The Hungry Ghosts

God alone knows what possessed Nicola to choose that dreadful wallpaper for this draughty room.White flowers plastered over a red background. It calls to mind the new regional flag they’ve chosen for Hong Kong. An uninspiring design if you ask me. It looks like one of those handheld windmills you buy at a fair, or at the seaside. Hardly something you can take seriously. It can’t be compared to the Union Jack. Now there’s a flag you can be proud of, a flag that means something.

The roof of this wretched building leaks. Why Nicola persuaded us to buy it I will never know.

‘Orchard House.The two of you will love it.’That’s what she said, as if we didn’t have any choice in the matter. And, quite honestly, looking back, I’m not sure we did.

There are buckets placed at strategic points to catch the drips. I can hear them plinking now. It is a bit like a form of Japanese water torture, waiting for the next plink, watching the buckets and pails slowly fill, wondering when the silvery skins will rupture, and the collected rain will trickle down the sides and soak into the Persian rugs. I think I can say that the state of the roof is the most weighty problem here, but there are others. Damp in general, peeling wallpaper, rotting window-frames and cracked panes, missing floortiles, banging pipes and a faulty central-heating system, to name but a few. I think we may even have a bit of woodworm on the first floor that needs treating. Oh, we have mice too. Larry, my son-in-law, claims he’s dealing with them. But I doubt it. He says a great deal, and as far as I can see does very little. And Jillian’s not much better. What I wouldn’t give for a couple of amahs to set the place to rights. I thought Nicola said that having Jillian and Larry living with us was going to make life much easier, that it would alleviate all our difficulties. What’s more, I could have done without the boy being foisted on us. Amos. What a ridiculous name for a child! It’s not even as if we’re great ones for religion. Besides, I have never been maternal. I can’t think why Jillian and Larry spent all that money trying to have a baby.When the doctor told her they had problems (something odd about Larry’s sperm, not that I pressed them for any details you understand), in my opinion she should have just accepted it. I would have. Gladly, as it happens!

I’m sorry, Ralph, but you know I never really wanted children. Not all women hanker after a family you know. We aren’t all programmed for reproduction. Some of us don’t need miniature replicas of ourselves to make our lives complete. Conversely, in Alice’s case, far from completing me, she very nearly destroyed me. I had her for your sake you know, so you can’t blame me entirely for what happened, what happened to our daughter, Alice. You were determined to have your son, weren’t you? Oh, you never put it into so many words,but the understanding was implicit.I did my best,Ralph. You must give me that. I tried my hardest to produce your boy, your heir. And if it did take me four goes, I managed it in the end. Don’t judge me, Ralph, wherever you are now.You have no idea what it was like for me producing girl after girl, producing Alice at that hospital in Ealing. I had to feel Mother’s scorn at my inability to get a son for my husband—not once, not twice, but thrice. After all, she had managed the feat first time, hadn’t she?

We didn’t put Alice’s name on your gravestone. The children wanted to make a dedication to you, a personal thank-you to their father. We talked about adding her name after theirs, but in the end we decided it wasn’t appropriate.We felt she hadn’t earned her place there. And Ralph, this once you weren’t around to make a fuss. So there it is, Jillian, Nicola and Harry, but…no Alice. If you want my opinion, and you never really did when it came to Alice, this is as it should be.

‘Is it a boy?’ I asked the midwife repeatedly. She was quite terse with me in the end.

‘It’s a girl,’ she snapped. ‘I’ve told you it’s a girl, a lovely girl.’

That was an oxymoron to me by then, Ralph. Can you understand that? I’d had Jillian and Nicola, and each of those pregnancies cost me dearly. But as a man you could never appreciate that. Besides, delivering Alice was meant to be my last messy natal performance. I deserved to have a boy. I deserved a son by then.You know what they say, Ralph, third time lucky.Well, it wasn’t for me. Having Alice was the most unpropitious thing that ever happened to me. Our daughter, our third daughter filled me with dread. But not you, oh no. You adored her, didn’t you?

The midwife was a big, hearty woman, with apple-red cheeks, and large pink hands, butcher’s hands I recall. She reached towards my chest and started fumbling with the tie of my nightie.

‘No! No, no!’ My voice was pitched too high. It reeked of panic.

