Locked Rooms (11 page)

The trip went smoothly, other than a few disapproving glances. And the restaurant at the end of the world was so pleased at the freshness of the crate’s contents that the cook gave Tom a dime tip and two thick sandwiches. Father and son took the food down to the beach at the foot of the cliffs, settling in against the sea wall for shelter.

It was a cold afternoon, the wind fitful from the previous day’s storm, the waves erratic against the cliff. Although the Playland carnival rides were going full-strength, there were few other beachgoers that day to object to a Chinese boy. Tom happily stuffed the remnants of his sandwich into his mouth and ran off to see what the waves had thrown up. He stopped regularly to swipe his glasses clean on his shirt-tail, and squatted occasionally to examine some treasure or other.

Another family was making its slow way up the beach in their direction. They were white people: a tall man with that yellow hair some of them possessed and, behind a pair of gold spectacles, the peculiar blue eyes that often went with the hair; a woman with dark eyes and tendrils of normal-coloured hair blowing out from under her warm hat; between them, half hidden between the woman’s dark red skirt and the father’s tall legs, toddled a young child. The father had taken off his hat and tucked it under his arm against the wind. The man and the woman, both of them warmly bundled, were talking and watching the ground. The woman, too, bent from time to time, holding up whatever small thing she had found to show to the man or the child.

They did not see Tom; Tom did not see them; the two paths were set to coincide. And although Long did not worry that this man would perform any act of actual violence against the boy, he did not want his son’s day ruined by a white man’s crushing remark. So he got to his feet, as if his limping gait might actually interrupt the meeting.

To his relief, however, the progress of the trio was broken when the child’s small foot caught on a length of kelp and she was sent sprawling face-first into the sand. Both parents lifted her, brushed her off, comforted her. The father held her to his chest and seemed to be engaging her in conversation, which made Long warm to him: White men so seldom talked with their children. And then the father turned away from the sea, carrying the child to the shelter of the sea wall. Long could not hear her, but he could tell when she laughed, and he was smiling himself when the father sat down with his great arms wrapped around her slim, well-padded body.

The woman, meanwhile, had been distracted by the approach of Tom. Long’s face twisted in concern and he strode as quickly as he could out onto the damp sand, but half a dozen steps and he slowed again. The woman said something to Tom, but whatever her greeting, it had been friendly, and Tom answered her by holding out something in his hand. She leant over to examine it, and the two discussed it for a while. She must have asked where he had come upon the object, because Long saw his son’s arm go out to point up the beach towards the rocks. The woman straightened to look, and then she nodded at the boy. They both continued in their original directions, Tom down the beach, the white woman in the direction of the cliffs; in a minute she was passing between Long and the water, greeting him with a polite nod before her eyes returned to the rocks.

It happened so fast that, if Long had paused even an instant to consider his actions, he would have been too late. The long-skirted figure strolled around the spit of boulders, comfortably above (or so she thought) the waves that broke and sank into the sand eight or ten feet away from her boots. But on this sea, the waves were unpredictable, and turning one’s back on the water invited that seventh wave, or seventieth—the big one. The woman had bent to study something in the lee of the boulder or she might have noticed the uncharacteristic retreat of the waters, sucked back to feed a growing swell like the lungs of a man preparing to shout. The husband saw the danger—Long heard the man behind him, his call faint and snatched away by the wind. But the woman remained oblivious, the wave built and swelled, and Long stumbled into a run, ignoring the pain in his leg.

“Miss!” he screamed. “Miss, come away, oh—”

But the great wave was already surging on, its summoned waters rising, cresting to hurl itself at the shore. Its ridge began to show white, the cap dwarfing the woman even as she stood upright, stared in alarm at Long with his lurching run and flailing arms, then whirled to see what threat lay behind her. The monster wave leapt at her like a falling wall, like the slabs of pavement at the base of the scaffolding. It pounced and scooped her up and hurled her over the small spit like a twig—a booted foot and a swirl of red skirt above the white foam the only signs of her as she skidded over the rocks and onto the sand, then turned, tumbling and gaining speed as the weight of the water sucked her down to the bowl of the ocean.

