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This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
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London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1999
Copyright © Simon Barnes 1999
The Simon Barnes asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The extract from the poem ‘Two Laments’ is reprinted from Chinese Poems translated by Arthur Waley (Unwin Paperbacks, 1989, p. 30), courtesy of the Arthur Waley Estate.
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Source ISBN: 9780006511953
Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2016 ISBN: 9780007483242
Version: 2016-10-04
Dedication
For Al and Les, with thanks, and for CLW, with eternal gratitude (again)
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
PART I
CHRISTMAS
PART II
SPRING
PART III
SUMMER
PART IV
AUTUMN
PART V
CHRISTMAS AGAIN
Keep Reading
About the Author
About the Publisher
The past is another country: an aggressive, imperial power seeking constantly to invade and overwhelm the peace-loving present. Death is part of its nuclear arsenal, the midnight telephone a favourite tactic.
And so they were launched across space and through time, worries about the present – their daughters’ ability to cope with a stay at their neighbours’, the animals that were their livelihood – meeting in pitched battle with the unresolvable anxieties of the past.
Alan Fairs looked at his wife, marooned in a troubled doze at the window seat, about her neck the thin gold chain he had given her yesterday: her Christmas present, a Christmas not untouched by the shadow. He thought of the dolphin she had given him: carved on bone by an Eskimo, she said, a handsome little thing. She always gave him a dolphin, a tribute to the Christmas Day when they had met, a day not without its shadow.
He had twenty of these dolphins now, for she had marked their initial meeting with the first of these serial gifts. And now flying back: back in time, back to their meeting place, back to Hong Kong, back to Tung Lung, back to the past and its various moments of horror and shame: naked women; projectile vomiting; death by water – suddenly he found himself laughing silently. Laughing as the aeroplane grumbled on north and west to their destination, laughing at naked women and projectile vomiting, laughing at his own shame, laughing at Charles, who, wiping tears from his eyes, tears of laughter and agony, had said to him: ‘Sweet Jesus, what an indescribably sordid scene.’
Madness.
He saw without willing it, and with quite extraordinary clarity, the body of Karen Song. Sitting on his, or in fact his wife’s, cushions, drinking tea, both of them quite naked. He saw her reach for the tea, jasmine tea she had made herself, for he, also naked, was quite unable to do so. It was her voice that he had heard on the midnight telephone, half-cockney and wholly Chinese. Karen Song as was: Karen James now, of course, Karen James for nearly twenty years. He had never told James of their naked night: had never dared. The shame was too great.
The telephone had splintered the silence. That had once been a favourite phrase of Alan’s, for it was what James Bond’s telephone did when M needed him. And for once it was more or less appropriate: the silent night shattered by the insistent bell. And by about the fifteenth ring, Alan had made it across the warmth of the Christmas night, a sarong tied about his waist. He held the receiver like a weapon. But it was not M, with a summons to take on Smersh and Spectre: it was Karen Song, a call to take on an enemy more fearful than either. Sorry to wake you, she said. Got the time difference muddled, thought it worked the other way for New Zealand. That’s all right, Karen, good to hear your voice again. And sorry, Alan, but I’ve got bad news to bring you …
And, thirty-six hours later, he and his wife were roaring towards the jaws of the past.
‘How did he die?’ she asked as he held her, her face, lit only by the night from the open window, looking almost as it did that Christmas twenty years previously. In tears then, too, of course.
‘More or less of a slight chill,’ Alan said, ‘from what Karen told me. He’d not been well for a few weeks, but nothing serious. That’s how it seemed, anyway. Series of colds and flu and coughs. Just took to his bed, she said. And sort of faded away.’
‘He died of a broken heart,’ she said. ‘I always wondered how Dad was going to cope with 1997. Now I know.’
