Wonder Women (29 page)

They got through the bathtime and bedtime routine, although it took an extra twenty minutes or so to calm the kids down. Although Jo did go out to work, a day at home with Daddy, and Mum coming home late, were out of the ordinary, and like all small children, Zach and Imogene saw it as an excuse to get madly excited. Eventually they were both in bed, and Lee went downstairs to finish washing up. Jo came down a few minutes later. She was still wearing her suit skirt and blouse, but she'd replaced her heels with fluffy animal slippers.

‘Sorry, I know you were loving the sexy librarian look
earlier, but my feet were killing me,' she said, kissing Lee on the cheek.

‘I don't know. I could be persuaded by the gorilla feet. It's kind of animalistic.'

‘Wow, I know keeping the romance alive in a marriage takes imagination, but that is impressive.' She gave him a squeeze. ‘Tea or wine?'

‘Not that fussed either way. What would you like?'

‘Well, I stayed on the fizzy water at lunch so I could keep my wits about me, so I would say definitely wine.'

‘Wine it is then,' agreed Lee. Jo opened a bottle of red and carried it into the living room, grabbing glasses as she went. Lee finished up in the kitchen and followed her.

They settled on the sofa and sipped their wine in silence for a few minutes. Eventually, Lee said. ‘Okay, go. I can't take the suspense any more.'

‘Well, he seems a nice enough guy. I think he's nicer than he used to be, if that makes any sense. He seems to be on the point of a big epiphany.'

‘Epiphany? What, like a religious vision?'

‘No, not religious as such, but he seems to be reassessing his life and wanting to do something different.'

‘Because …?'

‘Well, he says it's having kids. He's been in high finance all his life, working all hours, doing deals, making pots of money, as far as I can ascertain, but he wants to do something … his words were “a bit more meaningful”.'

‘Like caring for orphans in Romania? Eradicating rinderpest?'

‘Bear in mind he was an investment banker. His idea of
“a little more meaningful” may be slightly more modest than that.'

‘So his idea is …?'

‘He thinks Jungletown is an amazing business idea, but that it could grow exponentially and open stores nationwide, and beyond.'

‘Nationwide?' said Lee incredulously.

‘And beyond. He seems to think it would do especially well in Australia. Apparently conquering the American market is part of the five-year plan, but we wouldn't be tackling that quite yet.'

‘And how does he plan to go about this?' asked Lee.

‘Well, he's talking about significant financial investment from himself and a few friends. He proposes that he comes on board as Chief Financial Officer, I stay as founder and Creative Director, and we go from there.'

‘And his banking job?'

‘He wants to quit. He sees this as – quote – “downsizing”.'

‘I don't know what to say,' said Lee.

‘It's okay, you can laugh. I did. All the way home.'

‘So what do you … think?'

‘Think? Well, it's amazing that he sees so much potential … I mean, I just wanted to open a little neighbourhood shop, something to make a bit of money and fit in with caring for the kids … but … a multimillion-pound operation? Stores everywhere? Franchising?' She sighed, long and deep.

‘That still doesn't tell me what you think,' said Lee.

‘There's no point in saying what I might or might not think, Lee. It's just not possible. I thought about it on the
way home, and even if I wanted to do it, what about the kids? We stick them in care from seven till seven while I go off to my high-flying business empire? And what if I had to go away on trips? If we went nationwide, there'd have to be travel …'

‘But in an ideal world …'

‘What – an ideal world where my children don't exist?! That's scarcely an ideal world, is it?'

And to Lee's surprise, she burst into tears and began to sob. She rested her head on his shoulder and cried and cried. Lee had hardly ever seen Jo cry, and other than putting his arms around her and holding her tight, he didn't have a clue what to do.

Confidence is a funny thing, Richard thought. Nobody was born with it. People who were smooth, open and affable and who exuded power and self-assurance hadn't always been like that. He believed that deep down inside, everyone was a small and rather frightened child, hanging back, afraid to get something wrong. Nobody was naturally charismatic. Some people learned early on in life to fake it, and they kept faking it until it became second nature, or at least until they believed their own press and really did think they were amazing.

