NANTUCKET
HARRISON YOUNG
NANTUCKET
Nantucket by Harrison Young
First published by Ventura Press 2015
PO Box 780 Edgecliff
NSW 2027
AUSTRALIA
www.venturapress.com.au
Copyright © Harrison Young, 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any other information storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry
Author: Young, Harrison.
Title: Nantucket: where the rich and beautiful come to play/Harrison Young
ISBN: 978-1-925183-31-3 (print edition)
ISBN: 978-1-925183-34-4 (Epub edition)
Cover images: Getty images, iStock
Cover design: Deborah Parry Graphics
Editorial: Amanda Hemmings
Production: Jasmine Standfield
Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group
About the Author
Harrison Young has been writing fiction in airports and on weekends since 1981. Graduating from Harvard University in 1966, Young has been a journalist for The Washington Post, a captain in the U.S. Army Special Forces, a government advisor and an investment banker. He has done business in twenty countries and has advised a dozen governments on financial system issues. Young helped establish banks in Bahrain and Beijing and as a senior official at the FDIC in Washington he managed the resolution of 266 failing banks. A dual citizen, Young retired as chairman of Morgan Stanley Australia in 2007 and became a director of Commonwealth Bank of Australia.
1
If the weekend was music, it was a dazzling improvisation: invisible musicians, a theme stated and explored, the violins of reason chasing the cello of desire, sound swelling to fill the house. Andrew wasn’t listening when he landed in Nantucket, though. That came later. Understanding came later.
Andrew was quite pleased with himself, in fact, as he got off the plane, accompanied by his two billionaires and their seriously beautiful wives. One of the men owned something the other one wanted – provided the terms were “reasonable” – and had indicated his willingness to talk. Andrew had persuaded them to be his guests for the weekend – his and Cathy’s, that is. This was how he made his living.
Andrew had brought the usual financial projections and a handful of power point slides, but he doubted he’d need them. Joe and Shiva could do earnings-per-share dilution calculations in their heads – as could Andrew, of course – but more to the point, the deal in prospect didn’t hinge on numbers but on trust. Although Joe’s company was the “natural owner” of the intellectual property one of Shiva’s companies had developed, and consequently could offer a “competitive” price for it, Shiva would receive more value if the deal was “tax efficient,” and the structure most likely to achieve that involved their being partners for a few years. In Andrew’s experience, very rich people were reluctant to trust anyone, let alone accept them as partners. Hence the house party.
A house party is a form of theatre: a gathering of friends and strangers resolved to entertain each other, a little version of the world. What happened on this occasion was comic – a sequence of improbable events with a happy ending. But the players themselves didn’t know that. When they put on their costumes, everything was at risk.
Comedy is a form of wisdom. It permits outrageousness. We understand ourselves by mocking the blindness of others. We come to terms with life’s arbitrary cruelty by laughing at the neatness of the plot. Wisdom can be painful but it doesn’t have to be – which is nice to know.
Some house parties are primarily a means of showing off. See my gorgeous sailboat. Guess how much my decorator cost. Investment bankers make a lot of money, but foot soldiers like Andrew cannot win that competition. More importantly, if they’re smart, they never forget the famous question, “Where are your customers’ yachts, Mr Morgan?” and are modest about whatever wealth they possess.
The world Andrew and Cathy created each summer weekend in Nantucket was designed to make everyone an equal. The corporate chieftains and status-conscious wives they invited were treated like family – expected to help set the table and wash dishes. Some were a bit shocked by this, even at first insulted – they were used to staff and servants – but mostly and in time they found it amusing, even relaxing. They were made to go on walks that wore them out, helped them unwind, and with luck made them friends.
The objective this weekend was more challenging than usual: causing a driven American engineer and an elegant Indian prince to bond. “You’re kidding,” Cathy had responded when Andrew introduced the idea. “How are you planning to manage that?”
“Same as always,” he’d told her. “Make it up as we go along.” And so he did.
