‘Yes, maybe,’ said Oliver.
Three days into the administrative procedures, he was sitting trying to sort out some filing when one of the accountants came into the room. He smiled at Oliver. He was quite young, and the only one who had been at all friendly.
‘Hi. John Martin.’
‘Hi,’ said Oliver. ‘Oliver Clarke. Is – everything OK?’
‘Yes, sure. How about you?’
‘Sorry?’
‘You’d not been here long, had you? Must have been pretty distressing for you.’
‘Oh – well, a bit. It was only ever going to be a short-term thing. I want to go into private practice.’
‘Yes, much better. So how come you joined them at all?’
Oliver told him.
‘Oh, I see. You’re the son of Nigel Clarke. Who helped found this company?’
‘Yes, that’s right. Only he died. Twenty years ago.’
‘Sorry about that. Tough for you.’
‘It’s OK,’ said Oliver. ‘It was a long time ago.’
‘Yes, I suppose so. So you know old man Channing quite well?’
‘Yes, pretty well.’
‘And he’s kept an eye on you, has he?’
‘Yes,’ said Oliver, ‘and my sister and my mother.’
‘Nice of him. I mean obviously he should, but thousands wouldn’t. As they say. So you were pretty close to him?’
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ said Oliver. ‘It was quite a formal relationship.’
‘Uh-huh. Well thanks, Oliver. But there was this business of your mother’s nursing home fees? The Staff Benvolent Care?’
‘No,’ said Oliver, surprised, ‘no, that came out of our own – well, my father’s own – life insurance.’
‘Ah. Is that what Mr Channing led you to believe?’
‘He didn’t lead me to believe it,’ said Oliver shortly, ‘it was true.’
‘I see. Must have got it wrong, then. Did – well, do you like Mr Channing?’
‘Yes, very much.’
‘Is he popular in the company?’
‘Very,’ said Oliver firmly.
‘Good. He seems a nice enough guy. Tell me, did he and Mr Barbour work very closely together?’
‘Pretty closely, yes.’
‘More closely than, say, Mr Prentice and Mr Channing?’
‘I really don’t know.’
‘Did they have free access to each other’s files?’
‘Well, Mr Channing obviously had access to Mr Barbour’s. Whether it was the same the other way round I couldn’t say.’
‘Who could say?’
‘Marcia Grainger, I suppose. She was Mr Channing’s secretary. She knew everything there was to know.’
‘Yes, I see. You must have found the system here very complicated. All the subsidiary companies, the trusts, the transfers for developments, all that sort of thing.’
‘Not terribly. But of course I hadn’t been here long.’
‘No I suppose not. Well, I’ve certainly seen much worse. Now then, who would pay all the company phone bills?’
‘They came through this office,’ said Oliver. ‘That was the sort of thing I attended to. Any domestic expenditure – ’
‘Right. And that included the faxes?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Mr Barbour had a direct line, obviously. Did he use it much?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Oliver truthfully. ‘I don’t think an enormous amount. It meant Jean – Mrs Rivers – couldn’t screen the calls for him.’
‘So it rang straight through onto his desk? And was it mostly personal matters, would you say? Calls from home and so on? Or business too, people he worked very closely with?’
‘Both as far as I know,’ said Oliver. ‘Obviously I didn’t answer it or use it.’
‘And the bill for that would have gone in with the rest?’
‘Oh – yes. Certainly yes.’
‘Thanks, Oliver. I’d be grateful for that photocopying now, if you could manage it.’
‘Yes of course.’
He went off, feeling miserable and somehow, for no logical reason whatsoever, threatened.
‘Your dad’s been on the phone, Kirsten.’ Shelley, the girl in Reception, greeted Kirsten as she came in from a long round-trip delivering products and press releases to the furthest outposts of the media, taking in Wapping and Docklands, and pausing on her journey to gaze up at Coronet Wharf in all its harsh, glittering beauty, see what a temptation it must have been, and marvel that something so solid, so tangibly valuable, should have been the instrument that finally reduced her father to ruin. ‘I told him you probably wouldn’t be back today. Sorry!’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Kirsten, ‘that’s just about the best thing you could possibly have told him. Unless it was that I’d left the planet for good. What on earth did he want?’
