The Money Makers (40 page)

The most annoying thing was that Hatherleigh was going to say yes.

Then Zack spoke again. He didn’t even know what he was going to say before he said it.

‘This deal could transform Hatherleigh Pacific. It won’t be our skill that does it. It’ll be your own management talent and energy. But we do offer you a key to the door. And ...’ Zack paused, then continued, ‘and, hell, Jack, it would be fun, wouldn’t it?’

Phyllis Wang, Hal Gillingham, Scottie and Zhao were dumbfounded. You don’t say that. You just don’t talk about launching a one point four billion dollar bid for fun. This young man had overstepped the mark and would surely be bellowed out of the door. All eyes were on Lord Hatherleigh. It was for him to pass sentence.

Hatherleigh too stared at Zack. It was an amazing thing to say. In all his years of business, he’d never heard anything like it.

‘Fun?’ he said. ‘Fun?’ He continued to stare, and as he did so, his thin aristocratic features warmed slowly into a broad smile. ‘Yes, dammit, it will be fun.’

8

Blind and impenetrable stood the fortress. Off limestone ramparts, sunshine glittered and blazed. Beneath the ancient gate-tower, George stood drenched in clear autumnal light.

His hired two-seater Mercedes convertible was parked amidst a motley collection of Renault Clios, Fiat Puntas, and other small cars. George couldn’t fathom it. Why would one of the most eminent families in France - Europe, indeed - put up with the discomfort of living in this forbidding castle? Where were the luxury cars, the great entrance, the gardens and the peacocks?

Still, his not to reason why, all he wanted was to track down his quarry after more than two months of fruitless pursuit. He pushed at the picket gate set inside the huge mediaeval doors and looked around for help. Inside, an old man in overalls was talking with a laundrywoman. A nasty, vicious little dog, ugly as a gargoyle, leaped to the end of its chain, barking and snapping.

‘Excusez-moi,’
said George, quickly coming to an end of his French vocabulary, ‘I’m looking for -er- Kiki.’ He used her nickname, as he had never mastered the correct way to pronounce her name and title. ‘I’m expected,’ he added lamely.

The man and woman looked at George, at his Armani suit and designer sunglasses and through the picket gate at his shiny black sports car.

‘ Kelso. Tais-toi!’

The man shouted at the dog to be quiet, but in vain. Then he spoke to George in rapid peasant French, waving his hands and shouting to drown out the barking dog. George understood nothing.

Finally, the old man changed his approach. He searched around for a word and said, ‘Come.’ The two of them crossed the courtyard in the shadow of the keep, then entered a hallway lined with bits of armour and rusting weapons. The man tapped a rough wooden bench running the length of one wall.
‘Restez la.
Stay.’

George stayed. The cool was welcome after the sun. He leaned carefully against the wall behind, hoping its rough plaster wouldn’t come off on his new suit. Its careful cut struggled to hide George’s increasingly corpulent figure. Despite the cool he was sweating. After a wait of ten minutes or more, a neat young man slipped through a doorway at the end of the hall and approached.

‘Good morning. I understand that you have business with the family,’ he said, in French-accented but immaculate English.

‘Yes, please, I’m here to see Kiki. She’s expecting me. I’m George Gradley.’

The neat young man hesitated briefly. He was wondering whether to correct George’s use of Kiki’s nickname, but decided against.

‘Yes. I believe she was expecting you an hour or so ago.’ That was true enough. George had got horribly lost and ended up crawling slowly behind a tractor which was also headed for the castle.

‘I apologise that there was nobody to receive you,’ said the neat young man without apologising. ‘The old castle is for staff only. Guests of the family generally prefer to arrive at the north entrance.’

As he spoke, he escorted George rapidly down a series of dismal corridors until they arrived at a pair of nail­ studded oak doors. They went through and emerged into a high light-painted hallway, with bright sunlight streaming through large and airy windows. The colours were pale pastels. The curtains were silk. Two uniformed maids were at work polishing a Louis Quinze table on which stood a pretty porcelain bowl. The neat young man lifted the lid to reveal a heap of chocolates and popped one into his mouth.

