Historical Fiction Excerpt: Mrs. Sinden

Intro: Here Mrs. SInden forces herself to attend the Handover Ceremony to China on July 1, 1997—hours after her daughter has just committed suicide.  She and her husband know, but her other two children do not know yet.

Double doors opened. A herald seemed to summon them. Jessica seemed to hear trumpets, a summoning that was more of a long-delayed reckoning than a summons. Her children were outside. She felt herself hardening. She covered her knees with her skirt, stood up, smoothed it down, saying, under her breath, Felicity, and again, Felicity, adding,  

You did this. You did this. You did this.  

Her head felt cold. She wondered if Felicity had begun to smell. Her face was already waxy. The flat was warm. She always turned the air conditioning off when she was not there. Had she turned it off? Had she remembered to draw the curtains?  

She approached her husband, passing stiff pinkish faces in the room, faces that hardened even further when they saw her. One that didn’t was Elaine’s, but no, she could not talk to her now.  

A telephone in a small room nearby began to ring. Jessica watched an adjutant slipping away to answer it. Was the call about Felicity? Was she being summoned, even here? She once told Felicity that pain was everywhere, even in the bright light of ballrooms. Felicity had asked her to describe the pain in her back. She wished said something else, something less universal, even though, closing her eyes and trying to steady herself, she felt the truth of it. 

“Edward?”  

“Yes, I’m here.”  

“Tell Poppy we will go through the entire ceremony, exactly as planned, without deviation.”  

Edward sighed, hearing the words, which were hard and clear. He was relieved, as he often was, that she had made a decision for both of them.  He would never know how, seeing their daughter, she took a napkin from a table and held it to her mouth, praying that there was a heaven and hoping that it would be warm there.  

“Does she have the flag?”  

“I don’t know.” 

 “We shouldn’t have given it to her. If you see her, take it from her. I will give it to her when the time comes for her to hand it to the Governor.”  Adding, “They may ask why they can’t come home. Make up something.  Like quarantine. That’s unlikely enough.”  

When the time comes. Well, it had. They moved outside to a platform.  Poppy and Tristan were sitting in their assigned seats. One seat was empty. Tristan looked angrily at it. Felicity is always late, her son was thinking, and she’s just the one to get away with it. It was as if he knew that Felicity was the one her mother liked best.  

They assumed their positions. The ceremony began.  

She heard, from the dais, some words, British words:  

Tonight’s celebration will be tinged for some with sadness. So, it will be for my family and myself and for others who like us will soon depart from this shore. I am the 28th governor. The last governor. 

And in antiphony, the Chinese response:  

The national flag of the People’s Republic of China and the regional flag of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China have now solemnly risen over this land. July 1, 1997 will go down in the annals of history as a day that merits eternal memory. 

The words echoed over Victoria Bay. A few spotlights passed over its surface, making the water look blue and clean. But it was brown and muddy. Jessica sometimes had the feeling that the bay was muck waiting to swallow up the city at any minute. Best to live, as she did, on the Peak, where one could admire the water at a distance, pretending it was clean.  

And she heard, The return of Hong Kong to the motherland after going through more than one century of vicissitudes. 

The Sinden family stood in a row, listening. They had been among these vicissitudes. Jessica saw Prince Charles standing uneasily near a row of old smiling mandarins. The Chinese also seemed to conduct government as a family business. A row of officials stood in uneasy likeness, as though related. Her friend Elaine was now one of them, having married Simpson Kwan, who was related to someone, who was related to someone else, and so on until the chain reached Tung Chee-hwa. Such a glut of relations, an expanding universe of them. She tried to turn her head to what remained of her family, Edward, Poppy and Tristan. Edward was implacable. Poppy was tense and compulsively alert. Tristan’s eyes were brown and gentle, the weak eyes of a doe. And on an awning above them, in gold and red letters,  the bad English that was now everywhere:  

sincere welcome to our shining chinese garrison 

The Sinden family stood in a row close together. The platform was high up and she could look down on the world. Jessica did not know— she forgot her watch—at what precise moment Hong Kong reverted to the Chinese. She had meant to count it down, but now Felicity had taken away time. A hush was in the air. A row of grenadiers stood at attention.  A band somewhere started to play, but nobody was listening. The people were all watching the sky. 

