in the Bryant family from Mrs B, a minute-by-minute
history of the early days of Bryant and Co from Mr B …’
‘Well, you were magnificent. And next time I go to
New York to see them, you can come. Promise.’
‘Wow! What a lucky little woman I am. No thanks.’
‘All right,’ he grinned at her. ‘Don’t say I don’t try. By
the way, I’ve asked this new prospect of mine, Nico
Cadogan, the one your father put my way, to come to Ascot with us next week. Now that you will enjoy. He’s a nice chap, very good looking, oozes charm.’
‘I can hardly wait.’
‘And darling, that reminds me, what news of Michael
Carlton, and the sponsorship deal?’
‘Ah, yes. That one. Meeting pencilled in for Friday. And
before you ask me, I still haven’t spoken to the Foothold
people. But I will. All right? Now, Tom, if you really
wanted to show your gratitude for the weekend, you’d take
the twins to Holland Park for me. Or at least come with us.’
‘Darling, I can’t. I have a speech to write for a dinner on
Tuesday. I swear next weekend I’ll take them out all day on
Sunday. How’s that? Incidentally, I was hoping to get back
on Tuesday night, after the dinner, but I really don’t think I
can, I’ll have to dash back at dawn. I must spend a couple of
hours at my desk before we go to Ascot, so I’ll meet you
there. Up in the box. Is that okay?’
‘It’s fine. Where’s the dinner?’
‘Bath. It’s—’
The phone rang: it was her father.
‘Octavia, hallo. Just rang to see if you were all right.’
‘I’m fine, Daddy. How would you like to come with
your grandchildren and me to the adventure playground in
Holland Park?’
‘Can’t Tom go with you?’
‘No, he’s — working,’ she said, gritting her teeth, looking
at Tom who had now closed his eyes, put the Sunday Times over his face.
‘I see. It seems a pity he doesn’t have more time for his
family. I think, yes, that sounds rather nice. Nice to have
you to myself for a bit.’
‘You’ll have to share me with the twins.’
‘Well, that will be a pleasure.’
‘We’ll meet you there in an hour.’
She put the phone down, sighed. Now why had she
done that? It would actually have been easier if she’d taken
the twins on their own. They got very frustrated with their
grandfather, who would talk to them for a very few minutes
and then switch his attention straight back to her. She knew why of course; it had been to annoy Tom, to get back at him.
Felix drove across London, contemplating happily the prospect of having Octavia to himself for a couple of hours.; It was a rare treat these days. That had been the greatest
shock of her falling in love: of finding her no longer
automatically available to him. Until she met Tom, he had
come first; if he wanted to see her, if he was feeling unwell
or even lonely, needed her to hostess an evening for him as
she grew older and socially competent, he had only to ask
her. She would give up anything, more or less, for him.
She had once when she was only about ten, forgone a
very special treat for him, a birthday outing with friends to
the ballet at Covent Garden. Fonteyn and Nureyev were
dancing Giselle and she had talked of nothing else for weeks,
had planned what to wear, the present had been bought and
wrapped up days before the event. She didn’t get asked to
very many parties, was not popular at school — too clever
and altogether too grown up for the other children, he felt,
not interested in the sort of nonsense they liked, those
dreadful Barbie dolls and pop singers.
He had become faintly irritated by the ballet outing as it
drew nearer; he liked to provide her with the really big
treats of her life himself. And this was something very
special for her. The night before, when they had supper,
she had eaten very little; he had asked her if she felt all right.
‘Absolutely all right,’ she had said seriously, ‘just terribly,
terribly excited about tomorrow. The best day of my life,
it’s going to be.’
He hadn’t said anything, simply smiled and patted her
hand, but jealousy quite literally twisted his guts.
Next morning he had woken with a bad throat. By
lunchtime he realised he felt really unwell, had a headache,
a foreboding that this might be going to be a really nasty flu.
Octavia had sat at lunch, chattering excitedly about the
ballet, saying she couldn’t believe she was really, really going; it had begun to irritate Felix. He excused himself from the table, went to lie down on his bed. His headache was definitely worse.
