Julia Paradise (10 page)

A sudden look of doubt, almost of fear, came across her face when she saw Ayres watching her. She had spoken more than she needed to. Ayres slumped back in his chair, his cigar in his mouth, and said quietly, ‘That must have been a very painful time, Miss Platz. You must find it difficult to talk about it.'

She smiled and Ayres saw that the corner of one of her front teeth was chipped. ‘Not at all,
Doktor.
' She pronounced his honorific in the German manner, ironically, making him feel uneasy, outwitted in some obscure way. Partly it was her being German. The vague idea floated through his mind that he wouldn't mind asking what was her father's name.

‘My hero,' Willy Paradise was saying to him. ‘Is Timothy Richard. You've heard of him?' Ayres admitted that he had not.

‘A very famous missionary indeed. The Chinese called him Li-Ti-Mo-Tai. He had an extraordinary reputation in scholarly circles. Not everyone could accept his methods, of course, least of all our more conventional brethren. Timothy Richard dreamed of China reforming herself, rather than of a country studded with Western churches. He tried to emphasize the essentials of Chinese culture in his teaching. He inspired many young Chinese to join the revolutionary movement back in those days. But he was convinced that China must have Western learning. He lived in abject poverty, dining on rice and vegetables so that he could buy telescopes and microscopes for his students. And here we are—look at us having dined on roasted pork.' He looked at Ayres as though that were his fault.

‘An excellent meal,' said Ayres. ‘You met this man Timothy Richard?'

‘Sadly I never had the opportunity. He died in 1919. But he left his mark, my word he did. Now we have the New Missionaries and their national salvation through reform. That's Timothy's work. The
social
gospel, as they now call it.'

‘Those soldiers out there don't seem to appreciate it,' Ayres said.

Julia said loudly, ‘Of course they appreciate it. Didn't you see how it amused them to smash out our windows?' Then, more quietly, ‘They were only being Chinese.'

Willy turned to Ayres, ‘You have to understand that missionaries in this country have traditionally been targets for nationalist attacks. We have been extraordinarily lucky here. A handful of soldiers billeted for a few days. In a week or two our students will return. A few windows smashed. It would make your stomach turn to hear of some of the atrocious things that have been done to our people in the past.' Julia said, ‘Our girls will return if Johnny Yang will let them.'

‘Who is he?' Ayres asked.

Willy said, ‘One of the policemen at the prefecture. One of those who, as you say, doesn't seem to appreciate us. It's really all very petty. Occasionally a girl's family wants her back. They sign an agreement then two or three months later someone puts pressure on them, or they decide they're not Christians any more and they want them out. Sometimes they just send a few bully boys to get the girl back. Puts us in a terrible position. They might be abducting the girl, for all we know. It actually happened to one girl, last year. At other times they send young Captain Yang for them. A duty which, I might hasten to add, Captain Yang delights in performing.' Willy Paradise paused for a moment, as if deciding whether to go on. ‘He hates us. Loathes us with a fine burning hatred. He believes it is his sacred duty to drive all Christians out of China.'

‘But why send the police? Why not simply come and take the girl home themselves?'

Willy Paradise shrugged. ‘Cowardice, I suppose.'

Julia said sharply, ‘They are afraid Willy will talk them out of it. Willy can be very—convincing.'

Finally the party broke up and Ayres dragged himself upstairs to his room. He took off his shoes and jacket, lighted his pipe and lay back on the bed.

 

A high-pitched shriek cut through the night. Ayres shook himself awake and remembered where he was. The shriek died away and now he heard the excited babble of Chinese outside in the garden. And another sound that was unmistakeable: the crackling of flames.

The little wooden schoolhouse was already well alight when Ayres got there. The fire cast bright wobbly shadows over the garden. Bits of timber lay flaming on the grass and he heard the sharp knock and hiss as the iron roof collapsed. Flames leapt out and caught on the overhanging branches. The soldiers were doing nothing to stop the fire. They looked on with interest from their huddled rucksacks and bedrolls and rifles. Willy Paradise ran to the pump and filled one of the metal buckets left there, but the heat of the fire was so intense that he could not get close enough to throw his water at the flames.

