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‘This is the boss, Ah Yik,’ he said. ‘Ah Yik, this is Mrs Pendleton.’
‘So wet,’ the little woman cried. ‘Big rain.’
‘Yes,’ Will said. ‘Big, big rain.’ Then he spoke to her rapidly in Cantonese.
‘Tea for Missee?’ Ah Yik said.
‘Yes, thank you,’ he said.
The amah went into the kitchen.
They looked at each other, uncomfortable in their wet and rapidly cooling clothes.
‘You are proficient in the local language,’ she said, more as a statement than a question.
‘I’ve been here more than a decade,’ he said. ‘It would be a real embarrassment if I couldn’t meet them halfway by now, don’t you think?’ He took a tea towel off a hook and rubbed his head. ‘I imagine you’d like to dry off,’ he said.
‘Yes, please.’
She sat down as he left the room. There was something strange about the room, which she couldn’t place until she realized there was absolutely nothing decorative in the entire place. There were no paintings, no vases, no bric-a-brac. It was austere to the point of monkishness.
Will came back with a towel and a simple pink cotton dress. ‘Is this appropriate?’ he asked. ‘I’ve a few other things.’
‘I don’t need to change,’ she said. ‘I’ll just dry off and be on my way.’
‘Oh, I think you should change,’ he said. ‘You’ll be uncomfortable otherwise.’
‘No, it’s quite all right.’
He started to leave the room.
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Where should I …’
‘Oh, anywhere,’ he said. ‘Anywhere you won’t scandalize the boss, that is.’
‘Of course.’ She took the dress from him. ‘It looks about the right size.’
‘And there’s a phone out here if you want to ring your husband and let him know where you are,’ he said.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Martin’s in Shanghai, actually.’ And she went into the bathroom.
It was small but clean, with a frosted-glass window high above the lavatory. It was the wavy, pebbled kind, with chicken wire running through it. Next to that, a small fan was set into the wall with a string attached. It was humid, with the rain splattering outside, and the musty feel of a bathroom that hadn’t got quite aired out enough after baths. Next to the bath, there was a low wooden stool with a steel basin on top. Claire leaned forward into the mirror. Her hair was messy, the fine blonde strands awry, and her face was flushed, still, with the exertion of climbing up the hill. She looked surprisingly alive, her lips red and plump, her skin glowing with the moisture. She undressed, dropping her soaked blouse to the floor, which sloped to a drain in the middle. She towelled herself and pulled the dress over her hips. It was snug, but manageable. Why did Will have a dress lying around? It was very good quality, with perfectly finished seams and careful needlework. She went out to where he was sipping from a Thermos of tea.
‘Fits you well,’ he said neutrally.
‘Yes, thank you very much.’
All of a sudden, Claire couldn’t bear it. She couldn’t bear this man with his odd pauses and his slightly mocking tone.
‘Something to eat, perhaps?’ he said. ‘Ah Yik makes a very good bowl of fried rice.’
‘I think I’d better leave,’ she said.
‘Oh,’ he said, taken aback. She took satisfaction from his surprise, as if she had won something. ‘Of course, if you’d rather.’
She got up and left, putting her shoes on at the door while Will stayed in the living room. When she turned to say goodbye, she saw he was reading a book. This infuriated her. ‘Well, goodbye, then,’ she said. ‘I’ll have my amah return the dress. Thank you for your hospitality.’
‘Goodbye,’ he said. He didn’t look up.
That night, after dinner, she couldn’t relax. Her insides seemed too large for her outside, a queer sensation, as if all that she was feeling couldn’t be contained inside her body. As Martin was still away she put on her street clothes and got on the bus to town, bumping over the roads, elbow out of the window, open to the warm night air. She disembarked in Wanchai, where there seemed to be the most activity. She wanted to be among people, not alone. The wet market was still open, Chinese people buying their cabbages and fish, pork hanging from hooks, sometimes a whole pig’s head, red and bloody, dripping on to the street. This was the peculiarity of Hong Kong.
If she walked ten minutes towards Central, all would be civilized, large, quiet buildings in the European classical style, and wide, empty streets, yet here the frenetic activity, narrow alleys and smoky stalls were another world. All around her, people called to each other loudly, advertising their wares, a smudge-faced child playing in the street with a dirty bucket. A pregnant woman carrying vegetables under her arm jostled her and apologized, her movements heavy and clumsy. Claire stared after her, wondering how it felt to have a child inside you, moving around. A young couple, arms linked, sat down at a noodle stand and broke out loudly in laughter.
