by Mari Reiza
I had concluded that Lucy’s self-confidence must come from a mixture of things. I hated those who had the good fortune of inheriting wealth then defying it, turning leftist and deciding that the world should be a fairer place. But that was not exactly Lucy. When I had asked her about it, she said it was inevitable to want to try the other side, that when she was fifteen the temptation to go out with Harley groupies and painters was too much. She had not even meant Picasso-like painters: ‘I mean drug-addicted losers on single-day door paint jobs.’ She had made me laugh.
I could have imagined her wearing Yves St Laurent to deliver separatist leaflets in her youth, trying anything and everything. ‘Jewish princesses. Arab boys. Black chicks,’ she would say. She was so hungry for the world.
‘It will be good to give her the opportunity,’ Lucy was back to talking about Mandy.
I couldn’t say no, even if I hardly wanted Mandy to come between us.
It turned out in the end that Mandy was returning to Canada, divorcing the dentist she had been married to but didn’t live with, the one from Bristol. I thought of that saying of lying more than a dentist when I was told, then of how that would happen to me and Miriam soon, officially divorcing. But I was happy as castanets about Mandy’s decision, which meant that I had Lucy all to myself again.
The day of the conference eventually arrived, a rainy morning in September.
My speech was in good shape and I had my best suit on. I was building a luxurious collection on my Father’s salary. I had had a haircut, put on serious gold cufflinks, my Berluti shoes and a red Hermès tie. I had even gone out the weekend before to get a decent watch following Carlo’s suggestions. In the end, I went for the fifth down his list, as anything above that was extortionate. Carlo was definitely in another league. ‘God bless Goldman Sachs!’
I had obviously told Lucy that she should come to the talk and stay for the whole conference, and charge it to one of my project codes. I had rehearsed my other speech, the one inviting her to dinner as a last-minute impromptu thank you. I had booked at Quo Vadis, then panicked that it was a bit much, too pretentious. I thought Yauatcha looked more fun, younger, more informal. I had avoided Italians on purpose after the fiasco with Alakrita.
But Lucy sent an email overnight. She had gone into hospital, nothing alarming but she would be off for a couple of days and wished me luck. She had asked around not to waste her conference pass, and Rahim had agreed to attend instead of her.
‘Of course he has, that slimy creature who does anything to rub shoulders with our elite!’ I shouted at my iPhone screen.
‘It is all arranged with the organisers,’ Lucy wrote.
So I was stuck all day with the newly-slim, Ken-like, dented, vain brute in love with his own reflection. I cancelled Yauatcha and sulked all day. But I would try again.
Lucy and Peter
How do we get away with knowing so little? I was pondering, slouched in my office chair.
The ‘question everything answer nothing’ strategy, I told myself, as old as Euripides and much overused by Trojan, I didn’t fail to notice; the genial, wacky spur-of-the-moment ideas that made no sense and would be disregarded immediately, was my second mental bullet point, which prompted me to get up and start writing on my flip chart. The second strategy I loved because the recipients would always praise you as they could not be sure whether they were at fault themselves for not understanding the solutions you were offering. Nal and Mike were heavy users of this strategy.
‘There is also the focusing on the detail approach,’ I said aloud as I scribbled furiously on the A0 white paper.
This one meant picking on irrelevant page number, font and potential spelling errors after a quick scan of miniature documents on our newly provided iPhones. Yes, most Fathers had moved from BlackBerry to iPhone for exactly that purpose (and for the Ryder Cup’s app).
‘There are undeniably a myriad of ways,’ I was musing under my breath, but the easiness with which we got away with it was still surprising me when Lucy stormed in more furious than usual.
I immediately tore the flip chart page, embarrassed, and invited her to sit down.
She barked at me.
‘Peter-Moses is living like a movie star,’ was her opening line. ‘Even something simple like dining arrangements are hell with him. Does he think he is the US President?’
‘Well, he could be the next CEO of Enterprise,’ I replied.
