Speaker of Mandarin Read online

  That evening the screens were drawn closely around their table and he had no further sight of the party until he and they were boarding the bus for Zhuzhou where they would pick up the Shanghai to Kweilin train.

  It would have been easier and quicker to fly. Fanning’s party, of course, had to make every leg of their journey by train but Wexford would happily have gone on by air. It wasn’t a matter of his will, though, but the will of Lu Xing She and Mr Sung.

  He had a double seat to himself on the bus. Silently he observed his fellow passengers. A couple of days in the hotel at Chang-sha had gone a long way towards reviving them and they looked less as if they had been pulled through a hedge backwards.

  Each of the enemies had also secured a double seat, one of them behind the driver, the other on the opposite side of the aisle to Wexford. Out of the corner of his eye Wexford read the label tied to the older man’s handcase. A. H. Purbank, and an address somewhere in Essex. Purbank was perhaps forty-five, unhealthy-looking, thin, dressed in baggy jeans and an open-necked pale green shirt. His sprucer, dark-haired adversary was also in jeans, but a snugly fitting pair of denims which looked smart and suitable with a ‘friendship’ tee shirt. He had swivelled round in his seat and was talking to the woman in the seat behind him. This was the daughter of one of the elderly couples and after a little while Wexford saw her get up and sit in the empty place beside him. Wexford, with another glance at Purbank, thought how uncomfortable it must have been travelling all those miles from Irkutsk away up there on Lake Baikal with a man with whom you weren’t on speaking terms. What quarrel had sprung up between these inoffensive-seeming travellers? Both were English, both middle-class, prosperous presumably, adventurously inclined surely, having a fair bit in common, yet they had fallen out so bitterly as purposely not to have exchanged a word across all those vast stretches of eastern Asia. At table in the hotels they must have sat, if not together, near enough to each other, perhaps have been allotted adjoining rooms. Now they were to share a sleeping space some eight feet by five and lie breathing the same warm air in the rattling darkness for eight or nine hours. It was grotesque.

  Was one of them or perhaps each of them among the four men with whom Fanning alleged that pretty, painted, ageing creature in the spotted blouse and white pants had engaged in sexual relations during the trip? Fanning, of course, exaggerated wildly. Certainly he couldn’t have been indicating as among her partners the fair woman’s father, asleep now with his white cotton hat drooped over his eyes, or the austere silver-haired man with the ugly wife. Of course, Wexford reflected, he hadn’t exactly specified members of the party and presumably there had been plenty of other men in the Trans-Siberian train.

  The bright sky had clouded over and a little warm rain had begun to fall. It was still raining lightly when they came on to the station platform. By each door of the train stood a girl attendant in grey uniform and with the red star of the People’s Republic on her cap. Wexford was shown to the carriage that was to be his for the night. Though clean and with comfortable-looking berths, it was insufferably hot, the thermometer on the wall telling him the temperature was two degrees short of a hundred. Once the train started, he opened the window and switched on the fan. A very slightly cooler air blew in through the fly screen.

  As soon as they were off Mr Sung came in. Wexford, who had discovered a thermos flask and was busy with the Silver Leaf he had bought in Chang-sha, offered him a cup of tea but Mr Sung refused. Here, as elsewhere, he contrived to give the impression of always being busy and involved. The restaurant car would open at eight, he said, and drinks would be available: beer, red and white wine, Maotai, maybe Japanese whisky.

  Wexford drank tea and read his Fodor’s. It was dusk now, growing dark, and was no longer unpleasantly hot, though smuts came in through the fine mesh of the screen. Hunan Province, blanketed in darkness, fled past as the train reached a steady speed. After a while he went out into the corridor to establish the whereabouts of lavatory and bathroom.

  Next to the bathroom, in the first compartment of the carriage, four Hong-Kong Chinese in Palm Beach shirts and white trousers sat playing cards. The door of the next one was opened as Wexford passed it and a voice said, ‘Oh, excuse me. I wonder if we could possibly trouble you a moment?’

  Wexford went in, not entirely reluctantly. He had been curious enough about these two women to want to make a closer personal estimate. The one he had privately styled the alcoholic was lying in one of the lower berths, her shoes tumbled on the floor and her swollen feet raised up on two pillows. She gave him a wan smile.

