Isabella’s stomach in a way that surprised her. She thought back to her dream and felt oddly embarrassed. Music was playing in the sitting room ahead of them-The Fugees’ The Score — and a smell of garlic and rosemary wafted through from the kitchen.
“Wow. Something smells good.”
“You eat meat, right?”
Miles knew very well that Isabella ate meat. He had just wanted to appear casual.
“Of course.”
“Great, because I bought us some lamb. Is that gonna be OK?” He was not wearing socks or shoes, and the sight of his tanned feet padding down the corridor ahead of her added to the entirely artificial sense of homeliness and relaxation that Miles had hoped to create.
“Lamb’s wonderful. You’re very sweet to have cooked anything. I should have taken you out.” She paused at the edge of the sitting room. “Great flat, Miles.”
“You never been here before?” Another question to which he already knew the answer. “The American taxpayer can be pretty generous. You should check out the view.”
They now walked in different directions: Miles towards the open-plan kitchen, where he popped the cork on the Sancerre; Isabella towards the vast rectangular window at the northern end of the apartment. Spread out beneath her was the city at night, a brilliant wide shot of Hong Kong light and colour, every building from Sheung Wan to Causeway Bay illuminating the sky with a phosphorescent glow that framed the distant neon blur of Kowloon. She thought about all the girls that Miles must have lured to this place, the one-liners and seductions, and watched her own grin reflected in the glass.
“Pretty, huh?”
“It’s amazing. Did your painting arrive, by the way?”
“Sure,” he lied. “I’ve already got it hanging upstairs.”
The Sancerre was corked, which broke the ice. Miles swore and made a joke at the expense of the French which Isabella found funny, in spite of herself. It flattered her that he seemed slightly nervous and hesitant in these early moments, a side of his usually supremely confident personality that she had not experienced before. Was this just loyalty to Joe, or the uncertainty of a serial philanderer who did not know how to behave in the presence of a younger woman not visiting his flat solely for sex? Miles poured the wine down the sink-he didn’t want to appear cheap by corking it for a refund-and Isabella asked instead for a vodka and tonic. She was intrigued to watch him operate in his home environment, a domesticated male fetching ice from the freezer, switching CDs on the hi-fi, filling pans with water to boil vegetables on the stove. It somehow made him more human, more intriguing.
“I brought a notebook,” she said, because there was a danger that the atmosphere between them might quickly become flirtatious.
“Do you need me to ask you questions or can I just listen to you talk?” she asked.
“You want to listen to me talk, Izzy?” Miles seized on the opportunity to make another joke. “Works for me. Nothing I like more than the sound of my own voice.”
He sat beside her on the sofa, the weight of him, and they spoke in general terms about the film. What did she need to know? What was the purpose of the documentary? Isabella’s eyes wandered to Ladder of Years and The Accidental Tourist and she knew that Miles had placed them there to impress her. She mentioned that she had studied Brighton Rock at school. When Miles began to talk about the book, however, she found it difficult to concentrate on what he was saying. Her mind was suddenly scrambled by a nervous apprehension, the source of which she could not trace. Was it that she had long suspected Miles of harbouring feelings for her, feelings which he had been forced to suppress because of his responsibilities towards her boyfriend? Or was it possible that Miles felt nothing for her, that his soul had been so corrupted by a life of lies and easy sex that he was no longer capable of loving a woman? This last possibility made Isabella intensely sad, but it also intrigued her. She had had a glass of wine while getting dressed at home and wondered if she was already slightly drunk.
“So the triangle of that relationship is very interesting.”
“What?”
She had not been listening.
“Pinkie, Rose and Ida. The triangle. I thought that was incredibly powerful. It’s what really stuck with me about the book. The heat between them.”
Isabella took a sip of her vodka. It was already half finished. That was the danger of living in a humid climate; you drank alcohol like water. She looked at the window again because she needed somewhere to settle her eyes. An aeroplane was flying low over Victoria Harbour, piercing a vertical searchlight that shot up from the top of the Bank of China building like a column of fire.
“I should read it again,” she said, desperate to move away from talk of Catholic guilt and love triangles. She hoped, somehow, that Miles’s observations on Brighton Rock might move them seamlessly from a discussion of organized crime on the south coast of England to the Triads of Hong Kong. Instead, operating from a pre-rehearsed list of topics, he asked her endless questions about her life in Hong Kong, her past relationships, her jobs, a discussion that took them through a second vodka and tonic, into dinner, then three-quarters of the way down the bottle of Pinot Noir until they were eating pudding.
“So tell me about life at English boarding schools,” he said.
“What do you want to know?”
“Do the girls all sleep in the same dormitory?”
It was a typically flirtatious question. Miles had been grinning as he asked it and Isabella, by now drunk and relaxed, enjoyed playing the role of gatekeeper to his fantasies.
“Oh sure,” she told him. “And when it was hot we all slept naked and had pillow fights at the weekends.”
“Gardeners?” Miles asked immediately.
“Gardeners?” She was starting to laugh. “What do you mean?”
“Isn’t that what upper-class English girls do? Hump the gardener? Please don’t tell me that’s a lie, Izzy. I always had this image of you-what do you call it? — ‘rogering in the undergrowth.’ ”
Other stretches of the conversation were more sedate; Miles was careful to maintain a balance. How, for example, did Isabella find working for a French company? Were they respectful towards her? Did they seem to know what they were doing? Had television, he asked, pouring her another glass of wine, always been something that she had wanted to become involved in, or was it just an accident of her life in Hong Kong? For every joke or anecdote there was a subtle, intuitive observation about Isabella’s life. It must have been difficult, he said, to be separated from her mother in Dorset who, if he remembered correctly, had never remarried. Didn’t she also have a brother who lived in the States? Isabella was flattered that Miles should have remembered so much about her background. The only subject which remained uncovered was Joe himself; instead, he hovered over the evening like an invisible chaperon, determined to ruin their fun. Isabella concluded that Miles had not mentioned his name out of a deliberate sense of mischief, yet as the evening wore on and the wine began to take effect, she longed to speak about the frustrations of their relationship and even to open herself up to the possibility of desire. For all Miles’s bravado and roguery, he was a thoughtful, perceptive man and she thrilled to the energy of their flirtation. It was harmless, she told herself, but it had been bound to happen. In some strange way, they had been dancing around one another for years, even during the period when Isabella had been blissfully happy with Joe.
“Listen, we should talk about my documentary,” she said, suddenly aware that she was risking everything on their increasing closeness.
“Sure. Just tell me what you want to know.”
Miles was pouring boiling water into a cafetiere that he had used only once before.
“Anything,” Isabella said, taking out her notebook and pen. “There are only six people in Hong Kong who know less about Triads than I do and four of them are still in kindergarten. If you tell me that the average Triad is five foot six, listens to Barbra Streisand records and spends his weekends in Wolverhampton, I’ll believe you. The gaps in my knowledge are shaming.”
Miles was too busy moving to a mental lecture he had prepared to laugh at her joke. “Well, the term ‘Triad’ was coined by the British authorities here in Hong Kong to refer to a disparate group of secret societies that originally sprang up during the Qing dynasty to overthrow the emperor.” Isabella put her glass down and started writing. “Just about the only thing you can credit Chairman Mao with achieving in China is the eradication of opium abuse after 1949. Thirty million peasants may have died from starvation under communist rule, but at least they
