My Favourite Wife

‘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?

The pair of them held hands as they walked back through the peaceful streets of Gubei to the flat and, as Holly played with her Disney princess figures, Becca made a start on the unpacking.

‘Where did Daddy went?’ Holly asked.

‘Where did Daddy go,’ Becca said.

‘That’s just what I was wondered,’ Holly said, stunned at this amazing coincidence.

Becca pulled open a case. Suits. Dark blue suits for the hot young lawyer. ‘Your daddy’s at work, darling.’

Holly banged Prince Charming’s plastic head against the palm of her hand. ‘I need to talk to him.’

‘You can talk to him later,’ Becca said, but she wondered if Bill would get home from work before their daughter went to bed. She knew he would try his best. She also knew it was unlikely.

When Becca stopped for a cup of English breakfast tea, she went to the window but the courtyard was empty. There was no sign of the young women they had seen on Saturday night.

It was only early afternoon and the girls of Paradise Mansions were still sleeping.

THREE

The firm occupied three floors in a Pudong skyscraper so new that he could still smell the paint. Bill sat with his back to the window. Behind him the financial district stretched off into the summer mist.

There were spiked Tolkien towers constructed from steel and gold and black glass, one of them built to look like a hundred-storey pagoda, another with a screen covering an entire side of the building where a smiling beauty advertised a phone network. Looming above it all like the true masters of the landscape were the giant cranes.

On Bill’s desk there were neat stacks of draft contracts and a silver-framed photograph of his family – Bill and Becca and Holly standing in the surf on a beach in the Caribbean, Bill holding the then two-year-old Holly in his arms, Becca looking jaw-droppingly gorgeous in some kind of orange shift thing, the three of them wearing slightly shy grins as they gazed at the kind passing stranger who was taking the picture. It was the holiday they took before Becca gave up work and the money got tight. When his eyes drifted to the photograph in the course of his working day, Bill always found himself smiling.

He was going through the transactional documents of a new property development on the outskirts of the city. It was called Green Acres. When completed, it would be a gated community for the new rich of Shanghai. Butterfield, Hunt and West were representing the project’s German investors, DeutscherMonde. Bill had already noticed that the firm were doing a lot of work for DeutscherMonde. He looked up as Shane appeared in the doorway.

‘These Germans,’ Bill said. ‘Do they have a fixed cap?’

Shane shook his head and Bill looked suitably impressed. Clients often pressed law firms for a fixed cap on fees for any deal, knowing that if they were billed by the hour then the legal fees were potentially limitless.

‘Sky’s the limit,’ Shane said. ‘Limit’s the sky. That’s why they’re so important.’ The big Australian came into the room and leafed through some papers on Bill’s desk. ‘This place is going to be beautiful, mate. One hundred millionaires in one square mile. Gardens based on Versailles. Pools, saunas, panic rooms – all based on the actual pools, saunas and panic rooms that they had at Versailles. Twenty-four-hour armed security for the blokes who only just got used to using inside toilets. Lovely jubbly.’

Bill leaned back in his chair. He had building plans in one hand and a map of the area in the other. The development was being built in a place where right now there were only fields and a small village.

‘It looks like it’s being built on farmland,’ he said, handing Shane the map.

‘That’s right. The village is called Yangdong. They’ve been pig farmers for generations.’

Bill thumbed through the file. ‘So who owns the land?’

Shane put the map back on Bill’s desk. ‘The People,’ he said.

Bill looked at the map and up at Shane. ‘So the people of this village – the farmers – they own it?’

‘Not the farmers,’ Shane said. ‘The People. In China, all farmland is owned collectively. Each family in the village has a long-term lease on its holding. Our clients are buying the land from the local government.’

‘What happens to the farmers?’ Bill said.

‘They get a compensation package,’ Shane said, ‘and get to say so long and fare-thee-well to their pigs. Our clients build their two-million-US houses for people rich enough to afford them -and there are plenty of those. These places were all sold off the drawing board. And in a year there will be palaces where there used to be pig farms. And everybody will be happy.’

