“Of course.”
“This is a lovely place,” he said, quite gently. “Well, it’s all lovely, but this building—”
“Oh, the orangery. Yes, it’s very special. I adore it. We were never allowed in—I think Mummy and Daddy thought we’d smash the glass or something—but one day I saw the gardener get a key from under a flowerpot by the door—bit like Peter Rabbit, you know—and when no one was about, often early in the morning, I would creep down and let myself in, pretend I was a princess and this was my palace.”
“Well, it is a bit like a palace,” said Matt, “and you are a bit of a princess. By my standards, anyway.”
“Am I? Quite a poor one these days.”
“Yes, well, poverty is relative, I suppose,” said Matt, but his voice was easy, gentle, with none of the truculence that so often filled it. “I don’t suppose the key’s still under the pot?”
“Yes, it is. Do you want to go in?”
He nodded; she smiled at him conspiratorially and like a naughty child walked over to the corner of the building and retrieved the key.
He stepped in, looked round; the air was heavy with scent and heat.
“I was right,” he said. “I thought it looked from outside as if you could touch that light, feel it even.”
“Matt!” said Eliza. “What a lovely idea. I didn’t know you were such a romantic.”
“I’m not usually,” he said. “I feel a bit as if it’s cast a spell on me.”
Eliza smiled at him, and then suddenly sat down on one of the chairs. “Sorry to break the spell, but I have to get these foul shoes off. Too small they are; I’m sure Juliet did it on purpose.” She clapped her hand to her mouth, looking like a naughty child. “Gosh, I shouldn’t have said that. Sorry.”
“You don’t like her?” he said grinning.
“Not terribly much.”
“She seems a bit—” He stopped.
“A bit what?”
“A bit wrong for Charles. Can’t say more than that; don’t know her.”
“Oh, Matt,” said Eliza, “I could kiss you for that.”
“Well,” he said, “well, go on. I don’t mind.”
“All right.” She hesitated, then reached up and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “There. Thank you.”
“That’s … that’s OK.”
And she moved back a step, away from him, and they stood there in the bright, hot light, staring at each other, half-shocked, rather as they had in the church. He felt suddenly and unaccustomedly shy, and she seemed slightly awkward too, not her usual brisk, bossy self.
“Well,” she said, quickly, “we’d better go. The speeches are about to begin. Where’s your … your girlfriend?”
“Gina? I have no idea. We had a bit of a tiff.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Eliza. “What a shame. We’d better go and find her, and … and some champagne. Come on; if we scuttle down this path here, we can stay on the grass and I won’t hurt my feet. Oh, better just lock up.”
He followed her, bemused and still feeling half-enchanted, through an avenue of trees and out onto the sunlit lawn; people were moving into the marquee.
“Oh, good,” said Eliza. “Or bad. We haven’t missed anything yet. Now, can you—”
“Eliza, my darling girl! I’ve been looking for you. You look perfectly frightful, may I say. What a dreadful dress. Bride’s choice, I suppose.”
It was the woman in red silk with the turban. Eliza leaned forward and kissed her.
“Hallo, Gommie, darling. Yes, very much her choice. I can’t say you’ve made me feel any better, though.”
“Oh, you know I don’t mean it. You usually look marvellous. What a dreadful lot. Your poor mother, having them swarming all over the place.”
“I … um, Gommie, this is Matt Shaw. Matt, this is my godmother, Anna Marchant.”
“How do you do?” said Anna Marchant. “How do you fit in here?”
“I don’t,” said Matt briefly.
Mrs. Marchant laughed. “Very good. That woman, the bride’s mother, perfectly dreadful. Putting on airs and graces, telling me how she’d just been to a royal garden party. I told her I always turned the invitations down, too many unsuitable people there these days. That shut her up.”
“Gommie, do be quiet. Someone will hear you.”
“Darling, they’re much too drunk. Now, how is Jeremy? We had the briefest chat in church. So good-looking. And so extremely rich. I bet your mother’s getting her hopes up.”
