My Favourite Wife

by Tony Parsons

‘That’s right. The village is called Yangdong. They’ve been pig farmers for generations.’

  Bill thumbed through the file. ‘So who owns the land?’

  Shane put the map back on Bill’s desk. ‘The People,’ he said.

  Bill looked at the map and up at Shane. ‘So the people of this village – the farmers – they own it?’

  ‘Not the farmers,’ Shane said. ‘The People. In China, all farmland is owned collectively. Each family in the village has a long-term lease on its holding. Our clients are buying the land from the local government.’

  ‘What happens to the farmers?’ Bill said.

  ‘They get a compensation package,’ Shane said, ‘and get to say so long and fare-thee-well to their pigs. Our clients build their two-million-US houses for people rich enough to afford them -and there are plenty of those. These places were all sold off the drawing board. And in a year there will be palaces where there used to be pig farms. And everybody will be happy.’

  A man with fair, thinning hair appeared in the doorway. He was maybe ten years older than Bill, in his early forties. Bill had noticed him around the office because he seemed older than everyone else.

  ‘Shane?’ the man said. There was the north of England in his accent. ‘Mr Devlin is looking for you.’

  ‘Thanks, Mitch,’ Shane said. ‘I’m right there, mate.’ Shane made no attempt to introduce the man to Bill, so the pair of them smiled awkwardly at each other for a moment, and then the man was gone.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Bill said.

  ‘Pete Mitchell,’ Shane said. ‘Mad Mitch, we call him.’

  ‘What’s mad about him?’ Bill said. It would be hard to imagine a more quiet, self-effacing soul.

  Shane glanced at the empty doorway. ‘He’s the wrong side of forty and he never made partner. Wouldn’t you be mad?’

  Bill frowned. ‘Doesn’t the firm’s up-or-out policy apply here?’

  An up-or-out policy was a law firm’s way of staying lean and hungry, a money-making machine that carried no deadwood. If you lacked the stuff needed to make partner, then you were finished. The firm would not carry you to retirement. You moved up – or out.

  ‘Sure,’ Shane said. ‘Most – I guess, oh, eighty-five per cent – of our associate lawyers make partner. The ones that don’t are like a girl that gets left on the shelf. You know, the Bridget Jones lawyers – like an unmarried bird facing the change without her Hugh Grant.’

  Bill shivered as though someone had stepped on his grave. ‘Then what’s he doing here?’ he said. ‘Mad Mitch, I mean.’

  ‘Mad Mitch was in the Hong Kong office but he couldn’t stand the pace after the hand-over. For years the Hong Kong boys made money hand over fist, but it got a lot tougher when the Brits shipped out. Mitch was posted out here back when Shanghai was still a soft option.’ Shane sighed. ‘Sad, innit, mate? Forty-odd years old and still a wage slave. And we can’t go on forever, can we? Not the way we work. Lawyer years are like dog years – they run that bit faster than human years.’ Shane picked up the photograph on Bill’s desk. ‘But great things are expected of you,’ he said, nodding gravely. He studied the little family for a while and then gently replaced the photograph.

  ‘You’re a lucky man, Bill.’

  ‘Yes,’ Bill said, straightening the silver frame. ‘I am.’

  The Mercedes came out of the tunnel and on to the Bund.

  The famous road curved off ahead of them, a great sweep of stout colonial buildings made of marble and granite, the architecture of Empire.

  ‘The West is finished,’ Devlin said, watching the Bund go by. ‘The future belongs to the Chinese. They own it already.’ He turned to look at Bill. ‘Do you believe that?’

  Bill smiled, shrugged, not wanting to disagree with his boss, but reluctant to concede the future to anyone. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘Believe it,’ Devlin told him. ‘They work harder than we do. They put up with conditions that would make us call a human rights lawyer, or the cops. They make us – the West, the developed world, all the twenty-first-century people – look lazy, soft, the pampered men of yesterday. We haven’t seen anything yet, I promise you.’

