Rosie Thomas 4-Book Collection

by Rosie Thomas

  But he was pleased enough with himself to whistle softly as he drove, repeating the same phrase over and over, a little triumphant fanfare.

  Kath and Ken Trott had reacted exactly as he had expected they would. Sitting in their front room amongst the nested tables and well-dusted porcelain knick-knacks, he had begun with such circumspection that they had not, at first, understood what he was saying.

  ‘Peacocks in trouble?’ Kath had put her hand to her throat, twisting her strings of beads into a knot.

  Robin was quick to reassure. ‘Of course not. It’s a matter of steering, that’s all. So many companies, you know, under a dynamic entrepreneur like Harriet can suffer a small setback at just this stage. As we’re a small company still, almost like a family, I thought it best to come and talk to you informally, like this.’ And Robin gestured at the suburban lounge and the coffee tray on the low table at their knees.

  ‘You are important shareholders, you know. And, of course, you are Harriet’s family. You have a double concern.’

  ‘Just what are you getting at, lad?’ Ken’s arms were folded, indicating hostility.

  Because Kath was a director of Peacocks, Robin had encountered her at board meetings. He had summed her up long ago as decent, but stupid. He was less sure about Ken, but he was sure that if he could win Kath, Ken would come with her.

  Robin sighed, with a well-gauged combination of regret and anxiety. He opened his briefcase and took out the dossier. He began to talk in a low, sympathetic murmur, addressing most of his explanation to Ken, businessman to businessman, but directing long looks from under his eyelids at Kath, looks that were almost lover-like. Kath’s lips parted a little as she listened to him.

  Robin’s performance with the dossier was well enough rehearsed by this time, but he spoke haltingly now, as if made inarticulate by his own concern.

  ‘How we can best deal with this unhappy situation … spending out of control … not the wisest investment … Jeremy Crichton and I … Harriet’s best interest at heart … a safeguard before anything further … and, of course, to protect your own investment …’

  The room had been quiet, as if the listeners were mesmerised by the low voice, but now Kath’s head jerked up. A blush spread up over her throat and up into her cheeks.

  ‘I don’t care about the money, if that’s what you’re getting at. I haven’t wanted anything of it, after Simon died. It’s tainted money, isn’t it?’

  Ken’s arm descended on her shoulders. He leaned forward, restraining her.

  Robin almost smiled. Families were the most difficult to deal with, but they were also the most satisfying because of the little doors that sprang open only after the lightest pressure on exactly the right spot. The door yielded to him now.

  ‘I understand that you should feel that way. It was a great tragedy. A needless tragedy, even.’ He was as gentle as if he was reassuring a baby. There was no hint of a pounce, but still he pounced.

  ‘Don’t make yourself upset, Kath,’ Ken said.

  Robin nodded his sympathy, watching another door silently open. Ken would follow, because to do otherwise would upset his wife.

  Robin knew then that he would get what he wanted. He stayed for a long time in Sunderland Avenue, accepting another cup of coffee that he did not want and later a glass of sherry that he never drank, but he knew from the moment that the two little doors swung silently open that he would win, and win triumphantly.

  By the time he left the three of them were friends, united in their friendship by their concern for Harriet. That was Robin’s trump card. That their conspiracy would, in the end, be best for Harriet.

  Out of the cold March wind in the shelter of her storm porch, Kath watched Robin drive away.

  ‘I don’t want her to go and end up with nothing,’ she justified herself. ‘And I’ll be glad to be free of it myself, Ken.’

  ‘It’s like he said, isn’t it? There are the entrepreneurs, ideas people, and there are those who know how to keep an established business on the rails. Two different skills, isn’t it? I know, I’ve seen it. It doesn’t surprise me, what he says.’ Ken was knowledgeable, as he always was. ‘He’ll do all right by her, Kath. He was in love with her himself, wasn’t he, only she wouldn’t have him?’ He chuckled in amused appreciation of Harriet’s choosiness.

