Old Sins (124 page)

‘Did she indeed?’ said Phaedria thoughtfully. ‘That was very scrupulous of her.’

‘I think she is quite scrupulous,’ said Miles cheerfully, beaming at Mrs Hamlyn who had come in with the tea tray. ‘Here, let me take that from you, ma’am.’

Mrs Hamlyn beamed back, and rolled her eyes in a rather extraordinary way; Phaedria was momentarily alarmed; then she realized Mrs Hamlyn was flirting with Miles.

‘Thank you, Mrs Hamlyn,’ she said briskly. ‘I’ll ring if we want anything else.’

‘I wondered if Mr Wilburn might like something more substantial to eat,’ said Mrs Hamlyn. ‘That’s not much of a tea there, not really.’

‘Oh, no ma’am, thank you,’ said Miles, smiling at her again. ‘I already had a huge lunch. But it’s really kind of you to think about it.’

Mrs Hamlyn rolled her eyes again and walked reluctantly over to the door.

‘Well,’ she said hopefully, ‘there’s plenty of food in the kitchen.’

‘Maybe another time,’ said Miles. She looked up at him as if he had just suggested a weekend in Paris.

‘Maybe,’ she said with a last roll, and was gone. Phaedria looked at Miles and grinned.

‘You mustn’t flirt with my female staff,’ she said.

‘Am I allowed loose on the males?’ he said.

‘Certainly not. Now then, come and have some tea, and tell me again exactly what you want to do.’

‘Well,’ said Miles, ‘what I really want to do is get married.’

‘Anyone in particular?’

‘Yes, my girlfriend. She’s called Candy. Candy McCall. She’s eighteen.’

‘That’s young,’ she said, ‘to get married. And how old are you, exactly? You look quite young to be getting married too.’

‘Twenty-seven.’

‘Goodness. The same age as me.’

‘I don’t suppose anyone told you you were too young to get married.’

‘Well, they did and they didn’t,’ said Phaedria.

‘I guess they said you were too young to marry – Sir Julian.’

‘Correct. They did. Miles, my husband – or Hugo Dashwood, as you knew him – stepped in when your mother died, did he, and took you on?’

‘Yes and no,’ said Miles carefully. ‘We didn’t exactly see a lot of him. We never did. Not until my dad died, anyway. Or rather until my mom was ill. Then he came to see her a lot.’

‘And – how do you remember him?’

‘Well, he was very English, you know? A little formal. He was very generous, and real good to my gran. She thought a lot of him.’

Phaedria looked at him thoughtfully. ‘Does that mean you didn’t?’

‘Well – yes and no. He was very clever and all that. And it was real good of him to put me through college. I appreciated that. But we didn’t have – well, a lot to say to each other.’

‘I’m surprised,’ said Phaedria, and meant it. ‘I would have thought you would.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m not sure. I just would have thought you’d get on.’

He smiled regretfully. ‘Sorry. No. Of course, the thing I most minded about is all explained now.’

‘Which was?’

‘Well, I got mad because he wouldn’t give me a job in one of his companies.’

‘I can’t imagine you getting mad.’

‘I hardly ever do. But I was then.’

‘Well, as you say, it’s explained now.’

‘Yup. I suppose it is.’

‘And you studied at college? Maths . . . and you graduated summa cum laude, someone said?’

‘Yup.’

‘And you don’t want to use that?’

‘Nope. I just want to marry Candy. Buy a nice house in Malibu, maybe get a boat.’

He leant back on the cushions, smiling at her. ‘I can see you
all find it real hard to understand. But I find it hard to understand the way you live. Working, worrying, fighting as far as I can see. I mean Roz is a real nice person, she could be so happy, you know, and she makes herself wretched, fretting about where the next million’s coming from or going.’

‘No, you’re wrong,’ said Phaedria, adjusting with difficulty to the vision of Roz as a real nice person (hadn’t Michael said something similar a hundred, a thousand years ago?) ‘it has absolutely nothing to do with the next million. Or not a lot. What it’s about is seeing something work and knowing it was you that made it work. It’s very exciting.’

‘Uh-huh.

‘You and Roz aren’t too fond of one another, I gather,’ he said suddenly.

‘Really? How do you know that?’

‘Oh, I know she’s jealous as hell of you. I know she thinks you’re having an affair with her bloke –’

‘What!’ said Phaedria. ‘She told you that?’

