My Favourite Wife. Tony Parsons
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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,’ Becca 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