Golden Boy

by Rosemary Friedman

  Jane’s memories of her grandfather were of a white-clad figure, bathed in white mist, sprinkling flour onto the turning paddles in his huge vats like a votary, before dividing the stretchy dough, with sharp cutters, into equal portions. Although each portion was flung disdainfully onto the scales, Grandpapa got it right every time. The balance, with its dented tin bowls, was merely a formality which preceded the ambidextrous rolling of two balls of dough at a time into identical shapes, and arranging them into rows on greased trays which were then slammed into the cupboard to prove. Jane was allowed no further than the door of the bakery where she stood in her nightdress watching Grandpapa. The bakery was man’s work.

  From the time that she could reach the till, however, Jane had helped her grandmother in the shop. The rattle of the beaded curtain as the first customers came in from the street for the stacked sticks of still-warm bread round which she would fold minuscule squares of flimsy paper, was one of her earliest recollections. It was Grandmaman who taught Jane how to use a sewing machine and to crochet, how to wash her hair in vinegar, and make a pot au feu.

  When Jane was sixteen, Grandpapa, who had never had a day’s illness in his life, had a crise cardiaque. He was found by Grandmaman when she came down to open the shop in the morning, lying on the stone floor of the bakery, like a loaf of his own bread, in a shroud of white flour. On Grandpapa’s death it was discovered, to everyone’s surprise, that he was not only the owner of a large vineyard but had money in the bank. It was Jane’s legacy from Grandpapa which had taken her to Paris and the Union Centrale des Arts Décoratifs.

  With Grandpapa gone, Grandmaman sold the shop to his young apprentice and took her knitting to the seat occupied by the women beneath the sycamore tree, while at the other end of the street the men, flat caps on their heads, played boules, or sat on their sacrosanct bench in tranquil immobility. She refused to leave her village, where she had lived all her life, even for Jane’s wedding.

  Of all the copperknobs, Jane and Didier were the only ones still in England. Of the four girls, Julia was in Australia where she was married to a TV producer; Chantal was a nurse in Malta; Emeraude, an indigent actress, shared an apartment in New York with a cavalcade of lovers, and Sylvie, the only one to follow in her mother’s footsteps, lived with her soul-singing boyfriend and their twins – Quest and Journey – in Vancouver where she ran a ballet school. Didier, whom Jane saw frequently, was a partner in a successful firm of solicitors. It was Freddie, who kept a paternal eye on Jane’s young brother, who had been instrumental in setting him up.

  While Freddie like nothing better than the predictable rites of a formal dinner, Jane, influenced by Grandmaman whose pragmatism had left its indelible print on her childhood, would have been equally happy to sit round a wooden table in the kitchen with a casserole of jugged hare (marinated overnight in the washing-up bowl with branches of dried thyme and savory and rough red wine) mopped up with bread, followed by goats’ cheese, and washed down by a Coteaux du Layon with its bouquet of caramelised quinces.

  Although Jane did her own cooking, she usually employed extra help, in the persons of her cleaning lady, who went under the unlikely appellation of Lavender, and Lavender’s friend Tracey, who was a waitress at Fortnum’s during the day, to dish up the dinner and to serve.

  Going down to the kitchen to start her preparations for the dinner party, she was surprised to see that Lavender’s 4-year-old son, Shaun, was not at school but was sitting at the table, his nose running, stertorously working his way through a bag of salt and vinegar crisps. Lavender, in black leggings and a T-shirt with the superfluous message I AM PREGNANT, followed her glance.

  ‘I thought he might be sickening.’

  Jane made no comment. Lavender lived in an unheated council flat in Hackney and was married to Tony, a laid-off bricklayer who together with thousands of others had given up looking for work. Lavender was the breadwinner. She was not a particularly good cleaner. She removed the dirt only from eye level and left the tools of her trade in unlikely places. She was at the mercy of her children’s ailments – Shaun was asthmatic and the 3-year-old Daisy had eczema – and of her unemployed husband who was not averse to giving her the odd black eye. Jane often looked enviously at the efficient and unencumbered cleaning ladies she saw arriving, punctually and reliably, up and down the terraces each morning, but fate had sent her Lavender, with her aura of stale cigarettes, who brought the children to work with her in the holidays or on the increasingly frequent occasions when the nursery was closed, and relied upon Jane, to whom she entrusted her Post Office book – she was saving up to leave Tony – for her livelihood.

