Fragrant Harbour (21 page)

Cobb had become increasingly absorbed with a Chinese work he was translating called
The Lives of the Emperors
. In place of the dignified, official narratives and myths it substituted a cavalcade of murders, adulteries, drunkenness, vengeful plotting,
assassinations
, infatuations, an extraordinary love of cruelty for its own sake – and a sense that Imperial China’s past was a suppurating sewer of open secrets. Cobb explained that he felt it was his
mission
to make this scabrous alternative vision of Chinese history known to a wider public. ‘Not that anyone will want to publish it,’ he said. ‘Even the Communists are touchy about this stuff, in case people start to see parallels with Mao. That’s the thing about China.
Plus ça change
…’

One day he let slip that he had begun going to church again, for the first time since his early twenties.

‘I’m not absolutely sure why,’ he said. We were sitting in his office after one of the final meetings of the reading group. He had told us that we had ‘learned all he had to teach’ – which was
manifestly
untrue. It seemed to me that he was more bent on
conserving
his resources. He must have been in his late sixties by now, and
The Lives of the Emperors
would be his last big project.

‘I don’t in fact much like St John’s,’ he went on. ‘Doesn’t quite come off … or not for me, anyway … But it’s good to keep
aesthetics 
in its place … Jane thinks it’s very eccentric of me, to go back to religion. She won’t come. But she oftens joins me for dim sum afterwards, so if you felt inclined, one of these Sundays …’

We made a date. I was curious about Jane, whom I had met only once or twice. Cobb was, in his quiet way, a ruthless
compartmentaliser
. She was ten years younger, brisk and outdoorsy. She had obeyed the evacuation order for women and children in June 1940, and so had missed Stanley internment camp. That seemed often to cause strains in a marriage, but it hadn’t in this case. In a small way, Jane was quite well known in Hong Kong, because she gave a weekly radio talk about gardening. The
invitation
to meet them
à deux
felt like the significant crossing of a line in our friendship.

I arranged to meet Cobb at church, on the grounds that it was more polite to join in rather than just to turn up at lunch. I must also admit to a lowlier motive, in that I was curious about the sight of him kneeling at prayer; I found it difficult to imagine.

I arrived early, before Cobb, and stood outside the porch for a few moments while the congregation trickled in. Among the crowd of familiar and half-familiar faces I saw one that I knew in a different way, a man with a deeply lined scowling face who was striding towards the building in an unkempt suit with flapping, schoolboy-like trousers. He was smoking a final pre-service cigarette. Something about him seemed forty years younger than his actual age. That thought made me remember: the poet Wilfred Austen.

‘Mr Austen?’ I said as he was going past me. He stopped and the scowl momentarily deepened. ‘You won’t remember me. My name is Tom Stewart and I showed you and Mr Ingleby round some temples and what-not in 1938 when you were on your way to the war.’

His face cleared. There was great charm and mildness in his slow smile.

‘Why of course. You’re the Taoist chap. From the hotel. Jolly good. If I’d thought you were still here I’d have looked you up. I’m on one of these British Council thingies. Calcutta, Hong Kong, Tokyo. All a bit different from the last time I was here and largely for the better, so far at least. One of the noticeable things about the disintegration of empires is –’

At this point Cobb arrived from behind me, wearing a
Sunday-best
Panama hat. He stood blinking expectantly.

‘Mr Austen, excuse me for interrupting, this is Professor Raymond Cobb from the University of Hong Kong. Professor Cobb, this is Wilfred Austen.’

said Cobb, looking pleased, embarrassed, resolute. ‘Excuse me,’ he added. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever before had an opportunity to quote an author’s lines to his face.’

‘I am doubly privileged. As I was saying to Mr Stewart, the thing about the disintegration of empires is –’

Inside St John’s, the organ struck up. We wordlessly agreed among ourselves to go into the service. Austen led the way.

‘The thing about ancestor worship’, Austen said, about four and a half hours later, ‘is that it’s such a rational, liberating religion. Christ was quite wrong about all this. “Let the dead bury the dead.” No, no. Frightful rot. If people worship their ancestors, they’re freed from the normal human impulse to worship the past, because they carry the past with them. It sets them free to think about the future. The future is more important than the past. It’s the task of religion –’

‘One of them,’ said Cobb. He was counterpunching splendidly. Austen acknowledged the point with a nod.

‘– one of them, to orient people towards the future. Look at this – picnicking on their grandparents’ graves, thinking about tomorrow. Splendid, splendid.’

