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Shanghai

Christopher New

published by: epubli GmbH, Berlin, www.epubli.de

Copyright: © 2012Christopher New

ISBN 978-3-****-***-*

PART ONE

1

IT MUST HAVE BEEN THE CHANGE in the ship's motion that woke him, the roll of the open sea giving way to calm of the estuary. Propping himself up on his elbow, Denton looked out of the port-hole, through which the scuttle was channelling warm, moist air onto his face. It was dawn. He could see a pink flush in the sky, and across the smooth, still-dark, oily water he could make out the dim shape of land, a low, smudged bar of earth darker and more solid than the sea.

The other passengers in the crowded cabin were still snoring and sighing in their sleep. Dressing quickly and stealthily to avoid waking them, he made his way up to the lower deck. The sun had risen over the horizon already when he reached it, and the banks of the river, clear and distinct now, were closing in on the ship. The pilot was just climbing aboard; his launch, pouring black smoke from its sooty grey funnel, was curling away to a cluster of tumbledown grey stone buildings on the bank. The water was a yellowish muddy colour, its opaque surface glittering under the long slanting rays of the sun.

For more than an hour Denton leant over the stern, watching the level countryside slip placidly past: vivid green squares of paddy fields, tall thick bamboo groves, squat stone and mud villages, little shrines with curled, tiled roofs glistening in the rising heat of the sun. Everywhere there were narrow overgrown ditches lacing the fields, their torpid waters gleaming through the green. The villages looked still and empty, not even a dog barking, but the fields were alive and full, men and women standing knee-deep in the paddy, legs spread, backs bent double, as they groped in the mud for the rice seedlings. They all wore wide straw hats with shallow conical crowns, the browny-yellow brims spreading out over their shoulders. Under each brim, black, braided queues swung down, men and women alike. Occasionally the peasants slowly straightened their backs, looked incuriously up at the liner steaming remotely past, then bowed to their work again.

Now and then Denton saw water buffalo plodding through the mud of the few unplanted fields, or ambling along the banks between them. Grey and slimy from the water, they were prodded on by half-naked children with pointed sticks, who kept shouting out strange shrill cries. Some of the children waved at the boat, grinning or making faces. So this is China, he kept thinking, half-awed. So this is China.

Then Everett joined him. 'We've passed the Woosung forts, then?' he asked, his freckled fists gripping the rail beside Denton.

'Woosung forts?'

'Yes, the pilot gets on there. Bit of a ruin. We shelled them in eighteen forty something or other. When we took Shanghai.'

'Oh yes, I saw the pilot coming on board.'

Everett nodded, breathing deeply and regularly through his nose, making long hissing sounds in his nostrils. 'You'll be seeing them again, I should think. There's a Customs post there, too.'

The breakfast gong sounded on the first class deck above them, struck by a dough-faced, spotty youth, insolent in his white P&O steward's uniform. Time for them to eat too, then, in the airless third class saloon with its plain wooden tables and smells of stale cooking.

'Coming?' Everett asked.

'Not just yet,' Denton answered awkwardly. 'Think I'll just watch a bit more first.'

He stayed on deck till it was too late to eat, gazing across the yellowish water that swirled gently past the ship's smooth white hull. He watched wooden junks drift past, their stiff, ribbed sails like patched grey bats' wings, he watched the light and dark green squares of the paddy fields, he listened to the clanging of occasional bells, behind the feathery bamboos that sometimes screened the villages. The sun grew slowly hotter. His cheek began to burn. He moved reluctantly into the shade of one of the lifeboats. But still he watched.

And then, at last, the thing he scarcely knew he'd been waiting for: the city of Shanghai began to emerge from the shimmering haze ahead. First tall black columns of smoke from unseen funnels and chimneys, then the bright shapes of large buildings, windows intermittently sparkling in the sunlight, then the dark rigid fingers of pointing cranes and the masts of ships, bare as leafless trees. While he gazed at the approaching city, he heard the deep throbbing blast of a siren, and almost at once a rust-streaked liner slid round the next bend, heading downstream towards the sea. For a few moments Denton looked at the two raked stacks billowing sooty smoke and at the silent faces of the passengers lining the side, then the ship had passed and he was watching the Russian flag flopping limply at the stern above the muddy foaming wake churned by its propellers. Another liner was making its tortuous way upstream behind them, sailing almost in their wake. As it slowly turned at a buoy in the middle of the channel, he saw the American flag drooping from its mast.

They swung slowly round another bend and all at once they were in the middle of the city. On the starboard side, large stone buildings with colonnaded facades lay back behind a wide green park. On the port side a dirty grey slum of houses, factories and godowns sprawled, all crammed together. The river was dense with ships of all kinds there - liners, cargo ships, coalers, barges, lighters and junks. Between them and the shore, smaller boats dawdled over the smooth, sluggish water, Chinese sampans rowed from the stern with a single oar. From the quays came a continuous hubbub of noise - voices shouting and chanting, wheels grinding, chains squealing, whistles blowing, cargo thudding onto shore or barge. So this is China, he thought again half-exhilarated, half-afraid. He went below.

Everyone else in the six-berthed cabin had gone, their trunks and boxes piled outside. Denton quickly folded his few remaining clothes and started packing them into the dented metal trunk his father had bought him from a pawnbroker in London. The cramped cabin was on the lowest deck, hot and stifling now that the ship had stopped moving and the scuttle no longer scooped in any air. He began to sweat, and took off his jacket and tie. His best collar, which he had had starched for threepence in the ship's laundry the day before, was damp and curling already.

As he was closing the lid the stamp of approaching feet sounded outside, then an abrupt, authoritative voice. A large man in a white drill uniform pushed the door open and ducked inside, holding his topee in his hand. He seemed to fill the doorway.

'Denton?' His face was red and perspiring, and he had a bristly ginger moustache. 'My name's Mason. Been sent to meet you.' He made it sound more a duty than a pleasure.

'Where's your kit? That all?' He sniffed and then, as an afterthought thrust out a meaty red hand that was also perspiring. 'Mason's the name,' he said again. 'How do. Only one trunk?' He shouted over his shoulder in a hectoring voice, and a small crooked-backed Chinese padded in on bare feet, peering deferentially, warily, round the cabin, as if expecting to be cuffed or kicked. Mason gestured to the trunk. 'One piecee topside,' he ordered curtly.

The Chinese wore faded blue trousers and a shapeless, torn tunic. 'Master no more piecee?' he asked in a sing-song voice, shaking his head so that his waist-long queue twitched at his back. His head was shaved in front, giving his face a strangely naked and mask-like appearance.

'One piecee!' Mason repeated impatiently. 'Quick, quick top-side! Master later look-see, you blithering idiot.' He looked round the cabin distastefully as the Chinese heaved the trunk onto his shoulder and staggered out with it. 'Glad to get out of this, I should think, won't you be?'

Before Denton could answer, Mason frowned. 'I say, you have got a jacket and tie, haven't you? Better put 'em on, then.'

'Yes, I was just going to - '

'Put 'em on if I were you,' Mason said again, ignoring Denton's assurance. 'The Chief's hot on that sort of thing.'

'Yes.' Denton obediently adjusted his tie and slipped on his jacket under Mason's watchful, rather peevish, gaze.

'You'll be hot in that,' Mason said accusingly, brushing the tips of his moustache upwards with his knuckle. 'Couldn't you get tropical kit before you left?'

'They said it would be cheaper here?' Denton turned 'their' statement into a hesitant, mild inquiry.

'Did they now?' Mason asked indifferently. 'Well, they were right about that at least.'

The lascar cabin steward appeared in the doorway, a towel over his arm, smiling and nodding at Denton.

Denton gazed at him inquiringly.

'Wants his tip,' Mason muttered. 'Slip him a quid.'

'Oh,' He gave the man a pound note. Now he'd only got nine left.

The steward stared down at the note without moving. 'You are not liking my service?' he asked in a sullen, injured voice.

'What?'

'Only one pound?'

'Isn't that enough?' Denton asked meekly.

''Course it is!' Mason answered for him roughly. 'More than enough!'

'Other passengers are giving more.'

'Other passengers are bloody fools, then.' Mason pushed past the lascar. 'Come on, let's go. Just leave him to whine and snivel here. He'll soon get fed up with it.'

But as he followed Mason out, Denton added five shillings surreptitiously to the pound note. The steward took it ungraciously, still muttering his dissatisfaction.

On deck, Mason made his way through the waiting passengers commandingly, his uniform giving him licence. As they crossed the gangway down to the landing stage, Denton looked down at the beggar boats that had swarmed round the vessel's side. They were bare, dirty sampans rowed by women or children, who held up deformed infants, filthy, naked, covered with sores, while they wailed and clamoured against each other. 'Dollar, master! Baby hungry! Baby hungry!'

'Beggars!' Mason glanced at them contemptuously. 'I suppose you've seen enough of them on the way out?'

Denton nodded. Malta, Port Said, Suez, Aden, Bombay, Colombo, Singapore, Hong Kong - everywhere there had been beggars, smelly, sore, mutilated, emaciated and importunate. And everywhere they'd made him feel obscurely guilty. 'Yes,' he answered. 'Not so many as here, though. There must be a lot of poverty.'

'Brought it to a fine art,' Mason sniffed disdainfully. 'Don't give 'em a cent, you'll never shake 'em off if you do.'

'The children look very sick,' Denton protested uneasily, remembering the missionaries' slide shows in the church hall at Enfield, the blurry pictures of starving children that their weekly threepences would feed.

'Sick?' Mason scoffed, either at Denton or at the beggars. 'They're probably dead. They steal corpses to beg with. Dead babies their parents have chucked out. Begin to pong by midday, too.'

Denton stared at him incredulously, but he had gone on ahead to shout at the Chinese, who was patiently waiting with the battered trunk.

Already gangs of coolies were trotting up and down the gangways to the holds, chanting deep rhythmic cries as they lolloped along, giant loads swaying at each end of the springy bamboo poles they balanced on their shoulders. Denton sniffed the air of the quayside. It was rich and heavy, smelling of the muddy water, of dirt, sweat, greasy smoke, of incense and the food cooking on nearby charcoal braziers. All around him there was the din of shouting coolies, bustling hawkers, grinding cranes and squealing pulleys. Only a few ship's officers and a bearded Sikh policeman were aloof and quiet, surveying the tumult with detached superiority. And another Customs officer, dressed like Mason, whom Mason nodded casually to, brushing his moustache upward with his knuckle again.

A hand touched Denton's shoulder. It was Everett again. 'Cheerio,' he smiled amiably. 'Might run into each other some time, eh?'

'Yes. All the best.'

'Friend of yours?' Mason asked, or demanded rather, as if he had a right to know.

'He was in my cabin. He's with the police here.'

'Oh, with the slops, eh?' His voice seemed to drop a tone in disparagement. He strode on through the gangs of coolies towards a brick arch with an iron gate, guarded by another Sikh policeman. 'We'll take a rickshaw.'

'Is it far?'

'Nowhere's far here.' He brushed past the policeman. 'Customs,' he said brusquely.

The policeman saluted.

Mason's puffy, florid face was sweating copiously. He mopped it with a silk handkerchief. Denton noticed dark stains of sweat under his raised arm and round the high collar of his uniform, which his neck bulged over, red and irascible.

'It's very hot,' he said peaceably.

'Hot?' Mason gave a short, ill-tempered laugh. 'That's not the trouble. It's the humidity that's killing.' He turned away to shout something at the man carrying Denton's trunk.

Outside the gate they were surrounded by an insistent mob of rickshaw coolies, all calling out and beckoning, lowering the shafts of their rickshaws invitingly so that the two Englishmen almost tripped over them. Mason kicked out sullenly at several, before he chose one. 'Here, this'll do. Hop in. The trunk can go in the one behind. Suppose you've seen these things before, Hong Kong and so on?'

'Yes. And Singapore. But what's that?' Denton pointed to a large wheelbarrow on which three Chinese women were sitting, chirping noisily, while a single coolie pushed it along. 'I haven't seen that before. What is it?'

'That? A wheelbarrow. What's it look like?'

Denton gazed at the coolie's arms, stretched wide to grip the wheelbarrow shafts. A strip of cloth, fastened to each shaft, passed over his shoulders to help him take the weight. It was about three times the size of an English wheelbarrow. 'They carry people in them?'

'Unless my eyes deceive me,' Mason said with weighty sarcasm. 'I've seen the big ones carrying twelve people.' He laughed sardonically, derisively. 'It's their idea of an omnibus.' But then, 'After all,' he added with a note of sulky concession, 'You couldn't run a team of horses through these little streets.'

They climbed into the rickshaw, Mason's bulk squashing Denton to the side. The rickshaw coolie was small and stringy, grey hairs glinting among the black in his queue. Surely he was too frail to carry them both? But he lifted the shafts and, leaning against the cross-piece, with a sigh and a grunt tugged them into motion. Denton watched his calves, nothing but skin and corded muscles, jogging along at a trot. The coolie had the cart so finely balanced that his bare, calloused feet seemed scarcely to touch the ground as he lifted himself at each stride.

They jolted down a crowded, unpaved alley, lined on each side by barbers, fruit and vegetable hawkers and sweet-meat sellers, each squatting in the shade of a make-shift awning or large wax-paper parasol. All round them men and women bargained, jostled, shouted, spat and ate. The coolie's feet splashed into a pile of rounded, steaming dung.

'Pooh!' Mason covered his nose. 'Filthy devil! Why doesn't he look where he's going? Now we'll have that in our noses all the way! Good mind to get out and take another one.' But he didn't move. Indeed, he actually seemed to be growing better-humoured.

The coolie raced up a steep wooden bridge that spanned a stagnant, dirty canal. As the brow approached, he began to lose speed. Watching the man's knobbly back bent almost double as he strained against the shafts, listening to his breath wheezing harsher and harsher, Denton felt that same obscure twinge of guilt that he'd felt throughout the voyage whenever he was approached by beggars. For a giddy moment he thought of - he saw himself - getting out and helping the old man to pull. But Mason's white-shod foot rested so negligently on the shaft and his corpulent body was lolling there in such indolent unconcern, that Denton felt almost ashamed of the impulse, as if it had been a breach of etiquette. He leaned back again with a show of ease and indifference.

At last they cleared the hump and ran down the other side, the coolie taking long, flying strides. Mason called out imperious directions and the coolie grunted, swinging them round into one narrow alley after another. They seemed to be passing through a poorer part of the city now. The alleys were more cramped, the houses smaller and more dingy; the open drains stank with rotting refuse, at which cowering, mangy dogs with rheumy eyes furtively sniffed and nibbled. And every alley teemed with bustling Chinese, on foot, in rickshaws, in those strange, large wheelbarrows. Everywhere they were shouting their wares, bargaining, hawking and spitting, eating, bawling out conversations across the narrow spaces. The rickshaw coolie often had to stop when he met another rickshaw or a wheelbarrow head on, and every time a wheedling cluster of beggars gathered round them, children, women, old men. The coolie hissed at them through his teeth and shooed them away, as if he too regarded them as worthless dross. Mason merely sniffed and surveyed them distantly through half-closed lids.

'We're in the Chinese city now,' he said, as they lurched into another festering alley. 'Longer way round, but I wanted to show you something.' He tilted his topee down over his forehead against the sun.

Shading his own eyes against the heat and glare, Denton gazed passively down at the coolie trotting like a human horse between the shafts. Sweat was running down his creased neck, and his loose, patched tunic was wet with it wherever the faded blue cloth touched his bony body. Under his rolled-up trousers, his legs too were running with sweat. Denton watched the glistening rivulets trickling down between the dried splashes of dung on his protruding ankles.

Some way ahead there seemed to be the dull confused murmur of a crowd. Mason stirred ponderously beside him, taking a gold watch out of his fob. He opened the case and frowned down at it. 'Twenty past nine,' he muttered. 'Should be at it by now.' Denton glanced at him questioningly, but he settled back again without explanation, only letting a secretive little smile twitch his small red lips beneath the ginger bristles of his moustache.

The muffled murmuring grew gradually louder and more distinct, then suddenly the alley gave onto a wide open space. It was full of Chinese, all peering towards the centre, laughing and talking excitedly in their shrill, hoarse voices. Women with babies strapped to their backs, men in long gowns, coolies and children - some of them perched on their parents' shoulders. Near the centre, Denton saw a sprinkling of European men in straw hats and topees.

The rickshaw had stopped. 'Stand up and you'll see something,' Mason said in his loud, peremptory voice. 'Get a good view from here. One of the local sports.'

The coolie, panting, held the shafts level for him, grinning slyly at Mason as if the two of them were sharing some private joke. Behind, the rickshaw carrying the trunk stopped with a long-drawn-out sigh from the coolie as he lowered the shafts to the ground.

Gingerly Denton stood up, gazing over all the bobbing and turning heads, each of which was also straining to see. The crowd suddenly hushed, so that his voice sounded too loud when he asked 'Where?'

'In the middle. Can't you see anything?'

The rickshaw lurched as Mason stood up unsteadily himself, gripping Denton's arm above the elbow. The coolie muttered as he balanced the shafts again. He too was stretching his neck to see. 'There, look,' Mason pointed. 'Over there.'

'Where? Oh.' Denton saw a Chinese kneeling in a small clearing of the crowd. He was bare to the waist. Another stood behind him, pulling his arms back, while a third seemed to be yanking his head forward by the queue. It was as though they were wrestling. Or, rather, as if the two standing men were using the other as the rope in a tug of war.

'What are they doing?' he turned to Mason uneasily, a vague premonitory fear gathering like a cloud on the blank skies of his mind.

'Watch.' Mason's brown button eyes were gleaming slightly. His grip tightened on Denton's arm.

Denton looked back. A fourth man, obscured till now by the crowd, had appeared. He raised both arms. His hands held a heavy sword. The sun glinted a moment on the blade. The crowd was silent and still, as if frozen. Not even a baby cried. For one paralysed second Denton gazed in disbelief, his heart thudding helplessly, at the two braced men, at the kneeling victim, at the tensed, poised swordsman. Then the swordsman's arms swung and the heavy blade hurtled down in a flashing arc. Denton heard the soft thud as it sliced through the kneeling man's neck. The head dropped off and a dark spurt of blood shot out from the trunk as it collapsed onto the earth. The man holding the queue jerked the dripping head up in the air and swung it round and round like a ball on a chain. The headless body lay there twitching and jerking, like a fish flapping desperately about on the stones of a jetty.

An exultant roar, deep-throated and satisfied, had gone up from the crowd, and now they were surging forward round the body in a sudden powerful tide, men, women and children fighting to dip their hands in the blood that was still pumping from the severed neck.

Denton slumped down suddenly, shuddering. The rickshaw rocked and Mason wobbled dangerously. 'Hey!' he exclaimed, 'Watch what you're doing, can't you?' Then he eased his own body down carefully. 'That was a pirate,' he said, the sudden indignation fading from his voice, replaced by a tone at once gloating and indifferent. 'You'll see plenty of that before you're through. Still want to join the service?' He chuckled when Denton didn't answer, and called out to the rickshaw coolie, who was still grinning appreciatively, standing on tiptoe to peer over the crowd while he balanced the shafts.

'Chop-chop! Chop-chop!' Mason shouted at him again, clapping his hands impatiently.

With a reluctant shake of his head, the coolie turned them round and pulled them away, leaning against the cross-piece.

'See them putting their hands in the blood?' Mason asked. 'They think it's lucky. It's not their hands actually. They were holding cash, see? It makes the cash lucky. They think it'll make them rich.' He chuckled again, thickly and chestily. 'It may be nineteen hundred and three in England, but it's the Middle Ages out here. Still want to join the service? Hobson's choice, I expect.'

Again Denton gave no answer. But Mason didn't seem to notice. 'Of course they do get the blood on their hands as well,' he added reflectively. 'But it's the money they care about.'

A deep, wild, ecstatic roar welled up behind them again. Like the roar of the crowd at the football match his father had taken him to see before he left England. England, how far away!

'There goes another one,' Mason nodded over his shoulder. 'They'll be at it all morning.' He took a cigar out of his breast pocket and cupped his large hand carefully round the match as he lit it. 'Want one?' he offered perfunctorily as he buttoned the flap again. 'No? Suit yourself. Yes, they stick their heads on poles when they've chopped 'em all off.' He glanced round, funnelling a pale blue stream of smoke out between pursed lips. 'There's a couple over there, look.'

2

'YOU'RE LUCKY TO GET THESE QUARTERS.' Mason threw his topee onto the bare mattress and strode with a tread that shook the floorboards to the shuttered French windows, through which the sunlight shone in blinding slits. The Chinese servant in white jacket and trousers, who had met them deferentially at the entrance to the mess, let Denton's trunk down carefully with a groaning sigh and stood expectantly, his quiet, slant-lidded eyes glancing respectfully from Mason to Denton.

Mason was unbolting the shutters. He turned, his half-smoked cigar between his teeth. 'Must get you some of the local cash,' he muttered. He pulled a handful of change grudgingly out of his pocket, selected a tiny coin and with a 'Here!', held it out for the servant, who fumblingly caught it as he let it go.

'Give the boys the odd cent or two, it oils the wheels,' Mason advised Denton loudly as the servant left the room on slippered feet, pocketing the coin. 'Don't overdo it, though. The blighters get greedy in no time. You can change your English money downstairs.' The bolt on the shutters moved with a squeak and he swung them back, then unlocked the doors behind them. They opened onto a large veranda which ran the whole length of the room.

'You've got a sitting room next door. View of the harbour from both rooms, look. Bathroom's back there.' He seemed better-humoured since the execution, strolling round the room and humming, looking about him appreciatively.

Denton went obediently out onto the veranda and looked numbly out. Two floors below was the street they had come along, teeming with rickshaws, those strange large wheelbarrows, and people hurrying up and down, many of them women with parasols over their heads. Here and there a donkey moved, loaded with heavy panniers, a man leading it or goading it from behind. He saw a sedan chair carried by four bearers on long swaying poles, everyone giving way to it as it passed. He looked up over the roofs of the low houses opposite. There the river glittered in the sunlight, sailing ships, junks, steamers and warships moving silently and slowly over the oil-smooth yellow waters. On the other bank there were long, low buildings - warehouses, he supposed - with the black jibs of cranes rising austerely over them.

'Yes.' Mason came and leant over the parapet beside him. 'You're lucky to have these quarters.' He flicked his cigar butt out into the air, watching it arch slowly, spinning, down into the street. It landed beside a coolie trotting past with two baskets swaying from his springy shoulder pole. 'I only had one room when I started.' He sounded momentarily resentful of Denton's better fortune. 'Old Smithy waited over a year for these quarters, ever since he was a griffin, and then he only lasted three months.' He pushed his weight off the parapet and strolled back into the shade of the bedroom. 'That's what we call the new chaps by the way, griffins. It's a racing term. Young and green, that's what it means. No offence.'

Denton nodded absently. He was recalling the execution, the thud of the blade striking the man's neck, the spouting blood, the helpless flapping limbs. He still felt shaky and weak. He knew that if he spoke, his voice would tremble.

'Yes, old Smithy....' Mason was gazing reflectively round the room. 'Silly fool got cholera.'

Denton listened now with a new, apprehensive interest. Then a sudden movement on the ceiling by the gas lamp caught his eye. It was a little greenish lizard, like a miniature dragon, flickering along then suddenly freezing. 'Er, what's that?' he asked anxiously, imagining it might be poisonous or carrying cholera germs. He was right, his voice was trembling.

'What? That? A tjik-tjak. Quite harmless, they catch mosquitoes. Only their damn droppings fall on your sheets sometimes. Seem to like white for some reason, the little brutes.... No,' Mason resumed his interrupted thread, 'Say what you like to him, you could, old Smithy would not take precautions. This is your sitting room, by the way. Not much in the way of furniture yet, just a couple of armchairs and a table - you'll have to get curtains and covers and all that sort of stuff yourself. No,' he surveyed the bare sitting room, gloomy and musty behind the unopened shutters. 'Silly bastard thought he'd be all right if he only wore a stomacher. Would not take advice. Ate anything, drank unboiled water, went anywhere.' He shrugged, loosening the brass buttons of his tunic. 'Marvel he lasted as long as he did, when you come to think of it. Only died last week. Still, he got it in the end, all right.' He laughed, a short harsh laugh of retributive satisfaction. 'You got a stomacher, by the way?'

'A stomacher?' Denton asked diffidently. 'What's that?'

Mason's eyes widened with almost petulant surprise at Denton's ignorance. 'A cholera belt! Didn't they tell you that in London? Well, you can get it with your kit later on. I'll show you the tailor's. It keeps the chills out, that's half the battle against cholera. But the thing is, you've got to watch the food and water too. Only old Smithy, he would know best.... Still, there you are,' he shrugged disclaimingly, his jacket falling apart at last as the lowest, straining, button popped open. 'There, that's my stomacher.' He gave a proprietary pat to the wide felt band that girdled his swelling paunch. 'You can get one when they kit you out, after you've seen the chief. Brown's his name. Deputy assistant commissioner. I'll take you along to see him presently, after you've had a wash and brush up.' He reached with two fingers into his fob, hauled his watch out again, and frowned down at it, holding it away from him in the palm of his great red hand. Denton glanced shyly at the stomacher and the vest beneath it, moist with sweat, and at Mason's heavy chest, in the middle of which a little jungle of curly reddish hair grew, spreading right up the base of his bull-like throat.

'Yes, in about an hour.' Mason closed his watch with a snap. 'Don't know why he couldn't make it later.' He turned to leave. 'Old Smith's things are being auctioned this afternoon, by the way. You could get his furniture if you want it. It's the usual thing when a fellow dies, auction his stuff off. Help to pay his chits and things. Well, I'll leave you to it. I'm off to have a nap. Night duty last night, see? Need a bit of kip. Give me a knock if I don't turn up by ten-thirty. I'm just next door to you.' He took his topee from the mattress, set it rakishly on the side of his head and sauntered out, leaving the door swinging open behind him.

Denton closed the door softly and looked round the room, his hand still clasping the brass handle. The glare from the unshaded veranda dazzled his eyes and the cries from the street rose up strident and raucous. He closed the door, closed the shutters and leant back against them. Above the bed, a greyish-white mosquito net hung, tied in a loose, bunchy knot. On the white-washed ceiling, its cornice garlanded with cobwebs, were several of those little green lizards - what had Mason called them? He eyed them warily. Either they darted rapidly, or else they were immobile, as if glued where they were. They never moved slowly. The very way they turned their heads was swift and jerky, even the way their flanks moved as they watchfully breathed.

Somewhere down the corridor a door banged, and he heard Chinese voices, a man's and a woman's, shrill in argument. Otherwise the building was still and quiet, and the voices died like the chatter of birds round an empty pool. There were several faint rectangular patches on the walls, darker than the surrounding paint, where pictures must have hung. For an instant he saw the twitching, pumping trunk of the pirate framed in one of them. He looked quickly away to his homely, battered tin trunk, focussing his eyes on the large dent in the lid by the handle. There was sticky sweat on his neck, on his wrists, all over his body.

For a moment he wanted to climb onto the bed, pull the mosquito net down round him and hide behind it like a child. He imagined himself lying there with the net like a filmy wall all round him. Then he thought of Smith. Perhaps Smith had died on that mattress, with the screen of the net round him? Death by cholera, death by decapitation - was that China, the land he'd come to? But the mattress was new; Smith couldn't have lain on it. Probably they'd burnt the old one. He took a deep steadying breath and took off his tie, jacket and waistcoat before bending to unlock and unpack.

He laid his clothes tidily on the mattress, trying not to think of Smith or the pirate. There was a cupboard of bare, yellowish-varnished wood in the corner. When he opened the door, he caught his breath - two large, metallic-brown cockroaches about three inches long scuttled out over his shoe and disappeared behind the back of the cupboard. After a moment he went to wash his hands at the wash-stand in the bathroom, pouring water from the jug into the basin beside it. There was no soap, no towel. He splashed his face and dried himself slowly on his handkerchief. As he glanced at his lean, pallid reflection in the heavy wood- framed mirror, its glass cracked in the top right corner, he glimpsed his Adam's apple above the parting of his loosened collar. He had nicked it whilst shaving that morning. Now there was a clean little scab over the cut. He touched the scab gently and then without warning he was helplessly imagining the executioner's sword slicing through his own neck, just there, where the scab was, slicing through the skin and bones and muscles, through all the veins and arteries, in one savage stroke which seemed for all its speed to go on and on, always cutting and cutting again. He closed his eyes tight and shook his head, only to see the stiffened grimaces of pain and fear on the heads nailed to poles that Mason had pointed out to him as they left the execution ground.

He shuddered and walked back to sit miserably, not on the bed where his clothes were neatly piled, but on his empty trunk. How far away from England he was now! England, where he had packed those same clothes tidily into the trunk! How far from the P&O liner, with its civilised routine and order!

A mosquito was whining monotonously by his ear. He took out his watch and wound it. He had set it to Shanghai time by the ship's clock the night before. Forty-five minutes still to wait.

3

DENTON TAPPED HESITANTLY on Mason's door at half-past ten, and heard a slurred, morose acknowledgment. Ten minutes later Mason -appeared, heavy-lidded and taciturn as he fastened his jacket, and they took another rickshaw, this time by a direct route, to the deputy assistant commissioner's office in the Customs House on the Bund. The Customs House was like the Town Hall at Enfield, Denton thought, with a tall square tower and a clock, its solid Englishness reassuring. Mason led him through an outer office, where Chinese clerks sat watchfully silent at tall wooden desks. 'There's the door,' he nodded offhandedly. 'Got some work to do. Come to my room when you're finished. Number eleven, down the corridor.'

Denton tapped on the dark wooden door. After a moment, a calm, abstracted voice called out, 'Yes?' He turned the polished brass knob and went in.

A bald, bulbous-browed man with sallow skin sat writing at a large desk by the open window. The thick ring of hair round his head was a woolly grey, and he had a heavy drooping moustache. A punkah swung gently over the desk, creaking like the timbers of a ship. 'Yes?' Mr Brown asked again, stroking his moustache as he wrote.

'I'm Denton, sir.'

'Who?' Mr Brown dipped his pen in the ink well, then looked up inquiringly. 'Ah yes, of course. Mr Denton.' He shook the ink off the nib, examined the tip fastidiously, knitting his strangely scanty grey brows together, then laid the pen down, gesturing to the upright chair facing the desk. 'I was expecting you fifteen minutes ago,' he said precisely, glancing pointedly up at the mahogany-cased clock ticking on the wall beside his desk.

'Mr Mason brought me,' Denton murmured apologetically. 'I didn't know what time....'

'Ah yes.' Mr Brown stroked his moustache ruminatively. 'Met you off the boat, didn't he? What was it, the Orcades?'

'Yes sir.'

Mr Brown tilted back his head, gazing down his nose at Denton's crumpled collar. 'Pleasant trip?'

'Oh yes, sir, very pleasant thank you.'

'Good,' Mr Brown stroked his moustache again and tilted his head still further back, staring broodingly up at the punkah for more than half a minute, as if he were puzzled by its gentle flapping motion and didn't quite trust it. He seemed to have forgotten Denton was there.

Denton glanced uncomfortably at the topee hanging on the lowest branch of the hatstand behind the desk, then back at Mr Brown as he cleared his throat. Despite the heat, his high winged collar and cravat, his linen jacket and the mauve silk handkerchief tucked in his breast pocket were all creaseless and unsullied.

'Mason's shown you your quarters?' Mr Brown was asking. 'Quite satisfactory? Good. You can have tomorrow to get fitted out and settled in. Report for duty on Thursday morning. In the meantime, I....' His voice faded as his eyes narrowed faintly and he glanced up at the punkah again. A crease of annoyance appeared in the loose sallow skin of his forehead. Denton followed his upward gaze with respectful puzzlement. The wide, cloth-covered board had stopped its creaking motion and hung above them like a giant windless palm.

Mr Brown banged the bell on his desk imperiously three times, and after a few seconds the punkah started swinging again. The cool air fanned Denton's face and stirred the papers on the desk, so that they fluttered like leaves in a gentle breeze. 'And in the meantime,' Mr Brown resumed, 'here are some pamphlets regarding the duties you will be expected to perform, which I advise you to study attentively.' He passed a bundle of booklets, neatly tied with yellow tape, over the desk. 'I shall examine you orally on pamphlets three and four on Wednesday at 10 AM.'

'Yes sir.'

'The first two pamphlets merely give general information and so forth.'

'Yes sir.'

'That does not mean they can be disregarded.'

'No sir.'

'If your answers are satisfactory, you can start accompanying one of the established officers on his rounds.'

Denton looked down at the grey cover of the top pamphlet. There was a dark ring-stain on the corner and he imagined some previous probationary officer placing his glass there late at night while he swotted anxiously for the next day's examination.

'You will be expected to make some headway with the Chinese language, too. No doubt you have been told that? You will find a list of approved tutors in the mess. You may choose any one. Your fees will be paid by the service, of course. The details are in the first pamphlet.'

Denton nodded, glancing down at the ring-stained cover again, as if he expected to see the details there without having to open it.

'Your salary is paid in arrears,' Mr Brown went on, 'If you have not yet arranged a bank, I suggest the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank or the Chartered Bank. Both British and thoroughly reliable.'

'Thank you, sir.'

'They are on the Bund, of course.' Mr Brown's light blue eyes met Denton's for the first time with disturbing directness. 'Your contract is probationary at present, as you know, but with application, Mr Denton, I see no reason why you should not be substantiated at the end of two years.'

'Yes, sir, I'll try.'

'Stranger things have happened,' Mr Brown added obscurely, stroking his moustache ruminatively again. Just above his lip the flowing hairs were stained a dark yellow by tobacco. 'Mrs Brown and I would be glad if you could join us for dinner next Tuesday,' he said at last, as if the ruminative pause had been to consider whether Denton merited the invitation. 'Will that be convenient?'

'Oh, thank you sir. Yes, very convenient. Er, about what time?'

'Mrs Brown will send you a card. We usually dine at 9 PM.' He turned his head to glance at the clock again, then adjusted the papers on the desk. 'Well, that will be all for now, Mr Denton. Your quarters are quite satisfactory, you say?'

'Oh yes, sir,' Denton stood up. 'Very satisfactory.' He thought of his clothes still lying on the bare mattress.

'I don't suppose you've seen much of the city yet?'

'No, sir. Although we did see, I mean ...' Denton hesitated then went on. 'I mean we passed, er, an execution on the way from the ship.' His voice hushed slightly as he said 'execution,' and the image of the head swinging round on its queue swept over his mind.

'Really?' Mr Brown's scanty eyebrows rose. He took up his pen and examined the nib again. 'I would hardly have thought that was necessary,' he murmured. Then he leant forward, opening the file he had been writing in when Denton entered. 'Well, then, Thursday at ten o'clock.'

'Yes sir. Thank you, sir.'

He glanced up as Denton opened the door. 'Ten o'clock precisely, Mr Denton.'

4

BE WITH YOU IN A MINUTE.' Mason too was writing at his desk in his own, smaller, office. 'Got to finish off these damn reports. There's a paper over there, if you want to have a look at the local news.'

Denton sat down obediently in a cane chair beside the window and picked up the newspaper. The indemnity for the Boxer rebellion had definitely been agreed, the North China Daily News announced on its front page. The Dowager Empress had received the new German ambassador in Peking. In Shanghai, the American consul had given a reception in the international settlement to celebrate Independence Day.

Mason's pen scratched on while he grunted and sighed at his desk, occasionally muttering irritably under his breath.

'What does Bund mean?' Denton asked timidly when he saw Mason leaning back in his chair, sucking the end of his pen.

'What?'

'Bund?'

'Sort of embankment place. Indian term, originally. Got all the good-class buildings in it. Consulates and banks and the big hongs and so on. Not to mention the Customs House, of course.' He yawned, scratched his scalp with the end of his pen, examined it, and then leant forward to write again with a sigh. 'Shanghai Club, all those places. Bund is Hindi, actually.'

'Have you been to India?' Denton asked, impressed by Mason's knowledge.

'In my time,' Mason grunted, frowning as he wrote, as if to discourage further questioning.

Denton turned the page. Twenty-three pirates apprehended in Bias Bay had been handed over to the Chinese authorities. He read on quickly, to push away the blood-stained images that immediately leapt into his mind. Under Wanted Known, Ah Chew, ladies' tailor, announced immediate attention and promised 'instant visitings.' Church Services were listed in a solemn little ornamental border -

'Oh, that'll do for now,' Mason growled, shoving back his chair. 'Come along, let's go back to the mess. Time for tiffin.'

5

MASON KICKED HIS WAY through the crowded, clashing shafts of the badgering rickshaws and settled into one further away from the gate, leaning back sweating under the canvas canopy. 'Never take the first one,' he advised Denton loudly, 'They always charge more.' He took off his topee and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.

It was noon, the heat stared balefully at them from the cloudless sky, from the narrow, parched streets, from the flat walls of the houses. The coolie pulled them along bumpy, rutted alleys and beside stagnant little canals, stinking with refuse. Stalls and dark cave-like shops lined every street. Coolies with long bamboo carrying-poles, women with crushing loads of stones in baskets on their backs, children, dogs and whining beggars pressed noisily all round them. Occasionally another European passed in a rickshaw or a sedan chair, eyes narrowed like theirs against the heat and light.

'Where d'you come from?' Mason asked suddenly, taking another cigar out of his tunic pocket. This time he did not offer one to Denton. 'Enfield? Near London, isn't it?'

The rickshaw lurched into a pot hole and Mason fell against Denton. 'Blithering idiot!' he shouted at the coolie. 'Why don't you look where you're going?'

The coolie's head shook briefly in apology. Or was it incomprehension, or mere helplessness?

'Look-see! Look-see!' Mason called out threateningly. 'You damn well look-see, or I'll kick your behind!'

The coolie shook his head again, hunching his shoulders abjectly. His subservience seemed to mollify Mason. He gave a satisfied but still warning little grunt and leant back again, lighting his cigar. 'What got you into the Customs service?' he demanded, tossing the still burning match aside as he settled himself more comfortably in the seat.

Denton edged along to make more room for him. 'It was an accident, really,' he began.

'Hey, look at that,' Mason interrupted, nudging him with his elbow. 'Not bad, eh?'

A sedan chair was being carried past by two bearers. The curtains were open and Denton caught a glimpse of a doll-like oval face with quick, dark eyes and rouged cheekbones framed by shiny black hair. Mason twisted round as the chair swayed past, his eyes gleaming as they had at the execution. 'Not bad, at all, eh?' he sighed as he turned back, blowing out a long jet of aromatic blue smoke. 'That's what makes being here worthwhile.'

Denton looked at him inquiringly, puzzled.

'Sing-song girl,' Mason explained obscurely. 'They make a fortune. Cost it, too.'

'Sing-song girl?'

'That's the translation.' He said something in Chinese. 'Sing-song girls.'

'Oh, they're singers?'

Mason glanced at him sideways. 'That's one of their accomplishments,' he agreed, preening his moustache with his knuckle and pursing his rosy lips into an ironic little smile. 'Here we are. Hop out, you're smaller than I am.'

They walked together up the stone steps of the large building that Denton had scarcely noticed when he first saw it, his eyes still numbed by the execution. It was an imposing building, he recognized, in the same style as the Customs House. Imperial Chinese Maritime Customs Officers' Mess he read over the entrance, feeling a faint lift of pride that he belonged to it.

'Let's change your money first,' Mason nodded across the lobby. 'At the desk over there. Then you won't have to rely on me to pay the rickshaw boys.'

6

THE DINING ROOM WAS COOL and dim, two large punkahs stirring the limp, moist air beneath the high ceiling. Delicate large-fronded palms, and rubber plants with glossy, thick leaves stood along the walls and between the rattan tables. White-jacketed waiters moved noiselessly about in black cloth slippers. There seemed to be thirty or forty young officers in the mess, drinking and eating in separate groups. Mason took him a table in the corner, introducing him offhandedly to the two officers already sitting there. One was called Jones, a tall, fair-haired man with a downy moustache. Denton didn't catch the other's name, and was too shy to ask.

Mason ordered from the handwritten menu in a disdainful voice that suggested the food couldn't possibly be much good. Denton tamely said he'd have the same. The steward, an old man with a short grey queue, nodded silently. His slippers shuffled away over the tiled floor.

'Where d'you come from?' Jones asked Denton, as they began to eat.

'London,' Mason answered for him, packing his mouth with rice and diced chicken.

'Enfield,' Denton qualified mildly.

'Near enough. Ah Koo!' Mason snapped his fingers, calling out across the room. 'Soya sauce!'

'How did you get into this outfit?' Jones dabbed his downy moustache with his napkin, looking up at him with slightly bloodshot eyes.

'It was an accident,' Mason answered for him again.

'Well, I was going to be a teacher,' Denton spoke quickly and quietly, toying with his rice, 'I'd just done one year in a training college, actually - '

'Ah Koo! Soya sauce!' Mason called out again.

'and then my father had an accident at work, so I had to give it up. And I just saw an advert in the paper and....' He shrugged and sipped some of the beer Mason had insisted he should share with them. It was only the second time in his life that he'd drunk beer, and he shivered at the bitter taste. Jones, losing interest, turned to talk to Mason in a low voice that excluded him.

'What sort of accident was it?' asked the small, dark man, whose name he hadn't caught. He had a mild, even, slightly nasal voice.

'At the small arms factory. He was testing a rifle when the barrel burst.'

'Ah Koo! One piecee soya sauce!' Mason shouted irritably. 'Come along, man! Chop-chop!'

The dark man nodded, scrutinising the moistened point of the tooth-pick he was using. 'I started as a sailor. Strange what brought us all out here in our different ways.'

'Money,' Mason said emphatically.

The dark man inserted his tooth-pick between his teeth without replying, which Mason seemed to take as a tacit denial.

'Cash,' he said belligerently. 'That's what brought us here.' He took the soya bottle from the steward and shook it vigorously over his plate.

The dark man probed the gaps between his teeth reflectively.

'Not that there's much of that by the time you've paid your chits, eh?' Jones said pacifically.

'Anyone can make a pile out here,' Mason asserted through bulging cheeks.

'Do you mean the bonus on contraband seizures?' Denton asked hopefully. He planned to send some of his salary home to his parents each month.

Mason glanced at him under his reddish brows and swallowed deliberately before answering. A thick, blackish trickle of soya sauce ran down from the corner of his mouth and he dabbed it with his napkin. 'That, and other things,' he said, with the same ironic smile that he'd given when he spoke of the sing-song girl's accomplishments. He turned to Jones, who had pushed back his chair. 'Are you doing the auction, Jonesy?'

'Smith's stuff? Yes. Three o'clock in here. Why?'

'Nothing.' Then Mason jerked his head at Denton without looking at him. 'Except he'll want to buy some stuff.'

'I haven't got much money to spare,' Denton began doubtfully.

'Who cares? Pay by chit.' Mason waved his fork grandly. 'Cash is for coolies.'

'Er ... how do you bid?'

'I'll bid for you, if you like,' the dark man said reassuringly as he dropped the broken tooth-pick on his plate. 'You just tell me what you'd like, and I'll do the bidding.' He spoke in a monotonous, lulling tone of bland, sapless benevolence, but Denton was grateful.

'Well, perhaps some chair covers and curtains?' he suggested cautiously. 'Would that cost very much?'

'Depends who's bidding against you, doesn't it?' Mason said, with a mocking flick of scorn in the rising inflection of his voice. 'Come on, let's go to the tailor's first, get you fitted out.'

The tailor's was a dingy narrow room without windows, reaching back from an unpaved street into ever darker and mustier gloom. Six or seven Chinese men bent over sewing machines, working the treadles incessantly with their feet. Scraps of cloth lay scattered on the floor, which looked as though it had never been swept. The walls were grimy. Thick black cobwebs hung down from the ceiling. On a bare round wooden table near the back of the room stood several bowls with greasy chopsticks beside them. The table was littered with grains of rice and what looked like chicken bones, stained with a dark sauce. There was a smell of engrained dirt mingled with the heavy scent of incense which was drifting slowly up from some joss sticks smouldering dimly away at a little smoky red altar against the back wall.

