Letters From the Great Wall E-Book

Jenni Daiches

• Herausgeber: Luath Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 387

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

In leaving behind the physical closeness of her relationships with her long-term partner, parents, brother and family she is able to analyse and confront 'the mush of dissatisfaction' that had been expanding to fill her life. By lecturing in Beijing Eleanor is at once observer and observed, teacher and pupil. The novel culminates in Tiananmen Square, June 1989, as she finds herself drawn into the unfolding drama that led to one of the most momentous events of the 20th century.

Leseprobe

JENNI DAICHES was born in Chicago, educated in the United States and England, and has lived in or near Edinburgh since 1971. After several years of part-time teaching and freelance writing, including three years in Kenya, she worked at the National Museums of Scotland from 1978 to 2001, successively as education officer, Head of Publications, script editor for the Museum of Scotland, and latterly as Head of Museum of Scotland International. In the latter capacity her main interest was in emigration and the Scottish diaspora. She has written and lectured widely on Scottish, English and American literary and historical subjects (as Jenni Calder), and writes fiction and poetry. She has two daughters, a son and a dog.

By the same author:

Chronicles of Conscience: A Study of Arthur Koestler and George Orwell, Secker and Warburg, 1968

Scott (with Angus Calder), Evans, 1969

There Must be a Lone Ranger: The Myth and Reality of the American West, Hamish Hamilton, 1974

Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction, Thames and Hudson, 1976

Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Edward Arnold, 1976

Heroes, from Byron to Guevara, Hamish Hamilton, 1977

The Victorian Home, Batsford, 1977

The Victorian and Edwardian Home in Old Photographs, Batsford, 1979

RLS: A Life Study, Hamish Hamilton, 1980

The Enterprising Scot (ed, with contributions), National Museums of Scotland, 1986

Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, Open University Press, 1987

The Wealth of a Nation (ed, with contributions), NMS Publishing, 1989

Scotland in Trust, Richard Drew, 1990

St Ives by RL Stevenson (new ending), Richard Drew, 1990

No Ordinary Journey: John Rae, Arctic Explorer (with Ian Bunyan, Dale Idiens and Bryce Wilson), NMS Publishing, 1993

Mediterranean (poems, as Jenni Daiches), Scottish Cultural Press, 1995

The Nine Lives of Naomi Mitchison, Virago, 1997

Museum of Scotland (guidebook), NMS Publishing, 1998

Present Poets1 (ed, poetry anthology), NMS Publishing, 1998

Translated Kingdoms (ed, poetry anthology), NMS Publishing, 1999

Robert Louis Stevenson, (poetry, ed), Everyman, 1999

Present Poets2 (ed, poetry anthology), NMS Publishing, 2000

Scots in Canada, Luath Press, 2003

Not Nebuchadnezzar: In Search of Identities, Luath Press, 2005

Smoke (poems, as Jenni Daiches) Kettillonia, 2005

Scots in theUSA, Luath Press, 2006

First published 2006

eISBN: 978-1-913025-88-5

The author’s right to be identified as author of this book under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 has been asserted.

The paper used in this book is neutral-sized and recyclable.

It is made from elemental chlorine free pulps sourced from renewable forests.

The publisher acknowledges subsidy from

towards the publication of this volume.

Printed and bound by Creative Print and Design, Ebbw Vale

Typeset in 10.5 point Sabon

© Jenni Calder 2006

For Diana, without whom it would not have happened

Contents

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2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

1

I PROMISED AN explanation. But how can I explain? Not here, sitting on this warm stone, my back against the parapet wall, late afternoon, the sun hanging just above the mountains, still hot to my sun-starved skin. Fewer people now. Most of the buses have gone. A little while ago it was like a fairground, looking down on it all from this distance. So many people, so many colours, shapes forming and splitting, buses reversing and honking, dust burling, incongruous camels in bright leather trappings, stalls selling T-shirts and soapstone and cans of coke.

The fact is I no longer want to explain. Nor do I want to apologise. I realise apology might be considered appropriate but it doesn’t seem to belong now. I no longer feel I ought to.

It’s as if they chose the steepest, highest pinnacles to build on, that’s what I don’t understand. They did not build a wall to keep out barbarians – I see them assailing the barrier with daggers between their teeth. Typical occidental’s stereotype. We impose our own pictures – we can’t help it. They built a wall to demonstrate the building of a wall. There is no compromise with the landscape here, no acknowledgement of the contours of hills. No one sought – or did they, and lost their heads? – an easier way. The wall actually seems to loop and twist so as to follow the most spectacular, the most difficult, the most astonishing route. It seems organic to the mountains. At the same time it proclaims itself man-manufactured, woman too, perhaps. I don’t know, though I’ve seen women carrying stone and mortar, a weight at each end of a carrying pole. Whoever they were, thousands of them died in the building of it. Humankind’s mark upon the earth, and in it.

