It had probably been rather rude, Joy thought afterward, to meet one's future husband on what was really meant to be Princess Elizabeth's day. Or Queen Elizabeth II, as she would more grandly be known by the end of it. Still, considering the momentousness of the occasion for both of them, it had been quite hard (for Joy at least) to work up the appropriate feeling of excitement.
It was a day portentous of rain, not divine appointment. The skies over Hong Kong harbor had been humid and iron gray, and walking slowly around the Peak with Stella clutching a folder of damp song sheets, her armpits sliding as if greased and her blouse already sticking to her back like icing, Joy had felt something less than monarchist fervor at the thought of the Brougham Scotts' coronation party.
There was her mother, already fluttering at home, a taut string of anticipation and dissatisfaction, largely due to the presence of her father, back from one of his China trips. Her father's visits always seemed to coincide with a swift downturn in Alice’s moods, anchoring her hankerings for a better life, somewhere else, into something meaner and darker. “You’re not wearing that,” she had said, and frowned at Joy, her mouth a scarlet moue of disapproval.
Joy had eyed the door. She was desperate to meet Stella, and avoid having to walk to the Brougham Scotts’ villa with her parents and had fibbed, telling them that the hosts had requested the sheet music early. Journeys with her parents, even by foot, left her feeling seasick.
“You look so plain, darling. And you’re wearing your heels. You’ll tower over everyone.” That “darling” was a familiar sweetener to disguise the unpleasantness of what Alice was saying.
“I’ll sit down.”
“You can’t sit down all evening.”
“I’ll bend my knees then.”
“You should wear a wider belt. It’ll shorten you.”
“It’ll cut into my ribs.”
“I don’t know why you have to be so difficult. I’m just trying to make the best of you. It’s not as if you try to make yourself look nice.”
“Oh, Mummy, I don’t mind. No one else will mind. It’s not as if anyone’s going to notice me. They’ll all be listening to the princess saying her vows, or whatever it is she does.” Just let me go, she willed. It would be bad enough to have to suffer Alice’s corrosive temper for the entire party.
“Well, I mind. People will think I’ve brought you up not to care.”
What people will think was very important to Alice. Hong Kong is a goldfish bowl, she would say. There was always someone looking at you, talking about you. What a very small and boring world they must live in, Joy wanted to answer. But she didn’t, largely because it was true.
There was her father, who would doubtless drink too much, and kiss all the women on their mouths instead of their cheeks, so that they glanced around anxiously, unsure whether they had missed something. Just letting his hair down a bit, he would shout back at Alice later. What kind of a wife would deny her husband a bit of fun, after weeks of exhausting work in China (and we all knew the horrors of dealing with the orientals)? He hadn’t been the same since the Japanese invasion. But then they didn’t talk about that.
There were the Brougham Scotts. And the Marchants. And the Dickinsons. And the Alleynes. And all the other couples who lived in that particular class that resided just below the Peak, but not below Robinson Road (midlevels were really for the clerical classes these days), and saw one another at every drinks party at the Hong Kong Cricket Club, and met one another at the race meetings at the Happy Valley Race Course, and shared company junks on sherry-fueled boat trips around the outlying islands, and moaned about the difficulty of getting milk, and the mosquitoes, and the cost of property, and the shocking rudeness of the Chinese help.