A Time for Friends (30 page)

‘Em . . . what time are you getting up?’

‘I’m not.’ Hilary bent her head to her book.

‘But what about my sleepover?’ her daughter bleated plaintively.

‘Dad’s here, he can make up the salads to go with the pizza. I’m taking your advice, Sophie. I’m chilling. Now close the door like a good girl, I’m at a really
terrific part in my book.’ Hilary repositioned her glasses and began to read with studied interest, much to Sophie’s consternation.

‘The door, pet,’ Hilary reminded her sweetly, grinning when her daughter shut it with a decisive bang.

‘You’re not getting up at
all
?’ Niall demanded five minutes later after Sophie relayed the news to him.

‘Nope,’ she said equably. ‘Duvet day!’

‘You can’t have a duvet day today. Sophie’s having a sleepover,’ he protested.

‘And?’ She arched an eyebrow at him.

‘Well . . . well . . . things have to be done, the food. The house needs hoovering,’ he blustered.

‘Sophie’s fifteen. I don’t need to hold her hand. Hoover if you want. It’s entirely up to you. Oh and here.’ She rooted in the drawer in her locker. ‘Give
this to Millie for her shoes.’ She handed him some euro notes. ‘Can I get back to my book now, please?’

‘Do what you like,’ her husband said exasperatedly.

‘I certainly will,’ Hilary said.

‘Have you got PMT?’ he demanded, completely thrown by her totally uncharacteristic behaviour. She almost laughed watching him stand, legs planted apart, hands on his hips, jaw thrust
out aggressively.

‘No, I feel perfectly fine. Please close the door when you go out,’ she said, rolling over onto her side towards the window, with her back to him, precluding any further
conversation. There was silence for a moment and then she heard him leave the room. She felt as she’d felt the one and only time she’d mitched off school with a friend one wintry
December day, when they had gone to see the first
Star Trek
movie on a weekday afternoon, so desperately infatuated with Mr Spock and Captain Kirk they couldn’t wait until the
weekend. The movie had been disappointing, she remembered, with none of the humour and panache of the TV series; nevertheless it had been beyond exciting sitting in the darkened cinema with all the
other devoted Trekkies, watching a shot of the
USS Enterprise
fill the huge wide screen of the Savoy. A sense of decadent exhilaration had filled her then, as she thought of her fellow
classmates stuck at their desks studying geometry, and a similar feeling of decadent self-indulgence enveloped her today, lying in bed after midday on a Saturday when there was so much to be done.
Let them at it, Hilary thought languorously as the words blurred on the page. She was stepping away from life’s daily grind for once, and if they weren’t careful she’d take
tomorrow off as well.

Colette stretched cat-like on the luxurious emerald-green cushions on her lounger and gazed at the fine white silky sands and the translucent turquoise waters of the Caribbean.
She was alone. Delightfully, desirably solitary at last. Jazzy was at boarding school. Her husband and, most thankfully, their house guests had flown back to New York on the private jet Des had
hired to fly them all down to Turks and Caicos for the weekend. She’d had a stress headache since the previous night that had only begun to ease when the limos had pulled away from the villa
and disappeared round the curve of road on Grace Bay that led to Providenciales Airport.

She glanced at her diamond-encrusted Baby Graff watch. The plane should be taking off in the next few minutes and the relief she felt at not being on it couldn’t be described. She was
taking a scheduled flight in two days’ time to JFK via Miami, first-class of course. ‘I need that time to myself, Des,’ she’d insisted when he’d pointed out how
expensive it was to hire a private jet, and a luxury villa in TCI, and then have to pay for a first-class flight back to New York when there was no need.

‘I don’t care, I’ll pay it out of my own money,’ she retorted. ‘And that’s rich to say that to me, considering
you
were talking about hiring the
Gulf Stream,
which is way,
way
more expensive than the
Bombadier
,’ she snapped. ‘That’s crazy money you’re spending on those stuck-up
Wasps.’

‘Look you have to spend money to get money. You know what these people are like. It’s all about the image. Don’t forget Chuck Freemont knows Bernie Madoff and Steve Cohen
personally
. These are the biggest big cheeses in wealth and hedge fund management you could meet and I
want
an introduction. If you think we’re doing OK now, babes, we will
be on the pig’s back when we start investing with these guys.’ Her husband’s eyes gleamed with anticipation.

