World of Suzie Wong : A Novel (9781101572399) (17 page)

 

Then may I ask you to remember the many acts of friendship I have shown you in the past (and which you have made no effort to reciprocate) and to stand down as a personal favor?

May I also ask you, when writing insulting remarks, to enclose them in an envelope so that they cannot be read by hotel servants?

Rodney Tessler.

I wrote my reply underneath:

 

I refuse to stand down because this is an old date with Suzie, and I refuse to pass any more notes because (a) it's childish, and (b) it's wearing out poor old Ah Tong's slipper leather.

P.S. No insults, so no envelope.

I handed the note to Ah Tong, who hesitated and then said, “Sir, please excuse me. You have quarreled with your friend?”

I laughed, “I'm afraid so, Ah Tong.”

“Sir, what about?”

“Well, that's the trouble. I'm not quite sure.”

Ah Tong departed, now with a determined, almost evangelical expression, as if he conceived it his mission to act as peacemaker, and would not rest until he had seen us reconciled. However, Rodney must have dismissed him, to his great disappointment, for he did not return; and when, after a further fifteen minutes or so, there was another knock on my door, this time it was Rodney himself who entered.

He closed the door and stood there stiffly. He said, “Well, Bob, I've decided to sink my pride, and throw myself on your mercy. The fact is, Bob, I love that girl. I'm terribly, terribly in love with her, Bob, and it's making me—oh, God, if you knew—if you knew how unhappy. . . .” And he began to cry.

His tears always weakened me, and I waited until they were over to tell him that I didn't care a damn about the fortuneteller, that of course I would stand down; but before the opportunity presented itself, he was seized in the midst of the tears by a sudden fresh attack of fury, and he submitted me to a stream of violent abuse, during the course of which I learned for the first time the nature of my supposed offense on the beach: it appeared that, although shamelessly riding in his hired car and eating his food, I had persistently tried to turn Suzie against him. The diabolical tactics that I had employed to this end included telling her—he claimed to have overheard me whispering——that he made a habit of entertaining street girls; subtly distracting her during lunch from paying him any attention; and carefully choosing the moment of greatest disruption to carry out my bargain and leave them alone.

I said wearily, “Rodney, you know that's all rubbish. You had no luck with Suzie, so you want to put all the blame on me. Well, I can't stand it. It's too exhausting. Go and find somebody else to quarrel with.”

There followed an excruciating half-hour in which, his face ugly and distorted with spite, he continued to belabor me with abuse, preventing all possibility of escape by planting himself grimly before the door—until finally, his rage working itself out, he arrived at the recommendation that I should depart forthwith for London, Vienna, or New York, and place myself in the hands of a psychoanalyst. This conclusion of Rodney's, that he himself was perfectly balanced and that I was really the neurotic, had recently become his standard ending for every scene, so that I welcomed its arrival as the herald of my release. Five minutes later we were shaking hands and agreeing to visit the fortuneteller in a threesome as originally planned. And in the midst of this scene of amity Suzie arrived to collect us.

The Buick had remained at our disposal, and once more we climbed into the back. Rodney was now behaving so congenially that Suzie chattered to us both without discrimination; and all went well until we had passed through the business center of Hong Kong and were entering the Western District, when I suddenly became aware of a familiar tension.

I glanced across at Rodney. And sure enough, he was sitting once more with every muscle taut, and with that familiar tense, set look on his face. And just then, as I wondered what on earth had started him off again, he leaned forward and tapped the driver on the shoulder and ordered him to stop. The driver slowed down, looking for somewhere to pull in to the side; but the cars were parked along the pavement without a gap.

“I told you to stop!” Rodney snapped furiously.

“What's the matter?” Suzie said, in the same bewilderment as myself. “What's happened?”

Rodney ignored her. The driver obediently brought the car to a standstill in midstream, blocking the traffic behind, and sat waiting indifferently.

Rodney got out and slammed the door. He went to the driver's window, taking out his wallet.

“Drop these people where they want to go, then pack up,” he said.

