Typhoon (18 page)

At the age of eight, Joe was sent away to the same top-of-the-range preparatory school in Wiltshire where his father, his uncles and his paternal grandfather (as well as an heir to the throne of Nepal) had all been pupils at one time or another. It was a Christian school. There was a small private chapel on site and, every evening, shortly before packing the boys off to their windy dormitories, the headmaster would call for silence in the cavernous dining room and read from the Book of Common Prayer.

“I can still picture it,” Joe told me. “I can still hear his voice:
Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord, and by thy great mercy defend us from all the perils and the dangers of this night
. What perils? What dangers? We were a hundred and sixty boys wearing Aertex shirts, miles from home, living in an old monastery in the middle of the English countryside. Who the hell was coming to get us?”

At thirteen Joe went on to a larger, though still all-male, public school where the students were obliged to attend a fifteen-minute church service every weekday morning, with a longer version on Sundays. By and large it was more of the same: long, humourless sermons, eight-verse hymns which never seemed to end, older boys flicking spit and hard stares across the nave. For most teenagers, such an experience would have put them off religion for life, but somehow Joe maintained his faith.

“But you don’t go to church,” I said to him. “I didn’t exactly see you down at St. John’s Cathedral every Sunday when we were living in Causeway Bay.”

He looked at me as though I was being naïve. Joe would no more have wasted a Hong Kong Sunday in church than he would have broken cover.

“Why was that?” I asked. “Was Isabella an atheist?”

It was the first time I had mentioned her name for weeks. Joe looked down at the glass of wine he was drinking and ran his thumb along the stem.

“No. She wasn’t.” He stood up and walked away from the table, ostensibly to fetch me another can of Guinness, but doubtless as a means of preventing me from seeing the expression on his face. “She was Catholic, although I think probably we had a pretty similar attitude to religion. It wasn’t something that we talked about very much. Both of us hated the paraphernalia, the
interference
, that you get with religion, at least in its British incarnation. Wide-eyed vicars and half-empty pews. Bankrupt businessmen reading the lesson, trying to pass themselves off as pillars of the community. Going to church is at best a social occasion, isn’t it? A place where people can go and not feel lonely or devoid of hope.”

“Maybe,” I said, suspecting that this cynicism was a little forced. Then Joe surprised me again.

“When it came to Isabella,” he said, “I had this extraordinary feeling that she was a gift from God. That was the extent of the spell she cast over me.” I made to interrupt him but he looked at me with a fierce intensity. Both of us knew that what he was about to say was not something that a man like Joe might ordinarily disclose. “As our relationship developed, I felt that God was saying to me, ‘Here, this is the person that I want you to be with. This is the opportunity I am giving you to lead a happy and fulfilled life. Don’t mess it up.’ It was extraordinary. It was as if I had no choice.”

“And that’s why you wanted her to marry you?”

“Sure. That’s why I wanted her to marry me.”

So Joe went to Waterfield, because Waterfield was his mentor in Hong Kong, his priest and father figure. When he had first arrived in the colony, their relationship had even formed part of Joe’s cover. SIS created what is known as a Backstop, verifying a fiction that Waterfield had done National Service with one of Joe’s tutors at SOAS by doctoring a few military records and even airbrushing an old black-and-white photo from Sandhurst. He had therefore “looked him up” as a useful contact a few days after landing at Kai Tak and attended a dinner party at the Waterfield’s apartment where, for the benefit of any gossips or Chinese bugs, the two of them had engaged in a forty-minute conversation about Brian Lara and the difficulty of obtaining decent red wine in Asia. So it was not remarkable for both men to be seen together one Saturday afternoon at the bird market in Mongkok. Even if a Chinese spook had developed suspicions about Joe, he would have encountered an impenetrable wall of deep cover should he have chosen to investigate.

“You wanted to ask me about something.” Waterfield had brought his wife with him, but she was busy buying orchids on Flower Market Road.

“It’s about Isabella.”

“I see.”

