Cornucopia
Page 87
*
As Pat strained to see his old place across the Thames, beyond Albert and Chelsea bridges, he felt a deeper satisfaction than he would have perhaps cared to admit with his Cheyne Walk home. That did not however prevent him from being drawn by the unknown and he envied Tom Barton’s ability to drop everything and take off for South America.
More than four years had passed since Pat had crossed the river, to the left bank as he fancifully called the Cheyne Walk embankment, identifying the Thames with the Seine, though there were certainly no bohemian connotations in his living style.
His home was decorated with a mixture of exotic furnishings that included antique Chinese cabinets and vases intermingled with traditional Javanese hardwood furniture and martabans. The walls were hung with nineteenth and early twentieth century European works of art, including the original Gauguin prints he had bought in Paris, and some more recent modernist works. Pat felt like a man of means, a man of the world and Lili’s presence confirmed this with her delicate oriental beauty, her fine hands and carefully manicured deep red fingernails, her ivory skin and red lips, contrasted by her lustrous jet black hair.
Pat loved Lili and their daughter and it troubled him to imagine them as a decoration, although he was immensely proud to be seen with Lili at his side.
As they were served breakfast by the housemaid, under the watchful eye of their housekeeper, Pat thumbed his way through the morning papers.
“Look at this Lili,” he said pointing to an article in the Times. “They’ve discovered a lost city in Honduras.”
“Hon...?”
“洪都拉斯 in Central America,” said Pat proudly, having looked it up in Chinese before speaking to Lili.
“Oh. Hondulasi.”
Lili’s geography was not her strong point. She was very Chinese in this sense, beyond China few places existed other than London, New York or Paris. The rest was vague and as for South or Central America they were strange and distant places.
Pat read the article aloud. It’s called Ciudad Blanca, they say the ruins are deep in the Honduras jungle. They’re like the pre-Colombian cities in the Yucatan, built around plazas and pyramids, they think it belonged to a civilization that disappeared one or two thousand years ago.
Lili made an effort to listen, but she knew nothing of pre-Columbian history. She had long accepted Pat’s fascination by the strange and exotic and remembered how his eyes had gleamed with excitement when they had visited Xi’an with its warriors, and it was not the simple amazement of the casual tourist, it was something deeper.
“I think I should make a visit to Tom Barton.”
“Really.”
“Yes. We have interests in Panama, banking and shipping. We could go back to Hong Kong via New York.”
“You go Pat, jungles are not my thing, besides I have a lot of things to look after here in London.”
Lili had sensed the restlessness that had invaded Pat. It was part of his character, something she had felt the first time she had met him on the way to Canton. The pressure of the last weeks, not only the problems at the bank, but also the day to day constraints of conventional business needs, weighed on him. He needed to resource himself and would come back refreshed, full of new ideas, the kind that lacked in her family’s vision of the world. It would also give her time to explore ideas for her plans to invest in a project she had been been developing: a London fashion house founded by a Chinese designer Lulu Zhang which was beginning to make its mark on the international circuit.