Shanghai. Christopher New

the candle flame inside the lantern flickered. He cupped his hand round her shoulder. 'Tell me about your family,' he said slowly.

      Her shoulder shrugged lightly under his hand, as if to say, 'Why should you want to know about them? What business is it of yours?'

      'How many brothers and sisters have you got?' he persisted.

      Again her shoulder shrugged. 'Two half-brothers and a half-sister,' she said expressionlessly. 'Three younger brothers and two sisters.'

      He added them together in his head. 'Half-brothers?' he asked puzzledly. 'Half-sisters?'

      'My father had two wives at one time. My mother is the number two wife.'

      'He must have been rich then, to have had two wives?'

      'He was a rice dealer. When the Boxers came, they took all his rice. He was ruined. Then there was no trade for several years because of the Boxers. Everyone was starving. They say the peasants ate their dogs first, then the rats, then the girl babies. My father sold me when I was thirteen, I was the oldest girl. The Boxers killed the number one wife,' she added as an afterthought. 'When they took the town. They raped her and killed her. Many men. But my mother was my father's favourite wife.' She said that as though it somehow lessened the horror of killing the first wife.

      All the same she had been speaking in a dull, inexpressive voice - almost grudgingly, as though she resented having to tell him. A loud sally of laughter carried into the room from Mason's veranda, discordant and loutish after Su-mei's bare and unself-pitying words. Unself-pitying and grimly realistic, he thought. She'd mentioned the first wife's death last because it was less important for the family than the loss of the rice. Without rice they starved, but her father had a second wife - and could get another if he was ever able to afford it again. And anyway the second wife was his favourite.

      His hand left her shoulder to fondle the earring which lay in the hollow of her neck. He pressed it gently against her skin, rolling its little tear-drop mass to and fro.

      'You're hurting,' she said in the same level voice.

      'What's happened to your family now?' He was still rolling the earring to and fro. 'The Boxers were all killed in nineteen hundred, weren't they?' He glanced down at her face. She was looking up at him warily, her slanted lids almost closed, as though she thought he might suddenly jerk the earring or tear it off her ear. 'What are they doing now?' he asked again, holding his hand still.

      'My father owes a lot of money. He has to work for the people he owes it to, until he has paid it all off. My brothers are working too. They give him money to help pay.'

      'And your sisters?'

      'Married.' She stirred. 'I send more money than my brothers do,' she said simply, without pride. 'I make more.'

      'What does he look like, your father?'

      She shrugged, and he felt her cheek move as she smiled.

      'Old.'

      He imagined her father selling her, taking her to the dealer, showing off her good points, the little mole on her hand for instance, while the dealer smirked into his beard, knowing that hunger would force her father to take his price in the end. He couldn't visualize her father, but he saw the dealer as a bony old man with a straggly white beard and moustache. Did her father kiss her goodbye? No, he wouldn't do that. Did she cry? How did they treat her?

      The candle in the lantern went out. The room was dark except for the reflected moonlight filtering through the shutters. Again a guffaw of laughter from Mason's room. In the dark it sounded louder. 'What happened to you when you were sold?'

      'The dealer sold me to an opera company. But they broke up, they lost all their money. They wanted to sell me to a brothel, but I ran away. I stole some money from them. It was in Tientsin. I got on a train to Shanghai. It was the first time in my life that I'd been on a train. The only time. I think I was more scared of the train than of being caught. And when I got to Shanghai, I became a sing-song girl.' She sighed, as if telling her story had tired her.

      'How long ago was that?'

      'Two years. I came because it was a long way off. People said they would not be able to catch me in the foreign settlements. Because of the foreign police.'

      He had the sense that she had come to him across some immense plain in which everything was dim and strange. Would his life seem equally strange to her - his banal, narrow and sheltered life in Enfield?

      'And did they catch you?' he asked.

      'I would not be here if they had.' She raised herself suddenly on her elbows and looked down at him, resting her chin on her hands. 'You send money to your father?' she asked.

      He nodded. But they didn't sell me, he was just about to say, but then checked himself. After all they weren't starving either. He gazed up past her head at the ceiling. How did her parents live? What sort of work did her father do? He'd been in Shanghai over a year and he'd learnt the language and yet China seemed just as inaccessible to him now as the day he arrived. 'Do your parents know about me?' he asked.

      'No.' She was leaning her head on one side, unfastening the earrings; first one ear, then the other. 'They would be shocked to know I went with a foreign devil. I was frightened myself, only Wei told me it would be all right.'

      'Wei told you to come to me?' His voice rose with pique. Hadn't she come of her own accord? What business was it of Wei's?

      'Wei told me you would not hurt me.' She rolled onto her back suddenly and opened her arms. 'See? I have taken them off after all. You can bite my ears if you like.'