My Favourite Wife (11 page)

But that wasn’t what she meant.

She apologised again and said that he was a nice guy really, Guy was, and Bill got a bit confused there, because the boyfriend’s name was Guy, and they had a little laugh about that, and that was good, because she had such a beautiful face when she laughed, and then she said that Bill shouldn’t think they were all idiots and Bill said ah, don’t worry about it, he had no objection to spoilt rich kids with no manners, they had to drink somewhere, and she said that was not her, and he didn’t know her at all, getting angry now, and he said,
Well, prove it – let me have your phone number and I might give you a call sometime
, because he really didn’t give a fuck any more and he was sick of not having a girlfriend who looked like her and sick of being lonely and sick of feeling that he had never had the chance to suck all the juice out of being young.

So she wrote her number on the palm of his hand and by the time he got back to his rented room on the other side of town his heart fell to his boots because the eight digits had almost worn off.

But he still had the number. Just.

And that was how he met Becca. She was the first one in that
place, the very first, who didn’t look straight through him, or look at him as if he was dirt, and he would always love her for that.

And he got scared sometimes. Because his life was unthinkable without her. Because he wondered what would have happened to him if he had not met Becca. He thought – what then?

Who would have loved me?

The three of them walked hand in hand through a warehouse full of old masters.

There was Picasso’s
Weeping Woman
, Van Gogh’s
Starry Night
and Edward Hopper’s
Nighthawks
. There were Degas dancers, Monet waterlilies and haystacks, Cézanne apples and mountains. There were Lichtenstein’s comic-book lovers, Jasper Johns’ flags and Warhol’s Marilyn and Elvis and soup cans. There were canvases stacked everywhere, and on many of them the paint was still wet.

‘Do one-two-three,’ Holly commanded, happy to have a parent on each hand, so Bill and Becca went, ‘One-two-three!’ and swung their daughter up between them, her thin legs flying as they walked past Gauguin native girls, a pile of
Last Suppers
and
Mona Lisas
by the score.

‘One-two-three!’ they chanted, and Holly laughed wildly as they walked past Hockney swimming pools, Jackson Pollock splatter paintings and sailboats by Matisse.

They stopped at the end of an aisle where a girl in her late teens was painting half a dozen
Sunflowers
all at once. She worked quickly, occasionally glancing at a dog-eared
History of Modern Art
.

‘It looks absolutely like the picture in the book,’ Holly said.

‘It looks exactly like the picture in the book,’ Becca said.

‘Is it really real, Daddy?’ Holly said.

The girl artist smiled. ‘Everything is fake except your mother,’ she said. ‘Old Shanghai saying.’

Becca ordered four
Sunflowers
to go with the
Starry Night
and
The Sower
that she had already bought. She laughed happily, in a
way that she hadn’t laughed for a long time. Vincent Van Gogh was going to fill the walls of their new home.

They caught a cab to the Bund, which by now Bill had learned to called the Waitan, ‘above the sea’, and finally they saw the jazz band in the bar of the Peace Hotel.

The six musicians were in their eighties now, the very same bunch of swing-obsessed Chinese boys who had been playing when the Japanese army marched into Shanghai a lifetime ago, and as the waitress fussed over Holly’s hair and Bill and Becca sipped their Tsingtaos while the band swaggered through Glenn Miller’s ‘String of Pearls’, for a few sweet dreaming minutes Becca thought it truly seemed as though the old world had never been pulled apart.

The next day Bill came back from work early and joined his daughter at the window. Devlin had packed him off home. He wanted Bill’s family to be happy. He wanted them to stay.

‘That’s my favourite one,’ Holly said, indicating a half-starved ginger kitten that was patrolling the perimeter of the fountain. ‘That’s the best one.’

There were no pets allowed in Paradise Mansions but from their window Holly would watch the stray cats who haunted the courtyard – emaciated creatures that preened themselves in the shade of the straggly flower beds, or lapped delicately from the pools of water created by the mother-and-child fountain, or gnawed at bones they had foraged from the rows of huge black rubbish bins in an alleyway behind the main building.

Bill laughed. ‘So why do you like her best?’

Holly thought about it. ‘She’s the smallest.’

‘Shall we feed her, angel?’

