Fragrant Harbour (17 page)

‘No, not Stanley.’

‘Well, Big Wave Bay then, or Repulse Bay, or somewhere. Where people can go for a break or for weekends.’

‘No adulterers, though, Hong Kong’s not big enough.’

Masterson had often spoke of the importance of adultery to the hotel business. It was one of the things he said was tricky about Hong Kong from the professional hotelier’s point of view.

‘That’s right. Lots of other business, mind you. Weekends. Wedding receptions. Somewhere to go.’

‘Mary says that when the war’s over she wants to buy a boat and go sailing every single weekend.’

For a moment I could almost feel the movement of the boat under my feet. Sitting on deck with a beer after a swim; fishing; diving; finding unoccupied island beaches. At times the thought of freedom could be too sharp, too painful. Hope and despair were alike in the way that opposites often are, and the extreme form of one could become the other very easily. You had to keep your balance.

The need to do so was more acute because it began to seem that we were going to win the war. We could see it in the way our
Taiwanese guards behaved: they would whisper items of news, rumours of Japanese defeats and Allied progress. A coolie
bringing
fuel for the incinerator (where blankets ruined by dysentery were burnt) told Professor Cobb about the Normandy landings. As Beryl pointed out, even the
Hong Kong Daily News
couldn’t conceal the trend of the war, since its chronicle of Allied defeats moved ever closer to Berlin and Tokyo. Allied planes began to appear overhead. Some of them dropped bombs; an American bomb killed fourteen people in one bungalow. Canadian internees were repatriated. The idea of our eventual release made camp life harder to bear. There were rumours that we would be exchanged for Japanese civilians whom the Australians had interned. It was life day by day; I stuck to the near horizons.

In early August 1945, we heard that the Russians had declared war on Japan. That was the first sign that the war was ending. On the evening of Thursday 16th August I went down to the kitchen to see if there was any hot water left after dinner.

‘They’re saying something’s happened in Japan,’ Beryl Marler said. She was sitting at one of the tables checking a duty rota. ‘Someone heard it from the Chinese. Something about a bomb.’

We had all become experts at attempting to sense the texture of rumours – what felt possible, what was clearly nonsense; the
difference
between wishful thinking and informed speculation and genuine bamboo-telegraph information. Perhaps it is only with hindsight that I can remember feeling that this time it might be real. I said:

‘I hope it was a really big one.’

The next day we were given a special allocation of cigarettes and, for the first and last time in the whole war, a roll of toilet paper. That is when I knew it was finished. I gave my cigarettes to Masterson.

‘I do hope you’re right,’ he said. ‘I’m going to smoke all of these straightaway, so if the bloody war isn’t over I’ll never forgive you.’

The next day the
Hong Kong Daily News
announced that the Emperor loved his people so much he had decided to allow the war to end. We were advised to stay in camp until the situation had clarified and to refrain from excessive celebration.

Masterson and I sailed back to England on the SS
Abergavenny
. We were lucky in that it had been a passenger ship; troop ships were less comfortable. We shared a cabin. I took the upper bunk. The cabin was the same size as mine had been on the
Darjeeling
. When I asked if anyone had tidings of the
Darjeeling
I was told that it had been sunk in action in the North Atlantic with the loss of all hands.

I spent as much of the days as I could walking around the deck in the open air. At first this was no more than a couple of circuits. Before long I could walk for an hour at a time. I began to realise that I would get better. That was not a foregone conclusion. Many internees never recovered their health.

Masterson spent the whole voyage sitting in a chair on deck, reading. The ship’s library had a selection of nineteenth-century fiction, especially Dickens and Trollope. Masterson would wrap himself in a jacket, coat, and sometimes even a blanket as we crossed the Indian Ocean, Red Sea, and made our way through the Suez Canal, so absorbed in his book that I would have to address him two or three times if I wanted him to look up.

By the time we reached the Mediterranean I was, if not back to my state of health before the war, at least much better. I could exercise until I was out of breath without causing my heart and lungs to feel hysterical with the effort. My digestion was working well, as long as I avoided fatty foods and cheese. My gums had stopped bleeding. Other ex-internees were starting to look better also, putting on weight. You could, on the metal decks of the ship, hear the difference. This in turn made it clear that Masterson was not thriving; not getting any stronger. He needed help to climb
stairs, and would stand aside to let people overtake him if they came up behind him in the corridors and gangways. He was
perfectly
calm and stoical about this.

