World of Suzie Wong : A Novel (9781101572399) (39 page)

“How is she?”

“She's very weak, of course.” I had caught her off guard and she looked uneasy. “But we're giving her a blood transfusion, and there's no reason to lose hope.”

“I'll try not to lose hope,” I said.

But for three weeks I thought she was dying. And now I remember those weeks only as a long blur of pain, in which odd trivial moments stand out like snapshots or like fragments of dreams. Thus I remember walking through Wanchai and glimpsing a wall shrine in a shop, and below it a big white modern Frigidaire, and thinking “How incongruous!” and then thinking how strange it was that I could notice such things when Suzie was dying. And I remember strap-hanging in a crowded tram and imagining God saying, “I will save Suzie, but only at the cost of an accident to this tram after you leave it, with total loss of life—you can take your choice,” and wondering what I would do, and then thinking how quickly illness and death scratched through our civilized veneer and found the primitive man—for like the savage I was imagining a God that must be propitiated with human lives. And I remember telling Gwenny and Jeannie for the third time about how Suzie and I had got married in Macao, and both of them crying, and then the comedienne Fifi saying with mock-solemn face that she hoped Suzie had been a virgin as Chinese custom prescribed, and my saying, “I'm afraid we fell to temptation the day before”; and Fifi pretending to look shocked, and Gwenny and Jeannie laughing through their tears. And I remember a woman dying in Suzie's ward when I was visiting, and the loud hollow rattle in the throat that I had never known really happened, and the gaping mouth and the dead staring eyes, and the nervous titter spreading through the ward as if death was funny, and Suzie saying, “That woman is finished. Somebody finishes every day.” And I remember leaving the bar because the juke box was playing “Seven Lonely Days” and I could not bear it, and outside on the quay seeing American sailors arriving in rickshaws, and hearing one of the sailors saying, “Jeeze, I hope she's still here, fellers,” and thinking I heard him say “Suzie,” and hating him, and then joining the sailor at the bar and drinking with him and the sailor saying, “I'm telling you, feller, this kid Suzie can sure put it out,” and not hating him any more but loving him, because life was indivisible and we were all part of each other, and hoping that this was true and that I really believed it, and that it wasn't just the whisky.

And I remember the worst day of all, at the end of the three weeks, when Suzie was so ill that when I came to her bedside she did not even open her eyes, but dragged down my hand under the sheets and held it against her breasts, saying, “Robert, I'm scared. I don't want to die. I'm so scared,” and beginning to cry. She kept my hand clutched against her for an hour, and I thought that tonight would be the end, and I went up to tell Kay at her hostel where she was playing tennis; and she came off the court to speak to me, her legs brown under the tennis skirt, and looking very radiant and fulfilled because she had started an affair and it was going well. And when I told her about Suzie she looked self-conscious because of the radiance, which she could not suppress.

“I'm on duty tonight,” she said. “I'll slip along and see her.”

“I wish you would, Kay. I'm afraid nobody will let me know if anything happens.”

“Don't worry. I'll see to it.”

I stayed in my room until nine waiting for the telephone to ring, and jumping every time a bicycle bell tinkled outside in the street. Then I could not stand waiting alone any longer and told the operator I would be down in the bar. I drank several brandies in the bar and Gwenny came over and asked about Suzie, and then told me that her sister had just got engaged.

“Gwenny, how marvelous,” I said. “I hope the man's got lots of money?”

“No, he is not very rich. He has only two cars.”

“He sounds fine to me.” All the time I was listening with one ear for the phone. “And so you'll be able to give up work?”

“Yes, once my sister is married. I am so happy. We must all have a celebration when Suzie is better.”

The telephone on the bar counter began to ring and all my bones turned to jelly. Typhoo picked up the receiver, and then put it down again on the counter and looked round the bar. She saw me and grinned.

“Hey,
Chow-fan
—some girl friend for you. I think she just heard you got married and wants to make trouble.”

My knees were so weak as I crossed the bar that I was afraid they would give way. I picked up the receiver and Kay's voice said, “Hullo, Robert? All right, don't get alarmed. I just wanted to let you know I'd seen her, and they're giving her another transfusion.”

“But I thought they'd decided against it,” I said; for during the first transfusion she had developed some violent and irrational fear of being filled with a stranger's blood, and had tried to tear the tube from her arm; and the psychological effect had been disastrous and had lasted for days. “The doctor told me he couldn't risk another.”

“I know, but I think he's decided it's now about the only hope,” Kay said. “Anyhow, I'll ring you if there's any news.”