A wall for the sake of a wall. I can’t tell you, though I owe that to you, I know. Owe, ought. These words are cousins, but second cousins I think. My ‘owe’ should suggest not obligation but a wish to give. I can’t tell you why I left, why I came, what I am discovering here. No, that’s not true. (Why do I want to tell the truth? Does anyone else? I doggedly tussle with language and truth. I don’t care for lies but I tell them, of course I do.) I had good reasons to leave. But I should go back to the beginning again. What I should say is that I don’t want to. Like a truculent child I want to toss my head and say, why should I? Why can’t I do as I like? I hear you drawing breath to give me some answers, sensible answers. Of course, I know the answers. There was always room in my head for sensible answers, in the days of those private, precious conversations, but I don’t think I’m interested in them any more. Have I cast off the yoke of obligation and guilt? That’s too much to hope for. If there have been miracles I’ve been blind to them. You need sharp eyes for miracles.

A lot of questions. My flesh drinks in this eastern sun. The warmth of the stone, hard on the bum, is wonderful too, the very hardness making me feel as if the heat is reaching my bones. (Bones are everywhere. So much flesh and blood above the earth, so many tombs and trenches of bones beneath.) Suppose there were a cancer, I suddenly find myself thinking. Would this warmth penetrate the maverick growths in my body? It seems so much kinder and more healing than the savage things they do to attack the wildly splitting cells. There are times, though, when we need some savagery. I hate to say that – you know I have always believed in being kind. It’s not done me much good, or I’ve not been much good at it. The sun is dropping, way beyond the wall and the cone-shaped hills. The sky to the north and west is a murky yellow, freighted with desert dust. That’s where the threat comes from.

I remember deciding. I’ll tell you about that, it might help. It was a cold March afternoon, over a year ago. Thousands of miles ago. I was writing an article I’d put off all term and there were books I needed. It now seems remote and ridiculous. At the time it was important, a deadline to meet. I drove to George Square and parked the car nose to pavement. There were clumps of snowdrops in the grass, and crocuses. I could see the little dots and dashes of gold and purple through the railings. There’s nothing like spring in the dark, northern countries of the world. The trees were bare and black against a pale orange sky. It was late afternoon, as it is now.

I sat in the car for a bit, looking at those fragile scraps of colour, my hands and feet getting cold, and for the first time, suddenly and clearly, my head articulated my unhappiness. Until then I’d just felt a mush of dissatisfaction, worry, maybe fear, sometimes waking in the night with a stab of panic. But now something spoke. You are unhappy, it said. Your past, your present, your parents, with being here and doing this, with driving to the university to consult books, with writing an article that will say nothing of any real significance, or even make-believe significance. You are unhappy with what awaits you when you return home. What are you going to do about it?

I got out of the car, shut the door, locked it, walked. You know what it’s like when you suddenly see yourself performing actions you’ve performed a million times before. When you suddenly become a stranger to yourself. I watched myself get the books, return to the car, key, ignition, seat belt, reverse gear, radio on (Radio Three – CPE Bach with that almost tinny woodwind which I love). Traffic lights, left turns, right turns, cyclist snaking in front of me, elderly man jaywalking ten yards from a zebra crossing (I thought of my father, of course). Parking, only three doors down from the desirable urban residence I share with the man I now know I can’t marry. In through the street door and up the stairs. Front door key.

How easy. My mind made up. I can’t marry Roy. I can’t go on living in my fine and comfortable home. I can’t forgive my mother. I never loved my father. I can no longer tolerate my snarling colleagues. I can’t forgive myself. I have to go away. I stood, only seconds probably, looking at the white painted door of the flat, and I couldn’t believe how clear everything had become. All my life I’d been making things unnecessarily complicated, agonising over decisions, should I apply for that job, make love to that man, fail that student, confront parents, boss. Should I speak or stay silent? Should I flee or attack?

I didn’t tell Roy at once. But the perspective changed, and when perspectives change the people in them take on a different shape. The scenery, the quality of the air, the temperature, changed too. When he came in, later, he seemed diminished. He had no idea that I had a huge, expanding secret. I had just been sitting. I had taken off my jacket and was holding it against myself. The books were on the floor beside me. He hardly looked at me, saw nothing strange, smiled as he always did. Without that smile I’d never have been there. He won me with that smile.

