‘Kung fu,’ Lydia repeated carefully.

‘That’s right. It translates literally as Merit Master. The Japanese call it karate. That means empty hand. In other words, it’s unarmed combat.’

She smiled to herself, a soft smile of delight that warmed her slender face. ‘Yes. That’s it.’

‘But why on earth do you need to know about unarmed combat?’

She gave him a bold, mischievous grin. ‘Because I want to learn more about Chinese ways, so that I can decide for myself whether they are relevant or irrelevant, sir.’

‘Well, I am pleased that you are so eager to learn more about the land you’re living in, whatever the reason. Now off with you, young lady, as I have other things to do.’

For a split second Lydia let her eyes slide to the upstairs window, and then without even a good-bye, she was gone.

Theo sighed. Lydia Ivanova was never going to make life easy for him. Only today he’d had to take the ruler to her knuckles because she was late for afternoon classes yet again. The girl had scant respect for rules. Not insolent exactly. But there was something about her, the way she walked into class, the independent way she held her head and in the way she raised her gaze to his slowly when he asked her a question. It was there in the back of her eyes. As if she knew something he didn’t. It irritated him.

But not as much as Mr Christopher Mason irritated him. He reached up and locked the heavy gates, shutting out the world. Only then did he allow himself the exquisite pleasure of looking up at the window.


‘It is not wise to tweak tail of tiger, my love.’

‘What do you mean?’ Theo kissed the delicious hollow at the base of Li Mei’s throat and felt the pulse of her blood under his lips.

‘I mean Mr Mason.’

‘To hell with Mason.’

They were lying naked on the bed, the shutters half-closed against the heat, allowing only a narrow shaft of light to steal into the room. It lay like a dusty sash of gold across Li Mei’s body, as if it couldn’t keep its fingers from her breasts any more than he could.

‘Tiyo, my love, I am serious.’

Theo raised his head and kissed the point of her chin. ‘Well, I’m not. I’ve been serious all day long with a whole school full of monkeys and now I want to be very unserious.’

She laughed, a delighted sound that was so soft and low it made the soles of his feet tingle. Her skin smelled of hyacinths and tasted of honey, but infinitely more addictive. He brushed his lips down her sleek body, over the curve of her hip, and rested his cheek against her slender thigh with a sigh of pleasure.

‘So you go see Mr Mason tomorrow?’

‘No. The man’s a menace.’

‘Please, Tiyo.’

She reached down and caressed his head, the tips of her fingers beginning a gentle massage of his scalp, until he could feel all the tension melting from his brain. He adored her touch. It was like no other woman’s. He shut his eyes to block out everything else but that one swirling, emptying sensation.

‘Tomorrow is Saturday,’ he murmured, ‘so I shall take you out on the river. There the air is cooler and in the evening we shall stop off at Hwang’s and eat phoenix tail prawns and kuo tieh until we burst.’ He rolled over onto his side and smiled at her. ‘Would you like that?’

Her dark eyes were solemn. Gracefully she removed the cream orchid and the mother-of-pearl comb from her hair, placed them on the bedside table, and looked at him very seriously. ‘I very much like that, Tiyo,’ she said. ‘But not tomorrow.’

‘Why not tomorrow?’

‘Because you see Mr Mason tomorrow.’

‘For heaven’s sake, Li Mei, I refuse to go running over there like a puppy every time he crooks his finger in my direction.’

‘You want lose school?’

Theo pulled away. Without a word he left the bed and went over to the open window where he stood staring out, his naked back rigid. After a long silence, he said, ‘You know I couldn’t bear to lose my school.’

A rustle of sheets and she was there with him. Her slight body pressed tight against his back, her arms clasped around his chest, her cheek on his shoulder blade. He could feel her long lashes whisper over his skin. Neither spoke.

From this high up on the hill Theo looked down at the tiled roofs of the town that had been his home for the last ten years, a home he loved, and a refuge from the whisperings he’d left behind in England. He gazed out over the sweep of the whole International Settlement, a little speck of China that seemed to have mutated into a part of Europe. It possessed a curious mix of architectural styles, with solid Victorian mansions sitting cheek by jowl with the more ornate French avenues and long Italian terraces with wrought-iron balconies and exuberant window boxes.

The Europeans had stolen this parcel of land from the Chinese as part of the reparations treaty after the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. They had elbowed the ancient walled town to one side and set about constructing their own much larger town right next to it, seizing control of the waterway with gunboats that nosed their way like grey crocodiles up the Peiho River. The International Settlement, they termed it, a bustling centre of Western trade and commerce that delighted the masters back home in Britain but stuck in the craw of the Chinese government.

Theo shook his head. The British were too damn good at it, this whole controlling-the-world thing. Because though the settlement was international, there was no question that it was the British who controlled the place, Sir Edward Carlisle who set his signature with a flourish on every new document, just as he stamped his stern character on the International Council.

Officially the town was divided into four quarters – British, Italian, French, and Russian – lined up neatly next to each other like old friends, but it didn’t work out like that, not in practice. They bickered constantly. Argued over land distribution. Theo had heard them at it in the Ulysses Club. And somehow the British ended up owning nearly half the town while small areas were taken from the Russians and ceded to the Japanese and Americans in exchange for very large payments of gold. But then money always talked. Money and gunboats.

As Theo’s eyes scanned the town, he had to admit that compared to the ramshackle Russian Quarter over to his left, where many of the houses were cramped and shabby, the British Quarter was impressive. It gleamed like a well-fed cat. The church steeples, the clock tower of the Town Hall, the classical façade of the Imperial Hotel, the immaculately tonsured rose beds in the parks, no wonder the natives called them devils. Foreign Devils. Only a devil can steal your soul and turn it into alien territory. To the Chinese of Junchow the International Settlement was a different planet. Yet in the distance the river glinted like polished metal and the merchant ships at anchor alongside the clusters of sampans all added to the foolish illusion of permanence.

