‘You have to what!’ Freddie almost jumped out of the chair.
‘Let you go, Freddie.’ The words were clearly enunciated. ‘It has been decided. I’m afraid we have to let you go.’
Gordon rearranged the rose he had cut that morning in his buttonhole. ‘If you could arrange to collect up your bits and pieces… In accordance with usual practice you have two hours to clear your desk.’
Freddie clutched at his worry beads. He thought that he was going to faint. He felt shocked and dizzy. As if he had been personally assaulted. As if he had been mugged. Gordon and the room became distorted, then receded. From a distance, through a filter, he heard the drone of the chairman’s voice.
‘On a personal level, believe me, Freddie, I am extremely sorry…’
Freddie wiped his sweating forehead with his pink silk handkerchief.
‘…I have always valued your support and friendship –’
Re-entering his own body, the portraits resuming their rightful places on the wall, once more in control of himself, Freddie interrupted him.
‘You can cut the crap, Gordon.’ His voice was curt. ‘What are the financial arrangements?’
Gordon exchanged glances with Mathew Courtauld, the reason for whose presence in the chairman’s office had now become apparent.
‘I am not obliged to give you anything.’
Freddie stood up. The worry beads bruised his fingers. There was a strange tightness in his chest.
‘That is a matter of opinion.’
‘What I am prepared to do is offer you six months’ salary plus a small bonus…’
‘A small bonus!’
As if Freddie had not spoken, Gordon glanced at his memo pad. ‘I see that you are taking Hans Wichmann to Covent Garden. The tickets have already been allocated. Saturday night. That will be in order. There aren’t too many takers for Wagner.’
‘What about Hans Wichmann? I’m the only person who knows this client.’
‘In the circumstances…since you are so far along the road. I don’t wish to be… I can see no objection… You may carry on with Wichmann on a consultancy basis, if you like. Your car and driver will be at your disposal until the end of this week. Your health insurance will run until the end of the year. And don’t worry about the press. We’ll keep you on the books for the time being. Shall we say no formal announcements for a month? And Freddie…’
Freddie waited.
‘You will of course have to sign an undertaking not to take away any sensitive documents or client information. Just as a formality. We’ll sort out your diary, if you hand it over to the compliance officer.’
Freddie did not remember leaving Gordon Sitwell’s office, propelling himself down the back staircase used only for emergencies, and going out into the street. He did not remember leaving the Sitwell Hunt building, walking blindly past the Stock Exchange and the Mansion House, leaving behind him the clearing banks, Lloyds, Barclays, the Midland, the National Westminster, the Royal Bank of Scotland, had no recollection of walking through the City which had been abandoned by the Romans, destroyed by the Great Fire, razed by the Germans, in the 667 acres of which he had spent most of his working life.
Returning fifteen minutes later, he assumed that he must have passed the time of day with Sam, have taken the lift to the second floor. He thought that someone – a member of staff? a tea-lady? – had greeted him in the corridor but he could not be sure. He must, he supposed, have used his key card to enter the corporate finance department and sat down – the psychedelic colours of Rosina’s crystal pyramid blurring strangely one into the other before his eyes – he had no idea how long ago, in his office which now seemed strangely unfamiliar.
When his internal phone buzzed he did not answer it. When Susan came in to tell him that Denise, the compliance director, was on her way up to see him, she found him immobile at his desk, a dummy in the window of a men’s outfitters. Taking a closer look at him, she was shocked to see that the cheeks of the head of corporate finance were glistening. She wondered if her boss could possibly have been crying.
Nine
Narcissus at his pool, Jane inclined her face towards the mirror. A few fine lines had recently begun to radiate from the corners of her eyes and her mouth was defined by a couple of very definite creases etched, she hoped, by laughter and compassion. At least her face was her own. Some of her friends, heavily into preserving themselves, like long-life food or old furniture, had gone in for cosmetic surgery from which they had emerged terrified to smile, the skin pulled tight over their cheekbones, and the bags beneath their eyes removed. This left them, Jane thought, looking nowhere near as lovely as the women beneath the sycamore tree in her grandmother’s village, whose drooping eyelids and well-earned wrinkles bespoke a lifetime of living.
