11

Like many people with nothing to do she was always impatient to get things over with. Early in the twelfth moon she hustled the servants through the year-end house cleaning and sent men out for the New Year shopping─fruit, nuts, candies, preserves, herbs, ham, salted pork, rice cakes and the thin transparent noodles used for soup, like preparing for a siege as indeed they would live off the larder for weeks. She even got the New Year flowers weeks ahead, waxy yellow plum blossoms, berries with bamboo leaves, narcissus and 'green for ten thousand years', an evergreen. There was no sense in waiting until prices soared at the flower market. The rooms were cold enough to keep the buds from blooming too early.
This being the first New Year on her own, precedents had to be set, whether to continue as before or suitably cut down, such as the number of dishes set out before ancestors. So far even the tutor got the same number of meat dishes and vegetables as his predecessor in the old house, only the cook was allowed less per table, so the food suffered. She had to save where it would not show. She was really afraid for the future and was settled down for a long siege.
She wrapped the tips in rose-red paper, dozens of little packets to leave at relatives' houses. She herself would only go to a few elders. Her son would do the rounds. Money gifts for children were put in red envelopes. She made him write inside the gold borders Long life, hundred years or Longevity, wealth and influence while she watched with an elbow on the table under the lamplight. That felt good, their first New Year by themselves.
The servant Wong Ji had taken out the tin candlesticks and incense pot and ancestral portraits. This year there were two new pictures, Old Mistress and Second Master, both photographs. An extra place was set for the old concubine who had been Old Master's mother. The arrangement involved protocol that Wong Ji was familiar with. He also knew all the birthdays and death anniversaries when a sacrificial table had to be laid. She had kept all the old staff. There would be talk if she changed servants the minute she moved out and just as bad if she got rid of them one by one. They would go to her relatives to ask for jobs and recommendations and gossip about her. A widow could not be too careful of her name.
'Northern servants are still the best,' she said. Tor one thing they don't have relatives here to come calling and hang around.'
How tired she was of the old faces who had witnessed scenes she wanted to forget. But it was a revenge too just to keep them. They made the dynastic succession more real.
She kept to Old Mistress's ways in everything except for her mouthful of smoke. And she had the opium couch put away during the New Year when her room would be on view. With the room emptier than ever and again time on her hands, she stood at the window looking out on a grey day. A cock crowed thinly in the distance like a door creaking. Cocks answered in other parts of town. Almost everybody had a chicken in his backyard ready for the feast but not here, northerners do not have chicken at New Year. The wind swept the alley clean. A large unkempt black dog wandered alone past the row of closed doors, sniffed at a tall basket of charcoal, stood up to look inside and kept worrying it until he had upset it. He burrowed in and came out with a piece of charcoal which he gnawed, dropped and examined. He walked away disappointed, but found nothing else in the alley from end to end. He returned to explore the basket further and came up with another piece of charcoal. This he ate with a loud crunch. He ate one chunk after another always picking them with a disgruntled fastidiousness, testing them by throwing them on the ground and nuzzling them turning them over.
'Mistress, Third Master is here,' Old Cheng came in saying.
So, she thought, his creditors must be hounding him with New Year at hand. New Year's Eve was the mountain pass which once gone through may earn you another year's respite. Creditors with lanterns were out until dawn collecting. Debtors hanged themselves that night.
'Tell Wong Ji to light a fire in the parlour,' she said.
With mixed feelings largely lost in the excitement she changed into a padded jacket and trousers of the same slate grey cotton bound with white braid, suitable for this stage of the mourning. There's the old saying, 'Want to be smart? Wear light mourning.' Under the lacquered hair pulled back flat the face without any make-up was deep yellow, a protective colouring in a way. She didn't look so old she thought.
She greeted him with the usual 'Ek' of pleased surprise. 'How did Third Master find time to come just now?
'I don't celebrate the New Year. It's not like before when you have to.'
'Yes, there's really no point to it and it's going to be-lonely this year. With New Year it's the more the merrier.'
`We certainly had enough people.'
'Just the concubines, sit them down and they'll make three tables of mahjong.'
He laughed. 'Not so many.'
Yes there were. Maybe not at the same time, and that's not counting the ones outside.' When Old Mistress lifted the ban on concubines, judging her sons old enough to indulge, the singsong girls taken into the house had soon lost favour to new ones installed outside that the old lady knew nothing about. She never did keep up with them. Being trained to please they made superior slave girls. She especially took to one of Big Master's. It was 'Fourth Mistress Concubine', 'Fourth Mistress Concubine' all day long. Even the favoured daughters-in-law suffered at the hands of the wench, not to mention Yindi. She purposely brought them up now to show she no longer cared for him in the least. 'Why, we haven't even seen the two you have now.'
