‘We found a nice little house, up in Swiss Cottage, and Monty set about arranging everything. He would of married me if they’d cut him off with a shilling, but he was used to being rich, and there ain’t no point in being poor if you can help it, is there? So he had a bit of argy-bargy to do, took him out a lot. And we hadn’t been settled even a week when I was sitting alone one morning and a lady come calling, and it was Monty’s Mum.
‘Surprising how we hit it off, despite we was on opposite sides. She didn’t say so right out, but I got it into my head something must of happened to her, back in Paris, like what was happening to Monty now, and she’d come and married Monty’s Dad when she was stuck on someone else. She didn’t come the grand lady with me, nor lay down the law, neither. But she told me straight out that if I married Monty he wasn’t getting a penny. They’d chosen a wife for him, and what’s more she wasn’t one of themselves – she was the daughter of an English Marquess. I can’t hope to explain to you what that meant to them – all these years the Jews being shovelled aside by the English nobs, not being let into their clubs, not being allowed to meet their wives, being treated like dirt, really, despite lending them all the money they needed . . . Monty’d told me how it hurt. And then Monty’s Mum explained how they’d set him up if he married this girl, with everything he wanted. I remember I asked if the girl was interested in gardening, and Monty’s Mum just smiled and nodded. She’d taken care of that! She even knew the bit of ground we’d chosen for Monty’s garden – Monty’d come home the day before a bit down in the mouth, because he thought it was all settled and then he’d found it had been sold all of a sudden to someone else. Guess who had the title deeds in her handbag!
‘I didn’t tell Monty she’d been. I got him to take me down a couple of days later, pretending I wanted to look for another bit of ground in the same part of the world, but while we was there I said we might as well have a wander round this bit what we’d missed, as I’d never even seen it. Raining stair-rods it was when we get out of the carriage, but we walked all round under Monty’s big black brolly, arms round each other’s waists so as to keep out of the rain, and even so my shoes was falling apart and my skirt was sopping up to my knees by the time we’d been round – and my heart was breaking, too, ’cause I knew he had to have it. Seventy-three acres, running slant along a ridge looking out south-east. You couldn’t see fifty yards that day, but Monty said in decent weather you could see clear across to the Downs, twenty-five mile away – nothing much of a view round these parts, I suppose, but it’s a long way in England. I couldn’t see what made it so different from any other bit of farm on a hill-side, ’cept there was a huge old grove of sweet chestnut near the top and a long wood sweeping down half sideways, not too thick, just right for his lilies . . . Ah, he’s such a one for lilies. Me too . . . And as we went round he told me where he was going to put all his plants what we’d been collecting those two years, and what his gardening friends had been looking after for him, his clematis and his peonies and his eucryphias – you never seen a eucryphia in flower, I dare say, young man . . .’
‘I don’t know,’ said Theodore. The urgency with which she told her story, though she seemed to be talking as much to herself as to him, had somehow buoyed him out of sleep; but even so it was difficult to bring his wits together to answer the sudden question.
‘I suppose there were quite a lot of flowers round the Settlement, but I only got to know a few of their Chinese names,’ he explained.
‘No, there wouldn’t be a eucryphia round there,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘I wonder how he’s been getting his through the winter – they’re not that hardy . . .’
She sat brooding again, framed in the silver moonlight.
‘What did you say to Mr Monty?’ asked Theodore.
‘Nothing. Not straight off. I had to see his Mum again. Fix up about my income, fix up about the baby. You know, till she died last winter she wrote me a huge long letter, twice a year, telling me how the kid was doing; and when the doctors told her she hadn’t much time left she wrote again, saying she’d sent him down to live with Monty, giving out he belonged to one of Monty’s sisters what had died in France. I never seen him since he was two weeks old, and I was that sick having him, what with all the heart-break and the rows with Monty, that honest I hardly remember him. Monty guessed, you see. First off I told him I wasn’t going to marry him ’cause I wanted to go on fossicking round the world and I could see he wanted to settle down, but soon as that bit of land come back on the market he guessed we’d been going behind his back. He was that angry! Honest, I didn’t know he had it in him to get so stirred, him such a gentle bloke. It was me getting together with his Mum as done it . . . Whole evenings I was down on my knees beside his chair, begging him to see he’d be happier in the end . . . I wore him down, poor man, and in the end he went off and proposed to this girl and she said yes, and then he took her down to Sussex and showed her his piece of ground – I remember lying on my sofa, huge as a beer-barrel, I was that near my time, and looking out of the window and thinking they had a lovely sunny day for it.
