by Peter May
‘Jesus!’ Margaret said. ‘How on earth are you coping?’
He looked grim. ‘I’m not.’ He sighed. ‘You remember Mei Yuan? The jian bing seller?’
‘Of course.’
‘She was going to keep Xinxin for a few days until I got something else arranged. She phoned the office this afternoon to say that her cousin’s husband has had to go into hospital for an operation.’
Margaret shook her head, perplexed. ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’
‘Her cousin was looking after the jian bing while Mei Yuan looked after Xinxin. But with the cousin’s husband in hospital she can’t do the jian bing because she has to take him his meals.’
Margaret was astonished. ‘Doesn’t the hospital feed its patients?’
‘In China,’ Li said, ‘many people prefer family meals to hospital food. So tomorrow Mei Yuan will have to take over the jian bing again from her cousin because she cannot afford to lose the income. Which means she cannot look after Xinxin. When I have dropped you at the hotel I will have to go and pick her up and take her back to the apartment.’
The huge, red neon CITIC sign rose out of the mist ahead of them above the lights of the teatime traffic. ‘I’d like to meet her,’ Margaret said, taking both Li and herself by surprise. She had no idea why, but just the thought of Li’s niece, and that he was responsible for her, made him somehow more human again, more vulnerable, more like the man she had known. It was meeting his uncle that day in Jade Lake Park that had first changed her view of him, from a surly, xenophobic Chinese policeman, to a man who blushed easily, who got embarrassed and was sensitive to the feelings of others.
He looked at her and frowned. ‘Why?’
She just shrugged.
Without another word, Li did a U-turn at the next junction and headed east again, and then north towards the northern lakes and Mei Yuan’s hutong.
*
Yingdingqiao, or Silver Ingot Bridge, was a tiny hump-backed marble bridge, spanning the narrow waterway linking Houhai Lake in the north and Qianhai Lake in the south. It was an ancient commercial crossroads in the comparative backwaters of Beijing’s Northern Lakes district. The lights of a mini-market in an elegant five-sided traditional building blazed out across the water. In brick hovels with tin roofs, old women clattered woks over fiery stoves, sending steam and smoke and wonderful cooking smells issuing into the night air. Li nosed the Jeep carefully over the bridge. Further along the lake to their right, a children’s playground stood silent and deserted in the darkness. And as they turned south along the southern shore of Qianhai Lake, they saw the dazzling spectacle of the 140-year-old Kaorouji restaurant that had been the favourite eating place of Manchu princes in the nineteenth century, serving up roast mutton hotpot and other Muslim delicacies. Its lights twinkled and danced on the other side of the water behind the swaying fronds of weeping willows.
Mei Yuan’s siheyuan was unusually fronted by a small strip of garden with cut grass, shrubs and trees behind a low fence. She and Xinxin were sitting at a table making dumplings when Li and Margaret came in. She was delighted to see Margaret, and hugged her like a mother might hug a daughter she has not seen in months. It was a very un-Chinese show of affection. She beamed and told them both to sit, and apologised profusely to Li for the inconvenience. Her cousin’s husband would only be in hospital for a couple of days, and she could take Xinxin again the day after tomorrow anyway, since it was Sunday and she always took Sundays off. She stopped to draw breath, and they all noticed Xinxin sitting in wide-eyed amazement, her jaw slack, mouth open, as she gazed in wonder at Margaret. This was possibly the first non-Chinese person she had ever seen, or certainly the first she had seen in the flesh.
‘Xinxin, this is Margaret,’ Li told her. ‘She is an American.’ He was not sure if she would even know what an American was. Zigong, in Sichuan Province, where she had grown up, was deep in the heart of rural China. Not many, if any, foreigners would ever have ventured there. And Li had no idea how well acquainted, if at all, she was with Western television programmes. If she had heard Li, she gave no sign of it, but kept staring at Margaret as if unable to believe her eyes.
‘Hello, Xinxin,’ Margaret said. And she held out her hand. ‘I am very pleased to meet you.’
If it was possible, Xinxin’s eyes widened further, and she recoiled from Margaret’s outstretched hand and looked at Li with something like fear in her eyes. ‘I don’t know what she is saying,’ she said. ‘Is it a different kind of Chinese, like you and Mei Yuan speak sometimes?’
