Miss Jill

by Emily Hahn

  “And they’re divorced, are they?” she asked.

  “In the process of being,” said MacQueen. “They say she was the guilty party, but Macklin let her bring suit. It’s been hanging fire some time now. He isn’t contesting, as far as I know. Good riddance, I should think.… But she’s a pretty piece.”

  “I admire her spirit,” said the shipping man. “Very sporting type.”

  “That’s not her spirit you’re admiring, Johnny,” Mrs. Mac-Queen said, and they all laughed. Jill laughed too. She was somewhat drunk with a new sensation, being on the right side of the fence.

  Then, looking up again from her cards, she saw Sonya at another card table across the lounge, looking at her with malevolence and talking vehemently to her party. Jill’s excitement ebbed abruptly. After a little while she said truthfully that she was feeling ill again and went to her cabin.

  No doubt it was partly the need of opium, which still swept over her at the times of day she was most accustomed to having it, but the change in the atmosphere was not all morbid imagination. Sonya had managed to spread the unpleasant story about her. How the Russian girl was able to do this without implicating herself Jill did not know, nor did she care. It was enough that the trip was spoiled. Next evening Jill made a brief appearance in the bar, but Mrs. MacQueen’s greeting was cold, and Mr. MacQueen pretended not to see her at all, and after drinking one cocktail alone, desolately and defiantly, Jill went out on deck.

  It did not help at all that Mr. MacQueen later that night tried to be pleasant to her when he was safely alone, after his wife had gone to bed. His manner was different then; he was overadmiring, overassiduous, and far, far too condescending all at once. There were some passengers, of course, who did not alter their attitudes toward Jill, but she felt that her holiday had been poisoned, nevertheless. Only one comfort remained to her: she had her revenge on Sonya. One night near the end of the tour, when the lounge was full, she paused by the table where the Russian woman was playing cards. In a loud, clear voice Jill said:

  “Good evening, Sonya, how goes it? I haven’t had a really good talk with you since our old days at the Casino.”

  Back in Hong Kong, she hurried at once to Rosemary’s, the only place in which she felt safe.

  In the business world he frequented Andy held an enviable position. He was wealthy and clever at his work, which was importing. His family had lived long enough in the Colony to be an important part of it, and though he was Iraquian, only the newest, crassest British arrivals would have thought to look down on him for not being a true-blue Briton. Andy held his own. He contributed to the right charities and societies, he kept a box at the races, he entered horses at the same, and he owned a cottage out at Repulse Bay. Most of the men in his own line would have been glad to marry one of their womenfolk to Andy, but he had never married. A sister kept house for him. Sometimes, but not often, someone would wonder aloud why Andy was so stubbornly a bachelor; he had been exactly the same, however, for years, and now he was middle-aged, and few people thought about it at all.

  Rosemary and her girls could have told Andy’s friends anything they wanted to know about him. That part of his life which was not as open to the world as the racecourse was rooted firmly in Rosemary’s house. Throughout Andy’s adult years he had been going to Rosemary’s. There is no doubt about it, he was eccentric in his tastes. Even at that house where everyone was accustomed to eccentricity Andy was exceptional, but he was such a very old customer that he was no longer even a topic of conversation among the girls. Like his friends at the club and the stock exchange, they no longer found him worthy of comment.

  It wasn’t as if he was any trouble to the house, like the government man who weighed two hundred pounds but always insisted on wearing a coquettish bonnet and painting his face when he was drunk. As that one was an important official, Rosemary didn’t like his being on her premises. Andy’s pleasures were more discreet, and he never attempted to carry on with them outside her walls. He paid well, too, all around, and as he had large ideas and employed numbers of girls, he was popular.

  It happened one evening that Andy’s special friend, Nancy, couldn’t or wouldn’t come to the house, and he looked about for a substitute. Rosemary suggested her favorite, Gloria, but Gloria scared Andy to death when they were alone by taking all her clothes off. He was severely shocked by such an immoral proceeding; it almost put him off Rosemary’s completely. The next candidate was Jill.