She had discussed the matter, a trifle obsessively, over the course of Christmas Day and Boxing Day, as people with a sudden grief must. She talked of 1997, and how Hong Kong’s return to Chinese hands was the final invalidation of the dead man’s troubled life. Alan had objected that the handover did not take place for another six months, but she said that it had clearly been impossible for him to live into a calendar year that bore that ominous number: 1997: it was the rejection of himself by the people he had called his people.
Noble savages! Alan remembered the dead man’s orations on the subject, and the trouble the phrase had once made for him. My people are noble savages, Alan. And then he had given Alan the keys to a new life, a new freedom, and one he had never thought to end, settling into his Chinese village, an aggressive imperial power himself, and embarked on a course of delighted folly which he believed no 1997 could ever end.
‘What did you do out there?’
A question his neighbour Brett had asked him. They had gone to Brett’s for Christmas lunch, the usual barbie beside the pool. Alan, who never minded an excuse not to drink, had offered to be the abstemious one and to bring the horses in that evening, while his family stayed on. Brett, neighbourly and perhaps wanting a break from his own party, had driven him the few minutes between their next-door places. He watched Alan’s calm, quiet handling of the beasts. Afterwards, he had accepted a beer, and listened to Alan’s tale of sudden death and his wife’s need to return to Hong Kong for the funeral.
‘Are you going?’
‘Wish I could. Can’t afford the fare.’
Brett snapped his fingers, a normally irritating habit of his. ‘Tell you what. I wanted to do a Hong Kong piece in the paper, 1997 and all that. Why don’t you go out there and write it? Can’t afford expenses, but I’ll pay for the piece, and that should cover most of your costs.’
Brett was editor of the local daily newspaper; Alan did two days a week chief-subbing the Sunday edition. It was an unusual arrangement that allowed Alan to spend most of his time with the horses.
‘That’s a kind thought, Brett.’
‘What did you do out there?’
‘Now you’ve got me.’ But he talked a little about it: the year of madness, the island of folly.
‘Don’t you miss it? The thrill of the mysterious East and all that?’
Alan gestured to the extensive fields, the line of horses, heads nodding over the doors. ‘Try meeting the payments on this lot,’ he said. ‘That can get pretty thrilling.’
‘I thought it was a pretty good living you made.’
‘Nope. Not really much of a livelihood. Not a bad life, though.’
Brett, not being English, took a moment to realise that this was understatement. ‘Yeah, I see. Your own spread.’
‘Our own island.’
Hardly drunk at all, Alan Fairs raised his glass to wish a happy Christmas to the junk that was puttering gently into the harbour. ‘Happy Christmas, junk,’ he said softly, glorying in his solitude.
The junk bore no batwing sail, but that would have been too self-righteously picturesque. It was enough that the boat was shaped like a Spanish galleon, and that it swung its high square backside away from him. It was enough that the island of Tung Lung rose up behind it: its high and pointy hills. Until today, Alan had assumed that such hills were a graphic convention, a precious affectation of the painters of Chinese scrolls. Now he could see that it was a question of pedantic accuracy.
‘I am sitting here, drinking beer in a Chinese scroll,’ he said to himself. He drank a little more, for the glory of the thought.
He had journeyed here from the island of madness, or Hong Kong. In less than an hour he had passed from the great harbour and its endless castles of glass, to this other place, this toy harbour, its jolly bouncing boats and steep little hills crammed with elven dwellings.
He had resolved to turn down all Christmas invitations in search of a proud self-sufficiency. In the event, no invitations had come, but this had ceased to cast a shadow over his day. He had lunched, beerily, alone and in perfectly Chinese splendour, at a restaurant on the far side of the island of Tung Lung. He had handled both chopsticks and the occasion with some élan, he thought. Afterwards, he had walked, somewhat dizzily, over the spine of the island, up the pointy hills and down the other side, until he had reached the island’s second village. Here, he would soon be catching a ferry home – home! – to the island of madness, and his rather hateful flat in the Mid-Levels.
