More Than You Know

by Penny Vincenzi

  “Oh—and I must go,” said Scarlett. “I have to be on the coach at seven in the morning. I’m flying out to Milan first thing.”

  “Don’t go.” David Berenson’s voice was suddenly rather intense. “Stay for a coffee. It’s only just after ten.”

  “Oh—well, yes, that might be nice But then—”

  “Of course. It’d just be nice to … well, to chat a bit more. I’m feeling rather wide-awake now. It’s only, what, six or so in Charleston. Mother, I’ll see you to the elevator. Don’t turn into a pumpkin, will you, Miss Shaw?”

  “I won’t. And please call me Scarlett.”

  He was back in a few minutes, summoned the waiter. A brandy and soda. “What about you, Scarlett?”

  “Oh—no, thank you.”

  “Very well. Now … why don’t we take our coffee in the lounge?”

  “Fine. Yes. Why not?”

  Why did he make her feel so flustered? She just wasn’t a flustered sort of person.

  The lounge was half-empty; he led her to a large sofa by the fireplace, with its back to the room, sat down beside her. Rather close, she couldn’t help noticing.

  “So,” he said, “let’s talk about you now. Are you a very independent single girl? Or is there someone in your life? Do you have a boyfriend? I’m sure you do.”

  “Well—several, you know, but no one special.”

  “Ah. And your family—do you have brothers and sisters?”

  She began to talk, decided to be completely honest, describing her childhood; told him about Matt, how proud of him she was, how well he was doing.

  “It seems to me you’re doing pretty well, too. Your parents must be very proud of you both.”

  “Well, I think they are, quite.”

  “It must be great,” he said suddenly, “to have made your own way.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well—you know. It’s all been easy for me. I just did what my father told me when he was alive, and now I just go on doing what he told me, more or less, even though he’s dead.”

  “I’m sure it’s not that easy. And it’s obviously a very large and successful company, real estate, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, that’s right. How clever of you to know.”

  Brian had checked this out for her, intrigued by her friendship with Mrs. Berenson.

  “Well, it may be a large company, but I inherited the success along with everything else. I doubt if I would have made it on my own.”

  “I’m sure you would,” said Scarlett.

  “Now, why do you say that? You don’t know anything about me.”

  “Well, no, but I can see you’re very clever—”

  “How can you see that?”

  He had her there; it had been a ridiculous remark.

  “All you can see is someone rather spoilt, someone clearly with a bit of money, running a company that frankly would run itself for quite a long time, given a following wind.”

  “Well … it’s obviously silly to argue with you,” said Scarlett.

  “Very silly. Are you sure about that brandy?”

  “OK—maybe just a small one.”

  It was all so predictable after that, really, predictable and corny—the fact that he felt, if not a failure in his business career, very far from a success; and only a partial success as a person; and certainly a failure in his marriage.

  “We rub along OK, and we love the children and put on a good show for them, but Gaby leads her own life, and I think she cares more about her charities than she does for me. We’re just biding our time for a while, until the kids are grown, and then we’ll go our separate ways. It’s very sad, but I guess that’s the way of the world these days.”

  And why did she believe that, Scarlett wondered, half-amused and half-shocked at herself, and how many times had she heard it before? Because she wanted to believe it, she supposed.

  Time disappeared into some odd, confusing place; one moment it was half past ten, the next almost midnight. At one stage he put his arm along the top of the sofa, and then it drifted down to rest on her shoulders. “Is that OK?” he said, and the acknowledgement of it, that there was a need to ask, her laughing affirmation that of course, yes, it was perfectly OK, took them further into an intimacy that was yet perfectly respectable. And all the time, his eyes were on her, attentive, appreciative, sometimes smiling, sometimes thoughtful, and now and again so intense, so probing, it was like a physical touch, an embrace indeed, and she had to look away lest she did something unseemly.

  And then: “David, I must go,” she said. “It’s long after midnight, and I’m flying tomorrow.”

