He raised his glass. ‘Cheers.’ A satisfying clink of ice.
His companion, Yoshi Takeda, raised his glass in response. Behind them, Ken Ramsay sat at a small distance and checked his watch with ill-concealed impatience. He let his gaze wander over to the pretty little companion of a corpulent man at another table. Her long dress was revealing plenty with its split to well above her knee and that’s where his eyes rested.
Harry leaned back in his chair. ‘There was a great Chinese scholar who was known for his weakness for alcohol. He was visited by a friend who was surprised to find him sober. He asked him why. And the scholar said, I’ve decided to give up drinking until my son comes home. Oh, the friend asked, where’s he gone? To the shop, came the answer, to buy more wine.’
Takeda’s laugh was loud and warm. A few heads turned. There was nothing surreptitious about this meeting. Nearby, Ken yawned.
Takeda leaned towards Harry. ‘Are you sure he wasn’t Japanese?’
Harry picked at a slice of ham. ‘I notice there was an extra shipment of steel cable this month.’
Takeda frowned. ‘I don’t know anything about that.’
‘No? Maybe you should take a look. Otherwise the customs chaps might get wind of it and take it into their heads to make enquiries.’
‘I understand.’
‘Maybe you could remind them this isn’t a free port. Worth it in the long run, don’t you think?’ Harry made to stand up. ‘Have a word with someone on your side. Let them know we’re watching. Don’t want them to get the idea they could sneak anything past us.’
Takeda stood too, fleshy from a sedentary life and somewhat shorter than Harry. They shook hands warmly.
‘Next lunch is on me.’
As Ken followed Harry back into the bar he couldn’t resist saying, ‘Do we really have to rub up the Japs quite so publicly, sir?’
Harry laughed and patted him on the shoulder. ‘Where would you have us meet – at midnight in a brothel, I suppose, wearing disguises and speaking in code?’
‘I don’t know, sir, doesn’t seem right to me. He’s a shifty bugger, isn’t he? What’s he going to say right out there in the open?’
Harry’s tone changed, the light-hearted banter replaced by something darker. ‘Take it from me, Sergeant, Mr Takeda is the least shifty bugger you’re ever likely to meet.’
And Ken felt the heat of a blush spread across his face and chest yet again.
The harbour in the fading purple light of dusk drew Stevie on. At first sight, compared to Shanghai’s sophisticated and cosmopolitan shoreline, it seemed almost quaint. Sure, there were buildings crammed along the water’s edge and there was also the city of boats that reclaimed the water by at least half a mile and which must have swollen Hong Kong’s landmass by some small percentage. But the huge commercial port of Shanghai with its seventeen-storey tower blocks and staggering twenty-four-hour commotion was in a state of constant swagger and self-importance. No one who tried to make their way through the broiling crowds and heard the cacophony of languages could doubt its importance on the world’s stage. By comparison this small island colony felt like a backwater.
But Stevie could not deny that the harbour was picturesque as the last of the sunshine spread its fingers across the water. The scabby, small junks, tied to each other to form a floating village, were gilded in the dying light. Their wooden hulls creaked and groaned as they scraped against one another. Shrill voices skimmed the water. Among them one distinguished itself – angrier than the others. Stevie recognised it as Yang’s as she made her way towards him. The anticipation almost tripped her up. She stumbled over a loosely coiled rope and had to steady herself against the harbour wall. The excitement never abated. More cautiously now, she walked over the splintering decks of the other boats and, as she stepped on to Yang’s familiar junk, she was as thin-skinned and flushed as if she were racing to meet a lover. Stocky and middle-aged in loose trousers and a filthy vest, Yang hurled a last insult at his neighbour followed by a well-aimed spit, and turned back towards the cabin, barely acknowledging Stevie, although his unease at the Caucasian woman’s presence was profound.
