Two

It seemed for days that the Warlord of the South-West was sulking. There was no sign either of him or of Lao and for a whole fortnight the group at Kailin were left entirely to their own devices.

The parade at the airfield had broken up in confusion after Fagan’s comments and there had been a loud argument between Fagan and Lao which had then become one between Lao and General Tsu, with various aides of different rank joining in from time to time and Captain Yang yelling defensively between the various groups and Ira’s party.

It had started to rain heavily in the middle of it all, the torches hissing and spitting in the downpour, and General Tsu had retreated to the Pierce-Arrow, his face like thunder. No one had thought to dismiss his troops, however, and they had continued throughout all the shouting and the high wang-yang of Chinese voices to stand in lines, hunched against the rain but interested in the indignity of their superiors quarrelling.

Eventually Tsu had driven away in high dudgeon with Lao, leaving the argument to be finished by Kee and Captain Yang, who, by this time, had been alternately yelling about his honour and spitting with rage and likely, it seemed, to swing his sword out of its long curved scabbard at any moment to take a swipe at Fagan’s head.

With a good Irishman’s contempt for danger, Fagan had stood his ground. ‘I expect it was a bloody flight mechanic you were in this goddam air circus of yours,’ he snorted. ‘Sure, and not a very good one at that. A grease monkey, maybe, employed to wipe the engines down and clean the vomit out of the cockpits.’

They had got him away at last in a borrowed car, with an affronted and furious Ellie alongside the driver and Ira and Sammy sitting on the indignant Fagan in the back. They heard the argument in the bungalow across the garden going on long after they had closed the door behind them.

Still laughing, they had crossed the lawn to find Mei-Mei waiting for them with her birdcage and her smiles. They had forgotten all about her in the excitement and were startled to see her still around. She seemed to be dressed in her best, in dark grey silk-fringed trousers and a red silk jacket, and she was wearing make-up with carmine lips and a single flower behind her ear. As they appeared, she bent her head in a kow-tow before them.

They stared uneasily at each other, wondering what to do about her.

‘Seems to be a sort of housekeeper,’ Sammy said.

Ira eyed the girl dubiously. She was physically fragile, with sloping shoulders and narrow hips, and her hair, polished like fine lacquer, was wound carefully round the top of her head.

‘A nice decorative one, anyway,’ he commented.

She spoke softly for a while, smiles like ripples moving over her lips, but neither of them could understand her.

‘Think she’s got something warming in the oven?’ Sammy asked.

She looked startled and disappointed as they went to their rooms, but made no attempt to follow them. Instead, she sat down with her birdcage by the goldfish pond in the garden as though she were going to wait out the night there.

‘Hope she’s good on bacon and eggs,’ Sammy said as he closed the door.

She was still there next morning when the houseboy wakened them by the simple expedient of sticking a cigarette between their lips and lighting it. She had hung coils of red prayer paper near the door and was waiting by it, quiet and grave-faced, wearing a soft jacket ducktailed at the hips, her hair braided and held by a silver clasp. She was obviously not dressed for work and was on her knees in front of three smouldering joss-sticks which sent up spirals of aromatic smoke.

Sammy poked his head out uneasily. She seemed to be putting out prayers for their immortal souls but she didn’t have the look of a priest or joss-man and they couldn’t imagine that she’d been sent just to make the place smell sweet.

‘She’s still there,’ he said uneasily.

‘What doing?’

‘Burning joss. For us, I reckon.’

It was a warm morning, the scent of blossom in the air, and Ira was on the veranda, staring at the morning scurry of small birds and the lifting flap of herons from the river. Sammy joined him after a while and in the distance they could see the decorated roofs of a pagoda through the trees and hear the high-pitched chatter of Chinese voices in the street as peasant women went past hauling heavy handcarts loaded with sacks of rice or seed or canisters of human manure to fertilise the paddies outside the town, straining forward against the shafts and trailing smells of ordure and dust.

‘Lor’, don’t it bugle?’ Sammy commented, wrinkling his nose. ‘I’d rather have Mei-Mei’s joss, I reckon.’

They peeped back in the house, but Mei-Mei was still doing obeisances on the floor and, feeling vaguely as though they were intruding on some private ceremony, they retreated once more to the veranda, eager for food but uncertain whether to join in her devotions or ignore her.

Just inside a room on the next veranda they could see Ellie washing herself, half-naked as usual, a macaw-coloured pareu she’d bought the day before knotted round her waist.

‘Why’s she always do it where we can see her?’ Sammy asked wonderingly.

Fagan’s voice came across to them. He was singing in a dubious baritone, which he kept interrupting to shout to Ellie. They seemed to have recovered their good temper, a strange bewildered lost couple who never seemed to know whether they were happy in each other’s company or not.

After a while Fagan joined Ellie on the veranda and they saw him sponging her back, an operation which finally dissolved into a wrestling match that ended abruptly as he snatched away the pareu. For a while, they struggled, Ellie red-faced and shrieking and Fagan shouting with laughter, then he grabbed her in his arms and carried her screaming out of sight. For a while the shrieks continued across Fagan’s half-witted laughter, then they died away to a heavy silence.

Sammy turned to Ira. ‘Well, I suppose it’s better than fighting,’ he observed.

Mei-Mei was still waiting for them as they left their room, and they stopped in front of her, uncertain and baffled. Their ablutions had been conducted entirely by the houseboy who had been ready with tin bath, soap, water, sponge and toothbrushes without ever really being visible, and Ira wondered uneasily if Mei-Mei’s duties involved something similar.

