Sheer Abandon

by Penny Vincenzi

  “And what about changing distribution channels, how much is that going to cost them?”

  Shit! Shit! She’d meant to send her trainee into the data room that morning to check on everything—and forgotten. What was the matter with her? What? As if she didn’t know.

  She took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Paul. I haven’t checked that yet. Maybe I do need a little more time. Perhaps tomorrow morning?” If she had to spend the night in the data room herself, she would.

  He sighed. “Yes, all right.” He looked at her rather searchingly, and then said, “Martha, I agreed to help you in your political ambitions because I felt sure that, short-term, you’d be able to cope. Please don’t let me down. Or I might have to revise my thoughts on the whole thing. See you in the morning, then?”

  “In the morning, Paul, yes. Seven thirty.”

  If only it was her political ambitions that were absorbing her time and concentration. If only.

  “Clio, this is Fergus. Again.”

  “Oh—hello, Fergus.”

  Damn, she sounded breathless, nervous. Not cool and in control.

  “I wondered if you were free on Saturday evening. For dinner.”

  “Dinner would be lovely. Thank you!”

  She put the phone down and tried to compose herself before her next patient came in. She looked in the mirror; she was slightly flushed. Now come on, Clio, this won’t do. Fergus is just looking for a pleasant evening. Probably his regular girlfriend is away or something. Calm down. You’ve got to start taking things in your stride. It’s just a dinner date, not a proposal of marriage. Be cool.

  She pressed her buzzer. “Send my next dinner date in, would you, Margaret?”

  “I’m sorry, Clio?” said Margaret and she could hear her smiling. “What did you say?”

  “I must fly.” Gideon leant over to Jocasta and kissed the top of her head. She was burrowed into the pillows of the vast bed in their room at Cruxbury and still half asleep. “See you in forty-eight hours.”

  “Forty-eight!” She stared up at him, blinking her way into consciousness. “I thought you said it was one night.”

  “It was. It’s just become two. I’m relieved in a way—I was thinking of staying over anyway.”

  “You were?”

  “Yes. I was. I was actually contemplating being away from you for two nights and not one. I must be getting bored with you.”

  “Gideon, that’s not funny! You know I’d have come, if it had been more than a night. I said so.”

  “Did you? I’m sorry, I’d forgotten.”

  “Well, I think that’s a bit important just to forget. Of course I’d have come. I don’t like you going away.”

  “Well, darling, you can come, if you want to.”

  “I can’t now. There’s no point anyway, you obviously don’t care if I come or not.”

  “Jocasta, that’s ridiculous,” he said, smiling at her. “You’re putting words into my mouth. Of course I care.”

  “Then how can you forget to tell me you’re staying away another night?”

  He became visibly less patient. “Jocasta, this is absurd. Look, I’m very late, do you want to come or not? Because if you do, you have about five minutes to pack.”

  “No, I don’t want to come. Thank you.” She turned away from him, feeling absurdly near to tears. What was happening to her? To the independent Jocasta Forbes. How had she begun to be this dependent, clinging creature, crying because her husband was going away for two days? It was pathetic.

  “Gideon, it’s fine. Just go. I’ll see you in a couple of days.”

  “I thought I’d come back to London. Can you be there?”

  “I’m…not sure,” she said.

  “Do you have business down here?” The dark blue eyes were snapping with irritation now.

  “I might have.”

  “Oh Jocasta, you’re being so childish. I’m off—” His mobile rang. “Hello? How are you, darling? No, of course not, never too busy for you.” His voice had changed. Totally. It must be Fionnuala. She lay, with her eyes closed, pretending she wasn’t listening to every inflection, every syllable.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I will. I’m going to LA, and then across to Miami. So it couldn’t be better. I could easily pop down there for twenty-four hours. Tell Mum to call me. What? I’m leaving Cruxbury now, catching the midday flight. Bye, my love.” He looked at Jocasta, smiled at her, his irritation totally gone.

  “That was Fionnuala.”

  “I sort of worked that out.”

