Fragrant Harbour

by John Lanchester

  ‘No, I have fear also. Faith does not cancel fear.’

  She was gripping the guardrail with both fists. She did not move away. After a while she said:

  ‘N. G. O. H. Ngoh.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It will help take our minds off the storm. I’ll test your vocabulary. Ngoh. N. G. O. H.’

  ‘Er … I, me.’

  ‘Chín.’

  ‘Money.’

  ‘What is the word for thing?’

  ‘Yéh.’

  ‘And for weather?’

  ‘Er … tinhei.’

  ‘And for the verb to eat?’

  ‘Sihk.’

  She fell silent. The boat was still pitching as violently as ever. We stood there for the better part of an hour. Maria said:

  ‘I’m starting to feel a little better.’

  I reached out and put my right hand on top of her left. She stood there for a few seconds and then went inside. When I woke up in the morning the sun was shining and the sea was flat.

  *

  A few days before we were due to arrive in Hong Kong, a crewman I had never seen before – one of the First Class stewards – knocked on my door after the morning lessons. I was lying on my bunk, smiling at the ceiling. There had been a vocabulary test, and I had done well.

  ‘The Captain presents his compliments and says he would like to see you in his cabin at your convenience, sir.’

  ‘I’ll follow you,’ I said, my heart beginning to thump. I assumed I must be in trouble, though I couldn’t imagine for what. We went forwards and upwards towards the crew’s quarters. The steward knocked, was told to come in, saluted and left. The Captain was sitting at a desk in his bare, entirely unhomely quarters: no pictures, no evident comforts, apart of course from the pipe he was still sucking and fiddling with. He didn’t meet my eye.

  ‘Good voyage?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, thank you.’

  By now I was dreaming in Cantonese; or rather, since my Cantonese was still primitive, in chunks of it, bits of the language floating past me in my sleep like debris. Maria and I had spent so much time together it felt as if we could read each other’s minds. At lunch we finished each other’s sentences.

  ‘Good.’ There was another of his silences while he looked down and across the room. If there had been a porthole across his cabin at floor level, he would have been looking out of it.

  ‘How’s the Chinese? Coming along?’

  ‘Difficult for me to say, sir. I’m too much in the middle of it. When I ask her how she thinks the bet will go, Sister Maria just says, “Do not despair, do not presume.”’

  The Captain nodded but did not speak. There was more pipe activity. Then he said:

  ‘I’ve been sailing out East for thirty years. My whole sea life. Not many chaps bother with the lingo. I’ve noticed that. So you have something most people don’t. Bear that in mind. You need a job, accommodation?’

  I was so surprised that for a second I couldn’t speak. Eventually I managed:

  ‘Well …’

  ‘No shame in that. With your permission, I’m going to take the liberty of mentioning your name to a chap I know. Go and see him in a couple of days’ time after we arrive. He’s called Masterson and he runs the Empire Hotel. Anyone will tell you where it is.’

  In that act of unsolicited kindness, I catch a glimpse of how I must have seemed to other people in those days; how very young.

  *

  By the time we arrived in Hong Kong, Sister Benedicta and Marler had come to an agreement about the precise form of the bet. We would meet three days after arrival, to have lunch at the Hong Kong Club. The Captain would be present. Afterwards we would go and find a Chinese passer-by with whom to test my Cantonese in the following way: Marler would ask me a question, I would ask the Chinese passer-by the same question, I would relay the answer to Marler, and if the reply was satisfactory Maria would have won her bet. The Captain would adjudicate.

  People often say that their memory of an event or an occasion is a blur. Mine never is. I remember with crystalline accuracy or not at all. My recollection of those first days in Hong Kong more than sixty years ago is still sharp enough to cut. We came into the harbour an hour after dawn. The last shreds of mist clinging to the Peak were being burnt off by the sun; they looked like smoke, as if the island was an active volcano. The harbour was, as it always has been, busy. The junks were like overgrown children’s toys, or things seen in a dream. At first glance you could see they were family enterprises. Children and grandparents jostled on the decks, cooking and eating and living their lives. The sampans bucked up and down the waves like skittish young horses. A British warship, HMS Leo, the first we had seen since Aden, lay low in the water, its grey North Atlantic camouflage making it conspicuous in the South China Sea. I could see the limp Union Jack hanging above Government House. I felt the purest excitement as I looked at the Peak and imagined myself up there looking down.

