My Favourite Wife (21 page)

Fighting the panic and the anger, Bill got the old man off the line as quickly as he could and tried to call Becca. Engaged.

Probably at the hospital with her father, he thought bitterly. The excuse for everything.

He found the address book and tried calling the number he had for her sister. It was out of date. He called the old man back but he only had Becca’s number and Bill hung up without bothering with goodbye.

Why didn’t Bill have the sister’s number? Because that was another thing that changed with dazzling frequency. Her phone numbers. The mad sister was always changing her phone numbers to shake off her mad ex-boyfriends and sometimes their angry wives.

Bill pictured his daughter staying with her unstable Auntie Sara,
and for the first time in this whole sorry mess he was angry with his wife.

What was happening in Sara’s life right now? Whose marriage was she currently trying to destroy? What was she into this week – Tantric sex or an organic vegan diet or crack cocaine? It could be anything. Bill didn’t care how sick Becca’s father was, he didn’t care how bad it was getting. There was no excuse to pack Holly off. How could she do such a thing? Somewhere on the other side of the world his daughter was being looked after by Becca’s unstable, promiscuous, messed-up sister.

And whoever was living with her.

Bill flung the phone across the room and it came apart with a crash against a copy of Vincent van Gogh’s
Sunflowers
.

In the morning he saw that someone had slipped a note under his door. A sheet of ‘Hello Kitty’ paper folded in half.
Please call
me, it said, and then JinJin’s name in both English and Chinese characters and a mobile phone number.

He looked at it for a moment and then screwed it up and tossed it in the bin that still contained the crossword puzzles. This was all bullshit. He was tired of adolescent games, tired of being fed things he never asked for, tired of watching the light in her window.

He started getting ready for work. He couldn’t call London yet. Too early here, too late there. Whatever way you looked at it, the timing was all wrong.

Then, late on Sunday afternoon, when he had nothing to do but wait for the working week to start, JinJin knocked on his door.

‘You know how to work?’

She had a Sony Handycam, still boxed up. It was the latest version of the camera that he had used to record his daughter growing up.

‘Any idiot can use one,’ he told her.

She nodded happily, holding out the Handycam.

He was the idiot she had chosen.

They went back to her apartment and while Bill charged up the Handycam, she disappeared into the bedroom and eventually came out wearing an immaculate red
qipao
and far too much make-up – some hideous skin-whitening stuff that made her look like a ghost of herself, apple-red blusher, and some sort of sticky goo that made her mouth look all wet. He shook his head, hardly recognising her as the same young woman who never used cosmetics beyond the permanent lines of black mascara around her eyes.

‘What do you think?’ she said, her natural beauty buried under a thick layer of powder and paint. ‘Very nice,’ he lied.

JinJin Li had not built all her dreams around the man in the silver Porsche. More than anything, she dreamed of reading the evening news on China Central Television. That would solve all her problems. To sit solemnly behind that desk with a picture of the Shanghai night skyline behind her, reading an autocue that brought glad tidings of China’s latest triumph – she seemed to want this even more than a happy home.

She fussed around the flat until she found a spot for him to film her. They were both nervous. JinJin because she seemed to believe that this was her big chance to break into show business, and Bill because he couldn’t work out how to turn on the Handycam. It had been a while since he had filmed his daughter.

When the little red light finally came on he gave JinJin the nod and she delivered a piece to camera about herself in formal Mandarin, while he attempted to keep the Sony Handycam steady. CCTV, the state TV channel, was looking for trainee presenters, and JinJin was looking for a change of career, another life, a way out of Paradise Mansions.

It was a touching and pathetic dream, Bill thought. It reminded him of seeing her refusing to let go of the microphone in the
karaoke bar. It seemed a strangely juvenile fantasy, as though there was a neglected part of her that craved attention, that made her want the world to notice her.

But who was he to sneer at anyone’s dreams? He felt a surge of unearned pride in her – why shouldn’t she be reading the evening news on CCTV? She was more beautiful than the girls they had on CCTV. Or perhaps she just had more life in her.

