Golden Boy

by Rosemary Friedman

  Freddie might have ignored the incident if, two weeks ago when he had eschewed the directors’ dining-room for the Italian restaurant behind St Paul’s, where he went when he had no clients to impress or he wanted to be alone, he had not noticed Roland Tansley, Chapman’s partner, come out of the same building. Guessing that the days of Universal Concrete (in common with 22,440 other companies according to recent figures published by the Department of Trade and Industry) were numbered, Freddie decided to take a calculated risk. In his book a risk was never justified unless it was calculated, and he would no more dream of taking a chance in business than of overtaking on a blind bend. Instructing Leonard to drive on, he came to the conclusion that the sight of Tarquin Chapman was fortuitous and decided to play his hunch. Calling his stockbroker for the second time that morning, he bought a put option on a large parcel of shares in Universal Concrete.

  Dismissing Leonard as they drew up in front of the Sitwell Hunt building, Freddie had gathered up his briefcases and was halfway across the pavement before the driver had time to open the car door. Acknowledging the greeting of Sam, the commissionaire, who had served the Sitwell family, with a break for military service, for over fifty years, he nodded to the waiting messengers who paced the marble floor between the pot plants, and made a beeline for the lift.

  Swinging his briefcases as he hurried along the second floor corridor, his whistled rendering of ‘La donna è mobile’ was cut short by Conrad Verger, who, with his hands in the pockets of his Japanese designer suit, waylaid him.

  Conrad, member of the Assassins club and alumnus of Harvard Business School, was married to Sir Gordon’s daughter Sophie. He had recently been taken in by Gordon as an associate director of Sitwell Hunt. Despite his previous experience – including a couple of years in Hong Kong where he had picked up a smattering of Mandarin as well as some useful Chinese contacts – Conrad had a great deal to learn about banking and was heavily dependent upon Freddie who suspected that, although outwardly friendly, Conrad resented his position as head of the acquisition team, as well as his long-standing association with Gordon and his place in his father-in-law’s affections.

  ‘Morning, Freddie. Well done on the bid.’ Conrad’s voice sounded only slightly grudging. ‘Who did you have to fuck to get Randall?’

  Freddie glanced impatiently at his new chronograph. He wanted to get a few things under his belt before the morning meeting at which he planned to discuss the weekend press and the major marketing launches during the week. He explained briefly to Conrad, who seemed to be in no hurry, how, by conniving with Bonney, he had managed to persuade Roger Randall to wait for a more advantageous offer from Galaxy for Corinthian, which had produced the anticipated result.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Freddie!’ Conrad removed his hands from his pockets. ‘Are you saying you committed the resources of Sitwell Hunt, on an open-ended arrangement, without any board authorisation?’

  Freddie nodded.

  ‘Without even bothering to mention it?’

  ‘I only intimated to Bonney that, in the extremely unlikely event that I am unable to raise all the necessary funds in the market in a year’s time, Sitwell Hunt will step in with the balance…’

  ‘We’re in the middle of a recession, Freddie. Who knows what’s going to happen in a year’s time? If you can’t find the money in the market, Bonney’s going to look to us for hundreds of millions of pounds.’

  ‘I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it if I were you. There is no likelihood whatsoever of the bank having to raise a single penny.’

  ‘What makes you so damned sure?’

  Freddie put an avuncular hand on the shoulder of the chairman’s son-in-law. ‘I do know my own strengths, Conrad.’

  Leaving Conrad open-mouthed, he took out his key card and made for the corporate finance department, which specialised in mergers, takeovers and the raising of capital, locked away behind its Chinese wall.

  Entering his domain, and without slowing his pace, he acknowledged the greetings of those of his junior colleagues who were already at work in their glass cubicles.

  ‘Morning, Freddie.’

  ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘Well done on the bid.’

  Grinning broadly, Freddie made his way between the goldfish bowls to his inner sanctum.

  ‘Well done, everyone.’ He looked at his chronograph. ‘Twelve thirty in my office. Champagne’s on me!’

