by Rosie Thomas
Kath leaned forward. ‘It’s only a business, Harriet. It isn’t the world. It isn’t life itself.’
Harriet screamed at her. ‘How do you know? What do you know?’ She had to lift one shaking hand to wipe her mouth.
Out of the blur she saw Jeremy’s face, faintly coloured, and Graham’s pity, and embarrassment. It was an added humiliation to find that she had lost control of herself. She leant awkwardly back in her chair, trying to steady her breathing.
At last she looked at Robin. His face was clear in the fog, and she saw that there was no embarrassment there. He was watching her with a degree of interest that had something carnal in it. It was a look that made her pull her jacket more tightly around her, with an attempt at defiance.
‘What will you do if I refuse to resign?’ she whispered.
He smiled again, showing his perfect teeth at her. ‘I could call a shareholders’ meeting, as I have already said. Or there’s another alternative. Do you remember when the launch of Conundrum failed, and you came to me for further financing so you could relaunch the game as Meizu?’ His tone was light, conversational, as if he was telling an amusing story across the dinner table. Harriet nodded.
‘Of course you do. And you’ll also remember that one of the small conditions was that I took a floating charge on the company’s assets, including Mr Archer’s game itself? Now, I’ll remind you of the “security in jeopardy” clause relating to that charge. The clause states that the holder of the debenture – Landwith Associates, Harriet – has the right to foreclose if the assets on which the holder is secured appear to be threatened.’
Robin laid one caressing finger on his folder. ‘This information leads me to believe that through your mismanagement and neglect, my asset is very much in jeopardy. And so, according to our very proper agreement, I can foreclose on the game itself. I can take Meizu, and leave Peacocks. You don’t need me to explain what that means.’
He would strip the company.
Harriet raised her eyes. From the other three faces she could see that they had heard nothing of this. Robin had kept it to the end, his last trick. Perhaps he had used just a hint of it to bring one or two of his friends, the fund managers, into the fold. She didn’t doubt that he would do it. He would take Meizu and leave Peacocks with nothing.
As she had done, to Simon.
She was defeated. She had been defeated all along, and the memory of Simon took the last of her resistance. She couldn’t try to fight, and watch Robin destroy the company she had created, even though she was no longer part of it. Robin would have calculated that, too, as he had calculated everything else.
‘And so what do you propose?’ Harriet asked him.
He took out yet another piece of paper. She sat motionless while he read out the arrangements for the disposal of her shares through the institutions, her compensation, the formalities of the notice to the Stock Exchange, and the euphemistic wording of the announcement to the press.
‘I think you resign to “devote more time to your personal life”, don’t you?’ Robin murmured.
‘If you say so,’ she answered him.
‘I think that concludes the meeting,’ he said.
Harriet stood up. She picked up the two halves of the broken pencil, and closed them in her fist. As she passed behind Kath’s chair she touched her mother’s shoulder.
‘I’m sorry I screamed at you. I wish I hadn’t done.’
After the door had closed behind her, it was a long moment before Kath ventured, ‘I think I should go to her.’
Robin was sharp. ‘Don’t do that. She’ll prefer the dignity of some privacy.’
With dislike, Kath said, ‘You think you know her, don’t you?’
Robin was packing the papers and his dossier into his briefcase.
‘I do know her,’ he said, without emphasis.
Harriet sat at her desk. She looked unseeingly around her. After a little while, because she couldn’t think what else to do, she picked up the telephone to talk to Charlie Thimbell. At the sound of her voice, Charlie waved one of his writers out of his office, with a gesture that told him to close the door behind him.
‘What happened?’
Harriet told him all of it. The words spilled out.
‘The devious, dirty little motherfucker,’ Charlie pronounced. It was a wonderful story. A classic of its kind. He made some notes, on the lined pad he kept ready.
‘I should have seen it coming. I should have acted tighter. I should never have gone to LA.’
‘Well Harriet, I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve it.’ He was sorry, genuinely sorry, because he liked Harriet and he admired her. ‘You didn’t deserve what your family did, either.’
‘Oh. I probably did.’
‘What’s the deal, then?’ Not that he couldn’t have worked it out for himself.
‘A placing of my shares. Twenty-eight per cent’s a big slice, but Robin’s PR will convince the world that this is an amicable split, and it will be taken up. I daresay Peacocks will go down to one-ninety or so, which isn’t to say they won’t be back at two twenty-five the day after. With compensation I suppose it will mean about nine million. Say five to six, after tax.’
Charlie’s whistle was soundless.
‘So what are you going to do now?’ he asked.
Harriet sounded weary. ‘Have some time off. Take stock. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to say?’
‘Yep.’ Charlie would not have minded taking some time off, with six million to cushion him.
‘Charlie? Do you know what? I feel as if I’m right back at the beginning again. All the way back to that beach in Crete.’
‘You’re a long way from Crete, my love. A long long way. You’re rich.’
Harriet heard the words, without comprehension. The fear and its attendant adrenalin that kept her going through the meeting, that had brought her all the way from LA, were ebbing away. It was dawning on her what the loss of Peacocks truly meant. She couldn’t think what to do now, or tomorrow, or in the weeks that were going to follow each other.
