A Most Immoral Woman (20 page)

The SS
Hsin Fung
steamed up the Whampoa River towards the Yellow Sea and Wei Hai Wei. From the bridge, Morrison watched Shanghai disappear into the distance. To one side stood Kuan; to the other a stocky Englishman with mackerel eyes and unpleasantly fleshy lips. Major F.S. Bedlow of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers was the latest correspondent dispatched by
The Times
to bedevil him, a human blunderbuss capable, Morrison was quite certain, of flattening any enemy with garrulousness alone. Before the SS
Hsin Fung
had left the Whampoa, Bedlow had confided all manner of inside intelligence about the war to a subaltern with whom he had formed a casual acquaintance. The subaltern told the chief mate who, in turn, told Morrison.
A nice discreet man is our correspondent!
Morrison rued inviting him to stay in Peking. Battered by Tooth and bruised by Mae, he was already downspirited enough.

Over dinner at the captain’s table, an American woman
d’un certain age
named Lara Ball flirted with both Morrison and the handsome chief mate. Not in the mood, Morrison excused himself to search out a comfortable nook in the smoking saloon
where he might nurse a whisky and his disappointment in relative peace. He was obscurely rattled by the behaviour of Miss Bell. She was too old, he thought, for such shenanigans
. Forty if she were a day!

Almost his age in fact.

Anxiety flared in him along with his sinuses.

In came Bedlow in search of fellowship. Vainly attempting to deflect conversation, Morrison huddled over his journal. Bedlow, oblivious, pulled up a chair. Morrison scrabbled in his mind for the glorious solitude of the Australian wilderness and a clarity of thought he feared he might never recover.

Gossip welled up from Bedlow like a spring. Morrison, giving up any hope of writing in his journal, found himself almost admiring the man for the tirelessness of his news gathering. And Bedlow did convey the titbit that Paul Bowles—last seen amongst the crowd sniffing after Mae at the Shanghai racetrack—had so exasperated his employers at the Associated Press that only yesterday they had recalled him to San Francisco.
One down
, he thought and then remembered he was no longer in the competition himself. An acute sense of loss walloped him in the guts. Muttering some excuse, he stumbled off to the cabin he was sharing with a Japanese bean merchant called Yendo.

As Yendo snuffled and snored, Morrison pitched from cold, dank thought into tempestuous dreams and back again, waking more tired than when he had gone to bed. His jaw still ached from the dentist’s mallet. Stooping in the cramped cabin, he shaved, drawing blood. In the looking glass, a sallow man with downturned mouth stared back at him. Soaking his flannel in a basin of cold water, he pressed it to his face and eyes. A marginally pinker and more vital man looked back. The corner of Morrison’s
mouth twitched as he recited lines from Kipling that had given him comfort in the past:

A million surplus Maggies are willing to bear the yoke;

And a woman is only a woman, but a good Cigar is a Smoke.

God, he missed her.

Tailed by the scombroid Bedlow and having left Kuan to his own devices for the evening, Morrison entered the canteen on Liu Kung Island, where he found James drinking what looked like flavoured milk.

‘Local specialty. Not sure why I didn’t discover it earlier. Ichiban. Jap for “number one”. Egg, milk, brandy, gin, crème de Macao, Angostura bitters, all the usual devices of the devil. Midshipmen write home to their mothers about it but only mention the first two ingredients. Does wonders to keep out the cold. G.E.—there’s been an incident.’

James had been on deck on the
Haimun
. It was a cold night. He looked up the coast towards Port Arthur, then across to Dalny. Twenty-five miles of darkness. Not even a passing convoy. He was about to go below deck when a steamer flying the flag of a Russian admiral suddenly appeared at stern, all four funnels belching smoke. ‘Damned fast boat, that one,’ he told Morrison.

He raced into the saloon. Brown, the
Haimun
’s wireless operator, was deep in a novel by Jack London; he might as well
have been in Alaska. ‘Brown!’ James yelled and Brown jumped. ‘Spark up the wireless! We’re about to be boarded by the Russians! Tell Fraser that if they don’t hear from us within three hours he should inform the British commissioner, the senior naval officer and
The Times
.’ James then raced up to the bridge.

