Fragrant Harbour (7 page)

‘It sounds like you’re buying me off.’

‘This is a serious offer.’

‘It sounds like glorified PR work.’

‘There is obviously a PR component. But you will have much more power than that. In the future, if there were the need for a little conversation such as the one you and I had earlier, it would be you who took the decision.’

‘I’m flattered but this sounds like a rather limited brief. What happens when they pack their bags and go home? Collect my P45 and get on the plane back to Heathrow?’

Oss looked at Wo, who nodded. For a moment I thought he was agreeing with what I’d just said and that, yes, I would be on the jumbo with my severance pay crammed into the top pocket of my Armani jacket.

‘Mr Wo’s business interests are diversified and not all of them are in Hong Kong,’ Oss said. ‘There are opportunities all over the world and a wise man does not neglect any of them. The wise man also seeks to diversify his interests during difficult times – times of transition. There will be many opportunities for a
hardworking
executive in the areas in which you show knowledge. Mr Wo’s investments in the area of media already amount to many tens of millions of pounds. A not inconsiderable amount of those interests are in the English-speaking world. He’s a man
who has influence. The job we have to offer a successful executive in this field would be, it is safe to say, an opportunity of
unparalleled
range and interest and, dare I say so, power.’

Then he mentioned the salary. That was how the strangest day of my life brought me to work for Philip Oss and for T. K. Wo, and for money. And that was my fourth and biggest break.

On the boat home, Oss left me to myself for the first quarter of an hour, and then, just as I was thinking, disappointedly, that I’d be on my own for the whole return trip, he appeared on the
afterdeck
carrying another bottle of champagne and two glasses.

‘So what do you think?’ he asked.

‘Of what? The place? Mr Wo? The offer?’

He shrugged in a way that meant all the above.

‘It all seems a bit much. I’m not sure. I liked being a journalist. Part of me has misgivings about, well, going over to the other side.’

At that he just smiled and looked away from me, at the view of Hong Kong as we came around Lamma. Aberdeen was in front of us, its harbour as packed and frenetic as ever, as if the boats had hurtled in helter-skelter to avoid some large disaster.

‘There was a waterfall over there,’ he said, pointing off to one side of the Peak. ‘It’s what brought the British here in the first place. They came here for fresh drinking water for naval ships. The harbour on the other side was a bonus. Everything afterwards was a bonus.’

He smiled again and put the bottle, which he hadn’t yet opened, back on the table. He stared hard at me as if to show me that he knew something I would never know, and then he took me by the hand and led me downstairs.

My parents ran a pub near Faversham in Kent. The Plough had already been in the Stewart family for two generations before my father came to inherit it. This was a mixed blessing, because he was a bookish and private man who wasn’t suited to being
landlord
of a busy inn. At least that’s what his mother, my
grandmother
, told me. I have almost no memories of him. I was born in 1913, when he was twenty-eight and my mother twenty-three. He spent the years 1916 to 1918 serving in the Kent Foresters, where his weak lungs kept him from the front. During these years my grandmother looked after me, my sister Kate, and my brother David, while my mother ran the Plough. I remember late Sunday evenings when we would go out on walks with her through hop fields which in my memory are huge and gold and fragrant. I remember the ‘Welcome Home’ sign that my mother hung over the doorway, just after my fifth birthday. Someone gave me a mouthful of bitter, which I swallowed despite my shock at its nasty, acrid, adult taste. I thought it was revolting. I felt sick and dizzy and over-excited.

Publicans often catch things from their customers. Nine months after my father came home from the war, he and my mother and sister were dead of influenza. David was the only member of the family not to be affected. He always was a little bruiser. I was the first in the family to come down with the illness, and went in and out of a fever for ten days before recovering. There used to be a photo, one and only one, of all six of us, my father looking peaky and nervous, my mother looking cheerful, and all three children in various states of bored distraction, all in our holiday finery for the 1919 camera. My grandmother looked like a clever pixie. She used to seem so old in that picture; a
quarter
of a century younger than I am now.

