‘
It was enough. Without another word, he walked out of the kitchen and the study door banged shut.
He emerged just as Kitty’s hand was creeping towards the half-empty wine bottle on the kitchen table. ‘Fatal on an empty stomach,’ she murmured, with an irritating laugh. Julian refilled his glass with water.
Kitty gave in. ‘I’ll have some wine.’ She drank, her lipsticked mouth sipping fast and neatly. ‘I needed that.’ She put the glass down and fiddled with a charm on her bracelet. ‘Julian, I’m sorry for my outburst.’
The depths of his indifference to her apology terrified her. ‘I understand.’
‘I was defending my territory,’ she added hastily. ‘It was a hitch, nothing to worry about. All marriages have hitches. People survive. It’s a matter of will, an act of will. Anyway, I came to tell you that the clinic was very positive and – ‘
‘Kitty, we are not married. The contract was different.’
She gave an impatient tsk. ‘Words, Julian. You may be good on numbers but you need a few lessons in what matters.’
He stared at her. Kitty was correct. What expertise he possessed lay not in emotions but in theory and, at this precise moment, he was too embattled to change anything.
Kitty straightened in her chair and ran her hand over her hair to check that it was in place. She spoke with the fluency of someone well rehearsed in their lines. ‘We are married. You may think that this performance of weekends only and separate houses keeps you nicely insulated. But it doesn’t.’
‘You accepted it.’
‘Well, now I don’t. I’ve changed.’ She leaned over the table towards him, her face so soft with love that he could not bear it. ‘I know what you’re thinking, Julian. You’re feeling sad and trapped and besotted with someone else. But you know it will fade. If love isn’t fed, it dies of starvation…’ Kitty faltered, for the irony was cruel. ‘The other night you were honest and said that ten years is about the limit for any one relationship. Maybe that’s true. But it seems stupid to be condemned to repeating it with different people. Why don’t we just accept that we’re at a different stage?’
He looked down into his glass. ‘Why do you put up with all this, Kitty?’
‘You know those letters you were reading?’ asked the desperate Kitty.
‘Those damn letters,’ he muttered.
‘Well, the farmer wrote something along the lines that his life was empty without Mary, for she was the other half of his soul and without her he possessed only half a soul.’ Kitty reached up and took off her large, gold clip earrings and laid one down on the table. ‘That is me, Julian…’ she placed the second beside it ‘… and how I feel about you.’
‘Kitty. I can’t say the same. I’m sorry’
She sprang to her feet and her chair went winging back along the floor. ‘I beg you, Julian. Don’t leave me.’ She flung herself at Julian’s feet and slid her arm around his knees.
Guilty, despairing, repelled, Julian looked down at Kitty, a woman he had partly made who was wholly his responsibility. Sick with love that was not for Kitty, he put out a hand and stroked the highlighted head bent in front of him.
That night in the bedroom, they undressed. Kitty opened drawers, creamed her face, blew a drift of powder off the surface of the dressing-table and brushed her hair. Julian soaked in a bath, listened to the radio, ran more hot water, dropped a large towel on the floor and left it where it fell.
They lay in bed, exchanged a few words about the alarm clock, the whereabouts of the water glass, what time they would get up. The light snapped off and, with profound thankfulness, they waited for the dark to hide them from each other.
Eyes burning and chest occasionally shuddering from the aftermath of her crying, Kitty lay awake for a long time. Then, very daring, she put out a hand, touched the form beside her and… Julian flinched.
At that, Kitty walked to the edge of the precipice and was forced to look down.
On Monday morning, Angela greeted Julian in his office in a tight Lurex dress with a fake peony in her hair, which did nothing to hide her intelligence. On the desk were a list of calls, his appointment book, a tray of coffee and biscuits and his correspondence.
Before the afternoon was out, Julian together called his young, trendy, socially aware team and gave them a rundown on the situation. Then he dispatched some of them by helicopter to reconnoitre twenty acres of farmland near Bath being sold by its broke owner – land so expensive that the margins might prove impossible. He also called in Harold, who was wearing yet another variant of the crumpled linen suit but whose trendiness was cancelled out by his ashen face. Again they went over the figures.
By mid-morning on Tuesday, the crisis was full-blown. None of the banks had shown any interest in putting together a rescue package and the share price was on the slide. Worse, Legatt’s, the rival firm, had sniffed what was in the wind and was hovering, ready to launch a hostile takeover bid.
Harold was white to the gills and shaking. Julian took pity on him. ‘This won’t be your last crisis, or your worst.’
Harold closed his eyes for a second. ‘If you say so.’
They were standing together by the office window, overlooking the clogged street below. Julian punched the younger man’s shoulder gently. ‘Use your wits to think up something, but don’t worry too much. The Somerset deal might come through.’
He knew, and Harold knew, that it was touch and go.
Much depended on the Somerset deal, and on Wednesday morning Julian helicoptered down to the area. It was land owned by a farmer who, as soon as the subsidies came in from Europe, had abandoned mixed farming in favour of turning specialist cereal grower. But his profits had been eaten into by the variety of diseases that tend to attack monocultures and, despite huge applications of pesticide, the farm had failed to thrive. Now, the soil was dead and the farmer wanted out, to retire to France.
Julian walked the bare fields, the dry chalky soil crumbling under his feet. It offered the sort of opportunity on which Portcullis thrived, and Julian returned to London feeling marginally more positive, especially as the share price had steadied.
He returned to the Barbican in the late summer twilight, in the cusp before the razzle of lights took over from the dusk, through a city rattling with discarded polystyrene, and clotted with commuters.
The following morning a phone call from Harold woke him at seven thirty. ‘Legatt’s have launched their bid,’ he reported.
Julian swiped a finger across his throat. ‘That’s that, then.’
23
Some people reckoned their fifteen minutes of fame was their due and, if he ever thought about it, Andrew imagined he could be one of them. Yet when faced with notoriety, he discovered it was a dangerous thing. Too close to the bone of exposure. He did not like the questions it made him ask himself, and he hated the reminder that he was fraudulent and might be exposed as such.
After pictures and a report of his fiery protest appeared in the local press, he was besieged by the media and by phone calls. From being a case that had been virtually ignored, it now excited local interest, with supporters and detractors hurling insults at each other on the letters page of the
