The Man in the Wooden Hat (8 page)

“Kai Tak! Isn’t that a bit off-piste?”

“Yes. So are they. They’re missionaries. Hordes of kids. Normal people. In love with each other. My friends.”

“Elisabeth—what’s wrong? It is
on
, isn’t it?”

Sitting in the taxi she said, after a minute, “Yes. It’s on. But I need the taxi fare.”

“Shall I come with you?”

“No. I’ll be staying the night. Maybe longer,” and she was gone.

She saw him standing, watching her taxi disappear, and then the hotel’s white Mercedes roll along with all the legal team waving at him, making for the airport and Home. In very good spirits.

He was, in fact, unaware of them, but saying to himself that he’d made some mistake. Had made an absolute bloody bish. I wish Coleridge were here. I’m not good at pleasing this girl.

Betty, bowling along through the alleys round Kai Tak, was thinking: He’s shattered. He looked so bewildered. He’s so bloody good. Good, good, good.

Well, I’ll probably go through with it. I’ll be independent when I’m thirty. I’ll probably put a lot into it. I’ll damn well work, too. For myself. QC’s wife or not. And at least I have a past now. No one can take that away.

S
ince the night of celebration at Repulse Bay and the end of the land reclamation Case and the horrible parting outside the Peninsular Hotel, Elisabeth had moved in with Amy at Kai Tak. It was at Amy’s command.

“Have you room for me?”

“Yes. There’s a camp bed. And don’t be grateful, you’ll be very useful. Take the baby—no, not that way. Now, stick the bottle in her mouth—go on. Right up to the edge. She won’t choke, she’ll go to sleep and we can talk before Nick comes in.”

The other children were already asleep. Mrs. Baxter must at some point have been taken up to her barbed-wire fortress. The Buddhists were practising silence on the floor below.

“Now then,” said Amy. “Date of wedding?”

“Edward’s arranging everything. The licence. I expect I’ll have to be there at some point for identification. In case he should turn up with someone different.”

“You’re being flippant.”

“Not that he’d probably notice.”

“Now you’re being cheap. Seriously, Elisabeth Macintosh—is it on? It is a Sacrament in the Christian Church.”

“I’m being told yes from somewhere. Probably only by my rational self. There’s no way I will say no, yet I don’t quite know why. Marriage will be gone in a hundred years in the Christian Church. There’ll be women priests and homo priests. Pansies and bisexuals.”

“You’re tired. You live alone. What does Isobel say?”

“She’s disappeared. As she always did. She was never any help with people’s troubles, was she? She just stared and pronounced—if she could be bothered. She’s burdened with her own secrets but she never lets on.”

“I suppose she must tell someone. Some wise and ageing woman with a deep, understanding voice. And a beard.”

Elisabeth laughed and said, “Can I pull this teat out now? She’s asleep.”

Nick came in. It was very late. Very hot.

Elisabeth, lying on the camp bed near the kitchen sink, listened to the clamour outside in the sweltering streets, the thundering muted lullaby of the mah-jong players in all the squats around.

“I have no aim,” she said. “No certainty. I am a post-war invertebrate. I play mah-jong in my head year after year trying to find something I was born to do. I have settled on exactly what my mother would have wanted: a rich, safe, good husband and a pleasant life. All the things she must have thought in the Camp were gone for ever. Impossible for me, the scrawny child playing in the sand. Hearing screams, gunfire, silences in the night, watching lights searching in the barbed wire. I should be the last woman in the world to recreate the old world of the unswerving English wife. I am trying to please my dead mother. I always am.” She slept.

And woke to Mrs. Baxter flopping about with teacups saying, “I tried not to wake you. Are you staying long? Shall we say a prayer together?”

She and Elisabeth were alone, except for the baby, whom Mrs. Baxter ignored. Nick, Amy and the rest were already about the Colony and the nursery school and the clinics. The noise from the streets was less than in the night and the monks below were still silent. The telephone rang and it was Edward.

“Found you at last. Are you safe?”

“Of course. I’m going shopping.”

“Shall I come?” He sounded afraid of the answer.

“No. Do I have to come and sign things?”

“Not yet. I’m organising it. I’m planning our trip. Oh—Pastry Willy wants us to dine with them tonight.”

