Read the book: «My Favourite Wife»
My Favourite Wife
Tony Parsons
HarperCollinsPublishers
For Yuriko, MFW
You see, I loved her. It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.
Lolita
A man with two houses loses his mind. A man with two women loses his soul.
Chinese proverb
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One: Be The Prince
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Part Two: The Permanent Girlfriend
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Part Three: Home Calling
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Part Four: See You Around
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
By the Same Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART ONE: BE THE PRINCE
ONE
Bill must have fallen asleep for a moment. He was jolted awake by the limo hitting a pothole and suddenly there was Shanghai. The towers of Pudong split the night. He rubbed his eyes, and turned to look at his wife and daughter in the back seat.
Holly, their four-year-old, was sleeping with her head in her mother’s lap, blonde curls tumbling across her face, dressed like some sort of Disney princess. He wasn’t sure which one.
‘She can’t be comfortable in that,’ he said, keeping his voice down. Holly had been awake, or sleeping fitfully, for most of the flight.
Becca, his wife, carefully removed the child’s tiara. ‘She’s fine,’ she said.
‘Foreigners are very jealous they see this,’ said the driver, whose name was Tiger. He indicated the Pudong skyline. ‘Fifteen year ago – all swampland.’ Tiger was young, barely in his twenties, wearing a half-hearted sort of uniform with three gold stripes on his cuff. The young man bobbed his head with emphatic pride. ‘New, boss – all new.’
Bill nodded politely. But it wasn’t the newness of Shanghai that overwhelmed him. It was the sheer scale of the place. They were crossing a river much wider than anything he had expected and on the far side he could see the golden glow of the Bund, the colonial buildings of the pre-war city staring across at Pudong’s skyscrapers. Shanghai past facing Shanghai future.
The car came off the bridge and down a ramp, picking up speed as the traffic thinned. Three men, filthy and black, their clothes in tatters, all perched on one ancient bicycle with no lights, slowly wobbled up the ramp towards the oncoming traffic. One was squatting on the handlebars, another was leaning back in the seat and the third was standing up and pumping on the pedals. They visibly shook as the car shot past. Then they were gone.
Neither Becca nor the driver seemed to notice them and it crossed Bill’s mind that they had been a vision brought on by the exhaustion and excitement. Three men in rags on a dead bicycle, moving far too slow in the fast lane, and going in completely the wrong direction.
‘Daddy?’ His daughter was stirring from deep inside her ball gown.
Becca pulled her closer. ‘Mummy’s here,’ she said.
Holly sighed, a four-year-old whose patience was wearing thin.
She kicked the back of the passenger seat.
‘I need both of you,’ the child said.
Bill let them into the apartment and they gawped at the splendour of it all, like tourists in their own home.
He thought of their Victorian terrace in London, the dark staircase and crumbling bay window and musty basement, holding the dead air of a hundred years. There was nothing shabby and old here. He turned the key and it was like stepping into a new century.
There were gifts waiting for them. A bouquet of white lilies in cellophane. Champagne in a bucket of melted ice. The biggest basket of fruit in the world.
For Bill Holden and family – welcome to Shanghai – from all your colleagues at Butterfield, Hunt and West.
He picked up the bottle and looked at the shield-shaped label.
Dom Pérignon, he thought. Dom Pérignon in China.
Bill went to the door of the master bedroom and watched Becca gently getting the sleeping child into her pyjamas. She was quietly snoring.
‘Sleeping Beauty,’ he smiled.
‘She’s Belle,’ Becca corrected. ‘From Beauty and the Beast. You know – like us.’
‘You’re too hard on yourself, Bec.’
Becca eased Holly into her pyjamas. ‘She can come in with us tonight,’ she whispered. ‘In case she wakes up. And doesn’t know where she is.’
He nodded, and came over to the bed to kiss his daughter goodnight, feeling a surge of tenderness as his lips brushed her cheek. Then he left Becca to it, and went off to explore the apartment. He was bone tired but very happy, switching lights on and off, playing with the remote of the big plasma TV, opening and shutting cupboards, unable to believe the size of the place, feeling like a lucky man. Even full of the crates they had had shipped ahead from London, the glossy apartment was impressive. Flat 31, Block B, Paradise Mansions, Hongqiao Road, Gubei New Area, Shanghai, People’s Republic of China. It was in a different league to anywhere they had ever lived back home.
If they stayed on at the end of his two-year contract then they were promised a step up the Shanghai property ladder to an ex-pat compound with its own golf course, spa and pool. But Bill liked it here. What could be better than this? He thought of his father and wondered what the old man would say about this place. The old man would go crazy.
The suitcases could wait until tomorrow to be unpacked. He carried the bottle into the kitchen and rummaged around until he found two glasses. When he came back Becca was at the window. ‘You should see this,’ she said.
Bill handed his wife a glass and looked down ten storeys to the courtyard below. Paradise Mansions was four blocks of flats surrounding a central courtyard. There was a mother-and-child fountain at its centre, lights glinting below the water.
The courtyard was clogged with brand-new cars, their engines purring. BMWs, Audis, Mercs, the odd Porsche Boxster and two 911s. At the wheel, or lounging by the open driver’s door, were sleek-looking Chinese men. They looked as if they came from a different world to the three men on the bicycle. The porter was moving between the cars, gesturing, trying to regain control. Nobody seemed to be taking any notice of him.