After a while, he had heard the door open softly.
‘Daddy?’ Are you all right? Why are the curtains pulled?’
‘Well, my head aches. But not too badly.’
‘Poor Daddy. Can I get you an aspirin?’
‘Oh, darling, I’ve already taken something much stronger
than an aspirin. This is a real headache, I’m afraid.’
‘Not a migraine?’
He got them sometimes: when he was upset. She
Worried about them, hated the whole process, the pain he
was so clearly in, the vomiting. She knew he got them
when he was overworking or upset about something, took
a pride in trying to ward them off, making him leave his
desk on Saturdays or Sundays to go for a walk: ‘Come on,
time to get some fresh air,’ she would say, holding out her
hand as if she was the parent, he the child.
He had smiled at her, at her worried little face, had said
no, no, not a migraine. ‘More like flu, I think. Got a bit of a
temperature. Don’t you worry about me, poppet. Look,
hadn’t you better be getting ready to go?’
‘I don’t want to leave you,’ she had said, with enormous
reluctance. ‘Not if you’re ill.’
‘My darling,’ he had said, struggling to sit up, ‘my darling
sweetheart, you’re not missing that ballet for me. For your
old daddy.’
‘I’d miss anything for you,’ she had said, ‘if you wanted
me to.’
By a quarter to six, when she had put her head round the
door again, all dressed up by then in a dark plaid taffeta
frock, and a ribbon in her hair, tied by Mrs Harrington, the
housekeeper, he had realised he was feeling much worse.
‘Oh, Daddy …’ She had come over to the bed, put a
small hand on his forehead. ‘Daddy, you’re hot!’
‘A bit. Yes.’ Of course it had been silly, under the
circumstances, to shut the window, turn up the central
heating; but when he’d gone up to the room, he’d felt
rather cold. ‘But no one ever died of a temperature. Or flu.
Did they?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose Mrs Harrington will be here, to
look after you.’
‘Well, not, actually. It’s her evening off, remember? She’s
taking it instead of tomorrow. But she’ll leave me
something. Not that I feel like eating.’
‘So you’ll be on your own.’
‘Yes. Poor old me.’ Then he had smiled at her again.
‘But for heaven’s sake, Octavia, I am a grownup. Going on
forty. I’ll be all right for a few hours.’
‘I think I should stay with you,’ she had said in a small
voice. ‘Daddy, I can’t leave you alone. Not with a
temperature and maybe a migraine.’
‘Darling, I’ll be fine—’ an imperceptible pause, he heard
it himself— ‘of course I will.’
‘No,’ she said slowly, pulling the ribbon out of her dark
curls, ‘no, you won’t. I wouldn’t enjoy it, worrying about
you. I really wouldn’t.’
‘Oh, darling, you’re so sweet. So good to your old dad. I
feel so mean—’
‘Daddy! Stop it. I’ll just go and phone Flora’s mummy
quickly, and then I’ll come and sit with you. Make you a
milky cure.’
‘That would be wonderful.’ He heard her voice indistinctly
on the phone in his study next door, then her
footsteps running downstairs. She came back after ten
minutes, with a drink on a tray, and a book.
‘I’m going to read to you,’ she said. ‘Robinson Crusoe,
your favourite.’
Her voice sounded slightly funny: he looked at her. She
had been crying.
‘My darling,’ he said, ‘I can never thank you enough for
this. I feel so bad. I tell you what, as soon as I’m better, I’ll
take you to that ballet. We’ll go together. How about that?’
‘It’s all sold out,’ she said brightly. ‘Never mind. Next
time perhaps. Now be quiet, and rest your poor voice. I’ll
read to you.’
She did, and he fell asleep, watching her, listening to her,
thinking how beautiful she was, and how sweet, how much
he loved her, how much she must love him.
In the morning he felt extraordinarily better. Just a
twenty-four-hour bug obviously.
