nodded vaguely. He'd seen the little girls standing in docile rows in the Chinese city, waiting to be sold as slaves. At first he'd been shocked and indignant; but then, as Wei had blandly explained things to him, he'd felt his moral certainties begin to crumble. It was part of their way of doing things, he began to think, a way that foreigners couldn't understand, but which they would accept as inevitable for ever - or at least until some cataclysm overturned the whole of society. And how could you expect that to happen? Everything was so fixed, so Immemorially old. Each succeeding generation seemed to have stamped the lines of tradition further in, so that now they could never be dug out. Impoverished parents sold their daughters, Wei had said, to buy food for those that were left. Sometimes they had a better life that way - they might become a concubine for one of their new family's sons, and so escape the life of drudgery they would otherwise have lived. Sometimes of course, he acknowledged with a fatalistic shrug, they might have a worse life. It depended on the family that bought them. At least it was better than starving or being killed at birth. Denton hadn't asked him whether he had girl slaves himself. It was one of the many things about Wei that he didn't know.
'My teacher was good,' she went on casually. 'I was with some actors first. I can act as well.' Her face turned to him like a schoolgirl's proud of her achievements.
'You sing very well. Your voice is beautiful.'
She smiled, holding her hand to her mouth to suppress a giggle.
'What is the matter?' he asked in his stilted Chinese 'Why are you laughing?'
She shook her head, glancing up at him under half-closed lids. 'You said my voice is beautiful-to-look-at,' she said at last, 'not beautiful-to-hear.'
He laughed and slapped his forehead. 'I always make that mistake. It is because in English there is only one word for both things.'
'Both things?' She gazed at him incredulously. 'How can one word mean two things?'
'Well....' He tried to think of an explanation, but his Chinese wasn't up to it. 'We just do have one word for both kinds of things,' he repeated lamely at last.
She shook her head, either in continued disbelief or in simple amazement at the existence of so primitive a language. Then she got up. 'May I look at your rooms?'
He followed her round the living room as she gazed at the chair-covers and antimacassars, fingering them wonderingly, the curtains, the veranda, the print of some European river scene that he'd bought in a junk-shop some weeks after his arrival and hung on the wall - to remind him of home perhaps during those first melancholy, nostalgic weeks. He stood close behind her while she silently regarded it. It was as though he could feel her body through the long gown she wore, as though it summoned him to touch it. And yet she seemed unaware of her body's attraction, standing oblivious, with her head tilted, without even a sideways glance at him. He could hear her breathing; he dared not step closer. His heart beat faster as she strolled unconcernedly into the bedroom.
She pressed her hand down on the bed. 'So soft!' she exclaimed, shaking her head slowly as if she disapproved.
Denton swallowed and licked his lips, his heart thudding wildly.
'I sleep on wood,' she said, turning to him. 'With a quilt. Do all foreign devils have such soft beds?'
'It's not very soft, really,' he got out breathlessly. 'They have softer ones in England.'
She sat on the bed and smiled up at him, and then, as if to tantalise him, got up and wandered back into the living room. He felt his heart slowing. A confused weight of both relief and disappointment seemed to drag on his chest.
She was fingering the chair-covers again, consideringly. 'This is expensive?' she asked. 'How much did you pay? Does all this belong to you?'
But before he could answer, she looked up at the gaslight hissing faintly beneath its shade and let out a little gasp of wonder. 'Is that the new Western light?'
He nodded, reaching up to touch the dangling chain with its ring on the end. 'If you pull this, the light is smaller.'
She hooked her forefinger delicately inside the ring and pulled cautiously. The flame diminished and the room grew dim. He was standing beside her, his eyes fixed on her ear, small and flat, with a golden ring gleaming softly in the tiny lobe.
'How do you make it bigger?' she asked, turning to him. The faint blue flame seemed to glow in the shiny pupils of her slanted eyes.
'Pull the other end.'
She smiled as the flame hissed, growing white and bright again. She began pulling first one and then the other, her eyes glistening as the light dimmed and strengthened. She looked round at him, her lips parted in a smile. Her teeth seemed to glisten too. He imagined his tongue thrusting between them. Still smiling, but mischievously now, she pulled on the chain till with a little plut the gas went out.
'Is it broken?' she asked, suddenly anxious.
He couldn't answer at first, feeling her breath beside him, the faint stir and rustle of her clothes. The firecrackers in the street outside, the cries and shouts, the booming of a ship's siren on the river, all seemed to take on a new distinctness in the silence between them.
'Is it broken?' she asked quietly again.
'No, we must burn it with a match,' he said at last.
'Burn it?'
'Light it,' he corrected himself. She was looking up at him, still smiling, although the child-like, contrite anxiety lingered in her pupils. His eyes were on her lips. Suddenly he had lowered his mouth onto hers. He felt that the dreamer on the precipice had fallen, was rushing downwards through the giddy air. He pulled her body close against his. Her arms twined round his back.
She leant gently away from him after a while, although her arms still held him. 'You want to be with me?'
He nodded, pulling her back towards him.
But she held her face away as he tried to kiss her mouth again. 'How much will you pay me?'
'I do not know. Twenty dollars?'
She nodded faintly, placing her hand over his mouth as he tried for her lips again. 'You give me the money now?'
She took the note from him and put it somewhere in her gown, then walked into the bedroom and started to undress. The lamp was unlit above the bed. She glanced up at it and paused. 'You like the light on or...?'
He shook his head. Now that she was undressing, he was tense and uneasy. He'd never imagined further than holding her naked in his arms, and he knew there was more to it than that. But how did you do it, exactly? What did you have to do? Her clothes slithered off her, revealing first her breasts, then her slender waist, then her slim shadowy hips. She looked at him questioningly as she stepped out of her underskirt and laid it carefully over the chair. In the dim, erratic light from the window, her skin looked so pale - not with an anaemic whiteness of Ching which was dry and sickly, but with freshness and life beneath it.
'Aren't you going to undress?' she asked.
He began pulling at his buttons, trying to appear nonchalant and experienced.
She had put her hands up behind her head to loosen her hair, and now, with a little toss of her head, she let it fall down below her shoulders. 'Do you like me?' she asked, with that faintly anxious look in her eyes again.
'Yes.'
'Am I like foreign women?'
'I don't know.' He thought of Emily. Su-mei wasn't like her. 'No, not like foreign women,' he said unevenly. 'Smaller. More beautiful.'
She shook her head and smiled, glancing down at her body wonderingly. He had never seen a woman naked before, not since the time when, coming home early from school, he'd opened the scullery door to find his mother standing in the old zinc tub washing herself. He'd no more than glimpsed the pasty flabby cheeks of her buttocks, the quivering flesh of her blue-veined thighs, before she'd noticed him and shouted him angrily out, muttering fiercely to herself behind the swiftly slammed and bolted door. Su-mei's