But at Hong Kong, after Suzie had been carried ashore on a stretcher and put in one of the three waiting ambulances, the doctor came up and winked and said, “I’ve squeezed all the boat people into the others, and told this driver to take you to St. Margaret’s.”
“You’ve been awfully kind,” I said. “How much do I owe you?”
“Muck all.” And he was gone.
I climbed into the back of the ambulance and the orderly began to close the doors. He said carefully, “All right, King’s?”
“No, St. Margaret’s,” I said.
He shook his head. “This ambulance go King’s.”
“But the doctor said you’d take us to St. Margaret’s.”
The driver was standing behind the orderly. They watched me in silence as if waiting for something to sink in. I felt in my pocket and took out a five-dollar note. I handed it to the orderly and said, “All right, make it St. Margaret’s.”
The orderly took the note thoughtfully. He folded it into a square and tucked it into the pocket of his suit. He closed the ambulance doors. I heard the two men climb into the cab and the doors slam but the engine remained silent. The other ambulances had driven off. Suzie lay in silence with her eyes closed. The hemorrhage had stopped with the ice but she was very weak and she had not opened her eyes for the last hour, and I do not think she had even known she was being carried ashore. It was suffocating inside the ambulance. I peered through the window into the cab. The orderly and driver were busy talking. I rapped on the window and made signs to them to hurry. After a minute the orderly got out again and came round to the back. He opened the doors and said, “Sorry, St. Margaret’s too far.”
“But it’s not a mile,” I said. “It’s nearer than King’s.”
“Too far.”
“You mean you want some more ‘squeeze,’” I said. “How much do you want?”
“Give me ten dollars for extra petrol.”
I gave him a ten-dollar note. “That’ll buy you enough petrol to take you to Pekin.”
“Pekin no good now,” he grinned. “No fun. No dance girls. No good-time.”
“And no ‘squeeze,’” I said. “Now for God’s sake get moving.”
They must have been delighted with the fifteen dollars because the ambulance shot off at once with a great clanging of the bell to clear other traffic off the road. I held Suzie’s hand. It was pale and waxen like her cheeks as if she had been drained of blood to the last drop. I tried to remember how many pints of blood there were supposed to be in the human body, and work out how many pints she might have lost. The ambulance stopped outside St. Margaret’s. I watched Suzie taken off on the stretcher and then went to the desk in the hall. There was a note from Kay saying that she had gone off duty, but that she had briefed Sister Dunn in the T.B. ward, “who’s a poppet, and who I know will do all she can.” I found my way upstairs to the T.B. ward and asked a nurse outside for Sister Dunn.
“She’ll be out in a minute,” she said. “You can’t go in, some of the women are doing their ablutions.”
I waited in the corridor and presently Sister Dunn came out with a brisk efficient impersonal smile and said, “Don’t worry. We’ll look after her. Just go home and leave her to us, and I’m sure she’ll be delighted to see you tomorrow afternoon.”
“Tomorrow afternoon?”
“We only allow visitors in the afternoon—three to four.” She smiled, but the smile had been sterilized along with the chromium scissors and scalpels, and picked out with sterilized chromium tongs, and never touched by human hand. Well, she may be Kay’s idea of a poppet, I thought, but she isn’t mine.
I said, “I’d like to wait until the doctor’s seen her.”
“I’m afraid you can’t wait here. You’ll have to wait in the hall.”
“You’ll let me know when there’s any news?”
“Of course. Just wait in the hall.”
I waited an hour in the hall and nobody came. I waited another quarter of an hour and then went upstairs to the ward. The ward doors were wedged open and I could see down the long room with the twirling fans and the shining waxed floor down the middle like a bowling alley, and the two long rows of beds and the silent vacant Chinese faces. I spotted Suzie with a bottle strung up over her bed, and a red tube from the bottle bandaged to her arm. I turned back down the corridor to look for Sister Dunn, and just then she came briskly out of a door. She saw me and stopped and said, “Oh, I’m awfully sorry, I forgot all about you.” Her manner was less sterilized, almost warm. “I’m afraid I forgot.”
“How is she?”
