The Piano Teacher

Trudy has a body like a child’s – all slim hips and tiny feet. She is flat as a board, her breasts not even buds. Her arms are as slender as her wrists, her hair a sleek, smoky brown, her eyes wide and Western, with the lid-fold. She wears form-fitting sheaths, sometimes the qipao, slim tunics, narrow trousers, always flat silk slippers. She wears gold or brown lipstick, wears her hair shoulder-length, straight, and has black, kohl-lined eyes. She looks nothing like any of the other women at events – with their blowsy, flowing, floral skirts, carefully permanent-waved hair, red lipstick. She hates compliments – when people tell her she’s beautiful, she says instantly, ‘But I have a moustache!’ And she does, a faint golden one you can see only in the sun. She is always in the papers although, she explains, that’s more because of her father than because she is beautiful. ‘Hong Kong is very practical in that way,’ she says. ‘Wealth can make a woman beautiful.’ She is often the only Chinese at a party, although she says she’s not really Chinese – she’s not really anything, she says. She’s everything, invited everywhere. Cercle Sportif Français, the American Country Club, the Deutsche Garten Club, she is welcome, an honorary member of everything.

Her best friend is her second cousin Dommie, Dominick Wong, the man from the races. They meet every Sunday night for dinner at the Gripps, and gossip over what transpired at the parties over the weekend. They grew up together. Her father and his mother are cousins. Will is starting to see that everyone in Hong Kong is related in one way or another – everyone who matters, that is. Victor Chen, Trudy’s other cousin, is always in the papers for his business dealings, or he and his wife, Melody, are smiling out from photographs in the society pages.

Dominick is a fine-chiselled boy-man, a bit effeminate, with a long string of lissome, dissatisfied girlfriends. Will is never invited to Trudy’s dinners with Dommie. ‘Don’t be cross. You wouldn’t have fun,’ she says, trailing a cool finger over his cheek. ‘We chatter away in Shanghainese and it would be so tedious to have to explain everything to you. And Dommie’s just about a girl anyway.’

‘I don’t want to go,’ he says, trying to keep his dignity.

‘Of course you don’t, darling.’ She laughs. She pulls him close. ‘I’ll tell you a secret.’

‘What?’ Her jasmine smell brings to mind the waxy yellow flower, her skin as smooth, as impermeable.

‘Dommie was born with eleven fingers. Six on the left hand. His family had it removed when he was a baby, but it keeps growing back! Isn’t that the most extraordinary thing? I tell him it’s the devil inside. You can keep pruning it, but it’ll always come back,’ she whispers. ‘Don’t tell a soul. You’re the first person I’ve ever told! And Dominick would have my head if he knew! He’s quite ashamed of it!’

Hong Kong is a village. At the RAF ball, Dr Richards was found in the linen room at the Gloucester with a chambermaid; at the Sewells’ dinner party, Blanca Morehouse had too much to drink and started to take off her blouse – you know about her past, don’t you? Trudy, his very opinionated and biased guide to society, finds the English stuffy, the Americans tiresomely earnest, the French boring and self-satisfied, the Japanese horrible. He wonders aloud how she can stand him. ‘Well, you’re a bit of a mongrel,’ she says. ‘You don’t belong anywhere, just like me.’

He had arrived in Hong Kong with just a letter of introduction to an old family friend, and has found himself defined, before he has done anything to define himself, by a chance meeting with a woman who asks nothing of him except to be with her.

People talk about Trudy all the time – she is always scandalizing someone or other. They talk about her in front of him, to him, as if daring him to say something. He never gives anything away. She came down from Shanghai, where she spent her early twenties in Noël Coward’s old suite at the Cathay, and threw lavish parties on the roof terrace. She is rumoured to have fled an affair there, an affair with a top gangster who became obsessed with her; she is rumoured to have spent far too much time in the casinos, rumoured to have friends who are singsong girls, rumoured to have sold herself for a night, rumoured to be an opium addict. She is a lesbian. She is a radical. She assures him that almost none of these rumours are true. She says Shanghai is the place to be, that Hong Kong is dreadfully suburban. She speaks fluent Shanghainese, Cantonese, Mandarin, English, conversational French and a smattering of Portuguese.

