by John Harris
Emmeline herself had changed. She had lost weight and seemed to be all bones, angles and contours these days. Willie saw her occasionally, but she always looked straight through him as if he didn’t exist. Then she disappeared and they learned that, for the sake of economy, she had given up her big house and moved away.
Chinese politics, for the most part beyond the Europeans in Shanghai, who weren’t very interested, anyway, seemed to consist of assassinations and treachery. Since the death of Sun Yat-Sen, the two governments, one in Peking, one in Canton, seemed to draw further apart, and there was the beginning of a marked advancement to power of Chiang K’Ai-Shek, who suddenly started to wage a war of words on the warlords who had preyed on China since 1911. He was now the master of Canton and more than one warlord in the vicinity had decided that the old Chinese proverb, ‘The soundest of the sixty-six principles of waging war is to run away’, was a good one and had set off for a long holiday in Japan, Singapore or even the South of France.
Occasionally Willie heard from Nadya, but her letters were always addressed to his office, marked personal, and placed quietly on his desk by George Kee without comment. She had quickly established herself, as he knew she would, and every six months when the Sarth Shipping Line took him to Hong Kong, he called on her, discussed her business and stayed with her. There were no questions, no dispute about it. He simply arrived and that was that.
Abigail had noticed the absence of the antiquities and treasures from Russia and assumed that Nadya, who had put so many of them her way, had simply gone out of business with the revolution. Occasionally she asked Willie what had happened to her and he put on a show of not knowing. Then, in 1926, on a business trip to Hong Kong, she returned and announced that she had discovered where she was.
Willie had frozen with horror, but Abigail showed no resentment.
‘No wonder I’ve had nothing for some time,’ she said. ‘Your Nadya Kourganova has set up in business on her own.’
Willie held his breath, wondering what she had discovered, but she went on cheerfully. ‘I saw the name on the window and went in,’ she said. ‘Willie, she’s beautiful.’
Willie pretended indifference, aware that Abigail was too shrewd to be deluded. But she still seemed unaffected.
‘When the revolution came one of the commissars took over her business and she had to leave Russia. She had a stock of things for me, but decided to use them to start in business herself. I’m told down there that she’s considered quite an expert.’
‘You talked to her?’ Willie hardly dared frame the words.
‘Oh, yes. We had tea together and talked for a long time. She’s charming.’
Willie’s tenseness subsided. Thank God, he said under his breath. Obviously Nadya had been guarded in what she had said and had not implicated him in her escape from Russia so that Abigail was under the impression she had managed it on her own. Perhaps she would never know the truth. Perhaps she didn’t want to. Perhaps, even, she was just too honest to suspect anyone of anything she wouldn’t do herself. On the other hand – he eyed her warily – Abigail was no fool and, in her trips about the world, she had endured more than one pass at her from a man attracted by her good looks. Perhaps she did know, after all. He was in a quandary, lost in a morass of conflicting thoughts, so that he never quite knew whether to feel guilty or proud.
He must be one of the luckiest of men alive, he decided. He had two women and both of them considered that he – Willie Sarth, who was without doubt a liar and a cheat – was God’s gift to womenkind. Neither of them made demands on him, both trusted him, and he knew he could trust both of them in return. He was, he thought, faintly bemused by the idea, like having two wives.
Young Wissermann had missed Polly while she was in the States and had finally plucked up courage to ask her to marry him. The ceremony was held in the Cathedral and the reception seemed to include everybody who was anybody in Shanghai. The Wissermanns had wanted it to be held at the Balalaika and had been startled at the vehemence of Willie’s ‘No’. The place had changed its location, expanded and was now considered among the best in Shanghai, because Yip Hsao-Li, probably wanting a place of his own where he could foxtrot, waltz and tango to his heart’s desire, had put money into the business and expanded it into a place where tea dances and evening affairs were part of the programme. Despite the arguments, despite even Polly’s pleading, Willie refused to consider it, refusing even to explain why. It almost caused a rift between him and the Wissermanns, but then the matter was dropped abruptly and he suspected that Abigail had explained something he had been unable to explain, because Yip’s partner and manager, Zychov, was Nadya’s husband.