“She’s very weak, of course.” I had caught her off guard and she looked uneasy. “But we’re giving her a blood transfusion, and there’s no reason to lose hope.”
“I’ll try not to lose hope,” I said.
But for three weeks I thought she was dying. And now I remember those weeks only as a long blur of pain, in which odd trivial moments stand out like snapshots or like fragments of dreams. Thus I remember walking through Wanchai and glimpsing a wall shrine in a shop, and below it a big white modern Frigidaire, and thinking “How incongruous!” and then thinking how strange it was that I could notice such things when Suzie was dying. And I remember strap-hanging in a crowded tram and imagining God saying, “I will save Suzie, but only at the cost of an accident to this tram after you leave it, with total loss of life—you can take your choice,” and wondering what I would do, and then thinking how quickly illness and death scratched through our civilized veneer and found the primitive man—for like the savage I was imagining a God that must be propitiated with human lives. And I remember telling Gwenny and Jeannie for the third time about how Suzie and I had got married in Macao, and both of them crying, and then the comedienne Fifi saying with mock-solemn face that she hoped Suzie had been a virgin as Chinese custom prescribed, and my saying, “I’m afraid we fell to temptation the day before”; and Fifi pretending to look shocked, and Gwenny and Jeannie laughing through their tears. And I remember a woman dying in Suzie’s ward when I was visiting, and the loud hollow rattle in the throat that I had never known really happened, and the gaping mouth and the dead staring eyes, and the nervous titter spreading through the ward as if death was funny, and Suzie saying, “That woman is finished. Somebody finishes every day.” And I remember leaving the bar because the juke box was playing “Seven Lonely Days” and I could not bear it, and outside on the quay seeing American sailors arriving in rickshaws, and hearing one of the sailors saying, “Jeeze, I hope she’s still here, fellers,” and thinking I heard him say “Suzie,” and hating him, and then joining the sailor at the bar and drinking with him and the sailor saying, “I’m telling you, feller, this kid Suzie can sure put it out,” and not hating him any more but loving him, because life was indivisible and we were all part of each other, and hoping that this was true and that I really believed it, and that it wasn’t just the whisky.
And I remember the worst day of all, at the end of the three weeks, when Suzie was so ill that when I came to her bedside she did not even open her eyes, but dragged down my hand under the sheets and held it against her breasts, saying, “Robert, I’m scared. I don’t want to die. I’m so scared,” and beginning to cry. She kept my hand clutched against her for an hour, and I thought that tonight would be the end, and I went up to tell Kay at her hostel where she was playing tennis; and she came off the court to speak to me, her legs brown under the tennis skirt, and looking very radiant and fulfilled because she had started an affair and it was going well. And when I told her about Suzie she looked self-conscious because of the radiance, which she could not suppress.
“I’m on duty tonight,” she said. “I’ll slip along and see her.”
“I wish you would, Kay. I’m afraid nobody will let me know if anything happens.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll see to it.”
> I stayed in my room until nine waiting for the telephone to ring, and jumping every time a bicycle bell tinkled outside in the street. Then I could not stand waiting alone any longer and told the operator I would be down in the bar. I drank several brandies in the bar and Gwenny came over and asked about Suzie, and then told me that her sister had just got engaged.
“Gwenny, how marvelous,” I said. “I hope the man’s got lots of money?”
“No, he is not very rich. He has only two cars.”
“He sounds fine to me.” All the time I was listening with one ear for the phone. “And so you’ll be able to give up work?”
“Yes, once my sister is married. I am so happy. We must all have a celebration when Suzie is better.”
The telephone on the bar counter began to ring and all my bones turned to jelly. Typhoo picked up the receiver, and then put it down again on the counter and looked round the bar. She saw me and grinned.
“Hey, Chow-fan—some girl friend for you. I think she just heard you got married and wants to make trouble.”
My knees were so weak as I crossed the bar that I was afraid they would give way. I picked up the receiver and Kay’s voice said, “Hullo, Robert? All right, don’t get alarmed. I just wanted to let you know I’d seen her, and they’re giving her another transfusion.”