But he was in no hurry to make this retreat, for here on Tung Lung he felt like a conqueror. A red and white butterfly, the size of a bat, flapped about by his feet before dipping down to where the Christmas bounty of flowers bloomed out of sight. At a table beside him two young Chinese men played cards with cries of triumph and dismay, unmoved by the exoticism of their home. One man, grey-haired – unusual in the Chinese who dye their hair an iridescent black at the first hint of time’s passage – sat in regal dignity, served Coca-Cola by the fat proprietor with understated deference. A scent of dead and dying fish was wafted towards them in little spurts, on occasional gusts of wind.
Alan turned his attention to the boats in the little harbour. The junk had moored at the small jetty on the far side, half a dozen more motor-junks were tied up together in the middle beside a cluster of portly sampans, on one of which a man in a black shirt worked with absorption. And alongside that, a strange craft, apparently two plastic canoes linked by a trampoline, the whole thing an offensive shade of yellow. Alan speculated on an unseaworthy experiment, lashed together by some eccentric, dashing Chinese youth from the village. Yet again he sipped, savouring warm air, chill beer, the little harbour, his glorious Christmas self-sufficiency: above all the sense of distance from Hong Kong. By making this brief journey to this outlying island, he felt he had achieved some kind of tenuous control. He placed his left ankle on his right knee, a very subtle form of self-celebration. It was the James Bond Position: Bond had once been photographed thus, in ‘the sort of position only an Englishman would adopt’. Alan, on a dangerous mission overseas, was in control and, unshaken, was drinking San Miguel beer.
Smirking a little at this fancy, he became aware of a steady procession taking place behind him. He turned in his chair, looking back to the café from which he had bought his beer. Between him and the tubby young giant of a proprietor, who was lounging against the wall of his establishment, a tidal flow of people moved with single-minded determination along the larger jetty. Alan inspected them with fascination: island-dwellers moving out to Hong Kong for the evening; Hong Kongers returning home after a too-brief day of exile. Many seemed young, schoolchildren, most of them clutching ferocious double-pointed spears three feet in length. Alan pondered their use without coming to any firm conclusion: perhaps Hong Kongers carried them as protection against the wild Tung Lung natives. Among these returning exiles, little motorised carts buzzed about dangerously, trolleys powered by loud Rotavator engines, guided with languid gestures by the young men who clasped the long, elegant handlebars with the pomp of Hell’s Angels. The people shoved hard, but without active malice.
A dismal hoot sounded from across the waters, and Alan turned to see the ferry approaching: dingy; white; two-storeyed. It bore on its funnel the letters HYF, for Hong Kong and Yaumatei Ferry Company. This, according to his plans, was the boat that was to take him home, returning exile himself. He watched with disfavour as the boat came to a halt by the simple means of ramming the jetty wholeheartedly. It then performed a series of infinitely fussy forward and backward movements, with snarling engine and repeated distant blasts of the whistle. It took an astonishing length of time. Then all at once the tide turned: the incoming wash of islanders returning home. Home: again the word pricked at Alan’s heart.
He watched a stream of girls, dazzling nymphs all. Stragglers pushed their way undazzled against the flow. Others, family parties in their finery, walked cheerily, noisily back onto their island. They had, Alan guessed, been spending the day holidaying, shopping, eating in Hong Kong, for in Hong Kong nothing closed, ever, not for Christmas nor for anything else. Alan raised his glass, intending to drain it in a final brave swallow, to run to the ferry, last one aboard, just as the gangplank was pulled away. But with the swallow half done, he lowered his glass. A weak defiance had seized him. Thus do our lives change for ever.
The ferry hooted once more, reproachfully, and began its effortful journey back to the island of madness. Leaving Alan on the island of Tung Lung. It was warm, and anyway he had on the back of his chair his bad jacket, an unfortunate purchase in purple tweed. And he had money, money enough for another beer, at any rate. He would watch the sun go down from this scrap of a café, from this table on the edge of the toy harbour, watch the sun go down behind his Chinese scroll.
