Persuading Annie Read online

  By this time Caroline Markham was a jaded, used and lonely mother of three girls. Again she did the best thing she could do for her class, era and gender.

  She did nothing.

  Eventually, her early end came from an unfortunate mix of drink and pills. ‘A tragic accident’, was the official verdict. And nothing more was said of the matter. Her three daughters, then all away from home, were told little about it, save the final fact, and were expected to get on with things. Katherine, nineteen, was staying with friends in Switzerland when she heard the news. Her first thoughts were that she would have to buy a new outfit for the funeral and that she’d miss the next ball. The disappointment of the latter surpassed the excitement of the first. Victoria, seventeen, at finishing school nearby, was distraught – or at least distracted – until she realised what this meant. It meant time, sympathy and understanding from the teachers with her school work and attention of a totally novel kind from her fellow pupils; she was a guiltless victim of circumstance, the feeble, motherless, utterly passive heroine of her own life, to be pitied, revered and secretly envied by all. She felt like a princess. Annie, fifteen, at an English boarding school she despised, was heartbroken. She had lost the one close relation she could relate closely to, and for the first time in her life, she felt truly alone. It was a feeling that was to stay with her for a long time.

  Back in the adult world, there was, of course, the predictable gossip along the lines of a happy outcome for George Markham and Susannah Brooke. Their names were linked by many tabloid diarists for the first few years after their shared widowhood. But it soon became clear that George’s interests lay in women who knew less of the world than he, not more, and that Susannah’s interests lay in the world around her, not the men.

  But that wasn’t to say that they didn’t find each other’s company charming. Susannah still found it thrilling to meet every day with a man whose very ancestors had been King James’s sycophants. George was as English as weak tea, mild weather and rabid xenophobia, and Susannah couldn’t help but respect him for it. And George, full of generosity of spirit, respected Susannah for respecting him. In her work and in her most proper behaviour to George, Susannah had quickly become almost as indispensable to him as she had been to his wife.

  By the time Shirley popped back into the office, bringing with her a second round of coffee, George and Susannah’s conversation had shifted gently towards businesslike topics.

  ‘Mr Cavendish is coming to this meeting, isn’t he?’ Susannah asked.

  ‘Yes,’ sighed George. ‘That man worries me, you know.’

  Susannah went cold. ‘Why is that, George?’ she asked softly.

  ‘Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed?’ he asked, unable to keep the surprised dismay out of his voice.

  Susannah started to grow concerned. If George didn’t trust Cavendish – whom she trusted enormously – they were in serious trouble.

  ‘Noticed what?’

  ‘His nasal hairs. Spend my whole time wanting to pull them out. Most off-putting.’

  * * * * *

  The role of godmother to the Markham girls seemed at first to Susannah to be a role blessed in heaven. Three beautiful, wealthy debutantes with everything to lives for, who would look up to her as their guide. What more could a woman bursting with maternal advice possibly want?

  Three different girls, perhaps.

  Susannah had had to watch each Markham girl, once so full of promise, miss all the opportunities their lives had offered them and, one by one, sorely disappoint their father. Because Susannah had greater intelligence and imagination than George and therefore a larger capacity for pain, she had felt his disappointment on top of suffering her own, larger share.

  Katherine, Victoria and Annie had, in their early teenage years, been the darlings of the glossies. All three radiated a beauty that comes naturally from handsome parents and a wealthy upbringing. Susannah and George had high hopes for their future, financial and otherwise.

  George’s middle daughter, Victoria, now nearing twenty-eight, had married Charles Norman at the perfectly acceptable age of 22.

  Charles Norman came from old stock, like George, and would, one day when his father died, inherit his father’s considerable estate. Victoria had done well and they all celebrated her nuptials with so much relief that it hovered dangerously near smugness.

  It was only after her marriage though, that Victoria discovered the ghastly truth about her husband. Until said death of his father, Charles got nothing. Nada. Not a penny. And his father, a youthful fifty four, had the constitution of an ox. His father had lived past a hundred.

  The news, naturally, hit them all hard.

  Susannah had had to console both George and Victoria, while feeling no consolation in her heart at all. And she was truly concerned for her poor Victoria.