  There were four of them in the car, with Tiger at the wheel. He had taken off his toy soldier uniform and was wearing a business suit. Bill sat in the back seat wedged between Devlin and a lawyer called Nancy Deng, one of the firm’s Chinese nationals. She had her briefcase open on her lap, examining some files, and she hadn’t spoken since the journey began.

  Shane sat up front, his wafer-thin mobile phone in his big meaty fist, talking in calm, fluent Chinese. The words didn’t have the barking sound of Cantonese, or the rural, West Country burr of Mandarin, and so Bill guessed this must be what Shanghainese sounded like.

  ‘What happens when the Chinese can make everything the West makes?’ Devlin said, smiling back at Bill. ‘Not just toys, clothes and dinky little Christmas decorations but computers, cars, telecommunications – when they can make all that stuff at one tenth of the cost it takes our fat lazy work force?’

  ‘You want to pick up our Germans or meet them at the restaurant?’ Shane said over his shoulder.

  ‘We’ll pick them up at their hotel,’ Devlin said. ‘I don’t want our Germans getting lost.’ He looked back at Bill. ‘The Chinese are united,’ Devlin said, his eyes shining. ‘That’s the thing that nobody gets. They’re united. They have a unity of national vision that the West has lacked since, oh, World War Two. That’s why they will win.’

  Shane was telling the Germans that he would see them in the lobby in ten minutes.

  ‘I love the Chinese,’ Devlin said simply, leaning back. ‘I admire them. They believe that tomorrow will be a better day. And if you are going to believe in something, anything, then that’s not a bad thing to believe in.’

  Bill watched the Bund go by, and silently agreed with him.

  The beggars saw them coming.

  At first it seemed to Bill as though every single one of them had an oversized baby in her arms, as though begging without a toddler was forbidden by some local statute, but then he realised that there were also old people shambling along at the back of the mob, filthy hands outstretched, and solitary feral children who ducked and dived beneath the women with their toddlers in their arms, the toddlers carried as if they were babies.

  But Bill had not noticed the old people and the big children. He had only noticed the toddlers being carted under the arms of their mothers.

  Because they all seemed to be just a little bit younger than Holly.

  Shane cursed. He had not wanted to walk to the restaurant. He had advised the two Germans that it was better to take the Mercedes and a cab, but they had insisted. They wanted to stroll along on the Bund, and now look what had happened. The beggars were on them, all over them, with their toothless, ingratiating smiles, the rank smell of their clothes and their bodies, all the bewildered faces of the children carried under one arm.

  Shane shoved on ahead, shouting at them in Shanghainese, while Nancy pleaded with them and Devlin gave instructions to the clearly terrified Germans. Only Bill dawdled, stunned by a world where children the same age as Holly were begging in the street.

  He reached for his wallet, and immediately realised his mistake. He had planned to give some money to the women with children but there were just so many of them, too many of them, and suddenly he was overwhelmed, the coins and notes falling from his fingers and the women with toddlers being trampled by the older children. Empty palms were thrust in Bill’s face.

  One of the bigger kids – a weasel-faced runt with a cropped head and the eyes of an old man – grabbed Bill’s jacket and wouldn’t let it go. The child clung on as Bill edged his way through the mob to the building where his colleagues and the Germans were waiting. A uniformed doorman prised the child from Bill’s jacket.

  ‘Better watch your wad around here, mate,’ Shane said. ‘They’re not all driving BMWs and shopping at Cartier. There are still
millions of the little bastards wiping their arses with their hands.’

  ‘And nobody gets left behind in the West?’ Devlin flared. Then he smiled easily. ‘There’s more upward mobility here than anywhere on the planet.’

  Bill was embarrassed, shaken. The Germans were staring at him. One of them was balding and in a business suit, and the other had the long greying hair and the leather jacket of a wild youth. But they were both all business, and they could have been brothers. They murmured to each other in their own language.

  Bill wiped sweat from his face. As they went up to the restaurant in the lift, Nancy gave him a tissue for the smear of grime that the young beggar had left on his jacket. He thanked her, his face burning, and dabbed at the mark but saw that it would not budge.

  The perfect black print of a child’s hand.

  Bill didn’t understand.

