A Most Immoral Woman

by Linda Jaivin

  Churning with nerves, Morrison rose to follow.

  In Which Our Hero Suffers a Most Staggering

  Interview and Is Afforded More Than Just a

  Glimpse of Heaven

  Morrison glanced around the suite, lushly decorated in Louis XIV style, a European fantasy in powder pink. Martin Egan had left subtle but unmistakable signs of his presence: a necktie here, a bottle of shaving lotion there, a pair of socks and garters, and even a signed copy of Call of the Wild. Morrison wondered if this was happenstance or a tomcat’s spray, or perhaps mines left floating in the sea.

  He made a tentative move in Mae’s direction but she stepped back, an apologetic half-smile on her face. Indicating that he should sit on the chaise longue, she settled her skirts over a chair. ‘Ernest, darling, I am so glad we have this chance to talk.’ She twirled a ribbon around a finger. ‘We’ve had some high old times, haven’t we?’ Her eyes searched his for confirmation.

  He yearned to touch her. The chasm that yawned between chaise and chair seemed unbridgeable.

  ‘It’s been most agreeable,’ Morrison concurred between clamped teeth.

  ‘So perhaps we should leave it at that. Oh, look at me, honey.’

  ‘I thought we could…especially after…you know. I don’t understand why you told Mrs Ragsdale that it was Egan’s,’ he said under his breath.

  She leaned forward and put a finger on his lips. He sucked it into his mouth and she laughed—her true, free, natural laugh—for the first time since they’d seen each other this time. ‘Ernest, honey, you know I’m crazy for you. But I know that in your heart you were never comfortable with the idea of marrying me. You’re an ambitious and important man.’

  ‘You mock me.’ His voice was choked.

  ‘Not at all. But I know my own concerns often strike you as frivolous, even dull.’

  ‘Frivolous, perhaps, at times. Dull is the last word I’d ever use to describe you.’

  ‘Thank you for saying that. You say it—the word “dull”—of so many people, I did occasionally fear for myself. It’s true. Ever since I’ve known you, you’ve complained that so-and-so is an insufferable dullard and so-and-so is a terrible bore, that this dinner party was damnedly dull and that luncheon disagreeably stupid. Every day you dine with men you consider irksome or insipid—you cannot deny it. The only exceptions are Molyneux and Dumas, and you still cavil at the former’s lack of discretion and the latter’s dearth of ambition. As for your associates, I have heard an entire litany of complaint. James is fractious, Menzies fawning, Granger inept, Bedlow vexatious.’

  ‘You have a point about the others, but Maysie, you are not dull, and no dinner at which you have been present has ever been dull on your account. Good God, woman, if there have been dinners and luncheons this past few months that have not been dull, it’s only thanks to you.’

  Maysie toyed with the buttons on her sleeve. ‘I don’t wish to get stuck on this matter of dullness.’ A smile played over her lips. ‘It is true that I have never been accused of it before.’

  ‘You do have a talent for enjoyment—and for sharing it.’ That did not come out quite as I intended.

  Her lips pursed. ‘I know you’ve never approved of my seeing other men.’

  ‘It’s not about approving or disapproving, Maysie.’

  ‘Although I must accept a certain decorum for my family’s sake, modesty is not in my nature. And, as you know, I cannot countenance hypocrisy, even if that means that some of my deeds, and not a few of my words, must give those around me pain.’

  ‘Any pain you may have given me has been more than compensated for by pleasure. I do think we have more in common than you think. I detest hypocrisy too, Mae. With all my soul.’

  ‘So you have said to me many a time, but do you really, Ernest, honey? For all of your scathing comments about people, do you ever tell them what you really think? I have heard you express different opinions in private than you do in your telegrams, on the way the war is going, for example. You don’t always write what you think; you write what you think needs to be said. I think you love your place in society more than you detest the hypocrisy it requires to maintain it.’

  Though his mouth opened, Morrison had no words with which to answer her. She had hit her target squarely.

  ‘Oh Ernest, honey,’ she murmured, ‘I’m so sorry. I didn’t meant to be so harsh and I don’t wish to quarrel.’

  Morrison, miserable, stood and held out his arms. ‘If you don’t despise me, hold me.