  ‘It’s so awful constantly trying to make oneself understood to these Chinese,’ said the other, ‘and that beastly Yu has disappeared again. He always disappears when you want him. I suppose he thinks playing hard to get makes him more desirable, do you think? Oh, by the way, I’m Lois Knox and this is Hilda Avory—I already know your name, I spied on your luggage—and now, please, please, do you think you could be awfully sweet and make our fan work?’

  The attendant who had shown Wexford to his carriage had worked his fan for him, so he had no difficulty in finding the switch which was rather cunningly hidden under the back of the table.

  Lois Knox clasped her hands together girlishly.

  ‘And since you’re so clever, could you be even more of an angel and find out how to suppress that bloody radio?’

  The martial music which had greeted him on entering the compartment—interrupted now for what was presumably a political harangue—Wexford had supposed to be on at the desire of the occupants.

  ‘Oh, no, we hate it, don’t we, Hilda? There should be a knob under there but it’s broken and it won’t move. How shall we ever get a wink of sleep?’ Her eyes were a brilliant sea-blue, large beautiful eyes which she fixed intensely on his face. The muscles of her face sagged rather and her jawline was no longer firm but she had something of a youthful look as the gyrating fan fluttered her black hair about. It was dyed hair, greyish-brown at the roots after five weeks away from a hairdresser.

  ‘You’re all by yourself, aren’t you?’ She didn’t wait for confirmation. ‘We’re on that beastly train tour but never again, so help us God. How we should love an aircraft or even a humble bus for a change, shouldn’t we, Hilda?’

  Hilda Avory made no reply. She put out a hand for her teacup and drank from it with a shudder. She had a damp look, skin glistening, tendrils of hair clinging to her forehead, portions of her dress adhering to thin flesh, as if she had been out in the rain or had sweated profusely.

  Wexford set about hunting for the controls of the radio. ‘I could fix it for you if I had a pair of pliers.’

  ‘Imagine trying to explain pliers to that inscrutable little Yu! Do have a cup of tea, won’t you? Or some laoshan?’

  ‘That’s Chinese for mineral water,’ said Hilda Avory, speaking for the first time. She had a gravelly voice, unexpectedly deep.

  ‘I’m terribly afraid we haven’t anything stronger but the fact is Hilda is drying out, aren’t you, darling? And she doesn’t feel it’s very wise to have spirits about, such an awful temptation, you know.’

  There seemed no answer to make to this. He accepted a cup of tea. The music burst forth once more in a kind of Chinese version of ‘Washington Post.’

  ‘What shall we do?’ cried Lois Knox. She brought her hands together appealingly. The red nails were as long as a Manchu’s. ‘We shall be found stark raving mad in the morning.’

  ‘How about cutting the wires?’ said Wexford.

  The deep voice from the other berth said, ‘Not a good idea. I heard of someone who did that in China and they had to pay to have the whole train rewired. It cost them thousands of yuan.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said Wexford. He drank up his tea and went off down the corridor to find an attendant.

  The only one he came upon, a very young boy, had nodded off to sleep, his head against the hard wall, in a little cubby-hole next to the bathroom. Wexford went on
over the intersection into the next carriage, the sweat gathering on his body now and breaking out on his forehead and upper lip. Away from the fans the heat was as great as ever. There was nothing but dense blackness to be seen outside now and, dimly through the upper part of the windows, a few faint stars. In a compartment with Mr Yu and another young Chinese sat Mr Sung, the three of them poring over a map of the Li River spread out on the table.

  ‘Restaurant will open eight o’clock,’ said Mr Sung as soon as he saw him. All the guides seemed to think that visitors from the west needed to eat and drink all day long in order to maintain equilibrium, and that any requests they received from tourists must necessarily be for food or tea or beer. ‘I come fetch you when restaurant open.’

  ‘I want a pair of pliers,’ said Wexford.

  Mr Sung, Mr Yu and the other man looked at him in blank inquiry. Wexford recalled how, in Peking, he had asked an interpreter where he could buy a packet of aspirin and had been directed to an ice-cream shop.

  ‘Players,’ said Mr Sung at last.

  ‘You want cigarettes?’ said Mr Yu. ‘You get plenty cigarettes when restaurant open.’

