He gave me a sideways look. ‘You don’t remember?’
I shook my head.
‘It was Tina,’ he said. ‘She said she really wanted to paint Vivian because it was always much more interesting to paint people who weren’t beautiful.’
‘She said that?’
‘Vivian thought, Fuck you. She didn’t want to have anything to do with Tina after that.’
I suspected Tina had said – or meant to say – that she liked painting people who weren’t obviously beautiful – coming from Tina, this would have been a compliment; it was the way she saw herself – but there was little point in trying to explain this to Ralph twenty-seven years later.
‘So that was why you stopped seeing us?’ I said.
He nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘And then I refused to be your best man. That must have made things worse …’
‘I suppose it was a bit of a blow. But, you know – blokes: we get over things like that. Women are different.’ Ralph allowed himself a crumpled grin.
At lunch that day, Ralph had told me he had mentioned to Vivian that I was coming and had asked her if she would like to see me. Her response had been, Not particularly. She wanted to know whether he was going to bring me to the house. Tell me if you do, she said. Why? he said. So you can leave? She hadn’t needed to reply. Women are different. I imagined this was Ralph’s way of saying that Vivian still hadn’t forgiven me. Perhaps she never would.
‘I should have agreed to be your best man,’ I told him. ‘I should have said yes. I still feel bad about that.’ I turned to him. ‘I’m sorry.’
He gave me another of his sideways glances, more quizzical this time, as if trying to gauge what I was up to.
‘Really,’ I said. ‘I am.’
‘At least you came to the wedding.’ He stood aside to let an old woman past. ‘Do you remember what you gave us?’
‘No.’
‘A family bible. We thought that was strange.’
I shrugged. ‘I suppose we felt like we didn’t know you any more. All we knew was, you’d become a Catholic.’ Though we had probably thought it was funny too. Become a Catholic, have you? All right, then. Here’s a bible.
At the time, I told him, I’d had no idea where they were living. I had seen them as a version of Bonnie and Clyde – not just in love, but bound up in each other to such an extent that it removed them from society.
They hadn’t wanted anybody to know where they were living, Ralph said. Once, they had invited a friend to dinner. They refused to give him their address, though. Instead, they met him in a pub and blindfolded him, only allowing him to see again when he was inside their flat.
I asked Ralph if he blindfolded everyone who came round.
‘We wanted our own life,’ he said, ‘with no one interfering.’
‘That’s what I thought.’
‘I mean, I like you – and I like Robin. It’s just that I like Vivian more.’
I fell silent. It seemed that Ralph had got as close to explaining our estrangement as it was possible to get.
By ten o’clock that night, we were in a taxi again, heading back into the centre of Pudong.
‘So you didn’t have sex with Robin?’ Ralph said.
I looked at him. ‘No.’
He held my gaze.
The thought of having sex with Robin had never even entered my head. It was a difficult idea to get across, though, especially to somebody so sceptical: I would sound defensive, if not actually guilty, no matter what I said.
I tried another tack. ‘Look, I’d tell you if I had,’ I said. ‘I’m not trying to hide anything. It’s not like I’d be embarrassed, or ashamed.’
He looked away finally, but didn’t seem convinced.
A few minutes later, he stopped the taxi, saying there was something he wanted to show me. We walked to the next junction. On the corner was a modern office block, neat hedges framing silver revolving doors. Ralph pointed at a spot on the pavement, midway between the building’s entrance and the kerb.
‘I slept there once,’ he said.
Last summer, he had been out by himself, and it had got late. Vivian was in England, visiting family. He was beginning to think he would call it a night when he saw three Chinese men sleeping in a row on the pavement. They looked so comfortable that he lay down beside them. When he woke up, it was raining, and the Chinese men had gone. He was lying on his back on the street, with people stepping all around him.
I smiled. We crossed the road, walking more slowly now. For a while neither of us spoke. The traffic lights changed from red to green, but since there were no cars waiting, nothing happened.
I asked him how he had reacted when Dad died.