“Can’t,” she said. “Sorry. Next week? I must earn my keep here.”

“As to that, are you all right for money?”

“Rolling in it,” she said.

“Unexpected expenses—? Wedding dress and presents for . . .”

“You’re the one for presents. First, Eddie, to Amy. She needs them. Don’t dare to give her money; she’ll just put it into a savings account for the children. Look—I’m staying here. They’re my family. Until the wedding.”

“Willy’s wife will be upset.”

“No. I want to be married from Kai Tak with the planes all roaring overhead.”

“Can you—I mean. Darling”—“Darling!” Progress?—“is there anywhere to wash there? A bathroom. To get ready on the day?”

“No idea. I must get on. I have to clean the kitchen.”

“Shall I come over? I think I should.”

“It’s a free and easy place. Don’t come in spats.”

“What on earth are spats?”

“Oh, stuff it, Edward.”

Mrs. Baxter, pale as a cobweb, had been listening at the kitchen table where she was doing something with needle and thread. “Was that a conversation with your fiancé?”

“I suppose it was, Mrs. Baxter.”

She was silent as Elisabeth scoured away at the scum in the rice pot, black outside, silver within. Huge and bulbous. The black and silver raised a sense of longing in Elisabeth, of memory and loss: the outdoor kitchen in Tiensin, the servants’ shouting, the stink of drains and cesspits, the clouds of dust, the drab sunlight and her mother appearing at the veranda door. The amah would come and pick up little Elisabeth, wiping her face with a grey cloth. She saw her mother’s plump arms open towards her as she stretched her own stubby ones up to her mother. They all laughed. Her mother had been a blonde. She had twirled around with glee, swinging her baby. The servants were scouring the rice pots until their silver linings shone.

“You are not looking happy, Elisabeth.”

“But of course I’m happy, Mrs. Baxter.”

“I am not a happy woman, either. I believe that you and I are very much alike. I thought so as soon as I saw you. I thought, She is born to tears and wrong decisions and she will need the consolation of Jesus Christ.”

“You’ve got me wrong, Mrs. Baxter. I was thinking of my mother who never stopped laughing. I was a baby. She was beautiful, loving and hardly ever went to church.”

“Died in the Camps, I hear? Well, I shall pray for you,” and she took out her handkerchief.

“Mrs. Baxter. I am about to be married. I intend to be very happy. I’ll discover no doubt if I need Jesus Christ. And in what form. If it is in the form of sex and married love, then Jesus is for me. But I haven’t much hope.”

Mrs. Baxter sat thoughtfully. Later in the day when the family were all home again, she still sat thoughtfully. When Amy said that it was time for her to be taken home she said, “I was a bride once.”

“And I bet you looked lovely.”

“Yes, Amy, I did. I had a very good dress, and it has survived. Elisabeth could wear it.”

“Thank you, but I . . .”

“Yet I feel that I should like to buy her a new one. I know a dressmaker and his wife who can complete it in three days including covered buttons down the back. I shall see to it all if you will draw me a pattern. I still have my wreath of orange blossom that went round my head, but it is rather flat and discoloured.”

“Oh—I’ll get one made for her,” said Amy. “It can be my present. And I’ll get the shoes. Those green ones she has are the shoes of a whore.”

“What I
do
possess,” said Mrs. Baxter, “and it will be in perfect condition in a tin trunk against weevils, is a veil of Indian lace. It is patterned with birds and flowers. St. Anne’s lace—a little pun—my name is Anne—made by the nuns in Dacca in what was then Bengal. You shall wear it—no, you shall
have
it. What use is it to me but as a shroud?”

“Betty—you could keep it for the baby,” said Amy, and the baby hiccuped on yet another bottle, and the other children put rice in their hair.

“My wedding day,” said Mrs. Baxter, “was on a green lawn at the High Commission in Dacca and there were English roses.” She wept.

“Accept,” said Amy. “Quick. For God’s sake.”

“Thank you very much indeed,” said Elisabeth. “I believe your veil will bring me happiness.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t count on that,” said Mrs. Baxter.

