Wicked Pleasures (81 page)

‘Yes, I expect so,’ said Charlotte carefully. She held out the glass to Baby who was on her other side, nursing the ice box with the champagne in it. ‘Mr Watson’s glass, Baby. Are you all right?’

‘Yes, of course I am,’ he said irritably. Irritability was one of the major symptoms manifested by his illness at the moment. Charlotte had never expected to feel sympathy with Angie, but she quite often did these days. Baby passed her the bottle of champagne with his left hand.

‘Oh, marvellous!’ Brian Watson was beaming, his hostility to McEnroe temporarily halted. ‘Did you see that ace?’

‘Yes,’ said Charlotte, who hadn’t, passing the glass back to him, ‘and I saw that one,’ she added as McEnroe took his third straight set and the Centre Court roared its usual slightly grudging approval. ‘Shall we go in search of some strawberries, Mr Watson?’

She filled him a large bowlful, smothered it in cream, took it to him as he sat between Baby and Gus Booth in the hospitality tent, and then excused herself. ‘I want to get an extra programme,’ she said, ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

God, this corporate entertaining was hard work; she’d always loved Wimbledon, but this didn’t seem too much like fun at all. Well, if it was helping Baby keep the clients he’d got, it was worth it. The client list still wasn’t looking terribly healthy, even after the launch at Spencer House. And they had a very important prospective client coming along a little later, Jerry Mills from Nicolsons, the electronics people. She rather liked Jerry Mills, he was large and brash and vulgar and fun, very different from the stuffy Brian Watson. And Mrs Watson, with her refinement, her tutting at McEnroe’s behaviour, her ceaseless royal box watching. She had hardly seen a single game since the Princess of Wales had arrived.

‘Charlotte!’ said a voice. ‘Hi. How are you?’

‘Sarah! I’m fine. How lovely to see you.’ Sarah Ponsonby had been at school with her, they had been prefects together in the sixth.

‘I thought you’d gone to New York.’

‘Oh – I came back. Long story.’

‘But you’re still working with Praegers?’

‘Oh, yes of course. What are you doing?’

‘I’ve joined you. Well, your world. I’m working for Routledge.’

‘Routledge! Really? Is it fun?’

‘Great fun. Of course I’m just a frightfully small cog in the wheel, but I have my sights set higher. Gus Booth is with you, isn’t he? How do you like him? I’ve met Jemima a few times, you know she’s a Routledge by birth, and she’s an absolute hoot.’

‘Oh, he’s very nice,’ said Charlotte, ‘not exactly a hoot, but still. He’s here, actually. Are you working, Sarah, or watching the tennis?’

‘Working,’ said Sarah with a sigh. ‘With a special brief to take care of an important new client. Very lechy. Every time McEnroe swears, he pats my thigh. Oh, God, here he is.’ She switched on a careful smile. ‘Mr Phillips! I hope you’re not deserting us.’

‘Of course not. Just looking out for Mrs Phillips, that’s all. She’s late. Spot of bother with the babysitter.’ He nodded at Charlotte and smiled. ‘Enjoying the tennis?’

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ said Sarah, ‘Mr Phillips, this is an old school friend of mine, Lady Charlotte Welles. Charlotte, Tom Phillips. A very important person indeed.’

‘How do you do,’ said Charlotte, smiling, taking Tom Phillips’s hand, feeling its moist, warm, over-effusive grasp. ‘What do you do that you’re so important, Mr Phillips?’

‘Oh, run a little company,’ he said, smiling back at her.

‘Little company!’ said Sarah. ‘He runs Boscombes, Charlotte, you know, who own all those zillions of local papers.’

‘Of course,’ said Charlotte. The name did ring a bell.

It was not until the evening, back at Eaton Place, that Charlotte made the connection. She recalled, with great vividness, the evening at the Ritz. It had been the evening Baby had told her about his illness; when she had made the decision to tell Angie; and the evening he had been telling her his worries about Praegers’ rather limited success. And what had he said? She heard his voice quite clearly in her head: he had said, ‘Gus Booth is working for us right now. Talking to Tom Phillips, from Boscombes. I’m very hopeful about it.’

But Tom Phillips and Boscombes had failed to come up trumps, to deliver, to join Praegers, and Baby had been visibly upset when he told her.

And they had gone to Routledge instead; that in itself did not mean a great deal, nothing at all probably, except for a further memory, very recent, of Sarah’s voice saying, ‘Gus Booth is with you. Jemima’s a Routledge by birth.’

