by Rosie Thomas
Harriet didn’t think quickly enough to manufacture an excuse. She was still too startled by finding herself in conversation with him at all. She could only say, feebly, ‘Um, yes, I suppose so.’
Martin was as smooth as the butter that Linda was busy rubbing into the chicken skin.
‘About seven, then,’ he said. Harriet was left listening to the dialling tone.
‘Are you OK?’ Linda asked.
Harriet sighed, foreseeing trouble. ‘That was Martin Landwith. Do you remember him?’
Linda gave a theatrical grimace. ‘Ugh. That house. All those drapes and cushions.’
Harriet supposed that because Bel Air was home, Linda didn’t look with the same critical eye at Clare’s décor. She remembered thinking that the Bel Air mansion made Little Shelley look bleakly understated.
‘Mmm.’
‘What did he want?’
‘I don’t know, exactly. He’s going to pay us a little visit in an hour’s time.’
Linda put down her knife. Harriet watched her, side-on. She took a deep breath, raising her skinny shoulders, controlling herself by being seen to control herself.
‘Is he staying to dinner?’
‘Definitely not.’
Linda picked up her knife once more, exhaling steadily.
‘Good. Have I chopped enough of this stuff?’
There was no complaint this time about our weekend. Linda had listened to what she had been told.
‘Yes, that’s plenty,’ Harriet said. They went calmly on with their preparations.
At seven o’clock exactly Martin rang the doorbell. Harriet thought, if he turns up on a Saturday evening, he can take us just as we are. She showed him straight into the kitchen where Linda was perched on a stool, arranging her stuffed apples in a baking dish, surrounded by the debris of their cooking.
‘You remember Linda Jensen, Martin?’
‘Of course I do.’ Martin was about to extend an avuncular hand but then, seeing Linda’s, he thought better of it. Linda favoured him with a blank stare, and then turned her attention to licking the sugar and cinnamon off her fingers.
Martin accepted a glass of sherry and stood in the middle of the kitchen looking around him. For a Saturday evening in Hampstead he was dressed a shade less formally than on a weekday. The dark blazer was still magically tailored to make him seem taller and slimmer than he really was. Harriet found it almost comically incongruous to see him standing amongst her pots and pans. She caught herself staring at him, and turned abruptly to hustle Linda’s chicken into the refrigerator.
Linda watched it disappear. ‘Harriet and I are having dinner,’ she said coldly. ‘I did the cooking for her.’
‘Jolly good. This all looks very cosy.’
Harriet concealed a smile. She thought, if you turn up more or less unannounced …
Linda’s froideur was adult in its potency.
‘Ah, I was hoping, Harriet, that we might have five minutes’ talk?’
‘Linda, would you like to go and watch some television?’
‘How long for?’
‘Until I have finished talking to Mr Landwith,’ Harriet said severely. Linda would have to learn to gauge the dividing line between the unencouraging and the simply rude.
‘I’ll go in the garden.’
She swung her legs off the stool and strolled out. A moment later they saw her appear in the overgrown garden. She sat down in the late sun, on a bench under a heavy swathe of roses. She settled down with her back to the kitchen window, her knees pensively drawn up to her chin.
‘Not a very easy child, that one,’ Martin said.
‘On the contrary. She’s extremely bright, and excellent company.’ Only not an easy child in the prize-winning, captain of cricket, father’s-footsteps fashion of your child, Harriet thought. I know which I prefer.
‘Yes. Well. Harriet, you won’t mind if I come straight to the point?’
‘Please.’
He was looking at her in the old, calculating manner. He seemed, if it was possible, younger and fitter than when she had first met him. His appraisal of her contained the same elements of shrewd business evaluation and sexual challenge. Harriet felt impatient, and at the same time alarmingly susceptible. Martin was as attractive as ever. She wondered how it would be, after all this time, if he had come to proposition her?
The truth is, she told herself, I’m a sucker for a clean limb and a chiselled profile. After all that high-minded stuff I preached to Linda, too.
