Typhoon

45

Let’s face it: Joe didn’t need to go and see Isabella. He could have asked Zhao Jian to track her. He could have waited patiently for London to contact him with the information he had requested about Ablimit Celil. Shahpour’s disclosure that Miles used her as cover for his meetings with the cell was valuable product, certainly, but it didn’t necessitate a visit to her home in Jinqiao. What was Joe expecting? A confession? A full report on Miles’s clandestine movements in China? Isabella was hardly going to betray the man she had married, particularly to a former boyfriend who had once betrayed her himself. Yet the temptation proved too hard for Joe to resist. It was the perfect opportunity to see her. After all, Waterfield had tasked him with getting close to Miles Coolidge. Well, getting close to Miles Coolidge meant getting close to Isabella. And who knows a man better than his own wife? From a certain point of view, Joe was just doing his job.

Jian gave him the details. Every weekday morning, regular as clockwork, Isabella bicycled to Century Park where she joined a public tai-chi session between eight-fifteen and nine o’clock. By then, Miles had left for the office. She was always alone. It would simply be a case of finding her and taking things from there.

Travelling east on the Line 2 Metro into Pudong, Joe realized that he was blurring a dangerous professional and personal boundary which could only end in disappointment. He had hardly slept. He had deliberately avoided Megan for days. He had not prepared what he was going to say, nor thought through the consequences of his actions.

The train was packed. He stood in the pristine, swaying compartment, a laowai spy of thirty-four, thousands of miles from home, racing towards his destiny. It was 7:45 in the morning. What if Isabella simply turned on her heels, ignoring his entreaties? What if she phoned Miles and told him that Joe had been to see her? How would he explain that one? He was supposed to be an employee of a niche pharmaceutical company, not a British spook asking sensitive questions about the activities of the CIA. If she asked him what he was doing in Shanghai, Joe was going to tell her. He had already decided that. He could not lie. It was lies, after all, which had brought about their undoing eight years earlier. But to tell her was to jeopardize everything: the operation, his cover, the successful pursuit of the cell. If Joe had possessed even an ounce of common sense on that humid mid-May morning, he would surely have turned round at Dongfanglu and headed straight back to Puxi.

He found the location easily. He had no need of the map which he had brought with him. The tai-chi session was taking place at the southern edge of an artificial lake, a short walk from Century Park station. In the distance Joe could see a large group of exercising Chinese, mostly men and women of retirement age, stretching and revolving in slow motion, communing with invisible gods. He moved towards them. He saw a bearded Western man in his late fifties, and another laowai woman of a similar age wearing tracksuit trousers and a T-shirt which appeared to have been dyed pink in the wash. They looked out of place in a group of perhaps thirty or forty Han, with no sign of Isabella among them. Joe sat on a bench in the shade of a tallow tree. He wondered if he was observing the correct group. Had Zhao Jian sent him to the wrong section of the park? It would take at least forty minutes to scout the entire area, a period in which Isabella might easily return home.

An aeroplane flew in low overhead, descending east towards the airport. The decelerating noise of its engines smothered the wail of Chinese folk music issuing from a portable CD player at the edge of the lake. Joe stood up. To the north he could discern the faint outline of the Jin Mao Tower, obscured by smog. He lowered his gaze and stared again at the group, moving two paces to his left so that his line of sight was no longer blocked by four men wielding wooden swords.

And then he saw her, the haunting, seductive revelation of Isabella Aubert, her face and body as familiar to him as the morning breeze. She was wearing black cotton yoga trousers with a band in her hair, bare slender arms stretched out in front of her, shoeless feet rotating on the dew-kissed grass. Joe’s first reaction was to smile, because there was a look of intense, almost childlike concentration on Isabella’s face as she geared through the complex movements of the tai-chi. In this first instant he realized that all of his pain, all of his heartache and longing, had not been wasted. She was still as vivid and as beautiful to him as she had ever been, and it had been right to come back to her. He returned to the bench. Joe’s heart was racing and he lost himself in a flood of memories, recalling the first time that they had seen one another at the wedding, their first hypnotic nights in Kentish Town, the arguments which had raged between them in the desperate week of wui gwai. He continued to watch her, thinking of Miles and Linda and the lies in their lives, and it was almost impossible to imagine how close Isabella was living to a terrible secret. How was he going to break it to her? What the hell was he going to say?

