The evening ended at a typical bright young colonial party, with discreet flirtations everywhere, sleek, beautiful women and dashing young men in uniform, all being incredibly childish, so it seemed to me, and playing charades. I can’t romp the way they do. Or maybe I can. I put up a pretty good imitation that winter. I used to work hard at it in a quiet way. At the beginning of my Hong Kong residence it was never comfortable when I went to one of those parties, for anybody. Only the outstanding bad hats, the people known unfavorably as “crackers” or “intelligent” or something like that, were at ease with me. The others, the pretty blonde girls, the gallant young men, had a way of backing into corners and staring at me rather like rabbits at a tigress. But all that passed, because they were kindly young people really, and bored, and because the British are easier and more tolerant of eccentricity than are most people, and because, anyway, I had begun to develop an assurance that was to come in handy. We played our charades, we drank at the funny little bar, we giggled, we saw Christmas in. Half the men I remember that night, horsing around, are dead, and the girls are standing in line at Stanley with cup in hand, waiting for a handout of thin rice stew. Does that sound banal? It isn’t. It hits me sometimes like a slap in the face. It has no implications; I’m not moved to philosophy when this happens, but there it is. It dazes me.
It shouldn’t amaze me as much as all that. Charles, standing behind his barbed-wire fence in Argyle Camp, is not being dazed; I’m sure of it. He kept telling me in his off-guard moments. There was one afternoon when he dropped in after a walk. Sometimes when he had the time after work he would change his clothes and go striding up to the Peak and down again at a pace nobody else could keep up, and he stopped in on the road down for a glass of beer. One evening he said: “You’d better go away. If you’re having a baby you won’t be able to run very fast, will you?”
“Run from what?”
“The theory is that it would be the maddened populace, before ever the Japanese got in. Personally I believe that if the Sikhs were first there wouldn’t be much left of any of you, even for the Chinese. But that’s only my own idea.” He added, as he always added, “But it’s entirely up to you of course. …”
I said impatiently, “Darling, the whole world’s going to hell anyway. Suppose I go now; it may catch me wherever I am. Let’s take whatever time we have left right here. I like Hong Kong.”
He looked at his beer and said, “All right. It’s up to you.”
“Did you read,” I asked brightly, “in that book of yours — Rowlandson — about the British and what they did to the Indians after the massacre of the Englishwomen, during the revolution? They made them lick up the blood in the roads.”
“Yes,” said Charles, “I read it.”
On Saturday afternoon we would go to the Dogs’ Home and take the gibbons out into the country and let them play. It was a long way from home, though, and we couldn’t well afford the time entailed in getting the car across on the ferry to Kowloon. My flat had the usual Hong Kong veranda, and I decided to fence it in with chicken wire and take the gibbons home. Charles was amazingly amenable to the whole thing. He liked them. He always said that he wouldn’t have them in his own house for a million pounds, but he liked them at my flat.
Familiar trouble started immediately. Now and then one of them would get out and roam around the neighborhood, scaring people. When we went to the bathing beaches it wasn’t so bad, because nobody but ourselves went swimming in the winter and we had the place to play around in without interference most of the rime. I must admit that there was rather a contretemps on New Year’s Day. It was cold and foggy, but we packed a lunch basket with picnic food nevertheless, and took the gibbons and Cooper out to Middle Beach. Unfortunately a Chinese party was going on in one of the shacks on the hillside, and Mills was attracted by the noise and gaiety, and he went up to investigate.
I suppose I didn’t realize that Mills was getting to be quite a big boy. He weighed about thirty pounds and stood as tall as a six-year-old, and when you’re not used to gibbons it might be a little startling to have one drop playfully on your shoulders as you’re taking a quiet walk by the sea. I mean, I can realize that now. At the time I was just intolerant, I suppose. That afternoon, for example, I considered it definitely unreasonable of the Chinese party to object to Mills’s presence in their house, or, to be absolutely factual, on their roof peeking in here and there. I watched with impatient disdain when the party closed the doors and the windows and then sat there in what must have been a very stuffy bungalow, screaming for help.