She became aware that Martin’s expression had changed. He was looking oddly at her. It must be because she was smiling. It was his son who had accused her, a long time ago, of too often looking as if she was enjoying some private joke.
‘Go on,’ she encouraged him, resettling her face. Of course he hadn’t come to proposition her. Not in fifteen minutes, surely?
‘I heard – someone in the City told me, it doesn’t matter who – that you’re involved in a new venture?’
There were no secrets in business, Harriet thought.
‘Not yet. It’s no more than an idea.’
‘I heard it was more than that.’ Martin went to the window, as if to check that Linda was far enough out of earshot. He turned abruptly. With his back to the light his features were blotted out. He became a dark outline against the sunshine.
‘I came to say, be careful.’
Harriet repeated, ‘Careful?’ She couldn’t see his face, only the black shape of his head haloed with yellow light. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Just that property and construction are dirty businesses.’
‘I’m not afraid of dirt.’
‘I don’t think you understand me. If you’re trying to block a deal of Keith Bottrill’s you should know that his battles are not always fought on paper. His methods can be unconventional. Not personally, of course. But you could find a couple of burly individuals stepping out of the shadows one night, and suggesting that you let Mr Bottrill pursue his legitimate interests without opposition.’
In the warm light, in her own kitchen, Harriet shivered. She saw windy, empty streets and foul-smelling tunnels, and the echoing vaults of underground car parks. She knew how it would be, when the two men slid out of shadow’s to block her path, because it had already happened. She wrapped her arms around herself, rubbing her chilled fingers against her bare arms.
It isn’t cold, she told herself. Looking past Martin’s bulk she could see Linda, stretched out flat on the bench now, pulling at a spray of creamy roses. But still, she glanced up at the locks and bolts that protected the tall windows overlooking the garden. Simon had locked his doors and windows. He had pasted newspaper over the glass. Simon. Harriet lifted her head. Nothing will happen. It’s happened already. I’m immune, now.
‘I didn’t mean to frighten you,’ Martin said.
‘I’m not frightened.’
Martin walked away from the window. He crossed to the work-top, where the scattered remnants of Linda’s cooking lay, and the sherry bottle beside them. He lifted his empty glass. Harriet could see his face again.
‘May I?’
‘Please, help yourself.’ She picked up a cloth and began to wipe up spilt crystals of brown sugar. Then she straightened again, and still holding the cloth with the sugar in her cupped hand she said, ‘Thank you for the warning. I’ll remember what you said.’
Martin nodded. With one hand resting on her kitchen table, the other holding his sherry glass by the stem, tilting it as if he was going to comment on the colour of the wine, Martin seemed to be contemplating something new.
Harriet only had to wait a moment.
‘Yes,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I knew there would be no putting you off.’
‘Hardly.’
His dark eyes moved across her face. ‘I very much admire your spirit, Harriet. And your capabilities. Tell me, are you raising capital yet?’
Harriet almost laughed out loud. ‘Did I hear that?’
Martin made a s
mall gesture with his manicured hand, an urbane, smoothing-away gesture that indicated what was past was gone, and so need not disturb them. Harriet wanted to crack his composure. She wanted to make him hear. She shouted at him.
‘Martin, have you forgotten what Landwiths did to me? Levered me out of Peacocks overnight, while I was on holiday, after creeping round lying to my shareholders and my family?’
He was quite unperturbed. People must often shout at him, Harriet thought.
‘Not Landwiths, specifically. Robin. As you will remember.’
‘It’s the same damned thing.’
‘Not quite. Have you talked to Robin lately?’
He was impervious. Harriet’s incredulity bounced off him, making no impression. She sighed, impatient rather than angry. ‘Of course not. Nor will I be talking to him in the future.’
‘Ah. Well then, you won’t know that we have decided to separate the business. Probably not before time. Robin is a grown man and a shrewd brain, and it has probably been my mistake to keep him too much under my eye. He needs to spread his wings now. In the future, we shall be operating much more as separate entities.’
