They exchanged awkward cheek kisses in front of their audience. Phoebe didn’t know her mother’s friends, a French woman from her AquaExercise classes at the USRC pool, and her Cantonese husband, an oncologist. The woman was wrapped in mysterious folds of linen arranged like a swami’s robes, while the doctor played it safe in a sports coat. Deborah, in a new dress of a peculiar rusty colour, moved to the drinks trolley, but Jimmy swiftly intervened, saying, ‘I’ll do that.’

‘Oh, would you?’ She turned to her friends. ‘James makes a great cocktail,’ she told them. ‘It’s one of many talents. He works in finance.’

‘For my sins,’ he said comfortably. He commandeered the trolley, which for Phoebe dredged up memories of her parents’ long-ago drinks parties.

Deborah had a minor ankle complaint, but she stayed on her feet to study his movements as he contented himself with bottles and glasses.

‘I need ice.’

‘He needs ice!’ she said. She brought the ice.

‘Do you have lemons?’

She brought lemons.

It was excruciating. Phoebe, for some reason nervous in Jimmy’s presence, felt the awakening of old pathways in her brain, old patterns of attraction. She took a sweet from the bowl on the coffee table and ate it hurriedly, then another. She was meant to be cutting back. She had made this resolution on seeing that all her fellow doctors consumed was sugar and Coke. This was their crack, their fuel. ‘I saw the best minds of my generation…’

Jimmy was clearly enjoying being the centre of attention.

‘What kind of finance are you in?’ asked the doctor.

‘Structured equity. It’s mostly US dollar loans secured against stocks.’

Deborah continued to laud his accomplishments. ‘Jimmy had offers at four banks. He had his pick.’ She corrected herself. ‘James’s father is a writer. He’s very clever. He translates books.’

She made it sound quite chic, having a writer for a father, but Jimmy’s smile faltered. In truth, his father had not done well out of being a writer. He had spent time in a labour camp during the Cultural Revolution and afterwards had lived a peripatetic life, before settling in London. Then came his gambling, which Jimmy hated with a passion.

The guests, knowing none of this, looked approvingly at Jimmy and Phoebe. You’ve done well, their faces said.

‘We’re not —’ she began.

‘James is like family,’ said her mother, giving his shoulders a quick squeeze.

‘I go by James now,’ he said in an aside to Phoebe.

The conversation turned, as sooner or later it always did, to the topic of Hong Kong’s future under the one-country, two-systems rule. Deborah made it known she thought Hong Kong would be safe, it would retain its special freedoms. The way she spoke, Phoebe observed, you’d have thought the island had been a bastion of liberty, not a British colony.