‘Do you want me to take you out for a drink tonight? Or, come home and have dinner with Jenny, why don’t you?’
‘No,’ Harriet said. ‘No, thanks, Charlie. I think I’ll just go home tonight.’
After they had said goodbye, Charlie drew his notepad in front of him. He began to tap at his terminal, squinting at the words as they appeared on the screen. Whatever anodyne rubbish Robin’s PRs put out, he could counter it with the real story. Straight from the horse’s mouth. Charlie justified himself with the thought that, if their roles were reversed, Harriet would do exactly the same thing.
When Harriet had finished talking to Charlie, Karen came into her office. She was carrying a cup of tea, in the thin, fine china. She put it down on the corner of Harriet’s desk.
‘I’m really sorry,’ she said. ‘Everyone is.’
Harriet looked at her. Everything was all over. ‘Karen?’
‘Yes?’
‘Leave me alone for an hour, will you? Please?’
When she had gone, Harriet opened her fist and looked down at the two pieces of pencil. She had been holding on to them so tightly and for so long that they had left blue-white marks in the palm. Now she laid them out and tried to fit the fractured ends together. She stared at them for a moment.
Then she put her head down on her desk and wept.
Later, Harriet went home. She stayed at home while her lawyers and the company’s lawyers agreed on her compensation, and while the placement of her shares was organised. It was announced that her decision to leave Peacocks had been voluntary, that there had been no dissension, and that the company could only go on to further strengths under the direction of the new chief executive, Robin’s appointment. But it was Charlie’s different version of the story that was enthusiastically taken up by the press. With the boardroom battle public knowledge, the price of Peacocks shares fell. Harriet had no alternative but to accept a lower price for her
holding, but in the end, in exchange for the years she had put into Peacocks, she received rather more than five million pounds, net. She didn’t blame Charlie for telling the story. As he had rightly guessed, she knew that she would have done the same herself.
The popular press enjoyed the news as much as its City counterpart. There was a spate of ‘Meizu Girl’s Millions’ stories, and a siege of telephone calls and reporters’ visits cut Harriet off in Hampstead. She thought of escaping by returning to California, but Caspar didn’t respond to the suggestion when she made it. He was out of hospital, and back in his chair beside the pool at the ranch house.
‘I think you’d best stay there, baby,’ he told her. It was clear to Harriet that whatever there had been between them was now over, as definitively as her life within Peacocks was over.
Caspar said there was some possibility that he might have to stand trial for involuntary manslaughter, but his people were working on it. They were evidently also working on suppressing the news. There were a few mentions of the accident in the British press, and the brief accounts only said that Oscar-nominee Caspar Jensen had been involved in a car accident, in which one person had been killed. More was made of Caspar’s relationship with ‘Ousted Meizu Girl’; Harriet wished that she had advisers with the protective expertise that Caspar’s possessed.
For two or three days, it seemed that she could not walk out of her door without being surrounded by intrusive questions. She grew tired of fending them off with ‘No comment’ and ‘I am quite satisfied with the agreements made with the company,’ and she stayed at home to evade the questioners.
The tasteful, neutral confines of her flat began to seem part fortress, part prison. She began to feel that she was safe in her privacy so long as she stayed within her own walls, but to venture out was to risk something indefinable, that was still much more threatening than a few questions about her future plans. Her tall windows seemed suddenly to admit a little too much light; the possibility of spying eyes. She resisted the urge to keep her curtains closed, but it still overtook her each late morning when she finally got out of her bed. One part of Harriet was too rational not to recognise that sooner or later, the next day or the next week, another story would break and hers would be forgotten. But there was another part of her, the part that kept her doors double-locked and longed to leave the curtains drawn, that understood what Simon must have suffered. She thought about him a great deal, and talked aloud to him, the way solitary people do.
She did not cry again, after the long weeping fit in her office, but she was possessed with a weight of sadness that was more for Simon than for herself.
She could not think about the future, or her wealth, or what she might do. When she tried to, a prospect of such blankness confronted her that she was frightened, so she made herself sleep again, or sit in front of a television soap that bewildered her because she knew none of the characters or the reasons for their dilemmas.
Her existence narrowed to fit the frame of her four rooms. She slept, heated up tins of soup, watched more television. The telephone was her link with the world. It rang constantly, and mostly she left the answering machine to field the prurient inquiries. One caller who did get through to her was Alison Shaw, the television reporter. Alison wanted, if Harriet would be willing, to film a coda to the Success Story programme. She thought it would make a pertinent comment on City practices.
‘I don’t want to add anything at all,’ Harriet said.
‘It’s going to be difficult for us to schedule the programme without some kind of footnote after what happened.’
‘I can’t help you with that. I’m sure you can devise your own footnote, if pressed.’
‘I can’t persuade you?’
‘No.’
‘That’s a pity. I’m sorry about what happened, Harriet.’ Alison’s voice held natural friendliness, once business was out of the way, as Harriet had noticed before. ‘Keep in touch, won’t you?’
‘Thanks.’ Harriet found that she was sorry when Alison rang off. She would have liked to talk some more. The silence in the flat was heavy. Harriet walked through the rooms. She couldn’t think what to do. The reasons that had existed for everything, when Peacocks was everything, had all been removed.
