Heartbreaker (2 page)

VI

After meeting in the hotel lobby we moved into the main lounge where a pianist was stroking the keys of the piano, and at first I took the lead in the conversation; I thought Richard would want an update on my fundraising activities, but when I sensed he was merely listening out of courtesy I broke off.

“Sorry!” I said. “Fundraisers get fixated on money, don’t they? Occupational hazard.”

“It was money I wanted to talk to you about.”

I was aware of the pianist playing “The Windmills of Your Mind” from
The Thomas Crown A fair
for all those people who had been young in the 1960s, but the music seemed to fade as my curiosity accelerated. Richard took another gulp of his Beefeater martini. Then he said: “I want to make a donation to your Appeal.”

At once I answered: “That would be more than generous since you’ve helped us so much in other ways,” but as I spoke I was wondering automatically how much he would give. A thousand pounds? Five hundred? By this time I had learnt to regard even small amounts with gratitude, but I hardly thought we were talking of a token fifty here.

Meanwhile Richard was saying: “Last weekend Bridget sat down to Sunday lunch and ate a slice of roast beef, a potato and a Brussels sprout—and there was no vomiting afterwards either. I don’t know what Nick Darrow’s secret is but he’s certainly producing some kind of miracle.”

“Nicholas hates the M-word. He’d just say all healing comes from God.”

“I can’t think in that kind of language. All I know is that Bridget’s better.” And before I could comment he added: “I saw Nick today. I’d made up my mind that I had to tell him, face to face, why I’d always refused to be involved in any family therapy, but at the last moment I just chickened out and offered him ten thousand instead.”

I nearly choked on my wine.
“Ten thousand pounds?”

“Glad you’re impressed. Nick wasn’t. He just said: ‘You don’t need to buy your way out of talking to me.’ ”

I was speechless.

“Brave, wasn’t he?” said Richard amused, seeing how horrified I was that Nicholas should risk the loss of a donation by doling out such an unpalatable response. “I admired that. In fact I admired it so much that I said: ‘Let’s make that twenty thousand—you’ve earned it.’ He then told me he’d say nothing to you for twenty-four hours in case I decided I’d been too impulsive, but I’m sitting here right now with you to say I’m not going to alter my decision.”

“Richard, this is truly magnificent of you—”

“Magnificently crazy, perhaps! God knows what Moira will say.”

“But won’t she be pleased?”

“She’ll just say I’m still refusing to take part in Bridget’s treatment.”

“But it’s no good participating if you don’t want to! Surely Moira realises that?”

“God knows what Moira realises,” he said with such an abrupt change of mood that I jumped. “We don’t talk at the moment. The whole marriage is totally messed up.”

After a moment I managed to say: “I’m sorry. It’s hell when a marriage goes wrong.”

“Yes, I knew you’d understand that after what you went through with Kim. Maybe that’s why I’ve come clean with you.”

“Have you told anyone else?”

“Good God, no! I don’t believe in whingeing about my private life— shut up and get on with it is my motto—” He broke off to down the remainder of his martini and signal the waiter for a refill “—but life’s so bloody difficult at the moment that it’s becoming almost impossible to get on with anything.”

“But what’s gone so wrong?”

“I’ve fallen in love. I’m out of my mind over a heartbreaker, Carta, and there’s no way the disaster can ever come right . . .”

VII

“It’s the reason why I can’t touch family therapy with a bargepole,” he said. “If I did, the situation would come out and I’m not prepared to talk about that kind of stuff in front of my daughter, I’m sorry but I’m not.”

I kept my voice calm. “Why are you so sure the affair has no future?”

“Heartbreakers only wind up breaking hearts.”

“Yes, yes, yes, but—”

“This one’s completely unsuitable for me.”

I restrained myself from pointing out that men junked their wives and ran off with unsuitable women every day. Instead I said with concern: “How long’s the affair been going on?”

“Six months. At first I was just entertained. I didn’t believe in the falling-in-love syndrome once one was past thirty. Then I woke up one morning and realised I was not only hooked but panting for my next fix.”

“Tell me more about her.”