‘I know who they are,’ she retorted. ‘I read the
Journal of Finance
and the
Wall Street Journal
too,’ she added tartly, irritated that Des sometimes
forgot that she wasn’t some ditzy blonde airhead who was only interested in lunching with the ‘girls’.

‘Well then you know that Cohen’s SAC had 70 per cent returns riding the high-tech wave last year and the year before.
70 per cent,
Colette. The guy’s a financial
genius! I want to work with him! Madoff’s another one; the returns on his investments are high, high, high! Hell, some of my clients can retire because of the fortunes his company has made
for them,’ Des retorted. ‘I’ve worked my butt off for the last ten years and climbed higher than I ever thought we would over here, and now it’s time to make a killing and
if your pa had any sense he’d listen to me and invest a million with Madoff.’

‘Des, we’ve had this conversation before. None of the major Wall Street firms invest with him, none of the major derivatives firms trade with him. They think his numbers don’t
add up and he’s not legit. I’m warning you, don’t risk our money and all we’ve worked for on a gamble with him.’

‘For crying out loud, he’s a former non-executive chairman of NASDAQ . He runs a multibillion-dollar operation. Of
course
he’s legit. You’re dad’s a wuss
not to take an opportunity if it comes his way and so would I be,’ Des scoffed.

‘Whatever, Des, just play it safe,’ Colette said wearily.

‘Colette, did you ever think we would be living in a swanky apartment on the Upper East Side, or own a condo in Aspen, and three villas to let in Florida, or have a house in Nantucket, or
a share portfolio that would make your pa’s eyes water? Have I not managed our investments
very
well over the years?’

‘I suppose so,’ she conceded. ‘And we’re doing fine, so why do we need to be inviting these’ – she was tempted to call them freeloaders, but he would go
ballistic – ‘these acquaintances, on a weekend trip that’s costing a fortune? I mean spending over a hundred thou for a weekend’s entertaining is
way
over the
top.’

‘Contacts, honey, contacts. Money is no object to them – we must let them see it’s no object to us. Perception is everything. It’s time to take it up to the next level.
This weekend will pay for itself one hundred times over, for the contacts we will make, trust me,’ he said expansively.

Her husband was right: contacts were everything, Colette admitted. Mixing in the right circles opened doors that led to opportunities that they had taken every advantage of. The first few years
of their life in New York had been an absolute whirlwind as she and Des had, with a forensic determination, climbed the career and society ladder for all they were worth. Her background in fine
art, her judicious name-dropping of British artists, film stars, jet-setters, and even royalty, ‘clients she’d had dealings with’ in Dickon and Austen’s, lent her
authenticity and had impressed some of the people she had begun to socialize with.

It amazed Colette how the Americans adored the Royal Family and she had put that awe to impressive use when she had showed society matrons photos of Kensington Palace and the Orangery and formal
gardens, and more or less implied that she had met Princess Diana and other royals who ‘lived just down the road from her in Kensington’, and who ‘dropped into’ Dickon and
Austen’s to buy paintings and sculptures.

When the shocking news broke that the Princess had died in a car crash in Paris, she had received many calls from her American acquaintances and friends expressing their shock, dismay and grief.
Indeed, Colette had been, like millions, stunned at the news. She had held a discreet ‘memorial lunch’ on the day of the funeral to which she had invited the guests she and Des had
decided were most useful and influential. Gratifyingly when word got out that she was hosting such a lunch an invite became quite the prize.

Dressed in a Chanel LBD and her highest Louboutins, and wearing a single piece of jewellery – a gold Paloma Picasso necklace – she had welcomed her guests to view the funeral on
their enormous TV. Her maid had served Cristal champagne with beluga caviar, and Perugian white truffles, and, for afters, delectable petits fours from Duane Park Patisserie in Tribeca, an occasion
of sin Colette had happened upon when she had first moved to New York that served the most exquisite hand-made French delicacies.

That little social gathering had led to Des meeting the husband of one of her guests at a soirée they had been invited to, and a job offer at JPMorgan that had increased his earnings
eventually to the seven-figure sum he was now on. She had been over the moon when they had finally moved into a rental apartment on the Upper East Side. That was when Colette and Des knew they had
it made.

