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,