World of Suzie Wong : A Novel (9781101572399) (11 page)

I wondered how it would work. “I suppose it's only a matter of getting used to a new convention—and one can get used to anything,” I thought, and fell asleep. But the problem, as it happened, was only academic. The option was no longer open—because that day she met Ben.

2

The Men

Chapter One

B
en Jeffcoat, although Suzie met him at the Nam Kok, was not a sailor. But he had been a sailor during the war—and not just a matelot either. He had commanded a corvette, and had been awarded a D.S.O. for some action in the Atlantic in which he had lost his ship.

I do not know much about this action, since I only heard him mention it once, when he described it as “A jolly good bit of fun, actually. We gave the old Hun quite a time of it.” Six months later he had lost a second ship, and had been ten days adrift on a raft. He regarded these ten days in retrospect as the finest experience of his life, since the lonely battle for survival had called into play all the best qualities of manhood.

And Ben set a great store on manhood. He talked about it often. “What the devil's the use of manhood to a civilian? A fat lot of manhood one needs for selling air-conditioners!”

Nevertheless he did very well selling air-conditioners. After the war he had acquired the Hong Kong agency for an English firm that manufactured small one-room units; and he had no sooner set up shop than the influx of refugees from China had started a building boom. Air-conditioning units had been required in vast numbers for new hotels and blocks of flats, and his percentages on sales had totted up to an enviable income. He had bought himself a house on the Peak, an unostentatious but expensive car, and a sailing dinghy for weekends. At thirty-five, he was an established and successful man.

But I knew none of this, of course, when at one o'clock in the morning he first appeared in my room. Suzie had rung up from another room to announce the visit; and when I had protested that it was far too late, she had urgently assured me that her companion was so intelligent and charming, so altogether unusual, that the opportunity of meeting him was not to be missed. She was certain that I would take him to my bosom as a soul mate.

Five minutes later she ushered into my room a tall, broad-shouldered man in tropical suit. He was in early middle age; fair, good-looking, but with features that showed signs of coarsening too early and running to seed. He stood swaying just inside the doorway, eyeing me with bleary hostility. “Humph,” he grunted.

Clearly my soul mate was drunk.

I threw Suzie a look that I hoped expressed my displeasure, then steeled myself to the task of playing gracious host. I said, “You're my first civilian. I'm honored.”

“Humph.”

“My boy friend, Ben,” Suzie cheerfully introduced. “I forget his other name.” And she launched into an abbreviated version of her conducted tour, hurrying through it like a guide at an historic monument a few minutes before closing time. Ben swayed gently in the middle of the room, withdrawn behind blinking, hooded eyes. I fancied that he was not quite so drunk as he wished to appear: he was embarrassed at being confronted at the Nam Kok by a fellow countryman, and was using the intoxication as a convenient cloak behind which to hide.

Suzie finished the conducted tour abruptly, omitting the tape recorder. She picked up her bag. “All right, I go now.”

I stared in alarm. “Go?”

“Yes, I just go to see my baby.”

Her eyes twinkled mischievously. It dawned on me at last why she had been so anxious to bring along this great drunken lout: she wanted me to act as nursemaid while she slipped off home. I said, “You little devil!”

“I won't be long—ten minutes.”

“But if you're going to your house—”

“Maybe twenty minutes.” And she was gone.

I turned to the bleary swaying figure and said, “Come and sit on the balcony. I think it's warm enough.” And if it isn't, I thought, so much the better. It'll help sober you up.

He sank into a balcony chair, and I seated myself in another. I asked him politely if he lived in Hong Kong.

“Humph,” he said.

I decided on a less personal topic. I remarked that the harbor of Hong Kong was said to be one of the most beautiful in the world.

“Humph.”

“Though I believe Rio's even more spectacular,” I said. “Have you ever been to Rio?”

He said aggressively, “You're bloody curious, aren't you?”

“I'm awfully sorry.”

“Humph.”

Silence. I considered the possibility of retiring to bed forthwith, and was on the point of doing so when he said suddenly, “Christ, I'm pissed. I'm pissed as a newt.”

“You look a bit under the weather,” I sympathized.

“First time I've been to a place like this.” He shot me an aggressive glance. “You don't believe me?”

“Certainly, if you say so.”

