The Father (1): The boy knew no earthly father. He was
raised by the feminine, moon-lit side of his race. All men
were his father, all women his mother.
Testimony, I:3
“So,” said Holmes. “Shanghai.”
“Yes.” Damian took a breath, either summoning his thoughts, or rousing his determination. “As I said, you might think the city was the very worst place for a man vulnerable to temptation, but after my long sobriety aboard the Bella Acqua, it was as if my body came to value its natural state, and my mind found the tight-rope act of daily life in Shanghai exhilarating. It was a challenge simply to walk down the street for a newspaper, passing two gin-joints, an opium den, and the Sikh who sold bhang from a tray.
“And there was another reason Shanghai felt right. Do you know André Breton?”
“I have heard of him,” Holmes replied. “The self-appointed spokesman for the movement known as Surrealism.”
“Now, yes. During the War, André worked at the hospital in Nantes, where he came to adapt certain psychological theories of Sigmund Freud to treat victims of shell-shock. That was where I met him, after I … after I was injured.
“André’s idea was that if one could break through the madness of shell-shock and regain access to the unconscious mind, the conscious and the unconscious might, as it were, join forces, and wholeness would be regained. He used what he calls automatism, a pure up-welling of dream-thought and dream-images, without the guidance of rational or even aesthetic concern, in various forms of art: writing, painting, sculpting, drama.
“Before long, it became clear that automatism was not merely a source of healing damaged minds, but a philosophy of life, a means of bringing together the separate realities of the human experience. Anyone who has spent time on the Front knows that, when one lifts his head from a barrage and finds dead people all around, there is a moment when life is immeasurably sweet and intensely real. In a similar way, the shock of the unexpected in a piece of art can forge a momentary link between light and dark, rationality and madness, matter-of-factness and absurdity, beauty and obscenity.
“As you see in that painting, I’d already been feeling my way in that direction before the War—the Dada movement, although Dadaism was intellectual and political compared to what André had in mind.
“Shanghai—and particularly, being a foreigner in Shanghai—might have been purposefully designed by André to illustrate and encourage the ‘surrealist’ impulse. Every moment there possesses an air of peculiarity, every corner brings a new gem of crystal-clear absurdity. My landlord, it turned out, was a policeman with a side business of child prostitutes. One of his girls used to sit in the courtyard playing the guitar and telling me of her dream to become a Catholic nun, once she had finished putting her older brother through university. The head of the missionary school where I taught for a while spent his every lunch-hour with an opium pipe. One discovered purity in the gutters and filth in the glittering shop-windows, every hour of every day.
“I found Shanghai to be the very essence of Surrealist doctrine: If the world is mad, then the maddest man is the most sane.
“So: I became sane by embracing madness. I became intoxicated by sobriety. I moved from one job to another, earning just enough to keep me fed, sheltered, and in paint. I walked and walked, I learned the language, I opened my eyes in wonder. And the images simply poured out of me.
“What I painted were intensely realistic renderings of impossibility. As one of the catalogues put it, I was their ‘Max Ernst of the East.’
“Yes, within two years, I was in a catalogue. Let me tell you how that came about.”
Holmes stirred in his chair, betraying a trace of tension. I saw the non-committal look on his face, and realised, as surely as if he had murmured it into my ear, that Damian wasn’t here by accident. I don’t know why it took so long to put it together—Damian’s almost dutiful embrace; the lengthy formal narrative in place of conversation; even his presence the moment we arrived—but I finally saw that Damian had come here to Sussex, not to establish contact with his family, but because he wanted something.
Whatever he was after, Holmes’ slight motion confirmed that we were circling in towards it now.
“I’d been there less than a year, painting furiously all the while, when a friend gathered up half a dozen paintings and took them into the International Settlement. She’d asked around, you know, to find which of the Western art galleries might be interested in my sort of thing. When she came back, she brought more money than I’d seen in years.
“Before I knew it, I was popular. More than popular, I was a Sensation, the darling of Shanghai’s international set, proof that one did not need to live in Paris or Berlin to be avante-garde. At the drop of a hat, I had money, I had a house, a studio, servants—and I had problems.
“I’d managed to balance myself against the temptations of the city while I was poor. But success proved a greater madness than I could manage. One night I was at a party and dope was going around, and I reached for it, the first time in three years.
“And again, Yolanda saved me. She physically slapped the stuff out of my hand and dragged me away from the party.
“However, I haven’t told you about Yolanda. She’s the reason … No, I should start at the beginning, so it all ties together.” He took a deep draught from his glass and crushed out the half-smoked cigarette, then fiddled with the case; in another minute, his fingertips would begin to pluck at his buttons.
“I’d met Yolanda my first week in Shanghai. She worked in a bar down the street from my Wong, but I met her in the courtyard outside of my room. She was visiting one of my neighbours—one of my landlord’s girls, who was ill. Yolanda is Chinese, and although she worked in a bar and hadn’t much education, she spoke good English because her family was Christian and sent her to the missionary school until she was eleven.
