If the world was a fair place, Little Wu would not have been putting up laundry when she encountered Sir Seth Niall. But if it was fair, she would probably not have met him at all. Nor would her father Fat Tony Wu be a gangster refugee with a broken index finger scraping up a living in post-war Hong Kong by buying up British overprinted Military Yen and selling them to the British government on a razor-thin margin to get them out of circulation. Such currency was popular in brothels and tobacco shops because it looked like play money but had, by law, to be accepted. Frequenting these places also opened up small-time hustling opportunities for Fat Tony on the side, but it was nothing like the old days and he felt guilty that he could not do more for his daughter.
In a fair world, Fat Tony’s houses in China would be Little Wu’s inheritance. She would live an idle life of tennis, volleying the suggestions of Eurasian dandies, and stepping out on daddy-girl tiger hunts with big open cars, paresoleils and acting like she was new to bubbly. No matter what she did in that particular just world, she would be pretending to live another person’s life. The same one as practically everyone she knew. But her hands would not look old before their time and however common her distractions, at least she had a sense that frittering away her youth could feel like a unique pursuit if only because no-one else had the nerve to tell her otherwise.
In old Canton days of chanceless provision and consumption, Little Wu did not live in a war-damaged tenement and waiting for a landlord to make renovations so he could fetch the rent up. Nor would she entertain an offer of a rent abatement for the short moment of her father’s unquestioning amazement. Nor would she sense the come-down of suddenly having hardly any money and being surrounded by people who think their problems are greater than hers. Thinking quite a lot about her old life and her new one, it seemed to Little Wu that the least agreeable contrast lay between being kept as a princess and having to work for a living as she did now. Work did not become easier by submitting to it, but it got a lot harder by comparing it to her old life. She began to think that the routine of work might give her a sinew to cling to while she calculated an escape from it.
Her escape came but not on her terms, and was more like a new dilemma. That’s quite normal when you work for foreigners in a colony controlled by them. But her previous life in swinging Canton had allowed her to choose her foreigners, even laugh at their odd ways. Her unchosen closeness to them in Hong Kong drove her self-belief into hiding behind a wall she built from dull smiles and instant shows of duty that could appear instinctive to an untrained eye.
Irish linen needs work before it can be hung out. Heaving the sheet from the steaming copper, it was immersed in the starch solution, folded tight, hauled into the wringer, through it to the basket, and, once hurled and pegged the over the line, and lifted up to the air. Hard work. The trick was to work not as if escape was near at hand but as if Lady Edith was watching her every move, which was quite often the case anyway. The diligence of Little Wu in her work led Lady Edith quickly to an assumption not that her servant was heroic but that her affection for work was the only one she had room for. Little Wu either had a big, simple peasanty heart full of love for work, as one might love apples, or an inscrutable little urban heart harbouring, along with a work ethic, price lists for everything and God only knows what secrets. Unless Edith was prepared to ask Little Wu questions about her life, she would have to choose between supposed hearts and risk being wrong either way.
As for Sir Seth, his attraction to Little Wu was easy to understand. The girl had charms. Although not tall, or especially elegant in her way of moving, she had lithe legs. Her sassiness converged in the distances between her widely spaced eyes and the mysterious inches between her petticoat hem and the folds of her knees. When she wore short white socks she had the appearance of towering over herself and the gyrations of laundry washing seemed only to make her more remarkable. Sir Seth came from a generation of colonial white men who hit their prime in the inter-war years but carried on without good grace for a long time after. Women from home seemed to them more strident and reluctant at the same time and were generally referred to at the Club as The Great Demand. This seemed to Sir Seth to be like accusing a rival rowing club of taking sport too seriously, but equally, there seemed too much scope for seedy frivolity without a risk of losing one’s place that training harder was altogether off the cards.
Lady Edith had become used to her husband’s silly affairs around the American Consular Office. Home became a vast blindside where she created an upright English family, complete with tooth fairies and spiced eggnog taken strictly within the festive season. Lady Edith was captain and commander of her becalmed expatriate household. The only exception was in the annual summer sortie to the coastal hill-station at Weihaiwei where even she had been known to let her hair down. Ruling by ignorant edict, even being wrong and counterproductive, seemed simpler to Edith than actually listening to people of a race other than her own. Such women clubbing together only made things worse because they never believed anything they did to be wrong. They had reached a point where arresting their bad reputation seemed a losing battle. The younger women in their group had to be taken in hand and told 'it is either them or you'.
