My Favourite Wife

by Tony Parsons

  He steeled himself when Devlin approached him with a sympathetic smile, but his boss said nothing, just patted him twice on the back and let his hand linger for a moment on Bill’s shoulder.

  Then Devlin was gone, moving off into the chatter of the guests and the muffled battery of champagne corks, and Bill stared after him with gratitude.

  Bill could see what Becca would never see – the good that was in this city, and the kindness and generosity of these people.

  His wife was immune to something that increasingly had Bill in its grip – the glory of this place and time, the magic of what was happening here.

  Everyone’s life would be better, eventually. He could be a part of that, contribute something, and make a difference.

  And his life would get better too. He would not be held back the way he would be held back in London, where in the end they always wanted to know what school you went to and what your father did and what your real accent was like. All that sad old bullshit that had been going on for centuries in England. They didn’t really care how well you did your job back in England.

  The thing that Alice Greene complained about – the educated elite lording it over the huge pool of cheap labour, driving the economy on and on – most of the people in this room saw that as a good thing. Of course it wasn’t fair. But when had China ever been fair? Tell me when, he thought.

  As he moved away from the buffet table he found he had loaded his plate with jam doughnuts and foie gras. Nothing else. Just two jam doughnuts and a sliver of foie gras. A ridiculous meal, he thought, smiling with embarrassment at his choices.

  He hesitated for a moment and then he thought – but why not? Really – why not?

  Why shouldn’t you have whatever you want?

  In the master bedroom Bill read Holly a story until she slept. When she had nodded off he closed the book and just sat there for a while, smoothing back a tumble of fair hair that fell across her face. His daughter was the one who had taught him about unconditional love. There was nothing she could ever do in her life that could make him stop loving her.

  Becca was packing things. She was being very selective. She was careful to make it seem as though they were not going for good. Things were being left behind.

  Including me, he thought, fighting the bitterness and losing. And it wasn’t my idea to come here.

  ‘What’s the book?’ she said, her arms full of folded sweaters that seemed to belong to another world.

  Bill looked at the book in his hands. He hadn’t realised he was still holding it. ‘Farm Friends,’ he said. ‘Didn’t we see the movie?’

  Becca nodded seriously. ‘That has to go back to the school,’ she said. ‘It’s not one of ours.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said, opening the book. ‘I’ll get Tiger to run it over.’

  There was a reading list at the back of the book, a little library card with DATE DUE – TITLE – DATE RETURNED at the top, followed by a list of all the books that Holly had personally chosen to take home from school. The list made him smile, and he pictured her earnest face as she made her selection.

  5th June – Bunny Cakes

  12th June – Do Donkeys Dance?

  19th June – The Treasure Sock

  26th June – Favourite Rhymes

  3rd July – But No Elephants

  10th July – There Was an Old Lady

  17th July – Christmas Can’t Wait

  24th July – Imagine You’re a Princess

  31st July – Happy and Sad

  7th August – Sssh!

  14th August – Ballerina Belle

  21st August – Peter Pan’s Magical Christmas

  28th August – Farm Friends

  A Christmas book in July? And another one in August? Something about the list seemed to capture his daughter’s sweet, funny essence.

  He slipped the reading list into his pocket and went over to where Becca stood at the window silently watching the rain hammer down on the empty courtyard of Paradise Mansions.

  ‘Did she go down okay?’ she asked him.

  ‘She’s worn out,’ he said. ‘Two hours of dancing the Macarena.’

  What would they talk about if they didn’t have their daughter?

  ‘Bloody weather,’ he said, feeling ridiculous in the presence of English small talk. But the subject animated her.

  ‘I think this must be the start of the Plum Rain season,’ she said. ‘Doesn’t that sound just lovely? The Plum Rain season. I read about it before we came over. I wanted to see it. More than almost anything, really.’

  They stared out at the courtyard, and he felt her take his hand. The Plum Rain season, the rains of summer, had turned Shanghai into a city of mist. They seemed to be floating in the clouds.