As he went into his room – he had his room, I had a corner of what my mother called the lounge – he threw back a question. What are we having for dinner? Shall I open a bottle of wine? It was Friday. We always had a bottle of wine on Friday.

I didn’t feel sorry for him at all. I sat. A while later he emerged. Are you alright? His expression benign and preoccupied. Just tired, I said. Roy never complained. He took me as he found me. No reproof, that wasn’t his style. I’ll make omelettes, I said. I didn’t care, then or now, if I hurt him. Or his pride. He’s a nice guy really, I thought, clutching my jacket. Want a drink? Roy asked. I nodded. A pity, I remember thinking. I’ll have to move. I can’t go on sitting like this. I’ll give the game away.

Well, I moved. I left my jacket and my books on the floor and sat at the little writing desk under the window, the desk I found in that junk shop in St Stephen’s Street. Roy handed me a glass, turned on the television, and sat down on the sofa on the other side of our large, high-ceilinged living room. Or lounge. I’ll go out for a pizza if you like. The offer was rhetorical. It was Roy being considerate, though we both knew that I would demur, so I did. Not that I mind omelettes, he said at the same time as I said, it will only take minutes. And there’s some nice rye bread, and I’ll make a salad.

For the first time I began to understand the attractions of space travel. For being here is as I imagine the experience of another planet. If I were to describe the landscape, the curious conical hills, the dark scrubby trees, the dry crusted earth. Or the city, the stark new buildings, the forests of cranes, the canopy of dust, the startling fragments of another time. A green and yellow gateway, curling roof tiles, faded courtyards. It would at once be familiar as a known world, a different idiom maybe, but the same planet. If I were to describe the people, their movements, their expressions, their bundles of belongings, the clothes they wear, the smells, it would be recognised as a humanity we’re all acquainted with, if only through words and images. But it is also entirely different, different from anything I’ve ever encountered, frighteningly different. This is humanity on a scale beyond imagination, life concertina-ed, layered, fused, fractured. Like all the multiple activity that batters the earth below and above its surface.

I will go on writing to you and hope that I can clarify this in my own mind. It is important to me – the experience itself is not enough. But I don’t think it is something I can purposefully describe. I hope you will understand that discovering this is the most important thing that has happened to me. The writing about it is part of the importance. There’s never been anything to write about until now, except other peoples’ words.

A child has stopped to stare. I am getting used to this now. Never have I attracted so much attention! Imagine the fascination that lies in my thick, rather coarse light hair in a land where hair is smooth and dark. My blue eyes are dazzling. Fingers reach out to touch my freckled skin. At home I am of medium height and slenderish build. Here I am big and bulky, with rough pale limbs, patchily tanned, in a land where young flesh is smooth and lustrous.

The child still stares, beautiful, unsmiling. Yellow shorts and a white T-shirt, round face fringed with cropped black hair, skin subtle as silk, tilted eyes. I smile. She takes a step back and looks round quickly to check if her parents are still within reach. But her eyes swerve back to the foreign devil. Her parents are walking slowly away from her, the man, early thirties I’d say, about my age, the woman in a rather short white skirt, the edge of a nylon petticoat just visible as she walks, a yellow nylon blouse. The sleeves of the man’s shirt are rolled above his thin elbows. I recognise the ubiquitous thin cotton of his navy trousers. They walk side by side and begin the steep climb up one of the wall’s great arcs. After a few steps they pause, turn, and call the child. She hesitates, takes a last look at me, and trots after them in her little canvas shoes.

There is such joy in observing.

A child. That would be an easy explanation of it all, prefabricated, there to pick up and present. Everyone would nod, murmur to each other, ah yes, of course, poor Eleanor, a child, of course. I suppose it was Roy, they’d say, so ambitious, wouldn’t want his life cluttered up with a child. And on the other side the troops would also mass. Eleanor, what a pity, no space in her life for a baby, she’ll regret it later. You should have your children young. She’d be happier if she settled down. Children being necessary to settlement, as if without them there is nothing to hold you steady. If you wait too long, it may be too late.

That’s what hurt my mother, or at least I guessed it did, though she hardly seemed to notice when I told her that Roy and I had finally decided to marry. By that time I think she’d got used to it, our cohabitation, though a child without marriage would have been beyond her, and I was sure she’d immediately calculate on a grandchild when I told her yes, at last, we’d even set a date. Roy wanted a child. One of his arguments was that it was cruel to deny my mother a grandchild, though her son had already given her two.

