We lay in bed, backs to each other. I was angry. I really had no choice but to go. And Lisa really ought to be able to trust me to go on a business trip with a colleague, even a beautiful one.
I was still fuming, when I felt a finger brush gently up my spine.
'Simon?' she whispered.
'Yes?'
'I have an idea.'
'What is it?' I turned to face her.
She pulled herself close to me, her hands moving over my body. 'I'm going to wear you out so completely that Diane will have to dump you for someone her own age.'
She gave me a long kiss.
'Sounds like a good plan to me,' I said.
5
The scull cut through the river and the slight head wind towards the Boston University Bridge, where the Charles River narrowed. A mile behind me was the Union Boathouse from where I set off three mornings a week. I was into a good rhythm now. Legs, arms, shoulders, back, breathing all combined to produce the regular splash of wood in water on either side of me.
I had learned to row at school and had rowed again at Cambridge. In the army they had other ways of keeping you fit, but when I had arrived at Harvard it had not taken me long to find the river again.
On my left rose the Dome and Senate House of MIT, and beyond them the mysterious tall brown buildings of Kendall Square, housing the biochemical secrets of companies such as Genzyme, Biogen, and our very own BioOne. On my right was the long strip of green that was the Esplanade, then the noisy Storrow Drive, and overlooking that, the sedate apartment buildings of the Back Bay. The air was crisp, the water blue, and the sky clear. Out here, scudding through the middle of this broad river, I felt alone. I could think.
My conversation with Helen had depressed me. I knew she was near the end of her rope, and I wanted so badly to help her, but I just couldn't do it. If I could find the cash, and we did win the appeal, then her life would still be difficult but it would be bearable. I was the lucky one, with a wife I loved and a job I enjoyed. It wasn't fair. I wanted to share some of that luck with her.
Although the job wasn't going that brilliantly at the moment. My anger with Frank and the other partners was hardening.
I remembered the discussions Frank and I had had with Craig when we were putting the deal together. All three of us assumed that the extra three million dollars would be available. Sure, we had inserted the right to refuse to provide the funds in the legals, but my implicit assumption was that that was to protect us from Craig failing to get a team up and running.
From what I could see, he had done a great job. He was certainly volatile, but we'd known that when we'd invested. Frank was correct that in the last six months a number of companies large and small had begun work on the next generation of switches for the Internet. But none had the determination and sense of purpose of Craig. He lived and breathed Net Cop: it had become his whole life. He would get there first, I was sure. If only we would give him the funds to do it.
But the partners had made up their minds. There was nothing I could do to change it. I could disappear in a huff, my honour intact, my resume a shambles, and try to find another job somewhere else. But I'd be throwing away a promising career at a place I liked, working with people I liked.
Or I could do as Lisa suggested. Try to sort the mess out myself.
As usual, Lisa was right. I would stay and help Craig. I wouldn't let Net Cop die.
I reached the Harvard boathouses and turned round.
Frank's opposition bothered me a lot. And so did Lisa's reaction to my going to Cincinnati with Diane. I supposed I could have said no when Diane had suggested dinner the previous Thursday night. But nothing had happened, no matter what Frank thought. And Frank had overreacted to what he had seen, or what he thought he had seen.
Lisa didn't have anything to be jealous about. Did she?
Diane was attractive. I liked her. We got on well together, we had had a great time at dinner the other night. But I loved Lisa. I loved her so much, so much more than I could ever imagine loving someone like Diane. And I didn't want to do anything that would jeopardize that. I didn't want to end up like my father.
Sir Gordon Ayot (Bart) had never known his own father, my grandfather, who had died on the road to Arnhem. He had inherited a small estate in Devon, a baronetcy, and a desire to join the family regiment, the Life Guards, which he duly did. He did everything that a dashing cavalry officer was supposed to do. He gambled, entertained lavishly, womanized, found a beautiful wife, and learned to drive armoured cars round godforsaken parts of the world. Women loved him, and he loved women. This was clear to me from when I was quite a young boy. My parents did their best to keep the state of their marriage from Helen and me, sending us first of all to bed, and then to boarding school, but of course they didn't succeed. My father's expenditure easily exceeded his income, and the estate shrank until only a small cottage was left. My father felt let down, too. My mother was supposed to be rich, but her father had carelessly gone bust in the property crash of 1974. She tried hard to ignore her husband's recreations, and their expense, but when I was ten, they divorced.
I hated my father for hurting my mother. But I also admired him. Throughout my teenage years he used to take me off on a series of unplanned trips: scuba-diving in Belize, rock-climbing in Canada, and later when I was at university to nightclubs in London and Paris. Where the money came from for all this, I had no idea, and my mother could never find out. Then one morning at Cambridge I was called to my tutor's rooms. He told me that my father had died peacefully in the night, of a heart attack. He was only forty-five. I subsequently discovered that he had been drinking heavily the evening before, and there were two women half his age there to witness it.
Against my mother's wishes, I joined the Life Guards after Cambridge. I did it partly out of a sense of loyalty to my father and grandfather, but also because I thought soldiering would be fun. It was, and I was good at it, but in the end the layers of constricting tradition got to me, and I left.
I bitterly regretted my parents' divorce, and my father's part in it. At ten I had solemnly resolved never ever to do the same thing myself. And now, here I was, six months into my own marriage to a woman I loved, and my father-in-law was suggesting I was going the same way. It wasn't just that he was wrong: he had hurt my pride.
Lisa's parents were also divorced, of course. Frank had walked out from his wife when Lisa was fourteen. Lisa had never been given a satisfactory explanation, and like me, had never quite forgiven her father. But there the similarity ended. Although her mother quickly remarried and moved to San Francisco, taking Lisa and her brother with her, Frank had stayed single.
I wanted to make quite sure that neither one of us followed in our parents' footsteps.
I looked over my shoulder and saw the Union Boathouse speeding nearer. My arms and shoulders ached. It had been a good outing.
Gil's office was the largest in the firm. The walls were oak-panelled, the furniture antique. Pride of place was given to a portrait of a weak-chinned colonial nobody by Gilbert Stuart, after whom Gilbert Stuart Appleby had been named. The portrait had only arrived a year before. Gil no doubt liked visitors to assume that the picture had been hanging in the family home for generations. But Daniel had pretty good evidence that it represented the first premature expenditure of a chunk of the BioOne millions.
'Now, have you decided what to do about Net Cop?' Gil asked with quiet concern.
'I'm going to try to save it.'
Gil raised his eyebrows. 'How?'
I smiled. 'I'm not sure yet. But I'm not going to give up. I'll get the two million back somehow. And I'm going to try to make more.'
Gil watched me closely through those thick glasses. Then he smiled, the wrinkles rearranging themselves on his face. 'I admire your perseverance. Do what you can. But there won't be a cent more from Revere.'
