Exciting Times(25)

The following week we went for coffee in Sheung Wan. In the queue, Edith told me she liked how I’d done my hair. I was momentarily happy, but then she complimented the barista in the same animated way.

‘Tell me about your family,’ she said at the table, as if fascinated that I had one.

I did. In return, she told me her father was from Hunan province in mainland China. Her mum was Singaporean. She only considered herself Hongkie in that she’d grown up there, and even then, she was born abroad. Her mum had nipped over to Toronto to get Edith a Canadian passport, a trek Mrs Zhang regularly invoked for maternal leverage. She’d remind Edith that she flew while so pregnant she could barely walk and without Edith’s father there, all to get her daughter a document that would make it easier to one day leave her.

In Mr Zhang’s defence, he had planned to be present at Edith’s birth but had missed his flight. Mrs Zhang almost named Edith ‘Toronto’ to commemorate the affair. Mr Zhang convinced her it was gauche. The only way Mr Zhang could turn Mrs Zhang’s mind against a given course of action was by convincing her it was gauche.

‘If I’m making my family sound really quite something,’ Edith said, ‘that’s because they’re really quite something.’

We’d known each other four weeks at that point, but it felt like longer.

She said she fancied a pastry and queued up to get one. I watched her from the table. Edith disliked waiting but liked the order of queues. I saw from her tactfully impatient expression that she was doing her best to reconcile these stances. She was such a polished and resolute individual that tiny breaches stood out: stray thread on skirt, wisps where hairline met back of neck. Before I met her I’d wondered if uncouth meant uncouth then what did couth mean, and now I knew: couth meant Edith. That day, I realised I didn’t care what anyone else thought. We could be thrown out of the café and I would think it just showed that they did not recognise genius.

Alone in bed that night I googled her. She was a trainee solicitor and her headshot was on the firm’s website. There was a video underneath where she told prospective applicants that if she had to pick one thing, just one thing, that she loved most about work, it had to be the people. Her hair was in loose curls that bounced when she moved her chin. She nodded out her enthusiasms: the culture, nod, the ignition, nod, the fettle, nod, the élan. Such was corporate law.

I envied her conviction, and wondered if this was because I wanted to feel better about my own job.

Then I checked my phone: she’d just followed me on Instagram. When you followed someone first, you knew they would click on your name to see if they should follow back. And of course I saw her pictures when I did that. I wasn’t strictly obliged to keep scrolling and flick to the ones she was tagged in, but it was expected behaviour.

*

The next day, Victoria mined me about Julian in a French tearoom with striped upholstery. She thumbed the quilting of her Chanel bag, the squares threaded in penitential lines, and she dug. Questions. I’d known she wanted him since she told me when drunk, but I couldn’t gauge if her sober self realised how transparent she was being.

More curious still: I played along. I wanted nuggets about Edith, and Victoria gave me them.

‘How have you been, Ava?’ Victoria said, stressing the auxiliary so I’d know she didn’t care.

‘Fantastic,’ I said, hitting the middle syllable to remind her I was thriving specifically in Julian’s apartment. ‘It’s been so long’ – vowels elongated to clarify, in case I’d been too subtle, that I lived there and she didn’t.

‘Your hair looks lovely,’ Victoria said – I should cut it. ‘Have you cut it?’ – Victoria saloned monthly, but kindly remembered to ask as though for me it was a triennial treat, when to her it was a basic living expense – conveying the latter, too, though, since we had to be honest about these things.

Women are good at talking.

Menu, linen paper. The teas were in French, English and Chinese, in that order. Victoria ordered thé au citron. Her slight mispronunciation of ‘citron’ presented a quandary. I could order it, too, and say it properly. I wouldn’t if she’d really butchered it, since that would be crass – but a slight difference would prickle her without letting her feel cathartically wronged. Alternatively, I could ask for lemon tea and make her feel gaudy for having used French in the first place. I would read out the English, then meet her eye: my niveau de fran?ais is between me and God.

I could also just order a different tea, as I’d planned to before she said ‘thé au citron’ wrong, but that was no fun.

‘The lemon tea,’ I said. Then, waiting long enough that it was plausible the waiter was confused, but not so long he’d obviously already understood: ‘– sorry, the thé au citron.’

Men weren’t all I could do.

The waiter brought our tea with a military step. Victoria asked when Julian was back. I said I didn’t know. Normally I wouldn’t have admitted that – I would have implied I knew but was only authorised to share it with our very closest friends – but I wanted it settled so we could get to Edith.

From this implied level of communication with Julian, Victoria could gather I also didn’t know if he was sleeping with other people in London, or indeed in Hong Kong. Whether Julian had multiple women on the go was in any case too ambiguous for her purposes. If he didn’t, that might indicate he was – of all things to picture him saying – a one-woman man. If he did, his bandwidth might be full, between the side hustles and the regular Irish. Gobbets about Julian without clear implications did not interest Victoria. She was businesslike in this. If she could have offered him money to have sex with her, I knew she would. Equally, she wouldn’t go near him if he accepted.