My favorite wife

The bag was partially open, as if it had been rifled and found uninteresting. Bill could see files, a print-out of an unused e-ticket in a plastic envelope, Shane's laptop. Clothes and a toilet bag. A thick green paperback. The Rise and Fall of the British Empire by Lawrence James.

'I'll take care of it,' he said.

The father stuck out his hand and Bill shook it. Although

he was a small man – all of Shane's bulk came from his mother – the father had one of those old-fashioned handshakes where they think you are effeminate if you don't at least try to break a few bones. Or perhaps it's just the grief, Bill thought. Perhaps he doesn't realise what he is doing.

'How could this happen?' asked the old man, his voice trembling at last, baring his teeth with the hard physical effort of not coming apart. 'That's what I don't understand.'

Bill shook his head. He had no answers. The death itself was the only answer. 'Shane was lonely,' Bill said. 'I just think he was very lonely.'

The old man exploded. 'Rubbish!' he said with such anger that Bill stepped back. 'How could he be lonely?' demanded Shane's father. 'He was married, wasn't he?'

He was sitting on the bed watching their daughter sleeping when he heard Becca's key in the lock. Holly kicked back the duvet and he gently covered her again. She had her fists lifted above her head like a weightlifter.

He heard Becca come quietly into the room but he didn't look at her. Her hand touched his shoulder. He reached out and brushed a swathe of blonde hair from Holly's forehead.

'What happened to the ayi?' she said, her voice very soft in the sleeping child's room.

'I sent her home,' he said quietly.

'She could have put Holly to bed.'

He still hadn't looked at her. 'I like doing it,' he said.

She put her arms around his neck. He felt her face close to his cheek. Her hair falling, her breath in his ear. He could smell her perfume and wine. The smell of someone else's cigarettes.

'I'm so sorry, Bill,' she whispered.

He was silent for a long moment. 'What are you sorry about?' he said.

ЧЙ9

'Shane,' she said, straightening up, sounding surprised. 'I'm sorry about Shane. It's a terrible thing. His parents -1 can't imagine what his parents are going through.'

Holly moaned in her sleep and Bill reached out and stroked her shoulder. 'There's nothing anyone could have done,' he said. He looked up at his wife as she stood above him and he wondered what life would be like after she had left him. 'Something bad was always going to happen to Shane. I loved him, but the way he lived, it was inevitable.'

She dragged her fingers through her hair, pulling it off her face. And she shook her head.

'No,' she said. 'It's this city. It's Shanghai.' She turned and left him watching the sleeping child alone. 'It brings out the worst in people,' she said as she went out the door.

And then he went to see her again.

He went to see her again because he didn't know what else to do. He went to see her again because he couldn't stay away from her. He could see no reason why the spell would ever be broken. That's how stupid he was back then.

But she was gone. Jinjin was gone and nobody knew where. The old Paradise Mansions girls were in her apartment, making dumplings the way they had the first night he had really met them.

At first he felt as if they were stalling him, the difficult ex-boyfriend, the obsessive got-it-bad schmuck who doesn't, know when it is time to move on.

But as they took his wet coat and gave him a few pieces of kitchen towel to dry his hair and as he turned down their offer of a plate of dumplings, he realised that it seemed to be true. They really didn't know where she had gone. She had packed her bags and called Jenny Two, leaving a message on her phone saying that she was leaving the keys under the mat and that they were welcome to use the place in her absence.

1?Л

'There's a neighbour,' Bill said, glancing at the ceiling. 'A guy upstairs she was friendly with. Brad. He might know. She might have said something to him.'

They looked at each other and it took him a few seconds to understand, but he was there before the words came blurting out of Jenny Two. How stupid men are, he thought. And how stupid I am. How could I not have seen this coming? How could I have believed that her heart would never change?

'They left together, William,' Jenny Two said, and she squinted at his face, as if it hurt her too. There was no way back from this moment, and it was not a good moment. 'I'm so sorry.'

He nodded, and smiled like a happy idiot, smiled as if he had heard nothing but good news all day long, and sat down between Annie and Sugar, facing the two Jennys, swallowing the sob of grief that rose in his throat. So this is how it ends, he thought. She goes off with the first guy who comes along. It was almost funny.

Asked again, he accepted their offer of a plate of dumplings, and he realised that he did not want to run away from them and hide his feelings. The taste and smell and sound of the frying dumplings brought back her voice, and the pride she had taken in „being a Dongbei bo. 'Jiaozi dumpling from Shenyang. Like ravioli. You know?'

They told him their stories. Annie had returned to the bars after being run out of Paradise Mansions but had met another American boy who was taking her back to Hawaii. 'I shall drive a Mustang and surf,' she said proudly. 'You watch. I post on YouTube.'

Jenny Two had been left enough money in her old boyfriend's will to start her own business. She was wavering between a food stall and an Internet cafe. 'I shall be part of my country's economic miracle,' she said. Bill suddenly realised that she was no longer wearing glasses and gestured at her eyes.

'Laser surgery,' she said. 'In shopping mall.'

Jenny One's Frenchman had come back. Bill could see how it might yet work out for her, he could understand how: a lonely married man in Paris might wake up one night and believe that the woman he thought was his bit on the side was actually the love of his life. He could see how that might happen.

Sugar was working in one of the new bars on Mao Ming Nan Lu, but the thought did not seem to depress her, perhaps because she alone had never expected to be rescued.

And from Sugar he learned that the bars were changing. After the best part of a hundred years, the old anarchy of the Shanghai night was passing into history as the freelance girls finally came under control of the bars where they worked. The boomtown was not exactly getting respectable, but it was becoming increasingly regulated.

'And I got a promotion,' Sugar told him. T was a Customer Care Agent but now I am a Guest Relations Officer.'

They were all happy endings, of sorts, and he was grateful for them because he had reached the stage of his life when he was straggling to believe in happy endings. But then they were in Shanghai, where the act of survival was a happy ending.

Then it was time to go. They gathered around him at the door.

'See you around,' Jenny Two said, and it sounded like a phrase recently mastered in a language class.

'Yes,' Bill smiled, and he kissed each of them on the cheek, and they hugged him like they cared, and as if they were so sorry that it had ended with him and Jinjin, and as if he -soon to be a partner at Butterfield, Hunt and West – was the one to be pitied. 'See you around, girls.'

And he left, knowing that he now had his reason to never go back, to never see her again, and to finally get her out

of his blood, and out of his life. In the end it was so obvious. He should have expected it all along.

A new man. Of course. What else?

He wondered how he could ever have been so dumb, how he could ever have believed that she was really any different to him.

She was just another girl. She was just another woman. How could it possibly end any other way? She had met some new guy. Right. Of course. He almost laughed. But somehow the banality of it all was impossible to grasp. A new man? Jinjin with a new man? Yes, we all have our options. There was a part of him that still found it incredible.

A new man, when she had told him that there would never be another man, and that she would love him until the day she died. All that stuff that they put in the songs. All the lies they tell you and you are so eager to believe.

Only you, for ever and ever, like one of the old songs. That's what she had told him, that's what had come out of the mouth he knew so well, and he had believed her, and it made his life impossible because it meant he could never give her up. It meant that one day and someday and somehow they would be together, because there was no escaping the other. They were bound together like two mountaineers. But now she had broken the bond.

