And the Bride Wore Red (3 page)

She stared at him, awed by this insight.

‘That's exactly how it was. At least, that's how Norah says it was. I don't remember, of course, except that I picked up the atmosphere without knowing why. There was lots of shouting and screaming.

‘It got worse because they both started having affairs. At last they divorced, and I found I didn't really have a home. I stayed with her, or with him, but I always felt like a guest. If
there was a new girlfriend or new boyfriend I'd be in the way and I'd stay with Norah. Then the romance would break up and my mother would cry on my shoulder.'

‘So you became
her
mother,' Lang observed.

‘Yes, I suppose I did. And, if that was what romance did to you, I decided I didn't want it.'

‘But wasn't there anyone else in your family to show you a more encouraging view of love? What about Norah?'

‘She's the opposite to them. Her fiancé died years ago. There's been nobody else for her since, and she's always told me that she's perfectly content. She says once you've found the right man you can't replace him with anyone else.'

‘Even when she's lost him?'

‘But according to Norah she hasn't lost him. He loved her to the end of his life, so she feels that they still belong to each other.'

‘And you disapprove?' he asked, frowning a little.

‘It sounds charming, but it's really only words. The reality is that it's turned Norah's life into a desert that's lasted fifty years.'

‘Perhaps it hasn't. Do you really know what's inside her heart? Perhaps it's given her a kind of fulfilment that we can't understand.'

‘Of course you could be right, but if that's fulfilment…' She finished with a sigh. ‘I just want more from life than dreaming about a man who isn't there any more. Or,' she added wryly, ‘in my mother's case, several men who aren't there any more.'

‘But what about the louse? Didn't he change your mind?'

For the first time he saw her disconcerted.

‘I kind of lost the plot there,' she admitted. ‘But it sorted itself out. Never mind how. I'm wiser now.'

She spoke with a shrug and a cheerful smile, but she had
the feeling that he wasn't fooled. Some instinct was telling him the things she wouldn't, couldn't say.

She'd been dazzled by Andy from the first moment. Handsome, charming, intelligent, he'd singled her out, wooed her passionately and had overturned all the fixed ideas of her life. For once she'd understood Norah's aching fidelity to a dead man. She'd even partly understood the way her mother fell in love so often.

Then, just when she'd been ready to abandon the prejudices of a lifetime, he'd announced that he was engaged to marry someone else. He'd said they'd had a wonderful few months together but it was time to be realistic, wasn't it?

The lonely, anguished nights that had followed had served to convince her that she'd been right all the time. Love wasn't for her, or for anyone in their right mind. She couldn't speak of it, but there was no need. Lang's sympathetic silence told her that he understood.

‘Tell me about you,' she hastened to say. ‘You're English too, aren't you? What brought you out here?'

‘I'm three-quarters English. The other quarter is Chinese.'

‘Ah,' she said slowly.

‘You guessed?'

‘Not exactly. You sound English, but your features suggest otherwise. I don't know—there's something else…'

She gave up trying to explain. The ‘something else' in his face seemed to come and go. One moment it almost defined him, the next it barely existed. It intrigued and tempted her with its hint of another, mysterious world.

‘Something different—but it's not a matter of looks,' she finished, wishing she could find the right words.

He seemed satisfied and nodded.

‘I know. That “something different” is inside, and it has always haunted me,' he said. ‘I was born in London, and I
grew up there, but I knew I didn't quite fit in with the others. My mother was English, my father was half-Chinese. He died soon after I was born. Later my mother married an Englishman with two children from a previous marriage.'

‘Wicked stepfather?' Olivia enquired.

‘No, nothing so dramatic. He was a decent guy. I got on well with him and his children, but I wasn't like them, and we all knew it.

‘Luckily I had my grandmother, who'd left China to marry my grandfather. Her name was Lang Meihui before she married, and she was an astonishing woman. She knew nothing about England and couldn't speak the language. John Mitchell couldn't speak Chinese. But they managed to communicate and knew that they loved each other. He brought her home to London.'

‘She must have found it really hard to cope,' Olivia mused.

‘Yes, but I'll swear, nothing has ever defeated her in her life. She learned to speak English really well. She found a way to live in a country that probably felt like being on another planet, and she survived when her husband died ten years later, leaving her with a son to raise alone.

‘He was called Lang too. She'd insisted on that. It was her way of keeping her Chinese family-name alive. When I was born she more or less bullied him into calling me Lang, as well. She told me later that she did it so that “we don't lose China.”

‘My father died when I was eight years old. When my mother remarried, Meihui moved into a little house in the next street so that she could be near me. She helped my mother with the children, the shopping, anything, but then she slipped away to her own home. And in time I began to follow her.'

He gave her a warm smile. ‘So you see, I had a Norah too.'

