felt like a schoolgirl: silly, nervous.
‘Hallo, Octavia. How is Barbados?’
‘Oh — very nice thank you. Yes.’
‘Good time?’
‘Yes. Yes, very good. Thank you.’
‘Good. Everything’s fine here. I spoke to Caroline last
night, she’s bringing Minty back tomorrow.’
‘Tom—’
‘Yes?’
‘Tom, I thought you were — that is, I thought you were
in Italy.’
‘Did you?’ he said and his voice was cold, hostile
suddenly.
‘Yes. Yes, I did. I — don’t know how — why…”
‘I don’t know either,’ he said.
There was a long silence; clearly he wasn’t going to help
her out of this one.
‘I suppose I just got the wrong end of the stick.’
‘Yes. Very much the wrong end.’
‘Why didn’t you explain?’
‘Have you ever tried to explain to a fly there’s glass in the
window, Octavia?’
She said nothing.
‘Well, I did try. Once or twice, actually. But you went
on buzzing furiously and I just couldn’t get through to you.
Gave up in the end. Bit of a shame.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘A bit of a shame. But — but I thought when
they said you’d all gone to the airport…”
‘We did all go to the airport. I drove them, waved them
off and then went out to dinner.’
‘Oh,’ she said again, trying to digest this, to make sense of
it. ‘Yes, I see. Well — anyway, I’ll be home on Sunday.’
‘Fine. Goodbye, Octavia.’
‘Goodbye, Tom.’
She put the phone down; she felt very sick. It was more
than a bit of a shame. It was an appalling shame. It was the
only reason, really, she had asked Gabriel to come with her.
Because she was feeling so hurt, so angry. How stupid of
her. How extremely stupid. Not that it mattered really of
course. It didn’t make any real difference. The marriage was
over anyway. She and Tom were over. One more
misunderstanding, one bit less communication, didn’t really
matter. It didn’t matter at all. It was just a further example
of how far apart they had grown. It just didn’t matter.
She just didn’t care …
‘Why are you crying?’ said Gabriel. For the first time for
days he looked at her kindly, with concern. ‘Is something
wrong?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘not really. Everything’s fine.’
But she went on crying uncontrollably, just the same.
Time was running out on him, Felix Miller reflected. No,
that put a rather negative spin on the situation. In the
dreadful modern phraseology. He was doing so well,
acquiring the Cadogan shares, he’d have to declare very
soon. And that would be pure pleasure. He’d have to put in
a pretty high bid to the shareholders: probably three pounds
a share. He’d worked the price up himself. Well, the
company was probably worth it. All his research indicated
that Cadogan had made a good job of overhauling the
company. Done his work for him. That afforded Felix some
pleasure as well. Of course hotels ran on borrowed money;
but the properties alone were worth a small fortune. And he
could undoubtedly make the thing pay. Not that it
mattered; no price was too high. The first thing, the very
first thing he would do, after robbing Cadogan of the
company that was as much a part of him as his own name,
he had once told Felix, Was get him voted off the board.
There was the little matter of the merger referral of course;
but since he had no hotels of his own, then there should
probably be no problem. He wasn’t creating a monopoly.
Just an unemployed hotel owner. That would teach Nico
Cadogan how it felt to lose something very dear to him. It
would teach him very swiftly indeed. It had been really a
very clever idea. Very clever indeed …
Marianne felt worse about Felix every day. She had treated him appallingly; and he didn’t deserve it. He often treated
her at best thoughtlessly and at worst harshly. She did not
come first in his heart: Octavia did. She was used to that.
She had not come first in Alec’s either: his career did.
Nevertheless, she owed Felix a great deal; they had had a
marriage of a sort. He had not been some casual boyfriend,
to be discarded on a whim, and her feelings for him
remained very intense. Although he had treated her
particularly thoughtlessly over their final few weeks
together, she had too easily betrayed his trust and their past,
had turned her back on him when probably he needed her
most. And he was, at heart, a good man. Of course it had
been outrageous, trying to destroy Tom’s business, desperately
urging the marriage towards a final conclusion. But he
had been driven by the best motive, however misguided:
had been driven by love. And she, without doubt the
person he loved next best in the world, the person to whom
he had turned in his awkward, truculent way, had not been
there for him, had left him to do his worst. And she was
afraid that worst might be very dreadful.
