‘No, no, it’s not nonsense, I understand, I feel the same, it’s like some awful nightmare that we should wake up from.’
The phone rang. It was her mother.
‘Darling … darling, did you hear the news? Isn’t it so awful, so sad, I can’t believe it, he was so marvellously handsome and charming, a real breath of fresh air, and she is so beautiful, poor girl, those tiny children and the last baby died, of course, it must have been so appalling for her, sitting in the car with him – oh dear—’ Her voice was very tearful.
‘I know, it’s horrible, it seems unbelievable, such a shock – oh dear – sorry, Mummy, so ridiculous to cry, not as if we knew him.’
‘I feel as if we did,’ said Sarah. ‘Daddy was saying the same thing, he seemed like a friend—’
‘Jeremy said that too,’ said Eliza, and then cursed herself; she tried to play down the relationship, knowing that every report of every meeting heaped fuel on the fire of her mother’s obsession, and sure enough, ‘Oh, I’m glad you’re not alone,’ Sarah said, ‘you sound so upset, can he stay there for a while?’
‘Probably,’ said Eliza, gesturing at Jeremy to pour her a drink. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘I just spoke to Charles, he said he was very shocked. They were coming down tonight, but Juliet isn’t very well, bad tummy ache you know.’
‘Oh lord,’ said Eliza. Juliet had Periods with a capital P, making an endless fuss, demanding attention from Charles, who was expected to hover solicitously with hot-water bottles, aspirin and sympathy.
‘Silly cow,’ said Eliza as she put the phone down.
‘Who’s that?’
‘My sister-in-law to be.’
‘Eliza, that’s not a nice way to speak about a near-relative. Although I do tend to wonder what old Charles is doing with her, I must say. Now – I don’t know about you, but I don’t really feel too much like going to the pictures now. What would you say to a nice quiet meal somewhere?’
‘I’d say, hello nice quiet meal,’ she said and grinned at him. It was a familiar joke of theirs.
‘OK. San Lorenzo?’
‘Yes, lovely,’ she said.
San Lorenzo was surprisingly full. People obviously wanted to be with other people. There was talk of nothing else. Who had heard, what they’d heard, how dreadful it was, how appalling for Jackie, who might have done it – it was the Mafia, it was the Cubans, it was the Russians, and each new person or couple who came in had some new piece of information, ‘someone’s been arrested’, ‘Johnson’s been sworn in’, ‘Bobby’s just met Jackie off the plane’, which was shared around the restaurant.
Finally they had had enough. ‘Let’s go,’ Jeremy said suddenly, ‘your place or mine?’
‘Yours,’ said Eliza, ‘there’ll be at least two giggling girls at mine.’
‘Possibly not giggling tonight.’
‘You want to bet?’
Jeremy’s flat in Sloane Street was rather amazing. It was quite old-fashioned, admittedly, a mass of gilt mirrors and rather grand furniture and a very out-of-date kitchen, but it was luxurious beyond belief, room after room, high ceilings and tall windows, overlooking private gardens: there was a drawing room, a dining room – very grand indeed with dark red wallpaper and a highly polished floor, and a table that easily seated twelve. There was a very ornate bathroom, with an absurdly huge clawfooted bath, there were three bedrooms, the main one leading into Jeremy’s dressing room which actually resembled a small store in Jermyn Street, rows of suits, of shirts, of overcoats, of shoes; there was a small room which he called the snug, where he read and watched television and listened to music, and then there was his study, complete with leather-topped desk, several wooden filing cabinets, a magnificent wooden plan chest and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Her first thought when she went there (and her second and third, if she was honest) was how extremely rich he must be. Jeremy had inherited a very large amount of money from his banker grandfather; ‘and when his father died, he would get an incredible house in Norfolk, almost a stately home, with vast acreage, a flat in the South of France, and several millions more.’
‘Right,’ Jeremy said as they walked in, ‘you go and sit down. I’ll get us a drink.’
