Once More the Hawks (25 page)

‘There’s no defence,’ Father O’Buhilly explained. ‘The barrels of the anti-aircraft guns have worn smooth with use. But we’ve organised a system of air raid warnings. When the first warning comes, a paper lantern’s strung up where everybody can see it, to indicate the airplanes are two hours away. Two lanterns mean they’re close. When they’re dropped it’s an immediate alert. A long paper stocking’s the signal for the “all clear”. When the airplanes are within 50 miles, the switch at the power station’s pulled and the town becomes dead. Lights go out and everything stops. If a policeman sees a light, he simply shoots at it.’

Bustling about, pointing, directing, giving commands, he showed them into a single room with four cots and a charcoal brazier, the floor thick with dust. As they dropped their gear on to the beds, he returned, ushering them outside, and led them along a narrow path through the rice fields. Ahead, strings of peasants in single file burdened with household goods were heading for safety. Here and there was a barrow, pushed by a man, his wife hauling at the rope in front, a child sitting on top. Sometimes a woman rode a mule, side-saddle like an unhappy Madonna, and old women hobbled along on bound feet or rode on the shoulders of strong sons who watched the sky with wary black eyes. Young unaccompanied men walked at a quicker pace, unburdened by families.

Eventually they reached the river and at once it became obvious that every business that existed in the area was being moved. Machinery was being loaded into boats and covered with leaves and branches.

‘It’s been done before,’ Father O’Buhilly explained. ‘From Nanking. From Shanghai. At Hankow they moved the whole power station piece by piece.’

Everything detachable was being taken down and packed in boxes, and machinery was being carried on to waiting steamers, rowing boats and junks. Two enormous iron frames, which looked like the supports of a dozen looms, were being moved by manpower alone towards an enormous newly-built pontoon floating at the water’s edge. With shrill cries, like ants moving grain, the Chinese were edging them aboard inch by inch, while another horde of men was plaiting ropes and lashing the pontoons behind steamers, to be towed through the rapids further upriver.

‘Everything’s going,’ Father O’Buhilly said. ‘When the Japanese attack their punch will land in empty air. The factories will be rebuilt at Yuking with bamboo beams instead of iron girders, and blast furnaces will be supplied with coal carried in baskets. Schools are going, refugees, restaurant keepers, priests, sing-song girls, little merchants. If they can’t get aboard a junk or a sampan they’ll go by rickshaw or cart or on their own two feet.’

A herd of cattle was being chivvied on to a second huge pontoon, and on another people were piling tables, chairs, sewing machines, coops of chickens, a horse. On yet another there was an enormous steam roller, a scar down the bank showing where it had been lowered, with dozens of Chinese on ropes acting as a brake.

There was a mist like a sheet over the river so that a ruined pagoda stuck out above it like an immense phallic symbol, bottomless and floating on the white vapour. What they had thought at first was empty countryside was alive with people, appearing, disappearing, and reappearing from the banks and among the reeds. The men who were to take the rafts downstream were rigging enormous jury rudders and sea anchors to heave their vast log islands round the bends. Even as they watched, one of them pushed off, firecrackers going in celebration, fizzing and sparkling so that the excited Chinese laughed and began to jump up and down. On board was a group of drummers encouraged by a cheer leader on the stern.

Trains of pack ponies, ears and tails flapping against the flies, trotted along the top of the brown mudbank, laden with strange pieces of wood or metal from some small factory, and more rafts were arriving, some of them carrying sheerlegs for hoisting up their unwieldy cargoes. The din was tremendous with shouting men, screaming women, wailing children, bleating goats, and always the clink and clank of metal as too-large parts were further dismantled to make handling easier.

A column of Chinese troops went past, long files of small blank-faced men without discipline or fixed pace. The padding of their straw-sandalled feet lifted the dry earth in clouds so that they looked like a huge serpentine of dust. Their officer rode ahead on a bony horse and they were followed by coolies carrying ammunition boxes and sacks of rice. The company kitchen, a single soot-blackened cauldron carried by two men, brought up the rear, then several small pack guns on mules and a cart carrying more sacks of rice on which sick men were lying.

‘You’re seeing China on the move,’ Father O’Buhilly said grimly. ‘They’re all going to Yuking. About half of them will arrive, the soldiers doing rather better than the civilians. But they’ll die too eventually because they drink from the paddy fields which they’ve manured with night soil and they use their first aid kits to clean their rifles.’

