The last piece of music Lesley had played unfurled in his head when he opened his eyes. The song seemed to have wraithed through his dreams.
Propping himself up against the headboard, he thought back to the previous evening. Watching her close the piano and return to her chair, he had waited, saying nothing, keeping absolutely still – as a young medical intern on duty in the slums of Lambeth he had learned that any sudden movement tended to shatter the spell and mute the person on the brink of revealing something. And for the entire time as Lesley undammed the flood from within her he had not said a single word. She had only stopped talking when they heard the car rattling up the driveway. For the first time ever Willie wished fervently that Gerald had stayed out at his debaucheries until dawn.
He wasn’t at all surprised by Robert’s affair. But he suspected that Robert’s infidelity was not the sole cause of the sorrow buried inside Lesley. Something else, something much more painful, had happened to her.
After breakfast he wrote down in his journal everything she had told him, occasionally referring to the notes he had made before he went to sleep. She and Sun Yat Sen had been lovers, he felt it in his bones. He had struck his first seam of gold; a thin seam, but it was promising, and he intended to quarry the rest of it from the depths of her memories.
Locking away his journal, he changed into his swimming trunks and a cotton shirt, jammed his Panama hat on his head and strolled down to the beach. The earth had tilted the sea away from the shore, exposing a vast mirror that reflected the white clouds foaming across the sky. Gerald was lying at his usual spot beneath the coconut trees, shirtless and flipping through a magazine.
‘This is an unexpected visit,’ he said, wriggling to one side to make room for Willie on his mat.
Willie rested on his elbows, stretched out his legs and breathed deeply. The wind, hot and salty, crackled the coconut fronds. He felt Gerald’s hand stroking the inside of his thigh.
‘Just checking if the cat’s returned,’ Gerald said.
He took Gerald’s hand in his, brought it to his lips and kissed each knuckle. He opened his senses to every detail of the moment – the coconut fronds casting fish-skeleton shadows on the soft, fine sand, the smooth, warm touch of Gerald’s skin, the whiteness of his smile against his brown, glowing face. He wanted to remember all of it, absorb every element into his being, because he knew that when he opened his mouth and spoke, everything would be taken away from him.
Stammering more than usual, he began to tell Gerald about the money he had lost.
Gerald sat up and gaped at Willie. ‘You’re fucking joking.’
It wasn’t quite the reaction he had been hoping for. ‘I never joke about money.’
‘You’ve lost everything? You’re completely broke?’
‘I’ll need to speak to my … manager when I get back to London, find out how brutal the … damage is, but yes.’
‘Christ.’
‘No more first-class cabins for us; no more luxury … hotels. In fact, no travelling at all for a while.’
‘How long is “a while”?’
‘I haven’t a damned … clue, Gerald. Three, four years, maybe longer,’ replied Willie. ‘No one must know about this, you … understand? No one.’
‘We’re not cutting short our stay here, are we?’
‘Of course not.’ He took Gerald’s hand again, gripping it tightly. ‘I want us to be together for as long as we can.’
‘We can’t hide out here for ever.’
Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Willie thought.
White egrets spiralled down from the sky onto the exposed seabed, their wings flagging the temporary truce between land and sea.
‘What about my salary?’
‘You’ll have to survive on your army pension for a while, my boy.’
‘But it’s a pittance.’
He lost his temper; he couldn’t help it. ‘Damn it all, Gerald. I’m aware of that. But I – we – have to tighten our belts. And one more thing – I can’t afford to keep paying off your debts. So please, stop being so bloody … reckless.’
‘Reckless? That’s fucking rich, coming from a man who’s lost all his money in some idiotic investment. What a fucking disaster.’ Gerald gave a sidelong squint at Willie. ‘How did your darling wife take it?’
‘You’re the only one I’ve told.’
‘Perhaps she’ll divorce you now that you’re a pauper.’
The possibility of Syrie leaving him had not occurred to Willie; he didn’t know whether to be overjoyed or dismayed by the prospect.
‘So all your talk of us living together in a villa by the sea – I suppose that’s off the table now?’
‘I can’t afford it now, my dear boy.’
Without another word Gerald got to his feet, hitched up his swimming trunks, knotted the drawstrings and strode down to the dried-up sea. Willie watched him, shading his eyes against the sun’s glare. Gerald walked between the pools of marooned water turned to mercury by the sun. The egrets flew off at his approach and settled down a short distance away. Gerald kept walking, heading towards the thin white strip of surf in the distance, until he was nothing more than a small, wavering mirage.
