‘I do not. I’ll make you some strong tea, much better for you. No use looking for the answer to things inside a bottle. That’s what Pattie did, poor girl, I should have thought it would have taught you that lesson at least.’
Bard glared at her. There was a sudden shrill bleeping from his pocket: his mobile phone.
‘Yes?’ he said, pulling it out. ‘No. Yes of course I do. Obviously. Christ Almighty, it would all be so much simpler if they let me be in there. Bloody nonsense. Yes, all right, tell them to ring Pete. No I do not. No. None of them. Bloody vampires.’
He switched his phone off sharply, slammed it down on the table.
‘Who was that?’
‘Mary Forbes, Charlie Prentice’s secretary. One of the fortunate few allowed to be in the offices.’
‘You were very rude to her,’ said Jess. ‘It’s not her fault, any of it. I think you should ring her back and apologise.’
‘Oh Mother, for Christ’s sake. I have better things to do than start making bloody silly phone calls to secretaries.’
‘Isambard, probably that woman is going to lose her job because of what has happened. The least you can do is be pleasant to her while you can.’
There was a silence. Then he said, ‘Yes all right. I’ll ring her later. Don’t look at me like that, I swear I will.’
‘Good. Now I want to know why you’re not allowed in. If Charles Prentice is there. What’s going on?’
‘Oh God, I don’t know.’
She looked at him over her tea cup. Her black eyes were softer, more anxious. ‘You haven’t done anything wrong, have you, Isambard?’
‘What? Oh for Christ’s sake, of course I haven’t done anything bloody wrong.’
‘Please stop swearing. And explain to me what is happening at Channing House.’
He sighed, made a clear effort to sound more patient, less harsh. ‘The accountants, that is the administrators’ accountants, are going through everything. All the assets, all the debts. They have to try to salvage what is left. So that they can do what they can for the creditors.’
‘And they don’t want you to be involved in this? Why not?’
‘Because that is the procedure. They have a skeleton staff in there, picked by them, don’t ask me how, one senior person, that’s Charlie, one junior, who just happens to be young Oliver, doing some admin for them, photocopying and so on, one of the surveyors – ’
‘Not Peter Barbour?’
‘No,’ he said shortly. ‘No, not Pete.’
‘That seems very strange to me. He must know more about the finances of the company than anyone.’
‘Mother, for God’s sake, it is not strange.’
‘There is no need to shout.’
‘I’m not shouting.’
‘Isambard, you are shouting. Now then, there’s something else I want to know. Does this mean personal ruin for you?’
‘It could,’ he said carefully, ‘I don’t know.’
‘Why don’t you know?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Isambard, it’s a very basic piece of information. Either you’re liable for the company’s debts or you’re not. I would imagine you are: certainly you should be.’
‘Thanks.’
‘If I were a small shareholder in Channings,’ said Jess firmly, ‘and I lost all my savings, and I could see you still living in your big house driving around in your big car, I would personally wish to come and throw bricks through your window.’
Bard stared at her, a flush rising up his face: then he said quite calmly, ‘Yes, well, of course most of it will have to go. But there is so much to be sorted out, there are various funds put away for the children and so on, we may – salvage a little.’
‘Well, a little would be fair, I should say,’ said Jess. ‘So what are you doing with yourself, while they go through all these papers and so on?’
‘Not a lot. There isn’t a lot to do. I don’t know what – oh Jesus.’ It was the phone again. ‘Yes? No I will not speak to the press. No, no exceptions. Not Murdoch himself. Tell them to go and play with – ’ he looked at Jess, paused – ‘play with their computer systems. Oh and Mary, I didn’t mean to be rude. Earlier. Sorry.’
He switched the phone off, looked at his mother. ‘That do you?’
‘I’ve heard more gracious apologies, but it will have to, I suppose. I saw a very nice journalist a week or so ago, incidentally. They’re not all bad. He came to lunch here.’
Bard looked at her; his face was ghastly, ashen. ‘You what? What are you talking about?’
