Wicked Pleasures (92 page)

He drank two glasses of champagne very quickly, and tried to avoid her amused, thoughtful eyes.

A woman with the Collins entourage came over to them, held out her hands to Tommy, kissed him on the lips.

She was glossy, sexy, year-round tanned; Tommy put his arm about her, turned to Angie and Max.

‘Sammy, meet Angie Praeger. And Max Hadleigh. Oh and Gemma Morton. This is a good friend of mine, Sammy Brown. What are you doing in town, Sammy?’

‘Oh – a little shopping. Having fun,’ said Sammy. ‘A few stolen days from LA.’

‘If I had the chance to be in LA,’ said Angie, smiling at Sammy, ‘I certainly wouldn’t be here.’

‘You know LA?’ said Sammy.

‘A little. I love it.’

‘You should get Tommy to bring you over. Take a trip.’

‘Oh – I’m a working girl, I’m afraid,’ said Angie.

‘Really?’ Sammy looked bored. ‘Are you Praeger as in Praeger the bank? Family?’

‘Yes, I am.’ Angie’s voice was cautious; Max and Tommy stayed silent, following her lead.

‘So do you know Chuck Drew from the New York office?’ said Sammy.

‘I’ve – met him,’ said Angie.

‘His wife is a great friend of mine. She is thrilled at the thought of moving to London.’

‘Oh really?’ said Angie. ‘Well, I’m pleased for her.’

‘Sammy, come and have a drink with us, darling,’ said Tommy.

‘Maybe later,’ she said, kissing him rather lingeringly on the mouth.

‘Don’t go without giving me your number anyway.’

She went off to rejoin her party; Angie stared after her, looking puzzled.

‘Now why on earth,’ she said, ‘should Chuck Drew be moving to London? Is Fred the Third up to something, do you think?’

‘God knows,’ said Max. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

‘I have to worry about it,’ said Angie, ‘I’m afraid.’

The next day Angie called Max, ostensibly to thank him for the evening.

‘I meant to ring earlier, but Baby was bad. He’s better now.’

‘That’s OK,’ said Max. ‘And you don’t need to thank me. It was fun.’

‘I’m afraid Gemma didn’t think so.’

‘Oh – she was all right. Really.’

‘I hope so.’

‘Max, how do you think I can find out about Chuck Drew and why he might be coming to London?’

‘Not sure. I’ll ask Charlotte if she’s heard anything.’

‘Could you? I’m worried. It doesn’t make sense. Thanks.’

Charlotte hadn’t heard about Chuck Drew. She was upset. ‘Maybe it’s a mistake.’

‘Maybe.’

‘I think I might call Gabe. He’d know.’

‘You do that,’ said Max. ‘Good excuse to make contact.’

‘Oh, piss off,’ said Charlotte irritably.

She rang Max a few days later.

‘Gabe hadn’t heard a word, but he’s going to do some digging. He did say Freddy was being extremely pro-active, following up every possible lead. Apparently he’s pulled out of Harvard after only a year, and he’s building up a nice little empire there. Established in the Heir’s Room even.’

She sounded upset. Max was sympathetic.

‘Never mind. You’ll get back soon, I’m sure. Grandpa seemed pretty sweet on you at the wedding.’

‘Did you think so? I’m afraid I didn’t notice anything of the kind. I think it’ll be a long time before I get anywhere near Praegers New York again.’

‘It’s a terrible thing, sex,’ said Max solemnly.

‘What’s sex got to do with it? Oh, Max, that was mean. God, I could kill Freddy. And Jeremy Foster.’

‘Let me know if you need help. With either of them. It would be a pleasure.’

‘Well,’ said Max, ‘we survived.’

‘Only just,’ said Jake Joseph. ‘I need a drink.’

Jake was his mentor and officially his boss at Mortons. He was a dealer: short, heavily built, funny and deceptively relaxed, with a mind like a jet-driven razor. Dealing was in his blood. His great-grandfather had worked Stag Alley, the name given to Capel Court at the back of the Stock Exchange, where the spivs of the Victorian era had got news of a new issue of railway stock and dashed down the alley to cash in on it. His grandfather and father had been jobbers on the Exchange; with the coming of Big Bang, Jake was one of the market makers, the brave new world’s jobbers, who would buy and sell on their own accounts for their own profits. ‘I tell you,’ he said to Max, on his first day at Mortons, ‘this business is going to make Monte Carlo look like a car park.’