“Oh, go and get him,” I snapped at Cooper. “Tell him lunch is ready. Those idiots. … Really, the Chinese have no talent for animals, have they?”
Charles ate a whole tomato sandwich at a gulp. “I,” he said, “have nothing to do with this at all. I wash my hands of it. Go and get him, Snooper.”
Cooper said mournfully, “I don’t see why it’s always me.” But he started up the hill toward that vociferous bungalow. Mills, on the roof, yawned and scratched himself under the left armpit. We lay out in the pale sunlight, comfortable on the sand, and waited.
“Who do you suppose keeps those awful monkeys?” asked Charles lazily.
After a while the yapping on the hillside stopped, and a while later Mills loped up to me, saying, “Oop, oop.”
“They were angry,” reported Cooper. “One of them yelled, ‘Your monkey is trying to rape these girls!’ I borrowed a leaf from your book, Mickey, and replied with all the dignity I could muster, ‘It’s not a monkey, it’s an ape.’ ”
“What utter rot,” I snorted. “Did they look at him? Anybody who could be raped by Mills rapes awful easy.”
“The Chinese are going away,” said Charles.
“Let them,” I said. “We don’t want ’em, do we, Mills?”
“Junior is lost,” said Cooper dispassionately.
It took us two hours to find Junior.
It was on the cards that Charles should go to Singapore. He had had a narrow escape once about Christmas time, but the general decided at the last minute to put the trip off. Charles for his own secret reasons was to go down to Singapore and consult with the military authorities there. We learned about it definitely in February; he was to go in March.
“I don’t like it,” I said.
“I hate it,” said Charles. “But I’ll have to face her sooner or later.”
We had a birthday party for Charles at Mme. Kung’s, and Cooper asked me to marry him. It was nice of him, because I was feeling increasingly ill, and very much worried about Singapore.
“Don’t you let him go down there,” said Agnes Smedley.
I couldn’t very well help it. The general had told Charles to go, and of course he had to face Ursula sooner or later, anyway. But I couldn’t marry Cooper, certainly not, just at that time. I explained to him.
“I don’t think you are,” he said. “You’re just nervous. If you’ve never had a baby before, why should you be having one now?”
“But I don’t feel well. Not at all.”
“You’re nervous,” said Cooper. Charles had left us his car to use in his absence, and we drove out into the country and watched the working sea, and talked about poetry and Cooper. “I ought to be married,” he explained. “Obviously, somebody should take care of me. That’s why it doesn’t matter that you are older. It would be that sort of relationship with anyone.”
“But —” I stopped. I didn’t want to say outright that the prospect of taking care of a genius did not attract me. Besides, I felt a bit insulted. “Why,” I said to myself, “I’m sort of a genius myself. I’m entitled to a nurse or mamma too.” Not that I wasn’t very fond of Cooper; I was. We always had much more to talk about than Charles and I did. Charles noticed it himself.
The days went on. I taught school and felt sick. It wasn’t the way I should have felt sick, though; I was sick all the time, but never very much. I didn’t want to eat. Cooper practically moved into the guest
room and took very good care of me. I didn’t hear from Charles. We had agreed that we wouldn’t write, under the circumstances, but I regretted that. I found another gibbon, a dainty little female one, and I bought her and brought her home. Then Cooper and I found yet another one, very small and charming, like Mills in his youth. We named it Tertius and it was Cooper’s darling. He carried it everywhere, to the office and to the beach and into the Grips, hidden under his coat. He wrote poems about the gibbons, all of them lost now but the ones I can remember.
There was one about an afternoon we had spent at Repulse Bay with Chinese friends:
They went to Mr. Quock’s for tea.
Junior was one, the other Mills,
Two gibbons quite well known to me.
