Читать книгу Flying High - Литагент HarperCollins USD, Ian St. James Awards - Страница 7
ОглавлениеMin Dinning
Min Dinning spent more than twenty years teaching English worldwide, travelling in Europe, South America, China, Papua New Guinea and Australia. She began writing fiction at the age of seven but lapsed for more than thirty years, only to begin again two years ago, inspired by a creative writing class. Until then she had written letters, diaries and academic papers and published some non-fiction. These days she teaches Business EFL and is trying to come to terms with domestic bliss in rural Cambridgeshire. She still has secret yearnings to run away to exotic lands.
He tasted of sour pickle and rice porridge and stale tobacco. I had wanted this kiss for months and now I had it. Desire was injected uncomfortably into my bloodstream. His skin was hard and chapped as he pressed it into my face. I was shocked. It was not as I had expected. I was still unsure of why I wanted him. It may have been sex, but it wasn’t straightforward; he wasn’t attractive in a conventional way, like Martin. It may have been need and gratitude.
He kissed as if he didn’t know what a kiss was. Or maybe he wasn’t kissing at all. It was me who was doing it. His mouth was stiff and immobile but betrayed a repressed emotion that I couldn’t define. It briefly occurred to me that it might be anger. I had caught him unawares, walked up to him from behind. But was it unawares? We both knew.
He was wearing his best jacket, tailored too large in stiff blue cotton in what used to be an imitation of Mao, and smelling of mothballs as most Chinese clothes do when they are seldom worn. Why did I focus on that? It detracted from the moment. Smells and tastes tried to deflect me away from the strange reality of it.
For a moment we remained in an awkward clinch, he with his eyes closed, me searching for reaction, wanting response. He took no initiative and then withdrew as I placed my tongue on his teeth.
‘No, no,’ he moaned.
‘But we must, we’ve been waiting so long. We can’t waste more time just thinking about it and doing nothing.’
‘Somebody will find out. We’ll be criticized.’
‘We’ll be discreet. Nobody will know. Anyway we haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘You don’t understand. We’re not in your country. In China this is impossible. I could go to gaol.’
‘Don’t be daft. Of course you couldn’t,’ I said, not sure. People certainly seemed to get into trouble for things that go unnoticed or are laughed off in the West.
Anyway – what were we doing? Was this adultery? Infidelity? It certainly wasn’t fornication, nor was it likely to be.
Before the momentum was lost I drew his wiry body towards me again. I sensed tension, reluctance.
‘If someone sees, it will be wrong.’
‘But if no one sees it will be right?’
He relaxed a little and laughed.
‘Chinese logic!’ I said. The idea that a sin must be witnessed to be a sin struck me as peculiar but practical.
‘Honestly, Alison. You know what I’m saying.’
Sometimes he sounded like a middle-class Englishman. These phrases, learned from World Service plays, tripped off the tongue like the rehearsed script of a thirties drama. He seemed more foreign at moments like that and a twinge of uncertainty unnerved me. Was I dealing with an inhabitant of another world? Were we as close as I thought or had I invented it out of want?
He gently removed my arms and buttoned the top button of his jacket. He did up the hook and eye on the collar and took a step backwards.
‘I must go now.’ He looked out of the blurred curtainless window at the bleakness of the early spring campus beyond. Grey concrete blocks, brightened by the occasional piece of vivid underwear hung on a bamboo pole out of a window to dry in the dusty air.
‘Don’t come down,’ he said.
‘Shall I come to the studio tomorrow?’ I asked, suddenly unable to cope with the prospect of being alone in this chilly, dingy flat, not wanting him to leave.
To my relief, he smiled. ‘Yes, come for your lesson as usual. The other guys will be there. We’ll paint together.’
I heard his footsteps retreating down the concrete stairs fainter and fainter, then the click of his bicycle lock. I watched him as he pedalled silently down the path. I kept watching until he disappeared into the heavy stream of traffic on the main road beyond the gates of the campus.
Yes, I thought, I’ve done it. I’ve changed things between us at last.
I was trying to remember how it had been at the beginning. I cast my mind back to the day when I announced I was going to China.
‘You’ll never survive,’ Martin taunted me. ‘You’ll be back in two weeks.’
I tried not to believe that he might be right. It had certainly been a rash decision for me, but he had this way of making me feel inadequate and I had to show him I could cope.
‘Of course I’ll survive. Anyway it’s only nine months. I’ll be back in the summer. You won’t even have time to miss me.’