He stepped back out into the pounding rain and he didn't see it, he didn't feel it. In his face, in his shoes, drenching his suit. It didn't really touch him. Because he saw her in the arms of the new unknown lover and it was more real to him than the rain soaking him to the bones. He saw it all. It was as if he was in the room with them. He could almost smell her, almost hear her. Her face, her legs, her sighs and moans, the scar on the left breast. Her long thin arms wrapped around the new man's neck. Fine, he thought. Great. If that's the way it has to be. Get him to take you to the hospital next time,

he thought. Get him to find you a flat. Get him to turn his life inside out and destroy all the people he loves. Get him to listen to your lies. Get him to tear his heart in half.

Bill began walking, briskly but without direction or purpose. The rain blinded him.

He can have you, he thought.

He can fucking have you.

twenty-eight

Bill stood at the window watching the rain come down on the courtyard of Paradise Mansions.

He could hear the sound of water running and laughter. The ayi was giving Holly her bath. And in the master bedroom, the voice of his wife was an indistinct murmur that came and went, as if she was pacing as she talked on her phone, as if she could not keep still. Probably her old man, he thought. And then again, maybe not.

He could feel-the keys to Jinjin's flat pressing into his flesh. Bill took the keys out and put them back in his pocket. He thought about throwing them away but immediately dismissed the idea. He thought about putting them in an envelope and leaving them with her porter but that almost seemed like an act of cowardice, and she had meant too much to him for that. He could go back and give them to the girls. But he did not want the girls to see how he felt.

Bill knew exactly what he had to do. It was so clear. He had to give them to her. He had to place the keys in her hand and set her free, and set himself free.

Becca looked up as he came into the master bedroom with

his overnight bag. She was sitting on the bed now, the mobile phone still in her hand, but the connection broken.

T have to go,' he said.

He began opening drawers and throwing things into his bag. A change of shirt, socks, pants. His shaving kit. His British passport for ID. Not much. Just enough for one night. This wouldn't take long.

'You have to go? Go where?'

'Changchun. It's up north. Near the border with North Korea.'

'I know where bloody Changchun is,' she said.

She stood up and folded her arms across her chest as she watched him packing. 'You can't get a flight,' she said.

'The airport's open,' he said, zipping the bag shut, and placing it on the bed. 'And I'll be flying away from the weather. Going north. The trouble is all in the south.'

'Daddy, look,' Holly said, padding into the room in her pyjamas, her golden hair damp and tangled. She was holding a picture of a red panda. The ayi came after her with a hair dryer in her hand.

'That's beautiful, darling,' he said, scooping up his daughter, kissing her face. He turned to his wife. 'There are no typhoons up there,' he said. 'Too far north. One night. That's all I need.'

He kissed his daughter again, and she ran off holding her picture with the ayi struggling to keep up.

'You're not going,' Becca said. She unzipped his bag and began pulling out his clothes.

'One night and it's done,' he said. He reached for her and she pulled away. 'Please, Becca.'

'Don't go,' she said. T don't want you to go. I don't want you to go to that Third World whore and talk things over or whatever bullshit you have in your head.'

She held the bag upside down and shook out what was left inside. Bill slowly began to repack.

'I'm sorry,' he said.

'You're always sorry,' she said, and punched her fist hard against his chest. 'Do we have a life here or not? I want you to read Holly a story. I want you to draw with her. I want you to sleep with me tonight. I want us to be normal, Bill. Or I want us to be nothing. Do you understand all that?'

T have to do this one last thing.'

'Why?'

'So that it's over.'

She smiled with contempt. 'And do you honestly expect us to be here when you get back?' she said, and she shook her head and dismissed him with a wave of her hand, as if giving up on him at last.

The plane banked for landing and he saw the mountains beneath him, conical and black, satanic remakes of the green limestone mountains of Guilin.

As the plane turned towards its destination, the mountains reared up on either side and he saw that they were not mountains at all. There were no conical mountains here. These were mountains that had been made by men. What he had seen were-giant slag heaps of coal, and he saw now that there were people on them, bent double, tearing at the surface for usable chunks of fuel.

Then the black peaks were gone and the plane was coming down through fluffy white clouds, but then he saw that they were not clouds at all, but the emissions rising from the smokestacks of the remaining iron and steel mills. Then the plane was out of the man-made clouds and below them and rising up beneath him were the abandoned factories sitting in scrappy fields like wasted muscles on the arms of a dying man.

The plane hit the runway with a screech and he was back in her hometown of Changchun, the jagged metal in his

pocket still pressing into his flesh, wondering how he had ever seen romance in this wretched place.

He stood outside the ugly grey apartment block looking up at the windows that had been hung with red lanterns during Spring Festival. The windows were empty now. The sky was a flat grey. He had travelled beyond the rains.

He climbed the blackened stairwell, coated with the filth of long-dead factories, preparing himself for the moment when he would see her face, and see the new man, and give her the keys.

Jinjin's mother opened the door to the little flat and she was all smiles, and as Bill stepped into the apartment he saw that she was quite alone.

She ushered him inside, and as she made them tea she spoke rapidly in Mandarin interspersed with one-word stabs of English.

'Father. Sick. Guangxi.'

'Guangxi?' But that was all the way down south. That was the other end of the country. Near Hong Kong. Even nearer to Vietnam. Guilin was in Guangxi. Jinjin's father was in Guangxi. Bill brought the teacup to his mouth and it scalded his lips. He struggled to understand, the map of China reeling in his mind. Guangxi? That was the province where the limestone mountains looked across at Vietnam, and where they had watched the fishermen with their birds from the bridge in Guilin. That was where they had seen her father, and Bill had given the man money, and Jinjin had looked away.

'Guangxi!' her mother said. 'Guangxi!'

She had a newspaper and she showed it to him. There was a map of the country on the front page, giving the latest on the typhoons and the flooding, and although it was a Chinese newspaper and he could not read a word of it, he understood everything.

Because the page one headline was nothing but a number. 20,000,000, it said. Twenty million. The number of the displaced.

Zhejiang, Fujian, Jiangxi, Hunan, Guangdong, Guangxi. No part of southern or eastern China was untouched. It was impossible to comprehend. It was a bigger landmass than Western Europe.

Her mother tapped a stubby finger on the bottom end of the map, tittering with glee. Then he saw that her laughter was that peculiar Chinese response to disaster. She was terrified.

'Here! Here!'

And finally Bill got it. Jinjin was at the other end of the country. She was as far away as she could be, down in Guangxi with her father and the new man.

She was down among the floods.

The old woman grinned, baring her brown, tea-stained teeth. It had once maddened him, this habit of responding to disaster with delight. But now he understood. They wrapped their pain in a smile. Their laughter in the face of disaster was like a bandage on a wound. He touched the old woman's arm, and nodded. They wrapped their pain in a smile. That was what she was doing. That's what they all did.

He understood at last.

It took him three flights to get to Guilin.

From Changchun he flew south and west to Xi'an and then on to Chongqing. In Chongqing he waited with tourists who had been down the Yangtze River, and then the tourists left on flights to Beijing and Bill slept overnight in the terminal. In the morning he woke up and there were two old women sitting opposite him. His eyes were drawn to their abnormally small feet. He looked away, appalled, and looked again.

