‘No Gommie he hasn’t, and—’
‘Well, in my day it was called trifling. Trifling with your affections. Not done.’
‘Well, things have changed now,’ said Eliza firmly.
‘Yes, and not always for the better. Still, just remember what I said. So, why are you here, Matt? Not part of the bride’s lot, I’m sure.’
‘No,’ said Matt, grinning, ‘no, I’m a friend of Charles’s.’
‘Oh really? How’d you meet him?’
‘In the army. Doing basic training.’
‘Yes, I see. What were you in?’
‘The sappers.’
‘Good for you. Damn fine lot, the sappers. We’d have lost the war without them. Mulberry harbours and all that. And what do you do now?’
‘I’m – I’m in the property business.’
‘Eliza, you must bring Matt to lunch one day. I’d like to talk to him some more. I’m thinking of buying some shares in Blue Circle Cement. Good idea, Matt?’
‘Um – probably.’
‘That’s what I thought. Oh, God, here we go, Father of the Bride at the microphone. It’ll be dreadful. I need another drink.’
She moved off.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Eliza, laughing, ‘she’s so outrageous.’
‘I thought she was wonderful.’
‘Well, she took a great shine to you. You’d better watch it, she’s a frightful flirt.’
‘Fine by me,’ said Matt. ‘She’s got terrific legs.’
They moved into the marquee together, brought increasingly close, Matt thought, first by the singing, then the orangery, then by that wonderful conversation. He looked at Jeremy, smug bastard, laughing with Sarah, handing her a glass of champagne: and felt against all the odds a lurch of self-confidence.
‘I’ve got something – something I want to talk to you about.’
Eliza looked at Jeremy across the table; she felt a clawing at her stomach, a constriction in her throat. Was this it? Finally? And if so …
‘Yes?’ she said. Her voice didn’t sound quite as it should. Bit squeaky. It was awful. Embarrassing.
‘It’s – well, it’s pretty exciting really. I – I hope you’ll like it anyway. OK, here goes.’ He refilled her glass. It wasn’t champagne. Which she might have expected it to be if … But he had made a bit of a thing about getting some wine he knew she’d love. So …
‘Well, I’ve been asked to go to New York for six months. To head up the office there.’
‘Oh. Oh, Jeremy.’ She smiled. A brilliant, dazzling smile. She could feel its brilliance. It quite hurt. ‘Jeremy, that’s – that’s wonderful. So wonderful. I – well, I – congratulations, Jeremy. Um – how soon?’
‘Oh – beginning of September. I have to say I am a little bit nervous. But – well, it’s a great challenge. Carl Webster’s leaving the London office after five years and returning to New York which, according to him, is going down the pan fast. Not a cosy situation.’
It didn’t sound cosy, that was for sure. They’d lost several accounts, including JKL Tobacco and La Roche toiletries; Jeremy was being brought in as overall account director and his brief was to work with Carl, relaunching the entire agency.
‘It will be fun,’ he said, leaning back in his chair, ‘and I will enjoy it, I’m not asking for sympathy – except having to live without you of course – but God, the egos I’m going to have to dance around. The creative people are great, it’s the account people who’ve made a complete horlicks of it all, and morale is seriously bad. First off I’ve got to decide who’s wheat and who’s chaff and then see about getting rid of the chaff; there’ll be ground glass put in my coffee on a daily basis, I should think. But there will be good aspects, no doubt.’
‘Like?’
‘Oh – like an apartment on the Upper East Side – that’s sort of Knightsbridge-y; excellent expenses of course, and a contractual agreement that I can fly home at least once a month – First Class, natch. And then there’s you, of course.’
Oh God. He was going to say it after all. She composed her face again. Took a careful sip.
‘I shall miss you terribly. Terribly.’
‘I’ll miss you too, Jeremy. Of course.’
‘But I do want you to come over lots. For long weekends and so on. As well as me coming home lots as well. In fact I think I can swing the fare on expenses fairly often. I really couldn’t manage without you entirely. So – shouldn’t be too bad. Oh, darling.’
