The SS Hsin Fung steamed up the Whampoa River towards the Yellow Sea and Wei Hai Wei. From the bridge, Morrison watched Shanghai disappear into the distance. To one side stood Kuan; to the other a stocky Englishman with mackerel eyes and unpleasantly fleshy lips. Major F.S. Bedlow of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers was the latest correspondent dispatched by The Times to bedevil him, a human blunderbuss capable, Morrison was quite certain, of flattening any enemy with garrulousness alone. Before the SS Hsin Fung had left the Whampoa, Bedlow had confided all manner of inside intelligence about the war to a subaltern with whom he had formed a casual acquaintance. The subaltern told the chief mate who, in turn, told Morrison. A nice discreet man is our correspondent! Morrison rued inviting him to stay in Peking. Battered by Tooth and bruised by Mae, he was already downspirited enough.
Over dinner at the captain’s table, an American woman d’un certain age named Lara Ball flirted with both Morrison and the handsome chief mate. Not in the mood, Morrison excused himself to search out a comfortable nook in the smoking saloon where he might nurse a whisky and his disappointment in relative peace. He was obscurely rattled by the behaviour of Miss Bell. She was too old, he thought, for such shenanigans. Forty if she were a day!
Almost his age in fact.
Anxiety flared in him along with his sinuses.
In came Bedlow in search of fellowship. Vainly attempting to deflect conversation, Morrison huddled over his journal. Bedlow, oblivious, pulled up a chair. Morrison scrabbled in his mind for the glorious solitude of the Australian wilderness and a clarity of thought he feared he might never recover.
Gossip welled up from Bedlow like a spring. Morrison, giving up any hope of writing in his journal, found himself almost admiring the man for the tirelessness of his news gathering. And Bedlow did convey the titbit that Paul Bowles—last seen amongst the crowd sniffing after Mae at the Shanghai racetrack—had so exasperated his employers at the Associated Press that only yesterday they had recalled him to San Francisco. One down, he thought and then remembered he was no longer in the competition himself. An acute sense of loss walloped him in the guts. Muttering some excuse, he stumbled off to the cabin he was sharing with a Japanese bean merchant called Yendo.
As Yendo snuffled and snored, Morrison pitched from cold, dank thought into tempestuous dreams and back again, waking more tired than when he had gone to bed. His jaw still ached from the dentist’s mallet. Stooping in the cramped cabin, he shaved, drawing blood. In the looking glass, a sallow man with downturned mouth stared back at him. Soaking his flannel in a basin of cold water, he pressed it to his face and eyes. A marginally pinker and more vital man looked back. The corner of Morrison’s mouth twitched as he recited lines from Kipling that had given him comfort in the past:
A million surplus Maggies are willing to bear the yoke;
And a woman is only a woman, but a good Cigar is a Smoke.
God, he missed her.