Then they had got wind of the Polska CMC deal.
Simon thought briefly: I had a life before the Polska CMC deal, a life that was my own, running smoothly, going my way. The remembrance of what he had lost brought a shiver of bitterness.
Like all the best mistakes, they had been lured in effortlessly, by degrees. It had begun like any one of a dozen deals. There was a tip-off, a contact, they talked their way past the middlemen to the man in possession of the goods at Polska CMC, they got a feel for the price. A cancelled order for generators, twenty 2000-kilowatt machines originally destined for German hospitals. Dollar signs flashed huge and bright. Suspiciously huge, of course. But Ben wouldn’t listen. He wanted to give it a go. What’s the harm, he said, we can only lose the deal. So they had waltzed off to Warsaw with their double act, Ben the talker, the front-man, the Polish-speaking ideas man with the anglicised Polish name and the charming manner, Simon the detail man, specialist in small print and bank transfers.
Slowly but surely they had got sucked in. Slowly but surely they had neglected their other business until the other deals had melted away. Negotiations had spun out, months and months of suffocating red tape and back-slapping dinners and rousing toasts and appalling women with dubious hygiene and slobbering lips looming up in seedy Warsaw nightclubs; months and months of getting a feel for the way the wind was really blowing under the vodka-fired camaraderie, months of fine-tuning the terms and renegotiating the ‘special payments’. All this while tying up the other end of the deal with the South American broker who’d found buyers across the continent and probably off it too. Getting the money in the right place at the right time was always an art form, but with this deal it was like writing a score for a hundred-piece orchestra, the web of transfers between Warsaw and Switzerland and the Caymans, banks and front companies in Panama and El Salvador and Monaco, the timing of it all, the bonds, the guarantees.
Three months ago it had been in the bag, signed, sealed, first bank transfers due any day. But as Simon should have known did know deep down, but chose to ignore it was precisely when something was almost in the bag that it leapt out and savaged you.
Now, as he attempted to revive the business, Simon wasn’t sure whether it was his imagination or he was just suffering a general loss of heart but new deals seemed much harder to find.
He was finishing a call to Bahrain when he saw Ben emerge from Catherine’s room and walk briskly down the passage towards him. He noticed Ben was wearing business clothes, a dark blue Armani suit he’d acquired a couple of months ago in Milan to add to the twenty or more suits already in his wardrobe, and a dark open-necked shirt. As he got closer Simon noticed he was unshaven and that his shirt was not as crisp as it might have been, which suggested that, against all habit and instinct, Ben had gone travelling without a change of clothes.
“Oh hi, what are you doing here?” Ben demanded vaguely, swivelling to a halt.
“I came to find out how Catherine was.”
“Oh, she’s all right,” he said carelessly. “So what’s the latest?”
Simon shuddered with disbelief, he almost cried out, How can you say she’s all right? How can you stand there as if nothing’s happened? Then he remembered that they were all in shock, and that Ben simply had an unusual way of showing it.
Mechanically, Simon began to summa rise events at RNP while Ben stared past him into the atrium, listening with the inattentive, faintly bored expression that Simon knew so well. His face was mending quickly, Simon noticed. The bruising around the left eye was still a rather bright shade of blue-black but the swelling had gone down, and beneath its strip of transparent plaster the gash on his left cheek, sealed by the minuscule stitches, seemed to be healing neatly. In no time he would be back to normal: unmarked, unblemished, the handsome man with the winning ways. Simon found himself thinking, All bloody wrong, and just as quickly pushed this thought from his mind, because if you allowed yourself to get consumed by the injustices of life you could go mad.
“So Bahrain could be a goer?”
As they talked Simon tried to gauge Ben’s mood. With Ben this was never easy, since it was necessary to separate the person he chose to show to the world, a Ben who might be engaging, flamboyant, boyish, provocative, lost he kept the most mawkish of these fronts for women from the other Ben, the ‘real’ Ben in so far as this could ever be pinned down, the person who might be in a quite different and more prosaic mood, frustrated, annoyed, displeased, bleak. Simon saw the real Ben more often than most, saw him in his rare unguarded moments, between meetings, between phone calls, when for the odd minute or two he dropped the pretence that every moment of life must be lived to the full, at speed and with maximum enjoyment, and revealed a side of himself that was more sombre and altogether less straightforward.