‘No, Xinxin,’ Mei Yuan said. ‘It is another language. She has different words to describe the things you and I have the same words for. Sometimes Chinese people learn their words, too. And sometimes they learn ours.’
Li thought how good Mei Yuan was with the child.
‘What’s an American?’ Xinxin asked.
‘The name of your country is China,’ Mei Yuan explained. ‘So you are called Chinese. An American is someone who comes from the country of America.’
Margaret smiled apprehensively, feeling shut out of the conversation. ‘What’s going on?’ she said.
Li said, ‘Xinxin’s getting a lesson in geography and linguistics.’
‘Can I touch her hair?’ Xinxin asked.
Li looked at Margaret. ‘She wants to touch your hair.’
‘Sure.’ Margaret remembered with a jolt that it had been in the Muslim quarter in Xi’an with Michael that she had been asked the same thing by the waitresses.
Xinxin tentatively reached out to run her fingers through the silky gold of Margaret’s curls. Her face broke into a wide, and completely disarming smile. ‘It’s so soft,’ she said. ‘Is it real?’
‘Of course it’s real,’ Li said.
‘Can … what did you say her name was?’
‘Margaret.’
‘Can Mar-ga-ret help us make dumplings?’
Li looked doubtful. ‘We can’t really stay long, Xinxin. We have to get you home to bed.’
‘Oh, please …’ She widened her eyes to try to look her most appealing.
Li said to Margaret. ‘She wants you to help make dumplings.’
Margaret smiled, delighted. ‘I’d like that.’
For twenty minutes or more they sat drinking green tea and rolling round thin pancakes from pieces of dough cut off a roll. Xinxin showed Margaret how to spoon a little of the dumpling mixture into the centre of the pancake, fold it over and then crimp it around the edges, so that it looked a little like a seashell. The secret of the perfect dumpling was to finish it off by squeezing the mixture into the very centre by applying pressure with both thumbs and forefingers. The first few times Margaret made a mess of it, and the mixture came squirting out over the table, to Xinxin’s endless mirth and delight. Her giggling was infectious, and finally Li and Mei Yuan and Margaret were all reduced to helpless laughter, too.
Oblivious to the fact that Margaret could not understand a word, Xinxin chided her for getting it wrong and explained how it should be done, demonstrating as she went and producing perfect dumplings every time. Eventually, Margaret, too, was producing dumplings that were passable, if not perfect.
Xinxin nodded her satisfaction and began counting the dumplings they had made, making Margaret count with her. Mei Yuan helped with the numbers, and Margaret very quickly discovered that you only had to learn to count to ten to make almost any number. Ten-five was fifteen, five-ten was fifty. Fifty-nine was five-ten-nine. They had made ninety-five dumplings, so she never got to learn what a hundred was.
‘You will stay and have dumplings before you go,’ Mei Yuan said. ‘They will cook in ten minutes.’
But Li became suddenly self-conscious. ‘Another time, Mei Yuan,’ he said. ‘I must get Xinxin home. And I don’t want to keep Margaret back any longer.’
Xinxin said, ‘Is Mar-ga-ret coming, too?’
‘I’m afraid not, little one,’ Li said. ‘We have to drop her off at her hotel.’
A black cloud ca
st a shadow over Xinxin’s face and her mouth turned down in a sulky temper. ‘Won’t go without Mar-ga-ret,’ she said.
Li sighed.
‘What’s wrong?’ Margaret asked.
‘The Little Emperor syndrome,’ Li said. ‘She won’t go unless you come with us.’
Margaret shrugged. ‘OK. I’ll go back with you.’ For a moment their eyes met and she felt strangely uncomfortable, and flushed with embarrassment. To his annoyance Li blushed too, and he turned to find Mei Yuan watching them appraisingly.
Xinxin’s good humour returned immediately she learned the good news. Mei Yuan gathered her things together and put them in a bag along with the books she had brought the other night. ‘A book is like a garden carried in the pocket,’ Xinxin told Li.
Li frowned his surprise and looked at Mei Yuan who smiled. ‘I’ve been teaching her old Chinese proverbs,’ she said. ‘You’ll probably hear a few more of them.’
