The Man in the Wooden Hat (13 page)

The door into the clerks’ room opened and Edward came in and stopped, astounded.

Beside him, reaching not much above Edward’s waist, stood Albert Ross.

“It’s all right,” one of the typists was saying. “Mrs. Feathers? It’s all right. You just fainted for a moment. Here. Water. All right? Sit up carefully.”

“Jet lag,” Edward was saying. “We’ve been home for weeks but we almost covered the globe on our honeymoon. Elisabeth, you’ve been working too hard at the bloody house.”

“Where is he?”

“Who?”

“Ross, Albert Ross. I thought I saw him standing beside you.”

“You did. He’s gone. Don’t worry, we’ll both be seeing more of him soon. There’s a big new Case in Hong Kong. Betty, sit quite still until they get us a taxi. I’ll come back with you.”

“No. Don’t fuss. I’m fine. I just couldn’t stop walking. I walked all the way from home.”

“But it’s miles! It must be four or five miles!”

“It was lovely. I just thought I’d call in.”

When Mr. and Mrs. Feathers had gone, Charles, the head clerk, went to the pub and the junior clerk for his sandwiches. The typists brought out their packed lunches and thermos flasks and cigarettes. One girl lay back in her chair. “Pregnant,” she said. “Well! Good old Filth.”

A
fter the miscarriage of her child at four months, Elisabeth was to be in Hong Kong again with Edward and it was universally agreed that it would be excellent for her health. “Look at the colour of you,” said Delilah. “Milk-white, pinched and drawn, and staring eyes. Go back to your old friends and sit in the sun.”

“I like my new friends,” she said. “I’ve never had friends I like better. I can stand on the doorstep in my dressing gown and watch the world go by. In Hong Kong they open the hotel door for me and I wear gloves and a hat to keep my English skin milk-white. Like my grandmother.”

“But you’re not recovering. Not like us at your age. Gave thanks when it happened. Better than back streets and penny royal.”

“Don’t. Please.”

“I’m sorry, Elisabeth. Dexter and I had none and we never felt the loss. We had each other. And work.”

Elisabeth drifted in her narrow garden. She didn’t go out into the beautiful Regency crescents and squares behind Mozart Electrics towards Knightsbridge and Hyde Park, where the war-torn houses were being returned to their natural composure. Old cottages built for nineteenth-century artisans and mews houses and stables for grooms and horses round Chester Square were going freehold for a song. “We should buy one, I suppose,” said Edward. “It might be useful.” But she refused to go to look.

The streets around Victoria were full of prams. Once she took a bus to Hyde Park (“for the air,” said Delilah) and there were wild rabbits in the bushes. The Peter Pan statue was being repaired in Kensington Gardens. Unchanged, the nannies in navy-blue uniform and pudding-basin hats were striding out behind baby carriages, each bearing a spotless baby. The war seemed to have made no difference. Some perambulators had crests painted on their flanks. When Elisabeth sat down on one particular park bench, two nannies approached her and one of them said, “Excuse me, but this seat is only for titled families.” She walked the side streets after that but there was nothing that brought her comfort.

At last she said, “Well, I’d better go to Edward.”

“You had. But I’ll miss you,” said Delilah. “Next time you’re here you’ll be laughing again. I promise. And we’ll go to the music hall together and see
Late Joys
.”

Without saying goodbye to anyone she picked up a note Delilah had put through her letter box, looked across at the drawn curtains of the electrician who was getting up later and later now, and stepped into the taxi for the airport. She left no message for her new Jamaican cleaner, who had saved her life, because she could not face her. Even to think of her made her cry.

It had been the cleaner’s morning.

Elisabeth had, from the start, given her her own key. Singing, the young woman had come tramping up the stairs, flung open Elisabeth’s bedroom door, flung in the vacuum cleaner. Then stopped. Betty in bed. Eyes black pools. Sheets to chin.

“I’m losing the baby.”

“God a mercy! Where gone the doctor?”

“He came but he went. We’ve been expecting this. Things began to go wrong two weeks ago. He’s coming back. He didn’t think it’d happen yet. Well—I
suppose
he’s coming back.”

“And sir? Does sir know?”

“I phoned.”

“When you phone, ma’am?”

