The girl in the bed opposite watched them goggle-eyed. She was a sixteen-year-old who had grown up in a Beijing back street, and he was a good-looking man, a fine surgeon too. He was obviously from a good family, and had everything a young man like that should have. That was another attraction. An uneducated young girl was just as skilled as any university graduate at picking a likely prospect. And this girl had really taken a fancy to Doctor Lin.
On the operating table under local anaesthetic, Tianyi was upset and in pain. She cried and cried. Eventually, Doctor Lin himself grew distraught and the attending nurse had to intervene. Tianyi was roundly told off: ‘What on earth is all this fuss about? This is just a minor procedure, what are you crying for? An educated woman like you! Pull yourself together! Doctor Lin is a very kind man. Any other doctor would refuse to operate at all!’ At that point, Doctor Lin stemmed the outburst.
She was wheeled into a single room. Late in the evening, it must have been eight or nine o’clock, she was still crying, or rather the tears were falling silently. Night was falling and a corner of the curtain lifted and fell in the breeze. She was thoroughly chilled from all the crying, and clutched the thin hospital blanket around her, shivering uncontrollably. At that moment, the door opened. Doctor Lin came in, wearing his ordinary clothes. It was his habit to check up on all the patients he had operated on that day, before he went off shift. He saw her reddened eyes, and the bowl of rice porridge sitting untouched on the table and asked: ‘Has no one come to sit with you?’ She shook her head. She felt a great longing for him, though she could not say why, all she could do was cry. His expression, it seemed to her, grew much softer and his eyes filled with pity.
‘Why haven’t you eaten?’
‘I don’t want anything to eat.’
‘So you just want to cry?’
She was a little embarrassed and bit her lip.
‘It was only a minor operation. Is it very painful?’
She hesitated. Then she said in a low voice: ‘It’s not because of the pain …’
‘Then why?’
She said nothing. The tears stubbornly welled up again. He saw patients cry almost every day but for some reason, could not bear her tears. ‘I’ll go and buy you something to eat.’
‘No! …’ She slid out of bed, clutched the hem of his jacket, frantic, swayed and almost overbalanced. The stitches pulled painfully and she cried out in pain. He turned quickly and put his arm around her to steady her. Her whole weight lay against him. He had never felt such a soft body. He, who had always thought of himself as self-possessed, felt consumed by a surge of heat. She was as tense as he was, and for a long, long moment they stood stiffly, silently motionless.
Finally, he helped her to lie down and laid the quilt over her with great gentleness. The tenderness and restraint of this young man flooded her heart and the tears came again, but now she was completely soft, as if he had dissolved all her stiffness. At that moment, if he had laid his finger anywhere on her, her skin would have seeped like ripe fruit, but he did not touch her. His expression told her that he liked her, liked her very much, but it would be wrong.
The characteristic that all good Chinese men share is that they do not want to hurt a woman. The trouble is that they do not understand what really hurts a woman. It was a good man like that that she had met — and fallen madly in love with.
After she was discharged, she made frequent visits back to the hospital, even though it meant a long journey and changing buses three times, just so she could see him. The first story she ever wrote, for which she won a prize, had Lin as its main protagonist. On New Year’s Eve that year, she suddenly received a phone call that made her heart skip a beat: ‘Is that Yang Tianyi? … This is Lin, I’m on duty tonight in Emergency … If you have nothing on, would you like to come and keep me company?’ Her heart pounding with excitement, she dressed up and put on some make-up, then finally scrubbed her face clean and wore something very simple. She wanted her face to be completely naked.
Flickers of emotion softened his stern expression. His first words were: ‘Your story. I read it.’ Her face flamed.
Twenty years later, when she met him again, the years had given her complete self-possession. Or so she thought. After all, it had been twenty years, she had surely changed out of all recognition, would he even know her? In fact he recognised her immediately, and he flushed, just as he had twenty years before. The sign on his door read: ‘Professor Lin, Outpatient Services’, but nothing else had changed. There was the same unresolved tension between them, as if twenty years ago was just yesterday. He finished writing a prescription for the patient he was seeing, making, then correcting, four spelling mistakes. Then he saw the patient out and shut the door without calling the next one in. Just like twenty years ago, his consulting room was theirs.
Of course, he had aged, but not much. His face looked the same, though his hair was thinner and there were a few sombre frown lines on his forehead. However, once again, she had missed her chance. She asked a wise friend for advice. The response was: ‘Of course, because you are both too noble. Who needs nobility nowadays?’ Was that really true?
The same thing happened when she stayed up late into the night with Xiao’ou. Precisely nothing. Three months later, when Xiao’ou’s TV drama was about to go on air, he called her. She focussed all her attention on his tone of voice rather than the words, and discovered that that tone had changed. It was not that she was being over-sensitive, he really had changed. She put down the phone with a sigh. She realized that yet again love had passed her by.
She had not understood that the male of the species was an utterly pragmatic animal. There was not a man in this world patient enough to have a platonic relationship with her. Worse, none of them had the courage to bring this goddess down from her pedestal and turn her into a real woman. Only that rude boy Lian. He boldly took his chance, and actually succeeded.
10
One day Lian came home from the office and said to Tianyi: ‘They’ve let Mrs Zhang go, and they’ve got my cousin’s daughter Jiaojiao in to help with Niuniu. First, she’s family so she can be trusted and, second, she’s young so if there’s stuff she doesn’t do, the old folks can make her do it, it’s not like with a nanny, you have to tiptoe around them.’ Tianyi gave a faint mutter of assent, and carried on with her writing. Lian was always most respectful when he saw her scribbling away. He was in almost superstitious awe of the written word. He had had an article published in some newspaper once, had kept a copy, and had it still. Far from being scornful, Tianyi actually felt sorry for his foolishness.
Jiaojiao’s arrival had entirely unforeseen consequences. It triggered a crisis in their marriage that rocked it to the foundations.
That afternoon, Tianyi and Jiaojiao lay on the bed in the extra room Tianyi and Lian rented opposite her in-law’s home, as Niuniu slept soundly between them. It was just the two of them, chatting quietly because Lian was away on business, and Tianyi had come on her own to see her baby. Jiaojiao was a skinny girl, with a long face and protruding teeth. She was not pretty but she was young and had good skin, so was not unattractive. Tianyi had given her some clothes and a few knickknacks, the sort of things that girls liked, and that broke the ice. On that pleasantly warm afternoon, Jiaojiao began to whisper an alarming story in Tianyi’s ear.