After that my grandmother ran the pub, as she had done when her husband was alive, and looked after me and David. Luckily, business was so good that she could hire help, and from the age
of about ten, David and I would do our bit too. David liked to boast about his ‘barrel-rolling muscles’ and never got into a fight that he didn’t win. I was better at stocktaking and doing the books. The regulars liked us and used to tease us about being so different. We had the two basic ways of working behind a bar divided between us: I was the listener, he was the talker.

One steady source of trade at the Plough was people heading to and from the Channel ports. My grandmother used to joke that people should make the most of their last chance to enjoy good English beer. Perhaps my desire to travel was something I was born with; but this steady stream of people leaving on business or pleasure or escape helped the idea to grow in me. I loved hearing stories about foreign places and would fasten on regular
customers
who broke their journey with us. One man called Mr Morris, a commercial traveller who often went to Paris, used to tell stories of the French who ate frogs and snails and blood pie and entrail sausage. He made Calais sound as exotic as Timbuktu.

I had inherited a globe from my father, faded and brown but beautifully detailed in the drawing. It was tilted slightly, like a man angling his head. I would spin it for hours, telling myself stories about all the places on the map. Sometimes I just recited the names. Khartoum. Vladivostok. San José. Chile. Tasmania. But the place that really caught my imagination was China. I used to like even the sound of the word.

When I could take the time away from work, I would go up to the coast and look out over the Thames estuary from Whitstable or Sheppey. David liked to go south to the sandy beaches, I liked to go north to the wildness and big views. I loved the coming and going of boats, especially the Thames barges, which seemed so sturdy and low-slung, so romantic in the matter-of-fact, practical way they set out to sea. I loved the huge skies over the estuary, the flatness and sense of space. It made me feel small and safe, and it made me want to leave.

My grandmother, who had never been outside Kent – had never been to London, forty miles away – understood this with no difficulty.

‘It’s all the world out there, all the things you might be able to see. You don’t want to be in one place forever.’

‘Nothing wrong with Faversham,’ David would say if he was listening. ‘There are cannibals in Africa. Boil you up in a big pot.’

I began saving money. Once we were eighteen, David and I drew allowances from the inn’s profits. Not much but enough for pocket money and small treats. I didn’t spend any of it. Then one day Mr Morris came with a more serious expression than usual. He said he was going away and that this was the last we would see of him for some time. I was drying glasses behind the bar and I asked him where he was going.

‘Hong Kong. It’s part of China.’

‘Why?’

‘Work. Been offered a job.’ He thought for a while and added:

‘The map is red. If you’re British you can go anywhere in the world.’

When I turned twenty-one I did a deal with David. We owned a third of the Plough each. Our grandmother owned the other share. David would give me half of my share’s worth in cash as soon as he could raise it. He would send me my sixth of the profits once a year until he raised the money to buy me out at whatever my sixth of the pub was then worth.

‘Gran won’t like it,’ he said. We were sitting on the orchard wall about a mile from the pub. David swung his short legs.

‘Ah, she won’t mind really,’ I said.

I thought my proposal was brilliant. The idea was to use David’s cash plus the money I had saved to fund my own
departure
abroad. There was a grave flaw in the plan, however: it made me dependent on my brother’s ability to save money. When it came to anything financial, David was all holes and no colander. I spent most of the next year close to going mad with frustration every time he left for the races or came home with a new shirt or dreamed aloud about buying a car. I forced myself not to say
anything
. Instead I fumed and planned. I split up with Monica Potts, the girl I was seeing, because I thought it would be cruel to drag things out until the moment of my departure, and then spent months watching her step out with another man, Eric Perks, whose father owned Faversham’s first garage. I bought a suitcase and practised packing everything I owned into it. I studied expressions in the mirror – what I thought of as travellers’
expressions
:
amused, calm, detached, experienced, enigmatic. I longed to be gone and burned with frustration as I stood behind the pub counter. It was a year-long sulk.

On my twenty-second birthday, in the summer of 1935, I
decided
that I couldn’t bear it any more. I asked David if we could go for a walk. We went back to the orchard and hopped up on the crumbling wall.

‘Look, David,’ I said. He was staring at me as if trying to
control
an outburst of temper while he rummaged in his jacket
pocket
for his cigarette tin. ‘The thing is …’

I took a breath, and as I did so, David started laughing. Now it was I who was getting angry. He laughed for some time. Then he took a fat envelope out of his jacket and gave it to me. I opened it. There were twenty ten-pound notes: two hundred pounds. The notes seemed huge, the biggest I had ever seen. It was the amount we had agreed on to buy out my one-sixth share of the Plough.

