My Favourite Wife

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They stared out at the elevated Ya’an Freeway. The lights of the city seemed to be glowing somewhere far below them.

‘I’m sorry, Bec,’ he said. ‘It will get better. I’ll make it better.’

Tears sprang to her eyes. This was a good thing about him. He would always reach out a hand to her. It had always been that way when they argued. He wouldn’t allow them to go to sleep angry and hurt. He always tried to make it better. And he didn’t say what he could have said, what most men would have said – Coming here was your idea. But this life wasn’t what she had expected.

‘I wanted us to see the jazz band at the Peace Hotel,’ she said, almost laughing, it sounded so absurd. ‘And I wanted us to buy propaganda posters and Mao badges in the Dongtai Lu antique market. All these places that I read about, all the great places they say you should go.’

He put his arm around her.

‘And I wanted us,’ she said, snuggling down, adjusting Holly on her lap. ‘I wanted us to drink cocktails in hotels where in the thirties you could get opium on room service. I want to support you, Bill. And I want to be a good sport. And I want to muck in and I don’t want to whine. But why isn’t it like that?’

‘We’ll do all those things,’ he said, and he touched her face, that face he loved so much, and determined to see her happy again.

‘But when?’

‘Starting tomorrow, Bec.’ He nodded, and she smiled, because she knew that he meant it.

Her unhappiness, and her loneliness, and all the panic of tonight were things he would address with the dogged determination that he brought to everything. My husband, she thought. The professional problem-solver.

He could never understand why people felt sentimental about when they were young. Being young meant being poor. Being young was a long, hard grind. Being young meant doing jobs that sucked the life out of you.

Being young was overrated. Or maybe it was just him. For in his teens and twenties Bill had endured eight years of feeling like he was the only young person in the world who wasn’t really young at all.

At weekends and holidays, he had worked his way through two years of A-levels, four years at UCL, six months of his Law Society final exams and his two years’ traineeship with Butterfield, Hunt and West.

Over eight years of stacking shelves, carrying hods, pulling pints and ferrying around everything from takeaway pizzas (on a scooter) to Saturday-night drunks (in a mini cab) and cases of wine (in a Majestic Wine Warehouse white van).

The worst job was in a Fulham Road pub called the Rat and Trumpet. It wasn’t as back-breaking as lugging bricks on a building site, and it wasn’t as dangerous as delivering pizza to a sink estate after midnight, and it didn’t numb your brain quite like filling shelves under the midnight sun of the supermarket strip lighting.

But the Rat and Trumpet was the worst job of the lot because that was where all the people his own age didn’t even notice that privilege had been given to them on a plate. They had a sense of entitlement that Bill Holden would never have, the boys with their ripped jeans and pastel-coloured jumpers and their Hugh Grant fringes, the girls all coltish limbs and blonde tresses and laughter full of daddy’s money.

He had come across the type at university, but they had not been the dominant group, not at UCL, where the braying voices were drowned out by other accents from other towns and other types of lives. But this was their world, and Bill just served drinks in it.

Kids whose mothers and fathers had never got sick, or broke up, or divorced, or died. At least that’s the way he thought of them. They all looked as though nothing bad had ever happened to them, or ever would.

They stared straight through him, or bellowed their orders from the far end of the bar, and he had no trouble at all in hating every one of the fucking bastards.

The Rat and Trumpet had no bouncer, and sometimes Bill had to throw one of them out. The landlord slipped him an extra fiver at the end of the night for every chinless troublemaker Bill had to escort to the Fulham Road – they called it the Half-Cut Hooray allowance.

The extra money was greatly appreciated. But Bill – twenty-two years old and furious with the Fates – would cheerfully have done it for nothing. Hilarious, they always said. Like the woman from Shanghai Chic. Everything was hilarious. It was all so fucking hilarious that it made you puke.

One night some idiot was practising his fast bowling with the Scotch eggs and splattering yolk and breadcrumbs all over the customers in the snug. Howzat? Hilarious, darling. The Scotch-egg bowler was a strapping lad in a pink cashmere sweater and carefully distressed Levi’s. They could be big lads, these Hoorays. They weren’t selling off the playing fields at the kind of school his mummy and daddy sent him to.

There was a girl with him – one of those girls, Bill thought, one of those Fulham Broadway blondes – who was trying to get him to stop. She seemed halfway to being a human being. Bill gave her credit for looking upset. For not finding it absolutely hilarious. That was the first time he saw Becca.

Bill politely asked the Scotch-egg bowler to leave. He told Bill to fuck off and get him a pint of Fosters. So Bill asked him less politely. Same response. Fuck off and a pint of Fosters. So Bill got him in an arm lock before his brain had registered what was happening and marched him to the door. It toughed you up on those building sites. It didn’t matter how much sport they played at their private schools, it just wasn’t the same as manual labour.

A meaty lad but soft inside, Bill thought. He gave him a push at the door – slightly harder than was strictly necessary – in fact a lot harder than was strictly necessary – and the fast Scotch-egg bowler skidded and fell into the gutter.

At the outside tables, people laughed.

‘One day you’ll bring drinks to my children,’ he told Bill, getting up, his face red for all sorts of reasons.

‘Can’t wait,’ Bill said. They must have been about the same age, he thought. Bill bet his mum wasn’t gone.

‘And you’ll be a toothless old git with snot on his chin and your rotten life will be gone and you will still be waiting on the likes of me.’

Bill laughed and looked at the blonde girl. ‘I hope your kids look like their mother,’ he said, turning away, and never expecting to see her again.

But Becca came back inside to apologise on behalf of her boyfriend and offer to pay for the Scotch eggs and all the mess, and she was just in time to see the landlord fire Bill, who didn’t like it that Bill had used more force than necessary to throw out the fast Scotch-egg bowler; he wasn’t here to rough up the paying customers, he was here to stop trouble, not to start it, and Bill was saying that he couldn’t possibly be fired, because he was fucking well quitting, okay?

Becca followed him outside and said, ‘Don’t go.’

And Bill said, ‘Three quid an hour to be insulted by dickheads? Why not?’

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?’