  “She wants me to have a look at another pony for her.”

  “Another! Gideon, you’ve just bought her three.”

  “I know, but this one is special, apparently. Anyway, sorry darling, that means another day, I’m afraid. So I’ll be back in London on Friday. Please be there for me. We can spend the weekend in London. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes, it’d be really exciting,” said Jocasta, struggling to sound ironic.

  “Good.” Clearly the irony had failed. “Think of some things you’d like to see, places to go, and get Marissa to book them. Love you.”

  “Bye,” said Jocasta and burrowed back into her pillows.

  As soon as he’d gone, she felt terrible. How could she behave like that? Like a spoilt child. And she hadn’t even said goodbye properly, hadn’t told him she loved him. Suppose his plane crashed, suppose—She seized her mobile, tried to dial him. It was on message. Suppose he’d done that on purpose, suppose he was so angry with her he didn’t want to speak to her. She tried again, left a message: “Sorry I didn’t say goodbye properly. Love you too. Call me when you get this.”

  She got up, stared out at the garden. It was a beautiful day. So what was she supposed to do? Walk? Do a little light weeding? Swim in the pool? Alone? All day? Shit, this was pathetic. There was so much she wanted to do. What had she been telling Clio so stoutly? Find a new house for a start. A house for them. For her and Gideon. Well, she could do that. She’d call up all the estate agents in—in where? They had houses in the best places in England already. Why buy another? Wales? Not many nice houses. Scotland? So cold. All right then, France. She hated the French. Italy? That might be very nice. Or the States? California? What about somewhere like Virginia? That would be great. She’d never been there, but she’d heard it was fantastic. Horse country. Fionnuala would like that. Did she want to buy a house where Fionnuala was always coming to stay? Probably not.

  “Oh shit!” said Jocasta aloud. People never thought of this, people who weren’t rich. She certainly never had. When you could have everything, nothing was right, nothing was good enough. Not just houses, but clothes. If you could buy a Chanel jacket and then a Gucci leather coat and then a Valentino evening dress, where was the fun? Shopping was about choices, decisions, what suited you best, not about having whatever your eye lighted on.

  Maybe she should do something completely different. Find some new challenge. Like—yes, like learn to fly. That would be really great. She’d always wanted to do that. Always. That’d be something to get excited about, get the adrenaline pumping. That was the main problem: she wasn’t making adrenaline. Or rather her life wasn’t.

  And Gideon’s life, of course, was; it was all about work and pressure and deadlines and moving on to the next thing. God, she was going to seem boring to him pretty soon. An empty-headed wife, who had to get all her kicks out of stupid hobbies like learning to fly, or who tagged along after him on business trips, where all there was to do was shop some more and have more stupid hobbies. And the business trips were a big part of his life; Gideon’s world was lived largely out of his Vuitton suitcases.

  Jocasta felt her heart literally lurch. Had she, after all, been completely sensible giving up her job? Should she have hung on for a bit? Until—well until what? Until she had a family, people would say. That would inevitably be what they would say. But she wasn’t going to have a family. She absolutely wasn’t.

  Oh God. She’d b
een through all these options and Gideon had only been gone for twenty-five minutes. She had another three whole days to get through. What was she going to do? What?

  The old adage about marrying in haste and repenting at leisure drifted into her head; she drove it out again with sheer willpower: but all day, as she swam in the pool and then packed up her things and left Cruxbury, and made her way to London and settled herself into the vast house in Kensington Palace Gardens that was Gideon’s, not hers, it kept returning to her. And the thought that she had allowed it into her consciousness so early in her marriage. She had been Mrs. Gideon Keeble for just over a month and she was already not entirely happy about it. What kind of person was she, for God’s sake? What kind of stupid, reckless, ungrateful, unloving person?

  By five o’clock that afternoon—by now in possession of a Chanel jacket, and with the first of a dozen flying lessons booked for the next day, and a silver BMW Z3 on order—she was still depressed. Depressed and almost frightened.

  Chapter 32

  “Martha, we have to talk.” Janet’s voice was very brisk, very cool.

