My Favourite Wife

‘Where did they put you, dear?’ Mrs Devlin said, as an assortment of languages buzzed over the steaming bowls of shark’s fin soup.

‘Gubei New Area,’ Becca said, smiling across at Mad Mitch, who had accidentally made eye contact. He looked startled at this gesture of warmth.

‘Gubei?’ Mrs Devlin smiled her approval, and Becca saw that she had been a beauty. And she still was, if you got past the hard, glossy veneer and the professional charm and the effects of the booze. ‘Lovely, isn’t it? Good schools. We were in Gubei for the first two years when we came over.’ A drink was placed before Mrs Devlin and she turned viciously on the waitress. ‘I said Amaretto with no ice. This is Amaretto with ice. Americans and Germans may drink Amaretto with ice, but I am neither an American nor a bloody German. I am English. And we do not need to have every drink so full of ice that we can’t taste it. Take this away and bring me what I ordered.’ Mrs Devlin turned back to Becca, all smiles again. ‘So how is it? Have you settled in yet?’

Lost for words, Becca watched the young waitress walk away with the offending Amaretto. Then she looked back at Tess Devlin, and tried to put it into words. ‘It’s different. I was expecting – I don’t even know what I was expecting. Temples and teahouses, I suppose. Conrad and Kipling. I had this romantic image of Shanghai. I have it still, I guess. The taste of the East on my face…Silly, really.’

Mrs Devlin patted her hand, as if to say that it was not silly at all.

‘I lived abroad as a child,’ Becca said. ‘I love London, but England is hardly my home, not the way it is for Bill. So I can’t be one of those expats that tries to recreate the old country. You know -ordering Marmite online and buying the latest comedy DVDs and obsessing about football results.’ She picked up her big white soup spoon and contemplated it. ‘We have a beautiful apartment, a wonderful ayi, and Holly loves her school.’

Mrs Devlin pushed away her shark’s fin soup and lit a cigarette. ‘And the money’s good, isn’t it?’ she said, just the hint of a smile, the smoke streaming from her nostrils. ‘And it’s forty per cent tax for high earners in the UK, and only sixteen per cent in Hong Kong, where we cough up.’

‘The money’s very good indeed,’ Becca said, keen to show that she was sensitive to the realities of the working world. Sometimes she felt that she should keep Kipling and Conrad to herself.

Becca couldn’t tell this woman she had just met – this powerful, volatile, half-cut woman – the real problem. And the real problem was that she no longer saw her husband as much as she had in London, or as much as she would have liked, or as much as she needed. She missed him, and she couldn’t even mention it to Bill, because that would only be more pressure, and what could he possibly do about it? So Becca smiled brightly, the game younger wife. ‘I guess it just takes time to adjust,’ she said.

‘It’s not an equal opportunity city,’ Mrs Devlin said thoughtfully. She sucked her cigarette, exhaled through her mouth now, her green eyes squinting in the Marlboro mist. ‘It’s very different for men and women. You’ll see that. Perhaps you’ve seen it already.’

Becca thought of the girls of Paradise Mansions coming out to meet the cars, and she wondered if Mrs Devlin had seen them too.

Tess Devlin leaned close to Becca. She smelled of Amaretto and cigarettes and Giorgio Armani. ‘I know it’s hard sometimes, but look at it this way,’ she continued. ‘A few years out here and the pair of you will be set up for life.’

A drink was placed before Mrs Devlin. Amaretto, no ice. Without acknowledging the waitress – taking what she had wanted all along as nothing more than her right, Becca thought – she cradled the glass in the palm of her hand, checking the temperature, shooting the waitress a withering look that said, Oh yes, I know that old trick, where you just fish the ice out and don’t bring me a fresh drink. Then she slowly sipped her drink, her genuinely fresh drink, giving Becca a conspiratorial look that said, They can’t fool me. The waitress vanished.

‘Oh yes, Gubei New Area is lovely,’ Mrs Devlin said thoughtfully. ‘Dear old Gubei. You hardly know you’re in China at all.’

There was something wrong with the rest room. Bill felt it the moment he walked in. It appeared to be empty but – why was there a bucket and a mop in the corner? And what was that sound? What was going on in here?

He advanced with caution, his gaze shifting to the short row of cubicles. And that was strange too, because the doors were all ajar. But he could definitely hear someone. Someone who sounded as if they were trying to give birth.

Then Bill saw him. The old cleaner with his tattered trousers and filthy drawers around his ankles, sitting on the throne with the door flung open, grunting and groaning and straining, as if there wasn’t enough fibre in the world to free his strangled bowels.

He was in the furthest cubicle from the entrance, and perhaps that was his only nod towards decorum. For he considered Bill without a trace of embarrassment.

In fact Bill thought the man looked at him as though he was fresh off a British Airways flight from Heathrow, while he had been sitting there for a thousand years.

FIVE (#ulink_f45d275a-0f96-5e7a-91d5-74fec6aa6e86)

Bill stood at the window and watched the courtyard, waiting for Tiger to appear. A large black BMW with an elderly man at the wheel stood by with its engine running. A young woman in glasses came out of the opposite block and walked smiling towards the car and the man, who could only be her father. I recognise her, Bill thought. The librarian. So we are not the only ones. There are other regular people here, too.

‘Daddy? Daddy?’ His daughter’s voice, high and demanding. ‘Do you know what planet we’re on, Daddy?’