A man with fair, thinning hair appeared in the doorway. He was maybe ten years older than Bill, in his early forties. Bill had noticed him around the office because he seemed older than everyone else.

‘Shane?’ the man said. There was the north of England in his accent. ‘Mr Devlin is looking for you.’

‘Thanks, Mitch,’ Shane said. ‘I’m right there, mate.’ Shane made no attempt to introduce the man to Bill, so the pair of them smiled awkwardly at each other for a moment, and then the man was gone.

‘Who’s that?’ Bill said.

‘Pete Mitchell,’ Shane said. ‘Mad Mitch, we call him.’

‘What’s mad about him?’ Bill said. It would be hard to imagine a more quiet, self-effacing soul.

Shane glanced at the empty doorway. ‘He’s the wrong side of forty and he never made partner. Wouldn’t you be mad?’

Bill frowned. ‘Doesn’t the firm’s up-or-out policy apply here?’

An up-or-out policy was a law firm’s way of staying lean and hungry, a money-making machine that carried no deadwood. If you lacked the stuff needed to make partner, then you were finished. The firm would not carry you to retirement. You moved up – or out.

‘Sure,’ Shane said. ‘Most – I guess, oh, eighty-five per cent – of our associate lawyers make partner. The ones that don’t are like a girl that gets left on the shelf. You know, the Bridget Jones lawyers – like an unmarried bird facing the change without her Hugh Grant.’

Bill shivered as though someone had stepped on his grave. ‘Then what’s he doing here?’ he said. ‘Mad Mitch, I mean.’

‘Mad Mitch was in the Hong Kong office but he couldn’t stand the pace after the hand-over. For years the Hong Kong boys made money hand over fist, but it got a lot tougher when the Brits shipped out. Mitch was posted out here back when Shanghai was still a soft option.’ Shane sighed. ‘Sad, innit, mate? Forty-odd years old and still a wage slave. And we can’t go on forever, can we? Not the way we work. Lawyer years are like dog years – they run that bit faster than human years.’ Shane picked up the photograph on Bill’s desk. ‘But great things are expected of you,’ he said, nodding gravely. He studied the little family for a while and then gently replaced the photograph.

‘You’re a lucky man, Bill.’

‘Yes,’ Bill said, straightening the silver frame. ‘I am.’

The Mercedes came out of the tunnel and on to the Bund.

The famous road curved off ahead of them, a great sweep of stout colonial buildings made of marble and granite, the architecture of Empire.

‘The West is finished,’ Devlin said, watching the Bund go by. ‘The future belongs to the Chinese. They own it already.’ He turned to look at Bill. ‘Do you believe that?’

Bill smiled, shrugged, not wanting to disagree with his boss, but reluctant to concede the future to anyone. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘Believe it,’ Devlin told him. ‘They work harder than we do. They put up with conditions that would make us call a human rights lawyer, or the cops. They make us – the West, the developed world, all the twenty-first-century people – look lazy, soft, the pampered men of yesterday. We haven’t seen anything yet, I promise you.’

There were four of them in the car, with Tiger at the wheel. He had taken off his toy soldier uniform and was wearing a business suit. Bill sat in the back seat wedged between Devlin and a lawyer called Nancy Deng, one of the firm’s Chinese nationals. She had her briefcase open on her lap, examining some files, and she hadn’t spoken since the journey began.

Shane sat up front, his wafer-thin mobile phone in his big meaty fist, talking in calm, fluent Chinese. The words didn’t have the barking sound of Cantonese, or the rural, West Country burr of Mandarin, and so Bill guessed this must be what Shanghainese sounded like.

‘What happens when the Chinese can make everything the West makes?’ Devlin said, smiling back at Bill. ‘Not just toys, clothes and dinky little Christmas decorations but computers, cars, telecommunications – when they can make all that stuff at one tenth of the cost it takes our fat lazy work force?’

