“Breakfast! Now!” barked Wyer. “And tell your master and mistress I’m here and waiting for them.”
The kitchen was thrown into complete pandemonium as the frightened kitchen staff dropped dishes and rattled pans to meet the order in the allotted regulation time. Ten minutes later on the dot, Boy One served up deviled kidneys, sizzling fried sausages, bacon, mushrooms and eggs, grilled tomatoes, and triangles of perfectly brown toast, delivered on an immaculate silver service.
When Sam served the coffee, his hands shook so much that the lid of the coffee pot rattled.
“Are you drunk, or just a gibbering idiot?” exploded Wyer, giving Sam the evil eye. “Get out of my sight, you imbecile!”
Having pronounced sentence on Sam, the captain then summoned Ada for interrogation. “Where’s Mr. Bernard?”
“He went on an expedition to the province of Guangdong,” she said, avoiding the old man’s gaze. “He’s looking for a supplier of rare teas.”
“Has he gone completely mad? What kind of daft expedition is that?”
“I… I don’t know, sir.”
“The bounder,” Wyer muttered. “Alright, I’ll deal with him later. What’s the news here?”
Ada wished there was something she could say but she could not think of anything.
The captain hurled his napkin onto his plate in his impatience. “What a driveling little fool! Can’t you even string a sentence together?”
Finally, Edna entered the dining room, much to Ada’s relief.
“Here she is!” cried the captain as he offered Edna his dry, yellowish hand.
She greeted her father and asked Sam to give her some coffee.
“Ms. Marshall, would you mind going to see if we have any letters today?” she asked.
When Ada came back with the mail, the other servants had already vacated the dining room. She hesitated at the door, not knowing whether she would be scolded for interrupting Captain Wyer, who seem to be talking about something important.
“These hussies are ruining good English families,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Last week, there was a petition doing the rounds of the Shanghai Club to have every single one of these Russian jezebels expelled out of China for their loose moral behavior.”
“Then you’ll have to expel a lot of the English men as well,” Edna replied. “Let’s face it, their moral standards aren’t exactly exemplary either.”
“So you’ve found out, have you?”
“I’ve found out what?”
“That your philandering husband has gone and made Nina Kupina pregnant and left you to deal with the mess.”
Edna recoiled visibly as if her father had slapped her. “That can’t be true,” she said in a barely audible voice, but her father wasn’t listening.
“Daniel has no children with you, and it won’t bode any good if he has an heir on the side. What if he decides to adopt the baby? What will happen then is that this Russian whore’s bastard will inherit all your property.”
Ada backed away and quietly slipped away from the dining room door.
Klim had been held up at work, and Ada waited impatiently for him at their apartment. She was eager to tell him the news about Nina’s pregnancy.
Finally she heard keys turning in the door, footsteps, and the sound of something heavy being dragged along the floor. Ada ran out into the hallway and saw Klim pulling a large crate into their apartment.
“What is it?” Ada asked.
“A Victoria gramophone,” Klim announced cheerfully. “Where do you think would be a good place to put it? Do you want to have it in your room?”
He dragged the crate to Ada’s room and pulled a gleaming polished box out of the straw packaging.
“It’s a beauty,” he said. “See, the horn is neatly stored inside, and all the mechanical parts are made of nickel.”
“How much did it cost?” Ada asked.
Klim waved his hand dismissively. He took a brand new record out of its envelope and started winding the Victrola’s mechanism.
“Is señorita dancing?” he asked with a smile.
The sounds of a tango rumbled from the depths of the Victrola, and Ada put her hand on Klim’s shoulder.
“Do you make enough money to pay for toys like this?”
“Who cares about money when you can tango?”
Ada leaned towards him. It was lovely when he brought all sorts of curious presents, and even better to have him all to herself to dance with.
Later, they had their dinner together in the kitchen. Ada had baked an apple pie, and it had been the first time the recipe had worked out. Klim was drinking tea from his recently purchased painted cup and was telling Ada about a story he had picked up about the rivalry between two dance halls in the French Concession. The owner of the first one had hired men to release a bag full of snakes onto his competitor’s dance floor. The second man had got back at him by hiring thugs who just sat in his rival’s premises spitting chewing tobacco all over the dance floor.
Ada listened politely but in the end she couldn’t restrain herself any longer.
“Did you know that your wife is going to have Mr. Bernard’s baby?” she asked. “But as soon as she got pregnant, he just left her.”
Ada expected her words to make Klim furious, but he just shrugged.
“Everybody in our editorial office knows about it. A lot of people are jealous of Edna and happy to spread rumors like that around. They are saying that’s what happens to a woman who concentrates too much on her work and not enough on her family.”
Klim was much more worried about Edna’s wounded pride than his own, and he had spent a long time taking the gossipers to task for showing pleasure in a colleague’s misfortunes instead of standing by her.
“But what about you?” Ada asked. “Nina has cheated on you as well.”
“Who cares? We weren’t together for more than a year.”
Klim told Ada that he had to get up early tomorrow and excused himself from the table, without finishing his tea.
“Whatever you do, don’t tell anyone that Nina and I were married,” he instructed Ada. “It would be better for both of us if Edna knows nothing about it.”
It might have been easier if Daniel Bernard had been a complete stranger to me. But we’ve shaken hands on many occasions at Edna’s. The world of white Shanghai is a small one.
I don’t fully understand why I’m so ashamed of Nina. We have nothing to do with each other anymore. Nevertheless, I still feel like a man who has donated his last coins to a church only to find out that the priest has squandered everything on drink.
I’m trying not to think about what has happened, but my desk is close to the door, so I can hear every word coming from the corridor and the smoking room where people are discussing the minutiae of Edna’s misfortunes.
I started to avoid her out of embarrassment, the woman I owe my very survival to. She is perplexed by my behavior, unable to understand what’s going on. It’s hard enough when your loved one betrays you, but even more so when it seems that everybody else is turning their back on you. But I can’t master my feelings. The sight of Edna, broken and gloomy, causes me to recall the craziest things from my childhood. I still remember the smallest details of the scenes that my father used to make if my mother so much as smiled at a younger or better-looking man. A bit of my father’s envious green blood would appear to be flowing in my veins as well, and it takes me a great effort to stop myself from…