Since she couldn’t speak English, she was unable to enlighten them, and Sammy opened the play by slapping her behind as he passed her.

‘’Mornin’,’ he said gaily.

‘Mo-Nin?’ She gestured with fluttering hands at him.

Sammy shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m Sammy. Me – Sammy. Him – Ira. You – Mei-Mei. Yes?’

‘Yes.’ She beamed and followed them through to the dining area. She didn’t appear to have anything to do with the breakfast of chicken and noodles, however, or even the ceremony with incense sticks, prayer paper and fireworks that preceded it, and merely sat watching as the houseboy brought in the food, waiting with her birdcage and a cup of green tea for them to finish.

‘What do you reckon she’s for?’ Ira asked as they went outside to wait for the ancient Peugeot Lao had promised to send for them.

‘Gawd knows. Just decoration perhaps, like a geisha.’ Sammy turned and waved to the girl waiting on the steps of the bungalow. ‘So long, Mei-Mei.’

‘So-Long?’

‘So long. Goodbye.’

Her grave face broke into a smile and she waved. ‘Gu-Bai. Me Mei-Mei. You Sah-Mee. Him Ai-Lah.’

Sammy nodded enthusiastically. ‘You’re catching on. Me Sammy. Him Ira.’ He turned to Ira as she disappeared inside the bungalow. ‘Conversation’s a bit limited, isn’t it?’ he said.

Fagan’s outburst the night before seemed to have done him good and he turned up at the field later in the day beaming with good nature but still unpredictable, stormy and likely to explode into a doom-laden mood at any moment.

‘Whatever it was he got,’ Sammy chuckled, ‘he obviously enjoyed it.’

Ellie was warmer and more friendly, too, her face attractive under the short blonde curls. Fagan seemed to have got round her very effectively during the night and the frozen-faced anger at his behaviour the evening before had gone.

Since there was no one on the field to stop them, not even a night watchman, they moved among Tsu’s old aeroplanes, climbing into cockpits and testing flabby controls, feeling compression and running their hands over rotten fabric and struts devoid of varnish. Only the Aviatik, Yang’s machine, seemed to be airworthy.

‘And even that’s sagging like a busted balloon,’ Sammy observed.

Eventually they dug out a few of the tools they’d brought with them for running repairs and took off the engine cowlings. Perished rubber, verdigris and rust met their eyes.

‘All right for scrap,’ Ellie commented shortly.

Farman might make it,’ Sammy pointed out shrewdly. ‘We might make the Crossley go, too, and the Albion’s got a dynamo we can use.’

Reaching across the cockpit of the wingless D7, Ira cocked the guns and pressed the trigger, listening to the thump as the breech blocks shot home,

‘Guns work,’ he commented with a grin. ‘So would the interrupter, I think. If this wingless wonder only had wings it could do a lot of damage. Still, it’s got a propeller and we can use it for spares.’

Later in the day, Kee appeared and borrowed a few more tools for them, but there was little they could do until Geary and Lawn and their crates of spares turned up.

‘Why should we worry?’ Sammy said. ‘It’s not our war.’

For three days no one came near them except Lieutenant Kee, but he was only concerned with their comfort.

‘Everything is satisfactory?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘What ho! The bungalow is OK?’

‘The bungalow’s fine.’

‘Jolly decent! I say, how is the girl?’

‘Girl?’ Ira stared at him.

‘Good gracious my, the one the General sent to you.’

‘Oh, she’s fine.’ Ira nodded enthusiastically.

Kee seemed pleased and went away and, for lack of anything else to do, they began to work on the ancient Crossley. When they came to a full stop for lack of tools, they hired sedan chairs and explored the old city, a mass of Ming-type buildings with green roofs, up-curved so that demons sliding down them might do themselves a mischief as they dropped off the eaves. There was a half-hidden lake with stiff lotuses spread on a glistening grey surface that was fringed with willows and wisteria, and behind the town, rising out of the ash-coloured hills, a miniature square-topped mountain like a cottage loaf, red-brown at the base and fading to a pink-blue at its summit.

On closer acquaintance, the majestic city walls along the river turned out to be festooned with washing, and more was flapping along the steps and under the arches where the great iron-studded gates stood open. Everything in Hwai-Yang seemed to be done by hand, and there was no water except for what the coolies carried, and no light at night apart from bobbing paper lanterns.

Dragon bridges and pagodas rubbed shoulders with fountains and marble tombs guarded by snarling monsters; and there were joss-houses full of strange deities and redolent with perfumed smoke where women burned incense for easy childbirth; and outdoor theatres where crowds of people watched, happily eating highly coloured sweets and spitting sunflower seeds or having their ears cleaned by professional aurists moving among the seats. Camel trains and shaggy sorebacked mules shoved through the pedestrians picking their way round the heaps of dirt where babies and scavenging pigs wallowed together. A group of Tsu soldiers, sly, sullen and hangdog, moved past, slouching and slovenly and hung about with teapots, saucepans and umbrellas. They were pushing ahead of them a bunch of lunatics, lepers and criminals who were tied together by their pigtails, wailing and shrieking and gibbering. The crowd watched impassively – idlers carrying singing birds on the end of a stick or hovering over a cricket fight; letter writers with horn spectacles on the ends of their noses and their crinkly red paper under their arms on the look-out for lovesick youths or enamelled-faced courtesans who might need their skill; nomad horsemen from the north sucking toffee apples as they stared at the shops; old ivoried men with fans and black-garbed peasants carrying aged relatives on their shoulders; and tiny doll-like children, their hair plaited into stiff tufts about their heads, chirruping like flocks of gaily coloured birds. It was all so incredible it took their breath away.

