As she had crossed campus to get a taxi back to her hotel after her face-down with Bob, she had spotted Lily and taken a minor diversion. Lily had seen her coming, her face reddening, in spite of herself. Margaret kept it short and sweet, an exotic blend of profanities which would have made her mother blush. Even her father, an expert in the use of colourful language, would have been shocked. But whatever satisfaction Margaret had gained from her verbal castigation of the self-important former Red Guard, it was short-lived. She had lain down on the bed when she got back to her hotel and wept for nearly an hour. A hot shower had failed to ease her tension headache. A phone call to the airline office had achieved a rescheduled return flight for the following morning. There would be a considerable additional charge, the girl had told her. She didn’t care, Margaret had told her back.

Now, with a map and a guidebook in the basket of her bicycle, she was seeking an escape from the city, the opportunity for some solitude, time to sort out her feelings away from the chance of interruption. She passed the Beijing offices of Apple Computers, choking on the fumes that belched from the back of a diesel truck. She had been cycling for almost three-quarters of an hour, and didn’t appear to have made much impression on the route she had planned on the map. The streets always seemed so much longer in reality than they did on paper.

After another twenty minutes, negotiating busy street markets and crowds of lunch-time cyclists, she came to a major north-south-east-west intersection and saw, diagonally across the street, the gates of Yuanmingyuan Park, the Park of Perfection and Brightness. But there was nothing very perfect about the park. It was dusty and neglected, a shabby shadow of the royal playground it had once been during the middle years of the Qing Dynasty. Then, its rolling parkland had been filled with gilded halls, towers and pavilions, its centrepiece a collection of European-style marble palaces modelled on the French Sun King’s Palace of Versailles—an early experiment in the art of the joint venture. Sacked twice within forty years by British and French troops at the end of the nineteenth century, all that remained of it now were a few white marble skeletons and some weed-choked lily ponds.