The Cougar

The Cougar

When I first arrived in Hong Kong, I had quite a bit of free time in the evenings and at weekends. This situation gradually changed the longer I spent in the colony, so that by the time I left I was lucky if I spent an evening at home. The story I'm going to tell you is about two people I met after I had been living there for a couple of months, I suppose, shortly after I enrolled in a French course at the Alliance Française.

Now I had studied French in Hawick up to O-Grade level - equivalent to O-Level in England - and done pretty well, coming out with the top grade, in fact. Like many others, though, my speaking and, in particular, my listening weren't very good, so I decided to do something about it by taking an intermediate course where the emphasis was on those skills.

I still remember my first lesson very well. It was a Tuesday evening (7pm if I remember right) and among the other dozen or so other students there was this really handsome man called Eric. We chatted briefly during the ten-minute break at 8 o'clock and I actually thought of asking him if he wanted to go out for a drink in nearby Tsim Sha Tsui, when the class broke up at 9. Shyness got the better of me, and I didn't act on my impulse. Looking back at what happened next, I can only say that I wish I had.

For, on Thursday, we were joined by a new student - a woman I took an instant dislike to, called Brenda. I have to admit that I have had an irrational dislike of people called Brenda ever since. And - you've guessed it - Brenda was clearly intent on sinking her claws into Eric - my Eric!

It was pathetic. At the break, she was all over him, laughing at everything he said and generally making a complete ass of herself. Well, that is what I thought, but obviously not Eric, since the last I saw of them was Brenda hailing a taxi and the two of them tumbling into it.

I was so churned up by what had happened that I imagined they wouldn't be there the following Tuesday: that instead they would be making passionate love somewhere. Maybe on the beach, like Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster in From Here to Eternity. But, no, they turned up all right - sitting next to each other and whispering to each other through the whole bloody lesson, even secreting themselves away during the break and deigning to join the rest of us five minutes late.

Once more I managed to find myself outside on the street at the same time as they jumped in a taxi, which to all the world looked as if it had been waiting for them, just like in a movie. At that time, I was house-sitting for a family who lived in a place called Discovery Bay, a kind of gweilo ghetto, where gweilo is used to mean a white person.

Even today, more than 35 years later, Discovery Bay remains the weirdest place I have ever been to. Have you ever seen the 60s TV series The Prisoner, starring Patrick McGoohan, as Number Six? A man who's done something considered wrong by the powers-that-be, even if he has no clue what that might be. He and his fellow inmates live in a place that is like a cross between a Butlin's holiday camp and a kitschy Italian resort. Any attempt to leave the island is thwarted by a giant white balloon, whose guard dog credentials are underlined by the fact that it is named Rover.

Well, Disco Bay, as it is known, was at least as scary as that village. Because no cars were allowed, golf carts were the favoured form of transport, even though buses ran from the various tower blocks of identical flats to the ferry pier, from which ferries to the Central Business District ran every ten minutes. Such was the desire to get out of the place...

Going back to those golf carts, there was only a limited supply of the things, so that each time one came onto the market it commanded crazy prices. More than £100,000! If you don't believe me, Google it.

Anyway, I was living in a high-rise only five or six minutes' walk from the ferry, so getting about was pretty easy for me. Imagine my surprise, though, when one Monday morning, bright and early, I bumped into Eric as I walked down the gangway to board the air-conditioned super-fast ferry. He said 'hello' a little sheepishly, I thought, and when I looked beyond him I saw the reason why. There, in all her pin-striped, trouser-suited glory was Brenda, obviously a lawyer by trade. Either that, or a clown.

We exchanged pleasantries, each of us vying to be more phoney than the other, and made our way on board. Because we had been near the front of the queue, we had our choice of seats, and three in a row was very definitely on, if any of us was game for it. Step up Eric, who made a big show of pointing out a vacant row near the front of the boat, where we could all settle down snugly and spend the 20-minute journey trying to avoid saying anything meaningful.

The following evening, I seriously considered going back to Disco Bay directly after work rather than having to sit through a lesson at the Alliance Française in the company of the two nauseating lovebirds. In the end, I decided to take the underground from my office in Central to the Jordan area of Kowloon where its headquarters was situated. I got there five minutes late as a sort of assertion of my independence and took a seat at the back of the room.

It turned out to be a smart move. I could see Eric, up in the front row where he usually sat, but there was no sign of 'LA Law', as I had taken to calling her. At the break, I deliberately avoided Eric, approaching someone I hadn't bothered talking to before and engaging them in animated conversation. I tried to look over their shoulder to see if Eric was trying to talk to me, or at least come somewhere in my vicinity, but I couldn't see him at all.

When the lesson finished, I made a bit of a meal of packing my stuff away, so that Eric could come and find me if he wanted to. At last, I had played a gambit that worked. After a lot of embarrassed attempts at making small talk on his part, I realised I needed to take control and told him we would go to The White Hart on Canton Road for a drink.

There we chatted away until closing time, even though we both had to be up early the following morning for work. Before parting, sensing that the fellow was utterly incapable of making the first move, I kissed him on the cheek, handed him my number, which I'd written on a piece of paper when I'd gone to the loo, and told him to call me when he had decided where he wanted to take me for dinner on Friday.

To give him credit, there was a message on my phone waiting for me when I got home. We went to dinner at a place called Le Tire Bouchon, had a whale of a time in nearby Lan Kwai Fong, and went back to his place and had wild sex. Eighteen months later we married in Hawick. The day this story is published, we will be celebrating our thirty-fourth wedding anniversary, raising a glass, as we always do, to LA Law, who helped bring us together.