I stayed in the bar until midnight and then went back to my room. I sat on the balcony listening for the telephone and watching the neon signs going out along the water front and the last ferries like luminous caterpillars crawling across the harbor, and the sampans tossing in the dark lapping water along the quay and the junk masts swaying. Once a telephone rang in another room and I started so violently that for minutes afterwards my heart was thudding like a hammer. Then I felt suddenly overcome with exhaustion from the strain of waiting and I went inside and fell on the bed. “She is dead,” I thought. “She has been dead for hours, and they have forgotten to tell me.” I reached out for the telephone to ring the hospital, then thought, “No, that will make it too final.” Then dawn came and I lay watching the gray light creep into the room, and the world being reborn in cold dawn gray without joy and without color.

“She is dead,” I thought. “And the new day is born without her.”

And then there were dull colors appearing among the gray, and then the sun was rising, and I got up and went out onto the balcony, and the town was coming alive and beginning to throb, and the shafts of sunlight were thrusting down like gold bars into the mean little streets, and the harbor was tremulous and glinting, and the first ferry with white dazzling paint was starting out from the pier. And then there were little boats bustling about everywhere, and then all at once a great liner was sliding silently in among them, and all the little boats were blowing their hooters and scurrying out of the way, and the passengers on the liner were crowding at the rails and pointing, and saying, “That's the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank—and that's the Peak!”

And I thought with a sudden burst of joy, “She's all right—Suzie's all right! She must be all right or I'd have heard.” And I quickly washed and shaved, and put on a clean pair of slacks and my best shirt, and stuffed enough money in my pocket to buy flowers and dashed to the door, and then the telephone rang and I stopped.

I stood in the open door and stared at the phone. It gave another long ring and I went over, and stopped again and stood paralyzed with my hand outstretched; and then the bell began to ring in impatient staccato, and then continuously again, and I picked it up, and the ear-piece crackled as the operator went on ringing. And then the crackling stopped and the operator said, “Hullo,” and then Kay's voice said, “Hullo? Hullo, is that Robert?”

“Yes, hullo,” I said.

“Oh, there you are,” she said. “Well, I've good news—the transfusion really did the trick, and this morning she's as bright as a button. . . . Hullo? Hullo, are you there?”

“Yes, I'm here.”

There were queues for the tram and I could not find a taxi, so I took a rickshaw to the bottom of the hill and then climbed up the hill to the hospital, and when I arrived the perspiration was pouring down me in rivers and my hair was soaked as if I had just come from under a shower. I dashed up the stairs and into the ward, and a woman balanced on a bedpan looked so startled that I thought she would fall, but I did not see what happened because by then I had gone past and was beside Suzie, and I was laughing and kissing her, and Suzie was saying, “Good morning, I feel beautiful today.”

“You look beautiful, Suzie.”

“Yes, I didn't mind the blood this time. I think it came from a better person. Oh yes, this time they gave me very nice blood.”

Chapter Eight

“S
uzie, the doctor says that when you come out of hospital we must live somewhere high up. How would you like to live in Japan? I always wanted to go back there to paint, and there are heaps of wonderful spots in the mountains.”

“Yes, that would be nice.” She hesitated. “We would go straight to Japan?”

“Yes, we'd go straight from Hong Kong.”

She tried not to look disappointed. I knew that she had been hoping that first I might take her on a visit to England: she so much wanted to see London, and Piccadilly Circus, and the big shops, and the Queen. But of course I could never take her, for it would mean lies and deception and pretending she was somebody she was not, and then the truth coming out and everybody sniggering, “Have you heard?” No, it was out of the question.

But it rankled that England should be barred to us. It was a kind of challenge. I had an exhibition coming off in London and Roy Ullman, its sponsor, was pressing us to be there. I could just afford it. And one night I suddenly thought, “If Suzie wants to go, and has the courage to face it—why not?” And the next day at the hospital I told her we would go for six weeks.

And so three months later, when she came out of hospital, we went to England. We went by cargo boat and arrived in the spring, when the tired wintry Londoners' faces were thawing into smiles, and the parks bursting into leaf, and the warm bright sunshine in the streets bade us welcome. We lived in a furnished studio which Roy Ullman had found for us in the Fulham Road, but I did not paint much for the first week or two for we were too busy sight-seeing and riding round on the tops of buses. We went to the Tower and St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey, and down the river in a water-bus to Greenwich, and we got lost in the maze at Hampton Court and fed peanuts to the monkeys at the zoo. But the zoo was not the success with Suzie that I had expected, for she was less interested in watching animals than in watching people; and so we left without completing the full tour and lay on the grass in Regent's Park, where she became so absorbed in watching the passers-by that she would have been quite happy to stay there all day.

We also went many times to the theater, for nothing delighted her more. I first avoided straight plays since I supposed that in the theater, as in the cinema, she would find the English dialogue hard to follow, and I took her to an American musical and then to a popular farce; but her theatrical appetite was now whetted, and so after she had dismissed a light comedy with a rather contemptuous “I never saw anybody behave like that,” we graduated to serious contemporary drama. She could understand hardly a word but sat intently, her eyes never leaving the stage; and though I whispered a commentary she would often cut it short with a nod, understanding what was going on from the expressions and actions. And she would remember each play in detail, for she was as impressionable as a child; and days afterwards we would still be discussing whatever human issue had been involved.