A small man in a long grey gown shuffled towards them, bowing and hissing through his teeth. His face looked old, the skin thin and taut over his cheekbones.

'One piecee uniform for my friend, same same me.' Mason ordered. 'You makee one day fitting how muchee?'

The tailor glanced at Denton with a momentary gleam in his brown eyes. 'Today very busy,' he said impassively, gesturing to the hunched backs of his workers.

'Never mind busy. How muchee?' Mason demanded curtly.

The tailor's eyelids flickered. 'Forty dollar.'

'Forty? You must be mad! You before makee for me twenty-five dollar!'

The tailor smiled faintly. 'Long time makee for you. Now more dear.'

Denton, standing self-consciously beside Mason, grew aware of the workers' faces half-turned to listen while they sewed on at the same busy speed, pulling the cloth this way and that beneath the stabbing needles. There were smiles on their pale faces. One of them coughed and spat nonchalantly into a spittoon.

Mason damned the tailor, expostulated, threatened to walk out, and finally grudgingly offered thirty after the tailor had crept down to thirty-five. 'You makee chop-chop tomorrow night finish. Fitting morning time. Otherwise no pay.'

The tailor inclined his head a fraction and took a tape measure out of his sleeve. He hadn't raised his voice once in response to Mason's blustering. He'd bowed often and folded his hands courteously in front of him, yet his face had been unmoved, almost as though he hadn't even been listening. Denton sensed that he'd got the price he wanted and that Mason was put out. It was the first inkling he had that the Chinese were not all servile.

'Well, he knows your uniform allowance is forty dollars,' Mason muttered as the tailor's light, bony hands deftly measured Denton. 'Artful blighter knows how much you'll have to spend on shoes and a hat. He knows how much he can squeeze you for.'

The tailor called out the measurements to one of the workers, who jotted them down on a scrap of paper. Denton wondered how the tailor could measure him without even seeming to touch him, his hands were so light and nimble.

'Tell him which side you hang 'em,' Mason grunted as the tailor measured his inside leg.

'Sorry?'

'Oh never mind.'

Denton blushed, thinking that after all perhaps he had understood. 'Er, didn't you say I ought to get a stomacher as well?'

'Right, one piecee stomacher,' Mason patted his paunch. 'How muchee?'

'Five dollar.'

'Three.'

The tailor was measuring the width of Denton's trousers. 'Four-fifty. Special for you.'

Mason was evidently losing interest. 'Four,' he said, taking out a cigar.

The tailor stood up shaking his head mildly. 'No can do. Too muchee workee.'

'Oh all right then you blasted robber. Finish tomorrow, all right?' He bit his cigar and turned to Denton. 'That leaves you just enough for the hat and shoes. They've got it worked out to a tee.'

'Well it is much cheaper than in England,' Denton murmured. 'And I suppose he's got to pay all these workers here....'

Mason surveyed them indifferently, breathing out a blue curl of cigar smoke. 'You can bet he doesn't pay them much, if he pays 'em at all. Food and lodging probably, that's all. It's dog eat dog out here you know.'

'Lodging? Where?'

Mason snorted. 'On the floor. Where d'you think?'

7

NOW WHAT AM I BID for these curtains?' asked Jones, leaning forward over the table, resting his weight on his spreading finger-tips. 'Beautiful floral pattern, almost unused. Hold 'em up, Ah Koo. Up! Up! That's right. Shall we start at five dollars? Who'll start us off at five dollars?'

Ah Koo, barefooted, stood on the table, holding the curtains up one after another, his arms trembling with the strain. His wrinkled face smiled self-consciously, as if he were both embarrassed and proud of his prominence.

'These curtains graced our departed friend's sitting room and bed-room,' Jones was saying. He paused to glance round the room with an anticipatory leer. 'Eight lovely drapes from Whiteaway and Laidlaw's. And when they were drawn, who knows what sights they saw?'

A loud suggestive laugh from Mason led a snigger round the room. One of the stewards snaked his way between the tables, balancing a tea-tray on his hand. He set it down by the dark man, whose name Denton still didn't know. Denton glanced over his shoulder as he signed the chit. R Johnson.

'Six dollars I hear,' Jones called out. Ah Koo's arms quivered more and more unsteadily as he struggled to hold the curtains up, fold after fold. The smile on his face was growing fixed with the effort.

'Seven,' Johnson said.

'Eight,' called Mason. 'Why not?'

'Why not indeed? Eight I am bid.'

'You've just got some new ones,' Johnson murmured, pausing with his hand on the tea pot.

'And why shouldn't I get some more?' Mason asked provocatively. He glanced at Denton. 'Can't let 'em go too cheap, can we?'

'Any advance on eight?'

Denton hesitated as Johnson looked at him with raised, inquiring brows. Surely he could do without curtains? After all there were shutters. But impulsively, vertiginously, he nodded to Johnson.

'Nine dollars.' Johnson said, scarcely raising his voice.

'Nine fifty.'

'Only one dollar bids, Mr Mason,' Jones licked his lips. 'We're going up by single dollars only.'

'Ten, then,' Mason shrugged carelessly.

Johnson glanced inquiringlyly at Denton again. Denton rubbed his chin, blushing. Everyone was looking at him. He knew Mason was bidding against him on purpose, and he felt challenged. But he couldn't afford to spend much.

'Any advance on ten over there?' Jones asked hopefully.

Denton recalled the gleam in Mason's eyes at the execution that morning, and some small corner of his mind hardened. He nodded to Johnson.

'Eleven.'

'Eleven dollars? Mr Mason? Any advance? No? Sold for eleven dollars.'

Mason laughed loudly, looking round with eyes that sneered and yet at the same time seemed to seek approval. 'Well, that'll help pay old Smithy's bar debts, anyway.' he said.

Johnson leant closer to Denton. 'I knew he wouldn't go higher, once he'd bid nine fifty,' he murmured placidly. 'He was getting careful.'

'Next item, chair covers. Same design as the curtains, excellent condition, look. With antimacassars thrown in.'

Mason didn't bid again, and Johnson got the chair covers for Denton at six dollars. 'He's a funny fellow, old Mason,' Johnson whispered. 'He was just trying it on, to see what you'd do. He does that with everyone, he doesn't really mean any harm.'

'And last but not least,' Jones called out, 'a solid teak desk, which you see in front of me. Three drawers, top one lockable. Our departed colleague penned his billydoos on this desk. And if you're lucky you may find one inside still.'

'Get on with it Jonesy,' a voice called out in weary encouragement.

'You can sign a chit and give it to Jones, he's the mess treasurer anyway,' Johnson was saying to Denton.

'I'm trying to work out what it comes to in English money.'

'About two pounds altogether.' Johnson stirred his tea rhythmically, round and round, the spoon clinking against the same place on the cup each time.

'No offers for this beautiful solid teak desk?' Jones asked plaintively, with a show of incredulity, over the rising sound of inattentive voices. People had begun to leave the room. 'No offers at all?'

Denton gulped. 'Ten dollars,' he called out in a high, unsteady voice.

'Ten dollars?' Jones cupped his ear. 'Did I hear ten dollars?'

Denton nodded.

The desk was his.

'Well you soon got the hang of it, didn't you?' Johnson said encouragingly. He drank his tea down and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. 'Tibby Mason must've put you on your mettle. Did you really want that?'

'I suppose I'll want to write letters and things in my room sometimes,' Denton replied unsteadily. He felt his heart thumping slightly with surprise at his own audacity.

8

HE SAT IN HIS NIGHTSHIRT at his new desk, stroking the thick yellow varnish with his finger-tips. The curtains and covers lay neatly folded on the armchair. He glanced round at them once more, then dipped his pen in the ink bottle and began to write.

Dear Mother and Father. Arrived safely today, after hot but interesting voyage. Keeping well, hope you are too. Also hope you got the letters I have been sending. Weather here is very hot and sticky. Was met off the boat and shown - paused, thinking of the severed head swinging round on its queue, then went on - a few sights on the way to the above address where I am now settling in. Picture on other side shows Customs Headquarters. Have been measured for my uniform already, which they can make in one day. Long letter follows soon. Love, John.

He left the postcard on the desk and went to the bathroom. Dipping his toothbrush into the round, silvery tin of Dr Mill's Dental Powder, he started brushing his teeth. He had opened all the windows and shutters. Though it was after eleven o'clock, the street below was just as noisy as it had been in the morning. He listened to the hoarse, outlandish cries and shouts as he contemplated the white foam round his lips in the mirror. Would he ever get used to them, understand them? Darkness had fallen suddenly at seven o'clock, as he had come to expect on the ship, and the steward, whom everyone addressed as 'boy,' and whose silent presence still made him uncomfortable, had come and lit the gas lamps with a gentle plop that reminded him of home.

He wandered to the window, still brushing vigorously. Oil lamps flared over fruit stalls in the street below and glimmered in the poky little shops that crammed cheek by jowl against each other. Rickshaw coolies shouted their way raucously through the crowd, and a sedan chair floated past, preceded by a man with a lamp. The stall lights flickered over the chair, and through the uncurtained window he glimpsed a woman's face peering out with gleaming eyes. Further along, two British soldiers were strolling in their new khaki uniforms. Denton turned away, suddenly remembering his brother dead at Mafeking. If he'd had a khaki uniform there, instead of that proud scarlet one, the Boer sharpshooters might never have got him.

He had taken a mouthful of water from the tumbler and spat it out into the enamel pail below the marble wash-stand, before he realised that the water might not have been boiled. He brushed his teeth again fiercely, with a big cake of dental powder on the brush, and spat once more into the pail, this time without rinsing. A faint unease stirred in his stomach. Could Smith's cholera germs still be in the room?

The steward had replaced the bucket in the toilet box when he made the bed, and Denton sat on the seat, enjoying the freshness. His stomach was what his mother would have called loose. He got up and washed his hands, brushing his nails thoroughly.

Reaching up to the lamp, he pulled the lever down, avoiding the sticky brown flypaper hanging from it, on which several small black flies were hopelessly mired, feebly wriggling their legs and flapping their wings. The light faded; a blue flame licked round the mantle, then went out with a terminal plop. He walked barefoot to the bedroom, draped the mosquito curtain round the bed and turned the light out there too. Ducking under the curtain, he lay down.

The air was still and heavy, pressing warmly down on him. He was sweating under his nightshirt. He pushed the sheet down to his feet and lay on his back, hands clasped behind his head, watching the dim shadows from the passing lights in the street below flickering across the ceiling.

Closing his eyes, he clasped his hands over his chest and whispered a prayer, as he had done, secretly, every night in his berth on the Orcades. He remembered to add a prayer for the executed pirates. His eyes opened again on the flickering shadows. His arms beneath the nightshirt were sweaty. So were his chest and neck. He undid all the buttons down to his waist and pulled the nightshirt open. Forlorn images of home came straying through his mind: his mother in her apron, cooking at the large black grate in the kitchen; his father with his scarred hands crossed in his lap, seated immovably in the corner, silent and brooding. He saw Emily with her parents at the Easter service, her wavy brown hair falling loose beneath her wide-brimmed hat, the soft curls round her neck as she knelt to pray. He stirred despite himself and his fingers brushed the bare skin of his chest as if he were stroking her arm, her shoulder, her throat. To punish himself for his impurity, he forced himself to recall the horror of the execution that morning. But somehow praying for the dead men's souls had dulled the frightfulness, moved their deaths to a different plane, more distant, less disturbing. And it was Emily's lips that came into his mind now, fresher and more vivid than the ritual cruelty that had stunned and sickened him only a few hours before.

He turned onto his side and thought determinedly of the things that had happened to him since he left the Orcades, of the new curtains and chair covers and desk, of the pamphlets he would begin studying tomorrow. Soon he was thinking only of his temerity in bidding at the auction, of the Orcades sailing on to Japan, of the weird sing-song sound of the Chinese language.... A mosquito was whining somewhere near his ear. His watch was hanging by its chain from the brass bedrail, which gleamed softly in the dimness and he wondered whether he'd wound it properly, willing himself to reach up and check. But his lids were heavy now and it seemed such a big, tiring effort.... That mosquito was whining by his ear again and he must check his watch, in a minute he would reach up for it....

He woke up with a jolt, his eyes wide and fearful. He was lying on his back, the filmy gauze of the mosquito net veiling the menacing shadows that lurked and shifted round about him. For a moment he wondered why the ship wasn't rocking, where the other berths in the cabin had got to, but then he heard the raucous voices outside laughing and shouting, and something that sounded like a violin only it made weird, screeching, endlessly undulating sounds, not like music at all really, just a continuously repeated wailing. He remembered with a sudden, hopeless, forlorn drop in his stomach that he was not safe on the boat, he was alone in China, in Shanghai. He must think of something nice and peaceful. Like the ship when he left England for instance: the band playing at Tilbury Dock, the people shouting and waving, the paper streamers whirring through the drizzly air. He'd kissed Emily on the cheek, stiffly and shyly in front of his parents, and she'd turned her face away blushing, her fair skin glowing right down to her throat. Perhaps further - no, he mustn't think of that. He thought instead of his father gripping his hat with one clawed, mottled hand and waving with the other, unsmiling; while his mother fluttered her handkerchief briefly then turned jerkily away. The coal black smoke had bellied up from the funnels and, as the gap between the quayside and the sliding vessel widened, their faces, then their whole bodies, had slowly blurred. The deck had begun to creak in the estuary as the level banks of the Thames slowly receded, dimmed, became a faint grey smudge merging with the clouds. And then England was gone.

9

THERE WAS A CLINK-CLINK of china by his head, and, more distantly, a hubbub of voices, wheels, and donkeys' braying. His eyes opened onto the brilliant, harsh light.

'Tea, master,' the steward said, placing a thick white cup and saucer on the locker beside the bed.

Denton's stomach churned at the thought of the new day and the new things he would have to do in it. He glanced covertly at the steward. He was wizened and crooked-shouldered and very thin. His wrists were like chicken bones covered with loose veiny skin beneath the frayed cuffs of his white sleeves. Why did they call them boys? he wondered, blinking at the spilt brown trickle of tea dribbling erratically down the side of the cup. The steward - the boy - had gone into the bathroom, and Denton heard water splashing into the wash-basin. He realised his nightshirt had become crumpled up above his knees. Shyly he jerked it down to a decent length.

'Ho' water,' the boy said, clearing his throat noisily. He carried the toilet bucket out and shut the door.

Denton looked at his watch, still swinging gently on its chain. Quarter past six. He watched the long sweeping second hand ticking round. So he had wound it last night after all. His skin was still moist with sweat, his nightshirt felt damp with it. The sheets smelt faintly moist. He scratched a mosquito bite on his cheek, remembering the whining by his ear before he fell asleep. Lifting the gauze of the net aside - and that too felt damp, it must have got soggy and mouldy from the watery air - he sipped the strong, sweet tea. Had that noisy din outside gone on all night? He listened to the voices, trying to separate them from the confused hubbub of the other noises. A man was calling out the same chanting three notes, repeated again and again. A gong was clashing somewhere. Women's voices chattered stridently against each other. And all the time there was that undifferentiated swell of sound that rose and fell like the sea.

He swung his legs out of the bed and walked across to the veranda. Over the flat roofs of the low houses opposite, he saw the dull sheen of the river, gleaming sullenly in the early sunlight and bristling with masts, sails and funnels, some pouring out long plumes of smoke that rose straight up to the windless sky, others still and sleeping. Sirens and hooters blew, groaning and whooping like living monsters. Sampans moved slowly between the crowded ships, so slowly that they looked motionless, as though they'd been painted on the viscous surface of the river.

Hearing a donkey bray again, he glanced down into the street. There was a train of them plodding along, long ears twitching, loaded with baskets on each side. The baskets were open, and Denton saw they were full of human night-soil. He sniffed and caught the stench, wrinkling his nose. So that was where his toilet bucket went. Yet the hawkers and rickshaw coolies, the sedan chairs and the women carrying live chickens, ducks, bundles of fruits and vegetables bound with twists of rattan, seemed not to notice or care as they bustled along beside or amongst the don-keys, often brushing against the brimming panniers. His nose wrinkled again. He looked back at the broad waters of the river.

There was the Orcades gliding steadily downstream, smoke belching from her sloping yellow stacks, strings of coloured flags fluttering from her masts. He watched forlornly as the liner slid remorselessly away behind those bat-wing sails of the junks and the scaffolds of the cranes. For a moment he could see the lower deck where he'd said goodbye to Emily; then with the red ensign breaking at its stern, it was gone. He followed the masts above a warehouse wall, a patched junk sail, and then there was nothing but the drifting, spreading cloud of smoke staining the sky. He felt like a small abandoned child, just as he'd felt on his first schoolday, when his mother had left him in the screeching, shouting, alien Church School playground and he'd watched, paralysed with despair, as she sailed away, bonnet ribbons flying on the raw autumn wind.

'Come on, this won't do,' he muttered sternly to himself, and turned to go in. But then there was a loud report somewhere in the street, followed by several others, like the rapid rifle fire he'd often heard from the smallarms factory in Enfield. He looked back startled, images of massacre and revolution tumbling panicky through his mind. But the street life went on undisturbed although the loud reports still banged away spasmodically. No heads turned, there were no police or soldiers, no rampant bloodthirsty mobs. Then he saw that the bangs came from a giant red paper firecracker hanging down from the first floor of a building further down the street. The firecracker was slowly smouldering upwards in a cloud of bluish smoke, intermittently flashing and banging as the little parcels of gunpowder concealed in it exploded. One or two passers-by glanced at the dangling red snake and some children had gathered round it, gaping and clapping their hands over their ears, but nobody else seemed to notice. Even the donkeys, now disappearing, only flattened their ears and shook their heads.

A white fluttering movement on the next veranda caught the corner of Denton's eye. Knowing it must be Mason's, he glanced round, forcing a false, uncertain smile of greeting. But through the iron lattice work that separated the two verandas he saw, not Mason, but a young Chinese girl. She was leaning over the parapet to watch the firecracker, wearing nothing but Mason's tunic. Her long black hair hung down over the white of the tunic, which reached as far as her bare knees. As she leant further over, the tunic moved up, and he saw the shadowy dimples at the back of each knee, the pale curve of her thighs.

His first thought was that he mustn't allow a lady to see him in his nightshirt, but instead of turning away, he stared stupefied at the girl's pale legs and tiny bare feet. Then she turned, and saw him. Mason's tunic was hanging open and Denton glimpsed a small, swelling breast, the round rosy circle of a nipple, a long streak of pale skin and a shadowy darkness between her legs before she casually shrugged the tunic closer round her. She eyed him coolly, her eyes seeming puffy with sleep, and walked back into Mason's bedroom, while Denton gazed stiffly past her.

'Nothing, Tibbee,' he heard her chirp in a high toneless voice. 'Onlee fi' cracka.'

Denton went in and sat on the bed to finish his tea, his mind lurching from upright condemnation of what he'd just seen to turbulent images that went beyond it, images which he resolutely dismissed but which insidiously crept back again and again. He put the cup down and went into the bathroom, the vision of the girl's breast persisting wickedly in his mind.

There was a new bucket in the toilet box. He planted his legs before it sternly and imagined himself contemptuously upbraiding Mason. His own licentious thoughts slowly wilted too as he visualised Mason, shame-faced and crest-fallen, turning and slinking away from him in the mess.

When he was dressed and ready to go down for breakfast, his old diffident shyness seized him. He would have to brave a roomful of strangers, who would all look up at him with hard, judging eyes, he would have to choose a table under their watchfulness, perhaps introduce himself, order his breakfast from the steward without swallowing his words. He waited for several minutes with his hand on the door, rehearsing how he would greet strangers, call a steward (Boy! Boy!), order from the menu.... On the Orcades it had all been so much easier, a set meal without any choice at a set table. At last he forced himself to go. Even so, a creak on the boards outside held him back and he hung there listening till he was sure he wouldn't run into Mason or the Chinese girl outside, his brave imaginings of facing Mason down abjectly abandoned. Then he turned the handle gingerly and glanced cautiously through the crack before he slipped out and went down the stairs.

But breakfast went off all right. Johnson waved to him to join him at a table by the wall, and left after a few smiling bland remarks, so that Denton was able to order from the boy without being observed. He hastily chose a boiled egg - the first word he read on the menu - and signed his name to the chit afterwards without any mistake. Best of all, Mason didn't appear.

He decided he could walk to the tailor (he'd memorised the way when Mason took him the day before) which would save him the embarrassment and perhaps humiliation of trying to hire a rickshaw by himself.

When he set off, pretending to ignore the beggars and rickshaw coolies who besieged him as he walked down the broad stone steps, he saw a rickshaw being pulled away, a girl leaning back under the canopy. She glanced round at him with heavy-lidded eyes, very like those of the girl he'd seen on Mason's veranda. But he looked away at once before he could be certain, although he felt sure she continued to stare at him with a frank, inquisitive gaze.

10

ON THURSDAY AT TEN he knocked on Mr Brown's solid door and was summoned in. Mr Brown was sitting, as before, writing at his desk, and the punkah creaked regularly, as before, over his lowered head.

'Let us see how much you have learnt.' He closed his eyes and rested his bulging forehead between his hands, meditating for several long seconds, as if he were drawing the questions up from some solemn pool deep in his brain.

Denton licked his lips and waited.

At last Mr Brown opened his eyes, raising his massive head just enough to rest his chin on the steepled tips of his fingers. He exhaled slowly through pursed lips, stirring the limp grey fringes of his moustache, and cleared his throat portentously. 'Mr Denton, what tax is chargeable on goods exported via Chinese ports?'

'Five per cent ad valorem, sir.'

'And ad valorem means?'

'According to value.'

Mr Brown's faint grey eyebrows rose, giving him an implausibly perplexed expression. 'But who decides the value?'

'The assessor, sir.'

'Correct, Mr Denton, the assessor decides.' His brows slowly lowered, and his eyes closed for a second. 'Now tell me, what do you understand by the term likin ?'

'Er, it's a tax on anything that crosses the boundaries of a province.'

'Anything, Mr Denton? A donkey wandering in search of grass, for instance?'

'Oh.' Denton stirred on his chair. 'On specified goods only, sir.'

'Exactly,' Mr Brown nodded deliberately, then rested his chin on his fingertips again. 'On specified goods only, Mr Denton. We must be precise.'

'Yes sir.'

'That is why we are here - to be precise. The Imperial Chinese government has had a Customs Service for hundred of years, Mr Denton, but it was not precise. It is our duty to inject precision into a loose and apathetic organization that has not known it before and generally does not welcome it now.'

'Yes sir.'

'Precision, Mr Denton.' Again his brows rose in mock perplexity. 'But who decides the amount of likin in cases where the value of those specified goods is contested between the Customs officer and the owner?'

'The assessor, sir?'

'Precisely, Mr Denton.' His eyes gleamed with pride, as if he had led a dull pupil to appreciate at last a sparkling intellectual truth. 'There you have it, the assessor again!' He surveyed Denton satisfiedly for a moment and then narrowed his eyes gravely. 'Now we come to the question of opium, a question which, together with the question of salt, may be regarded as providing the raison d'être of the Imperial Chinese Maritime Customs Service.' He paused significantly and moistened his lips. 'Under what circumstances is it now legal to import opium into China?'

'When it is handled by a Chinese importer, sir.'

'And?'

Denton looked at him, nonplussed.

'Is it legal to import opium into China through a Chinese importer without payment of tax and, if need be, likin?'

'Oh I see, sir. No sir.'

'No it is not.' Mr Brown smiled. He unsteepled his hands to toy with his watch chain, glancing up at the clock on the wall. 'And in what ways are tax and likin payable?'

'Well, sir, it can be paid on entry into the country, in which case it is specially packed and stamped with the Customs seal....'

'With the Imperial Chinese Maritime Customs seal,' Mr Brown chided him.

'The Imperial Chinese Maritime Customs seal, sir,' Denton nodded.

Mr Brown was easing a gold watch out of his pocket. 'Precision, Mr Denton,' he murmured. 'Precision, even about titles.'

'Yes sir.'

He opened the case and frowned down at the dial, tilting his head to one side. 'And the other method?'

'To put it in bond, sir.'

Mr Brown glanced from his watch to the clock on the wall, then closed the case and slid the watch back into his pocket, nodding gravely. 'What is the regulation governing the importation of opium and when was it made effective?'

'Er, I think nineteen hundred and two, sir. I can't remember the number.'

'Notification number two hundred and sixty one.' Mr Brown smiled again, self-gratulatingly. 'And it became effective in nineteen hundred and three - this very year of grace.'

'I see, sir.'

'Is there any other method of paying tax and likin on opium imported into the Chinese empire?'

'Er, no sir. Opium from abroad is illegal to be imported,' he stumbled and went on, 'unless tax and likin have been paid like that.'

'It is illegal to import opium otherwise, Mr Denton. Not Opium from abroad is illegal to be imported. '

'Yes sir.'

'Precision in grammar as well as in other things. Always express yourself precisely.'

'Yes sir.'

'And finally,' Mr Brown stirred in his seat, 'to whom must all reports of searches, inspections and confiscations be made in the first instance?'

'To the assessor, sir?'

'There you have it again Mr Denton! The assessor once more! Always the assessor. Remember that, remember it well.' His lids drooped slowly down in satisfaction. 'Very well, Mr Denton, that will do for now. I shall arrange for you to accompany Mr Mason on his rounds in Upper Section and Mr Johnson later, down at the Woosung forts.'

'Thank you, sir.'

'And have you found a suitable Chinese teacher yet?'

'I'm going to start next week, sir.'

'I recommend you to apply yourself to it.' He glanced sharply up at the punkah, which seemed to be slowing, and struck the bell on his desk three smart blows, still gazing upwards.

The blade began to swing more quickly again. Mr Brown breathed out through his moustache. 'Precision, you see, Mr Denton. Precision in everything. Our watchword must be precision.'

'Yes sir. Oh, and thank you for the invitation. It arrived this morning.'

'No doubt you will be sending Mrs Brown a note of acceptance in due course,' Mr Brown hinted discreetly as Denton rose to leave.

11

THEY MOVED FROM QUAY TO QUAY through the Upper Section of the wharves, Mason swaggering ahead, Denton following a pace behind, self-conscious in his new uniform. The docks, open to the sloping evening sun, stank of rotting refuse, coal dust, oil, and all the casual effluents of the city that the sluggish muddy waters of the river washed lazily along. Burly Sikh watchmen lounged by the gangways, swinging long wooden clubs, while coolies watched from the shade of the godowns, silent and lethargic, squatting on their heels and smoking cigarettes through wide brown bamboo pipes.

At each vessel the Chinese agent greeted them respectfully and handed Mason the cargo manifest, waiting alertly - often, it seemed, nervously - while Mason lounged in the saloon, assessing duty and demanding in his abrupt, domineering tones to inspect some case or other in the hold. Each agent offered them drinks, cigarettes and cigars with ingratiating politeness. Mason invariably accepted, sticking the unsmoked cigar in his tunic pocket.

'What's the matter?' he asked sarcastically after Denton had declined everything on the first two ships. 'Don't you have any vices? Not even one?'

'I don't smoke or drink really,' Denton apologised uncomfortably, afraid of exposing himself to Mason's mockery, and simultaneously ashamed of his fear. It was true, he didn't smoke or drink (he'd signed the pledge at the Band of Hope when he was seventeen), but he was also thinking of the regulation he'd studied in the third, tan, pamphlet Mr Brown had given him, in which the acceptance of gifts of any description from persons dealing directly or indirectly with the Customs Service was expressly forbidden. On the third ship, a British India Steam Navigation tramp steamer, its hull dented and rusty, Mason seemed to divine this thought of Denton's. 'Well if you don't smoke yourself, you could at least take a cigar or two for your pals,' he muttered peevishly as the agent, a slight, young Chinese in a dark blue gown, with swift, shining eyes, offered them three cigars each. 'Or is it the rules that are stopping you? You needn't worry about them, nobody gives a tinker's cuss about a few cigars, you know!' He sniffed one of the cigars he'd taken himself, but said nothing, merely raising his brows in derisive amazement, when Denton again refused the cigars offered to him.

It was on that ship that Denton first saw opium. Mason carelessly ordered the opium consignment opened and took some of the dense-packed brown stuff in his fingers to smell it. 'Here, have a sniff.' He held it out to Denton. 'Best quality Indian. Worth a packet, even after tax.'

Denton's nose wrinkled at the rich, greasy smell, which he realised then he'd already encountered in faint whiffs on the waterfront and in some of the streets he'd passed along. Mason suddenly reached forward to tuck a few shreds under the flap of Denton's pocket. 'There you are,' he laughed, one eye on the agent. 'Smuggle some ashore.'

The agent chuckled obsequiously, his dark eyes glistening, while Mason went back into the saloon to compute the tax.

When they'd finished with all the ships berthed at the quays, they boarded a waiting Customs launch flying the Imperial Chinese pennant. 'Alexander the First,' Mason ordered the coxswain, a tubby Chinese with a rolling double chin that gave him a comfortable, jolly look. 'Number four buoy.' Mason held four fingers up in front of the coxswain's nose to ram the number home. 'Number four, all right?'

They went forward as the clanking engine started, dark smoke spurting up from the single grimy funnel. The sun was just setting over the skyline, a collection of long roofs and chimneys, black and sharp-edged against the great disc that sank further with every second, like a slowly-winking angry eye.

'That's the French Concession over there,' Mason nodded.

Denton gazed at the buildings, lower, older and shabbier than the merchant palaces along the International Settlement's Bund. 'Is it interesting?' he asked.

'Depends what you're looking for,' Mason glanced enigmatically at him from under slyly lowered lids.

Denton didn't speak again until the closing eye of the sun had vanished behind the buildings in the west. The sky still smouldered, reflecting its glow upon the smooth brownish waters of the river. He glanced back at the International Settlement, growing a dusky mauve and blurred already behind them. 'I wonder where the nearest church is?' he said unguardedly, half-aloud.

'What?' Mason turned to look at him as though he though he must have misheard. 'What church?'

'Well, the Church of England.'

'God knows.' He guffawed suddenly at his unintended witticism, and then repeated it to ensure Denton appreciated it too. 'God knows. And if He doesn't, who would, eh? There are dozens of 'em. Why? Thinking of getting married?'

'I'll ... I'll need to know for Sunday,' Denton muttered as if grudgingly confessing to some embarrassing frailty.

'Will you now?' Mason glanced at him, then looked down at the water. 'Personally I'd rather do something enjoyable on Sundays,' he said at last, drily, brushing the ends of his moustache lightly upwards with the back of his knuckle. Then he took out one of the cigars he'd been given and turned away from the wind to light it, smoking in silence as they drew nearer to the Russian liner.

Denton watched a blue sack-like thing floating in the water just ahead, wallowing almost below the surface. It slowly turned, rose, and sank as though it were being gently rolled and tugged from below. Mason had seen it too, and was leaning forward on the rail.

'It looks like a body,' Denton said.

'It is a body,' Mason answered coolly. He called out to the coxswain and the launch slackened speed.

Mason was right. It was a body, floating face down, its trousers and shirt darkened by the water and glistening slightly as it broke the surface. The queue, still neatly plaited, snaked away from the head like a piece of sodden black rope.

Denton's pulse quickened and he found himself holding his breath while he gazed at the submerged face, as if he himself were under the water. The coxswain fetched a boat hook and tried to hook the corpse's shirt with it. But the hook caught in the putrid flesh beneath and a piece flaked off like sodden pastry. A dark thick liquid oozed out.

'Phew!' Mason threw his cigar away. It landed with a little hiss in the water a few feet from the body. 'Can bring on board? Bring topside?'

'No can do.' The tubby coxswain laughed almost gaily, except that at the same time his eyes were mournful. 'He go open, open.' He closed his hands then flapped them open several times to express how the body would disintegrate if they touched it.

'Let him go then,' Mason said, waving dismissively. 'Or her. Can't tell, can you?'

The coxswain gave an obedient little shove to the corpse, pushing it under. It sank slowly, rolling on its side, then slowly rose again, rolling back, so that its greenish, eyeless face gaped at them for a moment, the flesh half gone. It was like a last silent scream for help.

The coxswain walked back to the wheelhouse, trailing the boat hook in the water to clean it. The engine clanked clamorously and they steamed on.

'That's one the slops didn't find,' Mason said, his nose still wrinkled above his ginger moustache. 'They pick up the corpses by the docks every morning. That one must've floated out. Been in a few days too, by the look of it, although they do rot pretty fast in this weather. Enough to put you off your grub, isn't it?'

Denton swallowed a little sour tide of nausea that was rising up his throat. 'What d'you think happened?' he asked.

Mason shrugged. 'There are usually a hundred or so bumping along the quays every morning. The slops have a special boat with nets to catch 'em with. Like trawling for fish.'

'A hundred?'

'About that, yes. Hunger, disease, gang-fights, ordinary murders and robberies - they all end up in the river. Nice and convenient. Some of our informers end up there too.'

'Informers?'

'How d'you think we nab the smugglers then?' He laughed shortly. 'We'd never get 'em, the likes of you and me. The Chinks are too crafty for us. It takes a Chink to see through a Chink. We have to buy tips. They'd sell their best friend for fifty dollars, too. That's how we do it.'

Soon they came alongside the gleaming white hull of the Alexander the First. The gangway trembled and swayed under Mason's weight as he clambered heavily up the steps. The agent was waiting for them at the top, an older man this time, dressed in a long silk gown with full sleeves and wearing a little round hat on his head. 'Good evening, Mista' May-song,' he smiled, affably rather than deferentially, giving a ceremonious bow that seemed almost mocking as he held out the cargo manifest courteously in both hands. The little fingernail of his left hand was long and curving, like some bird's talon.

'Evening, Mr Ching.' Mason replied with a grudging surly politeness himself. 'My assistant, Mr Denton.'

The agent bowed with the same mocking ceremony. 'Good evening, Mr Den-tong, how are you do?' His voice was high and loud, with none of the deference of the other agents.

Denton nodded and smiled awkwardly. He noticed how pale the man's skin was, as though it had never been in the sun, and wondered why Mason so uncharacteristically treated him with a certain respect.

Mason was leafing through the sheets of the manifest, each covered with a strange, looped writing that looked illegible to Denton. Then he glanced up, shaking the sheets together. 'We'll sort this out while we're eating, all right?'

'Of course, Mista' May-song.' The agent bowed again, folding his hands together in his sleeves, then led the way with short gliding steps, his gown flowing behind him, to the first class saloon.

They had hardly sat down at a table by the window, when the chief steward himself appeared, ushered in by the agent.

'What will you like to drink?' Mr Ching was asking, smiling that same courteous yet faintly mocking smile as he looked down at them through his rimless glasses. The chief steward snapped his fingers for the wine list.

'Sherry to start with. What about you, Denton? I can't stand vodka, myself.'

'Oh, nothing for me thank you,' Denton said hurriedly. 'Or just a glass of ginger beer?'

'Sherry and ginger beer?' Mr Ching turned to the chief steward and spoke to him briefly in Russian, leading him gently away.

'He speaks Russian as well,' Denton remarked tentatively. 'The agent.'

'Yes. Used to live up near the Russian border.' Mason opened the menu and studied it, frowning. 'Keep on the right side of him. He knows a thing or two.'

Confused by the names on the menu, Denton let Mason order for both of them. The putrefying corpse clearly hadn't put Mason off his grub after all, Denton noticed, nor indeed himself. It was as though it hadn't really been human at all, but some strange decaying fish. Only when he recalled the sightless eyes and exposed teeth did Denton feel a nauseous qualm.

After the meal, Mason sipped a brandy and picked over the box of cigars the steward brought them, while Mr Ching smoothed the cargo manifest out on the table in front of him. 'Wouldn't get this in second class,' he nudged Denton as the attentive steward lit the long cigar he finally selected. At last he looked reluctantly down at the manifest's sheets trembling under the fan, and began turning them languidly.

'Here, time you got started,' he said abruptly after a while. 'Sort out the tax on this lot. I'll check it afterwards.' He got up, dabbing his moustache with his napkin and went with Mr Ching to the far corner of the saloon, where the agent refilled his brandy while they talked quietly, facing each other across the table like card players.

At first Denton thought he wouldn't be able to decipher the script, but as he worked at the pages he found he could make it out after all. He finished with a lift of pride that was only slightly dashed when Mason negligently checked his calculations without comment.

'All right,' he burped. 'Let's sign.'

'Shouldn't we examine one of the cases?' Denton asked doubtfully.

'Hell, I s'pose we'd better,' Mason frowned in annoyance. 'Have 'em open up a case will you, Mr Ching?' He turned back to Denton as the agent rustled away. 'Teaching me my job now, are you?' he muttered, in a tone that seemed to hover uncertainly between indignation and bantering.

A case was opened in number three hold and Mason checked the contents perfunctorily against the manifest. 'All right,' he turned away. 'Let's sign and be off.'

As they were approaching the gangway, Mason suddenly stopped, slapping his pocket. 'Forgot my report book' he said. 'You go ahead, tell them to get ready. They're probably fast asleep, the lazy devils.'

It was night now, violet and soft, the lights glistening along the shore, with little misty hazes of moisture round them. Denton looked over the side at the Customs launch. The coxswain was talking to one of the sailors, looking up expectantly at Denton. The boiler fire glowed on their faces, and the water all round the boat seemed black and still, as if it had been varnished.

'We're just coming.' Denton called down. The coxswain moved into the shadow of the wheelhouse and then the engine began its vociferous clanking.

He returned along the empty, dimly-lit companion ways to the dining saloon. Mason was holding a white envelope in his hand, talking to Mr Ching in a low, tense voice. They moved apart when they saw him. Mr Ching quickly smiled, but Denton felt he had intruded. 'They're ready,' he said apologetically to Mason. 'Did you find it?'

'What?' Mason stared at him blankly.

'Your report book.'

'Oh.' His face loosened. 'Yes, got it. It was on the, er, on the table there all the time.'

They all looked at the table, while Mason slipped the envelope into the inside pocket of his tunic.

'Goodbye, Mista' Den-tong,' Mr Ching said in his high cheerful voice. 'Goodbye, Mista' May-song.'

Mason buttoned his tunic as he went along. He walked most of the way without talking, but then began speaking with a sudden heartiness. 'Extraordinary thing,' he chuckled. 'The old chief steward on this tub sent me a letter.' He patted his pocket as if he was willing to produce the evidence if Denton doubted him. 'We used to go round a bit when he came ashore. Nice of him to remember me, eh?'

Once on board the launch, Mason leant silently against the rail, one foot on the neatly coiled rope, unusually self-involved. Denton wondered why he didn't read his letter. There was light enough from the lamp on the mast.

'He's got a very fair skin for a Chinese, Mr Ching?' he asked across the uneasy silence.

'Mm.'

The night air sliding over his face was mild and cool. 'I always thought Chinese were yellow, but he's paler than many Englishmen,' Denton risked again as the silence between them tautened once more.

'They come in all shapes, sizes and colours,' Mason answered brusquely.

Rebuffed, Denton didn't speak again. He recalled the moral distance he'd meant to keep from Mason and turned his head stiffly to watch the dark shapes of the ships they passed, each lit by pale twinkling lights. The launch put in at the Bund, near the Shanghai Club. Denton gazed up at the long, brightly-lit building with its wide verandas and balconies, from which he could hear the distant, muffled sound of music and laughter, cheerful and assured. He watched two Sikhs in red tunics and white turbans stamping their polished boots arrogantly outside the main entrance, magnificent under the heavy gas lamps as they summoned sedan chairs or rickshaws for the members emerging in evening dress from the open doors. As Denton watched, Mr Brown arrived in a sedan chair borne by four coolies, with an oil lantern burning yellowly on one of the poles. He inclined his shiny bald head, with its woolly circlet of grey hair, as the Sikhs saluted him and ascended the stone steps with a steady, stately step, as if he knew Denton was watching and wished to impress the dignity of his office upon him once more.

12

HE TOOK THE LETTER from the rack with a slight churning feeling in the top of his stomach, and walked slowly into the lounge. He'd recognised Emily's long-anticipated handwriting from a distance, but now that her letter had come, he felt an apprehensive reluctance to open it, as if it might contain bad news. Through the open doors he could hear the soft clack of balls in the billiards room as, his pulse quickening faintly, he pushed his little finger under the envelope flap and tore it open. He drew the letter out.

Dear John,

It is only a fortnight since you left, but it seems an age already.

I am back at the college and you will be somewhere in the Mediterranean by now. This last week has been quite hard and I always get a headache in the tram coming home. But I expect I will get used to it. The weather has not been too bad, although I expect you are getting a lot more sunshine than we are.... When you have got this letter, I expect you will be quite used to your new life. Write and tell me all about it, and how your trip was and everything. I expect you stopped at a lot of interesting places. I wish it was not quite so far away though.

Is it very hot? Do the natives understand English? I always thought Chinese was a hard language to learn, but I suppose you can if you have to. There is going to be another lantern show about the missionaries' work in China next month. I expect I will go. 

Mother and Father send their best wishes and ask to be remembered to you.

Love from Emily.

PS I am sending this to the address you gave me. Hope it is right.

As he finished reading, Denton became aware again of the quiet clacking of billiard balls, then of Mason's high piercing laughter. He read the letter through once more, this time painting images to accompany the words. He saw her wavy brown hair, her hazel eyes, the way she held her head a little on one side and forward when she listened.

Folding the letter slowly, he put it back into the torn envelope, smoothing the rough edges of the flap down as if he were trying to seal it again.

They hadn't done much spooning, only holding hands and walking to the Band of Hope together, sitting side by side at lectures in the college and on the tram there and back. But he felt how pure their love was, unsullied by the sordid lusts of such as Mason, whom he heard again laughing loudly and penetratingly in the billiards room. Their love was spiritual, he thought solemnly, spiritual and undefiled.

He stood up, sliding the letter into his tunic pocket, and walked towards the stairs. She would wait for him, he would be faithful to her. Eventually he would send for her....

Lighting the gaslight in his room, he took off his tunic and drew the letter out again. A strange, slightly greasy smell seemed to cling to it. He frowned, holding it closed to his nose. Surely she hadn't used scent or perfume - not Emily? Then he remembered the threads of opium Mason had stuffed into his pocket. He felt deep inside until he could pick up the twisted little strands between his fingers. Rolling them between his finger and thumb, he sniffed cautiously. Yes, it was the same smell. Perhaps it wasn't so unpleasant after all - just very, very rich. He dropped the opium into the waste paper basket and wiped his hands carefully with his handkerchief. Opium, he was sure, was wrong, just as intoxicating liquor was wrong - a danger to religion and morals. Yet, in its rich, heavy way, that clinging smell wasn't at all unpleasant really...

13

THE CATHEDRAL'S PEWS were nearly all filled when Denton arrived, and a grave, tall sidesman with watery brown eyes motioned him to a chair in the aisle. He leant forward, covering his eyes, and whispered a prayer. When he sat upright again he had already forgotten the words he'd muttered, as though he'd prayed mechanically, as unconsciously as he breathed or blinked. He glanced round at the grey stone arches of the nave and up at the tall stained glass windows, which the burning sunlight outside struggled to pierce. Everything was new; the dark wooden pews, the unworn flagstones, the vivid colours in the windows, the fresh grey pillars. Musing treble notes wandered up and down the bass drone of the organ like ivy caressing a great broad tree. Denton thought of St George's at Enfield - so much smaller and dimmer than this magnificent airy building. He thought of Emily in her pew with her parents, lowering her eyes with a secret smile when he glanced at her from the choir stalls.

He clung to the poignant image, part-memory, part-fiction, until his eye was caught by the figure of Mr Brown walking up the nave toward a pew near the pulpit. A tall, stout lady rested her hand on his arm. They progressed at a stately gait, their heads erect and motionless until they reached their pew, when Mr Brown handed his wife in first with a grave inclination of his massive-browed bald head.