  On his desk were a glossy propectus, inviting him to participate in a multimillion-pound project in Brazil, half a dozen birthday cards, a wrapped bottle, and what looked like a book. Dropping his gear, he pressed the keypad on the table to suss out the market movers on the Topics Screen before zapping to the company news. A new bid for Rochelle led him to make a mental note to give the managing director of the electronics company – to whom he had marketed in the past – a ring, to see if he was thinking of changing his obviously lightweight advisors. Checking on the announcement of his own satisfactory coup, he sat down at his desk to look at his birthday mail and open his presents.

  The cards (which had sexual innuendoes to do with his age) were from colleagues, the bottle (non-vintage champagne) was from the tea-ladies, and the book, Golf for the Middle-Aged – which he presumed was supposed to be funny – was from one of the heads of departments. As he took Rosina’s glass pyramid from his briefcase and put it in pride of place next to his leather-framed photograph of Jane, an airmail envelope, marked personal and propped up against the calendar caught his eye. Sidonie. She never forgot.

  A trip to the States in search of acquisitions five years ago, when he had just joined Sitwell Hunt, had led to a liaison with Sidonie Newmark, the one and only time he had cheated on his marriage vows.

  Sidonie, a New York stockbroker, had come on strong to him on Concorde. The blonde Ms Newmark, as he was to discover over the next few days spent largely in bed with her in her Manhattan apartment – where the attachments for the cooker lay unused in their bubble-pack – fucked like a small tiger, shared his passion for opera, was his intellectual match, had eyes which could freeze an opponent at twenty paces, and could, when the occasion demanded it, be as ruthless in business as he. Sidonie was ignited by power and turned on by money, the word love did not feature in her vocabulary. In every respect she was the counterpoint to Jane, who not only abhorred anything to do with opera but was also tone-deaf. For six crazy months Sidonie screwed Wall Street by day and Freddie, when he was in New York, by night. Not surprisingly he had found an excuse to visit the States frequently throughout the course of their affair, and in between times met Sidonie – who thought nothing of crossing the Atlantic to spend a night with him – in Paris, Frankfurt or Geneva. On Sidonie’s sudden and unexpected betrothal to a (titled) Italian playboy, the liaison had ended as abruptly as it had begun, and a relieved and guilt-stricken Freddie had come to his senses.

  Slitting open the blue envelope with his paperknife, he removed Sidonie’s birthday card – ‘You may be pushing 40 but you’re still not over the hill’ – which was signed with her name in the familiar, backwards-sloping hand. Freddie allowed himself a wry smile and a momentary remembrance of things past, before putting the card with the others, pressing the buzzer on his desk for his personal assistant, and turning his attentions to the more important business of the day.

  ‘Morning, Freddie. Congratulations…’ Susan, a slim brunette almost as tall as her boss, who favoured shift dresses in dark colours enhanced by a silk scarf or a brooch, came briskly into the office, with a newspaper under her arm, and put a gift-wrapped package in front of him. ‘…and Happy Birthday.’

  ‘Morning, Susan. Is that for me? Thank you very much. Good weekend?’

  ‘Nothing to write home about.’ She put the Independent, its front page full of gloom and doom about dashed hopes for an economic recovery and job losses in power and petroleum, down on his desk.

  ‘There’s a photograph of you. And Wichmann has called twice. He wants to talk to you urgently. I
think Frankfurt is about to burst into action.’

  ‘Sod it! I thought I was going to have a quiet week. I need the Bretton Corporation team here. Will you sort it out? Two thirty, prompt. I want to get to the bottom of that leak. You can fix a meeting with Travers to discuss the marketing drive. Check the diaries and fix up dinner – the Savoy – for the Corinthian boys…’

  ‘When?’

  ‘ASAP…and chase up the weekend press cuttings on the bid, will you, Susan?’

  Susan had worked for Freddie ever since he had been at Sitwell Hunt. A few years older than he, she had been passed on to him by a friend at the Foreign Office who had been posted to Lagos, and came with a glowing reference, a radical mastectomy, and a broken marriage behind her. Now, with access to both Freddie’s bank account and to his diary, she was an indispensable extention of his daily life. Although their relationship had never been anything but businesslike – they simply functioned together like a pair of well-drilled ice-skaters – and Susan had not once spoken out of turn, Freddie was aware that his personal assistant was in love with him.

