My Favourite Wife. Tony Parsons
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hair and Bill and Becca sipped their Tsingtaos while the band swaggered through Glenn Miller’s ‘String of Pearls’, for a few sweet dreaming minutes Becca thought it truly seemed as though the old world had never been pulled apart.
The next day Bill came back from work early and joined his daughter at the window. Devlin had packed him off home. He wanted Bill’s family to be happy. He wanted them to stay.
‘That’s my favourite one,’ Holly said, indicating a half-starved ginger kitten that was patrolling the perimeter of the fountain. ‘That’s the best one.’
There were no pets allowed in Paradise Mansions but from their window Holly would watch the stray cats who haunted the courtyard – emaciated creatures that preened themselves in the shade of the straggly flower beds, or lapped delicately from the pools of water created by the mother-and-child fountain, or gnawed at bones they had foraged from the rows of huge black rubbish bins in an alleyway behind the main building.
Bill laughed. ‘So why do you like her best?’
Holly thought about it. ‘She’s the smallest.’
‘Shall we feed her, angel?’
Holly’s eyes lit up. ‘Shall we feed her? Shall we, Daddy?’ Holly hopped around with excitement while Bill got a carton of milk from the fridge and a saucer from the cupboard. Becca, in the bedroom getting ready to go out, frowned doubtfully, called something about fleas, but Bill and Holly were out of the apartment before she really had time to object.
Down in the courtyard, they watched from a respectful distance while the ginger waif lapped up its saucer of semi-skimmed and then took itself off to a flower bed where it collapsed with contentment in the dirt. Bill and Holly approached tentatively. The ginger kitten permitted Holly to stroke its back. Then Bill was suddenly aware that they were not alone.
The tall girl was standing there watching them with the cat. She was wearing a green qipao that made her long, slim body look even longer and her hair was hanging down. She was dressed to go out.
‘Hello there,’ she said, smiling at Holly, and Bill saw that she was holding his jacket. She had had it dry cleaned, and it was still in a cellophane wrapper that said Da Zhong American Laundry. He could see that they had not managed to remove the handprint.
‘Tse-tse,’ she said, holding out his jacket. ‘Thank you so much.’
‘Bu ke-qi,’ he said.
‘That means “you are welcome”,’ Holly told her, and they both laughed and the tall girl touched Holly’s hair. ‘So fair,’ she said, ‘I adore her,’ and that was the first time he really heard her English, and the strange weight that she put on certain words, and the unfathomable choices she made with the language. I adore her. It somehow clanged. And yet it wasn’t wrong. He could not say that it was wrong.
He held out his hand and she shook it lightly and awkwardly and quickly, as though she had never shaken hands with anyone in her life. Her hand was small and cool.
‘Bill Holden,’ he said, and he touched his daughter’s head. ‘And this one is Holly.’
‘Li JinJin,’ she said, and he knew that she was putting her family name first, in the Chinese fashion, the family coming before everything, the family name forever inseparable from the first name.
‘Hello, Holly,’ she said. Holding the slit of her qipao together with a modest gesture, she crouched down so that their eyes were on the same level. ‘What are you up to with your daddy?’
Holly squinted at her. ‘We’re look aftering this cat,’ she said, and the woman and the child silently contemplated the mangy ginger cat as it lolled in the flower bed. Bill sensed that JinJin didn’t know quite what to say about the stray moggy. The Chinese were not sentimental about animals.
Bill looked at JinJin when she stood up. The mark on her face looked better in the daylight. Not so raw. Or maybe he was just prepared for it now. And now he could see that it was from an airbag. He could tell that a human hand hadn’t made it. But even with that mark on her face, there was still something about her, Bill thought. She wasn’t the most beautiful woman he had seen in Shanghai. She wasn’t even the most beautiful woman he had seen in Paradise Mansions – that would have to be his wife. But when JinJin Li smiled, she seemed to have this inner light. He had never seen her smile before.
‘Have a good day in Shanghai,’ she said, and now it was his turn to be lost for words as he struggled for something to say about the other night, to put it in its rightful place, but nothing came, and it did not matter because at that moment the silver Porsche pulled into the courtyard and she gave him one last smile before she started off to where the car was waiting for her, its powerful engine still running, ready to take Li JinJin off to her life.
Becca’s night on the town had been fun, although she enjoyed it more in retrospect than she did at the time.
Alice had taken her to a bar on the Bund, plied her with ludicrously potent mojitos, and Becca had spent the evening with her mobile phone in her hand, just in case there was some problem with Holly. But Bill never called and they were both sleeping when she got home. Becca moved quietly through the apartment, checking on her family, and free at last to savour the evening, now that she knew everything was fine.
Holly was in the middle of the king-size bed, looking tiny. Breathing normally. And Bill in the spare room. His feet sticking out the bottom of the single bed. Looking comically big for it. Becca took off her clothes. He gasped and tried to sit up as she slid in beside him. She placed a soothing hand on his chest and kissed his face.
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