“I do say so—the first bloody time.” He noticed his own disagreeable tone, and looked a bit ashamed. He said in a more conciliatory way, “Look, old man, can't we get a drink?”

“Oughtn't you to go steady?”

This was fatal. He exploded again aggressively. “For Christ's sake! Don't start pulling that Liz stuff on me!”

“That
what
stuff?”

“Forget it. Can't we get something sent up?”

It seemed the lesser of two evils, so I rang down to the bar. Presently one of the waiters appeared with a double whisky for Ben and a San Mig for me. Ben gave him a note and told him to keep the change. He began to relax a bit with the whisky in his hand.

“Sorry I'm being such a bastard,” he said. “I always get like this when I'm drunk. I suppose that's because when I'm sober I'm the mildest bloody well-behaved bloke you could ever bloody well imagine. It's true, what I told you just now—I've lived in Hong Kong for years, and this is the first time I've ever been in a brothel. First time I've ever mucked about with a Chinese girl. In fact, let's face it, I've been a model husband to old Liz.”

“So Liz is your wife.”

“With a bloody vengeance, old man.”

And for the next hour, since Suzie was no quicker in returning than I had expected, he treated me to an account of his marital troubles. It appeared that the biggest thorn in his wife's flesh had been his sailing dinghy. Ben hated being a businessman, and admitted that he had never really enjoyed life since the war—and only sailing, with its requirements of tactics, manual skill, and knowledge of the elements, had been able to give him anything like the satisfaction of his life in the navy. He had developed a passion for it. He had hungered for reunion with his dinghy at weekends as another man might hunger for reunion with a mistress. Sailing, however, had made Elizabeth sick. She had hated it. And she had also hated being left out of it—and so every weekend had finished up with a cataclysmic row.

Finally Ben had agreed to sail only on Saturday afternoons and to devote Sundays to Elizabeth. However, even this compromise had not brought peace. Certainly Elizabeth, who had herself suggested the new arrangement, would no longer find fault with the actual sailing itself, but she would always greet him on his return from sailing with some allied grievance: there were people coming to dinner and he was late, or he had rushed off without doing something he had promised, or he had selfishly taken the car when he could so easily have got a lift, and had thereby caused her to miss a tea party—the
only
tea party for months that she had really wanted to attend. The rows usually lasted through Sunday, and he would return to work on Monday morning feeling shattered and exhausted.

At last, in exasperation, he had decided to chuck sailing. He had sold the dinghy. He had taken to going to the Kit Kat instead.

The Kit Kat Club was situated in the Central District. It was useful for morning coffee, lunch, and companionable drinking, since there was always somebody one knew at the bar. Ben took to calling in every evening after the office. After a drink or two he would forget the time and arrive home late for dinner. The rows started again. The blunt fact was that Elizabeth could not bear him to enjoy a moment's pleasure without her. She wanted total possession. And she damn well wasn't going to get it.

The rows had grown more bitter and prolonged, and their causes more trivial and absurd. Then one night about a week ago a row had started in the car after a cocktail party. It had been over a single word—over whether Ben, in refusing an invitation to a stag party, had said, “I'm sorry, I've got to stay with old Liz,” or “I'm sorry, I
want
to stay with old Liz.” Elizabeth had insisted that he had said “
got
,” thereby giving his friends the impression that he would gladly have abandoned her if he could, which of course was most dreadfully humiliating.

The row had continued during dinner, lapsed for an hour, then broken out again in bed, where it had outlived a crying fit by Elizabeth (much to her surprise) and continued until four o'clock in the morning. It had set off a series of rows which had broken out sporadically throughout the week. Ben, as usual, had dropped in every evening at the Kit Kat, since Elizabeth had finally agreed to this provided that he limited himself to one drink. But as with the sailing, so with the drinking—and albeit that he had kept strictly to the agreement, he would always find Elizabeth waiting for him with some grievance that indirectly reproached him for visiting the club at all. Thus tonight on his return she had complained that the cook, while trying to mend a blown fuse, had broken a dining-room chair, which would never have happened if Ben, instead of being at the Kit Kat, had been at home to mend it himself.

Ben said, “I see, so now I'm blamed because Ah Yuen is too lazy to fetch a ladder.”