In Shanghai, she says, the day starts at four in the afternoon with tea, then drinks at the Cathay or someone’s party, then dinner of hairy crab and rice wine if you’re inclined to the local, then more drinks and dancing, and you go and go, the night is so long, until it’s time for breakfast – eggs and fried tomatoes at the Del Monte. Then you sleep until three, have noodles in broth for the hangover, and get dressed for another round. Such fun. She’ll go back one of these days, she says, as soon as her father will let her.

The Biddles hire a cabana at the Lido in Repulse Bay and invite them for a day at the beach. There, they all smoke like mad and drink gimlets while Angeline complains about her life. Angeline Biddle is an old friend of Trudy’s, a small and physically unappealing Chinese woman whom she’s known since they were at primary school together. She married a very clever British businessman, whom she rules with an iron fist, and has a son away at school. They live in grand style on the Peak, where Angeline’s presence causes some discomfort as Chinese are supposed to have permission to live there, except for one family, so rich they are exempt from the rules. There is a feeling, Trudy explains to Will later, that Angeline has somehow pulled a fast one on the British who live there, and she is resented for it, although Trudy admits that Angeline is hardly the most likeable of people to begin with. In the sun, Trudy takes off her top and sunbathes, her small breasts glowing pale in contrast to the rest of her.

‘I thought you said a tan was vulgar,’ he says.

‘Shut up,’ she says.

He hears her talking to Angeline: ‘I’m just wild about him,’ she says. ‘He’s the most stern, solid person I’ve ever met.’ He supposes she is talking about him. People are not as scandalized as one might think. Simonds admits he was wrong about her.

The Englishwomen in the colony are disappointed: another bachelor taken off the market. Whispered, ‘She did swoop down and grab him before anyone even knew he was in town.’

For him, there have been others, of course – the missionary’s daughter in New Delhi, always ill and wan, though beautiful; the clever, hopeful spinster on the boat over from Penang – the women who say they’re looking for adventure but who are really looking for husbands. He’s managed to avoid the inconvenience of love for quite some time, but it seems to have found him in this unlikely place.

Women don’t like Trudy. ‘Isn’t that always the case, darling?’ she says, when, indiscreetly, he asks her about it. ‘And aren’t you a strange one for bringing it up?’ She chucks him under the chin and continues making a jug of gin and lemonade. ‘No one likes me,’ she says. ‘Chinese don’t because I don’t act Chinese enough, Europeans don’t because I don’t look at all European, and my father doesn’t like me because I’m not very filial. Do you like me?’

He assures her he does.

‘I wonder,’ she says. ‘I can tell why people like you. Besides the fact that you’re a handsome bachelor with mysterious prospects, of course. They read into you everything they want you to be. They read into me all that they don’t like.’ She dips her finger into the mix and brings it out to taste. Her face puckers. ‘Perfect,’ she says. She likes it sour.

Little secrets begin to spill out of Trudy. A temple fortune-teller told her the mole on her forehead signifies death to a future husband. She’s been engaged before, but it ended mysteriously. She tells him these secrets, then refuses to elaborate, saying he’ll leave her. She seems serious.

Trudy has two amahs. They have ‘tied their hair up together’, she explains. Two women decide not to marry and put a notice in the newspaper, like vows, declaring they will live together for ever. Ah Lok and Mei Sing are old now, almost sixty, but they live together in a small room with twin beds (‘So get that out of your mind right now,’ Trudy says lazily, ‘although we Chinese are very blasé about that sort of thing and who cares, really?’), a happy couple, except that they are both women. ‘It’s the best thing,’ Trudy says. ‘Lots of women know they’ll never get married so this is just as good. So civilized, don’t you think? All you need is a companion. That sex thing gets in the way after a while. A sisterhood thing. I’m thinking about doing it myself.’ She pays them each twenty-five cents a week and they will do anything for her. Once, he came into the living room to find Mei Sing massaging lotion on to Trudy’s hands while she was asleep on the sofa.