‘Because it’s Saturday night,’ Bill said, sipping his champagne.
‘That’s not it,’ Becca said. ‘Cheers.’ They clinked glasses and she nodded at the window. ‘Watch.’
So he watched, and he saw young women begin to emerge from Paradise Mansions. They were all dressed up, and like the female leads in some wildlife documentary about mating rituals, each joined one of the men waiting in the cars. They did not kiss.
One of them caught his eye. A tall girl with a flower in her hair. An orchid, he thought. Maybe an orchid.
She came out of the block opposite, and headed for one of the 911s. She raised her face to their window and Becca waved, but the young woman did not respond. She slid her long body into the passenger seat of the Porsche, struggling with her legs and her skirt. The man at the wheel turned his face and said something to her. He was older by about ten years. The girl pulled the door shut, and the Porsche moved away.
Bill and Becca looked at each other and laughed.
‘What is this place?’ she smiled, shaking her head. ‘Is this place a…what is this place?’
But he had no idea.
So they drank their champagne and watched the beautiful girls of Paradise Mansions pairing off with the men in their fancy cars, and by the time they had drained their glasses they were both dumbstruck by weariness.
So they took a shower together, soaping each other with tender familiarity and then they got in bed with Holly between them. They smiled at each other over the child’s face.
He slept until first light and then abruptly he was wide-awake.
He counted the things stopping him from going back to sleep. His body clock was pining for London time. Tomorrow morning at 8 a.m. the driver – Tiger – would take him to the Pudong offices of Butterfield, Hunt and West, and he would start his new job. He was curious to know where they were, and what their new life looked like in daylight. How could he possibly sleep with his head so full? As quietly as he could, Bill got up, got dressed and slipped out of the apartment.
The courtyard where the men in cars had waited for the girls was empty apart from Tiger. He was sleeping with his bare feet on the dashboard of the limo, his legs either side of the steering wheel. He jumped to attention when Bill walked past.
‘Where to, boss?’ he said, pulling on his shoes.
‘It’s Sunday,’ Bill said. ‘Don’t they give you the day off on Sunday?’
Tiger looked blank. And then hurt. ‘Where we going, boss?’
‘I’m walking,’ Bill said. ‘And stop calling me boss.’
The Sabbath may have meant nothing to Tiger but out on the streets of Gubei New Area it felt almost like Sunday morning back home, with nobody around apart from the odd jogger and dog walker, the neighbourhood shuttered and still. It was early June, and the heat was already starting to build.
Bill walked. He was hungry to see what he thought of as the real China, the China that was nothing to do with plasma televisions and Dom Pérignon. The real China was somewhere nearby. It had to be. There were blocks of flats as far as he could see in a bewildering jumble of styles, but broken up with patches of manicured green and oversized statues. There were strips of restaurants – he could see Thai, Italian, everything but Chinese -a Carrefour supermarket, and a couple of international schools, including the one that Holly would go to in the morning. Little parks. A nice neighbourhood. Gubei was greener and cleaner than the grimy, crime-ridden patch of London they had left behind. His family could live here. His wife and daughter could be happy here. He felt a quiet satisfaction, mixed with relief.
He glanced at his watch and decided he had time to explore before Becca and Holly stirred. So he walked towards the rising sun and as he left Gubei New Area behind, the streets quickly filled. Women selling bruised fruit stared through him from shaded side streets. Someone bumped into him. Someone else spat at his feet. There were men in filthy, dirt-encrusted two-piece suits working on a building site. On a Sunday. And in the streets there were people. A tide of people. Suddenly there were people everywhere.
He stopped, trying to get his bearings. The roads were wide and traffic flew by, horns mindlessly beeping, ignoring red lights and pedestrians and the rest of the traffic. He saw a chic girl in sunglasses with her hair up behind the wheel of a silver Buick Excelle. There were flocks of VW Santana taxis. A muddy truck piled high with junk and men. And more trucks, lots of them, with their strange cargo of cardboard or orange traffic cones or pigs or yet more cars, so new they still shone with the showroom wax.
As the sun got higher, and Bill continued to walk east, the city got noisier, adding to his sense of dislocation. A woman on a scooter mounted the pavement and just missed him, beeping her horn furiously. Schools of cyclists with giant black visors over their faces swarmed past. Suddenly he was aware of the time difference, the light-headedness that follows a long-haul flight, the sweat of exhaustion. But he kept walking. He wanted to know something about this place.
He walked down alleys where thin men shaved over ancient metal bowls and fat babies were fed, and where ramshackle buildings with red-tile roofs were draped with drying laundry and satellite dishes. Then abruptly the jumbled blocks with their red-tile roofs suddenly gave way to the new shining towers and shopping malls.
Outside Prada men with their skin darkened by sun and grime tried to sell him fake Rolex watches and DVDs of the latest Tom Cruise movie. Young women hid from the sun under umbrellas. Naked Western models advertised skin-lightening products on giant billboards.
And as Bill walked on, he felt something that he had never felt in his life, and it was an awareness of the sheer mass of humanity. All those people in the world, all those lives. It was as if he truly believed in their existence for the first time. Shanghai gave him no choice.
