Speaker of Mandarin Page 5

  Whatever amenities the rooftop bar lacked was made up for by the view. The sky glowed with moonlight and above the river’s thread the mountains floated like black storm-clouds. As Wexford, a glass of cassia wine beside him on the parapet, leaned over to gaze at the town and the mountains, music burst forth from a record player set up on a card table. It was an LP of Christmas music they were playing. The syrupy voices of an angel choir began with ‘Silent Night’, went on to ‘Santa Claus Is Coming’ and then Bing Crosby started his soft crooning of ‘White Christmas’. It was hotter here than in Changsha, stickily humid, the treetops rich with foliage, a bright June moon illuminating it all. As the record went relentlessly on, the Americans at the next table to Wexford’s began laughing. The neat smiling Chinese boy who supervised the player and had put the record on beamed at them with gratification. He had made the foreign tourists happy, he would make them even happier by starting it all over again.

  As ‘Silent Night’, with all its evocations of bitter cold, of church bells, of the star of Bethlehem, crept for the second time over the still, hot air, Lois Knox came up the stairs from the floor below. She came from under the concrete canopy which sheltered the bar out on to the roof and she was accompanied by a large paunchy Australian with whom Wexford had gone down to dinner in the lift. Lois’s make-up was fresh, she had at some time contrived to visit the hotel hairdresser, and she was wearing a newly pressed blue linen dress and high-heeled blue shoes. She was looking better than he had ever seen her and the Australian seemed smitten already. Wexford understood that he was forgiven, she could afford to forgive him now. She waved, calling out, ‘We won’t intrude on your reverie!’ The Australian took her arm and led her away to a part of the roof where neither the moon nor the lights penetrated.

  He sat down at a table alone. After last night it might be wise not to drink too much. Besides, the cassia wine was sweet to the point of cloyingness. Presently Gordon Vinald and Margery Baumann came up on to the roof together. He talked to them for a while and then he went off to green tea and bed.

  Going out of the hotel in the morning was a little like walking into a cloud of steam. Already, at a quarter to eight, the temperature was soaring into the eighties. To Wexford it seemed absurd to board a bus for a three- or four-hundred-yard journey to the landing stage. He walked, attempting to shake off the light-headed unreal feeling that was still with him. The roar of his air conditioner had awakened him at two, and when he turned it off the oven temperature returned, closing in like a thick soft blanket. Moreover, the bed was the hardest he had ever attempted to sleep on, a wooden cot with a thin layer of cotton wadding over it. He had lain there, reading, shifting his aching limbs about. Having already got through most of what he had brought with him, Vanity Fair (a third reading), the poetry of Lu Yu (because he was coming to China) and last year’s Booker winner, he had started on a weighty anthology called Masterpieces of the Supernatural. The first story in the collection was ‘The Upper Berth’ and he was glad he hadn’t tried to read it in the train.

  Gradually coming round, shaking off the miseries of the night, he walked along the avenue of cassia trees. The boat was in and the American party and the Australian businessmen were already going on board. As Wexford started to follow them the minibus drew up and Mr Sung came bounding out, cross and pompous.

  ‘This is very bad. Must not go alone. Why not wait bus like I say? Cannot board ship without tickets.’

  He thrust a piece of coloured cardboard at Wexford. Mr T’chung gathered up the train party by waving his arms like one making semaphore signals. Wexford took the ticket stub that was handed back to him. It had a map of the Li River on it and their route down to Yang-shuo marked, a number of ideographs in pink ink and the somewhat pretentious words printed: Ship’s papers. But the boat itself was nice enough, a typical river boat, with a saloon and a big upper deck with deck chairs.

  ‘Good scenery begin ten-thirty,’ said Mr Sung.

  ‘Isn’t this good scenery?’ Wexford asked as the gangway went up and they cast off. The Li River, broad and bronze-coloured, wound out of the town between green cone mountains.

  ‘Ten-thirty,’ said Mr Sung. ‘Then you take photographs.’

