Mandarin-Gold (39 page)

MacPherson was already slightly drunk. Sweat damped his white starched shirt and glistened on his forehead; alcohol slurred his speech. He admired Elliot; his calmness recalled other professional naval officers under whom he had served years ago — men of courage and. principle, who had been entirely detached from trade and bribes, and such commercial considerations which now weighed so heavily on him.

'Can't we help Elliot at all? A letter to the Government, or something?'

'No,' replied Gunn. 'We are all bidding for high stakes out here in different ways. Elliot played for peace with honour. He won, yet the Government think he lost. Kishen extracted the best terms he could, but his Emperor thought they were not good enough. So he lost, too.

'You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs. And you cannot have peace without war if rulers on both sides live in make-believe worlds!'

'I suppose
your
world is all real?' said MacPherson caustically, pouring out more wine.

'Entirely,' said Gunn; and that of course was the tragedy. It was all too real in terms of wealth and securities and bonds and gold ingots and ships on the seas. There was nothing of the spiritual nature of man about it; no time for dreams or gentleness, let alone love.

You used people all the time; their value was in direct proportion to their importance in your plans. You had no time to like them for themselves. Soon, you grew unable to like them only to use them. Had not the Parsee warned him, long ago, that he sought to acquire a fortune, and one day, too late, he could find that it had acquired him?

Gunn was rich now in everything that money could buy, except for the priceless qualities, like happiness and humility, that no currency could command.

'What you need,' Gunn said now cruelly, to MacPherson, to exorcize these uneasy thoughts, 'is another drink.'

'I have drunk enough,' MacPherson replied, speaking slowly so as not to slur the words. 'And have
you
forgotten you have invited fifty guests to dine with you tonight?'

'No,' said Gunn; but, incredibly, he had. They were only guests, that was the reason. They were not friends. They accepted his invitations because he was who he was, because he was rich and influential. And he invited them because he might need to use them and because it flattered his vanity to be surrounded by rich, important men and pretty women, on equal terms. Not as the local physician being shown into the servants' entrance of the big house, but as the host who commanded their presence at his table.

Equally, they did not accept his invitations because they, wanted to, but because they felt they ought to. They were his guests, but not his friends; Gunn had no friends.

17

In Which Dr Gunn Makes an Important Discovery

MacPherson came unsteadily into the dining-room and stood for a moment, looking over the shoulders of the chattering guests at the long polished table.

Candles glittered amber and red on glasses of hock and claret, and winked back from silver knives and forks. Through the wide open window, indigo with evening, paper lanterns along the quay glowed orange and green.

Gunn looked up at MacPherson enquiringly. He hoped the man had not drunk too much. As host, he sat at the head of the table, glass in hand, gold cufflinks agleam, long dark hair smoothed back. His face was still handsome, but under the flush of wine, it seemed slightly coarsened, like a portrait seen out of focus through a glass.

'You're late,' he said half-accusingly, treating MacPherson as an inferior, a hired man, as he had done increasingly and openly since Ling Fai's death. Gunn knew he had been growing more autocratic in other ways. He hated guests being late for his invitations; he felt no need to endure what he considered the smallest slight, whether imagined or unintended. He was a man of means now; he had a high position to maintain. After Jardine and Matheson, Mandarin-Gold was the most successful company on the Coast; and everyone knew who was the most successful man.

Gunn's six clippers had become ten. He had opened a depot in Manila and had successfully negotiated for a warehouse site on Hong Kong Island. He had overtaken the Parsee's agencies in Singapore and Rangoon and Calcutta. He was no longer the raw young doctor who had pleasured a native girl; he was a man of money who could write his name to a bond with a million pounds sterling; and he was still not thirty-five. Yet, although his success was universally acknowledged; he had to keep reminding himself of it, as though if he did not, it might disappear or at least diminish.