'They're not presentable.'
'You're too modest. Can your choice be wrong?'
'No, it was just the pranks of friends that got me into it.'
'Now who's to believe that?'
'It's true. Either that or it was to outdo somebody else. Actually I've always said why take it to heart when it's supposed to be play?'
She just smiled. 'Gone out much lately?'
'No, I seldom go out now. Getting old, not welcome any more.'
'Being modest again.'
The fire was coming up.
'Only now it's getting warmer. Why so thrifty, Second Sister-in-law?'
'Ai-ya, Third Master, go and ask around how much coal costs, with a war on up north and none coming.'
They talked about relatives trapped in the war in Peking. He took off his fur-lined gown, threw it on the rosewood divan and paced the room talking in a thin padded suit of dark blue silk. A wide stiff slate-coloured fringed belt hung down in front under the jacket where he was still flat in the belly. Once it .got warmer the flowers started to give off their scent. They crowded the white mantelpiece and the little tea tables. The white double doors were slid shut because there was no fire in the dining-room. The downstairs suite was never used, she never even came down because the teacher lived on the
ground floor. It smelled like a new house, clean and a bit dusty.
`Is Yensheng home?'
'He went to the Chungs. That's a southern custom inviting people for New Year dinners days ahead. Mrs Chung is from the south.'
'Mrs Chung with her looks,' he grunted.
She laughed, 'She can't be called ugly─lovely skin.' She was rotund and wore small round green glasses.
'Doesn't even look like a woman,' he complained as it outraged.
Spoken to a woman this would seem to include her among those that at least look like women, not much of a compliment but enough to make them feel cosy sitting across the room in the twilight. It had suddenly got dark. 'It's snowing,' she said.
They watched it come down like midges, dark specks on the pale grey sky. The neighbourhood shops had started to beat gongs and drums warming up for the New Year. The clerks and apprentices went at it as soon as they had closed for the day. The big gongs boomed hoarsely at a frenzied speed, dongdongdongdongdongdong, punctured now and then by a tinny clap of cymbals. Only in the pauses of exhaustion were the drums heard, like thumps of frantic toes racing in circles on a hollow floor. Unsynchronized from shop to shop but somewhat merged by distance, it had a vast sense of time running out. It paced the late shoppers carrying food parcels tied with straw that cut into their frozen hands. Shop and cook for the sacrificial table, do right by your ancestors, set the tone for the coming year, hasten home no matter how far away and be reunited. Hurried scenes in the withering year, was the old phrase for these last days of the year.
'Yes, it's snowing,' he said.
She was not going to give him anything this time and he knew it. Here was her chance to show that she was just being civil. Why pay for his conversation every time as if she was starved for company? It would not help him either to confess what straits he was in. It would only avenge her.
They talked about relatives. She was in no hurry to fill in the pauses, giving him time to think of leaving. But these silences in semi-darkness had a flavour of their own. Darkness came up as slow as honey, almost ticklishly creeping up bit by bit where they sat in this new thicker element, the half-frozen time of ten, twenty years ago. She could hear the nostalgia in his voice like a quiet smile they exchanged unseeing. She ought to get up and turn on the light before a passing servant saw them sitting in the dark. But she was afraid of disturbing the tenuous strands of the spell that bound him to her.
She got up.
'Don't turn on the light,' he suddenly said pettishly, almost with a childish whine. She had never heard him sound like this.
She smiled surprised and sat down again feeling very happy.
When she finally had to go to the light switch she had to add, 'Third Master is staying for dinner,' lest it seemed like a hint for him to leave. What could she do? It was getting on for dinner time.
It's still early. When do you people have dinner?' `
‘We have it early.'
Sometimes asking people to stay for dinner was also the cue for them to leave. But he stayed. Could it be that he came out today to avoid his creditors, with nowhere to go? She never asked if he wanted to smoke either. A tray could be brought in here and he could use the divan. Opium smokers were not required to stand on ceremony where they had to lie down. Still it wouldn't be very nice. Anyway opium was never mentioned in his family.
The dining-room was freezing. He put his fur-lined gown on again. The amahs filled their tiny fluted tin cups with warm wine in a tin kettle.
'This will keep out the cold,' she said.
'Is this burning roses? Not bad.'
'It's just sorghum brandy from the corner shop. I put in the dried roses and let it stand for two, three months, for the New Year. I'll tell them to get you a bottle to take home. We still have some roses left.'