Denton glanced over the rest of the congregation, sweat oozing from his pores despite the gently-squeaking punkahs that fanned the air above their heads. All the people in the nave were evidently rich - taipans, he supposed. You could tell by their clothes, the women in gorgeous dresses and sweeping, wide-brimmed hats, the men in faultlessly-cut silk suits. Watching them, Denton felt vague confused, feelings both of envy and of alienation. He knew that he wanted to wear fine clothes like Mr Brown, to have a sedan chair waiting outside the cathedral, to belong to the Shanghai Club, to be looked upon with awe by people like himself. Yet he felt he was not like Mr Brown and the other taipans, and never would be. There was some essential difference that would always keep him removed from them, their lives unassimilable. His mind slipped off to the church at Enfield, where the congregation were all workmen and shopkeepers in stiff dark suits with frayed button holes and shiny collars, the grime still under their fingernails.

Shanghai was beginning to unsettle him. He was becoming dimly aware of possibilities in the distance that had lain far beyond the level horizon of his life even when he'd been accepted for the teachers' training college and his father had said he was out of it now, he'd never have to work in a factory.

To stifle his unease, he joined in the opening hymn with a loud voice, following the choir's tenor descant.

Praise Him, praise Him, praise Him, praise Him,

Praise the everlasting King.

Denton waited, listening to the hushed coughing and the closing hymn books and the shuffling feet, determined to concentrate now on the worship of God. He gazed up at the gaunt face of the Dean, who had turned by the altar to face the congregation. But even while he was watching the Dean's grey head and penetrating, deep-set eyes, his fickle mind had slipped off again, and he was wondering about Emily his hand surreptitiously straying up to the pocket where her letter nestled. What would she be doing now? Sleeping? What would she be wearing? A nightdress? And under the nightdress? a voice whispered, while the memory of the girl on Mason's veranda, her breast uncovered beneath his tunic, floated across his mind. He jerked his mind guiltily back to the Dean, who had begun intoning in a high, strained voice, his eyes fixed in vacant reverence above their heads.

'If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves....'

He could feel a warm slow trickle of sweat rolling slowly down his cheek. Behind the Dean, over whose head a punkah moved slowly to and fro as though it were a blessing hand, he saw the choristers turning the pages of their hymn books, the leaves fluttering like little white butterflies.

14

Dear Sir,

I am honoured to accept to teach you the Chinese language, mandarin

or Shangahi dialect according to you choosing. My fees are $5 per

hour, for which you receive compensation from imperial customs service

on receipt. I will call at you in your rooms on Tuesday 9th August

at the 4 o'clock and esteem your honoured favour.

Wei Lam-tung.

Denton drew his watch out and held it away from him, letting it hang and slowly spin upon its chain. Five to four. He read the letter through again and replaced it on his desk. One of the little green lizards that had so disquieted him on his first day rippled along the wall above his head. He watched it pause in stone-like immobility then dart forward to take a little fly with a flick of its whiplash tongue, gulping it down before returning at once to that watchful immobility.

One minute before four there was a shuffling outside the door and a knock. The boy entered and wordlessly gestured a spare little Chinese with glinting, metal-rimmed spectacles towards Denton.

Denton stood up as the Chinese, dressed in a grey silk tunic and trousers, offered him a small, limp hand. 'Mr Denton?'

'Yes. Mr Wei?' Denton noticed the long, curling nail on the little finger of the man's other hand - a polished claw two inches long, just like the agent's on the Alexander the First. The hands were pale and hairless, paler than his own sunburned, reddish ones, which seemed, with their dark hairs, to be suddenly crude and coarse beside them. The long fingernail and anaemic pallor of Mr Wei's hands made him wonder a moment whether he could be related to the agent - Ching, wasn't that his name? But Ching was tall and uncomfortably mocking, whereas Wei was short and seemed to be open and eager.

'How do you doing?' Mr Wei smiled with a bird-like jerk of his neck. A gold tooth winked moistly in his lower jaw. 'Please' to meet you.' He was holding a leather satchel. He opened it deliberately and took out two books, placed them carefully on the arm of the chair Denton offered him, then perched himself on the edge of the seat as if ready to take flight. 'Mr Denton,' he asked, his gold tooth gleaming as he smiled again, 'how are you like Shanghai?'

'Very nice,' Denton murmured. 'It's very hot, of course.'

'Very ho',' Mr Wei nodded emphatically. 'Perhaps a typhoon will come. Many rains.'

'Oh they bring many - a lot of rain, do they?'

'Quite a lo'. In winter it is col'.'

'Ah.'

'Very col'. But blue sky.'

'Not like England?'

Mr Wei shook his head, his glasses glinting flatly in the light from the veranda. 'Very col',' he repeated emphatically.

They paused. Denton, glancing stealthily at Mr Wei's unlined, taut-skinned face, was unable to put an age to it, Thirty? Fifty? It could be either.

Mr Wei's glance met his inquiringly and he looked away, clearing his throat. Yet he had nothing to say, so he waited awkwardly. Outside, a man's voice chanted a hawker's call and he imagined the heat and glare of the street, which the heavy wooden shutters dimmed.

'Mr Denton, for Chinese lesson, what are you want?'

'I beg your pardon?'

'Chinese language many form, Mr Denton.' He held up his hands, pale fingers outspread, to indicate its variety. 'Mandarin, Shanghai, Canton, Fukien....'

'Oh, I see.'

'All same writing.' His gold tooth gleamed. 'Speaking all differen'.'

'Yes, well, I think Shanghainese, as that's where I'll be working.'

'Shanghai, good.' He nodded his head several times as though in approval, then took the lower book from the arm of the chair, holding it out to Denton with both hands and giving a little bow.

Denton half-rose to take the book, and some obscure intuition led him to take it with both hands too. Mr Wei's gold tooth gleamed as he smiled approvingly again. 'Mr Denton, you will be goo' pupil. Already you take thing Chinese way. One hand give or take is very ru'. Only for coolie,' his hand waved scornfully. 'For equal and superior must give and take with both hand. In China, teacher is superior,' Mr Wei went on, smiling widely. 'So you must take from me with both han'. Number one lesson, very goo'.'

Denton looked down at the book uncertainly. Was Mr Wei getting above himself? That suggestion of superiority - how would Mason have taken it? But Wei was speaking again in his precise yet stilted manner, unlike the toneless chanting of all the other Chinese he'd heard speaking English.

'You are official of Chinese Imperial Governmen',' Wei was saying with his gold-winking smile, his bright brown eyes watching Denton alertly behind the magnifying discs of his glasses. 'Not like business man, speak pidgin. You must learn proper Chinese, learn character! Three thousan' character enough for newspaper,' Wei continued, holding up his hand for attention, three fingers flung out rigidly. 'Only for news-paper, nor ver' goo'. How many alphabe' in English?'

'Alphabets?'

'Twenty-six alphabe',' Wei gave him no chance to answer. 'Twenty-six alphabe' in English, then all finish. No more to learn. But Chinese three thousan' character, only beginning. Five thousan', ten thousan', still not finish. I think three thousan' much more number than twenty-six? So, you see, to learn Chinese, you mus' work ver' har'.' He reached into his satchel. 'Here brush, and ink, and paper.' He drew them out one by one. 'To write Chinese character. Chinese character very difficul', Mr Denton. You must work ver' har'.'

'Yes I will,' Denton promised, infected by Wei's enthusiasm despite himself. 'I do want to learn to write well.'

'To write an' read well, goo'.' Mr Wei nodded encouragingly. 'Now we star' lesson.' He perched further forward, his hands on his spread knees, and gazed unblinkingly at Denton. 'Chinese language not like English language.'

'No....'

Wei held up his hand for stricter attention. 'If same sound have differen' tone, make differen' word. Listen.' He moistened his lips and spoke a few words slowly and distinctly, his voice rising and falling in that strange sing-song that Denton heard all round him in the streets. 'Now I say again.' He repeated the sounds, slowly and distinctly again. 'You hear the same or differen'?'

'The same,' Denton said promptly.

He shook his head, smiling his gold-winking smile again. 'The tone is differen', so they make differen' word'. One mean I know Chinese people, the other mean I eat Chinese people . Therefore tone in Chinese language ver' importan'. Now we begin to learn tone.'

15

UNABLE TO FIND any small cash, Denton paid off the rickshaw with an extravagant tip and walked apprehensively towards the wide stone steps that led up to the porch of the Browns' house. There was a balustrade each side of the steps, from which coloured paper lanterns hung on slender, swaying bamboo slips that had been fixed in the stonework. More lanterns swung gently on the veranda. Voices murmured behind the open windows. Denton fingered his bow tie anxiously as he climbed the steps. He peered up irresolutely at the lighted, empty porch.

'Ah. Mr Denton, it must be.' The tall stout lady he'd seen with Mr Brown at the cathedral appeared in the hall, dressed in a long black evening dress with billowy lace sleeves. 'How kind of you to come.' Her voice was stout too, booming in fact. Denton felt her pale blue eyes measuring him frankly, so that his hand crept up to his tie again, in case it had loosened. 'Do come in,' she said at last, as if pleased, or at least satisfied, by her inspection.

An elderly houseboy, his skin puckered into an apparently sardonic grin, took his hat.

'Ah Man!' Mrs Brown commanded, grasping Denton's hand firmly. 'Paraffin!'

The houseboy was already bending with a sigh under the black Chinese table with claw feet on which he'd placed Denton's new, and as yet unpaid for, silk hat. He brought out a spraying can and stooped to point it at Denton's ankles, pumping with a slow, wheezing sound. A fine, cold, oily haze enveloped his evening dress trousers, his socks and shoes, all bought with chits, glistening on them in a dew of little silvery droplets. Denton watched, mystified and vaguely alarmed.

'So much better than muslin bags, don't you think, Mr Denton?' Mrs Brown asked. 'Come along, then.' Denton nodded and mumbled while Mrs Brown sailed ahead of him towards a large sitting-room, her dress just brushing the floor behind her. 'The mosquitoes are quite terrible this year, we simply have to do something. It's all these canals, of course, I keep begging the municipal council to fill them in, but nothing ever gets done.'

Denton followed obediently in her train, awed and bemused, a distinct smell of paraffin rising from his feet. He saw Brown's round shining dome, with its fringe of grey curly wool, and twenty or so men and women, all splendidly dressed, who turned their heads and paused to survey him as Mrs Brown led him in. He stood meekly beside her.

'Now this is Mr Denton, Arthur's latest griffin,' she announced in her booming tones, and proceeded round the room, naming every person in the same loud voice, as if she thought he was deaf. Denton smiled stiffly, shook hands stiffly, bowed stiffly and mumbled how d'you do to one guest after another, forgetting every name as soon as he heard it. But near the end of the round, his cheeks rigid with his taut artificial smile, he found himself facing Everett, his fellow-passenger on the Orcades.

'Hullo, how are you getting on?' Everett asked, his round, ruddy cheeks, like little apples, crinkling as he smiled.

'Oh, you two have met already, have you?' Mrs Brown interrupted. 'Well, you can have a little chat later. I want you to meet some other people first, Mr Denton.'

Soon Denton was sitting beside an elderly lady whose sagging cheeks were pallid with powder. She had merely nodded when Mrs Brown introduced him, and now, fanning herself with fierce jerky energy, she turned her back on him to continue an edgy discussion with the couple on her left. The rapid movement of the fan in her mottled hand seemed to match a growing exasperation in her low, cracked voice. Another houseboy, with a dour unsmiling face, offered him a glass of sherry on a silver tray. 'No thank you,' Denton said, but the houseboy seemed not to hear, obdurately holding the tray out in front of him. So Denton took the glass, shrinking back into his seat to avoid the elderly lady's bony elbow. He sat uneasily sipping the sherry which, like the beer Mason had ordered for him on his first day, and despite his pledge at the Band of Hope three years before, he was too timid to refuse.

Suddenly the old lady turned to him, fanning herself with vigorous impatience. 'So you're in the Chinese Customs?' she began accusingly.

'Er, yes. That is, I've just joined,' he answered deprecatingly. 'It's only probationary for two years....'

'I've never understood why we should give them any help at all,' she cut him off sharply. 'Such a corrupt, barbaric government.' Her fan became even more excited as her voice hardened. 'And as for that woman ... the Dowager Empress...!' She sniffed up the spite she seemed unable to express in words. 'It would never have been allowed if Queen Victoria were still alive,' she snapped finally. 'That I am quite sure of.'

Denton had no reply to give her, but in any case she had turned away already with a scornful shrug, as though looking for something more worthy of her steel.

At dinner he sat between two middle-aged ladies whose names he never caught. They talked to him so infrequently and perfunctorily that he was able to attend to all the knives and forks and the two wine glasses watchfully and without blundering. When the ladies suddenly got up to leave, Denton was about to follow them. He'd felt so thirsty that he'd kept on drinking the wines the boy poured for him, and he thought muzzily that those who were staying must be holding some meeting which he wasn't invited to. But Everett caught his arm and pushed him into the seat beside him. 'Come and sit with me,' he said loudly, then muttered, 'Port and cigars, the ladies are withdrawing.'

Denton flushed and nodded, humiliated. But now he was sitting next to Mr Brown, who appeared at first astonished to see him there, regarding him puzzledly for some seconds while he stroked his luxuriant grey moustache. Then, as port, brandy and cigars were set on the long, richly glossy table, the perplexity cleared from his eyes. 'Tell me, Mr Denton,' he asked, selecting a cigar, 'As a young fellow just out from home, what do they think of the China Question now?'

'The China Question, sir?' Denton felt himself sliding down through blank featureless waters while Mr Brown's pale blue eyes rested expectantly on his, as if following him down from the rim of a well. 'The China Question?' He clutched desperately at broken straws. 'Well, sir, I think that, er ... the new King has a different attitude to Queen Victoria's. I think,' he added doubtfully.

'From Queen Victoria's,' Mr Brown said precisely, pressing his lips together under the brushy grey fringe of his moustache. 'I must say I'm surprised by what you say. Personally, I disagree entirely with the imperialists.'

Denton nodded respectfully, as though he too might have said the same thing if he'd presumed to offer an opinion of his own. He watched Mr Brown turn aside as the boy lit his cigar, then lean forward again, blowing out a jet of greyish-blue smoke while he rubbed his bulging brow reflectively. The boy had filled Denton's glass with port and he drank it down, still trying to quench the thirst he'd felt all evening in his stiff hot clothes. His eyes were beginning to smart from the smoke, the humid heat, and the alcohol he'd unwisely drunk. As he waited uneasily for Mr Brown to speak again, it seemed to him that the room was beginning to waver in a blurry mist. Part of him felt an apprehensive tremor at this strange experience, but part seemed unconcerned and careless. He watched the boy fill his glass again and watched his hand reach out and raise it to his lips.

'Have you commenced your Chinese lessons yet, Mr Denton?'

Denton blinked, moving his head slowly to still the misty swaying of the room. 'Started on Tuesday, sir,' he said, trying carefully not to slur his words. 'One lesson a week.'

He was conscious of Mr Brown's eyes resting on him again, and felt he ought to say something more. 'The Chinese Question is very difficult,' he added uncertainly.

Mr Brown's eyes seemed to widen and cool slightly. 'It is said to be so,' he said distantly. 'But it was the Chinese language we were discussing.'

'What do you think of the opium trade, sir?' Everett asked suddenly as the silence grew longer and heavier after Mr Brown's last remark.

'The opium trade?' Mr Brown turned slowly to Everett, 'My government - that is, the Chinese government - allows it, we know it is harmless when indulged in moderation, and it fosters international commerce....'

Now Denton began to feel tired as well as muzzy. His lids kept sliding slowly down over his eyes and he had to open them with a start only to feel them slowly slide down again a few seconds later. He nodded vaguely as Mr Brown's voice flowed past him in a murmuring river of sound.

'We cannot take his choice from the individual,' Mr Brown was pronouncing judicially, 'even from the humblest peasant or coolie, without diminishing him in his essential nature. Free trade, Mr Everett, is closely associated with deeper freedoms - Mr Denton, I fear I am boring you?' Denton awoke with a start.

When they returned to the drawing room at last, Denton managed to seat himself between Everett on one side and a group of four or five people on the other, who only occasionally interrupted their discussion of servants and horses to glance curiously at him, when he would smile confusedly with bleary eyes and they would turn away with lifted brows and continue.

Everett stood up to leave at last, and Denton rose too, treading on one of the ladies' shoes, and mumbling apologies as she winced and stared at him under raised, curved brows.

'You must come again,' Mrs Brown boomed to Everett, then, more coolly, 'I hope you are getting along in your work,' she added to Denton.

Denton walked a little unsteadily down the steps beside Everett, while the boy hailed a rickshaw for them both. The paper lanterns were still softly glowing, but their luminousness seemed tired now, hazy-rimmed.

'You know, I'm afraid I may have made myself a bit ill with all that wine,' Denton confessed blurrily. 'D'you think anyone noticed? I'm not used to it, you see.'

'Oh I shouldn't think so,' Everett answered casually.

He turned to look at Everett anxiously, the words tumbling out of his mouth almost before he was aware of them. 'I'm not used to it, you see, and they kept filling up my glass. D'you think Mr Brown noticed anything?' Before Everett could answer, another nagging thought that had been vaguely troubling Denton all evening rose up like a bubble to the surface of his mind. 'And what's all that about muslin bags Mrs Brown told me? Do they catch mosquitoes in them or what? And spraying me with paraffin - what was the idea?'

'You tie the bags over your ankles.' Everett smiled patronisingly. 'It's just to stop the mozzies biting you. Like mosquito nets.' He leant back, wrinkling his nose as they passed by a festering little canal in which the pale, bloated body of a dog floated on its side. 'Some people prefer paraffin, other prefer muslin, that's all. We've got both in our mess.'

'We don't have anything in our mess.' Denton felt obscurely deprived and aggrieved. 'I hope I don't catch malaria.'

'Malaria? What's that got to do with mosquitoes?' Everett peered into his face. 'You really have had a bit too much.'

'No, I read about it in the paper in England,' Denton persisted doggedly, straining to remember through the mists that were rolling across his mind. 'Before I left home.'

'No, it's from the swampy air,' Everett said decidedly. 'You've only got to smell it.'

In the thick moist heat, with the coolie panting in front of them between his wooden shafts, amidst the shadowy figures, the weird cries of the Chinese, the ripe, rotting, alien smells, Denton's mention of home had tugged loose a little avalanche of self-pitying images. What with malaria and cholera and all those other diseases, he wondered desolately whether he'd ever see Emily or his parents or home again.

16

JOHNSON WAS TEACHING Denton snooker. Lining up his ball carefully on the black, Denton swung the cue gently. The ball kissed the black on the wrong side and rolled smoothly away into the pocket.

'You lifted your head,' Johnson explained consolingly. 'You lifted your head as you hit it. Otherwise you might've got it.' He sipped from the beer he'd placed on the edge of the table, smacked his lips, and leant over to make his shot. The cue slid easily forward over the crook of his finger and thumb, the ball seemed to run inevitably towards the black, there was a click and the black sank into the pocket.

'Well, if we could have a table down at the Woosung forts next week,' Johnson said encouragingly as he finished his beer, 'you'd soon get the hang of it.'

'What's it like down there?' Denton asked. 'I saw them when I arrived, but I couldn't really make much out.'

'Just a guardpost really. We go down there to make sure they don't discharge contraband before they get into the harbour.' He paused as one of the boys approached and muttered to him. 'Where?' Johnson asked, glancing round towards the door. 'All right, bring him up to my room.'

He turned back to Denton with a faintly excited smile. 'One of my informers wants to see me,' he said quietly, as if he didn't want the others to hear. 'Come along, you might find this interesting.'

Denton followed him up to the second floor. At first glance, as Johnson turned the gaslight up, Denton thought the room was completely bare. But looking round again, he saw three straight-backed wooden chairs, which reminded him of a schoolroom, and a watercolour of a sailing ship pinned to the wall. Still, the room was cheerless. There weren't even any curtains. He felt obscurely that its featurelessness was in keeping with the level, monotonous landscape of Johnson's character.

Johnson gestured to the chairs, neatly placed against the wall. 'Make yourself at home,' he said. But as he remained standing himself, Denton merely smiled, then went across to the painting. It was of a three-masted ship with many sails, all billowing before the wind. The sky was blue except for some fluffy, yellowish clouds, there were sea-gulls curling round the mastheads and flecks of white foam on the choppy blue water.

'How d'you like it?' Johnson asked behind him.

'Very nice.'

'Did it myself.'

'Really?' Denton felt he ought to show added interest now, and he stepped nearer, peering at it closer. The figurehead on the bowsprit was a mermaid with golden, wavy hair that fell loosely down round full round breasts with little red nipples. He was slightly shocked. All the mermaids he'd seen before had had ringlets that decently obscured their nakedness. He couldn't reconcile this immodesty with what he knew of Johnson. But perhaps it was all right in art? he wondered doubtfully.

'See the mermaid?' Johnson asked with innocent pride. 'Life-like, eh?'

'Yes. Yes it is,' Denton agreed hastily, looking instead at the row of portholes running along the vessel's side.

There was an almost inaudible rapping on the door. Immediately, a short, lean Chinese slipped inside and closed it. He glanced briefly askance at Denton, then stepped swiftly to the corner, where Johnson followed him. They began speaking in quick, furtive whispers. Denton watched the man's queue twitching as he shook or nodded his head in reply to Johnson's slow, careful questions. It was as though he was trying to convince Johnson while Johnson was sceptical and dubious. He was dressed like a coolie in a cheap, patched black tunic and wide floppy black trousers that ended above his ankles. On his bare feet he wore rope sandals, and Denton noticed how his toes kept curling and uncurling all the time, as though they were squirming with uneasiness. After some time, Johnson counted some notes out into his hand, snapping each one cautiously between his finger and thumb. The man's lips worked silently as he counted the money in time with Johnson. He stuffed it into a pocket inside the waist of his trousers and left, glancing briefly at Denton without expression. There was a white scar on his temple.

'Three o'clock tomorrow morning,' Johnson said, putting his wallet away. 'A cargo of salt. Not very big, but worth catching. Want to come? It's right down river, past the forts.' His faintly nasal voice was still mild and even, as though he was merely inviting Denton to another game of snooker.

17

THE JOURNEY DOWNSTREAM took over an hour. They travelled in the same launch that had taken Mason and Denton to the Alexander the First, with the same chubby coxswain, whom Johnson called 'Lolly' in a tone that was at once familiar and colourless. Standing with Johnson in the prow, where the thick warm air fanned their faces, Denton kept patting and feeling the weight of the revolver he'd draw from the Customs House armoury. 'Not that we ever use them of course, but....' Johnson had said in his drab, monotonous voice.

Two Chinese Customs men with ancient rifles and wild-looking swords squatted in the stern of the boat, chatting loudly with the coxswain. The light from the boiler, glowing on their high-boned cheeks and slanting eyes, gave them, Denton thought, a lurid, sinister appearance. Sparks like little fireflies occasionally darted over their heads in the black smoke streaming from the funnel, and the sparks seemed to increase the fierceness of their looks. Yet all the while Johnson talked on in his amiably inexpressive voice about the hikes he'd taken round Shanghai last winter. As if they were only out for a picnic.

Soon after they'd passed the dark, broken heaps of the forts at Woosung, where the solitary yellow light gleamed on the smooth silk of the water, the launch slid slowly into a little creek and lay still with its engine scarcely turning. There were two hours to wait. The humid heat weighed on Denton's lids. He kept dozing off, despite the dull throb of tension in his stomach, to wake with a startled jerk as his head, loosening on his neck, lolled to one side or the other. The Chinese Customs men and the coxswain were all quiet now and seemed to be asleep. Only Johnson was still alert, humming softly to himself as he watched from the bow.

Denton slithered from one half-awake dream to another until Johnson's hand on his arm awoke him. Johnson's head was cocked on one side, his eyes turned up as though he was listening. Denton listened too. At first he could hear nothing except the run and slap of the water against the boat's hull, but then the soft plash of oars and a steady creaking sound carried faintly across the river. His stomach lifted. There was something menacing about that repeated creaking and plashing.

Without a word the two Chinese had risen together in the stern and gripped their useless-looking rifles. Johnson hissed to the coxswain and a second later the engine rattled and clanked. The deck shook and quivered as the launch thrust out of the creak at full speed. Almost immediately ahead were two sampans, low down in the water. The oarsmen were frantically trying to reach the bank before the launch closed on them easily, and when they saw it was hopeless, they gave up leaning on their oars as the launch came alongside them. The coxswain called out, translating for Johnson, and in a few minutes the sampans had been taken in tow, while the two smugglers sat dejectedly in the well of the launch, bound back to back.

Denton felt let down. It had all been so quick and ordinary.

'They can row quite fast with that single oar, can't they?' Johnson said pleasantly. 'If we'd left it much later, they'd've got clean away.'

Denton glanced at the nearest prisoner. His face in the flickering light of the boiler was leathery and grim. It seemed all shadows below the eyes, as if the cheeks had been hollowed out by hunger or disease. His lids looked inflamed, the whites of his eyes bloodshot. The man stared out vacantly over the river, while beside him the two Customs men were playing a game with little narrow playing cards no wider than two fingers, laughing boisterously. The coxswain listened, grinning widely, turning his head now and then to join in the banter.

Johnson was lighting his pipe. 'What will happen to those two?' Denton asked him.

'Oh well, you can't tell with a Chinese court.' He drew and puffed, the tobacco glowing bright and dull in the charred bowl of his pipe. 'Depends if they've got any pull, really.'

'But isn't there a set penalty?'

'Anything from death to being in the cangue for a bit. That's like the stocks, the cangue.' Johnson looked at his pipe, pushed the smouldering tobacco down and placed the moist stem back between his teeth. 'It's shame really, isn't? They're probably opium addicts, have to smuggle to get the money for their opium.' He shrugged with detached resignation, still as uninvolved as if they'd been talking about a picnic spoilt by rain. 'Bit of a shame, but there you are.'

Soon he was wondering aloud about the possibility of taking a trip to Hankow at Christmas, with the bounty from the capture. 'You can have some lovely hikes round there, you know, when the weather's cooler,' he said equably. 'Have to watch out for bandits, of course.'

Denton only half listened, gazing again at the prisoners' faces. They didn't look as though they'd have much pull. His eyelids drooped treacherously. How sore and heavy they felt. How sticky his skin was, despite the gentle fanning of the air. As he rubbed his eyes, he was reminded of the bloodshot eyes of the prisoner nearest him. He glanced at him again. The man's eyes stared out blank and motionless over the dark water and the dark, empty fields. As though the darkness had got right inside his eyes, inside his head, Denton thought. Johnson's voice flowed on uninterruptedly while Denton only half-listened. Then suddenly, as if a light had gone out, the misty shapes before his tired eyes were blotted out by sleep.

18

Dear Mother and Father,

Thanks for your letter. Sorry to hear Father has not been well lately. I hope it will soon clear up. I have more or less settled in here now, although some things still take a bit of getting used to. The food and climate affected my stomach for a time, but I am keeping well, apart from a few minor upsets.

You should see my quarters. They are rather grand, as I think I told you on my last letter. I have my own bedroom, living room and bathroom. The living room and bedroom have verandas and you can look over the houses opposite to the river and docks. I obtained some curtains and chair covers complete with antimacassars in an auction in the mess. They used to belong to someone who has now gone home.

The new work has kept me rather busy. It is often interesting. The port here is actually the third largest in the world. We have to inspect all the ships before they are allowed to unload cargo or sail. Sometimes we get meals on board, and then it is always in the first class saloon, which is often pretty grand!

I actually took part in the arrest of some smugglers last week! We caught some people in sampans (small boats) who were smuggling salt, after waiting in an ambush for them until three in the morning. Very exciting, my first capture! You get a bonus of 10% of the value of any contraband you catch, but I don't suppose I'll get much of it this time as I was really only taken along for the experience of it. But next time perhaps I'll make a real haul.

You would be amazed at the number of well-to-do people there are here. I had dinner with the deputy assistant commissioner a week or two ago. He lives in a grand house with lots of servants, and I had to get evening dress for it. There were a lot of good class people there. The table seated twenty-four!

I have offered to join the choir in the Anglican cathedral. It is supposed to be the largest and best in Asia. So I shall be able to keep my voice in practice. I met the Dean after service last Sunday. He is friendly and I am going to have tea with him the first Saturday next month. He does not know any of the clergy at Enfield, though. He has been out here fifteen years.

There is a native city and an International Settlement (mainly run by the British of course!), and a French Concession in Shanghai. The native population is about three quarters of a million and the whites altogether about twelve thousand. The French Concession is supposed to be rather scruffy, by the way. I have not seen it yet, except from the river.

The enclosed photograph shows me in my full working uniform. How do I look? I am having lessons in Chinese, which most people say is impossible to learn. But we get a special increment if we do learn, so I am going to try!

Must close this now to catch the next ship.

Love from

John.

PS Just received your letter posted in July. Glad to hear Father is better. Had a nice letter from Emily in the same post.

Denton placed his pen in the ink well and leant back as he read the letter through. He had taken his shirt off, but his skin was still moist with sweat. His forearms felt slippery against the grainy wood of the desk.

He read the sentence. They used to belong to someone who has now gone home with a little satisfied pursing of his lips. He imagined himself casually mentioning it to them a few years from now, when he returned bronzed and senior in rank to marry Emily.

'You remember that letter when I said I'd got some things that used to belong to someone who'd gone home? Well, I didn't want to worry you, but actually....'

He slipped the photograph into the envelope, folded it and slid the letter in after it. Sealing the thick creamy flap and writing the address in a hand that was larger and bolder than usual, he reflected how little he'd really told his parents. But then he couldn't very well tell them of the dark and deadly side of things - they'd only be upset and worry. He couldn't tell them that he'd seen a man's head chopped off, that he slept in a dead man's bed and wrote on a dead man's desk, that corpses floated in the river and were netted like fish every morning, that beggars held up dead babies to pluck your heart strings. He couldn't tell them of the girl in Mason's room, of the 'honey boats' that carried the nightsoil up to the farming villages at dawn, the nightsoil that was packed round the vegetables he subsequently ate, boiled of course, in the mess.

He pushed back his chair and put on his shirt. There were some things one just didn't tell, he thought, with a touch of pride at his own manliness, one simply had to pretend.

Tell who, pretend to who? His parents, or himself? Or the whole world? It wasn't until he was halfway down the stairs, tapping the hard, sharp edge of the envelope against his palm, that the disturbing question occurred to him. And then, after a moment's dim and uneasy pondering, as he reached the tiled lobby, it was the impropriety of the grammar that lingered in his mind, not the question itself. 'Tell whom,' he muttered under his breath. 'Pretend to whom.'

19

THE WEEK AT THE WOOSUNG FORTS passed slowly and vacantly for Denton. There was so little to do, it was like seven Sundays, he thought. Only without church. When they were not inspecting the junks and barges that infrequently put in for Customs clearance, Johnson would go wandering round the old stone buildings, many of them creeper-covered ruins that hadn't been touched since the British captured the forts in the opium wars sixty years before. Although it was late September and the sun was lower in the sky, the steamy heat seemed just as relentless. Yet Johnson would scramble tirelessly over fallen parapets, peer through crumbling gun embrasures and explore overgrown paths, even at midday when the sun was fiercest and his clothes were drenched with sweat. At first Denton went along too, unwilling to seem unsociable; and, despite the heat, he too enjoyed exploring the place, especially when they followed tracks that led to intensely green paddy fields with peasants working in them, or to placid fish tanks, or sudden little temples, half-derelict and no bigger than a room, in which sweet-smelling joss sticks from some unknown worshipper were still burning amongst the cobwebs and litter. But Johnson's insistently monotonous voice and interminable commentaries on everything they saw began to grate on him more and more. There was nothing, no matter how obvious or insignificant, that escaped Johnson's laboriously detailed explanations. 'That butterfly only lives for six days,' he would announce as Denton watched the fluttering spread of its gorgeous wings among the leaves. 'It lays two hundred eggs.' Or 'That's a joss stick. They burn for over an hour.' Denton had only wanted to stand and look, to absorb the scene through his senses, his imagination, to feel it working on him through the silence and the heat, but Johnson would be counting the bricks aloud or calculating how long ago the joss stick must have been lit.

So he began to make excuses. He had letters to write, he would mutter a little awkwardly, or his Chinese to study. And Johnson, unperturbed, would walk off alone along one of the almost overgrown paths, taking his sketch book with him.

'What's happened to those two smugglers?' Denton asked him as they sat at tiffin one day in the bare but cool stone hut that served as their mess. Johnson had just come back from one of his 'hikes,' his face red and glistening with sweat.

'Oh, I haven't heard. It usually takes a few months at least before they come to trial. I'll have to give evidence then, unless they're satisfied with my written report.' He shrugged, picking up a shred of chicken with his chopsticks, which he was patiently teaching Denton to use. 'You never can tell, they might be off scot-free by now. I might never hear of them again. And it'll take at least a couple of months before I get my bounty for the salt, too. Won't be much, of course, but I should be able to hire a boat to get me up to Hankow.' His jaws munched slowly and regularly - rather in the way he talked, Denton thought. 'Hope it comes through before Christmas. Look, try picking up a bean with your chopsticks. Like this. That's a good test of your skill.'

Denton felt a little prick of disappointment and hurt that Johnson unquestioningly assumed the bounty would all go to him, but he tried to reason the smart away. After all, he told himself glumly, as the bean kept slipping off the tips of his chopsticks, his fingers aching with the effort to control them, after all, he'd only gone along to watch, he'd been no help at all, so why should he expect any of the bounty to come his way? He laid his chopsticks down on the plate almost sullenly while Johnson methodically, obliviously, demonstrated with his own how you must hold the bottom one tight with the crook of your finger and thumb against the middle knuckle of your second finger.

'Have you got any plans for Christmas?' Johnson asked casually. Denton sensed an invitation was in the offing to join Johnson on his trip to Hankow and inwardly he resisted it. He looked away uncomfortably as the boy took the plates, guilty over the chagrin he felt about the bounty, guilty that Johnson's blandly persistent friendliness was so tedious. Could it be that overbearing, immoral Mason and wordly-wise Jones secretly interested him more? 'There was some talk about going on a houseboat and doing a bit of shooting,' he said vaguely, continuing to avoid Johnson's mild, solicitous gaze. 'Mason and Jones were talking about it. I don't really know of course. I might be on duty, I suppose.' He glanced apologetically at Johnson's still perspiring face.

Johnson's brown eyes glimmered in their depths, but then he nodded and smiled wryly, almost as if he'd expected all along that Denton wouldn't want to join him. After a few moments' silence he set off for the river bank with his sketchbook, the wry but not unfriendly smile still on his lips. Watching him walk away with his firm, energetic stride, Denton thought remorsefully how solitary he looked, recalling too that he never seemed to be with anyone for long. In the mess he would join a table and converse in his affable yet lifeless manner, and then, when the meal was over, he would be left sitting there by himself. And in the billiards room or the lounge, it always seemed the same - eventually he would be left alone while the others had formed groups with their backs towards him. Was that why he'd been so friendly to him, because he was shunned by all the others?

20

SITTING AT HIS DESK one evening, learning his vocabulary for his next Chinese lesson, Denton kept letting his eyes stray to the photograph of Emily propped against the wall in front of him, next to the picture of his parents. After he murmured each word aloud three times in what he hoped was the right tone, he would try to write the character, then allow himself to gaze at the misty, sepia-coloured portrait in its oval frame. He would purse his lips in an imagined kiss on Emily's, which he couldn't see properly as the photograph was taken in profile, and imagine the moist fresh pressure of her mouth as she responded. Sometimes his eyes would close and he would imagine her body pressing against his, soft and round and giving. Then, before his imagination had stirred him too far, he would open his eyes and check the strokes of the character he'd just drawn.

He was drawing the character for 'like' when there was a cheerful double-knock on the door.

'Come in?' He half-turned, brush in hand.

It was Johnson. Denton's brows rose slightly in surprise. Since that week at the forts, there had been a faint coolness between them, though more on his part than on Johnson's. Denton had started to avoid him except when others were there as well, feeling a slight, but distinct and solid wall inside his chest which he had to surmount whenever Johnson approached him with his affable benevolence.

'Hello.' Johnson closed the door and smiled blandly. 'Busy?'

'I'm learning my Chinese.' Denton dipped his brush in the ink and waited, his hand poised.

'Ah.'

'For tomorrow's lesson.'

'I didn't know you were working at it.' He came across to the desk and looked over Denton's shoulder.

'Just one lesson a week.' Denton held himself rigid, as though afraid Johnson was going to touch him. He gazed steadfastly at the moist, pointed tip of the brush.

'Jolly good,' Johnson said approvingly, yet absently. He leant further over to examine the character; yet, again, he seemed to do so absently. 'It rather looks as though we've got an unpleasant job to do,' he said, straightening up.

'Oh?' When Denton glanced round he saw that Johnson was smiling his usual equable smile, whatever the unpleasant job might be.

'Yes. That fellow that gave us the information about the salt-smugglers - remember him?'

'Yes?'

It wasn't 'us' when you were talking about the bounty, Denton thought with a fleeting sense of recollected smart. It was all 'me' then.

'It looks as though he may have been murdered.'

'Murdered?'

'Mm. They want us to go and identify the body.' Johnson went on dispassionately. 'Won't take long.'

'Us?' Denton exclaimed in alarm. 'But I hardly even saw him!'

'Well, it does help if there are two of us,' Johnson insisted amiably. 'It's a bit difficult to identify them if they've been mutilated, as I gather this one has. I mean, you might've noticed something about him that would help.'

Denton felt, a tide of sick fearfulness washing up his stomach. 'I didn't even look at him,' he protested weakly.

'The police are downstairs waiting,' Johnson went on as if he hadn't heard. 'Won't take half an hour. The mortuary's just round the corner. You'll be back at your Chinese in no time.'

Despite his unwillingness and his squeamish apprehension, Denton tamely pushed back his chair, slipped on his tunic and began silently buttoning it. Johnson leant over the desk again, gazing at the photographs.

'Your parents?' he asked equably.

'Yes.'

'And your sister?'

'I haven't got a sister.' He compressed his lips, then surrendered under Johnson's smiling, innocently inquiring eyes. 'It's my, er, fiancée, actually.' He looked away uncomfortably.

'Oh, fiancée?' Johnson strolled towards the door. 'Very nice' he added perfunctorily.

An English inspector and a Sikh constable were waiting downstairs, the inspector sitting in a cane chair, impatiently slapping the arm with the flat of his hand, the Sikh standing monumentally by the main door. 'Ah, there you are,' the inspector said gruffly as he got up. 'Shall we go?'

The Sikh led the way through the narrow streets, the others followed three abreast. Hawkers were selling from their stalls beneath hissing paraffin lamps - tea, food, fruits and vegetables - and a fortune-teller sat against the wall beside two old men squatting over a Chinese chess board, while a silent crowd stood round them, watching each move. Denton glanced at them all abstractedly and scarcely heard the strident, bargaining voices all round him, his mind tremulously foreseeing every kind of mutilation that a body could suffer; but Johnson was as undisturbed and detached as ever; talking on in that monotonous, faintly twangy voice of his. The inspector merely grunted noncommittally while Denton walked slightly apart, as though an invisible film separated him from both the street and his companions. 'Old Derek's all right,' he remembered Jones saying as they left Johnson picking his teeth in solitude at the dinner table one evening. 'Only he does drone on and on, doesn't he?' That droning jarred on him now more than ever.

Denton felt a new soft, squelchy quiver of fear as the Sikh led the way past a blue-glazed gas light into the mortuary. A few Chinese in white overalls were gossiping loudly at the back of a large hall, in which were several rows of almost empty benches. At the other end of the hall, guarding a gloomy corridor, a clerk sat at a high wooden desk, making entries in a register. The inspector spoke to him curtly and the clerk ran his finger up and down the columns of one page after another.

A wailing noise started abruptly at the far end of the corridor and everyone glanced round, except the clerk, whose finger was still running up and down the columns in his register. A frail old Chinese woman in black tunic and trousers was led out by two younger men who held her by the arms. She was throwing her head about and shouting wordlessly, yet her eyes seemed quite dry. Some of the attendants gossiping at the back looked incuriously round at her as they talked without any change in their voices. The police inspector glanced sharply at her, frowning.

'Number thirty-four,' the clerk said at last.

The inspector and Johnson followed an attendant while Denton went along behind them, clutching at every delay.

The air in the corridor seemed cool although there were no windows. The attendant opened a door and they walked into a cell-like room, in the walls of which were little tunnels with cloth flags hanging down in front of them, each cloth with a number stencilled on it in black paint. Here the air was really cold and for the first time since he'd come to Shanghai, Denton shivered. The attendant looked slowly and lazily for the appropriate flag, and Denton felt his heart thudding softly, his fingers clenching as, with a bored sigh, the man lifted the cloth and pulled out a stretcher on silent, rubber wheels. A naked body lay on the stretcher, packed in ice, with many congealed stab and slash wounds on its waxen face and chest. Denton shuddered as he looked at the arms. Both hands had been severed at the wrists.

'Twenty-two wounds,' the inspector was reading from the card pinned to the stretcher at the mutilated head. 'Hands missing, face seriously disfigured. Found in Soochow Creek near Garden Bridge, seven fifteen this morning. No identification marks, about thirty to thirty-five years old.' He turned to Johnson, laying the card down and wiping his fingers fastidiously. 'This your chap? How long's he been missing?'

'I haven't heard from him for two or three weeks,' Johnson reflected in his detached, twangy voice. 'But this chap's in such a mess it's really hard to tell.'

'I suppose we've got his finger-prints,' the inspector grunted. 'Otherwise they wouldn't've bothered to chop his paws off. Looks as though they didn't like the look of his face much, either.'

Denton gazed at the corpse while the other two talked. Strangely enough, now that he'd seen it, it wasn't so terrible after all, he felt with a surprised, buoyant sense of relief. The rigidity of the limbs, of the feet stiffly sticking up, the waxy pallor of the skin beneath its almond surface, the blocks of ice on which it lay, and which were packed round it, even between the legs, all seemed to dehumanize the corpse. It was hard to conceive of that lifeless marble thing as the living, breathing, furtively swift informer he'd seen a few weeks before in Johnson's room. Denton's gaze moved a little guiltily up the legs to the genitals, dropping from a little triangular patch of black fur between the spread thighs like a piece of limp gristle with a thick, crooked blue vein in it. So the Chinese weren't entirely devoid of body hair, the thought came to him, as though that were the issue he'd really come to settle. The belly was flat, the ribs starkly visible beneath the skin. Finally he gazed at the stumps where the hands should have been, blue round the skin and red inside, with jagged-edged faces of white, crushed bone. Instead of the horror he'd felt at first, now he felt only a distant repulsion, as if he were in a butcher's storeroom. The stab wounds in the chest were blue round the edges too, and he thought with what force the knife must have been driven into the flesh. The wounds' mouths were crusted with dried blood.

It's like a piece of meat, he thought. It's just a piece of meat. And although his heart was thudding steadily against the hollow wall of his body, he no longer feared he would faint or throw up. The face had been slashed all over. The confusions and ridges from the cuts made it almost impossible for him to compare the lifeless, disfigured visage with the dimly-remembered face of the informer. Besides, the lifelessness seemed so absolute that he couldn't really believe it had ever been alive. That was what took the horror away. At the actual moment of death, with terror gripping the muscles and screaming through the eyes, it might have been different.

'What do you think, John?' Johnson used his Christian name for the first time, with a familiar little smile.

