Lovers in Their Fashion Page 8

  ‘I got talking to a woman, about your age. Nothing herself, she was married to some guy, he knew the man who gave the party. To tell the truth, I was looking around for someone more interesting to talk to. But…she asked me what I’d been doing lately. English women love to flirt with Frenchmen, you know that? And I said I’d been at this party in Brighton, and I had to rush back to London, and I brought this woman with me, and how impressed I was, and I told her your name.’

  Michel laughed. ‘O la la, Alice. You should have seen her face. I tell her Alice Springer is the queen of the fashion business and she spits like a cat. Like a cat, ma belle Alice! Alice Springer, she says. Don’t talk to me of Alice Springer.’

  ‘Who was this woman?’

  Michel shrugged. ‘If I tell you that, I break the number one journalist’s rule.’

  ‘I’ll keep it to myself. I need to know.’

  ‘I have your word? Okay. Her name is Elizabeth Greener.’

  Alice looked blank.

  ‘It means nothing to you. Ça va. Greener is her husband’s name. You were at school together, you and Elizabeth Greener. A tall woman, skinny. Big nose. She doesn’t like you.’

  ‘Elizabeth Thomas.’

  ‘Maybe. I don’t know. When you were at school, you ignored her.’

  ‘She was a gossip.’

  ‘Ah, Alice, you say that like a terrible thing. Journalists, we love gossip.’

  ‘She wanted to be my friend. She wanted to be everyone’s friend.’

  ‘And you let her become your enemy.’

  ‘I don’t understand. I haven’t seen or heard of Elizabeth Thomas for years.’

  ‘Just so. But Elizabeth Thomas hears of you. She hears how you build your career. She hears how you jet from country to country. She hears how you have the millionaire’s apartment, all for you. She hears…’

  ‘How does she hear these things?’

  ‘Why, from her mother. Who still lives where she did. And her mother…’

  ‘Don’t tell me. Her mother hears from my mother.’

  ‘Exactement, ma belle Alice. And all the time she hears these things, she does some job that goes nowhere, and she is married to a man whose job goes nowhere. And the little god of envy, Alice, it eats away at her. It devours her. Who is this Alice Springer?, she asks herself. She is nobody. Yet she has all these things. You see how it is?’

  Alice nodded. ‘I see how it is.’

  ‘Never ignore the little people, Alice. We journalists do not. It is the little people who drag the big people down.’

  ‘With a little help from people like you.’

  ‘Touché, Alice. It is as you say. But I, I have a job to do. So when she stops talking about you and starts talking about your mother, I listen.’

  ‘What did she say about my mother?’

  ‘Why, that your mother has not been at work. That she says she is resting, but Elizabeth Greener’s mama say there is some scandale.’

  ‘And that’s it?’

  ‘Please, Alice. I am a journalist with one of the great French journals. What do you think I am? Someone tells me there is a scandale, I check.’

  ‘Which means…?’

  ‘Which in this case means I find out where Alice Springer’s mother works, I ring the personnel department, I ask why is Mrs Springer not there.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I get the pack of lies. But this is a young English woman I am speaking to, so I emphasize the French accent.’

  ‘Just as you are with me.’

  ‘Just as I am with you. But with the personnel lady it has more effect. I hear her melting on the phone. You, Alice, you will never melt just because a man speaks with the voice of Charles Trenet.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘But this personnel lady is different. So I say, Mrs melting Personnel Lady, meet me for a leetle dreenk. And she says yes.’

  Despite herself, Alice smiled. To hear a rogue who knew he was a rogue describing his roguery touched her sense of the absurd.

  ‘You did not like me when we met in Brighton,’ said Michel. ‘Why you came back with me I do not know, and you will not tell, but it was not because you wanted me. But now I think I go up in your estimation.’

  ‘Carry on,’ said Alice.

