Water Music

by Melanie Kershaw

Avocet Press $101

Out by Castle Peak Road there's an old colonial mansion, whitewashed with high ceilings and a grand central staircase. It's deserted and dilapidated now, but in the late 1960s it was the home of a British administrator who marvelled at his good fortune in being given such a large and impressive residence. His superiors must have thought highly of him, he reasoned. But when something seems too good to be true, it usually is, and the house turned out to have a dark secret.

During WWII it was used by Japanese troops to interrogate and torture prisoners. The war may have been long over, but the ghosts remained. The senior administrators did not want to live there. The local Chinese servants were terrified of the spirits and refused to work there, leaving his wife to take care of the house and their three children alone. The administrator didn't believe in ghosts, but his wife did, yet she wasn't afraid of them. She thought the spirits were friendly and believed they were looking after her.

True story? Perhaps not, but it could have been. It's against this background that Melanie Kershaw has set her first novel Water Music. The story is about a 23-year-old British woman, Fanny, who moves to Hong Kong with her husband. A few years later she runs away to the United States with another man, leaving her children behind. When we meet her at the beginning of the novel she's 52 and returning to Hong Kong to confront her past and the now-adult children.

Although the author lives in the US now, Kershaw still considers Hong Kong home. Her family moved here in 1960 when she was seven years old. Her father was a textile-machinery salesman, who travelled the Far East, and like the characters in her novel she lived in a gorgeous house with wide verandas on Castle Peak Road in the New Territories.