Fragrant Harbour (8 page)

‘There’s no English equivalent to this,’ I told my companions.

Then we simply wandered about, that skill of the young. By now we were all at the stage of pretending to be casual.

‘I think I’ll just have a wash and a brush-up before dinner,’ said Cooper. Potter – they were sharing a cabin – agreed. The Jardines man muttered something about a quick snooze. Nobody was at ease.

At seven-thirty I went through to dinner, skipping a
preliminary
drink in the bar on grounds of not wanting to appear
dissolute
. I’d heard stories of what the East could do to a man and did not want to be seeming to get an early start. All three of my day’s companions were already seated at the table. The other seats filled up over the next quarter of an hour. Our waiter brought a tureen of soup and began ladling out portions. I had my head
lowered to the bowl and was taking a mouthful when I heard the dining-room door swing open and knew without having to look up that there were the sisters, making their entry. I straightened from my dish. On the one hand, the Third Officer had clearly been lying about the two women being sisters, since one was European and the other Chinese. On the other hand, he had been telling the truth, because it was apparent from their grey habits that the two of them were missionary nuns.

Their names were Sister Maria and Sister Benedicta. They were Catholic missionaries from the Order of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin. The order was founded in the early nineteenth century. It was based in France and had an emphasis on
education
in Asia and Africa.

Sister Benedicta was the older of the two. She was a wiry Frenchwoman in her mid-forties, and was senior in the order’s
hierarchy
. I found her intimidating, not least because she was
alarmingly
frank and – this was something I later came to expect from Catholic missionaries, though it was a shock on this first encounter – interested in and well-informed about all worldly subjects. Her special area of interest was politics and her sympathies were always and provokingly on the side of the local peoples. She made no bones about seeing all us young men setting out Eastwards to make our fortunes as a type; by no means her favourite type, either. The only time I heard her implicitly admit some sympathy for a governing power was when she spoke about French Indo-China. If I hadn’t been so frightened of her I would have liked her very much.

The Chinese nun was Sister Maria. She was my age, more or less, tough and delicate at the same time; quick-witted; not so much pretty as perfect, as small-boned Chinese women can be. It was much later that I heard her story. She came from an inland part of the province of Fukien, a wild backwater famous for
producing
pirates. Her parents died when she was young and she was sent to live with relatives in Canton. A branch of the family had converted to Catholicism; they took her up and sent her to missionary school, where she simultaneously discovered her vocation and a talent for languages.

‘It’s the gift of tongues,’ she told me. When she spoke of
religious
subjects her manner became heavy and serious, as if there were some increase in the level of gravity. Along with her lively side there was this pompous religious persona. She could switch between the two in a moment. I never got used to it.

Maria joined the Order when she was eighteen, and went to work in a mission school in Hong Kong, where she learnt her
fluent
English, which in those days had a faint and rather lovely Chinese–French accent. At this time she also spoke French, Mandarin, Cantonese, as well as several different varieties of Fujianese and Chiu Chow. She never made a big fuss about this, it was just something she could do.

‘People are always more interested in what is impossible for them,’ she once said.

The arrival of the two sisters at our table caused upheaval, though not in the way I had been expecting. The Jardines and Hong Kong Bank men – the other bachelors, if you exclude the absent Gunner – teased me about the nuns for a few days and then let the matter drop, referring to it only occasionally and affectionately in the past tense, like a favourite practical joke that somebody had played at school. (‘That was a good one,’ I said to the smirking Scottish Third Officer the next time I saw him.) They dealt with the nuns surprisingly easily,
notwithstanding
Sister Benedicta’s obvious scepticism about the promising young Englishman as a genre. I suppose they had established models for dealing with women in a quasi-official capacity, formed by encounters with nannies, school matrons, and housemasters’ wives. They were polite and interested when Sister Benedicta spoke about politics. Before long, the Jardines man had developed a technique for responding to her opinions – diatribes would be too strong a word – about British India, by asking innocent-sounding questions about the regime in Hanoi or Algiers.

