My Favourite Wife
Page 36
And as Bill increased his pace, gaining on them now, suddenly knowing it was her, he understood why she would never be a TV presenter. He had always suspected that one day he would turn on CCTV and there she would be, reading the autocue and staring straight at him, looking like the passport photograph taken the year before she had met him. But like so many of their plans, he saw that it was not going to happen.
The glow had gone, or the glossiness of youth, or the magic, or whatever it had been. Maybe it had never been there in the first place, only in his eyes. Perhaps it was only there, that magic light of love, because he wanted and needed it to be. But now he saw her with the light extinguished and she was an attractive Chinese woman in her thirties, no more and no less, and she was getting older, and none of it was very complicated.
And here was the funny thing – as he saw her ordinariness, as he registered that she was just another human being trying to make her way in the world, trying her best to look nice for her new man and for herself, Bill Holden still loved her – or at least he still carried the love that remains when love has died, and he always would.
But she was not for him and he was not for her.
The happy couple had stopped walking. The man was buying a newspaper. He was a Westerner, maybe a bit younger than Bill. He didn’t look like anything special. He looked like the first guy who had come along. He looked like someone she had met in a bar or a gym or wherever it was that normal people met.
Bill realised that she had not stopped smiling since she had seen him, a strained and defensive smile, as if he were amusing, or as if she was trying to convince herself that all of this was funny.
And perhaps I am funny, Bill thought. Perhaps I am a barrel of laughs. Or perhaps her smile was just another bandage on another wound. He did not know.
Bill and JinJin stared at each other – they were both wearing dark glasses, and Bill was grateful for that, he could not stand to have her look in his eyes again – and the man, the first man who had come along, the man from the gym or the bar, put his arm around her again – Don’t worry, I’ll protect you from this bad man, darling. You know nothing, Bill thought. Oh, you have no idea.
And suddenly Bill found that he had started mouthing banalities. ‘Nice to see you, nice to see you,’ he said, while he stood there shaking everybody’s hand like the sporting captain of a losing side. The man’s hand. JinJin’s hand.
That’s the role he chose to play, the only one he could think of -the good loser. Three cheers for the guy from the gym or the bar or wherever it was. Had he ever shaken JinJin’s hand before? He didn’t think so. He was told the name of the new guy and immediately forgot it as he kept saying, ‘Nice to meet you, nice to meet you.’ Nice. So nice. Everything was so nice that it almost suffocated him.
Then he turned away, but her voice called him back, even as he kept moving.
‘My mum’s in town!’ she said, a happy exclamation unveiled as if it should mean something to him. He kept walking.
‘Then give her my love,’ he said over his shoulder, and he meant it. And perhaps she said it because she felt it too – the terrible finality of the ending, of letting it go, and she wanted him to stay for just a few more seconds, because they both knew they would never see each other again after today, and all they would ever share now was the past and whatever photographs that JinJin Li had been unable to destroy.
She was not innocent. She was not that. She was from a far harder world than he could ever imagine, a world that he had only glimpsed. But if she was not innocent, then there was still an innocence and purity about her, part of her that could never be touched or spoiled or owned – not by her father, not by the man who put her up in Paradise Mansions, and not by Bill. There was a part of her that was untouchable, and he envied and loved her for it.
He got to the end of the street, that famous street, old colonial Shanghai staring across the river at the future, and he hailed a cab, and as the taxi turned and drove back down the Bund he saw them sitting outside a café.
The man was reading a newspaper while JinJin sat opposite him, staring off into the middle distance, being ignored by her boyfriend, not even an attempt at a smile on her face now.
Bill had to laugh. They were arguing about him, or they had argued about him, and what she had said – My mum’s in town! -and what she had meant by what she had said, and did perhaps JinJin want him to call, and all of that, and it felt like the most pointless argument in the world – to argue about him, as something as dead and over and finished as Bill.
The smile was gone and JinJin Li looked quite ordinary and they were just a man and a woman sitting at a café trying to make sense of being together, and making no sense at all right now, and Bill had to grin because he felt like it was some higher power’s gift to him, a consolation prize to the man who would never stop believing that he had loved her first and best and then lost her. He raised a hand in salute and farewell and, sitting across from the grumpy new boyfriend reading his newspaper, JinJin waved back.
Bill knew that somewhere down the line she would smile again, and he could not begrudge her that, he could even be happy about it, even if she would not be smiling it for him, the world-famous smile of JinJin Li.
* * *
The plan was that Tiger would drive them to the airport in his new BMW. But the BMW was reclaimed by the loan company when Tiger’s business collapsed, and so the plan changed.
Down in the courtyard of Paradise Mansions, Holly adjusted herself in her father’s arms as she contemplated Tiger emerging from an old red VW Santana.
‘Is Tiger a taxi driver now?’ she said, gesturing with the yellow plastic pony she held in her fist.
Tiger laughed with embarrassment, looking from Bill to Becca, and then down at his shoes. ‘Too many people with same idea,’ he said, turning to Bill. ‘Now too much Chinese furniture in China.’ He looked shyly at Holly. ‘Yes, old Tiger a taxi driver now.’
‘It was still a good idea,’ Becca said.
Bill placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘You’ll think of something else.’
Tiger cast a mournful eye at the red Santana. ‘But should be a better car. Should be a limo, boss. Like the one you came in on.’
Bill placed Holly on the ground and hefted the first of the suitcases. ‘We’re grateful for the lift,’ he said.
‘And limos are overrated,’ Becca said, getting into the passenger seat. The phone in her bag rang once and then again and it was ringing for a third time as she turned it off.
Bill sat in the back of the cab with Holly on his lap and as the city slipped away from them the child slept. He turned his head to look at the Bund, and a single black star seemed to fall across the sky. As they crossed the river his daughter stirred in his arms.
‘Are we home yet?’ she said sleepily, and in the front of the car Becca laughed, turned to look at her, and at her husband. One day their beautiful daughter would stop saying these things, he thought. But not for a while.
Bill pulled his daughter close, his arms wrapped around her, her head nodding against his chest. She was still gripping the yellow plastic pony. The old VW turned on to the highway and the last lights of Shanghai were lost to him.
‘Just rest your eyes,’ he said, so quietly that only his daughter would hear. ‘That’s the big secret. You just rest your eyes and then you’re home before you know it.’
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Man and Boy
One For My Baby
Man and Wife
The Family Way
Stories We Could Tell
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers
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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2008
1
Copyright © Tony Parsons 2008
Tony Parsons asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record fo
r this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-0-00-722648-1
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination, other than the names of performers who make cameo appearances in the book. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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EPub Edition © 2008 ISBN: 978-0-00-736291-2
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