Tony Parsons - My Favourite Wife

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 an equal opportunity city,’ Mrs Devlin said thoughtfully. She sucked her cigarette, exhaled through her mouth now, her green eyes squinting in the Marlboro mist. ‘It’s very different for men and women. You’ll see that. Perhaps you’ve seen it already.’

Becca thought of the girls of Paradise Mansions coming out to meet the cars, and she wondered if Mrs Devlin had seen them too.

Tess Devlin leaned close to Becca. She smelled of Amaretto and cigarettes and Giorgio Armani. ‘I know it’s hard sometimes, but look at it this way,’ she continued. ‘A few years out here and the pair of you will be set up for life.’

A drink was placed before Mrs Devlin. Amaretto, no ice. Without acknowledging the waitress – taking what she had wanted all along as nothing more than her right, Becca thought – she cradled the glass in the palm of her hand, checking the temperature, shooting the waitress a withering look that said, Oh yes, I know that old trick, where you just fish the ice out and don’t bring me a fresh drink . Then she slowly sipped her drink, her genuinely fresh drink, giving Becca a conspiratorial look that said, They can’t fool me . The waitress vanished.

‘Oh yes, Gubei New Area is lovely,’ Mrs Devlin said thoughtfully. ‘Dear old Gubei. You hardly know you’re in China at all.’

There was something wrong with the rest room. Bill felt it the moment he walked in. It appeared to be empty but – why was there a bucket and a mop in the corner? And what was that sound? What was going on in here?

He advanced with caution, his gaze shifting to the short row of cubicles. And that was strange too, because the doors were all ajar. But he could definitely hear someone. Someone who sounded as if they were trying to give birth.

Then Bill saw him. The old cleaner with his tattered trousers and filthy drawers around his ankles, sitting on the throne with the door flung open, grunting and groaning and straining, as if there wasn’t enough fibre in the world to free his strangled bowels.

He was in the furthest cubicle from the entrance, and perhaps that was his only nod towards decorum. For he considered Bill without a trace of embarrassment.

In fact Bill thought the man looked at him as though he was fresh off a British Airways flight from Heathrow, while he had been sitting there for a thousand years.

Bill stood at the window and watched the courtyard, waiting for Tiger to appear. A large black BMW with an elderly man at the wheel stood by with its engine running. A young woman in glasses came out of the opposite block and walked smiling towards the car and the man, who could only be her father. I recognise her, Bill thought. The librarian. So we are not the only ones. There are other regular people here, too.

‘Daddy? Daddy?’ His daughter’s voice, high and demanding. ‘Do you know what planet we’re on, Daddy?’

Bill had worked out that the silver Porsche came for the tall girl on Wednesday and Friday nights. It was there most Sunday afternoons. There were also sporadic visits during the week, delivering her back to Paradise Mansions early in the morning, or collecting her at strange hours. Her husband, he thought. Yeah, right.