A Theory of Love

by Margaret Bradham Thornton

  * * *

  They were already an hour late to Louis’s birthday party at Annabel’s when Helen heard the taxi pull up. For the past two hours, she had been calling Christopher and he had not picked up, so she was angry on at least two counts. She knew Henrietta would be irritated. As he walked in, she stood up. He held up his hands. “Before you say anything—” But she wasn’t going to. She knew something was different, and it stunned her.

  “Sit down,” he commanded her. His voice was not the voice of her husband but that of a man already organizing and assessing his options. He told her about the SFO raid. He explained that they had seized his computer, his phone, and boxes and boxes of files. He couldn’t have called her, they would have been listening to everything. He didn’t want to tell her over the phone.

  “Christopher, you didn’t do anything wrong, did you?” She could tell her question wounded him. He looked straight through her as if he did not recognize her.

  “No, Helen.”

  “But then how could this have happened?”

  “I have no idea.”

  He told her she should go on to the party, to make some excuse for him. “There’s nothing you can do. Alan Symons-Smith is coming over in an hour. We need to draft a response for the press and our clients.”

  She didn’t want to go. “What should I say about your not being able to make it?”

  “I don’t know. Just say my flight was delayed.”

  “I’m not going to lie to my family.”

  “Okay, Helen, then say whatever you want. But whatever you say, don’t get into this with anyone, not even your family. It’s very important that you say nothing. Nigel is adamant about this. It won’t be helpful.”

  “How serious is it?”

  “Very. But until they charge us with something, it’s hard to know. If they do bring charges, and they stick, I could go to jail.”

  She sat down, dizzy. This world that she found herself in was not of her own making. She had entered it unknowingly—perhaps even unwillingly. A world of high stakes—where greed, betrayal, even bad judgment could destroy a life. It was a world where they had to think of analogies to measure money: twelve days versus thirty-three years. Money held a different place among her friends and colleagues. Money was a stress, not an asset. Her friends and colleagues worried about rent, mortgages, school fees, funds for summer holidays.

  He instructed her again to go to Louis’s birthday party. “It will seem very strange if we don’t show up. It’s best to keep things as normal as possible for as long as we can.” He believed this, but he also did not want to be distracted by her. She could feel him getting impatient with her. He was already thinking about other things.

  As she sat at dinner, surrounded by her family and Louis and Henrietta’s closest friends, she watched her brother and sister-in-law. They had a marriage that was organized and orderly. He brought her gifts from his travels, she cheerfully entertained his clients, they celebrated each other’s birthdays. They had Leonora and Henry. “How clever,” people would say when Henrietta said she had one girl and one boy. Their life together was settled and safe. They did not run through life the way Christopher did. Settled? That was not a word for him. She doubted Louis ever came across any deal, any situation, any person who could put him in jail. How could Christopher not know what his firm was being investigated for? Where did he stand in all of this?

  When Helen returned, the door to Christopher’s study was shut. She could hear voices of men she did not know. She didn’t intrude and went straight to bed. She stayed up until well past the early hours of the next day, and still he hadn’t finished. She would speak to him in the morning. But he was up by five thirty and out the door by six.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  London

  The on-site investigation finished at the end of the third day. Nigel told Christopher he thought the SFO was focusing on trading activity, although he could not be sure. He based his decision on the devices and documents they had seized both in London and Milan.

  When they left the office, Christopher asked Nigel, “What happens now?”

  “We wait. There will be more follow-up requests, but that will take place through me.”

  “What’s the worst case?”

  “The worst case is that they bring criminal charges, and we start preparing for a trial. Best case is they return the server, the computers, and all the copied files, and we never hear another word from them.”

  “How often does that happen?”

  “In my experience, not often. But the SFO has recently been criticized for not doing more, so this raid could just be some bureaucrat’s effort to appear as if he’s earning his keep. Marc is pretty high profile, so on one level I’m not surprised.”

  * * *

  “Nigel advised me to hire my own lawyer,” Christopher said to Helen when he returned home later that evening. He was leaning over unlacing his shoes.

  She wasn’t sure she had heard him correctly. “He doesn’t want to represent you?”

  “No, he’s representing the firm. It’s good advice. He told me who to hire.”

  “God, Christopher, it sounds really serious.”

  “It is.”

  “How long will it last?”

  “Hard to say.” He repeated what Nigel had told him about what could happen. He tried to be as flat as he could about the situation. No point in getting her upset, especially as she didn’t understand securities law or the nuances of what they did. He’d told her he had questioned Marc rigorously, Marc had sworn he had not crossed any line, and Christopher couldn’t find a reason not to believe him. He found some sense of comfort in knowing that in the past twelve months, Italian counsel had conducted a thorough investigation of the trading business. Surely Marc wouldn’t be stupid enough to do something crazy after that? But he wondered if Marc figured the best time to cross the line was right after the internal investigation had occurred.

