China to Me (74 page)

I put it out of my mind. The repatriation would never take place, I was sure, and if in the meantime it kept Hattori happy, thinking it would, who was I to argue?

Day-to-day life was incredibly monotonous. The only thing that was alive, growing and constructive, was Carola. She was, of course, the most precocious and brilliant child in the world, and both De Roux and Needa assured me of this whenever my own faith might have wavered. For regard, as De Roux would have said: on Christmas, when Carola was a year and three months old, I took her downtown to look at the feeble display in the shops, and she took a fancy to an enormous baby doll in Lane Crawford's, now called the Matsukaya. I ignored her pleading, because it cost eleven yen. Next day she and I set out on our usual gentle afternoon walk, down the bluff to Kennedy Road, around to another staircase leading up to MacDonnell Road past a sentry (but he liked Carola), and after we had bowed to him we usually made our way home. This afternoon, however, the baby balked as we reached the wide staircase that led down to town. She took my hand and urged me with her eyes to go along with her down the stairs instead of following Kennedy Road. I let her lead me — she was walking well by this time — to see how far she would go. Down and down went Carola to the tramway, past the Peak tram station, past the cathedral, through Battery Path and down to Queen's Road, definitely in the middle of town. Along Queen's Road she got lost and couldn't remember further. She stopped, looked at the bewildering crowd on foot and in ricksha, and began to cry uneasily. I carried her as far as the outside of Lane Crawford's, because I knew by then what it was, and she promptly led me inside and along the corridor to the toy department, back to the object of her desire, the baby doll.

So then, of course, I bought it, eleven yen or no eleven yen. Needa said I was quite right, and gave me the eleven yen back again as his Christmas present to Carola.

We had a regular beat of an afternoon. Ah Yuk and Carola and I. First we went to the French Bank and saw Uncle Paul, and Carola would demand in Chinese to see the lesson books, Paul's Mandarin primers with their highly colored pictures of babies and balls and slates and things. We had a glass of grenadine there. Then we traveled on to Needa's office, now humming with big business, and there Carola asked for candy and got sweet vitamin pills by the handful. Then we strolled through the streets, and then we made our way home. Ah Yuk and I taking turns carrying the baby when she was tired.

Even in the Foreign Affairs office she was spoiled. Hattori gave her all the pencils on his desk.

The chief of staff in town had been changed, and the new man was rumored to be a civilized sort, speaking good English. One evening Hattori took the Ho girls and me up to meet General Suginami. It was all very hush-hush. The Hos seemed to know him of old, but they had refrained from saying so. Suginami was a short, slight, tired man, and his English was so pure that it was Oxonian down to the slight lisp that used to be the fashion there. He told me immediately that he was an old friend of Charles, had known him in England, and had seen him in Argyle Camp.

“How does he look?” I demanded.

“As well as can be expected under those sad circumstances. They are good to him and will continue to be good to him. He gets treatment for the arm in our own hospital.”

My visits to the general were limited to the occasions when Yvonne could be persuaded to spend a little time with him. The general was much more keen on those visits than was the lovely Yvonne, who, though she protested she liked him, was still somewhat shy and canny of so much grandeur. I am sure that he could have dispensed with my company too; he adored Yvonne's dramatic beauty, and no doubt he would have adored it more without my chaperonage. But Yvonne would not go to see him without her beloved Mickey, and there you were. He was always a gentleman, as the shopgirls say, just the same. He was most reassuring to us after the American 1943 air raids started, as they did that summer. We were up there to dinner the night before the first raid took place, and the general promised us on his word of honor that there would be no raids for a long time.

“Oh, I'm so glad,” breathed Yvonne. “Thank you. General. I do get so frightened.”

“You need not be, little girl,” he said. “I have told them myself, ‘Do not bomb Hong Kong, because Yvonne gets frightened.' Seriously, they haven't enough petrol as yet. The Americans have brought in many planes to Chungking; we know that. But they have not brought enough petrol.”