  In those early, shocking months of marriage it had only been the fact that Victoria liked the face of her husband that kept her sane. She was, deep down, a woman of simple tastes. Some might say, on looking at her husband’s face, that she was, in fact, a woman of odd tastes. Charles’s face proved that if indeed, God did lovingly mould us all, occasionally His thumb slipped.

  Victoria stayed sane, but she didn’t stay the same determined young heroine of her own life, with everything before her. A sense of grievance, of being wronged by the world – and especially by Charles – gradually became so much a part of her identity that few could remember her before it. She honed the identity of guiltless victim/passive heroine, which had been thrust upon her when her mother died, to new heights. Susannah watched her middle god-daughter grow more and more resolutely bitter. In time, she became Victim Victoria, Giver of Guilt to all those who cared enough to deserve it.

  Meanwhile, Susannah was reduced to plotting with George different ways of funding Victoria and Charles’s lifestyle. Hardly what they had hoped for her.

  Charles was given a nominal role in George’s company – a role which, while creating the impression that he was important, gave him little, or nothing, to do. It was a thoughtful, clever gesture from George, which gave his son-in-law self-respect and his daughter an income. It had been Susannah’s idea. The young couple settled into domestic life, had their ‘heir and a spare’ and resolutely stopped partying.

  Then there was Katherine.

  George’s eldest daughter, Katherine, at thirty, had done enough high-publicity fundraising in her lifetime to get a one-way ticket on Concorde straight to heaven the very moment she shuffled off her mortal coil. Yet still she had not brought a steady investment into the family via a wealthy husband. She had had to endure the slow shame of growing world-weary in the full glare of the spotlight without her moment of shimmering, white-dressed glory. There were younger, hipper ‘It’ girls now, who did vulgar things like write newspaper columns and reduce their high-class addictions, phobias and ailments into prurient headlines.

  The fact could no longer be denied that Katherine Markham had extended even her credit on the platinum card of acceptable single life. It was growing harder and harder to maintain the angular figure and self-loathing nature that was expected of women nowadays. Her bulimia and acidic tongue were so twentieth century. The plain fact was that she was a has-been and her assets were crumbling before their eyes.

  And as for Annie, ah Annie, where had they gone wrong with her?

  Susannah endeavoured not to ponder this question too often, as it pained her so much. Unfortunately, once in a while, even she was unable to control her thoughts, and it was on those occasions that she mourned the loss of her dear Caroline most.

  Annie had always been Susannah’s favourite god-daughter. She was more soft, selfless and giving in nature than her older sisters. But perhaps most seductive of all, because she so desperately missed the wise counsel of her mother and never received any attention from her father, Annie was far more grateful than her sisters for her godmother’s attention. Perhaps this was why Susannah grew to feel that Annie was by far the p
rettiest of the sisters. Certainly her looks were less ostentatious than Katherine’s rather obvious blondness or Victoria’s dark beauty, and for those who did pay her any attention when her sisters were in the room, they did notice that Annie’s charm was the most subtle and beguiling. And then of course there was the utterly bewitching sense of loss, of steady sadness, that never seemed to leave Annie. It showed in her bearing, her manner and her voice. It made one instinctively want to stretch out and help, guide and reassure her. Annie was, felt Susannah, the ultimate in femininity. What man could resist being the one to fill the void Annie’s mother had left?

  Susannah had secretly hoped that the youngest Markham girl would surprise them all and, Cinderella-like, win the biggest lottery jackpot of the family. In her wildest dreams, Susannah had seen Annie marrying a titled man.

  But that dream had long gone.

  Susannah could have coped with almost anything happening to her three girls (except of course, obesity) – after all, hadn’t the privileged suffered imprisonment, drugs, divorce, scandal, even marriage to television celebrities, without lasting financial damage? But somewhere it had all gone wrong. She didn’t know how or why, but her gentle, pretty young Annie had grown up into a resolutely disappointed woman. And Susannah could barely tolerate pessimism in women. She simply didn’t understand it. It didn’t make any sense. It flew in the face of nature; it was base and ugly; the very scourge of femininity. What on earth had happened?