  And he said, “How sad, how very sad for me, but yes, of course you must go.”

  And he picked up her hand and studied it, as if it contained some important message for him, and then raised it and very briefly brushed it with his lips.

  “I will see you safely on your way,” he said. “Come along, my lovely Cinderella; let us seek out your pumpkin.” And he stood up and pulled her to her feet, and then kept her hand in his and walked her to the front lobby and then ushered her towards the swing doors and told the doorman to get a cab.

  “It’s been lovely,” he said, “so lovely. You are an enchanting companion and you have given me an enchanted evening, and I am very, very grateful to you. And I would like to do it again, next time I come to London. Which is fairly frequently. Do you think you might be available for dinner?”

  And Scarlett, so dizzy with excitement, so confused with desire, so lost in this new, strange, overwhelming emotion, said that yes, she might well be available for another dinner and gave him the telephone number of her flat and got into the cab, having been kissed on the cheek most properly, and sank back in her seat and closed her eyes and wondered how she could be so stupidly, so absurdly, so dangerously happy.

  Eliza was eating a sandwich at her desk when Lindy called her into her office; she was leaving Woolfe’s at the end of the year, she said, in order to marry a Swiss banker and move to Geneva. Eliza felt rather as if she had announced the earth was flat.

  “But you can’t! What about your career, what about—”

  “I know, I know, Eliza,” said Lindy, reaching for a cigarette, “but last time someone asked me to marry him, it was ten years ago, and I turned him down because I cared so much about my career. Anyway, I can’t risk another ten years. Jean-Louis wants a proper wife, he says, and I want to be a proper wife. Don’t look at me like that, Eliza; I’m thirty-seven, getting a bit old to be having babies, if I’m not careful. I don’t want to end up like some of the women in our profession, lonely and bitter, with only a set of tatty press releases for company.

  “Now, you’re not to worry, Eliza. I’m sure whoever takes over will be delighted to have you working for them.”

  Eliza hadn’t been worried until that moment; but then she began to.

  She went back to her desk, worrying: worrying about her own future, worrying about what she could do. And grieving that she had lost her role model.

  She’d always sworn she’d never put a man before her career. But if Lindy could …

  “Eliza? Jeremy Northcott.”

  “Oh—hallo, Jeremy. Yes. How are you?”

  “I’m absolutely fine, thanks. Look—I wonder if you’re doing anything on Friday?”

  She ought to say she was—Friday. When any self-respecting girl was booked up. Saying you weren’t made you look like a bit of a disaster. “So—”

  “No,” she said, “no, I don’t think so.”

  “Excellent. Well, I know we never made that night of it at the Saddle Room, but I thought we might make a visit to the Establishment instead. I’ve spoken to Charles and he says he and his girlfriend—Juliet, is she called?”

  “Yes.” God. Not Juliet. Not at the Establishment. She’d be such an embarrassment, she’d—

  “Right. Well, they’re free. So … how about it?”

  “It sounds wonderful,” said Eliza. “Thank you very
much, Jeremy, I’ll really look forward to it.”

  She put the phone down and realised her hand was shaking slightly. God. Jeremy Northcott. Rich, handsome, charming Jeremy Northcott. He’d asked her out. He’d actually … actually asked her out.

  What on earth could she wear?

  “I’ve got some news,” said Matt.

  “Oh, yes.” Scarlett smiled at him. They’d met—at his request—at one of the new Italian restaurants he liked so much. “What’s that, then?”

  “I’m setting up in business on my own.”

  “Really? Matt, that is exciting …”

  “I know. I can’t quite believe it myself. But me and a mate—Jim Simmonds, he’s called, known as Jimbo; he’s a negotiator same as me—we just decided we could make a go of it. You’d like him; you really would.”

  “How’d you meet him?”

