An Eligible Man

by Rosemary Friedman

  “What time do you go to the dentist, Delilah?”

  “‘Tooth ’urty!’ Get it?” She took his hand. “C’mon judge. We’re going to Guangzhou.”

  Beijing/Guangzhou, Guangzhou/Hong Kong, Hong Kong/ London. Topher was almost at the end of his journey.

  His decision to spend Christmas in the People’s Republic had been greeted with a variety of comments.

  “All those Chinese!” Mrs Sweetlove had been appalled. “Millions and millions of them!”

  “I’ll save you a piece of Christmas pudding,” Lucille had said. “They say the food’s not very nice.”

  Jo was disappointed that he would not be spending Christmas at Badger’s, and both Tina and his daughters were offended that he would not be sharing the festivities with them.

  Sally had surprised him, although he thought, in retrospect, that he should not have been surprised.

  “I’m so happy for you, Topher. It will do you good to get away.”

  Her words had comforted him during the long flight to Canton. They had sustained him during the midnight wait in the steaming cauldron of Bombay. He had thought of them when he had introduced himself to the group of Australian teachers, newly arrived from Sydney, who were to be his companions on the trip.

  The tour guide – young Mr Chen from Taiwan province – in his rimless glasses and his fawn anorak, had been delighted to welcome a visitor from England. Regarding Topher as curiously as if he had come from outer space, his first words to him had been to enquire politely whether he happened to know George Michael of the Wham. Confessing his ignorance of the pop singer, Topher wondered what he was doing 12,000 miles from home, when he could have been in Bingley eating Lucille’s Christmas pudding.

  When he revealed to the school teachers that he was a judge, only the eleven-year-old Delilah, whose presence had at first made Topher apprehensive, had not been intimidated.

  It was Delilah who sustained the spirits of the group in the less auspicious moments of the trip, while Topher, by virtue of his age and status, became its natural leader. When the hotels turned out to be unheated (the external temperature registering minus four) or dirty (peanut shells and mice droppings under the beds) and the food inedible (cold semi-fried eggs, in deference to the Western breakfast), they looked to him for guidance.

  It was not until they reached Shanghai, where long-johns hung like ceremonial flags from the plane trees which lined the streets, and astonished faces were pressed to the windows of the buses at the sight of Occidental noses, that the thought crossed Topher’s mind that perhaps he should marry Lucille.

  The two days allotted to the city had been spent trotting after the indefatigable Mr Chen. He had taken them to see the Jade Buddha (carved out of a single piece of stone), the Site of the First National Congress of the Communist Party of China, and the Residence of Dr Sun Yat-Sen. On the last afternoon Topher had made his own way to the waterfront (familiar from the old movies), where he would not have been in the least surprised to have encountered a trilby-hatted Humphrey Bogart or the sinister bulk of Sidney Greenstreet.

  Fascinated by the ships, and with trying to decipher their flags half remembered from his schooldays, he had remained for the evening in the vicinity of the Huangpu River. He watched a demonstration of students (agitating for better career opportunities and the chance to travel abroad) and ate an indigestible and unidentifiable dinner. Later on he had coffee in the Shanghai Peace Hotel to the accompaniment of jazz played by an enthusiastic band of elderly musicians left over from the Cultural Revolution. The nostalgic sounds of Red Sails in the Sunset, and Won’t You Come Home, Bill Bailey (pre-war Britain rather than Middle Kingdom) had taken him back to England and Lucille.

  That Lucille wanted to become his second wife was plain. She made no secret of it. He had his doubts about how she would go down in the Great Hall of Lincoln’s Inn, or at the Garden Party, but then one could not have everything. Penge approved of Lucille. Chelsea did not care. Tina, revelling in her role as matchmaker, would be in her seventh heaven. Life with Lucille would not be life as it had been with Caroline, but it would not be dull. Lucille would see to that.

  He was trying to superimpose the image of Lucille upon the landscape of his future, when he was roused from his reverie by the strains of Auld Lang Syne, not only played but sung by the six inscrutable members of the band. After this improbable finale, they put away their instruments, and the coffee lounge was summarily closed.