  Maria had joined me at the rail.

  ‘So what do you think?’

  ‘It’s –’

  I laughed. So did she.

  ‘It’s Hong Kong,’ she said. ‘Heung gong. Fragrant harbour.’

  The harbour had a distinct, dirty smell, too brackish to be mere seawater. I said: ‘That’s one way of describing it.’

  Maria smiled. ‘Chinese joke,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t want you to spend a year working for Marler.’

  ‘Nor do I. I don’t believe it will happen.’

  *

  On the day of the test I woke up feeling nervous, with a fluttering stomach. The proprietor of my boarding-house brought me a plate of fried food, bacon and eggs and sausage, which I now realise was an elaborately polite nod to my Englishness. I split the yolk of my egg and found that I couldn’t eat so much as a mouthful. On the front page of the South China Morning Post there were items about the visit of the HMS Leo, a reception at Government House, and an account of a jewel robbery in Wanchai. I spent the rest of the morning looking at vocabulary cards, and met Maria on a bench beside the Hong Kong Cricket Club half an hour before our lunch date.

  ‘You look nervous,’ she said. She was dressed in her full formal habit and we must have made a strange couple.

  ‘I am nervous.’

  ‘No need. Our Lady will look after us.’

  Even if I don’t believe in her? I thought.

  ‘Where’s your stuff?’

  Maria laughed.

  ‘“Stuff.” What a word. We have little luggage, as you know, and what there is of it has gone ahead to the train.’

  In those days, before the Communists won the civil war, you could take a direct train from Kowloon to Canton. Immediately after lunch, that’s what Maria and Benedicta were going to do.

  ‘And if I lose, you’ll be back?’

  ‘I shall.’

  ‘I’d better not lose then, had I?’

  I could tell as soon as I put a foot over the threshold that the Hong Kong Club was the poshest and snootiest institution I had ever been in. There was a smell of leather armchairs and, faintly, last night’s cigars. This did not help me to feel any less on edge. Mr and Mrs Marler and Sister Benedicta were already sitting at a table in the only one of the dining rooms which allowed women at lunchtime. I learnt afterwards that there had been special negotiations to have Sister Maria allowed in; being Chinese, she would normally not have been permitted in the Club. All three of them were sitting behind what looked like large gin-and-tonics. Marler, beaming, got up and held out his hand as we came in.

  ‘Ah, the teacher and her pupil, and very welcome you are. Have a pew.’

  His Yorkshire accent was less noticeable; he didn’t make such a big production of it in Hong Kong. We sat down and went through what, for me, was an excruciatingly laborious lunch. I could think only of the disgrace involved if I lost the bet, and of what I would be doing to Maria. She could not fail to resent me bitterly. Marler and Sister Benedicta, though, seemed to be vying wit
h each other in affability and chumminess. By the time we got to coffee and cigarettes I had been to the bathroom four times.

  ‘Now,’ said Marler, making great play with a balloon of brandy and for some reason smiling at Sister Benedicta as he spoke, ‘we come to the business of the meeting.’

  ‘Right,’ I said, feeling I needed to take charge, assert myself, stride confidently towards the gallows. ‘Let’s go and find a Chinese man. Or do you want to use one of the waiters? A rickshaw man from outside? Yes? But where’s the Captain?’

  ‘Well,’ said Sister Benedicta, ‘Mr Marler and I have been discussing this and have reached certain conclusions.’

  ‘The thing is,’ said Marler, ‘I’ve seen Sister Maria in action with you and I fully accept her assertions about the efficacy of her teaching methods. I also see that you show no signs of converting to the Roman Church, ho ho. So I withdraw without reservation my remarks about the deliberate spreading of ignorance and superstition.’

  ‘And I on my part unreservedly accept Mr Marler’s apology, and regret my own vehemence at the time of our earlier disagreement,’ said Sister Benedicta.

  ‘The question which remains is, whether it makes sense to carry on with the bet or not. The thing is, it’s a lot to ask of Sister Maria, to come and work for me for a year. I’d be turning her life upside down, and disrupting the work of her mission. I’m not saying I necessarily agree with her mission, but it’s what she believes in, and I’d be subjecting her in its stead to a kind of indentured servitude.’

