The Man in the Wooden Hat Read online

  At once the playing cards were flying. Ross began to shuffle and deal them.

  “Will you put those bloody things away?”

  “Do I understand,” said Ross, setting them carefully down, “that there is to be some sort of revelation?”

  “Yes.”

  “Much better find the Lady,” said Ross, beginning to deal again.

  “I have found the lady, Coleridge. I have found her.”

  There was silence; only the purr of the plane.

  The silence lasted until Delhi and all through the stopover, the pacing in the marble first-class lounge, the buying of trinkets in the shops—Ross bought a case of blue butterflies—the resettling into Air India. Along swam the smiling painted girls in their cheongsams. The final take-off for Hong Kong.

  “So,” said Ross. “You are about to be married. It is a revelation all right, but immaterial to your profession. Wait until you’ve done it as often as I have.”

  Filth looked uneasy. “You never told me any of that, Albert.”

  “I consider that they are my private affairs. Who is she?”

  “She’ll be in Hong Kong when we get there. Waiting. Today.”

  “She’s Chinese?”

  “No. No, a Scottish woman. But born in Tiensin. I met her—well, I’ve been meeting her off and on for a year or so. Whenever we come out East. The first case you got for me. In Singapore.”

  “So that I’m to blame?”

  “Yes. Of course. I’m very glad to say. You will, I hope, be best man at my wedding. Without that hat.”

  “Her name?”

  “She’s called Elisabeth Macintosh. Betty. She’s a good sort. Very attractive.”

  “A good sort!” The cards again were flying. “A good sort?” He was wagging his weird Johnsonian head from side to side.

  “She hasn’t actually accepted me yet,” said Filth. “I’ve only just asked her. In a letter from Chambers sent to her hotel and marked ‘To await arrival.’ She’s just passing through with a friend. They’ve been in Australia—or somewhere. She has had some sort of work—I’m not sure. Rather hush-hush. She’s a natural traveller but not at all well off. She’s at the Old Colony Hotel.”

  “Never heard of it.” Without apparent volition the cards rose like liquid into a circle, and subsided.

  “Look, Albert, on the whole perhaps not mention it yet. I think she may accept me. Seems quite fond of me. She hasn’t actually said—”

  “I’m glad that she seems fond of you. It is the usual thing.”

  “And I’m really very fond of her. What’s the matter?”

  “You haven’t slept with her then?”

  A steward looked away but went on listening.

  “No,” cried Filth, loud and unaware. “No, of course not. She’s a lady. And I want to marry her.”

  “How young?”

  “I’ve never asked. She’s a young girl. Well, she can’t technically be a girl. She grew up in the war. Japanese internment camp in Shanghai. Lost both parents. Doesn’t speak about it.”

  “Have you ever asked her about it?”

  “One doesn’t intrude.”

  “Edward, what does she know about you? That you ought to tell her? What have you talked about? Will she stay with you?”

  “She’s good at birds and plants. So am I. My prep school. She’s very lively. Infectiously happy. Very bright eyes. Strong. Rather—muscular. I feel safe with her.” Filth looked at the throbbing structure of the plane. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I would die for her.”

  “Yes, I will,” the girl was saying in the shabby hotel in the back street, and street music playing against the racket of the mah-jong players on every open stone balcony. The overhead fan was limp and fly-spotted. On the beds were 1920s scarlet satin counterpanes with ugly yellow flowers done in stem stitch. They must have survived the war. Old wooden shutters clattered. There was the smell of the rotting lilies heaped in a yard below. Betty was alone, her friend Lizzie out somewhere, thank goodness. Betty would have hated not to be alone when she read Edward’s letter. What lovely handwriting. Rather a shame he’d used his Chambers writing paper. She wondered how many rough drafts he’d made first. Transcripts. He was wedded to transcripts. This was meant to be kept.

  And she would. She’d keep it for ever. Their grandchildren would leave it to a museum as a memento of the jolly old dead.

  Eddie Feathers? Crikey! He does sound a bit quaint. (Would you consider our being married, Elisabeth?) Not exactly Romeo. More like Mr. Knightley, though Mr. Knightley had a question mark about him. Forty-ish and always off to London alone. Don’t tell me that Emma was his first. I’m wandering. I do rather wish Eddie wasn’t so perfect. But of course I’ll marry him. I can’t think of a reason not to.

