Fragrant Harbour (20 page)

In 1953, I was forty. My birthday fell on a Sunday. I was woken by a waiter with a tray of tea and a telegram:

I had been due to go out on a boat trip to Silvermine Bay,
followed
by a walk and picnic on Lantao, but many of the party had come down with flu in the previous week and the trip was
cancelled
on Friday. I put the telegram in my pocket and decided to take a whole day to walk over Hong Kong Island, something I had not done for a while. I had the kitchen make me up some
sandwiches
and put them in a rucksack along with a canteen of
boiled-and
-cooled water and a few tomatoes. I had had a particular craving for these in camp, and now I ate them whenever I could. For some reason the Chinese don’t like tomatoes.

First I walked all the way straight up Old Peak Road. It is almost vertical and I had to take frequent stops to ease my shouting leg muscles and racing heart. At the stops I would catch my breath and the view would settle. The Hong Kong Bank building, a dozen or so storeys high, still dominated the middle of town. The harbour was as busy as it had been before the war; more so. There was a good view of Government House and its peculiar Japanese tower.

The Peak Tram terminal is over a thousand feet up the mountain and it took me more than an hour to get there. There was a
sprinkling
of Sunday walkers, people who either lived on the Peak or who had taken the tram up for a constitutional. The proximity of St John’s church to the lower tram station meant a few of them had come straight from services in their suits and frocks and hats, with their well-scrubbed children, amah-less for the only time in the week. In shirtsleeves and shorts and boots, dressed for serious walking, I felt conspicuous and physically virtuous.

I set out down the far side of the hill, on the track that led down to Pok Fu Lam reservoir. Where the path led off from the circular road around the Peak, a couple were comforting a boy who had run on ahead of them, fallen over, and cut his knee so that the blood ran down into his white socks. I stopped at the reservoir for a ham sandwich and a couple of tomatoes and then pushed on down towards Aberdeen. It was hectic, and very many people were out and about, but I still didn’t feel as tired as I wanted to so I kept walking, along the side of the road that ran up and down and
eventually
to Deep Water Bay, where, properly footsore, I thought I could have a beer at the golf club and call a taxi to take me home.

Then, as I started down into the bay proper, I saw it: a big new house, about three-quarters built, with a number of Chinese workmen moving around in front of it. The building had a wide view over the bay. Its long veranda had open French windows. Although it was a mere fifty yards or so above the beach there was a swimming pool, a rarity in Hong Kong then. The style of the building was European rather than British colonial.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked the oldest and glummest looking of the workmen, standing in a singlet with his hands on his hips.

‘American man build house, today we hear he’s gone broke,’ he said in Cantonese worse even than mine. ‘We don’t know if we’re going to get paid.’

‘That’s bad luck,’ I said. ‘Does the American man live in Hong Kong?’

‘Singapore. Or America.’

‘Can I look?’

He turned to the other men and shrugged. I came through the gate and walked up the short circular drive to the front door. The view out over Deep Water Bay – about a minute or so’s walk away – was perfect. Inside, the house was much bigger than it looked from outside, stretching out backwards and up the slope. It was so big it was hard to imagine what use the owner would have had in mind for it. I later found out he had been turned down for membership by the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club some years before and, in a mixture of pique and revenge and
self-celebration
, decided to create a sort of private yacht club for
himself
and his friends – which was why every room had a sea view. 

Beryl appointed herself chief sceptic. Leaning on the walking stick she had begun using, as much, I suspected, as a stage prop as a necessity, she said:

‘The point isn’t, is it a nice spot, which it obviously is; the point is, will anybody come?’

‘People love to have somewhere else to go. It’s like Lantao or Fanling or something only much more convenient. You can come here for a drink after work.’

‘This isn’t India,’ Beryl said. I said:

‘Beryl, I have no idea what you think you mean.’

We were standing outside the gates of the house at Deep Water Bay on the Tuesday evening after I had found it. A beautifully fresh breeze was blowing in off the sea.

‘It’s like a cross between the Mediterranean and Scotland,’ she said, softening a bit.

‘Thank you.’

