“And the Kos?” Connie reminded him, while Doris noisily hauled some knitting out of a brown-paper bag.
The old man hesitated, and this time it was not senility, perhaps, which slowed his narrative, but doubt. “Well, yes,” he conceded, after an awkward gap. “Yes, rare adventures those two had, I can tell you.”
“Adventures,” Doris echoed angrily as she clicked her knitting needles. “Rampages, more like.”
The light was clinging to the sea, but inside the room it was dying and the gas fire puttered like a distant motor.
Several times, escaping from Shanghai, Drake and Nelson were separated, the old man said. When they couldn’t find each other, they ate their hearts out till they did. Nelson, the young one, got all the way to Chungking without a scratch, surviving starvation, exhaustion, and hellish air bombardments which killed thousands of civilians. But Drake, being older, was drafted into Chiang’s army, though Chiang did nothing but run away, hoping that the Communists and the Japanese would kill each other.
“Charged all over the shop, Drake did, trying to find the front and worrying himself to death about Nelson. And, of course, Nelson—well, he was twiddling his thumbs in Chungking, wasn’t he, boning up on his ideological reading. They’d even the New China Daily there, he told me afterwards, and published with Chiang’s agreement. Fancy that! There was a few others of his mind around, and in Chungking they got their heads together rebuilding the world for when the war ended, and one day, thank God, it did.”
In 1945, said Mr. Hibbert simply, their separation was ended by a miracle. “One chance in thousands, it was—millions. That road back littered with streams of lorries, carts, troops, guns all pouring toward the coast, and there was Drake running up and down like a madman: ‘Have you seen my brother?’”
The drama of the instant touched the preacher in him, and his voice lifted: “And one little dirty fellow put his arm on Drake’s elbow. ‘Here. You. Ko.’ Like he’s asking for a light. ‘Your brother’s two trucks back, talking the hind legs off a bunch of Hakka Communists.’ Next thing, they’re in each other’s arms and Drake won’t let Nelson out of his sight till they’re back in Shanghai, and then not!”
“So they came to see you,” Connie suggested cosily.
“When Drake got back to Shanghai, he’d one thing in his mind and one only. Brother Nelson should have a formal education. Nothing else on God’s good earth mattered to Drake except Nelson’s schooling. Nothing. Nelson must go to school.” The old man’s hand thudded on the chair arm. “One of the brothers at least would make the grade. Oh, he was adamant, Drake was! And he did it,” said the old man. “Drake swung it. He would. He was a real fixer by then. Drake was nineteen years of age, odd, when he came back from the war. Nelson, he was going on seventeen, and worked night and day, too—on his studies, of course. Same as Drake did, but Drake worked with his body.”
“He was bent,” Doris said under her breath. “He joined a gang and stole. When he wasn’t pawing me.”
Whether Mr. Hibbert heard her or whether he was simply answering a standard objection in her was not clear. “Now, Doris, you must see those triads in perspective,” he corrected her. “Shanghai was a city-state. It was run by a bunch of merchant princes, robber barons, and worse. There were no unions, no law and order, life was cheap and hard, and I doubt Hong Kong’s that different today once you scratch the surface. Some of those so-called English gentlemen would have made your Lancashire mill-owner into a shining example of Christian charity by comparison.”
The mild rebuke administered, he returned to Connie and his narrative. Connie was familiar to him: the archetypal lady in the front pew, big, attentive, in a hat, listening indulgently to the old man’s every word.
“They’d come round to tea, see, five o’clock, the brothers. I’d to have everything ready, the food on the table—lemonade they liked, called it soda. Drake came in from the docks, Nelson from his books, and they’d eat not hardly talking; then back to work, wouldn’t they, Doris? They’d dug out some legendary hero, the scholar Che Yin. Che Yin was so poor he’d had to teach himself to read and write by the light of the fireflies. They’d go on about how Nelson was to emulate him. ‘Come on, Che Yin,’ I’d say. ‘Have another bun to keep your strength up.’ They’d laugh a bit and away they’d go again. ‘Bye-bye, Che Yin, off you go.’
