Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1999

Copyright © Simon Barnes 1999

The Simon Barnes asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The extract from the poem ‘Two Laments’ is reprinted from Chinese Poems translated by Arthur Waley (Unwin Paperbacks, 1989, p. 30), courtesy of the Arthur Waley Estate.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or here in after invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780006511953

Ebook Edition © OCTOBER 2016 ISBN: 9780007483242

Version: 2016-10-04

Dedication

For Al and Les, with thanks, and for CLW, with eternal gratitude (again)

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

PART I

CHRISTMAS

PART II

SPRING

PART III

SUMMER

PART IV

AUTUMN

PART V

CHRISTMAS AGAIN

Keep Reading

About the Author

About the Publisher

PART I

The past is another country: an aggressive, imperial power seeking constantly to invade and overwhelm the peace-loving present. Death is part of its nuclear arsenal, the midnight telephone a favourite tactic.

And so they were launched across space and through time, worries about the present – their daughters’ ability to cope with a stay at their neighbours’, the animals that were their livelihood – meeting in pitched battle with the unresolvable anxieties of the past.

Alan Fairs looked at his wife, marooned in a troubled doze at the window seat, about her neck the thin gold chain he had given her yesterday: her Christmas present, a Christmas not untouched by the shadow. He thought of the dolphin she had given him: carved on bone by an Eskimo, she said, a handsome little thing. She always gave him a dolphin, a tribute to the Christmas Day when they had met, a day not without its shadow.

He had twenty of these dolphins now, for she had marked their initial meeting with the first of these serial gifts. And now flying back: back in time, back to their meeting place, back to Hong Kong, back to Tung Lung, back to the past and its various moments of horror and shame: naked women; projectile vomiting; death by water – suddenly he found himself laughing silently. Laughing as the aeroplane grumbled on north and west to their destination, laughing at naked women and projectile vomiting, laughing at his own shame, laughing at Charles, who, wiping tears from his eyes, tears of laughter and agony, had said to him: ‘Sweet Jesus, what an indescribably sordid scene.’

Madness.

He saw without willing it, and with quite extraordinary clarity, the body of Karen Song. Sitting on his, or in fact his wife’s, cushions, drinking tea, both of them quite naked. He saw her reach for the tea, jasmine tea she had made herself, for he, also naked, was quite unable to do so. It was her voice that he had heard on the midnight telephone, half-cockney and wholly Chinese. Karen Song as was: Karen James now, of course, Karen James for nearly twenty years. He had never told James of their naked night: had never dared. The shame was too great.

The telephone had splintered the silence. That had once been a favourite phrase of Alan’s, for it was what James Bond’s telephone did when M needed him. And for once it was more or less appropriate: the silent night shattered by the insistent bell. And by about the fifteenth ring, Alan had made it across the warmth of the Christmas night, a sarong tied about his waist. He held the receiver like a weapon. But it was not M, with a summons to take on Smersh and Spectre: it was Karen Song, a call to take on an enemy more fearful than either. Sorry to wake you, she said. Got the time difference muddled, thought it worked the other way for New Zealand. That’s all right, Karen, good to hear your voice again. And sorry, Alan, but I’ve got bad news to bring you …

And, thirty-six hours later, he and his wife were roaring towards the jaws of the past.

‘How did he die?’ she asked as he held her, her face, lit only by the night from the open window, looking almost as it did that Christmas twenty years previously. In tears then, too, of course.

‘More or less of a slight chill,’ Alan said, ‘from what Karen told me. He’d not been well for a few weeks, but nothing serious. That’s how it seemed, anyway. Series of colds and flu and coughs. Just took to his bed, she said. And sort of faded away.’

‘He died of a broken heart,’ she said. ‘I always wondered how Dad was going to cope with 1997. Now I know.’

She had discussed the matter, a trifle obsessively, over the course of Christmas Day and Boxing Day, as people with a sudden grief must. She talked of 1997, and how Hong Kong’s return to Chinese hands was the final invalidation of the dead man’s troubled life. Alan had objected that the handover did not take place for another six months, but she said that it had clearly been impossible for him to live into a calendar year that bore that ominous number: 1997: it was the rejection of himself by the people he had called his people.

Noble savages! Alan remembered the dead man’s orations on the subject, and the trouble the phrase had once made for him. My people are noble savages, Alan. And then he had given Alan the keys to a new life, a new freedom, and one he had never thought to end, settling into his Chinese village, an aggressive imperial power himself, and embarked on a course of delighted folly which he believed no 1997 could ever end.

‘What did you do out there?’

A question his neighbour Brett had asked him. They had gone to Brett’s for Christmas lunch, the usual barbie beside the pool. Alan, who never minded an excuse not to drink, had offered to be the abstemious one and to bring the horses in that evening, while his family stayed on. Brett, neighbourly and perhaps wanting a break from his own party, had driven him the few minutes between their next-door places. He watched Alan’s calm, quiet handling of the beasts. Afterwards, he had accepted a beer, and listened to Alan’s tale of sudden death and his wife’s need to return to Hong Kong for the funeral.

‘Are you going?’

‘Wish I could. Can’t afford the fare.’

Brett snapped his fingers, a normally irritating habit of his. ‘Tell you what. I wanted to do a Hong Kong piece in the paper, 1997 and all that. Why don’t you go out there and write it? Can’t afford expenses, but I’ll pay for the piece, and that should cover most of your costs.’

Brett was editor of the local daily newspaper; Alan did two days a week chief-subbing the Sunday edition. It was an unusual arrangement that allowed Alan to spend most of his time with the horses.

‘That’s a kind thought, Brett.’

‘What did you do out there?’

‘Now you’ve got me.’ But he talked a little about it: the year of madness, the island of folly.

‘Don’t you miss it? The thrill of the mysterious East and all that?’

Alan gestured to the extensive fields, the line of horses, heads nodding over the doors. ‘Try meeting the payments on this lot,’ he said. ‘That can get pretty thrilling.’

‘I thought it was a pretty good living you made.’

‘Nope. Not really much of a livelihood. Not a bad life, though.’

Brett, not being English, took a moment to realise that this was understatement. ‘Yeah, I see. Your own spread.’

‘Our own island.’

Hardly drunk at all, Alan Fairs raised his glass to wish a happy Christmas to the junk that was puttering gently into the harbour. ‘Happy Christmas, junk,’ he said softly, glorying in his solitude.

The junk bore no batwing sail, but that would have been too self-righteously picturesque. It was enough that the boat was shaped like a Spanish galleon, and that it swung its high square backside away from him. It was enough that the island of Tung Lung rose up behind it: its high and pointy hills. Until today, Alan had assumed that such hills were a graphic convention, a precious affectation of the painters of Chinese scrolls. Now he could see that it was a question of pedantic accuracy.

‘I am sitting here, drinking beer in a Chinese scroll,’ he said to himself. He drank a little more, for the glory of the thought.

He had journeyed here from the island of madness, or Hong Kong. In less than an hour he had passed from the great harbour and its endless castles of glass, to this other place, this toy harbour, its jolly bouncing boats and steep little hills crammed with elven dwellings.

He had resolved to turn down all Christmas invitations in search of a proud self-sufficiency. In the event, no invitations had come, but this had ceased to cast a shadow over his day. He had lunched, beerily, alone and in perfectly Chinese splendour, at a restaurant on the far side of the island of Tung Lung. He had handled both chopsticks and the occasion with some élan, he thought. Afterwards, he had walked, somewhat dizzily, over the spine of the island, up the pointy hills and down the other side, until he had reached the island’s second village. Here, he would soon be catching a ferry home – home! – to the island of madness, and his rather hateful flat in the Mid-Levels.

But he was in no hurry to make this retreat, for here on Tung Lung he felt like a conqueror. A red and white butterfly, the size of a bat, flapped about by his feet before dipping down to where the Christmas bounty of flowers bloomed out of sight. At a table beside him two young Chinese men played cards with cries of triumph and dismay, unmoved by the exoticism of their home. One man, grey-haired – unusual in the Chinese who dye their hair an iridescent black at the first hint of time’s passage – sat in regal dignity, served Coca-Cola by the fat proprietor with understated deference. A scent of dead and dying fish was wafted towards them in little spurts, on occasional gusts of wind.

Alan turned his attention to the boats in the little harbour. The junk had moored at the small jetty on the far side, half a dozen more motor-junks were tied up together in the middle beside a cluster of portly sampans, on one of which a man in a black shirt worked with absorption. And alongside that, a strange craft, apparently two plastic canoes linked by a trampoline, the whole thing an offensive shade of yellow. Alan speculated on an unseaworthy experiment, lashed together by some eccentric, dashing Chinese youth from the village. Yet again he sipped, savouring warm air, chill beer, the little harbour, his glorious Christmas self-sufficiency: above all the sense of distance from Hong Kong. By making this brief journey to this outlying island, he felt he had achieved some kind of tenuous control. He placed his left ankle on his right knee, a very subtle form of self-celebration. It was the James Bond Position: Bond had once been photographed thus, in ‘the sort of position only an Englishman would adopt’. Alan, on a dangerous mission overseas, was in control and, unshaken, was drinking San Miguel beer.

Smirking a little at this fancy, he became aware of a steady procession taking place behind him. He turned in his chair, looking back to the café from which he had bought his beer. Between him and the tubby young giant of a proprietor, who was lounging against the wall of his establishment, a tidal flow of people moved with single-minded determination along the larger jetty. Alan inspected them with fascination: island-dwellers moving out to Hong Kong for the evening; Hong Kongers returning home after a too-brief day of exile. Many seemed young, schoolchildren, most of them clutching ferocious double-pointed spears three feet in length. Alan pondered their use without coming to any firm conclusion: perhaps Hong Kongers carried them as protection against the wild Tung Lung natives. Among these returning exiles, little motorised carts buzzed about dangerously, trolleys powered by loud Rotavator engines, guided with languid gestures by the young men who clasped the long, elegant handlebars with the pomp of Hell’s Angels. The people shoved hard, but without active malice.

A dismal hoot sounded from across the waters, and Alan turned to see the ferry approaching: dingy; white; two-storeyed. It bore on its funnel the letters HYF, for Hong Kong and Yaumatei Ferry Company. This, according to his plans, was the boat that was to take him home, returning exile himself. He watched with disfavour as the boat came to a halt by the simple means of ramming the jetty wholeheartedly. It then performed a series of infinitely fussy forward and backward movements, with snarling engine and repeated distant blasts of the whistle. It took an astonishing length of time. Then all at once the tide turned: the incoming wash of islanders returning home. Home: again the word pricked at Alan’s heart.

