My Favourite Wife (15 page)

And did he love her?

Bill felt a ridiculous anger towards her, and towards the man. But what did he expect? What would he prefer? That she would stay as a teacher in Number 251 Middle School and meet some nice boy who would want to marry her? Yes, that was exactly what he wanted, that was exactly what he would have preferred.

There was a live band at the reception and after they had played their opening number Rosalita climbed on stage to sing ‘Right Here Waiting for You’, a beautiful power ballad about longing and loyalty that she supplemented with much slow grinding and wicked grinning.

‘Ah, the unblushing bride,’ Mrs Devlin said. ‘In her element at last.’

Becca and Holly hit the dance floor and Bill made his way to the end of the queue for the buffet, his head swimming with the lights and the candles and the smell of orchids, and the hole in his future as he wondered what his life here would be like without them.

He steeled himself when Devlin approached him with a sympathetic smile, but his boss said nothing, just patted him twice on the back and let his hand linger for a moment on Bill’s shoulder.

Then Devlin was gone, moving off into the chatter of the guests and the muffled battery of champagne corks, and Bill stared after him with gratitude.

Bill could see what Becca would never see – the good that was in this city, and the kindness and generosity of these people.

His wife was immune to something that increasingly had Bill in its grip – the glory of this place and time, the magic of what was happening here.

Everyone’s life would be better, eventually. He could be a part of that, contribute something, and make a difference.

And his life would get better too. He would not be held back the way he would be held back in London, where in the end they always wanted to know what school you went to and what your father did and what your real accent was like. All that sad old bullshit that had been going on for centuries in England. They didn’t really care how well you did your job back in England.

The thing that Alice Greene complained about – the educated elite lording it over the huge pool of cheap labour, driving the economy on and on – most of the people in this room saw that as a
good
thing. Of course it wasn’t fair. But when had China ever been fair? Tell me when, he thought.

As he moved away from the buffet table he found he had loaded his plate with jam doughnuts and foie gras. Nothing else. Just two jam doughnuts and a sliver of foie gras. A ridiculous meal, he thought, smiling with embarrassment at his choices.

He hesitated for a moment and then he thought – but why not? Really – why not?

Why shouldn’t you have whatever you want?

In the master bedroom Bill read Holly a story until she slept. When she had nodded off he closed the book and just sat there for a while, smoothing back a tumble of fair hair that fell across her face. His daughter was the one who had taught him about unconditional love. There was nothing she could ever do in her life that could make him stop loving her.

Becca was packing things. She was being very selective. She was
careful to make it seem as though they were not going for good. Things were being left behind.

Including me, he thought, fighting the bitterness and losing. And it wasn’t my idea to come here.

‘What’s the book?’ she said, her arms full of folded sweaters that seemed to belong to another world.

Bill looked at the book in his hands. He hadn’t realised he was still holding it.
‘Farm Friends,’
he said. ‘Didn’t we see the movie?’

Becca nodded seriously. ‘That has to go back to the school,’ she said. ‘It’s not one of ours.’

‘Okay,’ he said, opening the book. ‘I’ll get Tiger to run it over.’

There was a reading list at the back of the book, a little library card with DATE DUE – TITLE – DATE RETURNED at the top, followed by a list of all the books that Holly had personally chosen to take home from school. The list made him smile, and he pictured her earnest face as she made her selection.

5th June –
Bunny Cakes

12th June –
Do Donkeys Dance?

19th June –
The Treasure Sock

26th June –
Favourite Rhymes

3rd July –
But No Elephants

10th July –
There Was an Old Lady

17th July –
Christmas Can’t Wait

24th July –
Imagine You’re a Princess

31st July –
Happy and Sad

7th August –
Sssh!

14th August –
Ballerina Belle

21st August –
Peter Pan’s Magical Christmas

28th August –
Farm Friends

A Christmas book in July? And another one in August? Something about the list seemed to capture his daughter’s sweet, funny essence.

He slipped the reading list into his pocket and went over to
where Becca stood at the window silently watching the rain hammer down on the empty courtyard of Paradise Mansions.

