My Favourite Wife

‘She’ll be okay, Bec,’ he said, knowing how hard it was for her to leave their daughter. ‘It will be good for her to be with kids her own age. We have to let her go sooner or later, don’t we?’

The silence hummed between them and she made no attempt to fill it. She fought back the sudden tears, angry with herself for feeling like a mad housewife.

‘Try not to worry too much,’ he said. ‘Listen, I’ll see you later, okay?’

Becca still said nothing. She was thinking, wondering if the best thing for Holly wasn’t to stay with her, just keep her close, weighing it all up. Then she finally said, ‘Good luck up there, Bill,’ releasing him to get on with his job.

She couldn’t face the flat and all that unpacking. Not yet. So she caught a taxi to Xintiandi, the new area they always talked about in the guidebooks, the place she had been looking forward to seeing, where they said you could see the oldest and newest parts of the city. The flat could wait.

Suddenly a puff of wind, a puff faint and tepid and laden with strange odours of blossoms, of aromatic wood, comes out of the still night – the first sigh of the East on my face. That I can never forget. It was impalpable and enslaving, like a charm, like a whispered promise of mysterious delight.

Becca sipped a skinny latte on a stool by the window and read her Joseph Conrad paperback. That was what she was seeking in Xintiandi. The first sigh of the East on her face. On a side street away from the cafés and restaurants, she found the place she was seeking.

The modest little museum on Huangpi Lu was where the Chinese Communist Party had first met. She paid 3 RMB to go in, a sum so small she couldn’t calculate it in pounds. The place was deserted. The only other visitor was a serious female student in thick glasses taking notes by a tableau of dummies plotting to overthrow the foreigners and free the masses. All eyes were on the waxy features of the young Mao.

Becca drifted across to a small television displaying a propaganda film about China before the revolution. The film was grainy and ancient and only lasted a few minutes, but Becca watched it dumbfounded.

The starving faces of long-dead children stared back at her. She had never seen such poverty and misery, and as the images blurred behind a veil of tears she had to look away, telling herself, Get a bloody grip, woman, telling herself it was just the jet-lag and Holly’s first day at school.

Shanghai was Becca’s idea.

Bill would have been happy to stay in London and build a life together, and work hard, and watch their daughter grow. But life in London had disappointed her in a way that it had not disappointed him. Becca was ready for them to try something new. She saw Shanghai as a way out of their old life and their constant struggle for money. Shanghai was where they would turn it all around.

They had married young, both of them twenty-four, the first of their little group to settle down. They had never regretted it.

Becca had watched their single friends optimistically hooking up with someone they had just met in a bar, or a club, or a gym, only to grow unhappy, or bored, or trapped, or get their heart kicked around, and she was glad to say good riddance to all of that.

Marriage had seemed natural to them. They talked about it. If you find the right person, and you are both sure, then you can’t be too young, can you? And even at twenty-four both of them had felt too old for the sad dance of the gym and the bar and the club.

Some things they didn’t need to talk about. They had always taken it for granted that they would both work, and this didn’t change when Holly was born just after their third anniversary. Because it couldn’t change. Bill was a corporate lawyer at a firm in the City, Becca a financial journalist at a newspaper in Canary Wharf, and the mortgage payments on their little house in one of the leafier corners of North London demanded that they both keep earning. Every morning Bill would take Holly to nursery, and every afternoon Becca would pick her up.

And then one day everything changed.

Holly had just turned three and she had been at her nursery for a few hours when suddenly she was struggling to breathe. ‘Just a cold,’ said one of the carers, even when the child began to sob with terror and frustration. ‘Just a very bad cold.’

By the time Becca came to collect her, Holly was ready to be rushed to the nearest Accident and Emergency. By the time Bill arrived at the hospital, the doctor had diagnosed asthma. Holly never went back to the nursery and Becca never went back to her newspaper.

‘No stranger will ever look after her the way I will,’ Becca said, choking back tears of rage, and he soothed her, and he understood, and he told her that of course she was right, and nothing was more important than Holly.

Holly’s asthma was controlled with the help of a paediatrician in Great Ormond Street, who prescribed chewable tablets that she quite enjoyed and the breathing machine. She was brave and good-natured, never complaining, and Becca and Bill tried not to ask the question posed by every parent of a sick child – Why her? There were children far worse off than Holly. They saw them every time they came to Great Ormond Street.

But while Holly slept at night, sometimes making that strange sound at the back of her throat that they now recognised as a symptom of the asthma, Bill and Becca got out the calculators, applied for online overdrafts, thought about remortgaging, and wondered how long they could stay in their home.

They talked about moving to a cheaper, bleaker neighbourhood a few miles east. They talked about staying in the neighbourhood but selling their home and renting for a while. They talked about moving out to the suburbs. And everything they talked about depressed them.

Holly was well, and of course that was the main thing, but suddenly they were struggling just to get by. They loved their house. That was a problem. And they needed their house. That was another problem. Sometimes the senior partners at the firm invited them to dinner in their magnificent homes, these smooth-skinned old millionaires with their charming, hawk-eyed wives, and when you invited them back, you wanted them to come to a neighbourhood where they wouldn’t necessarily get mugged at knife-point for the bottle of Margaux they were carrying.

