‘Why are we pulling in?’
‘For lunch. Aren’t you hungry?’
‘What sort of birds?’ he asked uncertainly.
‘This is a breast of duck,’ Nan Luc said a few minutes later as an old woman handed them pieces of meat on a skewer. ‘I promise you.’
It seemed to Max that the whole village had turned out to examine him as he sat on a rough bench next to Nan Luc and watched the old women manipulate the fire. One small boy marched up and down wearing what was for him a vast US Army helmet. Young girls peeped shyly from behind a sampan beached on blocks for repair. A few black hogs squelched in the mud of the river bank and a transistor radio played a strange selection of Western and oriental music. To Max almost every fourth or fifth song seemed to be a strangely haunting gloat of Vietnamese triumph: ‘Hue, Saigon, Hanoi’.
Max looked around him as more duck was roasted and Nan Luc chattered rapidly with the old women. For the first time now he noticed the huge ponds of green water that lay behind the river bank, craters from the bombing during the war. Looking from face to face, the young man with only one arm, the young girls dancing together between the sampans, Max realised that the Englishman, Kipling, had been wrong. East and West had met. On the battlefields of Vietnam. A unique meeting which had affected both worlds. He looked back towards Nan Luc, her face animated and laughing. It was beginning to affect his world too.
After lunch Max sat on the bank with Nan Luc watching the incredible activity of the river, the painted rice barges hung with rubber tyres; the bustling sampans, crossing and recrossing with loads of timber or ducks and hogs; and once or twice a lone oarsman in a skiff flying across the water with the grace of a swan about to take off.
‘Was it a great surprise to see your grandmother in court yesterday?’ he asked her. They had not yet talked about yesterday afternoon. Each time Max had started on the subject he had felt Nan Luc’s reluctance to talk.
‘It was a surprise,’ Nan conceded. ‘I thought she had escaped to Paris.’
‘There’s no love lost between you and your grandmother, is there?’
‘I wish her no harm,’ Nan Luc said shortly.
‘What about the American pornographer, was that a red herring?’
He could see Nan Luc’s face change shape and colour. ‘I’m not sure what a red herring means,’ she said carefully. ‘But I believe my grandmother was lying. I believe there was no American pornographer. Perhaps an American who paid sums of money to Quatch for services in Vietnam he wished him to render. But that is all.’
He leaned on his elbow looking up at her. Her eyes were fixed on the far bank. He knew that if he pursued the subject of her grandmother’s evidence that he was in danger of breaking something, some trust that had developed between them. ‘Perhaps sometime you will tell me something of your life in the West,’ she said matter of factly.
‘Now?’
‘If you like.’
‘What would you like to know?’
‘Do you have a big family?’ He shook his head smiling. ‘You’re laughing at me,’ she said uneasily. ‘Have I said something wrong?’
‘No.’ He leaned back on one arm. ‘It’s just such a Vietnamese first question. The family.’ He paused. ‘I have a mother who’s very sick. She lives in London. I have uncles and aunts and cousins in the United States.’
‘In New York?’ she asked at length.
‘Some of them. But mostly Philadelphia. And a scattering in California.’ He paused. ‘They’re all pretty remote from my life, I guess. Except my mother. Mostly families don’t mean the same in the West.’
She nodded, waiting for him to go on. ‘You are not married then, Mr Benning.’
‘I was. No longer.’
A sampan floated by. Nan Luc seemed to be concentrating on the monkey leaping across its cargo of cut reeds. ‘Was your wife an American woman?’
‘No,’ Max said. ‘She’s German. The sister of my best friend.’ It seemed to him he continued without hesitating. ‘We divorced last year.’
‘Because you no longer loved each other?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I guess so.’
‘What other reason could there be?’ she asked, her eyes wide and candid.
This time he knew he hesitated. ‘There was a child. Four years old now. Katey.’
‘You still see her.’
Max looked up at the sharpness of her tone. ‘Yes, I still see her.’ He stopped, uncertain whether to go on. ‘She’s not my child, Nan Luc,’ he said quickly. ‘We’d been married a year. I had no reason to believe there was anyone else in Monika’s life. Naturally I thought Katey was my child.’ He felt a sudden rush of relief that he had said it out loud. And then surprise, astonishment almost, that he had said it to this girl, virtually a stranger. She sat beside him waiting, not pressing him, yet saying nothing that would break the thread if he chose to take it up.
‘We had been married a few months. We were both pretty young and things weren’t quite what either of us expected, I guess. You understand what I mean?’
‘It happens here too.’
‘Sure.’ He paused. ‘Mostly it was my fault. I was away constantly with my work. Monika had left her job in Germany to come to London. She didn’t speak English too well at that time. She was bored.’
‘And you?’
‘I came to believe I’d married Monika for no better reason than she was my best friend’s sister. I came back from my next trip, another long one to Brazil, to find she was pregnant. That seemed to solve all the problems.’
A group of men had arrived on the far bank. Each carried a short-handled axe with a huge heavy head. Their voices carried chattering across the river.
‘A long time afterwards, when Katey was nearly two, I learnt by chance that she was not my child.’
She was looking out across the river as the woodsmen selected a tree. ‘Do you know who was the father?’
‘Someone I was at school with in Germany. He’d come to stay a week or two in London after I left for the long trip to Brazil. He and Monika had a few drinks together. They’d known each other a long time too. I guess she cried on his shoulder. It happens. Mostly there’s no pregnancy to follow.’ The sounds of frenetic wood chopping carried across the river. ‘I’ve no right to tell you all this,’ he said. She was biting on her bottom lip. He stood up and offered her a hand. ‘My only excuse is that I wanted to.’
‘Ah…’ She released her lip and he saw that her white teeth were flecked with blood. ‘And now?’
‘Monika married Katey’s father a few months after we were divorced. I see them whenever I go to Munich or they come to London. I think it’s working out.’
She stood up. He could feel the agitation in her movements, not hostile, not distancing herself from him.
‘Have you ever thought of leaving Vietnam?’ he asked her as they began to walk along the river bank.
‘Perhaps sometime it will be possible,’ she said. ‘Not yet.’
‘Would you go to America?’
‘Yes. I would want to find my father.’ He was silent. She glanced towards him. ‘You’re thinking there are many American fathers who don’t wish to see their Vietnamese children. Who might wish to put the past behind them.’
‘I wouldn’t like to see you hurt,’ he said.
‘You’re wrong.’ She spoke with certainty. ‘Somehow I know you’re wrong.’
‘It’s easy to romanticise the idea of America, Nan Luc.’
She shook her head. ‘You must understand, Max, I believe I have the right to know my father. It’s the right of all Vietnamese.’ They walked along the river path in silence. At a bend in the river Max looked across at a long low white pavilion, terraced and balconied below a delicate oriental roof. In the creek beside it a freshly painted white launch was moored.