Page 23 of Behind Frenemy Lines

The hairs rose on my forearms.

I shook myself internally. Arthurwouldn’t.I’d worked with him for eight years and I’d never seen him do anything inappropriate. He was old enough to be my father—a young father, but still.

Even the thought was unsettling, unlikely as it was. I’d never been one of the parade of trainees and NQs who got crushes on Arthur. I knew too much.

I rubbed my arms.

“Cold?” said Arthur. “They’ve really got the air-conditioning on blast.”

“Yeah, I should have layered up.” I opened my laptop. “I’ll make the amendments now. What was the change you wanted to the title?”

My unease faded as we worked through the slide deck. Arthur was being fine, not leaning in too close or anything like that.

Why should the poor man come under suspicion simply because he’d helped me with my bag and wanted a chat? If his ex-wife was any guide, I was nothing like his type. I was dark, fat, and frizzy-haired. Whereas Kelly looked like a rich man’s wife: a slim, blonde woman who’d made all her clothes look exactly as expensive as they were.

I shut my laptop when we’d got through the slides, getting up. “I’ll go ask about getting these printed off.” Arthur preferred having hard copy notes to refer to when delivering presentations.

Arthur seemed disconcerted. “There’s no rush. You haven’t finished your drink.”

I glanced down at my glass, half-full of chrysanthemum tea.

“I’ve had enough,” I said. “It’s a bit too sweet for me.”

The weirdness with Arthur faded away after that first day. He was being completely normal. We talked exclusively about work.

We kicked off each morning with a pre-brief over breakfast, running through the agenda, talking about what we were going to do and who we were going to see.

This was Arthur’s idea. I would have preferred to have breakfast by myself. The breakfast buffet was amazing, a holy grail of fancy Asian hotel buffets. Besides the cereals and English breakfast and cured meats and cheese you might have found at any decent English hotel, there was fried rice, fried noodles, fresh tropical fruit, congee, eggs cooked to your liking by a man in a giant chef’s hat, dim sum, mini pastries, waffles, spring rolls, deep-fried bao, a salad bar, a juice bar, and another man in a giant chef’s hat who would make you noodle soup to your precise tastes, from your choice of a dizzying selection of noodles, green leafy vegetables, mushrooms, meatballs, fish balls, and wonton.

Faced with all this bounty, Arthur chose to eat, every morning, a bowl of oat porridge with a banana sliced into it. White people!

I made sure I ate well, since we didn’t always get to have lunch. The days were long. After the conference panels and training sessions and networking events and coffees with people who might at some point prove useful, there was always a dinner to entertain some client or other. After that, we went on to drinks—our local contacts all seemed to have some hip bar in Lan Kwai Fong they took proprietorial pride in showing us.

Arthur gave a good impression of enjoying himself. He might never have heard of jet lag. I could only do my best to keep up, swallowing my yawns and my yearning for my hotel room. It was an incredibly nice room. I had a king-size bed all to myself, and a view of the sea.

Our final client dinner, on our last day in Hong Kong, was with the GC of a Chinese tech company, a Dutch woman who’d been hired in recently and was still making sense of local office culture. At eight p.m., she did something miraculous. She looked at her watch and said:

“I must get going. Thank you for dinner.”

“Oh,” said Arthur. We’d only just finished our mains. He’d ordered a second bottle of wine, which hadn’t even arrived yet.

“You carry on,” said Karin airily, getting up and settling her handbag on her shoulder.

After she left, Arthur looked over at me. “Do you want dessert?”

I was pleasantly buzzed. I’d drunk my fair share of the first bottle of wine, but it was mostly the relief of being nearly done with the trip. Now, thanks to Karin, it was even looking like I might get back to my room before ten p.m., for once.

So I said, “I’ll take a look at the menu.”

I decided on tiramisu. Arthur deigned to order a scoop of lemon sorbet.

We chatted idly about Karin and the job she had ahead of her, whipping her company’s in-house legal function into shape. The conversation drifted on to the conference and the various people we’d seen over the past week.

Arthur was feeling optimistic about the business we were going to get from the trip. We had already had a couple of verbal instructions, as well as an invitation to deliver training to a client’s European colleagues.

“Can you make a note of all of that?” he said. “I’ll send it on to Farah. She’ll want to know what we’ve been up to.”

I opened Outlook on my phone, saving a reminder in my diary. “I’ll do it before my flight tomorrow.”

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