‘Did she go down okay?’ she asked him.

‘She’s worn out,’ he said. ‘Two hours of dancing the Macarena.’

What would they talk about if they didn’t have their daughter?

‘Bloody weather,’ he said, feeling ridiculous in the presence of English small talk. But the subject animated her.

‘I think this must be the start of the Plum Rain season,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t that sound just lovely?
The Plum Rain season. I
read about it before we came over. I wanted to see it. More than almost anything, really.’

They stared out at the courtyard, and he felt her take his hand. The Plum Rain season, the rains of summer, had turned Shanghai into a city of mist. They seemed to be floating in the clouds.

‘How long does it last?’ Bill said.

‘I don’t know,’ Becca said. She gave him that sly, sleepy look, the one that said
you know me
. ‘It doesn’t last for ever, darling.’

He took her hand and they went to his little bedroom where he made love to his wife, her body warm and loved and familiar, that familiarity that you only get after years together, which is the good side of knowing another human being so well, and she slept in his arms until their daughter began to cry in the hours just before dawn.

Then Becca went back to the master bedroom and he lay there for what was left of the night listening to his wife calm their child, smelling her perfume on his body, and thinking about the city his wife and daughter would soon be flying to, and remembering their old life in London when they were very young and very poor and very happy.

He came out of the departure gate of Pudong and looked at the mist and rain. Tiger beeped his horn from a no-parking zone. Bill dashed through the rain to the waiting limo.

‘Where to, boss?’ Tiger said.

‘Home,’ Bill said. ‘Let’s just go home.’

The car headed towards the city. Bill stared straight through sights that had once filled him with bemused awe. He didn’t see the blue and red flashing lights all along the highway, meant to replicate the watching eyes of the
gong’an ju
, the cops of the PSB. He didn’t see the ancient trucks, overloaded with animals, produce, junk and men who were wet to the bone. And he didn’t see the girls with the Shanghai look in their brand-new BMWs.

He wasn’t interested in seeing any of that.

Instead Bill pulled his daughter’s crumpled reading list from his pocket and it seemed a far greater source of wonder than any of these things. It made him smile. That girl. His girl. That little girl, sitting on her mother’s lap with her books and her crayons, 35,000 feet above – oh, it had to be Inner Mongolia by now.

‘Everything okay, boss?’ Tiger said, slightly worried now. You never knew when these crazy
da bizi
would crack. The heat and the pressure and the stress. It got to all of them eventually.

‘Yup,’ Bill said, finishing the reading list and going right back to the start.

Outside, the Plum Rain season was at full pelt and although Tiger’s windscreen wipers did their very best, they could not keep pace with Bill Holden’s tears.

The Chinese did what they wanted to do. That was the strange thing. That was what caught him off guard.

Before they had ever come over, he had read all about the human rights violations, and dissidents arrested, and Falun Gong members setting fire to themselves on Tiananmen Square, but when Bill walked around the Old City on Saturday afternoon, when there was no more paperwork to keep him at the office and he didn’t want to go home to an empty apartment, it felt like the Chinese were the freest people in the world. Or perhaps what they had was closer to anarchy than freedom.

Middle-aged women rode their motor scooters on the pavement. Businesses were set up in the street, and usually consisted of no more than a stool and a cardboard box and a couple of tools – the proprietors shaving old men, or helping clients to try on spectacles from a selection of hundreds, or cutting their hair. And in a pink-lit barbershop, where hairdressing was low on the agenda, two young women beckoned to him from the doorway.

Bill shook his head. One of them feigned disappointment. The other immediately turned to the next passing man. And in his loneliness Bill was so happy about the one who was pretending to be disappointed that he kept looking at her until he banged his shin against the bumper of a car parked on the pavement.

When he looked up it was a red Mini with a Chinese flag painted on the roof.

Looking more closely, he could see that the car was about seven different shades of red. The vehicle had clearly been pulled apart, and patched back together.

