My Favourite Wife

by Tony Parsons

  An hour later he came to see them, when Becca was feeling sick to the stomach with the coffee that Bill kept bringing her because he had to do something. And sick to the stomach with the thought of what would have happened.

  ‘She’s a healthy little baby,’ Dr Khan said. ‘Although that’s thanks to you, not me.’

  Becca shook her head. She was so tired. ‘I feel like I bother you all the time.’

  Khan laughed. ‘You’re not bothering me. You bring me sick children to look after. That’s what I do.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Becca said, her face in her hands. ‘Oh God. Thanks, Sarfraz.’

  She burst into tears.

  And Bill looked at his wife, stroked her arm and thought – Sarfraz?

  It was almost time for the old man to go home.

  The next morning, leaving Becca in bed, Bill and his father took Holly and her bike to the park and only had one minor row about when was the right time for a child to dispense with stabilisers. When they arrived back at Paradise Mansions there were voices on the child monitor.

  They had forgotten to turn it off when they came back from the hospital, sent the ayi home, and crawled into bed exhausted, Holly between them and sleeping through it all. The monitor must have been on all night because now the little lights glowed green with indistinct murmurs coming from the master bedroom. Like the sound of lovers in another world, Bill thought. The old man was holding Holly. He kissed her cheek, put her down and went into the spare room.

  ‘What’s Granddad Will doing?’ Holly said.

  ‘Granddad has to pack,’ Bill said.

  She turned her face to her father. ‘Is goodbye?’ she said sadly.

  As the ayi whisked Holly away, all good cheer and agreement, Bill hesitated in the living room, listening to the sound of Dr Khan talking to Becca, and understanding none of it. The monitor wasn’t built to pick up the sound of a man and woman talking.

  He paused for a moment, then went into the bedroom. Becca was in pyjamas, sitting up in bed but on the edge of sleep. One sleeve was rolled up and she was pressing a plaster against her arm. Dr Khan was standing by the side of the bed. He had just given her a shot of something and Bill flinched at the sight of the syringe. She said Bill’s name and he went to the bed and wrapped his arms around her and kissed her face and squeezed her until he thought perhaps he was hurting her. Her eyes were sore and puffy and it was clearly an effort to keep them open.

  ‘I’ve given your wife a small dose of Diazepam,’ Dr Khan said. ‘It will help her sleep.’

  ‘But I can’t sleep,’ Becca said, closing her eyes. She exhaled once, twice, and her head seemed to settle on the pillow. Bill and Dr Khan stood there silently for a minute. When they were certain she was sleeping they quietly left the room. They could hear Holly giving the ayi instructions for a game of Princesses.

  ‘When she’s up to it,’ Dr Khan said, ‘bring your wife to the hospital. I think she’ll cope better if she sees the baby.’

  Bill nodded. ‘Where did it come from?’ That wasn’t what he meant.

  What he meant was – How can this happen?

  Dr Khan shrugged. They had drifted across to the window. There were already a few cars waiting for the girls of Paradise Mansions.

  ‘There are around 300,000 abortions in this city every year,’ Dr Khan said. ‘It’s easier than having a tooth out. This baby…’ He inhaled, and released it as a sigh. ‘I don’t know. Maybe they were expecting a son. That happens. Or maybe the mother thought the father would leave his current family.’ He looked from the cars in the courtyard to Bill. He obviously knew all about Paradise Mansions, and the places just like it.

  ‘Sometimes these girls get their hopes too high,’ Dr Khan said. ‘Some of the girls are led to believe that their boyfriend is going to leave his wife. And then – he doesn’t. Incredible, I know.’ He smiled, shook his head. ‘What are the odds of that? That’s if the mother is one of the girls from this apartment block. But my guess is that she is probably some poor little dagongmei – what the Chinese call a migrant worker sister.’ He looked down at the courtyard. ‘It’s just about possible, but I think the mother is unlikely to be a resident of this place. The girls here are too tough and too smart for this kind of mess.’ He looked at Bill. ‘They don’t go to term with babies that they don’t want.’

