A Mind of Winter (6 page)

“Welcome,” he said warmly, caressing my hand. “Welcome to your new home.”

He showed me into a long narrow room, sparsely appointed but clean, where the girl who had greeted me at the door stood meekly by a long trestle table.

“Toung-Yang, please assemble the girls,” Han Shu said. “I would like to introduce you all to your new
school mistress.
” He enunciated the words as if he were saying
Her Majesty the Queen.

The girl soon returned, followed by eight or nine others of varying ages and heights. They were all dressed in a similar and decidedly odd fashion: garments that fit perfectly and yet seemed incongruous, on the wrong scale. Then I realized what it was. The girls were wearing women’s evening gowns of a dated European style that had been altered to suit the contours of a young girl’s shape.

* * *

That first meeting with my new wards was tense. The girls remained silent and would not look me directly in the eye.

Their reticence, however, soon lifted. Within days, the girls were talking happily in the school room, using the street slang I quickly learned to decipher, and showing me their few, but prized childish treasures.

My days fell into a pleasant routine. I would rise early, help prepare breakfast, and eat with my charges; then, while the girls cleared the dishes, I set up the schoolroom for the day’s lessons. Mercifully, my lesson plans came back to me, though I had to strip things back to basics. The small cache of books I’d brought with me from England sufficed for teaching basic courses in English; as their language improved, I would be able to use the novels in my collection to teach literature along with a little history.

Classes ended at two o’clock, when my pupils retired for a siesta. I spent the afternoons and evenings alone in my room—reading, correcting homework, preparing the next day’s lessons. When my work was done, I would lose myself slowly in the smoke of the pipe. It felt like an oddly pure existence.

Sometimes I would find myself casting a thought back to the street where my lodgings had been. Then, I would see the lone scrawny tree in the middle of the block and imagine creaking up the wooden stairs to my room. Invariably, I would think of Barnaby and wonder how he was getting along. I missed Barnaby—I could not deny this—yet I had no real desire to see him.

Behind everything was Robert. Behind and within the life I was living here. An uncanny, parallel world. I kept the postcard Robert had sent me in the cardboard box by my bed; on occasion, I would take it out and look at it. It was from this postcard that I’d realized he now called himself
Oscar Harcourt,
joining the first name of his friend from the Internment Center with the surname of his wealthy British mentor, Earnest Frederick Harcourt
,
creating an unlikely hybrid. But then, what was there in a name? The postmark read,
Long Island, New York
; the address he gave was that of his solicitor. Long Island—oddly evocative. Islands were places of respite, of escape; how much better, then, an island that was long, a place one could long to be, a place one could belong.

I saw Robert’s face, felt his touch; I would close my eyes and feel his warmth, find myself back in my London boarding house—those long hours, hazy with pleasure—find myself gazing once more into eyes that were searching and keen. No man had ever looked at me that way; I’d found it settling.

Robert hadn’t wanted anything from me, not the way other men had: only that I allow myself to be seen. Instead of the little ploys that go on between people, between lovers, there was, between us, only nakedness and light. With Robert, the ancient agitation that had accompanied me from my earliest memory simply dissolved. In its place, at least for a time, had been a gentle shared pleasure: unhurried, undemanding, undeclared.

“I’d like to know how it was,” Robert had said, his usually guarded eyes now piercing. “Your English childhood, before everything happened to the world. I can’t help thinking of Wordsworth—his daffodils, the sparkling lake he talks about in “The Prelude.” I’ve read him only in German translation, so I’m sure the version in my mind is heavily accented, and therefore inaccurate.”

“I grew up in Manchester. Not the most romantic of English cities, I’m afraid. I doubt Wordsworth would ever have been moved to write poetry about it.”

Robert had taken my hand and stroked it. “I’d like to hear. Really.”