  “Oh, we meet all the time, us negotiators. We go to the same pubs and restaurants; we all know what the others are up to, who our clients are—it’s the name of the game. We’ve pooled resources, Jimbo and I, a lot. Anyway, we was having a drink the other night and Jimbo said he reckoned we were doing too well for the old men, got to start doing well for ourselves. We worked out that if we got just one client, then that plus what we might be able to persuade the bank to lend us could keep us going for a bit.”

  “Sounds good so far.”

  “Yeah. And then right out the blue one day, client of mine, Mike Robertson, took me out for a drink and told me I was wasting my talents working for Barlow and Stein, and if I ever thought of going it alone, he could put a bit of business my way.” Mike Robertson bought a dizzying number of broken-down shops and buildings as close to bomb sites as he could manage and then sat on them, pleased if they were let, but not bothered if they weren’t. There was a roaring trade going on in bomb sites. National Car Parks bought them up to convert them—and could be forced to pay a great deal more for adjacent buildings than they were actually worth.

  Robertson also put up a fair few buildings of his own, and it was for those that Matt was briefed to find him tenants.

  “So that’s about the size of it, Scarlett. And simply because we can say he’s a client we’ve managed to get an overdraft. Only a thousand, but it’s enough to pay ourselves and a girl for a year, and he’s also letting us use a room in one of his developments dirt cheap. He says that he got lucky and so should we. So … all pretty good, really.”

  “It sounds incredible,” said Scarlett, “really, really exciting. When are you open for business?”

  “Well, almost straightaway,” said Matt. “Mr. Barlow said he didn’t want us pinching any more of his clients, and Jim’s boss said the same.”

  “But they were quite happy, really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And Jimbo, what’s he like?”

  “He’s Jewish, very positive, pushy, I suppose you could say—”

  “I like pushy people,” said Scarlett. “They get things done.”

  “Yeah, well, Jim certainly does. The thing you’d really notice about him is he’s really, really tall, six foot four—makes me look like a real little runt—and very skinny. He’s still living at home, like I am, fed up with not making any real money—”

  “Girlfriend?”

  “There’s some girl his family want him to marry, but he’s just not interested. He’s like me, married to the job … Nice bracelet, Scarlett,” he said, suddenly reaching for her hand, pulling it towards him. “Really pretty. All those charms. Where d’you get that, then?”

  “Oh—secondhand jeweller,” said Scarlett vaguely. “You know how good I am at finding stuff like this.”

  She was acquiring quite a bit of beautiful jewellery. David was very good at presents. The bracelet was her favourite—it had also been the first, and every time she saw him he gave her a new charm for it. The most recent had been a spinning disk that spelt out “I love you.”

  “Because I do,” he said.

  “David!” she had said warningly. “David, you mustn’t say things like that.”

  “But, my darling, I do. We may only have met a few times, but I feel I have always known you. I did from the very beginning, the very first time.”

  “Well, that’s nonsense,” she said, hearing the rather feeble note in her own voice—for had she not experienced precisely the same sensation herself, the feeling that she had found whatever and whoever she was looking for, had tumbled most happily and shockingly into love?

  And it was shocking: that she, Scarlett Shaw, could disregard the presence in his life of a wife of more than a dozen years and two much-loved children? And even as she had lain in his bed, tenderly and sweetly seduced, feeling the first tentative shoots of desire move inevitably into the disruption of brilliant, spreading, explosive orgasm, even as he entered her again and yet again, through a long, savagely inexhaustible night, as they fell finally asleep and then awoke to find each other stirring, smiling, reaching yet again, disturbed by a new, unsatisfied need, right through that first long night, she was achingly aware of those three people, and indeed of a fourth, sleeping not so far along the corridor of the hotel, the matriarch of his family, who had brought them so innocently and so dangerously together, and she swore to herself that this was a brief, deranged yielding to temptation that would not be repeated, however strongly it might assert itself.

  And how little she knew of herself, the strong-willed, self-controlled Scarlett, for the next time he came to London, only three weeks later, and this time without his mother, and sought her out with presents—a Tiffany necklace, a Dior scarf, as well as the bracelet from Garrard, things she would never in a hundred years have dreamed of possessing—presents and honeyed words and his own desperate need of her, she resisted for very little more than a moment, and then gave in to him laughingly, joyously, helplessly.

