Tall Poppies (21 page)

‘Hold it.’ Ron switched off Radio One and and waved Elizabeth over. ‘It’s the nobs’ answer to Anita Roddick! Good evening, milady, you’ve finally turned up.’

‘Nice to’see you too, boss,’ Elizabeth said, waving at the girls who all collapsed on the linoleum.

Ronnie came forwards and cast a critical eye over her body. Clearly he didn’t like what he saw.

‘Flex. Biceps, triceps, delts -‘ Expert stubby fingers probed her cotton-wool arms. ‘Quads, glutes -‘ Now he was pushing against her bottom, checking her out like one of Jack’s horses. Elizabeth blushed scarlet. She was as soft as a marshmallow.

Ronnie frowned thunderously. He grabbed her wrist and took her pulse.

‘You’re jokin’, aren’t ya? Seventy-five beats per minute? I’m sorry, miss, you’ll have to leave the gym. I’m expecting a World Champion athletd to show up any second.’

Elizabeth paled. Seventy-five? Just three months ago she’d been a steady fifty-eight. That was an athlete’s rate. Joe Blow’s average was eighty. Could she really have lost it that fast?

‘You can’t be serious.’

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‘I can be serious, darlin’. The question is, can you be?’ Ronnie threw a towel at her. ‘Warm up. You got five minutes. Then we’re gonna see just how bad the damage really is.’

Barely forty minutes later, Elizabeth was gasping for air. Her feet hurt, her calves were screaming. The clock on the wall told its own sorry tale: forty minutes, Christ, just a warm-up session normally, and here she was, totally worn out. Her sprint speed was still OK but her endurance was shot to pieces. Fifteen minutes of vicious squat thrusts had her in tears, .Ronnie screaming at her, the officials shaking their heads, Ronnie screaming at the officials. At least he’d sent them out of the room. Then Elizabeth had to endure the humiliation of a crunch routine and push-up routine in which Janet, Kate and Karen, three girls not usually in her league, outperformed her. easily.

‘Go and ‘ave your dinner,’ Ronnie barked at them eventually. ‘Not you, milady. You ain’t going anywhere. Drop and give me fifty.’

‘Fifty!’ Elizabeth gasped, wiping the trickles of sweat and dust out of her eyes. ‘I can’t manage fifteen.’

The coach settled himself on a gymnast’s mattress.

‘Fifty, Elizabeth. Hans had you on sixty for routine—’ ‘But that was—’

‘Back when you were a skier?’

Elizabeth responded to this .with such fury that she didn’t hear the gym door creak open again. She tried to ignore everything; the pain in her upper arms, the ache lancing over her back, Toyah Wilcox lisping on the radio, Ronnie’s cheerful hello to someone or other. Come on! She wasn’t so bad that she had to take this shit. Surely. The floor and her upper body. Fifteen, sixteen … now the lactic acid was burning, blazing fire around the weakness of her biceps … Another pair of boots had joined

Ronnie’s an inch from her nose. She was sweating, gasping, grunting like a stuck pig, willing herself through the red mist of exhaustion. Feeling like a tomato with the blood flooding her face. Twenty-two, twenty-three … but there was only so much that will power could do. Elizabeth felt failure hovering over her like a vulture. She groaned. Her body simply could not cash this cheque. With an agonised moan she swayed and collapsed, her cheek hitting the dusty linoleum, gasping for air.

‘We’ve got a lot of work to do,’ Ronnie said into the silence, ‘if you’re gonna go to the x98z Olympics. Let alone win ‘em.’

Elizabeth nodded. She didn’t have the breath to say anything.

‘Oh’ well.’ Her coach’s voice shifted back into a friendly, non-business mode. ‘Time for supper. You can catch up wi’ch the girls, Liz, you’ll enjoy that. And your mate here.’

A sudden sickening revelation hit Elizabeth as she stared at the second pair of boots. Cowboy. Chestnut leather. She’d seen those somewhere before.

She raised her reddened, sweating face from the dust and looked up into a pair of twinkling brown eyes. The neat suit and Gieves & Hawkes shirt could not conceal the perfect strength and proportion of his iron, obviously super-fit muscles.

‘Hi there,’ said Jack TaYlor.

Elizabeth scrubbed angrily at her hair in the pouring shower. The fragrance of lavender and hyme drifting up from her Floris conditioner, and the burning heat attacking her soreness, could not wipe away the sense of outrage. If she wasn’t so mad she’d be crying. Seventy five bpm, looking like shit, flabby, weak - couldn’t even do thirty reps on the floor, and Jack, bloody Jack Taylor, actually standing over her, watching her collapse!

