Joe lowered his gaze. He saw the battered gold wedding band on her finger. “Well, that’s not what I expected,” he said. Isabella spluttered out a laugh. “I had dinner with him in April. We bumped into each other on Huaihai. He never said anything?”
“Nothing,” Isabella replied.
It was possible, of course, that she was lying; after all, it would be easier to blame Miles than to admit that she had been deliberately avoiding the very confrontation that Joe had now engendered. Yet that wasn’t Isabella’s style. It never had been. She wasn’t a coward. She wasn’t a fake. She spoke her mind and called things as she saw them. Besides, why deny something so straightforward? She picked up a broad-brimmed sun hat from the grass and began walking towards the lake. There was a note of fatalism in her voice as she said, “Miles has been very busy. He’s away a lot.”
It sounded like a wife’s hollow excuse. Falling in step beside her, Joe could sense that Isabella barely possessed the energy to defend him. She knew instinctively that Miles had been trying to keep them apart. They both did. That was the obvious, embarrassing conclusion to be drawn. To save her further discomfort, Joe paid Isabella a compliment, saying that she looked exactly the same as she had done when he had last seen her eight years earlier.
“God. Is that how long it’s been?” The lovely cascade of her hair, the life in her voice, were returning to Joe like forgotten photographs. “Christ we’re getting old,” she said. “So is this an accident? Are you in Pudong on business?”
Joe had set himself only one rule for their reunion: that he would never again lie to Isabella Aubert. Already that rule was under scrutiny. It was too early in the conversation to reveal the true nature of his quest.
“Like I said, it’s a long story. Do you have time for a coffee?”
Isabella’s face suddenly contracted with worry, and she placed a hand on Joe’s arm. The contact was like a physical guarantee of her affection for him. Sensing her distress, Joe said, “Don’t worry, it’s nothing serious,” and if he had been more certain of Isabella’s feelings towards him, if there had not been so much history between them, so many doors to be reopened, he would have lifted her hand from his arm and held it, to reassure her. There still existed an extraordinary physical and emotional connection between them which he could sense as vividly as he could feel the morning sun burning in the sky. He was certain that Isabella could sense it too. There is a magic in first love; it never leaves you.
“There’s a cafe over there,” he said, pointing north towards the black glass structure of the Science and Technology Museum. He had been there once before, on a bored early weekend in Shanghai. “We could get breakfast and talk.”
“Let’s do that,” she said. “And I’m paying.”
They found an outdoor table set in a pseudo-futuristic courtyard overlooked by the dark polished curves of the museum. The humidity of mid-morning was kept at bay by a gentle breeze which ran free across the undeveloped marshlands of southern Pudong. Children were decanting from fat, gleaming buses. They played in the spray of a fountain, giggled as they waited in line.
“So are you married?” Isabella asked. “Have you got children? Are you still working for your secret bloody brotherhood?”
Eight years as the wife of an American spy appeared to have normalized her attitude to Joe’s chosen trade. She had grinned as she asked the list of questions and he had no hesitation in replying.
“I’m not married,” he said, adding quickly, “Not divorced, either,” because he saw what he interpreted as a look of confusion on Isabella’s face. “I don’t have any children. At least I didn’t last time I checked.”
“And the Foreign Office?”
Joe noted that there had been a little blink and swallow as she had absorbed the news that he was single. “Are we back here again?” he said. He could afford to risk the joke because there was no more pain between them. He stared at Isabella’s face, at the eyes he had kissed, the neck he had touched, and marvelled that their conversation was so effortless. “Actually I made a private vow to myself eight years ago that if we ever met again I wouldn’t lie to you about what I do for a living.”
“And yet here you are about to do exactly that.” She waved away her indiscretion. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have asked.” Their eyes met in a moment of quiet understanding. Joe could see that Isabella was now all too aware of the unique, private frustrations of the secret life.
“Can I say something about that?” she said suddenly.
“About what?”
“About the way I behaved in Hong Kong.” It was not yet ten o’clock, but she had plainly made the decision to clear her conscience as quickly as possible. “I was very hard on you.” She swept a strand of hair out of her eyes. “You didn’t deserve it. It took me a long time to realize that, and by then I was in Chengdu with Miles. I’m so sorry.” Joe tried to stall the confession, because he was shocked both by its candour and by the impact that Isabella’s words had on his heart. They had come too late, and yet they were all that he had longed to hear. “The truth is that I wasn’t really ready for what we had. I was too young. I used what I discovered about you as an excuse to end what we had between us.”
“Izzy…”
“No, please. Let me finish. For all I know it’ll be another eight years before I see you again and I’ve been wanting to say this for ages.” She lowered the cup of coffee she had been holding and placed it on the table in front of her. Joe suddenly glimpsed an extraordinary solitude in her eyes, as if there was no one in Shanghai to whom Isabella could speak as frankly and as passionately as she was now doing. “I wasn’t as kind as you thought I was,” she said. “You deserved better. I had a habit of pushing men away who were good to me. I did it with Anthony and I did it with you. It was heartless.”
“I lied to you,” Joe said, trying to protect her. “I should have been more honest from the start.”
“No. How could you have been?” She had thought it all through. She was trying to demonstrate her desire to mend their shared wound, as if they could not speak of anything else until the past had been laid to rest. “It was the nature of your job,” she said. “You couldn’t have done it if you were going around telling everybody the truth.”
“Perhaps,” Joe said. It occurred to him that there were other things, more damaging things, yet just as truthful, that Isabella might now have added. That Joe had been just a little bit too sensible, a little bit too buttoned up, a little bit too withdrawn and conservative for a girl of her background and character. A part of him had always known that Isabella had discovered his dark secret just at the point when she was beginning to tire of him. The timing was immaculate. Had he asked her to marry him, she might well have said no. These were less consoling truths and Isabella was being kind not to speak of them.
“And what about now?” he asked. He was trying to smile, trying to get her to relax and enjoy the morning. “Are you happy? Did it all work out the way you wanted it to?”
She stared across the blinding courtyard, the sun burning the concrete and glinting off the surface of the water. How much does a woman tell a man about the secrets in her heart? How much can a wife disclose about the failures of her marriage?
“Isn’t that why you’ve come?” she said.
Joe lit a cigarette. “I don’t understand.”
“To talk about Miles.”
He took the first smoke deep into his lungs and exhaled at the cloud-smothered sky. “It’s partly why I’ve come,” he conceded, though he could not imagine what Isabella knew.
“To talk about Linda?”
This stunned him. “You know about that?” he said, before he had a chance to consider the wisdom of betraying Miles.
There was silence.
“Izzy?” Joe experienced the extraordinary sensation that she had been waiting eight years to break her silence. He suddenly felt as though she regarded him as her closest friend in the world, and that he had ignored that friendship out of sheer spite.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. She took one of his cigarettes. She wasn’t going to break down or cry. That wasn’t her style. “It’s the lot of the expat wife, the tai tai. We make our beds, we lie in them.”
“I don’t understand.”
She lit the cigarette because he had forgotten to do it for her. “I mean that we come out here on six-figure