  Christopher warned her about the articles that were going to appear in the Telegraph and Mail over the weekend. Despite his PR firm’s efforts at damage control, Alan Symons-Smith was clear—the articles were going to be bad. Marc and Ghislaine’s flamboyant lifestyle had given the press plenty of material about which to speculate. Marc had courted money that was fast and new, and now the press, who had been waiting for the laws of gravity to engage, were ready to pounce. It was more than an uphill battle. The press was convinced it was impossible to be as successful as Christopher and Marc without being corrupt.

  “You should call your parents and brothers and let them know what’s coming so they’re not blindsided. I should call them myself, but I have to speak to all our employees and clients—we need to get in front of this.”

  The following morning, David called Helen into his office. “I heard about Christopher’s firm. Are you okay? There’s pressure to run an article, but apparently Ghislaine is godmother to Christy Farringdon’s child—so that may be enough to kill it—at least for now.”

  Helen didn’t say anything, she just listened. She was trying to gather some force around her. She knew Ghislaine and Farringdon’s wife were friends, but she didn’t know they were close enough for one to be a godparent to the other’s child. Had Christopher known any of this and not told her?

  “What do you want to do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you want to take some time off?”

  “No, David, I’d go crazy. I just want to work. I’ll do anything.”

  * * *

  Helen had tickets for a revival of Rhinoceros at the Royal Court Saturday night, and she knew the only reason Christopher agreed to go was that he could get the Sunday papers at the Sloane Square newsstand when the play was over. Their mews house was not far from the Royal Court, and they would usually have walked home after the play, but Christopher hailed a taxi. He opened the papers on the way home. She could tell that he didn’t know some of what he read about Marc and Ghislaine. There were several images of
Ghislaine with a bright red Birkin bag held in the crook of her arm leaving a Mayfair restaurant, Marc and Ghislaine aboard a Russian billionaire’s yacht in the South of France, Marc and Philippe Pavesi in Courchevel. “It reads like a parody of a nouveau riche financier and his trophy wife.” He closed the papers and handed them to her.

  “I’m going to call Nigel. Don’t wait up for me,” he said as the taxi stopped outside their house.

  * * *

  Sunday lunch at Willow Brook was worse than Helen expected. She didn’t even ask Christopher if he could come. She knew he couldn’t. No one brought up the articles that had appeared in the Sunday papers, but she could tell that everyone had read them and probably had spoken at length about them before she arrived.

  As the salmon was being served, Helen wanted to shout that no one had died. Instead she made polite chatter with Henrietta about Leonora and Henry. Henrietta said she and Louis were deciding whether to send Henry to Summer Fields or keep him near London. He had a place at Eton, so the question was which school would better prepare him for the entrance exam. Leonora would stay at Francis Holland until she was thirteen and then go on to Wycombe Abbey. Leonora was taking flute lessons, but Henrietta wanted her to take piano lessons, and Louis felt Leonora should choose. Speaking with her sister-in-law reminded Helen of a game she had played as a child—rolling a hoop down a sloped lawn. She would run alongside it, and when it began to wobble, she would brush it forward.

  When lunch was over, her father and Louis asked to have a word with her in the library. Helen felt ambushed.

  “Your mother and I are concerned about what we have read in the papers,” her father began.

  Helen didn’t react. She had learned from Christopher.

  Louis added his concerns. “One has to believe that the SFO would not conduct an investigation if there were not some pretty hard evidence. You should be prepared for that. The papers wouldn’t write a story either.”

  “You’re asking me to tell you what I don’t know and what Christopher doesn’t know.”

  “Helen, it’s his business. It’s not as if he’s a young associate—he’s in charge. It’s his responsibility to know what’s going on,” Louis said.

  “I know.” She understood her brother’s point, she understood he was being protective of her, but she resented his judgment.

  She couldn’t answer the questions her father and Louis asked, because Christopher had not explained much to her. She realized how little she really knew of her husband’s business. He had told her about his meetings, but only in the most superficial way. She was partly to blame, too. She had never been interested in knowing more. He had once said to her that she didn’t respect finance or commerce, but it wasn’t that—it was more that it had never interested her, and now she wished it had. Despite her absence of knowledge, her father’s and brother’s preemptive judgments pushed her into Christopher’s corner, even though she had doubts it was the right place to be. They had never created anything, had never stuck their necks out, had never taken any risk. Louis and Henrietta lived a safe, predictable life. She felt it was unfair to judge Christopher without knowing more than they did.

  “The silver lining is that you don’t have children,” Louis said. He could tell that he had upset her and quickly added, “I only mean about schools. You know how awful children can be to one another. They overhear their parents talking, and well, they can say mean things to one another. I didn’t mean to imply anything else.”

  As she turned onto the M3 heading back into London, she wasn’t so sure Louis had meant that. She felt as if she were trying to investigate a catastrophic crash even before it had occurred. But she had to find the black box, and only Christopher knew where it was.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  London

  In the months after the raid, Christopher was so engulfed by the investigation that it was as if he and Helen lived on two different planets. He focused on clients during the day and in the evenings worked late with the law firm he had hired to represent him. After six months, the SFO still had not brought charges, nor had they given any indication of where the investigation was heading. It was hard to know what to prepare for, so he prepared for everything. He and his lawyers reviewed all the firm’s transactions—backward and forward—looking for any aspect where a violation could have occurred.

