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.