‘Well, he didn’t say. But he was ever so nice to me. And I mean, he didn’t sound cross or anything. Probably just wanted to take you out to lunch or something.’
‘Yeah, and probably pigs are about to fly right past that window. No, I’ll have done something wrong, that’s for sure. Anyway, thanks, Shelley, and if he rings again, tell him the same, will you?’
‘Yes, sure. Oh, and Oliver phoned. Can you ring him?’
‘I will,’ said Kirsten, and went into her office smiling. She was even less daunted by her father, now she had Oliver.
The board of the London office of the Wall Street investment bank Fortescue-Tillich were all agreed they were most impressed by Naomi Channing. Her references, her career history, her education, her cool articulateness, her well-groomed (and well-bred) appearance, all reinforced the report from the Personnel Director based on her first interview, that she was the ideal candidate for the job of Vice President they were offering. A package had been agreed (£100,000 basic, plus increments, health insurance, car and five weeks’ paid leave), and there only remained the purely nominal interview with the Chairman, Saul Petersen, fixed for the following week, to confirm the appointment.
It was of course well known that Mr Petersen was a devout Protestant who held the strongest possible views on the sanctity of family life, that he viewed his company as an extension of his own family, and regarded any irregularity in their marital arrangements with the utmost seriousness. But as Mrs Channing had gone to great lengths to assure the board that she was happily married with a young family, there seemed no real possibility of any difficulty in that direction.
‘Are you OK?’ said Kirsten.
‘What? Oh – yes. Yes, I’m fine.’ They were in a cab on their way to Ealing; Oliver had been unable to find his cash card and become anxious about it, and Melinda had then phoned to say it was in the kitchen drawer, with his car keys.
‘Would you mind if we went to get it? It won’t take long, and we can pick up my car as well, maybe drive out to the country somewhere, instead of eating in town.’
‘I’d love that, all of it, and most of all seeing your house. Let’s get a cab though, my treat, I hate that crawly District Line.’
He had been quiet ever since they had met, quiet and distracted; it was unlike him. She asked him again what the matter was.
‘Oh – something that happened today in the office. It isn’t important.’
‘It seems to be.’
‘Well, it is in a way. It’s horrid there, seeing the place being taken apart, nobody around, like a sort of ghost town.’
‘Is my father really not allowed in?’
‘No.’
‘I wonder why on earth not?’
‘Oh, it’s perfectly normal in this sort of situation. Honestly. Doesn’t mean a thing.’
‘Pity,’ she said absently, ‘I thought maybe he’d been cheating the Revenue or something and was about to be locked up.’
‘No of course not,’ said Oliver. He sounded irritable. ‘You really shouldn’t talk like that. You’d hate it if something really happened to him.’
&
nbsp; ‘No I wouldn’t,’ said Kirsten positively. ‘I know you find it hard to understand, but I really don’t feel any of the proper things for him at all. As far as I’m concerned he can be locked up for a hundred years.’
‘Kirsten, I just know that isn’t true. If it was, he wouldn’t be able to upset you so much. Anyway, he’s been incredibly good to me – to us. Possibly more than I realised, actually.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh – doesn’t matter.’
‘Please tell me.’
‘Well – from something one of the accountants said today, Channings have been paying for my mother’s nursing home bills all these years, not her insurance policy at all. Some staff benevolent fund.’
‘So they should. Honestly, Oliver, he’s got so much money, it’s the least he can do.’
‘I don’t see it quite like that,’ he said, ‘but let’s not argue about it.’
‘No, don’t let’s.’ She leant over and gave him a kiss. ‘We’re going to have such a lovely evening.’
‘It’s really nice here,’ she said, looking round the small, just slightly overdressed sitting room, ‘I like it. Did you buy all the furniture and stuff, or was it your mum’s?’
