‘I knew about the trust fund, but I didn’t realize it was so big. I wonder why they didn’t tell me. Maybe they thought – oh well –’ She smiled rather shakily; it hurt her, hurt and humiliated her, that her parents should have thought she must be protected from the knowledge that Cressida was going to be seriously rich, that she would be jealous or upset. How much more pain was she going to have to take today? She pulled back abruptly to the present, to more immediate, more relevant questions. ‘Why wasn’t Julia getting it, Theo, this money? I don’t understand …’
‘Old chap didn’t like Josh. Doesn’t like him, rather. Never wanted Julia to marry him. Thought he was a loser.’
‘I see,’ said Harriet slowly. ‘Well, he was wrong there, wasn’t he?’
‘Not really. Josh is one of my dearest friends, Harriet, but I wouldn’t give him a job as my office boy. He’s no real business sense. He’s only held that job in the bank by the old virtues.’
‘What old virtues?’
‘Oh, you know, family connections, contacts, charm. They’ve lived off Julia’s income to a large extent.’
‘Which explains why Josh doesn’t like talking about the money. Makes him look bad.’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Good Lord,’ said Harriet. ‘Oh Theo. Oh shit. This has been such a truly shocking day.’
‘Yes it has.’ He looked at her carefully. ‘You OK?’
‘Yes. Yes, I’m OK. Just. Maybe Sacré-Coeur will yield an answer tomorrow. Only I don’t know if the priest or whoever will be able to help.’
‘Oh, he’ll help,’ said Theo. There was a darkness in his voice. ‘I’m quite good at persuading people to – help.’
And the expression on his face, the tone of his voice, replaced him for her, made him again the person he truly was, set him in his proper context, as tyrant, tormentor, arch-manipulator, and ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes, Theo, you are, aren’t you? Let’s change the subject briefly, shall we? Let’s talk Cotton Fields.’
‘Harriet, haven’t we got enough to worry about for now? I really don’t know what you’re talking about. Where it’s leading –’
‘I rather think you do, Theo. And from where I’m sitting it leads ultimately to my going absolutely and finally bust. In total humiliation. Unless of course I come crawling to you for money. Which I suspect might just be what you have in mind. Well, I can tell you, Theo, I would rather die from a thousand cuts.’
‘I don’t think you would,’ he said, ‘but still.’
‘I would. Now then. Did you or did you not tell Hayden Cotton not to back me?’
There was a long silence. Then Theo said, ‘Not exactly …’
‘I see. Perhaps you could enlighten me on exactly what you did say then. It must have been fairly specific. He disappeared from the negotiating table faster than a snowflake in hell. Rather suddenly.’
‘Harriet, I –’
‘Yes Theo?’
‘OK. I’ll tell you. I told him to take a very hard look at the figures.’
‘Theo, he’d taken a very hard look at the figures. And he seemed to be able to handle them.’
‘Yes, well, I had a look at them too. He showed them to me.’
‘What? Why?’
‘We’re old allies. He knows I know you. He wanted my advice.’
‘I see. And?’
‘And I thought they’d been massaged. A bit. And I said so.’
‘They’d what! Massaged!’ Harriet stood up. ‘Theo, how dare you! How dare you even imply such a thing? There are slander laws in this country, as you very well know. I intend to use them.’
‘Difficult,’ he said, ‘when you’re bankrupt.’
‘You bastard,’ she said, ‘you rotten, filthy bastard. What’s it to you, Theo Buchan, why do you want me bankrupt? What will it do for you? Flatter your grotesque ego? Take you one step nearer your ambition to rule the world? You disgust me, Theo, you really do. I’m ashamed to have ever had anything to do with you.’
‘Harriet,’ he said, and there was real, raw pain at the back of his dark eyes, ‘Harriet, don’t say that. Please.’
‘I’m afraid I have to say it, because it’s true. I am ashamed. It makes me feel sick.’
‘Oh God,’ he said, and put his head in his hands suddenly.
