“How else do you like being told that you’re beautiful?”
This was too much. Isabella felt the force of Miles’s desire and it flooded her, but knew that she had no choice but to stop him overstepping the mark. Their time would come. “It was lovely to see you, Miles,” she said, and in an instant she was poised and elegant and British. “Thank you so much for all your help.” Every word closed him out. They stumbled, off-balance, into a brief cheek kiss. “I’ve got amazing notes,” she said. “The guys are going to love me.”
The driver of the cab opened the back door of the vehicle using the automatic lever beside his seat. It swung open quickly on its hinge, almost knocking Isabella over.
“Hey, buddy!”
“It’s all right.” Isabella defused the situation by leaning into the taxi and showing the driver that she was unhurt. Then she climbed inside and wound down the window.
“What are you doing for the handover?”
“Parties all over town,” he said.
“Want to get together?” Isabella did not want to leave him with the feeling that she had rejected him, but the invitation was intended to imply that she would be with Joe. What other choice did she have?
“Sure. It’d be great to hook up with you guys.” Miles recognized that wherever Joe and Isabella ended up for wui gwai, Billy Chen would have to follow. It was useful to know their plans. “I have to go to a dinner at the American Chamber of Commerce on the 28th. Otherwise I’m pretty much free.”
“Well, there’s a big party in Lan Kwai Fong on the night of the 29th. Let’s go to that.”
“Good.”
The cab was sliding down the hill as Isabella leaned out of the window, smiling as she looked up at the low night sky. “It’ll probably rain,” she said, leaving Miles with a memory of her curled dark hair, those eyes that tricked and lured him. “It’ll probably rain.”
23
Which, of course, famously, it did.
And not just any old rain. A monsoon that made the red dye in Lance Corporal Angus Anderson’s Black Watch hackle run pink like a child’s watercolour as he marched in the gala parade. Rain that soaked the crisp white tunic of the lone bugler who played the “Last Post” as the standard was lowered over Government House for the final time. Rain that tried to drown out every solemn, stubborn word of Prince Charles’s speech to the “appalling old Chinese waxworks” at HMS Tamar. And rain that stained the shoulders of Governor Christopher Francis Patten’s already crumpled blue suit as he aimed one final shot across China’s bows.
“As British administration ends, we are, I believe, entitled to say that our own nation’s contribution here was to provide the scaffolding that enabled the people of Hong Kong to ascend,” he said. Huddled under complimentary umbrellas beneath a lightless, granite sky, 9,00 °Chinese and expatriate spectators looked on. “This is a Chinese city, a very Chinese city, with British characteristics. No dependent territory has been left more prosperous, none with such a rich texture and fabric of civil society. Now Hong Kong people are to run Hong Kong. That is the promise. And that is the unshakeable destiny.”
Watching the live broadcast on television from a suite in the American consulate, Miles Coolidge turned to Dave Boyle of the Visa Section and said, “In other words, Beijing can go fuck itself.”
“One country, two systems,” Boyle replied.
“Exactly.”
Miles watched as Patten reluctantly returned to the dais to accept the thunderous applause of his most loyal subjects.
“You know that can’t be easy,” he said.
“What can’t?”
“Clapping. Most of the people out there are holding umbrellas. You gotta really commit if you want to clap while you’re holding an umbrella.”
In common with about three-quarters of the international community in Hong Kong, Boyle had been drunk for the better part of five days. Yet the character of Patten’s conduct in these moments triggered something in his melancholy soul. When the governor returned to his seat and briefly bowed his head, as if holding back tears and searching for renewed strength within himself to cope with the magnitude of the occasion, the man from the Visa Section choked up.
“When a great man leaves, the heavens open,” he said, as the pitiless rain sliced across the parade ground. A boozy sleeplessness formed a knot in his Adam’s apple.
“What’s that?”
“A Chinese proverb,” Boyle replied.
In different circumstances, Miles would have poured scorn on this. You wanna hear another Chinese proverb? It takes many days of rain to wash away 150 years of shame. But he thought better of it. Guys in the Visa Section weren’t worth the trouble. Instead he said, “So you’re a fan of Fat Pang, are you?”
“Fat Pang” was the affectionate nickname that Patten had been given by the people of Hong Kong who, over a period of five years, had noted his fondness for Cantonese food, and for custard tarts in particular.
“He did his best,” Boyle replied.
Less than a kilometre away, David Waterfield raised his own silent toast to the waterlogged sunset of the British Empire and squeezed his wife’s hand. They had gathered at the Hong Kong Club on Chater Road to see out the final hours of colonial rule at a black-tie event attended by several hundred of the island’s business and diplomatic elite. When the post- Tamar fireworks began to explode over Victoria Harbour at around 8:30 p.m. there was a brief moment of panic when the glass walls of the club became so thick with condensation that a waiter had to be dispatched to the top of a ladder to wipe them clean. Thereafter, as the night sky erupted in umbrellas of light and fire, the assembled guests were afforded a clear view of proceedings.
“Beautiful,” Waterfield muttered. “Beautiful. God we do this sort of thing well.” Then he realized that somebody was missing. “Have you seen Joe Lennox at all this evening?” he asked his wife.
“No, darling” she replied. “Have you?”
The Waterfields had turned down the most sought-after and prestigious invitation of 30 June, the official handover dinner at the newly completed Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. Kenneth Lenan, on the other hand, had lobbied long and hard for his place at table. Waterfield’s number two believed that it was his right to break bread with the great and the good, to exchange knowing glances with Douglas Hurd and Sir Geoffrey Howe, to get a decent look at the all-new, all-smiling Tony Blair, and to witness Baroness Thatcher in the misery of her perpetual retirement. For some reason the menu for the event had been one of the most closely guarded secrets in the colony, but as Lenan chewed on his flavourless smoked salmon and sawed into a stuffed breast of chicken, he reflected that he could have eaten better at the airport. His suit was wet through from the celebrations at HMS Tamar and he was intensely bored by the property developer making conversation to his left. All anybody could talk about was the weather. Wasn’t it symbolic? Wasn’t it just a disaster? The only disaster, he reckoned, was that he had been forced to stand for over an hour in the shivering, air-conditioned hall while an international array of bored, exhausted VIPs had gradually made their way into dinner. The champagne had been over-chilled and, several times, the recently completed roof had dripped water onto his head.
Sovereignty was officially transferred at midnight in a ceremony at the Convention Centre which felt sterile and anti-climactic. The Union Jack came down, the flag of China went up, and then the international array of bored, exhausted VIPs made their way back to their $10,000-a-night suites at the Mandarin Oriental. Twelve hundred miles away, in Tiananmen Square, a specially invited crowd of the Party faithful consigned 150 years of shame and humiliation at the hands of the British to the dustbin of history, celebrating the safe return of their beloved Hong Kong with a fireworks display that shook the foundations of the Forbidden City. Meanwhile, the Royal Yacht Britannia slipped her moorings in Central and embarked on a final journey home, heading eastward through the Lei Yue Mun gap bearing a heavy cargo of grieving royals and weeping Patten daughters. The governor himself gave a