He watched a stream of girls, dazzling nymphs all. Stragglers pushed their way undazzled against the flow. Others, family parties in their finery, walked cheerily, noisily back onto their island. They had, Alan guessed, been spending the day holidaying, shopping, eating in Hong Kong, for in Hong Kong nothing closed, ever, not for Christmas nor for anything else. Alan raised his glass, intending to drain it in a final brave swallow, to run to the ferry, last one aboard, just as the gangplank was pulled away. But with the swallow half done, he lowered his glass. A weak defiance had seized him. Thus do our lives change for ever.

The ferry hooted once more, reproachfully, and began its effortful journey back to the island of madness. Leaving Alan on the island of Tung Lung. It was warm, and anyway he had on the back of his chair his bad jacket, an unfortunate purchase in purple tweed. And he had money, money enough for another beer, at any rate. He would watch the sun go down from this scrap of a café, from this table on the edge of the toy harbour, watch the sun go down behind his Chinese scroll.

It was then that the impossible happened. Ambling, strolling at his ease, in marked contrast to the babbling crowds that had preceded him, not so much a stroller as a flâneur, tall – an inch or two over six foot – clad in a suit of unnatural perfection but worn with a studied insouciance, a gweilo. A round-eye, a European, a foreign devil, and anyway, quite clearly an Englishman. There was a slim attaché case in his hand, a garment bag over his shoulder. By his side walked a Chinese boy, pushing a trolley on which stood two suitcases of imposing size and solidity. The gweilo – Alan already thought in the Hong Kong idiom – was smiling faintly to himself.

He turned into the café and, in a voice of unexpected harshness, shouted out a few words of Cantonese. The fat proprietor came out to meet him. The two shook hands and discoursed with some warmth. Then the gweilo turned away, laughing, throwing out some quip that made the proprietor laugh in turn. Still smiling to himself, he walked to the tables by the harbour. It was then that he noticed Alan. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said, all trace of coarseness gone from his voice.

‘Hello,’ Alan said. He saw with some surprise that the newcomer was a little younger than himself; for all that, his ease of manner and his maturity of expression left Alan rather intimidated. In this moment of awkwardness, he wished very much that he had caught the ferry that was now turning away to the north.

The man stopped at the adjoining table, a move nicely calculated to avoid any accusation of unfriendliness without seeming to force friendliness upon him. It was a moment of perfect Englishness. Before sitting, he hung his garment bag from a branch of the banyan tree that shaded their tables. He did so with an air of quiet delight, as if the tree had grown in that shape especially for his convenience, and he couldn’t help feeling flattered by the attention. He then sat, unbuttoned the collar of his shirt of virginal whiteness, and unknotted his tie. This he rolled around his fingers and slipped into the pocket of his jacket.

The proprietor approached him with a glass and a dewed bottle, and received courteous thanks in Cantonese. Then, with very careful attention, the gweilo poured liquid gold into tilted glass. He placed bottle and glass on the table, not drinking, savouring their beauty.

‘Visiting the island?’ he asked.

‘Came out for lunch. Can’t bear to go home.’

‘My dear chap. Stay for ever. Beer?’

‘Thank you.’

He filled Alan’s glass with the same care with which he had filled his own. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Happy Christmas.’

‘Happy Christmas.’

They drank.

‘I’m André Standing.’ This announcement took Alan by surprise. It was simply not English, neither the name nor the bare fact of its announcement. After the business of the man’s choosing of his seat, Alan had expected to be playing by English rules. André, clearly, was English, yet not English. Alan played his own name in return; André asked: ‘On holiday?’

‘In a manner of speaking. I’ve just started work at the Hong Kong Times. We all got Christmas Day off, by a miracle, so I thought I’d spend it on Tung Lung.’

‘Get on all right with old Simpson?’ This unexpected dropping of his editor’s name was disquieting.

‘Only met him the once. Seems all right. Rather a change of pace after Fleet Street.’ Alan was seeking to impress in his turn. ‘What about yourself? What brings you out here?’

‘My dear chap. I live here, you see.’

Alan was riven through the heart with envy. ‘What do you do?’

‘Well, I’m sort of an entrepreneur, really. Bit of import/export. Do a fair bit in your line too; I’ve been known to sell advertising space for the odd magazine. Take my card.’ He pincered two fingers into his breast pocket and produced it. It was nicely engraved, a statement of class.

‘Merchant,’ Alan read.

‘That seems to cover it, on the whole.’

‘Very stylish.’

‘Well, very Hong Kong, really. Or very Asia – I’m just back this minute, actually. Been in Seoul, South Korea, you know. Just for a few days, but did some very sweet business.’

‘What sort of thing?’

‘Oh, the usual stuff, you know. I’m interested in the pharmaceutical trade.’

‘Oh.’ Alan drank, from nervousness. André, observing this, called out again in Cantonese; the fat proprietor returned with two new bottles. He seemed greatly exhilarated, and clapped André on the shoulder several times. The two exchanged a series of surprisingly excited remarks, all in Cantonese, and then the proprietor withdrew, beaming. André, too, seemed tremendously bucked by the exchange.

‘Good old Tung Lung,’ he said, pouring his beer.

‘It will make my flat in the Mid-Levels seem doubly poky tonight,’ Alan said.

‘Yes,’ André said. ‘I love it here. Don’t suppose I’ll ever move away. Most Europeans are just staying in Hong Kong for a while. How long have you been in Hong Kong? Standard Hong Kong question. But here on Tung Lung, I’m home. I have a nice flat, a nice boat, nice friends, a nice life. Nice Chinese girl – well, some days she’s nice enough. But all thanks to this island here. Who cares if Ng’s well runs dry and you have no water for a week? This is Tung Lung, and it simply doesn’t matter.’

‘Mm, yes, I envy you.’ Alan thought all this was rather overdoing it, sympathetic though the message was. But then André, lowering his voice in a rather stagy manner, came down to it. ‘In fact, I may be able to fix you up with a flat on Tung Lung. Do you like the sound of that?’

So that was what they had been talking about. ‘My God. I’d adore it. But –’

‘That’s settled, then.’

‘But what time does the last ferry leave Hong Kong in the evening?’

‘Oh, late enough. Ten thirty.’

A thud of despair. ‘No good. I’m a downtable sub; I don’t finish work till eleven thirty. Three times a fortnight, I do a late turn, finish at three.’

‘Oh really. I say, what a terrible bore. You’re the sort of chap who’d do well here. Resign at once, come and join us out here.’

‘Wonderful thought.’

‘No, really, you can do it: moonlight flit on the job and the flat, take up residence here, start merchant-venturing about the place. I’ve got a row of contacts in your line of work. You’d be up to your eyes in business in no time. How about it?’

‘André – I wish I could. But it’s not possible right now.’

‘Ah well. You’re still new here, aren’t you? You’re not close enough to the edge yet. But you’ll get there soon enough. I promise you that.’

Alan sat on the ferry drinking his beer. André had insisted on buying him a can for the journey. They had shaken hands warmly by the café, and then André had turned inland, attaché case in one hand, garment bag over his shoulder. Had he forgotten his suitcases? But perhaps he had arranged for someone to do the portering for him. That sounded André’s style.

Alan looked back, the faint lights of Tung Lung fading behind him. Ah well. He would take his Boxing Day dinner at the Country Club with Bill and Wally, the other two Englishmen on the subs’ desk. That is, if Wally was back from his trip to Bangkok. They had, in their way, been very decent to him. The question of the Country Club had come up on Alan’s first day at the Hong Kong Times.

‘But do you think they’ll let him in, Bill, in that shirt?’

‘I’ll have a little word with the doorman.’

The occasion was the sub-editors’ evening break. Alan accepted their invitation, flattered and a little flustered. Bill disrobed himself of his cardigan, which was baggy and leather buttoned; Wally removed his own generous maroon sweat shirt. Alan, who had not known to arm himself against the boreal chills of the Times’s air conditioning, merely stood. The wet warmth of Hong Kong greeted them as they left the building.

They led Alan not to the opulent doorway he had feared, but to a small grocery store a couple of hundred yards from the newspaper offices. Its owner, a wispy-bearded and gold-toothed ancient who looked like Lao-tzu, greeted them. Then, very spryly, he rolled a great wooden cartwheel from its resting place against the wall and unfolded from it four legs: at once it was revealed as a table. He next unfolded three stools; then, as the final touch of elegance, he placed a roll of lavatory paper on the table. He asked, in Cantonese that Alan could follow even then, if all three required San Lig, meaning San Mig, meaning San Miguel, the beer of Hong Kong. They did.

Cans served, Bill and Wally each helped himself to a sheet of lavatory paper and commenced the energetic cleaning of the can top. Alan, eyeing their every movement like a hobbledehoy at a banquet, followed them a beat behind. Satisfied, they pulled the ringpulls from their cans, tossed them lightly into the gutter and drank. ‘Thank Christ,’ Wally said. ‘Why do we live here, God fuck it?’

Wally always wore a safari suit: trousers that matched in colour an epauletted, patch-pocketed, quasi-military garment that was neither jacket nor shirt. Alan was to learn that he had three of them, and that he wore them each for two days at a time. One was salmon pink, one pistachio green, the third pale dogshit. They were safe and conservative Hong Kong clothes. Wally was a slight man with a belly that travestied pregnancy.

‘Got my flight fixed up for Christmas,’ he said. ‘A whole lovely bloody week in Bangkok. Thank Christ.’

‘What does one do in Bangkok?’

‘In Bangkok one gets fucking well fucked.’

Bill was quieter, bitterer. Wally spoke with a flamboyant, almost a romantic pessimism; in Bill, as time passed, Alan wondered if he would not sense despair.

‘Why do we live here, God fuck it?’ Wally asked again.

‘Anywhere.’

‘Soon be dead, anyway, thank Christ.’

‘Downtable sub on the Purgatory and Hell Gazette,’ Bill said. He was, Alan was to learn, a man of quite extraordinary professional competence. That afternoon, challenged by Wally, he had named the last three prime ministers of Belgium.

Alan knew sub-editing skills when he found them. He had done his time on local newspapers, subbed in Fleet Street and had contemplated seeking permanent employment within its fastness. But the combination of the end of a love affair and of his training prompted him to seek jobs abroad: Robert Simpson had offered him, sight unseen, a job on the Hong Kong Times on three months’ trial. Thus the great adventure had begun.

Wally knew his job too, though he attacked it with the same savagery he brought to conversation. He called Soviet dissidents ‘fucking troublemakers’; the Pope was always ‘Popeye’; stories about the local police gave him especial delight. ‘Listen to this: “A bullet was removed from his left kidney.” Good on yer, PC Wong. Shot the bastard while he was running away, didn’t he? “The suspect remains in critical condition.” Course he does. They took the poor fucker to Queen Elizabeth Hospital; no one gets out of that kip alive.’