  She kissed the letter and put it down her shirt.

  Over the South China Sea Albert Ross was saying, “Do you know anything about this girl? Do you think she knows a bloody thing about you?”

  “I’d say I was pretty straightforward.”

  “Would you! Would you?”

  The plane lurched sideways and down. Then again sideways and down. It tilted its wings like a bird that had suddenly lost concentration and fallen asleep in the dark. Though, thought Filth, the prep-school-trained ornithologist, they never do.

  “Elisabeth,” he said, “makes me think of a kingfisher. She glitters and shines. Or a glass of water.”

  “Oh?”

  “A glass of clear water in a Scottish burn rushing through heather.”

  “Good God.”

  “Yes.”

  “Has she ever seen heather? Born in Tiensin? Is she beautiful?”

  Filth looked shocked. “No, no! My goodness, no. Not at all. Not glamorous.”

  “I see.”

  “Her—presence—is beautiful.” (It must be the glass of champagne that had been served with breakfast.) “Her soul is right.”

  Ross picked up the cards. “You are not a great connoisseur of women, Edward.”

  “How do you know, Coleridge? We didn’t talk about women on the Breath o’Dunoon.”

  “So what about the Belfast tart?”

  “I never told you that!”

  “The shilling on the mantelpiece. You talked of nothing else when you were delirious with poisoned bananas.”

  Filth in his magnificence pondered.

  “You’d better tell Miss Macintosh the outcome.”

  “How did you hear the outcome?”

  “Oh, I know people.”

  “Look here, I’m cured. I have a certificate. ‘VD’ they called it. Peccadilloes up there on the frontier. Old as soldiers. Old as man. Mostly curable.”

  “You weren’t on the frontier. You went to bed with an Irish slag in a boarding house in Belfast.”

  “I was sixteen.”

  “Yes. Well. You were curiously unperturbed. I’m worried about your . . .”

  “What?”

  “Fertility.”

  “For the love of God, Ross! I’m not sure I can go on knowing you.”

  “Think, Eddie. Nobody knows you like I do.”

  Below them the sun was rising from the rim of the globe. Mile-high columns of mist stood about in the air. Curtains of a giant stage. Stewardesses were clicking up the blinds letting in one bar of sunlight after another. The canned music began. Chinese music now. Ting-tang. Sleeping bodies began to stir and stretch and yawn, and Edward Feathers smiled. Looking out, so near to landing and yet so high, he waited for the first sight of the three hundred and twenty-five islands that are called Hong Kong.

  On one of them Betty Macintosh would be reading his letter. He saw her smiling and skipping about. Sweet child. So young and dear and good.

  What would she have made of him on the Breath o’Dunoon? Young, ravaged, demented, shipwrecked? She’d have been a child then. He’d been a gaunt, sick boy, just left school. With an Adam’s apple. Though women had never been scarce, from the start.

  Isobel.

 
Nowadays women looked at him as if he were a cliff face. I’m not attractive, he thought, but they’ve been told there’s a seam of gold about. Called money, I suppose.

  “We’re here,” said Ross and Kai Tak airport was waiting below.

  They swung round the harbour: the familiar landing pad that stuck out over the water like a diving board. During the war a plane a week had been lost there. Since then only one had tipped over into the harbour. But passengers on beginning to land always fell quiet for a moment.

  “And so, Edward,” said the bright-eyed girl that night, as the red sun dropped back into the sea, “Eddie, I will,” and she took his hand. “I will. Yes. Thank you. I will and I will and I will.”

  Somewhere in the archipelago her friend Lizzie would be drinking in a bar.

  All morning she had been saying, “Betty—you can’t. It’d be a dreadful mistake.”

  Finally, she had said, “All right. I’ll tell you something. I know him.”

  “You never said! How? You know Edward?”

  “See this pinhead? It’s the world. The middle classes. The Empire club. It’ll all be gone in a few years and I suppose we should be glad.”

  “You know Eddie?”