  She pressed the back of one hand to her forehead in a gesture worthy of the stage. ‘I can’t. I’ve given my solemn promise to Martin to be faithful.’

  I will perish on the spot. ‘Why did you ask me to come to see you? Simply to torture me?’

  ‘Of course not, darling. It’s because I love you.’

  ‘Why Egan then?’

  Mae’s voice fell to a whisper. ‘He does not put my heart in danger the way you do.’

  ‘Then I was wrong about you.’

  She stiffened. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Remember our conversation that day when we visited Shanghai’s native city? You told me that you embraced risk, that you abhorred the idea of a life lived timidly and in thrall to others. I believed you, but now I wonder if that was just an act.’

  She went limp, like a marionette whose strings had been severed. ‘Touché,’ she said in a barely audible voice. ‘But it wasn’t an act. I meant every word. And yet,’ she wavered, ‘I don’t know what to do. I promised Martin, you see.’

  ‘Yes, but you also promised—’ He was about to say that she’d previously promised him such things as well when it struck him that she never had.

  ‘No, I never did,’ she said, reading his mind. ‘I try not to make promises I can’t honour. And I try to honour the promises I do make. Perhaps some might scoff but that’s my way of being a moral person.’

  Morrison took a moment to absorb this. ‘Are you marrying him?’

  ‘No. Yes. Maybe. I am not all that eager. But he is.’

  Tied up in the ribbons and bows of her preposterous logic, Morrison could offer no argument. He was contemplating his exit, the better to retain his dignity, when she jumped up, threw herself around his neck and whispered, ‘Oh honey, you and me, we’re a bit hopeless, aren’t we? Anyway, Martin isn’t back from Tokio until tomorrow.’

  A boat’s horn sounded in the port. The electric fan creaked as it traced slow circles overhead.

  What a type it is! One moment she is the tragedienne, the next the temptress and provocatrix! She incites me and plays me for her own pleasure and with only the present in her mind, the past erased, the future unconsidered. She is Diana, goddess of the hunt, though no virgin. Her wit is her bow; her charm, her arrow. There would scarcely be a white man in all of China or Japan by now, I should imagine, who has not been wounded by that exquisite barb. She is as honest as whisky, as direct as a shot across the decks. I kiss her and am intoxicated. Her candour is breathtaking, admirable, enviable. She promises me nothing more than fleeting joy and surely that is enough. She will not be owned, and Egan will learn that to his detriment, poor sod. I kiss her and she folds herself around me until I can scarcely breathe. She moans, she sighs, she creates drama wherever she goes; I still don’t know if the baby was real, a hallucination or just a clever twist in her script. What is certain is that the world is her stage, hers is the limelight and we poor men but her supporting cast. She was right that I would not be long content with such a role. I understood her John Wesley’s reluctance, his vacillations, more than I cared to let on. For whilst Mae Ruth Perkins is absolutely, eternally, true to herself, she will never be true to anyone else. And though she does not actively seek scandal, it falls like the rains of June in Japan on those around her. As much as I detest the thought that C.D. Jameson ever laid his vile hoary paws upon her, I must admit that he was right. She is a nymphomaniac of the highest order and proves it with every action and indeed every breath. A
nd yet…Her capacity to communicate happiness is unparalleled. Her buoyancy, her mischievous humour, her theatrical extravagance, her sensuality. Her wetness. Her plump breasts. Her heavy-lidded gaze. Her welcoming thighs. Her cunt. Her natural, indefatigable joie de vivre is a great wellspring from which we all drink. Or perhaps, like her fathomless eyes, it is a pool where we kneel, only to fall in love with our own reflections. Whatever it is, it is deep and seductive and liquid. And it is what keeps me chained to her, on my knees, my face towards Heaven.

  Mae’s voice, kittenish, small and breathless, broke into his thoughts as her hand grabbed his hair, pulling him upwards. ‘Honey, you’re making me crazy. I need you inside me now.’