He had been very quiet for the last half-hour at the restaurant and totally silent as he drove to Sloane Street; she wondered if she had upset him in some way, it was so unlike him.
Eliza went into the snug – the drawing room seemed rather overwhelming for the occasion – and waited for him rather nervously. He walked in finally with a bottle of champagne and two glasses.
‘Goodness,’ she said, ‘is it really a champagne moment?’
‘It could be,’ he said and sat down beside her. ‘What would you say to champagne in bed?’
Silence, while the shock of it thudded into her head; and then, ‘I’d say, hello champagne in bed,’ she said and laughed, and he laughed too, and he kissed her, and she stood up and reached for his hand and they went into the bedroom, his sumptuously grand bedroom, and sat in bed drinking the champagne and not saying very much more really and – well then …
It was, well, it was very nice. Yes. Very nice indeed. And definitely better than anything she’d known yet. Which wasn’t much, of course. Just one other chap after the first. Another drunken country-house occasion. She’d felt terribly depressed after that one, cheap and tarty, and also beginning to think maybe it was her. Being frigid or something. Her friends all claimed to like it, to find it wonderful even. Maddy said she had what she described as gorgeous sex with her boyfriend, Esmond, who was a hatter and very pale and thin, and if Eliza hadn’t been told otherwise, she would have thought he was queer.
Anyway, sex with Jeremy was honestly not gorgeous. But it was very, very pleasurable, of course it was, and thank God, she thought, she’d found that wonderful lady gynaecologist who’d put her on the wonderful pill, no more terror about getting pregnant and no more hideous messing about with Things either. He was obviously very pleased about that; ‘Real girl-about-town, aren’t you, Eliza?’ he said, when she told him, and kissed her nose and then turned his attention to the lower parts of her anatomy. And it was all very nice, and not over too quickly; but she just kept waiting for the wonderful, fireworky stuff to happen – and it never did. And that really was a bit of a shock: that sophisticated, experienced, man-abouttown Jeremy Northcott should not be able to do better for her than that.
She pretended a bit – she had to really – and he was clearly enjoying it a lot; and when it was over and he rolled off her and kissed her and told her she was wonderful and asked her with genuine tenderness if it had been as good for her as it had been for him, she said, yes, oh, yes, it had been really lovely.
The worst thing of all, she felt, was that he seemed to believe her.
Matt never forgot 22 November either. It was the day he took delivery, as the salesman put it, of his new car. His first car. His own car.
He picked it up first thing in the morning: a racing-green Triumph Herald, with wire wheels and go-faster stripes, and a twin exhaust that roared most satisfyingly every time he put his foot down.
Driving it into work, he felt completely different: smoother, more confident, no longer an inexperienced boy, but a successful young man going to work, carving his way through the traffic rather than waiting to cross the road, warm and comfortable, not standing at the bus stop in the rain.
‘I’ve just parked my car outside,’ he said to the first client of the day, looking at a site in Westbourne Grove and, ‘I’ve put my car in the car park,’ he said to Louise as he walked into the office, ‘the one just two streets up.’
The day seemed to go on for ever; he longed for it to end so he could drive home and show it to his parents and the boys. Take them for a spin.
It wasn’t entirely his, of course: the hire purchase company owned most of it, but it was his to drive away, his to look at, his to take down the A3 when he went to pick up Corinne, his latest girlfriend, in Kingst
on where she lived.
It even had a radio, a Motorola, dead classy, fixed into the dashboard. It had cost another thirty quid, but it had been worth it.
He was halfway along Oxford Street at half past six, changing gear unnecessarily frequently, revving furiously every time he was held up in the traffic, when an announcement cut into the music he was listening to on the Light Programme.
‘We have just received news that President Kennedy has been shot as his motorcade drove through Dallas, Texas. He was taken to hospital, where doctors fought to save his life, but he was pronounced dead at 1 p.m. Texas time. Mrs Kennedy is still at the hospital. It is not yet known who was the assassin, but we will bring you further news as it unfolds.’
