Honourable Schoolboy (29 page)

Agents who recruit themselves, your Graces.

No one knew the job better, they told him - and he believed them. If the East was Craw’s home, the little ships were his family, and he lavished on them all the fondness for which the overt world had somehow never given him an outlet. He raised and trained them with a love that would have done credit to a father; and it was the hardest moment in an old man’s life when Tufty Thesinger did his moonlight flit and left Craw unwarned, temporarily without a purpose or a life-line.

Some people are agents from birth, Monsignors - he told them - appointed to the work by the period of history, the place, and their own natural dispositions. In their cases, it was simply a question of who got to them first, your Eminences:

‘Whether it’s us; whether it’s the opposition; or whether it’s the bloody missionaries.’

Laughter.

Then the case histories with names and places changed, and among them none other than codename Susan, a little ship of the female gender, Monsignors, South East Asian theatre, born in the year of turmoil 1941, of mixed blood. He was referring to Phoebe Wayfarer.

‘Father a penniless clerk from Dorking, your Graces. Came East to join one of the Scottish houses that plundered the coast six days a week and prayed to Calvin on the seventh. Too broke to get himself a European wife, lads, so he takes a forbidden Chinese girl and sets her up for a few pence, and codename Susan is the result. Same year the Japanese appear on the scene. Call it Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaya, the story’s the same, Monsignors. They appear overnight. To stay. In the chaos, codename Susan’s father does a very noble thing: To hell with caution, your Eminences, he says. This is the time for good men and true to stand up and be counted. So he marries the lady, your Graces, a course of action I would not normally counsel, but he does, and when he’s married her he christens his daughter codename Susan and joins the Volunteers, which was a fine body of heroic fools who formed a local home guard against the Nipponese hordes. The next day, not being a natural man-at-arms, your Graces, he gets his arse shot off by the Japanese invader and promptly expires. Amen. May the clerk from Dorking rest in peace, your Graces.’

As old Craw crosses himself, gusts of laughter sweep the room. Craw does not laugh with them, but plays the straight man. There are fresh faces in the front two rows, uncut, unlined, television faces; Craw guesses they are new entrants whipped in to hear The Great One. Their presence sharpens his performance. Henceforth he has a special eye for the front rows.

‘Codename Susan is still in rompers when her good father meets his quietus, lads, but all her life she’s going to remember: when the chips are down, the British stand by their commitments. Every year that passes, she’s going to love that dead hero a little more. After the war, her father’s old trading house remembers her for a year or two, then conveniently forgets her. Never mind. At fifteen, she’s ill from having to keep her sick mother and work the ballrooms to finance her own schooling. Never mind. A welfare worker takes up with her, fortunately a member of our distinguished brethren, your Reverends; and he guides her in our direction. Craw mops his brow. ‘Codename Susan’s rise to wealth and godliness has begun, your Graces,’ he declares. ‘Under journalist cover we bring her into play, give her Chinese newspapers to translate, send her on little errands, involve her, complete her education and train her in nightwork. A little money, a little patronage, a little love, a little patience and it’s not too long before our Susan has seven legal trips to Mainland China to her credit, including some very windy tradecraft. Skilfully performed, your Graces. She has played courier, and made one crash approach to an uncle in Peking, which paid off. All this, lads, despite the fact she’s half a kwailo and not naturally trusted by the Chinese.

‘And who did she think the Circus was, all that time?’ Craw bellowed at his enthralled audience - ‘who did she think we were, lads?’ The old magician drops his voice, and lifts a fat forefinger. ‘Her father,’ he says, in the silence. ‘We’re that dead clerk from Dorking. Saint George, that’s who we are. Cleansing the overseas Chinese communities of harmful elements, whatever the hell they are. Breaking the Triads and the rice cartels and the opium gangs and the child prostitution. She even saw us, when she had to, as the secret ally of Peking, because we, the Circus, had the interest of all good Chinese at heart.’ Craw ran a ferocious eye over the rows of child faces longing to be stern,

‘Do I see someone smiling, your Graces?’ he demanded, in a voice of thunder. He didn’t.

‘Mind you, Squires,’ Craw ended, ‘there’s a part of her knew damn well it was all baloney. That’s where you come in. That’s where your fieldman is ever at the ready. Oh yes! We’re keepers of the faith, lads. When it shakes, we stiffen it. When it falls, we’ve got our arms out to catch it.’ He had reached his zenith. In counterpoint, he let his voice fall to a mellow murmur. ‘Be the faith ever so crackpot, your Graces, never despise it. We’ve precious little else to offer them these days. Amen.’

