Bill for the Use of a Body (12 page)

Your devoted Julian

It was because he felt doubtful whether Merri was yet sufficiently attracted to him to invite further trouble by giving him a secret rendezvous that he had taken the line of inciting her to make a fight for her independence and, having read his letter through, he thought there was a good chance of its leading her to defy her mother.

As soon as he had dressed, he walked down past the Lido and reconnoitred the house. From the road he could see only a part of the roof that showed between the trees, and no-one was about except, just inside the gate, a young Chinese whom he took to be a gardener.

Beckoning the man over, Julian produced his letter, together with a ten-dollar note, and asked, ‘Do you think you could deliver this letter to Miss Sang without anyone else seeing you give it to her?'

Although poorly clad, the Chinese replied in passable English and appeared to have a quicker intelligence than
most of his class. With a broad grin he said, ‘Am not allowed in house, Master. But it iss fine day, so Missie certain come out. When she do everyfing O.K. I give Missie and no-one see.'

Feeling reasonably confident that the young fellow would succeed in getting the letter to Merri, Julian gave it and the handsome tip to him; then he returned to the Repulse Bay to get through the day with as much patience as he could muster.

At 7.30, with a self-drive car that he had hired through the hotel, he was waiting anxiously outside the Lido. Soon afterwards, to his relief, Merri came hurrying up the road. As she slipped into the car beside him she said a little breathlessly:

‘Well, here I am. I'm furious with Mother; absolutely furious. She continues to insist that I must give up my job as a guide; but I find it the greatest fun meeting people from all over the world and taking them round. I'd be bored to tears if, instead, I had to wade through endless reports and file things all day in her dreary old office.'

‘Then be your age,' Julian told her abruptly, as he set the car in motion, ‘and tell her that as a grown woman you are going to stick to the job you prefer.'

‘That won't be easy,' Merri said with a sigh. ‘She is a terribly dominating person, and all my life I've been used to doing as she tells me. She has forbidden me to leave the house without her permission and I wouldn't be here now if it hadn't been that I had already accepted an invitation to dine tonight with some people she knows quite well; and she could hardly order me to back out at the last moment.'

The town of Aberdeen lay only a couple of miles away, so Julian decided to reserve until over dinner his arguments to induce her to revolt. As he had fallen silent, Merri asked, ‘Where did you find the young Chinese who brought me your letter? He didn't look like a servant from the hotel.'

Julian gave her a look of surprise. ‘I thought he was one of your gardeners.'

‘No. They don't work on Sundays. When I came out to lie on the hammock he was hiding in the bushes and attracted my attention by giving a low whistle. Then, as I looked in that direction, he beckoned me over, pressed your note into my hand and scuttled away before I had a chance to say anything to him.'

‘Then I haven't an idea who he was. I had meant to sneak round to the back door of the house and bribe one of the servants to give it to you when your mother was not about. But I came upon this chap just inside your front drive, and counted myself lucky to have found someone who would do the job without my having to risk being seen.'

‘I asked because I thought it funny that you had only folded your letter and not put it into an envelope.'

‘But I did. He must have torn it open in order to get at the letter and see what it was about. What an extraordinary thing for a coolie to do. I shouldn't have thought many of them could read—English writing anyhow.'

‘Most of the young ones can; and although he was of the working class he wasn't a coolie.'

‘Why should he want to read it, though?'

‘Just curiosity, I expect. : People are insatiably curious and there is nothing they love so much as finding out about other people's private affairs. The very fact that you told him to give it to me in secret would have been quite enough to set him itching to open it.'

‘Since he does know what it was about, isn't there a risk that he'll try to earn another tip by spilling the beans to your mother?'

‘I don't think he's likely to do that. As a people the Chinese are remarkably honest.'

‘Say he did, though; your mama may come chasing after us to get you out of my clutches. Perhaps we had better not dine at Aberdeen, but go somewhere else.'

