A Risk Worth Taking

by Robin Pilcher

  The solution to his problem presented itself in the form of Jackie Porter, a woman who had been working with Rebecca since she had first started and whom Rebecca had managed to persuade back from her role as mother to a young family to take on public relations for the company. Intelligent, strong-willed, and beautiful, as well as being a good and trusted friend to Rebecca, Jackie had the ideal credentials to run the company and intermediate between Stephen and Rebecca. In a carefully worded address at one of the weekly management meetings, Stephen had proposed that the company should broaden its management base to allow Rebecca more time to expand the design division of the company. He felt that this could best be achieved by the appointment of a managing director.

  Stephen did not put forward Jackie’s name until the last moment. His timing was perfect. Rebecca agreed without a qualm, and it confirmed in Stephen’s mind that she had already been harboring concerns about how best to curb his own powers within the company.

  As it turned out, the working relationship between Jackie and himself could not have been more successful. Rebecca allowed them full sanction to get on with the running of her company and, from the day of Jackie’s appointment, never bothered to attend another management meeting. Jackie and he travelled to the States and across Europe together, setting up the retail outlets, and because they had to spend many days in each other’s company, sometimes under quite tedious and frustrating circumstances, their friendship developed into one of mutual support and respect. At least, that is how Stephen felt that Jackie would read the situation. For him, it was different. He had found himself becoming increasingly attracted to her, even though he knew that she was unattainable. Not only ten years his senior, she was also the mother of three children and the wife of an extremely successful City man. However, there had been considerable changes in Jackie’s home life over the past year. Her husband had lost his job and there had been furtive whispers in the office that relationships within her family were becoming increasingly strained. Although it did not seem to affect the way in which she ran the business, Stephen now detected the slightest chink of vulnerability in Jackie’s demeanour, one that had never before been apparent.

  Stephen broke off his train of thought and glanced over the top of his computer screen. In the office opposite his own, Jackie sat at her desk, raking her fingers repeatedly through her long blonde hair as she wrote quickly on a jotting pad. She looked up to catch her thoughts and their eyes came into contact. He smiled at her and she smiled back, but there was little joy or frivolity in its delivery. She dipped her head and continued to write.

  Stephen knocked out a quick rhythm with his hands on the desktop, then pushed himself out of his chair and walked out into the narrow glassed corridor that separated their offices. He gave a token knock on her door and entered.

  “All right if I come in?”

  Jackie looked up, nodded, then continued to write.

  Stephen sat himself down in a chair opposite her. He folded his arms and crossed one foot over the other, but remained silent.

  Jackie looked up again. She tilted her head questioningly to the side. “Is anything wrong?”

  Stephen shrugged his shoulders. “I was about to ask you the same thing.”

  Jackie held her pen six inches above the desk and let it go. It clattered down on the dark veneered surface. “Listen, I’m sorry if I didn’t seem very communicative at the meeting this morning.”

  “There’s no need to apologize. It couldn’t have gone any better. They seemed more than happy with the way things are going.”

  “As long as things keep going the way we’ve planned them.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that if Tom Headwick doesn’t come up with the modifications for the set design, then we’ve got a real problem on our hands.”

  “But you spoke to him this morning. I was under the impression that he told you they were all but finished.”

  Jackie scoffed dismissively. “Well, that’s what he says.”

  “Have you spoken to Rebecca about it?”

  “I haven’t been able to get hold of her. She’s been with a fabric supplier all morning and has her mobile switched off.”

  Stephen raised his eyebrows. “What’s new?”

  “And take a look at this, as well,” Jackie said, spinning a sheet of paper across the desk towards him. Stephen bent forward and picked it up.

  “It’s the schedule.”

  “Yes. I’ve just taken it off the Internet.”

  Stephen studied it for a moment. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Quite a lot, actually. We have a slot at one o’clock on Wednesday in the Bourdelle Museum.”

  Stephen shrugged. “That seems a good time. Means we don’t have to get up at sparrowfart.”

  “Yes, but look who’s showing in the Louvre at exactly the same time.”

  Stephen studied the schedule once more. “Ah. Gaultier.”

  “Exactly. So where’s the press going to be?”

  “Oh, hell!” Stephen muttered as he floated the schedule back onto Jackie’s desk. “And there’s nothing that we can do about it?”

  “Not a thing. The Chambre Syndicale set that schedule in stone. Do you want to hear more?”

  Stephen groaned and scrunched up his eyes, as if preparing himself for a stinging blow to the face. “If you insist.”

  “Three of our star models have backed out. I would hazard a guess that they’re probably going with him.”

  “Can they do that?”

  “I’m afraid so.” Jackie smiled. “It’s not really a big deal, though. I was half expecting something like this to happen, so I put a provisional booking on six other models from the agency.”

  Stephen breathed out a sigh of relief. “Thank goodness for that. Well done, you.” He pulled his chair forward and leaned his elbows on Jackie’s desk. As he did so, one of his gold cufflinks momentarily caught the sunlight through the full-length window and flashed a brilliant pinpoint of light across Jackie’s cleavage. “Listen,” he said, moving his hand imperceptibly so that the oval reflection played upon the deep split between her breasts, “are you going over to Paris before the show?”