All his life, in his unashamedly emotional way, old Craw would remember the applause.

Her debriefing finished, Phoebe hunched forward, her forearms on her knees, the knuckles of her big hands backed loosely against each other like tired lovers. Craw rose solemnly, took her notes from the table and burnt them at the gas ring.

‘Bravo, my dear,’ he said quietly. ‘A sterling week if I may say so. Anything else?’

She shook her head.

‘I mean, to burn,’ he said.

She shook her head again.

Craw studied her. ‘Pheeb, my dear,’ he declared at last, as if he had reached a momentous decision. ‘Get off your hunkers. It’s rime I took you out to dinner.’ She looked round at him, confused. The drink had raced to her head, as it always did. ‘An amiable dinner between fellow scribblers, once in a while, is not inconsistent with cover, I venture to suggest. How about it?’

She made him look at the wall while she put on a pretty frock. She used to have a humming bird but it died. He bought her another but it died too so they agreed the flat was bad luck for humming birds and gave up on them.

‘One day I’ll take you skiing,’ he said, as she locked the front door behind them. It was a joke between them, to do with her snow scene over the bed.

‘Only for one day?’ she replied. Which was also a joke, part of the same habitual repartee.

In that year of turmoil, as Craw would say, it was still clever to eat in a sampan on Causeway Bay. The smart set had not discovered it, the food was cheap and unlike food elsewhere. Craw took a gamble and by the time they reached the waterfront the fog had lifted and the night sky was clear. He chose the sampan furthest out to sea, deep in among a cluster of small junks. The cook squatted at the charcoal brazier and his wife served, the hulls of the junks loomed over them, blotting out the stars, and the boat children scampered like crabs from one deck to another while their parents chanted slow funny catechisms across the black water. Craw and Phoebe crouched on wood stools under the furled canopy, two foot above the sea, eating mullet by lamplight. Beyond the typhoon shelters ships slid past them, lighted buildings on the march, and the junks hobbled in their wakes. Inland, the Island whined and clanged and throbbed, and the huge slums twinkled like jewel-boxes opened by the deceptive beauty of the night. Presiding over them, glimpsed between the dipping fingers of the masts, sat the black Peak, Victoria, her sodden face shrouded with moonlit skeins: the goddess, the freedom, the lure of all that wild striving in the valley.

They talked the arts. Phoebe was doing what Craw thought of as her cultural number. It was very boring. One day, she said drowsily, she would direct a film, perhaps two, on the true, the real China. Recently she had seen an historical romance made by Run Run Shaw, all about the palace intrigues. She considered it excellent but a little too - well - heroic. Theatre, now. Had Craw heard the good news that the Cambridge Players might be bringing a new revue to the Colony in December? At present it was only a rumour, but she hoped it would be confirmed next week.

‘That should be fun, Pheeb,’ said Craw heartily.

‘It will not be fun at all,’ Phoebe retorted sternly. ‘The Players specialise in biting social satire.’

In the darkness Craw smiled and poured Phoebe more beer. You can always learn, he told himself: Monsignors. you can always learn.

Till, with no prompting that she could have been aware of, Phoebe began talking about her Chinese millionaires, which was what Craw had been waiting for all evening. In Phoebe’s world, the Hong Kong rich were royalty. Their foibles and excesses were handed round as freely as in other places the lives of actresses or footballers. Phoebe knew them by heart.

‘So who’s pig of the week this time, Pheeb?’ Craw asked genially.

Phoebe was unsure. ‘Whom shall we elect?’ she said, affecting coquettish indecision. There was the pig PK of course, his sixty-eighth birthday on Tuesday, a third wife half his age and how does PK celebrate? Out on the town with a twenty-year-old slut.

Disgusting, Craw agreed. ‘PK,’ he repeated. ‘PK was the fellow with the gateposts, wasn’t he?’

One hundred thousand Hong Kong, said Phoebe. Dragons nine foot high, cast in fibreglass and perspex so that they lit up from inside. Or it might be the pig YY she reflected judiciously, changing her mind. YY was certainly a candidate. YY had married one month ago exactly, that nice daughter of JJ Haw, of Haw and Chan, the tanker kings, a thousand lobsters at the wedding. Night before last, he turned up at a reception with a brand new mistress, bought with his wife’s money, a nobody except that he had dressed her at Saint-Laurent and decked her out in a four-string choker of Mikimoto pearls, hired of course, not given. Despite herself, Phoebe’s voice faltered and softened.