All was not harmony and peace at our dinner table, however; on the contrary. For some reason the arrival of the two
missionaries
seemed to strike Marler on a psychic sore point. Right from the start, when he was introduced to them, he behaved like a man inflamed, provoked beyond all reason. His opening words to the sisters were:

‘Off to save souls?’

This came out so bluntly, so much like a direct insult, that the rest of us simply laughed, as if this were a deliberate exaggeration of his usual directness, a clumsy attempt at humour. It seemed impossible that anyone would be this consciously rude, at first
meeting, to somebody he didn’t know. Even his wife looked embarrassed. But that didn’t impede Marler in any way, and it did not take long for the first proper argument. In fact, it
happened
during the dinner the first night after Marseilles. Sister Benedicta had asked the army man whereabouts in India he was headed. He said he was going to the Punjab.

‘Ah, the Afghan frontier. So troubling to you British for so long now. Subject peoples are often so ungrateful, are they not?’

Many of us may have been thinking, steady on, this is a bit much for someone we’ve only just met, but everyone smiled politely, except Marler.

‘I think that those remarks are extraordinarily offensive,’ he said at considerable volume.

Sister Benedicta gave him a long cool French look.

‘You are challenging the idea that the so-called North-West Frontier of your Indian Empire has been disputatious?’

‘We brought order and justice to half the world. There was no such thing as India before the British arrived there and civilised it. I simply will not accept this easy jeering from a citizen of a less successful empire whose only real objection to British
achievements
, if the truth is admitted, is that they were British and not French. As for the Catholic Church, systematically spreading superstition, idolatry, ignorance, and wishful hocus-pocus
wherever
it lands, the whole institution, with its greedy corrupt priests and credulous populace, casts a dark shadow on the earth and the world would be better off without it.’

‘Hocus-pocus is an accurate term. It is derived from “
hoc est
corpus
meum
”,’ said Sister Maria.

‘It is enviable to be able to speak with such confidence on
subjects
about which one knows so little,’ said Sister Benedicta. ‘I was briefly in Peshawar, in which we have a little mission
teaching
medical skills to the local people as part of our mission to spread darkness and unreason over the earth,’ she said,
speaking
to the army man, who was listening with his eyes while
continuing
to eat soup. ‘They have a remarkable range of unfamiliar breads which I think you will enjoy. As for the British bringing civilisation to India,’ she went on, turning to Marler, ‘you will find, if you have the opportunity to spend some time there, that the Indians were civilised many hundreds
of years before the Roman Empire first brought the light of reason to your homelands.’

It went on from there.

The next day, as we chugged across the tideless Mediterranean on our way to the Suez Canal, most of the passengers had settled down to a quoits tournament. The prize was a dinner for two at the Captain’s table, with champagne. (Although meals were included in the ticket price, we had to pay for our own drinks.) I had teamed up with Cooper.

‘What did you make of all that then?’ I asked him.

‘Bit rum,’ he said. ‘Not sure you should speak to a woman like that, however much you think she’s talking rot. Still, bit of a rough diamond, isn’t he?’

‘Bit of a bully,’ I said.

‘You have to get along with people if you work in an office,’ he said, apropos, I then thought, of nothing.

We got as far as the semi-final stage of the quoits tournament before being knocked out by the eventual winners, the Purser and a young Welsh passenger. The Purser had the physical agility of a plump man and had also had lots of practice. His quoit
throwing
was a revelation.

I went into dinner that evening without a thought in my head, beyond hoping there wouldn’t be another argument. On that score I was in for a major disappointment.

It began innocuously enough. People had been talking about the next few days’ sailing and the question of whether or not they were going to have a chance of spending some time ashore at Aden; it depended on our speed of progress.

‘I’ve always wanted to see the souk,’ said Mrs Scott-Duncan, blushing. The young Australian made some casual remark about how much he was looking forward to going through the Suez Canal.