  They watched an old VW Santana taxi pull into the courtyard and park behind the waiting cars looking like a poor relation. Alice Greene got out of the taxi. Dr Khan said he had to get back to the hospital and Bill thanked him and shook his hand. He walked Khan to the lift, saw him off, and he was still waiting there when Alice emerged a few minutes later.

  Bill didn’t want her inside their home. Not today.

  ‘For Becca,’ she said, passing the package in her hand to Bill, and he felt loose tea inside thick brown paper. ‘It’s Dragon Well tea from Hangzhou,’ she said, almost apologetically. ‘Most famous tea in China. From the Longjing spring.’

  Bill looked at the package of tea. ‘You know what happened?’ he said.

  She nodded. ‘Becca called me. When you got back this morning. I don’t think she has that many people who she can call.’ Alice looked abashed, as if afraid this sounded like a criticism.

  Bill kept staring at the tea in his hand. ‘Thanks for coming. Really, I appreciate it. But she’s sleeping now.’ Then he looked at Alice evenly. ‘Are you going to write about this?’ he asked.

  Alice shook her head.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said, and her smile was full of an almost physical pain. ‘A baby girl getting abandoned? A baby girl left out with the trash? No. My paper doesn’t want that. You see, it’s not news.’

  The next day Bill saw his father off.

  Tiger drove them to Pudong and they joined the long line for economy check-in. That’s the worst thing about being poor, Bill thought. It is so time-consuming.

  ‘Dad, I can get you upgraded to first,’ he said, looking at the long line. Already there were starting to be more Chinese faces than Anglos on their way to Europe. ‘Or at least business class.’

  The old man shook his big, bull-like head. ‘No point,’ he said, placing his suitcase on the floor, settling in for a long wait. ‘It’s a waste. I’m just going to sleep until Heathrow anyway.’

  Bill had made the offer without impatience, and the old man had declined without resentment. This was some kind of first.

  ‘Hope Becca feels better,’ his father said awkwardly and Bill nodded. Something had shifted between the pair of them. Something long frozen had started to thaw.

  My daughter, Bill thought. Holly did that. Yet he could not deny that when the old man turned and waved from the departure gate, Bill was still relieved to see him go.

  Bill got into bed and put his arms around his wife. She murmured and moved against him, although she was still sleeping or drugged or both.

  On the other side of the door he could hear Holly chattering as the ayi undressed her for her bath. She was going to sleep in Daddy’s bed tonight, with Daddy, because Mummy wasn’t well.

  Bill was slipping into sleep when he heard Becca say his name. He propped himself up on an elbow. She still had her eyes closed.

  ‘What is it, angel?’

  ‘Remember when I used to come and wait for you outside your office? When you were doing your training? And you could only take an hour so we had to eat lunch in places where the waiters were quick? Remember that, Bill?’

  He buried his face in her hair, inhaled deeply, then kissed her bare neck, and kissed her shoulder blade through her pyjamas.

  ‘I remember everything,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you sleep for a little bit more?’

  She turned her head and he saw her smile in the darkness. ‘That was a good time, wasn’t it?’ She was waiting for a reply, and he stroked her arm, encouraging her to rest.

  ‘It was a really good time,’ he agreed.

  ‘I can’t really do that now, can I?’

  He was silent.

&nb
sp; Her voice was soft, understanding. He felt his fingers on her ribcage. ‘It’s not that kind of job, is it, Bill?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s not that kind of job, angel.’

  She was silent for a few minutes. He could hear her breathing.

  ‘Bill?’

  ‘What?’

  He could feel her searching for the words. She didn’t know how to say it. He heard her take a breath in the dark. From somewhere else in the flat there was the sound of their daughter’s bath being run.

  ‘I might go back for a while,’ she said.

  It lay there between them until the statement – offered tentatively, as though it had just occurred to her – seemed to fill the room.