She felt guilty about Nico of course, but she wasn’t in
love with him; she felt she knew that very certainly now.
He had just been there, when she needed someone. Love,
in all its complex difficulty, was what, in spite of everything,
she still felt for Felix. It was time to make amends; time to
stop betraying Felix.
‘So when will Octavia be home?’ said Caroline. She was
spooning cereal rather briskly into Minty.
‘Oh — early on Sunday morning,’ said Tom. Then,
noticing that Minty was rubbing her cereal into her neck,
added, ‘Minty, that’s not what Weetabix is for.’
‘Oh, dear, I’d better get you another bib,’ said Caroline.
‘She needs some new ones, these are all too small. I think
I’ve got some bigger ones in this drawer — good heavens!’
‘What’s that?’ said Tom.
‘Mrs Fleming’s mobile phone. What an extraordinary
place for it to be. Underneath all the tea towels.’
‘Well, maybe Mrs Donaldson put it there.’
‘She’s away this week. Visiting her daughter and new
grandson. Well — it doesn’t matter.’
‘No,’ said Tom. ‘No, it doesn’t matter at all.’ It was true,
he realised: Mrs Donaldson had been away. The house had
lacked its usual sparkling order. Trained to neatness by
Octavia, he always cleared up his dirty coffee cups, put his
clothes in the dirty linen basket, made his bed, but this
week the bed had not been changed, nor the towels, and
nor had the waste paper baskets been emptied; in his
depressed distraction he had failed to notice it until now.
Anyway, clearly Mrs Donaldson had not put the phone in
the tea-towel drawer. So who …
‘Well - I must get Minty out,’ said Caroline. ‘It’s a lovely
day.’
‘She looks awfully well, Caroline. Obviously the country
air, down at your parents’. Thank you for taking her.
Anyway, I must get off to the office. ‘Bye for now.’
‘Goodbye, Tom. Should I get you any supper for this
evening?’
‘No, that’s all right. I’ll be out. Thank you all the same.’
He drove off, flicking his mind on to the day ahead: he
had a meeting with Nico Cadogan at ten. Nico was frantic
with worry about Felix Miller’s intentions and needed to be
steadied. And something more than an upbeat letter to the
shareholders would be necessary this time. But a tiny
portion of Tom’s mind refused to be flicked, stayed fixed
on the mobile phone hidden underneath the tea towels. For
some reason, it troubled him. He couldn’t quite think why.
‘It hasn’t really worked, has it?’ said Gabriel.
He put out a hand, stroked Octavia’s flat brown stomach
gently. She tensed, then relaxed and half smiled at him.
They were lying on the beach, in the shade of the great
heavy trees; they had become oddly, quietly close, in the
aftermath of a long and raging row, a sleepless night, an
acknowledgement from him finally that he had been less than courteous at lunch, less than easy altogether over the
previous few days, and from her that she had made demands
of him throughout the holiday that he could not reasonably
have expected.
‘No,’ she said finally and with huge difficulty, ‘no, it
hasn’t worked, I’m afraid.’
‘I blame the sun,’ he said, with an embarrassed grin. ‘The
sun and Marks and Spencer.’
‘Marks and Spencer? How can you blame Marks and
Spencer?’
‘They didn’t have any decent summer clothes when I
went in that day. Just sale stuff. And winter woollies. So I
couldn’t get properly kitted out.’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘yes, I see. Well — certainly partly their
fault, then.’ She smiled at him. Nearly a week of his
company had taught her not even to suggest that there were
other shops he might have gone to.
‘It’s very sad,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Well, just one of those things. And maybe, in a way, just
as well.’