The old women were small but their feet belonged to dolls, to toys, to another age. He knew they had been bound even before one of them absent-mindedly tugged off her blue canvas slipper and massaged her wilfully deformed foot, the end of it flapping like a door in the wind. She pulled her slipper back on and stared straight through Bill.

Suddenly their flight was called and the old women stood up and hobbled off quickly to their gate, their boarding passes in their hand. He watched them go. Their feet had not been bound but crushed. The process was more like having their limbs put in a vice than wrapped in a scarf. The bare foot he had seen was a memento of old China. But to the old woman it was just a foot. It had been just a foot for years, decades, for a lifetime. That was the strange thing. The normality of it all.

He had thought that he could not survive losing her, and he had been wrong. He would get over it. It would hurt and he would live, and she would live too. Bill watched the old women limp through the boarding gate.

You could get used to anything.

He was the only passenger on the flight to Guilin.

The stewardess strapped herself in beside him and clutched his hand as the pilot brought the plane down. They hit the runway, lifted off, hit the tarmac again and went into what felt like a wall of spray. Bill could feel the water on the runway dragging at the undercarriage, trying to pull the plane sideways, trying to turn them over.

But the pilot braked in a screech of rubber and the wall of spray subsided. As they taxied to the terminal, the stewardess vomited quietly into a paper bag. Bill pressed his face against the window. Outside, the rains came down as if they would never end.

There was chaos at the airport. It felt like the entire city was trying to leave. The green uniforms of the Public Security

Bureau were everywhere, holding back the crowds. Bill pushed his way through the mob, moving in the opposite direction.

The car-hire desks were abandoned so he went outside to the taxi rank. It was deserted and he stood there listening to the wind, uncertain what to do next. The wind was like a warning, a lament. He had never heard wind like it. An old red Santana taxi pulled up and began to unload a family laden with suitcases. When they had paid the driver, Bill stuck his head in the window.

T need to get to a village,' Bill said. 'A village on the road to Yangshuo.' He realised he did not even know the name of the place where her father lived. Perhaps it did not have a name. But he could remember the road. He could get them there.

'No Yangshuo,' said the driver. 'Road all closed Yangshuo.'

Bill took out his wallet and pulled out all the money he had and stuffed it into the hands of the taxi driver, closing the man's fist around the notes. The driver examined the grubby RMB notes and bared his yellow tombstone teeth. His breath was foul.

'Road still closed,' he said apologetically, although he made no attempt to return the money.

'As close as you can,' Bill said, getting into the car.

The driver stared straight ahead, muttering to himself, as the wind blew the rain sideways against the windscreen. Sideways rain, Bill thought. How do you get sideways rain? A steady stream of traffic and pedestrians were coming in the opposite direction, making for the airport. Everywhere there were suitcases that had been dropped or dumped or blown off roof racks. Everywhere there were bits of trees and billboards. The trees and billboards were the first things to go in a typhoon, he realised, and as he stared out of the window it was as if he had never been to Guilin, as if he had dreamed the time they had spent here.

The limestone peaks of the mountains were smothered in mist but it was the river that made it seem like somewhere he had never been.

The river had broken its banks and changed everything. The paddy fields were now lakes, and they looked as though they had been lakes for a thousand years. On the river where they had watched the fishermen with their cormorants, a giant barge loaded with what looked like sand seemed to be abandoned and drifting. As Bill watched, it split clean in two with a crack like lightning. He strained to see some sign of the crew fleeing for their lives. Nobody appeared and the two halves of the broken barge began to slide beneath the water. Then they were gone, and it was as if it had never been, or he had imagined it all.

There were no PSB police this far from the airport. Here it was all PLA soldiers. He watched a group fish something from the river and lay it on a tarpaulin by the side of the road. It was the body of another soldier.

'No road Yangshuo!' shouted the driver, recoiling at the sight of the bloated body.

'Just drive,' Bill shouted back at him, and he drove, and Bill felt bad that he had raised his voice at the man, because he knew he could not get to her without him.

Bill was sure they were going to make it. But then they were at a roadblock, soldiers everywhere, their lorry parked at an angle across the road, blocking everything, and a soldier was flagging them down. He stuck his head in the window and Bill could see they were being told to turn back. Beyond the soldiers Bill could see the road ahead buried under a mudslide. It looked like a congealed brown river that had slid down the hill. The driver was moaning to himself.

'Is there another way?' Bill said. 'Is there another road to Yangshuo?'

'This way Yangshuo,' the driver said, banging his steering

inn

wheel as the PLA began shouting at him, gesturing more fiercely. The driver began to turn the taxi around. 'Fuck you, man, okay?' he told Bill in an American accent.

Bill pulled off his watch. 'This is a good watch, okay? Worth a lot of money. A lot of money, okay? You take this watch and find another road.'

The driver showed Bill his wrist. He already had a watch. It was even a Rolex. It might not have been the real thing, but it was a Rolex of sorts and he clearly did not want another one. Bill took out his empty wallet and offered the driver his black American Express card. The driver looked away.

Bill got out of the car leaving his bag on the back seat and began walking towards the soldiers. Someone grabbed his arm. A young red-haired woman with an Irish accent. Some kind of aid worker.

'You can't go down there,' she told him. 'There's disease in there now. Typhoid. Dengue fever. Malaria.'

He nodded politely and kept walking. The woman shouted something but the wind was too loud and he did not catch it. He had reached the soldiers now. They were very young. They had rifles slung over their shoulders. They were looking at the mudslide. He walked past them. A child's arm was sticking out of the sludge. Bill felt his flesh crawl with horror, but he kept walking, leaning forward, pressing against the wind. The wind dropped for a second and he heard the raised voices in Chinese behind him and, further back, the Irish woman repeating that he couldn't go down there. He kept going. Then he felt fingers digging into his arm, and he turned and placed his hands on the young soldier's chest, and with no more force than was necessary shoved him away. The soldier stumbled two steps backwards and then lurched forward, and in one smooth movement swung the rifle off his shoulder and rammed the butt as hard as he could into Bill's face.

He didn't fall over but his legs went, and he staggered around drunkenly with red and yellow flashing lights the only thing he could see. He had been struck on the right side of his face, and he could feel the blow still, it was as if he was still being hit. The feeling ran for about six inches from just above his eyebrow to just below his cheekbone. The pain filled his head, a balloon of pain that was expanding by the second, but the damage was all in his eye. His right eye. His eyebrow and cheekbone had absorbed most of the blow but he had also been hit in his right eye, and when the reds and yellows faded there were black stars floating in his foggy vision.

Bill gave the soldier a sick, wonky smile and turned and walked obediently back down the road. The soldier watched him go, his rifle held like a club in case he came back. The taxi had gone but the Irish woman was standing in the same place. 'It's from the stagnant water,' she said, as if their conversation had not been interrupted. 'The disease. The mosquitoes and the stagnant water.'

He didn't know what she was talking about. He had already forgotten about the disease. The right side of his face was throbbing. The black stars dived and swooped, as if blown by the wind.

'Is there another road to Yangshuo?' he said, gently dabbing his cheekbone. It came away smeared with blood, but there wasn't much of it. He blinked repeatedly, trying to clear his eyes. The black stars continued to float across his vision, distracting him and scaring him. He closed his right eye. The other one was fine. 'I really have to get to a village on the way to Yangshuo.'

