Andrea Barrett - The Middle Kingdom

‘Walter’s twelve years older than me.’

‘So what’s your point? I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a badly matched couple.’

His voice was sour, and suddenly I was tired of him. Watching, judging, grading, his mouth always set as if he’d bitten something bitter. He was as fair-skinned as I was but twice as frail, the skin on the back of his hands already dotted with heat rash. I couldn’t imagine how he’d survived his tour of the southern cities. A woman holding a tray full of lukewarm juice in paper containers approached us, and Quentin stopped to examine her wares. ‘Rose hips, apple, orange,’ he read. The labels were printed in English as well as Chinese. ‘Rose hips? Do you have any ice? Do you have a straw?’

I left him to his negotiations and strode away, ignoring the pain in my feet, and a few minutes later I came around a bend and found Katherine and Walter sitting on a marble bench, much as I had sat with James Li just a few hours ago. I reminded myself that Walter always talked endlessly to anyone who flattered him; that James Li and I had also talked and smiled and it had meant nothing. The sun was so bright, the reflection off the lake so brilliant, that Walter’s head seemed almost black against the background of the water.

I sat down on the bench across from them and stripped off my shoes and then pretended to admire the view. Katherine and Walter went on talking, but they weren’t discussing their work.

‘Remember when we first saw the White Swan Hotel?’ Katherine said. ‘Like a piece of home, right there?’

‘We were so hot,’ Walter said. ‘And then all that glass and white concrete …’

‘And air-conditioning ,’ Katherine said.

‘And iced drinks,’ Walter replied.

They knew I was there; they smiled at me. But their conversation excluded me completely, and when they kept on talking I felt a stab in my temples that might have been jealousy. The memories they were sharing were supposed to have been mine; if I hadn’t been sick I would have gone on that trip. I listened hungrily, my eyes half-closed against the glare, and I tried to imagine what they’d seen.

‘That ferry,’ Katherine said, and they both laughed.

‘What ferry?’ I said. I tried to imagine it — low, with a roof and open sides, square and steel-floored and crowded. Or maybe it was small and made of wood, with glassed-in sides.

They stopped laughing. Walter composed his face and said, ‘I’m sorry, Grace — you don’t even know what we’re talking about. This was in Canton. We split from our guide for the afternoon and went wandering around on our own. And it was ninety-five degrees out, and we got lost …’

‘You and Katherine and Quentin?’ I said. I struggled to focus on what he was saying, but I was distracted. By half closing my eyes, half dreaming, I could see simultaneously all the palaces that had occupied these grounds. The palace the Emperor Qianlong had built and the ruins left after the Opium Wars, the Empress Cixi’s renovation and the rubble left after the Boxer Rebellion, the new renovation that Uncle Owen had seen, and the new destruction and the even newer repairs …

‘Me and Katherine,’ Walter said. ‘Quentin stayed in. He had diarrhea from something he’d eaten in Shanghai.’ I turned my head and saw Quentin in the distance, moving slowly from one patch of shade to the next. ‘Katherine and I had been walking along the river,’ Walter continued. ‘She found a bridge over to Shamian Island. And then we found this amazing hotel, so we went in and had lunch.’

‘A BLT,’ Katherine said. ‘With ginger ale. And ice cubes .’

There was real pleasure in her voice, and I focused on her face. Good teeth, straight nose, light brown hair, and wispy eyebrows. The kind of face that looked well outdoors. Her hands were small and sinewy. ‘You must be very homesick,’ I said.

‘The food here,’ Katherine began, and then she shook her head and smiled. ‘The sights have been wonderful, but the food …’

‘That lunch was great ,’ Walter said, as if I’d questioned it. ‘After lunch we found this ferry across the river and we took it just to be adventurous. There was this amazing market on the other side, all these animals being sold for food — snakes and eels and frogs and sparrows. Snipe, even. Monkeys. Owls.’

‘Live?’ I said. Uncle Owen had told me that Cantonese restaurants were famous for their exotic dishes. Once, when he’d been visiting our family, he and my father had roasted a saddle of venison from a deer a friend of my father’s had shot. The meat had been dark and savory and strange, and the two men had made a pungent sauce for it.

‘Live,’ Katherine said. ‘It was so outrageous. But we did what we could.’

‘It was Katherine’s idea,’ Walter said. ‘We bought as many of the birds as we could, and as soon as we’d paid for them we let them go.’

‘Right there,’ Katherine said. ‘Right in front of those cruel men. Selling wildlife like that — who ever heard of such a thing?’

‘It’s part of their culture,’ I said mildly. ‘They’ve always eaten those animals.’ Uncle Owen had eaten snake there, and wildcat and bear and more.

‘What culture?’ Walter said, and then he looked around the grounds when I made a face. ‘Oh, this,’ he said. ‘All this, I know it goes back thousands of years — but where’s the culture now? They’re thirty years behind us, and they’re destroying their own environment, killing off everything but the people.’

Katherine nodded in agreement. ‘In the fifties, they tried to kill all the songbirds here,’ she said. ‘They thought the birds were eating too much grain. And I’ve heard they kill dogs and cats in the cities for food.’

That seemed to be what she disliked about China — not the politics, not the bureaucracy or the legacy of the blood years or the reappearance of paupers and thieves, but a lack of respect for wildlife and pets. ‘You probably ate some during your trip,’ I said. ‘And didn’t even know it. My great-uncle ate cat here — he said it tasted like chicken.’

She paled and gripped her thigh with her hand. She was as thin as Walter, and their thighs on the bench looked identically long and bony. A shadow fell across my lap and I looked up to find Quentin hovering over us, the paper container that had held his drink suspended from one hand. He was damp all over and his lips were pale.

‘Aren’t you all hot?’ he said. ‘It’s so hot here, there’s no breeze …’ He sat down heavily next to me. A limnologist, I remembered. At home in cool lakes. Here he was like a fish on the shoreline, hot and scalded and sick.

‘We were telling Grace about the wild animal market,’ Katherine said. ‘In Canton.’

‘The great liberation,’ Quentin said. ‘The rescue of oppressed wildlife by the noble foreigners.’

‘Very funny,’ Walter said. ‘We did the right thing.’

‘The world’s staunchest cultural imperialist.’ Quentin crossed his ankles and stared over the lake for a minute. ‘I should have brought sunglasses,’ he said. ‘I can’t believe I forgot.’

‘I saw a kid selling some,’ I said. ‘Back at the east gate.’

Quentin ignored me and looked at Walter. ‘Did you tell her about the project yet?’

Katherine reddened and Walter shifted uneasily. ‘Not yet,’ Walter said.

Quentin turned to me. ‘Katherine’s going to spend her sabbatical in Massachusetts,’ he said. ‘In Massachusetts, at your university. Walter’s department, actually. Walter’s lab .’

The heat had made him mean. Walter glared at Quentin and folded his arms and Quentin copied the gesture. ‘It’s not for certain yet,’ Walter said.