  ‘How long does it last?’ Bill said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Becca said. She gave him that sly, sleepy look, the one that said you know me. ‘It doesn’t last for ever, darling.’

  He took her hand and they went to his little bedroom where he made love to his wife, her body warm and loved and familiar, that familiarity that you only get after years together, which is the good side of knowing another human being so well, and she slept in his arms until their daughter began to cry in the hours just before dawn.

  Then Becca went back to the master bedroom and he lay there for what was left of the night listening to his wife calm their child, smelling her perfume on his body, and thinking about the city his wife and daughter would soon be flying to, and remembering their old life in London when they were very young and very poor and very happy.

  He came out of the departure gate of Pudong and looked at the mist and rain. Tiger beeped his horn from a no-parking zone. Bill dashed through the rain to the waiting limo.

  ‘Where to, boss?’ Tiger said.

  ‘Home,’ Bill said. ‘Let’s just go home.’

  The car headed towards the city. Bill stared straight through sights that had once filled him with bemused awe. He didn’t see the blue and red flashing lights all along the highway, meant to replicate the watching eyes of the gong’an ju, the cops of the PSB. He didn’t see the ancient trucks, overloaded with animals, produce, junk and men who were wet to the bone. And he didn’t see the girls with the Shanghai look in their brand-new BMWs.

  He wasn’t interested in seeing any of that.

  Instead Bill pulled his daughter’s crumpled reading list from his pocket and it seemed a far greater source of wonder than any of these things. It made him smile. That girl. His girl. That little girl, sitting on her mother’s lap with her books and her crayons, 35,000 feet above – oh, it had to be Inner Mongolia by now.

  ‘Everything okay, boss?’ Tiger said, slightly worried now. You never knew when these crazy da bizi would crack. The heat and the pressure and the stress. It got to all of them eventually.

  ‘Yup,’ Bill said, finishing the reading list and going right back to the start.

  Outside, the Plum Rain season was at full pelt and although Tiger’s windscreen wipers did their very best, they could not keep pace with Bill Holden’s tears.

  PART TWO:

  THE PERMANENT GIRLFRIEND

  ELEVEN

  The Chinese did what they wanted to do. That was the strange thing. That was what caught him off guard.

  Before they had ever come over, he had read all about the human rights violations, and dissidents arrested, and Falun Gong members setting fire to themselves on Tiananmen Square, but when Bill walked around the Old City on Saturday afternoon, when there was no more paperwork to keep him at the office and he didn’t want to go home to an empty apartment, it felt like the Chinese were the freest people in the world. Or perhaps what they had was closer to anarchy than freedom.

  Middle-aged women rode their motor scooters on the pavement. Businesses were set up in the street, and usually consisted of no more than a stool and a cardboard box and a couple of tools – the proprietors shaving old men, or helping clients to try on spectacles from a selection of hundreds, or cutting
their hair. And in a pink-lit barbershop, where hairdressing was low on the agenda, two young women beckoned to him from the doorway.

  Bill shook his head. One of them feigned disappointment. The other immediately turned to the next passing man. And in his loneliness Bill was so happy about the one who was pretending to be disappointed that he kept looking at her until he banged his shin against the bumper of a car parked on the pavement.

  When he looked up it was a red Mini with a Chinese flag painted on the roof.

  Looking more closely, he could see that the car was about seven different shades of red. The vehicle had clearly been pulled apart, and patched back together.

  JinJin Li got out of the car. She had two ways of wearing her hair, he realised. She wore it down when she was out on the town with the man she called her husband, and pulled back in a ponytail for the rest of her life. Today she had it pulled back, the ponytail dragged through the back of a yellow baseball cap that said LA Lakers on the front, and he realised he preferred it that way because it meant you could really see her face.

  She was a pretty girl with troubled skin. Later, when he saw the attention she lavished on keeping her skin under control, when he saw all the lotions and potions and pills and special soaps, he came to believe that the troubled skin was a manifestation of some inner turmoil. Later still, he didn’t think about it – that was just who she was, and she was always beautiful. But that day in the Old City he thought that she was just a bit too old to have such troubled skin.