It was then that the impossible happened. Ambling, strolling at his ease, in marked contrast to the babbling crowds that had preceded him, not so much a stroller as a flâneur, tall – an inch or two over six foot – clad in a suit of unnatural perfection but worn with a studied insouciance, a gweilo. A round-eye, a European, a foreign devil, and anyway, quite clearly an Englishman. There was a slim attaché case in his hand, a garment bag over his shoulder. By his side walked a Chinese boy, pushing a trolley on which stood two suitcases of imposing size and solidity. The gweilo – Alan already thought in the Hong Kong idiom – was smiling faintly to himself.
He turned into the café and, in a voice of unexpected harshness, shouted out a few words of Cantonese. The fat proprietor came out to meet him. The two shook hands and discoursed with some warmth. Then the gweilo turned away, laughing, throwing out some quip that made the proprietor laugh in turn. Still smiling to himself, he walked to the tables by the harbour. It was then that he noticed Alan. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said, all trace of coarseness gone from his voice.
‘Hello,’ Alan said. He saw with some surprise that the newcomer was a little younger than himself; for all that, his ease of manner and his maturity of expression left Alan rather intimidated. In this moment of awkwardness, he wished very much that he had caught the ferry that was now turning away to the north.
The man stopped at the adjoining table, a move nicely calculated to avoid any accusation of unfriendliness without seeming to force friendliness upon him. It was a moment of perfect Englishness. Before sitting, he hung his garment bag from a branch of the banyan tree that shaded their tables. He did so with an air of quiet delight, as if the tree had grown in that shape especially for his convenience, and he couldn’t help feeling flattered by the attention. He then sat, unbuttoned the collar of his shirt of virginal whiteness, and unknotted his tie. This he rolled around his fingers and slipped into the pocket of his jacket.
The proprietor approached him with a glass and a dewed bottle, and received courteous thanks in Cantonese. Then, with very careful attention, the gweilo poured liquid gold into tilted glass. He placed bottle and glass on the table, not drinking, savouring their beauty.
‘Visiting the island?’ he asked.
‘Came out for lunch. Can’t bear to go home.’
‘My dear chap. Stay for ever. Beer?’
‘Thank you.’
He filled Alan’s glass with the same care with which he had filled his own. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Happy Christmas.’
‘Happy Christmas.’
They drank.
‘I’m André Standing.’ This announcement took Alan by surprise. It was simply not English, neither the name nor the bare fact of its announcement. After the business of the man’s choosing of his seat, Alan had expected to be playing by English rules. André, clearly, was English, yet not English. Alan played his own name in return; André asked: ‘On holiday?’
‘In a manner of speaking. I’ve just started work at the Hong Kong Times. We all got Christmas Day off, by a miracle, so I thought I’d spend it on Tung Lung.’
‘Get on all right with old Simpson?’ This unexpected dropping of his editor’s name was disquieting.
‘Only met him the once. Seems all right. Rather a change of pace after Fleet Street.’ Alan was seeking to impress in his turn. ‘What about yourself? What brings you out here?’
‘My dear chap. I live here, you see.’
Alan was riven through the heart with envy. ‘What do you do?’
‘Well, I’m sort of an entrepreneur, really. Bit of import/export. Do a fair bit in your line too; I’ve been known to sell advertising space for the odd magazine. Take my card.’ He pincered two fingers into his breast pocket and produced it. It was nicely engraved, a statement of class.
‘Merchant,’ Alan read.
‘That seems to cover it, on the whole.’
‘Very stylish.’
‘Well, very Hong Kong, really. Or very Asia – I’m just back this minute, actually. Been in Seoul, South Korea, you know. Just for a few days, but did some very sweet business.’
‘What sort of thing?’
‘Oh, the usual stuff, you know. I’m interested in the pharmaceutical trade.’
