Paradise

by Judith McNaught

  Meredith couldn’t go, not now, when the doctor wanted to see her every week, and she wasn’t supposed to walk around more than a little. She couldn’t go and she didn’t want to scare Matt by telling him the doctor thought she might be on the verge of losing the baby. On the other hand, she was so angry with him for not writing, and so frightened for the baby, she decided to scare him anyway. “I can’t come down,” she said. “The doctor wants me to stay home and not move around very much.”

  “How odd,” he shot back. “Sommers was down here last week and he told me you and your friend, Lisa, were at Glenmoor dazzling all the men in the lounge.”

  “That was before the doctor told me to stay home.”

  “I see.”

  “What do you expect me to do,” Meredith shot back with rare sarcasm, “hang around here day after day and wait for your occasional letters?”

  “You might give that a try,” he snapped. “By the way, you’re not much of a correspondent.”

  Meredith took that to be a criticism of her letter-writing style, and she was so furious that she almost hung up.

  “I gather you don’t have anything else to say?”

  “Not much.”

  When they hung up, Matt leaned his hand against the wall beside the phone and closed his eyes, trying to block out the phone call and the agony of what was happening. He’d been gone three months, and Meredith no longer wanted to come to South America. She hadn’t written him in weeks; she was already resuming her old social life and then lying to him about being home in bed. She was only eighteen, he reminded himself bitterly. Why wouldn’t she want a social life? “Shit!” he whispered in helpless futility, but after a few minutes he straightened with resolve. In a few months things at the drilling site would be under better control, and he’d insist that they give him four days off so that he could fly home and see her. Meredith wanted him and she wanted to be married to him; no matter how few letters she wrote or what she did, he knew in his heart that was still true. He’d fly home, and when they were together, he’d be able to talk her into coming back with him.

  Meredith hung up the phone, flung herself across the bed, and cried her eyes out. When he’d told her about the house he’d found, he certainly hadn’t tried to make it sound nice, and he hadn’t acted like he particularly cared whether she came or not. When she finished, she dried her eyes and wrote him a long letter apologizing for being a “bad correspondent.” She apologized for losing her temper and, surrendering all her pride, she told him how much his letters meant to her. She explained in great detail what the doctor had told her.

  When she finished, she carried the letter downstairs and left it for Albert to mail. She’d already given up hovering by the mailbox out at the road, waiting for letters from Matt that never came. Albert, who served as butler-chauffeur and maintenance man, walked in right then with a dustcloth in his hand. Mrs. Ellis had taken three months off for her first vacation in years, and he’d reluctantly assumed some of her tasks too. “Would you please mail this for me, Albert?” she asked.

  “Of course,” he said. When she left, Albert took the letter down the hall to Mr. Bancroft’s study, unlocked an antique secretary, and tossed that letter on top of all the others, half of which were postmarked from Venezuela.

  Meredith went upstairs to her bedroom and was halfway to the chair at her desk when the hemorrhaging started.

  She spent two days in the Bancroft wing of Cedar Hills Hospital, a wing named after her family in honor of their huge endowments, praying the bleeding wouldn’t start again and that Matt would miraculously decide to come home. She wanted her baby and she wanted her husband, and she had a terrible feeling she was losing both.

  When Dr. Arledge released her from the hospital, it was on condition that she remain in bed for the duration of her pregnancy. As soon as she came home, Meredith wrote Matt a letter that not only informed him she was in danger of losing their baby, but that was, moreover, meant to scare him into worrying about her. She was ready to do almost anything to stay on his mind.

  Complete bedrest seemed to solve the problem of impending miscarriage, but with nothing to do but read or watch television or worry, Meredith had ample time to reflect on painful reality: Matt had obviously found her a convenient bed partner, and now that they were apart, he had found her completely forgettable. She started thinking about the best ways to raise her baby alone.

