My Favourite Wife (45 page)

Bill said nothing.

‘And what’s your wife going to say when she learns you chucked a partnership away?’ Devlin said. ‘What’s your daughter going to say, Bill, when she finds out her daddy is a self-righteous loser who doesn’t have a job?’

Bill shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Becca will be disappointed. But my daughter’s a bit too young to understand.’ He smiled at a memory. ‘She just wants me to pretend to be a prince all the time.’

Devlin snorted. ‘Well, you’re good at that, if nothing else. Pretending to be a prince. But you’re no different to everyone else in this country, Bill. You hate everyone’s corruption except your own.’

There were two Chinese security guards in the doorway. One was holding a cardboard box containing what Bill recognised as his personal possessions. The other had his briefcase and jacket.

‘Get him out of my sight,’ Devlin said.

Bill’s briefcase slapped hard against his stomach. He was handed his jacket. And then the open cardboard box was placed in his arms. He stared down at the detritus on his desk.

Time to leave.

The office stopped to watch him go. No Shane. No Nancy. But Mad Mitch was still there, standing up as Bill passed his desk, and shaking his hand. Then the new guys, their faces masks of shock and delight. Harry looked as though he thought he might get Bill’s office by lunchtime. Nigel something had a love bite on his neck that was not quite covered by the white collar of his Brooks Brothers shirt. You can never go back to the Home Counties, Bill thought. You are Mr Charisma now. You are Brad Pitt. You are Errol Flynn. The city did that to you. It made you feel you were special.

And as the Chinese security guards escorted Bill from the building, he thought about a young man who’d been convinced that the world was his for the taking, and who never dreamed he could fall flat, or let his family down, he thought about a young
man who had wrongly believed he was special, and he wondered what had ever happened to him.

There was the smell of paint in the apartment. Fresh paint and some sort of paste. The smell of things being changed, and life moving on.

Bill dropped his empty briefcase by the door and went into Holly’s room. Becca was putting up wallpaper while Holly sat on the floor leafing through a book. Disney princesses smiled down from the walls. Snow White. The Little Mermaid. Cinderella. Sleeping Beauty. Pocahontas. Mulan. Belle from
Beauty and the Beast
. Holly smiled at him too.

‘Daddy will know,’ Becca said. ‘Go on, ask him.’

‘What do you call a baby penguin?’ Holly said.

Bill’s mind was blank.

‘Baby horses have a special name,’ Holly said, frowning impatiently. ‘And baby cows. And baby sheep. But what about baby penguins?’ she sighed elaborately. ‘I don’t know what’s this.’

‘I don’t know what it is,’ Becca corrected her.

‘Me neither,’ Holly said, and Becca laughed.

He picked up his daughter and held her in his arms. Heavier still. Definitely heavier. More robust and substantial. Staking her claim in the world.

‘I’ll think about it,’ he said. ‘The penguin thing. I’ll give it some thought, angel.’

‘Get back to me.’

‘I’ll do that.’ He put her back on the floor and turned to Becca. ‘Can we talk?’

‘First I want to show you something,’ she said, and there was an awkwardness about her, and he wondered if it would always be there now. Becca took him to the computer in the living room and she sat down in front of it.

‘Look,’ she said.

On the screen there were pictures of properties she had been looking at. A shortlist of new lives in new luxury homes. Homes fit for the family of a partner at Butterfield, Hunt and West.

He looked over her shoulder as she scrolled through the options. WESTWOOD GREEN – NEW LAKE-VIEW TOWNHOUSES TO BE RELEASED SOON – A HOME FOR THE HEART. This one was apparently an international community with a commitment to natural living. CALIFORNIA DREAMING AT RANCHO SANTA FE – ELEGANTLY FURNISHED SPANISH-STYLE VILLAS WITH PRIVATE GARDENS, 30 MINUTES TO HONG QIAO AIRPORT.

‘I don’t want to live here any more,’ she said. A statement of cold fact. ‘I’m not going to live here any more.’

He said her name and she looked up at him and it was a new way of looking at him, a look that buried bitterness and wariness and hurt, as if she carried a wound that was far from healed.

