Fragrant Harbour (25 page)

I had a vision of Masterson’s Surrey nieces, each with a
well-fed
husband and a tennis court. I said: ‘How much?’

He told me.

Those years were brightened for me by the activities of a new, very deeply flawed institution, the ICAC: Independent Commission Against Corruption. The Riots and subsequent
scandals
had brought this subject as close to the surface as it had ever been; and a huge scandal involving a corrupt British police inspector – as opposed, of course, to the other sort of British police inspector – meant that something had to be done. That something was the ICAC, a body with powers to arrest and
interrogate
anyone it wanted on almost any pretext. A broad swathe of the police retired, fled, or was forced out of the service. Best of all, Chief Inspector Watts was arrested and died of a heart attack while in custody.

I went to see Connor from the
South China Morning Post
. I asked him to choose a place where there would be no journalists, and no one who recognised me. We had a drink in a Wanchai bar. In one corner a group of British sailors had gone past the louder stages of intoxication and were now quietly, slurringly incapable. Connor looked around the room fondly.

‘Haven’t been here in ages,’ he said. ‘Had a reputation for being a bit lively at one time. American navy used to come here too. One night there’s a British ship and an American ship in
harbour
at the same time. You’re more or less guaranteed trouble. There’s about fifty Yanks and about fifty limeys, all bombed out of their minds. The Yanks’ ships are dry, don’t forget, so they go even more mental than our lot do. They’re sizing each other up all evening. Finally the biggest and ugliest American goes over to the biggest and ugliest Brit. Complete silence. The Yank says, “So how come you limey bastards aren’t fighting in Vietnam?” The Brit gets up and says, “‘O Chi Minh ain’t asked us yet.” Jesus fuck. All hell lets loose. Takes a couple of hundred military police to break the fight up and the whole place is completely
demolished
by the end. Wrote it up for the paper, page one.’

‘The landlord must have been pleased.’

‘Well yeah he was, actually. It was insured for double its value and he cleaned up. Bought a place in the New Territories.’

Connor took a long gulp of his San Miguel. He had, as he explained, switched from whiskey to beer to ‘take it easy for a bit’. Even in the dark bar he did not look well.

‘So what can I do for you?’ he asked.

‘It may be more the other way around,’ I said. I slid across the table a manilla envelope with a copy of the notes I had taken after Watts’s visit. Connor raised his eyebrows. ‘I won’t spoil it for you,’ I said, and left a hundred-dollar bill for the drinks.

It took a couple of weeks before I saw my act bear fruit. Connor did not tell the story about Maria directly – I had not expected him to – but he wrote a front-page article saying the
Post
now had ‘strong evidence’ linking the late Chief Inspector Watts with Triad boss M. L. Wo, currently in exile in Taipei. Watts’s
reputation
was posthumously destroyed. It did not bring Maria back but it did make me feel slightly better.

I did not exactly retire after the sale of the Empire, but I began taking life more slowly. I had in fact considered approaching some backers and making a counterbid to buy out the old hotel, but then decided that I was simply not able to summon up the energy. The thought of the large cash lump, versus a vigorous business–political battle followed by years spent squeezing every
available drop of cash out of the business – well, that choice was not too difficult to see clearly. I spent the weeks at Deep Water Bay and the weekends on Cheung Chau. My life was more simple and more limited than it had ever been. I cannot claim that I was happier than before, but my circumstances had fewer moving parts, and there was less to go wrong.

The early eighties brought one public event which attracted a great deal of attention in the wider world. Mrs Thatcher went to Beijing, overexcited by her recent victory in the Falklands, and struck attitudes the Chinese found so obnoxious that the question of Hong Kong’s sovereignty was publically reopened. There could of course be only one conclusion, once the issue had been raised. For the previous several decades the subject of the 1997 handover had never been brought up except by visitors. Now it became impossible to leave one’s room without having a
conversation
about it. The topic was discussed at great length, from every angle, with wild oscillations in both private and public mood not just weekly or daily but in the course of a single
conversation
. I found it easy not to join in; it is easy to be stoical about something when one doesn’t care. The received wisdom in the colony changed. Previously it had always focused on the fact that the Communists did not recognise the unequal treaties which had ceded Hong Kong: ‘All rubbish, old boy. The Commies don’t want the place back, it’s full of Triads and Kuomintang, and they don’t recognise the treaties anyway. They’ve got a standing army of two million soldiers – what are we going to do, say boo and make them run away?’ Then it became: ‘The Chinese don’t need to take Hong Kong over, they’re buying it up. Look at the ownership of –’ (fill in the blank with name of any large new Hong Kong
company
). ‘All Peking money. They need the foreign revenue, old boy. Why rock the boat? By 1997 they’ll own most of the place anyway. It’s not in their interest to make it go wrong.’ Now it became: ‘All bets are off. We’re moving our corporate offices to the Bahamas.’

To me it had been perfectly obvious for years that the Chinese would take Hong Kong over in 1997. Why on earth wouldn’t they? I thought that if I was still alive – I would be eighty-four – it would be then that I would consider moving back to England. But I would first see which way the wind was blowing. My will, which left everything to David and his children, had long since
been settled. With any luck, Wo Man-Lee would be dead by then, and I wouldn’t much care what I did. But things did not work out like that.