‘Yeah, she did. More or less.’

‘Well, she’s wrong.’

‘I told her she was wrong,’ he said, leaning back on the sofa with an expression of some complacency on his face.

‘Well, thank you,’ she said, amused. ‘That makes two of us. And I don’t think she believed either of us. But how did you know, anyway?’

‘It just didn’t seem very likely.’

‘Why not? I’m intrigued. When you hadn’t even met me. Or him for that matter.’

‘I’m not sure. You’d just had a baby, and you were in a vulnerable position, weren’t you?’

‘Was I?’

‘Well, yes. She’d been able to do what she liked here for a couple of months. You wouldn’t have been so dumb as to upset her that much. She’s pretty strong stuff, after all.’

Phaedria looked at him in silence for a minute. ‘Miles,’ she said, ‘are you quite sure you wouldn’t like to get involved with the business? It seems to me you have a real feeling for company politics.’

Miles was lying on his huge bed in Claridge’s, feeling lonely
and trying to ring Candy. He was missing her and he was missing home, and he hadn’t the beginnings of an idea what he was going to do about the situation he had landed up in. He was also being assailed by a fear of such proportions, such complexity that he could see that quite soon he was going to have to talk it over with someone or go mad. In the absence of having anyone to talk to he was trying to crush it, to ignore it, to push it to the bottom of his mind, but it went on rising up, ugly and threatening. In a desperate attempt to get away from it, he tried to occupy his mind with his dilemma.

As he saw it, he had three, maybe four choices. He could sell his share to Roz. He could sell it to Phaedria. He could offer them one per cent each, which probably neither of them would accept. Or he could sell out to someone else altogether. Of all the choices, he most favoured the last, because it would involve him in the least emotional trauma, but it could be an almost impossible burden to offload. The sum of money involved – running into at least seven, possibly eight figures – would be considerable: but more relevantly perhaps, the buyer would have to be a person of quite extraordinary character, both personal and professional, hurling himself, as he would be, instantly into the eye of one of the most ferocious hurricanes in commercial history.

There was another option, of course, which was simply to go back to Candy and the beach, and leave them all to it, but that would mean sacrificing the money. Miles reflected rather wistfully on the seven or eight figures. It was an awful lot of money. Too much. Too much for one person. Of course he could do a lot of good things with it, give lots away, to people like Father Kennedy, and his grandmother, and Little Ed and Larissa and the boys in the bars, but it would still leave a lot behind. He wondered if he might just go home without it. He had an uneasy feeling Candy wouldn’t be too pleased. And it would land him right back in the same old situation, with him not being able to marry her, and maybe doing awful dreary jobs like the one in the bank.

He went over his conversation with Henry Winterbourne again:

‘You are a very very rich young man. You have been left a two per cent share in this company, which is worth, at a modest
estimate, four billion pounds. The other beneficiaries to the company, as opposed to the personal, fortune, Mrs Emerson and Lady Morell, each hold forty-nine per cent of the shares. I need hardly spell out, I feel, the crucial role you have to play. Whether you get involved with the company or not.’

‘No cash, no money, just on its own, with no strings?’ Miles had asked hopefully.

‘No cash,’ said Henry firmly. ‘If you want cash, you have to sell. Or, of course, become a salaried director of the company. Which you are perfectly entitled to do, in any case.’

‘Oh, Jesus,’ Miles had said, ‘what a creep.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Henry had said, and Miles had apologized, and said nothing, he hadn’t meant anything, and had asked Henry what two per cent meant in hard cash terms, and Henry had told him. And it was all very scary.

Miles sighed. Maybe he could go and see the old lady, he liked Letitia the best. Even if she wouldn’t talk about the women, as he had come to think of Roz and Phaedria, he would like to hear more about her youth and how she had practically been engaged to the Prince of Wales, almost become Queen of England. And she might be able to offer him some advice at the same time. Miles dialled Letitia’s number, invited himself to dinner, dressed himself up in the new clothes he had bought the day before – an off the peg, dark grey wool suit from Gieves and Hawkes, a pale blue island cotton shirt from Harvie & Hudson, and a splendid hand embroidered red silk waistcoat from S. Fisher in the Burlington Arcade – and then, looking quite heartbreakingly and romantically handsome, carrying a huge bouquet of pink sweetheart roses, set off on foot (ensconsed in his new loafers from Wildsmith’s of Prince’s Arcade) to win Letitia’s heart further.