‘Yes?’
Maybe even now? His idea of a joke? A tease?
‘I do hate to leave just now while you’re so worried about your dad and the house and everything. But you know we can talk whenever you like.’
No joke, no tease.
‘Yes. Yes, of course I know that. And – congratulations, Jeremy, again. It really is wonderful.’
Well – so what? she thought when finally, finally she was safely home, in bed, with the light out, no longer pretending, no longer having to smile. Exploring how she felt. Which was fine. Absolutely fine. It would be marvellous to go to New York, meet the editors of things like American
Vogue
and
Harper’s
, see the New York designers. So it was a huge bonus, really. And it was only for six months. And what would be the point in getting engaged when they weren’t going to be together? Probably Jeremy had thought exactly that – although he could have said it. No, the simple fact was that clearly he just didn’t want to be tied down at this stage in his life. He had enough to worry about. And anyway – who on earth wanted to get married, when they were flying as high as she was? It was her career that really mattered to her. More than anything else in the world. Wasn’t it?
As if on cue, Jack Beckham sent for her the next morning, told her he had just fired Fiona – ‘and don’t try to defend her, I’ve had it on very good authority she’s been completely off her head for the last three days, and not for the first time, migraine my arse, and it was her fucked up that last session with the ball gowns, not the photographer’ – and formally appointed her fashion editor.
They all argued later over who had had the idea first. Valerie claimed it inevitably, Valerie Hill, still one of Simmonds and Shaw’s major clients, Valerie Hill who had become a phenomenon in her own right, one of the first female tycoons, constantly featured in the magazines and newspapers, with a chain of offices supplying at least half the upper echelons of the secretarial community.
She had come in one morning to see Louise, who now regarded her as her personal client, about a couple of offices in Ealing. And told her over Jenny’s coffee and biscuits, which continued, Louise claimed, to be one of the major contributions to the firm’s success, that she could see in the years to come there would be a huge increase in offices in the outer suburbs.
‘We’ll just have to look further out – well beyond Guildford. In the green belt, even. It can’t go on like this.’
Louise was talking to Matt and Jimbo later that day, about the nightmare of the Brown Ban, as it was called (after George Brown, a new minister in Mr Wilson’s punitive government) on any further office building in London. ‘Half our development work is being stalled for lack of planning permission,’ said Jimbo gloomily, ‘bloody Labour, thought they were meant to be getting us out of trouble, helping the working man, not putting him out of his job.’
‘Well, we’re not going to change that,’ said Louise. ‘And Miss Hill was saying this morning we’d all have to move right out, start building offices in the suburbs.’
‘Can’t see that,’ said Jimbo, ‘commercial firms want their feet in central London. They won’t want their offices here there and everywhere. So unless you can persuade an entire company to move, it’ll never work.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ said Louise. ‘Sun Alliance are doing it, moving everyone out apparently, except for head office. It’d be much cheaper for them, and it’d be nice for the staff, wouldn’t it, not having to go into London every day, able to work much nearer home. There’s a lot of people moving out of London to live, you know.’
‘Yeah, and if they were big firms,’ said Jimbo slowly, ‘big offices, people would move to work there, like they do to Ford, in Dagenham. I can see that makes sense.’
‘Yeah, but that’s factories,’ said Matt. ‘Can’t see people moving to be near an office.’
‘This’d be a bit like a factory though, wouldn’t it?’ said Louise. ‘Only not manufacturing cars or washing machines, but processing insurance claims or whatever.’
‘Tell you what,’ said Matt, ‘if we could buy some land, and then develop one of these places, ready and waiting for some of these big firms – well, we’d be printing money.’
Jimbo stared at him. ‘Mate, you’re living in dreamland. You’d have to print a whole lot, just to buy the land in the first place.’
‘Not necessarily,’ said Matt. ‘It’d be much cheaper than land in London. And there’s plenty of money around. You just need to have a good business plan, that’s all.’
‘Well, if you say so. But how’d you know where to buy it, where the firms would want to be?’