  Topher removed from his pocket the instructions he had been provided with by Mr Chen – “To return to your hotel please show this card” – and went out to the street. A grim looking, cloth-capped coterie, bolstered against the elements, stood on the corner by their antediluvian taxis. Putting his faith in the only driver who seemed prepared – after lengthy and unintelligible angry exchanges with his comrades – to take him, he was whisked off into the night.

  At the railway terminal they followed Mr Chen to the Soft Seat section of the train that would take them to Wuxi, where they were to board the canal boat for Suzhou. As they were carried along the platform on the human tide, it was easy to believe that one person in five on the planet was Chinese. A great many of them, Topher thought, seemed to be on Shanghai station.

  In Suzhou, their first port of call was the Embroidery Research Institute. A portrait of Prince Charles (with Princess Diana on the reverse side and not a knot in sight), so finely worked that the stitches were invisible, impressed even Topher. He was less impressed by the unheated sheds where the young embroiderers sat, with hot-water bottles on their laps, straining their eyes for eight months at a time over a single fish or cat or bird. The dead-fingered girls in the silk factory, their hands in hot water from morning to night as they teased the threads from the cocoons, were no better off.

  Unable to face another sweatshop, where the monthly wage was less than the price of a glass of orange juice in his joint-venture hotel, Topher politely declined the sight of fans being carved from sandalwood, and made his escape. With Delilah clinging to his arm, dodging the bicycles, and stepping over the drying orange peel on the pavements, he led the way downtown, where she bought a tie for her father from one of the open fronted shops. The wizened shopkeeper, eating her lunch from an enamel bowl, took the money in her mittened hands, and put it into the canvas pocket of her apron, without interrupting the steady rhythm of her chopsticks.

  To Topher’s relief the next stop was a garden. With its rockeries and waterfalls, its miniature trees and zig-zag bridges, it was – according to Chen – the perfect place for recollection. While the schoolteachers took photographs of each other, posed outside the Tassel-Washing Waterside Pavilion and Pine-Viewing and Painting Appreciation Hall, Topher sat on a stone seat in an arbour and thought of Sally.

  She would not have needed much persuading to come to China with him. There had been several moments when he had wished that she had. It would be no hardship to be married to Sally. He liked her company. He liked her generous nature. He liked the fact that she was sincerely interested in his family, and had gone overboard about his grandson. He had reservations about her spaghetti.

  Feeling a tickling beneath his chin, he realised that it was Delilah’s fluffy white hat.

  “C’mon judge. Didn’t you hear the hooting? Everyone’s on the bus.”

  A Jade and Mahogany Factory, in which he was not in the least interested, being next on the itinerary (the teachers’ hold-alls had long been bulging with souvenirs), Topher asked Chen if he might visit a People’s Court. He should have known better. Regarding him through the thick lenses, with eyes that seemed not to have blinked since the Long March, Chen assured him, without the slightest hesitation, that all the courts were shut.

  Jo Henderson was the only one of his women who had actually proposed marriage. Topher left her, as well as his shopping, for Beijing. Unpacking his lunch-box on the plane – after an uncertain take-off, during which the seats jerked backwards, overhead lockers crammed with new television sets
and electric fans, flew open, and the arm rest of his seat came off in his hand – he vowed never again to complain about British Airways. The free gift, a tinny keyring, presented ceremoniously by the cheongsamed stewardess, did little to compensate either for the stale roll and the “beefmeat”, which passed for a meal, or the speed and – what seemed to Topher – utter recklessness, with which they shot from the clouds to land in the sub-zero dawn of the capital.

  Since he seemed to be in imminent danger of losing his ears from hypothermia, Topher’s priority was to buy a hat. Given that the entire population seemed to be suitably kitted out against the bitter cold, he did not think that it would prove too difficult.