  Kath was back where they had begun, with her hands anxiously twisting the beads at her throat. ‘I wish she’d settle down. Perhaps this will give her a chance. What do you think?’

  ‘It might,’ Ken answered, without much conviction. He suspected that he understood Harriet better than her mother did.

  After Kath and Ken, Lisa in Blackheath was easy for Robin.

  ‘Harriet’s made a few boo-boos, has she?’ Lisa sniffed. ‘Well, you can’t always be perfection itself.’

  The door opened to Robin at once, at the very first tentative pressure. Jealousy, he reflected, was so often the key. He saw that Lisa was a watered-down version of her sister, a sharp little person without the clarity of Harriet’s intelligence or the unfailing sense of style that had first drawn him to her. He thought of her as he had first seen her, in his father’s office, and the recognition that he would have to live without her strengthened his purpose. He bestowed on Lisa a smile of particular charm.

  ‘There are some anxieties. I wanted to come and talk to you informally, like this …’

  Lisa needed no particular persuasion. She shrugged off Robin’s assurances.

  ‘It was my mum’s money. Harriet just put five per cent in my name, but Mum made the investment. I do what she does, of course.’

  Only the triumphant smile told Robin that she was quite glad to do it, too. The thickset photographer, who was – unthinkably – Harriet’s ex-husband was less acquiescent. Robin remembered Harriet telling him that Leo had taken up with her younger sister. Confronting him, Robin saw that he was opting for the less challenging version, a kind of diluted Harriet without the bite, or the sparkle. The man himself was second-rate. Robin could hardly suppress a sneer.

  ‘Why is this all being done behind Harriet’s back?’ Leo asked.

  Robin spread his hands. ‘By its very nature, an operation like this must be swift, and decisive. And Harriet’s absence, you know, at a time like this, is an indication itself.’ His finger rested on the dossier, the print of it as light as air, but the weight of implication behind it heavier than Leo had the ammunition to deal with.

  ‘It’s nothing to do with you, Leo,’ Lisa said, in her half-Harriet voice.

  This visit was not a long one. Robin did not enjoy the confines of the flat with the echo of Harriet and the man who had married her to remind him of what he no longer possessed.

  He kissed Lisa lightly on the cheek as he left. She yielded to it readily enough. Leo’s expression of poisonous dislike followed him, cheering him when he remembered it. Robin whistled as he drove homewards across Blackheath, his triumphant fanfare, repeated over and over. There was no need to make anxious reckoning. He had his fifty-one per cent, and some to spare.

  The seeds he had sown had ripened into a field of waving golden corn. The time had come to cut it, and take it to market.

  Robin did count then, but it was not shares but hours, the number of hours that separated London from Los Angeles.

  Harriet was adrift on the diamond pool.

  It was mid-afternoon, when the day’s potent heat was concentrated between the white wings of the ranch house. The pool water was slick with heat, and the haze-softened disc of the sun reflected off the ripples as dashes of light that chased over the white walls.

  The inflatable armchair drifted in a slow arc to the side of the pool and Harriet touched one toe to the steps. She sent herself at a tangent, keeping her foot raised as she sailed on so that she could admire her own sun-tanned instep, and the scarlet moons of pedicured toenails. The ice in her glass clinked as she drank and then she let her head sink back, closing her eyes, so that the sun imprinted copper discs within her ey
elids.

  She was ready for the awards ceremony. Her Bruce Oldfield dress, pressed to perfection by the Spanish maid, hung in the wardrobe. The manicurist and the hairdresser had done their work, and Harriet held her head so that not a drop of pool water would disturb a single hair. She had even, smiling a little at the performance of wifely duties, overseen the pressing of Caspar’s evening clothes. She approved of the stately, British cut, and the unfrilled reticence of his dress shirt.

  Caspar sat in his usual place in the shade. She had counted his drinks. She would get him to his seat primed as far as necessary, but fully capable of the speech, the necessary ponderous banter. He would do himself justice.

  It was almost time. The dictates of television, the broadcast of a live show across the nation’s time zones, meant that they must take their places almost before the end of the afternoon. Harriet roused herself. She would ask Vernon to bring her one more glass of iced tea, and then she would steer Caspar inside to dress.