The thought of leaving Martin for so many months made me uneasy, but I told myself I had nothing to fear. He would be there when I got back and whatever happened in between would soon be over. He still hadn’t been keen. He had wanted us to get married but I wanted to get my urgent need to travel out of my system. I thought I’d stay about a year, then go home and settle down for ever. I didn’t think Martin had the right to tell me not to go, so I made up my mind to do it, to stick it out whatever it was like, just to prove to him that I had a mind of my own. I felt I needed another dimension to myself. Martin was not enough. He was reliable, kind and rather good looking but I wanted to deny to myself that I cared for him as I didn’t relish the prospect of missing him. It would spoil my adventure. Besides, I was not interesting enough as I was. A tall, pale Englishwoman, over thirty, a virgin. A real spinster schoolmarm, in fact. I’d never worked abroad before and mistrusted foreigners on the whole. But something about China drew me. I needed to go there and see it. I wanted to be able to tell people I’d been to the Great Wall, the Ming Tombs and the Forbidden City. It would change me. The very thought was exciting, and my heart raced as I had fantasies of people in silk robes, gliding across the semicircular bridges and reading poetry in bamboo groves.
I’d got the job at the university through a friend who knew someone at the embassy. It didn’t seem to bother anyone that I had no experience of teaching university students. They seemed pleased to get a real English teacher and in the first few weeks I was treated like a VIP. When the novelty wore off and winter began to set in I felt less excited and less keyed up to learn new things. What had at first been amusing curiosities and fascinating ways eventually became tedious routine. I got fed up with the way the cleaners bobbed around with their stinking mops, the way the cook, sweating even in the ice of November, hawked and spat on the kitchen floor, and the chore of shopping at the market where my fair hair and my height set me apart as a freak or a visiting Martian. If Martin had been there it would have been all right. I wouldn’t have felt so self conscious. He was even bigger than me. It annoyed me that I wasn’t managing well on my own. ‘You’ll never survive’ – his words echoed in my head as I contemplated my inability to stride out and enjoy myself.
I bought local clothes – an army jacket and some quilted shoes – in an attempt to melt in a little. The shoes were men’s: no woman in China wore a size seven. But it made me more of a freak as the girls were by then starting to wear what they thought were Western clothes – hideous shapeless Crimplene jackets with twinkly thread and plastic high-heeled shoes. The daring ones wore lipstick. I knew I’d got it wrong, but I also knew I could never get it right. Not here.
My ideas about the country had been gleaned from National Geographic and the paperback book of the travels of Marco Polo. Reality was a rudely different shock. Nothing had prepared me for the drabness and alienation which seemed to make people physically ill in the winter, the strange food and the smells. Everywhere there hung in the air an almost palpable veil of smells. They were always stale and sickening. From the overpowering stench of lavatories which supplied fertilizer for the vegetables we ate to the acrid smoke of the miserable little market food stalls and the sweetish sickly aroma of hand-rolled cigars smoked by old ladies.
I became aware that I would have to learn the language or I would continue to feel autistic, sealed off into a bubble, in this world but not of it, as if I was watching it on television. There were no other foreigners in my unit, so I was obliged to seek out the company of Chinese English speakers, and this was how I met Liang.
‘I wonder if you could arrange painting lessons for me?’ I asked, standing at Dr Chen’s desk in the Wai Ban, the office that was in charge of me as a foreigner.
I had always wanted to do Chinese watercolours, though I was not artistic. It looked simple, so I thought I’d be able to produce something that I could hang, framed, over the mantelpiece at home.
‘Please sit down. Can I offer you some tea?’ came his high-pitched voice from behind a newspaper.
‘I’d like to learn painting.’ I remained standing. Once I sat down it would take all day.
There was a silence while Dr Chen finished reading the article he was absorbed in. On the shelf behind him there was a photograph of his son looking like an all-American boy at the University of Southern Illinois, and next to it a bottle of Mao Tai and two glasses.
‘Of course, Miss Alison. We’ll send you a teacher whenever you like.’ This was the predictable response. The answer was always yes, but I was doubtful whether it would actually happen.
‘I’d like to learn on Wednesdays.’
‘I see. You have nothing to do on Wednesdays.’ He laughed, coughed on his cigarette and peered over his newspaper.
They always seemed to think we were without inner resources. There was talk of getting a television to entertain me, as they thought I’d wither away without one. But of course there was no sign of it yet.
I wanted to snatch the newspaper away and yell ‘Get on with it, then!’ but I would have been wasting my time.
‘Well, thank you, Dr Chen. Could you let me know how much the lessons will cost?’
‘No charge,’ he said. ‘The painting unit will send someone.’
I forgot my request for a week or two, not expecting anything to happen quickly.