“Now and then, when his mouth wasn’t too full, Nelson would have a go at me on the politics. My, he’d some ideas! Nothing we could have taught him, I can tell you—we didn’t know enough. Money the root of all evil—well, I’d never deny that! I’d been preaching it myself for years! Brotherly love, comradeship, religion the opiate of the masses—well, I couldn’t go along with that, but clericalism, High Church baloney, popery, idolatry—well, he wasn’t too far wrong there either, the way I saw it. He’d a few bad words against us British too, not but what we deserved them, I daresay.”
“Didn’t stop him eating your food, did it?” Doris said, in another low-toned aside. “Or renouncing his religious background. Or smashing the mission to pieces.”
But the old man only smiled patiently. “Doris, my dear, I have told you before and I’ll tell you again. The Lord reveals himself in many ways. So long as good men are prepared to go out and seek for truth and justice and brotherly love, He’ll not be kept waiting too long outside the door.”
Colouring, Doris dug away at her knitting.
“She’s right, of course. Nelson did smash up the mission. Renounced his religion too.” A cloud of grief threatened his old face for a moment, till laughter suddenly triumphed. “And my billy-oh, didn’t Drake make him smart for it! Didn’t he give him a dressing down, though! Oh dear, oh dear! ‘Politics,’ says Drake. ‘You can’t eat them, you can’t sell them, and’—saving Doris’s presence—‘you can’t sleep with them! All you can do with them is smash temples and kill the innocent!’ I’ve never seen him so angry. And gave Nelson a hiding, he did! Drake had learned a thing or two down in the docks, I can tell you!”
“And you must,” di Salis hissed, snake-like in the gloom. “You must tell us everything. It’s your duty.”
“A student procession,” Mr. Hibbert resumed. “Torchlight, after the curfew, group of Communists out on the streets for a shindy. Early ’forty-nine—spring it would have been, I suppose—things were just beginning to hot up.” In contrast to his earlier ramblings, Mr. Hibbert’s narrative style had become unexpectedly concise.
“We were sitting by the fire, weren’t we, Doris? Fourteen, Doris was, or was it fifteen? We used to love a fire, even when there wasn’t the need—took us home to Macclesfield. And we hear this clattering and chanting outside: cymbals, whistles, gongs, bells, drums—oh, a shocking din. I’d a notion something like this might have been happening. Little Nelson, he was forever warning me in his English lessons. ‘You go home, Mr. Hibbert. You’re a good man,’ he used to say, bless him. ‘You’re a good man, but when the floodgates burst the water will cover the good and the bad alike.’ He’d a lovely turn of phrase, Nelson, when he wanted. It went with his faith. Not invented. Felt.
“‘Daisy,’ I said—Daisy Fong, that was; she was sitting with us—‘Daisy, you and Doris go to the back courtyard, I think we’re about to have company.’ Next thing I knew, smash, someone had tossed a stone through the window. We heard voices, of course, shouting, and I picked out young Nelson even then, just from his voice. He’d the Chiu Chow and the Shanghainese, of course, but he was using Shanghainese to the lads, naturally. ‘Condemn the imperialist running dogs!’ he’s yelling. ‘Down with the religious hyenas!’ Oh, the slogans they dream up! They sound all right in the Chinese but shove ’em into English and they’re rubbish. Then the door goes and in they come.”
“They smashed the cross,” said Doris, pausing to glare at her pattern.
It was Hibbert this time, not his daughter, who startled his audience with his earthiness: “They smashed a damn sight more than that, Doris! They smashed the lot. Pews, the Table,
the piano, chairs, lamps, hymn-books, Bibles. Oh, they’d a real old go, I can tell you. Proper little pigs, they were. ‘Go on,’ I says. ‘Help yourselves. What man hath put together will perish, but you’ll not destroy God’s word, not if you chop the whole place up for matchwood.’ Nelson, he wouldn’t look at me, poor lad. I could have wept for him.
“When they’d gone, I looked round and I saw old Daisy Fong standing there in the doorway and Doris behind her. She’d been watching, had Daisy. Enjoying it. I could see it in her eyes. She was one of them, at heart. Happy. ‘Daisy,’ I said. ‘Pack your things and go. In this life you can give yourself or withhold yourself as you please, my dear. But never lend yourself. That way you’re worse than a spy.’”
While Connie beamed her agreement, di Salis gave a squeaky, offended wheeze.