  ‘Go back?’ he said, dumbfounded, unable to comprehend what this meant. For him. For them. For their little family.

  ‘My dad’s not well,’ she said quickly, playing the trump card at once. ‘He’s not like your dad. He’s not fit. Independent. He can’t make it without my mum. He’s a different sort of old man.’ She patted his arm, wanting him to be all right about this. ‘And I just think it might be good for me and Holly to go back for a while,’ she said, happy to get it out in the open at last.

  He didn’t know what to say. ‘How long would you go back for?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Until I feel better about things.’

  Something about her shoulders told him that she was filling up with tears. He held her fiercely, as if the strength of his feeling could change a mind that was already made up.

  ‘I’m not asking you to leave,’ she said. ‘This was all my idea. Coming out here. I really think Devlin means it – you could be a partner in a few years. It could never happen that fast back home.’

  ‘But what about us?’

  ‘Well, there will always be us.’ She patted his arm. ‘Of course there will.’

  ‘Or you could stay,’ he said. He could hear the sound of splashing, and Holly laughing. ‘Or you could stay and we could try for a second one.’

  ‘What?’ She genuinely seemed to not get it. How could she fail to get it? Didn’t she think about this all the time? The baby who had yet to be born.

  ‘A brother or sister for Holly,’ he said. It was his own trump card, the only one he had to play.

  ‘No,’ she said wistfully. ‘No, I don’t think so. I think the best thing is if we go back for a while.’

  ‘That baby will be okay,’ he said, wondering if he truly believed it. ‘That baby you found.’

  ‘But it’s still a cruel place. It’s still a hard place. How different is it from the days when it said No Chinese, no dogs outside the parks? How different is it really?’

  ‘God, Bec, it’s really different. It’s better than it’s ever been. That’s what you have to remember. It’s better for more people than it’s ever been. And we could have a good life here. You know we could.’

  ‘Yes, but how many things do we have to ignore for our good life?’

  Then she was silent and he didn’t have the heart to argue with her. She had already decided. When she was sleeping he went back to his own room where Holly was sprawled across the single bed. The ayi had left a nightlight on, and Bill calculated where he could sleep and then turned it off and squeezed into the small sliver of bed that was still vacant.

  He carefully put an arm across his daughter, amazed at the small-ness of her, barely thirty pounds of life, a fragile and precarious presence in the world, and he held her as tightly as he dared in the darkness.

  But sleep did not come here either, and sleep would not come, and so he left this second bedroom and went to the window, staring down at the empty courtyard of Paradise Mansions.

  TEN

  The elevated freeway of Chengdu Lu runs right above St Peter’s, the Catholic church in Chongqing Nanlu. As the bride and groom stepped out into the sunshine the cheers of the congregation mixed with the buzzsaw of the traffic flowing high above the church spire.

  Holly was in Becca’s arms, throwing confetti with her eyes screwed up, as if she was the one being bombarded. Most of it went over Bill. He looked at his wife. She looked beautiful today. And he wasn’t the only one who noticed. When they had entered the church, it seemed to Bill that men on both sides of the aisle, the neat little Filippinos and the big affable Australians, all looked at his wife with a certain hunger. And now it seemed to Bill that, despite the two thousand or so nights they had spent together, he looked at her in exactly the same way.

  Yet he knew that only he saw the fragility there, only he saw how the woman he loved was struggling to hold it together and put on a good front. They all look at her, he thought. But I’m the only one who really sees her.

  He watched Becca smile at the sight of Shane and Rosalita, and it made him smile too. The happy couple were a study in opposites. The groom as big and blond as his bride was tiny and dark. Shane grinning like an idiot, bashful in the glare of all this attention, Rosalita laughing and waving to her friends in the crowd, centre stage at last, happy to be top of the bill.

  ‘He gets youth and beauty, and she gets affluence and security,’ Mrs Devlin said, suddenly appearing at Bill’s side. She lazily threw a fistful of confetti. ‘At least that’s the plan, I suppose.’ She sighed wearily, as if she had seen it all many times before. ‘What could possibly go wrong?’