“We don’t need to fall in love,” Joe had told Andrew, “but I’ve got to check him out. I won’t say I can read Indians, but I want to at least be sure no alarms go off.” And later, after the weekend had been arranged: “You know, Andrew, the thing about Indians is that some of them are saints and some are bandits – I’m talking about the top businessmen, now – and I find it very difficult to tell them apart. They all went to Oxford. They all have wonderful manners and excellent taste. They all have personal charities they support. Some of them fast one day a week, if you can believe it. But you’ve been to Mumbai, you’ve seen the poverty, you’ve read how widows get burned alive, or at least used to. Your brain is telling you the guy you’re doing business with is probably in line for the Nobel Peace Prize, but your gut is telling you he’d sell you his wife if that would grease the deal.”
“Have you met Rosemary?” Andrew had asked him over the phone. If Rosemary was for sale, she’d be expensive.
“That’s Mrs Shiva? No, I’ve barely shaken hands with him, as you know. What’s she like? Not Indian, I assume.”
“Venus as head prefect.” The notion of buying Shiva’s wife had lighted a fire in Andrew’s brain he was finding hard to put out. He didn’t want to put it out, actually.
“English bondage school, eh?” said Joe.
“Yes, and her father’s an earl,” said Andrew, pretending not to hear the joke. “But that doesn’t do her justice. Lady Rosemary is the sort of woman wars were fought over, back when that sort of thing happened. Pale skin. White-blonde hair. Long neck. Perfect figure…”
“She turns you on, eh?”
Andrew didn’t answer. Perhaps Shiva would give him Rosemary as a “deal toy” – one of those souvenirs that were passed out at closing dinners for major transactions. Andrew had four Montblanc pens, three scale models of Boeing airplanes, and five unopened bottles of Dom Pérignon in his office. A woman would be much more useful. Stop it, he told himself. He was getting over-excited.
Then again, excitement was crucial to getting deals done. You became more creative. You needed less sleep. “Holy madness,” Andrew sometimes called it. Not that there was anything holy about the merger business.
“Personally,” Joe was saying, “I’ve never seen the point of English girls. All that Wellies and Barbour crap, standing out in the rain, growling at the dogs and getting excited about a mug of hot cider.”
“I take it you’ve been to a shooting party.”
“Once. I’ve been to everything once. You get high enough on the Forbes ‘Rich List’ and everyone but the Pope wants to entertain you.” Joe had paused. “No offence, Andrew. This weekend with you and Cathy has a purpose. And I’m kind of curious to see where Moby Dick came from. Or to be accurate, where Ahab came from and Ishmael found a ship. The whale came
from the Great Southern Ocean.
“Anyway, it was grouse we were supposed to be shooting, only I couldn’t hit any. The whole weekend seemed to be a continuous in-joke. There was a girl I was expected to go after. This was before Cynthia, you understand.”
“But after Martha,” said Andrew.
“And Tina,” said Joe.
Joe had an “efficient” approach to marriage, as he put it. Andrew had summarised the matter for Cathy. “He knows what he wants, or he says he does. He insists on a pre-nup. If the woman delivers, great. If it doesn’t work out, she walks away with $100 million.”
“Hard to resist,” Cathy had said.
Maybe he could sell Cathy to Joe. If Joe was interested in bondage, Cathy would be ideal. Their marriage was a form of bondage. But so are many people’s marriages. Or so Andrew told himself.
“After dinner I went upstairs and crashed,” Joe continued, “which wasn’t hard after standing around in the cold all day. When I came down to breakfast, the hostess was mad at me. I was supposed to have realised the girl had the best guest room for a reason.”