Alan did not reply. Well, he told himself, Hong Kong was what you asked for; Hong Kong is what you have got.

‘Ah Christ, why do we live here, God fuck it?’ Wally asked, taking another mighty pull from his beer.

‘How long have you lived here, Wally?’

‘Twelve years, Christ help me. I must be mad. Been a Hong Kong Belonger for five years now.’

‘Belonger?’

‘After seven years you can apply for Belonger status,’ Bill said. ‘Did it myself a couple of years back. Regularises the visa situation, means you can vote in municipal elections. Not that anyone ever does. Just an administrative convenience.’

‘It’s the day they throw away the fucking key,’ Wally said.

That first expedition to the Country Club had been an initiation. Soon Alan was flinging his ringpull into the gutter without a backward glance, dining merrily and nightly on three cans of San Lig or Mig and a packet of peanuts. Remarkably good peanuts, which he would hull abstractedly, broadcasting the shattered halves into the street.

‘What were you rowing with Johnny Ram about?’ Bill had asked him on their last day at work, the night before Christmas Eve. There had been a slight, unseasonal chill in the air, and they had retained their air-conditioning-beating overgarments. Alan had bought himself a rather sporty top with a hood to wear in the office.

‘Letters page,’ Alan said. ‘Unbelievable stuff. I suggested to Johnny that we really ought to leave it out. He was of a different opinion.’

‘Opinion? Johnny? Do me a favour,’ Wally said. ‘Johnny doesn’t have opinions. Other people have opinions, other people being Simpson. Know how the letters page is run? Simpson skims the letters that come in and scribbles instructions on ’em. Then he passes them to Johnny and Johnny does what he’s told. What you were doing was asking him to walk into Simpson’s office and say, Simpson, you silly bastard, this letter is bollocks.’

‘Look at it this way,’ Bill said. ‘Can you imagine Moses going back up Mount Sinai with the tablets and saying, look, Jehovah, you silly bastard, can’t you see that this commandment about coveting your neighbour’s ox is bollocks? What was in the letter anyway?’

‘Some lunatic from one of the outlying islands. He said that the people who lived there were noble savages. I thought that was a bit stiff.’

‘So you subbed out the word “noble”?’ Wally said.

‘I said that no self-respecting newspaper would print such rubbish. I made him quite cross.’

‘Nevertheless, you made a valid point about the Hong Kong Times,’ Bill said. ‘What did you do?’

‘Par-marked it. Put “Noble Savage” in the headline, why not?’

‘The boy learns wisdom,’ said Wally.

‘I think I know the old bugger you mean,’ Bill said. ‘Always writing to the paper. One of those. Lived here since the fall of Shanghai. Dedicated man.’

‘They should send PC Wong over to his island to sort him out,’ Wally said. ‘Couple of slugs in the kidneys then over to the QE Hospital for the coup de grâce.’

Alan rose and purchased three more beers. They all tore, wiped, threw. Alan saw a sleek and graceful rat cross the street a few yards off, but knew enough not to pass comment. ‘Johnny really was rather cross,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t bear grudges, does he?’

‘I’d like to fuck Eileen Sung,’ Wally said. ‘Did you see her in the newsroom this evening? That arse of hers in those red trousers. Jesus.’

‘He won’t complain to Simpson about Simpson’s choice of staff,’ Bill said. ‘He won’t go out of his way to help you, but he won’t go out of his way to harm you. Either way it would be rocking the boat, and that is against everything that Johnny understands.’

‘Don’t rock the boat,’ Wally said. ‘They ought to print that on the front of the Hong Kong Times. Put it on the masthead, a bloody great banner supported by Simpson at one end and PC Wong on the other.’

‘I get worried every now and then,’ Alan said. ‘I’d be in serious trouble if I lost the job.’

‘Christ, you won’t lose it,’ Bill said. ‘You can sub. Besides, no one gets fired.’

‘What do you think this is?’ Wally asked. ‘A newspaper or something?’

‘Just keep your head down,’ Bill said. ‘The one thing Simpson doesn’t like is trouble. Promoted a step beyond his competence, just like Johnny Ram. Perfect way of making yes-men. What Johnny is to Simpson, Simpson is to the chairman. And the chairman is in the same situation vis-à-vis the board of Hong Kong Estates. And Hong Kong Estates owns the newspaper, as they own everything else around here. So – don’t rock the boat.’

‘I’ve had a change of heart about Eileen Sung,’ Wally said. ‘I’d like to bugger her.’

On Boxing Day Alan sat before another harbour with another bottle before him. The sun was going down and his legs were weary. This was because he had walked most of the length of Hong Kong Island. He had walked from the offices of the Hong Kong Times to Central, and there, turning right at the Great Orient Hotel, he had passed on to the Star Ferry Pier. He had then climbed a flight of steps that took him to Blake Pier. He had walked its length in order to contemplate the harbour, as a dismal ceremony of farewell, but he had found a dreadfully sordid café. So he took a seat, ordered a beer.

He had made his walk because walking keeps despair at bay. He had walked through Quarry Bay, North Point, Causeway Bay, Wanchai and Central, managing scarcely to think at all. Now, beer before him and the light beginning to fade, he inspected the boat-jams of Hong Kong harbour. Tangled together were various craft of the Star Ferry, the Jordan Road Ferry that carried motor cars, the ferries to Lantau, Cheung Chau, Lamma, Tung Lung, Po Toi. Alan watched, cut off from the world of purpose.

It was not the row about the Noble Savages letter that had got him the sack. It was the Gestapo. A few days before Christmas, Alan had subbed the report of a speech made by the chairman of the South China Bank, Sir Peter Browne, to the Rotary Club of Hong Kong. About three paragraphs from the end, the speaker had referred to the Hong Kong police and their ‘Gestapo tactics’. Pleased, Alan had seized on this, promoted it to the first paragraph, fitted the story around it, and used the word ‘Gestapo’ in a headline that had fitted to the last character. Nice, he had told himself at the time, bloody nice.

There had been a note on Alan’s desk when he returned to work on Boxing Day afternoon. Written on pink card, in fountain pen. See me. R. S. But Mr Simpson, what I did is just standard practice in Fleet Street. Mr Fairs, you do not seem to realise that we are not in Fleet Street. We are in Hong Kong. I happen to believe that a newspaper has a responsibility to the community. You clearly fail to appreciate that. It is my belief that you never will. Your professional standards, of which you make so much, are not ours.

Alan said thank Christ for that, and marched out slamming the door. No he didn’t. He sat on Blake Pier wishing he had. Instead, he had begged for a last chance, thinking of rent, debt, the distance from home. Pride had gone. Simpson asked if he would vacate the building. Now, please.

And so the great Hong Kong walk; the great Hong Kong adventure in ruins. He turned and looked bitterly at the tallest of the tall buildings on the waterfront, the one with round windows which, Wally had informed him, was known to the Chinese as the House of a Thousand Arseholes. Along the length of the pier, teenage Chinese couples embraced unrestrainedly, Blake Pier being a good deal more private than their homes.

What would he say when he got home? Didn’t work out. Couldn’t get on with the place. Journalistic standards appalling. Walked out of the job after six weeks, matter of self-respect. And they would all say in the pub after he had gone – all those who would never dare to make such a journey themselves – well, he couldn’t take it, could he, scuttling back home with his tail between his legs. Shall we give him a couple of shifts anyway? Oh, come on, hardly the type, is he?

Below, a motor-junk approached the pier, its seesawing deck loaded with large waste-paper baskets full of vegetables; choisum and pak-choi. He heard a voice chanting out some request or order – everything in Cantonese sounded like an order – concluding the sentence with a long aaa clearly audible above the grumble of the engine. Master that sound and you have mastered street Cantonese. The junk’s captain, if it were he and junks had captains, stood stocky and strong in a white singlet as the deck danced beneath him. He shouted again at a man hidden from view, perhaps on the lower level of the pier. Another merchant, no doubt. Buying cheap and selling dear: passage for choisum and pak-choi; passage too, perhaps, for more exciting cargoes, for brandy and American cigarettes, bears’ paws, tigers’ penises, pharmaceuticals. Or people. Perhaps even now a crop-haired, frightened boy crouched beneath the dancing deck, sick with both fright and motion, escaping from China to this promised land. In the morning he would make his run for freedom. The land of opportunity. The junk tucked snugly into the pier and was lost from view.

Alan ordered more beer and gave himself up to self-pity. He felt it was expected of him. But even as he did so, cursing Simpson, his luck, the woman who had left him in England, he knew that he was only going through the motions. He did not, in his dismay, permit that thought to come to the surface, but it lay beneath, awaiting its moment. Yes. Tie already rolled and in his pocket, strolling at his ease, a flâneur, through the unmalicious shoving of his fellow islanders. Stopping to buy a beer from the fat proprietor. And Alan knew that he could activate that destiny: in a single moment he could do it. The café would have a telephone, and no objection would be made to his using it, calls being free. André, I’ve been thinking over what you were saying yesterday …

Alan drank his beer and watched the light fade and the lights of the buildings and the advertisements come on one by one. At last in darkness he walked back to the Mid-Levels and took the lift to his flat on the fifteenth floor.

How early could you have a drink? This was not a question to be dismissed lightly. He had dined the previous night off a six-pack of San Mig and a packet of peanuts, and had played patience until the beer was finished. One o’clock was all right, surely? Well, twelve. The pubs opened in England on Sunday at twelve. On weekdays they opened at eleven, and this was a weekday. He did a deal with himself: a beer after he had spoken to the editor of the China Gazette. This was the competition, if such it could be called, to the Times, a newspaper that expressed the spirit of opposition by seeking to outdo its rival in fuddyduddyness. Alan bravely rang the number. The editor would be in at two.

By five past two, Alan had finished the second beer of the day. The first didn’t count and the second was necessary. He had learnt that no vacancy of any kind existed on the China Gazette. He had run the gamut of Hong Kong newspapers.

The telephone splintered the silence. It was Bill. ‘Bad luck, lad, I know, yes, Simpson’s a bad man. Look, I don’t know what your plans are, but there’s a friend of mine who produces a shitty little magazine that circulates free to businessmen. Sells editorial space, that kind of carry-on. It’s not exactly journalism, but nor is working for the Times is it? Know anything about business?’

‘No.’

‘That’s all right, nor does Reg. I know he’s looking for an assistant, by which he means someone to do the dirty jobs while he goes to the bar and to Bangkok and so on. Want his number?’

It took Alan a couple of tries to say thank you, yes please. Then, after Bill had rung off, he dialled the number without giving himself a moment to think.

