Fragrant Harbour (10 page)

Two days after leaving Calcutta we hit genuinely bad weather for the first time. The Bay of Bengal is shallow; its storms arrive quickly and can be severe. As a good sailor I was spared
seasickness
but I was not spared fear. The dread was made worse by the fact that the storm came on at night when there was no moon, so the ship began to yaw and pitch in a dark which offered no point of reference. The sea seemed malevolent. The sense that we were bobbing loose on the waves was hard to resist, especially when a wave carried the
Darjeeling
upwards and let her fall freely on the downslope. You could feel the engines lose traction in the water as we slid forward, and it was hard not to tense one’s muscles in anticipation of the bow’s punching into the bottom of the next wave.

I found it difficult to sleep that night. Like a man with a fever or a bad worry, I hoped that the morning would automatically bring relief – and in a way it did, since the steep, grey, quick-moving waves were less frightening when I could see them. I also thought that daylight would somehow cause the storm to go away, a view of which I was disabused by our waiter, who had the seaman’s love of frightening novice travellers.

‘Two or three days of this would be normal for these parts,’ he said. ‘Once going around the Cape …’

I stopped listening. After breakfast I went down to my cabin to clean up before my lessons and found a note from Maria pushed under my door. No one else from our table had made it to breakfast.

My vocabulary cards had the English word on one side, the Chinese word, spelt out phonetically, on the other. They stayed safely untouched all that long day. I wandered carefully around the boat. There was something regal about my isolation. I had most of the Tourist Class parts of the
Darjeeling
to myself. I even
contemplated paying a visit to the Scots baronial sitting room of the first-class passengers. But the ship was moving about so much and so violently that I decided simply to stay put, so I spent most of the day in the Tourist Class sitting room looking out of the stained windows at the unyielding storm.

That night I again couldn’t sleep. After going to bed, turning off the light for an hour or two and feeling the pitch of the boat, I gave up. I put the light back on and lay there a while before
finally
getting dressed and going up to the public rooms. It was now about 1 o’clock in the morning. I opened one of the doors out on to the deck proper, at the back of the ship. It was disconcerting to feel the rainless warmth of the strong wind. Maria was standing at the same rail. She didn’t hear me approach and startled when I arrived beside her.

‘I can’t sleep either,’ I said. ‘Are you all right?’

It was a stupid question. Even under the dim light spilling out from the back of the ship’s public rooms, she was a peculiar blanched colour.

‘Sick,’ she said. ‘I feel sick. For over a day now. It is such an unpleasant feeling to be so protracted.’

‘I don’t get that, but it does make me nervous. My stomach’s all right but I do feel frightened. I suppose I’m the other way around from you.’

‘No, I have fear also. Faith does not cancel fear.’

She was gripping the guardrail with both fists. She did not move away. After a while she said:

‘N. G. O. H. Ngoh.’

‘What?’

‘It will help take our minds off the storm. I’ll test your
vocabulary
. Ngoh. N. G. O. H.’

‘Er … I, me.’

‘Chín.’

‘Money.’

‘What is the word for thing?’

‘Yéh.’

‘And for weather?’

‘Er … tinhei.’

‘And for the verb to eat?’

‘Sihk.’

She fell silent. The boat was still pitching as violently as ever. We stood there for the better part of an hour. Maria said:

‘I’m starting to feel a little better.’

I reached out and put my right hand on top of her left. She stood there for a few seconds and then went inside. When I woke up in the morning the sun was shining and the sea was flat.

A few days before we were due to arrive in Hong Kong, a
crewman
I had never seen before – one of the First Class stewards – knocked on my door after the morning lessons. I was lying on my bunk, smiling at the ceiling. There had been a vocabulary test, and I had done well.

‘The Captain presents his compliments and says he would like to see you in his cabin at your convenience, sir.’

‘I’ll follow you,’ I said, my heart beginning to thump. I assumed I must be in trouble, though I couldn’t imagine for what. We went forwards and upwards towards the crew’s quarters. The steward knocked, was told to come in, saluted and left. The Captain was sitting at a desk in his bare, entirely unhomely quarters: no
pictures
, no evident comforts, apart of course from the pipe he was still sucking and fiddling with. He didn’t meet my eye.

