The Heat of the Sun (25 page)

‘No ghost.’ Uncle Grover held up cans of Campbell’s soup: one cream of chicken, one pea and ham. ‘He sleeps, but that’s not all he does. We’ll have that young
fellow on roast beef and mashed potatoes, apple pie and ice cream before the week’s out, mark my words.’

‘But missing so long! Has he said where he’s been?’

‘They picked him up in the Pacific, that’s all we know. Some nasty foreign island, Okin-something – is that what they call it? God knows what those Jap monsters have done to
him.’

‘He’s said no more – nothing?’

‘He will, Woodley. He’s been waiting for you.’

Earnestly I joined the vigil at Le Vol’s bedside, delighted when he stirred, offered desultory words, or sipped from spoons we held to his lips. What sufferings he had endured we dared not
imagine; his eyes were haunted and his skin was yellow, clinging like parchment to his hollowed face. The doctor said he was undernourished, that was all, and would rally soon. Only one thing was
certain: when Le Vol smiled at me, grasped my hand, and said he was glad to see me, I knew it was true.

After some days he was well enough to sit up. He said he missed the sun, so we took him down to the terrace, where he reclined on a wicker chaise longue and I read him stories by Somerset
Maugham. Whether he listened I could not be sure, but perhaps the lulling, elegant words were enough; the words and the wash of the sea and the summer laving the cliffs and the blue Pacific, as if
there were nothing wrong in the world and never could be.

That night Le Vol ate with us in the dining room. Uncle Grover, in his excitement, had prepared too much; Le Vol took only a little; but within days, as my uncle had predicted, we had him on
roast beef and mashed potatoes, apple pie and ice cream. The hollows left Le Vol’s face: the ghost was alive again. We began to take walks on the cliff paths. At first Le Vol used a stick,
like me, but soon discarded it. He would stride ahead of us as if he were our leader.

Our days fell into a dreamy rhythm. News barked from the radio, but I paid it little heed. The war dragged on in the Pacific. There was something called the Potsdam Declaration: some ultimatum
to Japan. It meant nothing to me. My world was Wobblewood West.

I must have been home for ten days before Le Vol told his story. We were all on the beach with a bottle of Scotch and a pack of Pall Malls. Le Vol, as I recall, wore a pair of ragged shorts and
a Hawaiian shirt – forced on him by Uncle Grover – that hung open over his bony chest. He had drawn up his knees and leaned forward, hugging them; he pulled back, hard, on his Pall Mall
and, all at once, as if the time had come, began.

Much that he said was shocking; often, it was all the rest of us could do not to exclaim, but we did not exclaim.

All that mattered was the story he was telling.

‘I guess I owe you an apology, Sharpless,’ he began. ‘You must have wondered what happened to me after they threw me out of Nagasaki. I meant to write to you
but never did. The tramp steamer that took me away could have been bound for Cloud Cuckoo Land or Timbuktu, I didn’t care; those days in a cell at Yamadori’s pleasure had left me shaken
and ashamed. The place was a dungeon, a medieval dungeon. Christ knows what they would have done if I’d been there for keeps; as it was, I’d been stripped and beaten and doused in cold
water so many times I thought my teeth would never stop chattering.

‘So there I was on the tramp steamer, looking out morosely on the East China Sea, when a shabby fellow with a red nose offered me a cigarette.

‘“Wainwright,” he said, and held out his hand.

‘I was hardly in the mood to talk, but didn’t need to; Wainwright could talk enough for both of us. Quite a voice he had too: that dreadful, snide bray of the upper-class Englishman,
except there was nothing snide about Wainwright. He was an “old China hand”, or that’s what he called himself. Been in the war, the first one, when he wasn’t much more than
a boy. Came back from the Somme an invalid. Lucky to be in one piece, but did he appreciate his luck? Don’t bet on it. Fell apart. Couldn’t settle to anything. There was a girl he was
going to marry – Cousin Essie, he called her. If the Garden of Eden were in Aldershot, Essie would be Eve, or so Wainwright said. But, before he married her, he wanted to be worthy. And there
lay the rub.

‘His next years were a nightmare. Sent down from Oxford. Drinking, gambling. Job in finance, arranged by Essie’s father. The firm was a family one, which was just as well, because
when Wainwright was caught embezzling the father said, “Did you know we’ve got a branch in Hong Kong? I think you’re going to get itchy feet, my boy, because that’s where
you’re headed. Last chance. Make good and we’ll take you back; you can even marry my daughter. Disgrace yourself and we never want to see you in England again.”