No, it wasn’t Roy who opted out of children. He comes from a big family himself, has several sisters and nephews and nieces I’ve never met. When he raised the subject of marriage and children he always took me unawares, for he never chose those intimate moments which, to me, suggest possibilities of close communication, but would, perhaps, come into the kitchen straight from the computer and without noting my activity, chopping onions or my hands in rubber gloves, would say, Eleanor, we should think seriously about marriage, you know. I don’t want you to wait too long before you have a child. Marriage was on his agenda, the decision deferred rather than dropped, which meant that I could dodge the issue without ever having to say no.

Something changed after my father died. I used to see, or imagine, reproof in my mother’s eyes. After my father died that vanished.

Roy required a child, two probably, just as he required a woman, not to depend on, not to share with, not for sex or housekeeping or hot dinners, but to complete his image of himself. That’s my ungenerous view. It was to do with status, with masculinity. The expectations of others. I glimpsed deep-rooted feelings about a son and heir, inheritance, carrying on the line, maintaining the name. He is the only son, perhaps that has something to do with it. I don’t think he’s ever taken his sisters seriously, although he clearly likes them. Sometimes I teased him. I’ll have a daughter, I said, who will bear my name. He smiled his wide, good-humoured smile. He didn’t take that seriously either; he knew I didn’t mean it.

The little family is returning now. I’ve done my climb, calf-aching, to the crown of the first arc to the east. From there you can see the wall dip and curve over the green and brown landscape. I wish I could convey the nuances of colour here to fix them in my mind. Green and brown are in no way adequate. It’s a particular density of green, a quality of brown, something of red in it, something of yellow, and it’s a tenacious green, a green against the odds. And all these colours seem influenced by the colours you find on T’ang tomb figures, horses, camels, lovely beasts built for burial. The eye is so imposed on by these colours, human creation, that the landscape too looks as if splashed by rich glazes. There’s nothing untouched by humanity. Not only is the landscape disturbed, we cannot avoid interpreting it as if art came first.

The wall is crumbled beyond this stretch of reconstruction, but its progress is distinct as far as the eye can see, and indeed further, for you know, not because of what words tell you but because of its conviction as a wall, that it goes on and on. Just as you feel that China itself cannot have an end. In some parts the wall has almost disappeared; much of it was never more than mud. This does not matter. In other parts just the watch towers survive, turrets like teeth on top of the highest peaks. And it didn’t keep them out, the barbarians. Whether it was treachery, or skill, or sheer weight of numbers, they crashed through from time to time and streamed east and south. Now the barbarian hordes drop through the air. But there is still the need to define territory. China does end. Other countries begin.

They are quite right to regard me with suspicion, the little family, all three of them staring as they pass. A northern barbarian from a rugged, limited land, gnawed by sea, walled and corridored by mountains. Child of hard-hewn, limited parents. Growing up in a small town with sandstone relics, a roofless grey palace, hollow reminder of hollow ceremonial. A defunct marketplace and dead distillery. Taught to expect too much and too little. Taught to respect money and morals, to respect respectability. Taught to be clean and orderly. But I mustn’t blame my parents, indeed I have no wish to, and what use is blame? Children blame parents out of convenience, not out of need. There is usually nothing else to blame.

It was hard for them to explain their daughter. Achieving yet feckless. It wasn’t the need to understand that bothered them, but the need to explain, to put into acceptable language that fitted the requirements of their small world. Other peoples’ daughters sang in the church choir. They needed more help than I did. Though God knows there were times when I’ve wanted to weep for lack of it. When I did weep. And my mother now? Perhaps I shouldn’t worry. She was always able to rationalise – me too, of course. Perhaps I learned it from her, though I tried so hard to absorb as little as possible. Sometimes my mother seems as resilient as a child. She still surprises me. My father was always more brittle, in spite of his granite exterior. I am quite sure my mother is not saying, Eleanor’s done a bunk. No. Eleanor will be taking advantage of a wonderful opportunity. And so she is. It is probably not often she tells the truth about her children. It is wonderful. But all the same, I know I’ve done a bunk, a wonderful bunk, a bunk I’d never have thought possible.

But I really don’t want to think about my mother, because I know it’s no longer possible to see her in quite the same way as before, and I haven’t yet figured out how the picture has changed.