Next day we had the first raid and it was a honey. Yvonne came up to see me that afternoon when the All Clear sounded, and her terror was pretty well under control, all things considered. The bombers had improved in their aim so much that you couldn't think of those first raids in the same class. This time they concentrated on the gendarmeries, and they knew exactly where to look and where to let go. They couldn't have done anything better calculated to cheer us up. Only in one place, at the Central Police Station, did they miss: that miss cost three hundred civilian Chinese lives. And later on, when they pounded the dockyards, they killed many of the workers, so that the government had to make a new law prohibiting their employees from quitting their jobs. Also they locked the coolies into the dockyards, so that the wretched people had no choice; they had to be bombed.

“There's no help for it,” said Ah Yuk. “We must die by thousands, we must. China has too many people anyway.”

I stared at her in appalled silence. The air raids had gone to her head; she jumped and clapped and laughed for joy at every alarm, not caring who may have been watching, and equally careless of the possible effect on herself.

“You mustn't cry when the planes come,” I heard her telling Carola. “There is nothing now to cry about. They won't hurt us. Those are our planes.”

“I saw Boxer,” said Hattori, who had come to see me one evening.

“Oh, really? What did he say?”

Hattori stared at me, his lips compressed. He was laboring under strong emotion. He often was, so I didn't worry about it; he was what the British would call rather unstable emotionally. “He wants you to go, if there is a repatriation,” he said.

I wasn't really surprised, but I said, “Oh, does he? Really?”

“Yes. At the moment the repatriation excitement has died down,” Hattori admitted, “so I couldn't tell him just when it would take place. He was delighted, however, at the possibility, and I have come now to tell you that I must add your name to the list of possible repatriates immediately, in order to send it off to Tokyo. That is what I will do this evening.”

“But I'm still not sure — ”

“You said you would abide by Boxer's decision.”

“So I did.”

“He told me something else,” said Hattori. “He told me that he intends to marry you.”

Then he beamed. The secret was out. That was why he looked so excited and mysterious and moved. He was not prepared for my reaction; neither, I suppose, was I.

“Oh,” I said, “does he indeed!”

A very peculiar half hour was the result of that exchange. I don't suppose Hattori and I could have reached any more of an understanding in ten times the period; certainly we were nowhere near an accord when he left my house and slammed my door.

It had been foolish of me, I told myself when I went to bed. I should not have forgotten I was talking to a Japanese, chief of the Foreign Affairs Department and a man of fixed ideas. Centuries of feminism stood between us, but I at least should have realized that and acted accordingly. And I should have realized too that Charles hadn't said it that way. He had said it at all only because he knew they would treat me with more care if they thought of me as his wife and not as a light of love.

Oh dear, I groaned in the weeks that followed, how right he was! He had been far too right. Hattori and I never saw each other nowadays without having a row.

“I have heard,” he said icily, “that you were Out to Dinner last night?”

“Yes, I was. Needa gave a dinner party.”

“Who is this Needa, anyway?”

I explained. I bore down heavily on the fact that Needa was in the good graces of the Army and the Navy. Also, I said sincerely, he was a good man, a very sweet man, generous and an old friend of mine. …

Hattori's face did not relax as I talked. He looked more and more like the dean of women at my old university. “Does Boxer know this man?” he demanded at last.

“Why — uh — no, as a matter of fact he doesn't. You see, Charles was never keen on racing. He just wouldn't go to races. And I met Needa years before I knew Charles, back in '35, in Shanghai — ”

I could scarcely have done worse. The result was that Hattori immediately invited Needa to dinner so that he could have a look at him, on behalf of Boxer. So we had dinner, and even Hattori had to admit that there was nothing inimical to the welfare of Boxer's Family in that gentle soul.

“Nevertheless, I do not think you should be seen so often in public,” he said grudgingly, “There will be criticism if the gendarmes see you around so much. In fact there is criticism. I am always being asked about you. It is dangerous.”

“Honestly?” Frankly, I was skeptical. “Really, Mr. Hattori, do you think you ought to worry so much about your responsibility? Mr. Oda couldn't have meant that you should waste so much time on me. He didn't, you know; I scarcely ever saw him. And he trusted me, too, more than you do.”

