To tell the truth, I am grateful for this moment of solitude. After a day spent in the close company of those four, I find it strangely comforting to be alone. I enjoy the times I have to myself. Mother would be shocked to hear me confess this. It would be no use trying to explain. Women are not often on their own: they are constantly surrounded by men — fathers, husbands, sons. Those are the people we live for, whose lives press into ours at every moment. We obey, nurse, nurture, and love. But in the end, we are and always have been alone. That is why I am glad for moments such as these. They are, I have realised, the only times I am truly myself.
WHEN I ARRIVED at dinner, I found Honey in the middle of telling a story. He was facing Kunichika as he spoke, but he had assumed his Public Speaking voice, so I deduced that his intention was to impress.
“. . my men had to quell a veritable uprising. The whole thing was most unpleasant.”
“Not the ‘Murder at the Mine’ story again, Frederick,” I said as I approached.
Peter got up from his chair, but as he did so he managed to nudge the table with his thigh. The small vase of drooping, nearly dead orchids toppled over, spilling its contents onto Honey’s part of the table. The smell of stale flower water filled the air. “Clumsy fool,” Honey muttered under his breath, not looking at Peter.
“Good evening,” Kunichika said, smiling as he pulled my chair back for me. “This is the effect you have on men, you see.”
“Effect? Rubbish. The man’s an idiot, that’s all,” Honey grumbled.
“Sorry,” Peter said in a tone which suggested he was anything but.
“Continue with your story, Frederick,” I said, even though I had heard it several times before. The life of a tin miner, even one of Honey’s grandeur, is hardly filled with excitement, and their few noteworthy stories tend to become repetitive.
“Thank you — I was nearly finished anyway. As you may have guessed,” he said, turning once more to Kunichika, “our man died. A year and a week after he was stabbed by the Chinaman. Well, plainly, it was murder. However: English Law is a strange creature. I’m not sure if you can understand this, but. .”
“. . the accused could not be convicted of murder because the length of time between actus reus and death was greater than a year and a day,” said Kunichika.
“Well, yes,” said Honey, eyeing Kunichika with a faint frown. “So they let him off. We have one dead manager on our hands and a homicidal Chinaman on the run.”
“It was such a long time ago, Frederick, long before your time. People aren’t still talking about that, are they?” I said.
“When I took over as the head of Darby Mines a year ago, I found that many people were still fascinated by this story. It had become a legend. What is it, now, eight years since it happened? Thing is, no one knew who this guy was. His name was probably an alias, he had no family, no home — nothing. And then he simply vanished into the jungle. He’s still out there, this murderer.”
“Except he isn’t a murderer in the eyes of the law,” Kunichika said.
“Ha!” said Honey, lighting a cigarette.
Johnny cleared his throat. He had remained silent throughout Honey’s story — I must say I do not blame him, for these stories are not the most riveting. “I have heard,” he said in an awkward and self-consciously bored manner (learnt, no doubt, from Peter), “that the so-called murderer was a mere boy.”
“Even children can be murderers, you know. Look at the Chinamen in the villages. Most of them are Commies by the time they’re thirteen — nasty little buggers.”
“Are you sure this isn’t some myth, like the ghosts that are meant to haunt Kellie’s Castle or whatever that place is not far from here?” said Peter. “Because it doesn’t sound very plausible to me. Nameless man-child emerges from nowhere, chops leg off sixteen-stone Angus McHefty, gets freed by Lord Justice Snooty, and then vanishes into the jungle, never to be seen again. Perhaps he’s hiding in Shangri-la.”
I found myself smiling at Honey’s bristling silence.
Kunichika said, “It’s always the case that details are lost in the retelling of stories. Sometimes things are forgotten, sometimes things are added. The tale of history is most unreliable. It is, after all, reconstructed by human beings.”
We found that hardly anything on the menu was available. “What on earth can we have, then?” demanded Honey in his VIP’s voice. The old Indian waiter seemed not to understand. In the end, we had mulligatawny soup, devilled chicken with boiled potatoes, and cold English rice pudding.
“Ah, the taste of the Orient,” said Peter.
A LITTLE MORE about last night. (It is raining heavily today so we are confined to our rooms for a while.) There was a string quartet playing while we had our dinner. As we were the only guests in the dining room, we wondered if the hotel had arranged the quartet especially for us.
