And the Bride Wore Red

by Lucy Gordon

  ‘Prime directive,’ he mused, his eyes glinting with amusement. ‘Now, let me see-what would that be? “Only learning matters.” “Life can be reduced to graphs on a page.” How am I doing?’

  ‘You’re part of the way there, but only part. Beware people, beware relationships-’

  ‘Beware men!’

  ‘Hey, you guessed.’

  ‘It was obviously what you were building up to. Are we all condemned?’

  ‘It’s not that simple. I don’t just condemn men, I blame women, as well.’

  ‘Well, that seems to take care of the entire human race. Having disposed of the whole lot of them, let’s go on eating.’

  His wryly mocking tone made her laugh.

  ‘My parents were both wild romantics,’ she went on, ‘and I can’t tell you what a misfortune that is.’

  ‘You don’t need to. Romance isn’t supposed to be for parents. Their job is to be severe and straight-laced so that their kids have a safety net for indulging in mad fantasies.’

  ‘Right!’ she said, relieved at his understanding. ‘According to Aunt Norah it was love at first sight, then a whirlwind romance-moon rhyming with June. All that stuff.’

  Lang regarded her curiously. Something edgy in the way she’d said all that stuff had alerted him.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘She was seventeen, he was eighteen. Nobody took it seriously at first, just kids fooling around. But then they wanted to get married. The parents said no. He had to go to college. So she got pregnant-on purpose, Norah thinks. They ended up making a runaway marriage.’

  ‘Wonderfully romantic,’ Lang supplied. ‘Until they came down to earth with a bump. He had to get a job, she found herself with a crying baby…’

  ‘Apparently I cried more than most-for no reason, according to my mother.’

  ‘But babies can sense things. You must have known instinctively that she was dissatisfied, wanting to go out and enjoy herself, and your father probably blamed her for his blighted career-prospects.’

  She stared at him, awed by this insight.

  ‘That’s exactly how it was. At least, that’s how Norah says it was. I don’t remember, of course, except that I picked up the atmosphere without knowing why. There was lots of shouting and screaming.

  ‘It got worse because they both started having affairs. At last they divorced, and I found I didn’t really have a home. I stayed with her, or with him, but I always felt like a guest. If there was a new girlfriend or new boyfriend I’d be in the way and I’d stay with Norah. Then the romance would break up and my mother would cry on my shoulder.’

  ‘So you became her mother,’ Lang observed.

  ‘Yes, I suppose I did. And, if that was what romance did to you, I decided I didn’t want it.’

  ‘But wasn’t there anyone else in your family to show you a more encouraging view of love? What about Norah?’

  ‘She’s the opposite to them. Her fiancé died years ago. There’s been nobody else for her since, and she’s always told me that she’s perfectly content. She says once you’ve found the right man you can’t replace him with anyone else.’

  ‘Even when she’s lost him?’

  ‘But according to Norah she hasn’t lost him. He loved her to the end of his life, so she feels that they still belong to each other.’

  ‘And you disapprove?’ he asked, frowning a little.

  ‘It sounds charming, but it’s really only words. The reality is that it’s turned Norah’s life into a desert that’s lasted fifty years.’

  ‘Perhaps it hasn’t. Do you really know what’s inside her heart? Perhaps it’s given her a kind of fulfilment that we can’t understand.’

  ‘Of course you could be right, but if that’s fulfilment…’ She finished with a sigh. ‘I just want more from life than dreaming about a man who isn’t there any more. Or,’ she added wryly, ‘in my mother’s case, several men who aren’t there any more.’

  ‘But what about the louse? Didn’t he change your mind?’

  For the first time he saw her disconcerted.

  ‘I kind of lost the plot there,’ she admitted. ‘But it sorted itself out. Never mind how. I’m wiser now.’

  She spoke with a shrug and a cheerful smile, but she had the feeling that he wasn’t fooled. Some instinct was telling him the things she wouldn’t, couldn’t say.