She was right about the tickets, but he managed to pull
some strings and hire a box. They sat in it together, just the
two of them, and he ordered a bottle of champagne and
gave her a small amount, mixed with orange juice, and she
smiled at him as she sipped it, and told him she loved him
and this was much much better than going with lots of girls
from school.
‘Is it really?’ he said. ‘Are you sure? That would surely
have been more fun.’
‘No, this is more fun. Honestly.’
‘I still feel guilty.’
‘You mustn’t.’
So he didn’t.
‘Right, then. I’ve had a look at all the background, the
figures and so on. More coffee?’
Nico Cadogan shook his head. George Egerton had
offered two pounds fifty a share for the Cadogan Group,
and Cadogan had had an emergency meeting with his
bankers. ‘I’m awash with the stuff. What do you think?’
‘Well, this offer’s going to tempt your shareholders, with
the shares at two pounds at the moment. What can you
offer them to stay with you?’
‘Precious little. I thought you were going to find a
political process to stamp on it.’
‘Cadogan, it isn’t as easy as that. We can do quite a bit of
stirring, yes. We can write to the MP in Romford — where
your head office is — stir things up, say Provincial are
ruthless, half the staff are going to be made redundant, we
can table a few questions, try to put down an EDM - an
Early Day Motion. It’s a sort of petition. You find an
interested MP—’
‘How?’
‘This is why you’re hiring us,’ said Tom, grinning at him.
‘Anyway, you write something for him, saying something
like “This house notes with concern the proposed merger,
blah blah blah,” and the person who puts it down goes
round the House, trying to get likeminded people to sign it.
Then it gets printed in the order paper for that day, and hopefully gets signed some more. You can use it for support, it has strong moral authority. Nothing much more
than that, though. And then we can write to Margaret
Beckett, point out that hotel prices will almost certainly go
up. Write to the papers — you’re very good copy — say
you’ve got a family company, have a personal holding of
fifty-one per cent, look after your staff well, all that stuff’
‘Sounds good to me.’
‘Yes, but there’s a catch, isn’t there?’
Cadogan looked at him, sighed. ‘Yeah. I know what
you’re going to say. Our duty to the shareholders.’
‘Precisely. They’re not going to like the idea of losing
out fifty pence a share, simply to keep a few people in their
jobs. I wouldn’t.’
‘So what do we do?’
I like that we, thought Tom; we is good. He felt a surge
of confidence.
‘You have to win the shareholders round. Present your
overhauled company, your aggressive plans for expansion,
your new MD; tell them you’re planning to trim the sails a
bit more, tell them two pounds fifty is not good enough,
that within a year, if they stick with you, the shares will be
worth three fifty. We can still plant the stories about loss of
competition, speculate about rising costs. If it goes to
referral—’
‘What, to the Monopolies people?’
‘Yes. If the Office of Fair Trading don’t clear it, say it
should be referred to the MMC — Monopolies and Mergers
Commission — then we can start beavering away quietly
about jobs being at risk, all that sort of thing. This is a PR
job as much as a political one. It boils down to that: are you
game?’
There was a long silence. Cadogan got up, went over to
the window. Tom studied his back view, the black and
silver hair, the broad shoulders, the perfectly cut suit, the
exceptionally long legs; if you sent to central casting for A
City Executive, they’d come back with someone who
looked exactly like Nico Cadogan. And sounded like him.
‘Okay,’ said Cadogan turning back to him. ‘You’re Now, what sort of fee are we talking here?’
Tom took a deep breath. ‘Twenty grand a month,’ he said.
There was a silence, for at least five seconds. ‘That your standard fee?’
‘Yup. For a case like this.’
‘It’s extortionate.’
‘It’s realistic’
Another silence. Then, ‘Okay, I pride myself on being
realistic. But you’d better deliver.’
Tom experienced the adrenalin rush very physically.
She couldn’t put it off any longer, Octavia thought: she
must phone the chair of the Felthamstone branch of
Foothold, see what reaction, if any, she got to Michael