My Favourite Wife by Tony Parsons

Holly was sleeping, Becca fetched a bottle of white wine from the fridge and carried it to where Alice was standing by the window.
    ‘You’re not writing any more?’ Alice said, quite casually, although Becca felt the words press against some sensitive nerve.
    ‘No. I’m looking after Holly, mostly.’ She started telling the story of Holly’s asthma attack in London, and Alice nodded and looked concerned, but Becca cut it short and poured their wine. It sounded like an excuse, and it wasn’t. It was a reason. ‘Anyway, there’s lots to do around here,’ she said. Why the hell should she apologise for giving up work? ‘What brought you to Shanghai, Al? I thought you’d be in Hong Kong or Singy.’
    Alice grimaced, and Becca smiled. She could see the ghost of the girl Alice had been at eleven, twelve, thirteen. Spoilt, generous, dead easy to love.
    ‘You know what it’s like for stringers,’ Alice said. They clinked glasses and grinned at each other. ‘Cheers. We have to follow the story.’ Alice sighed. ‘And the story they all want these days is the China dream. You know the thing –
How China is reshaping our world. One billion new capitalists. The great China gold rush.’
Alice looked out of the window. ‘They – all the Western news outlets -want you to report the miracle.’ She shook her head. ‘But it’s not all banana daiquiris at M on the Bund.’
    ‘How do you mean?’ Becca sipped her wine and felt a pang offoreboding. She really wanted them to have a good time tonight. Just get a bit drunk and talk for hours and feel that nothing had changed.
    ‘I mean the principal reason the economy keeps growing is because foreign idiots want to invest here,’ Alice said, and Becca recalled how impatient her friend could be with slowness and stupidity. There were girls at their school who were terrified of her. ‘No Western CEO wants to go down as the man who missed China,’ Alice said. ‘But how can it be an economic miracle when five hundred million Chinese are living on less than a dollar a day? By the middle of the century China will have a bigger economy than the US. And you know what? They will still have five hundred million people getting by on a dollar a day. It stinks. The whole thing.’ She sipped her drink. ‘Nice wine,’ she said.
    ‘But a lot of them are leaving poverty behind, aren’t they?’ Becca said gently. ‘I mean, that’s what Bill’s boss always says.’
    ‘Some of them,’ Alice conceded. ‘A few million or so. But the Chinese deserve an affluence that’s worth having – clean water, not empty skyscrapers; rule of law, not back-handers; uncensored news, not broadband porn. They need education, democracy, a free press – not propaganda and Prada bags and traffic jams full of local-made Audis.’
    ‘I thought it would be more like Hong Kong,’ Becca admitted. ‘Or Hong Kong the way we knew it. You know – day trips out to the islands, weekends on somebody’s junk, Sunday lunch at Aberdeen.’
    Alice laughed. ‘You make it sound idyllic.’
    ‘Well, it was, wasn’t it?’ Becca said defiantly.
    ‘But it’s not Hong Kong,’ Alice said, her smile fading. ‘Shanghai has always been mainland China. You can forget all that Paris-of-the-Orient stuff. The Anglos never made Shanghai their own the way they did Hong Kong.’
    ‘Anyway,’ Becca said, feeling that she had been too sentimental and revealed too much, and that Alice must think she was somesad old housewife dreaming of better days. ‘I’m sure we’ll be fine. Another drink?’ she asked her old friend.
    The two of them looked down at the courtyard. Gleaming cars were waiting with their engines running. The traffic was sparser than at the weekend, but there was a steady stream of young women getting into very new cars with older men at the wheel.
    ‘It’s very exciting,’ Becca said brightly, wanting to lighten the mood. She was so glad to see her friend. She wanted them to have a great time,