  “You didn’t handle him right,” said Jill to Gloria. “You don’t understand special work like this.”

  She was very, very careful with Andy. Instinctively she knew what he would like. She behaved like a virgin–not a true flesh-and-blood virgin, but a sentimental nineteenth-century idea of one. She was so backward and innocent that she might very well have been mistaken for an imbecile; she was shy, inarticulate, ashamed, lisping, laughing with delight when he gave her a smile, and trembling with fear at his frown. She did whatever he wanted, but she always had to be persuaded first.

  Andy fell madly in love with her. He was really in love, really emotionally moved. Nancy came no longer to Rosemary’s in his company, and after a few weeks Andy begged Jill to leave the house and devote herself to him. In the ordinary way she might have refused, but something always happened to Jill when she threw herself wholly into a part: she began to believe in the act herself, and it happened this time. What with so much simpering and so many repeated seductions, Jill was beginning to feel like a besmirched lily, and she genuinely longed to get away from Rosemary’s. She was glad to move into a private flat in Happy Valley.

  The reform and domestication of Andy began with that move. For a while he wanted Jill to go along with him as Nancy had done, attending sessions at Rosemary’s, or sharing massages with him at Japanese hotels, but after a while Jill realized that Andy was making the old rounds more from a sense of duty than from sheer youthful lust. He strained to keep the conversation dirty; when he appeared in the evening to take her out for dinner she had the feeling that he had worked hard all day collecting suggestive puns and schoolboy smutty stories just for her delectation. One evening when he had arranged for a private showing of one of his special cinemas and when she had borne a long time with his behavior during the performance-he kept his eyes fixed on her face and nudged her every so often with his elbow, saying, “Are you getting excited, Jillie? Are you excited?”—she lost her temper.

  “For God’s sake, shut up!” she snapped. “Don’t you think I ever get tired of all that muck? A girl can’t be working all the time. Don’t you think I’ve had enough of all this to last me awhile? I thought you were taking me out of it!”

  Andy was gravely shocked. He was silent for the rest of the evening, and when he went away she knew he would think over what she had said, but what effect it would have on him she could not guess. She worried and cursed herself for endangering her job.

  All was well, however. Andy came back to her full of contrition and with a brand-new set of manners. He had made a complete turnabout in his ideas of her; from now on, evidently, Jill was to occupy, as near as he dared bring her, the position of his sister, the regulation Good Woman of his world. Side by side with his indulgence in his own sort of voluptuous pleasure, Andy maintained and retained an attitude which was rigidly conventional, and, like most men, he had long been able to drive both horses together in harness.

  His behavior for a few days after Jill’s outburst was so exemplary that she began to regret her frankness. It was all very well for him to act as if he had just met her afresh and to treat her like a plaster saint, but they would both be bored with this program soon enough, and then what? Andy would start skipping off to Rosemary’s again, and she would be left as a respectable pensioner, and in time she would cease to be even that.

  One night, having drunk more than usual, she persuaded Andy to come off his new high horse. He was willing enough to visit Rosemary’s that night, but he never again worked hard at wallowing. Little by
little they slipped into a steady, dull sort of life, with just enough interesting play of his brand to keep Andy on the string. For the rest, Jill tried to behave herself. She saw no other men. When Andy became too boring she resorted again to opium. He would never have allowed her to use it in her flat, so she took to going in secret to places where she could smoke quietly. At a restaurant in West Point, upstairs in the private rooms, she found a satisfactory refuge; one of the hostesses of the place kept her company and prepared her pipes in return for a daily fee, and through the long warm afternoons they lay on a teakwood couch, chattering or lying silent, looking dreamily at the slow swirls of white smoke.

  “Do you think war will come to Hong Kong, Jill?” asked Mei-li, the hostess. “They say the government is sending all the European women away for fear of war. There is a war in Europe, isn’t there? Then why should the women go back, if the government doesn’t think the Japanese will come here?”