‘Next time Monty come to see me – he wasn’t living in my house no longer, of course – I asked him what the girl had made of it and he smiled like a pawn-broker and said she had the right ideas. And then I knew they’d make a go of it, and there was nothing more for me to do except have my baby and clear out. I only seen him twice more, once when the doctors thought I was dying, after the baby, and once very formal when his Mum took me along, pretending I was just a pal of hers, to meet his new wife, what I never seen. Funny how stuffy he was about that – didn’t like it at all. I could tell, of course. Never seen him again.’
‘But you still send him the plants you find?’ asked Theodore, after a pause.
‘No. Course not. Couple of times, when I’ve got something special, I thought of asking Mr Hillier – he’s the bloke I send things to, big commercial gardener near Winchester, I know he’ll do right by my plants if anyone will – I’ve thought of asking him to send a rooted cutting or some seed on to Monty, not telling who it really come from, but it wouldn’t be right, would it? What do you think? What do you think about the whole thing? I’ve never told anyone all this before, but I’d like your opinion, young man.’
Her tone was odd, suddenly mocking but still somehow earnest. Theodore hesitated. There was an easy way out. Matthew 7. 1 – ‘Judge not that ye be not judged.’ But he guessed that if he simply quoted that it would bring out her full mockery. She needed something from him, but he wasn’t sure what. He had understood most of her story, in the sense that he had followed the events in it; but why these things had happened, what force had driven her and this man together, and what other force, or set of forces, had then prised them apart, he could not comprehend.
‘Spit it out!’ said Mrs Jones. ‘I’m past praying for, ain’t I?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Theodore. ‘Honest, I don’t know enough.’
Perhaps she chose to misunderstand him.
‘You want the story of my life, eh?’ she said. ‘So you can see how I come to set up with Monty in the first place? Fair enough, though I warn you it’s a lot different from anything you’ve known. Eight children, we were, the ones what lived past weaning, all in a couple of rooms in Battersea. Dad, he wasn’t a drunk, and he never hit my Mum, far as I know. No, they were decent people, but dead poor. Dad was a docker, but he’d gone and ruptured himself lifting weights too heavy, so all he could do was sweeping kinds of jobs and there ain’t much of a living in that, even when the work’s there. And all those kids. Mum must have starved herself, often as not, see we got a bite, and even so three of us popped off afore they was eight, and that left me third eldest, what had been fifth . . .’
She was talking in a low, even voice, almost a whisper. The memories seemed to drag her back to those sooty, slime-paved alleys and dank, tiny rooms so that her accent became more marked and harder to follow than Theodore had ever heard it. Pay became p
ie, with became wiv, getting became ge’in’ as she relived that tatterdemalion strange childhood, as full of dangers as the wildest forest, with Saturday night stabbings as common as church-going, and the wheels of the always-drunk carters grinding along the cobbles – a life for the quick and the lucky to escape from and the rest to be submerged like rubbish tossed into the greasy Thames. Theodore was not aware of falling asleep.
He woke alone in the tent at dawn. Goodness knows how she had got him down there – woken Lung, perhaps, and between them carried him down the narrow steep steps in the moonlight. It was strange that she had not simply rolled him up in his blankets and left him to sleep in the cave. Her voice was still vivid in his mind, as if it had become part of his dreams. I’m past praying for, ain’t I?
