Wicked Pleasures

by Penny Vincenzi

  ‘What sort of gossip?’

  ‘Well that she had been sleeping around. Worse.’

  ‘Really? In what way worse?’

  ‘Oh – it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Well,’ said Michael Halston, ‘there never was any here. Gossip, that is. Certainly not of a serious nature. And I can’t believe that if your mother had been a seriously promiscuous woman, she would have confined her behaviour to England. Where she was far more likely to become notorious, where the talk would have mattered very much more.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Max. He sounded sulky. ‘I just don’t know anything any more.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve been able to confront your father with this? In any way?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Max. ‘Yes I have as a matter of fact.’

  He suddenly wanted Halston to understand that this was not mere gossip he had been listening to: that he was not simply idly curious, but that it mattered, that it hurt. That there was some reason for his inquiries. ‘My father said that it was true. That she had had lovers. But he wouldn’t tell me any more. And I have to know why. And I have to know who they were.’

  ‘Why? You’re only buying yourself a lot of grief. She’s dead, Max. Let her be the woman you loved, you remembered.’

  ‘But I don’t know who I’m remembering!’ said Max in a sudden agony of frustration. ‘I don’t know who that woman was. What she was really like.’

  ‘Virginia was one of my dearest friends. I miss her sadly. She was a life-enhancer. Things were brighter, better when she was there. In spite of the sadness underneath.’

  ‘Yes, well, she didn’t do all that much life-enhancing for us,’ said Max, ‘she was always away.’

  ‘Always?’

  ‘Well a lot.’

  ‘She needed to be away, Max. Not from you, but from the pressures at home. I only saw her in England twice, with your father, once at a party in London, once at a ball in the country. She was quite different. Tense, withdrawn. Rather brittle. She never asked me to the house. I think she felt she wanted to keep us, her New World friends as she called us, separate from her life there.’

  ‘My father is a really good man,’ said Max staunchly, realizing with a slight shock that he was thinking, albeit briefly, of Alexander as being truly his father, the friend in this enemy territory. ‘He really is.’

  ‘I’m sure. I liked him. He was charming and most courteous to me. Whatever was wrong with the marriage wasn’t his fault. I’m not saying that. It was – well, the nearest you can get, I suppose, is chemistry. The wrong formula.’

  ‘People say,’ said Max carefully, ‘that I look exactly like him.’

  Halston looked at him thoughtfully. There was no trace of emotion in his dark brown eyes, other than a gentle interest.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes, I think you do. Exactly. It’s all right, Max, I’m not about to start dissecting your parentage.’

  Later, as they ate lunch, Michael said, ‘I can give you a few names of people your mother saw quite a bit of here. Mostly in New York. And she had some good friends down in Florida Key West. There was one man in particular she was close to –’he looked at Max carefully –‘called Tommy Soames-Maxwell.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Max. ‘You’ve been terribly kind.’

  ‘My pleasure.’ He looked at Max rather oddly. ‘I’d go a bit easy if I were you,’ he said, ‘with these investigations of yours. They can’t really help you very much. And they might even hurt.’

  Chapter 23

  Angie, 1983

  Angie didn’t quite know when it had happened, but she did want to get married. She couldn’t work out why exactly; but she did. And she wanted to marry Baby. Maybe it was children she wanted.

  It really irritated her, that she loved Baby so much. She would actually have given quite a lot to feel differently towards him. He had so many disadvantages. He was much older than she would have wished; she actually (and particularly as she had got a little older herself – she was thirty-five now), preferred younger men. He wasn’t really all that hot in bed. He never had been – and she had never been able to understand why she didn’t mind that more. And of course he wasn’t nearly so much fun these days; he seemed so down and depressed a lot of the time. And it really got up her nose how frightened of his father he was. She really couldn’t see why he couldn’t stand up to the old bugger a bit more. After all, he had got the bank. Technically. All right, Fred III had moved back in after Baby’s illness, and was making mincemeat of Baby now, but he wouldn’t be able to do that to nearly such an extent if Baby would only stand up to him. Angie had come across a lot of bullies in her life, and there wasn’t one of them who hadn’t run away squeaking when she’d stood up to them. If they were married, she could help him more: make him the old Baby again.

