The Year of Dangerous Loving. John Davis Gordon

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СКАЧАТЬ every night, Al, I was married once myself.’

      ‘And evidently I’ve got unhealthy appetites. Like booze and gambling.’ He paused. ‘How can you make love to a woman who’s always fed up with you? Always telling you what a washout you were at the dinner party last night, you don’t tell funny stories any more, all you talked about was politics.’

      McAdam wasn’t sure what to say. ‘Well, maybe you should spend more time together, take her out for a few romantic dinners.’

      ‘Bit late for that – don’t feel very romantic with a bullet in my chest.’

      ‘But you love her.’ He added: ‘Don’t you?’

      ‘Ask me another one. Right now I’m angry, mortified. Whole town knows. Wish the earth would swallow me up.’

      ‘Do you think she loves you?’

      Hargreave snorted again. ‘She’s too angry with me for that. Fed up with me. This fed up –’ He indicated his chest – ‘even though it was an accident. When people do that, raise their hand to strike, or pick up a weapon, it means they’d really like to do it, even if they stop themselves.’ He sighed grimly. ‘I almost wish she’d had an affair, maybe that would have made me less intolerable.’

      ‘You told her to have an affair? Last night?’

      ‘No. She accused me of having an affair. Oh,’ he shook his head, ‘I don’t want to talk about it. Utterly untrue. God, who with? Friends’ wives? Don’t want a guilty conscience as well as being bored.’

      McAdam hesitated: ‘Apparently she found some lipstick on your collar?’

      Hargreave groaned and opened his eyes. ‘Oh Christ. That was just some Wanchai whore trying to be persuasive. Nothing happened, didn’t even buy her a drink. The cops were with me, they’d bear me out.’ He closed his eyes again. ‘But Liz was furious, yes, accused me of having it off down there, accused me of all kinds of womanizing for years.’ He sighed angrily. ‘Utterly untrue.’

      ‘So what happened with Elizabeth? You told her you were innocent. Then?’

      Hargreave sighed. ‘Furious with me for being late for the CJ’s dinner party. And drunk. I wasn’t really drunk, just exhausted after the case. Fell asleep at dinner. Snored, apparently. Gave me hell coming home, particularly about the lipstick. I refused to fight, went to bed, started to read while she ranted on about Wanchai whores. Next thing she’s standing at the end of the bed with the gun shouting “Answer me!” Then, bang! Bullet knocks the book out of my hands and hits my chest. I sat up with a certain alacrity. Couldn’t believe it.’

      ‘Jesus. So?’

      ‘So I leap off the bed, spouting blood. Grabbed the gun. We wrestle for it. Thing goes off again, punches a hole in the wall. She runs to the telephone and calls you. Drama. Then the neighbours come rushing in. While I stagger out and drive myself to hospital. Now the whole fucking town knows.’ He slapped the newspapers. ‘What did she say to you?’

      McAdam hesitated, then said, ‘“Send a policeman to arrest me, I’ve just shot my husband.”’

      Hargreave groaned. ‘Drama. She knew the cops weren’t necessary – that gun’s got a light trigger.’

      ‘I didn’t know you had a gun.’

      ‘Hangover from our days in Kenya. When we were seconded there ten years ago I bought a gun in case of burglars. It’s quite kosher, fully licensed.’

      ‘Where is it normally kept?’

      ‘My bedside table. Didn’t notice her get it, she was striding up and down giving me a bollocking.’ Hargreave sighed. ‘She didn’t intend to shoot me – just being dramatic.’

      ‘Okay, but this doesn’t look good from a police point of view. She fires, then she struggles to retain possession of the gun? That would sound like serious intent to the jury.’

      Hargreave took a deep, tense breath. ‘No jury, no cops. Natural reaction to struggle over a weapon once you’ve produced it to be dramatic. I just hope she goes back to America and cools off.’

      ‘Well, when I spoke to Max an hour ago he said she was packing her bags.’

      Hargreave opened his eyes and raised his head. ‘Really?’

      ‘But it might be bravado. Want me to go around there and pour oil on troubled waters?’

      Hargreave looked at him, then slumped back. ‘No,’ he said tremulously. ‘It’s for the best. Let her get out of this bloody awful town for a while …’

2

      In the Hong Kong summer your skin is oily, your hair is oily, the sun beats down oily maddening hot on this teeming city on the South China coast: on the frantic money-making, the towering business blocks and the apartments crowding along the manmade shores and up the jungled mountains; on the myriad of resettlement blocks and the squatter shacks, beating down on the sweeping swathes of elevated highways and byways and flyovers and underpasses, on the buildings going up on the mountains that are chopped down to make more land for teeming people, on the mass of factories and the shops, the jampacked traffic carbon-monoxidizing everywhere, the narrow backstreets and ladderstreets and alleyways, the jostling sidewalks, and the signboards fighting each other up to the sky. It blazes down upon the mauve islands and mountains surrounding the teeming harbour, with its container ships and freighters from around the world, and its cargo junks and sampans and jampacked ferries, beating down on the noise and work and money-making. But it is China’s money-making that comes first and foremost in this clamorous, anachronistic, capitalistic, British colony on the crazy-making China coast: Hong Kong is Communist China’s capitalist colony – it is only Great Britain’s in name. Hong Kong is a very unusual, dramatic place.

      And this year it was even more dramatic because the question on everybody’s mind, the question everybody had to answer was: ‘Shall I go or shall I stay? Shall I leave this crazy place and start life over again, or shall I take a chance on China and trust in the Lord?’

      Ten years ago they had trusted in the Joint Declaration – in which Great Britain and China agreed that ‘only the flag will change’ when the territory reverted in 1997 – ten years ago they had trusted in China’s avowed policy of ‘One Country, Two Systems’, trusted in the internationally-binding agreement that the new Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong that would come into being would be autonomous and governed democratically, that British law would continue to apply, trusted in the Basic Law which China had drawn up enshrining these principles. Ten years ago there had been hope, and that hope had got stronger when Communism collapsed in Russia and eastern Europe, stronger yet when Premier Deng of China declared that ‘to become rich is glorious’. In those days even Alistair Hargreave, who trusted Communists only as far as he could kick them, had resolved to stay after 1997. And then had come the massacre in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, where thousands of Chinese were gunned down by the People’s Liberation Army tanks for demanding democracy; Hong Kong’s hope was trampled into the blood of Tiananmen.

      ‘Communism is dead,’ Hargreave had said. ‘Long live the fucking Communist Party!’

      There was little hope after Tiananmen; thousands СКАЧАТЬ