“Then her father died, and when she was sixteen, she found herself out on the streets. She went through a period of what she called ‘hating herself.’ She drank, did any kind of dope offered her, and—well, suffice to say she lived a pretty wild life.” He did not look at Holmes, who sat with his fingers steepled to his lips. Damian played with the catch of his enamelled case and pressed on.
“The self-hate period lasted for a year, until one day she woke up a little more sober than usual, and she knew that one morning she would not wake up at all, unless someone dragged her out of it. She didn’t think she had the will to rescue herself, so she went to the missionaries, and told them they had to save her.”
He must have caught something of my reaction, because he gave me a crooked smile. “You like the image? Little painted bar-girl standing at the door to the local Christian do-gooders, throwing herself at them as you would a glove in a challenge.
“And give them credit, they tried their best. She stayed with them for three months until their rules became too much for her—but then, instead of giving up, she walked down the road to the Buddhist temple. She lasted a month there. And then it was a Shinto shrine, followed by some stray Hindus, then American Spiritualists. One after another, she worked her way through half the religions of the world, only at some point, it became more a hobby than a necessity. She went back to her bar, but only to serve drinks, and during her free hours she continued to sample the rich buffet of temples and churches and meeting places Shanghai has to offer.
“Until one day she encountered an odd French-American-English painter in the run-down house where one of her childhood friends was dying of syphilis. He saw a tiny little thing dressed in a tartan skirt, a Chinese silk blouse, a moulting rabbit-fur jacket, and a French beret, with cropped hair and painted eyes. She saw a tall, thin foreigner reeking of turpentine and blinking as if he’d just come from a cave.
“ ‘You need to eat,’ she said. ‘Take me to lunch.’
“What could I do? I took her to lunch, took her for a walk along the riverfront, and before I knew it, she was in my life. It was Yolanda who loaded up a rickshaw with my paintings and took them to the gallery. And Yolanda who haggled over the prices of the next batch. Yolanda who suggested that I become known, professionally, as ‘The Addler’—a sort of trademark. And as I said, Yolanda who kept me on something resembling the straight and narrow.
“In the end, it was Yolanda who suggested it was time to move closer to the centre of the art world, she who besieged the British Embassy until they told her how I might register as a citizen whose papers had been lost. I did not want to leave Shanghai, not really, but it was hard on her—there are many places where the Chinese are not welcome. I thought of Paris, which is as colour-blind as one can hope for, but she was afraid the pull of the old life would prove too strong for me. Plus, she had no wish to learn another language. In the end, we agreed on London, with my mother’s adopted nationality to build on.
“Your brother helped me, as I understand he had helped Mother when I was born. And, as I later found that she had, I asked him not to inform you until I could do so myself.”
He laid the cigarette case down and looked straight at Holmes, for the first time in several minutes. “Once we decided to leave Shanghai, I married Yolanda. Neither of us believes in the concept, but I doubt the government would have permitted her to come otherwise.” He waited for a reaction from Holmes, disapproval perhaps, but when no response came, he continued; there were clearly more revelations to come.
“As it happened, we arrived in London less than a week after you’d left for India—we probably passed you somewhere off the coast of France. It didn’t take long before we were wishing we’d stayed in Shanghai—winter is a terrible time to come here from the tropics, everything is bitter cold and grey and lifeless. Yolanda had never had chilblains before, and the cost of coal to heat the rooms was more than the rent itself. I hired a studio and rediscovered the challenge of painting with shivering hands. Every day we thought of leaving, but we didn’t, quite.
“Then April came, and the sun appeared. Everything was brilliant, seductive, cheering—the poets are right, to make much of this country in the spring. Yolanda began to look for more permanent housing, and I sent my first London paintings to a gallery she’d located off Regent Street.
“As spring wore on, that was our life: We scraped together enough to buy a little house with a garden in Chelsea, two streets away from my studio. Yolanda began to explore the nearby parks and religious centres, and made some friends. And one day I was in town and I heard my name called—a fellow I’d met in Shanghai. An artist. He was surprised to see me, of course, but took me for a drink and introduced me to his friends, and life began to settle into a pleasant pace.…”
“Until?” Holmes prompted.
“Until the latter half of June.” Damian ran fingers through his long hair, revealing a glimpse of the scars, and went through the business of lighting another cigarette. He pinched out the match. “You have to understand: I promised Yolanda before we married that I would support her in all ways. That I would never force myself or my opinions on her. That I would always recognise her complete right to make her own choices. Yolanda and I have a marriage of freedom. We love each other, and are honest with each other, but we have our own lives and our own interests. I may do things for her churches from time to time, and she may come to dinner with my artist friends, but neither of us expects the other to pretend to interests that aren’t compatible.” He looked from Holmes’ face to mine, searching for sympathy, I expect. “Ours is a modern marriage,” he insisted.
“Very well,” Holmes said. “What happened in the latter half of June? And, the date?”
“The date? I don’t know, it was a weekend—a Sunday. I’d been to the park and came home to find Yolanda … troubled. She was in the sitting room with the curtains drawn and the windows shut, although it was stifling. When I turned up the lights, she cried out as if she’d seen a snake in the room. She wouldn’t tell me what was wrong, but the maid said she’d started the morning completely normally, then after breakfast suddenly retreated into the room, and stayed there all day.
