Литагент HarperCollins - Flying High

He was wearing his best jacket, tailored too large in stiff blue cotton in what used to be an imitation of Mao, and smelling of mothballs as most Chinese clothes do when they are seldom worn. Why did I focus on that? It detracted from the moment. Smells and tastes tried to deflect me away from the strange reality of it.

For a moment we remained in an awkward clinch, he with his eyes closed, me searching for reaction, wanting response. He took no initiative and then withdrew as I placed my tongue on his teeth.

‘No, no,’ he moaned.

‘But we must, we’ve been waiting so long. We can’t waste more time just thinking about it and doing nothing.’

‘Somebody will find out. We’ll be criticized.’

‘We’ll be discreet. Nobody will know. Anyway we haven’t done anything wrong.’

‘You don’t understand. We’re not in your country. In China this is impossible. I could go to gaol.’

‘Don’t be daft. Of course you couldn’t,’ I said, not sure. People certainly seemed to get into trouble for things that go unnoticed or are laughed off in the West.

Anyway – what were we doing? Was this adultery? Infidelity? It certainly wasn’t fornication, nor was it likely to be.

Before the momentum was lost I drew his wiry body towards me again. I sensed tension, reluctance.

‘If someone sees, it will be wrong.’

‘But if no one sees it will be right?’

He relaxed a little and laughed.

‘Chinese logic!’ I said. The idea that a sin must be witnessed to be a sin struck me as peculiar but practical.

‘Honestly, Alison. You know what I’m saying.’

Sometimes he sounded like a middle-class Englishman. These phrases, learned from World Service plays, tripped off the tongue like the rehearsed script of a thirties drama. He seemed more foreign at moments like that and a twinge of uncertainty unnerved me. Was I dealing with an inhabitant of another world? Were we as close as I thought or had I invented it out of want?

He gently removed my arms and buttoned the top button of his jacket. He did up the hook and eye on the collar and took a step backwards.

‘I must go now.’ He looked out of the blurred curtainless window at the bleakness of the early spring campus beyond. Grey concrete blocks, brightened by the occasional piece of vivid underwear hung on a bamboo pole out of a window to dry in the dusty air.

‘Don’t come down,’ he said.

‘Shall I come to the studio tomorrow?’ I asked, suddenly unable to cope with the prospect of being alone in this chilly, dingy flat, not wanting him to leave.

To my relief, he smiled. ‘Yes, come for your lesson as usual. The other guys will be there. We’ll paint together.’

I heard his footsteps retreating down the concrete stairs fainter and fainter, then the click of his bicycle lock. I watched him as he pedalled silently down the path. I kept watching until he disappeared into the heavy stream of traffic on the main road beyond the gates of the campus.

Yes, I thought, I’ve done it. I’ve changed things between us at last.

I was trying to remember how it had been at the beginning. I cast my mind back to the day when I announced I was going to China.

‘You’ll never survive,’ Martin taunted me. ‘You’ll be back in two weeks.’

I tried not to believe that he might be right. It had certainly been a rash decision for me, but he had this way of making me feel inadequate and I had to show him I could cope.

‘Of course I’ll survive. Anyway it’s only nine months. I’ll be back in the summer. You won’t even have time to miss me.’

The thought of leaving Martin for so many months made me uneasy, but I told myself I had nothing to fear. He would be there when I got back and whatever happened in between would soon be over. He still hadn’t been keen. He had wanted us to get married but I wanted to get my urgent need to travel out of my system. I thought I’d stay about a year, then go home and settle down for ever. I didn’t think Martin had the right to tell me not to go, so I made up my mind to do it, to stick it out whatever it was like, just to prove to him that I had a mind of my own. I felt I needed another dimension to myself. Martin was not enough. He was reliable, kind and rather good looking but I wanted to deny to myself that I cared for him as I didn’t relish the prospect of missing him. It would spoil my adventure. Besides, I was not interesting enough as I was. A tall, pale Englishwoman, over thirty, a virgin. A real spinster schoolmarm, in fact. I’d never worked abroad before and mistrusted foreigners on the whole. But something about China drew me. I needed to go there and see it. I wanted to be able to tell people I’d been to the Great Wall, the Ming Tombs and the Forbidden City. It would change me. The very thought was exciting, and my heart raced as I had fantasies of people in silk robes, gliding across the semicircular bridges and reading poetry in bamboo groves.

I’d got the job at the university through a friend who knew someone at the embassy. It didn’t seem to bother anyone that I had no experience of teaching university students. They seemed pleased to get a real English teacher and in the first few weeks I was treated like a VIP. When the novelty wore off and winter began to set in I felt less excited and less keyed up to learn new things. What had at first been amusing curiosities and fascinating ways eventually became tedious routine. I got fed up with the way the cleaners bobbed around with their stinking mops, the way the cook, sweating even in the ice of November, hawked and spat on the kitchen floor, and the chore of shopping at the market where my fair hair and my height set me apart as a freak or a visiting Martian. If Martin had been there it would have been all right. I wouldn’t have felt so self conscious. He was even bigger than me. It annoyed me that I wasn’t managing well on my own. ‘You’ll never survive’ – his words echoed in my head as I contemplated my inability to stride out and enjoy myself.

I bought local clothes – an army jacket and some quilted shoes – in an attempt to melt in a little. The shoes were men’s: no woman in China wore a size seven. But it made me more of a freak as the girls were by then starting to wear what they thought were Western clothes – hideous shapeless Crimplene jackets with twinkly thread and plastic high-heeled shoes. The daring ones wore lipstick. I knew I’d got it wrong, but I also knew I could never get it right. Not here.

My ideas about the country had been gleaned from National Geographic and the paperback book of the travels of Marco Polo. Reality was a rudely different shock. Nothing had prepared me for the drabness and alienation which seemed to make people physically ill in the winter, the strange food and the smells. Everywhere there hung in the air an almost palpable veil of smells. They were always stale and sickening. From the overpowering stench of lavatories which supplied fertilizer for the vegetables we ate to the acrid smoke of the miserable little market food stalls and the sweetish sickly aroma of hand-rolled cigars smoked by old ladies.

I became aware that I would have to learn the language or I would continue to feel autistic, sealed off into a bubble, in this world but not of it, as if I was watching it on television. There were no other foreigners in my unit, so I was obliged to seek out the company of Chinese English speakers, and this was how I met Liang.

‘I wonder if you could arrange painting lessons for me?’ I asked, standing at Dr Chen’s desk in the Wai Ban, the office that was in charge of me as a foreigner.

I had always wanted to do Chinese watercolours, though I was not artistic. It looked simple, so I thought I’d be able to produce something that I could hang, framed, over the mantelpiece at home.