“An hour ago. He’s busy. He’s finishing a set of papers.”

The woman plunged at the bedside telephone. Then she was yelling from the window on the street. Then she was calling from the back window on the gardens where Delilah was regarding her flowers. Then she was boiling water. Then she was propping open the street door with the bicycle so that the ambulance men could run straight through. She had found a chamber pot with roses painted round it and set it by the bed, soothing Betty and telling her it would soon be over now.

“It’s coming in waves,” said Betty. “It’s like labour. Like they told us in the classes. Maybe I’m full-term? Maybe I’m just having a baby?”

“No, ma’am,” said the cleaner.

“Hold my hand,” said Betty.

“Give me this Chambers number. Right. Now then. Mr. Feathers, this is your cleaner speakin‘. You get you skinny arse home. Here. Now.”

A scuffle of people at the street door. The cleaner shouting down the stairs. A scream from the bed.

“Don’t look, don’t look,” Betty shouted to the cleaner. “It’s all over. It’s in the . . .” and she screamed again. “Get the dog out! The bloody dog.” It was Delilah’s dog. A daily visitor. It sniffed the air. Then fled.

“It’s the dog of the rat!” And she fainted. As she fainted she saw the little sliver of life slopped wet in the chamber pot. It had beautiful miniature hands.

Edward was too late to see. And too late to see her, for she had been taken off on a stretcher. Neighbours stood about the open door watching the arrival of the doctor, and the cleaner roaring at him. Edward had walked from the tube station, bringing with him his heavy briefcase to finish his work at home.

At the hospital they wouldn’t let him see her.

A
decade or so on, in their golden house in the row of judges’ houses on the Peak, protected from the world which he was paid to judge and in which Elisabeth worked all the time with her charity work, certain friends would occasionally touch on the Feathers’ childlessness. Betty, so fond of children—what a shame—etc. Betty had grown expert in her replies.

“Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think either of us was very child-minded. We knew nothing of children. We’d never had brothers or sisters ourselves. Poor Filth was a Raj orphan, you know. My parents died very young, too. We were ignorant.”

“You’ve had a wonderful marriage.”

“It’s not over yet, thank you.”

(Ha, ha, ha.)

“You must have been a child yourself, Betty, when you married. So young.”

“Yes,” Elisabeth always said, “I was.”

Hong Kong had embraced her again, wrapping her in its dazzle and warmth and noise: the smells of her childhood, the food of her childhood, the lack of false sentiment of her childhood. They took a furnished apartment on the Mid-levels and women friends came round for drinks and chat at lunchtime, and they went shopping with her in the blinding light of the big stores. She bought embroidered pillowcases and guest towels. She grew languid and lazy, and drifted away from Amy. Someone said that she should take up Bridge.

“Take her out of herself,” said a Scottish banker’s wife to the wife of an English judge. “Who hasn’t had a mis?”

The other woman said that she had to drive up into the New Territories and Betty could come too.

“I’m looking for a rocking horse,” she said.

“A
rock
ing horse?”

“The grandchildren want one. We’ll get it shipped home. They’re twenty-five pounds in Harrods and these are just as good. There’s an old chap up there somewhere who makes them. They look a bit oriental but that’s part of the fun. He sells them unpainted but then we could stipulate.”

“You mean stipple them? I don’t think . . .”

“No, no—we could tell him what we want. A bay or a grey. That sort of thing. I’ll ask the grandchildren in Richmond Gate what they’d like.”

“Is it tactful? Children’s toys? If we’re taking Betty?”

“Oh, come on. She’s got to get over this and have another.”

So they set off into the New Territories in a smart little car, Betty smoking Piccadilly cigarettes. The city did not disappear so much as change and become a canyon between concrete cliffs of new housing for city workers. “Further than this?” said the judge’s wife looking at the map. “I’ve never been as far as this. Oh yes, here’s that little temple. In those trees. Shall we go in? Have a breather?”

It was midday and very hot. The courtyard of the temple was silent, its surrounding trees unmoving. There was no chatter of birds. On the temple steps a dead-looking dog lay like dried-out leather, one lip lifted as if in disdain. In the courtyard in front of the steps sat two old men at a table. They wore traditional black tunics and trousers, and one had a pigtail and a wisp of beard. They were playing chess under the trees and all was black and white except for the bold red lacquer of the soaring temple. Occasionally a grey leaf detached itself from the trees and fell about the chess players like pale rain.