  ‘For our part, even though we are eager to subsidise our mission in Hong Kong, we have no desire to bankrupt Mr Marler, or to subject him to financial strain.’

  ‘So we have decided, in short, to waive the bet.’

  ‘Hey just a bloody … excuse me Sisters, just a minute,’ I said, suddenly very angry. ‘So the grown-ups make the decision and the children scuttle along behind doing what they’re told? What about the six weeks’ work we’ve just put in for your bloody wager? All that time I could have spent looking out the window and wandering around the decks? What if I don’t want to waive the bet? What if we want to keep you to it?’

  ‘Now Tom,’ said Maria, ‘we have to be reasonable. Mr Marler has a lot to lose if we should settle this wager, and so does our mission. Words were rashly spoken on the boat and it is only sensible that as adults we should seek a mature resolution. It would be unchristian of us to force Mr Marler to build our mission at great cost to himself, against his will.’

  I got up and walked out. Maria, running, caught up with me on the pavement outside the Club, where a small crowd of rickshaw men looked on with unconcealed curiosity.

  ‘Tom, I’m sorry, I didn’t want –’

  ‘You knew.’

  She sighed.

  ‘Not until last night. You should understand, the Bishop would never have let me go and work for Marler. Benedicta explained this to me. She lost her temper, she got carried away. She’s sorry. But the bet was not really in good faith, that’s why she had to settle it. Marler doesn’t know the real reason.’

  I said: ‘Goodbye, and thank you for a highly instructive six weeks,’ and walked away. I didn’t see her again for four years.

  Chapter Four

  One hundred and twenty-four Nathan Road was a three-storey, warren-like building on Kowloon side with a large number of over-decorated small rooms, a creaking lift, and a Sikh with a shotgun guarding the locked front doors. The rooms had high ceilings and ornate lacquer-framed mirrors. The overhead lights were dim and the bedside lights had red shades. The curtains were scarlet. The bedsteads were covered in dragon motifs. Dust had secreted itself into every cranny.

  ‘So what do you think?’ said Masterson. He was standing by the open window looking down into the noise and traffic of Nathan Road.

  ‘Can’t fault the location,’ I said. He nodded but did not turn around.

  ‘Quite like the fact that it’s got two entrances,’ he said as if to himself. Then he pushed away from the window, left the room, and, with me following, headed back to the lift. Mr Luk, the owner of 124 Nathan Road, was waiting there. He was fidgeting. With him was a caretaker who held a football-sized ring of keys.

  ‘So sorry, Mr Luk,’ said Masterson, ‘but your building is too big for me. I would be expanding too quickly, and couldn’t hope to fill the shoes of a great businessman like yourself.’

  Mr Luk smiled, either out of embarrassment at being turned down, or at the compliment.

  ‘Do you wish to raise the question of price?’ he said. I tried not to smirk; on the ferry ride over to Kowloon, Masterson had told me that Luk would treat refusal as a bargaining tactic.

  ‘So sorry, Mr Luk. It is not a question of price but of scale. My business is not big enough.’

  We rode down in the lift together after the caretaker had locked the room. Mr Luk confided that he had three other potential buyers coming to visit the property that afternoon. Down on Nathan Road, while the caretaker struggled again with his keys, we said our goodbyes, and Masterson and I headed off for Hong Kong side, past the Peninsula Hotel. Across the road, a flurry of porters, rickshaws, and taxis outside the railway terminus made it clear that the Canton to Kowloon train would be arriving before long. The train was one reason why Masterson had been looking for a property on Kowloon side.

  ‘Pity,’ he said, looking at the expectant crowd of greeters and baggage-handlers. ‘Still, it wouldn’t have worked.’

  *

  I had taken the Captain’s advice. The Empire Hotel, right in the middle of Victoria town on Hong Kong Island, was a lovely, cool colonial building with ceiling fans, palms in the lobby, and a Belgian cook. Masterson was its manager and half-owner. The other half belonged to an absentee German called Munster. They had met and teamed up in Singapore in the twenties.

