Chapter 10

Yao Shangqing was still shaken. Her hands trembled as she got clean clothes out for him.

"If you'd gone early today, would it have been you?"

Chen Yougong wasn't a fool. He had thought of it already. But he had asked the technician, and the fault in the machine was a small one. It was the man's own handling that did it.

"Don't dwell on it. Some things are fixed. And Uncle Niu was in too much of a hurry to get ahead."

He took his clothes and went through to change.

Yao Shangqing sat on the edge of the bed and looked at Yuanyuan. She was starting to believe that none of this was chance. Yuanyuan hadn't cried once all afternoon.

By evening the whole village knew about Uncle Niu.

Every household was talking about it.

The Zhaos were at supper.

Wang Fen, the Zhao grandmother, was in a good mood. She had never got on with that old woman at the Chens'. In their younger days she had two girls one after another while old Mrs. Chen had two boys, and then when she finally had a son old Mrs. Chen had another one as well. It had sat on her ever since.

The old carpenter that the third Chen son took as his master had come to her boy first. Her son had been ill at the time and she hadn't the heart to send him, and then the third Chen son had snatched the chance. That was another thing she had never swallowed. Anybody else and she would have minded less.

Now something had gone wrong at last. It hadn't happened to him, but the work would never stay in his hands after this.

Zhao Fangsong knew what his mother was pleased about, but he said it anyway. "Ma, I hear the job's still going to Chen Yougong."

Zhao Wanwan had been eating with her head down. She hadn't had meat since that one bun. The name Chen Yougong brought her head up. He could still work? In the book he had gone off to do carpentry and somebody who envied him tampered with the machine, and he lost an arm.

"How can that be? After what happened to your Uncle Niu? What good could possibly come to Chen Yougong out of this?" Wang Fen didn't believe a word of it. She had been waiting a long time for the Chens to come unstuck.

Zhao Wanwan pressed her lips together and said nothing. The book was vague about it, one line in passing. But she remembered that the man who set him up was called Niu, and here it had landed the other way round.

"The brigade leader explained it all, and there were any number of apprentices there at the time. Chen Yougong was quick, and he saved Uncle Niu. He'd have lost the arm otherwise." Zhao Fangsong shook his head over it. If you asked him, why do carpentry at all? Scratching a living out of the ground was good enough.

"Anyway, Ma, I'll take Lili her food." He got up and went into the kitchen, with no interest in any of the rest of it.

Wang Fen was not best pleased, but she could only watch him go. She was counting on that woman to give her a grandson, wasn't she. She picked up her own bowl, drank the gruel down in two goes, and looked at the three girls at the table.

"That's enough eating. Go and work." Then she got up herself.

Zhao Wanwan pulled a face, finished quickly, put her bowl on the table and walked off with no intention of washing it. She wasn't doing that. It wasn't her job.

Zhao Qingqing bit her lip, watched her big sister go, looked at the table, and carefully started clearing it. Her big sister had changed so much. She used to stand up for them, and now... Never mind. She could do this much herself. Perhaps her sister was just unhappy.

Something that big keeps a village talking for days, but the Chens carried on with their own work as usual.

Because of all the attention on them, the news that the Chens had taken in a baby girl got about as well.

There were people who envied them. It all came to the same thing: the Chens lived too well, with grain to spare for raising an outsider.

Yao Shangqing heard it herself when she went out to work. Because of her background hardly anyone in the village talked to her, and now people came over to dig for gossip.

Baijia Village lay well out of the way, and the land around it wasn't good for growing. But the people there worked, and little by little they had opened it up. Every household had its own private plot on the hill slope behind, some of them side by side, some with nobody near.

Yao Shangqing was clearing weeds. These vegetables had to see them through the winter.

"Some people just like taking what's other people's. Three of her own and she still can't get her fill of being a mother." The knot of young wives nearby had put their heads together. The one who could come out with a line like that was the accountant's daughter, Li Qiaoqiao. She was twenty-three that year and still not married. She had fancied Chen Yougong once, and when he chose this stinking-intellectual's daughter from the city instead, it stuck in her. She had sworn at home that she would marry a man with more to him than Chen Yougong, and she hadn't found one yet.

Yao Shangqing heard what she meant. All these years, and still this. She went on working, unhurried.

"Li Qiaoqiao, I do like being a mother, and I'm not mother to any son or daughter of yours. Oh, I forgot. You haven't got children. You're not married. Besides, my three boys are good and they mind me, and my daughter is fair and soft and anyone can see she's a lucky one."

Li Qiaoqiao was breathing hard with temper. It was always like this. She could never out-talk Yao Shangqing.

