by Rod Jones
The next morning Ayres found him still in the garden. He lifted his head but did not say anything. He had apparently not left the spot all night and his hands, face and clerical collar were filthy with soot and ash.
The building was cold black rubble. Part of the charred frame had collapsed during the night and roof timbers hung down dangerously from what was left. Sheets of iron lay here and there on the grass and Ayres inspected the blackened objects Willy had salvaged—an iron desk frame, a broken wash bowl, burnt books strewn from a partly burnt cupboard. As Ayres walked around, his feet stirred up clouds of ash.
Ayres said, ‘Did the soldiers tell you anything?’
‘They left early this morning. Didn’t you hear the lorry arrive?’
‘No.’
‘It was deliberate. There can be no doubt about it. Look over there.’ He nodded in the direction of the rubble. Ayres could not see what he meant at first, then he saw a blackened gasolene can, the faint red imprint of the brand name just visible.
‘It’s an absolute outrage,’ Ayres told him. ‘You must telegraph the Consul immediately. You must lose no time. We’ll have them reported to their superior officers.’
Willy Paradise did not even bother to answer. He seemed to have sunk into a black despair. Ayres felt a strong sensation that the man hated him. Then the clergyman recounted a story that had been told him in the night by some young men: not long before the fire had broken out, a woman made her way from the mission buildings down towards the canal at the back, where she untied from the small landing platform there a wooden dinghy. It was a mild night and some of the young peasant boys who had come up to watch the fireworks stopped at that spot where the canal, due to a sluice-gate, becomes a wide deep pool.
Along the bank grew a few willows, and from one of these trees a rope had been attached, from which on hot summer afternoons after harvesting these same young men swung out over the canal and plunged down into the water.
The water was flowing quickly that night because the sluice had been opened by the local water warden. For some reason known only at City Hall in Shanghai, the warden opened the locks to flood the canals at night time. The boys watched the woman travel more and more quickly down the canal without apparent struggle in the powerful current. She rowed smoothly and well [she had been in the Women’s Eight at Somerville, Willy pointed out], for all the world as though she were going for a bit of a Sunday trip in one of those boats they have next to the English tea gardens at the Racing Club in Shanghai. Minutes later, the sky behind the willows was shot full of flames and the screaming from the mission rent the air. None of them gave another thought to the woman. Out in the middle of the canal the current moved her quickly into the darkness, away from the firelight.
‘Have you seen Julia?’ Ayres asked him quietly. His face told him that he had. ‘Is she—sleeping?’
‘She’s sleeping now.’
There was something horrible about the way he said it.
‘What do you mean?’ Ayres demanded.
‘I sat up with her until the early hours. I was going to wake you, but—I’m accustomed to giving the injections myself.’
‘You mean she was hallucinating again?’
‘Oh yes. Dreadfully. She kept insisting that someone had been burnt in the fire. I spent the whole night sitting with her, trying to get straight in her poor mind what had really happened. The truth is that I don’t really know, myself. None of us does. I kept going through the simplest steps of logic, as though explaining to a child, that there was not, could not have been, any of the girls burnt in the school. She said she saw the house burning, thick palls of smoke coming from the upstairs windows. She said she saw flames up there, even the sound of breaking glass. She said she heard a girl screaming—perhaps she had in the panic confused the soldiers yelling—’ Willy Paradise looked at Ayres, the exhaustion and terror finally breaking over his face. ‘And then she insisted, absolutely insisted, that she had seen a girl in a nightgown jump from the burning upstairs window onto the lawn below.’
There were no servants to be seen and Ayres had to make his own breakfast. He prepared eggs, buttered toast and brewed tea for himself. The stacked plates and dishes were still unwashed in the cold little scullery. In the dining room the table was still exactly as they had left it, with the partly-eaten birthday cake and the stubs of cigars. As soon as he had finished breakfasting he felt for his pipe then sat back and let the rich, sweet-smelling smoke unwind over the debris. He went through to the sitting room and picked up a week-old South China Daily News with its stale stories of the big strikes in Shanghai.
