Текст книги "The Billionaire Banker"

Автор книги: Georgia Le Carre

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Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

Six

The muted but insistent ringing of her mobile phone jars Lana awake.  For a moment she lays crumpled and confused on her bed. Her head is banging furiously.  Then she pats the duvet around her, locates her purse and pulling her phone out squints at the number. It is the agency.

She sits up, clears her throat and says, ‘Yes?’

‘Hello, Lana, it’s Jane here.’

‘Hi, Jane.’

‘Well, we’ve received a disturbing and very serious accusation from your current employer.  They have also requested a replacement to finish the booking.  So please do not go into work today.  Mrs. Lipman would also like to see you to sort out this situation.  Can you come in later today?’

Lana remembers Blake telling her to keep the day free.  ‘Not today but tomorrow.’

‘Oh,’ There is a surprised pause.  ‘All right.  What about ten thirty tomorrow?’

‘OK, see you then.’

Lana gently eases her head back on her pillow.  She listens carefully and hears her mother moving around the flat.  She sighs.  She will have to go out and face her mother and tell fresh new lies, but she feels so tired she falls back to sleep.

Again it is the phone that wakes her.  She lifts it up to her face.  It is a number she does not recognize.

‘Hello,’ she croaks.

‘Miss Bloom?’ a woman’s voice enquires.  Her voice is extremely efficient and professional.  And wide awake.

‘Yes.’

‘Laura Arnold, Mr. Barrington’s personal assistant, here. Is this a good time for you to talk?’

‘Yes.  Yes, of course.’ Lana jerks upright and takes a gulp of water from a bottle by her bedside.

‘Mr. Barrington has asked me to make some appointments for you today.  May I run through them with you now?’

‘What kind of appointments?’

‘Peter Edwards, Mr. Barrington’s driver, will be around your flat at ten forty-five.  Your first stop will be your doctor where you have an appointment to see the nurse.’

‘How do you know who my doctor is?’

There is a pause.  It is pregnant with possibilities, perhaps even explanations.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Lana says quickly.

As if she has not been interrupted, the woman continues, ‘She will discuss various contraceptive options with you if you are not already on some form of birth control.  Next, you have a meeting with Mr. Barrington’s lawyer.  Once you have concluded your business there, you will be dropped off at our publicist, Fleur Jan’s office.  Ms. Jan will take you shopping and then on to your appointment with the hairdresser.  After that Peter has instructions to take you to a beauty salon where you are booked for a full body wax, manicure and pedicure.  Please bear in mind that Mr. Barrington does not like garish colors.  He prefers light colors, but likes French manicures best.

‘When you are done at the salon, Peter will take you to the apartment in St John’s Wood and show you around.  Please do settle in.  The fridge and cupboards will be fully stocked, but should you require, I can also arrange for a meal of your choice to be delivered to you from one of the local restaurants.  It would be advisable to eat lightly as Mr. Barrington gets into London late evening, and he wishes to take you out for supper about nine p.m.  He tends to be very punctual so do be ready by eight thirty.  Do you have any particular dietary needs or preferences?’

‘No.’

‘Food allergies?’

‘No.’

‘Good.  Would you like me to order your dinner?’

‘No, I’ll make do.’

‘Fine.  Do you have a passport?’

‘No.’

‘You will need one.’

‘Why?’

‘Mr. Barrington travels often and I believe you will be required to accompany him on some of those trips.’

‘Uh… I see.’

‘I will make the necessary arrangements for you and contact you tomorrow.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Oh, and when you go to meet the solicitor please take some form of identification with you.  Do you have any questions?’

‘Er… No.  I don’t think so.’

‘If you do come up with any question or requests call me on this number.  I will be happy to assist.’

‘OK.  Thanks, Miss Arnold.’

‘It’s Mrs. Arnold, actually.  Have a nice day, Miss Bloom.’

