unlocked and she had to turn out four uniformed room-boys who were lying on the floor and on the beds watching her tiny flickering black-and-white television. Lizzie must have turned the Room Free label the wrong way round instead of to Do Not Disturb . Lizzie’s reading of Cantonese was getting hazy. There was a musky smell in the room and Elisabeth opened the window, turned off the television and the lights and the air-conditioning. Warm harbour smells floated in. The water pipes along the walls clanked to the rhythm of somebody’s shower above. She took off the pearls and put them on a chair. She picked up the yellowing finger-marked breakfast menu and then thought, no, she’d order in the morning. She only needed sleep.
About midnight she woke in panic. The sky above was throbbing with planes. The boy Harry would be at the airport now. No, he’d already be in the air, sitting in his first-class seat. “Flying out at midnight.” To be hoped that the mother . . . The mother had looked drunk. You’d think the father would have cancelled that Con. An only child. Will Edward cancel a Consultation for a child? She decided, no. But there will be me.
Our children will always have me.
Where’s Lizzie? Secret life. Always had. All these secrets. She thought of the codes at Bletchley Park in the mild English countryside. We took it so lightly. Secrets. Elisabeth slept now against the madhouse clamour of Kowloon. Blank. Jet lag. Still partly in Sydney. Hole in the air, c’est moi . Ought to be better at all this. Calmer. I am getting married. I’m twenty-eight.
In a dream she was informing her long-dead and always shadowy parents not to worry. She was back on the blistered floor of the Camp. The dust. Her father’s voice suddenly boomed out at her, “There’ll be money when you’re thirty. Do nothing hasty.” His ribcage had stuck out. His nose sharp in the skull. “I’m quite safe,” she shouted. “I’m doing all right.”
In the morning she woke to Lizzie’s radio playing beside the other bed and sat up bleary and tousled blinking across to where Lizzie lay prone. The radio rattled on in Cantonese.
“Lizzie-Izz! You’re back! Where were you? I’ve something . . .”
“Shut up a minute. There’s terrible news.”
“Oh. What news?”
“Plane crash. Early this morning. Over the Indian Ocean. It broke in two.”
Elisabeth was out of bed and dressing, “Which?”
“Which what?”
“Plane. Airline. Going where?”
“British Airways, to Heathrow. The new design. A lot of children flying home to boarding school. What are you doing?”
Elisabeth was in her clothes. She did not do her hair or wash or look in the glass. She felt for her sandals by the bed, ran into the bathroom, ran out again, pulling up her knickers. She left the rope of pearls lying on the chair. She did not look for her purse. She ran from the room.
“I think actually they said it happened after it had left Rome,” Lizzie called, but Elisabeth was out of hearing.
Elisabeth ran into the street, on to the quay, ran across the roads in the drumming relentless Monday morning crowds that marched to work in their thousands, not looking at her, not speaking, not touching, not stumbling, and nor did she. She ran up the marble steps of the Peninsular Hotel and the bellhop boys in their white uniforms and pillbox hats pulled back the glass doors and blinked as she passed by.
Beside the fountain she stopped. The white piano on the dais was covered with a cloth and the gold music stands were folded up. She ran to the lifts and eyes turned from her in embarrassment, two immaculate men at the reception desk looking pointedly away. Somewhere above her in the hotel Edward would be getting up, thinking of the coming day in Court. It never occurred to her to ask for him.
She didn’t know the number of the Veneerings’ rooms and asked the lift boy who said “Suite Number One” but looked uncertain about taking her there.