The sounds of cars arriving outside roused Ayres but by the time he had hauled himself to the sitting room window only a wake of dust was left, rising lazily in the late morning sunshine.
He found Julia in the garden sitting on the wooden seat built around a peppercorn tree, engaged in earnest conversation with a policeman. He was a very well-dressed young Chinese policeman, to be sure—he wore a Western tie and vest and clean white shirtsleeves, and balanced on his knee a bowler hat—but he was unmistakeably a policeman, nevertheless. His jacket was folded neatly across the passenger seat of his motorcar, a late American model. In the green lorry behind it two other policemen, sullen and bored, sat in the cabin on either side of Willy Paradise. He still wore his ruined clerical collar and he had not washed his face. He sat up there impassively, and the combination of the blackened face and the lorry made Ayres think of a coalminer. A few moments passed before Julia realized Ayres’ presence; then she turned her head to him, her black hair gleaming in the sun.
‘They’ve arrested Willy,’ she said.
Ayres stood his ground and regarded the well-dressed policeman. Julia made an introduction and the Chinese insisted on shaking hands. His name was Johnny Yang, and he spoke good English with an American accent.
‘He’s been arrested on what charge?’ Ayres asked mildly.
‘No formal charge is required. Perhaps you have not heard? The supreme command of the National Peoples’ Party has declared a state of martial law.’
Suddenly Ayres was furious. He spoke sharply, his voice not disguising his loathing. ‘Except in the International Settlement.’
The Chinese looked at him pleasantly. ‘Except in the International Settlement, of course.’ He bowed the concession and went on smoothly. ‘Nevertheless, the Sungchiang prefecture is not presently under the jurisdiction of the International Settlement. The Reverend Paradise has been detained in connection with a fire which occurred last night on Chinese property.’
The policeman smiled.
‘Are you seriously trying to suggest that Mr Paradise tried to burn down his own mission school?’
‘If he burned his own mission it would be of no concern to us. But this mission is now Chinese property by forfeit under proclamation by the Supreme Commander General Chiang Kai-Shek that all foreign mission schools must have Chinese principals.’
Ayres was silent. He looked at the policeman, then asked, ‘And how long will he be detained?’
‘As long as it takes for the facts to come to light.’
Julia said softly, ‘Willy will be staying for a few days, I think.’ She stood smiling stupidly, in her Sunday frock. Then she looked down and plucked at the fingers of her glove.
Johnny Yang turned again to Ayres. ‘Are you staying here, Doctor, in any official capacity?’
Ayres said slowly, afraid of letting his anger show, ‘I am staying here as a guest of the Reverend and Mrs Paradise.’
The policeman seemed satisfied. ‘Well then.’ He turned towards his car. ‘Now you are staying as a guest of the Chinese people. I trust you will do your utmost to protect Chinese property from any further damage. By person or persons unknown.’ He put his bowler hat on his head and opened the door of the roadster. Then Julia moved forward and touched the shiny green fender.
‘Does it go fast?’ she asked silkily, caressing the duco.
‘Very fast,’ th
e man assured her, taking off his hat again and scrutinizing her face. ‘But I myself am a slow and careful driver.’ He smiled and gave a rather pretentious half bow forward, mocking the western image of the oriental manner, perhaps. ‘It was a present from my father. A wedding present,’ he grimaced slightly, showing straight white teeth.
‘Your father must be very well off to shower such presents upon his children.’
‘One gift. Hardly a shower.’ He looked to Ayres who was watching Julia. The colour had risen in her face and her little schoolmarm’s mouth was shut tight. She was staring into Johnny Yang’s face. No wonder he was embarrassed. He could not have returned such intense scrutiny politely. She was really inspecting him, as though he were a rarity, an oddity: his smooth dry sallow skin with the flattened-out nose, a face apparently without a seam or join in it anywhere, topped by the thick black neatly brilliantined hair.
Julia said, then, ‘He didn’t do anything wrong, you know. He has no understanding of politics.’
