Pearls

by Celia Brayfield

  ‘But don’t you yearn to be crushed in someone’s manly arms?’ asked Monty in a vague tone, giving her sister a meaningful wink over the child’s glossy dark head.

  ‘No. I only yearn for the years and the energy I wasted thinking that being crushed in someone’s manly arms was all there was to life. If you want the truth, Monty, I’m almost glad I walk with a limp because every step I take reminds me that I nearly lost everything I care about because I listened to Didi and believed all that junk.’

  ‘I can crush you, Mummy,’ Jamie announced, rolling happily towards her across the floor. ‘I’m stronger than King Kong and I can crush you to bits.’

  ‘Why not crush your aunt instead?’ Cathy swiftly pulled the computer sheets away from his trampling feet as he climbed the sofa to embrace her. ‘She’s letting you win, I can see she is.’

  ‘No she isn’t, she’s just stupid. Will you play with me now?’

  ‘What is all that stuff anyway?’ Monty asked, indicating the printed columns of numbers.

  ‘Sales figures, that sort of thing. Didn’t you go to Japan with the Juice?’

  ‘Uh-huh. Three nights at the Budokan.’

  ‘What was it like?’

  ‘Can’t remember – booze, dope and jetlag. Story of my life. Why?’

  ‘We’re not doing enough business over there and I was thinking of setting up a trip,’ she answered, putting aside the print-outs. ‘Do we have to play dominoes, Jamie? Louis XIV was playing chess with grown-ups at your age.’

  ‘Well he was French,’ her son replied in a dismissive tone before somersaulting over the back of the sofa. ‘And I bet they let him win, anyway.’

  Later, when Jamie had gone to bed, Monty returned to the subject of her sister’s lack of love-life. ‘There must be someone you fancy, surely? Just a tiny bit?’

  ‘No. I walk into the City every day knowing that there are thousands of men all around me and I don’t fancy any of them.’ Cathy wished Monty would stop nagging her. It was not quite true that she felt no attraction for any man. She was aware that now, when Heinz Feuer called, she felt a tiny but distinct thrill. But he was just a playboy, not the kind of man she wanted in her life at all.

  On Monday Cathy approached the senior director for whom she worked, Nigel Fairwell. ‘I think we ought to plan a trip to Tokyo,’ she said. ‘The Japanese traders don’t make use of half what we can offer them, and since we need to establish ourselves in the options market now, before the competition gets really hot, someone ought to go over and sell them positively. I don’t think options have been marketed as well as they could have been.’

  ‘Very well,’ Nigel said without enthusiasm. ‘Go ahead and set it up.’ He was a square-faced, blue-jowled man of about fifty, with broad shoulders and greying black hair.

  ‘The Japanese will never accept you,’ Lord Shrewton told Cathy with amusement as she set off for her first trip to Tokyo. ‘You’ll just have to sit back and let the men do the talking. Japanese won’t do business with a woman.’

  In Tokyo, she found that her chairman and former father-in-law had less faith in her than the men with whom she worked. The Migatto party comprised herself, Nigel and her former clerk, now her assistant, Maurice. The day began with a breakfast meeting at Sam, with the men smelling powerfully of aftershave and everybody damp-haired from their showers. They sat around the hotel table with Mr Shimura, Mr Matsuyama and Mr Kodo, and Nigel, who had been to Tokyo before, introduced them all to each other. Everybody bowed.

  ‘We’re here to talk to you about options, a new product we’ve introduced at Migatto. This is Miss Bourton, who’s our expert. She’ll tell you all about them.’

  While Nigel, in silence, attacked his eggs and bacon, Cathy went to work. ‘Buying options allows you to limit your risk at times when the market is subject to short-term price fluctuations,’ she explained. ‘The idea is that instead of buying a metal itself, you buy the right to buy it in the future – say in three months’time– but at today’s quoted price. Now obviously, if the price rises in the three months…’ Mr Shimura, Mr Matsuyama and Mr Kodo listened intently.

  Their next meeting was at 9.30 am, at a medium-sized brokerage house. Nigel again made the introductions. Everybody bowed. Their host led them to the boardroom, where twelve men sat around the table. At the head of the table stood a blackboard. Their host looked at Nigel with expectation.

