by Peter James
Blushing, and sweating profusely, he was forced to reboot. It was all slipping away from him, everything he had worked for, he could sense it. The meeting was running dangerously out of control, and John was fast losing confidence in his ability to pull it back together.
His thoughts flashed to Susan, her happiness in the new house, and all that they stood to lose if Clake cut up rough. And his partner, Gareth, to whom he had given a stake in the business when he had started, eight years back, and their staff of sixty, many of whom had worked for him since leaving college.
He had been rash in taking on so many new employees just recently, in buying a lot of equipment, in moving to their new offices, in buying the house, but they were on such an incredible roll that he had been completely confident. Now, desperately, he needed to convey that confidence to Clake, but it was deserting him.
He gave Clake a nervous smile. ‘Have you? Always? Been here, in London?’ John heard his voice sounding like a tape being played at the wrong speed.
Mr Clake did not reply; he was studying something hard in the printout. He was not looking happy.
Chapter Four
‘Where do you think I should put this?’
Harry, the painter, looked at Susan with his big, sad eyes. He had a droopy moustache that reminded her of a Mexican bandit in some Western she had once seen – perhaps The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, she wasn’t sure, and anyhow, it didn’t matter.
Her mind was all over the place and not where it ought to have been, which was on the manuscript she had brought home. She was finding it hard to concentrate on her work because she was worrying about John’s meeting with the bank.
It was much easier to watch Harry, much easier to think about the colour scheme for the house, to look at the books of fabrics and wallpapers, to walk around the rooms, marking crosses on the walls to indicate where the power points should go and where the radiators should be fixed, than to plough her way through a chapter full of equations that explained gravity.
John had promised to ring her straight after the meeting and let her know how it had gone. It ought to be finished now and he hadn’t rung. Maybe that was a good sign, she thought, but she knew she was kidding herself. If the meeting had gone well, he’d have rung her straight away. She was tempted to phone him but held back, not wanting to pressurise him.
She had been frightened by the state he had been in this morning. John was not a worrier, and it was his air of confidence, his calm way of handling problems, coupled with his terrific, unstoppable drive, that had most attracted her to him. He had always known exactly what he wanted and how to get it. He told her on their first date, shouting to be heard above the noise of a crowded bar in Westwood, that he was going to marry her, and when she had laughed, she had seen the hardening in his eyes, the determination in his face, and it had turned her on in a way she had never experienced before.
She’d had plenty of boyfriends, but no one had ever wanted her in the way she had seen John did. The following morning, there had been so many flowers in her office she could hardly get in the door.
She had always felt safe, secure with him: he had never made a promise he couldn’t keep, or a commitment he couldn’t meet. Nothing before had ever worried him. Within weeks she had left everything behind her in California and moved to London. He had become her world.
But this morning he had been a stranger, fumbling around, pulling out different shirts, ties, socks, trying them on, changing them, until in desperation she’d dictated to him what to put on and sent him on his way, and was left feeling, suddenly, very vulnerable.
She always thought they’d been open with each other, but it wasn’t until somewhere around dawn this morning, after hours of sleepless tossing and turning, that he’d confessed he was a lot deeper into the bank than he’d previously told her. And he was more worried than he had previously let on about a lawsuit hanging over the company from a composer.
She’d had her suspicions that things had been harder in recent months than he was admitting but he had always convincingly brushed them aside. And, anyhow, he’d been through a few tough times in the past years and always come through. He’d find a way to come through now; that was the kind of man he was.
And if he didn’t? Could her income support this place? It might just pay the mortgage, but not much else. British publishing houses were not renowned for the generosity of their salaries, and in any event, a dark cloud was hanging over her job right now: the threat of a takeover bid from an American media giant, which already owned one large publishing house in London.
And there was an even bigger problem than the house if their incomes dried up. How could her kid sister, Casey, be funded?
She stared out of the bay window at the garden for which she had so many plans. They both loved this house so much: was it possible that it could be taken away from them before they’d even had a chance to finish decorating it?
It wasn’t just the house that was so wonderful: it was the neighbour-hood too. She was enjoying exploring their new world. In the past couple of weeks since they’d moved in, she had discovered a bakery to die for two minutes’ walk away, a specialist wine merchant that it was already hard to keep John away from, and a great little Thai restaurant whose owner kept bringing them dishes that he refused to charge them for because he had taken a shine to them.
She had sorted out the kitchen, repapered the shelves, put up a spice rack and the paper-towel holder, and was really pleased with her prowess with John’s tool kit. She had written to her parents, enclosing photographs of the exterior and interior of the house (the interior labelled, clearly, BEFORE!!!) and she had written to Casey and sent her photographs as well, not that Casey could ever see them or read the letter but that did not matter. Susan kept Casey in the loop on everything.
Harry was taking his time thinking. He dipped his roller in the paint, then applied it to the wall again, up and down, steady vertical sweeps. In front of her eyes the living room was changing colour from sludgy beige to Dulux Not Quite White. She wanted this Not Quite White theme throughout the house with all the woodwork contrasting in satin black.