‘I remember that,’ he said.
Vivian had phoned him at work, asking him to come home. He knew from her voice that it was important. When he got back to the flat – they lived in South London then, in Grove Park – she sat him down and told him the news. He cried for about fifteen minutes, and that was it. He didn’t cry again. Hands in his pockets, he stared down at his shoes. ‘I liked Goat. Goat was all right.’ He lifted his eyes again and looked back along the road. ‘There’s nothing much here, is there?’ Hailing a passing taxi, he told me we would have a proper night on Friday. He would show me his Shanghai. We could also meet on Thursday if I liked, for lunch.
It was almost eleven by the time I reached my hotel, and I was hungry, but I didn’t feel like going out again. Instead, I walked into the Dream Café on the first floor where a young woman in a black evening gown was seated at a grand piano. Her fine, sleek hair outlined her head so faithfully that I could make out the exact shape of her skull; I could almost feel the tender curve of it against my palm. Apart from the pianist and two chatting waitresses, there was no one else about. I approached the counter and pointed at a sandwich and a can of Singtao beer, then I occupied a table to the left of the piano. From where I was sitting, I couldn’t see the young woman’s face, only her fingers as they drifted over the keys. She took tunes like ‘Come Fly with Me’ and ‘I’ve Got You under My Skin’, which, given the surroundings, were incongruous enough already, and played them with such a halting, melancholy touch that they became laments. Between numbers, she didn’t move from the piano, but sat quite motionless and upright, her hands gripping the leading edge of the stool, her hair falling sheer to the small of her back, and turning dark brown at the ends, like a black cat’s fur in the sun.
That night, as I sat in my room on the seventh floor, looking out over the misty, neon-tinted city, I thought how unlikely it was that one tactless remark from Tina, a girl I hadn’t lived with in more than a quarter of a century, could trigger such a long estrangement. After leaving the house in Eastbourne in September 1984, I had moved up to London, and Tina and I had started seeing each other again, just as I had suspected we might, but we’d both known that it couldn’t last, and the knowledge gave those weeks a beautiful, aching quality, an inbuilt nostalgia, like walking ankle deep in autumn leaves. I still wasn’t sure what to do about Hanne. Somehow I couldn’t imagine going back to her.
Tina and I split up just before Christmas, and I flew to New York with no plans to return for at least a year. The following February, when Hanne rang me, asking if she could visit – the first anniversary of my father’s death was also, of course, her thirty-second birthday – I told her that I didn’t think it would work. Not long afterwards, she wrote me a letter saying that she wouldn’t try and hold me back; if I wanted to be free, I should be free. She had behaved with such grace that I was humbled. Some months later, I heard that Tina had a new boyfriend. This seemed part of the same pattern.
I was on a different path, a path that would lead to Tokyo, Sydney and Los Angeles, and then, in the autumn of 1988, to a flat in West London and a blonde girl in a plum-coloured rubber dress. Her wide green eyes looked clear through me, as if to a different dimension, her intelligence was fierce and instinctive, and her lips burned the first time she
kissed me, on a dark windswept pavement near Portobello Road, so much so that I thought she might be carrying a fever, though she didn’t seem ill, not even remotely. Her face was pure and pale and rare, like something that needed looking after, and I thought, I’ll look after it, and I knew she would let me. What I didn’t know was that we would stay together, and that we would get married, and that there would be, eventually, a miraculous daughter.
Neither my wife nor my daughter had ever seen Ralph. For my daughter, especially, Ralph was a ghost figure, a kind of rumour: she would laugh gaily at the mention of his name, as though I were talking about someone imaginary, someone she didn’t quite believe in. I wondered if, in years to come, she would meet him, as I had once met my Uncle Joe. I wondered what he would say to her.
