Fragrant Harbour by John Lanchester Page A

as exotic as Timbuktu.
    I had inherited a globe from my father, faded and brown but beautifully detailed in the drawing. It was tilted slightly, like a man angling his head. I would spin it for hours, telling myself stories about all the places on the map. Sometimes I just recited the names. Khartoum. Vladivostok. San José. Chile. Tasmania. But the place that really caught my imagination was China. I used to like even the sound of the word.
    When I could take the time away from work, I would go up to the coast and look out over the Thames estuary from Whitstable or Sheppey. David liked to go south to the sandy beaches, I liked to go north to the wildness and big views. I loved the coming and going of boats, especially the Thames barges, which seemed so sturdy and low-slung, so romantic in the matter-of-fact, practical way they set out to sea. I loved the huge skies over the estuary, the flatness and sense of space. It made me feel small and safe, and it made me want to leave.
    My grandmother, who had never been outside Kent – had never been to London, forty miles away – understood this with no difficulty.
    ‘It’s all the world out there, all the things you might be able to see. You don’t want to be in one place forever.’
    ‘Nothing wrong with Faversham,’ David would say if he was listening. ‘There are cannibals in Africa. Boil you up in a big pot.’
    I began saving money. Once we were eighteen, David and I drew allowances from the inn’s profits. Not much but enough for pocket money and small treats. I didn’t spend any of it. Then one day Mr Morris came with a more serious expression than usual. He said he was going away and that this was the last we would see of him for some time. I was drying glasses behind the bar and I asked him where he was going.
    ‘Hong Kong. It’s part of China.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Work. Been offered a job.’ He thought for a while and added:
    ‘The map is red. If you’re British you can go anywhere in the world.’
    *
    When I turned twenty-one I did a deal with David. We owned a third of the Plough each. Our grandmother owned the other share. David would give me half of my share’s worth in cash as soon as he could raise it. He would send me my sixth of the profits once a year until he raised the money to buy me out at whatever my sixth of the pub was then worth.
    ‘Gran won’t like it,’ he said. We were sitting on the orchard wall about a mile from the pub. David swung his short legs.
    ‘Ah, she won’t mind really,’ I said.
    I thought my proposal was brilliant. The idea was to use David’s cash plus the money I had saved to fund my own departure abroad. There was a grave flaw in the plan, however: it made me dependent on my brother’s ability to save money. When it came to anything financial, David was all holes and no colander. I spent most of the next year close to going mad with frustration every time he left for the races or came home with a new shirt or dreamed aloud about buying a car. I forced myself not to say anything . Instead I fumed and planned. I split up with Monica Potts, the girl I was seeing, because I thought it would be cruel to drag things out until the moment of my departure, and then spent months watching her step out with another man, Eric Perks, whose father owned Faversham’s first garage. I bought a suitcase and practised packing everything I owned into it. I studied expressions in the mirror – what I thought of as travellers’ expressions :amused, calm, detached, experienced, enigmatic. I longed to be gone and burned with frustration as I stood behind the pub counter. It was a year-long sulk.
    On my twenty-second birthday, in the summer of 1935, I decided that I couldn’t bear it any more. I asked David if we could go for a walk. We went back to the orchard and hopped up on the crumbling wall.
    ‘Look, David,’ I said. He was staring at me as if trying to control an outburst of temper while he rummaged in his jacket pocket for his