Free Julia Paradise by Rod Jones Page B

unimaginable twenty miles away in the city with its strikes, the sudden changes of mood on the Bund when the head of a march appeared at the end of the street. You heard the noise before you saw them, then slowly the Bund filled up with thousands upon thousands of Chinese strikers. The shootings, the grisly discoveries in the dawn of men hanging from lamp-posts, the days of uneasy truce when it seemed the strike might be broken, then the British and American gunboats anchored in the Soochow Creek, from the armadas cruising up and down the Yangtze—all that seemed very much further away than twenty miles just then, that moment of sunlight on the water, that Saturday afternoon when Ayres was on his way to the little mission school for girls.
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    From the outside, the mission seemed a happy, sunny spot for the girls of middle-class Chinese families to spend their youth; not at all like the dreary dungeon of a public school in Edinburgh where Ayres, as a fat boy, had been miserable. Ayres did not see any of the soldiers: they only returned here to sleep at night.
    This little mission school with its timber and stucco buildings, its bungalows dotted amongst the vast well-tended gardens, its stands of trees and roses laid out neatly in rows was more English than Ayres’ school had been and, walking in the rose garden with Willy, it again occurred to Ayres that he seemed to be a world away from strikes and marches in Shanghai. More than anything, it seemed too peaceful, too idyllic a place to billet the officers of a platoon of the Kuomintang army in the final stage of its advance upon Shanghai.
    Willy Paradise’s study looked more like the preparation room in a museum of the natural sciences than the place where a missionary clergyman might write his Sunday sermons. Three walls were lined with the scientific texts he had brought on the ship with him from Australia. In the centre of the room was the large deal table on which he had laid out the paraphernalia of his scientific researches.
    The Reverend Willy Paradise was happy to show the physician, who was at least nominally his brother in science, his prized German microscope, his trays of neatly labelled butterfly and insect specimens, as well as his great leatherbound folios of birds, each painstakingly reproduced in watercolour on the expensive handmade paper he bought from a craftsman in the city.
    He showed Ayres the drawers full of his local rock samples, and the ragged beginnings of the manuscript which he hoped later to publish privately at home in retirement—a fine, weighty monograph on the formation of Pacific coral reefs.
    Ayres was determined to ask the man some of the questions which had over the weeks insinuated themselves in his mind like Julia’s snakes. He began by asking Willy where he and Julia had first met. The question seemed to take the reverend gentleman by surprise. He smiled, hesitated, and lifted the wet stem of his pipe to his lips. ‘As a matter of fact, it was at a dance in Brisbane,’ he said. ‘By the way, I trust we may judge her little holiday a success. She certainly looks all the brighter for it.’
    â€˜Apparently.’
    â€˜My word she does...’ His words trailed off and he took his pipe out of his mouth and examined it. Then he looked quietly back at his guest with his pale blue eyes. ‘I must say, Ayres, I chose an inauspicious time for a celebration. When all this is happening. How long will it last, do you think?’
    â€˜You’d know better than I.’
    â€˜But the strike, Ayres. The struggle of the people. You’re on the spot. What do they say at your club?’
    â€˜What they always say, I suppose. The usual mixture of doomsayers and sabre-rattlers. You have heard, have you not, that the Consul is recalling all missionaries who are British subjects from the inland?’
    â€˜I’ve heard it.’
    â€˜Apparently some of them are refusing to come into the