Because of the steep streets and that vast swathe of enormous stone steps that cut the town in half like a huge wound, there were no wheeled vehicles in the centre of the city – only sedan chairs carried by yelling baggy-trousered coolies, callouses on their shoulders as big as oranges, who ran up and down like ants to the river, the alleyways full of their noise. There seemed to be bells tinkling everywhere, and the whole city seemed to be filled with resonance and the clip-trotting of ponies. There were only a few foreign export and import agencies along the bund, but a solid mat of junks affronted with masts heaved and rolled among the garbage between the sandbanks. Along the river, to right and left of the Tien An-Men steps, there were low warehouses and godowns roofed with chocolate-coloured tiles. Near them, on the stone steps of the wharf, girls waited for the sailors off the foreign gunboats that stopped occasionally to water, full-lipped, jet-eyed and bored, leaning against the bars with their daubed signs.

 

 

The beer was warm and synthetic, however, and the stench in the narrow medieval streets appalling, and Sammy seemed awed by the place.

‘There are such a lot of the bastards, Ira,’ he said. ‘What’d happen if they decided they didn’t want us?’

As the days passed, they began to grow bored with having nothing to do and occasionally they begged shaggy ponies from the pupil-pilots who kept them in Kailin for their personal transport, or borrowed dubious guns and got themselves rowed out into the Yung Ling Lakes, a string of bright pools just to the south that were separated by strips of marsh and reed. The lakes were the home of countless snipe, woodcock, duck and geese which rose in honking hordes into the blood-red sunsets as they pulled the triggers, great islands of what at first had seemed weeds lifting uncertainly along the edges with the beat of wings and the spattering of webbed feet on water, until the sky was black with circling birds.

Despite his boast, Fagan, always the sad impostor, wasn’t any more gifted with a gun than he was with an aeroplane, and even his shooting seemed dogged by farce. When he almost blew Ellie’s head off in his excitement she turned on him in savage disgust and swung at him with the soggy corpse of a duck she was just lifting from the water, and he disappeared overboard with a splash and a hoot of giggling laughter from the Chinese boatman. He returned to the bungalow, noisily indignant and sour-faced, and the following day when Ira wasn’t looking he sneaked into the air with the Fokker and set off east to look for Kwei’s legendary balloon. He’d been talking for some time about it, itching to do it some damage, and he returned in such a flurry of excitement to tell them he’d found it, he overshot the inadequate field and dropped his nose into the ditch at the end.

Ira’s fury did nothing to damp his enthusiasm. ‘As God’s me judge, I saw it,’ he explained loudly, wiping away the blood where he’d banged his nose on the dashboard. ‘Like a bladder of lard it looked, and with so many patches, you’d only have to stick a pin in it to deflate it.’

 

For a fortnight, apart from throwing a rope over the Fokker’s tail and dragging it off to the hangars to remove the stump of propeller, they did little at the airfield except organise strange games of polo with the pupil-pilots, which came to an abrupt end when Fagan, showing off his prowess as a rider, inevitably got himself kicked by one of the shaggy ponies. They had just helped him to the office in the barrack block when, to their surprise, one of the cars from Tsu’s cavalcade arrived. In the rear seat was the Baptist General himself, wearing a woollen gown and a bowler hat and huddled against the cool wind in an expensive sable fur. Lao and Kee were with him, and Yang arrived soon afterwards in another car, still thunderous with rage.

Lao seemed to have accepted that most of the machines they had so laboriously assembled were never going to fly, but he still seemed concerned about the summer campaigning.

Carefully, Ira explained that a pupil-pilot would need around ten hours of flying instruction before he was even capable of taking up an aeroplane alone and that not even then would he be capable of giving battle, not even with General Kwei’s unarmed balloon.

‘If the General’s so keen,’ he said, ‘what’s wrong with Captain Yang?’

Lao suddenly didn’t seem to think much of Captain Yang and offered them two hundred American dollars for the destruction of the balloon.

‘Let’s be havin’ that down on paper,’ Fagan suggested eagerly. ‘I know where it is.’

Ira shook his head stubbornly, not retreating an inch. ‘It’s no good,’ he explained to Lao. ‘Before we can do a thing, you’ve got to find tools and spares.’

He was fighting for elementary safety, even here in this godforsaken place where there were no airworthy planes and even less in the way of spare parts.

‘We even need a windsock,’ he said firmly. ‘And there’s no ground organisation whatsoever, no transport, no engineering sheds, no coolies, no equipment, nothing. I’m not going to let anyone up into the air – neither your pupils nor any of the people who came with me – until we find a field bigger and flatter than this to fly from.’

 

It rained during the night, a heavy downpour that changed the beaten dust of the field into a bog, and the following morning, with the earth steaming under the sun’s rays and the early spring scents making themselves felt, Ira arrived to find an army of coolies had already been mustered from somewhere by Lao. He had been hunting through the godowns along the bund in the hope of unearthing a few of their possessions and appeared late, frustrated and furious, to find things transformed.

Already the maize in the next field had been trampled flat and trees were being dragged away, while earth was being packed into the ditch between from baskets that were passed down a long column of men and women snaking across the field herded by a line of shabby soldiers with ancient Martini rifles.

‘What in God’s name’s going on?’ he asked.

