World of Suzie Wong : A Novel (9781101572399) (34 page)

However, later, as I was leaving the hospital building, I met the prison doctor herself. She had just pulled up in a little car and I guessed her identity from her Eurasian features, and the wardress accompanying me confirmed it. I went up to her and said, “May I ask you about Wong Mee-ling?”

“Who are you?” she said. “Do you belong to the prison?” She was in her thirties with handsome clear-cut features and a down-right manner that seemed to say, “Now, tell me what you want with no nonsense. I don't mind if you've committed murder or raped a girl of five, so long as you give it me without any nonsense.” She wore a white cotton dress and carried a bottle with a glass stopper filled with yellow liquid. It might have been acid or urine.

“No, I've just been to visit her,” I said. “I'm a friend.”

“A painter?” She saw me look surprised, and said, “Oh, don't worry, I know more about you than you know about yourself. How that little girl can gossip! Well, she's perfectly all right, she's not going to die or anything. We got her just in time. But how long more's she got here? Six weeks? That's no good at all. She'll need at least another couple of months in hospital after she leaves here, otherwise in a few months she'll be back where she started.”

“Could you get her transferred to a civil hospital from here?”

“No.” She looked at me with the blunt no-nonsense Chinese-English eyes. “They throw patients out of the civil hospitals when they're no better than that girl in there, to make room for worse cases. No strings you can pull?”

I remembered Kay Fletcher at St. Margaret's; but I had not seen Kay since that night when she had driven me back to the Nam Kok, and I had said, “See you on Thursday,” and she had driven off in the rain, and then I had gone upstairs and Suzie had rung to say her baby was dead. And when I had rung her to cancel the meeting on Thursday she had been understandably brusque with me, saying “Well, I'm not surprised,” and ringing off. No, I could hardly ask Kay.

I said, “No, I don't know anyone.”

“Well, you've plenty of time. If you don't want her lungs to pack up on her again you'd better try and talk some hospital into taking her after she leaves here. Or soon after—a short holiday in between wouldn't do her any harm. That's all I can tell you. Except that she seems to me a very nice girl, and I hope you'll manage something—because I hate to see all our good work wasted.” She turned away briskly, but turned back in the hospital entrance and said with a faintly ironical smile, “By the way, I'd tell anybody who's had much to do with her to get a check-up themselves. That Chinese medicine's about as effective against infection as this would be.” She shook the bottle in her hand. I still did not know whether it was acid or urine.

“Yes, I'll do that.”

And a few days later I went along to the clinic in Wanchai, and stood in the queue of Chinese for a free X-ray. The English doctor looked surprised when he saw me and said, “Hello, what are you doing in these parts?” I told him I lived in Wanchai, and he said grimly that in that case I was very wise to come along. But when I returned the next week for the result he said, “Ah, lucky chap. No spots anywhere—you're passed as sound as a bell.”

II

I did not know there were so many hospitals in Hong Kong until I began my search to find Suzie a bed. The biggest T.B. hospital was the Ruttonji, a Parsee foundation, but they could not hold out any hope. They would have no vacancy for months, and even then they could only take in much worse cases than Suzie's. The other hospitals were the same. The sudden vast influx of refugees from China after the revolution had meant not only more people to be ill but a higher rate of illness per head of population, since overcrowding was synonymous with epidemics and a low standard of health. The Hong Kong government had done its best to meet the unexpected situation, and was building new hospitals and convalescent homes as fast as it could. But meanwhile the majority of consumptives received no treatment at all beyond the concoctions of Chinese druggists, but sickened and wasted away in congested rooms, breathed their germs into the fetid air, and died. And those who had been infected by the germs became sick in turn, and breathed more germs to infect others, and died likewise.