And so finally, abandoning all pretension of understanding her taste, I took her off on the top of a bus to Waterloo Road where we queued for the pit at the Old Vic. The play was
Hamlet
, and for Suzie it might just as well have been in Greek; but she enjoyed every moment, and as usual kept interrupting my whispered explanations with the brief nod that meant, “All right, I've got eyes!” And in the interval, her brow puckered with thought, she said:

“You know, that man has got a big worry. I understand very well, because I had a bad uncle like that. And I've been thinking, ‘Supposing my father never died in that junk, but really my bad uncle killed him because he loved my mother. And supposing my mother knew what he had done, and they got married. And supposing I found out. Now, I would have so much worry, I might go a bit mad like that man, too.'”

“And what would you do? What do you think's going to happen?”

“I think perhaps he will kill the bad uncle. But not his mother. That is the worry. He thinks, She did something terrible, my mother. But she is still my mother, she gave me her milk. I can't kill her.'”

“Pretty good, Suzie.”

“I think this author has a big heart. He understands everything.” She looked up at the boxes. “I wonder if he is here?”

I laughed and told her that Shakespeare had been dead for three hundred years. And I was delighted by the discovery that she had not known, for suddenly the drama was no longer an old classic, annotated by scholars and probed by schoolgirls in tunics for their exams, but a new and exciting experience; and seeing it through Suzie's eyes, with her freshness of vision, I could imagine myself an Elizabethan watching its first performance at the Globe.

Suzie's taste for theatergoing was easy enough to satisfy but much more difficult was her desire to see the Queen. She could not leave England without seeing the Queen. One night we stood outside Covent Garden to watch her arrival, but there was already such a dense crowd that we caught not a glimpse of her. I invested fourpence daily in the
Times
, and studied the Queen's official engagements and followed her movements as closely as some anarchist plotting to throw a bomb. Finally one morning, when the Queen was scheduled to attend a function in the City, we went down early to Buckingham Palace to watch her departure. A friendly policeman stationed us near the right gate and we waited two hours, the nucleus for a growing accretion of Swedes, Danes, Swiss-Germans, Arabs, and two American girls whose English made me feel less of an outsider. At last a gleaming limousine crossed the forecourt. Suzie watched calmly. It glided past, the Queen in the back, very pretty and natural and unassumingly spring-clad. A second's glimpse and she was gone, and the polyglot crowd dispersing. Suzie looked satisfied.

“All right,” she said. “Now only one more to see.”

“One more?”

“Princess Margaret.”

I laughed and said we would have a try, but a few days later read in the newspaper that Princess Margaret had left London and would not be returning for a month; and Suzie was very disappointed, though it did not matter so much after seeing the Queen.

Three weeks after our arrival in England the exhibition of my pictures opened at Uliman's Gallery in South Audley Street. The pictures were all of Hong Kong, and 90 per cent of them of the Nam Kok, and since Suzie featured in so many, and often in bar scenes with the sailors, there could be no pretense about her past; and I told Suzie that I did not think she should attend the private view, for it would be too much of an ordeal. However, the evening before the private view she was very thoughtful and preoccupied; and the next morning she came to me with two silk cheongsams over her arm, and said, “Which do you like best?”

“You're not coming, Suzie?”

“Yes.”

“Then wear the yellow—the one you were married in.”

But then in the taxi on the way to the gallery her nerves gave way and she suddenly announced that she could not go through with it, and that she wanted to go back. I told the driver to pull up, and said that we would just sit there for a minute and talk.

“No, I want to go back,” she cried in a sort of panic. “Just let me out and I will go back. I'm sorry, but I'm so scared. I'm so ashamed.”

“You needn't be ashamed, Suzie. You're as good as anybody.”

“No, I'm ashamed. They will all say, ‘She's just a dirty little yum-yum girl.' It's true—I'm no good.”

I nodded toward a woman crossing the road. She was tweedy and upper-middle-class and making for Harrods. I said, “You're as good as that woman. You're worth fifty of her.”

“No.”

“You are, Suzie. I'll tell you about that woman. She's a snob. She's intolerant. She's possessive. She's so overmothered her son that he's turned out a queer. She's bullied and browbeaten her daughter until the poor wretch daren't say boo to a goose. The other daughter's run off with a Jew, so she won't speak to her or have her back in the house. In fact she's a silly old bitch, and you can tell her so from me.” Suzie was silent, and I said, “Go on, tell her off properly. Say, ‘You're a silly old bitch and I'm worth fifty of you.'”

She shook her head. “No.”

“Go on, Suzie. Say it. Give her hell.”