Sammy grinned. ‘They’re going to join the two fields,’ he said. ‘It was Lao’s idea.’

Ira stared at the horde of blue-clad figures, some of them convicts with heavy wooden collars round their necks, pushing barrows and chopping at the earth, barelegged yellow ants with straw hats and strange medieval tools, hacking civilisation yard by yard with their hands from the ground itself, under the direction of Lieutenant Kee, who appeared to be taking his orders from Sammy. Hundreds more men were working at the other side of the ditch, rank after rank of them, digging and shovelling to the sound of a prearranged rhythm.

‘What about the owner of the maize?’ he asked.

Sammy shrugged, unconcerned. ‘It didn’t look as though he was getting much compensation,’ he said. ‘They marched him off between two soldiers.’

Lao was waiting for them with Yang as they returned to the battered Bessoneaux.

‘You are pleased?’ he asked, smiling.

‘Yes,’ Ira said. ‘Now,’ he went on briskly, ‘we shall need transport.’

Lao’s face fell. ‘You are difficult to satisfy, Major Penaluna,’ he said bitterly.

Ira grinned. ‘I’m asking for the barest essentials,’ he pointed out cheerfully. ‘Lorries are among them. I want at least one. We can probably make that other old wreck work if we can find some tyres. And I want a car. So far we’re having to use rickshaws or ponies to get out to the field, and none of them are very fast.’

‘There aren’t any cars in Hwai-Yang,’ Yang snapped. ‘This isn’t Shanghai.’

Ira smiled at him. ‘Then you’d better let us have yours,’ he suggested. ‘I also want a couple of good carpenters, and one or two intelligent coolies to work with the aircraft.’

Lao pulled a face but he agreed, and that afternoon Sammy pushed and chivvied half a dozen wriggling young Chinese into the hut where Ira had set up the beginnings of a flight office and was scowling at the creased, dirty, rat-gnawed, dog-eared scraps of paper that Yang called inspection sheets and log books. Behind the three youths were two older Chinese and Sammy had made them all laugh somehow and they were giggling and good-humoured and not a bit like the inscrutable Chinese they’d been led to expect.

‘Carpenters,’ Sammy said gaily. ‘Wang Li-Jen. Yen Hsu. The kids are coolies for the aircraft.’

Wang had a picture of King George torn from a magazine tacked to his shirt. ‘Wang work for Blitish,’ he explained, jabbing a dirty thumb at the portrait. ‘This Blitish Number One Joss-Man. Plenchee good for Wang.’

Fagan arrived late in a bad temper and with a monumental hangover. He and Ellie had been fighting during the night, and Ira wasn’t surprised to find him stamping about like a cyclone in a barrel, chewing at a cigar.

‘I’d shoot that bloody Yang if I was the Pride of the Missionaries,’ he said. ‘He’s never done a thing round here except maybe fart “Annie Laurie” through a keyhole now and then like Paddy’s pig. We should all pack up and bugger off home. The pubs’ll just be openin’ in O’Connell Street.’

Ira glanced quickly at Ellie, half-hoping she’d agree on the spot, but she frowned and made a slicing angry gesture with her hand. ‘We can’t afford to go home,’ she said in a low voice, and Fagan gave his yelp of laughter and pointed at her.

‘Sure, females are queer things with their wee womany worries,’ he said brutally. ‘She’s been dreein’ her weird about havin’ a house for the first time in her life. She wants to hang up some curtains or something.’

Ellie said nothing, standing with her fists clenched, as though he set every nerve in her body on edge.

‘Somebody’ll have to go and see Kowalski,’ Ira pointed out. ‘I’ve got a list as long as your arm of things we need. We can screw a note out of Lao authorising it all.’ He glanced hopefully at Fagan, hoping he’d jump at the chance. Once at the coast, he suspected, he’d board the first boat home.

The thought seemed to have occurred to Fagan, too, and he threw away his cigar. ‘I’ll go,’ he said, and Ellie turned on him immediately. In the extraordinary love–hate relationship that existed between them, she couldn’t stand him near her half the time yet she also couldn’t trust him out of her sight.

‘Hell, don’t look so egg-bound,’ Fagan said. ‘Somebody’s got to go. Himself has said so, hasn’t he? and there’s too much bloody domestic bliss around here all of a sudden.’

She stared at him for a moment, while Ira, knowing her habit of blunt, vituperative response, held his breath. Then the spirit seemed to drain out of her. ‘OK,’ she said quietly. ‘You go. I guess I’ll stay here. I want to stay. I have a house. I’ve never had a house before.’

Ira turned to her. ‘Don’t you want to go?’ he asked her.

‘Not with him,’ she said flatly. ‘He’ll only get drunk.’

Ira stared after Fagan, who was already striding towards the office, imagining him disappearing over the horizon with their money, their good name, and their last chance of making anything worthwhile of this ridiculous pantomime of a training school.

‘Will he come back?’ he asked uneasily.

She considered the question for a second and he saw her face become suddenly brighter, and realised she was looking forward to shedding some of her responsibility for a few days.

‘I guess so,’ she said simply. ‘He needs me.’

 

Getting rid of Fagan was like pulling a thorn out of an aching heel.

He got drunk the night before he left, less with the alcohol than with the thought that he was about to be free for a while of his responsibilities and the brooding, dangerous Ellie, and he was noisy and laughing and already giving the glad eye to a young and not too plain missionary on the Fan-Ling who was on her way down the Yangtze on the first leg of her journey home to the States.

