The Harmony Silk Factory (38 page)

She was not amongst the people gathered in the sitting room pleasantly sipping drinks. Someone else was there, though—my elusive neighbour, Kunichika.

“What a surprise to see you here,” he said brightly, hiding what I took to be a mixture of displeasure and shock behind a charming smile and a little bow. For a few minutes he behaved with exuberant fake bonhomie, joking about various things—the diabolical food at the rest house, the envy with which he regarded my camera, the troop of monkeys that gathered in the trees every evening, begging for food from the kitchen. “Goodness knows how Mr. Wormwood gets any peace with all their chattering!” he said to T. K. Soong.

I smiled politely and said, “I manage.”

Snow did finally emerge, wearing a brocade blouse over loose-fitting, dark-coloured trousers. She looked very refined, just like an Imperial Manchu consort.

“You are staring at something, Peter,” she said wearily. “Is something the matter with my dress?”

“No, of course not—nothing at all. It’s marvellous,” I said, feeling myself blush.

She greeted Kunichika with more warmth and familiarity—rather
too
much warmth and familiarity, I thought. He bowed low and she offered him her hand, which he accepted with one hand and clasped with the other. She smiled timidly, dangerously, and held his gaze. I looked at her parents, expecting their disapproving countenances, but I found none. They merely smiled vapidly, as they always did. Mrs. Soong turned to me and said, “Professor Kunichika is a
marquis,
you know.”

I paid little attention to the show. Our seats were a row of tiny wooden chairs arranged in the middle of the clearing in front of the screen. All around us the rest of the audience sat cross-legged, or else squatted in that loose-limbed Oriental fashion, almost resting on their haunches. I felt very disconcerted; I could barely stretch my legs for fear of kicking some poor urchin in the back. I found myself seated next to Snow, who remained utterly still throughout. My eye was constantly drawn towards her pale, luminescent blouse, which matched the intensity of her skin. It was impossible to concentrate on the show; I could not understand the constant lunging of the bizarre spectral shapes. I leaned across to ask Snow to explain what was going on. She spoke somewhat curtly, as if displeased at being disturbed during the performance. Yet a few moments later I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, that she was exchanging whispers with Kunichika. Quickly, I leaned over towards her again. “Who’s that character? There, that one,” I said, pointing. Kunichika answered for her, providing me with rather more information than I needed—I paid little attention to his tutorial on the philosophy of Eastern theatre. I was not effusive in my thanks, and spent the rest of the show trying to anticipate the next exchange between Snow and Kunichika. Every time I sensed she might be about to speak to him I quickly presented her with some spurious question about the characters, the story, the music, etc. I could not stop myself from doing this. I knew, of course, that there was a risk that my behaviour would be interpreted by Snow as being juvenile in the extreme, but the risk of not behaving thus felt even greater. Whenever Kunichika bent his nobly sculpted neck to whisper in Snow’s ear, the sense of panic that welled inside me was violent and painful. I had to do everything I could to stop it.

As the performance ended I noticed Johnny looking at me with an expression of some concern. We had been separated throughout by Snow’s parents, who sat between us, unmoving and silent as boulders. “Is everything alright?” Johnny asked me later.

“Oh yes,” I said. “I was on the edge of my seat. Utterly gripping.”

Back at the Soong house Snow took her leave and retired to bed. She offered her hand once more to Kunichika, who did, this time, kiss it briefly as he bowed. To me she said, “Good night, Peter,” and then disappeared down the long, dim corridor to her bedroom.

The bitter seed had been sown inside me. I tasted it at the back of my mouth and felt its dark, dirty tentacles creeping slowly inside my body, probing for where I was weakest. Johnny walked me home, chattering constantly about some poems—Shelley or some other nonsense—he had just read; about plans for his new house; about one day travelling to Europe. “Will you teach me to play the piano?” he said brightly.

I grunted.

“Is something wrong, Peter? Are you unwell?”

“I’m tired,” I said. I left him standing at the steps to the rest house with a vague promise of meeting the next day. I went to the bathroom and retched with dry, painful heaves. I fell asleep after drinking half a bottle of neat gin I found in the communal drinks cabinet. My dreams were filled with a single repeating image, that of Kunichika violently ravishing Snow. Their bodies twisted and glistened and pursued me wherever I went. In my bedroom at Hemscott they copulated in a frenzy by the window, silhouetted against the winter sky; in the Bodleian they thrashed amongst the dusty bookshelves; here, in the rest house, they formed a single pure-white creature, thrusting and jerking and swooning before my eyes. I could not escape this monster. I ran into the jungle, but they were above me in the trees, shrieking, wailing, crying. They pointed at my limp penis, for I was naked. It hung miserably like a rag, turning a bilious green in colour as I tried furiously to resurrect it, pumping it with both fists. All this time that howling two-headed white animal laughed at me from the forest above. I could not escape it.

