The Decision (14 page)

‘Yes.’ God. Not Juliet. Not at the Establishment. She’d be such an embarrassment, she’d—

‘Right. Well, they’re free. So – how about it?’

‘It sounds wonderful,’ said Eliza. ‘Thank you very much, Jeremy, I’ll really look forward to it.’

She put the phone down and realised her hand was shaking slightly. God. Jeremy Northcott. Rich, handsome, charming Jeremy Northcott. He’d asked her out. He’d actually – actually asked her out.

She was gazing out of the window, when Lindy came into her office.

‘What did
The Times
say about those coats?’

‘What coats?’

‘Eliza! The grey flannel coats. I really need to know.’

‘Oh – sorry, Lindy. Yes. I was just going to ring them. I’ll – I’ll do it now.’

‘OK.’ Lindy looked mildly irritated and went out, shutting the door a bit too sharply.

This won’t do Eliza. This will not do. Pull yourself together. He’s only a man.

Now what on earth could she wear on Friday?

‘I’ve got some news,’ said Matt.

‘Oh, yes,’ Scarlett smiled at him. They’d met – at his request – in one of the new Italian restaurants he liked so much. ‘What’s that, then?’

‘I’m setting up in business on my own.’

‘Really? Matt, that is exciting …’

‘I know. I can’t quite believe it myself. But me and a mate, Jim Simmonds he’s called, known as Jimbo, he’s a negotiator same as me, we just decided we could make a go of it. He’s my age, well, year older maybe, been in the game the same length of time, he did his National Service in the navy, been with a firm a bit bigger than Barlows. You’d like him, you really would.’

‘How’d you meet him?’

‘Oh, we meet all the time, us negotiators, we go to the same pubs and restaurants, we all know what the others are up to, who our clients are, it’s the name of the game. We’ve pooled resources, Jimbo and I, a lot. Anyway we was having a drink the other night and Jimbo said he reckoned we were doing too well for the old men, got to start doing well for ourselves. I wasn’t sure at first, to be honest, but we worked out if we got just one client, then that plus what we might be able to persuade the bank to lend us could keep us going for a bit.’

‘Sounds good so far.’

‘Yeah. And then right out the blue one day, client of mine, Mike Robertson, took me out for a drink and told me I was wasting my talents working for Barlow and Stein, and if I ever thought of going it alone, he could put a bit of business my way.’ Matt was very impressed by Mike Robertson. He had bought a dizzying number of broken-down shops and buildings as close to bomb sites as he could manage and then sat on them, pleased if they were let, but not bothered if they weren’t. There was a roaring trade going on in bomb sites. National Car Parks bought them up to convert them – and could be forced to pay a great deal more for adjacent buildings than they were actually worth.

Robertson also put up a fair few buildings of his own, and it was for those that Matt was briefed to find him tenants.

‘So that’s about the size of it, Scarlett. He’s backing us and simply because we can say he’s a client we’ve managed to get an overdraft. Not much, mind, only a thousand, but it’s enough to pay ourselves and a girl for a year, we reckon, and he’s also letting us use a room in one of his developments dirt cheap. He says he likes to see young people given a chance, that he got lucky and so should we. So – all pretty good really.’

‘It sounds incredible,’ said Scarlett, ‘really, really exciting.’

‘Well, I’m glad you think so. Mum and Dad kept going on about risking everything and giving up a good job, all that rubbish.’

‘It’s just that they don’t understand, Matt. Their generation, and their parents and their grandparents, they were stuck with whatever job they’d got and grateful for it. You’ve got to remember Grandpa Shaw was out of work for years in the Thirties, on the dole, it was hideous, a job was something you fought for, didn’t just take for granted. Mum’s always telling people how Mr Barlow’s promoted you or given you a rise or whatever. It frightens them, seeing you throw that away. Anyway, I think it sounds fantastic. And I’m very, very proud of you. When are you open for business?’

‘Well, almost straight away,’ said Matt. ‘Mr Barlow said he didn’t want us pinching any more of his clients, and Jim’s boss said the same.’

