“I don’t know what my uncle is going to say to her. I’m not sure he knows himself. But whatever he says, she will listen, in the way that she will listen to no one else.” He stretched up to look down the length of the queue. It didn’t appear to have moved at all. “This is no damned good,” he said, and pulled out his Public Security ID wallet from a back pocket and pushed his way up to the head of the queue.

Margaret watched from a distance as several people at the head of the queue began to remonstrate with him. She smiled as he turned and with a few sharp words and a flash of his ID silenced their complaints. And some were more equal than others, she thought wryly.

He hurried back across the concourse with the ticket and she followed him outside into the crowded square. “I’m sorry, I’m going to have to take the ticket to my uncle first,” he said, glancing up at the nearer clock tower. “His train is in just over three hours.”

“How long will he be away?”

“Oh, he’ll be back tomorrow night.”

“Short conversation.”

Li shrugged. “He’ll say what he has to say then go. At the end of the day it is her decision.”

They climbed into the Jeep. “What do you think she should do?” She watched him closely, interested in his reply.

“I think she should not have got pregnant,” he said.

“That’s not what I asked.”

He looked at her very seriously. “It is not my problem. I have enough of my own.” And she realised that a veil was being drawn over a part of him he did not want revealed.

As he shifted into first gear and started to pull away, he had to brake sharply as a woman in her thirties wheeled a pram across their intended path. It was a strange, crude, wooden pram, with two tiny seats facing each other across a small, square table. Home-made, Margaret might have thought, except that she had seen others just like it in the street. But there was only one seat occupied. The other, empty one was a potent symbol of frustrated Chinese parenthood. Li didn’t seem to see it as he waited for the mother to pass, glaring at them as she did. Then he slipped back into gear and squeezed the Jeep into the main stream of traffic heading west on Beijingzhanxi Street.

III