Afternoon sunlight spilled onto the bare oak floorboards; outside in the garden the cherry tree was in blossom. The house had large rooms and neither she nor John, who shared similar tastes on most things, wanted to clutter them. They had agreed to keep the feeling of space, airiness, light.
Harry pushed the roller up, against gravity, then down, with gravity, thinking about her question. She could see from his expression that he preferred the down strokes to the up strokes, and wondered if he was aware that gravity was helping him with the down strokes.
She was big on gravity right now, having spent the last ten days editing a book on it. Although adept at physics, gravity had always given her a hard time, but she took comfort in the fact that it had given Einstein a hard time also – although, as she confided in John, maybe not quite such a hard time as herself.
To make matters worse, its author, Fergus Donleavy, one of her favourite authors and her most successful acquisition for Magellan Lowry, was trying to be too clever in this book, or so both she and an independent reader thought.
‘There, by the French windows,’ Harry said finally. ‘That’s where you should put it’ Then he muttered something about good feng shui that Susan didn’t quite catch.
She lugged the Victorian pot stand over to the French windows. Harry was right, it looked good there. They both stood, admiring the piece, which she’d bought last week in a bric-a-brac shop a few streets away. Then she made a cup of tea for Harry, coffee for herself, and went back to the small room next door which she had made her study. She sat at her desk, in front of an open window overlooking the garden, and turned her attention once more to the manuscript.
She forced her way through three equations before the warm air on her face, and the scents of the garden that it carried, distracted her. This weather reminded her of California, her childhood in Marina Del Rey
, and her student days on the UCLA campus at Westwood. The memories were mixed, happiness tinged with sadness. The failure of her caring, loving parents to succeed at what they really wanted to do in life. The tragedy that had overtaken Casey, which continued to affect all their lives.
She sipped her coffee, looked at the blossom on the cherry tree, at the wooden seat and the small brick patio with the kettle barbecue and picnic bench, and dreamed for a moment of smoky outdoor evenings and chilled rosé wine. Then she turned her attention back to the manuscript, pushed back the sleeves of John’s old shirt that she was wearing over her jeans, picked up her pencil, chewed it and concentrated.
Time is a curve, not a straight line. Linear time is an illusion; we exist in a space-time continuum; your wristwatch at the top of a mountain tells time more slowly than your wristwatch at the bottom. This has nothing to do with gravity, it is relativity; but they are interconnected.
This was one of the key points Fergus was making, but considering that this was meant to be a book for the layman, he had not explained it clearly. Even she was getting confused.
Some while later Harry knocked at the door and told her he would see her in the morning. She waved good-night without looking up from the manuscript, drank the last drops of cold coffee and marked an indent for a new paragraph. A blackbird hopped across the lawn, in and out of the line of shadows stencilled on the uncut grass by the trees in the park beyond, its head jerking like a clockwork toy. She watched it until, as if it sensed her gaze, it took off.
John had still not called. She picked up the phone, unable to contain her anxiety any longer, and the doorbell rang.
She went to the front door and opened it. A man in brown overalls stood there; parked behind him in the street was a van with British Telecom markings. ‘I hope I’m not too late?’ he enquired. ‘I was delayed on another job. My office rang you?’
‘No, I didn’t get any call,’ Susan replied, her mind more on John and the manuscript than this visitor. ‘But that’s no problem.’
The man looked relieved. He held a tool box in one hand and a jumble of wiring attached to a metering device in the other. He was a big man, built like a quarterback, with a blunt face and close-cropped hair. He didn’t look English, more Eastern European, but his accent was North London and he talked in a way that made him sound, somehow, a little simple.
‘If it’s too late, I can come tomorrow.’
‘No, it’s fine. What actually are you doing?’
‘I am here to test your lines. Four lines, plus an ISDN?’
‘Yes,’ Susan said. ‘Come in.’
The man looked at her: she was even prettier in the flesh than in the photograph, he thought. He made a careful study of her eyebrows. Always the giveaway. They were red, like the hair on her head.
So now he knew that the pubic hair inside her jeans was also red. And that excited him.
Chapter Five
‘What the fuck’s this?’
‘It’s a telephone,’ John Carter’s secretary replied, calmly.
John regarded her as if she was plankton in a bucket. ‘I know that, Stella, OK? I want to know why I have this telephone on my desk and not the one that was there when I went out this morning.’
Mr Clake was mostly to blame for John’s mood but the traffic warden who had arranged for his car to be clamped had contributed to it, as had the news broken to him by his lawyer with whom he had spent most of the rest of the afternoon. But Clake had really trashed his day. Although right now John was more focused on the shiny grey BT CallMaster telephone, which had not been on his desk seven hours earlier.
‘British Telecom replaced it. A man came – said there was no charge. He replaced all the CallMasters,’ Stella told him. ‘They’re exactly the same as the previous ones,’ she added, used to John’s moods and normally able to calm him.
