The Palace of Heavenly Pleasure (7 page)

‘Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name…'

‘I hate you,' Hiram screamed, through his tears.

‘Forgive us our trespasses and lead us not into temptation…'

‘I'll leave you, Father.' Hiram's voice was a panicked croak. ‘I'll walk out. I will. I will.'

‘For Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory…'

Hiram sobbed a last despairing sob. Then, pointing a thin arm at his father, he yelled, ‘God damn you. I'll never, never come back,' and hurled himself away into the crowd.

‘… for ever and ever, Amen,' chanted the Millwards.

‘Hiram! Hiram!' called the doctor, but it took some moments for him to break through the stunned mass of people, some of whom were beginning to disperse in disgust. By the time he reached the open square, the boy had disappeared round a
pailou,
into an alley between two tall houses and away.

Airton felt strangely humiliated by the incident. Besides his concern for the boy and a sense of responsibility for what would now happen to him, he was incensed by Septimus Millward. The man was a menace—his eccentricities had a negative, possibly dangerous, effect on the reputation of Christianity in the town, and the standing of the foreign community as a whole. In the common people's eyes he was a buffoon but to some his unintelligible mumbo-jumbo smacked of sorcery. His cruelty to his own family was unspeakable, and his power over them unnatural. The doctor wondered whether he was clinically deranged. The Millwards were still crouched in positions of prayer. The crowd had lost interest, the spectacle over, and only one or two stragglers remained, but someone had thrown an egg at Septimus and his beard was sticky with running yolk.

‘Millward,' Airton called. ‘Listen to me, man.'

It was as if Septimus had not heard him.

‘Millward,' he shouted, ‘get a hold of yourself. What are you going to do about your boy?'

Septimus opened his blue eyes and stared expressionlessly at Airton. ‘“If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee”,' he said coldly. ‘I will pray for him.'

‘For God's sake, man, consider rationally. Hiram's only a boy.'

‘He has left the House of God, Dr Airton. If he comes back in repentance, I will surely kill the fatted calf and rejoice in the return of the prodigal. Until then he is no son of mine.'

‘For Heaven's sake.' The man was beyond reason. ‘Mrs Millward. Laetitia,' he appealed. Tears were misting her glasses, but she spoke calmly. ‘My husband has spoken, Dr Airton. I will be governed by him. I also pray that the devil releases my boy.' Her last words were lost in a shaking sob. Mildred put her arms round her mother protectively and glared angrily at the doctor.

‘Leave us to our sorrow, Doctor,' said Septimus. ‘You can do nothing here.'

‘I can at least try to find your son,' said Airton. He turned angrily on his heel. Then he faced Septimus again, began to speak, but words failed him. ‘When I find him I'll take him to my hospital,' he said lamely. ‘Please, reconsider your duty as parents.' He left the family at their prayers.

The young artisan who had made the original mockery of Septimus was still loitering with his friends. As the doctor passed he made a humorous face and laughed. Airton scowled at him. ‘I'll have no cheek from you, you scabrous son of a bastard turtle. Get out of my way, you stinking offspring of a mule and a blind snake.' The young man grinned broadly, delighted at the fluent string of Chinese invective.

‘Ta made!'
he swore. ‘One of them can speak a proper language after all!' And Airton had the humiliation of being clapped on the back for the third time that day. Furiously, he pushed the man aside and moved on, through the
pailou
at the southern end of the square, and down the main street towards the great gate of the city and his home.

*   *   *

The hospital and the doctor's house were located about two miles outside the city gates on a small bluff above some wheatfields. The doctor had first acquired the compound, originally the home of a prosperous farmer, during the plague year as a makeshift recuperation centre away from the poisonous fumes in the town. It had been in constant use ever since as a mission hospital. Over the years he had converted the mud-and-wattle dwellings into modest brick cottages surrounding three interconnected courtyards in the Chinese style. He had replaced the thatched roofs with neat grey tiles, and enlarged the windows, installing clear glass panes in red wooden frames. Nellie had planted trees and flowers in the courtyards. In spring bees buzzed among the azaleas and the cherry blossom, and in summer sparrows twittered and crickets chirped in the leaves of the plane trees shading the yard. At all times it had the comforting feel of a peaceful, rural retreat. The rooms were airy and clean inside, with pinewood floors and whitewashed walls. Sister Caterina, one of the two nuns whom Airton employed, said that the little hospital reminded her of the convent in her hometown in Tuscany.

