The Dangerous Years (27 page)

‘The bugger’s learning quickly, ain’t he?’ he observed to Verschoyle.

There was a letter for him from Charley to say she was sorry he’d not been able to meet her, but there was a curious indifference about it, and between the lines he could read her annoyance that he’d not been there when she stepped ashore. A discreet enquiry to a friend in Hong Kong revealed that she was far from lonely and that Kimister was entertaining her round the hotels and floating restaurants and, instead of telegraphing Hong Kong as he might have done, he telephoned Christina Withinshawe’s house in the Bubbling Well Road instead. She seemed to be well on form.

‘I’ve been checking up on you,’ she said at once. ‘I’ve learned that your father’s an admiral and that you’re the heir to a baronetcy.’

‘You’ve been quick,’ Kelly observed.

‘In the Clemo empire we employ people to find out things like that.’

‘I see. Does this put me in your class?’

He heard her chuckle. ‘Very definitely in the running. But what about that little English girl who’s come all the way out here to see you? I’ve heard about her. Is she pretty?’

Yes, Kelly thought bitterly, she is. ‘Not as beautiful as you,’ he said.

‘I like to hear that sort of thing.’ The voice over the telephone was smooth and happy. ‘Work it into any conversation you like. Come and see me.’

She remained in his mind, lying alongside the anger he felt about Charley. Tyrwhitt was busy with commissions of enquiry into the outrages upriver, struggling with Chiang K’Ai Shek’s Foreign Secretary, who was claiming that the trouble lay entirely with the Western Powers’ insistence on maintaining the treaties which benefited them without benefiting the Chinese; and, feeling vaguely relieved of guilt by the demand that he remain in Shanghai, Kelly put on a civilian suit, called a taxi, and set out for the Bubbling Well Road, determined to find out where his affections really lay. When he was announced by a Chinese maid, Christina appeared wearing a close-fitting, high-necked cheongsam of fine silk that showed every line of her body, her slender throat accentuated by its high neck. She’d done her hair in a bun on top of her head and her pallor was enhanced by the make-up she wore. It was typical of her, he thought, to defy all the British matrons in their cotton and pearls and wear something Chinese.

‘I think you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever met,’ he said.

She smiled. ‘You took a long time to get here.’

‘I’ve been busy. The admiral’s going off his head. He’s not the diplomatic type and he’d much rather set about the Chinese and beat them hip and thigh. I spend most of my time hanging on to his coat tails to hold him back.’

She smiled. ‘I think he’s getting on top of you a bit.’

‘At times.’

‘Nobody’s been getting on top of me lately. Certainly not you.’

He grinned at her lusty vulgarity. With her wealth and background, she could get away with things other women would never dare say. ‘He has enough here to drive the average man crazy,’ he pointed out. ‘Fortunately, things are quietening down a bit now and the government’s decided to send out another brigade.’

‘There’ll be so many soldiers here soon,’ she said, ‘they’ll be elbowing each other into the river.’

She moved to him and he took her in his arms and kissed her without embarrassment. She returned the embrace quite naturally, as though they’d known each other for years.

‘We’ll dine out,’ she said. ‘Thank God there’s still plenty going on. We can come back here for coffee.’

The restaurant was crowded, with an orchestra of Philippino musicians playing the sort of music for dancing you could hear at the Savoy. Despite the Chinese reputation for inscrutability, they were taking to Western jazz with a vengeance, and slant-eyed girls with flimsy chiffon dresses were hard at it dancing the Charleston.

Christina looked a knockout in a daringly low-cut evening dress that dragged every eye to her at once.

‘What keeps it up?’ Kelly asked.

‘Hope and holding my breath.’

After eating they danced, and, in that dress, holding her was like clutching someone unclothed. There were only a few people on the balcony of the hotel and because it was cold in the breeze coming from the sea, she moved closer to him. As he put his arm round her, he felt her shiver under his hand. He knew her interest in him was purely predatory, but he was young enough not to be indifferent to having alongside him an attractive woman in a dress so staggeringly brief she might have been naked.

‘The Shanghai matrons don’t approve of me,’ she said. ‘But I don’t approve of them much either. No wonder the Chinese want to throw them out. Let’s go home.’