It was 7.55. The groundwork for the dinner party had taken her the best part of the day. In five minutes’ time the curtain was due to go up. She wondered what could have happened to Freddie, who usually kept her informed of his movements and called her if he was going to be late. She had telephoned Sitwell Hunt, to be told by the security guard that everyone had gone home, and tried the car number to be answered by the robot: ‘The Vodaphone you are calling is not replying, please try later. The Vodaphone you are calling…’
Jane’s preparations did not take her long and her brief session at the dressing-table emphasised rather than transformed her fragile features. She smoothed a translucent foundation over her translucent skin, emphasised her eyes with khol and mascara, glossed her lips orange, and ran her fingers through her spiky, copper hair. She put on a dress she had both designed and made, which had an exceedingly short red skirt and a high-necked black velvet bodice slit to the lumbar vertebrae at the back. She hung heavy enamel discs from her ears, one green, one orange, snapped a matching bracelet onto her wrist (the whole ensemble matching the peppers) and had just taken her narrow black suede shoes from the cupboard when the telephone rang.
Assuming that it was Freddie, she said: ‘Where are you?’
‘Is that Jane?’
It was Margaret Sitwell.
‘I’m frightfully sorry, my dear, I know it’s last minute, but I’m afraid we have to let you down…’
Damn! If the Sitwells were not coming it was going to throw her table out.
‘Gordon’s just rung me from the car. He says we’re not going to be able to make it. An urgent meeting has cropped up and he won’t be home till late. He sends his apologies.’
Standing on one leg as she put on her shoe, Jane thought that if she moved Bingo round to the other side of the table and shoved everybody up one…
‘I had my hair done specially…’
Georgina would have to sit beside her. Two women next to each other.
‘…And I’ve got a little something for Freddie.’
‘How very kind.’
‘I do hope he likes it. I’ll give it to Gordon. He can take it to the bank in the morning. And please forgive us.’
Poor Margaret, she sounded disappointed.
‘Of course.’ Jane wriggled her foot into her second shoe.
‘Say happy birthday to Freddie for me.’
‘I will. He was looking forward to seeing you. Give Gordon my love.’
She was looking out of the window for Freddie’s car when the telephone rang again.
‘Freddie?’ Lilli’s voice was plaintive.
‘It’s Jane.’
‘Where’s Freddie?’
‘That’s what I’d like to know.’
‘The dinner’s getting spoiled.’
‘What dinner?’
‘He has dinner with me every Tuesday…’
‘It’s Monday, Lilli.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘If you say so, Jane.’
Hearing the slam of the front door as she put the phone down on a bewildered Lilli, Jane leaned over the banisters and, thinking it must be Freddie, waited for the thud of his brief
cases on the parquet, the signal that he was home.
‘Darling?’
‘It’s me, Lavender.’
Beginning to get worried, Jane ran downstairs to await her guests.
Robert Gould was the first to arrive. In the drawing-room Jane introduced herself to him and prised the bottle he was carrying from his chubby hand.
‘W-w-w-where’s Freddie?’
The young man seemed extremely agitated, presumably at the idea of being set up with Caroline Hurst, and judging by the way he kept turning his head over his shoulder, as if Freddie might appear at any moment from behind the curtains, appeared to have a nervous tic.
‘Freddie isn’t home yet,’ Jane said. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen him?’
‘I w-w-w-work in b-b-banking. M-m-m-my office is on a d-d-different floor.’
Jane gave him a drink and complimented him on his tie – which was striped and rather ordinary – to put him at his ease, then sat him down on the sofa. Nodding sympathetically at appropriate moments as he poured out his heart to her about the financial demands which were still being made upon him by his ex-wife, a subject clearly dear to his heart, she listened for the sound of Freddie’s key in the door.