  ‘Miss Bourton is our expert – I’ll hand you over to her,’ he said, taking a seat. Thank God I had a flip-chart prepared, Cathy thought, and she picked up the chalk and wrote OPTIONS across the top of the board, then asked Maurice for a separate stand for the chart. She talked for half an hour, at the end of which the twelve Japanese executives bowed again.

  Their next meeting was at eleven, followed by lunch. Cathy’s voice was starting to sound rough, so she talked little while Nigel explained how to order a combination of raw fish that would be acceptable to a Western palate. The first afternoon meeting was at the Hayasaka Corporation, who placed more business with Migatto than all the other Tokyo clients together. This time their host led them into a lecture hall where two hundred men were assembled. Everybody bowed.

  ‘Off you go, Cathy,’ said Nigel, waving her towards the podium.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ she began, noticing the interpreter in a glass booth at the back of the auditorium. Two hundred men reached for their headsets. ‘I’m Catherine Bourton from the Migatto Metals Company in London, and I’m here to talk to you about …’ The interpreter was gesticulating. She tapped the head of the microphone in front of her; it made no sound. At once their host rushed on to the platform to apologize, and there was a five-minute break while a technician was found to restore the sound. Then she began again.

  By seven o’clock, the three of them were in a whisky bar with the last two clients of the day, men whom Nigel evidently knew well. A board of raw fish snacks was in front of them, and a bottle of Japanese whisky beside it. Cathy was the only woman in the bar apart from the waitresses, a situation to which she was now completely accustomed in London, but here it was different, although she could not quite put her finger on the change.

  She said her piece on options for the last time that day, answered the questions, then leaned back on the bar stool in relief as Nigel saw the clients to the door.

  ‘Jolly well done,’ he said when he returned. ‘First class, Cathy.’

  ‘I thought they’d never go.’ She held out her glass and he poured the last round of whisky. It tasted slightly tainted, but at least it was alcohol and put some kind of energy into her exhausted body. The mathematical facility in her mind, which never seemed to falter no matter how tired she was, calculated that she had now gone two full days and nights without sleep.

  ‘They were a bit confused, I think. Normally the form is to drag us off to one of their god-awful love hotels that they’re so proud of. With you in charge they didn’t quite know how to play it.’

  Cathy laughed. ‘Good heavens, I’m sorry if I’ve deprived you of a good time, Nigel. Don’t mind me. I can always go back to the hotel and read a book.’

  ‘Please, you’re our excuse! Those places are so tacky you’ve no idea – all fur-fabric love-seats and heart-shaped jacuzzis.’ He ordered another bottle and the barman brought it with a bad grace, slamming it down on the bar in front of them.

  ‘What’s got into him?’ Maurice, her assistant, a skinny, dark young man with greasy black hair, picked up the bottle to pour the next round. The barman bustled back and took the bottle from him, replacing it on the bar with a crash.

  ‘Very bad!’ he announced in barely comprehensible English. ‘Very bad! Woman make drink for man, no man make for woman.’

  ‘Oh – he’s saying you ought to be serving us. Their women always pour the drinks. The geisha bit, you know,’ Nigel told her. He picked up the bottle himself. ‘Not to worry, old boy, we’re English, don’t you know – foreign devils, don’t know the native customs.’

  The ba
rman screeched with fury and seized the bottle before Nigel could pour it. He made a long speech in Japanese, then screwed the cap back on the bottle with an air of finality and pointed to the door. Nigel shrugged and led them out of the bar. They were all embarrassed by the incident.

  ‘I’m awfully sorry,’ Cathy began, then stopped, wondering what she had to be sorry about.

  ‘No, it’s our fault, we should have slugged it out. We’re paying, after all. The customer is always right.’ Maurice was looking intently at his feet as they threaded their way through the crowds on the pavement.

  ‘Let’s find an honourable Nippon hamburger,’ Nigel suggested, leading them away through the crush of people in the neon-harsh streets.

  The following four days were exactly the same, except that they kept out of whisky bars as much as they could. Nigel did nothing except make introductions, Cathy did all the talking and Maurice took care of the flip-chart.

