“Anyway, later, Victor could sense the tide turning in the war and he thought it might be more advantageous to give it back to the Chinese and bank a few favors from them. So he put the collection on a train to China. A gift from a loyal citizen. I didn’t know until after the fact.”
“And that was the end of it. And you never told anyone?”
“No,” Edwina said. “Victor made it abundantly clear it was to my advantage to keep silent.”
Claire thought of Edwina’s comfortable life, her large estate in the New Territories, all apparently paid for on a headmistress’s civil pension.
“Who knew?” she asked.
“I don’t know, my dear. Victor plays his cards close to his chest.”
“How much of this does Will know?”
Edwina smiled.
“Well, you’d have to ask him, wouldn’t you?”
“And why are you telling me this? I have nothing to do with this story.” Claire asked.
“You are… close to Will, are you not?” asked Edwina.
“I know him,” Claire allowed.
“Don’t be coy,” Edwina snapped. “He listens to you?”
“Not at all.” Of this she was sure.
“Well, I think you’d be surprised. You’re the first person in a long time that our Will has deigned to spend time with. I just think he needs a little push to do the right thing. A woman knows the right thing to say. It’s our instinct.”
“I don’t know that I understand what you’re saying.” Claire was deliberately being obtuse.
Edwina slapped her palms on the table.
“That man,” she cried. “That man, Victor Chen, promenades himself around Hong Kong as if he owns it. He hobnobs with everyone who’s important-you know he was chosen to host a party for Princess Margaret when she came to town? And who is he? Some trumped-up Chinaman in a Savile Row suit! A collaborator. An opportunist.” She said this almost spitting. “He pretends to be better than everyone, even English people! It’s nauseating and I won’t have it.”
Her outburst rang out, incongruous, against the heavy damask curtains.
“He snubbed Mary in town the other week. He’s forgotten old friends in his haste to ascend to the top. Well, he’ll learn.” She looked at Claire. “He is an awful person who doesn’t deserve anything of what he has.”
“It’s hard to say who does deserve the good in life,” Claire said. She felt as if she were placating a large, angry animal.
“He thinks the past can be buried. But it has a way of surfacing, again and again.”
“And the baby? Trudy’s baby?” Claire asked. An innocent, perhaps the only, in all of this.
“I don’t know, my dear. I suppose it was taken care of.” She paused. “Yes. That was the end. I think about that last afternoon with Trudy quite a lot, how remote she was, how removed. She didn’t care if she lived or died after Will abandoned her. I always thought that Will Truesdale broke her heart. And how about that? Who knew that the remarkable Trudy Liang had a heart to break?”
July 5, 1953
“AND NOW, ” Claire said. “What of us?”
She and Will had sat in silence for long minutes, looking out at the water, the boats streaming silently through the harbor, passing one another smoothly, like toy boats in a child’s bathtub. It started to sprinkle slightly. It had taken great effort to ask and she could not bring herself to look at him. She put her hands in her lap and cupped them together primly.
“You don’t need me,” he said slowly. “I’ve said it before and it’s truer than ever. I’m a liability now.”
Her first reaction: automatic withdrawal. Then she realized, with Will’s new release came uncertainty: he had lived too long with his secrets and now that they had been poured out, he was likely feeling empty.
“I don’t need you,” she echoed his words. How porous he seemed, how he always slipped through her grasp. Even in their most intimate moments, in bed, his face hovering over hers, intense with passion, he was never fully there. Now she understood why: he had always been with another.
Another unbidden memory: Will, lifting the strands of her hair as she lay beneath him, letting the fine gold slip through his fingers, his face oddly distant. “Gold,” he had said. “I love hair the color of metals: gold, bronze, even silver. The gold and bronze will turn silver eventually, yes?” The closest he ever got to saying the word love to her. It stung, suddenly. She had turned away, buried her face in the pillow. In bed, she was always shy around him, afraid that she would say something she would regret later.
“You deserve better, you know,” she said, trying to save what, she didn’t know. “You can live your life without always regretting.”
“You are trying to be kind but you don’t understand,” he said.
“It’s not kindness,” she said.
He didn’t reply.
“You always tell me to be strong, but you’re never strong yourself. When we first met, you told me I should take the opportunity to become something else, to transcend what I had been given. You can’t do that yourself. You are mired in the past and determined to be unhappy.” She had never seen so clearly before. Anger swept through her-unexpected-clarifying even more. “You cannot let go, and you are sinking. And you pretended to be so strong!” A feeling as if she had been duped, taken under false pretenses. The man she had loved was a mere shell. And she felt something more, unwelcome: a feeling of pity, fatal to passion.
“And I told you to go, don’t bother with me,” he said, also angry now. He just wanted to be left alone. But she wouldn’t leave him without trying to salvage something.
“Why did you come to me?” she asked. “You changed my life. You didn’t like me, you said. What was it? Were you bored?” She shot the last word at him, an accusatory arrow.
“You were pure,” he said, trying to explain. “You weren’t like the others. You had your prejudices and silly ideas, but you were open, willing to change. And I hadn’t minded being alone. But you came along…”
“And you were the great opener of my eyes, the wise and…”
“That’s not fair,” he said. “That is beneath you. I never looked at another woman until you came along. But it felt wrong, as if I were betraying Trudy, who I had betrayed in so many ways already.”
“You are wasting your life,” she said. Rain had wet his hair so it hung in jagged spikes down his forehead. He made no effort to wipe away the water running down his face. He looked so defeated.
She was cruel, finally. “You are a coward.”
How was this the man she had changed her life for? It seemed inconceivable.
“And you are simple,” he said fiercely. “And naïve. To think that you can just leave the past behind, like shutting a door.”
“You won’t even look at me!” she cried. “You won’t give me even that. You’ve always been mean with your attention, so measured.” She looked down at herself. She had dressed with care this morning, mindful of the impression she wanted to give: quiet, not reproachful, confident. This had translated into a knee-length navy cotton-voile dress with covered buttons all down the front, a few decorative pleats: tailored, not fussy, freshly washed hair held back with a navy satin headband. She tamped down the word that kept rising to the surface of her consciousness: fool, fool.