a wagging curly brush of a tail sniffed at one of the men's folded, bony hands, but there was no change in his liquid expressionless eyes, no movement in his skeletal fingers.
'They might as well be dead,' Jones said, pityingly and contemptuously at the same time. 'They don't know where they are any more.'
But perhaps their real gaze was inward, Denton thought on colours and sounds like those he'd just been seeing, on that absolute serenity, No wonder they didn't want to return.
Mason looked back over his shoulder. 'You know I dreamt I was having that girl,' he called out. 'It came from feeling her up before we sniffed, I suppose.'
'She was young enough to be your daughter,' Jones laughed.
'They mature early out here. Look at John's girl. Only a year or two older, isn't she?
'She's sixteen,' Denton acknowledged curtly, foreseeing a gibe.
But Mason's rickshaw lurched suddenly to avoid a palanquin escorted by four bannermen, and Mason turned back hastily to grab the side. Denton glimpsed the long straggly beard of a mandarin and two almond eyes glancing incuriously out at him beneath an elaborate hat, then the official had gone, the bannermen calling imperiously out for people to make way.
'Isn't the Chinese government going to ban opium soon?' he asked Jones.
'They keep talking about it, but they'll never do anything.' Jones yawned suddenly. 'Too much money in it. Besides, half of 'em are addicts anyway. All those eunuchs in Peking and so on.'
'I can see how you could easily become one,' Denton meditated aloud, still tinged with the drowsy flush of his intense yet tranquil visions.
'Become a eunuch? So can I. Get a hammer and slosh 'em.'
'An addict.'
'Once a week,' Jones held up his forefinger and wagged it admonishingly. 'Only a week and no more. That's the absolute limit.'
'Have you ever smoked opium, Su-mei?' he asked her the following evening. He raised himself on his elbow to look down at her.
She gazed up at him warily, her eyes opaque. 'Why?'
He shrugged. 'I had some last night.'
'Did you like it?'
He nodded. 'It was....' his Chinese failed him. 'It was strange,' he said at last.
'Opera singers take it,' she murmured, brushing the hair away from her eyes. 'One day I will be an opera singer.'
'Do you know how to make it?'
Her lids dropped slowly, giving her a sly, mocking look. 'You want me to?'
He bent his head down until his lips brushed her nipple. 'Maybe. One day.'
'If you teach me English, I will.'
Her limbs loosened under his touch. She let her fingertips trail lightly along his flanks, down to his thighs.
Her nails brushed across his skin like the claws of a kitten, sharp yet playful.
30
HIS RENEWED FRIENDSHIP with Mason was precarious from the start, and Denton was always uneasy with him, like an actor playing a role that didn't suit him. So he felt almost a sense of relief when it began to cool a few weeks later and resumed what seemed a more natural state of distant neutrality.
Going to Mason's office to give him some documents that the clerk had mistakenly placed on his own desk, Denton found Ching in the room, about to leave. Ching smiled as genially as ever at him, scratching his pale, taut cheek with the long, curved talon of his little fingernail. 'Good afternoon, Mista' Den-tong. How are you do?'
Denton nodded, while Mason smirked connivingly, 'I'll see what I can do then, Mr Ching.'
'Thank you, Mista' May-song. Thank you,' Ching answered affably as he closed the door.
Denton gave Mason the papers.
'Ah, thanks, old chap.' He glanced down at them inattentively. 'Er.... Funny man, old Ching, you know....'
'Yes?'
'He's just been talking to me about that spot of trouble on the Alexander the First - you know, when they were loading that night you came along.'
'Oh?'
'Yes. It cost the company quite a packet, apparently.' Denton shrugged as Mason looked up, drumming his fingers on the papers Denton had just given him.
'Seems to think you might have it in for him.'
'No. Why should I?'
'That's what I told him.' He paused, cleared his throat and glanced away out of the window at the river. 'You know, with your girl and a sniff of opium now and then, I expect you could do with a bit of extra income now and then, couldn't you?' He looked back at Denton, winking and slapping his pocket. 'I mean, you wouldn't turn the odd favour down if someone offered it to you and nobody was any the wiser, would you? Know what I mean?'
Denton hesitated, embarrassed rather than tempted. He'd heard rumours, he'd seen Ching passing an envelope to Mason on their first visit to the Alexander the First, and there had been the hints Ching had dropped to him over that contraband cotton. But this was the first time a Customs officer had approached him. Although there seemed to be a veiled threat behind Mason's words, his tone was so genial and natural that it seemed hard to be curt or indignant. 'Well, I don't know,' he muttered uncomfortably, as if it was he who was the guilty one. 'I mean, I don't really need anything extra, you know.'
'Oh come on,' Mason cajoled him blandly, 'It's not as though we're overpaid, is it? Everyone takes a bit, you know.'
'Well, all the same I don't really want to get mixed up with that kind of thing,' he said apologetically.
'What sort of thing?' Mason chivvied him. 'It's the way of life out of here. You're practically expected to, I mean, in England it'd be a different matter, but out here....' He waved his hand largely. 'Way of life. When in Rome, you know, sort of thing.'
But Denton refused to yield. 'I've got some papers to see to,' he said woodenly, turning to the door.
Mason sighed loudly in helpless resignation. 'Well, there's none so blind as those that won't see, so they say.'
In his own office, Denton tipped his chair back and gazed up at the ceiling with the sense of having avoided an unpleasant social duty rather than a moral catastrophe. It's the way of life out here, he thought, watching two large black flies flitting round and round on the listless air. When in Rome. And yet he wasn't tempted. He wondered why. Just because it was dishonest? But suppose nobody suffered from it, as might often be the case? Would it still be wrong? He felt his mind groping for a certainty that wasn't there. It was queer, unnerving, when you kept on asking why. He couldn't see through the mists these repeated questions rolled over his mind. Yet if he imagined himself being offered an envelope as Mason was, something stiffened in his arm as if to push it away. Was that all it was - just an instinctive recoil? Or merely a reaction he'd been taught as a child, like his religion? But he'd given up his religion easily and painlessly. Could he give up his honesty in the same way? One day he'd have to find the time to study philosophy and ethics, the meaning of life and that sort of thing, to try and find the answers to all these questions. It would be good to get out of all this dim uncertainty into something definite and secure. One day he'd really do that, when he had time.
He let the chair drop forward with a bang and turned to his forms, sighing in the heat.
Mason never mentioned the subject again, but they gradually cooled to each other once more, though at first without any open break. It was merely that Mason never invited him to smoke opium again and they avoided each other in the mess. It was not until some months later that they actually quarrelled, when they were both on duty one breathless June afternoon on adjoining sections of the wharves. Denton was going to his office when Mason called him from the corridor, his heavy face damp with sweat. There were motes of dust sliding through the sunlight that slanted relentlessly