The Ben he saw now the outer Ben was a man bearing tragedy intensely but bravely, with restraint and a kind of gruff bewilderment. As so often, his appearance had somehow come to match his mood, and he was looking Byronic, with his bruised face and unshaven chin, his grey eyes narrowed by fatigue, his light brown hair seemingly wavier and wilder and wind-blown. Yet for all his suffering, there was a light in his eye, a glimmer of something that, if not quite confidence, was pretty close to it resolution perhaps and, unless Simon was very much mistaken, relief.
Was the panic over, then? Had Ben, the master escape artist, done it again? Simon wanted to laugh aloud.
Instead, seeing an opportunity, seizing it hastily, he said, “The cash situation’s getting to be a real problem, Ben.”
“Yeah?” He was staring out into the atrium again.
“We have to decide. We could go on half salary until August, we could
‘
“Look I don’t think I can deal with this now.”
“Later then?”
“Not today. Not this week.” Reading Simon’s expression, he protested in a tone of self-justification, “Got to look after Cath, haven’t I? From now on, that’s the only thing that matters. Look after her properly, Simon! Whatever it takes. Come what may. The full bit. Be there for her, one hundred per cent!” He nodded emotionally, caught up by his own fervour. “It’s the whole world for her from now on! Nothing but the best.”
Simon thought: He really seems to mean it.
“I’m afraid you’re going to have to fill in for me, Simon. I mean, I’ll do what I can, when I can you know that. But Singapore, Warsaw I just won’t be able to make it. And Bahrain .. .” He gestured with upturned hands.
“I can do Bahrain and Warsaw, of course,” Simon replied. “But
Singapore I won’t have time, Ben. It’s going to take a week just to
‘
Ben cut him short with a rapid jerk of his fingers. “Well, just do what you can, eh? What you can.”
When Simon didn’t reply Ben made one of those comradely gestures he usually kept for business contacts, a comp licit touch on the arm accompanied by a rapid uplifting smile.
“What about the cash problem?” Simon asked before he could disappear.
“Shall we go for the half salary?”
“Sure, sure.”
“But will you be able to manage?”
He appeared to consider this seriously for the first time, he gave a light-hearted shrug. “I’ll have to, won’t I?”
Ben had always been a big spender, living up to his income and generally well beyond it, getting stuck into his half of the profits well before the end of the year. If he had savings Simon knew that they couldn’t be large. The house had been bought with Catherine’s only inheritance and a large mortgage.
He said, “If it’s a problem, I could always look into the chances of getting the Bahrain money up front.”
“Christ, no. We’d get stinking terms! No, no let’s cross bridges when we damn well come to them.”
A cash crisis was hardly a bridge to leave to the last minute, but Simon knew better than to push the issue when Ben was in one of his more impatient moods.
“So, is that it, then?” Ben asked briskly.
“You got my message about the police all right? To say I was taking Emma Russell to see them this morning?”
He pulled an elaborate face. “What?”
“I left a message at about eight ‘
“Why the hell did you take Emma to the police?”
“Well, she told me about the nuisance calls and I thought she should go
and tell Wilson ‘
“What nuisance calls?”
“The calls that Catherine had been getting on her mobile.”
Ben screwed up his handsome face still further into an exaggerated expression of incredulity. “For God’s sake, what are you talking about?”
“I thought you knew. I thought you’d just forgotten.”
“I’ve never heard of any calls! Never! This is rubbish!” He was angry.
“Well, according to Emma, Catherine had been getting calls for some time, since about November. Sometimes as often as twice a day.”
“Look, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ben retorted in a shoot-the-messenger tone. “Emma must have gone and got her wires completely crossed.”
“She seemed fairly certain.”
“For heaven’s sake, Cath would have told me about something like that.
