The Russian Concubine (19 page)

It was Mr Yeoman from downstairs.

Lydia’s eyes met Chang’s, and for the first time she saw danger in them. He was up on his toes, ready to strike.

‘No,’ she whispered harshly to him. ‘No.’

‘Are you having a spot of bother, dear? Do you need any help?’

Mr Yeoman was an old man, no match for Chang. Lydia rushed to the door and opened it a crack. He was standing on the landing, his white hair bristling, a brass poker in his hand.

‘I’m okay, Mr Yeoman, thanks. Really. Just . . . arguing with a . . . a friend. Sorry we disturbed you.’

His bright bird eyes peered at her, unconvinced. ‘Are you sure I can’t help?’

‘Sure. Thanks anyway.’

She closed the door and leaned against it, breathing hard. Chang had not moved.

‘You have good neighbours,’ he said in a quiet voice.

‘Yes,’ she said more calmly, ‘neighbours who don’t trick me with sly words.’ By the teasing light of the candle she could see the skin of his face grow taut across his high cheekbones and he started to speak, but she hurried on, ‘And if my mother should walk in now and find you here, she’d skin you alive, with or without your
kung fu
kicks. So . . . ,’ she reached for her dress and slipped it on, ‘we will go out into the street, you can tell me what it is you came to say, and then I never want to see you again. Understand?’

She heard his intake of breath, and it seemed to suck the air from her lungs. ‘I understand.’

She led him to a house two streets away. It was more of a shell than a house because it had burned down nine months ago but still lay like a blackened tooth stump in the middle of the brick terrace, and it had become home to bats and rats and the occasional feral dog. Much of what remained had been scavenged, but the outer walls still stood and gave a sense of privacy despite the lack of a roof. Rain had started to fall, a soft gloomy drizzle that sweetened the air and made Lydia’s skin twitch.

‘So?’ She stood and faced him.

Chang took his time. In silence he made himself a part of the darkness and seemed to glide through the ruined rooms, no more solid than the wind that rippled up from the river and cooled Lydia’s bare arms. When he was satisfied no others had taken refuge behind the black piles of rubble, he came back to her.

‘Now we talk,’ he said. ‘I came to see you so that we would talk.’

The faintest remnants from the street lamp on the far corner trickled into the space between them, and Lydia looked at Chang carefully. There was a change in him. She couldn’t see how or what, but it was there. She could feel it. As she could feel the rain on her face. There was a new sadness at the corners of his mouth that tugged at her and made her want to listen to his heart, to learn why it was beating so slow. But instead she tossed her head and reminded herself that he’d used her, that all his concern for her was worth nothing. Just lies and rat droppings.

‘So talk,’ she said.

‘It would have killed you.’

‘What?’

‘The necklace.’

‘You’re crazy.’ She had visions of it throttling her as she tried it on.

‘No, my words are true. You would have taken it to Junchow old town, to one of those snake holes that ask no questions. They rob the thieves that come to their doors but keep their hands white and clean. But no one would touch this necklace, no one would take that risk.’

‘Why?’

‘Because already it was known that it was meant as a gift for Madame Chiang Kai-shek. So you would have returned empty-handed and before you reached home you would be dead in a gutter, the necklace gone.’

‘You’re trying to frighten me.’

‘If I wanted to frighten you, Lydia Ivanova, there are many more things I could say.’

Again his mouth revealed a sorrow that the rest of his face denied. She studied his lips with care and believed them. Standing in the rain in the middle of the filthy ruin under a night sky as black as death, she felt a cold rush of relief. She breathed deeply.

‘It seems I owe you my life yet again,’ she said with a shiver.

‘We are involved, you and I.’ His hand moved through the gap of yellow streetlight that lay between them and touched her arm, a faint brush of skin, no more than a moth’s wing in the darkness. ‘Our fates are sewn together as surely as you stitched the flesh of my foot together.’

His voice was as soft as his touch. Lydia felt the solid ball of anger inside her tremble and start to melt; she could feel it trickling through her veins and out through the pores of her skin into the rain where it was washed away. But what if these were lies too? More lies from those lips of his that could make her believe his words. She wrapped her arms around her body and refused to let the small hard core of her anger escape. She needed it. It was her armour.