Bill hailed one of the Santana taxis, impatient to see the Bund, but the driver didn’t understand a word he said and dropped him by the river, glad to get rid of him. He got out next to a wharf with a ferry; not a sightseeing ferry but some kind of local public transport.
Bill handed over his smallest note, received some filthy RMB in return, and joined the milling mob waiting to cross to the other side. He tried to work out where the queue began. Then he realised that it didn’t begin anywhere.
And as the ferry filled with people, and then continued to fill even more until Bill was hemmed in on every side, and fighting back the feeling that the ferry was overloaded, he saw that here, at last, was the real China.
The numbers.
It was all about the numbers.
He knew that the numbers were why he would be starting his new job in the morning, why his family’s future would be decided in this city, and why all the money problems of the past would soon be over. They filled the dreams of businessmen from Sydney to San Francisco – the one billion customers, the one billion new capitalists, the one billion market place.
He struggled to move his arms and glanced at his watch, wondering if he could make it back home to his girls before they woke up.
The ferry began to move.
That afternoon they did the tourist thing.
The three of them joined the queues and took the lift to the top of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower where they stared down at the boats on the Huangpu River and saw that the city seemed to be without end.
On the other side of the tower they looked down at a park that was full of brides, hundreds of them, all in white, looking like a flock of swans as they surrounded the lakes, feeding confetti-coloured fish food to koi carp.
Bill lifted his daughter so she could see.
‘New school tomorrow,’ he said.
Holly said nothing, her eyes wide at the sight of all those brides. ‘You’re going to make lots of new friends,’ Becca said, gripping one of Holly’s ankles, and shaking it with encouragement. Holly thought about it, chewing her bottom lip. ‘I’m going to be very busy,’ she said.
Although foreigners were a common sight in Shanghai now, Bill and Becca and Holly were the only non-Chinese at the top of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower that afternoon, and people stared at them.
The child and the woman were so blonde, their skin so pale, and their eyes so blue they looked like weather. The man holding his little girl and the child with her arms circling her father’s neck and the woman with her arm draped around her husband’s shoulders.
That’s what was noticed about them – those gestures of childlike affection, the little family holding on to each other in their new home, as if the three of them could not exist without that physical contact, or without each other.
Everybody knew that Westerners didn’t care about family in the same way that the Chinese did, especially not Westerners in Shanghai. But this man and woman and child seemed different.
TWO
He was gone by the time she woke up.
Letting Holly sleep on, Becca padded through the flat, edging around the stacks of crates. There was the sign of a shower, the smell of after-shave, a tie that had been considered and discarded on the back of a chair. She pictured Bill at his desk on the first day of his new job, working hard, the earnest face frowning, and felt a stab of the old feeling, the feeling you get at the start.
She picked one of the crates at random and prised it open. It was full of baby stuff. A pink high chair in three pieces. A bassinet. A cot mattress. Assorted blankets, sterilisers and stuffed rabbits. All of Holly’s old things. She had kept them, and shipped them across the world, not for sentimental reasons. Becca had kept them for the next one. Their marriage, seven years old now, was at the stage where neither of them doubted that there would be another child.
Becca went back to the bedroom and watched Holly sleeping. Then she pushed back the sheets and held her daughter’s feet until the child began to stir. Holly stretched, moaned and tried to curl up into sleep.
‘Wakey-wakey, rise and shaky,’ Becca said. She stood listening to her daughter’s laboured breathing, a wheezing more than a snoring, caused by Holly’s asthma. ‘Come on now, darling. You’ve got school.’
While Holly came round, Becca banged about in the strange new kitchen, preparing breakfast. Yawning, Holly came and sat at the table.
‘I’m a bit worried,’ she said, with her spoon poised halfway to her mouth. Becca touched her daughter’s face, curled a tendril of hair behind her tiny sticky-out ears.
‘What are you worried about, darling?’ Becca said.
‘I’m a bit worried about dead people,’ Holly said solemnly, the corners of her mouth turning down.
Becca sat back. ‘Dead people?’
The child nodded. ‘I’m afraid they’re not going to get better.’
Becca sighed, tapping the table. ‘Don’t worry about dead people,’ she said. ‘Worry about your Coco-Pops.’
After breakfast Becca set up the breathing machine. It was routine now. The thing had a mouthpiece to make it easy for Holly to inhale her medication, and her blue eyes were wide above it.
Just before nine, Becca and Holly walked hand in hand to the Gubei International School. The children seemed to be from every nation on earth. There was that awkward moment when it was time to part and Holly clung to the belt of her mother’s jeans. But then a small, plump girl of about four who looked like she was from Korea or Japan took Holly’s hand and led her into the class, where the Australian teacher was taking registration, and Becca was the one who was reluctant to leave.
Everyone else was rushing off. Some of them were dressed for the office, some of them were dressed for the gym, but all of them acted like they had somewhere very important to go. Then there was a woman by her side, smiling, wheeling a fat toddler in a pushchair. The mother of the child who had taken Holly’s hand.
‘First day,’ she said in an American accent. ‘Tough, right?’ Becca nodded. ‘You know what it’s like. The trembling chin. Fighting back the tears. Trying to be brave.’ She looked at the woman. ‘And that’s just me.’
The woman laughed. ‘Kyoko Smith,’ she said, offering her hand. Becca shook it. Kyoko said she was a lawyer from Yokohama, not practising, married to an attorney from New York. They had been in Shanghai for almost two years. Becca said she was a journalist, currently resting, and she was married to yet another lawyer, whose name was Bill. They had been in Shanghai for two days.
