Vincent Lam - The Headmaster’s Wager

AT THE CERCLE SPORTIF, HAN BAI pulled up in the circular drive fronting the club’s entrance, stopped the car beneath the frangipani, and went around to Percival’s door. The headmaster was not in the habit of waiting for his driver to attend to him, and in most places he would simply open the door himself and step out of the car. However, at the club, Han Bai knew that the headmaster waited for his driver.

Percival ascended the canopied stone steps, nodded to the bows of the doormen, went through the clubhouse, and out to the pavilion that looked over the tennis courts. Since their divorce eight years earlier, this was where he and Cecilia met to talk. The roof of the pavilion was draped with bougainvillea, which reminded Percival of Cecilia’s old family house in Hong Kong.

A waiter pulled out a chair, his jacket already dark in the armpits. At nine in the morning, one game of tennis was under way. The Saigonese and the few French who remained from the old days played before breakfast, but some Americans were foolish enough to play at this hour. Cecilia was on the court in a pleated white skirt, playing one of the surgeons from the U.S. Army Station Hospital in Saigon. She had always cursed the city’s climate, but now did most of her money-changing business with Americans so played tennis when they did. She displayed no feminine restraint as she lunged across the court to return a serve. The surgeon had his eye more on his opponent than the white ball, and Percival could not help feeling the familiar desire.

“For you, Headmaster Chen?” said the waiter.

“Lemonade.”

“Three glasses?”

“Two.”

How typical of Cecilia, to arrange a game of tennis with an attractive foreign man when she had asked Percival to meet her at the club. In reply, he stared in the other direction. There was no way to turn his ears from the players’ breathy grunts, quick steps, and the twang of the ball ringing across the lawn.

Cecilia had played tennis since she was a child in Hong Kong, years before Percival ever saw a racquet. Her name had been Sai Ming until she was registered by the nuns at St. Paul Academy as Cecilia, and thereafter eschewed her Chinese name. When they had been students, he at La Salle Academy, and she at its sister school, St. Paul, she once offered to teach Percival how to play. He was even more clumsy with a racquet than he was on the dance floor. Cecilia had laughed at his ineptness, and Percival declared tennis a game of the white devils.

Percival had come to Hong Kong in the autumn of 1940, just a few months after a fever had ravaged Shantou. During that contagion, Muy Fa became hot, then delirious. Despite the congee that he spooned between his mother’s cracked lips, and Dr. Yee’s cupping, coin-rubbing, and moxibustion, one morning Muy Fa lay cold and still on the kang . The years of his father’s absence had put coins in the family money box, but now the silver seemed cold and dead to Chen Pie Sou. It had paid for a doctor, but not saved his mother. There was no question of a Western-trained doctor or medicines, for the Japanese occupation of Guangdong province was two long years old. Chen Pie Sou sent both a telegram and a formal letter of mourning to his father in Indochina, and paid ten silver pieces for it to go by airplane. An exorbitant sum, but his mother deserved every honour. He was shocked to receive a brief telegram from Chen Kai indicating that business matters and the dangers of the war prevented him from returning to mourn in Shantou, that he would pray for his deceased wife in Cholon, and asking his son to go ahead with the burial rites, though sparing extravagance. Soon after the funeral, a letter from Chen Kai informed his son that he would be sent to Hong Kong for a British education. Chen Pie Sou wrote back dutifully, saying nothing of his anger at his father’s failure to return, nor his disappointment at not being asked to join him. As most of the family’s cash savings was used for the funeral, Chen Kai made arrangements through a Shantou money trader for a sum of Qing silver coins to be provided for his son’s needs in Hong Kong. A forged French laissez-passer was smuggled to him, along with a letter of registration from La Salle Academy. These documents would allow Chen Pie Sou to leave the Japanese-controlled territory and enter Hong Kong for his studies.

Intending to dislike Hong Kong on account of the way he was sent there, Chen Pie Sou soon began to think that it was not so bad. The priests and nuns gave him a new name, Percival. People in the colony lived in an energetic jumble one on top of another, the streets filled with constant shouting and scrambling to buy and sell. The tall apartment buildings, he was told, were a Western invention. Afraid to live in such a towering structure of dubious origins, Percival took a tiny neat room in an old rooming house owned by a Cantonese woman, Mrs. Au. At first, it was frightening for him to be in the streets, to see the ghostly white British masters who rolled past in carriages that sputtered along without horses, or to be confronted at a street corner by the terrifying beard of a Sikh policeman. What weapons might they carry in their gigantic turbans if they wore curved knives on their belts? However, the tumult was soon energizing. From the street vendors, Percival bought dishes that he had never known existed. At La Salle, English came easily to him. Why did some boys complain that it was difficult, when there were only twenty-six letters? Percival was soon tutoring slower classmates and had a few extra coins for the cinema. And the girls! They were a different species than those in Shantou.

By the time Percival became captivated by the perfect arc of Cecilia’s neck, and by the slight pout which rested naturally upon her lips, she was already going out of her way to defy the introductions that her mother, Sai Tai, coordinated. Wealthy Hong Kong society offered its suitors by the handful to the heiress of the colony’s biggest Chinese-owned shipping fleet. One after another, Cecilia declared them unsuitable. One boy had bad skin, another was too pretty. One did not have enough money, and another bragged tiresomely about his family’s wealth. Also, she complained, that last one drove his car too slowly.

Percival heard all this by eavesdropping on Cecilia’s gossip with her girlfriends. He didn’t stand a chance, he concluded, but that didn’t keep his thoughts from being frequently invaded by Cecilia. She was unlike any girl he had ever encountered. She used none of the suppressed giggles or blushing avoidance of other girls her age. Cecilia entered movie theatres alone, people whispered. She was spotted at the betting window of the Happy Valley racetrack. She made wagers on new, unknown horses and won. Some of the less affluent students at St. Paul tut-tutted that Cecilia’s behaviour was disgraceful, and whispered with smug reproach that great wealth did not buy proper behaviour. Boys either found her strangely threatening or desired her with intensity, as Percival did.

Once, when he was trailing her longingly, she turned suddenly and stared straight at him. She fixed his eyes immediately. How could he have known, at that naive age, that these were the eyes of a cat who had found its mouse? He became hot, flushed. She was ivory-skinned perfection, her lips pursed. Then she tilted her nose up slightly and turned slowly away, so that Percival tortured himself for days afterwards, trying to decide whether she had been amused or offended by his interest.

At Christmas, the chaperoned school dance for the girls of St. Paul and the boys of La Salle was held in a respectable banquet hall on Queen’s Road. As the band began to play the easy three-beat rhythm of a waltz under the watchful eyes of the priests and nuns, Percival finally managed to summon the courage to approach Cecilia, resplendent in a peony-patterned gown. He crossed the now vast dance floor and managed to get out the words he had rehearsed. “I am Chen Pie Sou, will you dance with me?”