Over the following months, I took long walks in the countryside in the drizzle, musing about China and slipping about in the mud with the two dogs from Beijing. My mood recovered slightly with the onset of spring, when the banks along the country lanes were scattered with snowdrops and then daffodils. But I still found it difficult to reorient my thinking to the old English ways. How do you explain to one of the local farmers that if your dog strayed onto their land just to enjoy chasing the odd sheep, they would only respond to instructions in Mandarin? I’d often end up yelling at the dogs outside the village post office; they’d cock their heads and look at me in bemusement if I said ‘Sit!’ but were instantly responsive to ‘Zuo!’
Lorraine hardly fared any better as she tried to make new friends, and was regarded as eccentric by the locals. She had kept up her Chinese diet and once, when she went to buy eggs early one morning, the postmistress sniffed and asked – quite rudely, I thought – whether she’d had garlic for supper the night before. In fact, Lorraine ate a kind of Chinese boiled rice porridge for breakfast each day, flavoured with spring onions and spices. So she eyed the group of nosy customers who had gathered at the end of the wooden counter and said, ‘No, I just had raw onions for breakfast.’
In the early summer, the trees awoke and birds filled the hedgerows. On my daily run through the woods, I’d often pause by an old rickety stile and watch the wild deer jumping through the cornfields or the rabbits diving through the thickets. But my mind always flew back to the dusty skies and congested cities, the dry riverbeds threading across the plains, the persimmon orchards out by the Ming Tombs, and the ancient rice terraces on the hillsides where generations of farmers toiled in the squelching mud. I felt stranded at the opposite end of the earth, so I was in a restless, searching mood when I suddenly received that call in the quiet coach, asking me to go back to China.
WHEN THE HORSE HAS REACHED THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF, IT’S TOO LATE TO DRAW IN THE REINS;
When the Boat Has Reached the Midst of the Stream, It’s Too Late to Plug All the Holes
Traditional peasant saying
On the same day that I’d received the call from Mina, Rufus Winchester had driven his hybrid-electric car across Hyde Park towards Mayfair in the perfect summer sunshine. Tall, regimental, uptight, and buttoned down, this former British Army officer was an energetic and blustering serial entrepreneur who had survived a string of botched business start-ups. Things had never quite come right for Captain Winchester. But now, he thought to himself, we’re about to hit the big time.
His company, IHCF, had finished its first fund-raising and had signed up nearly €100 million from investors. Together with his partners, an assortment of earnest, well-meaning, and moneyed Englishmen, he had rented a large Georgian mansion in Mayfair as an office and set about hiring a team. Just like an Old Boys Club, the new headquarters had a ballroom on the first floor with high, corniced ceilings, but all the real work took place in cramped attic rooms where the juniors toiled behind computer screens hedging carbon credits in the City. Downstairs, the founders floated about between oak-panelled meeting rooms with the effortless self-confidence that comes from a good public school education. Excitement about carbon credits had just taken hold of the financial markets and IHCF’s fund-raising had been splashed across the front pages. Winchester took in a deep breath, pushed back against the steering wheel, and smiled. He was in the right place at the right time and he knew it.
Immediately after the first hundred million euros rolled in, IHCF had turned its attention to China. Winchester knew that over the past two decades, thousands of new businesses had sprouted up along the coast of China, and that, together with the old state-owned factories in the rustbelt cities of the north, they were cranking out greenhouse gases like there was no tomorrow. It was fertile ground for Winchester’s new firm and in a couple of months his team had found several big projects in China. By the summer, they’d initialled their first transaction. It was a landmark deal to buy a big tranche of carbon credits from a chemical factory in Quzhou, the biggest ever attempted by private investors. There wasn’t enough money in their first fund to cover the contract so they had to go out and find more. Eventually they managed to syndicate the deal with their chums in the City.
It had been three months of exhausting and stressful work, but they’d finally lined up investors. Deutsche Bank had agreed to underwrite the financing and they were ready to sign the contracts. It was a real coup; a big chunk of the first hundred million would be invested well ahead of schedule and the investors were happy. But much more exciting was that they had ‘circles’ around another €500 million from some big European pension funds to put into a second, much larger fund. ‘Just close that deal in Quzhou,’ Winchester thought to himself, ‘and the money’ll come rolling in. If we get those Dutch pension funds signed up, we could end up with a billion and we’ll be the largest carbon fund on the planet!’ It looked as though the last pieces were sliding perfectly into place just at the right time. But then they got a message from Quzhou. Chief Engineer Wang had called unexpectedly from the chemical factory and said that he wanted to change some key terms of the deal.
When they heard about Wang’s last-minute demands, the investors in the syndicate started to waver. It seemed as though the entire financing structure would collapse. The millions that Winchester had lined up from the Dutch pension funds started to crumble in his hands. It looked as though they might lose everything. A few hours later, I got the call from Mina.
At the end of the conversation in the carriage just outside York, Mina had insisted that I drop by at her offices as soon as the train arrived in London. I could see from the address that IHCF was located in one of the most expensive areas of London, so I had hesitated; I’d come down to London to see friends and hadn’t expected to go to a meeting. I was covered in stubble and in need of a haircut. My glasses were twisted out of shape from one of the children standing on them and I was wearing a pair of torn jeans and a thin cotton jacket that was a bit ragged about the elbows, but I had an hour or so to spare so I took the tube over to Mayfair. IHCF’s offices were in a long row of handsome merchant’s houses near to the American embassy; ornate iron railings ran around the ground-floor balconies and a row of Grecian urns stood out along the roofline. Underneath a white portico, a flight of stone steps led up from the pavement towards a highly polished black door. I’d heard that Condoleezza Rice was in town that day so the roads around Bond Street were blocked off and snarled with traffic. I was glad I hadn’t taken a taxi.
I grasped the brass knocker and, after a few moments, there was a click and the door swung open. Inside, a hallway led towards a pair of tall double doors of elaborately inlaid mahogany. There was a marble fireplace on the left with vases at each end. Pale grey panelling reached up towards ornate plaster mouldings on the ceiling. I sat down next to a low glass-topped table strewn with magazines – Country Life and Horse & Hound – crossed one leg over the tear in my jeans, and waited.
After about ten minutes, the double doors burst open and a tall blonde woman bounded in. ‘How you doing? Thanks for dropping by,’ she said, pushing back her hair with one hand and balancing an armful of files on her hip with the other. ‘This