One afternoon I was idly staring across the microcosm of the campus, watching people going about their business. Students strode around in army coats, their numb fingers clutching texts to be learned by heart, mumbling to themselves, grannies wheeled babies dressed in jewel colours in bamboo prams, old men tended plants in pots or spoke to their geese, and cadres cycled by, puffing on their rancid little cigarettes as their bikes clanked along. I was the only one doing nothing. I was getting together the courage to go out and shop but it was always an ordeal to venture forth, head and shoulders above the nimble locals, stared at and laughed at and, I suspected, cheated by the peasants with their crooked teeth and filthy hands. I must have seemed like a millionaire, and without a word of Chinese still I couldn’t do anything about rudeness or cheating except shout in English.
There was a tap at the door of the flat. I thought it would be the Wai Ban checking up on me again, coming on some pretext or other to see what I was getting up to. But when I opened the door I saw a small wiry man with a broad grin. His hair was longer than usual for a Chinese man, and he was wearing the height of fashion, a polo-neck sweater.
‘How do you do, Miss Hutchings. I’m Liang, your painting teacher.’
He was at least six inches shorter than me and peered up like a confident child hoping to please a teacher. I almost expected him to hand me an apple.
‘Hello, Mr Liang. Come in. Would you like some tea?’
‘No thanks, no thanks,’ he protested, waving a hand.
He sat on the hard plastic sofa. His shoes were covered in mud and I noticed with dismay that he’d left a trail across my mats that I would have to sponge off.
‘The Wai Ban told me to come and teach you painting,’ he announced.
‘Well, Mr Liang, I just mentioned it. I thought it would be nice to have something to do on Political Study afternoon.’ I was free on Wednesday afternoons as foreigners weren’t invited to Political Study, though it seemed they were often the subject of discussion. Sometimes we were in favour, sometimes we weren’t. You could tell by the way they kept at a polite distance, courteous but not friendly. They usually tried to provide things we asked for and didn’t want complaints or any kind of controversy.
Liang’s real job, he explained, was to churn out numerous identical ‘works of art’ for ‘dignitaries’ and foreigners. He made me laugh. On Wednesdays he was to show me the fundamentals of Chinese watercolour painting.
‘We’ll go to the artists’ store to get your paper and brushes and paints next week.’ He paused and lit up a Phoenix, settling into the uncomfortable sofa. He slurped his flower tea and I wondered whether to offer him a piece of Cadbury’s chocolate, but decided I didn’t know him well enough yet.
So that was how it began. He used to pedal across town to my flat, where I would set up a table with newspaper, jars of water and my selection of paints, ink stick and stone and a row of brushes he had chosen for me, from the one like a feather duster to the wispy tiger-hair one. Sometimes he would talk about his studio and I hoped to be invited there one day. I imagined it. It would be romantic, arty. There would be paintings in various stages of completion and sunlight flooding in at a large window. He would be there working quietly with a few chosen friends. The little clique would have higher things on their minds than the price of oil and how to get something for nothing. It would be a haven from the turmoil of daily life.
‘Liang, what’s your studio like?’ I asked.
‘Just a big room. We all sit and get on with our work.’
‘Do you talk to each other? Do you discuss art?’
‘No. Not really. We chat about this and that, but it isn’t really necessary for us to talk about what we’re doing.’
The lessons were a bit of a disappointment as they consisted of copying various masters from a book of samplers. I spent hours trying to flick the brush into a bamboo leaf, whirl it into a rock, dab colour into peonies and lightly tease out hairs on the head of a dancer. He was a patient teacher – either that or he didn’t care that I wasn’t talented. He was just doing his job.
At last he said, ‘Next week you must come to the studio to watch.’
I was so looking forward to being introduced to the charmed circle of artists. I hoped perhaps these people would become my friends. Here was an opportunity to get to know people. The language barrier wouldn’t matter once we started painting pictures together. I felt quite privileged.
I cycled over an hour in the rain to get to the studio on the other side of the city. It was a large grey building with dirty cracked windows, and inside the main room, in light I would have thought inadequate for painting, there were rows of artists producing delicate watercolours for tourists and diplomats. Liang welcomed me with a large smile and looked straight into my eyes, which he had never done before. He was larger than life on his own territory. Complicity with foreigners was not on, so what was he trying to say? Then I realized he was beginning to treat me as a friend. I was glad I’d made the effort to come. With the weather being so foul and the prospect of cold wet clinging clothes all afternoon I’d nearly stayed in the flat, but indoors and outdoors were equally cold and dank, so what did it matter? Anyway I was curious to see him on his own ground, I wanted to know what made him tick and I wanted to meet his friends.
‘Mr Wu paints tigers. One of his pictures was presented to an African diplomat last month. We are all very proud of him.’
I smiled, slightly embarrassed. The idea of an art factory seemed so Chinese. Several artists beamed up at me as if I was visiting royalty. I still hadn’t made enough progress with my Chinese to say more than hello.
