Wicked Pleasures (52 page)

‘Well you see,’ said Max, feeling his way carefully, ‘I think – well I know – that my parents’ marriage wasn’t quite – quite what it seemed.’

‘You mean they weren’t happy.’

‘Well – yes.’

‘Well, your mother certainly wasn’t. She was a very tortured woman. Poor Virginia.’

‘Tortured!’ said Max bitterly. ‘I don’t know why everyone’s so sorry for her. It’s my father who was tortured. Not her.’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘Well – I happen to know she was – well, having affairs.’ He suddenly looked up at Halston, horror in his eyes. ‘I’m sorry. Did she – were you –’

‘No we weren’t and no she didn’t. Although I have to tell you it was not for want of trying on my part. And maybe she had relationships and maybe she didn’t, but she was not a promiscuous lady, Max. She was too serious for that, too fastidious. I never heard anybody speaking carelessly, disparagingly of her, ever, and I knew her a long time. Her reputation was immaculate.’

‘But I –’ Max sat staring at him. Halston seemed perfectly serious, to be telling the truth; he was not covering up for his mother in any way. ‘But you what?’

‘Oh – nothing. It’s just that in England there’s been a lot of gossip.’

‘What sort of gossip?’

‘Well that she had been sleeping around. Worse.’

‘Really? In what way worse?’

‘Oh – it doesn’t matter.’

‘Well,’ said Michael Halston, ‘there never was any here. Gossip, that is. Certainly not of a serious nature. And I can’t believe that if your mother had been a seriously promiscuous woman, she would have confined her behaviour to England. Where she was far more likely to become notorious, where the talk would have mattered very much more.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Max. He sounded sulky. ‘I just don’t know anything any more.’

‘I don’t suppose you’ve been able to confront your father with this? In any way?’

‘Yes,’ said Max. ‘Yes I have as a matter of fact.’

He suddenly wanted Halston to understand that this was not mere gossip he had been listening to: that he was not simply idly curious, but that it mattered, that it hurt. That there was some reason for his inquiries. ‘My father said that it was true. That she had had lovers. But he wouldn’t tell me any more. And I have to know why. And I have to know who they were.’

‘Why? You’re only buying yourself a lot of grief. She’s dead, Max. Let her be the woman you loved, you remembered.’

‘But I don’t know who I’m remembering!’ said Max in a sudden agony of frustration. ‘I don’t know who that woman was. What she was really like.’

‘Virginia was one of my dearest friends. I miss her sadly. She was a life-enhancer. Things were brighter, better when she was there. In spite of the sadness underneath.’

‘Yes, well, she didn’t do all that much life-enhancing for us,’ said Max, ‘she was always away.’

‘Always?’

‘Well a lot.’

‘She needed to be away, Max. Not from you, but from the pressures at home. I only saw her in England twice, with your father, once at a party in London, once at a ball in the country. She was quite different. Tense, withdrawn. Rather brittle. She never asked me to the house. I think she felt she wanted to keep us, her New World friends as she called us, separate from her life there.’

‘My father is a really good man,’ said Max staunchly, realizing with a slight shock that he was thinking, albeit briefly, of Alexander as being truly his father, the friend in this enemy territory. ‘He really is.’

‘I’m sure. I liked him. He was charming and most courteous to me. Whatever was wrong with the marriage wasn’t his fault. I’m not saying that. It was – well, the nearest you can get, I suppose, is chemistry. The wrong formula.’

‘People say,’ said Max carefully, ‘that I look exactly like him.’

Halston looked at him thoughtfully. There was no trace of emotion in his dark brown eyes, other than a gentle interest.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes, I think you do. Exactly. It’s all right, Max, I’m not about to start dissecting your parentage.’

Later, as they ate lunch, Michael said, ‘I can give you a few names of people your mother saw quite a bit of here. Mostly in New York. And she had some good friends down in Florida Key West. There was one man in particular she was close to –’he looked at Max carefully –‘called Tommy Soames-Maxwell.’

‘Thank you,’ said Max. ‘You’ve been terribly kind.’

‘My pleasure.’ He looked at Max rather oddly. ‘I’d go a bit easy if I were you,’ he said, ‘with these investigations of yours. They can’t really help you very much. And they might even hurt.’

