Lies and Weddings(53)
“Hiyah, I’m so relieved! We were worried sick about you! Francis must have called us about a dozen times. He’s beside himself.”
“Good. He needs to suffer.”
Rosina laughed. “It’s good to make the hubby sweat once in a while, but you should have at least called me. We thought you might have been kidnapped! Madame, don’t you think the beading should go around the back too?”
Arabella realized Rosina was talking to someone else in the room. A voice could be heard. “Madame Leung, there are already eighty-two thousand five hundred sequins and stones hand-sewn onto the jacket. If we embroider the back, you will not be able to sit down.”
“Sitting is overrated. Will you ask the nice ladies at Lesage to do the back for me?”
Arabella cut in. “Lesage? Are you in Paris?”
“I’m at Chanel, in the couture salon. I’m having a fitting.”
“How long will you be there? Can you come to London?” Arabella asked excitedly.
“I have a better idea. Meet me here. I’ll get Kit to send a chopper. How soon can you get to Battersea?”
“Thirty minutes.”
* * *
?
Barely two hours later, Arabella found herself at a table on the glorious outdoor terrace of Rosina’s rooftop garden suite at the Peninsula Paris, alternately sipping champagne and chrysanthemum tea and enjoying a simple lunch of flamed blue lobster with caviar, Sichuan-style mapo tofu with minced Ibérico pork, lacquered abalone with ginger butter and lime, lotus roots with seasonal vegetables and golden garlic, braised boneless beef ribs flambéed with Shaoxing wine, goji berries and radish in a stone pot, and wok-fried rice noodles with Wagyu beef and bok choy in silky egg gravy.
“There’s nothing better than chau ho fan, is there?” Arabella moaned in pleasure as she devoured some of the wok-fried noodles. “Do you know that after all these years Francis still can’t eat his noodles with chopsticks?”
“Of course he can’t. He’s a typical gweilo.”
“Can you believe that gweilo put up all my contemporary art as collateral for the loans? It would have been one thing if he offered them his heirlooms at Greshamsbury Hall, but he specifically gave them my favorite artworks.”
“Of course he had to. All that dusty old British art is worthless. I mean, how much can you get for a Turner these days compared to a good Hockney?”[*2] Rosina sniffed as she chewed on a tender piece of lotus root.
“He lied to me. At any point over the last decade he could have said, ‘Arabella, if you want to dig four stories underground at the Hong Kong hotel to build an authentic Turkish hammam with hot and cold plunge pools, I’ll have to leverage the Agnes Martins.’ But he never said anything! Now, tell me what I’m supposed to do without my Martins? My powder room will never look the same!”
“Just get three sheets of A4 graph paper, frame them in white birch, and no one will ever know the difference,” Rosina suggested.
“You know, that’s not such a bad idea…”
“It’s like my pearl necklace, no one knows it’s fake.”
“Which pearl necklace?” Arabella asked, reaching across the table for a slice of abalone.
“The big ones I wore at the Winter Ball in Hawaii. Who would ever suspect they’re fake when it’s me wearing them?”
“Those gorgeous grape pearls? I assumed they were Van Cleef.”
“You see!” Rosina smiled triumphantly. “You know where I found them? Accessorize.”
Arabella snorted. “In all my years living in England, I’ve never once set foot in an Accessorize!”
“That’s because you’re a snob. There’s a very nice one on High Street Ken.”
“Don’t you own most of the buildings on High Street Ken?”
“Shhh!! No one is supposed to know that!” Rosina admonished her as the two women giggled conspiratorially.
“Now, what happened to all the money? Doesn’t the legendary Gresham Trust own swaths of land in Marylebone?” Rosina asked.
Arabella shook her head pitifully. “Sold to the Portmans in the nineteenth century. Sam tung, ah![*3] The legendary Gresham Trust was exactly that—a legend. When I think of all the prime real estate my husband’s ancestors used to own, and the mistakes they made generation after generation, I think, Why have I bothered to spend all these years trying to restore the fortunes of this godforsaken family?”
“You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to them! I’ve seen the ancestral portraits hanging in that house—each person in that family was uglier than the last. Not a single chin among any of them! And then you came along and now look, gorgeous Greshams everywhere! You’ve infused a strain of beauty into the lineage that will last ten generations!”
Arabella sighed. “What is the point of beauty when we are going to be penniless?”
“You’re looking at things the wrong way, Arabella. Beauty attracts fortune. Your greatest asset now is your beautiful son.”
“My stupid son has been nothing but a liability! Let’s face it, he’s never been the academic type, he couldn’t even get into Oxford. And now he’s ruined things with Solène de Courcy by letting himself be seduced by Eden Tong, of all people. Who knew that little mouse could turn out to be such a hussy? I blame her for everything!”