by Tony Parsons
Yes, that’s the way it must work, Bill thought, as they left their daughter with the ayi.
The heart just gets bigger.
You don’t love the first one any less. The heart can always find room for the ones that it loves.
A red Mini Cooper with a Chinese flag painted on the roof was blocking the exit to the courtyard.
Tiger leaned on his horn as George the porter excitedly conferred with the driver of the Mini. A number of women were gathered around the car, offering advice to the driver. George had to push his way through them. He came and stuck his head in the window.
‘Hello, lady. Hello, boss,’ he said to Becca and Bill, before releasing a stream of Shanghainese at Tiger.
‘Keys stuck,’ Tiger translated, looking at Bill in his rear-view mirror. ‘Keys stuck in car.’
Becca winced as Tiger put his hand on the horn and left it there. ‘Bill?’ she said, so Bill touched Tiger on the shoulder, requesting silence, then got out of the car and walked up to the Mini. George followed him. The women around the car watched him coming. From the window on Saturday night they had looked as similar as sisters, but up close they could not have been more different. There was a woman in her middle thirties, by far the oldest, who had the lithe body of a dancer. A much younger woman in thick glasses who could have been a librarian from central casting. There was one who was plain and slightly overweight who wore no makeup and carried a pack of disposable nappies. And there was one who clutched a Louis Vuitton bag and wore a mini-kilt that just about covered her sporran.
‘Excuse me,’ Bill said, and the little crowd parted without expression or complaint. He leaned in the window of the Mini with the Chinese flag on the roof. The tall girl with the orchid in her hair was in the driver’s seat, her long limbs everywhere as she yanked desperately at the ignition keys.
‘My goodness,’ she was saying, interspersed with torrents of Chinese. ‘Oh my goodness.’
‘Car broke,’ George said over Bill’s shoulder. ‘Brand-new car and broke.’
Bill sighed, shaking his head, glancing from the gearbox to the girl’s face. She was a good few years younger than him. Middle twenties, he guessed. But it was hard to tell out here. She could have been anything.
‘Miss? You have to put it in park,’ Bill told her patiently. ‘You’ll not get the keys out until you’ve got it in park. It’s designed that way so the thing doesn’t drive off by itself and kill someone.’
She shot him a fierce look. A leg emerged from the slit in her dress, a qipao, which back then he still thought of as a cheongsam. Her skin was an almost milky white. He thought, Why are they supposed to be yellow? Where did that myth come from? She’s paler than I am. He had never seen skin so white. It was like alabaster.
‘Do you mind?’ she said, glaring at him like a rich man’s wife putting a stroppy tradesman in his place. She had the biggest eyes he had ever seen. ‘My husband will address the problem.’
Bill stared at her, momentarily stunned by the formality of her English. Then he laughed. She dressed like Suzie Wong but she talked like a member of the Women’s Institute.
‘No, I don’t mind,’ he said. ‘Fine.’ He turned to George. ‘She’s got the car in drive and she needs to put it in park before it will let her remove the key.’ George looked confused. ‘It’s the way they make them,’ Bill explained, not quite as patient now.
George thought about it, and understanding slowly dawned on his round face.
‘Ahhh,’ George said. ‘Very clever safety device.’
‘My husband will be here soon,’ the tall girl insisted, still struggling desperately with the key. She unleashed some Chinese and then slapped the steering wheel with her open palm. ‘Oh, my goodness!’
Bill looked at her, said nothing, and after nodding in acknowledgement at the women gathered around the car, walked back to the limo. Tiger leaned on the horn again, that promiscuous use of the horn that Bill had already realised was endemic in China. He frowned, shook his head and Tiger stopped.
Bill settled himself next to Becca. He could see the back of the girl’s head, and the white orchid she had pinned there. George was leaning into the Mini, giving her careful instructions, as though it were all very complicated. The flower moved as she shook her head.
‘What’s the problem?’ Becca said.
‘Got it in the wrong gear,’ Bill explained to his wife. ‘She’s not going anywhere like that.’
