by Jane Gardam
All alone in the ridiculous white suit she ran from the edge of the motorway to the central reservation and stood there between the whizzing lorries, waiting for the second dash to the far shore. And there she smelled the pig boy.
He was in a lorry—a lorry still far away up the road, but the smell was so huge and terrible that she looked about her, up and down the road, to see if some great sewer were leaking near her feet. The wind then carried the smell in a blast into her mouth so that she retched and dropped the flowers and pressed her hands over her face. Her eyes streamed with water. She struggled to get her handkerchief—anything—out of her bag, and with a clashing, cranking roar the lorry came up beside her.
The back of it was filled to the brim with screaming pigs—dark with dirt, tossed in a writhing mass, suffering, fighting with pathetic, inadequate feet to get somehow steady and in control of their great bodies. The pigs at the bottom of the heap—their gaping faces pressed into the slats—seemed already dead.
But it was the smell. It made her nearly faint.
‘You want help?’
It was the driver. The pig boy. High above her head he looked down. She turned away sick, ‘No, no.’
‘You lost? English? You want help?’
He was not Chinese like the flower-seller, or the servants on the Peak, or the ivory-carved room-boys at the hotel, or even the red faced Hakkar professional beggar. He had a broad face, laughing cheek-bones, long, bright Mongolian eyes and curly hair.
‘Thanks,’ she gasped. ‘No. It’s fine, thanks. I’m just going—over there. To get a taxi.’
‘That place shut there now over there. That place shut. For new building. Re-settlement. Old English tennis club. Nobody now. Where you stay?’
‘The Peninsula.’
‘Four-five mile soon dark.’
‘It’s all right. Please go.’ She—still nearly fainting—tried to cross the road behind the lorry.
But he had jumped down and came towards her. He took her wrist and pulled her to the front of the lorry and tumbled her up and in. She retched again and her forehead fell down against the dashboard.
‘You ill?’ He had started the engine though it could hardly be heard against the screaming of the pigs. He turned on the radio. Chinese music wailed through the cab, too.
‘The smell, the smell!’
‘Oh, smell,’ he said and began to laugh. ‘Terrible, terrible smell.’ He laughed with his eyes and his shoulders and his mouth and with every bit of him. Clusters of good luck charms hung across the windscreen of the cab—tokens, ribbons, silly animals dangling from strings, and several photographs of girls. Veronica turned from all of them and leaned her head against the rattling, vibrating door. ‘Terrible smell!’ He laughed with pride. She remembered how the room-boys had laughed and laughed, Geoffrey had told her, when he had hurt his back soon after he arrived and had had to lie down on a hard board. ‘Terrible pain,’ they had laughed. And someone else, telling her of a visit to a Chinese dentist—and on the Peak at that—had asked, ‘Is this going to hurt?’ ‘Oh yes—it going to hurt all right,’ and had roared with laughter. Something at last was different here.
The lorry had turned off the motorway and down a drab road, seeming to turn away from the Centre again. It rattled past warehouses and long grey sheds. By one of them it stopped. Some people came out, wearing cloths across their faces. The driver jumped out and went over to them and they all went into the shed. Veronica, still holding the handkerchief to her mouth, sweating with sickness, struggled with the door but it wouldn’t open from the inside. She felt utter terror now through the sickness and began to cry.
Then the door was opened and she fell out into the pig boy’s arms. He jumped back at once. He looked shocked and only when he was sure she was safe on her feet did he shout above the pigs, ‘Please—come with me now.’
She could think only of getting away from the hell of the lorry and as he turned she followed, out of the filthy yard, along a wire-fenced road, then down an alley that led to another alley that led to another that led to a busy road again. They walked, one behind the other along this road until they came to an iron bridge. Under the bridge were some stalls selling kites—sharp yellow and red and blue. Around them people were eating and talking and shouting and under the bridge a man was squatting in vest and underpants playing an instrument balanced with a spike like a miniature cello on the pavement. It looked like something between a guitar, a cello and a lute and the noise that came from it was like chalk drawn across a blackboard and in its way hurt like the smell of the pigs.
