My Favourite Wife (28 page)

‘Are you going to die, Daddy?’

He stared out of his office window at the lights of Pudong, and heard the sounds of his side of the world. Shanghai had its own distinctive noise, he had realised, especially at night, an unbroken metallic hum that seemed to be made up of traffic on the road and the river, and the lives of twenty million other people.

‘I’m going to die one day,’ he said. ‘But not for a long time. And you know what, angel? If it’s possible for me to come back and be around you, then that’s exactly what I am going to do, and I’ll be there for ever. Everywhere you go. You’ll be all grown up but I’ll still be there. I’ll be in the sunlight on your face, and I’ll be in
rain on your shoes, and I’ll be in the wind in your hair. I’ll be there when you wake up in the morning, and I’ll be there when you go to sleep at night. And I’ll keep watch by your bed all night, and you will feel me smiling at you, and you’ll never be alone because I will be there, always and forever.’ The telephone line crackled and then was silent. ‘Do you hear me, angel?’

But Holly wasn’t listening to him. She was watching the commercials.

There was something strange about JinJin’s eyes. Those wide-set brown eyes – there was a mystery about them, something that he just could not work out, even though he had spent uncountable hours staring into them.

He saw now that there were no lines of black mascara drawn around her eyes. That wasn’t it. He had been mistaken. She did not wear make-up, she never wore make-up, and yet somehow he felt that she was always wearing make-up. He didn’t understand it. He was a married man and long accustomed to the rituals of a woman and her cosmetics and the ceremony of apply, repair and remove. He knew that his wife looked so totally different when she was or was not wearing whatever it was she put on her face. When they went out and Becca was wearing make-up, there was a polished, glossy beauty about her, and when she came home and took it off the beauty was still there but it was fresh-faced and unadorned and natural and pretty and lovely in quite another way.

It was not the same with JinJin.

He looked at her, and he looked at her some more, and he could not work it out, he didn’t understand the thick black and totally unnecessary eyeliner that never needed replacing. The mystery was solved the moment he mentioned it.

‘Permanent eyeliner,’ she said, one night when they were stretched out on the sofa, facing each other, and he looked again, at those eyes that needed no help at all to look beautiful.

‘Permanent?’ he said, unable to fight the sinking feeling. ‘What – you don’t mean tattoos, do you?’ But that was exactly what she meant.

‘I will change it,’ she said, sensing his distaste, jumping up from the sofa to confront herself in the mirror, her long slim body pale in the moonlight. ‘I get removed.’ The English was deteriorating the longer she looked. ‘I take away.’

And he went after her, and held her from behind, pulling her away from the mirror, telling her that he didn’t want her to go through with that, everything was fine, she was gorgeous, he was just surprised. He did not mention that he had never seen it before. On a girl in the West. Tattooed eyes. But JinJin Li wasn’t a girl in the West, and he forgot that sometimes.

‘I was young,’ she said, and he thought that she sounded like an actress who has suddenly had a youthful photo session revealed.
I was young, I needed the work
. ‘High school student. We didn’t know about such things. And we could afford. And we want to look like the ladies in the magazines.’

‘I’m sorry, it’s okay,’ he said, gently leading her back to the sofa, wishing he had never mentioned it, knowing that he would never mention it again for fear that he would one day find that she had had the permanent eyeliner surgically removed. The thought of it made his flesh crawl.

Still, he was sorry about the tattoos on the rims of her fabulous, wide-set eyes. She didn’t need that crap, and now it would be with her forever. Anything as permanent as that was always going to be a mistake.

‘Wives are like fires,’ Tess Devlin told Bill. ‘They go out when unattended.’

They were watching Rosalita weave her way towards a band in a hotel bar eighty floors above the city. The band was Filippino, like most of the bands in Shanghai, but they showed scant signs
of kinship as Rosalita approached them with a mojito in her hand and a wiggle in her hips.

The band’s singer, a stick-thin beauty in a backless black dress, was no more than twenty. She stepped sideways as Rosalita turned abruptly to confer with the musicians, sending a splash of cocktail slopping from her glass. The boys in the band were nodding reluctantly, as if they knew this could only end in tears.

‘Shane gives her plenty of attention,’ Bill said. ‘He doesn’t neglect her. He really doesn’t. He’s crazy about her.’