Captain Passmore was glued to a pair of binoculars. By now the Russians were running parallel. ‘Bloody hell, James.’ Passmore spoke without removing his eyes from the glass. ‘That’s the
Bayan.
’

At this revelation, Morrison sat bolt upright. ‘Makarov’s flagship?’

‘Yes, the flagship of the Commander of the Russian Pacific Fleet himself,’ James confirmed.

Morrison could have sworn Bedlow’s ears actually angled forward at this.

‘Brown sent the message. At that moment, the
Bayan
, which had passed the
Haimun
, suddenly changed course. Just then a great booming flash of yellow fire screamed across the
Haimun
’s bow.’

Bedlow’s eyes popped.

‘Ye gods,’ exclaimed Morrison.

James continued. ‘Brown, white as a sheet, raced back into the cabin as Passmore shouted the orders to weigh anchor. I whipped around, looking for Tonami.’

‘Your Japanese translator.’

James grimaced and took a swig of ichiban before continuing. ‘The quartermaster said Tonami had made a dash for his cabin. I pushed open the door. His shirt was off and he was pointing a dagger at his own stomach.’

A shiver went through Morrison. ‘Let me get this right. Your interpreter was going to commit
hara-kiri
.’

‘
Seppuku
. I mean, that’s what they call it.’

There was more to this story, that was for certain. Morrison was beginning to get an inkling of what it was. ‘Go on, man.’

‘I shouted at him to stop. He told me he knew what he had to do and thrust a sheaf of papers at me.’

‘Papers? What papers?’ Bedlow could scarcely contain himself. His eyes gleamed with interest, his moustache with milk. Morrison felt his hackles rise. There was enough to be concerned about here without worrying about the human wireless sparking up next to him. He glanced around the room. His eyes lit on the eccentric Reginald Johnston, a genial thirty-year-old Scot who served as Wei Hai Wei’s chief magistrate. Johnston, Morrison knew, travelled with an entourage of imaginary friends who had been with him since boyhood. Johnston could keep a man entertained—or trapped—for hours with his stories of The Quork, with her bonnet box and scandalous behaviour; the libidinous Mrs Walkinshaw, who could ‘shock a geisha’; and the strange malefic beast Hopedarg.

‘Bedlow.’ Morrison’s fingers closed around Bedlow’s wrist like a manacle. ‘There’s someone I want you to meet.’

Returning alone to James, Morrison scowled. ‘Indiscreet little jackanapes. He’s been a barnacle to my hull ever since I met him. Nearly impossible to scrape off. Now tell me all about Tonami and tell me fast. He’s no civilian translator, that’s for sure. Officer in the Japanese navy, I take it. Rank?’

James attempted a smile. ‘Commander.’

‘The papers?’

‘His ciphers. He said if he died I should destroy them.’

‘When were you going to tell me?’

‘I am sorry, G.E. It was part of the deal.’

‘The deal?’

‘To keep quiet. The Japs swore me to secrecy.’

Morrison raised one pale eyebrow. ‘I take it our employer is as in the dark about this deal as I am.’

James nodded. He confessed that the Japanese navy had finally agreed to give him limited access to the theatre of war on one condition: that he carried on board a Japanese naval officer pretending to be a civilian translator. Tonami would act as an official censor. His job was to ensure that James’s reports contained nothing detrimental to the Japanese cause. It was true he also translated but that was rather a bonus.

Morrison digested what James was telling him. ‘An arrangement that compromises the neutrality of the ship, and, by extension, Great Britain as well. Not to mention the operation and good name of
The Times
. And yet the Japanese have done next to nothing to fulfil their part of the bargain, which is to grant you protected access to the front.’

Digging in his tobacco pouch, James focused on refilling his pipe. ‘If you put it that way, yes.’