  ‘Ah,’ she said, as the central locking flashed orange behind her. ‘You have come to the Old City. In the past no foreigners dared to come to Old City. Oh my gosh. They very afraid to come here.’

  He watched her tugging the Lakers cap down over her eyes. What did she know about the Lakers? ‘Is that right?’ he said.

  She nodded curtly. ‘How about you? Are you afraid to come here?’

  ‘Only if you’re driving.’

  She nodded. ‘English joke,’ she said, dead serious. ‘I’m going to the market. Yu Gardens.’ She smiled encouragingly. ‘You want?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said, and she took his arm, and he was absurdly pleased. He felt his face reddening. He hadn’t blushed for years. But he knew it didn’t mean anything. He told himself that possibly she was lonely too.

  The Yu Gardens market was the usual collection of everything. In ramshackle wooden buildings untouched by time and developers, Mao memorabilia was stacked up next to bootleg Disney merchandise and the latest software from Microsoft.

  ‘For your daughter,’ JinJin smiled, holding up a strangely familiar costume inside a sealed plastic package. A yellow skirt, a blue top with red piping, puffy short sleeves. There was a picture of a girl with the face of a glacial brunette, like the young Elizabeth Taylor. And Bill thought – but where are the seven dwarves? Snow Girl, it said on the wrapping. Snow Girl? It was a counterfeit Disney princess.

  He smiled, as if impressed but unwilling to commit himself -Holly would spot a bootleg princess a mile off – as the woman squatting in front of the stall spread her arms indicating that if he wasn’t in the market for a genuine fake Snow Girl costume, then how about an opium pipe, or a Little Red Book, or a Deng Xiaoping watch, or a green coat from the People’s Liberation Army, or a propaganda poster of heroic factory workers?

  They kept moving. An old woman and her fat little Buddha of a grandson walked hand in hand, neither of them too steady on their feet, both eating courgettes as though they were ice cream cones.

  ‘Look at those two,’ Bill said, nodding at them as they paused to solemnly consider a badly scarred mechanical rabbit.

  JinJin smiled. ‘Fat little boy,’ she agreed. ‘Very nice child.’

  For JinJin Li, this was the real world. What was strange to his eyes was normal to hers.

  They emerged from the tumbledown maze of the Yu Gardens bazaar and there before them was a teahouse on a small lake. A wooden bridge zigzagged crazily across the water.

  ‘The Bridge of Nine Turnings,’ she said as they stepped on to it. Below them the water bubbled and exploded with hundreds of golden carp. ‘Because evil spirits can’t turn corners.’

  He looked at her face. She was perfectly serious. He felt her hand in his, small and cool, and she led him across the twisting bridge to the teahouse on the lake. They stepped inside a wooden room and Bill looked up at a photograph of the last American president grinning widely over a cup of green tea.

  ‘Huxinting teahouse,’ JinJin said. ‘It is very famous. Many VIPs come here.’ She indicated the former president. ‘And some V-VIPs. Do you know?’

  Suddenly he did know it. Of course – the Huxinting teahouse was the great symbol of the city’s past, a photo opportunity for every big shot that passed through Shanghai and wanted to show that they were in touch with the real China.

  He had always meant to come here with Becca, but somehow they had never got around to it. JinJin spoke to a woman in Mandarin as Bill looked up at the pictures of movie stars and presidents and royalty. But although the bazaar was teeming with people, the Huxinting was almost empty.

  ‘We shall drink tea now,’ JinJin informed him, and they sat opposite each other at a wooden table in a narrow room.

  JinJin took off her Lakers baseball cap. Cups were placed before them. A tiny pot. Three small glass jars with leaves and assorted plant life were filled with boiling water. He wondered how much of this was genuine historic ritual and how much of it was for the tourists. But then the thought left him because he was enjoying himself, and he liked having some company, and he was happy to make it to the Huxinting teahouse at last.

  A couple of funky young Japanese men with blond hair sat at the next table. Bill and JinJin smiled at each other, then looked away. He didn’t know what to say. He felt there were huge areas of her life that he couldn’t approach. She saw him staring at the long queue outside a shop on the other side of the lake.