We were sitting on a hillside in the New Territories. Austen was holding a roast-beef sandwich in his right hand, taking large mouthfuls from it at irregular intervals while continuing to talk non-stop. He seemed to eat, drink, smoke, and talk almost all the time; we had finished lunch about three hours before. In the course of the meal conversation had turned to ancestor worship and the habit of visiting graves, and Austen had become galvanised with a desire to see the practice in action. I had called the Empire and
arranged for a car to meet us at the Star Ferry terminal on Kowloon side, and we had driven out to the New Territories. Now we were all sitting on the ground at a discreet distance from a group of graves where one or two families were happily enjoying their Sunday outing. A brightly clothed and wrapped baby, solemn as an emperor, sat at the centre of each party.

‘Yes, well, no, it’s not always true, though,’ said Cobb. ‘One can’t see Roman cults of the family as being especially forward-looking or especially successful at inculcating the virtues the empire was attempting to stress. The whole idea of the Lares and Penates –’

‘Yes, but imperial circumstances are different,’ said Austen. ‘They need to emphasise virtue because they are all slowly going mad. They’re poisoning themselves with power. The Romans, the Dutch, the British, the Americans next. This thing in Vietnam, this is all becoming perfectly clear. The question of course is whether the world
needs
an imperial power. Actually, on balance, it
probably
does. Perhaps
needs
is too strong. Say, is better off with. And imperial powers are always obsessed with the past. Not like these people.’ He took another bite of roast beef and then gestured with the remains of the sandwich.

Lunch had been one those social successes which at the start looks like a disaster. Jane Cobb, waiting for us at Yuen Kee Tea House, had been visibly nonplussed at the unannounced arrival of our eminent guest. If Austen noticed he did not show it; he simply monologued away harder than before. We ordered a range of dishes and he ate them with the ravenous hunger of a young man after a long walk, rather than a poet in late middle age who had just been to church. As he had grown older, he had become even more dogmatic, a better talker and worse listener. Still, he had his charm, and so here we were in a Chinese
cemetery
, where one of the fathers was gently wrestling a thermos out of the grip of his fat little baby, against strong protests.

‘Well, we’re due an Asian century,’ Austen said, after finishing his sandwich. A tiny fleck of horseradish lurked at the corner of his lips like a beauty spot. ‘I hope they do better by us than we did by them. And that it doesn’t blow up too badly round here, when it does.’

Nobody asked him what he meant. We headed back to the car, and back to the Star Ferry. I parted with Austen at the taxi rank.
The Cobbs set off up the hill – they had a flat on Robinson Road – after the professor had shaken our hands and said ‘most
enjoyable
, most enjoyable’. Later, he several times referred to the day and how memorable it had been, but I never got to know Jane any better, and our friendship did not move past the point it had already reached. It was as if the very unusualness of the day had helped to derail the potential friendship; that instance of meeting them as a couple was the only time I saw them together. I had drinks with Austen in the bar of the Empire the next day, before he left for Kai Tak and took a plane to Tokyo.

Masterson died not long after that. He had an aneurysm in his sleep; in that sense, his death was sudden. In another, he had been dying for twenty years, ever since Stanley. His sister let me know in a touching and affectionate letter. She got the point of her
brother
; I was glad to know that. She wrote about his ‘dry, wild humour and permanent air of politely suppressed amazement at the human comedy’. That letter was written the day after he died. A week later I received another, stiffer letter from her, saying Masterson had left me some money and some voting shares in the hotel – though not enough to outvote the family’s share, which was put in a trust jointly administered by lawyers in London and Hong Kong. I knew Rathbone, the Hong Kong end of the operation, an exquisitely dressed fat man with a soft voice and legendary
knowledge
of UK tax avoidance. I did not anticipate difficulties.

At that time I had other things on my mind. There was, as Inspector Watts put it over the rim of his usual large pink gin, trouble brewing.

‘It’s a look in the eye. Or the fact that they won’t catch yours. A surliness. Seen it a thousand times. Palestine. Malaya. You can always tell. One minute some chap’s glowering at his mother-
in-law
, next thing he’s chopped his neighbour into roasting joints with his parang. Amok. Then he tops himself, or we come along and shoot him. Afterwards his chums always say they’d seen it coming. Of course, in a country where everyone’s wandering around with bloody great machetes, you have to expect a bit of trouble every now and then. For sheer brooding nastiness, Indonesia. One day I’m on duty, bloke comes in, his bearer pulled a knife on the cook. Very definitely not handbags at ten paces. Chap separates them. Goes to the station, makes everybody give a statement, thanks the bearer for his long service, sacks him, pays him off and gives him a severance bonus, writes out a good reference, all above board, right in front of us. Bearer goes off, all smiles. Two days later, the boiler blows up and takes the back
half of the house with it. Right up in the air. Miracle no one’s killed. Bearer’s put paraffin in the boiler instead of petrol. Never seen again. That’s Indonesia, the most dangerous place I’ve ever been in,’ Watts took a theatrical sip of his pink gin, ‘until I was in Mongkok last night.’