  Their clients, DeutscherMonde, were investing billions of RMB in the Yangdong project. The company had already built an identical development in the suburbs of Beijing. And yet, as the Germans sat with their expensive lawyers across the dinner table from the local government officials of Yangdong – five men with cheap suits and soft flesh and bad teeth, accompanied by their own lawyer, a bird-thin man of sixty with a shock of dyed black hair, and a slab-like stooge who looked like some kind of bodyguard – it was as if the Germans were the supplicants, the ones most desperate for the deal, the beggars at the feast.

  Courses came and went. The Germans sipped their mineral water. The Chinese chain-smoked high-tar cigarettes and swilled soft drinks. The conversation ebbed and flowed from English to Shanghainese, much of it concentrating on the glory of the Green Acres development, and how it would enrich the community.

  The oldest of the town’s representatives said the least. With his hooded eyes, long upper lip and frog face, Bill thought he looked like a mini Mao. They called him Chairman Sun. He smoked constantly, even when the chopsticks in his spare hand picked at a dish. Sun made no eye contact, yet still managed to convey the impression that he was mildly dissatisfied with everything, including the project, the food, the choice of restaurant, the presence of so many foreign devils, and possibly life itself.

  Only Bill had turned off his phone, and tinny snatches of familiar tunes punctuated the lunch. The Mission Impossible theme, the opening chords of ‘Brown Sugar’, niggling soundbites from Beethoven and Oasis and Faye Wong. Shane pushed his plate to one side and placed his laptop on the table.

  ‘What do you keep on that thing?’ Bill asked him.

  ‘The truth, mate,’ Shane told him. ‘The brutal truth.’

  Chairman Sun called for the waiter and gave him his instructions. The waiter went away and came back with the wine list. Sun chose a bottle and Shane ingratiatingly smiled and mumbled his compliments in Shanghainese at the excellence of the choice.

  Everyone fell silent as they watched the ritual of the waiter returning with the bottle of Burgundy, presenting it to Chairman Sun, who – after a tense moment – nodded his faint approval.

  The waiter removed the cork and delicately poured a splash of red wine into Chairman Sun’s glass. His frog face twitched with suspicion as he smelled the wine, tasted it and – after another breathless moment – nodded his approval.

  The waiter half-filled Chairman Sun’s glass with Burgundy. Then the Chairman topped it up with the can of Sprite in front of him, took a long slurp and exhaled with pleasure.

  Bill glanced across at Shane and Devlin and Nancy and the two Germans.

  But they didn’t even blink.

  * * *

  On Saturday afternoon he came home to an empty apartment.

  He placed the stack of files he was carrying on the table, tore off his jacket and tie, and read the note Becca had stuck to the fridge. She had taken Holly to ride the bumper cars at Fuxing Park. He had promised to go with them, if he could get away in time. But Saturday was a work day at Butterfield, Hunt and West.

  Bill had spent the afternoon going through paperwork with Shane and Nancy. The contract between the Germans and the Yangdong officials was in Chinese and drawn up under Chinese law, but the deal was structured so that all the important commercial rights were offshore, governed by Hong Kong law with documents in English.

  ‘It makes the deal easier to enforce,’ Nancy had explained.

  ‘When someone steals all the money,’ Shane added.

  Bill took a bottle of Evian from the fridge and crossed to the window. The courtyard was empty apart from a silver Porsche 911. It looked like a shark waiting its prey on the bottom of the ocean. A 911, Bill thought, yawning as he stretched out on the sofa. A 911 in China…

  He woke up with his daughter’s face pressed close, and he could smell the sweetness of her breath as she laughed with delight. She held a brightly coloured plastic figurine in each tiny fist. A prince in one hand, and a princess in the other.

  ‘Be the prince,’ Holly urged. ‘Come on, come on – be the prince, Daddy.’

  He closed his eyes. He had never felt so tired. When he opened them, Holly was still offering him one of the little figurines. He stretched, groaned, and closed his eyes.

  ‘Later, darling,’ he heard Becca say from the kitchen. ‘Your daddy’s been working very hard for us.’

  Bill felt relief as he heard small footsteps walking slowly away. When he opened his eyes he saw his daughter kneeling on the far side of the room, playing quietly by herself, and he felt unkind.

