by Rosie Thomas
‘It’s all right. I liked him.’
Harriet had certainly liked him, especially for his gloomy humour as Martin had hustled him away. She would have defended him against any of these people, except for Robin, but it was hard to forgive his implication of Linda.
When she came back downstairs she found that several guests had left, and the remainder were in the drawing room, sitting or standing in a circle around the child. She looked up as Harriet came in, with clear relief in her face.
‘I’d really love to go home.’ Her knees were drawn up and her locked arms thrust down between them. She looked small and thin, and shivery with cold. Martin Landwith was patting her shoulder, as if he couldn’t think what else to do.
Harriet glanced at him. ‘Where’s …’
‘Taking a little nap,’ Martin said dryly.
Harriet went and knelt in front of Linda so that their faces were level. ‘Is there anyone at home?’
‘Ronny’s there.’
‘Shall we telephone him?’
‘Her. She looks after me.’ Linda’s voice had shrunk, almost to inaudibility. Harriet thought, at least she’s got somebody.
Robin appeared beside Harriet. ‘I’ll drive her. It’s only a few hundred yards.’
‘Will you come too?’ Linda begged.
‘Of course I will,’ Harriet said.
There was an air of relief in the room at the prospect of getting rid of at least half of the problem. Very quickly, they found themselves outside. The air was cold and sweet.
‘The car’s over there,’ Robin said.
‘Could we … could we walk?’ Linda asked.
‘Yes, if that’s what you’d like.’ Harriet understood her need to be in the forgiving dark. Robin looked as if he would like nothing less. ‘I’ll take her. I’m sure Linda can show me the way,’ she added.
‘I’m not going to let you wander round the lanes on your own in the dark.’
Harriet smiled inwardly at the thought of legions of highwaymen lurking in the manicured byways of Little Shelley at seven o’clock on a winter’s evening. She said nothing, and they set out together. They walked the short distance in silence, beneath high walls and thick hedges, their footsteps clopping unevenly. About halfway there, Linda slipped her hand into Harriet’s.
They reached the right gates. Robin pressed the bell and announced their intentions into a speaker. The gates swung silently open. Ahead of them lay the bulk of another big house. There were lights showing in only two small upstairs windows, but as they passed through some security beam across the driveway, floodlights snapped on to illuminate the entire housefront. Harriet blinked, wanting to put her arm up to shield her face. The front door opened as they reached it.
A middle-aged woman in a tweed skirt stood in the harsh light. She looked more like a secretary or assistant than the homely nanny-figure Harriet had been imagining. Behind her, what was visible of the house looked as if the occupants were in the process of moving in or moving out. Packing cases piled haphazardly with books stood everywhere.
‘Thank you for bringing her,’ the woman said pleasantly. ‘I’m Veronica Page, by the way.’
‘Daddy’s asleep,’ Linda told her. Miss Page nodded, her mouth in a straight line. It was clearly a familiar occurrence.
‘Come on inside, then.’
Linda released Harriet’s hand and went to stand by her Ronny, without much show of enthusiasm. ‘Thank you,’ she said mechanically to Robin. But when she looked at Harriet her face changed, filling with imploring anxiety. ‘You will come and see me, won’t you? Will you come and see me at my school?’
Harriet went and hugged her, drawing her head against her. Her colourless hair felt fine and silky under her fingers. ‘I’m sure we’ll see each other again.’
They left her with Miss Page, and retraced their steps to the gates. Behind them, the probing lights snapped off again.
In the darkness of the lane, Harriet asked Robin, ‘What was it like when you were small, when you were Linda’s age?’
After a moment he answered, ‘Secure. Comfortable.’
‘Did you rough around with other little boys?’
‘Not much. There was only me. I spent a lot of time with adults.’
‘Yes,’ Harriet said. Robin seemed old for his years now; the same control must have been required from him as a child. Harriet felt sorry for him, but sorrier still for Linda Jensen.