  Lavender, whose heart was bigger than her pocket, took two polyester ties from her shopping bag.

  ‘Do you think Freddie’ll suit them?’ she said anxiously.

  The house was filled with cheap china ornaments and glass pyramids encasing mauve silk orchids, furnished over the years by Lavender.

  ‘I got them down the market. Shaun’s made him a card.’

  Freddie was Lavender’s dream man and on the rare occasions when their paths crossed he would put his arm round her shoulders and treat her to a chorus of ‘Lavender’s Blue’, which never failed to make her blush.

  While Lavender wrapped the ties clumsily in used Christmas paper, Jane, having reassured her about their suitability, took the peppers from the fridge and found a place for them on the table amongst the wax crayons and the painting books.

  ‘Move, Shaun!’ Lavender spoke roughly to her son as she bent, with obvious difficulty, to get her cleaning equipment from the cupboard.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Jane said.

  ‘Pain in me back.’

  ‘Perhaps you shouldn’t have come out.’

  ‘I can’t stop indoors. Not with him sat in front of the telly all day with his filthy trainers up on my coffee table. I’m glad to get out of the house.’

  Tempted sometimes to bring to Lavender’s notice the coating of dust which she left in her wake, or to complain about cups and saucers which had become inadvertently chipped or broken, Jane reminded herself that Lavender, for all her faults, was doing her best. Six months advanced in her third pregnancy, which entailed long waits in the antenatal clinic, and not all that much older than Rosina, she had to dress and feed the children each morning, take Shaun to school, trek from Hackney in all weathers on an erratic bus, walk half a mile to put Daisy in the nursery, queue for a second bus, make her way from Great Portland Street to Chester Terrace, do a morning’s work, repeat the journey in reverse, shop, cook, and tidy her own place, and cope with the humours of a violent and indigent husband.

  Delving once more into her shopping bag, Lavender produced a bunch of ‘mixed’ carnations.

  ‘They were selling them off.’

  Jane abandoned the peppers, which she was going to put under the grill until the skins blackened, to cut the stems and remove the lower leaves from the wilting carnations. Arranging them in an Art-Deco vase with as much attention as if they had been a beribboned bouquet delivered that morning from Pulbrook & Gould, she carried them into the dining-room. Placing them on the sideboard, she picked up the envelope on which she had scribbled the names of her dinner guests.

  Piers Warburton, reformed alcoholic and close friend of Freddie’s, in charge of retail banking in continental Europe at NatWest, and Alex, a feisty 25-year-old magazine editor rumoured to put herself around Fleet Street, his third wife; Lord and Lady Cottesloe – Peter and Georgina – Jane and Freddie’s laid-back next-door neighbours. Georgina had her own wine business on the income from which, topped up by Peter’s daily attendance allowance at the House of Lords, they lived; Jane’s old school friend Babs Ingoldsby (Bingo), an exactress now on her fourth husband (her numerous children were said to be confused about where to send their Father’s Day cards), Charles, another merchant banker; Robert Gould, a divorced executive of Sitwell Hunt whom Freddie had suggested Jane introduce to Caroline Hurst, a young widow on her committe
e; Gordon and Margaret Sitwell; and their oldest friends, James and Dos.

  Turning over the envelope, Jane drew a facsimile of the table round which she had been mentally seating her guests for days, moving them around like chessmen. Later she would transcribe the names, in the illuminated calligraphic hand she had learned from her father, onto hand-painted place cards.