  They flew back through Athens, where Cathy had learned to anticipate a perpetual air-traffic foul-up. The plane was delayed four hours, and they wearily collected their briefcases and trailed into the transit lounge.

  ‘Miz Caterina Button to information desk, pliz,’ the PA mumbled.

  ‘That’s you, Cathy,’ Nigel said, in a peevish tone which made it clear that he felt that if anyone from the Migatto party had been paged it should have been him. ‘Must be the office.’

  At the information desk they directed her to the VIP lounge, and at the VIP lounge the receptionist called a steward who led her to a side room, a square, concrete cell containing one table, four chairs and a telephone. She picked up the telephone and heard, through the whistling and hissing of a very bad line, the clipped tones of Lord Shrewton.

  ‘I want you to break your journey and take a trip to one of the Aegean islands. There’s a plane waiting to take you on, and I’ll be joining you in three or four hours. I’m having a weekend meeting with Prince Hussain Shahzdeh at his wife’s new place and she’s apparently asked particularly for you to come along.’

  ‘Why me?’ Cathy shouted into the receiver. She knew that the Prince dealt with Migatto’s banking subsidiary occasionally, but was sure he had nothing to do with her side of the business.

  ‘Your celebrity value, I expect.’ Lord Shrewton’s dry laugh crackled in her ear. ‘The Princess collects interesting people, they’re her stock-in-trade.’

  Cathy hesitated. She was exhausted, she wanted to write the report on the Tokyo trip for Nigel to sign as soon as possible, and she did not feel very much inclined to indulge the vulgar curiosity of a nightclub owner, albeit the most successful in the world.

  ‘Can’t you manage without me?’ she asked.

  ‘Absolutely not. This is an order. The place is being called L’Equipe Kalispera – you know her Paris club, L’Equipe? They’re sending a courtesy plane, I expect the pilot will be paging you any moment. I’ll see you later.’ There was a distant click and the line went dead.

  An hour later, Cathy, who detested flying in small planes, bit her lips with alarm as the tiny Piper skimmed the ultramarine sea and swooped over the island, a kidney-shaped pile of brown-black rock fringed with white foam. On the convex side the waves lapped at a sweeping, silvery beach which, Cathy deduced at once, had been artificially created from imported sand. The plane hit the tiny runway at a sharp angle and slewed crazily to a halt. White uniformed men ran forward to take her luggage and help her into a white mini-jeep.

  L’Equipe Kalispera was an exquisite miniature paradise, rocky and bare with spectacular cliffs which plunged into the crystal sea. There was a white monastery building at the apex of the bare, rocky hills and the meandering but newly surfaced perimeter road was dotted with the small shrines built by Greek islanders to thank heaven for saintly protection from shipwreck.

  Cathy was driven to the village, a higgledy-piggledy pile of whitewashed buildings and stepped, cobbled alleys clustered around a circular harbour containing two very large yachts and a flotilla of pleasure boats. Cathy had omitted to reset her watch on the way back from Tokyo, but she judged the time to be around six o’clock in the evening. The sky behind the rim of the rocky hills was tinged with lilac pink. She had the impression that the air was very clear and still; as the jeep drew up in front of a massive studded door of dark wood a single bell began to ring and the sound echoed back and forth across the harbour.

  The village turned out to be a very carefully built fake, which was in fact a vast, rambling hotel, furnished with massive pieces of dark antique furniture. Cathy was taken to a suite of white-walled rooms with low, beamed ceilings; the tall windows led out to a small balcony overlooking the water.

  She began to unwind, feeling the luxurious tranquillity smooth over her tiredness. The huge, dark wood armoire contained a wardrobe of blue and white silk resort clothes which, Cathy was surprised to see, bore the Valentino label. They were exactly the right size, even the delicately tailored bikini and the widebrimmed hat of plaited natural straw. In the drawers beneath she found ivory crépe-de-chine underwear and some very plain, gold Cartier jewellery.

  On the floor of the closet was a pair of slingback beach shoes of woven brown leather which caused her a pang of disappointment, because she still had to wear custom-made shoes. She saw that these had been made by Lobb. Full of curiosity she slipped one on to her maimed foot, and found that it was a perfect fit.

