Exciting Times(60)

That day back when we were speaking, I’d told Edith we did weird things with enumeration in Irish – that ‘two’ could be ‘dhá’ or ‘dó’ or ‘a dó’ or ‘beirt’ – but that I wasn’t sure if the grammar related to quantity classifiers or something else altogether. They didn’t explain it in school. Edith said no one had ever explained Cantonese quantifiers either, but she understood them intuitively. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well done, Miss Native Speaker. Congrats on not being robbed of your national language.’ She said that if I wanted to play colonial-oppression Olympics then by all means. I said I didn’t want to play colonial-oppression Olympics. ‘That’s wise,’ she said, ‘because white people generally lose.’

i needed to be with julian before i could love you. i was scared the first time i had sex with him. i thought i’d be bad and he’d hate me. everything i did, i was scared. i was scared with you as well, but i was ready to be scared.

The evening before I went to meet Mrs Zhang, I’d voiced my concern that I only used Edith’s English name and asked if I was ignoring a plank of her personhood. She laughed and said her family used ‘Edith’ more often than ‘Mei Ling’ and that she identified more strongly with the former. She didn’t say I was being condescending. She didn’t need to. I wished I had her talent for making herself understood.

‘Miss, is this good?’

I looked and saw that Anson Wu had circled ‘a kilo of books’. They could certainly weigh that much, I thought, and more if they were Julian’s, but the answer key didn’t see it that way.





46

Julian, Miles and I went back to St John’s Cathedral the third Sunday of November. The sermon was on the final exam down the road. Before Jesus, we would be accountable for everything: words, actions, thoughts. I looked at the royal pew and remembered RV, Victoria Regina, on the bell tower. In 1841 Victoria wrote: ‘Albert is so much amused at my having got the island of Hong Kong.’ Edith had told me that, adding that she, too, would find it droll if the Qing dynasty handed her a fiefdom.

That night Julian and I talked in the lounge. He said his ex-girlfriend at Oxford had been like me. She’d hummed the Darth Vader theme when he told her he was applying for City internships. This was fairly galling from someone whose hedge-fund father was bankrolling her to do unpaid ones at publishing houses, having secured her said placements by ringing editors he’d met at Cambridge. The ex was probably a better person now, he said. Everyone was terrible aged twenty. I said: ‘Don’t worry, at twenty-nine you’ve still got it.’

‘Wait,’ I added, ‘was this Charlie the anarchist?’

‘No, Charlie was cool. This was Maddy.’

‘You and your left-wing flings.’

‘Kat’s a Tory.’

‘So’s Kate Bush,’ I said. ‘No one should name their daughter Katherine.’

It would have been funnier if I’d said: let’s not name our daughter Katherine, but I sensed Julian feared, as straight men often did, that I secretly wanted his babies.

I also avoided quips available to me about why he liked women whose animosity he could claim was ideological. Or why, if you followed the narrative late-twenties Blairites often held of having graduated into centrism, then he had matured to loving a Tory, lost her, and regressed to what I was quite sure he thought of as fucking a girl with campus opinions. Or why he hated himself for it, for reasons I did not understand him well enough to torture myself with in detail. Or why the obvious presence of those reasons nonetheless made it hard to look at him while he thought his private thoughts about how at least I knew not to pull the Rosa Luxemburg shit at parties while his friends looked down my dress and discussed me at what they felt was a volume loud enough that he’d hear and soft enough that I wouldn’t, despite their standing in fact much closer to me, something they very much liked to do.

There was no more Clos de Vougeot, so we had Clos de la Roche. I said Ollie from Melbourne at work had told me Australians drank wine from a bag. It was called goon. Statisticians debated whether it was more responsible for Australia’s birth rate or its death rate.

‘By the way,’ I said, ‘I broke up with Edith.’

‘Fuck. You okay?’

‘No.’

‘Want to talk about it?’

‘No.’

‘Want more Pinot Noir?’

‘No.’

‘Want goon?’

‘You don’t have goon.’

‘I have Pinot Noir.’

As he poured, he told me it had a mineral palate, round tannins and a long finish. I said it smelled like wine. He said ‘clos’ just meant ‘vineyard’ in French. Our vaunted Clos de Vougeot (‘Your vaunted Clos de Vougeot,’ I said; ‘I don’t vaunt vineyards’) was founded by Cistercian monks. It and Clos de la Roche were among France’s many appellations d’origine contr?lée, which made it illegal to use the name of the region without passing quality control.

‘When Kat ended it,’ Julian said, as though this flowed naturally, ‘on the phone I’ll add because importantly she wasn’t in the room, I wanted to throw a bottle. I decided not to because it was my wine.’

‘So throwing other people’s wine is a sensible response to heartbreak.’