  Harriet sighed with satisfaction. It was as if Vernon had read her thoughts. He was already on his way around the side of the pool, towards her. She saw that he was holding an envelope.

  ‘This just came for you.’

  Harriet stretched out a lazy hand, the nails also perfect scarlet.

  When she took it from Vernon she saw that it was not an envelope but a fax, neatly folded in two. She shook out the thin sheet of paper and read.

  The words made no sense, and she read again.

  It was a letter, headed with Peacocks’ feather logo and signed by Jeremy Crichton as company secretary.

  The language was formal, with a deadpan nastiness that made Harriet blink in bewilderment as she floated in the scent of orange blossom. It was so unexpected, so mystifying, that it seemed to be a foreign tongue.

  Harriet read for the third time, trying to decipher this message that had sucked the air out of her lungs.

  In accordance with Article 14b of the Company’s Articles of Association you are hereby given three days’ notice, to run from the date of this letter, of a meeting of the Board of Directors to be held at 11 a.m. on March 31 at the Company’s registered office.

  In the event of your failure to attend, the meeting will proceed to business in your absence.

  An agenda is set out below.

  1. Minutes of previous meeting

  2. Matters arising

  3. Board appointments

  4. Any other business

  Confirmation of this letter follows by hard-copy telex, as required by the Company’s Articles.

  The ugly phrases jumped in Harriet’s sun-dazed head. Proceed to business. Board appointments. Article 14b. What was Article 14b? There was no business without her. There could be no appointments to the board, how could there be, without her own nomination?

  For a second she was convinced that this was a joke. It was part of some elaborate leg-pull that she didn’t understand because she was so far from London and absorbed in the sunny vigour of California. She closed her eyes and let her hand fall, holding the sheet of paper. One corner of it trailed in the blue water. Only it was the water, the white light and the heat that seemed foreign now.

  Harriet jerked the letter up again. This wasn’t a joke. No joke would knot a band of anger and fear around her chest such as she felt now.

  The armchair was becalmed in the dead centre of the pool. Harriet struck out, wallowing where earlier she had elegantly drifted. She could think of nothing but reaching a telephone. Caspar rejected the Hollywood cliché of calling from his poolside. She would have to go into the house. The water seemed to have turned to treacle.

  She reached the steps and floundered out of her armchair. Caspar opened his eyes as she ran by. He caught a glimpse of her face and called after her.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘I need to call London.’

  She was standing gripping the receiver before she asked herself, call who? Where?

  Vernon was crossing the room behind her, stately in his butler’s white coat.

  ‘Vernon, what time is it in London?’

  ‘Approximately three o’clock in the morning.’

  Who was it, faxing her letters in the low hour of the night, and from where? Harriet dialled the Peacocks’ number. It rang twice, and then she heard Karen’s bright message on the answering machine … Peacocks’ office is closed until nine a.m. Please leave your name and number …’

  She tried Robin, imagining the white telephone ringing on the bedside table, the bed where she had slept, mahogany-masculine … The interval was a little longer, but his invitation to leave her name and number, when it came, was no more informative than Peacocks’. So where was he? Was it Robin, staging this offensive against her? Even though her thoughts skidded in bewilderment, she was beginning to be sure that it was. Robin, with Jeremy whose signature was on the letter she still clutched, and who else?

  Who to call? Graham Chandler? She would have to look up his number, in her book, on the table beside Caspar’s bed. Or Charlie? In the middle of the night, while the children slept?

  What was she doing here, so far away? Charlie had called her, even as she was leaving for the airport. I’m not going up the Amazon, she had told him. What was it that Charlie knew, and she didn’t? I’m not going up the Amazon, I can be back in twelve hours, that’s what she had said. Why had she not had the patience to listen to him?

  She wouldn’t call anyone. She would be on the next flight and then she would sweep in against them, her own countershock. The next flight, taking her home.

