A Most Immoral Woman (6 page)

From behind the padded quilt that in winter helped trap his study’s meagre heat, the door banged in the wind. Snapping out of his trance, Morrison scrambled for the stitched bundle of rags
he kept to stuff in the crack by the floor. He adored the thrill of a storm but not the disorder it brought with it.

When the winds abated, he emerged from his library to find Cook upset and cursing. Before Cook had been able to get to his lark, the cage had crashed to the ground and the bird had flown away. Yu-ti appeared shaken by his temper as she and the other servants busied themselves sweeping the courtyard and tidying up. Though brief, the tempest had left piles of grit on the roof tiles, piped sand along the latticework and deposited souvenirs of the Ordos Desert into the hearts of cabbages. Back inside, Morrison found it had insinuated sand into the pockets of clothes folded in wardrobes and chests, the pages of his books and the lens of his precious Brownie camera, which had been encased in leather and locked within a drawer in his study.

Morrison dismantled the lens and blew on it, then brushed it with a feather. As he watched the drift of sand on his desk, a tune popped into his head.
It won’t be a stylish marriage, / I can’t afford a carriage, / But you’ll look sweet upon the seat, / Of a bicycle built for two!
How ridiculous he appeared, even to himself, humming out of tune. He could scarcely credit that just months earlier he had felt so debilitated by poor health that he’d considered leaving China altogether.
Maysie, Maysie, give me your answer do.
His blood flowed in his veins like that of a much younger man.

The following morning, Morrison woke invigorated, organised his notes and had just begun drafting his telegram for
The Times
when Kuan entered with a letter from Granger.

‘My dear Morrison,’ it began, presumptuous in its familiarity. Cavilling over the course of nearly two pages that his telegrams were not being published as regularly as he had hoped, Granger then fretted over the reliability of both modern telegraphy and the post. He begged the indulgence of his esteemed colleague: would Morrison please ensure the enclosed report, obtained at the cost of much sweat and blood, reach the eyes of their editor in London? He would be eternally grateful.

Morrison extracted the report and read it carefully.

Damned badly drawn and inconsequential. Addle-headed idiot.
He tore it up and tipped the scraps into the stove.

Yesterday’s storm had scoured the sky to a cerulean magnificence. Morrison worked through lunch but, as the afternoon wore on, he found it impossible to keep himself at his
desk. Buoyantly, he strode out into the breezy sunshine. The winds had strewn the candy-coloured petals of early-flowering apple and cherry blossoms about the streets like fragrant confetti. Through broad avenues and narrow
hutong
, Morrison wove his way through a dense traffic of merchants and peddlers, carters, ricksha pullers and palanquins. He passed Manchu ladies with lacquered wings of hair, beggars and Bannermen. The vendors’ sing-song cries, the chatter from the wine shops, the clatter of cart wheels and the shouts of the children kicking shuttlecocks rang in his ears. His nose was simultaneously assaulted by the rotten-egg smell of thawing sewage and delighted by the scents of toffee and pancakes. The streets of Peking were exhilarating and claustrophobic all at once, and he quickened his steps until he reached the ramp that led to the top of the Tartar City Wall.

The wall was forty feet high and so wide in places that four carriages could be driven abreast. Hundreds of years old, the ramparts afforded an incomparable view of the city, including the golden-roofed halls, gardens and pavilions of the Imperial Palace itself. The Tartar City Wall was a place to contemplate history—China’s, Peking’s, one’s own, and to order one’s thoughts with the aid of the grand symmetry of the capital, with its north-south axis and clear, sacred geometry. It was a post from which one could observe the teeming, clamorous life in the streets below without having it present in every pore. Walking the Tartar Wall appealed for every reason to Morrison, himself a man of solid bulwarks, gated enceintes and complex fortifications.

Atop the wall, Morrison took a breath and gazed out over his adopted city. Box kites carved colourful grooves in a brilliant blue sky and from all directions came the music of bells: ringing on peddlers’ carts, tinkling from the necks of camels and mules, and
chiming from the flying eaves of the city’s temples. It was not a day for guarded emotion. His heart sang.
Oh Maysie. What a type
, he thought.
She excites me passionately, pleases me infinitely.