‘Put her to your breast,’ she urged, still pulling at the lacing. She had a slight burr to her voice, though what the accent was I couldn’t tell you.

I thrust her hand away.‘I am not feeding it myself.I need a bottle,’ I told her succinctly. I had an image of a stray dog then, a dog I had seen on the streets of Nairobi, its dugs heavy with milk, puppies suckling frantically at them. Its eyes were rolled upwards to heaven, you could see their whites, but it lay in the gutter, and was coated with filth.

I suppressed a shudder. She stopped scrabbling at my painfully engorged breasts and nudged the baby forwards instead. I took it awkwardly, as if I thought it might bite me at any moment. I looked into the face. The wispy hair was lighter than Nicola’s. The mouth that rooted hopefully towards me was pretty enough. But the eyes unsettled me.They were the rich brown of tobacco, and preternaturally alert.They were needy too. I have been told a newborn cannot focus immediately, but as this child stared steadily up at me I had my doubts. Returning her gaze, what I felt was not a trickle of love, but a wave of cold dislike. ‘She’ meant that I would have to do it all once more. She was unnecessary, surplus to requirements. She did not even have the decency to look abashed,as Nicola had done.And quite suddenly, with the smell of disinfectant and warm sweet blood, and the distant muted sounds coming to me from far corridors of rolling trolleys and muffled voices and footsteps, I felt afraid.

‘Shall I show your husband in?’ asked the determined midwife, her tone brisk, business-like. And when there was no response, she added with unnecessary emphasis,‘To see his beautiful baby daughter?’

For a second I wondered who she meant. Then Ralph, in you came. You took the bundle carefully in your arms, studied it for a moment, and then your face lit up.You looked so delighted.

‘It is a girl,’ I explained, thinking you had not grasped this. It was the year 1956 and I had given birth to yet another baby girl.

‘I know,’you said.‘She’s beautiful.’To my amazement, your shining eyes proved the sincerity of your words. The baby seemed to sense this, following the sound of her father’s voice. Father and daughter’s eyes locked. Ralph, you looked smitten, mesmerised. I felt a pang just under my ribcage and had to turn away.

‘I think the name Alice suits her,’ you said. ‘Oh…yes, definitely. Alice. What do you think?’

I shrugged indifferently. ‘If you like,’ I said. I wasn’t really bothered one way or another. Alice would do as well as the next name.

There was black magic involved in the coming of my son though. Oh, scientists would say that I was just being fanciful, but I know. I was in my sixth month. We had since moved to the British Crown Colony of Aden. Having developed extreme eczema, blistering and bleeding over your hands and lower arms—a reaction to the chemicals you used in photography—you had been persuaded by George Walbrook, your friend in the Foreign Office, to apply for a posting in government information services in Honduras. Failing to secure this, you were offered instead an administrative post in Aden. And it was here, in the merciless heat and chaos of this busy port, with its shark-infested harbour, that we settled with our growing family.This time, I had decided not to return to England for the birth. I did not think I could bear Mother’s disapproval if yet again I failed to produce the necessary male. Besides, I had been assured that they had the very best of facilities and doctors here in Aden.

We were having a party when it happened. Do you remember, Ralph? We had many friends there, British and Arab. I was wearing a voluminous midnight-blue affair. Quite suddenly a tall Arab gentleman, with sable skin and very white teeth—dressed, I couldn’t help thinking, with his turban and glittering tunic, a bit like a fairground magician—seized hold of the hem of my dress, folded himself in half, and with his other hand flung some white powder up under the bell of my skirt. It coated my mound. The gentleman’s name was A…A…Akil, that’s right, and he worked with you.

He fixed me with his black hawk eyes, Akil, and straightened up. As I moved away the remaining powder fell softly about my ankles, like a dusting of snow. I was taken aback. I had not been prepared for someone shoving handfuls of unknown substances up my maternity dress, and did not know quite how to react. He bowed to me graciously.

‘The baby you are carrying, it shall be a boy now,’ he said in a deep, sonorous voice.

I was so delighted with his prediction that I forgot to be annoyed. At least he understood the turmoil inside me.The thought of another girl growing there, another Alice…dear God! Later that night as you and I tried in vain to slumber in the heat, you mentioned the encounter. I didn’t think you had seen it. Even in my tangle of sheets, hot and bothered, with the child stirring restlessly inside me, as if it too was finding the intense heat unbearable, I was surprised.

