The Man in the Wooden Hat Read Free Page B

Irish slag in a boarding house in Belfast.”
    “I was sixteen.”
    “Yes. Well. You were curiously unperturbed. I’m worried about your . . .”
    “What?”
    “Fertility.”
    “For the love of God, Ross! I’m not sure I can go on knowing you.”
    “ Think , Eddie. Nobody knows you like I do.”
     
    Below them the sun was rising from the rim of the globe. Mile-high columns of mist stood about in the air. Curtains of a giant stage. Stewardesses were clicking up the blinds letting in one bar of sunlight after another. The canned music began. Chinese music now. Ting-tang. Sleeping bodies began to stir and stretch and yawn, and Edward Feathers smiled. Looking out, so near to landing and yet so high, he waited for the first sight of the three hundred and twenty-five islands that are called Hong Kong.
    On one of them Betty Macintosh would be reading his letter. He saw her smiling and skipping about. Sweet child. So young and dear and good.
    What would she have made of him on the Breath o’Dunoon ? Young, ravaged, demented, shipwrecked? She’d have been a child then. He’d been a gaunt, sick boy, just left school. With an Adam’s apple. Though women had never been scarce, from the start.
    Isobel.
    Nowadays women looked at him as if he were a cliff face. I’m not attractive, he thought, but they’ve been told there’s a seam of gold about. Called money, I suppose.
    “We’re here,” said Ross and Kai Tak airport was waiting below.
    They swung round the harbour: the familiar landing pad that stuck out over the water like a diving board. During the war a plane a week had been lost there. Since then only one had tipped over into the harbour. But passengers on beginning to land always fell quiet for a moment.
     
    “And so, Edward,” said the bright-eyed girl that night, as the red sun dropped back into the sea, “Eddie, I will,” and she took his hand. “I will. Yes. Thank you. I will and I will and I will.”
     
    Somewhere in the archipelago her friend Lizzie would be drinking in a bar.
    All morning she had been saying, “Betty—you can’t. It’d be a dreadful mistake.”
    Finally, she had said, “All right. I’ll tell you something. I know him.”
    “You never said! How? You know Edward?”
    “See this pinhead? It’s the world. The middle classes. The Empire club. It’ll all be gone in a few years and I suppose we should be glad.”
    “You know Eddie?”
    “Yes. In the biblical sense, too. I was wild for him. Wild. He had this quality. I don’t know what it was. Probably still is. But you can’t forget Teddy Feathers. He doesn’t understand anyone, Bets, certainly not women. Something awful in his childhood. He’s inarticulate when he’s not in Court and then you hear another voice. As you do when he’s asleep—I know. He speaks Malay. D’you know he once had a horrible stammer? He’s a blank to everyone except that dwarf lawyer person, and there’s a mystery. Bets, you will be perfect for him as he becomes more and more boring. Pompous. Set in stone. Titled, no doubt. Rich as Croesus. But there’s something missing. Mind, he’s not sexless. He’s very enjoyable. It was before I was the other way—”
    “Did you ever tell him about that?”
    “Good God, no! He’d be disgusted. He leaves you feeling guilty as it is, he’s so pure. But there’s something missing. Maybe it’s his nanny—oh, Betty, don’t .”
    She said, “Lizzie-Izz, you’re jealous!”
    “Probably. A bit.”
     
    All day Betty had walked about, crossing and recrossing the city, changing twice from Hong Kong to Kowloon-side. It was Sunday and she went into St. John’s Cathedral and took Communion. She got a shock when the Chinese priest changed from Cantonese to English when he administered the Bread to her. She always forgot that she was not Chinese. She walked afterwards towards Kai Tak. Planes were landing and taking off from the airport all the time. She had no idea when Eddie’s would arrive. The planes