‘I had a very nice journalist to lunch,’ said Jess patiently. ‘Oh, it’s all right, he didn’t want to talk about you. He was interested in politics, in the early days, what I did for the party.’
‘A journalist! You had a journalist here. Who the hell was it, and why was he here – ’
‘He was from the News on Sunday. You must know it, it’s a very good paper. Kirsten arranged it.’
‘Kirsten! Kirsten arranged for you to see a journalist? What was his name? For Christ’s sake, Mother, have you no sense?’
‘Don’t swear. He was a friend of Kirsten’s, in fact he helped her get her new job. I liked him very much. His name was Townsend. He was at Douglas’s funeral, as a matter of fact. He seemed to know him quite well. And Teresa.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Bard, slowly, ‘Mr Townsend. He’s doing a very good job, inveigling himself into my family.’
‘Oh don’t be absurd.’
‘I’m not being absurd, that’s exactly what he is doing. I don’t like him and I don’t trust him. And how dare Kirsten arrange for you to see him at all? Will that girl never learn anything? She ought to be bloody thrashed. After everything I – she – ’
‘Isambard, do stop this. You’re being ridiculous. Mr Townsend is a very nice young man, he works for an extremely respectable newspaper, and he’s writing an article about the socialist party. Or what used to be the socialist party. I was very careful not to say anything whatsoever about Channings, and he was at pains to stress he wasn’t interested in it.’
‘I bet he bloody was,’ said Bard. ‘I cannot believe you did this, the pair of you, after the last fu — wretched fiasco. How dare Kirsten do such a thing to me, how dare she?’
‘Kirsten didn’t do anything to you,’ said Jess. ‘Now drink your tea and calm down. I do what I like in my own house, Isambard. I know you’re used to telling large numbers of people what to do, and it’s a pity they let you get away with it. But I don’t. Now then, you’d better pull yourself together, there’s a beef stew in the oven and I want it eaten properly. It’ll do you good. And I don’t want you getting angry with Kirsten, either, for arranging for Mr Townsend to come here.’
‘Oh for God’s sake,’ said Bard. ‘I won’t get angry with Kirsten, as you put it, for the simple reason I’m extremely angry with her already.’
‘Well, you’re not to start shouting at her,’ said Jess, ‘because there’s nothing to shout about. Are you listening to me?’
‘Yes,’ said Bard, struggling patently to be calm. ‘Yes, I’m listening to you.’
Without knowing precisely why, Francesca felt frightened. Well, she supposed she knew the main, the prime reason: that Bard was in serious financial trouble, was probably going to be declared bankrupt. But somehow that did not seem enough; not for the fear that stalked her, that woke her at two in the morning, and would not allow her to go back to sleep, that followed her wherever she went, that sat in her car, shared her table, was present in every ring of the phone, every knock at the door. In fact she didn’t actually think she minded very much about the bankruptcy; she had seen it before, with her own father, she knew the worst it could do, and it was not really, in her book, so terrible. She realised, of course, that it was one thing to think it might not be terrible when she was still living in her large house, or even houses, with people to take care of her and her children and her every physical need attended to, and another were she to
find herself on the street, or rather in a small house (if she was lucky) on a quite different style of street, but she still felt she could easily cope with it. She had never cared about Bard’s money; she had enjoyed it, had enjoyed the considerable pleasures it had brought her, the beautiful possessions, the seeing of much of the world, the removal of herself from such small everyday unpleasantnesses as standing at bus-stops in the rain, cleaning her own house, balancing her bank account (sometimes with great difficulty), but she would have given it up with only the briefest regret. Indeed, she thought (as she lay awake, tossing and fretting), without even the briefest, if she could have all that was good of her old life restored to her, along with the bad. She had tasted huge wealth and she knew very well (as in all the best moral tales) it had brought her no real pleasure.
