Wicked Pleasures (67 page)

It was one thirty before she finally finished, and Gabe told her to go home; he was still working furiously, his watch pulled off as it always was when he was intent on something, consuming endless cans of Diet Coke, and glaring at his terminal. He was working on a series of financial models for a paper company; the price of the stock was roaring up. Charlotte looked at him and thought with a touch of something near sadness that he had no idea that he had said anything particularly outrageous, anything that might have caused her to feel hurt, humiliated. Had she pointed it out, it would have intrigued him, she supposed, on an intellectual level puzzled him even, but it would have been totally inexplicable. A waste of time and energy. He was totally arrogant, chauvinist, insensitive; she felt a sense of strong sudden relief now that she had not made a scene, not reacted badly, come on all tender and girly, given him that kind of satisfaction. For the hundredth, possibly the thousandth time she reflected on the revenge she would extract from him one day, picked up her things and walked out of the office without a word.

She went into the ladies’ room, looked at herself and sighed. She was pale, and her eyes were dark with tiredness, her mascara smudged. Her hair was a mess; her skirt was creased. Well, at least it should put Jeremy off.

‘You look gorgeous,’ he said. ‘I like tired girls. Their resistance is lower.’

‘My resistance is very high,’ said Charlotte firmly. She sank into the seat beside him. He had shed his rags and was wearing a pair of Levis and a beige cashmere sweater. There was a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket on the floor of the limo.

‘What the hell have you been doing in there?’ he said, opening the bottle, pouring her a glass. He was good-naturedly interested, not in the least reproachful at the delay.

‘Oh – working on figures, and lists of contacts. Gabe’s still in there.’

‘Do you often spend the night together?’

‘Yes. Very often. Unfortunately.’ The car moved off; she sipped her champagne, feeling she was watching someone else in a bad movie.

‘You really don’t like him, do you?’

‘I loathe him,’ said Charlotte, Gabe’s words suddenly reiterating themselves in her head. ‘He’s arrogant, crude, and totally insensitive.’ She heard her voice tremble slightly again, and sighed.

Jeremy looked at her thoughtfully. ‘He’s upset you, hasn’t he?’

‘No! Well – maybe. Let’s not talk about him, Jeremy, please.’

‘OK. We’ll talk about everything else but. Tell me, Charlotte, how is the Chinese wall in that bank of yours?’

‘Very strong,’ said Charlotte firmly. ‘Why?’

The Chinese wall – the invisible security structure to protect clients from the hazards of information leaking out from the banking floor to the dealers – had been one of the first things she had learnt about on Day One at Praegers.

‘Oh – there’s such a lot of insider dealing going on. Someone was telling me the other day that in a lot of banks they’re not too much like a wall. More of a net curtain, I was told.’

‘Jeremy, I’m sure you’re wrong, and anyway, I don’t want to talk Praegers.’

‘No, I know. I’m sorry if I upset you. I didn’t mean to.’

‘Anyway, where are we going?’

‘Oh – nice little dining room I know.’

‘Jeremy! It’s not a hotel?’

‘It is not a hotel.’

The car was moving into Manhattan; the streets looked twice as wide in the deserted pre-dawn emptiness. Just past the Rockefeller Center they turned right, wound their way down a few blocks, and pulled to a halt. Charlotte looked up at the huge building towering above her.

‘Where on earth are we? Your office?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Jeremy, either it is or it isn’t your office.’

‘Well, it kind of is. Come along, darling, let’s go in.’

The driver was holding open the door, his face if anything blanker than before. Charlotte got out and allowed Jeremy to take her arm, shepherd her into the building. ‘I wish you’d explain,’ she said slightly irritably.

‘I will in a minute. Come on, into the elevator.’

Had she been anyone else, had Jeremy been anyone else, Charlotte thought, she would have refused, been afraid of being raped or attacked. But she felt (and told herself she was right to feel it) that she was protected by her position and his. She stepped into the elevator, watched him press the button for the seventy-third floor. The elevator roared up; she had never got used to New York buildings, she felt sick and her ears popped. Jeremy stood the other side of the elevator, smiling at her.

It stopped, they stepped out into a long wide corridor. Jeremy took out a key and unlocked the door to the left of the elevator. ‘Come on in.’

‘But Jeremy, where are we? Is this some kind of a night club?’

‘It is not,’ he said, sounding mildly indignant. ‘It’s my – workroom.’