The house was silent and the street roar was subsiding. Dim yellow lights showed from the sea. As the door shut, Christina turned. ‘What in God’s name did I do before you arrived?’ she asked.

Drowsily, as though the action were instinctive, she lifted her arms and put them round his neck. For a moment she clung to him like that, his hand moving on the bare flesh above her dress at the base of her spine.

‘It unfastens,’ she said quietly.

He unhooked the dress without speaking. She didn’t take her eyes off his, her face as pale and smooth as marble.

‘This is an age when morals don’t seem to matter much,’ she said. ‘It’s still too soon after the war and the world’s falling apart at the seams a bit. I always thought it best to take an easy-going attitude towards it. I’m in love with you, did you know?’

She released him and turned away to walk through the lounge to the stairs. Kelly followed. At the top, she turned and took his hand.

‘I’ll spare you the thought of sleeping in Arthur’s bed,’ she said. ‘We’ll use the spare room.’

She slipped out of the dress and let it fall at her feet. As she stepped out of her shoes, he moved towards her and she sat down on the bed and looked up at him, her face pale. Then, breaking into an unexpected cascade of laughter, she made a grab for him and he fell across her, cracking his skull on the headboard and almost knocking himself silly. As she squirmed under him, he felt her fingers tearing at his shirt. A button shot across the room and she laughed, wriggling out of the remains of her clothes.

‘It broke the old Duke’s heart
—’ she burst into a gay chirrup of song ‘—
when Lady Jane became a tart
. The properly constituted female always likes to clutch at the staunch male breast, you know, and I’m a properly constituted female. I feel like a properly constituted female, anyway, and I suspect you’re a properly constituted male. At the moment you
certainly
feel like one. I think you’re as randy as a bull mastiff.’

‘Yes I am,’ Kelly panted, ‘because I
am
a properly constituted male. And you’re quite a dish, with or without clothes.’

‘Hand on heart?’

‘You’d stir a bishop.’

She laughed in his face and he laughed back at her. Then, suddenly, abruptly, they stopped, staring at each other, and in one moment, as though they were both activated by the same strings, their smiles died and they reached out for each other, their hands desperate in their urgency.

Aboard the flagship, Kelly found Tyrwhitt fretting over the minor tension of Wei-Hai-Wei. It was a neat harbour, almost entirely landlocked, to the north of Shanghai where the navy used the island of Liu-Kung-Tao as a leave centre for its men. With the tension high in Shanghai, British civilians were asking if it would be safe to take their usual summer holidays there, and Lady Tyrwhitt was anxious to go there with her family.

‘Write her for me, Kelly,’ Tyrwhitt said. ‘It’ll sound better coming from you. Explain that if
she
goes, everybody here will start saying I’ve guaranteed its safety. And that’s not true. It’s all right for naval personnel and families because we could evacuate them in no time if necessary. It’s different for civilians.’

Kelly wrote the letter carefully, but his mind was less on Tyrwhitt’s problems than on his own. Another letter had arrived from Charley asking when he was going to Hong Kong. It was far more pleading this time and he wrote back explaining what was happening and said – quite honestly, he was pleased to feel – that he couldn’t leave. But, as he wrote, his mind was on the sight of Christina Withinshawe sitting on the side of her bed that morning, wrapped in a sheet that barely covered her, one slim naked arm outside it, watching him as she served him tea and toast. They had awakened to plunge into a new wave of urgent love-making that had ended with them exhausted in a tangle of tortured bed clothes.

‘You look like a cat that’s been at the cream,’ she had said, smiling at him. Then she had picked up her ring from the dressing table and slipped it on his little finger.

‘With this ring I thee wed,’ she said. ‘With my body I thee worship.’

‘No need to shout,’ Kelly grinned.

‘I want to shout.’ She had sat up and yelled.
‘With my body I thee worship!
’ She beamed at him. ‘I hope you were careful last night because it was fun, and we mustn’t spoil it with anything silly like babies.’ She paused. ‘What about that little girl of yours in Hong Kong, though?’

What indeed about the little girl in Hong Kong? Staring at the sheet of notepaper, Kelly decided he was a heel, but he had managed to console himself within ten minutes that, with Kimister in Hong Kong, too, and with what had happened in England after he’d left he had a right to be.