Yang brushed aside the curtain that hung limply over the low entrance. Stevie followed. Sickly sweet smoke filled the cabin. In stark contrast to the golden light outside, the interior of the boat was as gloomy and musty as a cave, a squalid, narrow place with low day beds lining the length of the boat. Heavy brocade curtains, originally dark red but now rusted into murky brown, separated the day beds at uneven intervals. In the windowless gloom, bodies lay against the boat’s sides on bitter-smelling cushions.
As he walked through his little empire, Yang paid no attention to the waxen faces of men, all Chinese, slumped, deep in drugged sleep. Some were dribbling and twitching, others moaning. Before them on the low wooden tables, black opium bubbled in pipes, the legacy of British free marketeering down the centuries.
Stevie found an empty couch and, settling on its sour cushions, she leaned over the table, concentrated. Her fingers deftly rolled the black, sticky opium into a ball and dug it into the pipe. She inhaled long and deep. The rush of euphoria came fast, wonderful, thrilling, consuming. She felt herself returning to the secret sanctuary which, all those months ago, she had first approached with trepidation and curiosity and then, miraculously, found to be better than home. Better than anything. Her veins ran with pleasure and she shivered before her eyes flickered shut. She slumped back, letting go of the pipe. Letting go of it all.
Later, through the lovely haze, she heard a blurry voice. It seemed to come from far away, perhaps through an ocean. ‘Look at you. A white girl with that mark. It’s disgusting.’
It was Jishang. She had no idea how long he’d been lying opposite her. He reached for her hand and she felt his touch as if through velvet. He turned her hand palm up, looking at the black, oily smudge on her left forefinger. He rubbed at it harshly. It didn’t go.
She marshalled all her strength and pulled her hand away. ‘Leave me alone, can’t you. You can hardly talk.’
‘I know what I’m doing.’
‘And I don’t?’
‘No. You absolutely don’t.’
‘Then why did you start me off?’
‘You wanted to try.’
‘That’s your answer to it all, isn’t it.’ She was suddenly tired of him. Tired of his know-it-all voice, his impeccable control. ‘Everything is somebody else’s fault. It’s none of it anything to do with you.’
Stevie leaned forward again and, lifting the pipe to her lips, defiantly drew the thick smoke into her lungs. But something was wrong. The burn was too intense and she tried to find fresh air to cool it. Suddenly she convulsed. Molten steel poured along her airways. Her whole body felt as though it was disappearing into a void. There was wave after violent wave of retching and ugly, awkward movements as she flung out her arms and legs, thrashing against the cushions. She was drowning and could not save herself.
Jishang roused himself to sit up. He shouted, his voice harsh. ‘No doctors.’
He swayed, unable to shake the drug’s torpor himself. Stevie retched again from deep inside. What she heard above the flailing of her own tortured limbs was the sound of wings. A flock of maybe twenty small birds whirred and beat around her face. She struggled to claw them off, then fell back on to the floor.
It was Yang who pulled Stevie to her feet.
‘Get out of here, both of you. I don’t want anybody dying here.’
Jishang carried and dragged Stevie’s half-conscious body through the pools of red light cast by the paper lanterns, their unsteadiness exaggerated by the constant rocking of the boats, the stench of vomit clinging to her clothes.
As Jishang adjusted Stevie’s dead weight around his shoulders, a quiet, watching man sank deeper into the shadows.
Chapter Three
Cold morning light filtered through the blinds. Their clothes scattered where they had been dropped, Stevie and Jishang lay awkwardly in a
tangle of sheets. She moaned in the remains of her opium sleep and pushed him away.
A scuffling and a tapping sound came from behind the wall facing the bed. And suddenly a bird burst through the wallpaper. Its wings beat wildly as it careered through the room, searching desperately for a way out.
Stevie, her pulse racing, opened her eyes and sat bolt upright. There was no bird. She shivered and drew the sheets tight around her.
It wasn’t meant to be like this. She remembered images from the night before: the putrid sweet smell, identified as the remains of the sick that stained her clothes; Yang’s face, contorted with rage; Jishang’s harsh grasp as he pulled her along the near-empty streets, up and up the hill.
