Give Us This Day (29 page)

“I’ll always be there. Anything you need, Hugo, and all the time. Every day and every night, my love.”

“Kiss me again.”

She turned her head and drew her lips slowly across his cheek and mouth, enlarging the caress into a kiss and lifting his hand to the swell of her breasts under her taut bodice. In the year of their marriage, she had never kissed him in that way or known how to, and her body quivered when she sensed the impact it was making on his senses, as if close contact with her flesh raised a barrier against the onrush of the murderous despair bearing down on him like a runaway express. She slipped her hand inside the loose linen gown that covered him and ran it lovingly over his massive shoulders and down the length of his ribs, consciously doing battle with the malign, destructive forces that were intent on destroying him.

“Oh, God, I love you… love you… I’ll care for you… make it up to you somehow.
Trust me
, Hugo! Never stop trusting me…!”

An orderly appeared at the flap of the tent, glanced inside, hastily drew back, and stole away, stepping quietly over the seamed earth of the parched compound.

Five

The Fists of Righteous Harmony

T
apscott, the Methodist missionary, brought them the first hard news, hammering on their bungalow door about an hour after dawn and almost falling over the threshold the moment Rowley drew the bolts. Tapscott, the little man who always reminded her of Peter the Hermit, shorn of his zeal but pinned here, it seemed, by dwindling hope that the Lord would finally take cognisance of his settlement along the Hun Ho River, in the apex of the Lu Hun and Peking-Tientsin railways, where he ministered to a flock of two dozen converts.

It was not, of course, the first news they had had of the campaign against the Foreign Devils, and their contemptible converts, the Secondary Devils. All that spring rumours had been creeping north from the Honan province and west from Shensi and Kamsu, where the Fists of Righteous Harmony, jocularly referred to by the representatives of various sects in the Chihli province as “The Boxers,” had been promoting their hate campaign for more than a year and were now openly threatening to erase every trace of the foreigner from Peking to Hong Kong and the vast hinterland of Mongolia. Their aim, it seemed, was to restore the ancient culture of China and the Manchu dynasty to the omnipotence it had enjoyed before the scattered trading posts were established, and the missionaries arrived with their gospel of a risen Christ and their meddlesome opposition to the rituals of a civilisation that was flourishing hereabouts when the Foreign Devils were living in caves on the other side of the world.

Rowley had showed her one of their propaganda posters, a drawing of a crucified pig transfixed with arrows and a Mandarin presiding over the execution of goat-headed strangers. She had dismissed it, as he had done at the time, as a crude expression of the almost total ignorance that predominated in this land of absurd contrasts. A land where female children were of so little account that many were left to die at birth, and an ex-concubine enjoyed absolute power over countless millions of idolators. But the breathless arrival of Tapscott changed all this, converting what had been a crop of rumours into indisputable fact. For Tapscott told of a descent on his settlement by men with red headgear and red ribbons at their wrists, who had butchered two of his converts and forced the rest to act as their labour force, pending an advance, they said, on the capital itself, where every foreigner who refused to leave would be instantly decapitated.

She was not really surprised by Rowley’s reaction and realised the futility of reasoning with him. He said, “They mightn’t take much account of our spiritual advice, Tapscott, but my experience is they’ve still got respect for our drugs and surgery. There’ll be sickness down river, no doubt. And wounds to be dressed. Turning one’s back on the situation will only make it worse for all the outposts strung out along the railway and river line.”

“What alternative is there?”

“There’s one. I’m going down there to find someone in authority and give him a piece of my mind, before they get too uppish. The legations in Peking are already threatening the Court, I’m told. Sooner or later the Government will have to act against these ridiculous bandits. You’ll be safe enough here and you obviously need rest. Wait until I’ve something to add to your report before we go on to Peking and get an audience with the British Ambassador there.” After which he issued orders for the saddling up of his riding and pack ponies, summoned his interpreter, and set off while the badly shaken Tapscott was still soaking in his bath.

