Master Wu smiles, and he stretches his narrow shoulders and they pop, and there is a little shine in his eye as recollection takes away his years.
“It was a great fight. Many buffets. Perhaps a hundred. They leaped and they struck and the young man broke the spar with his foot and the great master hurled him back and the young man rolled to his feet and attacked him again, and so on and so on, until the saloon funiture was all matchwood and they were both shaking and bruised, but the great master was still on his feet and his opponent could not prevail. The young man was covered in cuts and bruises, and his mouth was swollen. And the great master said:
“ ‘You have done very well, young man, but now I see that you are tired, and I am older and stronger than you are. Retire, and I will not hurt you any more, but if you remain, I will break you as you broke my spar, and your mother will weep for her wasted years.’ But the young man did not reply. He smiled as if he were just now understanding something, and he shut his eyes, and he listened to the sound of the waves. And he began to move. He moved in step with the slow, inevitable rhythm in his head, and the storm lent strength to his tired limbs and the ebb and the flow of the sea washed away his hurts and doubts, and soon the whole room was filled with the rush of the tide. The great master fell into that same rhythm and their footsteps moved as one, until the young man heard a great wave come roaring in from the deep, and it bore down over the great master with the weight which shatters stone, and the great master fell to his knees with a shout, and the fight was over. The master lay gasping on the floor of the saloon and spent many weeks in a cot recovering from his wounds. And then he left, after paying for the damage, with great humility. It is rumoured that thereafter he became a baker, and married, and had many children, and was a better man.
“And the young man was nicknamed Ocean thereafter, and he was still a terrible farmer and very bad dancer, but his father and uncle and his mother and all his family were very proud, and he was content. And the Secret is this . . .”
Master Wu screws up one eye and opens the other very wide. He crooks his hands and lisps. This is presumably an appropriate face for imparting Secrets.
“In unifying your chi with that of your opponent—in aligning the breath of your life and theirs—you will storm the strongest fortress. There! Is that a good Secret?”
I have no idea. It sounds as if it might be really profound. It also sounds like baloney. It is, therefore, the highest-quality bullshido, or martial arts hogwash. I don’t know whether to commit it to memory and study it or consider it an object lesson in the ease with which you can counterfeit ancient proverbs. Old Man Lubitsch once worked in an auction house in far off New York City, and is very fond of a saying he heard there regarding the provenance of religious iconography from eastern Europe: “Seventeeth century, but the artist is still alive.”
“What does it mean?” Elisabeth says.
“No idea. It’s a Secret. Means what you need it to mean. But now we have one, we can refuse to tell anyone about it!” He laughs. Wu Shenyang of the Voiceless Dragon, making up fairy tales like Lydia Copsen.
And then he puts another record on the gramophone (this one is Ella Fitzgerald, who—according to Master Wu—knew a great deal about chi), and Elisabeth and I are the first of his students ever to know the Inner Teaching of the Voiceless Dragon School.
THE SUMMER of that year is abnormally hot, and it is dry. The soil of Ma Lubitsch’s garden turns to dust by degrees, and the lawn cracks and fades. It doesn’t seem to matter how much water she sprays on it, the earth is so thirsty it can’t absorb moisture any more, and the sun slurps it all up into the air before the plants can drink it. In the end, she takes to hosing the whole place down at night, and Old Man Lubitsch makes a huge white tent from spare bedsheets to shade the entire garden during the day. Gonzo, aside from occasional trips to Angela Gosby’s house to use the pool (and fall in frantic lust with his young hostess), remains in the shade and pronounces himself unable to move. When the temperature goes up another degree, only the bees are happy, and even they must make allowances. The central chamber of the beehive cannot be allowed to rise above thirty-six degrees. A humming flight path reaches from the Lubitsch house to Cricklewood Creek, the inbound traffic carrying individual drops of water in gentle bee-fingers. Air-conditioning by slave labour, if you believe that a hive is run by an autocrat, but Old Man Lubitsch has long ago explained that the Queen is an asset, cherished and nurtured but not obeyed, and that the hives are a functioning biological machine. He cannot decide if they represent an eerie social harmony or a grim nightmare of mechanistic sub-servience to a purposeless and endlessly repeating pattern. In the heat, he muses on this imponderable aloud, until Ma Lubitsch pronounces it unsuitable conversation to go with lemonade, and her husband gratefully abandons political philosophy for citrusy relief.