At first the whole opium thing had been a gas. Priding herself on never saying never, Stevie felt almost obliged to try anything. The steeper the challenge, the harder she was prepared to pursue it. Who in the end was she proving herself to? She couldn’t say, but as she felt the stale taste of the night in her mouth she acknowledged that it really was no fun any more. Perhaps she’d stop. Jishang seemed to have a preternatural capacity for hedonism, he was able somehow to slip through its dangers without mishap. Stronger men had fallen by the wayside but he powered on, smooth as silk, through a life of incredible excess. It amused him to apply the same survival skills to politics now. He engaged in the dark, hidden corners of subversive politics with the same dry smile and sly ease as he occupied the opium dens and the brothels of Shanghai. She turned to look at him. Still and clear as a statue, Jishang’s face in repose was as beautiful as it was brazen. Maybe it was the danger itself, the profound thrill of transgression, that motivated him.
The spoilt elder son of an old-time, Chinese aristocrat, Jishang had been born to a life of grace and feudal rites. This modern world made an anomaly of him. Not that he cared. The magazine, started on a whim, had become the only uncensored voice in Shanghai, a city of many voices. Printed in two languages, it represented as clearly as possible the cacophony of opinions that rose and fell in the streets and back alleys. It refused to take a political line and was therefore equally loathed by all parties, and this was its perilous path. Jishang didn’t seem to care for anything – but he stood firm; deeply and darkly. He would not be told what to do. Not by a political party, not by the occupying Japanese forces or their collaborators, nor by the extreme Communist faction. She snorted to herself – he was an aristocratic rebel who just happened to fall on the side of right because of a deep-set stubbornness. Yes, stubbornness was his overwhelming quality. And it made him irresistible. You felt he must be right.
Stevie sighed, remembering the first meetings. The seduction. The kick of being invited into the heart of the China that none of her expatriate friends had access to. The secret courtyards. The mimosa-scented paths, the dark wood screens behind which they explored each other’s foreign and thrilling bodies. And always the musky smell of him.
Throughout her travels she had always left the last episode behind with very little regret. After all, there was the next party, the next article or horse race, the next man. But Shanghai had seemed different to her. The intensity of the city had been consuming. She hadn’t quite ever got to grips with the heaving, shifting movement of it. Also, Shanghai was where she had become aware of her power.
Stevie had hidden herself in trousers and loose shirts and practical clothes since her adolescence. Modelling herself on her close contemporary Katharine Hepburn, she had chosen to draw attention to her boyishness and her pragmatic qualities, the more to stand out. Girls and their preening and their obsession with boys had made her contemptuous. She was clear from the beginning that her ambitions lay beyond a husband, a house and a car. In college she had been happy, proud even, to be an anomaly. A girl in the geology department. Her interest was not in catching one of the men but in beating them. And as she grew through her twenties she found that if she kept her head down and made better calculations than the men, she could be accepted as one of them. Enough anyway to get the opportunity to travel as she had.
But everything had changed in Shanghai. The undercurrent to life in the city was brazenly sexual. It was inescapable and in the end she had not wanted to escape it.
The international quarter was a world unto itself. It would have been perfectly possible to have made a life there without ever even stepping into the Chinese parts of the city. And plenty of people did just that. Naturally there were servants and tailors and merchants of every description from the native population, but they mostly made the journey into the wide tree-lined streets. On a cool day one might have been in any occidental commuter town. The green banality and silence were deadening.
Stevie had been drawn out into the shouting, spitting, reeking streets of the port. She had befriended Irena, a beautiful, statuesque girl from Lithuania who lived in a decadently draped apartment just off the Bund. Daylight never penetrated it. She had a particular penchant for leopard skin. It turned out that she was the mistress of one of the Swiss League of Nations representatives, a skinny, angular man with delicate ribbons of fair hair brushed over his balding pate. Irena had studied to be a medical doctor and also liked to discuss Russian history in terms of the great novels. She pushed those books at people with the enthusiasm and guile of a drug-dealer. Stevie had lain back on the animal-print cushions in Irena’s lair and fallen asleep many times, a huge, heavy, badly translated book in her hands.