Father O’Buhilly’s hospital was in what had once been a country house. It had a walled garden with a circular moon gate and there were still black-lacquered furniture and silk wall hangings inside. It consisted of three narrow wards with beds in corridors and smaller rooms, even in large cupboards. Most of the patients were suffering from bomb injuries, and there was one doctor, a gloomy Russian, who had fled to China during the Revolution, a defeated melancholy man whose clock had stopped in 1917. He was assisted by a young Chinese mission convert who was loudly telling the patients in English. ‘Leave it to Jesus. Jesus will look after you.’

‘You’ll be needin’ somethin’ to eat, I’m thinkin’,’ Father O’Buhilly observed. ‘I’ll see you get it.’

He spoke quietly in Szechwanese to a young Chinese assistant who indicated the door. ‘This way, please, sirs and gentlemen.’

As the others moved away, Dicken gripped O’Buhilly’s arm. ‘Father, I’ve seen your patients. I’ve seen China on the move. I’ve seen the miracles. But I didn’t come
just
for that.’

Father O’Buhilly smiled gently. ‘I know, my son,’ he said. ‘But y’had to know first so that you’ll appreciate anythin’ she might say to you.’

‘Anything she might say? What will she say?’

‘That remains to be seen. But you’d surely rather see her on her own, would you not, than in the company of half a dozen others?’ He looked at his watch. ‘She’ll be in her office at this moment. And ’tis no better place there is to talk to her. It’s at the back of the building where you won’t be interrupted.’

He led the way to a small room at the end of a corridor. Through the open door Dicken saw a Chinese child, its body bandaged, playing with a wooden doll. A Chinese woman was listening to someone he couldn’t see, nodding her head. As he started forward, Father O’Buhilly held his arm.

‘Let her finish her business,’ he said.

Eventually, the Chinese woman nodded and picked up the child. As she passed, Father O’Buhilly moved backwards quietly, leaving Dicken alone, his heart thumping. It was as if he were a schoolboy about to meet a terrifying headmaster over some misdemeanour.

Marie-Gabrielle was standing in a corner, writing in a book. For some reason he had expected her to be wearing uniform like all the nurses he’d ever seen, with starched white skirt and cap. Instead she wore blue cotton trousers and a robe of flowered material. Her face had fined off but she was slim and tall, straight-backed, achingly beautiful, and surrounded by a strange immense calm.

He remained in the doorway, still unseen, wondering how to start a conversation that had been interrupted fourteen years before. Even when he cleared his throat she didn’t seem to be aware of him and he finally stepped into the room, suddenly sick with apprehension.

As she turned and her eyes fell on him, she stood motionless for a moment like a statue, the book she’d been writing in still in her hand. Her expression didn’t change.

‘Dicken,’ she said quietly.

With deliberation, she put down the book on the desk and the pen alongside it, then she crossed to him. Half expecting to take her in his arms, he was startled when she held out her hand.

‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe it.’

It was more difficult than he’d expected. She was curiously aloof, her expression unchanged, still caught by that strange calm that seemed to surround her.

‘I’ll get you tea,’ she said and they talked idly until a Chinese woman brought in a teapot and tiny Chinese cups.

‘I suppose you’ve been busy,’ she said, as though she were choosing her words carefully. ‘Fighting the war.’

‘A little bit,’ he said, unhappily aware that the interview was not taking the course he’d expected.

‘And now you’re here to help against the Japanese?’

‘I’ve been sent to find out something about what’s going on, that’s all. How the Chinese are doing and what Chiang is doing.’

‘The people who run the country from Chungking never come to places like this,’ she said sharply. ‘They even hate this part of China. They’re the intellectuals and they say it’s a peasants’ war because if we lose a few million peasants, what does it matter? There are plenty more.’

Her anger startled him. It was nothing more than he’d heard a dozen times already, from Americans, British, the Chinese themselves, from Johnson, from Father O’Buhilly; but coming from Marie-Gabrielle, true as he felt it to be, it seemed harsh and accusatory.

‘I didn’t come here just now to talk of Chiang,’ he said slowly and quietly. ‘I came to see you.’

There was a long silence while she studied him. Her eyes were steady and he felt strangely embarrassed under her gaze.

