Charles Cumming - Typhoon

“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 packages, we get our club-class air tickets, our tennis lessons and our houses in Jinqiao. And what’s the trade-off? Husbands who are away two hundred days a year with a girlfriend in every port and a permanent hangover on weekends.” She met his eyes. “Don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about, Joe. How long have you lived in Asia?”

“For ever.”

“Exactly. And it was the same story in Hong Kong, the same in KL, the same in Singapore, right?” He didn’t wholly agree with her, but knew better than to interrupt. “The Empire lives on. In the 1930s, corporate wives went to the Del Monte and the Cathay. Nowadays we go to Bar Rouge and M on the Bund. There’s no difference. We’re still bored and frustrated. We still have more money than the locals. We still have servants. We still dress up and play the Empire game. Meanwhile, our beloved husbands fuck as many Chinese girls as they can get their hands on and convince themselves they’re part of a master race.”

In truth, this was not the first time that Joe and Isabella had had a conversation of this kind. Her father, Eduard, the French insurance broker, had been a serial womanizer whose philandering was a frequent source of anguish for Isabella, even ten years after his death. When she had left Joe for Miles, a part of him rationalized the switch on the cod-Freudian basis that all women eventually married their fathers. Nevertheless, as he listened to Isabella on that summer morning, Joe experienced something of the same uncertainty that he had felt in the early stages of his conversations with Shahpour and Wang. Is everybody lying to me, or is everybody telling the truth?

“Where’s this coming from?” he asked. “I don’t know how I can help you. I don’t know what it is that you want me to do.”

She laughed. “Oh, Joe. You’re so sweet. You were always so old-fashioned. I don’t want you to do anything. It’s just lovely to see you again. It’s just lovely to talk. I had no idea how much I missed you. This place is so…”-she gestured north-“exhausting.”

Joe would have reached out to touch her hand, but he lacked the confidence. Isabella had stripped that away from him. In the eight years without her he had put on skins, layers, a carapace of emotional toughness to prevent him from falling prey to another woman. It had worked, by and large. Megan had broken through for a little while, but as he sipped his coffee and reflected that his heart was still anchored to Isabella, he resolved to end that relationship as soon as possible. It didn’t feel right. It wasn’t going anywhere.

“Why do you stay with him?” he asked.

It was a brave question. Isabella ground out her cigarette.

“Because I made a vow. In church. In front of God.”

Joe wasn’t sure whether this was a statement or a question. His own faith had become a nebulous thing; he admired any expression of devotion. “Nothing else? Are things that bad between you?”

“They’re like any marriage.” She placed the sun hat on her head. “When they’re good, they’re good. When they’re bad, they’re bad. The trouble is that the good times come along less and less often. So you’re left with consolations. You’re left with Jesse.”

“Who’s Jesse?” Even as Joe uttered the question he discovered its ghastly, inevitable answer. Jesse was their child. Miles and Isabella had a son.

“Miles really hasn’t been too forthcoming with the information, has he?” she joked. Joe felt a void opening up inside him like a sickness. “Jesse’s our son. My little boy.”

“Where is he?” Joe had buried his shock in the only question he could think of. He felt betrayed and humiliated. Why had Miles not seized on the opportunity to wound him with the news when he had met him on Huaihai, or at M on the Bund?

“He’s back at the house with Mary.” Joe assumed that Mary was an ayi, a Chinese live-in nanny. “Do you want more coffee? Do you mind if I get something to eat?”

He knew that she had said it to relieve his sadness. He shook his head and smiled, saying, “No, but you go ahead,” and Isabella stood up, making her way into the cafe. Why was he so distraught at the gift of a child? People got married. People had children. Miles was ten years older than Isabella; a pregnancy had been inevitable. The child was probably the one constant happiness in his mother’s life. Why resent it?

Joe’s mobile pulsed in his pocket. He took it out and saw that Waterfield was calling from London. The phone was not secure, so any conversation would have to be short and non-specific.

“Joe?”

He was grateful for the immediate distraction of work. “David. How are you?”

“Sorry to have been out of touch.”

“It’s all right.”

A little boy walked past him eating a toffee apple. Waterfield moved straight to business. “No news on your doorman, I’m afraid. Sally’s never heard of him. Ditto the chef.”

The doorman was Ablimit Celil. The chef was a nickname for Memet Almas. “Sally” was agreed language for the database at Vauxhall Cross. Joe leaned his elbows on the table and took a chance.

“Have you tried asking in Pakistan?” He wanted to verify Wang’s theory about the ISI. “I heard a rumour they’d worked in Islamabad. Might be worth checking.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Not entirely.”

Waterfield coughed. “I thought it was American owned?”

It amused Joe to hear him improvising with the coded language. Waterfield was part of the tele gram generation. Speaking about an operation on an open line was contrary to every instinct he possessed for secrecy.

“I thought so too,” he replied. “That still might be the case. It would just be interesting to know if the doorman ever had a job there.”

Isabella was coming out of the museum. When she saw that Joe was on the phone, she stopped, offering to grant him some privacy. Seeing this, he shook his head and waved her over, telling Waterfield that he had to go.

“I’m having a coffee with Isabella,” he said, because it would raise his stock in London.

“You are? Well, good for you. Be sure not to send her my love.”

“Work?” Isabella asked when he had hung up. She had bought two bottles of water and a brace of dehydrated croissants.