But the old man was really enjoying himself. “Well, so we sat down, me and Doris here, and we’d a bit of a cry together, I don’t mind admitting, hadn’t we, Doris? I’m not ashamed of tears, never have been. We missed your mother sorely. Knelt down, had a pray. Then we started clearing up. Difficult to know where to begin, really.
“Then in comes Drake!” He shook his head in wonder. “‘Good evening Mr. Hibbert,’ he says, in that deep voice of his, plus a bit of my North Country that always made us laugh. And behind him, there’s little Nelson standing with a brush and pan in his hand. He’d still his crooked arm—I suppose he has now—smashed in the bombs when he was little, but it didn’t stop him brushing, I can tell you. That’s when Drake went for him—oh, cursing him like a navvy! I’d never heard him like it. Well, he was a navvy, wasn’t he, in a manner of speaking?” He smiled serenely at his daughter. “Lucky he spoke the Chiu Chow, eh, Doris? I only understand the half of it myself, not that, but my hat! Effing and blinding like I don’t know what.”
He paused and closed his eyes a moment, either in prayer or tiredness. “It wasn’t Nelson’s fault, of course. Well, we knew that already. He was a leader. Face was involved. They’d started marching, nowhere much in mind, then somebody calls to him, ‘Hey! Mission boy! Show us where your loyalties are now!’ So he did. He had to. Didn’t stop Drake lamming into him, all the same. They cleaned up, we went to bed, and the two lads slept on the chapel floor in case the mob came back. Came down in the morning, there were the hymn-books all piled up neatly, those that had survived, same with the Bibles. They’d fixed a cross up, fashioned it theirselves. Even patched up the piano, though not to tune it, naturally.”
Winding himself into a fresh knot, di Salis put a question. Like Connie, he had a notebook open, but he had not yet written anything in it.
“What was Nelson’s discipline at this time?” he demanded, in his nasal, indignant way, and held his pen ready to write.
Mr. Hibbert gave a puzzled frown: “Why, the Communist Party, naturally.”
As Doris whispered “Oh, Daddy” into her knitting, Connie hastily translated: “What was Nelson studying, Mr. Hibbert, and where?”
“Ah, discipline. That kind of discipline!” Mr. Hibbert resumed his plainer style.
He knew the answer exactly. What else, he asked, had he and Nelson to talk about in their English lessons—apart from the Communist gospel—but Nelson’s own ambitions? Nelson’s passion was engineering. Nelson believed that technology, not Bibles, would lead China out of feudalism.
“Shipbuilding, roads, railways, factories: that was Nelson. The Angel Gabriel with a slide-rule and a white collar, and a degree. That’s who he was, in his mind.”
Mr. Hibbert did not stay in Shanghai long enough to see Nelson achieve this happy state, he said, because Nelson did not graduate till ’51.
Di Salis’s pen scratched wildly on the notebook.
“But Drake, who’d scraped and scrounged for him those six years,” said Mr. Hibbert—over Doris’s renewed references to the triads—“Drake stuck it out, and he had his reward, same as Nelson did. He saw that vital piece of paper go into Nelson’s hand, and he knew his job was done and he could get out, just like he’d always planned.”
Di Salis in his excitement was growing positively avid. His ugly face had sprung fresh patches of colour and he was fidgeting desperately on his chair.
“And after graduating—what then?” he said urgently. “What did he do? What became of him? Go on, please. Please go on.”
Amused by such enthusiasm, Mr. Hibbert smiled. Well, according to Drake, he said, Nelson had first joined the shipyards as a draughtsman, working on blueprints and building-projects, and learning like mad whatever he could from the Russian technicians who’d poured in since Mao’s victory. Then in ’53, if Mr. Hibbert’s memory served him correctly, Nelson was privileged to be chosen for further training at the Leningrad University in Russia, and he stayed on there till—well, late fifties anyway.
“Oh, he was like a dog with two tails, Drake was, by the sound of him.” Mr. Hibbert could not have looked more proud if it had been his own son he was talking of.
Di Salis suddenly leaned forward, even presuming, despite cautionary glances from Connie, to jab his pen in the old man’s direction. “So after Leningrad: what did they do with him then?”
