My Favourite Wife

Alice turned up just before Holly’s bedtime and when the two women embraced, fifteen years fell away.

The pair of them bathed Holly together, the child chatting excitedly at this admiring stranger, Alice making awestruck cooing sounds at Holly’s beauty and newness, and Becca couldn’t help feeling happy that perhaps she had restored some of the balance in their friendship. Now she had a child, a husband and a home, it felt like Alice wasn’t the one who held a majority share in the good life.

When Holly was sleeping, Becca fetched a bottle of white wine from the fridge and carried it to where Alice was standing by the window.

‘You’re not writing any more?’ Alice said, quite casually, although Becca felt the words press against some sensitive nerve.

‘No. I’m looking after Holly, mostly.’ She started telling the story of Holly’s asthma attack in London, and Alice nodded and looked concerned, but Becca cut it short and poured their wine. It sounded like an excuse, and it wasn’t. It was a reason. ‘Anyway, there’s lots to do around here,’ she said. Why the hell should she apologise for giving up work? ‘What brought you to Shanghai, Al? I thought you’d be in Hong Kong or Singy.’

Alice grimaced, and Becca smiled. She could see the ghost of the girl Alice had been at eleven, twelve, thirteen. Spoilt, generous, dead easy to love.

‘You know what it’s like for stringers,’ Alice said. They clinked glasses and grinned at each other. ‘Cheers. We have to follow the story.’ Alice sighed. ‘And the story they all want these days is the China dream. You know the thing – How China is reshaping our world. One billion new capitalists. The great China gold rush.’ Alice looked out of the window. ‘They – all the Western news outlets -want you to report the miracle.’ She shook her head. ‘But it’s not all banana daiquiris at M on the Bund.’

‘How do you mean?’ Becca sipped her wine and felt a pang of foreboding. She really wanted them to have a good time tonight. Just get a bit drunk and talk for hours and feel that nothing had changed.

‘I mean the principal reason the economy keeps growing is because foreign idiots want to invest here,’ Alice said, and Becca recalled how impatient her friend could be with slowness and stupidity. There were girls at their school who were terrified of her. ‘No Western CEO wants to go down as the man who missed China,’ Alice said. ‘But how can it be an economic miracle when five hundred million Chinese are living on less than a dollar a day? By the middle of the century China will have a bigger economy than the US. And you know what? They will still have five hundred million people getting by on a dollar a day. It stinks. The whole thing.’ She sipped her drink. ‘Nice wine,’ she said.

‘But a lot of them are leaving poverty behind, aren’t they?’ Becca said gently. ‘I mean, that’s what Bill’s boss always says.’

‘Some of them,’ Alice conceded. ‘A few million or so. But the Chinese deserve an affluence that’s worth having – clean water, not empty skyscrapers; rule of law, not back-handers; uncensored news, not broadband porn. They need education, democracy, a free press – not propaganda and Prada bags and traffic jams full of local-made Audis.’

‘I thought it would be more like Hong Kong,’ Becca admitted. ‘Or Hong Kong the way we knew it. You know – day trips out to the islands, weekends on somebody’s junk, Sunday lunch at Aberdeen.’

Alice laughed. ‘You make it sound idyllic.’

‘Well, it was, wasn’t it?’ Becca said defiantly.

‘But it’s not Hong Kong,’ Alice said, her smile fading. ‘Shanghai has always been mainland China. You can forget all that Paris-of-the-Orient stuff. The Anglos never made Shanghai their own the way they did Hong Kong.’

‘Anyway,’ Becca said, feeling that she had been too sentimental and revealed too much, and that Alice must think she was some sad old housewife dreaming of better days. ‘I’m sure we’ll be fine. Another drink?’ she asked her old friend.

The two of them looked down at the courtyard. Gleaming cars were waiting with their engines running. The traffic was sparser than at the weekend, but there was a steady stream of young women getting into very new cars with older men at the wheel.

‘It’s very exciting,’ Becca said brightly, wanting to lighten the mood. She was so glad to see her friend. She wanted them to have a great time, just like the old days. ‘I think we’ve moved into some kind of knocking shop.’

‘Not a knocking shop.’ Alice smiled, and Becca saw she was happy for the chance to show off her local knowledge, eager to keep all the power for herself. ‘Becca, Paradise Mansions is a niaolong – a birdcage. There are a lot of them here in Gubei. Maybe even more of them in Hongqiao. The girls are called jinseniao – canaries.’

Becca’s blue eyes were wide. ‘So it’s true, then? These girls are all…prostitutes?’

Alice shook her head emphatically.

‘No – they only sleep with one guy. It’s all quite moral, in a twisted sort of way.’

Becca stared down at the courtyard.

‘I get it,’ she said. ‘They are all some rich man’s mistress.’