Lana lets herself fall backwards and smiles. She feels a wild surge of joy inside her.  He has not changed his mind.  It seems almost impossible to imagine but she has pulled it off.  Raised the money.  Her mother will go to America.  Still, she never expected such competence or thoroughness.  This is more like a business takeover than the simple transaction she had envisaged.  Naively, she had thought up the oldest scheme in the book, imagining visits to seedy hotels or an odd-smelling flat somewhere in London, probably Soho, but with brutal efficiency he was drawing up her reality to mirror his unemotional world where everything is black and white, and every effort must be made to stop any sort of grey in the form of confusion or disorder creeping in.

She glances at her beside alarm clock.  She must have been more tired than she had realized.  It is already nine thirty even though it is another grey day outside.  She holds her tender head in her hands.  A couple more paracetamols should do the trick.

She sits up and looks down upon herself.  The orange dress is badly crumpled. The details of last night are fuzzy.  Only the kiss remains crystal clear.  She lies back on the bed, closes her eyes and remembers his eyes—how unaffected he was.  If not for that pulse drumming madly in his throat she would have thought he had felt nothing.  Eventually, she can no longer put off meeting her mother so she drags herself out of bed and pads to their shared bathroom.  The tiles are sickly green and one or two are cracked, but everything is sparkling clean.

She takes off the orange dress and carefully hand washes it in the sink.  She wrings it out, hangs it inside the bath, and gets in it herself.  She turns on the shower head, and holds the warm stream over her body.  When she comes out, she feels like a new person.  She slips into clean underwear and dresses in jeans and a white shirt.  Then she combs her hair, ties it into a ponytail high on her head and with a last look in the mirror she goes into the kitchen.

‘Morning, Mum.  How are you feeling today?’

‘Today is a good day.’

Lana smiles brightly at her mother.  Both look forward to the good days.  The good days are what keep them going.

‘Didn’t you have to go to work today?’ her mother asks.

‘Nope.  Got fired yesterday.’

 Her mother shoots her a surprised, worried glance.  ‘Sit down.  I want a word with you.’

Lana sits and her mother puts a bowl in front of her.  ‘Is this man really giving us the money?’

‘Unless he backs out,’ she says and pours some cereal into the bowl.

‘What’s his name?’

‘Blake,’ she says pouring milk.

Her mother sighs.  ‘Are you purposely making this hard?’

‘All right.  His name is Blake Barrington.’  She sprinkles two spoons of sugar on her cereal.

‘Barrington?’  Her mother’s forehead creases into a frown.  ‘Why is that name familiar?’

Lana finishes chewing before she answers.  ‘Because it’s that famous banking family,’ she mumbles and quickly spoons more cereal into her mouth.

Her mother gasps and sits on the chair opposite her daughter.  There is something in her mother’s eyes she has never seen before.  ‘How long have you been seeing him?’

‘I met him yesterday.’  More cereal gets immediately shoved into her mouth.  She wants to end this conversation as soon as possible.

‘You met him yesterday and he agreed to give you fifty thousand pounds.’

‘Mmnnn.’ She makes a production of munching.

‘Why?’

‘Guess it must have been love at first sight.’

Her mother’s eyes narrow.  ‘Is there something you are not telling me, young lady?’

‘Nope.  The rest are all gory details,’ she dismisses cheerfully.

But her mother is not put off.  She is like a hound that has scented blood. ‘How old is he?’

‘I didn’t ask, but he didn’t look a day over thirty.’

‘So he’s not an old man?’

‘Definitely not.’

‘When do I get to meet him?’

Lana slips out of her chair with her empty bowl and goes to the sink.  ‘Soon, Mum.  Very soon,’ she says, quickly rinsing her bowl and spoon.

Her mother sits at the table as still as a statue. ‘Does Jack know?’

‘Jack?’ Lana turns to face her mother.  ‘We’re not boyfriend and girlfriend, you know.’

‘I know, I know but…’

‘But what?’

‘Well, I always assumed you’d end up with him.’

‘We don’t feel that way about each other.’

She sighed.  ‘You just seem so right for each other.  I always dreamed that he’d be my son-in-law.’

‘Since when?’

‘You could do a lot worse than him, Lana.  He’s tall and handsome and he’ll be a doctor soon.’

‘I’m not marrying Jack, Mum.  He’s like my brother.’