W
hen he was very old and had retired to the Dorset countryside in England, and Betty dead, Old Filth, as he was always called now, reverentially and kindly, would walk most afternoons about the lanes carrying his walking stick with the Airedale’s head, pausing at intervals to examine the blossom or the bluebell woods or the berries or the holly bushes according to the season. The pauses were in part rests, but to a passer-by they looked like a man lost in wonder or meditation. A dear, ram-rod straight man of elegiac appearance. As he grew really old, the English countryside was sometimes on these walks shot through for an instant by a random, almost metallic flash of unsought revelation.

One November day of black trees, brown streams blocked with sludge and dead leaves, skies grey as ashes, he found himself in his room at the Peninsular Hotel again, and it was his wedding day.

It was early and he was looking down at the old harbour-front YMCA building, everything ablaze with white sunlight. The flash of memory, like an early picture show, was all in black and white. The carpet of his hotel room was black, like velvet, the curtains white silk, the armchairs white, the telephones white. In the bathroom the walls and ceiling were painted black, the towels and flowers were white. There lay on a black glass table near the door of the suite a white gardenia and he, Edward Feathers himself only just taken silk (QC), at all of eight a.m., ready dressed in European “morning dress” and a shirt so white that it mocked its surroundings by looking blue.

All these years later, he saw himself. He had been standing gravely at the window wondering whether or not to telephone her.

Breakfast?

He had not ordered a cooked breakfast. It would seem hearty. Others no doubt would be sitting down in their suites to bacon and eggs on the round black glass table, napkin startlingly white. But for Edward—well. Perhaps a cup of coffee?

Should he ring his wife-to-be? Amy’s number? His—his Elisabeth? But then the telephone shouted all over his room.

“Hello?”

“It’s me,” said Elisabeth.

“I was going to telephone you.”

“It’s supposed to be bad luck,” she said.

“No, it’s bad luck for me to
see
you before the church. I was thinking of—er—saying, well—well, how to get there—well, don’t get the time wrong. Will those missionaries get you there? Willy could fetch you.”

“I’ll be there, Edward.”

“All set, then?”

“All set, Edward. Edward, are you O.K.? Are you happy?”

“Don’t forget your passport. Tell them to throw your suitcase in the back. Oh, and don’t forget . . .”

“What?”

A long silence and he watched the seabirds leaning this way and that over the harbour.

“Don’t forget . . . Elisabeth. Dear Betty. Even now—are you sure?”

There was the longest pause perhaps in the whole of Edward Feathers’s professional life.

And then he heard her voice in mid-sentence, saying, “It could be cold in the evenings. Have you packed a jersey?”

“My breakfast hasn’t arrived yet. Then I have to pay the bill here. Are you dressed? I mean in all your finery?”

“No. I’ve a baby on my knee and Amy and everyone are shouting. But, Eddie, if you like we can still forget it.”

“I’ll be there,” he said. Silence again for an aeon. “I love you, Betty. Don’t leave me.”

“Well, mind you turn up,” she said briskly. Too brightly. And put down the phone.

He had no recollection in the Donhead lanes after Betty’s death of any of this except his own immaculate figure standing at the window.

“I am not going,” said Bets, hand still on the phone. “It’s off.”

Amy planted a glass of brandy beside the bride’s cornflakes. “Come on. Get dressed. I’ve done the children. What’s the matter?”

“What in
hell
am I doing?”

“The best thing you ever did in your life. Looking ahead at last. Here, I’ll do your hair.”

Edward’s luggage had already gone ahead to the airport. He paid his bill at the desk, the management far from effusive, since they’d expected him there for another two months. But they knew he would be back, and he tipped everyone correctly and shook hands all round. They walked with him to the glass doors and bowed and smiled, nobody saying a thing about his stiff collar and tailcoat so early in the morning. “You don’t need a car, sir? For the airport?” “No, no. I’m going across to church first.” “Ah—church. Ah.” The gardenia in his buttonhole could have been laminated plastic.

He set out to his wedding alone.

Briefly he thought of Albert Ross. Ross had vanished. Eddie had no best man.

Oh, well, you can marry without a best man. No one else he’d want. It was a glorious morning. He remembered his prep-school headmaster, Sir, reading Dickens aloud, and the effete Lord Verisoft walking sadly to his death in a duel on Wimbledon Common with all the birds singing and the sunlight in the trees.