  ‘I don’t want cigarettes, I want pliers.’ Wexford made pinching movements with his fingers, he mimed pulling a nail out of the wall. Mr Sung stared amiably at him. Mr Yu stared and then laughed. The other man handed him a large shabby book which turned out to be an English-Chinese dictionary. Wexford indicated ‘pliers’ and its ideograph with his fingertip. Everyone smiled and nodded, Mr Sung went off down the corridor and came back with a girl train attendant who handed Wexford a pair of eyebrow tweezers.

  Wexford gave up. It was a quarter to eight and he began to look forward to a beer. In the intersection he met the little elderly woman who was travelling in what he had mentally dubbed—though it certainly was not—a ménage à trois. She was carrying a packet of teabags.

  ‘Oh, good evening,’ she said. ‘This is quite an adventure, isn’t it?’ Wexford wasn’t sure if she spoke with seriousness or irony, still less so when she went on to say, her head a little on one side, ‘We English must stick together, is what I always say.’

  He knew at once then, he intuited, he hardly knew how, that she was getting at him. It was neither witty nor particularly clever, though she intended it to be both, and she was referring to his brief association with Lois Knox which she had perhaps observed from the corridor. Her expression was dry, her mouth quirked a little. She was as small and thin as a Chinese and the dark blue trouser suit she wore unsexed her. What was she to the man Fanning had told him was a retired barrister? Sister? Sister-in-law? Wife’s confidante or best friend’s widow? As she went on her way into the next compartment he observed that her left hand was ringless.

  In the cubby-hole next to the bathroom the boy was still asleep with his head against the wall. Wexford saw what he hadn’t noticed before, a cloth toolbag lying beside the boy’s legs on the floor. He went in, opened the toolbag and helped himself to a pair of pliers.

  Outside the windows a few feeble clusters of light showed. They were passing a village or small town. For a moment the outline of a mountain could be seen and then the darkness closed in once more as the train gathered speed. Wexford stood in the doorway of Lois Knox’s compartment. The radio was still on, playing a selection from Swan Lake. Hilda Avory still lay in the lower berth and on the end of it, beside her feet, sat Purbank. He seemed to be addressing them on the very subject which had been the reason for Wexford’s visit to China in the first place, crime prevention. Lois’s face wore the expression of a woman who has been taught from childhood that men must at all costs be flattered. Hilda’s eyes were closed and slightly screwed up.

  ‘These Communists make a lot of high-flown claims about how they’ve got rid of crime. Now that’s all very well but we know in practice it just isn’t true. I mean, where did I have my watch pinched and my Diners Club card and all that currency? Not in Europe, oh, no. In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. And that, mark you, was in a train. Now why should it be any different here? Same lack of material possessions—worse, if anything—so you can bet your life they can’t wait to get their hot little hands on rich capitalists’ property—and that means yours. So don’t leave it in the compartment, carry it with you, and when you …’

  Wexford coughed. Lois saw him and jumped up, clasping her hands. In his absence she had put on more lipstick and eyeshadow and had changed into a low-necked dress of thin yellow material with a black pattern on it.

  ‘Oh, what a fright you gave me! Tony has been scaring us out of our wits with tales of robbery and murder.’

  Purbank gave a very macho, reassuring-the-little-woman haw-haw of a laugh. ‘When did I mention murder now? I never said a word about murder. I merely counselled the inadvisability of leaving valuables around.’

  ‘Quite right too,’ said Wexford.

  He groped under the table, got a grip on the broken knob with the pliers and wrenched it anticlockwise. The music stopped.

  ‘Oh, you wonderful, wonderful man!’ cried Lois. ‘Listen to the blessed silence. Peace at last! Don’t you adore the masterful way he strode into the compartment? You couldn’t do that, Tony. All you could do was say we’d have to put up with it all night and get robbed as well.’

  ‘Give the man a cup of tea,’ muttered Hilda into her pillow.

  ‘I’ll give him anything he wants!’ She extended the teacup to Wexford, holding it in both hands and bowing over it in what she perhaps thought was the manner of an emperor’s concubine. ‘Oh, if only you hadn’t drunk up all the Scotch, Hilda!’

