A Polaroid of Peggy Page 34

  Not that it seemed to matter anymore.

  Not that anything seemed to matter anymore.

  Chapter 24

  London, 1999

  “Fraud,” said Geoff, and I saw nothing in his expression to suggest he wasn’t deadly serious, “is a serious criminal offence that usually carries a prison sentence.”

  We were, once again, and, as it turned out, for the penultimate time, in his office. There was Geoff, Vince, Hattie, Frank Connor and another sleek, grey haired bloke in very pricey looking, Prince Charles-ish, lace-up shoes, whom I thought I recognised, but to whose poker face I could not put a name. I had been summoned here the moment I stepped through the doors of BWD after I had hotfooted it in from Heathrow, having just got off the redeye on Tuesday morning. I had decided that the rougher and redder-eyed I looked, the more likely it would be to add some gritty authenticity to the yarn I was about to spin, and, wanting to get my retaliation in first, I had opened my mouth to speak the moment I had sat down on the cappuccino armchair. But Geoff had held up his hand to silence me and then launched into his barrage of accusations.

  “Fraud?” I said. “What are you—”

  Geoff held up the ‘Books Etc’ receipt with the squiggly tadpole. Who, I wondered, was the stoolie? The accounts girl or mouthy idiot? Hard to call.

  I just stared blankly – a sort of tacit taking the Fifth – and Geoff screwed up the receipt angrily and threw it in his leather covered (and cappuccino coloured) wastebin. Whereupon, Frank Connor dived into the bin, rescued the receipt and then carefully smoothed it out, thereby sending me the unmissable message that this was hard evidence.

  “But the dodgy receipt is just count one,” Geoff continued, picking up a shiny, plastic covered copy of ‘Seinfeld Reborn?’, and showing it slowly around the room, as though the others had never seen it, “And is as nothing – nothing – compared to this!”

  “Are you on a fucking suicide mission?” put in Vince. “Not only do you take a totally bogus trip on company money but you put it in writing.”

  “Bogus trip! Wh—” I started, as though some kind of ancient Samurai honour dictated I had to put up a defence, however futile.

  “Oh, please give it a fucking rest!” said Vince. “We knew what you were up to by Friday afternoon.”

  I began to feel myself switching to the usual default position of a cornered rat: belligerency. But – me being me – I mixed in a bit of casual flippancy too.

  “Friday afternoon?” I repeated, as off-handedly I could manage.

  “Yep” said Vince, “Hattie got on to it the moment you left the meeting. It was obvious that story about that woman at your kid’s school knowing Jerry Seinfeld’s agent was just bollocks. As it happened Hattie knows the woman herself. Go on Hattie, tell him.”

  What? I looked at Hattie. I knew she felt, with some justification admittedly, that my recent behaviour may not have had the most felicitous effect on her job prospects, but had I not been the person who’d advanced her career in the first place? Et tu Hattie? Apparently so.

  “I called Audrey.”

  “Audrey?”

  “Mrs McIver – the headmistress.”

  “Yes, thank you Hattie for clarifying who the headmistress of my own daughters’ school is.”

  “There really is no need to take that attitude,” said Vince.

  “Oh really. What attitude should I take?”

  “Well, you could try lying still so they could put the fucking straitjacket on you.”

  Geoff stepped between us – metaphorically – none of us would have actually risked mussing our hair – metaphorically – and asked Hattie to continue.

  “So I asked Audrey if she’d seen you talking to anyone at the junior school show. I speak to her a lot anyway on pog business.”

  “Pog?”

  “Does it matter? Parents and Old Girls Committee, if you must know. Does fundraising for the school. Anyway, she said she’d seen you talking to Margaux Delancey and of course, I know her because—”

  “She’s on Pog too?”

  “Yes, Andrew. As it happens she is. So I asked her what she’d said and well …”

  Hattie tailed off in to silence. What else was there for her to say? What else was there for anyone to say?

  Quite a bit, actually. Beginning with Vince.

