Original Sin (13 page)

Her willingness to make tea and coffee for the two PAs and the partners gave her the opportunity for a twice-daily gossip with the cleaner Mrs. Demery. Mrs. Demery’s domain
was centred on the large kitchen and adjacent smaller sitting room on the ground floor at the back of the house. The kitchen was furnished with a rectangular pine table, large enough to seat ten, one gas and one electric stove and a microwave oven, a double sink, a huge refrigerator and a wall fitted with small cupboards. Here, at any time between twelve and two, in a pungent aroma of discordant cooking smells, all but the senior staff ate their sandwiches, heated their foils of oven-ready pasta and curry, made omelettes, boiled eggs, grilled bacon for bacon rolls and brewed their tea and coffee. The five partners never joined them. Frances Peverell and Gabriel Dauntsey went next door to their separate flats at number 12 and the two Etiennes and James de Witt took the launch upstream to lunch in the city, or walked to the Prospect of Whitby or one of the pubs in Wapping High Street. The kitchen, without their inhibiting presence, was the centre of gossip. Here news was received, endlessly discussed, embroidered and disseminated. Mandy would sit in silence in front of her sandwich box, knowing that when she was present the middle-grade staff in particular were unusually discreet. Whatever their feelings about the new chairman or the possible future of the firm, loyalty and a sense of their status forbade open criticism in front of a temp. But when she and Mrs. Demery were alone brewing morning coffee or afternoon tea, Mrs. Demery had no such inhibitions.

“We thought Mr. Gerard and Miss Frances would marry. That’s what she thought too, the poor kid. And then there’s Miss Claudia and her toy boy.”

“Miss Claudia with a toy boy! Come off it, Mrs. D.”

“Well, maybe not a toy boy exactly, although he’s young enough. Younger than her anyway. I saw him when he came to Mr. Gerard’s engagement party. He’s good-looking, I’ll say
that for him. Miss Claudia always had an eye for a good-looking chap. He’s in antiques. You know, like the
Antiques Road Show
. They’re supposed to be engaged but I notice she don’t wear a ring.”

“But she’s quite old, isn’t she? And people like Miss Claudia don’t bother so much about rings.”

“That Lady Lucinda’s got one though, hasn’t she? A bloody great emerald set with diamonds. That must have cost Mr. Gerard a packet. I don’t know why he wants to marry an earl’s sister. Young enough to be his daughter, too. I don’t think it’s decent.”

“Maybe he fancies a wife with a title, Mrs. D. You know, Lady Lucinda Etienne. Maybe he likes the sound of that.”

“That don’t count for as much as it did, Mandy, not with the way some of these old families behave nowadays. No better than the rest of us. It used to be different when I was a girl, you had some respect for them then. That brother of hers is nothing to write home about, earl or no earl, if you’re to believe half of what you read in the papers. Ah well, them that lives longest will see most.” It was Mrs. Demery’s invariable way of ending a conversation.

On her first Monday, a day so sunny that she could almost believe they were back in the summer, she had watched with some envy while the first set of staff entered the launch at 5.30 to be taken to Charing Cross. On impulse she asked Fred Bowling, the waterman, if she could go for the ride. He made no objection and she jumped in. On the way there he had sat at the wheel in silence as she suspected he always did. But when the party had disembarked and they turned for the journey downstream to Innocent House, she had started asking him questions about the river and had been amazed at his knowledge. There was no building which he
couldn’t identify, no history which apparently he didn’t know, no fellow-waterman whom he couldn’t recognize, and few boats which he couldn’t name.

It was from him that she learned that Cleopatra’s Needle was first erected about 1450 BC in front of the Temple of Isis at Heliopolis, and towed to England to be erected on the riverbank in 1878. It was one of a twin and the other stood in Central Park, New York. She could picture the great container with its core of stone thrashing through the turbulent seas of the Bay of Biscay like a great fish. He pointed out Doggett’s Coat and Badge public house next to Blackfriars Bridge, and told her about Doggett’s Coat and Badge sculling race which has been rowed since 1722 from the Old Swan Inn at London Bridge to the Old Swan Inn at Chelsea, the first single sculling race in the world. His nephew had rowed in it. As they butted under the great pillars of Tower Bridge he could tell her the length of each span and that the High Walk was 142 feet above high water. When they reached Wapping he told her about James Lee, a market gardener from Fulham, who in 1789 had noticed a fine flowering plant in a cottage window which had been brought back by a sailor from Brazil. James Lee bought it for £8 and planted cuttings, and next year made his fortune selling 300 plants at a guinea each.

