My Favourite Wife (20 page)

‘What the fuck is this?’

‘Kai Tak rules,’ Shane said. ‘Don’t forget the Kai Tak rules. Don’t say a word to anyone. Now put it back.’

‘Kai Tak rules?’ Bill said. ‘You’re not banging some bar girl. This is not some little escapade that happened on tour. And who would I tell? What would I say? Our award-winning Head of Litigation is – what? – packing a piece? Is that the correct terminology?’

‘I mean it, Bill. Put it back where you found it.’

‘I want to know what it is, Shane.’

‘All right.’ Shane took it from him. He looked surprisingly expert with it. As if he knew that it wasn’t going to suddenly go off, Bill thought.

‘This is a PSM, often called a Makarov,’ Shane said. ‘It’s Russian. A Russian knock-off of the Walther PP. You know – James Bond’s gun. This is the cheapo Communist version. China’s full of them. From the days when Stalin wanted Mao to do his fighting for him. Fifty years back, during the Korean War. When Mao was telling Stalin that he would sacrifice a million Chinese in a war with America, but he needed the firepower to do it. Mao wanted an arms industry, but Stalin only gave him weapons. Like this one. It’s small, easy to carry, dead simple to fire. Any idiot can use it.’

Bill was speechless. He didn’t know where to start.

‘But what do you want a gun for? They’ll throw you out of the country. They’ll toss you in jail. They could kick out the firm.’

‘Nobody’s going to kick out the firm.’

Bill stared at the gun, dumbfounded. ‘I can’t imagine how you managed to buy this thing.’ He looked sharply at Shane. ‘And I don’t want to know.’

‘You can buy anything in China,’ Shane said. ‘Don’t you know that yet? The place is full of guns. When Mao was arming the people, waiting for some foreign invasion, what do you think happened? Do you think they just gave them all back?’

‘They will come down on you like a ton of bricks,’ Bill said. ‘If it doesn’t blow your head off the first time you pull the trigger.’

Then he waited for an explanation. But Shane couldn’t explain it. He didn’t even try. He carefully put the Makarov back in the wall safe and locked the door.

Bill watched him replace the
Mona Lisa
, still waiting, but Shane shook his head. He couldn’t find the words. It was beyond words. He knew that needing the gun had something to do with their beating, and something to do with the fear of what the pain might mean, and the overwhelming feeling that everything in his life was starting to fall apart.

But in the end Shane could not really explain to his friend why he needed a weapon in this city.

He knew it was somehow related to his jokes about the Great Unwashed, and his habit of getting drunk every night, and the need to see the money piling up, and the longing for something that felt like real love.

That’s why he had a fifty-year-old gun in his home.

Anything to convince himself that this place could never hurt him.

Not every client wanted to be taken to Mao Ming Nan Lu. Not every businessman who engaged the services of Butterfield, Hunt and West wanted to see the girls in Suzy Too. But they all wanted to see what they thought of as the real Shanghai.

The city, in all its frenetic modernity, encouraged the belief that you were somehow always missing the real Shanghai. The selfconsciously epic skyline of Pudong, the girls dancing on tables in Bejeebers-Bejaybers with a Guinness in their fist, the cappuccinos on every corner – this could not be the
real
Shanghai, could it?

The girls that came out at night on Mao Ming Nan Lu, or who lived in the apartments of Paradise Mansions, were no less citizens of Shanghai than a street barber on Fuyou Lu. These days, loving Starbucks was considered authentically Shanghainese – it was said that Shanghai now had more of the coffee shops than Miami – yet at the same time the city harboured a chippy need to show the developed world that China had not only caught them up but was about to pass them by and leave them for dead in the dust.

It was all the real Shanghai, if you wanted it to be.

Bill was happy when their client from the health-care company – a sickly-looking Miles Davis fan from Geneva – announced at brunch that what he really wanted was to see the jazz music at the Peace Hotel.

Bill knew that Shane secretly sneered at the Peace Hotel as a tourist trap, so he let his friend cry off, because he looked like hell, and anyway Bill always enjoyed sipping a Tsingtao and listening to those Glenn Miller standards being played for the millionth time. He sat there and thought of Becca and Holly, and how they must be walking home from school right now, as he watched the jazz band who had been teenagers when the Japanese marched in, now sprightly old cats in their eighties, and still banging out their spirited versions of ‘In the Mood’ and ‘String of Pearls’ and ‘I Love My Wife’.