  In Which the Truth of the Old Saw About the

  Diplomat Meaning No When He Says Yes Is

  Illustrated In the Person of Sir Claude, and Our

  Hero, Inspired by Talk of Sieges Past and

  Present, Decides to Persevere with His Own

  Before leaving the following morning, and whilst Mae’s back was turned, Morrison tipped Martin Egan’s cravat over the back of the bed. He was reluctant to go, but Sir Claude MacDonald had agreed to see him. He and Mae parted with tenderness. The thought of Egan’s imminent return to her side tormented him. He had not been so foolish as to try to extract a pledge of faithfulness.

  Morrison stepped off the train at Dzushi, where the minister had his residence, into a field of sultry heat. Insects strummed the air and pine needles baked in the sun. Dragonflies skimmed over a puddle and, in the distance, mountains faded to a grey-blue wash like a painting in ink. Although nervy from lack of sleep, his mood was elevated and he felt open to sensation in every pore.

  Sir Claude’s wife, Ethel, greeted him warmly. Morrison considered her the most attractive of the diplomats’ wives and had been ever mystified by Sir Claude’s luck. As she kissed him hello, he noticed that her hair was still thick and dark—not one grey hair. For a woman who had lost one husband and two children to cholera in India and then survived the siege with Sir Claude, this was no small miracle. The minister’s welcome was not so much cold as damp, his basset-hound eyes lugubrious, his handshake weak.

  In the MacDonalds’ parlour, amongst the usual Far Eastern mélange of Western and Oriental furnishings, Ethel asked after old friends in Peking. Had Lady Susan finished her book on China? Was the I.G. well? How was the eccentric Edmund Backhouse—still translating the imperial gazettes for him? Was Bertie Lenox Simpson still up to his usual mischief?

  Sir Claude, twirling the waxed ends of his moustache, noted that it was the thirteenth of June, four years to the day that hordes of Boxers launched their attack on Peking’s Legation Quarter.

  ‘So it was,’ said Morrison, surprised at himself for not remembering.

  ‘It was a terrible time.’ Ethel looked down at her hands, veined with age yet still graceful and fine. ‘And yet sometimes I find myself reminiscing as though they were almost halcyon days, even glamorous. Is that strange, do you think?’

  ‘No,’ Morrison replied, ‘not at all. Sometimes the worst of times make the best of memories.’

  Over cups of Indian tea, they slipped into shared remembrances. Of the French minister, Pichon, in his nightshirt patterned with red songbirds, wailing ‘Nous allons tous mourir ce soir’—every bloody soir—until they almost wished they would die, just to be free of him. ‘Nous sommes perdu!’ he would weep, and how they all wished he would get perdu himself, the sooner the better. They recalled how old Von Below of the German Legation banged out Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries on the piano as though to usher in the apocalypse—and sometimes, Sir Claude reminded them, just to drown out the screams from outside the Legation walls. Morrison and the MacDonalds fell silent for a minute.

  ‘I remember drinking from a bottle of vermouth that had been sliced through its neck by a bullet.’ Morrison chuckled and the mood lightened again.

  ‘And those dinners of curried racing pony or pigeon ragout washed down with champagne,’ Ethel said. ‘Dinners for which the Italian minister always dressed in formal attire.’

  Morrison recalled how less than a month before the siege, on the twenty-fourth of May 1900, the MacDonalds had hosted a magnificent celebration for Queen Victoria’s eighty-first birthday. The afternoon of the party, in a hutong not far from the Legations, Morrison had observed a young Boxer acolyte chanting himself into a trance and slashing at the air with his sword. It had made a good anecdote that evening. He had led Lady Ethel into dinner on his arm. They had waltzed on the tennis courts under red paper lanterns to the Inspector General’s own dance band.

  Morrison could see the scene as if it were yesterday. He had danced with his hostess, as well as the outrageous Lady Bredon, the lovely Juliet, the eminently squeezable Miss Brazier and the fat and gushing Polly Condit Smith, whom, not long after, he would rescue from the Western Hills together with Mrs Squiers. They had toasted the Queen again and again and the revels had lasted until the wee hours. The following morning, Morrison awoke to the news that whilst they’d been feasting, the Boxers had committed a horrific massacre of missionaries, only eighty miles outside of Peking. Throats slit. Limbs hacked off. Women defiled. On the eighth of June, the Boxers entered the outskirts of the city and burned down the grandstands at the Peking racecourse. Three days later, they dragged the chancellor of the Japanese Legation, Mr Sugiyama, from his cart and stabbed him to death, ripping the heart from his chest. Two days after that, the Boxers, encountering no resistance from the imperial Ch’ing forces, tore into the city and began torching the foreign buildings and slaughtering the converts. The siege began in earnest.