  ‘Nan Xiang,’ JinJin said. ‘Very famous dumplings. Do you want?’

  ‘Sounds good,’ he said, and he realised that he was free, and had nowhere to go and nothing to do and no one to meet. Then JinJin was looking up at someone standing beside him.

  ‘Bill?’ Tess Devlin was touching his shoulder. ‘How are you getting on without them?’

  Then he was stuttering a reply with his face flushing hot – no blushing for fifteen years and then twice in the space of minutes, he thought, good going, Bill – feeling as if he had been caught out. JinJin sipped her tea, and set down her cup. The water was still boiling hot.

  He noticed a Taiwanese client and his wife gawking up at the pictures on the wall, and Devlin smiling as he stepped around his wife to introduce himself and shake hands with JinJin Li. He does it so well, Bill thought, with a flash of admiration. He sees the situation and just takes control. JinJin shook hands with Bill’s boss as if it was a custom as alien to her as rubbing noses.

  Then Tess Devlin turned her beady all-seeing eyes on JinJin and Bill’s heart sank as they all joined them at the table.

  The Taiwanese stared blankly at Bill, even though they had been introduced at the office, and then smirked as he ran his eyes over JinJin Li. Bill tried to remember what this hideous little man was in town for. Something to do with a joint-venture dispute with a Chinese telecom operator. His small, bespectacled wife, along for the shopping, began unloading strange painted figurines on to the table. They were ornamental torture scenes depicting old men having their heads shaved, and women in glasses having their arms bent behind their backs, their tormentors angry figures in green, holding up their little red books as though they were the truth and the light.

  ‘Look what Mr and Mrs Wang found in Dongtai Lu market,’ chuckled Tess. ‘Isn’t that hilarious? Souvenirs of the Cultural Revolution. Why on earth do they make things like that?’

  ‘Because they know some mad tourist will buy it,’ Devlin said, smiling sweetly at the Taiwanese client’s wife.

  Tess was thoughtful. ‘Oh, yes
, money, of course,’ she said. ‘There’s always that.’

  Orders were placed for more tea. Bill thought that the logical thing would be to ask JinJin to do it, but Tess Devlin chose to instruct the waitress herself, slowly and loudly, in broken English.

  ‘And where are you from, dear?’ Tess said, staring at JinJin’s features as if examining important forensic evidence. ‘You don’t look typical Shanghainese.’

  ‘My mother is from Changchun,’ JinJin said. Bill had never heard of Changchun. She must have sensed it. She turned to him. ‘Big city in the Dongbei – the north-east. Near the border with Korea.’ She turned back to Mrs Devlin. ‘My father is from Guilin. Down south. But I grew up in Changchun.’

  Tess looked delighted. ‘So you’re – what do they say? A Dongbei ho

  JinJin smiled and nodded. ‘Dongbei ho – north-east tiger…’

  The Taiwanese gasped and jumped up having scalded his tongue with boiling tea. His wife looked around, sighing with boredom until she saw a picture on the wall of a famous Buddhist Hollywood star sipping tea in the Huxinting. She got up to examine it, bumping the table with her behind, and making her torture sculptures rattle precariously.

  ‘I thought so,’ Tess continued. ‘Your face – not really typically Chinese, even, let alone Shanghainese.’ She narrowed her eyes, making her judgement. ‘Hmmm – got a touch of the Manchu about you.’

  JinJin frowned, and Bill was reminded of the first time he had met her, when he had tried to tell her that she would never remove the ignition key while she had it in drive.

  ‘Changchun,’ her husband was saying. ‘They’ve had it tough up there. Did all right during the planned economy. Bit of an industrial powerhouse. Coal. Cars. Heavy machinery. Missed out on the big payday, though. What is it up there?’ This to Bill, as if he would know. ‘About fifty per cent unemployment?’

  Both Devlin and his wife seemed to have a genuine academic interest in JinJin. Bill wasn’t certain if he should be offended or not.