“But I thought they’d decided against it,” I said; for during the first transfusion she had developed some violent and irrational fear of being filled with a stranger’s blood, and had tried to tear the tube from her arm; and the psychological effect had been disastrous and had lasted for days. “The doctor told me he couldn’t risk another.”
“I know, but I think he’s decided it’s now about the only hope,” Kay said. “Anyhow, I’ll ring you if there’s any news.”
I stayed in the bar until midnight and then went back to my room. I sat on the balcony listening for the telephone and watching the neon signs going out along the water front and the last ferries like luminous caterpillars crawling across the harbor, and the sampans tossing in the dark lapping water along the quay and the junk masts swaying. Once a telephone rang in another room and I started so violently that for minutes afterwards my heart was thudding like a hammer. Then I felt suddenly overcome with exhaustion from the strain of waiting and I went inside and fell on the bed. “She is dead,” I thought. “She has been dead for hours, and they have forgotten to tell me.” I reached out for the telephone to ring the hospital, then thought, “No, that will make it too final.” Then dawn came and I lay watching the gray light creep into the room, and the world being reborn in cold dawn gray without joy and without color.
“She is dead,” I thought. “And the new day is born without her.”
And then there were dull colors appearing among the gray, and then the sun was rising, and I got up and went out onto the balcony, and the town was coming alive and beginning to throb, and the shafts of sunlight were thrusting down like gold bars into the mean little streets, and the harbor was tremulous and glinting, and the first ferry with white dazzling paint was starting out from the pier. And then there were little boats bustling about everywhere, and then all at once a great liner was sliding silently in among them, and all the little boats were blowing their hooters and scurrying out of the way, and the passengers on the liner were crowding at the rails and pointing, and saying, “That’s the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank—and that’s the Peak!”
And I thought with a sudden burst of joy, “She’s all right—Suzie’s all right! She must be all right or I’d have heard.” And I quickly washed and shaved, and put on a clean pair of slacks and my best shirt, and stuffed enough money in my pocket to buy flowers and dashed to the door, and then the telephone rang and I stopped.
I stood in the open door and stared at the phone. It gave another long ring and I went over, and stopped again and stood paralyzed with my hand outstretched; and then the bell began to ring in impatient staccato, and then continuously again, and I picked it up, and the ear-piece crackled as the operator went on ringing. And then the crackling stopped and the operator said, “Hullo,” and then Kay’s voice said, “Hullo? Hullo, is that Robert?”
“Yes, hullo,” I said.
“Oh, there you are,” she said. “Well, I’ve good news—the transfusion really did the trick, and this morning she’s as bright as a button. . . . Hullo? Hullo, are you there?”
“Yes, I’m here.”
There were queues for the tram and I could not find a taxi, so I took a rickshaw to the bottom of the hill and then climbed up the hill to the hospital, and when I arrived the perspiration was pouring down me in rivers and my hair was soaked as if I had just come from under a shower. I dashed up the stairs and into the ward, and a woman balanced on a bedpan looked so startled that I thought she would fall, but I did not see what happened because by then I had gone past and was beside Suzie, and I was laughing and kissing her, and Suzie was saying, “Good morning, I feel beautiful today.”
“You look beautiful, Suzie.”
“Yes, I didn’t mind the blood this time. I think it came from a better person. Oh yes, this time they gave me very nice blood.”
Chapter Eight
“Suzie, the doctor says that when you come out of hospital we must live somewhere high up. How would you like to live in Japan? I always wanted to go back there to paint, and there are heaps of wonderful spots in the mountains.”
“Yes, that would be nice.” She hesitated. “We would go straight to Japan?”
“Yes, we’d go straight from Hong Kong.”
She tried not to look disappointed. I knew that she had been hoping that first I might take her on a visit to England: she so much wanted to see London, and Piccadilly Circus, and the big shops, and the Queen. But of course I could never take her, for it would mean lies and deception and pretending she was somebody she was not, and then the truth coming out and everybody sniggering, “Have you heard?” No, it was out of the question.
But it rankled that England should be barred to us. It was a kind of challenge. I had an exhibition coming off in London and Roy Ullman, its sponsor, was pressing us to be there. I could just afford it. And one night I suddenly thought, “If Suzie wants to go, and has the courage to face it—why not?” And the next day at the hospital I told her we would go for six weeks.