He never grows used to them. They completely ignore him, always talking to Trudy about him when he’s there. They tell her he has a big nose, that he smells funny, that his hands and feet are grotesque. He is beginning to understand a little of what they say, but their disapproving intonation needs no translation. Ah Lok cooks – salty, oily dishes he finds unhealthy and unappealing. Trudy eats them with relish – it’s the food she grew up with. She claims Mei Sing cleans, but he finds dust everywhere. The old woman also collects rubbish – used beer bottles, empty cold-cream jars, discarded toothbrushes – and stores it underneath her bed in anticipation of some apocalyptic event. All three women are messy. Trudy has the utter disregard for her surroundings that belongs to those who have been waited on since birth. She never cleans up, never lifts a finger, but neither do the amahs. They have picked up her habits – a peculiar symbiosis. Trudy defends them with the ferocity of a child defending her parents. ‘They’re old,’ she says. ‘Leave them alone. I can’t bear people who poke at their servants.’

She pokes at them, though. She argues with them when the flower man comes and Ah Lok wants to give him fifty cents and Trudy says to give him what he asks. The flower man is called Fa Wong, king of flowers, and he comes round the neighbourhood once a week, giant woven baskets slung from his brown, wiry shoulders, filled with masses of flowers. He calls, ‘Fa yuen, fa yuen,’ in a low monotonous pitch, and people wave him up to their flats. He and the amahs love to spar and they go at it for ages, until Trudy comes to break it up and give the man his money. Then Ah Lok gets angry and scolds her for giving in too easily. The old lady and the lovely young woman, their arms filled with flowers, go into the kitchen, where the blooms will be distributed into vases and scattered around the house. He watches them from his chair, his book spread over his lap, his eyes hooded as if in sleep – he watches her.

He is almost never alone, these days, always with her. It is something different for him. He used to like solitude, but now he craves her presence all the time. He’s gone without this drug for so long, he’s forgotten how compelling it is. When he is at the office, pecking away at the typewriter, he thinks of her laughing, drinking tea, smoking, the rings puffing up in front of her face. ‘Why do you work?’ she asks. ‘It’s so dreary.’

Discipline, he thinks. Don’t fall down that rabbit hole. But it’s useless. She’s always there, ringing him on the phone, ready with plans for the evening. When he looks at her, he feels weak and happy. Is that so bad?

They are eating brunch at the Repulse Bay, and reading the Sunday paper when Trudy looks up.

‘Why do they let these awful companies have advertisements?’ she asks. ‘Listen to this one – “Why suffer from agonizing piles?” Is there a need for that? Can’t they be a little bit more oblique?’ She shakes the newspaper at him. ‘There’s an illustration of a man suffering from piles! Is that really necessary?’

‘My heart,’ he says, ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’ A displaced Russian in a dinner jacket plays the piano behind him.

‘Oh,’ she says, as if an afterthought. ‘My father wants to meet you. He wants to meet the man I’ve been spending so much time with.’ She is nonchalant, too much so. ‘Are you free tonight?’

‘Of course,’ he says.

They go for dinner at the Gloucester, where Trudy tells him the story of her parents’ meeting while they’re waiting at the bar. She is drinking brandy, unusual for her, which makes him think she might be more nervous than she is letting on. She swirls it, takes a delicate whiff, sips.

‘My mother was a great Portuguese beauty – her family had been in Macau for ages. They met there. My father was not as successful then, although he came from a well-to-do family. He had just started up a business selling widgets or something. He’s very clever, my father. Don’t know why I turned out to be such a dim bulb.’ Her face lights up. ‘Here he is!’ She leaps off the stool and rushes over to give her father a kiss. Will had expected a big, confident man with the aura of power. Instead, Mr Liang is small and diffident, with an ill-cut suit and an air of sweetness. He seems to be overwhelmed by the vitality of his daughter. He lets Trudy wash over him, like a force of nature, much as everyone else in Hong Kong does, Will thinks. The head waiter seats them with much hovering and solicitous hand-waving, which neither Trudy nor her father seems to notice. They speak to each other in Cantonese, which makes her seem like a different person entirely.

Their food is brought to them, as if preordained. ‘Should we order?’ he ventures, and their faces are astonished.

‘You only eat certain dishes here,’ they say.

Trudy calls for champagne. ‘This is a momentous occasion,’ she declares. ‘My father’s not met many of my beaux. You’re over the first hurdle.’

Wan Kee Liang does not ask Will about his life or his work. Instead, they exchange pleasantries, talk about the horse races and the war. When Trudy excuses herself to go to the powder room, her father motions for Will to come closer.

‘You are not a rich man,’ he says.

‘Not like you, but I do all right.’ How odd to assume.