At first Charlotte had been too unhappy, too homesick for New York and for Gabe and her life there to care what happened to Praegers UK, but after a few
weeks and learning about, being forced to face the implications of, Baby’s illness, she had become involved, concerned, determined for them to do well, to prove to Fred they could succeed. And it was therapy of a sort.

She wasn’t sure what made her most unhappy: her banishment from New York, her humiliation at Jeremy’s hands, or the removal of Gabe from her life. They were each, individually, misery enough: set together as components of a whole, they were a source of very severe pain. Jeremy had called her repeatedly and written to her; she had refused to talk to him, to return his calls; she tore his letters up.

Days without Gabe were dreadful and dead: empty not only of his presence and the constant turmoil he had created in her, but the excitement of working with him, the constant charging of adrenalin; and it was hard for her to separate that from the misery of losing the job she had loved so much, the sense that she was making some kind – quite some kind – of progress, that she was climbing, steadily and relentlessly, towards her ultimate, heady goal. Cast into what seemed like the sleepy backwater of the London office, her future uncertain, uncharted, she felt lost, confused – and unmotivated. The man she was working for, Peter Donaldson, was nice: not a mover and a shaker exactly, but highly competent, and extremely kind and considerate. The main problem was that the days moved at a pace that seemed not just slow, but virtually static; she had left a roller coaster and found herself on a treadmill.

Praegers had seemed set to do so well, they were a blue-chip bank, and what did it matter that they were – what was it Gus Booth had called them? – new boys in town? There were dozens of new boys in town and they were all doing really well. Why not Praegers?

She was having lunch with Charles St Mullin next day, and decided to talk to him about it. She talked to Charles about almost everything that happened to her; he had become her best friend. In her initial misery she had been tempted to resign from Praegers, and train for the Bar, follow in Charles’s footsteps. She had even discussed a change of course with Charles; he had advised her not to make it. He said he felt she had banking in her blood and that she was going to succeed at it. And partly because she knew he was right, partly because she could still see the expression of intense pleasure on Freddy’s face as he engineered her downfall in New York, she set aside the temptation to leave. She was going to stay at Praegers and she was going to win, and one day she would outflank Freddy, and Praegers would be at the very least half hers.

Meanwhile, Charles was enjoying having her in London again, he said; in fact he felt like writing both to Jeremy Foster and Freddy Praeger personally, to thank them for delivering her back to him.

They met every week, over long gossipy lunches, discussing the past, their respective presents, and to an extent their futures and how much of them might be shared.

‘So I expect it’s silly,’ she said to him, after outlining her story about Routledge and Praegers, ‘but I just think it’s faintly fishy. Don’t you?’

‘I don’t know enough about your world to know,’ said Charles, ‘I think you need to do a little more investigation into the background.’

The investigation proved easier than she had expected.

Charlotte wasn’t sure what she thought about Gemma. She seemed sweet but slightly ridiculous, clearly besotted with Max, hanging on his arm and his every word. ‘She’s exactly what he doesn’t need,’ she had said crossly to Georgina, who was spending a weekend in London with her, ‘making him think he’s God, boosting his ego. If there’s an ego in the world that doesn’t need boosting it’s Max’s.’

‘Oh, he’s not that bad,’ said Georgina, ‘and maybe the love of a good woman is what he needs.’

Charlotte sighed. Georgina had always been inclined to be blind to Max’s faults.

‘He doesn’t need anything, except perhaps getting away from that awful Tommy.’

‘Well I don’t know,’ said Georgina. ‘He came to Hartest the other weekend, with Gemma, Max I mean, and he was really nice to Daddy. You know how Daddy longs for him to be the devoted son. Well I really thought he was trying.’

‘He’s up to something,’ said Charlotte briefly. ‘How’s Kendrick?’

Georgina’s pale face flushed, and her eyes became soft and bright and larger than ever.

‘He’s fine. Not long now till the summer. He sends me lots of tapes,’ she added with almost childlike pride.

‘Tapes?’ said Charlotte, amused. ‘Who by?’

‘Himself, stupid. Talking. He’s no good at letter writing, he says, well he isn’t, so I write to him and he sends me tapes back. It works really well.’

‘Good,’ said Charlotte slightly absently. ‘Georgie, do you think you could try and talk Daddy into letting us do this photo session at Hartest? For the press? It just might help Baby.’

