Little White Lies (47 page)

‘Jesus Christ,’ Miranda mumbled, opening a bleary eye as he pushed his way aggressively beside her. ‘What have we here? I thought I’d have worn you out, old man like you?’

‘Be quiet, Miranda. That’s the
only
annoying thing about you.’

‘What is?’ she murmured sleepily.

‘You don’t know when to shut up.’

‘Tetchy, are we?’ She turned herself so that he lay with his cock pressed up against the small of her back. ‘Wonder what your wife says about early-morning bad humour.’

‘There you go again.’ He shoved a knee in between her still-warm thighs, forcing her legs apart. ‘Leave my wife out of this.’

‘Pity. I was rather looking forward to having something over you,’ she grinned into the pillow.

‘Miranda, the only thing I want of yours over me are your nether regions. Now, are you going to help me in, or do I have to force my way?’

‘Nether regions!’ Miranda giggled, shifting herself so that he slid into her almost immediately with practised ease.

He didn’t reply. That was another thing about Miranda. Ever fucking ready. He grinned as he began to move himself back and forth. Ever fucking ready. No pun intended either.

‘I don’t understand.’ Barry looked at the departing backs of the two men from Dubai. ‘I thought we were ready to sign?’ An hour and a half later, all traces of the night they’d spent together erased completely and utterly, they were sitting with Jeff and Barry at breakfast. Julian viciously speared the last grilled mushroom on his plate and chewed slowly, methodically, whilst Miranda smoothly answered Barry’s panicked questions.

‘Al-Rasool and Mansour are good guys,’ Miranda said, cutting her sliced melon into ever-finer slices. ‘Don’t underestimate them. But they’re not the money men.’

‘So who’s controlling the purse strings?’

‘The Al-Soueifs,’ she said simply. ‘Look, they’re the ruling family. QCI own sixty-five per cent, but make no mistake. Unless the sheikh’s signature is on the deal, nothing happens.’

‘So how do we
get
his signature on it?’ Frédéric asked, puzzled.

Miranda smiled and looked up at them all. ‘Simple. I’ll ask him. Nicely.’

Julian looked up in alarm. A sudden, disturbing image had flitted across his brow. ‘How?’ he barked suddenly.

‘What d’you mean, “how”?’

Julian cleared his throat, aware Jeff was looking at him closely. ‘I just meant it’s hellishly difficult to get access to them.’

‘Not for me. Soon as I get back tonight, I’ll ring him. He’ll take my call, don’t you worry about that.’

‘You’re amazing,’ Frédéric said, clearly impressed. ‘I’d heard you were good.’

‘The best,’ Miranda said calmly, with no trace of irony either. She took another sip of her black coffee and dabbed her lips delicately with her napkin. ‘Give me two days. I’ll get back to you with the outline proposal – and my fee, of course – and we can take it from there. Now, if you’ll excuse me, gentlemen, I’m meeting that group of men waiting by the door. I’m back in Dubai tonight, so I’m afraid I’ve rather packed you in.’ She got up, smoothed down the skirt of her dark-grey suit and held out a hand. The men scrambled to their feet. ‘Have a good morning,’ she said briskly, picking up her large, mannish-looking but exquisitely detailed handbag. The laptop was nestled securely inside it, Julian noticed. She turned to go.

At the far corner of the room, four Arab men waited patiently for her, their long white billowing robes a perfect contrast to the sombre granite and black interior of the hotel lobby. ‘She’s something else,’ Jeff murmured as all four men watched her cross the room.

‘You’ve known her quite a while, haven’t you?’ Barry asked Julian curiously.

‘A while,’ Julian admitted cautiously. The breakfast meeting had turned his earlier calm into something approaching near despondency. He shook his head faintly. He was acutely aware of Miranda’s reputation. It was the reason he’d brought her into the deal in the first place. He’d seen her in action before. She was good at the game. She ought to be. Doug – poor old, broke Doug – had been a master broker and she’d clearly learned much from him. Still, there was no reason for him to worry. He was every inch as good a dealmaker as Miranda. He watched her discreetly pull on a silk headscarf before greeting her next clients warmly. She clearly knew a thing or two about doing business with Arabs, he noticed. She shook hands with each, inclining her head respectfully but seating herself gracefully before they did. Every inch a woman, yet in no way deferential.

