“So what are my options?” Tom asked.
“Under the terms of the will, Mme Massot is in an unassailable position. She inherits five million euros and is guardian, until your majority, of your estate, which comprises the château and all other holdings, including thirty percent of House Massot stock.”
“So we challenge the will.”
“We can do that, certainly. It won’t work,” Mr. Elgin said. “You do realize that, sir?”
“Then what would be the point?” Tom demanded, annoyed.
“To gain an injunction preventing Mme Massot from acting until the case is heard. We can file a number of motions,” Mr. Hartford said encouragingly. “And if we are fortunate, we may be able to delay her. After all, you are only three years away from total control.”
“Ah.”Tom looked at them with a touch more respect. “Drown her in paperwork; yes, I like that.”
“And we could possibly challenge the declaration of death . . . if you have any evidence your father is still alive.”
He looked away. “I wish I did.”
“Of course . . . you do realize, Monsieur, that you have some stock of your own. Five percent, a gift when you were born.”
Tom nodded. “I can’t do very much with that, gentlemen.”
“And your grandmother,” Mr. Elgin went on, slyly, “the will mentions that she has ten percent.”
“Fifteen percent of the stock is substantial,” Mr. Hartford murmured, discreetly. “If you received enough shareholder votes, Monsieur . . .”
Tom leaned forward. Brilliant! Why hadn’t he thought of that? Grandmother! She had dignity, she valued his father . . . she wouldn’t stand for what Maman was doing any more than he would.
“Yes? What?” he demanded.
“You could demand a seat on the board. And naturally, the other board members would be aware that in a few years, you will control everything.”
“Forty-five percent, including the stock of the elder Mme Massot.”
“One doubts they would be all that keen to oppose your wishes.”
“Mme Massot could find her plans blocked.”
Tom stood up. The two older men regarded him with dismay.
“I hope we haven’t been too precipitate, sir?” asked Leonard Elgin. “There are other ways . . . quieter methods.”
“Where’s the retainer agreement?” Tom demanded. It was handed to him; he removed from his jacket pocket the platinum, custom-made Montblanc pen Maman had given him last Christmas and signed with a flourish.
The lawyers looked at each other with suitably muted triumph.
“Coutts will transfer the two hundred thousand to your corporate account later this morning,” Tom pronounced. He had made his decision; this was the right firm, now he simply wanted to get out of here. I am a man of action, he thought; Maman will think better of trifling with me.
“Thank you, M. Massot.” Mr. Elgin offered a firm handshake across the table. “We are delighted.”
“It’s a great honour to be working with you, sir,” said Mr. Hartford.
Tom shook hands coolly; such respect was no more than his due.
“Of course,” he said. “Good day, gentlemen.”
He took the train back to Oxford, first class; Tom had found that English taxi drivers are an inexhaustible source of conversation, especially when a man wants to think. He was going to have to give them up; his first action in the last few days that would have pleased his mother.
The English countryside rushed quietly past him. It was, he had to acknowledge, very beautiful, if one liked that sort of thing: gentle meadows, copses of trees, fat white sheep, mellow and contented in the hot summer. But nothing, certainly nothing to France, he thought with pride; nothing to the elegance of formal grey stone, graceful buildings in symmetry, the manicured lawns and schematic walks of his father’s park; villages where the houses were planned, not jumbled together. London was cluttered, Paris refined; he wanted to go home.
The simplest way would be to leave. Oxford was no prison. He could send movers, clear his room, take lodgings anywhere; there were some fine luxury places to rent on the Left Bank. But, although loath to do anything that Sophie wanted, he was not quite ready to throw away his degree. Oxford was still preeminent among the world’s great universities, and although he wouldn’t confess it now, Tom had been proud to make it in. He planned a safer out. He would go to the Senior Censor and request rustication. One year away. That would be enough to stop Maman messing with his inheritance, and then he could return to the girls and parties.