‘The thing about us old buffers …’ he would say. Once or twice he had a headache which made him look pale and grey beneath his tan. His face would become tight around the eyes. Then he would ask me to read from whichever book he had on the go. I tried to give the characters different voices, until he begged me to stop.

We arrived at Tilbury just after dawn. I had been up on deck for more than an hour, my bag already packed. It was drizzling and the sky was clouded over in a dense English way. It was as if greyness had leaked out of the sky and contaminated everything visible. I had thought that I would go straight to Faversham, but by the time I had disembarked and gone through customs with my temporary papers and single canvas bag I found that I could not. So I took a bus into London instead.

I have sometimes wondered what would have happened if that had been a bright blue autumn day, and a girl in a thin dress had sat down beside me on the bus and started a conversation. I had not been sure, on my way to England, whether I was ever going to return to Hong Kong. I felt that my experiment or adventure might have ended in Stanley. But that first morning, perhaps even that first glimpse, made me feel sure that I could not go back to England. The country seemed drab, flat, and lifeless. English voices seemed straining to be reasonable and apologetic, so unlike the frank contention of the Cantonese. There was no colour anywhere. It was not warm, and at the age of thirty-two I could feel a numb ache where my fingers had been broken. There was bomb damage everywhere. Parts of London looked as if they had been trodden flat. It did not look like the capital city of a
victorious
empire.

The bus dropped me at Waterloo station. My plan had been to wander around the centre of the city, see Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly again; but I was tired and shaky and my bag felt
suddenly
much heavier. I found a café underneath the station and sat with a disgustingly strong and over-milked cup of tea.

There was a train down to Faversham in the late afternoon. I
took it, using a pass I had been issued in Hong Kong. It was some years since I had last been on a train, so the trip was a great delight. Once we got outside London, the eye had some relief in the golds and reds of the autumn foliage. I smoked so many cigarettes I felt like Masterson. At Faversham station I set out on foot for the Plough. The town was more or less intact: it had been far enough from the docks to escape the bombing. I saw one or two faces I knew but nobody recognised me.

When I got to the Plough I went round to the yard at the back to get my breath before going in. As I put my bag down and straightened up I became aware that my brother David was
looking
at me. Or at least, it would have been my brother David if he had been a five-year-old child standing with his hands on his hips and a suspicious expression.

‘You must be Martin,’ I said. The look of suspicion darkened. Then he said: ‘Uncle!’

‘That’s right. I’m your Uncle Tom.’

We shook hands very formally. Then he turned and ran inside, shouting, ‘He’s here!’

I had been dreading it, but it was fine. David, stocky and bluff and shrewd as ever, could not hide how pleased he was to see me, nor I him. His wife Annie was much prettier than I had expected, tall (at least David’s height, or an inch more) and gentle and quick-witted. He was slightly careful with her, as if he could not quite believe his luck; it was sweet and funny to see. Martin was exactly, in every detail, like David had been like a child. Tom, the youngest, was shyer and better-looking, and barely spoke.

Martin was particularly interested that I had been in a camp. He interrogated me at dinner, a roast leg of lamb which Anne must have gone to some trouble to obtain, and which I could barely eat. For Tom the novelty of my arrival had worn off, and he was struggling to stay awake. There was thickly cut bread and freshly churned butter.

‘Did you have tents?’ asked Martin.

David and Anne exchanged a glance. I gave them a look to show it was all right.

‘No, not really.’

‘Did you climb trees?’

‘No.’

‘Did you go fishing?’

‘No.’

Some people at Stanley had sometimes tried to catch fish from the beach on the infrequent occasions when internees were allowed to walk there. But the expenditure of effort involved was so great that it left the fisherman gasping with exertion and ravenously, dangerously hungry. For the same reason, although the water looked beautifully tempting, nobody ever swam. All this was too much trouble to explain.

‘Did you have sing-songs?’

‘No – well, once or twice.’

He didn’t try to conceal his disappointment.

‘He’s mad about the Cubs,’ said David.

‘We made a boat out of a barrel,’ explained Martin.

‘I hope you’ll take me out on it,’ I said. All four of them said:

‘It sank.’

‘I was frighted,’ Tom added, quietly but firmly.