Holly’s eyes lit up. ‘Shall we feed her? Shall we, Daddy?’ Holly hopped around with excitement while Bill got a carton of milk from the fridge and a saucer from the cupboard. Becca,
in the bedroom getting ready to go out, frowned doubtfully, called something about fleas, but Bill and Holly were out of the apartment before she really had time to object.

Down in the courtyard, they watched from a respectful distance while the ginger waif lapped up its saucer of semi-skimmed and then took itself off to a flower bed where it collapsed with contentment in the dirt. Bill and Holly approached tentatively. The ginger kitten permitted Holly to stroke its back. Then Bill was suddenly aware that they were not alone.

The tall girl was standing there watching them with the cat. She was wearing a green
qipao
that made her long, slim body look even longer and her hair was hanging down. She was dressed to go out.

‘Hello there,’ she said, smiling at Holly, and Bill saw that she was holding his jacket. She had had it dry cleaned, and it was still in a cellophane wrapper that said Da Zhong American Laundry. He could see that they had not managed to remove the handprint.

‘Tse-tse,’
she said, holding out his jacket. ‘Thank you so much.’

‘Bu ke-qi,’
he said.

‘That means “you are welcome”,’ Holly told her, and they both laughed and the tall girl touched Holly’s hair. ‘So fair,’ she said, ‘I adore her,’ and that was the first time he really heard her English, and the strange weight that she put on certain words, and the unfathomable choices she made with the language.
I adore her. It
somehow clanged. And yet it wasn’t wrong. He could not say that it was wrong.

He held out his hand and she shook it lightly and awkwardly and quickly, as though she had never shaken hands with anyone in her life. Her hand was small and cool.

‘Bill Holden,’ he said, and he touched his daughter’s head. ‘And this one is Holly.’

‘Li JinJin,’ she said, and he knew that she was putting her family name first, in the Chinese fashion, the family coming before everything, the family name forever inseparable from the first name.

‘Hello, Holly,’ she said. Holding the slit of her
qipao
together with a modest gesture, she crouched down so that their eyes were on the same level. ‘What are you up to with your daddy?’

Holly squinted at her. ‘We’re look aftering this cat,’ she said, and the woman and the child silently contemplated the mangy ginger cat as it lolled in the flower bed. Bill sensed that JinJin didn’t know quite what to say about the stray moggy. The Chinese were not sentimental about animals.

Bill looked at JinJin when she stood up. The mark on her face looked better in the daylight. Not so raw. Or maybe he was just prepared for it now. And now he could see that it was from an airbag. He could tell that a human hand hadn’t made it. But even with that mark on her face, there was still something about her, Bill thought. She wasn’t the most beautiful woman he had seen in Shanghai. She wasn’t even the most beautiful woman he had seen in Paradise Mansions – that would have to be his wife. But when JinJin Li smiled, she seemed to have this inner light. He had never seen her smile before.

‘Have a good day in Shanghai,’ she said, and now it was his turn to be lost for words as he struggled for something to say about the other night, to put it in its rightful place, but nothing came, and it did not matter because at that moment the silver Porsche pulled into the courtyard and she gave him one last smile before she started off to where the car was waiting for her, its powerful engine still running, ready to take Li JinJin off to her life.

Becca’s night on the town had been fun, although she enjoyed it more in retrospect than she did at the time.

Alice had taken her to a bar on the Bund, plied her with ludicrously potent mojitos, and Becca had spent the evening with her mobile phone in her hand, just in case there was some problem with Holly. But Bill never called and they were both sleeping when she got home. Becca moved quietly through the apartment,
checking on her family, and free at last to savour the evening, now that she knew everything was fine.

Holly was in the middle of the king-size bed, looking tiny. Breathing normally. And Bill in the spare room. His feet sticking out the bottom of the single bed. Looking comically big for it. Becca took off her clothes. He gasped and tried to sit up as she slid in beside him. She placed a soothing hand on his chest and kissed his face.

‘She okay?’ Becca said.

‘Fine,’ Bill said sleepily. ‘She’s been fine. What time is it?’

Then he felt her hands on him. She said his name. Not much more than a whisper. Her mouth touched his mouth. She felt his hands lightly run down her ribcage, the swell of her hip, the long flank of her thigh. Soft kisses in the darkness.

