When We Were Orphans Read online

  It was the property of Morganbrook and Byatt, which meant there were many ornaments and pictures around the place I was forbidden to touch. It meant also that from time to time, we would have boarding with us a “house guest”—some employee newly arrived in Shanghai who had yet to “find his feet.” I do not know if my parents objected to this arrangement. I did not mind at all, since usually a house guest would be some young man who brought with him the air of the English lanes and meadows I knew from The Wind in the Willows, or else the foggy streets of the Conan Doyle mysteries. These young Englishmen, no doubt eager to create a good impression, were inclined to indulge my lengthy questions and sometimes unreasonable requests. Most of them, it occurs to me, were probably younger then than I am today, and were probably all at sea so far from their home. But to me at the time, they were all of them figures to study closely and emulate.

  But to return to Akira: there is a particular instance that now comes to mind from one such afternoon, after the two of us had been running frantically up and down that mound to enact one of our extended dramas. We were for a moment sitting down against the maple tree to recover our breath, and I was gazing across the lawn towards the house, waiting for my chest to stop heaving, when Akira said behind me:

  “Be careful, old chip. Centipede. By your foot.”

  I had clearly heard him say “old chip,” but did not at this point think anything of it. But having once used the phrase, Akira seemed rather pleased with it, and over the following several minutes, once we resumed our game, proceeded to address me so over and over: “This way, old chip!” “More fast, old chip!”

  “Anyway, it’s not old chip,” I told him in the end, during one of our disputes over how our game should proceed. “It’s old chap.”

  Akira, as I knew he would, protested vigorously. “Not at all. Not at all. Mrs. Brown. She make me say again and again. Old chip. Old chip. Correct pronunciation, everything. She say old chip. She teacher!”

  It was pointless to try to convince him; since starting his English lessons, he was immensely proud of his position within his family as the expert English speaker. All the same, I was unwilling to concede the point, and in the end the quarrel grew to such proportions, Akira simply stalked off in a fury, our game abandoned, through our “secret door”—a gap in the hedge separating the two gardens.

  On the next few occasions we played together, he did not call me “old chip,” or make any reference to this altercation on the mound. I had all but forgotten the matter when one morning a few weeks later, it came up again suddenly as we were walking back together along Bubbling Well Road past the grand houses and beautiful lawns. I cannot remember quite what I had just said to him. In any case, he responded by saying:

  “Very kind of you, old chap.”

  I remember resisting the temptation to point out that he had come round to my view. For by then I knew Akira well enough to realise he was not saying “old chap” by way of a subtle admission that he had previously been wrong; rather, in some odd way we both understood, he was implying that he had always been the one to claim it was “old chap”; that he was now merely reasserting his argument, and my lack of protest simply confirmed his conclusive victory. Indeed, for the rest of the afternoon, he continued to “old chap” me with an ever more smug expression, as though to say: “So you’re no longer determined to be ridiculous. I’m glad you’re seeing more sense.”

  This kind of behaviour was not at all untypical of Akira, and though I always found it infuriating, for some reason I rarely made the effort to protest. In fact—and today I find this hard to explain—I felt a certain need to preserve such fantasies on Akira’s behalf, and had, say, an adult tried to arbitrate in the “old chip” dispute, I would just as likely have taken Akira’s side.

  I do not wish to imply by this that Akira dominated me, or that ours was in any sense an unbalanced friendship. I took as much initiative in our games, and if anything, made more of the crucial decisions. The fact was, I believed myself his intellectual superior, and at some level, Akira probably accepted this. On the other hand, there were various things that gave my Japanese friend great authority in my eyes. There were, for instance, his arm-locks—which he would often administer if I made statements that displeased him, or if during one of our dramas, I became resistant to adopting a particular plot-turn he was keen on. More generally, even though he was actually only a month my senior, I did have a sense that he was the more worldly. He did seem to know about many things I did not. There was, above all, his claim to having ventured on several occasions beyond the boundaries of the Settlement.

