The Piano Teacher

She took off her jacket and put on a pot of water to boil. ‘I was at the Chens’ house today,’ she said. ‘Locket’s parents asked me to stay for a drink.’

‘Victor Chen, is it?’ he asked, impressed. ‘He’s rather a big deal here.’

‘I gathered,’ she said. ‘He was quite something. Not at all like a Chinaman.’

‘You shouldn’t use that word, Claire,’ Martin said. ‘It’s very old-fashioned and a bit insulting.’

Claire coloured. ‘I’ve just never …’ She trailed off. ‘I’ve never seen Chinese people like the Chens.’

‘You are in Hong Kong,’ Martin said, not unkindly. ‘There are all types of Chinese.’

‘Where is the amah?’ she asked, wanting to change the subject.

Yu Ling came from the back when Claire called. ‘Can you help with dinner?’ Claire said. ‘I bought some meat at the market.’

Yu Ling looked at her impassively. She had a way of making Claire feel uncomfortable, but she couldn’t bring herself to sack her. She wondered how the other wives did it – they appeared to handle their servants with an easy aplomb that seemed unfamiliar and unattainable to Claire. Some even joked with them and treated them like family members, but she’d heard that was more the American influence. Her friend Cecilia had her amah brush her hair for her before she went to bed, while she sat at her dressing-table and put on cold cream.

Claire handed Yu Ling the meat she had bought on the way home. Then she went to lie down on the bed with a cold compress over her eyes. How had she got here, to this small flat on the other side of the world? She remembered her quiet childhood in Croydon, an only child sitting at her mother’s side while she mended clothes, listening to her talk. Her mother had been bitter at what life had given her, a hand-to-mouth existence, especially after the war, and her father drank too much, perhaps because of it. Claire had never imagined life being much more than that. But marrying Martin had changed it all.

But this was the thing: she herself had changed in Hong Kong. Something about the tropical climate had ripened her appearance, brought everything into harmony. Where the other English women looked as if they were about to wilt in the heat, she thrived, like a hothouse flower. Her hair had lightened in the tropical sun until it was veritably gold. She perspired lightly so that her skin looked dewy, not drenched. She had lost weight so that her body was compact, and her eyes sparkled, cornflower blue. Martin had remarked on it, how the heat seemed to suit her. When she was at the Gripps or at a dinner party, she saw that men looked at her longer than necessary, came over to talk to her, let their hands linger on her back. She was learning how to speak to people at parties, order in a restaurant with confidence. She felt as if she were finally becoming a woman, not the girl she had been when she had left England. She felt as if she were a woman coming into her own.

And then the next week, after Locket’s lesson, the porcelain rabbit had fallen into her handbag.

The week after, the phone rang and Locket leaped up to answer it, eager for any excuse to stop mangling the prelude she had been playing, and while she had been chattering away to a schoolmate, Claire saw a silk scarf lying on a chair. It was a beautiful, printed scarf, the kind women tied around their necks. She put it into her bag. A wonderful sense of calm came over her. And when Locket returned, with only a mumbled, ‘Sorry, Mrs Pendleton,’ Claire smiled instead of giving the little girl a piece of her mind.

When she got home, she went into the bedroom, locked the door and pulled out the scarf. It was an Hermès scarf, from Paris, and had pictures of zebras and lions in vivid oranges and browns. She practised tying it around her neck, and over her head, like an adventurous heiress on safari. She felt very glamorous.

The next month, after a conversation in which Mrs Chen told her she sent all her fine washing to Singapore because ‘the girls here don’t know how to do it properly and, of course, that means I have to have triple the amount of linens, what a bother’, Claire found herself walking out with two of those wonderful Irish napkins in her skirt pocket. She had Yu Ling handwash and iron them so that she and Martin could use them with dinner.