John picked up the receiver, punched a button, got a dial tone, then hesitated. He’d promised to call Susan after the meeting with Clake, and she’d be anxious now because he hadn’t. But what the hell was he going to say to her?
He replaced the receiver in the cradle, slung his jacket over the back of his chair and sat down. ‘I don’t want to be disturbed for an hour, Stella,’ he called out, and closed his eyes against a headache that was becoming acute. ‘I’m due to play squash at seven with Archie Warren. Could you call him and cancel?’
‘Do you want anything? Coffee?’
He shook his head, heard the door shut, and sat motionless. His insides were drawn into a tight, hard, knotted ball and he felt queasy. John had always had a fear of heights, and he felt this way sometimes on a balcony or in a cable car, this dreadful, helpless fear that he was experiencing now.
He had to collect his thoughts, think his way through this, somehow find solutions to the two different problems that had kicked him into touch today. The intercom on his new telephone warbled; he ignored it. A bluebottle thudded against the window. Outside, a delivery truck rumbled along the mews.
He stared bleakly ahead of him. His life stared back. Glossy software packs framed and mounted on the walls. How to Play Bridge … How to Plant a Herb Garden … How to Build a Space Rocket … How to Wire a House … How to Make Love Properly … How to Eat Healthily …
John’s business had been built on a simple idea. His company made computer programs that told people how to do anything they wanted, and provided information at the touch of a keyboard. They’d started with CD-Roms, but now it was mostly on-line multimedia through the Internet. On-line medicine had been his biggest success of the past couple of years – in particular, the Virtual Gynaecologist.
He’d pulled off a great coup in getting Harvey Addison, London’s most fashionable obstetrician, to be the presenter of this service to which women could log on, ask any questions they wanted and get a seemingly live consultation – although it was, in fact, incredibly smart software that used pre-recorded filmed responses to every conceivable question, which gave the illusion that Harvey Addison was appearing live. People knew, of course, that it wasn’t live, but women loved it. For just a couple of pounds they could have their own personal, and thorough, consultation with the great man – and in their own home!
DigiTrak had been hugely successful. There were framed gold CDs on the walls. Statuettes, plaques. The company had won innovation awards from computer magazines, medical magazines, television stations. Its products had a good reputation and were respected.
John had made it all happen. He had smart ideas and a knack for picking great people and getting the chemistry right. His sixty employees were mostly computer-technology graduates, working either on improving the existing programs or designing new ones. He looked after his staff, paid them well, encouraged them. And last year he had found the perfect premises, a large mews building in the middle of South Kensington, which had previously been occupied by an advertising agency. It had great open spaces, split levels, wild spiral staircases. Staff liked working here and clients liked visiting. He had proudly named it DigiTrak House.
The one constant hassle was that the business had always been short of cash. As it expanded, DigiTrak gobbled money faster than it made it so it was constantly chasing its tail. John wasn’t alone: all fast-growing businesses tended to have the same problem.
But right now he was alone.
Bill Williams, who had protected him, had gone and now he had Mr Clake. And Clake didn’t want to know. In another year’s time, maybe less at the rate they were growing, they would be in a position to go public. An analyst John had talked to reckoned that if John could deliver the right figures, they could float the company for maybe twenty million pounds. But there was a yawning chasm between now and then.
John looked down at the workload on his desk. Letters that were unread, letters that awaited his signature, purchases to be approved, cheques to be countersigned. He touched his keyboard and his monitor sprang into life. The icon told him he had new mail. He touched the keyboard again. Seventeen new e-mail
s awaited him.
Susan stared at him from the photograph on his desk, a big, warm smile on her face that shouted, I adore you! at him. He adored her, too, and he needed her right at this moment more than ever. Susan was smart, she was level-headed, she had good ideas and she never panicked. She was a wonderful person and, he thought bitterly, she deserved better from him than failure.
He punched a number on his new telephone and eleven voice-mail messages repeated themselves to him; he jotted down on his pad the ones he would phone back when he could summon up the enthusiasm.
God knows when.
He buried his head in his hands, pinching the bridge of his nose to try to relieve the ache, and sat for some minutes, just thinking, compiling a list in his head of everyone he knew in banking, everyone he knew who had access to investment money, but he was finding it hard to think clearly. He stood up, wandered around the office looking at all the plaques and certificates, then unhooked a framed gold CD from one wall, the first Home Doctor he’d produced, and stared at it.
This is the kind of work we do, Mr Clake, he thought, angrily. The best. Our products are better than anyone else’s, because we care. Every single person in this company cares. You might sneer at technology, but the women whose lives we’ve saved because we showed them how to examine their breasts for lumps aren’t sneering at it.
He hung the frame up again then, gripped with a terrible, helpless sense of frustration, stared around the office, wondering if he would still have it in a month’s time. Wondering if he would still have anything in a month’s time.
He lifted the slats of the blinds and looked out of the window. Someone who was trying to get past the truck down below was pissed off and blasting their horn. It was going to be a fine evening. He and Susan were looking forward so much to this summer in their new home. How the hell could he possibly break it to her that they might have to put it on the market?