  That was one problem she had worried about needlessly. At the end of her fifth month, in the middle of the night, Meredith hemorrhaged. This time none of the skills known to medical science were able to save the baby girl whom Meredith named Elizabeth in honor of Matt’s mother. They nearly failed to save Meredith, who remained in critical condition for three days.

  For a week after that she lay in bed with tubes running into her veins, listening anxiously for the sound of Matt’s long, quick strides in the corridor. Her father had tried to call him, and when he couldn’t get through, he’d sent him a telegram.

  Matt didn’t come. He didn’t call.

  During her second week in the hospital, however, he answered her telegram with one of his own. It was short, direct and lethal:

  A DIVORCE IS AN EXCELLENT IDEA. GET ONE.

  Meredith was so emotionally battered by those eight words that she refused to believe he was capable of sending a telegram like that—not when she was in the hospital. “Lisa,” she’d wept hysterically, “he’d have to hate me before he’d do this to me, and I haven’t done anything to make Matt hate me! He didn’t send that telegram—he didn’t! He couldn’t!” She talked Lisa into putting on another performance for the benefit of the staff at Western Union in order to find out who sent it. Western Union reluctantly provided the information that the telegram had indeed been sent by Matthew Farrell from Venezuela and charged to his credit card.

  On a cold December day Meredith emerged from the hospital with Lisa walking on one side of her and her father on the other. She looked up at the bright blue sky, and it looked different, alien. The whole world seemed alien.

  At her father’s insistence, she enrolled for the winter semester at Northwestern and arranged to share a room with Lisa. She did it because they seemed to want her to, but in time, she remembered why it had once meant so much to her. She remembered other things too—like how to smile, and then how to laugh. Her doctor warned her that any future pregnancy would carry an even greater risk to her baby and herself. The thought of being childless had hurt terribly, but somehow she coped with that too.

  Life had dealt her several major blows, but she had survived them and, in doing so, she found in herself an inner strength she didn’t know she possessed.

  Her father hired an attorney who handled the divorce. From Matt she heard nothing, but she finally reached the point where she could think of him without pain or animosity. He had obviously married her because she was pregnant and because he was greedy. When he realized that her father had complete control of her money, he simply had no further use for her. In time, she stopped blaming him. Her reasons for marrying him had not been unselfish either; she had gotten pregnant and been afraid to face the consequences alone. And even though she had thought she loved him, he had never deceived her by claiming to love her—she had deceived herself into believing he did. They had married each other for all the wrong reasons, and the marriage had been doomed from the start.

  During her junior year she saw Jonathan Sommers at Glenmoor. He told her his father had liked an idea of Matt’s so well that he’d formed a limited partnership with him and put up the additional capital for the venture.

  That venture paid off. In the eleven years that followed, a great many more of Matt’s ventures also paid off. Articles about him and pictures of him appeared frequently in magazines and newspapers. Meredith saw them, but she was busy with her own career, and it no longer mattered what he did. It mattered to the press though. As year faded into year, the press became increasingly obsessed with his flamboyant corporate successes and
his glamorous bedroom playmates, who included several movie stars. To the common man, Matt apparently represented the American Dream of a poor boy making good. To Meredith, he was simply a stranger with whom she had once been intimate. Since she never used his name and only her father and Lisa knew that she had ever been married to him, his widely publicized romances with other women never caused her any personal embarrassment.

  12

  Wind whipped up whitecaps and sent them tumbling, frothing onto the sand twenty feet below the rocky ledge where Barbara Walters strolled beside Matthew Farrell. A camera tracked their progress, its dark glass eye observing the pair, framing them against a background of Farrell’s palatial Carmel, California, estate on the right, and the turbulent Pacific Ocean on the left.

  Fog was rolling in like a thick, undulating blanket, propelled forward by the same wild gusts that were playing havoc with Barbara Walters’s hair and spitting sand at the camera’s lens. At the prearranged spot, Walters stopped, turned her back to the ocean, and started to address another question to Farrell. The camera swiveled too, but now it saw only the couple framed against a dismal backdrop of gray fog while wind blew Walters’s hair across her face.