Robin and Harriet refused Annunziata’s invitation to stay for dinner and to see in the New Year. ‘What a wretched day it’s been for you,’ she said to Robin rather than to Harriet. ‘But there’s always next time to look forward to.’ She did turn to Harriet now. ‘We’ve hardly had time to talk. You will come again, won’t you?’
‘Of course I will,’ Harriet lied.
Martin walked out with them to the Porsche. He told Harriet, ‘I’m glad you and Robin are seeing something of each other.’
Harriet remembered the sensation of being looked over, and then of being dismissed in favour of the son. She still didn’t know if Martin merely summed up women in his sleek head, or whether he took their analysis any further. But having met his wife, she couldn’t blame him if he did all the investigation that was possible.
The Porsche wound down the narrow road, turned into the wider road, and then reached the motorway. Harriet’s spirits lifted like a balloon.
‘I’m sorry if you didn’t enjoy yourself,’ Robin said.
Harriet wondered if he was deliberately echoing her own words to him as they drove away from Jane’s house.
‘I did enjoy myself,’ she said. In a way it was the truth. She wouldn’t have missed the day, she was sure of that.
After a moment she added, ‘We don’t have much success, do we, in conjoining our separate worlds?’
Robin’s response was fierce. ‘I don’t care about worlds. I’m only interested in you and me. He lifted his hand from the wheel and let it rest against her thigh. ‘Happy New Year,’ he said, in a softer voice.
Harriet repeated the words after him. His touch didn’t affect her quite as strongly as it usually did.
That was all, except that two days later a big oblong package was delivered to Harriet at Peacocks.
Inside the wrapping paper she found a big cellophane box, and inside the cellophane lay a sheaf of orchids. The petals of the swollen blooms were bruise-purple, lime-green and velvet brown, spotted and furred and blotched like small, exotic animals. Harriet lifted the flowers. They were still moist, as if they had just been flown in from the East, or wherever it was that orchids bloomed in January.
The card enclosed with them read, Sincere and sober apologies. Perhaps I may make amends in person when I am back in England? Thank you for taking care of my daughter. Caspar Jensen.
Harriet wondered how he had found her office address. Perhaps he had, after all, been perfectly well aware of who she was.
She didn’t take the flowers back to Hampstead, where Robin would see them, but kept them at her desk. When at last they faded, turning over-ripe and then dropping their petals to lie on her papers like sloughed skins, she lifted them out of their vase and tipped them into the dustbin.
She thought no more about them and very little more about their sender.
Twelve
Harriet took her place at the big oval table. Beside the draft copy of the Peacocks prospectus that had been set at each place she laid her blank notepad, and the gold-nibbed pen that Kath had given her for Christmas.
Harriet was the only woman in the room. Six men were taking their seats to the right and left of her, laying out their papers and their notes in busy silence. Harriet folded her hands in her lap and waited. Under the table, out of the sight of the six men, she pressed the balls of her feet against the boardroom carpet. She pressed harder, until she felt the bite of cramp in her instep, but she couldn’t control the shaking of her legs.
After almost six months of preparation, of minute scrutiny of her company and it
s performance by accountants, bankers, brokers and lawyers, this was the pricing meeting. Harriet’s lawyer, Piers Mayhew, sat on her left, and Jeremy Crichton the accountant to her right. They had come to the offices of A.R. Allardyce & Co. Ltd, their sponsoring merchant bankers, to hear the valuation that they would put on her company, and the figure at which they believed Peacocks’ shares should go to the market in six days’ time. Harriet had come to hear what price they would put on her baby. After the months of work, Peacocks was ready to be floated. Harriet was about to become the head of a publicly-quoted company.
The date of this meeting had been fixed weeks before. All the necessary procedures had been completed according to City formulae, but now the hour had come Harriet could not stop herself shaking. She was afraid, but she was also enthralled, and she felt as high as if her veins had been pumped full of heroin.
