The First Wife: An unputdownable page turner with a twist

by Jill Childs

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ I said quietly. ‘Grown-ups just get cross sometimes. I’m sure they’ll be friends again soon.’

  Her eyes slid briefly to meet mine, her look wary.

  We were just clearing up, Lucy helping by stacking her plate in the dishwasher, when Caroline strode back in.

  ‘She’s gone. No notice, nothing.’

  I carried on clearing up, wiping a cloth over the kitchen table. ‘Maybe she’ll come back when she’s cooled down.’

  ‘I doubt it. She’s cleared her room.’

  I hesitated. ‘Cleared it?’

  ‘Pretty much. She’s taken her suitcases and everything. Called a taxi.’ She paced up and down. ‘Unbelievable. Now what? I’m meeting the hotel people tomorrow. The corporate team. I’ve got to work on a presentation. What the hell do I do with Lucy?’

  Lucy traipsed out of the kitchen on her own, her eyes downcast. I remembered her angular body, all elbows and knees, huddled against mine in my vast bed, and her tiny, icy feet reaching for my warm legs.

  ‘I can take her, if you like? Just until after your meeting.’

  Caroline looked at me as if she’d never seen me before. Her eyes brightened.

  ‘Really? Would you?’

  I shrugged, feeling myself flush. She seemed so pleased. ‘Why not?’

  Caroline strode across to me, grabbed my hand and gave it an impulsive squeeze. ‘That would be amazing.’

  I looked down at her fingers, with their neatly manicured nails, wrapped firmly round mine. I found myself smiling too. ‘Maybe I could check out the local nurseries too? It might do her good to make some friends.’

  ‘Absolutely.’ Caroline’s eyes were still shining. ‘Thanks, Sophie.’ Abruptly, the moment passed. She dropped my hand and moved away, brisk again.

  I wondered suddenly what I’d offered… what I could do to entertain Lucy? I thought about her messy hair. ‘Why don’t I walk her into the village and see if the hairdresser can even her out?’

  She nodded, friendly with relief. ‘Or I could put you on the insurance for the nanny car.’ She reached for her phone. ‘It’s just a little second-hand one. Tanya used it. Good plan?’

  I nodded. It made sense. It was a long walk to the shops I’d found that morning and I wasn’t sure where else to go.

  She beamed. ‘I’ll call them right now.’ At the door, she turned back, as animated now as she was earlier angry. ‘Help yourself to lunch. There’s plenty in the freezer for Lucy’s tea, just in case I’m not back.’

  I went to get the stuffed dog and colouring book I’d bought earlier for Lucy and then set out through the house to find her.

  She was sitting on the carpet in her attic bedroom, quietly playing with dolls and teddies. She didn’t look up as I entered. I hesitated, trying to remember what it was like, being three. She must be upset, surely? About Tanya leaving and about her mother being so cross with her.

  ‘I thought we might go out and play for a bit. Do you fancy that?’

  She didn’t respond. She was screening me out, focussed instead on her toys.

  I went to the window, biding my time, trying not to crowd her. The curtains were swept back, letting in shafts of weak autumnal sunlight. The side pane revealed a partial view of the front drive and Caroline’s car parked there. Something troubled me. Something wasn’t right in this house and I didn’t know what or why, I just felt it.

  The main windows, along the side of the building, were at the same angle as those in my bedroom but two storeys higher. They gave a dramatic panorama along the wild sweep of the cliffs and sea beyond, a view cut into even stripes by the row of painted vertical bars secured to the window frame.

  I leaned my forehead against the cold paint and smelled the iron of the bars. I could see why they’d been installed. They were for Lucy’s own safety, to protect her from the danger of such a high floor. They were designed to stop her from the slightest possibility of levering opening a window and falling through to the ground, far below.

  But it was hard too not to see the bars as sinister. They seemed further evidence that this small, silent child was trapped inside a home which was actually little more than a prison.

  Two

  Caroline

  I fell in love with Dominic the moment I saw him. He was that sort of man.