‘Sherman McCoy and Gordon Gekko have nothing on you, Des,’ his father-in-law had commented sardonically, walking under the elegant long green canopy at the entrance to their
building, to be admitted by Ryland, one of their liveried doormen, into the foyer of their posh new residence.

‘Hell, don’t say that,’ Des exclaimed as they glided silently upwards in the sparkling mirrored elevator. ‘Look what happened to them! Those “Masters of the
Universe” went belly up and I know people the likes of whom those characters were based upon, Frank, and I’m
not
one of them.’

‘Excellent,’ said his father-in-law wryly. ‘That’s good to hear. Colette and Jasmine are in safe hands.’

Frank and Jacqueline had flown over to New York to spend a long weekend with them in their new fifteenth-floor eyrie, with its parquet floors, Italian marble bathrooms,
‘European’-style kitchen and a view in the lounge, from a corner window, of ‘the Park’! It was still a view, corner window or not, Des had assured her proudly.

It was hard to believe that was almost five years ago, Colette sighed, as a boat drifted by on the aquamarine sea, red sails billowing in the trade winds. She reached out to take a sip of her
G&T, luxuriating in her solitude. She had been as ambitious and eager for success as Des in those early years. She had revelled in their glitzy lifestyle that often saw her change her outfit
five times a day to cover a coffee morning, lunch, launch, cocktail party and dinner she was regularly invited to.

But in the last year or so she had begun to weary of the constant treadmill their lifestyle subjected them to. Des worked practically seven days a week and was expected to be contactable by his
boss 24/7. The more money he made the more he wanted. Last year’s bonus always had to be topped.

She was constantly entertaining his clients or potential clients as well as their social set – at home, or in Nantucket during the summer months. Or co-hosting gala events with some of her
peers for this charity or that one. Colette exhaled deeply. The charity circuit was not for the faint-hearted. The events she’d attended or organized in Dublin and London had not prepared her
for the cut-throat viciousness that was a fundamental trait of the immaculately coiffed, face-lifted, plastic-surgery-enhanced, designer-dressed socialites who frequently reduced each other to
tears of fury and jealousy – in private of course – despite the air kisses and gushy greetings of endearment. The patrons of the New York charity scene made piranhas look tame, Colette
reflected glumly, taking a rather large slug of her cool, refreshing drink.

The breeze whispered against her face and she felt some of the tension flow out of her limbs. She hadn’t realized just how stressed she was until she was alone. Wilted, that was how she
felt, completely wilted from making small talk to people she hardly knew, and being constantly on the lookout to see that their every need was being met.

Chuck Freemont and his fat-thighed wife Dorothy had guzzled champagne from the minute they’d arrived on Friday evening, and had eaten their way through every expensive titbit put their
way, as well as polishing off an entire box of hand-made chocolate liqueurs that had been placed in their guest suite.

Shirley, stick-thin wife of Brandon van der Graffe, Des’s boss, had eaten nothing, except a few birdlike nibbles of lettuce and a couple of flakes of organic Irish salmon. She was
constantly disappearing into their suite and looked suspiciously glassy-eyed throughout the weekend. She was edgy, anxious and deeply unhappy, and it was well known that coke was her only comfort.
It was well known also that Brandon maintained an ultra glamorous young mistress in a pied-à-terre in Chelsea.

Des had looked a tad glassy-eyed, too, before the men had headed off to play golf and the women had settled to be massaged and beautified in their suites by a bevy of therapists Colette had
employed on the Saturday afternoon. That had gone down very well, she thought, satisfied. And tomorrow she was going to have one of the therapists come over and massage her from head to toe, and
give her a de luxe facial and to hell with the cost. She had worked her ass off this weekend being the perfect hostess. She deserved it.

Her taut, flat stomach gave a delicate little rumble and she realized she was hungry. She had had hardly any appetite for the rich food served by the chef who came with the villa, being far too
stressed to actually enjoy a meal. That was no bad thing. She had to keep a strict watch on her calorie intake, she was determined to maintain her superb figure. Despite her spinning and
cardiovascular workouts, and her jogs around the reservoir in Central Park, her tush was not as high and pert as it had once been.