Professor Cobb, professor emeritus as he then was, died early in 1983. After his retirement in 1975 he’d stayed in the colony, though his research trips and fellowships meant he was often away. When he came back he would always give me a
remarkably
Cobbish view of wherever he had just been, saying, for instance, after spending three months in Berkeley, ‘rather damp climate’. He added, ‘Not at all benign for the preservation of manuscripts.’ After a comparable period at the Sorbonne, he said nothing about the temptations, bright lights, cultural life, or
cuisine
of Paris, but merely: ‘Some of the people there are … very sound.’ He spoke about
The Lives of the Emperors
in the same
distant
, amused, embarrassed way, as if it were a guilty pleasure, or an indiscretion he couldn’t quite bring himself to regret. Jane Cobb, who made no secret of the fact that she would rather have retired back to the UK, took great comfort in all the travelling. She would buy one outrageously expensive item of clothing
wherever
they went, then have it copied in different sizes to give to women friends at Christmas.

To the best of my knowledge, Cobb had never had a single day’s illness. He was one of those men who look more or less the same age all their lives; his extreme thinness meant he had been deeply lined for as long as I had known him. So although he was eighty, his death, of a sudden massive cerebral haemorrhage, was a complete surprise. It happened in the middle of the night,
without
his waking Jane. That terrible shock was reserved for the morning.

The Lives of the Emperors
was left unfinished. Jane asked me if I would help her to put it together, even in uncompleted form, for publication.

‘I’d like it to be you,’ she said. She looked shy, as if she knew that what she was about to say would make it impossible for me to refuse. ‘He thought of you as his best friend. He asked me to say that if anything happened to him …’

So I said yes. I was pleased and surprised and a bit daunted. The manuscript was still in his office at the university: not the full professorial office he had once occupied but a small modern
corner room, still with its good scroll painting and wooden Buddha. The papers were in three cardboard boxes, and they looked more chaotic than they actually were once I realised that several chapters had been typed in different versions, marked out with numbers written on the top right hand of the page. Cobb’s office had to be emptied to make way for a keen young Chinese literature professor, who would occasionally stand in the
doorway
, embarrassed but eager, and offer to give Jane and me a hand with the packing. Jane asked me to read the book first, because she couldn’t face it. When she said that, her face looked pinched and red and lonely and English. I took the manuscript to Deep Water Bay, promising to report back as soon as I was able.

Over the years I had turned my rooms at the hotel into a kind of office-cum-bedroom. I had a room full of books and papers and then off it an archway leading to an L-shaped bedroom, which in turn led out to a balcony with a view across the bay. The austerity was supposed to be a way of reminding myself that if I had time off I should be spending it at Cheung Chau. In theory, of course, I could use the public rooms of the hotel – but there is something offputting about a hotel proprietor too obviously
lurking
in his own establishment. My armchair for reading was in the bedroom, but I would sometimes take a book out onto the
balcony
, unless or until the light began to attract mosquitoes. That’s where I sat with the first box of Cobb’s typed pages. I read all night. It was like watching a parade go past; not a benign
triumphal
parade but a phantasmagoria, a vision of what people could be at their worst. Every variety of hatred, murder, lust, treachery, ruthlessness, violence, envy, and rage was on display. Cobb had spoken of Chinese literature as the world’s largest body of writing that valued tradition, continuity, allusion, calm, distance – ‘the greatest echo chamber there is,’ he said on one occasion, ‘the most civilised conversation there has ever been’. (‘Conversation’ was his word for a body of writing or learning.) This was the shadow side of that. The First Emperor of Ch’in, the emperor who built the Great Wall and gave the order to burn all the books, was the presiding spirit of
The Lives
.

I stayed up all night and called Jane in the morning.

‘I think it’s remarkable. It’s … well, rather horrifying. But remarkable. What do you want me to do?’

‘I’ve no idea. I think, if it is publishable, Raymond would have wanted me to publish it but beyond that …’

‘Well, I’ve had an idea,’ I said.

I sent the letter via his London publisher. A week later there came a two-word telegram: ‘DELIGHTED AUSTEN’. I had the last version of the manuscript photocopied, and then sent it to the same address. I told Jane what I had done over dinner and as far as I could tell, through her thick carapace of grief, she was pleased.

I didn’t hear back from Austen for many weeks, as indeed I hadn’t been expecting to – though I still looked much more
eagerly
than usual through the mail every morning, in search of unfamiliar handwriting and a UK postmark. My experience has been that an awaited response always comes at exactly the moment one is not expecting it. One sits beside the front door waiting for a glimpse of the postman; and then returns from
making
a cup of coffee to find the letter on the doormat. I was
beginning
to be genuinely impatient at the lack of a reply from Austen – the slight but definite unreasonableness of my initial request making me more, rather than less, irritable – when Ah Wing knocked on my door on a muggy summer morning of low cloud and high humidity and handed me a letter, saying,

‘Mixed up with my post, Mr Stewart, so sorry.’

I recognised the letter immediately; or rather, I recognised that I didn’t recognise it, and therefore knew what it must be. I opened it with a memory of the long, long distant experience of facing examination results.