by Rosie Thomas
‘Don’t listen to him. Talk all night, if you want.’
Jenny was biting on a yawn. Her eyes were watery, and there were yellowish patches under them. ‘I couldn’t possibly. Charlie, I don’t want to drag you away too soon, but could we think about going before long?’
‘Now, my darling, if that’s what you would like.’ He held out his hand to her, and wobbled as he helped her to her feet.
‘I’ll drive,’ Jenny said patiently.
Jane packed up the baby and her belongings. They divided the load between the four of them and carried it out to her car.
Jenny’s face was wan as she said good-night. ‘I’m sorry to be such a rag for your lovely dinner, Harriet. I just feel so ill, that’s all. Much worse this time than with any of the others. Time to call a halt, I think. Charlie’ll be glad.’
Harriet consoled her, ‘Don’t worry, after thirteen weeks you’ll be fine and full of energy.’
Jenny even laughed at that. ‘Poor Harriet. You’ve had to listen to all of it. Still, you’ll know everything when your turn comes.’
Charlie gave Harriet a chaste kiss, and Jenny drove them away.
‘When are you off?’ Jane asked through the wound-down window of the Citroën. Harriet told her. ‘Lucky you. I’d give anything to be going off for some high-life in Los Angeles.’ But there was not a trace of envy in her voice. Jane had her five months’ maternity leave, her problems with finding a new house and a minder for her baby, her difficult job waiting unimproved for her, and she had Imogen herself. She wasn’t jealous of what Harriet had, and Harriet was relieved to recognise it.
‘Have a good trip,’ Jane called.
‘I will,’ Harriet answered softly.
She watched Jane drive away, and then went inside to load the dinner plates neatly into the dishwasher.
Robin had been busy. Robin was always busy, but lately there had been a methodical, implacable force about his busyness. All of it was in connection with Peacocks. He was gathering a crop from seeds that he had planted long ago, as long ago as last summer; Harriet would have been surprised to discover how thorough he had been, but Harriet knew nothing about Robin’s crop. Her attention had been on other things, and her preoccupation had led her to forget – or to overlook – what she already knew perfectly well about Robin Landwith.
Robin had begun, last summer when Harriet was dizzy with the exotic process of falling in love with Caspar, by making a series of telephone calls to a chosen few of Peacocks’ employees. Harriet was the chief executive, of course, but Robin was the company chairman and so it was not so very unusual that he should want to speak to various key members of the staff. It was a little more unusual that they were not the most senior people, but belonged to the secondary management level, and it was noticeable that the calls were made privately, out of working hours, to the individuals’ homes.
The telephone-call seeds had not always germinated, but when they did they were followed up with discreet meetings, nowhere near Peacocks’ offices. Robin kept the details that emerged at these meetings in a dossier that was always locked in a drawer of his big desk.
More recently, he had taken to visiting Winwood. None of the machine-minders bothered to look at Robin’s legs as he strolled around the factory floor with Ray Dunnett, although they did mimic his Duke of Edinburgh stance with his hands clasped behind his back. After these tours of inspection, Robin and Ray would retire to Ray’s office and Robin would make casual notes as the two men talked under the eyes of the girlie calendars.
Then Robin had started meeting Jeremy Crichton, the accountant. Robin had chosen his time and prepared himself carefully, but the first of these encounters, over a good dinner at one of Robin’s clubs, had not been particularly satisfying. Jeremy was not a gregarious man, and did not at first understand why Robin Landwith was suddenly inviting him to some exclusive club merely to exchange gossip over the beef and burgundy. But the unsociable accountant was far from stupid, and the light dawned quickly enough. He didn’t trust Robin but then he didn’t trust anyone, and he was swift to work out which way the wind was blowing. When they met a second time, Robin’s casually-framed questions were more pointedly answered. The third time, Robin brought his dossier with him and the two of them went through it together. Jeremy looked anxious, but by the time Robin was leaning back in his chair to enjoy his port and cigar the anxiety had all but disappeared.