  Masterson was a thin, intent man in his forties, with the type of concentration that can make a man seem absent-minded. In a different time, in a more heroic period of the Empire, he would have ended up running something big. He had gone into the hotel business to make his fortune and come out to Hong Kong for the same reason. When I went for my interview, he was perched at the counter of the hotel’s main bar, a long room off the elegant lobby. He was dressed casually, with a white jacket and a shirt open at the neck. He was smoking. In those days, when many people smoked a great deal, Masterson smoked literally all the time.

  Hoteliers have few illusions about human nature; Masterson had none. He asked me a number of questions about my experience, my Cantonese lessons with Maria, and about the Plough, and then he gave me a job. The speed and decisiveness of this process was, I was to learn, characteristic. I would act as his sidekick and take responsibility for the bar, alcoholic beverages, and all non-restaurant catering at the Empire Hotel.

  *

  ‘Any idea what that building used to be?’ Masterson asked, as we came to the Star Ferry on our way back from 124 Nathan Road.

  I had been wondering about this. It couldn’t have been a hotel, because that would have been obvious from the sign outside, lobby layout and so on; but it wasn’t so unlike a hotel. Some kind of hostel?

  ‘Don’t know.’

  We dropped our coins into the slot and went up to wait for the next ferry.

  ‘It was a cathouse. A Chinese one, specifically. European brothels were closed in 1932. It’s taken them three years to get round to closing the Chinese ones. Don’t ask me why. Not that any of that will make a blind bit of difference to the actual amount of prostitution that takes place in the colony. They’ll just move somewhere else.’

  ‘Golly.’

  ‘Typical Hong Kong,’ he said. ‘Cities often set themselves up as opposites. X does X so Y does Y. It’s the same the world over. In Shanghai you can get girls, boys, drugs, anything you like, more or less openly. If you have an itch you can scratch it. So Hong Kong has to be different. Nothing’s in the open. Of course people want to do the same things, so people do do the same things – but no
one does it where you can see. It’s not that Hong Kong people would mind staying in a hotel which used to be a Chinese cathouse, but they would mind people thinking that they didn’t mind, because it would show that they weren’t respectable. So it’s no go.’

  I had been taken by surprise by the ways in which I found Hong Kong a surprise. The exotic elements were what I had been expecting. Hakka women in their sombreros, which smelt of oil or lacquer; coolies dragging impossible bundles on their backs; rickshaw men, gold-toothed shoeshiners, gap-toothed Japanese businessmen, opium smokers visible through side-street windows, eagles circling wind currents on the Peak, the brake man’s crisp uniform on the Peak tram and the view from the Peak towards Kowloon; the mad clattering noise of mah-jong coming from servants’ quarters on a Sunday afternoon; girls in cheongsams showing more leg than I had ever seen; Europeans of no sure nationality, uncertain unemployment, and ambiguous appetite; family groups going for picnics on ancestors’ graves; furious Chinese gods with green faces and red eyes; the smell of fermented fish outside Taoist temples; joss sticks, Chinese art, mung-bean cake, dragon-boat races, face and joss and feng shui and the cheapest best tailors in the world, old women with bound feet – it would be untrue to say that all this was what I was expecting in detail, but the broader gist of it, yes. It was what I had come out here for. It wasn’t Faversham and it wasn’t the Plough.

  The other side of Hong Kong, the expatriate side, was what took me by surprise. It was the P&O all over again, but more so. The whole idea of coming East was to loosen the shackles England imposed, it seemed to me – that was self-evident. If you so liked the way things were in England why would you leave? But the sense of respectability, the need to conform and to fit, was crushing. There were codes, visible and invisible, everywhere. Each of the big concerns – the Government, the rival Hongs, the Bank – had a precise and intricate hierarchy, each with its own set of customs, mores, patterns of social life, do’s and don’ts, musts and mustn’ts, rules about where one went and what one wore and whom one talked to and what one said. My Hong Kong Bank friends were eaten alive by the life of the mess, Bank boat parties, Bank weekends in Fanling, Bank social life and career aspirations. The Jardines man disappeared into the separate world of his Hong as completely as Jonah inside the whale. There was a Jockey Club, a Yacht Club, a Country Club and Golf Club and the Hong Kong Club itself. The Chinese were not invisible, since not even the expatriate community could deny reality to that extent, but they were no more than extras – walk-on parts, menials, an exotic but ignored backdrop to the important real stage. Nothing to do with the Chinese was quite real.