Quentins by Maeve Binchy
It wouldn't be a holiday. It would be work, paid work."
"Where?"
"New York City! We've had more good news. The King Foundation says we've got to the next level. We're on the shortlist."
"Nick, that's great. Why didn't you tell me?"
"There were bigger things to talk about. But this is great, and one of us has to go, so it's perfect timing. Go on, Ella. It would solve everything."
I can't leave all my jobs."
"We've asked round. They'll all let you go. Tom and Cathy, Quentins, Colm's and Deirdre's laboratory. The only parties having any problems with this are Maud and Simon, who have learned whatever it is you asked them to and fear they might have forgotten it when you come back."
"You asked them without telling me .. . you dared to do this on my behalf?" Ella was incensed.
"We had to prove to you that you could go, before we bought the ticket."
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"Ticket?" she said.
"Yes, yes. You need a plane ticket to get to New York. Go, Ella."
"Make the call," she said suddenly. Til go out and look at the
river."
Til tell him you are away and it will be true," Nick said.
Mike Martin answered the phone.
"I went to find her," Nick said slowly.
"And?"
"And she's not here, apparently." "Not here? What does that mean?" "What it says. She's gone away. No one knew where." "Who did you ask?"
"Her various employers. You can check with them." "She'd be wise not to play around with Don." "Oh, I'm sure she knows that now, but at the time she probably thought it was a good idea and that he meant what he said and that sort of thing."
"You're a smart-arse, aren't you, Nick?"
"No, I'm relatively simple, but I was pleased that Ella is away, as it happens, and hope that she's strong enough to face you all when she gets home." He hung up, shaking. Ella came back from the river.
"They believe you've gone, Ella, so now let me brief you properly on Derry King." "On what?"
"A very rich guy indeed. He set up a foundation to help artists and film-makers. More strong black coffee. All the hopes and the entire current assets of Firefly Films are going into this trip." "You can't do this to me, Nick." Ella was alarmed. "We have to. It's our only hope." I'm fragile. You said yourself I look like shit." "You have two and a half days before you meet him. You could paint your face or something."
Her parents were pleased with the news. It will get you out in the real world again," her mother said.
"Lord, I don't think staying in a Manhattan hotel and trying to get a man to invest in a tiny Irish company is exactly what you'd call the real world," Ella said.
"It's a change," her father said.
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"There's one thing I have to tell you. Otherwise I can't go. You know that man, Mike Martin? He's often on television."
"I know him," her father said.
"Well, he's a friend of Don's, apparently, and Don is looking for a laptop machine he left in my flat. So Mike Martin might just possibly come and ask you about it. Suppose he does come and enquire. Can I ask you to say you have no idea where I am, but you know I took a laptop with me? I hate the lies, more lies, but it's nearly true. I am taking it with me, and you won't know where I am every hour of the day." She looked from one to the other pleadingly.
"That's fine. We'll say it just like that," her mother said.
"You never tell us your movements, that's what we'll say," her father agreed.
"And you won't let them browbeat you or anything?" She was looking at her parents fondly.
"Browbeat . .. what a marvellous word. I wonder what it means." Her father was smiling a less papery smile than he had some months back.
"Let's look it up, Dad." She went for the dictionary. It wasn't all that helpful. It meant to bear down on someone sternly, to bully them.
"We knew that already," he said.
"It's from Old English, "bru"," Ella read.
"A lot of help that is," her mother laughed.
They were much more like a happy family out there in the shed than they had ever been before.
Ella called in briefly to the twins in Muttie and Eizzie's house.
"Hallo, Ella. We heard you weren't coming. We were just talking about you." Simon sounded pleased.
"You were?" Ella was apprehensive.
"The man who rang and said you're not coming for two weeks, was that the bastard?"
"No, no it wasn't at all. It was Nick, a very nice man."
"Is he part of your future?"
"No, Simon, he's not, as it happens." Ella had a nearly irresistible urge to say that Nick was part of her distant past, the first man she had slept with, in fact. But not with those two, never wise to let them have any real information at all.
Til tell Maud. She's making fudge in the kitchen."
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I
"Simon, I'll be posting a letter in the mail to you. We were meant to be doing some geometry this week . . ."
"But we don't have to work if you're not here, surely?"
"You don't have to, but wouldn't it be nice if when I got back you had both studied this nice, easy explanation that I've written out for you about circles?"
"Oh, they're too hard. We couldn't understand those at all. One thing was the radius and then they called it the diameter and then they called it the circumference .. . no, that's too hard on our own."
"Not if you read it in the simple way I explain it, it isn't."
"It is, Ella."
"But you're going to do it. And you're going to know acute angles and obtuse angles. Believe me, you are."