Nobody said anything, but there was a marked sense of relief as the Fan-Ling disappeared from sight, and on the way back into town, by mutual consent they found a small scrubbed restaurant with spidery benches like Tang woodcuts and tables that had been worn and polished for centuries. It was full of chattering girls, bright as butterflies in their silk jackets and fringed trousers, all presided over by a middle-aged woman wearing a pair of corsets that stretched from bust to thigh, outside her dress. She seemed surprised to see Ellie and it dawned on them at last that they were in a brothel.

But, although the waiter’s hands were more notable for the length of the nails than for their cleanliness, the food was good and, with Chinese courtesy, no one seemed to mind. They nodded to the girls’ customers moving in and out past their table and, as the mistake and the samshui set them laughing, someone produced an orchestra of horns, gongs and one-stringed fiddles, and Sammy, outdoing Fagan for lunacy, got them playing for dancing. They cleared the tables and pulled the girls forward, and started a noisy free-for-all in the middle of the floor, Sammy bringing the house down as he tried to teach the shrieking madame how to dance the foxtrot. The evening became a celebration, with the room crowded and dozens of grinning heads jammed round the door to see what was going on.

‘Elevator Ellie, they called me on the fields back home,’ Ellie laughed. ‘I used to think they were complimenting me on my flying, but I found out later they were just being dirty-minded about my figure.’

With no Fagan to worry over, she drank a little too much, but it seemed to knock the props away from beneath her fears and frustrations, and she was noisy and unaffected, and when she said good night at the door of her bungalow she insisted on kissing them both before she disappeared.

Sammy stared after her, grinning as she weaved through the door. ‘She’ll probably have a hell of a head tomorrow,’ he said.

Ira nodded. They’d found it unexpectedly easy to make her laugh and, without Fagan on her mind, she was surprisingly attractive with bright eyes and colour in her cheeks, her grave expression changed for one of lunatic willingness to make a night of it.

‘If she does, she’ll probably feel better when it’s gone,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing like a good drunk for kicking a few boards loose.’

Mei-Mei was waiting just inside the door for them. She seemed to be dressed in her best again, her face carefully made up, the flower behind her ear. She was smiling and deferential as usual.

‘Sammy, that girl worries me,’ Ira said.

‘She looks worried, too,’ Sammy agreed.

Outside their room, they paused and glanced back. Mei-Mei had followed them and was now waiting by the doorway.

‘She still looks worried,’ Sammy said again uncertainly. ‘Lor’, Ira, suppose – suppose’ – he chuckled suddenly – ‘Ira, do you suppose that she’s just here for our pleasure?’

Ira turned. ‘Our pleasure?’

‘They do that sort of thing, don’t they? Lay down their wives for their friends and so on.’

Ira grinned. ‘She’s not married,’ he said. ‘Or is she?’

Sammy shrugged. ‘Tsu sent her. Perhaps she’s something in his yamen.’

‘We’d better ask her.’

Sammy hitched at his belt and put one hand confidently on Ira’s chest. ‘I’m better at the lingo than you are,’ he said firmly. ‘And if I’m right, I reckon three’ll be a crowd.’

 

The sun was bright and the scent of blossom was filling the house when Ira went to breakfast next morning. Without being able to explain why, he felt on top of the world suddenly, and to his surprise he could hear Ellie across the garden actually singing as she washed. Fagan’s departure seemed to have left them all lighter-hearted.

Preceded by a gale of giggles from Mei-Mei’s room, Sammy appeared a few minutes later, wearing only a towel and a smug look on his face like a cat that had been at the cream.

‘I was right, Ira,’ he said immediately.

Ira grinned. ‘Were you, by God? Did you spend the night with her?’

Sammy gestured airily. ‘A feller has to work up to that sort of thing,’ he pointed out. ‘I told her so.’

‘I didn’t know you could speak the lingo that well.’

Sammy laughed. ‘I’m picking it up fast.’

‘You ought to pick it up a lot faster now. There’s nothing like taking your dictionary to bed with you.’

Sammy blushed. ‘I’m going to teach her English,’ he said primly. ‘She’s only a kid really.’

‘They grow up fast out here, I’m told. Is this a permanent arrangement?’

Sammy looked sheepish. ‘She was sold to a dance-hall dame when she was thirteen,’ he explained. ‘She’s never had a home. If we send her away, she’ll lose face.’

Ira chuckled. ‘If she stays,’ he said, ‘she’ll probably lose something else.’

 

Fagan’s disappearance seemed to start a run of unexpected luck. Where, until his departure, everything had seemed gloomy and unpropitious, now things suddenly started to go right, and the following afternoon, to their surprise, their missing crates turned up – complete and undamaged, unearthed by Sammy in one of the godowns near where the Fan-Ling had moored – first the generator, then the lathe, then the spares and their personal luggage – and they were able to set the pupil-pilots to dismantling Tsu’s ancient machines and removing the engine complete from his useless Fokker, by this time known to everyone as the Wingless Wonder.

Taking out engine parts and unbolting guns, Sammy laid them on tables with dishes of oil and petrol and paraffin, and laboriously began to soak every working part and scratch off every scrap of rust with fine emery paper, carborundum powder and oil, moving the dulled metal inch by inch until it was free again.

‘Against all the tenets of engineering,’ Ira grinned. ‘Let’s hope the Chinks don’t think it’s what we do all the time.’