‘But they were quite happy really?’

‘Yeah. It’s that sort of business, Scarlett, every man for himself and that’s understood.’

‘I see. And Jimbo, what’s he like?’

‘You’d like him. He’s Jewish, an awful lot of people in the business are of course, very positive, bit pushy, I suppose you could say—’

‘I like pushy people,’ said Scarlett, ‘they get things done.’

‘Yeah, well, Jim certainly does. The thing you’d really notice about him is he’s really, really tall, six foot four, makes me look like a real little runt, and very skinny. He’s still living at home, like I am, fed up with not making any real money—’

‘Girlfriend?’

‘Not really. There’s some girl his family want him to marry but he’s just not interested. He’s like me, married to the job at the moment … nice bracelet, Scarlett,’ he said, suddenly reaching for her hand, pulling it towards him. ‘Really pretty. All those charms. Where d’you get that then?’

‘Oh – second-hand jeweller,’ said Scarlett vaguely, ‘you know how good I am at finding stuff like this.’

She was acquiring quite a bit of beautiful jewellery. David was very good at presents. The bracelet was her favourite – it had also been the first, and every time she saw him he gave her a new charm for it. The most recent had been a spinning disc that spelt out ‘I love you’.

‘Because I do,’ he said.

‘David!’ she had said warningly, as he took the bracelet from her wrist with a promise to return it next day, having had the charm fitted. ‘David, you mustn’t say things like that.’

‘But my darling, I do. We may only have met a few times, but I feel I have always known you. I did from the very beginning, the very first time.’

‘Well, that’s nonsense,’ she said, hearing the rather feeble note in her own voice; for had she not experienced precisely the same sensation herself, the feeling that she had found whatever and whoever she was looking for, had tumbled most happily and shockingly into love.

And it was shocking: that she, Scarlett Shaw, most down-to-earth and hard-headed of creatures, should be so easily and swiftly stripped of her common sense, should find her feet removed from the ground and, perhaps most shocking of all, her sense of right and wrong knocked inside out and back to front. In what way was it possible that she could disregard the presence in his life of a wife of more than a dozen years and two much-loved children? And even as she had lain in his bed, tenderly and sweetly seduced, feeling the first tentative shoots of desire move inevitably into the disruption of brilliant, spreading, explosive orgasm, even as he entered her again and yet again, through a long, savagely inexhaustible night, as they fell finally asleep and then awoke to find one another stirring, smiling, reaching yet again, disturbed by a new unsatisfied need: right through that first long night, she was achingly aware of those three people, and indeed of a fourth, sleeping not so far along the corridor of the hotel, the matriarch of his family, who had brought them so innocently and so dangerously together, and she swore to herself that this was a brief, deranged yielding to temptation that would not be repeated, however strongly it might assert itself.

And how little she knew of herself, the strong-willed, self-controlled Scarlett who did what she and not others wanted; for the next time he came to London, only three weeks later, and this time without his mother, and sought her out with presents – a Tiffany necklace, a Dior scarf, as well as the bracelet from Garrard’s, things she would never in a hundred years have dreamed of possessing – presents and honeyed words and his own desperate need of her, she resisted for very little more than a moment, and then gave in to him laughingly, joyously, helplessly.

They talked for many hours, that second visit – coinciding most happily with three days of leave – as much as they made love, indeed: of his need for her, his lack of happiness, his sense that at last he had found what he wanted in life.

He pleased her in many more ways than one. He was witty, which took the edge off his sentimentality; he was intuitive, and was able to disabuse her of any doubts and suspicions, almost before she was aware of them herself; he was generous, not just with gifts, which was easy for him, for he was, she discovered, extremely wealthy, but with himself, encouraging her to talk about herself, to lead her into new discoveries and interests, willing to do things she wanted even if he patently didn’t. Thus, even that second weekend, he found himself walking in the rain, ‘No, we will not go back to the car, this is what life in England is all about,’ sitting in smoky country pubs, skating round and round Richmond Ice Rink, ‘this was my biggest treat when I was a little girl, always on my birthday we came here,’ laughing bravely and dutifully when he fell over.