‘You want to pick up our Germans or meet them at the restaurant?’ Shane said over his shoulder.

‘We’ll pick them up at their hotel,’ Devlin said. ‘I don’t want our Germans getting lost.’ He looked back at Bill. ‘The Chinese are united,’ Devlin said, his eyes shining. ‘That’s the thing that nobody gets. They’re united. They have a unity of national vision that the West has lacked since, oh, World War Two. That’s why they will win.’

Shane was telling the Germans that he would see them in the lobby in ten minutes.

‘I love the Chinese,’ Devlin said simply, leaning back. ‘I admire them. They believe that tomorrow will be a better day. And if you are going to believe in something, anything, then that’s not a bad thing to believe in.’

Bill watched the Bund go by, and silently agreed with him.

The beggars saw them coming.

At first it seemed to Bill as though every single one of them had an oversized baby in her arms, as though begging without a toddler was forbidden by some local statute, but then he realised that there were also old people shambling along at the back of the mob, filthy hands outstretched, and solitary feral children who ducked and dived beneath the women with their toddlers in their arms, the toddlers carried as if they were babies.

But Bill had not noticed the old people and the big children. He had only noticed the toddlers being carted under the arms of their mothers.

Because they all seemed to be just a little bit younger than Holly.

Shane cursed. He had not wanted to walk to the restaurant. He had advised the two Germans that it was better to take the Mercedes and a cab, but they had insisted. They wanted to stroll along on the Bund, and now look what had happened. The beggars were on them, all over them, with their toothless, ingratiating smiles, the rank smell of their clothes and their bodies, all the bewildered faces of the children carried under one arm.

Shane shoved on ahead, shouting at them in Shanghainese, while Nancy pleaded with them and Devlin gave instructions to the clearly terrified Germans. Only Bill dawdled, stunned by a world where children the same age as Holly were begging in the street.

He reached for his wallet, and immediately realised his mistake. He had planned to give some money to the women with children but there were just so many of them, too many of them, and suddenly he was overwhelmed, the coins and notes falling from his fingers and the women with toddlers being trampled by the older children. Empty palms were thrust in Bill’s face.

One of the bigger kids – a weasel-faced runt with a cropped head and the eyes of an old man – grabbed Bill’s jacket and wouldn’t let it go. The child clung on as Bill edged his way through the mob to the building where his colleagues and the Germans were waiting. A uniformed doorman prised the child from Bill’s jacket.

‘Better watch your wad around here, mate,’ Shane said. ‘They’re not all driving BMWs and shopping at Cartier. There are still millions of the little bastards wiping their arses with their hands.’

‘And nobody gets left behind in the West?’ Devlin flared. Then he smiled easily. ‘There’s more upward mobility here than anywhere on the planet.’

Bill was embarrassed, shaken. The Germans were staring at him. One of them was balding and in a business suit, and the other had the long greying hair and the leather jacket of a wild youth. But they were both all business, and they could have been brothers. They murmured to each other in their own language.

Bill wiped sweat from his face. As they went up to the restaurant in the lift, Nancy gave him a tissue for the smear of grime that the young beggar had left on his jacket. He thanked her, his face burning, and dabbed at the mark but saw that it would not budge.

The perfect black print of a child’s hand.

Bill didn’t understand.

Their clients, DeutscherMonde, were investing billions of RMB in the Yangdong project. The company had already built an identical development in the suburbs of Beijing. And yet, as the Germans sat with their expensive lawyers across the dinner table from the local government officials of Yangdong – five men with cheap suits and soft flesh and bad teeth, accompanied by their own lawyer, a bird-thin man of sixty with a shock of dyed black hair, and a slab-like stooge who looked like some kind of bodyguard – it was as if the Germans were the supplicants, the ones most desperate for the deal, the beggars at the feast.

Courses came and went. The Germans sipped their mineral water. The Chinese chain-smoked high-tar cigarettes and swilled soft drinks. The conversation ebbed and flowed from English to Shanghainese, much of it concentrating on the glory of the Green Acres development, and how it would enrich the community.