She glanced covertly to her right. Piers Mayhew’s plump moon-face was impassive behind his heavy-rimmed glasses. His white hands were quite steady as he unpacked documents from his briefcase. On her other side Harriet saw that Jeremy’s marble features were disturbed only by the involuntary twitch of a muscle at the corner of his mouth. Harriet looked up at one of the clocks on the wall facing her, the one labelled London. Come on, please come on, she begged silently, as the thin black second hand swept around the face to three p.m., exactly.
‘Gendemen?’ James Hamilton, the senior member of the bank’s team, spoke with authority.
The meeting came instantly to attention.
Hamilton began his prepared speech. Harriet and her advisors leaned forward in their chairs to listen. Harriet was too intent to notice, but her legs stopped shaking. She had chosen these people, A.R. Allardyce and McGovern Cowper, the brokers who were acting in association with them. Months ago, Harriet and Piers had made the rounds of merchant banks who were eager to act as the issuing house for the stockmarket launch of her company. She had taken particular pleasure in their visit to Morton’s, although she had not seen the three wise monkeys at the meeting. The process of vetting the interested banks was known as a beauty parade; from the parade Harriet and Piers had chosen Allardyce’s for their enthusiasm for and high estimation of Peacocks.
The time had now come for it to be made clear whether their enthusiasm and Harriet’s choice were mutually justified. Deep inside herself, Harriet knew that there was no real cause to feel afraid. She had done everything that could be done, and she believed in Peacocks with every fibre of herself. After six months’ investigation, Allardyce’s could only do the same.
James Hamilton was coming smoothly to the point. The room was quiet enough for the sound of traffic in Cornhill, far below, to be audible through the barrier of the double glazing.
‘In giving our most careful consideration to the potential placing of Peacocks within its sector of the market, we have made a careful study of the performances of competitors, and of your accountants’ long-form report …’ James Hamilton tapped the copy of the prospectus in front of him. Harriet did not even glance down. After so many weeks spent helping to prepare the forecasts it contained, she knew the figures by heart. ‘… as a culmination of many hours of discussion, and a final analysis by the head of corporate finance, we are of the confident opinion that Peacocks, as a dynamic growth company with prospects of leading its sector in due course, has a market value of …’
Harriet saw that the faces were impassive. Allardyce’s probably sponsored twenty issues a year. This was a day’s work to Hamilton and the others. She wondered how much her face betrayed her own feelings, at this climax of more than three years of solid work.
‘… sixteen million pounds, give or take a narrow margin of perhaps half a million pounds.’
The room was still quiet. Harriet was surprised that it was not filled with the thumping of her heart. It felt as if it might burst out of her chest.
‘Your current after-tax trading profit of one point three million pounds,’ Hamilton intoned, ‘historical profits and profit forecasts … indicating a price-to-eamings ratio of sixteen. We suggest therefore that an appropriate share price for a company of this weight, to place it in the highly marketable range …’
He exchanged nods with the two brokers and then looked directly at Harriet over the rim of his spectacles. She waited. The bankers and brokers would pitch the shares at a price a little below their estimate of their real worth, to ensure a rise once trading began. But if the price was too low, she could justifiably accuse them of not getting the best price for her.
‘… is one pound twenty-five pence. We therefore propose flotation on impact day next Tuesday at this price.’
Harriet took a breath. It was what she had been hoping for. A shade better even. Figures began to unwind in her head, reeling faster and faster like a line once a big fish had taken the hook.
‘Miss Peacock?’
Harriet took up her notepad and wrote briskly. Piers and Jeremy edged their chairs closer to hers. With the benefit of their advice, Harriet had to decide whether to accept the sponsors’ proposal.
They murmured briefly together. The bankers and brokers talked politely amongst themselves while they waited.
Harriet lifted her head. ‘Two or three questions,’ she said. ‘With which other companies have you compared Peacocks? And why do you suggest a PE ratio lower than that of Dynamic, which stands at seventeen?’