  “You might be interested to know that Mick Hudnutt is no longer a client. He went back to his office after the meeting, and called me at lunchtime,” (just when I was squiggling the tadpole, I mused), “to say they’d had enough. Didn’t help my digestion, I have to say. He said they needed an agency that didn’t have a deranged fucking maniac for a creative director!”

  “He said that?”

  “Words to that effect, Andrew. And then took his seven fucking million quid away!”

  Then it was Geoff’s turn again. But first he ushered Hattie out of the room. She was not to be allowed to see the actual pulling of the cheesewire around my neck.

  “Right” said Geoff, when the door had closed behind her. “This is how it’s going to be. You go on sick leave right now—”

  “Fuck knows you need it!” put in Vince.

  “—that’s permanent sick leave, Andrew,” said Geoff. “We put out a press release, some bullshit saying we hope you’ll be back soon, and Lucille takes over. In a month or two – providing you play the game – we’ll have a leaving party for you. Clients, staff, old friends, press, and you get out with your head held high. At least, it looks like that.”

  “What about my shares in the company? The money you agreed to pay?”

  “Yes, I was coming to that. You have to realise we made you that offer before we’d lost a seven million pound account.”

  The flippancy was now overtaken by panic.

  “You’re withdrawing it? You can’t—”

  “Oh I think you’ll find we can.” Geoff looked at the bloke in the Prince Charles shoes as if he could provide confirmation, and then I remembered where I’d seen him before – at the company solicitors when we’d signed the original partners deal. (The piggy eyed, thin lipped assassin, here to fulfill his destiny.)

  “Still we’re not complete cunts, Andrew, so we’re just going to amend the terms.”

  Not complete cunts. I wondered what the degree of incompleteness would be.

  “And?”

  “Well, we’ll continue to pay your salary for six months. And you can keep the cars until that stops. And” – crunchtime, I braced myself – “we’re still prepared to pay you a million five …” – bloody hell, that’s not too bad – “… but for your whole share.”

  Sounded pretty complete to me.

  “What? That’s half what you offered before. And I won’t have any income after six months.”

  “You don’t have to accept of course.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Andrew, we’re not blackmailing you.”

  Meaning they were.

  “If you want to take legal advice, we quite understand, and you have some time. We won’t call in the police until one.”

  Well, I thought, I’m not going to beg. But I came close.

  “Geoff – Vince – look, I accept I have been acting a bit irrationally and maybe I exaggerated the situation slightly, but I really thought I could sort something out—”

  “Andrew, please, you’re wasting your breath,” said Geoff. “Just answer me one question will you? What the hell did you go to New York for?”

  Nothing, I thought, I went for nothing. I came back with nothing. Actually, thinking about Bette, I came back with a lot less than nothing. And now I said nothing and left the room.

  *

  I went up and straight in to my office, brushing aside Julia’s attempts to speak to me, and called Harriet Braintree, giving her the news as matter-of-factly as I could.
She’d have heard worse I figured, so I was actually quite surprised when she sounded genuinely worried. (Probably worried that I was going to start querying my bill.)

  “Goodness Andrew, sounds like you’ve got yourself in a bit of a pickle there. I’m not a criminal lawyer of course, and you should probably speak to one. I can get you a name if you like.”

  Well, I thought, in for £450 an hour, in for – so I called the name she’d given me, who confirmed that I was, indeed, in a pickle, a particularly tart and pungent pickle, from which he could see no easy way I could be easily extracted. He didn’t even suggest that I go in to see him – which suggested to me that Harriet had already forewarned him that I was on the uppers of my Todts – and I have to say I was grateful for that. My options were clear. I didn’t have any.