With Ira working on the Maurice Farman’s Renault engine, Ellie kept watch on the Chinese, threatening them all the time with Tsu’s wrath if they lost so much as a washer, while Sammy instructed as they went along.

‘This here’s a turnbuckle,’ he said, standing importantly by the tables, with Kee to translate, his big beaky nose in the air like a lecturer. ‘If I turn it this way, it tightens the wire. If I turn it the other way, it slackens it, see. We use ’em to rig the wings for flying.’

Labour was cheap and plentiful and they hoped to reap not only a harvest of minor spares from the old machines but probably also even a working engine and one or two working guns. Wang Li-Jen, the carpenter, a young-old man with empty gums, a beard and a bag full of ancient tools that resembled nothing they’d ever seen before, was a tower of strength, though it worried him that Ira and Sammy should lose face by working on the engines and covering themselves with oil.

‘Not good joss. Peng Ah-Lun dirty,’ he observed gravely, sounding curiously like Fagan in his disapproval. ‘Peng Ah-Lun, Sha Pi-Lo stay clean. Coolie use sclewdlivah, spannah.’

Ira gave him a cigarette and tried to explain the importance of expert knowledge of aeroplane engines, feeling surprisingly warm towards the Chinese with his already stooped back and aged face and the smell of charcoal and sweat that preceded him everywhere he went like an aura.

Spring came in a sudden heady riot of cherry and almond blossom and a rise in temperature that caused the coolies to shed their heavy winter clothing.

‘Spring’ll be the time when the lice start moving,’ Sammy commented, watching them picking at each others’ heads.

They were just beginning to make visible progress when Lawn turned up, shabby and stinking of booze, his eyes sunken and his suit looking as though it had been slept in. He was broke and trembling on the brink of DTs.

‘That bastard Geary,’ he said bitterly. ‘He done a bunk with me wallet and the tickets.’

‘But obviously not the money for booze,’ Ira said.

‘It wasn’t the booze,’ Lawn insisted. ‘It was the bleedin’ students in Kenli.’

Ira stared. ‘What in God’s name were you doing in Kenli?’ he demanded. Kenli was a hundred miles to the south, down one of the tributaries of the Yangtze, a godforsaken place without even a proper white community.

‘We got off the steamer by mistake.’

‘Drunk, I suppose.’

‘Not really, Mr Penaluna. We’d had one or two, that’s all, but it went without us. Then Geary disappeared with all me kit. They said he’d gone back to Shanghai. I was on me own and everywhere I went the bloody students followed me, chuckin’ muck at me and shouting at me to go ’ome. They was ’avin’ a riot and they ’ad placards up and were caterwaulin’ all night outside the ’otel where I stayed. One of the gunboats ’ad to turn out its crew with a Vickers and patrol the river bank for the local warlord. They got a problem down there with them students. I’d ’a’ gone ’ome if I’d ’ad the money.’

Lawn was in a pathetic state with trembling hands, wet lips and eyeballs like yellow marbles, and was clearly in no condition to do much work. Ira extracted a promise from him to lay off the booze for a while and set him to supervising the gangs of coolies and the student pilots working over the engines, while Ellie lectured and the tireless Sammy was released for other things.

The old Maurice Farman pusher, although little more than an aerial joke belonging to the days when they’d measured the pull of propellers with a butcher’s spring balance, proved to be in a better condition than they’d thought and while it would never be of much use to General Tsu in his campaigns, at least it was a slow safe aeroplane without vices on which to train pilots.

They studied the ancient machine, grinning at the incongruous birdcage of spruce struts and booms that housed the propeller. When Ira had still admired the long-vanished Deperdussins and Santos-Dumonts, the Taubes, the Demoiselles and Antoinettes and the kite-like monstrosities that took off on trollies and landed on skids, the Farman had seemed neat, square and modern. After ten years of fabric-covered fuselages, high-performance engines and tractor-propellered biplanes, however, she looked as though she rightly belonged on the end of a string, with a tail of paper and rags.

Nevertheless, she was still in working order and for days Wang and his assistant, with his eldest son as makee-learn boy, swarmed over her, replacing damaged and splintered struts and strengtheners, repairing the stabilisers fixed to the tail booms, and the elevator which stood out in front on outriggers of wood. Considering he’d probably never seen an aeroplane in his life before he showed a remarkable aptitude for fashioning the curved spars.

‘He makes this here carved screen stuff,’ Sammy pointed out proudly, busy at the rigging with level, plumb-bob, templates and protractors.

Wang nodded, grinning with a mouthful of empty gums, and began to replace whole sections of splintered wood, and when a tailor appeared with his son, complete with boards and tapes and offered to make cotton summer suits for them all, Ira was just in time to catch Sammy shooing them away.

‘For God’s sake, grab him, don’t chuck him out,’ he yelled as the tailor scurried for the road. ‘We need a rigger.’

And to their surprise, the tailor and his son found themselves sewing not suits but fabric on the old machine.

 

By this time, the maize field had been added to the airfield and the ditch between levelled, and the tireless Sammy had got the coolies filling in all the potholes and smoothing out the ruts.

There was another small army of them – each with his unseen helper who had another unseen helper for makee-learn – cooking, washing, mending and ironing with a big charcoal iron, and persisting despite all threats and warnings in using the bracing wires of the machines to hang out the wet clothes.

They slept in the tattered hangars and in the sheds at the back of the barracks, celebrating their festivals with fireworks or joss-sticks, invariably on the verge of starvation so that there were always a dozen of them looking for cast-off clothing or begging potato peelings, cabbage leaves or scraps of meat.