Half a dozen nationalities were represented at the wedding, and Abigail, in pale blue, was tremulously pleased with the result. Among the hard-headed business types who had to be invited were a few of Thomas’ student friends, including the luscious Chan Fan-Su and her family, Edward’s navy associates in uniform, and a whole crowd of Americans who had arrived especially for the occasion from the west coast of America. Old Wissermann, a long, lean man with a pale face and grey hair, had settled what seemed to be an enormous sum of money on his son.
‘Can’t let ’em be short, hey?’ he said.
To Willie, who had grown up knowing what being short meant, he seemed to be in danger of spoiling them.
‘My boy’s a lucky guy,’ Wissermann went on. ‘Still I guess your daughter hasn’t done so badly either. We ought to see more of each other, William. We’re in business in the same city but never see each other except at the Club. I’ll have to put my wife on to your wife.’
Willie hoped he wouldn’t, not because Wissermann wasn’t a good and honest businessman, but because he did all the things that Willie chose not to do – play golf, go to church and attend all the edifying lectures and meetings that were held.
There seemed an enormous number of loud-voiced women with mouths that were vivid slashes of lipstick, all discussing Paris, where the honeymoon was to be spent.
‘Why Paris?’ Willie asked Abigail. ‘What’s wrong with China?’
After all, he thought, Hong Kong compared favourably with anywhere in the world, the Peak sparkling with light at night, the illuminations reflected in the black water where the unending ferries and native vessels plied backwards and forwards like shiny bugs.
‘Or what’s wrong with Penang?’ he persisted. ‘Or Macassar? Or Java. This part of the world has far more beautiful places than Europe.’
He had come to know them all – places that sang of adventure: Penang, rising precipitously from the water’s edge crag on crag of naked rock jutting out from the green vegetation and surrounded by the deep blue of the Indian Ocean; Java, its creeks crowded with prahus waiting for the tide to work their way up to Soerabaya; Tananarive in Madagascar; Quantico; Macassar, the great emporium of the East, exporting sandalwood and beeswax from Flores and Timor, trepang from the Gulf of Carpentaria, oil of Cajuputi from Bouru, nutmegs, spices and pepper from the Spice Islands, mussoi bark from New Guinea; Zanzibar, where you could smell the cloves a mile offshore; Mombasa, where the skeletons back of Bagamoyo showed where the Arab slavers had murdered black men and women.
‘They know the East,’ Abigail pointed out gently to him. ‘They want to go somewhere new. Everyone wants to go to Paris once in their lives.’
‘I don’t.’
‘I did. And I’ve been. Leave it to them.’
When the newlyweds returned, they moved up to Yangpo, where young Wissermann had been manager of his father’s interests. Wissermann had given his son a house there and Abigail, who’d been helping her daughter buy furniture, was going up on the three-decker, Fan Ling, to help them settle in. Willie saw them off, promising to join them within a month. Firecrackers were set off and paper serpentines were thrown from the ship until it began to pull away from the quay, and he watched it until it faded into the mist, then he turned abruptly and headed along the quay to step aboard the Lady Robert
s bound for Hong Kong.
He had not forgotten the Lady Roberts. It was almost as if he felt gratitude to the old ship for the way she had brought Nadya out of Russia, but, in addition, he realised, despite their attitude of derision towards her, she had always been one of the Sarth Line’s best earners. The function of a fleet of merchant ships was to close the physical gap of marine space in the economy between production and consumption, and of the tramp steamers that supplied the need most were owned by British companies carrying heavy and bulky commodities. With the British coalfields behind them, they had the advantage of always being able to obtain outward cargoes of coal so that they didn’t have to go out in ballast. ‘Coal out, grain home’ was the cry.
