My Favourite Wife (26 page)

‘I’m so sorry, baby,’ she said.

‘What are you sorry about?’

‘Sorry that we had to come home. Sorry you had to get through this alone. I should have been there.’

‘You can’t help your dad getting sick.’

‘I know, but – I just want us to have a happy life. Really. That’s all I want. I just want us to be together again.’

‘Me too,’ he said.

It was such a simple and obvious thing to wish for, and she
couldn’t quite remember why they had ever wished for anything more.

‘How’s he doing? Your dad?’

‘No change,’ she said. ‘The tests were not conclusive. He has an irregular heartbeat but they don’t seem to know what’s wrong. I don’t know. He suddenly seems like an old man, Bill.’

‘And Holly,’ he said, and she remembered their screaming row, and she wanted to avoid another one.

‘She’s well, Bill,’ she said quickly. ‘She’s fine with Sara and her kids.’ A beat. ‘Please believe me, baby.’ She deliberately did not mention the partner. She knew how the unknown partner touched a raw nerve. ‘And I promise you it’s just for a little while, until my dad can really take care of himself.’

‘That’s good,’ he said, keeping it as neutral as possible.

‘How are you? When are you going to be back at work?’

‘I’m better. Really. Don’t worry. Devlin’s told me to stay away for a while. That’s okay. There’s plenty of stuff I can do from home.’

‘Still, maybe I should come over,’ she said. ‘I’ll talk to Dr Khan.’

‘No,’ Bill said. ‘Please don’t do that.’

It wasn’t true that there was nothing she could have done about it, Becca thought as she hung up. She could have stayed with him. But there was no point in thinking about it now. The worst of it was over, she thought, as she went into the kitchen and made some pasta and salad for herself and her father. Her dad was dozing in front of the evening news and Becca woke him when the meal was ready. He made lots of delighted and appreciative noises, but he hardly touched a thing.

After dinner Becca called Sara’s number to say goodnight to Holly. Then she watched a few hours’ television with her father, changing channels to follow the news. Or rather Becca watched television while her father slipped back into his snoring slumber.

It was strange. He could not sleep during the night, and she would often hear him bumping around, but he had no trouble at all sleeping on the sofa, when it wasn’t time to sleep.

Near midnight she woke him again and waited until she had heard him successfully negotiate the stairs, the bathroom and lights out before she turned in herself.

And Becca smiled wistfully to herself and thought how strange it was that now it was her turn to go to a spare room, and climb into a single bed, and go to sleep alone.

Tea was good for his recovery, JinJin said. And fresh air. And walking.

So when he had been home for a few days, and during one of those mornings when there was no ayi and no Tiger bringing him groceries and no Shane dropping in to see him or maybe just to delay going home from work, JinJin rang his bell and announced that she was taking him out. She recommended the Old City and Yu Gardens and the teahouse on the lake.

They drove there in her red Mini and he could not decide if she was the worst driver in the world or just a typical Shanghai racer. But they arrived in one piece and she took his arm as they walked through the Old City until they came to the zigzag bridge leading to the teahouse. He felt her long body pressing against him and stopped to look at her. Her eyes drifted to the waters bubbling with golden fish beneath them, and then back to his face.

‘Good father, good husband, good man,’ she said, then nodded once, as if making an important decision. They looked at each other for a very long moment. ‘Yes, I think so.’

When he kissed her it was a good fit. In fact their mouths fit together perfectly. There was usually something wrong with the way mouths fit together, he thought. Tongues too active or passive, lips too hard or wet, teeth that got in the way. Noses all over the place. But not with her.

‘It’s not going to happen,’ he said, stepping back, feeling himself responding instantly to her, wanting to hold her and stepping away so that he could not. ‘It’s not going to happen because if it happens
then I’m none of those things, am I? Good father, good husband, good man – it’s all out the window, JinJin. I’m none of those things if we start.’

She nodded thoughtfully, as if agreeing with him. ‘We can’t go anywhere,’ she said.

