*
Lili’s grandfather had know bad times. As a leader in the People’s Liberation Army he had escaped the madness of the Cultural Revolution. In the madness that Mao had unleashed, Wu Yeye had smuggled his family out of Canton in the dead of night, down the Pearl River by boat to the safety of Hong Kong and Macao. As the frenzy reached its peak Red Guards ran wild, rampaging through the streets, destroying the symbols of the old bourgeois world. The chaos and violence increased when schools and universities closed, freeing students to pursue the destruction of the Four Olds: old customs, old habits, old culture, and old thinking. They physically and verbally attacked their teachers, school administrators, Communist Party members, neighbours, friends, relatives and even their parents.
Once normality returned, Wu’s son, Lili’s father, turned his attention to the textile factories the family, in an opaque arrangement with other Communist leaders, still controlled. Following the death of Mao and the arrival of Deng Xiaoping, he invested all his efforts in expanding production to meet the growing demand as China reformed.
As Wu liked to explain, Southern Chinese always followed a different path. They were historically more open to the outside world. Thanks to the proximity of Hong Kong; his links with the People’s Liberation Army; and his position in the Guangdong government, he was encouraged to develop his multiple and diverse businesses.
During that propitious period Wu’s brother remained in Hong Kong, where with his cousins he built up the family business, becoming one of the colony’s richest man thanks to Deng’s creation of a Special Economic Zone in Shenzhen, created to take advantage of the British Colony’s financial strength and its links with the world outside.
HOUGHTON HALL
As Sergei Tarasov disembarked from his helicopter with his two English friends, he paused to admire the magnificent Palladian mansion the stood before him with its one thousand acre setting of rolling Norfolk parkland. Steve Howard reminded the Russian, Houghton Hall had been built as the home of Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister. Walpole had led the governments of George I and George II over a period of twenty years, from 1721 to 1742, before resigning following a motion of no confidence.
Walpole’s political career came to an end with the defeat of the British navy at the Battle of Cartagena de Indias in 1741. It was one of the greatest debacles in British military history, resulting in the loss of ten thousand men, a third of the British force, compared to a mere eight hundred on the Spanish side. Little mentioned in British history books, it marked an important point in colonial history, since it allowed Spain to maintain its Empire and military supremacy in South America for another one and a half centuries. Three years later Walpole died in debt.
Houghton Hall was now the home of the seventh Marquess of Cholmondeley, David Cholmondeley, the Lord Great Chamberlain of the United Kingdom, a hereditary role in the British monarchist system.
The occasion for Tarasov’s presence was the opening of an exhibition of seventy masterpieces from Sir Robert Walpole’s art collection on loan from the Hermitage Museum of Saint Petersburg, in the presence of Prince Charles, future King of England.
Tarasov, like another Russian media magnate, Alexander Lebedev, was a patron of Houghton Revisited. The magnificent art collection of two hundred paintings, including works by Murillo, Poussin, Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck and Velázquez, was owned by the Hermitage. In 1778, Walpole’s heavily indebted grandson, a philandering gambler, had sold more than two hundred of the paintings for forty thousand gold guineas to Catherine the Great to adorn her palace in St. Petersburg.
The elite gathering, in the splendid Palladian mansion built of York stone, was an important occasion for the Russians, time to repair, or at least try to plaster over the cracks that had opened in relations between London and Moscow. For the first time in more than two hundred years the paintings were presented in their original settings.
Howard spotted Tony Blair’s strange spin doctor amongst the guests. Howard remembered him from Santorino a few years earlier when he been an ardent friend of Saïf Gaddafi. In contrast to Walpoles outward going ideas, he had been one of the architects of New Labour’s immigration policy, responsible for burdening the UK with a massive influx of immigrants who brought nothing but their hands with them as the world marched towards the era of robotics.