They were not in their usual location. When the temperatures began to soar they had moved southwest to within half-a-day’s ride of Machiapu where they rented a summer bungalow and supervised an outlying post catering for the coolies working on the new railway branch to Paotingfu. Some Belgian engineers were camping five miles nearer the present terminus and there was no danger in his absence for a day or so. He kissed her gravely and rode away, and she did what she could to counter the chattering rumours among the converts, set in train by the initial outburst of that fool Tapscott on his arrival. The heat was building up all the time, even here away from that stinking slum of a city, and she thought,
I doubt if he’ll want to return north when he comes back, but if he does I’ll put my foot down in favour of staying out here for another month or so. Right here we can at least keep to surgery hours and that’s more than we can do in the city, where queues are still waiting at sunset… As for Tapscott, well, it’s high time he was recalled and a younger man sent out. He’s finished, that’s plain to see. Another six months here will kill him…

She did not mind the comparative isolation, having no taste for the society of the legations and the company of missionaries’ wives in Peking, with their malicious gossip and outward piety, their eternal round of race meetings, amateur theatricals, and sewing bees. In a way she half-sympathised with the unconverted Chinese, who regarded their presence here as an unwarranted invasion of privacy. The very rawness and brashness of Western civilisation was apparent to any thinking person who had spent a couple of years in China, and the striking contrast between Chinamen and the East African and Papuan savages of previous stations was so demonstrative that she sometimes wondered why an intelligent man like Rowland Coles did not throw in his hand and demand a transfer back to settlements where the natives were children and could at least be relied upon to defer to the white man’s right to call the tune. She could only suppose he had more or less withdrawn from all but the medical sphere and found his work here more absorbing and varied than it had been in less settled communities. She read a little from the latest batch of periodicals her mother sent out, took a long siesta, conducted an impromptu surgery at sundown, coping with a dozen or so simple cases, mostly dressings, and wrote a long letter to Joanna ready for collection by the first Belgian railway surveyor who called in at the post. Then, relishing her first lazy day for weeks, she ate supper with the worried Tapscott and retired to bed.

* * *

She was awakened by what sounded like a crash of glass and, glancing at her watch in the thin morning light that filtered through slatted blinds and mosquito net, saw that it was coming up to five. The initial crash, half-heard beneath a blanket of sleep, did not worry her much and she dismissed it as a kitchen accident on the part of the cook, but then she heard the wailing voice of Tapscott right outside her door and she jumped out of bed, struggled into bedgown and slippers, and called, sharply, “What is it now, Mr. Tapscott? What’s broken?” The only response was a kind of squeak, and she threw open the door and saw him standing there in his nightshirt.

He looked more like Peter the Hermit than ever in that get-up and was shaking from head to foot and jabbing his finger in the direction of the compound. She was aware then of a sustained buzz beyond the shuttered door, and, realising that it was early for the staff and converts to be abroad and making so much noise, she went back into her bedroom, held the blind aside, and glanced out across the verandah. About twenty Chinese were gathered there in two groups, standing near the compound entrance, but there were strangers among them and she told herself again that Tapscott’s nerve must have gone to let himself be scared to that extent by what looked like a quarrel among the staff, for she recognised Li-Yung, their major-domo, among the smaller group and he seemed to be making strenuous efforts to drive the others away from the gate. She said, impatiently, “Li-Yung has caught somebody stealing. Or it’s a casualty brought in and he’s trying to explain the Doctor is away,” and she went out of the front entrance and down the steps to the compound fence.

They made way for her with great haste, scattering in both directions, all save the major-domo who stood rigidly against one of the gate uprights, with a curiously blank expression on his face. She said, “What is it, Li? What did they want?” but he made no reply, only pointing across the track to a tethering-pole nailed to two stakes, each about five feet in height. Balanced on top of the further one was an object that she took to be a large round stone to which trailers of grey and russetcoloured moss were attached. She said, “What
is
it, for heaven’s sake?”, but still he made no reply so she hitched her robe and went out to see for herself. It wasn’t a stone. It was a severed head, draped in bloodied hair and whiskers and she stopped short about five yards from the pole, gazing at it with a revulsion that paralysed her senses. Li-Yung shuffled closer to stand immediately behind her. “A horseman brought it, a Kansu warrior. Hai saw him and said he carried a Kansu banner.”