‘The new house – becoming a partner – it’s not going to happen,’ he said. He hung his head, the sour taste of humiliation in his mouth. He was so ashamed. ‘I lost my job.’

‘Is that it?’ She turned back to the screen, shaking her head. ‘I thought – something else.’

He stared at her and then he understood. She had thought he was leaving. But he knew now that he would never leave. She would have to do the leaving.

Her fingers moved deftly across the keyboard. ‘But they were going to make you a partner,’ she said flatly. There was no disappointment in her voice. It was as if they hardly knew each other.

He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Bec. I let you down. I let you down in every way I could.’

She was busy deleting files. Clicking on the dream homes with the mouse and dragging them to the icon of a wastepaper basket at the bottom of the screen. She turned to look at him. ‘It’s just a job, Bill. You’ll get another one.’

He hung his head with despair. She didn’t understand what this meant. ‘We’re going to have to go back. That life we wanted…’

‘Someone will give you a job. You work hard. You’re good at what you do.’

He shook his head. ‘They fired me. I’m out. They cleared my desk and walked me to the door.’ There was a shocked silence before he spoke again. ‘And Holly – she loves her little friends here…’

‘She’s five years old,’ said Becca, flaring up at last, glad for the chance to be openly angry with him. ‘She’ll make new friends. And that’s what she will have to do all her life, the same as everyone else.’ Then she softened, and put the palm of her hand on his heart. ‘Look – we’ll be okay. Our home – it’s not the place in London, and it’s not here. We take it with us wherever we go. It’s you and me and Holly. That’s our home. It’s the three of us. I see that now.’ She touched his face. ‘Oh Bill – don’t you know it yet?’

He blinked against the shameful sting of tears.

‘I think you have to keep falling in love with each other,’ Becca told him, dry eyed and calm. ‘A man and a woman. A husband and wife. I think that’s what you have to do. And if you can’t do that, if you can’t keep falling in love with each other, then I don’t think you’ve got much of a chance.’

And later, when their daughter was sleeping in her room, and the light had been turned out on the Disney princesses, Bill went to the master bedroom and sat on the bed as Becca got undressed. But they didn’t talk about what had happened that day or how it would work back in London. They were both a bit sick of talking. They both felt that they had talked enough for now.

She just took off her clothes and came quickly to him, as he sat there still dressed and watching her, and they said nothing. Not like a married couple at all. More like lovers.

My wife, thought Bill.

He saw her one last time.

He was on the Bund, in front of the Peace Hotel, on his way home after closing down his bank account, one of a hundred chores he had to do before they left the next day, and that was when JinJin Li walked past him with her new man.

It was a dazzling day in early July and he did a double take, snapping out of his reverie. She looked familiar, but he didn’t think it could possibly be her, because it was only a passing resemblance, no more than that, and if it was her, if it was that special one, then surely he would recognise her in an instant? How could he mistake her for anyone else? How could she ever look like a mere imitation of the girl he had loved?

She looked too ordinary to be JinJin Li. Surely an ordinary woman could not have been the cause of all that wild happiness, of all that misery and upheaval and pain in so many hearts? Surely it would have to be someone very special to do all that?

But as he stood on the Bund, staring after her, the woman looked over her shoulder at him, and the man looked at him too, placing a protective arm around her shoulder as if to say,
Don’t worry, darling, I will protect you from that bad man
.

And so it was really her.

It was JinJin Li. And they had walked past each other like total
strangers. Bill almost laughed out loud at the absurdity of it all. So much spent emotion and then he almost failed to recognise her.

JinJin and the man kept walking.

Bill turned and followed them, with no idea of what he was going to do or say. But he knew that he objected to that man’s arm around her shoulder. He objected to the idea that JinJin Li would ever need protection from him.

And as Bill increased his pace, gaining on them now, suddenly knowing it was her, he understood why she would never be a TV presenter. He had always suspected that one day he would turn on CCTV and there she would be, reading the autocue and staring straight at him, looking like the passport photograph taken the year before she had met him. But like so many of their plans, he saw that it was not going to happen.