And so three months later, when she came out of hospital, we went to England. We went by cargo boat and arrived in the spring, when the tired wintry Londoners’ faces were thawing into smiles, and the parks bursting into leaf, and the warm bright sunshine in the streets bade us welcome. We lived in a furnished studio which Roy Ullman had found for us in the Fulham Road, but I did not paint much for the first week or two for we were too busy sight-seeing and riding round on the tops of buses. We went to the Tower and St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey, and down the river in a water-bus to Greenwich, and we got lost in the maze at Hampton Court and fed peanuts to the monkeys at the zoo. But the zoo was not the success with Suzie that I had expected, for she was less interested in watching animals than in watching people; and so we left without completing the full tour and lay on the grass in Regent’s Park, where she became so absorbed in watching the passers-by that she would have been quite happy to stay there all day.
We also went many times to the theater, for nothing delighted her more. I first avoided straight plays since I supposed that in the theater, as in the cinema, she would find the English dialogue hard to follow, and I took her to an American musical and then to a popular farce; but her theatrical appetite was now whetted, and so after she had dismissed a light comedy with a rather contemptuous “I never saw anybody behave like that,” we graduated to serious contemporary drama. She could understand hardly a word but sat intently, her eyes never leaving the stage; and though I whispered a commentary she would often cut it short with a nod, understanding what was going on from the expressions and actions. An
d she would remember each play in detail, for she was as impressionable as a child; and days afterwards we would still be discussing whatever human issue had been involved.
And so finally, abandoning all pretension of understanding her taste, I took her off on the top of a bus to Waterloo Road where we queued for the pit at the Old Vic. The play was Hamlet, and for Suzie it might just as well have been in Greek; but she enjoyed every moment, and as usual kept interrupting my whispered explanations with the brief nod that meant, “All right, I’ve got eyes!” And in the interval, her brow puckered with thought, she said:
“You know, that man has got a big worry. I understand very well, because I had a bad uncle like that. And I’ve been thinking, ‘Supposing my father never died in that junk, but really my bad uncle killed him because he loved my mother. And supposing my mother knew what he had done, and they got married. And supposing I found out. Now, I would have so much worry, I might go a bit mad like that man, too.’”
“And what would you do? What do you think’s going to happen?”
“I think perhaps he will kill the bad uncle. But not his mother. That is the worry. He thinks, She did something terrible, my mother. But she is still my mother, she gave me her milk. I can’t kill her.’”
“Pretty good, Suzie.”
“I think this author has a big heart. He understands everything.” She looked up at the boxes. “I wonder if he is here?”
I laughed and told her that Shakespeare had been dead for three hundred years. And I was delighted by the discovery that she had not known, for suddenly the drama was no longer an old classic, annotated by scholars and probed by schoolgirls in tunics for their exams, but a new and exciting experience; and seeing it through Suzie’s eyes, with her freshness of vision, I could imagine myself an Elizabethan watching its first performance at the Globe.
Suzie’s taste for theatergoing was easy enough to satisfy but much more difficult was her desire to see the Queen. She could not leave England without seeing the Queen. One night we stood outside Covent Garden to watch her arrival, but there was already such a dense crowd that we caught not a glimpse of her. I invested fourpence daily in the Times, and studied the Queen’s official engagements and followed her movements as closely as some anarchist plotting to throw a bomb. Finally one morning, when the Queen was scheduled to attend a function in the City, we went down early to Buckingham Palace to watch her departure. A friendly policeman stationed us near the right gate and we waited two hours, the nucleus for a growing accretion of Swedes, Danes, Swiss-Germans, Arabs, and two American girls whose English made me feel less of an outsider. At last a gleaming limousine crossed the forecourt. Suzie watched calmly. It glided past, the Queen in the back, very pretty and natural and unassumingly spring-clad. A second’s glimpse and she was gone, and the polyglot crowd dispersing. Suzie looked satisfied.
World of Suzie Wong : A Novel (9781101572399) Page 37
