He hesitates, then takes her shoulder with one hand and slaps her face with the other. “You need to settle down,” he says. “You are hysterical.”
She sinks to the floor, weeping.
“Will,” she says through her hands. “Oh, Will. What are we going to do?”
He gets up with difficulty and kneels down on the floor with her.
“Darling Trudy,” he says. “I will take care of you, even with my terrible, gimpy leg. I swear.”
Later, after he has put her in a bath, and gotten her a drink, there is a knock at the door. With the women upstairs, he goes to answer it, first looking outside to see who it is. A sandy-haired man in uniform is standing by the door.
“Who is it?” he shouts.
“Please, sir, it’s Ned Young, from Canada. With the Winnipeg Grenadiers.”
He opens the door.
“Come in. Are you all right? Are you alone? What the devil are you doing all the way out here? ”
“Yes, sir. I was on a van being transported with the others, as POWs, you know, and I managed to jump off and just walked and knocked on doors that looked safe.”
Inside, the man is revealed to be a boy, so young acne still pocks his skin. His trousers are soiled and he smells to high heaven.
“Have you had anything to eat? ”
“Not in the past few days, sir.” He looks ravenous and polite at the same time.
“Here, sit down here in the dining room. I’ll get you some things to eat.” He gets a plate and puts out some bread and the remaining duck from last night. There’s a beer and he opens it, pours a glass of water as well. The boy falls upon it, shoving the food in his mouth.
“There’s more. Don’t worry,” Will says. “You’ll get your fill.”
“It was awful out there,” the boy says. His mouth is full and he begins to weep. “It was awful. We were in the mountains, in trenches.”
“Don’t talk. Just eat and try to relax.”
The boy goes on, as if Will hadn’t spoken. “I saw my buddy’s guts come out. He was alive. He was talking to me, and his guts were outside. Then I smelled him, he was cooking, his guts were cooking and it smelled like food. I saw a woman with her head blown off and her child sitting next to her, naked, with shit running down his backside, with flies buzzing. We had to leave him. They wouldn’t let us take the child. I’ve never seen such things. We were in Jamaica just a month ago, training, eating bananas. They told us we wouldn’t see any action here.” He weeps and weeps but keeps eating. “And I didn’t have water for days, it seems. I just wanted to die, but I jumped off that truck ’cause I seen what those Japs do. They’re not human, what they do to other people. They’re not human. I saw them rip a baby out of a pregnant woman. I saw them chop off heads and put them on fence posts.”
Angeline walks into the room.
“What on earth?”
The boy stands up, still crying, still eating.
“Hello, ma’am. I’m Ned, Ned Young, from Winnipeg.”
“I see,” Angeline says, and sits down. Will appreciates for once her cut-and-dried sophistication, so needling in peacetime. “Ned Young, where were you? Did you see any of the Volunteers?”
“We’ve lost. We’ve surrendered. I haven’t seen anyone but Japs. They’re so well equipped. They have mountain shoes, and belts with food concentrate, and maps. We didn’t have any of that. They gave us rum for breakfast. They just dropped us here weeks ago and told us we’d have time to train.”
“What did you see in town? ” They want information. He wants balm.
“There’re riots, and dead people. Everything smells so bad, you want to die too. It’s thick out there, the smell, and people are scared, but the scoundrels are out, stealing, burning. They’re taking advantage, before the Japs get everything.”
“Why don’t you rest, Ned,” Will says, realizing he is not able to give them anything. “You bathe and rest. There’s a bed upstairs and we’ll wake you if anything happens.”
Angeline brings him up. When she comes back down, Will feels the need to be outside and get some air. The young boy has brought a tantalizing glimpse of the outside world with him.
“I’m going out,” he says. “My leg feels better and I need to know what’s going on. It’s driving me mad being cooped up in here all this time.”
“Fine,” Angeline says. “Just don’t go too far. When Trudy wakes up, she’ll be wanting you.”
Outside, the sky is still blue, and there are birds singing faintly. Save the occasional plume of smoke, it is quiet and lovely up here on the wide, well-paved roads and green manicured hedges of the Peak. From a cliff-side fence, he can see Hong Kong spread out before him, the harbor glistening, the sky gleaming. It is so still outside, he can hear himself breathing.
“One of those moments,” he says, before realizing he has said it out loud.
He comes back to Trudy and Angeline in the kitchen pouring all the bottles of scotch down the sink.
“Don’t worry,” Angeline says. “We got blotto first. And we saved some for you, and our new friend, young Ned Young.”
“Only thing worse than a Jap is a drunk Jap, right? ” he says. “Keep the empty bottles. They might come in useful.”
“We’ve been thinking, Will,” Trudy says, “and we think the best thing to do now is stay here since we don’t know that anywhere else will be any better, but we think that you and Ned should stay hidden. Since it’s so very obvious you are not Chinese, you know. Unless, of course, you are needed to rescue us, but Angeline and I could pretend to be the servants in the house and they might leave us alone.”
Will cocks his head.
“Really? That has rich comic possibility, certainly, but I don’t know if that’s the thing to do.”
“I know it sounds mad, but where would we go? What do you think we should do? ”
“We could go into town and see what other people are doing.”
“But we might not have a place to sleep or anything to eat.”
“Well,” Will says. “Let’s do this. Let’s take the car early tomorrow morning and we’ll go down to Central and see what’s going on there and we can come back up.”
“All of us?”
“Ned should stay, since he’s had a rough time, but you and Angeline can come if you want.”
The next morning, they pile into the car, Ned as well, as he had not wanted to be left alone. He is freshly bathed and absurdly attired in some of Frederick ’s clothes, the sumptuous weave of the shirt cloth glowing up underneath his childish face, his torso swimming in tropical-weight wool trousers cut to house Frederick ’s not inconsiderable girth, cinched inefficiently by an alligator belt.
The road winds down the mountain, and as they round this curve or that, they catch a glimpse of the harbor and Central, looking eerily similar, just without cars. As they enter town, they quiet, looking at the empty buildings, the barren streets.
“Let’s go to the Gloucester,” Trudy says. “There should be people there.”
They park and walk down Connaught Road. Ned touches Will’s hand and motions to the side. Between two buildings, a man’s body lies, crumpled, blood streaked over his clothes. They pass silently.
“It’s so quiet,” Trudy whispers.
“No cars or people anywhere,” Will says.
But inside the Gloucester, it is bustling, with more people than they’ve ever seen in the lobby of that elegant hotel. They are sleeping on sofas, on the marble floor, the potted plants all moved tidily to one side, forming a verdant fringe to this strange refugee camp. Uniformed hotel boys are scurrying around with cups of coffee on silver trays, trying to serve the unorthodox guests as best as they are able.