The Chinese Love Pavilion: A Novel

By Paul Scott

Paul Scott is most famous for his much-beloved tetralogy The Raj Quartet, an epic that chronicles the end of the British rule in India with a cast of vividly and memorably drawn characters. Inspired by Scott’s own time spent in India and Malaya during World War II, this two powerful novel provides valuable insight into how foreign lands changed the British who worked and fought in them, hated and loved them.
The Chinese Love Pavilion follows a young British clerk, Tom Brent, who must track down a former friend—now suspected of murder—in Malaya. Tom faces great danger, both from the mysterious Malayan jungles and the political tensions between British officers, but the novel is perhaps most memorable for the strange, beautiful romance between Tom and a protean Eurasian beauty whom he meets in the eponymous Chinese Love Pavilion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Aug 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9780226088570

Paul Scott

Paul Scott is a recognised expert on Robbie Williams and Take That. His 2003 biography, Robbie Williams: Angels and Demons, was a Sunday Times bestseller and has been translated into eleven languages. He is a regular contributor to the Daily Mail.

Book preview

her.

PART I

The God Hunter

1

THE STORY BEGINS NOT WITH TEENA CHANG BUT A man called Brian Saxby, and it begins before the war in India, not in Malaya.

India was of my bone.

The family tradition of service in that country had died with my grandfather before I was born but, as a boy, I could hardly imagine a life spent elsewhere and the house in Bayswater where I lived until the age of seven when it was broken up by the deaths of my renegade parents was full of Indian relics. Afterwards, as I moved from one distant relative to another, I had only grandfather’s yellowing photographs, his diaries and papers and the pale, amateurish water-colours of the Punjabi plains which he had painted himself and signed with a flourish: Richard Warren Brent – the Warren, I liked to fancy, from Warren Hastings. My parents left nothing behind them except their own unused years and myself whom they had christened plain Tom. The Indian tradition was my inheritance, my proof of identity.

From early boyhood I had thought of a career in India in terms of the army and brave actions against the hillmen of the North-West Frontier; but at sixteen, forsaking Kipling for Forster, as it were, the vision faded, ousted partly by a youthful contempt for what I called the military mind (my parents would have been pleased) and partly by the beginning of a new vision: that of myself as a District Officer, following in grandfather’s footsteps, wise, godlike, stern but just, administering the law from under the peepul tree.

This vision was shorter lived than the first and at this stage I had confirmation from an uncle, one of my mother’s several brothers (my father had none), that my father’s failure to follow an Indian career was not a combination of circumstances, ill-luck, and marriage but as I had suspected for some time the result of a deliberate policy. He had spent much of his childhood in India and his break with tradition had caused some unhappiness. My mother, according to this uncle, had been in all the women’s movements of her day. No doubt she had strengthened him in his resolve to have nothing to do with British Imperialism. They were schoolteachers.

I was torn between two loyalties. I admired my father and grandfather equally for keeping faith with what I assumed them to have believed in and yet I could not side with either of them. I too despised despotism, however benevolent, and yet I was bound to India emotionally and there was no point in denying it. For a while I considered the possibility of planting tea but the word coolie sat uncomfortably on my tongue. In the end, not unaware of anti-climax, acknowledging an urban upbringing, I plumped for commerce and became articled to a chartered accountant with the idea of qualifying and then applying for one of the jobs I used to see advertised by firms with offices in Bombay and Calcutta. It was a long-term project, too long for my patience. Within a year I approached a shipping line and after some weeks of waiting I was allowed, at the age of twenty, to work my passage out to Bombay in the purser’s office of a small steamer carrying machinery and some hundred passengers. I had saved about eighty pounds and had the assurance of at least three months’ work in the line’s Bombay office. I felt rich beyond measure.

The year which followed fell into three distinct phases. The first, which lasted no more than a few weeks, at most a month, was a time of disappointment, even dismay. What had this city to do with me or I with it? It took young Brent by the scruff of his neck and rubbed his face in its own dirt as if to make sure the boy would be given a sharp lesson in reality. In a city where the white-skinned were usually rich, influential or favoured in some manner I quickly learned that I had chosen to live on the lowest level of sub-European society and that it needed more than half-baked notions to make it supportable.

In the shipping office I was an embarrassment to the executives, one of whom, in a chatty, probing interview, discovered the fact that we had gone to the same school. He offered me a job as his assistant, bed and board in his own house (he was careful to mention that he was married): social and financial security, the absence of which had hit me like a punch to the midriff within twenty-four hours of landing. I accepted his offer. He clapped me on the shoulder, said he was glad and a bit relieved because it would be awkward to have a chap like myself working as a temporary clerk with all the wogs. He added that it would involve a two-year contract of service. I began to raise objections which he brushed aside with the best good will. We were interrupted by an Indian clerk. He shouted at him, treated him like dirt. No, I thought, not two years, not two years. The office was cool, air-conditioned, the man himself young enough to speak the same language as I did. He would have been easy to work for and in two years I might not have noticed words like wog or irritable outbursts like: Get out and bloody well knock next time. But I noticed them now. I weighed them against the air-conditioned room and the sense of belonging which talking to him gave me; and went back to clerical grade B to work with the Eurasians and westernized Indians: the object of their curiosity and suspicion.

From the beginning I lived in a hostel run by a Mrs Ross, a dark-skinned Eurasian woman to whom I had been sent by the assistant purser. She catered mostly for male members of her own sad, rootless community. She was kind and gentle and I remember her and her guests with affection in spite of the hundred ways in which they conferred superior status on me because I was pure-bred white and came from that country most of them called home. Her own complexion was not light enough to let her pass as a European, even had she wanted to, but the others practised this deception even amongst themselves. Warm and motherly, she listened patiently to the imaginary tales of an English up-bringing with which they propped up their self-esteem. She worked far into the night at menial tasks they would have despised her for doing had they seen her at them. Every Monday great play was made of collecting laundry for the man, filling in lists in duplicate, allotting marks; but I found her once, at two o’clock in the morning, in the room behind her kitchen, surrounded by those same bundles of ticketed clothes, ironing our white shirts and collars.

Why? I asked her, as she got me a cup of tea instead of the glass of water my sleeplessness had driven me downstairs to find. Why don’t you tell them there’s no laundry, no man?

They know, she replied. Now drink this down. I’ll find you an aspirin.

Yes, I said, they know, so why not tell them?

Tell them yourself, Mr Brent.

Tom. Call me Tom. For God’s sake someone call me Tom and not always Mr Brent.

All right, Tom. You tell them.

I will.

But I didn’t. That marked the end of the first month. I needed people to talk to, to be talked to by, to go out with, get drunk with, argue with. The next day I looked for another job. You can never be part of a city like Bombay but you can be whole within its walls. I wanted to work with my hands, to lift weights, heave crates, lay bricks, to sweat away the stench of ink and the airless smell of large rooms filled with paper, but that was as impossible for a white man, it seemed, as it was for a black one to swim in the pool of a European club.

I asked my fellow guests at Mrs Ross’s to help me. They were puzzled. But you’re at the shipping office, Mr Brent. They suspected I had money, a private income, what in their idiom was referred to as means. A job was a position. Holidays were vacs. To chuck a good position was a sign of instability, the supposed failing of half-castes. I longed to tell them to stop pretending but I couldn’t. I could have tripped them up a score of times when they talked about home (Our place in Shropshire), but I had not the heart. There was an affinity between my dream of their country and theirs of