‘Trudy is very spoiled girl, and want many things.’ The man’s face betrays nothing.

‘Yes,’ Will says.

‘Not good for woman to pay for anything.’

Trudy’s father hands him an envelope. ‘Here is money for you to take Trudy out. Will cover expenses for a long time. Not good for Trudy to be paying all time.’

Will is taken aback. ‘I can’t take that,’ he says. ‘I’ve never let Trudy pay for a meal.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ the man waves his hand. ‘Good for your relationship.’

Will refuses and puts the envelope on the table, where it sits until they see Trudy approaching. Trudy’s father puts it back in his suit jacket. ‘Not meant to be insult,’ he says. ‘I want best for Trudy. So best for her means best for you. This means little to me, but might make difference for you two.’

‘I appreciate the thought,’ Will says. ‘But I can’t.’ He lets it go at that.

The next week, Will receives letters in the post from restaurants and clubs around town informing him that his accounts have been opened and are ready for use. One has scribbled a note in the margin, ‘Just come in. You won’t even need to sign. We look forward to seeing you.’ The tone: apologetic to a good customer, but deferring to the wishes of their best.

He is a little irritated, but not so much, more bemused than anything. He puts the letters in a drawer. He supposes, to Wan Kee Liang, that everyone looks like a pauper, hoping for handouts. The Chinese are wise, he thinks. Or maybe it’s just Trudy’s family.

Trudy loves the Parisian Grill, is great friends with the owner, a Greek married to a local Portuguese who sees no irony in the fact that he serves the froggiest of foods. She refuses absolutely to go to a Chinese restaurant with Will, will only go when with Chinese people who, she says, are the only ones who appreciate the food the way it should be.

The Greek who runs the Parisian Grill, his name is now Henri, changed from God knows what, loves Trudy, views her as a daughter, and his wife, Elsbieta, treats her like a sister. She goes there for first drinks almost every night, often ends evenings there as well. Henri and Elsbieta are polite to him, but with a certain reserve. He thinks they have seen too many of Trudy’s beaux. He wants to protest that he is the one in danger, protest over the red vinyl banquettes, the smoky white candles burned down to smudgy lumps, but he never does.

They meet everyone at the Parisian Grill. It is the sort of place one goes to when one is new in town or old, or bored. Hong Kong is small, and eventually, everyone ends up there. One night, they have drinks at the bar with a group of visiting Americans and are invited to dinner with them.

Trudy tells their new friends that she loves Americans, their open-handed extravagance, their loud talk and braying confidence. When someone brings up the war, she pretends not to hear, instead going on about the qualities she feels all Americans have. They have a sense of the world being incomparably large, she says and that they are able to … not colonize, but spread through all countries, spending their money like water, without guilt or too much self-consciousness. She loves that. The men are tall and rangy, with long faces and quick decisions, and the women leave them be, isn’t that wonderful?, because they’re so busy with their own committees and plans. They invite all and sundry to their events, and they serve marvellous items like potato salads and ham and cheese sandwiches. And, unless there is a very special type of Englishman present (she tips her head towards Will), they tend to diminish the other men in the room. It’s very odd, but she’s seen it. Haven’t you noticed that? If she had it all to do over again, she says to the dinner-table, she would come back as an American. Lacking that possibility, she’ll marry one. Or maybe just move there, if someone objects to her marrying an American – said with eyes cast down demurely as a joke.

Will thinks back to when she complained that Americans were tiresomely earnest, and just smiles. She has free will, he says simply. He would never do anything to stop her from doing what she wants. The Americans applaud. An enlightened man, says a woman with red lips and an orange dress.

Life is easy. At the office, he is expected in at nine thirty, then a two-hour lunch is not uncommon, and they knock off at five for drinks. He can go out every night, play all weekend, do whatever he wants. Trudy’s friends move to London and want someone responsible to take care of their flat, so Will moves to May Road and pays the ludicrous rent of two hundred Hong Kong dollars, and this only after much wrangling to persuade Sudie and Frank Chen to take anything at all. They all go out for dinner, and it’s very civilized.

‘You’re doing us a favour!’ they cry, as they pour more champagne.

‘You really are, Will,’ Trudy says. ‘No one in all Hong Kong would agree to do anything so nice for the Chens, you know. They’ve awful reputations around here – that’s why they’re leaving.’