  ‘We meet for a drink. Later, she comes back to my place and o la la. I think she will exhaust me. In between, while I tell her I must recover, I am not an automaton, she tells me just enough. That Mrs Springer works in their accounts department, that she steals from the company for ever, but that there is a Mister Martin Planer and every time this man demands it, the money appears. From somewhere. And that Mrs melting Personnel Lady and her boss want to say goodbye to Mrs Springer, but Mr Planer does not allow it.’

  ‘It’s an interesting story, Michel. What has it to do with me?’

  ‘That money comes from somewhere, ma belle Alice. I look for places with money that are anywhere near your mother. And I see you. It is you who have been paying off Martin Planer to keep your mother out of jail. N’est-ce pas?’

  Chapter 15

  She got rid of Michel, largely by refusing to comment.

  ‘Alice. You know what journalists do when people refuse to comment.

  ‘I’ll take my chances.’

  ‘I shall have to speculate on why the rich Alice Springer pays back the money her mother steals. You know, when a journalist speculates, the ordinary people, they believe what they read.’

  ‘Michel, there is nothing I wish to tell you.’

  ‘I shall have to wonder in print what Martin Planer gets from this. Alice Springer’s mother steals money, Alice Springer pays it back, Martin Planer let’s Alice Springer’s mother stay. Why does he not simply let her go? That would be so much less trouble, non? Is he making a profit on the transaction? Is Alice Springer paying back more than Alice Springer’s mother steals? Or does Martin Planer take his return in some other form? Is there a yield on his investment?’ The emphasis he placed on the word “yield” was so slight, Alice almost missed it. A cold noose tightened around her heart.

  ‘I have nothing to say.’

  ‘What will my readers think when they know how beautiful Alice Springer is? What will they imagine when they know Martin Planer is a great bull of a man who has the reputation for taking what he wants, whoever he has to take it from?’

  Alice’s mouth was so dry she could hardly speak. She felt cold. Bitterly cold. And yet her heart pumped as it had never pumped before. ‘I’d like you to go, please.’

  ‘So be it. Alice, you say nothing but you say everything. Your lips remain sealed but your face, your body language…I have my story, I think. If the lawyers will let me run it, I run it. In France we love this kind of thing.’

  After Michel had left, Alice found herself unable to move, unable to speak. David and Marissa tried to help her pick up the rest of the afternoon’s planned activities but it was impossible. She remained in her chair, shaking, white-faced and silent. The coffee Marissa placed before her went untasted. At length, the two loyal assistants gave up. David carried her unresisting, apparently unaware, body into the private bedroom that could be entered only from her office. Marissa undressed her and David tucked her into bed. David called Graham and said he had no idea when he would be home – perhaps tonight, perhaps tomorrow – but he could not leave until his boss returned to herself. Then he placed an easy chair beside the bed, provided himself with a book and a bowl of lusciously sweet grapes and settled down to wait.

  ‘Should we call a doctor?’ Marissa said.

  ‘Tomorrow. If she’s no better in the morning, I’ll do it.’

  As for John Pagan, when he finally had his first free evening since his return, he knew himself to be on the edge of the abyss. It would be the easiest thing in the world for him to throw himself over – take to the whisky bottle, obliterate his anger in a drunken bender. He would not let himself do that.

  Billie McKay was the stuff of Fairmount legend. Recruited straight from Oxford.
Fast track from the start. Running a small subsidiary at twenty-five. Head of a Division at twenty-nine. Awed rivals said Billie would be COO at thirty-five and Chief Exec at forty. Nothing could stop his upward flight.

  Which was what, probably, they’d said of Icarus.

  Like John, Billie had been given an international roving brief. Two years, he was told. Get to know the Group businesses on the ground, right across the globe. Everyone needs that knowledge who aspires to the top position.

  When he came back after his two years, Billie didn’t seem quite the man he had been. He didn’t have quite the grip, quite the focus people remembered. There were whispers. Billie drank more than he had. More than he should. A shot to start the day. A bottle with lunch. Another bottle in the evening. A few more shots to help him sleep.