‘I see.’ Harriet could only guess at which transgressions of the favoured son, or what breakdown of the subtle power-play between the two of them, had led to such a severance. She could only wonder, too, if Robin had at the end refused to play with the right emphasis the role for which his father had groomed him. The thought, surprisingly, made her feel sad. She wondered what else Martin and Annunziata had to turn to for consolation.
Martin went briskly on. ‘If you’re looking to raise capital for your development, Harriet, I hope you would come to me. I’d spread the investment, of course, we could look into that when the time came. But as a basic principle …’
She interrupted him, gently but with all the firmness she could command. ‘Martin. I wouldn’t come to you for capital if you were the last person on the earth. Even if you and Robin are no longer in partnership. I couldn’t, you see. But thank you for the offer, and for coming all the way here to tell me to look after myself.’
Was there any dinner party in Hampstead, she wondered?
Martin set down his glass, empty once more. ‘No need to thank me. I like you, Harriet, you know.’
He took her hand and shook it. The appraising look came, and a crooked, perceptive, likeable smile with it.
‘Goodbye, Martin. Would you like to say goodbye to Linda? I’ll call her in.’
‘Don’t worry.’ He went to the window and sketched a wave. Harriet saw him to the front door and watched him down the steps, a smallish, dandified, confident man who didn’t impress her as much as he once had done.
Linda came back into the kitchen, peering warily around the door.
‘Gone?’
‘Yes, gone.’
‘Let’s grill the chicken now, I’m starved.’ They smiled at one another.
Later, after they had eaten the meal and praised one another extravagantly for it, and after they had watched television together for an hour, they made Linda’s bed up once again in the living room. Harriet wished that she had a proper spare bedroom, so that she could think of it as Linda’s room when she was at school, or in Los Angeles. When Linda scrambled under the covers Harriet sat on the edge of the bed, looking at the way her fine hair fanned out on the pillow.
‘I’ve had a lovely day,’ she told her.
‘Me too,’ Linda sighed. She put up her arms and locked them around Harriet’s neck. ‘I love you,’ she said.
Harriet whispered to her, ‘I love you, too.’
Thinking of the other times she had said the same words it came to her that it was only for Kath that they had lasted. Only now she believed that they would last for Linda, too.
Before she went to her own bed, Harriet checked the bolts on every window, and the locks and chains that secured the doors. She wasn’t afraid, she had been telling the truth when she told Martin so. But she wanted to be sure, while Linda was under her roof, that her house was secure. It was as if Martin’s visit had made her realise how valuable the little girl was. She was glad he had come, for that.
Two things happened, in quick succession, after Linda went back to school.
The first was that Harriet received a letter from the clerk to Everden Parish Council, informing her that the council, on behalf of the village of Everden, was willing to accept her offer to purchase Birdwood House and the gardens thereof.
The second, at the end of June, was the announcement that Castoria Developments’ proposal for the Birdwood Estate had been turned down by the County Planning Committee.
Harriet walked briskly along Leadenhall Street towards Piers Mayhew’s offices. She was early for the meeting and it was a pleasure to walk, passing women in summer dresses and bank messengers and pinstriped men who strolled, for once, instead of rushing. With the arrival of high summer and the prospect of holidays, the City seemed to have taken on a festive air. Harriet had been working hard, but she felt as full of energy as if she had just returned from a holiday. She looked up at the sky, and at the roofline of the banks and financial institutions, in a kind of salute. She was passing near Morton’s, the bank where she had made a visit to the three wise monkeys in an effort to raise capital for Peacocks, and she made another acknowledgement to the black glass edifice. Today’s meeting would be the opposite of what she had experienced at Morton’s. She had been waiting for today for a long time.
Piers Mayhew’s office suite was done up in English country house style. His English-rose receptionist came out from behind her walnut desk and showed Harriet into the sanctum. Piers jumped up and came to shake her hand. He was noticeably glinting with anticipation.