  Piers Warburton, whose tongue on Perrier water would remain immobilised all through dinner, would be her responsibility. She would seat Bingo, who never stopped talking and was incapable of conversing at all without clutching onto the nearest limb of her companion, on Freddie’s right. The bankers had to be separated and Robert had to go next to his blind date. She put Peter Cottesloe next to Bingo – who was impressed by titles – and Gordon Sitwell, by virtue of his seniority, between herself and Georgina, who had her eye on becoming his wine merchant. Poor Margaret Sitwell, terrified in company, would be put at her ease by Freddie, with the sociable James – who hopefully would not come out with too many risqué stories at least until after the pudding – on her left flank. Alex, on his other side, could easily handle James. With Dos next to Robert and Charles on Georgina’s starboard the arrangement was complete.

  Returning to Shaun and the kitchen, Jane switched on the grill and turned her attention once more to the peppers. Dressed with olive oil, garnished with hard-boiled eggs and anchovies, and arranged on a silver platter, they would give a colourful start to the evening for which, although she was producer and director, Freddie, with his talent for giving the élan vital to any gathering, would be the star.

  Eight

  On the fifth floor of Sitwell Hunt International, Gordon Sitwell, Message in his buttonhole, stood by the window of his panelled office hung with commissioned portraits of his father and his grandfather, the two previous Sitwell incumbents, dictating a letter to his secretary and contemplating the dark aurioles of her nipples clearly visible beneath the thin silk of her blouse. His secretaries were hand-picked, not for their skills at the word processor but for their youth and innocence, although today not even the youngest of them was unsullied. None of them stayed long. They left to get married. Or had problems with their boyfriends. Or were bored. Or pregnant. Sometimes he got his satisfaction by directing them to the S–Z drawer of the mahogany filing cabinets so that he could get an undisturbed view of their buttocks, and sometimes, according to his mood, he made them fetch a volume from the top-most bookshelf, which necessitated their clambering onto a chair in their skirts which were no bigger than a Band-aid and which revealed, at the very least, their thighs. He did not shame the girls. He did not frighten them. They did not know.

  His kerb crawling (which now often took place on foot) had become a twice-weekly habit, although since the time of his caution he took care to avoid the area of King’s Cross. He could not help himself. He got a thrill from his addiction and a buzz out of his clandestine life. The risk that he might be apprehended intensified the excitement. It was not the best part. When he wasn’t actually kerb crawling, he was contemplating kerb crawling; it gave him a sense of power. He never had sex with the hookers. He paid them to listen. He went with them to their rooms where he told them exactly what he would like to do to them, and what he would like them to do to him in return. Afterwards he would drive home and in the privacy of the bathroom, he would masturbate to the tune of the evening’s fantasies while from outside the door, contributing to the moment, Margaret enquired politely if he were going to be long. Sometimes, on the infrequent occasions that he made love to Margaret, he would imagine that she was a prostitute he had picked up. It was the only time he despised himself.

  ‘With some reservation…’ The current secretary, a Madonna lookalike, had her pen poised over her notebook. She repeated Gordon’s last words, prompting him, breaking into his thoughts.

  He dragged his eyes from her blouse and exited his reverie.

  ‘With some reservation. Stop. I’m prepared to consider helping you. Stop. But before doing so I shall require further information, details of which…’

  Gordon noticed that she had her legs crossed in such a way that you could almost, almost, see the shadowy triangle that separated her thighs. He liked it when the weather was warm and the girls went bare-legged.

  ‘…further information, details of which our accountants will send you this afternoon. That’s it, Dorothy.’

  ‘Deirdre.’

  ‘Deirdre.’ Gordon leaned back in his chair and fingered the rose in his buttonhole. ‘Get Courtauld for me, will you, Deirdre? Tell him I want a word.’

  The morning meeting had finished early and Freddie had spent the last five minutes on the telephone chatting to Jane.

  ‘It isn’t my birthday,’ Jane said, referring to the yellow roses which had already been delivered.

  ‘They were to thank you for my present,’ Freddie looked at his wrist. ‘I love it. I love you.’

  ‘I’ll put them on the dining-room table. They’ll go with the peppers.’

  ‘Before I forget, I have a surprise for you. There’s a client and his wife coming from Frankfurt at the weekend. We’re taking them to Lohengrin on Saturday night.’

  ‘Freddie!’ Jane groaned.

  ‘I thought you’d be pleased.’

  ‘Is that the one where Gottfried turns into a swan?’

  ‘Hardly. It’s the other way round!’