“Now, what do you think that plant was?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Bowling, I don’t understand about plants.”

“Go on, Mandy, have a guess.”

“It couldn’t be a rose?”

“A rose? ’Course it wasn’t a rose! There have been roses in England for ever. No, that was a fuchsia.”

Glancing up at him, Mandy saw that the brown creased face, still looking ahead, was quietly smiling. How odd people were, she thought. Nothing he had told her about the splendours and
horror of the river was for him as sweetly remarkable as the discovery of that single flower.

As they neared Innocent House Mandy could see the figures of the last two passengers, James de Witt and Emma Wainwright, ready to embark. Darkness had fallen and the river had become as smooth and thick as oil, a black tide which broke into a fishtail of white foam as the launch chugged away. Mandy crossed the patio to her motorbike. She didn’t linger. She wasn’t superstitious or particularly nervous, but once darkness had fallen Innocent House became more mysterious and a little sinister, even with the two globes of light casting over the marble their soft warm light. She walked with her eyes ahead, willing herself not to look down in case she could see that fabled stain of blood or upwards to the top balcony from which that long-dead distracted wife had hurled herself to her death.

And so the days passed. Going from office to office, willing, conscientious, quickly accepted, there was nothing which escaped Mandy’s sharp experienced eyes: Miss Blackett’s unhappiness, the casual contempt with which Mr. Gerard treated her; Miss Frances’s taut white face, stoical in misery; George’s anxious eyes following Mr. Gerard whenever he passed the reception desk; half-overheard conversations which broke off when she appeared. Mandy knew that the staff were anxious about the future. There hung over the whole of Innocent House an atmosphere of unease, almost foreboding, which she could sense and occasionally even slightly relish, since she felt, as she always did, that she was merely the privileged spectator, the outsider who was under no personal threat, who took her money by the week, owed allegiance to no one and could walk out when she chose. Sometimes at the end of the day when the light began to fade and the river
outside was a black tide, and footsteps echoed eerily on the marble of the hall, she would be reminded of the hours before a bad thunderstorm: the deepening darkness, the heaviness and sharp metallic smell of the air, the knowledge that nothing could break this tension but the first crash of thunder and a violent tearing of the skies.

It was Thursday 14 October. The partners’ meeting at Innocent House was due to begin at ten o’clock in the boardroom and by 9.45, as was his habit, Gerard Etienne had already taken his seat at the oval mahogany table. He sat in the middle of the side which faced the window and the river. By ten o’clock his sister Claudia would be seated on his right and Frances Peverell on his left. James de Witt would be opposite him with Gabriel Dauntsey on his right. The seating hadn’t changed since that day nine months earlier when he had formally taken over as chairman and managing director of Peverell Press. On that Thursday his four colleagues had loitered outside the boardroom as if each was reluctant to enter it alone. Joining them he had unhesitatingly thrust open the double mahogany door and, striding confidently into the room, had taken his seat in Henry Peverell’s old chair. Behind him the other four partners had entered together and silently seated themselves as if in obedience to some preordained plan which both established and reaffirmed their status in the firm. He had taken Henry Peverell’s chair as if by right, and it
was by right. Frances, he remembered, had sat pale-faced and almost silent throughout that short meeting and afterwards, drawing him aside, James de Witt had said: “Need you have taken her father’s chair? He’s only been dead ten days.”

He felt again that mixture of surprise and mild irritation which the question had provoked at the time. Which chair was he expected to take? What did James want, to waste time while the five of them deferred politely to each other, discussing who should or should not have a river view, playing a kind of unaccompanied musical chairs around the table? The chair with the arms was the managing director’s chair and he, Gerard Etienne, was managing director. How could it possibly matter how long old Peverell had been dead? Henry had used this chair, this place at the table, when he was alive, had occasionally raised his eyes to look out over the river in one of his irritating moments of private contemplation while the rest of them had waited patiently for the meeting to resume. But he was dead. James surely wasn’t suggesting that the chair should be left permanently empty as a kind of memorial, that a suitable plaque should be attached to the seat.

