Connections (2 page)

“Any experience?” he asked.

Fleur had filled in for the barmaid one summer at the pub in the village where her parents lived and spent another waiting on tables in a seaside café during a break from college. She just said, “Yes – plenty.”

“You'll be working in the kitchen mornings, helping out the chef. Then you wait at tables or you're behind the bar, as required,” he said tiredly. “The last girl was an Australian. She suddenly took off, like they do. Two rules – don't take anything out of the till but the customers' change. Don't drink on duty.”

“So I've got the job?” asked Fleur. “Well – I'll come back at four, then.”

“Sort everything out with the manager,” he told her and began to move past her. Heading for the door, he said, “Welcome aboard.”

His hand was on the doorknob when Fleur said, “Mr Housman?”

He turned. “Yes?”

“About the money …”

“Yes,” he said. “Twenty quid a day, a week in arrears. That do you?”

“Is there any chance of cash in hand?” she asked.

“That's what we do here,” he said. “Fix up the details with Geoff Frost, the manager.”

“Goodbye,” Fleur said to his retreating back.

During the conversation the woman had been sweeping up and polishing the tables.

Fleur looked at her. “Oh well,” she said. “I've got the job.”

“So I heard,” the woman said. “You live over there?” She nodded at the Denbigh Estate.

“That's right. Adelaide House, opposite.”

“Good luck, dear,” the woman said. “I don't suppose we'll meet again. Different hours.”

Fleur left, went back to the flat and sat down. She had a job. She felt very tired, as if she'd been doing it non-stop for a week. Today she'd not only got to work, she'd got an appointment, made earlier on. All this was rather a surprise after months of grief and nothingness.

In Wardour Street she got the agreement of small, gnomelike Gerry Sullivan, former accountant of the former Verity Productions, to divert a cheque for royalties from Bali to her.

“I shouldn't be doing this,” he said. “You realise this is a one-off.”

“Yes, I know, Gerry,” she said.

“Point is,” he admitted, “I've sent some money to Ben, too. But I can't do any more – that's it.”

“How much?” she asked.

“I can't tell you,” he said, but he was disguising embarrassment and she guessed Ben had received five, perhaps ten times what she'd got. He added, warningly, “But that
is
it. Any more, and you're in more trouble than you are already.”

“So where is he?” she asked.

“I asked him when he called me,” Gerry told her. “But he told me he was between addresses. I sent the money Western Union to Miami.”

Fleur felt despondent. “Miami – that seems to say it all, doesn't it?” she said to Gerry.

“Everybody knows this wasn't your fault,” he told her.

“It's my fault that I was an idiot,” she said bitterly.

He didn't deny it. “Learning's always expensive,” he said to her by way of comfort. They shook hands and parted – probably, she thought, for the last time.

After leaving the office and hitting the familiar pavements of Soho she felt shaky and weak-kneed. She was revisiting the scenes where she had worked so hard – and signed so many pieces of paper without reading them – where she had lived, made love, been excited by the present and the future. Now those same streets were putting her in a state close to panic.

Though tempted to go back to the safety of her dull flat in Adelaide House, she thought, I got here, I got the cheque, I'm meeting Jess for lunch.

Her friend – and betrayer – Jess Stadlen was late. She always was. She worked for an independent production company, Camera Shake, developing scripts for film and TV and seeing them into production. She was married to a journalist, tall, handsome, likeable Adrian Drake, to whom she was regularly unfaithful when she was in the mood and he was out of London. In fact she had slept with Fleur's lover, Ben Campbell.

Fleur had found out about this months ago, in the office of Verity Productions. Ben had left three weeks earlier. Dust motes had been floating in the strips of light coming through the Venetian blinds. Ben's desk, the leather sofa and chairs, the glass table on which tired magazines sat now all seemed dusty too. The phones rang intermittently and were picked up by answering machines. The fax squealed out continual messages. Fleur, with files and bank statements, was trying to make sense of the accounts.

Jess had entered on long tanned legs, her bright red hair flying. She carried a bottle of vodka. She said, “Fleur – I've got something to say. How are things? Can you unplug the phones?”

