acquire it locally or have pieces shipped from England for the public buildings – important paintings and statues and things like that. Hong Kong’s is very impressive, apparently, and he’s very worried about what will happen once war comes.’ She makes a face. ‘Also a bigot.’
She searches the room for others and her eyes narrow. ‘There’s my other cousin – or cousin by marriage.’ She points out a stocky Chinese man in a double-breasted suit. ‘Victor Chen. He thinks he’s very important indeed. But I just find him tedious. He’s married to my cousin, Melody, who used to be nice until she met him.’ She pauses. ‘Now she’s …’ Her voice trails off.
‘Well, here you are,’ she says, ‘and what a gossip I’m being,’ and drags him to the front where she has claimed the two best seats. They watch the races. She wins a thousand dollars and shrieks with pleasure. She insists on giving it all away, to the waiters, to the lavatory attendant, to a little girl they pass on the way out. ‘Really,’ she says disapprovingly, ‘this is no place for children, don’t you think?’ Later she tells him she practically grew up at the track.
Her real name is Prudence. Trudy came later, when it was apparent that her given name was wholly unsuitable for the little sprite who terrorized her amahs and charmed all the waiters into bringing her forbidden fizzy drinks and sugar lumps.
‘You can call me Prudence, though,’ she says. Her long arms are draped round his shoulders and her jasmine scent is overwhelming him.
‘I think I won’t,’ he says.
‘I’m terribly strong,’ she whispers. ‘I hope I don’t destroy you.’
He laughs. ‘Don’t worry about that,’ he says. But, later, he wonders.
They spend most weekends at her father’s large house in Shek-O, where wizened servants bring them buckets of ice and lemonade, which they mix with Plymouth gin, and plates of salty shrimp crackers. Trudy lies in the sun with an enormous floppy hat saying she thinks tans are vulgar, no matter what that Coco Chanel says. ‘But I do so enjoy the feel of the sun on me,’ she says, reaching for a kiss.
The Liangs’ house is spread out on a promontory where it overlooks a placid sea. They keep chickens for fresh eggs – far away, of course, because of the odour – and a slightly fraying but still belligerent peacock roams the grounds, asserting himself to any intruders, except the gardener’s Great Dane, with whom it has a mutual treaty. Trudy’s father is never there; mostly he is in Macau where he is said to have the largest house on the Praia Grande and a Chinese mistress. Why he doesn’t marry her, nobody knows. Trudy’s mother disappeared when she was eight – a famous case that is still unsolved. The last anyone saw of her, she was stepping into a car outside the Gloucester Hotel. This is what he likes most about Trudy. With so many questions in her life, she never asks about his.
Trudy has a body like a child’s – all slim hips and tiny feet. She is flat as a board, her breasts not even buds. Her arms are as slender as her wrists, her hair a sleek, smoky brown, her eyes wide and Western, with the lid-fold. She wears form-fitting sheaths, sometimes the qipao, slim tunics, narrow trousers, always flat silk slippers. She wears gold or brown lipstick, wears her hair shoulder-length, straight, and has black, kohl-lined eyes. She looks nothing like any of the other women at events – with their blowsy, flowing, floral skirts, carefully permanent-waved hair, red lipstick. She hates compliments – when people tell her she’s beautiful, she says instantly, ‘But I have a moustache!’ And she does, a faint golden one you can see only in the sun. She is always in the papers although, she explains, that’s more because of her father than because she is beautiful. ‘Hong Kong is very practical in that way,’ she says. ‘Wealth can make a woman beautiful.’ She is often the only Chinese at a party, although she says she’s not really Chinese – she’s not really anything, she says. She’s everything, invited everywhere. Cercle Sportif Français, the American Country Club, the Deutsche Garten Club, she is welcome, an honorary member of everything.
Her best friend is her second cousin Dommie, Dominick Wong, the man from the races. They meet every Sunday night for dinner at the Gripps, and gossip over what transpired at the parties over the weekend. They grew up together. Her father and his mother are cousins. Will is starting to see that everyone in Hong Kong is related in one way or another – everyone who matters, that is. Victor Chen, Trudy’s other cousin, is always in the papers for his business dealings, or he and his wife, Melody, are smiling out from photographs in the society pages.
Dominick is a fine-chiselled boy-man, a bit effeminate, with a long string of lissome, dissatisfied girlfriends. Will is never invited to Trudy’s dinners with Dommie. ‘Don’t be cross. You wouldn’t have fun,’ she says, trailing a cool finger over his cheek. ‘We chatter away in Shanghainese and it would be so tedious to have to explain everything to you. And Dommie’s just about a girl anyway.’
‘I don’t want to go,’ he says, trying to keep his dignity.
‘Of course you don’t, darling.’ She laughs. She pulls him close. ‘I’ll tell you a secret.’
‘What?’ Her jasmine smell brings to mind the waxy yellow flower, her skin as smooth, as impermeable.
‘Dommie was born with eleven fingers. Six on the left hand. His family had it removed when he was a baby, but it keeps growing back! Isn’t that the most extraordinary thing? I tell him it’s the devil inside. You can keep pruning it, but it’ll always come back,’ she whispers. ‘Don’t tell a soul. You’re the first person I’ve ever told! And Dominick would have my head if he knew! He’s quite ashamed of it!’
Hong Kong is a village. At the RAF ball, Dr Richards was found in the linen room at the Gloucester with a chambermaid; at the Sewells’ dinner party, Blanca Morehouse had too much to drink and started to take off her blouse – you know about her past, don’t you? Trudy, his very opinionated and biased guide to society, finds the English stuffy, the Americans tiresomely earnest, the French boring and self-satisfied, the Japanese horrible. He wonders aloud how she can stand him. ‘Well, you’re a bit of a mongrel,’ she says. ‘You don’t belong anywhere, just like me.’
He had arrived in Hong Kong with just a letter of introduction to an old family friend, and has found himself defined, before he has done anything to define himself, by a chance meeting with a woman who asks nothing of him except to be with her.
People talk about Trudy all the time – she is always scandalizing someone or other. They talk about her in front of him, to him, as if daring him to say something. He never gives anything away. She came down from Shanghai, where she spent her early twenties in Noël Coward’s old suite at the Cathay, and threw lavish parties on the roof terrace. She is rumoured to have fled an affair there, an affair with a top gangster who became obsessed with her; she is rumoured to have spent far too much time in the casinos, rumoured to have friends who are singsong girls, rumoured to have sold herself for a night, rumoured to be an opium addict. She is a lesbian. She is a radical. She assures him that almost none of these rumours are true. She says Shanghai is the place to be, that Hong Kong is dreadfully suburban. She speaks fluent Shanghainese, Cantonese, Mandarin, English, conversational French and a smattering of Portuguese.
In Shanghai, she says, the day starts at four in the afternoon with tea, then drinks at the Cathay or someone’s party, then dinner of hairy crab and rice wine if you’re inclined to the local, then more drinks and dancing, and you go and go, the night is so long, until it’s time for breakfast – eggs and fried tomatoes at the Del Monte. Then you sleep until three, have noodles in broth for the hangover, and get dressed for another