Jake often quoted Dick Morton’s claim that he could walk onto the Stock Exchange floor and say immediately if the market was going up or down. ‘I can sniff it.’ It was the sort of remark that set Max’s pulses racing.

After a few months at Mortons, Max was beginning to be able to sniff it too.

And today, 27 October, there was a great deal to be sniffed in the air.

They went out of Mortons and down to the Fenchurch Colony wine bar. The scene there more closely resembled something from a St Trinian’s film than the sober world of the City of London. A heaving mass of bodies filled the small space, fighting to get at the bar; empties stood outside in the street, in the gutter, all over the floor, more reminiscent of beer cans than champagne bottles. The champagne was not being poured into glasses, it was in some cases being sprayed in the air, drunk from the bottle, carried off to waiting cars; the first day of the brave new world was being celebrated in a way that was to become legendary. Not to mention extremely distasteful to the Old Guard.

Big Bang itself had actually begun with something of a whimper. Ten days earlier, on the Saturday, there had been a full-scale rehearsal: everybody in, an imaginary script handed out to every firm in the City and the new technology – SEAQ, the Stock Exchange Automated Quotation – switched on; the most memorable event of the day was a breakdown of the entire system.

On the day itself, the jobbers – ‘From this day forward we are market makers,’ said Jake solemnly – sat at their screens, tapping more than slightly nervously, entering bids and offers on share prices into the system, and trying to adjust to knowing what every other market maker was doing, and also trying very hard to believe it was for real. It began quietly; they were nervous. Max watched Jake, always so cocky, so 101 per cent sure of what he was doing, staring at his screen, almost unblinking, sweat beading on his forehead, tapping numbers tentatively into it, swearing, shouting into his phone, cursing the salesmen, the analysts, the clients, the information he was receiving, Max, himself. It was hot, very hot in the room; the screens alone generated a lot of heat. The noise was intense, the atmosphere claustrophobic; everybody was, as Jake said, shit scared. Twice the system broke down; three times Jake took his phones off the hook and said he couldn’t stand it any longer. And then suddenly, at about three o’clock, he looked at Max and his dark eyes were brilliant with excitement. ‘I’ve got it,’ he said, as if he had just learnt to ride a bicycle. ‘It’s OK. It’s good. We’re going to be all right.’

Max picked up on the excitement; it was frenetic, heady, all-consuming. He kept remembering things people had said – Chrissie Forsyte: ‘The trading floor is the centre of the universe.’ Jake Joseph: ‘It’s going to make Monte Carlo look like a car park.’ And his Uncle Baby remarking that the trading floor gave him a hard-on, and he knew suddenly and sharply, with a sense of sheer pleasure, what they all meant. At the end of the day, after he had left Jake, light-headed with adrenalin as well as champagne, he took Gemma out to dinner and then to bed, and made love to her with an almost frantic enthusiasm.

He could never again quite break the association of sex and money forged in his mind that day.

Angie, 1986

‘I just found out exactly where my heart is situated,’ said Baby. ‘I felt it break.’

Angie looked at him, as he sat in the car beside her, being driven home from St James’s, and felt her own heart hurting almost beyond endurance, her own eyes blur with tears. They had gone, at Baby’s request, to the bank for Big Bang, to see the trading floor in operation for the first time; she had stood by his chair, with Charlotte, watching the increasingly frenetic activity, listening to the shouting, wondering if she would be able to make sense of it in a thousand years, and after an hour or so, when Bill Webb, the chief trader, came over to them and said, ‘How does it match up with New York, Mr Praeger?’ and Baby had answered that it matched up pretty well, that he was proud of them all, and had had only a little difficulty getting the words out, he had turned to her and said, ‘Let’s go home.’

‘I shan’t go in again,’ he said, when she had got him settled in the drawing room, his teacup with its straw in his good hand. ‘I’m an embarrassment, the clients don’t like it, the other guys hate it, especially when my speech is bad, and I’d just rather not be there.’