Angie, 1983

Angie didn’t quite know when it had happened, but she did want to get married. She couldn’t work out why exactly; but she did. And she wanted to marry Baby. Maybe it was children she wanted.

It really irritated her, that she loved Baby so much. She would actually have given quite a lot to feel differently towards him. He had so many disadvantages. He was much older than she would have wished; she actually (and particularly as she had got a little older herself – she was thirty-five now), preferred younger men. He wasn’t really all that hot in bed. He never had been – and she had never been able to understand why she didn’t mind that more. And of course he wasn’t nearly so much fun these days; he seemed so down and depressed a lot of the time. And it really got up her nose how frightened of his father he was. She really couldn’t see why he couldn’t stand up to the old bugger a bit more. After all, he had got the bank. Technically. All right, Fred III had moved back in after Baby’s illness, and was making mincemeat of Baby now, but he wouldn’t be able to do that to nearly such an extent if Baby would only stand up to him. Angie had come across a lot of bullies in her life, and there wasn’t one of them who hadn’t run away squeaking when she’d stood up to them. If they were married, she could help him more: make him the old Baby again.

All these thoughts drifted through her head as she sat in a traffic jam, on her way to her office in Hanover Square. It was a very tenderly beautiful October day, golden and slightly misty. It made her feel tranquil and happy; Angie was surprisingly susceptible to the weather. Baby would be here in another week; she hadn’t seen him since the time of Charlotte’s dance, when he had paid a flying visit to London under cover of some meeting with a banker. Highly unsatisfactory that had been too: he had been so shit scared of Mary Rose or Fred finding out he had hardly been able to get it up at all. She had been angry, frustrated, outraged almost that they were of so much importance to him, even when he was with her, in her bed, and they had had a terrible row, and she had told him she wanted to end it; but then as she watched from the bed as he got up, and very slowly and heavily began to get dressed, his face etched with misery, she couldn’t bear it, and jumped up and took him in her arms and started kissing him and telling him she hadn’t meant it, that she never ever wanted it to end, and he had looked at her with absolute tenderness and gratitude and then started to smile, that great joyful all-encompassing smile of his, and looked totally and utterly different and twenty years younger. That was the kind of occasion when she realized she loved him.

But what, in the name of heaven, was to become of them? He would never
leave Mary Rose, he would never leave the bank – God, that would be awful, thought Angie with a shudder, the millions and millions he was worth, or rather that bank was worth. There was absolutely no doubt in her mind that she would find it much harder to love Baby without his wealth. The fact that she had money of her own was neither here nor there. Wealth meant power; it made even weak men like Baby strong and sexy. And power turned Angie on.

She had been at a party the night before and met a merchant banker. His name was Christopher Holden and he was tall and dark, very smooth, very Etonian, and he had turned her on too. He was telling her about some deals he was doing: ‘The real fascination about them is pulling numbers out of the air, playing games with them, and knowing when to cash in the chips.’ He told her he wouldn’t even look at a deal that was worth less than a billion. Angie had felt a stab of sexual hunger at those words; she accepted his invitation to dinner (cancelling another date at twenty minutes’ notice) and sat entranced in the panelled dining room of the Connaught, as he talked for three hours about the way he passed his days, the coded contacts, the secrecy, the high-level meetings, the twelfth-hour consultations, the creeping share prices, the tactics, the tension, the gambling, the heady exaltation when everything came together at the right time at the right price. He made it sound much more exciting than when Baby talked about it.

‘I have a friend who’s an investment banker,’ she said, ‘in New York.’

‘Oh really? Who’s he with?’

‘Praegers.’

‘Ah. Interesting one. Outside the bulge bracket, it’s one of the most desirable little houses there are. Fascinating combination of being small with a couple of really triple-A clients. I mean, their having Fosters Land is ridiculous really. And old man Praeger still controls it. Fantastic. Eighty or something and running the show.’

‘Well, he does and he doesn’t,’ said Angie, defensive on Baby’s behalf. ‘Control it. I mean, his son is in charge now. He has been for years.’