He shook his head again. As urbane and polished as he was, doing business with the patriarchs from Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Qatar and Jordan was difficult for him, a Jew. It was Lionel who’d first taught him to ‘put all of that aside’, as he called it. Lionel would do business with anyone, so long as they adhered to the gentlemanly rules of the game. He had little time for politics. ‘Ach, underneath it all we’re all the same,’ he always said. But Julian found it hard. If anything, he found the younger generation more difficult. There was something in the older men that he found he could more easily identify with. For all the ways in which they were different, they were also curiously alike. Polite, inscrutable, patient, cautious . . . much like him, in fact. The old ways appealed to him. The younger men, like Al-Rasool and Mansour, he found almost impossible to read. These were men who’d been to Harvard and Cambridge; they wore designer suits and expensive sunglasses and their mobiles seemed permanently clamped to their ears. Their casual, easy familiarity with Julian’s world only showed up his ineptness in theirs and it made him uneasy. Miranda seemed to have no such insecurities. Despite the fact that she was a woman – and a Western woman at that – she appeared to float easily between
all
their worlds. He’d even overheard her speaking Arabic at breakfast – somewhat accented, of course, but Arabic nonetheless. It was enough to put him off his omelette.

The whole trip had left him out of sorts, he realised, as he made his way upstairs to pack. He didn’t like the way Miranda had subtly taken charge of things, or the way she’d left his business associates speechless with admiration. And what of last night? They’d left the restaurant, leaving Jeff and Barry and the two Arabs to make their own way back to their rooms. He thought it had been his idea to have a nightcap on the rooftop bar, but perhaps it had been hers? He wasn’t sure if it was he who’d made the first move. Yes, they’d wound up in his room but perhaps that was what she’d wanted all along? Dammit. He’d woken up feeling so confident and strong, as though life couldn’t possibly get any better. He’d been absolutely sure they’d sign the deal over breakfast and he could go back to London, confident that there’d be another few million coming into the company coffers before long. And now? Now he was questioning everything. Miranda had them all eating out of her hand. It wasn’t quite what he’d had in mind.

TASH
London

Lyudmila was fast asleep by the time Tash let herself in, just after ten. She opened the front door cautiously, acutely aware she was several hours late. It was the third time in as many weeks that she’d left the office after nine thirty, too late to have dinner with Lyudmila, who ate around seven, if she ate at all.

She closed the front door and tiptoed into the flat. There was another scent overlaid on top of the usual smell of home, a faint sourness that made her wrinkle her nose. In the living room, the TV was on but soundlessly. Lyudmila lay sprawled out on the sofa, the remote still in her outstretched arm. She hung up her coat behind the door and looked around. The flat was a mess. There were dirty plates on the coffee table, the usual assortment of empty bottles and glasses left lying around, a new fur coat thrown carelessly over the back of the sofa. She sighed. She’d begged her mother to let Yvette, the woman who cleaned twice a week for her, come in and do the same. ‘At least once a week, Ma,’ she’d said only the other night. ‘Just to help with the dishes and things.’

‘What dishes? I live alone!’

‘I know you live alone, Ma. But everyone needs a cleaner. Even you.’

‘You saying I’m dirty? House not clean enough for you, now you rich girl?’

‘No, Ma, I’m not saying that. I’m just saying—’

‘
Nyet
. I don’t need cleaner. Here,
you
clean.’ She picked up a dishcloth and thrust it at Tash.

‘Ma—’

‘Always you
nezgovorchivaya
. Always.’ Tash held her tongue.

Now, surveying the aftermath of Lyudmila’s day, in all likelihood spent in front of the TV, she blew out her cheeks in frustration. How long had the plates on the coffee table been lying there? But to begin clearing the place up would mean waking Lyudmila and there was no telling what sort of mood she’d be in. She tiptoed out, eased off her own boots and walked into the tiny kitchen. Things weren’t much better in there. There were piles of plates in the sink, three or four empty wine bottles on the counter and countless saucers thick with cigarette butts. She sighed. Short of bringing Yvette in by force, there was nothing she could do. She opened the fridge, pulled out a half-full bottle of Chenin Blanc and picked a glass from the cupboard. She switched her phone to silent and walked back into the living room. She carefully pushed aside a few magazines and weeks-old newspapers from the chair opposite her snoring mother and sat down, leaning back against the cushions. She took a sip of wine. Considering it wasn’t a bottle she’d bought, it wasn’t bad. Across from her, Lyudmila made a funny kind of half-groan, half-sob, turning herself uncomfortably on the sofa, her face now thrust into the cushions. She groaned again, then sank back into sleep.