‘You want to get coffee sometime?’ Kyoko asked Becca. ‘Tomorrow, maybe? I’ve got to run right now.’
‘Oh, me too,’ Becca said. ‘I have to run too.’
‘Well, that’s Shanghai,’ Kyoko Smith smiled. ‘Everybody always has to run.’
As Becca walked slowly back to Paradise Mansions she called Bill on his mobile.
‘She go off okay?’ Someone was with him. Becca could tell. She could also tell he had been thinking about Holly on her first day.
‘Oh, she was fine,’ she said, far breezier than she felt.
‘She’ll be okay, Bec,’ he said, knowing how hard it was for her to leave their daughter. ‘It will be good for her to be with kids her own age. We have to let her go sooner or later, don’t we?’
The silence hummed between them and she made no attempt to fill it. She fought back the sudden tears, angry with herself for feeling like a mad housewife.
‘Try not to worry too much,’ he said. ‘Listen, I’ll see you later, okay?’
Becca still said nothing. She was thinking, wondering if the best thing for Holly wasn’t to stay with her, just keep her close, weighing it all up. Then she finally said, ‘Good luck up there, Bill,’ releasing him to get on with his job.
She couldn’t face the flat and all that unpacking. Not yet. So she caught a taxi to Xintiandi, the new area they always talked about in the guidebooks, the place she had been looking forward to seeing, where they said you could see the oldest and newest parts of the city. The flat could wait.
Suddenly a puff of wind, a puff faint and tepid and laden with strange odours of blossoms, of aromatic wood, comes out of the still night – the first sigh of the East on my face. That I can never forget. It was impalpable and enslaving, like a charm, like a whispered promise of mysterious delight.
Becca sipped a skinny latte on a stool by the window and read her Joseph Conrad paperback. That was what she was seeking in Xintiandi. The first sigh of the East on her face. On a side street away from the cafés and restaurants, she found the place she was seeking.
The modest little museum on Huangpi Lu was where the Chinese Communist Party had first met. She paid 3 RMB to go in, a sum so small she couldn’t calculate it in pounds. The place was deserted. The only other visitor was a serious female student in thick glasses taking notes by a tableau of dummies plotting to overthrow the foreigners and free the masses. All eyes were on the waxy features of the young Mao.
Becca drifted across to a small television displaying a propaganda film about China before the revolution. The film was grainy and ancient and only lasted a few minutes, but Becca watched it dumbfounded.
The starving faces of long-dead children stared back at her. She had never seen such poverty and misery, and as the images blurred behind a veil of tears she had to look away, telling herself, Get a bloody grip, woman, telling herself it was just the jet-lag and Holly’s first day at school.
Shanghai was Becca’s idea.
Bill would have been happy to stay in London and build a life together, and work hard, and watch their daughter grow. But life in London had disappointed her in a way that it had not disappointed him. Becca was ready for them to try something new. She saw Shanghai as a way out of their old life and their constant struggle for money. Shanghai was where they would turn it all around.
They had married young, both of them twenty-four, the first of their little group to settle down. They had never regretted it.
Becca had watched their single friends optimistically hooking up with someone they had just met in a bar, or a club, or a gym, only to grow unhappy, or bored, or trapped, or get their heart kicked around, and she was glad to say good riddance to all of that.
Marriage had seemed natural to them. They talked about it. If you find the right person, and you are both sure, then you can’t be too young, can you? And even at twenty-four both of them had felt too old for the sad dance of the gym and the bar and the club.
Some things they didn’t need to talk about. They had always taken it for granted that they would both work, and this didn’t change when Holly was born just after their third anniversary. Because it couldn’t change. Bill was a corporate lawyer at a firm in the City, Becca a financial journalist at a newspaper in Canary Wharf, and the mortgage payments on their little house in one of the leafier corners of North London demanded that they both keep earning. Every morning Bill would take Holly to nursery, and every afternoon Becca would pick her up.
And then one day everything changed.
Holly had just turned three and she had been at her nursery for a few hours when suddenly she was struggling to breathe. ‘Just a cold,’ said one of the carers, even when the child began to sob with terror and frustration. ‘Just a very bad cold.’
By the time Becca came to collect her, Holly was ready to be rushed to the nearest Accident and Emergency. By the time Bill arrived at the hospital, the doctor had diagnosed asthma. Holly never went back to the nursery and Becca never went back to her newspaper.
‘No stranger will ever look after her the way I will,’ Becca said, choking back tears of rage, and he soothed her, and he understood, and he told her that of course she was right, and nothing was more important than Holly.
Holly’s asthma was controlled with the help of a paediatrician in Great Ormond Street, who prescribed chewable tablets that she quite enjoyed and the breathing machine. She was brave and good-natured, never complaining, and Becca and Bill tried not to ask the question posed by every parent of a sick child – Why her? There were children far worse off than Holly. They saw them every time they came to Great Ormond Street.
But while Holly slept at night, sometimes making that strange sound at the back of her throat that they now recognised as a symptom of the asthma, Bill and Becca got out the calculators, applied for online overdrafts, thought about remortgaging, and wondered how long they could stay in their home.