Then September comes, and torrential rain. There are dry days after, of course, even barbecue days, but the flat-iron summer has been lifted and set aside. We go back to school and I find, briefly, a fresh tormentor among the new inmates who have arrived to receive the Evangelist’s curious wisdom.
Donnie Finch is a Big Bad Kid. This is to say he is strong, sporty, delinquent (in a very minor way) and antipathetic to anyone who pays more attention in class than he does. He is instantly well-liked, instantly obnoxious, instantly aware of his social inferiors. He backs me against the wall between French and biology and announces that I will henceforth call him “sir.”
This is the thing that I hate above all others. Donnie Finch does not know me. He has no reason for his animosity. He just knows that it is the Done Thing. He is Donnie Finch. I am not. He is a football hero, a smoker and a joker. I am not. Therefore, in the only mathematics which interest him, I am to be despised and picked on. He presses his thick damp hand in the middle of my chest and sneers. (I think of Mr. Lasserly.) This is habit. It is literally mindless: Old Man Lubitsch’s horrible determinist bee society writ large and sticky-fingered. There can be no discussion, no nuance, because either of these asserts a world which Donnie Finch’s picture of life denies. He eschews these things and chooses instead an off-the-shelf alternative.
In my mind, there is a calculus of risk and reward playing out. I am not helpless. I could kill Donnie Finch. I would quite like to, at this moment. His body is fragile. There are four targets in reach of my hand which would end this discussion in no small way, although three of them (temple, larynx, nose bone) require for a deadly blow more strength than I can easily bring to bear, and would most likely only incapacitate and terrify him. The other one (carotid artery) is something of a lottery. A smart tap will probably knock him out, but might dislodge a clot or cholesterol smear and cause an embolism in his brain. Killing him by mistake is not the point.
But satisfying as mayhem and (short) combat might be, these are not solutions. They are just reactions—as idiotic as Donnie himself. Thus I am paralysed, and upset. I want to unleash my anger. I do not believe that I should. At sixteen, it is a terrible thing to be hog-tied by conscience. I gaze at Donnie Finch’s pink face and his nasty freckled mouth and wonder what to do, and what he will grow into when he’s older. Maybe he will always be a thug. He shunts me against the wall, and I breathe out and am preparing to test my less lethal options, which are by definition more difficult because fending off an opponent without seriously damaging him requires a level of skill vastly greater than his, when Donnie Finch is mercifully eclipsed. Planet Gonzo’s orbit has brought him to the east corridor, and the gravity of my situation has pulled him in. He doesn’t say anything. He just steps firmly between us and closes his hand over Donnie Finch’s, and squeezes. Donnie Finch lets go. I am not sure whether to be relieved or not.
Christmas brings ribbons and pine trees and Ma Lubitsch’s memorable cake. The Evangelist, driven by a wretched fear of hormonal wrongdoing in the Season of the Lord’s Birth, pronounces that dating is forbidden by scripture. This is so remarkable that there is a queue at the library to
read the Bible for anything we may have missed. A theological debate is set in motion which lasts into February and beyond.
Master Wu’s daughter moves to Lindery, which is just along the coast. She is Ma Lubitsch’s age but looks mine, and she is very tiny and very beautiful. Her name is Yumei, and her daughter—who is two—is called Ophelia. Ophelia watches me gravely as I practise my Embrace Tiger, and her little hands bat insistently at my hip. It is sticking out. I try harder. Ophelia consults with Master Wu, and approves the change—and Master Wu smiles hugely as his assistant moves to her next student.
One of the donkeys develops a case of halitosis beyond what can be tolerated even in a donkey. The others ignore him, giving rise to great mournful honks of loneliness and betrayal until the vet arrives and performs some abcess-related miracle and all is well again.