On they went. Up marble staircases, down more duck­egg blue corridors, eventually coming to a halt outside a pair of white and gilt double doors. The neat young man knocked out of politeness but swept on through. There, in the canary yellow room with its blue upholstered furniture and sky-painted ceiling, its tall glass doors flung open to welcome the sunshine and air from the gardens beyond, was Kiki.

She was dressed in pale olive linen trousers and a cream cotton blouse. She had been practising the flute and laid it aside as George entered.

‘Georges, how nice to see you. Charles-Henri, thank you so much for rescuing him from the castle. I always get so lost in there. It gives me the terrors. And you will have his car brought round to the front, please?’ Thus thanked and dismissed, the neat young man left. ‘But you are a beast for being so late, Georges. There was nothing for it but to play my flute and that is so tiring, but so beautiful too, I suppose, so perhaps it’s good.’

As she chattered, they kissed as friends kiss, and Kiki found George a seat amongst her litter of sheet music.

‘It’s really nice to see you again, Kiki. I’ve been looking for you for ages.’

‘I know you have, you bad man. I had to run away to my friend Maria in Argentina. I felt like a fox that you English enjoy to hunt. I only came home because I thought “Poor Georges, he wants to see me very much, so I suppose I should see him, even though I have a funny feeling about it,” but then of course you come so very late, so I have to play the flute until my lips are blue and I have to send poor Charles­ Henri to rescue you from the dungeons over there.’ She waved her hand vaguely enough that the old castle was probably included somewhere in the course of its long sweep.

‘Kiki, why did you run from me?’ asked George, as gently as he could.

‘Oh, Georges, what have you come to tell me, that you have left your precious factory for so long?’

George’s question had come first, but Kiki was the lady, so her question took priority. George knew what he wanted to say and cleared his throat. He spoke softly.

‘Kiki, I love you. I have loved you as long as I have known you. When you kissed me last year at my flat, I knew that I couldn’t stop loving you. When you came to the factory, I knew I couldn’t be happy without you. So here I am.’

Awkwardly stooping on one knee, amidst the sheet music and the breeze from the open doors, George took out a small box from his pocket. He withdrew a simple diamond ring; a ring that had cost him thirty thousand pounds and maybe his factory as well.

‘Kiki, will you make me the happiest man alive and agree to marry me?’

He looked up. Kiki’s face was wet with tears. Her wilfully unserious manner was gone, but, amid her tears, her head was shaking. Wordlessly, she plucked at his sleeve and drew him outside to a terrace hung at either end with a long gilt-framed mirror. In the gardens beneath, peacocks called amongst the fountains and gardeners fussed over topiary and roses.

‘Georges, I think you are the kindest, nicest man I know, and I am very fond of you, truly. But look at us. We are too different. If you marry me, you would hate me before we had spent a night together, and that would be too horrible.’

George stood in front of the mirror and stared. The Armani suit couldn’t disguise the truth. He was his father’s son. He had his father’s bristling ginger hair, his father’s piggy eyes, his father’s heavy build. Of Yorkshire clay was George Gradley built and all the designers in the world would never be able to hide it.

And Kiki? He looked at her reflection next to his. She was trembling with emotion, as though the breeze from the garden was softly shaking her. She was all the things he was not. She was light, fragile, beautiful, rich. He was heavy, plain, thick-skinned, penniless. It was unimaginable that she should ever leave this world of hers, her golden cage. Gissings, Yorkshire, the factory would suffocate her in seconds. Neither could George imagine moving into her world. Christ, he hadn’t even been able to find her front door. How would he cope living with her?

He looked for a long time. Kiki was the most desirable woman in the world, but she would be no wife for him. He nodded miserably.

‘You’re right, Kiki. I wish you weren’t, but you are.’

‘My dearest Georges. I am too fond of you. That was why I had to run away to Argentina. I couldn’t bear to say no.’

