Lili was up early, she showered and slipped back into the bed putting her arms around Pat, gently waking him up.
“I’m so sorry I went asleep like that. Let’s make up for it now,” she whispered in his ear.
Pat was fascinated by Lili’s body, its smoothness, its firmness. He was fairly expert in the matter. Over the years during his travels he had encountered many women, but Lili was special. Their relationship had started slowly, each a little suspicious of the other, both very different, from distant worlds, which did not stop them discovering they had one thing in common, their desire for the exotic.
Pat, an Irishman from Limerick who had reached the top, was a good looking man. He had not been lucky in love, his wife Mary, once she realized they would not have children, had sought refuge in religion, dedicating her life to the church, it was God’s choosing. Five years earlier, after a short illness she had suddenly died, cloistered in a Limerick convent, a tragic end for the lively young woman Pat had married almost twenty years earlier.
Pat hated to admit it to himself, but it had been a release. He was a non-practicing Catholic, though his upbringing had instilled in him a fierce respect for the laws of the church, as had been his wife, which meant there had been no question of divorce.
It was nine when the sound of Mrs Reilly awoke them again. She was busying herself preparing the breakfast as she often did at weekends when Pat asked her to come in. She lived barely ten minutes away by foot on the other side of Chelsea Bridge on the Ebury Bridge Road.
“Who is there?” asked Lili.
“Don’t worry it’s Mrs Reilly. We’ll have breakfast now.”
The sun was streaming in and the view of Battersea Park from the bedroom window was splendid, the trees dressed in their late spring greenery. Pat slipped on a dressing gown and passed one to Lili.
“I can’t be seen like this!”
“Of course you can, she won’t bite you.”
Pat presented a very shy Lili to Mrs Reilly who was delighted to see Kennedy had found himself a nice young woman. The fact she was Chinese did not worry her in the least. London was a multi-cultural society and even her own children had made mixed marriages, as she called them, meaning with Protestants.