Dreaming Spies (11 page)

The second overheard conversation came the next day. We had succeeded in clearing the Straits without being set upon by pirates, but had failed to make up the time lost due to winds across the Bay of Bengal. Therefore our scheduled day-long stop in Singapore would be cut to a few hours.

We spent the morning with vocabulary drills and halting conversations based on the clothing and characteristics of our fellow passengers. Then, as the engines changed their timbre with the approach of the docks, our tutrix rose, saying that she had promised her new friends that she would go into the city with them.

“Why not come?” she asked. “You would learn many new words.”

In fact, once onboard a ship, I rarely ventured off before the journey’s end, since as the tedium dragged on and the decks shrank down to claustrophobic proportions, I found it more and more difficult to force my feet back up the gangway into a world of unremitting noise and bone-deep throbbing, with human beings at every turn, corridors that curved upwards in both directions, and air that stank of burning coal. In any event, this day I was happy to trade five hours of hurried sight-seeing for the chance of a nap, while Holmes wanted a conversation with the Chief Engineer—who, since the ship’s primary activity during the next few hours would be the taking in of coal and perishables, could permit his engines to fall silent. This was good, considering that most engineers were half-deaf by the time they reached forty, and this one was a solid decade past that age. Holmes went hoarse, after a long conversation below.

Passengers departed amidst loud plans for the botanic gardens and tea at Raffles, the Darleys and Miss Sato among them. Holmes changed into his oldest shirt and headed for the depths; I switched on the fan without electrocuting myself and settled onto my bunk with a nice soporific book from the ship’s library.

Voices came from the deck outside, one of them very young. It was an adenoidal voice I had heard a number of times, a plump male creature of perhaps ten years who was fiercely determined to master the skills of proper tennis, despite an ocean steamer being one of the world’s least congenial settings for the game: an exposed mountain-top might be a trifle worse—or a typhoon. Deck-tennis was the game of choice among the athletic shipboard set, with most big ships squeezing a court into some odd corner, but the game was played with quoits—rings of rope or rubber, which neither bounced nor rolled.

However, this valiant youth had his own apparently bottomless supply of tennis balls. Our very first day out, he had begun by using the section of bulkhead outside our cabin, until we thwarted him by the transfer of some potted palms. His current passion was learning to bounce the tennis ball from his child-sized racquet, as he had seen adult tennis players
do back in Delhi (although to my knowledge, he’d never got past half a dozen repetitions). I applauded his change of focus, and had come grudgingly to admire the creature’s tenacity, but it didn’t actually reduce the noise much, merely replacing the
pok … pok … pok
of rubber on metal with fifteen seconds of concentrated silence ending in juvenile shouts and scrambling noises as the ball made its inevitable dash for the water below. We’d left a trail of balls floating in our wake, a trail of aquatic bread-crumbs.

The lad’s parents had no doubt gone ashore to sample the gin slings of the Raffles Hotel, leaving their offspring in the care of his lugubrious nanny.

“But you
must
have taken it!” the young hellion exclaimed.

“Roderick, I hope you are not accusing me of lying. I promise you, I did not move your tennis racquet.”

“But it wasn’t
there
!”

“You must have left it somewhere.”

“You
know
I didn’t leave it up here! Why would I leave it up here?”

“You might have been distracted,” the poor woman offered.

The boy was outraged. “I’d
never
leave my racquet lying around!
Richard Sears
gave me that racquet!”

“Well, it will no doubt show up. In the meantime, maybe the purser has one you can borrow.”

“He won’t!”

“Come to think of it, when I was down in the hold yesterday fetching something for your mother I saw that one of the women had hers stored down there. Do you want me to see if she’ll lend it to you?”

“A
girl’s
racquet!” The governess might as well have suggested he dress in Suzanne Lenglen’s skirt. Shocked silence fell. They must have moved off eventually, because after a few more paragraphs, sleep wrapped its fingers around me, and gently tugged.

Loud and adult conversation woke me: returning passengers heading for their cabins to dress for cocktails and dinner. A while later, the great
engines rumbled into life. Soon, Holmes slipped up from the depths, looking as if the Chief Engineer had seized on this long, thin Englishman as a convenient way to swab out some duct-work. By the time he came up the companionway, I was sitting on the deck outside our cabin. Holmes raised his greasy cap to a horrified neighbour dressed in pale blue silk (a newcomer to sea travel, clearly: the dress already had smuts on it) who shrank back to let him enter the hatch. I remained where I was—no reason to get too near the man in his current state—until the aroma of filthy grease joined the salt-water steam vented out of the bath-room, indicating that the bath steward had taken one look at Holmes and ushered him in, regardless of where his name stood on the bath schedule.

Holmes came into our cabin slicked down, smooth-faced, and glowing.

As he dressed, I admired the state of his fingers (it would have taken me a week to prise that grease out of my cuticles) and asked about the ship’s haunt.

“I take it you didn’t see the viscount’s ‘below-decks ghost’ while you were down in the depths of the ship?”

“The ghost was not actually in the bilges then.”

“Good heavens. They did see something, then?”

“Apparently. The second night out.”

“As we were approaching Colombo.” Progress had been leisurely, so as not to inflict a mid-night arrival on well-paying passengers.

“Yes. Although it should be noted that the engineer is a phlegmatic individual who accepts ghosts as a regular part of shipboard life. He even had a candidate for the wraith’s identity: a lad named Mick, killed by a falling beam in the ship’s building. Says the lad’s a regular visitor.”

“So, not our missing passenger?”

“It would appear not.”

“Hmm. I don’t suppose young Mick liked to play tennis?”

