Conflict of Interest

He often wondered how much she recognised him; if she knew who he was. He wondered if she’d know him at all if he went away for two or three months. But it was too depressing a subject to dwell on, so he would focus only on the here and now.

‘Would you like to walk with me today, or go in a wheelchair?’

‘I think the wheelchair – it’s such a nice day.’

‘Yes, isn’t it.’

Having helped her into the wheelchair, he manoeuvred her out through the French doors and on to the path which wended its way through the beautifully landscaped gardens. It was so peaceful out here in the gardens. Every time he visited her he couldn’t avoid the irony of his own observation that it was a wonderful place to think – but thinking was the one thing of which Jeannie was completely incapable.

As he pushed her along the pathway, the slanting rays of an autumn sun were warm on his face.

‘Well, Jeannie,’ he told her after a while, ‘it’s caught up on me, at last.’

It had been a possibility from the start, of course, and in the early days when he’d just started seeing Launa, his wife, the problem had preoccupied him greatly. But the longer he’d been married to Launa – and they’d just celebrated their eighteenth anniversary – the more remote the possibility seemed. Then the call from Elliott North, a bolt out of the blue which brought it all back into horrifying definition.

‘I always hoped it would be our little secret – just you and Launa and me. And Him upstairs, of course,’ he chuckled sadly, pushing the chair through an arch in a hedge and out to where the gardens were wilder, less constrained.

‘I can’t think how it could have come out. They must have investigated me, looked into things. But you know, my darling, I still think I did the right thing. There was no reason anyone needed to know you’re my wife. You made me promise, when we married, never to leave you, and it’s a promise I’ve always kept. Launa understood. She wasn’t worried; she cares for you too.’

Jeannie began humming the theme tune from the TV soap that had been on in her room.

‘But there are people who wouldn’t understand. They wouldn’t see past the legalities. And in my position with Family First, it’s not just the personal and professional dis

grace, it’s the organisation I’m worried about too. How would it recover? I can see the headlines now, “Bigamist”. That’s the word they’d use.’

They came to a park bench, where he parked the wheelchair and sat down, taking one of her hands between his own.

‘I didn’t see what I could do, except go along with them,’ he said. ‘I haven’t wanted to tell Launa – she’s so happy at the moment, building a life for herself with the children off her hands. And now this. Oh, Jeannie, what am I to do?’

As they held each other’s eyes, he wondered, with the same sharp pain that he’d felt so very many times in the past – did she understand anything at all of what was going on?

Then something caught Jeannie’s eye. ‘Oh look.’ She pointed.

A large box kite was flying high overhead, a long tail of coloured ribbons dancing beneath it.

‘It’s a kite,’ Claude told her.

‘Yes. A kite.’ She looked back at him. ‘I feel like a kite.’

Elliott North’s flat in Onslow Gardens was part of an exclusive square of grand, Edwardian homes, with doric columns, bay windows, and balconies overlooking the private garden around which the houses had been built. In this South Kensington sanctum of establishment money, the aura of privilege and wealth was as inescapable as the luxury vehicles which occupied the residents’ parking bays – Jaguars, Audis, Grand Cherokee Jeeps.

North’s own flat was no mere bachelor pad. It had three spacious double bedrooms with en-suite bathrooms, a study lined with mahogany shelves from chair rail to ceiling, a dining room he never used, and an unusually large sitting room with French doors leading out on to the balcony. The flat had been furnished throughout in the finest taste, and with the benefit of a generous budget, by a well-known interior decorator just off the King’s Road. Kevin McLeod had attended to everything, from wallpaper to furniture to soft furnishings, including a pair of magnificent damask curtains in the sitting room, which swept with theatrical majesty from a high, tassled pelmet, down to the floor, secured at either side by tie-backs, to allow late-afternoon sunlight to flood into the room.