I stopped there, stiff with sitting and writing for so long with my pad on my knee. Though I stayed a little longer, leaning my head against the pale stone, catching the last of the sun before it dipped behind the dark hills. Then I had to gather myself together, shoulder my capacious bag – notebook, pens, money, traveller’s cheques, passport, sunglasses, aspirin, sun cream, paperback (The Butterfly by Wang Meng) and my precious camera, and make my way down to a bus that rattled me back to the Beijing Hotel, a magnificent assemblage of Edwardian and Stalinist architecture, my baseline for Beijing.

I went into its dark, vaulted lobby. I’m not staying in the Beijing Hotel, but I soon discovered that I could get cold beer there, brewed and canned in Shanghai, the legacy of German brewers who came to China in the nineteenth century. The corridors are lofty and cluttered. Everywhere there are ‘Europeans’, by which I mean mainly Americans and Australians, who wander aimlessly, it seems, among the little boutiques where you can buy silk and curios at inflated prices.

The cool, dim lounge where I sip my beer is not yet full of pre-prandial drinkers but in the corner there’s a noisy group of tanned Australians in shorts and polo shirts sitting round a table stacked with cans. I take out my notebook again, and acknowledge the ambivalent need to talk. Yesterday there was a couple from an English university, Reading I think. He a geneticist on a lecture tour, she a faithful companion who at home works for the local Citizen’s Advice Bureau. They were sipping gin and tonic in a rather conspiratorial fashion, talking in low voices, unlike the other occupants of the lounge. They turned out to be waiting to be picked up and rushed to another tourist site, or lecture hall, or banquet – whatever was next on the packed agenda. They thought it was all wonderful, but seemed confused.

I identified well-placed hearts and an engaging enthusiasm, like children, though almost old enough to be my parents. They had kindly turned to talk to me when they saw I was alone. They were anxious about what to take back for their teenage children. And anxious that I should miss nothing they had seen. Had I been to the Ming tombs, the Tibetan temple? How long had I spent in the Forbidden City? Had I walked in Beihai Park, and where was I going next? I explained that I had commitments in Beijing, that I, too, was giving lectures. But that I hoped to get around a bit later. On your own? they enquired. That’s very brave.

They were nice people, very nice people. I almost hoped to see them there again. They wore quiet clothes and were full of wonder, as much at the way every moment of their time was organised, as at China itself. Tomorrow, they told me, it was the Summer Palace, the day after, a flight to Cheng Du. A brisk lady in a grey suit and spectacles, a professor at Beijing University, arrived and whisked them away. They had not finished their drinks, but made no protest. I left soon after, and caught an overflowing bus to the Friendship Hotel, the place where ‘foreign experts’ stay.

I have hardly started. There is some shape to the story, I think, though there can be no end of course. If only one could write on one’s deathbed, issue a statement as it were, write the last words of one’s own story. This was what it was all about, this is what I meant to say. But it will be someone else who has the final say, and how can someone else possibly get it right?

2

WE EAT IN AN echoing dining room, distinctly institutional yet with vestiges of grandeur, as if chandeliers were suspended above us. But there are no chandeliers, and the high ceiling has a dark and dusty look. The noise is clamorous. Conversation bounces around the room like the sound of breakers in a sea cave. There are students, researchers, visiting academics, advisors. French, German, American. I am disinclined to talk.

Last night I found myself with a group of students, mainly French. The talk was of democracy. They say that Chinese students are not quite open in their disaffection, in their eagerness to be involved. Those I have met have been politely insistent in their questions about ‘England’. I have not yet tried to explain ‘Scotland’. They ask about politics, education, and how to get books and how to improve their English. They want to go to England. Or better, America.

Tonight I am sitting next to a bearded Canadian. He is tall and bulky, with brown curly hair and square hands. I quite like this place. Most people complain. I have a dingy little room with heavy dark furniture and a small window. The food is quite good. It’s also very cheap and there’s plenty of it. Steve has an attractive, warm voice. He is an ethno-musicologist.

I am giving two sets of lectures. Last week it was the nineteenth-century novel. The hall was packed. Students sat on window sills and stood at the back. Tomorrow I move on to Dickens. At the same time as listening to Steve my mind is fishing for similarities between Beijing and the London of Dickens. They are both foreign territories.

I am eating noodles and spicy vegetables. Steve is wearing a checked shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, and I notice his beard is greying. He comes from Vancouver. He says, waving his chopsticks for emphasis, that Chinese music is more richly and complexly tuneful that anything written by Mozart or Beethoven, and if I’d care to listen to his tapes he would demonstrate. Western music, he says, depends on harmony. Without harmony most of the melodies would be banal.

