Enchanted Evening (7 page)

I still have a clear mental image of that sash being made. The artist, having mixed a small supply of the modelling paste with several different colours, took a pinch of each and, having rolled each one separately into a tiny ball, placed them all into the palm of one hand, kneaded them together and rolled them out flat, as you would roll out a piece of pastry. And there, believe it or not, was a neatly striped piece of red, yellow, emerald green and white dough, exactly the right size to do duty as a sash. Those colours are still as bright as on the day it was made, and each stripe in the tiny sash is no wider than a strand of cotton. But alas, I feel sure that Mao and his murderous Red Guards will between them have put an end for ever to the men who practised that particular and fascinating craft. Certainly no one who had been forced to work as a farm labourer for three years would have been able to model those beautiful little objects, for the hands of the man who fashioned them with such skill and speed on Pei-tai-ho beach were not made for digging and ploughing and pulling up weeds.

In addition to her art, China was to provide me with two of those magic moments that I imagine all of us experience at least once in the course of our lives, and for which I have no explanation. I can only describe them as a brief span of time in which the ordinary suddenly becomes extraordinary, and we know, without a shadow of doubt, that this is something that will be stamped on our memory long after a host of far more important things have been smudged out and forgotten.

The first came one September evening when Bets and I had gone for a walk to Lighthouse Point and, having reached the high ground, sat down on a boulder to admire the view. In those days there were hardly any houses between the British Embassy buildings and the Cathedral Rocks which marked the far end of a long, shallow curve of beach. If there were any, they too were hidden by dips in the ground, and all around us was barren, uncultivated land patched with wind-blown scrub and grass.

To our left, beyond the Cathedral Rocks, the land sloped down and merged with a wide expanse of plain that stretched away to meet the mountains that hemmed it in on the north, and the small garrison town of Shan-hai-kwan where (according to the Chinese) the Great Wall of China begins, or alternatively (according to the Europeans) where it ends. And in contrast to the biscuit-brown country around us, every inch of the plain appeared to be cultivated. Fields and fields of
kao-liang
stretched across it like a pale blue carpet, dotted here and there with the occasional tree or a cluster of brown-tiled Chinese farmhouses. In front of and around us there was nothing but barren ground and the squat stump of the ancient, stone-built lighthouse, and I remember thinking how drab and uninspiring it was, and that I would never want to paint it. As the sun went down behind us, any colour there may have been before drained away and left the whole world looking depressingly dreary …

And then suddenly it was as if I was watching one of those transformation scenes that were an obligatory part of the pantomimes of my youth, when Cinderella's kitchen seems to quiver and melt and change before your eyes into the shimmering crystal caves where a host of dwarfs and fairies are busy making those glass slippers. A moment before I would have said that there wasn't a cloud in that Isabella-coloured sky. But as the daylight faded and the sky began to darken to a soft Adam green I realized that the whole expanse of the eastern sky had in fact been full of invisible threads of vapour, some no longer than the palm of my hand. The vanished sun was now catching them, turning them from gold and apricot to every possible shade of pink, until the whole sweep of the sky, and the satin-smooth sea that reflected it, glowed and shimmered like some fabulous fire-opal.

There was at no time any harshness in those colours, and as the hidden sun sank lower and lower and the duck-egg green of the sky darkened to jade and amethyst, it remained a picture in pastel and gold dust. We stayed where we were on the headland, watching while the colours flamed up and faded, and though I had in the past seen more spectacular sunsets and would, I was sure, see more of them in the future, I knew that this one was different. This one was special. One of those things that are ‘marked with a white stone'.

The house lights of Shan-hai-kwan at the far end of the bay had begun to flower in the dusk before Bets and I tore ourselves away and made for home. And a few days later, having booked the house for next summer, we left Pei-tai-ho and set off for Peking.

Chapter 5

Neither Tacklow nor Mother had told us much about the house in Peking. Only that it was a Chinese-style one, but not to be compared with Aunt Peg and Uncle Alec's lovely house in Shanghai. I can only suppose that, realizing that both their daughters took a poor view of China, they hoped to surprise us. They did.