‘And don’t,’ she said, ‘don’t call in the throbbing strings, Theo, because they’re sounding fairly badly out of tune. I find it hard to imagine that you could say anything, anything at all, that would change the way I’m feeling about you right now. Which is above all nauseated.’
He looked up at her, and his face was literally grey; he reached out for his glass and his hand was shaking so violently he had to put it down again. ‘Harriet, I –’
‘Theo, don’t. Just don’t. I’ve seen them all, all the routines, heard all the scripts. I’m leaving. Now.’ (So why aren’t you going, Harriet, why are you still standing there looking at him? Just walk out, walk away. Maybe kick him in the balls for good measure.)
‘No,’ he said, getting up. ‘No, Harriet, don’t go. I want to talk to you –’
‘Well, I don’t want to talk to you. Ever again. Except just possibly in court. Goodbye, Theo.’ (Well, go on, Harriet, go, leave, you don’t want to talk to him, you want to get out of this room, full of his bloody arrogant, manipulative presence. What’s stopping you? God, Harriet, don’t, don’t walk forward, don’t whatever you do let him touch you, take your hand away from his –)
‘Oh God,’ he said, and the words were a great echo of misery, ‘oh God, Harriet, please, please stay, don’t leave me, I’ll do anything, anything at all, but don’t go.’
‘Theo,’ she said, and she put out her other hand now, the one he wasn’t holding, and to her own intense astonishment gently, tenderly touched his hair, ‘Theo, we can’t –’ and the words came slowly, falteringly, she had to struggle with every one, and there was something else going on now, a warmth, that bloody, dangerous, flooding warmth that he could always create in her, the prelude to something fiercer, stronger. Her body throbbed once, twice, sweetly, powerfully, and she was afraid, afraid of its betrayal, of its longing for him. ‘Theo,’ she said, ‘Theo, we can’t let it begin again. We really really can’t.’
And she pulled her hand away then, hard, roughly, and looked away from him, and the effort was so intense she felt it physically, and then she turned her back on him and walked swiftly, desperately fast, to the door, wrenched it open, ran down the stairs, through the front door, across the courtyard to Merlin’s car and struggled to start it, frantically fearful that he would follow her, catch her, knowing that if he did, she would be lost, helplessly, hopelessly lost, and that if he touched her once more, however lightly, she would take all her clothes off there and then, and just lie down on the hard stones and fuck him and fuck him until they were both senseless.
Chapter 21
Mungo 11:30pm
Financial reality was not something Mungo was overfamiliar with. Like most people who have grown up cushioned by apparently limitless wealth, he had really very little idea what anything cost: he had once been asked how much his weekly outgoings were and he had replied with charming naiveté that he thought about £5. His flat in Sloane Street had been bought for him out of his trust fund; its outgoings were paid for from the same source. Such food as he ate at home he had delivered from Harrods and Fortnums, on the Buchan account, his clothes were all made by the various tailors who served his father, or from establishments where a Buchan charge account had been run for decades, Harrods, Fortnums, Simpsons and Paul Smith in London, Brooks Brothers and Paul Stuart in New York, Trimingham Brothers in Bermuda. His shoes were all made by Lobb. His cars were provided and serviced by his father’s garage, he bought air tickets on his father’s accounts with various airlines, hired cars on his father’s account with Hertz. Many of the world’s great hotels welcomed him, and simply presented him with a bill to sign as he left; the same applied to a large number of restaurants. Theo h
ad accounts with cab companies, florists, theatre ticket agencies; Berry Brothers of St James’s had supplied the Buchan family with wine and spirits for three generations. For several days at a time, the only cash Mungo ever had to produce was for an evening paper or a packet of Polos. Indeed one of the more educational aspects of his affair with Alice had been discovering the cost of eating at places like McDonald’s and Pizza Hut. Mungo was not stupid or even thoughtless; he knew perfectly well what an inordinate amount of money he must work his way through in the course of a year, or even a month, but there was a faceless quality to the money, it didn’t mean anything, no thought went into its coming and going, it was simply part of the process by which he procured things. He thought, he chose, he signed; no decisions were necessary, no choices made, he wanted therefore he had.