‘Good voyage?’ he asked.

‘Yes, thank you.’

By now I was dreaming in Cantonese; or rather, since my Cantonese was still primitive, in chunks of it, bits of the language floating past me in my sleep like debris. Maria and I had spent so much time together it felt as if we could read each other’s minds. At lunch we finished each other’s sentences.

‘Good.’ There was another of his silences while he looked down and across the room. If there had been a porthole across his cabin at floor level, he would have been looking out of it.

‘How’s the Chinese? Coming along?’

‘Difficult for me to say, sir. I’m too much in the middle of it. When I ask her how she thinks the bet will go, Sister Maria just says, “Do not despair, do not presume.”’

The Captain nodded but did not speak. There was more pipe activity. Then he said:

‘I’ve been sailing out East for thirty years. My whole sea life. Not many chaps bother with the lingo. I’ve noticed that. So you
have something most people don’t. Bear that in mind. You need a job, accommodation?’

I was so surprised that for a second I couldn’t speak. Eventually I managed:

‘Well …’

‘No shame in that. With your permission, I’m going to take the liberty of mentioning your name to a chap I know. Go and see him in a couple of days’ time after we arrive. He’s called Masterson and he runs the Empire Hotel. Anyone will tell you where it is.’

In that act of unsolicited kindness, I catch a glimpse of how I must have seemed to other people in those days; how very young.

By the time we arrived in Hong Kong, Sister Benedicta and Marler had come to an agreement about the precise form of the bet. We would meet three days after arrival, to have lunch at the Hong Kong Club. The Captain would be present. Afterwards we would go and find a Chinese passer-by with whom to test my Cantonese in the following way: Marler would ask me a question, I would ask the Chinese passer-by the same question, I would relay the answer to Marler, and if the reply was satisfactory Maria would have won her bet. The Captain would adjudicate.

People often say that their memory of an event or an occasion is a blur. Mine never is. I remember with crystalline accuracy or not at all. My recollection of those first days in Hong Kong more than sixty years ago is still sharp enough to cut. We came into the harbour an hour after dawn. The last shreds of mist clinging to the Peak were being burnt off by the sun; they looked like smoke, as if the island was an active volcano. The harbour was, as it always has been, busy. The junks were like overgrown
children
’s toys, or things seen in a dream. At first glance you could see they were family enterprises. Children and grandparents
jostled
on the decks, cooking and eating and living their lives. The sampans bucked up and down the waves like skittish young horses. A British warship, HMS
Leo
, the first we had seen since Aden, lay low in the water, its grey North Atlantic camouflage making it conspicuous in the South China Sea. I could see the limp Union Jack hanging above Government House. I felt the
purest excitement as I looked at the Peak and imagined myself up there looking down.

Maria had joined me at the rail.

‘So what do you think?’

‘It’s –’

I laughed. So did she.

‘It’s Hong Kong,’ she said. ‘
Heung gong
. Fragrant harbour.’

The harbour had a distinct, dirty smell, too brackish to be mere seawater. I said: ‘That’s one way of describing it.’

Maria smiled. ‘Chinese joke,’ she said.

‘I don’t want you to spend a year working for Marler.’

‘Nor do I. I don’t believe it will happen.’

On the day of the test I woke up feeling nervous, with a fluttering stomach. The proprietor of my boarding-house brought me a plate of fried food, bacon and eggs and sausage, which I now realise was an elaborately polite nod to my Englishness. I split the yolk of my egg and found that I couldn’t eat so much as a
mouthful
. On the front page of the
South China Morning Post
there were items about the visit of the HMS
Leo
, a reception at Government House, and an account of a jewel robbery in Wanchai. I spent the rest of the morning looking at vocabulary cards, and met Maria on a bench beside the Hong Kong Cricket Club half an hour before our lunch date.

‘You look nervous,’ she said. She was dressed in her full formal habit and we must have made a strange couple.

