The primary motivation for this uncharacteristic behaviour was undoubtedly Isabella’s imminent engagement. Miles wanted to present himself as a viable alternative to Joe and must have believed, in his strange, corrupted pathology, that he had a chance of breaking them up if he appeared to be the sort of man who could put his life back on track at the flick of a switch. As a strategy, it was ambitious to the point of lunacy, yet it had the effect of creating a sense of confusion within Miles’s circle of friends. What had come over him? Why was the celebrated Lothario suddenly cleaning up his act? And, of course, this confusion fed its way down to Isabella.
At the same time, she had begun to tell her close friends that her relationship with Joe was in a dip. They were seeing less of one another. They were constantly working. Habits of his that had once been charming and idiosyncratic now seemed commonplace, even annoying.
“He’s never around when I need him to be,” she told me. “There’s always an excuse or an apology. We can’t ever plan anything because he’s always at the beck and call of his job. Yet he has this fixed way of seeing the world which somehow prevents us being spontaneous.”
Their sex life, which had been dizzying in its initial intensity, had now moved into a second, more predictable phase. It had been the same story with Anthony, her married lover who had left his wife for her after the summers in Ibiza; two years of bliss, then the power cut of over-familiarity. Yet a part of Isabella was determined to make this latest relationship last, to go through the wall of her momentary indifference and to build something constructive and lasting with Joe. She knew that he adored her. She knew that if she left him it would break his heart. If he proposed, she would find it very difficult to turn him down, yet she knew that she was not quite ready, at twenty-six, to take the plunge into marriage.
Every snake needs his bit of luck and, against this background, Miles experienced a further slice of good fortune. The French television company for whom Isabella had been working decided to remain in Hong Kong after the handover and to shoot two supplementary films: a documentary about the first few months of Chinese rule, and a factual programme about the history of the Triads. I was in Hong Kong when Isabella was first approached to act as a researcher on the second film, so it was perhaps telling that she turned to Miles as her primary source of information. There was an additional irony, of course. Isabella had a man sharing her bed who knew just as much about Chinese organized crime as anyone in the Hong Kong CIA. But Joe was just a freight forwarder at Heppner Logistics. Joe didn’t know anything.
Miles played the whole thing very cleverly. He was keyed in to Joe’s itinerary because of the crossover between both services and suggested to Isabella that she come to his apartment to discuss the documentary on a night when he knew that Joe would be tied up until the small hours discussing handover security issues with David Waterfield. It was necessary to meet at his flat, he explained, because he was expecting delivery of a painting at some point after six o’clock.
Miles left the consulate at five in order to be home in good time to prepare supper, have a shower and put on a clean set of clothes. An enormous amount of time and thought had gone into every element of the evening. Should he shave or leave a stubble? Should he cook a three-course dinner, or would that look ostentatious? Was it better to have the apartment looking lived-in and scruffy, or reasonably clean and organized? Miles had been to the best supermarket in town-Oliver’s in the Prince’s building-to pick up the ingredients for a decent meaclass="underline" a rack of lamb, some expensive French cheese, a homemade apple pie and a tub of Ben and Jerry’s vanilla. He then blew HK$150 on a bottle of Sancerre at Berry Bros amp; Rudd and a further HK$230 on a Robert Mondavi Pinot Noir. At about seven o’clock he began scattering CD cases on the floor near his hi-fi and placed a stack of old New Yorkers and well-thumbed paperbacks on the coffee table in the sitting room. If Isabella sat on the sofa at any point in the evening, she would see that Miles was reading Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, Jacques Gernet’s Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, and a brace of novels- Ladder of Years and The Accidental Tourist — by Anne Tyler. No harm, after all, in being seen to read fiction by women. (The book that Miles was actually reading-and was quite gripped by-was The Firm, momentarily stashed in a cupboard in the spare bedroom next to Michael Crichton’s Disclosure and a hygienically unreliable copy of Playboy.)
Isabella arrived at eight o’clock. She was wearing a dark blue Agnes B dress and a pair of wedge-heeled espadrilles. It was a hot night, muggy in the Mid-Levels, and she had wanted to dress in a way that was striking without seeming provocative. Miles buzzed her in and came to the door of his apartment wearing a pair of blue jeans and a white linen shirt. He had taken a shower an hour earlier and the fresh warm smell of his skin tugged in Isabella’s stomach in a way that surprised her. She thought back to her dream and felt oddly embarrassed. Music was playing in the sitting room ahead of them-The Fugees’ The Score — and a smell of garlic and rosemary wafted through from the kitchen.
“Wow. Something smells good.”
“You eat meat, right?”
Miles knew very well that Isabella ate meat. He had just wanted to appear casual.
“Of course.”
“Great, because I bought us some lamb. Is that gonna be OK?” He was not wearing socks or shoes, and the sight of his tanned feet padding down the corridor ahead of her added to the entirely artificial sense of homeliness and relaxation that Miles had hoped to create.
“Lamb’s wonderful. You’re very sweet to have cooked anything. I should have taken you out.” She paused at the edge of the sitting room. “Great flat, Miles.”
“You never been here before?” Another question to which he already knew the answer. “The American taxpayer can be pretty generous. You should check out the view.”
They now walked in different directions: Miles towards the open-plan kitchen, where he popped the cork on the Sancerre; Isabella towards the vast rectangular window at the northern end of the apartment. Spread out beneath her was the city at night, a brilliant wide shot of Hong Kong light and colour, every building from Sheung Wan to Causeway Bay illuminating the sky with a phosphorescent glow that framed the distant neon blur of Kowloon. She thought about all the girls that Miles must have lured to this place, the one-liners and seductions, and watched her own grin reflected in the glass.
“Pretty, huh?”
“It’s amazing. Did your painting arrive, by the way?”
“Sure,” he lied. “I’ve already got it hanging upstairs.”
The Sancerre was corked, which broke the ice. Miles swore and made a joke at the expense of the French which Isabella found funny, in spite of herself. It flattered her that he seemed slightly nervous and hesitant in these early moments, a side of his usually supremely confident personality that she had not experienced before. Was this just loyalty to Joe, or the uncertainty of a serial philanderer who did not know how to behave in the presence of a younger woman not visiting his flat solely for sex? Miles poured the wine down the sink-he didn’t want to appear cheap by corking it for a refund-and Isabella asked instead for a vodka and tonic. She was intrigued to watch him operate in his home environment, a domesticated male fetching ice from the freezer, switching CDs on the hi-fi, filling pans with water to boil vegetables on the stove. It somehow made him more human, more intriguing.