As Veronica watched, the musician looked up and smiled at her and the sun came out. All the coloured kites blazed for a moment in the sunset.
‘Quick, quick,’ said the pig boy and walked lithe and fast under the bridge and into a dark street. As they reached it, out came the sun again and Veronica saw the street crumbling before her. A lumpish, medieval machine, very different from the mechanics on the Peak, slowly swung a huge iron ball at a tall, papery old building. The whole front of the building slipped quietly to the ground and the sun went in again.
‘I am being shown things,’ said Veronica, ‘like Faust.’ They went on down the dark and filthy street. ‘Or maybe I am being kidnapped. Perhaps I am about to be raped. Or knifed. Geoffrey—all of them, said, “Never go Kowloon Side alone.” I am mad.’ But she walked quietly on behind the pig boy.
He stopped and said, ‘Tea?’
‘No—no. Please—I want to go home. Can you find me a—bus or a taxi or something? I must get back.’
‘You are ill. Tea first and then home.’
They were standing outside a dirty, blackened house with a very narrow, dark doorway. It was the oldest house she had seen in Hong Kong. Outside it, on two ancient basket chairs there sat an old woman and a very, very old man dressed in black tunics and black trousers. They sat very straight, like royal people. The woman looked at Veronica and bowed. The man looked gravely at her for rather longer, and then bowed. Nobody spoke, and in the quiet Veronica could still hear the piercing music of the lute player that now sounded the only right music for the scene.
Then, from across the road, next to the house that was being pulled down, people came running and gathering round a queer, high car, piled high with paper flowers—pink and red and yellow and white. They chattered and laughed and fussed and took no notice of Veronica or the ancient royal personages or the demolition.
The pig boy had disappeared, but he now came out of the dark doorway between the two basket chairs with a painted Chinese girl who looked at Veronica and smiled. From the thickness and symmetry of the paint Veronica saw that the girl was a prostitute. Several other girls came out who looked like her sisters. They seemed dolls from a box. Then someone else came and laid a cleanish sheet of white paper on the pavement and bowed to Veronica to sit on it. Then an older woman in a thick woollen suit and a gold bangle round her ankle brought a tiny bowl of tea.
Veronica drank it, and caught the eye of the old people. The old woman smiled, showing a mouth full of gold teeth. The old gentleman touched first one side of his long moustaches and then the other before smiling, too. Across the road the wild party surged about the car, filling and covering it with more and more paper flowers. The pig boy, who had been talking to the painted girls, came over and said, ‘You happy and well?’
She drank the tea.
‘It is a funeral,’ said the boy. ‘You have come to a funeral.’ He repeated this to the others in some sort of language and everyone laughed tremendously. He said, ‘You are dressed in white for the funeral.’ Their laughter mixed with the laughter and shouts of the funeral party across the road, as it moved off.
The sun had gone in now. The dust from the demolished building hung heavy. The pig boy stank. Rubbish was piled in the gutter. The woman brought more tea. The queer music went faintly on.
‘You happ
y and well?’
Veronica said, ‘Oh I am happy. I am well.’ This was translated, and the old aristocrats bowed. There was silence.
Veronica realised sadly that they were expecting her to go. She stood up and said to the pig boy, ‘I wish I had kept my flowers, my flowers to give them. I let them drop.’
This was translated and there was more bowing. Veronica shook hands with everyone. They took her hand with a very slight hesitation. Following the pig boy, she turned at the end of the road to wave to them, but there was no one on the street at all except the two old people and they seemed to be sitting thoughtfully looking in another direction.
The pig boy walked ahead and then after a while beside her, saying nothing. She could hardly keep up. He had fallen quite silent and she said, ‘Please—can I get a bus or taxi now? I thought I saw a taxi just then.’
‘No taxi,’ he said. ‘You are back hotel.’
‘Where?’
‘One minute now. Two minute.’
‘It can’t be.’
