Dao-Ming came up the stairs with a box of goose eggs, some food in take-out boxes, and a bottle of Yellowtail wine. She was in a waterproof motorcycle jacket and goggles and her hair was wrapped in a see-through plastic bag, which she tore off as she laid the items down on the kitchen bar. She smiled when she saw me huddled in the quilt and told me she had bought goose eggs to make me feel better and fried wontons and other things that were reputed to be restorative. We made a little dinner out of it. I ate the goose eggs cracked into a glass and whisked with soy milk. Then the wontons. I hardly noticed the storm now lashing the house, the cables singing outside. She made us gin and tonics, with the rinds of lemons cut like fingernails. The wine was for later.
She was relaxed, which she wouldn’t have been after a client. Perhaps she had not had one. We sat around the low table and ate the last two uncooked eggs, breaking them and separating the whites and the yolks into the two shells and drinking them one after the other. She talked as slowly as a woman can talk, her vowels dragged out as she gave her sentences weight, and her thoughts sat upon them like tiny riders upon horses who don’t use bits or spurs.
She said, “You slept for a whole day, a whole night. I’ve never seen a man sleep like that.”
“I’ve never slept like that.”
She sipped her gin and tonic.
“I have been thinking. It was so remarkable to see you at the Intercontinental. When I saw you I thought — I thought you were a ghost. It was as if you were dead. You were dead and I had come across you all the same.”
“I wasn’t quite dead,” I said.
“But almost, no?”
“I crashed at the tables. I burned out.”
Was that death of sorts?
She took off her slippers.
“That’s how I know that look.”
“All gamblers—”
“Yes, you burn out.”
“I lost it all,” I said. “Everything. Everything.”
“You have to forget all the money you’ve lost.”
I told her how much it was.
“It’s all right,” she replied. “I’ve heard of worse.”
“But other men are millionaires,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter if they are. They can lose everything, too.”
“Yes.”
“You couldn’t pay at the hotel. I know.”
I laughed.
“If you hadn’t been there—”
She smiled.
“You’d be washing the dishes.”
I’d be deported, I thought.
And yet, I wanted to say, I couldn’t help myself. I was compelled.
“I just want you to eat,” she said.
“All right, I will. Sihk faan.”
She made some soup with squid, and we got drunk on the gin. The squid so fresh a spoon could scoop it. She brought out a lemon cake from the fridge.
“You made a mistake,” she went on. “It’s a very simple thing to do. One can change, however.”
I didn’t say anything, because I don’t believe in change. We are who we are; a loser loses. She cut the cake and made me eat a slice off her hand.
“It’s not the mistake you think. You made a mistake thinking I didn’t know. You can’t hide your desperation. You don’t have to hide your desperation.”
She ate the cake as well, and she said she had a bottle of rum intact.
“Disgusting but good. Shall we?”
She laughed, covering her mouth.
“I was sure you are an alcoholic,” she went on. “You behave like one. Alcoholics always lie about their problems.”
“Maybe I am just a liar.”
“Is everything you do a lie?”
I nodded.
“I also have some red opium if you don’t like the rum. We can smoke it the old-fashioned way. With cake.”
She lit another oil lamp and set it on the floor next to us. She took out a glass pipe and prepared it; we angled it against us and puffed for a while. It was good stuff, juicy and pungent, and because I hadn’t smoked it in years it had the power of nostalgia. I noticed how oily my lips had become, and how the slime of the goose egg had coated the inside of my mouth, undissolved by the other foods. She laid out the sofa bed and we lay with the oil lamp flickering against the wet window listening to the cables, continuing to smoke. From down in that imponderable darkness I could hear the sea, angry as always, and the buoys clicking far out. We mixed the pipe with shots of rum.
She took off her clothes piece by piece, folding each one and laying it down in a pile next to her. There was an indescribable neatness about her. She folded and stashed everything, just as she had that first night at the Hotel An-Ma. When she was naked she rolled on her side and brought the quilt up against her chin and she asked me to tell a story. If I wouldn’t do that, I was to tell her what my family had really been like, and what my childhood had really been like, and not the lies I had told her before.
She inhaled deeply and her eyes began to slink away.
“Lies are stories, too,” she said. “But I don’t want lies now.”
I told her about Haywards Heath, my life as a lawyer in Cuckfield. I described my village school in Lindfield; I told her about law school in Nottingham. I made no mention of lordship or manors. I told the truth. I said: My father was a salesman for a vacuum cleaner company in Croydon. Thirty-five years with Silverliner Air Systems. He was in debt all his life. Died of an infarction on the commuter train to work at Bolney station one summer morning in 1979. Dropped dead like a stone reading the Daily Telegraph with a scone on his lap. Crumbs everywhere. Nothing left to the wife and son. Buried in Pyecombe cemetery with his parents. The Silverliner Anti-Static Dust-Buster 2070 left suspended in midair, his house reclaimed by the bank.
“Ever since,” I said, “I’ve had a strange relationship with vacuum cleaners. I think of them as demonic in some way.” He was a teetotaler, a drab. He organized campaigns against bingo in Haywards Heath. Bingo, the work of Satan! He wore ties with the Middlesex cricket insignia and arrived at work at 7:59 every morning for thirty-five years. He never swore, not even in the bath. He swept his Brown and Taylor suits every night with an anti-lint brush, read The Hobbit to me in bed when I was nine, and led in general a life of honor and pride, a rock to his family and community, a true man in the quiet English way that no one today understands. A man in gentle debt merely because he kept to his word with regard to his wife and his garden. My role model for most of my life, until I rolled heavily into debt myself.
I knew I was talking to myself, and soon she was sleeping against me as if she had never been listening at all. I laid her head on the pillow next to me. I reached back and turned off the oil lamp and for some time I lay there agonizing about my cloudy future. Then, as if a counterweight, the past came back again and soon I was immersed in it in the way that you fall quietly into a nightmare and cannot climb out. How meaningless and repetitive a human life is, and how mechanical mine had been, I thought, until I discovered baccarat and the Chinese. A degree from Nottingham in something as useless as the law, a job at Klein and Klein, a year in Hong Kong with one of the big firms and then my employment in Haywards Heath at Strick and Garland settling wills (a lot of rich old widowers in that part of the world, as I have mentioned, rich and easy pickings for a smart young man). I became a secret gambler. I went to Paris once to help settle a claim for a client and while I was there I went to the little casino at Enghien-les-Bains. The casino sat by the lake with a suburban respectability and it was filled with off-duty policemen and failed businessmen, and what is sadder in the human world than a failed French businessman? It was nothing more than curiosity that drew me in there, but once inside it was a revelation.