Exciting Times(23)
The play was a Chekhov number in Russian, with Chinese and English surtitles. We were too near the front to see both the words and the actors’ faces at once, so we had to choose which to follow. Throughout, Edith tended to her work inbox. She managed this by holding her bag like a lapdog and thumbing away inside it. I wondered if the actors noticed.
One man wore a monocle. Another carried perfume and intermittently doused himself. You knew the women by their dresses: white for ingenue, navy for spinster, black for wife. There was vodka and, presumably, adultery. I decided to read the surtitles so I could fill Edith in later, but it was all a tangle of Olgas and Mashas and catalysed interpersonal tension.
A man lost a duel. Edith started at the gunshot. Curtain call.
‘Did you like it?’ she said as we left.
‘As much as I could follow,’ I said.
‘Well, I thought it was exceptional. Shall we do it again some time?’
I tried to hide my excitement.
*
Edith had come into my life just when there was a vacancy.
Julian had been in London a few weeks now. He sent messages. I never read them right away. First, like a stress test, I’d list the worst things he could say. Things like: I’m back with Kat and we’re getting married. Our relationship was an elaborate social experiment which has now exhausted my interest. I’m subletting the apartment and you need to leave. I’m not subletting but you still need to leave.
Once I’d modelled out every possible way the message could hurt me, I went somewhere quiet and opened it. Then it didn’t say anything I’d worried about and I felt I’d got away with something, but that I’d be found out next time.
In person, if I missed a shaking hand or a falter in his smile, then that was that and I couldn’t revisit it. But in written form he was under a bell jar and would stay there until my analyses were complete. Of course he had me under one as well, but I chose my phrasing carefully and knew it would stand up to scrutiny. Really it was a shame we had bodies. I wrote: i miss having sex with you but only because i have a body, & if i didn’t then everything would be easier. He replied that on the contrary, he suspected sex without bodies might pose challenges.
Sunday mornings were Saturday for him. His papers came as usual. I laid them on the coffee table, read the headlines, and fidgeted with my watch. He’d left some shirts behind that I still hadn’t ironed. The creases seemed like his, though I knew they were the washing machine’s. I watched movies in his bed. This was in theory no different to doing so in my own, but I found it more immersive.
Sometimes he rang on the weekend, but more often he messaged. Like me, he seemed to find it easier to express himself behind a screen. The Saturday after my theatre date with Edith, he wrote:
Feel we may have parted on bad terms. Suboptimal terms certainly. Hope you’re keeping up with Miles, Victoria, Ralph-pronounced-Rafe, etc. It’s mental here. The gar?on absolut still too principled to want to win elections, which is splendid now Tories have called one. & Bank of England says we’re not doing enough to prepare for no deal – so between May grabbing Damocles by the sword & the rest of us stocking up on canned beans, London is, as ever, a haven of quietude. Interesting how pitch has changed from ‘Take back control’ to ‘We think there will still be food’. Anyway. Say if you need anything. Sorry for uncertainty re: when back. J.
An editor could have fun, I thought, going through his messages and changing the full stops to exclamation marks.
I didn’t tell him about my evening with Edith. I couldn’t be bothering him with every tiny detail.
*
A fortnight after we met, Edith had theatre tickets again. This time she asked me first, and then the next week, too. I didn’t tell Victoria. I hoped the longer I left it, the more dudgeon it would cause her. I liked dudgeoning Victoria. And it was private, all of it – listening to the pinnacles and spires of her accent, sizing our proportions, feeling with each play like I was more and more someone Edith would be friends with.
After the first play, I’d googled her boarding school tuition and the international student fees at Cambridge. I was unsurprised when she said her parents worked in finance. In the interval of the second play, I said something in passing about posh English people, and Edith said the concept of poshness didn’t exist in Hong Kong. It was like Ireland: all money was new money. Rich was posh and posh was rich. Given that I was neither, I wasn’t sure why I found that comforting, but I did. There wasn’t even an upper-class accent, Edith said, although mainland Cantonese was regarded by ‘some’ as sounding nicer.
On each outing she spouted facts at me. She used her hands when she talked, and often her whole body. To show me the regions of China, she scribbled on a napkin. I kept it. I liked her enthusiasm. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d met someone who got excited about things.
Each play she had a different handbag. She managed this by putting the same abundantly pocketed travel case inside them all, so that the outer bag on any given day was just a shell. The designer bags cost thousands of Hong Kong dollars, and the travel case was maybe a hundred, and the latter was where she actually kept her things. I’d never understand rich people. Edith’s keys, Octopus card and wallet all ‘lived’ in a given crevice, so that she could quickly locate them. This I admired and tried to implement in my own life. But I would choose bad places for things to ‘live’, forget they lived there, and still not be able to find them.