The buildings in the first courtyard consisted of a storage room and pharmacy, and the surgery where Airton treated his outpatients. Every morning at seven o'clock, his chief Chinese assistant, Zhang Erhao, would open the gate and the sick would file in to sit patiently on the benches by Nellie's favourite dwarf pine, or in winter gather around the charcoal stove in a cleared-off section of the storehouse. Not only townsfolk came, with their boils, their toothache and their sciatica, but also peasants from further afield. Often they walked all night through the countryside to get here, or were pulled on handcarts by their families if they were too ill or injured to move. These large-limbed peasants, with their broad, wind-burned northern features, would sit stolidly for hours, bearing any degree of pain, waiting for a few moments of the foreign doctor's time. Such was Airton's reputation and skill that they rarely went away unsatisfied, though the doctor himself was only too aware how little he could do with his few drugs and bandages, and that the one disease he could never hope to cure was poverty.

The main building facing the gate contained the chapel. Each evening at six thirty the little community would gather there for evening prayers, singing the hymns that had been translated into Mandarin by the Missionary Society. The courtyard beyond was the preserve of the two Italian nuns, Sisters Caterina and Elena, whose white-habited figures could be seen moving energetically between the three wards opening on to the flower garden. The Catholic sisters had early taken on themselves the responsibility of nursing the bedridden patients, and even Nellie hardly ever intervened in their little kingdom. The two women were both in their late twenties. They had originally come to Shishan to assist Father Adolphus, a saintly, grey-bearded Jesuit scholar who had lived in Shishan ever since anyone could remember—but tragically their arrival had coincided with the beginnings of the bubonic-plague epidemic, which had claimed Father Adolphus among its earliest victims. Airton had found the two nuns in one of the worst-stricken areas looking after the orphans of families whose parents had perished. He had immediately taken them on as nurses and helpers. After the epidemic, he had written to the head of their mission in Rome, praising their courage and selflessness, and requesting that until a replacement for Father Adolphus could be found the nuns stay with him in Shishan. They had been with him ever since. Once a year at Easter they would travel to Tientsin for communion and confession, but otherwise they lived with the Airtons as members of his family, sharing in all the activities of his own mission, even participating in the services in his chapel. They were both of Italian peasant stock and were simple, cheerful souls. Sister Elena's merry laugh was as much a part of the hospital as the smell of carbolic and iodine in the wards. They lived in a wing of the third courtyard, which also served as dormitory and school for the various orphans they had befriended during the epidemic; some of the older children were now grown-up enough to become willing helpers in the hospital.

Airton and Nellie and their own children, with their servants, Ah Lee and Ah Sun—a Cantonese couple who had looked after the doctor since he had first come to China fifteen years before—lived in a yellow stucco bungalow separated from the hospital compound by a short walk. It was a sprawling building, surrounded by a well-kept lawn and bounded by a wooden fence. Its sitting room and dining room would not have been out of place in his native Edinburgh. At his own expense he had shipped out furniture and family portraits, wallpaper, Sheffield cutlery, curtains, Nellie's pianoforte and, her pride and joy, a modern cast-iron stove from Birmingham, which kept the house beautifully heated in winter and allowed hot water at any hour of the day. The doctor loved this house; he loved the smell of polished wooden floors, the aroma of bacon and hot buttered toast in the morning, the chatter of his children in their nursery, the absolute quiet of his study—but for a year now the long white corridors had seemed empty. He bitterly missed the company of his elder children. His fourteen-year-old son, Edmund, and his daughter, Mary, three years younger, had been sent back to Scotland the previous summer in the care of the Gillespies, missionary friends from Tientsin, and were now at boarding school in Dundee. Both Nellie and Airton knew that one day the younger children, Jenny and George, aged ten and eight respectively, would follow. For now, they were of an age that they could attend school in the hospital with the orphans. It was the doctor's joke, and one endlessly relayed by the two nuns, that Nellie, despite her affection for Sisters Caterina and Elena, was convinced that her children would grow up to be papists under their tutelage, and that was why she insisted on sitting in whenever they gave Bible classes. Nellie would smile along with them, but it was a wry smile: there was an element of truth behind the jest.

