The Man in the Wooden Hat Read online

  “It’s a fourteen-hour flight. And there’s a change of plane in India.”

  “He’s a self-reliant little beast. He’s done it before.”

  “If you ever need anyone to meet him we’ll probably be living in London at first. I should like to. Please.”

  “I hear you’re marrying Old Filth. It’s the sensation of the party. “Who is she, my dear?” No—he’d never let you have anything to do with a son of mine. We don’t get on. He thinks I’m common. So when did he get rid of his stammer and manage to ask you?”

  “About three hours ago.”

  “Is he weighing up your acceptance? Considering your sentence? I can see that you are.”

  She stood up. “You are as vulgar as they say you are.” She handed him her empty plate, crumpling his son’s dinner napkin on top of it as if he were a waiter, and walked away.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  She had been right about dinner. A junior in his team had asked Edward for a consultation after the party. It might make a vital difference to the Case. Edward would of course walk her back to her hotel first.

  “Will we meet later?”

  “I never know how long—”

  “Edward, we’ve not been engaged for a day yet. Can’t you even stop for some dinner? I didn’t see you eating anything. We’ve said so little—”

  “Not hungry. My clock’s not settled yet, it’s the middle of the night, I think.” He took her arm above the elbow and said, “Anyway, I’m too excited.”

  “Oh! Oh, well. Eddie, come to my room afterwards. At the Old C. It’s number 182. I’ll be alone. Lizzie’s out.”

  “Rather not promise. The end of the week will be ours for two full days. Then we have all the years we’re going to live.”

  He dropped her outside her hotel, which was pulsing with lights and screeching music.

  “Well, goodnight, my future husband who doesn’t ever kiss me.”

  “Well, certainly not here. You know I love you. I always will. Thank you. Please live for ever. Stop me from being a bloody bore. I can’t help working. It’s been a safety valve since school. Device for not thinking. But I’ll be all right now. Always. We’ll have a long, long honeymoon when this Case is out of the way.”

  He kissed her like a brother.

  Her room was unlocked and she had to turn out four uniformed room-boys who were lying on the floor and on the beds watching her tiny flickering black-and-white television. Lizzie must have turned the Room Free label the wrong way round instead of to Do Not Disturb. Lizzie’s reading of Cantonese was getting hazy. There was a musky smell in the room and Elisabeth opened the window, turned off the television and the lights and the air-conditioning. Warm harbour smells floated in. The water pipes along the walls clanked to the rhythm of somebody’s shower above. She took off the pearls and put them on a chair. She picked up the yellowing finger-marked breakfast menu and then thought, no, she’d order in the morning. She only needed sleep.

  About midnight she woke in panic. The sky above was throbbing with planes. The boy Harry would be at the airport now. No, he’d already be in the air, sitting in his first-class seat. “Flying out at midnight.” To be hoped that the mother . . . The mother had looked drunk. You’d think the father would have cancelled that Con. An only child. Will Edward cancel a Consultation for a child? She decided, no. But there will be me.

  Our children will always have me.

  Where’s Lizzie? Secret life. Always had. All these secrets. She thought of the codes at Bletchley Park in the mild English countryside. We took it so lightly. Secrets. Elisabeth slept now against the madhouse clamour of Kowloon. Blank. Jet lag. Still partly in Sydney. Hole in the air, c’est moi. Ought to be better at all this. Calmer. I am getting married. I’m twenty-eight.

  In a dream she was informing her long-dead and always shadowy parents not to worry. She was back on the blistered floor of the Camp. The dust. Her father’s voice suddenly boomed out at her, “There’ll be money when you’re thirty. Do nothing hasty.” His ribcage had stuck out. His nose sharp in the skull. “I’m quite safe,” she shouted. “I’m doing all right.”

  In the morning she woke to Lizzie’s radio playing beside the other bed and sat up bleary and tousled blinking across to where Lizzie lay prone. The radio rattled on in Cantonese.

  “Lizzie-Izz! You’re back! Where were you? I’ve something . . .”

  “Shut up a minute. There’s terrible news.”