  “I had planned to. I don’t think that one can tell the organizers too many times how grateful we are to be given a slot.”

  “Right. I’ll come with you.”

  Jackie shook her head. “There’s no reason for you to come.”

  “Oh, but I think I should. Two heads are always better than one, especially if there’s a problem to negotiate. Anyway, my workload’s pretty clear right up until the Tokyo trip.”

  Jackie contemplated his offer for a moment, then reached across the desk for her diary. Stephen immediately dropped his hands to his lap in case she caught the positioning of the reflected light from his cufflink. She opened the diary and flipped through the pages. “All right then. What about Saturday?”

  “This Saturday?”

  “I can’t do next week. I have meetings every day.”

  “I don’t think that’ll be much use then.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, if we hit a problem, we’re not going to get it sorted out on a Sunday. What meetings do you have on Monday?”

  Jackie glanced back at her diary. “One in the morning, one in the afternoon.”

  “Are they important or could you put them off to another day?”

  Jackie picked up her pen and began to turn it over in her fingers. “You really think it’s necessary?”

  “As an insurance, yes, I do.”

  She nodded. “Okay then. I’ll get Laurie to change them.”

  Stephen pushed himself to his feet. “Right. I’ll get straight onto Eurostar and book the tickets.”

  Jackie made no further comment about their arrangement, but swiveled around in her chair and stared out at the panoramic view of the River Thames and the uneven skyline of Wandsworth beyond. Sensing her deep distraction, Stephen stopped halfway to the door and then t
urned and walked over to the window, arriving in time to see a coxless four glide their boat upriver towards Putney.

  “You’re really not your usual dynamic self this morning, are you?”

  “No, not really,” she replied quietly.

  He turned and sat on the windowsill. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  She breathed out a laugh. “No, not really.” She turned to look at him. “Anyway, besides being unmarried and without the burden of children, I think you’re probably the wrong age and the wrong sex to understand my problem.”

  Stephen laughed. “I don’t know. I’ve always felt that I’ve been quite in touch with my feminine side.” His remark did not even register a spark of humour on Jackie’s face. “Things are a bit difficult at home, are they?”

  “Just a little,” Jackie murmured. She rested an elbow on the arm of the chair, and closing her eyes, she began to rub a thumb and forefinger up and down the bridge of her nose. “For some reason, it was so much easier to cope with Dan losing his job when it first happened. He was so . . . vulnerable and lost. But now he seems to be so complacent about it all, even happy, and it infuriates me. I don’t think that he’s making any effort at all to find another job.”

  “What’s he doing at the minute?”

  “Not a lot. He does a bit of housework, he takes the dogs for a walk, and most days, he has lunch with one of his friends in the pub. He’s also got heavily into cooking, which entails a great deal of watching Jamie Oliver on the television and serving up weird concoctions to me and the kids.”

  “Well, at least he’s doing that. Surely if you were both working, you’d be having to pay someone to look after the house.”

  “Yes, but you can’t count that as a job. Dan was earning close on two hundred thousand pounds a year in the City. That’s a pretty expensive housekeeper, wouldn’t you say?”

  Stephen spread out his hands along the windowsill. “So you are now the family’s sole breadwinner.”

  “Yes, in rather a large nutshell.”

  “Well, in that case,” Stephen said, “I would have thought that the way you’re feeling is pretty natural. All your married life, he’s been the security for your family—the provider. And now you’ve had to take over that role. Maybe . . .”—he paused momentarily, being caught in two minds as to whether he should continue—“maybe you’ve just lost some of your respect for him.”

  Jackie shot him a steely glance that told him he had overstepped the mark. He immediately tried to backtrack. “Not that you can’t rebuild that.”

  “Damn you.”

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “No, I mean damn you for being so intuitive. I was wrong. Maybe age and sex have got nothing to do with it. But what you certainly won’t understand is that, in marriage, losing respect for your partner is as bad as infidelity. There is no way that you can ever retrieve that complete, unassailable level of confidence that before existed between you as naturally as . . . the creation of life itself.” She turned to look out the window once more. “My word, you’ve stuck a spear deep into a wound that I was trying my best to ignore.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. You’ve stopped me from fooling myself.”

  Stephen pushed himself away from the windowsill and moved quickly towards the door. “Come on. You’re coming with me.”

  Jackie’s expression was one of puzzlement as she spun around in her chair to track his exit. “Where?”

  “Out for lunch.”

  Jackie shook her head. “No way. I can’t. I’ve got a pile of work to do.” She glanced at her wristwatch and laughed. “Anyway, it’s only half past eleven.”

  “I couldn’t give a toss. As financial director of Rebecca Talworth Design Limited, I consider it a necessary expense to take the company’s managing director out for lunch in order to talk about the extremely successful meeting that we had this morning and . . . to lift her spirits so that she can continue to perform as brilliantly as she has done since taking over at the top.” He shot her a wink similar to the one that, half an hour beforehand, had succeeded in turning the young receptionist’s knees to jelly. “We’ll only be an hour. What’s more, you’re not the only one who has work to do.”