‘That reminds me,’ Li said. ‘I have the solution to your riddle.’
Mei Yuan smiled and raised an eyebrow. ‘You do?’
‘You deliberately misled me,’ Li said. ‘You planted a whole set of figures in my head that did not make sense. You had me wasting my time trying to make them work.’
‘What was the riddle?’ Margaret asked.
Mei Yuan told her. ‘That’s easy,’ said Margaret. ‘Your arithmetic doesn’t add up.’
‘I just told you that,’ Li protested.
But Margaret gave them the solution anyway. Starting with the twenty-five and adding the three and the two to make thirty. Mei Yuan clapped her hands in delight. She said, ‘I give you a stone, you give me back jade.’
‘What about me?’ Li said. ‘I got the answer, too.’
‘But you took so long,’ Mei Yuan said, ‘the stone I gave you turned to stone.’
Margaret laughed. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Here’s one for both of you.’ She thought for a moment. ‘It is National Day in Beijing. The middle of the day. Everyone is out in the streets. Li Yan walks from Xidamochang Street to Beijing Railway Station, and yet not a soul sees him. How is this possible?’
Both Li and Mei Yuan were silent for a moment as they considered the puzzle. Mei Yuan shook her head. ‘This I will need to think about.’ She opened the door and ruffled Xinxin’s head, turning to Li. ‘You have a very clever lady, Li Yan. Take care not to let her go.’
And they both blushed fiercely.
*
Xinxin’s face was relaxed and beautiful in the repose of sleep. Margaret sat on the edge of the bed and brushed a few stray strands of hair from her cheek and gazed down on her innocence. Xinxin had ‘read’ to her from her picture book when they got back to the apartment. And although she could not really read, she had been read the story so often by Mei Yuan in the last couple of days that she knew it off by heart. She still did not fully grasp that Margaret could not understand what she said, and gabbled to her constantly, tutting with irritation whenever Margaret responded in English. ‘You must teach her to speak Chinese,’ she had said to Li in annoyance.
*
Now, as she lay sleeping, Margaret’s heart went out to her. Abandoned by her mother, rejected by her father, landed on an uncle who had not the first idea of how to look after her. And she felt for Li, too. It was an awesome responsibility, the life of another person. Particularly one so young and utterly dependent. And it was not a responsibility for which he had asked. Somewhere, Margaret became aware, deep inside of her there was a latent desire to share in that responsibility. Something hormonal, she supposed. That chemical spark that fired a woman’s desire to have children. She was thirty-one years old, and she had never once felt the desire to have children. Until now. Absurdly. Inappropriately. Impossibly. And yet, as she gazed on the sleeping child, some primeval instinct was conjuring a longing to hold her to her breast, to protect her from all the dreadful slings and arrows that life would throw at her.
Suddenly aware that a constriction in her throat was causing her to breathe erratically, she looked up to find Li standing watching her from the doorway. Her face coloured in embarrassment, as if she believed he could somehow read her thoughts. She looked away, and saw the photographs of Old Yifu on the wall, and unaccountably felt tears filling her eyes. She blinked them quickly away, looking down at the bed to hide them from Li. She picked up Xinxin’s picture book and stood up, pretending to scrutinise the pages. Her eyes fell on the vertical columns of large Chinese characters that ran up the right margin of each page, and clutching at something to say to hide her emotion she said, ‘Do you really read from right to left?’
Li took the book from her and closed it gently. ‘Only when the characters are on the vertical. When they are horizontal we read left to right.’ He seemed very close now. She could hear his breathing, and the familiar smell of him made her heart beat a little faster. He said, ‘They say that Chinese children learn to read up and down because they are very obedient and always obey their parents.’ He made an up and down nodding motion with his head. ‘But Western children are very disobedient and never do what they are told. That is why they read from left to right.’ And he moved his head from side to side as if shaking it.
She smiled. ‘When you say “they” say, I take it you mean the Chinese.’
‘Of course.’ He dropped the book on the bed and she felt an arm slip around her waist. He lowered his head to kiss her, and she tipped her face towards him in an instinctive response. It was only the shock of his lips on hers that suddenly made her pull away.