The audience – half a dozen regulars – gave a collective
shudder
. Watts’s act was done for effect; but there was something in it. China was going insane. Everyone was frightened that the Cultural Revolution would spill over into the colony. In Macao, there were already signs of that. Portuguese soldiers had fired shots at Red Guards. I began to believe I could feel the
atmosphere
myself. Before a typhoon there is a day or two of entirely clear skies and perfect stillness. The weather seems calm but is in actuality violent. This is what that time was like. There were troop movements and mini-skirmishes along the border. Allegations about corruption and predictions of imminent doom were filling the Chinese newspapers.

One weekday evening I went to Mongkok to meet Maria. An English adult-education class of hers had an exam coming up and I was to give the students some dictation and comprehension practice. Her regular native English speaker, Father Ignatius, had appendicitis. The plan was that we would meet at the Catholic school in Mongkok. I took a bus there from the Star Ferry on a clammy summer evening. A small crowd of pickets and strikers was gathered around the terminals at either end of the ferry crossing. There had been a series of heated protests about a rise in prices on the ferry – all rather bizarre, since the rise only affected first-class fares.

The bus went north on Nathan Road, as crowded and
streaming
as ever. Every time one saw it there were new businesses: Taiwoo Sewing Machine Emporium, with a huge pink neon Singer sign. Lotus Garden Dim Sum. Wishful Cottage Tea Shop. Cheng Kee Electronics. Sam’s Tailors. Auspicious Festival Men’s Tailoring. A huge branch of China Arts and Crafts, the company which sold goods from Communist China. Prosperous Future Watch Repairs: Cheaper Faster Better. The pavements were full of charging pedestrians. The only time I had ever seen Nathan Road anything other than seething with people was the day after the Japanese invasion.

I walked the last few hundred yards to the school. The
buildings
were as tightly packed as anywhere in the colony, with that feeling one sometimes had that the balconies were converging overhead. I was jostled once or twice. Many men were standing or squatting in the street. The Empire Hotel felt quite some way away.

Maria, with an uncharacteristic look of worry or
preoccupation
, was waiting for me outside the school gates.

‘Everything all right?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes. All fine. I hoped you weren’t caught up in
demonstrations
or anything like that.’

‘Of course not. Just a bit of arm waving. People waving their
little
red books. Looks oddly like a bank deposit book, doesn’t it?’

She gently, reproachfully, tapped me on the arm with a
folded-up
devotional pamphlet. We went through to the schoolroom, which was already full. The lesson went on for an hour and a half. I was out of practice. The room was airless, the evening was warm and humid, and the occasion was something of a struggle. At the end of the class, Maria had to stay behind to have a word with a pupil. I had promised to wait. We were going back to Hong Kong island together via the bus and ferry. The pupil’s business, whatever it was, took some time.

‘Excuse me,’ Maria said to me at last. ‘That was more involved than I expected.’

It was dark when we left. Immediately I felt that something was not right. There were far more men in the street than there had been before, and an atmosphere of expectancy as they stood and jostled and smoked and looked around them. It was hard to squeeze past the barging groups and resist the temptation to walk unnaturally fast. In a tight spot, never run. That was the standard advice.

We had covered perhaps a third of the way down the
cross-streets
to Nathan Road when a noise came from farther down the alleys. It was not like a human sound so much as a natural
phenomenon
: a gale, or the groaning noise made by an earthquake. People turned in one direction, away from us, and then ran the way we had come, at first in ones or twos, like men who had
suddenly
remembered an urgent errand, and then not as individuals but as a single mass. We turned and began to run also. There was
no choice or volition involved; if we had not joined the crowd we would there and then have died under its feet. Some of the men were swearing and some were crying for their mothers. Their faces were blanched and tight with fear. Someone pushed hard against my back and I almost lost my footing, but Maria caught my arm and with astonishing strength gave me a pull which helped me regain my balance. At the end of that first alley we managed to squeeze our way into a side passage. Overhead, linked awnings were tied together so that no light from above penetrated to the street. A small group of men were here, many of them gasping, their hands on their knees. One, in a white
short-sleeved
shirt with pens clipped to his top pocket, was being sick just in front of me. No one spoke. The roaring in the alleyway behind us was thinning and fading as the stampede moved away. We waited for a few minutes. The man finished vomiting and leant with both his arms against the wall, quietly saying ‘fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck’ to himself.