“I coaxed her to eat and put her to bed. The next morning she seemed better. She laughed when I asked her what had happened, and said something odd about being unaccustomed to happiness.
“She wouldn’t let me stay home, insisted she was fine, tried to pretend she was herself again. But she wasn’t. I could see that something was eating at her, but I thought perhaps it was simply as she had said, that when one has spent one’s life tensed against life’s next blow, security and comfort can themselves seem untrustworthy. I vowed to myself that I would sustain her comfort, until she became convinced that it was real, and permanent.
“Since then, I’ve done my best to convince her of her worth. I took her to Brighton for a few days, to amuse her, bought her books, even went to her favourite church with her. And I thought I was succeeding. Her friends started to drop by again, she’s been out a few times—generally with a mundane purpose, to shop or visit the lending library, but the haunted look seemed to leave her, and she spent less time behind closed curtains.
“Until she disappeared.” Holmes sat back, one finger resting across his lips; I sat forward. “This was Friday. Three days ago. I’d been up late Thursday, working, and I fell asleep in the studio—I keep a bed there, so I don’t disturb the household with my comings and goings. I slept until noon, then went home. The maid, Sally, told me that Yolanda had gone out first thing that morning with a packed valise, saying she wasn’t sure when she would return.”
“Had she received a letter? A telegram?”
“Not that Sally knew, and the only time she’d been away from the house was when she went to the greengrocer’s Thursday afternoon. I was more puzzled than alarmed—Yolanda does this sometimes, goes off for a day or two. She calls them her ‘religious adventures.’ Still, she always tells me when she’s going to be away, and with her recent uneasiness in mind, I found myself distracted. Twice I left my painting to walk home and see if she had come back. She hadn’t.
“So on Saturday I woke up early, and when there was still no sign of her, I sent Sally out to do the round of Yolanda’s friends, to see if any of them knew where she was. While she was doing that, I went around Yolanda’s favourite churches and temples and the like, but no-one had seen her in days. I didn’t know what else to do, so I went back to the studio, but I couldn’t settle to work.”
“You didn’t wish to notify the police?”
“No. Not until, well, considerably longer. And then when I returned to the house around tea-time, Sally gave me an envelope she’d found under my pillow, where Yolanda had put it before she left. It could have sat there for days, if I’d continued to sleep at the studio, but when Sally’d come in, she couldn’t decide what to do with herself, not knowing if we were in for dinner and all, so she’d decided to strip the beds.”
Holmes made a small gesture of impatience with his finger, and Damian abandoned the question of out-of-sorts maidservants.
“Anyway, this is what she found.”
Damian reached around for his jacket and fished out not one, but two envelopes. He half-rose to hand the light blue one to Holmes. For a moment, the slip of blue linked two near-identical hands, then Holmes’ long fingers were pulling at the contents, tipping the page so that I, too, could read the words. They were written in a precise, bold hand:
I am going away for awhile, on what I suppose is one of my religious adventures. This time I’ve taken E with me. I must ask you to be patient, although I know that you always are.
Your loving Y
P.S. I don’t think I’ve told you in awhile, that you are the best thing that could have happened to me and to E.
“Who is—” Holmes started, then cut off as Damian stood up and held out the second envelope. His clenched jaws declared that here, at last, was what he had been working towards: There was resentment in his face, and embarrassment—perhaps even shame—but also determination.
Holmes took the envelope; Damian retreated, not to his chair, but to the low wall at the back of the terrace, where we could only see his outline and the glow of his cigarette. Holmes’ fingers pushed back the flap, and eased out a photograph.
It was a snapshot, showing three people. Damian Adler stood in the back, wearing a dark, formal frock coat and high collar: From his overly dignified expression, the costume was a joke. In front of him, the top of her head well below his shoulders, stood a tiny Oriental woman. She wore Western dress, looking more comfortable in it than many photographs of Orientals I had seen. Her ankles were shapely under a slightly out-of-date dress, her glossy black hair was bobbed; her dark eyes sparkled at the camera with the same sense of humour as his.
It was the third person in the photograph that made Holmes go very still and caused my breath to catch: a child around three years old, held in the woman’s arms. Damian’s right hand was on the woman’s shoulder, but his left arm circled them both; his hand looked massive beside the infant torso. The child’s features had blurred slightly as she swivelled to crane up at Damian, but the glossy hair was every bit as black as the mother’s.
“My wife, Yolanda,” Damian said into the pregnant silence—and there seemed no trace of embarrassment in his voice, only affection and worry. “And our daughter, Estelle.”
He came off of the wall, to look over Holmes’ shoulder at the photograph.
“Estelle is missing, too,” he said. “I need …” He cleared his throat, and frowned at the picture in his father’s hand. “I need you to help me find them.”
His embarrassment, I saw at last, was not over having married a woman of Shanghai, nor even that his wife had a dubious past. His shame was because he had been forced to come to Holmes for help.