Exciting Times(13)

Clever about Latin, clever about taxonomy, able in his intellect to brook being called pretentious provided you matched his penchant for scathing women. I didn’t take holidays. I also found the phrase ‘his penchant for scathing women’ interesting, grammatically. It did sometimes strike me that one could equally say Julian had e.g. managed things so he could take me to meet his father and still make it about how detached he was, detachment being something he knew I both wanted and didn’t want from him and which he played up to these conflicting levels of desire as, respectively, carrot and stick – but historians could debate all that when we were dead and interesting.

The waiter came back with three glasses of hot water. ‘Tell me, Ava,’ Miles said, ‘what do you make of the election?’

‘In Hong Kong?’ I said.

‘Yes, yes, for the Chief Executive in March.’

‘Stop grilling her,’ Julian said. ‘They’re all mainland puppets anyway.’

I should have been grateful, but wasn’t. Did he think I couldn’t handle Miles? As it happened, I couldn’t name a single candidate, but Julian didn’t know that about me.

‘All right, how about you, Julian?’ said Miles. ‘Lam or Tsang? Since heaven knows you won’t be backing the underdog.’

‘Untrue. I was with Blair till the end.’

‘And against Corbyn from the beginning.’

‘I will readily admit to a prejudice against having dangerous nutters lead parties.’

‘Spare a thought for me, Ava,’ Miles said. ‘The one thing worse than a centrist dad is a centrist son.’

‘How much does your university pay its cleaning staff, Miles?’ Julian said.

‘Shamefully little,’ Miles said. ‘It would almost suggest that capitalism doesn’t fairly remunerate socially important labour.’

‘I wonder which creates more jobs – my directing capital where it will stimulate the most growth, or your writing books about how this makes me a bourgeois parasite.’

‘Certainly the books. Hordes of Guardian writers keep the wolf from the door by pretending to have read them.’

‘Whereas I do it for free,’ said Julian. ‘Maybe I’m the communist.’

Miles turned to me. ‘What brings you to Hong Kong, Ava?’ he said.

I said: ‘I’m here to teach.’ I tried to balance my chopsticks on top of the bowl, then noticed a small wooden rest for them. I never knew what to do when someone had obviously asked me a question to include me in the conversation. How much could I say in response before I was abusing their generosity?

Miles said: ‘Teach what?’

‘English.’

‘Tell her what you think about Ireland,’ Julian said. ‘She’ll like that.’

‘First,’ Miles said, ‘I’d like to hear what you think I think about Ireland.’

Julian said: ‘Isn’t it that independence was a waste of time because the free state hasn’t yet transitioned to full communism?’

‘I appreciate the “yet”. But I don’t know that that was my precise contention. I do think the republic has betrayed the socialist contingency that fought for it.’

‘When should we have left?’ said Julian. ‘Everywhere the British left later than Ireland, it was too late for you, and yet Ireland was too early.’

‘When did I say Ireland was too early?’

‘You don’t like what happened after we left. The only counterfactual is staying longer.’

Miles blew on his tea. ‘The fact that you consider that the only counterfactual,’ he said, ‘tells me all I need to know about the history faculty at Oxford.’

‘I think I picked up my ideological stubbornness from a slightly earlier influence,’ said Julian.

They stopped talking about politics for a while after that.

*

The flat was cold when we got back. I turned on the heater and wrapped up in one of the throws. Julian asked what I’d made of Miles. I said I liked him.

‘I’m not trying to turn you against him,’ said Julian, ‘but I think you should know that my parents divorced because he had an affair.’

He wouldn’t want me to say anything sympathetic, so I didn’t. His shoes looked scuffed. I told him to leave them by the couch so I could polish them tomorrow.

‘Why did he send you to Eton?’ I said.

I considered it a deviant thing for any parent to do to their child, but a Marxist one especially.

‘That was Florence,’ Julian said. ‘A key boiling point. Florence thought Miles wanted to, quote, sacrifice her son’s education on the altar of socialism. Miles felt Florence wished to, quote, seal me in a hermetic bourgeois bubble. It was especially fraught because we were entitled to bursaries and Miles thought it was outrageous that we’d take the money from somebody who actually needed it.’

And now I knew all about his family life, he said. As much as he did, anyway, which he suspected was relatively little of it.

I knew that was the kind of disclosure he’d instantly regret making, so I didn’t ask him to unpack it.





11

On Christmas Day, Julian went to church with Miles. I stayed in bed and phoned my family. When he returned, presents: necklace for me, wallet for him – the things you gave colleagues in gift exchanges when you wanted them to know you’d gone over the spending limit. It was the first time I’d bought him something. I couldn’t help thinking I should have asked permission.