Long saw only a flash of red in the turmoil of foam and launched himself at it. The fingers of his right hand met only liquid grit and the bite of rock; his left felt the tease of wet fabric darting rapidly past them and he grabbed hard.

Even with two of them struggling, even with four legs and two sets of arms digging into the sand and clawing at the rocks, the ocean nearly had them. Long’s heels dug in first, came to rest with a jolt against a half-buried outcrop of rock, and the sudden jar of the woman’s weight shot a bolt of hot pain up his arm. The half-healed collarbone snapped; he cried out, but he did not let go, his fingers clenched into the wet fabric as he prayed that the seams did not give way, that his muscles not fail, that his bones . . . And then the predatory water turned its back on its prey, retreating into the sand; out of its foam appeared a tangle of red skirts and undergarments, a moving tangle as the woman choked and pushed herself upright against the immense weight of her sodden clothing. Long staggered upright, curled his right arm around her waist, and hauled her up into the air and away from the greedy fingers of the waves.

They collapsed onto sand that was damp but not wet, the woman retching and crying, blood and hair casting red-and-black fingers across her face as she fought to free her arms from the ripped and constricting garments. Only when he saw that she was safe did Long sink to his knees, gagging up quantities of sea water.

The husband was there then, the little girl in his arms screaming with alarm at their startling flight across the sand and the state of her mother and this strange man, both of whom were bleeding and making frightening noises. After a minute, Tom arrived, stark-faced, bending over his father, dabbing at Long’s bloody hand with his schoolboy handkerchief.

Slowly, the woman’s vomiting passed, to be replaced by deep shudders of cold and shock. The husband, satisfied at last that her bleeding was superficial and her skull and bones unbroken, dashed tears of relief from his eyes and lowered the child down to her mother’s lap, where the two clung to each other. He glanced over his shoulder to measure the distance to the road, then looked at his wife’s rescuer; taking in Long’s pinched expression and the care with which his right hand was cradling the other elbow, the pale eyes shifted from relief back into alarm.

“You’re hurt.”

English was an effort, but Long managed to retrieve the words. “Old injury, sir. It will heal.”

“You must see a doctor. Do you live around here?”

Tom answered. “We live in Chinatown.”

“Then you’ll have to come with us in the car.” Long tried to protest, but the man was already speaking to the child, his voice measured and reassuring. “Mary, my brave girl, I need you to help me. Your mama’s all wet and cold and she needs me to carry her to the car. This nice man here hurt himself helping Mama; can you take care of him and his boy? Do you think you can bring them to the car for me?”

The child’s pale eyes considered the situation, and then she clambered out of her mother’s sodden embrace and extended her hand to Tom. The man swung his wife up easily, waited until Tom had got his father upright, and led the way across the sand.

It was Tom’s first ride in a motorcar, and he was torn between the softness of the upholstery and the hisses his father let out, like a prodded kettle, every time the car bumped and swayed. At the end of the ride, the white man pulled into the drive of a house so grand Tom wondered if he was the mayor. He turned off the motor and trotted around to lift his protesting wife out of her seat and carry her to the door, which opened an instant before they reached it. They vanished inside; a stern-looking white woman peered out of the doorway, and appeared to be coming out until a command from within made her hesitate. She said something, at which a voice so sharp it could be heard from the car made her turn and retreat inside, leaving Tom, his father, and the little girl seated in the car.

Child and boy looked at each other in the silence, self-contained blue eyes meeting apprehensive black ones.

“What’s your name?” she asked. Behind the piping lisp of youth, her voice sounded like her mother’s, some kind of accent, Tom thought.

“My name is Tom.”

“Mine’s Mary. Is your papa okay?”

“He hurt his shoulder in a fall a while ago. I think he’s hurt it again helping your mother.”

The pale gaze travelled from the cradled arm to the Chinese face. “I’m sorry,” she said.

Long had to smile at her seriousness—he did not know young children well, Tom having come to him half-grown, and the size of Western infants always confused him, but despite her fluent speech he didn’t think this one could be older than three. “It will be fine, missy,” he reassured her.

“Does it hurt?”

“A little, yes.”