In April, I walk along Cricklewood Creek with Penny Greene, who does geography with Gonzo and wears a plastic butterfly in her hair. It is cold and very beautiful. We are looking at the water and talking about ducks, and she sort of lunges. I think for a moment that she has fallen, but her arms are slim and strong around my back and she eels up over my chest and plants a smacker on my mouth. She is very soft in some places and very bony in others, and the difference between her body and mine is like switching a light on in my head. We kiss for a very long time. She is pleased. She goes home. I sort of expect this to lead to an official date, but it doesn’t. We remain friends. I find that this does not bother me. Penny Greene falls in love with a boy called Castor, and the whole business looks—from the outside, at least—utterly desolate. I go on a date with Alexandra Frink instead, but she is monumentally boring, or perhaps I am, and we part chastely and with a measure of relief.
And then there comes the day when Master Wu and I are mixed in a blur of limbs and actions and reactions (“Newton! Very good gong fu!”) and I see an opening and I strike sharply into it and even as I do so I am thinking that I have made a mistake, and of the gramophone and my horror at the notion of harming it, and at how ghastly and impossible it would be if I struck my teacher and damaged him, even to the extent of a bruised head, and God forbid I should break his skin. At which point his left hand gently but firmly captures my fist, and his right, driven by the same motion turning around the fulcrum at the base of his spine, borrowing my force for his purpose, propels me through the air and into the ornamental fish pond, which causes Master Wu and half a dozen senior students to laugh so hard they nearly rupture, and my relief and my delight at the cheeky old sod are so great that I have to be helped out before I drown. But Master Wu is more delighted because he is also proud.
“Excellent! You won!”
“I fell in the pond!” I object, but he shakes his head.
“You made me misjudge! You were fast! I had to do something I did not intend!” He grins. “Do you think you found out what the Secret means? Maybe you very nearly merged your chi with mine! Then you’d have to teach me!” He laughs, and he is glowing, and so am I. From the sun deck, Elisabeth is watching, her face completely still, and she fetches a towel for me, which I know is a high honour indeed.
“Does anyone ever really win? Do they even get close?” I ask Master Wu that evening, as he swings his legs over the edge of the little bridge at the bottom of his garden and cools his feet in the water.
“Oh, they get close all the time,” he says, “but they never know that they are close and I never tell.”
“You told me!”
“Once! Not again. Now you must work it out like the others! Yes? Yes! For everyone the instruction they need, all of it, but no more.” He smiles. “I have one student who might beat me. But he doesn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Maybe he thinks that’s what I need—and what the other students need: for me to go to my grave as the teacher who couldn’t lose.” He grins. “But more likely he is too scared to try in case he is wrong.” He laughs, loudly, and splashes me with his foot.
A week later, Alan Lasserly’s teacher knocks very politely on the door of the House of the Voiceless Dragon, and watches Master Wu teach Ophelia for half an hour. He watches Master Wu’s feet and his hands and the way he steps, and he watches Master Wu’s index finger touch Ophelia behind the knee so that her whole body falls into line and she looks like a little fighting woman and not a small girl playing at gong fu. When Yumei reclaims her daughter and takes her off for milk, Mr. Hampton bows very low to Master Wu and thanks him for the lesson. Master Wu says Mr. Hampton is very welcome, and Mr. Hampton says that he wishes he had known Master Wu when he was Ophelia’s age, to which Master Wu responds that when Mr. Hampton was Ophelia’s age, Master Wu was a wild and intemperate youth much given to drinking and taking off his trousers in public places. Mr. Hampton smiles and says that he supposes this is not impossible, and Master Wu avers that there are photographs to prove it, although no one will ever see them. Mr. Hampton says that is probably for the best. They drink tea. After enquiring as to the good health of Mr. Hampton’s family and friends, Master Wu asks after Mr. Lasserly. Mr. Hampton says that Mr. Lasserly is sadly still an idiot, and they both find this lamentable and extremely amusing.