  “Oh. What news?”

  “Plane crash. Early this morning. Over the Indian Ocean. It broke in two.”

  Elisabeth was out of bed and dressing, “Which?”

  “Which what?”

  “Plane. Airline. Going where?”

  “British Airways, to Heathrow. The new design. A lot of children flying home to boarding school. What are you doing?”

  Elisabeth was in her clothes. She did not do her hair or wash or look in the glass. She felt for her sandals by the bed, ran into the bathroom, ran out again, pulling up her knickers. She left the rope of pearls lying on the chair. She did not look for her purse. She ran from the room.

  “I think actually they said it happened after it had left Rome,” Lizzie called, but Elisabeth was out of hearing.

  Elisabeth ran into the street, on to the quay, ran across the roads in the drumming relentless Monday morning crowds that marched to work in their thousands, not looking at her, not speaking, not touching, not stumbling, and nor did she. She ran up the marble steps of the Peninsular Hotel and the bellhop boys in their white uniforms and pillbox hats pulled back the glass doors and blinked as she passed by.

  Beside the fountain she stopped. The white piano on the dais was covered with a cloth and the gold music stands were folded up. She ran to the lifts and eyes turned from her in embarrassment, two immaculate men at the reception desk looking pointedly away. Somewhere above her in the hotel Edward would be getting up, thinking of the coming day in Court. It never occurred to her to ask for him.

  She didn’t know the number of the Veneerings’ rooms and asked the lift boy who said “Suite Number One” but looked uncertain about taking her there. “It’s urgent,” she said. “It’s about a legal Case in the Courts.” He looked at her wild hair and crumpled dress.

  But the lift rolled up, the gates slid open and she was running towards the double doors of Suite Number One and ringing the bell. She rang and rang.

  The door at last was opened by a maid—no, by a nanny. One of the old amahs in black and white, her face gaunt. Behind stood Terry Veneering. And beside him stood Harry.

  “We missed the plane,” the boy shouted. “I’m still here. Mum passed out and we missed it. And one just like it crashed in the Med.” He flung himself on Elisabeth.

  The amah vanished and Veneering said, “Harry—quick. Go and tell them, Miss Macintosh needs some coffee. Go on. Go on.”

  Then he stepped forward and took her hands and led her inside.

  “No, no, I won’t come in,” she said. “It’s all right now. I don’t need to come in.”

  His clownish face of the night before looked thin and white, his blue eyes exhausted. His hands holding hers shook. “I thought so, too,” he said. “But it wasn’t his.”

  “Must go back,” she said. “Find Edward. Tell friend. Isobel. All right now. I’m all right now.”

  “Stop crying.”

  “I must be mad,” she said.

  “I’ll send a car for you tonight. Your hotel the Old C? I’ll send a car at six-thirty. Look. Stop. He’s all right. It wasn’t his flight. Sing Te Deum and Laudamus. Elisabeth, it was a different plane.”

  “Yes. Yes, I will sing—I’ll sing for ever.”

  “You met him—shut up or I’ll shake you—you met him for about half an hour. He’s mine, you know, not yours. Soon you’ll have your own.”

  “Yes. I can’t understand. It must be hysteria. I’m never, never—Oh, but thank God. Thank God, Terry!”

  “Six-thirty,” he said, shutting the door on he
r.

  CHAPTER SIX

  She went out. She did not telephone Edward or wait for him to ring her, or explain anything to Lizzie who had again vanished. She went to a small, expensive shop and with the end of her money, labelled “emergencies,” she bought a dress.

  The girl selling was shivering with cold because of the new, Western-style air conditioning. She looked ill and resentful. Elisabeth moved the ready-made silk dresses along the rails and found her fingertips covered with oil. She showed them to the sneezing girl, who at first looked away in denial. Then, when Elisabeth said in Cantonese, “Please take a cloth to the rails at once!” went to get one and at the same moment Elisabeth saw a sea-green silk, the dress of a lifetime. She held her black oily fingers out to let the girl clean her hands and when the girl had finished said, “I would like that one.” The girl shrugged and moved her hands in a disenchanted gesture that Elisabeth might want to try it on and Elisabeth said, “No, thank you. It will be perfect. Have you shoes to match?” She paid for it (a price) and walked back towards the hotel room. It was still empty of Lizzie and there was no message light on the bedside telephone. She stood the stiff paper bag on her bed and went to find a hairdresser.