Denton shook his head slowly. 'I don't know....' He felt them both glancing at him for some sign of weakness, but he pretended not to notice, looking thoughtfully down at the head again, the sightless eyes, dead and pebbly, the skin all round them lacerated and swollen. Then he noticed a little whitish line from an old scar across the temple, and instantly recalled seeing the same mark of Johnson's informer when the man had hurried past him to the door.

'Yes, it is the same man,' he said suddenly and decisively. 'That scar on his forehead - I noticed it in your room that night, just as he was leaving.'

They both bent over the head, while the attendant hawked loudly and impatiently behind them.

'This one, you mean?' the inspector pointed.

Johnson pushed out his underlip consideringly. 'Well, it could be,' he pronounced almost grudgingly at last. 'I can't say I really remember exactly, but ... yes, it could be.'

'I'm sure it's the same scar,' Denton said coldly, as if his words had been doubted.

The inspector stood back and gestured to the attendant, who was now belching quietly. With a bored, disdainful shake of his head, the man rolled the corpse back into its grave-like slot.

'Well, we can try and locate some next of kin, then,’ the inspector said briskly. 'You haven't got any ideas, I suppose? No? Just let me have his name and any address you've got for him, would you? Chilly in here, isn't it?'

As the inspector opened the door, Denton saw a little grey shape scurrying along the wall. It ran over the inspector's shoe and disappeared into the corridor.

'God damn it! A rat!' the inspector shouted with sudden intensity, as though for all his apparent unconcern, his nerves had really been stretched taut in there. The attendant slammed the door after them, chuckling in his phlegmy throat. 'Him too cold,' he muttered. 'Him not likee cold.'

'Pity about that, if it really was my chap,' Johnson ruminated evenly on the way back to the mess. 'He was quite a useful informer. Don't know if I'll find anyone as good to take his place. Still I suppose something'll turn up.... If it really was him, of course.'

'I'm quite sure it was the same man,' Denton said shortly, nettled by Johnson's persistent doubt.

Johnson didn't reply. He had stopped to bargain with a grey-haired woman hawker who was squatting beside a basket of oranges.

'Here you are, have one,' he said as they walked on. 'Yes, I didn't know you were engaged. Of course a lot of people are when they first come out here, but then it often all falls apart.'

Denton cupped his palm round the globe of the orange without answering. Johnson's voice had seemed to express satisfaction, relish even, about the disintegration of engagements.

'What are you doing next Saturday, by the way?' Johnson asked obliviously as they turned towards the steps of the mess. 'I was wondering whether you'd like to come for a little stroll, see a bit more of the place. Bit too hot still for a real hike, of course.'

Johnson had avoided looking at him while he spoke, perhaps to make the invitation seem more casual. But there was almost a pleading note in that flat, monotonous voice as he ended.

'I'm afraid I've got another invitation,' Denton excused himself thankfully. 'I'm going to tea with the Dean of the cathedral,' he added with a touch of pride.

'The Dean?' Johnson repeated with an indifference Denton felt sure was feigned. 'Well, some other time then, eh?'

It was not until he was going to bed that Denton thought of the rat again and imagined it nibbling at the frozen corpses in the mortuary. Apprehensively, with a suddenly shivering back, he looked round the skirting board of the room before he turned out the light.

21

THE REVEREND GEORGE EATON had an emaciated, ascetic looking face, but the cakes his amah set before Denton in the Deanery were rich and plentiful. And it wasn't till the plate was empty, Denton having politely declined the last cake - which the Dean promptly popped whole into his mouth - that with preliminary throat-clearing he broached spiritual matters.

'Well, John,' he said as he dabbed his thin, crumb-laden lips with his napkin, 'Shanghai is very interesting of course, but it does offer many ...' his lids lowered tactfully '... many temptations. Which it is often hard for young men to resist out here. Immorality, particularly in relations between the sexes, is, I'm afraid, a byword.' He paused to confront Denton uncompromisingly with his deep-set hazel eyes. 'A byword,' he repeated sternly. 'As I expect you may have noticed.'

Thinking of the Chinese girl in Mason's room, Denton blushed, as though he himself were guilty. Perhaps he was guilty, the thought occurred to him as Mr Eaton finished, for his recollection of the girl was somehow fascinating and thrilling. 'Well, yes,' he said uneasily, 'I have noticed something of the kind.'

'A byword.' The Dean nodded emphatically, his eyes still probing Denton's. 'Our Christian Youth Fellowship is a bulwark against that kind of temptation.'

Denton recalled the high, rouged cheekbones of the Chinese girl, her pale, slim legs beneath Mason's hanging tunic. Were Emily's legs as pale and slim? He caught himself blushing again under the Dean's disconcerting unblinking gaze. 'Er, as a matter of fact I'm engaged,' he muttered defensively.

'Already?' The Dean's white brows arched in disapproving incredulity.

'Oh no, not out here,' he spluttered hastily. 'I mean before I left home. We got engaged before I left.'

'Ah, I see.' The Dean's eyes relaxed their grip, and slowly let him go at last. He leant back with a sigh of relief folding his hands behind his back. There were damp sweat marks under the arms of his white cassock. 'And when is your fiancée coming out to join you?'

'Well, she has to finish her course first - she's training to be a teacher - and then it's, er, well, a question of money really.'

The Dean nodded understandingly, then, glancing up at the failing punkah over their heads, called out in an unexpectedly sharp voice. Slowly the punkah's wing-like flapping quickened and the cooler air fanned their faces in continual draughts once more.

'These people are really incorrigible, you know, John,' he smiled resignedly, shaking his head. 'Always going to sleep. One mustn't blame them too much of course, but it's most irritating. The heat has affected their pulses over the centuries, you see. Their pulses are slow and languid now, they are completely enervated. But we are making gradual progress.' He held up his hand when Denton nodded, as though warding off any interruption, however sympathetic. 'We are making gradual progress. My friends in the out-stations tell me, for instance, that more and more of the natives are joining their churches. We may yet see a truly Christian China in the not too distant future. Not I, perhaps,' he smiled a theatrically wry smile, shaking his grey head again in rueful recognition of his years, 'but you may. And it is people like you who must set the example, John. The white man, the Christian in China. We are all of us missionaries in our way, not just the clergy.'

The Dean turned to look at the amah, sleek and plump in her white tunic and wide black trousers. She was calling in a quiet, sibilant whisper from the door, smiling widely.

'Master, the man come.'

The Dean rose with sudden energy and went to meet a tall, thin Chinese in a long grey silk gown who was already gliding into the room. The amah's whisper, and the Dean's haste, as if he didn't want Denton to see his visitor, suggested something confidential, or even secret, and Denton stood up awkwardly, ready to leave.

'Good afternoon, Reverend,' the Chinese said loudly, his eyes smiling behind his rimless glasses. Then, after only a moment's hesitation. 'Good afternoon, Mr Den-tong. How is my friend Mr May-song?'

Denton frowned in puzzlement, then, noticing the man's long, curved nail, suddenly remembered. It was Mr Ching of course, the agent from the Russian ship.

'You know each other?' the Dean asked, on a note of almost displeased surprise.

'I have met Mr Den-tong in the lines of duty,' Ching answered, smiling gaily. 'If I may have a few words with you, Reverend, I will not intrude on your pleasant chatting any longer.'

The Dean ushered him out of the room without a backward glance, closing the door behind them. Denton sat down again, gazing up at the white-washed ceiling, where the punkah, as if on a signal, was wearily slowing and resting. He felt his nerves slackening and resting too, and realised how tense he was with the Dean, as tense as he was with nearly everyone, he thought sadly.

When the Dean returned a few minutes later, the punkah at once began its regular sweep again. 'A little business matter,' he apologised. 'A little property I am negotiating to buy in Hongkew. If you ever have the opportunity to invest in land in Hongkew, John,' his voice strengthened, losing that faintly disconcerted and embarrassed tone it had had when Ching was in the room, 'I strongly advise you to do so. I understand that property prices are bound to appreciate there as Shanghai continues to expand.'

'Oh I see.'

'Yes indeed. And now that you're contemplating matrimony,' he wagged his finger genially, 'You have an obligation to think of the future, eh?'

'Yes, I suppose so,' Denton smiled sheepishly.

'Now where were we? Oh yes, the Christian Youth Fellowship. We're having our next meeting on Thursday. A little talk about the doctrines of Dr Pusey and the position of the Church of England with regard to the sacraments.' His voice, alert and energetic when he talked about property, was taking on its stately, pious tone again now. It put Denton fleetingly in mind of a man changing into his stiff best suit after work. 'Mr Fenton will start the discussion. A missionary near Hankow. A deep thinker, I believe, as well as a tireless missionary. And his topic is of fundamental importance, of course.'

Leaving the Deanery half an hour later, so unlike, in its white, lofty spaciousness, the cosy picture that the word drew in his English mind, Denton wandered aimlessly down the narrow, unpaved alleys towards the Bund. He held his hat in his hand and walked in the shade that the walls threw from the sloping afternoon sun. Rickshaw coolies hailed him importunately, hawkers eyed him appraisingly from their stalls, women labourers heaving heavy stones on their backs staggered past him towards a new building, sweat oozing down their cheeks and straining necks. It was too late for the concert in the park and too early for dinner in the mess. He felt a slow, heavy swell of dejection rolling over him as, reaching the Bund, he watched fashionably-dressed men and women sauntering away from the park gates and climbing into cabs or sedan chairs, to be carried laughing and smiling away into the evening. It was a nameless dejection that had been growing quietly inside him while talking to the Dean, a depression that seemed to crush him silently with its suffocating weight. An old beggar-woman accosted him, mumbling words he couldn't understand and insistently shaking a scratched and dented red tin box in which a few copper cents rattled together. Her wretched little box, symbol of the hopeless, dreary life it represented, seemed suddenly to epitomise his own life too, although he couldn't have said why. He took out a dollar and recklessly dropped it in the box, as if he could buy off his own depression with such extravagant generosity. At once more beggars appeared, women, children, men without arms, blind, deaf, dumb, diseased and deformed, young and old. He stood helplessly, gazing at the seething, beseeching, clinging little crowd, shaking his head against their insistent whining murmur, while the homeward stream of Europeans flowed steadily past him from the park, their eyes stiffly unseeing or ironically amused. He knew that he ought to go back and practise his Chinese or write another letter home. But the image of his silent empty rooms, of the mess where the rest of them would be drinking, playing billiards or vacantly lying back in the cane chairs of the lounge, yawning with boredom, only added another dark weight to his depression. He ploughed impulsively through the softly plucking hands of the beggars and stepped into a waiting rickshaw.

'Where to, master?' the coolie asked, lifting the shafts. He was a young man, not much older than himself, with a wispy moustache that gave him a sardonic, mocking expression.

Denton didn't know. He pointed vaguely along the Bund.

The coolie nodded, heaved against the bar and trotted off. Watching his sandalled feet slap on the hard uneven road. Denton looked away over the river a trifle guiltily. A long white liner was swinging slowly round in the middle channel, turning to sail downstream away from Shanghai. The setting sun glowed on its side, gleaming brokenly on the portholes and washing the white paint with a faint rosy hue. The sight of the liner leaving, perhaps for England, sent a pang through him and he suddenly understood his dejection. He was lonely, that was all. The letter he'd been waiting for from Emily hadn't come and there wouldn't be another mail ship for a week. It was Saturday afternoon. If he were in England, he'd be walking with her beside the Lea perhaps, or going to her parents' for tea. For a moment he wanted just to talk to someone, just to tell someone about Emily and him - he even considered going back to the mess and calling on Johnson. But no, that wouldn't be any use. He stared at the river, where the liner had completed its turn. A deep, mournful bellow from its siren tore the hanging stillness of the air. He wished longingly that he could be on board, sailing home. The coolie slowed his steps and glanced back over his shoulder, as though divining Denton's thoughts. But Denton waved him on, and the man grunted as he quickened his pace again. The back of his shirt was dark with sweat.

They came imperceptibly to a part of the city he hadn't seen before. The change was subtle but definite. The streets seemed even narrower, the canals more filthy, the smells stronger and more rotten. Then the rickshaw swung under an arch into a main street, and he saw the name - rue Molière. He was in the French Settlement. He looked about him wonderingly, and even a little anxiously - the French Settlement was full of crime, so people said. But there was something appealing about it. French names appeared on the shops, a French sailor with a red pompom in the middle of his hat was strolling along the street, and he heard the rapid, voluble murmur of the French language being spoken behind him. Looking round, he saw that it was a lady and a little fair-haired girl in a rickshaw. The lady was holding a parasol slantwise against the last rays of the sun and the little girl was peering round its scalloped edge as she talked. There was something calm and peaceful about them that caught his heart and he kept secretly looking back.

Soon the lady's rickshaw stopped outside a large house, set back behind a white-washed wall, through which streaks of an older, darker, colour showed. Denton watched the lady step gracefully down, holding her bunched, grey skirt in one hand, resting the parasol on her shoulder with the other. The little girl followed her, skipping through the arched entrance in the peeling wall. He felt a sudden impulse to tell his coolie to stop, to take him back, so that he could watch the two of them walking along the drive to the house that lay concealed behind the peeling wall. But he said nothing. He let them float away like some vision - what sort of vision he couldn't say. A vision of serenity, perhaps? He felt some perceptible lightening of his self-pity, as though the lady and the little girl had left a promise of comfort for him as they slipped so peacefully away.

After a short time the coolie's pace slackened again and he stopped outside a tall narrow house with green-washed walls, lowering the shafts expectantly. Denton looked from the coolie to the house. The door was open and a very large Chinese sat toad-like beside it in a cane chair on the shaded porch. At first Denton thought he was asleep, but then one lid slowly opened, followed by the other. The man regarded him unwinkingly from under the wide brim of his straw hat.

The coolie gestured Denton to get down, panting lightly. 'What is this?' Denton asked in his lame Shanghainese. The coolie replied unintelligibly, gesturing again. The huge man on the porch heaved himself ponderously out of his chair, and Denton heard the wood creak and groan. He was grossly fat and rolled from side to side as he walked, his whole body quivering at every step. He glanced from the coolie to Denton, his face immobile except for the flickering of his little brown eyes. 'M'sieu'?' he asked in a calm, even voice. 'Vous d‚sirez?'

Denton shrugged. He had never heard a Chinese speaking French before, and it seemed outlandish. At the same time there was something insolent in the fat man's examining, undeferential gaze. 'Do you speak English?' he asked.

The fat man turned his head slowly to the coolie, ignoring Denton, and spoke to him quietly. Then he turned slowly back, gazing unblinkingly into Denton's eyes again. 'Vous désirez une jeune fille?'

'I don't understand,' Denton said blankly, in English, then in Shanghainese.

The man sighed impatiently and brought his round, heavy face closer, speaking slowly and distinctly as if to an idiot. 'You ... want ... this?' he slapped his groin suggestively.

'What? No!' Denton pulled back indignantly, as if he'd been hit.

The gross man turned away, shrugging his massive shoulders indifferently. He muttered something to the coolie, at which the coolie, glancing back at Denton, gave a short, derisive laugh, then waddled quivering back to his chair, where he slowly subsided. Again the chair creaked and groaned.

'Go back,' Denton said weakly, but the coolie laughed, gesturing again to the open door. At the same time footsteps sounded down the dark, wooden stairway inside the hall and a man came out into the light. He was a European, dark-haired and sallow, about thirty years old, with a slim, black moustache. He walked swiftly down the path and away, glancing momentarily at Denton. 'Bonsoir, m'sieur,' he nodded casually, raising his elegant straw hat with a brown silk band round it. There was a white carnation in his lapel.

The coolie was gesturing encouragingly again, but Denton adamantly shook his head. 'Bund!' he said tensely, making a turning movement with his hand. 'Bund!'

The coolie shrugged at last, and picked up the shafts wagging his head slowly in amused disbelief.

The rickshaw lurched into a pot-hole, as if the coolie was no longer bothering how he pulled such an unworthy passenger, and Denton glanced stealthily back at the house. Beneath his almost panicky abhorrence, he was secretly enticed by the allure of that open door with its vague carnal promise. His heart was beating more rapidly as he felt a guilty sense of regret and self-reproach that he hadn't dared enter. He tried resolutely to think of Emily, of the Reverend Eaton's exhortation, of the Christian Youth Fellowship and Dr Pusey's doctrines, but all the pure and earnest images that he summoned up seemed pale and drab against the forbidden excitement of that open door beside the gross and sensual Chinese. In a quarter of an hour, he thought bewilderedly, he'd passed from the serenity of the lady with the little girl to the sordid turmoil of lust - how was such a thing possible?

The evening stretched out before him, stale, lonely, and empty, and the dark crushing swell of his depression rolled over him once more.

22

IN NOVEMBER THE HEAT at last began to weaken, like an iron hand slowly loosening its grip on the city. Denton could wear his uniform without immediately sweating, even at midday. The evenings were cool, and at night he slept now beneath a light cotton blanket. The mosquitoes were less troublesome too, as if the drier, cooler air was too thin to carry them.

Mr Brown seemed moderately satisfied with his progress, though not to the point of inviting him to dinner again, and not long after the Moon Festival, when the Chinese wandered through the street with coloured lanterns hung on springy twigs, Denton had been able to write proudly to his parents that he was no longer merely a training probationary inspector, but a probationary inspector in his own right, inspecting vessels in his own section of the wharves, often without any supervision at all. His Chinese, too, had been improving, and Mr Wei, who always perched on the edge of the same chair in his room, his head alertly cocked like an eager little bird, was able to hold simple conversations with him in the language.

It was in November, too, that the Shanghai Race Club held its annual meeting. A party of officers went on the last day, when the best horses and riders were competing.

'They're gentlemen riders, of course,' Johnson explained to Denton, as they stood by the paddock watching the horses being led round. 'They don't have professional jockeys or anything like that here.'

Denton nodded, moving a little away. His coolness towards Johnson had begun to turn into a mild revulsion, as though Johnson were always standing too close to him, brushing his sleeve, or accidentally nudging him. Besides, he was irritated by Johnson's quiet, smug assumption that he was in all things Denton's guide and tutor. He turned to Jones, who was discussing with Mason which horses to bet on. 'Whose colours are they?' he asked, pointing to a pony that had just come in.

'Jardine's. And that's the Bank's. Moller's over there. That's Moller riding himself.' Jones raised a quizzical eyebrow. 'You a betting man?'

Denton shook his head deprecatingly. 'I've never been to a race before.'

'I'd put twenty dollars on Jeremiah, Jonesy,' Mason said confidently, looking up from his card.

'Do you know a lot about horses?' Denton asked with grudging respect. Horses had always signified gentlemen and aristocrats to him.

'Used to be in the cavalry,' Mason threw out as he moved away.

'Really? Where?'

But Mason didn't answer, walking towards the stands as though he hadn't heard.

Jones leant towards Denton confidentially. 'One thing it doesn't do to ask too much out here is where people were before they came,' he breathed in Denton's ear. His breath smelt of beer. 'You going to bet?'

Denton shook his head. 'No money to spare,' he said with a show of regret, although in fact it was his moral scruples that prevented him. Noticing that Johnson had clamped onto someone else now, he edged away, strolling with Jones towards the stands. Crowds of jostling Chinese thronged the stalls. Hawkers were selling tea and bottled drinks that lay in metal boxes of slushy, melting ice. Bookmakers bawled out the odds while their assistants took money from the men and women who clamoured round them. A melon-seller was deftly slicing the great round fruit with a long thin-bladed knife into perfect half-moon segments. 'That's what they stab people with,' Jones said nonchalantly. 'Goes right through and out the other side. Sharp as a razor.' Denton thought of Johnson's informer with his twenty-two wounds.

They sauntered on, past the mounted Sikh policemen to the Europeans' enclosure. Denton gazed up at the taipans in their boxes, their finely-dressed wives and daughters twirling their parasols in gloved hands or playing with the ribbons of their hats. One of the girls looked a bit like Emily, he thought, except, he conceded reluctantly and only half-consciously, she was prettier and far more elegantly dressed.

'No good looking that way, old man,' Jones said, tilting his hat forward over his eyes. 'They're not for the likes of us.'

Denton flushed again. 'I'm engaged to a girl in England,' he said stiffly.

'So we've heard, so we've heard,' Jones smiled, stroking down the silky ends of his moustache. 'But what the eye doesn't see the heart doesn't grieve over, eh?'

Denton had had only five letters from Emily, each a little shorter than the one before, each somehow a little more constrained, as though the miles and the months that separated them had laid an autumn coolness on their feelings. But the changes were so gradual and Denton himself so unwilling to acknowledge them, except in unguarded moments of loneliness, that he hadn't yet realised what they might mean. He was re-reading the letters, his imagination supplying the glowing colours which they lacked in reality, when Mr Wei arrived one day, out of breath and uncharacteristically late for his lesson.

'The rickshaw coolie, very stupid,' his gold tooth glistened in his apologetic smile. 'He bump a foreigner. Very angry. Indian policeman hit him for his clumsy.' He laughed, a nervous, breathless little giggle, but behind his glinting, steel-rimmed glasses, Denton detected a gleam of resentment and humiliation.

Where are you going? the first exercise began. I am going to the tea-house. Denton paused before saying the two sentences, mentally rehearsing the different rising and falling tones that he so easily confused.

'No, no, Mr Denton,' Mr Wei chirped spryly, his habitual alertness recovered, 'You must do by feeling, not think before say.'

'I've never been to a tea-house,' Denton said irrelevantly, abruptly taken by the realisation. 'Can you take me to one?'

'A tea-house?' Mr Wei giggled. 'You will not quite like it, I think.'

'Why not?'

Mr Wei's hands fluttered deprecatingly, 'Foreigners do not go to such place. Only for Chinese.'

'But I'd really like to go.'

'You like to go?' Mr Wei's voice, his whole face, expressed polite disbelief. 'I do not think.'

'Really I would,' Denton insisted.

Mr Wei shook his head, chuckling to himself at the very idea as if it were the naive illusion of an eager but uninformed child. Yet at the end of the hour he referred to it again, as though he'd been silently reflecting on it during the interchanges of I am going to a tea-house. Is your brother in the tea-house? 'You want to see Chinese tea-house?' he asked circumspectly, as if Denton couldn't really have been serious.

'Yes, I'd like to very much.'

He scratched his cheek lightly with his long, curved fingernail. 'When you are free?'

'Yes, when I'm free.'

Mr Wei looked puzzled. 'When you are free?' he repeated less -confidently.

'Oh, when am I free?' Denton raised his hands. 'Any time. Now?'

Mr Wei cocked his head. 'I am going to a goo' one after my lesson. If you wish, we can walk. It is not far.'

But outside the building he hailed a rickshaw, deciding, over Denton's protests, that it would be too far for him to walk in the sun. His manner to the rickshaw coolie was curt and decisive. To Denton, accustomed to his fluid courtesy, it seemed almost arrogant. He hadn't suspected that frail little man was capable of such authority.

The coolie ran them along the bank of the Soochow Creek, the waters thick with sampans and barges, then over a little wooden hump-backed bridge, past the out-stretched hands of the beggars who rose in a swarm at the summit where the coolie could hardly pull the rickshaw. Mr Wei's face, normally so expressive, assumed a stony impassivity as the beggars' hands clutched at their feet, their clothes, their hands, with limp, pleading gestures. It was as if he didn't want to recognise even their existence. But then his mouth and eyes relaxed as they left the murmuring beggars behind and passed along an unfamiliar street. 'Mr Denton, are your parents still live?' he asked. 'How many brother you have?' His eyes shadowed sympathetically when Denton told him his only brother had been killed in the Boer War. 'Where is he bury?' he asked solicitously. 'You have made arrangement for bury in family grave with your ancestor?'

'No, he's buried in South Africa. It would have cost too much to bring his body home.'

Mr Wei's eyes opened wide in pained astonishment at Denton's answer, and he was silent for some time, as if out of deep but puzzled delicacy for his family's humiliation.

They came to the tea-house. It was an old stone building with gold characters painted on a faded red background over the carved wooden entrance. Here too beggars and rickshaw coolies crouched, watchful for prey, while unkempt dogs prowled in the gutter for scraps of food. Denton's adventurous enthusiasm sagged. On his own he wouldn't have given the building a second glance, it was indistinguishable from the seedy slums on either side. Now he'd have to go in, and probably get food-poisoning as well!

There was a wooden screen just inside, facing the doorway. 'To keep bad spirits out,' Wei explained. 'Chinese people think ba' spirit' only fly straigh' line. So bounce off screen and go out door.' He smiled, as if he didn't believe it. Behind the screen a large hall opened out, full of round wooden tables in partitioned areas, while at the back were stairs leading to private rooms. The place echoed with the clatter of crockery and the exuberant noise of shouted conversations, orders called to the scurrying waiters, greetings shouted, and above everything else, like a castanet continuo, the clacking and scraping of mahjong tiles. Mr Wei led Denton to a table in the corner. He was the only European there, and his back tingled under the frankly curious gaze of a hundred eyes while the hubbub continued round them without pause.

He sat down uncomfortably. Before they came to the place, he'd expected something cool, refined and with a quiet, gracious air, but this was as noisy as the street outside, as pulsing with raucous energy and life. And the floor looked none too clean, either. What about the cups they were carelessly slapping down on the table? He rubbed his finger surreptitiously along the edge of the table and was relieved to see it was reasonably clean. He looked round warily, regretting his rashness. The Chinese here had none of that submissive deference his experience of them so far had led him to expect, and the lack of it disturbed him. It was almost as if they were deliberately flouting his western superiority. Even Mr Wei himself seemed to have changed. He called for tea in a loud, sharp voice that meant to be obeyed and exchanged shouted greetings with customers at nearby tables. They kept calling out questions about Denton that he couldn't understand, but which he could tell were bantering and familiar. Their eyes, meeting his, smiled or stared without flinching.

An old man in a long blue gown, with glasses resting on the tip of his nose sat down beside Mr Wei, asking him curiously about the foreigner and throwing smiling, unabashed glances at him. Soon he was joined by another, younger man, then by a third. Smiling at Denton with candid interest, but never addressing him, they plied Mr Wei with questions about him that his beginner's Chinese could only help him guess at. It was like being discussed as a boy by his uncles and aunts round the kitchen table. When he tried to answer a question one of them asked him directly - an easy one about his age - they nodded and smiled at him encouragingly, commenting loudly to each other about his ability while Mr Wei's eyes shone with proprietary pride in his pupil.

The tea arrived. Remembering Mr Wei's instructions in Chinese etiquette, Denton tapped the table with his middle finger when the waiter poured the steaming green liquid into his rice-patterned cup. The watchers murmured in surprised approval, turning to the nearby tables, from where steady eyes had been observing him too, and recounted his proficiency in Chinese customs as well. Before long there were several more men sitting at the table, ordering food, testing Denton's Chinese, and discussing it uninhibitedly amongst themselves. Their warm, congratulatory smiles seemed to be touched with a jesting, patronising surprise that a foreign devil could make anything at all of a civilised language like Chinese.

Although he felt uncomfortably on show, Denton was dimly aware of a new dimension forming in his mind as he sat amongst these inquisitive, lively people. Already, after only a few months, he'd come to expect the Chinese to be subdued and deferential towards him, to call him 'master' and to wait on him, to empty his toilet box and pour his hot water. When they didn't conform, as the fat man outside the brothel hadn't conformed, he'd been shocked, as if by a subordinate's insolence. But there, amongst Wei's genial friends, who plainly thought of him as no more than an outlandish, if good-natured, barbarian, he felt the brittle mould in which Shanghai had cast his ideas beginning to crack. Perhaps these people weren't so different from himself? Perhaps they weren't naturally inferior? Beneath their unabashed and curious gaze, he began to wonder, to doubt. It was hard to assume superiority when you were yourself being regarded with patronising benevolence by those who were supposed to be your inferiors.

Gradually the interest in him diminished and the customers drifted off to their own tables, to their tea and mahjong, as casually as they had first drifted to Wei's. Denton sat thoughtfully sipping the pale, faintly bitter, tea, in which a white jasmine floated round and round, until Mr Wei called for the bill.

'Please let me pay,' he asked, but Mr Wei would not allow it. 'Next time, then?' Denton suggested.

'You would like to come again?' Wei smiled happily.

As they were leaving, a waiter was escorting a sing-song girl through the hall towards one of the private rooms. She had rouged cheeks and black glossy hair that reminded Denton instantly of the girl Mason had pointed out to him on his first day in Shanghai. She glanced with momentary surprise at Denton as they passed and then she was gone. A musician followed her, carrying a two-stringed Chinese violin with a gourd-like soundbox and ornately decorated pegs.

Wei noticed Denton looking after them, and offered to arrange for the girl to sing.

'Oh no,' Denton declined, flustered. 'I wouldn't understand.'

'If you not like, can sen' away,' Wei suggested. 'Never mind understanding. Chinese music only soundings, never mind words.'

'No, really. Another time, perhaps.'

Wei summoned a rickshaw. They travelled back through a maze of alleys Denton had never seen before, alleys in which large houses with tiled pagoda roofs would suddenly appear beside little wooden huts that clung to their walls like sores. With each turn the lanes seemed to get narrower, the crowds more dense. Wei stopped the rickshaw outside a long low brick building with a blue-tiled roof. Trees grew round the entrance, their branches, old and twisted, resting on the curving eaves. A faint sweetish smell came from the heavy wooden doors.

'This is my clan burial house,' Wei said, smiling his winking gold smile. He pointed to the doors. 'In there is the coffin I give my parents.'

'Your parents are dead?' Denton inquired with a sympathetic softening of his voice.

'Not yet. When they die, the coffin ready for them.' He smiled proudly. 'They are very happy for coffin, cost a very lot, very goo' coffin.' While he was speaking four coolies entered the building straining under the weight of a heavy wooden coffin like a moulded, polished tree bole. The same sweetish smell came from that too. The coolies staggered and sighed as they pushed the double doors open and bore the coffin inside.

'When they die,' Wei was explaining cheerfully, 'we bury them here first, then take bones back to home village. Grave is all ready, very ol', goo' outlook.' He nodded satisfiedly several times before sharply ordering the coolie to move on.

'Mr Denton, are you buy coffi' already for your parents? And funeral clothings? No?' He shook his head in amazement at English indifference to their elders' welfare. 'In Chinese we say dying is plucking the flower of life. Do you have such poetical sayin' in England? I think it is very expensive to have bury in your country. How much are you pay, Mr Denton?'

That night in the mess, in a thoughtless moment that he instantly regretted, Denton told Mason and Jones about his visit to the tea-house. 'It was quite interesting, really,' he ended lamely and defensively as he saw a leer forming under Mason's ginger moustache.

'Oho, slumming it with the natives, eh?' Mason mocked. 'You'll be wearing a pig-tail next, I wouldn't wonder. Watch out your eyes don't start slanting.'

23

ON SATURDAY AFTERNOONS, if he wasn't on duty, Denton would write his letters home, a long one to Emily, a shorter one to his parents - he had no one else to write to. He wrote every week, even when he found he had nothing to say. Perhaps it was only to relieve the heavy loneliness of those dull, blank hours after tiffin, perhaps it was merely to cling on to the links with them that he sensed were slowly weakening. Often, ransacking his brains for new bits of information, he would gaze out from the veranda towards the Bund, trying to conjure up their faces - especially Emily's - amongst the forest of masts and funnels, as if the sight of the ships that sailed to England would work some magic on his imagination. But he couldn't picture Emily clearly any more, her face was fading in his memory like an old photograph. He could no longer imagine them taking up where they'd left off with her shy farewell kiss on deck of the Orcades. He could no longer visualise her joining him in Shanghai - not next year, not the year after, not at all, except in some vague fantasy in which her face was dim and misty, the surroundings unreal. Despite himself his letters to her began to sound hollow even as he wrote them. And yet she could be brought back vividly and painfully by some sharp splinter of memory or a chance thought or word. If only she would write more often!

Sometimes he would be disturbed in his writing by the sound of a woman's voice laughing on Mason's veranda. Perhaps Mason's baritone would answer the woman teasingly, and then there might be a silence, a hush almost, followed by a little smothered scream of laughter from the woman. Denton would get up again and pace the floor, muttering indignantly. Yet at the same time he felt a prurient, thrilling desire to peep from his own veranda at the woman on Mason's.

Was it the same woman? What was she wearing? Not Mason's revealing tunic again? But it was when the voices quietened later and there was no sound or stirring for an hour or two in the somnolence of the afternoon that the distraction was, curiously, as its worst. Purge his mind how he would, the same lascivious images would come back again and again in that suggestive silence, images no less sinful for being vague and ill-informed. He imagined the girl he'd first seen there, soft, filmy clothes slithering off her shoulders. He saw her on the bed, a bed just like his, her breasts rippling as she raised her arms to embrace Mason and pull him down on top of her, her lips parting for his, her black hair spread like a fan on the pillow beneath her. Or was it not Mason he imagined sinking down on her softness, but himself? He jerked his mind guiltily away from all these images and forced himself back to the dull dead words on the page in front of him. He could go on determinedly with his letters, and yet his mind would still stray, he would still catch himself gazing dreamily at the wall, his head slightly cocked, listening for the first drowsy sounds of their awakening.

Then at last it would come, the lazy, unhurried yawning of Mason on the veranda again, his languid murmurs followed by the girl's brighter replies. The street below would be throbbing with the usual noises - hawkers, coolies, rickshaw boys and bearers of sedan chairs, servants, cooks, beggars, masters, mistresses and children, all talking, laughing, shouting and complaining in their quick, shrill voices. But in all that clamour, his keen ear unerringly picked out the low, playful or indolent voices of satisfied lust next door.

Sometimes he took Emily's last letter out and read it through, to return his mind to purer thoughts. But while his eyes were scanning the words he now knew almost by heart, his imagination would sidle off to titillating visions of the Chinese girl's swelling breasts, her round brown nipples, the smooth flat paleness of her belly and the exquisite darkness between her thighs.

It was on one of those Saturdays early in December, when the sun was so weak that it was welcome now and Denton would actually seek it in the room, pulling his chair closer to the window, that Ah Koo came in with his laundry. Denton was sitting, unfinished letter in hand, gazing out over the veranda at the paling blue of the sky as the sun went down. He was half-consciously listening for the awakening sounds from Mason's room. After the usual giggles and laughter there had been a silent stillness there for over two hours. Denton had even begun to wonder whether they'd slipped out and stealthily crept away - as if they knew he was listening, or cared if they knew! But then they came, the mutterings and sighs and yawnings, the easy, indulgent murmurs. He looked down at what he'd written with an effort of concentration, but his eyes were soon unfocussed as he strained to hear.

Ah Koo cleared his throat loudly and swallowed. 'Master wantee young gir'?'

'What?'

'Wantee young gir'?' He stood with Denton's pressed shirts neatly folded over his arm. 'You wantee, I bring. Very young. First time gir'.'

'No.' Denton frowned indignantly, his cheeks tingling.

'All same Mr Mason. I bring young gir' Mr Mason, he not likee, send away. I bring you other one gir', very goo'. Mr Mason same same you?'

'Certainly not!'

'Not wantee?'

'No. Not wantee.' His confusion had robbed Denton momentarily of even the simplest Shanghainese and he stumbled into the pidgin he was trying to grow out of.

'Wantee young boy?' Ah Koo's face seemed utterly impassive. Nothing moved in it except his mouth. There was neither disgust nor gloating in his eyes, nothing but the faint shrewd glimmer of inquiry. He might just as well have been asking where the shirts over his arm should go. 'Not wantee gir', not wantee boy?' he asked, shaking his head faintly.

'No.' Denton turned away. A low, throaty giggle sounded voluptuously from Mason's veranda, almost as though the girl had heard Ah Koo and was doing her best to help him corrupt Denton. Mason's voice muttered something, then he laughed.

'You wantee, you say,' Ah Koo said, unabashed, as he opened the wardrobe and put the shirts carefully away. 'All same same Mr Mason. He very likee. Say Ah Koo bring young gir', I bring chop-chop. I bring you same same. Never mind boy or gir'.'

Denton had ostentatiously bent his head over his letter again, but now he turned round and spoke in carefully rehearsed Shanghainese. 'I do not want girl, I do not want boy.'

Ah Koo listened to him from the door, his corrugated face still impassive. 'You wantee, you tell Ah Koo,' he said. 'Japan gir', Chinese gir', Portugal gir'. Ah Koo bring chop-chop.'

A few days later, Mason paused by Denton's table in the mess, where he was sitting with several other young inspectors. 'Ah Koo's a bit worried about your health, you know,' he said, leaning on the back of Denton's chair.

'Ah Koo?'

'Yes. Wonders if there's something wrong with you.' He surveyed the expectant, grinning faces all round the table. 'Says you don't care for girls.'

Denton looked back at his half-empty plate silently, feeling his cheeks beginning to flush.

'Perhaps you prefer boys?' Mason suggested. 'Only Ah Koo said you weren't interested in them either.' He laid his hand companionably on Denton's shoulder.

'You know perfectly well I'm engaged,' Denton said, his voice wavering between a show of amusement and a show of indignation. He wanted to shrug Mason's hand off and yet at the same not to antagonise him - rather to treat his teasing casually, as though he was indifferent to it, or even faintly amused himself. After all, it is only a joke, he told himself uneasily.

'We know perfectly well you say you're engaged,' Mason answered, winking at the others. 'But some of us are beginning to wonder if that isn't an excuse. In any case, even if you are engaged,' he straightened up, brushing his moustache with his knuckles and glancing significantly round the table again, 'you need to get a bit of practice in, don't you? I mean it might be years before she comes out here, mightn't it? You wouldn't want to disappoint her, would you?' And while he basked complacently in the sniggers that rippled round the table, his heavy hand patted Denton's shoulder amicably as if to assure him that honestly, he was only joking.

24

WHEN EMILY' S LETTER CAME at last, he felt a little quiver of fear as though he knew already what it would say. She hadn't written for nearly two months and Christmas was only three weeks away, so when he saw the slim small envelope peeping out of his pigeon-hole that morning as he left for duty, he tried to tell himself it must be her Christmas greetings. But there was an unbelieving anxious tremor about his fingers as he tore the flap open.

He read it in the rickshaw that was taking him to the Lower Section wharves. It was only one page long, and when he saw that, he felt his illusions fluttering away like plucked feathers. She was very sorry, she wrote in that clear large hand without a sign of emotion, but she did not think she could ever be his wife. She had come to realise that she could not bring herself to leave everything in England to live in Shanghai. And he ought to know from her first, because people would be bound to tell him anyway, that she had met someone recently, nobody he knew, to whom she thought she was better suited. But she would always have the fondest thoughts of him and hoped that he would not blame her too much, and might even one day be able to think of her kindly.

He read the letter through twice, the first time with his heart thumping unsteadily, the second time with it still as a stone. Then he folded it carefully in the same creases, slid it back into the envelope and buttoned it away in his tunic pocket - the very pocket in which he'd put her first letter, close to his heart. The air was cold, although the rising sun was warm on his face. He gazed dully at the alleys and streets, the cold dark waters of the canals, at the rickshaw coolie's back with its bony wing-like shoulder-blades sticking up under the torn cotton jacket, at the pyramid of mandarin oranges on a hawker's stall, and at the cabbages and spinach lying higgledy-piggledy on another stall while a woman with torn grey hair and a hunched back sprinkled water over them to make them look dewy and fresh. For some minutes, it seemed, he thought of nothing but what passed before his eyes, as though her letter had slid straight through his mind without leaving a trace. Then, slowly, her words began to recur, as if they hadn't disappeared at all, but had only been taking their time to sink into his brain, to take root. They began to echo in his ears, as though she were quietly speaking to him, to form themselves in her handwriting across his eyes, and he felt a blank, numb chill stealing over him that set the muscles of his face into a rigid, grim mould. I knew it, he thought bitterly, staring at the great stolid walls of the godowns coming into view along the quayside. I knew it all along.

But then, after those few minutes of bitterness, he boarded his first ship and had to force himself to work. And he started checking the manifest with a determination that closed his mind down as if with metal shutters and left it bare of any thought or feeling except the details of tax, likin, seals and signatures.

He went through the morning without once opening his pocket and re-reading her letter - without even touching it through the cloth of his uniform. At tiffin in the mess, he deliberately sat next to Johnson, knowing that Johnson's stream of banalities would flow on unprompted and distract his own mind with its soothing trivia. He even shared a rickshaw with Johnson back to the wharves, the first time in weeks, and listened to his detailed, unhurried account of the hikes he planned to make round Hankow over Christmas.

His last inspection of the day was of a small opium cargo from Bombay. At the head of the gangway a European stood beside the ship's Chinese agent, a man whose sallow face and dapper appearance seemed vaguely familiar to Denton.

'Good afternoon,' the European greeted him with a slight accent. 'I am the owner of the cargo if you have any questions. This is the ship's agent, but they never know anything.' His voice was smooth yet tense, as if it might grow warmer or cooler suddenly, without warning - the nervy voice of a volatile temper. Looking through the manifest, Denton briefly, hazily, tried to recall where he'd seen the man before, till the spidery figures and letters, inscribed, in ink that was almost brown, by some clerk in Bombay, took over the forefront of his mind.

He examined the opium without comment and computed the tax and likin, accepting the cup of coffee which the owner impatiently told the agent to bring before they had even reached the saloon.

'How long have you been here, Mr...?' the owner asked, sipping coffee himself.

'About six months.' He thought of Emily's letter and looked away from the man's face, which was peering at his across the table. Six months - in just six months she could forget him and take up with someone else! He felt his eyes darkening with self-pity.

'I have been here six years,' the owner declared proudly.

'Have you?' How would he spend the evening? The long empty hours? There was the weekly Christian Youth Fellowship meeting, but - 'In six years I have made myself rich,' the man was saying, peering closer into Denton's abstracted face and smiling with almost boyish pride. 'I came from Russia with nothing, and now I have a business, a house on Jessfield Road, servants, money in the bank ... Jessfield Road, you know? Only rich people.' He opened his hands, palms up, as if he were a magician performing a trick. 'You wait and see, I will be a millionaire. My name is Ephraim, Jacob Ephraim. How do you do? One day you must come to dinner with me.' He thrust out his hand, his brown eyes glowing with friendly warmth.

Denton shook it stiffly, distrustfully.

'And what is your name, may I ask?'

'Mine? Denton.'

'Denton? Are you from England? Yes, I thought so. One day I am going to buy a ship from England. John Brown makers. Secondhand. I will start a fleet.'

Denton nodded inattentively, returning to the report he was writing in his book. And just as he was writing down the time of his inspection, he remembered suddenly where he'd seen this talkative little man before. It was on that Saturday, a couple of months before, after tea with Mr Eaton, when the rickshaw had taken him into the French Concession. This was the man who'd come out of that house with the green shutters and the gross Chinese at the door. This was the dapper man who'd greeted him and walked casually away as if he'd done nothing to be ashamed of. Denton frowned in disapproval at the memory and a moment later thought. Then I was still engaged to Emily, she hadn't written that letter yet.

'What is the matter?' the man's voice broke in sharply. 'You don't like to talk to me? Because I am a Jew?'

'What?'

'Because I am a Jew? You despise me, is that it?' Ephraim's eyes had suddenly grown fierce with resentment and his sallow skin was heavily flushed.

'Not at all!' Denton answered hastily. 'I was busy, that's all.'

'You think, he's a Jew, he's only interested in money, don't you?' Ephraim went on as if Denton hadn't spoken, his eyes burning brighter.

'No - '

'Well, I was a teacher in Russia. In Odessa. Not for money, for love of learning!' He rapped the table imperiously with his knuckles, to compel Denton's attention. 'The Cossacks killed my father, so I came to Shanghai, and yes, I said, yes, I will make money now, because money is security. That is why.' He nodded emphatically several times. 'Money is security for us, Mr...?'

'Denton.'

'Denton. Money is security and power, and we have been without it. That is why Jews make money. Not greed, but safety. We have to survive!' He nodded emphatically again. 'There is only one safety for a Jew: get rich. I have learned my lesson, Mr Kenton - '

'Denton.'