*
With Ralph busy on Tuesday and Wednesday, I explored Shanghai. I stood in the People’s Park at dawn and watched an old man in blue silk pyjamas walking backwards, holding a transistor radio. I ate steamed crocodile soup with gastrodia tuber in the house where J. G. Ballard used to live. I found a stationery shop on Fuzhou that sold exquisite handmade paper. I came down with a cold. Though exhausted, I couldn’t seem to sleep for more than four hours at a stretch. Some mornings I left my hotel so early that I heard alarm clocks going off as I wandered the empty streets. I was seeing everything off-kilter, through a haze.
When I called Ralph on Thursday to confirm our lunch, he told me that he, too, had been having trouble sleeping. Only the night before, he had dreamt a wild animal was loose in his garden.
‘That’ll be me, then,’ I said.
We both laughed uncertainly, not sure whether such a joke could be made.
I reached his office just after twelve. My suitcase had arrived at last, and I had Ralph’s presents with me. As we crossed the drop-off area outside his building, a taxi honked at us.
Ralph’s head swivelled. ‘All right,’ he shouted in English. ‘Yes.’
He wasn’t angry, or even annoyed. But, like a character in a pantomime, he engaged directly with everything around him. He responded to everything. Kate had thought Ralph looked as if he might not have too long to live, but what Frank’s photos had failed to show was how alert, how vigorous, how humorously combative he was, so much so that sometimes, as in a cartoon, I imagined I could see a set of curving lines in the air to one side of his head, or his shoulder, or his elbow. He might get himself into altercations, even fights, but he didn’t seem like somebody who would die in the near future, and I was glad about that.
The restaurant he took me to – Xin Ji Shi – was airier and more modern than the place we had eaten in on Monday. Once we had a table, and Ralph had ordered drinks, I produced two silver packages from my bag and slid them towards him.
He looked disconcerted, almost indignant. ‘What’s this? I haven’t got you anything.’
‘You were supposed to have them on Monday,’ I said.
Watching him unwrap the smaller of the two presents, I saw that he had his own particular technique. He didn’t tear the wrapping, as most people did. Instead, he peeled off the strips of Sellotape, one by one, then painstakingly unrolled the present out of its paper.
The first package contained some Spanish Lucky Strikes.
‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘I’ll smoke these next.’
The second present was a book. In a recent e-mail, Ralph had told me that he missed nature, and that the nearest countryside to Shanghai was two hours away by plane. With that in mind, I had bought him The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane, a choice I was even more happy with now I had discovered that Ralph, like the author, had a predilection for sleeping in the open air.
Ralph thanked me for the presents and put them carefully to one side, then he signalled to a waiter and ordered more beer. A discussion began, and it was a while before the waiter walked away and Ralph was able to translate. He had asked the waiter for two new beers, he told me, but the waiter thought he was ordering two new beers – that Ralph wanted a different make of beer, in other words – and it had taken Ralph three or four attempts to explain that he wanted two new beers, as in two more of the beers he’d ordered previously. I was beginning to think that he deliberately provoked these little flurries of misunderstanding. He seemed to feed off the confusion that flourished in the gap between the two cultures.
While Ralph and the waiter had been talking, I had been thinking about Monday night, and how, at one point, we had touched on the subject of the perfect murder. We had agreed that there were moments when an ideal opportunity seems to present itself. I had given Ralph an example from my own life – a chance encounter with two Esperanto speakers on an isolated beach in north-east Brazil. Ralph had listened, nodding, and then described a journey through Portugal in 1982. It was the height of summer, he told me, and the doors of the train had been left open so as to allow air to circulate. Outside, the landscape was barren, empty, just treeless hills and rocks and dried-up riverbeds. There was no one in their carriage apart from a hippie backpacker. At that time, he and Vivian had a private language, Ralph said – they still did, in fact – and they could often have whole conversations without so much as opening their mouths. It occurred to them, looking at each other, that they had taken an instant and violent dislike to the backpacker. It also occurred to them that, since they both had knives on them, they could easily get rid of him. I asked Ralph if they were carrying flick knives, as they had in Eastbourne. No, these were different, he said. Short, curved blades. Probably used for harvesting grapes. In any case. They would attack the hippie, then push him from the moving train. By the time his body was found, they would be in another country – Spain, or Morocco. There would be no witnesses, and no motive. Nothing to link them to the crime. But you didn’t do it, I said to him. We discussed it for half an hour, he said, but in the end we thought, Best not.
