Page 6 of Babel

Months ago Robin would have spat at anyone for speaking so cruelly about his family. But here, alone in the middle of the ocean with no relatives and nothing to his name, he could not summon the ire. He had no fire left in him. He was only scared, and so very tired.

In any case, all this accorded with what Robin had been told of his family’s previous wealth, which had been squandered completely in the years after his birth. His mother had complained about it bitterly and often. Robin was fuzzy on the details, but the story involved what so many tales of decline in Qing dynasty China did: an aging patriarch, a profligate son, malicious and manipulative friends, and a helpless daughter whom, for some mysterious reason, no one would marry. Once, he’d been told, he’d slept in a lacquered crib. Once, they’d enjoyed a dozen servants and a chef who cooked rare delicacies imported from northern markets. Once, they’d lived in an estate that could have housed five families, with peacocks roaming about the yard. But all Robin had ever known was the little house on the river.

‘My mother said that my uncle lost all their money at the opium houses,’ Robin told him. ‘Debtors seized their estate, and we had to move. Then my uncle went missing when I was three, and it was just us and my aunts and grandparents. And Miss Betty.’

Professor Lovell made a noncommittal hum of sympathy. ‘That’s too bad.’

Apart from these talks, the professor spent most of the day holed up in his cabin. They saw him only semi-regularly in the mess for dinners; more often Mrs Piper had to fill a plate with hardtack and dried pork and take it to his room.

‘He’s working on his translations,’ Mrs Piper told Robin. ‘He’s always picking up scrolls and old books on these trips, you see, and he likes to get a head start on rendering them into English before he gets back to London. They keep him so busy there – he’s a very important man, a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, you know – and he says sea voyages are the only time he gets any peace and quiet. Isn’t that funny. He bought some nice rhyming dictionaries in Macau – lovely things, though he won’t let me touch them, the pages are so fragile.’

Robin was startled to hear that they’d been to Macau. He had not been aware of any Macau trip; naively, he’d imagined he was the only reason why Professor Lovell had come to China at all. ‘How long were you there? In Macau, I mean.’

‘Oh, two weeks and some change. It would have been just two, but we were held up at customs. They don’t like letting foreign women onto the mainland – I had to dress up and pretend to be the professor’s uncle, can you imagine!’

Two weeks.

Two weeks ago, Robin’s mother was still alive.

‘Are you all right, dear?’ Mrs Piper ruffled his hair. ‘You look pale.’

Robin nodded, and swallowed down the words he knew he could not say.

He had no right to be resentful. Professor Lovell had promised him everything, and owed him nothing. Robin did not yet fully understand the rules of this world he was about to enter, but he understood the necessity of gratitude. Of deference. One did not spite one’s saviours.

‘Do you want me to take this plate down to the professor?’ he asked.

‘Thank you, dear. That’s very sweet of you. Come and meet me above deck afterwards and we’ll watch the sun go down.’

Time blurred. The sun rose and set, but without the regularity of routine – he had no chores, no water to fetch or errands to run – the days all seemed the same no matter the hour. Robin slept, reread his old books, and paced the decks. Occasionally he struck up a conversation with the other passengers, who always seemed delighted to hear a near pitch-perfect Londoner’s accent out of the mouth of this little Oriental boy. Recalling Professor Lovell’s words, he tried very hard to live exclusively in English. When thoughts popped up in Chinese, he quashed them.

He quashed his memories too. His life in Canton – his mother, his grandparents, a decade of running about the docks – it all proved surprisingly easy to shed, perhaps because this passage was so jarring, the break so complete. He’d left behind everything he’d known. There was nothing to cling to, nothing to escape back to. His world now was Professor Lovell, Mrs Piper, and the promise of a country on the other side of the ocean. He buried his past life, not because it was so terrible but because abandoning it was the only way to survive. He pulled on his English accent like a new coat, adjusted everything he could about himself to make it fit, and, within weeks, wore it with comfort. In weeks, no one was asking him to speak a few words in Chinese for their entertainment. In weeks, no one seemed to remember he was Chinese at all.

One morning, Mrs Piper woke him very early. He made some noises of protest, but she insisted. ‘Come, dear, you won’t want to miss this.’ Yawning, he pulled on a jacket. He was still rubbing his eyes when they emerged above deck into a cold morning shrouded in mist so thick Robin could hardly see the prow of the ship. But then the fog cleared, and a grey-black silhouette emerged over the horizon, and that was the first glimpse Robin ever had of London: the Silver City, the heart of the British Empire, and in that era, the largest and richest city in the world.