The Irish woman looked sympathetic. 'Have you got family there?' she said, and he didn't know how to answer that.

He walked down the hill and below the mudslide. The soldiers were on the road above him. He could see the stumps of trees

when they had been chopped down, and the frozen brown river that had slid across the road. The hill looked as though it had collapsed. Black stars lazily drifted across the scene. But his eye was closing now and the black stars were not so bad.

The ground was slick with wet mud. As he descended the slope he fell over almost immediately, pitching forward on to his hands and knees. He got up slowly, holding on to a stunted tree for support, his palms and trousers covered in mud. He kept going down the hill, but treading more carefully, walking sideways, digging his shoes into the churned earth.

When he was beyond the mudslide he walked back up to the road and among the stalled traffic. He could hear a helicopter above him. He kept walking. He felt he knew this road but when he came to her father's village he almost walked through it before he recognised the place.

The river was a broad brown flood. There were no tents. There were no fields. The fields and the tents were all gone. A mountain of mud had slid to the very edge of the village, burying the school, and wiping the place clean of any distinguishing features. He stared around, completely disorientated.

The small, carefully divided paddy fields that he remembered were now a glassy lake. He heard a noise and could not place it. It was like a growl coming from the centre of the earth. It was like underground thunder. He was very scared. But this was the place, even if everything had changed.

He could not find her father's house. He looked around at the world of mud that had invaded this place. Then he saw it. Propped up with thick logs. The house next door was gone. Just gone. He heard the noise again and this time understood. The mud was rumbling in its core.

Something landed on his hand and he slapped it dead. A mosquito with black and white stripes. There were helicopters in the sky, as if watching him. He went inside her father's

house. Jinjin was sitting on the side of a single bed, holding ChoCho. Her father lay on the bed, shivering uncontrollably. Bill took a few steps forward. There was a rash on his face. Bill stared at them with wonder. He would never have guessed that she would come to her father. He thought the years of violence had killed her sense of duty towards the old man. But nothing would kill it.

'William,' she said, as if expecting him. 'Your face.' There was a cracked shaving mirror on the wall. He looked into it and saw his right eye was buried under gorged black-and-purple bruising. He turned away and didn't look at it any more. The black stars had gone for now, and he was glad of that. He saw that the rash on her father's face was also on the baby.

'What's wrong with them?' he said. 'Sick from the mosquito,' she said. 'From the bad water.' Dengue fever. The Irish woman was right. He put his arm around Jinjin and outside he could hear the tons of mud growl and move. Or perhaps he imagined it. The mud was what he was frightened of. It had not scared him on the road but it did now. There it was. The noise from outside again. Louder now. It was real. They could all die today. 'We have to get out of here,' he said, jumping up, ready to be gone. 'We have to go, Jinjin.'

'The soldiers will come for us,' she said, indicating the ceiling. You could still hear them up there. 'The helicopters.' 'Nobody's coming,' Bill said. He looked around the shack. Something was missing. He stared at her, trying to concentrate. 'Listen to me,' he said, kneeling beside her, feeling the sickness in this place. The child scared him. The child wasn't crying. 'Nobody's coming,' he said. 'The helicopters are not coming. You know why? Because they can't land.' He realised that he saw it all with perfect clarity. The hovering helicopters and the ground transformed to

shifting mud. They could look but they couldn't touch. 'They want to help us but tliey can't, so we have to help ourselves.'

Jinjin smiled weakly. 'The soldiers are so great,' she said. She was a real Chinese patriot, a true believer. Perhaps they all were.

'The soldiers are so great but they can't help us,' he said, standing up. 'The roads have gone. Everyone is stuck. We have to help ourselves. We have to go now or we will die.' He looked around the room. 'Where's your friend?'

'He went back to Guilin,' she said, as the wind picked up outside. 'There's only you, William.'

She still didn't move. They could hear the old man breathing, the rain beating against the corrugated roof, the moaning wind, and he could almost feel the great mass of sludge outside, waiting to bury them all.

Jinjin remained where she was and Bill saw for the first time that she was paralysed with exhaustion. How many nights had she gone without sleep, caring for her father and her son? Bill took ChoCho from her arms and wrapped him in all the blankets he could find. Then he helped her father from the bed. If he could stand up then he could walk, and if he could walk then he could live. They could all live.

'I this girl father,' he told Bill, leaning against him, and Bill nodded, taking the man's weight. The rash on his face was a splatter of red welts.

'Listen to me. I can't carry both of them. I can't carry everybody. I can't do it.' Bill held out the listless child. 'You understand?' The old man took his grandson.

Bill got Jinjin to her feet and she reached for her son. Then she was on her knees and Bill was crouching beside her, his arms around her, holding her, whispering to her until she nodded once, acknowledging that carrying her child was impossible. She looked at him and wiped her eyes with her fingers.

'Bad mother,' she said.

'No,' he said.

Bill scooped her up in his arms and carried her out of the shack. The old man trailed behind them, carrying the boy. Bill carried her through the mud with the half-buried and three-quarters-buried bodies and the wrecked homes and ruined lives, cursing the heavens and then saying, Please God, Please God, until he was too tired to do even that.

They reached the highway. The old man was dropping behind. But he was still there. ChoCho was still in his arms. Bill sat down on a tree stump, Jinjin beside him, leaning against him, almost sleeping now, or something like sleep, and they let the old man catch up and rest, and they kept resting until Bill thought he heard a sound. From the hill above them, from the ground below. Mixed in with the terrible wind, the sound of something underground, about to appear and devour them. Then he stood up and they kept going. The old man was soon trailing behind. Bill shouted at him to keep going, and Jinjin held him with her arms around his neck, and he felt her breath on his face, and it was as if they were still lovers.

They got to the roadblock and it was only then that his legs gave out. Bill collapsed into the arms of a PLA soldier and he could feel arms lifting Jinjin from him, and someone holding him close, and not letting him go, as if the human touch would heal everything.

At the shelter they wrapped him in a blanket and gave him a bottle of water and a bowl of instant noodles.

There were no dry clothes to be had, but he felt warmer inside his blanket and gulped the noodles down, far too fast at first, making him giddy with nausea, and then more slowly, like a child learning to eat, and then he licked the plastic bowl clean when the food was gone, trying to get the last bit of goodness.

Jinjin had gone to the hospital with her child and her

father. Bill was still dumbfounded that he had found her here. This was the part of her that he had never imagined. Despite everything, she was still her father's daughter and she did not hesitate to go to him in his need. He had thought that he knew her better than anyone in the world. But perhaps he knew nothing at all.

Bill realised that his hands were shaking and he stared at them with his good eye, willing them to be still. But they kept trembling with shock and cold and relief.

He looked up at the sky. There was something wrong with the sky. It was different. He realised that the rain had stopped and the wind had fallen silent. And it was only then that he remembered the keys.

He felt in his pocket, then shoved in his hand. Nothing. Lost in the mud somewhere. On the hill. At the roadblock. In the back of the taxi. Left in a plastic security tray at an airport he would never see again. It didn't matter. It didn't matter. He had not really come thousands of miles to return her keys. He saw that now.

He had told himself that he was coming to return the keys, but now he understood that he was coming to tell Jinjin Li that he had loved her, and to tell her that his heart did not change so easily, and to tell her goodbye.

The apartment was empty when he got home.