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How could Ronnie do it to her? She was going to complain in the strongest language. Get the insufferable bastard thrown out. What was a Yank doing in the British training camp? What, oh God, if word of her condition leaked out? Heidi Laufen would have a very happy Christmas!

She switched off the water and started to dry her hair. Miserably she wished she’d packed a few more cosmetics. There was nothing in her bag but basic foundation, blusher and lipstick. Not much to counter the first impression Jack must have got. He was probably still laughing about it now. Vanessa and Ursula and co. had all looked like they’d spent the morning at Molton Brown. But God, she’d only packed for the girls!

Elizabeth dressed in her travelling outfit, a long, simple knitted jersey sheath from Sonia Rykiel. It was OK, but she had no jewels to dress it up with. The pale pink shade matched her lipstick and blusher and that was about all you could say. It was off the sh6ulder, and Elizabeth ‘˘˘ished it had sleeves. Dinner with four athletes and a coach, it was like advertising her wimpy delts.

She didn’t know which was the more humiliating - looking so ugly or looking so weak! Jack had been as polished and gorgeous as ever, and he was clearly still at his peak performance. He could race a downhill tomorrow and cruise it. Most likely he was laughing about it in the hotel bar, right now. With whatever bimbo he was here with.

That thought stopped her hairbrush in mid-stroke. She ” pounced on her telephone and stabbed out the number for Ronnie’s room.

‘Hi, it’s Elizabeth.’

‘Want to talk about it already? Look, Liz, it’s early days. No need to panic just yet—’

‘No, no.’ She cut him off. ‘Jack Taylor, Ronnie! What

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the hell’s he doing here? I want him gone by tomorrow morning!’

‘He’s here because I invited him. He’s going to be

doing a little pre-season training with us. It’s just fitness.’ ‘Fitness, hell! He could report back to Kim or Holly.’ ‘Jack’s hardly a spy. You didn’t exactly complain about training with him before.’ Ronnie’s voice was sharp. ‘In fact, it did you a lot of good, I seem to recall.’

‘He goes! I’m not having it!’ Elizabeth heard her own voice rise. She felt like stamping her feet. ‘I’m the World Champion, it’s my team—’

‘Hey! It’s the British team, Liz Savage.’

‘Bullshit!’ Some part of her mind told her to give in, but the shame and the anger wouldn’t let her stop. Karen, .Janet, who the luck were they? She was the only hope they’d got! ‘I’m the medallist here! I refuse to train with a foreigner! You get him out of here, Ronnie, or I’m filing an official complaint to the Olympic Council.’

‘All right, that’s enough.’ Davis’s surprise was as obvious as his anger. ‘I’m the gaffer, Elizabeth, simple as that. You say one more word about it and I’ll call in the OC myself. There’s a minimum fitness standard for all Olympic athletes, do you hear me? If I have you tested officially tomorrow, you’re scratched.’

Elizabeth took a deep breath, frozen to the spot. ‘You do exactly what you’re told, girl, or you wind up a “Where Are They Now” clue on Question of Sport. Jack stays. You come down to dinner in ten minutes, and we never had this conversation.’ Davis paused; his fury crackled down the line. ‘Your attitude needs as much work as your body. You got two weeks to get both in shape or believe me, milady, you are out.”

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Nina pulled her Golf GTi sharply to the right and parked neatly. It was the black darkness of early morning in December, but the Dragon car park was flooded with light. It gave her a little thrill to see her name stencilled in white against the wall. ‘Reserved, Miss Nina Roth, New Products.’ Last week she had passed her driving test first time; no trouble learning the English system, because she’d never had a car in the States.

The Golf had been the first tangible benefit. The day after that long, teasing dinner with Tony, Keith Sweeney from Personnel had summoned her and shown her a range of cars. Pick one. Any colour. Red is the most popular.

Nina thanked him and took a dark blue.

She smiled softly as. she left Sweeney’s office. Dinner

the night before had rewritten the rulebook around here. As she casually ran through chat about drugs, approvals, regulations, Nina made sure her body did all the real talking. Leaning into Tony, le .tting those hard eyes flicker over her bodice, her inviting smile and long legs. Tony Savage had started bringing up figures of his own. Money. Market share. Personal profits. Letting her see just how powerful and rich he really was. He was brash and obvious, but it had worked. Savage was magnetically sexual. Nina knew it was throwing her principles to the winds to flirt with Tony like that, but he was the boss, and it was what he wanted.

