Jon Cleary - The Phoenix Tree

There was a great deal of her mother in Natasha; she had a saint’s name but the devil in her blood. Or so said the nuns, who knew more about the Blood of Christ than they did about the blood of young girls. It was they who had given her the saint’s name, Therèse, one that Natasha never used. She already knew that the men she saw outside the convent walls weren’t interested in saints.

In 1938, when she was sixteen, her father was killed. He was up-country, in Sikang, trying to sell Jardine Matheson goods to a warlord, when the warlord took a sudden dislike to Henry, Jardine Matheson, all things British or the goods themselves: the reason was never determined, but Henry was suddenly dead. He left Natasha a small inheritance, his cigarette card collection of English cricketers and a sense of loss that came as a surprise to her. Her true love for certain men, first her father and later Keith Cairns, was delayed. It was as if her absent mother had left behind the unspoken advice that nothing in her heart should ever be committed to men.

She ran away from the convent and went further south, to Hong Kong. She was already beautiful, her beauty apparent in the eyes of perhaps too many beholders; there was a certain coolness to her beauty, almost a remoteness which would suddenly be denied when she smiled. Men besieged her, and she recognized the pleasures of being a prize.

She did not become a prostitute, more a floating mistress: there is a difference of more than just price. In the middle class morality of the British colony, her mixed blood put a brand on her; even a girl with the blood of St Francis of Assisi and one of the better Sung princesses in her would have been looked upon as a half-caste. Though Natasha looked more Western than Eastern, there was a slant to her eyes, a tilt to her cheekbones and an ivory sheen to her skin that set her apart from the Roses and Daisies of Bournemouth, Scunthorpe and other respectable breeding grounds. She graced tea parties at Government House and receptions at the Repulse Bay Hotel, but she was never invited to dinner parties at private homes on the Peak. Then in March 1940 she met Keith Cairns when he came to Hong Kong for what was, supposedly, a conference on Oriental art. Only later did she learn that it was a conference of Intelligence agents.

Keith Cairns was that rare man, an academic with the proper flair for courting a woman. He was forty-two years old, roughly good-looking, had had no wives but a succession of mistresses and, at his first sight of Natasha, decided then was the time to settle down with a wife, one who would also be his mistress. He was a romantic, which was one reason he had become an agent for MI6, and though he did not sweep Natasha off her feet, since she was on her back beneath him when he asked her to marry him, he overwhelmed her with his passionate persistence. She married him for a variety of reasons: she liked him; she had a sudden, if fleeting, yearning for respectability; she knew that the war in Europe would soon spread to Asia. Keith Cairns told her that Japan would probably enter the war, but that he, and she, would be safe in Tokyo.

‘Tokyo is my home,’ he told her, ‘even though I’m a Scot. I live there and I’ll probably die there because, whatever the Japanese have done outside Japan, in their own country I find them honourable and admirable and I want to go on living amongst them.’

Later she would find that frame of mind at odds with his being a spy; but then she would also find him a mixture that, because of his early death, would always remain a puzzle to her. He was kind and cruel, romantic and hard-headed, daring and cautious; he was a mass of contradictions, which perhaps was why the Japanese, a nation of contradictions, liked him and he them. But he loved Natasha as none of her patrons ever had and eventually, but too late, she loved him. She took over from him as an MI6 agent as belated payment for what he had meant to her. Having no country of her own, she was neither friend of Britain nor enemy of Japan. She was, as Keith Cairns had been, a romantic, seduced by the thought of danger, trying to prove, without any hope that the proof would be made public, that life for her was more than bed, board and baubles. She was, in the most hazardous way, still looking for respectability.

‘I got some extra fish on the black market,’ said Yuri Suzuki, coming up from the village. ‘But we are running out of money.’

She was a round little woman, a dumpling spiced with iron filings; Natasha had never discovered her age: she could have been anything between forty and sixty. She had been Keith Cairns’s housekeeper for five years when he had brought Natasha home; they had met like two wives over the still-warm body of a bigamist. But when Keith had died, Yuri had, as if there was no longer anything to fight over, abruptly changed her attitude; she had taken over as Natasha’s surrogate mother. Short-tempered, ungracious, she nevertheless had a motherly instinct she could not deny: she had a need to take care of someone.

‘I have nothing else to sell,’ said Natasha.

She had already sold the jewelry that her admirers in Hong Kong had given her. She had always kept it hidden while Keith had been alive, not wanting to remind him blatantly of what she had been before she had met him. After his death she had brought it out and, piece by piece, had found buyers for it. Now all she and Yuri had to live on was the small pension that the university, with punctilious regard for its dead professor, still paid her. Keith had died after a bungled operation for appendicitis, a mundane death for an agent, and the university authorities had suffered a loss of face in that it was one of their own medical professors who had performed the fatal operation. The pension payment arrived each month like a penance.

‘You should ask your friends to send money.’

Yuri knew of the short-wave radio hidden in the secret cellar of their house. She had never made any comment on Cairnssan’s extracurricular work as a spy, as if it were just another bachelor’s peccadillo, on a par with his drinking and his bringing home women who were no better than they should have been. When Natasha had taken over the broadcasting, Yuri had continued to make no comment, treating it as if it were the normal pan of running a household. Natasha sometimes felt uneasy about her, but she had no alternative but to trust her.

‘Yuri, how can they do that? Cable it to the General Post Office? One hundred pounds payable on the order of the British Government?’

‘They should pay you for what you are doing,’ said Yuri stubbornly. She was not thinking of the risk, but only of the actual work being done. ‘Work should be paid for.’

‘You sound like a trade unionist.’ Natasha had learned from Keith, a born Tory, of the blight one could find in Britain.

‘What’s that?’ sniffed Yuri, and on the other side of the world Keir Hardie and company went on strike in their graves.

Then Natasha saw the local sergeant of police and a stout man in civilian clothes coming up the path towards them. Nayora was a private resort village that had been developed by a group of upper-middle-class professionals just before World War One: government officials, lawyers, doctors who did not want to have to mix in their holiday time with the rapidly expanding lower middle class. All the villas stood in what had once been carefully tended gardens; now, in the present war, one elderly gardener ran an arthritic-gaited race against galloping grass and exploding shrubs. Some of the old families still lived here, though they did not mix with the alien residents who had been foisted on them. Nayora had always been a law-abiding community and even with the advent of the aliens the authorities had seen no need to enlarge the village force of Sergeant Masuda and his rather dull-witted constable.