Mr Ma and Son (6 page)

I
T WAS
typical April weather: bright one moment, dull the next, then suddenly there’d be a shower of rain, and, while the raindrops were still falling, the sun would come out again. Tiny pearls of water hung in a string across the window frame of the house at Gordon Street, and as soon as the sun hit them they would slowly disappear in wisps of white vapour. Outside the house there were tall poplar trees that had just thrown forth their spring leaves. After the rain, their trunks were as moist and sleek as the legs of a freshly bathed elephant: slippery, shiny and very grey.

Although the elder Mr Ma had already had forty days’ sleep at sea, he was still extremely tired. When he lay down in his bed that first night, he could feel the bedding rise up and down, and seemed, too, to hear the shush-shushing of the sea. He woke up a good few times during the night. It was lacquer-black in the room, and in his soporific state he couldn’t remember where he was. On the ship? In Peking? Shanghai? He felt utterly lost and helpless, and when he’d properly woken up, and recalled that he was in London, he experienced quite another feeling, that of inexpressible gloom and melancholy. His friends in Peking, the meat dumplings of the
Great Beauty Restaurant
, the
K’un-ch’ü opera
of the
Extending Virtue Theatre
, his late wife, his elder brother . . . Shanghai . . . He recalled them all, and the next moment forgot them all again, but from the corners of his eyes two big teardrops escaped.

Parting’s sorrows and meeting’s delights. Such is life. Make the best of things wherever you are,
the elder Ma comforted himself.
When Ma Wei’s finished his studies, I’ll be able to enjoy a few more days’ happiness, live as a gentleman for a bit.

The very thought of it made him feel cheerful. He stretched out his sweaty palm and brought it up over the blanket to smooth his minute moustache. Then he lifted his head from the pillow a bit, to hear if there was any sound from next door. There was nothing.

‘Young and strong, you can eat like a hog and sleep like a log! He’ll do well, that boy of mine,’ he mumbled to himself, and slowly closed his eyes once more.

He kept on waking up and dozing off, and it wasn’t until the sun had risen that he at last shifted into a steady sleep. He seemed to hear Ma Wei getting up, and half heard the sounds of traffic in the street, but didn’t open his eyes. It was probably about half past seven when there came two gentle taps on the door, followed by Mrs Wedderburn’s voice: ‘Hot water, Mr Ma!’

‘Thank you, er . . . ugh . . .’ He went off to sleep again.

Ma Wei was up before seven o’clock. He was set on taking a look round London, and was so impatient to do so that nothing could have induced him to carry on sleeping. What’s more, he’d met Miss Wedderburn yesterday, but he couldn’t very well chat to her while his father was around. Breakfast this morning would give him his chance, as his father was bound to sleep in.

He rose, and gently drew open the curtains. The rain had just stopped, and the rays of the sun were like yellow bees bearing the sweet honey of springtime, crawling along Ma Wei’s hand as they came through the window. He donned the Western-style patterned dressing-gown that he’d bought in Shanghai, and silently waited for Mrs Wedderburn to bring the hot water so that he could shave.

He’d acquired the habit of shaving only while on board ship. Before embarking, he’d bought a safety razor in the
Sincere Department Store
in Shanghai. On the ship each morning, before anyone else had risen, he’d hurry to the bathroom for a careful shave. There was a grand total of ten or so moderately thick whiskers on his face, but after Ma Wei had been shaving for a week, the stubble was terribly prickly if he skipped a day. Looking at himself in the mirror after shaving, he felt that his face looked extraordinarily virile and vital, with a certain intrepid air to it. Film heroes would often get involved in a fight in the middle of shaving, with soap lathered all over their faces, and no sooner have finished the fight than they were back shaving, with nary a tremble. Or sometimes when they’d won the fight, they’d take a nearby young lady in their arms and kiss her, leaving soap-lather all over her cheek. Shaving, viewed in such a light, wasn’t a mere habit but in fact the embodiment of a variety of subtle emotional implications.

At long last the hot water arrived, and he hastily rinsed his mouth and shaved. After combing his hair and washing, he gave his suit a meticulous brushing-down. Once fully dressed, he thought to go downstairs, but was afraid to head down too early in case it incurred him the landlady’s displeasure. He eased open the door and peeped out. A little steam was still curling up from the white enamel bowl outside his father’s door. From downstairs he could hear very clearly the voices of Mrs Wedderburn and her daughter. The daughter’s voice sounded especially clear, with an exciting note to it, and every word he heard set his heart trembling like a rain-pattered petal.