  Opening his parcel, he knew that he would find another sweater – it was white cashmere this time – to add to his collection, and that it was, according to Rosina who had read it in a magazine, an unconscious manifestation of Susan’s desire to put her arms around him. Buzzing his PA to thank her profusely for the extravagant present and to ask her to get the German broker on the line, he decided that in honour of his birthday he would take Susan out for lunch.

  Hans Wichmann was acting on behalf of several companies who, with an eye on Eastern Europe, were trying to set up a chain of supermarkets in the CIS.

  ‘Guten Morgen…’ It was the extent of Freddie’s German. ‘Yes, yes, I was going to call you,’ Freddie lied, have hoped for a few days to catch up with himself after Corinthian. ‘Things are looking good this end, Hans.’ He put his feet up on the desk. ‘As far as English investment is concerned it’s in the bag. You can tell your people not to worry. Sitwell Hunt International can provide all the finance you’re going to need. No problem. No problem at all. But before we go any further, I think you and I need to talk…’

  Freddie decided that it would be a good move to invite this potentially valuable client, with whom negotiations had been going on for some time, to come to London at the weekend with this wife. On Saturday night he would take them to a gala performance of Lohengrin at the Royal Opera House where he was in charge of the Sitwell Hunt box.

  There were those who believed that corporate entertaining was an expensive and unnecessary luxury at best, and an immoral form of bribery at worst. In Freddie’s book, goodwill in business was an inestimable asset. He had himself been wined and dined at some of the world’s most prestigious restaurants, been taken on private tours of Venetian palaces and even – on one memorable occasion in Hockenheim – invited to shoot wild boar. His own method of establishing what he considered was a vital personal rapport with his clients, which at the same time satisfied his own predilection, was to take them to the opera.

  His love affair with opera had begun during his first term at Trinity when he had accidentally tuned his radio into the second act of Don Giovanni, and the voice of Lisa della Casa singing ‘Non mi dir’ had struck him with the impact of a physical blow. This apocalypse was later reinforced when while visiting a friend on his staircase he had heard the Prisoners’ Chorus from Fidelio, and he was hooked for life. It was not only the music which spoke to him. No matter how badly the dramatis personae treated each other, no matter how dire their acting, the ultimate revelations of the triumph of hope and tenacity over often overwhelming odds never failed to move him.

  As others were capable of reflection in another language, Freddie frequently even thought in terms of opera. ‘Là ci darem la mano’ – Don Giovanni wooing the country lass – was the first night he spent with Jane in his Cambridge room seventeen years ago, ‘Parigi, O cara’ (without wishing upon Jane the fate of Violetta) was his vow to spend his life with her, while ‘Pur ti miro’ – Nero’s double-crossing of his Empress for love of Poppea – was his betrayal of Jane with Sidonie of which he was not the slightest bit proud.

  Putting the phone down on Wichmann, who on behalf of Frau Wichmann and himself had accepted Freddie’s invitation with alacrity, Freddie buzzed Susan to fix the couple up with a suite at the Connaught (plus the usual flowers and champagne), to pencil him in for the Covent Garden box on Saturday, to call Interflora and have a dozen yellow roses sent to Jane, and to bring him up to date with the correspondence.

  She brought in a pile of letters and a memo.

  ‘Your put option…’

  Freddie glanced with satisfaction at the details of the shares he had bought. If his hunch was correct and Universal Concrete went down the tubes, he stood to gain some sixty to seventy thousand pounds before the end of the account.

  ‘…confirmed. And Gordon just put his head round the door. He really wanted a quick word with you but I told him you were involved with Wichmann. He’s running late – he had his knickers in a twist over the traffic on Hendon Way – and he has someone waiting upstairs. I said ten o’clock. After the morning meeting.’

  Seven

  When Freddie first brought Jane down from Cambridge to introduce her to his mother, Lilli took her silver pastry forks from their blue velvet next and polished them, but the resentment which welled up within her, and which for Freddie’s sake she tried hard to conceal, permeated the Victoria sandwich and cast a pall over the tea-trolley. That there was nothing personal about her feelings towards her son’s red-headed girlfriend was immaterial. Freddie was her son and she did not want to share him with anyone.

