Nantucket (2 page)

“In a weekend?”

“A proper test match lasts five days, but yes.”

“You are making this up, I assume.”

“Didn't Francis tell you?”

“No. And neither did Frances.” One of the many
disconcerting features of the weekend was that his host and hostess had the same name, though with different spellings. The British loved double entendre, he had found.

“Well, they both keep game books,” said Venetia. “But here's the deal. You're a banker, right? Presumably you know about deals. I'm at Sotheby's. I know about furniture. Now you do me.” She turned around without giving him a chance to answer, which was helpful. It still made him self-conscious to call himself a banker and it definitely made him self-conscious to be rubbing her shoulders with soapy hands. She was probably a few years older than he was. “There is no central heating,” she continued. “Frances believes central heating is non-U. You know about U and non-U, I assume. No? It's such fun when the American knows nothing. Nancy Mitford's coinage. ‘U' for upper class. Anyway, the water in your wash basin will probably freeze overnight. You don't have to fuck
any
one, but you are well advised to share a bed with
some
one.”

“Right,” Andrew said.

“To be honest,” said Venetia. “Lower back, please. Yes.
Yes
. Now rinse me off. To be honest, I hope you'll share mine. I've never bagged an American.” Before he could respond, she was out of the tub and had opened the door into her bedroom. A cloud of cold air rolled in, followed by another English beauty. “This is Anne,” said Venetia. “Her bedroom only has a shower. But you've got to get out now. I'm not letting you touch her.”

“Oh, unfair,” said Anne, taking off her robe.

“Get dressed quickly, Andrew,” said Venetia, “or you'll freeze to death. And remember, we have an understanding.”

That weekend was where Andrew had gotten the idea of using house parties as a business development tool, though it was a dozen years before he had the money to buy the right
sort of house. Generally speaking, it had been a good strategy.
This
weekend was likely to be hard work, though. The elan necessary to amuse billionaires was hard to generate if your wife wasn't enthusiastic, and recently Cathy hadn't been much fun – on edge most of the time. He hadn't had much time to talk to her about her moods. But if he had to be charming for both of them, well, he had to.

He'd tuned back in on Joe. “‘Look, I told the hostess,'” Joe was saying, “‘I'm an American. I miss a lot. But if it would help, I'll stay in this morning.' It was pelting rain, you understand. ‘I'll claim I have a cold. She can stay back to look after me. Satisfaction guaranteed. Her name's Lavinia, right?'

“Hostess very offended. Lavinia had left already. Her horse was alleged to be sick.”

Andrew had laughed. “It must be hard having fifteen billion dollars.” And to himself: perhaps that's a requirement for a proper English house partyparty – there should be a naive American for one of the girls to lay.

“Oh, it's all right,” Joe had said. “But if there's someone I'm supposed to sleep with, just tell me. Except when it involves money, I'm pretty accommodating.”

“Cynthia would be a good choice,” Andrew had said without thinking about it.

“That's why I married her. I decided I wanted to sleep with her. Good-looking girl, don't you think? Bit of glamour, her being a TV star. A news anchor's a star, right, even if her show is in the morning?”

“Most of America knows her name,” said Andrew, “and probably a quarter of them wake up by listening to her.” It struck him that Joe regarded his wives as a series of venture capital investments.

“Third time lucky, I hope,” said Joe. “And come to think of it, Cyn spent a year as an exchange student in England. Her father wanted to make her posh, I guess. She knows how to play field hockey. She can kick me under the table if I say something wrong.

“You know, the funny thing is,” Joe continued, “I began to think that Lavinia chick was fairly attractive once she'd left. I liked the way she didn't put up with any crap. Just got in her car and drove home. That was the trouble with Tina, I realised. She was always trying too hard to please me, asking me what I wanted. I have enough decisions to make at work without having to be in charge of where we go for dinner.”

Joe did the dumb country boy routine pretty well, in Andrew's opinion. It helped that he was six foot four and never looked comfortable in a suit. It helped that he was completely unembarrassed about sex.