She pocketed three French cloisonné turtles after Locket had abruptly gone to the bathroom – as if the child couldn’t take care of nature’s business before Claire arrived! A pair of sterling silver salt and pepper shakers found their way into her bag as she was passing through the dining room, and an exquisite Murano perfume bottle left out in the sitting room, as if Melody Chen had dashed some scent on as she was breezing her way through the foyer on her way to a gala event, was discreetly tucked into Claire’s skirt pocket.

Another afternoon she was leaving when she heard Victor Chen in his study. He was talking loudly into the telephone and had left his door slightly ajar.

‘It’s the bloody British,’ he said, before lapsing into Cantonese. Then, ‘Can’t let them,’ and then something incomprehensible, which sounded very much like swearing. ‘They want to create unrest, digging up skeletons that should be left buried, and all for their own purposes. The Crown Collection didn’t belong to them in the first place. It’s all our history, our artefacts, that they just took for their own. How’d they have liked it if Chinese explorers had come to their country years ago and made off with all their treasures? It’s outrageous. Downing Street’s behind all of this, I can assure you. There’s no need for this right now.’ He was very agitated, and Claire found herself waiting outside, breath held, to see if she couldn’t hear anything more. She stood there until Pai appeared and looked at her questioningly. She pretended she had been studying the painting in the hallway, but she could feel Pai’s eyes on her as she walked towards the door. She let herself out and went home.

Two weeks later, when Claire went for her lesson, she found Pai gone and a new girl opening the door.

‘This is Su Mei,’ Locket told her when they entered the room. ‘She’s from China, from a farm. She just arrived. Do you want something to drink?’

The new girl was small and dark, and would have been pretty if it hadn’t been for a large black birthmark on her right cheek. She never looked up from the floor.

‘Her family didn’t want her because the mark on her face would make her hard to marry off. It’s supposedly very bad luck.’

‘Did your mother tell you that?’ Claire asked.

‘Yes,’ Locket said. She hesitated. ‘Well, I heard her say it on the telephone, and she said she got her very cheap because of it. Su Mei doesn’t know anything! She tried to go to the bathroom in the bushes outside and Ah Wing beat her and told her she was like an animal. She’s never used a tap before or had running water!’

‘I’d like a bitter lemon, please,’ Claire said, wanting to change the subject.

Locket spoke to the girl quickly. She left the room silently.

‘Pai was stealing from us,’ Locket said, eyes wide with the scandal. ‘So Mummy had to let her go. Pai cried and cried, and then she beat the floor with her fists. Mummy said she was hysterical and slapped her face to stop her crying. They had to get Mr Wong to carry Pai out. He put her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes and she was hitting his back with her fists.’

‘Oh!’ Claire said, before she could stifle the cry.

Locket looked at her curiously. ‘Mummy says all servants steal.’

‘Does she now?’ Claire said. ‘How terrible. But you know, Locket, I’m not sure that’s true.’ She remembered the way Pai had looked at her when she came upon her in the hallway and her chest felt tight.

‘Where did she go?’ she asked Locket.

‘No idea,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Good riddance I say.’

Claire looked at the placid face of the girl, unruffled by conscience.

‘There must be shelters or places for people like her.’ Claire’s voice quivered. ‘She’s not on the street, is she? Does she have family in Hong Kong?’

‘Haven’t a clue.’

‘How can you not know? She lived with you!’

‘She was a maid, Mrs Pendleton.’ Locket looked at her curiously. ‘Do you know anything about your servants?’

Claire was shamed into silence. The blood rose in her cheeks. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I suppose that’s enough of that. Did you practise the scales?’

Locket pounded on the piano keys as Claire looked hard at the girl’s chubby fingers, trying not to blink so that the tears would not fall.

June 1941

It begins like that. Her lilting laugh at a consular party. A spilled drink. A wet dress and a handkerchief hastily proffered. She is a sleek greyhound among the others – plump, braying women of a certain class. He doesn’t want to meet her – he is suspicious of her kind, all chiffon and champagne, nothing underneath, but she has knocked his drink over her silk shift (‘There I go again,’ she says. ‘I’m the clumsiest person in all Hong Kong’), and then commandeers him to escort her to the bathroom where she dabs at herself while peppering him with questions.

