*
Beryl appointed herself chief sceptic. Leaning on the walking stick she had begun using, as much, I suspected, as a stage prop as a necessity, she said:
‘The point isn’t, is it a nice spot, which it obviously is; the point is, will anybody come?’
‘People love to have somewhere else to go. It’s like Lantao or Fanling or something only much more convenient. You can come here for a drink after work.’
‘This isn’t India,’ Beryl said. I said:
‘Beryl, I have no idea what you think you mean.’
We were standing outside the gates of the house at Deep Water Bay on the Tuesday evening after I had found it. A beautifully fresh breeze was blowing in off the sea.
‘It’s like a cross between the Mediterranean and Scotland,’ she said, softening a bit.
‘Thank you.’
I had made enquiries. The owner, Jackie Lee, was an American businessman who had made and lost a fortune in oil speculation in China during the thirties. He returned to America, did well out of the war, then went back to Shanghai and lost all his money, essentially because he bet his assets on Chiang Kai-Shek winning the civil war. This house had been planned to be his Hong Kong retreat and in its three-quarters-finished state it was, although not cheap, the closest thing to a bargain one could find in Hong Kong.
‘Good feng shui,’ said Maria. I had been due to meet her for tea; when I called her to say I had to cancel because of this business, she asked to come too. It wasn’t at all clear to me that she had ever stayed in a hotel; though with Maria that would not be a bar to her having strong views on the subject. She seemed to be enjoying the spectacle of Beryl – with whom she got on well – and me.
‘You’re a Catholic nun, Maria. You’re not supposed to believe in feng shui,’ I said, irritated by her amusement.
‘There is a distinction between superstition and belief. Many a devout Western Father touches wood and refuses to walk under ladders.’
‘It’s not at all –’ I began.
‘What about transport?’ asked Beryl. We talked a little more about all that. The quick subtropical sunset came and went and lights came on here and there around the bay. We got into the hotel car I had ordered and went back to the Empire. Ah Ng had made crab salad and shepherd’s pie, the daily specials (an old idea of Masterson’s: ‘People love a clubby feel’). I had divided the main dining room into two so that there was now a European room, decorated with wood panels and dark curtains, and a Chinese one, with gold-leaf dragons painted on black lacquer and clever use of mirrors – like a tart’s boudoir. We were in the European room.
There was a question I had been meaning to ask Maria. For whatever reason, it was one that made me feel nervous. I waited until we had started in on the shepherd’s pie and she had drunk one of her infrequent glasses of red wine.
‘Maria, do you ever hear news of Ho-Yan?’
She put down her knife and fork.
‘Wo Ho-Yan. He was someone I sent to Thomas from the mission in Canton,’ she said to Beryl. ‘He is still working for his brother. I knew them both from childhood.’
‘Bloody hell,’ said Beryl. ‘Wo Ho-Yan? Wo Man-Lee’s brother? Biggest hoods in the whole colony.’
‘He is a gangster,’ said Maria. ‘What has happened is exactly the thing I most feared since I first met Ho-Yan in Canton many years ago. But perhaps I was trying above myself. You can help people, but without God’s grace you cannot transform them, and if people refuse that grace, then there is nothing you can do.’ She turned and looked straight at me and went on: ‘I know you did everything you could to help Ho-Yan, Thomas. There is nothing more you could have done.’
‘Ho-Yan was a nice boy and I don’t think his brother is rotten all the way through,’ I said. ‘Wo did things for us during the war anyway, and we were grateful enough for it at the time.’
‘He only ever does things for himself,’ said Maria. ‘You do not know of what you speak.’