When the client had had his fill, and his jet-lag was kicking in hard, Bill got Tiger to drive his guest back to the hotel while he caught a cab home to Paradise Mansions. He let himself in, happy that he still had the Book City carrier bag with him.

He had been carrying the bag around for hours and had been afraid that he would leave it under the table in the bar of the Peace Hotel. It contained a wide selection of crossword puzzles. Every book of crossword puzzles that he could find in Book City.

His doorbell rang and he flew to it, expecting to see her face on the other side of the door. But it was Jenny One, holding a steaming takeaway container wrapped in a white linen napkin.

‘Noodle soup,’ she said, as if that explained everything. ‘You need noodle soup.’

She came into his apartment and examined it with expert eyes. ‘Company pay,’ she observed, looking for somewhere to place the soup. ‘You don’t ’ave to pay.’ She went into the kitchen and rattled around looking for pots and plates.

‘You’re very kind,’ he said. ‘But why do I need noodle soup?’

‘Wife gone,’ she said.

Did they all know? And what did they think? Did they think that Becca had gone for good?

‘Only temporarily,’ Bill muttered, watching the taxi dancer heating up the noodle soup.

The soup was good. Full of vegetables, thick noodles and juicy pieces of pork. She watched him wolf it down, declining his invitation to join him with a Gallic shrug.

‘Good chopsteek technique,’ she said, turning down the corners of her mouth with approval. The Book City bag caught her eye and she peered inside. ‘Ah.’ She looked at Bill with a knowing smile. ‘Are these for Li JinJin?’

He shook his head, feeling his face redden. ‘No,’ he said. ‘They’re for me. I like crossword puzzles.’

She folded her arms, unconvinced. ‘Is good soup?’

‘It’s very good. Thank you, Jenny One.’

‘I think he love her very much.’ She nodded. Bill kept eating, his eyes on his noodle soup. ‘I think he does. I think he leave his wife for Li JinJin. In the end.’

He said nothing, but he saw that Jenny One wanted JinJin to have a happy ending, the ending that had eluded the taxi dancer with the French accent.

And Bill also saw that although the girls of Paradise Mansions scandalised and appalled the expat world he moved in, they all dreamed very conventional dreams – dreams of relationships that lasted, dreams of marriage, and monogamy, and children. At best they were kept women, there was no denying it, but what they really wanted, and what not one of them had, was someone who would stay the night.

‘You love ’er,’ Jenny One said, and he riled at the casual Chinese use of the word. The way they tossed it around as though it meant nothing, or as though it meant you had a soft spot for someone.

‘I love my wife,’ Bill said, thinking of the song in the Peace Hotel, and Becca and Holly walking home from school. ‘That’s who I love.’

‘And maybe Li JinJin love you,’ Jenny One continued, ignoring him. She was serious now, and he saw that this was the real reason for the visit. It had nothing to do with noodle soup. She had to tell him something, something that he was just too dumb to realise. ‘But she has to think about her future,’ Jenny One said, and she counted off the strikes against him. ‘Married…foreigner…no future.’

She got up to go. There was nothing else to discuss. Bill thanked her for the soup, saw her out and when Jenny One had gone he went to the last window of the master bedroom and looked down at the courtyard. The silver Porsche was parked and empty. The man had come round, but they were not going out tonight. And in his mind he saw with hideous clarity the image of the man fucking JinJin Li and her loving it, and moaning, and begging for more.

Bill watched the lights in her apartment until they all went out and when that finally happened he stuffed the Book City bag
containing all the crossword puzzles into the bottom of the rubbish bin.

And that was the real Shanghai too.

They could walk from Holly’s paediatrician in Great Portland Street all the way to Becca’s sister’s house in Primrose Hill and their feet touched nothing but grass almost all the way.

Becca bought two ice creams by the little lake in Regent’s Park, the last ice creams of summer, smelling the zoo in the distance, and London felt like a city built on a human scale, a city where a child could breathe.

They came out of Regent’s Park, walked past the zoo and across Prince Albert Road on to Primrose Hill. They were some distance from the zoo when two giraffes suddenly loomed out of nowhere.