“You'll think he's a jock until you discover how smart he is,” Andrew had told Cathy. “Big hands. Big shoulders. Powerful body. Has to have his suits made. Women probably find him attractive, and not just for the money. But if you
can't
see him – like when talking on the phone – you start thinking he's a nerd. Gobbles up information like a lumberjack eating breakfast. He knows everything there is to know about the patents Shiva controls. Refers to them by number. He can take you through the tax strategy like he's negotiating rapids in a kayak.

“The only thing he hasn't worked out yet is Shiva himself, and he's doing the research. Probably knows his blood type by now. Is Shiva reliable? The answer is mostly, by the way. Is Shiva a criminal? No one seems to think so. What are his hobbies? Vintage cars, supposedly. Showing off his education is what I'd say. Does he have any weaknesses? Whispers about
imaginative sex, but I suspect that's just other people fantasising.”

“So why do they have to spend the weekend with us?” Cathy had asked.

“Well, for starters, Shiva needs to check out Joe, though he'd never say that.”

“Shiva hasn't done the research?”

“Probably done some – or had it done for him. We have to pretend this weekend is purely social, by the way. No ‘commerce' involved.”

“Which is bullshit,” said Cathy. It was a pretence that governed most of their house parties, which for some reason had always offended Cathy.

“We let Joe and Shiva decide when to admit that,” said Andrew. There seemed to be an argument they needed to have soon.

“To be honest, it is very difficult to figure out what Shiva knows. Or thinks. He turns the charm on and off as it suits him. Same for temper tantrums.”

“He'd better not try that with me.”

“The trick,” Andrew lectured – he'd told her all this before – “the trick is not to take it personally. You have to view him as a machine that occasionally does strange things, and try to figure out how the mechanism works.”

“Is that how you see me?” said Cathy.

“Shiva has a massive sense of entitlement,” Andrew continued, ignoring her question. “He had an employee who figured out a way to save him fifty million dollars. Joe unearthed this story. The man asked for a modest raise. Shiva was genuinely shocked. He'd given the man the job that allowed him to score goals. Shiva therefore owned the goals. But many successful entrepreneurs are like that. With Shiva, there's other stuff going
on. It may have to do with his ancestry, which he tells me he can trace back a couple of thousand years.

“On the plus side, he seems to be genuinely pleased to be spending the weekend with us. I assume he had to twist Rosemary's arm. ‘A magical island,' he calls Nantucket, ‘somewhere out in the vast Atlantic.' He wants to know if there will be sprites and monsters, wants me to show him ‘the local Caliban,' as he puts it. Can you think of any candidates?”

“Fresh out of monsters,” said Cathy. “But did you tell Shiva Nantucket is only thirty miles from Cape Cod? Or that
The Tempest
, to which I take it he's referring, was inspired by the discovery of
Bermuda
?”

“Never be smarter than the client,” said Andrew, repeating a maxim he sometimes had trouble obeying. “It was Rosemary who told him where Shakespeare got the idea – when we had dinner in London.”

“So she likes to parade her erudition too.”

“
Please
don't be touchy, sweetheart.” For just a moment neither of them spoke. Cathy had dropped out of college to marry Andrew, and produced Eleanor almost immediately. For some stupid reason she had an inferiority complex about her lack of a diploma, which no amount of reading could overcome. Andrew himself had been Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard, which he endeavoured never to mention. “But yes,” he continued. “Rosemary got first-class honours at Cambridge, I fear. She wants to go to the whaling museum, by the way.”

“Part of the package,” said Cathy.

“I should warn you that Shiva continues to call me ‘Prospero.'”

“Sounds like if he believes something, that makes it true,” said Cathy.

“Bit of that,” Andrew had said. “But remember, you don't have to like him, just be nice to him. And tell me what you think when you've met him.”

“I'll do my best,” Cathy had said.

For obvious reasons, the weekend needed to be perfect. But Andrew and Cathy were good at this sort of thing.