  I tidied my desk and called Julia in. I told her the official story, but in such a way that I made it clear that I was leaving her to pick the bones out of that. She burst into tears. I really hadn’t anticipated that, and I felt quite choked myself. But I did the manly thing, stiffened my upper lip, gave her a hug, and told her I’d be fine, and that I’d call her and buy a bloody good lunch very soon. (Cloth cutting permitting, but I didn’t mention that.) And then I picked up my case – photos of Florence, India, and yes, of Alison, already having been slid into the side pocket – took the last nostalgic look around that you always do and left the office of the Executive Creative Director of Bradley Dutton Williams forever. As I got into the lift, I heard Julia shouting that she’d forgotten to tell me something but I didn’t want to stop. I just wanted to get it all done and dusted as soon as I could.

  When I walked back into Geoff’s office for the last time, it was no more than thirty minutes after I’d left it. A good two and half hours before my one o’ clock deadline – probably earlier than I had ever been for anything in my life – but, judging by the fact that they were all still there, I don’t think that the brevity of my deliberations was any great surprise.

  I hardly had to say anything. Geoff told me that everything was prepared and that included a confidentiality clause, strict observance of which was required if I wanted to get all my money, three quarters of a million to be paid into my account today, and the rest in six months time, when I ceased being on salary. I was about to make a protest that I wasn’t getting it all now, but then I thought that, one way or another, it was all going to Alison anyway, and that Harriet Braintree would probably be able to work something out with her solicitor. (And it turned out I was right.) So I just nodded along with everything Geoff said and then he of the Prince Charles shoes approached the desk and laid before me a series of legal documents, all with little pencil ‘x’s’ on them denoting the places I was to sign. A. C. Williams, I wrote, so many times that it began, after the fourth or fifth time – just like when I used to have to sign batches of traveller’s cheques – to look less and less like my usual signature and more and more like the weak efforts of a crap fraudster. Which was fair enough, I suppose, since that is what I was. But it didn’t seem to matter to them. Then Geoff signed and Vince signed and Frank Connor witnessed everything and the lawyer nodded his sleek grey head and put the documents away in his brief case.

  And then an awkward silence. The burial was complete but the corpse was still standing there. In the end, I just said something completely inconsequential like ‘Okay then’ and turned and walked out of the door. I thought I saw Geoff make the slightest move of his right arm as though he were going to shake my hand but he quickly saw I wasn’t going to respond and he stopped himself. I don’t suppose it made me look very big, but I was fucked if I was going to give him the satisfaction. Actually, that moment, the almost snub I had managed to inflict on him, rather lifted my spirits. I picked up my case and left the building rather jauntily.

  As I climbed into the Porsche there was just one thing that was slightly bothering me. How come they’d never asked me to be on the Pog Committee?

  *

  I was sitting outside the school again, waiting for Florence and India to come out, not a little worried about how this was going to go. On the plane I’d had everything worked out; I would need my head straight to get everything sorted out at the office, so I would deal with that first, and only afterwards try to square it with the girls. I didn’t try to call them when I landed and left my phone off just in case Alison tried to call me. (I knew she’d be fuming, because I hadn’t pitched up last night to discuss whatever it was she’d wanted to talk about.)

  As things had turned out at BWD, the direction of my head, straight or otherwise, turned out to be entirely beside the point, so I might just as well have called them from the airport. In fact, in all the turmoil of the morning I hadn’t given them a thought. It wasn’t until I got back to the flat that I turned my mobile phone on to find an endless stream of anxious messages from Julia, angry messages from Geoff, and Vince, even angrier ones from Alison – none of which were unexpected, and none of which I listened to. It was the same with the answering machine on my landline. But on both, there were calls too from Florence and India, and these completely threw me. The initial ones were quite calm, just wanting to know where I was, and asking me to call back, but they got increasingly hysterical and shrill and heartbreakingly tearful. It wasn’t that easy to understand what was being said as they got more and more agitated, but after playing them two or three times, I finally got it. And it wasn’t good.

