And the liberation, entering a brave new world outside, still wary of the Japanese, dangerous in their loss. Some lashed out, killed while they could, but most trod the fine line between conquered and conqueror, that undefined space.
As if an old creaky machine were being cranked back into life, Hong Kong sputtered back. The buses and trams started running on their regular schedules, stores started to receive provisions, and prices slowly returned to normal. People ran into one another on the street and clutched each other, remarked on how thin everyone was, happy to have survived and to see each other, even if they hadn’t liked each other before. Practicing the normal, trying to get to mundane.
Otsubo was repatriated to Japan. Later, they heard he was hung at Sugamo Prison. There was no relief in hearing the news.
The strangeness of the first dinner party, and how everyone slipped into it cautiously at first, and then how everyone got comfortable so quickly it was unseemly. They complained about the lack of basic supplies, then the lack of good help, then how hard it was to get good wine, then everything. The amnesia of comfort, soothing, anodyne, too seductive. They were all too soon back to themselves.
How can a woman disappear? How can someone so vivid vanish?
Searching for her in the aftermath, the empty taste in his mouth, the taste of regret. Funny thing: He was always thirsty after liberation. He procured a car and drove the empty roads throughout the island-to her old flat, to Angeline’s old house, to her father’s house in Sai Kung, all vacant and vandalized, smelling musty and worse. A tour of abandoned houses. Her father dead in Macau, unknown causes during the war. Dominick also gone. Just another sad story.
Without the lightness of Trudy buoying him up, Will became morose, too serious, too dark. He lurked in odd corners of Hong Kong or stayed home, a sparse affair with one glass, one plate, a bare lightbulb. He was no longer invited anywhere. “He’s gone odd,” whispered around town. He could not define a new self without Trudy.
He sank into anonymity until he caught a glimpse of Victor and Melody getting out of their car in Causeway Bay, with their daughter. Their daughter who looked nothing like them. He remembered hearing something about Melody in the United States, a tragedy, but something that had been whispered once and then never again. He started to think. And then rang up Victor with a hard-luck story and asked for a job, knowing that the man would love to hire an Englishman for what he would consider a menial job, both men knowing there was much more to the request.
Victor loved to show him off to unknowing business associates, particularly those just arrived from Europe or America. Will would pull the car around and get out to open the door. Victor’s guests would widen their eyes and step into the car, visibly impressed. An Englishman working as a driver, even for a family such as the Chens, was almost unheard of, especially someone like him, who’d been out and about in society before the war. Still, most were embroiled in their own concerns and many had emerged much changed from the war-the Dutch banker who exited Stanley a schizophrenic and now lived in an alley building in Sheung Wan and came out to beg with a rattan basket, his blond hair matted and dark; or the Miller girl who had been engaged to one of the Hos, the shipping family, but came out of the camp too used, and now lived in Mong Kok and was rumored to be a bar hostess. Will was just another casualty of war, and not the worst off of them. People talked at first, but then it became just another quirky fact of Hong Kong life.
He worked odd hours and tried to get glimpses of Locket, but the Chens always had the other drivers take her to school. Despite himself, he looked at her face, looking for signs of what? Trudy, yes, but also what he could not voice in his own head.
One day, Victor got in the car and directed Will to drive to the Peak. On the way up, he had seemed agitated, fidgeting with papers in the backseat.
“Mistakes were made,” he said suddenly, opaquely.
Will had not answered, which had made Victor more jumpy.
“Do you know what I’m talking about?” he had asked.
“No.”
“In times of war, there are many decisions that are made, and things that get done without the benefit of reflection.”
“Yes, sir,” he had replied, his deference more threatening than anything he could have said. He saw Victor’s face in the rearview mirror. He was perspiring heavily.
“I’ve had some news…” Victor started.
“Yes, sir,” he repeated.
Victor hesitated, then seemed to get ahold of himself.
“At any rate, Will, the war has changed all of us. We’re all in this together now.”
Will remained silent.
“I’ve changed my mind, Will. You can take me home now.”
Will swung the car around and took Victor home. They didn’t speak on the return journey. His wages were suddenly doubled. Will never found out what had spooked Victor but neither he nor Victor ever mentioned the ride again.
He was waiting for something to happen. And in the meantime, he remembered.
Trudy and Dominick locked in a terrible embrace.
Funny how so many things seem inevitable, given enough distance. Put a girl and a boy of similar persuasions together in summer and see what evolves. Usually love. Two friends, equally matched, and then one suddenly has an advantage: rarely will they remain friends. This must have been what happened. Trudy and Dominick, alike as two peas in a pod when things were good. When the situation turned fraught, each reverted to form. Trudy essentially good, Dominick an animal. The betrayal sharp.
But his own? Much worse. He knows.
“I forgive you,” she says. “I understand.”
He clings to this. Hears her say it over and over.
How can he leave her now?
Epilogue
A WOMAN IS SITTING in a chair, reading by a window. A cup of tea has gone cold beside her. Dusk is gathering outside, and when it becomes too difficult to see, she goes to turn on the light. The room is suddenly illuminated.
She lives by herself now, in a small apartment she has found in Wan Chai, amid locals and wet markets. It is furnished simply, with an iron bed and a thin mattress, a wooden fruit crate for a bedside table, a lamp she bought at Dodwell’s during the holiday sales. She has a comfortable reading chair as well. She lives very frugally, within her means as a secretary for a shipping company, and she has found that it is possible to live like a local, on almost nothing, bargaining for everything from lightbulbs to tea towels. She buys one orange at a time, or two carrots, or picks her own chicken to be killed, a purchase that will last her three days. She eats at the street stalls: noodles and congee and roasted meats and other dishes she would have found unappealing just a year before. She can wield chopsticks now with the best of them. Sometimes, as she sits on the stools, next to a taxi driver or a shopkeeper, she listens and finds she can understand some of what they are saying; words emerge from the noise, like jewels. In the beginning, she was a curiosity to them, but now they have seen her enough to ignore her. Her Cantonese-still rudimentary-is improving. Now she can order at the daipaidong, and they will not repeat the order loudly, in English; they just grunt and dump the noodles in the broth to boil, same treatment as the locals.
At home, she sometimes wears the black trousers and white tunics-the amah uniform-as night clothes and finds them oddly comfortable. They are made of light cotton and are very inexpensive. The shop owner had assumed she was buying them for her amah and kept asking how tall, gesturing with her hands. Claire held the cloth against her frame and nodded her head. The first day she spent in her flat, she walked down to the local street barber and sat down, much to his surprise, and asked him to cut her hair short all around.