Life's eternal straight man, as he said of himself.
"Anyone very important?" She shrugged his shoulders, as if plumping them like cushions.
"Sir Herbert of Bank A, Lord Sisfield of Bank B, Mr. Martin of Bank C, Herr Adler of Bank D… The biggest creditors' biggest guns. Crikey-!"
he added self mockingly Charlotte was forced to answer his ingenuous, open smile. They studied one another in the tall mirror. Burton sighed.
Ten more minutes of this and I'll be able to carry it off," he murmured, then continued: They're giving Alan Vance an even harder time, I gather. Really squeezing Angrily, she snapped: "Never mind Alan Vance! If his aeroplane hadn't fallen out of a clear blue sky you wouldn't be in the midden!"
"I took the lead, Charley, I really did. take the brunt of it, I said to him. He wanted a creeping barrage, like a Great War general some small American carriers, maybe a Far East airline, a few of the holiday charter firms…"
She gripped his shoulders fiercely.
"I know all that, Tim, I know!" she said through clenched teeth.
"But it was the plane that failed, not you. Now—" She was quickly sitting beside him. Jamie had wandered off towards the kitchen and Greta or the housekeeper.
"Now," she repeated, 'how bad are things? Really."
"Cash flow is down. The big carriers are trying to undercut me cut my throat, more likely. They can stand the loss. Maybe I can't. I'm not sure yet. The team's doing some projections for me…" He tried to lean against her but she remained sitting bolt upright, hands folded on the lap of her narrow cream dress. He smiled at the effort of restraint she indulged in order to appear frowningly assertive, inquisitorial. He raised his hands in mock surrender.
"Alright, alright. Seriously, a few months more of it — all the summer traffic across the Pond and my losses could be enormous. Which means the debts will not be serviced properly interest payments and the like and I won't have a cheaper plane to put into service to recover the losses. Unless, my darling girl, I can charm the pinstripe trousers off the men in suits tonight and every other night they demand to have dinner with me—" In spite of her resolve, she smiled for a moment. He grinned back.
"Unless I can, I won't be able to buy new aircraft, I won't be able to fly the Atlantic cheaply. I won't' his features at once became angry, filled with a hateful disappointment 'be able to open the Australian route. The big carriers all the bastards who've been trying to screw me for ten years… they'll have won. I'll go the way of Freddie Laker, Charley. I really will!"
She put her arms around him and pulled his head on to her breast.
"Nice," he murmured.
Not nice, she thought. Not the prospect of financial ruin. She would live in a hut with him, on crusts and love, if necessary — though she wouldn't choose it.
She remembered the grotty flats, the dingy Victorian terraced house in north London they couldn't afford to do up or alter… She did not want to return to them. For there was, naturally, little in her name, not even the house here or in the Cotswolds. Tim daft bugger had always used his money as collateral.
One of those perfectly awful magazine features only two months earlier had named him in the top two hundred wealthiest people in Britain… which, then, was the measure of the value of Artemis and his other interests. Outside the business, he was not independently wealthy.
There was no crock of gold in Switzerland or anywhere else. If the business failed, so did he and she wasn't wealthy either. Tim hadn't cared enough about money, only about achieving, about winning- which he never measured in millions.
"He'd better make that aircraft work, then, hadn't he," she murmured into his thick, greying hair, 'your friend Alan Vance? So he can get you out of the mire and me and the children with you. Oh, you silly bugger, Tim, why didn't you give me a million or two against a rainy day!"
He laughed, quite genuinely.
"I didn't think I needed to," he confessed.
"And you never asked!"
"When do you have to start flying the Vance aircraft? Latest?"
"I should have had it for this summer. The banks have been happy to wait because the two we've got stoogeing around Scandinavia are performing well and bringing in passengers. There's one small airline with two 494s in New Mexico. They're turning in good figures, too. But I don't think they'll wait, not now. You've seen the papers, the TV Christ, you'd think the bloody plane was held together with string and sticky tape and flown by means of a rubber band!"
"What is wrong with it, then?"
He threw up his hands, then sat up on the sofa. He looked at her with such an exaggerated seriousness that she felt he was mocking her. Then he said:
"Vance doesn't know. He doesn't bloody know, Charley. And if he can't find out, we really are in the shite we really, really are! Up to our necks and beyond." He stood up and began pacing the room. Their confidentiality and intimacy were at an end. His mind was already marshalling argument, proposal, charm, fabrication in anticipation of the evening meeting.
"But it must be bloody serious to make an aircraft fall out of the sky without the slightest warning! So serious it might be impossible to remedy. Oh shit!" He tugged his hands through his hair.
"Oh, shit, shit, shit!" He turned to her as if to a stranger, his eyes gleaming.
"I can't see any way out, Charley, I think we've bloody had it. Artemis is going out like a dim bulb, and I can't do anything to save it!"
She towelled her blonde hair in a rough, pummelling motion, as if it had somehow offended her, watching her actions in the mirror above the carved wooden fireplace, positioned to make her sitting room seem larger. Her cheeks were still pinked from the shower. Her eyes, blue and without make-up, stared knowingly back at her, examining the first crow's-feet of her late thirties.
Laughter lines, she pretended, just like those on either side of her mouth.
However, she smiled at her reflection and knew she wasn't doing too badly for her age. She continued to watch herself, almost with that strangest of childhood sensations, seeing the person in the mirror, reflected back, as oneself. Was she really that person? She possessed her mother's high forehead and cheekbones, her full mouth. And Giles' piercing blue gaze, finished off by her grandmother's blonde hair, worn shoulder-length. It wasn't a bad amalgam, she admitted indulgently.
Then, aware of her vanity and the recollection of men's admiration bubbling just below the surface of her thoughts, she moved to the window of the sitting room and studied the fall of the evening sun across the Chelsea Physic Garden which lay behind the mansion block of flats. Hers was on the top floor.
Sipping at her gin and tonic, she grazed the rows of neat, white-painted shelves which housed her books and her collection of records and CDs. Then she scowled suddenly as she recalled herself to the day's last duty and flicked the answer phone to replay the messages she had missed while at the Commons that afternoon. The Prime Minister, to the embarrassment of the greater part of his own side of the House, had stumbled like a three-legged dog through PM's Questions, challenged on Europe, Ulster and sleaze with equal and equally impotent ferocity.
She listened half-heartedly to the voice of her constituency agent detailing the business of her Saturday-morning surgery, then with much more pleasure to her father's voice reminding her of their lunch date the following day. Then two calls from lobbyists one of them a fellow MP which made her long to switch on some music… and, finally, a call from Brussels, from Michael Lloyd. She smiled with anticipation.