And the Bride Wore Red

‘She’s the opposite to them. Her fiancé died years ago. There’s been nobody else for her since, and she’s always told me that she’s perfectly content. She says once you’ve found the right man you can’t replace him with anyone else.’

‘Even when she’s lost him?’

‘But according to Norah she hasn’t lost him. He loved her to the end of his life, so she feels that they still belong to each other.’

‘And you disapprove?’ he asked, frowning a little.

‘It sounds charming, but it’s really only words. The reality is that it’s turned Norah’s life into a desert that’s lasted fifty years.’

‘Perhaps it hasn’t. Do you really know what’s inside her heart? Perhaps it’s given her a kind of fulfilment that we can’t understand.’

‘Of course you could be right, but if that’s fulfilment…’ She finished with a sigh. ‘I just want more from life than dreaming about a man who isn’t there any more. Or,’ she added wryly, ‘in my mother’s case, several men who aren’t there any more.’

‘But what about the louse? Didn’t he change your mind?’

For the first time he saw her disconcerted.

‘I kind of lost the plot there,’ she admitted. ‘But it sorted itself out. Never mind how. I’m wiser now.’

She spoke with a shrug and a cheerful smile, but she had the feeling that he wasn’t fooled. Some instinct was telling him the things she wouldn’t, couldn’t say.

She’d been dazzled by Andy from the first moment. Handsome, charming, intelligent, he’d singled her out, wooed her passionately and had overturned all the fixed ideas of her life. For once she’d understood Norah’s aching fidelity to a dead man. She’d even partly understood the way her mother fell in love so often.

Then, just when she’d been ready to abandon the prejudices of a lifetime, he’d announced that he was engaged to marry someone else. He’d said they’d had a wonderful few months together but it was time to be realistic, wasn’t it?

The lonely, anguished nights that had followed had served to convince her that she’d been right all the time. Love wasn’t for her, or for anyone in their right mind. She couldn’t speak of it, but there was no need. Lang’s sympathetic silence told her that he understood.

‘Tell me about you,’ she hastened to say. ‘You’re English too, aren’t you? What brought you out here?’

‘I’m three-quarters English. The other quarter is Chinese.’

‘Ah,’ she said slowly.

‘You guessed?’

‘Not exactly. You sound English, but your features suggest otherwise. I don’t know—there’s something else…’

She gave up trying to explain. The ‘something else’ in his face seemed to come and go. One moment it almost defined him, the next it barely existed. It intrigued and tempted her with its hint of another, mysterious world.

‘Something different—but it’s not a matter of looks,’ she finished, wishing she could find the right words.

He seemed satisfied and nodded.

‘I know. That “something different” is inside, and it has always haunted me,’ he said. ‘I was born in London, and I grew up there, but I knew I didn’t quite fit in with the others. My mother was English, my father was half-Chinese. He died soon after I was born. Later my mother married an Englishman with two children from a previous marriage.’

‘Wicked stepfather?’ Olivia enquired.

‘No, nothing so dramatic. He was a decent guy. I got on well with him and his children, but I wasn’t like them, and we all knew it.

‘Luckily I had my grandmother, who’d left China to marry my grandfather. Her name was Lang Meihui before she married, and she was an astonishing woman. She knew nothing about England and couldn’t speak the language. John Mitchell couldn’t speak Chinese. But they managed to communicate and knew that they loved each other. He brought her home to London.’

‘She must have found it really hard to cope,’ Olivia mused.

‘Yes, but I’ll swear, nothing has ever defeated her in her life. She learned to speak English really well. She found a way to live in a country that probably felt like being on another planet, and she survived when her husband died ten years later, leaving her with a son to raise alone.

‘He was called Lang too. She’d insisted on that. It was her way of keeping her Chinese familyname alive. When I was born she more or less bullied him into calling me Lang, as well. She told me later that she did it so that “we don’t lose China.”

‘My father died when I was eight years old. When my mother remarried, Meihui moved into a little house in the next street so that she could be near me. She helped my mother with the children, the shopping, anything, but then she slipped away to her own home. And in time I began to follow her.’

He gave her a warm smile. ‘So you see, I had a Norah too.’

‘And you depended on her, just as I did on mine.’

‘Yes, because she was the only one who could make me understand what was different about me. She taught me her language but, more than that, she showed me China.’

‘She actually brought you here?’

‘Only in my head, but if you could have seen the fireworks she set off in there.’ He tapped his forehead. ‘She used to take me out to visit London’s Chinatown, especially on Chinese New Year. I thought I was in heaven—all that colour, the glittering lights and the music—’

‘Oh, yes, I remember,’ Olivia broke in eagerly.

‘You saw it too?’

‘Only once. My mother visited some friends who lived near there, and they took us out a couple of nights to see what was happening. It was like you said, brilliant and thrilling, but nobody could explain it to me. There was a lot of red, and they were supposed to be fighting somebody, but I couldn’t tell who or what.’

‘Some people say they’re fighting the Nian,’ Lang supplied. ‘A mythical beast rather like a lion, who devours crops and children. So they put food out for him and let off firecrackers, because he’s afraid of loud noises and also of the colour red. So you got lots of red and fireworks and lions dancing. What more could a child want?’

‘Nothing,’ Olivia said, remembering ecstatically. ‘Oh, yes, it was gorgeous. So much better than the English New Year celebrations, which always seemed boringly sedate after that.’

‘Me too. It was the one thing I refused ever to miss, and that drove my mother mad, because the date was always changing—late January, mid-February—always lasting fifteen days. Mum complained that she couldn’t plan for anything, except that I’d be useless for fifteen days. I said, “Don’t worry, Mum, I’m always useless”.’ He made a face. ‘She didn’t think that was at all funny.’

‘Your grandmother sounds wonderful,’ Olivia said sincerely.

‘She was. She told me how everyone is born in the year of an animal—a sheep, an ox, a rat, a dragon. I longed to find I was born in the year of the dragon.’

‘And were you?’

He made a face. ‘No, I was born in the year of the rabbit. Don’t laugh!’

‘I’m not laughing,’ she said, hastily controlling her mirth. ‘In this country, the rabbit is calm and gentle, hard-working—’

‘Dull and plodding,’ he supplied. ‘Dreary, conventional—’

‘Observant, intelligent—’

‘Boring.’

She chuckled. ‘You’re not boring, I promise.’