He crawled out of his blankets, stiff with travel, and stood up outside the tent. Far up the rock pinnacle a dove was calling; the rock spired into an almost white sky, but the air was so clear he felt he could see the individual grass-blades all the way to the mountains. Mrs Jones was presumably asleep in the cave, and Lung was nowhere to be seen. The hobbled horses grazed near by.
Theodore stood for a while, feeling very strange. The cleanness of the upland air, the whiteness of the sky, the ache of muscles and nerves remade in sleep, the dew and the one dawn bird – these combined to make the world seem not merely clean but new. They had come out of the ancient, stifling, ever-decaying forest into this austere arena and here they had found a new beginning. He started to climb the stairs, moving with extra caution so as not to break the spell of newness by speaking to anyone before he had first tried to speak to God. It was colder than he had realized. His breath hung in white puffs before him and the air rasped in his throat, but at last he reached the top.
The shrine was in good repair, a little, square wooden hut, with a pointy, tiled roof which ended in up-turned eaves, all painted gaudy red and green and streaked with bird-droppings. To the south-east lay the tumble of infolded forested hills through which they had journeyed; to the north-east, more hills, ringing a vast shadowy basin; and to the west the enormous wall of the Himalaya. For days these mountains had been retreating as the travellers had trudged towards them. Now, seen from this height, they had rushed in.
Theodore had forgotten about the little heathen shrine when he had decided to climb up here to pray; he chose a smooth patch of rock the other side of the single birch tree and knelt, closing his eyes and waiting for the last beating of his heart to quieten. Then, as always, he started with the Lord’s Prayer.
‘Our Father . . .’
He moved his lips through the familiar words and held his mind to their meaning, but they were still no more than words. He was talking to a white sky and a huge, clean, empty plateau, neither of which could hear him. Nothing had changed. Nothing had been born anew. The world was the same stale, mindless place in which Father had been murdered by the Boxers and the Settlement wiped out, and the old man in the forest had wailed over the body of his bandit son, shot by Mrs Jones . . .
I’m past praying for, ain’t I?
No words formed in Theodore’s mind, but for a moment while he was considering how to begin he sensed that somewhere in the unlistening emptiness around him a crack had opened and that his thought, his image of Mrs Jones, was being perceived and received. The feeling lasted only an instant, and then the blankness walled him round. For some time he tried to recapture the feeling, but it didn’t come again. He was about to return to the routine of familiar prayer when the silence was broken by a suppressed cough.
He opened his eyes and looked round. Mrs Jones was standing in front of the shrine with her binoculars in her hand.
‘Sorry to interrupt, young man,’ she said. ‘I hope you popped one in for me.’
‘Yes.’
‘So you don’t think I’m past praying for, then? Though I’m a wicked old woman in all conscience.’
She smiled at him teasingly, as though she pitied him and was thoroughly pleased with herself. A cooing note in her voice echoed the call of the dove that had woken him at dawn. Theodore felt he wanted to shake her, to shock her, to take water and soap and harsh flannel and scrub away the make-up that plastered her wrinkled skin; and at the same time he wanted her to smile at him without mockery, to speak as she had last night when she had seemed to need him for more than his ability to speak Miao and Mandarin and to manage a pack-horse. He looked away, but was still aware enough of the tension between them to know the moment when her stance changed and her plump and pliant body stiffened into concentration.
‘Come and look here,’ she said. ‘See if you can spot what I think I just seen.’
He moved across and took the heavy binoculars.
‘See that tall lump with the pines atop?’ she said. ‘Line up on that, so you can find it in the glasses. Right? Now go up from there . . .’
The binoculars seemed to make mist, faint layers of quivering grey which were not there to the naked eye. The image jumped at the slightest tremor in his hands . . . now, there, a little blurred in the mottled grey and fawn, spots of darker matter, clumped at the centre but with a few outliers on either side. Deer? The clump changed shape. An outlier moved inwards, and for a second the blur of distance sharpened and the spot was a man.
‘People,’ he said.
‘That’s what I make ’em. What are they carrying?’
‘Not much. Not coolie-poles.’