North hadn’t seen the flat when he bought it. Nor had he been at all involved in its interior decoration. Starwear’s London office had seen to all that, couriering over papers to sign and briefs to check over, to which he had paid scant attention. For the fact was, North had very little interest in the niceties of his living arrangements. He didn’t care if he lived on the first or second floor, or whether his bedroom was blue or yellow. That kind of thing meant nothing to him. His only concern had been location; so long as his home was no further than a five-minute drive, or a twenty-minute walk from The Boltons, he would be happy enough. Because, in that ultra-exclusive residential enclave, a magnificent, four-storey detached mansion, which boasted one of the few remaining private ballrooms in London, had been recently acquired, at a cost of £5 million, by Starwear’s new Chief Executive Officer, Jacob Strauss. Jay had arrived from New York with his wife, Amy, and family; their two teenage daughters would be flown back to America every term until they completed their schooling. For the next few years, at least, London was to be home for Mr and Mrs Jacob Strauss.

North sat in his sitting room wearing a burgundy velvet dressing gown and scanning his laptop for e-mails. He’d never really been big on clothes, but the dressing gown was something he was proud of because Jay had given it to him about three years ago in New York. He still clearly remembered the day in Saks. Jay Strauss rarely ventured anywhere near a shop, all his stuff was bought for him. But that particular day, they had been caught up in traffic in the back of Jay’s limo, when the gown had caught Jay’s eye from across the sidewalk. Urging him out of the car and into the store, Jay had walked right in, demanded he remove his suit jacket and try on the gown for size, before buying it for him on the spot.

‘I’m not saying there’s anything less than satisfactory about your physique.’ Jay had touched North’s hand. ‘It’s just that there are moments when it’s useful to have something to wear that’s not a suit.’

North knew exactly which moments he was referring to. The next time one of them came along, he had slipped into his new, quilted, velvet dressing gown, provoking great admiration from Jay. North had become so attached to the garment, in fact, that when the time had come for him to pack his belongings for the move to London, it was one of the few items he insisted on bringing over with him – most of his wardrobe being shipped over a few days later.

It wasn’t only the luxuriance of it which made North fond of the gown – it was also the fact that Jay Strauss had bought it for him. For while Elliott North had long-since resigned himself to the fact that he was one of society’s outsiders, one who lived on the fringes of normal intimacy, on the subject of Jay Strauss his feelings ran very strongly indeed. The bond between them was as compelling and intimate and reciprocal as could be. And he never, for one moment, forgot whom he had to thank for his success.

That spark of mutual recognition had been there from their very first meeting. At the time, North had been running his own PR agency out of a shabby office in Brooklyn. North Media claimed specialism in ‘marketing and corporate communications’, a term deliberately designed to mean all things to all people. He called it an ‘agency’, but in reality it was just him, a telephone, a coffee-stained PC, and a box of index cards on which were written the names of a few dozen not-very-important in-house PR managers and local businesses whom North hoped might, in time, become his clients.

North Media had come about by necessity rather than choice. While his peers had always found North abrasive and unfathomable, his awkwardness hadn’t mattered so much when he was at the very beginning of his career in PR. By the age of twenty-eight, however, he’d been expected to meet clients and establish rapport, to create the chemistry needed for new business wins. He hadn’t been a success in this department, and it was on the grounds of ‘poor interpersonal skills’ that his employer, Ketchum PR, had let go of him. Hence North Media, and the hand-to-mouth subsistence it provided. He had one retained client, a small, local insurance broker whose fee just covered the rent, and added a couple of other small-time regulars. Apart from that, he’d take whatever one-off projects he could get.

Then one day he got a call out of the blue from Douglas Cameron, Corporate Communications Director of Starwear. There was a project he might be able to help them with, Cameron told him; would he be available for a briefing at Starwear HQ later that day? All the time he was talking to Cameron, North was getting more and more excited. And curious. How was it that the PR head honcho of one of the world’s biggest brands had decided to call him in? North had never written to him to solicit business; he wouldn’t have wasted the stamp. What, in Christ’s name, did he have of any interest to a heavy hitter like Douglas Cameron?