‘Yes, of course, I’d forgotten that. But Fred the Third came back when Baby Praeger had his heart attack, didn’t he? Poor old Baby. Not quite the same calibre as Dad, I believe. But what I mean is, the shares are all in the hands of the family, aren’t they? Except for a tiny handful with the partners.’

‘Yes, they are,’ said Angie. ‘It’s unbelievable really.’

He looked at her, amused. ‘What does your friend do at Praegers?’

‘He’s a trader,’ said Angie.

‘Ah. That really is fun. Lucky fellow. I wish I was ten years younger. Those boys are going to make a fortune over here now. Are Praegers going to open a London office?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Angie, surprised. ‘Why should they?’

‘I bet you they’re thinking about it. In three years’ time one hell of a big balloon is going up. Everyone’s going to want to be here.’

‘Why?’

‘Big Bang,’ said Holden. ‘Heard of that?’

Angie laughed. ‘Well –’

‘Just as exciting,’ said Holden, grinning at her. ‘The Stock Exchange as we
know it will cease to exist. Free-for-all instead, buying and selling shares. It’s going to be very interesting indeed. And the banks will want to be in on it, and in order to accomplish that, they’ll be buying the stockbroking firms.’

‘Oh, I see,’ said Angie. She looked at Holden thoughtfully. ‘Well, I must ask my friend.’

‘Well, he’ll need to tell them to get their skates on. It’s all going to happen very fast. There won’t be many firms left to buy in a month or two. Look, this has been a really nice evening. Would you like a glass of champagne in Annabels to round it off ?’

Angie said she would; after several glasses of champagne, and a very arousing half hour on the dance floor, Holden offered to drive her home. He had a black Porsche which he drove extremely fast; Angie invited him in for a brandy. He said he had to get back to his wife, but that he would certainly be in touch.

The human brain works in a very complex manner. Looking back on her actions over the following few weeks, Angie could see they all dovetailed very neatly into one another, but at the time they seemed rather haphazard and disconnected. She started reading the financial pages in the papers very carefully; she talked to some public relations firms with a speciality in financial and business matters, with a view to appointing one of them; she instructed a City stockbroker, Edwards and Dawson, to open a share portfolio worth £10,000 for her, and to keep her closely informed as to which shares they were buying and selling and when and why; she booked several flights to New York, at four-weekly intervals, telling Baby she had a new client who was looking for property there; and she left her contraceptive pills to gather dust upon the bathroom shelf.

Charlotte, 1983–4

Charlotte had always been a star. She had been top of every class in every school she had ever attended; she had always scored straight As in exams; she had gained a double first at Cambridge. She had won enough rosettes to cover an entire wall in the tack room; she had a golf handicap of seventeen, she had been tennis champion of her school, house captain, deputy head girl, a leading light in the Union, a major contributor to
Granta
. She had been, moreover, she knew, a tower of strength in the family, had taken over in many small ways from her mother in duties on the estate; she was popular, she made people laugh, she was pretty, she was admired. Moreover she had been her grandfather’s favourite for the whole of her life, and much talked about in her role as heiress elect. She had confidently expected to arrive at Praegers in this capacity, follow a short induction programme, and then settle into some junior but important job, using her brain and the considerable administrative skills she also knew she possessed to their full capacity. Instead she found herself appointed a junior associate, seconded to a senior vice president, doing grunt work. And grunt work meant very very menial. It meant sitting at her boss’s desk, listening to his conversation, in a respectful silence; it meant taking minutes of meetings; it meant setting out the meeting room with paper and pencils and calculators; it meant Xeroxing; it meant proof reading; it meant stapling pages together; it meant making coffee; it meant putting a presentation book together at three in the morning; it meant never getting in after seven thirty in the morning, and often staying until after eleven at night; it meant having a bleeper with her wherever she went, even at weekends, in case she was needed for some extra urgent bit of grunt work. Occasionally it meant doing something just a little bit interesting like analysing the rate a stock had been trading over a twenty-year period, or doing financial models for a company, or phoning around individual shareholders to enlist their support in a bid. But mostly it was boring. And exhausting. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Fred III, in more than usually Machiavellian mode, had decided the vice president she worked for was Gabe Hoffman.