One man was painting carp from life. I was disturbed to see the fish darting around an enamel bowl, confused, their scales reflecting light from the neon strip lights above, their silly eyes staring as if in fright and their mouths mouthing a silent message. They swam aimlessly round and round, sometimes in a figure of eight. The artist had captured their movement and their fearful staring. They would be trapped in the enamel bowl until the picture was finished, then, their aesthetic purpose over, disposed of in a practical manner.
‘What will you do with them?’ I asked.
‘Eat them,’ said Liang, a mock serious look on his face.
‘But they’re pets, aren’t they?’
‘We don’t have pets here. Only rich people have pets. We like our animals best in the cooking pot.’
I was beginning to understand that my fatuous comment about a carp being a pet was very Western. The idea that eating carp was cruel suddenly struck me as silly in this context – it made more sense to eat them than to have these slithery cold creatures as pets. I had no choice but to start perceiving life around me in a more practical way. I started to see how much I was spoiled, prejudiced and set in my ways. I had recently started to dismiss the voice of Martin that often echoed around in my head pointing out various wickednesses and cruelties. He had started to irritate me. Who was he to impose his pampered views on people?
The visit to the studio was the first time I’d been interested in the real China as opposed to the fairytale version that lingered as a fantasy. I had enjoyed it in an unexpected way. It wasn’t how I’d imagined it at all, but better. It was as if the experience had taught me something, refreshed me. It was Liang who had gradually wrought the beginnings of change in me. I was at last starting to absorb those new experiences I so badly wanted and the catalyst was Liang. It was Liang who made it possible for me to open up. He too was beginning to change. No longer the distant and polite teacher. He began to be aware of me as a person. I was no longer just an awkward and large foreigner, but a source of information about outside, a companion and possibly even a woman. I reluctantly admitted to myself that I was beginning to feel a little excited in his presence. I found myself looking at the back of his neck, noticing his neat ears and his remarkable long eyelashes. I couldn’t stop myself looking at him, partly out of fascination and curiosity at his differentness and partly in the way one looks affectionately on an intelligent pet. He seemed so young. He was about the same age as me, but his cheeks looked boyishly smooth. I wondered if he shaved. His hair had the gloss of a child’s hair, which was a wonder considering the nasty sticky shampoo they used.
‘You know, Miss Alison,’ he said one day, ‘I’m really interested in seeing your country. I often listen to the BBC and VOA. I feel I know the West already. It’s different from here, isn’t it? You’ve got so much freedom. You can choose your job, your politicians, your friends …’
‘But Liang, you can choose your friends too, can’t you?’ It occurred to me that my self-appointed role of ‘friend’ to him was perhaps not exactly his choice.
‘Not really. We don’t have many friends here, not in the sense you mean it. People suspect one another, and besides you’ve probably noticed that we often say “classmates” when we’re referring to people we know. That’s because they’re people we studied with. What chance do we have to meet anyone else? You can see what it’s like in my unit. Apart from them you’re the only person I see. You’re the only outsider in my life.’ The idea that I was now ‘in his life’ sent a small shudder through me.
‘What about your family?’
‘Relatives,’ he said with a grimace.
‘What’s wrong with relatives?’ I asked, knowing what he was going to say.
‘Obligation,’ he said. ‘My wife was given to me by my uncle. She’s the daughter of some remote member of his wife’s family. When I got to twenty-seven and I wasn’t married, they said, “Liang, it’s time you had a child.” They’re peasants, you see. Within six months I was married to Wang and a year later my son was born.’
‘Couldn’t you have chosen your own wife? Why did you let them do this to you?’ I was beginning to feel resentment towards these primitive people who were his family. Didn’t they realize that he had the right to make his own choices in life? How could they foist some stranger on him like that? It was absurd.
‘It must have been awful for you.’ I realized this sounded feeble, like a schoolgirl commiserating over an embarrassing parent.
‘Not awful. I just did my duty to my family. They were right. I needed to get married and I hadn’t met anyone suitable. A man of twenty-seven can’t stay single.’
I’d been in China long enough to know he was right. He would have been regarded as a freak or people would have suspected his reasons for avoiding women.
I wanted to ask him if he loved her. I needed to know. But I was certain he didn’t. He was obviously trapped for eternity in an enforced relationship which was meaningless and gave him no joy. But he always seemed joyful enough as if it was never on his mind. He never mentioned the child.
We were seeing each other more and more. He was obviously growing fonder of me, wanting my company. And I wanted him too. I thought about him a lot. I often found myself daydreaming about him as I stood before my forty undergraduates, crammed into filthy Classroom Number Three where I attempted to teach the rudiments of English Literature. The uncomprehending faces stared back, obedient but totally unabsorbed. I must have looked as uninterested as they did. My mind was elsewhere too.
