‘Yes I would.’
‘But where would you keep him?’
‘I’d keep him …’ the sooty smudges of his eyebrows raised as the little boy tried to think. ‘I know where – I’d keep him in my room with my toys. I’d get a special big box for him and he could have breakfast with me every morning.’ He chattered on eagerly as Cathy exchanged a sad smile with Nanny Barbara and led her son downstairs and off to the stables, where his black Shetland pony was irritably trying to chew its halter.
She lifted him on to the felt child’s saddle, settled his legs in their diminutive jodhpurs around the pony’s barrel-shaped sides, shortened the stirrup leathers and led the pony and rider off for a lonely walk around the estate. The splendour of the house and grounds oppressed her, and made her feel hopeless. How could she ever hope to give her son a good life when he was accustomed to so much luxury and all she could claim in the way of wealth were a puny salary and an apartment so small and grim that she felt as if she were living in a pair of upended coffins.
It was February and the grass had a greyish, exhausted look. A cutting wind swept across the Coseley estate from the chalk downs to the west. Cathy wondered if she would ever stop feeling guilty for the few moments of weakness that had made it possible for the divorce court to take her son away from her. She hated to feel guilty, not only because it was painful, but because it was a waste of her emotional energy.
Encouraged by Lord Shrewton, she spent every weekend at Coseley with Jamie. The Marchioness was charming to her now that she no longer had a place in Charlie’s affections, and since Cathy had never discovered that the scheming woman had played a part in breaking up her marriage, she enjoyed a pleasant friendship with both the parents of her former husband. Charlie seemed to have no plans to return to England.
Monday morning was always the worst, because after spending the weekend at Coseley with Jamie the pain of parting was still fresh. The joy of loving her son was the only happiness she had and every time she had to leave him she felt as if she were leaving her whole self behind with him.
The hard facts were that Cathy’s apartment consisted of only two rooms, and, as a secretary, Cathy hardly earned more than Nanny Barbara, given that the nanny’s board and lodging were free.
‘I’ve got to get them to promote me,’ she told Monty, as she finished basting the hem of a blue-and-white print dress she was making. She stabbed her needle into the fabric and snatched it out again so angrily that it made little clicking noises at every stitch. ‘It’s maddening to work with all those men, and know that they aren’t any smarter than me, and know that they’re earning ten times what I make, even though Lord Shrewton’s overpaying me for what I do.’
‘What have these guys got that you haven’t?’ Monty asked, handing her the scissors. Seeing her sister once more making her own dresses out of necessity, she felt awkward in her own lavish clothes. It was so easy to forget how other people lived now that Rick was a big star and they never seemed to go anywhere except by Rolls Royce or private jet. She twitched the wide lapels of her kingfisher-blue St Laurent satin blazer and wished she’d chosen something less ostentatious.
‘The guys have got exams, degrees, old school ties … though, now I think of it, some of them haven’t got any of those things. My boss is always saying that some of the traders are nothing but East End barrowboys.’ She finished stitching and moved to the ironing board to press the garment. ‘Clever old Monty – you’re quite right. If they can do it, I can.’
‘But why the City, Cathy? Wouldn’t it be easier doing something like private catering, cooking boardroom lunches and all that?’
‘Oh yes, it would be easier,’ Cathy’s voice was harsh as she shook out the finished dress and held it up against her shoulders to show Monty how it looked. ‘It would be as easy as anything to make a living cooking, or sewing, or looking after children – but that’s all I‘d make, a living. This apartment block’s full of gallant little divorcees like me, scraping together a few pounds every week out of cooking boardroom lunches and hoping they’ll get married again pretty damn quick. Don’t you understand, Monty, I need to make money, real money, big money, because that’s what it will cost to make a home for Jamie. And the place to make real money is the City. All I need is the first break.’
Cathy spoke with more confidence than she felt. The City, she knew well, was like a very large gentlemen’s club which took pride in having no plans to admit women members. Thanks to her father, Cathy understood the unwritten rules very well, but changing them seemed an awesome task.