‘Now how do you work that one out?’ he said.
‘Well, at least it’s settled things. Otherwise it might have
dragged on for months, mightn’t it? We could have gone
on and on, trying to make it work, not getting anywhere,
disrupting our lives
‘Yes, and that would have been a serious waste of time,’
he said. ‘I can see that. Your pragmatism is breathtaking,
Octavia. I really must try and pick up a few tips. Before we
part.’ He stood up. ‘I’m going for a walk.’
‘Gabriel, you’re being silly,’ she said.
‘I’m not being silly. I find your attitude very hurtful.
Incomprehensible, even. Regarding a love affair as a - as a
sort of marketing exercise. A bit of research. It’s horrible.’
‘Look,’ she said, and there was an underlying panic in her
voice, ‘all I meant was we’d have made one another
unhappy for longer. Longer than we have.’
‘Oh, so we’re happy now, are we? Start an affair, find it doesn’t work, finish it, all inside a week, phew, that’s all right, then, no time or energy lost.’
She reached up and took his hand, pulling him down on
to the beach again. ‘Think of what might have happened.
We’d have gone on and on for weeks, months, the
occasional night here and there, all more and more
unsatisfactory. And in the end, the same, miserable finale.
Better to - well, to find out now. That’s all I meant. You
must see that.’
‘I do see it,’ he said. ‘Of course. But I’m afraid I can’t
parcel up my emotions quite so neatly, Octavia, set time
limits on them. One of the reasons, I daresay, we could
never have — well, made things work.’
‘Oh, God,’ she said, and buried her face in her hands.
‘Octavia — I’m sorry.’
‘No, no, don’t say you’re sorry. I deserved that. You’re
right. I am — well, I am all the things you said last night.
Controlling. Ruthless. Manipulative. Arrogant.’
‘Did I say you were all those things?’
‘You did. And—’ she gave him a watery smile — ‘and that
I was a concrete-skinned, self-aggrandising bitch. Gabriel,
you were right. Maybe not concrete skinned. But all the
rest. I have to be — in charge. Don’t I? That’s my problem.’
‘Well, to a degree. You do seem to need to be in control
at any rate. Have everything on time, in order—’
‘I know I do,’ she said, very quietly.
‘But is that really your problem, as you put it? It’s made
you a very successful person.’
‘Oh, very successful,’ she said bitterly, ‘so successful my
marriage is over.’
‘Is it?’
‘Of course it is! My children are neglected — apart from a
little quality time, at the fag end of the day. My job is at this
moment in jeopardy—’
‘I really do doubt that,’ he said.
‘I’m afraid you don’t know anything about it. Melanie is
absolutely sick of me and my carryings on. Always away,
always upset, letting people down, ducking out of meetings — that is no way to run a company. I do know that.’
‘Well, that really is all temporary, surely,’ he said. ‘When
you get back to real life — and at least in real life you won’t
have me hanging about any more — and it’s true, it would
have gone on and on, never any time together, you rushing
back to your children, me to my constituents.’
‘Perhaps even your putative fiancee?’
‘Oh, no,’ he said, ‘no, not her. Definitely not her. Not
after you.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘thank you for that at least.’
Her voice was very quiet suddenly, quiet and shaky; he
looked at her sharply.
‘Octavia?’
‘Yes?’
‘This thing not working out. It’s no reflection on how I
feel — felt — about you.’
‘Of course it is!’ she said. She was crying, rummaged
furiously in her beach bag for a tissue.
‘Oh, God,’ he said, ‘you’re seeing this as another
rejection, aren’t you? Another failure?’
‘So - isn’t it?’
‘No!’
‘Well, tell me what it is, then.’
‘It’s got nothing to do with you. You as a woman. I still
think you’re one of the sexiest women I’ve ever known.’
‘Gabriel, please don’t. Don’t try and humour me. Flatter
me …’ Her eyes were full of tears again. ‘The fact is,
however you dress it up, I’ve made a hash of our
relationship, our time together and — oh, God …”