‘The path of true love is not always smooth,’ her mother insists stubbornly.

 Lana goes into her bedroom, puts the orange coat on a hanger, picks up the orange shoes from the floor, and goes out of the door, saying, ‘Popping over to Bill’s.’

Seven

The door next to their home is open.  Lana enters her neighbor’s home without knocking or calling out. The air is full of the smell of bacon cooking.  A big woman wearing a faded apron in the kitchen shouts out to her.

‘Morning, Jane,’ she replies and takes the blue stairs two at a time.  Billie has been her best friend since they were in primary school, and she has been taking these stairs all her life.  She doesn’t knock on the door, but enters and shuts it behind her.  Billie’s room has exactly the same view and dimensions as Lana’s but it has been done up in myriad colors and is perpetually messy.  When it is clean, it reminds Lana of a piece of modern art.  She hangs the orange coat on a hook behind the door, opens a cupboard, puts the shoes inside and closes it.  Then, she carefully sidesteps over a mess of clothes and a pizza takeaway box to sit at the edge of the single bed.

Billie has her head buried under a pillow.  She was born nondescript with pale eyes and mousy brown hair and given the equally nondescript name Jane, but when she was eleven years old she reinvented herself.  She turned up in school one day, her hair bleached white and turned into an Afro.

‘Why have you done that to your hair?’ the bad, white boys taunted.

‘Because I like it,’ she said so coolly and with such confidence that their opinion no longer mattered.  She had become a law unto herself.  She changed her name to Billie knowing that it would be shortened to Bill.  Then she found a tattooist in Kilburn High Street, who agreed to tattoo a spider on her left shoulder.  ‘Wouldn’t a butterfly have been better?  Spiders are so creepy,’ her mother worried.  But more and more spiders crawled onto her back, down her thin left arm, and eventually a few small but intrepid ones began to climb up her neck.  Now Bill Black has given up the Afro, but her hair is still dead white and her lips perpetually crimson.

‘Wake up, Bill,’ Lana says.

Billie mutters something.  It sounds very much like fuck off, but Lana is persistent.

‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ she says, and gently shakes Billie’s shoulder.

‘What time is it?’

‘Nearly ten.’

Billie extracts her crown of white hair from under the pillow.  ‘This better be good,’ she grumbles and hangs her head off the side of the bed with her eyes still shut.

‘Come on, Bill.  I’ve only got thirty minutes.’

‘Pass me a fag,’ Billie mumbles, and makes a silent snarl with her lips.  Lana takes a cigarette out of a box she finds by the bedside, lights it and puts it into the curve of Billie’s snarl.  Billie inhales lustily.

Lana stays silent until Billie has sat up, propped up some pillows behind her, and is leaning back against them.  ‘OK,’ she says, ‘did you do it?’

Lana nods.

Billie’s eyes pop open.  ‘Whoa…. You did….? And you got the money?’

Lana nods and grins.

Billie almost chokes on her cigarette. ‘I don’t believe it!  The fat bastard agreed to cough up fifty grand?’

‘Actually, it wasn’t him.’

Billie holds a palm up. ‘Back up, back up.  What?’

‘OK, I did ask him, but he turned out to be a total perv; you won’t believe what his idea of a good time is.  Fortunately, someone else cut in and offered double what I had asked him.’

‘Bloody hell!’ screams Billie.

‘Keep your voice down,’ Lana whispers.  ‘Your mother’s in the kitchen.’

‘Double, as in a hundred thousand pounds?’

Lana nods a lot.

‘So who is this guy then?’

‘Have you heard of the Barringtons?’

‘Who?’

Lana walks to the laptop sitting on Billie’s messy desk and, flips it open.  When the familiar Google emblem pops up on the screen she types in Blake Barrington.  As the page starts to load she takes the laptop over and holds it out to Billie.  Billie grinds out her cigarette in an overflowing ashtray and takes it wordlessly.

She whistles low and long and looks up at Lana with shining eyes.  ‘Oh! Mr. Bombastic, call me fantastic.  I thought all the best-looking males were gay?’