  Business is ruthless. No-one tried to help Billie, and there was no shortage of colleagues to put the knife in. Colleagues who had envied his meteoric progress. Colleagues who saw that Billie’s departure would leave a space which someone would have to fill. Eighteen months and Billie was gone. A nice payoff, but there were wonderings out loud about how long the money would last if he went on drinking like that.

  Fairmount forgot Billie McKay. Until someone saw him reeling along the Embankment in a coat that had seen better days, his hair matted, his face unshaven. He was swearing and shouting and he swung a bottle in his hand. It was the talk of the company.

  The chatter died down. Then someone else was coming out of the Savoy and saw Billie trying to get in. His clothes and hygiene were even worse than before and his mental state clearly dire. He was arguing with the doormen, insisting that there was a breakfast meeting (it was four in the afternoon and the Savoy was starting to serve afternoon tea) and that he must attend it.

  The Savoy doormen, who had seen it all before and knew they would see it again, dealt kindly but firmly with this ghost from their past. Which was more than Billie’s one-time colleague did. She walked quickly away, determined not to get involved.

  There were no more sightings of Billie. And then, one day, a police constable called on the Human Resources department. A derelict had been found dead of hypothermia. In his pocket were thirty pence and an out of date ID card that said his name was William McKay and he had the right to park his car in the Fairmount Head Office car park. The policeman said he would put the dead man’s age at about seventy. In fact, he had not yet reached forty.

  The Chairman paid for the funeral out of his own pocket. HR introduced new, rather more helpful, policies on alcoholism.

  But being a drunk was still a quick route out of the company.

  The businessman or woman who travels the world knows the risks. You are alone so often in strange cities where you know no-one. Have a drink in your room or in the bar. You’ll feel better. Have another drink. You’ll feel better still. So have another.

  And, before you know where you are, you’re not drinking to feel better. You’re drinking because you must.

  John knew all about Billie McKay, though they had not been at Fairmount at the same time. John enjoyed a drink and would have one – when he was with someone else. Alone, he stuck to water, fruit juice and the occasional coke.

  Sitting alone now in his Brighton home, he needed all of that determination. He succeeded in keeping himself from drowning his sorrows. He could not prevent himself from brooding.

  Alice. Alice, whom he had loved so much that when she left him he went for ten years without being able even to contemplate a lasting relationship, let alone enter into one. Alice, who still retained such power over him that he had been like a teenager when he heard her name on the airport tannoy and worse – a scampering puppy longing to be petted – when they actually came face to face. Alice, the love of his life. It was she who had betrayed him.

  He could not believe it. And yet he must. The Chairman had said there could be no doubt, and the Chairman would not make a mistake like that. The checking and counter-checking would have been meticulous. That was the Fairmount way.

  Slowly, through the brooding and the grief, John saw that the way forward was clear – because there was no way forward. Not in the sense of a quick “With one bound he was free” denouement. What he could do – and all he could do – was to lead his life. To put one step in front of the other until he found himself on solid ground again. He could not force himself to forget Alice, and nor should he. He could, though, live without her. Simply by doing it.

  And it was with a strange lurch of the heart that he realized he had never attempted to do that. Whatever he had been doing, wherever he had been, whoever he had been with, Alice had always been there somewhere in the back of his mind. At some level, his hopes and dreams had always included her. And he could change that. He could not bury the anger, he could not lose the sadness but that, at least, he could change.

  And he could start here.

  Today.

  Now.

  He pulled on a lightweight jacket and stepped out into the street.

  If Alice was catatonic with despair and John at the beginning of what promised to be a long haul back to happiness, not everyone was so gloomy. Martin Planer was enjoying his evening immensely.

  A man with physical presence, a good job and lots of money will not lack for women ready to date him. That is the way of the world. Planer never struggled to find someone to join him for dinner, the theatre, a bar. More often than not, he had little trouble persuading them into bed afterwards.

  It was getting them to see him a second time that he sometimes found difficult.