As the days passed, they slowly began to make headway. They got the Avro repaired and tested, and Ellie’s German machines serviced properly for the first time in years, though even a simple matter like moving an aircraft was a problem that drove them to a fury of frustration and left them exhausted as they tried to drive into the minds of men who had never seen an aeroplane fly and knew nothing about its construction that they could be surprisingly fragile.

The uninitiated coolies always had a tendency to climb on to the fabric of the wings where there was no step, and it was difficult to explain the technicalities in pidgin English. Twice they wheeled the old Farman back into the hangar that was now beginning to stink encouragingly of petrol fumes and hot oil and dope, before they finished it and were ready for flight.

‘Maskee,’ Sammy was bawling as they swung the ancient machine out. ‘Makee quick! Turnee fly-machine! Chop-chop! Come on, you bastards, look slippy!’

A fire had been lit at the end of the field, the coolies wafting it with their straw hats and headcloths, and the smoke blew steadily towards them in the breeze that billowed the canvas hangars and slapped them against the poles. The coolies round the old Farman stood importantly in a group, chattering noisily, eyed by their less favoured friends who were relegated to digging and levelling and repairing sheds and hangars.

Ira’s mind fled back as he realised how far they’d come since the Maurice Farman had been considered an aeroplane of war, and he grinned as he gazed affectionately at the enormous box tail trembling in the breeze above his head at the end of the trellis-like fuselage. ‘Can’t tell the bow from the stern,’ he said.

Standing in his waistcoat and huge flat cap, his sleeves rolled up, his watch-chain across his stomach, his celluloid collar stained with oil, Sammy sniggered back at him. ‘Perhaps it can travel either way,’ he suggested.

Ellie joined them, hugging her elbows as usual, her expression admiring and strangely excited as she stared at the ancient machine with its forest of struts and spars and its sails of floppy white fabric. Behind her, old Wang stood with his box of tools, grinning and nodding with his son.

‘Looks as though you ought to sail it,’ Sammy giggled. ‘And all them wires!’

‘You check they’re all there by letting a linnet loose inside,’ Ira said gravely. ‘If it escapes, it isn’t rigged properly.’

When they started up the elderly engine, it made a noise like a small lawnmower clitter-clattering across a lawn rather faster than normal and it made him swallow awkwardly with the nostalgia of the occasion as he saw again the rows of the ungainly machines standing underneath the poplars of northern France, their wings dripping with moisture, gaunt and grey in the mist.

‘How about it, Sammy?’ he said. ‘I flew one of these in 1915. I wonder if I can again.’

Wang and the tailors and the coolies looked on gleefully. They had known for some time that Ira would soon make an attempt to fly the ancient contraption and there had been a great deal of washing and head-shaving and much burning of joss-paper in preparation for the occasion.

‘Peng Ah-Lun fly?’ Wang asked with breathless anticipation and, as Ira nodded, he turned and informed the other Chinese, and the younger ones began to caper and turn cartwheels in joyous expectation, while the older men solemnly burned joss-sticks and began to set off fireworks.

‘Plenchee good joss,’ Wang explained earnestly. ‘Debil no catch Peng Ah-Lun.’

Ira stepped over the wooden outriggers and picked his way through the wires to climb into the bath-like nacelle. Sammy watched as he lowered his goggles then he turned his vast cap back to front and, jamming it down over his ears, climbed up beside him.

‘Take a good look round, Sammy,’ Ira advised. ‘It might be your last.’

‘I think you’re both cuckoo,’ Ellie said.

Ira grinned and waved a hand and, under Ellie’s instructions, the coolies heaved away the chocks. Wang began to hammer on an empty petrol drum and more fireworks fizzed and sparkled to propitiate the demons, and the machine moved forward, lurching from side to side, wires twanging like banjos as they slackened and tightened, all the struts, wires and the huge box tail conspiring to waltz it round in the breeze so that Ira had to work his feet violently on the rudder pedals to keep the tail into wind.

Swinging the old machine round at last, he opened the throttle and, as the lawnmower behind them whirred faster, the mass of wire, fabric and wood began to jolt forward, the draught from the propeller rippling the grass and all the coolies streaming after it in a yelling excited mob. It seemed impossible that all the various parts could remain fixed together, but with his eye on the forward elevator that sat out in front of them like a detached tea-tray, and judging the speed by the noise of the lawnmower behind him, Ira pulled back on the handlebar controls and the rumbling beneath them ceased and they floated into the cloudless golden sky at forty miles an hour, balancing gingerly in the open air in what was little more than a powered box kite.

His hand clutching a strut so tightly his knuckles were white, Sammy was staring downwards like a hypnotised rabbit, then he gave a sudden yell of delight. ‘We’re up,’ he shrieked. ‘Forty miles an hour, flat out! And here I was telling Wilbur and Orville it wouldn’t fly!’

Ira laughed with him at the sheer joy of flight and the excitement of heaving the ancient machine into the air.

‘Say your prayers, Sammy,’ he yelled. ‘We’ve got to come down again soon. And don’t fidget so bloody much. You’ll have us over.’

All the instructions he’d been given ten years before rushed back into his head. Beware of stalling. Beware of spinning. Don’t push the nose down too fast or you’ll pull the wings off.

There were only three instruments, a rev counter, a pitôt tube and a bubble to show they were flying level, but as none of them was working he flew by the sound of the wires and the feel of the wind and the engine note, and gently eased the ancient machine round until the field appeared beneath them again.