I found myself telling Robert about a little girl in a white cotton dress with an eyelet collar. Of a mother who doted on her husband and only child, who’d made a haven of their cottage: lavender and geraniums in the window box, handstitched quilts on the beds. A childhood spent running with friends in the cobbled alley at the back of their houses, playing games on the grassy patch in front of the schoolhouse. Picnics in the surrounding countryside, threading daisy chains while my mother unpacked the lunch and my father napped on a blanket in the shade of a tree. And hunting for treasures: shiny pieces of quartz and flint, tiny bright ladybirds, and fragments of speckled eggshell.

I watched Robert’s face as I talked; saw in the softening of his features that each brushstroke I painted fulfilled the hopes of the portrait he had unwittingly commissioned—this picture of haven and innocence, of a child coming to full flower, untainted, free, within the benevolent bosom of her family.

At some point, I realized that this is what had made a refuge of our lovemaking: Robert’s utter belief in my goodness, in the idea of an eyelet-collared dress, lovingly ironed. It was there in my soul, this other self that could have been, should have been, that was every child’s birthright and shining hope. That inner spark that would one day become the North Star that Archibald was so fond of talking about, and without which the heavens would only smolder, empty and black.

Robert had given me this. And, for a time, it had held: my innocence, his longing, the belief in the construct we each clung to and shared.

Except there had been no picnics, no simple quartz and eggshell treasures, no father I had known, and certainly no white eyelet dress. Perhaps it was the knowledge of my own deceit that aroused in me the gnawing suspicion about Robert. If we were two of a kind, would
he
not also have lied to
me
?

The logic was inexorable. What secrets, like mine, did Robert have to hide?

I did not consciously decide to spy on Robert. I simply found myself, one afternoon, arriving an hour early at his club, where we were to meet. I slipped into the elegant building across the street and waited in the vestibule, peering through the glass panels of the door out onto the street. A car pulled up to the curb and Robert emerged, wearing a navy overcoat with wide lapels. A fellow member, leaving the club, engaged him in conversation and I could see the seriousness of Robert’s expression; he was nodding, his intelligent face taut with concern. The other man I saw in profile, the even small features arranged in impenetrable aristocratic politeness, though the hands, clenched together before him, betrayed agitation. There was something odd about them—as if the two men were engaged in some sort of charade. Had I imagined it, or did the other man cast a furtive glance in my direction? Once again, I wondered if Robert were up to something, guarding a secret beyond that of his origins.

There must have been clues, clues I chose to close my eyes to. How could there not have been?

I was struck by how much alike the two men looked: both slimly built and moderately tall, both with neat, fair hair. And oddly similar, too, in their bearing, the way each seemed to lean forward while remaining erect. Would a stranger walking by have seen it?

They shook hands, and then the man consulted his pocket watch and disappeared through the glass and brass door. Robert remained there some minutes before drawing a pair of gloves from his pocket and carefully pulling them on, his face transformed: private and mild and closed. Then he walked toward the street corner and disappeared to the right.

I pushed against the heavy doors; for a moment, it seemed as if the thick panes held my fate in their glassy palms. When they closed behind me, I had the unnerving feeling of being swallowed into a looking glass, of crossing to the other side. The cold leapt up at my face.

At the corner I turned right: there he was, Robert, up ahead. I became aware of something unusual about the condition of my own feet: a buoyancy that seemed to belong to the pavement, as if it were guiding me toward a destination. I was aware, too, of an irrational urge, every now and then, to turn and look behind me, as if I were the one being followed.

Robert kept a good pace. I worked hard to maintain the right distance, adapting my own stride to his while keeping a certain number of steps behind. When Robert made a turn, I worried that by the time I also turned, he’d no longer be in sight. Then something about his manner seemed to change—as if he’d decided suddenly that he were looking for something, something specific, which he knew he would find. I could feel my nerve slipping; I wanted to turn back, go home to my comfortable lodgings. But then Robert broke into a run, gained the corner, and made another turn. We were on a dark street; the height and closeness of the buildings muted the dim light coming from the sky. The pavement was uneven, slabs of old slate unbalanced by a hundred years of swollen tree roots. Up ahead, Robert was moving effortlessly, unhampered by the cracks and depressions and jutting slate edges underfoot. And then he came to an abrupt halt.

