Afterwards, damp, exhausted and euphoric, the three lay entwined on the bed, Sarah facing Bertrand, one leg draped over his, and spooned by Rory, until they slowly drifted to sleep. Sarah never told Bertrand that later in the night she’d been woken by the slow rocking of Rory’s pelvis from behind and that she’d let him slip himself inside her and had rocked him gently to a climax while Bertrand, who had rolled over to the other side of the super-king-sized bed, slept soundly. Likewise, Bertrand never told Sarah that he’d been far too hot and damp to sleep properly and that he had watched wordlessly while Sarah was taken by one of his oldest and dearest school-friends, just as he had done twenty-four years ago when they’d shared Georgina after Rory’s sixteenth birthday party.
****
Olympia had just had a blow-dry and now tossed her poker-straight newly red bob in slow motion, like someone in a shampoo advert.
‘Mallinder hasn’t been profitable this quarter as you all know,’ she announced during the last company meeting of the year, ‘so I’ve decided to cancel tonight’s staff Christmas party in order to save money. Instead I’ll be cutting it down to a dinner just for me and all the producers. None of you’ll be needed at the dinner I shouldn’t think, so there’s an extra evening’s holiday for you right there.’
‘But we normally get the hours of the Christmas party off in lieu anyway,’ whispered a disappointed Wendy, holding back a tear. The Mallinder Christmas party was the only time she was ever taken to a restaurant where the sauces didn’t come in sachets.
‘What was that, Wendy?’ Olympia snapped. ‘Speak up! Oh, and Abena, seeing as you know the most about the producers, I’d like you at the venue beforehand to oversee the seating plan and help organize. You can make yourself scarce once the boys arrive, I’m sure you’ve got other things to do this evening anyway what with your ritzy social life.’ She shot Abena an envious or disapproving stare.
‘Actually, Olympia, I’ve nothing on tonight as I had the Christmas party diarized. But of course I’ll be there, since it’s my job.’
‘I’ll need you from 5 p.m. onwards – actually you’d better stick around throughout the evening in case there’s a problem. The producers will start coming at six-thirty so at that point you can go across the road – there’s a seafood place where you can sit and get yourself a bite to eat, and don’t worry of course you can expense that.’
Abena perked up. Sheekey’s was a wonderful fish restaurant, even smarter than the place Olympia had booked for the party. ‘Sure, I’ll wait at Sheekey’s and you can just call if you need me.’
‘Sheekey’s?’ Olympia’s lips twitched. ‘No, I meant that fish and chip place nearby. What’s it called … Dandy Dan’s Fish ’n Ribs? Something like that anyway. Right, now we’ve overrun. Get back to work everyone.’
Dejected, Abena wondered idly how Bertrand was getting along in France. It was almost five o’clock and she’d had no time to change before rushing to the restaurant to help. Not that it mattered seeing as she was now disinvited along with the rest of the staff. Or not as it turned out. She looked at the name cards on the table and saw that the acquisitions manager and the sales manager had both been included. Why on earth had two such insipid and uninspiring men been allowed to join the party?
Moments later, Olympia flew into the restaurant, sighing loudly. ‘So much to do and so little time.’ She smiled at Abena. ‘Great, you’re here already. So how should we do the names?’
‘Well, I ’d been thinking that the producers should be seated next to those they might have creative synergies with, that way they could end up working together on co-productions, which means bigger budgets and potentially bigger money for Mallinder?’
Olympia thought about it for a nanosecond then shook her head. ‘No. I think I should occupy the central position.’
She picked up her name card and placed it in the middle of the table, ‘And then we can have the most important producers beside me, becoming gradually less important the further away from me they’re seated.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Right I’m off. Back at six so I’ll leave you to get on with things here. Oh, and have a read through this speech; the acquisitions and sales managers wrote it together, pretty good right?’
Abena felt like puking as she read the first few lines of the speech. No, Olympia was not ‘as inspirational as President Obama, as serene as Buddha himself’. She was amazed that they’d actually extracted their noses from up Olympia’s majestic bottom in order to write the thing. She couldn’t bear to read any more so she put the speech down and turned her attention back to the names. All the usual suspects were there – but hang on a minute, was that Benedict Lima? She thought back to Olympia smirking that she’d added a freelancer to the database who had heard of the company through Carey Wallace. But he wasn’t a producer. He was just a runner. Puzzled, she placed him towards the end of the table.