Peter was an Alister at Enterprise and had the right to create grief. In fact, there was an expectation for grief around him and people would have been disappointed if they hadn’t got any. People, but not Lucy.
‘He has repeatedly rescheduled my welcome dinner for nearly over a year,’ she was furious. ‘It hasn’t happened yet.’
God, I was pleased! I hated her over-obsessing about being close to Peter, probably as much as I once had myself. Although on second thought, was this Peter’s way of courting her?
‘On every one of the dates,’ Lucy continued, ‘Luz...’
‘As in the-light-that-takes-you-to-God,’ I added, making her smile.
‘Yes, she has cancelled at short notice. This morning, she called first to switch the location of the dinner because Peter was already having sushi for lunch, next to move it closer to his hotel as he has not seen his darling second wife who has travelled down with him for the week and expects a fuck, then to cancel the meal entirely,’ her rage was so strong it almost got in the way of her words coming out properly.
I suddenly thought, is Peter in London? And I was immediately surprised and hurt not to know anything about it but hid it quickly.
‘He needs to be nice to his wife,’ I added, happy to justify his behaviour. ‘You would not like him to be disinherited by his daddy-in-law, it would make for a very unhappy man.’ It seemed I was enjoying ridiculing him in front of Lucy. I had got to know that the Bald Cypress house had been bought with Peter’s second wife’s money, which meant that I had, perhaps, not been paid that badly in the last year after all. It had cheered me up at least a bit after having seen him at it on that flap with Alakrita.
‘Wait,’ Lucy added, ‘Luz called a fourth time to put the dinner back on, starting thirty minutes late and capping it to forty-five minutes because Peter has taken another engagement after that!’
Luz had apparently said to Lucy, ‘You know these guys, they are so busy, do not take it personally,’ because she herself knew that she worked for God and that there was nothing she could do about it. Lucy, however, knew that she was ‘a person’ and that she was going to take it ‘fucking personally’.
I thought again that I hadn’t even known that Peter was in London for the week and was pissed off not to have received a call from him, and that Lucy’s response was too strong even for her standards, unless...
‘Vittal, we have been getting on now for over a year and I have not got so much as a dinner,’ her voice brought me back. ‘What am I talking about, not even a drink at the pub? Is he so fucking busy? Is he fucking Shiva? And then he thinks that he is my mentor and I owe him.’
I decided to let her moan.
‘I am not sure about Enterprise mentoring techniques,’ she added, ‘but in the last month when I was in New York, I caught Peter ruffling his hair and opening his shirt before I went into his office.’
I made an inquisitive face. Where was this going?
‘He then poured himself a whiskey.’
Did Peter have a drinks cabinet in his office? I had no idea that we were allowed to do that.
‘Then two whiskeys.’
‘And?’
‘Then he put his hand on my shoulder and said that I was like a rock to him, that he was going to make Enterprise work for me.’
I was starting to be uncomfortable but could not pinpoint my exact feeling.
‘What a tossing pikey with an addiction to veneration!’ she shouted straight at my face, about Peter and I congratulated her on her line, giving myself time to take things in.
<
br /> But she was not having any of my irony. She cut me off abruptly to describe how next Peter’s trousers got caught on the side of his office table, and she would not bend down to help or it would have looked like she was giving him a blowjob.
‘If he just wants a suck,’ she added, ‘he’ll have to ask and at least take me out for dinner first.’
I felt like a hot iron.
Peter had a drinks cabinet in his office, and he could ask for a suck if he wanted one. Something was going on between those two and I was frozen with jealousy; I had pinpointed the feeling by now. I could tell it was plain jealousy...
Then Lucy got an unexpected call on her mobile and left and I was almost relieved.
Trojan is fucking Gert Rottenmeier
Gert wanted to be sweet but it was a genetic impossibility, except if Trojan was around.