Phaedria sat in her white study in Hanover Terrace, trying to concentrate on the company reports, sheets of figures, financial forecasts she had had brought from the office. Whatever else happened to her now, she had to get back to work. That was a clear, crucial need. It could wait no longer. She had to get back and she had to try and win; and in that case she needed to be absolutely
au fait
with the situation in the company. It had been one hell of a day.

She went over it in her head as she began to tidy up the files: first Michael’s phone call – God, why hadn’t she been able to get hold of him, where was he, she had phoned four, five times, to try and apologize, to explain why she had slammed the phone down, to tell him about Roz’s visit. His secretary had just kept saying he was out, and Franco had exhibited his quite outstanding capacity for saying nothing at all. Well, she could try again tomorrow.

And then there had been the hideousness of Roz and what she had done to her; it wasn’t so much her words, she could have anticipated every one of them, it had been her style of delivery, the burning hatred in her eyes, the ugly rawness in her voice.

Maybe she should duck out. Offer Miles some more of the company, sell out to Roz. Why not? What possible future for her lay in that writhing, albeit gilt-edged, can of worms?

Upstairs she heard Julia yelling lustily; there was certainly nothing fragile about her these days. She would fix herself a cup of warm milk (feeding babies induced a desire for such childish pleasures), take herself up to the nursery and meditate upon the advantages and possibilities of a new future away from Morell Industries.

Holding her mug of milk she walked into the nursery; the baby had worked herself into a fury and was kicking frantically, her small face red with rage, her fists flailing indignantly at the unsympathetic air. Phaedria smiled, put down her cup and bent over, pulling back the covers, murmuring to Julia; she looked up at her mother, suddenly silent for a moment, and fixed her with a gaze of great intensity from her dark eyes. Julian’s eyes. Julian’s baby. His legacy to her, just as much as the money, the company, the nightmare. What of her father lay in this small, tough little creature? His brain, his charm, his capacity for survival? What would he have wished for her? What was her due as his daughter?

Things suddenly became very clear to Phaedria. Julia was the heiress to this kingdom now, as much as Roz. She might turn her back on it, walk away, on her own account, but she could not do it for Julia. That was not a decision she could or should make.

The company was her inheritance, bequeathed to her,
unknowingly, by her father; he would want it to be hers. She would never know her father, but she could know what he had done, what he had fought for and created, and through that she would learn much of him, appreciate his brilliance, his shrewdness, his toughness, his power. Phaedria could talk to her about him, show her photographs, make sure she knew and loved the people and things that he had known and loved. But the company, the heart of the company, was also the heart of Julian, a living manifestation of what he had been. And so Julia had to be part of it too.

Well, she thought, stroking the small head, playing with the small, frond-like fingers, feeling the strong, satisfying sensation of the hungry little mouth working at her breast, how did that alter the situation? Did it mean she could not, after all, walk away from it all, did it mean she had to battle on indefinitely? Probably, and it would be painful and wearisome, but at least now there seemed some sense in it all. And what of Miles’ share? He had not even begun to understand the complexity of this situation even as it had stood; if she were to attempt to explain the factor of Julia in the equation, he would be still more confused. No, that was wrong, he would not be confused: Miles was not stupid: far from it. She felt for a moment the nightmare, the monster, surfacing again; she crushed it relentlessly down.

A thought suddenly roared through her brain; she sat frozen, still, turning it over. Would Miles sell his share to Julia? God, how neatly, how gloriously beautifully neatly that would resolve things. What was the sum Henry had mentioned? Eighty million. Could she raise that and buy the share on Julia’s behalf? It was a great deal of money. It would mean selling many things: pictures, jewellery, houses, but she could probably do it. And then what would the legal implications of that be? As Julia’s mother, it would to all practical purposes give her control. Roz would fight it to the death; Miles might not agree. But she could ask him. She could see what he thought.

She looked at her watch. It was nearly midnight. He would probably be asleep. Not the best time. She wanted his head clear when she talked to him. She would ring him in the morning. Maybe she should talk to Richard or Henry first. Richard. He would be more realistic about it, take a more
pragmatic view. It might be quite impossible. It might be against the law. But she couldn’t really see why. She suddenly felt excited, exhilarated, her weariness forgotten. If only she could talk to someone. She looked down at the head now lolling blissfully relaxed against her and smiled: in time, Julia could fulfil that role for her. She was not alone for ever.