A Risk Worth Taking

by Robin Pilcher

  It never failed to work. Just as the kettle came to the boil, he heard a thump on the floor above. Nina was on the move. He poured himself a cup of instant coffee, waiting for her usual riposte. When it came ringing down the stairs, he mouthed out her words in perfect synchronization. “Dad, stop doing that! It’s so unfa-yer!”

  “Morning, Ni,” he called back. “Make sure Millie’s up, will you? You’ve got twenty-five minutes to get out of the house.”

  “I’m not waking her up. She’s a cow.” She said it in a crescendo, obviously wanting her sister to hear.

  Dan shook his head and walked through to the hall. Nina, still in her pyjamas, sat slumped at the top of the stairs, her feet resting halfway up the banister post.

  “She is not a cow, Ni. She is your loving, if not slightly tetchy sixteen-year-old sister who happens to be two years your senior, so I would be grateful if you didn’t give her any more excuse than that to splatter your brains against the wall.” He took a gulp of coffee. “Okay, tell me. Why is she a cow?”

  “She’s got my Atomic Kitten CD,” Nina replied moodily.

  “Ah.” Dan paused. “Well, she hasn’t actually.”

  “Yes, she has, Dad. Why do you always have to protect her?”

  “I am not always protecting her. I know she hasn’t got it because I’ve got it. You’ll find it in the CD machine in my office.”

  Nina’s face sneered disapproval. “That’s so sad,” she said, getting up from the step and stomping off to her bedroom.

  “Wake up Mill—” The door slammed shut before Dan could finish. Letting out a long sigh, he returned to the kitchen and pulled out a chair from the table. He sat down, resting his elbows on the table, and began to work his fingers at the throb of anxiety in his head. Biggles, noticing that this might be an opportune moment for reconciliation, crept from his basket and gently laid his muzzle on his master’s knee. Dan looked down at the dog and smiled. “Well, thank you, Biggles. At least someone in the world gives me a vague inkling that I’m still loved and appreciated.”

  2

  Back then, he had always thought that it could have read rather like one of those smart announcements in the social columns of the Times; or even printed on a stiff-carded invitation with raised letters, the kind that one might find tucked into the cracked edge of a gilded overmantel mirror in the drawing room of some well-connected household.

  Dan Porter and Jackie Entwhistle are pleased to announce their plan for life, formulated whilst consuming two quarter-pounder cheeseburgers and French fries in the Central Park Diner, High Street, Kensington on 3 April 1984. Following their wedding at Chelsea Registry Office on 18 April (which is to be paid for by Jackie’s parents who say that it is the last thing that they will ever do, financially speaking, for their daughter) and the arrival of their firstborn on (circa) 8 September of the same year (that being the reason for the breakdown of relationships with Jackie’s parents), Dan and Jackie will be moving (when they can afford it) to a large house in (London suburb, south of the river—somewhere) where they will add two more children to their family, plus two dogs—eventually. Thereafter (when Dan has reached retirement age, having made his fortune in the City, which he is bound to do), they will be moving to a small cottage in the country (South Devon coast preferably) where Dan will sit with a smug smile on his face, knowing that he has not only done his bit to perpetuate the human race, but has achieved it with distinction.

  At that time, it all seemed a bit pie-in-the-sky, really. Just the dreams of a young couple, both only two years out of their teens, who were fortified with too much Chardonnay and fizzing with excitement at the prospect of loving, honouring, and cherishing each other until death do us part. Yet for Dan, it could so easily have read something like:

  Dan Porter and Sharon Pettigrew or Janice Long-shaw or Kathleen Malloney (there were other girls with whom he had clothes-wrestled during midmorning break in the darkened store cupboard of the chemical lab at St. Joseph’s Secondary School, Tottenham Hale, North London—but they were the more likely ones to have ended up in the same full-stomached condition that Jackie now found herself to be in) are pleased to announce their plan for life. Following their wedding in St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Tottenham Hale (his mother’s local), Dan will take up employment in Baldwin Metals where he will work, on split shifts for £1.50 an hour, alongside his father in the dust-choking, earsplitting environs of the fabrication shed. They will be having only one child (the very same one that’s got them into this bloody mess in the first place) because, until a council flat comes up, they will have to live with Dan’s parents. Thereafter Sharon/Janice/Kathleen will be getting a job because otherwise they won’t be able to afford to go out to the pub together on a Saturday night. Dan would like to take this opportunity to apologize to Tottenham Hotspurs Football Club and to all his mates with whom he goes to matches, because one of the sacrifices that he’ll have to make is giving up his season ticket. From now on, he will only be able to watch those matches that are being televised—that is, if Dixon’s allows him to buy a television on hire purchase. And finally, once they have reached retirement age, the happy couple plan to . . . live off a state pension for a bit, then die.