His friend was on the other side of the table, talking to a London partner who was passing through on his way to Hong Kong, and currently blinking back the jet-lag. Shane didn’t turn around even when his wife lurched into ‘Right Here Waiting for You’. He had the look of a man who was steeling himself for something bad to happen.

Rosalita’s voice was as sweet and pure as ever, but she shuffled backwards and forwards uncertainly, her old slick professionalism impaired by the lack of space and the potency of the mojitos. When she trod on the bass player’s foot, impaling his instep on a Jimmy Choo spike and making him hop around, shrieking in protest, Shane still didn’t turn around. If he heard the laughter in the bar, he gave no sign.

‘Whatever he gives her,’ Tess Devlin told Bill, ‘it’s clearly not enough.’

Devlin and Nancy were at opposite ends of the table, and they looked from Shane to his wife and then back again. Shane failed to react as Rosalita went into her second number. He was telling the London partner an interesting story about Bao Luo, the aircraft hangar of a restaurant where they had had dinner, and how it had started life as a noodle stand in a bicycle repair shop. Devlin got up and came quickly to Bill’s side.

‘Get him to control his wife, will you?’ he muttered angrily.

Bill shrugged helplessly, but when he saw Nancy making her
way to the tiny stage where Rosalita was now grinding her hips while crooning, ‘I Will Always Love You’ – the band appeared to be playing something else entirely – he got up to help her. The pair of them reached Rosalita just in time for a close-up of her falling on her bottom. Holding one arm each, they got her to her feet as sarcastic applause came from dark corners of the bar.

‘Show’s over, Rosalita,’ Bill said lightly. ‘Why don’t we all get some coffee?’

‘He never lets me have any fun,’ Rosalita complained. They started leading her away, to the relief of the band. Unseen men were calling for an encore. Women were laughing. Rosalita’s eyes were blazing with anger and self-pity. ‘He is such a cheap guy,’ she said. They had reached the table now and as the band struck up a polite version of ‘The Girl from Ipanema’, Rosalita shouted at the back of her husband’s head, ‘Such a cheap guy!’ Shane flinched but did not turn around.

Bill and Nancy escorted Rosalita to the bar and ordered coffee. They were told there was no coffee in the bar. Only room service could get coffee. Bill impatiently threw a fistful of RMB on the counter and the bartender went off to get room service.

Rosalita laid her head on his shoulder and told Bill that he was a nice guy and that she had always liked him. Then she sang a wonky chorus of ‘Yesterday Once More’, wiped away a sentimental tear, put her head on her arms and fell asleep. The woman on the next stool glanced at her and then looked away with a snort of contempt.

‘The Carpenters,’ said Alice Greene. ‘I always hated the fucking Carpenters.’

Bill turned as Shane’s bulk parked itself on the stool beside him. The big man stared down at his sleeping wife and reached out a hand. It hovered over her mass of glossy black hair, not quite daring to touch her.

‘She’ll be okay,’ Bill told him.

‘It’s true what they say,’ Shane said sadly. ‘You can take the girl out of the bar. But you can’t take the bar out of the girl.’

‘That’s not what you did,’ Bill said. ‘You didn’t take her out of a bar. She’s a regular girl.’

Shane wanted to believe him. ‘Yeah,’ he said, eyeing his wife with a mixture of fear and longing. ‘A regular girl.’

He nodded and turned away, slapping Bill once on the shoulder, not looking him in the eye. Alice was still talking to him.

‘So,’ she said. ‘How’s business at Butterfield, Hunt and West?’

‘Better than yours,’ he said. Bill had looked for her story online, the one about the man at the Happy Trousers Factory losing an arm, but it had never appeared. As far as he could tell, nothing with Alice’s by-line had appeared for months.

She laughed. ‘Yeah, well,’ she said, and he realised that he had never seen her looking embarrassed before. He felt a stirring of sympathy for her. ‘My paper has got moral-outrage fatigue,’ she said. ‘I mean, how many stories can you do about land grabs or industrial pollution or some poor little sod in some miserable factory dropping dead from exhaustion?’ She stared into her glass, as if it might contain a clue. ‘Or losing a limb in machinery because nobody really, truly cares? I mean, how many times? In the end it’s like a starving child in the Third World or a bomb going off in the Middle East. Everybody’s heard it all before. And everybody’s bored shitless with it.’ She looked at Bill over the rim of her glass. ‘Remember what I said to you? When Becca found that baby?’

