China to Me (46 page)

Vera was with him, waiting outside, and driving home he was quiet for a long time, in deep thought. At last with a sigh of relief he said to her, “Anyway, she can never be a Methodist minister.” That remote possibility of his son's fate had evidently been bothering him a lot.

“What does the new baby look like, Uncle Charles?” demanded Vera's daughter Bridget.

“Exactly like a poached egg,” said Charles.

I had baskets and baskets of flowers, but I didn't care. I lay there howling with the bellyache. I'd never had an operation before, and I felt exceedingly aggrieved. It should have been over, I felt; this was something extra, and it wasn't fair. “I don't think I'll ever get well,” I gasped to Gordon King.

“Nonsense,” he said, and left the room. Next door to me was the third-class delivery ward, and coolie women were being brought in and out all day. It contributed to my inferiority complex that they did their jobs with such admirable dispatch — a couple of moans, a Siamese cat, and then the nurse saying, “Hand me a safety pin, somebody.”

Besides, Carola was so small, so awfully small. She weighed five pounds and a half, and she dropped off to four pounds ten ounces. They didn't tell me, and the nurses were indignant with King because he wouldn't allow supplementary feeding; he was trying to bring me up to the mark by force of practice. Little by little she climbed up again in weight, and my bellyache subsided, and the days dragged on. I had earphones plugged in the wall and the hospital radio gave out the news. There was a lot of excitement about Japan, and then somebody named Kurusu was sent to Washington and all the nurses felt happier. They still crowded in to ask Charles what he thought about things, though, when he came in the evening.

Between Carola's visits every three hours I slept a little, and then I had dreams. I dreamed about air raids in Chungking, and sinking ships, and Carola's face in the sky, all over the sky and all eyes. The rest of the face shrank smaller and smaller, and the eyes got bigger and bigger, and I knew she was starving to death.

I would wake up and ring frantically for the nurse, and ask for a pillow or something.

The days dragged on. I thought I would not get home in time.

Chapter 37

There were days of wrangling between me and Gordon King. I wanted to get home. I wasn't rational about it; I just felt that I was entitled to a few days with Charles before they took him away from me for the war, but I didn't like to say that to Gordon. Nobody talked that way. It would have been like asking for it in advance. We all skirted the subject, except for one redheaded nurse who was frankly nervous and who pestered the life out of Charles whenever he came in, asking him if he thought it would really happen.

Gordon and I argued about my discharge from hospital for days, the battle growing really intense at the end when I said flatly that he couldn't keep me there legally, and that I was going on Saturday or else. He begged for Monday, but I was firm, and I won. So I had three weeks at home before Pearl Harbor.

As I remember now, those three weeks were nice but confused. I was awfully frightened of the baby, and though I had taken a couple of lessons in hospital on bathing her, I felt quite unable to grapple with such a big problem alone. Vera had found me a regular English-trained amah, a dithering old lady named Ah Cheung. Certain things about her I approved of, as an improvement on the Chinese-style amahs I had known in Shanghai at Sinmay's house, but she seemed lamentably old to me and needed a lot of watching. Also, she was entitled to days off, one afternoon a week and one whole day every month. The afternoons were all right; I could manage Carola for an afternoon, any time. But as that whole day off approached I was as nervous as I'd been about having the baby. Over and over I talked to Vera Armstrong about giving her her bath alone.

“She gets so slippery. What if she slips out of my hands completely and falls into the water? What about that awful business of cleaning her nose? What if — ”

“For God's sake,” said Vera, “I'll come over and do it.”

“Missy no worry. Ah Cheung stay home until tiffin,” said the amah.

“No,” I said firmly. “Carola and I must see this through together. It's too silly. Why, Mother had eight of us. …”

The Japanese intervened. Ah Cheung never did get her day off, but I learned how to bathe a baby by myself, ultimately.

In the attenuated social atmosphere of Hong Kong the arrival of a Canadian regiment made us all feel a little better. They were given welcome parties all over the place.