Everything about the building occupied by the Migatto Group impressed three cardinal qualities upon the visitor – prosperity, stability and masculinity. The hallway through which Cathy walked four or more times every day had massive porphyry columns, a marble floor checkered in black and grey and dark oak panelling with carved fruit embellishments by Grinling Gibbons.
The commissionaire attended to a large board telling visitors whether the director and executives in the Migatto companies were in or not. The names had one of three prefixes – Lord, Sir or Mr.
Over the unused fireplace in the hallway hung a portrait of the founder, Samuel Migatto, in a beaver coat and a close-fitting black bonnet with flaps over his ears. He had a white beard, a shrewd eye and a hooked nose which the artist had highlighted.
The portrait dated from the late seventeenth century, when Solomon Migatto first appeared in the meticulous records of London trade. Below his portrait was a facsimile of the page of the Cash and Commerce Journal of the East India Company which registered his debut. Transaction number 309 at the end of Januarie, Anno 1690, showed that Samuel paid £7 for the privilege of importing 80 ounces of gold into London.
More portraits of men lined the grey-stone staircase. The higher Cathy climbed, the shabbier the building became. Carved oak gave way to mahogany, which in turn was replaced by teak-veneer doors and polystyrene ceiling-tiles at the top floor, where Cathy shared an office with one other secretary, Miss Finch. Miss Finch was a brisk little spinster with protruding teeth and white hair who reminded Cathy of a West Highland terrier. She worked for a senior director on the second floor.
Cathy’s boss, Mr M. J. Gibson-Wright, had an office next to hers, indicating his lowly position in the pecking order.
‘My dear, you have been sent to work for a dinosaur,’ he told her on her first day. ‘By rights I should have faded away three or four years ago, after the last takeover. I frequently leave my brains in my hip pocket, as you will discover. I’m still here because it will be cheaper to let me die than to sack me. Now, where shall we go for lunch – do you like fish?’
His hair was white at the temples and grey over the top, so he looked like a dapper seagull. Mr Gibson-Wright had the perceptible flush of good living, and a combination of age, obesity and arthritis caused him to waddle as he walked. He looked at Cathy and saw a thin, intense girl with haunted eyes and a slight limp, who could, he thought, have been quite a beauty if she were not so steeped in unhappiness.
‘I want you to call me G. W. – everybody else does.’ He smiled at her approvingly over the silver-plated cruets. The restaurant was decorated in exactly the same ponderous style as the Migatto building, with a lot of dark wood and gilt-framed portraiture. ‘What would you say to the potted shrimps?’
‘I’m afraid my typing’s a little rusty.’ Cathy told him with anxiety. ‘But I’ve been practising my shorthand and I’m sure I’ll be able …’
He waved a glass of pale sherry at her to silence her. ‘As far as I am concerned, my dear, your abilities are of no consequence. What I need is someone to buy my cigars, show me which bit of the paper to read, book my table for lunch and put me in my car at the end of the day – if not sooner. Apart from that, your most important duty is to allow no one to disturb me when I am asleep. I take a little nap in the afternoons.’
Cathy’s face fell as she realized that there was no hope whatever that these trivial duties would l
ead her on to better things. Dutifully, she bought his cigars, made his bookings and marked his Financial Times every morning, highlighting the passages she thought he ought to read. G. W. took her to lunch several times a week, and told her indiscreet stories about the other men in the restaurant. There were no other women in the restaurants at all, except the waitresses.
Another burden from which Cathy could not escape was her grandmother, who relentlessly put her on the committees of her charity balls and pushed her into the arms of one prospective husband after another, while nagging her endlessly about her deteriorating appearance.
‘You can’t pine over Charlie for the rest of your life,’ advised Lady Davina, oblivious of the fact that Cathy never spoke of her former husband because the only thing she could think of to say about him was that he was a pitiful apology for a human being and, but for Jamie, she wished she had never set eyes on him. ‘It’s the same for all of us, you know. Girls become women but every man remains a little boy. He was simply bound to lose interest in you once you were married. That’s the trick of marriage, you see, dear. Keeping the mystery. Next time, remember that.’
‘There isn’t going to be a next time, Didi.’