Morrison put one hand on his forehead as though to shield himself from further revelations. ‘So go on. Tonami, the Japanese naval commander posing as a civilian translator, was about to commit
hari-kiri
aboard a putatively neutral vessel leased by
The Times
.’

‘
Seppuku
. I said we could disguise him. They’d never guess who he was. Alive, anyway. I’d have had a bloody hard time explaining the presence of a freshly disembowelled Japanese translator to the Russian search party. But Tonami shook his head. “They’ll know. The Admiral, Stephan Makarov, and I were in Paris together.
Il est genial. Intelligent, aussi. Tout le monde le
trouve ça.
” There was more. Something about a French girl. Makarov had never forgiven him. Marvellous, I thought. Bloody marvellous. I forbade him to do anything foolish and dashed off, returning moments later with the uniform of the Malay quartermaster. By the time Russian boots were clomping across the gangway, Tonami was at the ship’s wheel, the brim of the quartermaster’s cap low over his eyes.’

James had extended a hand to the leader of the boarding party and introduced himself in English and French, doing his best to look calm.

The Russians exchanged glances. Also speaking in French, they asked if there were any Japanese on board.

James shook his head.
‘Mais non, bien sûr
.’

The Russians demanded to be taken to the wireless and shown what had been transmitted. James handed over a ream of fake, innocuous telegrams they’d prepared for just such an emergency. Checking these against the equipment, the Russians noted that the latest transmission was missing. James found it and showed them: it was the notice to Wei Hai Wei that they were about to be boarded. The Russians took in the fact that since the
Haimun
seemed to be a neutral ship engaged in nothing that would compromise its neutrality, holding it beyond three hours might precipitate an international incident. Seeing his chance, James chose that moment to tell them he had earlier seen four Japanese cruisers steaming towards Port Arthur. He intimated that it would be a shame, a tragedy even, if ships of the Russian navy—including the Admiral’s own flagship—were cut off from the home port due to their dealings with such an irrelevant person as himself. The Russians raced up onto the deck, thundered down the gangplank and were gone.

James exhaled. ‘We returned here straight away and I cabled you to come. I wanted to inform you in case there were any repercussions. I knew I could count on your support. I am not so sure our editor will be as sympathetic.’

Morrison swirled his drink in his glass. ‘Just out of curiosity, what was in the real record of transmissions that the Russians could have objected to? Were they not just submissions to
The Times
and so on?’

‘They don’t call you the great correspondent for nothing, G.E.’ James took a few quick puffs on his pipe. He lowered his voice until it was barely audible. ‘Tonami uses our wireless equipment to transmit intelligence and orders to the Japanese navy.’

‘Ye gods, man! Are you reporting a war or trying to start one?’ Morrison was about to ask James when he’d planned on telling him the truth when he realised that James had been hinting at it from that time they’d met in Peking. What’s more, James had asked him to travel to Nagasaki with him and Tonami on the
Haimun
. He’d clearly wanted to tell him then. Morrison was certain that if only he’d gone, he’d have been able to work out some strategy to prevent the disaster that was now threatened by the Russians. But no, he’d gone to Shanghai in pursuit of the cackle-headed Miss Perkins instead.
From the evidence, it is I who is the cackle-headed one!
Well, that strange episode in his life was over. And thank goodness for that. His work needed him and he needed it.

In Tientsin again, and having barely set down at the Astor House, Morrison heard from the faithful Dumas the disconcerting news that Miss Perkins, whose return to Tientsin had preceded his by less than one day, had been spotted earlier that same morning seeing off Martin Egan at the train station.

Morrison shrugged as though the news was of no concern. ‘At least Egan has the decency to make himself scarce upon my arrival. But they can do as they like. She and I are through. I told her I will not be seeing her again.’

‘Ah, now that is a new development,’ said Dumas with a dubious air. He turned to Kuan. ‘Your master has come to his senses, don’t you think?’

‘
Shi
.’ Kuan nodded. ‘I think Miss Perkins…she was like fox spirit.’