I had made enquiries. The owner, Jackie Lee, was an American businessman who had made and lost a fortune in oil speculation in China during the thirties. He returned to America, did well out of the war, then went back to Shanghai and lost all his money, essentially because he bet his assets on Chiang Kai-Shek winning the civil war. This house had been planned to be his Hong Kong retreat and in its three-quarters-finished state it was, although not cheap, the closest thing to a bargain one could find in Hong Kong.

‘Good feng shui,’ said Maria. I had been due to meet her for tea; when I called her to say I had to cancel because of this business, she asked to come too. It wasn’t at all clear to me that she had ever stayed in a hotel; though with Maria that would not be a bar to her having strong views on the subject. She seemed to be
enjoying
the spectacle of Beryl – with whom she got on well – and me.

‘You’re a Catholic nun, Maria. You’re not supposed to believe in feng shui,’ I said, irritated by her amusement.

‘There is a distinction between superstition and belief. Many a devout Western Father touches wood and refuses to walk under ladders.’

‘It’s not at all –’ I began.

‘What about transport?’ asked Beryl. We talked a little more about all that. The quick subtropical sunset came and went and
lights came on here and there around the bay. We got into the hotel car I had ordered and went back to the Empire. Ah Ng had made crab salad and shepherd’s pie, the daily specials (an old idea of Masterson’s: ‘People love a clubby feel’). I had divided the main dining room into two so that there was now a European room, decorated with wood panels and dark curtains, and a Chinese one, with gold-leaf dragons painted on black lacquer and clever use of mirrors – like a tart’s boudoir. We were in the European room.

There was a question I had been meaning to ask Maria. For whatever reason, it was one that made me feel nervous. I waited until we had started in on the shepherd’s pie and she had drunk one of her infrequent glasses of red wine.

‘Maria, do you ever hear news of Ho-Yan?’

She put down her knife and fork.

‘Wo Ho-Yan. He was someone I sent to Thomas from the
mission
in Canton,’ she said to Beryl. ‘He is still working for his brother. I knew them both from childhood.’

‘Bloody hell,’ said Beryl. ‘Wo Ho-Yan? Wo Man-Lee’s brother? Biggest hoods in the whole colony.’

‘He is a gangster,’ said Maria. ‘What has happened is exactly the thing I most feared since I first met Ho-Yan in Canton many years ago. But perhaps I was trying above myself. You can help people, but without God’s grace you cannot transform them, and if people refuse that grace, then there is nothing you can do.’ She turned and looked straight at me and went on: ‘I know you did everything you could to help Ho-Yan, Thomas. There is nothing more you could have done.’

‘Ho-Yan was a nice boy and I don’t think his brother is rotten all the way through,’ I said. ‘Wo did things for us during the war anyway, and we were grateful enough for it at the time.’

‘He only ever does things for himself,’ said Maria. ‘You do not know of what you speak.’

‘Well I must say, that’s a facer,’ said Beryl. ‘You kept quiet about that one, Tom. I bet you did not know Wo Man-Lee owns more newspapers than anyone else in the colony. All Chinese, obviously. Doesn’t take sides – he’s too clever for that. Some of them pro-British, some wildly anti-. It all grew out of those numbers rackets. Remember those newspapers we saw that day,
the ones used in the numbers racket? That was him. Lots of other things too. First they gave the papers away to communicate the numbers, then they started to put ads in, then they realised they got better ads if they had real articles, then they gradually turned them into proper newspapers. If that’s not a contradiction in terms. All Triad up to their eyeballs, goes without saying. Don’t expect the papers make nearly as much money as the drugs and the girls but it’s still not a bad source of cash flow. Ho-Yan is the front man for the legitimate side of the business. He does the building stuff and the paper stuff. We’ve bid against them a
couple
of times and needless to say we lost. Hard to compete over a tender when the chap doing the buying is worried about waking up minus a couple of limbs. All the people at the heart of the shop are from the same place. Fukien toughies. Wo Man-Lee only really trusts people from the same village. If they let him down, he takes revenge on all the relatives. Very clever, very nasty. I say, the pie’s damn good today.’