“I … wouldn’t know.”
“Of course she is. She’s only human. And they could use the money; that’s for sure. But it’s your life. Not theirs. Remember that.”
“Gommie, please.”
“Well, it’s important. Anyway, he ought to have asked you by now. It’s gone on too long. Or has he?”
“No, Gommie, he hasn’t, and—”
“Well, in my day it was called trifling. Trifling with your affections. Not done.”
“Well, things have changed now,” said Eliza firmly.
“Yes, and not always for the better. Still, just remember what I said. So why are you here, Matt? Not part of the bride’s lot, I’m sure.”
“No,” said Matt, grinning, “no, I’m a friend of Charles’s.”
“Oh, really? How’d you meet him?”
“In the army. Doing basic training.”
“Yes, I see. What were you in?”
“The sappers.”
“Damn fine lot, the sappers. We’d have lost the war without them. Mulberry harbours and all that. And what do you do now?”
“I’m … I’m in the property business.”
“Eliza, you must bring Matt to lunch one day. I’d like to talk to him some more. I’m thinking of buying some shares in Blue Circle Cement. Good idea, Matt?”
“Um … probably.”
“That’s what I thought. Oh, God, here we go, father of the bride at the microphone. It’ll be dreadful. I need another drink.”
She moved off.
“I’m sorry,” said Eliza, laughing. “She’s so outrageous.”
“I thought she was wonderful.”
“Well, she took a great shine to you. You’d better watch it; she’s a frightful flirt.”
“Fine by me,” said Matt. “She’s got terrific legs.”
They moved into the marquee together, brought increasingly close, Matt thought, first by the singing, then the orangery, then by that wonderful conversation. He looked at Jeremy, smug bastard, laughing with Sarah, handing her a glass of champagne, and felt against all the odds a lurch of self-confidence.
“I’ve got something … something I want to talk to you about.”
Eliza looked at Jeremy across the table; she felt a clawing at her stomach, a constriction in her throat. Was this it? Finally? And if so …
“Yes?” she said. Her voice didn’t sound quite as it should. Bit squeaky. It was awful. Embarrassing.
“It’s … well, it’s pretty exciting, really. I … I hope you’ll like it, anyway. OK, here goes.” He refilled her glass. It wasn’t champagne. Which she might have expected it to be if … But he had made a bit of a thing about getting some wine he knew she’d love. So …
“Well, I’ve been asked to go to New York for six months. To head up the office there.”
“Oh. Oh, Jeremy.” She smiled. A brilliant, dazzling smile. She could feel its brilliance. It quite hurt. “Jeremy, that’s … that’s wonderful. So wonderful. I … well, I … Congratulations, Jeremy. Um … how soon?”
“Oh … beginning of September. I have to say I am a little bit nervous. But … well, it’s a great challenge. Carl Webster’s leaving the London office after five years and returning to New York, which, according to him, is going down the pan fast. Not a cosy situation.”
They’d lost several accounts, including JKL tobacco and La Roche toiletries; Jeremy was being brought in as overall account director, and his brief was to work with Carl, relaunching the entire age
ncy.
“It will be fun,” he said, leaning back in his chair, “and I will enjoy it; I’m not asking for sympathy—except having to live without you, of course—but, God, the egos I’m going to have to dance around. The creative people are great; it’s the account people who’ve made a complete horlicks of it all, and morale is seriously bad. But there will be good aspects, no doubt.”
“Like?”
“Oh … like an apartment on the Upper East Side—that’s sort of Knightsbridge-y—excellent expenses, of course, and a contractual agreement that I can fly home at least once a month—first-class, natch. And then there’s you, of course.”
Oh, God. He was going to say it after all. She composed her face again. Took a careful sip.
“I shall miss you terribly. Terribly.”
“I’ll miss you too, Jeremy. Of course.”
