“Lower your voice, Eddie! Everyone can hear us!”
“I give precisely zero fucks who can hear us! I want the whole world to know what an idiot you are! You had a chance to read my grandmother’s will and you didn’t!”
“I have respect for your grandmother’s privacy!”
“Respect my ass! What about me? Why don’t I get the respect I fucking deserve?” Eddie continued to yell.
“I’m not going to sit here and take this abuse anymore! Take an Effexor and calm the hell down.” Fiona got up from the settee and tried to leave, but Eddie grabbed her forcefully.
“Don’t you get it? You’ve ruined your children’s lives and you’ve ruined my life!” he screamed, taking hold of Fiona by the shoulders and shaking her.
“Let go of me, Eddie!” Fiona shrieked.
“Aiyoh! That Eddie is too much,” Ah Ching said, shaking her head as she heard his ranting. “It sounds to me like he didn’t get the house, did he? Oh thank all the gods!”
“He’s an utter fool if he thought Su Yi would leave this place to him!” Ah Ling chimed in.
Just then, the muffled sound of something hitting the marquetry floor could be heard.
Jiayi, the young Chinese scullery maid, flinched in terror. “Oh my God! Did he just hit her? It sounds like she landed on the floor! Someone do something! Ah Ling, what should we do?”
Ah Ling just sighed. “We should stay out of it! Remember, Jiayi, we don’t see anything and we don’t hear anything. That’s what we do. Now, let’s get the first five courses out to the dining room. Quickly! The animals are hungry.”
As the rest of the kitchen maids sprang into action, Jiayi instead made a dash up to Eddie’s bedroom. Fiona had been so sweet to her, she wasn’t going to let anyone hurt her. She crept up the stairs to the hallway where the guest bedrooms were, and as she came to their bedroom, she could hear someone moaning in anguish. Jiayi opened the door slowly and whispered, “Ma’am, are you okay?” She looked in and saw Eddie lying on the floor in a fetal position, his head in Fiona’s lap. Fiona sat on the floor, calm as a pietà, stroking his hair as he sobbed uncontrollably like a little boy. She looked up at Jiayi, and the maid quickly closed the door.
—
In the family dining room of Tyersall Park, everyone had gathered around the massive round mahogany dining table designed by the great Shanghai artist Huang Pao Fan. Anticipating that this was going to be a contentious meal, Ah Ling and Ah Ching devised a lunch that consisted of the favorite dishes of the Young siblings when they were children—pumpkin and prawn noodle soup (Catherine’s favorite), fried rice with lap cheong*1 and extra eggs (Philip’s favorite), steamed pomfret in ginger sauce (Felicity’s favorite), lor mai kai*2 (Alix’s favorite), and Yorkshire pudding (Victoria’s favorite). If it made for a slightly schizophrenic menu, no one noticed except the in-laws.
Victoria threw out the opening salvo as she savored her first forkful of pudding. “Philip, surely you weren’t serious when you said we should sell Tyersall Park?”
“I don’t see any other choice,” Philip answered.
“Why don’t you buy us all out? You have the majority stake, and we’ll sell you our shares at a family discount. This way we all can keep our rooms, and Tyersall Park can be like our private family hotel.”
Alix looked up from her aromatic chicken rice. What on earth was Victoria suggesting? She had no intention of selling her share at a discount.
Philip shook his head as he swallowed a mouthful of fried rice. “First of all, I can’t afford to buy you all out, but that’s beside the point. What would I do with this house? I live in Sydney most of the year—I can’t be bothered to maintain this white elephant.”
“Cat, wouldn’t you like to have Tyersall Park? You can afford it, can’t you?” Victoria asked her sister hopefully.
“Everything about this place reminds me of Mummy, and I’d be too sad,” Catherine mused, picking at her noodles without much of an appetite.
Alix spoke up. “Cat’s right. This house just isn’t the same now that Mummy’s gone. Look, Mummy clearly wanted
us to sell it. She knew none of us would really want to take it on.”
Victoria looked distressed. “Then what happens to me? Am I supposed to move in to a flat? Goodness gracious, I’d feel like I’m suddenly part of the ‘new poor’!”
“Victoria, no one cares anymore,” Alix argued. “Look at all our friends, our cousins—the T’siens, the Tans, the Shangs. No one we know still lives in their original houses. Buitenzorg, Eu Villa, 38 Newton Road, the House of Jade. All the great estates are long gone. Even Command House is now part of bloody UBS. I’ve lived in a three-bedroom condo for decades and I love it.”
Harry nodded in agreement. “I dream of the luxury of living someplace small, like one of those HDB flats! Why, I hear that most of them even have elevators these days!”*3
Alix looked around the table at each of her siblings. “A property of this size has not come on the market in almost a century—this is like Central Park going up for sale in New York. In this neighborhood, the going rate is $1,000 per square foot. We have more than 2.8 million square feet here, and that adds up to $2.8 billion. But I think developers would pay even more, and there’s going to be a bidding war. Trust me, I’ve been flipping properties in Hong Kong for years. We have to orchestrate this very methodically, because this is our one chance to make an absolute killing.”
Victoria gave a dramatic sigh, although secretly she was already thinking of the cute topiaries she would put on the doorstep of her town house in London. “Okay, so let’s sell the house. But we can’t appear to want to sell it anytime soon. That would be unseemly.”
“I think we should wait at least six months. We wouldn’t want to look like greedy pigs,” Felicity stated as she sucked on a fish bone.