“My papa will make it better for you,” she said, without a doubt in the world. “Would you like to come in?”

“I think your father will have someone take us home,” Long said. He couldn’t afford any more doctors, and in any case there was little to do but strap the shoulder and keep it still. He just wished the man would hurry; the sun had gone and his clothes were soaked. He stifled a shiver, then grunted at the effects the motion had on his grating bones; the child saw, and frowned.

“Are you cold?” she asked, and without waiting for an answer, stood and pulled herself over the front seat, balancing over the seat with her feet dangling free while she stretched down, then slid back clutching the corner of the plaid travelling-rug the man had wrapped around his wife. Ignoring Long’s protests, she arranged it over him, tucking the thick, soft wool around his knees in a child’s imitation of adult nurturing. “There,” she said, admiring her handiwork, and then looked up at an approaching figure.

It was the stern woman from before, come to snatch her employer’s child from the wicked Orientals. She yanked the car door open and, without sparing the Longs a glance, pointed one finger at the ground by her feet.

“Come out here.” Her command brooked no argument, but to Tom’s astonishment, the infant’s chin came up and her eyes narrowed.

“Papa said to take care of them.”

The woman’s eyes flashed and she reached over Long’s knees for the child. “Your father didn’t intend for you to sit in a dark motor with a pair of heathen—”

“Miss MacPherson!” The male voice from behind her gave the woman pause; with a glance at the wide-eyed faces of Tom and his father, she stood back from the car door.

“The child—” was as far as she got.

“We’ll be fine, Miss MacPherson. Perhaps you could go and heat some water for the doctor, and see if Philips needs any more warm bricks for my wife’s feet. Thank you.”

The woman hesitated on the brink of insubordination, then thought the better of it and stalked away. The blond man laid one arm across the roof of the car and leant inside, his unruly hair falling forward onto his high brow.

“Sorry about her,” he said. “She becomes a bit mother-hennish. Let’s get you in and comfortable. The doctor will be here in a minute.”

Long tried to protest, but the man already had his hands on Long’s legs to swing them to the ground. He seemed to sense which motions would be difficult for a man with a bad shoulder, and his supporting hand was there to help. In moments, the man was propping his damp, sand-clotted Chinese guest on an immense leather sofa before a fire and giving succinct orders to the servants who appeared.

The fire was built up and a hot drink fetched. When the doctor arrived, although he was allowed upstairs to check on the woman first, he was soon retrieved and told firmly to patch Long together. When the re-snapped collarbone had been securely if excruciatingly strapped and Long’s wet clothing replaced by ridiculously long but dry substitutes, a thick soup was brought, oddly flavoured but restorative. And at the end of it, a car arrived to take Long and Tom home, not a taxi, but commercial nonetheless.

“You’re not to take any money from these people,” the blond man told the driver. Then he moved to the back window and took out a slim bill-fold.

“Sir, please,” Long protested. “I hope you are not offering me payment.”

The man hesitated, glanced briefly with his peculiar blue eyes at Tom’s heavily worn, too-small shoes, and stood uncertainly, slapping the bill-fold against his hand. “You saved my wife’s life.”

“As you would have done for mine,” Long replied firmly.

The look the two men exchanged seemed to go on a long time, and said a great deal. Would this tall, beautifully dressed white man have thrown himself into the waves after the wife of the short Chinese man with the much-mended trousers? Most would not. But this one?

In the end, the man slid the bill-fold away into his breast pocket, and held out a hand to Long.

“Thank you,” he said. And then he closed the door of the car, which negotiated the streets from the heights to Chinatown. The driver stopped before the greengrocer’s, even getting out to hold the door for them as if they were white, or rich. A very worried Mah bustled onto the pavement, coming to a dead halt at the sight of the uniformed driver. The man tipped his hat to her, got into his vehicle, and drove away before Long could search his pockets for a tip.

The next afternoon, while Tom was off with a delivery for the grocer’s and Mah was scrubbing shirts at the laundry down the street, there came a knock at the door of the apartment. Long, who had ached all day as if all his broken bones had come to pieces instead of just the one, laboriously got to his feet and answered it. The blond man filled the door-way.