We were all in a state of flux. The Governor, Sir Geoffrey Northcote, retired to East Africa with Lady Northcote, because his health wasn't good. I was sorry to see them leave because I liked them enormously from the one or two times I had talked with them, and Hilda reported that the new Governor, Sir Mark Young, wasn't her type. She didn't think she would ever be on the same comfortable terms with him that she had been with the Northcotes.

General Grassett, commander of the forces, had been exchanged. The new general was an unknown quantity and I couldn't make Charles give me any opinion on him at all. I wasn't interested, anyway, in anything but Carola. Gordon had at last let me supplement her diet with ordinary milk, and she was putting on weight fast on a half-and-half basis. I was preoccupied with all that, arranging my day so that I could nurse her at the right times. When she reached eight pounds we stopped the three-hour business, and that was a great relief. The household revolved busily around the nursery, and out in his cage my last black gibbon gnashed his teeth in impotent jealousy. When the coolie wheeled the pram past the cage the gibbon would throw himself at the bars and shake them, and howl bitterly. One day he got loose, but he didn't attack the baby. He just kept circling around us at a distance, looking her over.

“So that's fairly safe,” I said to Charles. “Still, until she's older I won't get any more gibbons, if then.”

“Much better not. And as for that cat,” he said, looking with mistrust at Jocasta, the incestuous Siamese cat that Cooper had given me: “I wish you'd dispose of it. Cats smother babies, don't they? They want to get warm, and they climb into bed with them and smother them.”

“Oh, I don't think so.”

“Yes, they do. Vera says so. You'd better dispose of it.” He added, “I read in the paper Sunday that it's not good for a child to be the only one in the family. We owe it to Carola to have another one, don't we?”

“Yes indeed,” I said. “Do you mean to say you really got that idea out of the Sunday paper?”

“Why, yes. Sometimes there's a good deal of sense in those syndicated articles.”

The public watched Charles narrowly when Carola was born, hoping to catch him out in some outrageous behavior, but they were disappointed.

“He was buying drinks for his friends and looking happy,” one lady reported disapprovingly to Vera, “just like an ordinary father.”

“Well, for heaven's sake, he is an ordinary father!” snapped Vera.

Hilda came to dinner one evening, and we talked about the war. Everyone in town was supposed to have signed up for some “essential service,” and I had missed out in the rush, having been in hospital.

“What can I do?” I asked. “I don't drive a car very well, but I can do that in a pinch. I can typewrite, and manage a switchboard badly, and — ”

“You can be a dispenser,” said Hilda. “I did that course myself, and all you have to do is telephone the A.N.S. leader, Nina Valentine, to sign up as an A.N.S. (Auxiliary Nursing Service.) In the meantime, while you're untrained, consider yourself a dispenser. You know something about drugs and medicine, don't you?”

“Yes, a little, from Africa.”

“Then that's all right. And listen, Charles: if it happens, I think Mickey would be better off with us on the Peak. That's settled; the minute it strikes, I'll come down and pick her up with the baby.”

Charles was relieved and grateful. I had better explain before we dive into the war that the whole Colony had already been warned for some months that we would in case of emergency go in for “billeting.” The authorities were suitably vague as to why they would want a lot of housing space in such a case, but they were definite in saying that they wanted it, and this is the way they proposed getting it: all of us were to move at the first sign of war. Those of us who lived on mid-level, as I did, would be given addresses on the Peak. We were to lock our best things up but leave all our rooms but one free for the billetees, and our bedding and cooking implements were to be left for their use.

People living at sea level would be moved uphill too. People in Kowloon were to be brought over to the island. Nobody said what was going to happen to Kowloon.

Afterward we pieced it out. The “defense plan” stipulated that the troops were to hold the enemy off as long as possible, probably three weeks. When at last they retreated the civilian population of Kowloon was to have been safely transported to the island, and there we were supposed to hold out against the besiegers for three months. It was all planned down to the last ridiculous detail, and there wasn't anything wrong with it except that it didn't work. We couldn't hold the enemy off at all as it happened.

