More Than You Know (40 page)

“That’s … that’s very generous of you, sir.”

It really was all he could do; the alternative was quite literally bankruptcy, which would mean the end of his job on the stock exchange.

Adrian had had another fall and broken his pelvis. Sarah rang to say that she knew he would love to see Eliza. “It’s been quite a long time.” Eliza lost her temper and said she would have been down quite often if they hadn’t been so hostile to Matt; Sarah said she was sorry, but it had been a terrible shock about the baby.

“Mummy, if I’d been pregnant with Jeremy’s baby you’d have been
over the moon with excitement. But of course I’ll come and see Daddy. I’d have come before if you’d asked me. I just felt so hurt. I can’t come this week; next Saturday all right?”

“Yes, I suppose so. And if Matt wants to come, then he’ll be—”

“Honestly,” said Eliza, interrupting her, “I don’t think he will.”

But Matt, unpredictable to the last, insisted that he would go with her.

“I don’t want you driving all that way on your own. It’s not good for you to get too tired, and long car journeys are probably not good for the baby, you getting all shaken about—”

Matt’s devotion to his unborn child continued to surprise and delight her. He insisted on attending her appointments with the doctor, to her considerable embarrassment. He had more or less auditioned all the hospitals and insisted that he would pay for her to have the baby privately, if that seemed to be the best option. However, Eliza had established that one of the most highly regarded obstetricians in London, one Professor Anthony Collins, worked at the maternity unit of the Fulham and Battersea, an NHS teaching hospital, where he had established a culture of excellent education on all aspects of pregnancy and childbirth, including one evening that fathers were encouraged to attend, close family bonding, and the admission of fathers to the labour ward if both parents wanted that. This was so revolutionary a notion that there had even been letters to the
Times
about it. Eliza said hopefully she was sure Matt wouldn’t want it, and that he’d faint, but he said he wouldn’t miss it for the world and that he wanted a grandstand view.

“No,” said Matt, “no, no, no, no, no. That clear enough for you? You are not going to work when you’ve had the baby.”

“But—”

“Eliza, no. You are not sacrificing that baby in favor of your career. Do you really think photographing a few frocks is more important than bringing up your own child? I’ve never heard anything so … so disgusting, frankly.”

“Of course it’s not disgusting. And I don’t think my work is more important than my child. But I just don’t see how being away from it—him—for
a few hours a day is so terrible. And I really don’t think I’m cut out for full-time motherhood.”

“Well, you might have thought of that before you got yourself pregnant.”

“That’s unfair!”

“Is it? I don’t think so. I tell you what I think, Eliza: I think you’re so fucking impressed with yourself and your life as a lady fashion editor, getting your arse licked all day long by all that fancy riffraff you seem to like so much, you can’t face giving it up. I’ve heard them at parties and in the office: ‘Oh, Eliza, you’re so marvellous; oh, Eliza, darling, what a wonderful editor you are; oh, Eliza, you’re so clever.’ It makes me want to throw up. Well, right now I think you’re pathetic and self-centred and attention-seeking, with a pretty rotten sense of values, and it’s not good enough. Not good enough for the baby and not good enough for me. So … is that quite clear?”

She had walked out after that and gone to the office, where she had smoked at least five of the cigarettes Matt had ordered her to give up and sworn and cried and talked to Annunciata and rung Maddy, both of whom agreed that Matt was a monster and was not to be given in to, and she said of course she wasn’t going to give in to him; it would be marital suicide; she would do what she liked with her life—and she even went out for a drink with Annunciata to give herself Dutch courage for the evening’s battle.

It was a battle, and it raged for days and became very ugly. He told her she was disgraceful; she told him he was monstrous; he told her she lacked a sense of maternal duty; she told him he had no concept of the sort of person she really was; he said if he had, he certainly wouldn’t have married her.

“I’m surprised you didn’t just get rid of the baby; I really am,” he said, finally, “since it’s going to be such a burden to you. Maybe it’s not too late to do that now, Eliza. I’d investigate it if I were you.”

Eliza walked up to him and started to attack him physically, flailing at him with her fists; he stared at her, then turned in silence and left.

He didn’t come back that night, spent it in the office; but as he sat at his desk, grey-faced and shaking with exhaustion the following morning, staring out of the window, and his misery so evident that even Louise was touched by it, Eliza walked through reception and into his office,
shut the door behind her, and told him she had decided that she would give up work when the baby was born.

It was prompted partly by her own guilt and partly as simply an acute weariness and inability to go on fighting Matt in all his hurt fury.

The guilt, because of course she knew, deep down at the bottom of her soul, as any mother or rather prospective mother would know, that she should stay at home and look after this precious longed-for little creature, that it was her responsibility to do so and to deny it was an act of wanton selfishness. She could plead no mitigating circumstances: there was no financial need for her to carry on working; her work was hardly benefitting humanity. It was acutely superficial in its nature, as Matt had so forcefully pointed out, and continuing in it was undoubtedly threatening her marriage. Which was not going to benefit the baby either.