The glow had gone, or the glossiness of youth, or the magic, or whatever it had been. Maybe it had never been there in the first place, only in his eyes. Perhaps it was only there, that magic light of love, because he wanted and needed it to be. But now he saw her with the light extinguished and she was an attractive Chinese woman in her thirties, no more and no less, and she was getting older, and none of it was very complicated.

And here was the funny thing – as he saw her ordinariness, as he registered that she was just another human being trying to make her way in the world, trying her best to look nice for her new man and for herself, Bill Holden still loved her – or at least he still carried the love that remains when love has died, and he always would.

But she was not for him and he was not for her.

The happy couple had stopped walking. The man was buying a newspaper. He was a Westerner, maybe a bit younger than Bill. He didn’t look like anything special. He looked like the first guy who had come along. He looked like someone she had met in a bar or a gym or wherever it was that normal people met.

Bill realised that she had not stopped smiling since she had seen him, a strained and defensive smile, as if he were amusing, or as if she was trying to convince herself that all of this was funny.

And perhaps I am funny, Bill thought. Perhaps I am a barrel of laughs. Or perhaps her smile was just another bandage on another wound. He did not know.

Bill and JinJin stared at each other – they were both wearing dark glasses, and Bill was grateful for that, he could not stand to have her look in his eyes again – and the man, the first man who had come along, the man from the gym or the bar, put his arm around her again –
Don’t worry, I’ll protect you from this bad man, darling
. You know nothing, Bill thought. Oh, you have no idea.

And suddenly Bill found that he had started mouthing banalities. ‘Nice to see you, nice to see you,’ he said, while he stood there shaking everybody’s hand like the sporting captain of a losing side. The man’s hand. JinJin’s hand.

That’s the role he chose to play, the only one he could think of -the good loser. Three cheers for the guy from the gym or the bar or wherever it was. Had he ever shaken JinJin’s hand before? He didn’t think so. He was told the name of the new guy and immediately forgot it as he kept saying, ‘Nice to meet you, nice to meet you.’ Nice. So nice. Everything was so nice that it almost suffocated him.

Then he turned away, but her voice called him back, even as he kept moving.

‘My mum’s in town!’ she said, a happy exclamation unveiled as if it should mean something to him. He kept walking.

‘Then give her my love,’ he said over his shoulder, and he meant it. And perhaps she said it because she felt it too – the terrible finality of the ending, of letting it go, and she wanted him to stay for just a few more seconds, because they both knew they would never see each other again after today, and all they would ever share now was the past and whatever photographs that JinJin Li had been unable to destroy.

She was not innocent. She was not that. She was from a far harder world than he could ever imagine, a world that he had only glimpsed. But if she was not innocent, then there was still an innocence and purity about her, part of her that could never be touched or spoiled or owned – not by her father, not by the man who put her up in Paradise Mansions, and not by Bill. There was a part of her that was untouchable, and he envied and loved her for it.

He got to the end of the street, that famous street, old colonial Shanghai staring across the river at the future, and he hailed a cab, and as the taxi turned and drove back down the Bund he saw them sitting outside a café.

The man was reading a newspaper while JinJin sat opposite him, staring off into the middle distance, being ignored by her boyfriend, not even an attempt at a smile on her face now.

Bill had to laugh. They were arguing about him, or they had argued about him, and what she had said –
My mum’s in town!
-and what she had meant by what she had said, and did perhaps JinJin want him to call, and all of that, and it felt like the most pointless argument in the world – to argue about him, as something as dead and over and finished as Bill.

The smile was gone and JinJin Li looked quite ordinary and they were just a man and a woman sitting at a café trying to make sense of being together, and making no sense at all right now, and Bill had to grin because he felt like it was some higher power’s gift to him, a consolation prize to the man who would never stop believing that he had loved her first and best and then lost her. He raised a hand in salute and farewell and, sitting across from the grumpy new boyfriend reading his newspaper, JinJin waved back.

Bill knew that somewhere down the line she would smile again, and he could not begrudge her that, he could even be happy about it, even if she would not be smiling it for him, the world-famous smile of JinJin Li.