  “Yes. In the biblical sense, too. I was wild for him. Wild. He had this quality. I don’t know what it was. Probably still is. But you can’t forget Teddy Feathers. He doesn’t understand anyone, Bets, certainly not women. Something awful in his childhood. He’s inarticulate when he’s not in Court and then you hear another voice. As you do when he’s asleep—I know. He speaks Malay. D’you know he once had a horrible stammer? He’s a blank to everyone except that dwarf lawyer person, and there’s a mystery. Bets, you will be perfect for him as he becomes more and more boring. Pompous. Set in stone. Titled, no doubt. Rich as Croesus. But there’s something missing. Mind, he’s not sexless. He’s very enjoyable. It was before I was the other way—”

  “Did you ever tell him about that?”

  “Good God, no! He’d be disgusted. He leaves you feeling guilty as it is, he’s so pure. But there’s something missing. Maybe it’s his nanny—oh, Betty, don’t.”

  She said, “Lizzie-Izz, you’re jealous!”

  “Probably. A bit.”

  All day Betty had walked about, crossing and recrossing the city, changing twice from Hong Kong to Kowloon-side. It was Sunday and she went into St. John’s Cathedral and took Communion. She got a shock when the Chinese priest changed from Cantonese to English when he administered the Bread to her. She always forgot that she was not Chinese. She walked afterwards towards Kai Tak. Planes were landing and taking off from the airport all the time. She had no idea when Eddie’s would arrive. The planes shrieked over the paper houses of the poor. The people there were said to be deaf.

  Not noticing the noise, she wandered on among the filthy streets and came to a blistered building four storeys high with rubbish on every cement stair. She climbed up and up, noise bursting from each doorway and gallery, like feeding time at the zoo. The dear, remembered childhood chorus, the knockout smells of food and scraps. She clambered over boxes and bundles of rags and birdcages and parcels guarded by immobile individuals glaring at nothing. Rice bubbled thick on little stoves. On the third floor some Buddhist monks were chanting, and there was the smell of lamp oil, spices and smoke. On the top floor there was an antique English pram, inscribed Silver Cross, nearly blocking the apartment door, which her friend Amy opened when Betty knocked, a blond and rosy child on her hip and another child imminent. She had a Bible in one hand and was holding the place in it with her thumb. Schoolfriends, they hadn’t met since Amy became a missionary several years ago. She had been a dancer then.

  Amy said, “Oh. Hullo, Betty Macintosh. Come on in. There’s a prayer group but there’ll be some food. Can you stay the night?” Behind her the corridor was packed with noisy people.

  Inside the apartment there appeared to be no furniture except a piano where a very old Englishwoman was going hell for leather at Moody and Sankey hymns, as children of several nationalities were being fed, cross-legged on the floor. The old lady began to sing to her own accompaniment. “She’s a missionary, too,” said Amy. “But she’s got Depression. We have her round here every day in case she jumps into the harbour. She lives towards the New Territories behind barbed wire and guard dogs—she has some antiques—and does it stink!”

  A chair was found. Betty sat on it and was given the baby to hold while Amy went off to dollop out rice from a black pot. The old lady stopped playing and singing and began to cry, and a different surge of wailing Buddhist chant rose from the floor below. From a sort of cupboard burst a young Englishman who ran out of the apartment, leaned over the Harrods pram on the landing and began to shout down to the monks that they could damn well give over. He was trying to work. If they wanted food, here it was, but they could stop chanting and let God have an alternative for half an hour. His Cantonese was very good. In a moment several monks in orange robes had negotiated the pram. They came into the apartment where they stood about, smiling in a row, awaiting rice.

  Amy, ladle in hand, took the baby from Betty’s knee and dumped it on the knee of the Depressive. It immediately began to cry, which made the Depressive stop, and Amy, holding two dishes of rice, squeezed herself down on the floor near Betty, and said, “So?”

  “Hello, Amy.”

  “So, when did you get home?”

  “Home? I’ve not had a home for years.”

  “Oh, get on,” said Amy.

  “I’m on holiday. Passing through. I’m drifting.”

  “Alone?”

  “With a girlfriend. Lizzie Ingoldby. D’you remember? Older than us, at school. Where’s Nick?”

  “That was Nick, yelling at the Buddhists. He’s trying to write a sermon on Submission to God. He’s upset. They all fall in love with him out here and he hates to disappoint a woman. By the way, we’re having another.”