A handy man was sent to buy a bottle of wine. An amah brought it in together with the dried roses in a paper packet. She slid them in and they hung in a cluster at the bottleneck. Miraculously the withered tiny roses turned a luscious deep red. She had never noticed it before and would never have thought wine could resurrect dead flowers. She added powdered sugar sprinkling it like scraped ice over the blossoms on the surface. The white flakes drifted slowly down through the greenish twilight in the bottle. The bottom was soon covered with snow with one or two rose petals lying on it, a strange scene. The dead flowers that bloomed again shook her a little. She was instantly ashamed of herself; turning away from it like the immediate reaction to a bad omen, not so much dread as dislike. The drinks had brought a flush to her cheeks that burned in the cold room, more like her old face with the rouge, the face he knew her by. Her eyes slid around like a heavy liquid that had to be controlled with an effort.
'Rice for me,' she signalled an amah.
'Second Sister-in-law can drink more than that.'
'I'm out of practice, Old Mistress used to have wine at supper every day. You have more.'
The amah refilled his cup and he raised it at her. 'Dry cups.'
She finished hers to keep him company. Absurdly instantaneous and quite unconnected with the course of the wine down the system a secret warmth came up from under her like sitting on a strong lamp. She applied herself to her rice and only pressed food on him.
They were served tea in the parlour. The gongs and drums were louder. More shops had joined in after supper. He sat hunched forward nursing his tea looking into the pane of red light on the stove.
'This time of year you can't help looking backwards and forwards. I'm finished, and who's to blame? Not you.'
For a moment she was stunned trying to make out what he meant. 'What's the matter with Third Master?' she said half laughing. 'Didn't have much to drink either.'
'Think I'm drunk because I let out the truth? When was it that you came, the year of the revolution? The year before. Ever since you came I couldn't stand it at home. I had to go out all the time. I wasn't like that before.'
'Don't talk nonsense,' she murmured smiling slightly looking away.
'I only want you to know that I the Third Yao wasn't born like this. No matter what other people say, as long as Second Sister-in-law understands I'd die content.'
He sounded like he was speaking of suicide. 'Why talk like this all of a sudden? It couldn't be that a clever man like you would think himself into a corner?'
He smiled back at her. 'Don't misunderstand now. All I want is a good word from you. Say it and I'll go.'
'What is there to say? What's the use of going into it now?'
It wasn't easy keeping it to myself all these years, but: I'd rather have you hate me. If it got known it'd be worse for you than for me.'
'How thoughtful of you. I nearly died.'
'I know. I wanted so much to tell you afterwards, if we die we'd die together.'
`That's what you say now. Who knows what you told other people?'
'If I ever said a word I'm not human.'
This she more or less believed after continual soundings these many years. There'd be a difference if anybody knew at all. 'Who can tell about you?' she muttered in a tone of dismissal.
'Funny, the one nice thing I ever did in all my life. Heaven's retribution I suppose.' He stood up and was going to get his gown. 'You're hard,' he said looking at her. I always liked hard women.' He reached for her hand. I'm going, just say you understand.'
'What is there to say? My life is over anyway.' She did not believe him but it was good to bask a while in that soft religious light that had suddenly flooded over the years giving everything a meaning and a reason for all the pain. Already she was speaking as if she did. Like a disbeliever in a temple she was bowing with folded palms just because the ancient bell was tolling and the incense was sweet.
Her hands remaining in his had said enough. But she could not meet his eyes, afraid that deceit would be faced with deceit. Her cold hands in his were real. So was the grip of his fingers, surprisingly bony. They were both here even if half a lifetime had gone by.
'We don't want to be overheard.' He got up to close the door.
She could not just sit there waiting. She got up to stop him. A closed door seen by the servants would be fatal. She didn't want to spoil everything, she wanted to dwell on her new-found past until it began to feel real.
They struggled entangled as if sewn together with his arms in her sleeves.
'You're out of your mind.'
'We have an account to settle,' he said. It's been too long. You owe me too much. As much as I owe you.'
At these words all her sorrows welled up to block the throat. He manoeuvred her to the divan and pushed her on to it. The clasp of her ear-ring cut into the side of her face. The round thick rosewood border of a marble panel thrust up hard against the back of her head. There was no time, there never was any. The ever-watchful scheme of things could make animals of men and girls who were alone at last for a minute, as in the old romances. It had to happen instantly or not at all. Especially with them, unless he took her now there could be no arrangements to meet in a safer place. There were just too many things between them that no amount of words could clear away.