“But I do want you to come over lots. For long weekends and so on. As well as me coming home lots as well. In fact, I think I can swing the fare on expenses fairly often. I really couldn’t manage without you entirely. So … shouldn’t be too bad. Oh, darling.”
“Yes?”
Maybe even now? His idea of a joke? A tease?
“I do hate to leave just now while you’re so worried about your dad and the house and everything. But you know we can talk whenever you want to.”
No joke, no tease.
“Yes. Yes, of course I know that. And … congratulations, Jeremy, again. It really is wonderful.”
Well … so what? she thought when finally, finally she was safely home, in bed, exploring how she felt. Which was fine. Absolutely fine. It would be marvellous to go to New York, meet the editors of things like American Vogue and Harper’s, see the New York designers. So it was a huge bonus, really. And it was only for six months. And what would be the point in getting engaged when they weren’t going to be together? Probably Jeremy had thought exactly that—although he could have said it. But anyway … who on earth wanted to get married when they were flying as high as she was? It was her career that really mattered to her. Wasn’t it?
As if on cue, Jack Beckham sent for her the next morning, told her he had just fired Fiona—“And don’t try to defend her; I’ve had it on very good authority she’s been completely off her head for the last three days, migraine, my arse, and it was her fucked up that last session with the ball gowns, not the photographer”—and formally appointed her fashion editor.
They all argued later over who had had the idea first. Valerie claimed it inevitably, Valerie Hill, still one of Simmonds and Shaw’s major clients.
She had come in one morning to see Louise, who now regarded her as her personal client, about a couple of offices in Ealing. And told her over Jenny’s coffee and biscuits, which continued, Louise claimed, to be one of the major contributions to the firm’s success, that she could see in the years to come that there would be a huge increase in offices in the outer suburbs.
“We’ll just have to look farther out—well beyond Guildford. In the greenbelt, even. It can’t go on like this.”
Louise was talking to Matt and Jimbo later that day about the nightmare of the Brown Ban, as it was called (after George Brown, a new minister in Mr. Wilson’s punitive government), on any further office building in London. “Half our development work is being stalled for lack of planning permission,” said Jimbo gloomily.
“Well, we’re not going to change that,” said Louise. “And Miss Hill was saying this morning that we’d all have to move right out, start building offices in the suburbs.”
“Can’t see that,” said Jimbo. “Commercial firms won’t want their offices here, there, and everywhere. So unless you can persuade an entire company to move, it’ll never work.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Louise. “Sun Alliance are moving everyone out, apparently, except for the head office. And there’s a lot of people moving out of London to live, you know.”
“Yeah, and if they were big firms,” said Jimbo slowly, “big offices, people would move to work there, like they do to Ford, in Dagenham. I can see that makes sense.”
“Yeah, but that’s factories,” said Matt. “Can’t see people moving to be near an office.”
“This’d be a bit like a factory, though, wouldn’t it?” said Louise. “Only not manufacturing cars or washing machines, but processing insurance claims or whatever.”
“Tell you what,” said Matt. “If we could buy some land, and then develop one of these places, ready and waiting for some of these big firms … well, we’d be printing money. It’d be much cheaper than land in London. And there’s plenty of money around. You just need to have a good business plan, that’s all.”
“Well, if you say so. But how’d you know where to buy it, where the firms would want to be?”
“We could work it out,” said Matt slowly. “It’d be where the public transport was good. The underground, bus routes, mainline stations. Easy as that.” He sat back in his chair and lit a cigarette, looking at them very coolly through the smoke. “This is our way into the big time,” he said. “Trust me.”
The news had broken fast about Eliza’s appointment. Next morning, she came into an office filled with flowers; by lunchtime every vase in the place was utilised, and she had to ask her secretary to go out and buy half a dozen more. Breathy messages accompanied them: “darling Eliza … so thrilling … so exciting … so well deserved … many congratulations”: all from people who only days before had been fawning over Fiona. Other fashion writers called in their unique code: “We’ve been worrying about Fiona … she couldn’t go on like that … she needs a rest.”