‘You seem to have a case,’ Jeremy said cautiously. ‘Or you make it appear that you could have. I did give my agreement to the financial arrangements you indicate, however. That is incontrovertible.’
Robin smiled his reassurance and recharged the port glasses from the decanter left for them by the club servant. ‘I don’t think it will be difficult to argue, given the style of management, that there was no other course open to you. The nub of the business, of course, is that you need not worry about your previous role if the shareholders can be persuaded that a strong management is doing all that is necessary to set the company on a secure footing for the future.’
Jeremy did not like cigars. He lit up one of his own Silk Cut and examined Robin through the smoke.
‘And you can get sufficient showing of support from the institutions?
‘I think you had better leave that to me,’ Robin answered.
Robin made the last preparations for his harvest through another series of meetings. These last meetings were an odd mixture of the formal and the informal, being mostly held in the proper offices of the big financial institutions, but at which there was a good deal of Christian-naming between the dark-suited men, and even the occasional half-jocular old boy.
At these meetings Robin made a lot of play with his dossier, and with the information that he had gleaned from the financial controller, the production manager, the junior marketing executive, and the rest of his collection of germinated and now flourishing seeds. And after these smaller plants had been counted, he moved on to Ray Dunnett and Jeremy Crichton, his prize exhibits.
Not one of these meetings, however, for all their superficial friendliness, was easy for Robin. After more than one he had to return to his office and exchange a sweat-dampened shirt for a clean one, off the top of the cellophane stack in his desk drawer. But he never lost sight of exactly what he wanted, and it was in any case in Robin’s nature to enjoy taking on these men, the fund managers of the big insurance companies with all their power and the might of the Investment Protection Committees behind them, men who had admired Harriet’s entrepreneurial skill and had invested accordingly, and winning them over to his own side.
He was not successful every time. Sometimes James, or Christopher, or whichever fund manager it was at whichever institution, would glance up from the dossier that Robin had prepared and ask, with narrow eyes, ‘Aren’t you exaggerating all this a touch, Robin? There doesn’t seem to me to be all that much in it.’ It was then that Robin would nod, regretfully, and embellish his case with a few smooth exaggerations. Some of these exaggerations were developed enough to qualify as lies, as it happened, but Robin was a very, very skilful liar.
At the end he would fold up his papers and say, ‘That’s it, Chris. We are all admirers of Harriet Peacock, and her abilities are unquestionable. But as chairman I have a responsibility to the shareholders and to the future of the company itself …’
Christopher and James and the rest would not see the dark patches under the arms of Robin’s shirt, because his well-cut suit jacket masked them. And they didn’t guess, either, at the delicious adrenalin that coursed through his veins as he fenced with them. The thrill was better than sex, Robin thought. Better than the time, even, when he had made love to Harriet in his office, the week before Peacocks’ flotation.
Of course, in the end, Robin would get what he wanted, because he always did and always had done.
Most of the individual holdings of Peacocks shares amounted to three or four per cent. He had calculated that he needed to persuade only four of these major sha
reholders into his camp, four fund managers represented by the Jameses or Christophers, to give him the magic fifty-one per cent that he needed.
After the last meeting, Robin went back to his office and locked the dossier away in his desk once more. He sat for a moment, thinking. The most delicate negotiations were still to be made, and he would be dealing with less familiar and predictable creatures than the fund managers of the major insurance companies. But he knew from experience that families offered much more fertile ground than financial institutions for his seeds of suspicion and dissent. The prospect and the potential prize, if he did his job right, interested him even more than all the prizes he had already gained. It was a challenge for him: he knew that simple people did not always make simple targets.
Robin left his desk and went over to some low shelves where, amongst the mementoes and plaques and other little personal possessions, the earliest production example of Meizu sat propped against the wall. It was the first, shiny black plastic model, that Harriet had christened Conundrum and which had failed to sell. He liked to see it now, because it reminded him that Harriet was fallible, whatever her loyal supporters chose to believe.
