“Of course, as I declared in that article: a ‘people’s policeman’s sense of dedication’.” She laughed and tilted her glass in the sunlight.

At that moment, she was no longer the reporter who had talked to him seriously, sitting upright at the office desk, an open notebook in front of her. Nor was he a chief inspector. Just a man with a woman whose company he enjoyed, in his own room.

“It’s been over a year since the day we first met in the hallway of the Wenhui office building,” he said, refilling her wineglass.

“‘Time is a bird, / It perches, and it flies,’“ she said.

These were the lines from his short poem entitled “Parting.” Nice of her to remember it.

“You must have been inspired by a parting you cannot forget,” she said. “A parting from somebody very dear to you.”

Her instinct was right, he thought. The poem was about his parting from a dear friend in Beijing years earlier, and it was still unforgotten. He had never talked to Wang about it. She was looking at him over the rim of her glass, taking a long slow sip, her eyes twinkling.

Did he catch a note of jealousy in her voice?

The poem had been written long ago, but its catalyst was not something he wanted to mention at the moment. “A poem does not have to be about something in the poet’s life. Poetry is impersonal. As T S. Eliot has said, it is not letting loose an emotional crisis-”

“What, an emotional crisis?” Overseas Chinese Lu’s excited voice burst into their conversation. Lu barged through the doorway carrying an enormous beggar’s chicken, his plump face and plump body all the more expansive in a fashionable heavily-shoulder-padded white suit and a bright red tie. Lu’s wife Ruru, thin as a bamboo shoot, and angular in a tight yellow dress, brought in a big purple ceramic pot.

“What are you two talking about?” Ruru asked.

Putting the food on the table, Lu threw himself down on the new leather sofa, looking at them with an exaggerated inquiry on his face.