‘Oh.’ Alan drank, from nervousness. André, observing this, called out again in Cantonese; the fat proprietor returned with two new bottles. He seemed greatly exhilarated, and clapped André on the shoulder several times. The two exchanged a series of surprisingly excited remarks, all in Cantonese, and then the proprietor withdrew, beaming. André, too, seemed tremendously bucked by the exchange.
‘Good old Tung Lung,’ he said, pouring his beer.
‘It will make my flat in the Mid-Levels seem doubly poky tonight,’ Alan said.
‘Yes,’ André said. ‘I love it here. Don’t suppose I’ll ever move away. Most Europeans are just staying in Hong Kong for a while. How long have you been in Hong Kong? Standard Hong Kong question. But here on Tung Lung, I’m home. I have a nice flat, a nice boat, nice friends, a nice life. Nice Chinese girl – well, some days she’s nice enough. But all thanks to this island here. Who cares if Ng’s well runs dry and you have no water for a week? This is Tung Lung, and it simply doesn’t matter.’
‘Mm, yes, I envy you.’ Alan thought all this was rather overdoing it, sympathetic though the message was. But then André, lowering his voice in a rather stagy manner, came down to it. ‘In fact, I may be able to fix you up with a flat on Tung Lung. Do you like the sound of that?’
So that was what they had been talking about. ‘My God. I’d adore it. But –’
‘That’s settled, then.’
‘But what time does the last ferry leave Hong Kong in the evening?’
‘Oh, late enough. Ten thirty.’
A thud of despair. ‘No good. I’m a downtable sub; I don’t finish work till eleven thirty. Three times a fortnight, I do a late turn, finish at three.’
‘Oh really. I say, what a terrible bore. You’re the sort of chap who’d do well here. Resign at once, come and join us out here.’
‘Wonderful thought.’
‘No, really, you can do it: moonlight flit on the job and the flat, take up residence here, start merchant-venturing about the place. I’ve got a row of contacts in your line of work. You’d be up to your eyes in business in no time. How about it?’
‘André – I wish I could. But it’s not possible right now.’
‘Ah well. You’re still new here, aren’t you? You’re not close enough to the edge yet. But you’ll get there soon enough. I promise you that.’
Alan sat on the ferry drinking his beer. André had insisted on buying him a can for the journey. They had shaken hands warmly by the café, and then André had turned inland, attaché case in one hand, garment bag over his shoulder. Had he forgotten his suitcases? But perhaps he had arranged for someone to do the portering for him. That sounded André’s style.
Alan looked back, the faint lights of Tung Lung fading behind him. Ah well. He would take his Boxing Day dinner at the Country Club with Bill and Wally, the other two Englishmen on the subs’ desk. That is, if Wally was back from his trip to Bangkok. They had, in their way, been very decent to him. The question of the Country Club had come up on Alan’s first day at the Hong Kong Times.
‘But do you think they’ll let him in, Bill, in that shirt?’
‘I’ll have a little word with the doorman.’
The occasion was the sub-editors’ evening break. Alan accepted their invitation, flattered and a little flustered. Bill disrobed himself of his cardigan, which was baggy and leather buttoned; Wally removed his own generous maroon sweat shirt. Alan, who had not known to arm himself against the boreal chills of the Times’s air conditioning, merely stood. The wet warmth of Hong Kong greeted them as they left the building.
They led Alan not to the opulent doorway he had feared, but to a small grocery store a couple of hundred yards from the newspaper offices. Its owner, a wispy-bearded and gold-toothed ancient who looked like Lao-tzu, greeted them. Then, very spryly, he rolled a great wooden cartwheel from its resting place against the wall and unfolded from it four legs: at once it was revealed as a table. He next unfolded three stools; then, as the final touch of elegance, he placed a roll of lavatory paper on the table. He asked, in Cantonese that Alan could follow even then, if all three required San Lig, meaning San Mig, meaning San Miguel, the beer of Hong Kong. They did.