  ‘Holly?’ He was propped up on one elbow. ‘Yes?’ she said with that shy formality that always touched his heart, and then owned it forever.

  He swung his legs round, ran his fingers through his hair. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  Holly looked up at him with her perfect face. ‘Go on,’ she said, advancing towards him with the figurines in her hand. She pushed a piece of plastic in his face. A little unsmiling man in a golden crown and trousers that were too tight. ‘Go on, Daddy,’ his daughter urged. ‘Go on, Daddy – be Prince Charming.’

  He did his best.

  FOUR

  He liked watching his wife get dressed. He especially liked it at times like this – when she was getting dressed to go out somewhere special, and he knew that soon men and women would turn their heads to look at her in any room she entered. But now, half-dressed and getting ready for the night, the way she looked belonged only to him.

  Watching her face as she put on her lipstick, a blonde tendril of hair falling across her face as she leaned towards the mirror, the familiar lines of her body, the special dress waiting on the bed. He loved it. He could watch her forever.

  ‘Who are you looking at?’ she said, smiling at him in the mirror.

  ‘I’m looking at you.’

  They were in his room. He had his own room now, the second bedroom, so he could come home late from the office and leave early in the morning without disturbing Becca and Holly, who slept together in the master bedroom. The sleeping arrangements of the first night had become the sleeping arrangements of every night.

  In many ways this was a drag. He missed the physical nearness of Becca, of sensing her the moment he woke up. He missed being able to reach out and touch her in the middle of the night, he missed the soft sound of her breathing when she slept, and he missed the warmth of her body beside him. And yet in many ways sleeping apart made her physical presence more of a treat, as if they were playing some kind of game, rationing intimacy, pretending to be strangers. And perhaps that was a part of the excitement he felt now. It wasn’t every day that he saw his wife getting dressed.

  She stood, her make-up done, dressed in her underwear and heels. The sight of the Caesarean scar on her stomach moved him, as it always did, although he never quite knew why.

  He watched her slip into her dress and the label stuck out of the back. Koh Samui, it said, and he thought of the little shop in Covent Garden, and how much she loved it, and how they would linger there on Saturday afternoons before Holly was born. He zipped her up and deftly tu
cked in the label with the assured touch of the married man.

  ‘How do I look?’ she said, and he told her she looked great, and then he tried to touch his mouth against hers, but she turned away laughing, protecting her make-up, and he laughed too. Even though it felt as if he was never allowed to kiss her when he most wanted to.

  It was their first night out in Shanghai, or at least their first night out without Holly. Their first grown-up night, they called it. They had been in Paradise Mansions for three weeks now, and the jet-lag was gone and so were the packing crates, but they had never felt comfortable leaving Holly. They still didn’t, not really, but Bill could not get out of dinner invitations from Hugh Devlin forever, and Becca had to concede that the elderly Chinese ayi, Doris, who as far as Becca could tell had practically raised her own grandson, was at least as trustworthy as the string of East Europeans and Filippinas who had baby-sat for them in London.

  Holly was sleeping, sprawled sideways, and Doris was sitting by the side of the bed watching her. The old ayi smiled reassuringly as Bill and Becca crept in. They stood by the bed, reluctant to leave.

  Bill looked at the beauty of his daughter’s face, and it made him think of the high chair that was parked in a corner of his bedroom, and of the second child that they had talked about trying for once they were settled. They both wanted more children. But Bill loved his daughter so much that a secret part of him felt that another child would somehow be a betrayal of Holly.

  He understood why people had more than one child. Most of all it was because when you had just the one, you almost loved them too much. You were sometimes paralysed with love. That wasn’t good, the constant fear. That wasn’t the way to be. But with a second child, how could you ever again spend as much time with the first? Already he felt that he wasn’t spending nearly enough time with his daughter.

  If he had to find space in his life, and his heart, and his weekends, for a second child, then surely that would mean there was even less for Holly. Or didn’t it work that way? Did you love the first one in the same old way and just as much, but discover a new store of love for the second child? Did the heart just keep expanding?