‘Could I have a word, Dr. Ward?’ she asked.
Ward turned and glared at her. ‘I’m busy right now.’ And he turned back to the others.
Margaret stood smarting for a moment at his rebuff. Then she said, ‘So one of your people is dying in an isolation ward and you’re “too busy” to talk to me about it.’
She saw the back of his neck flush deep red. A hush fell over the group. ‘Excuse me, gentlemen,’ he said, and he turned to lay a dark look on her. ‘I don’t care to be spoken to like that, Doctor,’ he said tightly.
‘Well, at last you and I have found something in common,’ Margaret said, meeting his eye with an unwavering stare. She saw red spots appear high on his cheeks. Contained anger.
‘What do you want?’ he asked evenly.
‘Steve asked me to get some stuff for him from his office. I wondered if I could drop by tomorrow.’
‘I’ll get one of the secretaries to have it sent up to him,’ Ward said.
‘No. Steve asked me to get it,’ Margaret said. ‘Some of it’s personal.’
‘Personal?’ Ward tried out the word, and from his expression did not appear to like the taste of it. ‘Why would he ask you to get something personal for him?’
‘With the greatest respect,’ Margaret said, showing no respect at all, ‘that’s none of your fucking business, Doctor.’
Ward blanched. He gave her a long, hard look. ‘You’re a very hostile young woman,’ he said.
‘Actually, I’m not,’ she said. ‘But when people make it clear they don’t like me, as far as I’m concerned they lose all right to my civility.’ She thrust her jaw out defiantly. ‘So what is it you don’t like about me, Dr. Ward? I’m not aware of having done anything to offend you — at least, before tonight.’
Ward took a long time considering his response, or perhaps deciding whether or not to make one at all. Finally he said, ‘My father was a medic in Korea in the fifties, when I was just a teenager. He died at the hands of the Chinese. Rather horribly, I’m led to believe.’
Margaret stared at him. ‘And your point is?’
‘I would have thought that was obvious,’ he said.
And Margaret knew then that her relationship with Li was likely to prove just as difficult in the United States as it had in China. She looked at Ward with contempt. ‘I used to think, Dr. Ward, that intelligence and reason were one and the same thing. Clearly I was wrong.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I’ll come by and pick up Steve’s things tomorrow.’ She turned toward the door, but stopped and, half turning back, added, ‘By the way, I think you’ll find there are a lot of men and women in China who lost their fathers in Korea, too.’ She tossed her guest security pass on the desk and walked out.
The chill air stung her hot cheeks, and she felt the wind cut through her like a cold steel blade. There was a line of cars sitting at the curbside, engines running. Uniformed drivers sat waiting patiently for their passengers, and it suddenly occurred to Margaret that she was a long way from home with no way of getting back. The rear passenger door of the car second from front opened and Li leaned out. ‘Are you coming?’ he called.
She didn’t need a second invitation. As she slid into the rear seat beside him she said, ‘Where are we going?’
‘Washington,’ he said. ‘The military have laid on transport.’
‘But I’ll not get a flight back to Houston at this time of night.’ Even as she said it, she realised that she had not the faintest idea what time it was. She looked at her watch. ‘Jesus!’ It was nearly one a.m. ‘Are the military going to put us up in a hotel as well?’
‘I was thinking,’ Li said, ‘that you could stay over with me. I live in Washington, remember? Or, more accurately, in Georgetown.’
It came as something of a shock for Margaret to realise that although she was back in America, the country of her birth, she was still on Li’s home patch. ‘Well, that would be cheaper,’ she said, ‘and in keeping with the government budget cuts.’ She smiled. ‘Provided, of course, you have a spare room.’
‘I didn’t think we’d need that,’ Li said. And Margaret was immediately self-conscious. Their conversation was certainly being overheard by their driver. Then she thought of Dr. Ward and his disapproval and immediately felt guilty at her self-consciousness. And guilty about Steve, and the images that flooded her mind of the face behind the glass in the isolation ward telling her how scared he was.
‘Sure,’ she said. And leaning forward, ‘Georgetown, please, driver.’ But when she sat back again, her mind was filled with confusion and uncertainty. Last night it had been so easy making love to Li. Tonight she knew that the world was never going to let it be an easy relationship.
III
There was very little traffic on Wisconsin Avenue. The occasional restaurant or club was tipping its last customers out into the early morning. The odd group of university students on their way home from some party wandered by, engaged in still animated chatter, as if they had not had enough of the night already for talking. Margaret smiled, remembering her own student days. How the most trivial things had been of such crucial importance, how she and her group were going to change the world. She guessed it was the same for each successive generation. What disappointments lay ahead with the realisation that it was they who changed, and not the world.
Li told the driver to let them off on the corner of Wisconsin and O. Peter’s Flower Stand was all closed up. A few forlorn stalks and crushed flowerheads lay scattered across the redbrick sidewalk. Margaret reflected on the strange coincidence that she and Li both rented houses in streets called ‘O’. The shadow of the trees lay darkly along the street in the strong moonlight. The first few leaves of fall were gathered in the gutters, wet and sad after the earlier rain.
As they walked silently along the sidewalk, side by side but not touching, Margaret looked at the two- and three-storey brick townhouses painted green and red and white, the Georgian windows, the wrought ironwork, the expensive cars parked at the kerb. She glanced at Li. ‘How can you afford to live here?’ she asked. The two-bedroomed police apartment he had shared with his uncle in Beijing had been extravagant by Chinese standards, modest by American. But this was millionaire territory. Rich people lived here. She knew that the Kennedys had owned a house somewhere close by, in one of the streets off Wisconsin, while he was a senator. Their last home before his final move to the White House.
‘The embassy pays for it,’ Li said. ‘Before I took the job, I had a long conversation with the man I would replace. Like most of the rest of the staff he had a tiny apartment in the embassy building over on Connecticut. He said you could never escape from the job. When it was night-time here, it was daytime in China, and vice versa. And because he was in the building he was on call twenty-four hours a day. So I made it a condition of accepting the post that they got me an outside apartment.’
‘And they agreed?’ Just like that?’
He shrugged. ‘Apparently they have owned the house here on O Street for many years. I don’t know who used it before, or what for, but I had another very good reason for needing a bigger place.’
‘What was that?’
‘I was not alone.’
Margaret stopped and looked at him with a mixture of consternation and anger. ‘Are you telling me you’ve brought a woman here with you?’
He nodded solemnly. ‘I’ve been meaning to tell you. But somehow the moment just never seemed right.’
Margaret stared at him in disbelief. ‘And do I know her?’ she asked facetiously.