  ‘They must have been made on my own last,’ she muttered aloud in astonishment.

  A waiter appeared with a pitcher of a cold, frothy pink beverage which she judged to be a cocktail based on champagne and natural pomegranate juice. She sipped it from a chilled flute of paper-thin silver and felt deliciously refreshed. A maid arrived and drew her a bath which foamed with a milky essence and smelt very strongly of pure rose oil. She had just emerged from the fragrant water and put on a white robe of soft handwoven Greek cotton when the telephone buzzed and Lord Shrewton announced that he had arrived and would call to take her to dinner in an hour.

  They dined on a sheltered terrace, enjoying the glimmering semicircle of lights reflected in the harbour water. There was a dish of golden Iranian caviar, some slim-shelled clams steamed with herbs and noisettes of tender, pink lamb.

  ‘I’m so glad you ordered me on this trip,’ she told him. ‘I feel like a new woman.’

  ‘Thought you’d come around to the idea – first trip to Tokyo is always a killer,’ he commented. The change of environment had not altered his bearing in the slightest. He had replaced his London uniform of a sober grey suit which always fitted rather badly with an identical lightweight ensemble and his stiffly braced shoulders and tense jaw showed no sign of relaxation.

  ‘Hasn’t the Princess got another resort somewhere?’ Cathy vaguely remembered reading of a gala launch to the new chain of developments in a magazine, but she only had time to read magazines at the hairdresser’s and her sleek, simple bob took barely half an hour to snip into shape every month.

  ‘This is her second venture,’ he explained. ‘The first was off the coast of Sardinia, L’Equipe Falcone. She’s a clever woman. She picks the best architects and creates a first-class leisure complex in a completely natural environment. Then she makes sure she gets the best people to come to it – none of the sort of nightclub aristocracy. Exiled royalty doesn’t impress her either. The Princess only invites the crème de la crème.’

  ‘Such as ourselves.’

  ‘Such as ourselves. I wasn’t surprised she asked me to bring you. She likes beautiful women, but she likes them best if they’re not making a career out of their looks.’

  The next day the Prince and Princess formally welcomed their guests at a reception on the yacht, which slowly backed out of the tiny harbour and cruised around the island, anchoring in a rocky bay below high, steep cliffs, a natural cauldron where the waves churned white on the black rocks and the sea was so clear it was possible to see the sunlight playing on the pebbles of the seabed dozens of metres below the surface.<
br />
  ‘She’s like a mink,’ Cathy murmured as she watched the Princess’s small, white-clad figure moving among the throng of people. ‘She looks glossy and beautiful but sort of savage.’

  Shrewton nodded. ‘She can be a dangerous woman,’ he muttered from the side of his mouth. ‘The French papers call her “The Queen of Darkness”. Some of the things that happen to people who’ve stood in her way cause some unpleasant gossip. The old woman who owned this island, for instance. She didn’t want to sell, and one day she just went for a walk in the hills and didn’t come back. They never found the body.’

  The Princess was moving towards them through the crowd, pausing to exchange a few words with each group of guests, her white silk dress rippling round her firm, slender body. Even in the deep shade of the yacht’s canvas canopy the sun caught her diamond earrings and made them blaze. Her black hair was dressed in a simple chignon, revealing perfect bone structure and an unwrinkled olive complexion.

  In a short time she reached them and Cathy immediately complimented her on the island. ‘This is the most exquisite place I’ve ever seen – and the clothes in my suite, and the shoes – they were such a wonderful surprise …’ she heard herself becoming almost incoherent with enthusiasm. The Princess’s heart-shaped face was at once illuminated with satisfaction and Cathy was touched by the fact that this professional hostess, so full of hard, contrived graciousness, should have remained emotionally accessible.

  ‘I was sure that you would have only business clothes with you, and would prefer to relax this weekend in something more appropriate.’ The full lips, painted fuchsia-pink, smiled widely but the Princess’s black eyes were scanning Cathy’s face. ‘You have done me a great honour by coming here. I wanted so much to meet you, I have heard a great deal about you. I know, of course, that you have to leave tomorrow, but would you care to come to have tea with me before you go? It would be nice to talk quietly alone together, don’t you think?’