Six
Field emerged onto the street, relieved to feel a breeze on his face, even if it did carry with it the smell of dead fish and stagnant water from the wharves and the sulfurous pollution of factories over in Pudong, on the far side of the Whangpoo River.
He had changed into his father’s dinner jacket, but it was just as thick and hot.
Once it became clear he wasn’t getting into a car, he was besieged by a group of rickshaw pullers—every one scrawny and shabbily dressed—imploring him to use their services. He shook his head and waved them away, but without discernible effect. He walked purposefully the other way, passing the open doors of a packed restaurant and a billboard advertising “Money Exchange.” The signs along the street ahead were mostly in Chinese, competing for the attention of the hordes rushing to their destinations. Long cotton banners twisted in the breeze.
An old man with no legs thrust a flat cap in Field’s direction and tugged at his trousers as he passed. Field fended him off and careered into a smart, handsome Eurasian wearing a white fedora and a long gray cotton tunic, with a silver watch pinned to his chest and bright, white shoes. Behind him was a woman in a long, figure-hugging white dress, her hair pulled back in a tight bun to reveal a pretty, oval face. Perhaps it was his imagination, but he thought she smiled at him.
Ahead, a thousand telegraph wires crisscrossed a dark, brooding sky, heavy with monsoon rain. The first drops landed on his face. Field wondered if he should feel homesick, but he didn’t. He missed nothing at all about Yorkshire.
Outside the white portico entrance to the tall red brick building that housed the American Club, Field stopped to light a cigarette. He looked up at the Stars and Stripes fluttering above the entrance. He was opposite the Municipal Administration Building and wondered if Geoffrey, too, would be walking. He couldn’t really remember what his uncle looked like. Field realized he was nervous, and recalled Edith accusing him, in a rare moment of disagreement, of “hero-worshiping a man who has played no part in our lives.”
Field stepped off the sidewalk and waited for a tram to rattle past before crossing the road and turning onto the Bund, the city’s business heart, the Wall Street of Asia. The wind was strong here, so that the Chinese walking next to him lost his hat and had to scrabble on the sidewalk to catch it. Field stopped and ran his hand through his hair, then put both hands in his pockets and watched the new Buicks and Oldsmobiles rolling past. A black Chevrolet moved slowly among them, with burly bodyguards—White Russians—standing on each running board, machine guns resting casually over their shoulders.
The Shanghai Club at number 2 the Bund was an ornate, classical stone building, with a red iron-framed awning shielding its entrance, Italianate cupolas capping a colonnaded facade of Ningpo granite. The street outside was quieter than usual, a group of chauffeurs kicking their heels, talking and smoking next to their sleek black cars. The rickshaw pullers stood discreetly about twenty yards down the street.
On the Whangpoo, Field could see two dragon boats pulling away from the shore, their sides and bows decked out with bright-colored silk hangers and paper lamps. He waited again for a tram to come past, then crossed the road, walking between the line of cars parked down its center. He headed for the war memorial—a bronze angel standing above a square stone pillar. Some children were playing tag around it while their parents watched the dragon boats.
Field looked at his watch. He did not want to be either early or late.
He waited for a few minutes. A steamer, loaded to the gills with people bent low beneath a canvas awning, made its way downriver. It was towing three cargo barges, but still moving faster than a similarly overloaded sampan struggling to get out of its way. Both were making for the wooden jetty that jutted out ahead of him.
Field leaned over the wall, looking down into the muddy waters. The lights along the shore came on suddenly. They were electric here.
He looked at his watch again and turned to survey the solid majesty of the Bund. It was like the Strand, or any of London’s other classical streets; every building along it, he thought, a projection of European and American power. He pushed himself away from the wall and walked back across the road and through the iron gates. The glass doors at the top of the steps swung back as he reached them.
“Good evening, sir,” the doorman said, bowing, next to a pair of Greek goddesses that guarded the entrance. He spoke with a thick Russian accent and wore a bright blue and gold uniform. Behind him, a broad staircase of white Sicilian marble climbed toward the first floor.
“I’m here to meet Geoffrey Donaldson.”
The man pointed toward the lobby. “Mr. Donaldson is not in yet, but if you’d like to wait through there . . .”
Field walked through to the colonnaded hall across a black and white marble floor. The opulence of his surroundings was testament enough, he thought, to confidence in the permanence of the European presence here. He looked up at the ceiling with its ornate plasterwork and the enormous light that hung from a chain thick enough to hold a ship’s anchor. There was a balcony above and, on the walls behind, pictures of Shanghai life—hunting out in the fields beyond the city limits, men standing at the Long Bar of the club, and a panorama of the Bund.
Field moved to a glass cabinet full of silver trophies at the edge of the lobby. Beyond it was a bulletin board covered in the latest Reuters reports, pulled from a telex machine. He read one that detailed further intercommunal riots in Rawalpindi and was grateful again that he’d not chosen to join the Indian police instead.
Field turned to see a tall, sandy-haired, pleasant-looking man limping toward him.
“Richard.” He was smiling. Field tried to wipe the sweat from his hand in his pocket before offering it. “I’m sorry to be late,” Geoffrey said.
“No, I was early.”
“Did you see the dragon boats?”
“Yes, in the distance.”
“You should take a closer look. It’s quite a spectacle.”
Field was suddenly embarrassed and searched for something to say. “How often do they have them?”
“Once a year. They are to celebrate a hero’s death. A faithful minister of state was dismissed by his prince, or so the legend goes, and threw himself into a small river in Hunan to show his humiliation. His friends gathered to throw rice across the water so that his spirit wouldn’t starve, and since then, on the anniversary of his death, they