When he went ashore that night they made no pretence and went to bed together as if they’d been doing it for years.

By now, everybody in Shanghai was living in a state of virtual siege. What had seemed at first to be only a vast undisciplined anarchy had jelled into a great campaign of detestation against the Western powers. The whole of South China seemed to be on the march, each uprising against the hated foreigners starting another in a chain reaction. Millions of pounds worth of property was being abandoned without even a backward glance, its owners glad to be escaping with their lives.

Beyond the safety of Shanghai, the Westerners had been humbled. They had found suddenly that the Chinese would not even offer them their rickshaws to the waterfront because there had been too many beatings with bicycle chains and too many rickshaws burned, and they had to go on foot to the ships and always in groups for safety – humiliated, cowed, sometimes even bloodstained – through the shouting, spitting mobs. For generations the Chinese had accepted their inferiority without question but now they’d become a nation simply by joining hands and marching together. Nothing mattered any more – neither treaties nor flags nor guns – only victory; and the Whites had grown shabbier and dirtier every day as they’d waited for rescue. The days of the treaty powers were numbered. American and British consulates were being wrecked, and every vessel in China seemed to be somewhere up the Yangtze doing the same job of evacuation. By now almost every woman and child had been lifted to safety and their men were living on the river banks ready to leave at a moment’s notice.

‘The damned river’s in a state of chaos,’ Tyrwhitt grumbled.

By the end of the week, when Kelly was wondering what excuses he could offer for not going down to Hong Kong, he announced that he was going upriver again on a tour of inspection and that they were taking Lord Gort as a guest. Hurrying ashore that night, Kelly made his farewells with Christina clinging to him and weeping.

‘Oh, come on,’ he urged.
‘You’re
not a weeper.’

‘I am now,’ she sniffed. ‘I shall miss you.”

‘With fifteen thousand troops in the place? – every one of ’em willing to give his right arm to get a look at you.’

She gazed at him, her eyes big and bright and calculating. ‘Why don’t you marry me, Kelly?’ she asked.

He smiled. ‘Because it wouldn’t work.’

‘It did with Arthur Withinshawe. Well, after a fashion, it did.’

‘I’m not Arthur Withinshawe,’ he pointed out. ‘And never likely to be. Besides, I can’t afford it.’

‘I can. Plenty of impoverished soldiers and sailors have made their name by managing to catch an heiress. Don’t you love me or something?’

‘Yes.’ But he wasn’t sure it was true and there was still a nagging feeling of guilt about Charley.

She looked at him shrewdly, calculatingly. ‘Once upon a time, you’d have
had
to marry me – if only to make me an honest woman.’

‘Honest be damned!’ He gave a bark of laughter. ‘You’d always be devious.’

‘I’ll be waiting for you when you come back. And if you don’t pop the question then,
I
will. I’m getting old.’

‘You’ll never grow old.’

‘I’ll soon be too old to stagger into church. I’m twenty-seven. That’s old for a woman without a husband.’

She opened a bottle of champagne and they took it upstairs with them. Their love-making was violent and he crept away in the early hours of the morning, unclenching her fingers from behind his neck as he backed from the bed.

They left Shanghai in
Hawkins
and headed upriver. The situation didn’t seem to have improved, and at every town and village there were mobs of people along the bank and groups of soldiers riding on shaggy ponies. There seemed to be fires everywhere, where the homes and offices of the British and Americans and the Chinese businessmen who’d worked with them had been set alight, and it seemed to be as common a practice now for the Nationalist batteries to fire on them as it was to fire back.

As they stopped for two hours at Kiukiang, the consul came aboard to meet Tyrwhitt, a tired harassed-looking man who was trying to look after British interests under enormous difficulties because the British settlement these days consisted chiefly of sand-bagged gunposts. Though the treaty powers’ flags flew alongside the company flags over the office buildings to put on a show, they seemed pathetically few against the enormous number of Kuomintang banners.

At Hankow, a new storm was brewing. The imposing marble of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank still stood, but it had a shabbier look now and there was a huge scorch mark near the front door where someone had tried to set it on fire.