One day a group of runners training for a sports meeting ran past the open window. My adrenalin suddenly whirled as I saw Liang among them. But no, it was just someone who looked like him. It couldn’t have been him. He was wearing blue cotton running shorts and a white singlet with a figure of eight on the back and grey plimsolls without socks. His thin legs were spattered with mud and his shoulders were hunched in the cold. So unlike Martin’s rugby player’s physique. I watched him as he ran, unaware of me, intent on his task of forging ahead of the others. I thought of Liang’s slight body, unclothed – his knees and elbows, his small buttocks – and felt a blush spreading over my neck. I was jolted back to my yawning class who had noticed nothing. They sat impassively picking their noses, scratching their armpits and staring blankly through me as before.
How Liang managed to get away from his unit I never discovered. The painting lessons continued, sometimes at my flat and sometimes at his studio and I eventually managed to produce a passable, rather sentimental picture of kittens and peonies which I had mounted on a scroll. We both began to be aware that painting was no longer the only interest we had in common. I positively looked forward to his visits. We would both invent reasons for him to come.
‘I’d better have a look at your bike,’ he’d say, knowing full well that the University Bicycle Workshop checked it regularly for me.
Or he’d say, ‘Have you taken your winter ginseng? I’ll get you some at the medicine store.’
And I would cut out articles about life in the West for him and save him my Guardian Weekly. Without a telephone, we had no choice but to meet often.
He helped me with many of the small things I found so taxing in my first months in China.
It was him who showed me how to eat properly. I had been trying to survive on boiled eggs and boiled vegetables which was all I could manage to cook on the pathetic gas ring provided in my kitchen. The oil smelt so vile I couldn’t fry anything. When I tried, the wok sent up clouds of smoke and the food tasted as if it had been cooked in engine oil. Liang primed my wok for me and expertly showed me how to heat the oil to the right point. He flicked vegetables and fatty scraps of pork around and made feasts.
I gave up going to the market by myself. I waited for him to come and we would set out on an adventure. What used to be a painful experience became fun. We tried out anything new that came into season and rushed back to the flat to cook it. I ate everything: eels, their tiny heads nailed to a board while their long bodies were split with a sharp knife, rabbits bought live and their fragile necks cracked, their white fur peeled off like peeling an orange, tiny salty dried shrimp, sweet creamy yoghourt in chunky pottery jars, and delicate translucent hundred-year-old eggs with their glinting green and orange hues. Food became a fascination to me and I even discarded the fork and spoon I’d carried everywhere and learned awkwardly to wield chopsticks. I still couldn’t bring myself to use the bamboo ones in restaurants which you had to clean up with a bit of exercise book kept in the pocket for the purpose.
We started meeting on Sundays. Usually he’d come in the afternoon. I didn’t ask what he did in the morning. I was vaguely aware he might have family commitments but kept the idea at the very back of my mind. When the weather was still cold in March I lay one Sunday morning beneath my quilt, comfortable, with the sounds of the campus outside. I’d been reading one of Martin’s letters and thinking of home. He wanted me to meet him at the end of the term and have a holiday. He would come out on a package tour and I could join him in Peking. Somehow I didn’t feel elated enough about the prospect of seeing him. I wouldn’t say my heart sank exactly, but it almost did. While I was trying to sift through my thoughts on the subject, there was a tap at the door and I knew it was Liang, very early.
‘Hang on – I’ll put my dressing-gown on.’
I rushed eagerly to open the door and there he was, clutching a small parcel in pink wrapping paper tied with a piece of string.
‘This is a little gift for you.’
‘Can I open it?’
‘Go on.’ His eyes were wide with anticipation. More than ever he seemed childlike. I recalled the runners and had to look away.
It was a set of silk hand-embroidered handkerchiefs, totally impractical but pretty in a fussy Chinese sort of way. It was the sort of gift a man gives to a woman.
‘But it isn’t my birthday, Liang.’ This was silly. Birthdays didn’t mean much here.
‘No, I thought you’d like them. My cousin works at the embroidery factory,’ he said by way of justification. Suddenly I felt a rush of sentiment, of joy and of something I had never felt in the presence of Martin. I wanted to fling my arms round him and dance.
I can’t think how I restrained myself, but I felt as if I was saving it for a later I knew would come. I increasingly enjoyed the thought of it. We went out on our cycle ride, him pedalling protectively on the traffic side of the cycle lane, telling me when to stop, when to turn, giving disapproving glances when other cyclists jostled me. He was still somewhat astonished that I could ride a bike as he was certain all Westerners drove around in large cars.