Next to her, a wizened elderly lady tugged at Claire’s arm. Dressed in the grey cotton tunic and trousers that most of the local older women seemed to favour, she had a small basket of tangerines on her arm.
‘You buy,’ she said. She smelled like the white flower ointment the locals used to fend off everything from the common cold to cholera. One of her teeth was grey and chipped, the others antique yellow. The woman’s brown face was a spider web of deeply etched lines.
‘No, thank you,’ said Claire. Her voice rang out like a bell. It seemed that its sound stilled the bustle around her for a moment.
The woman grew more insistent.
‘You buy! Very good. Fresh today.’ She pulled at Claire’s arm again. Then she reached up and touched Claire’s hair like a talisman. The local Chinese did that sometimes, and while it had been frightening the first time, Claire was used to it now.
‘Good fortune,’ said the old woman. ‘Golden.’
‘Thank you,’ said Claire.
‘You buy!’ the woman repeated.
‘I’m not looking for anything today, but thank you very much.’ The hum around her resumed. Claire continued walking. The old woman followed her for a few yards, then shambled off to find more promising customers.
Why not buy a tangerine from an old lady? Claire thought suddenly. Why not? What would happen? She couldn’t think why she had declined, as if her old English self, with its defences and prejudices, was dissolving in the foetid environment around her.
She turned, but the woman had already disappeared. She breathed deeply. The smells of the wet market entered her, intense and earthy. Around her, Hong Kong thrummed.
And then, suddenly, he was everywhere. She saw Will Truesdale waiting for the bus, at Kayamally’s, queuing outside the cinema. And though he never saw her, she always lowered her head, willing him not to notice. And then she’d glance up, to see if he had. He had a way of seeming completely contained within himself, even when he was in a crowd. He never looked around, never tapped his feet, never looked at his watch. It seemed he never saw her.
When she went for Locket’s lesson on Thursdays, she found herself looking for Will Truesdale. She heard the amahs laughing at his jokes in the kitchen, and she saw his jacket hanging in the hall, but his physical presence was elusive, as if he slipped in and out, avoiding her. She lingered at the end of her lesson, but she never saw him or the car.
Then they were at the beach the next weekend. She hardly knew how it had happened. She had come home. The phone rang. She picked it up.
‘I’ve a friend with one of those municipal beach huts,’ he said. ‘Would you like to go bathing?’ As if nothing had happened. As if she would know who it was by his voice.
‘Bathing,’ she said. ‘Where?’
‘On Big Wave Bay,’ he said. ‘It’s a perk for the locals but they don’t mind if we sign up as well. It’s a lottery system and you get a cottage for the season. A group of us usually get together to do it and swap weekends. It’s quite nice.’
She shut her eyes and saw him: Will, the difficult man, with his thin shoulders and grey eyes, his dark hair that fell untidily into his eyes, a man who stared at her so intently she felt quite transparent, a man who had just asked her to go bathing with him, unaccompanied. And she opened her eyes and said, yes, she would join him at the beach that Sunday.
Martin was away for three weeks and he had telegraphed from Shanghai to let her know he would be delayed for some time. He was on a tour of major Chinese cities to inspect their water facilities, which he expected to be very primitive.
And so, it was water. She wondered why she hadn’t thought of it before. How it rendered everything changed. She was a different woman in a different sphere. And Will! The way he plunged in, without a thought, his limp gone, dissolved into the current. He was a fish, darting here and there, swimming out into the horizon, further than she would ever go.
They were the only Europeans at the beach. The water was still warm from the summer, the air just starting to crisp. The hut was a simple structure with wooden cupboards and woven straw mats. The sand was fine, speckled with black, and small, withered leaves. Families picnicked around them, chattering loudly, small children scrambling messily about. He wanted to go out to the floating diving docks, some two hundred yards out. When she said she couldn’t, that it was too far, he said of course she could, and so she did. Out there, they climbed on to the rocking circle and sunned themselves like seals. He lay in the sun, eyes closed, as she watched surreptitiously, his ribs jutting out, his body pocked with unnamed scars of unknown origin. He wore short cotton trousers that were heavy with water. He wasn’t the type to wear a bathing suit.
It was hot, hot. The sun hid behind clouds for brief moments, then blazed out again. There was no cover. She wished for a cold drink, a tree for shade, both of which seemed impossibly far away on the shore.
‘We should have swum out with a Thermos of water,’ she said.
‘Next time,’ he said, eyes still shut.