  It is slightly surprising to me, looking back today, to think how as young boys we were allowed to come and go unsupervised to the extent that we were. But this was, of course, all within the relative safety of the International Settlement. I for one was absolutely forbidden to enter the Chinese areas of the city, and as far as I know, Akira’s parents were no less strict on the matter. Out there, we were told, lay all manner of ghastly diseases, filth and evil men. The closest I had ever come to going out of the Settlement was once when a carriage carrying my mother and me took an unexpected route along that part of the Soochow creek bordering the Chapei district; I could see the huddled low rooftops across the canal, and had held my breath for as long as I could for fear the pestilence would come airborne across the narrow strip of water. No wonder then that my friend’s claim to have undertaken a number of secret forays into such areas made an impression on me.

  I remember quizzing Akira repeatedly about these exploits. The truth concerning the Chinese districts, he told me, was far worse even than the rumours. There were no proper buildings, just shack upon shack built in great proximity to one another. It all looked, he claimed, much like the marketplace in Boone Road, except that whole families were to be found living in each “stall.” There were, moreover, dead bodies piled up everywhere, flies buzzing all over them, and no one there thought anything of it. On one occasion, Akira had been strolling down a crowded alley and had seen a man—some powerful warlord, he supposed—being transported on a sedan chair, accompanied by a giant carrying a sword. The warlord was pointing to whomever he pleased and the giant would then proceed to lop his or her head off. Naturally, people were trying to hide themselves the best they could. Akira, though, had simply stood there, staring defiantly back at the warlord. The latter had spent a moment considering whether to have Akira beheaded, but then obviously struck by my friend’s courage, had finally laughed and, reaching down, patted him on the head. Then the warlord’s party had continued on its way, leaving many more severed heads in its wake.

  I cannot remember ever attempting to challenge Akira on any of these claims. Once I mentioned casually to my mother something about my friend’s adventures beyond the Settlement, and I remember her smiling and saying something to cast doubt on the matter. I was furious at her, and thereafter I believe I carefully avoided revealing to her anything at all intimate concerning Akira.

  My mother, incidentally, was one person Akira regarded with a peculiar awe. If, say, despite his having got me in an arm-lock, I was still loath to concede a point to him, I could always resort to declaring that he would have my mother to answer to. Of course, this was not something I liked to do readily; it rather hurt my pride to have to invoke my mother’s authority at such an age. But on those occasions I was obliged to do so, I was always amazed by the transformation brought about—how the merciless fiend with the vice-like grip could turn in a second into a panic-stricken child. I was never sure why my mother should have such an effect on Akira; for although he was always exceedingly polite, he was on the whole unintimidated by adults. I could not, moreover, recall my mother ever having spoken to him in anything but a gentle and friendly way. I can remember pondering this question at the time, and various possibilities occurring to me.

  I did, for a while, consider the notion that Akira regarded my mother as he did because she was “beautiful.” That my mother was “beautiful
” was something I accepted, quite dispassionately, as fact throughout my growing up. It was always being said of her, and I believe I regarded this “beautiful” as simply a label that attached itself to my mother, no more significant than “tall” or “small” or “young.” At the same time, I was not unaware of the effect her “beauty” had on others. Of course, at that age, I had no real sense of the deeper implications of feminine allure. But accompanying her from place to place as I did, I came to take for granted, for instance, the admiring glances of strangers as we strolled through the Public Gardens, or the preferential treatment from the waiters at the Italian Café in Nanking Road where we would go for cakes on Saturday mornings. Whenever I look now at my photographs of her—I have seven in all, in the album that accompanied me here from Shanghai—she strikes me as a beauty in an older, Victorian tradition. Today, she might perhaps be regarded as “handsome”; certainly, she is not “pretty.” I cannot imagine her, for instance, ever having had the repertoire of coquettish little shrugs and tosses of the head that we expect of our young women today. In the photographs—all of them taken before my birth, four in Shanghai, two in Hong Kong, one in Switzerland—she is certainly elegant, stiff-backed, perhaps even haughty, but not without the gentleness around her eyes I remember well. In any case, the point I am making is that it was quite natural for me to suspect, initially at least, that Akira’s odd attitude towards my mother derived, like so many other things, from her beauty. But when I thought the thing over more carefully, I recall settling on a more likely explanation: namely, that Akira had been unusually impressed by what he had witnessed the morning the company’s health inspector visited our house.