  ‘The last time you made me sit through that, the machinery jammed and the poor bird got stuck in the wings. What are they like?’

  ‘The Wichmanns? Haven’t a clue.’

  ‘What did Gordon have to say about Corinthian?’

  ‘Nothing yet. He wasn’t at the meeting. Everyone else was chuffed. I’m due up there now.’

  ‘Don’t forget to thank Gordon for the birthday card. I don’t suppose he knows anything about it. I expect Margaret sent it. I’ve put her between you and James, and Gordon next to me and Georgina. I thought…’

  ‘I’m sure everything will be wonderful. As usual. I leave it entirely to you. According to my extremely smart chronograph, which can stop the time to an eighth of a second and calculate how many days there are in the month for centuries to come…’

  ‘Given to you by your loving wife.’

  ‘Given to me by my loving wife, it is now 9.55 and forty-three seconds. I’d better go.’

  ‘See you then.’

  ‘See you, darling. And don’t forget my rain check.’

  Jane blew kisses down the telephone. ‘When they’ve all gone home.’

  It was 9.59 a.m. when Freddie strode down the fifth-floor corridor between the serried prints of Redouté roses, and ten o’clock precisely, when, having nodded to the security guard, he knocked on the chairman’s door. As he entered the room and crossed the pale blue expanse of carpet he was surprised to see Mathew Courtauld, one of the senior directors, already ensconced in one of the Queen Anne armchairs facing the desk.

  ‘Congratulations, Freddie,’ Gordon indicated the second chair.

  ‘Thank you,’ Freddie said. ‘And thanks for your card…’

  ‘Card?’ Gordon looked blank.

  ‘Birthday card.’

  Gordon picked up some paperclipped pages from his desk. ‘I meant…I have the transaction summary here…a note on the key issues of the Corinthian bid.’

  Freddie waited for the well-earned praise which had been his life’s blood since the time he had come running out of school with an A for his essay, or a ten out of ten for mental arithmetic.

  ‘A quite remarkable outcome, not unexpected, of course, given your track record, but remarkable none the less. And a significant contribution. We are now well ahead of budget. A fact not to be sneezed at in these difficult times. Difficult times. Which is really what I wanted to talk to you about, Freddie, why I asked you to come up here.’

  Gordon leaned back in his ox-blood-red leather chair which was outlined with antique studs. As always, Freddie remarked the chairman’s resemblance to the facsimiles of his fat
her and his grandfather executed in oils, and wondered would it be his own likeness which would one day grace the walls.

  ‘As you are well aware,’ Gordon closed his eyes, ‘our first-half profits are well down. Together with my opposite numbers in other banks, with whom I have discussed the matter, I am extremely pessimistic about the second half. Extremely pessimistic.’

  ‘I agree that profits aren’t up to much,’ Freddie said. ‘But the way I see it is that we just have to sit tight. The Chancellor is already talking in terms of recovery…’

  ‘That is not how it appears to me. All the indications are that we are sliding deeper and deeper into recession. Chancellor or no chancellor, I see no reason to revise my opinion.’

  ‘You’re being a bit too pessimistic,’ Freddie said. He was beginning to get irritated with Gordon. ‘It’s not all doom and gloom. I’d give this recession about another six or nine months before it bottoms out.’

  ‘Be that as it may,’ Gordon opened his eyes, ‘we have already seen a great many job losses in the financial sector. There may have to be some pretty drastic restructuring and rationalisation nearer to home.’

  ‘Restructuring’ and ‘rationalisation’ were euphemisms for reducing staff to cut costs when the number of employees outweighed the amount of work available. Freddie hoped that he was not being asked to carry out any purges within his own department. Despite his tendency to push them, as he pushed himself, extremely hard, his relationship with his team had always been a happy one.

  ‘We are forced to reconsider things within the bank,’ Gordon was saying. ‘Which is really why I asked you to come up here. What I wanted to discuss with you.’

  Leaning forward, with his elbows on the Corinthian dossier, Gordon put the tips of his manicured fingers together and looked directly at Freddie.

  ‘I’m afraid we have to let you go.’