Lana blushes.  ‘Pick the Wikipedia entry,’ she advises.

Billie hits the Wikipedia link and proceeds to read aloud from the screen.

‘The Barrington banking dynasty, also referred to as the House of Barrington is one of the world’s oldest existing banking dynasties with a history spanning over four hundred years.  The family is descended from Lord John James Barrington.

‘Unlike the courtiers of earlier centuries, who financed and managed European noble houses, but often lost their wealth through violence or expropriation, the new international bank created by the Barringtons was impervious to local attacks.

‘Their assets were held in financial instruments, circulating through the world as stocks, bonds and debts. Their strategy for success was to keep control of their banks in family hands through carefully arranged marriages to first or second cousins. Similar to royal intermarriages, it allowed them to maintain full secrecy about the size of their fortunes.  By the late nineteenth century, however, almost all of the Barringtons had started to marry outside the family into other great, old families.

‘The name Barrington is synonymous with extravagance and great wealth.  The family is renowned for its vast art collections, palaces, wine properties, yacht racing, luxury hotels, grand houses, as well as for its philanthropy.  By the end of the century, the family owned, or had built, at the lowest estimates of forty-one palaces, on a scale and luxury level perhaps unparalleled even by the richest royal families.  In 1909, the soon to be British Prime Minister Lloyd George claimed that Lord Charles Leon Barrington was the most powerful man in Britain and America.

‘The Barringtons are elusive.  There is no book about them that is both revealing and accurate.  Libraries of nonsense have been written about them.  An author who planned to write a book entitled Lies About The Barringtons abandoned it, saying, “It was relatively easy to spot the lies, but proved impossible to find the truth.”

Billie pauses and lets her eyes skim down the screen.  ‘Well, the rest seems to be stuff about their international investment banking activities, the mergers they have been involved in, and is as interesting as a man in a wet T-shirt.  Yup, and more shite here about them being one of the oldest institutions operating in the London Money Market.’

Billie yawns hugely.  ‘It just goes on and on about their…hedging services…worldwide assets… Boring, boring… Holding companies…Swiss registered. Boring, boring, primarily a financial entity but…largest shareholders in the DeBeers…a virtual monopoly of quick silver mines. Ah!  Here is something a little more meaty.  In 2008 the group had one hundred billion in assets!  God! Can you imagine having that kind of money? No wonder the great, great grandson is spending it like water.

‘Oh look.  Some pictures.  Wow! Get an eyeful of how the rich live.’ She turns the laptop around so Lana can look at the images as she scrolls down. ‘Just some of their chateaus, palaces, castles, garden-mansions and city houses.  Wow! Look at this one in St James’s Park.’  There is silence for a while as the girls gaze in wonder at the photos.

‘Do you think you will get to visit any of these places?’

‘Definitely not.  I have to sign a confidentiality agreement.’

‘Still, it’s an unbelievably exciting prospect, isn’t it?  Just don’t fall for him.’

‘I won’t,’ Lana says confidently.

‘Let’s skip back to Google and go to about…page three…and see what the conspiracy theories have to say about this august family.  Oh dear…blood-sucking crew.  “If my sons did not want war, there would be none.”  His grandmother said that.  Very nice.  In 1865, President Abraham Lincoln stated in his statement to Congress, “I have two great enemies, the Southern Army in front of me, and the financial institutions in the rear.  Of the two, the one in my rear is my greatest foe.”

Billie shuts the laptop.  ‘OK, quite enough of this.  Let’s not spoil a good thing.  Let’s celebrate your total brilliance, instead.’

Lana opens her mouth to protest.  She knows exactly what Billie means by celebrate.

‘Aaa-aaa… Don’t say another word,’ Billie says, reaching under the bed to pull out a bottle of vodka.  She opens the drawer of her tiny bedside table and rummages around until she finds two dirty shot glasses.  She puts the two glasses on her bedside table, which is marked with leftover circles from other vodka full glasses.  These glasses will make new moons that overlap the other moons.

She fills them to the brim and holds one out to Lana.

Lana laughs.  ‘So early in the morning?’