‘David –’ I began. He just shook his head.

‘Standing there with your long fucking face all fucking year,’ he said. ‘I tell you, it’s so easy getting up your nose, it’s almost no fun.’

‘How? Two hundred quid, how?’

‘None of your business,’ he said in a final way. I never did find out. I think he borrowed some of it and won the rest at the races.

SS
Darjeeling
, a P&O ship, was leaving in September from Tilbury docks for Hong Kong via Marseilles, the Suez canal and Calcutta. I bought a ticket for
£
35. When I told my grandmother, she was standing in the kitchen of the Plough making a pot of tea. She showed no expression, but asked me how long I would be gone. I said I didn’t know. I also realised for the first time how upset the thought of my leaving made her; it was something I had
deliberately
prevented myself from seeing. Later she gave me a gold necklace that had belonged to her mother.

‘This is to sell if you need the money in an emergency. To get you home.’ The next few weeks were difficult.

I said my goodbyes at the Plough rather than the docks.

‘Good luck, Tommy son,’ said David as we shook hands.

‘Write,’ said my grandmother. ‘God bless, see all the things you want to see. Write.’

In the end I had two suitcases, not just the one. I took the train to London Bridge and then, for the first time in my life, a taxi. London was exotic, crowded and brown. The docks were the
busiest
thing I had ever seen. My stiff shiny passport, never used, was checked by a customs man whose uniform looked so spick he was something out of a film. Then I was sent over to the
Darjeeling
, much smaller and lower in the water than I had expected. My mind’s eye was seeing something like the
Queen Mary
, a floating castle of lights. This looked only a few steps up from a tramp steamer. I asked the man in charge of allocating
cabins
how many passengers there were.

‘Good few,’ he said without looking up from his clipboard. He was Scottish.

I had heard about shipboard romances. The trip to Hong Kong would take six weeks. He had the plan for the dining room, at which the sittings were to be unchanged for the whole voyage. I said:

‘Any single women at my table? Please say yes.’

‘Aye, a pair of sisters. They’re getting on in Marseilles.’ He gave me an amused look as he handed back my ticket. I took it to be a token of male conspiracy or fellow feeling.

My cabin was tiny but because the ship was not full and I had it to myself, I had the choice of sleeping on the upper or lower tier of the bunk. There was a washbasin and a chair. The cubicle
bathroom
fitted a shower and a WC into the floor space the size of a doormat. The folding chair, I was to find, creaked and wobbled underneath one in rough weather.

There was no formal dinner on that first day. It was assumed that we had ‘taken care of ourselves’, as the purser explained it. He was a fleshy, oily man whose uniform buttons were always shiny and whose skin often had a sheen of sweat. He had a faint air of corruption which I came to think of as characteristic of his job. I had had nothing to eat since breakfast, and so stood at the rail as the ship left the dock conscious not of any large feelings about leaving England so much as of a bitter, cavernous
emptiness
in my stomach. Most of the other passengers and some of the crew had people at the dockside waving them off. A smart young married couple were seen off by both sets of parents, who stayed on the quay until we had gone out of sight round a wide corner into the Thames. Even the sardonic Scot who had given me my cabin, whom I now knew as the Third Officer, stood at the rail and watched the shore recede. I felt lonely and also felt for the first time the rashness of what I was doing. I stayed on the deck as we headed out to sea, with our pilot boat making visibly heavy going of the choppy water. Before long we were passing the Isle of Sheppey, looking back at all the places I’d liked to visit on Sunday afternoons. I had enjoyed watching ships head out into the world. Now I was on one of them. The Thames estuary seemed busier from the land than it now did from the deck. Out here on the water there was more space, more light, and more weather. As the light faded, the shore became a long flat line and then disappeared into the sea. I went down to my cabin to count the hours until breakfast.