‘Top-hole,’ said Reg unexpectedly. ‘Excellent. Let’s discuss it right away. Beer after work, you know the Two Brewers in Lockhart Road?’

Alan spent the afternoon playing patience, an attempt, not as effective as walking, at keeping both hope and despair at bay. Then he took a taxi to the heart of Wanchai, and walked along Lockhart Road, a narrow gully above which hung an endless procession of Damoclean neon signs: Crazy Horse, New American Restaurant, Ocean Bar, Seven Seas Bar. Alan walked, striving to give no more than a casual glance at the photographs, outside the topless bars, of glorious ping-pong ball breasts.

The Two Brewers stood between a tattoo parlour and a restaurant decorated with the wind-dried corpses of chickens. To open the door was to pass, as through the looking-glass, into the Home Counties. The sort of dingy pub you find by the railway station. There, beer and a copy of Hong Kong Business on the bar before him, in safari suit (electric blue) and behind a small paunch, Reg. Two strange white tufts of hair sprang from his head, behind his ears. They looked like powder puffs. Reg looked like a saloon-bar golfer, half a pint of cooking and a Scotch egg please, landlord. Odd to think that his favoured, apparently unashamed, leisure pursuit was not golf but whoring.

‘So you’re a friend of Bill’s, what a good sort he is, terrible shame of course but there you are, that’s Hong Kong. But he knows his job and he says you’re OK, and that’s good enough for me. Worked at the Times myself, of course, years ago, never could get on with Simpson, set up on my own and here we are.’

Reg was not a man to deal with any subject briefly, but several beers later, hands were shaken on a decision. Alan was to work for Reg five afternoons a week for two thousand dollars a month. ‘Flexible as you like, old chap, so long as we get the work done. I need a dogsbody, to tell you the truth, and some of the work will be an awful grind. But if you can put up with that, I’m more than happy to have you on board.’

Alan could. He was invited to start the following Monday. Did he need an advance?

Back on the fifteenth floor, head slightly fuzzy after his interview with Reg, Alan stood at his window with the telephone in his hand. He could see the harbour between the two buildings that rose up in front of him, the moving lights of the shipping, the still lights of Kowloon on the far side. He grasped the instrument like a weapon, Bond setting an assignment in motion. ‘Hello. This is Alan Fairs, remember we met –’

‘Alan, my dear. How perfectly splendid. Are you coming out to see us again? How is the Hong Kong Times?’

Alan did not feel it necessary to hide things from André. ‘Rather why I’m calling you. I’ve just been sacked.’

‘I knew you were the right sort for us. I have an instinct. But my dear old thing, how perfectly rotten all the same. Being sacked always depresses me for hours. But, Alan, could it really be that you are coming to join our glorious community on Tung Lung?’

‘Is the flat still free?’

‘Yours for seven hundred bucks a month.’

‘Done.’

‘Naturally you must sign some bits of paper and shake hands with your new landlord. Let me see. Tomorrow I can make the four thirty ferry home from Central. Why not catch it too?’

Home. ‘All right.’

‘And your life in Hong Kong can begin.’

It was now four thirty-five. The ferry hooted and growled restlessly, and then moved fussily away from the jetty. André had clearly missed it. Alan would have to wait to see if he arrived on the following ferry. Well, he would do so at the café beneath the banyan tree, drinking beer served to him by the fat proprietor. No hardship. Or perhaps André wouldn’t be there at all. The whole deal was about to fall through. Perhaps André was not the infinitely plausible person he seemed, but a fey, untrustworthy rogue. Alan felt a pang of fear at this thought. Future Hong Kong life was feasible only in terms of Tung Lung rent.

Then, like a miracle, André’s head appeared at Alan’s feet, rapidly rising in the stairwell. The rest of him followed: another beautiful suit, another beautiful smile of greeting.

‘I thought you’d missed it.’

‘Not me. I don’t miss ferries. But come, we must sit at the back.’

He led the way to the last bench, the only one that was open to the world. A sprightly wind whipped in off the harbour; André smiled quietly to himself as he felt it against his face. He sat, removed his tie, wound it around his hand and slipped it into his jacket pocket. Then he placed his attaché case on his knees, caused it to open with a double detonation and produced from it two cans of San Mig. Cold, naturally. They opened, drank.

‘So, my dear, how does it march?’

Alan explained a little. André listened with interest. The connection with HK Business News amused him. ‘Done some work for old Reg myself, in my time. Usual standby, selling advertising space, selling editorial space, too, if it comes to that. No false pride, old Reg. Made rather a little killing, actually, in Singapore.’

‘Really? Oh well, I’ll pass on your regards.’

‘Wouldn’t do that, my dear. Had a bit of a falling-out. The killing wasn’t actually for him, you see. But shall I tell you an important fact? In this town, the one thing you never run out of is clients.’

‘Mags, you mean?’

‘Well, I meant it more generally, actually, but it is certainly true of magazines. One mag folds, another two spring up. Same in every other business. Drives some people crazy. But we who keep light on our feet rather like it that way.’

Alan, more interested in his own affairs than in André’s summary of Hong Kong life, returned doggedly to the subject closest to his heart. ‘Do they take copy from outsiders, then?’

‘My dear, you are living in a freelance’s paradise. You’ll make a great living, have loads of fun. Get some travel under your belt, get around Asia a bit. That’s the thing. Why not start your own magazine? I’ll sell the advertising space, editorial space too. We’ll make a fortune.’

It was not until the ferry cut its speed and made its laborious approach to the Tung Lung ferry pier that André turned to the business in hand. ‘I’ve pretty well settled everything with your new landlord. We’ll go straight up and see him, if that’s all right with you. He’s got a lease all ready.’

‘Chinese guy?’ It seemed worth asking.

‘Lord, no. Well, born in Shanghai, but the son of Baptist missionaries. All English blood, but rather Chinese in some ways. Plus catholique, in fact. Name of John Kingston, lived on Tung Lung for about twenty years. Unusual chap. You’ll like him.’

Alan looked out over the surrounding land, the awaking mountains. It was as if he had received a light blow on the chest: the smallest tap, little more than the brushing of Oddjob’s finger, but a touch performed with such acute, well-nigh surgical skill that it was enough, for one half-second, to suspend the processes of life. I am to live behind this toy harbour, before this green mountain. I am to live in a Chinese scroll.

‘Ready for a climb?’ André asked. ‘You’re going to live in the highest house in the village.’

André led the way past the café and the banyan tree, and past a tiny, almost a doll’s house, branch of the South China Bank. Beside it stood a fly-thronged collection of wide, flat, woven baskets, from which arose the scent of the death of a thousand sea beasts: the ambient odour of Tung Lung. ‘Shrimp-paste factory,’ André said airily. ‘One of Chuen-suk’s money-spinners. Here’s where we start to climb.’ They turned left off the main path and concrete steps rose up before them. Though winter and the temperature barely turning past 70 degrees, Alan felt sweat burst from him. After a while, begging a halt, he asked, mouth-breathing fiercely: ‘How many more?’

‘About halfway. You’ll soon be used to it. Look on it as Nob Hill. Worth climbing 176 steps for. Catch the breeze in the summer, which is pretty good news, on the whole.’

Alan looked around him. A shower of inky blooms hung over a mesh fence; before it danced a butterfly, orange, black-veined. It looked like a stained-glass window. ‘Onwards,’ André said. ‘Onwards and upwards.’

More leg-weary than he had been since his epic walk from Quarry Bay to Central, Alan reached the top. A narrow concrete path led onward, mercifully now along the level. ‘We use Calor Gas for cooking,’ André said. He seemed unaffected by the climb. ‘For an extra five dollars they deliver it. Best deal on the island. Two old ladies do it.’ Alan didn’t actually believe this. André led him to another flight of stairs, no more than a dozen steps. Straight ahead stood a huge pair of iron gates, beautifully ornamented and painted green. They were flanked by two bulging-eyed, door-guarding lions. Through the chain-link fence on either side, Alan could see a shaded green garden, and set within it three separate, small but majestic houses. ‘Old man Ng’s place,’ André said. ‘Richest man on the island.’ He turned his back on this vista of expensive living, and gestured to another dwelling. He announced, not without pride: ‘Here we are.’

The lemon-yellow house stood head and shoulders above those around it. Two houses, in fact. Semi-detached. How odd. Two front doors, a shared front yard, a garden of concrete. ‘My place,’ André said, pointing to the left middle floor. ‘Charles lives next door to me – you’ll meet him soon enough, a great man in his way. You’re underneath me; the flat next door to you isn’t finished yet. Yours was only finished last week. King has the entire top floor; he knocked it through, done a neat conversion job. So he has the roof, and he’s made a nice little garden up there.’

Alan peered through the seven-foot-high mesh of the fence to what would soon be his home. He followed André round to the back of the building. Another door, and more stairs to climb. Halfway was a door, on which had been stuck a colour photograph of a sailing boat leaving behind it a long creamy wake. It also bore the legend ‘Cool Cool Cool!’

‘That’s me,’ André said. ‘But let’s find King.’ Up another flight of steps; there André knocked jauntily on a door. It opened. ‘Hello, King, here’s your new man. Pretty smart of me to find him, I think you’ll agree. Alan Fairs, John Kingston.’

John Kingston stepped onto the landing to meet them. He was tall, with a massive chest, and he moved with a strange deliberation, rather like a troll. It was as if his aim were to frighten, though not very severely, an audience of uncritical children. He fixed Alan with a challenging eye and said, basso profundo: ‘Welcome to the real Hong Kong.’

Alan took the proffered hand; received an expected bone-crushing. ‘Er, thank you.’

‘The people are real here. Do you feel a sense of privilege in being here? Do you feel that already?’

‘Well, I do as a matter of fact,’ Alan said, half ingratiating, half honest.

‘The people here are real.’

‘Yes.’

‘I call them noble savages.’

Alan felt momentarily at a loss. This would have been the case even without the dizzying sensation of the wheel turning full circle. He found himself babbling: ‘Great, yes, sure, I’m glad about that, because I haven’t met anybody noble in Hong Kong yet, apart from André, of course.’

Kingston received this in long, serious silence. After a while, he said: ‘Noble savages.’

André was suddenly beside him, pushing a beer into his hand. ‘Beer. Have a beer, King. I found it in your fridge.’

‘Thank you, André,’ Kingston said. ‘You are indeed a generous man.’ Kingston said this as solemnly as he had spoken of noble savages. Alan was having a little trouble with his sense of perspective. ‘Now. Alan. Come. Before anything else occurs, you must inspect your flat.’