“I wasn't blaming you. I merely said . . .”

An hour later at dinner they were still at it. Suddenly Ben put down his knife and fork.

“Listen, we've been at this for a week now, and I'm not going through another night of it. If you go on, I'm going back to the Kit Kat.”

“You started it.”

“I don't care who started it. I've warned you.”

“Well, if you prefer the Kit Kat to your own home—”

Ben rose without a word, left the house, and drove down to the club. There he deliberately set about getting drunk. Soon he was joined by a ship's surveyor called Wildblood, a small, rat-faced, taciturn man with thinning hair, who was married and had children but was reputed to sleep with his Chinese servant. Ben despised him. They desultorily discussed the virtues of different brands of whisky and the pro-communist statements of a brain-washed missionary who had just been released from China. Ben noticed Wildblood's eyes follow someone across the room. He looked round. It was Moira Wang, a slim beautiful girl of twenty-six who was a qualified doctor. She had been brought in by Bill Harper, an up-and-coming young left-wing politician.

“Not bad,” Ben said approvingly.

Wildblood grunted, pretending to notice her for the first time. He was always at pains to conceal his interest in Chinese girls and to imply that he would not touch them with a barge pole. He said that Moira Wang was a damned Red. Why didn't she stand by her principles and go back to China for a taste of her own medicine?

“I've never had a Chinese girl,” Ben said.

“Well, keep off them. They're all gold diggers—hard as nails.”

They had another whisky. Moira Wang and her companion were eating a Chinese dinner at a near-by table. Ben watched them. He had reached that stage of intoxication at which, his attention concentrated supernormally on some person or object, he would perceive truths of world-shattering importance. These would come to him almost like spiritual revelations, giving him the same ecstatic sense of privilege as a prophet or saint. And now, as he watched Moira Wang wiping Harper's chopsticks for him and then helping him to some choice morsel, a new truth burst upon him with a blinding flash: that oriental women had a femininity that Western women had lost—that they were dedicated to building up masculinity, whereas Western women were dedicated to its destruction.

He continued to watch the couple at the table. The feminine tenderness of Moira Wang's manner filled him with fresh anger at the thought of Elizabeth, who for so long had starved him of his masculine due. He began to feel an almost intolerable yearning. He had never been troubled by a promiscuous desire for women. But now he hungered for a woman—for tenderness, for love. He made up his mind. He turned to Wildblood and said bluntly: “Where can I get a Chinese girl?”

Wildblood gave him a peculiar look, then avoided his eyes. “Why ask me? I wouldn't go with a Chink if you paid me.”

“Come off it, Wildblood,” Ben said. “You know where one can get a girl.”

Wildblood said he had heard that the taxi girls at Chinese dance halls were really tarts—but he wouldn't know.

“I can't go to a dance hall,” Ben said. “Too public. I've too many Chinese clients.”

“Then go to a Chinese hotel. They've always got girls laid on.”

“But I can't speak Chinese. I wouldn't know how to ask for one.”

“You don't have to ask. Take a room in a Chink hotel, and there'll be six lined up in the corridor before you've closed the door.”

“Six?”

“All shapes and sizes—take your choice.” He admitted that he had been to the odd Chinese hotel in his time. Not intending to have a girl, of course—but you were obliged to take one in the end, otherwise they went on knocking on your door all night so that you couldn't get a wink.

“Tell me the name of a hotel,” Ben said.

“Dozens of them. They're all brothels, these Chink places.”

Now that he was faced with practicalities, Ben began to get cold feet. But his nature was stubborn. He felt committed to his decision, if only as an act of defiance against Elizabeth. He put down another double Scotch to bolster his courage, then left the club. Outside he took a taxi. He told the driver what he wanted, and presently they stopped outside a hotel in the back streets of Wanchai. It looked so sordid that he refused to go in. Next the driver brought him to the Nam Kok. He booked a room at the reception desk and went upstairs. There was no sign of any girls so he rang for the floor boy, who explained that the hotel really only catered for sailors, and that he would have to get a girl from the bar downstairs. Ben was self-conscious enough already, without having to perform this shady transaction before a crowd of matelots, and he gave the boy a hefty tip to bring some girls to the room. Then he collapsed on the bed, his head spinning.