  It became clear that the reason neither had mentioned my birthday for so long, and the reason Alison had said she wanted to talk to me at the house were not unconnected. The need for this supposed talk had just been a cover for the surprise party that Florence and India – entirely of their own volition as Alison was at pains to tell me later – had been planning for me. They’d arranged for Alison and Doug to go out, had spent the weekend specially decorating the house with ‘Happy 50th birthday, Daddy’ banners they’d designed and made themselves, baked and decorated a birthday cake for me, and even cooked a special birthday dinner for the three of us, refusing to believe, as Alison also told me, that I wouldn’t come back to the house at some point, even though Alison had phoned Julia first thing on Monday morning and had found out then that I was in America. Despite this, Alison told me, she had been unable to convince the girls that I still might not turn up, and so, apparently, she and Doug – noble Doug – had gone through with the charade of pretending to go out, and sat outside in the car, until finally, at about ten, she had gone back into the house and escorted them tearfully to bed. The only good thing to have come out of this was that Spot had leaped onto the table overnight and wolfed down the entire cake which, as he didn’t vomit it back up, she assumed he’d enjoyed, and which she said – and I did not contest the point – had served me bloody well right. Much of this I didn’t find out until Alison took me through every excruciating detail, but I got the gist of it from the phone messages and that was bad enough. I think I can safely say I needed no further discussion with Donald McEwan on the subject of the nature of guilt.

  I got to the school before three, and that left me with plenty of time to ruminate on what a completely fucking useless excuse for a father I was. Peggy was clearly right. Given how hopeless I was with Florence and India, Bette was obviously a lot better off having nothing to do with me. Karma is one of the many things I do not believe in but there did seem to be a certain cosmic justice at work here in that, on the same day I had treated Florence and India with such casual, thoughtless cruelty, I should discover I had another daughter and then be forbidden all contact with her.

  So I sat there in the Porsche – only mine for another six months and counting – beating myself up relentlessly. Every so often my attention would drift away to something else and then suddenly I would be reminded again of the missed party and the banners they’d made and the cake they’d baked and the dinner going cold on the table – I found out later it was scrambled eggs and baked beans, and the poignancy of that ju
st made me feel even worse – and whenever any aspect of it came back to me, I’d get this sudden physical pain like I’d been hit in the solar plexus, and I would let out an audible squeak of anguish. In the end, I became exhausted by it all and I checked my watch. I still had twenty minutes to wait.

  Then, for the first of many, many times over years that have passed since, I reviewed my actions at the office that morning, and wondered if I’d done the right thing. And, although I am an inveterate changer of my mind, and have never bought a single thing without thinking, the moment I am out of the store, that I’ve made a terrible mistake and, as often as not, have rushed straight back in to demand my money back, I decided I’d come to the right decision. And, in the light of what I knew then, about me, about them, about the situation – and even allowing for the fact that, as things turned out, it was almost certainly not everything – I have never come to any other conclusion.

  You might think that they were bluffing, that they would never have risked the publicity that bringing me down so publicly would have brought the agency. But they could have got on the phones and explained all to the clients, even though it wouldn’t have looked good. I held no particular sway with any of them – Charles Mullins was long since gone – and, alright, Geoff and Vince might have had to promise a few favours but they had a ready to go replacement in Lucille, who was already bedded in – no pun intended – on a lot of the accounts, so they would have probably have got away with it. And, if I had called their bluff, wouldn’t it have been a massive gamble which, if I’d been wrong, would have cost me absolutely everything? Anyway, I think my poker playing abilities or lack of them have been pretty well documented here, and despite the gut wrenching news I would get a few weeks later – yes, incredibly, it turned out my gut was still not totally wrenched – I’ve always believed that I made the right call.

  And, as I sat there in the car, thinking about all that, and confirming to myself the wisdom of my decision, I did feel marginally better. For about five seconds, tops. And then I glanced up, and saw the school buildings, inside which were my two daughters whom I had treated so appallingly, and I felt sick to the stomach once again. I was wrong about Geoff and Vince. They might be treacherous bastards. They might be cunts. But complete cunts, no, not any more. Everything is relative. Once they might have scored a perfect ten. But there’ll always be someone who comes along and raises the bar. Or, in this particular field of human endeavour, lowers it. The title was now mine.