How It All Began (8 page)

Jeremy lies awake at night doing sums in his head, and composing letters to the shit of a lawyer whom Stella has hired. He is not lying in Marion’s arms as often as he would like because she seems to be rather distracted these days and often pleads weariness. She too is hit by the economic downturn, she explains; she does not have the bank on her back—yet—but she is concerned about the dearth of customers and commissions and is having to think about possible diversification. Oh, she is still very sweet and solicitous about all the business with Stella—as she should be, Jeremy sometimes thinks, after all it was her text message that triggered the whole thing—but the initial zest seems absent from their relationship, just when he could most do with it. He’s still not sure where it would be going, in the long-term, and he is desperate to sort things out with Stella, but he does need Marion, so calm and reassuring.

Jeremy does not want a divorce, period. No way. It simply is not necessary. Yes, he has committed adultery—that silly, biblical word—and he was stupid to have admitted as much, but he had felt that honesty was the best move, he hadn’t wanted to lie and then get
further embroiled later on. He had known that Stella would throw a wobbly, but hadn’t reckoned with this terminal reaction. That bloody sister has egged her on, no doubt, and now there is Stella’s solicitor, demanding that Jeremy produce one of his own so that the pair of them can go hammer and tongs and ratchet up their fees—nice little earner if you can get it.

Well, he’s not playing. He is not agreeing to be divorced. Can Stella divorce him one-sided, if he’s just lying there with all four paws in the air? What he needs is to be able to
get
to Stella, talk to her, make her see that this has all got out of hand, that he’s sorry, sorry, that she’s being taken for a ride by that bloodsucking solicitor, that her sister is a conniving bitch. But he can’t get near Stella. Her phone is always on answer, his letters are ignored, if he gets the girls on their mobiles they are just embarrassed and monosyllabic. He has been allowed back to the house once to collect some clothes and other stuff; Stella was not there, and a note required him to leave the keys on the hall table.

Jeremy thinks himself pretty well equipped to ride out circumstances. He is a natural optimist. When something tiresome turns up he doesn’t allow himself to get panic-stricken; there’s always a way out. Confront the situation and you can usually sort it. That double-dealing Pole was a shock, leaving him high and dry with the restoration project, but he had managed to pull the plug on it without too much loss—reneging on the rental for the workshop meant he’d better steer clear of that guy in Clapham, but who needs to frequent Clapham? It had been a bit of a shock to find that he couldn’t get any takers for Bickston Manor, when he had stripped it of the Jacobean staircase and all the other recyclable features; he had thought there were always people who wanted a nicely gutted subject to re-create from scratch. The place was pretty well a ruin when he’d snapped it up; obviously the thing was to strip it down properly, give someone the chance of a tabula rasa. People are so unimaginative. In the end he had to settle for a ridiculous amount from that demolition company—outrageous when you think of the opportunity lost, but
there you go. And the staircase didn’t fetch as much as he’d hoped. The bank had started snarling somewhat at that point, but Jeremy hadn’t let them get him down; he’d talked up various potential deals—very potential in some cases—and stayed confident, and sure enough within weeks he’d had a marvelous stroke of luck with an amazing junk yard in Somerset, dotty old fellow who didn’t know what he was sitting on. Jeremy bought the lot for some folding money and a few pints in the local pub. Whole stack of de Morgan tiles, covered in mud under a pile of sacking, fantastic wrought iron gates, a treasure trove. The old fellow had pretty well lost his marbles—high time he wound up the business, he was doing him a favor.

That’s the trick—to stay cool when things look nasty and with a bit of luck you win through. But this time he’s got the jitters. The threat of divorce terrifies him—it’s so climactic, so final. He doesn’t want to lose Stella, he’s
fond
of Stella, however trying she can be at times. He doesn’t want to lose that familiar, reassuring base—the house, the girls. Divorce would be bad for the girls, no question. And bad for him, definitely, from what he’s heard about it. Apparently everything you’ve got between you gets split in half, no matter who’s been paying for what, so Stella would get half the house and half his measly pension money and half of the cars and half the new Bang & Olufsen TV and half of the ride-on mower—despite the fact that it’s he who has been paying for the mortgage and pretty much everything else. That’s the way it is now, he’s heard, in which case it’s amazing that the divorce rate has been going up, you’d think most men would hang in there for all they were worth, unless of course it was one of those marriages in which the wife is doing nicely, in which case it’s the guy who is going to profit. Is that how they reckon the system is fair?