‘I spent years trying to find you. Years, Marie-Gabrielle. My wife’s dead. She was probably dead all the time we were together in Rezhanistan. I discovered within hours of you disappearing. I tried to find you.’

‘It’s too late, Dicken.’ Somehow, in the way she spoke, he sensed that she was listening to him now instead of talking to him. But her calmness worried him. He remembered her as a child, gregarious, happy, swinging on his arm, telling him tall tales, promising to marry him when she was old enough, and in Rezhanistan as a nineteen-year-old girl, vitally alive, still certain there was no one else in the world for her but him. This quiet, reserved, expressionless woman, so unlike the Marie-Gabrielle he remembered, unnerved him a little.

‘What did you want of me?’ she asked.

‘To see you. After Rezhanistan, there was no one I wanted more.’

Her eyes flickered and he seemed to sense a spark of interest. ‘That was a long time ago,’ she said. ‘A very long time ago.’

‘Rezhanistan was a long time after Italy where I first met you.’ He was suddenly desperate, feeling it required more advocacy than he possessed, to convince her that this new meeting had started an unexpected hope in his breast. ‘Nearly eleven years after. You hadn’t changed then.’

‘I hadn’t been to China then.’

‘You can’t spend your whole life looking after Chinese.’

‘Other people have. Many of them. What were you hoping for? Marriage, Dicken?’

It came out bluntly and he was caught wrong-footed, clumsy, searching for the right words to say.

‘Other people get married,’ he said. ‘I went the other day to the wedding of an American pilot who was marrying a nurse.’

‘Do you want to marry me?’

In that moment he knew he did. Nothing had been further from his thoughts when he’d agreed to come with Father O’Buhilly. All he’d thought of then was seeing her again, explaining why he’d never found her, trying to make right things that he’d sensed were wrong, to correct the feeling he felt she might have had that he’d betrayed her after getting her out of besieged Rezhanistan. But now he knew that all along at the back of his mind was the hope that she wouldn’t have forgotten the promise she’d made as a child that she’d marry him when she was old enough.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I do.’

She smiled at last. It was a warm smile and for the first time he felt at ease before her. ‘Then, I’m sorry, Dicken, but no.’

‘Why not?’

Her cheeks went pink. ‘Do I have to explain? Do I have to give a reason?’

The words shook him and disappointment made him bitter. ‘My God,’ he said, ‘you sound like my wife!’

Immediately, her expression changed again and the tartness went out of her voice. Reaching across the desk, she put her hand on his. Turning his palm upwards, he gripped her fingers.

‘I didn’t mean to, Dicken,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t realised how important it was.’ Her eyes searched his face. ‘
Is
it important?
Really
important?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not just because you’re lonely and hurt because your wife didn’t turn out as you expected her to?’

‘No.’

She withdrew her hand and sat staring at her fingers for a moment. ‘I’m touched, Dicken,’ she said. ‘I really am. I had no idea.’

‘I don’t think I had either,’ Dicken admitted. ‘But when I saw you I knew at once that was what I wanted.’

‘What a pity it comes so late.’ She sighed. ‘I can’t leave these people, Dicken. They depend on me.’

He didn’t know what to say because he suspected she was right.

‘We’re moving upriver. Everything here goes tomorrow. Any women who’re left behind will be raped when the Japanese come. I tell them to go but they’re peasants and their husbands and fathers insist on hanging on because they have a scrap of earth that won’t even feed them. The men will be shot and the women taken off for Japanese brothels. That’s what always happens. Eventually I shall set up a new hospital in Yuking.’ Once again she touched his hand. ‘There are other girls in China,’ she went on gently. ‘American girls. Pretty girls who’ll know how to live in a western city when the war’s over.’

‘They aren’t you!’

As he spoke he knew why he’d never remarried after his wife’s death. All the time, through all the years, he’d known at the back of his mind, the idea unspoken, even almost unthought, that he’d hoped to meet her again.

She gave a little smile. ‘Some men don’t even bother to get married. Men who left their wives in Canton or Shanghai acquired mistresses. They even have families. In a way this war is the making of China. Wealthy children from the coast have grown up speaking the Szechanwese dialect, and men from Shanghai are marrying Cantonese girls, even though their parents wouldn’t have understood each other. People who wore smart western suits and people who wear peasant blue have suddenly realised they’re the same people. When Chiang’s gone, they’ll become a united nation.’