It was late afternoon on the next day. They should have been here. It was a school day, a Monday, and whatever they had been doing, it should have been over by now.

Bill took off his mud-caked clothes and looked at the laundry basket and then put them in a rubbish bag. Everything. It was all ruined. Then he went to the shower and stood under the hottest water he could stand until the black stars were swarming over his damaged eye and he thought he was going to faint.

He came out of the shower and found a T-shirt and jeans and went to the window. The weather was finally lifting. Mountainous clouds rolled across the sky, the dying sunshine struggling behind them. The courtyard of Paradise Mansions was deserted. It was as if his wife and daughter had disappeared. He tried calling Becca's mobile and there was only the voicemail. He said that he was back, and his cracked voice sounded weak and strange in the empty flat.

Dinnertime came and went and still there was no sign. He ate nothing, and felt as if he was floating. Even the pale sunlight from the window seemed dazzling. He sat on the sofa and massaged his temples, but the pounding would not stop. He was lost, he realised. He had never felt so lost in his life. He closed his eyes and he must have slept because he awoke with a jolt when he heard the key in the lock. Then his daughter was standing in front of him. She was holding a pink balloon with Shanghai Zoo printed on it.

'What happened to your eye?' she said.

He self-consciously touched his face. 'I hurt it, angel.'

Holly pulled a face. 'It looks really gross.'

'It will be better tomorrow,' he said.

She tapped the balloon against his legs.

'We saw the red panda,' she told him. 'And the golden monkeys.'

He smiled. 'You sure it wasn't the other way round?' he said.

She looked confused. 'What?'

'You're sure it wasn't a red monkey and a golden panda?'

Holly shook her head, wise to his tricks. 'Daddy,' she sighed. 'You're going to have to stop being so dumb.'

Becca had gone into the kitchen and he did not see her face. She was at the fridge, pulling out drinks. They must have eaten out.

Holly went off to her room. He heard the sound of her

playing. No, he realised. She was reading. She was already reading. He had missed so much. He stood up and it felt like every muscle in his body was aching. His legs, his arms, his back. There was an old man's stiffness in them, and he knew that he had asked them to do too much. He walked over to his wife and watched her face in the light of the fridge.

'I thought you were gone,' he said, and she turned to look at him. There were three cartons in her hands. Orange juice for Holly, cranberry juice for herself and milk for his tea. A drink for each of them.

She shook her head. 'I'm not gone,' Becca said simply. 'We're not gone.' She put down the drinks and stood in front of him. She reached out and lightly touched his broken face and he held her hand there and he would not let it go.

He remembered.

twenty-nine

'This is Suzy Too,' Bill told the two new guys. 'Everyone comes to Suzy Too.'

Business was good. The cake was getting bigger. The firm couldn't cope with the work. So Devlin had flown to London and a little over a month later a pair of lawyers arrived with two-year contracts and dreams of early retirement.

On their first night in Shanghai, Devlin and Bill took them for dinner on the Bund and then Bill took them out for drinks on Mao Ming Nan Lu.

Jet-lagged and drunk and free at last from the chains of home, they stared with disbelief at their first sight of Suzy Too. The girls at the bar. The girls on the dance floor. The girls everywhere. They had never known there were so many women in the world.

Their very first night in this city, Bill thought, envying them as he signalled for Tsingtao all round. He blinked up at the strobe lights. The black stars had almost gone but the lights all had an aura, like a misty halo. He looked away, remembering his own first night in Shanghai.

Jenny One walked by, suddenly looking a lot older. She took Bill's hand and placed a chaste kiss on one cheek and

then the other. She smiled sadly and kept walking. Bill wanted to ask – But what about the Frenchman?

The new guys were covered in girls. Hanging on their arms, asking them where they came from, swaying their hips, and trying to encourage the new guys to dance, because then there would be no need to talk to them.

'Bill – these girls?' said one of the new guys. Somehow it was a question, although Bill did not know exactly what the man was asking. There was a tall, haughty woman behind him with her long arms around his waist, and two smaller ones by his side, one of them doll-like and pretty, the other one chubby but proudly large-breasted. Bill did not recognise them. It felt like Suzy Too was full of newcomers. The women were holding the guy's hands and trying to encourage him to shuffle his brogues to Eminem's 'Shake That'. Bill guessed that Elgar was more his thing. The guy was one of those old-fashioned Englishmen – all Adam's apple and glasses and an accent that told Bill he had been educated privately and among boys. Harry something. He looked as if he had struggled to meet girls all his life. But even Harry something wouldn't struggle in Shanghai, Bill thought. In six months Harry something would think he was Errol Flynn. In six months he would be the cock of the Bund. But for now there was a thin film of nervous mist on his spectacles.

Til tell you about these girls,' said the other new guy. Fresh off the flight from Heathrow, he fancied himself as something of an expert. Bill looked him up and down. Blond, cropped, fit in a Sunday-morning-football sort of way. Nigel somebody. He was not so obviously overwhelmed as Harry something. Probably been on a two-week package tour to Thailand, Bill thought. Probably had a hand-job in Patpong and thought that made him Marco Polo.

'These girls are whores,' Nigel said confidently. He reached

out and squeezed a small breast too hard. The girl flinched, pulled away with a grimace of pain and distaste.

Bill took a breath, and held his temper.

'Don't call them that,' he said. 'Please don't ever call them that.'

The man looked at Bill with surly belligerence, but said nothing. Bill was about to become a partner. He was billing more hours than anyone in the firm. Soon Bill would be their boss. He could make their lives very hard.

'Then what are they?' said Harry something. His little eyes had completely disappeared behind his steamed-up glasses. The chubby girl with large breasts had a hand in his trouser pocket and she was laughingly telling the other one that she could not find anything. This is not a deferential society, Bill thought. 'If not whores,' asked Harry something, 'then what are they?'

Bill took a long pull on his Tsingtao. He was going to start cutting back on the beer. He was going to stop coming to Suzy Too. He wasn't a tourist guide. Let them find their own fun. A shower of black stars fell across his vision and was gone.

'They're just practical,' he said.

He had been told that they did not feel love in the way that he felt love, that they responded to acts of kindness and generosity with all of their body and heart, but that was not love, they told him, not in the Western sense of the one true one, the partner for life, the unmet lover found at last. Not love like that, like love back home, the way that it was meant to be, they said. Not real love the way it was made in the West.

They were just so practical when it came to love, they told him until he believed it, until he could see what they meant, and he could see that we in the West were not practical at

all – we simply fell, we just took the giddy step over the cliff and landed where our wayward hearts took us.

The East was practical. The East could not afford to love. The West was romantic. Because the West could afford to love.

But he came to believe that somehow he and Jinjin Li had traded places. He came to believe that she had somehow stopped being practical and become infected with the Western concept of love – loving him even when common sense told her to bail out, loving him even when her head told her to find someone else, loving him when every instinct in her soul told her to be practical - she still loved him, she loved him through all the hurt and betrayal and sadness, and she kept on loving him even when it was not wise, and even when it brought her no happiness.

And Bill changed too. He had started out believing that he was different from the married man in the silver Porsche who had brought her to Paradise Mansions. Bill thought that he was better than that man because his heart was good, because he cared for her in a deeper, truer sense than that man, and that his love for her was real. But even back then, when he thought he loved her well and true, he could not deny that he felt that he had a claim on Jinjin Li.