We sat together in a tea house in those low bamboo chairs. An ancient man in a grubby apron poured water from a steaming black kettle as we clattered the lids of our tea dishes. I looked at Liang and wanted urgently to know more about him. He was deliberately uncommunicative about his personal life, as if his life in my presence was the only life he had.
‘Liang, why don’t you bring your wife along?’ I ventured, uncertain of his response. I couldn’t even remember her name.
‘She’s busy,’ he said evasively, looking at the violinist squeakily performing at the far end of the tea house.
‘But you never talk about her.’ Then I dared to ask, ‘Don’t you get on?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Well, aren’t you and your wife good friends?’
‘She’s my wife,’ he said as if this explained everything.
‘And your baby? Isn’t it wonderful being a father?’
‘Yes, I’m proud of him.’
‘But Liang, when do you spend time with him? You’re always with me!’ As I said this I realized it was true. I hadn’t been aware until I said it that he was spending time with me that he probably should have been spending with his family.
‘I see him once a week.’
It was then that I discovered that Liang and his wife didn’t actually live in the same place and that Liang was effectively a bachelor, married in name only. Shocked but overjoyed, I sensed a tremor of anticipation. Hadn’t it always been him and me, never a triangle?
‘She’s with her mother. She can’t live with me. There isn’t room with the baby. I only have one room. Anyway she prefers it.’
Liang’s life must have been bleak until I turned up. I provided him with an excuse to go out and enjoy himself. Wasn’t it his duty to see that the foreigner was kept content? It concerned me for a moment that maybe our friendship wasn’t what I thought it was after all – then I remembered the little silk hankies. No, he wasn’t pretending. The desire to kiss him welled up again, and I wanted to tell him how sweet he was and how much he meant to me and how he had freed me. I couldn’t in the tea house, so I left it until he came the following week.
It was a Tuesday evening. He was going to call in and see me before a meeting. Although I was on the other side of town he never seemed to object to the long ride. He would call in for a chat and a cup of tea. The note he had sent said he had some news.
His jacket made him look small as he stood at the door.
‘Come in. A man came round the campus with some tinned lychees today. I got you some.’
He enthused about my discovery, but urgently wanted to tell me his own news.
‘I may get a chance to go abroad,’ he said, phrasing it carefully, not allowing himself too much certainty. Going abroad was like going to Heaven. Everyone wanted it and feared it and thought they’d never be good enough.
‘You could come to England,’ I said without thinking. Then it immediately struck me that this was not a good idea. It was a potentially dangerous displacement for us both.
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Because I’m married it makes it easier. The authorities know I’ve got a son to come back for.’
Little did the authorities know the irony of this. From what I could tell, Liang’s son did not have a father who would pine for him while suffering in a foreign land.
Liang was looking out of the window as he spoke, with his back to me. And it was then that I chose to kiss him.
The kiss did change our lives. The relationship did take on a sexual dimension but was dominated more by intimacy than sex. We both seemed to have difficulty in expressing ourselves sexually – we didn’t easily fall into each other’s arms, we were embarrassed about kissing and bed was never mentioned. Whether he thought of it I don’t really know. It seemed out of reach, impossible and I’m not sure I wanted it. We substituted a physical manifestation of our closeness with looks into the eyes, standing close, touching fingers when we thought nobody would see. Of course, he always pretended it wasn’t happening. It was not tantalizingly erotic as neither of us understood eroticism and wouldn’t have known how to bring it about. I was certain this was more like love than the insipidness I had with Martin, who was, I suppose, a kind of fiancé. I was happy. I allowed myself the luxury of what I thought was illicit love. The fact that it might not have seemed like passion in other people’s eyes didn’t mean it was unexciting for me. Quite the reverse. I hummed with it. I had a permanent grin on my face, but in a country where grinning reflected embarrassment, a feeling appropriate to a tall foreigner, my secret was safe.
As the spring opened up into flowers and warmth in April, Liang and I began to be seen around together more. I used to get little gifts for him at the Friendship Store. He wasn’t allowed in so he would wait with the bikes outside and I’d go in and spend my foreigner’s money.
‘What can I get you, Liang? Just say what you want. It’s easy. I’ve got hard currency. Look!’ and I’d wave my notes at him.
I couldn’t fail to notice how his eyes lit up at the thought of goodies normally out of reach to all but party officials.
‘No, really. I don’t want anything, Alison.’
I’d go in and get him a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label and some Marlboros. He’d have to keep them at my flat. It wouldn’t have done for him to be seen with these gifts. He’d have been criticized; that is, hauled up in front of some bossy committee to explain himself. I’d started smoking Phoenixes. I kept the Marlboros for him. I even bought him – silk tie of the kind favoured by visiting Americans, but of course he couldn’t wear it. I wondered if I was overdoing it, making a bit of a fool of myself. I just wanted to please him and give him things he could have only from me.