Polly would still be there in a year. Tom flinched at the thought. He was busy—he was heartbroken—but yet, but yet, he still thought about her. Could he win her back? If he returned in triumph, sole controller of his father’s vast holdings, a celebrated homme d’affaires. More than just an heir. Tom had a strong suspicion that being an heir would mean nothing to a girl like Polly. What was it the English called it? Trust fund brat. A man needed to show himself a man to get rid of such a label, and Thomas Massot was ready to do it. Nobody complained about the Rothschild boys, or the Rockefellers. It was so old-fashioned to consider twenty-one the majority, anyway. Legally it was eighteen, had been for years.
The train pulled into the station at Oxford. Tom was glad. His plans were made, and he only wanted, now, to set them in motion.
At the end of this bitter fight, he would have put things right. The world was becoming clearer to him. He needed to save his mother from herself, be his father’s son. And win Polly back. She was different—intelligent, beautiful, daring. There were, indeed, better groomed and more delicate girls out there. And true, he’d enjoyed his stint as a playboy.
But now that he’d lost her—Tom was starting to think there was only one girl for him.
“But I don’t understand why you have to leave,” Flora said. Her plump bottom lip was quivering, and her eyes were brimming, threatening to spill into tears at any moment.
Tom looked at her uncomfortably. It was so undignified, this display. What had he seen in her? That she was pretty?
“I told you, dearest, family business,” he said lamely. “Mind if I smoke?”
“I’d rather you didn’t. . . .” Flora’s voice trailed off. Tom was already reaching for his packet of Gauloises. “Of course if you need to. . . .”
She doesn’t have the energy to fight, he thought. Polly would have slapped the carton out of his hands, but Flora just moped. He sighed; the thought of Polly had spoiled the pleasure. He put the carton back. Anyway, a cigarette would just delay getting out of here, which was the most pressing problem.
“That’s all right,” he said, wearily. He looked at the girl: slightly heavy, in rather a sexy way, with big lips and breasts to match, dark hair, a sprinkling of freckles, and that incredible accent. He had wonderful English, but Scots and Welsh threw him; as did Yorkshire, or thick Birmingham; how could the British cram so many voices into such a small island?
“I’ll miss you terribly,” she said meekly. Tom wondered if it were true. For all her great shape and sensuous mouth, Flora McAllister was rather a dull girl, studious, with a placid temperament. She only got really excited when discussing her subject, and who the hell was interested in mathematics?
“We’re great friends, and I’m sure we’ll meet again,” Tom said, carefully. He was trying to give her a coded dismissal. After that towering row with Gemma, who also got weepy, he had no desire to repeat the scene. Sex with Flora was mechanical, relief of his urges and frustrations; it had been a penance to lie there afterwards, when her body seemed doughy instead of curvy, holding her while she slept, mouth open and snoring lightly.Yes, it was good he could get away from this.
“D’you think we’ll still be able to date? I could come to France on the ferry about once a month. You could pick me up at Calais,” Flora said hopefully.
“Darling.”Tom pressed her plump hand to his mouth gallantly. “If we’re realistic . . . it’ll be impossible. . . . You hav
e your studies, and you mustn’t disrupt them. . . .”
Flora looked concerned; he knew she was after a first, maybe more. A fellowship of All Souls had been mentioned.
“And I’ll be too busy. Nothing but the utmost concern for my family could keep me from you,” he lied. “Perhaps when we’ve both achieved our goals, we can come together again, and if our hearts are free. . . .”
He left it hanging there and to his great relief Flora nodded.
“Och, I suppose it’s best,” she said thickly. Her accent always got worse when she was emotional, which was thankfully rare. “But I’ll miss you, Tom. You were different,” she said.
He glanced at her with surprise and warmth as he reached for his shirt. Different! Damn right he was different. He liked cow-like Flora a little better now that she had said that.
