No Comebacks

NO COMEBACKS

MARK SANDERSON LIKED WOMEN. For that matter he also liked Aberdeen Angus fillet steaks, medium rare with tossed heart-of-lettuce salad, and he consumed both with equal if passing enjoyment. If he ever felt a little peckish, he rang up the appropriate supplier and ordered what he needed to be sent round to his penthouse. He could afford it, for he was a millionaire several times over, and that was in pounds sterling, which even in these troubled times are each worth about two US dollars.

Like most rich and successful men, he had three lives: his public and professional life as the golden-boy tycoon of the City of London; his private life, which is not necessarily what it means, for some men like to lead a private life in a glare of publicity; and his secret life.

The first was regularly chronicled in the financial columns of the major newspapers and TV programmes. In the mid-sixties he had started work for a real-estate agent in the West End of London with little formal education but a brain like a razor for a lucrative property deal. Within two years he had learned the rules of the game and, more importantly, how to break them legally. At the age of twenty-three he clinched his first solo deal, a mere £10,000 profit inside twenty-four hours for a residential property in St John's Wood, and founded Hamilton Holdings which remained sixteen years later the pivot of his wealth. He named it after the first deal he clinched, for the house had been in Hamilton Terrace. It was the last sentimental thing he ever did. By the early seventies he was out of residential property with his first million pounds and into office-block development. By the mid-seventies he was worth close to £5 million and began to diversify. His Midas touch was as shrewd in finance, banking, chemicals and Mediterranean holiday resorts as it had been in St John's Wood. City editors reported it, people believed it and the shares of the ten-division conglomerate grouped under Hamilton Holdings rose steadily.

His private life could be found in the same newspapers a few pages earlier. A man with a Regent's Park penthouse, Elizabethan manor in Worcestershire, chateau in the Loire valley, villa at Cap d'Antibes, yacht, Lamborghini, Rolls Royce, and a seemingly endless succession of young and athletic starlets photographed in his company or envisaged in his four-metre circular bed, tends to have a compulsive fascination for the scribes of the William Hickey column. A mention in dispatches at the divorce hearing of a million-dollar film actress and a paternity suit from a dusky Miss World contender would have ruined him fifty years ago, but at the turn of this decade it merely proved, if proof were needed and nowadays apparently often is, that he could do it, which among the 'In' people of the West End of London is sufficiently remarkable to excite admiration. He was a much chronicled man.

His secret life was something else again, and could be summed up in one word — boredom. Mark Sanderson was bored out of his mind with the whole shooting match. The quip he had once coined — 'Whatever Mark wants Mark gets' — had become a sour joke. At thirty-nine he Was not bad-looking in a glowering, Brando sort of way, physically fit and lonely. He was aware he wanted someone, not hundreds of them, just someone, and children by her and a place in the country called home. He also knew he was extremely unlikely to find her, for he had a fan-idea of what he wanted and he had not met one in a decade. Like most rich philanderers, he would only be impressed by a woman who quite genuinely was not impressed by him, or at least the public him, the him of money and power and reputation. Unlike most rich philanderers he still retained enough capacity for self-analysis to admit this, at least to himself. To do so publicly would mean death by ridicule.

He was quite certain he would never meet her, when in the early summer he did. It was at a party in aid of some charity, the sort of thing where a boring time is had by all and the tiny balance left from the ticket money is sent to provide a bowl of milk in Bangladesh. She was across the room listening to a small fat man with a large cigar to compensate. She was listening with a calm half-smile that gave no indication whether she found the anecdote amusing, or the antics of the short man, who was trying to get an eyeful of her cleavage.

Sanderson drifted across and on the strength of a nodding acquaintance with the short film producer had himself introduced. Her name was Angela Summers, and the hand that took his was cool and long, with perfect nails. The other, holding what looked like a gin and tonic but turned out to be just tonic, bore a slim brand of gold on the third finger. Sanderson could not have cared less; married women were as easy as any others. He ousted the film producer and guided her elsewhere to talk. Physically she impressed him, which was unusual, and excited him, which was not.

Mrs Summers was tall and straight-backed, with a calm and handsome if not fashionably beautiful face. Her figure certainly was unfashionable in the lath-thin eighties — deep-bosomed, small-waisted, with wide hips and long legs. Her gleaming chestnut hair was coiled behind her head, and seemed to be healthy rather than expensive. She wore a simple white dress which improved a medium-gold suntan, no jewellery and only a touch of make-up round the eyes, which alone set her off from the other socialite women in the room. He put her age at thirty, and later learned it was thirty-two.

He assumed the suntan came from the usual winter skiing holiday extended into April or from a spring Caribbean cruise, meaning she or her husband had to have the money to live that way, which the other women in the room also had. He was wrong on both counts. He learned that she and her husband lived in a chalet on the coast of Spain on the basis of her husband's tiny earnings from books about birds and her own from teaching English.

For a moment he thought the dark hair and eyes, the carriage and the golden skin might mean she was Spanish by birth, but she was as English as he was. She told him she had come to visit her parents in the Midlands and a former school friend had suggested she spend a week in London before returning. She was easy to talk to. She didn't flatter him, which suited his mood, nor did she burst into peals of laughter if he said something mildly amusing.