‘Bill?’

‘What?’

‘Don’t make love to me,’ she said. ‘Not tonight. Just fuck me, okay? You can do that, can’t you?’ He could do that.

Bill’s father came through the arrivals gate at Pudong, his tough old face lighting up at the sight of his granddaughter.

‘Granddad Will,’ Holly said, squirming out of Bill’s arms and running to him.

Picasso, Becca had said the first time she met the old man. That’s exactly what Picasso looked like. Bald, broad-shouldered, eyes that stared straight at you and never looked away. Bill didn’t know about Picasso. He thought his father looked like a bull. Old and strong. A tough old bull.

He had a suitcase in one hand – the only suitcase Bill had ever known him to own, the old man was very monogamous when it came to luggage – and tucked under his free arm was an inappropriately gigantic teddy bear.

‘Dad,’ Bill said, ‘they have trolleys, you know,’ and the old man said, ‘Do I look like I need a trolley?’ and so they nearly had a row before they had even said hello, which would have been some kind of record.

‘Please be nice,’ Becca murmured to Bill as Tiger led them to the car, and the old man listened patiently to one of Holly’s meaningless monologues about a character she called her ‘third-favourite princess’. Bill didn’t remember that kind of patience when he had been growing up. Maybe everything was different with grandchildren.

Becca’s father had been scheduled to be the first one to come out to visit, but a heart murmur and endless tests had kept him confined to London. It felt like more than ill health. For someone who had spent his life on the move with Reuters, Bill thought that Becca’s father seemed very reluctant to stray far from home. But Bill’s old man was hard as nails. He blinked back the effects of a ten-hour flight as if he had just woken from an afternoon nap.

‘So what do you want to do?’ Becca said as they drove to Gubei. The Bund was passing by the window. But the old man didn’t take his eyes from his granddaughter. Bill felt he couldn’t look at her without smiling.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘I want to see the Great Wall, of course.’

Bill and Becca looked at each other.

‘That’s Beijing, Dad,’ Bill said. ‘The Great Wall is near Beijing.’

Becca was looking concerned. ‘We could fly up there at the weekend,’ she said to Bill. ‘If you could get off work on Saturday…’

Bill shook his head impatiently. Silly old sod. He probably hadn’t even looked at a guide book. ‘What else, Dad?’

‘How about the Forbidden City? That looks nice.’

‘It’s very nice,’ Bill said. ‘But the Forbidden City is right in the middle of Beijing.’

The old man looked at him. ‘I don’t want to be any trouble. If it’s too difficult…’

‘Oh, it’s not too difficult at all,’ Becca said happily.

‘Granddad, Granddad,’ Holly said, disappointed that his attention had been diverted. She kicked the back of the seat and Becca told her to please not do that.

‘It’s not too difficult, if that’s what you want to see, Dad,’ Bill said, with the exasperated impatience he knew so well. ‘But it’s like expecting the Tower of London when you’re in Paris.’ He felt his wife’s restraining hand resting lightly on his shoulder and said no more.

* * *

They were all up early the next morning. As Holly played with her grandfather, Becca took Bill to one side.

‘Make the most of it,’ she said, and Bill thought that she was thinking about her own father. ‘He’s not going to be around forever.’

‘No,’ Bill said, watching his father down on the carpet, doing one-arm push-ups with his granddaughter on his back. Holly squealed with pleasure. The old man’s thick builder’s hand pressed into the freshly cleaned carpet of the company flat. ‘It just feels like forever.’

Holly lost her balance but righted herself by gripping what was left of her grandfather’s hair. They both laughed. Holly held on tight and the old man changed hands and continued with his one-arm push-ups.

Bill made a move towards them but Becca stopped him. ‘Leave them,’ she said.

‘But it’s
dangerous,’
Bill said.

His wife shook her head, and he went to work before anything started.

Becca was making tea and toast when Bill’s father came into the kitchen with Holly in his arms.

‘His Lordship gone off to work?’ he said, settling the child on the floor. She clambered up into her special chair.

Becca smiled and nodded. ‘The pair of you were having such fun, he didn’t want to disturb you.’

‘Bill has an early start,’ he noted, spooning three sugars into his tea.