Little Wu did not take up with Sir Seth because Lady Edith was a deluded householder, or a remarkably racist old crow, although she was decidedly both. It was out of delayed revenge for a moment of Lady Edith’s behaviour. Of course, it had a racial tinge, for that was her repertoire. But it occurred to Little Wu as a fathomless meanness calculated to provoke her dismissal from service. Her thinking at the time was to not react to her humiliation but linger a little while longer for some muffled fun. Little Wu’s exact moment of resolve had sprung from a Winter’s afternoon at the Happy Valley races where she attended to the family’s needs while Sir Seth ferried tickets between the bookie and their friends, and Lady Edith took a little too much champagne on ice. Their daughter, Milly, began to cry for want of attention and Little Wu did her best to calm her. Edith was in fine form. ‘The word, if you must speak English to my children, is ‘upset’. ‘Up’ with a ‘p’ and ‘set’ with a ‘t’, she said to Little Wu for the information of everyone in the stand. At this outburst, an old man up the back began to clap slowly and loudly and Edith instructed: ‘Do shut up, Brigadier!’
Little Wu was used to being privately berated. ‘There is a reason why you are not our Governess, you know’ was one of Edith’s tired charges whenever Little Wu overstepped the bounds of the Queen’s English. For that matter, Little Wu was not concerned that Lady Edith’s criticism of her diction was in public. It was the fact that Little Wu had used the word ‘upset’ in a sentence designed to mollify Lady’s Edith’s infant daughter that was the final straw. No act of reassurance, or bringing of comfort, was exempt from Lady Edith’s policing of every moment. This was no revelation to Little Yu. The moment made her growth and progress or happiness of any kind impossible. Such possibilities having no hope also meant that trust became about what Little Yu would or would not do, not what Edith could be relied on to do at some point in the future.
What Little Wu would do in her shambling affair with Sir Seth was quite limitless. It was not that snowballing, cream-seaming, patter splatting, face-sitting or feltching had no equivalent words in Chinese, they all did. It was that she could not imagine another man negotiating with her the intimacy that each casting down, both his and hers, implied. That was actually a refreshing aspect of Sir Seth – he allowed her and she allowed him – to pull a shared domain into an exclusive dominion. Either one of them could end up whimpering at the other’s feet. In this uncertainty, Little Wu found a possibility that did not exist outside the walls of the bedroom.
At that time Little Wu found where the line was by crossing it in a fantasy world. It stood inside her world of service which, itself, existed in a world pulsating outside the front door of the house in Repulse Bay.
The first starched linen went up high on the courtyard clothesline and was nearly translucent against the sky and the rising sun. Without a word, Lady Edith approached Little Wu from behind, pulled her around by the shoulder and delivered a slap to her face so hard that Little Wu crumpled to the ground.
‘How could you? You little tart. How dare you?’
Standing up, Little Wu straightened her hem a little. She pulled her washing bonnet around to frame her face neatly once again.
‘Don’t get upset, Ladee Eee-dee!’ she replied, ‘Don’t get up-set!’
As Lady Edith moved in for a fresh assault, Sir Seth appeared on the scene, a sleazy Santa in shaving foam and belt buckle. He wanted to know what all the commotion was about. But he knew. So did Lady Edith. Ho ho ho.
'When we try for a bother for Milly you had better not give me a dose!' Edith cried.
'Oh dear. In front of the servants, Edith' he replied.
'You got your dick out in front of this one' replied Edith pointing at Little Wu. 'The time for modesty is long past, you craven shit'.
Little Wu was dismissed with a month’s pay in lieu. This should have made her feel like the winner. It gave an impression of Sir Seth bearing some sort of responsibility in the reason for her being asked to leave the household. Yet as the weeks rolled by, her morning sickness became undeniable, as did the changes in the shape of her body, and the icy silence of the household in response to her messages seeking support. At that moment, although her familiarities with Sir Seth had been in a perfect counterpoint with his liberties with her, a stony fact remained: he risked nothing and she had risked everything. That her everything seemed like nothing to him came to her as a betrayal. This imbalance in risk, it seemed to her, should have translated to the interior world she shared with Sir Seth to her always being the frightening one, and his role in trembling and obedience, night after night, giving her a feeling that throwing the linen high to the sky was more than an occasional feeling of domestic wonder, but merely another demonstration of her power.
Comments (0)
See all