Eventually, having liaised with the staff and chefs, checked on the music and finished the names, there was little else for Abena to do. Olympia had returned, sporting an ill-advised thigh-skimming shirt-dress and a trilby hat. She looked Abena up and down. Abena was purposefully scruffy today in beat-up denim and high-tops. ‘Quick, get out before the producers see you,’ Olympia shrieked. So Abena went and sat in the dreary chippie opposite, sulking as she watched the dinner kick off through the clear glass.
She saw the mostly male producers file in to the restaurant, though there was no sign of Benedict. She noted with satisfaction that many failed to show and those who did looked bereft at being cheated of their chance to get the delightfully accommodating receptionist and other young staff under the mistletoe. It was clear that, by ignoring anything so profit-friendly as compatibility and synergy, competitors and bitter enemies had ended up side by side, and nobody got to network effectively. And the seating hierarchy was so obvious that Abena could see people frowning as they took their place in social Siberia, egos irreversibly dented. It was safe to say that Olympia wouldn’t be seeing the two at either end of the long table again.
From her lookout, sitting at a booth between a junkie and a hobo who smelt faintly of urine, Abena tried not to laugh at Olym-pia’s misfortune. She was just about to sink her teeth into her pungent kebab – the best of a bad bunch – when she felt a hand on her arm.
‘Abena, is that you?’
She gawped at the tall, dark, clean-shaven man with intense eyes and thick black lashes.
‘Ben! I didn’t recognize you.’
‘Likewise – do you normally spend the festive season eating kebabs by yourself in a Leicester Square chippie?’
‘You won’t believe it but I’m supposed to be at the Mallinder party. I got told to piss off at the last minute by my boss Olympia and to wait here in case she needs me.’
‘That’s disgraceful! Well I’m not going in without you. Looks like it’s kebabs all round.’
They were interrupted by a brunette running into the chippie calling ‘Benedict, Benedict, where are you?’ She was petite and stunning, with a smattering of freckles across her upturned nose.
‘Hey, we’re over here. Abena, this is Lee.’
Abena put out her hand and smiled but the woman stepped away, repelled by the greasy remnants of kebab on her fingers. ‘What’s going on Benedict? Where’s the party?’
‘Across the road, but we’re not going in unless Abena’s allowed in.’
Lee turned and stomped off down the street.
Abena winced. ‘You’d better go after her. Sorry, I think I’ve scuppered your date. What are you doing here anyway?’
‘Carey mentioned Mallinder to me – I wanted to contact every distributor in the country just to have all bases covered while I’m here. And don’t worry, she’ll calm down. But, actually, I’m glad to see you … You see, I got your message, and I just wondered—’
‘You got my message? So why didn’t you call? I thought manners was your thing!’ Abena didn’t quite know why she felt so indignant – it was only Ben after
all.
‘Well, actually, I did come to Annabel’s but you seemed to have your hands full, so …’
Abena felt hot with shame. ‘Oh, oh God, Ben that’s awful. You came all that way and I, I—’
‘Shhh,’ Ben said, ‘it really doesn’t matter. But if you must know, the reason I came all that way was because I wanted to tell you something.’ He looked Abena fiercely in the eye, daring her to stop him. ‘Even when you were clearly plastered, with that scumbag all over you on the dance floor, I still couldn’t stop looking at you. You’re the most incredible girl I’ve ever met. I think, Abena, I think I might be falling for you.’
Abena looked into his eyes, troubled pools of molten chocolate, and leaned forwards to brush his lips with hers. The kiss sent shock waves through her body.
‘Uh-oh,’ she thought.
Benedict’s date flounced back into the gritty chippie and he and Abena jumped apart before she spotted them.
‘Really, Benedict, let’s go now. We’re late as it is and after that Olympia woman’s gushing letter about you being the guest of honour I think it’s very rude of us not to show,’ she said.