He lifted the camera and her funny Valentine face filled the frame. Her mouth was too small. Her chin was a little weak. Her black-brown eyes were big and seemed even bigger in the small head that rested on the long lines of her body. Even without the teeth-filled smile she was not quite a classic beauty. Would someone hire her as a TV presenter? He did not know. But as he lowered the camera and kept looking at her, he could see very easily why someone would love her.

‘Is there something wrong?’ she said.

He shook his head. ‘There’s nothing wrong, JinJin.’

Her fingertips flew to her face. ‘Is it my skin?’

‘Your skin is fine,’ he said. In truth her troubled skin was invisible to the naked eye under all that make-up.

‘Do I look ugly?’

‘No,’ he said, and laughed shortly at the absurdity of the question. ‘You could never look ugly.’

‘I have very sensitive skin,’ she said, staring at the fingers that had touched her face. ‘You’re lucky. You don’t have sensitive skin.’

‘That’s true,’ he said. ‘I have very insensitive skin.’ He lifted the camera and then brought it down again. ‘But a sensitive heart.’

‘Hah,’ she said, and her buck-toothed smile came out like the sun. ‘English joke.’

‘You’re lovely, JinJin,’ he said. ‘Don’t you know that? Haven’t a thousand guys told you that?’

‘Ah,’ she said, and he saw the uncertainty in her. ‘Being told is not the same as knowing.’

‘Is that a wise Chinese saying? Or did you just make it up?’

She grinned. ‘It’s a wise Chinese saying that I just made up.’

‘Okay, take it from the top,’ he laughed, framing her face once more. ‘But try breathing this time. You’re allowed to breathe.’

‘Pardon?’ She said
pardon
when she wanted something repeated. He didn’t know anyone who said
Pardon?

‘Let’s just do it again,’ he said.

And they did, and his heart sank because he saw that perhaps she wouldn’t be reading the evening news on CCTV. Because all her quirky grace and charm and humour and warmth and loveliness seemed to evaporate the moment the red light came on. And because she was too nervous, and the nerves did not diminish as they did take after take. And because her skin, like her ambitions of TV glory, was strangely adolescent – it was young, troubled skin that was prone to sudden rashes and eruptions.

Her nerves made him nervous too. When he gave her the nod, her smile – that lovely, natural toothy-goofy smile – became frozen in a cold rictus grin, and she stumbled over her words and couldn’t keep the tremor of fear from her voice.

She wasn’t good enough. That was the truth. But maybe she could improve, break through the fear barrier, do something about her difficult skin. For some reason he wanted to have faith in her.

When they had finished filming, she sat him at the table in the tiny kitchen and brought two steaming bowls of congee. She told him that congee, rice porridge, was all she ever ate when she was home alone.

‘I go to many restaurants,’ she said. ‘But when I am in my home, I like simple food.’

‘I know what you mean,’ he said, watching her pour two cups of green tea. ‘I go out to a lot of restaurants.’

‘With your wife?’ she said, not looking at him.

‘Sometimes,’ he said. He reached for the cup but it was too hot to hold and he quickly pulled his hand away. ‘But mostly with clients.’

‘It doesn’t need to be rich all the time,’ she said.

Then he heard the key in the door and the man came in. He was suddenly there with them. The unknown man in the silver Porsche.

He gawped dumbly at JinJin and Bill as if equally surprised to find them here. Bill stared back at him, wondering why he was shocked to discover the man had a key. Of course he had a key. This was his place and he owned it all, including fixtures and fittings.

JinJin flew to the man’s side, and although she did not kiss him, she laughed and took his arm in a proprietorial way that somehow seemed more intimate than a kiss would have been, and far worse.

She babbled a happy explanation about what they had been doing, then showed the man an ad in a Chinese newspaper as if to prove she wasn’t lying.

Bill watched JinJin fussing around the man – getting him settled on the sofa, giving him the Handycam so that he might examine it and give his approval, then going off to prepare fresh tea, all the while chatting away – and Bill fought back emotions he had no wish to feel.

He was disappointed in her. After those long moments watching the man make himself at home, he was bitterly disappointed in her. He did not want to feel this way, but he couldn’t help it.