Late one evening in the autumn of 1913, Willie had been looking forward to some quiet reading in his flat when he received a last-minute invitation from the Carstairs next door. They were hoping he could replace a guest at their dinner party, and then attend a play in the West End with them afterwards.
He was introduced to Syrie Wellcome when he stepped into the Carstairs’ sitting room. She told him that she was recently separated from her husband Henry Wellcome, the pharmaceutical tycoon. She was already in her late thirties, and she was not pretty, but Willie found her charming and gay, and he was flattered by her interest in him. When they were putting on their coats to leave for the theatre, she whispered to him, ‘I wish we didn’t have to see this play. I’d much rather spend the evening listening to you.’
A few days later he invited her to the opening night of his new play. After the curtain came down he rushed off to the party she had organised for him in her house. The audience had been rapturous about his play, and he was in high spirits. That evening he and Syrie became lovers. She was a famous hostess among London’s fashionable set; she was fun and stylish. They attended parties and opening nights at the opera and the theatre together. Willie felt flattered to be seen as her lover, and she relished basking in the glow of his fame. Although she was separated from her husband, she was still involved with Gordon Selfridge, but Willie didn’t mind. He viewed his own affair with her as nothing more than a fling that both enjoyed, with no long-term prospects in it for either of them.
Her husband had insisted on sending their son to boarding school. Syrie pined constantly for him. Willie was horrified when one day she told him she wanted to have his child. He talked her out of it and considered the matter closed. Two months passed, and then one morning in late summer she telephoned him. She sounded in great distress, demanding that he see her immediately. Rushing to her house in Regent’s Park, he found her sitting up in bed, her eyes swollen from crying, her hair unkempt.
‘What’s wrong, Syrie? What happened?’
‘Oh Willie, I lost the baby. I lost our baby.’
He felt as if he had been punched in the face. ‘But … damn … it all, Syrie, we had … agreed.’
‘I was going to tell you …’ she choked her words out through her tears, ‘when … when I was sure …’
He wanted to walk out of her oppressive bedroom, out of her house, he wanted to have nothing to do with her ever again. But instead he sat by her bedside, consoling her. He felt sorry for her, but secretly he was glad that she had lost the baby.
After she had recovered, he told her unequivocally that he would not have a child with her while she was still married to Henry Wellcome. They resumed their rounds of socialising, but he grew bored with her and her possessiveness. He longed to be free, but when he thought of the tearful scenes she would make, he couldn’t bring himself to end the affair. He was almost glad when war broke out in Europe. He applied to the Red Cross ambulance corps; with his medical qualifications and his French he was accepted immediately. After a day spent learning to drive an ambulance at an army depot he was given his uniform and assigned to Boulogne.
On the afternoon before his departure, Syrie informed him that she was with child again. His child. Willie sat in her expensively decorated sitting room tight-lipped with rage. Bitch. Deceitful bloody bitch. But most of all he was furious at his own stupidity.
The next morning he left England on the first boat and, with an immense feeling of freedom and relief, rushed headlong towards war.
His ambulance unit was assigned to a makeshift hospital set up in a chateau fifteen miles outside Boulogne. The drivers were called out at all hours of the day to drive into the battlefields to collect the wounded, often coming under heavy enemy shelling themselves. When he was not on ambulance duty, he worked in the overcrowded wards, resurrecting the medical training he had not used in years to treat the maimed soldiers. He cleaned the men’s wounds and changed their dressings; he calmed their fears and did his best to ease their torment. Never a squeamish man, he was horrified by the injuries, injuries he had never seen on anyone before, and hoped he never would again – the shattered bones, the gaping wounds seething with pus and rot, men with half their faces blown off.
One night, trudging up the grand marble staircase to his quarters, hours after his shift had ended, he was overcome by a powerful longing to gaze at the stars, to look at something pristine, something unpolluted by the war.
The drawing room on the first-floor landing had been closed up. He slipped into it, shutting the door behind him. There was just enough light from the gaps in the heavy velvet drapes to guide him between the strange shapeless forms shrouded beneath dark sheets to the French windows. He opened one of them, stepped out onto the broad balcony and drew in a long, deep breath. The bracing purity of the cold night air felt wonderful.