'Denton. I have learned my lesson and I am not ashamed. I am making money and nobody can harm me. I feel safe. That is why I make money. You have no need to. So you have no right to look down on me. I tell you I would rather be a schoolteacher - '

'I was going to be a schoolteacher too,' Denton said drily, closing his report book.

'What? A schoolteacher?' Ephraim's indignant flood ebbed as suddenly as it had risen. The angry light drained from his eyes and was replaced by one of sympathetic curiosity. 'A schoolteacher? Why are you here, then? Why did you stop?'

'For money too. I didn't have enough to carry on with my training. I had to give it up.' He thought bitterly of what else he'd lost.

'A teacher?' Ephraim shook his head wonderingly. 'In that case you cannot have any prejudices against the Jews. Your country had Disraeli for prime minister.' He announced that as if Denton himself might not know it. 'But in Russia they think we are all bad, evil, cheats, robbers, murderers. Do you know they believe we kidnap Christian children and sacrifice them? Russia!' He wrinkled his nose distastefully. 'Barbarians! They think we are all Shylocks, you see? They are still in Shakespeare's times, so backward!'

Denton nodded uncertainly.

'They think our religion is superstition,' Ephraim was saying excitedly, his moist lips smiling derisively as he spoke. 'But what about Christianity? Three gods in one - absurd! Whereas Jewish customs are good ones. Circumcision, for instance. You think it silly? Well, a famous German doctor has proved it prevents cancer of the sexual organ!' He paused to gaze directly into Denton's eyes, as if expecting to see astonishment and admiration there instead of confusion and embarrassment. 'I have a copy of his paper in the Zeitschrift für Chirurgie at home, I will lend it to you. You will be interested to read.'

'I don't know any German,' Denton said quickly.

'Never mind,' he waved the difficulty aside. 'You can make it out. I will lend it to you. Where are you going now - after this ship?'

'I've finished for the day now.' Again he thought of his empty room and the letter in his pocket. A disconsolate, self-pitying tone had slipped into his voice.

'You have finished work? Good! We will have some tea at the Central Hotel. Or the Astor House. You know the Central? It is near my office. The Astor House is the most expensive. I go there too. Which do you prefer?'

'I'm afraid I can't.'

'Another time, then, I will bring you that article, you will be very interested.'

Denton retreated under the barrage of Ephraim's words. The little man kept bringing his face closer to Denton's, gazing at him searchingly so that Denton had to keep drawing back. As Ephraim was ushering him towards the gangway, still talking and gesticulating volubly, he suddenly checked himself and stared harder at Denton's face. 'We have met before, haven't we?' he asked almost suspiciously. 'I have seen your face.'

Denton hesitated. 'Was it in the French Concession once?' he asked pointedly. 'I think I may have seen you coming out of a house there.'

'Ah!' Ephraim's eyes widened with recognition. 'I remember, you were just going in as I was leaving. Yes, I remember very well. What a good house it is, isn't it? How did you find it?'

'Oh, I wasn't going in!' Denton protested hotly. 'I'd never go to such a place.'

'But you were going in!' Ephraim declared. 'You were just getting out of your rickshaw!'

'No, it was a mistake. The rickshaw took me there by mistake. I'm - I was engaged then. To someone in England.' He looked quickly away, his cheeks and lips setting hard.

'You were engaged?' Ephraim's voice warmed with sympathy. 'What happened? Your betrothed has died?'

'No, no,' Denton waved his hand. 'Nothing like that. We, er, well, we broke it off.' He couldn't bring himself to admit that he'd been jilted, but Ephraim seemed to understand anyway.

'She let you down? Then you must go!' He followed Denton nimbly down the narrow, springy gangplank. 'Otherwise you will have bad blood - spots, pimples, acne.' Denton, averting his face, imagined him scrutinising his impure complexion. 'The girls are all clean, I know for a fact. All the girls there, every one.'

Denton nodded coldly at the bottom of the gangway. 'I must be going.'

'I'll walk along with you. My chair's over there. Oh my friend, you must not be miserable and dull over a love affair.' He gripped Denton's arm suddenly with surprising strength and held him still a moment, gazing earnestly into his eyes. 'Why, I lost my betrothed in the pogrom of ninety-five. And what did I do? I went to a house, I chose a girl that looked as much like her as I could find - not that she was like one of those girls, you know,' he qualified hastily, 'but the general features - and I cried all night with her. And in the morning - pouf! I was better.' He blew out his lips, kissed his fingers as if bidding his fiancée farewell, and then stroked his thin black moustache complacently. 'So you must not be miserable about a love affair Mr...?'

'Denton,' Denton said reluctantly, unwilling to allow this strange, immoral man even the intimacy of knowing his surname. He looked down at Ephraim's hand still gripping his arm.

Ephraim relaxed his eager grip at last and walked beside him till they reached his sedan chair. 'We will have tea together, Mr Denton, we have so many interesting things to talk about.' And he shook Denton's cold but unresisting hand before turning to the bearers squatting idly in the last warm patch of fading sunlight. 'Chop-chop!' he shouted peremptorily. 'Central Hotel! If no chop-chop, me makee muchee bobbery!'

At the Christian Youth Fellowship that evening, after a discussion on the furthering of missionary work in China, the Reverend Eaton made a brief announcement about the new movement for young boys that had been started by Colonel Baden-Powell. The fifteen young men and women - Denton had counted them to prevent himself from thinking about Emily - listened respectfully while Mr Eaton, his eyes glancing more and more often at Denton, explained what the new movement was. The little congregation nodded their heads piously. They were all schoolteachers at the new municipal schools, or the sons and daughters of missionaries; and Denton couldn't help feeling guiltily that their piety was tedious and insipid. The truth was, he had been growing more and more uneasy at the Christian Youth Fellowship and somehow Emily's letter had intensified his unease.

'A truly Christian idea, worthy of the heroic defender of Mafeking,' Mr Eaton concluded sonorously, 'with great possibilities for attracting young native boys to the right ideals, while at the same time giving them valuable training in, er, in practical affairs and so on. Boy Scouts, Colonel Baden-Powell suggests these associations should be called. And I hope that some of you' - he glanced at Denton again - 'will consider giving up some of your time to promoting a Boy Scout troop here in Shanghai. Who knows, perhaps Colonel Baden-Powell's service to the empire will be matched by a corresponding service to the Christian religion?'

Mr Eaton had turned directly to Denton. 'John, you've been very quiet tonight. What do you think about it?'

'I don't know,' Denton answered disconcertedly. 'I think, er, perhaps one of the schoolteachers here might be the best person to organise something like that.' He stood up abruptly. 'Excuse me, I have to go. A very interesting evening. Sorry I can't stay longer.' He hurried out of the church hall and hailed a rickshaw, anxious to be gone before anyone could follow him.

Later, when he sat in his room gazing at the bare walls, after he'd read Emily's letter again, he began to feel a kind of peace, as if he'd known all along that it was going to happen, but was only now ready to acknowledge it. As though a long anxious time of waiting for bad news had ended with the relief of certainty. And after all, he had to admit, perhaps he'd been growing cooler himself. Was it really only his pride that was hurt? He got up, put the letter together with her photograph and her other letters, tied them all tightly with a piece of brown, coarse-fibred string, and put them away in the top drawer of his desk, the only drawer that locked.

And soon, within a week, he began to feel free and detached, as if the tie that had bound him to Emily had really been a restraint, a bond that he'd unconsciously wanted to be released from all the time. Without her photograph in its oval frame to remind him, he forgot about her for days on end. At first that disturbed him. Did it mean he was heartless? Then even that ceased to worry him. She belonged to England and a part of his life that was finished. He never replied to her letter.

When Wei asked, self-deprecatingly and with elaborate apologetic suggestions that it wouldn't really be worth his while, whether he might like to visit another tea-house, Denton asked instead to be allowed to pay for a meal in a restaurant. After many courteous demurrals, Wei gave in and took him to a restaurant by the river in Hongkew. The place was richly decorated, though in colours that Denton found garish, and every table was partitioned off by bamboo screens over which the laughter and voices of the other guests came in boisterous gusts of noise. They ate spicy dishes garnished with hot peppers and drank sticky, burning rice wine - Denton soothed his uneasy Band of Hope conscience by telling himself that he drank it as a social duty, not for pleasure; and indeed he didn't like the slightly nutty flavour or the burning in his mouth. Wei's eyes grew a little bloodshot and his pale cheeks were flushed. He insisted Denton should hear a sing-song girl, and this time Denton didn't refuse.

After a few minutes a slight young girl was escorted in, with a blind fiddler who found his way uncannily behind her. The fiddler sat cross-legged on the floor and began to play the two-stringed violin while the girl sang. At first the music seemed shrill and unmelodious to Denton's ear, the girl's voice flat and toneless. But the longer he listened, while Wei drank glass after glass of the clear rice wine, the more he was captivated by the plangent sounds of the girl's voice and the charm of her lowered, oval face. Wei gave her some money and she left while Denton was stumblingly asking in Shanghainese for the bill.

'Mr Denton,' Wei asked as they left, 'Do sing-song girls sing in English dinner parties?' He promised to teach Denton to play mahjong and to take him to the best Chinese opera in Shanghai.

They went to the same restaurant the next week and the week after, and each time Wei engaged the same sing-song girl to sing her plaintive songs, while the hubbub of voices and laughter, the clack and slither of mahjong tiles sounded exuberantly round them. Denton watched her while he listened and began to know the expressions of her child-like face, the way she tilted her head when she sang, even the curls and vortices of her delicate ears. He drank the rice wine too, almost with enjoyment, and was scarcely troubled by his Band of Hope conscience.

25

AFTER CHRISTMAS THE WEATHER HARDENED. The winds that blew off the Siberian ice swept southwards over China all the way down to Shanghai, and the nights were frosty, though the days, as Wei had promised, glittered under bright blue skies. Beggars, coolies waiting to be hired, and drifting opium addicts clustered on the sunny sides of the streets now, wrapping themselves up in rags and newspapers to keep out the cold. These with money wore thick quilted jackets that made them look like clumsy animals as they moved. The girl-babies exposed on the rubbish heaps during the black-ice nights and the homeless street sleepers who gave up in the cold were often half-frozen in the morning when the municipal cart came round to collect them. The mosquitoes and flies vanished, though, and the decaying summer smells in the rank little canals were bitten back by the cleansing cold.

Mason, Jones and Clark, another officer, had hired a houseboat to take them up the river past Soochow for some shooting at the end of January. But Clark caught the 'flu and the others asked Denton if he would like to go in his place. It was an invitation that had been hanging vaguely about like an unwanted relative since Denton's first few weeks in Shanghai, when Jones had been quite friendly with him. But then Jones, perhaps following Mason's lead, had taken to mocking him slyly for what Denton supposed they thought was his priggishness. Since Emily had jilted him, though, he had relaxed his rigid moral austerity, and though he was never more than coolly amiable, Jones' teasing had grown milder, almost good-natured. Denton sensed he had been asked now only because nobody else was free and they needed someone to share the expenses, but nevertheless he accepted.

Even so, Denton suspected the invitation wouldn't have been revived but for the illusion both Jones and Mason had that he'd lost his virginity after the New Year's Eve party in the mess. Although the ladies of senior Customs and municipal officials had been there, the party had been much more boisterous than a tame Christmas celebration held the week before. And Denton, slightly drunk despite the pledge, had announced that he'd 'broken it off' with his fiancée. It was at the end of the evening, when the ladies had all gone and Denton's head was wobbly, and Jones had suggested visiting a 'house' to mark Denton's 'liberation,' as he called it. Denton had gone along with the crowd of them as far as the entrance of the place, in Bubbling Well Road. But as the others climbed the stairs, he'd slipped stealthily away, trembling with both fear and desire. Then he'd wandered the bitter streets and alleys by himself, all the way down to the docks where the sailors' brothels were, veering between fearful desire and disgusted remorse.

He passed several brothels, his head turned sternly aside at the last moment, while girls chirped at him from the open, dimly-lit doorways. In the end, tired and cold, his eyes sore, his mouth dry, he'd found his way back to the empty mess with its jaded decorations, and gone to bed feeling as guilty as if he really had followed the girls up the seedy mysterious stairways he'd glimpsed as he passed.

The next day was Sunday. He sang in the choir at the cathedral and prayed with a sick empty feeling in his stomach for forgiveness of his craving lust and drunkenness. Yet, while he prayed, the image, not of the sordid places he'd seen the night before, but of that more alluring green-shuttered house on rue Molière, where he'd first met Ephraim, had kept stealing seductively across his mind. And that image had brought another with it, the image of the article on circumcision in the German journal. Ephraim had accosted him on the waterfront one day in the dead of the year between Boxing Day and New Year's Eve, and insisted on lending him the journal with its strange Gothic script. 'I have been looking for you every day,' he exclaimed almost accusingly. 'Now you must have tea with me.' Unable to think of an excuse, Denton had let himself be led into the Central Hotel by the voluble Jew and prevailed on to drink lemon tea in a glass. 'Just like the Russians. Lemon tea and vodka - the only things they have produced in a thousand years,' Ephraim had declared loudly, with a glint in his brown eyes, daring anyone to deny it. Stiffly and hesitantly he'd sipped the tea under Ephraim's quick, warm encouragement, and listened reluctantly at first, to his spontaneous, child-like self-revelation, to his eager offers of friendship, talk, hospitality and happiness, all of which Ephraim was certain were his to give. And gradually he'd thawed, despite his brittle shyness, as he listened to Ephraim's continuous flow of ideas and anecdotes - about his business, Odessa, the Russian pogroms, the rituals of the Jewish religion.... Sometimes, in his enthusiasm, Ephraim had gripped his arm again with that unexpectedly powerful grip. At first Denton had stiffened and recoiled, but by the time he got up to go he'd grown so used to it that he scarcely even noticed it. He'd taken the German journal back to the mess, and although no one could read German there, he'd kept it discreetly out of sight in the top drawer of his desk, beneath Emily's letters and photograph.

The houseboat was a long barge-like vessel towed by a steam launch with a patched, faded, junk sail above its cabin. The three of them sat in the sunlight, protected from the wind, and watched the fields slide slowly past, brown and rich, waiting for the next sowing. The scattered villages they saw, cowering under the bare branches of leafless trees, looked poor and shabby, as if all the wealth of the country went into the land while the people lived like cattle. The huts were dingy, windowless and unpainted, the walls cracked and flaking as though they had mange. Peasants leant on their hoes and gaped at them as they passed.

Jones knew a German businessman in Soochow and he arranged for the houseboat to be moored at a jetty near the house his friend had leased. The jetty was empty except for a few covered sampans in which whole families huddled, gazing at them over their rice bowls with the listless envy of the wretched for the unreachably rich. The street behind the jetty was empty too, although it was early afternoon.

'Funny,' Jones said, feeling his wispy moustache that never seemed to grow any thicker. 'You'd think there'd be quite a lot of people about at this time of day.' They walked down the street to a two-storied Chinese house, the freshly-painted shutters all closed. Jones knocked on the door and a dog began barking inside, loudly and fiercely. After some time, while they glanced up and down the deserted streets, there was the sound of a shutter being unbolted and opened on the first floor. An amah appeared, grumbling and sour-faced, as the shutter swung open and dashed back against the wall.

'Mr Henschel?' Jones shouted up, first in English, then in a Shanghainese that Denton was advanced enough by then to know was very bad. 'Where's your master?'

The woman shook her head peevishly, pointing down the street and shouting down to them in an angry, complaining voice.

'What's the old girl jabbering about?' Mason asked. Jones shrugged.

'Something about some bandits, I think,' Denton said uncertainly. 'I can't understand her accent very well. It must be a dialect.'

The shutters slammed shut and they heard the bolts squealing as she tortured them into their sockets. They stood looking at each other.

'Well, she pointed that way,' Mason said, nodding down the street. 'Why don't we go and take a look?'

They began walking on slowly, uneasy in the eerie silence.

A suspicion began to tug at the corner of Denton's mind. Hadn't the amah used the word for 'kill'? Was it another execution they were going to? Or had the bandits killed someone? The emptiness of the street unsettled him as they strolled along. The silence was sinister, unnerving. He glanced back. The launch and the houseboat looked small and remote at the little jetty.

They came to a canal with a hump-backed bridge over it. The street went on, was crossed by other streets, passed over more canals. And everywhere the place was deserted, except for a toothless old beggar the other side of the bridge, whose head was shaking uncontrollably as he gazed up at them, silently holding out his box. They didn't even bother to question him, it seemed so hopeless.

'Looks a bit rum,' Mason muttered, his normal hectoring tone subdued. He was unsettled, too. 'Where is everybody? The place looks in pretty good shape, they can't have had any trouble.'

It was true, Denton thought, the place was well cared for. The houses were neatly and freshly white-washed, and the little stone steps that led down to the canals were firm and sharp, unlike the crumbling quays they'd passed on their way upstream.

'Venice of China,' Jones murmured. 'That's what they say this place is. Only where the hell are the Venetians?'

Then Denton heard, far away, that sudden yell of a thousand exultations that had haunted his first nights in Shanghai. 'Why don't we go back and wait at the boat?' he suggested quickly, knowing instantly what the sound had meant.

But Mason had heard it too. 'There's a meeting going on somewhere,' he said slowly. Then his eyes brightened. 'By god, I know what it is: they're holding an execution or something. Everyone's gone to the execution, that's what the old girl meant - they've caught some bandits! Of course! Come on, I bet your friend's there, Jonesy, having a grandstand view.'

And Denton followed them. Unwillingly, his stomach already turning apprehensively, he followed them all the same. For against his rising sense of horror, another sense contended, a sense of fascinated awe. Men were about to die today as he would have to die some day or other. And indistinctly, inarticulately, he wanted to learn about death from them.

After some minutes, the streets began to be alive and full again. Everyone was hurrying in the same direction, laughing and excited, in holiday mood. And now they could hear the full throaty roar of the unseen crowd ahead, shouting Kill, Kill, Kill, with delirious joy.

At last they came to the execution ground. It was a square outside the city wall, with fields and little canals stretching out beyond it, and a small, squat temple with some stone huts nearby, about half a mile away on a muddy road. The sides of the square were crammed with people, standing, craning their necks, shouting, talking and laughing light-heartedly, as at any spectacle. Hawkers were calling out their goods in drawn-out chanting voices, more and more people were pushing and jostling their way to the front, and children were climbing the plane trees and clambering up the stone walls, fighting and shoving each other to get a better view.

Near the front of the crowd was a tall European wearing a green hat with a feather in it. 'There's Henschel!' Jones exclaimed. He shouted and waved to his friend while the people near them gaped and giggled at the foreign devils with their weird foreign voices. The tall figure turned, stared, and then waved back, taking off his hat, shouting unintelligibly over the tumult of the crowd. He seemed to be beckoning them forward, but it would be impossible to push their way through.

'Perhaps it's all over?' Denton asked hopefully.

But then the crowd in front of them began to part and they saw some Manchu bannermen roughly shouldering people aside to make an alley for them, beating them with their rifle butts if they were slow to move. The bannermen gestured the three Europeans to follow them and they walked as honoured guests through the wondering, murmuring crowd to where Jones' friend was standing.

'The captain here is a friend of mine,' Henschel said after shaking their hands with a formal little bow. He was very fair and sunburned, speaking in a voice that was nearly accentless, except that he clipped off every word before he started the next. 'They have caught some bandits who rob our mule trains and kill the escorts and so on. So he has asked me along to see justice done. Come and sit beside me.'

A batch of prisoners was being assembled for execution. They stood in a wretched cluster, each with a placard fixed to a pole that was tied to his back, on which his crimes were written in large characters. The soldiers were unfastening the placards and throwing them nonchalantly down in a heap on the ground, then ripping off the men's shirts. Some distance away, where the executioner was waiting, a man was setting up a wooden tripod. It took Denton some seconds to realise that he was a photographer. The man ducked under the black velvet cloth mantling the tripod, then marshalled the docile prisoners fussily in front of it, just like the annual Sunday School outing at Enfield.

'I must show you some of my pictures,' Mason was saying. 'Taken in Shanghai.' As if to compete with Henschel he brushed the ends of his ginger moustache up with his knuckle.

The captain wanted the bandits' crimes to be shown on the photo-graph, so the poles had to be collected and dealt out to the prisoners again. The placards wavered unsteadily above their heads. But now they had to be moved back several feet, the photographer pushing them again like a nervous schoolteacher. They shuffled obediently, their dull, lacklustre eyes fixed on the shiny lens. Denton could just make out some of the characters on the placards. Murder, Piracy, Abduction, and many others he couldn't read. But their shivering bodies looked so thin and weak - how could they possibly have robbed and murdered?

'Really these people are impossible,' Henschel laughed again. 'They are supposed to have started over an hour ago.'

At last the photographer was satisfied. He ducked under his cloth, peered out again, motioned the two men at each end closer in, then ducked under the cloth once more, holding his hand up beside the camera. Sheep-like, the prisoners stood still, blinking at the photo-grapher's raised hand.

'Watch the birdie!' Jones called out lightly.

The photographer pressed the bulb. The prisoners stood patiently, slack and shivering. How can they possibly be going to kill them, Denton wondered, after taking their pictures like on a Sunday School treat? But his swiftly thudding heart told him they would do it quite simply, without a moment's reflection on the monstrous irony of it all. After all, this is China, he told himself, as if that somehow lessened the horror of it.

At last the photographer emerged from his cloth, smiling contentedly and waving at the prisoners with a gesture that might have meant goodbye or thank you.

A low, excited mutter rose from the crowd as the guards began leading the first prisoner towards the executioner. The prisoner was limping and dragging his foot. One of the guards pushed him, not roughly, but as if to help him along, doing him a service. But the push, no more than a nudge really, was enough to make him stumble. He fell in front of the executioner, his face on the bare earth and with his hands tied behind his back he couldn't raise himself. A little titter ran through the crowd. Then the same guard helped him to his knees, in the same almost courteous manner. He knelt there dumbly, his head lowered as if he dared not raise his eyes to look at the executioner. Like a man kneeling in prayer before his god, it seemed to Denton, except that his hands weren't clasped in front, but bound behind him.

Henschel turned to Denton and spoke quietly into his ear. 'If they have not paid enough squeeze, he uses a blunter sword.' The sunburned skin round his eyes crinkled as he smiled, as if he thought it terribly amusing.

Denton turned away.

A man pulled the prisoner's head forward by his queue while the two soldiers heaved his bound arms backward. How pale his neck was at the exposed nape, where the sun never reached! The crowd hushed with that tense stillness he remembered from his first hour in Shanghai. Denton saw, or thought he saw the quick shadowy pulse of the man's blood at the side of his neck. The executioner hadn't lifted his sword yet, there were still seconds to go, seconds to live through. Beyond the kneeling victim he could see the waiting prisoners. Like him, they were looking on. Even they couldn't wrench their eyes away.

Now the executioner was ready. He raised his sword slowly higher and higher till it seemed to hang down his back from his clasped hands. Denton's heart pounded violently. His teeth were clenched. He felt his nails digging into his sweating palms and yet he could do nothing to loosen them. One, two, three seconds he counted, his body taut, unbearably taut, his teeth gritted, willing the man to strike and simultaneously wildly praying that some miracle would prevent him. Then the executioner's body seemed to relax faintly, a scarcely noticeable loosening of his muscles, and Denton thought for a brief, dizzy moment that the miracle really had happened. But no, it was only that he was looking at the photographer, who had now turned his camera towards the kneeling victim. The man pulling on his queue and the two soldiers holding his arms back had all turned like the executioner to face the camera, and even the victim himself was twisting his head slightly to stare up at the photographer's hand as it was slowly raised from behind the black cloth. The four faces, expressionless, staring, like amateur actors posing in a Band of Hope tableau such as he'd often seen with Emily on St George's Day, hung there in the silence; then, as the photographer's hand steadied, Denton saw the executioner's body grow tense again, the curved blade of the sword, which had wavered a little in his grip, grow firm and still. I'm going to be sick, he thought frantically, the blood pounding in his ears, the choking horror surging up his throat. He saw for an eternal moment the victim screwing up his eyes and wincing, the shadowy pulse throbbing in his half-turned neck; then the sword slashed down with a little whirr through the air and with a clean chopping sound sliced the head right off. It happened so quickly that for a fraction of a second the head still seemed to be there after the blade had passed through the neck; then it parted as the man holding the queue staggered back.

Denton wanted to scream, to run away, to escape this obscene ritual, but he couldn't move. The very thing he dreaded seeing held him to his seat. He waited for the next victim. He waited like the rest, breathless to see how he would die, whether he would plead or scream. His eyes were fastened to the man by invisible chains as the soldiers heaved and hauled him stolidly towards the headsman. Other soldiers were forcing back the people who had been dipping their cash in the blood of the first victim. The man's trunk lay still, the head a few feet away from it, blood still leaking from the wound onto the hard earth. Already it looked so still and small, he could hardly believe it had ever been alive. The young man stumbled past the corpse as if he hadn't noticed it. His eyes were wide and empty and the mouth was hanging open slackly, as though he were walking in a trance. Denton stared compelled; compelled by the elemental emotions of terror and awe.

Suddenly the man began to hang back, moaning and muttering, his eyeballs rolled up wide and white as if he were in a fit. The crowd seemed to hold its breath as the headsman's assistant stepped forward, grabbed his queue, and yanked him headlong forward, his feet trailing and flapping helplessly. The headsman raised his sword hurriedly while the soldiers hauled back on the man's bound hands. They seemed nervous now, tense and anxious because of the victim's panic. The photographer was under his cloth again, but the headsman wouldn't wait. The victim seemed to give up, kneeling tamely at last, and the headsman swung the sword down with a massive grunt. Yet just as the blade hurtled down-wards the man jerked spasmodically back, twitching his queue out of the assistant's hands. The blade swerved as the executioner tried to follow the movement, but it smashed into the back of the man's head. He fell to the ground screaming like a wounded animal - Denton thought of the abattoir at Enfield, where once, when he passed, he'd heard a pig screaming and squealing. The man's whole body quivered and shook uncontrollably and again the whole crowd seemed to catch its breath. The executioner shouted at his assistant and they both tried to drag the man up onto his knees while the two soldiers stood nervelessly by. But it was impossible, there was no strength left in the man's body, he collapsed as soon as they hauled him up. Then they began kicking him wildly, yelling and swearing at him. His faced was turned towards them and Denton thought that his neck must be broken, his head jerked and twisted so strangely at every kick, like a broken-stemmed flower. His eyes were popping, still turned up so that the pupils had almost vanished, and bubbles of blood frothed round his lips. His mouth seemed to be contorted into a wild impersonal sneer.

At last the headsman stopped kicking, his rage exhausted. He planted one foot on the man's shoulder, the other beside his head and swung the sword again. But the earth was in the way, he couldn't get a clean stroke and the blade clanged against a stone without severing the neck. He bent his knees then to get a flatter stroke, but it wasn't until the fourth or fifth blow that he got the head completely off.

When it was over, nobody spoke. The crowd remained still and uneasy. Nobody came forward to dip his cash in the blood. Nobody believed his blood could be lucky. At last the executioner called impatiently for the next victim.

There were eleven executions altogether, eleven loppings of eleven heads. Afterwards, while the crowd slowly dispersed, limp and exhausted, Henschel insisted on introducing them to the captain of the soldiers. The captain bowed and smiled, but said only 'Thank you for your coming,' in a thick, embarrassed voice before with another bow he left them.

They strolled back in a deep, drained silence towards Henschel's house. The crowd had thinned by now, and the streets were gradually reassuming the usual appearance of a Chinese city - hawkers squatting by their stalls, rickshaws and sedan chairs moving past, coolies bearing great loads at each end of their carrying poles, walking with that swinging, bouncing gait that seemed to lift them along.

Suddenly they came up behind a thin, stooping man who was walking more slowly with his bamboo carrying pole, as if he were carrying a delicate load. When they looked more closely, they saw that a swaying human head had been tied by the ears to each end of the pole, blood still dripping and splashing in thick congealing blobs onto the street. The spattered trail of dark red splotches followed the man as he walked with short careful steps, but none of the Chinese he passed seemed to notice him, except for a gaggle of children in rags and bare feet, who ran just behind him, gaping and giggling at the bobbing heads. The man himself seemed indifferent to them, his eyes set on the distance, his queue jerking rhythmically with each shuffling step.

'Christ, now I've seen everything,' Jones said with an uneasy laugh. 'Don't tell me he's going to boil them for soup.'

'No, he is taking them for burial,' Henschel answered, stepping fastidiously over a drying splash of blood. 'He must be a relative. I expect he has paid my friend some squeeze money; their heads are supposed to be stuck on poles at the city gates.'

Mason wrinkled his nose. 'You'd think he'd want to wrap them up or something,' he said. 'Hardly the kind of thing you'd want the neighbours to see, I would have thought.'

'Oh, they do not think like that,' Henschel replied carelessly. 'They are not like us. Death does not mean much to them, their lives are worth so little.'

They travelled further upstream the next day, past Soochow, and Henschel joined them, riding along the banks of the Imperial Canal, a shotgun strapped to the shoulder of his Mongolian pony. At midday they moored the boat and ate tiffin in the little saloon, the sun warming them through the windows. Denton watched the junks and barges moving slowly past, pulled by coolies whose back were bent almost parallel with the earth.

'Isn't this the canal that goes all the way to Peking?' he asked.

'No idea,' Mason said, finishing his beer. 'Let's see if we can get some birds for dinner.'

They followed Henschel across the dry, hard, rutted fields, past a squalid village to a wooded rise where he said there were plenty of partridges and pigeons. Jones had left his gun behind; there was something wrong with the trigger. Mason walked beside Henschel, carrying his. The peasants were digging and hoeing, working with long-handled hoes and mattocks. They turned and raised their heads to watch the foreign devils striding across their land, yet without altering the rhythm of their slow, patient digging. Denton listened to the clink of stones and the grate of hard earth as the mattocks came down on each downward swing. It reminded him for a moment, as the sun glinted on the shiny metal blade of a poised mattock, of the sound of the headsman's sword biting into the earth the day before.

A partridge lumbered up suddenly from a furrow behind a narrow grass verge, its wings beating loudly like a desperate heart. Henschel and Mason fired at the same time. The bird's wings folded and it plumped down to the earth. Simultaneously a woman yelled, and the peasants working the fields all round them began shouting and gesticulating, running towards them brandishing their tools.

'You must have winged one of them,' Jones said, licking his lips uneasily. He had picked up the dead bird and was holding it uncertainly by its feet.

They were soon surrounded by the peasants who muttered and scowled with a kind of jocular truculence that Denton couldn't make out. Were they really angry, or only pretending?

A woman was pushed forward, large-boned and tall, by a heavy, broad man with a set face and glaring, angry eyes. The man began shouting at Henschel and Mason, while the others growled behind him. The woman was massaging her back and wincing with pain, looking at them dumbly as if she had no other part to play.

Henschel smiled. 'I think he is her husband. He says we hit her.' He was undisturbed by all the threatening looks and accusations. 'It happens quite often,' he shrugged. 'Ten cents for each pellet is the rule. Sometimes they get in the way deliberately.'

'How can we tell how many pellets hit her?' Mason asked, relaxing his trigger finger slightly. 'They'll be asking for fifty dollars!'

'She has got to show us the marks.' Henschel took a hooked pipe out of his pocket and began filling it deliberately with tobacco. The crowd paused to watch him, even the woman's husband, whose face was stiff and flushed. Henschel put his tobacco pouch away slowly, then smiled round at the circle of faces, some of which were already starting to crease into grins. 'One hole, ten cents,' he said in broken Chinese, clenching his teeth down on the stem of his pipe and yet still managing to keep his smile. He held up the fingers of both hands. 'One hole, ten cents.'

Some of the peasants began to titter, nudging each other and glancing at the injured woman and her husband.

'First see, then pay,' Henschel gestured to the woman. 'First see, then pay.' Then he added quietly in English, 'And I hope she has had a wash recently.'

The titter became a ribald laugh. Only the woman and her husband didn't join in. She was still wincing and massaging her back. Her husband stood and glared, as if he hadn't heard them laughing all round him. His eyes blinked - it might have been with tears of rage - and he shook his head sharply.

Henschel lit his pipe, sheltering the bowl with his cupped palm. 'I would believe there are at most twenty pellets in her,' he said between puffs, glancing with a sly, measuring look at the woman's body. 'That is worth two dollars. Give them two dollars.' He turned to the woman's husband. 'Twenty holes,' he said in Chinese, throwing up both hands twice with fingers outstretched. 'Two dollars.'

'Why me?' Mason asked sulkily. 'It might have been you that hit her.' But he fished in his pocket and held out two dollars in front of the man's face, as if he expected him to sit up and beg for it like a dog.

The man shook his head fiercely while the woman watched in silence, rubbing her back more gently as the pain apparently lessened. The peasants looked from the silver coins gleaming between Mason's thick, reddish fingers to the man refusing them.

'If she has more holes, let her show the marks,' Henschel said, breathing a wreath of blue smoke up into the air. 'Show more hole, give more money,' he offered negligently in Chinese.

The crowd grinned and muttered, repeating his words to each other. But the man shook his head sullenly. He knew he was defeated, but he wouldn't give in and take the money.

'She'll never show her bum,' Jones said with a relieved laugh.

'All a show for money,' Henschel said confidently.

'Give him a couple of dollars more and let's leave them to it,' Mason suggested. He swung his hand round to Henschel, who, after a noticeable pause, added two more dollars.

Mason held the four dollars out to the man, but again he shook his head obdurately, his eyes glowing. The coins were in the palm of Mason's hand. He tilted his hand slowly till the coins slid off one by one onto the cold earth. They lay there gleaming.

'He will pick them up when we have gone,' Henschel said, examining the smouldering tobacco in his pipe. 'Shall we go? Don't look round - ignore them.'

They turned and walked back towards the boat, followed at an increasing distance by the peasants. After a while, when he could no longer hear them, Denton covertly looked round in spite of Henschel's advice. The man and his wife were still standing there staring after them. As he turned back he saw some boys stooping to the ground at the man's feet, picking up something and then darting away. The man didn't seem to move an inch, as if his resentment had turned him to stone. Denton felt obscurely ashamed, sullied, as though it was he who had hit the woman and dealt with the man in that supercilious manner.

Taking a more direct way back, they followed a path that led them closer to the village. The huts were of mud and unpainted wood, patched here and there with sacking and tin. Some of the roofs seemed to have caved in and those huts were derelict. There was a smell of dirt and decay, a pungent odour of pigs and stale urine.

'Pfui!' Henschel turned aside onto another path, that skirted the village. 'It would not be surprising if they had every kind of disease here. Let us keep clear.' They passed rows of freshly planted cabbages, the roots of each one neatly plastered with human manure, and left the dogs and the children behind.

'I wouldn't keep a pig in that filth,' Mason growled with contemptuous distaste, 'Never mind human beings. Why don't they clean themselves up a bit?

'Do you think they are human beings?' Henschel asked lightly, rhetorically.

'That man didn't pick up the money,' Denton interjected with a faint, hard edge to his voice. For some reason, he felt he had to defend them. 'Some kids ran off with it.'

Mason grunted. 'More fool him.'

'I suppose it was a matter of principle for him.' Denton suggested weakly, yet not ready to give up completely. 'I mean losing face or something?'

'He'd never have let her show her bum to us,' Jones laughed gaily, swinging the partridge jauntily now, 'I knew he wouldn't.'

'You didn't look so sure of yourself at the time,' Mason muttered surlily. 'You were ready to run for it.'

Jones flushed, but didn't answer and Henschel smiled a sly complacent little smile.

That night Denton went to bed early while the others drank in the saloon. He lay in his narrow bunk reading by the light of the smelly paraffin lamp. The shadows flickered from the unsteady wick and he kept glancing up at the cabin walls and window as if somebody had moved across the light. When at last he turned down the lamp, he looked almost apprehensively out over the moonlit ricefields towards the darkened village, where not a single lamp was shining. He imagined he could still see the man standing there with his silent wife beside him, glaring fiercely across towards the houseboat. Denton was frowning as he closed his eyes to sleep. He wasn't enjoying this trip, he had to admit. It was a mistake, he wished he'd never come.

26

AFTER DUTY DENTON OFTEN DRANK TEA now at the Central Hotel, where Ephraim frequently joined him. Denton would drink the Russian tea with a slice of lemon in it that Ephraim had introduced him to, while Ephraim, if it was after five o'clock, would order nothing but vodka. For a time Ephraim was his only friend, for he had grown more solitary since his expedition with Mason and Jones on the houseboat. They had ended the journey coolly, Denton declining to shoot and reading instead in his cabin, while the other two drank and gossiped with Henschel after the day's slaughter of birds and sometimes rabbits. Back in Shanghai, he avoided both of them, as well as Johnson with his assiduous attempts to become his mentor. And he began to skip the Christian Youth Fellowship meetings, pleading special Customs duties as his excuse. He continued to sing in the choir, though, and attended every service punctually. The blending of the voices under the dark beams of the cathedral still filled him with a melancholy satisfaction in which he released the emotion of his loneliness and yearning for ... for something else, something more, he didn't know what. Since Emily's jilting of him he seemed to have been living in suspension, waiting, restless, discarding the ways of life he'd been brought up in and worn unthinkingly like his clothes, but putting nothing in their place.

He took to roaming the city at night, the long crowded streets of the international settlement, the seedier boulevards of the French settlement, the narrow canals and alleys of the Chinese city. Often he passed the entrance to the house on rue Molière where he'd seen the lady in grey with the little girl, and it seemed to him that somehow that was an emblem of what he was searching for. But equally often he would go on, towards the house on the other side with its green shutters and mysteriously enticing ever-open door. He would glance in and then saunter past, as though uninterested in what the doorway promised; yet his heart always beat faster. The fat man with the level voice was gone, but another, older, man sat in the same chair now, forever reading a Chinese news-paper, from which he would slowly raise his eyes at every passer-by. The lady with the little girl, elegant, serene, remote - he never saw again.

His feet seemed to carry him to places of temptation solely in order to allow him to turn away at the last moment. He was torn between half-acknowledged lust and half-abandoned chastity. Once, in the sailors' district by the docks, two young, effeminate-looking Chinese youths accosted him, smiling in a strange, uncontrolled manner, as if they were drunk - except that Denton had never seen a drunken Chinese.

'You wantee fuckee-fuckee?' one of them asked.

'What?'

'Fuckee-fuckee?' One took his arm familiarly while the other groped for his groin.

He shook them off violently, shocked. They shrugged and sauntered away indifferently, giggling to each other their gait unsteady. It was not until later, when he'd overcome his quivering repulsion, that he realised that they were intoxicated not by alcohol, but by opium.

Yet still he sought out the same places, and always alone, to see and yet avoid them, to titillate his desires and frustrate them. Faces peered provocatively at him from doorways, rickshaw boys called out invitations from their shafts - 'Very clea', Portuguesee, Filipino, what you want?' - girls brushed against him longingly in the street, laying their hands on his arm with a caressing, feather-light touch. He was frightened of them, yet he couldn't keep away. In his room, he would listen more keenly, tantalised, for the chuckles and murmurs through the wall at weekends or whenever Mason was off-duty. On his visits to restaurants with Wei, he watched the sing-song girls with long furtive glances, especially the one Wei had sing for them the first time. Noticing his half-concealed interest, Wei often suggested that restaurant and often engaged the same girl to sing. Denton knew her name now: Su-mei.

The weather grew colder. He wore his overcoat in his room at night when he sat down to study his Chinese.

One evening in February Ephraim joined him at his usual corner table at the Central Hotel, behind the glossy green leaves of a palm tree. He was rubbing his hands together and smiling gleefully. 'Today I have made twenty thousand dollars, my friend.' He sat down and gripped Denton's arm with his familiar pressure. 'Twenty thousand in one day!'

'Oh? How?'

'How does anyone make a profit? By buying cheap and selling dear!' He gazed at Denton goggle-eyed, shaking his head amusedly at his naivet‚. 'By buying cheap and selling dear! The only law of business, my friend.'

The waiter brought him his vodka unbidden, and Denton listened with a twinge of envy while Ephraim recounted with self-congratulatory chuckles and extravagant gestures how he'd held onto a consignment of opium because he was sure the price was going to rise - and of course he'd been vindicated. As he drank, he became more voluble, more expansive, his mobile, slightly sallow, face glowing with warmth and pride. 'You see, we Jews must have a national home - that is why we work to make money. To found our national home where we can be safe from the Cossacks. Have you seen our magazine in Shanghai? Israel's Messenger? You will like it, an educated man like you. I will bring you a copy to read. It has many interesting pieces, not just for Jews, but everyone. Politics, art, literature.... It is the organ of the Zionist movement in Shanghai,' he added, as if that were its ultimate distinction.

'In English?' Denton asked cautiously.

'Of course. There is a translation of that article on circumcision in the next issue.'

As he drank his way into the fourth or fifth vodka, always vainly pressing Denton to join him, he switched without a pause from the Zionist movement to the future of Shanghai. 'Mark my words,' he gripped Denton's arm again, 'Shanghai will be another city-state like Venice or Florence in the Renaissance.... You know?'

Denton nodded vaguely, unwilling to betray his large uncertainties about Italian Renaissance city-states.

'We are growing like them, and for the same reasons,' Ephraim rushed exuberantly on. 'From nothing we are already the third largest port in the world, the largest city in China - '

'Isn't Peking - ?'

'Peking? Pah! Finished! Shanghai, I tell you, will be a merchant state as powerful in world trade as Venice was in Italy. It is the door to China. And we shall hold the key to the door.' He filled his glass again from the bottle (the waiters knew that he never wanted a glass of vodka, but a whole bottle). 'Look at our government. Who rules Shanghai? China? Of course not. Britain? You British founded it, but it is not a British colony.'

'The foreign consuls?' Denton suggested mildly.

'Pah! What can they do? The power has passed to the Municipal Council - a merchant oligarchy. There you are - Venice without its Doge! We even have the canals!'

'Without its what?' Denton asked unsurely.

'Without its Doge. Duce, a leader, a chief. Ah, one day I shall sit on that municipal council, you mark my words. And we will control China from there, the whole of China.' He drank with a flourish and smacked his lips, leaning back with closed eyes to savour his dream.

Denton was still uncertain. Who did Ephraim mean by 'we'? 'Do you mean the Jews will have a national home in China?' he asked hesitantly.

But Ephraim hadn't heard him. His mood had suddenly changed, his brown eyes frowning now. He shook his head sadly, recalling perhaps the vicissitudes of life in Odessa. 'Ach, what are you doing, Jacob, always talking and talking?' he upbraided himself in a melancholy voice. 'It will all pass, it will all pass. Venice fell, Florence fell, even Jerusalem fell.... So why won't Shanghai fall too?' He sighed heavily, resignedly, pushing out his glistening underlip. 'So what are you doing, always talking and talking about your national homes and your Shanghai like Venice? Ach, ach, ach....'

Denton watched in embarrassed silence while Ephraim lamented, rocking slowly back and forth on his seat. But then, as suddenly as it had come, the mood passed. He leant forward, finished his glass and screwed the cap on the bottle, calling for the bill with a peremptory snap of his fingers. He paid as always in cash. 'Never pay with chits,' he advised Denton early on. 'Never pay with chits. They always cheat you.' He stood up, took the half-finished bottle under his arm and walked with Denton towards the door. 'Tonight, I shall celebrate with a girl,' he said decidedly. He stopped to peer into Denton's face. 'What about you?'

Denton shook his head uncomfortably, looking away from the lighted porch, on which palms and rubber plants stood like doormen, to the darkness of the river beyond the Bund. 'I must be getting back to the mess,' he said.

Ephraim gazed at him reproachfully. 'Ach, you're not still thinking of that girl in England, are you?'

'No.'

'She's gone.' He ignored Denton's denial. 'Why don't you forget her? Come,' taking Denton's arm encouragingly, persuasively, in his grip, 'I know just the girl for you.'