‘All right. Though I am sure it will be perfect.’ Even a concrete shell would be perfect in such a setting. King led a beer-clutching procession back down the stairs and round the outside of the building. A gate, of metal bars, spike-topped and unlocked, guarded the way into the concrete garden. Kingston walked through, opened the door to the flat, and announced, ‘Seven hundred square feet,’ though whether in apology or boast Alan could not tell.

It was a concrete shell. It was perfect. The walls had been lightly painted with whitish paint. Four tiny rooms led off the main area. Two were bedrooms, one containing an actual bed, double, with a thin foam mattress. Alan walked around the flat. This did not take a great deal of time. A kitchen, with a Calor Gas stove on a tiled concrete shelf. A bathroom with a shower in it. ‘Water is sometimes a problem on Tung Lung, my friend,’ King said. ‘We use the Ng well here, of course. If it runs dry, we have permission to use the standpipe below the last flight of steps. That is connected to Chuen-suk’s well, and that never runs dry.’ And the concrete apron before the house, half of it shaded by the balcony above. On the far side of his fence, another tumble of the purple stuff; was it bougainvillaea? And a jumble of houses marching down the hillside before him, and beyond them the harbour of Tung Lung and beyond that the South China Sea. He turned inland, to a flat-bottomed valley floored with a chessboard of green fields. Allotments, really. Alan could just make out a man working on his little square of green, two watering cans suspended from a yoke that rested on his shoulders. He wore a pointed hat; he too lived in a Chinese scroll. Alan found that he could smell the sea.

‘I love it. If you’ll have me, I’ll take it.’

‘Yours for seven hundred dollars.’

‘Done.’

‘Then let us sign the lease. How are you off for furniture? I can sell you some electric fans, chairs and so on.’

‘Thanks. Though I’m a bit strapped for cash just now. At least, I will be once I’ve paid you a deposit.’

‘Pay me later, then. No hurry. I may be a landlord, but I am a landlord with a human face.’

‘A noble landlord,’ Alan said idiotically.

Kingston greeted this with a great hohoho, like the demon king. ‘I can see that this is going to be a very happy community,’ he announced. ‘A great future stretches before us.’

They returned to Kingston’s flat. After the bare expanse of the downstairs flat, the contrast was apparent. Kingston’s style of decoration was disconcertingly – Alan groped for a word – permanent. There was even a large photograph of a family group. This had been printed onto canvas, to make it look like a painting. It showed a pretty woman with an elaborate, slightly dated hairstyle, a pigtailed girl, a boy who looked like the illustration on the fruit gums packet. Kingston stood at the rear of the group, beaming in satisfaction.

Alan signed his lease, wrote a cheque for $1,400, deposit and first month’s rent, and received a second bone-crushing in recognition of the completion of a deal. ‘I’ll move in tomorrow or the next day,’ Alan said. ‘Just as soon as I have fixed up things with the landlord of my Mid-Levels place.’

‘What’s he got to do with it?’ André asked. ‘Does he owe you money?’

‘I think I owe him, actually.’

‘Then surely the only thing to do is to lug your stuff into a taxi and get the hell out? He’ll never trace you to Tung Lung.’

Alan could not help but think about this. Such a manoeuvre would, he reckoned, save him about $2,500. The thought went, and he was sorry to see it go. ‘André – can I be utterly frank with you? I don’t have the nerve.’

André looked for a moment deeply saddened, as if by a friend’s unwitting blasphemy. ‘My dear, it’s hardly the right way to begin your career as a freebooter.’

‘André, I was brought up to be honest – more or less, anyway. It’s a handicap. But keep faith with me; I’m sure I shall rise above it in time.’

Alan stood at the centre of a kind of refugees’ camp. Six vast striped plastic bags formed a circle around him: the contents of his flat in Mid-Levels. He had in his pocket a cheque for $1,000, returned deposit on the furniture.

The loading and unloading of the taxi had been accomplished, not without superhuman exertions. The carrying of the bags, two by two through the little gate beside the ferry turnstile, normally used for the passage of vegetables, had brought out resources Alan did not know he possessed. But the next stage, the carriage of bags to the ferry, seemed impossible. He could not even begin to think about the 176 steps.

The ferry arrived, and eventually opened its doors to admit new passengers. Alan made his first effort, and carried two bags on board. He fought his way back against the unstemmable tide of passengers to collect two more, in a state of blind frazzlement. He had just reached his encampment when he heard a voice call: ‘New neighbour!’

An impression of suit, size and extraordinary freshness of face. Alan was not quite in the mood for being bothered, but managed a flustered greeting.

‘Your gear?’ the stranger demanded.

‘Yes, I –’

‘Hold,’ he said sternly. He handed Alan a briefcase and a pink carrier bag. Then he squatted, and addressed the four bags rather formally. He inserted his arms through all the handles, straightened his back, and seized his own forearms in a grip of steel. He inhaled and exhaled through his nose, very noisily, about half a dozen times. Then he stood. Miraculously, the bags rose with him. He marched inexorably to the boat, benignly shoving passengers from his path with every step, tendons standing out from his neck like steel hawsers, breath roaring from his nose. Alan followed bearing his presumed neighbour’s briefcase, his own shoulder-bag full of valuable items, and the pink carrier bag. Condensation had formed, though not to his surprise, on its surface. With every appearance of relish, the neighbour lowered his preposterous load to the floor, back still perfectly straight.

‘Thank you,’ Alan said inadequately.

The neighbour rose with slow grace from his squat, and rotated his shoulders just once, so that the shoulder blades almost touched. Then he made a strange, rather papal gesture to the stairs that led to the top deck of the boat and a smile of rather unearthly beauty lit his face. ‘Beer!’ he said. Then he turned and absolutely sprinted up the stairs.

Alan followed more sedately, arriving on the top to find his neighbour sitting on the very back seat, both arms outstretched along its back in a crucifixion position. Alan passed him his two bags. The briefcase was placed on the floor, but from the carrier bag he produced two cans of San Miguel, passing one to Alan. Alan thanked him and reached for the ringpull. The neighbour at once placed a huge paw over Alan’s hand. ‘Wait!’ he said. ‘Not until the ferry moves.’

He sat quite silent, after this, his own unopened can in his hand and a rather solemn expression on his face. Alan watched as the stragglers came aboard. The day was chill, and most people wore jackets on top of shirts. They crowded together towards the front, enclosed section of the boat, from love of crowds, from dislike of air. There was a clatter from below as the gangplank was raised. The engine roared, and the ferry pulled away with the usual exchange of referees’ whistles. Alan’s neighbour, roused from a species of trance, smiled his beatific smile, tore the ringpull from his can, tossed it over his shoulder into the wash of the screw behind them and then positively threw the can into his face. Alan watched, fascinated, as his throat worked convulsively, like a pump. At last, he lowered the can, and smiled again.

‘Hello, new neighbour. I’m Charles Browne, the man upstairs. Browne with an E.’

Alan said his own name, and they shook hands. The clasp was gentle, unKingston-like.

‘You are going to like Tung Lung,’ Charles said.

‘Have you lived here long?’

‘Tung Lung? Or Hong Kong?’

‘Both, I suppose.’

‘Hong Kong, all my life, or twenty years. Tung Lung, ever since I went to the bad, or about two years. Here’s how!’ He raised his can once again and drank with the same primeval ferocity as before. He tossed the can, presumably now empty, over the back of the boat. He took another from his pink bag and opened it. ‘Your beer all right?’

‘Yes, great, thanks.’

‘I mean, you do drink?’

‘Of course.’

‘I mean, not a single beer and that’s it for me thanks, I’ve got a busy day tomorrow.’

‘No.’

‘In fact,’ Charles said, more or less beseechingly, ‘you drink quite a lot.’

‘Well –’

‘And get drunk and throw up and go to bed and it spins and get up next morning feeling shithouse and then have a drink to feel better.’

There was an expression of touching eagerness on Charles’s face. Alan could not bear to disappoint him. ‘Oh yes.’

‘Well then. Time for another beer, isn’t it?’

Alan made a quite heroic effort. He lifted his can, half full, and finished it in a series of frantic swallows. Tears pricked the back of his eyes and he wondered for a second if the shock of the chill and the bubbles would effect an instant purgation, even as he wiped his mouth with feigned relish. He threw his can overboard and took the new one.

‘Good man!’ Charles said, with restrained violence.

Alan opened his new can and consigned its ringpull to the deep. He took a semireluctant sip. ‘Are there many Browne-with-an-Es in Hong Kong?’ he asked. ‘I came across that name once or twice when I was working for the Hong Kong Times.’

‘Course you came across the name. My old man owns the bloody place.’

‘What bloody place?’

‘Hong Kong, of course.’

‘He can’t actually own all of it, can he? I expect you’re having me on.’

‘Well, sucks to you, because he does. More or less, anyway. My old man happens to be the chairman of the South China Bank.’

Once again, the wheel spun full circle before him. ‘Golly,’ Alan said. ‘That’s quite a grown-up job, really.’

There was a split-second pause, during which Alan thought he might have caused serious offence. Then Charles threw back his head and gave a dramatic howl of laughter. ‘Grown-up!’ he said. ‘My old man’s got a grown-up job!’ He laughed out of all proportion to the merits of Alan’s remark, rocking forward, resting his forehead on his beercan, finally emerging, wiping his eyes. ‘So that’s what’s wrong with the bastard,’ he said. ‘He’s got a grown-up job!’

‘I had a grown-up job last week,’ Alan said. ‘But I got fired.’

‘Is that why they sacked you?’ Charles asked. ‘They discovered you weren’t a grown-up?’

‘That must be it.’

‘André hasn’t got a grown-up job,’ Charles said. ‘I don’t think King has one either. He acts as if he has one, but I think he’s only pretending.’

‘What about you?’

‘Oh, me? I’ve got a grown-up job. I have a very grown-up job indeed. But shall I tell you how I handle it?’ He turned with sudden elephantine staginess to Alan, and whispered hoarsely and penetratingly: ‘I do it very, very badly.’

It was impossible to tell how serious he was, or even if he was serious at all. ‘Is that a good idea?’ Alan asked.

The response startled him, because it came as a bellow, one that turned the heads of the passengers ranged before them, all engaged till then in noisy conversations of their own. ‘Course it’s not! It’s a bloody appalling idea. They give me hell. Browne, you bastard, they tell me, you’re not shaping up. Do the job properly or we’ll sack you and then you’ll be sorry. We’d sack you today if it wasn’t for the fact that your old man owns Hong Kong.’

‘Jolly good,’ Alan said.