  IT WAS AN ACCEPTED FEATURE of our lives to be visited from time to time by an official from Morganbrook and Byatt, some man who would spend an hour or so wandering about the house, noting things in his notebook, mumbling the occasional question. I remember my mother once telling me that when I was very young, I liked to play at “being” a Byatt’s health inspector, and that she often had to dissuade me from spending prolonged periods studying our lavatory arrangements with a pencil in my hand. This may well have been so, but as far as I can recall, these visits were mostly entirely eventless, and for years I did not think anything of them. I can see now, though, that these inspections, checking as they did not only on hygiene matters, but also for signs of disease or parasites among household members, were potentially very embarrassing, and no doubt the individuals selected by the company to conduct them tended to be those with a gift for tact and delicacy. Certainly, I remember a series of meek, shuffling men—usually English, though occasionally French—who were always carefully deferential not just to my mother, but also to Mei Li—a point which always went down well with me. But the inspector who turned up on that morning—I must then have been eight—was not at all typical.

  Today, I can remember in particular two things about him: that he had a drooping moustache, and that there was a brown mark—perhaps a tea stain—at the back of his hat disappearing into its band. I was playing alone at the front of the house, on the round island of lawn encircled by our carriage track. I remember it being overcast that day. I had been absorbed in my game when the man appeared at the gate and came walking towards the house. As he passed me, he muttered: “Hello, young man. Mother in?” then carried on without waiting for my reply. It was as I was staring at his back view that I noticed the stain on his hat.

  What I remember next must have occurred around an hour later. By that time Akira had arrived and we were busy up in my playroom. It was the sound of their voices—not raised exactly, but filled with a growing tension—that caused us both to look up from our game, then eventually, to move stealthily out on to the landing and crouch beside the heavy oak cabinet outside the playroom door.

  Our house had a rather grand staircase, and from our vantage point beside the oak cabinet, we could see the gleaming banister rail following the curve of the stairs down to the spacious entrance hall. There, my mother and the inspector were standing facing each other, both very stiff and straight, near the centre of the floor, so that they looked rather like two opposing chess pieces left on the board. The inspector, I noticed, was clutching to his chest his hat with the stain. For her part, my mother had her hands clasped just below her bosom, the way she did before she burst into song on those evenings Mrs. Lewis, the American curate’s wife, came to play the piano.

  The altercation that followed, though of no apparent significance in itself, I believe came to mean something special to my mother, representing perhaps a key moment of moral triumph. I remember she would refer to it regularly as I grew older, as though it were something she wished me to take to my heart; and I remember often listening to her recount the whole story to visitors, usually concluding with a little laugh and the observation that the inspector had been removed from his post shortly after the encounter. Consequently, I cannot be sure today how much of my memory of that morning derives from what I actually witnessed from the landing, and to what extent it has merged over time with my mother’s accounts of the episode. In any case, my impression is that as Akira and I peered round the edge of the oak cabinet, the inspector was saying something like:

  “I have every respect for your sentiments, Mrs. Banks. Nevertheless, out here, one can’t be too careful. And the company does have a responsibility for all employees’ welfare, even the more seasoned, such as yourself and Mr. Banks.”

  “I am sorry, Mr. Wright,” my mother responded, “but your objections have yet to make themselves clear to me. These servants you talk of have given excellent service over the years. I can vouch utterly for their standards of hygiene. And you have yourself admitted they show no signs of any contagious illness.”

