‘I’m not going to be your private charity.’ A tumult of old and new emotions was raging inside her. Monty felt exhausted, panic-stricken and ready to succumb to the sheer force of the woman’s will.
The small, silhouetted figure stood up, walked to the apartment door and unlocked it. ‘You have no alternative,’ she announced, pulling the door open wide and admitting a dim light from the hallway. ‘Except to leave now, in which case you will not get as far as the end of the street. There are so many accidents just here.’
The last shred of Monty’s resistance parted. ‘But I don’t understand,’ she protested in a weak voice. ‘Why would you want to do this? What am I to you?’
She did not reply. Then, as quickly as she had appeared, the woman left, and Monty heard her quick, light footfalls on the stairs. A few moments later the lights flickered into life, and she blinked in the brightness. She sat on the sofa in miserable apprehension until a heavy tread sounded outside and Véronique came through the door carrying a small Vuitton case.
‘Come along,’ she said sternly, ‘get your things. We must not miss the flight.’
This isn’t happening to me, I don’t believe this, Monty thought, as she was steered out of the apartment, into a car, through the airport and into the first-class cabin of a Tri-Star. They were offered champagne, and she drank a lot of it and went to sleep.
The smoggy sprawl of Los Angeles behind the square airport tower seemed like a scene from a dream. Monty felt passive and controlled. Her deepest emotions were in turmoil after her conversation with the woman she was more and more convinced must have been Madame Bernard, and throughout the long, dull, uncomfortable flight the curious metallic voice asking the questions Monty had evaded for so long echoed without ceasing in her head.
There was a limousine, chilly with air-conditioning, at the airport, and after hours of driving they arrived at a substantial white-pillared mansion set in the centre of a vivid green lawn. Royal palms cast long shadows in the rich sunlight of the afternoon.
Véronique sat beside her like a watchful toad as she was interviewed by a young man with a dark curling moustache.
‘When did you last drink any alcohol?’ he enquired.
‘On the plane, champagne.’
‘Any idea how much? It’s difficult, I know …?’
‘I suppose about a bottle.’ Her nose was running and she was starting to feel the lousiness of withdrawal.
‘And your drug of choice is heroin, is that right?’
‘Well, I use it sometimes.’ She did not like the routine way he used that expression, as if she were obviously just another junkie.
‘When was the last time?’
‘Heavens …’ She tried to work out the time changes, and finally judged by how bad she was feeling.
‘The day before yesterday. You want to know how much?’ He nodded. ‘I’m not really sure,’ she lied, ‘I don’t pay much attention.’
She was to share a room with Véronique. They were directed to the laundry store to collect linen to make up the beds. Then Monty was allowed to telephone Cathy in London and tell her sister where she was. Monty looked at the other people in the Centre with curiosity; this was what addicts and alkies looked like. They seemed to be a mixed bunch, old and young, some obviously very wealthy. One of the women, tall with fair hair drawn severely back and a ravaged face, looked faintly familiar.
The next morning Monty attended her first therapy group. They had given her a shot to make the cramps stop, but she still felt shaky and sick as she looked around the people taking their places in the circle of cheap plastic chairs.
‘I’m John, and I’m an alcoholic,’ began a curly-haired young man.
‘I’m Darren, and I’m an alcoholic and chemically dependent,’ followed a barrel-chested man in denims.
‘I’m Mary-Louise and I’m chemically dependent,’ said the matron in a pants-suit beside him.
‘I’m Camilla, and I’m an alcoholic and chemically dependent,’ said the woman with the ravaged face and fair hair. Monty stifled a gasp as she heard the assured English voice. It was Camilla Carstairs, the daughter of the judge, the lacrosse captain, the prettiest and most perfect of all the irreproachable girls in Benenden School. The last anyone had heard of her she had been married to an ambassador. Monty suddenly lost the sense that this reality too was something from which she could escape.
Camilla looked at her with a weak but encouraging smile. The rest of the group had introduced themselves and now it was her turn.
‘I’m…’ she hesitated on her name; she seemed to have had so many names. ‘I’m Miranda, and I’m chemically dependent,’ she said at last.