‘Look, Mummy!’ Holly cried. ‘The secret giraffes!’

This was what they thought of as one of their family secrets. The giraffes at London Zoo were kept on the far side of the road to the entrance, well away from the main body of the zoo, and it meant that the giraffes could suddenly appear as if by magic, their heads swaying above the trees as if they were free to roam the busy North London streets.

‘We saw them with Daddy, didn’t we?’ Holly said excitedly. ‘Remember? We saw the secret giraffes with Daddy.’

‘That’s right, darling,’ Becca said, taking her daughter’s hand as they looked up at the giraffes. ‘We saw them with Daddy.’

The next night the old man called.

The phone was ringing as Bill came through the door, worn down from twelve hours at the office and a few more taking clients down Mao Ming Nan Lu. His spirits sank when he heard the fury in his father’s voice. He was too tired for an argument with the old man.

‘You have to come back,’ the old man told him. ‘You have to be with your family.’

How long had he bottled this up? Days? Weeks? Bill could see the old man brooding as he went about his daily routine of shopping, telly and tea. The life of quiet domesticity that always had this great store of rage bubbling under the game shows and the cosy chats at the local supermarket. His father would be angry until the day he died.

‘I can’t come back, Dad,’ Bill said. ‘I have a contract. And this is my chance. My big chance to become a partner.’

‘I don’t understand,’ the old man said, and Bill knew that was exactly the problem. The old man didn’t understand and he would never understand. Because the old man had broken his back for peanuts all his life. ‘Why is becoming a partner so important, Bill? What does that
mean?’

Bill took a breath, let it go. ‘Partners don’t work for the firm,
Dad,’ he said. ‘Partners
are
the firm. Partners are not salaried employees. They share in the firm’s profits.’

The old man mulled this over. ‘If there are profits,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘If there are profits,’ the old man repeated. ‘You can only share in profits if there are profits. You can’t take a share of air pie and windy pudding, can you? You can’t take a percentage of bugger all, can you?’

Bill laughed with disbelief. ‘Technically that’s true,’ he said. ‘But it’s not going to happen out here. Trust me, Dad. It’s not going to happen in Shanghai. The economy is going through the roof over here. The firm has more work than it can handle.’

‘I don’t know anything about it,’ the old man said, ‘but I suppose a partner has to share costs as well as profits, doesn’t he? I mean, you can’t just share the good times, can you? But of course I don’t know anything about it.’

How technical did Bill have to make it to show his father that he was a stupid old bastard? He was aware that his head was throbbing. From banging it against a brick wall, he thought. From banging it against the old man.

‘You’re right, Dad,’ Bill said calmly, rubbing his temples. ‘A partner is taking on the entire liability of the law firm. That’s why there’s what’s known as a capital call when you become partner. You have to invest in the firm. About £250,000. The firm helps you take out a loan.’

There was a moment of stunned disbelief at the other end. ‘You have to take out a loan of a quarter of a million quid when they make you a partner?’

It was more money than the old man had ever seen. It was more money than he could imagine. He lived in a little suburban house that had taken his entire working life to buy. You could buy four of those little houses with that kind of money.

‘You invest in the firm so that you are in the same boat as the partners,’ Bill said. ‘For better or worse, for richer or poorer.’

‘Like a marriage,’ the old man said.

‘Yes, Dad – just like a marriage.’

More silence. And then the real reason for the call.

‘Come home,’ the old man told him, his voice gruff with emotion. ‘Come home now.’ It wasn’t a suggestion. It was an order. ‘Walk away from it, Bill. Your baby needs you.’

‘Holly? But she’s doing well. Becca told me she’s –’

The rage suddenly flared up in the old man, and for a moment Bill believed that his father truly hated him.

‘You think you know everything, don’t you?’ the old man said. ‘But you know nothing. Absolutely nothing. Holly’s not even staying with her mother. Did you know that?’

Bill felt his stomach fall away. ‘What?’

‘That’s right, Einstein. That’s right, Mr bloody know-it-all. The poor little thing has been palmed off on Becca’s sister. What do you think about that?’

Becca’s sister? Holly was staying with Becca’s mad sister? Everything changed every few years or so with the sister. Career, hair colour, man.