tile and plaster fell down onto the lawn beside my feet.
Nowadays, the view from the top of the hill behind the Forbidden City is often obscured by smog; the air of the Beijing summer is opaque. Down below, the traffic snarls and tempers fray. Cyclists clutch at their mouths and turn their faces away from the fumes. In my mind’s eye, I fly westward across the mountains, out towards the dusty orchards, the country villages, and the crumbling loess soil on the plains of central China. Beijing is a vantage point to survey all the desperate activity across China; inland, millions toil in search of a better life. Miners descend in black cages; workers hack at rock faces and dig tunnels for the next intercity highway. Engines roar and sirens scream; the rivers inland have run completely dry, their beds a mass of smashed rocks covered with thornbushes, and there are no trees. Dead fish float about in filmy water. Plagues of river rats ravage the crops, deserts devour the fields, and acid rain falls across the land.
On Beijing’s old foundations, a new metropolis of vast proportions has been thrown together in a few years. Glass spikes rise skyward and elevated highways dominate the landscape now. In a few small areas of Old Beijing, around the lakes and drum towers of the Ming Dynasty city, the government preserved the ancient courtyards, but they cower in the shadows of high-rise apartment blocks. The alleyways there are clogged with rickshaws full of shouting tourists. China has moved on as it prepares to take on its new role in the world. Beijing had become less foreign, less different, and consequently – for me – less interesting.
I had begun to feel doubts about whether I was doing the right thing at the bank. Besides, the children were growing up so quickly. I felt a growing sense of inevitability about a move back to England. But it was with a heavy heart the following summer, after nearly twenty years in China, that I called a shipping agent and we started the journey back.
We had found a place in a small rural village tucked in among the hills at the foot of the Yorkshire Dales. It was close to the place where I had grown up, and at first I enjoyed the familiar sight of the stone walls arching across the fields as they rolled up the dales, the grass clipped short by the sheep, the smell of bracken and heather. Lorraine seemed relieved to be back in the fresh air and countryside and quickly gathered a menagerie of animals around her. She stocked up the vegetable garden and left grain in the little dovecot. The children threw themselves into the outside life, racing in horse shows, falling out of trees, and galloping through the mud in the hills and in other people’s gardens. Three cats and an indeterminate number of horses joined the two dogs we brought back from China.
Stupidly, we chose an old house that was far too big for us and needed an enormous amount of work. The place was so infested with field mice that even the cats despaired; the window frames were rotten and after poking around in the cellar, we saw that part of the foundations were propped up with stacks of newspapers dating from the 1960s. I discovered a row of buckets in the attic for collecting the drips, and throughout the interminable damp of the first Yorkshire winter, the rain cascaded through the roof and ran down the walls, short-circuiting the electrical outlets and providing impressive blue sparks around the light switches. Downstairs, the coal fires barely took the frost off the carpets and the wind howled through the shutters. After nearly twenty years in China, it was tough to adapt to such a different life. I found it difficult to re-engage and fit in.
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
