When Ying Yue and Charles marry (approximately a year on from this house viewing), Ying Yue will feel a slight pang of anxiety that Denny Neale is not present at the ceremony (which will be held, at Wang Shu’s insistence, on the end of Llandudno’s remarkably long pier), and as Charles pushes the ring on to Ying Yue’s finger, she will wonder, idly, whether Charles’s father (Denny Neale) ever managed to find a nice house for himself.

And she will think, almost wistfully, of quinces.

But it would be a shame to spoil the present moment by glancing, casually (head tilted, almost squinting), into the future.

Ying Yue has such a marvellous, generous, porous mind.

Let that – and that alone – suffice for now.

Hmm.

But why would Charles’s father be trying to buy Charles’s mother’s old house from Charles (with Avigail’s assistance)? Unless Avigail was, in fact, Charles’s sister?

His long-lost sister?

Does that work?

Yes!

Of course it works!

Of course it does!

Oh my goodness – this is a very small room!

It’s like being crammed into a tiny elevator!

Hardly any space at all!

And …

Oooh!

Oooh! Teddies! Look! Teddies!!

Everywhere!

Teddies!

Just like in heaven which is ONLY teddies! Oh! Yes! And tiny squirrels with little silver wings and angel-faces! And dragons who breathe bubbles not flames!

Ying Yue’s own sweet face is now wreathed in smiles.

She bounces up and down with uncontrollable excitement.

Lots and lots and lots and lots!

Teddies!

Teddies!

Teddy-love!

Love-teddy!

Oh!

Oh!

Oh!

Oh!

Ying Yue grabs an utterly bemused Charles and – still bouncing up and down – hugs him, violently.

YING YUE SOOOO HAPPY NOW!!

8.

LET’S EAT GRANDMA.
LET’S EAT, GRANDMA.
COMMAS SAVE LIVES.

Yes, Wang Shu is always on the phone talking in Chinese, but it would be deeply misguided to automatically glean from this fact that she is – in some crass and unimaginative way – ‘avoiding life’, or ‘never quite in the moment’, or ‘simply bloody rude’, etc.

Oh no. Far from it.

Richard Grannon may well call this too-easy, knee-jerk-y response a ‘faulty perception’.

Wang Shu is indubitably somewhat rude and distracted and self-involved, but she is actually often having quite interesting conversations on the phone in Chinese. Relatively important conversations on the phone in Chinese.

During the course of this brief, twenty-odd-minute house viewing (for example), Wang Shu has organised a visa via her over-worked London ‘arranger’ for a trip she is planning to Bolivia in the spring to try and finally bring about an atmosphere of concord between Bolivia and Chile after the many decades of rancour that have been generated over Bolivia’s loss of sea access (it was actually taken away between the years of 1879 and 1883. And there have been no diplomatic relations since 1978). Yes. It’s a long, interesting and ultimately rather tragic story. But we don’t really have time to go into it here.

There simply isn’t room. This is just a novella (approx. 23,000 words +).