‘And you depended on her, just as I did on mine.'

‘Yes, because she was the only one who could make me understand what was different about me. She taught me her language but, more than that, she showed me China.'

‘She actually brought you here?'

‘Only in my head, but if you could have seen the fireworks she set off in there.' He tapped his forehead. ‘She used to take me out to visit London's Chinatown, especially on Chinese New Year. I thought I was in heaven—all that colour, the glittering lights and the music—'

‘Oh, yes, I remember,' Olivia broke in eagerly.

‘You saw it too?'

‘Only once. My mother visited some friends who lived near there, and they took us out a couple of nights to see what was happening. It was like you said, brilliant and thrilling, but nobody could explain it to me. There was a lot of red, and they were supposed to be fighting somebody, but I couldn't tell who or what.'

‘Some people say they're fighting the Nian,' Lang supplied. ‘A mythical beast rather like a lion, who devours crops and children. So they put food out for him and let off firecrackers, because he's afraid of loud noises and also of the colour red. So you got lots of red and fireworks and lions dancing. What more could a child want?'

‘Nothing,' Olivia said, remembering ecstatically. ‘Oh, yes, it was gorgeous. So much better than the English New Year celebrations, which always seemed boringly sedate after that.'

‘Me too. It was the one thing I refused ever to miss, and that drove my mother mad, because the date was always changing—late January, mid-February—always lasting fifteen days. Mum complained that she couldn't plan for anything, except that I'd be useless for fifteen days. I said, “Don't worry, Mum, I'm always useless”.' He made a face. ‘She didn't think that was at all funny.'

‘Your grandmother sounds wonderful,' Olivia said sincerely.

‘She was. She told me how everyone is born in the year of an animal—a sheep, an ox, a rat, a dragon. I longed to find I was born in the year of the dragon.'

‘And were you?'

He made a face. ‘No, I was born in the year of the rabbit.
Don't laugh!
'

‘I'm not laughing,' she said, hastily controlling her mirth. ‘In this country, the rabbit is calm and gentle, hardworking—'

‘Dull and plodding,' he supplied. ‘Dreary, conventional—'

‘Observant, intelligent—'

‘Boring.'

She chuckled. ‘You're not boring, I promise.'

It was true. He delighted her, not with any flashy display of personality, but because his thoughts seemed to reach out and take hers by the hand in a way that, she now realized, Andy had never done.

He gave her a rueful grin.

‘Thank you for those kind words, even if you had to scrape the bottom of the barrel to find them.'

‘According to everything I've read, there's nothing wrong with being born in the year of the rabbit.'

‘And you've obviously read a lot, so I guess you know your own year.' He saw her sheepish look and exclaimed, ‘Oh, no, please don't tell me—!'

‘I'm sorry, I really am.'

‘The year of the dragon?'

‘It not my fault,' she pleaded.

‘You know what that means, don't you?' He groaned. ‘Dragons are free spirits, powerful, beautiful, fearless, they soar above convention, refusing to be bound by rules and regulations.'

‘That's the theory, but I never felt it quite fitted me,' she said, laughing and trying to placate him. ‘I don't see myself soaring.'

‘But perhaps you don't know yourself too well,' he suggested. ‘And you've yet to find the thing that will make you soar. Or the person,' he added.

The last words were spoken so quietly that she might have missed them, except that she was totally alive to him. She understood and was filled with sudden alarm. Things were happening that she'd sworn never to allow happen again.

She would leave right now and retreat into the old illusion of safety. All she had to do was rise, apologise and leave, trying to avoid his eyes that saw too much. It was simple, really.

But she didn't move, and she knew that she wasn't going to.

‘T
HE
trouble with soaring,' she murmured, ‘is that you fall to earth.'

‘Sometimes you do,' he said gently. ‘But not always.'

‘Not always,' she murmured. ‘Perhaps.'

But it was too soon. Her nerve failed her and in her mind she crossed hastily to the cautious side of the road.

‘What about your grandmother? What was her year?'

Tactfully he accepted her change of subject without demur.

‘She was a dragon too,' he said. ‘With her courage and sense of adventure she couldn't have been anything else—a real dragon lady. Everything she told me about this country seemed to bring me alive, until all I could think of was coming here one day.

‘We planned how we'd make the trip together, but she became very ill. I'd qualified as a doctor by then, and I knew she wasn't going to recover, but she still talked as though it would happen soon.

‘At last we had to face the truth. On her deathbed she said, “I so much wanted to be there with you.” And I promised her that she would be.'

‘And she has been, hasn't she?' Olivia asked, marvelling.

‘Every step of the way,' he confirmed. ‘Wherever I go, I
remember what she told me. Her family welcomed me with open arms.'

‘Did you find them easily?'