‘Are you all right?’ Maria asked him. The man waved her away. She looked hot and ruffled but not, I was amazed to see, fundamentally discomposed.

‘Which way do we go now?’ I asked. My feeling was that once we got back to one of the main roads, out from the crowded
warren
of flats, we would be safe.

‘Keep on?’ Maria replied. I shrugged and agreed. A few of the men who had taken refuge with us had already melted away, but some followed us. I looked around the corner into the alley we’d come out of. It was empty – not sparsely peopled, but completely empty. There was no noise. In the most crowded place on earth, that was frightening. We turned the corner and the others
scattered
, running off in the opposite direction while we headed towards Nathan Road. We walked as quickly as we could. I was conscious of being observed from the flats above us. After a
couple
of hundred yards the alley bent to the right, and suddenly there was an explosion of sound. A crowd of people about fifty yards ahead were running back and forth across a small open space where four alleys intersected. At first I could detect no
pattern
in what they were doing; then I saw that their arms were loaded, and they were carrying all sorts of goods – boxes, crates of bottles – and I thought they must be evacuating a building.
Then I realised that they were looting. The individuality of those men’s faces was visible – a pair of buck teeth here, a bald patch there – but at the same time, all particularity was lost in the mad urgency of the crowd.

‘Better go on back,’ Maria said. ‘We must get to Nathan Road.’

So we turned around, again trying not to run. I could feel
people
looking at our backs. One man, his hands holding a crate of dead, unplucked poultry, his eyes empty, looked for a moment as if he was going to stand in front of us and block our way, but he saw me seeing him decide what to do, and in that second’s pause Maria and I were past him. The alley went around another slight bend, and then another, and opened out a little so that the
buildings
no longer seemed to close together over our heads, and just as it opened we could hear the same roaring noise from not far away, and then three or four youths, their faces rigid with fear, came sprinting past, falling and shouting and picking themselves up like tumblers. They might have been trying to be funny if it had not been for the terror in their faces.

Just to our right there was a furniture shop, its front
fortuitously
or presciently boarded up. But the rioters’ attention had already been drawn to it and the door, smashed open at the lock, was swinging open on its hinges.

‘In here,’ I said, and took Maria’s arm. We went in. I pushed the door closed. I had expected devastation, but inside there was only mild disarray and an overpowering smell of camphor wood. Chests of drawers and office furniture had been pushed about, but not smashed. A desk at the end of the room, which was half sales and display area, half workshop, had all its drawers opened. They had gone for the money.

The noise outside grew louder. Through chinks in the
boarded-up
window we could see a shouting, swearing crowd run past. Without warning somebody kicked hard against the door, much too hard, so that it rebounded in the face of whoever was trying to break in. Then it was finally kicked off its hinges and fell into the shop. Five or six men came into the room. They were panting, furious, maddened. One had a badge with a picture of Chairman Mao, the only such sign I saw that day. They clearly did not know what they wanted to do. But violence was a part of it. There was cacophony outside the room while silence stretched inside it.

Maria, who had been standing about a pace behind me, stepped forward, and gave the men a second to take her in fully. They might not have been able to tell at a glance that she was a nun, but they could probably sense something official about her; just enough of a whiff of magic. She reached out a hand behind her to the ransacked desk and said in an absolutely calm voice:

‘There’s no money left. If you want to take some furniture, though, just help yourselves.’

The man in front, the one with the Mao badge, did not smile, but gave a sort of grunt. Some colour came back into his face. All the men, I suddenly saw, looked relieved. Whatever they had been about to do they hadn’t wanted to do any more than we had wanted them to do it. The man with the Mao badge looked around the chaotic workshop, turned, pushed through the others, stepped over the door, and went out. The others followed him. There was perhaps a faint tinge of sheepishness. I realised I had been holding my breath.

‘Jesus,’ I said.

‘Don’t blaspheme,’ said Maria. We waited there for a half-hour and then headed to Nathan Road without further incident.

This episode was the start of what became known as the Riots. It was by far the closest encounter I had with them. There were comparable incidents, and many bombings, and not a few deaths. Many people panicked. I didn’t, because if the Chinese wanted to take back Hong Kong, all they needed to do was to shut off the water supply; the world wasn’t going to be turned upside-down by a few Red Guards shouting and waving copies of the Little Red Book. Eventually, the Gurkhas were sent to Hong Kong, and things quietened down. For my part, I started renting a cottage on Cheung Chau, the same one where I live today. It occurred to me that Masterson would have described what I was doing as ‘sitting out the Riots’. The public inquiry into the Riots blamed people who had made public allegations of corruption in the colony and accused them of fomenting trouble.