Pat Kennedy’s world had changed. In barely a dozen years he had become a rich man, a very rich man, rich beyond the wildest dreams of most men. His fortuitous association with Michael Fitzwilliams and then Sergei Tarasov had been the catalysts for his success. Why fortune chose certain men was difficult to explain. But, it had always been like that; from Carnegie to Vanderbilt, from Gates to Zuckerberg.
He was not yet a billionaire, but there seemed little doubt he would soon be a member of that exclusive club. However, the greatest change in his life was not his wealth, it was the almost miraculous arrival of a baby daughter, Lily Rose, almost eighteen month earlier that had transformed his life; his vision of the world. It gave him a sense of accomplishment and a raison d’être.
Until that moment, at least until the day Lili had announced the news she was expecting, the idea of having a family had been long forgotten. His first marriage back in Limerick had not produced children, it had not been for the want of trying. Whose fault that had been was unimportant, if fault there was. It was the will of God, his mother had sadly told him, that was how her generation talked about that kind of thing in Ireland.
The couple tried everything: doctors, specialists and quacks, before they turned to prayer: that is to say Margaret. Finally, they had each ended up leading their own lives. He as a banker in London. She dedicating herself to charitable work for the church. It was if they had thrown their respective energies into a kind of diversion to forget the family they had imagined, and which should have been so natural.
Had Margaret’s early death changed anything in his daily life? If he had been asked at the time he would have been forced to admit no. In the period leading up to her illness she had become a friend, a sister, a cousin, or something like that.
He had invested all his energy into transforming the bank into an international group. He with Michael Fitzwilliams had ridden out the storm, confounded the doomsters predictions, as had Ireland, Italy, the EU and the euro.
Then Lili entered his life and offered him the unimagined joy of fatherhood. Their daughter Lily Rose was nothing like he had ever imagined, her smooth black hair, her brown oval eyes, her skin was white, but not that ghostly Irish white.
Their London home was all he could have ever hoped for, a vast mansion on Cheney Walk, overlooking the Thames, a stone’s throw from the functional London bachelor pad he had become used to across the river in Battersea.
Cheney Walk – London
Whenever he watched his daughter sleep he wondered what the future held for her. Whatever happened she would not be one of the have nots, he would make certain of that. She would know two worlds, London and Hong Kong, Europe and China.
China was not however a world he had begun to understand. His Irish upbringing, in provincial Limerick, was far removed from what he experienced in the furore, if not chaos of southern China. He like many ambitious men, who had risen to power and fortune from humble origins, not only owed the extraordinary story of his success to the vagaries of fortune, but also his strength and determination.