Delicious is a word that keeps coming to mind as one reads Jane Gardam’s new novel. Delicious and poignant. The 81-year-old author’s mood is elegiac, and so eventually is that of Elizabeth, Betty, the wife of Sir Edward Feathers QC, who was portrayed first as the protagonist of Old Filth. ‘Filth’ is the acronym for Failed in London Try Hong Kong. Actually, his career progressed right from the start in a smooth upward trajectory, as a successful barrister in the Temple, an eminent judge in the Crown Colony. Now, depicted mainly from Betty’s point of view, the portrait is stereoscopic. She sees him as a stiff-upper-lip romantic, rather ludicrously conservative in his gentlemanly Englishness.

Betty, Scottish, born in Tiensin, survived years in a Japanese wartime internment camp in Shanghai, where her parents died. Like the man she married, she is equally at home — equally homeless — in the Far East and England. A missionary friend predicts that Betty will ‘metamorphose into a perfect specimen of 20th-century uxorial devotion,’ but with ‘a guilty secret’.

Edward has a guilty secret of his own, of an adolescent peccadillo with far- reaching consequences. The only person privy to these secrets and others is the solicitor who has enabled Edward to prosper, an internationally celebrated but enigmatic Chinese dwarf, who prefers to be known as a Hakkar, ‘the ancient red-brown tribe of oriental gypsies,’ and hints that he is an Old Etonian. He owns a Kowloon tree-house hidden in the woods and available, hired by the hour, for discreet assignations.

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