Jane telephoned. They talked a little about the mechanics of Robin’s coup. Jane offered her sympathies that were tinged with the faintest satisfaction, perhaps only audible to Harriet’s silence-attuned ears. Jane had never much liked or trusted Robin. She asked the inevitable question, What now?
‘I don’t know,’ Harriet answered.
‘You could do anything. Anything at all, couldn’t you? Patronise the arts. Travel. Invest the great fortune and sit back and count the interest.’
Harriet read the envy. In the middle of her loss, she didn’t know how to contend with it.
‘Money isn’t everything,’ she said.
‘Isn’t it?’
Jane was sitting on the rug in her front room. She looked up as a thin shaft of sunlight came between the houses opposite and lay in a bar across the whitish fur. It made her notice that the window needed cleaning. Imogen’s basket beside her was empty because the baby was asleep in her cot upstairs. Soon she would wake up, and Jane would put her in her pram and wheel her round the circuit of Clissold Park. As she talked to Harriet, Jane was thinking that she would like to look forward to an evening with some friends, going to the cinema or perhaps to a restaurant, but she couldn’t because there was no one, at the moment, to babysit Imogen. But Harriet, Harriet could walk out of her expensive pale flat and buy herself a ticket to anywhere.
Harriet heard. Distance yawned between them. It was impossible to tell Jane, across the space, that she could think of nowhere she wanted to go except back to her desk, or to Winwood to vanquish Ray Dunnett and the plastic moulder. She looked at her walls, beginning to hate them as her dependence on their protection increased.
Jane and Harriet talked a little more, promised to see one another very soon. When the conversation finished, both of them wondered if they would.
Jenny, Charlie, Leo, other friends, all put their calls through to Harriet. The messages came like darts, piercing her solitude. Harriet didn’t want to talk, but she felt the loneliness in the intervals between the stilted conversations.
She spoke to Kath, too.
‘Are you angry with me?’ Kath asked. Her voice was soft, almost bland. It was a ‘little me’ question, making Kath seem vulnerable and humbly acknowledging Harriet’s right to anger. And yet, on another level, it was a challenge. Be angry: it won’t make any difference to what I did.
Yes, I’m angry.
The words exploded inside Harriet’s head, hot little pellets of rage. The thought of Kath at the other end of the line, in the secure nest that Ken had created for her lined with china ornaments and velvet cushions, sent a hot current of fury washing all through Harriet. Kath was a coward, a non-competitor, a prettifier, an evader of reality, her own mother.
Harriet fought to control her voice, and her feelings.
‘Yes. Yes, I’m angry. What did you think? You lost me my company. It isn’t that you don’t understand how, or why. Because you do, don’t you? You’re not as stupid as you pretend to be. Listen, I built that company up. Day by day, hour by hour, watching it and planning for it. I loved it. It was mine, can you understand that? And still, Robin Landwith comes and lies to you and you listen to him, and you throw my company away on some sentimental whim that won’t bring Simon back. Nothing will bring Simon back. He’s damn well dead.’
‘There’s no need to talk like that, Harriet,’ Kath said.
Harriet thought, it’s exactly as if I was a little girl who had said shan’t or so there. Why won’t she admit what she’s done?
Kath was saying, in her soft voice, ‘What did you want? You’ve made a lot of money out of it, haven’t you?’
‘I don’t want the money,’ Harriet screamed. The telephone receiver felt like putty in her fingers.
She could have crushed it or twisted it and torn down all her tasteful, pointless surrounding possessions and destroyed them with it. ‘I don’t give a fuck for the money. I want my company back.’
But she wouldn’t get it back. It was gone, into the hands of Robin and Jeremy and the people she couldn’t touch, and it would never be hers again.
Harriet was panting, gasping for breath and her face was burning with tears.
Kath’s voice went on, pricking at her, ‘I can’t listen to you when you talk like this. I’ll have to call you back, Harriet. You’ll make us both upset.’
There was a click, and then the dialling tone in Harriet’s ear.
She shouted at the walls. Upset! God forbid that anyone should ever be upset.
The walls and the curtains and the carpet absorbed the sound of her voice, and gave her back silence. Harriet dropped the receiver, letting it hang. She slid slowly down the wall, collapsing in a shapeless bundle, so that her head rested on her knees and her arms stuck out sideways, empty, palms upwards.
She sat for a long time, crying. And then the tears dried up. Harriet opened her sticky eyes and surveyed the room. Nothing had moved, nothing had altered, and nothing would change however long she went on crying. She sat still, in her huddle, thinking.
She knew that she would ring Kath and apologise, and Kath would say, ‘That’s my girl. We’ll forget all about it. It was in the heat of the moment, wasn’t it?’ That was how it was between them. They had subsided and set fast into those roles long ago, and there was no changing them now.
We’re not alike, Harriet thought. We’re quite different. That’s something to be thankful for, isn’t it?
The flat was very silent. She longed for the sound of voices or a television or music from next door, or overhead, but there was nothing. She felt weary, and vacant, and peculiarly disorientated.