The bell rang downstairs. He guessed it must mean that breakfast was ready. He took another look at himself in the mirror: his eyebrows didn’t shoot up at the tips, they curved down now, almost down past his eyes. Adjusting his tie again, he pulled his lapels straight, and finally clomped downstairs.

Mrs Wedderburn and her daughter usually ate breakfast in the kitchen, but because of Mr Ma and son’s arrival, they now ate in the dining room. As Ma Wei entered the room, Mrs Wedderburn was still in the kitchen, and only Miss Wedderburn was there, sitting at the table with a newspaper in her hands, studying the latest fashion illustrations. Seeing Ma Wei come in, she gave a ‘Hello’, without raising her head, and carried on reading her newspaper.

She wore just a sleeveless green dress, which left her neck and arms on display. Her well-fleshed white arms were like a pair of elephant tusks, an ivory of mysterious composition: silk-floss soft, supple and lustrous, and emanating some fragrant scent.

Ma Wei straightened his shoulders. ‘Quite nice weather, isn’t it?’ he said.

‘Cold.’ She squeezed the word from her deep-red lips, still not looking at him. Mrs Wedderburn came in bearing a tea tray.

‘What about your father?’ she asked Ma Wei.

‘I’m afraid he isn’t up yet,’ said Ma Wei in a subdued voice.

She said nothing, but her face dropped like a blind. She sat down opposite her daughter, and poured tea for them. She’d made a special point of using the tea leaves that Mr Ma had given her, and but for the sake of the tea, she would have exploded. All the same, as she poured the tea, she did remark in a quiet voice, ‘I really can’t make breakfast twice.’

‘Whose fault is it if you let the rooms to Chinamen!’ said Miss Wedderburn, flinging the newspaper away and cocking her head to one side.

Ma Wei blushed deeply, and he thought of getting up and marching out. He frowned, but didn’t get to his feet.

Miss Wedderburn looked at him with a smile, as if to say, ‘Cringing cowards, the Chinese. They can’t even get properly angry.’

Mrs Wedderburn gave her daughter a look, and hastily passed Ma Wei a cup of tea. ‘Lovely tea. The Chinese are great tea drinkers, aren’t they?’ she said.

‘Yes, they are.’ Ma Wei nodded.

Mrs Wedderburn took a mouthful of toast, and was just about to drink her cup of tea, when Miss Wedderburn tugged at her and exclaimed, ‘Watch out, there might be poison in it!’

She pronounced these words so earnestly, as if Ma Wei weren’t present, as if it were an absolute, unshakable truth, beyond all shadow of doubt, that the Chinese were poisoners. Her lips shuddered spontaneously and her reaction was utterly natural, with no thought of offending anyone nor any attempt to be smart. It didn’t seem to occur to her that she could be insulting Ma Wei. In every play in which a Chinese person appeared, he was sure to poison someone. It was the same in all films and novels as well. Miss Wedderburn’s anxiety was drawn from a long creative history, and had something about it that was akin to religious faith. Muslims don’t eat pork, and, as everyone knows, the Chinese poison people. Yes, a kind of faith.

Ma Wei smiled. He picked up his cup of tea, and took a sip without saying a word. He knew what she meant, because he’d read English novels about the Chinese murdering people with poison.

Mrs Wedderburn, embarrassed, sipped some tea through her delicate lips, and then peppered Ma Wei with questions: How many different kinds of China tea were there, whereabouts in China was it produced, what was the name of the tea that they were now drinking, and how was it manufactured?

Swallowing his indignation, Ma Wei gave her the first answers that came into his head, telling her that what they were now drinking was called
Hsiang P’ien
, or ‘fragrant flakes’.

Mrs Wedderburn asked him to say it again, then mumbled ‘Hang Ben’, and asked Ma Wei whether she’d got it right.

Meanwhile, Miss Wedderburn was thinking of a film she’d seen a few days earlier. An English hero had fought and killed some fifteen yellow-faced, noseless Chinese men in a marvellous fight. She’d clapped her plump hands so hard they’d looked like a couple of beetroots plunged in boiling water. As she drifted off into such reminiscences, she clenched one hand under the table, waving her fist in Ma Wei’s direction, and saying to herself,
It’s not only English men who can beat you cringing cowards – even our heroines could knock you head over heels!

At the same time, she thought of her boyfriend, John, who was now in China. What a fine figure John would cut in Shanghai. With those two big fists of his, he could surely thump dead a few dozen Chinese with one punch. Her blue eyes shone ever more radiantly. John was the hero of her heart. In his letter he’d written:
I’ve joined up as a volunteer. Yesterday with one burst of gunfire I shot dead five of the yellow devils, one of them a girl . . .