  With his head down, his hands in his pockets, and his exhaled breath visible, he went in search of a gentlemen’s outfitters. A solitary overcoat and a pair of gloves in a steamed-up window, caught his eye. Inside the shop, from around a central brazier at which they warmed their hands, a circle of well wrapped up Chinese suspiciously measured his approach. Recalling the charades he had last played at Badger’s, and feeling not a little ridiculous, Topher mimed “hat”. Getting no response from his dour audience, and unable to see anything which remotely resembled a hat in the glass display counters, he moved on. By the time he actually found what he was looking for, he had grown accustomed to the scrutiny, and his ears had almost dropped off.

  Dwarfed by the vast expanse of Tian’men Square, and assaulted by the icy wind (courtesy of Outer Mongolia) as he waited with his group to visit the Mausoleum, the unhappy thought occurred to Topher that had he been a Chinese judge, under the banner of Mao Zedong in the late sixties, he would almost certainly have met his death on that very spot at the hands of the Red Guards. Summoned by Chen, and infiltrating the patient queue of Chinese work-units who stood politely aside to allow the foreigner to pass, they stepped on to the red carpet and entered the building. Hurried along by grim-faced attendants, they shuffled in pairs – “Two to the right, two to the left, hats off, no talking” – past the crystal sarcophagus where, draped in a red flag and preserved in eternal slumber, lay the waxen remains of Chairman Mao.

  The Great Hall of the People (“the Great Whore”), with its 10,000-seat auditorium, impressed with its size and construction, as did the Mausoleum with its solemnity. But for Topher it was the visit to the Great Wall, which made its way through five provinces and two autonomous regions, which was the apotheosis of the journey. He had not imagined that it would be so vertiginously steep or so treacherously slippery, or that there would be so many Chinese, each one of whom stopped open-mouthed to stare at him, climbing it. The sight of the Great Wall, snaking into the distance from the fortress where he paused for a moment to regain his breath, gave him the same green acres of Badger’s. He was not sure whether his elation was due to the fact that on Christmas Eve he found himself at the height of some 1000 metres, suspended between Shanhaiguan Pass and the Gobi Desert, or the thought, provoked by the grandeur of the landscape, that he might do very much worse than marry Jo.

  The idea of accepting Jo’s proposal remained with him as, clinging unceremoniously to the guard rail, he slithered in his unsuitable shoes down the more hazardous reaches of the descent. By the time he rejoined the group which was waiting anxiously for him in the car park (Delilah wearing an “I climbed the Great Wall” sweatshirt) he had convinced himself that the prospect of life with Jo, shared between their Monday to Friday judicial interests and the asylum of weekends at Badger’s, might not be all that bad.

  On his last afternoon in Beijing Topher, having so far managed to avoid them, visited his first Friendship Store. With the help of Delilah, he chose scarves for his daughters (trying to dismiss from his mind the wrinkled fingers of the girls in the silk factory), a diminutive Happy Coat for Charlie, and a fan for Mrs Sweetlove. Eschewing painted ashtrays, mahogany coasters, and other local arts and crafts, he traipsed the aisles in a panic of indecision before settling on a marble seal for Sally, engraved with her name in Chinese characters, and a scarlet kimono for Lucille. Recalling the objets d’art which decorated Jo’s sitting room, he could see that she was going to pose more of a problem. He settled on a jade necklace, and wondered if the number of yuan he spent on it reflected Delilah’s extravagant taste or his predilection for Jo. He was walking away from the jewellery counter when he was stopped in his tracks in the art department. A painting was displayed on an easel. Morning Song. A dozen sparrows, delicately brush-stroked, huddled together on the bare brown branches of a water-coloured tree.

  “It’s only a load of old birds,” Delilah pulled him towards the refreshment counter. “Who wants a load of old birds!”

  Twenty-five

  Topher stood on the balcony of the Barbican flat, which would have fitted comfortably into the two ground floor reception rooms of his Hampstead house, and looked out on to the peaks and spires that traced the graph of the London skyline.

  Whilst his whistle-stop tour of China had been in many ways unsatisfactory, it had enabled him, on his return, to regard his modus vivendi in a new and improved light. To say that after three weeks he understood China would have been no more intelligent than to assert that he could get a very fair idea of Christianity by looking at the dome of St Paul’s.