  She’d been dazzled by Andy from the first moment. Handsome, charming, intelligent, he’d singled her out, wooed her passionately and had overturned all the fixed ideas of her life. For once she’d understood Norah’s aching fidelity to a dead man. She’d even partly understood the way her mother fell in love so often.

  Then, just when she’d been ready to abandon the prejudices of a lifetime, he’d announced that he was engaged to marry someone else. He’d said they’d had a wonderful few months together but it was time to be realistic, wasn’t it?

  The lonely, anguished nights that had followed had served to convince her that she’d been right all the time. Love wasn’t for her, or for anyone in their right mind. She couldn’t speak of it, but there was no need. Lang’s sympathetic silence told her that he understood.

  ‘Tell me about you,’ she hastened to say. ‘You’re English too, aren’t you? What brought you out here?’

  ‘I’m three-quarters English. The other quarter is Chinese.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said slowly.

  ‘You guessed?’

  ‘Not exactly. You sound English, but your features suggest otherwise. I don’t know-there’s something else…’

  She gave up trying to explain. The ‘something else’ in his face seemed to come and go. One moment it almost defined him, the next it barely existed. It intrigued and tempted her with its hint of another, mysterious world.

  ‘Something different-but it’s not a matter of looks,’ she finished, wishing she could find the right words.

  He seemed satisfied and nodded.

  ‘I know. That “something different” is inside, and it has always haunted me,’ he said. ‘I was born in London, and I grew up there, but I knew I didn’t quite fit in with the others. My mother was English, my father was half-Chinese. He died soon after I was born. Later my mother married an Englishman with two children from a previous marriage.’

  ‘Wicked stepfather?’ Olivia enquired.

  ‘No, nothing so dramatic. He was a decent guy. I got on well with him and his children, but I wasn’t like them, and we all knew it.

  ‘Luckily I had my grandmother, who’d left China to marry my grandfather. Her name was Lang Meihui before she married, and she was an astonishing woman. She knew nothing about England and couldn’t speak the language. John Mitchell couldn’t speak Chinese. But they managed to communicate and knew that they loved each other. He brought her home to London.’

  ‘She must have found it really hard to cope,’ Olivia mused.

  ‘Yes, but I’ll swear, nothing has ever defeated her in her life. She learned to speak English really well. She found a way to live in a country that probably felt like being on another planet, and she survived when her husband died ten years later, leaving her with a son to raise alone.

  ‘He was called Lang too. She’d insisted on that. It was her way of keeping her Chinese family-name alive. When I was born she more or less bullied him into calling me Lang, as well. She told me later that she did it so that “we don’t lose China.”

  ‘My father died when I was eight years old. When my mother remarried, Meihui moved into a little house in the next street so that she could be near me. She helped my mother with the children, the shopping, anything, but then she slipped away to her own home. And in time I began to follow her.’

  He gave her a warm smile. ‘So you see, I had a Norah too.’

  ‘And you depended on her, just as I did on mine.’

  ‘Yes, because she was the only one who could make me understand what was different about me. She taught me her language but, more than that, she showed me China.’

&nbs
p; ‘She actually brought you here?’

  ‘Only in my head, but if you could have seen the fireworks she set off in there.’ He tapped his forehead. ‘She used to take me out to visit London’s Chinatown, especially on Chinese New Year. I thought I was in heaven-all that colour, the glittering lights and the music-’

  ‘Oh, yes, I remember,’ Olivia broke in eagerly.

  ‘You saw it too?’

  ‘Only once. My mother visited some friends who lived near there, and they took us out a couple of nights to see what was happening. It was like you said, brilliant and thrilling, but nobody could explain it to me. There was a lot of red, and they were supposed to be fighting somebody, but I couldn’t tell who or what.’

  ‘Some people say they’re fighting the Nian,’ Lang supplied. ‘A mythical beast rather like a lion, who devours crops and children. So they put food out for him and let off firecrackers, because he’s afraid of loud noises and also of the colour red. So you got lots of red and fireworks and lions dancing. What more could a child want?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Olivia said, remembering ecstatically. ‘Oh, yes, it was gorgeous. So much better than the English New Year celebrations, which always seemed boringly sedate after that.’