He could not get enough of her past, of talk of her family, of the war years in London, even of her career as a hairdresser, and loved her stories of difficult passengers, of turbulent flights, of her sister stewardesses, ‘I’ve never really known a working girl before.’

In short, being with him was complete and absolute pleasure; she felt cared for, amused, interested, satisfied in every way. She told him so.

‘Every way?’

‘Every way,’ she said laughing.

‘That is so lovely for me,’ he said, his green eyes very serious suddenly, ‘you have no idea, after years of being tolerated in bed, not even tolerated for the most part, rebuffed, I find myself considered desirable again – and an old man, like me, I cannot believe it.’

‘Hardly old,’ she said firmly, but of course it was true, he was forty-four, twenty years older than she was, and she could only disregard the fact because he was in superb shape, slim and muscly, with a sportsman’s body, honed through three decades of tennis, golf and squash. And he dressed so well: that was something else. He wore beautiful linen and light wool suits, glorious shirts from Brooks Brothers in finest lawn and twill and Madras cotton, cashmere sweaters, handmade shoes or tasselled loafers – he just always looked wonderful.

She was intrigued by the fact that his family were clearly posh: he spoke of nannies, gardeners, of being away at school, of summer houses on the East Coast.

‘I thought the whole point of being American was that everyone was the same, it was classless,’ she said almost plaintively one day when he had tried to explain the concept of ‘preppy’ to her, and he had laughed.

‘My darling Scarlett, the American is every bit as snobby as the Englishman, possibly more, always stressing how far back his family goes, denying anything remotely nouveau, fighting to get into the right schools and colleges, launching debutantes into society – it’s all just the same. You have to be Old Money, with capital letters, or you might as well not have any at all.’

‘Did you say debutantes!’ exclaimed Scarlett. ‘Surely not!’

‘Oh yes. There are balls where it is de rigueur to be seen, where girls in white dresses are led in by their parents to find rich and suitable young men—’

‘Your wife then,’ said Scarlett, ‘is she very – very old money?’

‘I suppose so, yes,’ said David, with a sigh. ‘But please can we not talk about her?’

‘All right. But you know I’m not, don’t you? I’ve made my own way and I’m proud of it. And I know underneath I’m not really up there at all.’

‘To me you are, my darling. Very, very high up there. Beautiful, amusing, chic, and sexy. What more could anyone possibly ask? Now how about we go upstairs and you take some of those – no, all of those – chic clothes off. And I show you how important you are to me.’

He was irresistible: absolutely irresistible. Even while she could see, and with hideous clarity, how stupid she was being, that was what she found him. And – what harm were they doing, after all? Making each other happy. Nothing worse than that.

The evening at the Establishment hadn’t begun too well; Eliza, Charles and Juliet had arrived together to find a message from Jeremy.

‘Mr Northcott says to tell you, he’s very sorry,’ said the girl on the reception desk, ‘but he’s been held up in a meeting. He’s ordered a bottle of champagne for you, and there’s a table reserved. He’ll be about half an hour.’

‘Wonderful,’ said Charles, taking Juliet’s hand, ‘come along darling. Eliza?’

‘Yes, coming.’

Forty minutes later, there was still no sign of Jeremy.

‘I think it’s rather extraordinary, I must say,’ said Juliet. She often used this phrase, as if it conferred some kind of originality on what she was saying. ‘Quite rude, really. I mean, why make an arrangement if you’re not going to keep it. And it’s very late for a work meeting, surely? Half past nine.’

‘Not at all,’ said Eliza briskly. ‘I know exactly what those sort of advertising meetings are like. Complete nightmare. They end when the client wants them to.’

‘Well, all I can say is, I’m glad I’m not in that business,’ said Juliet.

As if she would be, Eliza thought. She looked at Charles, who was clearly mildly embarrassed, anxious himself at the turn the evening was taking. He couldn’t stand upsets of any sort.