Piers Warburton, more taciturn than usual, and the exotic Alex, whose habit of flinging her exceedingly thick mane of wavy brown hair back over her shoulder every few minutes was often unnerving, were the next to arrive. Judging by their faces they had had one of their frequent slanging matches in the car. ‘Where’s Freddie?’ Piers kissed Jane while Alex plonked a magnum of champagne down on the table and moved ostentatiously to the far end of the room.
‘That’s what I’d like to know.’
Jane mixed a Screwdriver for Alex and poured a tomato juice for Piers as Bingo Ingoldsby, wearing a satin bustier – followed by an adoring Charles carrying a yard of Bendicks Bittermints, Freddie’s favourites, and looking as if he had just won first prize in a raffle – ran breathlessly up the stairs.
‘Where’s the birthday boy, then?’ Bingo embraced Jane before, trailing a cloud of Opium, she moved on to the other guests and kissed them – including a blushing Robert Gould – enthusiastically on both cheeks.
Jane had put Charles in charge of the drinks tray by the time James and Dos – the silicone breasts displayed to advantage in gold lurex – arrived with a Harrods box almost as big as themselves and enquired, with some surprise, where Freddie was. Caroline Hurst, tall, even in flat shoes, and not unattractive, sidled in wearing an unflattering haircut and an excess of blusher on her aquiline face. Making no comment about the absence of her host, she singled out her blind date at once and accepting a gin and tonic – which Jane suspected was not her first – from Charles, stayed well away from Robert.
The conversation – precipitated by the appearance of Peter and Georgina from next door – about how those who lived nearest were habitually the least punctual, while guests from a distance were always on time, was interrupted by the noisy arrival of Freddie, who burst into the room with his hair awry, his jacket over his shoulder and his tie dangling from his pocket.
As, apologising for his lateness, he embraced the women and hugged the men, thumping them amicably on the back as he did so, Jane was immediately alerted that something was wrong. When to everyone’s amusement – they thought that Freddie was acting – he pulled her into his arms, breathed brandy into her orange mouth, and slid a hand down the back of her dress, she realised that he was drunk. Alarmed, she followed him upstairs and hammered on the locked door of the bathroom. As she called his name, she could not be certain if he really had not heard her or if her voice was drowned by the Credo from Otello and the running water of the shower.
With his worry beads working overtime, Freddie was back on his usual form at dinner. Jane dismissed her fears as unfounded and his over-the-top performance as due to a stressful day at the bank, probably followed by a celebration at the City Cellar of his defence of Corinthian Hotels, and concentrated on the smooth running of her party.
While Tracey, in her Fortnum’s uniform, passed the dishes, Freddie attended to the wine. He was an exemplary host. He flirted with a delightful Bingo, laughed at James’ stories as if he were hearing them for the first time, and, as he went round the table refilling the glasses, put reassuring arms round Robert and Caroline, who seemed acutely uncomfortable with each other and able to manage very little in the way of conversation.
The appearance of Jane’s marinated pepper salad gave a kick-start to the evening which was assisted by Freddie’s Minervois. By the time they had finished the poulets de Bresse and Tracey had taken away the plates, the talk had turned to the unreasonable behaviour of Robert’s ex-wife, which was apparently his sole topic of conversation, at which Freddie and Jane exchanged ‘whose idea was it to ask him?’ glances. This was topped by Bingo’s hilarious account of how she had got her own back on her penultimate husband by ordering gargantuan banquets, paid for with his credit card, to be delivered every night to the home he shared with his mistress, which was followed by a discussion about the EMS.
‘M&S? What about M&S? That’s where I buy my knickers.’ Bingo picked up the fag end of the conversation.
‘EMS, darling. European Monetary System,’ Charles said, ‘not M&S!’
‘In plain English, my sweet,’ James said, ‘we will soon be swapping our ten-pound notes for ECU coins which can be used as legal tender from the north of Germany to the south of Spain.’
