‘So there we are in Yokohama, in this room with walls made out of, what, toothpicks and paper, and I’ve got my boots off. I don’t feel happy about that at all. We’re sitting cross-legged. It’s putting my legs to sleep. Brinkley’s pushing all these damned oddly shaped little dishes at me. I hardly recognise a thing. All very pretty but it doesn’t look like food. This is food.’ Lionel James pointed to his plate of boiled mutton with caper sauce. ‘You know what all that sushi-shimi stuff looked like to me? It looked just like the titbits of information on the war that the Japanese government is doling out to correspondents in lieu of access to the front. Nicely packaged, wholly insubstantial. This doesn’t bother our colleague Brinkley, though. Neither the quality of the information nor the food. Our man in Japan has gone completely native. Speaks the lingo, eats raw fish with sticks, has taken a little Japanese missus. He’s telling me the Japanese have the most developed aesthetic in the world; couldn’t be more proud of his adopted country’s achievements if they were his own. He pushes a plate towards me. On it is something that looks like wet shoelaces left behind by leprechauns. “Seaweed,” he says, as if that will really make me go for it. Then he urges on me something that looks like a block of milk. It falls apart on my camp fork and tastes like damp. He tells me it has as much protein as a plate of chops. That’s when I know he has passed the point of no return. I had a damned hard time keeping him on the subject.’
‘Did you meet his wife?’ Morrison asked.
‘No. I hear she is a pretty sort.’
‘That she is. It’s interesting to observe them together, for you can find the key to Brinkley in their interaction. She appears frail and ladylike, and makes a great show of deferring to her husband. In truth, she leads him by the nose no less surely than if she’d put a ring through it, as the farmers here do with their buffalo. Our uxorious colleague submits to her—and to her country—as wholeheartedly as a Mohammedan submits to Allah. I am guessing that your plan to report from the scene of the action makes him nervous, though he chooses an approach of Oriental indirectness by which to communicate his concerns.’
‘I don’t understand his reservations. The plan is a boon to our mutual employer and to journalism itself!’ James thumped the table. The crockery danced. Kuan poked his head in to see if anything was the matter. ‘Sorry, old chap,’ James apologised as the vibrations settled.
When Morrison had described James earlier to Dumas, he’d mentioned his determination. He’d forgotten that his colleague’s other leading quality was rampant excitability.
‘G.E.,’ James continued, ‘I’ve reported from Africa and India. I’ve had to get my reports out by pigeons, camels, horses, skin-floats, heliographs, bottles, field telegraph, boats and flags, cutthroat Pathans and long-limbed Ethiopians. It is ludicrous in this modern age, with all the advances made in wireless telegraphy, that we must take such risks. We have steam-powered rotary presses that can print hundreds of thousands of newspapers in an hour. But what’s the point if the news is stale?’ He went to bang on the table again but stopped himself just in time. ‘The public deserves better. We deserve better. The future of correspondence rests with the science of Hertzian waves.’
‘Indeed. This is the twentieth century after all.’ Morrison unexpectedly found himself infected with his colleague’s enthusiasm.
A grateful smile lit James’s face for a moment as he fumbled in his pockets for tobacco pouch and pipe.
‘Here’s the problem with Brinkley,’ Morrison said, watching James prepare his smoke with practised, yellow-stained fingers. ‘It’s two problems really. One is pressure from the Japanese. They’re worried about the difficulty of censoring your reports. As you know, they’re fanatical about controlling news from the battlefield. Brinkley knows that if the Japanese have any complaints, they will go to him.’
‘I will take full responsibility for my reports.’
‘That’s not how it works in the Orient.’
‘I’m not an Oriental. What’s the second problem?’
‘It’s obvious. The Japanese have been refusing all journalists, and most military attachés, access to the front. And so any news that they had given The Times permission to steam straight into the Siege of Port Arthur, on its own boat no less, would incite the rest of the correspondents violently. Your reports will make their dispatches look even more belated and second-hand than they are. Never mind the Japanese navy—the other correspondents will be watching you like a hawk. This naturally places Brinkley, as your colleague, in a deucedly awkward position.’
James sucked on his pipe, unmoved, filling the room with the scent of tobacco and a cloud of stubbornness. ‘That’s not my concern.’
Morrison liked James. He wanted him and The Times to succeed. He would try to make it happen—no, he would make it happen. It occurred to him that he was at an age and in a position in life where he ought to be able to forgo the sort of compromises forced upon youth. He did not need to sleep in short beds any longer. He had been recently unbalanced by romantic obsession and underemployment; a focus, a mission, would restore him. ‘We will get Britain’s minister in Japan, Sir Claude MacDonald, to help us.’ Morrison heard himself say the words ‘we’ and ‘us’. He was committed. It felt good.
‘Do you know Sir Claude?’ James asked hopefully. ‘Brinkley said that Sir Claude has already told him that we’re wasting our time and our employer’s money. Noel, the admiral in charge of the China Station, is apparently applying considerable pressure on the minister to go against us. Brinkley says Noel is furious at the thought that through some blunder or indiscretion we might compromise British neutrality. Or create some sort of precedent by which journalists could demand access to any future theatre of war and the right to report from it unhindered. I suspect that is the real problem, franchement.’ James pronounced the French word like a true Englishman, biting down on the ‘ch’ as though it were crackling.
‘You’d be right about that,’ Morrison said. ‘The thing about MacDonald is that he may have been a good military officer but he doesn’t have the marrow for diplomacy. He needs to be able to stand up to the likes of Noel. You know, they say Lord Salisbury only appointed MacDonald minister because Salisbury believed that MacDonald was in possession of evidence proving that he, Salisbury, was Jack the Ripper.’
James’s eyes nearly popped out of his head. ‘Is there any truth—’
‘No of course not,’ Morrison replied. ‘It’s just scuttlebutt. But it’s true that MacDonald is a vacillating and selfish old dry-as-dust who, just as water always flows downhill, will always do what’s easiest for himself. Especially if he is being pressured. You know the old joke about the difference between a diplomat and a virgin?’
‘What’s that?’
‘If a diplomat says yes, he means perhaps. If a diplomat says perhaps, he means no. If a diplomat says no, he’s no diplomat.’
‘And the virgin?’
‘If a virgin says no, she means perhaps. If a virgin says perhaps, she means yes. If a virgin says yes—well, she’s no virgin.’
‘Ha. I must remember that one.’
‘Anyway, the point is—best to act discreetly for the time being. And work on the Japanese. The rest will fall into line if you can get past them.’
‘I am the soul of discretion,’ James asserted. ‘And I am working on the Japanese.’
There was something in the way James said this that made Morrison think there was something else to the story. But if he had been hinting at something, he offered no further clues.
‘All right then,’ Morrison said after a pause. ‘I shall write to Sir Claude forthwith. I shall not mention anything about the neutrality issue as that could be tricky. Instead, in my letter I shall impress upon him how, if you are allowed to report directly from the front, The Times will be the paper of record on this war. It will reflect well on all of us and be to the glory of Britannia. I shall compliment him on the foresight and spine that he will have displayed in standing with us and make it clear that his hand will be one of those that has written this new page in the history of journalism.’
Morrison drank in the admiration on James’s face like a tonic.