The policeman now understood. He said as he got into the car, ‘You mustn’t worry. We’ll be in touch. Tomorrow maybe.’
‘Come to tea,’ Julia said flatly as he started the motor. Then the car moved off followed at a distance by the lorry, with Willy Paradise, a willing martyr, in his blackened collar still sitting up in dignified silence.
As they rounded the bend in the drive, Ayres saw Gerthilde Platz in her trousers and man’s broad-crowned hat straighten up. She watched the roadster and the lorry until they were out of sight, then turned back to pruning the roses.
Julia had put on the old cardigan again and she was smoking cigarettes one after the other. Ayres heard music coming from somewhere in the house, upstairs, he thought, the sound of a gramophone playing the same American jazz tune over and over again. He thought it extremely unlikely that Gerthilde Platz would be playing that kind of music.
Julia’s face was screwed up as she spoke. She did not seem to have noticed the music. She was talking about her childhood with the old intensity. Her words, which had begun to slur, came out in venomous little bursts as she struggled for breath in the middle of sentences. Now and then she had to stop herself and make a loose sucking noise because of the saliva that had collected in her mouth. ‘The first night Willy came to the Hotel Continental he was just another man in a suit who had come to pay to get rid of his excess fluids.’ She suddenly looked very much older than her thirty-one years of age. Her eyes looked raw.
After a silence she spoke on, her voice ugly.
‘Later that night I saw a man chasing the child along the balcony outside. She was terrified. I ran to the door but she was already at the end of the balcony, the man nearly with her. And then she turned and jumped. When I looked over the rail I could see her white nightdress spread out on the road below.’
Little claws of lines had crept around her mouth which she had rouged a shocking red since the afternoon.
‘Tina Terrina put her big arms around me and wouldn’t let me go down to look. We cried together in her bed all night. I can still feel her big breasts shaking in her nightgown.’
Visions of her past continued to pour out of Julia. Everything stubbornly and perversely failed to flesh out the Freudian bones of the ‘case’ assembled by Ayres in his clinical notes. As on their Tuesday afternoons she would brook no interruptions for question or clarification.
At one point, suddenly turning in her chair, she switched on the standard lamp and picked up from the floor a flat cardboard box and opened the lid. Still talking all the time, she began shuffling through the dozens of photographs inside. Ayres watched her with a foreboding that he was about to be shown her ‘night pictures’.
It was dark outside and Ayres was anxious to get going.
She was not capable of driving the motorcar and even if he could make it to the station there was no certainty that trains had not been delayed or even cancelled. He felt trapped. He wanted to stop the woman speaking because she was telling him things he did not want to hear, but there was a part of him sitting in that room, with Ayres but not of him, so it seemed, that cold cruel part of his mind which continued to listen behind the knocking of his heart. So excited was that scientific part of him that he said nothing, and sat and watched her hand shake as she lighted her next cigarette.
Open on the table beside his chair was the flat cardboard box of photographs. They had indeed proved to be her ‘night pictures’ of the Chinese quarter in Shanghai: a legless beggar sitting on the footpath outside the entrance of a bank; coolies carrying huge bales on either end of bamboo poles bent over their backs; the girl-prostitutes, scarcely twelve or thirteen, lifting their skirts to expose themselves, hungry eyes grotesque above their mannequins’ figures; a man wearing a gas mask, and behind him an open tray truck piled with corpses. There were photographs taken in the early-morning tea shops and around the markets, and none of them would have seemed out of place in a police coroner’s report. But the subject of the photograph he was staring at was very much alive: one of the waif-prostitutes with her gleaming hair piled up on top of her head, her blouse open to reveal her unformed breasts, her face with its precocious make-up pouting forward at the camera as though she recognized some image in the lens, or behind it. It was the girl called Lucy, whom Morgan McCaffrey had hired as a model a couple of times and whom Ayres himself had used occasionally.