Also, for some time past — he was not positive for how long — weeks certainly, probably for months,, he had been growing progressively less interested in his career. Maybe he had overworked, and this was the reaction; or maybe the heat and humidity and the frustration of dealing with Chinese who said one thing and did another, had affected his constitution. Whatever the reason, he knew he was becoming more irascible, and he found a salve for his inner discontent in abruptness to his colleagues and rudeness to those he considered his inferiors.

MacPherson crossed the polished floor towards him.

'I went for a short walk,' he explained, 'and saw the
Hesperides
arrive from Calcutta. A very quick run. Eighteen days.'

'Anything for me?' asked Gunn mechanically, not caring greatly. Others opened his commercial mail. He had Chinese clerks on high stools scratching away with their pens and gritty ink, invoicing bills, sending receipts, acknowledging bonds and debentures. Sometimes, less frequently than before, his mother wrote. He always read her letters, not because she had much to say that interested him now, but because a letter was something she had gone to the trouble to write. Not many people did things for him now without hope of reward; in fact, he could not name a single person.

'One letter,' MacPherson replied. He put it down among the glittering silver on the dark, glowing wood that reflected his hand and also the poor quality of the envelope. Gunn picked it up and glanced at the post mark: Herne Bay, Kent, England.

So it must be from home, and yet he did not recognize the handwriting. He probably received six or seven letters a year from his mother and sent back as many in reply, but her news of a neighbour's death, or of the new railway from London through Chatham to the coast, seemed as remote to him here as his news to them of a thousand chests of mud at fifteen dollars each, or the cost of maintaining his house in Macao.

He sent money to his parents, of course, from time to time, but not so much as he had originally intended, and not as often, either. Gunn told himself that this was not because he was mean, but because he did not wish to boast about his wealth; and to his parents fifty pounds was a sum they could appreciate and equate against their needs, whereas five hundred or five thousand would have been a gift beyond all relevance to their circumstances.

But now, as Gunn sat at the head of his table of guests, all drawn to him by the irresistible triple magnetism of youth, power and wealth, he felt a sudden spasm of guilt, and a longing for a different life; for a time long since past, when he had also been a different person; when money and ruthlessness had only been words and not integral parts of his character.

He picked up a silver bread knife and slit the envelope, ignoring the chatter that went on like the shrill cawing of birds; oblivious of servants in splendid white and gold livery who moved silently with crystal decanters of wine, and of others who waited behind each guest to remove their plate. Gunn shook out the letter. It was from his father.

'Dear Robert,' he read, 'I do not know how long this letter will take to reach you, but I feel I must tell you that your dear mother has been unwell for some weeks.

'As she explained in her last letter, old Doctor Golightly has retired, and the new physician does not yet know us as well as he did. He has caused your mother to be bled and has regularly applied leeches, but her general condition is not responding to this treatment.'

What
is
her general condition? thought Gunn irritably. Who was this unknown doctor indiscriminately abstracting the life-blood of his mother? Damn it, he was a doctor, too, and her son. He had a right to know. He read on.

'I know that you are very busy with your own affairs which we here find so difficult to comprehend, because our lives go on quietly as they have always done, but I would esteem it more highly than I can express if you could return to see us this summer.

'Your mother does not know I am writing in this way, for she has resolutely insisted that I do not inform you of her illness, which she assures me is only temporary and unimportant. I would not presume to go against medical opinion, but when you have been married to someone for nearly forty years you know them as well as you know yourself, and I feel — I hope without cause — that your mother is seriously ill.

'It would lighten her life like a month of sunshine if you could write to say that you were on the high seas, coming back to see her and your father, who shares her pride in our only son's great achievements.'

Gunn folded up the letter, put it in the envelope and then into his jacket pocket.

'Bad news?' asked MacPherson. His voice seemed to come from a great distance, and the conversation of the others was as meaningless as the roar of surf breaking on the sand. '

'Yes,' said Gunn shortly.

'Anything I can do?' asked MacPherson.