‘A remarkable triumph of vision, perhaps even more
remarkable
as such than as a feat of engineering,’ said Sister Benedicta. ‘A victory of the imaginative and theoretical over the mere empirical. De Lesseps was convinced a canal could be built because his historical researches told him that the ancient Egyptians had managed to do it, and he was sure that anything accomplished in the past by guesswork and forced labour could 
be matched by the skills of French engineering. Many sceptics, not least some of your own countrymen’ – Sister Benedicta appeared here to be bracketing the Australian in with the rest of us Anglo-Saxons – ‘proclaimed the self-evident impossibility of the scheme. A favourite objection was that the desert winds would fill the canal with sand. De Lesseps of course paid no attention, as confident in his researches as in his calculations and his imagination. As a result the canal is a united triumph of
reason
and faith, so perfect as almost to resemble a parable.’

‘Typical,’ said Marler promptly and loudly. ‘The French
dressing
up their imperial aspirations in a fog of claims about this and that. The simple truth is that we are a world power, you’re not, and you want to be. No offence,’ he then added.

‘Not everything is about power,’ said Sister Benedicta. This made Marler even more angry.

‘Come off it, France is the most power-mad country in the world, the only one to conduct their foreign affairs without even a shred of concern for anything beyond national self-interest and self-aggrandisement. Power is precisely what French foreign
policy
has been all about since before the tyrant Bonaparte.’

‘Reason and enlightenment are universal values and France has done what she can to spread them. Not every country can say the same.’

‘It fails to make any sense to me how a member of an institution as corrupt and benighted as the Catholic Church can spout about reason. Your church spreads superstition and ignorance
wherever
she goes. Talk about power, that’s the only thing your church has a significant interest in – the slightest real interest.’

Sister Maria responded by saying:

There was a silence.

‘An Irish nun, Sister Bernadette, taught me that poem,’ she said to Marler. ‘I suppose she was only interested in power, too.’

‘Well –’ he said, but she went on:

‘The Church brought me out of darkness and ignorance into light. It taught me that thanks to God’s grace I have a gift, and thanks also to his grace I can share some of my gift with other people through teaching.’

‘And shoving a bucketload of superstitious claptrap down their throats at the same time.’

‘Nobody shoves anything down my pupils’ throats. Education is the opposite of ignorance.’

‘I am sure you have great gifts, Sister, and I’m sure you’re
wasting
them in such a backward institution.’

‘I can reach more of the people I need to reach where I am than in any other body on this earth.’

‘But they can’t learn as much as they would if they were being taught in an atmosphere that didn’t reek of superstition and idolatry.’

‘On the contrary, our students learn quicker than in secular schools.’

‘I find that difficult to believe.’

‘Nonetheless it is so.’

‘It’s easy to make claims when there is no way of substantiating them.’

‘Who said there was no way of substantiating them? I can take a person wholly ignorant of a language and raise him up to a functional standard within a matter of weeks. I could do it with any of the gentlemen around this table tonight. I could even do it with you, Mr Marler.’

‘I find that also difficult to believe.’

And then, I suspect for no other reason than that she was
sitting
next to me, she said:

‘I can have this gentleman able to pass muster in Cantonese by the time we get to Hong Kong.’

Marler laughed at that, and sat back in his seat.

‘You should be careful what you say, young Sister, or I’ll take you up on that bet.’

‘About five hundred of your pounds sterling would more than keep our mission in Hong Kong running for a year,’ said Sister Benedicta.

Marler became serious. For him, talk about money was always fighting talk.

‘Well now,’ he said, ‘perhaps there is an opportunity for a meaningful wager here, if we look hard enough. Let’s see. You can hardly put up an equivalent amount in cash, of course. Perhaps you have the leasehold on a property or two, which might be of interest … no, again that’s missing the point. Somehow it would be wrong to exchange a thing for a thing. An exchange of goods for labour, perhaps that would be more like it. Yes. All right, Sister Maria, how’s this: you win and I give you your five hundred pounds. I win, and you come and work for me in my Hong Kong office for a year. How’s that?’

Sister Benedicta and Sister Maria looked at each other for a moment and then Sister Benedicta said: