MARRIED, she found she was born to be a wife.
It was not fashionable to say so, and she kept her opinions to herself. Her career, though unfolding steadily, was not taking off in the way David thought it should. He had an exaggerated sense of her capabilities, liked to pretend that she was the brain, and he only the workhorse, of their partnership. (It was his way, indirect, of getting back at her for getting a First. He had a private gallery of grudges which he kept concealed from everyone but her. When roused, he would forcibly tour her through them, with icy precision.) He was always asking her to change jobs or agitate for a promotion or a raise, and she didn’t have the heart to tell him that while she liked her job it was only that, a job. She had no particular career ambitions; she was afraid she was the paradigm of what his brother Freddie liked to deride as middle-class complacency. So she made excuses, fobbed off David’s enquiries about her work, let him think he was winning the competition between them for what he considered success in life. It was a handicapped race, because one of them was secretly refusing to compete, but she couldn’t tell him that. He would be insulted. His need for competition had something hollow at the centre of it: without trumping someone, he wouldn’t have known he was alive.
She discovered she liked domesticity. She liked housework, its almost ritualistic motions, the sense it gave her of ordering her life. Saturday mornings, when she did the laundry and cleaned the flat while David was at work, the sun forming brilliant rhomboids on the floor that crept up the walls to the ceiling as the morning wore on, took on, over the months, an almost sacral quality for her. Her work done, she would make coffee, and sit on the balcony and wait for him, savouring the quiet, in a noon haze that shimmered just beyond the awning. Unlike him, she seldom listened to the radio or watched TV; the music, and the jittery patter, got on her nerves. Living with David, she’d adjusted herself to a level of noise she wouldn’t have thought possible. He had once told her, jokingly, that what he most loved about her was the hush of wealth, but the truth was he couldn’t bear silence. It set him on edge. Whereas she had to brace herself for his return: he would burst through the door, halfway through the telling of some anecdote or some amazing scheme for making money which he’d just thought of, and she would have to ask him to repeat what he’d said, and his fingers would reach for the radio dials, or the TV remote, and the jangly ragged music which he listened to then would roll through the rooms. He brought with him a nervous energy which she was not used to: it was like opening the door to find the sea rushing in, in its unstoppable motion.
He’d pace through the flat, commenting on her work: “God, you’re such a wonderful wife.” It was another of his games, pretending that she was some hairy feminist and he a Neanderthal chauvinist, and he would greet all her signs of domesticity with an ironic air. She found, disconcerted, that he didn’t really want a domestic wife. He thought housework a waste of time. He made cracks about career women in killer black cocktail dresses swimming like piranhas through parties, but she often thought he should have married one of them. At the very least, they could have competed madly with each other and talked stocks in bed. (She analysed stocks all day and she didn’t want to talk about them at night. David saw nothing wrong in talking nonstop about work.)
In only one area of their life could she safely claim to be unskilled: she discovered, chagrined, that he was a better cook than she was. Weekends, when they stayed in, he did the cooking, presenting the food to her with a flourish: “I’m such a wonderful househusband.” He often played to her, as though she were an audience of one; stop it, she was tempted to say, we’re alone now, you don’t have to put on a show. But she suspected that he wouldn’t have known what she was talking about. Evasion had become a second skin for him, a way of disarming the enemy before the enemy got to him. Everyone was the enemy, including, at times, herself.
In the beginning, they were happy, of course they were. Everything had a kind of dizzying newness: their clothes hanging together in the wardrobe, the angle of the sun in the morning, their shoes aligned on the doormat. They were a little shy, and polite, those first few days; they said please and thank you, and laughed at the formality. He bought her flowers on the way home from work, and she said, “You’re such a cliché.” Even their fights had a kind of amatory silliness in their triviality. The first week, he’d managed, miraculously, to make it home before seven in the evening, hardly able to wait to see her. The following weeks, old habits reasserting themselves, he’d lingered till seven, eight, in the office, and returned to find her smouldering over a perfectly set dinner table. She took his lateness as a personal repudiation, while he had never understood her obsession with keeping perfect time. The dinner went uneaten, fighting being, in those days, a sort of verbal foreplay.
For her, a large part of the happiness was pure relief at no longer having to skulk around or resort to elaborate stratagems to see each other. She had wanted to be with him, in the light, and she thought that was what she was doing. Those few months, drunk with relief, she drifted away from her parents. Her mother had said after the wedding, “You know you’ll always have a home with us,” an innocent remark to outsiders, but Li interpreted it differently. Her mother expected to be vindicated by a midnight visit from the prodigal daughter asking, tearfully, to return home for good. And, annoyed, she was a little cool to her mother, a coolness that persisted for a year.
She thought of that first year, later, as a kind of perpetual waiting. She waited through the day at work to see him at night, she waited through the evening for him to return. She let herself be absorbed in him in a way that she recognised, later, as being self-abasing and not good for either of them. Normally scrupulous about keeping up with friends, or what passed with her for friends, she let old acquaintances lapse, and drifted into a self-imposed isolation. These were the friends who, meeting David for the first time, conveyed, through raised eyebrows and trailing questions, their surprise that she was going out with someone like that, though they never qualified precisely what they meant by that. They told her she had changed, their tone implying not for the better, and she shrugged, not caring. David, in any case, didn’t like her friends. He called them the ladies who lunch, and it was true that though most of them had degrees, in some cases two, they almost invariably gave up their jobs when they married (well) and thereafter seemed to exist in a kind of cafe society limbo, their pictures appearing with tedious regularity in the gossip pages of local magazines.
She knew, on hindsight, that she should have eked out certain parameters at the start. Constructed her defences. He could be overwhelming; in the beginning, she’d welcomed that, she’d wanted to be swept away, marriage had appeared to her, paradoxically, as a kind of liberation. Beneath her surface love of order, he’d unleashed in her an unknown capacity for existing in the midst of chaos. And it was only later, when she needed to fall back again on the social network she had grown up with, that she realised how much being with him had left her stranded, an island unto herself.
Their fights, in the beginning, were about money. How much she spent, how much he thought she should spend. In a rare moment of impulse, she’d bought an absurd 120-piece Mediterranean crockery set, jaunty and colourfully whorly as a child’s tea set. David hated it. He hated paying for anything nonessential which could be obtained less expensively elsewhere. His cheapness, when there was no real financial need for them to live like that, was the one thing she couldn’t bear about him. It was, in her eyes, an aesthetic flaw, almost worse than any character defect.
Money animated his guerilla attacks on her family. He accompanied her docilely enough to Sunday lunch with her parents, and Friday night dinners with her mother’s relatives. But beyond this he conceded nothing. He was inexorable, forever trying to prove some vain, ideological point about her family. He needled her, for instance, so mercilessly over golf that she found it easier simply to forswear the game. What about public courses, she’d tried to argue, taxi drivers play there, and he’d said, It’s very good of you to let the working classes have their fun, his voice unconsciously mimicking her own, another trait of his which she hated. It was useless pointing out his own hypocrisy in denouncing privilege while busily chasing its rewards himself; he would acknowledge the hypocrisy, and continue to out-argue her. And he made it impossible for her to accept things from her parents; he turned it into a war, of us and them, when really, she wanted to shorn, we’re all on the same side.
He’d left it to her to decorate the flat, and she had done it to suit her tastes, which were severely minimalist and modern. When he discovered that it was her parents who had paid for it, they had a row, a bad one. He was biting, and sarcastic, and she retaliated by threatening to return home. He said, That’s right, run back to Mummy, and she slammed the door on him. She hadn’t made it far down the road when he came running after her, anxious and contrite, and sweet, in that way he could be when he wanted to and which no-one else saw, and they made it up, in the only way they knew how. In the dark, his fingers on her face were like a blind man’s, tracing her eyelids, her cheekbones. He said, I’m sorry, and she forgave him, she always forgave him, because there was no choice. Walking out on him, she had known that she could never return to her parents. It would be too humiliating, an admission of failure.
She had never failed at anything in her life. And so she’d turned to him in the dark, pressing herself against him, hoping to fight down the panic that was rising up in her like fire up a stairwell: she had the sensation, while he held her in his arms, of being completely, and utterly, alone.
It was a pattern that would repeat itself: the fights, the brinksmanship, the reconciliations. She became intensely tired of it, but by then the motions had become as ritualistic as a lockstep, and neither knew how to break the cycle.
The fights were not always about money. He had a streak of jealousy which she had sensed, before their marriage, but never really seen; if she had thought about it at all, she had been secretly flattered. Until the Chinese New Year reunion dinner at his father’s flat, all of them squashed round the kitchen table, elbows clashing. Gary had ignored Li for the first half of the meal, and then he’d suddenly turned on her the full battery of his attention, overwhelming, bewildering. With him, she had always been aware of a charge, a tension, that could have been anything from a simple desire to needle David (and David showed himself alarmingly ready to be provoked by his brother) to a sexual undercurrent. The lure of the forbidden: my brother’s wife. Like David, he liked games, he played them for his own obscure purposes. Beside her, she could feel David getting restive, eyes sweeping the ceiling, setting his glass down with exaggerated emphasis. Then he was suddenly on his feet: they had to leave at once, while his grandmother protested, and Freddie shook his head, and Gary looked angelic. And outside, while they were waiting for a taxi (this was before he bought his frightful claptrap of a car) he accused her of flirting with Gary, of—and this took her breath away—having to have all the men. There was a kind of wildness to his accusations, as though he were making things up which he didn’t quite believe himself. She had screamed at him, Stop, thankful for the unaccustomed emptiness of the roads. And he’d stopped, with that headspinning return to normalcy of which he was capable, while she was still shaking.
“Why do you do this?” she asked him, she was always asking him that, and he never had a satisfactory answer. “I don’t know,” he would say or simply, “I don’t want to lose you,” which she could never understand. “I’m not going anywhere,” she told him, and he would groan, and say, “I know, I know,” but there was no conviction in the words.
He had begun, almost immediately after the wedding, to scout for a place of their own to stay. This was something in which he’d come to invest an almost spiritual significance (man’s home is his castle, and so on, he had a surprisingly powerful belief in folkloric sayings) and she knew she should have shown more wifely interest, followed him to more of those showflat viewings that had a kind of voyeuristic novelty in the beginning—it amazed her, traipsing through people’s homes, how much they loved clutter, knickknacks, a suffocating density of objects that would have left her no room to breathe—but wore off, quickly. He had predicted, when he agreed to stay in her father’s flat, that she would become far too comfortable to move out, and he was right. Once she got used to things, she showed a mule-like inertia to change. He talked about pride, and independence, and not living off one’s parents, and she rolled her eyes. In the end, he gave up asking her to come along; he went alone, to his viewings, and came back one day and announced he’d paid a deposit of ten thousand dollars for an apartment. She said, “ What?”; she couldn’t believe he would do this without consulting her. He said, coolly, that if she wasn’t interested he didn’t see why he had to consult her. She went after him, in a stream of invective, in a reversal of roles, and he listened, with that same, peculiar detachment and called her a fucking millstone around his neck. It was all he said. He didn’t apologise. She stopped, shaken. He went to bed, early, and slept with his back to her. He refused to speak to her for days, the sadist; ironically, she found the unaccustomed silence impossible to bear. He was exerting his will, beating her down; she had the exhausting sense that he would continue to play these power games with her until one of them yielded to complete submission. She grew desperate; she didn’t care about the apartment. “Talk to me,” she pleaded with him. And when he did, finally, turn to her one night, whispering those words which she had learned to distrust, she did think, I hate you, but the thought echoed, stingless, in her mind. What she felt, chiefly, was relief, and a certain shame at her relief. She didn’t really have the stomach for these struggles, they left her queasy and so tired she found it difficult to concentrate during the day. And so, when she should have pushed him away, her arms went round him, her captor, and she was glad of the dark that hid the furious wetness that threatened to run down her face.
She wanted a child.
The first year, he said it was too soon, and she agreed with him. The second year, he said they needed to shore up their finances, and she agreed again, while feeling the first stirrings of mutiny. She caught herself staring at babies in the street, on the train, fascinated by the precarious wobble of their heads. Visiting his family, she was the one who played with Gary’s daughter, overdoing the doting aunt routine, while Gary winked at David, and David gave her the quizzical look which meant he thought her brains were turning to mush.
Her friend gave birth; holding the baby in her arms, looking down at the tiny cranium downy with wispy hairs, she had a rush of longing so intense she wondered the mother didn’t snatch the child back from her. She had the idea that a child might thaw out that secret frozen centre of her, the part of her that shied from people and made her feel, to herself, stiff and unlovable. David thought her unsociability was a function of her superiority—no-one was good enough for her—whereas in truth she seldom felt good enough, warm enough, generous enough, for others. “I want a child,” she whispered to David; his face hidden in her hair, she thought she heard him murmur, You can have anything you want.
She had always sensed a certain reluctance in him. He had said, once, that he didn’t think he would be a good father. She had been diverted by this new humility, not seeing it for what it was, a way of heading her off. She asked him why.
He said, shrugging, surprising her, “I’m selfish, I’m self- absorbed, I wouldn’t be interested in it. And if you’re not going to be interested, what’s the point?”
“Well. Don’t run yourself down.”
Her irony bypassed him. He added, unguardedly, “I saw what it did to my mother.”
He never mentioned his mother. She said, intensely curious about this other woman who held a part of him that would never belong to her, “What did it do?”
Already regretting bringing up his mother: “She could have done so much more.”
“If she hadn’t had children? If she hadn’t had you?”
He didn’t answer.
“That’s so patronising. Maybe she chose to have all of you.” She had to defend his mother because he was, implicitly, criticising her, Li, as well. For falling into the same old maternal trap.
“Oh Christ,” he said. He hated these conversations. “I’m going for a run.”
She was operating on certain assumptions. That he would come round when the baby was born, and he saw how much it was, irrevocably, his. Theirs. Relying on the atavistic, egoistical urge in every man to see himself replicated in the next generation. Until she got pregnant, and saw the expression on his face when she told him the news. It was fleeting, instantly suppressed, but she read it all the same. He was dismayed. She was defiant.
When she miscarried, she felt, irrationally, that he had engineered this. For the first time in her life, she allowed herself to go, to wallow in a cocktail of grief, and anger, and self-pity. She took to bed, in classic Victorian manner, and refused to emerge until her feelings of hatred for him had subsided. She slept in the middle of the bed, forcing him to take to the sofa. Discovering, again, a child’s greedy need for its mother, she refused to let her mother leave her side until well past midnight. She woke once, in the early hours of the morning, to find him, her night sentry, lounging against the window; she said, “Stop watching me,” and rolled over, back into a pill-induced sleep.
She had scared him. She sensed this, when she finally got out of bed one night and went into the sitting room, to find him slumped before the TV. Turning to her, in the white strobe light of the screen, she saw on his face, drawn from lack of sleep, a wariness, and a gratitude. He held her as though she were porcelain, or something that might shatter: in her new fragility, she’d gained an unexpected power over him.
She exploited it, ruthlessly. She set about making him make her pregnant again. He knew what she was up to, but she didn’t care. She discovered in herself a new abandon, a new wantonness that both turned him on and repelled him and left him, helpless, in her hands. He had also had time to think about things; when she conceived again, he had the sense, and the grace, to conceal his feelings, he put on a terrific show. She wasn’t fooled, but she played along: they had both, in their marriage, learnt the inestimable value of dissimulation.
She was alone a good deal then. He had always come back late in the evenings, and then he began to travel as well, as part of his work. Always, he would call her, that first night away. They had little to say to each other on the phone, but she liked hearing his voice, distant, fading in and out, on the line. When he was away, she felt, paradoxically, closest to him; she went to sleep wearing his t-shirt, and experienced a tranquillity she never knew in his kinetic, unrestful presence. Alone, she reverted to her calm, methodical habits, she could actually hear herself think.
She was used to being on her own. Alone, she would sort through things, mending, filing, discarding. (David had always marvelled, slightly sardonically, at her ability to spend hours doing this.) While her hands busied themselves, her mind drifted into long, wordless communings with the baby in her; she concentrated, as in prayer, on making it feel how much it was wanted, how much its parents would have to give it, offer it, when it was born. When David called, and asked what she had been doing, she would say, truthfully, that she had been busy. And it was true that, in this girding of emotions for the arrival of the baby, she sometimes felt as tired as if she had been up all night studying for an exam.
Absorbed in the changes that were taking place in her body, David receded to the periphery of her consciousness. When he came back from his trips, she had to make an effort to ask him about them; the places he talked about seemed unreal, his presence jarring, tearing a rent in the peace she’d carefully constructed when he was away. He sensed his dwindling importance to her and, egotist that he was, he didn’t like it. At nights, when she swam in the pool or went out on the balcony, he would sneak up to her, like a child claiming his quota of attention. He irritated her then; she wanted so intensely to be alone with the baby that was growing, unfurling in her. She would be curt, abrupt, and after a while he would leave her and go for one of those runs which were becoming almost obsessive with him, as though he thought he could run whatever it was that was gnawing at him into the ground.
Pregnant, she found herself the recipient of unsolicited advice and unexpected benedictions. David’s grandmother boiled herbal soups, thick with fungus and lichen, which she had to drink. Her parents, flustered by the prospect of the first grandchild, expended their anxiety in the only way they knew how, through a round of gift-buying that left her braced, again, for another argument with David. Gary, leaning towards her at a family dinner, offered congratulations and added, with that predatory grin of his, “Now’s the dangerous time, you know.”
Unable as always to resist his blandishments, she asked why.
He shrugged. He had changed jobs and girlfriends recently, not apparently for the better, and the defiant jauntiness was wearing thin, the handsomeness showing a new, battered weatheredness. “You don’t know? They say a man begins to stray when his wife gets pregnant.”
She said, coolly, “You mustn’t apply your own example to everybody else.”
His words stuck, disagreeably, in her mind. Her own mother disapproved of David’s schedule; she said it wasn’t good for a man to be away from home so much, especially with a baby on the way. “Mum,” Li said, automatically; she had stopped defending David to her mother, she had learnt there were certain arguments that could not be won.
She asked him one night, when he’d come back at eleven, “Are you really in the office when you say you’re in the office?” She had called him several times that evening, and the night before, and there had been no answer, the phone shrilling itself into a paroxysm of indignation before it cut itself off in a dead, buzzing tone, and Gary’s words, her mother’s, had recurred to her with a treacherous clarity. She knew, no-one better, how easily he could lie to her without even being conscious that he was lying. Deception becoming self-deception, he would call it, with his talent for twisting words, being economical with the truth or sparing her feelings, and he would believe it too.
“What?” he said. He was lying on the bed, eyes closed; later, she knew, he would get up, go for a run and prowl around the apartment until the early hours of the morning. He had been living like this, flat out, for months.
She said, “Are you seeing someone?”
He opened his eyes. He accused her, “You’ve been talking to your mother.”
“No,” she lied.
“Come here,” he said.
She made to resist, and he pulled her down, until she was lying on top of him and she could smell the day in his clothes, the chemical, freeze-dried smell of the modern office.
“I haven’t looked at another woman,” he said, solemnly, stroking the hair back from her face, “since I met you.”
She heard the teasing note in his voice and knew this wasn’t true, he’d carried on with Clarissa, flagrantly for a good two years while claiming to be in love with her. Yet, in some deeper, emotional sense, he was speaking the truth. He had lost an essential, crucial measure of himself in her and, if he held her hostage, she did him as well. He would never betray her. The knowledge came to her, with flat, absolute certainty. And she became aware of an irrational feeling of disappointment. She realised she had wanted, had needed, in some way, to believe him capable of anything.
He treated her, then, with an apologetic delicacy that was new and disconcerting. In public, he took her arm, protectively; at home, he hovered. He said, sombrely, “You’re so tough,” as though she had agreed to undertake, alone, a wantonly vicious and gruelling ordeal. She realised he was playing out another of those fanciful storylines he sometimes indulged in: this one was probably entitled something like Heroic Wife, Pillar of the Earth. He confessed, “I feel foolish,” having nothing to do. Nothing important, at any rate. Accompanying her to the doctor, he behaved as if his presence were superfluous; he leaned against the door, ignoring the doctor’s invitation to sit down, wincing when the scan showed what looked like a peanut bobbing in a sea of fluid.
She had been afraid that, with his odd sense of fastidiousness, he would be repelled by her swelling body, but he seemed to like it. “You should always be like this,” he told her one night after they’d made love in the new, careful way they’d adopted after learning the news, a way she rather liked.
“You mean barefoot and pregnant and chained to the kitchen sink.”
He protested, not seeming to realise that she was joking. In her condition, she’d discovered a new, liberating levity, whereas he seemed to have misplaced his sense of humour, he took all her remarks seriously and painstakingly rebutted them, one by one.
“I like you,” he said, “full like that, you’re great, you’re majestic.” He called her his ship. The QEII.
She was naive enough to believe that because he found her condition erotic he was reconciled to the idea of the child. Not noticing, or not wanting to notice, his new tactic of aggressive passivity, the way he skilfully deflected any real discussion of life after the baby. A stubborn optimism insulated her from what she didn’t want to see. At nights now, she slept deeply, dreamlessly, which was how she liked it. Dreams, with their defiance of logic, their inexplicable cul-de-sacs, had always bothered her.
On Sundays now, she went to church with her parents, the same church she had attended all her life. Built in the last century, in another age, she felt, in its vaulting, stained-glass interior, an involuntary lift of the spirit that might have been due as much to the gracefulness of the architecture as to any belief on her part. She didn’t try to analyse it, it was enough that it gave her the release that she sought.
For a year after her marriage, she had stopped attending, in the same spirit of defiance that had carried her through her mother’s silent opposition to David, and the wedding. Church, her family, had all seemed interlinked in some oppressive alliance and she had thought, then, that lines had been drawn and that she had to take a stand. Now, older, tempered, her views less rigidly idealistic, she saw there had never been a question of sides. Her pregnancy gave her the nudge she needed to find her way back in: one Sunday morning she called her mother, and said she was going to church. Her mother, if she was pleased, didn’t show it; as was her way, she merely said, “Ten o’clock then.”
David refused to accompany her to church, a sore point with her mother. It could have been principle, as he claimed, or simple opacity. He was one of those men who started shifting restlessly eyes glazing over, when the subject of religion came up, who had to bite their tongue when their meal companions bowed their heads in grace before they began to eat. Who claimed there was nothing mysterious at all about the so-called religious experience: it was a simple combination of solemnity, spectacle and the hypnotism of the chants that featured in every religion.
She refused to be browbeaten. There was, in her, a residual belief in the unknown and the mystical, which her usual practicality could not entirely overcome. His sturdy cynicism was beyond her. She sang the hymns, the voices dissipating in the cavernous heat of the building, and tried not to drowse during the sermons. It was in church, holding her hymnal in front of her, her arms curving round her stomach, that she felt the baby’s first kick, a surprisingly strong thrust. She gasped. Her mother leaned, anxiously, towards her. “I’m all right,” Li whispered back. She would remember, for years, the strangest sensation welling up in her. She knew then, exactly, the texture of happiness: it was a lightness like no other.
She had not forgotten Wai Keong. Months after the break-up, she was still tormented by the manner of it, what he must have perceived as the slyness of her behaviour, and David’s. Oddly, this bothered her more than the thought of what he must have felt. (She was one of those people, David said, who, in the midst of wreckage, would be thinking, is anybody looking at me? rather than, what can I do?) More than once, she had been tempted to call him to explain.
She’d tried to talk to David about it, but each time he had either feigned deafness or obtuseness and she’d given up the attempt. And then, after that ridiculous scene at his family’s, when he’d practically accused her of having an affair with Gary, the topic had become too incendiary even to raise.
Yet she continued to feel a claim to, a stake, in him which she found difficult to relinquish. Without consciously asking about him, she knew a surprising amount about his life—her friends, the ladies who lunched, moved in the circles that he moved, or his friends moved, and information was the coin that greased these gatherings. She heard things: he had passed the English Bar, he was doing pupillage, he was a legal assistant in a large firm, he was not happy in his work. He had—a point of keen interest—a girlfriend.
Meeting him at that awful British alumni gathering, she felt no surprise. (The only surprise was that, in the fishpond society they lived in, she had not run into him sooner.) Only a sense of relief that she could, finally, quell the dread of seeing him again. He looked, indefinably, older. Still with that impeccable sense of dress, that understatedness which she had always liked about him, and which David lacked. The rumoured girlfriend was not with him. He was taken aback to find her pregnant, and heavily so; from his gaze, embarrassed, shifting, she knew he was having difficulty reconciling the woman in front of him with the girl he’d known.
She knew she didn’t love him, and meeting him like this, talking to him, brought this home to her with an even sharper keenness, but the sight of him moved her, unexpectedly: she felt a stray, troubling tenderness. She had seen other couples break up, in an acrimony that made it impossible for either to mention the other without insults and name-calling; she’d hoped to avoid that and it seemed that they had. Standing there with him, she conjured up a civilised coda to their time together: lunch, an exchange of greeting cards. The keyword was civilised.
Then David had glided up, and with that force which he brought with him everywhere, a force which had attracted her once but which she now felt as a gale, and she a tree fighting to stay upright in its path, contemptuously sliced through all that delicate filigree of feeling which had been building up between her and Wai Keong. She saw, not for the first time, how badly he could behave when he chose to. He’d shaken Wai Keong’s hand, after looking at it as though a dead fish had been offered to him, and then he’d simply stood there, in a blank silence. And Wai Keong, after a few tortuous remarks, had excused himself.
She was furious with David. He had no sense of proportion, he used a bludgeon where a subtler instrument would have done. Then, in the car, he’d practically accused her of forcing a child on them. She had known, deep down, that this was what he had thought all along, that his surface pliancy, his conciliatory manner the past few months had been a front designed to placate her. Yet, hearing him admit it was not the same as only guessing it, it was not the same at all. She’d felt suddenly sick, at how delusional and duped she’d been (if you’re not going to be interested, what’s the point?), and she’d thought she was going to throw up then and there. She had known, in that moment, with a flash that was like a photographic exposure in its blinding clarity, that she couldn’t bring a child into this marriage, not while he felt like this, not while almost every day between them felt as if they were tearing bits out of each other.
So she’d run out of the car, leaving him in the middle of the street. He only returned the following morning. She didn’t ask where he’d spent the night. For days, they hardly spoke. Two weeks later, she was rushed to hospital, and the baby, as though responding to her flash of revelation in the car, died a day after birth from complications during delivery. The doctor explained later, when she swam up to lucidity, clearing his throat, from sympathy or medical embarrassment, she wasn’t sure, that what had happened was very, very rare, almost unheard of. His tone was subtly beseeching; she understood he feared a medical malpractice suit. She let him make his explanations; his presence was merely annoying, a pinprick. David came; she barely registered his presence. There always seemed to be someone in her room; at one point, she found her wrists taped to the bed railings, and screamed for the tape to be removed. She understood that they thought she might harm herself in some way; she had said things, during delivery, under anaesthesia and in her sleep, things which they refused to tell her, that had led them to conclude this. She had no wish to die; she wished she could tell them this, but her tongue seemed to have snagged in her throat; she was too angry.
Three months later, after she had been discharged and was back at home, at her job, everybody marvelling at what a remarkable recovery she had made, she picked up the phone and called Wai Keong.