  “Cut!” she called out, irritably shoving hair out of her eyes, trying to free the strands sticking to her lipstick. Turning to the woman who was in charge of makeup, she said, “Tracy, do you have anything that will hold my hair down in this wind?”

  “Elmer’s Glue?” Tracy suggested with a lame attempt at humor, and motioned to the van parked beneath the cypress trees on the west lawn of the Farrell estate. After excusing herself to Farrell, Walters and the makeup girl headed toward the van.

  “I hate fog!” the cameraman announced bitterly as he glowered at the thick gray mist shrouding the coastline, obliterating the panoramic view of Half Moon Bay that he’d envisioned using as cinematic background for this interview. “I hate fog,” he repeated, turning his scowling face up to the sky. “And I hate wind, goddammit!”

  He had addressed his complaint directly to the Almighty, and, as if in answer, a fistful of sand blew up like a miniature whirlwind at the cameraman’s feet and hurtled itself into his chest and face.

  The assistant cameraman chuckled. “Apparently, God isn’t very fond of you either,” he observed, watching the irate man dust sand off his eyebrows. He held out a cup of steaming coffee. “How do you feel about coffee?”

  “I hate that too,” the cameraman muttered, but he took the cup.

  The assistant nodded in the direction of the tall man standing a few yards away, gazing out at the ocean. “Why don’t you ask Farrell to stop the wind and clear the fog? From what I hear, God probably takes His orders from Farrell.”

  “If you ask me,” Alice Champion chuckled, joining the pair and sipping her own coffee, “Matthew Farrell is God.” Both men shot an ironic look at the script girl, but they said nothing, and Alice knew their silence represented their own reluctant awe of the man.

  Over the rim of her coffee cup, she studied Farrell as he stood looking out across the ocean—a solitary, somewhat secretive ruler of a financial empire called Intercorp, an empire he had created out of his own sweat and daring. A tall, urbane monarch who sprang from the steel mills of Indiana, Matthew Farrell had somehow purged himself of any of the characteristics that might have been identified with his lowly origins.

  Now, as he stood on the ridge, waiting for the interview to continue, Alice thought he absolutely radiated success, confidence, and virility. And power. Most of all, Matthew Farrell emanated raw, harsh power. He was tanned, suave, and impeccably groomed, yet there was something about him that even his tailor-made clothes and polite smile couldn’t conceal—a danger, a ruthlessness that made others try to amuse, rather than annoy him. It was as if his entire being gave off a silent warning not to cross him.

  “Mr. Farrell?” Barbara Walters stepped down from the van, clamping her blowing hair down against her temples with both hands. “This weather’s impossible. We’ll have to set up inside the house. It will take us about thirty minutes. Can we use the living room?”

  “Fine,” Matt said, his annoyance at this delay concealed behind a brief smile. He did not like reporters of any kind, from any medium. The only reason he’d agreed to allow Barbara Walters to interview him was that there’d been a long rash of publicity about his private life and amorous affairs, and it was beneficial to Intercorp’s image for its chief executive officer to be seen in his corporate persona for a change. When it came to Intercorp, Matt made whatever sacrifices were necessary. Nine years ago, after he finished working in Venezuela, he’d used his bonus and the additional money Sommers put up, to buy a small automotive parts manufacturing company that was teetering on bankruptcy. A year later, he sold it for twice what it had cost. Using his share of the profits and additional money he borrowed from banks and private investors, he formed Intercorp and, for the next several years, he continued to buy up companies that were teetering on bankruptcy—not because they were poorly managed, but only because they were undercapitalized—then he shored them up with Intercorp’s capital and waited for a buyer.