At twenty-five, he was still deep in the ‘faking it' phase. Yes he was a successful trader on the floor of a major multinational investment bank. He already owned his dream car (a vintage Porsche), and a delightful Docklands apartment. He was never without a beautiful woman on his arm or in his bed. He knew he was reasonable-looking, and by the standards of most people, extremely successful. Nevertheless, he couldn't shake the feeling that one day, as he sat at his desk, a heavy hand would fall on his shoulder, and a deep voice would say, ‘Richard Anthony, no one was fooled. You're a fake. Out you go.'

His lack of confidence came, he thought, from his rather commonplace beginnings. He'd been born the eldest child in a very ordinary middle-class family living in one of the slightly less posh parts of Kew. His mum was a music teacher, and his dad was a solicitor. His father, Matthew Anthony, had been born Matteo Antonioni, the only son of Italian immigrants who ran a small restaurant in Bethnal Green. Matteo's parents had literally worked themselves into an early grave to give their son the finest education available. They both died when he was in his early years at university. He repaid their efforts by becoming a modestly successful lawyer, marrying a beautiful blonde English rose and anglicising his name. Mario and Rosa would not have recognised the polished man with his clipped vowels that their son became. Matthew was even more ambitious for his son, whom he named after the Lionheart – Richard was the most English and heroic name Matthew could think of, and he hoped it meant his son would leave his Italian peasant roots far behind.

Richard's mother, Elizabeth, was a fierce disciplinarian and expected a lot from her son. Music was everything to her, and she taught him to read music before he could read words, and play the piano before he could use a pencil. It was this intensive tuition and these high expectations that revealed Richard's golden ticket: a pure, clear treble voice and a perfect ear. Elizabeth took him to audition for the Westminster Abbey choir school, and by the time Richard was eight, he was boarding full-time and singing in the cathedral every day. He found it frightening and lonely at first. He would ring his parents every evening and beg to come
home, but they were both immovable and just kept repeating how it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience and he would thank them when he got older.

He did get used to it eventually, and loved the camaraderie of the small group of boys. His talent led to a music scholarship to Harrow School when he was thirteen. He had been there just eighteen months when his voice broke, and the fluting treble was replaced with a very average tenor. He was still musical however, and continued with the piano up to Grade Eight, but he knew that, despite Elizabeth's efforts, music would never be his career. He felt that he had been faking it as a member of Harrow's exclusive community, riding on his musical talent, but he believed it wasn't enough. He began to work harder at his academic subjects. He mistook his classmates' easy confidence for cleverness, and he always felt he wasn't quite keeping up, even though his marks were excellent. He knew he was bright, but he didn't think he was exceptional, so he studied intensively to make up for what he saw as his lack of talent. It paid off, unsurprisingly, with outstanding results and a place at Oxford to read Politics, Philosophy and Economics. He worked just as hard there, with equally gratifying results. With a first-class honours degree under his belt, he went straight into a graduate programme at an American bank, and was swiftly headhunted to work at the one where he was currently employed.

The Abbey, Harrow, Oxford … Richard's CV read like that of someone who had been born into a lifetime of privilege, like so many of his co-workers. But he knew that everything he had was as a result of his parents' ambitions, a lucky
talent and some very hard work. If things had gone a little differently for both his father and him, he might well have been Ricardo Antonioni, head waiter at his grandparents' restaurant in Bethnal Green. He was extremely careful about the way he spoke and the way he dressed. He wanted to fit in apparently effortlessly, but that took a lot of money and thought. His friend William, whose father seemed to own most of Berkshire, wore scruffy corduroy trousers and drove a twenty-year-old Range Rover that smelled of dogs, but Richard knew he couldn't get away with that. Not when the ancestral home was a three-bedroomed 1930s house just off the A315.

But one day, everything changed. He hadn't had cause to go into the PR department of the bank for some time, but he had been sent a press release to approve which concerned a deal he'd just done, and it was full of errors. Not small ones either: the name of the key client was misspelled, and the total value of the deal had an extra two zeroes, which took it from a big deal to the GDP of a small country. He scribbled all over the printout in angry red ink and went storming off to PR to find the R. Holmes who had made such a pig's ear of a simple job. When he found him – or more likely her – some ditzy poppet on work experience no doubt – he was going to tear a strip off them.