He saw the incident as typical of James’s overdeveloped and self-indulgent sensitivity, typical too of something else which he found more perplexing and more interesting since it concerned himself. It sometimes seemed to him that the thought processes of other people were so radically different from his that he and they inhabited a different dimension of reason. Facts which to him were self-evident required from his four partners prolonged thought and discussion before, reluctantly, they were accepted; discussions were complicated by confused emotions and personal considerations which seemed to him as irrelevant as they were irrational. He told himself that, for them, reaching a decision was like achieving
orgasm with a frigid woman, requiring a tedious amount of foreplay and the expenditure of disproportionate energy. He wondered occasionally whether to present them with the analogy but decided, inwardly smiling, that the pleasantry was best kept to himself. Frances, for one, would not find it amusing. But it would happen again this morning. The choices facing them were stark and inescapable. They could sell Innocent House and use the capital to establish and develop the firm; they could negotiate an arrangement with another publishing house whereby the name Peverell Press would at least be preserved; or they could go out of business. The second option was merely a longer and more tedious route to the last, beginning invariably with public optimism and ending in ignominious extinction. He had no intention of going down that well-trod path. The house must be sold. Frances had to realize, they all had to realize, that they couldn’t both keep Innocent House and continue as independent publishers.

He got up from the table and moved over to the window. As he watched, a cruise ship suddenly and silently blocked his view, so close that for a moment he could look into a lighted porthole and see, in the half-circle of brightness, the head of a woman, delicate as a cameo, pale arms raised, running her fingers through an aureole of hair, and could imagine that their eyes met in a surprised and fleeting intimacy. He wondered briefly, and with no real curiosity, who it was who shared her cabin—husband, lover, friend?—and what plans they had for the evening. He had none. By established habit he worked late on Thursday nights. He wouldn’t see Lucinda until Friday when they had planned a concert on the South Bank followed by dinner at the Bombay Brasserie since Lucinda had expressed a preference for Indian food. He thought of the weekend without excitement but with quiet satisfaction. One of Lucinda’s virtues
was her decisiveness. Frances, asked where she preferred to eat, would have replied “Anywhere you like, darling” and if the meal disappointed and he complained, would have said, leaning against him, slipping her arm through his, beguiling him into a good humour, “It was perfectly edible, not bad really. And what does it matter, darling? We were together.” Lucinda had never suggested that his company could compensate for or excuse a poorly cooked, ill-served dinner. Occasionally he wondered whether, in fact, it did.

Etienne said: “This is a private meeting, Miss Blackett. We have some confidential business to discuss. I’ll take my own notes. There’s plenty of typing to keep you occupied.”

His voice was dismissive with a note of contempt. Miss Blackett flushed and gave a small, soundless intake of air. Her notebook slid from her fingers and she bent stiffly to pick it up, then rose and walked to the door with a pathetic attempt at dignity.

James de Witt said: “Was that kind? Blackie has taken the notes of the partners’ meeting for over twenty years. She’s always sat in.”

“Wasting her time and ours.”

Frances Peverell said: “You needn’t have suggested that we don’t trust her.”

“I didn’t. All the same, when we get to discussing the mischief here she has to be a suspect. I don’t see why she should be treated differently from the rest of the staff. She has no alibi for any of the incidents. She has plenty of opportunity.”

Gabriel Dauntsey said: “So do I, or any of the five of us here. And haven’t we spent enough time discussing the practical joker? It never gets us anywhere.”

“Perhaps. Anyway, that can wait. The important news first. Hector Skolling has upped his offer for Innocent House by another £300,000. Four and a half million. It’s the first time in the negotiations that he’s used the words ‘final offer,’ and when he says that he means it. It’s a clear million more than I thought we would have to take. More than it’s worth in purely commercial terms, but property is worth what someone is prepared to pay, and Hector Skolling likes the house. After all, his empire is in Docklands. There’s a clear distinction between the property he develops for letting and the kind of house he’s prepared to live in. I propose to accept verbally today and get the solicitors working on the details so that we can exchange within a month.”