Some of us had been convinced for a while that they were an item and had placed bets. Alakrita had of course been the first to spread the gossip. I had five hundred dollars on Trojan dumping Gert as soon as he didn’t need to know what Bev was up to anymore. ‘Isn’t that the attraction, Gert being Bev’s right hand?’ Alakrita agreed with me wholeheartedly.
Anyway, there was no future. Gert must have felt it was improper to desert a husband who had turned down a career as a Formula One mechanic in Germany, to fulfill her dream of living in the English countryside, meaning the London outskirts. And for Trojan it was not as much a matter of moral decency as the fact that he could not do without the professional happy family portraits at Christmas. I could have bet on my life.
Trojan had apparently said recently to Lucy that she should always look up to Gert. ‘Gert’s experience and integrity are second to none,’ he had said, ‘as well as her commitment to Enterprise.’
Personally, I didn’t see much integrity in fucking someone else’s husband. I had discussed it with Alakrita again but on this point she had disagreed, and expressed that she thought it definitely provided experience and showed commitment to the firm to ‘suck that moron’.
The truth was, though, that Trojan and Gert were suited as a couple. Gert was full of contradictions. Nothing wrong about that in my view, so was Lucy. But for Gert they were not the kind of contradictions that cheered me up: Gert hated people who wasted her time airing problems but it also disturbed her when people were too happy; she wanted PEN-ers to do as they were told and be grateful for having her to guide them as their governess, but she also wanted them to choose themselves what they were doing; she detested people who did not fear to venture out but insisted that these were exactly the people we needed, then made sure that they left Enterprise.
Gert was the most painful spoiler, a sergeant whose worries had aged her fast. She definitely seemed the kind that had existed before as a mean literary character; she made me think of the words of Lewis Carroll on the essence of all governesses.
But in the eyes of Trojan, Gert transformed into the most loyal architect, securing that bridge between him and Enterprise’s pinnacle. We had a woman who didn’t know what she wanted and a man who didn’t know who he was, both hating the human condition, a match made in heaven.
And you could feel it, that they yearned to grow old together, that they would spend hours making eyes at each other across a plastic table in a derelict empty cafe by a pebble beach of the North Sea, enjoying a humble cup of tea, listening to the strident seagulls and looking out to the English drizzle, before deciding whether to have a short walk and open their picnics by the bench or perhaps have them in their car. Trojan would angst over whatever decision they took, to be later reassured by the authority of his governess.
You could further imagine how behind closed doors this was a romance of a kind, the fiction of two perverted minds. Trojan became Gert’s Herr Kushemski and supplicated to her, ‘Faites ce que vous voulez de moi. Make what you want of me. Fuck me like I am pathetic. Punishment is what I want.’ And he yearned for her pain, pain being the most sensual thing that he had ever experienced. He loved her with sharp intensity as his Venus, as his muse, as they exchanged those café symboliques (symbolic coffees). ‘Une petite copulation (a small fuck)?’ Next Gert’s gruff sexy voice would say softly in his ear, ‘Don’t marry her but fuck me, fuck me like you are scared of me.’
But Trojan would never marry anyone other than his wife, with whom he had already made children like himself, so he could one day die without regret. However, for those robbed minutes with Gert behind closed doors, he could let himself go in the safety of his governess, so that they became Adam and Eve in an alternative Genesis, eating tons of apples, with a potency of bliss that could make black cats levitate.
‘Il faut être raisonnable? You need to be reasonable?’ he would ask himself.
‘Au diable la raison. Fuck reason,’ she would answer him.
And Gert would manipulate Trojan who would manipulate Gert, and it kept them both alive, turned on, centre stage, with the lights turned off.
The good Lord found him and gave him to a woman, Trojan would say to himself. ‘Gert, be my governess, be my master, be my muse, my Botticelli’s Venus, my Venus de Milo my Vénus à la fourrure.’ He could even make verses for her.
