The Decision (49 page)

‘I think I’ll turn in,’ she said, ‘I’m leaving early.’

‘Ah. Getting Ari the Ferry out of his bed early. No mean feat.’

She giggled, surprised again at this flash of humour. ‘Is that your name for him?’

‘It is. Well, I discovered his name was Aristotle and I couldn’t resist it. I’m part Welsh, you see, and in Wales everyone is Dai the Baker or Jones the Fish. It came from that.’ He stopped and looked quite anxious, as if aware he had made too big a revelation. He’s afraid I’m going to start asking him about Wales, Scarlett thought. ‘Goodnight then,’ she said and saw the relief almost palpable on his face. He was a nutcase.

‘Goodnight,’ he said, standing up and shaking her hand formally, ‘safe journey.’

Her last thought was that in the right circumstances, Mark Frost could – just possibly – be quite fun.

‘I just – don’t like it. I’m sorry.’

‘But, Matt, why not? What’s wrong with it?’

‘He’s married for a start.’

‘Matt! He hasn’t seen her in years.’

‘And how do you know that’s true?’

‘Matt! For God’s sake. I don’t know, not for sure, but I trust him.’

‘Well, I don’t.’

‘Funny thing to say about your business partner.’

‘That’s not what I meant and you know it.’

‘Oh, Matt. Chill out. I’ve got an appointment, I’ll see you later.’

Driving into Chelsea, playing ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction’ by the Stones very loudly, Louise smiled to herself. She did enjoy rattling Matt. And he was seriously rattled by the fact that she was having an affair with Barry Floyd. She would have liked to think he was jealous, but it was a less flattering reason: he felt professionally threatened by it. He thought they’d gang up on him. Which was pathetic really. She was too professional in the first place, and it stung that he might even consider it; and in the second, the partnership was much too successful to put at risk. Barkers Park was going up fast, WireHire were perfect tenants, making stage payments on the dot, agreeing to a bonus payment if the offices were finished ahead of time.

There was no way either of them would want to change the basis of any part of their working relationship.

Their personal one, however, had changed rather quickly.

‘I mean, I thought he was pretty sexy,’ Louise explained to Valerie Hill, who had become her confidante over the whole thing. ‘But I knew about Maura, of course—’

‘The wife?’ Valerie managed to convey a lot in those two words: that wives were asking for trouble and their husbands fair game if they weren’t keeping an eye on them, and were too complacent to worry about what they were up to.

‘The wife. Yes. But—’

‘Don’t tell me, in name only.’

‘If living with another man means in name only, yes. And don’t look at me like that, it’s true. They were married when he was eighteen and she was seventeen. She was in the family way, or told him she was, and then surprise, surprise, soon as they were married, she had a miscarriage. He said he walked straight into it. Well, you would at eighteen, wouldn’t you?’

‘I wouldn’t,’ said Valerie. ‘So then what happened?’

‘Well then, she did have three babies, over the next five years or so, but then when Barry came to London, she stayed behind and then started playing around, got very friendly with this farmer—’

‘Louise,’ said Valerie, ‘are you sure it wasn’t him playing around? He doesn’t seem too much of an innocent to me.’

‘Oh, no doubt he did too,’ said Louise. ‘I’m not that stupid. But now she’s living with the farmer over there, and …’

‘Don’t tell me they’re going to get a divorce.’

‘No, of course not. It’s not an option in Catholic Ireland. And even an annulment is virtually impossible unless you’re best friends with the pope. But a lot of people just do what Barry and Maura are doing and get on with their lives. He sends her money, of course, a lot, and besides, the farmer is not exactly poor as far as I can make out.’

‘And are you sure this is all on the level?’

‘As sure as I could be without going over there and checking it out for myself.’