Life on board the boat was more formal than I had expected. It was as if the sensation of openness and possibility brought by sea travel was feared, and so was warded off by a deliberate policy of
stuffiness. I was travelling in something which once used to be called Standard, and had now been renamed Tourist Class. That word, ‘tourist’, was new. First-class passengers did as much as possible to pretend that they were on an entirely different ship. I took a glance into their lounge, pretending to be lost, and could not believe my eyes: it was the dining hall of a baronial lodge in Scotland, down to the fireplace, panelled roof, leather
armchairs
, crossed tapers on the wall, and mounted stag’s head. A man in a tweed suit folded down the top of his newspaper to look at me. For a few seconds we stared at each other with frank class hostility and then he flicked the top of his paper back up with a harrumph.

Breakfast on that first day at sea was a crisis at which I ate two full cooked meals, and then felt so ill that I skipped lunch as we pulled down through the Bay of Biscay. I convinced myself that I was going to be a martyr to seasickness. It turned out that my queasiness was due purely to overeating. I spent all day in a chair on deck reading
Kim
, on the theory that it would prepare me for life in the East, and by the evening I had recovered, ready for the first formal meal.

The dining room was bright, a good space with heavy fixed
fittings
. Each table took twelve guests; several didn’t have their full complement yet, as other passengers would be joining at Marseilles. Our table had three spare seats. Two of these belonged to the sisters who would be joining us in Marseilles. The third was to be taken by a soft-voiced captain in the Royal Artillery, who missed dinner on the first day; he seemed to need food only at irregular intervals, since he often skipped meals. Apart from myself, there were eight people present. The smart couple I had seen waving goodbye to their parents were the Scott-Duncans, heading out to Bombay for the husband to take up a post in the Indian Civil Service. He had, I gathered as much by hints and silences as by what was said, done very well in the qualifying exams. They had been married for six weeks. They were both clever and quiet and shy. They already seemed to be getting on well with a young Australian called McCague, who’d spent four years at Oxford and was now going home to his
family
in Adelaide, catching an onward connection from Hong Kong. He had the kind of Australian–Irish face in which the ears stick
out as a young man, only to fall back into proportion as his visage fills out. There were two almost identical young men heading out to take up jobs with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank. They were called Cooper and Porter. Both of them looked very clean. Another young man, Tuttle, more raffish in demeanour, was
taking
up a post with Jardine Matheson, which he explained was one of the Hongs. I had no idea what that meant.

The last two people at our table were a married couple called the Marlers. I have lost count of the number of couples I have known in whom one partner’s apparent vices exactly correspond to the other’s virtues: bumptiousness to charm, noisiness to quietness, talking to listening, selfishness to grace, nastiness to kindness, meanness to generosity, closed to open, nasty to nice. I suppose people often look for a partner who can voice the parts of themselves they have difficulty in expressing. The Marlers were like that. He was a bluff Yorkshireman who spoke of
himself
as being ‘in business’, details unspecified. He was fifty or thereabouts, five and a half feet in each direction. She was an inch taller and spoke mainly to tell him to be quiet, stop bullying
people
, give someone else a chance to get a word in; and she smiled encouragingly at whomever Marler was trying to browbeat. She was a decade or more younger.

The atmosphere on board, and the difference between the boat’s classes, came up as a topic of conversation at the very first dinner. That was thanks to Marler, who prided himself on never being in any doubt as to what was on his mind, and on never being slow to speak it. He had the kind of bluntness which is proud of itself.

‘I could afford to travel first class perfectly easily. That’s not a boast, it’s a simple statement of fact. I’ve just paid a pound for a bottle of claret. It was damned good claret and I was happy to pay what it cost. It was worth it. A hundred pounds for a ticket to Hong Kong when you can take the same boat and travel through the same weather for a third of the price, that isn’t luxury in my book, it’s nothing more than stupid waste.’

All this was said in a tone which implied that someone had been arguing the other side of the case and it was his duty to set the record straight. If there was no one else to start an argument with, Marler would simply start one with himself.

‘If people don’t spend money, the whole economy grinds to a halt,’ said one of the Hong Kong Bank men.

‘Albert,’ Mrs Marler said, with a warning note in her voice. She knew what was coming.

‘And what would you know about the real economy, a lad like you just off to take up his first job? I built a business up from the ground with my own salt sweat. Forty years man and boy,
getting
up at dawn and going to bed after dark, and that means I know the value of money and I’m not going to sit in some
overstuffed
armchair while my own lifeblood leaks away. Whatever some boy in his stiff new shoes tells me about so-called
economics
.’