‘What do you mean, jolly good? Don’t talk wet, it’s bloody awful.’ Charles started laughing again. He wiped his eyes briefly, and eased up his laughter a little. ‘Now. Listen to me. I have a plan. It’s a good plan, so pay attention. The ferry stops. We get off it. We take your bags to Ah-Chuen’s. That’s the café by the harbour run by the fat bastard. We drink beer. Then we take the bags up to your flat. Then we have a beer at my place. Then we go down again and have supper, say, a bucket of shit at Ah-Chuen’s. Then, we sit about drinking beer. How does that sound in general terms?’

‘It sounds perfection itself.’

‘And we’ll roll the dice a bit, of course. You play yah-tze?’

‘No. I’m not terribly good at games, cards and so forth. Always lose at poker and stuff, never seem to have a card.’

Charles held up a hand in a stately gesture of reproach. ‘Have no fear, neighbour. Yah-tze requires no skill, no thought, no mind. It’s almost impossible to lose much money at it, because it is the longest, most boring game in the world. That’s why we love it; that’s why we play it all the time. You need never fret about life when the five dice roll across the table.’

‘Then I long to learn,’ Alan said.

Charles tossed his second can into the sea and produced a third, opening it with calm certainty. ‘Then here’s to us. Here’s to Tung Lung. Health, wealth and long life.’ With his can he caught Alan’s own a glancing blow. And drank.

PART II

The telephone splintered the silence. Alan ceased typing and got up from his desk, a massive metal thing rather like M’s. King had supplied it to him on indefinite loan. He passed through to the main room of his flat. The telephone stood on a smallish table by the window. Alan seized it. ‘Hello?’ he said, looking approvingly at the South China Sea. He could see the triple-decker ferry moving out towards Cheung Chau, also a small craft near the shore from which a pair of noble savages did the rounds of their fish traps.

‘Colin Webb, Business PanAsia.’

‘Oh, hello –’ was it too early in the relationship to say Colin? – ‘there.’

‘Thanks for coming in last week, Alan. Sorry not to get back to you before, but you know how it is.’

‘No worries, Colin.’

‘I was looking over your list, some smart ideas. I particularly like the eccentric businessman. I’d like you to go ahead on that one.’

Pleasure flowed through Alan. Here he was, being commissioned to write a story for the top business magazine in Hong Kong, and yet he was watching a sampan and wearing a sarong. A sarong? Well, why not? The temperature was in the eighties and air conditioning was for non-island-dwelling wimps.

He put the phone down and adjusted the sarong. He hadn’t quite got the folding right yet, it tended to slip without warning. André, who had donated the sarong to Alan – it was bright red and copiously flowered – said he had spent half a lifetime watching the sarong-clad women of various Asian nations in the eternally disappointed hope of seeing the sarong slip unexpectedly from their golden bodies. Alan wore the sarong as his island work uniform, with a khaki army surplus shirt worn unbuttoned above it.

It was time – no, it wasn’t time for a beer, don’t be stupid, it was time for another cup of coffee to celebrate the glories of the commission. Let’s see, two thousand words at sixty cents each was, well, more than a thousand anyway, well, it was $1,2.00, wasn’t it? And there was the story on the trams for Hong Kong Life. And the story about the Peak for the Hong Kong Airlines magazine Josun! And there was the regular work, the subbing and rewriting for Reg at HK Biz. And it was all going to add up to, well, er, definitely more than he would have made had he been working for the Hong Kong Times. My God, a milestone had been passed. A triumph. Surely that was worth – no, it wasn’t. It was barely eleven o’clock. He filled the kettle and put it on his two-ring stove. It leapt into life at the merest touch of a match, and so it should have done. He had purchased a new cylinder of Calor Gas the previous day. He had paid an additional five dollars so that the cylinder might be carried up the 176 steps to his door. The task was accomplished by a pair of ancient women who suspended the cylinder from beneath a bamboo pole for portage.

The kettle boiled and Alan poured boiling water onto brown powder, adding a splash from a carton of UHT milk. He must get round to making proper coffee. But anyway, a proper coffee break was in order.

He took the mug of brown liquid to the door, which stood open as usual. Outside, in his concrete garden, he had set out a few plastic chairs and a table. To one side an inflated airbed lay perishing slowly in the sun. He sat on one chair, placed his feet on another. From the village below, he heard the sound of power tools in operation. Building, always building. But even from his seated position, he could see the chessboard field below. A slight figure, in jeans rolled to her knees, was working one of the patches. Was it the beautiful schoolgirl that André had introduced as Priscilla? He would marry Priscilla and live for ever on choisum and pak-choi and beer. But he was winning, was he not?

Voices rose suddenly in the Ng estate below and beyond his flat: the Ng clan had several ancient women about the place, and a number of unexplained females of all ages – whether retainers, meddling half-retired servants or poor relations, Alan did not know. One of these, the youngest but by no means young, a woman of some character, with a certain faded beauty, he knew was called Chai. They were given to energetic quarrelling, of which the only word Alan could understand was ‘Aiyaaaah!’ This, he thought, could mean anything at all save the possibility that it was the speaker’s own fault.

Which reminded him. He finished his coffee and went inside to call Reg, grabbing just in time at his sarong. ‘Looking good, old boy. Cleared up a hell of a lot yesterday. Good of you to stay late. It will be off to the typesetters any minute now. No, no, no, I’ll lock up, don’t dream of coming in. Not even sure about tomorrow. Let’s talk after I’ve gone through the post. Call me about ten.’

‘Thanks, Reg.’

‘No, no, thank you, old boy. Never known what it’s like to be ahead of myself before.’

After a few more gratifying amiabilities, they rang off. How splendid. The way was clear for the first step in the piece on the eccentric businessman. Alan took a perfunctory wash beneath the dribbling showerhead; it’s like little boys pissing on you, Charles had said. Surely the Ng well wasn’t running dry again.

Alan dressed in cotton jeans, twenty bucks the pair in the place behind the tramstop in Wanchai, and an almost respectable shirt. Combed his hair, removed the loose hairs from the teeth without looking to see how many. Did that show how relaxed he was, or how worried? He put on a pair of black cotton kung-fu slippers bought from China Products, and left the flat. Closed the door behind him, as a security measure, but did not lock it. He did not even know where the key was. Hadn’t seen it for weeks.

He walked around the side of the house and climbed the stairs. As he walked past Cool Cool Cool!, he tapped the poster, as was now his superstitious habit. This was to remind him that never, no matter how drunk, would he again venture out into the South China Sea with André and his ghastly boat. He climbed the last flight, and knocked on the door. King’s voice called out in Cantonese bass, presumably bidding him welcome. So Alan let himself in.

King was sitting on one of the sofas; opposite him, the far side of a low glass table, a Chinese man. ‘Ah, my young friend. You know Mr Ng, of course. And Ah-Hei.’

‘Of course.’ Mr Ng, possessor of that most wonderful of Cantonese surnames, was a man he saw regularly, and nodded to. As well as the estate next door, he owned Ng’s restaurant, down in the village, where Alan ate two or three times a week with his island companions, any time they felt like aiming above the traditional bucket of shit at Ah-Chuen’s. It was a place decorated with the single-mindedness that all Chinese prefer when it comes to eating: no frivolous distractions. The principal decoration was a series of tanks containing still-swimming dinners. Mr Ng himself was another aspect of décor: he was invariably to be found, sitting on a high stool behind a desk, clacking at an abacus and calligraphing mysterious signs into a huge ledger. Business was business and food was food, and Ng’s restaurant was a temple. Ah-Hei was another aspect of décor. He had a shimmering black mane of hair, and looked like the hero of a martial arts film. This was because he was a martial arts hero: a real one. He was a genuine kung-fu adept. Charles said he had once seen Ah-Hei deal with a tableful of belligerent Chinese revellers: ‘Fastest thing on two legs I have ever seen. Looks stupid on the movies. But that bastard is real.’

Mr Ng had smartened himself up for this visit to King. He wore a clean white shirt instead of his usual dirty white singlet. Even so, his outfit probably cost even less than twenty dollars; Alan guessed that he could put his hands in the pocket of his China Products trousers and pull out enough cash to buy a Mercedes. He smiled at Alan; one large and unmissable gold tooth. ‘You like my restaurant.’

It was not a question. ‘Oh yes, very much. Nice place.’

‘You drink much beer in my restaurant.’

Nor was that. Praise, admiration, or perhaps a neutral acceptance of the differences between races. It was all profit, anyway, and boozing gweilos hardly made more noise than feasting Chinese. ‘Nice place,’ Alan said lamely.

‘Ve’y nice place.’

Alan turned to King. ‘Er, something I want to discuss with you, but it’ll keep.’

‘A moment, my friend.’ He and Mr Ng then embarked on a conversation in Cantonese with much guffawing from Mr Ng. No, he really would start to learn the language properly. Buy a book. Buy a tape. No, fall in love with a beautiful Cantonese girl. Alan examined King’s family photograph, idly speculating on the sexual potential of the pigtailed daughter. Perhaps she was now grown up, beautiful, available, ready to fall in love with him at first sight, to tumble into his bed in a wild whim of passion. King and Mr Ng shook hands, not without warmth. Then Mr Ng turned to Alan, and bestowed on him a final blessing from his golden mouth.

‘You come to my restaurant tonight, drink much beer, hahaha.’

‘Hahaha,’ agreed Alan. Ah-Hei got to his feet, still without offering a word, and walked cat-footed after his master.

‘You moving into the restaurant business, then, King?’ Alan asked, when they were alone.

‘Ng is an old friend of mine. We have done business together for many a year. His restaurant is only one of his interests. He owns the well, for example. Water is power on Tung Lung, Alan. Ng is also in property; he owns this place, among many others. He sub-lets much of the market-gardening land in the valley. He has a share in most of the fishing boats.’

‘And he owns the shrimp-paste factory outright, doesn’t he?’

‘No, that is Chuen-suk.’ Alan remembered the silver-haired Coca-Cola drinker at the waterfront café. ‘Chuen-suk and Ng are big rivals. Chuen-suk has the better well, and that means greater power. But my partner, Ng, is the more enterprising man, with more diverse interests. A big man, Alan, a big man on Tung Lung.’

‘Oh,’ Alan said. ‘I didn’t realise you were in partnership.’

‘In some aspects. In property, a little, but mainly we work together on import-export.’

Oh. ‘Actually, it was business that I wanted to talk to you, King.’

‘What else does anyone ever want to talk about in this town?’ This was brought out with a rhetorical flourish, as if it were something of a mot. Alan laughed, remembering from somewhere a line about it being almost as good being a hypocrite as a liar: the same warm feeling inside. And, allowing the smile to remain on his face, he made his proposal: suggesting that King be the subject of a ‘portrait’ in Business PanAsia. He had not expected difficulty, relying on King’s habitual readiness to oblige. But he was surprised by King’s flattered delight. Alan felt a comfortable frisson of the journalist’s endless source of power: the promise, or threat, of publication.