The fact was that, in spite of her tough talking, Louise wasn’t entirely happy about getting involved with a married man. In the first place, she knew that, given the divorce laws in Ireland, it could never lead to anything permanent; and in the second, and more importantly, it was against her rather complex moral code. She really didn’t like girls who broke up marriages; in fact she disapproved of them quite strongly. She had grown up in a very moral culture that respected marriage and the family above all things; and she had struggled with herself considerably over taking the affair with Barry any further than their ongoing and very light-hearted flirtation.

But, she was beginning to find her single lifestyle unsatisfactory; she didn’t dream of a home and babies, but she was beginning to think she would like to have someone to share things with, not just her leisure time and her bed, but the contents of her head, her thoughts, her plans, her ambitions for herself, someone who understood her and what she was about. The only man who had ever fitted that brief was Matt Shaw; and he was clearly hopelessly in love with someone else – someone who just happened to be his wife and the mother of his adored child.

But she discovered on their very first date that Barry Floyd did fill the brief extraordinarily well.

He’d asked her out to dinner one evening, after they had been to a meeting at Barkers Park, and then made an unapologetic pass at her afterwards (‘You know, I fancy you absolutely, Louise, and I just get the feeling you might return the favour, and if you do, well, I wonder if you’d like to take it a little further’).

Not wishing to be a pushover, Louise had said that dinner was all well and good, and that yes, she didn’t find him completely unattractive, but she wasn’t sure how much, or indeed if at all, she wanted to take it even a little further, and that she didn’t approve of women who slept with married men; Barry said, his blue eyes dancing, that he couldn’t recall having mentioned anything about sleeping, all he’d had in mind was a second date.

‘You’re a liar, Barry Floyd,’ Louise said, pushing his hand from where it was resting on her knee, and struggling to ignore the effect it was having on the area just above it, ‘and you are married and don’t give me any of that rubbish about how it’s in name only, because I won’t believe you.’

‘So you’re just an old-fashioned girl at heart, are you?’ he said, and she said if not wanting to put a marriage at risk made her old-fashioned, yes she was.

They had a second dinner. It was even better than the first: just as much fun, but they talked more, about more serious things, the business, the future and, as the wine went down, their own hopes and fears. And he told her about Maura and the state of his marriage.

‘I make no apologies for how it sounds,’ he said, his blue eyes fixed very seriously on hers, ‘which is terribly corny and extremely unlikely to a hugely intelligent girl like yourself. But it’s true. I don’t know how to make you believe me, Louise, but I would give a great deal if I could.’

‘How great a deal?’ she said. ‘Your stake in Barkers Park?’

‘Oh, now, let’s keep things in proportion, for the love of God,’ he said, laughing, and she laughed too; but afterwards, as she told Valerie, it was when she began to believe him.

‘If he’d said yes, I’d have known it couldn’t be true.’

She was not, however, prepared to make things easy for him.

‘So can we have a third date?’

‘I think I could agree to that, yes.’

‘And where would you like to go? Your choice.’

‘OK,’ she said, ‘let me see. Um – how about the Ritz?’

‘Well, that’s easy. I can certainly arrange that. Tomorrow night?’

‘Oh, you couldn’t arrange it by tomorrow, surely,’ she said, ‘there’d be the flight and all that sort of thing.’

‘The flight?’

‘Didn’t you realise, sorry, I meant the Ritz in Paris.’

He didn’t flinch. ‘Well now, maybe we should make it Friday instead,’ he said. ‘Because we probably wouldn’t get the last train home.’

He called her in the morning with a flight booked ‘and somewhere to stay, not the Ritz, I can’t afford that, not this year, next maybe, but a very nice little hotel on the South Bank. Two rooms if you like.’

‘Two rooms of course. This is only our third date. What sort of girl do you think I am?’

‘A very sexy one,’ he said.

Dinner at the Ritz was spectacular; back in the small hotel, Louise kissed him goodnight at the door of her room, and waved him off down the corridor. After ten minutes, she knocked at his door.

‘I don’t seem to be able to sleep,’ she said, ‘I wondered if we could have a bit more of a chat about Barkers Park.’

