My Favourite Wife (44 page)

‘Bill – these girls?’ said one of the new guys. Somehow it was a question, although Bill did not know exactly what the man was asking. There was a tall, haughty woman behind him with her long arms around his waist, and two smaller ones by his side, one of them doll-like and pretty, the other one chubby but proudly large-breasted. Bill did not recognise them. It felt like Suzy Too was full of newcomers. The women were holding the guy’s hands and trying to encourage him to shuffle his brogues to Eminem’s ‘Shake That’. Bill guessed that Elgar was more his thing. The guy was one of those old-fashioned Englishmen – all Adam’s apple and glasses and an accent that told Bill he had been educated privately and among boys. Harry something. He looked as if he had struggled to meet girls all his life. But even Harry something wouldn’t struggle in Shanghai, Bill thought. In six months Harry something would think he was Errol Flynn. In six months he would be the cock of the Bund. But for now there was a thin film of nervous mist on his spectacles.

‘I’ll tell you about these girls,’ said the other new guy. Fresh off the flight from Heathrow, he fancied himself as something of an expert. Bill looked him up and down. Blond, cropped, fit in a Sunday-morning-football sort of way. Nigel somebody. He was not so obviously overwhelmed as Harry something. Probably been on a two-week package tour to Thailand, Bill thought. Probably had a hand-job in Patpong and thought that made him Marco Polo.

‘These girls are whores,’ Nigel said confidently. He reached out and squeezed a small breast too hard. The girl flinched, pulled away with a grimace of pain and distaste.

Bill took a breath, and held his temper.

‘Don’t call them that,’ he said. ‘Please don’t ever call them that.’

The man looked at Bill with surly belligerence, but said nothing. Bill was about to become a partner. He was billing more hours than anyone in the firm. Soon Bill would be their boss. He could make their lives very hard.

‘Then what are they?’ said Harry something. His little eyes had completely disappeared behind his steamed-up glasses. The chubby girl with large breasts had a hand in his trouser pocket and she was laughingly telling the other one that she could not find anything. This is not a deferential society, Bill thought. ‘If not whores,’ asked Harry something, ‘then what are they?’

Bill took a long pull on his Tsingtao. He was going to start cutting back on the beer. He was going to stop coming to Suzy Too. He wasn’t a tourist guide. Let them find their own fun. A shower of black stars fell across his vision and was gone.

‘They’re just practical,’ he said.

He had been told that they did not feel love in the way that he felt love, that they responded to acts of kindness and generosity with all of their body and heart, but that was not love, they told him, not in the Western sense of the one true one, the partner for life, the unmet lover found at last. Not love like that, like love back home, the way that it was meant to be, they said. Not real love the way it was made in the West.

They were just so practical when it came to love, they told him until he believed it, until he could see what they meant, and he could see that we in the West were not practical at all – we simply fell, we just took the giddy step over the cliff and landed where our wayward hearts took us.

The East was practical. The East could not afford to love. The West was romantic. Because the West could afford to love.

But he came to believe that somehow he and JinJin Li had traded places. He came to believe that she had somehow stopped being
practical and become infected with the Western concept of love -loving him even when common sense told her to bail out, loving him even when her head told her to find someone else, loving him when every instinct in her soul told her
to be practical –
she still loved him, she loved him through all the hurt and betrayal and sadness, and she kept on loving him even when it was not wise, and even when it brought her no happiness.

And Bill changed too. He had started out believing that he was different from the married man in the silver Porsche who had brought her to Paradise Mansions. Bill thought that he was better than that man because his heart was good, because he cared for her in a deeper, truer sense than that man, and that his love for her was real. But even back then, when he thought he loved her well and true, he could not deny that he felt that he had a claim on JinJin Li.

He had invested so much of everything he had to give, and he had risked losing all the things he loved, and he told himself that – unlike the man in the silver Porsche – he expected nothing in return. That was not true. What he expected in return was that she would love him and that she would keep on loving him as if he owned the lease on her heart. They would both be disappointed.

Was he any better than the man who had kept her in Paradise Mansions? No, Bill saw now that he was far worse, because he had dressed it all up as love. But when JinJin Li finally remembered to be practical and walk away, when the contract between them was finally broken, he’d felt totally and utterly betrayed, and responded with a bitterness that he thought might choke him.

Bill, you’re behaving like a romantic Western fool, he told himself. You’re acting like she has the power to rip out your heart.

And he knew that just wasn’t practical.

The office was dark now.

The only light came from the twinkling jewel box of Pudong
in the early hours beyond the window, and from the glow of the screen of Shane’s laptop. It shone on the face of Alice Greene as she copied the files, and Bill wondered what she was seeing. Corruption and justice, he thought, scoops and awards. It was all mixed up with her, he thought. The wish for a better world, the need for a better life. Greed and conscience. Perhaps it was all mixed up with everyone.

‘Why did he keep all this stuff?’ she said, not looking away from the screen. ‘I mean – even if this Chairman Sun character needed paying off by these Germans, why keep a record of it?’

‘Because he was a good lawyer,’ Bill said. ‘And a good man.’

She snorted. ‘That’s an oxymoron, isn’t it?’ She looked over her shoulder and smiled. ‘Just kidding.’