Because we thought they’d like a spree,
Believing boredom almost kills,
They went to Mr. Quock’s for tea.
How quickly they dispelled ennui
And made the guests forget their ills!
Two gibbons quite well known to me.
Chatter of wars, finance, T.V.,
Gave way to far less distant thrills.
They went to Mr. Quock’s for tea.
They swung among the crockery
And thought them in their native hills.
They went to Mr. Quock’s for tea,
Two gibbons quite well known to me.
The house turned into a small, exclusive zoo. There was nobody to keep us in hand but Ah King, and it was all beyond him. Gibbons wandered at will, and we read a crazy mixture of Donne, Joyce, the modern Americans, Edward Lear, and our own efforts. We didn’t go to bed sometimes for a few days, and then we didn’t get up for longer than that. It seems like a dream now. It was a dream, and not always a good one. There was a pain somewhere between my backbone and the wishbone in front, and I couldn’t eat.
I wanted Charles.
Chapter 34
Charles came back just a month from the time he left. He had gone down by boat, then flown to Chungking and had a riotous week there with some of our old friends, but I didn’t know that until he told me afterward. I just went on with Cooper, teaching school in a misty way and complaining about my back, or was it my chest? The day before he came back I went to Tony Dawson-Grove for an examination. Tony had an ulcer, and he decided that I had an ulcer too. Anyway, he said, it was probably the beginning of one. Then he examined me some more, and I realized from his expression that it wasn’t my imagination after all.
I thought I would say it for him, because he was looking terrified. He is younger than I am. “I might possibly be pregnant,” I said in an offhand tone.
There was a long chilly silence, and then he said, “You oughtn’t do this to a man like Charles.”
I bristled. “Why not?”
“And to yourself,” said Tony hastily. “Have a cigarette. … You don’t know this town, Mickey; I do. You can’t. You’ll have to go away.”
I said, “What do you bet?”
We stared at each other. “I don’t understand you,” said Tony.
“I didn’t mean to drag you into it,” I said apologetically. “You’ll have to check up with Gordon King. Have I really an ulcer, do you think?”
He brightened when he knew that Gordon King was in on it, but he held firmly to the ulcer. “You’ve been fretting over Charles’s wife,” he said, “and fretting helps an ulcer. I’m always much worse when I worry over my cases. I won’t sleep a wink tonight,” he added in angry tones. “It’s early days to say definitely, anyway.”
I dragged home, told Cooper, who was sulky about it, and went to bed. Charles arrived that night but didn’t telephone me until morning, which was a plain indication of what had happened in Singapore, and I knew it. It was Ah King who gave me the news, straight from Master’s own houseboy, that the major was back.
He called in the morning, crisp and cheerful. “Where the hell’s my car?”
“Cooper should have sent you the keys last night,” I said. “The car’s down the road. We stopped putting it into the garage because Cooper kept locking the keys in with it.”
“I’ll drop in after work, shall I?”
“Yes. Oh, Cooper says, can he have the car this afternoon?”
Charles said, “Well, if he likes. … But doesn’t he intend to do any work?”
“He’s rather got into the habit of taking me around instead,” I explained.
“I see. Well, I’ll give him the keys before tiffin.”
I went downtown after my lecture and had a hair-set. Then, feeling much better and dressed in new navy blue, I called for Charles at the office, complete with car and Cooper. He was undoubtedly pleased to see me. “I’ll drive,” he said, smiling. “Cooper, I think I’ll take a walk and then stop in to see Mickey. When are you coming up?”
Cooper looked at me and I said, “Well, we ought to be through fighting about six-thirty. But telephone first.”
He walked off into the crowd and we drove home. I chattered all the way, without asking that one question that had to be asked, and we duly separated at the bottom of the steps. Nothing could have been more admirably civilized, or sillier. I feel quite detached about it now, and I see that. Charles took his walk, and I changed into the housecoat he had given me for Christmas, and waited for him. And he came in, civilian-looking and sweaty in a blue shirt, and ordered beer, and we sat side by side on the sofa like the lady and gent that we were, and made conversation.
