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it’s given her a kind of fulfilment that we can’t understand.’
    â€˜Of course you could be right, but if that’s fulfilment…’ She finished with a sigh. ‘I just want more from life than dreaming about a man who isn’t there any more. Or,’ she added wryly, ‘in my mother’s case, several men who aren’t there any more.’
    â€˜But what about the louse? Didn’t he change your mind?’
    For the first time he saw her disconcerted.
    â€˜I kind of lost the plot there,’ she admitted. ‘But it sorted itself out. Never mind how. I’m wiser now.’
    She spoke with a shrug and a cheerful smile, but she hadthe feeling that he wasn’t fooled. Some instinct was telling him the things she wouldn’t, couldn’t say.
    She’d been dazzled by Andy from the first moment. Handsome, charming, intelligent, he’d singled her out, wooed her passionately and had overturned all the fixed ideas of her life. For once she’d understood Norah’s aching fidelity to a dead man. She’d even partly understood the way her mother fell in love so often.
    Then, just when she’d been ready to abandon the prejudices of a lifetime, he’d announced that he was engaged to marry someone else. He’d said they’d had a wonderful few months together but it was time to be realistic, wasn’t it?
    The lonely, anguished nights that had followed had served to convince her that she’d been right all the time. Love wasn’t for her, or for anyone in their right mind. She couldn’t speak of it, but there was no need. Lang’s sympathetic silence told her that he understood.
    â€˜Tell me about you,’ she hastened to say. ‘You’re English too, aren’t you? What brought you out here?’
    â€˜I’m three-quarters English. The other quarter is Chinese.’
    â€˜Ah,’ she said slowly.
    â€˜You guessed?’
    â€˜Not exactly. You sound English, but your features suggest otherwise. I don’t know—there’s something else…’
    She gave up trying to explain. The ‘something else’ in his face seemed to come and go. One moment it almost defined him, the next it barely existed. It intrigued and tempted her with its hint of another, mysterious world.
    â€˜Something different—but it’s not a matter of looks,’ she finished, wishing she could find the right words.
    He seemed satisfied and nodded.
    â€˜I know. That “something different” is inside, and it has always haunted me,’ he said. ‘I was born in London, and Igrew up there, but I knew I didn’t quite fit in with the others. My mother was English, my father was half-Chinese. He died soon after I was born. Later my mother married an Englishman with two children from a previous marriage.’
    â€˜Wicked stepfather?’ Olivia enquired.
    â€˜No, nothing so dramatic. He was a decent guy. I got on well with him and his children, but I wasn’t like them, and we all knew it.
    â€˜Luckily I had my grandmother, who’d left China to marry my grandfather. Her name was Lang Meihui before she married, and she was an astonishing woman. She knew nothing about England and couldn’t speak the language. John Mitchell couldn’t speak Chinese. But they managed to communicate and knew that they loved each other. He brought her home to London.’
    â€˜She must have found it really hard to cope,’ Olivia mused.
    â€˜Yes, but I’ll swear, nothing has ever defeated her in her life. She learned to speak English really well. She found a way to live in a country that probably felt like being on another planet, and she survived when her husband died ten years later, leaving her with a son to raise alone.
    â€˜He was called Lang too. She’d insisted on that. It was her way of keeping her Chinese family-name alive. When I was born she more or less bullied him into calling