Merri shook her dark head. ‘There's no fear of that. Mother would never make a scene in public.'

A few minutes later they were running into Aberdeen. Some way out from the packed mass of moored sampans, that housed by far the greater part of the population of the place, lay the two floating restaurants. Had they been on land and seen from a distance these great double-decker house-boats might well have been taken for Chinese temples and, although it was only just dusk, they were already gaily lit with many chains of coloured fairy lamps.

Having parked the car, they were met at the landing stage by rival porters, and when they chose the Sea Palace its porter beckoned up a sampan. Its owner and a girl who was little more than a child then poled them across the neck of the bay to the restaurant. Most visitors, on arriving, went straight to the big tank to choose a fat garoupa, or other fish to be netted and cooked as a course in their meal. But Julian was impatient to have his talk with Merri; so as soon as she had telephoned, excusing herself to the friends with whom she had been going to dine, he took her straight to the upper deck. There, after one glance at Julian, the head waiter led them to a table on the landward side from which they could watch the thousand lights come on in the massed sampans along the shore.

Julian liked Chinese food and, while he considered shark's fin soup, birds' nests, fried snake and so-called ‘thousand-year-old eggs' much over-rated, he greatly enjoyed Pekin Duck and sucking pig, with their honey-saturated skins roasted to a crisp golden brown. But tonight his mind was on other things, and Merri's too; so having ordered cocktails, they settled for the set dinner. Crab meat with sweet-corn soup was followed by huge fried Prawns with sweet and sour sauce, baked Lobster, diced Chicken sautéed with walnuts and Chow Fan, Young-Chow Style. While they ate these intriguing things, and picked with their chopsticks at the numerous side
dishes that accompanied each course, they discussed the situation.

Merri was at first much inclined to accept it, but Julian argued that she would be very foolish to do so. He pointed out that mothers with only one child, like Mrs. Sang, are often apt to become possessive and, although not deliberately, sacrifice their daughters' happiness for their own selfish ends; so that the girl continues as the mother's unpaid companion until, too late, she realises the trap she has allowed herself to fall into, and is too old to have much choice of a husband. Following up that line, he stressed the fact that Mrs. Sang led a very restricted life; so Merri had little opportunity of meeting eligible bachelors in their own circle, whereas, as she admitted, she had met quite a number since she had been acting as a guide.

To that she agreed, but replied that in any case her mother could, and would, insist on the Tourist Association's dispensing with her services.

‘All the more reason,' Julian told her, ‘that you should dig in your toes now, and assert your right to take some other job which would bring you into contact with plenty of people, instead of becoming a slave in your mother's office.'

For a while they discussed other jobs that she was qualified to do. But none of them would give her both the opportunity to make many new acquaintances and also enable her to enjoy long days in the sunshine.

At length Julian smiled at her, laid his hand on hers and said, ‘There's one way out. Why not make a clean break and marry me?'

She sighed and shook her head, ‘No, Julian. I like you. I like you a lot, but I don't love you.'

‘Don't put too much weight on that,' he urged her. ‘Many marriages which are made solely for convenience, and in which the couple have hardly met one another, turn out the most lasting in the long run. That you like me a lot is enough for the moment. Love will come.'

Then he went on to endeavour to persuade her by saying that he would buy a well-situated house with a good garden in Hong Kong, so that she need not give up her friends, and that they would live there through the best months of the year, but travel during the great heat of summer in France, Italy, Spain and Germany, where he would take her to see the works of the great masters, the chateâux on the Loire, the glories of Seville and the castles on the Rhine. But when dinner ended she still would not commit herself.

‘It all sounds heavenly,' she said. ‘My favourite dream come true. And I don't suppose I'll ever meet another man with so much knowledge of these lovely things and places, and the time and money needed to show them to me. Perhaps, too, I would fall in love with you if we were constantly together for longer than we have been so far. But I do feel that Mother was right about one thing: the fact that there is such a big difference in our ages. And, as she said, your never having been married before makes that worse instead of better, because men who have lived as bachelors for years often get so set in their habits that when the first excitement of being married has worn off they resent having to lead an entirely different life.'