He had wanted to be alone, so he was peeved to discover someone else already there, leaning against the balustrade and staring out into the night. The man peered at him over his shoulder. Even in the milky starlight Willie had no difficulty recognising him – one of the volunteers in the Red Cross who had helped him restrain a ranting, badly injured patient earlier that day.
‘Gerald Haxton,’ the man said. ‘And I know who you are.’ His teeth flashed in the darkness. ‘Knew the second I clapped eyes on you.’
‘I forgot to thank you – for this morning.’
‘It was bloody chaos, wasn’t it? That poor bastard …’
They stood shoulder to shoulder at the balustrade, their breaths flouring the hard, frosty air. There was no moon, and the privet hedges and flowerbeds of the formal gardens below were buried in darkness. It was one of those rare nights when the constant shelling had ceased and the sky over the horizon was not haemorrhaging its usual infernal crimson. The world was at rest, at least for the moment.
Lifting his face, Willie offered up an incantation to the stars: ‘“Tempora cum causis, lapsaque sub terras ortaque signa canam.”’
‘What does that mean?’
‘“Of Times and their reasons, and constellations sunk beneath the earth and risen, I shall sing.”’
‘That’s beautiful. You wrote that?’
‘If only I had.’ Willie smiled. ‘Ovid. A poet from … ancient days.’
They started talking, stumpy, tentative sentences at first, testing the ground between them. Gradually they drifted away from the war and began telling each other about what they would do once the madness was over and life returned to normal again.
‘I want to travel, see more of the world – Polynesia, the Far East, the Malay Archipelago,’ said Willie. ‘And you? What do you … want?’
He would always remember the natural ease of the young man’s reply. ‘From you, or from life?’
He felt his face flushing, and he was grateful for the darkness. ‘Why not … both? They might turn out to be … the same in the … end.’
The silence seemed to seep out from deep inside the earth and rise all the way to the stars above. And then, in the darkness, he heard Gerald Haxton saying, ‘I’ve got a bottle of gin in my room.’
And it was as simple as that.
Lesley had arranged for her brother to interview Willie after lunch. While waiting for him, Willie went through his latest correspondence on the verandah. There were no further letters from his lawyers, thank Christ – at least they had given up trying to get him to go home. He stacked the invitations to one side of the coffee table for Gerald to deal with. The party at Istana had tired him, and he didn’t feel inclined to go to any more of them.
Gerald had been uncharacteristically subdued during lunch. He would leave him, Willie was certain, now that he knew Willie was broke. He was young and handsome, he would have no trouble attracting another wealthy patron to provide him with the lotus-eating life he had become accustomed to.
He was still fretting over the problem of keeping Gerald by his side when Lesley brought a tall, fat man to the verandah. She introduced them to one another and left.
‘I appreciate you giving me an exclusive interview, Willie,’ said Geoff Crosby.
Lesley’s brother shared her faded colouring and her deep-set eyes. He would have been an attractive man once, thought Willie as he noted the vestiges of his looks. ‘Lesley’s older than you?’
‘Younger by two years, actually, but she always behaves like Big Sister.’ Geoff opened his notebook. ‘Shall we begin?’
His questions were the sort Willie had been asked countless times in every foreign port he had ever set foot in: What did he think of Penang and the people? Was he going to write a book about it? What was his favourite food in Penang? Where did he find his inspiration? How many hours a day did he write? Did he write with a pen or a typewriter? Who were his influences? Willie gave his oft-repeated answers, refused to entertain any questions about his wife or his daughter, and he steered their conversation to his latest book, The Trembling of a Leaf.
‘It’s a splendid collection of tales,’ Geoff said. ‘“Rain” was particularly … disturbing. Do you think you’ll write another story like it?’
The very same question had been troubling him for some time now, although he was not going to admit it to anyone. ‘For any writer to come up with a story like that, even once in his life, is already a gift. I’d be greedy to hope for another one.’
‘Lesley says you have a new book coming out soon.’
‘On a Chinese Screen. It’s a … record of my recent travels in China.’
‘What’s it like there? Is it as hopeless as I’ve been told?’
Willie took a few moments to craft his reply. ‘I did my practical midwifery … training in St Thomas’s—’ he began.
‘Somerset Maugham, midwife. Now that’s hard to imagine.’