They talked about moving to a cheaper, bleaker neighbourhood a few miles east. They talked about staying in the neighbourhood but selling their home and renting for a while. They talked about moving out to the suburbs. And everything they talked about depressed them.
Holly was well, and of course that was the main thing, but suddenly they were struggling just to get by. They loved their house. That was a problem. And they needed their house. That was another problem. Sometimes the senior partners at the firm invited them to dinner in their magnificent homes, these smooth-skinned old millionaires with their charming, hawk-eyed wives, and when you invited them back, you wanted them to come to a neighbourhood where they wouldn’t necessarily get mugged at knife-point for the bottle of Margaux they were carrying.
‘One of your senior partners had his wife’s fiftieth birthday party at the Sandy Lane,’ Becca said. ‘When they come over to our place, we can’t open a six-pack in a bedsit.’
‘We’ll never have to open a six-pack in a bedsit,’ Bill said, a note of resentment in his voice.
She put her arms around his neck. ‘You know what I mean, darling,’ she said.
He knew what she meant.
Some of the firm’s younger lawyers were already in big flats or small houses in Notting Hill and Kensington and Islington, bankrolled by indulgent parents who stayed together, or guilty parents who didn’t. Bill and Becca were doing it on their own. Nobody was giving them a thing.
Then suddenly there was a way to end all their money worries. Your life can change in a moment, Becca realised. You go through the years thinking you know what the future looks like and then one day it looks like something else.
Becca sat next to a man at the annual dinner of Bill’s firm, and nothing was ever the same again.
Every January, Hunt, Butterfield and West rented one of those big soulless hangars in a posh Park Lane hotel and personnel from the firm’s offices all over the world flew in to celebrate the anniversary of Robbie Burns’ birth. Five hundred lawyers in black tie, or kilt, and their wives – or, more rarely, their husbands.
Bill found himself sitting between the wives of two senior partners from New York, who knew each other and were happily talking across him. Becca was at the next table and she smiled as he rolled his eyes and mouthed three little words – Kill me now. Then she looked up as two men sat down either side of her. The men from Shanghai.
One of them was a big blond Australian in a kilt – Shane Gale, he said. He looked like he had been a surfer ten, fifteen years ago. Head of Litigation in Shanghai, he said. Shane was suffering from the effects of the champagne reception, but the way he avoided eye contact made Becca think that perhaps his real problem was not drunkenness but shyness.
The man on the other side was a tall, thin Englishman called Hugh Devlin, senior partner of the Shanghai office. It was funny the way their job titles tripped off their tongues as naturally as their names, she thought, fighting back the urge to say Becca Holden – housewife, homemaker and former financial hack.
While Shane silently buried his face in the Burgundy and started to get seriously rat-faced, Devlin took the table in hand.
She smiled across at Bill, her handsome young husband in his tuxedo, the American wives still talking across him, and Devlin smiled at him too. He had heard such good things about Bill, he said. Nothing but good things. A real grafter, said Devlin. Billed more hours than anyone in the London office two years in a row. Devoted to his family.
‘Yes,’ Becca said. ‘That’s my man.’
But, Devlin wanted to know, what’s your husband doing wasting his time in London? If he’s truly ambitious, then why doesn’t he come and try his luck in the fastest-growing economy on the planet? It was New York in the twentieth century and London in the nineteenth. And now it’s Shanghai, Devlin said. If you can make it there…
He saw the doubt on her face. A move to the Third World? London was rough enough for her. I mean it, he said. I’m serious. Lower taxes, higher salary. He’ll make partner out there a lot faster than he will here. And then he had her attention. A partner – it was what the young lawyers – and their wives – dreamed of. To escape the salaried life, and share the firm’s profits. When you made partner you were no longer working for the firm. You were the firm.
Devlin was talking about a life of colonial splendour that Becca had imagined went out years ago. You would have a home with a maid and a cook and a nanny and a driver – these things were cheap over there. These things were normal. And it was almost as if Devlin sensed something that she had tried to keep buried, even from Bill – that their life in London had let her down, that she was bitterly disappointed with their lot, that her little family had to struggle when they deserved so much more…
But – they couldn’t really do it, could they? Surely Shanghai was a place for a single man, Becca suggested. A man with no family ties?
No, said Devlin, not at all – Shanghai was actually a perfect posting for a man with a family. A man with stability, ambition, loved ones to work for. Shanghai had too many distractions for the single man, he said. Too many distractions. Later they would all become experts on the distractions of Shanghai.
Devlin was a family man himself – and he showed Becca a wallet photograph of a beautiful middle-aged woman and three smiling boys. Devlin said he liked his staff to have families. It meant they had a stake in the future.
Becca turned to Shane, who had been listening to some of this with a lopsided grin, and asked him how his own wife liked Shanghai. But Shane said that he wasn’t married, and they all laughed.
The pipers came into the room. They were playing ‘Flower of Scotland’. And when the dinner started to break up, and Bill came over to their table, Becca could almost hear the invitation from Devlin to have breakfast, to talk about the future, all the coy small talk of the headhunter.
But as Bill took his wife’s hand, happy and relieved to be back by her side, the man from Shanghai surprised both of them.
‘I like it that you’re married,’ he told Bill.
Becca picked up Holly from the school at twelve sharp. She could have stayed until three, but Becca was afraid that her daughter might miss her.
