John Davis - The Year of Dangerous Loving

Hargreave sat up wearily. ‘You could fetch the dinghy,’ he said.

‘Yes. Of course.’

‘Can you row?’

‘I can learn.’ She heaved herself into a sitting position.

Then Hargreave realized that he had forgotten to put the swimming ladder down before he dived in. ‘Oh Lord … You won’t be able to get aboard, the gunnels are too high.’

Olga stared out at the yacht lying out there in the moonlight, registering this information: then she dropped her head and giggled. ‘Oh no! And we are naked on the beach.’ Then Hargreave saw the funny side of it despite himself. Olga laughed: ‘ So the only solution is to walk naked to the village and borrow some clothes! ’

‘Borrow us a sampan while you’re about it.’

‘ Me? ’

‘You’re the pretty one!’

Olga threw back her head in the moonlight and guffawed. She collapsed back on the sand, arms outflung. ‘This is so funny . Naked in Hong Kong! But what are we going to do, darling?’

Hargreave stood up, grinning. He walked into the water and washed the sand off his hands. ‘Climb up the anchor chain,’ he said.

Olga sat up again. ‘Of course!’

‘Haven’t done it for years; it’s damn hard, but it can be done.’

‘Not you – me ,’ Olga said emphatically. ‘At gymnastics we had to climb up ropes, my arms are very strong. Look!’ She bent her elbow and made her biceps hard. ‘So impressive! I am not letting you swim out there and drown.’

‘In an hour the tide will have turned and whatever causes cramp will have gone away.’

‘No, I am not letting you …!’

‘Al Hargreave may be unathletic but he’s not a complete prick. Would Errol Flynn have let his girl swim out there alone to climb anchor chains? Sean Connery would do it in his dinner jacket.’ He spread his arms. ‘Relax. You’re marooned in the hot China night on a deserted beach with your very own yacht out there – all we’ve got to do is climb up the fucking anchor chain. What could be more romantic?’

‘With my own true love?’

‘So come here and let me wash that sand off your beautiful body.’

She did not have to save his life again when they finally swam out to the boat when the tide had turned: she stayed beside him but the cramp did not return. She was as good as her word about rope-climbing: while he clung to the anchor chain she put one foot on his shoulder, grabbed the chain above his head, stood, then went hand over hand up the short distance to the bows. She grabbed the gunnel, then swung one leg up under the rail, lost her grip and crashed back into the water with an undignified flash of naked flesh. Giggling, she tried again. This time she succeeded. She wriggled under the rail, and got to her feet.

In the morning they sailed to the yacht club. Hargreave left Olga aboard while he took a taxi to the Marine Department and completed port-entrance formalities: he got her admitted into the colony as his crew-member without a hitch – the young Chinese immigration officer recognized him and did not query Olga’s profession of singer recorded on her Macao identity card. ‘Have a nice sail, Mr Hargreave.’

They had a lovely sail, for the next week. That first day he circumnavigated Hong Kong, to show Olga the bustling industrial development and the beautiful bays and luxurious apartment complexes on the other sides of the island. ‘So much money – so much work!’ He anchored in Repulse Bay for the night amongst dozens of yachts and pleasure junks out for the long weekend. They sat on deck in a beautiful sunset, the jungled mountains looming up, the shore lined with the lights of gracious apartment blocks, music and laughter wafting across from the boats.

‘We were told at school,’ Olga began, ‘that the West was terrible, only very few people were rich, all the rest very poor, without enough food, dying of cold. Our teachers showed us movies of New York in the winter, the hoboes freezing while the rich people ate in restaurants and all their children took drugs and all the pretty girls had to be prostitutes. The American army were well-fed because their only job was to conquer Russia to make us slaves. And the whole of Europe was the same, our teachers told us, and England was worse, because you have a queen. I remember, when I was a little girl, when Prince Charles married Diana, we were shown a movie of them at Buckingham Palace after the wedding, on the balcony, the crowds of people outside, and our teacher told us the crowd was demanding bread.’

Hargreave smiled. ‘And you believed your teacher.’

‘Of course, I was only about ten. Even my father and mother believed it. I wanted very much to be a soldier for Communism to help those poor American and English people, to give them food, so their children could grow up happy like me. And when they showed us pictures of the Berlin Wall to keep out all the nasty West Germans and Americans, I clapped. I was very patriotic, darling, when I was ten.’

‘And then?’

‘And Africa – our teachers showed us such pictures of little black babies crying with nothing in their stomachs and flies on their noses and their mothers’ breasts all empty, and we were told this was the fault of the capitalists who were making them work in their factories and mines, who killed all the wild animals and chopped down all the trees for firewood in London and New York. And we saw many pictures of brave Russian and Cuban soldiers fighting to free them from such misery. And, oh, I wanted to be a soldier. I was going to be a parachutist, darling!’

‘A parachutist?’ Oh, he loved her.

‘Jumping out of the sky with my machine-gun and shooting all those nasty capitalists. And when we saw movies of the Americans fleeing out of Vietnam – oh boy, I wanted to marry a soldier so much!’

Hargreave laughed. ‘And when did you change?’

‘When I started to get tits, I suppose. When all us girls started to look at black-market magazines from the West – fashions and icecreams and motor cars. And one of my friends had a brother who had come back from the army and he told her many things. My mother was dead and my father was very sick now, and my brother had left to work in the mines. Then suddenly Mr Gorbachev was the new boss and he was talking about perestroika and glasnost . I was living in the orphanage now and I was very interested in boys, and clothes, and all this was very exciting to us. We only understood that the West was maybe not so bad, but to us it meant being pretty girls with rich husbands. So romantic. Then I went to work in the aluminium factory, but there were no pretty clothes, everybody was poor except the apparatchiks; things got worse not better because there was so much confusion, so many criminals now. Then I was offered the job at Mosfilm, like I told you, but it really was a KGB job. Then everything went crazy when the old Communists tried to take Gorbachev’s power, and I was sent to Istanbul. I was very confused.’

‘And now?’

She spread her arms. ‘Now I am the happiest girl in the world, with my knight in shining armour. Now I am not confused, even if I am still a whore.’

‘You’re not, you’re a singer.’

She smiled. ‘Yes, with you I am not a whore. And I never want to be a whore again, that is what I have learned, that is one of the things I am not confused about.’

He believed her; but what would she do the week after next when this holiday was over? He felt the happiest man in the world, too – but was this the real world?

‘And another thing I am not confused about: now I really know what I want to be. I always wanted to do it, but now I am really determined. Study to be a vet. I like animals very much. On the collective farm I often helped the vet, and I was very good at school with chemistry and biology, so interesting. So after I have bought my brother a farm I will study to be a vet.’