“I can’t disclose any names. Some things should still stay secret if I know what’s good for me, so I’ll just use the initial G. Age: twenty-nine. Stunningly beautiful. Amazing in bed. Charming, well-educated, likes opera—and sailing. I keep a boat at Hamble, as you know, and when G and I went sailing together recently I don’t think I’ve ever known such happiness.”

“So just what makes her so unsuitable?”

“No interest in a monogamous relationship.”

“Oh God, an elderly adolescent! But maybe once she hits thirty she’ll start to grow up . . . What does she do?”

“Works for a company based in the Cayman Islands.”

“Financial services?”

The waiter arrived with our new round of drinks. When we were alone again Richard said: “There’s an office suite near the Stock Exchange, and that’s where we meet. Number forty-nine, Austin Friars . . . I always thought the number was significant since I
am
forty-nine—there seemed to be some sort of resonance there which . . . God, listen to me, I’m talking like a New Age nutter! No wonder I feel I’m being such a bloody fool.”

“What’s so bloody foolish about wanting to love and be loved?”

There was a pause. Richard looked away as if he had to struggle for self-control, but after a mouthful of the new martini he was able to say levelly: “Thanks. I needed to hear that. I’ve been feeling so humiliated.” “I just wish there was something I could do to help—”

“You’ve listened, you’ve sympathised, you’ve understood—that’s all help with a capital H.” On an impulse he added: “Look, can you have dinner with me? I’d really be grateful for the company—if I go back now to my flat I’ll just drink the night away.”

I accepted the invitation and went away to call Eric with the news that I would be late home.

VIII

Richard said no more about either his family or G during our dinner in the Grill Room. Instead we talked about the law, a world which we both knew so well although after my long absence from a high-profile firm I felt I was losing touch with the day-by-day mayhem in the City jungle. After dinner Richard drank brandy and smoked a cigar and announced he felt better.

I was relieved, but later, as my cab headed home towards the City, I found myself reviewing his story of unrewarding love with mounting incredulity. I hardly needed my legal training to tell me that his confession had as many holes in it as a slab of Swiss cheese.

IX

I surveyed the holes.

If the Slaney marriage was so unsatisfactory, why was it surviving in an age when divorce was readily available and carried no stigma? I could accept that Richard and Moira had originally stayed together for the sake of the children, but what was keeping Richard with her now that the children had left childhood behind? I could answer that question by saying: “Bridget’s illness,” but prolonged illness in a family often merely accelerated the dissolution of the marriage as the continuing stress dragged all the buried tensions to the surface. And perhaps this was indeed what had happened; perhaps Bridget’s illness had been the trigger that had pushed Richard into a mid-life crisis involving a City glamour-babe twenty years his junior.

But even if that were true, why was self-confident, successful Richard—a most unlikely person to be suffering from low self-esteem— locked into this new relationship which, by his own admission, was humiliating? He was an attractive man. He didn’t have to settle for an immature narcissist who puked at the words “commitment” and “monogamy.” I could see him trading in Moira for a younger woman; plenty of men his age slithered down this route when the age-factor began to bite, but what I couldn’t see was a situation where he messed around with someone who was only going to make him suffer. Maybe his major omission was to tell me he was a masochist, but no, he definitely wasn’t enjoying his pain.

I suddenly realised the cab had halted and I was home. I lived in a house on Wallside, one of the handful of houses in the City’s vast Barbican estate. The Barbican formed a thirty-eight-acre complex where residential accommodation, offices, schools and the famous Arts Centre were grouped around gardens, lakes and waterfalls. My house overlooked the church of St. Giles Cripplegate, which rose above the remnants of the City’s Roman wall.

Eric was lying on the living-room couch, shirt open to the navel, just as I had requested. When I came in he zapped the TV picture and sprang to his feet to greet me.

“No need to explain what happened,” he said. “I’ve already written the outline in my head. Richard confessed his undying love and begged you to run away with him to Ireland where you could both rediscover your Celtic roots in between starting up a business capable of being run on a PC.”

“Is this a horror novel?”

We laughed.