  ‘Me too. It was the one thing I refused ever to miss, and that drove my mother mad, because the date was always changing-late January, mid-February-always lasting fifteen days. Mum complained that she couldn’t plan for anything, except that I’d be useless for fifteen days. I said, “Don’t worry, Mum, I’m always useless”.’ He made a face. ‘She didn’t think that was at all funny.’

  ‘Your grandmother sounds wonderful,’ Olivia said sincerely.

  ‘She was. She told me how everyone is born in the year of an animal-a sheep, an ox, a rat, a dragon. I longed to find I was born in the year of the dragon.’

  ‘And were you?’

  He made a face. ‘No, I was born in the year of the rabbit. Don’t laugh!’

  ‘I’m not laughing,’ she said, hastily controlling her mirth. ‘In this country, the rabbit is calm and gentle, hardworking-’

  ‘Dull and plodding,’ he supplied. ‘Dreary, conventional-’

  ‘Observant, intelligent-’

  ‘Boring.’

  She chuckled. ‘You’re not boring, I promise.’

  It was true. He delighted her, not with any flashy display of personality, but because his thoughts seemed to reach out and take hers by the hand in a way that, she now realized, Andy had never done.

  He gave her a rueful grin.

  ‘Thank you for those kind words, even if you had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find them.’

  ‘According to everything I’ve read, there’s nothing wrong with being born in the year of the rabbit.’

  ‘And you’ve obviously read a lot, so I guess you know your own year.’ He saw her sheepish look and exclaimed, ‘Oh, no, please don’t tell me-!’

  ‘I’m sorry, I really am.’

  ‘The year of the dragon?’

  ‘It not my fault,’ she pleaded.

  ‘You know what that means, don’t you?’ He groaned. ‘Dragons are free spirits, powerful, beautiful, fearless, they soar above convention, refusing to be bound by rules and regulations.’

  ‘That’s the theory, but I never felt it quite fitted me,’ she said, laughing and trying to placate him. ‘I don’t see myself soaring.’

  ‘But perhaps you don’t know yourself too well,’ he suggested. ‘And you’ve yet to find the thing that will make you soar. Or the person,’ he added.

  The last words were spoken so quietly that she might have missed them, except that she was totally alive to him. She understood and was filled with sudden alarm. Things were happening that she’d sworn never to allow happen again.

  She would leave right now and retreat into the old illusion of safety. All she had to do was rise, apologise and leave, trying to avoid his eyes that saw too much. It was simple, really.

  But she didn’t move, and she knew that she wasn’t going to.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘THE trouble with soaring,’ she murmured, ‘is that you fall to earth.’

  ‘Sometimes you do,’ he said gently. ‘But not always.’

  ‘Not always,’ she murmured. ‘Perhaps.’

  But it was too soon. Her nerve failed her and in her mind she crossed hastily to the cautious side of the road.

  ‘What about your grandmother? What was her year?’

  Tactfully he accepted her change of subject without demur.

  ‘She was a dragon too,’ he said. ‘With her courage and sense of adventure she couldn’t have been anything else-a real dragon lady. Everything she told me about this country seemed to bring me alive, until all I could think of was coming here one day.

  ‘We planned how we’d make the trip together, but she became very ill. I’d qualified as a doctor by then, and I knew she wasn’t going to recover, but she still talked as though it would happen soon.

  ‘At last we had to face the truth. On her deathbed she said, “I so much wanted to be there with you.” And I promised her that she would be.’

  ‘And she has been, hasn’t she?’ Olivia asked, marvelling.

  ‘Every step of the way,’ he confirmed. ‘Wherever I go, I remember what she told me. Her family welcomed me with open arms.’

  ‘Did you find them easily?’

  ‘Yes, because she’d stayed in touch. When I landed at Beijing Airport three years ago there were thirty people to welcome me. They recognised me at once from the pictures she’d sent them, and they all cheered.

  ‘It’s an enormous family. Not all of them live in Beijing, and many of those who lived further out had come in especially to see Meihui’s grandson.’