He didn’t know if she meant that the relationship could go nowhere, or if she meant they could not go out for fear of being seen – the teahouse by the lake was a lot emptier during the week, there was not much chance of seeing someone from the firm today, but it was still a possibility – or if she meant that it was unthinkable, conducting an affair at either of their apartments.

Maybe she meant all those things.

‘No, no, no,’ he said, desperate now, backing away from the edge of a cliff. ‘Nothing could ever happen. I can’t take you to the place where my wife sleeps and my daughter plays. And we can’t go to your place – your friend might walk in.’ There was no keeping the jealous bile out of his voice. ‘He has keys, doesn’t he?’

JinJin confirmed this in her devastatingly matter-of-fact tone. ‘He has keys, yes,’ she said. ‘He owns the apartment.’ They began slowly walking towards the teahouse. She smiled as if at some good clean joke. ‘No making love in William’s apartment. No making love in JinJin’s apartment.’

He could not smile back at her. This had gone too far already. The kiss had been a mistake. But she had been so kind, and she looked so good, and he had been so lonely for so long.

‘How can we?’ he said. ‘I think you’re terrific – you know I do – but how can we?’

Then they said nothing at all until the woman had brought them their tea and poured two cups. And while they were waiting for the boiling water to cool, JinJin opened her bag and silently gave him an envelope that contained two Dragon Air tickets with their names on. He looked more closely. Shanghai to Guilin. Leaving tomorrow morning. Impossible, he thought. No chance.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to – where is it? – Guilin. I’m going back to work.’ He stared at the tickets, shaking his head. ‘I’ve never even heard of Guilin.’ He held out the tickets. She made no move to take them. She blew on her tea. He leaned forward. ‘Listen to me. Look at me. I’m not free, JinJin. Three little words before it begins.
I’m not free.’

‘You’ll like Guilin,’ she said, giving him three little words of her own, and she lifted her cup, although gingerly, because it was almost too hot to hold.

Then they didn’t talk until the red Mini with the Chinese flag on the roof was bombing east, back to New Gubei, and she was turning to chat to him in the fast lane of the freeway, telling him how her father came from Guilin, so she had a mother from the far north in Changchun and a father from the distant south, next door to Vietnam, and she was leaning on the horn just to announce her presence in this world, overtaking on the inside, tailgating, flashing her lights, showing absolutely no fear.

That was what scared him most. That total lack of fear, as if JinJin had no idea of how bad it could get.

On a wooden bridge high above the river they huddled together under an umbrella bearing the hotel’s name and watched a fisherman with his cormorant.

After dark there were boats that took the tourists out to watch the men fishing with their birds. Bill and JinJin had gone out on the first night in Guilin, the searchlights from the boat illuminating the fishermen squatting at the back of their flat little punts, the cormorants facing them with a kerosene lamp between them, man and bird gathered around the lamp as though it was a camp fire.

When the birds were put to work they burst into the water and immediately exploded back out again, a miraculous fish in their beaks. The fishermen – ageless little men made of nothing but brown muscle and ropey sinew – threw most of the fish into a big wicker basket. But with every seventh catch they released the metal clasp around the bird’s neck, allowing the cormorant to swallow the fish. At night, surrounded by the dumbstruck Chinese tourists, it had seemed like a clever circus trick. But during the day, when the men fished with the cormorants and there was no audience, and you could watch them fishing from the high wooden bridge for free, you knew that this was just the way they fished, it had nothing to do with tickling the tourists. Bill thought it looked like a vision from a thousand years ago.

Guilin was the China he had seen in paintings. Beyond the town he could see the limestone mountains stretching on for ever, selfconsciously picturesque, some of them so triangular that they looked like the mountains in one of his daughter’s drawings, and all the scene swathed in mist, as if posing, as if waiting to be captured for posterity.

It felt like the edge of China, and he almost suspected that it was the end of the world, even though he knew that Vietnam was on the far side of those mountains. But although it was the most ravishing country he had seen in his life, the postcard beauty of Guilin did not grip him like the sight of the fisherman and his bird.