  “Nevertheless, madam, they are from Shantung. And the company is obliged to counsel all our employees against taking natives of that province into their houses. A stricture, may I say, derived from bitter experience.”

  “Can you be serious? You wish me to drive out these friends of ours—yes, we’ve long considered them friends!—for no other reason than that they hail from Shantung?”

  At this, the inspector’s manner grew rather pompous. He proceeded to explain to my mother that the company’s objections to servants from Shantung were based on doubts about not just their hygiene and health, but also their honesty. And with so many items of value in the house belonging to the company—the inspector gestured around him—he was obliged to reiterate most strongly his recommendation. When my mother broke in again to ask on what basis such astonishing generalisations had been made, the inspector gave a weary sigh, then said:

  “In a word, madam, opium. Opium addiction in Shantung has now advanced to such deplorable levels that entire villages are to be found enslaved to the pipe. Hence, Mrs. Banks, the low standards of hygiene, the high incidence of contagion. And inevitably, those who come from Shantung to work in Shanghai, even if essentially of an honest disposition, tend sooner or later to resort to thieving, for the sake of their parents, brothers, cousins, uncles, what have you, all of whose cravings must somehow be pacified . . . Good gracious, madam! I’m simply trying to make my point . . .”

  Not only was it the inspector who recoiled at this point; beside me, Akira gave a sharp intake of breath, and when I glanced at him he was staring down at my mother open-mouthed. It is this picture of him at that moment which led me later to believe his subsequent awestruck view of my mother originated from that morning.

  But if the inspector and Akira both started at something my mother did at that point, I did not myself see anything out of the ordinary. To me, she appeared to do no more than brace herself a little in preparation for what she was about to assert. But then, I suppose I was well used to her ways; possibly to those less familiar with them, certain of my mother’s customary looks and postures in such situations might indeed have come over as somewhat alarming.

  This is not to say that I was not fully alert to the explosion that was to follow. In fact, f
rom the instant the inspector had uttered the word “opium,” I had known that the unfortunate man was done for.

  He had come to an abrupt halt, no doubt expecting to be cut off. But I recall my mother letting hang a trembling silence—throughout which her glare never moved off the inspector—before finally asking in a quiet voice that nevertheless threatened to brim over with fury:

  “You presume, sir, to talk to me, on behalf of this of all firms, about opium?”

  There followed a tirade of controlled ferocity in which she put to the inspector the case with which I was by then already familiar and which I was to hear outlined again many more times: that the British in general, and the company of Morganbrook and Byatt especially, by importing Indian opium into China in such massive quantities had brought untold misery and degradation to a whole nation. As she spoke, my mother’s voice often grew taut, but never quite lost its measured quality. Finally, still fixing her foe with her glare, she asked him:

  “Are you not ashamed, sir? As a Christian, as an Englishman, as a man with scruples? Are you not ashamed to be in the service of such a company? Tell me, how is your conscience able to rest while you owe your existence to such ungodly wealth?”

  Had he had the temerity to do so, the inspector might have pointed out the inappropriateness of my mother’s admonishing him in such terms, of such words issuing from the wife of a fellow company employee, residing in a company house. But by this point he had realised he was out beyond his depth, and muttering a few stock phrases to preserve his dignity, retreated from the house.

  In those days, it was still a surprise to me when any adult displayed—as had the inspector—ignorance of my mother’s campaigns against opium. Throughout much of my growing up, I held the belief that my mother was known and admired far and wide as the principal enemy of the Great Opium Dragon of China. The opium phenomenon, I should say, was not something adults in Shanghai made much effort to hide from children, but of course, when I was very young, I understood little concerning the matter. I was accustomed to seeing each day, from the carriage that took me to school, the Chinese men in doorways along Nanking Road, sprawled in the morning sun, and for some time, whenever I heard of my mother’s campaigns, I imagined her to be assisting this specific group of men. Later though, as I grew older, I had more opportunities to glimpse something of the complexity surrounding the issue. I was, for instance, required to present myself at my mother’s luncheons.