The Rice Paper Diaries Read Online Free PDF Page A

talked. She was gesticulating affectedly, probably speaking quietly so he had to bend towards her and concentrate to catch what she was saying. He stopped smiling suddenly, and started nodding, as if she was telling him something he knew and he agreed with her. The woman put an arm on the lapel of his jacket and was starting to talk more quickly and urgently as Elsa came up behind her.
    ‘Elsa,’ Tommy interrupted the woman and reached out to draw Elsa into the middle of their twosome. He put both arms around her and pulled her to him. One of the buttons on his shirt had come undone and Elsa could feel his hot skin against hers.
    ‘Elsa, this is Miss Mimi Forsyth. She’s a journalist.’
    The woman was older than she looked from behind; there were streaks of grey in her hair and fine lines of black kohl had smudged a little around her eyes. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ Elsa said, stretching out one arm to shake her hand.
    ‘Enjoying Hong Kong, Mrs Jones?’
    The journalist was looking at Tommy and not Elsa.
    ‘It’s quite a home from home.’ Elsa tried to sound polite. ‘What about you? What brings you here?’
    The woman answered reluctantly, as if she’d rather make eyes at Tommy all day.
    ‘There’s going to be a war and I’m here to report on it.’
    Elsa looked over at Tommy, expecting to see one of his social grimaces in place, accompanied by a comment about the Japs getting too big for their boots. But he just took his arm off the bar and raised it, as if to stop the rush of words that might follow, or to surrender to them, Elsa didn’t know which. Elsa wondered how well he knew this journalist.
    ‘Mimi, don’t you think you’re being a bit jumpy about all this?’ He’d stopped smiling.
    ‘Things are getting more serious, Tom.’ She said his name as if she owned it, tucking her hair back over her ears as she spoke. She looked directly at him as if Elsa wasn’t there, challenging him to disagree with her.
    ‘There are bombs in London,’ Elsa said. ‘Not here.’
    She had no notion of how bombs might sound, or the havoc they might make, apart from the odd story from back home that she’d picked up in the Hong Kong dailies. All that Nannon had to say about it in her letters was that that the price of eggs and sugar had gone up again.
    ‘How well do you know the Pacific?’ said Mimi.
    Nannon would have known how to deal with a woman like this. Drama queen .
    ‘So is that what you’re doing, Miss Forsyth?’ Elsa said. ‘Sitting in an office writing stories about the war in Europe?’
    ‘I can’t tell you half of what I’m doing. It’s classified. I can’t even tell Tommy.’ It was there again, her husband’s name spread out like a warm palm around this woman.
    She wondered if Harry had been dead when they’d lifted him out, or if his heart had stopped beating on the examination table. No one had said much afterwards, just how sorry they were, as if, now that it had happened, it wasn’t really important to know how, or why. But those were the details that Elsa wanted to keep, like pressed flowers that would fall out of the pages of a book later on, the colour and sap drained out of them, but still reminding her of the short, dark life he’d lived inside her. This journalist wouldn’t understand.
    Tommy cleared his throat.
    ‘First race in five minutes, ladies and gentlemen!’ someone shouted down the bar. People started to wander through to the box outside in threes and fours.
    They were among the last to leave, and Tommy turned to thank the waiter who was holding the door open for them.
    ‘Hello, Dai, my man!’ Tommy laughed, clapping him on the back, and the boy laughed back, not knowing that he looked comical in his stiffly starched shirt that was too big for him. No one was invisible to Tommy. He talked to everyone as if they were his friend, and not in that polite way that expects no answer. People’s faces opened up when he spoke to them, even if he was still laughing at