And so finally I went to Kay. I had already been once to St. Margaret's to try my luck there on my own, and had drawn the usual blank; but now I went again and sent up a note. I explained briefly why I had come and how ashamed I felt to be asking her help, and I said that if she did not want to see me I would understand; though I had no doubt really that, being Kay, she would come down and be very forgiving and nice. However, ten minutes later, when she appeared, she sailed across the entrance hall with a rather cold impersonal smile, and said in a hard bright voice with an edge, “Robert, you really have a lot of cheek! Ashamed my foot! And obviously you haven't a clue about the hospital situation. There's a queue five miles long for every bed in this place, and even if I could help you, which I can't, it would mean somebody else losing his turn. But I suppose that never occurred to you?”

I said, “Yes, it did.”

“You mean so long as you can get your own friends fixed up you couldn't care less what happens to other people, even if they're dying.”

“Yes, I could. But I'm prepared to do it.”

She was taken aback for a moment. Then she smiled a bit more warmly and said, “Well, anyhow that's honest. But I'm not.”

I said, “Kay, one can't fight for everybody, and I'm going to fight for Suzie. I know it's all wrong, and I ought to let her take her turn and get worse again, and probably die. But I'm not going to, because she means more to me than the people I don't know, and because I want to see her properly cured, and because I'm going to marry her.”

Kay looked stunned. “You're not?”

“She hasn't agreed yet. But I think she will when she comes out of gaol.”

“I think you're mad.”

“I probably am.”

“Stark staring mad. Well, I wish you luck.”

She held out her hand. I realized that I was being dismissed. However, as she accompanied me across the hall to the entrance I sensed a softening of her mood. We paused rather awkwardly on the top step. Then she said, “Are you really? I mean seriously?”

“Going to marry her? Yes.”

“I know it's none of my business, but wouldn't it be better just to live with her? Without tying yourself down?”

“I want to marry her.”

“I can't help feeling it's only out of pity—because of what she's been.”

“No, I've thought all that out,” I said. “It's not pity.”

“You wouldn't have married her if she'd just been some shopgirl you'd seduced.”

“No, but if she'd been a shopgirl she wouldn't have been Suzie. What she's been is part of her.”

“Then why
are
you marrying her?”

“Kay, you wouldn't like to have dinner?”

“Well . . . all right.”

We had a Chinese dinner and I tried to explain to her why I wanted to marry Suzie, but I did not convince her and she still shook her head and said, “Well, I may be biased, but I'm sure you're being a fool.” I was not surprised because I had not even convinced myself. All the reasons that I had given her had sounded superficial, and I felt sure that I had left out the most important reason of all. Yet I did not know myself what it was. Then after dinner Kay took me along to a party to which she had been invited. It was in somebody's flat on the Peak—a party of gay and pleasant young people most of whom were only recently out from England and not yet imbued with the older residents' stereotyped colonial way of thought. There was a high-fidelity long-playing gramophone with loud-speakers mysteriously hidden about the room, and we danced to the oozing sexy voice of a colored American crooner currently in fashion. A silent impersonal house boy filled our glasses with iced gin drinks. There was intellectual discussion about music, books, and films. It was mostly above my head. Then I was approached by a young man with a beard, a professor of English at the Hong Kong university, who said that he had seen my Malayan paintings and pastels when they had been exhibited in London, and had been sufficiently struck by them to remember my name. He had realized that I had “something to offer.” I was very touched and flattered, for he could even remember the work well enough to discuss it in detail and give a sound appreciation of its merits and faults. He went on to discuss critical theories of art and the work of various modern artists; but I knew little of theory and few of the artists' names, and when he asked me about my own work I could say little more than that I had wanted to try and express something, and had done my best to do so. I felt ashamed of my ignorance and incoherence. I was self-consciously aware that each time I opened my mouth I sank lower in his estimation. And the flattery over, I began to grow bored, and to feel a creeping claustrophobia in this beautiful hygienic modern flat, among the high-fidelity loud-speakers and the martinis and the hygienic theories of art. Then the Chinese house boy, who was not a boy at all but an elderly man, came to refill my glass, and while he was doing so I noticed his eyes—small deep withdrawn Chinese eyes that belonged to a world infinitely remote from everything else in this room. And it was as though all at once a window had been thrown open and I had breathed fresh air; for although I had only been afforded the merest glimpse of that remote world, it had been enough to reassure me, “Don't worry, you're not trapped in this room. This is only a tiny unimportant corner of life—and there's the whole universe waiting outside to be explored.” And I knew that I had come close to the answer I had been seeking. If I had married Kay or the pretty girl in the cocktail dress who was saying, “Of course it's the theater I miss,” I would have been shutting myself in this room and bolting the windows and doors. But marrying Suzie would be like taking a flying leap (suicidal, Kay would say) from the sill.

