said, clutching a glass of champagne, evidently his third or fourth. ‘That’s enough small talk. Dawn, you’ve been here long enough to have formed a view about this. So tell us – who’s your favourite Patten daughter?’
*
We sailed out to a beach at the back of Cheung Chau and moored a couple of hundred yards offshore. I talked to Oss and to Berkowitz and to the wife of a man called Mitchell who herself was called either Sonia or Sonja and had plans to start an art gallery specialising in openly fake French furniture and to another woman called Katy who said that she ‘wrote pieces for the London papers’ and then drifted away when I began to ask questions and avoided me for the rest of the day, and to a woman called Peta who was about twenty-five and was the daughter of a friend of Oss’s and was travelling around the world for three months before beginning a course as a mature student of photography at St Martin’s College. Some of us swam before lunch, others did more B & Y (boozing and yakking), talking of Cathay Pacific versus British Airways club class, about the old days when a flight to Hong Kong took twenty-one hours because planes didn’t overfly China or Vietnam, about the parts of London where the Chinese were buying up property and about the ads for London properties in the Hong Kong papers; we talked about a new restaurant in Macau called Lusophonia, where the designer came from Lisbon, the maître d’ from Kowloon, and the chef from Mozambique via Rio; we talked about the new Peak Tram terminal, about swimming pools, about which of the London papers was going through an off patch; there was an altercation about whether a visit to South Australia was as good as a visit to Tuscany but with fourteen hours’ less flying time; someone said that FILTH (Failed In London Try Hong Kong) was an acronym you only heard from tourists and newcomers who wouldn’t last ten minutes in the territory; there was gossip about the new chief executive of the Jockey Club (verdict: American – but who cares?), there was a conversation about the last time anyone present had actually bought anything from Lane Crawfords, therewas talk about whether it was just us but weren’t people actually beginning to get a little bit tired of the China Club? We talked about David Tang, about water temperature as a predictor of typhoons, and about ways of retiring to France without paying French tax. We ate chicken à la king and cold roast beef and mozzarella-and-tomato salad and Thai peanut-and-noodle salad and chilled spicy tomato soup and air-freighted Pont L’Évêque and fruit salad and Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey or Häagen-Dazs Double Chocolate ice cream. We drank gin and tonic and Virgin Marys with Worcestershire sauce and celery salt and Veuve Clicquot with or without freshly squeezed orange juice and Rothbury Estate Show Reserve Chardonnay and Guigal Côtes du Rhône and Hennessey XO Cognac and Lagavulin and Ty Nant water and coffee and peppermint tea and Tsingtao beer because Oss said that San Miguel didn’t taste as good as it used to when the brewery was owned by the Marcoses. We swam and a few of us waterskied and a few others sunbathed and a couple of people tried to windsurf, and a couple of other people said they would go below decks for a little lie down. My swimsuit got a couple of good reviews. At dusk the wind died and we could hear the laughter and the talking coming from other similar boat parties off the beach and the boats looked closer now because their superstructures were strewn with lights. And then as the stars were coming out we pulled up our anchor and headed back to Queen’s Pier. Life in the bubble.
Chapter five
About three months after the trip on Tai Pan , Michael came out to visit. I was as busy as hell and it was wildly inconvenient, but I couldn’t entirely blame Michael for the timing, since it wasn’t arbitrary: it was Easter. I had been home once since moving to Hong Kong, but
*
We sailed out to a beach at the back of Cheung Chau and moored a couple of hundred yards offshore. I talked to Oss and to Berkowitz and to the wife of a man called Mitchell who herself was called either Sonia or Sonja and had plans to start an art gallery specialising in openly fake French furniture and to another woman called Katy who said that she ‘wrote pieces for the London papers’ and then drifted away when I began to ask questions and avoided me for the rest of the day, and to a woman called Peta who was about twenty-five and was the daughter of a friend of Oss’s and was travelling around the world for three months before beginning a course as a mature student of photography at St Martin’s College. Some of us swam before lunch, others did more B & Y (boozing and yakking), talking of Cathay Pacific versus British Airways club class, about the old days when a flight to Hong Kong took twenty-one hours because planes didn’t overfly China or Vietnam, about the parts of London where the Chinese were buying up property and about the ads for London properties in the Hong Kong papers; we talked about a new restaurant in Macau called Lusophonia, where the designer came from Lisbon, the maître d’ from Kowloon, and the chef from Mozambique via Rio; we talked about the new Peak Tram terminal, about swimming pools, about which of the London papers was going through an off patch; there was an altercation about whether a visit to South Australia was as good as a visit to Tuscany but with fourteen hours’ less flying time; someone said that FILTH (Failed In London Try Hong Kong) was an acronym you only heard from tourists and newcomers who wouldn’t last ten minutes in the territory; there was gossip about the new chief executive of the Jockey Club (verdict: American – but who cares?), there was a conversation about the last time anyone present had actually bought anything from Lane Crawfords, therewas talk about whether it was just us but weren’t people actually beginning to get a little bit tired of the China Club? We talked about David Tang, about water temperature as a predictor of typhoons, and about ways of retiring to France without paying French tax. We ate chicken à la king and cold roast beef and mozzarella-and-tomato salad and Thai peanut-and-noodle salad and chilled spicy tomato soup and air-freighted Pont L’Évêque and fruit salad and Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey or Häagen-Dazs Double Chocolate ice cream. We drank gin and tonic and Virgin Marys with Worcestershire sauce and celery salt and Veuve Clicquot with or without freshly squeezed orange juice and Rothbury Estate Show Reserve Chardonnay and Guigal Côtes du Rhône and Hennessey XO Cognac and Lagavulin and Ty Nant water and coffee and peppermint tea and Tsingtao beer because Oss said that San Miguel didn’t taste as good as it used to when the brewery was owned by the Marcoses. We swam and a few of us waterskied and a few others sunbathed and a couple of people tried to windsurf, and a couple of other people said they would go below decks for a little lie down. My swimsuit got a couple of good reviews. At dusk the wind died and we could hear the laughter and the talking coming from other similar boat parties off the beach and the boats looked closer now because their superstructures were strewn with lights. And then as the stars were coming out we pulled up our anchor and headed back to Queen’s Pier. Life in the bubble.
Chapter five
About three months after the trip on Tai Pan , Michael came out to visit. I was as busy as hell and it was wildly inconvenient, but I couldn’t entirely blame Michael for the timing, since it wasn’t arbitrary: it was Easter. I had been home once since moving to Hong Kong, but
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