No, it was not the fear of bankruptcy that frightened her: it was her sense of loneliness, of isolation, of being set aside, seen as of no use any longer to Bard, having no importance in his life. The scene in his office, when she had found her mother comforting him, clearly far closer to him than she had been for weeks, had distressed her deeply; had made her feel humiliated and ashamed. She felt even worse at the memory of what had happened next; of shouting at her mother on the stairs, ordering her to leave her alone, of refusing to take her phone calls for twenty-four hours. She had gone to see her then, tearful, deeply distressed, had apologised, told her she knew Rachel had only been doing what she should have done, and Rachel had been (of course) generous, gentle, understanding. But she still knew she had been deeply in the wrong.
And when Bard had come home that night, late, exhausted, avoiding her, to sleep in his dressing room, she had lain awake, staring into the darkness, trying to summon up the courage to go to him, to say she was sorry, to ask how she could help. But he had been fast asleep, snoring drunk, a half bottle of whisky on the bedside table; in the morning he had gone early, without a word to her, only to return, humiliated, wretched, two hours later, having been barred from Channing House. She could hardly bear to look at him as he told her, so hideous had been his shame, his fall from grace as he saw it, the transformation of Bard Channing from legend to mortal, from success to failure, from walker on water to drowning man. And he had seen that she could not look at him, and had misinterpreted it; had turned away from her and walked out of the room, out of the house, and she had heard his car start, heard it driving away; much, much later when he returned she tried to explain, to apologise, but he saw it as an excuse, a feeble attempt to cover her distaste, her disdain even. And since then they had hardly spoken: he had moved about like a great restless ghost, from room to room, always on the phone, always in a hurry, never available to her. After a couple of days Marcia arrived, spent long hours locked in the study with him; she was as always perfectly, distantly polite to Francesca. She too had been banned from Channing House.
The banishment was another reason for Francesca’s fear; dark, shadowy, ever more familiar. Bard had explained impatiently, Pete Barbour (who had also been to the house, having been banished also) more gently when she had, carefully careless, asked him about it, had explained that it was quite customary in such cases, that there were various anxieties about security on these occasions, that the directors might manage to salvage more than they should, ‘shred documents, shunt money around, all sorts of exciting things’, Pete had said with a weary smile; but the unease, ever more insistent now, stayed. What were they going to find, these people, sifting through the minutiae of the company, what were they looking for, what might be there? She kept hearing Terri’s words again, in her kitchen, after the funeral, the very clear implication that she knew something about Bard, something dangerous. ‘It’s gloves-off time, Francesca.’ What had that meant, what did she know, was there some connection with it all? And then, as she had trained herself to do so often and so carefully over the past few months, she would crush the fears, calm her panic, tell herself it was all normal, to be expected, that Terri had been overwrought, saying inevitably things that made no sense, that what was going on was, of course, as Pete had explained, a statutory procedure, something that under these circumstances had to be done.
And then too, she was lonely; her own phone was silent, people were clearly embarrassed, most of them not knowing what to say. A few of her closer friends had phoned, expressed an awkward sympathy – Miranda Scott had been marvellous, phoned her several times, taken her out for lunch, teased her about moving to Cardboard City, made her laugh – but most of them had simply stayed away. If she saw any of them at the gym, or at a restaurant, or even phoned someone unexpectedly, they carefully avoided the subject, were falsely, clumsily bright, as if she had been stricken by sudden bereavement or a terminal illness. It was, she could see, something not covered by most etiquette books, most social experience, the correct thing to say to someone whose husband’s company had gone bankrupt and was now under investigation. Although after the last few years, it must have happened that most people had been confronted by it, somewhere in their circle. And it was hardly a crime, an offence even, simply a piece of misfortune. And of course mismanagement. She supposed that was what lay at the heart of the embarrassment: the implication that Bard must be a fool, incompetent, or it would not have happened. Whatever the reason, she felt rebuffed, alienated.
She also felt frightened, without knowing why, about Liam. She supposed it was fear of discovery, but that was absurd (she told herself): discovery of what? Several conversations, a few hospital visits, an hour at the house, some brief, almost innocent embraces: nothing wrong, nothing for which she could really be blamed. Except perhaps a little secrecy of her own. And yet – yet when she woke, in her midnight vigils, and thought of Liam, it was fear she found alongside him in her head.