But Denton, as always, pulled himself away. He watched Ephraim climb into his sedan chair and wrap himself round with a rug. Ephraim waved, nursing the vodka bottle on his knees. The chair swayed as the bearers moved off. To the house with the green shutters? Denton wondered. An oil lantern glowed on one corner of the chair. Denton watched it bobbing away, imagined it arriving at the house, saw Ephraim getting out, being greeted by sensuous girls with long hair and high, rouged cheeks....

He heard his name called in Chinese. The sound came from the rickshaws clustering across the road from the hotel. He looked across at them, frowning. His name was called again, quietly and urgently. He walked down the steps and into the shadows where the rickshaw coolies were squatting between their shafts, smoking or dozing, wrapped in rags and old sacks. Again he heard his name called, and this time he made out the podgy figure of Kwai, the coxswain of the Customs launch he'd first been on with Mason.

'Mister Denton,' he hissed from the edge of the rickshaws. 'Come quickly.' He was smiling excitedly, the bringer of good news. But then he always smiled, as though he thought the whole of existence was a genial comedy. Every officer except Mason called him Lolly Kwai. Mason, refusing to be so familiar with any Chinese subordinate, called him curtly by his name alone, if he troubled to use even that.

Lolly Kwai nodded into the shadows thrown by some plane trees. 'This fellow says there will be some smuggling tonight.'

Denton peered into the trees, but couldn't see a thing. 'Where?'

'On the Alexander the First.'

'But I checked their cargo this evening. They're sailing tonight.'

Lolly shook his head, smiling broadly. 'Come and talk to the man. He wants money.' He led him past the trees to another rickshaw standing by itself. A young Chinese with a wisp of beard straggling from a large mole on his chin was leaning back in the shade of the raised awning. He scarcely glanced at Denton, the whites of his eyes flickering once in the dark and then remaining still. He looked only at Lolly Kwai, his face half-turned away from Denton as though he didn't want to be seen. The three of them whispered in Chinese, Lolly Kwai smilingly translating into pidgin when Denton couldn't follow. There were a hundred bales of cotton outside a godown on the wharf where the Alexander the First was berthed. Just before she sailed, having already got Customs clearance, they would swiftly load the bales and so avoid paying tax on them.

'What about the wharf police?'

The young Chinese shrugged meaningfully.

'I have the launch ready,' Lolly Kwai turned to Denton. 'We can catch them from the river. They will have lookouts on the shore.'

Denton felt his stomach crumple. He was unsure and diffident. He tried to remember how Johnson had handled the salt smuggling all those months ago.

'We must hurry,' Lolly Kwai urged. 'They sail in one hour.'

'How much should I pay him?' Denton whispered uncertainly in English.

The informer's eyes flickered again, as if he'd understood. But he said nothing.

Lolly Kwai held up five stiff, plump fingers. 'Fifty dollar.'

'I haven't got that much on me,' Denton said worriedly. 'I'll have to draw some more out.'

The Chinese spoke rapidly to Lolly Kwai, so quickly and quietly that Denton couldn't understand a word, Lolly Kwai turned back to Denton. 'Twenty-five now, twenty-five afterwards?' he suggested.

Denton handed the money over. The man's eyes watched tensely as Denton counted it out, then he slipped it into his quilted jacket without checking it. As he did so, Denton recalled the handless stumps of Johnson's informer in the mortuary. The man slid out of the rickshaw and merged with the night, his black cloth slippers making no sound on the paved street - the first street to be paved in Shanghai.

Lolly laid a restraining hand on Denton's arm until the informer had had time to get well away, then led him to the launch. As they steamed the half-mile down to the lower section wharves, Lolly, his face glistening in the light in the well of the launch, explained how they could catch the smugglers red-handed. Denton nodded gladly, grateful that he was taking over. He felt he was hollow, acting like a puppet; but he couldn't have acted by himself. Lolly gave orders to the two men in the bow, who were flapping their arms across their chests against the cutting chill of the breeze off the water.

When they neared the vessel, Lolly stopped the engines and had all the lights put out. It was a moonless night, and they drifted almost invisibly down toward the Alexander the First. Lolly grinned and pointed. A file of coolies were trotting up a gangplank at the stern, carrying the bales on their shoulders and dropping them on the main deck. They were working silently, their usual grunting chant hushed. As the launch drifted towards the white, rusty hull of the ship, Denton could hear the bales thumping dully onto the metal deck above him.

It wasn't until they had gently bumped against the ship's side that they were seen. There was a soft yell, and the coolies dropped their bales and fled. Denton followed Lolly Kwai up some iron rungs onto the quay. How cold and smooth the rungs were, he thought detachedly, surprised that he should notice such a thing at such a time. The gangplank lay on the ground where it had been hastily thrown when the last coolie had run off. Lolly led the way up the main gangway amidships.

Denton, following, saw the ship's agent awaiting them, the same smooth, pale Mr Ching, in whose presence he'd signed the customs clearance a few hours before. 'Good evening Mista' Den-tong.' His rimless glasses, always set a little down his nose to give him a quizzical, scholarly expression, glinted as he smiled. He spoke a little breathlessly, rubbing his hands together inside the full sleeves of his long, quilted gown. 'Is something wrong? It is very cold, I think.'

'You've been loading without authority?' Denton said unsteadily. Against his will a polite note of questioning had slipped into his voice.

'Without authority?' Ching's eyebrows rose in hurt amazement. 'Surely no, Mista' Den-tong.'

'What were those bales you were just loading, then?' Denton still felt unable to be brisk and authoritative against Ching's elastic, courteous friendliness. He glanced after Lolly and the two men who had gone aft to find the bales. Without Lolly's presence, he felt smaller, unprotected.

'Are not those the bales we have already pay tax?' Ching's eyebrows rose again in pained incredulity.

'May I see the manifest, please?' Still he was asking, not demanding.

Ching led him politely to the first class dining-saloon and ordered some coffee for him while the manifest was sent for.

As Ching laid the papers before him, Denton noticed he was drawing a long white envelope out of his full sleeves. Ching held the envelope half-covered, half-revealed as he spoke. 'I am sure if there is any mistakings they can be quickly arrange',' he said, smiling, his eyes on Denton's.

Lolly Kwai appeared in the doorway, and the envelope disappeared into the wide folds of Ching's gown. He waited courteously while Lolly Kwai murmured into Denton's ear. 'Twenty-nine bales cotton. Under tarpaulin. More below.'

Denton nodded, scrutinising the manifest. 'There doesn't seem to be any cotton down here at all.'

'No cotton?' Ching shook his head in disbelief. 'No cotton, Mista' Den-tong?'

'See for yourself.' He pushed the manifest across. At last his voice was strengthening. Was it Lolly Kwai's presence that stiffened it?

Ching bent and studied the sheets for some time turning them backwards and forwards and shaking his head in a show of perplexity. At last he straightened up smiling still. 'A misunderstanding, Mista' Den-tong. They must have thought the cotton is already cleared. I tell them to unload at once. Some more coffee? Brandy?'

'I'm afraid I'll have to report this, Mr Ching,' Denton said. 'The ship can't sail until the matter's been investigated. It appears those bales are contraband.'

'If they are unload', Mista' Den-tong?' Ching's voice was wheedling now. 'You will let the ship sail? It is high cost of pay dues in port.' Again Denton glimpsed the white envelope as Ching turned away from Lolly Kwai. It was just like the envelope Mason had taken from him that time when they'd inspected the ship together.

'I'm sorry. I have to withhold clearance from the ship now.' Denton heard himself uttering the official phrases at though he were reciting from the pamphlets Mr Brown had given him in his first week. 'And we shall have to leave a guard on board too.' His voice still sounded too polite and apologetic, but there was a stubborn core to it now. He stood up with a faint, throbbing feeling of elation. He felt he'd carried it off after all. He could tell from the momentary, hesitant glimmer in Ching's eyes like an actor's who'd forgotten his lines. And from his smile too - it had lost its pliability and become fixed. Even his supple voice had run dry.

As he went down the gangway, Lolly Kwai turned to him with his cheerful smile. 'Mr Ching big friend Mr Mason,' he said, in a pidgin that seemed to mock itself. 'Mr Mason not likee this bobberee.' His breath steamed on the air as he laughed.

27

ON THE FIRS' DAY of Chinese New Year, all the family must have dinner together.' Wei paused while some firecrackers banged and flashed nearby. 'After thir' day visit relative'.' He was nursing a small potted tangerine tree on his lap, the little orange fruits quivering on their stems as the rickshaw jolted over the ruts and holes in the road. His spare, bony shoulders pressed against Denton's when the coolie suddenly swung the shafts round to avoid a sedan chair borne out of the little alley by four trotting bearers. 'Everyone must have new clothe' to wear and relative' give money to children. Good fortune token, it is called.'

Some grinning boys threw a firecracker at the rickshaw wheels and the coolie swore angrily at them as the explosion sent flame and smoke round his legs. Wei nearly dropped the tangerine tree which was wrapped in red paper.

'And after the third day,' Denton smiled, eager to display his know-ledge, 'students must visit their teachers and pay their respects.'

'You are very goo' pupil,' Wei nodded approvingly. 'You have learn' a very lot.'

'And the money packets are red for good luck, and the money inside them must be new money,' Denton went on. 'And that tangerine tree is for your family, for prosperity in the coming year.'

Wei began speaking in Chinese now, smiling encouragement. 'If you go on like this, you will become my best pupil.'

It was Denton's turn to act as host, so he paid the coolie when they reached the restaurant. Firecrackers were exploding again nearby and he covered his ears, recalling his first morning in Shanghai, when he woke up to the banging of firecrackers and thought it was gunfire.

Wei smiled, cuddling his tangerine tree with both hands in front of him, so that his face was half-obscured by the lattice of its branches. 'This is nothing. They are only practising.' He spoke in Chinese still. 'When the holiday really starts, it will sound like a battle.'

As they went up the stairs to the restaurant, where Denton's appearance was no longer a novelty, Denton thought of Su-mei, the sing-song girl. He visualised the curve of her cheek, the black fringe of hair across her forehead, the slightly roguish glances she'd given him the week before. Something quickened in him, a faint rippling thrill. He quite enjoyed her singing now, although she didn't seem to have a large repertoire and he knew all her songs. And it was only her clear, sharp voice really, he told himself, that he was eager for, not the way she held her head and smiled, or half-smiled, at him.

The waiter led them to the partitioned room where they always ate. Denton turned to Wei. 'I've never met your family,' he began indirectly, in his best Chinese, feeling for a way of finding out whether, as Wei's student, he should visit him after the third day of the holiday or not.

'Oh, they will not interest you,' Wei answered hastily, giving the tangerine tree to the waiter to put on the floor, 'They are only women and children.'

Was that merely a polite disclaimer or definite discouragement? Denton toyed with his chopsticks, probing for a more certain answer. 'Do all your students visit you on the third day?' he asked more directly.

'Not foreigners, it is only for Chinese students,' Wei said decidedly. 'I don't think foreign devils should do it.' He had used 'foreign devils,' the ordinary, derogatory Chinese epithet for foreigners, unconsciously, then, realising his error, laughed in embarrassment. 'As we are speaking Chinese, I forgot that you are a foreigner.'

Sometimes he was open and easy with Denton, sometimes reserved and polite. At restaurants, as he ate and drank, he usually became more open. This time, he drank more than his normal amount of wine, and began to talk freely, changing to English as his thoughts surpassed Denton's still limited ability in Chinese. His cheeks became slightly flushed and his voice louder as he talked above the clack of mahjong tiles and the boisterous laughter rising over the partitions all round them. He even applauded Su-mei when she came to sing for them and gave her a New Year's money packet - usually he scarcely acknowledged the sing-song girls he engaged except with a curt nod. While she sang, he told Denton about his two wives, who were always quarrelling, and about his family in their village in the northern part of Kiangsu. Once they had been big landowners, but his grandfather had mortgaged all their land except the ancestral house in his losing passion for gambling.

'What happened to him in the end?' Denton asked, his eyes on the curled strand of hair that fell cunningly down in front of Su-mei's ear.

'The creditor' take all the lan', and my gran'father kill himself. Throw himself down the well.' His eyes were misty behind his glasses, whether from emotion or wine, Denton couldn't tell. Wei's father had come to Shanghai when the British came and became a clerk in Jardine Matheson's. Now he was old, he'd stopped working and lived with his sons, smoking opium and waiting to die. He'd wanted to buy back all the land his father had lost, but he'd never made enough money. Besides, he'd always been too fond of opium. Some people should never take it, they found out too late that they couldn't do without it. Wei enjoyed it himself, but never too much. He held up the heavy pewter wine jug. 'You see, I drink, but I am not get drunk,' he said, beaming hazily at Denton. 'The same with opium - I take but no' too much. But if get drunk on wine like foreigners, you must not take opium.' He let the jug down with a thump and splash.

Su-mei sang again. Wei left to talk to some friends in another room, walking with a cautious steadiness that seemed to belie his confidence in his imperviousness to wine - yet he would never show any other sign of intoxication. Denton lolled in his chair, the wine fumes wafting through his own head too. He watched the rise and fall of the girl's breasts under her silk gown, the spot of rouge that emphasised her high, prominent cheekbone, the full scarlet of her slightly pouting lips. Demons slipped the idea into his mind of placing his hands over those breasts. He blinked the demons away. In his pocket he too had a red money packet for her, but he hadn't the nerve to give it. Now was the time, while Wei was out of the room, but though his fingers were round the little packet, he couldn't draw it out. The demons slipped the fantasy of his hands over her breasts into his mind again, and this time he didn't dismiss them so quickly. But still he couldn't get up and give her the packet with the customary words.

She stopped singing and sat with her head slightly bowed, her hands demurely folded in her lap. He sipped some more wine and cleared his throat. He kept glancing at her and then away again, his fingers closing and unclosing on the little red envelope. Then her glance met his as she looked up at him from the corner of her eye. 'You like me?' she asked quietly.

'Yes,' he answered lamely. 'You sing very well.' Her eyelids drooped again. 'Not very well,' she murmured conventionally.

Suddenly he hauled the packet out of his pocket, got up clumsily and gave it to her with both hands, mumbling the New Year greeting. Her fingers touched his as she took it. She inclined her head and smiled the response. She put the packet away without opening it, folding her hands demurely in her lap as Wei came back into the room.

Later that night, while Denton was leaning over the veranda in his overcoat, watching the anticipatory firecrackers flash and burst in the street below, there was a loud rap on the door. Ah Koo opened it as Denton turned round and, set-faced, with a flinty nod of the head, gestured Su-mei into the room.

Denton stared at her, startled, thrilled, alarmed. She stood looking at him with slightly bowed, submissive, head until the door had closed. He heard Ah Koo's long, phlegmy cough growling away along the corridor.

'What are you doing here?' he asked bewilderedly in Chinese.

She looked up with widening, surprised eyes. 'You said you like me. You didn't want me to come?'

'No - I wasn't thinking' - he couldn't recall the word for 'expecting' - 'you would come.'

Her shoulders lifted slightly. 'You want me to go?' she asked simply, as if she was about to turn and leave.

'No ... I don't know.... Sit down, please.' Had he secretly expected her to come? What else did it mean to say 'I like you' to a sing-song girl? Yet the idea hadn't even brushed the surface of his conscious mind. He felt himself trembling slightly, helpless, like a man dreaming he is teetering on the brink of some precipice.

She was sitting on the edge of the chair at his desk, perching as if ready to fly, glancing at the picture of his parents. 'Your mother and father?' she asked calmly.

'Yes.'

'How old are they? Are they very rich? How many sons and daughters?' She took the picture off the desk as he answered each question, frowning at it with a little smile at the edge of her lips. She held in gingerly, as if she thought it might play some trick on her. 'Is it safe to have these pictures made? In my village, people said the machine that does it makes you sick.'

He laughed, closing the veranda doors and taking off his coat. 'No, it is safe. Even the Empress Dowager has had a picture made of herself.' It was all right, he thought, he would merely talk with her a little, there was no danger of.... 'Where is your village?' he asked more easily.

'Beyond Ningpo,' she shrugged. It was the same with all of them - the boys, the rickshaw coolies, the cooks. Whenever you asked them where they came from, it was always 'Ningpo more far.' It was a kind of evasion, a drawing of the curtains over their own space, like the faint, shuttered rigidity that their eyes assumed when your probed too far. And yet they thought nothing of asking how much you earned or what your suit cost!

'How long have you been a sing-song girl?'

'Three years.'

'How did you become....' He faltered. 'How did you become this thing?'

'Sing-song girl?' She laughed, a fluting, mocking little laugh, 'My parents sold me.' She placed the picture carefully back on the desk.

He nodded vaguely. He'd seen the little girls standing in docile rows in the Chinese city, waiting to be sold as slaves. At first he'd been shocked and indignant; but then, as Wei had blandly explained things to him, he'd felt his moral certainties begin to crumble. It was part of their way of doing things, he began to think, a way that foreigners couldn't understand, but which they would accept as inevitable for ever - or at least until some cataclysm overturned the whole of society. And how could you expect that to happen? Everything was so fixed, so Immemorially old. Each succeeding generation seemed to have stamped the lines of tradition further in, so that now they could never be dug out. Impoverished parents sold their daughters, Wei had said, to buy food for those that were left. Sometimes they had a better life that way - they might become a concubine for one of their new family's sons, and so escape the life of drudgery they would otherwise have lived. Sometimes of course, he acknowledged with a fatalistic shrug, they might have a worse life. It depended on the family that bought them. At least it was better than starving or being killed at birth. Denton hadn't asked him whether he had girl slaves himself. It was one of the many things about Wei that he didn't know.

'My teacher was good,' she went on casually. 'I was with some actors first. I can act as well.' Her face turned to him like a schoolgirl's proud of her achievements.

'You sing very well. Your voice is beautiful.'

She smiled, holding her hand to her mouth to suppress a giggle.

'What is the matter?' he asked in his stilted Chinese 'Why are you laughing?'

She shook her head, glancing up at him under half-closed lids. 'You said my voice is beautiful-to-look-at,' she said at last, 'not beautiful-to-hear.'

He laughed and slapped his forehead. 'I always make that mistake. It is because in English there is only one word for both things.'

'Both things?' She gazed at him incredulously. 'How can one word mean two things?'

'Well....' He tried to think of an explanation, but his Chinese wasn't up to it. 'We just do have one word for both kinds of things,' he repeated lamely at last.

She shook her head, either in continued disbelief or in simple amazement at the existence of so primitive a language. Then she got up. 'May I look at your rooms?'

He followed her round the living room as she gazed at the chair-covers and antimacassars, fingering them wonderingly, the curtains, the veranda, the print of some European river scene that he'd bought in a junk-shop some weeks after his arrival and hung on the wall - to remind him of home perhaps during those first melancholy, nostalgic weeks. He stood close behind her while she silently regarded it. It was as though he could feel her body through the long gown she wore, as though it summoned him to touch it. And yet she seemed unaware of her body's attraction, standing oblivious, with her head tilted, without even a sideways glance at him. He could hear her breathing; he dared not step closer. His heart beat faster as she strolled unconcernedly into the bedroom.

She pressed her hand down on the bed. 'So soft!' she exclaimed, shaking her head slowly as if she disapproved.

Denton swallowed and licked his lips, his heart thudding wildly.

'I sleep on wood,' she said, turning to him. 'With a quilt. Do all foreign devils have such soft beds?'

'It's not very soft, really,' he got out breathlessly. 'They have softer ones in England.'

She sat on the bed and smiled up at him, and then, as if to tantalise him, got up and wandered back into the living room. He felt his heart slowing. A confused weight of both relief and disappointment seemed to drag on his chest.

She was fingering the chair-covers again, consideringly. 'This is expensive?' she asked. 'How much did you pay? Does all this belong to you?'

But before he could answer, she looked up at the gaslight hissing faintly beneath its shade and let out a little gasp of wonder. 'Is that the new Western light?'

He nodded, reaching up to touch the dangling chain with its ring on the end. 'If you pull this, the light is smaller.'

She hooked her forefinger delicately inside the ring and pulled cautiously. The flame diminished and the room grew dim. He was standing beside her, his eyes fixed on her ear, small and flat, with a golden ring gleaming softly in the tiny lobe.

'How do you make it bigger?' she asked, turning to him. The faint blue flame seemed to glow in the shiny pupils of her slanted eyes.

'Pull the other end.'

She smiled as the flame hissed, growing white and bright again. She began pulling first one and then the other, her eyes glistening as the light dimmed and strengthened. She looked round at him, her lips parted in a smile. Her teeth seemed to glisten too. He imagined his tongue thrusting between them. Still smiling, but mischievously now, she pulled on the chain till with a little plut the gas went out.

'Is it broken?' she asked, suddenly anxious.

He couldn't answer at first, feeling her breath beside him, the faint stir and rustle of her clothes. The firecrackers in the street outside, the cries and shouts, the booming of a ship's siren on the river, all seemed to take on a new distinctness in the silence between them.

'Is it broken?' she asked quietly again.

'No, we must burn it with a match,' he said at last.

'Burn it?'

'Light it,' he corrected himself. She was looking up at him, still smiling, although the child-like, contrite anxiety lingered in her pupils. His eyes were on her lips. Suddenly he had lowered his mouth onto hers. He felt that the dreamer on the precipice had fallen, was rushing downwards through the giddy air. He pulled her body close against his. Her arms twined round his back.

She leant gently away from him after a while, although her arms still held him. 'You want to be with me?'

He nodded, pulling her back towards him.

But she held her face away as he tried to kiss her mouth again. 'How much will you pay me?'

'I do not know. Twenty dollars?'

She nodded faintly, placing her hand over his mouth as he tried for her lips again. 'You give me the money now?'

She took the note from him and put it somewhere in her gown, then walked into the bedroom and started to undress. The lamp was unlit above the bed. She glanced up at it and paused. 'You like the light on or...?'

He shook his head. Now that she was undressing, he was tense and uneasy. He'd never imagined further than holding her naked in his arms, and he knew there was more to it than that. But how did you do it, exactly? What did you have to do? Her clothes slithered off her, revealing first her breasts, then her slender waist, then her slim shadowy hips. She looked at him questioningly as she stepped out of her underskirt and laid it carefully over the chair. In the dim, erratic light from the window, her skin looked so pale - not with an anaemic whiteness of Ching which was dry and sickly, but with freshness and life beneath it.

'Aren't you going to undress?' she asked.

He began pulling at his buttons, trying to appear nonchalant and experienced.

She had put her hands up behind her head to loosen her hair, and now, with a little toss of her head, she let it fall down below her shoulders. 'Do you like me?' she asked, with that faintly anxious look in her eyes again.

'Yes.'

'Am I like foreign women?'

'I don't know.' He thought of Emily. Su-mei wasn't like her. 'No, not like foreign women,' he said unevenly. 'Smaller. More beautiful.'

She shook her head and smiled, glancing down at her body wonderingly. He had never seen a woman naked before, not since the time when, coming home early from school, he'd opened the scullery door to find his mother standing in the old zinc tub washing herself. He'd no more than glimpsed the pasty flabby cheeks of her buttocks, the quivering flesh of her blue-veined thighs, before she'd noticed him and shouted him angrily out, muttering fiercely to herself behind the swiftly slammed and bolted door. Su-mei's body was so different: smooth, firm, small.

She lay down on the bed, one leg stretched out, the other drawn up. 'You would rather have a girl with lily feet?' She asked.

'No.' He was pushing at his shirt buttons, forcing them through the holes. Lily feet. He hadn't seen bound feet uncovered, but the sight of rich Chinese ladies shuffling along on them, supported by an amah at each side, had made him imagine they would look like deformed hooves.

She lifted her leg and turned the ankle, pointing her toes. 'I was not born to be a lady. None of my sisters' feet were bound either.' She looked down at her turning foot with a smile, as if she liked what she saw nevertheless, then lay back again, spreading her hair out on the pillow like a black shiny fan. One arm lay carelessly out-stretched on the bed, where he would have to lie, the other across her body, her hand just over her groin as though she were modestly covering herself. He'd got his shirt off now and her eyes surveyed his chest between half-closed lids. Shy and uncertain of himself, he turned his back to pull off the rest of his clothes, tugging fiercely at his shoelaces, which he'd stupidly pulled into a knot. He heard her giggle behind him and blushed, imagining he must seem as repulsive to her as his mother's body had to him. When at last he turned round, she had rolled onto her face. Was that the right way? He didn't know. He lay down beside her. She didn't move. But she wasn't laughing at him now, her eyes, between the long dark strands of hair, looked serious - grave, even. The firecrackers and street noises seemed louder again, each one sharp and distinct. What should he do? He noticed detachedly the soft gleam of the brass bedrail. Perhaps if he kissed her again, it would all happen, somehow. But instead of kissing her, he found that his hand was on her buttock, shaping itself round the cold smooth mound and slowly stroking it. Now I've started, he thought with that same detachment with which he'd just now noticed the gleam of the bedrail, as if his body were going of its own accord and he were merely a passenger in it. Now I've started. I can't go back. Her eyes were watching him still, there seemed to be the shadow of a smile about her lips. Should his hand move up or down now? He felt her leg move slightly under his palm, like a cat arching its back against your hand when you stroked it. He felt himself stirring too. He leant over to kiss her back and his hand slid down her thigh as he did so. Her skin was smooth and cold on his lips. But what next? It was between the legs, he knew, but where exactly, and how? In his demon dreams he'd sometimes imagined himself lying on top of a woman kissing her mouth, her breasts. But she was upside down for that. All the time he was wondering what to do, he was kissing and licking her back, his hand was caressing her legs with rising pleasure and desire, as if his body knew perfectly well what his mind did not. He pressed her side gently and she rolled over onto her back, flicking the hair out of her face and closing her eyes. He leant over to kiss her and as he did so his hand covered her breast. Another mound, smooth and swelling. He heard her draw in her breath as he pressed against the hardness of her nipple and her excitement roused him still further. Her lips opened for his. They seemed to grow warmer and moister the more he pressed against her, the more he brushed his palm across her nipple. Suddenly her tongue slipped between his teeth, withdrew, then slipped in again. He lay on top of her now, his stalk digging into her belly. She laid her arms lightly round his back. Her fingertips brushed delicately along his skin, up and down his flanks. That was as far as his imaginings had ever brought him. For a brief moment he paused, uncertain how to go on. Again that detached sense of being a spectator of his own body came over him. He seemed for a second to be seeing himself from above - he had a definite image of his own back as he sprawled on top of her - and he wondered remotely how such grappling could be important or exciting, and then, as she pressed up against him with her hips, he succumbed again. His lips found her breasts now, the hard little nipples were urging themselves between his teeth and he felt his stalk lunging at her thighs, blindly and wildly. But her legs were tight together and he couldn't get in. Was it the wrong place? he wondered uneasily.

But now she was moving beneath him, gently easing him over onto his back. She knelt over him while his straying hands stroked her head, her cheeks, her shoulders. Her hand was on his stalk, her hair brushing his chest as she kissed his throat, his nipples, his belly. Her hand was playing with the tip of his stalk, pressing and squeezing it, sliding her fingers softly up and down. Slowly he let go, surrendered, abandoned himself to this delicious sensation that seemed to be melting his body with pleasure. His eyes were closed, his fingers were tangled in her hair, she had her lips over his stalk, she was kissing it, licking it, moving down to the root and up again to the very, exquisitely thrilling, tip. Her lips were closing over the tip, were sliding slowly down it once more, further and further down till he could feel the back of her throat like a warm velvet cushion against the tip of his stalk. And all he'd known, the thought drifted like a wisp of cloud across his mind, was that you kissed in bed!

He felt his stalk thickening and trembling, the sap throbbing up, but then, as if she too had felt it with her agile lips, she slipped away and rolled over onto her back, pulling him close on top of her. Her legs were spread wide apart now, and his stalk was between them, probing and thrusting assuredly now, as if he'd known all along where the place was. He felt her take him between her finger and thumb and guide him into the warm, ready, moistness of her body while the other hand, behind his neck, pulled his mouth down onto hers.

Desire suddenly flowered in every fibre of his body. She led him on, rocked him, teased him, charmed him with her licking of his throat, his ears, with caressing movements of her legs, with the lift and surge of her whole body as he plunged wildly into her. At last, with a long moan, he spent himself in violent shuddering spasms that were echoed in her, quivering through them both again and again until, finally exhausted, his head on her shoulder, he felt his mind sliding away into a vast, empty calm.

The loud bursting of firecrackers and the strident angry yell of a woman in the street outside penetrated the heavy layers of his sleep. His eyes opened slowly. His mouth was half-open on her round smooth shoulder still, as though he'd fallen asleep in the act of biting it. The room seemed darker now, the street, after the outburst that had woken him, quieter. He wondered how late it was. He stirred luxuriously against her body and raised his head.

She was gazing up at the ceiling, her face still and reflective. He kissed her throat, sniffing the faint, unnameable scent of her skin, and looked into her eyes again. The dim light in her dark pupils changed as she pulled back from her faraway thoughts, whatever they were, to look up at him. She smiled slowly, her lips just moving at the corners, a lazy, dreamy satisfied smile. He let his fingers trail gently over her lips, her chin, her cheekbones.

'How old are you?' he asked.

'Sixteen Chinese style. Fifteen western style. Chinese children are one year old when they are born.'

He nodded.

'I would like to have a house with gas lamps like this one day,' she murmured thoughtfully. Was that where her thoughts had been? Her eyes slipped back to him questioningly. 'Do you want more?'

'More?'

'Me? If you pay, I will.'

A cold wave of disenchantment broke over him and he shook his head.

She seemed to sense his changed mood. She got out of bed with a little shrug and gathered her clothes together. He would not look at her. He lay with his head turned away, gazing at the bare wall. He heard her washing herself in the bathroom.

'Can you give me fifty cents?' her voice asked, small and clear by his head.

'Fifty cents?'

She was dressed, looking down at him, her hands deftly pinning her hair behind her head. 'For Ah Koo,' she said. 'Otherwise he will not let me in next time. I must give him something.'

He couldn't reach his jacket. She held it out for him. He pulled out a dollar and gave it to her.

She was ready to leave. He watched her dispiritedly.

She walked to the door, then turned and raised her hand to wave, with a childlike flutter of her fingers. 'Shall I come again?' she asked, almost shyly. 'Did you like me?'

He hesitated. 'I will see you at the restaurant,' he answered evasively. 'I will tell you then.'

When the door had closed, he listened for the sound of her footsteps, but just then the iron-bound wheels of a heavy cart were trundling past outside. He got out of bed and went to the bathroom. The tiled floor was wet where she'd stood. He could see the dark print of her foot near the door. He stood in the same puddle and washed himself with the same cold water. Suppose she wasn't clean? He soaped and soaped, shivering in the cold night air.

He hurried back to the bed and covered himself with all the blankets, keeping away from the side were she had lain. Suppose he'd caught something from her? The wave of guilt and disgust that had been looming over him toppled and broke. He prayed for forgiveness, imagining God as an all-seeing Reverend Eaton. Yet even as he prayed, obscurely hoping that if he truly repented, God would protect him from disease, her voice came back to him - Shall I come again? - and with her voice, the image of her face, her body, reviving the memory of her lips on his, her thighs closing round his thrusting stalk.

Far away he heard firecrackers banging and crackling like distant gunfire and as his sore, exhausted lids closed, he imagined her being borne away in a rickshaw, flashes and smoke all round her while she turned and waved and asked, 'Shall I come again? Did you like me?'

28

WHEN THE CLINK of his teacup woke him in the morning and he opened bleary eyes onto the mean, cold light, a wave of stale distaste and uneasy guilt washed over him again, together with a lurching sense of fear. He sipped the strong, sweet tea that Ah Koo had brought him and listened to him pouring the hot water into his basin in the bathroom. I have committed fornication, I am unclean, he thought with grim Biblical rhetoric. And I've probably caught some disease from her, too. He lay down again and closed his eyes when Ah Koo came out with the toilet bucket, unwilling to face his blandly inquisitorial gaze. Unclean, diseased, the words thumped accusingly through his mind. He remembered with a sudden stabbing keenness the boys at school who at fourteen or so, just before they left, would start sniggering about the smell of girls, which ones would let you put your hand up their skirts, which ones had 'started' and which hadn't. He'd kept himself pure and intact then, but now he was no better than they were, he had come down to the same thing in the end. Disease - he knew nothing about it except from the bragging he'd overheard in the boys' toilets. It could drop off, he remembered one boy with carrotty hair saying, showing off his new-found knowledge.

But how did you tell if you were infected? How long did it take to show? He put his hand down cautiously and felt himself, as if there might be some difference already. And while he did so, Mr Eaton's face seemed to loom over him, minatory and indignant, hurling down denunciations and imprecations.

The door closed quietly behind Ah Koo. Denton propped himself up on his elbow again and finished his tea, his stomach turning softly with remorse and anxiety. A long black hair lay on the pillow. The sheets were stained. There was a sour smell about them. They were the emblem of his sordid lapse. He pulled the bed apart and heaped the unclean sheets on the floor. Perhaps if he washed himself in his shaving water, he might kill the germs? Or was it too late? He washed himself anyway, examining the limp and flabby little thing for any signs of disease. The tip looked a bit red, he thought. But that might only be because he'd been rubbing it so hard with the soap. Undecided, he poured the water away and shaved in the cold water, searching his face in the mirror for telltale signs of debauchery. And though all he saw was a pair of worried brown eyes with solemn, wide pupils, he couldn't convince himself that the wages of sin weren't already gathered there. He cut himself badly in his usual place, on his Adam's apple, and, as he staunched the blood with the new styptic pencil he'd got from Watson's, he vowed to God, whom he still visualised with the hard, unforgiving brow of the Reverend Eaton, that he would never see Su-mei again if only he could be free of disease. The nagging question, how did people like Mason and Jacob Ephraim manage? he pushed aside into an obscure corner of his mind.

For five days firecrackers banged out their salute to the Chinese New Year. All the shops were shuttered and half the boys disappeared from the mess. The weather was cold and dreary and each drab day the same images of guilt and retribution harried Denton, assailing him while he was at work, while he was eating in the mess, in the lonely hours of the night when he lay awake sleepless, and in the thin, chill light of the morning, when he woke tired from the fitful sleep that had come at last in the small hours before dawn. A faint, relentless churning of his stomach, the accompaniment, if not the essence, of his guilt and fear, stole over him time and again, whenever his mind was empty. It came to seem as natural and familiar to him as breathing. He felt he would never feel calm and unworried again.

At last, unable to endure the anxiety any longer, he decided to see a doctor. If I'm all right, he promised that stern Providence with the rigid, righteous face of Mr Eaton once more, I'll never do it again. And if I'm not, please let me get better and I'll make up for it, I'll make amends. Yet several more days passed before he could work up enough courage to make an appointment. He chose a Dr McEwan, whose surgery was on the edge of Hongkew, where many of the sailors' brothels were. He shouldn't be too expensive, Denton thought. Or too censorious. In the meantime Sunday came; Denton sang fearfully in the choir and prayed with aching penitence at morning and evensong. He avoided the Rever-end Eaton's eyes, but sitting in the choir stalls, his feet cold on the chilly flags, he glanced often over the irreproachable heads of the congregation, especially Mr Brown's sedate bald dome with its woolly grey circlet of hair, and his wife's stately wide-brimmed hat. They seemed more remote than ever from him, superior not only by being 'good class,' but also now by their virtue. He felt he had no right to sing in the choir even, that he was a hypocrite whom the Reverend Eaton might at any moment turn to and denounce with burning eyes.

Dr McEwan was disconcertingly young - he looked hardly more than five years older than Denton. But he seemed fifteen years older in his manner. Thick black hair grew low down on his forehead and a bristly moustache sprouted belligerently on his upper lip. 'Yes, Misterr Denton?' he asked in a faint Scottish brogue, looking up suspiciously beneath knitted, heavy brows, as though he expected something unsavoury already from one glance at Denton's hangdog face.

'Er ... I think I may....'

'Yes?' The heavy brows drew even closer together. 'Inadvertently, I mean ... I may have been in contact with ... with a disease.'

'That's probably true of all of us, Misterr Denton,' he grunted. 'Did you have any particular disease in mind, or do ye want to be checked for every blessed one? It'll be mighty expensive if ye do.'

'Well....' Denton smiled feebly at his sarcasm, his cheeks smarting.

'Been to a brothel, I take it?'

'Oh no! Nothing like that!'

Dr McEwan's flush deepened with impatience. 'Well, what, then? Pish, man, I can't treat a patient like this! What's the trouble?'

'Well, it was a bit like that,' Denton conceded shamefacedly. 'Only it wasn't a....' His voice failed him at the word Dr McEwan had uttered with such no-nonsense briskness.

'Right then, ye've been with a woman.' His eyes glittered irritably. 'Why didn't ye say so? When was it and what are your symptoms?'

'Well, I don't seem to have any symptoms yet - '

'When was it?'

'Last Monday.'

'A week ago? Good grief man, ye won't have any symptoms in seven days. God may have made the worrld in six days, but venereal disease takes a wee bit longer. The woman was a prostitute, I take it?'

'Oh no, not at all!'

Dr McEwan glanced at him sharply. 'Ye don't mean a respectable woman, surely?'

Denton looked away. 'A sing-song girl.'

'Sing-song girls are prostitutes, Misterr Denton.'

'No, she was different,' Denton stammered weakly. 'I mean she ... she....'

'She only does it when she wants to, eh?' He laughed sardonically. 'A high-class lady, no doubt. Well, you're probably all right. It's the lads in the cheap places by the docks that are more likely to catch a dose - and I doubt ye've been there by the look of ye,' he added witheringly. 'I'd better have a glance at ye all the same. On the couch please and drop your trouserrs.'

Denton lay obediently on his back, ridiculous and vulnerable, gripping his lifted shirt-tails in both hands. He gazed up anxiously past Dr McEwan's shoulder as he leant over to examine him. A large black fly was flitting erratically round the motionless blade of the punkah that hung from the ceiling. Dr McEwan's hand felt cold. Denton's body stiffened slightly in recoil at the impersonal insult of his touch.

'Pish, man, there's nothing wrong there,' the doctor straightened with a sigh. 'It's your conscience that's bothering you, not your health. And I'm not the man to cure that.' He glanced wrily down at Denton as he spoke, and Denton caught the definite warm scent of whisky on his breath. He dressed quickly, his chest light with relief, shivering slightly in the cold of the unheated consulting room.

'Keep away from the cheaper places, if ye can't keep away from it altogether,' Dr McEwan advised drily at the door. 'You'll be running very little risk if ye just use your noddle. And come back to see me in six weeks' time, just to be sure.'

Again, as he passed the doctor, Denton caught that warm smell of whisky on his breath.

His health assured, Denton determined to keep his vow. He attended the Christian Youth Fellowship on Thursdays and covered his inward yawns with a outward expression of piety. He went to choir practice on Friday evenings and both services on Sundays. On Saturdays, to escape the sounds of Mason's love-making in the afternoon, sounds which had become agonisingly disturbing now that he understood their meaning, he left his room and walked along the Bund. There was the municipal band to listen to in the public gardens, and, in the evening, the brass concert from the balcony of the German Club, the players smoking cigars and drinking great stone tankards of beer between pieces, looking down on the shifting crowd that gathered in the street below with genial, well-fed smiles. And on weekday evenings he worked at his Chinese.

Wei had gone away for three weeks, to visit his ancestral village for the New Year celebration. When he returned, he suggested their usual restaurant for their weekly dinner. But Denton asked if they could go somewhere else for a change. He didn't want to meet Su-mei again. Images of her face and body tempted him still at every unguarded moment, especially when he lay in bed at night, and he felt he wouldn't be able to resist her if he saw her in the flesh - still less so, now that he knew the fears which had been the greater part of his guilt were groundless.

Wei took him to another restaurant in the old Chinese city, where the streets were so narrow that two rickshaws could barely pass. He began telling him, while they ate their Peking duck, about some Chinese revolutionary called Sun Yat-sen who had been imprisoned in the Chinese Embassy in London and escaped with his life only by throwing messages into the street, which some passer-by had found and taken to the police. Wei was just describing how the handwriting on the notes was recognised by an Englishman who'd been Sun's teacher, and Denton, listening, was just taking a slice of the brown, crackly-skinned duck from the dish between them, when he saw Su-mei being ushered past their table by the head waiter. Their eyes met. He felt his outstretched arm pause while something throbbed for an instant in his chest, as it might have if he'd just missed a step.

'... he is in Japan now,' Wei was saying, 'waiting for a chance to return....' His eyes followed Denton's gaze, but he went on smoothly with scarcely a break, switching however for some reason into English. 'He has many wester' idea', such as democracy and other new thing'. The Manchu try to kill him, but I think she - he - win in the en'.'

Denton nodded absently, noting detachedly how Wei, like so many Chinese, often mixed up the genders of English pronouns, Chinese having no genders itself. But he could not have repeated Wei's last sentence - that little grammatical error was the only thing he'd heard. His arm trembled slightly as he dipped the slice of duck into the black soya sauce and watched his chopsticks carry it to his mouth. Su-mei had gone on, into one of the private rooms; but, as she passed, the faintest smile had touched her lips, and her eyes had lingered on his for one appealing second before she looked away.

'Sun was educate' in the British colony of Hong Kong,' Wei went on. 'Therefore he was learn' many wester' liberal idea'.'

Denton didn't respond and for a few moments they were awkwardly silent. Then Wei swallowed his rice wine with screwed-up eyes as it burned his throat, and coughed, smiling at Denton indulgently as he reverted to Chinese.

'Your mind is on other things. Shall we ask if she is free to join us later on?'

'No, no,' Denton blushed, shaking his head too emphatically to be believed, 'I'm sorry, I was only thinking....'

'She has a good voice and she is good to look at,' Wei urged gently.

'Yes, but not for me, not just now. If you want to hear her...?'

Wei shook his head, his shrewd little eyes smiling in their pale folds of skin. 'I have two wives already, that is enough for me.'

After the almond soup and the oranges, when they had wiped their hands with the steaming towels the waiter brought them, Denton stayed sitting as long as he dared without being discourteous, hoping he might see Su-mei leave, or at least hear her voice. Wei waited patiently, talking still about Sun Yat-sen although he must have known Denton was only half-listening. But Su-mei didn't appear again and his strained ears heard nothing except the usual lively clatter of a Chinese restaurant. Just as well, he told himself at last when he got up to go. But why then did he feel so disappointed, so forlorn?

He was writing a letter home late that night when he heard a sudden shouting and screaming in the street below. There were men's voices, angry and harsh, and a woman's, shrieking wildly in protest. He raised his head, listened a moment with a frown, then lowered it again. Then he jumped up. The woman was calling his name, screaming between what seemed to be blows. And it sounded like Su-mei's voice. He pushed the veranda doors open and leant over the rail. It was Su-mei. She was cowering against the wall while two men struck at her with their fists and feet. People passed by on the other side of the street, gaping but indifferent.

Denton shouted out, but nobody heard - the men went on striking her at will. He dashed out the room, down the stairs, through the lobby. Mason and some others were coming out of the lounge, attracted by the noise.

'What's going on?' Mason asked.

'Quick, they're beating a girl!'

He rushed past them down the steps. Su-mei's hair was loose and she had fallen to her knees. One of her assailants, a vast heavy man, was slapping her face with his open hand, while the other, grabbing her hair, was swinging her into the blows. There was blood on her mouth. Denton felt an immense surge of anger carry him over the threshold of violence. He slipped his arm round the smaller man's neck and swung him round against his braced leg, flinging him to the ground. The fat man stopped, his hand raised to strike Su-mei, and stared at him with flat, expressionless eyes. It was like being stared at by a toad. Denton heard Mason and the others running up behind him, cheering loudly, hallooing like huntsmen. Su-mei raised her head slowly, whimpering. She put her hand up tentatively to touch the blood at her lip and looked down at her fingertip wonderingly, as though she couldn't believe it.