She is famous, born of a well-known couple, the mother a Portuguese beauty, the father a Shanghai millionaire with fortunes in trading and money lending.

‘Finally, someone new! We can tell right away, you know. I’ve been stuck with those old bags for ages. We’re very good at sniffing out new blood since the community is so wretchedly small and we’re all so dreadfully sick of each other. We practically wait at the docks to drag the new people off the ships. Just arrived, yes? Have you a job yet?’ she asks, having sat him on the rim of the bath while she reapplies her lipstick. ‘Is it for fun or funds?’

‘I’m at Asiatic Petrol,’ he says, wary of being cast as the amusing newcomer. ‘And it’s most certainly for funds.’ Although that’s not the truth. A mother with money.

‘How delightful!’ she says. ‘I’m so sick of meeting all these stuffy people. They don’t have the slightest knowledge or ambition.’

‘Those without expectations have been known to lack both of those qualities,’ he says.

‘Aren’t you a grumpy grump?’ she says. ‘But stupidity is much more forgivable in the poor, don’t you think?’ She pauses, as if to let him think about that. ‘Your name? And how do you know the Trotters?’

‘I’m Will Truesdale, and I play cricket with Hugh. He knows some of my family, on my mother’s side,’ he says. ‘I’m new to Hong Kong and he’s been very decent to me.’

‘Hmm,’ she says. ‘I’ve known Hugh for a decade and I’ve never ever thought of him as decent. And do you like Hong Kong?’

‘It’ll do for now,’ he says. ‘I came off the ship, decided to stay, rustled up something to do in the meantime. Seems pleasant enough here.’

‘An adventurer, how fascinating,’ she says, without the slightest bit of interest. Then she snaps her evening bag shut, takes his wrist firmly and waltzes – there is no other word, music seems to accompany her – out of the bathroom.

Conscious of being steered round the room like a pet poodle, her diversion of the moment, he excuses himself to go smoke in the garden. But peace is not to be his. She finds him out there, has him light her cigarette and leans confidentially towards him. ‘Tell me,’ she says. ‘Why do your women get so fat after marriage? If I were an Englishman I’d be quite put out when the comely young lass I proposed to exploded after a few months of marriage or after popping out a child. You know what I’m talking about?’ She blows smoke up to the dark sky.

‘Not at all,’ he says, amused despite himself.

‘I’m not as flighty as you think,’ she says. ‘I do like you so very much. I’ll ring you tomorrow, and we’ll make a plan.’ And then she is gone, wafting smoke and glamour as she trips her way into the resolutely non-smoking house of their hosts – Hugh loathes the smell.

He sees her in the next hour, flitting from group to group, chattering away. The women are dimmed by her, the men bedazzled.

The next day the phone rings in his office. He had been telling Simonds about the party.

‘She’s Eurasian, is she?’ Simonds says. ‘Watch out there. It’s not as bad as dating a Chinese, but the higher-ups don’t like it if you fraternize too much with the locals.’

‘That is an outrageous statement,’ Will says. He had liked Simonds up to that point.

‘You know how it is,’ Simonds says. ‘At Hong Kong Bank, you get asked to leave if you marry a Chinese. But this girl sounds different, she sounds rather more than a local girl. It’s not like she’s running a noodle shop.’

‘Yes, she is different,’ he says. ‘Not that it matters,’ he adds as he answers the phone. ‘I’m not marrying her.’

‘Darling, it’s Trudy Liang,’ she says. ‘Who aren’t you marrying?’

‘Nobody.’ He laughs.

‘That would have been quick work.’

‘Even for you?’

‘Wasn’t it shocking how many women there were at the party yesterday?’ she says, ignoring him. The women in the colony are supposed to have gone, evacuated to safer areas, while the war is simmering, threatening to boil over into their small corner of the world. ‘I’m essential, you know. I’m a nurse with the Auxiliary Nursing Service!’