An older woman nearby saw where this was going and stepped in to calm it before it came to blows.

"That'll do, Yougong's wife. Qiaoqiao talks without thinking. Don't come down to it."

Yao Shangqing wasn't unreasonable. She could tell good will from bad.

"I know, auntie."

The woman took a firm hold of Li Qiaoqiao and got her away in the end.

The others went back to their own plots and their work, and turned it over among themselves. They had never spent time with Yao Shangqing and had always assumed a woman from the big city would be too proud to row with anybody. It turned out she could take you apart without a dirty word in it.

Yao Shangqing had never been anyone's doormat. She gave way to the eldest's wife and the second's wife at home for her husband's sake, so he wouldn't be caught in the middle. Outside the house, that was another matter.

She worked on with her head down, thinking, quick and neat about it.

When it was done she went home.

Old Mrs. Chen was minding Yuanyuan. The baby wasn't a month old and couldn't be out long, and she was asleep now and back in the room.

Li Guilan from next door, Granny Li, had brought her basket of shoe-making over to work and gossip with her.

The two of them sat where the sun was good. "I've heard something. That daughter the Zhaos say died at birth could well be the one your family's taken in."

Old Mrs. Chen frowned. The thought had crossed her mind. The village was only so big. Which wife was expecting and which wasn't, you could see it at a glance.

Granny Li had been her neighbour for many years and knew her inside out. Sharp tongue, soft heart. All that hard talk on the outside, and underneath she gave way.

"You know what Wang Fen's like. We all remember how she was when she was young. She wouldn't have her own boy suffer while he was ill, so she let Yougong go and take the master and learn the trade, and then she turned round and held it against you. If that child really is the Zhaos', how do you feel about it?" Granny Li talked on, then thought of something else. "Does the Zhao woman know the baby's hers?"

Old Mrs. Chen knew Li Guilan meant well by her. "The child is on my third son's register. She's his child. I don't care a scrap about the rest of it. If the woman ever dares come to my door, I'll throw her out of it."

Li Guilan thought about what her old friend had been like in her day and stopped worrying for her.

"Right. And I'll help you fight." Li Guilan was past fifty herself. She rolled her sleeves up, afraid of nothing.

Old Mrs. Chen was about to say something when the baby started crying inside, and she got up and hurried in.

Li Guilan went in after her. She hadn't actually seen this child yet. She thought of the Zhao family's faces and shook her head.

Old Mrs. Chen picked the baby up and rocked her, and felt the nappy. She was wet. A clean one went on and the crying stopped.

Li Guilan stood looking at the child, and the longer she looked the lovelier she found her. "You know, I'm starting to doubt she's the Zhaos'. Look at her. That row of three granddaughters of theirs, not one like this. She's beautiful." Her eyes stayed on the baby the whole time, unwilling to leave her.

Old Mrs. Chen was feeling the credit of it. "Well, there you are. The child came in at the Chen gate, so of course she looks like one of ours." She laughed and dug Li Guilan with her elbow.

"And here's a stranger thing. You know when Uncle Niu got his hand crushed? This girl would have nobody but Yougong hold her. Anyone else took her and she cried. If Yougong had gone in as usual, who knows how that would have ended."

Li Guilan heard it out. "I'll tell you this, a small child sees truest. And I think this one's a lucky child. Whose baby looks like that before she's a month old?"

Old Mrs. Chen had been going on guesswork, and now an old friend had said it too. She was sure of it. This child might well be a lucky one sent by heaven. The Zhaos didn't value her, so the luck had come to her house.

She settled the baby again and the two of them went back out to the yard.

Li Guilan had thought the talk outside was right, that her old friend had gone soft in the head. Now she found herself envious.

"The good years are ahead of you."

Old Mrs. Chen was in high spirits. "Your mouth to heaven's ear."

The two of them went on about this household and that for a good while longer.

Li Guilan saw Yao Shangqing come back and started packing up to go.

"That third son's wife of yours is a worker. Don't you go being the wicked mother-in-law now." Li Guilan said hello to Yao Shangqing, and on her way out she gave her old friend a look and a wink.

Old Mrs. Chen patted her hand, to show she understood that much now.

Yao Shangqing put her tools away, washed her hands and face and went in to look at the baby. She seemed fine.

She was about to go out again when she heard Chen Shaoyuan shouting in the yard.

Old Mrs. Chen came out of the main room too.

"What's all this? What are you running for? Don't you know your sister's asleep? What if you wake her?"

Yao Shangqing heard that from inside and smiled, and came out as well.

"Mum, Granny, look what we got out of the little river down by the hill."