Thousands of faces were turned upwards as though for an annunciation. Something was coming—some sign—but all Jessica could feel was her glasses pinching the backs of her ears and the bits of graying hair that had been released by the snap of that awful  green rubber band. Poppy was holding the stamps the General Post Office had issued just last month, pairs of stamps with flags crossed like swords and the severed heads of leaders in profile, Queen Elizabeth and Tung Chee-hwa. Jessica’s head was bowed, but Poppy was looking up, first at her and then at her father. Something was wrong. Felicity was not here. Tristan, as usual, saw and thought nothing, glancing, blinking, at  his sister, wondering what she was thinking, for she was surely thinking  something, observing it with that strange feeling of exaltation Poppy had  when something occurred to her that had never occurred to her before. 

“Mama, I’m not as sad as I should be,” said Poppy. “You and Papa. You look as though someone has died.” 

“Not someone,” said Simpson Kwan, overhearing her and turning around from the first row. “Something.” He looked at the Sindens. “I had no idea you felt so strongly about the end of British rule.”  “I don’t,” said Jessica.  

Simpson, who knew Jessica Sinden through her close friendship with  his wife Elaine, sensed she had just said something true, though in what  way, he did not know. 

So, he turned back to his wife.  

At last the fireworks came. They were so disappointing. With the lights of the city turned down, Jessica was staring mostly into the dark.  The city before her was a rolling panorama of skyscrapers, some as high as the mountains behind them, blue in places, brown in others. Above them were little hanging points of light, but they kept flickering out.  She stared, trying to hold onto the moment of the brightness, but by the time she saw it, the flash was gone. Poppy squinted at them, too, but with determination: Jessica would not be surprised if she came to her, wanting to have a Chinese fireworks tattoo on her thigh. Something indelible to frighten her mother, more than that closed sign on her bedroom door, its windows half papered with black construction paper  and inside, clothes piled in cardboard boxes all over the floor, and next  to her bed, a side table with two candles burning on saucers. Poppy was sloppy, but somehow she expected her mess to amount to something.  Not like Felicity, who—  

Another line of red dropped, shuddering, through the sky. Then there were more flashes, balls of them, then lots of dropping sparks, more pin-pricks that never seemed to reach the ground. This time she tried to cover her ears. An area of the park between the bleachers and the bay had been fenced off with chicken wire. Men moving in the shadows set them off; from there the fireworks hissed into the sky, disappearing before bursting with pops and crackles. The display was curiously unimpressive. Below them, the skyline of Hong Kong never darkened, for tonight the lights in all the buildings were turned on even though they were all empty. Jessica imagined the fireworks rocking the skyscrapers, but they seemed unrockable.  

Tristan was shifting in his seat. He seemed bored with the fireworks.  He knew so little, saw so little, that boy. How many times had she showed him the plants of her garden, chanterelles, bullaces, fennel roots, and wild garlic, all ordered from Thompson & Morgan in Suffolk, but he had shown no interest.  Not like Felicity, who in the side garden once said,  

“Look at these poor gillyvors, Mother. They’ve been dry for days.  Doesn’t it make you think of Cardinal Woolsey in the play, I forget which one, saying,  

This is the state of man: today he puts forth 

The tender leaves of hopes, tomorrow blossoms; 

The third day comes a frost, a killing frost. 

“There is no frost in Hong Kong, Felicity,” Jessica told her daughter.  But Felicity had been right. Like those fireworks, like those twigs, everything seemed to disappear, there it was, one moment, vivid and crisp, and the next left you blinking because nothing was there at all besides traces of smoke and a few falling sparks. As a girl, Jessica thought there would be rules to life. 

