The music stopped. There was laughter and a coming together of friends. Isabella appeared to know one of the elderly Chinese ladies on her left because they immediately fell into conversation when the exercise ended. A gull flew in front of them and settled at the edge of the lake. Joe stood up and began walking through the crowds. He was forty metres away. Thirty. Isabella put on a pair of soft shoes and shook out the long dark curls of her hair, movements that were almost melancholy in their practised simplicity. It was at this point that she seemed to sense his approach and it surprised Joe that Isabella smiled as he came towards her, as if they had made an arrangement to meet, almost as if she had been expecting him.
“Oh my God.” The smell of her as they hugged was an opiate of memories. She was on tiptoes, squeezing his back, saying things into his body that he could barely hear. “What are you doing in Shanghai? I don’t believe this.”
They parted and looked at one another. Isabella’s face was flushed with exercise, but it was also alive to the pleasure and surprise of seeing him. The final, dreadful months in Hong Kong appeared to have been forgotten. Time had erased all ill feeling between them.
“What are you doing in Shanghai?” she said again. “This is so unbelievable.”
“It’s a long story.”
It was only after several seconds that Joe realized what she had revealed: that Miles had told her nothing. Had he deliberately withheld the fact that Joe was living in the city? Or was what Shahpour and Zhao Jian had told him correct? That Mr. and Mrs. Miles Coolidge no longer lived together, no longer shared the same bed?
“I didn’t mean to surprise you,” he said. “Didn’t Miles say anything? Didn’t he tell you I was living here?”
Isabella shook her head, the rueful smile on her lips providing him with the answer to his question. Miles doesn’t tell me anything. My husband is a basement of secrets.
Joe lowered his gaze. He saw the battered gold wedding band on her finger. “Well, that’s not what I expected,” he said. Isabella spluttered out a laugh. “I had dinner with him in April. We bumped into each other on Huaihai. He never said anything?”
“Nothing,” Isabella replied.
It was possible, of course, that she was lying; after all, it would be easier to blame Miles than to admit that she had been deliberately avoiding the very confrontation that Joe had now engendered. Yet that wasn’t Isabella’s style. It never had been. She wasn’t a coward. She wasn’t a fake. She spoke her mind and called things as she saw them. Besides, why deny something so straightforward? She picked up a broad-brimmed sun hat from the grass and began walking towards the lake. There was a note of fatalism in her voice as she said, “Miles has been very busy. He’s away a lot.”
It sounded like a wife’s hollow excuse. Falling in step beside her, Joe could sense that Isabella barely possessed the energy to defend him. She knew instinctively that Miles had been trying to keep them apart. They both did. That was the obvious, embarrassing conclusion to be drawn. To save her further discomfort, Joe paid Isabella a compliment, saying that she looked exactly the same as she had done when he had last seen her eight years earlier.
“God. Is that how long it’s been?” The lovely cascade of her hair, the life in her voice, were returning to Joe like forgotten photographs. “Christ we’re getting old,” she said. “So is this an accident? Are you in Pudong on business?”
Joe had set himself only one rule for their reunion: that he would never again lie to Isabella Aubert. Already that rule was under scrutiny. It was too early in the conversation to reveal the true nature of his quest.
“Like I said, it’s a long story. Do you have time for a coffee?”
Isabella’s face suddenly contracted with worry, and she placed a hand on Joe’s arm. The contact was like a physical guarantee of her affection for him. Sensing her distress, Joe said, “Don’t worry, it’s nothing serious,” and if he had been more certain of Isabella’s feelings towards him, if there had not been so much history between them, so many doors to be reopened, he would have lifted her hand from his arm and held it, to reassure her. There still existed an extraordinary physical and emotional connection between them which he could sense as vividly as he could feel the morning sun burning in the sky. He was certain that Isabella could sense it too. There is a magic in first love; it never leaves you.
“There’s a cafe over there,” he said, pointing north towards the black glass structure of the Science and Technology Museum. He had been there once before, on a bored early weekend in Shanghai. “We could get breakfast and talk.”
“Let’s do that,” she said. “And I’m paying.”
They found an outdoor table set in a pseudo-futuristic courtyard overlooked by the dark polished curves of the museum. The humidity of mid-morning was kept at bay by a gentle breeze which ran free across the undeveloped marshlands of southern Pudong. Children were decanting from fat, gleaming buses. They played in the spray of a fountain, giggled as they waited in line.
“So are you married?” Isabella asked. “Have you got children? Are you still working for your secret bloody brotherhood?”
Eight years as the wife of an American spy appeared to have normalized her attitude to Joe’s chosen trade. She had grinned as she asked the list of questions and he had no hesitation in replying.
“I’m not married,” he said, adding quickly, “Not divorced, either,” because he saw what he interpreted as a look of confusion on Isabella’s face. “I don’t have any children. At least I didn’t last time I checked.”
“And the Foreign Office?”
Joe noted that there had been a little blink and swallow as she had absorbed the news that he was single. “Are we back here again?” he said. He could afford to risk the joke because there was no more pain between them. He stared at Isabella’s face, at the eyes he had kissed, the neck he had touched, and marvelled that their conversation was so effortless. “Actually I made a private vow to myself eight years ago that if we ever met again I wouldn’t lie to you about what I do for a living.”
“And yet here you are about to do exactly that.” She waved away her indiscretion. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have asked.” Their eyes met in a moment of quiet understanding. Joe could see that Isabella was now all too aware of the unique, private frustrations of the secret life.
“Can I say something about that?” she said suddenly.
“About what?”
“About the way I behaved in Hong Kong.” It was not yet ten o’clock, but she had plainly made the decision to clear her conscience as quickly as possible. “I was very hard on you.” She swept a strand of hair out of her eyes. “You didn’t deserve it. It took me a long time to realize that, and by then I was in Chengdu with Miles. I’m so sorry.” Joe tried to stall the confession, because he was shocked both by its candour and by the impact that Isabella’s words had on his heart. They had come too late, and yet they were all that he had longed to hear. “The truth is that I wasn’t really ready for what we had. I was too young. I used what I discovered about you as an excuse to end what we had between us.”