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