Flying High

‘And your baby? Isn’t it wonderful being a father?’

‘Yes, I’m proud of him.’

‘But Liang, when do you spend time with him? You’re always with me!’ As I said this I realized it was true. I hadn’t been aware until I said it that he was spending time with me that he probably should have been spending with his family.

‘I see him once a week.’

It was then that I discovered that Liang and his wife didn’t actually live in the same place and that Liang was effectively a bachelor, married in name only. Shocked but overjoyed, I sensed a tremor of anticipation. Hadn’t it always been him and me, never a triangle?

‘She’s with her mother. She can’t live with me. There isn’t room with the baby. I only have one room. Anyway she prefers it.’

Liang’s life must have been bleak until I turned up. I provided him with an excuse to go out and enjoy himself. Wasn’t it his duty to see that the foreigner was kept content? It concerned me for a moment that maybe our friendship wasn’t what I thought it was after all – then I remembered the little silk hankies. No, he wasn’t pretending. The desire to kiss him welled up again, and I wanted to tell him how sweet he was and how much he meant to me and how he had freed me. I couldn’t in the tea house, so I left it until he came the following week.

It was a Tuesday evening. He was going to call in and see me before a meeting. Although I was on the other side of town he never seemed to object to the long ride. He would call in for a chat and a cup of tea. The note he had sent said he had some news.

His jacket made him look small as he stood at the door.

‘Come in. A man came round the campus with some tinned lychees today. I got you some.’

He enthused about my discovery, but urgently wanted to tell me his own news.

‘I may get a chance to go abroad,’ he said, phrasing it carefully, not allowing himself too much certainty. Going abroad was like going to Heaven. Everyone wanted it and feared it and thought they’d never be good enough.

‘You could come to England,’ I said without thinking. Then it immediately struck me that this was not a good idea. It was a potentially dangerous displacement for us both.

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Because I’m married it makes it easier. The authorities know I’ve got a son to come back for.’

Little did the authorities know the irony of this. From what I could tell, Liang’s son did not have a father who would pine for him while suffering in a foreign land.

Liang was looking out of the window as he spoke, with his back to me. And it was then that I chose to kiss him.

The kiss did change our lives. The relationship did take on a sexual dimension but was dominated more by intimacy than sex. We both seemed to have difficulty in expressing ourselves sexually – we didn’t easily fall into each other’s arms, we were embarrassed about kissing and bed was never mentioned. Whether he thought of it I don’t really know. It seemed out of reach, impossible and I’m not sure I wanted it. We substituted a physical manifestation of our closeness with looks into the eyes, standing close, touching fingers when we thought nobody would see. Of course, he always pretended it wasn’t happening. It was not tantalizingly erotic as neither of us understood eroticism and wouldn’t have known how to bring it about. I was certain this was more like love than the insipidness I had with Martin, who was, I suppose, a kind of fiancé. I was happy. I allowed myself the luxury of what I thought was illicit love. The fact that it might not have seemed like passion in other people’s eyes didn’t mean it was unexciting for me. Quite the reverse. I hummed with it. I had a permanent grin on my face, but in a country where grinning reflected embarrassment, a feeling appropriate to a tall foreigner, my secret was safe.

As the spring opened up into flowers and warmth in April, Liang and I began to be seen around together more. I used to get little gifts for him at the Friendship Store. He wasn’t allowed in so he would wait with the bikes outside and I’d go in and spend my foreigner’s money.

‘What can I get you, Liang? Just say what you want. It’s easy. I’ve got hard currency. Look!’ and I’d wave my notes at him.

I couldn’t fail to notice how his eyes lit up at the thought of goodies normally out of reach to all but party officials.

‘No, really. I don’t want anything, Alison.’

I’d go in and get him a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label and some Marlboros. He’d have to keep them at my flat. It wouldn’t have done for him to be seen with these gifts. He’d have been criticized; that is, hauled up in front of some bossy committee to explain himself. I’d started smoking Phoenixes. I kept the Marlboros for him. I even bought him – silk tie of the kind favoured by visiting Americans, but of course he couldn’t wear it. I wondered if I was overdoing it, making a bit of a fool of myself. I just wanted to please him and give him things he could have only from me.

As the chilly weather suddenly stopped I shed my army jacket and began to wear a skirt. People noticed and I thought they were making snide comments. I hoped I was beginning to look a bit less foreign. My hair had grown and I’d put it in bunches like the local girls. Actually, I didn’t dare risk the pudding-basin barber. We must have made a comic pair, I suppose, me six inches taller than him. But it didn’t matter.

At least so I thought until one day when he came along looking very agitated.

‘The Wai Ban says I mustn’t spend so much time with you.’

‘What do you mean? Do they suspect? What did they say?’

I felt panic-stricken. This could mean trouble for both of us. It could mean him losing his job or worse. It could mean me losing him.

‘They’re worried about me being influenced by you. And they’ve told Wang about you.’

For a second I couldn’t remember who Wang was. Then I remembered she was his wife.

‘What did she say?’

‘Not much.’

‘What d’you mean “not much”?’

‘Well, she has her own life. She’s never met a foreigner. She doesn’t know what to think.’

‘Isn’t she upset?’

‘Why?’

‘Well, you’re seeing another woman.’

‘She’s Chinese.’

‘But she’s still your wife.’

‘Yes. But she doesn’t see it like you do.’

‘You’re close enough to have had a child together, and you’re telling me she isn’t jealous?’

‘Anyone can have a child. It’s easy.’

He was talking about the thing most Westerners thought they wanted out of their relationships and dismissing it as if it was the easy bit. Getting someone into bed made people forgo understanding and kindness, as if sex would replace friendship or be an improvement on it. But from what I could see Liang and Wang didn’t seem to have much apart from the evidence of a fleeting sexual encounter. They appeared to have an easy-going or even apathetic tolerance of each other, and maybe some woolly notion of duty.

‘Well, what does it mean? Are they saying we’ve got to stop seeing each other?’ I couldn’t bear to think about it.

‘They want an explanation. They’re trying to be reasonable. And Wang has offered to divorce me.’ He added this last bombshell as a sort of afterthought.

I added up in seconds what it would mean if he was divorced. Would he then expect me to marry him? The thought ricocheted around in my brain. What about Martin? What about Mummy and Daddy? What about my friends? The thought of being married to a five-foot, two-inch Chinaman appalled me suddenly. He must have seen my expression of anguish and read it completely wrongly. All was confusion. Did I love him or had it suddenly stopped like a watch stops when it is overwound and the spring snaps?

‘Don’t you see?’ he said. ‘It would be wonderful.’

Wonderful for whom? I saw all the advantages for him and none for me. He would unload an unwanted wife and child and acquire the much coveted passport out of China – a foreign spouse. I would be married to a foreigner who would never fit in at home and who would make me a laughing stock. The thought was impossible. Could I see him at the Point to Point or the Hunt Ball, or meeting the vicar or Uncle Basil? They would all be horrified. I began to see the value of Martin. He was of my world, my sort. I had stepped into an alien place and been befriended by an alien. Liang was China and was inseparable from it. I could not blend the two worlds – the only piece of this world that I could take home was my picture of peonies and kittens.

Since I was lost for words and Liang was evidently hoping for a positive response, he said, ‘You could come with me to America. We could travel together and get out of this dump. We could be free together.’ What did he mean ‘free’? I was already free.

I looked into his eyes, then looked away to his frayed grubby collar and the tide-mark on his neck.

‘But you can’t just leave your family like that – they haven’t done anything wrong.’