  All these thoughts drifted through her head as she sat in a traffic jam, on her way to her office in Hanover Square. It was a very tenderly beautiful October day, golden and slightly misty. It made her feel tranquil and happy; Angie was surprisingly susceptible to the weather. Baby would be here in another week; she hadn’t seen him since the time of Charlotte’s dance, when he had paid a flying visit to London under cover of some meeting with a banker. Highly unsatisfactory that had been too: he had been so shit scared of Mary Rose or Fred finding out he had hardly been able to get it up at all. She had been angry, frustrated, outraged almost that they were of so much importance to him, even when he was with her, in her bed, and they had had a terrible row, and she had told him she wanted to end it; but then as she watched from the bed as he got up, and very slowly and heavily began to get dressed, his face etched with misery, she couldn’t bear it, and jumped up and took him in her arms and started kissing him and telling him she hadn’t meant it, that she never ever wanted it to end, and he had looked at her with absolute tenderness and gratitude and then started to smile, that great joyful all-encompassing smile of his, and looked totally and utterly different and twenty years younger. That was the kind of occasion when she realized she loved him.

  But what, in the name of heaven, was to become of them? He would never leave Mary Rose, he would never leave the bank – God, that would be awful, thought Angie with a shudder, the millions and millions he was worth, or rather that bank was worth. There was absolutely no doubt in her mind that she would find it much harder to love Baby without his wealth. The fact that she had money of her own was neither here nor there. Wealth meant power; it made even weak men like Baby strong and sexy. And power turned Angie on.

  She had been at a party the night before and met a merchant banker. His name was Christopher Holden and he was tall and dark, very smooth, very Etonian, and he had turned her on too. He was telling her about some deals he was doing: ‘The real fascination about them is pulling numbers out of the air, playing games with them, and knowing when to cash in the chips.’ He told her he wouldn’t even look at a deal that was worth less than a billion. Angie had felt a stab of sexual hunger at those words; she accepted his invitation to dinner (cancelling another date at twenty minutes’ notice) and sat entranced in the panelled dining room of the Connaught, as he talked for three hours about the way he passed his days, the coded contacts, the secrecy, the high-level meetings, the twelfth-hour consultations, the creeping share prices, the tactics, the tension, the gambling, the heady exaltation when everything came together at the right time at the right price. He made it sound much more exciting than when Baby talked about it.

  ‘I have a friend who’s an investment banker,’ she said, ‘in New York.’

  ‘Oh really? Who’s he with?’

  ‘Praegers.’

  ‘Ah. Interesting one. Outside the bulge bracket, it’s one of the most desirable little houses there are. Fascinating combination of being small with a couple of really triple-A clients. I mean, their having Fosters Land is ridiculous really. And old man Praeger still controls it. Fantastic. Eighty or something and running the show.’

  ‘Well, he does and h
e doesn’t,’ said Angie, defensive on Baby’s behalf. ‘Control it. I mean, his son is in charge now. He has been for years.’

  ‘Yes, of course, I’d forgotten that. But Fred the Third came back when Baby Praeger had his heart attack, didn’t he? Poor old Baby. Not quite the same calibre as Dad, I believe. But what I mean is, the shares are all in the hands of the family, aren’t they? Except for a tiny handful with the partners.’

  ‘Yes, they are,’ said Angie. ‘It’s unbelievable really.’

  He looked at her, amused. ‘What does your friend do at Praegers?’

  ‘He’s a trader,’ said Angie.

  ‘Ah. That really is fun. Lucky fellow. I wish I was ten years younger. Those boys are going to make a fortune over here now. Are Praegers going to open a London office?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Angie, surprised. ‘Why should they?’