‘Nonsense!’ the old woman dismissed Cathy’s opinion with a wave of her arm and a clash of her bracelets. ‘You say that now but you’ll soon find life is quite impossible without a husband.’
As much to deflect Lady Davina’s interest as to please herself, Cathy began to date Rupert Lampeter, Charlie’s one-time polo buddy and best man, the most personable of the small herd of her ex-husband’s friends who gathered around her, as soon as she was divorced, hoping to be infected with the Coseley glamour.
Rupert entertained her. He was completely frivolous and largely uninterested in the boutique, the record company, the three restaurants and the property company in which his inheritance was rapidly trickling away. Tall, athletic, beautifully dressed, well-mannered, with wavy, pale blond hair and grey eyes, Rupert was also convinced that no scheming woman would ever entrap him into matrimony, which Cathy found reassuring. He flirted with her exuberantly and she felt herself bloom with his admiration.
Confidently, Rupert drove her home to Battersea one night, parked his little blue Mercedes under the leafy canopy of the plane trees, put his arm delicately around her shoulders and brushed her lips with his. Cathy instantly felt a wave of revulsion so violent that she thought she was going to be sick. Her body seemed to turn icy cold. A clammy film of sweat coated her skin and her arms, which were tentatively returning Rupert’s embrace, started to tremble.
‘Steady,’ he murmured, sensing her strange reaction. ‘Poor little girl, you are in a state, aren’t you? Better take it easy, eh?’
After two weeks, however, things were no better. Rupert was gentle, patient, humorous and desirable, but Cathy could feel nothing but acute physical distress in his arms. Sometimes it seemed as if every individual cell of her body was struggling to escape from the touch of a man.
‘It’s as if someone’s playing some awful joke on me,’ she confided to Monty in despair. Rick and Monty had moved into a stucco-fronted house close to the Thames in Chelsea, and Cathy was helping her sister hang her cases full of multicoloured clothes in the dressing room. ‘Rupert’s perfect, everything I could want in a man; he’s far, far kinder than Charlie.’ She handed Monty a chamois-leather Minnehaha dress embroidered with beads. ‘I can’t tell you how sweet and patient he’s been. But as soon as he touches me, I freeze. It’s horrible.’
‘Do you fancy him?’ Monty demanded, stepping over five pairs of high-heeled boots which she had bought but never worn.
‘Yes. I think I fancy him, anyway; he’s good-looking and funny and I like his aftershave. What else is there?’ Perhaps it was the bad light in the cramped room, but Cathy’s speckled brown eyes seemed dull and unresponsive.
‘Oh not much – feeling your heart jump when you see him and your insides melt when you touch him and not being able to think about anything else for hours … you can think you fancy someone, you know.’
Cathy’s mobile upper lip twisted with contempt. ‘That’s little-girl hearts-and-flowers stuff. Do you feel that way about Rick?’
Monty paused with her arms full of her vivid chiffon stage dresses, trying to decide whether to hang them apart from her street clothes or not. The truth was that she cared for Rick, she felt fiercely protective of his vulnerability and insecurity, she liked making love with him, and sometimes it felt as if they fitted together like two halves of a single being, but she never felt on Rick’s account any of the sensations she had described to Cathy.
‘Yes, maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s only like that the first time and after that, everything else is just … toothpaste.’ Monty sighed, feeling much more than her twenty-two years. ‘Perhaps your body’s being wiser than your mind,’ Monty suggested to her sister, finally closing the closet doors on her wardrobe. ‘Charlie must have really fucked up your head – perhaps you just aren’t ready to love anyone else yet.’
‘Yes, perhaps,’ Cathy answered doubtfully. ‘Do you think I’ve become frigid, Monty?’ She could hardly say the word. Being frigid somehow meant being disqualified from being a woman.
‘No, of course not,’ Monty reassured her sister at once with a warm hug. ‘You just need time to adjust, time to heal, that’s all.’
Within herself, Cathy was not reassured. Now that she had experienced sexual repulsion, she noticed how many other areas of her life no longer gave her joy. She was uninterested in clothes, unable to taste food very well, unmoved by beauty in man, woman or art, easily bored and almost unable to laugh at things she knew she ought to have found funny. Every sensual faculty she possessed seemed to be frozen.