Piers sipped his Perrier water with distaste. ‘It doesn’t just mean the scrapping of individual currencies. It means loss of control. If the Germans raise their interest rates, the UK must follow. If the European Central Bank puts its rates up by 2 per cent at a time when UK unemployment is high, it’s going to affect us far more than a country with plenty of jobs. Am I right, Freddie?’
Freddie was filling the glasses with Beaune in expectation of the cheese. He was, Jane thought, drinking far more than usual, and appeared not to have heard.
‘There is a price to pay for everything,’ Peter Cottesloe began deliberately, as if he were debating the subject in the Lords. ‘Stability of exchange rates may be the overwhelming advantage of joining the ERM, but by keeping our exchange rate stable, we will lose the freedom to move our interest rates according to our domestic economy…’
The arrival of the cheeseboard, which was not a board at all but a circular marble platter weighing over three kilos – which Tracey put on the table in front of Robert – distracted Peter from his homily.
Robert, unfamiliar with Jane’s monstrous talking point, attempted to pick the cheeseboard up by its handsome brass handle and almost dropped it as he attempted to hold it for Caroline, who took one look at the Brie and shook her head.
‘Women who do not like cheese are frigid…’ James said.
The conversation came to an embarrassed halt.
‘…That is not to say that all frigid women do not like cheese.’
Everyone avoided looking at the unfortunate Caroline, as James explained that this particular form of reasoning, in which from two given or assumed propositions a third is deduced from which the middle term is absent, was known as a syllogism.
‘Because all the women who come from a certain part of Russia have red hair, one is not to assume, for example, that all women with red hair come from Russia…’
In an effort to unseat her husband from his hobby horse – James was passionate about the English language, polished off The Times crossword before breakfast, and would have gone on all night – Dos interrupted with a toast.
‘To the end of this unspeakable recession.’
Georgina, whose wine business was bumping along the bottom, raised her glass. ‘You can say that again!’
‘I’m very much afraid that the end is nowhere in sight.’ Piers, on the receiving end of the cheeseboard, put on his half-glasses to examine the Brie. ‘A thousand jobs are going down the drain every day. Half my customers are in some kind of difficulty and the wors
t is by no means over.’ He cut a triangle of cheese. ‘Redundancy used to be something that happened to other people. Someone in the north-east, some smart aleck who had priced himself out of the market…’ He speared the piece of Brie on his knife. ‘Now it’s hitting everyone, in every occupation, in every industry, in every part of the country, at every level. No one is safe. Even senior executives are, as they say in France…’ Piers put the knife into his mouth ‘…being “handed their aprons”.’
James, who was in the building industry, had seen the recession coming. By cutting costs, working capital, and capacity, he had managed not only to stay afloat, but to avoid the massive write-downs and spiralling interest charges which had floored so many of his rivals. He refilled his glass from the bottle on the table and leaned back in his leopard-skin chair.
‘Have you heard the one about the property tycoon stuck with land which had fallen in value and who was on the verge of bankruptcy? “Things are going from bad to worse,” he said to his wife one night in bed. “If only you were a good cook we could manage without the housekeeper.” “Sweetie-pie,” came the retort, “if only you were a good fuck we could do without the chauffeur!”’
Amid the laughter, Georgina, who was holding on to her wine business by the skin of her teeth, and who didn’t much care for James, said: ‘It’s no joke, James. People like you don’t know what it’s like in the real world. My ex-accountant is now a Saturday night shelf-filler, and his wife – she used to have her own estate agency – has started car booting. I had to let one of my own managers go last week. A married man with a whacking great mortgage and four young children, one of them handicapped. It isn’t funny to have the door slammed in your face when you’re too old to get another job. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. At first he didn’t believe me, then he got angry and called me every name in the book. After that he just crumpled up. Slumped in the chair. As if he’d been punched in the gut. And…cried!’
There was an awkward silence interrupted by Jane who jumped up to dim the lights. The birthday cake, with its forty pin-points of flickering light, was brought in and set before Freddie. Bingo gave him the serrated knife and put her hand over his, holding it aloft over the candles.
Golden Boy Page 7