‘Melinda chose most of it,’ said Oliver, ‘and I have to say it’s more to her taste than mine. But as she was doing all the work, making the curtains and so on, it didn’t seem fair of me to be too fussy.’
‘Well, I think it’s lovely,’ said Kirsten, and meant it. Raised as she had been on her father’s austere taste, her mother’s fondness for the ethnic, and with a strong hostility towards the kind of restrained chic with which Francesca dressed her houses, this pretty, chintzy, frilled and flounced house enchanted her. She had liked Gray’s house, of course, but that had been a show-place, a devastating display of stylish confidence; this one was for living in, being happy in, a normal proper house, for normal, proper people. She smiled at Oliver, slipped her hand into his, gave him a kiss. ‘I’d like a house like this,’ she said.
He kissed her back, and smiled at her, and, ‘You’re just saying that,’ he said, and she knew that once again he was surprised by her, surprised that she was not the person he had always imagined her to be. She surprised herself quite a lot, these days.
‘Right,’ he said, picking up the keys and the card, ‘let’s go. I thought sort of Oxford direction, what do you say?’
‘I say Oxford direction’d be fine,’ she said (wondering, with a stab of pleasure, if this might be her answer, if perhaps they might find themselves with too much to drink, in some nice country hotel, forced to stay the night), ‘but I must go to the loo first.’
‘Sure. Down there, end of the hall.’
Kirsten went into the cloakroom; it was decorated in the same pretty, cottagy taste as the rest of the house, with flower-sprigged wallpaper, elaborate ruched blinds at the small window, and a Victorian-style basin and loo, in blue and white patterned china. There were baskets of pot pourri, bowls of shells and tiny guest soaps; it had a delicious rosy, musky smell. The only thing that marred its perfection was an open box of Tampax on the shelf: Melinda had obviously left in a hurry that morning. And as she stood washing her hands, Kirsten suddenly found herself concentrating very hard on that packet, and realising with a stab of faint, but very real, unease that it seemed to have been a long time since she had needed to buy any herself; and then she told herself she was being silly, it probably wasn’t long at all, and that when she got home she would check in her diary. Not that she was worried. Not at all. Not in the very least.
‘Well, Liam.’ Jess looked at him rather sternly over her cup of tea. ‘You’re looking much better than when I last saw you. Using the leg, are you?’
She had summoned him to her house for tea, telling him it was time she had a chat with him; he had gone slightly nervously, for she seldom wanted to chat about nothing, there was usually some other agenda. He had arrived in a taxi (for walking was still painful), with a bunch of flowers for her and a carefully prepared script on the subject of his career and his marriage. And thought, as he travelled through the hot London afternoon, that he might, if he put his mind to it, learn a little more about the background to the early days of the company in which Teresa Booth had shown so much interest. Jess would know all about that, if anyone did.
‘Oh – yes. I look less like Hopalong Cassidy every day. And I feel really extremely well.’
‘Good. How’s Naomi?’
‘Oh – she’s fine. We think she’s got a new job. A proper one, I mean. Fingers crossed.’
‘Hmm. What about you? When are you going to get back to work?’
‘Oh – pretty soon now, I hope. As soon as I’m properly mobile. Got a couple of interviews, at least. In-house jobs, which isn’t really what I want, but I can’t go on living off Naomi for ever.’
‘Good for you. Well said. And when’s your case coming up?’
‘Oh – in about a month. Not looking forward to that, I must say. But I deserve it, whatever I get. I was just lucky no-one else was hurt.’
‘Yes, you were. Very lucky. Might have been your children. But we talked about that before. No point raking over old ground.’
‘No. Anyway, how are you, Granny Jess?’
‘Oh – I’m pretty well. Busy, of course, with this leadership election, you know.’
‘Yes. What do you think of Tony Blair?’
‘I think he’s a very good Tory,’ said Jess severely. ‘Prescott now, he’s more what the party needs. But I fear they won’t get him. I liked Kinnock, of course. A genuine socialist, he was. The last one. But that showbiz rally of theirs, dreadful. He deserved to lose, agreeing to that.’