It was the failure of Conundrum and its rebirth as Meizu, too, that had delivered into his hands the best card of all in the game that he was playing with Harriet. Robin smiled as he thought about it. Above everything else, he liked to win.
He picked up Conundrum and set the gates before releasing the balls to roll, and rattle in succession, and drop towards their destination. As they fell he saw that he had miscalculated, and the yellow ball insinuated itself before the blue one, into the wrong slot. Robin was still smiling when he put the board down and turned back to his desk, leaving the coloured balls and bright discs in the wrong correspondence. It was typical of Harriet, he was thinking, and presumably also of the old man about whom she had worried so ineffectually, to imagine that the game provided some kind of metaphor for life. Robin did not see his own life as any kind of labyrinth. Rather it was a straight and well-defined path along which he progressed confidently towards the goals of his own gratification. If any obstacles appeared in his path they could be shouldered aside, and if the path deviated it could, with the application of the right amount of effort, be wrenched into the appearance of straightness again.
Setting his own path straight was, after all, what he was doing to Harriet. Harriet had disturbed his equilibrium, she had refused him, and he could not tolerate that.
It had been Harriet’s mistake not to understand as much.
Harriet was all ready. Graham and Jeremy and the others were prepared for her week’s absence, Winwood appeared to be functioning acceptably, her bag was packed with her Academy Awards dress. She had even seen Linda off from Heathrow a few days earlier, at the beginning of the Easter holidays, en route for Clare’s Bel Air estate.
Linda demonstrated a well-travelled familiarity with the airport’s long-haul terminal and with the business of flying. She detached the badge announcing her as an unaccompanied minor almost as soon as it was pinned to her lapel, and stuffed it into her pocket. She craned her head to look up at the departures screen.
‘Look, it’s not even boarding yet. Can I get something to read on the flight, Harriet? The shop’s at the end of the concourse, there.’
‘I’ll buy you an improving novel,’ Harriet promised sweetly.
Linda scowled. ‘A couple of mags will do fine, thanks.’
They threaded through the crowds together. The shop offered a wall of gold-inscribed paperbacks and a mounted display of Union Jack tea towels and plastic Beefeaters. Linda caught at Harriet’s arm. ‘Look!’ she crowed.
Harriet’s experienced eye had already seen it, and registered the stock position as well. There was a spinner standing at one end of the display unit, one of her own spinners topped with the Peacocks’ feathers, and the pockets in it were neatly filled with her games. There was Meizu in the blister pack that had caused manufacturing problems, and in the black and silver executive version, and Alarm in the old packaging that didn’t satisfy her.
Harriet said, ‘Yes, airports are good outlets.’
Linda had already hurried over to the spinner. She was tidying the units in their pockets, moving them to fill slots that had been emptied. A Japanese couple were standing nearby, examining Travel Meizu.
‘It’s really good,’ Linda said, planting herself in front of them. ‘You should get it.’ They backed away from her, balancing Meizu defensively on top of an armful of tartan-packaged shortbread.
‘Linda!’ Harriet protested.
‘Well? It’s a sale, isn’t it? Don’t you feel proud when you see people getting your things? I feel proud of you. It’s like seeing Dad in a movie. You can’t believe someone belongs to you.’
‘Yes, I feel proud. Of course I do. I keep quieter about it, that’s all.’
As quiet as she kept her pleasure in hearing Linda linking her with Caspar in the same admiring breath, Harriet thought. But that wasn’t to deny the reality of it. She smiled at Linda, ‘I should have you on my sales force.’
It was time for Linda to board her flight. Harriet busied herself with checking that she had her passport and her ticket and her boarding card.
‘It’s not a proper goodbye,’ Linda said. ‘Not as you’re coming to LA so soon. It’ll be so great to have you there.’