‘Be that as it may,’ Will says. ‘I have to pay something.’

‘We’ll talk about it later,’ the Chens say, but they never do. Instead they drink four splits of champagne and end up going to the beach at midnight to hunt for crabs by candlelight.

May Road is different from Happy Valley, his old neighbourhood. Filled with expatriates and their servants, it is a bourgeois suburb of England, or how he’d always imagined one to be. Children walk obediently next to their amahs, matrons climb into the backs of their chauffeured cars; it’s much quieter than the chattering bustle of his old haunt. He misses Happy Valley, the vitality of it, the loud, rude locals, the lively shops.

But then there is Trudy. Trudy has a large place not five minutes from him. He walks the winding road to her flat every day, having picked up fresh clothes after work.

‘Isn’t this nice?’ she says, lavishing him with kisses at the door. ‘Isn’t it delicious that you’re so close and not in that dreadful Happy Valley? I do think the only time I’d go there before I met you was when I needed plimsolls for the beach. There’s this wonderful shop …’

And then she’s on to something else, crying out to Ah Lok that the flowers are browning, or that there’s a puddle in the foyer. At Trudy’s, there’s no talk of war, no fighting except squabbling with the servants, no real troubles. There’s only ease and her sweet, lilting laugh. He slips gratefully into her world.

June 1952

Claire had been waking at the same time every night. Twenty-two minutes after three. By now, she knew it without even looking at the clock. And every night, after she started awake, she would look over at the hulking shape of her husband as he slept, and she would be calmed from the shock of consciousness. His chest rose and fell evenly as his nose reverberated with a gentle snore. He always slept heavily, aided by the several beers he drank every evening.

She sat up, clapped loudly twice, her hands stiff, the sound like two bullets in the night. Martin shifted at the noise, then breathed freely. That trick was one of the few that her mother had imparted about married life. The clock now showed three twenty-three.

She tried to go back to sleep. She had done it once or twice before, fallen back asleep before her body got too awake. Breathing softly, she lay flat on her back and felt the damp linen sheet beneath and the light weight of the cotton quilt on top. It was so humid she could only wear a thin nightdress to bed, and even that grew sticky after a day or two. She must buy a new fan. The old one had sputtered to a standstill last week, caked with mossy mould. A fan, and also some more electric cord. And lightbulbs. She mustn’t forget lightbulbs. She breathed lightly, over the slight rumble of Martin starting up again. Should she write the things down? She would remember, she tried to tell herself. But she knew she would get up and write them down, so as not to forget, so as not to obsess about forgetting, and then she would be up and unable to go back to sleep. It was settled. She got up softly and felt her way out of the mosquito netting, disturbing a resting mosquito that buzzed angrily in her ear before flying away. The pad was lying on a table next to the bed, and she pencilled her list.

Then, the real reason. She reached into the depths of the bureau and felt around carefully for the bag. It was a cloth bag, one she had got for free at a bazaar, and it was large and full. She pulled it out quietly.

Going into the bathroom, she switched on the light. The bath was full of water. There hadn’t been rain for several months now, and the government was starting to ration. Yu Ling filled the bath every evening, between five and seven o’clock when the water was on, for their use during the day.

Claire set the bag down, dipped a bucket into the water and wet a cloth to wipe her face. Then she sat on the cool tiled floor and pulled up her nightdress so that she could place the bag between her legs.

She tumbled out the contents.

There were more than thirty items glittering up at her. More than thirty costly necklaces, scarves, ornaments, perfume bottles. They looked almost tawdry, jumbled together in the harsh bathroom light, against the white tiles, so Claire laid down a towel and separated them, so that each had a few inches of space, a cushion against the floor. There. Now they looked like the expensive items they were. Here was a ring, thick, beautifully worked gold, with what was probably turquoise. She slipped it on to her finger. And here was a handkerchief, so sheer she could see the pale pink of her palm underneath it. She sprayed it with perfume, a small round bottle of it, called Jazz. On the bottle, there was a drawing of two women dancing in flapper dresses. She waved the scented handkerchief around. Jasmine. Too heavy. She did her hair with the tortoiseshell comb, rubbed French hand lotion into her fingers, then carefully applied lipstick. Then she clipped on heavy gold earrings and tied a scarf round her head.