‘None of the nurses I’ve ever had looked like you,’ he says.

‘If you were injured, you wouldn’t want me as a nurse, believe me.’ She pauses. ‘Listen, I’ll be at the races in the Wongs’ box this afternoon. Would you care to join us?’

‘The Wongs?’ he asks.

‘Yes, they’re my godparents,’ she says impatiently. ‘Are you coming or not?’

‘All right,’ he says. This is the first in a long line of acquiescences.

Will muddles his way through the club and into the upper tier where the boxes are filled with chattering people in jackets and silky dresses. He comes through the door of number twenty-eight and Trudy spies him right away, pounces on him, and introduces him to everybody. There are Chinese from Peru, Polish by way of Tokyo, a Frenchman married to Russian royalty. English is spoken.

Trudy pulls him to one side. ‘Oh dear,’ she says. ‘You’re just as handsome as I remember. I think I might be in trouble. You’ve never had any issues with women, I’m sure. Or perhaps you’ve had too many.’ She pauses and takes a theatrical breath. ‘I’ll give you the lie of the land here. That’s my cousin, Dommie.’ She points out an elegant, slim Chinese man with a gold pocket watch in his hand. ‘He’s my best friend and very protective, so you’d better watch out. And avoid her,’ she says, pointing to a slight European woman with spectacles. ‘Awful. She’s just spent twenty minutes telling me the most extraordinary and yet incredibly boring story about barking deer on Lamma Island.’

‘Really?’ he says, looking at her oval face, her large golden-green eyes.

‘And he,’ she says, pointing to an owlish Englishman, ‘is a bore. Some sort of art historian, keeps talking about the Crown Collection, which is apparently something most colonies have. They either 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 round. Such fun. She’ll go back one of these days, she says, as soon as her father will let her.

The Biddles hire a cabana at the Lido in Repulse Bay and invite them for a day at the beach. There, they all smoke like mad and drink gimlets while Angeline complains about her life. Angeline Biddle is an old friend of Trudy’s, a small and physically unappealing Chinese woman whom she’s known since they were at primary school together. She married a very clever British businessman, whom she rules with an iron fist, and has a son away at school. They live in grand style on the Peak, where Angeline’s presence causes some discomfort as Chinese are supposed to have permission to live there, except for one family, so rich they are exempt from the rules. There is a feeling, Trudy explains to Will later, that Angeline has somehow pulled a fast one on the British who live there, and she is resented for it, although Trudy admits that Angeline is hardly the most likeable of people to begin with. In the sun, Trudy takes off her top and sunbathes, her small breasts glowing pale in contrast to the rest of her.

‘I thought you said a tan was vulgar,’ he says.

‘Shut up,’ she says.

He hears her talking to Angeline: ‘I’m just wild about him,’ she says. ‘He’s the most stern, solid person I’ve ever met.’ He supposes she is talking about him. People are not as scandalized as one might think. Simonds admits he was wrong about her.

The Englishwomen in the colony are disappointed: another bachelor taken off the market. Whispered, ‘She did swoop down and grab him before anyone even knew he was in town.’

For him, there have been others, of course – the missionary’s daughter in New Delhi, always ill and wan, though beautiful; the clever, hopeful spinster on the boat over from Penang – the women who say they’re looking for adventure but who are really looking for husbands. He’s managed to avoid the inconvenience of love for quite some time, but it seems to have found him in this unlikely place.

Women don’t like Trudy. ‘Isn’t that always the case, darling?’ she says, when, indiscreetly, he asks her about it. ‘And aren’t you a strange one for bringing it up?’ She chucks him under the chin and continues making a jug of gin and lemonade. ‘No one likes me,’ she says. ‘Chinese don’t because I don’t act Chinese enough, Europeans don’t because I don’t look at all European, and my father doesn’t like me because I’m not very filial. Do you like me?’