  The fact that Jane was pregnant with Freddie’s child took Lilli by surprise and forced her to retrench. In an unconscious statement, she wore a white suit for the wedding, and afterwards not only rang Jane frequently to make sure that she was looking after Freddie, but called round uninvited to make sure – with a glance from her critical eye – that the home Jane had made was what Freddie had been used to and that his new wife was not going to disturb the status quo.

  Gradually Lilli’s fears abated, and a grudging admiration for Jane, coupled with her delight in her grandchildren whose musical education she took in hand, replaced the mistrust. As the years went by the two women grew fond of each other and Jane became the daughter Lilli had never had. Lilli invited her frequently to the house in Maida Vale, and played Schumann’s ‘Träumerei’, and Kinderszenen (which were lost on Jane) on the piano while she regaled her with stories of Freddie’s childhood.

  The dinner menu Jane had planned for Freddie’s birthday was a simple one. A vibrant salad of red, yellow, and green peppers; poulets de Bresse roasted with rosemary, garlic and lemon juice; a runny wheel of unpasteurised Brie; a birthday cake made by what called itself a ‘French’ pâtisserie in Charlotte Street, accompanied by a green fruit salad for the calorie freaks.

  Jane had not been brought up as Freddie had been, in the rarified atmosphere of an only child. She did not in fact remember actually having been brought up at all.

  She was the oldest of five red-headed sisters. Her father, Vincent Morley, was a charming but poorly paid heraldic artist who had quietly succumbed to the complications of a faulty heart valve when she was 13, and her mother, Odette (née Bérenguier), was a distracted ballet teacher (now remarried and living in Buenos Aires), who had taught her daughters to jeter and plier and trained them as flower girls and sugar-plum fairies. The ‘copperknobs’, as Jane and Sylvie and Chantal and Emeraude and Julia were known in the Barnes street where they lived – together with various cats and tortoises and hamsters and canaries which came and went over the years – were left mainly to their own devices. A great deal of time, as Jane remembered, seemed to have been devoted to standing on the derelict sofa and looking out of the window (the only one in the street without curtains) waiting for their mother to come home, or dressing up in handed-down tutus, darned pointe s
hoes, and fragments of stage costumes. The dressing-up box, an oversized laundry hamper kept on the sitting-room floor, metamorphosed, according to the game the copperknobs were playing, into boat, raft, vaulting horse, ‘home’, stage, soapbox, or throne. Sometimes, too hungry to wait for their mother’s return – when she would quite often have forgotten to go to the shops anyway – the hamper became a table for the makeshift meals which they scavenged for themselves.

  When the single male copperknob made his appearance – he was delivered at home, with the aid of the midwife and very little fuss, as the other copperknobs had been – Jane was ten. When Odette had finished breast-feeding him, a process which continued long after the approved time, and had gone back to her teaching, Didier Jean-François Théodore found himself with five surrogate mothers who carried their brother around with them, fed him, and played with him as they did with their kittens.

  The neighbours purported to look down on Jane’s family with its ramshackle lifestyle, but it was to the Morleys’ house that the children in the street came with their painted faces on Hallowe’en, and in the Morleys’ wilderness of a garden that, huddled in warm clothing and stamping their feet to restore the circulation on their toes, they gathered round the bonfire on Guy Fawkes’ Night.

  From the age of 9, Jane’s school holidays had been spent in the Massif des Maures with Grandmaman and Grandpapa, who was the village baker, in the house above the Boulangerie. The Boulangerie – in those days there had been only one – was in the main street opposite the church tower, the bells of which proclaimed not only the hour (which it repeated quixotically thirty seconds later) but weddings, baptisms and funerals, and, owing to the proximity of the volatile oak forests, frequently summoned the fire brigade. The windows of Jane’s bedroom looked out onto the insignia of the drying tea towels which hung from the windows of the Bar de la Poste, below which the young men of the village assembled on their motorbikes.