‘That Akil has a cheek,’ you mumbled through a yawn.‘Throwing talcum powder up your dress, and coming up with that mumbo-jumbo about our baby.’You thrust the sheet back from your body, and I saw that your skin was slick with sweat.

We were sleeping beneath mosquito nets, and I found the effect of that claustrophobic haze disturbing.

‘He took me unawares,’ I responded primly, pushing down my own portion of our sheet, sitting up, and resting back against the pillows. ‘He told me that now we will have a son.’

You laughed. ‘What, as if it was down to him!’

Outside the netting, the high-pitched whine of a mosquito could be heard, fading and then coming back, as it attempted re-entry.

‘It might be true. It might be a boy,’ I commented casually, as if I couldn’t have cared less.

‘And it might be a girl,’ you said equably.

After that you fell asleep. But I remained awake for some time, my hands exploring my bump, glossy with moonlight. I could not bear to go through this again. There was no choice in the matter, and the child should know this. It had to be male. Our son was born three months later. Clearly he had been paying attention to our Arab friend.But he had obviously been a touch overwrought at the prospect of his much longed-for arrival, and had wound the umbilical cord around his neck like a noose. He emerged not a healthy shade of pink, flushed with his first breaths of life, but milky-blue, his lips an even deeper hue, kissed with death. The doctors were uncertain if he would make it through the night. They took him away to wrestle with the black prince, promising to do their best to snatch my son from his grip. I lay alone in bed that night, in a white nondescript room, in a hospital in Aden. I felt bleak. I had produced a son. Finally I had produced a son, and now he might die. I thought about our three healthy children—my firstborn, Jillian, a girl, but welcome for all that, and my second, Nicola, impossible not to like, with her indomitable charm and her discretion. She understood the boundaries so well and never overstepped the mark. And then our third daughter, Alice. Alice had already made it apparent that she did not understand about boundaries. She was colouring outside the lines. I felt annoyed just thinking about her. If I could…if…I could…swap her life for his, then…At first the thought was so terrible that it floored me. It had all the menace of dark fairy tales. I will give her up if you will…

But gradually in the dullness of that room my wicked thought glowed like a hot coal.You may take Alice but leave me my son. I will never renege on the contract. Take her. Take Alice. Take Alice. Take Alice, was my incantation. She’s yours. I shall never want her back, only leave me my son. It seemed the demons were not listening, or perhaps they didn’t want Alice either because as it was they both survived.The next day you brought our daughters to see their new brother. You stood, Ralph, and the girls sat on the low wall that surrounded the hospital.They squinted up through the fierce sunlight as I stepped onto the balcony from my second-floor room, my fragile son in my arms. The doctors felt it would be better to keep my sickly babe away from any possible source of infection for the time being, until he grew stronger.They recommended no direct contact with our other children during those first crucial days.

The girls were wearing matching pinafore dresses, with white blouses, Jillian in French navy, her blonde hair in pigtails, Nicola in bottle-green, her dark silky locks cropped short, and Alice in red, blood-red, her mousy-brown bob with a side parting, held back from her face with a grip.The green and blue blended in with the flashing gold of the sun and the cooler acid green of the young palm trees. The girls waved.You waved, Ralph. I looked down at my son and felt pride wash over me.

‘Here in my arms are all my hopes and dreams,’ I thought.

But the red of Alice’s dress hooked me back again. Even then she was a jealous child.

You were reassigned after that, this time to the British Colony of Hong Kong. When you first mentioned it to me, the new posting, I was intrigued.

‘How would you like it if I spirited you away to a beautiful island in the Orient?’ you asked, jumping up suddenly from the wicker chair you had been sitting in. We were in the bedroom of our bungalow home in Aden.Above our heads a fan rotated noisily,doing its best to hold the heat at bay.

‘I should like that very much,’ I said, only half listening, concentrating on our blue-eyed, golden-haired boy, wriggling in my arms.

‘Then your wish is my command. I shall transport you to Hong Kong,’ you shot back, unable to hide your delight.

