Jane Gardam - The Man in the Wooden Hat

The girl selling was shivering with cold because of the new, Western-style air conditioning. She looked ill and resentful. Elisabeth moved the ready-made silk dresses along the rails and found her fingertips covered with oil. She showed them to the sneezing girl, who at first looked away in denial. Then, when Elisabeth said in Cantonese, “Please take a cloth to the rails at once!” went to get one and at the same moment Elisabeth saw a sea-green silk, the dress of a lifetime. She held her black oily fingers out to let the girl clean her hands and when the girl had finished said, “I would like that one.” The girl shrugged and moved her hands in a disenchanted gesture that Elisabeth might want to try it on and Elisabeth said, “No, thank you. It will be perfect. Have you shoes to match?” She paid for it (a price) and walked back towards the hotel room. It was still empty of Lizzie and there was no message light on the bedside telephone. She stood the stiff paper bag on her bed and went to find a hairdresser.

The hairdresser preened above her head.

“Is it for an occasion?”

“I don’t know. Well, yes, I’m going out tonight.”

The hairdresser smiled and smiled, dead-eyed. Elisabeth had the notion that somewhere there was dislike.

“Would you like colour?”

“I don’t know.”

“Would you like to be more seriously red?”

“No. No, not at all.” (Am I making sense?) “Just wash my hair, please. Take the aeroplane out of it.”

“ Aeroplane out of it.” Silly giggle.

High on the wall above the line of basins, probably unnoticed for years, was a studio photograph, from before the war, of an English woman of a certain age, her hair sculpted into marcel waves, her ageing manicured hand all rings. And she was resting her cheek against it. Her mouth was dark and sharp with lipstick, her fingernails dark with varnish. Her smile was benevolent but genuine and sweet, and she had signed her name across the corner with I shall remember you all . She was so like Elisabeth’s mother’s Bridge-playing friends in old Tiensin that for a moment Elisabeth smelled the dust of her early childhood that had settled on everything without and within, covered her mother’s dressing-table mirrors, the long parchment scrolls on the walls, the tea tray with cups and silver spoons, the little grey butterfly cakes, the cigarette cases and cigar lighters and dried grasses in china vases. Memory released an instant image, and sound too, for she heard her mother’s laugh as the amah carried her into the room to sit quietly at her mother’s feet for half an hour as the four ladies gazed at their cards and smoked their cigarettes. Her mother would look at her sometimes to check that she was tidy, and she would smile back, at her mother in the silk tea gown, silk stockings, the boat-shaped silk shoes, a diamond ring (where had it gone?) glinting through the dust in the shaft of sunlight through the blinds.

“Who is that woman?”

The hairdresser looked up at the photograph. “Oh, it will be a client from before the war. Long ago.”

“Can you read her name?”

A long giggle. “No, no! We must take it down. It is old. The frame is very old-fashioned. The salon will be modernised soon.”

“She must have liked you all. The frame is expensive. Was she the Governor’s wife?”

All the girls laughed. The embarrassed, tinkling laughter.

“There are fly spots on it. We must take it down.”

“I think she gave it to you before she left for Home. Maybe when the war began. Before the Japanese.” They laughed again, watching her. She saw that one girl was Japanese. Elisabeth’s hair was being dried by a new-fangled hand-held blower, like a gun. The woman would have sat for over half an hour under a metal helmet that roared in her reddening ears while she wrote letters on her knee or drifted among copies of Country Life or The Royal Geographical Magazine or John o’London’s —happy, loving her warm unhurried life, sure of the future, certain that she and her country were admired. She would always have left a tip, but unostentatiously, and at Christmas — but not at the Chinese New Year — she’d arrive with little presents for everyone wrapped in paper printed with mistletoe and holly, which none of the girls had ever seen. Little Christmas puddings and mince pies that would all be thrown away. How do I know all this?

“She is like my mother.”

“We must take it down.”

The hairdresser brought her some tea.

Back at the Old Colony there was still no message from Edward so the Case must by now be groaning into life: a Case about land reclamation. Edward was for the architects, Veneering for the contractors. The villagers living on the doomed land were for neither, and nobody represented them except the legendary monsters and serpents that lurked in the depths below the site which was at present a marsh where they had always wallowed in the imagination, seeking whom they might devour. The projected dam would produce water for the new Hong Kong which would arrive years and years later, after the handover. The villagers came out after dark to appease the monsters with offerings and saucers of milk. In the morning the Western engineers removed the untouched offerings. Nothing was getting done.

Elisabeth, in her frowsty bedroom, the beds still not made, sent for a room-service lunch and when it came did not want it. She slept, and woke at six o’clock. No phone messages, no word from Edward or Lizzie. She combed her new shiny hair and thought of the photograph of the virtuous woman who looked like her mother. Then she took the sea-green dress and slid it on. There was a small, matching, sea-green purse on a string. She slipped it over her shoulder. Then she put on her evening shoes. Pale, silk, high-heeled sandals. Then she looked out of the window.

(“I’ll send a car. Six-thirty.”)

It had been a time so early in the morning, half in dream, half in nightmare. Perhaps it had all been imagined.

Only hours ago she had been all set to become the next reincarnation of a virtuous woman, like the one in the benevolent photograph. She had stood beside her man — and how her parents would have approved of Edward Feathers — watching the stars in the heavens, thinking that she would tell her children about how she had said “I will” and had meant it. She saw her mother’s face, imprisoned in the emptiness of Empire and diplomacy.

A cab was standing by itself without lights across the road from the Old Colony. She turned the notice in Chinese characters on her door to Do Not Disturb . She left no message. She took the lift down. She carried only the little green purse. It had her passport in it and her final travellers’ cheque ticket strip, but not her return ticket to England.

As she walked over to the dark cab, the driver got out and opened the passenger door. He said, “Veneering?” and she said, “Yes.”

They turned quickly away from the lights and quays, then inland. As they climbed, the traffic and people thinned and they drove towards the New Territories among cities of unfinished blocks of workers’ flats, all in darkness, waiting for the New Age. The road curved and climbed, flattened and then climbed again. It climbed into trees, through trees and then into thick woods.

Woods?

She had not known about the woods of Hong Kong. Woods were for lush landscapes. She had believed that outside the city all would be sandy and bare. The cab plunged now deep into a black forest. The sky was gone and the road levelled and began to drop down again. The cab turned on to an unmade-up track. Small dancing lights began to appear, around them, like a huge entourage, the moving shadows of hundreds of people carrying the lights in their hands.