Peach (41 page)

This would be different from any other Harry Launceton book. It was a novel of the senses, the story of a man and a girl and her entrapment of him in a love affair. It was Colette or Proust, fleshed out with sensual details. It would be his masterpiece and without Peach he couldn’t finish it.

Harry stared desperately at his empty page, then he picked up the phone and dialled her number. He could hear the girl who answered the phone calling her. “It’s your Englishman,” he heard her tell Peach … the whole of Radcliffe probably knew about them by now!

“Hello,” Peach’s voice was breathless. “Harry, is that you?”

“I love you, Peach de Courmont,” he said gritting his teeth. “Damn it all, I love you!”

“Ohh. Oh, Harry, I love you too.”

“Can you meet me right now?”

“Harry, I should work.”

“Please,” he said quietly. “I need you.”

The month that Peach flunked her exams was the same month that Harry Launceton’s extraordinary new novel was published to rave reviews. And Boston rocked to the fact that Harry had run off with Peach de Courmont.

Augusta Launceton took the news calmly enough. Harry’s letter had been brief but apologetic—he would always love her, he said. She read the gossip columns in the papers the way she had before and accepted the calls from “friends” wishing to sympathise or find out the juicy details. “It’s just Harry,” she explained, “when he’s writing he becomes so confused about reality. He’ll come back.” Then she packed her bags and returned to England to wait. It came as quite a surprise a few months later to find that Harry had obtained a Las Vegas divorce and had married Peach de Courmont.

Noel was probably the only person in Detroit who liked the city in winter when its grimy streets were covered in thick frozen snow that turned in a matter of days from virgin white to big-city pollution black. Detroit’s angles and intersections and the sharp spears of its tall buildings splitting the sky lent thrust to his ambition. He needed the constant reminder that life was an upward struggle until you reach the very top of one of those towers. Noel knew that it was on the executive floors that Detroit’s power games were played out against a backdrop of high tension and luxury and the players were men in custom-tailored suits from London, men who drove “special” model supercars customised to their requirements, men who returned each evening to their million-dollar homes in Grosse Pointe, homes crammed with expensive antiques and fine paintings where beautiful elegant wives waited for them.

At least that’s how Noel visualised it. And that’s exactly what he wanted. Meantime he had a job as assistant research engineer at Great Lakes Motor Corporation at a salary of $12,000 a year. Good money for a new guy, but he had an excellent degree from the University of Michigan and a masters from MIT. He had a small furnished studio apartment on a decent street in a suburban area with its own kitchen and bathroom and the day he’d paid the deposit plus the first month’s rent and had opened his own front door with his own key, had been a milestone in his life. 22b Cranbrook Street was his first real home.

He prowled its square, compact, freshly carpeted area feeling the thrill of possession and then he took the bus into town and scoured the art galleries until he found a couple of inexpensive prints, a Kandinsky whose jagged geometry and flashing colour appealed to him and a huge black and white Mondrian with thin lines of scarlet and electric blue bisecting its squared design. Their angular compositions pleased him as he drank his solitary cup of coffee in the morning, or when he came home from work—late as always. It was a sort of welcome.

A sympathetic bank manager advanced him money on his first paycheck and he bought himself half a dozen blue Oxford-cloth button-down shirts and a plain dark Brooks Brothers-type suit. He chose two muted striped ties and a pair of black lace-up shoes. Like a kid starting a new school, he wanted the right uniform.

He bought a three-year-old Chevrolet with payments spread over a three-year period, though of course he didn’t expect to keep it that long. He would be moving up in the car world.

Not bad going for the orphan kid, Noel thought as he drove out of downtown Detroit west towards Dearborn.
But not good enough
.

As assistant research engineer he sat in on meetings with designers and product-planners, thrashing around ideas based on market research as to what the public wanted from their cars. They discussed the social changes and fashion trends and the economics until a concept for a new car was born and a cost target projected. Noel’s job was to help devise the engineering guts of the car, the “power-pack,” suitable for the new design.

Working on his first car was a thrill that filled his waking and sleeping moments. He worked late every night refining his concepts, consulting with the toolmakers and the body
designers and attending endless more meetings, while endless more changes were discussed and made. Designers’ drawings were adapted and refined until finally a clay model of the proposed car took shape in the studio.

The new car was a small compact model aimed at the middle range of the market and Noel’s personal view was that the design was unexciting. Despite all those stimulating meetings, its body lines were little different from previous models and an excessive amount of chrome trim had been added to the design in an attempt to jazz up its visual appeal, though Noel doubted the public would be fooled. Of course he kept his mouth shut and voiced no criticism. Permission was given to take the car to the next stage and a few months later a “mock-up” of the car awaited directors’ approval. At this stage the car was merely a fibreglass shell moulded from the original clay model and sprayed a harsh bright blue—one of the latest colours. Spotlit dramatically on matching blue carpet the car still looked insignificant and Noel turned away disappointed. It wasn’t only the way the new car looked. Limited by costing and design dimensions, the engineering concepts had been whittled down until the power-package was virtually the same as the previous model. He felt as though all his hours of work had been for nothing.

