My Favourite Wife (6 page)

Bill had worked out that the silver Porsche came for the tall girl on Wednesday and Friday nights. It was there most Sunday afternoons. There were also sporadic visits during the week, delivering her back to Paradise Mansions early in the morning, or collecting her at strange hours. Her husband, he thought. Yeah, right.

Bill wondered what excuses the man told his wife. Maybe he didn’t tell her anything. Maybe he didn’t need to make excuses. Maybe that was the way it worked out here.

‘Daddy?’ Tugging at his sleeve now. He looked down at Holly and smiled, his fingertips touching her face. ‘Do you know what planet we’re on, Daddy?’

She was holding up a complicated contraption of string and
wool and balls and cardboard for his inspection. Doris the ayi stood behind her, smiling proudly.

‘Made at school,’ the ayi said. ‘Very clever. Very genius.’

Bill looked carefully at the dangling strings and balls.

‘It’s the planets,’ Holly explained.

‘It’s really beautiful, angel,’ Bill said, studying the contraption more closely. In her matchstick fingers, his daughter held a champagne cork. Blue wool came from the cork and passed through a paper plate that had been painted black and embellished with sticky gold stars. Below the plate, which he now recognised represented the night sky, or perhaps infinite space, the wool dropped to hold a collection of different-sized painted balls revolving around a large orange cardboard sun.

One little finger pointed to a yellow ball with a wavering purple ring daubed around it. ‘That’s Saturn,’ Holly said confidently. She touched the smallest ball. ‘Pluto – furthest from the sun.’ A larger red ball. ‘Mars, of course.’ She turned her shining blue eyes up at her father. ‘I was going to use yellow cardboard for the sun but…um…I used orange instead.’

‘Personally, I think orange is even better,’ Bill said. ‘That’s just my opinion.’

‘And this is us,’ Holly said, touching a green-and-blue ball. ‘That’s earth. That’s where we are…and guess what, Daddy.’

‘What, darling?’ Did he know that much about the planets when he was four? He didn’t think so. In fact, he didn’t know that much about the planets at thirty-one.

‘The brightest stars you can see are already dead,’ she said confidently. ‘We see their image, and they look nice and lovely, but they died a long time ago.’

The brightest stars were dead already? Could this possibly be true? He didn’t know if he should correct her or not. She knew far more than he did.

‘It’s just something I learned,’ Holly said.

The ayi ushered her off to brush her teeth before going to school, and Bill heard Becca in the bedroom on the phone to her father. He glanced at his watch. Breakfast time in Shanghai meant that it was around midnight back home.

Becca called her father almost every day. Bill felt a pang of guilt, because he hadn’t phoned his own father since they’d arrived.

Perhaps he should give the old man a call, he thought, and immediately dismissed the idea. They wouldn’t have anything to talk about. Or they would get into one of their pointless rows about nothing, hang up angry, and that would be even worse.

It was different when his mother was still alive. They were a real family then. But they had stopped being a real family fifteen years ago. Bill and his father tried hard, but they both knew that it was doomed to failure. Two men couldn’t be a family. There were just not enough of them, there was no centre, no heart, and there were too many rough edges. Too much testosterone, too many rows. Everything and nothing proved reason for an argument, and then Bill was out of the house and off to university, working in the holidays and weekends because he had to, it was the only way he could afford to stick it, and because he didn’t want to go home. It made him feel desperately sad to admit it.

Get the old man out here, Bill thought as down in the courtyard the limo appeared and Tiger pulled up behind the silver Porsche. Yes, get the old man out here for a few weeks. Show him the sights. Let him spend some quality time with his granddaughter, who he loved to bits. That would work.

His feeling that family life had ended forever didn’t change until he met Becca six years later. It was Becca who made him believe that he had a chance to belong to another family. He fell in love with her the night he met her, and it was like starting all over again.

Bill turned as Holly and the ayi came back into the room. His daughter still had the home-made universe in her hands and he
smiled at her and got down on his knees to better admire the intricate design.

That’s what love is, he thought, as down in the courtyard came the sound of a Porsche 911 pulling away. A chance to start again.

For five years, between the age of eleven and sixteen, Becca and Alice Greene had been best friends.

It was one of those delirious all-consuming friendships of childhood, gloriously isolationist, a time of shared secrets and energetic recklessness – one night Alice had pierced Becca’s ears with a needle that she had heated over a candle, and it was a bloodbath that they laughed about for years. But it was the kind of friendship that was always slightly out of whack.