Over the next few days I saw people I knew. Most of the boys I was at school with had been in the war, and a good few of them weren’t yet home. Some – not an enormous number, but not a tiny one either – had been killed. The worst single incident had come when a bomb had a direct hit on a rickety shelter and killed a group of dockworkers, four of whom came from Faversham. Many of the women had been working in the fields and looked amazing: they were healthy and fit and golden, not the deep leather suntan of the tropics but with skin the tint of ripe wheat. There was cider and beer and plenty to eat. (After the end of rationing, my brother never ate rabbit again.) I settled down a
little
. Here out in the country everything did not seem grey. In the afternoons I would go for walks out of town, taking footpaths I hadn’t been on since I was at school. The walks all seemed much shorter than I remembered, but on the other hand I was weaker, so it evened out.

I was due to go back to Hong Kong after three months. Halfway through that time I began helping David at the Plough, pulling pints in the evenings, stacking barrels as I got stronger, and doing paperwork. I could see in the ledgers and files that
there was a period when my grandmother had done the books. Her tiny, rhythmical handwriting was present in several sets of them: when she had been a young married woman; then again after my parents’ death, until we could afford help, and before I began to do the books myself; then again at the end of her life, during the war. It was good that she had kept her faculties right until the stroke that killed her.

Two weeks before I was due to leave for Hong Kong, David joined me on a walk. Without discussing it we went out back, across the hop fields and down to the orchard. The wall was still there and still crumbling. We climbed up onto it and sat with our legs dangling over the side. In ten years not much about the
location
or the view had changed.

‘So?’ said David.

‘I’m going back.’

He exhaled, or sighed. He shook his head.

‘That’s what Annie said you would do. You know it’s your pub too. As much as it’s mine.’

Perhaps it wasn’t until that moment that I was really truly sure. But the idea of sharing the pub made it clear.

‘No, I’m for Hong Kong. It’s good of you, but …’

‘Unfinished business,’ he said. He always was the shrewd one. Then he reached in his jacket pocket and took out a brown
envelope
. ‘The sixth of the profits till Gran died, and then a half from then till now. I still don’t have enough to buy out your share, but when I do, I will.’

‘David –’

‘It’s what we agreed.’

I took the envelope. Later that evening I counted what was in it: more than five hundred pounds, the most money I had ever had in my life.

Two days before I sailed back to Hong Kong I saw Masterson for lunch in London. I was staying at a hotel for the last couple of nights, to get a taste of the city. We met in the grill-room of the Café Royal – his choice. The walls and ceiling were covered in paintings of naked women. He had not taken his coat off and sat swaddled at a corner table in several layers of clothes. He was reading a book as I approached the table:
Brideshead Revisited
. He
was of course smoking. As I got to the table he looked up and smiled. He did not look any worse, nor any better.

‘Makes a change from our own beloved Bank,’ he said, by way of greeting, looking up at the paintings. ‘Perhaps we should copy it for our dining room.’

His laugh had a cough in it. We made small talk while we ate. It was heavy going, which Masterson normally never was. When they cleared our main courses away, he said:

‘Tom – I have news. I’m not coming back.’

It took me a moment to realise what he had said. I don’t know why I was so taken by surprise. In retrospect his decision seems perfectly obvious. It may be that to me Masterson was Hong Kong, and the idea that it could exist without him, or vice versa, did not seem possible.

‘Alan, I … I don’t know what to say.’

‘I’m not well. As you know. I have liked staying with Catherine’ – his sister – ‘and,’ he smiled, ‘I love her girls. I’m not getting any younger. You’ll run the hotel better than I did
anyway
, and I’ll live in
rentier
luxury in Surrey, spending the fruits of your labours.’

‘But –’

‘It’s settled in my mind,’ he said, flatly and seriously. ‘I know it’s not an easy thing to face, out of the blue. I know you can do the job, so if you want to do it, it’s yours.’ Then he paused and said: ‘It’s all up to you, now.’

What could I say? I agreed, feeling that something
fundamental
about my life had just changed. The talk went more easily after that. At 3 o’clock, I felt someone approach our table from behind and stop there. Masterson smiled.

‘Catherine.’

I turned. His sister was tall and fair and elegant, and she looked a good twenty years younger than him.

‘You must be Mr Stewart,’ she said. ‘I hope he’s managed to talk you into running the hotel. He says you’re brilliant.’