Изменить стиль страницы

“I wish you the best. Don’t worry and thank you for everything.” He has left the majority of his borrowed clothing.

“How on earth does he think he’s going to get out of here? ” Johnnie sits down on the bed.

“Lord knows. He didn’t want to incriminate himself or us, I suppose, with this rather cryptic note. I’m thinking the worst. He has no idea of the terrain out here, or even in town, no friends, no Chinese language, nothing. Even if he gets out of the camp boundaries, he’s a blind man. And he’s left all his clothes…” His voice trails off.

“Not the sign of a sane man, certainly,” Johnnie offers.

“No.” Will crumples up the note and puts it in his pocket.

In the morning, some internees are talking over breakfast about how they heard gunshots in the middle of the night, toward the southern wall of the camp.

February dawns the next week and it is cold. Hong Kong has a subtropical clime so there is no heating infrastructure and the winter is always an insidious, creeping cold that surprises you in the middle of the night or when outside too long. No sign of Trudy. It’s now been more than three weeks since he’s seen her. It’s getting to be more than disheartening-it’s embarrassing now as people inquire as to how she’s doing. Amahs, houseboys, local girlfriends, and spouses who are still on the outside for one reason or another come to try to see the internees, but the camp is still working out the visitation rules and they are turned away with their packages. Still, their visitors are allowed to leave word that they’ve been there.

Will concentrates instead on winterizing the buildings as much as he can. Beds have been provided, with some semblance of bed linens, but the temperature plummets at night. He’s never thought of the cold in Hong Kong as anything more than brisk, but he realizes now that that was with a proper winter coat and well-insulated walls. Everyone is hunched over, trying to conserve body heat, sleeping with all their clothes on, shivering in the bathrooms, not taking baths. When Will brushes his teeth, the silver water feels like ice. He puts in an official request for more blankets and winter coats, especially for the children, who are running around in their parents’ extra clothing, hems and sleeves trailing the floor. He organizes a patching team that goes around plugging any holes in the wall with a crude mix of mud and leaves. All this does little to alleviate the creeping misery of unrelenting discomfort that clouds their days.

Trudy, when she comes, is unexpected. A guard plucks Will from the lunch queue and takes him to the office of Ohta, the head of the camp.

Expecting a response to his blankets-and-coats request, Will is taken aback when he is told he has a visitor. They have not been allowed yet. But, of course, rules have never really applied to Trudy.

Ohta, a portly man with greasy skin and smudged wire spectacles, gestures that Will is to sit down. He is attired in a Japanese version of a safari suit, but one with long sleeves and pant legs.

“You have a visitor.”

“Is that so? ”

“We have not yet allowed any visitors.”

“I’m aware of that. But I don’t know anything about it.”

Ohta eyes Will over his desk.

“You want drink?”

“Please.” Will knows to accept.

He gestures to the soldier by the door and barks out something in Japanese. Whiskey is poured into small, dusty glasses.

“Kampai!” He lifts up his glass with one pink, porcine hand, and drains it, tossing his head back with a grunt. Will follows suit, with less vigor. Ohta shakes his head as if to throw off cobwebs. “Good!” He pours another.

“Your visitor, your wife?”

“I have no idea who my visitor is.”

“Woman, Chinese?”

“Trudy Liang?”

“Yes. Miss Liang is here to see you.”

“Oh, good.” Will’s heart is beating fast. “Thank you very much.”

“I told her only one time she can come on no visitors’ day. Special for her.”

“Well, she is special, isn’t she? ”

Ohta stares at him.

“No one special now. Everyone same, prisoner or not Japanese. Same!”

“Yes, of course.” Mercurial, he thinks. “Well, I think she’s special because she is to me.” Lame finish.

Ohta gets up. “Wait in room here.”

After a few minutes, during which Will sips at his whiskey, enjoying the warm burn in his throat, trying to calm his nerves, the guard gestures for him to come. They go into a small room with a table and five chairs, where Trudy is sitting, looking uncomfortable. She is thin, her clothes serviceable. Her hair is pulled back into a chignon, face colorless without any sort of makeup. Still, somehow, she radiates privilege.

“Darling,” she says. “I’ve missed you so much.”

He doesn’t say anything about her absence, just asks her what she’s been doing, forfeiting the right to rebuke her for her neglect.

“ Frederick is dead, so I’ve been with Angeline, but she hasn’t really spoken for weeks. I keep telling her she has to cope for Giles’s sake, but she doesn’t seem to listen. She wants to bring him back here but what kind of place is this to be responsible for a child? She doesn’t want to go to England where she doesn’t have any family but Frederick ’s, not that she could go right now, and his family was against the marriage in the first place, so it’s a rather difficult situation. So that’s what I’ve been doing. Besides trying to get a foothold in the new world out there.”

“You’re all right for food and all that? Dominick is taking care of you? ”

“The Japanese are so odd,” she says, ignoring him. “They have this extraordinary custom of defecating in every room of every house they loot. Isn’t that awful? Marjorie Winter’s house was completely soiled-she found it when she went up to get some supplies. The odor! The whole city smells of waste. That’s one Japanese custom I’m not too enthralled by. So extraordinary. They have that beautiful tea ceremony and all that lovely gardening, and then they go and do something like that. And of course, all the women are in a tizzy about rape. You’re not supposed to go anywhere alone. I brought a driver.”

“Ned is gone. I think he tried to escape but I’m quite sure he was shot in the attempt. He was going rather mad.”

Trudy’s face falls. “Don’t tell me such awful things, darling. I can’t stand it as it is. Can we talk about something else? Something else entirely, something quite trivial in comparison. Like how I’m scrabbling all the time. It’s terribly unbecoming. At least here, you don’t have to do that. You just stand in a line and get food handed to you.”

“You have quite a good idea of what goes on here, have you?” It’s the first time he’s been sharp with her and she takes note.

“Is there anything you need that you think I might be able to procure outside?”

“It’s scant hunting out there too, isn’t it? ”

“Yes, but I could get Dommie on it. We have food but it’s rather dear. I could weep when I think of the Japanese bombing the godowns. There was so much food in there, and they just incinerated it all. They said you could smell the food burning miles away. Makes me ravenous just thinking of it. At least there’s no chance I’ll get plump if this goes on. You don’t like plump women, do you, Will? No chance of me getting that way.” She chatters on. “Conditions in Sham Shui Po and Argyle are supposed to be hideous,” she says. “They’re coming down very hard on the uniformed. You’re lucky you’re here. That Jane woman at the hospital really saved you, I think. Very clever of her.”

“Do you think I should be there?” he asks, hard. “Do you think I’m a coward for being here? ”

“Are you mad? ” she says with genuine astonishment. “Of course I don’t.”

How quickly he has lost the ability to gauge what she thinks, he realizes. She is off to something else entirely.