They were both boarders at a school in Buckinghamshire, a grim Gothic building surrounded by lush wooded hills, like a setting from a fairy tale. When their friendship began they had dressed the same, and wore their hair in the same fashion, and both said they wanted to be journalists when they grew up. Naturally they loved it when their schoolmates and their teachers said that they looked like twins. Yet they were not twins.

Becca’s father made a decent living at Reuters, but the school would have been out of reach without a scholarship, while Alice’s family owned a string of restaurants on Boat Quay in Singapore, and Alice had that easy confidence that comes from growing up with money that you haven’t earned.

The largesse was one-sided – Becca enjoyed family holidays in Bali with Alice and her parents, shopping sprees in Hong Kong courtesy of Alice’s credit card, first-class flights to Singapore during the long summer break. Singy, Alice called it, and before she was twelve years old, Becca was calling it Singy too.
Coming down to Singy, Bec?
So when Becca learned that Alice was working as a freelance journalist in Shanghai, it felt like the best news in the world.

Alice turned up just before Holly’s bedtime and when the two women embraced, fifteen years fell away.

The pair of them bathed Holly together, the child chatting excitedly at this admiring stranger, Alice making awestruck cooing sounds at Holly’s beauty and newness, and Becca couldn’t help feeling happy that perhaps she had restored some of the balance in their friendship. Now she had a child, a husband and a home, it felt like Alice wasn’t the one who held a majority share in the good life.

When Holly was sleeping, Becca fetched a bottle of white wine from the fridge and carried it to where Alice was standing by the window.

‘You’re not writing any more?’ Alice said, quite casually, although Becca felt the words press against some sensitive nerve.

‘No. I’m looking after Holly, mostly.’ She started telling the story of Holly’s asthma attack in London, and Alice nodded and looked concerned, but Becca cut it short and poured their wine. It sounded like an excuse, and it wasn’t. It was a reason. ‘Anyway, there’s lots to do around here,’ she said. Why the hell should she apologise for giving up work? ‘What brought you to Shanghai, Al? I thought you’d be in Hong Kong or Singy.’

Alice grimaced, and Becca smiled. She could see the ghost of the girl Alice had been at eleven, twelve, thirteen. Spoilt, generous, dead easy to love.

‘You know what it’s like for stringers,’ Alice said. They clinked glasses and grinned at each other. ‘Cheers. We have to follow the story.’ Alice sighed. ‘And the story they all want these days is the China dream. You know the thing –
How China is reshaping our world. One billion new capitalists. The great China gold rush.’
Alice looked out of the window. ‘They – all the Western news outlets -want you to report the miracle.’ She shook her head. ‘But it’s not all banana daiquiris at M on the Bund.’

‘How do you mean?’ Becca sipped her wine and felt a pang of
foreboding. She really wanted them to have a good time tonight. Just get a bit drunk and talk for hours and feel that nothing had changed.

‘I mean the principal reason the economy keeps growing is because foreign idiots want to invest here,’ Alice said, and Becca recalled how impatient her friend could be with slowness and stupidity. There were girls at their school who were terrified of her. ‘No Western CEO wants to go down as the man who missed China,’ Alice said. ‘But how can it be an economic miracle when five hundred million Chinese are living on less than a dollar a day? By the middle of the century China will have a bigger economy than the US. And you know what? They will still have five hundred million people getting by on a dollar a day. It stinks. The whole thing.’ She sipped her drink. ‘Nice wine,’ she said.

‘But a lot of them are leaving poverty behind, aren’t they?’ Becca said gently. ‘I mean, that’s what Bill’s boss always says.’

‘Some of them,’ Alice conceded. ‘A few million or so. But the Chinese deserve an affluence that’s worth having – clean water, not empty skyscrapers; rule of law, not back-handers; uncensored news, not broadband porn. They need education, democracy, a free press – not propaganda and Prada bags and traffic jams full of local-made Audis.’

‘I thought it would be more like Hong Kong,’ Becca admitted. ‘Or Hong Kong the way we knew it. You know – day trips out to the islands, weekends on somebody’s junk, Sunday lunch at Aberdeen.’

Alice laughed. ‘You make it sound idyllic.’

‘Well, it was, wasn’t it?’ Becca said defiantly.