Now, all of a sudden, I had a question for Ralph, and it wasn’t one that appeared on my list. In fact, it wasn’t one I’d thought of before.
‘When we were in Eastbourne,’ I said slowly, ‘did you ever think about killing me and Robin?’
He glanced down at the table, smiling.
‘You did, didn’t you?’ I said.
‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘For about a week.’
I laughed despite myself. ‘How were you going to do it?’
He watched me through his cigarette smoke, head at a jaunty angle. ‘You remember the Rover Robin bought?’
I nodded.
‘We were going to doctor the brakes,’ he said.
They would make it look as if the brake cable had frayed or snapped. It was the kind of thing that happened, wasn’t it, in old cars? Thinking of how the gear lever had come away in Robin’s hand, I nodded again. They would suggest a joint outing to Beachy Head, Ralph went on, a place Robin and I seemed fond of. Once on the cliff top, though, he and Vivian would announce that they felt like stretching their legs, and they would walk back down, leaving us to drive …
‘And there’s that steep hill,’ I said. ‘Lorries were always going out of control when we were young and knocking down the wall at the top of our road –’
‘It’s a one-in-seven gradient,’ Ralph said.
I imagined the scenario – Robin stamping on the brake pedal, and the Rover gathering momentum. They don’t make them like they used to.
‘It’s not exactly foolproof,’ I said. ‘I mean, it might not have worked …’
‘No.’ Ralph looked at me and smiled again.
The food came: pork belly in a deep black pot – hongshao rou – winter bamboo green vegetables, and sticky red dates.
‘The pork’s very good here,’ Ralph said.
Obviously, he and Vivian had found it hard living in the house with us, I said, but they seemed to have arrived with preconceived notions. Why else would they have had a Chubb lock fitted on their door right at the beginning?
They’d had the lock fitted, Ralph said, because Robin and I had walked in on Vivian when she was
asleep in bed. We had poked around in their private things. Made all sorts of derogatory remarks.
I found myself staring at Ralph again.
‘Don’t tell me you don’t remember,’ he said.
As he spoke, I had a vision of Robin in Paradise. He was wearing his overcoat, and hunched over furtively in the corner by the clothes cupboard. I saw him send a sharp glance to his left. Christ, he hissed, she’s in here. Quick! He meant we should leave the room – though by then, of course, it was already too late.
I shook my head. ‘Were we drunk?’
‘I don’t know. It happened during the day, while I was at work. We only had the lock fitted after that.’ Ralph poured the last of the beer into our glasses, then put the empty bottle down. ‘You ask this time.’ He told me the Chinese for ‘beer’.
‘Vivian really hated being in that house,’ he went on when the waiter had gone. ‘You kept drugs in the larder, next to our food. We didn’t do drugs. And we couldn’t stand those friends of yours who were always hanging round. Graham, and Toby. And that doctor – I’ve forgotten his name.’
‘So how come you were there,’ I said, ‘if it was all so difficult?’ ‘I don’t know. It seemed the right thing to do at the time.’ He lit a Shanghai Gold. ‘I probably shouldn’t have put her through it.’
I helped myself to more hongshao rou, then I brought up the story Dad had told me about Ralph breaking into the house in the middle of the night. Was that true?
‘Yes, I think so,’ he said.
He had ridden down to Eastbourne with Vivian, but Dad disapproved of her so strongly that he’d had to smuggle her into the house. Climbing on to the roof of the coal shed, he had forced the box-room window and let Vivian in through the back door. They had gone to bed in Robin’s old room. Vivian had crept out of the house at dawn and walked down to the seafront. After spending a few hours with Dad, Ralph went to look for her. They hadn’t agreed on a meeting-place, and no one had mobiles in those days, but he didn’t have too much trouble finding her. She was the only girl asleep on the beach.
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