‘Is everybody out of there?' Ayres yelled across to him.

Willy looked confused, then, understanding, turned and yelled something in Chinese to the soldiers. They did not seem to understand Willy's Mandarin. They looked at each other, then back to Willy and smiled. One of the young soldiers, who had the beginnings of a straggling moustache, lifted a bottle of rice spirit to his lips and drank, then, staring into the fire, passed it on to the soldier standing next to him.

Something made Ayres look up. Julia was standing in one of the dormer windows. She was looking beyond him to the burning schoolhouse and in the firelight her face was exultant.

Half an hour later the building was a skeleton of blackened timber which smoked and smouldered but would not fall. The soldiers had withdrawn with their belongings to the group of garden sheds which had been jerrybuilt against the back fence. As they left, one of them—it was the young one with the moustache—lugged his kit and bedroll over to where Willy stood by himself and took something out from inside his pack and handed it to Willy apologetically. Ayres saw that it was a microscope.

 

Willy had shown no signs of moving away from the smouldering ruin when Ayres had retired. He continued to stand there, oblivious to Ayres' goodnight, surveying what was left of his school.

The next morning Ayres found him still in the garden. He lifted his head but did not say anything. He had apparently not left the spot all night and his hands, face and clerical collar were filthy with soot and ash.

The building was cold black rubble. Part of the charred frame had collapsed during the night and roof timbers hung down dangerously from what was left. Sheets of iron lay here and there on the grass and Ayres inspected the blackened objects Willy had salvaged—an iron desk frame, a broken wash bowl, burnt books strewn from a partly burnt cupboard. As Ayres walked around, his feet stirred up clouds of ash.

Ayres said, ‘Did the soldiers tell you anything?'

‘They left early this morning. Didn't you hear the lorry arrive?'

‘No.'

‘It was deliberate. There can be no doubt about it. Look over there.' He nodded in the direction of the rubble. Ayres could not see what he meant at first, then he saw a blackened gasolene can, the faint red imprint of the brand name just visible.

‘It's an absolute outrage,' Ayres told him. ‘You must telegraph the Consul immediately. You must lose no time. We'll have them reported to their superior officers.'

Willy Paradise did not even bother to answer. He seemed to have sunk into a black despair. Ayres felt a strong sensation that the man hated him. Then the clergyman recounted a story that had been told him in the night by some young men: not long before the fire had broken out, a woman made her way from the mission buildings down towards the canal at the back, where she untied from the small landing platform there a wooden dinghy. It was a mild night and some of the young peasant boys who had come up to watch the fireworks stopped at that spot where the canal, due to a sluice-gate, becomes a wide deep pool.

Along the bank grew a few willows, and from one of these trees a rope had been attached, from which on hot summer afternoons after harvesting these same young men swung out over the canal and plunged down into the water.

The water was flowing quickly that night because the sluice had been opened by the local water warden. For some reason known only at City Hall in Shanghai, the warden opened the locks to flood the canals at night time. The boys watched the woman travel more and more quickly down the canal without apparent struggle in the powerful current. She rowed smoothly and well [she had been in the Women's Eight at Somerville, Willy pointed out], for all the world as though she were going for a bit of a Sunday trip in one of those boats they have next to the English tea gardens at the Racing Club in Shanghai. Minutes later, the sky behind the willows was shot full of flames and the screaming from the mission rent the air. None of them gave another thought to the woman. Out in the middle of the canal the current moved her quickly into the darkness, away from the firelight.

‘Have you seen Julia?' Ayres asked him quietly. His face told him that he had. ‘Is she—sleeping?'

‘She's sleeping now.'

There was something horrible about the way he said it.

‘What do you mean?' Ayres demanded.

‘I sat up with her until the early hours. I was going to wake you, but—I'm accustomed to giving the injections myself.'

‘You mean she was hallucinating again?'