Yet the streets were different, noisier, busier. There were tourists about. Then all at once, there was the Hakkar beggar with her child, but now, the pig boy beside her, the child did not come after her crying, ‘Money.’
‘I should tell you,’ said the pig boy, ‘that you must not take hands. You must not take hands here or embrace.’
‘I’m sorry. I just wanted to say thank you to them.’
He walked on, filthy and beautiful and rough in the rich street. The crowd was changing every moment, growing smarter, faster, better dressed. He wove expertly among them.
‘What are you? Who are you?’ she said.
‘A pig boy. I bring pigs every day out of Red China into Hong Kong. Chinese pigs. Big trading.’
‘Yes, I see.’
‘Good job,’ he said. ‘Sweet and sour’—he laughed. ‘Only for strong men.’
‘Oh goodness,’ she said—here were the shoes, ‘oh goodness, we’re back at the Peninsula. Oh thank you, thank you.’ She turned to the pig boy and not able to help it held out to him both her hands. He looked at them unsmiling.
‘You took my wrist,’ she said, ‘to pull me into the cab.’
Briefly he touched her hands with his own and was gone.
‘My God!’ It was Geoffrey beside her getting out of a taxi. He carried a brief case and a pile of papers. ‘You just back? You’ve had a long day. It’s past nine. God, this bloody place. I hate it. Let’s get a bath and—heavens, you smell dreadful. Wherever’s the memsahib been taking you?’
‘Do you hate it?’ She could not move one step until Geoffrey had answered. If she moved she knew that something would break. ‘Do you hate it here?’
‘Well—no. But you do.’
‘Do I?’
‘You know you do. I know you do. I’ve known all the time.’
They stood on the pavement and the crowds washed effortlessly by. ‘You couldn’t live here, Veronica.’
‘I might,’ she said, ‘I might.’
RODE BY ALL WITH PRIDE
Marjorie Partridge at the end of her garden savaged the earth around the hydrangeas and wept for her child, Olivia.
Wimbledon gardens can be venerable. Even Tudor. Marjorie’s garden was only nineteenth-century but it had had a hundred years of care, seventy-five of them from a chain of full-time gardeners, now forgotten.
Wimbledon is not the suburb of the plastic greenhouse, tomato plant, sunflower and prize marrow; the squirl of coloured glass in the vestibule window, permanent-wave and coffee morning, of wife-swopping and vodka. This is folklore. It is—or the enclave of red roads round the Common is—one cannot speak for down the hill—a serious, rich and confident place which does not follow fashion.
The enclave is the old town and as in the old town in Rabat or Delhi or Paris or Dublin it breathes its own air. Like many old towns there is still money there—the best sort of money: old, invisible, slow-burning, undiscussed and never used in idiot beautification. Marjorie had not had a new coat in years. Her shoes were funny. Her drawing room curtains were very old and her Turkey rugs, though nearly priceless, were worn and frayed down to the knots. In Hampstead a house with a Picasso in its safe has grilles to its windows when the owners are away. In Old Wimbledon, when there is a Braque on the wall (the Partridges had a Kandinsky) there is only the most antique of burglar alarms hidden in the creeper. There is however a Veronica or a Phyllis or a Mrs. Something who moves in until the holiday is over to keep things looking occupied. These people cost more than grilles in the end and are not so smart, but they are more effective. They are also interesting, being the last trickle of the Edwardian servant class which staffed and enlivened these twenty or so streets until the Wars. The Partridges’ house—and it was not ostentatious—had five indoor servants until 1939, Marjorie had been told, not to mention gardeners. Now, as she was fond of saying, ‘There is only me—and Maureen. And of course Mr. Jackson who sees to things outside.’
Maureen and Mr. Jackson were not only better dressed than the Partridges. They had more comfortable and warmer houses, more ready cash, more holidays, more laughs, more sex, more entertaining lives. But there existed between them and their employers a queer mutual confidence, a feudal equality and a genuine loyalty that was very like love. They had stayed—Maureen and Mr. Jackson—for years.