He had invested so much of everything he had to give, and he had risked losing all the things he loved, and he told himself that – unlike the man in the silver Porsche – he expected nothing in return. That was not true. What he expected in return was that she would love him and that she would keep on loving him as if he owned the lease on her heart. They would both be disappointed.

Was he any better than the man who had kept her in Paradise Mansions? No, Bill saw now that he was far worse, because he had dressed it all up as love. But when Jinjin Li finally remembered to be practical and walk away, when the

contract between them was finally broken, he'd felt totally and utterly betrayed, and responded with a bitterness that he thought might choke him.

Bill, you're behaving like a romantic Western fool, he told himself. You're acting like she has the power to rip out your heart.

And he knew that just wasn't practical.

The office was dark now.

The only light came from the twinkling jewel box of Pudong in the early hours beyond the window, and from the glow of the screen of Shane's laptop. It shone on the face of Alice Greene as she copied the files, and Bill wondered what she was seeing. Corruption and justice, he thought, scoops and awards. It was all mixed up with her, he thought. The wish for a better world, the need for a better life. Greed and conscience. Perhaps it was all mixed up with everyone.

'Why did he keep all this stuff?' she said, not looking away from the screen. 'I mean – even if this Chairman Sun character needed paying off by these Germans, why keep a record of it?'

'Because he was a good lawyer,' Bill said. 'And a good man.'

She snorted. 'That's an oxymoron, isn't it?' She looked over her shoulder and smiled. 'Just kidding.'

'Are you almost done?' He wanted her to take what she needed and get out of here. There was something else he had to do tonight.

'Finished,' she said. There were perhaps a dozen disks on Bill's desk. She straightened them like a card dealer with a new deck, and slipped them into her shoulder bag. Bill walked her to the lift.

'Thanks,' she said. 'I mean it, Bill. You did the right thing.'

'First time for everything,' he said.

When he was alone he unlocked his desk and took out a shoebox. He opened it and leafed through the evidence of their time together in Guilin, Changchun, Shanghai. On the boat, going down the Yangtze, the Three Gorges outside their cabin window. All their photographs. The box was stuffed full. So many photographs. And now he had to destroy them. He carried the box across the office to the shredding machine.

There were too many. She had had a fanatical need to record their happiness. Were they all like that? Or was it just Jinjin? He never really knew what was typically Chinese and what was typically Jinjin Li. Now he would never know. It didn't matter. He began to feed his memories into the shredder. In the end there were only two that he could not destroy.

The passport photograph taken the summer before he had met her. The only passport photograph that anyone ever looked beautiful in. The cool wide eyes staring back at the camera, lips wet, mouth closed, beauty intact, goofy charm successfully concealed. Then there was the second photograph that he could not bring himself to destroy. The picture of them dancing, taken by the elderly American after dinner on the boat down the Yangtze. It had almost been a joke to them, Bill and Jinjin dancing to Chinese pop music on the ship's tiny dance floor. But the lovely old tourist had told them that they looked so happy, and so perfect together, and he'd insisted that Jinjin hand over her camera so that he could record the moment. They were both grateful and touched, although Bill could not tell if the old American was a saint or a crazy person. Maybe a bit of both. And anyway, the old American had been wrong about them. Because so soon after that picture was taken it was all over forever. Perhaps that was the perfect reason for taking the picture. Perhaps the old tourist on that dreadful cruise ship knew that it could never last.

Bill slipped the two surviving photographs into his wallet,

and then he stood there staring at the shredding machine, and the pile of glossy paper beneath it, wondering what had hit him.

It was never meant to be this way. He had thought that he could somehow stand back from the thing they shared, as if what he thought of as the real part of his life – Becca and Holly, family and home, wife and child – could remain untouched by his feelings for Jinjin Li.

He had been wrong.

Now the evidence had been reduced to the two surviving photographs. The passport photo. The picture of them dancing on the boat. He wasn't going to keep them forever, just for a little while, and when they were gone there would be nothing to show that they had ever met, apart from what they carried inside.

Perhaps the thing that killed his father would one day come for him. In fifty years, or next week. It did not matter. He would still have time to destroy the two photographs. What did they call it? Oh yes. Putting your affairs in order.

He would do it. He would put his affairs in order. One day. But he couldn't do it yet. Not yet. He couldn't do it yet.

Bill walked to the lift and pressed the call button. The lift came and he stood there staring at it. The doors closed as he turned and went back into his office, where he fed the last two photographs into the shredding machine.

You have to remember the bad times, he thought. That's the only way to get through it. That's the only way to go on. You don't remember the good times. You deny them. You forget them. That's how you get over it. That's how you carry on with your life.

The passport photo. Gone. The dancing picture. Gone. Every trace of her and them was now destroyed. It was the only way.

Remember the bad times, Bill thought.

it Я М-.

From page one of the South China Morning Post, 1st June 200-:

SHANGHAI GRAFT PROBE SPREADS

Government plans to curb illegal land grabs by Song Tiping and Alice Greene

The Communist Party's top disciplinary watchdog is expanding its Shanghai corruption probe to the city's leading property developers, state media said yesterday.

Following this newspaper's expose of the Yang-dong land grab, senior local government official Chairman Sun Yong was arrested at the grand opening of the Green Acres luxury development and charged with 'loose morals, economic crimes and decadent living'.

Plainclothes secret police accompanied by officers from the Public Security Bureau ushered Chairman Sun from the cocktail party in handcuffs, protesting his innocence and still clutching a champagne flute.

Rather pre-empting the verdict of Sun's trial, the state news agency commented, 'His punishment of a lengthy jail term will fully demonstrate the central committee's resolution to build a clean party and to fight corruption.'

Now more cases of illegal authorisation of land for property development are expected to be uncovered, leading to investigations of more government officials and businessmen.

Dong Fan, a property industry professor at Beijing Normal University, said most corruption cases occurred during the land acquisition stage.

'Land is owned by state and local governments and the whole development operation is run in a murky, non-transparent environment,' Mr Dong said.

In a speech to more than 800 guests at the city's National Day banquet, in what appeared to be a manoeuvre to boost the city's reputation, Shanghai mayor and acting party chief Han Zheng yesterday expressed optimism in Shanghai's future development and commitment to the battle against corruption.

New urgency as heads roll - A4

Devlin tossed the paper on to his desk. Then he put his feet up, the heels of his Church's brogues resting on the cover of the South China Morning Post.

'The thing is,' Devlin said, 'when they crack down on corruption, it has actually got bugger all to do with justice and truth, and everything to do with political manoeuvring. The things that poor old Sun stands accused of – cutting in his family, feathering his nest, grabbing as many sweeties as he could cram into his greedy old cakehole – are equally true of any local or government official in the country.'

Devlin did not ask Bill to sit down.

'Okay, Sun was a fool,' Devlin continued, with a small sigh of regret. 'He didn't have enough friends in high places. Should have cut in some friends in Beijing – or their families. They always crack down sooner or later. They have to. That's the funny thing – they would have got him anyway.' And finally the flash of anger in the eyes, at last the murderous rage of the betrayed. 'Without you selling me out,' he told Bill, 'and without this hack from Hong Kong.'

