Sheer Abandon (3 page)

“So,” he said as they were finally settled at Mon Plaisir, “tell me about your day. You do look tired, Mrs. Cook.”

“I
am
tired, Mr. Butler.”

They had once gone to a fancy dress party as the cook and the butler and used the names occasionally in their e-mails (the more indiscreet ones), whenever a code was necessary.

“But it was OK. One tragedy, one trivia—Mrs. Prescott’s hair. I do get so tired of doing those stories.”

“But you’re so good at it.”

“I know that, Nick,” she said, and indeed she was good at it; she could get into anyone’s house, however many other journalists were on the doorstep, make her way into anyone’s life, it was all part of her golden charm and, to a degree, she knew, the way she looked. If it was a choice between talking to a male reporter in a sharp suit or an absurdly young-looking girl with long blond hair and wide blue eyes, whose face melted with sympathy for you and whose voice was touched with feeling as she told you this was the worst part of her job and she absolutely hated having to ask you to talk to her, but if you could bear it, she would make it as easy as possible—then it was not a very difficult decision. Jocasta got more bylines on human-interest stories, and what were known in the trade as tragedies—and also those about celebrities caught with their trousers literally down—than almost anyone in Fleet Street. But she was weary of it; she longed to be a feature writer, or a foreign correspondent, or even a political editor.

No editor, however, would give her that sort of chance; she was too valuable at what she did. In the predominantly male culture that was newspapers, a dizzy-looking blonde with amazing legs had her place and that was getting the sort of stories other reporters couldn’t. Of course she was extremely well rewarded for what she did, she had a very generous expense account, and most of the time she was happy. But as in her relationship with Nick, she was aware that she wanted more.

“Anything happen to you today? Apart from your scoop?”

“I had lunch with Janet Frean.”

“Should I be jealous?”

“Absolutely not. Very nice, I’m sure, but a Wonder Woman type, politician, five children, famously pro-European, sacked from the shadow cabinet is not for me. Actually, I don’t exactly like her, but she’s an incredible force to reckon with.”

“So?”

“So, she’s pretty sick of what’s going on in the party. They’re all feeling depressed. Saying that the party has got everything wrong. That they’ll never get in again, that Blair can walk on water, however often it looks like he’ll drown. There’s talk of some of them doing something about it.”

“Like what?”

“Well, like making a break for it. Forming a new party with a few right-minded people within the party.”

“And do these people exist?”

“Apparently. Chad Lawrence, for a start.”

“Really? Well, I’d vote for him. Most gorgeous man in Westminster. According to
Cosmo
anyway.”

“Which won’t do him any harm—women voters by the dozen. And then they have a couple more quite senior and high-profile people in the party onside. Most notably Jack Kirkland.”

Jack Kirkland had risen from extraordinarily unpromising beginnings—and indeed unlikely for a Tory—from a South London working-class family, to a position as minister for education in the Tory party; his journey from grammar school to an Oxford first was extremely well charted in the media.

“So where is this leading, Nick?”

“A new party. A party just left of centre, but still recognisably Tory, headed up by a pretty charismatic lot, which will appeal to both disillusioned Blair and Tory voters.”

“That’s what every politician since time began has said.”

“I know. But there’s a growing disaffection with Blair, and there are a lot of instinctive Tory voters out there, longing for change. If they could look at someone new and strong and say, ‘Yes, that’s more like it, I could go for that,’ Kirkland and his merry men could do rather well.”

“And what does this Frean superwoman want you to do?”

“Get the editor onside. Get the paper to support them. When the time comes. I think maybe he would. He’s a Tory at heart and the whole thing will appeal to his romantic nature.”

“Romantic! Chris Pollock!”

“Jocasta, he’s terribly romantic. Not in your women’s fiction sense, but David and Goliath, triumph of the underdog, that sort of thing. And our readers are precisely the sorts of people Frean is talking about. They’ve got to get some funds together and more people onside. There’ll be a lot of plotting—which’ll be fun. I would say by conference time it’ll all be boiling up nicely.”

His large brown eyes were brilliant as he looked at her; she smiled. “Is this another exclusive?”

“At the moment. Obviously they chose the finest political editor of the lot.”

“Yes, I suppose so.” She looked at him. “Maybe,” she said thoughtfully, “maybe this could give me my big break. Be my first proper story. You never know.”

“Jocasta, I adore you, but this is not a human-interest story.”

“It might be. I bet Chad Lawrence has an intriguing private life for a start.” She looked at him and took a deep breath. “Nick, there’s something I really want to discuss with you. Speaking of human interest…”

But he dodged the issue, as he always did, told her he was tired and he just wanted to take her home and curl up with her and think how lucky he was. Feebly, she gave in.

Martha looked out of her office window and saw the first streaks of dawn in the sky. She had worked all night. Of course it was July, and dawn came pretty early: it was only—she glanced at the three-faced clock on her desk, showing London, New York, and Singapore time—only just after four. It seemed much harder in the winter, when the nights were long and the streetlights were still on at seven thirty in the morning. People always said how exhausting it must be, which irritated her. She enjoyed the all-night sessions, found them exciting; and perversely she never felt remotely tired. Adrenaline boosted her all through the following day, she seemed to become high on her own nervous energy, only collapsing as she closed her front door on the day and the deal, poured herself a drink, and sank into the hottest bath she could bear—often to fall asleep and wake an hour later to find it cooling rapidly. People warned her it was dangerous, that she could drown in it or have a heart attack, but Martha pooh-poohed this. It was what she did, she said, how she ran her life, it suited her, and as in so many other tenets of hers—like only eating once a day, or never taking more than one week’s holiday at a time—it had always worked very well. Martha was extremely sure that what she did was right.