  This was not a new topic, and Jill frowned with annoyance. It was quite true that the war in Europe had somehow succeeded in penetrating her own private world. Andy talked about it a good deal, though, like most people born and bred in the East, he acted as though Europe could hardly affect him seriously. “It’s getting awfully hard to do any business,” was the way he put it. “People are jittery.”

  Now the rumors were becoming even more intrusive; the Chinese were possibly only reflecting the white colony’s nerve attacks, but Jill didn’t like it. Even in the peaceful mood of opium she didn’t like it.

  One day the Chinese girl said, “Jill, I’m going to have a baby.”

  “Are you?” Jill raised herself on her elbow and looked with interest at Mei-li. “Are you pleased about it?”

  Mei-li made a slight grimace and began to cook a bead of opium without replying.

  “Who’s the father?”

  The Chinese shrugged and grimaced again. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, then-do you have to have it?”

  “Of course. It will be born in four months.”

  Jill knew that these girls depended on drugs to get rid of unwanted children before birth. If the drugs didn’t work they seldom had recourse to abortions.

  “I shall have to give it away,” said Mei-li. “If it is a girl that will be easy. If it is a boy …” She shrugged again.

  “But I thought––” said Jill, recalling all she had heard about girl babies in China abandoned or drowned. Then she stopped and smoked the pipe instead.

  Among the girls who seemed to live in the upper premises of the restaurant, who drifted down to visit with her in the afternoon, she had sometimes noticed children. They were always little girls, prettily dressed and rouged, and when she asked whose they were the reply was vague. “My niece,” one of the girls would say, or, “I have adopted her.” Suddenly now she understood. For some reason facts which she had always taken for granted now shocked her. She thought back to Kikusan’s house, to the doll-like geisha. There had been children there, too, and she had always known that they were in training for geishaya. It had not worried her then. Now, however…

  “Will you want to give it away?” she asked abruptly.

  “If I don’t see it first,” said Mei-li. “It is like that, you know. If they take it away before I look on its face.”

  She was impassive; Jill could not make out what she felt, or if she felt anything.

  “You shouldn’t have to,” she said. A strong impulse made her add, “You keep the baby. I’ll help you. I’ll give you enough money every week to feed her and bring her up.” She felt exalted and happy at the thought.

  “Jill has a good heart,” said Mei-li.

  But a few months later, after some days’ absence, she reappeared to cook Jill’s opium and she did not have the baby with her. “It was a girl,” she said, “and they gave it away. It was better to do that. Life is uncertain even for Europeans.” Soberly, impassively, she fashioned an opium pellet.

  When the evacuation order sent Hong Kong’s foreign population into the jitters Jill had already outwitted the officials, thanks to Andy’s foreknowledge. While businessmen’s and officials’ wives and daughters went about their duties grumblingly, registering their names for the shipping companies and the government records, Jill stayed quietly in Canton, where Andy had sent her. She came back just as unobtrusively after the registration was completed. Many other women were feverishly training as nurses so that they could remain in the Colony on “essential service.” Others had their own methods of evading the order, but in the summer of 1940 hundreds of disgruntled British women were packed into ships and sent down to Australia. A great wave of indignation swept the populace. Some women of Indian or Eurasian blood felt insulted because they were not included in the order, which was restricted to “pure” whites, though ostensibly it had been meant to include all British nationals. Yet those who had to go were vociferously envious of those who did not leave. Men who liked their families found loneliness irksome. Men who hated their wives nevertheless did not care for the discomforts of bachelor life and moved to their clubs. As for Rosemary, carrying on with a skeleton staff, she had more business than she could cope with.

  The months dragged on, and angry husbands wrote to the papers complaining of the government’s ridiculous, unnecessary caution, while their evacuated wives wrote to the papers complaining of Australia’s treatment of them. None of it affected Jill very much. With Andy she spent a good deal of time now in public rooms, the Hong Kong Hotel or the Gloucester, and often she saw Dorothy Macklin there, too, sometimes in the uniform of one of the nursing services. Andy was not acquainted with Dorothy, but he knew something about her. Everyone knew something about everyone else in the European Colony.