‘Involvement means sharing, doesn’t it?’ she said. ‘And it doesn’t alter the fact that the necklace
was
mine. If you sold it somewhere in the south where they don’t know the importance of it, then at least we should share the money. That sounds fair to me. Fifty-fifty.’ She held out a hand.

He laughed. It was the first time she’d heard him laugh and it did something strange to her. It made her mind uncurl. For that one fleeting moment she forgot the endless struggle.

‘You are like a she-fox, Lydia Ivanova, you sink your teeth in and never let go.’

She wasn’t sure if that was an insult or a compliment but didn’t stop to find out. ‘How much did you get for it?’

His black eyes watched her face, and still the laugh lingered on his lips. ‘Thirty-eight thousand dollars.’

She sat down abruptly. On a low ragged wall. Put her head in her hands. ‘Thirty-eight thousand dollars. A fortune,’ she whispered. ‘My fortune.’

The silence was broken only by something scuttling across the floor and making a dash for the doorway. Chang stamped on it. It was a weasel.

‘Thirty-eight thousand,’ Lydia repeated slowly, rolling the words around her tongue like honey.

‘As many lives were taken in Shanghai and Canton.’

Canton? What was he talking about? What on earth did Canton have to do with her thirty-eight thousand dollars . . . ? Her mind felt clumsy, but then something clicked inside it. A massacre last year. She remembered everyone talking of it. And then there was the time in Shanghai when, on Chiang Kai-shek’s orders, the Kuomintang Nationalists ambushed the Communists and wiped them out in bloody street fighting. A purge, they called it. But in China that was nothing new. Not remarkable. There was always some warlord or other, like General Zhang Xueliang or Wu Peifu, making pacts with another and then betraying each other in savage warfare. So what was it about Canton? Why did Chang bring up that particular incident?

She looked up at him. He had stepped deeper into the shadows, but his voice had given him away. It was so full of rage.

Suddenly it all made sense to her. She leaped to her feet.

‘You’re a Communist, aren’t you?’

He said nothing.

‘It’s dangerous,’ she warned. ‘They behead Communists.’

‘And they jail thieves.’

They stared at each other in the darkness. Silent accusations unspoken on their tongues. She shivered, but this time he did not touch her.

‘I steal to survive,’ Lydia pointed out stiffly. ‘Not to indulge some intellectual ideal.’ She moved away from him. ‘I cannot afford ideals.’

She did not hear his footfalls, but suddenly his dark figure was in front of her again. Rain glistened in his cropped hair and turned his skin silver.

‘Look, Lydia Ivanova, look at this.’

She looked. He was holding up something small and thin, hanging from his fingers. She peered closer at the object. It was the dead weasel.

‘This,’ he said, ‘is my meal tonight. I am not the one who eats my food in a restaurant using sweet lies and false smiles. So do not offer words about the price of ideals. Not to me.’

Lydia’s cheeks burned.

‘Settle this business now,’ she said more sharply than she intended. ‘I want my share of the money.’

‘You are always hungry like the fox. Here. Feed on this.’

He held out a leather pouch to her. She took it. It felt light. Too light. She moved over to where the street lamp’s glow was stronger, stepping over crumbling bricks and finding the open rectangle that had once been a window. In a rush her fingers opened the pouch and tipped out its contents, the same way they had trickled the ruby necklace into her palm not so long ago, but this time there were only a few coins. Did he think a handful of dollars would keep her quiet? She felt them smooth and warm against her skin, the price of his betrayal. Was she worth so little to him? She spun around and in three quick strides she was in front of him again. She pulled back her arm and hurled the pieces of silver into his face.

‘Go to hell, Chang An Lo. What is the point of saving my life, if you destroy it?’

She didn’t go home. The thought of being alone in that miserable room was more than she could take right now. So she walked. Hard and fast. As if she could walk the heat from her blood.

Walking at this hour was not safe. Tales of kidnap and rape were always rife in the International Settlement, but it didn’t stop her tonight. She wanted to rush down to the river where she could escape from the thousands of people all fighting for their square inch of air and space in Junchow, and maybe there she could breathe easier. But not even Lydia was that reckless. She knew about the river rats, the men with knives and a habit to feed, so she headed uphill, up Tennyson Road and Wordsworth Avenue where the houses were safe and respectable and where dogs in kennels kept watch for any stealthy tread.

