Fragrant Harbour by John Lanchester Read Free Book Online Page B

like today, the boat trip would be a nightmare of exposed, lard-coloured , mottled and pimply flesh – unless the weather had already been good for a few days, in which case you could throw in some lobsterish burns for good measure. Here, though, there were crisp white ducks, imperial-purple Agnès B slacks, John Smedley sea-island cotton tops – and that was just the men. I had my lightest English long trousers (Joseph, in an all-too-easily- stainable cream) and a too-cheap-not-to-be-fake Marc Jacobs dark-blue silk shirt from a new shop in a Tsim Sha Tsui arcade – and I was only just getting by. My secret weapon was a new black Gucci one-piece swimsuit. Berkowitz calmed me down with a compliment.
    ‘You look good enough to eat,’ he said.
    Susan Lee and I were doing clothes-shopping getting-to- know-you chat – her Fendi bag had cost two and a half thousand Hong Kong dollars, which I was assuring her was insanely cheap by European standards – when Philip Oss came over. The boat had cast off by now and we were plunging about the harbour through the wakes of the usual heavy traffic. Three or four young women – a couple of executive secretaries, a daughter or two – were already stretched out on sunbeds at the front of the boat; this was one of Hong Kong’s rare cloudless days, and they were going for it. The rest of the party were standing or sitting around in clumps, boozing and yakking.
    ‘Bob tells me you’re enjoying it here,’ Oss said. Susan held her glass up and headed off for a refill, or pretended to.
    ‘Well, it can be hard to tell, but I think so,’ I said. ‘Nice boat, by the way.’
    ‘You like boats?’
    ‘I haven’t been sick yet, so I suppose the answer is yes.’
    He laughed a rich hammy tycoon laugh. It was at this moment that I realised: he’s hitting on me. This, in the way that it can, caused a reassessment. Trim, mid-to-late forties, energetic, fond of himself; hard to think he would be anything other than selfish in bed, though I hadn’t yet seen him eat (I’m a believer in that one); in short, thinkable, but not really possible . Also, Oss was tanned in a way that you didn’t often see since the scares about skin cancer. Still, I had never fended off advances from a millionaire before. In a kind of emotional spasm I found myself thinking of Michael and his continual shall-I-or-shan’t-I male dithering about whether or not to come out to Hong Kong. On the one hand, his show had gone well, and that was an argument for staying on and getting as much work as he could while his profile was high; on the other, the fact his work was now beginning to be known made him more able to move about and go where he wanted, so he could come to Hong Kong without worrying about vanishing off the map. On the one hand, he was missing me, on the other hand he thought that in some ways the break was rejuvenating our blah blah blah.
    I said: ‘Is Mrs Oss here?’
    Give him credit, he didn’t even blink.
    ‘Daphne, unlike you, gets seasick. The secret’, he said, leaning towards me, ‘is not to brace yourself. It applies to lots of things.’
    Oss then subjected me to a thirty-minute interrogation about my journalistic background in the UK, including who it was I’d worked for, contacts and sources at papers and the Beeb, my view of the country’s economic fortunes and the Tories’ political prospects. It was charmingly done, but it was also as thorough a grilling as I’d ever had. The questions were asked in that British way that sets a test of intelligence and insiderish-ness as a precondition to taking you seriously. At the same time he did not stop being flirty – an odd mix. Finally he called it a day.
    ‘If you’ll excuse me for a brief moment, I have a work thing to get out of the way.’
    He swayed backwards to the stern and joined a claque of men who looked like younger and less successful versions of himself. I wandered over to where Berkowitz was holding court.
    ‘Well,’ he