‘Are you almost done?’ He wanted her to take what she needed and get out of here. There was something else he had to do tonight.

‘Finished,’ she said. There were perhaps a dozen disks on Bill’s desk. She straightened them like a card dealer with a new deck, and slipped them into her shoulder bag. Bill walked her to the lift.

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I mean it, Bill. You did the right thing.’

‘First time for everything,’ he said.

When he was alone he unlocked his desk and took out a shoebox. He opened it and leafed through the evidence of their time together in Guilin, Changchun, Shanghai. On the boat, going down the Yangtze, the Three Gorges outside their cabin window. All their photographs. The box was stuffed full. So many photographs. And now he had to destroy them. He carried the box across the office to the shredding machine.

There were too many. She had had a fanatical need to record their happiness. Were they all like that? Or was it just JinJin? He never really knew what was typically Chinese and what was typically JinJin Li. Now he would never know. It didn’t matter. He began to feed his memories into the shredder. In the end there were only two that he could not destroy.

The passport photograph taken the summer before he had met her. The only passport photograph that anyone ever looked beautiful in. The cool wide eyes staring back at the camera, lips wet, mouth closed, beauty intact, goofy charm successfully concealed. Then there was the second photograph that he could not bring himself to destroy. The picture of them dancing, taken by the elderly American after dinner on the boat down the Yangtze. It had almost been a joke to them, Bill and JinJin dancing to Chinese pop music on the ship’s tiny dance floor. But the lovely old tourist had told them that they looked so happy, and so perfect together, and he’d insisted that JinJin hand over her camera so that he could record the moment. They were both grateful and touched, although Bill could not tell if the old American was a saint or a crazy person. Maybe a bit of both. And anyway, the old American had been wrong about them. Because so soon after that picture was taken it was all over forever. Perhaps that was the perfect reason for taking the picture. Perhaps the old tourist on that dreadful cruise ship knew that it could never last.

Bill slipped the two surviving photographs into his wallet, and then he stood there staring at the shredding machine, and the pile of glossy paper beneath it, wondering what had hit him.

It was never meant to be this way. He had thought that he could somehow stand back from the thing they shared, as if what he thought of as the real part of his life – Becca and Holly, family and home, wife and child – could remain untouched by his feelings for JinJin Li.

He had been wrong.

Now the evidence had been reduced to the two surviving photographs. The passport photo. The picture of them dancing on the boat. He wasn’t going to keep them forever, just for a little while, and when they were gone there would be nothing to show that they had ever met, apart from what they carried inside.

Perhaps the thing that killed his father would one day come
for him. In fifty years, or next week. It did not matter. He would still have time to destroy the two photographs. What did they call it? Oh yes. Putting your affairs in order.

He would do it. He would put his affairs in order. One day. But he couldn’t do it yet. Not yet. He couldn’t do it yet.

Bill walked to the lift and pressed the call button. The lift came and he stood there staring at it. The doors closed as he turned and went back into his office, where he fed the last two photographs into the shredding machine.

You have to remember the bad times, he thought. That’s the only way to get through it. That’s the only way to go on. You don’t remember the good times. You deny them. You forget them. That’s how you get over it. That’s how you carry on with your life.

The passport photo. Gone. The dancing picture. Gone. Every trace of her and them was now destroyed. It was the only way.

Remember the bad times, Bill thought.

From page one of the
South China Morning Post
, 1st June 200-:

Devlin tossed the paper on to his desk. Then he put his feet up, the heels of his Church’s brogues resting on the cover of the
South China Morning Post
.

‘The thing is,’ Devlin said, ‘when they crack down on corruption, it has actually got bugger all to do with justice and truth, and everything to do with political manoeuvring. The things that poor old Sun stands accused of – cutting in his family, feathering
his nest, grabbing as many sweeties as he could cram into his greedy old cakehole – are equally true of any local or government official in the country.’

Devlin did not ask Bill to sit down.

‘Okay, Sun was a fool,’ Devlin continued, with a small sigh of regret. ‘He didn’t have enough friends in high places. Should have cut in some friends in Beijing – or their families. They always crack down sooner or later. They have to. That’s the funny thing – they would have got him anyway.’ And finally the flash of anger in the eyes, at last the murderous rage of the betrayed. ‘Without you selling me out,’ he told Bill, ‘and without this hack from Hong Kong.’

The firm’s senior partner looked at Bill with a mixture of hurt and loathing. Above his head the red light of a CCTV camera gleamed like an ember of hell. Of course, you couldn’t take a leak in this building without someone watching you. But Bill had known that, hadn’t he?

‘So you think you’re better than the rest of us, Holden,’ Devlin said. It wasn’t a question. His mouth twisted with mockery. ‘Purer. More noble.’

Bill shook his head. ‘I never thought that.’

‘But you couldn’t close your eyes to the rottenness,’ Devlin said. He got a sly look about him. ‘Just because some Chinese bitch fucked you blind.’

‘Watch your mouth,’ Bill said quietly.

Devlin looked frightened for a moment. But it was just a moment. He was the one with the power here. He jabbed a finger at Bill.

‘More people are climbing out of poverty in this country than anywhere at any time in human history,’ he said. ‘In human history! Think about it! And assholes like you are fighting against it. So, you tell me – who’s the idiot here, Bill? Who’s the villain? You or me?’