Infinitely. His thoughts jumped to Mary Joplin. Mary was the angelic Eurasian nurse who had aided his convalescence from fever in Calcutta at the end of his epic journey from Shanghai to the subcontinent ten years earlier. Sweet Mary, on whose fingers even hydrochlorate of quinine tasted like honey. He had written much of that ilk in his journal at the height of his infatuation:
the animation of her beautiful features…the charming grace and noiseless celerity of her movements…

When he had recovered enough to leave India, Mary tearfully bade him marry a good girl of his own station in life. Yet he could not put her from his mind. In 1899, he persuaded
The Times
that he needed to visit Assam to report on advances in tea cultivation. He never came within a mile of a tea bush. Mary had fallen on hard times and pawned the jewellery he’d given her—for fourteen rupees, half its worth, he’d noted with displeasure. What was worse, this time quinine could truly compare to her.
She wired into me like blazes
. Shouted, cried, pummelled his chest with her small, caramel fists. Morrison had done his duty and helped her out as best he could, but his feelings had turned to stone. When he finally left, it was forever, and with relief. He had moved up in the world. Women like Mary, as achingly lovely and tender as she had been, would not perform well under society’s glare.

A cheery baritone cut into his thoughts. ‘And what are you frowning about to yourself on such a fine day as this, Dr Morrison? Is the war not going to your satisfaction?’

Morrison looked up with some chagrin. ‘Ah, Mr Egan. What a surprise.’

The men shook hands. Egan’s grip was strong, assured, his smile as big and white as a sail. He easily matched Morrison in height and athletic physique, though being ten years younger than the Australian was trimmer and tauter of build. Morrison had always found Martin Egan disconcertingly hale and hearty. He possessed the sort of bold good looks that his American self-assurance had a way of amplifying until they reached a state of near caricature. The United States may have been a place full of teeming slums and political corruption, barely recovered from civil war and only recently clean of the stain of slavery, and Americans could be presumptuous and their culture crude, but you couldn’t beat the New World for its confidence, idealism and optimism. All the world loved America for its belief in progress, democracy and a better future for all, and admired its ruddy, irresistible youth. Egan’s grip and his smile spoke of all this.

Morrison recovered his hand. ‘What brings you to Peking?’ He suddenly remembered Mae saying she’d met Egan in Tientsin and wondered how well he knew her. ‘I heard you were in the country.’

‘A bit of business, a bit of pleasure,’ Egan replied. He had recently joined the Associated Press after a stint with the
San Francisco Chronicle
, and headed up the AP’s bureau in Tokio. ‘The bureau can run itself for a few weeks. There’s no place like Peking, is there? Imagine, the capital of three dynasties and the current one alone older than the United States.’

‘
Five
dynasties. Liao, Chin, Yuan, Ming, Ch’ing,’ Morrison corrected. He then recalled that Egan had lent Mae his book. He owed the man for that. His tone softened. ‘Of course, the first two were relatively minor as dynasties go.’

‘I must read more Chinese history,’ Egan conceded. ‘I always thought the Mongol Yuan was the first. I do wonder what goes
on in there.’ He gestured towards the Forbidden City. ‘It’s like a dream of the Orient.’

‘A dream of Oriental despotism more like it.’

Egan pursed his lips in thought. His lips were full, pouty, on the border of feminine, and Morrison experienced a flicker of revulsion.

‘I always understood Oriental despotism, at least as Aristotle described it, to be despotism by consent, which implicates the people in their own slavery. I may be wrong.’ Egan’s relentless affability was getting on Morrison’s nerves.

‘But then again, your personal enmity towards the Old Buddha is well known.’

‘There is nothing personal about it. You know what the Chinese call this gate here?’ Morrison pointed at the wall’s southeast corner. ‘The Devil’s Pass. That’s because of the tax collectors there, imposing tariffs on rice and salt and cigarettes and the rest. Every Chinaman knows it only goes to keep the Old Buddha in fancy soaps and face powder, just as she diverted the funds for naval defence to construct her marble pleasure boats at the Summer Palace. The woman is a jezebel.’
That should shut him up.

A camel train approached from the west and Egan pointed at it. ‘I always wonder what marvels these caravans are bringing to market. I imagine beautiful tapestries or woven rugs, furs—’

‘Coal. From collieries in the Western Hills.’

Egan shook his head in admiration. ‘I only have to be in your company five minutes and I’m reminded why you’re the doyen of the correspondents!’

Morrison mined for respect like other men prospected for gold. He decided he didn’t really mind Egan. The man was not such bad company after all.

Egan then mentioned that the famous American novelist Jack London had arrived in Japan to cover the war for Hearst’s newspapers.

‘Ah yes. My colleague at
The Times
, Lionel James, said they were on the same ship over from San Francisco to Yokohama.’

‘Yes, London remembers James well. Said it was the talk of the ship that he was travelling with a valet! The Americans were all greatly amused. Turns out—’

‘Yes, I know. The so-called valet was in fact our colleague David Fraser.
The Times
said Fraser could cover the war if he paid his own way. Got a cheap ticket under the guise of being James’s valet. Apparently the ribbing still hasn’t ceased. As for London, James said he was good company. Drank everyone under the table. Young bloke too, apparently.’