  Several months into the investigation, Nigel returned from the Milan office after another full-scale review of the trading operations. Again no improprieties were found. He met with Christopher and filled him in on his findings. Even though Christopher had nothing to do with the trades, he still could be liable. He also knew any charges, let alone convictions, could bring the firm down.

  “From what we can tell, everything is in order.”

  “And none of the trading counterparties have changed?”

  “No, still the same big firms—Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse.”

  “Any with Pavesi and Company?”

  “No, Pavesi and Marc are obviously very close, but with the exception of three business development fees, we could find no transactions.”

  “Is it possible Marc could be keeping some trades off the books?”

  “We went through everything with a team of forensic accountants. It’s possible Marc was trading through a personal account, but in that case, you’re not implicated.”

  “Then what is my exposure?”

  “Well, if everything is aboveboard—and we have no reason to believe it isn’t—then you’re fine. Worst case under that scenario, the SFO will try to find some infraction—some sloppiness—and slap a fine to save face, but it will only be window dressing.”

  “How much longer can this go on?”

  “God only knows. But the more it goes on without charges being brought, the more pressure on the SFO to close the case.”

  Christopher could no longer be sure about Marc. His taste for the high life was directly correlated with the amount of time he had lived in Europe. Different countries allowed people the freedom—if not to re-create their background—then at least to hide it. Nuances did not transfer across borders. Marc’s desire for residential properties with the correct address, long summer holidays along the Mediterranean coast, winter holidays at European ski resorts, increased each year. He never seemed to have enough. And what, three years ago, Christopher had been prepared to say Marc wouldn’t do, he found he could no longer say with any sort of conviction.

  After his meeting with Nigel, Christopher left work in time to have dinner with Helen. He wanted to be with her. Over the past months, he had moved away from her. His world of reason and logic, of numbers and legal briefs, had no room for anything that took energy and attention from what he was facing. His concentration had to be intense and absolute. He was not sure she understood, and he wanted her to know. He had missed being with her, missed how her mind was forever tracing latitudes, how she sailed away from words or ideas to find others and then tacked back to find the place she wanted to be.

  The early March night was wet and cold. Small patches of leftover rain glimmered like shards of glass on the sidewalk and in dips of pavement. On the walk to the restaurant, he told her only a skeletal version of what Nigel had told him. He wanted to get it out of the way. They could not risk speaking in public places.

  They walked to a shoe-box-size restaurant that had just been opened by the owner of a dockside trattoria on the Amalfi Coast, made famous by the number of European yachts that stopped for lunch. As they entered the restaurant, they ran into Fiona and Adrian Campbell—they were just leaving. After they were seated, Helen decided to hang her coat in the hallway outside. As she turned the corner to the coat check, she overhead Adrian saying to Fiona, “Darling, you were awfully cool. You didn’t even ask if they were coming to Saint-Tropez this summer.”

  “Going to jail is more like it.”

  Helen returned to the table, her coat still in her hands. She told Christopher what she had overheard. It had unne
rved her.

  “Doesn’t it make you angry?”

  “Idle chatter.” He tried to make her feel better. “Fiona’s opinion has no effect on you or me. You expect too much. You expect people to behave the way you think they should.” He wouldn’t let her know it bothered him, too.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chamonix

  At the beginning of April, David called Helen into his office and assigned a short article on summer hiking in the Alps. He instructed her to keep the article light for the general reader who wanted something pleasant to consider for a holiday in August. He said he would only print an interview of a guide of happy tourists and not some seasoned mountain climber who railed against the vanities and egos of hedge-fund-fit mountain climbers. “Stay away from controversy” were his last words to her.

  Earlier in the week, Nigel had informed Christopher that he had been given an indication that the SFO was finishing up their preliminary investigation. He would soon know if they were going to bring charges. Helen asked Christopher if she should cancel her trip to Chamonix. She wasn’t sure he had comprehended where she was going. She suspected she could have said San Francisco or Timbuktu and his reaction would have been the same. By the time she had finished her sentence, his mind was already on other things, calibrating the hours, the days, the weeks before him—performing iterations of scenarios she was incapable of imagining.

  “No, you should go. There’s nothing to do here. I’m going to be working late every night. We have no idea if and when the SFO will make their decision. There’s no point in waiting around.”

  A week later, she was sitting by herself at an outdoor café along the main street in Chamonix with her notes and various hiking maps spread out in front of her. She had arranged an interview with a professional climber who supported himself by taking wealthy tourists on advanced hikes. He was delayed, but he had called to say he was on his way. She wished he would appear soon. She had given up looking for him in the people who passed—mostly outdoorsy-looking families with one or two young children or shower-deprived, backpack-laden students. Mont Blanc rose behind her, blotting out the sun—a gigantic stone tsunami that oppressed and threatened the town with its shadow. Helen wanted to finish her interview and leave as quickly as she could.