'Too acid.'

We were sitting on the thick Hangchow carpet and she looked at me over her clasped knees.

'Are you trying to get me pissed?'

'You've been helping yourself.'

She looked steadily at the magnum. 'That's perfectly true. God, this stuff goes right through you, doesn't it,' she said, and went out for the third time. 'Fix yourself some scotch or whatever you want.'

I looked around again. The overall picture was inconsistent: Ming to the tune of ten or fifteen thousand pounds and then a lacquer table you could pick up in Cat Street for a song, and in between them a brand new cocktail cabinet with chrome bamboo style legs imported from Birmingham. A nouveau riche with condescending friends who'd told her where to buy the Ming and hadn't been looking when she'd done some shopping on her own. But the total contents of this apartment would still pull in close on fifty thousand even at an auction and the Tewson dossier said they'd come here for the last two years on a package tour.

No books, no pictures. No picture of George Henry Tewson, even in the bedroom when she'd shown me proudly round. The whole apartment was just an expensive waiting-room.

'To tell you the truth,' she said, coming back and smoothing her lame skirt, 'I do want to talk about it.'

'About what?'

'Remember you said I didn't want to talk about it?'

'Oh yes.'

'Well — ' She tried to lift the magnum and I went to help her but she put it down again, shaking her head. 'I'd better not, had I?'

'If you feel like it.'

'Why shouldn't I?'

'I'll put you to bed.'

'I bet you would!'

She giggled and looked away and that was when the shivering began, but I didn't think it was anything to do with sex, at least not directly. Freedom or something.

'I've just realized,' she said with a gutsy little laugh, 'it wouldn't've been funny if this bloody great bottle had been on that tray, would it!'

She lit another cigarette, gold lighter, Dunhill. That would have been a present. This was where I could say well go on, tell me what happened to him, and just conceivably blow the whole thing.

'How old are you, Nora?'

'Little me? Thirty-two. Why?'

'I'm a bad judge of people's ages.'

'I wouldn't have thought,' she said with the frank stare starting again, 'you'd be a bad judge of anything.'

No extra-marital affaires, the dossier said, so far as is ascertainable. This explained her little Victorian innuendoes and frank stares and so forth. It could explain the shivering too.

'It's time you threw me out,' I said, and got up reluctantly, and quickly she said 'I was going to talk about it, wasn't I?'

'Oh yes.'

'He was in the Ministry of Defence.'

Oh was he?

There must have been a good reason why London had kept this one out of the briefing and out of the dossier and maybe it was on the principle of never telling the ferrets what they don't have to know or maybe it had been part of the softlee softlee catchee monkee approach by that devious bastard Egerton because he knows if he tried to sell me a conventional intelligence operation I'd only tell him to tuck it up his truss.

'Pretty important job,' I told her and knew instantly I was right on the nail. It had been the only thing she'd ever been able to say about George Henry Tewson: the Ministry of Defence, you know.

'Pretty important,' she said, liking the phrase. 'Well, I mean it was important that he worked there — ' she uncurled off the carpet and stood with her hands clasping her bare arms, not quite sure where to go — 'actually his work wasn't important, to tell you the truth.'

'As long as it was to him.'

'Oh Christ,' she said with a sour laugh, 'it was all he ever thought about.'

Then she knew where she wanted to go and it took ten minutes for the whole trip, back to England and then to Hong Kong for the first time, 'all he could think about, worked half the night sometimes, I don't believe he knew I was there except when he wanted his meals,' still with her small ivory-pale hands clasping her arms and she trod circles in the silk pile, not looking at me once, 'hewouldn't have gone across his own doorstep if I hadn't dragged him, it was like getting a baby away from its bottle, him and his slide-rule,' dropping the cigarette-end into the neck of the magnum, she was going to regret that, 'it was Spain at first, the Costa Brava, then I saw this ad about the Exotic East and it — ' she stopped moving and stood dead still and looked at me — 'it really turned me on, you know? Perfumes and jade and jewellery and all that sort of thing, I suppose you think I'm childish.'

Said no.

'He liked it, in a way. It was the fishing.' From this point she lost touch and most of the time forgot I was here, 'It quite brought him out, the first time we came,' a curl of her light hair falling loose as she talked, her small stockinged feet silent as she moved across the carpet, the nervous giggles more frequent and the memories more random, 'though to tell you the truth it might have been the Isle of Wight as far as he was concerned, everywhere was the same once he'd got over the shock of leaving England for a couple of weeks,' gesturing now and saying suddenly and bitterly, 'he never thought much about sex,' stopping just this once to listen to what she'd said and then going on, 'giving me the impression that she didn't really want to tell me about George Henry Tewson but about something much more urgent that she daren't even mention, so this would have to do, giving her some kind of release.

I could have looked around at the Ming and the Cat Street Contemporary while I was listening because that was all I'd come here for, to listen, but she was using her body a lot, couldn't keep still, and I looked at that, and the movements it made, the way she shivered sometimes as she went on, she'd only meant to go in as far as her knees and it was up to her stomach now, the tense trembling fear of going too tar, the thrill of not going back, talking to me all the time, and none of the time, about Tewson, 'then of course I found he'd been putting it away in Savings Certificates and buying insurance and that kind of thing, poor lamb,' her cigarette tracing smoke in the air as her feet did a pirouette, 'that's how I can live like this, and quite honestly it makes a change. My God, I can go on once I get started — you must be bored stiff!'

Said of course not.

'Then I thought no, I'll stay here, and never go back at all. I don't want to leave him, you see? The psychiatrist said I was right, the one I went to. He said I'd get over it quicker if I stayed here, where George was.'

Then she just stood perfectly still in the middle of the room looking at nothing, a girl with ivory skin and stockinged feet and a lock of hair and a sheath dress with stains where the scotch had soaked it, her head turning slowly as she remembered me, her dark eyes deepening.

'You don't have to go, do you?'

'No.'

The shivering began again.

'I'm so bloody frightened,' she said.

I walked north, away from the Cathay Hotel, going along Kingston Street and up as far as Gloucester Road without seeing any traffic, not really expecting to at this hour, three in the morning. A patrol car slowed a little to check me, going west, and turned down Cannon Street. The smell of the harbour came on the wind, and a ship was hooting, some way off, three slows, farewell.

It had been as if she hadn't slept with anyone for years, or as if she knew it was for the last time, an act of desperation, and afterwards depression of course, tugging the cigarette out with small sharp nails, tearing the packet, I don't even know who you are, Clive, who are you, so forth. Essential to ask her why she was frightened, two reasons: I wanted to know and she'd expect me to ask. No go. Did I say that, I must've been stoned, furious with herself for having said it and with me for reminding her.