“But you don’t go to church,” I said to him. “I didn’t exactly see you down at St. John’s Cathedral every Sunday when we were living in Causeway Bay.”
He looked at me as though I was being naive. Joe would no more have wasted a Hong Kong Sunday in church than he would have broken cover.
“Why was that?” I asked. “Was Isabella an atheist?”
It was the first time I had mentioned her name for weeks. Joe looked down at the glass of wine he was drinking and ran his thumb along the stem.
“No. She wasn’t.” He stood up and walked away from the table, ostensibly to fetch me another can of Guinness, but doubtless as a means of preventing me from seeing the expression on his face. “She was Catholic, although I think probably we had a pretty similar attitude to religion. It wasn’t something that we talked about very much. Both of us hated the paraphernalia, the interference, that you get with religion, at least in its British incarnation. Wide-eyed vicars and half-empty pews. Bankrupt businessmen reading the lesson, trying to pass themselves off as pillars of the community. Going to church is at best a social occasion, isn’t it? A place where people can go and not feel lonely or devoid of hope.”
“Maybe,” I said, suspecting that this cynicism was a little forced. Then Joe surprised me again.
“When it came to Isabella,” he said, “I had this extraordinary feeling that she was a gift from God. That was the extent of the spell she cast over me.” I made to interrupt him but he looked at me with a fierce intensity. Both of us knew that what he was about to say was not something that a man like Joe might ordinarily disclose. “As our relationship developed, I felt that God was saying to me, ‘Here, this is the person that I want you to be with. This is the opportunity I am giving you to lead a happy and fulfilled life. Don’t mess it up.’ It was extraordinary. It was as if I had no choice.”
“And that’s why you wanted her to marry you?”
“Sure. That’s why I wanted her to marry me.”
So Joe went to Waterfield, because Waterfield was his mentor in Hong Kong, his priest and father figure. When he had first arrived in the colony, their relationship had even formed part of Joe’s cover. SIS created what is known as a Backstop, verifying a fiction that Waterfield had done National Service with one of Joe’s tutors at SOAS by doctoring a few military records and even airbrushing an old black-and-white photo from Sandhurst. He had therefore “looked him up” as a useful contact a few days after landing at Kai Tak and attended a dinner party at the Waterfield’s apartment where, for the benefit of any gossips or Chinese bugs, the two of them had engaged in a forty-minute conversation about Brian Lara and the difficulty of obtaining decent red wine in Asia. So it was not remarkable for both men to be seen together one Saturday afternoon at the bird market in Mongkok. Even if a Chinese spook had developed suspicions about Joe, he would have encountered an impenetrable wall of deep cover should he have chosen to investigate.
“You wanted to ask me about something.” Waterfield had brought his wife with him, but she was busy buying orchids on Flower Market Road.
“It’s about Isabella.”
“I see.”
It is difficult to exaggerate the extent to which SIS was a male-dominated culture among Waterfield’s generation. Talk of wives and girlfriends generally made them suspicious and bored. Women were like children in the era of Victorian parenting: to be seen and not heard.
“I think I’d like to ask her to marry me.”
“Really. Well, congratulations.”
They were walking side by side down a cramped alleyway that was lined with bird cages, the smarter ones fashioned from varnished bamboo. Rainwater from a recent storm dripped from corrugated-iron roofs and made a thin mud of the dirt and straw at their feet. If anybody had been attempting to record the conversation, the take quality would have been severely compromised by a perpetual, tuneless squawk of mynah birds and parakeets.
“Does that present any difficulties as far as the Office is concerned?”
More than a month had passed since Joe had interviewed Wang and he was still wary of putting his foot wrong. Waterfield glanced down at a table covered in sealed transparent bags and stopped walking.
“Crickets,” he said, prodding one of the bags so that the insects inside them leaped out of a camouflage of leaves and dried grass. “They feed them to the birds. With chopsticks.” Waterfield appeared to remember that Joe had asked him a question and looked up into his eyes. “It presents a difficulty, of course, only if you’re going to want to have everything out in the open.”
“I will want that,” Joe replied without hesitation.
“Then we’d better sit down and have a proper chat.”
They walked a further three hundred metres until the headache din of the birds had largely died away and they were alone in a small market stall selling noodles, simple Cantonese dishes and cheap Peking duck. There was a half-empty bottle of soy sauce on the table. When Joe moved it to one side the neck left a dry, sticky glue on his hands.
“I’m going to be patronizing,” Waterfield said, ordering a pot of green tea. It was one of the things that Joe liked about him: he had the confidence to be self-effacing. “You’re very young to be thinking about getting married.”
“I realize that.”
“Do you? One of the things that’s most difficult for men of your age to grasp is the enormous span of time left to you on the planet. That may sound grandiose, but so many years lie ahead, do you see? I’m not talking here about careers. I mean in a strictly personal sense. It’s extremely hard for a human being to have any notion of the extraordinary changes that they will undergo in their future lives, particularly between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. Changes in approach. Changes in personality.”
Joe didn’t know what to say. He wondered if Waterfield, in a roundabout kind of way, was telling him that he was immature.
“Let me divulge something about getting older.” The tea came and the SIS Head of Station poured it quickly into two white bowls. “Life contracts. Less room for manoeuvre, if you follow me. One acquires responsibilities that are perhaps unimaginable to someone of twenty-six. Responsibilities towards one’s children, of course, but also the added burden of work, of longer hours, of scrambling up the greasy pole. In a very real sense one must put away childish things.” Waterfield saw the look in Joe’s eyes and must have felt obliged to defend himself. “I can see what you’re thinking: ‘The old man is full of regrets, didn’t have enough fun in his youth. Insists the younger generation sow a few wild oats.’ ”
“Isn’t that partly what you’re saying?” Joe asked.
“Well I suppose it is, yes.” Waterfield laughed at himself and plucked a toothpick out of a small plastic canister on the table. Rather than put it in his mouth, he tapped one of the sharp points into the ball of his thumb. “Look, I think you are a very remarkable young man, Joe, and I say that both as a colleague and as a friend.” Joe had to remind himself that he was talking to a spy, but it was difficult not to extract a pulse of satisfaction from the compliment. “What you’ve achieved out here in such a short time is very impressive. But you are still young. You are still at the very beginning of what should be an extremely interesting and eventful life.”
Joe knew that he was expected to speak, but took his time before responding. Two elderly women passed the table carrying plastic bags stuffed with bok choi and washing detergent. Joe took out a cigarette, lit it, and blew the first smoke up into a flapping tarpaulin canopy that functioned as a roof over the stall. The gesture may have looked self-conscious.
“The thing is, David, I can only deal with what’s in front of me. I can only deal with the reality that I’m at this point in my life and that I’m in love with Isabella Aubert.”