Over the years, however, Willie had learned to compete with them and was careful to arrange his charters so that his ships moved around the East minimising ballast voyages and following the seasonal shifts in supply and demand, and tried to terminate the voyages where he could secure another cargo. His ships carried rubber, tea, coffee, tobacco, cotton, jute, palm oil, grain, Malayan tin, timber and iron ore for Japan. In the Eastern waters, where communities found it difficult to reach each other, ships were useful and he had taken care to develop his trade among the islands that needed seaborne cargoes to get rid of their flax, hemp, copra and vegetable oils, so that his vessels plied between the Chinese mainland, the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, the Pacific Islands and Malaya, always with one eye on the Australian wheat season, because wheat always took ships southward in winter. The Dutch East Indies alone had 3,000 islands across an area covering 3,500 miles and a population of 100,000,000, and if ships didn’t operate on schedule it could be difficult, even fatal, for the island populations.
The whole basis of shipping was exactitude, and he based his passenger schedules on the fact that businessmen needed to rely on them. For this reason, and with his growing attachment to the Lady Roberts, he had decided to fit her out as a cargo-passenger steamer.
She had always proved a bit of a surprise in that her engine had never let them down, so he had her cleaned from stem to stern, overhauled and re-equipped to carry a dozen first class passengers, a horde of deck passengers and a cargo, and had sat back to watch her become one of the Sarth Line’s assets.
He climbed aboard her now, pleased with her appearance, enjoying the brass and the white paint. As he reached the deck, John Yeh, given the ship as a token of gratitude for his part in the Vladivostok adventure, came forward to greet him. He never smiled, never gave much away in the manner of words, but he was always loyal and accepted Willie, a fully qualified master now with a certificate and sufficient sea time behind him, as an equal.
Heading for the first class cabin which was always kept for him when he wished to travel, Willie reflected that the Sarth Line was still growing. It now consisted of ten ships, from 750 tons dead weight to the 2,500 tons of the Apu Shani, and the Tahaf, the latest additions, which he had bought from a firm running from Ceylon. He seemed to have a gift for knowing when someone was needing to get rid of some of his assets and, though the Sarth Line ships were all small and some of them shabby, they continued to make a steady profit. As he had often said, they would never be mail steamers, never Glen Line or P & O, but they were doing a steady trade and he had noticed that lately they were being trusted occasionally with specie or bank notes, something which had led to him having grilles fixed round the bridge and the entrance to the engine rooms, because pirates were still busy along the coast.
Nadya was waiting for him, more beautiful than ever. Her shop had acquired an air of graciousness and prosperity now and she was clearly happy at the way things had turned out. But the strained look in her eyes had returned and he knew something was wrong.
‘My husband has found me,’ she said.
Willie’s eyes became cold and hard. ‘What happened?’
‘He turned up on the doorstep.’
‘I hope you shot him.’
She managed a laugh. But it died quickly. Zychov had asked for money. As usual, he had spent more than he was worth and was short of capital.
‘Why doesn’t he ask for it from Yip?’ Willie snapped. ‘They’re in business together. Was Yip here with him?’
‘He said he was. He said they had come to attend to some affairs of theirs.’
Willie drew a deep breath. ‘Nadya, did you give him anything?’
‘Yes.’
‘That doesn’t make sense, Nadya. I didn’t give you that money so you could pass it on to him.’
‘I didn’t pass on your money, William.’ Her voice was suddenly cold. ‘I passed on my own. Money I had earned here.’
Willie was taken aback by her anger. ‘Nadya,’ he said. ‘Do you still love him?’
‘No.’
‘But you’re still concerned for him?’
‘He was my husband.’
‘I’m your lover!’
Somehow, they managed to settle their quarrel, but it brought a little cold wind between them. She swore Zychov meant nothing to her, that the only man in her life was Willie, but, remembering Zychov, hating him as he had never hated anyone because he had once left him to die and was his rival for Nadya’s affections, he wasn’t sure if he could believe her.
But he was an easygoing man for the most part and, somehow, they managed to get back on an even keel and talk instead about her business. She was already doing well, she said. ‘I can run it with one assistant,’ she insisted, ‘and that’s enough for a middle-aged woman.’