Except when he walked into the department, he was stopped short by quite the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. She was standing in the middle of the room with her back to him, and when he entered, she turned to look at him. She looked a little like Alice in Wonderland grown up, with a smooth sheet of fine blonde hair and a slender figure,
and the finest creamy skin Richard had ever seen. As he walked towards her, he found himself staring at her mouth. Her upper lip was beautifully, classically shaped, but her lower lip was somehow a little too full. There was something so soft and inviting about it. He wanted to touch it with his finger and see if it was as soft as it looked, and then he wanted to kiss her and never stop.

He managed to pull himself together before he ended his career with a charge of sexual harassment in the workplace, and said brusquely, ‘I'm looking for R. Holmes. The R. Holmes who wrote
this
.' He waved the offending piece of paper.

‘That's me,' said the angel. ‘Rachel. What can I do for you?'

There were so many answers to that question. Richard took a deep breath and went for, ‘There are a few mistakes in it. Could we go through it?'

She beckoned him over to her desk and they sat down. He felt awful for all the angry red marks on the page, but he managed to put his criticisms to her gently and politely. She was mortified to have got so much wrong. ‘I'm so sorry,' she kept saying. ‘So, so sorry. This was my first go at a press release by myself. I should have been more careful. I'm so sorry.'

She promised to get a revised version to him by the end of the day. He couldn't think of a reason to stay in her office, and in fact there were any number of pressing matters awaiting his attention, so he reluctantly left and went back to his desk. She made him feel shy and gawky, but immensely protective at the same time. She was so lovely, but, he felt certain, completely out of his league. And even if that wasn't
the case, how was he to make a move to get to know her better without looking like a sleazy perv? In the macho, male-dominated atmosphere of the bank, he was sure she spent a lot of her time fighting off advances from predatory traders. If he went and begged to take her out, spouting assurances about how he ‘wasn't like those other guys', wouldn't that make him exactly like those other guys? And if, by some slim chance, she said yes, he'd have to put up with all sorts of teasing and ribald comments from his colleagues. Maybe it was best just to do nothing at all.

He'd talked himself into this position so firmly that when Rachel emailed him the revised press release, he responded with a curt ‘That's fine, thank you for your prompt turnaround' and left it at that. However, he didn't forget her. Whenever he walked through the building and passed the PR office, he would glance in and look for her. When he went to the kitchen to make coffee, he would hope against hope that she would take a break at the same time. And in the mornings and evenings, he would pray silently that she would get into the same lift as him. It happened rather seldom: obviously they were on different timetables. After a few weeks, he thought of her a little less. He was caught up in a fiendishly complex deal, and it absorbed all his time and attention.

Until Justin Thackeray. Thackeray, a trader at Richard's level, was a burly, rugby-playing toff whose neck was wider than his head and whose ego was fatter than both. He was loud, brash and pushy. He believed that he who shouts the loudest does the best. He bulldozed over people in meetings and liked to yell at underlings. He treated everyone around
him as inferiors: his fellow traders, who in his opinion, all knew nothing; anyone more junior in the company; all women, all foreigners, all politicians and anyone outside the world of finance – they were all scum to him and were spoken to accordingly. Richard had seldom disliked anyone as much as he disliked Justin Thackeray.

Late one Friday afternoon, after the UK markets had closed, the office was quietening down, and people on the trading floor were beginning to relax a little and chat to one another. Justin was still barking at full volume into his phone. Rachel walked into the room – she was obviously passing through on her way to somewhere – and Justin slammed down his phone and yelled, ‘Oi! Blondie!' at the top of his voice. Rachel turned at the sound. Justin beckoned her over and she approached his desk hesitantly. Justin tipped his chair back. He kept beckoning until Rachel was standing in front of his desk like a schoolgirl called in to see the headmaster. Several people at the surrounding desks, including Richard, had stopped what they were doing to watch. Justin glanced around, enjoying the fact that he had an audience. ‘Are you the brainless bint who wrote this?' he said, lazily waving a piece of paper under Rachel's nose.