She couldn’t think of anything to say; no words of comfort came, no protestations that he was wrong; she just took his hand and kissed it, and tried to smile at him, and finally managed to tell him that she loved him.

‘I’m pretty pleased about that,’ said Baby, and fell asleep.

He slept a lot these days; she was glad that he did. The muscle twitching that plagued him didn’t seem to prevent sleep; he was very tired a lot of the time. She supposed it was the drugs.

She went out of the drawing room quietly and down to the kitchen, and made herself a pot of tea, strong enough to stand a teaspoon in. Bugger champagne: when the chips were really down, she thought, you returned to your roots. She felt very weary suddenly, weary and heartsore. Watching Baby deteriorate had been like the worst possible nightmare: a living death that was neither swift nor merciful. He was so brave now: patient and calm, the bad temper of the early days quite gone. She kept telling herself maybe she should stop going to work, stop doing anything, but it was her lifeline, it got her through the dreadful days, enabled her to come back to him smiling, with stories to tell, thoughts to share. And besides, the doctor had said he could live for a year yet or even two. Whenever she thought of that, of his being condemned to this for two more years, Angie felt physically sick, and more than sick, violently angry. It was so unfair, so wrong; what had Baby done to deserve it? He had been a kind, good man, a loving
father, a loyal son; for what wrongdoing had this piece of vengeance been wrought?

Fucking me, I suppose, she thought; fucking me, leaving his wife. Well, Mary Rose had been spared this, this misery, this pain: justice of a sort perhaps.

To distract herself from her pain, she rang Tommy. He sounded pleased.

‘Darling, how nice to hear your voice. I’m all alone here. Max has spent all day personally supervising Big Bang, and now he’s carrying through his own version of it with Gemma. How are you? You wouldn’t like dinner, would you?’

‘I’m fine,’ said Angie, determinedly crushing the chill that always accompanied news of Max and Gemma, ‘and I’d love dinner, actually, Tommy. But I can’t.’ She sighed and shifted in her seat, trying to ignore the ever-present ache of frustration in her body; she had no doubt that had Baby been in good health, she would have had little hesitation in launching into a dazzling joyful affair with Tommy.

‘Ah well. I wasn’t terribly hopeful. How’s Baby?’

‘Oh – you know. Pretty bloody awful. Tommy, I need your help. Are you still in touch with your friend Sammy?’

‘Sometimes, darling, yes. Why?’

‘I need some information. That’s why.’

‘Angie! You’re not asking me to spy?’

‘I’m asking you to spy.’

‘And what would you give me in return for this – information?’

‘Tommy, I’ve already given you a great deal. Don’t be greedy.’

‘Well, but darling, I get so tired of living in a cramped little cottage in a noisy London mews.’

‘It’s a whole lot better than a bedsit in Vegas.’

‘Well, I know, and I do appreciate it. But we’ve outgrown it a little.’

‘Tommy, I’m sorry to hear that,’ said Angie briskly. ‘You’re going to have to shrink back into it a little. At least until you’ve paid off your debts. Primarily to me.’

‘Oh well.’ He sighed theatrically. ‘Well, maybe I could stack this information you want against my credit account. How would that be?’

‘I suppose it would be OK.’

‘What do you want to know then, darling?’

‘I want to know why she thinks Chuck Drew is coming to London. When. Who knows about it at Praegers. That sort of thing. If she’s really best friends with Janette Drew she’ll know. Women always tell their best friends everything, especially things their husbands tell them not to talk about.’

‘All right, darling. Are you sure you don’t want dinner?’

‘Quite sure. But thanks anyway.’

It was a week before he came back to her. Sammy had been most forthcoming after Tommy had promised her a snort of the best-quality cocaine he kept for special occasions.

‘Of course that’s expensive, darling. I shall have to bill you.’

‘Of course. Come on, Tommy, get to the point.’

‘Well it seems that Chuck’s move to London is Freddy’s idea. And that it has the backing of most of the senior partners.’

‘Does Fred the Third know this?’

‘Apparently not.’