JinJin Li got out of the car. She had two ways of wearing her hair, he realised. She wore it down when she was out on the town with the man she called her husband, and pulled back in a ponytail for the rest of her life. Today she had it pulled back, the ponytail dragged through the back of a yellow baseball cap that said LA Lakers on the front, and he realised he preferred it that way because it meant you could really see her face.

She was a pretty girl with troubled skin. Later, when he saw the attention she lavished on keeping her skin under control, when he saw all the lotions and potions and pills and special soaps, he came to believe that the troubled skin was a manifestation of some inner turmoil. Later still, he didn’t think about it – that was just who she was, and she was always beautiful. But that day in the Old City he thought that she was just a bit too old to have such troubled skin.

‘Ah,’ she said, as the central locking flashed orange behind her. ‘You have come to the Old City. In the past no foreigners dared to come to Old City. Oh my gosh. They very afraid to come here.’

He watched her tugging the Lakers cap down over her eyes. What did she know about the Lakers? ‘Is that right?’ he said.

She nodded curtly. ‘How about you? Are you afraid to come here?’

‘Only if you’re driving.’

She nodded. ‘English joke,’ she said, dead serious. ‘I’m going to the market. Yu Gardens.’ She smiled encouragingly. ‘You want?’

‘Sure,’ he said, and she took his arm, and he was absurdly pleased. He felt his face reddening. He hadn’t blushed for years. But he knew it didn’t mean anything. He told himself that possibly she was lonely too.

The Yu Gardens market was the usual collection of everything. In ramshackle wooden buildings untouched by time and developers, Mao memorabilia was stacked up next to bootleg Disney merchandise and the latest software from Microsoft.

‘For your daughter,’ JinJin smiled, holding up a strangely familiar costume inside a sealed plastic package. A yellow skirt, a blue top with red piping, puffy short sleeves. There was a picture of a girl with the face of a glacial brunette, like the young Elizabeth Taylor. And Bill thought – but where are the seven dwarves?
Snow Girl
, it said on the wrapping. Snow Girl? It was a counterfeit Disney princess.

He smiled, as if impressed but unwilling to commit himself -Holly would spot a bootleg princess a mile off – as the woman squatting in front of the stall spread her arms indicating that if he wasn’t in the market for a genuine fake Snow Girl costume, then how about an opium pipe, or a Little Red Book, or a Deng Xiaoping watch, or a green coat from the People’s Liberation Army, or a propaganda poster of heroic factory workers?

They kept moving. An old woman and her fat little Buddha of a grandson walked hand in hand, neither of them too steady on their feet, both eating courgettes as though they were ice cream cones.

‘Look at those two,’ Bill said, nodding at them as they paused to solemnly consider a badly scarred mechanical rabbit.

JinJin smiled. ‘Fat little boy,’ she agreed. ‘Very nice child.’

For JinJin Li, this was the real world. What was strange to his eyes was normal to hers.

They emerged from the tumbledown maze of the Yu Gardens bazaar and there before them was a teahouse on a small lake. A wooden bridge zigzagged crazily across the water.

‘The Bridge of Nine Turnings,’ she said as they stepped on to it. Below them the water bubbled and exploded with hundreds of golden carp. ‘Because evil spirits can’t turn corners.’

He looked at her face. She was perfectly serious. He felt her hand in his, small and cool, and she led him across the twisting bridge to the teahouse on the lake. They stepped inside a wooden room and Bill looked up at a photograph of the last American president grinning widely over a cup of green tea.

‘Huxinting teahouse,’ JinJin said. ‘It is very famous. Many VIPs come here.’ She indicated the former president. ‘And some V-VIPs. Do you know?’

Suddenly he did know it. Of course – the Huxinting teahouse was the great symbol of the city’s past, a photo opportunity for every big shot that passed through Shanghai and wanted to show that they were in touch with the real China.

He had always meant to come here with Becca, but somehow they had never got around to it. JinJin spoke to a woman in Mandarin as Bill looked up at the pictures of movie stars and presidents and royalty. But although the bazaar was teeming with people, the Huxinting was almost empty.