  Jackie smiled at him. “All right. We’ll have lunch, but let’s leave it until midday. That should give you enough time to book those train tickets.”

  4

  Back then, the truth of the matter was that young Mr. and Mrs. Porter had struggled for a bit after they were married. But with the arrival of Josh, a beautiful, healthy nine-pound baby who had threatened to do permanent damage to Jackie’s elegantly light frame, they were quite content to live in a state of impecunious bliss in the minute flat that they rented off Baron’s Court Road.

  Then, in 1986, when Josh was an eighteen-month-old bundle of trouble, all things changed and Dan had to alter his thinking about being born in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was the year of the Big Bang, the deregulation of the stock market, and the staid, formal image of the City took on a new and welcome vibrancy. Dan’s firm benefited immediately, being one of the first to be taken over by a large American financial conglomerate, and within three months, he had been plucked from relative obscurity by the company’s new senior vice president to be one of their market makers. And from the moment that he started, he thrived on it. His battling days at school had fitted him well for the job. He loved the quick decision, the adrenaline rush of making a deal, the subterfuge in offloading a nonperformer. But above all, he loved making money.

  It was probably a much-needed energy release on Dan’s part that resulted in Jackie’s giving birth to Millie and Nina within the space of the next two years. The flat in Baron’s Court had begun to groan with overcrowding, so Dan decided to make the largest personal investment of his lifetime and took out a mortgage on the three-storey, four-bedroom house in Clapham. It was not until they had spent their first few months there, happily throwing themselves about this newly acquired space, that Jackie reminded Dan of their conversation in the Central Park Diner. Three children and a house in a suburb south of the river. They had achieved it all, minus the dogs. Jackie said that the dogs could wait.

  Dan had never paid much attention to the letters from headhunting firms that kept turning up in his in-tray. He was quite content to work in a familiar environment with colleagues that he knew and trusted. But there came the time when, at the age of five, Nina joined Millie at Alleyn’s School, and with Josh already attending Dulwich College for Boys, Dan suddenly found himself faced with paying three hefty school fees. Having tied up the greater proportion of his extensive savings in long-term investments, the effect on the family’s bank balance was immediate, even though Jackie had by now resumed work for three days a week with Rebecca Talworth. Either Dan had to find a better-paid job for himself or else such luxuries as their twice-yearly holidays abroad would have to be forfeited.

  Within a month, Dan had been headhunted by a Hong Kong–based investment bank, and thereafter he played the field, never staying with any company for longer than a year. But he found that, no matter for whom he was working, he loved what he did, and he could never quite believe his good fortune in ending up doing a job that made him money and made him smile. It had always been a bit of a laugh, a game, like playing one schoolboy prank after another.

  And then he had been badly caught out. Having decided to switch a substantial amount of his investments over to dot.com technology, he moved to another job that paid so well that the cash-in penalties incurred by the change were going to be written off in a year. But five months later, the dot.com bubble burst. Dan had seen it coming and had tried to offload his shares as fast as he could, but traders by now were wary of his techniques and treated them like leprosy. All he could do thereafter was to watch their value drop day by day. And then he had found the internal e-mail on his computer. At first he thought it a mistake that he had received it, obviously just sent out on blanket
coverage. Nevertheless, he had read the e-mail through, two pages of corporate jargon, explaining that the company was being forced to shed jobs due to the collapse of the dot.com market. It wasn’t until he reached the last paragraph that the true meaning of the e-mail hit him.

  “This company has always adopted a policy of last-in, first-out, and for this reason, we find ourselves with no alternative other than to terminate your contract of employment.”

  There were further remarks and apologies, but Dan hadn’t bothered to read them. He picked up the telephone and immediately called the firm of headhunters that had secured his last position. Over the next hour, he tried time and time again to make contact with someone who could give him advice, but he never managed to get past the sweet-talking receptionist. Eventually, he replaced the receiver, and it slowly began to dawn on him that, for the first time in his working life, he was going to be without financial security and without a job.

  At first, he had felt furious with himself for investing so recklessly and bitterly resentful at losing his job, but when, over the next few weeks, he received no offers from the headhunting firms that in the past had been falling over themselves to entice him away from one company to another, those feelings compounded to one of pure terror. At night, sleep deserted him and he would more often than not end up in the kitchen in the early hours of the morning drinking endless cups of tea and trying to blank out his thoughts by watching Open University or second-rate films on the television.

  But those thoughts were all too pervasive, and during his lonely nighttime vigils, he constantly mulled over the effects that his new circumstances would have on the comfortable lifestyle that he and his family had enjoyed up until then. Due to his catastrophic investment in the dot.com market, he no longer had the financial resources to keep the family protected from the consequences of his unemployment; he had only been with the company for two months, so there was to be no substantial redundancy payment; he would have to freeze his pension contributions; the girls were just about to go back to Alleyn’s for the start of the autumn term, and he knew that if his unemployment was to be long term, there was no way that he could keep them at the school; it was the start of Millie’s sixth form year, so what would be least disruptive to her? Maybe it would be better to move them both to Clapham High School now, rather than halfway through Millie’s A-level course.