‘Well I must say, that’s a facer,’ said Beryl. ‘You kept quiet about that one, Tom. I bet you did not know Wo Man-Lee owns more newspapers than anyone else in the colony. All Chinese, obviously. Doesn’t take sides – he’s too clever for that. Some of them pro-British, some wildly anti-. It all grew out of those numbers rackets. Remember those newspapers we saw that day, the ones used in the numbers racket? That was him. Lots of other things too. First they gave the papers away to communicate the numbers, then they started to put ads in, then they realised they got better ads if they had real articles, then they gradually turned them into proper newspapers. If that’s not a contradiction in terms. All Triad up to their eyeballs, goes without saying. Don’t expect the papers make nearly as much money as the drugs and the girls but it’s still not a bad source of cash flow. Ho-Yan is the front man for the legitimate side of the business. He does the building stuff and the paper stuff. We’ve bid against them a couple of times and needless to say we lost. Hard to compete over a tender when the chap doing the buying is worried about waking up minus a couple of limbs. All the people at the heart of the shop are from the same place. Fukien toughies. Wo Man-Lee only really trusts people from the same village. If they let him down, he takes revenge on all the relatives. Very clever, very nasty. I say, the pie’s damn good today.’
I tried to imagine Wo Man-Lee presiding over a stable of newspapers and other ramifying subdivisions of a criminal empire. It was not difficult. Ho-Yan I had a little more trouble with – but only when I saw it in the abstract, as the idea of Ho-Yan the criminal. When I thought of it as a family affiliation, a form of loyalty, it made perfect sense.
These were the years when one began to hear the word ‘Triad’ used often, usually with a lip-smacking relish or enjoyable shudder, and always in connection with hoodlum outrages. It helped that a favourite instrument of retribution amongst small-time, street-level Triads was the meat cleaver. Chief Inspector Watts was a particularly good source of stories about choppings. He would stand at the bar and describe these atrocities to a steadily expanding circle of appalled, enthralled listeners. I remember one about his going into a restaurant in response to an emergency call and being greeted on the threshold with a small mound of severed arms. That was the way people liked to think of criminal culture in Hong Kong. It was to do with lurid stories about meat cleavers and initiation rites. But most of the infrastructure of Hong Kong was built by the levy on legal gambling. If illegal gambling was as extensive and as lucrative, where was all that money going? And then there were the drugs and the girls and the Triads’ ‘legitimate’ businesses. Nobody wanted to think about it.
‘Golly,’ said Beryl. ‘Let’s not dwell on it. Tom: so tell me what you’re expecting your occupancy rate to be, and what you’ll need it to be to break even?’
We got on with talking about money while we ate our shepherd’s pie.
Chapter Twelve
In the event, I bought the house from Jackie Lee’s bankruptcy receivers. I renamed it the Deep Water Bay Hotel. It took two years to get through the legalities and overcome a series of obstacles too tiresome to enumerate, each of which seemed certain to derail the whole arrangement. As for the money, I used my share of the Plough cash from David, borrowed more from the Bank, brought Beryl in as a sleeping partner, and wrote a difficult letter to Masterson. I said what I intended to do, offered him a sleeping partner’s share in the new business, and added that I wanted to keep running the Empire – after all, a vastly bigger hotel – while setting up Deep Water Bay. Ah Wing would be the manager under me. I thought it was fifty–fifty that Masterson would accept. About a month after I wrote with the proposal, I had this letter:
The Elms
Godalming
12-2-56
Dear Tom,
I had mixed emotions on receiving your letter, as Pygmalion must have had when his creation first did something he did not expect. I cannot pretend that I – or rather we, the Mastersonian family ‘we’ – would not prefer to have the benefit of
your continuing undivided attention in running the Empire. But we have had that exclusive benefit for over a decade, to our great profit, and should not be graceless about acknowledging the fact that life, and people, and protegés move forwards. We would be delighted to accept your offer to continue running the Empire in conjunction with a 20 per cent stake in your new venture, along the lines of the terms you propose.
English winters do not, I find, become any easier. Come and see us soon.