  But at that moment Mr Yu appeared in the doorway, announced that the restaurant was open and please to follow him. Mindful perhaps of Purbank’s warning, Lois gathered up purse, handbag, hand case and what looked like a jewel box. Wexford gulped down the by now lukewarm tea, realizing he was about to be trapped into a foursome with the two women and Purbank. This being China, though, the restaurant would hardly be open for long. Everywhere he had been so far what night life there was came to a halt at about ten. But was there much chance of sleep in this stuffy train? He felt himself being overtaken by those sensations which result from an insufficiency of sleep, not so much tiredness as a lightness in the head and a feeling of unreality.

  They walked down the corridor, Wexford at the rear with Lois immediately in front of him. The boy was still asleep, his head having slid down the wall and come to rest on the table. Wexford slipped in to replace the pliers in the toolbag. Lois hadn’t noticed his absence and had gone on in the wake of the others. Wexford stood a moment by the window, trying to make out some indication of the terrain in the darkness that rushed past. He heard a footstep not far from him, the way they had come, turned round and saw approaching him, though still some yards away, the old woman with the bound feet.

  This time she was without her stick. Had she followed him on to the train? He closed his eyes, opened them again and she was gone. Had she turned aside into one of the compartments? A hand, red-taloned, was laid on his arm; he smelt Lois Knox’s perfume.

  ‘Reg? Do come along, darling, we thought we’d lost you.’

  He followed her down the corridor to the restaurant car.

  Blue velvet curtains, lace curtains, and on the seats those dun-coloured cotton covers with pleated valances that cover the chairs all over China in waiting rooms and trains and airports and even aircraft. Lois patted the chair next to hers and he had no choice but to sit there. On the table were a plate of wrapped sweets, a plate of wedges of sponge cake, a wine bottle which contained, according to Purbank, spirit and a spirit bottle containing wine. Both liquids were the colour of a Riesling. Wexford asked the waiter for a bottle of beer. Purbank, lighting a cigar, began to talk about the frequent incidence of burglaries in metropolitan Essex.

  The restaurant car was full. Chinese passengers sat eating noodles and vegetables out of earthenware bowls. The guides were drinking tea, whispering softly together in Pu Tong Hua. Behind Wex
ford the two married couples shared a table and the older of the men, in the high-pitched, jovially insensitive voice common to many surgeons, was instructing his companions in the ancient art of foot-binding. A gasp of revulsion came from the barrister’s wife as he described toes atrophying.

  The beer arrived. It was warm and sweetish. Wexford made a face and signalled to the waiter who was walking round with a tea kettle. Under the tablecloth Lois’s knee touched his. ‘Excuse me,’ Wexford said and he got up and walked over to Mr Sung’s table. ‘Let me know when you’re ready for bed. I don’t want to keep you up.’

  One of those complex misunderstandings now arose. Why did Wexford want him, Mr Sung, to go to bed? He was not ill. It was (in Mr Sung’s words) only twenty-one hundred hours. The dictionary was again produced. Mr Yu smiled benignly, smoking a cigarette. At length it transpired that Mr Sung was not sharing Wexford’s compartment for the night, had never intended to share his compartment, would instead be sharing with Mr Yu and the other man whom he introduced as Mr Wong. Because the train wasn’t crowded Wexford had his accommodation to himself. He went over to Lewis Fanning and offered him one of the spare berths in his compartment.

  But Fanning rejoined in a fashion very interesting to those who are students of character.

  ‘Good God in heaven, I couldn’t leave those two alone together! They’d be at each other’s throats in two shakes of a turkey’s tail. They’d tear each other to pieces. No, I’m frightfully grateful and all that but it’d be more than my life’s worth.’

  From which Wexford gathered that Fanning was by no means dreading the night ahead and looked forward to extracting from it the maximum of dramatic value for the delectation of those willing to listen to him. Mr Sung, Mr Yu and Mr Wong had begun to play cards. The surgeon was drawing diagrams of the metatarsals, before and after binding, on a table napkin. Wexford sat down again. His teacup had been refilled. Having apparently postponed her drying out, Hilda Avory was drinking steadily from a tumbler filled out of the wine bottle Purbank said held the Chinese spirit Maotai, while Purbank himself told anecdotes of thefts and break-ins he had known. Lois Knox’s knee came back against Wexford’s and he felt her bare toes nudge his ankle, her sandal having been kicked off under the table. The train ran on through impenetrable darkness, through a dark that showed no demarcation between land and sky and which was punctured by not a single light.