Simon had a conference with his sister in the kitchen. "Maud wants to know, do you get paid for this?"
"Yes, your grandparents give me money."
"They're not exactly our grandparents."
"So when this letter arrives .. . you are both to take it seriously too."
"Why can't you send it by e-mail, it would be quicker?" Simon countered.
"I can't do that."
"Don't you have a computer?" He was scornful.
"Yes, I do, actually. But the password is jammed, I can't get into it."
"I could do that in a minute," Simon said. "Do you have it with you in your bag?"
"Yes." Ella wasn't sure.
"Simon is terrific at computers," Maud said reassuringly.
"It's just that it's not mine. It's a friend's. He asked me to open it for him."
"Well then, Simon, help her pull it from the briefcase."
"What do you think the password is?"
"I thought it was "Angel". I saw him type it in," she said. Her heart was thumping. Was she really insane enough to share this with these two children?
"No, it's not Angel." Simon had tried it expertly. "It often is something just like that."
"Cherubs," Maud said. "Feathers? Wings?"
"Don't think so," Ella said.
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"Is he in America?" Simon asked.
"No. Why?"
"It could be something like Los Angeles."
She remembered the blue and white tiles on the white walls of the resort of Playa de los Angeles. Playground of the rich, criminal or famous. The hiding place full of billiard rooms and swimming pools. That must be where Don lived. That could be the password. She wrote it down with a trembling hand.
Simon entered it and the screen sprang to life. List after list of initials and numbers, column after column of them.
"It wasn't hard," Simon said loftily.
"No, no indeed." She closed it down. "Thank you both very much. I'll bring you a present from . . ."
"From where?" Maud asked.
"From where she's getting her head stuck together," Simon explained.
It was midnight. She would be leaving Dublin at noon the next day. She was sitting drinking coffee in Deirdre's flat. Ella needed her wits about her. Deirdre and Nuala were drinking a great de
Ella was trying on Deirdre's clothes. "I think I'll take this red jacket, and the black dress, definitely," she said.
"Yes, I'll be walking to work in my knickers," Deirdre said. "Take the red and black scarf too, while you're at it."
"Imagine going off to wherever you "want to." Nuala sounded envious. "It's years since I've been able to do that."
If the others thought that Nuala's husband Frank was always able to do just that, they didn't say it.
She hadn't slept at all by the time she got on the plane. Her only expense at the airport was a fairly heavy duty makeup. And something the assistant recommended, which was an under-eye concealer.
On the plane she studied the brief that Sandy and Nick had prepared for her. There was an entire folder of clippings, photographs and a biography of the man she was going to meet. She looked at the pictures first. Pleasant enough face, square shaped, his hair short, thick and coarse, like a brush with bristles.
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In most pictures he appeared to be peering, almost squinting, at something, causing very ex aggerated smile lines at his eyes. His nose was quite snub, but his chin was strong. It was hard to see if he was tall or small. He dressed formally. He was rarely photographed without collar and tie even at a young filmmakers" gathering, where everyone else was much more casual. Either he had many tuxedos or he got the same one cleaned regularly, since he always looked smart at the many functions where he was captured. There were no pictures of his home surroundings.
She wondered how old he was, and began to check up. He was born forty-three years ago in New York, the son of an Irish father and a Canadian mother. The eldest of three sons, he described himself as self-educated. Yet some of his citations included honorary degrees from universities, so he must have done a good job educating himself. She read how he had worked in many different aspects of the stationery trade and eventually set up a company specialising in office equipment. It had become a market leader, with branches all over the United States. She read many company profiles, trying to analyse its success and its award winning status. Nobody seemed to be able to pinpoint the exact reason it had gone on when so many had fallen by the wayside. Any more than anyone had been able to define Derry King, the Chief Executive Officer and Chairman. He was described as hardworking and easy-going, and said to be determined but not ruthless.
Ella got the feeling that he had been courteous to those who interviewed him, but not greatly forthcoming. He gave no details about what he did for breakfast or how he spent his leisure time. He gave hardly any information about his taste in books, music or theatre, saying apologetically that he had worked so hard in his youth that he had never known the luxury of losing himself in music, drama or literature.
But he did love the visual arts. When he was nine, he had a very inspiring teacher at school who told the children that they could all paint and all find beauty inside and around them if only they looked. This had been a great surprise to the young Derry King. He said that he never claimed to have any artistic talent himself, but it had certainly opened his eyes to the beauty around him, which is why he sponsored so many art competitions among the young in the inner cities.
One of the many jobs he took in order to pay his school fees
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was that of cleaning and tidying up in a cinema. It meant he saw many movies free. It had left him with a love of the film world all his life. No, he had never been tempted to sink his considerable fortune into a studio or a production company, but had tried instead to encourage young people in various aspects of film making.