Love,
Alan
The actual building work was surprisingly quick. Beryl’s firm took on the contract to complete the project. I asked her to retain the workmen who had been employed on the house to date. She was sceptical – ‘I have workmen of my own to employ, you know’ – but she saw the force of my argument about fairness and about their knowledge of the building. She insisted however that the site foreman – the man in the singlet – be answerable to her foreman, who in turn would report to her.
‘We can’t insist on that. He’ll lose face.’
‘Does he speak English?’
‘Don’t know. Not much, I shouldn’t think.’
‘Then we’ll say it’s because we need the overall foreman to speak English. All his boys will still report only to him. It’ll be fine.’
On site, seeing Beryl give orders to the two crew chiefs, I understood why she had been a success at the head of Marler’s. As a woman in authority she was instantly recognisable as a figure to these men – she was a Dragon Lady, tough, autocratic, formidable, her authority unquestioned. This was a role and a status she would not have had in this kind of work back in England. The men hung on her words in a way that no English workmen would have. It was strange and in a way terrible, the extent to which Marler’s death had liberated her and given her a new life.
*
After Deep Water Bay had been up and running for some time, I went back to England for the first time in fifteen years. I felt that I could afford to. The hotel was going better than I had expected, and the restaurant much better. At this rate I would pay off my debts in two to three years and begin making a profit within four.
There were differences about this trip to England. Last time I had described it to myself as going home. This time I was going back. Also this time I flew. It was my first time in an aeroplane; that seemed a somehow embarrassing fact, and I made a point of not telling anyone. The plane was a BOAC Boeing 707, much bigger than I had imagined, and the flight took a day, with stops in Singapore, Delhi, Bahrain, and Rome. At Delhi, in the middle of the night, I bought two Indian-made watches as presents for David’s boys. The proprietor of the shop, the only one open, was a Sikh, and the sight of his turban bending over the display case as he fished out the watches gave me a twinge of nostalgia for Hong Kong. I stretched my legs at each of the airports, which were less undifferentiated than they have since become. Pilots and crew changed regularly but the passengers did not. That made the trip seem even more exhausting than it was.
David came to meet me at Heathrow. We sent each other pictures now and then, so I was braced for changes. The reality was still a shock. This middle-aged man, as broad as he was tall, his hair now grey, with a chubby caricature of my brother’s face – that was David? The giant who stood beside him seemed also to be taking a mysterious amount of interest in my arrival. Then I realised it was Martin. David’s letters had said something about the boy ‘shooting up’. David saw my look.
‘Anne’s brothers are both over six foot,’ he said as we embraced. He was so broad my arms did not meet around his back, and he felt not so much heavier as denser, stronger.
‘Well, at least you’re no taller,’ I said. Martin picked up my bag. He was lanky; one might have thought he was my son rather than David’s. He was quiet, with lively eyes. David and I squeezed into the Morris Minor as Martin got behind the wheel.
‘Dad’s a terrible driver,’ explained Martin. ‘Much too impatient.’ From the back seat, David gave an amused grunt. As a father, he was much less of a disciplinarian and patriarch than I would have expected.
Travelling around the outskirts of London and down to Kent, England seemed huge, spacious, provincial. We drove for hours – a novel sensation. We left the city behind. Martin asked me questions about the flight and about the East while I looked out of the window at all the various greens.
Anne was waiting for us when we got to the Plough. She wiped her hands on her apron before taking mine. David’s a nicer man because of you, I thought. She still seemed clever and pretty and not worn down.
‘It’s been much too long,’ she said, tears in her eyes.
The Plough was exactly as it had been only busier, shinier, cleaner, and therefore somehow newer. Business was very good. Tom was involved in running the pub, while Martin worked in an estate agent’s in Faversham and, I gathered, chased girls. I spent two weeks at the Plough with them and then two weeks travelling in France. It felt like the first proper holiday I had ever had. I didn’t think I had much to learn from the hotels but I loved the food and the trains and the pace of life. I went down to the south and pottered around the Mediterranean coast for a few days. I spent a night in Marseilles, visiting it for the first time since my trip out on the Darjeeling; since the day I met Maria.