‘You’re not middle-aged,’ Willie protested.
‘I’m no longer young and neither are you. I’m prepared to settle for calm.’
They made love that night and somehow, perhaps because there had been that period of anger, it was more passionate than ever and he reminded her of her words.
‘With you,’ she said, ‘it’s different. With you, it’s always different.’
She talked freely about meeting Abigail so that he found it hard to understand that two women, both of whom claimed to love him, could be so naive. How could they accept each other, each knowing perfectly well that the other must constitute a challenge? It was one of the mysteries of the female mind he would never understand. He still found it hard to accept that he was a man with a wife and a mistress, because that situation had always seemed to him as a young man to be one which was reserved only for sophisticates, magnates of great wealth, Chinese taipans, the aristocracy and Frenchmen. He’d heard of this sort of thing happening before, where wives and mistresses accepted each other, each happy to concede the other had something to give, but he found it hard to believe that such a situation existed in his case. Abigail was never the woman to accept an intruder and Nadya had never seemed the person to accept another woman who might undermine her position. But it was a situation that did exist and he tried not to think about it too much.
Returning to Shanghai, he took the Fan Ling upstream. She looked top-heavy with her three tiers of decks and a black and red funnel blowing its siren at the tiny river craft. The Yangtze Kiang was known to the Chinese as the Ta Chiang, or Great River, and changed its name more than once over its three thousand miles as it ran from Tibet into China; first the River of Golden Sand, then the Kinsha Kiang, then, as it deepened and boiled through its gorges to reach the sea, the Yangtze Kiang.
The channel was marked with buoys, the banks on either side dancing in a haze, then the banks rose and the scenery unfolded and the countryside came alive. Roofs peeped over the bund, some with green tiles, others of untidy rush matting. Water buffalo wallowed in cool mud under the trees, a train of pack ponies appeared, then a wheelbarrow loaded with a family of ten.
They overtook the crew of a junk bending double as they hauled on a thick rope of bamboo fibre with which they worked the vessel upstream. As it surged in the steamer’s wash, it threw the panting men on their faces, then sank back, dragging them off their feet, so that a child sitting on the broad back of a buffalo burst into laughter at their an
tics. Fishermen working their nets from the end of long bamboo jetties looked up as the steamer passed. The river was always busy, the junks sailing in small convoys as a protection against warlord soldiers turned pirates. A motor vessel towing strings of other junks against the current was barely making headway, but the passengers were enjoying the trip and showing none of the impatience Europeans showed. At night the breeze dropped and the opposite bank became a low purple line across water that was beginning to reflect a yellow moon, and the lights on deck brought the ping of mosquitoes as they became the target for clouds of insects.
As the ship passed through a series of lakes, the edges of what seemed to be mats of floating weed twitched nervously as if under a flirt of breeze, then, as the ship approached, they broke up, followed by the beat of wings and the spatter of webbed feet on water, and the air echoed to harsh cries as clouds of duck whirred and creaked overhead.
A junk swung abruptly across the Fan Ling’s bow amid furious shouting from the ship’s officers. The manoeuvre was to cut off the demons which the junk’s crew believed they towed behind them. If their own bows were crossed, they too would collect demons, but now, having rid themselves of their unwelcome passengers, they let off fireworks and hammered gongs because Chinese demons were not very bright and, hating noise, could be put off trying to return.
Yangpo came up at last, a large city now, with the oil tanks clearly visible. A Japanese warship was anchored in midstream, close to an ocean-going cargo ship with a grey funnel. The buildings along the bund had grown taller, beyond them the smoke haze of the Chinese city. It always seemed strange to Willie to see ships eight hundred miles from the sea.
The heat shimmered on the dusty bund, the mountain behind hazy blue. Near the landing jetties where the clubs and brothels were situated, sailors in white shorts and black boots looked like small boys going to a party. The railway from Peking ran through and, as the ship came to a stop, a train arrived, heavily-built, grey and ugly, shooting steam into the air.
