His father stared at him for a long time before slowly shaking his head. ‘Why an American?’ he asked. ‘Are Chinese girls not good enough?’
‘Of course,’ Li said, restraining an impulse to tell his father that he was just being an old racist. ‘But I never fell in love with one.’
‘Love!’ His father was dismissive, almost contemptuous.
‘Didn’t you love my mother?’ Li asked.
‘Of course.’
‘Then you know how it feels to be in love with someone, to feel about them the way you’ve never felt about anyone else, to know them as well as you know yourself, and know that they know you that way, too.’
‘I know how it feels to lose someone you feel that way about.’ And the old man’s eyes were lost in reflected light as they filled with tears.
‘I lost her, too,’ Li said.
And suddenly there was fire in his father’s voice. ‘You didn’t know your mother. You were too young.’
‘I needed my mother.’
‘And I needed a son!’ And there it was, the accusation that he had never put into words before. That he had been abandoned by his son, left to his fate while Li selfishly pursued a career in Beijing. In the traditional Chinese family, the son would have remained at the home of his parents and brought his new wife to live there too. There would always have been someone to look after the parents as they grew old. But Li had left home, and his sister had gone shortly after to live with the parents of her husband. Their father had been left on his own to brood upon the death, at the hands of Mao’s Red Guards, of the woman he loved. And Li suspected he resented the fact that Li had shared an apartment in Beijing with Yifu, that Li had always been closer to his uncle than to his father. He fought against conflicting feelings of anger and guilt.
‘You never lost your son,’ Li said.
‘Maybe I wish I’d never had one,’ his father fired back, and Li felt his words like a physical blow. ‘Your mother only incurred the wrath of the Red Guards because she wanted to protect you from their indoctrination, because she tried to take you out of that school where they were filling your head with their poison.’ And now, finally, he had given voice to his deepest resentment of all. That if it wasn’t for Li his mother might still be alive. That they would not have taken her away for “re-education”, subjected her to the brutal and bloody struggle sessions where her stubborn resistance had led her persecutors finally to beat her to death. Just teenagers. ‘And maybe my brother would still have been alive today if it hadn’t been for the carelessness of my son!’
Li’s tears were blinding him now. He had always known that some twisted logic had led his father to blame him for his mother’s death. Although he had never felt any guilt for that. How could he? He had only been a child. His father’s blame, he knew, had been cast in the white heat of the horrors he had himself faced in that terrible time, marched around the streets in a dunce’s hat, pilloried, ridiculed and abused. Imprisoned, finally, and brutalised, both physically and mentally. Was it any wonder it had changed him, left him bitter, searching for reasons and finding only blame?
But to blame him for the death of his uncle? This was new and much more painful. He still saw the old man’s eyes wide with fear and disbelief, frozen in the moment of death. And his father blaming him for it hurt more than anything else he might ever have blamed him for, because in his heart Li also blamed himself.
He stood up, determined that his father should not see his tears. But it was too late. They were already streaming down his face.
‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘I have a murder inquiry.’ And as he turned towards the door, he saw the bewildered look on his father’s face, as if for the first time in his life it might have occurred to the old man that blame could not be dispensed with impunity, that other people hurt, too.
‘Li Yan,’ his father called after him, and Li heard the catch in his voice, but he didn’t stop until he had closed the apartment door behind him, and he stood shaking and fighting to contain the howl of anguish that was struggling to escape from within.
VII
Margaret had waited up as long as she could. On TV she had watched a drama set in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. It was beautifully shot, and although she had not been able to understand a word of it, the misery it conveyed was still powerful. It had depressed her, and now her eyes were heavy and she knew she could stay up no longer.
As she undressed for bed, washed in the moonlight that poured in through her window, she saw her silhouette on the wall, bizarre with its great swelling beneath her breasts, and she ran her hands over the taut skin of it and wondered what kind of child she and Li were going to have. Would it look Chinese, would it be dark or fair, have brown eyes or blue? Would it have her fiery temper or Li’s infuriating calm? She smiled to herself, and knew that however their genes had combined, it would be their child and she would love it.
The sheets of the bed were cool on her warm skin as she slipped in between them, disappointed that she was going to spend the night alone, that Li had not come as he had promised. She thought about Wen and her childish, smiling face, and that fraction of a second when it had clouded. You verr lucky, she had said of Margaret about Li, and Margaret wondered now if that moment of shadow had signalled that all was perhaps not entirely well between Wen and Sun. But it was no business of hers, and she had no desire to know. Her own life was complicated enough.
For once she had not been the only mother-to-be whose partner had failed to turn up. Sun, of course, was not there. But for the first time that Margaret could remember, Yixuan had been on her own as well. Jon Macken had not been with her.
Her thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a key in the lock, and her heart leapt. Li had come after all. She glanced at the clock. It was nearly eleven. Better late than never. But as soon as he opened the bedroom door she knew there was something wrong. He only said, ‘Hi,’ and she could not see his face, but somehow his voice in that one word had conveyed a world of unhappiness.
She knew better than to ask, and said simply, ‘Come to bed.’
He undressed quickly and slipped in beside her. He had brought with him the cold of the night outside, and she wrapped her arms around him to share her warmth and banish the night. They lay folded around each other for a long time without saying anything. In the vertical world, outside of their bed, he always towered over her, dominant and strong. But here, lying side by side, she was his equal, or greater, and could lay his head on her shoulder and mother him as if he were a little boy. And tonight, she sensed that somehow that was what he needed more than anything. She spoke to him then, out of a need to say something. Something normal. Something that carried no weight to burden him.
‘Jon Macken didn’t turn up today at the antenatal class,’ she said. ‘First time since I’ve been going there.’ Li didn’t say anything, and she went on, ‘Turned out his studio was broken into last night. You know, he’s got some little shop unit down at Xidan. Secure, though. He had an alarm system and everything installed. So it must have been professionals.’ Li grunted. The first sign of interest. She knew that work was always a good way to bring him out of himself. ‘Anyway, the weird thing is, they didn’t really take much. Trashed the place and took some prints or something, and that was it. He says the police were useless. Yixuan thinks they probably didn’t care much about some “rich American” getting done over. Insurance would pick up the tab, and anyway shit happens, and it’s probably better happening to an American than a Chinese.’