The door opened into a small lobby; he pushed it open without switching on the light. Charlotte gasped aloud. She seemed to be standing in the middle of the night sky. She was in a large room, two walls of which were windows; presumably they were on the extreme outside edge of the building, and it had some complex, geometric structure. The view was breathtaking; she could see the graceful lace-like shape of the Chrysler, the great pointing needle of the Empire State and a hundred others, the lights shining starrily at her against the dark sky. The room had a marble floor and marble walls, and was almost entirely unfurnished apart from a couple of large couches in the window. She realized there were some very dim lights set in the walls; Jeremy turned a switch by the door and they brightened slowly. There was a discreet cough; Charlotte turned and saw a waiter in full white-tied splendour standing in the doorway.

‘Shall I serve the champagne, sir?’

‘Yes, Dawson, do. Thank you.’

Dawson withdrew; Charlotte looked at Jeremy, her eyes wide and sparkling.

‘Jeremy, whatever is going on?’

‘Dinner. In a minute. First a drink. Thank you, Dawson.’

‘But where are we?’

‘I told you. In my workroom. This is where I work. Where I think, and have ideas. There’s what you might call a studio through there. And when it gets very late, I don’t go home. Hence the kitchen. Oh, and there is also a bed.’

‘I just thought there might be,’ said Charlotte tartly.

Jeremy looked hurt. ‘You just thought wrong. It’s a single bed.’

‘Yes, I know the New Yorker’s idea of a single bed,’ said Charlotte. ‘It would contain a whole English family. Let me see this studio.’

Jeremy handed her a glass of champagne, and took her hand.

‘It’s here,’ he said, leading her through the lobby again. The studio was parallel to the first room, and almost as big; it did indeed have a huge artist’s desk in it, completely empty of pencils, paints or paper. There were two plan chests, a table with a computer terminal on it, and some architectural drawings hung round the wall. It did not look as if it was very frequently used.

‘Very nice,’ said Charlotte. ‘I can see you burn the midnight oil here a lot.’

‘Come and eat,’ said Jeremy, ‘you must be starving.’

Dawson served dinner with extreme formality at a table which he produced from the kitchen and set up in the wall-windowed room. It was a superb meal – ‘Very light,’ said Jeremy, ‘as it’s a little late’ – asparagus, salmon in filo pastry, and summer pudding. ‘I know it’s only spring, but I like to look forward.’

Charlotte wasn’t really hungry, but Jeremy was so pleased with the meal he had orchestrated, so eager to give her pleasure, it seemed churlish not to eat. She drank as little as she could, aware of the dangers of getting even mildly muddle-headed, but the champagne in the car and the second helping on arrival had shot into her bloodstream dangerously fast. By the time she had finished her summer pudding, she was pleasantly confused about exactly where she was, precisely why she was there, and certainly about how she was going to get home.

If Jeremy had set out to disarm her, she thought, he was going the right way about it. He had made no attempt to seduce her, had not even tried to flatter her; he had simply talked, charmingly and amusingly, about himself, and had led her, equally charmingly, to talk about her own life; Charlotte, who had thought she was too tired to speak at all, heard herself talking easily and happily about her childhood, her schooldays, Hartest, her family, her relationship with her grandfather, and then less happily about her hopes and fears for herself at the bank. ‘It’s so horribly complex. It sounds so wonderful, doesn’t it, just to inherit this huge golden egg, and it is, I suppose, but it’s a nightmare as well. So many people resenting me, jealous of me; I still have to take a deep breath before I walk into the restaurant at lunchtime, even though at last I have some friends. But they’re outnumbered by the enemies.’

‘You poor kid,’ said Jeremy, looking at her, sympathy liquid in his light brown eyes. ‘Did you ever think it would be so bad?’

‘Stupidly, no. I suppose I realized Freddy would be upset, but I didn’t bargain on the remaining ninety-nine per cent of the bank.’

‘I don’t really see it, I must say,’ he said, reaching to refill her glass. Dawson had disappeared into some discreet back room. ‘I mean, Praegers have always inherited the bank. It’s been passed on for – what – four, five generations. Nobody resented Baby or even Freddy.’

‘Yes, but I’m not a Praeger. I’m a stuck-up English debutante with a very dubious claim to my position, apart from being my grandfather’s favourite. Poised to throw my weight about, cash in on a lot of unearned benefits, all that sort of thing.’

