'I mean the whole thing's welcome. The idea of being invited to dine on board with a fellow guest. If that's quite the word.'
He looked down.
'They suggested it.'
'Civil of them.'
'I would have asked you myself, of course, if — '
'Of course — '
'I'm glad of a chance to talk to you.'
He took a sip of water.
'Cheers.'
'Cheers.'
We began eating.
I didn't look at him except when he made the odd remark, and he found it difficult to meet my eyes. September was a beautiful month in Hong Kong, he said: the evenings were always like this, very calm.
I said I hadn't been in this part of the globe for some years.
He asked me how the food was.
'Very good.'
He seemed pleased again and I couldn't think why. Some exaggerated sense of hostmanship? His eyes went down to his plate, and the light flashed across his thick-lensed glasses.
'They treat me well. Very well.'
'I'm sure they do.'
'Nothing to complain of.'
'That's good.'
He ate rather hungrily, but I imagined they wouldn't be rationed on board a first-line missile site. Possibly he was hoping to get to the flavour.
He put his knife and fork down.
'Did you come here to take me back?'
I had to think for a couple of seconds.
'That was the idea.'
'What will they do with you now?' he asked me, and looked up.
'The same as they'll do with you.'
He pushed his plate away and folded his arms on the table and leaned towards me.
'I don't believe it, you know. What you said.'
'Don't you?'
I left it at that, wanting to know how much he'd need convincing. He stood it for five seconds or so.
'You can't prove anything.'
He wouldn't need much convincing.
'Anyway,' I said, 'it's up to you.'
He let that go because he had to: he knew we couldn't talk.
'How — how well do you know Nora?'
Check and re-check.
I wouldn't normally have to, but that bloody light had bored holes in my eyes and I was longing for sleep and couldn't think as fast as I should.
Situation: I'd blown my cover to him. They hadn't broken me down but that didn't mean anything: they knew they were going to, if they kept on long enough. So I could talk to him about anything I chose but not about my warning to him now. He might not realize this and I was ready in case he let a word slip so that I could try covering it.
It was academic anyway.
They'd got us both.
'I don't know her very well,' I said. 'Done a bit of shopping with her, you know-House of Shen, Constellation «144» and places like that. Few evenings together at the Orient and Gaddi's — she's fun, isn't she? Loves expensive things. Of course I didn't know she was married, or — well — '
'That's all right,' he said with his head going down.
I don't often see people suffering — I don't mean self-pity, I mean suffering. Maybe I don't recognize it too easily, because in my opinion it's always their own bloody fault and that's why I don't seem to have too many friends.
But I recognized it now.
I suppose she'd gone and shoehorned him into this thing.
Be a pushover in a place like Hong Kong.
My husband works for the Ministry of Defence.
How interesting.
It's interesting for him all right, but the money's not much.
I'm sure the prestige is a compensation.
You can't have a fling on prestige.
Hong Kong is certainly a little expensive.
So's everywhere, I find! Excuse me, but are you sort of — I mean fully Chinese?
I was born here. That makes me a British subject.
Oh isn't that nice I Pushover.
He was staying at this hotel too, and knew London quite well. She ought to look up his brother when she got back, he must give her the address. The Chinese Embassy-just a temporary post.
She'd found his brother charming, and discreet, and extraordinarily generous. Because of his love for the British.
Then Hong Kong again for their next vacation and this time a prearranged contact and a blazing row in their hotel, what did she think she was doing, she wasn't doing anything except wasting the best years of her life tied to a man who couldn't even do it more than once a month and couldn't give her any money so she could at least buy a few new dresses and try to look like a woman somebody loved, but this would be treason, oh don't be so bloody dramatic, the Chinks haven't got anything against us, it's India they're scared of now it's got the bomb, he told me, they're a poor country and this thing you're working on would cut their costs of defence down to a tenth, oh all right, we've talked quite a lot together, so what, and listen, will you, do you know how much they'd pay us for a. few months' work, just as a technical adviser? Better get ready for it, George. A hundred thousand pounds.
He sat with his head down, toying with some kind of fruit mush in a waxed hygienic cup.
'I haven't had time to think,' he said quietly.
He meant he hadn't had time to think about what I'd told him out there on deck with the riveter hammering away.
I haven't had time to think.
You'd have to give me longer than that.
How much longer?
I don't know. I'd have to think.
Egerton sitting there on the edge of the table by the voice spectograph, telling them to do the whole series again and double check.
Tewson's voice.
I wondered where they'd bugged him. Somewhere in Hong Kong.
They'd been getting serious about George Henry Tewson, maybe a long time before they'd sent for me and put me down the hole. They wouldn't be too worried about the Chinese Republic setting up a cheap missile system: the UK was a small island at the wrong end of the telescope and the first targets in any kind of pre-emptive nuclear showdown would be the Soviet Union and India. But Tewson didn't have to stop at China. He'd got goods for sale and there were other potential buyers and some of them were in Europe and he could go from door to door a hundred thousand a knock and she'd think he was the most wonderful man in the world and that was what he wanted, all he wanted.
He didn't want money. None of us do. We want what it can buy.
He wanted his wife.
They didn't know about that in London or maybe they did and maybe that was why they wanted him back there to put away and lose the key. He was a bacillus at large: a one-man do-it-yourself bubonic plague.
He hadn't spoken for five minutes.
'That was very nice,' I said, and pushed my plate away and got up and took my knife and prised the second wall-plug cover off and dragged out the wires and pulled down the portrait of Mao and neutralized that one too and got the fire-extinguisher off the wall and shot foam into the ceiling ventilator grille that didn't have any dust accumulated around the vanes and threw the extinguisher on the bunk and said:
'Listen, they don't want anyone to know they've got this thing because people are going to feel pressed into developing their own systems in retaliation, particularly India, and if you're let loose across the frontiers everybody will know. They'll even know if you're caught and sent back to London and shoved in clink, because of the trial proceedings.'
He was watching me from his chair and the light wasn't across his thick-lensed glasses and I could see his eyes and I could see they were looking at something he'd known would happen to him one day. So he didn't look surprised and he didn't look afraid. He looked destroyed.
'There's only one way they can make sure you keep your mouth shut about the work you've done for them. They're going to do it for real this time, Tewson: they're going to take you to Tai Tam Bay and leave you long enough for the fish to pick you clean so they can show you've been there since your fishing accident and they're going to take a leg off to show it was a shark but they'll leave your head on so the dentist can prove it's you. And don't tell me I've given you a load of cobblers — work it out for yourself.'