Jenny and George greeted Airton clamorously as he came through the door. He was tired, irritated and sticky from the heat. He longed for a bath. It had been a frustrating afternoon. As soon as he had arrived at the hospital on his return from town he had instructed Zhang Erhao and some of the other helpers to conduct a search for Hiram. Zhang had been deliberately obtuse and had only reluctantly set out after much persuasion. Sister Elena had then come to him with a hysterical complaint that moths had eaten the new shipment of cotton bandages, and it had taken him several minutes to calm her down. Then he had had to conduct complicated surgery on a wagoner whose leg had been crushed in a collision between two carts. And finally, at dusk, Zhang Erhao had returned to report that Hiram had disappeared. He had been spotted leaving the city with some of his street-urchin friends in the direction of the Black Hills. Zhang had shaken his head sadly, miming a throat being cut. ‘Iron Man Wang,' he whispered. ‘Very bad.' On Airton's dismissal of this preposterous conclusion, Zhang had grinned. ‘Maybe it'll be a ransom demand first,' he said. ‘
Then
he'll cut his throat!' Airton told him to get a lantern and search through the night, if need be. Zhang had left, his shoulders shaking with silent mirth, knowing that he had successfully irritated his master; this minor malicious triumph somewhat compensated for the chore he had to perform.

Airton sank into his armchair and gratefully received a glass of whisky from Ah Lee. Nellie was sewing at her table but smiled at him, a thread between her teeth. He smiled back. What a fine-looking woman she was, with her auburn hair piled high above a wide forehead, her firm jaw and her steady blue eyes. She was beginning to show slight signs of ageing, a greying near the temple, a ruddiness of the cheeks and at the tip of her nose, perhaps a hardening of the worry lines around her mouth, but her movements were lithe and her carriage erect. With her tall height and broad shoulders she possessed a natural stateliness. He reached into his waistcoat for his watch. He had half an hour to relax before they were due in chapel. He knew he should tell Nellie about Hiram. She would be more disturbed than he—but for the moment he did not want to think about that unpleasantness. Instead he told her about his meeting with Frank Delamere and the imminent arrival of Helen Frances.

‘I hope she's not going to be one of these modern young women,' said Nellie.

‘Oh, do be pleased about it,' sighed the doctor. ‘It's the only piece of good news I've had this whole dreadful day.'

‘You poor wee dear,' said Nellie. ‘I thought you enjoyed the days you go off and talk to that murderous old Mandarin.'

But Airton felt no desire to explain his bad mood. Morosely he sipped his whisky, wondering what he would say in chapel in half an hour. He thought of Septimus's dreadful sermon, his ludicrous reference to the Samson story, and then he began to chuckle. ‘He fell off the roof!'

‘What, dear?'

‘Nothing, my love. Just thinking of what text we might use for the lesson this evening. What about a bit of Judges? The story of Samson, perhaps. “Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness.”'

‘If your mind is still on Mr Delamere and his daughter, I think it would be very inappropriate. I can't think that much sweetness could come out of a wicked old lion like him, however pretty young Helen Frances might set herself out to be.'

‘Oh, Nellie, how cruel you are,' said Airton. ‘And you haven't even met the girl!'

But they were both laughing. Nellie moved over and pecked her husband on the cheek. The door burst open: the children bounced in, and in a moment the whole Airton family was wrestling on the sofa, a scramble of limbs and flying cushions.

Two

We pray in the temple for rain—but still the sun beats down on dry fields.

 

The British Legation was holding a picnic in the Western Hills. The cavalcade of broughams, carriages, palanquins, and horse riders had set out at six in the morning, escorted by a troop of mounted servants. Sir Claude MacDonald, Queen Victoria's Minister to the Imperial Court, doyen of the diplomatic community and senior spokesman of those Western nations, including Japan and the USA, with an established and powerful presence in China, had quietly left Peking the night before and he and his wife were already waiting for their guests in the Taoist temple that they had converted into a weekend villa.