  Wexford was tired of explaining to him that he didn’t have a camera. Impossible to make Mr Sung understand that to be without a camera was to be free. Gordon Vinald, the barrister’s wife and her friend were already up on deck, grumbling, changing films, struggling with telescopic lenses. Wexford sat at a table in the saloon with Margery Baumann, drinking tea that was just being served. Sometimes it is possible for a middle-aged woman to look as fresh as a girl and that was how Margery Baumann, in blue and white checked cotton and with her fair hair newly washed, looked at eight-thirty in the morning on the Li River.

  ‘I’m looking forward to this trip,’ she said. ‘It’s going to be wonderful. And after that—well, we can’t get home soon enough for me.’

  ‘I don’t imagine you’re doing the homeward trip by train as well?’

  ‘Oh, no, thank goodness.’ She had a nice light laugh and laughed a good deal but not, Wexford thought, from any sort of nervousness. ‘Train to Canton, train out of China to Hong Kong, then the flight home with dear old comfy Swissair.’

  ‘You haven’t enjoyed your holiday?’

  ‘In some ways tremendously.’ For a moment her eyes had a dreamy look as of delightful, perhaps romantic, things remembered. She became practical. ‘But I’ve had enough, six weeks is too much really. And then I’m needed at home. I’m beginning to feel guilty.’

  ‘What job do you have, Miss Baumann?’

  ‘I’m a GP.’ He didn’t know why he was so surprised. The children of doctors are often doctors themselves. But she looked so much more the sort of woman who had devoted a gentle life to her old parents. ‘I hadn’t taken a holiday, not more than a long weekend, in three years. So I got a locum and took the lot owing to me in one—well, not fell, but super swoop!’ She laughed.

  ‘The practice is in London?’ He really mustn’t ask so many questions. It was the habit of an investigating officer. She didn’t seem to mind.

  ‘No, Guildford.’

  ‘Really? I’m not far away in Kingsmarkham.’

  ‘Then the Knightons are even nearer to you. They come from a place called Sewingbury.’

  ‘The Knightons?’

  ‘Those people,’ she said, as the barrister and his wife walked past the windows. Lois Knox came into the saloon with her Australian. She introduced him as Bruce. Wexford, keeping a straight face, shook hands. Bruce began to talk loudly and vituperatively about Chinese double-think, the way everything was the people’s—the people’s money, the people’s hotel, the people’s school—while the people themselves had nothing. He button-holed Mr T’chung who was peaceably drinking tea with Mr Sung.

  ‘You say it was slave labour built the Ming Tombs, right? It’s wrong to force men to build a grandiose tomb for some lousy emperor?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Mr T’chung.

  ‘But it’s OK to make men build a damn great tomb for Mao Tse Tung in Tien An Men Square, is it? What’s the difference?’

  Mr T’chung looked at him calmly. ‘That is a question,’ he said in his little clipped voice, ‘no one can answer.’

  Bruce threw up his hands and gave a bark of laughter.

  ‘Don’t let’s talk dreary dreary politics,’ said Lois.

  Wexford went up on deck. The Knightons’ friend and Hilda Avory were sitting in deck chairs, drinking tea and Maotai respectively. Hilda said in her gravelly voice with its dying fall, ‘Some people who did the trip yesterday told me the boat broke down in midstream and they were three hours repairing it.’

  ‘Then the odds are against it breaking down today.’

  ‘It’s not a matter of odds, it’s a question of efficiency. My only comfort is this place isn’t quite so bad as Russia.’

  There were boys swimming in the river on one side and water buffalo on the other.
High up on the cliffside, against the limestone, wheeled a pair of birds that might have been eagles. Wexford sat in silence, watching the life of the river go by, a village in which was a little curved bridge over an inlet, a temple with a blue roof that the Cultural Revolution had managed to miss, men fishing with cormorants …

  He stayed up there in the sun for as long as he could stand the heat. Mrs Knighton came up on deck and indefatigably took pictures of everything she saw, water buffalo, cormorants, peasant farmers in the fields, boats with square orange sails, even a utilitarian building Wexford suspected might be a sewage works. By the time it was ten-thirty he had gone below, scorched off the deck. But it was true what Mr Sung had predicted. The scenery suddenly became spectacular, the mountains looping like fantastic clouds, the water clear as glass but with a fierce current running.