IT IS on the evening after Mr. Hampton’s visit that I notice the bells for the first time. Seeing them, I realise they have always been there, that they are as much a part of the room as the china ducks—but they are different from the ducks because they are very deliberate. Amid the clutter of Master Wu’s life, the bells stand out because they are structured.
Elisabeth and Master Wu and I are loafing. We have eaten a muddled sort of meal, cake and cheese and fruit, and slices of salami, and Elisabeth and Master Wu are discussing the matter of China’s space programme. The discussion is quite animated. They have co-opted the butter dish (the Moon), the cake plate (the Earth) and a mango (the Sun, acknowledged to be much further away and not to scale, but equally a necessary component in their orrery), and currently Master Wu is waving a spoon, which symbolises the Apollo rockets. The gist of his argument is that the Moon is up in the sky, and America (as evidenced by European and American maps) is on the top half of the world. The journey from the United States to the Moon is therefore considerably shorter than the journey from China, which is (as evidenced by European and American maps) on the bottom half of the world. It is therefore absolutely consonant with his contention that China, despite her flaws, is the most advanced nation on Earth, that the Americans should reach the Moon before the Chinese. They simply did not have to work as hard.
Elisabeth is stumped by this contention on two fronts. In the first place, it is balderdash, of a sort which is so fundamentally wrong-headed as to be hard to argue. In the second, she cannot shake the nagging suspicion that her revered teacher knows full well the measure of this wrong-headedness, and is gently stringing her along to stretch her cultural preconceptions, is in fact taking the piss. She sputters for a moment.
Initially, this whole thing was grand sport. I tuned back in for a while and even suggested that the American rocketeers were at a disadvantage because the Earth was spinning, and they had to build a ship which could go really quickly so as to reach the Moon before it passed by overhead, whereas the Chinese had longer to make course corrections, owing to the greater distance. Master Wu brushed this aside as a minor consideration and Elisabeth seemed to regard it as treachery, and back and forth they went, Master Wu twinkling and vexatious, and Elisabeth in one of her moments of doubt. These are fun to watch, because they are extremely rare. Elisabeth’s fundamental attribute is certainty. However, after the debate over the positioning of the mango and whether it should affect the arrangement of the cake plate and whether in fact the mango should be replaced with an object several miles away and about the size of a house, I sort of drifted off again and I am now viewing the room with new eyes, or at least, with eyes which are paying attention to the detail.
Everything is familiar, of course. I have sat here countless times since I first saw the overstuffed furniture an
d the weapons on the walls, and fell in love with the gramophone. At this moment, I am looking at the window frames. I have not, until now, spent a lot of time doing this, but a long day and a lot of gong fu followed by cake (planet Earth) and tea (either a non-relevant experimental error or a terrifying cosmological event even now threatening to upset the gravitational balance of the solar system) have produced in me a state of contemplative calm and watchfulness. I have studied Master Wu’s mouth, and concluded that the occasional twitch of his upper lip is in fact a quirk, and evidence in favour of the supposition that he is winding us up. I have studied Elisabeth’s upper lip and concluded that it is a fine specimen of the kind, slender and pale pink and slightly masked by a wisp of icing sugar. And so now I have turned my attention upward and outward.
The window frames are made of a darkened wood, which has a fine sheen of varnish over it, and the edges are crusty with yellow, resiny stuff. This is probably where the treated wood has sweated over the years. If I were to touch it, it would feel smooth and shiny and slightly flexible, and then it would snap like crystal sugar. The glass is old and ever so slightly distorted. Glass is mysterious. I once heard Mr. Carmigan, the chemistry teacher, discussing it with Ms. Folderoi, the art mistress. Mr. Carmigan asserted that glass is still technically a liquid, slowly but inevitably obeying gravity as the years pass, while Ms. Folderoi said it isn’t and it doesn’t. Mr. Carmigan replied that neither of them would live long enough to make a personal empirical observation. Ms. Folderoi hit him with an oil sponge. The debate—like the one unfolding in front of me now—was irascible but good-natured. Also like the one in front of me now, it was one in which I took scant interest. I ponder the window again.