Bill had worked out that the silver Porsche came for the tall girl on Wednesday and Friday nights. It was there most Sunday afternoons. There were also sporadic visits during the week, delivering her back to Paradise Mansions early in the morning, or collecting her at strange hours. Her husband, he thought. Yeah, right.

Bill wondered what excuses the man told his wife. Maybe he didn’t tell her anything. Maybe he didn’t need to make excuses. Maybe that was the way it worked out here.

‘Daddy?’ Tugging at his sleeve now. He looked down at Holly and smiled, his fingertips touching her face. ‘Do you know what planet we’re on, Daddy?’

She was holding up a complicated contraption of string and wool and balls and cardboard for his inspection. Doris the ayi stood behind her, smiling proudly.

‘Made at school,’ the ayi said. ‘Very clever. Very genius.’

Bill looked carefully at the dangling strings and balls.

‘It’s the planets,’ Holly explained.

‘It’s really beautiful, angel,’ Bill said, studying the contraption more closely. In her matchstick fingers, his daughter held a champagne cork. Blue wool came from the cork and passed through a paper plate that had been painted black and embellished with sticky gold stars. Below the plate, which he now recognised represented the night sky, or perhaps infinite space, the wool dropped to hold a collection of different-sized painted balls revolving around a large orange cardboard sun.

One little finger pointed to a yellow ball with a wavering purple ring daubed around it. ‘That’s Saturn,’ Holly said confidently. She touched the smallest ball. ‘Pluto – furthest from the sun.’ A larger red ball. ‘Mars, of course.’ She turned her shining blue eyes up at her father. ‘I was going to use yellow cardboard for the sun but…um…I used orange instead.’

‘Personally, I think orange is even better,’ Bill said. ‘That’s just my opinion.’

‘And this is us,’ Holly said, touching a green-and-blue ball. ‘That’s earth. That’s where we are…and guess what, Daddy.’

‘What, darling?’ Did he know that much about the planets when he was four? He didn’t think so. In fact, he didn’t know that much about the planets at thirty-one.

‘The brightest stars you can see are already dead,’ she said confidently. ‘We see their image, and they look nice and lovely, but they died a long time ago.’

The brightest stars were dead already? Could this possibly be true? He didn’t know if he should correct her or not. She knew far more than he did.

‘It’s just something I learned,’ Holly said.

The ayi ushered her off to brush her teeth before going to school, and Bill heard Becca in the bedroom on the phone to her father. He glanced at his watch. Breakfast time in Shanghai meant that it was around midnight back home.

Becca called her father almost every day. Bill felt a pang of guilt, because he hadn’t phoned his own father since they’d arrived.

Perhaps he should give the old man a call, he thought, and immediately dismissed the idea. They wouldn’t have anything to talk about. Or they would get into one of their pointless rows about nothing, hang up angry, and that would be even worse.

It was different when his mother was still alive. They were a real family then. But they had stopped being a real family fifteen years ago. Bill and his father tried hard, but they both knew that it was doomed to failure. Two men couldn’t be a family. There were just not enough of them, there was no centre, no heart, and there were too many rough edges. Too much testosterone, too many rows. Everything and nothing proved reason for an argument, and then Bill was out of the house and off to university, working in the holidays and weekends because he had to, it was the only way he could afford to stick it, and because he didn’t want to go home. It made him feel desperately sad to admit it.

Get the old man out here, Bill thought as down in the courtyard the limo appeared and Tiger pulled up behind the silver Porsche. Yes, get the old man out here for a few weeks. Show him the sights. Let him spend some quality time with his granddaughter, who he loved to bits. That would work.

His feeling that family life had ended forever didn’t change until he met Becca six years later. It was Becca who made him believe that he had a chance to belong to another family. He fell in love with her the night he met her, and it was like starting all over again.

Bill turned as Holly and the ayi came back into the room. His daughter still had the home-made universe in her hands and he smiled at her and got down on his knees to better admire the intricate design.

That’s what love is, he thought, as down in the courtyard came the sound of a Porsche 911 pulling away. A chance to start again.

For five years, between the age of eleven and sixteen, Becca and Alice Greene had been best friends.

It was one of those delirious all-consuming friendships of childhood, gloriously isolationist, a time of shared secrets and energetic recklessness – one night Alice had pierced Becca’s ears with a needle that she had heated over a candle, and it was a bloodbath that they laughed about for years. But it was the kind of friendship that was always slightly out of whack.

They were both boarders at a school in Buckinghamshire, a grim Gothic building surrounded by lush wooded hills, like a setting from a fairy tale. When their friendship began they had dressed the same, and wore their hair in the same fashion, and both said they wanted to be journalists when they grew up. Naturally they loved it when their schoolmates and their teachers said that they looked like twins. Yet they were not twins.

Becca’s father made a decent living at Reuters, but the school would have been out of reach without a scholarship, while Alice’s family owned a string of restaurants on Boat Quay in Singapore, and Alice had that easy confidence that comes from growing up with money that you haven’t earned.

The largesse was one-sided – Becca enjoyed family holidays in Bali with Alice and her parents, shopping sprees in Hong Kong courtesy of Alice’s credit card, first-class flights to Singapore during the long summer break. Singy, Alice called it, and before she was twelve years old, Becca was calling it Singy too. Coming down to Singy, Bec? So when Becca learned that Alice was working as a freelance journalist in Shanghai, it felt like the best news in the world.