Tash closed her eyes. It had been a long day, not helped by her decision to break it off halfway through and spend most of the afternoon looking through Annick’s new wardrobe. She’d rushed from Annick’s new flat to Selfridges for her meeting with Henrietta Wheeldon, the hot new designer who’d agreed to a
[email protected]
exclusive, arriving twenty minutes late. Fortunately for her, Henrietta was also running late; by the time the two women met, it wasn’t clear who was waiting for whom. From there, she’d jumped in another cab to Bailey’s for a quick drinks meeting with the head of women’s fashion, the utterly charming Sally MacKenzie, who not only had a cold bottle of Dom Pérignon but some chocolate biscuits as well. She had two. Two bottles of champers and two chocolate biscuits – the sum total of her daily intake. No wonder she still looked like a rake, she thought to herself wryly as she closed her eyes and took another sip of her wine. Yes, it had been a long day, but worth it. For the first time since they’d started, designers were ringing
her
up, courting her instead of the other way round. She’d turned down three well-known fashion houses in the past week, much to Edith’s amusement.

She poured herself another glass. ‘Cheers,’ she whispered, raising it to herself. What an odd scene, she thought to herself. There she was, at the age of thirty-two, well on her way to making her first million, sitting alone in a darkened, dirty basement flat in Kensington drinking cheap white wine whilst her mother lay sleeping on the sofa opposite. She’d just installed her best friend in a beautiful little flat close to hers, the sort of flat her mother ought to be in if only she could get her to agree to the move. Just what
was
it that made her so damned stubborn?

She felt a painfully familiar ache, deep in her chest, as she looked at Lyudmila. She was the most maddeningly difficult woman on the damned planet. She’d do anything for her and Lyudmila knew it. She was happy to accept the generous monthly stipend that Tash discreetly arranged for her, but aside from shoes and clothes and her weekly trips to the salon on Beauchamp Place where she had her hair and nails done, she didn’t want much else. She refused outright to move. ‘Is my
home
,’ she said stubbornly. ‘No move.’ In desperation, Tash had once offered to move her into her flat. She’d looked at Tash as though she were crazy. ‘No move,’ she repeated firmly. ‘I
like
my home.’

Lyudmila’s relationship with money was impossible to fathom, Tash realised finally. It had something to do with her upbringing, of course, which Tash knew very little about. She was also exceedingly proud. It was an odd, uncomfortable equation, lots of pride, no money. Not that having money necessarily entitled one to be proud, Tash thought to herself in one of those sudden flashes of insight that always seemed to accompany a bottle of wine. But it certainly helped. What was the
point
of Lyudmila’s stupid insistence that the house didn’t need cleaning, or that the TV could do with being replaced? Lyudmila seemed to view
herself
– her own face, body, clothes – as the only thing worth trusting and therefore investing in. In that department, sadly, her own daughter had spectacularly let her down. It was as though she’d been slapped in the face twice. Once, by life –
zhizniu
, in Russian, which loosely translated to ‘fate’ – and then by Tash, who refused to honour the things that Lyudmila held sacred: her looks. Tash had always been determined to make it using a different set of criteria – her brains. Not that she had much choice, she thought to herself wryly, polishing off the last of the wine. If she’d done as Lyudmila wanted and tried to trade on her looks, she’d be homeless by now. She put the empty glass down on the floor and stood up. She’d never quite managed to balance tipsy insight with maudlin, hard-hitting truths. The last thing she felt like doing was sitting up until midnight, waiting for Lyudmila to wake up, going over things she’d rather not think about. She walked over to the sofa and laid an arm on Lyudmila’s.

‘Ma,’ she whispered, bending down close. ‘Wake up.’ She wrinkled her nose again. The smell she’d first noticed when she walked in was stronger now. She looked down the length of her mother’s slumbering form. Her legs were covered with a thin blanket that she must have yanked off her bed. She peeled it back slowly and then stood up, a hand going automatically to her mouth. Her mother had wet herself. The sour smell was urine. She swallowed. The dark stains appeared all down her cream woollen trousers.