Gunn shook his head. There was nothing anyone could do now. He could have visited his parents a dozen times, and combined each trip with business in London, but the chances had passed, and like the river rushing south beyond the paper lanterns of Canton, the tide of time only ran one way. Maybe, even now, it had gone out for his mother:

‘You look pale,' MacPherson went on.

'It is nothing. Just the heat.'

Gunn picked up his glass and drained it, and immediately it was refilled, and he drank that, too. He would go home by the next boat. If need be, he would take one of his own. Extraordinary, that now he could command an entire clipper to convey him home, while others had to wait for weeks — or even months in the season — for a cramped passage aboard an East-Indiaman, and then often be asked to buy furniture in the cabin as well.

Now the furniture was his, the cabins were his, the ships were his. He had paid for them all with his integrity and years of effort, and in some other unquoted currency, the value of which he was not yet quite certain.

This was what years of trading in mud and breaking other rivals, crushing all opposition, had done to him. You could not touch pitch and stay undefiled; you could not do what he had done without some damage to your soul.

He glanced around the vast room, at the flushed, sweating faces of the men, staring lasciviously at the pushed-out, almost bare breasts of the women. Their husbands were, of course, in Canton, and the women were free and available; and after the meal they would pair off to a dozen different bedrooms. When the dawn came up, their mouths would be dry from far too much drink, their heads beating with the dual drums of disillusion and worry lest their husbands should discover yet another infidelity.

None of these, people cared a damn whether he lived or died; Gunn knew that. If he dropped dead at the head of the table in front of them, they would mourn perfunctorily for a few days. A drunken parson — probably Mackereth, he thought bitterly — would address an audience who did not hear, or, if they heard, did not wish to understand. Then someone else would own the clippers, someone else would equate what they had once been with what they would become. In the blood and bone of some other young, ambitious man, the juice of the poppy would turn his will to iron.

Gunn stood up. He could bear the heat and. the wine and the foolishness of the chatter no longer.

'Excuse me,' he said to the woman who sat on his right. 'I have business to attend to.'

He had intended to lie with her that night, but now the prospect seemed disgusting. He had indulged too many appetites — lust, greed, avarice, cruelty — far too long. He must escape. But where — and how?

Gunn went out of the room into his bedroom and stood on the dark verandah overlooking the Praya. He would not be able to sail tomorrow because a new clipper was being delivered and he had to check this himself, otherwise he might be swindled, for a subordinate could take a bribe.

The following day, he had a dinner engagement with the Portuguese Governor in Macao, and after that he had arranged a tour in the new clipper up the coast, to meet mandarins and personally to renew contacts and contracts.

He would put them all off. If he did not, he would always find new and urgent reasons for delaying his departure. But first he must speak to someone who would understand how he felt, who could assuage his sudden guilt. But who was there? Ling Fai was dead. And even if she had lived, she was only a body, a soft warmness in the dark, a heart against his own; only a girl who had never been out of China. How could she have understood how he felt about England and a Kentish mist; about his longing for the smell of drying hops, or a fresh wind from a colder sea?

There was MacPherson, but Gunn would never lower his mask in front of him, not after what had happened with Ling Fai. And MacPherson was in any case his inferior; he would lose face if he confessed his feelings to him.

He knew no-one else he could trust, for everyone absorbed the confidences of a rich man as greedily as blotting paper soaked up ink. Then they rushed out to pass them on to other people, suitably amplified and distorted, for another man's weakness minimized their own.

What he needed was some impersonal confidant bound by an oath of secrecy, who would listen and not condemn, who could pour some balm on his raw misery; another physician, maybe, or a priest.

He suddenly thought of Mackereth, the only priest he knew, if one could call a Son of Zebedee a priest. On the impulse, he walked down the stairs, out of the side door, past the watchman who saluted, and along the narrow streets to Mackereth's house. The white-washed walls had stored up a whole day's heat of the sun, and the air was still warm, sharp with the smell of sewers and the salt of breaking waves.