It is difficult to exaggerate the extent to which SIS was a male-dominated culture among Waterfield’s generation. Talk of wives and girlfriends generally made them suspicious and bored. Women were like children in the era of Victorian parenting: to be seen and not heard.

“I think I’d like to ask her to marry me.”

“Really. Well, congratulations.”

They were walking side by side down a cramped alleyway that was lined with bird cages, the smarter ones fashioned from varnished bamboo. Rainwater from a recent storm dripped from corrugated-iron roofs and made a thin mud of the dirt and straw at their feet. If anybody had been attempting to record the conversation, the take quality would have been severely compromised by a perpetual, tuneless squawk of mynah birds and parakeets.

“Does that present any difficulties as far as the Office is concerned?”

More than a month had passed since Joe had interviewed Wang and he was still wary of putting his foot wrong. Waterfield glanced down at a table covered in sealed transparent bags and stopped walking.

“Crickets,” he said, prodding one of the bags so that the insects inside them leaped out of a camouflage of leaves and dried grass. “They feed them to the birds. With chopsticks.” Waterfield appeared to remember that Joe had asked him a question and looked up into his eyes. “It presents a difficulty, of course, only if you’re going to want to have everything out in the open.”

“I will want that,” Joe replied without hesitation.

“Then we’d better sit down and have a proper chat.”

They walked a further three hundred metres until the headache din of the birds had largely died away and they were alone in a small market stall selling noodles, simple Cantonese dishes and cheap Peking duck. There was a half-empty bottle of soy sauce on the table. When Joe moved it to one side the neck left a dry, sticky glue on his hands.

“I’m going to be patronizing,” Waterfield said, ordering a pot of green tea. It was one of the things that Joe liked about him: he had the confidence to be self-effacing. “You’re very young to be thinking about getting married.”

“I realize that.”

“Do you? One of the things that’s most difficult for men of your age to grasp is the enormous span of time left to you on the planet. That may sound grandiose, but so many years lie ahead, do you see? I’m not talking here about careers. I mean in a strictly personal sense. It’s extremely hard for a human being to have any notion of the extraordinary changes that they will undergo in their future lives, particularly between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. Changes in approach. Changes in personality.”

Joe didn’t know what to say. He wondered if Waterfield, in a roundabout kind of way, was telling him that he was immature.

“Let me divulge something about getting older.” The tea came and the SIS Head of Station poured it quickly into two white bowls. “Life
contracts
. Less room for manoeuvre, if you follow me. One acquires responsibilities that are perhaps unimaginable to someone of twenty-six. Responsibilities towards one’s children, of course, but also the added burden of work, of longer hours, of scrambling up the greasy pole. In a very real sense one must put away childish things.” Waterfield saw the look in Joe’s eyes and must have felt obliged to defend himself. “I can see what you’re thinking: ‘The old man is full of regrets, didn’t have enough fun in his youth. Insists the younger generation sow a few wild oats.’ ”

“Isn’t that partly what you’re saying?” Joe asked.

“Well I suppose it is, yes.” Waterfield laughed at himself and plucked a toothpick out of a small plastic canister on the table. Rather than put it in his mouth, he tapped one of the sharp points into the ball of his thumb. “Look, I think you are a very remarkable young man, Joe, and I say that both as a colleague and as a friend.” Joe had to remind himself that he was talking to a spy, but it was difficult not to extract a pulse of satisfaction from the compliment. “What you’ve achieved out here in such a short time is very impressive. But you are still
young
. You are still at the very beginning of what should be an extremely interesting and eventful life.”

Joe knew that he was expected to speak, but took his time before responding. Two elderly women passed the table carrying plastic bags stuffed with
bok choi
and washing detergent. Joe took out a cigarette, lit it, and blew the first smoke up into a flapping tarpaulin canopy that functioned as a roof over the stall. The gesture may have looked self-conscious.

“The thing is, David, I can only deal with what’s in front of me. I can only deal with the reality that I’m at this point in my life and that I’m in love with Isabella Aubert.”

Silence.

“What that means is that I want to spend the rest of my life with her. What that means is that I don’t think I’ll ever meet anybody like her ever again, whether I’m twenty-six, thirty-six or a dying man of ninety-one.”