He became aware that Li Mei’s fingers were caressing his chest in slow spinning circles.

‘In market today, Tiyo, I see your friend. Newspaper man.’

‘Who do you mean?’

‘Your Mr Parker.’

‘Alfred? What was he up to down there?’

She gave a soft little laugh that rippled through him. ‘I think he look for something old. But I think he in trouble.’

‘How’s that?’

‘He too English. Not keep eyes wide awake. Not like you.’

She wrapped her arms more tightly around Theo and gave an encouraging giggle, but he did not respond. Disappointed, she shook her head and the perfume from the silky curtain of her hair billowed around him. Somewhere out in the street a car sounded its klaxon but the room remained in silence. A handful of pigeons fluttered past, the whistles attached to their tails making a whirring noise that sounded like the laughter of the gods.

‘Tiyo,’ Li Mei said at last, ‘you want I should ask my father?’

Theo swung around, his grey eyes suddenly hard. ‘No. Don’t you ever ask him.’

4

The gas lamp in the hallway wasn’t working, probably needed a new mantle, but Lydia didn’t even notice. She hurried down the gloomy passage from the front door, instinctively avoiding the holes in the linoleum, dumped her packages on the bottom of the stairs and knocked on Mrs Zarya’s sitting-room door.

‘Who is it?’

‘It’s me, Lydia.’

The door opened and a tall middle-aged woman looked out at Lydia suspiciously. ‘Kakaya sevodnya otgovorka?’

‘Please, Mrs Zarya, you know perfectly well I don’t speak Russian.’

The woman laughed as if she had scored a point, a great big laugh that shook the thin walls. She was a large woman with a broad fleshy face and a bosom like the great steppes of Russia. She frightened Lydia because her tongue could be as fierce as her hugs and it was important to stay on the right side of her. Olga Petrovna Zarya was their landlady and occupied the ground floor of her small terraced house. The rest she let out to tenants.

‘Come in, little sparrow, I want to speak to you.’

Lydia stepped inside the room. It smelt of borscht and onions, despite the window being open onto the narrow strip of flagstones she called her backyard, and was full of heavy furniture too large for the cramped space. In pride of place on an embroidered runner that hid the stains on the top of the mahogany piano stood a framed photograph. It was of General Zarya. In full White Army uniform, his arms folded, his gaze stern and accusing. Lydia always avoided his sepia eye if she could. There was just something about it that made her feel a failure.

‘My patience is over,’ Olga Zarya announced, planting herself firmly in front of Lydia. ‘Tell that lazy mother of yours that she has taken wicked advantage of me, of my good nature. You tell her. That next week I throw her out. Da, into the street. And what does she expect, if she doesn’t…’

‘Pay the rent?’ Lydia placed a neat pile of dollar bills on the table and stood back.

Mrs Zarya’s jaw dropped for a split second, and then she snatched up the money and flicked through it quickly, counting to herself in Russian.

‘Good. Spasibo. I thank you.’ The woman stepped closer, her long shapeless black dress wafting the smell of mothballs toward Lydia, and put her big face so close Lydia could see her mouth twitch with irritation as it said sharply, ‘But not before time.’

‘The two months we owe and this month. It’s all there.’

‘Da. It’s all here.’

‘I’m sorry it was so late.’

‘She’s been playing again? To earn this?’

‘Yes.’

The landlady nodded and reached out a well-padded arm as if she would enfold the girl in an embrace, but Lydia eyed the bosom with alarm and backed out the door.

‘Do svidania, Mrs Zarya.’

‘Good-bye, little sparrow. Tell that mother of yours that…’

But Lydia shut her ears. She scooped up her packages and dashed up the stairs. The treads were uncarpeted, the bare wood scuffed and dusty, so her feet made a clattering sound she knew her mother would hear from above.

‘Hello, Mrs Yeoman,’ she sang out as she shot past the second-floor rooms. They were rented by a retired Baptist missionary and his wife who had decided, inexplicably, in Lydia’s view, to eke out their pension in the country they had devoted their lives to.

‘Good afternoon, Lydia,’ Mr Yeoman called back in his usual cheery manner. ‘You sound as if you’re in a hurry.’

‘Is my mother home?’

There was a slight pause, but she was too excited to notice. ‘Yes, I do believe she is.’

Lydia took the last flight of narrow steps up to the attic room two at a time and burst through the door. ‘Mama, look what I’ve got for us, Mama, I’ve…’ She stopped. The smile died on her face.

Her foot kicked the door shut behind her. She felt all the happiness of the day drain from her body and trickle onto the floor alongside the broken crockery, the crushed flowers, and the thousands of cushion feathers that made the room look as if it had been attacked by a swan. At her feet lay the pieces of a shattered mirror. In the middle of the chaos lay the small figure of Valentina Ivanova, curled up on the carpet as neat as a cat. She was fast asleep, her breath coming in soft, regular little puffs. Under the table lay a vodka bottle. It was empty.

Lydia stood staring, struggling for control. Then she dropped her armful of parcels and brown paper bags carelessly on the floor and tiptoed over to her mother, as if she feared she might disturb her, though in reality she knew that only a bucket of water could wake Valentina now. She knelt down beside her.

‘Hello, Mama,’ she whispered. ‘I’m here. Don’t you worry, I’ll…’ But the words wouldn’t come. Her throat ached and her head felt as if it might burst.