When asked about his typical day, Derry King gave no little human glimpses of himself reading the stocks and shares over a plate of fruit or visiting a personal trainer, or any minimal insight into his family life at home. Either he did not know how to manage publicity or else he knew how to manage it very well. Ella wasn't sure.
He emerged as a philanthropic benefactor who gave to charities across the board. Always he was interested in causes that helped young people, and advanced funds to those who had not been given an easy start in life. You had to read very hard between the lines to work out what he was like and so far he sounded quite staid, Ella thought.
But that didn't matter. She was coming to New York, on Nick and Sandy's hard-earned money, to be entertained and fascinated by this guy. It "was her job to make him interested in their project. To sell it as well as she possibly could. There was not a great deal of publicity about his foundation. It was as if he didn't want to be thanked in public for doing good. She could have done with more information.
It was in many ways a bald file. No pictures of him in a penthouse suite or in a Malibu Beach home. On a ranch at weekends. There was mention of a wife, Mrs Kimberly King, a leggy number, very possibly a trophy wife. In one interview he said they had no children. In another he said that both his parents were now dead. Nowhere did he say anything about his Irish ancestry. Twice in the clippings he mentioned happy childhood vacations in Alberta, Canada.
She looked long and hard at his picture again.
A man of forty-three, the same age as Don Richardson, who had worked hard all his life. She learned little from his picture. But then she had learned little of Don after two years of loving him. This Derry King looked much older than Don. Perhaps his life had been harder. He might not have had all the perks and pleasures that Don had. And, indeed, probably continued to have.
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Chapter Seven.
The hotel was a small, inexpensive but chic place off Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan, far from the boarding house in Queens where she and Deirdre had stayed that time so many years ago when they had come to New York. It was a place owned by someone's brother who was meant to give them a great deal but there had been a great misunderstanding. He had thought they were coming out to his place to give him the trade, not the other way round looking for a bargain. She had been so young then, Ella thought. Imagine them getting upset by that! If she had known what upset was really like!
Anyway, no point in brooding. She must enjoy the days in the hotel to the full. She had said she didn't really need to spend all this time in New York, but they had insisted. Nick and Sandy had said it was essential that she should be on the spot and available, in case Derry King needed to rethink something through with her. Deirdre had said that it took everyone at least fourteen days to get a head together, especially since Ella's head had been so battered and then tried to cure itself by overwork. Brenda Brennan said that she should make the most of it. New York City in autumn was everyone's dream. She must not think of running back. Her father and mother said she must write down some of the things she saw, they'd love to hear all about it when she came back. She realised that they were all afraid for her. They were afraid of Don Richardson and what he might do when he came back.
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Ella shared a taxi into town with a small, plump Dublin woman who knew every angle there was in the world. She was a dealer, she said proudly, had travelled over with four empty suitcases. She was going to buy stuff in bargain basements for the next four days, fantastic stuff you didn't see at home at all, slippers with pink fur on them, black underwear with red feathers. She'd sell it all at three times what she paid. She did it every year. She could not understand to save her life why there weren't more people in on it. It was the easiest money she'd ever made, and believe her, she had made money in many different ways.
She asked Ella what line she was in herself.
"I'm trying to raise money to make a film," Ella said.
The woman said her name was Harriet, and that if ever Ella was lonely, give her a ring at her hotel and they'd go out for a few drinks.
Ella tried to cover her amazement that Harriet named a very expensive, five-star hotel. There must be good money in importing exotic lin
She settled into her own hotel and had a long bath. Deirdre had given her a very expensive oil, 'to put you in a good mood". Its scent seemed to seep into every part of her body and all around the room. Ella didn't really believe that these unguents and lotions did any good, but she did feel a lot better. And maybe looked a little less drawn.
Then she called the hotel beauty salon to make an appointment for the next morning. She had promised Nick and Sandy that she would have her hair done before she met Derry King. On behalf of the company they said she had to do this. They didn't want her frightening him away before the negotiations started. And then she found herself wandering around the room, pacing like an animal in a cage. To her amazement, she felt restless and edgy. In need of company, any company. It might be midnight back home, but it was only 7 p.m. here. Outside her windows, a New York evening was just getting under way. If only Deirdre were here. They would have great fun. Or Nick and Sandy, she enjoyed their company. If
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they were here now, with a bottle of inexpensive wine that Sandy would have found in some liquor shop, they could sit and plan their strategy.
Or anyone else she liked. Brenda Brennan from Quentins, for example. She was surprisingly good fun when you got to know her.
She looked over at the laptop. No, she would keep her promise to herself. Don't look into all it contained until she had dealt with Derry King. There would be plenty of time later. And now at last she knew how to unlock its secrets. She really owed young Simon for that.