The firm's senior partner looked at Bill with a mixture of

hurt and loathing. Above his head the red light of a CCTV camera gleamed like an ember of hell. Of course, you couldn't take a leak in this building without someone watching you. But Bill had known that, hadn't he?

'So you think you're better than the rest of us, Holden,' Devlin said. It wasn't a question. His mouth twisted with mockery. 'Purer. More noble.'

Bill shook his head. 'I never thought that.'

'But you couldn't close your eyes to the rottenness,' Devlin said. He got a sly look about him. 'Just because some Chinese bitch fucked you blind.'

'Watch your mouth,' Bill said quietly.

Devlin looked frightened for a moment. But it was just a moment. He was the one with the power here. He jabbed a finger at Bill.

'More people are climbing out of poverty in this country than anywhere at any time in human history,' he said. 'In human history! Think about it! And assholes like you are fighting against it. So, you tell me – who's the idiot here, Bill? Who's the villain? You or me?'

Bill said nothing.

'And what's your wife going to say when she learns you chucked a partnership away?' Devlin said. 'What's your daughter going to say, Bill, when she finds out her daddy is a self-righteous loser who doesn't have a job?'

Bill shrugged. 'I don't know. Becca will be disappointed. But my daughter's a bit too young to understand.' He smiled at a memory. 'She just wants me to pretend to be a prince all the time.'

Devlin snorted. 'Well, you're good at that, if nothing else. Pretending to be a prince. But you're no different to everyone else in this country, Bill. You hate everyone's corruption except your own.'

There were two Chinese security guards in the doorway.

One was holding a cardboard box containing what Bill recognised as his personal possessions. The other had his briefcase and jacket.

'Get him out of my sight,' Devlin said.

Bill's briefcase slapped hard against his stomach. He was handed his jacket. And then the open cardboard box was placed in his arms. He stared down at the detritus on his desk.

Time to leave.

The office stopped to watch him go. No Shane. No Nancy. But Mad Mitch was still there, standing up as Bill passed his desk, and shaking his hand. Then the new guys, their faces masks of shock and delight. Harry looked as though he thought he might get Bill's office by lunchtime. Nigel something had a love bite on his neck that was not quite covered by the white collar of his Brooks Brothers shirt. You can never go back to the Home Counties, Bill thought. You are Mr Charisma now. You are Brad Pitt. You are Errol Flynn. The city did that to you. It made you feel you were special.

And as the Chinese security guards escorted Bill from the building, he thought about a young man who'd been convinced that the world was his for the taking, and who never dreamed he could fall flat, or let his family down, he thought about a young man who had wrongly believed he was special, and he wondered what had ever happened to him.

There was the smell of paint in the apartment. Fresh paint and some sort of paste. The smell of things being changed, and life moving on.

Bill dropped his empty briefcase by the door and went into Holly's room. Becca was putting up wallpaper while Holly sat on the floor leafing through a book. Disney princesses smiled down from the walls. Snow White. The

Little Mermaid. Cinderella. Sleeping Beauty. Pocahontas. Mulan. Belle from Beauty and the Beast. Holly smiled at him too.

'Daddy will know,' Becca said. 'Go on, ask him.'

'What do you call a baby penguin?' Holly said.

Bill's mind was blank.

'Baby horses have a special name,' Holly said, frowning impatiently. 'And baby cows. And baby sheep. But what about baby penguins?' she sighed elaborately. 'I don't know what's this.'

'I don't know what it is,' Becca corrected her.

'Me neither,' Holly said, and Becca laughed.

He picked up his daughter and held her in his arms. Heavier still. Definitely heavier. More robust and substantial. Staking her claim in the world.

'I'll think about it,' he said. 'The penguin thing. I'll give it some thought, angel.'

'Get back to me.'

'I'll do that.' He put her back on the floor and turned to Becca. 'Can we talk?'

'First I want to show you something,' she said, and there was an awkwardness about her, and he wondered if it would always be there now. Becca took him to the computer in the living room and she sat down in front of it.

'Look,' she said.

On the screen there were pictures of properties she had been looking at. A shortlist of new lives in new luxury homes. Homes fit for the family of a partner at Butterfield, Hunt and West.

He looked over her shoulder as she scrolled through the options. WESTWOOD GREEN – NEW LAKE-VIEW TOWNHOUSES TO BE RELEASED SOON – A HOME FOR THE HEART. This one was apparently an international community with a commitment to natural living. CALIFORNIA

DREAMING AT RANCHO SANTA FE – ELEGANTLY FURNISHED SPANISH-STYLE VILLAS WITH PRIVATE GARDENS, 30 MINUTES TO HONG QIAO AIRPORT.

'I don't want to live here any more,' she said. A statement of cold fact. 'I'm not going to live here any more.'

He said her name and she looked up at him and it was a new way of looking at him, a look that buried bitterness and wariness and hurt, as if she carried a wound that was far from healed.

'The new house – becoming a partner – it's not going to happen,' he said. He hung his head, the sour taste of humiliation in his mouth. He was so ashamed. 'I lost my job.'

'Is that it?' She turned back to the screen, shaking her head. 'I thought – something else.'

He stared at her and then he understood. She had thought he was leaving. But he knew now that he would never leave. She would have to do the leaving.

Her fingers moved deftly across the keyboard. 'But they were going to make you a partner,' she said flatly. There was no disappointment in her voice. It was as if they hardly knew each other.

He shook his head. 'I'm sorry, Bee. I let you down. I let you down in every way I could.'

She was busy deleting files. Clicking on the dream homes with the mouse and dragging them to the icon of a wastepaper basket at the bottom of the screen. She turned to look at him. 'It's just a job, Bill. You'll get another one.'

He hung his head with despair. She didn't understand what this meant. 'We're going to have to go back. That life we wanted …'

'Someone will give you a job. You work hard. You're good at what you do.'

He shook his head. 'They fired me. I'm out. They cleared my desk and walked me to the door.' There was a shocked

silence before he spoke again. 'And Holly – she loves her little friends here …'

'She's five years old,' said Becca, flaring up at last, glad for the chance to be openly angry with him. 'She'll make new friends. And that's what she will have to do all her life, the same as everyone else.' Then she softened, and put the palm of her hand on his heart. 'Look – we'll be okay. Our home – it's not the place in London, and it's not here. We take it with us wherever we go. It's you and me and Holly. That's our home. It's the three of us. I see that now.' She touched his face. 'Oh Bill – don't you know it yet?'

He blinked against the shameful sting of tears.

'I think you have to keep falling in love with each other,' Becca told him, dry eyed and calm. 'A man and a woman. A husband and wife. I think that's what you have to do. And if you can't do that, if you can't keep falling in love with each other, then I don't think you've got much of a chance.'

And later, when their daughter was sleeping in her room, and the light had been turned out on the Disney princesses, Bill went to the master bedroom and sat on the bed as Becca got undressed. But they didn't talk about what had happened that day or how it would work back in London. They were both a bit sick of talking. They both felt that they had talked enough for now.

She just took off her clothes and came quickly to him, as he sat there still dressed and watching her, and they said nothing. Not like a married couple at all. More like lovers.

My wife, thought Bill.

thirty

He saw her one last time.

He was on the Bund, in front of the Peace Hotel, on his way home after closing down his bank account, one of a hundred chores he had to do before they left the next day, and that was when Jinjin Li walked past him with her new man.