I tried to imagine Wo Man-Lee presiding over a stable of
newspapers
and other ramifying subdivisions of a criminal empire. It was not difficult. Ho-Yan I had a little more trouble with – but only when I saw it in the abstract, as the idea of Ho-Yan the
criminal
. When I thought of it as a family affiliation, a form of loyalty, it made perfect sense.

These were the years when one began to hear the word ‘Triad’ used often, usually with a lip-smacking relish or enjoyable shudder, and always in connection with hoodlum outrages. It helped that a favourite instrument of retribution amongst
small-time
, street-level Triads was the meat cleaver. Chief Inspector Watts was a particularly good source of stories about
choppings
. He would stand at the bar and describe these atrocities to a steadily expanding circle of appalled, enthralled listeners. I remember one about his going into a restaurant in response to an emergency call and being greeted on the threshold with a small mound of severed arms. That was the way people liked to think of criminal culture in Hong Kong. It was to do with lurid stories about meat cleavers and initiation rites. But most of the
infrastructure
of Hong Kong was built by the levy on legal gambling. If illegal gambling was as extensive and as lucrative, where was all that money going? And then there were the drugs and the girls 
and the Triads’ ‘legitimate’ businesses. Nobody wanted to think about it.

‘Golly,’ said Beryl. ‘Let’s not dwell on it. Tom: so tell me what you’re expecting your occupancy rate to be, and what you’ll need it to be to break even?’

We got on with talking about money while we ate our
shepherd
’s pie.

In the event, I bought the house from Jackie Lee’s bankruptcy receivers. I renamed it the Deep Water Bay Hotel. It took two years to get through the legalities and overcome a series of obstacles too tiresome to enumerate, each of which seemed certain to derail the whole arrangement. As for the money, I used my share of the Plough cash from David, borrowed more from the Bank, brought Beryl in as a sleeping partner, and wrote a difficult letter to Masterson. I said what I intended to do, offered him a sleeping partner’s share in the new business, and added that I wanted to keep running the Empire – after all, a vastly bigger hotel – while setting up Deep Water Bay. Ah Wing would be the manager under me. I thought it was fifty–fifty that Masterson would accept. About a month after I wrote with the proposal, I had this letter:

The actual building work was surprisingly quick. Beryl’s firm took on the contract to complete the project. I asked her to retain the workmen who had been employed on the house to date. She was sceptical – ‘I have workmen of my own to employ, you know’ – but she saw the force of my argument about fairness and about their knowledge of the building. She insisted however that the site foreman – the man in the singlet – be answerable to her foreman, who in turn would report to her.

‘We can’t insist on that. He’ll lose face.’

‘Does he speak English?’

‘Don’t know. Not much, I shouldn’t think.’

‘Then we’ll say it’s because we need the overall foreman to speak English. All his boys will still report only to him. It’ll be fine.’

On site, seeing Beryl give orders to the two crew chiefs, I understood why she had been a success at the head of Marler’s. As a woman in authority she was instantly recognisable as a
figure
to these men – she was a Dragon Lady, tough, autocratic, formidable, her authority unquestioned. This was a role and a
status
she would not have had in this kind of work back in England. The men hung on her words in a way that no English workmen would have. It was strange and in a way terrible, the extent to which Marler’s death had liberated her and given her a new life.

After Deep Water Bay had been up and running for some time, I went back to England for the first time in fifteen years. I felt that I could afford to. The hotel was going better than I had expected, and the restaurant much better. At this rate I would pay off my debts in two to three years and begin making a profit within four.

There were differences about this trip to England. Last time I had described it to myself as going home. This time I was going back. Also this time I flew. It was my first time in an aeroplane; that seemed a somehow embarrassing fact, and I made a point of not telling anyone. The plane was a BOAC Boeing 707, much
bigger
than I had imagined, and the flight took a day, with stops in Singapore, Delhi, Bahrain, and Rome. At Delhi, in the middle of the night, I bought two Indian-made watches as presents for David’s boys. The proprietor of the shop, the only one open, was a Sikh, and the sight of his turban bending over the display case
as he fished out the watches gave me a twinge of nostalgia for Hong Kong. I stretched my legs at each of the airports, which were less undifferentiated than they have since become. Pilots and crew changed regularly but the passengers did not. That made the trip seem even more exhausting than it was.