Miss Wedderburn felt that killing a girl wasn’t very humane, but then, it had been a Chinese girl. In awe of John’s heroism, she was oblivious to anything else. But it had said in the newspaper that the Chinese had massacred some English people – surely John couldn’t have been boasting and telling lies? At which juncture in her thoughts, she heard her mother saying ‘Hang Ben’.

‘What, Mum?’ she asked, turning her head.

Her mother told her that the tea was called Hang Ben. Miss Wedderburn tried to pronounce it too. The English always have to show off. She temporarily forgot how loathsome Ma Wei was.

‘Hang Ben. Hang Ben. Is that right?’ she asked Ma Wei.

Naturally Ma Wei said, ‘Yes, that’s right.’

Breakfast over, Ma Wei was about to go upstairs and see how his father was. Miss Wedderburn came running downstairs, wearing a new hat she’d bought the previous day and on which was displayed a mouse’s tail, as though she had stuck a strip of buckwheat vermicelli there. Mousetails were the latest fashion, and so she was wearing one, too.

‘Cheerio!’ she said, giving Ma Wei a sideways glance. And off she dashed like a puff of smoke.

W
HILE MISS
Wedderburn went off to work, Mrs Wedderburn wove in and out of the rooms, doing the housework with Napoleon in tow, leaping wildly all around her. Ma Wei sat alone in the drawing room, waiting for the Reverend Ely to arrive.

Since his mother’s death, when he was eight years old, Ma Wei had had virtually no experience of female love or concern. At primary school, he went round all day in a pack of little ragamuffin boys, and at high school he mixed with slightly bigger ragamuffins. It was only on Sundays, when he went to church, that he had been able to see a few women. During prayers, with his head lowered, he would secretly peep at them out of the corner of his eye. But many a time he was caught at it by Mrs Ely, who would report it to the Reverend Ely. And the reverend would give him a thorough telling-off, partly in English, partly in Chinese.

‘Little boy! Mustn’t look at young ladies during prayers! Understand?’ he’d say in Chinese. ‘See?’ he’d add in English.

As Mrs Ely prayed, she’d always have one eye closed, looking up to God in heaven, and the other eye open to watch the crowd of hell-worthy pupils. Ma Wei’s ‘girl-spotting’ couldn’t escape her.

Eighty or ninety per cent of the girls in the church were even uglier than Mrs Ely, and, as Ma Wei’s roving glance encountered them, he would sometimes instinctively shut his eyes, musing to himself that when God made humans, He sometimes went a bit wrong. Occasionally, though, he did spy a pretty girl. But beautiful, he couldn’t help being reminded of the paper effigy-dolls in the funeral parlours. That, inevitably, was somewhat off-putting. But never mind if she was a paper doll – she was still a pretty girl, and it was no small thing to catch a glimpse of one. Chatting with her, or holding her hand, however, was beyond the realm of possibility – a foolish fantasy.

Just once he had actually been around a girl for a good few days. It happened the year before he came to England. Things were hotting up in the student world. Headmasters were striking, teachers were striking, and students were striking. Not many knew what it was all about, but everyone jumped on the bandwagon. Even the church school downed bibles and joined the strikers. Ma Wei had always been a capable speaker and looked presentable enough, and thus he was elected a representative, thanks to his natural eloquence and the fact his father didn’t keep too close an eye on him.

On the representative committee, there were of course female delegates, and during the campaign, Ma Wei had numerous opportunities to speak to them, and even once physically joined hands with them. But periods of unrest are so unreliable: they might last three days, they might be five months. Although everybody might feel that the longer the better, all good things must come to an end. It just so happened that this particular period of unrest was unfortunately brief, which meant that Ma Wei in his social contact with women was fated to resemble some minor acrobat: no sooner has he turned one somersault than he crawls under the stage-curtain and disappears into the wings.

Did fate play a hand in determining that Ma Wei and Miss Wedderburn should come together? Had
Yüeh Lao
, the old man in the moonlight, tied their big toes together across the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean with a strand of invisible thread? She was one of countless Western girls, and she just happened to be the first one that Ma Wei met. The moment he set eyes on her, with her playful manner and kittenish skipping about, his feelings sped from surprise to admiration, and from admiration to infatuation, like someone drinking wine for the first time, face flushing headily after just one cup. Her expression and way of speaking cooled him off considerably, it was true; yet she had smiled when she’d said ‘Cheerio!’ to him, and her eyes had glanced his way, however fleetingly . . . Surely she wasn’t deadset against him then. If only she could just come to like Chinese people. Wait and see – sooner or later he’d make her understand what the Chinese were really like . . . No need, no absolute necessity, to get on affectionate terms with her, was there? Especially not with so many other girls around.

