The Buddha of Brewer Street. Michael Dobbs
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great slabs of grey-green rock and shadows of deepest purple, leaping up from the land and stretching for the sky. A sky the colour of polished lapis. Before the mountains lay a great plain, filled with snow so intensely white that it must have been many feet thick and perhaps many centuries old. From somewhere nearby, but unseen, came the rushing of meltwater. Then the meltwater came into view, spreading like a stain across the snow. A deep red stain. Like the flowing of a lama’s robe.
The colour of flowing blood.
Goodfellowe woke with sweat trickling down his chest. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get back to sleep that night. And, after he had put in his letter of resignation to the Prime Minister, not for many nights to come.
‘Madame Lin!’ Goodfellowe exclaimed, almost as if in surprise. ‘What a pleasure. Please – come in.’
The expression on the face of the veteran Chinese diplomat made it evident that this was not one of those pleasures to be shared. Hers was an elegant face, not round and androgynous in the manner of many ageing Chinese but with high cheekbones and full lips that, when they smiled, were still very feminine. This morning, however, they were not smiling. The bun that held back the fine silver sixty-something hair seemed to have been tightened an extra turn and the dark-spice eyes, which so often glowed with humour, were narrowed and deliberately inscrutable. Her hand barely brushed the Minister’s palm in greeting.
The Ambassador was followed into Goodfellowe’s Ministerial office by her interpreter. Madame Lin spoke excellent English – with an American undertow picked up at Harvard – but there were rules of engagement to be followed this morning. Diplomatic violence was always to be undertaken in the mother tongue. For a moment Goodfellowe wondered whether he should have greeted her in the Ambassadors’ Waiting Room, a gesture of cordiality, a symbolic willingness to meet her half-way that might help soften the blow. But it could also have been taken as a sign of weakness, and such gestures had the propensity for being horribly misconstrued. There were tales filed away in the private office, and brought out only late at night, of an incident in the waiting room between one of Goodfellowe’s female predecessors and the diminutive Ambassador from the Dominican Republic, although who first laid a hand on whom varied according to the teller and the amount of water in the whisky. The Minister concerned had since gone off to become a cable TV agony aunt at three times her Ministerial salary, leaving a deep sense of loss around the masculine fringes of the Court of St James’s.
Would he be missed? Goodfellowe wondered. The Prime Minister had suggested as much when he had handed in his resignation two days before, and indeed had spent a few minutes trying to argue him out of it. But he’d soon given up. Goodfellowe was adamant, his family truly needed more of his time. Anyway, perhaps Goodfellowe’s talents were just a little too apparent for his leader’s comfort; they all but demanded his inclusion in the Cabinet at the next reshuffle. Prime Ministers like to feel they have a measure of choice in the disposition of favours, which is why they are constantly in search of abilities less evident than their own.
‘You’ll be back,’ the Prime Minister had said, not meaning it.
‘Sure,’ Goodfellowe had replied, not believing it.
But at the Prime Minister’s request Goodfellowe had agreed to stay on until the weekend to allow a decision on his replacement to be taken with deliberation, so for now Goodfellowe was going through the motions. A diplomatic game of charades. One word. Nonentity. And after the news had leaked the whole world knew it. What was still more relevant at this moment, Madame Lin knew it, too.
She refused to make herself comfortable on the sofa, insisting on perching on its edge as though ready to walk out at a moment’s notice. He sat in the easy chair beside her.
‘I have been instructed by the Government of the People’s Republic of China to protest in the strongest possible terms,’ she intoned, reading from a formal statement. The voice was husky from tobacco.
Tonelessly the interpreter translated while Goodfellowe’s private secretary scribbled hurried notes. So what else was new? Complaints from Beijing nowadays fell like apples in autumn and were normally left to rot on the ground. Particularly after Hong Kong. In Goodfellowe’s view, handing over the colony had been a great mistake, but for the Chinese it had proved to be a time of great deception, the euphoria soon draining away into what Goodfellowe described as China’s ‘duckpond of despairs’. The great tiger economy had developed ingrowing toenails. Corruption. Food riots. Then had come the failure of the absurd military adventure to retake a small outlying island off Taiwan. As the world had watched through CNN, America had coughed and the Chinese had caught a very public cold. It was all unravelling in Beijing. So they complained, endlessly and usually without merit.
‘The Dalai Lama is a splittist and a renegade and a tool of imperialism,’ Madame Lin continued, her brow furrowed. Frowning didn’t suit her, thought Goodfellowe; she had remarkably smooth skin for her age, and in her earlier years must have been something of a beauty. Is that how she had prospered? It was an ungallant thought, but Maoism was a peculiarly ungallant creed.
‘The People’s Republic of China has objected most strenuously to his presence in this country,’ she continued, ‘but we were assured that this was an informal visit, with no political overtones. Yet Ministers of the British Government have already met with the Dalai Lama and tonight he is to be a guest at the Foreign Secretary’s official residence in Carlton Gardens.’
A rather frumpy residence, in Goodfellowe’s view, but with some fine Ming blue-and-white expropriated by British troops for safekeeping while they and the French were ransacking the Summer Palace. Not the British Empire’s most laudable episode, just another in a long line of imperial punishments handed out during the last century, which was perhaps why no one had ever bothered to tell the Chinese of the porcelain’s ancestry. Although inevitably, in this brave new and abominably correct world, suggestions had been floated that the porcelain might be handed back, as a gesture of goodwill, an opportunity to creep a little closer to a market of more than a billion wallets. Goodfellowe had dug in his heels so deep he thought there was a chance he might emerge in the Yellow River. He was fed up with apologizing for the past, and with giving things back. So long as he had any say in the matter, they weren’t getting the bloody vases. As he had scrawled on the relevant memo, ‘No. They’ll just have to make do with Hong Kong.’
On the sofa, Madame Lin took a deep breath, trying to draw up her diminutive figure to its full height. The clichés of diplomatic protest were laid before him. ‘Gross interference in China’s internal affairs … my Government’s serious concerns … Britain has turned a deaf ear … Dalai’s lies and slanders … in complete disregard of the major progress on human rights made in Tibet.’
One day, just one day, Goodfellowe promised himself, he’d get to ask a Chinese why, since they claimed to have delivered Tibet from serfdom, so many of these newly liberated serfs still risked their lives trying to escape from this Maoist paradise. They walked for weeks through the Himalayas, across the highest mountains in the world, equipped with nothing more than hope and prayer. Some made it, some didn’t. Many froze. Others starved. Vulture pickings. But still they came, thousands every year. Fleeing from paradise. Yes, one day he’d ask why. But not today.
He raised his eyes. The bookcase behind Madame Lin was laden with the doodles of diplomacy – the boxes of inscribed mementoes, the paperweights and pen sets and other assorted knick-knacks that Foreign Ministers seemed compelled to exchange with each other. Most of it was engraved, over-embellished, and crap. Before every meeting one of his private secretaries would scour the room, ensuring that the gift from the visitor’s country was on prominent display. Rather like pulling the photograph of mother-in-law out of the drawer. In their own turn the Chinese were rather more subtle. Visitors to Beijing were invited to the Pearl Room where a table would be laden with strings of raw pearls, all carefully sized. They were for purchase, but at very generous prices. Yet inevitably in the diplomatic marketplace there was a careful order of things. Goodfellowe had been shown which sizes of pearl had been selected by his French counterpart, and then he had been shown those chosen by his Whitehall superior, and with great Oriental deftness had been encouraged to go a little bit better than the first while not daring to go