She gave up teaching for this guy? She left those children who adored her for him? She played the golden canary for somebody as ordinary as this? This was the guy she gave her body to?

The two men nodded at each other, and Bill fought back the bile, his face seized with a disgusted grin of embarrassment and loathing. The man was around forty. No spring chicken, Bill thought. Prematurely grey-haired, but without the physical puffiness that a lot of successful Chinese businessmen toted around. He was a big man – Bill wasn’t sure why that surprised him. Bill also wondered if he had disguised the fact that he despised the man on sight.

The man was dressed in the smart-casual style of the affluent Asian male. Polo shirt, grey flannel trousers, shoes so polished you could see your face in them – the off-duty-Japanese-salaryman look that all the new Chinese big shots were adopting as their own. He didn’t speak English, and made no attempt to shake Bill’s hand, but there was no hostility there. The man simply did not care. Bill Holden was nothing to him. Just a dumb big-nosed pinky neighbour who had been roped in to do a domestic chore.

No threat, no rival, no problem.

Without even being asked, JinJin had clearly offered the man an explanation of what they were doing and the man accepted it. It wasn’t a big deal to him. Bill’s meaningless presence in JinJin’s flat had no impact whatsoever on his life, or his plans for the evening.

And Bill wondered what Becca would have thought if she had walked in on him pointing a brand-new Sony Handycam at the face of JinJin Li.

His wife would have seen right through him.

This is what he wondered. He wondered if every marriage in the world became less and less about the man and the woman and more and more about their child, or if that was just his marriage.

In the afternoon Becca called him at work.

Right in the middle of a crisis meeting, a meeting called because back in the UK the press had picked up on the soaring number of industrial accidents in the factories of China, all those men and women who were losing eyes, limbs and lives in the workshop of the world so that the West could have their cheap gadgets and trainers and rock-bottom underpants. Foreign investors in China were suddenly being made aware of the phrase
ethical shopping
, and up at the firm they knew that this could only be bad for business. Something had to be done.

But when Bill saw Becca’s number on his phone, he stood up at the conference table with all of them there, Devlin and Shane
and Nancy and Mad Mitch, and he did not care what it looked like. No meeting was more important than his daughter.

‘Sorry, I have to take this,’ he said, and stepped outside the conference room, and then kept walking, just to be moving, and to stop them from hearing.

‘Bill?’

She sounded down, way down, and he unexpectedly felt a flood of the old love, the original love, the feeling that was there from the start. Just one word and he could read her mood. She said his name and he felt it, knew it with total certainty – it was her father.

‘Your dad,’ he said. ‘What’s happened, Bec?’

But it wasn’t her father. He was wrong.

‘My dad’s actually doing okay,’ Becca said, so breezy that Bill felt like a fool. ‘He went to the hospital for his test, but they let him come back home until his cardiologist has looked at the results.’

Then there’s no excuse, Bill thought. There is just no excuse. ‘So what’s happening with Holly?’

Becca laughed, and it infuriated him. ‘She’s fine. She’s so grown up. She misses you, Bill. She misses her daddy. She misses it when you throw her around. I can’t do that with her. Not the way you can.’

He had forgotten about the throwing around. How could he have forgotten that? His daughter would wrap her arms around his neck and he would let her go, and she would scream and squeal as her fingers slipped away and she started to fall, and then – just at the moment she let go – he would catch her and swing her up over his shoulder, and upside down, and into his arms, her eyes inches from his own.

‘I talked to my old man,’ he said, suddenly hoping that it wasn’t true and that perhaps the old man had got his ancient wires crossed, the silly old bastard, perhaps Holly had just been shunted off to the mad sister for one night, while Becca’s father had his
tests. ‘My old man said that Holly was staying with your sister.’ It always seemed unnatural to call her by her name, as though nothing could fit her better than
mad sister
. ‘With Sara,’ he said.

‘She is,’ Becca said, brightening, as if this were nothing but good news. ‘And Sara’s with this new guy, and he’s just great with Sara’s kids and with Holly.’

Some guy? Some fucking guy?

It got worse.

It got far worse than Bill had ever imagined. It got so bad that he could hardly contain his feelings.