The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel (22 page)

'Let's fuck again,' he said, unbuckling his belt and practically dragging me to the floor. I knew his lust had been stirred by the rough coupling of the fat German and his slight oriental lover, but whatever the inspiration, I always enjoyed Harry's enthusiastic lovemaking.

'That will help you to remember me, if I can ever bring myself to leave Shanghai,' he said. I told him that no woman ever forgot her most passionate lover, which seemed to satisfy him. He needn't have worried. He compared well to all of my lovers, and not only did I never forget him, but over the years I have often thought of him with tenderness and a degree of regret at his absence.

I believe that in Shanghai Harry found a way of being that satisfied the shadowy side of his nature, probably kept hidden in England. There were nights when he was nowhere to be found and times when his bruises spoke of a more desperate sort of sex than the kind we shared. Had he stayed in Shanghai, perhaps he would have indulged that side of his personality too much and lost that part of himself that was full of happiness and light.

A few years later the Shanghai Club would be occupied by the Japanese, who would shorten the legs of the tables and chairs for the convenience of their bantam-sized officers. I expect they behaved in the same way as the English club members did, only the language of their hypocrisy would have been that of honour, as opposed to that of manners. As night became day, did samurai kiss samurai in the love pool of the British club, I wonder.

I never lost my attraction to Japanese men, but after Harry Sanger my taste where lovers were concerned became more liberal. I grew to like not only the creamy smell of Europeans, but also their generosity and sense of humour which, once you are used to it, colours your way of thinking forever.

On the way out of the club, Harry stopped at the night porter's desk and openly offered him a large note which he took without once looking at me. He said to Harry that on such a muggy night he supposed a midnight swim was very refreshing. Harry replied that it had made him feel like a new man. We went on to the Venus Cafe and ravenously ate beef stroganoff and paskha, a delicious pudding of cream cheese and dried apricots. Then, with our stomachs hot with vodka, I took Harry to the opium den around the corner from the Astor Hotel for his first taste of the poppy. Six hours later, he told me that he thought we had only been there for a few minutes, although he remembers dreaming that he was on a beautiful beach made of flat white pebbles that were soft to the touch. The water was as tender as velvet and his playmates were his old school friends whom he loved and admired.

During Harry's last week in Shanghai the air was heavy with humidity and high winds that whipped the street's litter into doorways and rattled the ill-fitting windows of the Central Hotel. Everyone said that a typhoon was on its way and that it would be the last one of the summer before winter was upon us. At night the leaden air made it hard to breathe and turned my dreams into nightmares where I watched myself walking down empty streets without even thoughts for company. When the storm finally broke, it wrenched the tiles from the roofs and sent them crashing to the street. It littered the Bund with sea debris and flooded the drains so that the roads ran with water so high that it lapped at the rickshaw boy's knees.

I was in the Nanking Cinema with Harry watching an American movie called
Forty Winks
at the time. We had been drinking sake from Kawashima's flask and smoking Harry's English cigarettes. The torrential rain on the roof drowned out the soundtrack of the film, so we left and ran back to the hotel for our last night together. By the time we got there we were completely drenched and shivering. We shared a hot bath, drank a lot more sake and made love twice. Harry asked me to slick my short hair back like a boy's and to wear the high heels, suspender belt and black stockings that Sesyu had given me. He liked me half boy, half girl; it satisfied all his needs, I suppose. Later, when I sat on the floor playing cards with him, dressed in that way and smoking one of my black cigarettes, he told me that if he ever had a reluctance to make love to his wife he would picture me as I was then and he was sure it would solve the problem. I observed that he called it making love and not fucking and I felt a little envious of his bride to be.