“I’ll see you at supper, chérie,” he said, kissing her on the cheek and making good his escape. As he strode back to his rooms, top button rakishly undone so everybody would know what he had been doing, Tom made a note to himself. Flora was a good girl, he thought, a little complacently. He would call the Massot showroom in Bond Street and have them send her a gift. Something plain, but valuable; a brooch, perhaps. He remembered a fine spray of gold with antique seed pearls and pink sapphires; his mother had pointed it out to him last year. He would send her that, with a note: “A token of my esteem. Until we meet again. Thomas.”
Yes, that would do very well. He smiled complacently. That was stylish, and it was incumbent on him to develop style, the style that becomes a man of property and business. Parting from Flora had been mercifully easy. He hoped the college would be as accommodating.
“I have letters here from your tutors.”
Mr. Butters was the Senior Censor of Christ Church, and Tom wondered if he had ever disliked anybody quite so much. Why, the academic was pacing up and down in front of him like a general in front of an unruly subaltern. What were academic salaries in England these days? He would be surprised if the man made eighty thousand euros a year. And he was dictating to him, Thomas Massot, heir to many millions and future controller of one of Europe’s great fortunes?
He said nothing.
“They report that your work has been most unsatisfactory.”
“My last essay got a Beta plus,” Tom responded, with a touch of defiance all his struggles couldn’t suppress.
“Indeed, but Mr. Hillard tells me you have a fine mind, the type that ought not to be satisfied with Betas of any sort.”
Tom was amazed. Hillard had said that?
“That’s very kind of him.”
“On the contrary, young man,” Mr. Butters said, staring at him with those piercing hazel eyes, “he is quite disgusted with you. Ignorance is forgivable, laziness is not. You have no hope, no hope at all of a first if you carry on in this manner. You do understand that?”
Tom regarded Butters’s threadbare waistcoat and ill-fitting trousers, and the red pinching mark his spectacles made on the bridge of his nose. He felt uncomfortable with this line of questioning and told himself it was both impertinent and irrelevant.
University tutors seemed to forget they were not schoolmas ters. They were two adults together, were they not? He hadn’t come here to be hectored.
Butters was waiting for an answer.
“I have been under a great deal of pressure, Monsieur.”
“I am not French,” said Butters dryly, “and as you are reading English, I think we had better stick to that.”
I hate him, Tom thought. He said, “Of course, sir.”
“What pressure, precisely, have you been under?” Butters asked, folding his arms.
“My father . . . my father has recently been declared dead,” Tom said, hanging his head and hoping for sympathy.
“Yes, I had heard. But that event took place just a few weeks ago, whereas the inattention and sloppiness began halfway through your first term.”
Tom stiffened. He had imagined mention of his father’s death would put an end to the interrogation. They were nightmares, the Christ Church faculty, but nonetheless had a reputation for great compassion and elasticity whenever an undergraduate had a real problem, family or otherwise.
He thought fast.
“Monsieur—Mr. Butters. I know I have not been doing as well as I should. The pleasures of independence rather distracted me.” He saw this small measure of truth had not gone down badly. “And I had resolved to, as you say, pull my socks up.”
To Tom’s aggravation he saw the Censor swallow a smile at his colloquialism, delivered with that permanent trace of a French accent he neither could get rid of, nor wanted to.
“But the news of my father’s death, that he is declared dead, that has shaken me. I find I cannot concentrate, I can think of nothing else.” To his horror, Tom found he was being affected. His voice shook; he struggled. “I will certainly fail my degree, or you will send me away, if I have to continue to try to study at present, but if I can take a sabbatical. You can rusticate me. . . .”
Butters had noted that the boy’s eyes were reddened. Tom angrily dashed his sleeve across them, and then tried, pathetically, to cover the gesture with a cough.
The older man softened. “If we rusticate you, Mr. Massot, do I have your word that when you return here you will do your best to vindicate the trust the admissions officers placed in you?”
This was an unexpected question. Tom did not want to give his word. Giving his word was a serious matter. But there was nothing for it other than to say “Yes.”
