection, and meant that it was better to drink no wine at all, than to drink only one glass with no possibility of replenishment; for the taste of the wine would only arouse a thirst for more—a thirst that, left unquenched, would give more pain than the pleasure of the one glassful had been worth.

And thus it would be if we went on meeting without becoming lovers: the whetted appetite, the denial, the pain.

“Well, good-by, Suzie. You know where to find me if ever you want me. You can always ring me if there's anything you want.”

“Yes. Good-by, Robert.”

I turned and went back through the velvet curtains into the pink womb of the room. I went over to the table where I had left my parcel. The lance corporal with the smooth sixth-form face rose crookedly in meticulous regard to manners.

“I say, excuse my asking, old chap,” he said, “but what exactly's the form here?”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, I'm such a frightful ignoramus about these matters. But that girl—I mean, she's absolutely wizard, really, and I was just—well, to put it bluntly, old chap, she doesn't really go the whole hog, does she?”

“You'd better ask her.”

I took the parcel and went out. The street was pockmarked by the rain. I turned down Nathan Road through the gray driving streaks. The rain stung my face and pounded coldly on my shoulders. My fingers made holes in the parcel as the brown paper grew soggy in my hand.

III

The rain continued for over a week. The noise and violence of the downpour everlastingly rose and fell. Now it swelled to a great drumming, splashing crescendo; now diminished to a whispering drizzle. Even for Hong Kong's rainy season such weather was freakish. Many parts of the town were flooded; squatters' huts had been washed down the escarpment in their hundreds; the streets were long spitting gray rivers down which you caught a misty glimpse of a Chinese, barefooted under a black umbrella, hitching his cotton trousers at the knee as he dodged a lonely tram. And there was no view from my balcony but the streaking gray curtain.

The rain coincided with a dearth of naval ships in the harbor and gloom descended on the Nam Kok bar. The girls knitted, yawned in corners, fished in their handbags for coins to feed the juke box. The comedienne Fifi persevered heroically to keep up flagging spirits; but at last even Fifi's fund of comedy ran low and she subsided with a long gaping yawn, closed her eyes, murmured, “Somebody remember to wake me up for Yankee payday,” and fell sound asleep. Then the heroin-smoker Big Alice, wearing a grubby wet shirt, walked in from the quay, sat down alone, hypnotized the only sailor in the place out of the arms of Jeannie, and bore him off upstairs; and everybody woke up to enjoy half an hour of good honest indignation.

One day I was in the bar, taking a mah-jongg lesson from Gwenny, when the manager said there was a call for me on the bar telephone. Only Suzie would ring me in the bar. I jumped up and raced across the room. But it was Kay.

“You're not furious with me for ringing?” she said.

“Of course not,” I said. “But how did you know I was in the bar?”

“I didn't.”

“Oh, I expect the switchboard guessed. Anyhow, it's nice to hear you, Kay.”

“I was just wondering how you got on with Suzie the other night.”

“You were quite right about her, of course. She didn't want to see me, so I've not bothered her since.”

“Well, the rain's getting me down. You wouldn't like to take me out to dinner?”

“Yes, I'd love it.”

We had a Chinese dinner and went to a cinema. When we came out the rain was driving down in a solid sheet. The visibility was only a few yards and we had to crawl along in the car at five miles an hour. We stopped outside the Nam Kok and sat talking until it had subsided again, because Kay had to drive home alone.

“You sounded dreadfully disappointed this morning when you found it was me on the telephone,” she said.

“Oh, nonsense, Kay.”

“You're a bad liar. You thought it was going to be Suzie, didn't you?”

“Well, as the call came through in the bar—”

“That means you haven't really finished with her.”

“I had a feeling she might ring sometime. But it's ridiculous, because she won't. Kay, when's your next day off?”

“Thursday.”

“Can we meet?”

“If Suzie doesn't ring before then.”

“She won't. I'll see you Thursday.”

I dashed across the pavement. I stood in the entrance and watched her drive off, her tires splashing stickily on the road. I dropped into the bar for a beer, then went upstairs. Ten minutes later the telephone rang.

“Hello. This is Suzie.”

I could hardly speak. I was grinning with excitement. I had expected it to be Kay ringing to say she had got home, or could not come on Thursday, or wanted to change the time.

“Suzie!” I said. “You sound miles away! And that funny little voice!”

There was a long pause. In the background I could hear voluble Chinese voices. It sounded like a shop. My grin died as I realized that something must be wrong.