What with everything going as it did, the letter from Ursula didn't cause nearly the excitement it would have done before the baby's birth. It arrived just two days after Carola. In restrained and ladylike tone Ursula announced that she was applying for divorce, not only for various other reasons but because Charles had said he wouldn't live with her any more in any case. She wanted Vera, in another letter, to send her some decent clothes from Hong Kong, as Vera had such good taste. Ursula was beginning to love Singapore, she said. She would be willing to stay indefinitely.

Vera studied the letter suspiciously.

“It's a great improvement,” I said, “over the last letter she wrote Charles.”

“So she will get a divorce, and then there'll be six months, and then — Well, what do you think?” asked Vera.

I said, “Honestly, I don't know. I suppose we'll marry. It doesn't seem to matter any more.”

On Saturday, the sixth, a large Japanese armada was sighted steaming south, off the coast of Indo-China. The Volunteers were mobilized in Hong Kong. The paper said that Roosevelt had sent a cable to Hirohito, direct, pleading with him to avert this disaster, and the Japanese in Tokyo must have laughed grimly when it arrived. I don't believe that Hirohito ever answered that cable.

On Saturday afternoon Maya Rodeivitch was taking photographs of Carola and me, and, under his protest, of Charles, who dropped in for lunch in uniform. He was rather sleepy, for the night before he had been at a big Japanese dinner party given by his old friend the general, out on the border of the New Territories. He was worried, too. Me, I had spent the evening Friday with Colin MacDonald of the London Times, and an amusing Australian newspaperwoman named Dorothy Jenner. Colin had met her in Chungking, and he took us out to dinner at the Parisian Grill. I invited them both for cocktails at Charles's house on Sunday evening.

They came, and so did Charlotte, looking handsome in dark green. Our good friends, Barbara Petro and her husband, were there. A few others came, too, including Hoffman from our consulate. He told me a story about one of the consulate girls. It seems that she had hurried into his office one morning, twisting her handkerchief, and blurted out in frightened tones, “Emily Hahn has had a baby.”

“I know it,” said Walter Hoffman. “In fact I've seen the baby. It's a nice baby. Well?”

“Well,” gasped the girl, “she'll have to register it here, won't she? I mean, that's my job.”

“Yes,” said Hoffman. “She's coming in next week; we've already arranged that. What's the trouble? I'll be here; she's going to telephone before she comes.”

“Don't you leave me alone with her!” cried the typist.

“I suppose,” added Walter, “she thinks it's catching.”

Charles had a better story. In Hong Kong when a child is born the parents are supposed to register it in the city registry in person. Although I hadn't known it, the nurses in hospital had been thrown into a regular jitter when it came to signing a required preliminary paper, after the baby's birth. They didn't know what to put in under the heading, “Father's Name,” and they milled around in utter confusion until the almoner, Margaret Watson, a friend of Hilda's, reminded them acidly that they had only to ask Miss Hahn. Charles had signed it, naturally, and then gone home, supposing he would be informed when it was time for us to go downtown to the registry office and do the job properly. One morning he received a mysterious telephone message from the registrar. Would Major Boxer come in to see him at his earliest convenience?

Wondering, and a little apprehensive, Charles went. He was taken hurriedly into an inner office, and then into the inner office of all, and there was the registrar himself, looking very nervous and pink. “Major Boxer,” he said, waving toward the hospital slip which we had signed, “you don't have to do this, you know. There's no law that forces you to recognize the child. …”

Charles had been angry.

The cocktail party went on to a buffet supper, but none of us was really merry. Charles's uniform, and the fact that he sat at the radio most of the evening, had a dampening effect on our spirits. People went home about midnight. I stayed. We listened to a broadcast from Tokyo at four in the morning, but there wasn't anything special in that, and at five o'clock I had to go home. Carola was to be fed at six. I climbed the hill, holding my long skirt up out of the dew and watching the cracked stairs carefully in the dawning light, for my ankle was still weak. It was a lovely fresh morning, just turning cool. Hong Kong nights are often stuffy, but the dawns are better. It had been raining.