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She tried not to think about the fact that it was what she’d wanted too.

Tony’s kiss on her hand at the end of the night was slow, toying with her skin, his lips touching her hand just that fraction too long.

He wants me, Nina thought triumphantly.

She got out of the car and pressed a button on her keys. Central locking, a new invention. They were all over the place. Atari games consoles were cramming the West End toy stores, and yesterday someone at Phillips had shown them a flat, rounded metal disc, loudly proclaiming it to be the future of music. In television, video recorders were the new craze; now you could tape pictures as well as sound. Betacam and VHS were fighting it out as operating systems.

‘Buy VHS. And buy stock in VHS,’ Nina had told Tony last night.

He had smiled at her, a little patronisingly. ‘Betacam is clearly superior.’

She had ducked her head, letting her newly waved, softly curled hair skim her shoulders. ‘Yes, but VHS have more software available. Superior pictures don’t matter if you can’t watch any movies.’

Once more she had felt his eyes lock on hers as the finance director launched into his report. For two weeks they had been circling each other; Tony, with his diary crammed full of year-end speeches and Christmas dinners, hadn’t had any evenings free since he took her to dinner. Nina, pressing her advantage, put together a file on freelance drug researchers that she hoped would blow Frank Staunton away. It was clear to her that the current slimming drug was a bust. Effective, but not safe. If Dragon put a pill out there before it was ready, the company could be ruined. Like Betacam would be.

And there was more work to do. Nina knew Tony was chasing his holy grail, but what if that was a mirage? “

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Right here and now there was a lot more work to do. Inefficient customer response. Poorly advertised standard drugs that were losing market share. Dull stuff, maybe, but their bread and butter. Nina made sure she had that stuff covered too. It wouldn’t look good on her rsum if she spent all her time on a project that ended up a failure.

So Tony was busy and she was busy. But that was about to change.

The building was half-empty.-In the last week before the Christmas holiday, many staff had taken up holiday time and gone home. Balloons sprouted from computer monitors and gaudy paper-chains looped across ceilings. There was a definite sense of unreality. In the States, Nina thought wryly, you’d get a couple of cards stood on a desk, that was it. The Brits did it differently; x98x seemed already over for most of the drones sitting here making half-hearted calls. Partly that was because of Europe. The Swiss had packed up and gone home, retailers had placed Christmas orders long ago, research labs stocked with international teams were dispersing across the globe. Who would you call? Even the Stock Exchange was sluggish. The Brits were like a bunch of schoolchildren, watching the clock and waiting for the bell.

Nina threaded her way through Marketing. Lady Elizabeth’s desk was unoccupied except for a huge pile of cards and presents. The staff sucking up. Sports fans’ tributes, forwarded by the BBC. But Elizabeth wasn’t here to pick them up, she was off at training camp in Kent.

Nina paused. ‘This looks ridiculous.’

Dino Vincenza, senior marketing manager, looked up from his terminal. ‘Lady Elizabeth is very popular,’ he said silkily. ‘Many people like her skiing. And her ideas.’

Nina heard the rebuke just as he meant her to. Popular, unlike you. And you’re stamping on her. T.echnically

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Dino outranked her, but she was a corner in a more important department, and a favourite of the Robber Baron.

She reached forwards and picked up an envelope at random. It was very stiff, thick card inside creamy paper. An invitation. Nina flipped it over and found a gold coronet franked on the back. What was it? A New Year’s ball, Boxing Day sherry, a hunt meet somewhere? She didn’t look to see whose the crest was. It didn’t matter. It was another sign of Elizabeth’s world, of her class, her privilege. All the things that Nina could never get.

‘I’ll call Maria in the postal office. Get this cleared, and future mail routed to the castle. Itmay be Christmas, but

that’s no excuse for the place looking a dump.’

‘Of course,’ Dino said sweetly.

Nina stormed off to her area with her cheeks flaming. She hated “being mocked. Her own desk was fastidiously neat; since she was Jewish, nobody had sent her cards. Yesterday she had been pleased by this sign of respect. Now she found herself riddled with doubts. Was it respect? Or were they all snubbing her?

Come on, girl. Since when did you care what a bunch of limey assholes thought of you?