‘They’re not even really mistresses,’ Alice said. ‘It’s closer to second wives. I wrote a story about it. These women fall in love. Have children. Do a lot of laundry, if the guy is from out of town. It’s not a glamour profession, Bec. They live a normal, domestic life while waiting for the man to dump the number one wife. Which invariably he doesn’t – although I suppose it has happened. It can be quite a chaotic existence. Status can change overnight. The guy gets bored. Or his wife finds out. Or the canary gets caught enjoying her own bit on the side. Or the guy takes one too many Viagra and dies on the job.’

Becca nearly choked on her Chablis.

‘Don’t laugh, you heartless cow, it happens!’ Alice said. ‘These women are the modern concubines. The man is often from out of town – Hong Kong, Singy, Taiwan. A lot of overseas Chinese. They set the woman up in a flat, stay there when they’re in Shanghai. A lot of Taiwanese. Taibazi, the girls call them – which sort of means Taiwanese hicks from the Taiwanese sticks. They badmouth the Taiwanese, but most of the girls prefer the out-of-towners.’

Becca cradled her drink. ‘Why’s that?’

‘Because they stay the night,’ Alice said, looking down at the courtyard. ‘Makes them feel more like a real wife, I guess.’ She smiled at her old friend. ‘You tell me, Bec. What does a real wife feel like?’

Becca just smiled.

Alice gestured at the courtyard with her glass. ‘Most of these guys all look like locals. Nobody in Taiwan or Hong Kong dresses as badly as that. But think about it. The man is spared the agony of looking for company in the bars, and the woman – who invariably grew up in unimaginable poverty – gets security. For herself and her family. At least for as long as it lasts, which can be years.’

‘A marriage of convenience,’ Becca said.

‘More like a meaningful relationship between sex and economics,’ Alice said.

‘I guess it goes on everywhere,’ Becca said, trying to sound worldly, trying not to look alarmed. Somehow prostitution would have been easier to understand.

‘These women can make a few thousand RMB a month in a normal job, if they’re lucky,’ Alice said. ‘Or they can live next door to you and Bill. Using what they’ve got to get what they want. Very pragmatic. Very Chinese. And this city is full of them.’

Buzzing between the larger cars was the red Mini Cooper. Of course, Becca thought. The tall girl stuck in the wrong gear.

‘There’s money here, all right,’ Alice said. ‘But Shanghai is a distorting mirror. Go to the countryside. Half of the kids there have never seen the inside of a school.’

Out of the child monitor came the sound of crying, and Becca left Alice brooding at the window. Perhaps she was trying much too hard to recapture their old friendship. Perhaps she should enjoy her own company a bit more, Becca thought as she took the half-sleeping Holly in her arms. And the company of her child in the hours between school and bed, and the company of her husband on Sunday and sometimes part of Saturday. Married people shouldn’t have this desperate need for friends, Becca thought.

But when Holly had settled Becca went back to the living room and found Alice smiling as if something had just come back to her.

‘Hey Bec,’ she said. ‘Remember when I pierced your ears?’

They couldn’t practise law in China.

That was the joke played on the Western lawyer in Shanghai, and Shane liked to mention it whenever the clock was creeping close to midnight and the lights were going out all over Pudong and they were sipping their cold coffee at desks still crowded with paperwork.

It said Foreign Lawyer on their business cards, because it was different for foreigners. If you were a foreign lawyer working for a foreign firm in Shanghai, the People’s Republic of China restricted you to the role of legal representative and kept you in your place. Even a Chinese lawyer like Nancy Deng could not practise PRC law at a foreign firm and was designated PRC lawyer, non-practising. Butterfield, Hunt and West had to get all their Chinese contracts rubber-stamped by some tame local lawyer.

But despite not being real lawyers in the eyes of the PRC, most nights the endless bureaucracy of doing business in China kept Bill in the office until he was too tired to see straight, and too full of caffeine to contemplate sleep.

‘For blokes who can’t practise law here,’ Shane said, ‘we sure are busy little buggers.’ He yawned and stretched, and sat on Bill’s desk, squashing a stack of files marked Department of Land and Resources. ‘Enough for one night, mate. More than enough. Let’s get a beer.’

A beer sounded good. Bill knew that Becca and Holly would have gone to bed hours ago. Now that he was sleeping in the second bedroom so as not to disturb them when he came back late, and when he left for work early, it didn’t really matter when he got home. A little unwinding sounded like just what he needed.

‘I’m going to tell you how it works out here,’ Shane shouted, raising his voice above a song that Bill couldn’t quite place. Something about making things more complicated. ‘I’m going to tell you what we call the Kai Tak rules, okay?’

‘The what?’

‘The Kai Tak rules. Pay attention. The Kai Tak rules are very important.’

They were in a place called Suzy Too. ‘Everybody comes to Suzy Too,’ Shane said. It was loud, smoky, crowded beyond belief. There was a dance floor in one corner, although people were dancing all over the place, including on the bars.