but just then the iron-bound wheels of a heavy cart were trundling past outside. He got out of bed and went to the bathroom. The tiled floor was wet where she'd stood. He could see the dark print of her foot near the door. He stood in the same puddle and washed himself with the same cold water. Suppose she wasn't clean? He soaped and soaped, shivering in the cold night air.
He hurried back to the bed and covered himself with all the blankets, keeping away from the side were she had lain. Suppose he'd caught something from her? The wave of guilt and disgust that had been looming over him toppled and broke. He prayed for forgiveness, imagining God as an all-seeing Reverend Eaton. Yet even as he prayed, obscurely hoping that if he truly repented, God would protect him from disease, her voice came back to him - Shall I come again? - and with her voice, the image of her face, her body, reviving the memory of her lips on his, her thighs closing round his thrusting stalk.
Far away he heard firecrackers banging and crackling like distant gunfire and as his sore, exhausted lids closed, he imagined her being borne away in a rickshaw, flashes and smoke all round her while she turned and waved and asked, 'Shall I come again? Did you like me?'
28
WHEN THE CLINK of his teacup woke him in the morning and he opened bleary eyes onto the mean, cold light, a wave of stale distaste and uneasy guilt washed over him again, together with a lurching sense of fear. He sipped the strong, sweet tea that Ah Koo had brought him and listened to him pouring the hot water into his basin in the bathroom. I have committed fornication, I am unclean, he thought with grim Biblical rhetoric. And I've probably caught some disease from her, too. He lay down again and closed his eyes when Ah Koo came out with the toilet bucket, unwilling to face his blandly inquisitorial gaze. Unclean, diseased, the words thumped accusingly through his mind. He remembered with a sudden stabbing keenness the boys at school who at fourteen or so, just before they left, would start sniggering about the smell of girls, which ones would let you put your hand up their skirts, which ones had 'started' and which hadn't. He'd kept himself pure and intact then, but now he was no better than they were, he had come down to the same thing in the end. Disease - he knew nothing about it except from the bragging he'd overheard in the boys' toilets. It could drop off, he remembered one boy with carrotty hair saying, showing off his new-found knowledge.
But how did you tell if you were infected? How long did it take to show? He put his hand down cautiously and felt himself, as if there might be some difference already. And while he did so, Mr Eaton's face seemed to loom over him, minatory and indignant, hurling down denunciations and imprecations.
The door closed quietly behind Ah Koo. Denton propped himself up on his elbow again and finished his tea, his stomach turning softly with remorse and anxiety. A long black hair lay on the pillow. The sheets were stained. There was a sour smell about them. They were the emblem of his sordid lapse. He pulled the bed apart and heaped the unclean sheets on the floor. Perhaps if he washed himself in his shaving water, he might kill the germs? Or was it too late? He washed himself anyway, examining the limp and flabby little thing for any signs of disease. The tip looked a bit red, he thought. But that might only be because he'd been rubbing it so hard with the soap. Undecided, he poured the water away and shaved in the cold water, searching his face in the mirror for telltale signs of debauchery. And though all he saw was a pair of worried brown eyes with solemn, wide pupils, he couldn't convince himself that the wages of sin weren't already gathered there. He cut himself badly in his usual place, on his Adam's apple, and, as he staunched the blood with the new styptic pencil he'd got from Watson's, he vowed to God, whom he still visualised with the hard, unforgiving brow of the Reverend Eaton, that he would never see Su-mei again if only he could be free of disease. The nagging question, how did people like Mason and Jacob Ephraim manage? he pushed aside into an obscure corner of his mind.
For five days firecrackers banged out their salute to the Chinese New Year. All the shops were shuttered and half the boys disappeared from the mess. The weather was cold and dreary and each drab day the same images of guilt and retribution harried Denton, assailing him while he was at work, while he was eating in the mess, in the lonely hours of the night when he lay awake sleepless, and in the thin, chill light of the morning, when he woke tired from the fitful sleep that had come at last in the small hours before dawn. A faint, relentless churning of his stomach, the accompaniment, if not the essence, of his guilt and fear, stole over him time and again, whenever his mind was empty. It came to seem as natural and familiar to him as breathing. He felt he would never feel calm and unworried again.
At last, unable to endure the anxiety any longer, he decided to see a doctor. If I'm all right, he promised that stern Providence with the rigid, righteous face of Mr Eaton once more, I'll never do it again. And if I'm not, please let me get better and I'll make up for it, I'll make amends. Yet several more days passed before he could work up enough courage to make an appointment. He chose a Dr McEwan, whose surgery was on the edge of Hongkew, where many of the sailors' brothels were. He shouldn't be too expensive, Denton thought. Or too censorious. In the meantime Sunday came; Denton sang fearfully in the choir and prayed with aching penitence at morning and evensong. He avoided the Rever-end Eaton's eyes, but sitting in the choir stalls, his feet cold on the chilly flags, he glanced often over the irreproachable heads of the congregation, especially Mr Brown's sedate bald dome with its woolly grey circlet of hair, and his wife's stately wide-brimmed hat. They seemed more remote than ever from him, superior not only by being 'good class,' but also now by their virtue. He felt he had no right to sing in the choir even, that he was a hypocrite whom the Reverend Eaton might at any moment turn to and denounce with burning eyes.
Dr McEwan was disconcertingly young - he looked hardly more than five years older than Denton. But he seemed fifteen years older in his manner. Thick black hair grew low down on his forehead and a bristly moustache sprouted belligerently on his upper lip. 'Yes, Misterr Denton?' he asked in a faint Scottish brogue, looking up suspiciously beneath knitted, heavy brows, as though he expected something unsavoury already from one glance at Denton's hangdog face.
'Er ... I think I may....'
'Yes?' The heavy brows drew even closer together. 'Inadvertently, I mean ... I may have been in contact with ... with a disease.'
'That's probably true of all of us, Misterr Denton,' he grunted. 'Did you have any particular disease in mind, or do ye want to be checked for every blessed one? It'll be mighty expensive if ye do.'
'Well....' Denton smiled feebly at his sarcasm, his cheeks smarting.
'Been to a brothel, I take it?'
'Oh no! Nothing like that!'
Dr McEwan's flush deepened with impatience. 'Well, what, then? Pish, man, I can't treat a patient like this! What's the trouble?'
'Well, it was a bit like that,' Denton conceded shamefacedly. 'Only it wasn't a....' His voice failed him at the word Dr McEwan had uttered with such no-nonsense briskness.
'Right then, ye've been with a woman.' His eyes glittered irritably. 'Why didn't ye say so? When was it and what are your symptoms?'
'Well, I don't seem to have any symptoms yet - '
'When was it?'
'Last Monday.'
'A week ago? Good grief man, ye won't have any symptoms in seven days. God may have made the worrld in six days, but venereal disease takes a wee bit longer. The woman was a prostitute, I take it?'
'Oh no, not at all!'
Dr McEwan glanced at him sharply. 'Ye don't mean a respectable woman, surely?'
Denton looked away. 'A sing-song girl.'
'Sing-song girls are prostitutes, Misterr Denton.'
'No, she was different,' Denton stammered weakly. 'I mean she ... she....'
'She only does it when she wants to, eh?' He laughed sardonically. 'A high-class lady, no doubt. Well, you're probably all right. It's the lads in the cheap places by the docks that are more likely to catch a dose - and I doubt ye've been there by the look of ye,' he added witheringly. 'I'd better have a glance at ye all the same. On the couch please and drop your trouserrs.'
Denton