The music stopped. There was laughter and a coming together of friends. Isabella appeared to know one of the elderly Chinese ladies on her left because they immediately fell into conversation when the exercise ended. A gull flew in front of them and settled at the edge of the lake. Joe stood up and began walking through the crowds. He was forty metres away. Thirty. Isabella put on a pair of soft shoes and shook out the long dark curls of her hair, movements that were almost melancholy in their practised simplicity. It was at this point that she seemed to sense his approach and it surprised Joe that Isabella smiled as he came towards her, as if they had made an arrangement to meet, almost as if she had been expecting him.

“Oh my God.” The smell of her as they hugged was an opiate of memories. She was on tiptoes, squeezing his back, saying things into his body that he could barely hear. “What are you doing in Shanghai? I don’t believe this.”

They parted and looked at one another. Isabella’s face was flushed with exercise, but it was also alive to the pleasure and surprise of seeing him. The final, dreadful months in Hong Kong appeared to have been forgotten. Time had erased all ill feeling between them.

“What are you doing in Shanghai?” she said again. “This is so unbelievable.”

“It’s a long story.”

It was only after several seconds that Joe realized what she had revealed: that Miles had told her nothing. Had he deliberately withheld the fact that Joe was living in the city? Or was what Shahpour and Zhao Jian had told him correct? That Mr. and Mrs. Miles Coolidge no longer lived together, no longer shared the same bed?

“I didn’t mean to surprise you,” he said. “Didn’t Miles say anything? Didn’t he tell you I was living here?”

Isabella shook her head, the rueful smile on her lips providing him with the answer to his question. Miles doesn’t tell me anything. My husband is a basement of secrets.

Joe lowered his gaze. He saw the battered gold wedding band on her finger. “Well, that’s not what I expected,” he said. Isabella spluttered out a laugh. “I had dinner with him in April. We bumped into each other on Huaihai. He never said anything?”

“Nothing,” Isabella replied.

It was possible, of course, that she was lying; after all, it would be easier to blame Miles than to admit that she had been deliberately avoiding the very confrontation that Joe had now engendered. Yet that wasn’t Isabella’s style. It never had been. She wasn’t a coward. She wasn’t a fake. She spoke her mind and called things as she saw them. Besides, why deny something so straightforward? She picked up a broad-brimmed sun hat from the grass and began walking towards the lake. There was a note of fatalism in her voice as she said, “Miles has been very busy. He’s away a lot.”

It sounded like a wife’s hollow excuse. Falling in step beside her, Joe could sense that Isabella barely possessed the energy to defend him. She knew instinctively that Miles had been trying to keep them apart. They both did. That was the obvious, embarrassing conclusion to be drawn. To save her further discomfort, Joe paid Isabella a compliment, saying that she looked exactly the same as she had done when he had last seen her eight years earlier.

“God. Is that how long it’s been?” The lovely cascade of her hair, the life in her voice, were returning to Joe like forgotten photographs. “Christ we’re getting old,” she said. “So is this an accident? Are you in Pudong on business?”

Joe had set himself only one rule for their reunion: that he would never again lie to Isabella Aubert. Already that rule was under scrutiny. It was too early in the conversation to reveal the true nature of his quest.

“Like I said, it’s a long story. Do you have time for a coffee?”

Isabella’s face suddenly contracted with worry, and she placed a hand on Joe’s arm. The contact was like a physical guarantee of her affection for him. Sensing her distress, Joe said, “Don’t worry, it’s nothing serious,” and if he had been more certain of Isabella’s feelings towards him, if there had not been so much history between them, so many doors to be reopened, he would have lifted her hand from his arm and held it, to reassure her. There still existed an extraordinary physical and emotional connection between them which he could sense as vividly as he could feel the morning sun burning in the sky. He was certain that Isabella could sense it too. There is a magic in first love; it never leaves you.

“There’s a cafe over there,” he said, pointing north towards the black glass structure of the Science and Technology Museum. He had been there once before, on a bored early weekend in Shanghai. “We could get breakfast and talk.”

“Let’s do that,” she said. “And I’m paying.”

They found an outdoor table set in a pseudo-futuristic courtyard overlooked by the dark polished curves of the museum. The humidity of mid-morning was kept at bay by a gentle breeze which ran free across the undeveloped marshlands of southern Pudong. Children were decanting from fat, gleaming buses. They played in the spray of a fountain, giggled as they waited in line.

“So are you married?” Isabella asked. “Have you got children? Are you still working for your secret bloody brotherhood?”

Eight years as the wife of an American spy appeared to have normalized her attitude to Joe’s chosen trade. She had grinned as she asked the list of questions and he had no hesitation in replying.

“I’m not married,” he said, adding quickly, “Not divorced, either,” because he saw what he interpreted as a look of confusion on Isabella’s face. “I don’t have any children. At least I didn’t last time I checked.”

“And the Foreign Office?”