She let him embrace her. They hugged for a long time. Eventually, she detached herself gently and kissed him, letting him dab clumsily at her tears with his handkerchief. When he’d finished, she silently completed the job with her own tiny scrap of cotton and lace.

‘Georges, first you make me late and make me play my flute, and then you come and make me cry and spoil my make-up and just before lunch so Papa will want to know what’s wrong and I shall have to lie to him and I cannot lie to Papa, because he always knows,’ she chided, but her heart wasn’t in it. She invited him to stay to lunch. For a moment George was tempted, but in the end he refrained.

‘Thanks, Kiki, but I’d only be out of place. Besides, I’d best be getting back. My factory’s probably missing me.’

‘Tu as raison,
Georges. You are right. Oh, and Georges, this is a terribly sweet little ring, but I think it belongs to some other lady.’

She handed back the ring.

‘Somebody else? Come off it, Kiki. It’s only been you for years.’

‘What about your lady - Valerie, I think she is called?’

‘Val?’ said George, bewildered. ‘How do you know about Val? Anyhow, there’s never been anything at all serious between us. How could there be?’

‘Oh.
Pardon.
When I saw you with her, I thought, you must be ... I thought you were together. That was the other reason why I ran away so hard. I didn’t want to come between you and her. I hoped so much you would see that she was better for you.’

George took the ring back. Gissings wasn’t doing so well that it could afford to waste half of its contingency reserve on an unwanted engagement ring. George put the ring in his pocket. He didn’t feel brokenhearted but somehow purged, like when you cry a lot at the end of a weepie, before walking out into the street with your friends and feeling the world return to normal around you. He was pleased he had come, but now felt able to go.

George and Kiki walked slowly to the front of the house, into the grand hall, where there stood a bust of one of Kiki’s ancestors, one of the most influential men in the history of France. His solemn features were crowned with a preposterous yellow hat.

‘Oh! My hat! I have been looking for you.’

She put it on. In the enormous yellow shadow cast by the brim, George and Kiki kissed, fondly and sadly. Kiki’s face was still a little damp.

‘Adieu, Georges,’
said Kiki.
‘Bonne chance.’

‘Bye, Kiki. Don’t forget me.’

George got into his Mercedes and headed for the road to Bordeaux. For the past six weeks he hadn’t been able to get Kiki out of his head. Whenever he’d thought of Val or the factory, he’d felt an almost physical sense of repugnance. But now, driving away, far from being heartbroken, he felt OK. And far from thinking obsessively about the woman he was leaving, he couldn’t help looking forward to seeing Val again. He thought of her strong arms and cosy embrace, their ease with each other, their shared nights in bed, sex followed by steaming mugs of sweet tea, their shared passion for everything to do with the factory.

Val was the same as George. So close were they, she could almost be his sister. But she wasn’t his sister, she was his lover. And George had an expensive engagement ring to dispose of.

9

Matthew touched a few buttons on his keyboard and his trading portfolio came up on screen. He hardly needed to look. All he cared about was the Western Instruments position and he knew that well enough. The bond price had rallied a bit, following some less-bad-than-expected results, but he was still heavily underwater. To sell or not to sell?

There wasn’t a question really. He had lost his faith in Cornish. Fiona was right. He must see a dozen opportunities like this every year, and he launched a bid only every four or five years. Betting on a takeover is like putting your money on the 30-1 outsider in a horse race: your odds of success are low, but the potential rewards are high. It’s an attractive way to gamble, but a dumb way to trade.

The phone rang. It was a client interested in unloading some IBM bonds, ‘in search of something with a higher yield’. As it happened, Matthew needed some IBM bonds to square out a trade from the week before, so he was able to quote a good price. The client hit his bid right away and Matthew began to scribble out a ticket.

‘You’re not interested in Western Instruments, are you?’ he asked, before hanging up. ‘I’ve got a position I need to unwind and I can let you have them at a quarter of a percent better than the market price.’