now, in that long, hot, maddening summer of 1995, Great Britain was timidly trying to enforce the Joint Declaration by holding the first fully democratic elections for the Legislative Council, and China had announced that she would destroy the new Council when she took over, Joint Declaration or no. There is no democratic nonsense in the paradise of the People’s Republic of China and there would be none in the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong: there would be no independent judiciary and no freedom of the press either, Basic Law or no Basic Law, United Nations or no United Nations.
It was a bad time for Hong Kong, that long hot summer of 1995. Shall I go or shall I stay?
It was a bad summer for Alistair Hargreave, although it had nothing to do with China’s treachery. Within a week of being shot by Elizabeth he was back at work, showing a brave face, but he was very embarrassed. Lord, he hated the solicitude, the polite circumlocution, he hated people feeling sorry for him: most of them believed that Liz had shot him deliberately, that he had come by the lipstick the usual way. He went to work early, came home late and did more work with the help of whisky. He declined all social invitations. Occasionally he had to meet Jake McAdam or Max or Bernie Champion for a drink, and even those encounters were embarrassing: these guys were his closest friends and expected him to open up to them, but Hargreave did not want to open up to anybody, he wanted to turn his face to the wall. As they said, there were plenty of women out there who would be pleased with his attentions, but he could not bring himself to go through the bullshit involved; he would feel a fraud. And, oh yes, he missed Elizabeth, even though he knew the marriage was a certifiable failure now. Sometimes, in the long hot nights in the empty apartment he considered taking some leave and flying to California to see if they could try again: but in the cold light of hungover dawn he knew it couldn’t work. Finally, towards the end of that long bad summer he decided what to do: pull himself together, stop feeling sorry for himself, take early retirement after he had had his next annual leave and get the hell out of this bloody embarrassing town whether he could afford it or not, and start life anew somewhere. He felt better after he had made that decision. Then the letter from her Californian lawyers arrived.
It was the usual hostile stuff that lawyers prefer, advising him that they were instructed by Elizabeth Amelia Hargreave to institute divorce proceedings against him in the Supreme Court of Hong Kong, reminding him that in terms of the law of California, where the marriage was solemnized, the said Elizabeth Hargreave was entitled to half the matrimonial assets. The grounds for divorce were his ‘mental cruelty’, his ‘persistent refusal to lead a normal social life’, his ‘unnecessary dedication to work at the expense of his home life’, his ‘excessive drinking and gambling’, his ‘embarrassing attentions to other women’, his ‘unreasonable withholding of conjugal rights’ and his ‘mediocre performance of same’. No mention of her shooting him. Fuller particulars of his cruelty would be provided in the petition that would be served on him shortly: meanwhile it would expedite matters and reduce expenses if he would indicate whether he intended to contest the action.
Lord, it hurt him. And mortified him. But no way would he contest it – Unreasonable withholding of conjugal rights and his mediocre performance of same … No way could he wash his dirty linen in public; no way was he going to stand in the witness box and argue about any of it, let alone his lousy sexual performance. Anything rather than that – let Elizabeth take him to the cleaners, let the divorce slip quietly through undefended, just let the earth swallow him up, let him resign his post immediately, fold his tents and steal out of this bloody awful town.
That letter arrived on a hot Saturday at the end of that long, tormenting summer, six weeks after Hargreave came out of hospital. He had intended venturing out socially for the first time since the shooting incident, and had arranged to meet Bernie Champion at the horse races in Happy Valley, the first meeting of the season: but the letter changed that. He could not face his friends with that letter ringing in his ears, nor the yacht club crowd; but neither could he face the empty apartment. So that left only one place to go, to get the hell out of himself, out of this embarrassing town: Macao.
And so it was that Alistair Hargreave, on impulse, took a taxi down to the hydrofoil jetty and boarded a vessel to the Portuguese colony of Macao, forty miles away, on the other side of the River Pearl: and his life took a very serious turn.
Many events in life are mere coincidences, in that something happens only because something else has just happened to happen. Had the lawyer’s letter not arrived that very day Hargreave would have gone to the races in Happy Valley, not to Macao, and he would not have made a fistful of money by betting recklessly on greyhound races – he knew nothing about greyhounds and didn’t bet on animals whose form he had not studied. Had that letter not arrived that Saturday he would not have got drunk in the process of making a fistful of silly money and he would not have gone on to the clamorous floating casino to blow it. Hargreave, being a cautious, serious gambler, believed in quitting when he was ahead, and furthermore he eschewed games of pure chance. Had he not gone to the casino he would not have found himself throwing silly dice at the crap table, winning more money, and standing next to the beautiful Olga Romalova. Had the letter from Elizabeth’s lawyer not arrived that very Saturday, had Hargreave gone to Macao the following weekend to drown his sorrows, even if he had ended up at the very same floating casino, he would not have met Olga Romalova, for her work permit expired that week and she would have returned to Russia. Had he not been winning silly money, the beautiful Olga would not have followed his bets, jumping up and down in excitement and planting a big fragrant kiss on his cheek. Had she not done that he would not have rubbed the dice against her for luck and felt her magnificent femininity as she hugged him in delight when he won yet again, he would not have been emboldened to invite her for a drink. Had he not done that, his life would have been very different.
Despite all the whisky inside him Hargreave was surprised that she accepted: he had presumed that elsewhere in the clamorous casino was a husband or a boyfriend about to reclaim her. When, at the noisy bar, she looked into his eyes and said she was totally unattached, Hargreave thought it was his lucky day. What a beautiful, magnificent girl … So when he invited her to dinner, thinking that beat-up Alistair Hargreave had made a conquest, her reply disappointed him greatly.
‘Thank you, that would be very nice, but I am a singer at a night-club so we must first go there so you can arrange to take me out.’
Bitterly disappointed, was Hargreave. A prostitute – what kind of night-club singer can you ‘arrange’ to take out? So it wasn’t his lucky night – it wasn’t true love after all. A prostitute, a smashing girl like this … But night-clubs, and prostitutes, were simply not Hargreave’s scene – he had not been to bed with a bar-girl in twenty years. So he mumbled an excuse and watched her walk away to work with regret.
It was watching her walk away that did it: those long golden legs, her silk dress sliding over her beautiful buttocks, her tumult of blonde hair down her back, the dazzling smile and cheery wave she threw over her shoulder: she was pure sexuality. If he had not watched her walk away, if he had shrugged off his alcoholic disappointment and gone back to the crap table, his life would have been very different: but for the next hour, while he drank another row of whiskies midst the Chinese clamour, that image of her sexuality steamed in his mind. Maybe she really was a singer, not a prostitute? Maybe arranging to take her out meant nothing more than advising the manager she was going to be absent for a while, perhaps it simply meant rescheduling her performance? And when he finally scraped together his drunken resolve and set out into the teeming Macao waterfront to look for her, coincidence continued to play a vital part, for he did not know which night-club she worked in. He could have wasted hours looking in the Troubadour or the China Nite or the Pearl, and given up: but he went first to the Heavenly Tranquillity because it was a well-known place he remembered hearing about over the years. And if he had been even five minutes later he would not have found her, because she was a very popular prostitute.
‘Hullo, Alistair,’ she murmured behind him as soon as he had sat down at the crowded bar in the glittery tourist joint, ‘so am I very