It wouldn’t be fair in this case, which is why Jeremy has to put up a furious resistance, fight off that solicitor, persist in trying to get through to Stella. Divorce would be ruin, not to put too fine a point on it. The bank chasing him is bad enough, but the bank plus divorce would clean him out. He might as well jack in the business, and set up as a house clearance firm with a van and a sleazy flat over a garage.

Marion’s lunch with George Harrington took place at a restaurant she knew to be pretty swank. Certainly the prices were that—she had a good look down the menu while he was attending to a call on his mobile, for which he was full of apologies: “Wretched things. Remember when one could be genuinely unavailable?”

She has checked out George Harrington, so far as possible. His financial organization was not known to her but is, she now sees, a bank—one of the smaller and more recherché banks. Like Barings, maybe—but that came to grief, didn’t it? So George Harrington, even if in a minor way, is one of those who have brought the world to its financial knees. He is an architect of the recession, to be reviled, and strictly speaking one should not be breaking bread with him. In fact George Harrington should not be breaking bread himself, let alone Brittany scallops with a bean, shallot and parmesan cream sauce or tian of smoked chicken with wasabi mayonnaise and pancetta crisps, but here he is, in a suit that Marion’s shrewd eye knows to be the best, evidently in good spirits, and with the maître d’ bowing and scraping.

And, it turned out over the crispy pork shoulder, celeriac puree, wild mushroom and poached egg and the grilled John Dory fillets, Niçoise salad, banana salsa and mandarin and elderflower foam, he is still buying property for renovation. Is he oblivious to the economic downturn, or foolhardy, or does he know something others do not know, including the Chancellor of the Exchequer who has warned this very morning that there will be no green shoots for many months to come? None of these, it seems. George Harrington is being perfectly logical; the market has almost certainly bottomed out (“Excuse me—such an inelegant term”) in which case this is the expedient thing to do. There are golden opportunities around for property investment, if you are equipped to take advantage, which George evidently is. For Marion, the word “bonus” floated between them, only to be batted away as an indelicate introduction; after all, who was she to question this man’s circumstances—a potential business partner whose personal arrangements were no concern of hers?

The lunch proceeded most agreeably. George Harrington’s latest purchase was a flat in Hampstead: “Lovely job—old building newly converted, bags of room, prime location, sort of place that gets snapped up by foreign executives here for a year or two. How would you kit out a property like that?”

Marion asked a few quick questions, offered a selection of ideas—modernist, traditional, or a take on her own signature style. She suggested that he visit her showroom to get an idea of what she did; George whipped out a diary.

Eventually, over coffee, some terms were proposed, which Marion found eminently acceptable, though not without a tweak or two of her own—always be businesslike, never let people think they can roll you over. George listened and nodded: “Absolutely . . . I appreciate that . . .” He pushed his cup aside: “Well, I think we’ve got a deal—Marion, if I may. Such a relief it’ll be, to forget about curtains and kitchen fittings. Give my secretary a ring, to arrange yourself an inspection visit, and we’ve fixed a date for me to see your own place.”

The flat was in the final stages of conversion, apparently, and not much more than an empty shell, which is just what Marion liked. She would use her own subcontractors for the various installations. It only remained for George to decide on what style he felt would most appeal to some American fund manager or German diplomat. The final sum for the spend would be agreed when George had made his decision. Marion’s own commission would nicely stem her looming cash-flow problem; she reflected on this with satisfaction as she washed her hands in the restaurant’s luxuriant Ladies, which had some choice effects, she noted—neat, those light fittings, where do they come from? She was unable to enter a room without assessing it and was tiresomely aware of this.