‘Tell me your story,’ she said, after allowing herself a minute to digest what that meant. She was still vibrating with the strangeness of the situation – that she was at the beach with a man, intentions unknown.
‘I was born in Tasmania, of Scottish stock,’ he said mockingly, as if he were starting an autobiography. He sat up and crossed his legs as if he were a swami.
‘Why?’ she said.
‘My father was a missionary and we lived everywhere,’ he said. ‘I’ve only been to England once, and loathed it. My mother was a bit of a Bohemian and she had some money from her family so we were set in that way.’
Hong Kong was full of people like Will, wandering global voyagers who had never been to Piccadilly Circus. Claire had been just once, and there had been an old man in tattered clothes who would shout, ‘Fornicators!’ at everyone who passed.
‘And how did you learn?’ she asked.
‘School, you mean? Taught at home – good basic education of the Bible and the classics.’ He held up his hands so that they blocked the sky. ‘It’s all you need, really, isn’t it?’ His voice was sarcastic. ‘Solid background for life.’
‘So how did you come to be a chauffeur?’
‘A couple I knew before the war, I used to live in their flat while they were abroad. They came back after, and found me this job with their cousins. I didn’t know what else to do. No interest in going back to an office. And I’ve very few skills,’ he said. ‘But I do know Hong Kong like the back of my hand.’
‘And how did you end up in Hong Kong?’
‘My parents were in Africa, and then in India. When they retired to England, I stayed on as an assistant manager at a tea plantation, then got tired of that after three years and was on a ship to a variety of places and ended up in Hong Kong. Just picked it out of a hat, really. I came here, like everyone else, not knowing anything, and sort of took it from there.’ He stopped. ‘Of course, that’s the story I tell all the ladies.’
She couldn’t tell whether he was joking or not. ‘Oh?’
They were still lying on the too-sunny floating dock, waves rocking them, sky an ethereal blue above.
‘How was India?’ Claire asked.
‘Very complicated.’
‘And Partition?’
‘After I left, of course. They needed us out. But undoubtedly a mess in the interior. Trains carrying tens of thousands of corpses back and forth. Humans capable of doing the worst to each other.’
Claire winced. ‘Why?’ She had never heard anyone talk about historic events in such a personal way.
‘Who knows?’
‘And life there before all that?’
‘Rather incredible. We’d carved out quite a world for ourselves, you know. Society’s rather limited, of course. Women – our women – were in short supply.’
‘You never married?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I never did.’
There was silence.
‘Is the inquisition over?’ he asked.
‘I haven’t decided,’ she said.
He hadn’t asked a single question about her life. They lay silently and let the sun beat down on them.
They went to eat, hot, salty chicken drumsticks from the Chinese vendor, who sold them bottles of juice as well. There were little stalls clustered around the small village where you could buy a woven mat to lay on the sand, a bathing-suit, a cold drink. Will watched her eat. A mangy dog ambled through the tables and chairs.
‘I can’t eat much,’ he said. ‘I’m all messed up inside from the war. I was a big chap before, if you can believe it.’
Her stomach leapt inside of her as he moved closer.
He took her hand, guided it to his mouth and took a small bite. His grip was firm and sandy. ‘It comes up again, sometimes,’ he said. ‘Like bile.’ He chewed slowly, grimaced.
After they ate, they walked back to the car. He leaned over to open the door for her. His limp was apparent. Human again. She turned to him, back against the door, and he pushed her shoulder back and kissed her, a fluid movement that seemed inevitable. She was encircled in his arms, his hands on the car. A physical kiss, one she felt intensely, his lips hard on hers – she felt as if she was drowning.
She told herself: This is Hong Kong. I am a woman, displaced. A woman a world away from who I am supposed to be.
He stood back and looked at her. He traced her profile with his finger. ‘Should we go?’ he asked.
‘Do you like me?’ she asked, on the car ride back, her hair full and thick from the sea salt. She didn’t know where they were going.
‘I haven’t decided yet,’ he said.
‘Be good to me,’ she said. It was a warning. She wanted to save herself.
‘Of course,’ he said, but there was no conviction in his voice.
After a few moments, he asked, ‘Do you think you’ll be teaching the girl for long?’
‘I haven’t any idea. She shows no enthusiasm but her parents seem keen that she learns to play.’
‘You like her, though?’
‘Well enough. I have no affinity with children.’ She said this automatically; it was something her mother had always told her.
‘You’re too young. You’re a child yourself,’ he said.
‘You like children?’
