Typhoon. Charles Cumming
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‘Anything. Tell me about the people you work with. Tell me what Joe Lennox does when he gets up in the morning.’
He was aware that the questions formed part of an ongoing interview. Should I share my life with you? Do you deserve my future? Not once in the two days they had spent together had the subject of the distance that would soon separate them been broached with any seriousness. Yet Joe felt that he had a chance of winning Isabella round, of persuading her to leave London and of joining him in Hong Kong. It was fantasy, of course, not much more than a pipe dream, but something in her eyes persuaded him to pursue it. He did not want what they had shared to be thrown away on account of geography.
So he would paint a picture of life in Hong Kong that was vivid and enticing. He would lure her to the East. But how to do so without resorting to the truth? It occurred to him that if he told Isabella that he was a spy, the game would probably be over. Chances were she would join him on the next flight out to Kowloon. What girl could resist? But honesty for the NOC was not an option. He had to improvise, he had to work around the lie.
‘What do I do in the morning?’ he said. ‘I drink strong black coffee, say three Hail Marys and listen to the World Service.’
‘I’d noticed,’ she said. ‘Then what?’
‘Then I go to work.’
‘And what does that involve?’ Isabella had long, dark hair and it curled across her face as she spoke. ‘Do you have your own office? Do you work down at the docks? Are there secretaries there who lust after you, the quiet, mysterious Englishman?’
Joe thought about Judy Heppner and smiled. ‘No, there’s just me and Ted and Ted’s wife, Judy. We’re based in a small office in Central. If I was to tell you the whole story you’d probably disintegrate with boredom.’
‘Are you bored by it?’
‘No, but I definitely see it as a stepping stone. If I play my cards right there’ll be jobs that I can apply for at Swire’s or Jardine Matheson in a year or six months, something with a bit more responsibility, something with better pay. After university, I just wanted to get the hell out of London. Hong Kong seemed to fit the bill.’
‘So you like it out there?’
‘I love it out there.’ Now he had to sell it. ‘I’ve only been away a few months but already it feels like home. I’ve always been fascinated by the crowds and the noise and the smells of Asia, the chaos just round the corner. It’s so different to what I’ve grown up with, so liberating. I love the fact that when I leave my apartment building I’m walking out into a completely alien environment, a stranger in a strange land. Hong Kong is a British colony, has been for over ninety years, but in a strange way you feel we have no place there, no role to play.’ If David Waterfield could hear this, he’d have a heart attack. ‘Every face, every street sign, every dog and chicken and child scurrying in the back streets is Chinese. What were the British doing there all that time?’
‘More,’ Isabella whispered, looking at him over her glass with a gaze that almost drowned him. ‘Tell me more.’
He stole one of her cigarettes. ‘Well, at night, on a whim, you can board the ferry at Shun Tak and be playing blackjack at the Lisboa Casino in Macau within a couple of hours. At weekends you can go clubbing in Lan Kwai Fong or head out to Happy Valley and eat fish and chips in the Members Enclosure and lose your week’s salary on a horse you never heard of. And the food is incredible, absolutely incredible. Dim sum, char siu restaurants, the freshest sushi outside of Japan, amazing curries, outdoor restaurants on Lamma Island where you point at a fish in a tank and ten minutes later it’s lying grilled on a plate in front of you.’
He knew that he was winning her over. In some ways it was too easy. Isabella worked all week in an art gallery on Albemarle Street, an intelligent, overqualified woman sitting behind a desk eight hours a day reading Tolstoy and Jilly Cooper, waiting to work her charms on the one Lebanese construction billionaire who just happened to walk in off the street to blow fifty grand on an abstract oil. It wasn’t exactly an exciting way of spending her time. What did she have to lose by moving halfway round the world to live with a man she barely knew?
She took out a cigarette of her own and cupped Joe’s hand as he lit it. ‘It sounds incredible,’ she said, but suddenly her face seemed to contract. Joe saw the shadow of bad news colour her eyes and felt as if it was all about to slip away. ‘There’s something I should have told you.’
Of course. This was too much of a good thing for it to end any other way. You meet a beautiful woman at a wedding, you find out she’s terminally ill, married, or moving to Istanbul. The wine and the rich food swelled up inside him and he was surprised by how anxious he felt, how betrayed. What are you going to tell me? What’s your secret?
‘I have a boyfriend.’
It should have been the hammer blow, the deal-closer, and Isabella was instantly searching Joe’s face for a reaction. Somehow she managed to assemble an expression that was both obstinate and ashamed at the same time. But he found that he was not as surprised as he might have been, discovering a response to her confession which was as smart and effective as anything he might have mustered in his counter-life as a spy.
‘You don’t any more.’
And that sealed it. A stream of smoke emerged from Isabella’s lips like a last breath and she smiled with the pleasure of his reply. It had conviction. It had style. Right now that was all she was looking for.
‘It’s not that simple,’ she said. But of course it was. It was simply a question of breaking another man’s heart. ‘We’ve been together for two years. It’s not something I can just throw away. He needs me. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about him before.’
‘That’s OK,’ Joe said. I have lied to you, so it’s only fair that you should have lied to me. ‘What’s his name?’
‘Anthony.’
‘Is he married?’
This was just a shot in the dark, but by coincidence he had stumbled on the truth. Isabella looked amazed.
‘How did you know?’
‘Instinct,’ he said.
‘Yes, he is married. Or was.’ Involuntarily she touched her face, covering her mouth as if ashamed by the role she had played in this. ‘He’s separated now. With two teenage children…’
‘… who hate you.’
She laughed. ‘Who hate me.’
In the wake of this, a look passed between them which told Joe everything that he needed to know. So much of life happens in the space between words. She will leave London, he thought. She’s going to follow me to the East. He ran his fingers across Isabella’s wrists and she closed her eyes.
That night, drunk and wrapped in each other’s bodies in the Christmas chill of Kentish Town, she whispered: ‘I want to be with you, Joe. I want to come with you to Hong Kong,’ and it was all he could do to say, ‘Then be with me, then come with me,’ before the gift of her skin silenced him. Then he thought of Anthony and imagined what she would say to him, how things would end between them, and Joe was surprised because he felt pity for a man he had never known. Perhaps he realized, even then, that to lose a woman like Isabella Aubert, to be cast aside by her, would be something from which a man might never recover.
The House of a Thousand Arseholes
Waterfield wasn’t happy about it.
Closing the door of his office, eight floors above Joe’s in Jardine House, he turned to Kenneth Lenan and began