Eric Tucker was my “cher ami.” Translate that how you like. I was thirty-seven, he was a little older, and having known each other for over two years we now felt very much at ease together so long as we avoided the subject of money. Thanks to my past legal career and my husband’s will, I was a rich widow; Eric was a novelist who was hoping that his earnings would cross the five-figure threshold in the current tax year. To supplement his income he worked now and then as a temporary secretary, and it was in this role that he had met me at Curtis, Towers in the spring of 1990.

He too now lived in the Barbican, in one of the studio flats facing the gardens at the bottom of Thomas More House. Writers need a certain degree of solitude, and after my husband Kim died I had felt the need for solitude as well. However, Eric and I still managed to achieve a considerable amount of shared time—which explains why he was lolling around my house at a quarter to eleven that night, fanning himself with my television remote control and amusing me with his fantasy of my future with Richard.

“I wish I could tell you more about this evening,” I said, sinking down on the couch, “but the core of the conversation was confidential.”

“Bared his soul to you, did he?”

“No comment!”

“I love it when you play the austere lawyer with me, Ms. G . . .”

So geared was I to Richard’s problems that I even flinched at the sound of the letter G, but this particular G was short for Graham, my maiden name which I had always retained in my professional life.

“So he wines you and dines you at the Savoy,” Eric was saying, still amused. “Maybe I should be thankful that it was only his soul that he bared!”

“I—”

“Okay, I don’t seriously think he’s trying to make you, but there’s something off-key about Richard Slaney, and it’s always annoyed me that I’ve been unable to figure out what it is.”

I stared at him. “What’s making you suspicious?”

“It’s that glitzy social manner of the professional extrovert. He’s the wrong generation for a cocaine habit, so what’s driving him to hype up the gloss? Maybe he’s got some very unpleasant secret—and if you put that together with his daughter’s illness—”

“Your trouble,” I said severely, “is that you’ve got the kind of imagination which can instantly convert good guys into sleazeballs without any evidence. Knock it off!”

“Okay, I accept he’s not into incest, but something’s got to be going on, Carta. He’s a workaholic. He smokes like an industrial furnace. And he drinks too damn fast and too damn much.”

“You mean he’s a typical City high flyer.”

“I mean he could be right out there on the edge and teetering on the brink of a crack-up.”

I shook my head. “No way,” I said firmly. “Richard’s just not the type to have a spectacular nervous breakdown.”

But I felt more worried about him than ever.

X

The news reached me the next morning at the Appeal office. Here I was assisted by a volunteer, a youthful pensioner called Caroline, who held the fort in my absence, typed letters on a vintage electronic typewriter and kept me fuelled with strong coffee. I was just shoring up some details of the reception we were planning to hold at the hall of Richard’s City livery company, when Caroline took a call on the other line.

I saw her expression change. “Carta, it’s Jacqui from Curtis, Towers with some bad news about Richard Slaney.”

Guillotining the conversation I was having with the livery company’s clerk, I punched my way onto the other line. Jacqui, now Richard’s PA, had once worked for me, so I knew her well. “What’s happened?” I demanded, wasting no time on preliminaries, and heard her say unsteadily: “He had a coronary. It was just after he arrived at the office this morning, and—”

“Hang on.” I took a deep breath and listened to my heart banging. Then I demanded: “Is he dead?”

“No. He’s in intensive care at Barts. Carta—”

I started to feel numb as the shock hit me. I had to make a big effort to concentrate on what she was saying.

“—I would have called you with the news anyway, but I do also have an urgent question to ask. I’m trying to cancel his appointments, and I find he’s slipped a lunch-date into his desk diary without telling me— there are no details on the computer. Do you by any chance know who ‘G’ is? Could it be someone from the St. Benet’s Healing Centre?”

I was transfixed. “When are they supposed to meet?”

“Twelve-forty-five, but there’s no restaurant named and no contact number.”

“Leave it with me.” I knew there would be no rendezvous at a restaurant. Richard had said he always met G at an office suite in Austin Friars, and the number of the building was . . . I remembered him mentioning his age, remembered how I had noted he was the same age as Nicholas. Forty-nine was the magic number. Forty-nine, Austin Friars. To Jacqui I added: “I do know who this person is. I’ll make sure the date’s cancelled.”

Two hours later I was walking into Austin Friars.