He raised one eyebrow, so I told him about the loss of Master Roderick’s racquet. He grunted, adjusted his tie in the looking-glass, and glanced over at me.

“Is that a new frock?”

I looked down. “Yes. I was at the ship’s tailor, making arrangements for our Buddhist pilgrim costumes, and he had some fabric samples out, things he’d just bought in Colombo. I rather liked this one.”

“Handsome,” Holmes said, to my astonishment. “Shall we go?”

Hand-glass and child’s toy
.

Moonlight blankets the dead with

A touch in the night
.

The next day, we rounded the end of Malaysia and turned north. Cabins formerly shaded in the mornings were now exposed, while those that had been slightly cooler in the evenings now took until midnight to become habitable. At both ends of the day, the faces of the habitués changed, grumpy at the unaccustomed hour.

Our cabin was among those now exposed in the afternoon, and although the purser assured us (after more bribes) that he could provide cooler rooms (though perhaps not a suite) it would not be until Hong Kong (in twelve days). In the meantime, I slept fitfully, one night joining those on mattresses the stewards had dragged onto the decks, although I was loath to inflict the effects of my dreams on the other refugees.

Miss Sato, on the other hand, seemed to be sleeping just fine. Every morning she appeared on the dot of seven, chipper and sharp-eyed as a sparrow, pecking at our grammar like a bird after crumbs. Every afternoon she would stand before her growing crowd of admirers, wait for silence, give us a bow, and launch into the day’s topics. Following the stop in Singapore, she produced a heap of bulging string bags filled with
exotic foodstuffs. She talked about seaweed, rice, the scarcity of meat, and the many products derived from the soybean—then handed us each a pair of chopsticks and invited us to try them. When the ensuing hilarity had run its course, four women—two British, one American, and a New Zealander—talked about their native cuisines. It would be difficult to judge who was the more off-put: the Japanese at the idea of calves’ brains, or the Americans faced with dried seaweed and amorphous blobs of bean-curd.

The next afternoon’s topic was both less demanding and more sparsely attended: in tropical heat, the temptation of Our Classic Literatures was less of a pull than a swim in the boat-deck’s canvas pool. Or, in Holmes’ case, a session with the engineers.

I, however, did go.

Miss Sato was as punctual as ever, and seemed unaware that the numbers were less than half the usual. She bowed, thanked us for coming, and said that she hoped to introduce the English speakers to the pleasures of Japanese literature, then do the same in reverse to the residents of Japan, dividing the English side into two: America, and England itself. In each case, the brief look would include both poetry and prose writers. Not that we would be able to so much as touch upon the riches, she noted, but completeness was not the goal here, merely formal introductions.

This time, in the interest of fairness, Miss Sato chose to begin with English literature—or rather, American, with one of my schoolteacher table-mates called upon to talk about Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. I had vivid memories of Mr Clemens, whom I had met when I was small, although I admit his writing never caught my attention. Nor did it that day, with the lady earnestly reading small bits from both men.

An elderly woman behind me began to snore.

Miss Sato then spoke about two Japanese writers. One was an aristocratic lady of the eleventh century named Murasaki, credited with writing the world’s first novel, a tale of secret aristocracy and forbidden love. She read a few passages from an ongoing English translation, then
turned to Matsuo Bashō, a seventeenth-century itinerant poet and master of the form called “haiku.” Miss Sato did get a bit bogged down in her explanation—that the form was at the poet’s time known as
hokku
, that what he had mastered was more the linked
renko
than the haiku itself, that the classic 5/7/5 syllable arrangement of haiku did not really mean syllables—but then she put aside the lecture and thought for a moment, oblivious of the stir and coughs.

“The haiku captures a fleeting moment. Of great beauty, or heartbreak. A moment that, hmm … 
encapsulates
the essence of a season. Such as the fragrance of blossoming cherries, or the sound of snow, or the feel of hot summer wind blowing the bamboo. I am sorry, my words are not sufficient. I will read.”

So she read us a few. Those of us not peacefully drowsing in our chairs agreed that they were charming, and thought-provoking, although the intensity of their imagery perhaps failed to translate into English.

She ended with what she said was Bashō’s most famous haiku. First, the original Japanese:

Furuike ya

Kawazu tobikomu

Mizu no oto
.

Then, a crude translation of the words alone:

Old pond—

Frog leaps in:

Water noise!

She then re-shaped it to carry the classical haiku 5/7/5 arrangement into English:

Dark, mossy old pond—

Lively frog leaps from the bank:

The sound of water
.

When she bowed and sat down, the room gave a stir. I was not the only one to consider the doorway with longing—until I saw Miss Sato’s choice of expert for English literature: Lady Darley.

She was wearing white—a frock that on me would guarantee instant collision with a child and a chocolate bar. It was of a conservative cut, with loose, elbow-length sleeves, a reasonable neck-line, and a waist at the upper hip, rather than the exaggerated drooping torso that only the thinnest girls could get away with. There were more expensive dresses in the room, but none that looked it.

The countess gazed down at her notes until the shuffling stopped. “Thank you. When I was asked to speak about the glories of English literature, my first impulse was to decline the honour, in favour of someone more qualified. However, I have been thinking of late about a cousin, who was like a brother. He was killed on the Somme, eight years ago. I …” Lady Darley paused, her eyes going back to the notes until the inevitable stir of sympathy died down. “I have been remembering Edward, and how much literature meant to him. So with your permission, I should like to make a few remarks on two writers who sustained him in the trenches. I apologise that both are poets, strictly speaking, rather than one writing pure prose, but I would contend that a playwright produces prose of a sort.