Joe noted that there had been a little blink and swallow as she had absorbed the news that he was single. “Are we back here again?” he said. He could afford to risk the joke because there was no more pain between them. He stared at Isabella’s face, at the eyes he had kissed, the neck he had touched, and marvelled that their conversation was so effortless. “Actually I made a private vow to myself eight years ago that if we ever met again I wouldn’t lie to you about what I do for a living.”

“And yet here you are about to do exactly that.” She waved away her indiscretion. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have asked.” Their eyes met in a moment of quiet understanding. Joe could see that Isabella was now all too aware of the unique, private frustrations of the secret life.

“Can I say something about that?” she said suddenly.

“About what?”

“About the way I behaved in Hong Kong.” It was not yet ten o’clock, but she had plainly made the decision to clear her conscience as quickly as possible. “I was very hard on you.” She swept a strand of hair out of her eyes. “You didn’t deserve it. It took me a long time to realize that, and by then I was in Chengdu with Miles. I’m so sorry.” Joe tried to stall the confession, because he was shocked both by its candour and by the impact that Isabella’s words had on his heart. They had come too late, and yet they were all that he had longed to hear. “The truth is that I wasn’t really ready for what we had. I was too young. I used what I discovered about you as an excuse to end what we had between us.”

“Izzy…”

“No, please. Let me finish. For all I know it’ll be another eight years before I see you again and I’ve been wanting to say this for ages.” She lowered the cup of coffee she had been holding and placed it on the table in front of her. Joe suddenly glimpsed an extraordinary solitude in her eyes, as if there was no one in Shanghai to whom Isabella could speak as frankly and as passionately as she was now doing. “I wasn’t as kind as you thought I was,” she said. “You deserved better. I had a habit of pushing men away who were good to me. I did it with Anthony and I did it with you. It was heartless.”

“I lied to you,” Joe said, trying to protect her. “I should have been more honest from the start.”

“No. How could you have been?” She had thought it all through. She was trying to demonstrate her desire to mend their shared wound, as if they could not speak of anything else until the past had been laid to rest. “It was the nature of your job,” she said. “You couldn’t have done it if you were going around telling everybody the truth.”

“Perhaps,” Joe said. It occurred to him that there were other things, more damaging things, yet just as truthful, that Isabella might now have added. That Joe had been just a little bit too sensible, a little bit too buttoned up, a little bit too withdrawn and conservative for a girl of her background and character. A part of him had always known that Isabella had discovered his dark secret just at the point when she was beginning to tire of him. The timing was immaculate. Had he asked her to marry him, she might well have said no. These were less consoling truths and Isabella was being kind not to speak of them.

“And what about now?” he asked. He was trying to smile, trying to get her to relax and enjoy the morning. “Are you happy? Did it all work out the way you wanted it to?”

She stared across the blinding courtyard, the sun burning the concrete and glinting off the surface of the water. How much does a woman tell a man about the secrets in her heart? How much can a wife disclose about the failures of her marriage?

“Isn’t that why you’ve come?” she said.

Joe lit a cigarette. “I don’t understand.”

“To talk about Miles.”

He took the first smoke deep into his lungs and exhaled at the cloud-smothered sky. “It’s partly why I’ve come,” he conceded, though he could not imagine what Isabella knew.

“To talk about Linda?”

This stunned him. “You know about that?” he said, before he had a chance to consider the wisdom of betraying Miles.

There was silence.

“Izzy?” Joe experienced the extraordinary sensation that she had been waiting eight years to break her silence. He suddenly felt as though she regarded him as her closest friend in the world, and that he had ignored that friendship out of sheer spite.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. She took one of his cigarettes. She wasn’t going to break down or cry. That wasn’t her style. “It’s the lot of the expat wife, the tai tai. We make our beds, we lie in them.”

“I don’t understand.”

She lit the cigarette because he had forgotten to do it for her. “I mean that we come out here on six-figure packages, we get our club-class air tickets, our tennis lessons and our houses in Jinqiao. And what’s the trade-off? Husbands who are away two hundred days a year with a girlfriend in every port and a permanent hangover on weekends.” She met his eyes. “Don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about, Joe. How long have you lived in Asia?”

“For ever.”

“Exactly. And it was the same story in Hong Kong, the same in KL, the same in Singapore, right?” He didn’t wholly agree with her, but knew better than to interrupt. “The Empire lives on. In the 1930s, corporate wives went to the Del Monte and the Cathay. Nowadays we go to Bar Rouge and M on the Bund. There’s no difference. We’re still bored and frustrated. We still have more money than the locals. We still have servants. We still dress up and play the Empire game. Meanwhile, our beloved husbands fuck as many Chinese girls as they can get their hands on and convince themselves they’re part of a master race.”