David came to meet me at Heathrow. We sent each other
pictures
now and then, so I was braced for changes. The reality was still a shock. This middle-aged man, as broad as he was tall, his hair now grey, with a chubby caricature of my brother’s face – that was David? The giant who stood beside him seemed also to be taking a mysterious amount of interest in my arrival. Then I realised it was Martin. David’s letters had said something about the boy ‘shooting up’. David saw my look.

‘Anne’s brothers are both over six foot,’ he said as we embraced. He was so broad my arms did not meet around his back, and he felt not so much heavier as denser, stronger.

‘Well, at least you’re no taller,’ I said. Martin picked up my bag. He was lanky; one might have thought he was my son rather than David’s. He was quiet, with lively eyes. David and I squeezed into the Morris Minor as Martin got behind the wheel.

‘Dad’s a terrible driver,’ explained Martin. ‘Much too
impatient
.’ From the back seat, David gave an amused grunt. As a father, he was much less of a disciplinarian and patriarch than I would have expected.

Travelling around the outskirts of London and down to Kent, England seemed huge, spacious, provincial. We drove for hours – a novel sensation. We left the city behind. Martin asked me questions about the flight and about the East while I looked out of the window at all the various greens.

Anne was waiting for us when we got to the Plough. She wiped her hands on her apron before taking mine. David’s a nicer man because of you, I thought. She still seemed clever and pretty and not worn down.

‘It’s been much too long,’ she said, tears in her eyes.

The Plough was exactly as it had been only busier, shinier, cleaner, and therefore somehow newer. Business was very good. Tom was involved in running the pub, while Martin worked in an estate agent’s in Faversham and, I gathered, chased girls. I spent two weeks at the Plough with them and then two weeks
travelling in France. It felt like the first proper holiday I had ever had. I didn’t think I had much to learn from the hotels but I loved the food and the trains and the pace of life. I went down to the south and pottered around the Mediterranean coast for a few days. I spent a night in Marseilles, visiting it for the first time since my trip out on the
Darjeeling
; since the day I met Maria.

I liked the Med. In some small ways it reminded me of Macau. My schoolboy French came out more readily than I had thought possible. The papers, which I read with the aid of a dictionary, were full of France’s difficulties with Algeria.

The day before I was to fly back home I took the train down to Godalming to see Masterson. Again there was that sense of greenness and space. His sister had given me directions from the station: it was a ten-minute walk uphill to a house he had more than once described to me as ‘classic stockbrokers’ Tudor’. I found it easily: The Elms. (There were no elms.) There was a short curved gravel driveway and a wide double-fronted building with white paint and black beams. I felt nervous as I went to the door.

One of Masterson’s nieces answered my ring. She was pretty and businesslike, and was dressed for tennis.

‘Uncle Alan’s in the sitting room,’ she said and led me out of the hallway, which had an elephant’s-foot umbrella stand. We went into the sitting room. From here one could see the lawn, much bigger than I would have predicted, with large clumps of colourful shrubs – pink and blue – at the far end, and a tennis court to one side, behind a hedge, where I could hear but not see a match taking place. Masterson was sitting in an armchair with the sunlight behind him. He took a moment or two to stand up. Because he was backlit it took me a few seconds to register his appearance. Perhaps that was deliberate on his part – no sudden shock. It’s the kind of thing he thought of. He was almost unrecognisably older, and the history of a painful failure to recover from Stanley was imprinted on him. Since the war he had never been the same again. One could read that at a glance.

‘Tom,’ he said. His voice, too, had become an old man’s, with a scratch in it. The effect was querulous, which he himself never was, or rather never had been. ‘Darling, how would it look in the paper if our guest was to perish of thirst?’

‘I’m so sorry, Mr Stewart,’ she briskly said. ‘Can I bring you something?’

‘I’m fine, thank you.’

‘She’s too keen to get out on the court, which your dividends paid for,’ Masterson said. To her credit, the niece simply giggled and skipped out.

‘Lunch at one,’ she called over her shoulder.