  Don’t panic, Martha, don’t.

  “What about? Anything important?”

  “Depends on your viewpoint, I’d say. I thought you might be able to meet me after work today.”

  “I’m sorry, Janet, I’m going to be terribly late tonight. Tomorrow might be possible.”

  “Look.” Janet sounded almost impatient now. “I’m busy too, you know. But we’ve got to do this thing and—”

  “Janet, what thing? I’m afraid I don’t understand—”

  “Oh God. Hasn’t Chad called you?”

  Chad? Had she told Chad? “No. But I’ve been in a meeting all morning. He couldn’t have.”

  “Oh, I see. Well, he’s arranged for what he calls the female force to be interviewed. By some girl from The Times for Saturday’s paper. He thinks we can save the party.”

  “Save what party?” Relief had made her stupid.

  “Martha dear, you’ll have to do better than that,” said Janet, her voice slightly kinder.

  The female force consisted of Janet, Martha, and Mary Norton, one of very few defectors from the Labour Party to Centre Forward. Fortyish, sensible, articulate, with a strong northern accent. She was very good with the media and a frequent guest on both Any Questions? and Question Time. Martha had only met her once and found her even more awe-inspiring than Janet.

  “Jack thinks we’ll make a good team.”

  “You and Mary will,” said Martha carefully.

  “Yes, but Jack sees you as the future,” said Janet. She sounded very cool. “And of course,” she added, quite brightly, “you are much the best-looking of the three of us.”

  That was all right then; she was to be cast as the group’s bit of fluff. Fine. She would normally have resisted that, but under the circumstances, it was less frightening.

  “Your skin is just so, like, totally perfect.” The makeup artist smiled at Kate. He was black, with white-blond hair and rather red lips. She smiled back nervously. Crew, as he was inexplicably called, was hard to talk to; he was from New York, for a start, so that cut out any conversations about shops or clubs, and when Kate admired his shirt, he said he bought all his clothes from what he called thrift shops.

  He worked exclusively for Smith Cosmetics, so she couldn’t ask him what other jobs he did, what famous people he’d made up; and anyway, whenever she tried to talk, he held up his hand and said, “Don’t talk for, like, just a tiny moment,” and the tiny moment seemed to mean the entire duration of the session.

  Every so often the door would open and two women would come in; they were, it had been explained to her, the creative director and the advertising director of Smith and neither of them had talked to her at all, beyond saying, “Hi, Kate, we’re just totally thrilled to have you on board,” when she was first introduced to them. Since then, they would stand and study her each time, as if she was a shop-window model, not a girl at all, narrowing their eyes at her reflection in the mirror, and then leaving again, talking very quietly and occasionally saying, “Difficult forehead” or “The hair’s too full,” and telling Crew to try wider eyes. Or fresher skin tone. Or bigger lips. Mostly he just nodded and said he was, like, totally willing to try, but when they said bigger lips, he shook his head and said, without collagen there was, like, no way.

  “So I think we should either postpone and go for the collagen, or use what we have, and, like, make the story less is more.”

  After an hour of this, Kate was convinced they had decided they had made a mistake even to be doing test shots, and was all ready to be told to go home—and thinking she actually would like that.

  The photographer hadn’t appeared yet, but the way everyone talked about him, he was obviously very big and important in the company. It was, “Oh, Rufus would never consider sleeves” and “Rufus never does curly,” as what she might wear or how her hair might be done was discussed. She imagined some huge man with a booming voice and a suit, but when Rufus appeared, he was tiny, about five foot six, dressed in white trousers and a beige T-shirt. His voice was very quiet and in fact everyone had trouble hearing what he said, which irritated him; but he smiled at Kate in the mirror and said hi, he was Rufus Corelli, and then turned her to face him, pushed back her hair, and studied her for what seemed like forever, and then said, “She’s sixteen, for fuck’s sake. You have to take most of that shit off.”