  We were at a Chinese New Year fireworks party in Mid-Levels. Friends had a flat at the top of a stubby fifteen-floor housing block and they’d taken over the communal rooftop for the night.

  They’d rigged up huge speakers, blasting out dance music, and set up trestle tables, covered with white cloths and tons of food and drink. It was catered, of course. All the parties were. Demure Chinese waiters in tuxedos and white gloves were in constant circulation with trays of drinks and nibbles, everything from dim sum to mini burgers and chips served in twists of newspaper. They were sheets of The South China Morning Post, not The Daily Mail, but even so, it was a nod to Home.

  I’d just moved to a new job that year in the HR department of one of the big banks and bought my own place, thanks mostly to my father. It was a smart harbour-view apartment a few blocks higher than this one. I was in my late twenties, having fun and partying hard, the world at my feet.

  That night, I was wearing my favourite red dress, with a low neckline. I was all curves and I knew it. It was cold, a breeze reaching up from the water below. Late January can be chilly in the evenings. I really needed a shawl, but I didn’t want to cover up. Despite the chill, the air was moist with the hint of humidity which never quite left Hong Kong and rich with the rising smell of sap.

  The guy from the investment wing of the bank who’d asked me along – not a date exactly, just an expression of friendly interest – had started flirting outrageously with me, leaning in too close and clumsily trying to drape his jacket round my shoulders. I laughed and joked but I also kept my distance. I didn’t mind messing around a bit with him, but he definitely wasn’t my type.

  And then I saw Dominic. He stood to one side with a group of young men, all smoking cigars and drinking champagne. He looked more sophisticated than the usual crowd and I was intrigued, partly because I knew most of the Hong Kong expats, at least by sight. He was tall and dark and yes, handsome, and, best of all, debonair.

  The guy from investments – was his name John? I don’t remember – saw me looking.

  ‘Not him,’ he said, a little too quickly.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Probably gay.’

  I didn’t believe him for a minute. ‘You know him?’

  ‘Dominic something. An investment guy.’

  John went back to trying to worm his way closer to me, stroking my arm to warm me up, exclaiming at my goose bumps. I detached myself from him as soon as I reasonably could, when he went down into the building in search of the bathroom, and kept my eye on Dominic, biding my time.

  There was a general move forwards when it was time for the fireworks to start. Everyone surged closer to the edge of the roof and stared down across the dark mass of vegetation, dotted with residential buildings with brightly lit windows, towards the harbour far below.

  Someone switched the speakers to Hong Kong radio and the soundtrack for the fireworks blared out, echoing through the night. All eyes focussed on the harbour as the display began. The water was crammed with boats of all sizes, from ferries and cruisers to junks. The informal flotilla was lit each time a fresh volley of fireworks erupted into the night sky, with bursts of red, green or yellow light, steadily filling with clouds of smoke.

  There was a fractional delay between the music relayed through our speakers and the pulse of the bangs, screams and fizzes of the fireworks. It made me feel strangely disconnected from the scene below, as if we were watching it on film at a later date, as if the fireworks and people were of another time. I’d had a few glasses of wine by then. Maybe that was also partly to blame.

  I’d made a point of positioning myself close to Dominic. Now I turned and smiled up a
t him, emboldened by alcohol, and said, ‘Is this your first time?’

  He smiled down at me. ‘It is. Although usually I find first times a bit over-rated, don’t you? Give me experience any day.’

  He lifted his cigar to his lips and puffed, turning the end red. I looked away, breathing in the heady smell of the smoke, feeling myself flush. I loathed cigarette smoke, but this was different. And a cigar looked right in his hand, it looked stylish.

  As the fireworks exploded, he leaned in so close to me that I felt the warmth of his breath on my cheek. ‘Imagine that harbour a hundred years ago. The junks and fishing boats, the people, drawn here from mainland China, all here to chase a dream, to build a future. And they did.’

  I blinked, taking in the skyscrapers, their windows and polished chrome flashing with bursting colour. It wasn’t exactly what I’d been feeling but it was close.