‘She’s been fine, didn’t miss Mummy at all,’ the Australian teacher said, giving Becca a shrewd look that said, Who’s doing the missing around here?
The pair of them held hands as they walked back through the peaceful streets of Gubei to the flat and, as Holly played with her Disney princess figures, Becca made a start on the unpacking.
‘Where did Daddy went?’ Holly asked.
‘Where did Daddy go,’ Becca said.
‘That’s just what I was wondered,’ Holly said, stunned at this amazing coincidence.
Becca pulled open a case. Suits. Dark blue suits for the hot young lawyer. ‘Your daddy’s at work, darling.’
Holly banged Prince Charming’s plastic head against the palm of her hand. ‘I need to talk to him.’
‘You can talk to him later,’ Becca said, but she wondered if Bill would get home from work before their daughter went to bed. She knew he would try his best. She also knew it was unlikely.
When Becca stopped for a cup of English breakfast tea, she went to the window but the courtyard was empty. There was no sign of the young women they had seen on Saturday night.
It was only early afternoon and the girls of Paradise Mansions were still sleeping.
THREE
The firm occupied three floors in a Pudong skyscraper so new that he could still smell the paint. Bill sat with his back to the window. Behind him the financial district stretched off into the summer mist.
There were spiked Tolkien towers constructed from steel and gold and black glass, one of them built to look like a hundred-storey pagoda, another with a screen covering an entire side of the building where a smiling beauty advertised a phone network. Looming above it all like the true masters of the landscape were the giant cranes.
On Bill’s desk there were neat stacks of draft contracts and a silver-framed photograph of his family – Bill and Becca and Holly standing in the surf on a beach in the Caribbean, Bill holding the then two-year-old Holly in his arms, Becca looking jaw-droppingly gorgeous in some kind of orange shift thing, the three of them wearing slightly shy grins as they gazed at the kind passing stranger who was taking the picture. It was the holiday they took before Becca gave up work and the money got tight. When his eyes drifted to the photograph in the course of his working day, Bill always found himself smiling.
He was going through the transactional documents of a new property development on the outskirts of the city. It was called Green Acres. When completed, it would be a gated community for the new rich of Shanghai. Butterfield, Hunt and West were representing the project’s German investors, DeutscherMonde. Bill had already noticed that the firm were doing a lot of work for DeutscherMonde. He looked up as Shane appeared in the doorway.
‘These Germans,’ Bill said. ‘Do they have a fixed cap?’
Shane shook his head and Bill looked suitably impressed. Clients often pressed law firms for a fixed cap on fees for any deal, knowing that if they were billed by the hour then the legal fees were potentially limitless.
‘Sky’s the limit,’ Shane said. ‘Limit’s the sky. That’s why they’re so important.’ The big Australian came into the room and leafed through some papers on Bill’s desk. ‘This place is going to be beautiful, mate. One hundred millionaires in one square mile. Gardens based on Versailles. Pools, saunas, panic rooms – all based on the actual pools, saunas and panic rooms that they had at Versailles. Twenty-four-hour armed security for the blokes who only just got used to using inside toilets. Lovely jubbly.’
Bill leaned back in his chair. He had building plans in one hand and a map of the area in the other. The development was being built in a place where right now there were only fields and a small village.
‘It looks like it’s being built on farmland,’ he said, handing Shane the map.
‘That’s right. The village is called Yangdong. They’ve been pig farmers for generations.’
Bill thumbed through the file. ‘So who owns the land?’
Shane put the map back on Bill’s desk. ‘The People,’ he said.
Bill looked at the map and up at Shane. ‘So the people of this village – the farmers – they own it?’
‘Not the farmers,’ Shane said. ‘The People. In China, all farmland is owned collectively. Each family in the village has a long-term lease on its holding. Our clients are buying the land from the local government.’
‘What happens to the farmers?’ Bill said.
‘They get a compensation package,’ Shane said, ‘and get to say so long and fare-thee-well to their pigs. Our clients build their two-million-US houses for people rich enough to afford them -and there are plenty of those. These places were all sold off the drawing board. And in a year there will be palaces where there used to be pig farms. And everybody will be happy.’
A man with fair, thinning hair appeared in the doorway. He was maybe ten years older than Bill, in his early forties. Bill had noticed him around the office because he seemed older than everyone else.
‘Shane?’ the man said. There was the north of England in his accent. ‘Mr Devlin is looking for you.’
‘Thanks, Mitch,’ Shane said. ‘I’m right there, mate.’ Shane made no attempt to introduce the man to Bill, so the pair of them smiled awkwardly at each other for a moment, and then the man was gone.
‘Who’s that?’ Bill said.
‘Pete Mitchell,’ Shane said. ‘Mad Mitch, we call him.’
‘What’s mad about him?’ Bill said. It would be hard to imagine a more quiet, self-effacing soul.
Shane glanced at the empty doorway. ‘He’s the wrong side of forty and he never made partner. Wouldn’t you be mad?’
Bill frowned. ‘Doesn’t the firm’s up-or-out policy apply here?’
An up-or-out policy was a law firm’s way of staying lean and hungry, a money-making machine that carried no deadwood. If you lacked the stuff needed to make partner, then you were finished. The firm would not carry you to retirement. You moved up – or out.