  ‘We have lived through remarkable times,’ Sir Claude said. ‘But,’ he addressed his guest, ‘you have not come here to reminisce.’

  It occurred to Morrison, as he followed his host to the study, that whilst he had never lived life by halves, some time towards the end of the previous year, 1903, the adrenalin had run out and he had slumped into middle age. He had begun to surrender to his body’s complaints. He’d grown cautious and cynical in spirit. And from the start of this new conflict, he’d been obsessed with minutiae (the number of rounds of ammunition smuggled in mail bags, the names of warships, even counting how many Russian troops guarded the platform of Newchang’s railway station), the whole time dogged by the feeling that he was missing the real story. Not just of the war but of life. He hadn’t dwelt on it, for his quotidian existence never lacked for stimulation. When he’d met Mae, he could hear his heart beating fast again. He still could not say if that quickening was the source of love, proof that it was possible, or something else entirely.

  He was pleased with himself for having prepared for this meeting the day before, as, face to face with Sir Claude, he suddenly felt very tired. ‘We have decided to surrender the charter of the Haimun,’ he opened, testing the diplomat’s reaction.

  ‘Don’t do that.’

  ‘No?’ Morrison kept a poker face.

  ‘Not until I see Baron Komura.’

  Komura was Japan’s foreign minister. ‘When will that happen?’

  ‘Thursday. But before that, you, James and I will meet with General Fukushima.’

  Morrison wondered if he had underestimated MacDonald.

  On the train back to Tokio, the surfeit of tension and dearth of sleep caused him to nod off, his chin tipped forward onto his chest. He could barely keep his eyes open at dinner that night with James, to whom he delivered the following assessment of MacDonald’s promise to help: ‘Weak, flippant, garrulous and possibly insincere. But our main hope.’

  The following morning, Morrison awoke to the sound of rain. Pouring like blue blazes. After moving to the Imperial, he wrote a loving note to Mae, telling her he was tied up with work but would call her after his meeting with Sir Claude and Fukushima at the British Legation. He felt light as air.

  General Fukushima didn’t mince words. The Haimun was nothing less than an impediment to Japanese military operations; it interfere
d with their communications and, given the Russians’ overt hostility towards it, was a danger to itself. Japan did not wish to concern itself with the protection of such a vessel when it was fighting a war. Morrison suggested that if they did give up the Haimun, at least James should be guaranteed special accreditation and assistance in reaching the front.

  ‘We’d be pleased with such a concession,’ Sir Claude said, backing the request.

  ‘It won’t be necessary,’ Fukushima responded, the picture of geniality.

  ‘Why not?’ James’s question was a controlled explosion.

  ‘Because we shall be taking Port Arthur in such a short time that no correspondent could make it there in time by land to see the victory.’

  ‘Of course.’ Sir Claude nodded, evidently satisfied with the answer.

  The minute James was alone with Morrison, all restraint evaporated. ‘The vacillating bastard agrees with our case one minute and is persuaded by Fukushima the next! Can’t he see that the problem lies in a lack of understanding between the Japanese navy, which sees the advantage to itself of the Haimun, and the rest of the Japanese military—represented by the infuriating Fukushima—which does not! You must do something.’

  Morrison did not see what he could do. Advising James to calm down, he excused himself to make a phone call.

  ‘Hello?’ A sleepy purr.

  ‘Maysie.’

  ‘You always sound so urgent. It makes me feel like the heroine in a melodrama.’

  ‘And so you are.’

  ‘How’s the war?’

  ‘We haven’t won it yet. Two excruciating hours with Sir Claude and General Fukushima and all we managed to extract was the promise of greater frustration.’

  ‘Ohh. Poor baby,’ she cooed.

  ‘I am dying to see you.’

  ‘Don’t,’ Maysie said. ‘It’s not attractive.’