“Worse than I thought,” Fleur confessed, though she wasn't
sure if she could trust Jess. Gossip travelled fast through the narrow streets of Soho. “Ben told me when he left he was taking the last chance to put it right.”

“Heard from him?” Jess asked. Her voice was low and she was speaking more slowly than usual. Normally conversation with her was like being sprayed with buckshot.

“No,” said Fleur. “The man he's staying with says he's left New York. But the company in Atlanta hasn't seen or heard from him. And there's stuff coming in here I don't know anything about.” She blurted, wondering if she should, “You know that documentary he wanted to make about the City – you know, the traders and the other traders, the street market guys—”

Jess nodded.

“Well,” said Fleur, “he told me the proposal had been turned down by everybody – but it looks as if he sold it to Channel Four and took a payment. Only I can't find the money anywhere or any work he's done on it and now of course I'm getting phone calls about it from the editor, Rodney Beavis. I'm bluffing, but I think he smells a rat. Jess,” Fleur appealed, “I don't know anything about this. In April I was commiserating with him, saying what a good idea it was and how sad it was nobody would support it. But he had the deal set up, and the money, in March. What's he been doing? He's been a bit strange for months, in retrospect. Do you think he's having some kind of a breakdown?”

“Look,” said Jess, putting the vodka on the table. “Got any mixers?” She got up and started to prowl about, looking. She called back from the kitchenette, “I don't know about a nervous breakdown, but there's a lot of talk about a financial breakdown.”

“I know things are tight,” Fleur admitted.

Jess came back carrying two vodkas and orange and handed Fleur one, which she took automatically.

“Jess, what is this? Have you come here for a reason?”

“Yes,” Jess told her. She paused. “OK. I feel guilty. And also – someone's got to warn you. Ben's in big trouble. The first thing you ought to do is go and see Gerry Sullivan.”

“But Ben handles all that side of things.”

Jess ignored this. “You've got a joint bank account for the business. You've signed stuff – right?”

Fleur nodded.

“And your flat's collateral?”

“How do you know?” Fleur demanded.

“I know a lot,” Jess said. “That's – well – look, Fleur, it's complicated.”

Fleur had a bad feeling about Jess's sudden inarticulacy and was apprehensive about what she was going to hear when Jess found her tongue again. She took a big swig of vodka. “Come on, Jess, tell me.”

And Jess did, confessing to a three-day affair with Ben at her house in Highgate while Ben was supposed to be up at Hadrian's Wall, filming. As she spoke Fleur stared at the carpet. She and Jess had been friends at school. They'd got jobs at the BBC practically simultaneously. Ben and Jess's husband had twice gone off together for a week's sailing, leaving Jess and Fleur to luxuriate in the facilities of a country house hotel.

Jess concluded, “I don't normally worry about these things – a bit of fun and no harm done is my motto. I'm not a homewrecker, I don't let it get out of hand—”

This was when the information sunk in and hard-pressed Fleur let out a yell, like an animal.

“Oh Christ,” said Jess. “Shut up, Fleur. Don't make it any worse than it is. Look – I wouldn't even have told you—”

Fleur stood up and threw her vodka right in Jess's face. “Get out, you bloody bitch. What a filthy thing to do. I really hate you, Jess. Just get out” – she picked up the vodka bottle – “or I'll throw the rest of this over you and that nice suit you're wearing. Then I might bash you with it. You're horrible, you tart. I could murder you.”

Jess, now up on her feet with vodka dribbling down her face, flinched but stood her ground. She put both hands up in a placatory gesture, warding Fleur off. “OK, OK – but listen to me – just this – Ben's gone. He may not come back, Fleur. He's in a very messy situation—”

Fleur advanced towards her, holding the bottle. “Right – right,” Jess said hastily, and left the office at speed.

Fleur gazed at the door, which had just slammed. For a moment she thought of running after Jess and hitting her with the bottle. Then she sat down with a bump on the couch Jess had just vacated, put her head in her hands and groaned.