“You're a silly old bitch and I'm worth fifty of you.”

“‘And I've nothing to be ashamed of—I'm proud!”

“No. I'm just a dirty—”

“Say it!”

“I'm proud.”

“‘I'm the proudest person on God's earth!'”

She said it once and then said it again as if she was beginning to feel it, and then she began to smile, and soon she was sitting up proud and straight in the Chinese way, and then we drove on to the gallery, and she looked so proud and poised as we entered the gallery that you would have thought twice before calling her a whore, and if you'd done so you would have felt that it had made you dirtier than it had made her.

In the gallery she stood close by my side and I held her hand, and I did not let it go all afternoon; and sometimes there was tension in her hand, but her eyes were proud and calm and met other people's eyes with a calm level gaze. The gallery was crowded and all the time Ullman was bringing up people to introduce, and at first you could see them thinking, “I know she was a sailor's whore but I must behave naturally,” and so of course they did not behave naturally at all, but were gushing and false, the men trying to be gallant and all but giving her winks, and the women being very patronizing and thinking, “How charming of me to be so nice to her—how broad-minded!” And then they met Suzie's calm level eyes that seemed to be saying, “All right, take a good look, because I've nothing to hide,” and they began to feel her presence in a new way; and at this point a few turned hostile, thinking, “Aha, she thinks because I'm nice to her that she's as good as me,” and with sudden coolness trying to put her back in her place—but most were pleased and relaxed gratefully, and did whatever they could to show their appreciation and respect, and paid her compliments with real warmth.

“My dear, I envy you,” one woman impulsively exclaimed. “I really do—your experience of life! It makes one feel one's lived so narrowly, been so
shut in!
” And she went away in a flurry of frustration as if intending to knock off a policeman's helmet or undress in the street. And another elderly white-haired lady with a silver-topped stick told Suzie that she was beautiful.

“A great beauty, none of the paintings do you justice.” And she turned to me and snapped, “You haven't caught it—none of your paintings have caught it.” This was true, though not due entirely to my deficiencies as a painter; for all the work on exhibition belonged to my earlier days at the Nam Kok when the prettiness of Suzie's round white little face had been immature, and it was only prison and her long illness that had brought the maturity which alone gives real beauty to a woman's face. But when I tried to explain this to the white-haired lady she just said, “Pah! I'd have liked Humphrey to do her—it's a real Humphrey face. If only Humphrey wasn't in America!” And Humphrey, whoever he was, being in America, she went off and bought two of my pictures, telling me later, “I'm not as wild about your stuff as some of the others appear to be. But one day with a bit of luck you may do something good.”

Then it was over and the last viewers had gone, and Roy Ullman was sailing up to us, discreetly wafting scent and beaming all over his white moon face, and saying, “Success! Look at all those delicious, delicious red spots!” He waved a manicured hand round the gallery indicating the number of pictures marked as sold. “I do really, really congratulate you. What a success!”

I said, “It's Suzie who's had the real success today.”

“Oh, quite, of course. Everybody thought her quite, quite enchanting. But naturally it's your pictures—”

He was rather a stupid man. He did not understand the ordeal through which Suzie had passed. But all afternoon I had watched people going out through the glass door to the street, because it was then that they would betray themselves, and there had not been a single snigger, and this was a triumph so much greater than my own that I could think of nothing else. And I left the gallery aglow, not because of the red spots but because of Suzie, and because I was so proud of her.

After the opening of the exhibition we became involved in a social whirl. One invitation led to another and our days were filled with engagements; a lunch party with Ullman and an art critic lasting until four o'clock, two cocktail parties between six and eight, dinner with someone in St. John's Wood, then at midnight down to Chelsea where they'd said, “Don't worry what time—our parties usually last three days.” And it was at that Chelsea party, as a matter of fact, that Suzie suffered her only real bad moment—when another guest, a cow-eyed woman given to making outrageous remarks with the innocent air of discussing the weather, asked her out of the blue what she would do if in London she ran into some sailor she had known in Hong Kong. There was a ghastly silence. The dozen people round us were paralyzed by the remark. Then Suzie said, “I would say, ‘Hello, good morning,'”—and there was a great burst of relieved laughter all on Suzie's side. She had not meant to be funny: her brain had been stupefied with embarrassment and she had said the first thing that had come into her head. But everybody thought her reply wonderful, and it gave her the reputation of a wit.

And it was Suzie who saved me from making a terrible fool of myself. I had begun to enjoy the social life, for the exhibition had had a lot of publicity and I was received everywhere like a lion. Everybody seemed to know me and to admire my work—and if they happened to reveal by some little slip that they had not actually seen it themselves, and were only going on hearsay, I could still flatter myself that they felt ashamed of their omission. In fact we were moving round in a narrow little circle, but it seemed like the whole world, and for the first time in my life I thought, “I'm somebody—I'm really somebody!”