Fragrant Harbour by John Lanchester

above.
    ‘It all seems a bit much. I’m not sure. I liked being a journalist. Part of me has misgivings about, well, going over to the other side.’
    At that he just smiled and looked away from me, at the view of Hong Kong as we came around Lamma. Aberdeen was in front of us, its harbour as packed and frenetic as ever, as if the boats had hurtled in helter-skelter to avoid some large disaster.
    ‘There was a waterfall over there,’ he said, pointing off to one side of the Peak. ‘It’s what brought the British here in the first place. They came here for fresh drinking water for naval ships. The harbour on the other side was a bonus. Everything afterwards was a bonus.’
    He smiled again and put the bottle, which he hadn’t yet opened, back on the table. He stared hard at me as if to show me that he knew something I would never know, and then he took me by the hand and led me downstairs.

Chapter One
    My parents ran a pub near Faversham in Kent. The Plough had already been in the Stewart family for two generations before my father came to inherit it. This was a mixed blessing, because he was a bookish and private man who wasn’t suited to being landlord of a busy inn. At least that’s what his mother, my grandmother , told me. I have almost no memories of him. I was born in 1913, when he was twenty-eight and my mother twenty-three. He spent the years 1916 to 1918 serving in the Kent Foresters, where his weak lungs kept him from the front. During these years my grandmother looked after me, my sister Kate, and my brother David, while my mother ran the Plough. I remember late Sunday evenings when we would go out on walks with her through hop fields which in my memory are huge and gold and fragrant. I remember the ‘Welcome Home’ sign that my mother hung over the doorway, just after my fifth birthday. Someone gave me a mouthful of bitter, which I swallowed despite my shock at its nasty, acrid, adult taste. I thought it was revolting. I felt sick and dizzy and over-excited.
    Publicans often catch things from their customers. Nine months after my father came home from the war, he and my mother and sister were dead of influenza. David was the only member of the family not to be affected. He always was a little bruiser. I was the first in the family to come down with the illness, and went in and out of a fever for ten days before recovering. There used to be a photo, one and only one, of all six of us, my father looking peaky and nervous, my mother looking cheerful, and all three children in various states of bored distraction, all in our holiday finery for the 1919 camera. My grandmother looked like a clever pixie. She used to seem so old in that picture; a quarter of a century younger than I am now.
    After that my grandmother ran the pub, as she had done when her husband was alive, and looked after me and David. Luckily, business was so good that she could hire help, and from the ageof about ten, David and I would do our bit too. David liked to boast about his ‘barrel-rolling muscles’ and never got into a fight that he didn’t win. I was better at stocktaking and doing the books. The regulars liked us and used to tease us about being so different. We had the two basic ways of working behind a bar divided between us: I was the listener, he was the talker.
    One steady source of trade at the Plough was people heading to and from the Channel ports. My grandmother used to joke that people should make the most of their last chance to enjoy good English beer. Perhaps my desire to travel was something I was born with; but this steady stream of people leaving on business or pleasure or escape helped the idea to grow in me. I loved hearing stories about foreign places and would fasten on regular customers who broke their journey with us. One man called Mr Morris, a commercial traveller who often went to Paris, used to tell stories of the French who ate frogs and snails and blood pie and entrail sausage. He made Calais sound