‘Whose words are those? Gabe’s?’

‘Yes. And everybody else’s. Gabe is the only person who speaks them, that’s all.’

‘He clearly is a very charming young man,’ said Jeremy lightly. ‘Does your grandfather know about all this?’

‘No,’ said Charlotte, looking at him with alarm in her eyes, ‘and he is not to, either. He already practically killed me for what he called whingeing to a client.’

‘Tell me about that.’

She told him; in her exhausted over-emotional state, remembering that day, her hurt at being excluded so brutally from the Christmas lunch, her eyes suddenly filled with tears. Jeremy looked at her and his expression was very tender.

‘Poor darling,’ he said, covering her hand with his. ‘How vile. I wish I’d been there.’

‘It would have been worse if you had,’ said Charlotte, smiling at him weakly, and withdrawing her hand rather too hastily. ‘I’d have cried all over you too.’

‘And I should have taken you off for a most extravagant and wonderful lunch and dried your tears.’

‘Well,’ she said, smiling at him slightly shakily, ‘you weren’t.’

‘Do you ever think of giving up? Going back to England and doing something else?’

‘Never,’ said Charlotte simply. ‘Never for a single instant.’

‘Well you’re a brave girl. Why not?’

‘Firstly,’ she said simply, ‘because I love it. And secondly because I’m not going to let them beat me.’

Later, much later, he began to talk about himself. Charlotte had no idea what the time was; everything had lost any sense of perspective, she seemed to be inhabiting some strange world with no conventional areas of time and space. She was no longer tired, but in an oddly calm, slightly distant state. They had moved to one of the couches; Dawson had brought in, at Jeremy’s request, a large pot of coffee. Charlotte had looked at it, and asked if she could possibly have tea. ‘How very English. Of course you can. Can’t she, Dawson?’

‘Of course, sir.’ He reappeared five minutes later with a silver tray laid with cup, milk, sugar, hot water, and a huge variety of tea bags, Indian, China, fruit and herb of every possible description, and withdrew again with a slight bow.

Charlotte giggled. ‘I’m sure if I’d asked for Horlicks, he’d have delivered it.’

‘Of course he would. That’s what he’s there for.’

‘Not to act as chaperon for hapless young girls?’

‘I don’t think you’re hapless at all,’ he said, looking at her very seriously. ‘And no, not at all. He has a very efficient blind eye which he can turn when required.’

‘I see.’ She looked at him thoughtfully. ‘How extremely spoilt you are. How does it feel, Mr Foster, to be the man who has everything?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ he said, ‘I am nothing of the sort, you see.’ And he set out to disabuse her of any notion that he did indeed have everything and was therefore happy. He had everything certainly, he said, that money could buy, but that was most assuredly not enough.

Charlotte, who had grown up on the fringes of great wealth, while not actually possessing it, was nevertheless intrigued by the stories: the private jets to take him to wherever he wanted on a whim, the island bought for a house party, and used only two days a year, the house in Jamaica built and never occupied, the fleet of servants in every house, the bodyguards, the helicopters, the yachts, the endless trail of parties, of beautiful women, of the quest for pleasure. He talked of it not boastfully, but casually, almost sadly.

‘All I ever wanted,’ he said, ‘was love.’

‘But you’ve been married to Isabella for eight years,’ said Charlotte. ‘That must mean something.’

‘It means we suit one another very well,’ he said. ‘I don’t make demands on her, nor she on me, except socially. Our secretaries put our diaries together, once a week, and the result of that liaison is a mass of parties, dinners, benefits, trips. But we are two lonely people. Or certainly one lonely person.’

‘And what are you looking for?’ said Charlotte interestedly.

‘Oh,’ he said, reaching out and stroking her cheek, ‘I am looking most tirelessly for love.’ There was a long silence; her head was spinning very slowly and gently.

‘And if you found love,’ she said, ‘would things change? Would you and Isabella cease to suit one another?’

‘I can’t tell you that,’ he said, picking up her hand and kissing it. ‘I have never quite discovered it. I have come near, but not near enough.’

‘Well,’ said Charlotte, helping herself to some more tea in an attempt to become sober, ‘speaking for myself, the order would have to be a little different. I would have no wish to start helping you to find love, and then be relegated to a subclause in a weekly meeting between two secretaries.’