He handed the driver some money, then came and stuck his head through the back window, his face pinched and spiteful, his eyes glinting with hate. His hand on the door trembled.

“That's what you want, isn't it?” he said. “That's what you've been waiting for all day—just to get rid of me? Well, I hope you're happy now. Though my God, when I think what I've—”

He suddenly bit his lip and closed his eyes as though from an unbearable access of self-pity. He turned away quickly and crossed the road without regard for traffic. He disappeared along the pavement in the crowd.

Suzie and I stared at one another. I said, “But what on earth was all that about, Suzie? What suddenly upset him?”

“I don't know. I was being very nice to him.”

There was an angry blaring of horns from the cars piled up behind us. The chauffeur was indifferently lighting a cigarette. I told him to drive on, and he unhurriedly threw away the match, lodged the cigarette in an ashtray, put the car in gear.

“I was being very nice,” Suzie said. “Didn't you see?” She was indignant now that so much niceness had been wasted. “And after that street girl! He was lucky I even spoke to him, never mind being so nice.”

“You didn't put your hand on my knee while we were talking, did you?”

“No, I never touched you.”

“Then it must have been something we said.”

But a post-mortem of our conversation revealed nothing that could possibly have offended Rodney, and we decided that it must have been something quite imaginary, or else simply that his distemper had come round automatically, like a point on a wheel, in the endless cycle of his moods. I was only worried, since he had looked so distraught, that he might have gone off to do something desperate, like commit suicide; but when I suggested this possibility to Suzie, she shook her head. “No, he won't kill himself. Not today.”

“He's the sort of person who would, just to make us feel bad about it,” I said. “Anyhow, what makes you so sure he won't?”

“I just know. I could tell.”

She spoke with the conviction that told me her sixth sense had been in operation. This sixth sense of Suzie's, like the sharpened sense of smell that counterbalances blindness, counterbalanced her illiteracy. It often afforded her astonishing flashes of insight; and although these flashes occurred unpredictably, and never to order, whenever they did occur they proved unerring, and I had come to place in them an implicit trust.

“Well, thank God for that,” I said. “We needn't worry about him.” I glanced out of the window. We were now passing through the oldest part of Hong Kong, where the margin of land between sea and escarpment was barely a hundred yards wide. Short streets led down to the quay, and I caught a glimpse of the
Fatshan,
the steamer that plied between Hong Kong and the Portuguese colony of Macao, and of forests of swaying junk masts. “Aren't we nearly there, Suzie?”

“Yes, soon.”

“By the way, what are you going to see the fortuneteller about?” I knew that she never paid such a visit without some particular problem on her mind.

“I just want to ask him something,” she said evasively. And she added, “I may tell you afterwards.”

“All right, Suzie.”

“Driver, stop! We must walk now—up that hill.”

We dismissed the driver and turned up a side street, a narrow canyon packed with stalls and pedestrians that soared up out of sight like a switchback, ending somewhere among the houses at mid-level on the escarpment. It was turned almost into a tunnel by the ceiling of washing on bamboo poles. It rose in a series of flights of steps, each flight steeper than the last, and we climbed slowly, keeping pace with a sedan chair carried on the shoulders of four coolies. Inside sat a tiny old Chinese woman fluttering a cheap paper fan. We reached an intersecting road and turned off through a vegetable market, and past an open site that at first glance appeared to be a rubbish dump, and at second glance a gigantic rabbit warren because of the holes in the rubbish like burrows, and at third glance a human warren, which is what it was—a colony of squatters' huts made from old sacking, rotting wood, and flattened-out tins. The road seethed with humanity. Beyond the warren of rubbish was a warren of concrete: a block of tenements, into which we turned. I followed Suzie up a concrete staircase. It was strewn with litter and stained by spittle. The building resounded with voices, the cries of children, the clatter of mah-jongg. We turned down a dark narrow concrete passage and Suzie knocked at a door. A blue close-shaven scalp appeared amidst a waft of cooking—and under the scalp, a broad friendly grin. The door opened farther, revealing the fortuneteller's faded, food-stained orange robe, tattered at the extremities where it trailed on the floor. He shook our hands and invited us inside, grinning and fussing and chattering in the dialect of Shanghai. He was himself a native of Shanghai: the Tibetan guise had only been adopted to give himself a professional
cachet
.