‘It’s only for a week,’ Harriet warned. ‘And I don’t know how much we’ll be able to see of each other. You’re staying with your mother …’ And I’m your father’s girlfriend, she had delicately not added.
Linda responded smartly. ‘Clare likes what keeps me happy. Seeing you makes me happy. Don’t worry, we’ll fix it.’
Her high spirits and her confidence and her affection pleased Harriet. Linda seemed a different girl from the mutinous child she had met at the Landwiths’.
‘See you in LA.’ They hugged each other, not like mother and daughter and not like sisters. Nothing like Lisa and myself, anyhow, Harriet thought. She watched and waved until Linda passed out of sight behind the airside screens.
The last day before her own departure came. There was only the television interview to be taped, and then she would be on the way back to the airport.
Alison Shaw arrived, with her television crew, to make the programme called Success Story. Sitting in her office under her portrait, with the startling title of ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’ just awarded to her, Harriet was evidently a success. She could remember Simon, reaching out to give her the cracked wood of the first Meizu, but she need not dwell on what had happened. She could be confident that when she came back after her week’s holiday, her deserved reward, she could make Winwood work. She had always made everything work; she was a success story.
The reporter wound up her interview. While the crew filmed the reaction shots Harriet went out to take a call from Charlie Thimbell. Charlie was relieved to have caught her. As he talked he doodled fiercely on his notepad, drawing looped circles and then slashing oblique lines through them.
Harriet, I heard a rumour.
He had had lunch that day with a PR agent, a lively girl who enjoyed her wine and with whom he regularly shared convivial, indiscreet lunches. But Charlie had a story to write that afternoon. He drank only one glass and the girl finished the rest of the bottle.
You’re a friend of Harriet Peacock’s, aren’t you, Charlie? The question was accompanied by the knowing squint that suggested a titbit of information to follow. Charlie’s contact didn’t work for the company employed by Peacocks, but she had her contacts too. And although what she leaned forward to breathe across the table to him did not amount to so very much, in hard fact, it still worried Charlie very much. It also suggested the kind of City story he excelled at winkling out for his readers. He hurried back to his office, and put through the call.
Are you watching your back. Harriet? Are you overstretched?
Her laughter was confident, but it didn’t reassure him.
&
nbsp; I couldn’t tell you, Charlie. Which would you put first, me or a good story?
You’ll be a long way from home.
Airily Harriet had told him that she was not going up the Amazon. She could be back in London in twelve hours if she was needed. Which she would not be.
And so there was no more Charlie could say, except, Enjoy yourself.
Harriet hung up. Karen was signalling at her to say that the car to take her to the airport was waiting for her downstairs. Alison Shaw came out of Harriet’s office, the thick folds of her clothes and the raincoat over her arm making her look dumpy in comparison with Harriet’s elegance. The two women shook hands and Alison thanked Harriet for the interview. Harriet answered that she had enjoyed it, lying because she didn’t like being interviewed, not any more. It connected too readily back to the old search for publicity, any publicity, and Simon.
But she noticed that now the reporter’s work was finished, there was warmth and friendliness in Alison’s face, as well as sharp intelligence. It made Harriet think that if there were only time to spare, it would be nice to make a new friend. She responded with warmth of her own.
Have a good trip, Alison and Karen said together.
By five o’clock, Harriet was airborne.
Sitting in her first-class seat, holding a glass of British Airways champagne, Harriet allowed herself a small sigh of satisfaction that was touched with the smallest, most pleasurable tinge of disbelief. She was a successful businesswoman, by an eminent committee’s reckoning the ‘Entrepreneur of the Year’, no less. She had money, real money, and the evidence of it in a silk and wool suit with a covetable label, handmade shoes, and a diamond ring she had happily bought for herself. And now, better than any of those things, best of all, she was flying out to Los Angeles, to Caspar Jensen.