Chapter Twenty-Three
‘We’re part of a revolution, do you realize that?’ Henry Rose and Cathy were standing at the corner of St Mary Axe and Leadenhall Street at 7 pm, waiting for a taxi to take them to their dinner meeting at Trader Vic’s.
‘I never saw you as the Fidel Castro of Finsbury Circus,’ Cathy kidded him. They were both distinctly mellowed by early-evening drinking. Henry had been appointed to the board of Migatto’s banking division, and they had been celebrating with the Black Cat’s best champagne.
‘You know what I mean,’ he said, sighting a taxi in the distance. Across the road two elderly men, caricatures of the City gentleman with furled umbrellas and pinstriped suits, had also sighted the taxi. ‘We’ve got where we are on ability and nothing else: we didn’t go to Eton, we don’t belong to the right clubs, nobody pulled strings for us.’
‘Not for you, maybe, but I married the boss’s son, don’t forget.’
The taxi cruised past them and they hailed it, sprinting across the street to get to the vehicle before the slowmoving, pinstriped pair who glowered resentfully as they climbed into the vehicle.
‘Shrewton hasn’t given you any breaks you don’t deserve, you know that. If you couldn’t hack it you’d be back in the typing-pool tomorrow.’ Henry settled into the corner of the cab, waving cheerily at their disappointed rivals, one of whom made a threatening gesture with his furled umbrella as they drove away. ‘In ten years’time, they’ll be laughing at the way the old City types did business, with their old-boy networks, their deals done on a handshake, their alcoholic lunches and their chauffeurs taking them home at four o’clock.’ Henry, normally the soul of good humour, could not keep an edge of malice out of his voice. A few years older than Cathy, he relished the prospect of his own success at the expense of men who considered themselves his social superiors.
‘If my father were still alive he’d never believe it. He spent his life telling me not to get ideas above my station. He was as fossilized as the nobs, in his way. Deep down he hated them, but it was all covered over with a veneer of respect.’ Henry’s father had been a cutter in a Savile Row tailor’s shop, a stooped, obsequious man who was ill-paid for his skill and who took refuge in a pedantic devotion to his craft. This allowed him to look down on the customers and disparage them for their inability to tell one weight of worsted cloth from another, however noble their lineage, weighty their influence or long their credit might have been.
They sped past the new white Stock Exchange building, the symbol of the switched-on seventies, where women had been admitted to the floor a few weeks earlier. The optimistic sunshine of the springtime glinted on the gothic weathervanes and heraldic symbols which for centuries had shone above the Square Mile’s grey temples of commerce. The medieval courts were lost in the evening shadows, and hundreds of feet above the time-scarred stonework of the ancient churches towered the new scaffolding around the City’s first skyscraper, fifty-two storeys of steel and glass which would house the headquarters of the National Westminster Bank.
Cathy rearranged the long rope of pearls which gleamed creamily in the folds of pink-striped silk between the lapels of her tailored grey jacket. She got a kick out of the oblique compliment which Henry had paid her, but thought he was right for the wrong reasons.
‘It’s not
because of us, is it, though? The real change is that the world’s getting smaller, communications are getting better: the old boys can’t adapt, that’s all. You tell them we’ll be trading in a twenty-four-hour market in ten years’ time and it gives them a coronary just thinking about it.’
He laughed, showing an expensive mouthful of dentistry. ‘Go on, take some credit, Cathy. Modesty’s out of fashion too, you know.’
‘I’m not being modest, I’m being accurate.’
‘You’re being dumb. If someone gives you the chance to brag a bit you should never turn it down. I didn’t get where I am today by being accurate, I did it by making damn sure I grabbed all the glory that was going, whether I deserved it or not.’
In the dealing room at Migatto Metals the revolution they were talking about was clearly in progress. It was scarcely a year since Cathy had first stepped into the Ring at the Metal Exchange, but already the Reuters teleprinter had disappeared from the dealing room, and been replaced by a VDU on which the news was transmitted in luminous green. The sheaves of paper to which the traders had to refer grew smaller, as more and more information was electronically conveyed. People now sent telexes instead of written orders.