‘I am nervous.’

‘No need. Our Lady will look after us.’

Even if I don’t believe in her? I thought.

‘Where’s your stuff?’

Maria laughed.

‘“Stuff.” What a word. We have little luggage, as you know, and what there is of it has gone ahead to the train.’

In those days, before the Communists won the civil war, you could take a direct train from Kowloon to Canton. Immediately after lunch, that’s what Maria and Benedicta were going to do.

‘And if I lose, you’ll be back?’

‘I shall.’

‘I’d better not lose then, had I?’

I could tell as soon as I put a foot over the threshold that the Hong Kong Club was the poshest and snootiest institution I had ever been in. There was a smell of leather armchairs and, faintly, last night’s cigars. This did not help me to feel any less on edge. Mr and Mrs Marler and Sister Benedicta were already sitting at a table in the only one of the dining rooms which allowed women at lunchtime. I learnt afterwards that there had been special
negotiations
to have Sister Maria allowed in; being Chinese, she would normally not have been permitted in the Club. All three of them were sitting behind what looked like large gin-and-tonics. Marler, beaming, got up and held out his hand as we came in.

‘Ah, the teacher and her pupil, and very welcome you are. Have a pew.’

His Yorkshire accent was less noticeable; he didn’t make such a big production of it in Hong Kong. We sat down and went through what, for me, was an excruciatingly laborious lunch. I could think only of the disgrace involved if I lost the bet, and of what I would be doing to Maria. She could not fail to resent me bitterly. Marler and Sister Benedicta, though, seemed to be vying with each other in affability and chumminess. By the time we got to coffee and cigarettes I had been to the bathroom four times.

‘Now,’ said Marler, making great play with a balloon of brandy and for some reason smiling at Sister Benedicta as he spoke, ‘we come to the business of the meeting.’

‘Right,’ I said, feeling I needed to take charge, assert myself, stride confidently towards the gallows. ‘Let’s go and find a Chinese man. Or do you want to use one of the waiters? A
rickshaw
man from outside? Yes? But where’s the Captain?’

‘Well,’ said Sister Benedicta, ‘Mr Marler and I have been
discussing
this and have reached certain conclusions.’

‘The thing is,’ said Marler, ‘I’ve seen Sister Maria in action with you and I fully accept her assertions about the efficacy of her teaching methods. I also see that you show no signs of converting to the Roman Church, ho ho. So I withdraw without reservation my remarks about the deliberate spreading of ignorance and superstition.’

‘And I on my part unreservedly accept Mr Marler’s apology, and regret my own vehemence at the time of our earlier
disagreement
,’ said Sister Benedicta.

‘The question which remains is, whether it makes sense to carry on with the bet or not. The thing is, it’s a lot to ask of Sister Maria, to come and work for me for a year. I’d be turning her life upside down, and disrupting the work of her mission. I’m not saying I necessarily agree with her mission, but it’s what she believes in, and I’d be subjecting her in its stead to a kind of indentured servitude.’

‘For our part, even though we are eager to subsidise our
mission
in Hong Kong, we have no desire to bankrupt Mr Marler, or to subject him to financial strain.’

‘So we have decided, in short, to waive the bet.’

‘Hey just a bloody … excuse me Sisters, just a minute,’ I said, suddenly very angry. ‘So the grown-ups make the decision and the children scuttle along behind doing what they’re told? What about the six weeks’ work we’ve just put in for your bloody wager? All that time I could have spent looking out the window and
wandering
around the decks? What if I don’t want to waive the bet? What if we want to keep you to it?’

‘Now Tom,’ said Maria, ‘we have to be reasonable. Mr Marler has a lot to lose if we should settle this wager, and so does our mission. Words were rashly spoken on the boat and it is only
sensible
that as adults we should seek a mature resolution. It would be unchristian of us to force Mr Marler to build our mission at great cost to himself, against his will.’

I got up and walked out. Maria, running, caught up with me on the pavement outside the Club, where a small crowd of rickshaw men looked on with unconcealed curiosity.