In truth, this was not the first time that Joe and Isabella had had a conversation of this kind. Her father, Eduard, the French insurance broker, had been a serial womanizer whose philandering was a frequent source of anguish for Isabella, even ten years after his death. When she had left Joe for Miles, a part of him rationalized the switch on the cod-Freudian basis that all women eventually married their fathers. Nevertheless, as he listened to Isabella on that summer morning, Joe experienced something of the same uncertainty that he had felt in the early stages of his conversations with Shahpour and Wang. Is everybody lying to me, or is everybody telling the truth?

“Where’s this coming from?” he asked. “I don’t know how I can help you. I don’t know what it is that you want me to do.”

She laughed. “Oh, Joe. You’re so sweet. You were always so old-fashioned. I don’t want you to do anything. It’s just lovely to see you again. It’s just lovely to talk. I had no idea how much I missed you. This place is so…”-she gestured north-“exhausting.”

Joe would have reached out to touch her hand, but he lacked the confidence. Isabella had stripped that away from him. In the eight years without her he had put on skins, layers, a carapace of emotional toughness to prevent him from falling prey to another woman. It had worked, by and large. Megan had broken through for a little while, but as he sipped his coffee and reflected that his heart was still anchored to Isabella, he resolved to end that relationship as soon as possible. It didn’t feel right. It wasn’t going anywhere.

“Why do you stay with him?” he asked.

It was a brave question. Isabella ground out her cigarette.

“Because I made a vow. In church. In front of God.”

Joe wasn’t sure whether this was a statement or a question. His own faith had become a nebulous thing; he admired any expression of devotion. “Nothing else? Are things that bad between you?”

“They’re like any marriage.” She placed the sun hat on her head. “When they’re good, they’re good. When they’re bad, they’re bad. The trouble is that the good times come along less and less often. So you’re left with consolations. You’re left with Jesse.”

“Who’s Jesse?” Even as Joe uttered the question he discovered its ghastly, inevitable answer. Jesse was their child. Miles and Isabella had a son.

“Miles really hasn’t been too forthcoming with the information, has he?” she joked. Joe felt a void opening up inside him like a sickness. “Jesse’s our son. My little boy.”

“Where is he?” Joe had buried his shock in the only question he could think of. He felt betrayed and humiliated. Why had Miles not seized on the opportunity to wound him with the news when he had met him on Huaihai, or at M on the Bund?

“He’s back at the house with Mary.” Joe assumed that Mary was an ayi, a Chinese live-in nanny. “Do you want more coffee? Do you mind if I get something to eat?”

He knew that she had said it to relieve his sadness. He shook his head and smiled, saying, “No, but you go ahead,” and Isabella stood up, making her way into the cafe. Why was he so distraught at the gift of a child? People got married. People had children. Miles was ten years older than Isabella; a pregnancy had been inevitable. The child was probably the one constant happiness in his mother’s life. Why resent it?

Joe’s mobile pulsed in his pocket. He took it out and saw that Waterfield was calling from London. The phone was not secure, so any conversation would have to be short and non-specific.

“Joe?”

He was grateful for the immediate distraction of work. “David. How are you?”

“Sorry to have been out of touch.”

“It’s all right.”

A little boy walked past him eating a toffee apple. Waterfield moved straight to business. “No news on your doorman, I’m afraid. Sally’s never heard of him. Ditto the chef.”

The doorman was Ablimit Celil. The chef was a nickname for Memet Almas. “Sally” was agreed language for the database at Vauxhall Cross. Joe leaned his elbows on the table and took a chance.

“Have you tried asking in Pakistan?” He wanted to verify Wang’s theory about the ISI. “I heard a rumour they’d worked in Islamabad. Might be worth checking.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Not entirely.”

Waterfield coughed. “I thought it was American owned?”

It amused Joe to hear him improvising with the coded language. Waterfield was part of the tele gram generation. Speaking about an operation on an open line was contrary to every instinct he possessed for secrecy.

“I thought so too,” he replied. “That still might be the case. It would just be interesting to know if the doorman ever had a job there.”

Isabella was coming out of the museum. When she saw that Joe was on the phone, she stopped, offering to grant him some privacy. Seeing this, he shook his head and waved her over, telling Waterfield that he had to go.

“I’m having a coffee with Isabella,” he said, because it would raise his stock in London.

“You are? Well, good for you. Be sure not to send her my love.”

“Work?” Isabella asked when he had hung up. She had bought two bottles of water and a brace of dehydrated croissants.

“Work,” Joe replied.