Matt stopped revving his engine; he felt seriously upset. Shocked, even. President Kennedy had seemed a symbol of a new age where power didn’t have to be in the hands of old men. It seemed totally wrong that he should have been wiped out just like that. Just when he was beginning to do some good. It was so – untidy somehow. How and why would anyone do that? He supposed it was most likely some nutter who had it in for him. Or someone from Russia, maybe, or Cuba.
It was very sad: those two little kids, with no dad. And Jackie, that lovely Jackie, so classy, always so well dressed; she reminded him in a way of Eliza with her dark hair and eyes and her long legs.
He wondered if Eliza knew, and what she was doing now … And then wondered why he was thinking of her at all.
Scarlett was sitting in her flat, staring at the television. She felt very upset. Absurdly so. She remembered David talking about Kennedy, his exact words: ‘We need him. He gives our nation a kind of grace.’
Well, if Johnson took over – and he would of course, it was in the Constitution – there wouldn’t be much grace there.
She had sat on the BEA bus coming into London, tired from a flight to Munich and back, staring out into the crowded streets, looking at the people, all visibly moved, at the queues to buy newspapers, at the placards, all reading the same thing, ‘JFK Assassinated’, feeling rather as if she was watching a film. It seemed so wrong somehow: that someone so young, so promising, such a force for the good, should have been wiped out so easily.
The traffic was very thick; one of the stewards got out of the bus and bought a couple of papers. Pictures showed them, Jack and Jackie, arriving in Dallas, a couple even of them in the motorcade. The bullets had ripped into the car from a warehouse along the route; the president had been killed more or less instantly; a man had been arrested; Lyndon Johnson had been sworn in as the thirty-sixth president; Jackie was flying back to Washington with the body.
When Matt rang her and asked if he could come round, she said she’d love it.
‘It’s not a night to be alone,’ she said, ‘silly, isn’t it, to be so upset?’
‘I don’t think so, no,’ he said. She wasn’t surprised; he could be quite soppy, Matt could; he was a real romantic under his tough-guy exterior. When he fell in love it would be pretty major, that was for sure.
Charles sat in Juliet’s small sitting room, in the Earls Court flat she shared with another ex-Roedean girl, listening to the radio in the same state of shock as much of the entire world, and occasionally asking Juliet if she was OK. To which she gave him a wan smile, shifting the hot-water bottle she was holding on her stomach slightly, and sighing. She didn’t seem to share his sense of grief and loss. She said it was dreadful of course and terrible for Jackie; but beyond that she was untouched by it.
‘I should be feeling better tomorrow, Charles, but if I’m not, can we leave in the afternoon? And you will tell your mother I won’t be able to go on one of her long walks, won’t you? I’ll feel a bit mean, I know how much she enjoys them …’
‘Yes darling, of course I will.’
‘It’s so unfair, I’d wanted the weekend to be a success, Mummy and Daddy are looking forward to lunch so much, but of course they’re a bit nervous—’
‘Why?’ said Charles in genuine surprise. Carol and Geoffrey Judd seemed inordinately self-confident to him, especially the golf-obsessed Geoff.
‘Darling, don’t be silly. They’re meeting my future parents-in-law, it’s so important, and Mummy’s not sure what to wear, she’s not really a country person, as you know—’
‘She should wear whatever she feels comfortable in,’ said Charles, ‘we’re not going to take her out shooting.’
It was meant to be a joke; Juliet was not amused.
‘I should hope not. She’d be terrified, well, I was that time you took me.’
The occasion, a few weeks earlier at a neighbouring shoot, had not been a success. Juliet had walked along looking apprehensive and hostile at the same time, and whenever a gun went off she put her hands over her ears. After about an hour she had said she would like to go back to the house and insisted Charles escorted her; ‘I don’t want to go the wrong way, I might get shot at.’
Charles, embarrassed and irritated, left her in the house and returned to the shoot, not returning until the end of the day; she had driven herself back to Summercourt and when he finally reached it, having had to sort out a lift, found her sulky and reproachful. He told her she was being unfair and childish, at which she started crying and saying how sorry she was, and she couldn’t bear it if he was cross with her, and she wasn’t sure if she was good enough for him. She was very accomplished at emotional blackmail.