Denton glared at the fat man, panting heavily while the other scram-bled to his feet. It was the man he'd seen at the house with green shutters in rue Molière. He recognized him at once. The same small unwinking eyes stared like opaque beads into his.

'What's going on?' Mason shouted. 'Kick their teeth in!'

But the two groups merely stared at each other like two packs of dogs, the Chinese silent, the British, except for Denton laughing and threatening at the same time, secure in their colour and their numbers. Denton's heart was pumping wildly, his pulse thumping unsteadily in his ears. He'd never struck a man before, and he felt elated and fierce, as if he'd broken some barrier that had been hemming him in.

'Get out!' he said with jerky breathlessness to the toad-like fat one. 'Go on, get out!' He didn't even realise he was speaking in English.

The great bulk didn't move. He stared calmly at Denton a second longer, then spoke slowly, in the level, throaty voice that Denton immediately recalled from before. 'Cette fille,' he said slowly, 'Cette jeune fille … moi.'

'No!' Denton shouted fiercely. He stabbed his chest with his forefinger. 'Mine! Understand? Mine, you fat brute!'

The man stared back at him with a cold insolence that seemed almost dignified. His massive head shook slightly, the long queue quivering down his back.

'Hear what he said?' Mason swaggered forward. 'Go on, push off! Come round here again, you'll land in prison. Get it?'

The fat man's eyes flickered in his moonlike, immobile face as he glanced swiftly from Mason to Su-mei to Denton.

Denton dragged out his Chinese at last - he seemed to have lost it all at first, as though it didn't belong to this savage, elemental layer of his self. 'Go away or I will have you arrested,' he said distinctly, trying to control his heaving breath.

The man moved his eyes again, without turning his head, to watch his companion draw closer to him, then let them swivel back to Denton. 'This woman works for me,' he answered in Chinese, staring coolly into Denton's eyes. 'It is nothing to do with you.' He nodded faintly to the other man, who seized Su-mei's arm. She gave a shocked little yell, then stiffened, pursed her lips and spat deliberately into his face.

'Let her go or I kill you,' Denton said. His voice was under control now, low and level. He knew with the same elation as before that he would hit the smaller man if he didn't let go. He felt the violence throbbing up behind that broken barrier.

The man let go after a moment and slowly wiped the spit off his face.

'Good for you, Denton,' someone muttered behind him.

Su-mei was trembling and white-faced, though no longer whimpering. She touched the blood with her finger again and looked down at it with the same detached wonder.

'Proper little spitfire, isn't she?' Mason said admiringly. The others laughed.

'She owes me money,' the gross Chinese went on stolidly, as if nothing had happened since he last spoke. 'One hundred dollars.'

'You working for the Red Triangle?' Mason interrupted belligerently, first in English, then in broken Chinese.

The fat man's eyes shifted slowly to Mason then back again. He didn't answer, except for a faint, scornful lowering of his lids.

'Because you'd better watch out if you're not. This is Red Triangle territory.' Mason said, again first in English then in Chinese. 'This town belong Red Triangle.'

Again the fat man's eyes shifted to Mason while his face remained motionless, still turned towards Denton. He looked back again, as though a fly had momentarily disturbed his concentration. 'One hun-dred dollars,' he repeated in his husky, even voice. 'She owes me one hundred dollars.'

Su-mei was winding up her hair, breathing heavily and unsteadily. 'I don't owe him anything,' she said sullenly. 'He's lying.'

Denton took a handful of change from his pocket and counted out ten silver dollars.

'Hey, don't give him anything!' Mason protested. 'He's just a pimp trying to make a bit out of the girl. Give him a kick and send him packing.'

But Denton held out the coins. The fat man's eyes moved a fraction, then he shook his head. 'One hundred dollars,' he said.

'Liar!' Su-mei muttered. The man's muscles hardened under his cheeks, but there was no other sign that he'd heard her. His eyes remained, flat and demanding, on Denton's. Denton recalled Mason's dropping the money in front of the peasant outside Soochow. He tilted his palm and let the coins slide off one by one. He was standing so close that several of them landed on the fat man's cloth slippers. But the man didn't flinch. His rigid baleful expression didn't change. The other man stooped, though, and rapidly gathered them up.

'Now leave her alone,' Denton warned the fat man. 'I know you, I'll send the police to get you if you touch her again. Or the French police. I know where you come from.'

For the first time the man's eyes changed. A different, darker light glimmered in them for a second, then they were flat and still again.

'And if the police do not have you, the Red Triangle will,' Mason sneered.

'Not enough,' the fat man said, ignoring Mason, 'She owes me one hundred dollars,' but then he turned suddenly with surprising speed for so ponderous a body, and walked swiftly away, gross in his swaying, waddling gait. The small man trotted after him.

'Christ, what a fatty!' Mason shouted. 'Be far quicker if he lay down and rolled!'

Denton led Su-mei back to the mess. A crowd of Chinese onlookers had collected and now, as they slowly dispersed, they followed them with their eyes, gawping silently.

'Nice-looking piece, though, isn't she?' Mason nudged Denton and leered. 'Where'd you find her? Didn't think you'd got it in you, frankly.'

Suddenly Denton's limbs were trembling. He felt he must be wobbling as he walked. 'What ... what was that about the Red Triangle?' he asked in an unsteady voice, passing over Mason's dig.

'Red Triangle? One of the big triad gangs.' Mason brushed up the ends of his moustache, eyeing Su-mei frankly across Denton's front. 'Anyone operates in the International Concession without their say so, he's likely to end up in the river in no time. I expect that's what scared old fatty off,' he added complacently. 'Not the police bit. They always reckon they can buy off the mashers. But the Red Triangle's different. Shouldn't think she'll have any more trouble from him.' He leant forward, eyeing Su-mei again. 'What's your name, dearie?'

Su-mei didn't answer, dabbing her mouth with her hand. Her eyes stiffened faintly as though she disliked the assuming familiarity of his tone.

'She doesn't speak English,' Denton said curtly.

Mason shrugged and nudged him again. 'You know old Ching's supposed to be something big in the Red Triangle. He didn't like the way you handled that business with the Alexander the First, so I've heard. I'd watch my step there if I were you.'

Denton recalled Lolly Kwai's enigmatic remark as they left the Alexander the First after discovering the contraband. Mr Ching big friend Mr Mason. 'I suppose you didn't like it either?' he asked pointedly.

'Me?' Mason glanced quickly away, his voice growing slightly hollow. 'Why should I care? It's no skin off my nose.'

They were climbing the steps now. The waiters and desk clerks who had been watching from the lobby whispered to each other and grinned.

'I'd better take her up to have a wash,' Denton murmured self- consciously.

Mason had recovered. He smirked round at the other. 'Oh yes, give her a wash,' he winked. 'And then it'll be bed-time, eh? Time to put her to bed.'

Denton led her up the stairs while the rest sauntered back to the bar, laughing and joking, ostentatiously calling out, 'Goodnight! Sleep well.'

He leant against the bathroom door, watching Su-mei wash her face and dab her swollen eyes. She explained what had happened in short emotionless sentences, examining her face in the mirror while she spoke. The fat man was Pock-mark Chen, one of the leaders of the Green Triangle triad in the French Settlement. The Green Triangle were challenging the Red Triangle on the borders of what had always been their territory - the International Settlement. She used to pay protection money to the Green Triangle when she lived in the French Settlement, but since she'd moved into the International Settlement, she'd been paying the Red Triangle. Now Pock-mark Chen was trying to make her pay the Green Triangle as well. How could she pay both? At first he'd just demanded money and she'd kept putting him off. Recently he'd threatened to disfigure her if she didn't pay. She touched the cut on her lip gingerly and felt the bruise on her cheekbone.

He took her into the living room and sat her down opposite him.

'Why don't you go to the police?' he asked.

She pouted and smiled simultaneously. 'What good would that do? They'd only laugh.'

'Well, what are you going to do, then?' He felt elated and pleased with himself. He had saved her from being disfigured, he would protect and advise her. His sleeping with her - that was done with. He was atoning for it now. And yet his nerves tingled when he looked at her. The bruise and the cut, which was still bleeding slightly, somehow made her even more appealing than before. He imagined his hand stretching out to brush her cheek. 'You will have to do something,' he said slowly, struggling to find the right Chinese words. 'Otherwise more bad will happen to you.'

She shook her head. 'It will be all right now. He will not touch me if I have foreign-devil friends. That is why I was coming to you tonight, after I saw you in the restaurant. But they caught up with me.' She paused and glanced up at him under puffy lids, her head slightly bowed. 'You did not want me any more? You never asked for me again.'

'No, not that,' he said quickly, evasively. He felt suddenly guilty, for all his pure resolution, before the submissive reproach of her voice. As though he had betrayed her by staying away.

'It does not matter,' she went on. 'So long as they think you are my friend. It does not matter if you do not want me.'

He felt his resolution melting and sat silent, chewing his lip uncertainly.

'Do you want me to go now?' she asked in a small voice.

He shook his head, still not trust himself to speak.

She was gazing at him inquiringly. 'You do not like me like this? My face is ugly now?'

'No, it's good,' he said, 'Good to look at.'

She smiled, and winced as she smiled. He imagined his lips on her bruise. He would be tender and gentle with her.... He forced the seductive dream away. 'What are these triads - the Green Triangle and the Red Triangle?' he asked quickly, in a stiff, brittle voice. He had heard of them, but only vaguely.

'People pay money to them for protection,' she said simply. 'If they do not - ' She shrugged.

'Who pays?'

'Who? Everyone. Shops, restaurants, businesses, opium divans, sing-song girls, even hawkers. Everyone.'

'And you pay the Red Triangle?'

'Of course. This is their territory.'

'They do not protect you very well against the Green Triangle, though.'

'The Green Triangle is getting stronger,' she admitted. 'But if I do not pay the Red Triangle - ' She shrugged. 'And how can I pay both? I wish they would fight it out and then everyone would know who to pay. As it is - that is why I came to you.' She glanced up at him with an appealing yet frankly practical look in her eyes. 'They will not hurt me if I am with a foreign devil.'

Denton was silent. Send her away now, keep clear, a prudent voice whispered insidiously in his mind. Remember your vow, a weaker one added faintly. Yet he thought of her erect brown nipples, of her body arching beneath his.

'I will go if you like.' She stood up suddenly, as if she'd read his thoughts in his downcast, irresolute eyes. He looked up. She was fumbling with her delicate fingers in a tiny silk purse. 'I will give you back the ten dollars,' she was saying in a small, defeated voice. A smooth jade bracelet, milky-green, trembled on her wrist. He remembered she'd worn it in bed with him that night. It was the only thing she hadn't taken off.

'No, I don't want the money,' he heard his voice say. His resolution and his vow dissolved. He stood up and held her hand, closing the purse. How small her hand was, how slim and vulnerable the fingers. She followed him unresistingly towards the bedroom.

29

HIS VOW ONCE BROKEN, Denton abandoned it for good. He became Su-mei's acknowledged protector and she spent several evenings a week with him - Ah Koo even agreed to accept a smaller tip from her because it was so regular. Denton stopped going to church from one day to the next, not even troubling to send any excuse for his absence. In the fires that Su-mei lit in him, his conscience and religion, all the weight of that unexamined childhood teaching which he'd carried so solemnly and unreflectingly throughout his life, burned to grey and powdery ash. Not that he deliberately rejected the old beliefs and myths - he merely ceased to have any use for them and let them fall away.

The formal break didn't come, though, until a month later, when the weather became suddenly warm and humid again, hurrying into spring. He was on his way to the mess one afternoon, when he saw Mr Eaton on the Bund. It was too late to avoid him, the Dean's eyes were glinting with recognition already. He had to lift his hat and smile.

'Ah, John, we haven't seen much of you lately.' His piercing, unsettling gaze fixed sternly on Denton's eyes.

'Er, no, I'm afraid I've been very busy,' Denton murmured, his voice trailing away, uncomfortable in its deceit.

Mr Eaton's face seemed to hang there waiting, his eyes slowly hardening with disbelief. Denton looked awkwardly away to the knotty tracery of a banyan tree's roots that gripped the stone wall beside them like grey twisting tentacles, 'I expect I'll be more free soon.' he said dully, his face flushing. 'I hope so.'

Still Mr Eaton's face loomed there, his eyes dark with censure.

Denton abandoned pretence, refusing to let himself be made to feel guilty. 'Well, I must be getting along.' he said breezily.

Mr Eaton inclined his head a fraction in cold, mute, condemning dignity.

I am corrupt, evil, degenerate, Denton said to himself, testing his conscience. But the words were like snowflakes, fluttering away without weight. He was thinking already of Su-mei's pale skin, the mole on her wrist, the milky green bracelet she never took off, the artful rocking and swaying of her hips. Soon he heard the tap, tap of her shoes coming along the corridor.

He grew more assured, as though Su-mei's influence extended beyond the erotic to the whole of his personality. He no longer hesitated or shrank back so much in his dealings with agents and ship's officers. He gave instructions with authority. He bore Mason's and Jones' chaffing patiently and indifferently - or even with pride when Jones admitted his envy, seeing Su-mei arrive in a sedan chair one sultry evening (she wouldn't travel in a rickshaw now - it would have made her lose face as his mistress). And he grew steadily more fluent in Chinese, the vivid Shanghainese of Su-mei which often shocked Wei with its crude vitality. 'Nothing like a sleeping dictionary for learning the language,' Mason said, hearing Denton bargaining with a rickshaw coolie by the docks - for whatever Su-mei might think, Denton didn't give up travelling by rickshaw himself. Not merely because it was cheaper. He found sedan chairs too luxurious, effeminate even, preferring the steady hard ride of the rickshaw to the soft undulation of the sedan chair.

Recognising the change in himself, Denton recognised the cause too. Sometimes he lay awake at night thinking of his life before he met Su-mei - so narrow, so tight, so drab and dry. And he would marvel that a woman could have worked such a change in him. And not even a woman really, but a mere girl of sixteen! He would turn to put his arm round her and fall asleep smiling on her shoulder.

Not only did he bear Mason's and Jones' chaffing patiently, he even began to listen to their stories of debauchery with a knowing look, as if to say I'm not shocked by all this, I'm a man of the world too. And it was in recognition of this change - 'By god, you really have grown up at last,' Mason said, wiping the beer froth off his moustache with the back of his hand, 'I thought you never would' - that Mason and Jones offered to take him to an opium divan. There was a challenging tone in Mason's voice when he casually asked, 'Like to come along with us to a place in Hongkew, smoke a pipe or two?' The challenge, Denton indistinctly recognised, was to his new, apparent manliness, to see if it wasn't only skin-deep after all.

They set off in two rickshaws, Mason and Jones leading while Denton followed alone in the second. His coolie was an older, stringy man, reminding him of the man who'd pulled Mason and himself on his first morning in Shanghai. That coolie had had grey threads in his queue too, and the knobs of his backbone had stood out under his worn shirt in the same way. But so many of the rickshaw coolies were thin and bony, especially the older ones. He recalled how squeamish he'd felt then at being pulled along by a human horse. Now he thought nothing of it. Had he grown callous, he wondered with a twinge of the earlier squeamishness, or simply more realistic? How would this man live, for instance, if he didn't pull a rickshaw? He imagined the thousands of rickshaw coolies in Shanghai lying starving by their empty shafts, and then their wives and children clustering round them, starving too. He watched Mason and Jones' rickshaw turning into the sailors' area, sagging on Mason's side, the coolie straining with bowed head as he pulled them up a slight incline. It wasn't right, he thought, but like so much else in China, it couldn't be changed.

The open drains were smelling again in the warmer weather. The canals flowed sluggish with scum and stinking refuse. The rickshaws stopped outside a shabby stone house in an alley that Denton had often walked through struggling with unassuaged lust before Su-mei had become his mistress. Blue Heaven Tea-House the faded gold characters proclaimed over the porch. Beside the door, a small metal plaque announced that the premises were licensed by the Municipal Council for the sale and consumption of opium, licence number 178. Across the unpaved road, workmen were squatting on their heels, hammering sheets of glittering tin into long cylinders like drain-pipes. American, British and French sailors strolled in groups, boisterous and yet uncertain, up and down the alley, peering up the dark stairways of open doors or clustering dubiously round the painted old women who sat on little stools beside them. Mason surveyed them scornfully. 'Look at 'em, they're scared to go in,' he said loudly, brushing the tips of his bristly moustache up with that familiar gesture of his knuckles. 'Safety in numbers, I suppose, I sometimes wonder how sailors get their reputation.' He walked into the tea-house with an exaggerated swagger while the nearest sailors, a group of Americans, watched with the wary eyes of tourists suspicious of the natives.

Here there were no sailors, no foreign devils at all, except for the three of them. Despite its shabby facade, the tea-house was furnished richly with antique blackwood tables and tall inlaid screens. Spittoons of florid china stood by every table and waiters wandered in their soft shoes through a heavy atmosphere of silence. Scrolls hung down from the walls, faint, misty mountain scenes, bamboo branches, and over-life-size birds. The customers too were rich, to judge by their silk gowns, their lean, refined faces, their slim, pale hands with heavy rings, and the long, curved fingernails that confirmed their gentility. There was something strange and church-like about the silence. Denton had never been in a tea-house before that wasn't noisy and exuberant. But here there was a reflective, tranquil, almost religious silence. And the customers were all solitary, too. He'd never seen that before. Each one sat alone at his own table, not even glancing up at the three foreign devils, silently self-involved, as if at prayer. The steam from the teapots rose like incense before their immobile faces and hooded lids. At the back of the sombre room, by the stairs, some joss sticks burned before a red and gold altar. The banging of the hammers on the sheets of tin outside sounded through the doors like the regular muffled clanging of gongs.

Mason led the way up the staircase to the first floor. An attendant wafted them into a dark little room with a fluttering wave of his hand. Blackwood couches with hard porcelain pillows on them were arranged round the three walls. Mason and Jones lay down on their sides, their heads resting on the pillows. Denton took the empty couch.

'Why these people never invented soft pillows I cannot imagine,' Jones complained.

'They keep their money in them,' Denton said, glad of the chance to show off his knowledge. 'That's why they're hollow. Then they sleep with their hand in the hole and no one can get at their money without waking them up.

'Thanks for the lecture, professor,' Mason sneered.

'Take my hat off to anyone who can sleep with his head on this thing,' Jones went on grumbling. 'If you ask me it's a kind of torture.'

'You'll be comfortable enough in a few minutes,' Mason muttered peevishly. 'Don't make such a song and dance about it, for god's sake.'

Denton's heart was beginning to thud lightly in uncertain excitement. A little oil lamp was burning with a low flame in the middle of the room and a single joss stick was smouldering away beside it, dropping a long curling leaf of grey-white ash onto the floor. Its heavy smell mingled with a richer, greasier one, a smell that seemed to permeate the whole room, as if it was in the floors and walls, not just hanging in the air. Denton recognised it at once as the sweetish odour he'd smelt that day when Mason stuffed a shred of raw opium in his tunic pocket. Only here it was much stronger. The dulled clanging of the metal-workers hammering sounded through the closed window.

'Five dollars each,' Mason said gruffly. 'Better give it to me now.'

A young girl wearing a long gown came in. She was carrying a tray of pipes and some dark opium pellets which looked like molasses. She took the money silently from Mason and knelt to prepare the pipes, turning the wick higher in the lamp. Her child-like eyes were solemn and absorbed as she moulded the little pellets onto the long needle. Mason lazily reached under her gown and squeezed her calf. She went on moulding the pellets, with only a faint quiver of her lids. His hand slid further up her leg as she held the opium over the flame. Still she seemed to take no notice, until, when the opium was ready, she put it in the bowl of the pipe and, brushing his hand away as she turned, offered him the pipe first. Each of them inhaled three times, dragging the smoke deep into their lungs. Denton was last. As he inhaled, he looked up at the girl's face. She couldn't have been more than fourteen years old. Her grave, child's eyes seemed indifferent to him, concentrated on the bowl of the pipe. As he breathed in, he noticed how her own flat nostrils flared, as if willing him to breathe deeper - or was she imagining it was herself inhaling?

He felt nothing. He was just going to say, This stuff must be poor quality, it's not doing anything to me - he had the words in his head, waiting ready-formed - when suddenly he realised he was going after all. There was a slight giddiness and then he was gone.

All the time he knew where he was, he could even hear the dulled hammering of the metal-workers, but it was as though he was detached from his body, from his sensations, a waking spectator of his own dreams. As the room moved gently about him, taking on new, marvellous shapes and colours like a shaken kaleidoscope, he could still feel the sweet greasy smell in his nostrils and knew, or thought he knew, with startling clarity exactly what was happening. Strange, vivid colours swept over his eyes and his ears were full of harmonies he'd never heard before, and yet it was the same dark room with the burning oil lamp and the glowing joss stick - he could see them clearly. And the same clanging of the gong-like hammers drifted up from the street, which he knew perfectly well was outside the window. His mind remained as still and clear as a mountain pool while all the varied colours and sounds danced across its surface. And his eye was in the pool, looking up at the dancing colours through the cool, heavy, lucid waters. The young girl with the grave, attentive eyes and the flaring nostrils became Su-mei, although she was still herself, and he was looking at Su-mei in her. Yet though her face gave him much pleasure, he had no desire for her, no desire at all except for his serenity to continue while her face smiled down over the pool and the colours and sounds danced across it. And even that desire was muted, passionless. The girl was offering him the pipe again. He wondered whether it was a few minutes or several hours that had passed. The pool grew slowly darker....

The lamps were being lit in the tea-house below when they walked down the dark stairs out into the early evening. The metal workers were eating their rice, squatting in a circle in the shade of their workshop. Red lanterns glowed over the bloody carcases in a butcher's stall further down the alley. Groups of sailors - the same sailors, it might have been - were peering up the same stairways and haggling indecisively with the same old women. The western sky was stained with all the fading lights of sunset, orange and green and silver-blue. The cries of the food hawkers, raucous and coaxing, rose all round them. Yet the whole world seemed unbearably drab and dull to Denton, as if all the sounds and colours of life had been coated with grey mud.

They hailed rickshaws, and this time it was Mason who travelled alone while Jones and Denton followed together. Jones' eyes were slightly glassy still. 'Ah, I sometimes think that's better than a woman,' he murmured drowsily, his voice scarcely audible above the hubbub of the streets. 'Only you mustn't do it too often, you know. Once a week maximum, or you'll end up like those addicts over there.' He nodded at several men squatting on their haunches against a wall. Their faces were sunken and deeply scored, with shadowy caverns for eye-sockets, from which their red-rimmed eyes looked apathetically out, shiny and bloodshot. Their hunched bodies looked emaciated, their arms and legs like fragile, brown sticks. They seemed unaware of what passed in front of their eyes. A filthy mongrel dog with a wagging curly brush of a tail sniffed at one of the men's folded, bony hands, but there was no change in his liquid expressionless eyes, no movement in his skeletal fingers.

'They might as well be dead,' Jones said, pityingly and contemptuously at the same time. 'They don't know where they are any more.'

But perhaps their real gaze was inward, Denton thought on colours and sounds like those he'd just been seeing, on that absolute serenity, No wonder they didn't want to return.

Mason looked back over his shoulder. 'You know I dreamt I was having that girl,' he called out. 'It came from feeling her up before we sniffed, I suppose.'

'She was young enough to be your daughter,' Jones laughed.

'They mature early out here. Look at John's girl. Only a year or two older, isn't she?

'She's sixteen,' Denton acknowledged curtly, foreseeing a gibe.

But Mason's rickshaw lurched suddenly to avoid a palanquin escorted by four bannermen, and Mason turned back hastily to grab the side. Denton glimpsed the long straggly beard of a mandarin and two almond eyes glancing incuriously out at him beneath an elaborate hat, then the official had gone, the bannermen calling imperiously out for people to make way.

'Isn't the Chinese government going to ban opium soon?' he asked Jones.

'They keep talking about it, but they'll never do anything.' Jones yawned suddenly. 'Too much money in it. Besides, half of 'em are addicts anyway. All those eunuchs in Peking and so on.'

'I can see how you could easily become one,' Denton meditated aloud, still tinged with the drowsy flush of his intense yet tranquil visions.

'Become a eunuch? So can I. Get a hammer and slosh 'em.'

'An addict.'

'Once a week,' Jones held up his forefinger and wagged it admonishingly. 'Only a week and no more. That's the absolute limit.'

'Have you ever smoked opium, Su-mei?' he asked her the following evening. He raised himself on his elbow to look down at her.

She gazed up at him warily, her eyes opaque. 'Why?'

He shrugged. 'I had some last night.'

'Did you like it?'

He nodded. 'It was....' his Chinese failed him. 'It was strange,' he said at last.

'Opera singers take it,' she murmured, brushing the hair away from her eyes. 'One day I will be an opera singer.'

'Do you know how to make it?'

Her lids dropped slowly, giving her a sly, mocking look. 'You want me to?'

He bent his head down until his lips brushed her nipple. 'Maybe. One day.'

'If you teach me English, I will.'

Her limbs loosened under his touch. She let her fingertips trail lightly along his flanks, down to his thighs.

Her nails brushed across his skin like the claws of a kitten, sharp yet playful.

30

HIS RENEWED FRIENDSHIP with Mason was precarious from the start, and Denton was always uneasy with him, like an actor playing a role that didn't suit him. So he felt almost a sense of relief when it began to cool a few weeks later and resumed what seemed a more natural state of distant neutrality.

Going to Mason's office to give him some documents that the clerk had mistakenly placed on his own desk, Denton found Ching in the room, about to leave. Ching smiled as genially as ever at him, scratching his pale, taut cheek with the long, curved talon of his little fingernail. 'Good afternoon, Mista' Den-tong. How are you do?'

Denton nodded, while Mason smirked connivingly, 'I'll see what I can do then, Mr Ching.'

'Thank you, Mista' May-song. Thank you,' Ching answered affably as he closed the door.

Denton gave Mason the papers.

'Ah, thanks, old chap.' He glanced down at them inattentively. 'Er.... Funny man, old Ching, you know....'

'Yes?'

'He's just been talking to me about that spot of trouble on the Alexander the First - you know, when they were loading that night you came along.'

'Oh?'

'Yes. It cost the company quite a packet, apparently.' Denton shrugged as Mason looked up, drumming his fingers on the papers Denton had just given him.

'Seems to think you might have it in for him.'

'No. Why should I?'

'That's what I told him.' He paused, cleared his throat and glanced away out of the window at the river. 'You know, with your girl and a sniff of opium now and then, I expect you could do with a bit of extra income now and then, couldn't you?' He looked back at Denton, winking and slapping his pocket. 'I mean, you wouldn't turn the odd favour down if someone offered it to you and nobody was any the wiser, would you? Know what I mean?'

Denton hesitated, embarrassed rather than tempted. He'd heard rumours, he'd seen Ching passing an envelope to Mason on their first visit to the Alexander the First, and there had been the hints Ching had dropped to him over that contraband cotton. But this was the first time a Customs officer had approached him. Although there seemed to be a veiled threat behind Mason's words, his tone was so genial and natural that it seemed hard to be curt or indignant. 'Well, I don't know,' he muttered uncomfortably, as if it was he who was the guilty one. 'I mean, I don't really need anything extra, you know.'

'Oh come on,' Mason cajoled him blandly, 'It's not as though we're overpaid, is it? Everyone takes a bit, you know.'

'Well, all the same I don't really want to get mixed up with that kind of thing,' he said apologetically.

'What sort of thing?' Mason chivvied him. 'It's the way of life out of here. You're practically expected to, I mean, in England it'd be a different matter, but out here....' He waved his hand largely. 'Way of life. When in Rome, you know, sort of thing.'

But Denton refused to yield. 'I've got some papers to see to,' he said woodenly, turning to the door.

Mason sighed loudly in helpless resignation. 'Well, there's none so blind as those that won't see, so they say.'

In his own office, Denton tipped his chair back and gazed up at the ceiling with the sense of having avoided an unpleasant social duty rather than a moral catastrophe. It's the way of life out here, he thought, watching two large black flies flitting round and round on the listless air. When in Rome. And yet he wasn't tempted. He wondered why. Just because it was dishonest? But suppose nobody suffered from it, as might often be the case? Would it still be wrong? He felt his mind groping for a certainty that wasn't there. It was queer, unnerving, when you kept on asking why. He couldn't see through the mists these repeated questions rolled over his mind. Yet if he imagined himself being offered an envelope as Mason was, something stiffened in his arm as if to push it away. Was that all it was - just an instinctive recoil? Or merely a reaction he'd been taught as a child, like his religion? But he'd given up his religion easily and painlessly. Could he give up his honesty in the same way? One day he'd have to find the time to study philosophy and ethics, the meaning of life and that sort of thing, to try and find the answers to all these questions. It would be good to get out of all this dim uncertainty into something definite and secure. One day he'd really do that, when he had time.

He let the chair drop forward with a bang and turned to his forms, sighing in the heat.

Mason never mentioned the subject again, but they gradually cooled to each other once more, though at first without any open break. It was merely that Mason never invited him to smoke opium again and they avoided each other in the mess. It was not until some months later that they actually quarrelled, when they were both on duty one breathless June afternoon on adjoining sections of the wharves. Denton was going to his office when Mason called him from the corridor, his heavy face damp with sweat. There were motes of dust sliding through the sunlight that slanted relentlessly in between the slats of the bamboo-blinds.

'I say, John.' His voice was unusually friendly, wheedling almost. 'They've put the Marseilles in berth nine?'

'Yes, there's been an accident on the cranes at ten. They can't work them, apparently.'

'Oh, accident, eh?' Mason brushed the tips of his moustache up thoughtfully, frowning down at the sheaf of manifests in his other hand. 'The thing is, I know some of the chaps on that boat, I was expecting to have a chat with them. Tell you what, I'll do the Marseilles and you do the Wonosobo.' His faced cleared. 'Got the manifest, have your Here's the Wonosobo's.'

Denton looked down at the papers Mason was holding out. 'I think, as it's berthed in my section,' he said slowly, with an almost reluctant dryness, 'perhaps I'd better do it myself.'

'Why?' Mason's face began to darken beneath its shiny glow of sweat. 'Not much to ask, is it? No need to be such a stickler - after all, it would've been in my section, but for this blasted accident anyway, wouldn't it?'

'Yes, but all the same,' Denton persisted, hardening as much against Mason's hectoring as against the corruption he suspected lay behind it. 'All the same, I think I'd better do it, as things stand.'

Mason stepped nearer, bringing his face close to Denton's. 'Now listen here, old man, I've got a special reason to do the Marseilles.' His voice was quiet but unpleasantly tense, his eyes gazing hard at Denton's. 'As I've already told you. I want to have a chat with some of the chaps on board. Got it? They're friends of mine.'

'Friends of Ching too?'

'Ching?' Mason stiffened. 'What are you getting at?'

'Nothing,' Denton stared obstinately down at his papers. 'Couldn't you talk to your friends while I inspect the ship?'

Mason's neck began to swell, and the veins stood out on his forehead. His cheeks became florid. 'You trying to insinuate something, old man?' he asked threateningly.

'No,' Denton's voice was blank and dead. He took a sudden breath, as though he was about to jump from a height.

'Well, then....'

'But as I've been given the Marseilles, I'll just have to inspect it, unless I'm ordered not to. That's all.'

'Oh you will, will you? Well, listen here, Mr Holy Bloody Denton,' Mason was speaking now with loud, angry irony. A passing clerk glanced at him in timid awe and hurried on down the corridor. 'Just you listen here. I don't think you've quite got the hang of things out here yet. I'm your senior in rank, right? You're just a probationary inspector, right? You're not established yet, are you? You could be kicked out quite easily, and don't you forget it. Well, as your senior in rank, I say I'm doing the Marseilles. So I am doing it. And you're doing the Wonosobo. If you don't mind.'

Denton frowned down at his papers, his cheeks flushing.

'My orders - '

'Or if you do mind, for that matter. Now take this bloody manifest.'

'My orders are to inspect all the vessels in my section.' Denton said doggedly.

'Well, I'm giving you another order!'

'You realise I'll have to report this to Mr Brown?'

'Well, go along and report it, then,' Mason said in high, sneering tones. 'Run along and report it then, there's a good boy.' Then, as Denton turned away, 'Only don't forget he's on leave. And don't forget to let me have the Marseilles' manifest first, either. All right?'

Denton went instead to the Superintendent of the Wharves. He was kept waiting outside his office while the clerks covertly eyed him and whispered smilingly to each other as if they knew already what was going on. Denton waited uneasily, licking his lips. How was it that he felt almost guilty for being there? He had to keep reminding himself that it was Mason who had something to answer for, not himself. And yet he still felt uneasy.

Superintendent Smith was burly, irascible and said to be a heavy drinker, which the hectic flush on his face suggested was true. He'd never got far in the service and was bitter about it. He'd been a 'tide-waiter,' and 'outside' man, for most of his career, and the 'inside' men, who could pass examinations, had taken the top jobs and sat in cool offices while he was sent to remote posts from one end of China to the other.

A voice boomed angrily behind the heavy wooden door and a clerk scurried out with anxious, humiliated eyes.

'Now what's all this nonsense about, Denton?' Smith's protuberant, bloodshot eyes stared at him impatiently. 'Mason wants to do the Marseilles. What are you making a fuss about it for? Can't you arrange a swap between yourselves without running to me?'

'It was my section, sir,' Denton began falteringly, on the wrong foot already. 'And I....'

'You what?'

'I didn't see any good reason for changing ships.'

'Good god, is that all?' Smith shook his grey head in mock amazement. His fist rose and thumped the desk in front of him, making the pens and pencils quiver. 'Mason tells me he wants to speak to a friend on the ship. Isn't that a good enough reason? What's wrong with that? A bit of a swap, that's all.'

Denton hesitated, pressing his lips together. He sensed he was about to cross some boundary, although he couldn't have said what exactly it was.

'Well? Don't mind walking a couple of hundred yards to the Wonosobo, do you?' Smith laughed bluffly, his ill-temper apparently draining away at the sight of Denton's abashed hesitation. 'Young feller like you? Bit of exercise'd do you good!'

'Did Mr Mason tell you what he wanted to talk to these friends about?' Denton said at last, plunging suddenly across the unknown boundary.

'What d'you mean?' Smith's thick brows contracted like two stiff grey brushes. 'Talk about? What d'you mean? Are you trying to accuse anyone of improper conduct, Denton?' He jutted his chin forward over the desk grimly, the brief, false heartiness swept from his face. 'You'd better be careful what you're saying, you know. That's a serious matter. Have you got any evidence?'

Denton swallowed. 'I only meant that Mr Mason's reasons didn't seem good enough to me, sir.'

'Oh, they didn't, didn't they? They didn't seem good enough?' He leant back slowly, nodding, his head on one side. 'So they didn't seem good enough to you, Mr Denton, eh? Well, let me tell you something, lad,' he leant forward again, speaking in a growling whisper. 'Let me tell you something. They're good enough for me. And if they're good enough for me,' his voice began to rise slowly, ominously, 'they should bloody well be good enough for you!'

Denton stared rigidly in front of him, at the brass buttons on Smith's uniform. 'You are satisfied with Mr Mason's reasons, then, sir?' he asked stiffly.

'That's just what I've been saying, isn't it, lad? How many times do I have to repeat myself?' He glared at Denton with those bulging, bloodshot blue eyes that seemed to have a film of anger over them. 'And what's more, I don't like young officers getting above themselves and coming in here suggesting all sorts of things about their brother officers, without a shred of evidence! I don't like it at all! Is that clear?'

Denton felt the muscles growing rigid in his cheeks. 'Yes, sir.' After a pause, he heard his voice speaking sarcastically, almost of its own accord. 'Very clear.'

'And don't you cheek me, young feller!' Smith's voice rose to a shout and his eyes bulged dangerously, as if they might pop out. 'Just yes sir, no sir, understand? I don't want any of this suggestive “Very clear” stuff from you. I don't know what you're thinking, lad, but you'll keep you tongue under the lock and key if you know what's good for you! Understand?'

'Will that be all, sir?' Denton heard his voice as if speaking of its own accord again, small but unbending.

'Yes it bloody well will.'

He felt Smith's eyes glowering at his shoulders still as he opened the door and went out.

31

TWO WEEKS LATER, Denton was transferred to a different section of the port, along the French Bund. He was on night duty, and he shared the patrol of the whole sections with Johnson. Johnson seemed oblivious of the change Su-mei's alchemy had worked on Denton, and even of the passing of time; he still treated him like and inexperienced griffin and saw himself as a benevolent paternal advisor, impervious to Denton's distant off-handedness. 'If there's any help you want with those forms, just sing out,' he would offer in his friendly monotonously deadening voice. Or, 'Have you done the manifest for the Camboge? I'll check the duty for you if you like.'

Denton put up with it, only occasionally frowning with irritation and answering curtly when Johnson's mild persistence spoiled his concentration.

One night in July, when the moist heat hung like a still, vaporous curtain and a typhoon warning signal had gone up in the harbour, Johnson's launch broke down. He joined Denton on Lolly Kwai's boat for the journey back to the Customs House. 'Looking forward to your first typhoon?' he asked avuncularly 'We had a really bad one a couple of years ago. There were ships blown right onto the Bund. Not against the Bund,' he went on with his maddening talent for needless exposition. 'Actually on it, on the road itself.' He waited smiling, to see the effect of his revelation on Denton's face.

'Yes, I heard about it,' Denton said carelessly. 'By the way, what happened to those two smugglers we caught last summer?' Maliciously, he emphasised the word 'we' - Johnson had taken all the prize money.

'Didn't I tell you?' Johnson's equanimity was undisturbed. 'They were strangled. I had to go to the Chinese court in Chapei to give evidence. Rather an unpleasant way to die. They do it slowly.' His flat, even sympathy made strangling sound like a mild digestive discomfort. 'I had a wonderful hike round Hankow on the prize money. I suppose you got a bit too, for that cotton on the Alexander the First?'

'Yes. So did Lolly Kwai, of course.' Denton glanced back at the wheelhouse.

'Ah yes. You'll find he's jolly useful,' Johnson said encouragingly, as though Denton had only arrived a day or two before. 'I expect your fiancée will be coming out soon?' Denton hesitated. Johnson must have been the only officer in the mess who didn't know it was all over - who didn't even know about Su-mei. He felt a pitying thought, like the flutter of a bird's wing, stir his mind. Johnson was so isolated that he didn't even know that. He was so boring because nobody talked to him, and nobody talked to him because he was so boring. Behind his dull, perpetually good-natured smile, he lived a solitary life of crowded ostracism. 'No,' Denton said, his voice relenting slightly. 'As a matter of fact it's all over. We've broken it off.'

'Oh, all over, is it?' Johnson nodded, as though the news was unsurprising and unremarkable, like a change of plans for the summer holidays. 'Well, there are plenty of things to do out here of course.' He began to hum a tune in his nasal, toneless voice.

Denton felt his brief, vague ripple of pity had been wasted. He looked away at the lights of the French Settlement, his mind passing from Johnson's indifferent 'plenty of things to do' to the thought of the green-shuttered house of pleasure in rue Molière, which Jacob Ephraim still praised so highly, and then to Pock-mark Chen and Su-mei. She'd been right, she'd had no more trouble with him. Apparently the Green Triangle weren't strong enough to challenge the Red Triangle after all. And his own status had protected her from Pock-mark Chen. She continued to pay the Red Triangle, but she wouldn't tell him how much. When he'd remonstrated with her occasionally in the early days for paying at all, she'd stared at him with a child-like amazement, as though he'd suggested she should walk out into the street without her clothes on. 'They're just extortioners,' he'd said. 'No,' she protested. 'They look after people.' To her it was like paying tax to an unofficial government, one that could protect her in fact from the real one - or so she believed. Yes, that amazement was child-like. Although she could be shrewd and wise about some things, he thought of her, and it flattered him to do so, as a child. She was still only seventeen, Chinese style - he'd bought her a gold hairpin on her birthday - but her parents had sold her in a famine as soon as she'd begun to menstruate and she must have been used by many men since then. Yet she still seemed unspoilt to him, unspoilt and even innocent. Those early times when she'd seemed merely mercenary had soon passed. Now she never asked him for money. He gave her some every week and she took it, in that curious face-saving way that forbade her to thank him; but she never asked for it. Sometimes she bought him little presents with the money he gave her, or that she earned as a sing-song girl, like the seal on which she'd had his name engraved in Chinese characters, and the little ornaments she'd placed about his room. Of course she only sang in restaurants now, she had no other 'protector' as she called him. And she was clever, too - the way she picked up English! Quicker than he'd learnt Chinese in the beginning - though he hadn't had a 'sleeping dictionary' then, of course.

As he idly watched the dim lights of the quays slip past, haloed with misty rings, he noticed something moving near the shore. His glance slid over the vague shape, moved on to a ship, then slid back again. The shape was a string of sampans moving quietly along beside the wharves, with only one weak yellow lamp flickering in the leading boat.

He called softly to Johnson, who was on the starboard side of the bow, cooling his bland, smug face against the breeze the launch itself was making. The air smelt of fish and oil and the heavy sulphurous smell of the Chinese factories in Pootung on the other shore.

'Yes, what is it, old chap?' Johnson asked brightly.

Denton pointed. 'Those sampans look a bit suspicious. Let's go in and look at them.'

Johnson gave the order to Lolly Kwai at once, while Denton was still turning to the wheelhouse. Denton suppressed the twinge of irritation he felt. He watched the sampans moving unconcernedly along in the dark. Either they hadn't noticed the launch, which was unlikely, or else they had nothing to hide. But Johnson was smiling with the faint, complacent air of alertness that was the nearest he came to excitement - he seemed to think there was something in it. 'A little prize money would come in handy,' he murmured, narrowing his eyes. 'I haven't had any since Easter.'

They drew closer. Denton could see now that there were four sampans altogether, with two men in the leading one. One sat in the bow gazing incuriously at the approaching Customs launch; the other was barely rowing at the stern, just stirring the water to guide the little convoy closer to the wharves as it floated down on the current. The sampans were heavily loaded, but the two men's obvious unconcern convinced Denton they must after all be perfectly innocent.

Lolly Kwai hailed them. 'What are you carrying in those sampans?'

'Silk bales.' The one rowing spat into the water.

'Where to?'

The man nodded at a large Fukienese junk moored at a pontoon a couple of hundred yards downstream.

Johnson interrupted Lolly's next question in his own flat, awkward Chinese. 'Where is the silk going?'

'Foochow.'

'Have you paid likin?'

The two men stared at him blankly.

'Likin!' Lolly shouted bullyingly. 'Have you paid likin?'

The bigger one looked at the other questioningly. They both shrugged.

'I'll have a look,' Denton said. But with a 'No, you might fall in and you can't swim,' Johnson had already dropped neatly down onto the sampan, which was almost awash with the weight of its cargo. 'You keep an eye on these chaps, see they don't make a bolt for it.' His smile had become the slightly superior smirk of the schoolmaster who was alive to the pranks of the children and was showing a colleague how to deal with them. But there was an acquisitive sharpness in his eye as well, and Denton guessed he was after the main share of any prize money there might be going. Lolly Kwai must have thought so too; he was muttering something disparagingly under his breath. They leant over the rail, watching Johnson struggling with the corner of an old, frayed sail that had been lashed across the cargo. He turned and gestured to the two men, who were watching him with sullen indifference, to untie the knots. The bigger one moved unwillingly forward and reached for something on the deck. Johnson bent over the rope again. Suddenly the Chinese straightened up and hit him with some sort of club. Denton heard the heavy, smacking thud on the back of Johnson's skull and the soft, almost drowsy, gasp that he immediately gave. His body sagged at once as if it had turned to jelly, and slithered down over the side of the boat into the river. At the same time both men dived over the other side and swam away into the shadow of the nearby wharf.