He assures her he does.

‘I wonder,’ she says. ‘I can tell why people like you. Besides the fact that you’re a handsome bachelor with mysterious prospects, of course. They read into you everything they want you to be. They read into me all that they don’t like.’ She dips her finger into the mix and brings it out to taste. Her face puckers. ‘Perfect,’ she says. She likes it sour.

Little secrets begin to spill out of Trudy. A temple fortune-teller told her the mole on her forehead signifies death to a future husband. She’s been engaged before, but it ended mysteriously. She tells him these secrets, then refuses to elaborate, saying he’ll leave her. She seems serious.

Trudy has two amahs. They have ‘tied their hair up together’, she explains. Two women decide not to marry and put a notice in the newspaper, like vows, declaring they will live together for ever. Ah Lok and Mei Sing are old now, almost sixty, but they live together in a small room with twin beds (‘So get that out of your mind right now,’ Trudy says lazily, ‘although we Chinese are very blasé about that sort of thing and who cares, really?’), a happy couple, except that they are both women. ‘It’s the best thing,’ Trudy says. ‘Lots of women know they’ll never get married so this is just as good. So civilized, don’t you think? All you need is a companion. That sex thing gets in the way after a while. A sisterhood thing. I’m thinking about doing it myself.’ She pays them each twenty-five cents a week and they will do anything for her. Once, he came into the living room to find Mei Sing massaging lotion on to Trudy’s hands while she was asleep on the sofa.

He never grows used to them. They completely ignore him, always talking to Trudy about him when he’s there. They tell her he has a big nose, that he smells funny, that his hands and feet are grotesque. He is beginning to understand a little of what they say, but their disapproving intonation needs no translation. Ah Lok cooks – salty, oily dishes he finds unhealthy and unappealing. Trudy eats them with relish – it’s the food she grew up with. She claims Mei Sing cleans, but he finds dust everywhere. The old woman also collects rubbish – used beer bottles, empty cold-cream jars, discarded toothbrushes – and stores it underneath her bed in anticipation of some apocalyptic event. All three women are messy. Trudy has the utter disregard for her surroundings that belongs to those who have been waited on since birth. She never cleans up, never lifts a finger, but neither do the amahs. They have picked up her habits – a peculiar symbiosis. Trudy defends them with the ferocity of a child defending her parents. ‘They’re old,’ she says. ‘Leave them alone. I can’t bear people who poke at their servants.’

She pokes at them, though. She argues with them when the flower man comes and Ah Lok wants to give him fifty cents and Trudy says to give him what he asks. The flower man is called Fa Wong, king of flowers, and he comes round the neighbourhood once a week, giant woven baskets slung from his brown, wiry shoulders, filled with masses of flowers. He calls, ‘Fa yuen, fa yuen,’ in a low monotonous pitch, and people wave him up to their flats. He and the amahs love to spar and they go at it for ages, until Trudy comes to break it up and give the man his money. Then Ah Lok gets angry and scolds her for giving in too easily. The old lady and the lovely young woman, their arms filled with flowers, go into the kitchen, where the blooms will be distributed into vases and scattered around the house. He watches them from his chair, his book spread over his lap, his eyes hooded as if in sleep – he watches her.

He is almost never alone, these days, always with her. It is something different for him. He used to like solitude, but now he craves her presence all the time. He’s gone without this drug for so long, he’s forgotten how compelling it is. When he is at the office, pecking away at the typewriter, he thinks of her laughing, drinking tea, smoking, the rings puffing up in front of her face. ‘Why do you work?’ she asks. ‘It’s so dreary.’

Discipline, he thinks. Don’t fall down that rabbit hole. But it’s useless. She’s always there, ringing him on the phone, ready with plans for the evening. When he looks at her, he feels weak and happy. Is that so bad?

They are eating brunch at the Repulse Bay, and reading the Sunday paper when Trudy looks up.