“Good,” the Senior Censor continued. “Every year, many more students apply to the house than we can take in. We select from the best and disappoint the others, sometimes crushingly. There were at least fifteen qualified applicants for your place, Mr. Massot.”
Tom sulked; he couldn’t help it if others were too stupid to qualify.
“We shall see you promptly at the start of next Michaelmas but one,” Mr. Butters said. He shook Tom’s hand briskly. “Good day.”
After that, it was the work of a few hours. He called a firm in London and a storage facility in the Banbury Road, and arranged for his possessions to be moved. There was nothing he could not leave behind; Tom kept nothing too personal here. He rang the Massot store on Bond Street and asked about the brooch; it had been sold, but the salesman, who was enjoyably deferential, recommended another, a flower with leaves of gold, petals of mother-of-pearl, and a fine garnet in the centre. Tom agreed and made the arrangements. It would be sent to Flora McAllister at once. He felt virtuous; that was a kind way to leave her.
Flora had not been devious like Gemma or unforgiving like Polly; she deserved it. Well, I won’t be sorry to be rid of the lot of them, Tom thought.
He left notes for some of his drinking buddies; none could particularly be called friends, except possibly Simon Lancaster—a brilliant but reserved historian, and like him, heir to a lot of money. Tom and Simon had been close since they had discovered this circumstance, although Simon seemed to regard it as an unwanted burden. He could not have been more unlike Tom if he’d tried, and yet the two were firm friends. Simon admired Massot’s rakish success with women and complete disregard of academic work; Tom said and did things he would not have dreamed of himself. And Tom, although he would never have admitted it, liked Simon’s steadiness of purpose and quiet, methodical achievement.
He walked quickly over to the bar to find him. It was six, and Simon invariably went to the bar at that hour, drank two gin and tonics, and then returned to his rooms to study. Tom would say a temporary goodbye; he would have Simon over to Paris as a guest, he thought, show him some real living. He could shake that English reserve out of him.
He ran along Tom Quad, then cut down towards the bar. It was crowded as usual; the subsidized alcohol, one of Oxford’s greatest pleasures, was as enduringly popular as ever.
Tom scanned the room. A few acquaintances beckoned him over, shouting drunkenly, but he grinned and shook his head. A few weeks
back he’d have been here first and got drunk with the best of them; today it seemed somehow beneath him. I’m growing up, he thought, proudly. Simon was not here—he’d have to go call on him in his rooms, otherwise it would be a phone call. He had no intention of delaying; he wanted to get out of this little English backwater right now, and be on the Eurostar to Paris before midnight—
Then he saw her. Polly. She was standing there, her red hair tossed back, laughing with those gorgeous white teeth. She was wearing one of her usual scruffy outfits: a Metallica T-shirt, low-cut jeans, Doc Marten boots, cheap Indian-style bangles jangling on her left wrist. She was, he realized, quite staggeringly beautiful. And she looked so happy. Tom stared, mesmerized, as Polly turned her face away from him. He saw she was standing next to Mark Allston, and she kissed him on the cheek.
Rage overtook him. Rage so intense, so thick, he could feel it clogging his throat. He couldn’t speak.
“Oh-ho,” said one of his drinking buddies, nudging another man in their crowd.
They’re amused, Tom thought; they all think this is funny. Thoughts rushed in on him, making him dizzy. Allston’s brawny arm around Polly’s waist now; his hands, pinning her to the bed like Tom had done; his fingers over her soft, warm body; Mark kissing her; Mark . . .
Tom shoved his way through the crowd, sending drinks spilling, ignoring angry shouts of protest. He marched up to Mark Allston.
“Get your hands off her!” he shouted. “She’s mine!”
Allston looked down at him and chuckled. “It’s the Frog Prince,” he said, at which the crowd around him exploded with laughter. Tom did not care for them, or their opinion; he despised them all—peasants.
Polly looked miserable. “Mark—”
Mark Allston looked down at Tom. He was six feet tall and thick, with shoulders like Atlas.
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