  ‘That’s Hong Kong for you,’ I said. ‘City of dreams.’

  He nodded, his eyes forward now, avoiding mine. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Opportunity. Isn’t that what draws us all here?’

  I considered. Why was I still here? My parents had long since moved on. I could too. But where? I didn’t belong here, not really, but I knew more people here than in any other city.

  I turned back to him. ‘Where were you before?’

  He shrugged. ‘Singapore. London. LA. It felt like Hong Kong’s turn.’

  I smiled. ‘Lucky old Hong Kong.’

  He smiled back. ‘More like, lucky old me.’

  The fireworks ended then and John was back – he grabbed my arm and we fell into a taxi, pretty drunk, heading on to a nightclub in Tsim Sha Tsui with a cluster of others from the party. It was an edgy all-night place where we drank over-priced cocktails and pretended to be embarrassed by the hard-faced, semi-naked Chinese women serving drinks, whilst actually checking them out as much as the men, only in our case not because we fancied them but because we wanted to know how our bodies compared.

  I thought about Dominic again a few days later when I sat down to write a long email to my oldest friend, Sophie, one of the few people left in my life who’d known me as a girl. Funny how that happened. How the people who stayed friends in later life weren’t the ones you’d most liked but the steady, quiet ones who could be relied on to reply. I found it easier, too, to write to someone I never expected to see. Sophie and I had nothing in common. We hadn’t had for a long time. But we did share a past.

  I thought about him again the next day when I found myself in one of the block’s unreliable, mirrored lifts with a local man from one of the middle-class Chinese families who shared the Mid-Levels housing block with young western professionals like me. City of dreams, I thought. What brought you here?

  And again that evening when I passed the elderly Chinese women practising tai chi, their movements slow and stately and flowing, in the manicured patch of grass near the gates.

  These families had buggies and child’s tricycles and shoes piled on the landing outside their front doors. They didn’t reply when I smiled and attempted to say ‘Hello!’ or ‘Good morning!’ in my atonal Cantonese.

  I had an absurdly spacious apartment, all parquet polished floors and rugs with vast air conditioning units set into the windows and heavy wooden ceiling fans. I wondered now, as I kicked off my shoes and pulled open the family-sized fridge for a cold drink, what search for opportunity brought them here and what they made of their European neighbour, with my casual wealth and party lifestyle – how they felt about the fact I commanded three whole bedrooms for myself in this absurdly over-crowded city while they crammed three generations into theirs.

  From the first, Dominic always set me thinking. He stirred me up. He made me see things differently.

  * * *

  I didn’t see him again for a while and I realised I was annoyed. I’d imagined I’d made an impression, that he might make an effort to find out more about me and even get in touch. It wouldn’t have been hard. For a week or so, I made a special effort each morning as I got ready for work. I picked out my smartest jackets and wore my favourite silk shirts underneath them, just in case, and kept a sharp eye out every time I crossed a busy street in Central or met friends in a bar after hours. But there was no sign of him.

  Then, one Sunday, a friend of a friend was given access to the bank’s junk and I was asked along.

  It was March by then and the weather was all over the place. Overcast and cool one day and hot and humid the next, a premonition of the summer to come.

  That Sunday was the first really hot day of the year – it must have reached about eighty. I remember standing on the quay with a funky cotton shoulder bag I’d bought in New York. I was wearing a halter-necked top and cut-off shorts and the sun was pleasant on my bare legs. I gazed out across the harbour through designer sunglasses, excited about the day and imagining how I looked, part of the in-crowd here, and felt a sudden surge of optimism.

  I was still deciding how much longer I’d stay in Hong Kong. I had a decent network here, partly thanks to several years at the American School, although many of the people I’d known had already moved on. My parents weren’t too far away, in Singapore. That didn’t hurt.

  But I also felt displaced and at times – despite the frenetic party scene that came with ex-pat life – lonely. I’d lived in so many cities, attended so many schools, that I had no roots. I didn’t belong anywhere. Hong Kong could be an aggressive city – intense, brittle and raucous.