As the chilly weather suddenly stopped I shed my army jacket and began to wear a skirt. People noticed and I thought they were making snide comments. I hoped I was beginning to look a bit less foreign. My hair had grown and I’d put it in bunches like the local girls. Actually, I didn’t dare risk the pudding-basin barber. We must have made a comic pair, I suppose, me six inches taller than him. But it didn’t matter.
At least so I thought until one day when he came along looking very agitated.
‘The Wai Ban says I mustn’t spend so much time with you.’
‘What do you mean? Do they suspect? What did they say?’
I felt panic-stricken. This could mean trouble for both of us. It could mean him losing his job or worse. It could mean me losing him.
‘They’re worried about me being influenced by you. And they’ve told Wang about you.’
For a second I couldn’t remember who Wang was. Then I remembered she was his wife.
‘What did she say?’
‘Not much.’
‘What d’you mean “not much”?’
‘Well, she has her own life. She’s never met a foreigner. She doesn’t know what to think.’
‘Isn’t she upset?’
‘Why?’
‘Well, you’re seeing another woman.’
‘She’s Chinese.’
‘But she’s still your wife.’
‘Yes. But she doesn’t see it like you do.’
‘You’re close enough to have had a child together, and you’re telling me she isn’t jealous?’
‘Anyone can have a child. It’s easy.’
He was talking about the thing most Westerners thought they wanted out of their relationships and dismissing it as if it was the easy bit. Getting someone into bed made people forgo understanding and kindness, as if sex would replace friendship or be an improvement on it. But from what I could see Liang and Wang didn’t seem to have much apart from the evidence of a fleeting sexual encounter. They appeared to have an easy-going or even apathetic tolerance of each other, and maybe some woolly notion of duty.
‘Well, what does it mean? Are they saying we’ve got to stop seeing each other?’ I couldn’t bear to think about it.
‘They want an explanation. They’re trying to be reasonable. And Wang has offered to divorce me.’ He added this last bombshell as a sort of afterthought.
I added up in seconds what it would mean if he was divorced. Would he then expect me to marry him? The thought ricocheted around in my brain. What about Martin? What about Mummy and Daddy? What about my friends? The thought of being married to a five-foot, two-inch Chinaman appalled me suddenly. He must have seen my expression of anguish and read it completely wrongly. All was confusion. Did I love him or had it suddenly stopped like a watch stops when it is overwound and the spring snaps?
‘Don’t you see?’ he said. ‘It would be wonderful.’
Wonderful for whom? I saw all the advantages for him and none for me. He would unload an unwanted wife and child and acquire the much coveted passport out of China – a foreign spouse. I would be married to a foreigner who would never fit in at home and who would make me a laughing stock. The thought was impossible. Could I see him at the Point to Point or the Hunt Ball, or meeting the vicar or Uncle Basil? They would all be horrified. I began to see the value of Martin. He was of my world, my sort. I had stepped into an alien place and been befriended by an alien. Liang was China and was inseparable from it. I could not blend the two worlds – the only piece of this world that I could take home was my picture of peonies and kittens.
Since I was lost for words and Liang was evidently hoping for a positive response, he said, ‘You could come with me to America. We could travel together and get out of this dump. We could be free together.’ What did he mean ‘free’? I was already free.
I looked into his eyes, then looked away to his frayed grubby collar and the tide-mark on his neck.
‘But you can’t just leave your family like that – they haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘I can. Lots of people do. I’ve been applying for scholarships for months and now at last one has come through. I’m going to Ohio in July.’
‘You never said anything to me,’ I said, hurt and beginning to be angry that I had not been part of this plan.
‘I wasn’t sure until yesterday.’ He started to fidget irritatingly with a loose button on his jacket. He couldn’t bring himself to look me in the eye.
So my part in the grand plan had been to help him prepare himself for the peculiarities of the West in order to make the escape less painful.
‘Do you really want to marry me, then?’
‘Of course. It would make things much easier. As the husband of an Englishwoman, I would be able to …’
I stopped listening. I was right. He was after a passport. How had I failed to see it from the very first? Why had I thought he cared for me? An icy trickle of disappointment pierced me with startling pain. Facing reality was like discovering I hadn’t won the jackpot after all. After months of the luxury of fantasy I now had to return to mundane reality. I couldn’t let the ice sear an irreparable wound. I shut it out.
There had been a point in both our lives where he needed to turn away from China and I needed to turn away from England. We had met in the centre of a figure of eight, travelling in opposite directions. We generated a small spark, a misunderstood spark as it turned out, as we passed, and now our only route was away from each other.