Andrew had been to that sort of English weekend once himself. The memory of it was a pillar of his Anglophilia – and a well-spring of guilt. He’d been at the investment banking firm where he’d made his career for a little more than a year. He was twenty-two. The firm had sent him to the London office to crunch numbers on a deal. It was supposed to be for a week but it turned into a month. “It’s a good sign,” he’d told Cathy, who was stuck in Brooklyn with their six-month-old daughter. The guys in the London office wanted to give him a good time, so they arranged to have the client entertain him. Or maybe he was being hazed. He was pretty green. “Be amusing,” he was told. “Your host is important.”
Long train ride to the north. No idea where he was. A cold wind that chilled him as he waited to be picked up. His hostess arrived fifteen minutes late, apologised profusely, drove way too fast for the narrow roads, apologised further that the roster of guests kept changing, with the result that she now needed to ask him, would he mind sharing a bathroom with another guest? Of course he wouldn’t. “You’ll have your own bedroom, of course,” his hostess had said.
The bathroom was between, and only accessible from, the two bedrooms. There were no locks. He was warming up by taking a strongly recommended pre-dinner bath in the enormous tub when his neighbour came in. “I’m told there’s a hot water shortage,” she’d said, hanging her dressing gown on a hook on the door and climbing in so she faced him. “I hope you don’t mind my joining you.”
“Delighted,” Andrew had said, trying to be casual about it.
“Oh, aren’t you nice,” she said, as if his erection was a form of good manners. “I’m Venetia, by the way.” She held out her hand.
“I’m Andrew,” he said.
“And you’re an American, I take it. Have you been to one of these things before? Here, let me wash your back.”
“Never,” he said, turning around.
“Well, the men compete to see who can shoot the most pheasants, and the ladies compete to see who can bag the most men.”
“In a weekend?”
“A proper test match lasts five days, but yes.”
“You are making this up, I assume.”
“Didn’t Francis tell you?”
“No. And neither did Frances.” One of the many disconcerting features of the weekend was that his host and hostess had the same name, though with different spellings. The British loved double entendre, he had found.
“Well, they both keep game books,” said Venetia. “But here’s the deal. You’re a banker, right? Presumably you know about deals. I’m at Sotheby’s. I know about furniture. Now you do me.” She turned around without giving him a chance to answer, which was helpful. It still made him self-conscious to call himself a banker and it definitely made him self-conscious to be rubbing her shoulders with soapy hands. She was probably a few years older than he was. “There is no central heating,” she continued. “Frances believes central heating is non-U. You know about U and non-U, I assume. No? It’s such fun when the American knows nothing. Nancy Mitford’s coinage. ‘U’ for upper class. Anyway, the water in your wash basin will probably freeze overnight. You don’t have to fuck anyone, but you are well advised to share a bed with someone.”
“Right,” Andrew said.
“To be honest,” said Venetia. “Lower back, please. Yes. Yes. Now rinse me off. To be honest, I hope you’ll share mine. I’ve never bagged an American.” Before he could respond, she was out of the tub and had opened the door into her bedroom. A cloud of cold air rolled in, followed by another English beauty. “This is Anne,” said Venetia. “Her bedroom only has a shower. But you’ve got to get out now. I’m not letting you touch her.”
“Oh, unfair,” said Anne, taking off her robe.
“Get dressed quickly, Andrew,” said Venetia, “or you’ll freeze to death. And remember, we have an understanding.”
That weekend was where Andrew had gotten the idea of using house parties as a business development tool, though it was a dozen years before he had the money to buy the right sort of house. Generally speaking, it had been a good strategy. This weekend was likely to be hard work, though. The elan necessary to amuse billionaires was hard to generate if your wife wasn’t enthusiastic, and recently Cathy hadn’t been much fun – on edge most of the time. He hadn’t had much time to talk to her about her moods. But if he had to be charming for both of them, well, he had to.
He’d tuned back in on Joe. “‘Look, I told the hostess,’” Joe was saying, “‘I’m an American. I miss a lot. But if it would help, I’ll stay in this morning.’ It was pelting rain, you understand. ‘I’ll claim I have a cold. She can stay back to look after me. Satisfaction guaranteed. Her name’s Lavinia, right?’