I liked the Med. In some small ways it reminded me of Macau. My schoolboy French came out more readily than I had thought possible. The papers, which I read with the aid of a dictionary, were full of France’s difficulties with Algeria.
*
The day before I was to fly back home I took the train down to Godalming to see Masterson. Again there was that sense of greenness and space. His sister had given me directions from the station: it was a ten-minute walk uphill to a house he had more than once described to me as ‘classic stockbrokers’ Tudor’. I found it easily: The Elms. (There were no elms.) There was a short curved gravel driveway and a wide double-fronted building with white paint and black beams. I felt nervous as I went to the door.
One of Masterson’s nieces answered my ring. She was pretty and businesslike, and was dressed for tennis.
‘Uncle Alan’s in the sitting room,’ she said and led me out of the hallway, which had an elephant’s-foot umbrella stand. We went into the sitting room. From here one could see the lawn, much bigger than I would have predicted, with large clumps of colourful shrubs – pink and blue – at the far end, and a tennis court to one side, behind a hedge, where I could hear but not see a match taking place. Masterson was sitting in an armchair with the sunlight behind him. He took a moment or two to stand up. Because he was backlit it took me a few seconds to register his appearance. Perhaps that was deliberate on his part – no sudden shock. It’s the kind of thing he thought of. He was almost unrecognisably older, and the history of a painful failure to recover from Stanley was imprinted on him. Since the war he had never been the same again. One could read that at a glance.
‘Tom,’ he said. His voice, too, had become an old man’s, with a scratch in it. The effect was querulous, which he himself never was, or rather never had been. ‘Darling, how would it look in the paper if our guest was to perish of thirst?’
‘I’m so sorry, Mr Stewart,’ she briskly said. ‘Can I bring you something?’
‘I’m fine, thank you.’
‘She’s too keen to get out on the court, which your dividends paid for,’ Masterson said. To her credit, the niece simply giggled and skipped out.
‘Lunch at one,’ she called over her shoulder.
The general effect of the day was close to that of visiting someone in hospital. There was the same difficulty in finding things to say, the same sense that the other party’s energies were being conserved for the real, important work of his health. Masterson was in a painful way very insistent on reminding everyone – his sister, his two nieces, and their two bland young male friends – of my work in Hong Kong, and how their prosperity was sustained by it. He made a pointed reference to the subject every five or ten minutes. I was, before lon
g, feeling obliged to make apologetic glances around the table every time he did so. He spoke at length about how much he disliked England and its climate, unfriendliness, inefficiency, endemic sloth, punitive taxation, hypocrisy, narrow-mindedness, and ‘grey-mindedness’ – there was a touch of the old Masterson in that last phrase. His sister, I could see behind her tight smile, took all this personally, as perhaps she was intended to. As soon as they decently could – not all that soon, after a meal progressing from smoked salmon to coffee – the women and their guests excused themselves, and clearing-up noises from the kitchen were succeeded by happy sounds from the tennis court.
Masterson and I moved to the sitting room. Every now and then Catherine or one of her daughters would look in and see if we ‘needed anything’. At four-fifteen I announced that it was time for my train. Masterson got to his feet.
‘Well, you know how I feel about you and what you’re doing,’ he said. ‘I hope they didn’t seem too ungrateful.’ I suddenly understood: he was talking about himself, about his feeling that his English family had no idea what he had done, who he had been. Here he was somebody else, and his past didn’t matter. It was the reason for leaving home put into reverse. People left England so that it wouldn’t matter who they had been; but if they returned home, it also didn’t matter who they had been when they were away. Nothing would be more draining for a man like Masterson than to be in other people’s debt, to constantly feel an obligation to be grateful.
‘I hope you’ll come back out and see us soon,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Goodbye.’ Once I was out of sight at the end of the driveway I broke into a run, to make sure I caught the train.
Fragrant Harbour Page 20
