Toll for the Brave

Five hours a day were devoted to learning Chinese. In one of many interviews with me, Chen-Kuen told me that this was to help promote a closer understanding between us, an explanation which never made much sense to me. On the other hand, languages were something I’d always been good at and it gave me something to do.

Each afternoon I had a long session of ‘instruction’ with Madame Ny which St Claire made me report in detail to him each night, although that was only one of our activities. He taught me karate and aikido, subjected me to lengthy and complicated breathing exercises, all designed to make me fit enough to face up to the day when we were going to crash out of there, his favourite phrase.

But he was the original polymath. Philosophy, psychology, military strategy from Sun Tzu and Wu Ch’i to Clausewitz and Liddell Hart, literature, and poetry in particular, for which he had a great love. He insisted that we talked in Chinese and even gave me lessons on his guitar.

Every minute had to be filled to use up as much as possible of that burning energy. He was like a caged tiger waiting his chance to spring.

I once tried to sum him up and could only come up with words like witty, attractive, brave, totally unscrupulous, amoral. All I know, and still believed at the end of things, was that he was the most complete man I have ever known. If anyone ever lived with total spontaneity, bringing it right up from the core of his being, it was he.

My relationship with Madame Ny was perhaps the strangest part of the whole affair.

I was taken to her office in a room on the second floor of the monastery each afternoon. There were always two guards in the corridor, but inside, we were quite alone.

It was a comfortable room, surprisingly so, although I suspect now that was mainly by design. Chinese carpets on the floor, a modern desk and swivel chairs, a filing cabinet, water colours on the wall and a very utilitarian looking psychiatrist’s couch in black leather.

It became very plain from the beginning that these were psycho-analytical sessions. That she was out to strip me to the bone.

Not that I objected, for it quickly became a game of question and answer – my kind of answer – that I rather enjoyed playing and the truth is that I wanted to be with her. Looked forward to being in her company.

From the beginning, she was calm and a little remote, insisted on calling me Ellis, yet never by any remark or action, referred to that emotional breakdown at my bedside on the evening they had released me from the Box.

What I could not erase from my mind was the memory of that strange dream, an erotic fantasy so real that to see her simply get up and stretch or stand at the window, a hand on her hip, was enough to send my pulse up by a rate of knots.

A great deal of her questioning, I didn’t mind. Childhood and my relationship with my grandfather, schooling, particularly the years at Eton which seemed to fascinate her. She seemed surprised that the experience hadn’t turned me into a raving homosexual and asked searching and vaguely absurd questions about masturbation which only succeeded in bringing out the comic in me.

We spent a month in this way and it became obvious to me that she was becoming more and more impatient. One day she stood up abruptly after one particularly feeble joke, took off her tunic and walked to the window where she stood in the pale sunshine, angrier than I had ever seen her.

From that angle, half-turned away from me, it became obvious that her breasts managed very well without the benefit of such a western appurtenance as a brassière and I could see the line of them sloping to the nipples as the sunlight filtered through the thin cotton.

‘All men are at least three people, Ellis,’ she said. ‘What they appear to be to others, what they think they are and what they really are. Your great fault is to accept people at face value.’

‘Is that a fact?’ I said mockingly.

She turned on me in anger, made a visible effort to control it, went to the door. ‘Come with me.’

We didn’t go very far. Through a door at the end of the corridor which led to a gallery above what was obviously the central half of the old temple. There was a statue of Buddha at the far end, flickering candles, the murmur of voices at prayer from a group of Zen monks in yellow robes.

Madame Ny said, ‘If I asked you who was the commander of Tay Son you would say Colonel Chen-Kuen of the Army of the People’s Republic.’

‘So what?’

‘The commander is down there at this moment.’

The monks had risen to their feet, their Abbot magnificent in saffron robes at their head. He glanced up at that moment and looked straight at me before moving on. Colonel Chen-Kuen.

We returned to her office in silence. I sat down and she said, ‘So, nothing is as it seems, not even Ellis Jackson.’

I made no reply and an orderly came in with the usual afternoon pot of China tea and tiny porcelain cups. It was unfailingly and deliciously refreshing. She passed me a cup without comment and I took the first long sip with a sigh of pleasure and knew, almost instantly, that I was in trouble.