Although recently she’d been having just a few doubts…

Anyway, she had finished now; she had only to get the document typed, complete with its final changes, ready for sign-off. She rang the night secretary, got no asnwer, and rang again. She’d obviously gone walkabout. They were always doing that, gossiping in one another’s offices. Very annoying. Well, it would have to go to the word processing centre. She took it down, told them to call her when it was done, and decided to get her head down for an hour and a half in the overnight room and then go to the gym and come back to the office. With the clients coming in and the deal closing at noon, it was terribly important nothing went wrong now. It was one of the biggest acquisitions she had worked on—one financial services company taking over another, made more complex by the worldwide offices of both and a very quixotic CEO in the client company. And the whole thing had begun as a management buyout that had gone wrong in the other company, and the acquisition was salt in the wound of the main protagonist; he had been dragging his feet, looking for a white knight until the eleventh hour, and raising objections to almost every clause in the contract.

But they had done it. Sayers Wesley, one of the biggest, sleekest operations in London, had fought a mighty battle on behalf of their client, and won. And Martha Hartley, at thirty-three one of the youngest partners, had been in control of that battle.

She was happy: very happy indeed. She always felt the same at this point, her muscles aching as if the battle had been a physical one and light-headed with relief. She had sent her assistant home to get a few hours’ sleep and the poor exhausted trainee as well; she worked best on her own in these last-lap hours, undistracted, her head absolutely clear.

What was more, she had earned a great deal of money for Sayers Wesley, which would be reflected in her salary in due course. Her £300,000 salary. Her dream of becoming rich had certainly come true.

Her father had asked her, quite mildly, the last time she had gone home, what she did with her earnings; she had appeared, to her irritation, in a list of the up-and-coming women in the city, the new nearly millionaires it had said, and her family had been shocked by the amount she earned. She didn’t tell them it had been underestimated by about twenty thousand.

“Spend it,” she had said.

“All of it?”

“Well, I’ve invested some of course. In shares and so on.” Why was she feeling so defensive, what was she supposed to have done wrong? “And bought that time-share in Verbier. Which you could also call an investment—I let it if I don’t go there.” Which she hadn’t for the past two years, she had been too busy. “My flat was quite expensive”—she hoped he wouldn’t ask how expensive—“and that must be worth at least twice what I paid for it. And I give a lot to charity,” she said, suddenly nettled. “Really a lot. And I’m ready and waiting to help you and Mum buy your retirement bungalow.”

This was a sore point with her parents. One of the things about being clergy was that you never owned a house, you lived in church accommodation, never had that huge investment most people did nowadays, to cash in on at the end of their lives. Pride had so far kept Peter and Grace Hartley from accepting money from their children, but it was beginning to appear inevitable—and painful. Martha knew that and was as discreet as she could be about it; but there was no very satisfactory way of saying, “Look, Mum and Dad, take thirty thousand, you need it more than I do.”

She had the money in a high-interest-bearing account; had saved it without too much difficulty over the past five years. It almost frightened her to think she could do that.

But most of her life was appallingly self-indulgent, and she knew it. Her apartment was dazzling, in one of the most sought-after high-rise buildings in Docklands, with huge sheet-glass windows and coolly pale wood floors, furnished from Conran and Purves & Purves; she owned a soft-top Mercedes SLK, which she used only at weekends; she had a walk-in wardrobe that was an exercise in fashion name-dropping, Armani, Gucci, Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan, and a stack of shoes from Tod’s and Jimmy Choo and Manolo Blahnik filed in their boxes in the fashionably approved manner, with Polaroids stuck on the outside for instant recognition. And she worked on average fourteen hours every day, often over the weekend, had a very limited social life, hardly ever went to the theatre or concerts because she so often had to cancel.

“And what about a boyfriend?” asked her sister, married now for seven years with three children. “I suppose you just go out with people in your own line of work.”

“Yes, that’s right,” Martha had said briefly, and it was true; she had had two rather tidy relationships with solicitors on a similar level to her, and one heartbreaker of an affair with a third, an American who had just happened to be married and failed to acquaint her with the fact until it was too late and she was helplessly in love with him. Martha had ended the relationship immediately, but it hurt her horribly, and a year later she was only just able to consider going out with anybody at all.

She wasn’t lonely exactly, she worked too hard for that, and she had a few good friends, working women like herself with whom she had dinner occasionally, and a couple of gay men she was immensely fond of, who were invaluable escorts for formal functions. And if an empty Sunday stretched before her, she simply went to the office and worked. But somewhere within her was a deep dark place which she tried to deny, which drew her down into it during her often sleepless nights, usually at the news that yet another friend was settling into a permanent relationship; a place filled with fears: of a life that was not merely independent and successful but solitary and comfortless, where no one would share her triumphs or ease her failures, where fulfilment could only be measured in material things and she would look back with remorse on a life of absolute selfishness.

But (she would tell herself in the morning, having escaped from the dark place) being single was perfectly suited to her, not only to her ferocious ambition; nobody messed up her schedule or interfered with her routine, no untidied clothes or unwashed cups or unfolded newspapers destroyed the perfection of her apartment. Apart from anything else, it meant her life was completely under her control.