The Thief of Time (18 page)

‘Music stores,' she told me. ‘I'm an area manager with a retail chain. London and the south-east. That's forty-two shops in all.'

‘Really,' I said, impressed by such responsibility. ‘That must be -'

‘I've been there since I left school, to be honest with you,' she continued. ‘Skipped all that university palaver. Been working my way up the ladder ever since. Salesgirl, assistant manager, branch manager. I got the area manager's job because everyone else who went for it was either incompetent or lazy. Now I'm their boss,' she added.

I smiled. ‘And how do you treat them?' I asked her.

‘With amazing fairness, all things considered,' she said, ‘although I'd give my left nut to see about half a dozen of them leave or lose their footing as they stroll around the top of a very, very tall building. I'm trying to guide them towards alternative careers but they seem settled for life there. I, on the other hand, feel like a change. Ambition is all I really have. It's what I have instead of a life.'

‘And is that enough for you?'

‘That and ability. I'm looking for alternative employment, you see, Mr Zéla. I feel I've gone about as far in
retail
as I'm ever going to go.' Her face took on a slightly sour expression as she employed the dreaded R-word.

‘Matthieu, please,' I said, predictably.

‘So this has come as a godsend to me, you see.'

I nodded and finished my tea, wondering how much longer we would have to chat politely before we could say goodbye when that last sentence finally sank in. ‘What has?' I asked her, looking up. ‘What has come as a godsend?'

‘This,' she said, smiling. ‘This opportunity.'

Another pause. ‘Sorry, I'm not with you.'

‘This television station,' she said, leaning forward and looking at me as if I was an idiot. ‘It's the right opportunity at just the right time for me. I've been in the same job for eleven years now. It's time I got out. Got involved in something different. It excites me. I feel challenged by it.'

‘You want to work
here7.'
I asked, surprised by the idea, wondering what exactly I could offer her but sure already that she was the kind of woman that it would be good to have on board. ‘But what exactly do you want to do?'

‘Look, Mr Zéla,' she said, putting her cup down on my desk and her cards on the table as she crossed her legs in a quick movement. ‘My father has given me his power of attorney and wants me to represent him in this business. Basically, his shares are now being operated by me. I
already
work here, you might say. So I will of course want to be kept up to speed with all the company's plans and transactions while at the same time learn very quickly about the history and needs of this place. You can see that, I'm sure. I'll need to look at budgets, projections, productivity, ratings, market share, that type of thing.'

‘Right,' I said, very slowly and very suspiciously, as I tried to look quickly into the future and into what all of this might mean. I probably should have expected it but had never considered someone else stepping into P.W.'s shoes until now. I had always assumed that he would remain a sleeping partner, doing no work and drawing on his profits every quarter. He had barely been more than that before all of this business began anyway. ‘Well, I suppose that can be arranged,' I said. ‘You have all the necessary documentation, I presume.'

‘Oh, yes,' she replied confidently. ‘There're no problems there. I'll bike them across to you later this afternoon for your legal department to read through. No, the important thing is that I want to actually work here. Not just be employed here, not just be paid from here, but to
work
here.'

‘On air, you mean?' For a moment I could almost see it. She was the right age, she was attractive, intelligent. A possible replacement for Tara, I thought. Weather? News? Documentaries?

‘No, not on air,' she replied with a laugh, knocking that idea on the head immediately. ‘Behind the scenes obviously. I want James Hocknell's job.'

I blinked. Although I admired her forthrightness, I was amazed by her arrogance. ‘You have to be kidding me,' I said.

‘Not at all. I'm perfectly serious.'

‘But you have no experience.'

‘No experience?' She looked at me in amazement. ‘I've worked in a management role in a high profile organisation for over nine years. I deal with an annual turnover of sixteen million pounds. I have authority over a staff of almost six hundred people. I administer -'

‘You have no experience in the media world, Caroline,' I said. ‘You've never worked for a newspaper, a television station, a film company, a PR agency – nothing. You said yourself you've been in retail since you left school. Well? Am I right?'