Not once did I think of Johnny, my only friend in this world.

A CHINESE SPARROW HAWK has begun visiting the woods behind the house. No one has seen it but me. It comes at the quietest times of the day, when I am the only person about. Just after dawn, when the last wisps of sea mist have faded away, it hovers against a pearl-grey sky, shivering tentatively in the chilled breeze. In the afternoons, when everyone else is ensconced in a geriatric siesta, I watch it dart between the trees, wheeling furiously between the casuarinas, or flashing its wainscot-coloured wings as it speeds across the paddy fields. Sometimes I spot it perched silently on a bough, deep in the foliage, staring at me with huge yellow irises. I smile at it and nod a greeting. It knows I am an ally, and so it reveals itself only to me. For only I know that it is responsible for the recent and oh-so-terrible decimation of the local brown shrike population.

“Do you think it could be a mongoose?” Gecko trilled anxiously. Speculation had been rife in the days following the initial discovery of a few brick-red shrike feathers lying on the patio where those annoying creatures feed on morsels of food left for them by Gecko and the others. A list of suspects was drawn up: civet cats, snakes, flying foxes, dogs, rats—even the cook’s cat, which was finally exonerated on the grounds that its age and girth prevented it from venturing past the kitchen doors.

“Ah bollocks,” said Brother Rodney, a burly Australian who likes to think of himself as rather more worldly-wise than he is. “It’s a bloody shite hawk,” he said.

“How charming,” I said. “What exactly is a ‘shite’ hawk?”

“One that shits all over the place,” he said, as if it were perfectly obvious. “You get great big colonies of them this time of the year, out in those islands across the Straits. Yep, thousands of them, shit-ting all over the place. Bloody awful. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Some islands get turned into a huge shite pile, nothing but shite as far as the eye can see.”

I stood watching flocks of birds winging their way wearily across the Straits. This is where they complete their long, lonely journey, all the way from Manchuria and Siberia. Some of them travel the extra distance across to Sumatra (where they will certainly not be bothered by the likes of Gecko), others remain here. Why? I don’t suppose anyone will ever know the mysteries of migration. I have always loved the idea of being a migrating bird, a hawk or some other raptor, riding the warm thermals across the vastness of continents, all of Asia under my wings. I would follow my prey south, ready, like my little shite hawk, to swoop at any moment. There would be no plan for my journey, no map, no coordinates. And yet I would find my way, guided by forces too powerful and ancient for me to discern; I would simply follow my destiny.

Alvaro set up a rota to keep watch over the bird feed. The idea was firstly to identify the culprit and secondly to prevent the repetition of such terrible crimes that we all hate, you know.

“I’m not volunteering,” I said. “I have other—better—things to do. The garden, in case you’ve all forgotten, is still in the making. There’s plenty of work for me. Why don’t you people just accept the workings of nature? Some things die, other things live. Predators and prey—it’s a long-standing arrangement. Man needs to establish a
rapprochement
with Mother Nature.” The plan, of course, did not work. No one could stay awake for the duration of the watch, and nothing was seen. Once, Gecko
thought
he saw a python at the end of the garden. But the monsoons are upon us now, and the rain, when it comes, falls in sheets, blurring the vision and turning every shape into a ghostly spectre. He could not be sure.

Erring on the side of caution, I crept into the kitchen and stole little pieces of raw chicken from the refrigerator. I took these to the woods and laid them out on the highest bough I could reach. I wanted to make sure that the sparrow hawk does not go away.

 

 

 

 

JOHNNY WAS ILL-TEMPERED and sullen from the very start of the journey. He would not be cheered up, not even by me. By the time we reached the Formosa Hotel he was entombed in his own silence.

“Is he ill?” Snow asked me after he had gone ahead to their room. For a brief moment, I found myself alone with her in the gloomy foyer. We stood apart from each other like two chess pieces marooned on their own tiny squares of the chequerboard floor. “I don’t know,” I said, lowering my voice to match her hushed tones. The whispering hid the slight tremor that had crept into my voice. Perhaps she trusted me at last. She looked at me with a faint smile of conspiratorial concern. Before I could prolong this moment of intimacy, however, Kunichika appeared. “May I take your things upstairs?” he asked her, lifting her case before she had time to acquiesce.