‘Yes. Quite. As I was saying, in one month I went into Lambeth’s slums over sixty … times,’ said Willie. ‘I delivered babies in the most appalling … surroundings. Ten, fifteen men and women crammed into a tiny room, with no running water, no fire. I’d never been so weary in all my life. There’s nothing noble about poverty, despite what people – and it’s always the rich – tell you.’ Willie sipped his tea and dabbed his lips with the corner of his napkin. ‘TB and … diphtheria and poverty; the booze-soaked husbands … thrashing their wives and children. Criminal gangs terrifying people in the streets. Hopelessness and violence hung like a thick fog in the air. That’s what the … villages in China reminded me of – the slums of Lambeth.’
‘Must have been terribly frightening.’ Geoff was scribbling away furiously. ‘Were you ever robbed? Assaulted?’
‘I could stroll into the most dangerous slums with more impunity than the … police. My doctor’s black leather bag was my talisman. Of course, in the beginning the women – and their husbands – distrusted me. They kept absolutely tight-lipped about their ailments and symptoms; I had great problems trying to … diagnose them.’
Geoff stopped writing. ‘How did you get them to trust you?’
With the air of someone about to divulge a secret of the ages, Willie leaned forward, drawing Geoff closer to him.
‘A man is more willing to open up to you once you’ve revealed something … personal, something shameful, about yourself,’ he said. ‘If you want someone to confide in you, you must first offer him some private … morsel of your own.’
Willie sat back, giving Geoff time to finish jotting down his words. The wind had come up, planing long white curls off the surface of the sea. ‘Speaking of China,’ Willie said, ‘I’ve just finished your book on Dr Sun Yat Sen.’
‘Ah – A Man of the Southern Seas. Did you enjoy it?’
‘It’s an … alluring title.’
‘I wish I could say I came up with it, but it was Lesley’s idea.’ He paused. ‘She said you’re thinking of writing a book about him.’
‘She’s been telling me about him,’ said Willie. ‘I didn’t expect to find such a … personal link to China here.’
‘I was the only one from the English newspapers he spoke to,’ Geoff jabbed his forefinger at his own fleshy chest, ‘the only one he trusted. He was here, Willie, he sat where you’re sitting now, the first time I met him. Probably even in the very same chair.’
‘What was he like?’
Geoff stared off into the distance, paging through his memory. ‘To be honest, Willie, the first time I met him I didn’t think much of him.’
‘What did you not like about him?’
‘He reeked of failure – all his attempts at starting a revolution – and there’d been five or six of them already – had gone phut. I found it perplexing that he had so many supporters. It was only after I got to know him better that I realised he was a masterful manipulator of people. He could have them eating out of his hand, and they’d still beg for more.’
‘And popular with the ladies too, no doubt.’
‘Oh, he collected more than his share of female supporters – he was a very good-looking chap, you know.’
‘Lesley became close to him, didn’t she?’
A careful expression draped itself over Geoff’s face. ‘She supported his cause,’ he said.
‘Not many white women here did, I’m sure.’
‘My sister’s always been a bit of a contrarian. Anyway,’ Geoff slapped his knees and pushed himself to his feet, ‘I’ve taken up too much of your time, Willie. Oh, I almost forgot.’ He pulled out a copy of The Trembling of a Leaf from his satchel. ‘Would you mind inscribing something for me and the missus?’
In his room, Willie picked up A Man of the Southern Seas from his writing desk and studied the photographic plates of Sun. The majority of them had been taken in Penang. One photograph showed Sun seated with the Hamlyns on the verandah of Cassowary House. The last photograph, dated October 1918, was of an older Sun sitting alone in a Ming blackwood chair, his face hewn with a noble, almost saintly, suffering; it made him look even more attractive. Willie recalled seeing this particular photograph in a newspaper when he was in Shanghai.
On a map inside the book he traced the elliptic lines of Sun’s travels around the globe. They were as extensive as his own. He and Sun had been in London at about the same time, he realised, and now here he was on the same island where Sun had once spent half a year of his life. And what was even more curious, he was staying in the very house where the Chinaman had been a frequent visitor.
He recalled reading about the kidnapping in the London papers, but his memory of it was blurry – at the time he had taken no more than a fleeting interest in the story. He had been busy with his practical midwifery training. And furthermore, he and his friends – and countless others in the stratum of London society in which they moved – were reeling from the death knell rung across England by poor Oscar Wilde’s fate. They were all frantically consigning caches of letters and notes to the flames, letters and notes that should never have been written and sent; and how many more men were fleeing across the Channel to the civilised havens of the Continent. What did he – or anyone else – care about the abduction of some Chinaman by his own government?