  They talked for many hours, that second visit—coinciding most happily with three days of leave—as much as they made love, indeed, of his need for her, his lack of happiness, his sense that at last he had found what he wanted in life.

  He could not get enough of her past, of talk of her family, of the war years in London, even of her career as a hairdresser, and loved her stories of difficult passengers, of turbulent flights, of her sister stewardesses.

  In short, being with him was complete and absolute pleasure; she felt cared for, amused, interested, satisfied in every way. She told him so.

  “Every way?”

  “Every way,” she said, laughing.

  She was intrigued by the fact that his family were clearly posh: he spoke of nannies, gardeners, of being away at school, of summer houses on the East Coast.

  “I thought the whole point of being American was that everyone was the same; it was classless,” she said almost plaintively one day when he had tried to explain the concept of “preppy” to her, and he had laughed.

  “My darling Scarlett, the American is every bit as snobby as the Englishman, possibly more. You have to be Old Money, with capital letters, or you might as well not have any at all.”

  “Your wife then,” said Scarlett, “is she very … very Old Money?”

  “I suppose so, yes,” said David, with a sigh. “But, please, can we not talk about her?”

  “All right. But you know I’m not, don’t you? I’m not really up there at all.”

  “To me you are, my darling. Very, very high up there. Beautiful, amusing, chic, and sexy. What more could anyone possibly ask? Now, how about we go upstairs and you take some of those—no, all of those—chic clothes off. And I show you how important you are to me.”

  He was irresistible, absolutely irresistible.

  The evening at the Establishment hadn’t begun too well; Eliza, Charles, and Juliet had arrived together to find a message from Jeremy.

  “Mr. Northcott says to tell you he’s very sorry,” said the girl at the reception desk, “but he’s been held up in a meeting. He’s ordered a bottle of champagne for you, and there’s a table
reserved. He’ll be about half an hour.”

  Forty minutes later, there was still no sign of Jeremy.

  “I think it’s rather extraordinary, I must say,” said Juliet. She often used this phrase, as if it conferred some kind of originality on what she was saying. “Quite rude, really. I mean, why make an arrangement if you’re not going to keep it? And it’s very late for a work meeting, surely? Half past nine.”

  “Not at all,” said Eliza briskly. “I know exactly what those sort of advertising meetings are like. Complete nightmare. They end when the client wants them to.”

  “Well, all I can say is, I’m glad I’m not in that business,” said Juliet.

  As if she would be, Eliza thought. She looked at Charles, who was clearly mildly embarrassed.

  Various people Charles and Eliza knew came over to say hallo; Juliet sat silent, sipping at her juice.

  “Eliza, ’ow’re you doin’?!”

  “Rex! Hallo, how lovely to see you.”

  “You too, darlin’.”

  Rex was a photographer she’d worked with once or twice. She had no idea what his surname was; he never used it. He was tall and skinny and always wore tight jeans, Chelsea boots, and some kind of variation of a dinner jacket over white shirts. He had a strong South London accent and told her he’d gone to a secondary modern and hadn’t even passed his eleven plus, which surprised her, since he was clearly very bright. He was very successful; he’d done work for Queen and Vogue and lots of advertising campaigns, and had a studio just off World’s End.

  “You on your own?” she said now. She was so relieved to have met someone she knew and someone so eminently suitable for the occasion—a brilliant example of the new classless, talented London she worked in—she could have kissed him. She did kiss him.

  “Yeah, just for the minute. Waiting for some mates.”

  “Come and have a drink.”

  “Yeah, well, thanks.” He sat down, smiled rather coolly at Juliet.

  “Haven’t seen you for a bit,” Eliza said to Rex. “How’s it all going?”

  “Good, yeah. Done a session for Vogue last week.”