  Kate expected the women to argue and Crew to have a tantrum, but they all meekly nodded and Crew said, “But her skin will have to rest, it’s, like, so over-absorbing already,” and he cleaned her makeup right off and told her to sit very quietly in the reception area of the studio, where it was, like, fresher air.

  It was two o’clock before they did the first test shots, and that was fraught as well, because Rufus said he wanted the studio cleared. “I want no one here, except the model,” he said, as if she didn’t have a name. She was a bit scared of being alone with him, but he actually became much nicer and said she still had too much makeup on, didn’t these people understand what young looked like, and offered her a stick of his chewing gum and asked her where she got her jeans.

  “The thing is,” he whispered, “I’m so tiny, I can wear girls’ clothes, it’s such a help.”

  Kate wasn’t sure in what way that could be a help, and thought her jeans would be much too long for him anyway, but again she didn’t like to say so and told him they were Paper Denim & Cloth from Harvey Nichols. They were actually her only extravagance from her Sketch money, but he wasn’t to know that.

  “Right,” he whispered, pulling a Polaroid out of his camera and tucking it under his arm, “what we’re going to do is nothing like those obscene roughs. Jed, did you see those roughs, aren’t they completely obscene?”

  Jed, his assistant, had come in when everyone else had left the studio; he was about twice as tall as Rufus, but no wider, and he also spoke very quietly.

  “Completely obscene,” he said.

  “Now, Kate, this is nice,” Rufus said, studying the Polaroid, “but you’re trying too hard. I want you to think about nothing at all. Certainly not this—this rubbish. Just empty your head. What I don’t want is sexy. Or mannered. Just be. Be you. Before any of this happened to you.” She nodded. It was quite difficult, thinking of nothing at all. After three more tries, she was getting upset; and then Rufus suddenly rushed out of the studio and disappeared.

  He was complaining she was no good, he wanted another model, she thought; but he was back with a pile of magazines, Seventeen and Glamour and Company.

  He gave her one. “Right. Read it. Really read it, find something you’re interested in, OK?”

  She nodded, opened Glamour, which was her favourite, and found an article on how you’d know if you were in love. She was always wondering if she was in love with Nat. She rather thought she wasn’t.

  “I’ve got something.”

  “Good. Now sit there, on that
stool, where you were before, that’s right, and read it. Really read it.”

  It was easier than she’d expected. She was just into the second question, wondering if what she felt when Nat kissed her was exciting, very exciting, or totally off the scale, when Rufus said, “Kate!”

  She looked up, not sure what he might want. The camera flashed.

  “OK,” he said. “Carry on.”

  After three more, he came over to her, with some Polaroids. “There,” he said, “how’s that?” Kate looked; she could have been her own younger sister; almost no makeup visible, her hair tumbled over one shoulder. She looked slightly surprised, sweetly confused, her dark eyes wide and questioning, her pale lips just parted.

  “It’s glorious,” said Rufus. “Can you do that over and over again, do you think?”

  “Oh yes,” said Kate, more confident now she knew what he wanted, “I’m sure I can.”

  Next day, Smith made their offer: a three-year contract for Kate to be the face for their new young range, Smith’s Club, for a million dollars a year. The terms of the contract would include a publicity tour in both the States and the United Kingdom, as well as public appearances at Ascot and at Smith’s Lawn polo, and at various film premieres, and a free hand for Smith’s with press briefings. Fergus told them he would have to discuss it with Kate and her parents and that he would get back to them after the weekend.

  He spent the next twenty-four hours wondering how best to present the news to the Tarrants in order to ensure their agreement, while thinking what he could do with twenty percent of three million dollars. And just occasionally considering what the whole thing might do to a vulnerable child of not quite sixteen, with a sad and difficult history: then telling himself that was absolutely no concern of his, that his job was to do his best for her. And securing three million dollars was a pretty good start.

  Nick was in the Members’ lobby on Thursday morning, only half listening to a story he had already heard too often, about how Gordon Brown was about to demand the leadership before the next election or resign, when he saw Teddy Buchanan moving on his self-important way towards the Chamber.