We broke our journey at Tientsin, and after spending a night there we left for Peking, our train pulling out from the same platform on which, some thirty years previously, Tacklow – until then a confirmed bachelor – had caught sight of a pretty teenager kissing her father goodbye, and fallen in love on the spot.

Once again the countryside was not particularly interesting. The same fields of
kao-liang
and Indian corn, the same shortage of trees. A pagoda, a temple, narrow canals, walled clusters of farmhouses with their distinctive tiled roofs tip-tilted in the Chinese fashion, a sprinkling of fruit trees, willows, almond and walnut trees. And always, somewhere in the picture, a little man in a rush hat ploughing his fields with the aid of a lumbering water-buffalo. This, after my disappointment at finding that neither Shanghai nor Tientsin looked in the least like the China of my romantic imaginings, was distinctly encouraging. For one thing, it looked a lot more like the place Tacklow had tried to describe to me, the country that he had fallen in love with so long ago, even before he had laid eyes on Mother. And for another, it was exactly like one of those fascinating little landscapes, lightly sketched in monochrome on yellowed scrolls of silk by Chinese craftsmen using the minimum of lines to maximum effect. Those landscapes were actually there outside the windows of our railway-carriage, exactly as they appear on the scrolls. Perhaps after all we were not too late to see the fabulous China of history and legend before the West, we, the ‘Outer Barbarians', succeeded in destroying it.

Peking was there at last. But oddly enough, I don't remember anything about our first sight of it, except that the station was much like any other station, and that the built-up area around it was as forgettable as the surroundings of most railway stations. Grimy and industrial. Our new Number-One-Boy, a relative of the
K'ai-mên-ti,
as were all the staff, was there to meet us, and in no time at all we found ourselves packed on to rickshaws and whisked off through the mazes of this most ancient of cities, Tacklow's leading and the rear one being brought up by the new Number-One-Boy's.

The first nip of cold weather had already been felt in Peking, and everywhere the trees were turning gold or red as if to match the colours of a city whose massive walls and gate-towers were every shade of red from rose-madder to scarlet, while the glazed roof-tiles throughout the enormous acreage of the Forbidden City glistened with the Imperial Yellow that in China is the prerogative of royalty. Most of the roads we passed along were dusty and full of potholes and, apart from a few reasonably tall European buildings, few of the Chinese houses seemed to be more than a single storey high; most were hidden behind high walls, so that all one could see of them were ridges of those grey or brown tiled roofs with their tip-tilted eaves, with here and there clusters of tree-tops that told of unseen gardens.

*   *   *

Tacklow had told us that our house had no name and was known only as No. 53 Pei-ho-yen. This had instantly made me visualize a solid row of Pont Street houses, all exactly alike, until he added that Pei-ho-yen meant ‘the Jade Canal', which sounded much more romantic. I should have learned by now to make allowance for the Chinese love of bestowing wonderfully fanciful titles on almost everything within reach – ‘The Black Dragon Pool', ‘The Green Cloud Temple', ‘The Gate of Quietude in Old Age', ‘Hill of a Thousand Flowers', ‘Pavilion of Great Happiness', and many, many others.

The Jade Canal, when we reached it, certainly lived up to its name. It was a long, narrow strip of water, crossed at intervals by enchanting humpbacked bridges and bordered on both sides by willow trees that leaned above their own reflections and turned the whole thing into a long, green tunnel. The water too was green, the darkest of jade greens. It also, unfortunately, possessed a good dark-green smell. Which was not surprising, since it turned out to be a main drain.

Fortunately for the success of the day, I had barely taken in this unpleasant fact when our cavalcade stopped at a gate in a long stretch of wall that ran parallel to the canal on one side of the dusty road. The gate was open, and outside it stood the
K'ai-mên-ti
and an assortment of Chinese servants, making welcoming noises. It seemed we had arrived. And suddenly the rest of the day became magic.