‘All ready for the off?’ Piers often talked in racing or sporting jargon.
‘All ready,’ Harriet said composedly.
At eleven o’clock, Piers’s secretary announced that Mr Bottrill and Mr Montague had arrived.
‘Show them in,’ Piers said. He was rubbing his hands with pleasure. ‘Show them in and let’s see what they’re made of.’
The two men were ushered into the room.
Keith Bottrill was a big man. The sleeves of his suit creased horizontally around his biceps and rose up in protest over his wide shirtcuffs. His striped tie lay like an exhausted tongue over his convex chest. His eyes, small points in a fleshy, suntanned face, went straight to Harriet. He made his solicitor, thin and dark with black-rimmed spectacles, seem by contrast as elegant as Martin Landwith.
Bottrill’s hand enveloped Harriet’s. She felt that he could easily grind her bones, and the thought of dark places and empty corners came back to her. She withdrew her fingers, and forced herself to look into his eyes.
‘Thank you for coming to meet us today.’
The man smiled, showing crowded teeth. ‘We’ve got interests in common. Important interests have we not? It’s a pleasure to be here.’
The four of them sat down around Piers Mayhew’s conference table. Keith Bottrill leaned forward, knitting his thick fingers together. He was wearing a gold bracelet.
‘The Birdwood site,’ Harriet said softly. ‘Shall we get straight down to business?’
‘By all means,’ Keith Bottrill answered. ‘It’s what we’re all here for, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t think it will come as a surprise to you if I tell you that I have acquired the site access, will it? And you probably also know that I am in the process of acquiring Birdwood House and the surrounding grounds?’
‘I did know as much. As you also know that the clowns in the planning department have turned down my first proposal.’ The man leant back, crossing one tree-trunk leg over the opposite knee. Harriet was not sure whether the accompanying facial tremor was intended as a wink. She stared back at him, stonefaced, and waited.
‘So we’ve come to make a proposal to you, Miss Peacock, in return. A commercial proposal. That’s what you’re intending, isn’t it?’
Harriet and Piers l
et him talk. Montague slid a sheet of notes in front of him, and Bottrill unfolded his plan. As they had known it would be, it was a proposal for amalgamation, Harriet’s interests with those of Castoria Developments. Keith Bottrill’s creases softened, and his thick fingers danced and riffled through his plans and notes. His voice became almost musical as he extolled the beauty of the site, the desirability of the development, the opportunities that would thickly present themselves once the small obstacle had been cleared. It was, he told her, hardly surprising that a businesswoman of Harriet’s calibre had been similarly attracted. And it was in their mutual, entirely mutual interests to present a united front now. As a team, they would be formidable.
The crowded teeth showed again.
It was just a question of agreeing the detail, the mutually acceptable terms, was it not?
Mr Montague put his pale fingers together, indicating his alertness in working out any details to their mutual satisfaction.
When she was quite sure that Bottrill had finished his pitch, and was leaning back in pleasure awaiting her agreement, Harriet spoke. She took pleasure in letting her words fall like cold stones into the pool of oily warmth that Bottrill had spilt.
‘Our interests are by no means common,’ she said clearly.
The temperature in the room dropped by several degrees. The solicitor let his fingers fall apart again.
‘You are proposing an in-and-out development that will do nothing to enhance the existing village. I am interested in helping to create an integrated community that will bring direct benefits to local people. I have to tell you that there is no basis for an amalgamation of our interests. None whatsoever.’
Angrily, the man started forward in his seat. ‘I don’t think you appreciate quite what the financial opportunities are. Quite what the returns on this project will be. Even if, as I am willing to agree, they are divided equally between us.’
Harriet said, ‘I do appreciate the opportunities. And I reject your version of them.’
The man was not used to rejection. A dull red flush spread under his suntan. Silence turned solid in the pleasant room. Harriet held herself still in her seat, against a sudden urge to run. Beside her, reassuringly, Piers unscrewed the cap of his fountain pen.