Irena had looked at her in horror when she arrived to chaperone her to the first dance.
‘No. No. No. No. No.’ She had actually stamped her foot in its shiny cream leather.
‘I guess it’s no, then.’
Stevie had thought she’d done rather well. Her skirt was neat, her shirt was clean and her hair was relatively well brushed. Irena had practically ripped the clothes off her and insisted that she put on a dress which she herself chose from the explosion of little dresses she had stuffed into the wardrobe. It was Stevie’s Cinderella moment. The pale-green satin followed the geography of her. It was cool on her skin. She felt absolutely naked. But even she could see in the age-spotted mirror on the back of the door that she had been transformed. She looked like – well, she looked like a girl. A very pretty girl. Her curves were fine and her limbs lithe. It was like being someone else. A distant cousin she’d never met, perhaps. She drew the line, though, at the strappy shoes Irena thrust at her.
That first evening she drew men and attention and compliments like a debutante, which in a way she was. And she liked it. She found the greatest pleasure in this new game. Almost dizzy with it, she became a lepidopterist of compliments. At first, any ordinary or garden variety thrilled her. Soon she became more discerning. The rare and esoteric quickly held more value. She collected the attention, revelling in her new-found power. She played the game well and soon the most subtle of its rules were in her armoury. She had become that most dangerous of creatures – a beautiful and clever woman.
Through Irena she had been invited to those events where the more adventurous members of the international community tentatively chatted to carefully chosen Chinese men. It was at one such party – to celebrate the opening of a department store – that she had first lain eyes on Jishang. He was glorious and different in his traditional clothes, a marked contrast to all the other men, who looked stiff and uncomfortable in heavy woollen suits and ties. He was tall and languid and moved through the party like water. His invitation to her to visit his mountain retreat was, naturally, irresistible. In some ways they were very alike, each aware of opportunity, each hungry for experience, each well defended from any dangerous depth of feeling. But in others the chasm between them was unbridgeable.
Her visit to Jishang’s mountain place had been chaste enough. The house was almost European in its structure. Two storeys of handsome wood with a wrap-around veranda, it stood in a clearing by a lake near the summit of the mountain. They argued about the definition of mountain. Stevie was more inclined to consider it a hill. A tall hill but a hill none
theless. She told him he’d comprehend mountains when he saw the Rockies or the Grand Canyon and the thought of Jishang, tall and graceful, his traditional robe billowing as he peered over the edge into the distant chasm below, was so incongruous it made her laugh. They were sitting on the veranda watching the sun disappear behind the rounded peaks of the range. The thing that most struck her was how incredibly like a Chinese painting of a mountain the Chinese mountains were. They really were round and almost out of focus with their soft, greyish-green coating of fur, like dragons sleeping. It wasn’t difficult to see where the legends came from.
The crickets scraped, the fireflies winked, the phonograph played Glenn Miller’s ‘In the Mood’. She was acutely aware of his expressive hands as they gesticulated and then lay still on the thighs of his extended legs.
‘You know, I came alive when I discovered English literature. I was filled with possiblities. It’s hard to describe how alive it made me feel. All the old certainties of my education were overthrown by these books. Quite literally, a new world beckoned.’
‘Shakespeare?’
‘Yes, of course, Shakespeare. But also Tennyson, George Bernard Shaw.’
‘Really? Shaw seems so old-fashioned. So like an old man, I suppose.’
‘He is an old man. I met him, you know. He came to Shanghai.’
‘How was his beard?’
‘In good health. It kindly brought the rest of him along too.’
They laughed and she leaned forward. ‘I’m jealous.’
‘Of my meeting his beard?’
‘I’m jealous of your discovering English books. For me they were things to get past, obstacles not doorways. It’s only now I can begin to appreciate them for what they are. I guess I was impatient.’
The Harbour Page 3