Dear Dad
Sorry to read about your problems in the papers. It must be very distressing for you, and I hope things are not too tough. What a shock! Obviously the press are giving you a hard time; I hope your shareholders don’t follow suit!
Yours, Liam.
The pleasure he got from writing that letter was, Liam thought smiling, as he finally sealed the envelope, almost, if not quite, orgasmic. The thought of his father humbled, brought so low, reduced from mighty Colossus to puny mortal, stripped of dignity, of position, no longer riding his vast fortune, his huge power, but dragged helpless along in his creditors’ wake, more beggar than benefactor, useless, impotent – and at that thought, that particular label, Liam threw back his head and laughed aloud. It was a long time, a very long time, since he had felt so good, so powerful, so omnipotent himself. All the years of hurt, of rejection, of belittlement, were suddenly, sweetly avenged: the past and his endurance of it infinitely worthwhile, that he might savour this most marvellous present.
And there remained for him still the ultimate prize.
He had not been able to speak to Francesca since they had parted on his father’s birthday; she had returned none of his calls, had been away all weekend and not answered the phone herself once. She had — most foolishly, had she known it, but having been assured quite wrongly that Naomi was away – sent him a note, saying they must not meet again, and thanking him for all that he had been to her ‘at a difficult time’, signed simply ‘Francesca’. It wasn’t much, but it could still be quite useful.
And since the news of the company’s crash, all the lines, all the ranks had been closed, getting near to her was impossible. Finally, late on the Thursday afternoon, he had spoken to Sandie, briefly; she had sounded excited, clearly enjoying the drama. Mr Channing was beside himself, unable to do anything, banished from his office – ‘it’s what they call sealed, Liam, he literally can’t get into it’ – holed up in his study at home, emerging occasionally to shout at Francesca, at her, Sandie, at the children.
‘And how is Francesca?’ he said.
‘Upset, but she’s not actually with him much, they’re hardly speaking. Nanny’s being sent with the children to Stylings tomorrow, apparently the atmosphere�
��s bad for them. Bad for them!’ she added, her voice rising. ‘Not too good for any of us. And Barnaby’s gone off to stay with Kirsten, I think I might go mad.’
‘Poor you!’ said Liam. ‘And poor Mr Channing! It must be very hard for him. No point you sending him any good wishes from me, Sandie, but you could give Mrs Channing my – my sympathy. And my love, if you can do it discreetly.’
Another little kitten, he thought, sent out padding innocently amongst the pigeons.
Oliver was hating the whole thing. For lots of reasons. It was terrible to see the place disintegrating: nice people like Sam Illingworth and Jean Rivers disappearing, Peter Barbour banished – that was really odd. If the administrators wanted to keep the company going, wanted to know what all their systems were, what buildings were tied up and so on, then surely Barbour was the one man above all they needed there.
‘They just want skeleton staff,’ Barbour had said to him carefully, by way of explanation, ‘from the various management levels. And Charlie Prentice can tell them what they want to know just as well as I.’
‘I don’t see how,’ said Oliver. ‘He’s not involved in the day-to-day running of the company, or – ’
‘Well, they’re very experienced,’ said Barbour, heavily, ‘and I think we must assume they know what they want. I shall be called in from time to time, I’m told. Meanwhile they’re retaining you.’
‘Me! Why?’
‘Oh – they want someone from this office. You’re cheaper than I am – ’ he smiled grimly at Oliver – ‘and they want someone to do some dogsbody work. Photocopying, and so on. Sorry, but at least you’ll still get paid. Of course if any of those other jobs comes through – ’
‘Well, they haven’t yet,’ said Oliver, and then because he felt so sorry for Barbour, he said, ‘I’m really sorry, Mr Barbour. Very sorry.’
‘Thank you, Oliver. I tell you, I’m sorry too, that we couldn’t go on working together. Maybe in another life – ’
The Dilemma Page 51