‘Yes, because she'd stayed in touch. When I landed at Beijing Airport three years ago there were thirty people to welcome me. They recognised me at once from the pictures she'd sent them, and they all cheered.

‘It's an enormous family. Not all of them live in Beijing, and many of those who lived further out had come in especially to see Meihui's grandson.'

‘They weren't put off by your being three-quarters English?'

He laughed. ‘I don't think they even see that part of me. I'm one of the Lang family. That's all that counts.'

‘It was clever of your grandmother to name you and your father Lang,' Olivia mused. ‘In England it's your first name, but here the family name comes first.'

‘Yes, my uncles are Lang Hai and Lang Jing, my great uncle is Lang Tao, my cousin is Lang Dai, so I fitted in straight away.'

A sudden look of mischief crossed her face. ‘Tell me something—have your stepbrothers given you any nephews and nieces?'

He looked puzzled. ‘Three, but I don't see…'

‘And I'll bet they call you Uncle Lang.'

‘Yes, but—'

‘And what do the children of the Lang family call you? It can't be Uncle Lang, because that would be nonsense to them. So I guess they must call you Uncle Mitch.'

A glazed look came into his eyes and he edged away from her with a nervous air that made her laugh.

‘Are you a witch to have such second sight?' he demanded. ‘Should I be scared?'

‘Are you?' she teased.

‘A bit. More than a bit, actually. How did you know that?'

‘Logical deduction, my dear Watson. Second sight doesn't come into it.'

He could see that she was right, but it still left him with an enchanted feeling, as though she could divine what was hidden from others. A true ‘dragon lady', he thought with delight, with magic arts to entice and dazzle a man.

‘You're right about my grandmother,' he said. ‘In her heart, she never really left China.'

‘How did her relatives feel about her marrying an Englishman and leaving the country?'

‘They were very supportive, because it's in the family tradition.'

‘You all believe in marrying for love?'

‘Much more than that. Marrying in the face of great difficulties, putting love first despite all obstacles. It goes back over two-thousand years.'

‘Two thou…?' She laughed in astonishment. ‘Are you nobility or something?'

‘No, just ordinary people. Over the centuries my family has tilled the land, sold farm produce, perhaps made just enough money to start a little shop. We've been carpenters, wheelwrights, blacksmiths—but never noble, I promise you.'

The arrival of the waiter made him fall silent while plates were cleared away and the next course was served. It was fried pork-belly stewed in soy and wine, and Olivia's mouth watered at the prospect.

‘We're also excellent cooks,' Lang observed, speaking very significantly.

‘You mean…?'

‘This was cooked by my cousin Lang Chao, and the guy who served it is his brother, Lang Wei. Later Wei's girlfriend, Suyin, will sing for us.'

‘Your family own this restaurant?'

‘That's why they virtually hijacked us. I wasn't planning to bring you here because I knew we'd be stared at—if you glance into the corner you'll see Wei sneaking a peek and thinking we can't see him—but they happened to spot me in the street, and after that we were lost.'

‘We seem to be providing the entertainment,' she said, amused. ‘Wei's enjoying a good laugh over there.'

‘I'm going to strangle him when I get home,' Lang growled. ‘This is why I didn't want them to see you because I knew they'd think—Well…'

‘That you'd brought one of your numerous girlfriends here?' Olivia said.

She was teasing but the question was important.

‘I occasionally bring a lady here to dine,' he conceded. ‘Purely in a spirit of flirtation. Anything more serious, I wouldn't bring her here. Or at least,' he added, grinding his teeth and glaring at the unrepentant Wei, ‘I'd
try
not to.'

‘No problem.' Olivia chuckled. ‘You tell him that he's completely wrong in what he's thinking, that we're just a pair of fellow professionals having a quiet meal for companionship. There's no more to it than that.'

‘No more to it than that,' he echoed in a comically robotic voice.

‘
Then
you can strangle him.'

‘That sounds like a good idea. But what do I tell him when I take you out again?'

‘Tell him to mind his own business?' she suggested vaguely.

‘I can see you've never lived with a family like mine.'

‘Wait a minute, you said when you “get home”? You don't live in the same house, do you?'

‘Sometimes. I have a room there, but also a little place of
my own near the hospital where I go if I've done a long stint at work and need to collapse. But if I want warmth, noise and cousins driving me crazy I go to the family home, so they tend to know what I do. But next time we'll avoid this place and have some privacy.'

‘Look—'

‘It's all right.' He held up a hand quickly. ‘I don't mean to rush you. I know you haven't decided yet. But, when you do, let me know where you want to go.'

Her eyebrows rose at this quiet assurance but his smile disarmed her, making her complicit.

‘I didn't finish telling you about our tradition,' he said.