She was not sure what they were, but suspected that various adults other than her father knew them but for some reason had simply decided not to pass them on in any way that made sense to her. The world was organized in some places, but there were a thousand places where it wasn’t. The parade that came grinding by was organized. It had rules. It was factory-made, probably somewhere in southern China. Jessica watched without interest as a corps of men in band uniforms beating cymbals passed by. A wall of girls, walking in stiff unison, with pale lemon flowers pinned just under their shoulders, followed by boys dressed as cowboys in chaps. Rows of men in black satin pajamas embroidered with Chinese characters. A large tank filled with tiny diaphanous fish. The air was heavy with flowers, so many different kinds that they gave the parade a thick funeral sweetness. A contingent came by carrying small boxes, an offering perhaps, but to Jessica they seemed to be bearing the ashes of the British Empire. The boxes were enameled, that cheap Chinese kind, not the perdurable cloisonné of her reliquary at home. The parade was a cheap funeral in bad taste. At its end there were armored cars, coming from the Chinese garrison stationed discreetly in Mong Kok. It was just below Lion Rock, near a hill scattered with those ancestral tombs. The road did not seem wide enough for all of them. The dead always took up so much space in Hong Kong. There was simply no room for them. They had to go into the cemeteries every few years and clear them out to make room for the newly dead. She wondered where they dumped them all. Felicity would be spared this. She would lie near Judy Royce-Chapman on a Sussex down.  

She talked to Edward just that morning before they left. He asked, “Do you want to go back to England after the Handover?”  “We’re here because of you, Edward.” 

“No, we’re here because of you.” Adding, “Ultimately, because of what your father did to you.” 

Jessica did not contest the statement. 

“But can we stay here?” she pressed him. 

“I am willing to see it through.”  

She did not know what the it was, but Edward was not the kind of man to ask. He would not ask anything, and so would never know how, finding her, she backed out of the room, took an embroidered pillow from the couch in the hallway and stabbed it with scissors until the down fell out in clumps. He would never know, too, how carefully she cleaned it up afterwards; how she vacuumed; how she washed her hands and dried them. She had a sudden ache thinking of all the years ahead of her with Edward. An empty future life, with two young Sindens left, the least of them, she was afraid.  

Then the parade was over. The two young Sindens she turned over to Elaine, with instructions to take them to Stanley for the night. She and her husband then quietly slipped away into the crowd. They seemed to follow it wherever it led, through Victoria Park, past shops, cafés, and cinemas, bright and buoyant though nearly empty because everyone had taken to  the streets. Jessica found herself walking down Great Jones Street, where a long capering dragon still took up most of the street, a dragon that was all spine, its crooked meninges propped up by sticks—so like her own back, held together with staples and pins! She had no idea where she was walking to.  She was glad for the commotion and the litter and the bland streetlights, each with its beige corona. She made her way on Lockhart Road through some red and white confetti, stooping to put a handful in her pocket. She passed a man dragging home a large portrait of Sun Yat-Sen, and some teenagers from a marching band carrying scuffed white tubas that seemed bigger than they were. A few women followed in long dresses of dull blue silk. Elaine Kwan gave one of these to Poppy for her eleventh birthday, but Poppy never wore it because she said the emblem on the back reminded her of the watermark on her mother’s  stationary, a cursive JBS where all the serifs wound together into a knot.  It was just like Poppy to complain until Jessica went into the closet and gave her a smock which belonged to Felicity. Poppy took such comfort in wearing her older sister’s clothes, though when Felicity was home from  Oxford, she would have none of it. Felicity had been away at Jesus two years, which Poppy considered to be an awfully long time. 

Her husband followed her at a respectful distance. He would leave her alone until they reached the car, though it was in the opposite direction.  There was no one to help her. His wife was impossibly alone. She was moving stiffly, holding her shoulders back, shaking her head slowly, saying something to herself. When they got home he would call the police. She said to tell them that the way she arranged her was the way they found her. Felicity’s sweater she had buried. The rope was hidden.  Her note was still in her pocket.  

Mother, I feel so alone.