  The hairdresser preened above her head.

  “Is it for an occasion?”

  “I don’t know. Well, yes, I’m going out tonight.”

  The hairdresser smiled and smiled, dead-eyed. Elisabeth had the notion that somewhere there was dislike.

  “Would you like colour?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Would you like to be more seriously red?”

  “No. No, not at all.” (Am I making sense?) “Just wash my hair, please. Take the aeroplane out of it.”

  “Aeroplane out of it.” Silly giggle.

  High on the wall above the line of basins, probably unnoticed for years, was a studio photograph, from before the war, of an English woman of a certain age, her hair sculpted into marcel waves, her ageing manicured hand all rings. And she was resting her cheek against it. Her mouth was dark and sharp with lipstick, her fingernails dark with varnish. Her smile was benevolent but genuine and sweet, and she had signed her name across the corner with I shall remember you all. She was so like Elisabeth’s mother’s Bridge-playing friends in old Tiensin that for a moment Elisabeth smelled the dust of her early childhood that had settled on everything without and within, covered her mother’s dressing-table mirrors, the long parchment scrolls on the walls, the tea tray with cups and silver spoons, the little grey butterfly cakes, the cigarette cases and cigar lighters and dried grasses in china vases. Memory released an instant image, and sound too, for she heard her mother’s laugh as the amah carried her into the room to sit quietly at her mother’s feet for half an hour as the four ladies gazed at their cards and smoked their cigarettes. Her mother would look at her sometimes to check that she was tidy, and she would smile back, at her mother in the silk tea gown, silk stockings, the boat-shaped silk shoes, a diamond ring (where had it gone?) glinting through the dust in the shaft of sunlight through the blinds.

  “Who is that woman?”

  The hairdresser looked up at the photograph. “Oh, it will be a client from before the war. Long ago.”

  “Can you read her name?”

  A long giggle. “No, no! We must take it down. It is old. The frame is very old-fashioned. The salon will be modernised soon.”

  “She must have liked you all. The frame is expensive. Was she the Governor’s wife?”

  All the girls laughed. The embarrassed, tinkling laughter.

  “There are fly spots on it. We must take it down.”

  “I think she gave it to you before she left for Home. Maybe when the war began. Before the Japanese.” They laughed again, watching her. She saw that one girl was Japanese. Elisabeth’s hair was being dried by a new-fangled hand-held blower, like a gun. The woman would have sat for over half an hour under a metal helmet that roared in her reddening ears while she wrote letters on her knee or drifted among copies of Country Life or The Royal Geographical Magazine or John o’London’s—happy, loving her warm unhurried life, sure of the future, certain that she and her country were admired. She would always have left a tip, but unostentatiously, and at Christmas—but not at the Chinese New Year—she’d arrive with little presents for everyone wrapped in paper printed with mistletoe and holly, which none of the girls had ever seen. Little Christmas puddings and mince pies that would all be thrown away. How do I know all this?

  “She is like my mother.”

  “We must take it down.”

  The hairdresser brought her some tea.

  Back at the Old Colony there was still no message from Edward so the Case must by now be groaning into life: a Case about land reclamation. Edward was for the architects, Veneering for the contractors. The villagers living on the doomed land were for neither, and nobody represented them except the legendary monsters and serpents that lurked in the depths below the site which was at present a marsh where they had always wallowed in the imagination, seeking whom they might devour. The projected dam would produce water for the new Hong Kong which would arrive years and years later, after the handover. The villagers came out after dark to appease the monsters with offerings and saucers of milk. In the morning the Western engineers removed the untouched offerings. Nothing was getting done.

