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