Fragrant Harbour (11 page)

‘Tom, I’m sorry, I didn’t want –’

‘You knew.’

She sighed.

‘Not until last night. You should understand, the Bishop would never have let me go and work for Marler. Benedicta explained this to me. She lost her temper, she got carried away. She’s sorry. But the bet was not really in good faith, that’s why she had to
settle
it. Marler doesn’t know the real reason.’

I said: ‘Goodbye, and thank you for a highly instructive six weeks,’ and walked away. I didn’t see her again for four years. 

One hundred and twenty-four Nathan Road was a three-storey, warren-like building on Kowloon side with a large number of over-decorated small rooms, a creaking lift, and a Sikh with a shotgun guarding the locked front doors. The rooms had high ceilings and ornate lacquer-framed mirrors. The overhead lights were dim and the bedside lights had red shades. The curtains were scarlet. The bedsteads were covered in dragon motifs. Dust had secreted itself into every cranny.

‘So what do you think?’ said Masterson. He was standing by the open window looking down into the noise and traffic of Nathan Road.

‘Can’t fault the location,’ I said. He nodded but did not turn around.

‘Quite like the fact that it’s got two entrances,’ he said as if to himself. Then he pushed away from the window, left the room, and, with me following, headed back to the lift. Mr Luk, the owner of 124 Nathan Road, was waiting there. He was fidgeting. With him was a caretaker who held a football-sized ring of keys.

‘So sorry, Mr Luk,’ said Masterson, ‘but your building is too big for me. I would be expanding too quickly, and couldn’t hope to fill the shoes of a great businessman like yourself.’

Mr Luk smiled, either out of embarrassment at being turned down, or at the compliment.

‘Do you wish to raise the question of price?’ he said. I tried not to smirk; on the ferry ride over to Kowloon, Masterson had told me that Luk would treat refusal as a bargaining tactic.

‘So sorry, Mr Luk. It is not a question of price but of scale. My business is not big enough.’

We rode down in the lift together after the caretaker had locked the room. Mr Luk confided that he had three other potential
buyers
coming to visit the property that afternoon. Down on Nathan Road, while the caretaker struggled again with his keys, we said our goodbyes, and Masterson and I headed off for Hong Kong
side, past the Peninsula Hotel. Across the road, a flurry of porters, rickshaws, and taxis outside the railway terminus made it clear that the Canton to Kowloon train would be arriving before long. The train was one reason why Masterson had been looking for a property on Kowloon side.

‘Pity,’ he said, looking at the expectant crowd of greeters and baggage-handlers. ‘Still, it wouldn’t have worked.’

I had taken the Captain’s advice. The Empire Hotel, right in the middle of Victoria town on Hong Kong Island, was a lovely, cool colonial building with ceiling fans, palms in the lobby, and a Belgian cook. Masterson was its manager and half-owner. The other half belonged to an absentee German called Munster. They had met and teamed up in Singapore in the twenties.

Masterson was a thin, intent man in his forties, with the type of concentration that can make a man seem absent-minded. In a
different
time, in a more heroic period of the Empire, he would have ended up running something big. He had gone into the hotel business to make his fortune and come out to Hong Kong for the same reason. When I went for my interview, he was perched at the counter of the hotel’s main bar, a long room off the elegant lobby. He was dressed casually, with a white jacket and a shirt open at the neck. He was smoking. In those days, when many people smoked a great deal, Masterson smoked literally all the time.

Hoteliers have few illusions about human nature; Masterson had none. He asked me a number of questions about my
experience
, my Cantonese lessons with Maria, and about the Plough, and then he gave me a job. The speed and decisiveness of this process was, I was to learn, characteristic. I would act as his
sidekick
and take responsibility for the bar, alcoholic beverages, and all non-restaurant catering at the Empire Hotel.

‘Any idea what that building used to be?’ Masterson asked, as we came to the Star Ferry on our way back from 124 Nathan Road.

I had been wondering about this. It couldn’t have been a hotel, because that would have been obvious from the sign outside, lobby layout and so on; but it wasn’t so unlike a hotel. Some kind of hostel?

‘Don’t know.’

We dropped our coins into the slot and went up to wait for the next ferry.

‘It was a cathouse. A Chinese one, specifically. European
brothels
were closed in 1932. It’s taken them three years to get round to closing the Chinese ones. Don’t ask me why. Not that any of that will make a blind bit of difference to the actual amount of
prostitution
that takes place in the colony. They’ll just move
somewhere
else.’

‘Golly.’

‘Typical Hong Kong,’ he said. ‘Cities often set themselves up as opposites. X does X so Y does Y. It’s the same the world over. In Shanghai you can get girls, boys, drugs, anything you like, more or less openly. If you have an itch you can scratch it. So Hong Kong has to be different. Nothing’s in the open. Of course people want to do the same things, so people do do the same things – but no one does it where you can see. It’s not that Hong Kong people would mind staying in a hotel which used to be a Chinese cathouse, but they would mind people thinking that they didn’t mind, because it would show that they weren’t respectable. So it’s no go.’