“Why, he came back to Shanghai, naturally,” said Mr. Hibbert with a laugh. “And promoted, he was, after the learning he’d acquired, and the standing: a shipbuilder, Russian taught, a technologist, an administrator! Oh, he loved those Russians! Specially after Korea. They’d machines, power, ideas, philosophy. His promised land, Russia was. He looked up to them like—”
His voice and his zeal both died. “Oh, dear,” he muttered, and stopped, unsure of himself for the second time since they had listened to him. “But that couldn’t last forever, could it? Admiring Russia—how long was that fashionable in Mao’s new wonderland? Doris dear, get me a shawl.”
“You’re wearing it,” Doris said.
Yet still, tactlessly, stridently, di Salis bore in on him. He cared for nothing now except the answers—not even for the notebook open on his lap.
“He returned,” he piped. “Very well. He rose in the hierarchy. He was Russia trained, Russia oriented. Very well. What comes next?”
Mr. Hibbert looked at di Salis for a long time. There was no guile in his face, and none in his gaze. He looked at him as a clever child might, without the hindrance of sophistication; and it was suddenly clear that Mr. Hibbert didn’t trust di Salis any more, and indeed that he didn’t like him.
“He’s dead, young man,” Mr. Hibbert said finally, and, swivelling his chair, stared at the sea view. In the room it was already half dark, and most of the light came from the gas fire. The grey beach was empty. On the wicket gate a single sea-gull perched black and vast against the last strands of the evening sky.
“You said he still had his crooked arm,” di Salis snapped straight back. “You said you supposed he had. You said it about now; I heard it in your voice.”
“Well, now, I think we have taxed Mr. Hibbert quite enough,” said Connie brightly and, with a sharp glance at di Salis, stooped for her bag. But di Salis would have none of it.
“I don’t believe him!” he cried in his shrill voice. “When did Nelson die? Give us the dates!”
But the old man only drew his shawl more closely round him, and kept his eyes to the sea.
“We were in Durham,” Doris said, still looking at her knitting, though there was not the light to knit by. “Drake drove up and saw us in his big chauffeur-driven car. He took his henchman with him, the one he calls Tiu. They were fellow crooks together in Shanghai. Wanted to show off. Brought me a platinum cigarette-lighter, and a thousand pounds in cash for Dad’s church and flashed his O.B.E. at us in its case; took me into a corner and asked me to come to Hong Kong and be his mistress, right under Dad’s nose. Bloody sauce!
“He wanted Dad’s signature on something. A guarantee. Said he was going to read law at Gray’s Inn. At his age, I ask you! Forty-two! Talk about mature student! He wasn’t, of course. It was all just face and talk, as usual. Dad said t
o him, ‘How’s Nelson?’ and—”
“Just one minute, please.” Di Salis had made yet another ill-judged interruption. “The date? When did all this happen, please? I must have dates!”
“’Sixty-seven. Dad was almost retired, weren’t you, Dad?”
The old man did not stir.
“All right, ’sixty-seven. What month? Be precise, please!”
He all but said “Be precise, woman,” and he was making Connie seriously anxious. But when she tried to restrain him, he again ignored her.
“April,” Doris said, after some thought. “We’d just had Dad’s birthday. That’s why he brought the thousand quid for the church. He knew Dad wouldn’t take it for himself, because Dad didn’t like the way Drake made his money.”
“All right. Good. Well done. April. So Nelson died pre-April,’sixty-seven. What details did Drake supply of the circumstances? Do you remember that?”
“None. No details. I told you. Dad asked, and he just said ‘dead,’ as if Nelson was a dog. So much for brotherly love. Dad didn’t know where to look. It nearly broke his heart and there was Drake not giving a hoot. ‘I have no brother. Nelson is dead.’ And Dad still praying for Nelson, weren’t you, Dad?”
“I prayed for Nelson and I pray for him still,” he said bluntly. “When he was alive, I prayed that one way or another he would do God’s work in the world. I believed he had it in him to do great things. Drake—he’d manage anywhere. He’s tough. But the light on the door at the Lord’s Life Mission would not have burned in vain, I used to think, if Nelson Ko succeeded in helping to lay the foundation of a just society in China. Nelson might call it Communism. Call it what he likes. But for three long years your mother and I gave him our Christian love, and I won’t have it said, Doris, not by you or anyone, that the light of God’s love can be put out forever—not by politics, not by the sword.”