‘Hong Kong?’ I said, trying out the name and finding it both familiar and unknown.

You elaborated. ‘It’s a small island in the South China Sea, not much more than 400 square miles I believe. But then there is the Kowloon Peninsula and the New Territories too, just across the harbour.’

‘Oh,’ I said, trying to sound enlightened.‘It seems odd that we should own an island so far away.’ You smiled knowingly and continued.

‘It was leased to Britain after some skulduggery which involved the shipping of a great deal of opium grown by us in India into China.Very lucrative apparently. When China, unsurprisingly, protested and asked that we desist in the trade, we were so outraged we went to war with them.’ Here you paused mid-stride and chuckled.

‘Ah,’ I said, switching my son from one shoulder to the other, and patting his back gently. In a while I would call for his nanny, but just for now it was nice playing mother. You packed tobacco into the bowl of a wooden pipe, then paced thoughtfully around our bed. You used to smoke a pipe back then, though you gave it up when we got to Hong Kong. I rather liked the smell of it and missed it later. ‘And we won?’ I asked.

‘We did, and among the spoils we acquired Hong Kong Island in 1842, and a bit later on, Kowloon and the New Territories, leasehold for 99 years.’

You perched on the side of the bed, Ralph, leant forwards and gently stroked your son’s golden curls.Then you placed the stem of the pipe in your mouth, struck a match, and held the flame to the bowl, sucking hard until the fragrant strands of tobacco caught. For a while you puffed contentedly, your expression dreamy. After a bit you removed your pipe, those engaging eyes of yours searching my face. ‘So how do you fancy a spell residing on Queen Victoria’s ill-gotten gains?’ you asked, your eyes alight with mischief.

I thought about it for a moment—only a moment, mind. I recalled a red pagoda towering up into the sky, the roof of each diminishing segment looking like an oriental hat, the brim curving upwards into delicate points. I recalled a fly beating its wings against the grubby window of a bus, longing for liberation, and I remembered too the dull greyness that seemed to encroach on everything back then.

‘I think I should like that very much,’ I said. So we packed our trunks and set off again. In the late spring of 1962 I had my first sighting of Hong Kong,as we sailed into busy Victoria harbour.We would come to know that bridge of water between the island and Kowloon as if it was an extension of our own bodies.The dull, green face of the sea was dotted with sampans and junks and ferries. From here, my gaze strayed past the mass of buildings that crowded the waterfront, and on up the verdant slopes looped with winding roads. We had docked off a bustling, mountainous island, the summits veiled mysteriously in dense powder-grey clouds. And it was a short while later up these mountains we wound in a shiny, black chauffeur-driven car.

‘Our flat is set almost on the highest point of The Peak,’ you told me,Ralph.‘Fabulous views.’We threaded our way higher and higher, into what seemed to me an impenetrable fog. ‘That is of course, unless we are temporarily lost in the mist. I understand it can be a real problem here,’ came your wry observation.

But any qualms I may have had about our mountain home were soon quelled. Here was a grand, airy, top-floor flat, situated right at the summit of The Peak, with the views you had boasted of to be enjoyed from every window.The white, flat-roofed building was only six floors high, double-sided, the central column housing the stairwell and the lift. Our front door opened onto a hall that would have graced any stately home back in England, while doors to either side of it led on the left to a lounge, this in turn giving onto a long, open veranda, and on the right to a dining room, and thence into a spacious kitchen. Beyond the kitchen was a communal sheltered area for drying washing. It led through to the servants’ accommodation, six tiny bedrooms in all, with a shared rudimentary bathroom and toilet, and for their use a separate stairwell leading down to the ground floor. Returning to our hall I explored further, the children running ahead excitedly.My high heels clicked smartly on the wooden floors of the long corridor that ran the length of the flat. Light flooded through tall wide windows to my right, while on my left doors led off it into large bedrooms, the first of which had a luxurious en suite bathroom. A second bathroom lay at the end of the corridor from which, on fine days, you assured me, you could look out over Pokfulam and the sea.