‘Here we go,’ he shouted. ‘We’re going down. Touch wood, Sammy. There’s plenty around you.’

They began their slow float downwards, the throttle back, the machine making a soft rustling sound as it sailed through the air. With the utmost gentleness, expecting the Farman to drop to pieces at any moment, Ira pulled back the handlebars, treading uncertainly on the pedals to keep the nose into wind. The front elevator rose and the noise of the wind through the wires died. Sammy was staring ahead, still hypnotised, then from directly underneath came a reassuring rumbling sound and the machine lurched. Fragments of grass flew over the lower wing as the machine came to a stop, wires twanging, the wings seeming to sag with relief.

Wang was capering and dancing with glee and giving the thumbs-up sign he’d picked up from Sammy. ‘Ding hao, Peng Ah-Lun! You fly!’

Ellie came running towards them, her fair hair blowing, her face vital with excitement. ‘You did it, Ira,’ she screamed, laughing with pleasure and flinging her arms round him as he jumped down. ‘You flew the goddam thing!’

‘Well’ – Ira was grinning with the sheer joy of achievement – ‘we’ve got one of their aeroplanes to teach ’em on at last. The Avro makes two and the Fokker three. If we can get a second seat in the Albatros and the Aviatik off Yang we’re in business.’

 

As they walked back, chattering noisily, to where the pupil-pilots were chirruping and dancing with excitement by the tables, they saw Captain Yang’s machine being pushed out. Yang himself followed, dressed in skin-tight breeches, leather coat and helmet decorated with ribbon streamers.

Sammy stopped dead. ‘Oh, Gawd,’ he said. ‘Who’s he think he is? Richthofen?’

Yang came towards them, his head up, studying the sky. ‘Not much bite in the air today,’ he said as he passed. ‘This climate, I guess.’

Sammy gaped at him and then at Ira. Yang was heading towards the Aviatik in a strut-like walk.

‘I think our intrepid birdman’s actually going to take off,’ he said.

Yang was studying the sky again, under the adoring gaze of the Chinese pupils, sniffing the air like a gundog, so that Ira almost expected him to snatch a handful and test it between finger and thumb.

The clouds towards the east were building up again and the sky was full of cumulus as the Aviatik’s engine was started up with an uncertain popping and banging and clouds of blue smoke. Yang climbed into the cockpit and began to wave to the pupils to remove the chocks.

‘In a hurry, isn’t he, Ira?’ Sammy asked. ‘She’s hardly warm. And she’s rigged like a circus tent.’

Ira was watching with narrowed eyes. He’d seen men like Yang before, self-satisfied young men who knew remarkably little, showing off before eager young men who knew nothing. ‘I think Captain Yang’s going to show us a thing or two,’ he said, indicating the gaping pupils. ‘We’ve stolen his thunder a bit since we arrived.’

The Aviatik was lumbering into wind now, past the old Maurice Farman which almost disintegrated in the propeller blast as the Aviatik’s tail swung. There was only a short pause, then Yang opened the throttle, taking off obliquely towards the sheds, and the machine rose immediately and began to climb.

Sammy was chewing a piece of grass. ‘Too steep,’ he said critically. ‘And his engine sounds like a bag of bloody nails, man.’

The Aviatik circled and Yang waved importantly to the pupils as he buzzed over their heads fifty feet up, heading towards the cloud banks. Against the sun, the machine was difficult to see, and even as they shaded their eyes, they heard the engine splutter, and the roar of the exhaust fade into a broken clattering. The nose of the machine dropped sickeningly.

‘Don’t turn back, you fool!’ Ira roared instinctively.

Ahead of Yang there was a loop of the river and a few broken fields, but Yang had been eager to show off his prowess and the thought of a crash-landing after such a striking take-off obviously never entered his head.

The sun glowed through the translucent wings as the old machine turned downwind, held course for an instant, then made another short flat turn. As it came towards the sheds, however, the engine was missing badly and Yang was already losing flying speed and stalling even as he banked for his final run-in.

The nose went down with a lurch in the first turn of a spin and the machine’s wing caught the edge of the shed. They saw fragments fly off in erratic arcs, then the engine caught again, and for a second it gave a scream of terror as the Aviatik disappeared, then it died in a series of diminishing pops followed by a rending crash.

There was a stunned silence and even the birds seemed to stop singing, then Ira was running as hard as he could, with Sammy, Ellie and all the Chinese following in a long string and Lawn lumbering along in the rear. As they rounded the shed, they saw the Aviatik spread on the ground, steam coming from the engine that had fallen clear of its housing, a mass of splintered spruce and shreds of yellow fabric. Yang was still in the cockpit and two or three coolies working nearby had reached him and were leaning over him when a sly flicker of flame and smoke started beneath the fuselage. With a roar a great flower of red burst from the split petrol tank and the coolies flopped back on the ground, screaming and beating at their blazing clothes.

As the flames reached Yang, he seemed to try to free himself but he didn’t move from the cockpit. There were no extinguishers, no axes, nothing to pull away the wreckage, not even an ambulance. The breeze was blowing the flames into the cockpit and, still moving from time to time, he was roasted to death before their eyes.

‘My God!’ Ellie’s face was ashen and Ira put an arm round her shoulders to turn her away.

‘Poor bastard,’ she whispered, her face buried in his jacket.

Sammy’s epitaph was longer but more to the point. ‘You shouldn’t never turn back,’ he said in a flat voice. ‘Not if your engine cuts on take-off. It says so in the book.’