‘Tremendous, Alan. I’d be happy to be a “portrait”. When would you like the ordeal to commence?’

‘Right now, if by any chance you are free.’

‘For you, Alan, I am always free.’ So Alan ran downstairs to fetch a notebook, and returned to find King at the fridge liberating a pair of cans. ‘Would the roof be a suitable place for this inquisition?’

‘Admirable.’ So they climbed the island’s final flight of stairs. Table and chairs stood beneath a canopy of vine; other plants grew around in heavy glazed pots, decorated with Chinese characters or bamboo leaves. Below them the harbour, the fields to one side. Priscilla, if it were she, had gone. At sea, the twelve o’clock ferry was heading towards its berth. Alan could see the flow of people moving towards the jetty through the narrow streets, the wheeled motor-carts vying for the leading positions for loading and unloading.

‘To business, my friend. Shoot. As they say.’

‘Well, er, what is your main line of business?’

It was a question that gave deep delight. King smiled to himself for a long time, looking out across the sea, for all that there were no noble savages in sight. At last he replied, ‘Love, Alan. Love.’

Alan wrote ‘love’ in his notebook.

‘Now I can see that I have surprised you. Business is supposed to be a matter of oppositions. Enmity and hatred. But that is not how I work, my friend. I say this: there is only one sort of good business, and that is when both parties walk away as winners.’

King spoke as if listening to him speaking at length was an experience all serious people should undergo at some stage in their lives. He started, fulsomely, with his childhood in Shanghai, the Baptist school run by his father. ‘I learnt love in English, Mandarin, Cantonese and Hokkien.’

His father had died shortly after the fall of Shanghai and their enforced move to Hong Kong. ‘Of a broken heart, Alan. I was sixteen, and never went to school again. There was nothing anyone could teach me.’

By the age of twenty-four, he was a millionaire. ‘Import-export. Contacts with China, always contacts with China. Hong Kong was ever the financial pore through which the Chinese dragon breathed.’ Alan hesitated over the shorthand outline for dragon.

The enmity of his partner, who was involved in the Triads – ‘for the love of God don’t print that, Alan’ – had seen King reduced to nothing. But by the age of thirty he had built up a second fortune. ‘Like Hong Kong itself, I diversified into manufacturing. Plastics. The joy of plastics, Alan.’ He bought a house on the Peak, married a beautiful Australian woman. ‘On the wall downstairs, the two women of my life: Monica, my lovely wife; Jacinta, my lovely daughter.’ For a second Alan wondered if King had read his mind as he’d mused over the pigtailed photograph. ‘You see them pictured below with the man destined to become my business partner and, ultimately, should we be saved, my boss. My son, Byron.’

‘Nice names,’ Alan said. After all, you had to say something.

‘They are all, alas, in UK,’ King said. ‘A matter of education. God, Alan, I miss them. Every day of my life, I miss them. A temporary thing. We remain a devoted family. I love my wife, and shall I tell you something else? I still fancy my wife. Twenty years we’ve been married, and when she was last here we were like two teenagers in love. Taking baths together. A honeymoon.’

‘And the kids?’

‘Fine children, Alan. Jacinta is now nineteen, and no longer in pigtails. Beautiful, wilful, headstrong, intelligent. Byron is sixteen, though most people take him for twenty-one. A remarkable boy who makes his father very happy. But where was I, Alan, in this history lesson?’

‘Living in millionaires’ row on the Peak.’

‘I merged my business with a larger concern. Things hotted up. I was on the move constantly: Singapore, KL, Bangkok, Manila, Jakarta, Taiwan. Busy beyond belief, stressed beyond belief, powerful beyond belief, rich beyond belief. And then one day, do you know what I said?’

‘Tell me.’

‘I said “fuck it”. I walked into a board meeting one morning, and told them all. I said “fuck it”.’

‘And how did they respond?’

‘They begged me to stay. Naturally. But I said “fuck it”, and I meant it from the bottom of my heart. And so what do you think I did?’

‘You moved out to Tung Lung and founded a business based on the principle of love.’

‘My friend, you are very wise. And do you know what, Alan? I prosper. I really do.’

The beauty she possessed was so perfect, so profound, that it constricted Alan’s breathing. With a vast effort of will that did him great credit, he found a voice, and asked if he might be admitted to the editor of Business PanAsia. She performed this small miracle for him, and bestowed on him the gift of a smile. Love beat him lightly about the head and neck.

Colin Webb greeted him, and then insisted on reading, while Alan watched in fidgeting silence, every one of the two thousand words he had written.

‘Virry nice, Alan. Virry, virry nice.’ You could hardly tell that he was Australian. ‘I had a feeling this piece was going to be nice. So I was planning to ask you to write something else for me.’ Soon, Alan was accepting a commission for a cover piece. Hong Kong as manufacturing base: the shift to quality. ‘Talk to a lot of people, Alan. Put a lot of work in. I want three thousand words, and I’ll pay seventy-five cents a word for this one.’

Alan, much made up by this, decided to speak to the receptionist on the way out. Hello, you’re very beautiful. You’re rather tall for a Chinese girl, aren’t you? I suppose marriage is out of the question? My God, he was a genius. ‘Hello, er, I wonder if you could tell me the best place to find a taxi around here.’

A white blouse opening in a narrow V. Hair a raven’s wing, iridescent black, falling straight and simple to her lovely shoulders. My God, this really was love. ‘Best place is in front of Fragrant Harbour Hotel. On the waterfront, you know?’

‘Won’t the hall porter be cross?’

‘You give him a dollar, he won’t be cross.’

Alan made a creditable attempt at a winning smile. ‘I’m still new here. Don’t know all the dodges.’

‘How long have you been in Hong Kong?’ The great conversational gambit of the territory.

‘Maybe six months.’

‘You like?’

‘Very good.’

And suddenly, her face was illuminated with delight – almost, Alan thought, with love.

‘Sophie, my dear, how beautiful you are looking today. Alan, what a pleasant surprise. Dean, I believe you are employing the finest journalist in Hong Kong, and I am quite certain that you have the most beautiful receptionist.’

The receptionist spoke one word. ‘André.’

André was standing by the reception desk, one hand in a pocket, with a man, severely rather than elegantly suited, who had the finicky-tough air of a Mormon proselytiser. ‘Dean, have you met Alan Fairs, the journalist? No? Alan, this is your publisher, Dean Holdsworth.’

‘Glad to know you, Alan,’ Dean said, in flawless American. ‘You’re doing the June portrait, right? Look forward to reading it.’ This was a very creditable feat of memory. He shook Alan’s hand with every appearance of warmth. ‘André, if I might have a further moment?’

‘By all means, Dean, by all means. Alan, if you care to wait, we might share a taxi.’

‘All right.’

André followed Dean into his office. Alan did not have to rack his brain for a new conversational gambit. Sophie was now ready, in fact eager, for conversation.

‘You know André?’ she asked.

‘Neighbour of mine.’

Her eyes grew a little bigger. Were they rounder than was usual for a Chinese girl? Or had he never looked quite as closely before? ‘You live on Tung Lung?’ she asked reverently.

‘Yes.’

‘Very beautiful.’

‘Yes.’ A beat later, he decided that he had missed an opportunity.

‘I like to live there one day.’

Alan could think of no rejoinder that did not indicate absolutely helpless desire. They talked a little of the ferry service, and whether or not the restaurant on the far side of the island, where Alan had eaten his Christmas lunch, was better than Ng’s. Then a door opened and jovial voices rang out in the corridor.

‘Well, André, all I can say now is have a good trip.’

‘Consider the target already met, Dean. Consider it obliterated.’

Dean continued to escort André to the door, evidently a mark of considerable favour. ‘Great, André. Just great. Send my regards to the Great Orient.’

‘I shall indeed. Sophie, thanks, as ever, for everything. Goodbye, Dean. I shall call you to touch base on arrival. I have all the documents. Goodbye.’ They shook hands, not without warmth, and Dean wished him good luck as he returned to his office.

‘Alan. Excellent. So good of you to wait. I shall buy you a drink. Not dead set on catching the six thirty, are you? Then perhaps I shall buy you two drinks.’

‘Excellent thought. Two Brewers?’

A slightly pained expression passed across André’s face. ‘I think not. The Harbourmaster’s Bar, do you know it? Rather a favourite spot of mine.’

André led the way out onto the crazy pavements of Causeway Bay. It was impossible to walk two abreast as the tall buildings simultaneously debouched their million inmates onto the streets. André led the way: the crowd seemed to part before him, only to reform itself in front of Alan. André did not check his pace for anyone, not even for the road, picking his way fastidiously through the lorries, trams, buses, taxis and private cars. A man who jay-walked through life. They passed the usual collection of street stalls, all selling clothes of remarkable newness and high quality; to each André gave an all-embracing glance that took in both merchandise and price. He was never off duty. He passed onto Lockhart Road, but to Alan’s surprise kept on, past this street of a thousand bars, ignoring the claims of a man selling fishballs from a vat of boiling oil to a small group of enthusiasts starved after two or three solid hours without food. Here Alan was able to move alongside. ‘Not in Lockhart Road, this place of yours?’

‘My dear old thing. No, it’s in the Fragrant Harbour Hotel.’

Alan at once felt his clothes, a fairly respectable outfit as recently as this morning, grow ancient and ragged about him. Jacketless in the sticky April warmth, a yellow shirt, rather too many buttons undone at the front, and the sleeves rolled past the elbows. No tie, of course, not even one in his bag. And this object, hanging from his shoulder and containing too many papers to yield to the zip, lacked the cool precision of André’s attaché case.

The Fragrant Harbour Hotel stood, as Sophie had justly pointed out, on the waterfront, a precipitous many-windowed cliff. A Sikh, bearded and turbaned, guarded the entrance in top boots and a species of guardsman’s jacket. He saluted André as they walked past him: ‘Good evening, sir.’

‘Good evening, Mr Singh, thank you so much.’

He led the way across the marbled lobby to the lifts. Alan, hit by the sudden chill of the air conditioning, rolled down his sleeves and did up a few buttons. The lift panel bore thirty-four buttons, plus a thirty-fifth labelled Harbourmaster’s Bar. This André hit, and they were fired courteously skyward while André gave a brief summary of the nature of Business PanAsia, its strengths and weaknesses, and the problems it created for itself by its refusal to countenance paid editorial. Then the doors slid open.