Thus Mr. Jackson would crash into Mrs. Partridge’s conservatory when she was reading Solzhenitsyn and roar, ‘Your boiler’s done for. It’s new central heating now. Can’t complain. Old in the sixties—and before that. We’re none of us what we were.’ Maureen the cleaner—who called herself housekeeper on the telephone but was otherwise without vice—knew Majorie’s most inward thoughts, could say anything to her. ‘You look better the less you try,’ she would observe through the bedroom door as Marjorie gazed sternly at herself in some old fur; and, ‘You and I understand each other, Mrs. Partridge.’ She had known Mrs. Partridge’s daughter Olivia since the shawl, and although Maureen’s days were Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays (mornings) and Olivia killed herself on a Tuesday afternoon it was Maureen who was first at the house. She lived in Morden—a good three-quarters of an hour.
Mr. Partridge had left the previous morning for Thailand via the Middle East and Dacca, and was just about arriving in Bangkok as Maureen reached Rathbone Road. He was a civil servant in high office, a tiny, yellow-faced, pre-aged man, not clubbable. He seldom spoke at the few Christmas drinks parties he attended in the enclave but was very welcome at them and would have been very sorry not to have been asked. He was known as ‘old Jack Partridge—bloody clever’. He read a great deal—Descartes—in the French of course—Hobbes, Keynes; but Thomas Hardy too, and Brecht, and Beckett. At the cinema—the Partridges did not watch television and did not have a set—he very much enjoyed Woody Allen. Unstuffy Jack Partridge, immensely able, up to date, seeing both Private Eye and The Times Literary Supplement.
And no one could say that he had ever expected too much of Olivia. He had never pushed her in any way. There had been no need. Dreamy and cool, Olivia had always seemed to live without stress. Yes, Jack Partridge knew that he had the measure of nearly all his colleagues at work. Yes, he had got a First at Cambridge and later at Harvard. Yes, he could run rings round his Minister and such members of the Cabinet as dared present themselves before him; and when he dined on high table at his old college, such Fellows as were forewarned sharpened themselves up in advance. Yes, he knew that only Marjorie who had also taken a First—in English at Oxford—very much the woman’s subject in those days, but still—yes, he knew that only Marjorie could stand up to him in rational day to day logic; and yes, he knew that the pair of them must be rather formidable parents for an only child.
But not for Livie.
Jack Partridge had loved his daughter from the day he first met her in St Teresa’s Maternity Hospital along the Ridgway. In those
days it was run by crackling long-skirted nuns, and quite cheap, not as later the resting place for millionaires, often foreigners. It was the unquestioned lying-in place for the memsahibs of the enclave and many of them had met there and long friendships had begun. In the private room at St Teresa’s Jack had noted for the first time his daughter’s silky hair, her bland reflective sleeping face, had moved a sensitive finger, later that evening used to turn the pages of official reports, along her cheek. ‘Olivia,’ he had said.
‘“Olivia Partridge”,’ Marjorie had said, looking down at the cot. Marjorie was rosy and large—an awfully nice woman—huge-bosomed on the high bed, for she was of course going to breast-feed. A Double First was by the way in the sixties. Educated women were fulfilled by their memories and moved on with intensity and dedication to bring up their children themselves. They read the FT with the baby on their shoulder, kept up The Times crossword and at least one foreign language. They baked cakes, wrote letters to each other and when the children were old enough to be at school all day had pleasant times at Hatchards and the University Women’s Club for lunch. Feminism’s self-awareness, self-love, was in Wimbledon strictly for the future—though less than ten miles away in Richmond it was already knocking on the Georgian doors, seeping through the wisterias and round the glossy dining tables. Richmond women were rushing upstairs weeping and packing suitcases, or asking young men to lunch and to stay the afternoon. But a curious class of person has always lived in Richmond.
‘“Olivia Partridge”,’ said her mother, eighteen years ago at St Teresa’s in her sensible long-sleeved nightdress, surrounded by the garden flowers of local friends and a photograph of Jack doing his army service in the Education Corps, ‘“Olivia Partridge”—oh dear, it does sound rather like a don.’