‘That’s China for me,’ he said. Far below them, on the glassy water of the River Li, the river that shared her name, the lone fisherman was releasing the metal clasp around his bird’s neck. The fish in its beak was gobbled down in an instant. ‘That fisherman,’ he told her, ‘that bird.’

JinJin shrugged. She smiled at Bill and squeezed his arm, but the light in her eyes hardly changed, as though the sight of the fisherman and the cormorant was nothing to make a fuss about, as though she was just humouring him. As though her country, and the world, was a far more simple place than he believed.

‘Practical,’ she said, as the bird plunged once more into the water, and came out with a fish that this time it would not be allowed to keep. ‘Just practical.’

This was the time when he couldn’t get enough of her.

In the day they walked around Guilin. In the late afternoon they put the sign on the door to make the maid and the world go away, and he moaned and loved her and slept in her arms.

It all made perfect sense, and it was also a kind of madness -because the world slipped away and being there in that room with her was all that mattered. He didn’t know how, he had no idea
how, but they would work it out. He would make their days in Guilin go on, back in the real world. He would make a holiday romance last for ever. All he had to do was work out how.

At the same time the guilt was as real inside his body as the sickness had been – the crushing guilt and sense of shame, and it came to him like a baseball bat smacked against the back of the head as he lay awake and she slept. The guilt was as undeniable as the illness, and so was the terrible knowledge that if he had his chance to do it all over again, then he would do exactly the same thing, and take JinJin Li’s hand, and drive to the airport, and catch the flight to Guilin, and watch the fishermen with their birds, and step right off the cliff.

He was amazed that she wanted to see her father.

On the first morning in Guilin, inspired by the proximity of her father’s hometown, she had casually told him a string of horror stories about growing up with his violent rages, and Bill had assumed that she had severed all contact after her parents had divorced. But he was in a village in the countryside beyond Guilin, a brief taxi-ride away, reportedly in ill health, and to JinJin it was unremarkable that they should pay him a visit.

‘A father like that,’ Bill said, outraged on her behalf, ‘in the West you wouldn’t have anything to do with him.’

JinJin shrugged. ‘But we are not in the West,’ she reminded him.

So they caught a cab to his village, the limestone mountains and the glass-smooth river and the paddy fields drifting by outside the window as the horrors of her childhood at the other end of the country came back to Bill. Her father rapping JinJin and her sister across the hand with chopsticks if they annoyed him at the dinner table. Her father dragging their mother off for a beating with the words, ‘Say goodbye to the children – you will never see them again.’ And her father eventually leaving but never leaving them alone, arguing in the street with JinJin when
she was fifteen and he was forty, and the passers-by mistaking them for lovers.

He was a gambler. The violence came from the gambling. He worked, he gambled, and when he had lost everything he came home to blame his wife and two daughters, and to take it out on them.

His village sat in a valley between two stubby hills. The white stumps of trees that had been cut down years ago crept up the hills like the massed tombstones of some forgotten war. The village itself was part shantytown and part campsite. Shacks of wood and corrugated metal stood alongside grubby brown tents. Barefoot children came out of the tents to gawp at the arrival of the taxi. It was hardly a village at all, Bill thought.

‘What happened in this place?’ he said.

JinJin looked up at the hillsides. ‘Flood,’ she said. ‘In the past, many trees were cut down around here.’ She groped for the word. ‘Soil? When typhoon comes, soil comes quickly down the hill without trees there.’ She slowly raised one of her small hands, palm down. ‘Rains come, river get big – you understand?’

He nodded.

‘How long have these people been living in tents?’ he asked her. ‘When was the flood?’

She thought about it. ‘Three years ago. Come on, let’s find my father.’

JinJin’s father was at the bus depot where he worked. He had a Clark Gable moustache and he was as wide as he was tall. He was so physically different from his long lean daughter that Bill struggled to believe they shared the same blood. He grinned shyly at Bill as he chattered with JinJin, and perhaps because she was so apparently at ease with him, Bill could not find it in his heart to hate the man.

‘I this girl father!’ he announced, and Bill nodded, both of them smiling away at this shocking revelation. His two friends cackled with amusement at his mastery of a foreign language.