Читать книгу Shanghai - Christopher New - Страница 8

THE DINING ROOM WAS COOL and dim, two large punkahs stirring the limp, moist air beneath the high ceiling. Delicate large-fronded palms, and rubber plants with glossy, thick leaves stood along the walls and between the rattan tables. White-jacketed waiters moved noiselessly about in black cloth slippers. There seemed to be thirty or forty young officers in the mess, drinking and eating in separate groups. Mason took him a table in the corner, introducing him offhandedly to the two officers already sitting there. One was called Jones, a tall, fair-haired man with a downy moustache. Denton didn't catch the other's name, and was too shy to ask.

Mason ordered from the handwritten menu in a disdainful voice that suggested the food couldn't possibly be much good. Denton tamely said he'd have the same. The steward, an old man with a short grey queue, nodded silently. His slippers shuffled away over the tiled floor.

'Where d'you come from?' Jones asked Denton, as they began to eat.

'London,' Mason answered for him, packing his mouth with rice and diced chicken.

'Enfield,' Denton qualified mildly.

'Near enough. Ah Koo!' Mason snapped his fingers, calling out across the room. 'Soya sauce!'

'How did you get into this outfit?' Jones dabbed his downy moustache with his napkin, looking up at him with slightly bloodshot eyes.

'It was an accident,' Mason answered for him again.

'Well, I was going to be a teacher,' Denton spoke quickly and quietly, toying with his rice, 'I'd just done one year in a training college, actually - '

'Ah Koo! Soya sauce!' Mason called out again.

'and then my father had an accident at work, so I had to give it up. And I just saw an advert in the paper and....' He shrugged and sipped some of the beer Mason had insisted he should share with them. It was only the second time in his life that he'd drunk beer, and he shivered at the bitter taste. Jones, losing interest, turned to talk to Mason in a low voice that excluded him.

'What sort of accident was it?' asked the small, dark man, whose name he hadn't caught. He had a mild, even, slightly nasal voice.

'At the small arms factory. He was testing a rifle when the barrel burst.'

'Ah Koo! One piecee soya sauce!' Mason shouted irritably. 'Come along, man! Chop-chop!'

The dark man nodded, scrutinising the moistened point of the tooth-pick he was using. 'I started as a sailor. Strange what brought us all out here in our different ways.'

'Money,' Mason said emphatically.

The dark man inserted his tooth-pick between his teeth without replying, which Mason seemed to take as a tacit denial.

'Cash,' he said belligerently. 'That's what brought us here.' He took the soya bottle from the steward and shook it vigorously over his plate.

The dark man probed the gaps between his teeth reflectively.

'Not that there's much of that by the time you've paid your chits, eh?' Jones said pacifically.

'Anyone can make a pile out here,' Mason asserted through bulging cheeks.

'Do you mean the bonus on contraband seizures?' Denton asked hopefully. He planned to send some of his salary home to his parents each month.

Mason glanced at him under his reddish brows and swallowed deliberately before answering. A thick, blackish trickle of soya sauce ran down from the corner of his mouth and he dabbed it with his napkin. 'That, and other things,' he said, with the same ironic smile that he'd given when he spoke of the sing-song girl's accomplishments. He turned to Jones, who had pushed back his chair. 'Are you doing the auction, Jonesy?'

'Smith's stuff? Yes. Three o'clock in here. Why?'

'Nothing.' Then Mason jerked his head at Denton without looking at him. 'Except he'll want to buy some stuff.'

'I haven't got much money to spare,' Denton began doubtfully.

'Who cares? Pay by chit.' Mason waved his fork grandly. 'Cash is for coolies.'

'Er ... how do you bid?'

'I'll bid for you, if you like,' the dark man said reassuringly as he dropped the broken tooth-pick on his plate. 'You just tell me what you'd like, and I'll do the bidding.' He spoke in a monotonous, lulling tone of bland, sapless benevolence, but Denton was grateful.

'Well, perhaps some chair covers and curtains?' he suggested cautiously. 'Would that cost very much?'