Eliza called Fiona herself, several times; there was no reply. Finally at the end of the day, feeling increasingly wretched, she wrote her a note and ordered some flowers to be delivered at her flat next morning. They were returned, with a message that said there was no reply; later that day Fiona’s mother phoned Jack Beckham to tell him that Fiona had been admitted to a psychiatric clinic suffering from a major breakdown. Jack called Eliza into his office to tell her.
“Oh, Jack, that’s terrible. I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he said. “I only told you so you could see how right I was. She obviously couldn’t have gone on anyway.”
She thought suddenly—and not for the last time—how like Matt he was.
“Scarlett, it’s David.”
“Oh—hallo, David.”
“Look—are you quite mad? My mother says you’re coming out here to stay with her. You can’t do that; you really can’t.”
“I don’t see why not. It’ll be fun. It sounds so lovely. And maybe it’ll answer some queries for me.”
“What sort of queries?”
“Well, you know. Like how Gaby can be pregnant, when you haven’t slept together for years. Does she have a lover, I wonder? Is it someone else’s baby?”
“Of course not.”
“Well … must be immaculate conception then. How amazing.”
“Look, Scarlett of course we … That is I—she … Occasionally we … well, we sleep together. It’s … it’s just …”
“Just what?” A silence. She sighed. Loudly and theatrically. “Well, this is why I want to come, you see. To answer those sorts of questions. And I do like your mother so much, and her house sounds really lovely. And she says so is Charleston this time of the year. So … I’m coming. Sorry, David, if you’re not entirely pleased. But you should have thought that something like this might happen. Bye now.”
Something like this. That hurt so much a lot of the time she felt she couldn’t breathe properly. Someone else having the baby she should have had. With the man she loved. The baby she didn’t have, the baby that had been torn out of her, just to save the man and his filthy, lousy marriage. The baby she had kept quiet about, been so brave about, never complained about. The baby that still haunted her sleep, with its sweet, smiling, embryonic face, the baby that she had killed.
What kept her going was the rage. At the lies
, the injustice, her own gullibility. How could she have listened to him, believed him, trusted him?
Well … she had. And now she was getting her revenge. A bit of it, anyway.
“What on earth is going on in there?”
“I really don’t know, I’m afraid. He just seems really angry.”
“Who with?”
“I don’t know. Someone on the telephone.”
“Well, who is it? A client?”
“I don’t know, Miss Mullen. I don’t think so. Well, first some woman phoned; she was ever so posh. She was called … Oh, dear. It was a name I’ve never heard before. Really unusual. I thought at first she said she was making an announcement about her name, but that seemed to be it. Her name. Anyway, he didn’t talk to her for long. Then he rang someone else. That’s who he’s shouting at.”
Louise listened at the door for a moment; she heard the words bloody outrageous and then slightly later, “You made me a promise, and in my business we don’t renege on such things. Yours is obviously less principled. I’m quite prepared to sue if necessary”; and then: “Well, you’ll have to sort it out, because I’m not bloody having it.”
There was then a loud noise as the phone was slammed down, and a long silence.
Rather reluctantly, Louise went out to meet a client. When she came back, Jenny was looking rather excited, typing very fast.
“Oh, Miss Mullen,” she said. “What a morning we’ve had. That girl came back—that girl who came to interview Mr. Shaw for the papers.”
“Oh,” said Louise.
“Yes. She was quite rude.”
“She has no business being rude to you. What did she say?”
“She said, ‘Is Matt Shaw in there?’ So I said what you always told me to say; I said, ‘Mr. Shaw is very busy at the moment, but I’ll see if he has a moment to speak with you,’ and she said, ‘Don’t give me all that rubbish; is he in? Yes or no.’ ”
“So what did you say?”
“I said, ‘Well, yes, he is.’ And she just barged in.”
“Goodness. And then what?”
More Than You Know Page 16