“It is my responsibility to Boxer that now motivates me,” he said grimly. “Since I have seen him, and have seen what a fine man he is, and how upright and honorable — ”

“Well” — I played my trump card — “Charles doesn't care if I go out. He never did. He encouraged me to have my own friends, Mr. Hattori. If that is what you are thinking of — ”

“It is different now. He intends to marry you.”

I went home cursing under my breath, in a tangle of exasperated gratitude, laughter, and desperation, I do like to be boss. Like Mélisande, I was not happy there.

Helen Ho after her release came to see me, as was natural, and when we had drunk tea together we both started for town. When we came out of my door a young man in a long white gown, who had been loitering up on MacDonnell Road, looking at a brook that ran down by the house, strolled after us. Helen turned white.

“Is he following us?” she demanded. “I saw him, I'm sure, on my way up. He is following me, Mickey.”

“Oh, I don't think so.”

But he was. Helen was arrested again that night and questioned for two more days before she was again released. It was the first time I felt directly responsible for that kind of thing.

“Oh, good Lord,” I groaned, “actually, I wish there would be a repatriation. They're bound to take him away someday, now that the Americans are bombing us; they won't keep any prisoners here to escape back to the Allied lines.” There, I had faced it at last. I ran down to the kitchen and talked it over with Ah King. Even Ah King thought that if by any chance a repatriation took place — well …

Upstairs I went again, to look at Carola in the nursery.

“You've had ice cream three times in your whole life,” I said. “How would you like an ice-cream soda every day — twice a day? And enough eggs, and fresh milk? And a doctor when you're sick? And no bombs? And a grandmother?” Carola, who spoke no English, stared at me, and I chattered on. “Do you think there's still a New York, Carola, with drugstores? Do you think any of my family are still alive?”

“Tang-kuo,” said Carola, which meant that she wanted a piece of candy.

Chapter 59

Except for the uncertainty that one would find anybody at all left in the camps, the parcel-bringing had become fairly routine. We brought fresh fruit when fresh fruit was allowed and we wailed when it wasn't, and carried our scorned offerings back home to eat there. We waited in tense hope when it was rumored that we could bring lard or margarine; for many anxious months nothing like that was permitted, as somebody smuggled radio parts into Stanley buried in lard, and the built-up radio was finally discovered, and twenty people were implicated and handed over to the gendarmes.

Any woman who really went in for parcel duty had her day's work cut out for her. Monday was Argyle, Tuesday was Stanley, Thursday was Bowen Road, and Saturday was Shamsuipo. Each parcel day meant that more than half the daylight hours were taken up with the mechanics of getting there and back. The other mornings and the afternoons were insufficient for the necessary marketing, preparing of the parcels, and finding the necessary sacks or boxes to send them in. Transportation grew less and less, we walked everywhere, and the distances in Kowloon are long.

Added to this was the anxious business of getting food into the gendarmerie for Selwyn. A dozen women were eager to help, though it was dangerous to show too much of an interest in the prisoner, and it was Constance who seized the coveted honor of carrying the food to the gendarmes' desk every week. We all took a hand in supplying the food, though we suspected he got very little of it. It was much easier to send things to Hilda and Mary. Hattori did all he could to alleviate Hilda's lot. Although he was strict about forbidding our communication, he did everything else that he could to help.

There were clashes, however, between Hattori and the civilian camp, and I was very much worried for a while. Although the Foreign Affairs chief had come to Hong Kong full of the milk of human kindness, he was in a King Cophetua mood rather than the humble state of mind that one has learned to associate with Christ's sort of charity. He expected the Stanley prisoners to fall on their knees to him in a passion of gratitude. Instead, in truly British fashion they took his favors with offhand thanks and went right on demanding more. They didn't think he was dispensing favors; they thought he was doing his duty, however belatedly, and they were willing to point out to him wherein he was still falling short. That didn't go down well at all with Mr. Hattori. Often he came to see me when he had dined next door at the super-geisha house, and he was usually a little drunk and very much wrought up over the latest “impertinent demand” from that troublesome community at Stanley.