Thirty-five floors high, they seemed to have descended to the depths of the sea. The room was murky and green with mysterious enigmatic lights. Towards them gliding or swimming rather than walking the normal way, a woman, an angel fish, perhaps. Her face was painted with a beauty that was formal rather than erotic. Yes, there was a tank of fish, a huge tank, its denizens to be admired rather than eaten. ‘Good evening, Mr Standing.’

‘Good evening, Helen.’ She was clad in a wonderful way, a high mandarin collar on a floor-length dress of green silk. There was something odd about the garment but Alan couldn’t quite, as it were, put his finger on it. ‘And would you be so good as to take my bag? Thank you so much.’

‘Lilac will look after you, Mr Standing. Customary table?’ And she gave a sudden instruction, harsh after her honeyed English, to a woman who materialised beside her, smiling almost as beautifully as Sophie had been earlier. As Lilac stepped forward, Alan realised with a glorious start that her dress was split from floor to hip.

She led them to a table in the corner, by the floor-to-ceiling window from which they could see the harbour, Kowloon, the hills of the Nine Dragons beyond the buildings. Alan could see at least one thousand boats; a jet attempted to defy gravity jinking its way through the far buildings to touch down at Kai Tak. ‘I think in view of the occasion, I’ll have a Singapore Sling,’ André said. ‘I seriously advise you to do the same.’

Alan was quite definitely beginning to panic. Even a beer would be beyond his funds. This was hideous. He would have to run.

‘On me, my dear. On me. I’m celebrating, you see.’

‘Well. Thanks.’

André turned again to Lilac and gave the order, with a glittering exchange of smiles. He caught Alan looking, with rather provincial fascination, at the lower half of Lilac’s costume. ‘Did you know that the tailoring of a cheongsam is so complicated that they take a measurement from nipple to nipple?’

Alan was fractionally recovering his nerve. ‘I feel happier for knowing that,’ he said.

Lilac brought the drinks. She had to take extremely small steps in order not to fall over. Every stride threatened to expose the entire length of her, from sculpted ankle to journey’s end, and every dozen or so strides this actually happened, but for no more than a nanosecond: it took all Alan’s concentration to catch the moment as it flew. The drinks she brought were longish and pinkish, and tasted as if the barman had started at one end of the bar and worked his away along, pouring as he went.

‘Good,’ said André. ‘They look after one, don’t they?’

Alan looked down at the puny craft crisscrossing the harbour. ‘It’s rather like being taken to the high place by the devil and shown all the kingdoms of the world,’ he said. ‘By the way, André, what are we celebrating?’

‘Oh, I am going to do a spot of selling for Dean. Wants me to sell some advertising space to airlines, hotels and stuff for Business PanAsia, round up some specialist stuff for Cargo News and Asian Shipping. But he’s planning a Singapore special issue for the autumn, and I’m to try and get a few ads for that. The fact of the matter is that Dean is sending me to Singapore for a fortnight, and putting me up at the Great Orient, nice pub, and it’s all the most frightfully good news because I don’t expect it will take more than a week to get Dean’s stuff sorted out, and earn my commission. I’ve got some awfully good contacts there. So for the rest of the time – well, you know me, Alan. I can always find things to do.’

André started to expound on Singapore, and how it differed from Hong Kong and from KL and various other Asian cities. This became a dissertation on Southeast Asia.

Lilac brought more drinks in response to André’s languid summons. ‘Might pop over the causeway while I’m there. I know a rather nice girl in Johor Baharu. Might be time to get as far north as KL. Met some interesting people there, nothing came of it, but they said to look them up next time. But you see the principle, don’t you, Alan? Dean gives me a free flight and base, and, as it were, a guaranteed minimum for the trip. But my real profit won’t come from selling advertising space.’

‘Where then?’ Alan, feeling the ambush of the Singapore Sling, was moved to forthrightness.

‘I specialise, my dear, in omnifariousness. Chap in Denpasar once told me that. One more? And then perhaps some dinner? In the hotel? On me?’

They dined, then, in some splendour. Alan wore a tie for the occasion, for André produced a spare one from his attaché case. He retired to the gents to put it on: a Chinese ancient watched the knotting process with great concentration, as if he were to be asked questions about it afterwards. Alan joined André, who was already at the table and by now utterly magnificent.

‘Fish, yes, they do it rather well here. We are, as you note, not too far from the sea.’ He ordered sole véronique with a polished French accent and sent back the white wine as imperfectly chilled. Alan wondered rather incoherently if the ordering of the fish was to make possible the ordering of the white and its subsequent rejection.

‘Well, it’s in the blood, you see, as you can no doubt tell from the name, bloody silly name to have in Hong Kong, or anywhere else in Asia for that matter. I have to spell it exactly one hundred times per day. Girls can never say it in bed. I don’t think I have ever made love to a girl who called me by my name. I am always On-jay, or worse, On-lay.’

‘Karen calls you André. I’ve heard her.’

‘She does, bless her. It’s her chief attraction, really.’

André insisted on Armagnac with the coffee. ‘Did you ever meet Pearl? Nice girl, works in a travel agency. I rather think she was before your time. She used to come out and see me on Tung Lung now and then. There was something of a kerfuffle when Karen paid me a surprise visit.’ He started laughing a little. ‘On a clear day you can still hear the echo. Sophie’s a nice kid, isn’t she?’

‘Who? Oh, the receptionist at Business PanAsia. God yes, gorgeous.’

‘I quite agree. An ex of mine, as you may have guessed.’

‘Lucky fellow.’

André put his head to one side and regarded Alan kindly. ‘We really must get you fixed up with a nice Chinese girl. You won’t want to look at a Western woman after a bit.’ He called for the bill and settled it with a lordly flourish of the credit card. The Sikh doorman showed them into a taxi and received five dollars for doing so. André gave the driver hectoring instructions in Cantonese.

‘Oh God, is that the time?’

‘Certainly. Be calm. Allow nothing to trouble your mind. The ten thirty ferry is never less than ten minutes late.’ The taxi pulled up outside a small shop in Lockhart Road; André left the car. He returned a moment or so later carrying, inevitably, a pink carrier bag filled with beer.

‘Oh Jesus, we’ll have to spend the night in town.’

‘Not a bit of it. You worry too much. Fai-dee, fai-dee, aaa!’ This last to the driver, who fai-deed as best he could. They reached the ferry pier after a sick-making slalom along Con-naught Road. André negligently dropped a ten-dollar bill for the six-dollar ride, and strolled towards the ferry. Alan, heaving his bag to his shoulder and rescuing a sheaf of papers with a mad grab, scuttled after him. The gangplank was raised the instant they stepped on board the ferry. The time was ten forty-two.

‘See what I mean?’

‘Oh God.’

‘Have a beer.’

‘André, you are an appalling person.’ By this stage, Alan had begun to giggle foolishly. ‘I can’t begin to keep up with you. Not the beer. I mean, the chances you take.’

. ‘I take no chances, my dear. I take the trouble to learn the odds. There is a difference, you know.’ They reached their seat at the back of the ferry as the boat pulled away from the pier. They sat; opened their cans in unison.

‘Perhaps so. But I couldn’t do it.’

‘That, my dear, is why you are a journalist and I am a merchant venturer.’ They both laughed a good deal at this, but then André was suddenly and rather dramatically transfixed by seriousness. ‘Listen, Alan. Last year, I was down the tube for about thirty grand. Three companies were after me for money I no longer had – never did have, to tell the truth. I went to Bangkok, a few hours before the storm broke. Had five grand up front, in cash, from someone who wanted something I could get in Thailand. I did a deal – one deal. I was gone for a week. It was a rather sordid trip, actually, had to pay for my hotel, and thought I’d better keep my head down, so I stayed at the Malaysia – backpacker’s place, terrible old dump. Anyway, I was back in Hong Kong a week later with all debts paid and twenty grand to the good on top of that.’

‘Christ,’ Alan said respectfully. ‘A miracle.’

‘But it isn’t, you see. You tell me you’ve just written two thousand words on King.’

‘Very true. The business of love and his total faithfulness to his wife.’

‘Laid that one on you, did he? Didn’t tell you about shagging Chai, then?’

‘I thought she just came to clean up his flat.’

‘Oh, Alan. My dear Alan.’

‘Hong Kong will never return to China,’ Alan said, repeating King’s words in King’s voice. ‘You might as well expect the UK to have a female prime minister. These two things are simply impossible.’

André laughed at this impersonation. ‘But where was I? Ah yes. Well, I couldn’t write two thousand words about King or anybody else. But if you want two thousand bucks, then I’ll raise it in no time. Or lose it in no time, but it doesn’t really worry me, because I know I’ll be able to make it up some other way. It’s my experience that most people only have one talent. Yours is journalism. Mine is money.’

‘The other night you said the same thing, but that your one talent in life was sailing.’

André began to laugh again. ‘So it bloody well is. I can sail the arse off anyone.’

‘You’d be first in any capsizing race.’

‘I do regret that, Alan, I really do. But you have to get close to the wind, you know. I thought you’d like it.’

Alan winced at the memory. ‘It wasn’t the closeness to the wind I minded. It was the closeness to the water.’

‘Well again, Alan, as I say, it’s not about taking chances, it’s about knowing the odds. I don’t capsize in races, when I’m playing different percentages.’

‘Charles wouldn’t let you capsize in a race.’

‘He does take it seriously, doesn’t he? Bit of a sobersides when it comes to sailing, old Charles. But no, in a race, I like to win, and so does Charles. You can capsize at home any time you want.’

‘If there’s a moral in that, I lost it somewhere. Give me another beer.’

The ferry at last arrived at Tung Lung. Laughing, zigzagging a little, very happy with each other, they essayed the 176 steps. At one point, Alan fell up a few of them, but André hauled him to his feet.

‘Alan. Something to help you sleep?’

‘A wise precaution, André.’

No light shone from the house. They entered André’s flat, which always surprised Alan by its austerity. There was not a picture on the wall, save a single poster of a catamaran in full sail towing a water-skier. The only furniture was a set of folding tables and chairs from China Products. A ghetto blaster the size of a suitcase provided music when required, which was often. André disappeared into his bedroom, and reappeared with a plastic bag. Delving into its contents, he began to roll a joint. Pure grass, no mixing with tobacco.

‘Hey,’ said Alan. ‘It’s illegal, that stuff.’

‘What are laws?’

‘The crystallised prejudices of the masses.’

‘Karl Marx?’

‘Goldfinger, actually.’

‘I like it.’

‘Isn’t that stuff hard to get here?’

André did not reply, completing his work with great attention to the fine detail. He then lit the joint, bringing the flame to its tip three times to ensure a perfectly even burn. He drew twice before passing to Alan, and then spoke smokefully: ‘Not if you know what you are doing, my dear, like so many other things in life.’

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.