Wicked Pleasures (2 page)

‘You won’t get caught,’ said Virginia irritably. ‘You never do.’

‘I might.’

‘Well anyway, that’s a really logical answer. Like Daddy saying girls don’t go into banking. It’s just so stupid.’

‘Which do you fancy more?’ asked Baby. ‘Banking or sex?’

‘Banking,’ said Virginia promptly. ‘How about you?’

‘Sex. We could discuss a swop,’ said Baby, laughing. ‘You’re a fraud, Virgy, deep down, wild oats don’t actually interest you. Now how about the bank? Do you really want to get into all that?’

‘Well – maybe not. But I’d certainly like the option … Look out, Baby, there’s a cop coming up.’

Baby swung over into the slow lane, the needle dropping with formidable ease. The cop pulled up alongside him, gave him a look to kill and sat alongside him for several miles before pulling off fast after a Merc that had leapt out of the twilight behind them and vanished again ahead. And Baby didn’t get booked. Didn’t get caught.

It was true, what Virginia said, he never did. Right from the moment they had both been toddling about together, Baby had never got into trouble. If something got broken, if they were late back for tea, if they didn’t untack their ponies, if they didn’t write thankyou letters, if they got bad reports, if they forgot to walk the dog or clean out the rabbit’s cage, Virginia got into trouble and Baby, somehow, got off. It wasn’t that he lied, or pretended he hadn’t committed the crime; he was just lucky. Their father would have been out or away when he
should have heard about the misdemeanour, or too busy to be bothered about it; or their mother would have been distracted, involved in one or another of her endless charitable causes; or Mrs Viney, their nurse, would have been doing something else as he scuttled in late; or the gardener would take pity on the rabbit and see to it instead of waiting for someone else to notice.

But whatever the reason, Baby never did get into trouble.

And Virginia did. In spite of being much loved, she was always in hot water. Especially with her father. And she was always permanently in Baby’s shadow: whatever she did, he seemed to do better. Which was strange, because she was cleverer. She knew she was. She was quicker than he was, faster on the uptake, her grades were consistently better, her successes more frequent, her failures fewer. Year after year she got straight As, while Baby’s results teetered between all right and mediocre. And yet, somehow, she always felt she’d failed. That was because of her father too; careless of, blind to, his daughter’s impressive talents and achievements, he would boast of Baby’s far less remarkable ones, and where there were none, would boast of that fact too. ‘Boy’s a lost cause,’ he would say, his eyes soft with pride as he looked at his son: and ‘No better at math than I ever was,’ looking to, waiting for, the laughing, flattering denial from his audience, and drawing attention to Baby’s talent for appearing to be clever, purporting to work, the dangerous, social skills that some feckless fairy had bestowed upon him in his cradle, making them seem a virtue, a skill in themselves. As indeed they were, and Baby knew they were, and he invested much time and trouble honing them, perfecting them, while Virginia watched, irritable, resentful, from behind the barriers of her own dutiful dullness.

And then Baby was easier than she was, more socially accomplished: Virginia had pretty manners, everyone said, but she did not actually have Baby’s charm, she didn’t sit at the centre of attention at parties, she wasn’t regarded as the one person who must be at a gathering to ease it into life, set a seal on it.

Of course she was popular: very popular. There was no shortage of young men trying to make their way into her bra and her panties, and her social diary was not exactly bereft of social entries. Her friends said that was because she was not only very pretty but nice; her enemies (few, but articulate) maintained it was because she was an heiress to a fortune so big that even in a college where real money was in no way a rarity it was impressive.

Frederick Praeger III was a banker. In the circles in which the Praegers moved, that meant he owned the bank. His father had owned it, and his grandfather had founded it, and it was confidently expected that in the fullness of time, Baby would take it on and be known no longer as Baby but as Frederick Praeger IV.

The seeds of the Praeger fortune had been sown in 1760 by a bright sassy young man called Jack Milton who worked as a clerk for a small bank in Savannah, Georgia. He kept hearing talk of the money to be made from financing the Golden Triangle, a chain of trade in which a ship would leave Liverpool, England, loaded with metal boxes, and tin spoons and forks, and sail to the west coast of Africa, where the goods would be exchanged for slaves. The ship would then sail
on to Bermuda, where the slaves (destined for shipment to the Southern states of America) would be traded for molasses; the third leg of the triangle saw the sugar sold back into Liverpool. It was perfectly possible and indeed normal to make 150 per cent profit on each leg of the journey.