Waterfield produced a rueful smile as Joe thought of God’s instruction to him.
Marry this woman. She is the best thing that will ever happen to you
. He knew that such thoughts were absurd, yet he could not shake them.

“You see that’s just it, Joe, that’s just it. One feels that way now, but will one feel that way in the future?”

Irritated by a creeping formality in Waterfield’s tone, Joe again paused for thought. It occurred to him—not for the first time—that Isabella was deeply unpopular within the walls of SIS. Why should that be? Whom had she offended? Was it simply that she was beautiful and charming and kind, and therefore coveted by dozens of unhappily married spooks who wished that they could live their lives all over again, preferably in her company? Why else had she not been accepted by them?

Then it became very plain to him, very quickly. Waterfield wanted to prevent the marriage in order to protect the integrity of RUN. He wanted to interfere with Joe’s private life in order to give SIS one less thing to worry about in the run-up to the handover. His advice and good counsel were simply political.

“I think I’m an old soul,” Joe said, trying to find a way round this. Waterfield’s encouraging smile convinced him to keep going. “I’ve always been decisive, I’ve always known what I want. And I want to take care of Isabella. I want us to be husband and wife. Maybe I’m being naïve, maybe I’m too young to be thinking like this, maybe I’m just a lovestruck teenager who’ll learn a hard lesson. But I want to stop lying to her. I want my girlfriend to know what I do for a living. I’m sorry, I can see that that is going to present problems for you. I can see that you’ll be concerned about my cover and whether it’ll affect the quality of my work. But I’ve made my decision and I need the Office’s support. I love her.”

“Then you must marry her,” Waterfield said. “It’s as simple as that.”

“But why
did
you want to marry her?” I asked. “What was the fucking hurry?”

We are back in 2004 again, on the eve of his departure for Shanghai. I was opening my can of Guinness and Joe’s subsequent laughter smothered the hiss of the widget. He produced another one of those looks that appeared to question my innate common sense and shook his head.

“Isn’t it obvious?” he said. “Isn’t it straightforward?”

It was obvious, to a certain extent. They were perfect for each other. Where Joe was often concealed and emotionally withdrawn, Isabella was open and honest. On those rare occasions when she became anxious or depressed, he knew how to listen to her and to soothe her worries. Isabella could be unpredictable, but not in a way that was threatening or unkind, and I think Joe fed off her impulsiveness and volatility. They made each other laugh, they had similar interests, they were both naturally inquisitive and adventurous people. Above all, there was an innate understanding between the two of them which made you jealous that there was not some sort of similar chemistry in your own life.

Nevertheless, in answer to Joe’s question, and in an effort to find out exactly what was going through his mind back in 1997, I said: “No, it’s not obvious. To be honest, it doesn’t make any sense to me at all.”

So Joe tried to explain himself. He had drunk the better part of a bottle of wine by then, which had loosened up his natural reticence.

“I had a drink the other day with a friend from university,” he began. “A guy called Jason. He’d only been married about six weeks and already had the shortest recorded incidence of the seven-year itch. He said to me, ‘Joe, in an ideal world no man would ever have conceived of the institution of marriage. It’s counter-intuitive. Why would we limit our options like that? Marriage is a feminist conspiracy designed to exercise control over men.’ ”

“Your friend’s got a point,” I said.

“My friend is an idiot,” Joe replied. “What would you have done in my place? Isabella and I had been together for more than two years. There were no other circumstances in which the Office would have tolerated me telling her about RUN. Waterfield would have handed me a P45 and told me to swim back to London.”

“So that was the reason?” I seized on this. “You did it just to ease your conscience? You felt so guilty about lying to Isabella that your only way out of it was to
propose
?”

I have already written about Joe’s temper, about the extent to which he had to be pushed before the lid came off, and for a split second here I wondered whether he was going to launch at me. My words were ill-chosen and his face tightened in anger. In an instant, all of the easygoing, wine-fuelled bonhomie of our conversation evaporated.