The man who finally rescued her from this bleak emotional prison was her boss. Although Cathy presumed that she had been assigned a valetudinarian failure on account of her lack of secretarial skill, Lord Shrewton had deliberately sent her to Mr Gibson-Wright’s office in the hope that the old man’s ingrained benevolence would find a way to revive her wounded spirit.
‘You seem quite intelligent to me,’ he told her one day in tones of mild amazement. ‘Your father-in-law warned me you’d lost your marbles when young Charlie kicked over the traces. I thought any woman who took on young Coseley would need her head examined. Whatever did you do it for?’
‘I was in love with him,’ she said.
‘Next best thing to being out of your mind, I suppose.’
She giggled, feeling the muscles in her cheeks, long accustomed to disuse, stretch around her smile.
‘Don’t laugh at my jokes, for heaven’s sake. They’ll all think you’re the new popsy and I’ll get no peace at home after that.’
In her first three months at work Cathy typed just seven letters for G. W. Miss Finch suggested that she reorganize the filing room. Cathy suggested that she should instead relieve Miss Finch of the job of taking the minutes of the company’s board meetings, but the older woman angrily refused. However, she then fell ill. Cathy was asked to take over her work, and when Miss Finch recovered and returned she found that Cathy had laid a firm claim to her most important function, and negotiated a small raise in salary in consequence.
Every Thursday, a woman identical to Miss Finch came up from the Accounts Department with a tray full of brown-paper envelopes and handed both of them a pay packet. Miss Finch snickered with disapproval at this point, making it clear she did not think Cathy deserved her pay.
‘Wages!’ G. W. trundled into the office as the accounts clerk was leaving. ‘Let’s see what they’re paying you for putting up with me – hmph! How long will it take you to get a new frock out of that, I wonder? Come into my office.’
She followed him along the threadbare carpet.
‘I wish they’d give you a decent office,’ she said, looking round at the plain little room.
‘Badge of rank, dear girl. They’ve demoted me, this is all I’m entitled to. When it’s your t
urn, never be humble about the inessentials. Women always think status symbols are pretentious – they’re not. Badge of rank.’
‘What do you mean, when it’s my turn?’ Cathy sat on the ragged leather couch where G. W. took his afternoon siesta. The room had no chair for a visitor.
G. W. plumped down in his chair. ‘You’ve got twice the guts of most of the men in this building, and twice the brains. You may be hibernating now, young lady, but the day is at hand when you are going to want to use your abilities – and I’m going to show you how to start. Now give me your wages.’
Cathy handed over the envelope and he tore it open with clumsy, old fingers. ‘Twenty-four pounds, eh? And two shillings. There’s the four pounds, that’s your bus fares.’ He shoved the notes into her hand, then picked up a telephone.
‘We can’t open an account for you at my brokers until you’ve got a bit more to play with, so I’ll do your buying for you at first. Now what we want, if we’re going to make money by Tuesday, is something fairly lively …’ He glanced keenly down the list of share prices.
‘But that’s playing the stock market – I can’t do that with my wages,’ Cathy protested.
‘You don’t play the stock market,’ he corrected her, mimicking her disapproving tone. ‘You play Monopoly, which is much more risky. You invest in the stock market. Now take this …’ he put a coin in her hand, ‘and toss it. Heads we’ll go for gold, tails for Fraser’s Hill.’ The coin came down tails and G. W. telephoned his broker.
That weekend she impatiently scanned the share prices in the newspapers. Fraser’s Hill, an Australian mining company, leapt up almost two shillings in two days.
‘You’ve made just over £7,’ G. W. told her on Tuesday morning. ‘So here’s your wages back,’ more notes fluttered across his desk. ‘Now, shall we take your profit, stick with it, or what?’
Cathy considered. ‘If we’d put it in gold we’d have done better …’ she ventured, picking at the hem of her navy-blue crépe dress; years with Charlie had made her wary of the consequences of questioning a man’s judgement.
Pearls Page 49