But it hurt desperately and harshly; she felt bereft, robbed of her life prize so dearly won. And she felt afraid, too, of a future without one of her main sources of happiness. Try as she might, she felt an uncrushable resentment towards Matt.

It was a new world she had to make her way in; she hoped she would survive.

Jenny was having what she called a turnout. This mostly meant taking everything out of every cupboard and drawer in the office and putting ninety-nine per cent of it back again, all to a running commentary on her own progress, when the phone rang. It was Barry Floyd.

“Is that the lovely Jenny?”

“It’s Jenny, Mr. Floyd, yes. I don’t know if—”

“And is the equally lovely Louise there?”

“I’ll just inquire, Mr. Floyd; would you mind holding?”

“I wouldn’t mind holding anything at all, and certainly not you, my darling, no.”

“It’s Mr. Floyd, Miss Mullen,” said Jenny. “He sounds very cheerful. Do you want to speak to him?”

“Well, since he’s cheerful, yes, Jenny, put him through. Barry, hallo.”

“Good morning, my darling Louise. And how are you this beautiful morning?”

“I’m fine, thank you,” said Louise, “but I don’t know where you are. It’s pouring with rain in London.”

“I’m in London and it looks beautiful to me. Now then. Could I interest you in a tenant today?”

“What sort of tenant and for where? That building in Holborn?”

“No, not Holborn. This is about Slough. Someone who just might be moving in … that direction, just so long as he can find premises.”

“Oh, my God. Barry, that’s amazing. Who is he?”

“It’s a little outfit—you may not even have heard of them—”

“Oh.” Louise’s voice echoed her disappointment. They needed a big one for Slough: a really big one.

“Still—worth pursuing, I think. Could you see him for a meeting this afternoon on site, do you think? At around three p.m. And bring those two boys of yours with you.”

He always referred to Matt and Jimbo as Louise’s boys; she liked it; it diminished them rather satisfactorily.

“I’ll try. But it’s quite a trek out to Slough. And … well, if he’s really small, is he the sort of tenant we want anyway?”

“Oh, I think so. You know how one thing leads to another in this game.”

“Well, I’ll ask them. But I’ll be there.”

“Good girl. You’ll like him; he’s a real charmer.”

“That always helps,” said Louise.

She asked Matt and Jimbo whether they wanted to come; they both said they had far more important things to do, and that a small tenant for Slough would be worse than useless.

“Barry said he was worth pursuing. And it is very important to us, that site. Plus Barry said he’d want a quick decision if he liked the place.”

“Yes, all right,” said Matt, “of course someone should go, but that’s fine; you’ll do. And there’s no way I’m going to be rushed into letting some wanker take half that space or less, and you can tell Barry that first off.”

She had still not returned by half past six; Matt and Jimbo were beginning to grow irritable. Jimbo was expected at his fiancée’s home for a family conference about the wedding, now rivalling the D-day
landings in its complexity, and Matt wanted to go and look at a car-park site in the city.

“Give her another half an hour; then we’ll lock up and she can tell us about it in the morning.”

At six fifty-nine precisely Louise came in.

She had what they both called her look on. It was a look that transformed her from sexy, sassy girl to sleek, successful woman, and it settled on her whenever she had pulled off some deal. It was partly the way she moved, rather more slowly than usual, partly the expression in her eyes, partly a just-supercilious curve to her mouth.

“Oh,” she said, “hallo.”

“Hallo, Louise. Bit late, you could have called.”

“Yes, well, unfortunately there aren’t any telephones set into the foundations at Slough, and the two boxes I passed were out of order. Anyway, it’s only seven, for Christ’s sake.”

“Yes, OK, OK. What was this mysterious client, then, and is there any hope of a deal?”

“I … think there might be, yes.”

She sat down on Matt’s desk, her long legs swinging, pulled out a pack of cigarettes and the small tortoiseshell lighter they had given her for her last birthday, and lit one, inhaling hard and then blowing out a great cloud of smoke.

“Quite a lot of hope. Good thing I went; he’s going to need quite a bit of stroking. He was obviously a bit disappointed we weren’t all there; he’d brought his PR along.”

His PR! Jimbo and Matt looked at each other. Small firms didn’t usually have PRs, and certainly not ones they brought to meetings.

“Yes. She was great. I really liked her.”

“She!”

“Yes. Nothing wrong with that, I trust. Or do you not approve of female PRs?”

“Of course we do,” said Jimbo hastily. “We approve of female everything. Even developers.”

“Yes. Anyway, her boss, he liked the development very much, liked the landscaping particularly, and the location, of course. Matt, I made sure you got the credit for that, at least—”

“What do you mean, ‘at least’?”

“Well, even though you were too busy to come.”

“For Christ’s sake, Louise,” said Matt, “who the fu— Who was this client?”

“Have you heard of WireHire?”

“WireHire?”