  To be quite honest, that scenario had been in Dan’s mind for a hell of a lot longer than the one that he and Jackie had formulated whilst polishing off the bottle of Chardonnay in the Central Park Diner. It was, in every way, his worst nightmare, and from his early teens had hung over his head like the sword of Damocles, heralding the inevitable progression of his life. He had been born in the wrong place at the wrong time, with neither prospect nor privilege.

  So he decided to do his damnedest to avoid ending up like that. He kept his head down at school, both physically and academically, and watched as all his friends opted out as soon as they could with qualifications that suited them better for lives as mobsters rather than businessmen. When he eventually walked out of the gates of St. Joseph’s for the last time, he knew that the school’s enduring and hard-earned legacy to him was that he was coming away with both these attributes.

  University was out—his parents couldn’t afford to support him during three years of further education, neither was he willing to burden himself with student loans. So, dressed in his cousin’s ill-fitting wedding suit, he headed for the City with his exam certificate, showing his three top-grade A-level passes, carefully folded in his inside pocket. He had no idea what he was doing or where he was going, but he was determined not to catch the tube back to Tottenham Hale without securing some sort of employment for himself.

  He would have no doubt been forced to change his mind about that had it not been for the intervention of a kindly commissionaire who had been standing on the steps of a large, gargoyle-fronted building in Cheapside. He had witnessed Dan walk up and down the street four or five times, stopping outside offices, bracing himself to enter, then turning away with a shake of his head.

  “You’re looking for a job, aren’t you, son?” he had said in a voice that would have sounded more fitting on an army parade ground. Dan had nodded meekly, and the commissionaire had given him a wink and flicked his head to motion him into the building. Twenty minutes later, he came out into the late morning sunshine with a photocopied list of stockbroker firms clutched in his hand.

  It took exactly four and a half hours and the heavy scoring out of eight names on his list before Dan found himself a job. Walking triumphantly from the lift of the office block in Leadenhall Street, he crossed the reception area, tightly balling up the piece of paper in his fist. As he pushed open the heavy glass doors, he lobbed it into a tall chrome litter bin, then stood outside on the pavement, feeling as if he had reached up to discover that the sword of Damocles was so blunt that it couldn’t even cut through butter. Dan Porter, the office trainee from Tottenham Hale, had arrived in the City. From now on, he was going to do nothing but make money for himself.

  And he had done just that for three years. No steady girlfriends, not
too much excessive boozing. His two greatest expenditures were paying for his share of the rent on the flat that he had moved into with three other work colleagues just off Fulham Broadway, and the occasional sortie down King’s Road to buy clothes. And then, one Saturday afternoon, he met Jackie Entwhistle.

  Dan had been walking back to his flat when he passed the shop, situated at the unfashionable end of King’s Road. It was the name on the sign above the small display window that had at first caught his eye. Rebecca Talworth. He had read about her in some newspaper or magazine. A young dress designer, fresh out of St. Martin’s, who they said was destined to make the grade. Dan peered through the window into the shop’s crowded interior and almost immediately caught sight of a blonde girl, her face lit with animated humour as she served a customer. Maybe it was the intensity of his stare that had caused a slight tingling on the flawless skin of her cheek, because, for no apparent reason, she turned her head through ninety degrees and looked directly at him, and he was sure, if it was at all possible, that her smile broadened even more. It was on sheer impulse, but he decided not to go any further until he had asked her for a date. He entered the shop and reappeared on the street half an hour later with a grin on his face and a pain in his wallet. The price of the date had been the purchase of a £200 original Rebecca Talworth dress. Of course, Jackie had no idea that it was destined for her. He had said that it was for a friend, but he knew the moment that she held it up against herself to show off the style, that it would be sacrilege for anyone else to own it.

  He had given it to her for her twenty-first birthday. Actually, it was four days after her birthday, because she had had to go up north for a big black-tie “do” that her parents were holding in her honour at their golf club near Chester. But Dan had also organized a little celebration of his own. Back to his place, give Jackie the dress, get her to change into it, and then out to dinner at Quaglino’s. Trouble was that Jackie never wore the dress and they never made dinner. The truth was that neither of them had worn very much that night.

  And that was why they had come to be sitting making plans about their future over a bottle of Chardonnay in the Central Park Diner in Kensington High Street.

  3

  Stephen Turnbull strode across the office reception area, a neat cluster of files tucked under his arm, and shot a wink at the young temporary receptionist as he passed by. He kept his eye on her as he walked into his office and smiled to himself when he witnessed through the glass partitioning a slight colour rising to the girl’s cheeks. It satisfied him that, at the age of twenty-nine, rising thirty, he still had the charisma and the looks to get that kind of reaction from a girl ten years his junior. He sat down at his desk and clicked the mouse of his computer, and stretching out his long, linen-clad legs, he leaned back in his chair and watched as the screensaver cleared to be replaced by the spreadsheet on which he had been working prior to the meeting.

  Stephen had every reason to feel pleased with himself that morning. During the meeting that had finished half an hour ago, he had given a presentation to the company’s financial backers demonstrating that everything was going pretty damned well with Rebecca Talworth Design Ltd. After only eighteen months since its inception, the company was performing way ahead of its forecast schedule, and if the spring/summer collection to be shown at Prêt-à-Porter in Paris in three weeks’ time proved to be as successful as the previous one, then profit margins might just surpass all expectations.