The party looked all set until the early hours. Kay was ensconced on the sofa with an admiring young man and looked all set for a long time, too. I left and walked home alone, musing about beautiful hygienic conventional rooms and leaping from windows. Then suddenly there came into my head a random memory of Suzie, as I had encountered her one evening in the entrance hall of the Nam Kok on my return from a stroll. She had at that moment been parting from a sailor with whom she had just been upstairs. The sailor was no more than a blurred face in the background, with one hand lifted to tilt his hat, and that expression of false jauntiness with which men leaving brothels are wont to hide their disillusionment after the departure of desire. Suzie was half turned away from him, her face pale and a little tired. She had already forgotten the sailor's existence and had just caught sight of me. Her expression showed fleeting embarrassment, for she wanted me to be in love with her and knew my feelings about her job. She wished that I had come a second or two later after the sailor had gone. But instantly she realized that embarrassment was pointless and only a refusal to face facts; and in a moment the embarrassment had passed and a new expression had taken its place that seemed to say, “There is a whole world behind me, a whole field of experience, that you can never understand. But it is part of me, and I cannot be otherwise, even though it means losing you.” And there was hurt in her eyes, and sadness, but there was also pride. And now in memory the expression seemed to me very moving and beautiful, and I knew I must paint it.

And I had no sooner felt this compulsion to start a new painting than I glanced about to see where I was walking, and quickly moved from the center to the side of the road. For at such times I would always go in dread of being knocked over by a car, or of war breaking out, or of some cataclysm occurring; for an unborn painting was like an unborn child and made me responsible for another life besides my own. I began to hurry. I did not usually paint at night because in artificial light the colors changed their values, but the impulse was so strong that I determined to try, and the moment I got back to my room I placed a new canvas on the easel and started.

I painted all through that night. My mind was clear and the memory so vivid that I could have done no better even with Suzie there as a model. I did not feel any need for sleep. And when the dawn came and I saw the colors I was very pleased, because although the tones were not what I had intended, they were oddly effective and heightened the feeling.

I finished at ten o'clock in the morning. I had painted the scene exactly as I remembered it, with the matelot behind Suzie with his hand tilting his hat, and Suzie half turned away from him with the hurt and the sadness and the pride in her eyes. And Ah Tong, bringing tea for the fourth time, stood gazing at it for a long while and I could see he was moved. And then the telephone rang, and it was Kay.

She said, “Well, I've done my best for you, though I can't think why. I've just spent nearly an hour soft-soaping the Registrar, and he's promised a bed in about six weeks.”

“Kay, bless you.”

“That was the earliest he could manage without seriously upsetting anybody. She'll be able to hang on until then, won't she?”

“Yes, it's perfect. The prison doctor said a holiday would do her good. I think I'll take her to Macao.”

“I always wanted to go to Macao.”

“You can come with us if you like.”

“That
would
be fun for you!”

Ah Tong was still studying the picture when I rang off. He said, “It is very beautiful, sir. She looks so unhappy.” And then he said, “She is looking at me, sir. It is very curious. She was looking at me when I stood over there. Then I came over here and she is still looking. Her eyes are speaking to me.”

“What are they saying?”