  Later, instead of selling the companies off, he began a carefully planned acquisition program. As a result, in one decade, he’d built Intercorp into the financial empire he’d imagined during those grim days and nights he labored in the steel mills and sweated on the oil rig. Today, Intercorp was a massive conglomerate headquartered in Los Angeles that controlled businesses as diverse as pharmaceutical research laboratories and textile mills.

  Until recently, Matt had made it a practice to purchase only selected companies that were for sale. A year ago, however, he had entered into negotiations to buy a multibillion-dollar electronics manufacturer headquartered in Chicago. Originally, the company had approached him, asking if Intercorp would be interested in acquiring them.

  Matt had liked the idea, but after spending a great deal of revenue and many months finalizing the agreement, the officers of Haskell Electronics had suddenly refused to accept the previously agreed-upon terms. Angry at the waste of Intercorp’s time and money, Matt decided to acquire Haskell with or without their consent. As a result of that decision, a fierce and well-publicized battle ensued. At the end of it, Haskell’s officers and directors were left lying crippled on the financial battlefield, and Intercorp had gained a very profitable electronics manufacturer. Along with victory, however, Matt also acquired a reputation as a ruthless corporate raider. That didn’t particularly faze him; it was no more irksome than his reputation as an international playboy which the press had bestowed upon him. Adverse publicity and the loss of his personal privacy were the costs of success, and he accepted them with the same philosophical indifference that he felt for the fawning hypocrisy he encountered socially, and the treachery he faced from business adversaries. Sycophants and enemies came with extraordinary success, and if dealing with them had made him extremely cynical and wary, that, too, was the price he’d had to pay.

  None of that bothered him; what did bother him was that he no longer derived much gratification from his successes. The exhilaration he used to feel when he faced a difficult business deal had been missing for years, probably, he’d decided, because success was virtually a foregone conclusion now. There was nothing left to challenge him—at least there hadn’t been until he’d decided to take over Haskell Electronics. Now, for the first time in years, he was feeling some of the old adrenaline and anticipation. Haskell was a challenge; the huge corporation needed to be completely restructured. It was top-heavy with management; its manufacturing facilities were antiquated, its marketing strategies outdated. All of that would have to change before it could begin to realize its full profit potential, and Matt was eager to get to Chicago and get started. In the past whenever he acquired a new company, he’d sent in the six men who Business Week magazine had dubbed his “takeover team” to evaluate the organization and make recommendations. They’d been at Haskell for two weeks already, working in the
sixty-story high-rise that Haskell owned and occupied, waiting for Matt to join them. Since he expected to be in Chicago off and on for the better part of a year, he’d bought a penthouse apartment there. Everything was in readiness, and he was eager to leave and get started.

  Late last night he’d returned from Greece, where negotiations to acquire a shipping fleet had taken four long, frustrating weeks, instead of two, to bring to fruition. Now the only thing that was holding him up was this damned interview. Silently cursing the delay, Matt turned toward the house. On the east lawn, his helicopter was already waiting to take him to the airport, where the Lear he’d bought was ready to take off for Chicago.

  The helicopter pilot returned Matt’s brief wave, then gave the thumbs-up sign that the chopper was fueled and ready to fly, but he glanced worriedly toward the wall of fog closing in on them, and Matt knew his pilot was as eager as he to be airborne. Crossing the flagstone terrace, he entered the house through the French doors that opened into his private study. He was reaching for the telephone, intending to call his Los Angeles office, when the door across the room banged open. “Hey, Matt—” Joe O’Hara poked his head into the opening, his gruff, uncultured voice and unkempt appearance a jarring contrast to the almost antiseptic grandeur of the marble-floored study with its thick cream carpet and glass-topped desk. Officially, O’Hara was Matt’s chauffeur; unofficially, he was his bodyguard, and far better suited to that role than the role of chauffeur—for when O’Hara slid behind the wheel of an automobile, he drove as if he were jockeying for first place in the Grand Prix.

  “When’re we leavin’ for Chicago?” O’Hara demanded.

  “As soon as I get this damned interview over with.”