I am interested, and Dickens slides out of my mind. I like his brown eyes, which are slightly prominent, but warm, like his voice. Back in Vancouver he has a collection of oriental instruments. He lives near the university. He is drinking beer, and when he gets up to buy more, from a little booth, he asks if I’d like one. I say yes, and an hour later we are the sole occupants of the dining room. Then we go to his room to listen to his tapes, Steve carrying a couple of beer bottles by the neck in each hand.

I like the music. Once you get past the barrier of strangeness that these curiously congested sounds throw up, once you learn to listen to the currents of the pentatonic, it becomes amazingly open and flexible. Its sinuosity winds itself around and through you. When Steve discovers I come from Scotland he points out, almost with a degree of triumph, the kinship between Scottish and oriental music. He hums sonorously to demonstrate. One thick-wristed hand is raised above his head, and slowly, gracefully, descends.

In the night I had to get up to pee. It meant a long walk down the corridor, lit only by a single hanging lightbulb, which seemed fierce, though the light it cast was so weak. The silence is also fierce, and I am relieved to get back to my room and into my narrow bed.

I’ve walked for hours in the Forbidden City, crisscrossing the vast courtyards. Grass and weeds grow through the cracked marble. Neglected artefacts rest among the dust. The surging crowds of visitors overlie the desolate passivity of the place, but when another tour group has passed, emptiness reasserts itself. It could never have been like this.

The great bronze cauldrons and tortoises, dragons and lions, glint under the heavy sun with a vibrant but alien insistence. The scale of the expanse of white stone, of the sweeping steps laced with marble dragons, of the winged buildings, seems to diminish rather than enhance the human. I am not happy with such grandeur, yet I cannot stay away.

I shoulder my camera and make another traverse in the sun. The lone traveller is a rarity here. The space is not adequate for a human being alone. And although there are so many people, they tend to remain in clumps. It is easy to step round a corner into an architectural backwater and to reflect on my small presence. My camera gives me a purpose, for just to look doesn’t seem enough. Through a lens I can almost take it in better, as if I am cutting it down to size. I feel more comfortable with my camera in my hand, less alone.

In April last year I was with Roy at a conference in Bologna. It rained. I don’t think I saw the sun at all, so I think of Bologna as a dark city. I accompanied him because I thought of an Italian spring, a Florentine spring. I thought I would go to Florence. At first I walked round and round Bologna’s arcaded square, out of the rain, pausing to examine stalls piled with cheap sweaters and shirts, until I began to know them by heart. Finally I bought two sweaters. Roy was mildly scornful. We quarrelled in the hotel room. We didn’t often quarrel, not seriously, well, not really at all. I don’t think it was because of the sweaters, but perhaps it was the rain, or my difficulties in being a conference-goer’s partner. What were they supposed to do? Why didn’t I join the other wives on tomorrow’s trip to Ravenna? At dinner, Roy was in animated conversation with his colleagues, and I was silent.

The next day I got on the train to Florence. In the Uffizi I imagined the roar of tramping feet to be tanks in the narrow streets outside. Botticelli was pierced by an American voice explaining, explaining. I didn’t want anything explained. Dutiful students moved, tramp, tramp, from one picture to the next. They massed in front of oval faces and festoons of waving hair, extraordinary, compelling fabrications. On the Ponte Vecchio I was wedged in a sea of tourists, and struggled off the bridge to look down at the khaki-coloured Arno moving lethargically at my feet.

But the sun was shining in Florence. Back in Bologna I crossed and recrossed the dark square in the rain, to the university where I listened to a paper delivered in a ponderous monotone, then back to the hotel where I stood at the window and watched the ebb and flow of people in the street, or lay on the bed with a book. I sat silent at dinner while Roy and colleagues bandied anthropology. From time to time he glanced at me, and I read discomfort in his look. A wonderful city, one of his colleagues said, smiling with perfect teeth, when he gathered I’d spent the day before in Florence. No other city glows like Florence.

Beijing in June doesn’t glow. Sitting at the little desk in my gloomy room with the window open, I’m acutely conscious of the dry darkness beyond. I am here because I choose to be, which is why I find myself thinking of Bologna. Here of my own free will, as they say. Choice is exhilarating, even when it isn’t real. Frightening too, of course. I know people who disintegrate in the face of choice, others who retreat from it. And there are those who make choices but deny they are doing it, deny the responsibility, the effect on others. The ultimate justification, and perhaps the only explanation I feel the need to offer, is that I decided to come here. The decision came out of my own head and heart. Exactly how a decision on an arrival became also a departure I am not quite sure. It remains to be examined, if not to be explained.