  The three Devlin boys were running wild, dodging in and out of legs, assaulting each other with confetti mixed with gravel that they had scooped up from the ground. The smallest one got caught in the eyes by one of his brothers and began crying.

  Holly eyed them warily and Bill picked her up. She didn’t much care for boys. She took Bill by his ears. It was her new way of getting his attention. He felt her sweet breath on his face.

  ‘We’re going back for a while,’ she whispered. ‘But you’re staying in your home.’

  He felt the panic fly up in him. ‘My home is with you,’ Bill whispered. ‘Always. Wherever you are, that’s my home. Okay?’

  She thought about it, staring at her father with the solemn blue eyes of her mother.

  ‘Okay, Daddy,’ she quietly agreed, and they held each other as they stood there in their wedding clothes, and the chatter went on around them.

  ‘We must do something with our children,’ Mrs Devlin was telling Becca. Bill thought she meant some kind of military discipline, but apparently it was a play date with their daughter that she had in mind. ‘Does Holly like pandas?’ Tess said, baring her teeth at Holly. ‘Do you like pandas, dear?’

  ‘I like cows,’ Holly said.

  ‘We found this place near Renmin Square with a giant panda,’ Mrs Devlin said, straightening up, ignoring Holly’s affection for cows. ‘A sort of Chinese circus. Well, their version of a circus. And the panda – he drives a car!’

  Devlin grimaced. ‘They do have a taste for the grotesque,’ he murmured.

  One of his sons crashed against his legs.

  Becca smiled apologetically, and said nothing.

  ‘They’re going back for a while,’ Bill said, and Mr and Mrs Devlin took it in and quickly looked away with frozen smiles, as if embarrassed to intrude upon a marriage more fragile than their own.

  On the first floor of the Portman Ritz-Carlton, Becca and Holly joined the queue to congratulate the bride and groom.

  Bill drifted off in search of a rest room and then he saw them coming – a group of casually dressed Chinese men and young women making their way down a spiral staircase.

  The girls all had the look, that Shanghai look.

  The look that summer was a tall slim girl in heels and tight white trousers. Straight shoulder-length hair, worn its natural jet black. In the chic, self-confident Shanghai of the new century there was a lot less of the highlighting and lightening than you saw among women in other parts of Asia. And the Shanghai look was no make-up, except maybe a little lipstick, and a short-sleeved or capped top to show off long, slender arms.

  Everything about the look accentuated height
and length and a willowy beauty that was specifically Chinese. The Shanghai look could make a young woman of quite average height appear over six feet tall.

  It took him a moment to see that one of the young women with the look was JinJin Li.

  He stood transfixed as the group walked past him as if he wasn’t there.

  If she saw him, she gave no sign.

  And he knew that she saw him.

  And he wondered, how did it work? Her unknowable life. Her unimaginable nights. How was it played? Bill saw that the man was about forty, big and fit but balding, the high school jock running to seed, too old for her by far.

  How did the arrangement work? Did she get a certain amount of money paid directly into her bank every month? It had to be. Was the apartment in his or her name? How many times a week did they meet? Did he fuck her every time? Did his wife suspect a thing?

  And did he love her?

  Bill felt a ridiculous anger towards her, and towards the man. But what did he expect? What would he prefer? That she would stay as a teacher in Number 251 Middle School and meet some nice boy who would want to marry her? Yes, that was exactly what he wanted, that was exactly what he would have preferred.

  There was a live band at the reception and after they had played their opening number Rosalita climbed on stage to sing ‘Right Here Waiting for You’, a beautiful power ballad about longing and loyalty that she supplemented with much slow grinding and wicked grinning.

  ‘Ah, the unblushing bride,’ Mrs Devlin said. ‘In her element at last.’

  Becca and Holly hit the dance floor and Bill made his way to the end of the queue for the buffet, his head swimming with the lights and the candles and the smell of orchids, and the hole in his future as he wondered what his life here would be like without them.