Jack Milton, who was a shrewd young man, talked to his superior at the bank about the feasibility of investing in the Golden Triangle at the American end; his superior, who was less shrewd, shook his head and said it sounded real risky to him. And there it might have ended, had Jack not found himself working late one night when the owner of the bank, one Ralph Hobson, had come back to his office, a little the worse for drink, to collect a box of cigars a client had given him. Seeing Jack at his desk, and impressed by his industry, and being in benevolent mood, he started talking to him, and Jack found himself discussing the Golden Triangle and its potential. Three months later, Hobson had invested in a small ship; nine months after that he saw his money quadrupled. He repeated the exercise, watched the bank’s profits soar and, being a fair man, gave Jack shares in the bank. In the fullness of time he made Jack a partner. Milton Hobson prospered; young Mr Milton and young Mr Hobson succeeded their fathers, and their sons succeeded them. They lived on adjoining plantations in Georgia, made additional fortunes from cotton, and owned a great many slaves. Then, early in 1850, Douglas Hobson contracted cholera and died, childless; Jeremy Milton found himself sole owner of the bank, with only daughters to succeed him. His wife had died bearing their only son, and the child had followed her after a very few hours.

Jeremy was not strong himself; he had bronchial trouble, and doctors feared consumption. He looked, at thirty-five, a middle-aged man; he feared for the future of his bank.

His oldest daughter, Corinna, was a beauty, with great dark eyes and a cloud of massing dark red ringlets; moreover, being sole heiress to a considerable fortune, she was a great prize. No one could understand why she decided, therefore, not to marry any one of the handsome, charming boys who were paying her court, but a serious, albeit handsome young man with a stammer, no money and a desk at the bank, called Frederick Praeger.

They were married in 1852, Jeremy made Frederick a partner in the bank and the two young people settled down to a first year of rather stormy bliss, after which Corinna settled down as a young hostess in Savannah society. Frederick prospered on his own account, investing hugely both for himself and on behalf of his clients in the railroads that were being built the length and breadth of the country; Jeremy watched his progress and the development of the bank and was pleased with what he saw. Frederick was showing himself worthy of his position both as son-in-law and successor.

And then as the 1850s drew to a close the talk was all of war. Of war between North and South. The South was complacent, certain not only that it could, but that it would, win, that its generals – the mighty Beauregard, and Johnston and Lee – were unbeatable, that the Yankees were a bunch of upstarts who didn’t know how to fight. Most Southern citizens were unconcerned by the imminent prospect of the conflict; but Jeremy Milton had friends and associates in the
North, and he knew they had superior weapons, communications and men certainly as brave, certainly as well trained as the Confederate Army. And they also had more money. Far more money.

‘I don’t like it,’ he said to Frederick, ‘I don’t like it at all. Oh, we shall no doubt do well out of it. Wars are great for banks. The build-up beforehand and the reconstruction afterwards. But I am fearful for the South. Fearful for this town. Fearful for you and my daughter. I think you should send Corinna to the North if and when the war starts.’

So Corinna and her father spent the war years in Philadelphia. Frederick joined the Confederates and did not rejoin them until early 1866 – thin, a little frail from continuous onslaughts of dysentery, but safely, wonderfully alive. The family had survived. It had also survived with much of its fortune intact. From the beginning of the war, Frederick had continued to invest in the railroads. And despite the defeat, the siege, the shelling, the burning of Atlanta, the great steel arteries had survived, and were now pumping lifeblood back into the South. What was more, he had for the two years immediately before the war sold huge consignments of cotton direct to Liverpool and had the money banked there, where no one could touch it. Now he reclaimed it; thousands of dollars. And then there was Atlanta to rebuild. The whole of the South to rebuild. New industries, and vigour. The Praegers had returned to Savannah, one of the few fortunate families who were not impoverished; on the phoenix-like rebirth of the South, they grew richer still.

In 1867 Corinna became pregnant; she was a little old at thirty-two to be bearing children, the doctor said, but she was strong and in good health, all should be absolutely well. The Praegers were delighted; perhaps at last the longed-for son was to be given to them. Jeremy was as excited as they; he had dreamed of a grandchild, a successor, ever since Corinna’s marriage.