I do think of Roy sometimes. I think of my mother. I think of my dead father, though without thinking of him as dead. I think of my brother George, and Sally his wife, and Fiona and James, their children. I think of their house in Newington where Roy and I went often for Sunday lunch. I resented this example of normal, familial life foisted on me so regularly. Roy, on the other hand, seemed to enjoy it. George and Sally felt, or so I thought, imagined, that I needed this not so subtle reminder that I too could share in the delights of marriage and children. Nothing was ever said.

I’m fond of Sally, although I don’t like to be alone in the same room as her. There is something that makes me uncomfortable – even her voice seems to have a glossy skin to it. George often told me, in the months before they married, how sensitive she was, but I can see only the poise. She is convinced I will grow out of my wrong-headedness. George tells me that too. Sally says nothing directly, but has a way of smiling on her children and turning to catch my eye. I am George’s little sister. She never openly reproves her children, only suggests that they should behave differently. George doesn’t beat about the bush. Like his father he is abrupt, not raising his voice, but adopting exactly the same unbending tone with just a hint of sarcasm. Fiona and James are no worse than other children, it seems to me, but being George’s children they are required to be better. George and I were also required to be better than other children.

Memory tells me that I always did as I was told. I don’t think that can be true, because I feared that iron voice – my grandfather worked in an iron foundry, perhaps that’s where it came from – and my mother was always there with the terrible blackmail of disappointment. Oh Eleanor, how could you. Oh Eleanor, I asked you. Oh Eleanor, you haven’t. I can’t remember these things I did or didn’t do. I would rather have been shouted at, and watching George and his children I wonder if that’s what they would prefer. Anger is easier to understand than the taste of metal.

But I often say to myself, Eleanor how can you? How can you live with Roy? How can you do this to your mother? There’s nothing wrong with Roy. A promising young academic with a doctorate that impressed my parents greatly. They could hardly have wished for anything better, except, of course, that I should marry him. When my mother came to visit she laid her good tweed coat and silk scarf (a Christmas present from her daughter) on the bed that Roy and I shared. What was she thinking? I wondered. Roy escorted her to an armchair and poured her a glass of sherry. She had come without my father, the family harbinger. She admired the flat, the spacious rooms, the olive-green curtains (left by the previous owner), the trendy pine panelling in the kitchen (also the choice of the previous owner).

My mother did not usually drink sherry, or anything else, at lunchtime. She sipped it with a certain gravity. I had spent hours tidying, dusting, pushing the vacuum cleaner nozzle into unfamiliar corners. I had never met Roy’s parents, or visited the large untidy house in the south of England where he had grown up. The house of my childhood, where my parents still lived, was a 1930s bungalow into which my father never quite seemed to fit. He seemed to have to fold his height when he came in through the front door. Perhaps it affected his temper.

Mother must have reported back favourably, for after a while father came too. Roy behaved impeccably. He was very polite to me as well as to my parents. Not that he wasn’t normally polite, but his behaviour on that occasion must have suggested that we were bound by an almost formal courtesy rather than anything remotely like passion. I had agonised for a week over the menu. My father didn’t like fancy food. Avocados? I found myself wondering, in the middle of a class on the Brontës. No, perhaps not. Then, yes, why not? Avocados, definitely, but then reduced myself almost to tears when I failed to find ripe ones on the day they were coming.

We didn’t exactly pretend, but we colluded in presenting an image of an upwardly mobile young married couple, for that was what my parents wanted us to be. Roy talked cheerfully. Mother responded, almost smiled. Father gradually unbent. I had arranged the table carefully. Everything on it could have been a wedding present. Here we are, mother, I was trying to say, here we are, happy, respectable, doing well. Look at all our nice things, our nice lives. Roy poured wine as if my parents drank wine with their dinner every day. My guts were knotted in my anxiety that nothing should be allowed to distort their appreciation of the scene. What worries me now is that I don’t understand why I tried so hard to fool myself as well as them. Neither am I quite sure any more why I didn’t want marriage while I accepted, at least for a while though always with shrewish doubts, so much of what marriage is. Was there a thrill, perhaps, in not being married, an added lustre? There was nothing very lustrous about life with Roy. Perhaps I was trying to manufacture it. But there was an air of promise, and that was what appealed to my parents. They looked around them, Roy smiled and filled their glasses, and they responded to that inimitable suggestion of potential.