‘We could work it out,’ said Matt slowly. ‘It’d be where the public transport was good. The underground, bus routes, mainline stations. Easy as that.’
He sat back in his chair, and lit a cigarette, looking at them very coolly through the smoke. ‘This is our way into the big time,’ he said, ‘trust me.’
The news had broken fast about Eliza’s appointment. Next morning, she came in to an office filled with flowers; by lunchtime every vase in the place was utilised, and she had to ask her secretary to go out and buy half a dozen more. Breathy messages accompanied them: ‘darling Eliza … so thrilling … so exciting … so well deserved … many congratulations’: all from people who only days before had been fawning over Fiona. The phone rang constantly, offering her lunch, drinks, even that newest social occasion, breakfast; other fashion writers called in their unique code: ‘We’ve been worrying about Fiona … she couldn’t go on like that … she needs a rest.’
Eliza called Fiona herself, several times; there was no reply. Finally at the end of the day, feeling increasingly wretched, she wrote her a note and ordered some flowers to be delivered to her flat next morning. They were returned, with the message that said there was no reply; later that day Fiona’s mother phoned Jack Beckham to tell him that Fiona had been admitted to a psychiatric clinic suffering from a major breakdown. Jack called Eliza into his office to tell her.
‘Oh, Jack, that’s terrible, I’m so sorry.’
‘Don’t be,’ he said. ‘I only told you so you could see how right I was. She obviously couldn’t have gone on anyway.’
She thought suddenly – and not for the last time – how like Matt he was.
‘Scarlett, it’s David.’
‘Oh – hello, David.’
‘Look – are you quite mad? My mother says you’re coming out here to stay with her. You can’t do that, you really can’t.’
‘I don’t see why not. It’ll be fun. It sounds so lovely. And maybe it’ll answer some queries for me.’
‘What sort of queries?’
‘Well – you know. Like how Gaby can be pregnant, when you haven’t slept together for years. Does she have a lover, I wonder? Is it someone else’s baby?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Well – must be immaculate conception then. How amazing.’
‘Look, Scarlett of course we – that is I – she—occasionally we – well, we sleep together. It’s – it’s just—’
‘Just what?’ A silence. She sighed. Loudly and theatrically. ‘Well, this is why I want to come, you see. To answer those sorts of questions. And I do like your mother so much and her house sounds really lovely. And she says so is Charleston this time of the year. So – I’m coming. Sorry, David, if you’re not entirely pleased. But you should have thought that something like this might happen. Bye now.’
Something like this. That hurt so much a lot of the time she felt she couldn’t breathe properly. Someone else having the baby she should have had. With the man she loved. The baby she didn’t have, the baby that had been torn out of her, just to save the man and his filthy, lousy marriage. The baby she had kept quiet about, been so brave about, never complained about. The baby that still haunted her sleep, with its sweet, smiling embryonic face, the baby that she had killed.
What kept her going was the rage. At the lies, the injustice, her own gullibility. How could she have listened to him, believed him, trusted him?
Well – she had. And now she was getting her revenge. A bit of it anyway.
‘What on earth is going on in there?’
‘I really don’t know, I’m afraid. He just seems really angry.’
‘Who with?’
‘I don’t know. Someone on the telephone.’
‘Well, who was it? A client?’
‘I don’t know, Miss Mullan. I don’t think so. Well, first some woman phoned, she was ever so posh.’
‘Not Valerie Hill, I hope?’
‘No, she was called – oh, dear. It was a name I’ve never heard before. Really unusual. I thought at first she said she was making an announcement about her name, but that seemed to be it. Her name. Seemed to be something like Announcement. Anyway, he didn’t talk to her for long. Then he rang someone else. That’s who he’s shouting at.’
Louise listened at the door for a moment; she heard the words ‘bloody outrageous’ and then slightly later, ‘You made me a promise and in my business we don’t renege on such things. Yours is obviously less principled. I’m quite prepared to sue if necessary,’ and then, ‘Well you’ll have to sort it out because I’m not bloody having it.’