  ‘They weren’t put off by your being three-quarters English?’

  He laughed. ‘I don’t think they even see that part of me. I’m one of the Lang family. That’s all that counts.’

  ‘It was clever of your grandmother to name you and your father Lang,’ Olivia mused. ‘In England it’s your first name, but here the family name comes first.’

  ‘Yes, my uncles are Lang Hai and Lang Jing, my great uncle is Lang Tao, my cousin is Lang Dai, so I fitted in straight away.’

  A sudden look of mischief crossed her face. ‘Tell me something-have your stepbrothers given you any nephews and nieces?’

  He looked puzzled. ‘Three, but I don’t see…’

  ‘And I’ll bet they call you Uncle Lang.’

  ‘Yes, but-’

  ‘And what do the children of the Lang family call you? It can’t be Uncle Lang, because that would be nonsense to them. So I guess they must call you Uncle Mitch.’

  A glazed look came into his eyes and he edged away from her with a nervous air that made her laugh.

  ‘Are you a witch to have such second sight?’ he demanded. ‘Should I be scared?’

  ‘Are you?’ she teased.

  ‘A bit. More than a bit, actually. How did you know that?’

  ‘Logical deduction, my dear Watson. Second sight doesn’t come into it.’

  He could see that she was right, but it still left him with an enchanted feeling, as though she could divine what was hidden from others. A true ‘dragon lady’, he thought with delight, with magic arts to entice and dazzle a man.

  ‘You’re right about my grandmother,’ he said. ‘In her heart, she never really left China.’

  ‘How did her relatives feel about her marrying an Englishman and leaving the country?’

  ‘They were very supportive, because it’s in the family tradition.’

  ‘You all believe in marrying for love?’

  ‘Much more than that. Marrying in the face of great difficulties, putting love first despite all obstacles. It goes back over two-thousand years.’

  ‘Two thou…?’ She laughed in astonishment. ‘Are you nobility or something?’

  ‘No, just ordinary people. Over the centuries my family has tilled the land, sold farm produce,
perhaps made just enough money to start a little shop. We’ve been carpenters, wheelwrights, blacksmiths-but never noble, I promise you.’

  The arrival of the waiter made him fall silent while plates were cleared away and the next course was served. It was fried pork-belly stewed in soy and wine, and Olivia’s mouth watered at the prospect.

  ‘We’re also excellent cooks,’ Lang observed, speaking very significantly.

  ‘You mean…?’

  ‘This was cooked by my cousin Lang Chao, and the guy who served it is his brother, Lang Wei. Later Wei’s girlfriend, Suyin, will sing for us.’

  ‘Your family own this restaurant?’

  ‘That’s why they virtually hijacked us. I wasn’t planning to bring you here because I knew we’d be stared at-if you glance into the corner you’ll see Wei sneaking a peek and thinking we can’t see him-but they happened to spot me in the street, and after that we were lost.’

  ‘We seem to be providing the entertainment,’ she said, amused. ‘Wei’s enjoying a good laugh over there.’

  ‘I’m going to strangle him when I get home,’ Lang growled. ‘This is why I didn’t want them to see you because I knew they’d think-Well…’

  ‘That you’d brought one of your numerous girlfriends here?’ Olivia said.

  She was teasing but the question was important.

  ‘I occasionally bring a lady here to dine,’ he conceded. ‘Purely in a spirit of flirtation. Anything more serious, I wouldn’t bring her here. Or at least,’ he added, grinding his teeth and glaring at the unrepentant Wei, ‘I’d try not to.’

  ‘No problem.’ Olivia chuckled. ‘You tell him that he’s completely wrong in what he’s thinking, that we’re just a pair of fellow professionals having a quiet meal for companionship. There’s no more to it than that.’

  ‘No more to it than that,’ he echoed in a comically robotic voice.

  ‘Then you can strangle him.’

  ‘That sounds like a good idea. But what do I tell him when I take you out again?’

  ‘Tell him to mind his own business?’ she suggested vaguely.