  For Martin Planer was a cruel man. Bed for him was not a place where a man and a woman could come close in tenderness and passion. It was a setting for the expression of superiority, dominance, possession. Sex was not an act of sharing between two people who loved each other. It was a matter of taking and giving. Planer took and the woman he was with gave.

  The internet had been a boon to people like Planer. Without it, he would have had to venture into a seedy Soho shop for the fur-lined hand cuffs that secured tonight’s captive to the bed on which she lay. A captive who, without it, he would certainly have struggled to find.

  She called herself Desdemona Perigord. Her bank and building society and the mother she occasionally went home to Nottingham to visit now that her stepfather was gone still called her Denise Stowe. Whatever name she went by, she advertised her very special services on the Web.

  Desdemona knew her market, she knew her customers and she knew how to keep herself safe. The bed she was secured to was in Planer’s apartment. The man she called her boyfriend and the Police called her pimp was in a car parked twenty yards from the front door of the apartment building. A cell phone sat on the bedside table. Every hour, it rang. If Denise failed to speak into it within three rings the single word, “Okay,” her boyfriend would depart and the police would be called.

  Denise did not take quite such draconian measures with all of her clients. She had spotted Planer for what he was at their very first meeting. There had been more than twenty since then, and not once had she even considered letting down her guard. She had looked into his eyes and she had recognized what she saw there.

  It was not difficult. She had seen it in her stepfather’s eyes when she was thirteen. She had seen it in her stepbrother’s eyes two years later.

  None of this meant that Denise did not enjoy her work. Each fall of Planer’s hand on her bare rump brought her almost as much pleasure as it did him. When he finally positioned himself behind her, raised her bottom in the air and entered her, she would come before he did and there would be nothing faked about her squeals and cries of ecstasy.

  But Denise knew when to stop. She wasn’t sure Planer did.

  Chapter 16

  Merrill tried twice to contact Alice at home before giving up. If she was working late, she was working late. Merrill knew Alice kept a bed in the office and had her own private bathroom there for precisely that eventuality. When was she more likely to use it than
when she had a hugely important show coming up? That was also, probably, why her cell phone was switched off. Merrill left a happy message and hung up.

  It was a pity, though. Merrill wanted to tell someone about her and Tony, and who better than her best friend?

  Bernice had spoken the truth when she told Alice that Merrill wanted to be able to produce a man to keep her mother quiet. She had also been looking for someone who would give her a good time, both in bed and out of it. She had certainly not wanted a long-term arrangement that would change the single lifestyle she so revelled in.

  As it will, life had crept up behind her and played a little trick.

  For Merrill had fallen head over heels in love with Tony Frejus.

  If she had reached Alice, she had planned to propose dinner. During the meal, her conversation would have gone something like this.

  “Love is madness. Love is temporary insanity. At least, I hope it’s temporary. All I think of is Tony. All I want to talk about is Tony. I love the sight of his face, I love the way his muscles ripple under his shirt. I love even more the way his muscles ripple when he’s taken his shirt off. I love the smell of him, clean from the shower, and I love the scent of him in arousal. I love what he talks about, and the way he says it. I love that Spanish difficulty he has with “d”s and “t”s when they come in the middle of a word. Did you ever hear a Bolivian say “Madrid”? I love it when he goes down on me and I love it when he pulls me over him so I’m sitting on his face. I love it when he throws me down and has me. And oh how I love”—and would she have blushed when she said this? Perhaps. But, knowing Merrill, probably not—”I love his cock. Just the sight and the heft and the feel of it. I love it when he has to pee and I hold it for him. I love it when I take it in my mouth after he’s washed it clean because he knows we’re going to bed. And I love it when he puts it in me.”

  That is the kind of conversation she would have had with Alice. Of course she could have had the same sort of conversation with her mother, but it would have needed heavy censorship and Merrill was in no mood to censor her conversation about Tony. The now staid matron Mrs Abercrombie had once been the young Sicilian virgin Irene Secco and in neither of those guises could she have been allowed to hear her daughter rhapsodizing about her lover’s cock. The word alone could have Merrill banished for life.