  “I can see.”

  “It will make four. And we’re broke. Have you any spare money?”

  “Not a bean. I’m coming into money when I’m thirty. My parents thought I might be flighty. Instead, I’m hungry.”

  “Well, don’t become a missionary. We’re not hungry but we’d like a sideline. We’re not allowed a sideline. A rich one who puts his arms round me would be nice.”

  The old lady, a Mrs. Baxter, had now silenced the baby with Hymns Ancient & Modern, and called out, “Oh, I do agree! I am not a nun.” And began to dab her eyes. Amy passed her a very small cup of rice wine.

  “We’re just about all she’s got,” said Amy. “She hasn’t the fare to England and there’s nobody she knows there now if she even got there. So what sort of sideline have you got, clever old Elisabeth of the Enigma Variations and always top of the form, star of St. Paul’s and St. Anne’s?”

  “I think—well, I think—I’m going in for a husband.”

  “Oh? Really? Oh, very, very good. Who is it?”

  “You don’t know him. Well, I don’t think you do. I don’t know him very well, either. I came to ask you if I should do it. He’s flying in tonight. I’ll have to make up my mind. I’m sick of fretting on about it. By tomorrow. Maybe tonight.”

  “What is he? English or Chinese? Is he Christian or ghastly agnostic? Your eyes have tears in them.”

  “He’s English. Christian. Not Christian like you are, full time. More like I am. Doesn’t talk about it. Oh, yes, and he’s already pretty rich. He’ll get very rich. He’s got the touch. He’s an advocate. He’ll be a judge.”

  “Oh, he’s in his nineties. Does he dribble?”

  “No. He’s quite young. He’s brilliant. And he’s so good-looking he finds he’s embarrassed walking down the street. Thinks they belong—his looks—to a different man. He’s very, very nice, Amy. And he needs me.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Have you slept with him?”

  “He’s not the sort. I don’t even know . . .”


  “He’s a virgin?”

  “Oh, no. Not that. I’ve heard. In the war he was close to Queen Mary.”

  “He had an affair with Queen Mary?”

  They stared at each other and began to howl and laugh and roll about, as at school.

  “He must be very grand,” said Amy.

  “No. Oh, no. He never knows who anyone is. Social stuff doesn’t interest him.”

  “And you? You, you, you? D’you love him?”

  “I don’t know. I think so. I suppose I should but you see I’m retarded. I want the moon, like a teenager.”

  “You should want the moon. Don’t do it, Bets. Don’t go for a forty-watt light bulb because it looks pretty. You’ll get stuck with it when it goes out. You are so loyal, and you’ll have to soldier on in the dark for ever afterwards.”

  Mrs. Baxter announced that Jesus was the Light of the World.

  “That’s right,” said Amy. “Have some more wine.”

  “And Him only shalt thou serve,” said Mrs. Baxter.

  “Amy, I must go. He may already be here. At any minute.”

  “But come back. You will come back, won’t you? Bring him.”

  Betty tried to see Edward standing in the pools of rice in his polished shoes, the Buddhists chanting, Mrs. Baxter weeping.

  “I’d love your life, Amy.”

  “So you say,” said Amy.

  CHAPTER THREE

  And so, a few hours later, into the sea dropped the great red yo-yo sun and darkness painted out the waters of a bay. Then lights began to show, first the pricking lights under the ramparts they stood on, then more nebulous lights from boats knocking together where the fishermen lived in houses on stilts, then the lights of moving boats fanning white on black across the bay, and then across faraway bays and coastlines of the archipelago; lights of ferries, coloured lights of invisible villages and way over to the south dim lights staining the darkness of Hong Kong itself.

  Edward Feathers and Elisabeth Macintosh stood side by side, looking out, and a drum began to beat. Voices rose in a screech, like a sunset chorus of raucous birds: Cantonese and half a dozen dialects; the crashing of pots and pans, clattering pandemonium. Blue smoke rose up from the boats to the terrace of the hotel and there was a blasting smell of hot fish. Behind the couple standing looking out, waiters were beginning to spread tablecloths and napkins, setting down saucers decorated with floating lights and flowers. The last suggestion of a sun departed and the sky was speckled with a hundred million stars.