  Some Saturdays, I took a taxi down to Wanchai or jumped on the MTR up to Mong Kok and wandered around the side streets, looking at shops there and poking around the street stalls. Everything was for sale. Baby turtles and crabs crawled endlessly round the bottom of washing-up bowls on the pavement. Squat women chewed and spat, sitting guard on stools in the middle of curtains of clothes, hung on cardboard hangers and packed along metal rails.

  The pavements were sticky underfoot with animal blood and congealing fat. Hatchets crunched through bone and sinew as street butchers hacked up carcasses and hung body parts on display. Whole legs with trotters still attached. Innards, shining and slippery and dark with flies. The districts smelled of slaughter, overlaid with the sour, smoky scent of boiling cooking fat as hawkers fried up sugary snacks.

  On all sides, multi-storey tower blocks rose, some crumbling, some gleaming, all over-crowded, every tiny apartment stuffed with people. Washing stuck out from windows on extended poles, drying in the pollution. Hallways and stairwells were crammed with bicycles and scooters and toy cars. It was one of the most congested cities in the world and there was excitement in that, but oppression too.

  I had a lot of freedom. I recognised that. On good days, I pretended to myself that I was the star of a TV documentary, exploring exotic Hong Kong and turning a smiling, ironically bemused face to the camera as I explained strange delicacies to the viewers back home. I thought of the words I’d use to write to Sophie about it all. Unlike New York, I never felt intimidated here. People left you alone. I felt safe, as a young woman, to potter around in public and poke my nose into someone else’s culture, someone else’s way of life. There was no danger, no hassle.

  But in a way, that sense of being ignored, of being shut out, was also difficult. Dominic’s words had kindled something in me. A restlessness. I wondered what they thought about me, those old ladies with bent backs and lined faces who put fruit in thin plastic bags and took my Hong Kong dollars without ever looking me in the eye? Those bare-chested men, muscles glistening with sweat, who cycled through the chaos and clamour, laden down with brooms or buckets for sale, steering expertly round me when I was the only person in the street not to understand their cries and therefore not get out of the way?

  But that Sunday, I looked out at the stripes of sunlight glancing off the water and the thick traffic of boats criss-crossing the harbour and out towards the outlying islands beyond, ferries and junks, launches and fishing boats, and I thought yes, this is extraordinary. I won’t liv
e here forever, this will never be my permanent home, but for a while, as an experience, this is amazing.

  And just then someone cried: ‘Here she comes!’ and I turned, shielded my eyes from the sun with my hand, and saw the bank’s pleasure junk scudding towards us through the water, cutting its way through a tide of bobbing plastic and pungent patches of spilt diesel. A sinewy middle-aged Chinese man stood in the prow with a coil of thick, blackened rope round his forearm and prepared to lasso the bollard beside us, judging the shrinking distance as we approached, his eyes always on his work, never on us, the white-faced milling crowd jostling, eager to get on board.

  The staff around us, short and stout in crisp white uniform, shouldered the voluminous cool bags and lifted crates of Tsing Tao beer and soft drinks and readied themselves to jump on board in their sandals and start setting up the galley for the day to come.

  We were almost ready to push off again, ropes loosened, when Dominic appeared.

  One of the lads from the bank waved and shouted: ‘Hey! Move yourself!’

  He just smiled and quickened his pace without looking flustered, as if he knew we’d wait, why wouldn’t we? He wore cream cotton slacks, perfectly ironed, a blue polo shirt and dark, rubber-soled shoes.

  He carried himself well, tall with a long, lolloping stride. His hair was tousled as if he wasn’t long out of bed and his chin dark with stubble. I wondered if he did his own ironing or had a maid. I wondered where he’d been last night and if he’d woken alone this morning or if he were late because someone had kept him in bed. Someone he found hard to leave.

  He reached us and jumped onto the side of the boat as it started to turn and move away from the harbourside.