‘Guest of honour? I thought you said you were a runner on film sets?’ Nothing was making any sense to Abena.
‘That’s what he always tells ditsy, greedy girls who he doesn’t like,’ spat his date. ‘And I know all about you, trying to get into Carey Wallace’s pants! In fact, Benedict runs a film-financing company he set up five years ago straight after film school in LA. He started out on film sets but now he earns pots of money raising eye-watering sums to executive-produce films he cares about. But because he’s low key, and discreet and modest,’ she rested her hand on his shoulder, ‘you vacuous star-fucker types who suck up to all the Hollywood bigwigs have never even heard of him. Well, one day he’s going to be bigger than anyone.’
‘Is this true Ben?’ Abena asked him sadly.
‘About the job. Yes. That’s what I do, but—’
‘Sure Ben, d’you know what, don’t bother waiting for me. I’m just fine here. Why don’t you and your charming girlfriend go and join all those clever, worthy, non-vacuous people across the road, who of course care nothing for status and aren’t greedy in the slightest. You all deserve each other. And when you’re gone, don’t ever come back.’
‘Abena don’t be—’
‘Ignore her, Benedict! Come on, we’re leaving.’ Lee grabbed his arm and pulled him out of Dandy Dan’s Fish ’n Ribs mid-sentence.
Only when she was alone did Abena let out a sob. With a deep breath she tried to pull herself together and, just for something to do with herself, she reached down for her soggy kebab. It was gone. She looked to her right and noticed that coincidentally the smelly homeless man had also done a runner. Looking to her left she saw that the junkie was staring at her in disgust, shaking his head as if to say ‘Sort your life out, love’.
Abena went home to sleep off the evening’s events, and woke up just as miserable. At work she found that Olympia had disappeared off to her holiday home in Gstaad, leaving a to-do list that kept Abena working frantically until the morning of Christmas Eve. Just as she was finishing an inventory of furniture in Olym-pia’s office – grumpily comparing Olympia’s soft leather chair to her own back-ache-inducing piece of tat –Olympia called the office from a mountain-top restaurant. ‘Abena, hi,’ she shouted over the tinkle of toasting wine glasses. ‘Before you leave, can you just do something for me quickly. I’m thinking about installing an en-suite dressing room in my office so I can head straight from there to my dinner dates with the industry boys. So much more efficient, no? Get me some quotes.’
Miraculously, Abena managed to get everything done, but she had almost reached breaking point by the time she left and headed, deflated, for the train station to travel to her family home.
****
Natalya had been desperate to return home to spend Christmas with her mother but Claude had insisted she come to Geneva with him. She loathed it. The usual party-circuit locations were always exciting in parts, even with Claude. But unlike in St Tropez, or Paris, or London, where people treated her as part of the Perren power machine, Switzerland was hideously boring, like one great big old-people’s home. Civilized people migrated to the mountains or a far-flung beach over the Christmas period, but this was Claude’s time to switch off. So they would probably spend much of their time in just each other’s company, in the hideous prison of a home Claude had had built on the outskirts of Geneva. When she was not with him, she would be expected to engage with his ghastly relatives, with whom she had absolutely nothing in common.
So it was with reluctance that she had boarded Claude’s plane a few days earlier and arrived in a land where every street was clean and tidy and nothing was out of place. And it was with even more reluctance that she forced his chef’s stodgy, carb-laden food into her super-slim body. How can a man who had all the ingredients in the world at his disposal exist on a diet of cheese, potatoes, bread and chocolate?
‘You must eat everything you have been served,’ Claude wheezed, scraping up the remains of the lamb goulash on his plate with a hunk of granary bread. ‘And afterwards you will go to the bedroom, put on your blue gown and wait for me on the bed.’
Natalya wanted to drown him in a vat of melted Emmental. Instead, she stabbed at a fried potato with her fork and surveyed the building. He had literally built himself a fortress here. A fifteen-metre wall made of solid rock surrounded the entire property, penetrated only via a secret sliding stone door, which, as with all of Claude’s properties, had been programmed with retina-recognition technology. Natalya’s eyes had now been approved and entered into the system but she had no idea how Claude had obtained a 3-D scan of her eyeball.