She arrived back in London dizzy with weariness, and extremely happy; and reflecting on the great foolishness of Maura Floyd. For the time being, she thought, she had found exactly what she had been looking for. And the time being was long enough for now.

She had been speaking the truth when she said she wasn’t looking for marriage; as far as she could see, it was a straight and fast road downhill to a place where even if you continued with your career, and earned as much or even more than your husband, he still remained in some mystical way the head of the household, and had to be waited on, fussed over and asked permission if you wanted to be away or even work late.

She had been shocked by Eliza’s giving up work; she and Eliza were not close friends, but she liked and admired her, and she was fairly sure it had been at Matt’s insistence, and an extremely foolish move. Eliza had changed from dazzling, successful girl to anonymous mother; where, Louise wondered, was the wisdom in that? She wasn’t sure which was her strongest emotion, distaste at Matt’s behaviour or disappointment in Eliza’s; either way, that assuredly wasn’t what she wanted.

That was the spring that
Time
Magazine bestowed upon London the ultimate accolade of the title ‘The Swinging City’, when it became the most desirable place on earth, a modern day Camelot, home of every kind of pleasure. That was the year that photographs of London – often also featuring the new model sensation Twiggy, with her childlike face, her boyish haircut, her spindly body – appeared in every newspaper in the world. That was when everyone fought to get in on the act, when the Prime Minister Harold Wilson was photographed with the Beatles, and the Queen’s sister (who had after all married into the Camelot fantasy herself) rocked to the Rolling Stones; when Michelangelo Antonioni chose London as the location for
Blow Up
, his iconic tale of fashionable and degenerate society; when even Paris fashion turned tricksy and trendy, when Courrèges showed girlish rather than womanly models in short white boots and plastic dresses, and Paco Rabanne draped models’ forms with dizzily wonderful plastic mirrored jewellery; and that was the time when Eliza thought she was going mad, watching from her self-imposed exile, as every fashion editor in the world battled to find new designers, models and photographers and to give them the freehold of their pages in ever wilder and more imaginative ways.

She would sit in the flat or in the park, Emmie in her pram, leafing through magazines, in an agony of impotence: thinking how differently, how much more creatively, how much better for Christ’s sake, she would have shown this dress, those colours, that designer. Occasionally she would go and meet Annunciata or Maddy or one of the other fashion editors for lunch, and come back feeling depressed, disenfranchised, cheated of her rightful place in this dazzling over-the-rainbow world. She told herself it was pathetic, struggled to rise above it, to see it all as so much nonsense set against her new, more worthy role in life, struggled also to see Emmie’s achievements – sitting, crawling, smiling toothily – as truly important, so much more so than a few double-page spreads in a magazine, or being crowned fashion editor of the year at some award ceremony. And she knew they were, of course she did; but her pleasure and pride in them were hard won.

‘And I’m lonely,’ she wailed to Maddy, one of the very few people to whom she would admit any flaw in her new life. ‘Matt’s never home before nine, and then he’s too tired to talk and more importantly listen.’

‘Don’t you have friends with babies?’ asked Maddy.

‘Well, yes and no. Lots of acquaintances, girls I used to know of course and they ask me to tea and to meet them in the park, although lots of them have got nannies, it drives me crazy, Maddy, there they are, allowed nannies by their husbands, so they can leave their babies and go shopping and do dinner parties, and I’m not allowed one by mine to do something really important. God, it’s so unfair.’

‘Have you told him you feel like this?’

‘What would be the point? It would be like – like trying to explain to a fly there was glass in the window. And they’re so bloody boring, always going on about their dinner parties and which schools the little boys are being put down for. So actually, yes, I prefer to spend my time alone with Emmie. Although I have got one friend,’ she added, ‘much more interesting. I met her at the clinic.’

‘The clinic?’

‘Yes. I go there to have Emmie weighed and have her vaccinations and so on. It’s the highlight of my week, I tell you.’