The three of us walked in the direction indicated by the sign, came to an empty room that was just an empty room like all the others, though the emptiness it contained must have been qualitatively different to that found in the uncultivated elsewhere.
We could only be out in the sun for five minutes at a time. It was roasting, the sky a burned blue. A month earlier, walking through London at ten on a cloudy evening, I’d been told that this was what Beijing looked like at midday: nearly dark with pollution. I’d had a cough at the time and that was also a foretaste of Beijing, apparently; it was impossible to go there without succumbing to a serious throat or lung infection. I told Li what I’d heard: that the pollution was so bad you could see it falling from the sky.
‘A few years ago we broke the record for air pollution. We didn’t only beat record. The machine for measuring broke also. The pollution was so bad the measure — how you say?’
‘Gauge?’
‘Yes, the gauge could not measure it.’
‘It was off the scale.’
‘It was terrible. . ’
Li took out her phone; she had an air-quality app which confirmed that the air today was, relatively speaking, mountain-clear. Expats I’d met all had these air-quality apps too, but the source for their measurements was the U.S. Embassy, whose figures were always twice that of the official Chinese figures. None of that mattered as we walked through the magically unpolluted but still-roasting air of the Forbidden City, which easily lived up to its billing as one of the wonders of the world. If it was one of the wonders of the world; I could remember only two others, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the pyramids. Did the Hanging Gardens even exist anymore? Had they ever — in the solipsistic sense of within my lifetime — or had they only been included as a mythic leftover from the vanished past? These days the whole idea of Seven stately Wonders had an elegiac feeclass="underline" a standard of excellence rendered obsolete by bucket lists of a hundred things to do before you die, whether bungee-jumping over the Zambezi or losing your mind on mushrooms at a full-moon party at Ko Pha Ngan, neither of which I’d done, both of which were on my list of things to avoid before giving the bucket its final kick.
We paused in the corner of yet another square, heading to the Imperial Garden. Li was drinking water. As she raised the bottle to her lips I could see her armpit, hairless and unsweating. And a small scar at the edge of her mouth. It could only be seen when she was in sunlight, when that side of her face was turned to the sun. Min suggested she take a picture of the two of us, of Li and me together. I put my arm around Li’s shoulder but didn’t dare touch her bare skin. When I looked at it later the photo seemed marred by my hand, bunched in a fist like a potato.
‘You look so handsome,’ said Min, glancing at the image on the back of the camera, taking another. She was always saying things like that. A surprising number of her colleagues from the publishing house said the same thing, in fact, and I was not at all displeased to hear these nice things. It might even have been true in a way. The friend who’d warned me about the pollution had also warned — in the sense of reassured — that Chinese women found white middle-aged men attractive. Was this true or was it a kind of mirror projection of the yellow fever to which Western men succumbed? Either way, the constant flow of charm from Min and her colleagues, combined with how young everyone looked, lulled me into behaving like an attractive young man. I became so at home with this new self-image that, on Nanjing Road in Shanghai, I’d glared with disdain at a middle-aged Westerner coming towards me with an expression of barely concealed contempt. The mirrored window had been polished to such a shine that the awful truth took another second to reveal itself. I had bumped, almost literally, into my own reflection: the self as pink-faced other. Right now, flattered by Min and having my picture taken with Li, that was a faded, possibly false memory. And Min’s capacity to make me feel better about myself and the world knew no bounds. It was too hot for her, she said. She had to make arrangements with the driver; she would meet us outside in half an hour.
‘Really? Are you sure?’ I said, glad that I had my sunglasses on in case any sign of excitement manifested itself in my face, my tanned and rugged face. Min was sure; she would see us in twenty minutes. She began walking back the way we had come, sticking to the borders of shade. So now it was just the two of us, just me and Li and about a million other visitors, strolling through the Forbidden City. It would have been the most natural thing in the world — and entirely impossible — to take her by the hand, to stroll hand in hand through the Forbidden City. It would have been nice to wander for the rest of the day, like Adam and Eve in some crowded paradise of the ancient East, until we came to a distant and shaded spot, to have found this place and sat down where no one could see us, away from the prying eyes of wives and visitors, far from intrigue and at its exact centre. She drank from the sun-scalded bottle until it was empty. The repeated word in all this—‘until’—bounced and echoed in my head until it was time to leave, to go and meet Min.
We walked out of the gate, found Min, the car and the driver, who was standing there in a white shirt, his hair slicked back, smoking — but smiling, pleased to see me. This was Feng, for sure.
‘Different car to this morning, same model,’ Min explained. ‘And different driver. Same driver as yesterday.’ She got in the back behind him, behind Feng. Li sat in the front, I sat in the back with Min, behind Li. We drove for ten minutes until, at some unknown place in the city, Feng pulled over so that Li could get out. I clambered out too, surrounded by the heat-roar of traffic. She had to go back to her work. It was fine to shake hands and to kiss her goodbye, on the cheek, on the side of the face with the small scar. We talked about our respective evenings. She gave me her bilingual card, holding it with both hands.
‘I’m afraid I don’t have a card,’ I said. ‘But perhaps we will be able to meet later tonight, after dinner. I hope we can.’
I’d said it casually but had never said anything more heartfelt. In my teens the prospect of going on a date with a girl I’d just met crushed my chest with excitement. Was that the physiognomic etymology of having a crush on someone?
She also hoped we could meet later, she said before turning away, leaving. I tucked her card carefully into one of the many pockets of my shorts and clambered back into the cool car. By the time I looked out of the window she had already disappeared into the crowd. The car eased back into the relentless traffic. Chatting with Min, I touched the sharp edges of the card, resisting the urge to take it out and pore over the amazing information printed on it: her phone number, her e-mail address. There was a time — it seemed to last from my mid-teens to early forties — when it was so difficult to get women’s phone numbers that a night out was considered a major success if you came home with a single number scrawled indecipherably on a piece of paper: a number you called with much trepidation, unsure if a father or, later, a boyfriend might answer. On reflection, Li had been a little reserved about handing over her phone number; in Asia it was usually the first thing anyone did.
The afternoon was, as Min had promised, exhausting: a succession of interviews which involved saying the same thing over and over, with less and less conviction, sometimes drifting off in the middle of my shtick and forgetting what I was saying, had said or was planning to say. I’d heard of soldiers being so weary they could sleep while marching, but that option was not available for the weary author being asked about his work, conscious all the time of the problem that, while he talked about his book — a history of improvisation in music, a major theme of which was the necessity of being at home in the moment — or waited for the interpreter to translate the answers, he was always either replaying sequences of Li walking through the Forbidden City, her bare shoulders, her green dress, or looking ahead to the evening, calculating the earliest possible moment they could meet again.