And now suddenly, he could see quite a lot was going to change and there might, for a while at any rate, be a great deal he wanted and would not be able to have.
Of course, any such deprivation was not strictly necessary: when it came to Mungo, Theo’s memory was famously short, his attitude notoriously liberal. Had Mungo not gone into battle so vigorously, taken Theo on so valiantly, had he told Alice that it might be politic for them to wait a while before actually getting married, had he seen his property company safely through a full financial year or maybe two, then he could have continued with his way of life more or less unthreatened. But battle, and the more vigorous the better, was Mungo’s style; and having forced the confrontation, made all those brave statements, there could be no going back. Even if he’d wanted it: which he most emphatically didn’t. It was going to be tough, making out on his own, but it would be very very good. There would be no more insinuations about his inadequacy, no more references to his dependency; for the first time in his twenty-seven years he would feel like an adult. And he was hardly going to be destitute: he still had a sizeable income from the capital in his trust fund, he had his flat, his car, enough clothes to see him through the next twenty years, and he had a viable – well, potentially viable – business. He would be all right.
He had spent the past hour in his office in Carlos Place, looking at business in hand, studying the cash flow, doing projections. And confronting a truth that had confronted a great many people running companies over the past thirty-six months: that his incomings simply didn’t begin to match his outgoings. The costs of the offices, staff and advertising were, month on month, roughly double what they were earning. It hadn’t mattered before: Theo had simply made up the shortfall. Now it mattered a lot. Mungo stared out of his window at the subtle opulence of the Connaught Hotel and realized that he would have to get rid of the office and most of the staff. He and the two Sloaney girls he had hired as negotiators (extremely effective as well as pretty) would have to run the business from his flat. It wouldn’t be ideal, but it would be all right. The marketing and advertising manager, the surveyor and the interior designer would have to go; they simply weren’t earning their keep. They were useful in promoting the company, but he could cope without them. He’d have to put a lot more hours in, of course, but that would be OK; he’d enjoy it. Looking through his books, his files, that night, he realized how much he loved his company, already, how much the business fascinated him, how much he wanted to develop it. And he knew he could. He might even study for a degree in estate management in his spare time: Roddy Fairfield, his rather flashy young assistant (he’d have to go too) had one, and there was no doubt he was not only very knowledgeable, he had all the jargon. People liked jargon. And it would be good to study, good to learn something again. He went off into a brief reverie, imagining himself working every night in Alice’s little house while she read and did her tapestry. Well, he would get off to the little house now; it was late, but she wouldn’t mind. She hardly ever went to bed before midnight, usually well after. He’d said he wouldn’t be coming, so she wouldn’t be expecting him of course, but that would make his arrival all the nicer, more fun.
Mungo went down the stairs and locked the heavy front door behind him; the street was deserted and very quiet. The crime wave that was theatening to engulf London, if the media were to be believed, certainly hadn’t broken on Carlos Place. Now he had to get a cab; well, there were plenty outside the Connaught. He might just have a drink there, before he went to Alice. He felt he needed one suddenly; it had been a bit of a bitch of a day.
It was almost midnight when he left the Connaught, two glasses of champagne later. Maybe he should ring Alice, warn her he was coming. Then he thought that if she was asleep, the phone would wake her; he would go to the house and if all the lights were out, he would restrain himself.
‘Nine, Chatto Street please,’ he said to the driver and sat back.
‘Lovely evening,’ said the cabbie.
‘Lovely,’ said Mungo.