‘Yes, I'm curious. How did a family that had to work so hard come to put such a high value on romantic love? Surely it made more sense for a man to marry the girl whose father owned a strip of land next to his own?'

‘Of course, and many marriages were made for such practical reasons. But the descendants of Jaio and Renshu always hoped for more.'

‘Who were they?'

‘They lived in the reign of the Emperor Qin, of whom I'm sure you've heard.'

She nodded. In reading about China, she'd learned about the time when it had been divided into many states. Qin Shi Huang, king of the state of Qin, had conquered the other states, unifying them into one gigantic country. Since Qin was pronounced ‘chin' the country had come to be called China. Qin had proclaimed himself emperor, and on his death he'd been buried in a splendid mausoleum accompanied by any of his concubines who hadn't born him a child.

‘One of those concubines was Jaio,' Lang told her now. ‘She didn't want to die, and she was in love with Renshu, a young soldier who also loved her. Somehow he managed to
rescue her, and they fled together. Of course, they had to spend the rest of their lives on the run, and they only had about five years before they were caught and killed. But by then they'd had a son, who was rescued and spirited away by Jaio's brother.

‘Nobody heard anything for years, but when the son was an old man he revealed the writings that Jaio and Renshu had left, in which they said that their love had been worth all the hardship. Of course, they had to be kept secret, but the family protected them and still has them to this day.

‘Because of this the Langs have always cherished a belief in love that has seen them through many hard times. Often their neighbours have thought them mad for trusting in love when there were so many more
important
things in life, but they have clung to their ideals. It was that trust that made Meihui leave China and follow John Mitchell to England. And she never regretted it. She missed her homeland, but she always said that being with the man she loved mattered more than anything in life.'

Hearing these words, Olivia had a strange sense of familiarity. Then she realised that this was exactly what Norah would have said.

She sipped her wine, considering what she had just been told. On the surface it was a conventional legend—charming, a tad sentimental. What made it striking was that this serious man should speak as though it had a deep meaning for him.

‘It's a lovely story,' she said wistfully. ‘But did it really happen that way?'

‘Why not?' he asked, giving her a quizzical smile.

She suppressed the instinct to say,
Because it's too absurdly romantic to be real
, and said, ‘I only meant that two-thousand years is a terribly long time. So many things get lost
in the mists, and you could never really know if they were true or not.'

‘It's true if we want it to be,' he said simply. ‘And we do.'

For a moment she almost queried who ‘we' were, and then was glad she hadn't, because he added, ‘All of us, the whole family—my aunts, great-aunts, my uncles, cousins—we all want it to be true. And so it is—for us.'

‘That's a delightful idea,' she mused. ‘But perhaps not very practical.'

‘Ah, yes, I'd forgotten that you must always be practical and full of common sense,' he teased.

‘There's a lot to be said for it,' she protested defensively.

‘If you're a schoolteacher.'

‘Doesn't a doctor need common sense, as well?'

‘Often, but not always. Sometimes common sense is a much over-rated virtue.'

‘And sometimes it can come to your rescue,' she said wryly.

She didn't realise that she'd spoken aloud until she saw him looking at her with a question in his eyes.

‘Has it rescued you very often?' he asked gently.

‘Now and then. It's nice to know I can always rely on it.'

‘That's just what you can't do!' he said with sudden urgency. ‘You must never rely completely on your head, because sooner or later it will always let you down.'

‘And you think the heart doesn't?' she retorted with a touch of indignation. ‘We're not all as lucky as Meihui.'

‘Or Norah.'

‘I'd hardly call her lucky.'

‘I would,' he said at once. ‘The man she loved died, but he didn't betray her. That makes her luckier than many women, and men too, who live for years with the shadows of failed love, bad memories, regrets. Or the others, who never dared
risk love at all and have only thoughts of what might have been if only they'd had a little more courage.'

‘That sounds very fine,' she said. ‘But the fact is that most people are unlucky in love. Is there really much to choose between taking the risk and regretting it, and deciding not to take it at all?'

‘And regretting that?'

‘And living free,' she said defiantly. ‘Free of regrets, free of pain—'

‘Free of joy, free of the sense that life is worth living or ever has been?' he interrupted her firmly. ‘Being free of pain can come at a heavy price.'

How had they strayed into this argument? she wondered. And why? The conversation was becoming dangerous, and she acted instinctively to get back into control.

‘I see Wei coming towards us,' she said brightly.

If he noticed her abrupt change of subject he didn't say so. Instead he turned sardonic eyes on his cousin, who bustled forward eagerly, his gaze darting between the two of them.

‘We'd like some fruit, please,' Lang said firmly. ‘And then,
vanish!
'

Wei gave him a hurt look and departed with dignity. Lang ground his teeth.

‘Sometimes I think I should have stayed well clear of my family,' he said.