When she rejoined George he was busy once more on his mobile but quickly put it away: “I can’t wait to see what you do with the flat. I don’t think minimalist, for Hampstead, do you? Countrified but smart, maybe? Anyway, we can discuss and then I shall leave it to you. I’m off to my place in Greece for a week but after that let’s talk.”

They parted outside the restaurant. Marion saw him flag down a
taxi. She walked to the bus stop, thinking about money. She was parsimonious about taxis these days, and about other things, indeed. No holiday this year; no new clothes except essentials. But money is such an elusive concept. It serves up something concrete—the taxi, the cashmere sweater, the week in Corfu—but is also an absence, vanished behind the figures on a screen, the columns on a page, the immense piles and pages of figures that have announced a global crisis and ravaged millions of lives. George Harrington comes from the world of figures; he presumably thinks differently about money. It is not, for him, the taxi or the new pair of shoes, though it has presumably provided these, along with the place in Greece and the flat in Hampstead and the Clerkenwell studio apartment and the penthouse by the Thames—the property portfolio that is his hobby, it seems, and that he sees as a foray into creativity. It has delivered all this, but serious money, for him, is that evanescent stuff at which he stares on his screen, and to which he responds in a way that is quite mysterious to Marion. She understands figures—oh yes, quite well enough to run a small business without, so far, going bust, but she realizes that this is a far cry from the relationship that George Harrington has, and others like him. She has a vague idea of what is being done—money is being moved around, all the time, second by second, great invisible intangible mountains of the stuff, and these strange notional movements drive the world’s economies and, when they go awry, can rock individual lives.

She took the bus back, spending a notional amount from her Oyster card, stopped off at the corner shop, where she handed over real cash, and arrived home. No prospective clients had phoned or e-mailed. The woman for whom she was currently doing a small job had left a message disliking all the curtain samples that Marion had provided. Marion thought with relish of George Harrington, who would presumably give her a brief and leave her to it. Women clients were always the worst; sometimes she thought she hated women.

There was also a message from Jeremy, a touch reproachful, saying hadn’t she had his text, or was her mobile on the blink? She had indeed had his text, on the bus, and had not replied. He wanted to come around this evening; Marion had been planning soup and a salad in front of
the telly. If Jeremy came she would feel she had to cook a proper meal, and the evening of privacy and relaxation would be gone.

When you prefer soup and the telly to a few hours with your lover there is something not quite right. Marion confronted this truth, while wondering what to say to Jeremy. Yes, so far as she was concerned the affair had lost its panache. She still liked him, still enjoyed his company, sex was indeed most welcome; but an element of take it or leave it had crept in. She was growing more than a little tired of hearing about his struggle to access the tiresome wife, and the aggressive letters from the solicitor. And where his financial headaches were concerned she felt entitled to point out that her own were just as bad, except that for the most part she did not. In Marion’s family it had been considered bad form to talk about money. Admittedly they hadn’t much had to worry about it, if ever. Her mother thought you just took it out of the bank, when needed. She had never really got it into her head that Marion’s business was such, that Marion earned a living; she saw it as “such fun for Marion, so clever of her.”

A smidgeon of this attitude had perhaps rubbed off onto Marion. Certainly, she found too much discussion of financial problems both tedious and rather ill-mannered. She did not want to hear much more about Jeremy’s skirmishes with the bank, amusing as he could sometimes be. And she definitely did not want to get drawn further into his despondent analysis of what divorce would mean, how he would be ruined, effectively, left with half a house and half a car and half this and half that, and he was not making any attempt to be amusing about this, no way.

She felt that she was being sucked into things. The implication was that it was after all partly her fault. For heaven’s sake! Jeremy is grown up; he knew what he was doing. The wife is of course being impossible, but that is nothing to do with Marion. People are answerable for their own wives; Jeremy presumably knew Stella’s potential for combustion. No, Marion is not going to be drawn into some situation in which she is allied with Jeremy against the manic Stella. Jeremy is on his own where his wife is concerned. Marion will listen with sympathy, offer advice maybe, when appropriate, but that is all.