Roy made love in a way that was considerate but somehow non-committal. As if his body quite liked what it was doing but his mind was somewhere else. Perhaps that’s one of the things I’ve run away from. I did want to engage Roy’s mind as well as his body, and I didn’t succeed. I didn’t know him. I liked him. But I watched him taking off his clothes at night, removing socks from his white feet, and had no idea what was in his head. I think about this quite a lot and ask myself if I was expecting too much. After all, you never can intrude into the mind (the heart is easier to get at) and the body is awfully good at performing illusions. I’m sure Roy was troubled by none of this. If I had tried to tell him about my difficulty he would have been puzzled, so I never tried. I would only have felt inadequate, and he would have fallen back on his kind smile.

The way I was brought up suggested that there was no place for passion in ordinary life. No tidal waves of lust that overwhelm you before you reach the bed, no sex on Sunday mornings, no longings that draw you from the food on the table to richer tastes. No making love on the hearth or in the bath. But also no hugs or impulsive embraces. No thank you kisses or farewell tears. Tears won’t make it better, my mother used to say. I discovered that wasn’t true. And I discovered other things, but not from Roy. Roy saw, and it seemed loved, the reserved and careful, even sometimes fearful, child of Robert and Margery Dickinson. He did not see the Eleanor Dickinson who learned to give absolutely everything she had, and didn’t know she had. I can’t blame him.

It’s not passion I’m looking for now. I’m satisfied that I discovered it, but if I wanted it now I’d be disappointed. I detect no currents of passion here, and although I look at Steve with interest and see tenderness in his large hands and a kind of fatherliness in his manner (not, of course, the fatherliness of my own father), passion with another foreign devil, seeking some non-oriental oblivion, seems unlikely. Passion seems now an irrelevance. Perhaps it is the privilege of the indulged third of the world. Here it is work, persistence, dedication, survival, that take hold. I see earnestness in the talk of participation, democracy. Conviction, huge seriousness – we’re talking life and death here – but not passion. But it may be that I am failing to recognise it, as others failed to detect it in me.

There were beggars at the railway station the other day, when I went to buy my ticket for Xian. Two brothers, I guessed. One was blind, led by the other, who yanked him by the hand and pointed silently at him in the hope the spectacle would bring forth money. They were appallingly dirty, their skin mottled with grey patches of grime. Their clothes were shreds of dirt-caked cotton. They seemed about fourteen. The seeing boy looked cunning. The blind boy’s teeth were bared. They went from group to group of those who camp in front of the station, waiting perhaps a day or two for a train, but as I watched no one gave them money. The little knots of people, squatting on the ground with their bundles and cats and chickens in bamboo cages barely glanced at them. They carried on throwing dice or eating noodles from small enamel bowls, or simply did not open their eyes but continued in apparent slumber. Some of the bundles were people, wrapped in blankets, in spite of the heat.

3

STEVE HAS A bicycle, and today he borrowed one for me. It’s Sunday, and I had no lectures. We set off along one of Beijing’s ring roads that are wide as car parks. Imagine a city with acres of new but dust-covered buildings, half-built multi-storeyed structures topped by cranes; then suddenly you turn a corner and you’re in a narrow lane, flanked with crumbling, patchy walls with flaking gateways and doors. If you look carefully you can find traces of faded paint.

Thousands of men and women on bikes, children behind or before their parents. Every time you hesitate at a crossroads they come towards you like a cavalry charge, obeying rules and impulses that I don’t understand. The intersections are vast and you have to pedal across an endless arena of space, a kind of no man’s land without definable frontiers. I clung to Steve, or tried to. I was on the edge of panic, and if his bike pulled too far ahead the thought that I would lose him brought tears to my eyes, already stung by the dust. He says the trick is never to look behind or to the side. Fix your gaze steadily in front of you and whatever happens don’t stop. But several times I wobbled to a standstill and was engulfed, sure I would never get started again. I was ignored, or the target for hostile stares, in my helpless hesitation, while Steve’s broad shoulders and greying, curly hair vanished into an ocean of people.

I forced myself to launch across a vast space in a stampede of bikes intermingled with ramshackle buses and trucks. And there was Steve, grinning, his red-checked shirt dark with sweat. Then suddenly we were out of this great surging torrent and in a narrow lane, a little tributary stream which seemed centuries away. We were in amongst the hutongs. We got off our bikes and pushed them over the cracks and gaps in the road surface. Here most people were on foot, although a few Chinese on bikes bumped and wove in and out of the pedestrians. There was a smell of garlic everywhere, garlic threading through the dust. On windowsills there were pots of garlic growing. And flowers. People with almost nothing, or so it seemed, had their garlic and their flowers.