‘Take your wife,’ I said. ‘I’m leaving here and going back to England.’
He looked up at me. I had intruded on a dream. He remained lost in reflection for a moment, then seemed to emerge gradually like a creature coming out of hibernation.
‘Yes.’ He said it with an air of relief.
‘I’m sorry if you misunderstood my behaviour. We Westerners are not like you Chinese. We’re a bit impulsive, you know. It doesn’t mean anything.’
‘No.’
He made his excuses and left. I didn’t have any more painting lessons and we did not communicate any more after that meeting.
Much as I wanted to weep and feel wretched, I couldn’t. The moment had passed and I had evaded that peak. I was frustrated and even guilty that I couldn’t summon up any real misery. I felt numb and blank. It wasn’t the numbness of shock. It was the numbness of a bemused vacuum.
Eventually at the end of the summer term it was time for me to leave. Martin’s trip was fixed and I was to meet him in Peking. While I was packing I discovered a pair of Liang’s gloves. He had left them behind on the day we first kissed and I’d kept them hidden in my underwear drawer. I took them out and felt a slight pang. I sniffed them and they smelt of sourness and cheap plastic. They were too small for me to wear. They were useless and ugly. I threw them in the bin.
As always I had trouble at the airport, with nobody to help with my bags, being sent in different directions by different officials, and was glad to be leaving this irritating mayhem. I wasn’t all that keen on the grand tour of China, but at least we’d be insulated from the chaos inside an air-conditioned bus.
I got on to the plane at last after much pushing and shoving, but of course someone was sitting in my seat. They never seemed to manage these things efficiently, and having got up at the crack of dawn to be chauffeured to the airport in the university limousine, I was pretty tired and irritable already. A woman with a baby had dumped her things across three seats – there were endless gaping bags of blankets, fruit, enamel cups and Heaven knows what else.
‘Excuse me,’ I said in English, hoping she’d get the message. She stared up at me. She was a tiny delicate woman, maybe from one of the Minorities. She was like a pretty doll with perfect almond eyes, peach cheeks and a long black plait, and wearing a pink silk jacket, old-fashioned among the Crimplene glitter creations worn by other girls. The baby was bundled into several layers of shawls in spite of the heat and was wearing those disgusting crotchless trousers so that his little raw bottom protruded. He laughed as she swung him on to her shoulder and kicked his tiny feet in his little red cotton shoes. I felt large and ungainly, gawky and imperfect. I shifted my bulky body into the aisle to let her pass as she gave up her seat without a murmur. She shuffled with her belongings towards the smoking section of the plane at the back.
I flopped into the saggy loose-covered seat and clipped on my belt. I was leaving. I’d said my goodbyes, had my banquets, drunk my toasts to mutual friendship and was now free to be a tourist with the rest of them. We soared into the sky, and the city, still grey in summer brightness with patches of dusty green where there were parks, receded.
I didn’t look back.
Martin would be waiting in Peking and after a lot of hanging about waiting for bags to appear, I spotted him beyond the barrier and waved. I was more glad to see him than I thought I would be. I felt a bit like a soldier coming home after an arduous campaign. I had survived. I was comforted by his familiar brown tweed jacket and looked forward to his tobacco smell.
Emerging from behind him was a man that looked exactly like Liang. He had much shorter hair and was wearing a rather baggy Western-style suit. It was Liang – I recognized the tie I had bought him at the Friendship Store. Why was he here? How could he have known I would be on this plane? I was too noticeable to hide myself. I would have to brazen it out.
‘Hello,’ I said, smiling.
‘Hello, darling,’ Martin said, leaning forward to peck my cheek. ‘It’s lovely to see you.’
I looked away from him to see what had happened to Liang. He was standing there next to Martin, the same grin on his face as when we had first met so many months before.
‘How are you, Miss Alison? It’s a pleasure to see you.’
He was like a stranger.
‘Mr Liang, my painting teacher. Mr Roberts, a friend from England.’
They greeted each other formally, Martin towering like a bear a foot over Liang and leaning slightly to reach his outstretched hand. I noticed Liang’s dirty fingernails. Then Liang’s grin changed focus and became a distant stare, his eyes seeking someone in the crowd.
‘Excuse me, I’m meeting my wife. We’re being briefed for our trip to the States.’
And Liang wandered off into the throng. A few minutes later he emerged carrying suitcases, baskets, nylon holdalls and string bags, followed by the doll in the pink silk jacket. She was exquisite: three inches shorter than Liang, carrying the beaming child.
He did not bring her over to be introduced, but as they walked away he looked smugly over his shoulder at me, as if he was carrying away the spoils of the campaign.