‘Yes, Jack is still short of thirty. Two years my junior. Have you read any of his books?’

‘I enjoyed
The Call of the Wild
. I’m not convinced that he is the American Kipling, as some would claim, though I speak as an ardent fan of the English poet. I’m certainly not an admirer of London’s socialist ideas. But he writes well. Manly sort of prose.’

‘Jack and I are good friends—mates, as I think you say in Australia. It’s true he still swaggers and drinks like the sailor he was. He’s challenged me to arm-wrestling in bars once enough whiskies are down the hatch, but he’s educated himself well, lived hard and is the best raconteur I’ve ever known. I must introduce you. I’m sure you’d like him. In spite of his socialism.’

‘I look forward to it,’ said Morrison, privately dismayed at the thought of another boisterous American. One who arm-wrestled in bars, at that.

‘He’s on his way to the front now.’

‘Ha! Let him get past the Japanese. He’ll be the first. One month into the war and they’re still not giving anyone permission to get to the front.’

‘Jack says the Japanese aren’t going to stop him.’

Morrison raised an eyebrow. ‘He underestimates their determination.’

‘Oh, if anyone will get there, it’ll be Jack. What’s more, he says he’ll report the real face of war—the mud on the soldiers’ boots, the look in their eyes, the sizzle of their cookfires, the smell of gunpowder. Already he’s got one of the Japanese soldiers to empty out his kit so he could take notes on it!’

‘That’s all very well for a novelist. A journalist requires harder facts.’ Realising that Egan was about to launch into what would no doubt be a rather tedious defence of his friend, Morrison quickly switched the subject to that which was most on his mind. ‘I hear you’ve been spending some time in Tientsin lately.’

‘I certainly have been,’ Egan replied with a broad smile, and Morrison was once again struck by how alarmingly white and orderly were the American’s teeth. ‘The attractions of that entrepôt have increased enormously in recent months. In saying that, I confess to feeling somewhat guilty. I promised someone there I would introduce you. A visiting American lass. She’s very keen to meet you. I must say, however, that it’s been hard not to try to keep her for myself.’

Morrison did not like the sound of that. ‘You are speaking of the delightful Miss Perkins, I assume.’

‘Ah, so you’ve met her already.’

‘Only recently. At Mountain-Sea Pass. She was there with Mrs Ragsdale.’

‘Her poor chaperone.’

‘To all appearances, Mrs Ragsdale was rather enjoying Miss Perkins’s company. It was probably far more agreeable than that of her husband.’

‘Ha!’ The American, laughing heartily, slapped Morrison on the back.

Brash pup.

Encountering one possessed of genuine youthful ardour left Morrison feeling considerably less suffused with that quality himself. Those teeth. Ridiculous. An infected molar suddenly pierced Morrison’s jaw with arrow-like pain. As though the toothache opened a door through which other ailments could rush in, rheumatism flared through his joints and the damned spear wound threatened a nosebleed. He wondered how, just two days earlier, he could have felt so mindless of anything but the pleasures of the flesh when once again all he knew were the pains.

‘Are you all right?’

‘Grand. Never been better. But I must be off. Much to do.’ Espousing an imprecise intention to see Egan again soon, and shaking hands with a grip that he thought compared well, Morrison took his leave and marched off with an air of purpose that he did not feel.

In the west, the sunset overlaid the violet hills with crimson and gold. The roofs of the Forbidden City fell into silhouette. His hand searched his pocket for Mae’s handkerchief. She had still not written, though he realised it had only been two days since they’d met. Yet he had found the time to write and he was a busy man; he didn’t understand why she hadn’t even dropped him a postal.

He told himself to stop being obsessive. His mind wrapped itself around myriad anxieties.

He would try to get to Tientsin as soon as possible.

The following day, Morrison arrived home from a walk to discover Kuan in conversation with Cook’s wife, Yu-ti. She scurried off at Morrison’s arrival.

‘Is she settling in all right?’ Morrison asked.

‘Yes. Oh, and I have asked one of the coolies to buy a pair of wedding quilts as a gift from you to her and Cook.’

‘Very good.
Hen hao
.’ Morrison shot his Boy a look of appreciation.

‘Oh, and could we pay Yu-ti, too?’

Morrison’s expression dimmed slightly. Cook, who earned twenty-five silver dollars a month, was the highest paid servant in his household after Kuan.

Kuan read his master’s expression. ‘
Yisi, yisi,
’ he said, using the Chinese term that meant ‘just a token’ but managed to imply both a negligible amount and a burden of thoughtfulness at the same time.

Morrison nodded, abashed at his own transparency and, thinking of how Maysie might view his natural parsimony, obscurely ashamed. ‘You look after it.’