I went up to my room and had a long soak in the cavernous roll-top bath. One of its claw-and-ball feet was missing, replaced by a sturdy block of wood. As I reclined in the lukewarm water I looked at the flakes of peeling paint on the ceiling and the glossy green-black moss forming on the cornices. The rugs on the floor were threadbare, patched and tufted like mange on a feral Malayan dog. Nonetheless, my bath seemed transcendentally luxurious after an arduous day on the road; it brought relief to my aching muscles and washed away the red dust that had formed a film on my skin. I made a quick mental note: not even Rolls-Royces are immune to the forces of nature.

At the bottom of the sweeping, dimly lit stairs, I paused to straighten my tie. I wanted to make sure that Snow saw me in the best possible light: freshly scrubbed and shaved, immaculately dressed, fully revived, and bursting with
joie de vivre.
The voices from the dining room drifted into the foyer, muffled and inarticulate but audible nonetheless. I listened for Snow’s voice but heard only those of Kunichika and Honey. They spoke softly but firmly, forming each word carefully and with great deliberation. One or two words were emphasised heavily, but their voices were never raised.

“Ah, Wormwood,” Honey said breezily when I walked into the room. “What will you have—whisky? Always take it neat in the tropics. Kills the germs, you see.”

“I know, you’ve already told me that. How kind,” I said, accepting the cigarette he offered me. I looked at Johnny. He wore an ivory-coloured shirt of mine, which I had given to him some days earlier. I had noticed him looking at it longingly, and told him it had been made for me in Paris (I had in fact bought it in Tunbridge Wells). When I gave it to him he said, “That is the kind of thing I want to sell in my new shop.” This evening he was wearing it for the first time, and he looked awful. The yoke was too tight across his shoulders, the sleeves were too long, and the colour was too pale for his complexion. His face looked flushed and damp with perspiration, and he stared resolutely at the melting cubes of ice in his drink. With his forefinger he drew shapes in the moisture on the glass, his eyes hollow and unblinking.

For the rest of dinner, Honey held court like a schoolmaster lecturing a group of fifth-form boys. His stories of petty tin-mining heroics failed to impress anyone. He filled his chair magisterially, speaking with an air of studied superiority, frequently exhaling plumes of cigarette smoke. In every respect he resembled a young child imitating the mannerisms of an adult. He looked at Johnny as he spoke—singling out the easiest target, as it were: no one else seemed interested.

“Nonsense,” I said, challenging every assertion he made. I spoke with as much
sang-froid
as possible. Snow had now joined us, and it was important to pitch my voice in exactly the right manner: clever but not cynical, involved but not aggressive. I cast a quick glance at her. I was not surprised to see she was looking at Kunichika, and he at her.

“I don’t believe a word of it,” I said at the end of Honey’s long and implausible story about the killing of an English tin miner by a Chinaman coolie. Whatever control I had had over my voice seemed suddenly to have vanished, and I was aware of the sharpness of my words: waspish, acidic, adolescent. It was too late now, and I lashed out at the inconsistencies of his story. To my surprise, this unseemly little rant raised a smile from Snow—though I could not decide whether the subject of her mirth was me or Honey.

We had an execrable meal of
réchauffé
leftovers—bacterial soup of an unidentifiable variety (though mutton was clearly an important component), bland chicken, and lumpy rice pudding. “I think this presages the end of the Empire, don’t you?” I said. A string quartet sat under the dry, drooping leaves of an enormous potted palm. Like the plant, the members of the quartet seemed near death. They moved their bows feebly and played out of tune, turning every piece into a sad, funereal farewell. Even the most recent songs were somehow transformed into antique death marches—“J’attendrais,” for example, a blithe and simplistic song (learnt, no doubt, from an itinerant French planter), was executed with moaning top notes which begged to be accompanied by the tolling of an Orthodox funeral bell. Over this horrific
continuo,
Honey sounded off on every conceivable topic. He was a
soi-disant
expert on everything relating to the tropics, from fungal infections to the politics of the Malay sultanate. The cacophony was so distracting that I barely noticed Snow slip away from the table. I waited a minute before following her, making the appropriate excuses as I left. I thought I might catch her before she got to her room—I would use Johnny’s “illness” as an excuse to engage her in conversation.