If it was in the slightest bit serious, I mean.” He glared at Simon. “And you went and took Emma to the police with it! Jesus, Simon, you might have waited, you might have talked to me first. Really! For God’s sake!”
“You weren’t around. I thought it was the right thing to do. And the police do seem to think it could be important. They’re certainly taking it seriously.”
“That’s all we need! Emma making a drama out of a crisis. Jesus! I’ll have to go and sort it out with the police, I suppose. Tell them they’ve been sold a load of cobblers.” He gave a heavy sigh of forbearance. “Oh, and speaking of dramas’ he jabbed a finger at Simon “Alice tells me you barged in on Cath when she was barely conscious. For Christ’s sake, what’s wrong with you? Have you gone mad?”
Simon took a deep breath. “I didn’t barge in on her, as you put it. I simply had a very quiet word to establish if she had any memory of the attack, so that I could keep the police away. I thought that was the idea to make sure she wasn’t hassled by them. Now if I’ve done the wrong thing, then excuse me!” He put a hand to his chest, his voice shook with aggrievement. “But if I may remind you there’s been no one else around to organise anything, to deal with the police and sort everything out. You were very glad of my help at the beginning, if you remember. Getting the locks changed and tidying up and everything else you couldn’t deal with. And that was quite apart from the business. Now, don’t get me wrong I was glad to help, more than glad. I’d do anything, anything at all, you know that. But when you disappeared’ he emphasised the word mercilessly ‘and Duncan asked me to deal with the police, what was I meant to do refuse? And after all that, what do I get but a bollocking from Alice!”
“All right, all right, keep your hair on. It’s just Alice being Alice, you know how she is.”
“Incredibly, unbelievably rude.”
“Needs a good screw, as usual.” Ben threw out such remarks all the time, the more outrageous the better. They were made largely for effect, but also because for him there was more than a grain of truth in such primitive beliefs.
“You don’t understand,” Simon cried, ‘it’s me she’s got it in for. You should have seen her. It was hideous.”
“Perhaps it’s you she wants to shag.” This thought caused him such amusement that he laughed loudly and suddenly.
“Oh, for God’s sake!”
Simon’s explosion of fury was so violent that it startled both of them. Ben thrust out a quieting hand. “Look, calm down, will you? Calm down. It was only Alice. She’s a pain, everyone knows that.” Then, dropping his head and looking at the floor, he muttered grudgingly, “Listen, I do appreciate everything you’ve done. Really. I’m very grateful.”
Simon thought: And well may you look guilty, you shit. You should be bloody ashamed of yourself.
Ben looked at his watch. “Hell I’m late. Are we done? Anything else?”
“One thing,” Simon said. “There was a call yesterday from Terry Devlin.”
“Oh yeah?”
“He seemed to know an awful lot about Catherine about her condition, I mean.”
Ben was checking the time on the wall clock over the nursing station.
“Medical information,” Simon persisted. “Stuff he could only have got from someone here.”
“Aha.” He was determined not to pay attention.
“Ben, are you listening? Someone’s been talking out of turn, passing on confidential information.”
Ben was combing his fingers through his hair and pulling his shirt collar into shape. “Well, it wasn’t any of us, was it?” He was looking around for some shiny surface in which to check his reflection.
“Well, if it was any of the staff we should make a strong complaint.”
“I’ll look into it.” It was the tone Ben used to humour people when he wanted them off his back.
“Aren’t you bothered? I mean, it’s none of his damned business.”
“Mmm?”
“But why would he want it ‘
Ben gave the sudden explosive sigh of someone who is being sorely tried. “Simon for God’s sake, because he’s a control freak. Because he’s got this thing about the family. Because he can’t let go.”
When Simon still didn’t get it Ben took a long-suffering breath and spelled it out as if for an idiot. “Because he’s soft -in the head.” He raised his eyebrows, he lifted a palm in the pose of someone awaiting a sign of comprehension. “About -Cath:
“You mean ...”
“He had a thing for Cath’s ma, Lizzie. Now he’s transferred it to Cath. Call it continuity.”
“Oh.”
“Sort of sick really.”