Next morning we went for breakfast at the Chocolate Shop on Bubbling Well Road. Harry ate eggs and pancakes and I had ice cream, which I had never eaten before. He gave me money, and a St Christopher coin on a chain. He said St Christopher was the patron saint of travellers. He told me that he worried about where I would end up, and that it wouldn't harm me to have a saint on my side. We left the Chocolate Shop arm-in-arm and went to the Siberian Fur Store where he bought me an astrakhan coat and two silver fox collars to keep me warm through the winter months. The dark little eyes of the pair were fashioned from tiger's eye; there was a brocade loop that held their tails in a symbiotic knot and their feet hung realistically over my shoulder.

We walked back to the Central Hotel along the crowded streets, where we had to press ourselves against a wall to allow an elaborately decorated bridal sedan to pass. It was covered in fresh flowers and accompanied by musicians and the bride's family. Harry shouted out 'Good luck', but they ignored him. He asked me what I thought of marriage and I told him it was probably a good thing for a man. He laughed and said that he would let me know.

I could tell that he was sad to be leaving, but he said that he intended to come back and that I hadn't seen the last of him. I didn't believe him. I thought that he was just one of those people who hated goodbyes. In those days no one who had once sampled the delights of Shanghai could believe that they would not do so again. But after that time I never saw Harry again.

I felt strangely empty without him, as though I had no idea of what I should be doing. I took a bath, missed lunch, and I suppose I missed him too, at least for the rest of that day. But Shanghai was a difficult place to be lonely in for long.

Mari, pleased to have Harry out of the way, took me over once again. She had a jealous nature and hadn't liked me moving away from the intimacy of her connections. She couldn't bear her friends to wander or to have experiences that she wasn't a part of. When I told her about swimming at the British Club, she said that she had done a similar thing in India, only with the wife of a colonel in the Indian Army. I often felt annoyed with Mari and it would be a lie to say that I liked her, but she was a useful contact and kept me company in the months leading up to that New Year's Eve, when things were to change dramatically for both of us.

It was Mari who found me the beautiful villa on Rue Lafayette, at half the price of my room at the Central. I moved in that December, when Shanghai seemed to forget that it was Chinese and celebrated Christmas as though it was the most natural thing in the world. Weeks before Christmas Day there were decorations and artificial snow in the windows of the stores. Along the promenade of the Bund the trees were hung with shiny glass stars, and there was a Christmas tree in front of the Shanghai Club. The Chocolate Shop served Christmas pudding with ice cream and on the Avenue Foch you could buy gold and silvered almonds in boxes tied with red satin bows.

It was colourful, fun and foreign, and Mari who had experienced European Christmases before was even more excited about the season than me. She took me shopping for presents and to a different party every night. We bought flesh-coloured lingerie edged with pale lace, and chiffon dresses that floated like gauze in the slightest breeze. In a rush of excess, Mari bought me a ring set with a huge moonstone and we drank champagne at every stop we made. In the early hours of the morning, I would return to my rented villa exhausted and sleep until after noon the next day, when we would start the whole thing over again. Sometimes Mari would come to the villa to pick me up. She would talk to me while I bathed in the delightful marble-floored bathroom that had mirrored walls and brass taps. Sitting on the edge of the bath puffing on Camel cigarettes, she would fill the small room with smoke and gossip. The bathroom had stone shelves on which I kept my chrysanthemum oil, and a chandelier above the bath where I hung Harry's St Christopher's coin on its silver chain. Camouflaged amongst the crystal drops I forgot it, and have a fancy that it is still there, swaying in the humid air of that scented room.

On my first night in the villa I dreamt that Miura's little songbird was caught up in the room. It flew about in a panic, dashing itself against the walls, getting tangled in the folds of the chintz curtains that hung at the long windows. When I finally clasped it in my hands, I saw that it had the face of poor Shimako and thinking that it would flyaway, I threw it out of the window, only to watch it fall to the ground.

It doesn't matter how lightly we may choose to travel; in the shadows and in our dreams the company of ghosts is always with us. Shimako often comes to me in mine in the form of a flying creature, perhaps because I like to think of her free at last from her dragging leg. I think Natsuko would have been surprised to discover that even in death her sister accompanies me, stirring my longing for home.