  Elisabeth, in her frowsty bedroom, the beds still not made, sent for a room-service lunch and when it came did not want it. She slept, and woke at six o’clock. No phone messages, no word from Edward or Lizzie. She combed her new shiny hair and thought of the photograph of the virtuous woman who looked like her mother. Then she took the sea-green dress and slid it on. There was a small, matching, sea-green purse on a string. She slipped it over her shoulder. Then she put on her evening shoes. Pale, silk, high-heeled sandals. Then she looked out of the window.

  (“I’ll send a car. Six-thirty.”)

  It had been a time so early in the morning, half in dream, half in nightmare. Perhaps it had all been imagined.

  Only hours ago she had been all set to become the next reincarnation of a virtuous woman, like the one in the benevolent photograph. She had stood beside her man—and how her parents would have approved of Edward Feathers—watching the stars in the heavens, thinking that she would tell her children about how she had said “I will” and had meant it. She saw her mother’s face, imprisoned in the emptiness of Empire and diplomacy.

  A cab was standing by itself without lights across the road from the Old Colony. She turned the notice in Chinese characters on her door to Do Not Disturb. She left no message. She took the lift down. She carried only the little green purse. It had her passport in it and her final travellers’ cheque ticket strip, but not her return ticket to England.

  As she walked over to the dark cab, the driver got out and opened the passenger door. He said, “Veneering?” and she said, “Yes.”

  They turned quickly away from the lights and quays, then inland. As they climbed, the traffic and people thinned and they drove towards the New Territories among cities of unfinished blocks of workers’ flats, all in darkness, waiting for the New Age. The road curved and climbed, flattened and then climbed again. It climbed into trees, through trees and then into thick woods.

  Woods?

  She had not known about the woods of Hong Kong. Woods were for lush landscapes. She had believed that outside the city all would be sandy and bare. The cab plunged now deep into a black forest. The sky was gone and the road levelled and began to drop down again. The cab turned on to an unmade-up track. Small dancing lights began to appear, around them, like a huge entourage, the moving shadows of hundreds of people carrying the lights in their hands.

  The shadows did not rest. Sometimes they came up close to the cab. They were moving, sometimes quite close to the cab’s closed windows. They were in twos and threes, not speaking. Not one head turned. They even seemed unaware of the cab which was moving through them now quite fast, but still silent, the d
river never once flashing his lights or sounding his horn. Nobody moved out of their way. Nobody turned his head. There seemed to be a white mist near the ground and the cab became very hot.

  The strangeness of the crowded forest was its silence.

  To left and right in the trees, a little off the road, a bright light would now and then shine out, then vanish, masked by trees and trees. There must be big houses up there, she thought, rich men’s second homes. She had seen the sort of thing long ago in Penang, most of the year empty, shadowy palaces locked inside metal armour lattice and on the gates the warning with a zigzag sign saying Danger of Death, blazing out in English and Chinese and Malay.

  The hosts of the shadows paid no attention to the houses hidden in the trees. The shadows swam altogether around the cab in a shoal. They concentrated on the dark. They became like smoke around her in the forest and she began to be afraid.

  I want Edward. He has no idea where I am. Nor have I.

  The driver’s little Chinese head did not turn and he did not speak when she leaned forward and tapped his shoulder and shouted at him in Cantonese, “Will it be much longer? Please tell me where I am. In God’s name.”

  Instead, he swung suddenly off the road, obliterating the moving shadows, and up a steeper track. After a time, a glow appeared from, apparently, the top of some tree. In front of the light the cab swung round full circle and stopped.

  The light was glowing in a small wooden house that seemed to be on stilts with tree branches growing close all round it. There was some sort of ladder and a gate at the bottom bore the electric charge logo and Danger of Death. All Admittance Forbidden.

  She looked up at the top of the ladder and saw that a wooden cabin seemed held in a goblet of branches. Its doors stood open and light now flowed down the ladder. Veneering was beside the cab. He opened the door and took her hand. He stood aside for her at the ladder’s foot and at the top she looked down at him and saw that behind him in the clearing the cab was gone.