‘But it’s not Hong Kong,’ Alice said, her smile fading. ‘Shanghai has always been mainland China. You can forget all that Paris-of-the-Orient stuff. The Anglos never made Shanghai their own the way they did Hong Kong.’

‘Anyway,’ Becca said, feeling that she had been too sentimental and revealed too much, and that Alice must think she was some
sad old housewife dreaming of better days. ‘I’m sure we’ll be fine. Another drink?’ she asked her old friend.

The two of them looked down at the courtyard. Gleaming cars were waiting with their engines running. The traffic was sparser than at the weekend, but there was a steady stream of young women getting into very new cars with older men at the wheel.

‘It’s very exciting,’ Becca said brightly, wanting to lighten the mood. She was so glad to see her friend. She wanted them to have a great time, just like the old days. ‘I think we’ve moved into some kind of knocking shop.’

‘Not a knocking shop.’ Alice smiled, and Becca saw she was happy for the chance to show off her local knowledge, eager to keep all the power for herself. ‘Becca, Paradise Mansions is a
niaolong –
a birdcage. There are a lot of them here in Gubei. Maybe even more of them in Hongqiao. The girls are called
jinseniao –
canaries.’

Becca’s blue eyes were wide. ‘So it’s true, then? These girls are all…prostitutes?’

Alice shook her head emphatically.

‘No – they only sleep with one guy. It’s all quite moral, in a twisted sort of way.’

Becca stared down at the courtyard.

‘I get it,’ she said. ‘They are all some rich man’s mistress.’

‘They’re not even really mistresses,’ Alice said. ‘It’s closer to second wives. I wrote a story about it. These women fall in love. Have children. Do a lot of laundry, if the guy is from out of town. It’s not a glamour profession, Bec. They live a normal, domestic life while waiting for the man to dump the number one wife. Which invariably he doesn’t – although I suppose it has happened. It can be quite a chaotic existence. Status can change overnight. The guy gets bored. Or his wife finds out. Or the canary gets caught enjoying her own bit on the side. Or the guy takes one too many Viagra and dies on the job.’

Becca nearly choked on her Chablis.

‘Don’t laugh, you heartless cow, it happens!’ Alice said. ‘These women are the modern concubines. The man is often from out of town – Hong Kong, Singy, Taiwan. A lot of overseas Chinese. They set the woman up in a flat, stay there when they’re in Shanghai. A lot of Taiwanese.
Taibazi
, the girls call them – which sort of means Taiwanese hicks from the Taiwanese sticks. They badmouth the Taiwanese, but most of the girls prefer the out-of-towners.’

Becca cradled her drink. ‘Why’s that?’

‘Because they stay the night,’ Alice said, looking down at the courtyard. ‘Makes them feel more like a real wife, I guess.’ She smiled at her old friend. ‘You tell me, Bec. What does a real wife feel like?’

Becca just smiled.

Alice gestured at the courtyard with her glass. ‘Most of these guys all look like locals. Nobody in Taiwan or Hong Kong dresses as badly as that. But think about it. The man is spared the agony of looking for company in the bars, and the woman – who invariably grew up in unimaginable poverty – gets security. For herself and her family. At least for as long as it lasts, which can be years.’

‘A marriage of convenience,’ Becca said.

‘More like a meaningful relationship between sex and economics,’ Alice said.

‘I guess it goes on everywhere,’ Becca said, trying to sound worldly, trying not to look alarmed. Somehow prostitution would have been easier to understand.

‘These women can make a few thousand RMB a month in a normal job, if they’re lucky,’ Alice said. ‘Or they can live next door to you and Bill. Using what they’ve got to get what they want. Very pragmatic. Very Chinese. And this city is full of them.’

Buzzing between the larger cars was the red Mini Cooper. Of course, Becca thought. The tall girl stuck in the wrong gear.

‘There’s money here, all right,’ Alice said. ‘But Shanghai is a
distorting mirror. Go to the countryside. Half of the kids there have never seen the inside of a school.’

Out of the child monitor came the sound of crying, and Becca left Alice brooding at the window. Perhaps she was trying much too hard to recapture their old friendship. Perhaps she should enjoy her own company a bit more, Becca thought as she took the half-sleeping Holly in her arms. And the company of her child in the hours between school and bed, and the company of her husband on Sunday and sometimes part of Saturday. Married people shouldn’t have this desperate need for friends, Becca thought.