They stood holding hands on the balcony of the private members’ club and the city surrounded them in all its money, mystery and pride. It was wild. It was like nothing they had ever seen.
They looked out over the floodlit rooftops of the Bund and saw the mighty river shimmer with fragments of reflected neon, the barges invisible now but their foghorns blaring as they moved through the darkness, and all the shining peaks of Pudong beyond.
In the daylight Shanghai was hot, cruel, overcrowded, but at night Bill thought that it was always beautiful, undeniably beautiful; at night it looked as it had looked the very first time he had seen it, coming across the bridge from the airport, still punch-drunk from the flight.
He squeezed Becca’s hand and she smiled at him.
Devlin came out on to the balcony and stood beside them, drink in hand, shaking his head at the sight.
‘There was never a city like this before,’ he said quietly, and Becca thought it was as if he was talking to himself as much as them. He was like some old Empire builder, she thought, he had that mad passion about him. She could imagine him on a farm in the Ngong Hills in Africa, or suffocating in the heat of Satipur, or being carried on a sedan chair up Victoria Peak. But of course there was no Empire left.
‘Never,’ he said. ‘Not in the history of humanity.’ He looked at her and smiled, and he had enormous charm, and she could do nothing but share his wonder. He filled his lungs with the thick air of the Shanghai night. ‘To be living in this place at this time -I tell you, future generations will envy us.’
Becca smiled at him. What she liked about Devlin most of all was that he talked about the Chinese with genuine affection. She had grown up on the move, her father a reporter for Reuters, and until they finally returned to England when she was eleven her childhood had been measured out in extended postings in Johannesburg, Frankfurt and Melbourne. Becca knew that the default expat reaction to the country he or she lived in was usually a kind of amused contempt. But Devlin was not like that. He loved the Chinese, and now he stared out at the night talking about how China’s economy was already bigger than the UK’s, how it would be bigger than Germany’s by 2010, bigger than America’s by 2020, and he seemed awed, not resentful, as if it was only what the Chinese deserved. There was something wonderful about him, Becca thought, feeling that their lives would get better and keep on getting better if only they stayed close to Hugh Devlin. He made her feel that this was a good move for her family, and that the coming years would be all they dreamed.
And there was another reason for Becca to like Devlin – he didn’t patronise her, he didn’t treat her the way the firm’s senior partners in London had treated her. As a wife and nothing but a wife, she thought. As a mother and nothing before or after she was a mother. A homemaker, they would say, hardest job in the bloody world, and she knew they didn’t believe it for a second, and she saw the buried mockery.
With Devlin, she didn’t feel as though she had to establish her credentials as a former career woman, the lapsed financial journalist, and she knew that Devlin realised that rising young hotshot Bill Holden would not be here without her.
A thin, blonde woman of about forty wobbled on to the balcony with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She looked as though she should have switched to Perrier an hour ago. It was the woman that Becca had first seen in Devlin’s wallet in London. Tess Devlin held out her hand and Becca shook it.
‘I want your husband to give me a child before it’s too late,’ she told Becca.
‘That’s fine,’ B
ecca said. ‘Can he finish his drink first?’
‘Oh, come inside, you two lovebirds,’ Mrs Devlin said, kissing Bill on both cheeks, and taking him by the arm. She shot a look at her husband. ‘It’s so hot out here.’
Mrs Devlin allowed Bill to dawdle behind, talking to her husband, but she didn’t let go of Becca until she had steered her to the seat next to her own. It was a table for twelve, all lawyers at the firm and a smattering of the wives, although quite a few of the men seemed to be single, or at least alone.
Becca could guess the identity of some of them from the shoptalk that Bill had brought home. The Asian woman instructing the waiters in Shanghainese must be Nancy Deng. The tired-looking Englishman sitting by himself and staring sadly into the middle distance had to be Mad Mitch, who apparently was not long for this firm. She only recognised Shane, and he grinned at her and said her name, and she was touched that he remembered, as he raised a glass of Tsingtao in his meaty fist.
‘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
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 l
arge 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.