I had been taken by surprise by the ways in which I found Hong Kong a surprise. The exotic elements were what I had been expecting. Hakka women in their sombreros, which smelt of oil or lacquer; coolies dragging impossible bundles on their backs; rickshaw men, gold-toothed shoeshiners, gap-toothed Japanese businessmen, opium smokers visible through side-street
windows
, eagles circling wind currents on the Peak, the brake man’s crisp uniform on the Peak tram and the view from the Peak towards Kowloon; the mad clattering noise of mah-jong coming from servants’ quarters on a Sunday afternoon; girls in cheongsams showing more leg than I had ever seen; Europeans of no sure nationality, uncertain unemployment, and ambiguous appetite; family groups going for picnics on ancestors’ graves; furious Chinese gods with green faces and red eyes; the smell of fermented fish outside Taoist temples; joss sticks, Chinese art, mung-bean cake, dragon-boat races, face and joss and feng shui and the cheapest best tailors in the world, old women with bound feet – it would be untrue to say that all this was what I was expecting in detail, but the broader gist of it, yes. It was
what I had come out here for. It wasn’t Faversham and it wasn’t the Plough.

The other side of Hong Kong, the expatriate side, was what took me by surprise. It was the P&O all over again, but more so. The whole idea of coming East was to loosen the shackles England imposed, it seemed to me – that was self-evident. If you so liked the way things were in England why would you leave? But the sense of respectability, the need to conform and to fit, was crushing. There were codes, visible and invisible, everywhere. Each of the big concerns – the Government, the rival Hongs, the Bank – had a precise and intricate hierarchy, each with its own set of customs, mores, patterns of social life, do’s and don’ts, musts and mustn’ts, rules about where one went and what one wore and whom one talked to and what one said. My Hong Kong Bank friends were eaten alive by the life of the mess, Bank boat parties, Bank weekends in Fanling, Bank social life and career aspirations. The Jardines man disappeared into the separate world of his Hong as completely as Jonah inside the whale. There was a Jockey Club, a Yacht Club, a Country Club and Golf Club and the Hong Kong Club itself. The Chinese were not invisible, since not even the expatriate community could deny reality to that extent, but they were no more than extras – walk-on parts, menials, an exotic but ignored backdrop to the important real stage. Nothing to do with the Chinese was quite real.

Masterson and I went into the compartment at the front of the ferry and both lit up cigarettes. On the row of seats in front of us a man was tackling a weeks-old edition of
The Times
crossword. We took in the view in silence. The island in those days seemed much emptier, much more rock-like than it is today; it looked like a natural phenomenon on which man had camped, rather than like one of humankind’s most crowded and vivid deliriums. The buildings now crawl all over the hill as if trying to obscure it from sight. Then it wasn’t like that.

‘I’m going to buy somewhere over there,’ said Masterson. ‘It’s just a question of finding the right place. When things feel
uncertain
, it’s a good time to buy. Confidence is expensive.’ That was him thinking aloud.

‘Things might get worse in China,’ I said, this being a popular bar topic in the Empire Hotel.

‘Things are always about to get worse in China. That’s China’s version of staying the same.’

It was a ten-minute walk to the hotel from the Star Ferry. When we got back Masterson went to his office and I went to mine. There had been a problem with discrepancies between the invoices we were paying for spirits and the actual quantity of alcohol that was moving through the hotel, so I had resolved to check every invoice by hand and try to find at what stage things were going awry. It was tedious work with the prospect of a
confrontation
and sacking at the end of it, so my spirits were low as I slung my jacket on its hook behind the door and crossed to my desk. Sitting on top of the pile of invoices in my tray was a letter from Maria.

It was the third letter I had had from her since we had exchanged apologies for the ‘misunderstanding’. I wrote back and said, yes of course.

Sister Benedicta would have been pleased about my Cantonese. I was making a conscious effort to keep it up. I had moved into a three-room second-floor flat halfway up the Peak and acquired a houseboy called Mun, a dapper man of about my own age whose family in Canton were weighing the pros and cons of coming to join him in the colony. We spoke Cantonese at home; or I tried to. This caused Mun to behave as if I was mad but not dangerous.

I was beginning to be deeply grateful for the work I’d put in, and to develop an affection for the language. It was immensely useful in bargaining and doing deals for the Empire. I began to accompany Masterson on negotiations and buying meetings, and was soon made responsible for this side of the business.

Something Maria had not told me was that Cantonese is one of the world’s greatest languages for swearing. This was wholly in harmony with the Cantonese character, which I had come to see as being like that of cockneys back in England: blunt, direct,
argumentative
, money-minded, clannish, knowing, worldly,
materialist
. As for the rest of China, the Cantonese had an old adage: the mountains are high, the Emperor is far away.