The pace of business was increasing too, and the more frantic it became the more Cathy loved it. The metals market was responding to the throes of the world’s economy; when the dollar was devalued, when civil war broke out in Africa, or another major strike paralysed Britain itself, prices soared or sank and a huge volume of metal changed hands. On those days the dealing room was a madhouse and the Ring complete pandemonium.
Cathy traded without a pause, wildly exhilarated by the pace, her mind a stream of figures, her ears burning from the telephone, her throat sore with incessant talking, barely pausing to eat or drink until the pressure shifted to New York at the end of the day. Then the priority was alcohol, a stiff drink – often several – before she went out to dinner, usually with clients, to massage contacts, sell Migatto’s services and generally continue the social side of the business. Her mastery of her new profession delighted her, although it had startled some of Migatto’s clients at first.
Only a few months earlier she had snapped, ‘Migatto Metal,’ into a telephone one afternoon and heard a splutter at the other end of the line.
‘Can I speak with the trader please?’ She recognized the voice by its Swiss accent.
‘This is the trader, Herr Feuer.’
‘No, I would like to speak with the trader, please.’
‘Herr Feuer, I am the trader. What can I do for you?’
The line went dead. Half a minute later she saw Henry leave his desk at the end of the room, throwing down his telephone with a gesture of anger. He bustled down the room to within earshot of her and yelled, ‘I’m putting Feuer back to you – he‘s having a fit because he’s got to speak to a woman.’
‘I know,’ she shouted back, ‘he just hung up on me.’
‘Fucking Swiss. I told him to stuff it up his Lederhosen and join the twentieth century.’ There was a surge of amusement from the men around her and the light on Cathy’s switchboard winked once more.
‘Yes, Herr Feuer. Certainly, Herr Feuer. No trouble at all. I’ll be right back to you.’ She sold Herr Feuer’s aluminium for him and thought no more about it.
That had been six months ago, and now Herr Feuer liked her to call him Heinz and had come round so much to the idea of doing business with a woman that he had invited Cathy to dinner. Since she was a minor celebrity, clients were often eager to meet her, but this time she had insisted that Henry come too because the flirtatious tone in the Swiss-accented voice was quite unmistakable.
Trader Vic’s always made Cathy want to smile. The restaurant was the top favourite among young City types and she had to admit the food was delicious; but the idea was ridiculous – a phoney Polynesian paradise with bamboo walls and a palm-thatched roof created in the basement of the Park Lane Hilton a few yards from the concrete, the tarmac and the carbon monoxide of central London.
Heinz Feuer was much younger than she had expected, a slim, tall man in his middle twenties with hair the colour of butterscotch which flopped into his clear green eyes.
‘You look much nicer than you sound on the telephone.’ The words were out of Cathy’s mouth before she could stop them and once more she cursed herself for her unthinking rudeness.
‘So do you,’ he returned with untroubled candour. ‘I thought you’d be an old witch of fifty who smoked cheroots.’
‘I thought you’d be at least sixty.’
‘A real gnome of Zurich, ja?’
He wore the kind of clothes that were almost a uniform among the young, rich Europeans who used the markets as just a more exciting way of gambling – brown Cerruti slacks and shirt, a plaid V-necked sweater in muted lovat green, Gucci loafers. Cathy was not at all surprised when he suggested that they accompany him to Crockfords to play roulette after dinner. She weighed the value of his business against the tedium of watching roulette and decided she should accept.
‘Heinz is OK, really,’ Henry said as they waited while he claimed his car from the Hilton’s parking jockey. ‘Less of an android than the average Swiss, anyway.’
Cathy yawned, then noticed that Feuer was waving to them from the depths of a white Lamborghini Espada. ‘Nice quiet taste in cars, too,’ she said with amiable sarcasm.