  Harriet began to dial the airport before she remembered why she was in Hollywood. In two hours, she would be leaving for the awards on Caspar’s arm. She replaced the receiver stiff-armed and smoothed the crumpled fax so that she could examine it more carefully. Of course. It had been timed to reach her now. That explained the hour in London. It had always been intended to reach her as she prepared to set out, in her Bruce Oldfield dress on the arm of her film-star, to see her lover receive his Oscar. This piece of paper was the flimsy envoy of a calculating saboteur. He was aiming at Caspar as well as herself, at their moment of public pride, and he could be no one but Robin Landwith.

  Cold fury took hold of Harriet. It set in her stomach and her heart, and made iron hooks of her fingers. She screwed the letter into a ball and flung it away from her.

  ‘Vernon?’

  ‘Yes, madam.’

  Her brain would not function. She couldn’t count or remember because the anger was so corrosive. ‘Was it three a.m. last night, or tonight?’

  ‘London time is ahead of Los Angeles. So tonight, if you choose to see it that way. I personally find it less confusing just to subtract …’

  ‘Yes, thank you. Vernon, will you do something for me, please? Will you book me a seat on the first available flight to London in the morning? Any seat, the first possible flight.’

  ‘Yes, madam.’

  Three days’ notice, the letter had said. Harriet thought she remembered now what was set out in Article 14b. It was something to the effect that meetings of directors could be summoned by letter or telex, and in the case of directors’ absence abroad telex or facsimile would be deemed sufficient, giving a minimum of three days’ notice.

  So they were giving her three days because they were obliged to, but because of the time difference twelve hours of that were already spirited away from her. Perversely, it was the realisation of that that decided Harriet. Whatever was against her, even time itself, she would still stay for the awards and defy Robin’s sadistic calculation. She would stay for the ceremony and the party afterwards, and reach London twenty-four hours after that. By doing so she would deny Robin one small satisfaction.

  She couldn’t even begin to assess how else she might thwart him, not until she knew what he was planning. It must be something to do with the balance of power within Peacocks, altering it by making new appointments to the board, and not in her favour, she was certain. But beyond that, she c
ould only guess until she was back in London.

  Harriet looked at her watch. It was time to dress.

  Caspar opened his eyes once more as her shadow fell across him. ‘Make your call?’

  When he saw her face he sat up, fully awake. ‘Jesus, Harriet. You look like you’ve eaten a handful of nails. What’s up?’

  She clenched her fists.

  ‘There’ll be worse than nails to eat in the next day or so. Either for me, or for Robin Landwith. He’s trying to fuck my company up, Caspar, while I’m away. He’s pulling some shitty trick that I don’t understand yet. But I will understand it. I’ll turn it inside out, and Robin with it.’

  Harriet tasted fury and fear and determination on her tongue, a bitterly potent cocktail. Her legs and arms twitched with some atavistic impulse to fly or to give chase. A heavy medicine ball that Caspar was supposed to use for some complex and ignored fitness regime sat on the edge of the pool. Harriet vented a ridiculous fragment of her anger by kicking it away. The ball swung in a curve and dropped into the water, sending up a glittering plume of spray. Her foot hurt after the impact.

  She knelt down by Caspar’s seat, gripping the arm of it.

  ‘It’s my company, Caspar. I laboured for it and suffered all the pains of it. If he interferes with it, I will kill him.’

  And then she thought of Robin in his glove-like suits, living his ordered, discriminating, privileged life out of her own efforts, and those like her, because he had money to bestow. His power seemed in that moment feudal, corrupt like the touch of some medieval king conferring sickness on the faithful, instead of health. The king’s touch, Harriet thought. Taking instead of giving. She knew that she was being irrational. But she knew that she had generated the success, not Robin. She had done it, and Simon, who was dead.

  She lifted her head and her eyes met Caspar’s. Hatred for Robin overtook her anger, frightening her with its intensity.

  ‘No, I won’t,’ she said softly. ‘I won’t kill him. I’ll castrate him and stuff the pieces in his soapy mouth.’