‘I shouldn't, Merri,' he assured her. ‘You would be rescuing me from my accursed loneliness, and I'd be happy to do anything to please you.'

She smiled at him. ‘You're so kind and gentle and generous, that I believe you would. But I've got to make really certain that I could do my part, and give up lots of things that only young people enjoy, before I can say “Yes”. I do promise, though, to think it over very, very seriously during these next few days.'

When they left the Sea Palace they were handed into a sampan poled by a strong-limbed woman and a boy in his early teens. The reflection of the coloured lights of the restaurant danced on the water and in the distance those in the packed sampans looked like a swarm of
fireflies; but the night was dark, and it was not until they were about half-way to the shore and close upon her that they noticed a large, unlit launch. Unlike the one in which they had gone round the island, she had no upper deck; but she was as long and, obviously, a sea-going vessel.

She was almost stationary, but as they approached her they could hear her engine purring. Suddenly someone in her switched on a powerful torch and focused it on the sampan. Its beam came to rest on Merri and the man who held it gave a shout. Next moment the launch nosed forward, turned and came alongside them, scraping the side of the sampan and nearly upsetting it. The woman who was poling the boat gave a cry of protest. Then everything seemed to happen at once.

Half blinded by the light from the torch, Julian glimpsed half a dozen men a few feet above him over the counter of the higher vessel. With a long boat-hook one of them gave the woman sampan owner a violent prod in the stomach. Giving a gasp, she fell backwards and overboard. Another man struck at Julian's head with a cudgel. As he dodged the blow, a third flung a big piece of thick material over Merri's head, muffling her cries of alarm. By the time Julian had lurched to his feet in the now dangerously rocking sampan, two of them had leant over, seised Merri by the arms and were dragging her into the launch. What happened to the boy Julian did not see, but his cries, too, had been promptly silenced.

Julian hit out at the face of one of the men who were hauling Merri on board. His fist landed with a thud, The man gave a grunt and let go his hold, but the other had a firm grip on her. Just as Julian was about to seise her round the waist, she kicked out violently. Her right heel caught him in the chest, temporarily throwing him off balance. Before he could recover the man he had hit grabbed Merri again and she was pulled over the side.

Without a second's hesitation Julian scrambled over
after her and hit out right and left. A blow to the chin sent one man reeling. Another, who grappled with him, he kneed in the groin. Then one of the others struck him on the side of the head with a bludgeon. Reeling back, he fell against the gunwale of the launch. One of them seised his legs, jerked them up and tipped him over the edge. Under the thrust from his feet as he had followed Merri the sampan had drifted away. As he blacked out his last conscious thought was that he had struck the water and was going under.

No Actuary, knowing all the circumstances, would have assessed the chances of Julian's surviving the night at more than a thousand to one against. And had he been thrown unconscious into most other harbours he would certainly have drowned. That he did not was owing to the fact that the Chinese, who live and die in waterborne sampan towns, are taught, even as tiny tots, to keep themselves afloat in case they tumble overboard, and later they all swim like fish.

The strong-limbed woman who had poled the sampan from the restaurant was no exception. Although winded by the jab from the boat-hook, she had soon got back her breath, and it was Julian's luck that he was thrown in within a few feet of her. Diving like a heron, she grabbed him by the hair and brought him to the surface.

Her young son, filled with terror at the totally unexpected and murderous attack, had not waited to see its outcome. Quick as a flash, he had dived overboard. On coming up, his first thought had been for his mother's sole means of livelihood—the precious sampan. A few swift strokes had brought him to its far side. As soon as it had drifted clear of the launch, he scrambled in and seised a paddle. Deftly he turned the boat and, exerting all his young strength, brought it alongside his mother; so that while supporting the unconscious Julian with one arm she could use a hand to cling on to it.