'Depends who's bidding against you, doesn't it?' Mason said, with a mocking flick of scorn in the rising inflection of his voice. 'Come on, let's go to the tailor's first, get you fitted out.'

The tailor's was a dingy narrow room without windows, reaching back from an unpaved street into ever darker and mustier gloom. Six or seven Chinese men bent over sewing machines, working the treadles incessantly with their feet. Scraps of cloth lay scattered on the floor, which looked as though it had never been swept. The walls were grimy. Thick black cobwebs hung down from the ceiling. On a bare round wooden table near the back of the room stood several bowls with greasy chopsticks beside them. The table was littered with grains of rice and what looked like chicken bones, stained with a dark sauce. There was a smell of engrained dirt mingled with the heavy scent of incense which was drifting slowly up from some joss sticks smouldering dimly away at a little smoky red altar against the back wall.

A small man in a long grey gown shuffled towards them, bowing and hissing through his teeth. His face looked old, the skin thin and taut over his cheekbones.

'One piecee uniform for my friend, same same me.' Mason ordered. 'You makee one day fitting how muchee?'

The tailor glanced at Denton with a momentary gleam in his brown eyes. 'Today very busy,' he said impassively, gesturing to the hunched backs of his workers.

'Never mind busy. How muchee?' Mason demanded curtly.

The tailor's eyelids flickered. 'Forty dollar.'

'Forty? You must be mad! You before makee for me twenty-five dollar!'

The tailor smiled faintly. 'Long time makee for you. Now more dear.'

Denton, standing self-consciously beside Mason, grew aware of the workers' faces half-turned to listen while they sewed on at the same busy speed, pulling the cloth this way and that beneath the stabbing needles. There were smiles on their pale faces. One of them coughed and spat nonchalantly into a spittoon.

Mason damned the tailor, expostulated, threatened to walk out, and finally grudgingly offered thirty after the tailor had crept down to thirty-five. 'You makee chop-chop tomorrow night finish. Fitting morning time. Otherwise no pay.'

The tailor inclined his head a fraction and took a tape measure out of his sleeve. He hadn't raised his voice once in response to Mason's blustering. He'd bowed often and folded his hands courteously in front of him, yet his face had been unmoved, almost as though he hadn't even been listening. Denton sensed that he'd got the price he wanted and that Mason was put out. It was the first inkling he had that the Chinese were not all servile.

'Well, he knows your uniform allowance is forty dollars,' Mason muttered as the tailor's light, bony hands deftly measured Denton. 'Artful blighter knows how much you'll have to spend on shoes and a hat. He knows how much he can squeeze you for.'

The tailor called out the measurements to one of the workers, who jotted them down on a scrap of paper. Denton wondered how the tailor could measure him without even seeming to touch him, his hands were so light and nimble.

'Tell him which side you hang 'em,' Mason grunted as the tailor measured his inside leg.

'Sorry?'

'Oh never mind.'

Denton blushed, thinking that after all perhaps he had understood. 'Er, didn't you say I ought to get a stomacher as well?'

'Right, one piecee stomacher,' Mason patted his paunch. 'How muchee?'

'Five dollar.'

'Three.'

The tailor was measuring the width of Denton's trousers. 'Four-fifty. Special for you.'

Mason was evidently losing interest. 'Four,' he said, taking out a cigar.

The tailor stood up shaking his head mildly. 'No can do. Too muchee workee.'

'Oh all right then you blasted robber. Finish tomorrow, all right?' He bit his cigar and turned to Denton. 'That leaves you just enough for the hat and shoes. They've got it worked out to a tee.'

'Well it is much cheaper than in England,' Denton murmured. 'And I suppose he's got to pay all these workers here....'

Mason surveyed them indifferently, breathing out a blue curl of cigar smoke. 'You can bet he doesn't pay them much, if he pays 'em at all. Food and lodging probably, that's all. It's dog eat dog out here you know.'

'Lodging? Where?'

Mason snorted. 'On the floor. Where d'you think?'