  Chaperoned by Chen, and cocooned for the most part in his group, he had paid homage to the landmarks and to the sliver of life he had been permitted to glimpse behind the recently lifted curtain. He had, with the help of his guide book, committed to memory the dynasties from Xia to Qing. He had tasted (and rejected) jelly-fish, and white fungus, and lily bulbs, and had swallowed a mouthful of “sea cucumber” before Delilah had informed him that he was eating slugs. He had cruised on the longest canal in the world, trodden the only man-made structure visible from the moon. From the window of the train he had watched the countryside transmute from the dull olives of the plains to the brilliant emeralds of the paddy fields. Guangzhou, Shanghai, Suzhou, Beijing were now more than place names on a map, but he knew that even if he were to live among the Chinese for half a lifetime he would not be able to claim that he knew a single one of them. It was not only a question of nationality. It was a matter of ancestors, an attitude of mind, a spiritual concept which was totally and permanently exclusive.

  His welcome home had been gratifying. His presents variously received. Chelsea and Penge (who had had sufficient nous not to dash out for a Chinese takeaway) had collaborated in a formal dinner in the dining room, at which his grandson, whom he scarcely recognised, had worn his new Happy Coat. More gratifying even than the dinner was the fact that Charlie (who according to Penge was being poisoned by the noxious wastes of Hampstead) was about to be taken to his father in the Welsh countryside, and that Chelsea had her bags packed in the hall.

  With the help of Marcus she had reconciled herself to the misfortune which had overtaken her lover, and was now able both to go back to Wapping and to deal with her predicament in practical terms. It was a subdued Chelsea who rested her head for a long moment on Topher’s shoulder before returning to her warehouse.

  “Thank you for having me,” she said. “I know it was a bit of an imposition.”

  Topher opened his mouth to tell her that while he expected to wait for an invitation to visit his daughter in Wapping, this would always be her home. That no matter how old she was, how independent, she would always have the inalienable right to return. Eloquent as he was in his summings-up, his reserved judgements in which he was never at a loss, he could not find the words. Caroline, who had a veritable arsenal of good sense in her armoury (she was fond of talking about doors closing and others opening) would have known exactly what to say.

  “It’s been a pleasure,” Topher said, as if his eldest daughter were an acquaintance blown in from New York. “Look after yourself, Chelsea. And keep in close touch.”

  He hadn’t thought that it would be such a wrench to say goodbye to Charlie. He had grown attached to his grandson and swore that in return he had been acknowledged with a too
thless smile. He had taken Penge to the station. After holding Charlie tightly to him for a moment he had handed the baby to his mother in the carriage. As the train pulled out (“Say goodbye to Grandpa,” Penge had said, animating the small hand at the window) Topher, waving inanely after it from the empty platform, was disturbed to discover that there was what could only be described as a lump in his throat.

  The welcome with which Sally had greeted him had been rapturous. As he fell willingly into her arms, the thought occurred to him that people of mature years were subject to exactly the same emotions as their children (and grandchildren). He was more pleased to see Sally than he had imagined. He kissed her face and her hair and both her hands, and they had talked – and it was not only about China – far into the night.

  “God how I missed you,” Sally said. “There can’t have been a moment when I didn’t think about you. You are the light of my life.”

  “I kept saying to myself,” Topher confided, thinking back to the Children’s Palace (Jingle Bells sung in Mandarin by five-year-olds) and the Temple of Heaven, “Sally would have liked this.”

  “Next time…” Sally looked at the marble seal he had brought her, which stood next to her typewriter. “India, Africa… Where shall it be?”

  Raising his head from where it rested on her shoulder, and looking into the face, the image of which had accompanied him to the markets of Wuxi and the gardens of Suzhou, Topher thought that it would take very little effort on his part to make Sally Maddox his whole world.

  Lucille, with no hesitation, had removed all her clothes to try on her present. For the first time – and he wondered whether it was significant – Topher had taken her to his own bed. Celibacy, he decided, did not suit him. As if to make up for his lost three weeks, and despite the jet-lag which had caused him to nod off from time to time on his first few days on the Bench, he had made love to Lucille with the vigour and potency of a very much younger man.