“Salut, Ludivine. Ça va?” Nick said with a smile.
“Comme ci comme ça,” Ludivine replied coquettishly, wondering why she’d never met madame’s hottie French-speaking cousin before.
Stepping into the front foyer, Nick could see that the room had been painstakingly restored to its original style. The floor was an elaborate mosaic of ceramic tiles painted in a William Morris–esque floral pattern, and intricately carved gilt wood screens created a partition between the front room and the rest of the house beyond. The centerpiece of a typical Peranakan front room was the ancestral shrine, and Astrid had honored the tradition by installing an elaborate Victorian altarpiece against the back wall. But instead of placing pictures of dead relatives or porcelain gods within the altar, she had cheekily hung a small Egon Schiele drawing of a nude male figure inside.
Ludivine led Nick from the front foyer through a darkened antechamber into the chimchay—the open courtyard exposed to the sky that provided the natural ventilation and lighting essential to these long, narrow shop houses. Here, Astrid had departed from tradition and completely transformed the space: The roof had been glassed in and the entire space air-conditioned, while the usual concrete floor was now covered in obsidian black tiles, making it shimmer like a pool of black ink.
But the pièce de résistance was the east wall of the courtyard, where Astrid had worked with the pioneering French landscape architect Patrick Blanc to install a vertical garden that soared three stories high. Creepers, ferns, and other exotic palms seemed to grow out of the wall, defying gravity. Against this dramatic fresco of flora was a sleek arrangement of sculpted bronze divans covered in soft pillows of blindingly white linen. There was a verdant, monastic stillness to the space, and in the midst of it all, Astrid perched cross-legged on a divan, nestling a cup of tea on her lap, Zenly attired in a black tank top and a voluminous black skirt.*3
Astrid stood up and gave Nick a tight hug. “I’ve missed you!”
“Same here! So this is where you’ve been slumming it.”
“Yeah, you like it?”
“It’s incredible! I remember coming here as a kid for one of your great-aunt’s nyonya feasts—I can’t believe what you’ve done with it!”
“I moved in here thinking it would just be temporary, but I ended up falling in love with the place so I figured I’d do some work on it. I can feel my great-aunt all around me here.” Astrid gestured for Nick to take a seat next to her on the divan, and she began to pour him some tea out of a cast-iron teapot. “This is a Nilgiri from the Dunsandle Tea Estate in South India…I hope you like it.”
&
nbsp; Nick took a sip of the tea, savoring its delicate smokiness. “Hmmm…fantastic.” He gazed in wonder at the ocular-patterned skylight far above. “You’ve really outdone yourself with this space!”
“Thanks, but I can’t take any credit for it—Studio KO, this amazing Parisian duo, designed everything.”
“Well, I’m sure you inspired them much more than you let on. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a house quite like this—it feels like Marrakech two hundred years from now.”
Astrid smiled and gave a little sigh. “I wish I could be in Marrakech two hundred years from now.”
“Yeah? I get the feeling it hasn’t been all that great a morning. What’s this latest gossip I hear?” Nick asked, sinking down into the plush sofa.
“Oh, you haven’t seen it?”
Nick shook his head.
“Well, I’m very famous now,” Astrid said self-mockingly as she handed him the newspapers. It was the South China Morning Post, and on the front page, the headline screamed:
MICHAEL TEO SEEKS RECORD $5 BILLION DIVORCE SETTLEMENT FROM HEIRESS ASTRID LEONG
SINGAPORE—For the past two years, billionaire venture capitalist Michael Teo, 36, has been mired in divorce proceedings with Singapore heiress Astrid Leong. What was supposed to be an amicable divorce has taken a new twist, as Mr. Teo’s legal team is now demanding a $5 billion settlement in light of recent developments.
Last week, pictures of Ms. Leong, 37, went viral on international gossip sites. The images purport to show Ms. Leong being proposed to by Hong Kong tech tycoon Charles Wu, 37, at the Mehrangarh Fort in Jodhpur, India. Surrounding them were 100 classical Indian dancers, 20 Sitar players, two elephants and Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan, who reportedly serenaded the couple with a Hindi version of the Jason Mraz love ballad “I’m Yours.”
Mr. Teo is now accusing Ms. Leong of “intolerable cruelty and adultery” in his latest divorce filings. He claims to have incontrovertible evidence that his wife has been having an affair with Mr. Wu “since as early as 2010.” It is a sad ending to what was once a romantic Cinderella story in reverse: Mr. Teo, the son of two schoolteachers, grew up in middle-income housing in Toa Payoh, met Ms. Teo, an heiress to one of Asia’s largest fortunes, at the birthday party of one of his army friends. After a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the ridiculously photogenic couple married in 2006.
It was a union that took many in Asia’s society circles by surprise. Ms. Leong is the only daughter of Henry Leong, the president of S. K. Leong Holdings Pte Ltd, the secretive conglomerate said to be the world’s leading supplier of palm oil. Before she married Mr. Teo, she had previously been engaged to Charles Wu and also linked to a Muslim prince and several members of European nobility. Like her family, Ms. Leong is an exceedingly private individual who has never granted an interview and has no social media presence. The Heron Wealth Report has ranked the Leong family number three on a list of Asia’s richest families, and estimates Ms. Leong’s personal fortune to be “in excess of $10 billion.”
Now, half of Ms. Leong’s fortune is at stake, along with custody of their seven-year-old son, Cassian. “My client is a self-made-billionaire—this is not about the money,” claims Mr. Teo’s lawyer Jackson Lee of the esteemed firm Gladwell and Malcolm. “This is about the principle of it all. Michael Teo, a loyal and devoted husband, has been humiliated on the world stage. Imagine how you would feel if the woman you were still married to was proposed to by another man, in such a public and disgustingly showy manner.”
Singapore legal experts feel that Mr. Teo’s legal maneuvers are unlikely to succeed, due to Ms. Leong’s assets being tied up in the labyrinthine S. K. Leong Trusts. But this latest filing has already done its damage. An insider to Singapore’s social scene comments, “The Leongs do not ever like being in the news. This is a huge embarrassment for them.”
“Bloody hell,” Nick said, throwing the newspaper on the floor in disgust.
Astrid smiled at him wanly.
“How does the Post get away with publishing this? I’ve never read so much bullshit in all my life.”
“You’re telling me. Self-made billionaire my ass.”