The general effect of the day was close to that of visiting
someone
in hospital. There was the same difficulty in finding things to say, the same sense that the other party’s energies were being conserved for the real, important work of his health. Masterson was in a painful way very insistent on reminding everyone – his sister, his two nieces, and their two bland young male friends – of my work in Hong Kong, and how their prosperity was sustained by it. He made a pointed reference to the subject every five or ten minutes. I was, before long, feeling obliged to make apologetic glances around the table every time he did so. He spoke at length about how much he disliked England and its climate,
unfriendliness
, inefficiency, endemic sloth, punitive taxation, hypocrisy, narrow-mindedness, and ‘grey-mindedness’ – there was a touch of the old Masterson in that last phrase. His sister, I could see behind her tight smile, took all this personally, as perhaps she was intended to. As soon as they decently could – not all that soon, after a meal progressing from smoked salmon to coffee – the women and their guests excused themselves, and clearing-up noises from the kitchen were succeeded by happy sounds from the tennis court.

Masterson and I moved to the sitting room. Every now and then Catherine or one of her daughters would look in and see if we ‘needed anything’. At four-fifteen I announced that it was time for my train. Masterson got to his feet.

‘Well, you know how I feel about you and what you’re doing,’ he said. ‘I hope they didn’t seem too ungrateful.’ I suddenly understood: he was talking about himself, about his feeling that his English family had no idea what he had done, who he had been. Here he was somebody else, and his past didn’t matter. It was the reason for leaving home put into reverse. People left England so that it wouldn’t matter who they had been; but if they returned home, it also didn’t matter who they had been when
they were away. Nothing would be more draining for a man like Masterson than to be in other people’s debt, to constantly feel an obligation to be grateful.

‘I hope you’ll come back out and see us soon,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Goodbye.’ Once I was out of sight at the end of the driveway I broke into a run, to make sure I caught the train.

The Cold War was good for the hotel business in Hong Kong. It corresponded with the years of the boom in all sorts of ways – the population exploding, the economy taking off, the shanties going down and the blocks of flats going up. Before very long Hong Kong had the largest proportion of publicly owned housing in the world, much of it paid for by the state’s monopoly on legal gambling. I should also mention that the Chinese regard living on welfare as a shamefully important loss of face, which helps to keep government costs down. I am told that this circumstance is different elsewhere.

But in addition to all that, the Cold War itself was good for us. It kept Hong Kong the centre of operations for anyone in the West with an interest in China. This guaranteed a stream of customers in the form of soldiers, spies, soldier–spies, businessmen,
compradors
, would-be compradors, aspiring Hong founders, thieves, buccaneers, refugees, journalists, salesmen and wheeler-dealers, and opportunists of every description. Both the Empire and the Deep Water Bay Hotels thrived. Americans did not find it tremendously easy to gain admission to the Hong Kong Club, for the predictable reasons and also because President Roosevelt had wanted Hong Kong to be handed over to China at the end of the war. But there were a lot of Americans around – it was where many of them came for R & R from Vietnam, in addition to all the other Cold War reasons – and they liked to have somewhere to go, and we made them very welcome at the Empire. One of our best customers, Cleveland Weston, was a CIA man who came to the hotel when he wanted to be seen doing things in public. That was good for business too. So was the Hong Kong Club’s
continuing
race bar. Chef Ng went from strength to strength. In my view he never quite scaled the summits known to poor Ah Wang, but feelings of other sorts were perhaps at work in my thinking that. I more or less lived at Deep Water Bay and either drove in to
work – still possible, without losing one’s mind, in the Hong Kong of the early sixties – or had one of either hotel’s drivers take me. Once a week I would spend a night in one of the rooms at the Empire, taking whichever one happened to be free; a Masterson trick to test for flaws in the plumbing, the air conditioning, or the mattresses.

Professor Cobb’s reading group slowed down during these years. Our French intellectual, Prévot, now had two small children and as he himself claimed, ‘these days I read only Babar.’ A former Miss Simmons, now Madame Prévot, had made concerted attempts to tidy him up, with only partial success. He was
usually
wearing perhaps one cleaned and pressed garment, cancelled out by two dirty, crumpled ones. On one of his last visits to Cobb’s room he wore a crisp white shirt set off with a tie which appeared to have had an entire egg yolk decanted over it. He seemed happy and spoke often about moving back to Paris.