The oldest of the town’s representatives said the least. With his hooded eyes, long upper lip and frog face, Bill thought he looked like a mini Mao. They called him Chairman Sun. He smoked constantly, even when the chopsticks in his spare hand picked at a dish. Sun made no eye contact, yet still managed to convey the impression that he was mildly dissatisfied with everything, including the project, the food, the choice of restaurant, the presence of so many foreign devils, and possibly life itself.

Only Bill had turned off his phone, and tinny snatches of familiar tunes punctuated the lunch. The Mission Impossible theme, the opening chords of ‘Brown Sugar’, niggling soundbites from Beethoven and Oasis and Faye Wong. Shane pushed his plate to one side and placed his laptop on the table.

‘What do you keep on that thing?’ Bill asked him.

‘The truth, mate,’ Shane told him. ‘The brutal truth.’

Chairman Sun called for the waiter and gave him his instructions. The waiter went away and came back with the wine list. Sun chose a bottle and Shane ingratiatingly smiled and mumbled his compliments in Shanghainese at the excellence of the choice.

Everyone fell silent as they watched the ritual of the waiter returning with the bottle of Burgundy, presenting it to Chairman Sun, who – after a tense moment – nodded his faint approval.

The waiter removed the cork and delicately poured a splash of red wine into Chairman Sun’s glass. His frog face twitched with suspicion as he smelled the wine, tasted it and – after another breathless moment – nodded his approval.

The waiter half-filled Chairman Sun’s glass with Burgundy. Then the Chairman topped it up with the can of Sprite in front of him, took a long slurp and exhaled with pleasure.

Bill glanced across at Shane and Devlin and Nancy and the two Germans.

But they didn’t even blink.

* * *

On Saturday afternoon he came home to an empty apartment.

He placed the stack of files he was carrying on the table, tore off his jacket and tie, and read the note Becca had stuck to the fridge. She had taken Holly to ride the bumper cars at Fuxing Park. He had promised to go with them, if he could get away in time. But Saturday was a work day at Butterfield, Hunt and West.

Bill had spent the afternoon going through paperwork with Shane and Nancy. The contract between the Germans and the Yangdong officials was in Chinese and drawn up under Chinese law, but the deal was structured so that all the important commercial rights were offshore, governed by Hong Kong law with documents in English.

‘It makes the deal easier to enforce,’ Nancy had explained.

‘When someone steals all the money,’ Shane added.

Bill took a bottle of Evian from the fridge and crossed to the window. The courtyard was empty apart from a silver Porsche 911. It looked like a shark waiting its prey on the bottom of the ocean. A 911, Bill thought, yawning as he stretched out on the sofa. A 911 in China…

He woke up with his daughter’s face pressed close, and he could smell the sweetness of her breath as she laughed with delight. She held a brightly coloured plastic figurine in each tiny fist. A prince in one hand, and a princess in the other.

‘Be the prince,’ Holly urged. ‘Come on, come on – be the prince, Daddy.’

He closed his eyes. He had never felt so tired. When he opened them, Holly was still offering him one of the little figurines. He stretched, groaned, and closed his eyes.

‘Later, darling,’ he heard Becca say from the kitchen. ‘Your daddy’s been working very hard for us.’

Bill felt relief as he heard small footsteps walking slowly away. When he opened his eyes he saw his daughter kneeling on the far side of the room, playing quietly by herself, and he felt unkind.

‘Holly?’ He was propped up on one elbow. ‘Yes?’ she said with that shy formality that always touched his heart, and then owned it forever.

He swung his legs round, ran his fingers through his hair. ‘What do you want me to do?’

Holly looked up at him with her perfect face. ‘Go on,’ she said, advancing towards him with the figurines in her hand. She pushed a piece of plastic in his face. A little unsmiling man in a golden crown and trousers that were too tight. ‘Go on, Daddy,’ his daughter urged. ‘Go on, Daddy – be Prince Charming.’

He did his best.