When they arrived at her mother’s sitting room, Victoria started interrogating the nurses while Philip and Eleanor went into the bedroom. Alix was sitting in the armchair by her mother’s bedside when they entered. “Oh, Gor Gor, you’re here. Mummy’s just fallen asleep. Her blood pressure was fluctuating too wildly, so they gave her a sedative.”
Philip looked down at his mother, suddenly shocked by her appearance. When he had last seen her at Christmas, barely five weeks ago, she was still climbing on the ladder to the top of her star-fruit trees. But now she seemed so small in the hospital bed, so lost in the tangle of tubes and machines surrounding her. All his life, she had seemed so strong, so invincible, he couldn’t even begin to fathom the possibility of her not being around.
“I think I’ll spend the night here with Mum,” he said in a quiet voice.
“There’s really no point. She’s going to sleep right through the night, and besides, her lady’s maids take turns to be with her all night long in case she wakes up. The nurses also come in to check on her every half hour. Come back tomorrow. She’s usually conscious for a few hours in the morning,” Alix said.
“It doesn’t matter if she’s asleep. I’ll stay with her,” Philip tried to insist.
“Are you sure? You look like you could use a little sleep yourself—” Alix began.
Eleanor agreed. “Yah, lah, you didn’t sleep much on your flight, did you? You look so run-down—I can see all the bags under your eyes. Let’s go home and come back early tomorrow.”
Philip finally relented. “Okay. But Alix, can you do me a favor? If Mummy wakes up anytime soon, will you tell her I was here?”
“Of course.” Alix smiled.
“And will you tell her Nicky was here too?” Philip pressed her.
Alix hesitated for a moment. She was concerned that any mention of Nicky would upset her mother again, but she also felt that her mother needed to mend her rift with him. It was the only way she would truly close her eyes in peace. “Let’s see. I’ll try my best, Gor Gor.”
* * *
*1 Hokkien for “Bengali dog shit.” However, Eleanor is technically wrong in her swearing, since Vikram—being a Gurkha—is Nepali, not Bengali. But to her, there are only two types of Indians: rich ones, like her friends the Singhs, and poor ones, like everybody else.
*2 National University of Singapore.
*3 Cantonese for “brother.”
CHAPTER FOUR
SURREY, ENGLAND
Anyone lucky enough to be a guest at Harlinscourt should wake in time to watch the sun rise above the gardens, Jacqueline Ling thought as she sipped the orange pekoe tea that had just been brought to her bedside on an exquisite bamboo tray. Propped up against four layers of goose-down pillows, she had the perfect view onto the pure symmetry of the box parterres, the majestic yew hedges beyond, and the morning mist rising over the Surrey Downs. It was these quiet moments before everyone began to assemble downstairs for breakfast that Jacqueline relished most during her frequent visits at the Shangs’.
In the rarefied stratosphere inhabited by Asia’s most elite families, it was said that the Shangs had abandoned Singapore. “They’ve become so grand they think they’re British” was the common refrain. Though it was true that Alfred Shang enjoyed a lifestyle that surpassed many a marquess at his six-thousand-hectare estate in Surrey, Jacqueline knew it would be a mistake to assume that he had transferred all his allegiances to queen and country. The simple truth was that over the decades, his three sons (all Oxbridge educated, naturally) had one by one taken English wives (all from appropriately aristocratic families, of course) and chosen to make their lives in England. So beginning in the early eighties, Alfred and his wife, Mabel, were compelled to spend greater parts of the year there—it was the only way they would get to see their children and grandchildren regularly.
Mabel, being the daughter of T’sien Tsai Tay and Rosemary Young T’sien, was far more Chinese in her ways than her husband, who was an Anglophile even before his Oxford days in the late 1950s. At Harlinscourt, Mabel set about creating a decadent domain that indulged her favorite aspects of East and West. To restore the nineteenth-century Venetian revival–style house built by Gabriel-Hippolyte Destailleur, Mabel coaxed the great Chinese decorative-arts historian Huang Pao Fan out of retirement to work alongside the legendary British decorator David Hicks.*1 The result was a ravishingly bold mix of modern European furnishings with some of the finest Chinese antiquities held in private hands.
Harlinscourt soon became one of those great houses that everyone talked about. At first, many of the Burke’s Peerage crowd talked about how terribly vulgar it was for a Singaporean to buy one of the finest houses in Britain and try to run it “in the old way” with its mind-numbing number of staff and all the trimmings. But the landed gentry accepted their invitations anyway and after their visits grudgingly had to admit that the Shangs hadn’t mucked it up. The restoration was splendid, the grounds were even more splendid, and the food—well, that was utter heaven. In the decades that followed, guests the world over began to covet their invitations because word got out that Harlinscourt’s chef Marcus Sim—a Hong Kong–born prodigy who had trained with Frédy Girardet—was a genius in both classic French and Chinese cuisine. And it was the thought of breakfast this morning that made Jacqueline reluctantly get out of bed.
She walked into the dressing room adjoining her bedroom and discovered a fire already burning in the fireplace, a vase of freshly cut Juliet roses arranged on the dressing table, and the outfit she had selected for the morning already hanging against the copper warming rack. Jacqueline slipped on her figure-hugging cream fit-and-flare sleeveless dress with iconic pointelle knit trim, marveling at how it had been warmed to the perfect temperature. She thought of weekends at other English estates, where the bedrooms felt like iceboxes in the morning and her clothes felt just as frozen when she put them on. I don’t even think that the queen lives this well, Jacqueline thought, recalling that before Alfred and Mabel had moved in, her godmother, Su Yi, had sent a team over from Tyersall Park to help train the British staff properly. Asian hospitality standards were fused with English manor-house traditions, and even her boyfriend Victor had been impressed the last time he visited. Holding up his Aubercy dress shoes one evening as they dressed for dinner, he said in astonishment, “Honey, they fucking ironed my shoelaces!”
This morning, it was the chef’s eggs that most astonished Jacqueline as she sat at one end of the immense dining table in the Grade II Heritage-listed breakfast room. “Ummmm. How is it that only Marcus can make scrambled eggs like this?” She sighed to Mabel as she savored another forkful.
“Doesn’t your chef do good eggs?” Mabel asked.