‘I’ve been in there,’ I said. ‘The first-class lounge. It’s got a
tigerskin
carpet.’

Everybody looked at me. Mrs Marler smiled.

‘Quite right,’ she said. Somebody changed the subject.

For a few days after that the weather was rough. It wasn’t a full storm but it was enough to make most people ill. I found that I was what was called a ‘good sailor’, meaning I did not get
seasick
. In those days this was no trivial matter. I was often to meet expatriates who lived in dread of the journey to and from England.

The ship had a small library which was, in those seas, deserted. After finishing
Kim
in less time than it had ever taken me to read a book, I went and rummaged among the shelves. The material had a strong Eastern bias. Every magistrate who had ever sat on an Indian Bench or soldier who had put down a rebellion seemed subsequently to have written a volume of memoirs. As for most of the other writers, about the only one I had heard of was Somerset Maugham. I took
Of Human Bondage
down from the shelves, and killed time until we got to Marseilles.

We had half a day in the docks, so the Hong Kong Bank men, the Jardines man, and I were going to ‘do the sights’. There was some kerfuffle about passports and transit visas and the like, which the Jardines man solved by speaking fast, confident,
surprising
French, and then we were let loose in the old part of town. Abroad, I could quickly tell, was different from England. The light and the smells and the people were all different.

My plan had been to keep the news about the sisters to myself. Perhaps the others would get tipsy and appear at dinner flushed and garrulous; perhaps they would gorge themselves in Marseilles and miss dinner. One way or another, my secret knowledge would give me a crucial advantage in making the
all-important
first impression.

In those days I had trouble keeping secrets. The two Hong Kong Bank men quickly went into a routine of saying ‘Ooh la la’ every time they saw an unaccompanied Frenchwoman under the age of sixty. We sat in a café where the Jardines man ordered us beers all round. The drinks were stingingly cold. A girl carrying a parasol over her shoulder walked by, sparing us a cool sidelong look as she did so.

‘Ooh la la,’ said both the young bankers.

‘There may be some of that a little closer to home,’ I said, unable to resist.

‘What does that mean?’

‘Oh, you know, rumours.’

‘What sort of rumours?’

I made a point of observing the Marseilles streetscape at my own speed.

‘You’ve noticed our table is missing two of its full
complement
.’

This had been the subject of open speculation.

‘And?’

‘Perhaps I happen to know that two glamorous young sisters are embarking on their own great journey eastwards.’

This news had all the effect I had hoped for. All three men sat back in their chairs. The Jardines man recovered first and said, in a note of dazed wonder, ‘the fishing fleet’. This was the P&O term for single young women travelling East in search of a husband. Failures encountered on the homeward journey were known as ‘returned empties’.

‘How do you know?’

‘I have my sources.’

My companions were not so much exhilarated, which is what I suppose I had expected, as thoughtful. I did not know then that in those days the life of a company man out East was close to that of a young army officer, in the sense that it was ordered within
narrow social confines, and the opportunities to meet young women were not all that common. Both the bankers, for instance, were going to live in the ‘mess’ – company quarters for junior bachelor staff. The idea of young women made them feel
pre-emptively
wistful and sorry for themselves, with, of course, a wild romantic optimism bubbling underneath. They had all gone to single-sex boarding schools; they were almost totally ignorant of what women were actually like.

‘What else do you know about them?’

By now I was beginning to feel chastened by their reaction. The giggles and high spirits had vanished; they were behaving as if this was an extremely serious development. A note of
consternation
was present. Expectations of the journey were undergoing upheaval.

‘Nothing that I haven’t told you. I’m in the dark.’

I could tell that they didn’t believe me. It was a muted
foursome
who spent the next few hours ambling about Marseilles; cries of ‘Ooh la la’ fell into abeyance. We went to visit the Sailors’ Church at the top of the hill and the sight of the crowded bay, so dramatically curving round, and the thought of the number of sailors who’d seen this as their last ever glimpse of land, were sobering. We lunched, also soberly, in a brasserie by the old port which I remember not so much for the food, though that must also have seemed surprising, as for the wildly different nature of the restauration.