  And Stephen knew that it was he who had been entirely responsible for the whole thing happening. Two years before, whilst working for a small chartered accountancy practice in West Hampstead, he had been assigned a number of “headache” clients, those whose accounting techniques consisted of submitting little or no ledger work and a pile of disordered receipts for reconciliation. Wading through them like an automaton, he had come across Rebecca Talworth’s file, and was both surprised and bemused as to why one of the most successful and well-known fashion designers in the country should use such an unprestigious, out-of-the-way company to audit her books. However, having spent an hour scrutinizing her accounts, he had come to realize that the recognition that she had achieved for herself through her creative skills could in no way be complemented by an astute business sense. Rebecca Talworth was, to all intents and purposes, bust. He also surmised that she herself was probably fully aware of the fact and hoped that, by placing her books with a small, unknown firm of chartered accountants, she would be able to cajole them into throwing up a smokescreen to hide her dire financial situation.

  It had never been Stephen’s plan to become an accountant. When he had left school, he had every intention of going on to art college, having a greater aptitude towards all things creative than to any one thing in the academic field. But his overpowering father had bullied him into altering course, telling him that he expected his only son to take on the eventual running of his own business, and that accountancy was the best grounding with which to accomplish this successfully.

  With not one iota of enthusiasm for the work, Stephen had scraped a lowly pass in his final accountancy exams, and consequently had only managed to find employment with the small West Hampstead practice. Every morning, he struggled to get himself out of bed, knowing that the day had little to offer him other than indescribable boredom. But now, as he scrutinized the Talworth file, he began to see a means of escape. He just had to manipulate it correctly.

  He laid aside the file that day and went on to sort out the affairs of a self-employed jobbing plumber from Hackney. Then, that night, he took it home and began to put together a proposal for the designer. After a week of working well into the small hours of the morning, he devised a business plan that broadened the parameters of Rebecca Talworth’s work into lucrative sidelines, whilst still granting her complete autonomy over designs and products. The control of expenditure and cash flow, however, was to be placed firmly in the hands of a financial director.

  It took him five times of asking to arrange a meeting with Rebecca, something which confirmed in his mind that she was fully aware of the fact that her glitzy, jet-setting world was about to crumble around her feet. He was never put off by her complete refusal to speak to him on the telephone, because every time the line went dead, he became more assured that she had little option other than to accept his plan.

  They met in her small mews house off Exhibition Road exactly three weeks after he had made his initial attempt to contact her. He handled the meeting with care, always putting across the harder points for her to accept with a generous massaging of her obviously extensive ego. Within an hour, he had struck the deal and was shown to the front door by a smiling, almost ebullient Rebecca Talworth. He left her waving on the doorstep and walked away down the narrow cobbled lane as the newly appointed financial director of Rebecca Talworth Design Ltd., a position that carried a healthy salary increment on the fulfillment of each of his proposed targets. By the time that he had emerged onto Exhibition Road, he had called the chartered accountancy practice in West Hampstead and told them that he was leaving without notice.

  As he had imagined, raising the finance on the terms that he had set out in the business plan was plain sailing. In fact, he had managed to better them by narrowing down the offers that he had received from a plethora of financial institutions. They had fallen over themselves to get a foothold in the action, impressed by his proposals to tap into the huge marketing potential behind the goodwill of Rebecca Talworth’s name.

  Two weeks after the financial package had been finalized, he had negotiated a five-year lease, with an option to buy after that period, on 10,000 square feet of office space in a converted flourmill on the north side of the River Thames, just west of the Wandsworth Bridge. Being on the top floor, it had an abundance of natural light flooding in through the large Velux windows that ran the full length of the roof, and there was ample room for the offices and large studio where the cutting and machining of design samples were to be carried out.

 
; Within three months, Rebecca had closed down her two shops in King’s Road, laying off all but two of her sales assistants, and had moved into the new premises. The shops were not part of the business plan. To begin with, retail was to be handled from rented floor space within one of the more prestigious department stores in the West End, depending on which was able to offer the better deal. Once manufacturing was in full swing, then units in similar department stores were to be sought in major cities throughout the world.

  And it had worked. The base of the letterheading of Rebecca Talworth Design Ltd. now listed London, New York, Paris, Stockholm, Frankfurt, and Madrid, and if his negotiations proved fruitful, then Tokyo would be added within the next month.

  However, from the moment that the new company had started trading, there was one problem that Stephen had found hard to overcome, and that was his working relationship with Rebecca herself. She was still the creative genius, but still hopeless with money, and she displayed a wild extravagance with this new injection of finance. Having been on the receiving end, on a number of occasions, of her quick temper and irrationality of thought, Stephen knew that he had to handle Rebecca with the softest pair of kid gloves in order to maintain a measure of civility between them.