Fragrant Harbour by John Lanchester

a man and did not want to be seeming to get an early start. All three of my day’s companions were already seated at the table. The other seats filled up over the next quarter of an hour. Our waiter brought a tureen of soup and began ladling out portions. I had my headlowered to the bowl and was taking a mouthful when I heard the dining-room door swing open and knew without having to look up that there were the sisters, making their entry. I straightened from my dish. On the one hand, the Third Officer had clearly been lying about the two women being sisters, since one was European and the other Chinese. On the other hand, he had been telling the truth, because it was apparent from their grey habits that the two of them were missionary nuns.

Chapter three
    Their names were Sister Maria and Sister Benedicta. They were Catholic missionaries from the Order of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin. The order was founded in the early nineteenth century. It was based in France and had an emphasis on education in Asia and Africa.
    Sister Benedicta was the older of the two. She was a wiry Frenchwoman in her mid-forties, and was senior in the order’s hierarchy . I found her intimidating, not least because she was alarmingly frank and – this was something I later came to expect from Catholic missionaries, though it was a shock on this first encounter – interested in and well-informed about all worldly subjects. Her special area of interest was politics and her sympathies were always and provokingly on the side of the local peoples. She made no bones about seeing all us young men setting out Eastwards to make our fortunes as a type; by no means her favourite type, either. The only time I heard her implicitly admit some sympathy for a governing power was when she spoke about French Indo-China. If I hadn’t been so frightened of her I would have liked her very much.
    The Chinese nun was Sister Maria. She was my age, more or less, tough and delicate at the same time; quick-witted; not so much pretty as perfect, as small-boned Chinese women can be. It was much later that I heard her story. She came from an inland part of the province of Fukien, a wild backwater famous for producing pirates. Her parents died when she was young and she was sent to live with relatives in Canton. A branch of the family had converted to Catholicism; they took her up and sent her to missionary school, where she simultaneously discovered her vocation and a talent for languages.
    ‘It’s the gift of tongues,’ she told me. When she spoke of religious subjects her manner became heavy and serious, as if there were some increase in the level of gravity. Along with her lively side there was this pompous religious persona. She could switch between the two in a moment. I never got used to it.
    Maria joined the Order when she was eighteen, and went to work in a mission school in Hong Kong, where she learnt her fluent English, which in those days had a faint and rather lovely Chinese–French accent. At this time she also spoke French, Mandarin, Cantonese, as well as several different varieties of Fujianese and Chiu Chow. She never made a big fuss about this, it was just something she could do.
    ‘People are always more interested in what is impossible for them,’ she once said.
    The arrival of the two sisters at our table caused upheaval, though not in the way I had been expecting. The Jardines and Hong Kong Bank men – the other bachelors, if you exclude the absent Gunner – teased me about the nuns for a few days and then let the matter drop, referring to it only occasionally and affectionately in the past tense, like a favourite practical joke that somebody had played at school. (‘That was a good one,’ I said to the smirking Scottish Third Officer the next time I saw him.) They dealt with the nuns surprisingly easily, notwithstanding Sister Benedicta’s obvious scepticism about the promising young Englishman as a genre. I suppose they had