The room was partitioned with sacking, from behind which came the hushed voices of a numerous family that had been admonished to keep quiet, and also the aura of frying fat which now fought with the smell of incense from burning joss sticks for the domination of our nostrils. The joss sticks were stuck like fireworks into an old soup tin filled with sand on the fortuneteller's cheap little table. Near them was a pile of tattered almanacs, a Tibetan rosary, the shell of a tortoise. The table was squeezed into a corner of the cubicle, for most of the space was occupied by a huge black wooden settee, elaborately carved and inlaid with ivory; and here the fortuneteller made me sit, while Suzie sat on a chair at the table, and he himself behind the table on a wooden box. He hooked a pair of horn-rimmed glasses over his ears and the session began.

It lasted nearly an hour. It was conducted with great solemnity, and no traditional method of divination was omitted. The fortuneteller pored over astrological charts and consulted almanacs; he read Suzie's palm and felt the bumps of her head; he watched her shake a cylinder of spills until one fell out onto the floor, then looked up its number in a key; he examined the fateful positions of two banana-shaped pieces of wood which she had cast upon the table.

Meanwhile my discomfort on the flat-seated straight-backed settee mounted with the steep curve of compound interest. I wriggled and squirmed on the flat unyielding wood. Then all at once I realized that I was under scrutiny: a child's eye was watching me from a hole in the canvas partition. I challenged it with a bold stare, and it sheepishly withdrew. I looked away. Presently, from the corner of my eye, I saw it return. I challenged it again, and again it disappeared. And this game continued for nearly fifteen minutes, providing a welcome distraction from the cruel torture of the settee; and we were still playing it when Suzie turned round in her chair.

“All right—finished!”

Her face glowed with satisfaction: evidently the session had been a success. She opened her bag and gave the fortuneteller a five-dollar note. He grinned us to the door. I turned abruptly in the door and gave a last wink to the eye at the hole: it shot back in surprise. We went back down the spittle-stained stairs and out into the street. Suzie glowed in silence, nursing her secret happiness. We strolled past the squatters' rubbish warren, through the market. The road was littered with trodden cabbage leaves, the air laden with heavy decayed-vegetable smells.

Suzie said, “I am going to England.”

“What?
What
did you say, Suzie?”

“I am going to England.” She glowed. “In three years' time.”

“Good Lord, Suzie! Are you really?”

“Yes, my fortuneteller just told me. Ben will take me. He will divorce his wife in Hong Kong, then take me to England.”

“Well, how marvelous! Is that what you went to find out?”

“Yes, I had got scared. I was scared that Ben had finished with me.” And she explained that recently he had put off their lunchtime meetings so often on account of business lunches that she had grown suspicious. She had been afraid that he had fallen out of love with her; she had even begun to wonder if he was keeping another Chinese girl. She had been so worried about it that at night she had lain tossing and turning and been unable to sleep. It had been like that for nearly two weeks.

I said, “But Suzie, I'd no idea! Why didn't you tell me?”

“I was ashamed. I didn't want to lose face.”

“Suzie, how absurd—to feel that with me!”

“If it was true, it would have been a terrible loss of face. I would have wanted to kill myself. But it is all right, he still loves me. My fortuneteller got four signs.” She purred with satisfaction. “Yes, four! He told me, ‘I only need one sign really, but I got four. I got one sign in your horoscope, one sign in your hand, and one sign in the numbered sticks. Then you threw the two pieces of wood, and they said, Yes, we agree. So that is four signs altogether that your boy friend loves you'!”

“Well, no wonder you're looking so pleased with yourself.”

“And he got two signs about going to England. Only he was not quite sure about the three years. He said it might only be two and a half years, or it might be three and a half.”