Still she fought him, her resistance having found a focus. With the bitterness piled up over the years she would rather give in to any other man than him. They tussled over the trousers sash that left a narrow red line on her, a visible barrier. He squashed her hands with his full weight leaning on one side, his elbow hurting her as he arched up to pull down his trousers. She could sense the danger outside the room, tremendous pressure on a bubble. Their struggle seemed enclosed in a glass dome much smaller than the room. People could see through. Perhaps even he was looking. Her wrist was pressed against the fur lining of his gown on the couch. The feel of fur touched off that fear of mating like animals and a sudden spurt of madman's strength. She threw him off and got on her feet and only then heard voices outside. He was also listening sitting up. A trap she thought. It sounded like people arguing. She rushed to open the door hoping that nobody had seen it shut. On the way she straightened her clothes and hair a bit. At least there was no one outside in the ill-lit hall. That was Wong Ji's voice remonstrating at the back door outside the kitchen, the only entrance in use.
'What is it, Wong Ji?' she called out.
'Some people here asking for Third Master.'
Two men came into the hallway wearing black satin caps more pointed than usual and black gaberdine gowns with salt-like snow on the shoulders.
'Is this the lady of the house?' one of them turned around to ask Wong Ji who followed close behind.
'How could you be such a fool, Wong Ji, to let in strangers at night?' she said.
'I kept telling them to wait outside
'Mistress, please ask Third Master to come out, we came with Third Master,' the men said.
'People you don't know, you let them force their way in?' she insisted on speaking only to Wong Ji. 'End of the year and you're not more careful of doors and windows?' There were more robberies when people needed money for the New Year.
'Here's Third Master,' cried the men when he came out of the parlour. 'Huh-ya, Third Master, you certainly kept us waiting. In this snow too.' 'We're frozen stiff and footsore, one at the back door, one at the front door, didn't dare leave our posts either, and no dinner."Huh-ya, we thought you'd left by another door. Worried to death what to tell the others when we get back.'
'You people wait outside,' he took them by the arms and started to walk them towards the door. 'Wait outside, I'll be with you in a minute. Go get rickshas, you can wait in the rickshas.'
'Now, wouldn't it embarrass Third Master?' they said reproachfully. 'Throw us into the snowstorm just when we've found Third Master at last?'
'Who are these people?' she said to nobody in particular.
'We came with Third Master, Mistress. Third Master has a bill to settle with us, and with Mr Ung here from the Yuan Feng Money Shop.'
Mr Ung said, 'We're hard-pressed for money ourselves, end of the year. We went to Third Master's residence and were told he was out. So what could we do but wait? We camped in the parlour with the other collectors and slept on the floor. It's been weeks now. Third Master came downstairs today and promised to go out and raise money. The others had the two of us go along with him.'
'All right,' he cut in, 'now you know I didn't give you the slip. This is not my house, you can't make a row here. Just walk ahead of me, I'll be right with you.'
'Please don't make things difficult for us, Third Master. If we go, we go together.'
'Ours is a hardship post and Third Master has always been most considerate,' said the other.
'Everybody out,' she said. 'Pushing into people's houses at night─who knows what you are? If you still won't go we'll call the police.'
'Get out, get out,' Wong Ji murmured pushing at the men. 'Our mistress has spoken.'
Third Master herded them on whispering while they begged, 'Third Master is most understanding, he knows the fix we're in. If we go back alone they'll think we got some special consideration from Third Master. And how are we going to account for ourselves back at the shop?'
She cut them short, 'Go talk business elsewhere, this is not a tea house. We don't owe you money here, what right have you got to barge in at all hours? Wong Ji, go call the police.'
'Second Sister-in-law,' he turned to her for the first time and she slapped him hard. He started to hit back but Wong Ji caught hold of his arm pleading under his breath, 'Third Master. Third Master.'
The bewildered creditors also held him back babbling, 'All right, all right, Third Master, it's all among ourselves, there's nothing that can't be talked over.'
He looked across them at her. 'All right, you be careful. Just be careful, or you'll have me to reckon with.'
He walked out with the two men at his heels and Wong Ji behind them. She went back to the parlour. She did not want to go up just now with all the amahs upstairs. Wong Ji would not come in here. The lights were curiously bright. The flowers' fragrance mingled with cigarette smoke as after a party. She didn't go near the stove. There was a faint hum inside it, the sound of burning timber breaking off and falling. The little window on the stove looked into an empty red room.
For the want of something to do she uncorked the bottle that he was to take with him and took a sip. All the dried roses crowding on the surface almost stopped the flow. It was slightly rasping and tasted bitter. The sugar was all at the bottom. The gongs and drums were still beating far off warming up the New Year.