“And how’s Ursula?”
“Oh, fine.”
“Well?”
“Well …”
“Did you live with her?”
“Oh, of course I did,” said Charles impatiently.
I looked down at my beer and tried to keep my lips still. “Well, what do you want to do?” I asked.
“It’s up to you, Mickey.”
“But it isn’t. Not now.”
We were both quiet. “She was perfectly furious,” he began explaining. “She was going to have you kicked out of the Colony. I had to keep her quiet. Besides, she wanted to.”
“She couldn’t have me kicked out.”
“I don’t know. … I was afraid.”
“Is she going to have a baby?”
“I don’t know. She tried to. She didn’t tell me that for some days. And then when I said, ‘do you think that’s wise?’ she said she wanted to have a little Frog anyway. … She always calls me Frog. Don’t cry, Mickey. I love you much better than I do her. I told her so. She kept asking me, and I kept telling her.”
I said, “Wait a minute,” and went into the bedroom and lay down. I wasn’t crying. That is the advantage of being older. I was just wondering what to do. I also felt pretty sick.
He looked miserable and badly frightened. Something had certainly happened to me in the years I spent in China, because I didn’t get any satisfaction at all out of that. I have said I won’t probe into Charles’s motives and I will stand by that, but I’ll go so far as to say that I think I know what it was, and why we felt so differently about the thing. He had just acted like one normal single person, taking the easier and pleasanter way. I was being two people, myself and the baby. I was thinking half the time like that unborn child, a fact that probably mystified him. We didn’t quarrel. Charles and I never quarreled except once, after the surrender. We didn’t quarrel, and we didn’t talk about it endlessly, and I didn’t even nag him — much. We couldn’t talk any more that evening anyway, because Cooper came in and Charles went home. I told Cooper and said I had a bad headache. Naturally he blew up. He was righteously indignant. But I went to bed, and I slept.
There was to be a cocktail party the next evening. In the afternoon Charles invited another girl to come with us, swimming — and Cooper, of course; always Cooper. I had come to a decision. “We’ll have to talk it over with him, Art,” I said in the car. “We’ll have to pin him down, to see what he wants. Just one talk.”
“Certainly,” said Cooper, and after Vera had been taken home, sun
burnt and gritty with sand, he leaned forward to Charles in the driver’s seat and said impressively, “Mickey and I wish to talk with you. With your permission we’ll come into your place early this evening, before it’s time for the party. Is that satisfactory?”
“Quite,” said Charles. Later he told me that he said to himself, “This is it. They’re going to be married. They’ll announce it tonight.”
So there we were, dressed up and ready for the party, except that Cooper was wearing Tertius, the youngest gibbon, firmly clinging to his shirt front all through the interview.
I have never actually seen a shotgun wedding, though I’ve made plenty of jokes about them, but that interview must have been exactly like one. I’ve laughed about it a lot since. At the time, though, I was feeling tragic. I don’t know how Cooper felt; he looked like a Methodist minister. And Charles was airy as all hell. As if we were acting in a drawing-room comedy, we settled down in our chairs and ordered drinks with meticulous care, and made polite chatter. Then Charles said, “Well, shoot,” and I said, “Well, what do you want to do about things?”
I really didn’t know. He never talks about the way he feels; he’s afraid to. I suppose if Cooper hadn’t been there we never would have been able to talk it out, but Cooper was there, and taking the leading role. He cracked the whip. He asked questions. He made Charles talk, and he made me talk.
I said I couldn’t go on just like that, having a baby that had been deserted. The fact that Charles was considering a permanent reconciliation with Ursula meant desertion, I said.
No, said Charles, no indeed; he was not considering a permanent reconciliation. I was wrong there, absolutely wrong. He had only gone back to her because she had wanted him to, and it seemed the easiest and simplest thing to do at the time.