Enchanted Evening by M. M. Kaye Read Free Book Online Page A

a Number One Boy, a cook and an amah. They spoke ‘Pidgin’ – in other words Pidgin English – a fascinating language that had come to be the lingua franca of coastal China and can now be regarded as a language in its own right, since books have been written about it, and poems and songs 5 written in it. Tacklow and Mother could speak to them in their own tongue, and though neither Bets nor I ever got further with Chinese than a handful of phrases, we could just make out in Pidgin.
    Still homesick for Kashmir, and missing Neil 6 far more than I had thought I would, I hadn’t expected much of that first summer in North China. But, looking back on it, I don’t remember a single day when the sun did not shine. The sea was almost on our doorstep and we more or less lived in it, bathing for half an hour or so before breakfast and again at intervals during the day. Two of the girls we had made friends with in Tientsin, Evelyn and ‘Bobbie’ (I don’t think I ever heard Bobbie’s real Christian name) were on their summer holidays in Pei-tai-ho, and the four of us used to spend long, lazy hours in a casuarina-shaded sandpit, discussing life and speculating about the future.
    Evelyn and I were going to be artists (famous ones we hoped), while Bobbie, who was engaged to a young man in the Diplomatic Corps, already had a fairly shrewd idea of what lay ahead of her – as had Bets. Our American friend, Florise, paying a flying visit to Pei-tai-ho, joined our quartet for the duration of her stay. It is a sharp reminder of how greatly the pattern of behaviour has changed since then that Florise, who had been out the previous evening on what she called a ‘blind date’ (the term was new to us), after describing the events of the evening and speaking enthusiastically about the charms of the said date (a young Englishman newly arrived in North China), ended up by admitting, regretfully, that she had completely failed to make a hit with him. Since this was something that I could not believe – Florise, as I have said before, being a notable charmer – I demanded to know how she could possibly know that? ‘Well, he didn’t even try to kiss me when we said goodnight,’ said Florise indignantly.
    Few people now alive can realize how shocked I was by this statement. ‘But Florise, he’d only just met you!’ I protested. ‘Surely you don’t expect a man to kiss you the very first time he takes you out? Englishmen don’t.’ ‘Americans do!’ retorted Florise. ‘And so do the French – and the Italians!’
    The unsophisticated British were evidently still clinging to a code of morals and behaviour that had died with the Great War and the arrival of the Roaring Twenties. It had never occurred to me that any young man whom I had met for the first time at a dinner party, and later that evening danced with, would attempt to kiss me when we said goodnight, however much I might have been attracted to him – or him to me!
    Discussing the matter with Evelyn, Bobbie and Bets, we agreed that this was probably the pattern of the future, because anything that Americans did was sure before long to cross the Atlantic and be copied by Europe. Florise had merely shown us the shape of things to come. But we did not envy her. On the contrary, we felt sorry for her, because she missed all the fun – the thrill of meeting someone you were attracted to, and hoping that he might with luck feel the same about you. Of watching for the signs that he did; of seeing more and more of him, and then wondering if – when – he would kiss you.
    â€˜Courting’ was, on average, a long-drawn-out affair and as fascinating as dancing a minuet or a pavane. For the ‘Colonial’ British still lived in a world that was at least a quarter of a century behind the times, and probably more, a world in which a kiss was still a serious thing, almost