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