‘One of your senior partners had his wife’s fiftieth birthday party at the Sandy Lane,’ Becca said. ‘When they come over to our place, we can’t open a six-pack in a bedsit.’

‘We’ll never have to open a six-pack in a bedsit,’ Bill said, a note of resentment in his voice.

She put her arms around his neck. ‘You know what I mean, darling,’ she said.

He knew what she meant.

Some of the firm’s younger lawyers were already in big flats or small houses in Notting Hill and Kensington and Islington, bankrolled by indulgent parents who stayed together, or guilty parents who didn’t. Bill and Becca were doing it on their own. Nobody was giving them a thing.

Then suddenly there was a way to end all their money worries. Your life can change in a moment, Becca realised. You go through the years thinking you know what the future looks like and then one day it looks like something else.

Becca sat next to a man at the annual dinner of Bill’s firm, and nothing was ever the same again.

Every January, Hunt, Butterfield and West rented one of those big soulless hangars in a posh Park Lane hotel and personnel from the firm’s offices all over the world flew in to celebrate the anniversary of Robbie Burns’ birth. Five hundred lawyers in black tie, or kilt, and their wives – or, more rarely, their husbands.

Bill found himself sitting between the wives of two senior partners from New York, who knew each other and were happily talking across him. Becca was at the next table and she smiled as he rolled his eyes and mouthed three little words – Kill me now. Then she looked up as two men sat down either side of her. The men from Shanghai.

One of them was a big blond Australian in a kilt – Shane Gale, he said. He looked like he had been a surfer ten, fifteen years ago. Head of Litigation in Shanghai, he said. Shane was suffering from the effects of the champagne reception, but the way he avoided eye contact made Becca think that perhaps his real problem was not drunkenness but shyness.

The man on the other side was a tall, thin Englishman called Hugh Devlin, senior partner of the Shanghai office. It was funny the way their job titles tripped off their tongues as naturally as their names, she thought, fighting back the urge to say Becca Holden – housewife, homemaker and former financial hack.

While Shane silently buried his face in the Burgundy and started to get seriously rat-faced, Devlin took the table in hand.

She smiled across at Bill, her handsome young husband in his tuxedo, the American wives still talking across him, and Devlin smiled at him too. He had heard such good things about Bill, he said. Nothing but good things. A real grafter, said Devlin. Billed more hours than anyone in the London office two years in a row. Devoted to his family.

‘Yes,’ Becca said. ‘That’s my man.’

But, Devlin wanted to know, what’s your husband doing wasting his time in London? If he’s truly ambitious, then why doesn’t he come and try his luck in the fastest-growing economy on the planet? It was New York in the twentieth century and London in the nineteenth. And now it’s Shanghai, Devlin said. If you can make it there…

He saw the doubt on her face. A move to the Third World? London was rough enough for her. I mean it, he said. I’m serious. Lower taxes, higher salary. He’ll make partner out there a lot faster than he will here. And then he had her attention. A partner – it was what the young lawyers – and their wives – dreamed of. To escape the salaried life, and share the firm’s profits. When you made partner you were no longer working for the firm. You were the firm.

Devlin was talking about a life of colonial splendour that Becca had imagined went out years ago. You would have a home with a maid and a cook and a nanny and a driver – these things were cheap over there. These things were normal. And it was almost as if Devlin sensed something that she had tried to keep buried, even from Bill – that their life in London had let her down, that she was bitterly disappointed with their lot, that her little family had to struggle when they deserved so much more…

But – they couldn’t really do it, could they? Surely Shanghai was a place for a single man, Becca suggested. A man with no family ties?

No, said Devlin, not at all – Shanghai was actually a perfect posting for a man with a family. A man with stability, ambition, loved ones to work for. Shanghai had too many distractions for the single man, he said. Too many distractions. Later they would all become experts on the distractions of Shanghai.

Devlin was a family man himself – and he showed Becca a wallet photograph of a beautiful middle-aged woman and three smiling boys. Devlin said he liked his staff to have families. It meant they had a stake in the future.

Becca turned to Shane, who had been listening to some of this with a lopsided grin, and asked him how his own wife liked Shanghai. But Shane said that he wasn’t married, and they all laughed.

The pipers came into the room. They were playing ‘Flower of Scotland’. And when the dinner started to break up, and Bill came over to their table, Becca could almost hear the invitation from Devlin to have breakfast, to talk about the future, all the coy small talk of the headhunter.

But as Bill took his wife’s hand, happy and relieved to be back by her side, the man from Shanghai surprised both of them.

‘I like it that you’re married,’ he told Bill.

Becca picked up Holly from the school at twelve sharp. She could have stayed until three, but Becca was afraid that her daughter might miss her.

‘She’s been fine, didn’t miss Mummy at all,’ the Australian teacher said, giving Becca a shrewd look that said, Who’s doing the missing around here?