Now Julia spoke urgently, and it was apparent to Ayres that she was entrusting him with everything because she sensed she might be running out of time. She was full of stories that afternoon, specific and detailed as if they had actually occurred, a victim of her own fiction. ‘I didn’t realize it was Lucy at first, with her face painted. I had only seen her in her blue school tunic. It had been six months. Even her family had given her up for dead. I had loved that girl. She had been my special girl, she was different from the others. I remember the first time she came to me and recited by heart,
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree...’
Suddenly Julia looked up at him. ‘You killed her, Ayres.’
The face of the child looked back at him from the photograph. The door opens and the painter, Morgan, remains at the easel. Behind his left shoulder Ayres can see the girl. At the sound of the door closing she turns and stares at him with such silent force that her head is thrust forward and her naked body seems out of balance. Morgan, bearded, with unkempt hair, hardly even European-looking in his padded blue coolie’s jacket, does not move at Ayres’ intrusion. He stands impassively, his brush classically almost pretentiously, poised in the air. His look is stern, his beard and moustache cover his mouth and any sign of emotion it might have given away. Only the eyes are clear, blue, open, almost transparent, giving him something of the piercing expression of the blind. When he finally speaks his voice is playful, amused, out of keeping with that gruff outcrop of beard. He says in his slow, amused voice, ‘Well, lookey me. If it isn’t little Lucy’s doctor friend here. Whatever can he want?’
‘I want you to show me the picture,’ Ayres says.
Lucy’s dark eyes look towards Ayres, then wander around the room, unwilling to meet his gaze. It is a large whitewashed room with a stone floor. The room is barbarically bare: no mats, no carpets, no stove for heat, and the model is shivering. Only the walls are covered with Morgan’s paintings, some on paper, others on cardboard, plywood, the sides of a tea chest. In the middle of the room where he stands is the makeshift easel, the small work table, nothing more. Ayres looks around at the ten or twelve works pinned to the walls—teahouse scenes, lake scenes, boats drifting along a canal, strangely large brown-skinned native women with egg-like breasts sea bathing.
The painter watches him, his blue eyes still smiling. ‘Well, missee,’ he says. ‘Well, little Lucy. We’d better find out what little Lucy’s friend the doctor wants. You want to know what he wants, don’t you, missee?’
She whimpers and stares hard at Morgan: intense, her fragile body twisting aw
ay, dark eyes shining, a tiny forest animal that might break its cover and run. He laughs sympathetically and takes Ayres by the shoulder, ‘Come on, little Lucy’s friend. Come into the warm. We wouldn’t want you to wear out your big bad bear’s feet, now would we?’
He opens the door into the next room. The girl hesitates, then scampers through under his arm. He closes the door of his icy studio gently behind them. They are in a smaller room, almost as bare, but the warmth from the squat porcelain stove in the corner and the furled bed mat make the room feel less stark. A small window high up lets the bleak northern light into the room and shows up the large picture resting against a wall. On canvas this one, and still on its stretchers: a nude of the twelve-year-old girl. Ayres is not prepared for this cold realism, the girl’s flat breasts with the nipples scarcely formed, the childish paunch of her belly, no less than the surprise of her pubic hair. There is a message written clearly in the drooping languorous lines of her body, her lank blue-black hair which hangs as though sodden with sweat, the tousle of the bed mat in the background, this same bed mat now rolled up against the wall: Morgan has captured there the sadness of a man’s receding desire, a desire not entirely satisfied, and on the girl’s face, the despair of repeated rape. Ayres waits and watches for little Lucy’s reaction, which does not come. Then the suddenness and force of his movement makes her cry out as he bends her forward against the wall. As he fumbles with his trouser buttons the sadness and the pity of it sticks in his throat.
In another country, and besides, the wench is dead; he thought. What difference between a ruptured uterus and a perforated rectum when a girl dies in the streets. The man from City Hall with the gas mask and the open truck wouldn’t stop to find out. Or perhaps she had been picked up from the gutter by a woman who haunted the night streets in an old raincoat and scarf, with a camera, and taken to a missionary hospital to do her dying under a cross. Now, sitting in Julia’s living room with the burden of the minutes ticking through his nerves, he could do nothing but wait for Julia to tell him.