Their house was a classic “shore colonial” – unpainted pine shingles that had turned grey, with white trim that had to be refreshed every other year. It had five bedrooms, spacious porches where you could sit and play scrabble when it rained, easy access to the ocean when it was sunny. In the time before air-conditioning, when Broadway theatres closed for the summer months, it had been part of a noted actors' colony. Its relatively isolated location, on the ridge at the eastern edge of the island, threw its occupants together and required them to perform.

Andrew saw himself as an impresario – a profession requiring both vision and nerve. He booked airplane tickets twelve months in advance, and spent each fall and winter deciding who it would pay to entertain. If Cathy grew weary, which to be fair hadn't been often, he'd remind her that “your skill as a hostess and my brass balls are what put our daughters through college.” Nine months earlier, Joe and Shiva had never heard of Andrew. Didn't know each other either. He'd talked them into separate meetings with him on the strength of an idea. By the end of the year he hoped to send each of them a bill for ten million dollars.

A big fee would be quite helpful, to be honest. He hadn't brought one in for a couple of years. The men who ran his firm were reasonable, but Wall Street is Wall Street. The unspoken question, “Is Andrew losing his edge?” would get
asked soon enough.

Andrew hadn't discussed compensation with either house guest yet. The time to do that was
after
the weekend, when the fact of his having brought them together would be irrefutable. Joe would agree immediately. Shiva would try to negotiate, but would fold when Andrew pointed out that Joe had already agreed. Then when they got to documenting the transaction, Joe (or more accurately, his lawyers) would be difficult, and Shiva would have to ask him to lighten up. That's how he read them, anyway. Andrew prided himself on reading people.

Going down the steps from the plane, Andrew scanned the crowd of wives waiting behind the waist-high chain link fence at the edge of the airfield. No Cathy. Bad form, her being late. That hadn't happened before. But no doubt there would be an explanation. Andrew told himself not to be grumpy. All it would do was show he was anxious. Mustn't be anxious.

One of Cathy's party tricks was to meet the plane from New York with a thermos of gin and tonic, which she served to arriving guests in plastic cups. “House rules,” she'd tell anyone who was reluctant. “You're on holiday. And make the men take off their neckties.” It would spoil the effect, though, if she was late.

A moment later, Andrew spotted Sally, the au pair. She was holding the thermos and a stack of cups. She appeared to be wearing one of Cathy's loose-fitting, brightly coloured summer dresses. No doubt there would be an explanation for that as well. In any event, she seemed to have collected Shiva and Rosemary, who'd been seated further forward in the plane and would have been easy to identify. Andrew suggested Joe and Cynthia join them and went to organise the luggage.

The “au pair” was an innovation. Andrew was, to be
honest, slightly disconcerted by her. Something about the way she moved, the way she did things – rearranged the refrigerator, ate a raw carrot while she fried mushrooms, perched on the porch railing reading a magazine – every gesture told you she was in charge. She struck him as a free spirit. There weren't a lot of free spirits in his world. But with Cathy being for some reason delayed at home, it was certainly convenient to have employed her. In contrast to the high-school girls they'd had when their daughters were young, Sally was a safe driver and a capable cook. She was teaching Cathy to draw. They went running together. And she was nice to look at. Joe and Shiva would both like that.

The reason they'd hired Sally was basically that Cathy was afraid of being lonely. Cathy had turned thirty-nine that April. Andrew was forty-two. Their daughters had grown up, or were trying to. Florence had finished her first year of college and had met a boy who looked like a “keeper” – as she and her friends called potential husbands – so she'd found a summer job in San Francisco that allowed her to be near him, with the result that she wouldn't be in Nantucket.

“And Eleanor?” Andrew had asked.

“We've been through all that,” Cathy had said.

“She's decided to hate us.”

“She needs to become her own person.”

“It's fine if she hates us, you know, so long as she gets over it. Which she will – probably by September but certainly within a year. What was it she said at that very dramatic family lunch we had on your birthday? I'm a blood-sucking investment banker and you're a what?”

“A trivial woman who never finished college,” Cathy said evenly.

“Sorry.”