‘Then they ain’t traders. And you see how they ain’t all sticking to the one path? Only time I seen men moving like that – in Africa, mostly – was when they was following a trail. Tracker in the middle, main party following him, couple of blokes out each side case he misses where the trail jinks.’
‘Boxers? The men from the forest?’
‘Well, they might be hunting some kind of animal, but my guess is it’s us.’
‘You mean they still want to rob us?’
‘Well, they’ll take what we got, supposing they catch us. But it ain’t just that. There’s more blokes there than what we met in the forest – Uncle Sam’s gone back and got his tribe. Like it says in the Bible, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.’
‘Burning for burning, stripe for stripe, wounding for wounding,’ quoted Theodore. ‘But it says that if you don’t lie in wait for your enemy and God delivers him into your hand, then you are allowed to flee.’
‘Doubt if they’ve read that bit,’ said Mrs Jones drily as she took the binoculars back. ‘They’ll be here by dinner time. We better get started. You nip down and explain to old Lung, though you’ll have a job getting anything into his head this morning. He’s full of his poems!’
She laughed, apparently more amused by Lung’s behaviour than alarmed by the murderers on their trail. Even in the panic of the moment Theodore found this odd.
6
FLIGHT, BUT A strange exhilaration, like the flight of a wild bird freed from the hand. They breakfasted on horseback and rode all morning, stopping only to water and feed the horses at two of the strange little circular ponds that pocked the plateau almost as dramatically as the rock pillars, impenetrably deep below the mirror surface. At their midday halt by another of these ponds Mrs Jones made them fake a struggle. Lung and Theodore wrestled vigorously on a patch of softer ground, laughing between the grunts of effort. When they rose, still laughing, Theodore found he was filled with a sudden rush of affection and comradeship, something which he had never known in the God-centred community of the Settlement. It was as though the three of them were the only people in the world. They left a couple of empty cartridge-cases by the pool and one of Mrs Jones’s scarves, bloodied with Lung’s blood, half-hidden at its edge. They loosened two boulders and threw them in, hoping that their pursuers would see the fresh sockets and guess that the boulders had been used to weight something down. Then they rode on towards a hamlet marked on the map, the only real houses for fifty miles.
Well short of this place Theodore and Mrs Jones dismounted and walked south, choosin
g hard ground where they would leave no footprints, while Lung rode on into the hamlet with instructions to make a parade of guilt and haste, buy what provisions he could – feed for the horses was the most urgent – and leave the place heading north.
It was almost dusk when Lung came over the horizon. The sun, low over the mountains, threw stilted shadows from the weary horses. Mrs Jones put four fingers into her mouth and produced a screeching whistle. He waved a triumphant arm and headed towards them.
‘All fine,’ he called, almost before he was in ear-shot. ‘I find Chinese trader-man. He think I rob you, kill you. I tell him going north. Find old river – no water, all rock. Ride long way. Then come round. Trader say men in village Red Lolo, men in forest Black Lolo. Black Lolo enemies with Red Lolo.’
‘Sounds promising,’ said Mrs Jones, spreading out P’iu-Chun’s map on a jut of the rock pillar they had chosen for a rendezvous. ‘Now see here. The track we been following gets up into the mountains through this pass here, but down south here, by the river – looks like it runs through a gorge all the way – there’s this other little path he marked . . .’
‘Very poor road,’ said Lung, reading the exquisite characters at the edge of the map. ‘Bad bridge. Very difficult mountains.’
‘The worse the better, far as we’re concerned, ’cause them brigands won’t imagine us trying it. Bit of luck they’ll think you done me in and shoved me in that pool, and then they’ll pack it in, ’cause it was me they was after.’
‘This path go into Tibet,’ said Lung.
‘Now ain’t that a rum do! Just what I been wanting all along. I hope you don’t mind, gentlemen both.’
‘You go. I go,’ said Lung.
‘Fair enough,’ said Mrs Jones, smug as a well-fed cat. ‘Now we’ll give the horses a bite and a rest and get on as far south as we can. If there’s a moon like what there was last night, it’ll be good as daylight.’
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