‘Bill,’ she breathed, ‘that kid looked completely fantastic beside the old frog, you should have seen.’

Or maybe Harold Tan, she pondered dreamily. Harold had been specially nasty. Harold had flown his kids home from their Swiss finishing schools for the festival, first-class return from Geneva. At four in the morning they were all cavorting naked round the pool, the kids and their friends, drunk, pouring champagne into the water while Harold tried to photograph the action.

Craw waited, in his mind holding the door wide open for her, but still she wouldn’t pass through, and Craw was far too old a dog to push her. Chiu Chow were best, he said archly. ‘Chiu Chow wouldn’t get up to all that nonsense. Eh Pheeb? Very long pockets the Chiu Chow have, and very short arms,’ he advised her. ‘Make a Scotsman blush, your Chiu Chow would, eh Pheeb?’

Phoebe had no place for irony. ‘Do not believe it,’ she retorted demurely. ‘Many Chiu Chow are both generous and high-minded.’

He was willing the man on her, like a conjurer willing a card, but still she hesitated, walked round it, reached for the alternatives. She mentioned this one, that one, lost the thread, wanted more beer, and when he had all but given up she remarked, quite dreamily:

‘And as for Drake Ko, he is a complete lamb. Against Drake Ko, no bad words at all please.’

Now it was Craw’s turn to walk away. What did Phoebe think of old Andrew Kwok’s divorce, he asked. Christ, that must have been a costly one! They say she would have given him the push long ago, but she wanted to wait till he’d made his pile and was really worth divorcing. Any truth in that one, Pheeb? And so on, three, five names, before he allowed himself to take the bait.

‘Have you ever heard of old Drake Ko keeping a roundeye mistress at any time? They were talking about it in the Hong Kong Club only the other day. Blonde party, said to be quite a dish.’

Phoebe liked to think of Craw in the Hong Kong Club. It satisfied her colonial yearnings.

‘Oh everyone has heard,’ she said wearily, as if Craw as usual were light years behind the hunt. ‘There was a time when all the boys had them - didn’t you know? PK had two, of course. Harold Tan had one, till Eustace Chow stole her, and Charlie Wu tried to take his to dinner at the Governor’s but his tai-tai wouldn’t let the chauffeur pick her up.’

‘Where’d they get them from for Christ sakes?’ Craw asked with a laugh. ‘Lane Crawford?’

‘From the airlines, where do you think?’ Phoebe retorted with heavy disapproval. ‘Air-hostesses moonlighting on their stop-overs, five hundred US a night for a white-woman whore. And including the English lines, don’t deceive yourself, the English were the worst by far. Then Harold Tan liked his so much he made an arrangement with her, and the next thing they were all moving into flats and walking round the stores like duchesses any time they came to Hong Kong for four days, enough to make you sick. Mind you, Liese is a different kettle of fish entirely. Liese has class. She is extremely aristocratic, her parents own fabulous estates in the South of France and also an out-island in the Bahamas and it is purely for reasons of moral independence that she refuses to accept their wealth. You only have to look at her bone structure.

‘Liese,’ Craw repeated. ‘Liese? Kraut, eh? Don’t hold with Krauts. No racial prejudices but don’t care for Krauts, I’m afraid. Now what’s a nice Chiu Chow boy like Drake doing with a hateful Hun for a concubine, I ask myself. Still, you should know Pheeb, you’re the expert, it’s your bailiwick, my dear, who am I to criticise?’

They had moved to the back of the sampan and were lying in the cushions side by side.

‘Don’t be utterly ridiculous,’ Phoebe snapped. ‘Liese is an aristocratic English girl.’

‘Tra la la,’ said Craw and for a while gazed at the stars.

‘She has a most positive and refining influence on him.’

‘Who does?’ said Craw, as if he had lost the thread.

Phoebe spoke through gritted teeth. ‘Liese has a refining influence on Drake Ko. Bill, listen. Are you asleep? Bill, I think you should take me home. Take me home, please.’

Craw gave a low sigh. These lovers’ tiffs between them were six-monthly events at least, and had a cleansing effect on their relationship.

‘My dear. Phoebe. Give ear to me, will you? For one moment, right? No English girl, highborn, fine-boned or knock-kneed, can possibly be named Liese unless there is a Kraut at work somewhere. That’s for openers. What’s her other name?’