Becca could guess the identity of some of them from the shoptalk that Bill had brought home. The Asian woman instructing the waiters in Shanghainese must be Nancy Deng. The tired-looking Englishman sitting by himself and staring sadly into the middle distance had to be Mad Mitch, who apparently was not long for this firm. She only recognised Shane, and he grinned at her and said her name, and she was touched that he remembered, as he raised a glass of Tsingtao in his meaty fist.
'Where did they put you, dear?' Mrs Devlin said, as an assortment of languages buzzed over the steaming bowls of shark's fin soup.
'Gubei New Area,' Becca said, smiling across at Mad Mitch, who had accidentally made eye contact. He looked startled at this gesture of warmth.
'Gubei?' Mrs Devlin smiled her approval, and Becca saw that she had been a beauty. And she still was, if you got past the hard, glossy veneer and the professional charm and the effects of the booze. 'Lovely, isn't it? Good schools. We were in Gubei for the first two years when we came over.' A drink was placed before Mrs Devlin and she turned viciously on the waitress. 'I said Amaretto with no ice. This is Amaretto with ice. Americans and Germans may drink Amaretto with ice, but I am neither an American nor a bloody German. I am English. And we do not need to have every drink so full of ice that we can't taste it. Take this away and bring me what I ordered.' Mrs Devlin turned back to Becca, all smiles again. 'So how is it? Have you settled in yet?'
Lost for words, Becca watched the young waitress walk away with the offending Amaretto. Then she looked back at Tess Devlin, and tried to put it into words. 'It's different. I was expecting – I don't even know what I was expecting. Temples and teahouses, I suppose. Conrad and Kipling. I had this romantic image of Shanghai. I have it still, I guess. The taste of the East on my face .. . Silly, really.'
Mrs Devlin patted her hand, as if to say that it was not silly at all.
T lived abroad as a child,' Becca said. 'I love London, but England is hardly my home, not the way it is for Bill. So I can't be one of those expats that tries to recreate the old country. You know – ordering Marmite online and buying the latest comedy DVDs and obsessing about football results.' She picked up her big white soup spoon and contemplated it. 'We have a beautiful apartment, a wonderful ayi, and Holly loves her school.'
Mrs Devlin pushed away her shark's fin soup and lit a cigarette. 'And the money's good, isn't it?' she said, just the hint of a smile, the smoke streaming from her nostrils. 'And
НЧ forty per cent tax for high earners in the UK, and only llKlcrn per cent in Hong Kong, where we cough up.'
' [be money's very good indeed,' Becca said, keen to show ill.и she was sensitive to the realities of the working world. lometimes she felt that she should keep Kipling and Conrad mi herself.
Mecca couldn't tell this woman she had just met – this powerful, volatile, half-cut woman – the real problem. And i In real problem was that she no longer saw her husband as пни h ms she had in London, or as much as she would have likcil, or as much as she needed. She missed him, and she i mikln't even mention it to Bill, because that would only be ниiiс pressure, and what could he possibly do about it? So Mecca smiled brightly, the game younger wife. T guess it just dices time to adjust,' she said.
'It's not an equal opportunity city,' Mrs Devlin said thoughtfully. She sucked her cigarette, exhaled through her mouth now, her green eyes squinting in the Marlboro mist. 'It's very different for men and women. You'll see that. Perhaps you've seen it already.'
Mecca thought of the girls of Paradise Mansions coming out to meet the cars, and she wondered if Mrs Devlin had seen them too.
less Devlin leaned close to Becca. She smelled of Amaretto .mil cigarettes and Giorgio Armani. T know it's hard sometimes, but look at it this way,' she continued. 'A few years out here and the pair of you will be set up for life.'
Л drink was placed before Mrs Devlin. Amaretto, no ice. Without acknowledging the waitress – taking what she had wanted all along as nothing more than her right, Becca thought – she cradled the glass in the palm of her hand, checking the temperature, shooting the waitress a withering look that said, Oh yes, I know that old trick, where you just fish the ice out and don't bring me a fresh drink. Then she
slowly sipped her drink, her genuinely fresh drink, giving Becca a conspiratorial look that said, They can't fool me. The waitress vanished.
'Oh yes, Gubei New Area is lovely,' Mrs Devlin said thoughtfully. 'Dear old Gubei. You hardly know you're in China at all.'
There was something wrong with the rest room. Bill felt it the moment he walked in. It appeared to be empty but -why was there a bucket and a mop in the corner? And what was that sound? What was going on in here?
He advanced with caution, his gaze shifting to the short row of cubicles. And that was strange too, because the doors were all ajar. But he could definitely hear someone. Someone who sounded as if they were trying to give birth.
Then Bill saw him. The old cleaner with his tattered trousers and filthy drawers around his ankles, sitting on the throne with the door flung open, grunting and groaning and straining, as if there wasn't enough fibre in the world to free his strangled bowels.
He was in the furthest cubicle from the entrance, and perhaps that was his only nod towards decorum. For he considered Bill without a trace of embarrassment.
In fact Bill thought the man looked at him as though he was fresh off a British Airways flight from Heathrow, while he had been sitting there for a thousand years.
five
Bill stood at the window and watched the courtyard, waiting for Tiger to appear. A large black BMW with an elderly man at the wheel stood by with its engine running. A young woman in glasses came out of the opposite block and walked smiling towards the car and the man, who could only be her father. I recognise her, Bill thought. The librarian. So we are not the only ones. There are other regular people here, too.
'Daddy? Daddy?' His daughter's voice, high and demanding. 'Do you know what planet we're on, Daddy?'
Bill had worked out that the silver Porsche came for the tall girl on Wednesday and Friday nights. It was there most Sunday afternoons. There were also sporadic visits during the week, delivering her back to Paradise Mansions early in the morning, or collecting her at strange hours. Her husband, he thought. Yeah, right.
Bill wondered what excuses the man told his wife. Maybe lu- didn't tell her anything. Maybe he didn't need to make excuses. Maybe that was the way it worked out here.
'Daddy?' Tugging at his sleeve now. He looked down at 1 lolly and smiled, his fingertips touching her face. 'Do you know what planet we're on, Daddy?'
She was holding up a complicated contraption of string and wool and balls and cardboard for his inspection. Doris the ayi stood behind her, smiling proudly.
'Made at school,' the ayi said. 'Very clever. Very genius.'
Bill looked carefully at the dangling strings and balls.
'It's the planets,' Holly explained.
'It's really beautiful, angel,' Bill said, studying the contraption more closely. In her matchstick fingers, his daughter held a champagne cork. Blue wool came from the cork and passed through a paper plate that had been painted black and embellished with sticky gold stars. Below the plate, which he now recognised represented the night sky, or perhaps infinite space, the wool dropped to hold a collection of different-sized painted balls revolving around a large orange cardboard sun.
One little finger pointed to a yellow ball with a wavering purple ring daubed around it. 'That's Saturn,' Holly said confidently. She touched the smallest ball. 'Pluto – furthest from the sun.' A larger red ball. 'Mars, of course.' She turned her shining blue eyes up at her father. 'I was going to use yellow cardboard for the sun but . . . um … I used orange instead.'