Bill nodded. He remembered.
It’s not news
.

Alice nodded too. ‘Well, none of it is news. Not any more. They want journalists who are going to report the miracle. That’s what these editors want. Booming China. Funky Shanghai. Tell the world that Beijing is Washington and Shanghai is New York. All that stuff. All that happy, shiny bullshit.’ She raised her
glass in mock salute. The bartender had returned with three cappuccinos.

‘Black coffee,’ Bill said. ‘I ordered black coffee.’

The bartender looked sad. ‘Only cappuccino,’ he said. ‘No more black coffee.’

On top of the foamed milk on each cup the chocolate was sprinkled into careful heart shapes. ‘You won,’ Alice said. ‘Your lot. Cheers.’

‘My lot?’ Bill said, watching Nancy gently trying to wake Rosalita. He pushed his cappuccino away. ‘They’re not my lot.’

But Alice wasn’t listening. ‘I should have been born earlier,’ she said, signalling the bartender for a refill. ‘I should have been in Tiananmen Square.’ She narrowed her eyes at Bill. ‘The fourth of June 1989. That’s where it started. All of this. The greed. The corruption. The poison at the core.’

Nancy stared at her but Alice didn’t notice. There was a fresh drink in front of her. Rosalita was sipping the cappuccino that Nancy offered her. The heart-shaped chocolate broke and melted at the touch of her lips.

Alice jabbed a finger at Bill.

‘You think it’s a coincidence that the guy who sent the tanks into Tiananmen Square is the same guy behind the economic miracle?’ she said. ‘You think it’s a coincidence that Deng Xiaoping is responsible for all of it? It’s not a coincidence. Tiananmen Square was where they sent out the message to every man, woman and child in China –
Support us and we will make you rich, oppose us and we will crush you.’
Alice sipped her drink and shook her head. ‘I should have been there.’

‘Stick around,’ Nancy said, and they all looked at her. Alice. Bill. And even Rosalita through her bleary, mojito-fogged eyes. There was a ring of chocolate around her mouth.

‘Really, you should stick around,’ Nancy said. On her lips the idiom sounded like something borrowed from a Berlitz guide.
Stick

around
. ‘You may have missed the last massacre,’ Nancy told Alice, smiling pleasantly, ‘but you will probably be just in time for the next one.’

Instead of going home, Bill walked down the Bund, swerving between the tourists gawping at the lights and the beggars with their babies and the drunken businessmen and the off-duty bar girls and the fashionable young Chinese who were increasingly claiming the famous old street as their own. He was meeting JinJin in the bar of the Peace Hotel. And it wasn’t until he was sitting at the crowded bar sipping his Tsingtao and the band were banging their way through ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’ that he realised it was a rotten place to meet.

What was he thinking? The bar of the Peace Hotel was a great place to go if you were a man and wife out on some special occasion. What many people didn’t realise about the band in the Peace Hotel was that the old boys were very happy to play requests. So you could sit there all night listening to them play your songs. It was a fine place for all that. But it was a lousy place for a liar.

The bar was full of out-of-towners, as always, but Bill was aware that someone he knew – anyone he knew – could walk in at any moment. Every expat with a relative in from the old country had to take a look at this bar. Every Pudong suit entertaining a client who was a Shanghai virgin had to have a drink in here. If his body clock suddenly shook him awake, it was even possible that the senior London partner himself could be brought here tonight by Devlin and Tess.

Bill watched the door, aware of his pounding heart, and drinking far too fast. He saw JinJin enter the bar, and watched her serious face as she scanned the crowd, not seeing him. He smiled because he loved this moment – when he could watch her without her knowing he was watching. He also loved the moment when she saw him and that perfect beauty was split by the toothy grin, and
became something else, something better, something that he could claim as his own. The face of his girl.

JinJin moved through the crowd towards him.

It’s not her fault, he thought with a rush of shame. She had no one to hide from. She had no reason to watch the door. He was the liar, not her.

She kissed him on the mouth and took the hand that was resting by his beer. The bartender asked her what she wanted to drink.

‘We’ve got to go,’ Bill said, still holding her small hand, and squeezing it tight, but keeping it off the bar and out of sight.