‘No!’ she said, and then suddenly remembered Xinxin and lowered her voice to a whisper. ‘No, Li.’ They stood staring at each other for a moment. Then she said, ‘I’d better go. I’ll get a taxi in the street.’ And she hurried past him, stopping in the living room to pick up her folders, before running out and down the stairs. He heard the door slam behind her, and felt the tears run warm on his cheeks.
IV
Margaret struggled out of her taxi, laden with the files that Li had dumped on her. She fumbled to pay the driver, then hurried into the Ritan Hotel, past the deserted lobby shop with its display of overpriced trinkets, and turned right towards the elevators.
In the short taxi ride from Li’s apartment to her hotel, her distress had turned to anger. How dare Li play with her emotions like that? How could she ever hope to accept his rejection if he could not accept it himself, if he became jealous of any relationship she had with another man, if he was going to succumb to his own weakness every time they were together? And she was just as angry with herself for almost having given way to desires she had been trying to sublimate. Desires she had been forced to sublimate. What had seemed clear and easy and right with Michael just twenty-four hours before was suddenly thrown into confusion again. She needed time to think.
‘Margaret.’ She turned at the sound of Michael’s voice just as the elevator doors slid open.
‘Michael. What are you doing here?’
‘Waiting for you.’ He approached across the vast expanse of marble looking at his watch and smiling ruefully. ‘For the last two hours. You people work long days.’ His face clouded. ‘I wanted to talk to you, Margaret. About this morning.’
‘I wanted to talk to you, too, Michael.’ Margaret sighed. ‘I can’t apologise enough. It was just Li Yan being jealous. Trying to get back at me through you.’ The elevator doors slid shut again.
Michael frowned. ‘I thought you and he were history.’
‘So did I.’
He shuffled awkwardly. ‘Look, Margaret. The thing is, if it gets around that I’m some kind of suspect in a murder investigation, it could completely ruin my connections here in China.’
Margaret couldn’t stop herself laughing. ‘Oh, Michael,’ she said. ‘You’re not a suspect. Li was just playing silly games with the most tenuous of links. There’s no question of anyone thinking you had anything to do with this. You were with me the evening Yuan was killed, you weren’t even in the country when another tw
o of the murders took place.’ She paused, gasping her frustration. ‘What can I say? Forget it. It’s not even an issue.’
He seemed to relax a little then, and smiled. ‘Have you eaten?’ She shook her head. He said, ‘Good, ’cos I booked us a table at a little place I know.’ He checked his watch again. ‘They should still be serving. Just.’
She glanced down at herself. ‘Michael, I’ll have to change first. Fifteen minutes. That’s all. I promise.’
He grinned. ‘OK. Starting from …’ he raised his wrist and began pushing buttons on his watch, ‘… now.’ He started the stopwatch function. She pressed the call button for the elevator.
He held open her hotel room door as she staggered in and dropped her files on the bed, papers spilling out across the bedspread and dropping on the floor. He stooped to start picking them up. ‘Just leave that stuff,’ she said. ‘I’ll get it later.’ She grabbed some fresh underwear from a drawer, and took a pair of jeans and a lemon tee shirt from hangers in the wardrobe. ‘A quick shower,’ she said. ‘I promise I won’t be long.’
He grinned and tapped his watch. ‘Still counting.’
She hurried into the bathroom and quickly stripped off and started the shower running. She caught a glimpse of herself naked in the mirror and remembered being with Michael the night before, his hands gentle on her breasts and buttocks, the great sense of his contained strength and control as he slipped inside her. The steam from the shower misted her reflection and she turned to step into the stream of deliciously hot water.
‘So if I’m no longer the prime suspect, who is?’ she heard Michael call through from the bedroom.
‘It’s a long story,’ she called back.
‘Better make it quick, then. You’ve only got another ten minutes.’
She laughed and started lathering herself with a big soft sponge drizzled with shower gel. ‘Yuan’s father was killed back in the sixties by a group of six Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution.’ She spluttered briefly as she pushed her head back under the shower and let the water run down her face. ‘Yuan was at university in America and didn’t know about it till he got his mother’s diary thirty years later. Seems he came back to take his revenge.’