Maybe he could have explained it better. He had wanted to come home. He really did. But it was work. He wanted her to understand. He wanted her to get it. Surely she knew that there was nothing more important to him than her and Holly? I le wanted to tell her everything.
But he couldn't tell her about the girl.
Devlin had told Tiger to wait for them. As they drove back to Gubei, Becca held Holly on her lap and the child slept in her arms. Bill touched his daughter's hair.
'She's okay,' he said. 'She's doing really well -' ISecca's anger exploded. 'What do you know about it, Bill? You're never around. How dare you? And she's not okay. She's not okay at school because she started in the middle nl ¦ term and the other kids already have their friends so .In- plays alone in the playground.' It was all pouring out now, even things she had decided not to share with him btCftU.se she didn't want to worry him, because there was пи nigh pressure already, he had enough on his plate at work. I ›ul you know that? Of course you didn't. And her breathing's mil okay because the air here is filthy. All right? So don't ¦ Mi i ill me she's okay, because you know absolutely nothing iboul it.'
I In у stared out at the elevated Ya'an Freeway. The lights nl i In- city seemed to be glowing somewhere far below them.
'I'm sorry, Вес,' he said. 'It will get better. I'll make it better.'
Tears sprang to her eyes. This was a good thing about him. He would always reach out a hand to her. It had always been that way when they argued. He wouldn't allow them to go to sleep angry and hurt. He always tried to make it better. And he didn't say what he could have said, what most men would have said – Coming here was your idea. But this life wasn't what she had expected.
'I wanted us to see the jazz band at the Peace Hotel,' she said, almost laughing, it sounded so absurd. 'And I wanted us to buy propaganda posters and Mao badges in the Dongtai Lu antique market. All these places that I read about, all the great places they say you should go.'
He put his arm around her.
'And I wanted us,' she said, snuggling down, adjusting Holly on her lap. 'I wanted us to drink cocktails in hotels where in the thirties you could get opium on room service. I want to support you, Bill. And I want to be a good sport. And I want to muck in and I don't want to whine. But why isn't it like that?'
'We'll do all those things,' he said, and he touched her face, that face he loved so much, and determined to see her happy again.
'But when}'
'Starting tomorrow, Bee' He nodded, and she smiled, because she knew that he meant it.
Her unhappiness, and her loneliness, and all the panic of tonight were things he would address with the dogged determination that he brought to everything. My husband, she thought. The professional problem-solver.
He could never understand why people felt sentimental about when they were young. Being young meant being poor. Being
young was a long, hard grind. Being young meant doing jobs that sucked the life out of you.
Being young was overrated. Or maybe it was just him. For in his teens and twenties Bill had endured eight years of feeling like he was the only young person in the world who wasn't really young at all.
At weekends and holidays, he had worked his way through two years of A-levels, four years at UCL, six months of his 1 .aw Society final exams and his two years' traineeship with butterfield, Hunt and West.
Over eight years of stacking shelves, carrying hods, pulling pints and ferrying around everything from takeaway pizzas (on a scooter) to Saturday-night drunks (in a mini cab) and cases of wine (in a Majestic Wine Warehouse white van).
The worst job was in a Fulham Road pub called the Rat and Trumpet. It wasn't as back-breaking as lugging bricks on a building site, and it wasn't as dangerous as delivering pizza to a sink estate after midnight, and it didn't numb your brain quite like filling shelves under the midnight sun of the supermarket strip lighting.
But the Rat and Trumpet was the worst job of the lot because that was where all the people his own age didn't even notice that privilege had been given to them on a plate. I bey had a sense of entitlement that Bill Holden would never have, the boys with their ripped jeans and pastel-coloured lumpers and their Hugh Grant fringes, the girls all coltish limbs and blonde tresses and laughter full of daddy's money.
I le had come across the type at university, but they had iiiii been the dominant group, not at UCL, where the braying miucs were drowned out by other accents from other towns ttml other types of lives. But this was their world, and Bill | и it served drinks in it.
Kids whose mothers and fathers had never got sick, or bfokc up, or divorced, or died. At least that's the way he
thought of them. They all looked as though nothing bad had ever happened to them, or ever would.
They stared straight through him, or bellowed their orders from the far end of the bar, and he had no trouble at all in hating every one of the fucking bastards.
The Rat and Trumpet had no bouncer, and sometimes Bill had to throw one of them out. The landlord slipped him an extra fiver at the end of the night for every chinless troublemaker Bill had to escort to the Fulham Road – they called it the Half-Cut Hooray allowance.
The extra money was greatly appreciated. But Bill -twenty-two years old and furious with the Fates – would cheerfully have done it for nothing. Hilarious, they always said. Like the woman from Shanghai Chic. Everything was hilarious. It was all so fucking hilarious that it made you puke.
One night some idiot was practising his fast bowling with the Scotch eggs and splattering yolk and breadcrumbs all over the customers in the snug. Howzat? Hilarious, darling. The Scotch-egg bowler was a strapping lad in a pink cashmere sweater and carefully distressed Levi's. They could be big lads, these Hoorays. They weren't selling off the playing fields at the kind of school his mummy and daddy sent him to.
There was a girl with him – one of those girls, Bill thought, one of those Fulham Broadway blondes – who was trying to get him to stop. She seemed halfway to being a human being. Bill gave her credit for looking upset. For not finding it absolutely hilarious. That was the first time he saw Becca.
Bill politely asked the Scotch-egg bowler to leave. He told Bill to fuck off and get him a pint of Fosters. So Bill asked him less politely. Same response. Fuck off and a pint of Fosters. So Bill got him in an arm lock before his brain had registered what was happening and marched him to
i he doon It toughed you up on those building sites. It didn't matter how much sport they played at their private schools, it just wasn't the same as manual labour.
A meaty lad but soft inside, Bill thought. He gave him a push at the door – slightly harder than was strictly necessary – in fact a lot harder than was strictly necessary – and the fast Scotch-egg bowler skidded and fell into the gutter.
At the outside tables, people laughed.
'One day you'll bring drinks to my children,' he told Bill, getting up, his face red for all sorts of reasons.
'Can't wait,' Bill said. They must have been about the same age, he thought. Bill bet his mum wasn't gone.
'And you'll be a toothless old git with snot on his chin and your rotten life will be gone and you will still be waiting on the likes of me.'
Bill laughed and looked at the blonde girl. T hope your kids look like their mother,' he said, turning away, and never expecting to see her again.
But Becca came back inside to apologise on behalf of her boyfriend and offer to pay for the Scotch eggs and all the mess, and she was just in time to see the landlord fire Bill, who didn't like it that Bill had used more force than necessary to throw out the fast Scotch-egg bowler; he wasn't here to rough up the paying customers, he was here to stop trouble, not to start it, and Bill was saying that he couldn't possibly be fired, because he was fucking well quitting, okay?