Since the night with Rupert Lampeter when her body had reacted so violently against a man’s touch, Cathy had gradually lost the sensation of icy physical detachment. She felt alive now, sensual and physical. She got a dizzying high from the thrill of the market, she felt melting tenderness towards her son, but she had not felt attracted to a man. The truth was that romance now had a very low priority in Cathy’s life. She was making good money now, and had thankfully sold her apartment in Battersea and bought a much bigger and more luxurious home in the new Barbican development, a ten-minute walk from the Migatto office.
As soon as she moved in she realized that she had solved one problem and created another. She was working a fourteen-hour day, and although she now had the space and the means for Jamie to live with her, she would barely have seen him during the week. Passionately as she adored her son, she could see that it would be cruel to uproot him from the familiar comfort of his life at Coseley, where he now attended the village school and ran riot all summer around the estate with a gang of local children, and expect him to flourish in the loneliness of a London apartment.
Lord Shrewton, thinner, greyer and wiser than ever, proposed a compromise as they drove down to Coseley together one Friday evening. ‘I expect you’d like to have young James to yourself a bit more now you’re – ah – settled. Why don’t we send him up to you sometimes for the weekend? No need to tamper with the custody arrangements and let Charlie know what’s going on, just arrange things between ourselves, eh?’
‘I think that would be ideal,’ she agreed at once. She had not seen her former husband since the miserable day at the divorce court when the judge had directed that Jamie should live with his grandparents. Charlie was working for an advertising agency which his new wife’s father owned in Dallas, but every now and then she would hear, through Nanny Barbara or one of her old friends, that his affections were straying once more. It was not difficult to imagine that, when Charlie’s current meal ticket threw him out, he would scuttle back to England and set about claiming Jamie and the money in trust for him. If she applied outright for custody of her son, she might just precipitate such an action. It seemed better to have Lord Shrewton firmly on her side than to have his loyalty once again split by a legal battle between herself and his son.
Lord Shrewton’s solid, unostentatious Rover picked up speed as the river of vehicles leaving the city flowed more freely once it passed the last junction on the Oxford road. The only sign that her former father-in-law was nearing his seventieth birthday was that he invariably fell asleep during the journey home, but Cathy decided to press her advantage while h
e was in the mood to talk family business.
‘I’ll be trading copper next week,’ she told him. The copper traders were considered the most senior.
‘Excellent. I hope Rose gave you a decent raise before he moved on. Certainly deserve it.’
‘Thank you. Yes, he did.’
‘Nothing to beat the markets – great life if you don’t weaken. You seem to thrive on all the ballyhoo. More than most, it strikes me. A lot of traders are just in it for the money, but you’ve got a taste for the job.’
‘I love it, but I don’t want to do it forever.’
‘Got your eye on young Rose’s desk, I suppose. Well, why not? Remind me when you’ve had enough of trading copper, eh? You’ll have more time for the boy too, when you’re a director. Good idea.’ She heard the gratification in his voice and realized he had been planning to promote her all the time.
In another year Cathy moved up to the position of junior director. She had gained the reputation of a baby tycoon in the making, and was amused to acknowledge that what her colleagues most resented about her was neither her ability nor her connections, but the mystery she preserved about her private life. The fact that the beautiful Miss Bourton gracefully rejected all the approaches which were made to her, and yet seemed to have no man in her life, seemed to imply an insult to most of the male sex. This attitude was not very logical, but after a few years of watching the markets soar and plummet on waves of male emotion, she had realized that there was nothing very logical about the world of high finance.
Even her sister was mildly disbelieving. ‘Don’t you get lonely?’ Monty asked, sitting cross-legged on the oatmeal carpet in Cathy’s Barbican apartment, playing dominoes with Jamie one rainy Sunday afternoon. Cathy was curled on the sofa in a red velour tracksuit, absorbed in reams of computer print-out, analysing the past quarter’s business.
‘No,’ she replied truthfully. ‘I’m totally blitzed with social life, I’ve got great mates who I work with all day, I hardly have time to see my old friends and I don’t have a lot to say to them in any case. Jamie keeps me sane at weekends, and I don’t get enough time with him anyway. You’re the only person I’d like to see whom I don’t see enough.’
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