‘You're right, but -'

‘Let me ask you this,' I said, raising a hand to silence her for a moment and she sat back with a slightly sulky expression, folding her arms like a child who hasn't been given what she wanted. ‘In your business, if someone came to you from another company, a company where they may well have done very well for themselves but in a completely different industry all the same, and asked to be employed at the very highest level, would you consider it for more than a moment?'

‘If they seemed like they could do the job, yes. I'd ask them to put together a -'

‘Caroline, hold on. Answer me this question as if you were in the very position you aspire to.' I leaned forward and joined my hands together as I looked her directly in the eyes. ‘If you were me, would
you
hire you?'

There was a long silence as she thought about it and realised that the best answer to that question was not to answer it at all. ‘I'm an intelligent woman, Matthieu,' she said. ‘I'm good at what I do. And I can learn quickly. And at the end of the day, I
am
a major shareholder,' she added, a hint of a threat in her voice, as if this was going to swing the vote in her favour.

‘And I'm an even more major one,' I replied without hesitation. ‘And with Alan on my side, as I assure you he will be, I am the
majority
shareholder. No, I'm sorry. It's out of the question. James Hocknell may have been many things and he may have come to an unpleasant end, but the man was a professional and absolutely brilliant at his job. He's helped advance this company and bring it to the point where it is today. I can't afford to see all that work go to waste. I cant take the risk. I'm sorry.'

She sighed and sat back in her chair. ‘Tell me this, Matthieu,' she said, ‘do you want to go on working here?'

‘Oh, God no,' I said honestly. ‘I want things to go back to the way they were. I want to be able to come in once a week, sure that I've left someone in charge who can handle any situation that presents itself. I want a little peace and quiet. I'm an old man, you know.'

She laughed. ‘You are not,' she said. ‘Don't be ridiculous.'

‘Trust me. I don't look my age.'

‘All I want is a chance, that's all I ask. You can always fire me. You can put it in my contract that I can be fired at any time for any reason and I can't sue you. What do you say? I can't say fairer than that.'

I pushed my chair back a little and looked out of the window. On the pavement below I could see a small child waiting with his mother for the traffic to stop so that they might cross the road. They weren't holding hands and I watched as he suddenly made a break for it, only to be whisked back by his mother before he was run over, whereupon she gave him a sharp slap on the back of his legs. Then he burst out crying although I couldn't hear him from this distance. I could just see his little eyes scrunched up tightly and his mouth twisted into some sort of wide open contortion. Hideously ugly. I looked away. ‘I tell you what,' I said, turning back to her, and thinking, ‘What the hell?'. ‘It really looks like
I'm
going to be doing James's job for the foreseeable future. So how about you come to work here as my assistant. I'll teach you what I know about the place, for what it's worth, and after a few months we can re-evaluate the situation. See whether it's the kind of thing you really want to do or not. Maybe you'll prove me wrong. Maybe you'll be excellent at it. Or maybe your father will come home and we'll all be right back where we started.'

‘I think that's unlikely somehow,' she said. ‘But that sounds fair enough, I suppose. At least I'm willing to accept that arrangement for now. One last question.'

‘Yes?'

‘When do I start?'

It was splashed across the front pages of all the tabloids, and even hit a broadsheet or two. A colour photograph, slightly off-kilter, of Tommy and Barbra clinched in a passionate embrace, eyes closed, lips locked together, blissfully unaware of the paparazzo snapping away in the distance. The location was a dark corner of a famous people's nightclub; Tommy looked rather smart in his now apparently trademark black shirt and jacket, while Barbra was definitely not looking her age in a simple white blouse and culottes. He had one hand in her shoulder-length blonde hair as they kissed; their bodies could hardly have been closer together without risk of consummation and the whole picture represented the word ‘lust'. The papers could hardly contain their excitement.