She was angry with Chang An Lo. But worse, she was angry with herself. She’d let him get under her skin and make her feel . . . oh hell, . . . feel what? She tried to snatch at the swirling knot of emotions that was making her chest all blocked and tight, but they were jumbled together, snagged on one another, and when she pulled they dragged through her lungs and caught at the back of her throat like barbed wire. She kicked at a stone and heard it ricochet off the hubcap of a parked car. Somewhere a dog barked. A car, a house, a dog. With thirty-eight thousand dollars she could have had them all. There were twelve Chinese dollars to the English pound, that’s what Parker had told her tonight, more than enough for what she wanted. Two passports, two steamer tickets to England, and a small redbrick house, one that had a bathroom and a parquet floor for dancing. A patch of lawn too for Sun Yat-sen. He’d like that.

Her thoughts shut down. It was too much. She pushed the images out of her mind, but she couldn’t push away so easily the images of Chang’s intent eyes and the whisper of his touch on her arm. It echoed through her, spreading over her skin from limb to limb.

She tried to work out what it was about him that was different tonight. He was thinner, yes, but it wasn’t that. He’d always been lean. No, it was something about his face. In his eyes, in the set of his mouth. She had seen that same kind of expression once before, on Polly’s face when her beloved cat Benji was run over. A look of constant pain. Not pain like when she’d sewn up Chang’s foot. Something deeper. She longed to know what had happened to him to cause such a change since that day at Lizard Creek, but at the same time she swore to herself she would never ever speak to him again. Tonight he’d made her feel . . . what? What? What?

Bad. He’d made her feel bad about herself.

She turned in through a pair of stone pillars and wrought-iron gates - easy to climb over - and keeping in the deep shadow of the high box hedge that surrounded the property, she ran swiftly through the rain toward the back of the house.

‘Lydia! You’re all wet.’ Polly’s blue eyes were wide and startled, but her face was still soft with the mists of sleep.

‘Sorry to wake you. I just had to come and tell you about . . .’

Polly was pulling at her, dragging the wet dress over Lydia’s head and shaking it out with a sorrowful little moan of displeasure. ‘I hope it’s not ruined.’

‘Oh Polly, never mind the dress. It got soaked when I wore it before but dried out fine. Well, almost fine. One or two water stains on the satin bit, that’s all, so a few more won’t hurt.’

Polly placed the dress with care on a hanger. ‘Here, wear this.’

She threw Lydia a dressing gown. It was white with small pink elephants round the hem and cuffs. Lydia thought it childish but put it on anyway to cover up her fleshless bones. Polly’s body was all soft and full of curves, her breasts already full and mobile, while Lydia’s were little more than upturned saucers. ‘When you get some food inside you, darling, they’ll fill out, don’t fret,’ her mother had told her. But Lydia wasn’t so sure.

Polly sat down on her bed and patted the spot beside her. ‘Sit down and tell all.’

That was one of the things Lydia loved about Polly. She was adaptable. She didn’t mind in the least being woken in the middle of the night by a rap at her window and was happy to throw it open to her drenched nocturnal visitor. It was a simple climb up to the second floor, one Lydia had often done before, up the trellis, across the veranda roof, and an easy jump up to the windowsill. Fortunately Christopher Mason was so besotted by his dogs that they were allowed to sleep in the scullery whenever it rained, so there was no risk of losing a chunk of leg to sharp teeth.

‘How did it go?’ Polly demanded, excitement making her face look younger than her sixteen years. ‘Did you like him?’

‘Like who?’

‘Alfred Parker. Who else? Isn’t that what you’ve come to tell me about?’

‘Oh yes. Yes, of course. The dinner at La Licorne.’

‘So what happened?’

Lydia had to search a long way back in her mind. ‘It was fun. I had prawns in garlic sauce,’ she breathed heavily into Polly’s face to offer proof, ‘and
steak au poivre
and . . .’

‘No, no. Not the food. What was
he
like?’

‘Mr Parker?’

‘Yes, silly.’

‘He was . . . kind.’ The word surprised Lydia, but when she thought about it she decided it was true.

‘How dull!’

‘Oh, yes, he’s as dull as a Latin lesson. He thinks he knows everything and wants you to think the same. I got the feeling he likes to be admired.’