“Well! You’d have thought they might have stood up,” said the banker’s wife, “as we went past. And I don’t like the look of that dog. It’s ill.”

“It’s hot,” said Elisabeth. “It’s having its siesta like the whole of Hong Kong. Except us. And the chess players.”

“Well, don’t go near it. A bite could kill. Oh, look here! This is monstrous!”

The temple steps were cracked and littered with papers and Coca-Cola cans, and the portico broken. The figures of the Buddha inside, arms raised, more than life-sized, were thick with dust. At a desk to one side, presumably selling things, a heavy girl lay sprawled asleep, head on arms. Her desk was thick with dust and dust seemed to emanate from the walls and ledges high above, resting on all the carvings like snow. The girl opened her eyes and made a half-hearted move to get up.

“Look here,” said the judge’s wife. “This won’t do. What sort of impression does this make on the tourists?”

“Well, it’s very Chinese, Audrey.”

“Not New Territories Chinese. It’s all very well sending people to prison for graffiti on the new tower blocks where nobody goes except the workforce, but what about our own image here? This temple is in the guidebooks. Everyone comes.”

“There don’t seem to have been many recently,” said Elisabeth.

“I’m not surprised,” said Audrey and began to harangue the girl in execrable Cantonese. The girl drooped again, but said nothing.

“I think we should report this. I really do. Betty, have a word with Edward. I’ll speak to Ronnie. We’ll see they hear about it in Government House. It isn’t fitting.”

“But it’s their religion,” said Elisabeth. “It’s nothing to do with us. Perhaps dust doesn’t matter to Buddhists.”

“Oh, but it’s more than dust. It is slovenly.”

“And neglected,” said the banker’s wife.

“It’s theirs to neglect, I suppose,” said Elisabeth. “If they wish to.”

“Hong Kong is still ours to administer,” said Audrey, and Elisabeth walked away, handing some dollars to the girl as she passed. The girl was pregnant.

Elisabeth went down the temple steps, stopping to stroke the dog, and her eyes were full of shame and tears as she stood in the glaring courtyard looking across at the chess players.

There was now a third man pondering the board. He was standing facing her, a blond European, dressed in khaki shirt and shorts, and when he looked up and across at her she saw that it was Veneering.

The querulous voices of the women floated out from the temple behind her and she walked forward across the courtyard towards Veneering’s beckoning arm. He put his hand on her shoulder and said, “Come with me. There are some seats lower down in the trees,” and they dropped down to a wooded track, passing the old men by. The old men did not stir.

There was a red-painted bench and they sat down and Veneering said, “
Whatever
are you doing out here?”

“I’m on the way to buy a rocking horse.”

They looked at each other for a minute or more and Veneering said, “I heard that you have been ill.”

“Yes. The rocking horse is not for us. It’s for one of the others. She’s a granny.”

“Then she should have had the tact not to bring you.”

“She’s one for soldiering on. Getting over things. Following the flag.”

“She sounds like my son Harry. He’s a blimp.”

“How is he?”

Veneering smiled and said, “Skiving off cricket. Says he has a limp. I’ve told him to go running. He’ll get to Eton all right. Probably be a scholar.”

“Is he happy?”

“Oh, Harry’s always happy.”

They fell silent and Elisabeth said, “I didn’t know you played chess.”

“It’s just to keep up with Harry in the holidays.”

“Does Elsie . . . ?”

He gave her a look.

“Give Harry my love,” she said. “Is Elsie . . . ?”

“It’s Saturday. She’s at the racecourse. Elisabeth, are you going to live here always with Edward?”

“Why?”

“Because if you are I’ll have to go. I’m going to apply for a judgeship in Singapore. Hong Kong, the English Bar here—it’s too small.”

She said nothing for a long time and then they heard the women coming back down the steps of the temple and passing by them through the courtyard above.

“I want to go back to London now,” she said. “I was so happy there after the—honeymoon.”

“And Edward?”

“Who knows where Edward is happy? He belongs to Asia. He was born here.”