‘I can’t think how it could,’ said Georgina, ‘but anyway, I don’t need to. He’s agreed. Angie’s asked him. I thought you knew.’

‘No I didn’t,’ said Charlotte with a stab of irritability. ‘Nobody told me.’

Compton Manners had managed to persuade the
Mail on Sunday
to run a feature on the two dynasties, as he called the Praegers and the Caterhams.

A photographer and a writer spent a long Sunday at Hartest, trailing the family round the house and the estate: they were photographed on the front steps, in the library, on the flying staircase, and at the top of the Great Drive (most of them on horseback) with the house standing below them like some exquisitely painted backdrop. Even the twins were photographed, in a boat on the lake, with their mother and father and their cousin Max.

Everyone was slightly surprised that Max had agreed so readily to come; he had arrived with Gemma in her Peugeot 205, ‘Both of them stepped straight out of a commercial,’ said Georgina; Gemma had been dazzled by the day, and stayed most discreetly out of all the pictures until Max hauled her into the one on the steps, and gave a rather reckless quote to the journalist about having found the right woman for him at last.

What was even more surprising was that Alexander had actually submitted to the camera twice. ‘I’ll hold your hand, it won’t hurt,’ Angie had said, laughing, ‘come on, Alexander, just for me,’ and he had stood between her and Baby at the foot of the flying staircase, looking very much the eccentric aristocrat, dressed in his shabby breeches and riding boots, shirt open at the neck, a rather vague smile on his face.

The pictures appeared in the centre spread of the paper the next weekend, captioned ‘The Real Life Dynasty’ and making much of the link between Praegers and the Caterhams; Compton Manners rang to congratulate Baby and asked him to thank Alexander. His satisfaction was greatly increased in the morning when there was an item about the families in
The Times
City Diary, and on Tuesday, when the
Telegraph
mentioned the link in a story about what it called the Hidden Billions, the stately homes of Great Britain.

‘It should help a lot,’ he said. ‘Watch.’

He was right; two of the three companies currently being courted by Praegers had signed by the end of the week.

But Jerry Mills signed with Routledge.

Max had had dinner with Gemma and her parents several times now; Dick Morton, charmed and impressed by Gemma’s new, extremely aristocratic boyfriend, was equally delighted at Max’s interest in the banking fraternity, and told him he could come and spend a couple of days in the office if it really appealed to him. ‘I’m hiring a lot of people,’ he said, ‘a lot. These are exciting times.’ The one black mark he felt chalked up against Max was his career. And his youth: ‘But time will take care of that,’ he said to his wife, ‘and he seems very mature for nineteen.’

Mrs Morton, who was half in love with Max herself, agreed fervently.

‘It’s a gas,’ said Max to Charlotte, over a drink one night. ‘I really like it. Old man Morton has offered me a job as a trainee. They’re huge, you know, Mortons. They’re not being swallowed up by some investment bank. Clarkes have bought an interest, but basically they’re setting up as corporate brokers. Market makers, the new buzz words. With a full service, corporate finance, security trading, underwriting, analysts, the lot. I think I can have a good time there. Only thing is, my income would be cut by about ninety per cent. But I think it’ll be worth it. Alexander is giving me a bit of a sub. He’s really pleased about it.’

‘I’m sure he is,’ said Charlotte, realizing suddenly why Max had been so amenable to taking part in the photo session, and had spent several weekends at Hartest with Gemma now. ‘You’re a clever little chap, aren’t you, Max? Pleasing everybody, impressing Daddy with your new job, Gemma with Hartest, oh it’s all very neat. What does Tommy Soames-Maxwell have to say about it?’

‘Oh, he thinks it’s fine,’ said Max. ‘As long as we can survive financially. He’s been very supportive.’

‘How nice of him,’ said Charlotte sarcastically.

‘Oh, don’t be so miserable about it all,’ said Max easily. ‘You should be glad
I’m thinking of going legit. And that I’ve got a nice steady girlfriend. Who isn’t married.’

Charlotte felt herself flushing.

‘Don’t look so tragic, Charlotte. You want to forget all about Jeremy Foster, and set your cap for Gabe Hoffman instead. Now he
is
a good egg. I can’t think why you don’t snap him up.’

‘I don’t want to,’ said Charlotte irritably, and then seeing Max looking at her particularly knowingly, decided to change the subject.