She listened carefully to Hamilton’s fluent answers. At length she nodded. ‘Mr Mayhew has some points to raise also.’
And then, when Piers was satisfied, Harriet looked to Jeremy for his approval. Only now did she allow herself to smile.
‘Thank you, Mr Hamilton,’ she said softly. ‘Your proposal is acceptable. We shall be happy to float on Tuesday at one twenty-five.’
They stood up, all six of them, and shook hands.
‘Very good,’ Hamilton answered. ‘All being well, we shall have impact at ten a.m. next Tuesday morning.’
Impact day, Harriet had learned to call it. Tuesday, June the twelfth. The date had been allotted by the Bank of England all of three months ago, but the lengthy lead-up had only increased Harriet’s excitement. The figures continued to dance in her head. The sale of five per cent of her own equity would net her several hundred thousand pounds, but the remainder of her holding now had a paper value of rather more than four million pounds. The dividend on her holding alone would amount to more than eighty thousand pounds a year, to add to her salary as managing director.
Harriet was still smiling as dizziness took hold of her. She had estimated all this, of course, a thousand times over, but now that the bankers had confirmed it, it was as if she held the money in her hands.
I’m rich, Harriet told herself, chanting the words as if they were part of a rhyme, I’m suddenly, suddenly rich.
She remembered Crete, and the half-joke that had just become wholly truth.
She remembered also, with pleasure, that Kath’s investment had brought wealth to the Trotts too. Paper wealth, as yet, because Robin had convinced the family that they should hold on to their shares and wait for the post-launch rise.
Then, with sudden clarity, imprinted on the jumbled images of her friends and her family, she saw Simon’s face. He was in a dim place that might have been his kitchen or the half-imagined horror of the camp, but his features were sharp. He was looking past her, over her shoulder, as if in expectation of someone else. There would be money for Simon too, she thought. And the blankness of the following question, what can it do for him? brought her up short, in bewilderment.
Deliberately, carefully, Harriet steadied herself again. There was still work to be done. That was what was important now, at this minute.
James Hamilton’s number two was holding up the draft prospectus. Harriet nodded her approval at him. The figures that the seven of them present at the meeting had just agreed upon would now be inserted, and the whole document would be whisked away to the security printers. The final prospectus would be printed over
night, and on the morning of impact day McGovern Cowper would issue it to their clients and potential subscribers.
The months of work, the planning and calculating, would find their measure in the interest of the market at impact on Tuesday morning.
There was another job, too, that must be immediately attended to. A report of the meeting must be sent to Peacocks’ public relations company, who would arrange for the story to be fed to the press – the business and financial press. There would be stories in the City pages about the forthcoming issue, the PR people would make sure of that. James Hamilton had described Peacocks as a dynamic growth company with real prospects of leading its sector in due course. The press release would repeat the phrases, Harriet would see to it, and the journalists would paraphrase them and add their own interpretations of Peacocks’ performance. The stories would catch the eye of the investors, most of whom would have seen Meizu somewhere, probably played it, perhaps read about Meizu Girl.
The other stories, in the blue cuttings file, were all justified now, Harriet believed. Today’s pricing meeting justified them, the Meizu stunts and Meizu Girl and even the British PoW stories. All the work, all the marketing and the pushing and pleasing, had led to this; James Hamilton of A.R. Allardyce, looking at her over the rim of his spectacles, had announced that her company was worth sixteen million pounds.
Harriet felt a shock of triumph running through her like an electric current. She could take the figures to Martin and Robin, to Kath and Ken, and say you see? I did do it. She could even go to Simon and lay in front of him whatever he wanted, whatever he needed, in return for Meizu.
And she would do that, Harriet determined.
As soon after impact day as she could she would take the figures, and the benign, impersonal business cuttings, and show them to Simon. It was a long time since she had seen him, although she ensured that money continued to accumulate in the bank account she had opened for him. But now she could go to see him and tell him that although she had taken his story, taken his suffering, she had translated it into success.