‘Sure,’ Shane said. ‘Most – I guess, oh, eighty-five per cent – of our associate lawyers make partner. The ones that don’t are like a girl that gets left on the shelf. You know, the Bridget Jones lawyers – like an unmarried bird facing the change without her Hugh Grant.’
Bill shivered as though someone had stepped on his grave. ‘Then what’s he doing here?’ he said. ‘Mad Mitch, I mean.’
‘Mad Mitch was in the Hong Kong office but he couldn’t stand the pace after the hand-over. For years the Hong Kong boys made money hand over fist, but it got a lot tougher when the Brits shipped out. Mitch was posted out here back when Shanghai was still a soft option.’ Shane sighed. ‘Sad, innit, mate? Forty-odd years old and still a wage slave. And we can’t go on forever, can we? Not the way we work. Lawyer years are like dog years – they run that bit faster than human years.’ Shane picked up the photograph on Bill’s desk. ‘But great things are expected of you,’ he said, nodding gravely. He studied the little family for a while and then gently replaced the photograph.
‘You’re a lucky man, Bill.’
‘Yes,’ Bill said, straightening the silver frame. ‘I am.’
The Mercedes came out of the tunnel and on to the Bund.
The famous road curved off ahead of them, a great sweep of stout colonial buildings made of marble and granite, the architecture of Empire.
‘The West is finished,’ Devlin said, watching the Bund go by. ‘The future belongs to the Chinese. They own it already.’ He turned to look at Bill. ‘Do you believe that?’
Bill smiled, shrugged, not wanting to disagree with his boss, but reluctant to concede the future to anyone. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘Believe it,’ Devlin told him. ‘They work harder than we do. They put up with conditions that would make us call a human rights lawyer, or the cops. They make us – the West, the developed world, all the twenty-first-century people – look lazy, soft, the pampered men of yesterday. We haven’t seen anything yet, I promise you.’
There were four of them in the car, with Tiger at the wheel. He had taken off his toy soldier uniform and was wearing a business suit. Bill sat in the back seat wedged between Devlin and a lawyer called Nancy Deng, one of the firm’s Chinese nationals. She had her briefcase open on her lap, examining some files, and she hadn’t spoken since the journey began.
Shane sat up front, his wafer-thin mobile phone in his big meaty fist, talking in calm, fluent Chinese. The words didn’t have the barking sound of Cantonese, or the rural, West Country burr of Mandarin, and so Bill guessed this must be what Shanghainese sounded like.
‘What happens when the Chinese can make everything the West makes?’ Devlin said, smiling back at Bill. ‘Not just toys, clothes and dinky little Christmas decorations but computers, cars, telecommunications – when they can make all that stuff at one tenth of the cost it takes our fat lazy work force?’
‘You want to pick up our Germans or meet them at the restaurant?’ Shane said over his shoulder.
‘We’ll pick them up at their hotel,’ Devlin said. ‘I don’t want our Germans getting lost.’ He looked back at Bill. ‘The Chinese are united,’ Devlin said, his eyes shining. ‘That’s the thing that nobody gets. They’re united. They have a unity of national vision that the West has lacked since, oh, World War Two. That’s why they will win.’
Shane was telling the Germans that he would see them in the lobby in ten minutes.
‘I love the Chinese,’ Devlin said simply, leaning back. ‘I admire them. They believe that tomorrow will be a better day. And if you are going to believe in something, anything, then that’s not a bad thing to believe in.’
Bill watched the Bund go by, and silently agreed with him.
The beggars saw them coming.
At first it seemed to Bill as though every single one of them had an oversized baby in her arms, as though begging without a toddler was forbidden by some local statute, but then he realised that there were also old people shambling along at the back of the mob, filthy hands outstretched, and solitary feral children who ducked and dived beneath the women with their toddlers in their arms, the toddlers carried as if they were babies.
But Bill had not noticed the old people and the big children. He had only noticed the toddlers being carted under the arms of their mothers.
Because they all seemed to be just a little bit younger than Holly.
Shane cursed. He had not wanted to walk to the restaurant. He had advised the two Germans that it was better to take the Mercedes and a cab, but they had insisted. They wanted to stroll along on the Bund, and now look what had happened. The beggars were on them, all over them, with their toothless, ingratiating smiles, the rank smell of their clothes and their bodies, all the bewildered faces of the children carried under one arm.
Shane shoved on ahead, shouting at them in Shanghainese, while Nancy pleaded with them and Devlin gave instructions to the clearly terrified Germans. Only Bill dawdled, stunned by a world where children the same age as Holly were begging in the street.
He reached for his wallet, and immediately realised his mistake. He had planned to give some money to the women with children but there were just so many of them, too many of them, and suddenly he was overwhelmed, the coins and notes falling from his fingers and the women with toddlers being trampled by the older children. Empty palms were thrust in Bill’s face.
One of the bigger kids – a weasel-faced runt with a cropped head and the eyes of an old man – grabbed Bill’s jacket and wouldn’t let it go. The child clung on as Bill edged his way through the mob to the building where his colleagues and the Germans were waiting. A uniformed doorman prised the child from Bill’s jacket.
‘Better watch your wad around here, mate,’ Shane said. ‘They’re not all driving BMWs and shopping at Cartier. There are still millions of the little bastards wiping their arses with their hands.’
‘And nobody gets left behind in the West?’ Devlin flared. Then he smiled easily. ‘There’s more upward mobility here than anywhere on the planet.’