Once through the wall and into the compound she could move freely through the ‘garden’ – if you could call a grassy courtyard covered overhead with bulletproof glass a garden. At the end of the garden you reached the main building, a horribly dark cavernous space with tiny windows to ensure that, even from the air, it was impossible to see inside.
The interior was furnished as Natalya had come to expect – with the best of everything, but in peculiarly functional style. Claude had torn down anything personal after his wife died, since when he’d had neither the time nor inclination to refurbish.
Strangest of all was the small chamber beside the panic room. Natalya had stumbled upon it one evening and let out a bloodcurdling scream. ‘What is it my darling heart?’ Claude had come running. Natalya pointed at the shrouded figure on the floor, shocked into silence.
‘Oh yes, did I not tell you I have preserved my wife? So that she might be with me always. I did not like the idea of the doctors cutting her open, violating her.’
Natalya shivered. She never had found out how it was Claude’s wife died and there was little information to be gleaned from the net.
Just as dessert was being served, Claude’s very serious son and daughter-in-law silently entered the dining room with their own son, his grandson. Only they were allowed to be late. Claude beckoned his son to his side and sent the other two to sit on either side of Natalya. His son sneered at her across the table so she turned away, assessing the wife, wondering how such a plain, straight-looking woman had snared a Perren for herself. She felt the child’s sticky fingers tap on her knee. Irritated, she was about to slap his hand away when she saw that Claude was watching, curious to see how she was with youngsters. She put on her wedding catalogue smile and stroked the boy’s curls.
‘Yes? What is it my dear?’ She lowered her face so that he could speak into her ear.
Pulling at her diamond earring, he whispered, ‘I hate you.’ Then, laughing, he jumped off his seat and ran round the table to clamber on to his father’s lap.
****
As the train trundled away from the station Abena stared out of the wide window and watched the lightest flakes of snow land softly on the track, melting as they made contact. She’d been longin
g for this Christmas fortnight at home with her family in Kent, and there was the family skiing holiday in Switzerland to look forward to as well. Bertrand was trying to engineer a clandestine visit too. She still had misgivings about their affair, but it did at least help take her mind off work and assuage her loneliness post Sebastian. Not to mention the constant drain of having to watch over Tara. Thank God Tina had come to pick her up yesterday – some time relaxing at home could be just the therapeutic break her friend needed.
The snowflakes were becoming bigger and harder now and as the train picked up speed they pelted Abena’s window in relentless, rhythmic thrusts. She loved the passion and unpredictability of the weather, loved that any minute now the clouds could clear and give way to revitalizing sunshine. She let the rhythm of the beats against her window soothe her into an almost trancelike state. And so it was a few seconds after the man had walked by that her mind registered his passage. Jolted out of her reverie, Abena leapt up, forgetting her bag in her haste, and dashed down the aisle into the next carriage.
She just caught sight of his back before the carriage door closed behind him. Was she destined to keep missing him? Well she wouldn’t give up this time. She pursued him to the far end of the train, where she finally caught up with him, breathing hard. ‘Ben!’ she shouted. ‘Ben!’
The man swivelled round and looked at her blankly. He was not Benedict.
‘I’m so sorry, I thought you were somebody else,’ a shamefaced Abena explained. Her cheeks burned with embarrassment and she didn’t dare look at anybody else in the carriage as she hurried back to her seat and slumped down into it. Probably a good thing it hadn’t been him. She was furious with him anyway and had no idea what she would have said. The rest of the journey dragged on, but she put on a cheerful smile to match that of her father, waiting happily for her at the station.
Abena’s three older brothers and their wives, girlfriends and children had already arrived at the family home. The pretty, detached farmhouse house was filled to busting with informal family photographs, irreverent modern European art and ancient African artefacts. Big, comfy, worn sofas were everywhere apart from in the main living room, where a smart Roche Bobois suite shared the space with tall, tribal, throne-like chairs – both wedding presents from her respective grandparents. Her oldest brother’s chubby twin toddlers, Kwame and Jojo, were dancing in reindeer romper-suits by the front door and Abena found her spirits instantly lifted.
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