  Lunch was served at the favourite Chinese time of eleven-thirty and it was the worst meal Wexford had so far eaten, the main course being mainly those organs and entrails which in the west are not eaten by human beings. It amused him to consider how Chinese food, which is usually thought of in Rupert Street or at Poon’s as crisp and delicate, may have its slime and lights side too.

  It was during lunch that, looking round, Wexford saw the man who had been introduced to him in the train as Mr Wong. He was very surprised. But perhaps it wasn’t Mr Wong, perhaps he was confusing him with someone else. But he didn’t think so. To say that all Chinese look alike to Europeans was as great a fallacy as that all Chinese had yellow skins. Ah, well, there must be some reason for his being there, not mysterious at all probably to Lu Xing She.

  There was just room to wedge a chair into one of the shady companionways. He sat there sleepily while the boat chugged along from Kao Ping to Hua Shan through the deep water, past the drifting boats on which whole families lived, past the cormorant fishermen, between the domed mountains on which trees grew like moss on boulders. When he didn’t want to sleep he couldn’t keep awake …

  A commotion awoke him to an immediate awareness that the boat was no longer moving. Normally, his was a quick rousing from sleep, but after so many white nights and in the slumbrous steamy heat he came to gradually and slowly. His first thought was that Hilda Avory had been right and the boat had broken down. But the engine room was just behind where he was sitting and, turning round, he saw it was deserted.

  Then he saw the heads bobbing on the water. He got up and tried to go forward but after a few yards his passage was blocked by the press of people. The saloon was empty, twenty or thirty people were in the bows. Wexford turned back and made his way up on to the upper deck. Here too was a similar craning crowd but the river could be seen. He could see Mr Sung swimming, fully clothed, and what seemed like the entire crew of the boat in the water. And not only the crew—Margery Baumann, Gordon Vinald, Tony Purbank, all swimming or treading water, searching for something, someone …

  Mrs Knighton, holding her camera in thick red hands, said to him, ‘A man went overboard. He couldn’t swim, they can’t find him.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  She began to take pictures, and said with indifference, ‘Not one of us. A Chinese.’

  It was an hour before they gave up trying. Before that they had put one of the crew ashore and he had set off to walk, a distance of four or five miles, to the nearest place where there would be a telephone. Wexford watched the little figure in the blue shirt walking along between the river bank and the ricefields until it was swallowed up by the richer blue and the green.

  Margery Baumann was the first of the would-be rescuers to reboard the boat. She was in a one-piece black swimsuit. Wexford thought she was exactly the sort of woman who would never take this sort of trip without wearing a bathing costume under her clothes. She said nothing, went down to the bathroom to get dried and dressed. Purbank came next, shivering in spite of the heat. The crew member who had stayed on board—young, though older than the others, who all looked to Wexford about eighteen—seemed to be the captain. He helped haul Purbank aboard, tried to say something to him in very halting English, failed, and shrugged, holding up his hands.

  Gordon Vinald was still swimming among the reefs which reached in places almost to the surface of the water. But as, one by one, the Chinese gave up the search, he too swam reluctantly towards the boat in a slow crawl and allowed himself to be hauled in. Now the search had been abandoned, almost everyone had either gone up on deck or retreated into the saloon. The river was empty, a shining sheet of turquoise under a pale blue sky, the mountains behind making a horizon of misted blue loops. Such a beautiful, gently smiling river! A river artists had been painting for two thousand years and would paint, no doubt, for a thousand more. Under its silken rippling surface, trapped in the teeth of one of those reefs, hung a drowned corpse, small, thin, white as a root.

  ‘What happened?’ Wexford said to Purbank. ‘I was asleep.’

  Purbank, in blue underpants, the sun drying him, pushed his fingers through his wet hair. ‘Nobody knows really. It’s always like that, isn’t it, when someone goes overboard? This chap was up here in the bows where we are now. He must have been alone and he was sitting on his haunches, I reckon, the way they all do, and somehow or other he toppled in. Couldn’t swim, of course. Captain Ma got everyone who could swim to go in after him but he’d gone before I was even in the water.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Who was what?’