“Hostess very offended. Lavinia had left already. Her horse was alleged to be sick.”
Andrew had laughed. “It must be hard having fifteen billion dollars.” And to himself: perhaps that’s a requirement for a proper English house partyparty – there should be a naive American for one of the girls to lay.
“Oh, it’s all right,” Joe had said. “But if there’s someone I’m supposed to sleep with, just tell me. Except when it involves money, I’m pretty accommodating.”
“Cynthia would be a good choice,” Andrew had said without thinking about it.
“That’s why I married her. I decided I wanted to sleep with her. Good-looking girl, don’t you think? Bit of glamour, her being a TV star. A news anchor’s a star, right, even if her show is in the morning?”
“Most of America knows her name,” said Andrew, “and probably a quarter of them wake up by listening to her.” It struck him that Joe regarded his wives as a series of venture capital investments.
“Third time lucky, I hope,” said Joe. “And come to think of it, Cyn spent a year as an exchange student in England. Her father wanted to make her posh, I guess. She knows how to play field hockey. She can kick me under the table if I say something wrong.
“You know, the funny thing is,” Joe continued, “I began to think that Lavinia chick was fairly attractive once she’d left. I liked the way she didn’t put up with any crap. Just got in her car and drove home. That was the trouble with Tina, I realised. She was always trying too hard to please me, asking me what I wanted. I have enough decisions to make at work without having to be in charge of where we go for dinner.”
Joe did the dumb country boy routine pretty well, in Andrew’s opinion. It helped that he was six foot four and never looked comfortable in a suit. It helped that he was completely unembarrassed about sex.
“You’ll think he’s a jock until you discover how smart he is,” Andrew had told Cathy. “Big hands. Big shoulders. Powerful body. Has to have his suits made. Women probably find him attractive, and not just for the money. But if you can’t see him – like when talking on the phone – you start thinking he’s a nerd. Gobbles up information like a lumberjack e
ating breakfast. He knows everything there is to know about the patents Shiva controls. Refers to them by number. He can take you through the tax strategy like he’s negotiating rapids in a kayak.
“The only thing he hasn’t worked out yet is Shiva himself, and he’s doing the research. Probably knows his blood type by now. Is Shiva reliable? The answer is mostly, by the way. Is Shiva a criminal? No one seems to think so. What are his hobbies? Vintage cars, supposedly. Showing off his education is what I’d say. Does he have any weaknesses? Whispers about imaginative sex, but I suspect that’s just other people fantasising.”
“So why do they have to spend the weekend with us?” Cathy had asked.
“Well, for starters, Shiva needs to check out Joe, though he’d never say that.”
“Shiva hasn’t done the research?”
“Probably done some – or had it done for him. We have to pretend this weekend is purely social, by the way. No ‘commerce’ involved.”
“Which is bullshit,” said Cathy. It was a pretence that governed most of their house parties, which for some reason had always offended Cathy.
“We let Joe and Shiva decide when to admit that,” said Andrew. There seemed to be an argument they needed to have soon.
“To be honest, it is very difficult to figure out what Shiva knows. Or thinks. He turns the charm on and off as it suits him. Same for temper tantrums.”
“He’d better not try that with me.”
“The trick,” Andrew lectured – he’d told her all this before – “the trick is not to take it personally. You have to view him as a machine that occasionally does strange things, and try to figure out how the mechanism works.”
“Is that how you see me?” said Cathy.
“Shiva has a massive sense of entitlement,” Andrew continued, ignoring her question. “He had an employee who figured out a way to save him fifty million dollars. Joe unearthed this story. The man asked for a modest raise. Shiva was genuinely shocked. He’d given the man the job that allowed him to score goals. Shiva therefore owned the goals. But many successful entrepreneurs are like that. With Shiva, there’s other stuff going on. It may have to do with his ancestry, which he tells me he can trace back a couple of thousand years.
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