Bill was embarrassed, shaken. The Germans were staring at him. One of them was balding and in a business suit, and the other had the long greying hair and the leather jacket of a wild youth. But they were both all business, and they could have been brothers. They murmured to each other in their own language.
Bill wiped sweat from his face. As they went up to the restaurant in the lift, Nancy gave him a tissue for the smear of grime that the young beggar had left on his jacket. He thanked her, his face burning, and dabbed at the mark but saw that it would not budge.
The perfect black print of a child’s hand.
Bill didn’t understand.
Their clients, DeutscherMonde, were investing billions of RMB in the Yangdong project. The company had already built an identical development in the suburbs of Beijing. And yet, as the Germans sat with their expensive lawyers across the dinner table from the local government officials of Yangdong – five men with cheap suits and soft flesh and bad teeth, accompanied by their own lawyer, a bird-thin man of sixty with a shock of dyed black hair, and a slab-like stooge who looked like some kind of bodyguard – it was as if the Germans were the supplicants, the ones most desperate for the deal, the beggars at the feast.
Courses came and went. The Germans sipped their mineral water. The Chinese chain-smoked high-tar cigarettes and swilled soft drinks. The conversation ebbed and flowed from English to Shanghainese, much of it concentrating on the glory of the Green Acres development, and how it would enrich the community.
The oldest of the town’s representatives said the least. With his hooded eyes, long upper lip and frog face, Bill thought he looked like a mini Mao. They called him Chairman Sun. He smoked constantly, even when the chopsticks in his spare hand picked at a dish. Sun made no eye contact, yet still managed to convey the impression that he was mildly dissatisfied with everything, including the project, the food, the choice of restaurant, the presence of so many foreign devils, and possibly life itself.
Only Bill had turned off his phone, and tinny snatches of familiar tunes punctuated the lunch. The Mission Impossible theme, the opening chords of ‘Brown Sugar’, niggling soundbites from Beethoven and Oasis and Faye Wong. Shane pushed his plate to one side and placed his laptop on the table.
‘What do you keep on that thing?’ Bill asked him.
‘The truth, mate,’ Shane told him. ‘The brutal truth.’
Chairman Sun called for the waiter and gave him his instructions. The waiter went away and came back with the wine list. Sun chose a bottle and Shane ingratiatingly smiled and mumbled his compliments in Shanghainese at the excellence of the choice.
Everyone fell silent as they watched the ritual of the waiter returning with the bottle of Burgundy, presenting it to Chairman Sun, who – after a tense moment – nodded his faint approval.
The waiter removed the cork and delicately poured a splash of red wine into Chairman Sun’s glass. His frog face twitched with suspicion as he smelled the wine, tasted it and – after another breathless moment – nodded his approval.
The waiter half-filled Chairman Sun’s glass with Burgundy. Then the Chairman topped it up with the can of Sprite in front of him, took a long slurp and exhaled with pleasure.
Bill glanced across at Shane and Devlin and Nancy and the two Germans.
But they didn’t even blink.
* * *
On Saturday afternoon he came home to an empty apartment.
He placed the stack of files he was carrying on the table, tore off his jacket and tie, and read the note Becca had stuck to the fridge. She had taken Holly to ride the bumper cars at Fuxing Park. He had promised to go with them, if he could get away in time. But Saturday was a work day at Butterfield, Hunt and West.
Bill had spent the afternoon going through paperwork with Shane and Nancy. The contract between the Germans and the Yangdong officials was in Chinese and drawn up under Chinese law, but the deal was structured so that all the important commercial rights were offshore, governed by Hong Kong law with documents in English.
‘It makes the deal easier to enforce,’ Nancy had explained.
‘When someone steals all the money,’ Shane added.
Bill took a bottle of Evian from the fridge and crossed to the window. The courtyard was empty apart from a silver Porsche 911. It looked like a shark waiting its prey on the bottom of the ocean. A 911, Bill thought, yawning as he stretched out on the sofa. A 911 in China…
He woke up with his daughter’s face pressed close, and he could smell the sweetness of her breath as she laughed with delight. She held a brightly coloured plastic figurine in each tiny fist. A prince in one hand, and a princess in the other.
‘Be the prince,’ Holly urged. ‘Come on, come on – be the prince, Daddy.’
He closed his eyes. He had never felt so tired. When he opened them, Holly was still offering him one of the little figurines. He stretched, groaned, and closed his eyes.
‘Later, darling,’ he heard Becca say from the kitchen. ‘Your daddy’s been working very hard for us.’
Bill felt relief as he heard small footsteps walking slowly away. When he opened his eyes he saw his daughter kneeling on the far side of the room, playing quietly by herself, and he felt unkind.
‘Holly?’ He was propped up on one elbow. ‘Yes?’ she said with that shy formality that always touched his heart, and then owned it forever.
He swung his legs round, ran his fingers through his hair. ‘What do you want me to do?’
Holly looked up at him with her perfect face. ‘Go on,’ she said, advancing towards him with the figurines in her hand. She pushed a piece of plastic in his face. A little unsmiling man in a golden crown and trousers that were too tight. ‘Go on, Daddy,’ his daughter urged. ‘Go on, Daddy – be Prince Charming.’
He did his best.
The free sample has ended.
