My Favourite Wife Read Free Page A

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 cafés 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 lifein 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.
    Marriage had seemed natural to them. They talked about it. If you find the right person, and you are both sure, then you can’t be too young, can you? And even at twenty-four both of them had felt too old for the sad dance of the gym and the bar and the club.
    Some things they didn’t need to talk about. They had always taken it for granted that they would both work, and this didn’t change when Holly was born just after their third anniversary. Because it couldn’t change. Bill was a corporate lawyer at a firm in the City, Becca a financial journalist at a newspaper in Canary Wharf, and the mortgage payments on their little house in one of the leafier corners of North London demanded that they both keep earning. Every morning Bill would take Holly to nursery, and every afternoon Becca would pick her up.
    And then one day everything changed.
    Holly had just turned three and she had been at her nursery for a few hours when suddenly she was struggling to breathe. ‘Just a cold,’ said one of the carers, even when the child began to sob with terror and frustration. ‘Just a very bad cold.’
    By the time Becca came to collect her, Holly was ready to be rushed to the nearest Accident and Emergency. By the time Bill arrived at the hospital, the doctor had diagnosed asthma. Hollynever went back to the nursery and Becca never went back to her newspaper.
    ‘No stranger will ever look after her the way I will,’ Becca said, choking back tears of rage, and he soothed her, and he understood, and he told her that of course she was right, and nothing was more important than Holly.
    Holly’s asthma was controlled with the help of a paediatrician in Great Ormond Street, who prescribed chewable tablets that she quite enjoyed and the breathing machine. She was brave and good-natured, never complaining, and Becca and Bill tried not to ask the question posed by