this firm – and for you – is your knowing nothing, your meeting no one.’
‘I do know!’
‘You’re staying away. Out of it.’
‘You said you were staying over tonight?’
‘Yes?’
‘We have to talk tomorrow. I need a lot more guarantees.’
‘You’ve got them.’
‘Tomorrow,’ insisted Carver. ‘Tomorrow we talk specifics.’
‘Lunch,’ agreed Northcote. ‘It’ll be our own farewell celebration.’
Nothing had emerged the way it should have done. The way he’d wanted. What he’d wanted – fervently hoped for – was booming-voiced offence and a provable, point-by-point, figure-by-figure denunciation of his every suspicion. What he’d got instead amounted to a confirmation – a near-immediate admission – of fraud and false accounting and involvement in organized crime – which meant Mafia – and criminal conspiracy and criminal complicity and probably a lot more indictments he couldn’t, and most certainly didn’t want, to think of. It was all too much, too overwhelming, to contemplate. What did he want to think of? The best answer. Or was it the right answer? And was the best and right answer the easiest way out? Or the most difficult? He’d examined George Northcote’s argument from every which way and from every which way what the older man had said about bringing the house down around him – throwing his own words back at him – made the only logical sense. Of course he would prove his professional integrity and rectitude by disclosing the indications of crime to the SEC – to every governing authority – but in so doing he’d bring about the collapse of one of Wall Street’s most prestigious and internationally trusted financial names. Every sort of criminal and governing-body investigation would take months, during which they would most likely be suspended and during which any proper work would in any case be impossible. And there would also be the personal fallout. No matter how right and correct his actions, he would publicly be seen – and despised – as a man totally destroying his own father-in-law by exposing the man at the age of sixty-seven to inevitable imprisonment and an inevitable multimillion-dollar fine. And even if George Northcote accepted every responsibility, in Wall Street – in the global financial village – the mud would stick and those clients who didn’t despise him personally would rush to wash their hands of all and every association. George W. Northcote International would be relegated as another greed-driven, illegally operating financial pariah.
‘Hello. My name’s Jane and I’m your wife.’
So engrossed was he that Carver physically started at his wife’s voice, smiling apologetically across the dinner table. ‘Sorry. I was thinking.’
‘Darling, you were so deep in thought you were out of sight! You haven’t said a word for at least the last thirty minutes. Or eaten a thing!’
Carver sipped his wine, setting his knife and fork aside. ‘I ate a big lunch,’ he lied. How would their marriage withstand his blowing the whistle on her father? Her mother had died when Jane was fourteen and practically from the time she was sixteen until their marriage – and even after – Jane had been at her father’s side at all the charity events he’d sponsored and hosted, which were literally beyond count. The feeling – the bond – between father and daughter was umbilical. Jane, whom Carver sometimes thought to be even stronger than her father, would be the person to despise him the most.
‘I don’t ever remember you like this!’
‘Trying to sort out one or two things in my mind. Making choices.’
‘Involving me?’ she asked, with coquettish confidence.
‘You know the answer to that.’ He smiled back, trying to match her lightness. There was no feeling of hypocrisy or guilt, both of which he’d long ago rationalized, as he had all the uncertainties about morality.
John Carver was not a promiscuous man: indeed, he’d sometimes considered himself undersexed. His affair with Alice was his first and he was sure it would be his last. And hopefully lasting. He’d never consciously set out to seduce Alice Belling, nor she him. George Northcote had introduced them when Alice had come for the first interview session and he’d asked Carver to handle any subsequent questions, which he did on three occasions, twice over lunch. The fourth occasion, at her apartment on the West Side, had been to read the finished article, which was immaculately factual and in his opinion brilliantly written, which he told her, and her intended joking kiss of gratitude had become something more when he’d inadvertently turned towards her. She’d said, ‘Why did you do that?’ and he’d said, ‘Why did you do that?’ and they’d kissed again, intentionally this time, and after they’d made love they’d solemnly agreed it was one of those unexpected, accidental things that had been wonderful and should be immediately forgotten. He’d telephoned the following day and they’d lunched together and gone to bed together and the excitement – the flattery – of his first sexual dalliance had become a deeply loving affair.
Which was what it was. Quite simply he loved two women, neither of whom were endangered by the other. Carver would never leave Jane. Nor did he want – nor intend – ever to leave Alice. If their relationship ended it would be Alice’s decision – which she insisted she’d never make – and if she did he knew he would consider it an unsought and very much unwanted divorce. The word – divorce – lodged in his mind, refocusing it. Carver was sure Jane loved him as much as she was able: as she ever would. Maybe, even, that there would be love – bruised, wounded, but still some love – if Jane ever learned about him and Alice. But he was equally sure – surer even – she wouldn’t be able to love him, stay married to him, if he were responsible for publicly ruining and humiliating a father she adored. At once the conviction that Jane would reject him overwhelmed his fear of what effect any disclosure would have upon the firm and even more upon him, personally.
‘It must be important, for you to be like this?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated, not knowing what else to say.
‘You want to tell me about it?’
‘I’ve gotten things out of proportion,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘That’s what I meant about making choices, which wasn’t it at all. I’m trying to balance things.’ He never compared Jane with Alice or Alice with Jane, because they were incomparable, but physically they were remarkably similar, except for the most obvious difference of Jane being naturally deep brunette against Alice’s blondness, again natural. There was nothing to choose – a wrong word because he would never choose – between them in height nor in their small-busted slimness.
The difference was in their personalities: their imbued motivations. Jane had always been cared for: cosseted, accustomed from childhood to the best, although she had by no judgement or criticism – certainly not by him – grown from a spoiled child into a spoiled woman. Jane was someone grateful of her privileged upbringing, recognizing her advantages and working always to give back. Which she did sometimes with an almost relentless determination better fitted to a business environment than a charity organizer: indeed, Carver had occasionally wondered why Northcote had not groomed Jane to take over the firm upon his retirement. Carver’s reflection stopped at the thought. Knowing what little he did now about George Northcote’s criminal involvement was the most likely answer to that uncertainty.
Alice’s character had come from a similar but cracked mould. As far as Carver understood, although it was not a biography he’d deeply explored, her parents had at one time – briefly – been even richer and she more indulgently cared for than Jane. But her father had been a bull-and-bear-market gambler whose fortunes appropriately rose and fell upon his prediction of which way the market would go. His disastrously misplaced switch, between bull and bear when the markets were going in the opposite direction – and not reversing, when he’d further invested in the expectation that they would – financially ruined Alice’s family. Alice was left with a suicide note of apology, a final year at Harvard Business School, a roller coaster personal awareness that money was a buy-or-sell marketable commodity, not the green stuff in her purse, and a street savvy to invest her way extremely comfortably to her graduation ceremony. Unrecorded upon that graduation certificate – although an indication, perhaps, of how successfully she would later pursue her chosen heads-or-tails career – was that Alice Belling was not just a woman totally emancipated in mind, body and attitude but more inherently streetwise than her finally unable-to-cope father.
‘Hello, again!’
Shit, thought Carver. ‘It’s not my best night, is it?’
‘Is it a big problem, whatever it is?’
‘I don’t bring work home, remember?’ That wasn’t even true.
‘You just did.’
‘Let’s forget it, Jane.’
She looked surprised at the tone in his voice. ‘It’s nothing to do with us, is it?’