There were perhaps two seconds of startled silence while they stared at the gently widening ripples where Johnson had slid beneath the water, then Lolly suddenly shouted and two sailors jumped in. They dived, surfaced, shouted, dived and surfaced, again and again. Denton gripped the rail, his arms quivering, staring numbly at the black water where the sailors' heads kept bobbing up, then vanishing. He felt a tingling on his scalp at the back of his head, just where the blow had struck Johnson.

All around him there were shouts, questions, answers. Someone brought a lamp and held it over the water. The light glistened peacefully on the silky surface while the shouts grew less excited and the two sailors in the river spent a little longer breathing gulps of air before each dive. Gradually they all became silent, and the two sailors stopped diving altogether, clinging to the side of the sampans. Lolly Kwai looked at Denton inquiringly, his usually genial face lugubrious.

'Perhaps he swam to the shore?' Denton suggested, unbelieving himself.

Lolly shrugged, then shook his head. There had been something conclusive about the way Johnson had slid down below the surface, as though his body had been weighted with lead. 'It is a long time already,' he muttered.

Denton drew his watch out and examined its large dial under the lamp. Twenty past three. They'd been searching for nearly an hour already. He imagined Johnson floating near the bottom with the same bland smile on his face, only his eyebrows faintly raised in surprise. He closed the watch with a snap and put it away. 'I'll have to report it to the French police,' he said dully. 'Take the sampans in tow.' His limbs had stopped trembling. As the boat got under way again, he stared down at the dark, oily water with the last unreal hope that Johnson might yet suddenly pop up his head and wave to them with his cheerful, self-satisfied grin. But at the same time he felt a tremulous, rising sense of relief. Suppose he had boarded the sampan instead of Johnson?

While he was making a long, detailed statement to a French police officer who chewed his pen in ferocious concentration as he tried to translate Denton's sentences into official French, Lolly got the covers unlashed from the impounded sampans. The cargo was nothing but sacks of sawdust. He shook his head gloomily when he showed them to Denton by the grey cheerlessness of the first light. 'It was a trick. No silk at all. They wanted to get Mr Johnson.' He paused, thrusting out his underlip and scratching his slightly stubbled chin. 'Mr Johnson or you.'

The typhoon came and the harbour emptied as all the ships steamed downriver to ride the storm out in the open sea. But it wasn't a bad one, the winds were no stronger than a gale at home, and there was only the continuous rain that fell steadily for two days and nights from a sky vast with clumsy, tumbling grey clouds. The canals flooded onto the streets and sedan-chair bearers walked waist deep in muddy water; the rickshaw and wheelbarrow coolies couldn't work for a day until the floods subsided. Watching the rain from his window, Denton saw a wheelbarrow go floating down the street at the height of the flood, with an anguished coolie plunging after it.

Then the clouds began to thin, to fall apart and let in gaps of blue. The rain eased, and by the evening of the third day the sky was clear and serene, a pale greenish blue with a faint orange tinge where the sun had set, as though that too had been washed by the rain.

Four days later, Johnson's body floated to the surface, bloated and decomposing. It was picked up by the river police three miles down-stream, against the walls of the Bund. Denton was called to the mortuary to identify the body. The dingy waiting room didn't seem to have changed since the first time he'd gone there with Johnson himself to help identify his informer's body. The same clerk was yawning over the same maroon-coloured ledger, the same attendants were chatting and playing cards at the back of the hall. It almost seemed as though the same mute, hollow-eyed men and women were still waiting on the same bare benches for their missing relatives to be brought in.

A senior police inspector turned towards him with a smile of recognition. 'Hello, Denton, haven't seen you since that dinner at your chief's house. How are you getting on?'

It was Everett, the man who'd shared his cabin on the Orcades coming to Shanghai.

'Just been promoted,' Everett said proudly, glancing down at the shiny new pip on his shoulder. He gave Denton a cloth to hold over his nose. 'I'm afraid the body isn't really cold yet, it still smells.'

Denton gazed at the distorted and rotting corpse. The swollen features retained hardly any trace of that insistently affable smugness that Denton had come to detest. It was not a face he was looking at, Denton thought, but the putrid carcase of a face. Only the short, dark hair seemed the same, as though it hadn't died at all. Looking at the hair alone, still dripping on the ice, you could imagine Johnson had just been in for a swim. Denton pressed the cloth closer to his nose. It had been soaked in some strong disinfectant stuff, but he could still smell the powerful sickly-sweet scent of decaying flesh that he'd first caught in the burial house Wei had shown him last summer. When the attendant turned the head, Denton saw a livid, ulcerous bruise at the base of the skull.

He looked away with a sudden queasy turning of his stomach. 'Yes, that's him,' he muttered. 'That's about where he was hit, too.'

Outside, while the two attendants shuffled indifferently past on sandalled feet, carrying in another corpse, Everett paused for a few 'inquiries,' as he called them with a slightly self-important inflection in his voice. 'I suppose you didn't get a good look at the man who struck him?'

'No, it all happened so quickly. He was quite big, that's all.'

'Would you know either of the two men again?'

Everett was jotting down his replies in a little black notebook, and the official act, the official tone of voice, irritated Denton. He shrugged. 'No, it was pitch dark.' He watched a stone-eyed young Chinese being led into the mortuary by a police corporal.

'Would anyone have known he was to be on the launch at that time?'

Denton's chest caught suddenly with the awakening of the thought that Lolly Kwai had left to sleep in his mind. 'He wasn't supposed to be there at all,' he said slowly. 'He only came along because his boat had broken down.'

Everett glanced up at him, then continued writing. 'Looks as though they were after you, then,' he said as he closed the book. 'Shall I take that?' He took the cloth which Denton had been absently holding in his hand and dropped it in a rattan basket.

'They?' Denton repeated. 'Who?' 'In Your line of business,' Everett shrugged, 'there are bound to be people it's dangerous to offend. As in mine.'

Denton thought of Ching scratching his pallid cheek with that talon of a nail in Mason's office. Obviously Mason was taking bribes and Ching had wanted him to buy Denton off too. They were both put out by his refusal perhaps, but this.... He shook his head incredulously, and yet he kept seeing Ching's face, his faintly ironic smile, mocking his unbelief.

'I think it was only meant as a warning,' Everett was saying soothingly. 'It probably just went too far. They hit him too hard, that's all.'

'Unless they knew I can't swim.'

'Oh no, if they wanted to finish someone off, they could do it quite easily. But they don't like drawing too much attention to themselves by killing a foreign devil.' He paused as the stone-eyed Chinese came back down the corridor followed by the corporal, who was noisily clearing his throat and looking for somewhere to spit. The man's eyes were perhaps a little stonier, his mouth a little more stiff. 'It'd be different for a Chinese, of course,' Everett went on. 'They don't mind killing them - nobody takes much notice. Know anyone who might have a grudge against you?'

'I may have got on the wrong side of a ship's agent called Ching - '

Everett's eyebrow's rose. 'There are all sorts of stories about him,' he said with a note both of respect and of warning. 'I should watch your step if I were you.'

Denton felt suddenly as though his back was exposed - he even glanced round over his shoulder at the patient yet hopeless relatives waiting on the benches. 'How? What do you mean?' he asked uneasily.

'Well, just don't run any risks, that's all,' Everett said coolly. 'I'll have this statement copied out,' he went on at once, before Denton could answer. 'And then if you'd come to the Central Police Station to sign it....'

'It was Ching,' Su-mei said simply when he told her that night. She pulled the long, gold pin he'd given her for her birthday out of her hair and held it between her teeth while she reached up for the smaller ones.

'How do you know it was?' Again he felt that feeling that his back was exposed, vulnerable.

She shook her head. He took the pin from her mouth. 'How do you know?'

She shrugged. 'He is high up in the Red Triangle. You made trouble for him and he got Mason to try to bribe you.' She shook her hair loose. It fell down in a loose glossy mass round her shoulders. 'You must be careful.'

He felt sure she was right, but still he didn't want to believe it. 'How can he be so dangerous? He is only a ship's agent! And Mason - '

'He does many things,' she interrupted matter-of-factly, gazing at her face in the mirror. Her eyes switched to his reflection beside hers. 'Every Chinese in Shanghai knows about Ching. You foreign devils never look behind things.'

He made a dismissive gesture with his hand. 'Stories, that is all,' he tried to scoff. 'Only stories.'

She shook her head, watching his reflection with cool eyes. 'He is not like Pock-mark Chen. He is an important man. You foreign devils never understand.'

32

JOHNSON WAS THE FIRST EUROPEAN to be murdered in Shanghai for two years, and the North China Daily News carried a report of the inquest on its front page. The verdict was murder by persons unknown. The next day the paper's editorial, recalling the atrocities of the Boxers, urged the foreign powers to consider stationing a permanent garrison in the city. There was an announcement on the same page that the Shanghai Volunteers would welcome recruits from every foreign nationality and every walk of life.

Customs officers were authorised by Mr Brown to carry revolvers at all times when on duty, instead of merely when going on a raid. Denton learnt to shoot accurately with his on the police firing range and began to feel heroic. But often he felt that exposed feeling, as though someone were creeping up behind his back.

Johnson's possessions were auctioned in the mess. There were fewer people there than usual, and Jones, in his last week as mess treasurer, began the auction in a voice that was strangely subdued. There wasn't much to buy, but as the last item, Jones announced, with a little smirk, that some unusual paintings had been found in the bottom of a sea chest that Johnson had kept under his bed. 'Always tightly locked,' he added, stroking his slim moustache.

'Let's see them!' Mason called out, but Jones, still smirking coyly, said the committee had decided they should not be publicly exhibited. Any officer who was interested could examine them on the table, where they were at present placed face down.

There was a snickering, yet still constrained, pause for viewing. Only Mason seemed unaffected by Johnson's death, and he was soon giving a loud, lewd commentary, while the others merely chuckled. The paintings were all crude erotic pictures of women, each done in great detail, but in violent colours, as if Johnson had hated what he so carefully depicted. Johnson had never been known to have a woman in his room and Denton, gazing with fascinated disgust, wondered what he might have done to one if he had. He tried to imagine what it must have been like to live through the furtive turbulence and twisted rage that the pictures represented. But he couldn't. All he could visualise was that bare room of Johnson's, with the carefully made but empty bed. And the picture of the sailing ship he'd seen on the wall, with those realistic woman's breasts on the figurehead, breasts which now seemed so significant. He could hear the note of pride in Johnson's voice when he'd said he painted the picture, and that too seemed significant now. But what was it like to have lived his remote, distorted life - to have been him night after night alone in his room? That, he couldn't imagine.

Mason bought all Johnson's pictures for two dollars each. A week or two later, he claimed to have sold them to a Chinese brothel-owner at a two hundred per cent profit. 'If you ever go there, it'll remind you of the poor old blighter,' he declared at the bar, his eyes for some reason straying blankly over Denton's as he spoke, without a glimmer of acknowledgement.

The murderers were never found, but there were no more attacks on Customs officers and gradually they all forgot Johnson's death, or put it safely away in the past, in history. Ching disappeared from the docks, no longer acting as the Russian line's agent. In any case, Russia and Japan were at war, and no more Russian ships called at Shanghai. Su-mei said he was living in Chapei, in a house surrounded by bodyguards.

The heat of summer slowly eased. On the afternoon of the autumn lantern festival Denton went into the street of the silversmiths to buy some earrings for Su-mei. He wandered in and out of the long, cave-like shops until eventually he found an old silver pair of rings, shaped like heavy tear-drops, which the bald, bowed shopkeeper with crafty little eyes said had come from Peking. Usually, in spite of Ephraim's repeated strictures, he paid by chit, but this time he had a fair amount of cash on him. The shopkeeper squinted at each coin and rang it sharply on the counter before he wrapped the earrings in red paper and gave them to Denton.

As he left the shop, the usual swarm of beggars clustered round him, stretching out their hands and whining with quiet, insolent insistence. Most of them, he knew, were professionals, especially the ones with babies in their arms - at least they were all living infants this time - carefully calculating how to work on the guilt of the sentimental rich. But one man was so mutilated, professional or not, that the callous of indifference that had gradually hardened over Denton's natural sympathy was abruptly softened. The man's legs had been cut off high above the knees, and the stumps were covered with worn leather patches. He was dragging himself along by his hands, trailing his stumps behind him, and his arms and shoulders had become large and powerful. He glared at Denton with an accusing, bitter stare, as though he were personally responsible for his amputated legs. Yet, he is a professional, Denton thought detachedly. But what else could he be? He gave him a dollar. The beggar rang the coin suspiciously against the cobble stone and then dragged himself off without a word, as if he thought he'd got no more than his due. And perhaps it is his due, Denton thought, half-guiltily feeling the expensive earrings in his pocket. Perhaps it's even less than his due. The other beggars crowded round him more thickly now, waving their hands determinedly under his face and fixing their eyes demandingly on his. He pushed his way through them. 'No, no more,' he said curtly, striding on. He couldn't give them all money. Was he responsible for all the suffering in the world? 'No!' They took no notice, shuffling along beside him, whining and plucking his clothes. 'No more!' He was shouting now. And then abruptly, involuntarily almost, he had stopped and was dropping the rest of his change into their outstretched hands, young, old, clean and dirty, ashamed at the same time of his weakness, his sentimentality. As if those few cents would solve any problems! As if charity was the answer! But then what was? All the money was gone; but still the soft, plucking hands reached out and the whining voices cajoled and coaxed him. He shook his head again and brushed through them, climbing into a waiting rickshaw. The coolie regarded him with a sly, calculating look. Good for a big tip, his eyes seemed to say.

'Where to, master?' he asked in pidgin.

'Chinsan Road.'

'Long way, master. You pay one dollar?'

Denton shrugged. He'd given so much away, why bother about fifty cents more or less now? 'This time I will pay one dollar,' he said in Chinese. 'But don't think I don't know it should be fifty cents.'

'You speak Chinese? Very good.' The coolie grinned, put out his half-smoked cigarette, placed it carefully in his pocket then lifted the shafts.

As the coolie pushed his way through the still hopeful beggars, shooing them gruffly and scornfully away, Denton noticed two people gazing at him from across the road. They were a man and a woman, both taller than the average, dressed in faded black cotton trousers and jackets. The woman wore a peasant's wide-brimmed dun straw hat. The man had slung his by its cord over his back. They were gazing at him with a solid, disconcerting stare, but it wasn't until the rickshaw had passed and he'd turned back to look at them again that Denton recognised them. It was the woman who'd been hit by buckshot that day they'd gone shooting with Henschel outside Soochow - she and her husband. They were still gazing after him with that disconcerting stare, neither hostile nor friendly. The memory of the shooting revived his obscure sense of shame about it and he turned away uncomfortably. What had brought them to Shanghai? he wondered. Had they lost their land, or sold it, as so many of the peasants flooding the city had done, and come in search of work? Their unnervingly dispassionate stare stayed in his mind while he fingered Su-mei's present in his pocket. Were they too blaming him for their fate whatever it was? But their gaze hadn't been accusing. It had been a curious one, rather, as if he were some brilliant exotic fish displayed in a tank, interesting but useless. And that too made him uneasy. Sometimes he felt he never knew where he was with these people. So many of them seemed to have the Great Wall in their eyes, even the humblest of them, from which they could look down at you with cool indifference as mere barbarians, foreign devils. Even Wei. And Su-mei? He pushed the question aside. He didn't want to think like that about her, especially not tonight.

Su-mei had brought an orange lantern with her for the festival. She lit the candle inside it and hung it from the veranda railing. Denton had ordered dinner in his room and they sat across the little table she had bought him, their knees touching, teaching each other new words in Chinese and English. When they had finished eating and were sipping the last of her favourite strong green tea, he laid her present on the table beside her.

'T'ank you,' she said in the high, level tone in which she spoke English, tilting her head and smiling faintly. If he hadn't known her better, he might have thought she was hardly pleased at all. But he understood now that she would have found it demeaning to be more effusive. She leant forward across the table to let him put them on her. 'If I wear them tonight, you will not dare bite my ears in case you swallow them,' she said simply, in Chinese now.

He smiled, but her face was still, as though she'd meant it seriously. She put her hands up to feel the earrings hanging from her small pink lobes. They looked like two little silver tears tugging gently at them. He took her hands as she leant back. 'Su-mei?' be began.

'I want to look at them in the glass.'

'Wait a minute.' He held her wrists tighter. His tanned hands, with the dark hair sprouting at the knuckles, seemed enormous on her smooth slender wrists. How odd, too, that her skin was actually paler than his. 'If I moved out of the mess, we could find a place to live together in.'

She glanced up him with a sly smile in her half-lidded eyes. 'You want to marry me?' she asked mockingly.

'You know what I mean.' Of course he hadn't thought of marriage. He too smiled at the idea.

She eased her wrists out of his slowly slackening grip and went to the mirror in the bathroom, turning her head from side to side. The silver gleamed, dangling in the shadowy hollows beneath her ears.

'Well?' he asked.

'Very beautiful.' She raised her hands to adjust the earrings.

'What do you say about finding a place to live together in? Several people here have done it.'

She held up the hand with the little dark mole on it. 'Do you know Chinese people think this is very good, this mole here? When my father sold me, he got a better price because of that.'

'Su-mei!'

She went back to the veranda and leant over the rail. Below, orange, red, blue and yellow lanterns jogged and swayed along the street as children carried them towards the little hill that was the highest point nearby. The children were shouting and laughing as though there were no such thing as poverty and starvation and the selling of children.

'Well?' he asked again.

'And still be a sing-song girl?'

'I would have enough money for both of us. You could give up your room in Hongkew.'

'I have given it up already. I have let it to someone.'

'Let it?' he glanced round at her frowning. 'Where do you sleep when you don't stay here?'

'With a friend.' She was looking steadily over the rail, avoiding his eyes. 'I pay her - '

'Him or her?'

'Her,' she repeated sharply. 'I pay her half what it costs her. So I make money out of the other place.'

He paused, trying to visualise this girl who was only sixteen by western reckoning, and who was such a child in some ways, hard-headedly devising profitable schemes that he would never have dreamt of. 'So we can move together,' he said uncertainly, feeling that she had gone suddenly out of focus, acquiring a new dimension. 'You have given up your room already.'

'But if I stop being a sing-song girl, I will lose all my customers,' she went on in a practical voice. 'Then one day you will go away. And what will I do without my customers?'

He felt a sudden doubt that seemed to make something crumble in his chest. 'Su-mei, your customers - you don't...? I mean you only sing for them, don't you?' he asked suspiciously.

'Since I have been with you, yes.' She spoke lightly, as if that was irrelevant. 'But what will I do when you go away? Besides - '

'I will not go away,' he said bravely, and felt he meant it.

'Of course you will,' she answered flatly. 'Foreign devils always go away. One day you will marry a foreign woman. You will have to.'

She was gazing directly at him now, challenging him to deny it. He looked away from her assured brown eyes, down into the street with its nodding lanterns. He wanted to deny it, to take up her challenge, but something cold and heavy blocked his voice. Living with a Chinese girl, a sing-song girl at that - of course it could only be temporary, no matter how much he liked her. He felt the chill hand of reason pulling him back, the same chill hand that was guiding her. It was like a cloud suddenly covering the sky, draining the colour out of everything. She was right. In the end he would go away. Of course she was right. She couldn't rely on him.

Her eyes were still on his face. He glanced up at the earrings glistening against the glossy jet of her hair. 'You could keep on with your customers and still live with me,' he said hesitantly.

She gave a definite little shake of her head that made the earrings quiver. 'You would want a place at least as big as this, and an amah to look after it - it would cost much more than you pay here.' She glanced back over his rooms with a remorseless practical eye. 'Too expensive,' she concluded. 'You would pay more to someone else and you would have to give me less. Then I could not pay for my singing lessons. Or else I would have to send less to my parents.'

'Your parents!' He stared at her. 'But they sold you!' He knew about her singing lessons, her ambition to become an opera singer, and he enjoyed the thought that he was helping her with his money in that, although the only Chinese opera he'd ever attended had seemed a gaudy, clashing cacophony to him. But sending some of his money to her parents - that was different. She'd never told him about that.

Yet she seemed amazed at his astonishment, gazing at him with wide, uncomprehending eyes. 'Of course I send them money, they are my parents!'

'And they sold you!'

'Otherwise I would have starved. And so would they. Now I can send them money.' She spoke slowly and patiently, as if explaining a simple problem to a little child.

He heard several voices laughing and talking suddenly in Mason's room. They sounded boisterous and exuberant, with the shrill, uncontrolled hilarity of drunkenness. 'Shall we go in?' he asked abruptly. He didn't want to see their leers or hear the gibes they'd be bound to make if they saw Su-mei.

She took the lantern in from the veranda and hung it on the wardrobe door in the bedroom. How little he knew about her, he thought, as they undressed. How little he understood. Her parents sold her, and yet she sent them money as a matter of course. She even made it sound as though they'd done her a favour in selling her. Perhaps they had. He shook his head perplexedly.

She lay with her head on his shoulder, and he, on his back, gazed up at the pale shadows on the ceiling looming and shrinking weirdly as the candle flame inside the lantern flickered. He cupped his hand round her shoulder. 'Tell me about your family,' he said slowly.

Her shoulder shrugged lightly under his hand, as if to say, 'Why should you want to know about them? What business is it of yours?'

'How many brothers and sisters have you got?' he persisted.

Again her shoulder shrugged. 'Two half-brothers and a half-sister,' she said expressionlessly. 'Three younger brothers and two sisters.'

He added them together in his head. 'Half-brothers?' he asked puzzledly. 'Half-sisters?'

'My father had two wives at one time. My mother is the number two wife.'

'He must have been rich then, to have had two wives?'

'He was a rice dealer. When the Boxers came, they took all his rice. He was ruined. Then there was no trade for several years because of the Boxers. Everyone was starving. They say the peasants ate their dogs first, then the rats, then the girl babies. My father sold me when I was thirteen, I was the oldest girl. The Boxers killed the number one wife,' she added as an afterthought. 'When they took the town. They raped her and killed her. Many men. But my mother was my father's favourite wife.' She said that as though it somehow lessened the horror of killing the first wife.

All the same she had been speaking in a dull, inexpressive voice - almost grudgingly, as though she resented having to tell him. A loud sally of laughter carried into the room from Mason's veranda, discordant and loutish after Su-mei's bare and unself-pitying words. Unself-pitying and grimly realistic, he thought. She'd mentioned the first wife's death last because it was less important for the family than the loss of the rice. Without rice they starved, but her father had a second wife - and could get another if he was ever able to afford it again. And anyway the second wife was his favourite.

His hand left her shoulder to fondle the earring which lay in the hollow of her neck. He pressed it gently against her skin, rolling its little tear-drop mass to and fro.

'You're hurting,' she said in the same level voice.

'What's happened to your family now?' He was still rolling the earring to and fro. 'The Boxers were all killed in nineteen hundred, weren't they?' He glanced down at her face. She was looking up at him warily, her slanted lids almost closed, as though she thought he might suddenly jerk the earring or tear it off her ear. 'What are they doing now?' he asked again, holding his hand still.

'My father owes a lot of money. He has to work for the people he owes it to, until he has paid it all off. My brothers are working too. They give him money to help pay.'

'And your sisters?'

'Married.' She stirred. 'I send more money than my brothers do,' she said simply, without pride. 'I make more.'

'What does he look like, your father?'

She shrugged, and he felt her cheek move as she smiled.

'Old.'

He imagined her father selling her, taking her to the dealer, showing off her good points, the little mole on her hand for instance, while the dealer smirked into his beard, knowing that hunger would force her father to take his price in the end. He couldn't visualize her father, but he saw the dealer as a bony old man with a straggly white beard and moustache. Did her father kiss her goodbye? No, he wouldn't do that. Did she cry? How did they treat her?

The candle in the lantern went out. The room was dark except for the reflected moonlight filtering through the shutters. Again a guffaw of laughter from Mason's room. In the dark it sounded louder. 'What happened to you when you were sold?'

'The dealer sold me to an opera company. But they broke up, they lost all their money. They wanted to sell me to a brothel, but I ran away. I stole some money from them. It was in Tientsin. I got on a train to Shanghai. It was the first time in my life that I'd been on a train. The only time. I think I was more scared of the train than of being caught. And when I got to Shanghai, I became a sing-song girl.' She sighed, as if telling her story had tired her.

'How long ago was that?'

'Two years. I came because it was a long way off. People said they would not be able to catch me in the foreign settlements. Because of the foreign police.'

He had the sense that she had come to him across some immense plain in which everything was dim and strange. Would his life seem equally strange to her - his banal, narrow and sheltered life in Enfield?

'And did they catch you?' he asked.

'I would not be here if they had.' She raised herself suddenly on her elbows and looked down at him, resting her chin on her hands. 'You send money to your father?' she asked.

He nodded. But they didn't sell me, he was just about to say, but then checked himself. After all they weren't starving either. He gazed up past her head at the ceiling. How did her parents live? What sort of work did her father do? He'd been in Shanghai over a year and he'd learnt the language and yet China seemed just as inaccessible to him now as the day he arrived. 'Do your parents know about me?' he asked.

'No.' She was leaning her head on one side, unfastening the earrings; first one ear, then the other. 'They would be shocked to know I went with a foreign devil. I was frightened myself, only Wei told me it would be all right.'

'Wei told you to come to me?' His voice rose with pique. Hadn't she come of her own accord? What business was it of Wei's?

'Wei told me you would not hurt me.' She rolled onto her back suddenly and opened her arms. 'See? I have taken them off after all. You can bite my ears if you like.'

33

THE FIRST MOTOR CAR TO ARRIVE in China was unloaded at Quay Five in the Lower Section wharves in December nineteen hundred and four, while the winter sun shone brightly on a cold morning that it could not warm. Denton, on duty there, watched with interest, but little excitement, as the coolies broke the crate open and revealed the strange horseless carriage, black and shiny, to an invited group of businessmen and reporters. Two photographers were there too, delaying the ceremony while everyone stood rigidly facing them, paralysed smiles on their faces. The photographers fussed beneath their black velvet hoods and the smiles grew more strained, until at last the photographers pressed the bulbs and the staring faces came back to mobile life again. Then a young griffin from Jardine's climbed into the thing and sat at the wheel, wrapped up in a leather coat and cap with a scarf round his throat. They couldn't start the engine yet, but some photographs were taken of the coolies pulling the machine along with ropes while the young driver steered, one gauntleted hand on the wheel, the other raised in precarious salute.

Denton returned to the Customs House by rickshaw. The coolie laughed and muttered to him about the strange, useless western contraption they'd just seen. Denton leant back against the padded seat, looking out indolently at the facades of the consulates as the coolie trotted past at an easy, steady pace. First the Russian consulate, tall with turrets and spires, then the German with its colonnaded verandas, then the smaller ones, Dutch, Portuguese and Belgian. Each one seemed to assert, by its size and position, its country's stake in Shanghai. The most stately of them all was the British, he felt with a throb of pride. Its architecture was not grand like the Russian or German, but it stood in the most dominant position near Garden Bridge, set in wide rolling lawns like a country house at home. It didn't have to clamour for attention by making grandiose gestures. It merely stood there, serene and slightly remote, secure in the knowledge of its own preeminence. The other consulates you could almost mistake for business houses or clubs. But the unpretentious British consulate couldn't have been a vulgar hong. It was the manor house round which the city had developed. Denton thought he would mention this to Jacob Ephraim when they next met. Jacob was always praising the Germans for their science and their culture, but he'd have to admit they'd had precious little to do with the building of Shanghai. When it came to government, administration and the running of an empire, the Germans simply weren't in it. Even the French, although they were always a bit shabby in Shanghai, had done more than the Germans.

He gave the coolie a tip and went towards his office with a vague glow of well-being warming his body. After all, it did feel good to belong to a nation that counted.

The glow cooled a little when he noticed several of the clerks in the large outer office eyeing him rather impertinently and smiling behind their hands as he passed. He stared at a couple of them until they lowered their eyes, but, as he opened his door, he noticed they were glancing at him again, still furtively smirking at each other.

He pulled the door shut behind him, frowning in irritation. His irritation grew stronger when he saw the letters and forms he'd signed earlier in the morning still piled on his desk. He was just going to ring for the messenger when he noticed a white envelope addressed to himself leaning against the ink well. It was an official envelope, with the seal of the assistant commissioner across each of the flaps. He felt a faint stirring of unease in his stomach as he turned the letter over in his hands, the same stirring that he'd felt when he took Emily's last letter from his pigeon-hole in the mess. The muttering and tittering of the clerks suddenly seemed significant and ominous to him. He had to push himself to slit the envelope.

He drew the letter out and took it to the window to read.

Dear Mr Denton,

The commissioner has come to the conclusion, after careful consideration, that it would not be in the best interests of the Service to offer you a permanent contract in the Imperial Maritime Customs Service. Your employment will therefore terminate upon the expiry of your probationary contract on June 30th 1905.

Yours faithfully,

W Brown

Assistant Commissioner.

Stunned, Denton stared down at the letter, while the words went on echoing in his head. He felt as though he were sagging and crumpling where he stood - as though something was running out of his body, something more vital than blood. He read the letter through again, then looked up out of the window. The sunlight lay as before on the cold dirty waters of the river, ruffled here and there by cats' paws of wind; there were the same masts and smoking funnels, the same rigid arms of the derricks, the same junks and barges clustering round each ship. But though they hadn't changed, they all seemed suddenly distant now, as though with those few lines on that crisp piece of paper, they had moved into another dimension, outside his life. He watched a sea gull swooping low over the wake of a tramp steamer that was sailing slowly down the channel towards Woosung; but his eyes were nerveless, and it was the cool, wounding phrases of the letter that he really saw.

Why? Why? He shook his head uncomprehendingly while his eyes mechanically followed the dipping and wheeling of the seagull. Why? What have I done wrong? 'Not in the best interests'? Was it Mason? Or Smith? Surely they wouldn't do a thing like that? 'Not in the best interests.' The sea gull passed from sight behind one of the new Whampoa Docks godowns. He read the letter through once more with that frantic, irrational hope that he might after all have misunderstood it. But no, it was plain and curt - they didn't want him. He folded it slowly and slid it back into the envelope, his eyes smarting, his cheeks stinging with humiliation. So that was why the clerks had been looking at him like that outside! Of course - they knew already! They always knew first. He'd lost face, he was down, so they could smirk at him with impunity and make their mean little souls feel large by sneering at him. Well - he turned to the desk and banged the bell sharply, one, two, three times.

He stood waiting, his pulse throbbing in his wrists and ears. He still had the letter in his hand. He slipped it into his pocket and banged the bell again. He banged it so hard that it hurt his hand. He imagined the clerks outside watching his door and grinning at each other. He'd half a mind to go out and - And What? His mind and will stumbled into a soggy blankness. He saw himself sinking into a swamp. Whatever he said or did, they'd always get the better of him with their elusive, silent mockery that he'd never be able to get hold of and pin down. And he'd slowly sink deeper and deeper into the swamp.

At last the messenger came, shuffling in with a cigarette burning half-concealed in the cup of his hand. He lounged by the door, not even troubling to shut it, his brows lifted a fraction in dumbly insolent inquiry.

'Why haven't these letters been taken away?' Denton asked in a tight, rising voice, his eyes stiff with resentment.

The man, who only yesterday had bowed and smiled ingratiatingly when he came in, now merely gazed at him silently for a second before lifting one indifferent shoulder. 'Too busy,' he muttered.

'Well, take them at once!' Denton's voice snapped tensely - more tensely than he'd meant, betraying his emotion. He saw the man's lips twitch in amused superiority as he shuffled idly forward and took the papers lazily one by one, 'And if you're too busy tomorrow, I'll see you're dismissed. Understand?'

The messenger shuffled out as though he were deaf.

Denton listened to the door closing, squeaking on its hinges as it had done for weeks. He'd kept asking for the hinges to be oiled but nothing had happened. Now, he thought with a self-pitying catch in his chest, now he needn't bother. He gazed down at the torn edge of the blotting paper on his pad, the pad that was now no longer really his at all. 'It would not be in the best interests of the Service.' The phrase kept sliding through him like a knife. He glanced over the furniture of the desk, the pens, the pencils, the volumes of Customs regulations, the calendar, the Chinese dictionary, the unfinished report forms, the neat pile of official writing paper - all that a few minutes ago was his by right; and now was only lent him. By some trick of memory he suddenly recalled the crowd of beggars that had swarmed round him that day only two months ago when he bought Su-mei those earrings for the moon festival. He remembered how he gave away his change, first to that legless beggar with the sullen face, then to all the others, and how he'd seen that peasant couple from Soochow. Their faces seemed to form and dissolve in the dark wooden grain of the desk. Had they come back to him now because of some unconscious association his mind had made already - because today he'd slipped a step nearer them? 'Not in the best interests.' They didn't want him. Why, why, why?

Abruptly, he sat down, chose a sheet of paper from the middle of the pile, where neither dust nor sunlight had reached to discolour it, and wrote a note asking for an appointment to see Mr Brown.

When he told Su-mei that night, he was still stunned, incredulous, unable to think the decision was final. Su-mei listened in silence, then, raising her head, looked directly at him. 'Will you go away?'

It was the first time he'd thought of the practical consequences of the letter, and immediately he shied away from them. 'I'll have to see Brown first,' he shrugged. 'Perhaps they'll change their minds - perhaps there's some mistake.'

Her lids half-closed as she looked down again. 'Why should they change their minds?' she asked dispassionately, refusing to encourage his delusions.

He shrugged again irritably. 'How do I know?'

'Then you will go away,' she said with dry conclusiveness. It was as though a door had shut between them.

He turned the polished brass knob and went in. Mr Brown sat at his desk, stroking his moustache pensively. He was reading in a file, his domed head, with its woolly circlet of grey hair, slightly inclined, his brows faintly drawn together. 'Mr Denton?' he inquired, without raising his eyes. 'Please sit down.'

Denton sat. A page rustled beneath Mr Brown's turning finger. He read on unhurriedly for half a minute, then looked up, closing the file. Denton made out his own name on the stiff green cover.

'You wished to see me?'

'Yes sir, about ... about the termination of my contract.'

'Yes?'

'Well, sir, I don't understand this letter.' Denton pulled the letter out of his pocket.

Mr Brown gazed at it in his hands, making no move to take it. 'You do not understand the letter, Mr Denton? Is it unclear? Is it ... imprecise?'

'No, sir, it's not that. It's ... I mean, I don't understand why my contract is being terminated. The letter doesn't really give any reason.'

'No reason?' Mr Brown clasped his hands slowly on top of the file. 'The reason given, was it not, was that the commissioner does not feel a permanent contract would be in the best - '

'Yes, sir, but it doesn't say why not.'

'in the best interests of the Service,' Mr Brown finished, lowering his eyelids faintly in displeasure at the interruption. 'I may add in amplification that your immediate superior officers have reported that in their opinion your temperament is not entirely appropriate for the Imperial Maritime Customs Service.' His shoulders rose in a brief, resigned shrug. 'In the light of those reports, I am afraid there was nothing more to be said.'

'But can't I be told why?' Denton asked helplessly. 'What have I done wrong? Is my work unsatisfactory?'

Mr Brown gazed down at his clasped hands, drawing Denton's eyes too down to their pale plumpness. 'Mr Denton, it is not your work exactly, but your temperament.' He frowned lightly for some seconds and then looked up. 'I don't know if you play cricket at all, but I'm sure you know enough about the game to agree that a man may be an excellent batsman and yet never be included in the team, simply because he does not quite ...' he glanced up at the ceiling, searching for the exact word, '... he does not quite blend with the other members of the team. The captain's job in such a case is to see that his team still functions. He cannot afford to play the best batsman, or still less a merely quite promising one, if the rest of the team will not play with him. I'm sure you can see the analogy I am drawing. Do you play cricket, Mr Denton?'

'No, sir.'

'However, the analogy is quite clear, I expect?'

'Suppose that the player doesn't blend because the other players are cheating and he isn't?'

'It is not cricket to cheat, Mr Denton. Nor is it cricket to slander other members of the team because you are not chosen to play yourself.' He leant slowly, ponderously, back, regarding Denton with a closing look that signified the interview was over. 'That is all I have to say.'

'Who says I don't blend?' Denton asked rebelliously. 'Superintendent Smith?'

Mr Brown glanced at the clock on the wall and felt for the gold watch-chain that hung across his soft, round paunch. 'I cannot discuss the details of a confidential report of this nature with you any further, Mr Denton.' He drew out his watch, opened the gleaming gold case and checked the clock against it. 'Personally, I may say that I regret this decision had to be made.' His lips turned down at the corners as he peered over his paunch to slip the watch back into his waistcoat pocket. 'However, given the nature of the report' - his eyes slid to the file for a moment, then up to Denton's face - 'given that, I am bound to say that no other outcome was conceivable.'

'How can you judge someone when he's not even allowed to speak in his own defence?'

'This is not a trial, Mr Denton.' Mr Brown had drawn a handkerchief out of his breast pocket. He began wiping his fingers fastidiously on it, and Denton recalled for years afterwards that the handkerchief was a pale blue silk with white spots on it. 'It is a decision by your superior officers, arrived at according to the appropriate procedures, about your suitability for a permanent contract. And I must confess I was not entirely surprised by the report that was made on your temperament, having regard to your somewhat ... erratic behaviour at my own residence soon after your arrival in Shanghai.'

Denton flushed, remembering how fuddled with wine he'd become at the Browns' dinner party. 'I simply wasn't used to wine then, I'd never drunk it before!' he protested. 'You can't hold that against me, it isn't fair!'

'I merely observed, Mr Denton, that in the light of that incident the report did not surprise me. But in any case, as to the question of fairness,' Mr Brown said, replacing his handkerchief and arranging it carefully, 'I must remark that sometimes ... that sometimes one has a larger duty to consider than simple fairness to individuals. Good day, Mr Denton.'

'What larger duty, may I ask?' Denton was surprised himself by the flick of sarcasm in his voice.

Mr Brown's massive forehead shook almost imperceptibly from side to side, and his lids lowered with the mildest, but definite, display of annoyance at Denton's insubordination. 'Good day, Mr Denton.'

At the mess, as he walked through to the lounge, several officers seemed to be watching him covertly, and the voices suddenly died in the group by the bar where Mason sat, his portly buttocks bulging over the tall bamboo stool. Mason's head half-turned towards him, and Denton heard him mutter something at which the others smiled. He walked on through the doorway, his face rigid, his cheeks burning. Sitting down in an empty corner, he picked up the North China Daily News and ostentatiously pretended to be reading it. But his eyes scanned the words uncomprehendingly, as if they were written in a foreign language.

Someone began playing Home, Sweet Home on the piano in the bar, with many flourishes and trills. Denton knew the words were syrupy with sentimentality, but still they sprung ambushes in his chest and throat. How would he help his parents now? In their last letter his mother had added a secret postscript under his father's laconic good wishes, 'Your father is not at all well.' Well, how would he help them now? 'Wherever I wander,' the words sang forlornly through his head, 'There's no-o-o place like ho-o-me.' Indignation, shame and self-pity mingled in a sudden flood behind his eyes. He held the paper higher to shield his face and blinked back the shame and bitterness.

After a few minutes he got up and walked out through the bar, across the lobby, up the stairs, his head erect and stiff, forcing himself not to hurry. Su-mei wasn't coming that night. He lay down on his bed without undressing and gazed up at the pale, anonymous shadows wandering across the ceiling. The indifferent, raucous sounds of the street that he'd long ceased to notice sounded strangely loud and distinct to him now, as though he were hearing them for the first time - or the last. It was cold. He kicked off his shoes, and the hollow clump they made on the floor seemed desolate to him. He pulled the blankets up to his chin and stared up at the ceiling once more.

34

ALTHOUGH SU-MEI HAD TAUGHT HIM the vivid colloquial speech of Shanghai, she had never learnt to read or write beyond the level of a child. So he'd continued taking lessons with Wei, and was slowly mastering the Chinese script. At the end of the next lesson, just after Christmas, he was subdued and inattentive. He explained to Wei apologetically afterwards, that he would be leaving the Customs Service soon. 'I'll be going back to England, I suppose - I'll have to stop having lessons.'

'Leaving Shanghai?' They always spoke Chinese now, unless Denton was lost for a word. Wei's lids flickered momentarily. 'I shall be sorry to see such a good pupil leave.'

'I shall be sorry to go. But I have to.' Denton's fingers fidgeted with the watch-chain that looped into his fob. He glanced up. Wei's half-hooded eyes were watching him alertly, yet without curiosity. 'The fact is,' he took a sudden breath and rushed on awkwardly, 'I am not being given a permanent contract in the Customs Service.'

Wei's lids flickered again. His expression did not change.

'They don't want me,' Denton added bitterly.

Still Wei sat quietly watching him with those alert yet incurious eyes. It had cost Denton some humiliation to admit he was being sacked, but apparently it had aroused neither sympathy nor interest. 'Well, there it is.' He gestured clumsily with his hand.

Wei stood up spry and erect. 'Shall we go and have some tea? There is a new place just over the Garden Bridge.'

Even when they had settled down in the rickshaw, Wei uttered no word of sympathy. Denton stared sombrely at the coolie's shoulders as he heaved on the shafts and hauled them over the hump of the bridge, past the beggars soaking in the midday sun. Wei perched beside him, his thin lips pressed austerely together. Occasionally his sharp little eyes darted sideways glances at Denton behind his steel-rimmed glasses, but Denton obstinately ignored them, staring unresponsively at the patched tear in the coolie's threadbare jacket. I suppose I've lost face with Wei too, he thought sullenly. Soon even the coolies will be sneering at me.

Wei had said the tea-house was just over the bridge, but the coolie loped along from one alley to another into parts of the city Denton had never set eyes on before. As the streets grew narrower the sun was often shut out, and the shadows were numb with cold. At last, they came to a larger building; red banners were streaming down the front blazoned with golden Good Luck characters. The smoke of fire-crackers still hung about the entrance and beribboned baskets of flowers had been placed along the steps. Wei led the way in, being met by a smiling, bobbing waiter who led them to a table by the window and waited with exaggerated deference for their order. 'It only opened today,' Wei said, as if he sensed Denton's surprise at the respect they were being shown. He ordered spring rolls, one of Denton's favourites, and a strong tea 'to keep the blood warm in the cold weather.' A young boy brought them hot, moist towels. They wiped their hands on them in silence.

At last when the tea had been poured and they had sipped from the cups, Wei leaned forward, sucking his lips in before he spoke. 'Why does the Customs Service not want you?'

Denton sipped the dark green, bitter tea again before he answered. 'They said I did not ...' He couldn't think of the Chinese for 'blend,' 'did not fit with the other people,' he said at last.

Wei nodded, belching softly as he put his cup down.

'You think they were right, then?' Denton asked ironically.

Wei waited while the waiter placed the steaming basket of spring rolls on the table. He took up his chopsticks and delicately broke off a piece from one of the rolls while he spoke. 'Yes, perhaps you did not fit with them. Perhaps you were ... awkward to deal with?'

'Awkward?'

'Perhaps you were offered presents and did not take them? That might make you awkward for some people.'

Denton smiled wryly. 'Of course that is what I suspect, but I cannot prove it. I only ran my head into a brick wall.'

Wei looked up, puzzled and concerned, at Denton's head. 'You ran into a brick wall?'

'No, no, not like that. It is an English saying. It means I keep trying to make progress, but I cannot.'

'I am running my head into a brick wall,' Wei said reflectively in English, testing the metaphor as though it was a wine. He nodded approvingly, then returned to Chinese. 'It was unlucky for you that you crossed Ching.'

'Ching? How do you know about that?'

Wei smiled modestly, placing a piece of roll in Denton's bowl with his chopsticks. 'People talk,' he said evasively. 'It is Ching who does not want you in the Customs Service.' His chopsticks toyed with a morsel abstractedly, dipped it in the soya bowl, then raised it to his mouth. 'He found you awkward to deal with.' He swallowed and licked his lips.

'I can't believe that