Pulling into a liquor store Noel bought himself a bottle of J&B scotch and drove to his apartment. Closing the front door behind him he headed for his tiny kitchen, took a glass from the cupboard and some ice from the refrigerator and poured himself a hefty drink. Glass in hand he prowled the small rented space he called home. The Kandinsky and the Mondrian on the bare white walls looked suddenly like the cheap framed prints they were. Disillusioned, Noel poured a second glass of whisky, staring out of the window at the neat, grass-verged suburban street, feeling trapped. For the
first time since he was thirteen a year of his life had gone by without progress. He was twenty-two years old, claiming to be twenty-six, and in the mirror he looked dark and drawn and closer to thirty. He was assistant research engineer at Great Lakes Motor Corporation and maybe, if he could keep his mouth shut about the way he felt about the designers and the production chiefs, in another year’s time he could expect a promotion to full research engineer at $20,000 a year.
But that wasn’t what he’d worked for all these years!
Then how—
how
—did you get from assistant engineer to be the one who could give the nod of approval to an innovative design that would revolutionise the car industry?

Walking to the table he opened the big black portfolio that contained all his ideas and drawings from the past four years. He knew they were good. But he would need more than that. He needed to know more than just engineering and design to make it to the top in this town. He would need to know how the business worked.

Slumping on to the brown vinyl sofa that converted into his bed at night Noel sipped his scotch and contemplated his problem. His game-plan had reached a major set-back and he wasn’t as prepared for the world he sought to command as he had thought. The grey dawn of Detroit appeared in his window and the bottle of scotch was finished by the time he finally fell asleep on the sofa.

Noel didn’t show up for work the rest of that week. He called in to say he was sick and then he made a few more phone calls. Noel knew now what he would have to do, but it was no use planning on years of night school in Detroit. He would have to go for the top. Packing his curriculum vitae, his business suit and a blue shirt into a bag, Noel topped up his car with petrol and headed east.

He felt uneasy back in Boston again. He was used to industrial
complexes, inner-city decay and automotive plants, and Harvard’s leafy brick-paved squares felt alien. He found a small rooming house where he arranged to stay for one night, then he showered, changed into his dark suit and crossed the Anderson Bridge into North Harvard Street. Two hours later he emerged from Harvard’s Graduate School of Business where he had been accepted for a course in business administration.

In Boston that evening Noel walked through Copley Square to the Copley Plaza Hotel. Ordering a Martini from the young barman he silently toasted his new life. He sat for a long while, watching that anonymous barman serving the smart customers, remembering how it felt.

The next day he set off on the three-day drive back to Detroit, stopping at roadside diners for cups of coffee and sleeping in the car. As soon as he arrived he gave up the lease on his apartment, sold his car and took a room in a cheap rooming house close by the plant. He saved every penny he could from his salary and in July he gave in his notice at Great Lakes Motor Corporation. Then he went to speak to the guy in the personnel for the assembly line at US Auto to make sure he would have a job in the breaks from school.

In September he started his new courses and picked up his old job as barman at the Copley Plaza. He had come full circle.

It rained all the time in England, decided Peach. There was green rain in the summer when all the leaves were on the trees and Launceton Hall’s emerald lawns glimmered under pools of water. And there was grey rain in winter when the trees were bare and the cold flower beds displayed only sodden grey-brown earth.

It seemed to her she spent all her time just staring out at endless rain falling on the same unchanging vistas thinking longingly of the blue skies and warm sunshine of the Riviera. She longed for hot days and the harsh summer sound of cicadas and the smell of the sea and the pines and jasmine. And she dreamed of warm nights with the waves murmuring in the darkness outside her old room at the villa and the glorious golden dawns when you just knew it was going to be another perfect day.

If she weren’t pregnant she would just pack up and go there but Harry wouldn’t hear of her travelling.

“Of course you can’t go,” he told her, astonished that she had even suggested it. “The baby’s due in two months. What if anything happened to you? You know that Launceton babies are always born here at the Hall.”

Of course she knew that, he’d told her often enough. It had come as a shock to Peach to find that the avant-garde literary man who was famous for the progressive new concepts of his books, lived for family tradition. At Launceton Hall there were no decisions to be made and no choices. The elder Launceton son and heir, Harry in this case, always
inherited the title and the estates and lived at Launceton Hall while his widowed mother moved out into a cosy flat in London that Peach secretly envied. Tom, who was the middle brother, lived at Launceton Magna Farm and managed the three large thriving farms that belonged to the estate and Peach was jealous of his way of life. The youngest son, Archie, whom Peach barely knew, was at Sandhurst preparing for a career in the Army. That was the way it had always been in the Launceton family. And to Peach’s surprise no one ever seemed to question it. Tom, whom she had thought would be her friend, led his own life with a much younger crowd of people than Harry and their paths crossed only at Sunday lunches or family get-togethers.

Her baby had already been registered at the schools he would attend, and his names were pre-planned, William Piers Launceton. Her shy suggestion over the Sunday lunch table that she liked her grandfather’s name, Gilles, brought dismissive stares from the family and her mother-in-law’s reply, “My dear, I don’t think there have been any
Gilles
in the Launcetons’ history.”

And of course no one
ever
considered the possibility that the baby might be a girl. I mean, she might have a sweet little fair-haired feminine version of Harry who she would name something exotic like Jessamy or Eloise. But even with a girl she’d be voted down by the family in favour of Caroline or Elizabeth.

Merde
! Peach glared at the rain moodily. Getting pregnant just wasn’t something she had planned on. Making love was a private matter between her and Harry and their passionate nights had nothing to do with this baby. She resented the great bulge under the blue smock she was wearing and when she bathed she tried not to look at herself in the mirror because she looked so odd and ungainly. She couldn’t blame Harry for not wanting to make love to her
any more.
Merde
, oh
merde
thing! She hadn’t wanted to admit it, but it was true. Harry
didn’t
want to make love to her.