  ‘The man who was drowned. Who was he?’

  ‘God knows. To tell the truth I never asked. I mean, we wouldn’t know anyway, would we? He was Chinese.’

  ‘Not one of the crew?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. Anyone would think you were a policeman, the questions you ask. I daresay we shall get enough of that from the Chinese cops when we get to what’s it called, Yang Shuo.’

  But Captain Ma, apparently, had no intention of continuing the journey to Yang Shuo. They were within a bend of the river of a village with a landing stage and it was to there, Mr Sung told Wexford, that they were now heading. The engines started up and the boat began to move. A bus would come and pick them up. It was best, there was nothing to worry about, the incident was unfortunate, that was all.

  ‘Who was the drowned man?’ Wexford asked. ‘One of the crew?’

  Mr Sung hesitated. He seemed to be considering and he looked far from happy. Wexford, from long practice in studying the reactions of men, thought that what he saw in Mr Sung’s face was not so much sorrow at the death of a fellow human being as fear for his own skin. Eventually he said with reluctance, ‘His name Wong T’ien Shui.’

  ‘Mr Wong?’

  Mr Sung nodded. He stood looking over the side at the reefs, one of which the boat’s bottom had slightly scraped. ‘Impossible navigate here at all January, February,’ he said brightly.

  Wexford shrugged. He went into the saloon and helped himself to one, then a second, cup of green tea. The pungent tea revived him with almost the stimulus of alcohol. The passengers were gathering up their belongings—bags, carriers, raincoats, umbrellas, maps—preparatory to landing.

  ‘What the hell was that Wong doing on this trip anyway?’ grumbled Fanning to Wexford. ‘I thought he was supposed to be a student? I thought he was supposed to be at university in Chang-sha? Chinese can’t just run about the country like that, going where they please. They’re not free. I bet you fifty yuan there’s going to be hell to pay. Heads will roll over this. Thank God I’m whizzing my little lot off to Canton tomorrow.’

  They went ashore. On a little beach sat an old man with a sparse beard and two strands of moustache. Three small children played about him in the sand. The beach was also populated by a hundred or so chickens and ducks and two white goats. The old man looked at the people from the West with a kind of impassive polite curiosity. He put a few words to Captain Ma and nodded his head.

  The village lay above them, at the top of a sloping lane. It was the hottest part of the day. Wexford had never before experienced the sun as a
n enemy, something to retreat from, to fear. The party wound its way up the street where mirages danced ahead of them in the light. The ground was thick with reddish-brown dust which rose in spirals at their tread. Dust coated everything, the hovels that lined the lane, the walls, the grass, even the legs and arms and faces of the children who came out of their houses, chewing on handfuls of glutinous rice, to stare at the visitors.

  At the top of the hill half a dozen men and a girl were building an apartment block. The smell of the river and the dust gave place to a pleasanter one of sandalwood. There was a shop next door into which the entire party, with the exception of Wexford and Fanning, immediately disappeared, and at the end of the village a big house with a walled-in court which had perhaps once been the home of the local warlord. Fanning squatted, oriental fashion, on the broad veranda of the shop and lit a cigarette.

  ‘I make call Yang Shuo,’ said Mr Sung. ‘Bus come very soon.’

  ‘I make call,’ Mr T’chung corrected him in a very admonitory voice. He began lecturing the other guide in a hectoring sing-song, wagging his finger. Wexford began to think that if it were to be a question of finding a new Chairman from this part of the world, T’chung Bei Ling might stand a better chance than Sung Lao Zhong.

  It was too hot to explore the village, though Wexford walked down one or two narrow lanes. Children followed him in a giggling huddle. As he returned once more to the square or marketplace where the shop was he saw an old woman standing in the deep shadow of an overhanging roof. He stood still and looked at her, from her black hair laced with grey, her white puffy face—the Marquise of Tai’s face—down to her tiny wedge-shaped feet in child’s slippers. He approached till he was no more than a yard from her.