Charles Cumming - Typhoon

Isabella Aubert arrived at the restaurant at about twenty-past eight. The first indication that she had entered the room came with a simultaneous movement from two male diners sitting near the entrance whose heads jerked up from their bowls of soup and then followed her body in a kind of dazed, nodding parabola as she swayed between the tables. She was wearing a black summer dress and a white coral necklace that seemed to glow under the lights against her tanned skin. Joe must have picked up on the crackle in the room because he pushed his chair back from the table, stood up and turned to face her. Isabella was smiling by now, first at me, then at Joe, checking around the restaurant to see if she recognized anyone. Joe kissed her only briefly on the cheek before she settled into the chair next to mine. Physically, in public, they were often quite formal together, like a couple who had been married for five or ten years, not two twenty-six-year-olds in only the second year of a relationship. But if you spent time around Joe it didn’t take long to realize that he was infatuated with Isabella. She dismantled his instinctive British reserve; she was the one thing in his life that he could not control.

“Hi,” she said. “How are you, Will?” Our little hug of greeting went wrong when I aimed a kiss at her cheek that slid past her ear.

“I’m fine,” I replied. “You?”

“Hot. Overworked. Late.”

“You’re not late.” Joe reached out to touch her hand. Their fingers mingled briefly on the table before Isabella popped her napkin. “I’ll get you a drink.”

They had met in December 1995, on Joe’s first visit back to the UK from Hong Kong, when he had been an usher at a wedding in Hampshire. Isabella was a friend of the bride who had struggled to keep a straight face while reading from “The Prophet” during the service. “Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself,” she told the assembled congregation. “He sifts you to free you from your husks. He grinds you to whiteness.” At one point Joe became convinced that the beautiful girl at the lectern in the wide-brimmed hat was looking directly at him as she said, “He kneads you until you are pliant. And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast,” but it was probably just a trick of the light. At that moment, most of the men in the church were labouring under a similar delusion. Afterwards Isabella sought him out at the pre-dinner drinks, walking towards him carrying a glass of champagne and that hat, which had lost its flower.

“What happened?” he said.

“Dog,” she replied, as if that explained everything. They did not leave one another’s side for the next two hours. At dinner, seated at separate tables, they made naked eyes across the marquee as a farmer complained to Isabella about the iniquities of the Common Agricultural Policy while Joe told a yawning aunt on his left that freight forwarding involved moving “very large consignments of cargo around the world in big container ships” and that Hong Kong was “the second busiest port in Asia after Singapore,” although “both of them might soon be overtaken by Shanghai.” As soon as pudding was over he took a cup of coffee over to Isabella’s table and sat at a vacant chair beside hers. As they talked, and as he met her friends, for the first time he regretted having joined SIS. Not because the life required him to lie to this gorgeous, captivating girl, but because within four days he would be back at his desk on the other side of the world drafting CX reports on the Chinese military. Chances are he would never see Isabella again.

Towards eleven o’clock, when the speeches were done and middle-aged fathers in red trousers had begun dancing badly to “Come on Eileen,” she simply leaned across to him and whispered in his ear, “Let’s go.” Joe had a room at a hotel three miles away but they drove back along the M40 to Isabella’s flat in Kentish Town, where they stayed in bed for two days. “We fit,” she whispered when she felt his naked body against hers for the first time, and Joe found himself adrift in a world that he had never known: a world in which he was so physically and emotionally fulfilled that he wondered why it had taken him so long to seek it out. There had been girlfriends before, of course-two at Oxford and one just a few days after he had arrived in Hong Kong-but with none of them had he experienced anything other than the brief extinguishing of a lust, or a few weeks of intense conversations about the Cultural Revolution followed by borderline pointless sex in his rooms at Wadham. From their first moments together Isabella intrigued and fascinated him to the point of obsession. He confessed to me that he was already planning their lives together after spending just twenty-four hours in her flat. Joe Lennox had always been a decisive animal, and Joe Lennox had decided that he was in love.

On the Monday night he drove back to his hotel in Hampshire, settled the bill, returned to London and took Isabella for dinner at Mon Plaisir, a French restaurant he loved in Covent Garden. They ate French onion soup, steak tartare and confit of duck and drank two bottles of Hermitage Cave de Tain. Over balloons of Delamain-he loved it that she treated alcohol like a soft drink-Isabella asked him about Hong Kong.

“What do you want to know?” he said.

“Anything. Tell me about the people you work with. Tell me what Joe Lennox does when he gets up in the morning.”

He was aware that the questions formed part of an ongoing interview. Should I share my life with you? Do you deserve my future? Not once in the two days they had spent together had the subject of the distance that would soon separate them been broached with any seriousness. Yet Joe felt that he had a chance of winning Isabella round, of persuading her to leave London and of joining him in Hong Kong. It was fantasy, of course, not much more than a pipe dream, but something in her eyes persuaded him to pursue it. He did not want what they had shared to be thrown away on account of geography.

So he would paint a picture of life in Hong Kong that was vivid and enticing. He would lure her to the East. But how to do so without resorting to the truth? It occurred to him that if he told Isabella that he was a spy, the game would probably be over. Chances were she would join him on the next flight out to Kowloon. What girl could resist? But honesty for the NOC was not an option. He had to improvise, he had to work around the lie.

“What do I do in the morning?” he said. “I drink strong black coffee, say three Hail Marys and listen to the World Service.”

“I’d noticed,” she said. “Then what?”

“Then I go to work.”

“And what does that involve?” Isabella had long, dark hair and it curled across her face as she spoke. “Do you have your own office? Do you work down at the docks? Are there secretaries there who lust after you, the quiet, mysterious Englishman?”

Joe thought about Judy Heppner and smiled. “No, there’s just me and Ted and Ted’s wife, Judy. We’re based in a small office in Central. If I was to tell you the whole story you’d probably disintegrate with boredom.”

“Are you bored by it?”

“No, but I definitely see it as a stepping stone. If I play my cards right there’ll be jobs that I can apply for at Swire’s or Jardine Matheson in a year or six months, something with a bit more responsibility, something with better pay. After university, I just wanted to get the hell out of London. Hong Kong seemed to fit the bill.”

“So you like it out there?”

“I love it out there.” Now he had to sell it. “I’ve only been away a few months but already it feels like home. I’ve always been fascinated by the crowds and the noise and the smells of Asia, the chaos just round the corner. It’s so different to what I’ve grown up with, so liberating. I love the fact that when I leave my apartment building I’m walking out into a completely alien environment, a stranger in a strange land. Hong Kong is a British colony, has been for over ninety years, but in a strange way you feel we have no place there, no role to play.” If David Waterfield could hear this, he’d have a heart attack. “Every face, every street sign, every dog and chicken and child scurrying in the back streets is Chinese. What were the British doing there all that time?”