There was room aplenty for the Safford family and we had soon settled in. I told you that, for the time being, I could make do with just two servants. So Ah Dang, with her glossy jet-black hair drawn back into a tight bun, her wide girth attesting to her own passion for food, and her glittering gold front teeth, became our housekeeper and cook.And Ah Lee, with her bouncy, dark curls and her constant nervous giggling, juggled the tasks of washing, ironing, cleaning and shopping and, it seemed, found plenty to amuse herself in each.We provided them both with the standard uniform—drawstring black trousers, and plain three-quarter-length white tunics. The children were dispatched to English-speaking Little Peak School and Big Peak School respectively,both within walking distance,Alice attending the former, and Jillian and Nicola the latter. Four-year-old Harry, our son, soon followed, so to a large extent I had my freedom. Quite what we would do when Jillian finished at Big Peak School I did not know, for exclusively English-speaking secondary schools were in very short supply.

Life on The Peak in Hong Kong was punctuated by regular letters from Mother. I had come to dread these epistles. I had forsaken her. I was on the other side of the world, living a life of opulence and indulgence. I never spared a thought for her. In these aspersions, Mother was wrong. I thought about her a great deal. After careful consideration, I decided to make a sacrifice to appease her. I would give her Jillian and Nicola. They would be dutiful in my place. It would soon be time for Jillian to go to secondary school. It made perfect sense to send first Jillian and then Nicola to a boarding school in England—and not just any boarding school, but the convent at which my mother was now employed part time teaching English and Drama. Of course, she had no qualifications for the job, but apparently rearing Albert, now a professional musical actor, was pedigree enough.’

‘I’ll miss Jillian,’ you admitted, as we sat sipping scotch on the veranda one evening,watching dusk deepen and the lights of Aberdeen start slowly to glimmer, appearing one by one, as if by magic.You looked shattered.These days your only escape from work was on our boat, White Jade, and even then we had been tracked down by the marine police a couple of times with urgent messages.

I freshened up my own drink, and ran the frosted tumbler between my hands before taking a hefty swallow. Cars purred by on the road below.I waited a moment then took another gulp.The whisky seemed very watery tonight; the bite was slow in coming, and the accompanying numbness even slower.

‘I’m sure Saint Mary’s Convent is a wonderful school, and that the children will relish a bit of time with their grandmother,’ I persuaded you.

You sat forward in your chair and sighed. ‘I’m just not certain—’ you began, but smoothly I interrupted you.

‘These insects can be a real problem in the evenings,’ I said, swatting away a flying ant. Even paradise has its drawbacks.‘Let’s go inside. I’d better check that everything’s all right with the amahs in the kitchen. Take your eyes off them for a second and they start doing all kinds of silly things.’ I picked up the bottle of scotch and stood up.When you did not move,Ralph,but just sat brooding and staring into your glass, I told you dinner was almost ready and took the lead.

I had thought that sending Jillian and Nicola to boarding school would free me up to devote more time to you and my social duties as wife of an important government servant. I had even looked forward to seeing more of my friend and next-door neighbour, Beth Fielding, and enjoying a leisurely lunchtime drink with her once or twice a week. But this presumption was flawed. Alice, a demanding, insecure child from the outset, was becoming steadily more and more difficult. My mind teemed with a growing tally of unnerving incidents, where her behaviour was both unpredictable and extreme, incidents which no matter how much scotch I drank often refused to melt away.

The part of a king in the school nativity play became a nightmare when I tried to apply shoe polish to her face, in an attempt simply to make her look authentic.

‘What are you doing, Mummy? You are making me all brown! It’s horrid of you,’ she wailed, plucking the crown from her head, and letting it fall to the ground.

My entreaties that it was just for the role she was acting were ignored.‘I don’t want always to have a brown face!’ she had screamed, so loudly that several other mothers in the school changing rooms looked round and grinned.‘Why have you done this to me,Mummy?’

Painstakingly I explained that with the help of soap and water, the shoe-polish would quickly wash away, but Alice only shot me a disbelieving look and abandoned herself to racking sobs. Finally she tottered onto the stage, her blotchy complexion attesting to hurried attempts at scouring her face of its autumnal hue. But even this did not assuage her histrionics, and she broke down before a baffled Mary, and had to be coaxed from the stage. This scene marked the first of several involving the parents of other children, teachers, and even on one occasion the headmistress. No matter how much I implored, cajoled and pleaded, there was no reasoning with Alice once her mind was made up.