Free Avenue of Eternal Peace by Nicholas Jose Page A

Honorary Doctorate.’
    â€˜Good heavens!’
    She opened her plastic briefcase and pulled out a swatch of untrimmed photocopies and dog-eared Chinese journals.
    â€˜I know you are interested in Director Kang’s work, so I make these samples available to you. Unfortunately, not all is in English.’
    Wally looked glumly at the testimony to Director Kang’s distinction. He detected for once a certain unease in Mrs Gu’s manner. By not immediately, enthusiastically, gleefully taking up the bundle she offered, he had upset her strategy—here was the thin edge of the wedge that allowed him to make his move.
    â€˜You mentioned last time that Professor Hsu is in retirement. Can he be visited? It would be a delight to talk with him—’
    â€˜Hsu? Oh, he’s not in Beijing.’
    â€˜Where is he then?’
    â€˜He’s retired. I don’t know.’
    â€˜You mean he’s severed all ties? Can you find out?’
    Mrs Gu pushed the pile of Director Kang’s papers across the table to Wally.
    â€˜I will contact you.’ And she broke into her sweet befuddled smile.
    â€˜Thank you, Mrs Gu.’
    She rang Wally after lunch to say that Professor Hsu was in a rest home on the coast some five hours by train from Beijing.
    â€˜Couldn’t be better,’ he yelled into the phone. ‘I’ve been fancying a trip to the seaside. Can you get his address?’
    â€˜You will go alone?’
    â€˜Sure!’
    6
    Wally had the sketchiest idea of how his grandfather Waldemar had stuck China so long. He had seen photographs of a hospital built under his grandfather’s supervision, an imposing whitewashed building with neat inset windows and a tiled roof along Chinese lines, with at one end a church incorporated, a steeper slope to the roof, gothic windows and a cross on top. Outside, in rows for the photograph, were the staff: Chinese in traditional dress with round glossy heads; Western women in long full skirts and men in suits with the odd dog-collar, and in the middle (if you used a magnifying glass) sunken-eyed, droopy-moustached Waldemar, beside whom was a small beady birdy woman in a pale blouse with floppy bow—his wife Retta. A ragged, painterly line of Chinese mountains faded into the sky. Behind that scene of the little mission hospital lay, to Wally’s eyes, all the capability, vanity and pathos of Victorian imperatives.
    Waldemar Frith was the second son of a prosperous Bristol merchant called Zachary, a name and personage to conjure with. The money came in foreign trade (tobacco to be precise), unrelenting hard work, and obsession with every penny. Vigilant, at attention, the righteous burghers of Bristol carried themselves, while their ships carried their goods, every crate accounted for, to the four corners of the empire, and returned laden with tea, spices, wool, silk, sugar, tobacco for warehouses and suppliers throughout the kingdom, every ounce inventoried and profit-bearing. Bristolians grateful for what the bounty of nature provided, along with the natural laws of a free market and their own superior position in the chain of being, were ready to pay tribute to the natural world by promoting Natural Science, Philosophy, Education, Self-Improvement and, once souls were improved, Philanthropy. From the modestly large bluestone houses aggregated on the rises of Clifton were sent outwards goods of a more spiritual kind to ballast the inward traffic. Here too the accountancy was strict in an economy inseparably practical and moral and buoyed up by a generous conception of self-interest. No accountancy was stricter than that on Sunday mornings to one’s Maker and profit-bestowing Friend, no one nearer to God than the men of Clifton, assured in their evangelical projects and social reforms. Hence Zachary Frith argued in persuasive pamphlets that the advantage of Bristol, and consequently mankind, lay in the abolition of the slave trade.