Even the most unsuperstitious minds have a tiny crack in them into which, at the right moment, a suggestion of the supernatural might seep.
A fox spirit is as sophisticated, intelligent and raw as the man she haunts, as lovable, canny and dangerous as his own
reflection.
Professor Ho’s words flooded back to him.
Ridiculous
. He pshawed. ‘Come, come, Kuan. Next thing you know, you’ll be telling me again how, according to the laws of geomancy, the placement of my bed is impeding my chances for marriage. And my dear Dumas. My senses have been a part of the deal from the beginning. It is my rationality that went missing from time to time. I see from your expression that you crave further detail but, I assure you, there’s nothing worth telling. We’re through and that’s that. It was but an inconsequential dalliance and, as is the way with such trifles, it has come to an end. It’s already the first week of April and I’m feeling somewhat derelict in my duties. I’ve much to do. I should like to request a meeting with the Viceroy. Would you care to join me there, Dumas?’

As they discussed that and other arrangements for the next several days, a powerful wave of relief swept through Morrison. It was his firm opinion now that Mae’s rejection of his proposal had prevented a moment of foolishness leading to a lifetime of regret.
A fox spirit, indeed! Whatever she is, she’s incapable of fidelity, nothing more than a born prostitute—albeit one without desire for money or present
. Miss Mae Ruth Perkins, Morrison concluded, was beyond doubt the most immoral woman he had ever met.

Dumas looked through the papers as Kuan unpacked and Morrison changed into a fresh suit. As the three men descended the stairs into the lobby, a sultry ‘helloo’ caused Morrison’s breath to stick in his throat. Mae rose from the settee, a vision in rose velvet.

‘Major Dumas. Dr Morrison. Kuan.’ She curtsied genially. ‘Oh, Dr Morrison, I was so pleased to receive your note about going to the hockey. It is a very fine day for a ride. As you suggested, I’ve engaged a horse and carriage for us.’

A chill travelled down Morrison’s spine. It would be useless, not to mention risible, to protest that he had sent no such note, made no such suggestion.
Besides, has she not just been with Egan? I, George Ernest Morrison, do not eat the crumbs off another’s table! Look how her eyes flash with mischief. Her waist, cinched to nearly a handspan. My bracelet upon her wrist. She is shameless. Outrageous. That smile. Brazen beyond belief.
He expelled the breath he realised he had been holding. ‘Very good,’ he said at last. ‘I suppose we should be off then. Dumas, I shall see you later at the Club. Kuan, you have those chits I have written to the Viceroy’s interpreter and others. Please wait on the answers.’

‘How was your ride?’ Dumas asked that evening.

Morrison raised an eyebrow. ‘Ride? Ah. Suffice it to say that the horse was less fatigued after four hours than his passengers.’

Morrison, Dumas and Menzies were at the bar in the Tientsin Club. At this revelation, Menzies appeared to duck for cover behind his own face.

‘So, let me get this straight.’ Dumas swirled the ice in his whisky. ‘You proposed to her in Shanghai. She turned you down—or at least declined to accept—because, employing impeccable feminine logic, she loved you.’

Morrison winced. He had not gone into unnecessary detail. ‘Yes. That’s what she said.’

‘So you forswore both your suit and her company. You duly arrive in Tientsin, mentally fortified against further offence to reason and good sense but, upon the first sight of the fair maiden, surrender all your forces.’

‘It was an ambush.’

‘It is a poor army that does not make some allowance for the possibility of entrapment in its strategy,’ chided the military man. ‘Wouldn’t you agree, Captain Menzies?’

Menzies looked as though he’d rather be lying in a muddy trench somewhere.

Morrison grimaced. ‘I have, I swear, no emotion on seeing the body clad. But hair down and body discovered—I confess this thrills every fibre in me.’

‘Ah, youth,’ said Dumas.

‘She
is
young,’ Morrison replied, knowing full well it had been a jibe.

Staring into his glass of gin, Menzies mumbled, ‘Perhaps you could take a break, go into the country, find some restful brickkiln.’