‘Are you kidding?  This is an un-fucking-believable turnaround.  You go out of here in borrowed plumes to snare a fat bastard and you come back with not just the most eligible bachelor on either side of the Atlantic, but the son of the richest family on earth.  You’ve pulled off the deal of the century, girl.  We have to celebrate,’ Billie says firmly.

‘I haven’t pulled him, Bill.  He wants to have sex with me in exchange for money.’

‘So?  Would you rather be having sex with the hunk or the perv?’

Lana says nothing.

‘Look, I know you are into that deluded saving yourself for the special guy nonsense, but honestly, love, you really are getting too old to be playing virgin.  Every puss needs a good pair of boots otherwise it shrivels up and dies.’

Lana smiles.  ‘You don’t have one.’

‘Ah, but I have Mr. Rabbit.  Nothing dies when he is around.’  She opens the second drawer of her bedside cabinet to expose her huge and colorful dildo.

Lana gasps.  ‘With your mum in the next room?’

Billie shrugs.  ‘I use it when she’s at the supermarket.’

Lana takes the proffered glass, still shaking her head at her friend’s total lack of inhibitions.  They clink glasses.  ‘Here’s to…’ Billie grins wickedly. ‘hot sex with anyone.’  They down the vodka and Billie thumps her chest.  So early in the morning the alcohol has an immediate effect on Lana. Heat spreads quickly through her veins and makes her feel light-headed.  The future seems exciting suddenly.

Billie’s mother yells, ‘Breakfast is ready,’ from downstairs.

Billie lets her head hit the pillow behind her in disgust.  ‘God, she does my head in.  If only she wouldn’t do that.  Every fucking morning she goes on about breakfast.  You’d have thought after nineteen years she’d know I don’t eat that shit.’  She twists her body and reaches out to the little cupboard under the drawers of her bedside cabinet and takes out a jar of strawberry jam and a spoon.  She unscrews the lid and feeds herself a spoonful of jam.

Lana simply looks at her.

‘Don’t say it,’ Billie warns.

‘I won’t, but really, Billie, your mum’s right.  How can you eat jam for breakfast?’

‘For the one thousandth time because it’s delicious.’  She spoons another mouthful in, and commands, ‘Now, tell me every inappropriate thing that happened last night.  Don’t leave a single thing out.’

Lana tells her everything except for the kiss, which she herself cannot make sense of and cannot bring herself to talk about.  Billie’s eyes alight on the orange coat and she smiles smugly.  ‘I told you the dress and coat were lucky.  This is what you wanted, right?’

‘Yeah, it’s what I wanted.  More than anything else in the world.  You’re still OK to travel with my mum, aren’t you?’

‘Of course.  I love your mother too, you know.’

‘Thanks, Bill,’ Lana’s voice breaks.

‘Don’t thank me.  I’m going on an all expenses paid trip to America! Yee…haa…’

‘I don’t know what I’d do without you and Jack.’

‘Talking about Jack, what and when are you going to tell him?’

Lana sighs.  ‘Everything, this weekend.’

‘He won’t be happy.’

‘I know, but he’ll understand.  I’ve got no choice, Bill.’

‘I know, babe.’

‘Bill, thanks again for agreeing to accompany my mum.  I really don’t know what I’d do without you.’

‘There’s a big, black car parked outside,’ Jane’s mother hollers.

Billie leap-frogs to the end of her bed and, standing on her bed with her palms resting on the windowsill, cranes her neck to look out into the street below.  ‘Jesus, Lana, that’s a Bentley with a driver in a peaked cap.’

Lana looks at the clock face.  ‘That’ll be my ride.  Got to go.  Call you later.’

Billie sits on the windowsill, exhales and, through the smoke says, ‘Say hello to banker boy for me, won’t you?’

Lana runs down the stairs and finds Jane standing at the bottom of them.  Her round, red face looks quite animated.  ‘Is that car here for you?’

‘Looks like it,’ Lana says as she disappears into her own home.  She picks up her rucksack, makes sure her ID is in it, kisses her mother and runs out towards the waiting Bentley.