“But I thought he pulled a fast one over the Langleys’ house in Ireland.”
“He did. But then, that’s always been his way of showing affection to shaft his friends. Though it has to be said that Duncan was easy meat. Bit off more than he could chew .. .”
In the flow of people along the corridors Simon became aware of a familiar figure heading towards them and signalled a warning to Ben.
‘.. . Out of his league on every front, silly old fool. Always been
clueless when it comes to Catching the signal, Ben turned and, without
a break in his flow, said easily to Duncan,
“Hey ho, Dune. We were just sorting a few things out. So ... I’m off to Fortnum’s now to get some goodies for Cath. Cheer her up. Bit of champagne and caviar.”
“Good idea,” said Duncan, taking it literally. “Can’t do any harm, can it? Just a spoonful.”
Clapping Duncan on the arm, Ben gave a delighted chuckle, and for an instant he was the old Ben, the hard-living, hard-playing rogue with the appetite for life. “No harm at all!”
As Duncan watched his son-in-law stride off, his lip trembled, he seemed to control his feelings with difficulty. “What a thing for the poor chap. Married less than a year! Just setting out on the road of life. What a start! And being so bloody good about it. Determined to do his best for Cathy, you know. Going to pull out all the stops. Makes one feel very moved, you know. Very proud.” His voice reverberated with such honeyed, almost theatrical emotion that Simon couldn’t help thinking that on some typically ill-judged level Duncan was rather enjoying the drama surrounding his daughter.
“How is Catherine?”
“Mmm?” Duncan turned and looked at Simon with faint surprise as if registering his presence for the first time. “Oh, coming along. Coming along. The doctors are doing a marvelous job. Under the best chap in London, you know, the very best. I made sure of that.”
Selective amnesia was a peculiar talent of Duncan’s and his memory was never more uneven, it seemed,
than when Simon had done him a favour. Not only had Simon been the person to suggest they should check out the consultant, but at Duncan’s request he had also been the one to make the necessary enquiries.
“The operation yesterday was it a success?”
“Oh, absolutely!” Duncan said expansively. “Went very smoothly. Of course, it’ll be quite a while before she’s back on her feet. You know lots of physiotherapy, lots of rest.”
Back on her feet. Could it be true? Everything Simon had heard told him it was unlikely, yet this didn’t stop a small bubble of hope from rising irrepressibly to the surface of his mind. “So ... is that what they’re saying, that she’s going to be all right?”
“Oh in time! In time! You know.”
Simon’s hopes subsided. He should have remembered that making the right noises was part of Duncan’s stock in trade, like his easy charm and air of patrician authority. For this reason it was never easy to get a fix on Duncan, never easy to tell what, if any, of his utterances were true.
“And how about her memory, Duncan?” he asked solicitously. “Has it come back at all?”
“Memory?”
“The attack does she remember anything?”
“Good God, haven’t asked her!”
“It’s just that I told the police that she couldn’t remember anything, and it’s on that basis that they’re staying away.”
Duncan looked blank.
“You did ask me to deal with the police, if you remember.”
“Did I? Well, there we are. But now that things are quieter ‘.. .”
“You did ask me to see the police, Duncan. Very definitely. And I’d
be grateful if you could tell Alice, so that she doesn’t go around
saying that I ‘
They were interrupted by an apologetic Sister Jones, pausing in a rapid flight up the corridor to confirm some arrangement with Duncan. Instantly Duncan produced his ready smile, his twinkling gaze, his attentive manner. With his fine even features, his high forehead and greying hair combed back to reveal a widow’s peak, his lean stooped figure clad in a well-cut summer suit and clubbish tie, he had the distinguished air of the international boardroom, the embassy or the judge’s chambers. By background, you would guess county and a well-trodden path through public school and Oxbridge. The truth, Simon knew, was somewhat closer to the Eastbourne suburbs, an independent day school and a short stint at some non-accredited college in America. From his father Duncan had inherited a love of horseflesh, though like his father it was invariably the laggardly and lame that attracted his money, and barely a month went by that Duncan didn’t fret about his salary, his shares and the scandalous cost of living.
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