‘Oh yes. Dreadfully. She kept insisting that someone had been burnt in the fire. I spent the whole night sitting with her, trying to get straight in her poor mind what had really happened. The truth is that I don't really know, myself. None of us does. I kept going through the simplest steps of logic, as though explaining to a child, that there was not, could not have been, any of the girls burnt in the school. She said she saw the house burning, thick palls of smoke coming from the upstairs windows. She said she saw flames up there, even the sound of breaking glass. She said she heard a girl screaming—perhaps she had in the panic confused the soldiers yelling—' Willy Paradise looked at Ayres, the exhaustion and terror finally breaking over his face. ‘And then she insisted, absolutely insisted, that she had seen a girl in a nightgown jump from the burning upstairs window onto the lawn below.'

 

There were no servants to be seen and Ayres had to make his own breakfast. He prepared eggs, buttered toast and brewed tea for himself. The stacked plates and dishes were still unwashed in the cold little scullery. In the dining room the table was still exactly as they had left it, with the partly-eaten birthday cake and the stubs of cigars. As soon as he had finished breakfasting he felt for his pipe then sat back and let the rich, sweet-smelling smoke unwind over the debris. He went through to the sitting room and picked up a week-old
South China Daily News
with its stale stories of the big strikes in Shanghai.

The sounds of cars arriving outside roused Ayres but by the time he had hauled himself to the sitting room window only a wake of dust was left, rising lazily in the late morning sunshine.

He found Julia in the garden sitting on the wooden seat built around a peppercorn tree, engaged in earnest conversation with a policeman. He was a very well-dressed young Chinese policeman, to be sure—he wore a Western tie and vest and clean white shirtsleeves, and balanced on his knee a bowler hat—but he was unmistakeably a policeman, nevertheless. His jacket was folded neatly across the passenger seat of his motorcar, a late American model. In the green lorry behind it two other policemen, sullen and bored, sat in the cabin on either side of Willy Paradise. He still wore his ruined clerical collar and he had not washed his face. He sat up there impassively, and the combination of the blackened face and the lorry made Ayres think of a coalminer. A few moments passed before Julia realized Ayres' presence; then she turned her head to him, her black hair gleaming in the sun.

‘They've arrested Willy,' she said.

Ayres stood his ground and regarded the well-dressed policeman. Julia made an introduction and the Chinese insisted on shaking hands. His name was Johnny Yang, and he spoke good English with an American accent.

‘He's been arrested on what charge?' Ayres asked mildly.

‘No formal charge is required. Perhaps you have not heard? The supreme command of the National Peoples' Party has declared a state of martial law.'

Suddenly Ayres was furious. He spoke sharply, his voice not disguising his loathing. ‘Except in the International Settlement.'

The Chinese looked at him pleasantly. ‘Except in the International Settlement, of course.' He bowed the concession and went on smoothly. ‘Nevertheless, the Sungchiang prefecture is not presently under the jurisdiction of the International Settlement. The Reverend Paradise has been detained in connection with a fire which occurred last night on Chinese property.'

The policeman smiled.

‘Are you seriously trying to suggest that Mr Paradise tried to burn down his own mission school?'

‘If he burned his own mission it would be of no concern to us. But this mission is now Chinese property by forfeit under proclamation by the Supreme Commander General Chiang Kai-Shek that all foreign mission schools must have Chinese principals.'

Ayres was silent. He looked at the policeman, then asked, ‘And how long will he be detained?'

‘As long as it takes for the facts to come to light.'

Julia said softly, ‘Willy will be staying for a few days, I think.' She stood smiling stupidly, in her Sunday frock. Then she looked down and plucked at the fingers of her glove.

Johnny Yang turned again to Ayres. ‘Are you staying here, Doctor, in any official capacity?'

Ayres said slowly, afraid of letting his anger show, ‘I am staying here as a guest of the Reverend and Mrs Paradise.'

The policeman seemed satisfied. ‘Well then.' He turned towards his car. ‘Now you are staying as a guest of the Chinese people. I trust you will do your utmost to protect Chinese property from any further damage. By person or persons unknown.' He put his bowler hat on his head and opened the door of the roadster. Then Julia moved forward and touched the shiny green fender.