I pulled up against the façade of a town house. Robert, dwarfed by a church, was looking up at the steeple, which I could see presided over a massive jagged hole in the roof; one of many bombed-out buildings throughout the city, awaiting repair. I could almost feel the dissolving of his tension; this was the place he’d been looking for. He climbed the steps, holding the thick stone rail. The huge medieval door swung open; a black velvet shadow swept across the steps, soft and unsavory as a bat’s wing. I waited several minutes then followed.

Inside the vault of the church, the smell of stone: limey and cold. Gray light, a thickness of sky pouring through the belly of the space, the ragged edges of the hole etched onto the mosaic floor. A feeling of being underwater: a fluid, slowmoving haze. Robert was nowhere to be seen. I slid into a pew at the back.

The silence was ruptured by a gentle, precise murmur, which echoed strangely in the disrupted space. The words became clearer, louder: no longer a whisper but boldly spoken. Latin, a prayer of some kind. I rested my head on the pew before me, breathed in the scent of frankincense and old candles baked into the wood.

And then I saw Robert, kneeling in the front row, directly beneath the open sky. Beside him lay mounds of rubble not yet cleared away: large asymmetrical stones, chunks of ancient beam. He was bowed over, and though his voice rang out clearly, his shoulders heaved with grief.

I don’t know when I first admitted to myself what I must have known from the start; walking along the corridor, perhaps, seeing, through a crack in the door, three of the younger girls sitting in front of the dressing table, leaning close into the mirror, chatting together while carefully applying color to their faces. I saw again the glossy lips, skillful gray lines encircling the eyes, the shading of those broad smooth cheekbones—and the flush of excitement, the guarded knowledge in the back of the eyes.

It is true I had heard things that first night, sitting in my room with the door ajar: the hushed voices of the girls as they made their way downstairs, conspiratorial and childlike. The sounds of people coming and going; I couldn’t be sure—there was quite a distance between my tiny room at the back and the main entrance. But my interest had soon waned. Closing the door, I picked up my pipe, along with a book, then lost the house, the girls, and their goings-on as I sank into that marshy green place and watched the words dance on the page before they exploded with images.

“Do sit down,” Han Shu said, gesturing toward a large white couch. “Well, now. How are the classes coming along?”

Compared with his rooms at the café, the office Han Shu kept at Manor House was a simple affair, dominated by a plain ashwood desk and an overstuffed couch where I now sat. In one corner, two wicker armchairs were placed opposite each other, separated by a small wicker and glass table.

“We have to make up for lost time but I think we’re making progress,” he continued, giving me a probing look. “I believe you’re ready to assume another duty I’ve had in mind for you from the start. Something that requires judgment—and ingenuity. Quite naturally, the time comes for each of the girls to go out and make her way in the world. I feel it is incumbent on me to keep the house full. Besides, there is always room for a little—how might one put it—expansion.

“In the past, the girls have come to us in one of two ways. Family members, usually the mother or father—poor people, it goes without saying—hear about Manor House and bring the girl. I must then make a decision. Will she fit in? Is she equipped with the necessary talents to make use of what we have to offer? It is not an easy process. The parent gets upset if I send the girl away—and even when I take her in, the parent can get ideas. We’ve had some unpleasant encounters, to say the least. I prefer, therefore, to take in orphans, or children who’ve been abandoned. The streets are full of them, as you know.”

Han Shu leaned forward conspiratorially.

“And now, with all the refugees from the provinces, swarming into Shanghai. I’ve seen mothers leaving children by the side of the road—just walking away. Perhaps they imagine that some kindly stranger will be able to feed their children better than they have any hope of doing.

“That’s where we come in. Me—and now, you.”

Han Shu gave a rare grin that showed his stained teeth to full advantage.

“
We
are those kindly strangers. Even so, we have to be careful not to make a mistake. Once a girl is here, there is no sending her back.” Han Shu clapped his hands. “This is where your experience can help. I don’t expect any of the girls are quite ready to leave at the moment, but we could accommodate two, maybe three new additions. One at a time, over the course, say, of a month. The right girls, mind you; I cannot impress on you enough how important that is.”