  “She’s Bransome’s girl,” he said when Jill asked him. “He’s a barrister. In the Wavy Navy now. Why, does Jillie know her?”

  “No, Jillie doesn’t.”

  Somberly she watched Dorothy sitting at a large table across the lounge. Everyone who came into the hotel, it seemed, knew the woman; men and women hailed her or went over to talk to her.

  “She’s respectable, I suppose, Andy?” she asked suddenly.

  “Who?” Andy had forgotten the topic. “Oh, Mrs. Macklin? Why, I suppose so. More or less, like everyone else. Why do you ask?”

  “She’s sitting with Lady Whitford, that’s why. Surely Lady Whitford wouldn’t know anybody who wasn’t all right. She’d never know me. Not in a month of Sundays.”

  “Poor little Jillie,” Andy said, and patted her hand, but there was no rebellion in his tone. He accepted the truth.

  Jill continued to stare at Dorothy Macklin, her face as impassive as Mei-li’s.

  XVI

  One morning the phone in Jill’s flat shrilled out at a time when Andy was busy in his office. She felt a premonitory thrill as she picked it up, though that was nothing unusual; anything out of the ordinary round gave her a thrill in those very quiet days.

  “Is that Blondie?” she heard Ray Macklin say.

  After all the months she had been feeling resentment against him, Jill felt choked with things to tell him. She wanted to call him names, yet on the other hand she would have liked to hang up without replying. She wanted to demand apologies and explanations, though she felt certain that any apology Ray offered would be a flippant one, and any explanation a lie. In a flash of time she considered every possible course, but before she came to any conclusion she heard herself saying idiotically:

  “How on earth did you get my number?”

  “Andy gave it to me,” Ray said astoundingly.

  “Andy?”

  “Andy,” said Ray. “I met him last night in Bessie’s Bar, and the conversation worked round to you. Why the surprise, Blondie? Didn’t you know he knows where you live? Because he does.”

  Jill laughed, doing violence to her better judgment. It was a strong habit, laughing at Ray. Even after all this time.

  “He’s a nice fellow,” said Ray. “Look here, honey, what are
you doing for lunch? Manning a gun or something? Meet me at the Hong Kong Hotel, why don’t you?”

  At lunch Jill managed to say at least some of the speeches she had failed to deliver on the phone. It was not so easy to do it, however, face to face with Ray; he had a disarming way of ignoring the interim, and he behaved as though the long-ago parting scene in Shanghai, at Annette’s, had simply never occurred. He looked rather haggard, but he rattled on as he had always done.

  “What’s new about Dorothy?” asked Jill, stubbornly dragging in the remark and planting it down on the table.

  Ray’s face darkened a trifle. “There’s never anything new about Dorothy,” he said shortly.

  “I read in the paper about the divorce,” she said.

  “Oh, that’s old history.” He snapped his fingers at a waiter. “Boy, bring two more of the same,” he said. “Well, Blondie, you should have been with me on this last trip to Tokyo. It was––”

  “Have you seen her yet?”

  “I saw her last night,” said Ray, “and that’s the last time I’ll bother. Positively Macklin’s last appearance.” He reached over and took Jill’s hand and carried it up to the tablecloth, where he held it a moment. “Forget all that, won’t you, Blondie?” he pleaded. “I was rotten to you, I admit it, but I had to be rotten to somebody and I didn’t think it ought to be my wife. I didn’t mean to be such a stinker, honest. You’d be surprised how I’ve had you on my mind.”

  Jill felt her lips trembling, and she began to bluster. “Well, if that’s the truth, you took your sweet time to tell me about it. Waiting until she kicked you out––”

  “Well, naturally.” He sounded surprised. “I’d made up my mind to stick by Dot, hadn’t I? How could I do anything about you, then, until she did kick me out?”