With Harry gone my dark days came more often. They were deep and disabling and I dreaded them. I knew when they were about to overtake me because nothing would be right, not how I looked, how I felt nor how I related to others. I would dwell on my life's disappointments and relive the feelings of those painful times in a self-indulgent wash of misery. The loss of my mother, Yamaga's desertion, Natsuko's coldness to me all seemed to be alive in the present and no amount of socialising could console me. I would take to my bed, get drunk on sake or lulled by opium until the dark hours passed. And they always did, leaving me light-headed and longing for company.

On one bright morning during those weeks of Christmas festivities, I woke with the dreaded hollow ache and knew that it would not be a good day. The pain made no sense to me. There were painful memories from the past, but my current life, although lacking direction, was interesting and, I thought, hopeful. But that day, the gloom was so deep that I didn't have the energy to go to my favourite opium house. I started drinking early to deaden the pain and to dull the sense I had of being completely worthless. I could not wipe the picture of my sweet mother's face from my mind, or lessen the sound of Shimako's voice telling me, when I was just twelve years old, that her sister's black pearl matched my nature.

I missed my appointment with Mari and she came to the villa, furious with me for letting her down. She said that my depressions were a luxury that I gave into too easily. 'Sometimes, Yoshiko, I feel a little tested by life myself, but it is foolish to lose the day. You know that I can't bear to be let down. I waited in the Virtue teahouse for almost an hour.'

I apologised to her and determined that I would not allow the next dark time that came to possess me in the way it had done that day.

Perhaps I was too free, too unbounded to feel safe. I was as alone as an orphan and frustrated in my desire to be a true daughter of Japan. The Kawashimas may have rejected me, but in my heart I felt that my country never would. I needed to find a way to serve it that would give me the recognition and purpose I so craved. Much as Shanghai had captivated me, I wanted to be taken back into the fold, cherished and treasured by the only parent left to me, my beloved Japan.

Dismissing my melancholy as indulgence, Mari was interfering and full of advice. She said that I was a determined person and could help myself if I really wanted to.

'Try a girl for a change, Yoshiko. I swear it would lift your gloomy moods in a way no man ever could.'

Just for the sake of experience I agreed, although I had my doubts that I would enjoy it. I felt odd and unsettled at the thought of it, as though I was about the business of building a house on a swamp.

A few days before, Mari had met an interesting Russian girl in the French Jew's pawnshop on Nanking Road. Trying not to catch Mari's eyes, she'd had tears in her own as she handed over a rather fine diamond brooch, and took in return a small wad of used notes. The pawnshop was a familiar haunt for Mari, who was always running out of cash because, as she said, her father had so many daughters to support that he often forgot to send her funds. I didn't believe that her father sent her anything, and as she usually reclaimed her treasures from the pawnbroker within weeks, it was obvious that she had a secret means of obtaining money that she did not want known.

Under Mari's sociable front there was something dark and unreachable. It showed in the way that she suspected any act of kindness, and in the restlessness of her nature. It was as though if she sat still for too long she would be overtaken by her demons. I think that she hid what she thought would revolt others under a cloak of sophistication and the pretence of gaiety. Though I could not bring myself to like her, I was attracted to the air of danger that hung around her.

In her usual way of collecting people, Mari had made friends with the Russian girl and discovered that she had been the lover of an heiress in Cairo, who for the sake of respectability and to secure her father's fortune had married a high-profile politician and given up her lesbian lover. She had arranged a small fund to secure her lover's silence, on the provision that she left the country and never contacted her again. According to Mari the girl had set about a world tour and had fetched up in Shanghai, low on funds and friends, but full of charm. She claimed to be a countess, of course, one who, fleeing the Bolsheviks, had arrived in Egypt alone and almost penniless. Mari said that she was a cold-climate beauty with narrow grey eyes and pale skin as matt as paper. She had only been in Shanghai a few weeks and was already pawning her jewellery to pay for the undistinguished room she had taken in a small hotel near Yanglingbang Creek, on the edge of the French concession.