‘A restful
what
?’ He stifled a laugh. If Menzies had his odd moments, Morrison thought, they were also one of the man’s more endearing traits.

‘I think what Menzies is saying,’ Dumas interjected, ‘is that a holiday might not be a bad idea.’

Morrison cleared his throat. ‘I appreciate your concern. I have far too much work, however, to consider a holiday at the moment.’ For all his dallying with Miss Perkins, he informed them, he had also managed that afternoon to see the Manchurian Prince Na. After that, he’d persuaded the head of a missionary body to withdraw all of his organisation’s funds from the Russo-Chinese Bank. He had requested a meeting with the Japanese consul, had got word that the Viceroy would see them, and he intended to look up many other contacts over the next several days before returning to Peking. ‘Including Professor Ho, whom
I encountered recently aboard the steamer to Chefoo. Interesting man. Although he has not said it in as many words, it is obvious that my Boy, Kuan, holds him in almost reverential awe. Says he is one of the country’s most progressive intellectuals and a leading light of reform and progress. Very critical of the Empress Dowager and the Ch’ing government. He speaks blessedly excellent English, too. In fact, Granger and others I know could take some lessons from Ho. He speaks with great irritation of the Old Buddha and her profligacy.’ As he spoke, Morrison could see Dumas and Menzies relax, as if he had once again become the man they knew and expected him to be. I
have worried my friends. I shall say no more to them of my relations with the cackle-headed maiden. Indeed, there is nothing really to say. My senses may still be captive to her but she no longer has any purchase on my heart.

And so it transpired that over the next two days, up and down the high streets and low of foreign Tientsin, Morrison collected and dispersed information, facts, figures and rumours, dined well, drank moderately, slept poorly, and, as was his wont when disturbed by other matters, fretted about the state of his health. When temptation threw herself into his path, which she did on a regular basis, he failed to resist and he stopped pretending that he was interested in doing so. But he was very clear in both head and heart—it was not love. Like him, she was a hunter, an explorer, a collector. A conqueror. He had been a fool not to have understood this earlier, to have become so emotionally involved. He took her more roughly than he’d ever done before on that first day back in Tientsin, more like a whore and less like a lover, and was both scandalised and titillated to see how readily she responded to it. The second day,
she
took
him
the same way—and he was equally astonished by how much it electrified him. He
realised that, as a great actress, she not only played any role on offer but made it her own. And she had a few scripts she’d written herself. He stayed in Tientsin longer than anticipated. There was, of course, much there to be done.

‘The dentist,’ she suggested one day, ‘the boy, Tommy,’ the next. ‘Willie Vanderbilt Jnr and his maid.’ He had drawn the line at Zeppelin. She asked him to propose some scenarios as well, and, overcoming his initial reticence, he told her about Noelle and a time in the Bois de Bologne. Whether acting out fantasies or just revelling in sensuality, the sex he had with her made all that had come before it seem like curry without spice, bland and meaningless. But it was not the stuff of eternal union and on that point he was as clear as the spring skies over Tientsin. She was the quintessential courtesan. He didn’t raise the issue of marriage again and she acted as though it had never come up in the first place. He could see no reason not to partake of the pleasures that were so freely offered to him. He was just a man, after all, even if she had never been just another woman.

On the train back to Peking, Morrison met a Miss McReady who was travelling in the company of a British diplomat’s wife. She was in her early twenties, small-chinned and thin; Morrison guessed that the attractively generous appearance of her hips was aided by bustle pads. She was pretty enough, however, with cornflower-blue eyes, clear pale skin and glossy black hair. She had a practical, demure air about her, and the habit of pausing before speaking, as though tasting her words first to ensure they were not too salty. There was nothing extravagant about her clothes, constructed
from more workaday fabrics than those with which Maysie adorned herself, and she wore them with an appealing modesty. Miss McReady, he caught himself thinking, was the sort of girl he could introduce to his mother.