For this I shall always be grateful to Tacklow, who had known from the first that both Bets and I took a poor view of this move to China. But apart from our initial and instinctive wails of protest and woe, once we had taken in the fact that both he and Mother had set their hearts on it and were not going to change their minds, we had done our best not to spoil it for Tacklow by continuing to grizzle. Any further hostile criticism was to be kept strictly between the two of us, for we were both aware that he had – at considerable cost to himself – given us ample opportunity to meet and marry that legendary Mr Right whom the majority of girls of our class and generation were brought up to believe was waiting somewhere out in the great blue yonder to meet and marry us. If I had failed to do so, it was no fault of dear Tacklow's, and now that Bets was engaged, it was high time that the poor darling did what
he
wanted for a change.

Yet I should have known that I could not fool Tacklow by pretending to an interest in everything Chinese. He knew what I really felt about it and that was why he had purposely refrained from describing the house on the Jade Canal. With Mother's help he had allowed me to think that it wasn't much of a place: merely a comfortable house within walking distance of the Legation Quarter, and complete with all mod cons. Which had made me visualize something tediously suburban and much like Uncle Ken's house in Shanghai. I couldn't have been more wrong.

No. 53 Pei-ho-yen had once been part of the palace of a Manchu prince, and except for the addition of such things as Western baths and plumbing, it remained a purely Chinese house. The entrance to it was sunk back into the wall, forming a square porch, and on each side of it stood a stone ‘lion'. These ‘lion dogs' are not lions at all, but ‘butterfly hounds' – stylized Pekinese dogs, creatures which have always been greatly prized by the Emperors of China because in spite of their small frame they are credited with having great hearts and great courage. Their effigies, carved in stone and on occasion cast in bronze and mounted on ornate pedestals, stand guard at the gates of every sizeable house in the city. One male and one female. At first sight they seem to be identical, each with its chrysanthemum plume of a tail curled over its back and its luxuriant ruff depicted as hundreds of tight, formalized curls, and each with a front paw holding down a ball. But if you look carefully at the ball you will see that one is just a ball, which represents the world, while the other, under the female's paw, is a rolled-up puppy.

There is a charming story in Peking that tells of two pairs of stone lions who, in the course of their construction in the studio of a sculptor in the city, became great friends, but were parted when, on completion, they were dispatched to houses in different parts of the city. This so upset them that they took to visiting each other by night. In time, though, they grew careless and made so much noise about it that they woke up the residents, who rushed out one night, banging gongs and tin pans, to drive them away. The two male lions fled, but the two females with their puppies leapt up on to the vacant pedestals – where they remain to this day. And that, it is said, is why one house in Peking is guarded by a pair of male lions and the other by two females.

There must be thousands of these pairs of guardian lion dogs in Peking, and they come in all sizes. Some, in the Forbidden City and the Lama Temple for instance, are bronze and immense. Ours were of stone, and small, and our front door, the ‘To-and-from-the-World-Gate', was not impressive. But it opened into a courtyard the sides of which were the rooms where the
K'ai-mên-ti
and his family lived, and in the centre of which stood a Spirit Gate. This enchanting feature owes its existence to the fact that Chinese evil spirits – most conveniently – can only walk in a straight line. So just in case the residents, or any person visiting the house, should have been followed in by one or more of these ill-disposed
djinns,
the prudent householder installs a second gate, facing the entrance and permanently locked, which since it does not extend beyond the gateposts each side of it allows anyone coming in to walk round it and into the inner courtyards, but forces any evil spirit one might have picked up in the course of shopping or visiting friends to beat a retreat.

The door of our Spirit Gate was of green lacquer, faded by the years to a pale shade of its original turquoise green. The base and steps were of weather-worn marble, while the uprights and roof ends were lacquer red, and the tiles, like those on the rest of the roofs, were Imperial Yellow, denoting the fact that it had belonged to a member of the royal line. The ends of the wooden beams had once been coloured, and it must have been a flamboyant sight when the house was new. I preferred it the way it was, worn and faded by the centuries and totally charming. The whole courtyard had once been lacquered in red, and in place of glass in the windows there was oiled paper, which let in light but preserved privacy and, unlike glass, is not a conductor of heat or cold, so that it helped keep the rooms behind a lot warmer in winter, and slightly cooler in summer.