‘Juliet, it’s just a family lunch party, for God’s sake, so they see the house and meet the parents.’
‘Charles, don’t get cross with me, you know I’m feeling rotten – Charles!’
But Charles had turned up the radio; news had come in of a man arrested in downtown Dallas.
‘How amazing,’ he said, ‘that they should find him so quickly. I can’t quite believe it’s down to one man though, I’d have thought—’
‘Charles, I think I’ll go to bed. If you don’t mind. I’ll ring you first thing, let you know how I am.’
‘Of course. Sorry. It’s just that this is so—’
‘Yes, I can see, much more interesting than my curse pains. That’s fine. See you tomorrow.’
He stood up; she raised a pinched, half-smile of a face to be kissed.
Charles left.
And walked rather heavily down the road, his mind wiped temporarily clean of the assassination of President Kennedy, in a new and rather more personal panic of his own, that he could just possibly have made a rather terrible mistake.
Chapter 13
Things really were looking pretty good, Matt thought. Too good, he sometimes thought; was it too easy? Were they just enjoying beginner’s luck? If they were, then best make the most of it. The demand for office space was insatiable. There was still very little in the way of planning restriction, money was easy to get hold of, and very often a site was sold in a day. The ideal was clearly to pack as much office space as possible into a site, plot ratio was the phrase on every developer’s lips. ‘It’s the relationship between the area of the site and the floor area of the building,’ he had explained to Louise on her first day, ‘and it’s all everybody talks about. In other words, the taller the building the better.’
Giant constructions like the Shell Centre on the South Bank and the Vickers Tower on Millbank both rose above three hundred feet. There was no conservation lobby to contend with; the bomb sites were mainly all developed now, so old buildings were simply being bulldozed and a rash of functional glass and concrete boxes rose in their place. There was even a serious suggestion that the Houses of Parliament be demolished and the site redeveloped.
Matt and Jimbo already had almost more clients than they could deal with; they worked increasingly long days, often arriving as early as seven and leaving twelve or even fourteen hours later.
One morning in early December, a tall, rather severe-looking woman walked in. She was about forty, Matt reckoned, wearing a suit with a pencil skirt; she had blond hair drawn back from her face in what Louise afterwards de
scribed as a French pleat, very good legs and an extremely posh accent.
She sat down, accepted a cup of coffee and said she was setting up a secretarial agency in London. ‘You’ll have heard of the Brook Street Bureau, no doubt?’
Matt said untruthfully that of course he had.
‘Our agency, which is called Status Secretaries, is very similar, although with one important difference: all our girls will have GCEs and a shorthand qualification not merely in English, but in one other language. As I’m sure you know, there is an increasingly international emphasis in London business life.’
Matt said indeed he was aware of that.
‘So I need not just one but several offices, not too big, say about a thousand square feet each one. I’d initially require one in the City, one in the West End, one in Chelsea, and one in Bayswater. We are extremely busy, and struggling to operate out of somewhere totally inappropriate, just down the road from here. Can you help?’
‘I’m sure we can,’ said Matt, buzzing for Louise. ‘Miss Mullan, could you bring in the small offices file. This lady – I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name—’
‘I didn’t give it. Hill, Valerie Hill.’
‘Yes, Miss Hill is looking for space for her secretarial agency. Several offices in fact. In – let’s see, EC4 or maybe 2, W1, SW3 and W2. I’m sure we can help.’
‘Absolutely, especially in the City area. Several very appropriate properties there. I won’t be a moment,’ said Louise – she really was impressive, Matt thought, not just a pretty face as his father would have said – and was back well inside a minute holding several bulging files.
Valerie Hill was clearly impressed by her. ‘What an extremely efficient girl,’ she said, ‘exactly the type we would be looking to employ. Not that I would dream of poaching her, of course,’ she added hastily.
The Decision Page 14