Kowloon Tong Read Online Free PDF Page B

mentioning it for years, but the British had scoffed. Incredibly, the promise was made.
    Betty said, "It may never happen." One of her sayings, it meant, "Cheer up!"
    But events moved ahead, baffling the Milliards, mother and son, baffling many people they knew, and enraging Mr. Chuck. It was now inevitable. What had changed? Business was not good but there was money around. Many Chinese had gone to Canada, some had returned. Now they hardly thought about the Hand-over, except when it was boringly described in the newspaper or ranted about by some politicians. Mr. Chuck's heroes were Emily Lau and Martin Lee. Betty refused to think about the Hand-over, she hated all the talk.
    "Jeremiahs," she said. "It's just Chinese take-away!"
    That was why, when Mr. Chuck died, Betty said, "Maybe it's for the better," thinking of how upset Mr. Chuck was at the prospect of 1997. "Maybe you could say it was one of those merciful releases."

3
    A FTER THE two funerals, after the reading of the will, after the departure of Mr. Chuck's relatives, after all the urgencies and interruptions of the old man's death—the fuss, the sniveling, the expense—life returned to normal for Betty and Bunt. The soft-boiled eggs at Albion Cottage and the lunch pail. Wang's oaties, his dismal fruit salads, his dinners of boiled vegetables and burned meat. Betty's knitting: "I've got a new color," she said. "It's called graphite." She was making coasters again. Imperial Stitching resumed with its full workforce and some new accounts. "Royal" was being dropped from many club and company names in anticipation of the Hand-over, so new badges and monograms were being ordered. The factory was busy, phones were ringing more often in the office, there was greater noise from the cutting and stitching floors, and the Hong Kong radio in Shipping played meaningless music.
    The clammy cold days of early March gave way a week later to humid heat: a taste of the next six months, growing worse by the week, a foretaste of stifling April, monsoon May, suffocating June, and the summer sauna. Bunt liked the bad weather for its being an easy topic of conversation with his mother, and a handy source of excuses for being home late and looking harassed, when the truth was that he had been with a woman in a blue hotel or the back booth of the Pussy Cat.
    It seemed remarkable to Bunt that the whole of Imperial Stitching was now his. Yet he felt the pressure of others hovering near him in the enterprise—his dead brother and namesake, his dead father, and now dead Mr. Chuck. They guided, they chivvied, they signaled for attention. These ghostly presences were as real to him and as awkward and demanding as his mother—Betty with her quarter-share of Imperial. He was working for them all as much as he was for himself. They were restless, they allowed him no peace—and he would have welcomed a bit of solitude. Seeing him, club members said, "You're on your own an awful lot, Neville," and seemed to pity him. But he was never alone.
    About ten days after the reading of the will, Bunt's routine was reestablished. He woke at seven, listened to the radio, switched it off when the Hand-over news came on, then met his mother in the lounge and had breakfast while she watched.
"And a wee scrap of toast..." He gulped his tea, he filled his mouth with toast, he cracked and lopped off the top of his egg with one sideways hit of his spoon, scraped that bit of cranium clean, then went at it with toast soldiers. He never stopped chewing, he breathed through his nose, and all the while his mother hovered, not eating herself, so it was less a meal than a performance.
    Wang went back and forth from kitchen to lounge, scuffing in his plastic sandals, stacking plates, setting Bunt's teeth on edge. The man's height—he was a little over six feet—was impressive, because it was useless in this job. But what Bunt found himself reflecting on from time to time was that Wang was his own