Later she began to piece together the events surrounding the days Jess and Ben had spent together. It must have been just after New Year when Ben was theoretically filming a documentary about the tourist trade in Britain during the inhospitable North-East winter. They'd been in co-production with French and German companies. The theory had been that this would sell throughout Europe, though it hadn't. Ben had been rushing up and down for a month while things went wrong, especially the weather. Fleur had tried to schedule the filming for later on in the year when there'd be more light, but Ben had gone ahead anyway, not wanting to provide any reason for the other two companies to back out. He must have gone to the North-East six or seven times – only once he'd gone to North London instead, and tucked himself up in Jess's comfortable bedroom. Her lover – her best friend, more or less – and no one had let on. Only a few months later they'd all four, she and Ben and Jess and Adrian, gone off to Pamplona together on a break.

That January she'd been the one who'd had to drive up to be with Ben and sort things out all the time. She made five trips up the motorway, one in a snowstorm and one where she'd broken down and been boxed into a lay-by by two big lorries. She'd sat there with the windows up and a mobile phone in her hand until a police car had turned up and the two trucks had eased away.

“Oh God, oh God,” she groaned aloud.

She'd wondered if Jess had been lying. Hope had flared up, then subsided again until, finally, she'd had to recognise that she knew Jess had been telling the truth. She'd sat on in the office in silence broken only by traffic noise and the ever-grinding fax. She recalled Jess trying to tell her why she had confessed to the affair – because she knew something about Ben. But Jess hadn't told her what it was – hardly
could have, while Fleur was menacing her with a bottle of vodka.

Fleur sat on. Jess had said, just before Fleur chased her away, that Ben might not come back. On top of the sick feeling and the pain of hearing Ben had betrayed her with Jess Fleur felt another, horrible sensation. Jess's visit had confirmed that the business was in a bad, bad mess, worse than she'd imagined.

Stooping over like an old woman, Fleur made her way to the desk, plugged the phones in and picked up the pile of fax paper which had flooded out over the floor. She sat in the office until one in the morning making notes and came in at nine sharp to start phoning.

Late that afternoon she'd called Jess and said, “You're a treacherous bitch, Jess, but at least you came round to warn me. I want you to help me.”

Jess and she had met in a quiet pub near the British Museum, where no Soho gossips could see or hear them. There Jess told her that back in January Ben had said the business was going down the drain. They worked out what Fleur should do, and Fleur did it.

Now, as she headed towards the café where she and Jess were to meet, she remembered Ben vividly, as if he were beside her in the street. She'd met him six years earlier, chucked up the traineeship at the BBC because he, twelve years older, could teach her, he had said, more than she would learn there.

And he had: Ben was tall and wiry and very clever, capable of putting ten ideas together in a second, holding a room silent for five, ten minutes at a time as he spoke, joking, producing notions, quoting from poets, philosophers, films. He could write, edit scripts, run a camera as well as any cameraman. He could cut film. He could persuade, cook up budgets, put deals together. Over six years he and Fleur had made a dozen documentaries, won prizes in France and Canada and earned a reputation and a lot of money – which they'd put back, mostly, into the business.

When they met Ben had been living apart from his wife. When their affair began Fleur thought she was the luckiest woman in the world, so lucky it was unfair, so lucky it couldn't last.

It hadn't, Fleur thought. Sick at heart, she remembered Ben
had left school at sixteen before taking A levels, joined the army and left when they suggested he do officer training, gone on a scholarship to Oxford – and not taken his degree. He'd worked for three companies and as an independent producer by the time she met him. Everyone knew he was brilliant. Everyone he knew was brilliant. Life with him had been brilliant.

Now, as she went to meet Jess, friend and betrayer, it was dust and bills, and more bills and a lonely bed.

Jess dashed into the café with nine hundred pounds' worth of buff coat swirling round her and a hundred pounds of red hairdo corkscrewing round her head. She plonked herself down.

“You've lost weight,” she said enviously to Fleur.

“It's known as stress and living on the dole,” Fleur said. “Try it – it works.”