‘Is that what you think? I’m not so sure.’ Liam was genuinely interested in politics, it was one of the close bonds between them, he the instinctive Tory, she the rational socialist, and they would roam the subject in all its aspects and ramifications for hours, incorporating such absorbing philosophies and arguments as the incompatibility of Conservatism and Christianity, economics and socialism.
Today, Liam having postulated that the Tory party had lost its way and its philosophy under the classless banner of John Major as thoroughly as the Labour party would do the same under Blair, and Jess having mourned the cynicism of the young – ‘the true danger in politics’ – towards both parties, Liam realised that it was after six and at seven he had to collect his children from their friends in the Terrace. Or had to unless he phoned, asked if they could stay on.
‘Phone if you like,’ said Jess, ‘but won’t they be disappointed not to see you?’
‘Good Lord no,’ said Liam. ‘They’re with me all the time at the moment. I’m the new man, Granny Jess, not an absentee father, like my own.’
‘Yes, and I always thought that was a great pity. Isambard wasn’t a bad father at all, he could have been a good one given a little more time with you all.’
‘Well, I think that’s a slightly over-charitable view,’ said Liam lightly, ‘but I suppose the circumstances in my own case were rather extreme.’
‘Yes they were. Which is not to say I approved of what he did, because I didn’t. You needed one parent at least, and he should have recognised that. But he had to survive somehow, and I’m afraid throwing himself into his work was the only way.’
‘Yes. Well, I suppose I had you.’
‘You had me. And Douglas and Suzanne. And Heather Clarke, she was very good to you as well.’
‘Poor Heather,’ said Liam, tipping his voice over into the honeyed liquid sympathy that, on the rare occasion it had been put to use in court, had invariably led his witnesses into a sense of false security, ‘I really must go and see her again. I feel very bad about her, she must be horribly lonely.’
‘Yes, I think she is. But she’s as well looked after as she could be.’
Liam made a great performance of shifting his injured leg about, so that Jess couldn’t see his face. ‘I didn’t realise until the other day,’ h
e said, ‘that my father paid her nursing home bills.’
‘And who told you that?’ said Jess. A spot of colour burned suddenly on her high, sallow cheekbones.
‘Teresa Booth. She was going through all Duggie’s papers and so on, and – ’
‘It seems a rather strange thing to tell you,’ said Jess. ‘Confidential, I’d have thought, that sort of thing.’
‘Well – she did tell me. For whatever reason. She’s a funny woman. Not to my taste, but I understand she made Duggie quite happy.’
‘I think she did, yes,’ said Jess, ‘and I quite like her. I find her honest. As you get older, you value honesty more and more.’
‘So you knew that, did you?’
‘Well, I knew there was some provision made for her. By the company. And at your father’s suggestion, she was not to know.’
‘Why on earth not?’
‘Because she’s very proud, that’s why not, and she wouldn’t have taken it. It seems Nigel had left her rather badly provided for.’
‘I see. Well, I suppose we shouldn’t begrudge her anything. Poor woman.’
‘No,’ said Jess, ‘we certainly shouldn’t.’
‘And after a purely temporary spell as a cripple, I’m even more sympathetic towards her. Just the same – ’
‘Yes?’
‘It still seems a very generous thing to do. Paying all those bills for her. I mean – ’
‘Liam, your father is a very generous man. And besides – ’
‘Yes?’ He hardly dared to move, to breathe, for fear she might draw back.
‘Oh – doesn’t matter.’
‘Granny Jess, go on. You know I have a lot of trouble relating to my father. Coming to terms with what’s happened between us. Anything that helps me to understand him better – ’
‘I do wish,’ she said apparently irrelevantly, ‘the two of you could become friends. It’s a source of great regret to me, this feud between you. So unnecessary, such a waste of time and emotion.’
‘It doesn’t seem that way to me,’ he said, and he was speaking with genuine passion suddenly. ‘He rejected me when I was a small boy, when I needed him, and he’s been rejecting me ever since. And he might have helped the Clarkes, but he’s done precious little for me.’
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