The hum around her resumed. Claire continued walking. The old woman followed her for a few yards, then shambled off to find more promising customers.
Why not buy a tangerine from an old lady? Claire thought suddenly. Why not? What would happen? She couldn’t think why she had declined, as if her old English self, with its defences and prejudices, was dissolving in the foetid environment around her.
She turned, but the woman had already disappeared. She breathed deeply. The smells of the wet market entered her, intense and earthy. Around her, Hong Kong thrummed.
And then, suddenly, he was everywhere. She saw Will Truesdale waiting for the bus, at Kayamally’s, queuing outside the cinema. And though he never saw her, she always lowered her head, willing him not to notice. And then she’d glance up, to see if he had. He had a way of seeming completely contained within himself, even when he was in a crowd. He never looked around, never tapped his feet, never looked at his watch. It seemed he never saw her.
When she went for Locket’s lesson on Thursdays, she found herself looking for Will Truesdale. She heard the amahs laughing at his jokes in the kitchen, and she saw his jacket hanging in the hall, but his physical presence was elusive, as if he slipped in and out, avoiding her. She lingered at the end of her lesson, but she never saw him or the car.
Then they were at the beach the next weekend. She hardly knew how it had happened. She had come home. The phone rang. She picked it up.
‘I’ve a friend with one of those municipal beach huts,’ he said. ‘Would you like to go bathing?’ As if nothing had happened. As if she would know who it was by his voice.
‘Bathing,’ she said. ‘Where?’
‘On Big Wave Bay,’ he said. ‘It’s a perk for the locals but they don’t mind if we sign up as well. It’s a lottery system and you get a cottage for the season. A group of us usually get together to do it and swap weekends. It’s quite nice.’
She shut her eyes and saw him: Will, the difficult man, with his thin shoulders and grey eyes, his dark hair that fell untidily into his eyes, a man who stared at her so intently she felt quite transparent, a man who had just asked her to go bathing with him, unaccompanied. And she opened her eyes and said, yes, she would join him at the beach that Sunday.
Martin was away for three weeks and he had telegraphed from Shanghai to let her know he would be delayed for some time. He was on a tour of major Chinese cities to inspect their water facilities, which he expected to be very primitive.
And so, it was water. She wondered why she hadn’t thought of it before. How it rendered everything changed. She was a different woman in a different sphere. And Will! The way he plunged in, without a thought, his limp gone, dissolved into the current. He was a fish, darting here and there, swimming out into the horizon, further than she would ever go.
They were the only Europeans at the beach. The water was still warm from the summer, the air just starting to crisp. The hut was a simple structure with wooden cupboards and woven straw mats. The sand was fine, speckled with black, and small, withered leaves. Families picnicked around them, chattering loudly, small children scrambling messily about. He wanted to go out to the floating diving docks, some two hundred yards out. When she said she couldn’t, that it was too far, he said of course she could, and so she did. Out there, they climbed on to the rocking circle and sunned themselves like seals. He lay in the sun, eyes closed, as she watched surreptitiously, his ribs jutting out, his body pocked with unnamed scars of unknown origin. He wore short cotton trousers that were heavy with water. He wasn’t the type to wear a bathing suit.
It was hot, hot. The sun hid behind clouds for brief moments, then blazed out again. There was no cover. She wished for a cold drink, a tree for shade, both of which seemed impossibly far away on the shore.
‘We should have swum out with a Thermos of water,’ she said.
‘Next time,’ he said, eyes still shut.
‘Tell me your story,’ she said, after allowing herself a minute to digest what that meant. She was still vibrating with the strangeness of the situation – that she was at the beach with a man, intentions unknown.
‘I was born in Tasmania, of Scottish stock,’ he said mockingly, as if he were starting an autobiography. He sat up and crossed his legs as if he were a swami.
‘Why?’ she said.
‘My father was a missionary and we lived everywhere,’ he said. ‘I’ve only been to England once, and loathed it. My mother was a bit of a Bohemian and she had some money from her family so we were set in that way.’
Hong Kong was full of people like Will, wandering global voyagers who had never been to Piccadilly Circus. Claire had been just once, and there had been an old man in tattered clothes who would shout, ‘Fornicators!’ at everyone who passed.
‘And how did you learn?’ she asked.
‘School, you mean? Taught at home – good basic education of the Bible and the classics.’ He held up his hands so that they blocked the sky. ‘It’s all you need, really, isn’t it?’ His voice was sarcastic. ‘Solid background for life.’
‘So how did you come to be a chauffeur?’
‘A couple I knew before the war, I used to live in their flat while they were abroad. They came back after, and found me this job with their cousins. I didn’t know what else to do. No interest in going back to an office. And I’ve very few skills,’ he said. ‘But I do know Hong Kong like the back of my hand.’
‘And how did you end up in Hong Kong?’
‘My parents were in Africa, and then in India. When they retired to England, I stayed on as an assistant manager at a tea plantation, then got tired of that after three years and was on a ship to a variety of places and ended up in Hong Kong. Just picked it out of a hat, really. I came here, like everyone else, not knowing anything, and sort of took it from there.’ He stopped. ‘Of course, that’s the story I tell all the ladies.’
She couldn’t tell whether he was joking or not. ‘Oh?’
They were still lying on the too-sunny floating dock, waves rocking them, sky an ethereal blue above.
‘How was India?’ Claire asked.
‘Very complicated.’
‘And Partition?’
‘After I left, of course. They needed us out. But undoubtedly a mess in the interior. Trains carrying tens of thousands of corpses back and forth. Humans capable of doing the worst to each other.’
Claire winced. ‘Why?’ She had never heard anyone talk about historic events in such a personal way.
‘Who knows?’
‘And life there before all that?’
‘Rather incredible. We’d carved out quite a world for ourselves, you know. Society’s rather limited, of course. Women – our women – were in short supply.’
‘You never