And indeed, the son was born: a large, lusty child, with Corinna’s dark blue eyes and Frederick’s blond hair; but he brought grief in his wake, not joy. Corinna, who had seemed to weather a long, hard labour with her customary courage and stoicism, took him in her arms, gazed adoringly into his small, cross face and then abruptly and without warning haemorrhaged and died before anything could be done to save her.

Jeremy, already frail, had a mild stroke a week later, and never quite recovered his full faculties. Frederick was left with the responsibility of raising the baby.

He hired nurses, housekeepers, governesses, and in time the household was restored to order, but he was desperately unhappy himself; Corinna’s memory lived on in the house and haunted him, and the sight of his feebly shuffling father-in-law filled him with a bleak misery, from which there seemed no escape. He lived on in this nightmare for four years, the bank his only refuge; in 1872 Jeremy died, the bank became Praegers and Frederick moved to New York.

The move was an immediate success.

Frederick had no serious business struggles; communications had opened up enormously, many of his clients had offices in New York and were delighted to find him there, and the economy was growing at a formidable rate.

The building, on Pine Street parallel to Wall Street, was beautiful, built in brownstone, with elaborate cornices on the ceilings, marble fireplaces in the larger rooms, carved shutters at the tall windows, and a great deal of fine panelling, and he furnished it charmingly, as much like a house as he was able, with lamps from Tiffany, furniture from the antique showrooms of both Atlanta and New York, Indian carpets; it was a point of pride at Praegers that there were always fresh flowers in every room, and the walls were lined not only with financial reference books but the works of Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Walter Scott, Shakespeare. Clients liked to go there, it was a small, gracious world in itself, a pleasant place to be, and to pass time as well as receive excellent business advice.

New York was a heady place; the world’s first department store had been opened there by Alexander T. Stewart, followed by Lord and Taylors, Cooper-Siegel and Macys, developing slightly frenetically into what was known as Lady’s Mile. The building work was formidable; Frederick watched St Patrick’s Cathedral and Trinity Church go up, as well as a wealth of other fine commercial and civic constructions such as the Metropolitan Museum and Carnegie Hall. Accustomed to the gentle and genteel pace of Southern life, Frederick found the fast, acquisitive atmosphere of New York, and the potentially dangerous but heady multi-racial mix that lay beneath the city’s booming fortunes, inspiring and stimulating. His formidable capacity for work, his commercial foresight and his personal, rather serious charm brought him success both business and personal; realising early that he could not compete with the great giants of Wall Street, and that he had a genuine advantage in being able to give a more personal service than they, he specialized, taking as his clients companies in the publishing and the communications business, the flourishing cable companies along with book publishers and the growing magazine market. One of his first New York based clients was a young man called Irwin Dudley, who published romances and sold them to the young working-class women of America by the million; over dinner one night the two men conceived of a new publication for their readers, a weekly story paper, many of the works being serials, thus ensuring a steady flow of readers. When
Love Story
was launched upon a hungry female public in 1885, the first issue had to be reprinted three times; a sister paper,
Real Romance
, purporting to be true stories and incorporating an advice column for the lovelorn, sold out so quickly that emergency paper supplies had to be rushed in from mills in the South as New York could not service the huge order at such short notice. Frederick, who had seen fit to underwrite Dudleys with Praeger capital, was a director of the company, and his own fortune increased gratifyingly as a result.

But he had many many clients; Praegers flourished, and so did he, as the more ambitious hostesses of New York discovered the rarest of rare social jewels: an unattached, attractive man. He was invited everywhere; as sought after at dinner tables as on the boards of the great flourishing building and railroad companies that were among his clients, admired, revered almost, happier again than he would have believed. But any of the dozens of young women who were settled at his side at dinner, who met him at theatres, concerts, summer garden parties, with matrimony in mind were set for
disappointment. Frederick had only one love in his life (apart from his son and the memory of Corinna) and that was Praegers. The bank occupied not only his intellect, but his emotions; he viewed it not so much as a company but a favourite child, the subject of his first thought in the morning and his last one at night, and very frequently even of his dreams. In vain did the New York debutantes and their mothers hint that his baby son must need a mother, that the Upper East side mansion must seem large and empty without a mistress, that he himself must find his leisure hours empty and chill; he would smile at them all in the slightly sorrowful manner he had perfected and say that no, no, they were fine, that the baby’s nursemaids and governess were doing a wonderful job, that his housekeeper ran the house with energy and skill, that he was left no time by his friends to feel lonely.