Houghton Hall
During the years of the Blair-Brown tandem, more than two million immigrants entered Britain, transforming the country as it had never been transformed since Julius Caesar had disembarked on England’s shores. The Roman invasion had brought Latin civilisation, the Viking invasions their Germanic language, the Norman conquest the French language, all of which fused into modern English, spoken by five hundred million people across the planet and studied by three times that number.
Whatever the new multicultural society would bring it was still in the making. The change had not been created by force, but by transient politicians, laissez-faire policies, stealth and complicity, whilst the majority of voters had closed their eyes, the awakening would be rude, the face of Britain changed forever, without debate, without the least democratic process, or consideration for the effect it would have on the life of its citizens and institutions, the life they had been led to believe they had fought for in two world wars, the idea of the stalwart island fortress that had been drummed into each and every Briton since early childhood in stories and legends, before they opened the first pages of their history books.
Kings and Queens of England had repulsed papists forces by sword and fire over the course of more than four centuries, then, suddenly, for no reason, without the least protestation, the floodgates were thrown open to an entirely new population, many bringing with them a new and demanding religion with its conflictual precepts.
Tony Blair and his spin doctor had gotten filthy rich all right, according to the Spectator. It was in line with New Labour’s infatuation with wealth: curious for a former member of the Young Communist League, since become a Lord of the Realm, owner of a multimillion loud four-storey Gothic Revival property, with its wine cellar and two-storey atrium.
CANTON
Weekends at their home on Shamian Island in Canton and the proximity of China’s teeming millions were fraying Pat’s nerves. Every time he went beyond one of Shamian’s bridges he was confronted by a sea of humanity. From the market to the main shopping precinct the mass of bobbing, uniform, black heads activated his latent agoraphobia. It was not the Chinese as such, but the fear that some new kind of deadly contagious flu was lurking in their midst. Word of a new virus in Shanghai had got him nervous, more than one hundred and thirty people and been infected and the mortality rate was twenty five percent.
For weekends in Canton, Pat, in contrast to Lili who preferred the high speed train, opted for his powerful motor yacht. Fridays, after his day in the office was complete, he headed for Queen’s Pier where the boat was waiting. The journey from Hong Kong to Shamian took a couple of hours, during which he transformed himself into weekend skipper, steering the yacht, under the attentive eye of his professional captain, past merchant ships lying at anchor, around Lantau Island and up the Pearl River, passing sampans, fishing boats, freighters and ferries.
In June sunset at seven in Hong Kong and as darkness fell the lights of the river twinkled, becoming denser as he headed upstream, then as he approached Canton the darkness gave way to the bright lights of the vast teeming city. It was a great moment of pleasure, freeing his mind from the week’s pressures and business concerns.
At first their moments of matrimonial bliss at Shamian elated him. The colonial house on the historic island, set amongst the elegant late nineteenth early twentieth century mansions, had become their weekend get away. It had been a gift from Lili’s parents in the hope their daughter would remain close to home.
Pat was devoted to Lili and perfectly at ease with her family, but what bugged him, as he put it, was the proximity of the street markets beyond
the bridges. His fear was accentuated by the media scare that announced chickens and ducks were carriers of H7N9, a new form of bird flu, which it seemed could jump from one species to another.
Strangely, Hong Kong with its dense population, never worried him as he felt more assured in his ascepticized penthouse high above the city or in the glass and concrete office tower of his office in Jardine House.
Lili tried to comfort him with the news that only people in direct contact with poultry had been infected, but Pat was not convinced. The idea of an infectious disease on the loose set his fertile imagination in motion. Pandemics begin small, he told Lili, as he imagined thousands and millions infected by H7N9, a coronovirus. Each morning Pat nervously scrutinised the pages of Xinhua, struggling to decipher the characters in the news headlines on the newspaper’s Internet site, searching for details and statistics on the latest outbreak. Donning his mask whenever he left the house, shuddering at the thought of the throngs of Cantonese on the streets and its underground with a coronovirus on the rampage.