As she related her experiences in China to Morrison, which included a recent boat trip up the Yangtze, he stifled his boredom. Her observations were hackneyed, those of every other traveller. On the other hand, he was flattered by her keen interest in his own experiences as well as his work. The conversation flowed all the way back to Peking. If Miss McReady had none of Mae’s demonic spark, he told himself that this commended her to him all the more. She’d be staying as a houseguest at the home of the diplomat. When he bade her and her hostess goodbye at the station, he promised to call on them soon and was immediately overcome with enervation at the prospect.

He saw a plausible version of his life stretch out before him, full of predictable small joys and sorrows; children, yes—and that would be wonderful; his mother happy—and that would be more than grand; and himself respectable at last in the eyes of all—Chinese and foreign.

Dull, dull, dull.

He had just met Miss McReady. He didn’t have to marry her.

But if that was not the whole point with a woman like that, what was?

Morrison expelled a long breath.

He and Kuan bounced along in the back of a covered Peking cart on their way home. ‘What do you think, Kuan? Would Miss McReady be a suitable match for your master?’

‘I think,’ said Kuan, ‘my master is very smart. I think he knows the answer. He does not need his poor servant to tell him.’

‘That’s a “no” then, is it?’ Morrison chortled. ‘You’re probably right there, old boy.’

They arrived home. In the main courtyard, they ran into Cook, off to the markets with empty baskets dangling from the ends of his carrying-pole. ‘I think my master is very lucky,’ Kuan said as they waved Cook off with some requests for the evening meal. ‘He can choose who to marry.’

‘That’s the theory,’ Morrison replied abstractedly.

Inside his library, Morrison greedily inhaled the comforting animal smell of leather bindings, the woody scent of paper and the mineral wafts of ink that hung in the air like motes of dust. His dominion, his kingdom. He reflected, cringing, on the amount of time he had spent over the previous six weeks in feverish thrall to that incantadora, that
fox spirit.
He’d neglected the war for her—
his
war. Morrison was supposed to be keeping a watch over those colleagues dispatched to cover the war. If a scandal blew up now over the
Haimun
, he would have to answer to his editors.

The drone Bedlow arrived from Wei Hai Wei two days later and installed himself in the main guest room whilst awaiting his papers. He brought word that a Japanese mine had blown up the Russian warship
Petropaulovsk
. Admiral Makarov perished with all his crew. Tonami and James, at least, should be content with that glad news.

Morrison called on Miss McReady and offered to ride with her to the Western Hills, though already he knew that he would not pursue her.

On his fourth day back, a letter came from the malevolent Jameson. ‘She is like a bitch on heat,’ wrote the indefatigable knave. Hands shaking, Morrison ripped the note to shreds. He ceased to think about Mae every waking minute.

As for the war, rumours flew as fast as the telegraphists’ hands could punch out the dots and dashes. Facts—reliable, verifiable—remained scarcer than hen’s teeth. ‘They’re certainly scarcer than the journalists who come to hunt them down,’ Dumas remarked. He was visiting Morrison and the pair had gone walking on the Tartar Wall to avoid what Morrison called the ‘damned nuisance’ of Bedlow.

‘I have been up and down the China coast a fair bit in recent weeks,’ Dumas told him, ‘and everywhere I go they’re there—correspondents, illustrators and photographers come to cover the war, stagnating in watering holes, sinking men o’ war and evacuating towns before the advancing armies with every whisky. And still the Japanese control access as if the frontlines were their own virgin daughters. They say this will be the most reported war in history, but the devil knows what the reports are going to contain if this situation continues.’

‘Indeed. Thanks to all the work done on Japanese customs by war correspondents unable to reach the front, readers in the West now know more about the balloon man of Uyeno Park, the intricacies of the tea ceremony and the routines of the geisha than they do of the diversions of Paris or New York. I have heard from my colleague Brinkley in Tokio that a Japanese nobleman, Baron Mitsui, is personally funding the veteran war correspondents to compile an anthology of their writings on previous wars. It will be called
In Many Wars.
’