It was a dazzling day in early July and he did a double take, snapping out of his reverie. She looked familiar, but he didn't think it could possibly be her, because it was only a passing resemblance, no more than that, and if it was her, if it was that special one, then surely he would recognise her in an instant? How could he mistake her for anyone else? How could she ever look like a mere imitation of the girl he had loved?

She looked too ordinary to be Jinjin Li. Surely an ordinary woman could not have been the cause of all that wild happiness, of all that misery and upheaval and pain in so many hearts? Surely it would have to be someone very special to do all that?

But as he stood on the Bund, staring after her, the woman looked over her shoulder at him, and the man looked at him

too, placing a protective arm around her shoulder as if to say, Don't worry, darling, I will protect you from that bad man.

And so it was really her.

It was Jinjin Li. And they had walked past each other like total strangers. Bill almost laughed out loud at the absurdity of it all. So much spent emotion and then he almost failed to recognise her.

Jinjin and the man kept walking.

Bill turned and followed them, with no idea of what he was going to do or say. But he knew that he objected to that man's arm around her shoulder. He objected to the idea that Jinjin Li would ever need protection from him.

And as Bill increased his pace, gaining on them now, suddenly knowing it was her, he understood why she would never be a TV presenter. He had always suspected that one day he would turn on CCTV and there she would be, reading the autocue and staring straight at him, looking like the passport photograph taken the year before she had met him. But like so many of their plans, he saw that it was not going to happen.

The glow had gone, or the glossiness of youth, or the magic, or whatever it had been. Maybe it had never been there in the first place, only in his eyes. Perhaps it was only there, that magic light of love, because he wanted and needed it to be. But now he saw her with the light extinguished and she was an attractive Chinese woman in her thirties, no more and no less, and she was getting older, and none of it was very complicated.

And here was the funny thing – as he saw her ordinariness, as he registered that she was just another human being trying to make her way in the world, trying her best to look nice for her new man and for herself, Bill Holden still loved her – or at least he still carried the love that remains when love has died, and he always would.

But she was not for him and he was not for her.

The happy couple had stopped walking. The man was buying a newspaper. He was a Westerner, maybe a bit younger than Bill. He didn't look like anything special. He looked like the first guy who had come along. He looked like someone she had met in a bar or a gym or wherever it was that normal people met.

Bill realised that she had not stopped smiling since she had seen him, a strained and defensive smile, as if he were amusing, or as if she was trying to convince herself that all of this was funny.

And perhaps I am funny, Bill thought. Perhaps I am a barrel of laughs. Or perhaps her smile was just another bandage on another wound. He did not know.

Bill and Jinjin stared at each other – they were both wearing dark glasses, and Bill was grateful for that, he could not stand to have her look in his eyes again – and the man, the first man who had come along, the man from the gym or the bar, put his arm around her again – Don't worry, I'll protect you from this bad man, darling. You know nothing, Bill thought. Oh, you have no idea.

And suddenly Bill found that he had started mouthing banalities. 'Nice to see you, nice to see you,' he said, while he stood there shaking everybody's hand like the sporting captain of a losing side. The man's hand. Jinjin's hand.

That's the role he chose to play, the only one he could think of – the good loser. Three cheers for the guy from the gym or the bar or wherever it was. Had he ever shaken Jinjin's hand before? He didn't think so. He was told the name of the new guy and immediately forgot it as he kept saying, 'Nice to meet you, nice to meet you.' Nice. So nice. Everything was so nice that it almost suffocated him.

Then he turned away, but her voice called him back, even as he kept moving.

'My mum's in town!' she said, a happy exclamation unveiled as if it should mean something to him. He kept walking.

'Then give her my love,' he said over his shoulder, and he meant it. And perhaps she said it because she felt it too -the terrible finality of the ending, of letting it go, and she wanted him to stay for just a few more seconds, because they both knew they would never see each other again after today, and all they would ever share now was the past and whatever photographs that Jinjin Li had been unable to destroy.

She was not innocent. She was not that. She was from a far harder world than he could ever imagine, a world that he had only glimpsed. But if she was not innocent, then there was still an innocence and purity about her, part of her that could never be touched or spoiled or owned – not by her father, not by the man who put her up in Paradise Mansions, and not by Bill. There was a part of her that was untouchable, and he envied and loved her for it.

He got to the end of the street, that famous street, old colonial Shanghai staring across the river at the future, and he hailed a cab, and as the taxi turned and drove back down the Bund he saw them sitting outside a cafe.

The man was reading a newspaper while Jinjin sat opposite him, staring off into the middle distance, being ignored by her boyfriend, not even an attempt at a smile on her face now.

Bill had to laugh. They were arguing about him, or they had argued about him, and what she had said – My mum's in town! - and what she had meant by what she had said, and did perhaps Jinjin want him to call, and all of that, and it felt like the most pointless argument in the world – to argue about him, as something as dead and over and finished as Bill.

The smile was gone and Jinjin Li looked quite ordinary and they were just a man and a woman sitting at a cafe trying

to make sense of being together, and making no sense at all right now, and Bill had to grin because he felt like it was some higher power's gift to him, a consolation prize to the man who would never stop believing that he had loved her first and best and then lost her. He raised a hand in salute and farewell and, sitting across from the grumpy new boyfriend reading his newspaper, Jinjin waved back.

Bill knew that somewhere down the line she would smile again, and he could not begrudge her that, he could even be happy about it, even if she would not be smiling it for him, the world-famous smile of Jinjin Li.

The plan was that Tiger would drive them to the airport in his new BMW. But the BMW was reclaimed by the loan company when Tiger's business collapsed, and so the plan changed.

Down in the courtyard of Paradise Mansions, Holly adjusted herself in her father's arms as she contemplated Tiger emerging from an old red VW Santana.

'Is Tiger a taxi driver now?' she said, gesturing with the yellow plastic pony she held in her fist.

Tiger laughed with embarrassment, looking from Bill to Becca, and then down at his shoes. 'Too many people with same idea,' he said, turning to Bill. 'Now too much Chinese furniture in China.' He looked shyly at Holly. 'Yes, old Tiger a taxi driver now.'

'It was still a good idea,' Becca said.

Bill placed a hand on his shoulder. 'You'll think of something else.'

Tiger cast a mournful eye at the red Santana. 'But should be a better car. Should be a limo, boss. Like the one you came in on.'

Bill placed Holly on the ground and hefted the first of the suitcases. 'We're grateful for the lift,' he said.

'And limos are overrated,' Becca said, getting into the passenger seat. The phone in her bag rang once and then again and it was ringing for a third time as she turned it off.

Bill sat in the back of the cab with Holly on his lap and as the city slipped away from them the child slept. He turned his head to look at the Bund, and a single black star seemed to fall across the sky. As they crossed the river his daughter stirred in his arms.

'Are we home yet?' she said sleepily, and in the front of the car Becca laughed, turned to look at her, and at her husband. One day their beautiful daughter would stop saying these things, he thought. But not for a while.

Bill pulled his daughter close, his arms wrapped around her, her head nodding against his chest. She was still gripping the yellow plastic pony. The old VW turned on to the highway and the last lights of Shanghai were lost to him.

'Just rest your eyes,' he said, so quietly that only his daughter would hear. 'That's the big secret. You just rest your eyes and then you're home before you know it.'