'What do you think of our West End society?' he asked as they stood with backs to the wall watching the party.

'Probably not what I'm supposed to,' she replied thoughtfully.

'They're like a lot of parakeets in a jamjar,' he muttered savagely.

She raised an eyebrow. 'I thought Mark Sanderson was one of the pillars of it.' She was teasing him, quite gently but firmly.

'Do our doings penetrate down to Spain?' he asked.

'Even on the Costa Blanca we can get the Daily Express,' she answered deadpan.

'Including the life and times of Mark Sanderson?'

'Even those,' she said quietly.

'Are you impressed?'

'Should I be?'

'No.'

'Then I'm not.'

Her reply caused him a sense of relief. 'I'm glad,' he said, 'but may I ask why?'

She thought for a few moments. 'It's really rather phoney,' she said.

'Including me?'

He was glancing down at the gentle rise and fall of her breasts under the simple white cotton when she looked round at him.

'I don't know,' she said seriously. 'I suspect that given half a chance you might be quite a nice person.'

The reply caught him off balance.

'You could be wrong,' he snapped, but she just smiled tolerantly as to a fractious small boy.

Her friends came to reclaim her a few minutes later, gushed to Sanderson and prepared to leave. On the way to the lobby he whispered a request to take her out to dinner the following night. He had not asked in that way for years. She made no arch rejoinder about the dangers of being seen out with him, assuming he would take her where there were no photographers. She considered the request for a moment, then said, 'Yes, I think I'd like that.'

He thought about her all that night, ignoring the bony and hopeful model he had found at Annabel's in the small hours, lying awake, staring at the ceiling, his mind filled with a fantasy vision of gleaming chestnut hair on the pillow beside him and soft, golden skin under his touch. He was prepared to bet she slept calmly and quietly, as she seemed to do everything else. He moved his hand across the darkness to caress the model's bosom, but found only a diet-starved puppy's ear and an exaggerated gasp of feigned arousal. He went into the kitchen and brewed coffee, drinking it in the darkened sitting room. He was still sitting there looking out over the trees of the park when the sun rose over distant Wanstead marshes.

A week is not long to have an affair, but it can be enough to change a life, or two, or even three. The next evening he called for her and she came down to the car. She wore her hair piled high on top of her head, a white ruffled blouse with leg-of-mutton sleeves ending in a froth of lace at the wrists, a wide cinch belt and black maxi-skirt. The outfit gave her an old-fashioned Edwardian air that he found exciting because it was in contrast to his own private thoughts about her of the night before.

She talked simply but with intelligence and listened well when he talked about his business, which he seldom did with women. As the evening wore on he became aware that what he already felt for her was not a passing attraction, nor even simple lust. He admired her. She had an inner calmness, a self-composure, a serenity that rested and relaxed him.

He found himself talking to her more and more freely about things he usually kept to himself — his financial affairs, his boredom with the permissive society that he at once despised and used like a bird of prey. She seemed not so much to know as to understand, which is far more important in a woman than mere knowledge. They were still talking quietly at the corner table after midnight when the restaurant wanted to close. She declined in the nicest possible way to come up to his penthouse for a nightcap, which had not happened to him in years.

By the midweek he was admitting to himself that he was smitten like a seventeen-year-old boy. He asked her what her favourite perfume was, and she told him it was Miss Dior, of which she sometimes permitted herself a quarter ounce duty free on the plane. He sent a minion to Bond Street and that evening gave her the largest bottle in London. She accepted it with unaffected pleasure, and then immediately protested at the size of it.

'It's far too extravagant,' she told him.

He felt embarrassed. 'I wanted to give you something special,' he said.

'It must have cost a fortune,' she said severely.

'I really can afford it, you know.'

'That may be so, and it's very nice, but you mustn't go buying me things like that again. It's sheer extravagance,' she told him with finality.

He rang up his Worcestershire manor before the weekend and had the heating in the pool turned on, and on the Saturday they motored down for the day and swam, despite the chill May wind that forced him to have the sliding glass screens wheeled round three sides of the pool. She appeared from the dressing rooms in a one-piece swimsuit of white towelling and the sight of her took his breath away. She was, he told himself, a magnificent woman, in every sense.

Their last evening out was on the eve of her departure for Spain. In the darkness of the Rolls parked in a side street round the block from where she was staying they kissed for a long time, but when he tried to slip his hand down her frock she gently and firmly removed it and put it back in his lap.

He proposed to her that she leave her husband, divorce him and that they marry. Because he was evidently very serious she took the suggestion seriously, and shook her head.

'I couldn't do that,' she said.

'I love you. Not just passingly, but absolutely and completely. I'd do anything for you.'

She gazed forward through the windscreen at the darkened street. 'Yes, I think you do, Mark. We shouldn't have gone this far. I should have noticed earlier and stopped seeing you.'

'Do you love me? Even a little.'

'It's too early to say. I can't be rushed like that.'

'But could you love me? Now or ever?'

Again she had the womanly sense to take the question completely seriously.

'I think I could. Or rather, could have loved you. You're not anything like you and your reputation try to make you out to be. Underneath all the cynicism you're really rather vulnerable, and that's nice.'

'Then leave him and marry me.'

'I can't do that. I'm married to Archie and I can't leave him.'