The child and the woman were so blonde, their skin so pale, and their eyes so blue they looked like weather. The man holding his little girl and the child with her arms circling her father's neck and the woman with her arm draped around her husband's shoulders.
That's what was noticed about them – those gestures of child-like affection, the little family holding on to each other in their new home, as if the three of them could not exist without that physical contact, or without each other.
Everybody knew that Westerners didn't care about family in the same way that the Chinese did, especially not Westerners in Shanghai. But this man and woman and child seemed different.
two
He was gone by the time she woke up.
Letting Holly sleep on, Becca padded through the flat, edging around the stacks of crates. There was the sign of a shower, the smell of after-shave, a tie that had been considered and discarded on the back of a chair. She pictured Bill at his desk on the first day of his new job, working hard, the earnest face frowning, and felt a stab of the old feeling, the feeling you get at the start.
She picked one of the crates at random and prised it open. It was full of baby stuff. A pink high chair in three pieces. A bassinet. A cot mattress. Assorted blankets, sterilisers and stuffed rabbits. All of Holly's old things. She had kept them, and shipped them across the world, not for sentimental reasons. Becca had kept them for the next one. Their marriage, seven years old now, was at the stage where neither of them doubted that there would be another child.
Becca went back to the bedroom and watched Holly sleeping. Then she pushed back the sheets and held her daughter's feet until the child began to stir. Holly stretched, moaned and tried to curl up into sleep.
'Wakey-wakey, rise and shaky,' Becca said. She stood
listening to her daughter's laboured breathing, a wheezing more than a snoring, caused by Holly's asthma. 'Come on now, darling. You've got school.'
While Holly came round, Becca banged about in the strange new kitchen, preparing breakfast. Yawning, Holly came and sat at the table.
'I'm a bit worried,' she said, with her spoon poised halfway to her mouth. Becca touched her daughter's face, curled a tendril of hair behind her tiny sticky-out ears.
'What are you worried about, darling?' Becca said.
'I'm a bit worried about dead people,' Holly said solemnly, the corners of her mouth turning down.
Becca sat back. 'Dead people?'
The child nodded. 'I'm afraid they're not going to get better.'
Becca sighed, tapping the table. 'Don't worry about dead people,' she said. 'Worry about your Coco-Pops.'
After breakfast Becca set up the breathing machine. It was routine now. The thing had a mouthpiece to make it easy for Holly to inhale her medication, and her blue eyes were wide above it.
Just before nine, Becca and Holly walked hand in hand to the Gubei International School. The children seemed to be from every nation on earth. There was that awkward moment when it was time to part and Holly clung to the belt of her mother's jeans. But then a small, plump girl of about four who looked like she was from Korea or Japan took Holly's hand and led her into the class, where the Australian teacher was taking registration, and Becca was the one who was reluctant to leave.
Everyone else was rushing off. Some of them were dressed for the office, some of them were dressed for the gym, but all of them acted like they had somewhere very important to go. Then there was a woman by her side, smiling, wheeling
a fat toddler in a pushchair. The mother of the child who had taken Holly's hand.
'First day,' she said in an American accent. 'Tough, right?' Becca nodded. 'You know what it's like. The trembling chin. Fighting back the tears. Trying to be brave.' She looked at the woman. 'And that's just me.'
The woman laughed. 'Kyoko Smith,' she said, offering her hand. Becca shook it. Kyoko said she was a lawyer from Yokohama, not practising, married to an attorney from New York. They had been in Shanghai for almost two years. Becca said she was a journalist, currently resting, and she was married to yet another lawyer, whose name was Bill. They had been in Shanghai for two days.
'You want to get coffee sometime?' Kyoko asked Becca. 'Tomorrow, maybe? I've got to run right now.' 'Oh, me too,' Becca said. 'I have to run too.' 'Well, that's Shanghai,' Kyoko Smith smiled. 'Everybody always has to run.'
As Becca walked slowly back to Paradise Mansions she called Bill on his mobile.
'She go off okay?' Someone was with him. Becca could tell. She could also tell he had been thinking about Holly on her first day.
'Oh, she was fine,' she said, far breezier than she felt. 'She'll be okay, Bee,' he said, knowing how hard it was for her to leave their daughter. 'It will be good for her to be with kids her own age. We have to let her go sooner or later, don't we?'
The silence hummed between them and she made no attempt to fill it. She fought back the sudden tears, angry with herself for feeling like a mad housewife.
'Try not to worry too much,' he said. 'Listen, I'll see you later, okay?'
Becca still said nothing. She was thinking, wondering if
the best thing for Holly wasn't to stay with her, just keep her close, weighing it all up. Then she finally said, 'Good luck up there, Bill,' releasing him to get on with his job.
She couldn't face the flat and all that unpacking. Not yet. So she caught a taxi to Xintiandi, the new area they always talked about in the guidebooks, the place she had been looking forward to seeing, where they said you could see the oldest and newest parts of the city. The flat could wait.
Suddenly a puff of wind, a puff faint and tepid and laden with strange odours of blossoms, of aromatic wood, comes out of the still night - the first sigh of the East on my face. That I can never forget. It was impalpable and enslaving, like a charm, like a whispered promise of mysterious delight.
Becca sipped a skinny latte on a stool by the window and read her Joseph Conrad paperback. That was what she was seeking in Xintiandi. The first sigh of the East on her face. On a side street away from the cafes and restaurants, she found the place she was seeking.
The modest little museum on Huangpi Lu was where the Chinese Communist Party had first met. She paid 3 RMB to go in, a sum so small she couldn't calculate it in pounds. The place was deserted. The only other visitor was a serious female student in thick glasses taking notes by a tableau of dummies plotting to overthrow the foreigners and free the masses. All eyes were on the waxy features of the young Mao.
Becca drifted across to a small television displaying a propaganda film about China before the revolution. The film was grainy and ancient and only lasted a few minutes, but Becca watched it dumbfounded.
The starving faces of long-dead children stared back at
her. She had never seen such poverty and misery, and as the images blurred behind a veil of tears she had to look away, telling herself, Get a bloody grip, woman, telling herself it was just the jet-lag and Holly's first day at school.
Shanghai was Becca's idea.
Bill would have been happy to stay in London and build a life together, and work hard, and watch their daughter grow. But life in London had disappointed her in a way that it had not disappointed him. Becca was ready for them to try something new. She saw Shanghai as a way out of their old life and their constant struggle for money. Shanghai was where they would turn it all around.
They had married young, both of them twenty-four, the first of their little group to settle down. They had never regretted it.
Becca had watched their single friends optimistically hooking up with someone they had just met in a bar, or a club, or a gym, only to grow unhappy, or bored, or trapped, or get their heart kicked around, and she was glad to say good riddance to all of that.