  ‘I bet you they’re thinking about it. In three years’ time one hell of a big balloon is going up. Everyone’s going to want to be here.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Big Bang,’ said Holden. ‘Heard of that?’

  Angie laughed. ‘Well –’

  ‘Just as exciting,’ said Holden, grinning at her. ‘The Stock Exchange as we know it will cease to exist. Free-for-all instead, buying and selling shares. It’s going to be very interesting indeed. And the banks will want to be in on it, and in order to accomplish that, they’ll be buying the stockbroking firms.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said Angie. She looked at Holden thoughtfully. ‘Well, I must ask my friend.’

  ‘Well, he’ll need to tell them to get their skates on. It’s all going to happen very fast. There won’t be many firms left to buy in a month or two. Look, this has been a really nice evening. Would you like a glass of champagne in Annabels to round it off ?’

  Angie said she would; after several glasses of champagne, and a very arousing half hour on the dance floor, Holden offered to drive her home. He had a black Porsche which he drove extremely fast; Angie invited him in for a brandy. He said he had to get back to his wife, but that he would certainly be in touch.

  The human brain works in a very complex manner. Looking back on her actions over the following few weeks, Angie could see they all dovetailed very neatly into one another, but at the time they seemed rather haphazard and disconnected. She started reading the financial pages in the papers very carefully; she talked to some public relations firms with a speciality in financial and business matters, with a view to appointing one of them; she instructed a City stockbroker, Edwards and Dawson, to open a share portfolio worth £10,000 for her, and to keep her closely informed as to which shares they were buying and selling and when and why; she booked several flights to New York, at four-weekly intervals, telling Baby she had a new client who was looking for property there; and she left her contraceptive pills to gather dust upon the bathroom shelf.

  Chapter 24

  Charlotte, 1983–4

  Charlotte had always been a star. She had been top of every class in every school she had ever attended; she had always scored straight As in exams; she had gained a double first at Cambridge. She had won enough rosettes to cover an entire wall in the tack room; she had a golf handicap of seventeen, she had been tennis champion of her school, house captain, deputy head girl, a leading light in the Union, a major contributor to Granta. She had been, moreover, she knew, a tower of strength in the family, had taken over in many small ways from her mother in duties on the estate; she was popular, she made people laugh, she was pretty, she was admired. Moreover she had been her grandfather’s favourite for the whole of her life, and much talked about in her role as heiress elect. She had confidently expected to arrive at Praegers in this capacity, follow a short induction programme, and then settle into some junior but important job, using her brain and the considerable administrative skills she also knew she possessed to their full capacity. Instead she found herself appointed a junior associate, seconded to a senior vice president, doing grunt work. And grunt work meant very very menial. It meant sitting at her boss’s desk, listening to his conversation, in a respectful silence; it meant taking minutes of meetings; it meant setting out the meeting room with paper and pencils and calculators; it meant Xeroxing; it meant proof reading; it meant stapling pages together; it meant making coffee; it meant putting a presentation book together at three in the morning; it meant never getting in after seven thirty in the morning, and often staying until after eleven at night; it meant having a bleeper with her wherever she went, even at weekends, in case she was needed for some extra urgent bit of grunt work. Occasionally it meant doing something just a little bit interesting like analysing the rate a stock had been trading over a twenty-year period, or doing financial models for a company, or phoning around individual shareholders to enlist their support in a bid. But mostly it was boring. And exhausting. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Fred III, in more than usually Machiavellian mode, had decided the vice president she worked for was Gabe Hoffman.

  ‘I know you two have met a few times,’ he said, when he took Charlotte down to Hoffman’s office.

  ‘Yes, we have,’ said Gabe, holding out his hand to Charlotte. ‘Most memorably on Fred’s birthday. Welcome.’ He smiled at her, revealing his perfect teeth; but his eyes did not smile and they did not say welcome either.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Charlotte, returning the handshake briefly. ‘I’m certainly looking forward to working with you.’

  ‘Lesson number one,’ said Gabe, smiling the same cold smile. ‘Not with. For.’