‘I don't know how it happened exactly,' Tommy explained to me as we sat drinking cappuccinos in a top-floor cafe off Kensington High Street, hidden slightly behind a fern in order to escape from prying eyes. ‘It was just one of those things. We met, we got talking, one thing led to another, we kissed. I know it seems odd but it felt perfectly natural at the time.'

‘Honestly,' I said, amused by the boyish look of smug self-satisfaction he was giving me, ‘she's old enough to be your mother.'

‘Maybe, but surely the most important thing is that she's not.'

I laughed. ‘Do famous people only make love to other famous people?' I asked him, intrigued now by the world which he inhabited. ‘Explain it to me. Is that why famous people want to be famous?'

‘Not always,' he said, shaking his head. ‘Look at Andrea. She's not famous.'

‘She's not famous
yet,
Tommy. Give her a couple of months and come back to me on it.' Andrea was Tommy's current girlfriend, who had already announced that she was two months pregnant with his child. They had met at a television awards ceremony, where Andrea was working as a junior sound recordist with the television station responsible for its broadcasting. According to him – well, according to her originally – she didn't know who he was when they met, never having seen an episode of his television show. Apparently, she doesn't even own a TV, which I find unusual for someone who actually works in the medium.

‘It's true,' Tommy told me. ‘There isn't a single TV in her apartment. It's wall to wall books, that's all. She's not like those other girls. She's not interested in who I am.'

I wasn't convinced. Even if she really didn't have a TV, it was impossible to conceive of an existence in this country over the last few years where, somehow or other, the name of Tommy DuMarque did not creep into your consciousness. His many ventures into different areas of the entertainment world – television, music, theatre,
Hello!
magazine – have made him such a ubiquitous presence in the cultural melee that it seemed ridiculous that a normal person with eyes and ears could travel from day to day without having made his acquaintance, metaphorically speaking, at some point or another. And yet this girl, this Andrea, this now pregnant twenty-four-year-old sound recordist, was claiming that very thing.

‘She's all right really,' said Tommy, defending her to me with his usual lack of superlatives. ‘She's a nice girl. I trust her.'

‘Do you love her?'

‘Christ, no.'

‘But you're still together?'

‘Of course we are. We're having a baby, remember?'

‘I remember.' What he didn't realise was that, to me, hearing of his impregnating someone was like watching someone sign his own death warrant. I picked up the newspaper again and waved it at him. ‘So what about this then?' I asked. ‘How do you explain this? To
Andrea,
if to no one else.'

‘I don't
have
to explain it to her,' he said with a shrug, twirling his cappuccino around inside his cup carelessly. ‘We're not married, you know. Things happen. We're young. What are you gonna do?'

‘I'm not going to do anything, Tommy. I just want to try to understand why you're allowing yourself to get more and more deeply involved with some girl who you don't really care about, while you go around smooching with ageing movie stars whenever you get a chance. It seems to me that, if this Andrea really cared about you, she'd take exception to your behaviour.'

‘Stop calling her “this Andrea”. It's just Andrea.'

‘Who has become pregnant with your baby. A rich and famous television personality. I wonder what particular qualities she first saw in you,' I added sarcastically.

Tommy looked irritated and paused before answering, in a slightly higher tone of voice. ‘Who are you calling rich anyway?' he asked me.
^T
haven't got two fucking pennies to rub together, surely you know that better than anyone. She's not after me for my money, you know.'

‘Tommy, you're in a unique position. You may not currently be wealthy but you have the ability to make as much money as you want whenever you want. You are one of the elite. You are a star. People who never have and never will meet you look up to you, dream about you, have sexual fantasies in which you are involved. People will pay to see you. You belong to the extraordinary social group of the professional celebrity. Can't you see that? You could make £100,000 tomorrow simply by allowing someone to take photographs of your gracious drawing room.'