‘Of course, he never went back. Wainwright lasted three months in that Hong Kong office before the demons claimed him. Don’t think he hadn’t gone with good intentions.
There’d been solemn, tearful promises to Cousin Essie; to himself too. He said he’d end it all if Hong Kong didn’t work out.

‘But Hong Kong didn’t work out and Wainwright didn’t end it. He picked up work as a stringer for Reuters, enough to keep body and soul together. Over the years that followed he
rattled around China and Japan and Indochina. Sometimes he told himself he’d go back to England, but another year slipped by, then another, until he realized that something had happened
he’d never expected: he’d fallen in love with the Far East. This filthy hole he’d been sent to in shame had gotten under his skin. Oh, his dreams wouldn’t let up; sometimes
in his cups, or in the arms of some almond-eyed whore, he’d sob for Cousin Essie, but for all that, Wainwright was happy, or as happy as he could be.

‘Needless to say, I didn’t learn all this on that first morning; still, I discovered enough to know there was a connection between Wainwright and me, something broken in me that
responded to what was broken in him. By the end of that voyage we were fast friends, and when he learned I was a photographer, he said I was the man of the hour. Reuters would be more than
interested in the snaps I could take in China. Wainwright could do the words and I could do the pictures. What a team we’d make! Suffice to say he was on the money.

‘We ended up in Peking. For Wainwright this was an old stomping ground, and as spring turned to summer that year he initiated me thoroughly into its bars, its brothels, its opium dens; if
it’s true that every man has one special talent, Wainwright’s was for immersing himself in the lowlife of any place he visited and dragging any half-willing accomplice down with
him.

‘But our pleasures were short-lived. Just over the border in Manchuria – Manchukuo, as its Jap masters called it now – the drums of war were beating. The Tosei-ha faction,
wresting control of the government in Tokyo, was intent on fresh hostilities in China.

‘When the “incident” happened at Marco Polo Bridge, just outside Peking, I don’t think Wainwright turned a hair, but war had never come so close to me, and I was
frightened. A minor skirmish, that’s all it was: Jap troops, there to protect their embassy, firing on a party of Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Nationalists. But we knew what was really
going on. For the Japs to conquer Korea was one thing, but how could they hold Manchuria? Chiang Kai-shek would never stand for it. For the Japs, there was no going back. There was nothing to do
but defeat him utterly. They couldn’t stop until they possessed the whole of China. Now the “incident” gave them a pretext for new incursions. It was the Chinese! The Chinese had
started it!

‘Wainwright was in his element. There’s something fearless about a fellow like that; I suppose if you’ve lost so much, you don’t care if you lose the rest. The next few
years saw us knocking around China as the Japs continued their relentless advance. Reuters got more than their money’s worth. We were there when Shanghai fell; we were there when the Japs
stormed into Nanking, taking possession of the city in an orgy of pillage and plunder.

‘They say the Rape of Nanking shocked the world, but only if you’d been there could you understand the horror of those days. Who cared if you were a civilian? Who cared if you were a
POW? The Japs had turned into monsters, driven by primitive hatreds. Their savagery knew no bounds – and I took the pictures. Remember that little pigtailed girl screaming and cowering as the
Jap’s bayonet lunges towards her? That was one of mine.

‘Wainwright and I were lucky to escape with our lives. How many times did we fling ourselves on the last train out of a city that burned behind us? How many times did we trudge with
refugees over devastated fields, always just one step ahead of the Japs? On and on they came, like locusts. Soon, pretty much all of China was in Jap hands, except the provinces of Szechwan and
Yunnan, but there was no end in sight to the war. Chiang Kai-shek wasn’t giving up, and the Japs became more determined to bring him to his knees.

‘Strange, how war changes time! China seemed like the world to me then; I barely seemed to have had another life, and if I had, it was so far away there was no going back. If you’d
told me I’d be sitting one day on a beach in California, I’d never have believed you. America was unreal to me, as unreal as Wainwright married to Cousin Essie. We heard there was war
in Europe and shrugged. We had enough going on in China, but never dreamed that the Chinese war would fan out to consume the whole Pacific.