It was such a spectacle for the likes of the Trojan and Gert we had known, for the likes of Enterprise, and we all stood there mesmerised that two such reasonable people could have such a thing going on. But Gert and Trojan had both discovered that they would find no real shame in cheating on their spouses. Until…
‘Until the illusion we built in secret, out of our deepest desires, breaks, pops! Like a hope bubble, a giant soap bubble of that merchant in Portobello Road.’ Gert made Trojan into the most unlikely of poets.
And we were all there to see it pop.
One day Trojan’s wife was sick. It was January. The doctors said it was depression and that she could not care for her children.
In an instant, Gert became an unwitting accomplice to a dreadful crime entangled in a spider’s web, a young woman trapped in a prison of guilt.
But aren’t there always so many versions of the truth?
We all knew in our hearts that Gert couldn’t stop herself wishing depression finished off Trojan’s dysfunctional spouse who didn’t fit the programme. Trojan was such a charismatic man, with a brilliant life, a dazzling career ahead of him and nothing should stop him. And this wife, ‘She had never known about us. Had she?’ Gert fretted, because she knew the onus of causative guilt could not be shifted so easily. ‘Does love not justify the most selfless of actions? Who is going to judge me? Are there any witnesses to my thoughts?’
We all were.
We all rejoiced in the governesses stumbling down, such is human nature.
But she was the governess and she had that capacity to push forward regardless, a heroic trait at Enterprise, one that perhaps sometimes we should have ruthlessly interrogated. It would not work this time though. We all knew that a disgraced woman had fucked up her future.
‘And Trojan?’
He too pushed to heal, helped by Enterprise mentors and leaders who had held him in high regard and now felt only pity for him. ‘But what if the damage went further, into the core of Enterprise values?’ colleagues questioned themselves and felt personally threatened. So Trojan was encouraged to gain forgiveness and to forget the past to remake the future. It was unfair that he got so much more help than Gert herself, perhaps, that whilst a disgraced woman had destroyed her future, a man could easily erase his past and rise again.
Gert wouldn’t have it.
‘If only that were possible!’ she shouted viciously to Trojan. She obviously had plans to make the world understand, how kissing a forbidden woman in a dark corner in the back of someone else’s snap that gets posted to Facebook is not bad luck but a holy warning of how pathetic he was.
Had we seen a bit of justice from the God of small things? Not that the whole episode made any difference to Trojan’s character, nor did it make him question his attitude to humanity
or thirst to hurt most people. He only went back to his wife out of pure fear of God, and of Enterprise. Perhaps they were both the same thing to him.
Peter golfs around the world
Peter was badly affected by sob stories like Trojan’s. Maybe he thought it could have been him instead of Trojan, or perhaps things were not going so well with his second wife, or he was furious that he could not get Lucy into his bed. The fact is he called me that spring to tell me that he was off, the first nine days of TOR (time off religion) in his whole career, he said.
‘I feel luxurious and decadent and have decided to indulge in my main passion after salmon fishing and yacht sailing – doctor golf,’ he was putting on a posh accent.
‘Excellent,’ I was happy to have him away for a bit because after Alakrita and now Lucy he was getting on my nerves.
But apparently he was undecided on the packing. Did he really need to discuss that with me?
‘So far I have a green limited edition waterproof golf cap, three luxury polo shirts in a tar-heel blue, and a Locharron tartan cashmere scarf with matching trousers.’
‘Ok,’ I was lost for words.
‘I need urgently to go shopping!’ he exclaimed and added something about him definitely requiring, without a doubt, six different combinations for each three-day tournament, and a crisp and incisive look being essential for him to win.
‘I know golf fashion is a multi-million-pound global industry, but you do not need to fuel it all by yourself, Peter,’ I was hoping the fact that I had become less tolerant of him wouldn’t show.
But of course, he had not called to discuss golf fashion… had he?
‘My tour starts at the exclusive Cypress Point Club, followed by Pebble Beach in California, which has outstanding views of the rocky shores, and finishing at St. Andrews, embedded in the stormy North Sea dunes.’