Such thoughts churned around in Ma Wei’s mind, presenting a host of problems but no other solution than ‘wait and see’. He felt his face. On his cheekbones were two particularly hot spots, as if a stub of incense were burning there. ‘Wait and see. Don’t be in a hurry. Don’t be impatient,’ he murmured away to himself, his mouth slightly agape as if he were about to smile – though he didn’t – or as if he were almost annoyed . . . Annoyed about her? That’d never do! He shot looks at himself in the drawing room mirror, glancing at his white teeth, while pacing back and forth with his hands in his trouser pockets. ‘Don’t be impatient. Just wait and see.’

‘Ma Wei! Ma Wei!’ shouted the elder Mr Ma from upstairs, with a frog in his throat. Then he coughed, and his voice rang out a little sharper and smoother: ‘Ma Wei!’

Pulling himself together, Ma Wei raced upstairs two or three steps at a time. With one hand, Mr Ma was holding open the door, and in the other he held the enamel bowl. There were red creases on his face from where he’d been sleeping, and his scrap of moustache was all twisted.

‘Go and get some hot water.’ He handed the enamel basin to Ma Wei.

‘I daren’t go into the kitchen,’ said Ma Wei. ‘Didn’t you hear what the landlady said yesterday? We’re not to go into the kitchen. You didn’t turn up at breakfast, and she’s already been going on about that. What do you think —’

‘All right, all right,’ said Mr Ma, rubbing his eyes, ‘Does it matter if I don’t shave?’

‘The Reverend Ely’s coming round in a bit to take us out, isn’t he?’

‘Would it matter if I didn’t go?’

Ma Wei said nothing, just poured some water into a glass and handed it to his father.

While Mr Ma gargled to rinse his throat and mouth, Ma Wei opened up their cases, which had been delivered the previous evening, and asked his father whether he wanted to wear a different suit. Feeling irritable, Mr Ma ignored him. Ma Wei thought first of telling his father that when in England you had to do as the English did, but seeing the expression on his father’s face, he crept out without saying a word.

The more Mr Ma thought about it, the angrier he grew:
So this is what it’s like when you go abroad! And what have I done to deserve such treatment? Yes, what have I done? Can’t get up late, or there’s no hot water! No hot water!

He brooded for quite some time.

Ah! I know. We’ll go and live in a hotel. Blow the cost – just as long as I don’t have to put up with such foul insults!

But then, as he glanced at the cases and their other belongings, his ardent resolve cooled off somewhat.
We’ve got too many things. Be too much bother to move them.

A moment later, and his angry determination had wilted yet further.

Let’s give it a try here first. Stick it out.And then, if we come across a suitable place, we’ll move.

His wrath thus dispelled, he put on his big spectacles, picked up his pipe and marched into the study.

Thoughts are the cheapest thing in life. You think something, and you feel there’s some truth to it. You have another ponder, and you realise your first thought wasn’t so enlightened and ingenious after all. And when you give it yet more thought, it sends you into a proper muddle, and the more you think, the more fuddled you get, so that all you’ve thought up till then can be viewed as a sheer waste of effort. In Mr Ma’s case, however, this effort was considerably less than had he decided to up sticks and leave.

Downstairs, Mrs Wedderburn was specially waiting for Mr Ma to get up and ask her for some breakfast, so that she could give him a piece of her mind. If he was pulled up sharply and painfully the first time, you could bet he wouldn’t try it on again. Hearing him get up, and calculating when he’d have finished his morning ablutions, she walked upstairs grumbling to herself. When she reached Mr Ma’s door it was half open, and there was no sound from inside. Suddenly she heard two coughs, and, turning her head, noticed that the study door was also half open . . . and that Mr Ma was sitting on a chair in the study, with a pipe in his mouth.

No wonder the Reverend Ely says there’s something spooky and supernatural about the Chinese,
she said to herself.
Leave him without his breakfast, and – what do you know! – he doesn’t even turn a hair. Doesn’t even ask for any. All right, you can go hungry!

Mr Ma sat there quite immobile, just sucking away on his pipe, puffing ring upon ring of blue smoke above his head.

The Reverend Ely didn’t arrive till eleven o’clock and didn’t come inside, but just stood at the front door and asked Ma Wei, ‘What about your father? Is he coming out or not?’

Ma Wei ran upstairs to ask his father. Mr Ma gave a slight shake of his head, dispersing the rings of blue smoke around his head. Ma Wei hurried downstairs and told the Reverend Ely that his father still wasn’t sufficiently rested, and didn’t intend going out. So he went off with the Reverend Ely by himself.