‘Long day,’ said the cabbie. ‘Been driving tourists round since lunchtime. Can’t stand them. Except the Americans of course. They’re all right. Speak English as well. Mind you, why they go on coming here I can’t think, the filth in the streets, and the traffic, beats me, when they’ve got the whole of the United States to look at. Course they haven’t got the royal family, that’s what brings them in, and that’s a mystery too, the way they’ve all gone downhill, well, not the Queen herself, but the rest of them, specially the young ones, no sense of duty any more, no real class, terrible, and I’ll tell you something else, I don’t think she should be charging for seeing over the palace, doesn’t seem right somehow, makes the whole thing too commercial, we shall be having a republic soon, I’m sure of it, and then we’ll be sorry, specially when she’s gone, it’ll be Mrs Thatcher all over again, Lady I should say –’
Mercifully Mungo was saved from hearing how the downfall of the monarchy might be paralleled in some way with Lady Thatcher’s demise; they had reached Chatto Street and he was about to pay the driver off and get out when he saw that the small house was indeed in total darkness. Shit. That was seriously irritating. Oh, well, he told himself, if he was going to be a proper businessman in future, he was going to have to get used to keeping more demanding hours. He was about to tell the cabbie to turn around and go back to Sloane Street when he realized he had only just enough money to pay the fare as it was.
‘Thanks, that’s fine,’ he said. ‘Look, I’m terribly sorry, I don’t have any spare change at all, I can only give you a 5p tip, bit of an insult I’m afraid, but –’
‘You keep your bloody 5p, mate,’ said the cabbie, reversing viciously, preparatory to turning round, ‘you must need it more than I do.’
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ said Mungo again. ‘I thought –’
‘I wouldn’t try,’ said the cabbie, ‘thinking I mean, you might find it too much of a strain.’
And he was gone with a squeal of tyres and a blare on his horn as he reached the junction with the Kings Road.
Mungo looked after him, and sighed, and then thought he might as well just walk home. There was no point waking Alice up, she was bound to be tired, and they had all the time in the world after today. It wasn’t far to Sloane Street, only about ten minutes; he would get a good night’s sleep and then – His plans for the next day were gently disturbed by the quiet clunk of a door being shut. Someone leaving a dinner party, no doubt, although there was no shouted bonhomie, no ‘thank yous’, no ‘lovely evenings’. Just the clunk.
Vaguely intrigued he turned round, and saw a figure walking away from Alice’s house. A male figure. One of Jemima’s friends, Mungo told himself firmly, ignoring the tiny movement, a minute curl of fear stirring somewhere in the region of his stomach; she was home for the holidays after all. Considerate of them to be so quiet: unlike Jemima that. Much of Jemima’s behaviour made Annabel Headleigh Drayton appear a dead ringer for Mother Theresa by comparison. He didn’t slow down, then, in order to get a better look at the person; of course he didn’t. He was tired and it was very hot and he just didn’t want to get any hotter, that was all. A nice gentle unwin
ding walk was what he wanted; the fact that the man was catching him up, about to overtake him, was neither here nor there. There really was a dinner party going on in the house he was passing now; the dining room was at street level, the light flooding out onto the dark pavement. It lit up the man’s face as he passed Mungo, and he didn’t look too much like one of Jemima’s friends: he was at least thirty years old, extremely good-looking, his jacket was slung across his shoulders, his tie hung loosely round his neck and he was whistling ‘Candle in the Wind’ very quietly under his breath. ‘Candle in the Wind’ was one of Alice’s favourite songs.
Mungo took a deep breath and walked straight back to number 9.
The house was not in total darkness any more; Alice’s bedroom (front, first floor) had a light in it. Well, maybe whoever’d just left had woken her and now she was reading. She was a very light sleeper. He rang the bell gently, hardly to be heard. He wished Alice would let him have a key; he felt so foolish, having to be let in like a casual visitor. But she was very protective, possessive even, about her domain, her personal space; she told him it was on account of living alone for so long. Well, now they were definitely going to be married, she would surely agree to let him have one. Until they got a place of their own. He’d been thinking of a house, on the Kensington–Chelsea borders, maybe near The Boltons, nothing too grand, but big enough for all of them. Shit, even that would be more complicated now, he’d have to get the trustees’ permission and – What on earth was she doing, why was she so long? Maybe she hadn’t heard him. He rang again, a little more firmly. Ah, there were footsteps now. The door opened; Jemima’s face appeared in the crack above the chain. She looked confused, embarrassed.
Another Woman (9781468300178) Page 39