She hardly heard him, much less understood what he was saying. She was slowly coming to terms with the frightful certainty that this was Rowland Coles’s head and in the few seconds that elapsed between seeing it and identifying it she noted aspects of it that stamped themselves on her memory like a brand on the flesh. The eyes were half-closed and the mouth open so that the expression was a parody of a man caught in the act of yawning. She marked this and several other aspects; the length of the iron-grey hair with its premature white streak; the thick growth of the beard below the high cheekbones; the fact that one ear was half-severed, as by a sword stroke that had all but missed. And then the wide landscape beyond the tethering pole heaved and spun, and the pale sky merged with the brown folds of the plain as she teetered backwards and all but brought Li-Yung to his knees in his effort to prevent her falling flat on her back.

* * *

When she opened her eyes, the room seemed to be full of Europeans, some of them in travel-stained white ducks, others in operatic-looking military uniforms and armed to the teeth with an array of swords, daggers, holstered revolvers, and bandoliers. Someone, a young civilian, was holding a metal cup to her lips, and she sensed the taste of brandy on her tongue. The civilian said, in near perfect English, “We haven’t much time, ma’am. We’re taking you along to Peking. Can you sit a pony?”

She pushed the cup away and nodded, holding at bay the memory of that grotesquely decorated post, for the sense of extreme urgency that dominated the room conveyed itself to her, sufficiently strongly to enable her to hoist herself out of the chair and stare about her, recognising the civilians as Belgian railway surveyors from the camp nearer Fentai and the armed quartette as foreign soldiers in battle array. The young man who had given her the brandy said, “The legations sent an escort. These men are Cossacks from the Russian Embassy guard. They were enough to get us out as far as here but we daren’t waste a moment, ma’am. If you can ride we can move that much faster. If you hadn’t regained consciousness I was going to harness up a cart.”

She said, tonelessly, “The staff… the converts…” and he replied, indifferently, “They’ve gone. We had to threaten them with our revolvers to leave the horses behind,” and they hustled her out into the open where Li-Yung and one other Chinaman were holding the bridles of about eight ponies. The head, she noticed, had gone from the haltering post. She became aware, on mounting, that she was still in her nightgown, bedgown, and slippers, but Li-Yung fastened her mantle about her shoulders and they moved off at a trot, heading northeast into the sun. The civilians rode in a compact body; the Cossacks, carrying lances, rode in formation, one out on either flank, the others fifty paces behind the cavalcade. She had no other awareness of the journey than the painful friction of her calves on the smooth leather of the stirrups.

2

The trauma isolated her for a long, long time, protecting her to some extent from the stupendous happenings around her, from the noise, heat, stench, and deadly ennui of the legations’ siege, so that, although present, and even, marginally, participating now and again, she could not have given a coherent account of what was occurring in that city within a city. And this, to a great extent, was responsible for the rescue of her reason, for she continued to think of Rowley and that object crowning the post outside the compound as totally unrelated to one another.

It was not that her memory was blurred in any respect. Indeed, it was sharp and clear, more so than it had been at any time throughout the monotonous months they had shared out here. She accepted the fact that Rowley was dead, that never again would she see his grave, bearded face across the table, or lie beside him under the mosquito net in some benighted corner of the earth, but he might have died in a faraway land among strangers a long time ago, and this meant that the identity of the head had no significance. It was just a head, anybody’s head. Something someone had left there because they were tired of lugging it about.

She came to know the precise moment when she returned to full awareness, cognisant of their perilous situation here between the wall of the Forbidden Imperial City and the Tartar Wall to the south, where the American and German detachments manned the barricades. It was about halfway through the siege then, the day the Imperial troops and their allies, the Boxers, mined the French Legation and blew it sky high, together with some of the garrison. The roar echoed clear across the city, from the Tartar quarter in the north to the Temple of Heaven on the southern rim of the Chinese quarters, and probably across the plain beyond. And at once the tocsin in the bell tower began to toll and on its notes she found her identity restored to her, that other Helen Coles, née Swann, who had ridden her new safety bicycle down Kentish lanes and laughed and danced and flirted and played endless games of tennis at the old house in the Weald. She watched everybody else run to the assembly point, but she did not join them. The sense of release and self-discovery was too urgent for that. It was like watching oneself born. She just stood by the canal that intersected the defences and listened to the crackle of rifle fire coming from the direction of the shattered French Legation and thought:
I’ll live through this. I’ll go home. I’ll see Tryst again. I’ll survive to see Joanna and tell her what having adventures and escaping to the outside world is really like… For sh
e recalled a discussion they had had on this very subject the night she and Joanna conspired to switch beaux.