‘By the end of 1941 we’d holed up in Hong Kong. It was a relief to be in a British colony. We needed a rest and Wainwright’s talents had found a new outlet. I’d always
known that Oxford accent of his was worth its weight in gold, but never quite how much until he infiltrated the finest club in town. He’d put it out that he was Lord Somebody, a relative of
the British royals. There wasn’t a member of that club he didn’t fleece blind. Our plan was to rake in as much as we could, then take a little vacation. Wainwright said he fancied a
nice Pacific cruise. Well, I hardly need tell you what happened next.

‘I’d be lying if I said Pearl Harbor took us by surprise. Oh, I’ve heard how they painted it over here – bolt from the blue et cetera – but if you’d had your
ear to the ground in East Asia, you wouldn’t see it that way. Things had turned sour between us and the Japs. Hardly a surprise. Let the white man storm about the world all he likes, throwing
his weight around with the natives; that’s in the natural order. Let the yellow man do the same, and the white man gets on his high horse. Ultimatums flew back and forth: the Japs must do
this, the Japs must do that. Here’s Roosevelt cutting off exports; meanwhile, here’s the Japs, desperate to expand their new empire. How could they keep the show on the road without
oil, minerals, rice fields? And how could they seize what they wanted with the American fleet so close? “Told you so,” said Wainwright, when we heard news of the attack. But we were
amazed at how quickly the Japs moved after that.

‘It was only a day – one day! – after Pearl Harbor when they swept into Hong Kong. Thank God one of Wainwright’s club cronies got his lordship and his loyal factotum
– that’s me – on a ship bound for Singapore. Surely we’d be safe there, back in the arms of the British? Well, maybe for a month or two. I got some of my best pictures
during the fall of Singapore, but Christ knows what happened to them; I think they ended up at the bottom of the sea, coiled inside a Leica of which, alas, I had grown inordinately fond.

‘We made it to Manila. In the Philippines, we thought, we’d be on American soil. Hah! Even before we docked, we could see the fires raging. Desperate days followed. We fell in with a
party of GIs, hiding out in foxholes on the outskirts of the city. Wainwright and I had stolen uniforms from a couple of dead soldiers – he was a colonel, I was a corporal. If we were
captured, he reasoned, we would be POWs and at least have some rights.

‘I’m not sure the GIs agreed. To be taken prisoner by the Japs, they said, was a fate worse than death. I didn’t need convincing. The GIs said that General MacArthur had
evacuated to Australia, and when a chance came for us to do the same, we seized it. A Chinese captain said he’d take us all to Darwin, if only we gave him everything we owned and then some.
Wainwright grumbled, but his ill-gotten gains from Hong Kong came in useful now.

‘We set out, deep in the night, from a shabby fishing village on the Luzon coast. We were jubilant. Rumour had reached us of a big battle somewhere out in the ocean – the Midway, it
must have been – where at last we’d got the Japs on the run.

‘So the tide had turned: but not for us. The Chinese captain made us keep belowdecks. I lost count of how many days we spent in that stinking hold, ten or twelve men squashed in like
sardines, with nothing to eat but weevily biscuits and the occasional smoked fish. I’d look at sunlight seeping through cracks in the deck above and feel like the Count of Monte Cristo.

‘I was worried for Wainwright. For more than twenty years, ever since the Somme, he’d not gone a day without a drink – hell, he’d not gone a waking hour. Keeping him
quiet was the hardest thing. He’d cry out in his sleep as if the devils were chasing him, and then the Chinese captain was upon us, threatening to chuck poor Wainwright overboard if we
didn’t shut him up. “Just let me take him on deck, let me get him some air,” I pleaded, but that slitty-eyed bastard was immovable.

‘I cursed him, but not as much as I did when we docked. Down he came, beating a baton against the hull, telling us to get up, get up, and go ashore; and though I thought I’d lost
track of time, I was surprised – Darwin, already? Had we been at sea so long?

‘When I staggered up to the deck, the light was so bright I was blinded; besides, I was doing my best to hold up Wainwright. But the GIs cried out, horror-struck. Then there were bayonets
all around us, the Chinese captain threw back his head and laughed, and, as the glare faded, I saw the familiar harbour with its junks and sampans, saw the coolies and rickshaws on the quay and the
Jap guards who surrounded us.