  From that moment it was war.

  Gabe was outstandingly unpleasant to her. If he had been a woman, she would have described him as a bitch. He was critical, demanding, discourteous. While she would not have expected him to stand up when she came into the room, or hold the door open for her, she was not prepared for the way he interrupted her when she was talking to shout at someone else across the room, ordered her to put the phone down mid-conversation because he wanted something done, hauled her in early or at weekends, and then kept her waiting sometimes for over an hour before he appeared himself. He would exclude her from any conversation, any discussion even, unless it was necessary for him to explain something to her; ignored any comments, crushed any suggestions she made with an abruptness that in the very early days at least brought tears to her eyes.

  To make it worse, he was doing very well at Praegers. His star was indisputably rising. Fred III thought he was wonderful. His father was due to retire in five years’ time and it was generally assumed that when that happened, Gabe would be made a junior partner.

  What made it almost worse than anything was that every other female in the bank was dying of love for Gabe. Much as she loathed him, Charlotte had to admit that he was extremely sexy. He was thirty-two years old now, and patently carnal. She remembered him as being tall, but he was very big now, heavily built, with huge shoulders, and yet lean and surprisingly graceful when he moved. The combination of that with his size was extremely sensual. It was said that he could dance extremely well, and his game of tennis was exceptional. He had a year-round tan, and sailed almost all year from the family house in Sag Harbor. His brown hair, which was cropped very short, somehow still managed to look unruly, and his eyes, which were exceptionally dark and ringed by lashes which would have looked girly on anyone else, could, when turned on most members of the female race, inspire an almost slavish desire to please. They did not inspire that in Charlotte.

  Charlotte would have given anything to displease Gabe Hoffman: only she didn’t dare.

  And then there was Freddy. Freddy was not rude to her as Gabe was, he was icily polite in public, and in private he ignored her totally. Charlotte found this initially almost amusing; as her morale crumbled, she began to find it horribly hurtful. He and Gabe often lunched together, and had endless early morning meetings; Charlotte had a shrewd suspicion that Gabe did not actually like him very much, but he went along with him, in a typically pragmatic Gabe way. Freddy
would after all one day be his boss. And they were united over one important matter: a determination to put her down, to disabuse her of any notion she might have of her own importance, to impress upon her that her life at Praegers was never going to be anything else but tough.

  She was very lonely. She hadn’t yet made any friends in New York; she had not yet found any kindred spirits at Praegers, and as she was working virtually round the clock she was hardly able to form any relationships outside it. The young men at Praegers were wary of her, daunted by her relationship with the family, her ultimate destiny in the bank and her attitude, which they all agreed was typically British and high-handed. And there weren’t any other women, so far as she could see, except secretaries, and she had nothing in common with them.

  She was staying, very reluctantly, with Fred and Betsey; she felt in her bones it was politically unwise, but she really did not feel brave enough to move into an apartment of her own yet, and she had no time to look anyway.

  After six weeks she returned home for a few days, taking advantage of the Thanksgiving holiday period, excusing herself from Betsey’s invitation to join them at Beaches with the explanation that Alexander was lonely and depressed. She put up a brave front to him, and to Max, saying it was fascinating and fun, that the work was a breeze, that she was learning loads, that she had never felt more sure that she was doing the right thing, but on the day before she went back she had lunch with Charles St Mullin at Simpsons in the Strand and surprised and shocked herself by bursting into angry tears.

  ‘I hate it. I hate everything to do with it. It’s boring, my boss is a pig, I don’t have any friends, and everyone treats me as if I was some kind of a puffed-up princess.’

  ‘Well,’ said Charles, surprisingly calm, passing her his handkerchief and then her glass of wine, ‘you can hardly blame them. You may not be puffed up but you are a princess. It’s not your fault, but you are. And even this boss of yours, this Gabe, he must find it a little hard to take. That however hard he works and well he does, he can never hope to be more than a partner with a very minority shareholding in a business you’re going to own and run.’