  The only glimmer of hope that came to Susannah when she thought of Annie was in the form of Markhams’ new chief executive, Edward Goddard. She had seen how Edward’s eyes lingered a moment longer than necessary on Annie’s face, how they focused whenever Susannah mentioned her name in meetings. And, more exciting than that, she had seen that for all her youngest god-daughter’s attempts at indifference, Annie’s face always lit up at Edward’s attention. But perhaps the most attractive thing about Edward was that Susannah had met him first and felt in the loop.

  He wasn’t a title, but he was the next best thing – a wealthy, distant relation to one. And the way Annie had turned out, that was all they could hope for now.

  Yes, she felt sure that Edward was the catalyst for change in Annie’s and all of their futures. He would bring her back home, back in the fold, for good.

  ‘Are any of the girls coming to the meeting?’ asked Susannah.

  ‘Hmmm? Katherine is.’

  ‘And Annie?’

  ‘Think so.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Why?’ asked George bluntly. ‘Is she bringing the food?’

  * * * * *

  Susannah’s dual role of the girls’ guardian and, in more recent years, that of Markhams’ finance director had naturally extended to caring for their widowed father too. She had indeed become the official Markham Guardian.

  Over the years, this role too had become harder than she could ever have imagined.

  Like Caroline, Susannah soon discovered the truth behind George’s glittering career.

  Many years ago, before either of the two women had even heard of him, George had been a bored young millionaire with so much more money than sense that he didn’t need the sense. Indeed, sense would only have spoilt the money.

  Not so any more.

  He had bought one of the top consumer PR businesses in the country, complete with its 4,000 members of staff. For him it was a buzz, a plaything, its main attraction being that it already had an office in New York. This gave him the perfect excuse to buy an apartment on Fifth Avenue with views over Central Park, while modernising the office, no expense spared. And as chairman of such a company, he could designate himself as managing director and personally oversee the hiring of many disadvantaged, beautiful young things who hadn’t had the help in life that he had.

  In the past, he had been very hands-on, so to speak, with most of the female, disadvantaged, beautiful young things, and even now in his middle age, he still showed an inspirational interest in their development. He always appeared first thing in the morning, drank Shirley’s excellent coffee and breezed into meetings with clients who might be impressed by the MD in their midst. His presence alone – those features again – still managed to clinch the odd deal. And although he was considerably more picky now, George still had an eye for the most deserving of his female, disadvantaged, beautiful young things. It was a life of selfless charity work.

  He was blissfully unaware that his hardworking employees’ buttocks clenched at the sudden appearance of him in such meetings, in dread of their esteemed boss opening his mouth and ruining everything. This rarely happened though. George had his performance honed to a tee. He merely smiled enigmatically, shook the client’s hands with a confident smile, delighted that his features were having the same effect on them as they had on himself, patted his trusted employee on the shoulder and said something like ‘I’ll leave things in your capable hands, shall I, Tom/Dick/Harry?’ He would then raise both hands, palms facing the client, before humbly begging, ‘Please don’t get up,’ which always resulted in said client getting up, to watch the respected George Markham leave the office. Another deal clinched, another set of buttocks unclenched.

  George thoroughly enjoyed the business life.

  Which was where Susannah’s difficulties had begun.

  By the time she had worked her way up to become the finance director of Markhams’ a decade ago, the company still had the potential to claw itself back to its glory days. But in the past few years, things had been rapidly worsening and now it was in serious danger of suffering a precipitous fall in performance results and client numbers. Terrifyingly, the end had come far sooner than Susannah had predicted. The last few months had seen the company lose money faster than a fat cat with a girlfriend.

  For the first time in their history, they were having to seek out clients rather than the other way round, and the company was in real danger of going under, taking George and his three daughters with it.

  In its present state, George couldn’t even sell his company and make enough money to maintain the standard to which he and his family were accustomed. And if they were ruined it would pain Susannah more than she could say to think that she would no longer be able to mix in polite company with her best friends.

  Even more terrifying was George’s behaviour. He was simply ignoring the fact that the money wasn’t coming in any more at a rate to cover the speed with which it went out.

  Both he and his two eldest daughters blithely went on spending. They occasionally popped on Concorde to spend weekends at the New York apartment. Otherwise they enjoyed the simple luxury of their mansion house overlooking Hampstead Heath where George occupied the ground and first floor and Katherine had the amazing penthouse apartment. They both rattled around in their respective homes, leaving vast annexes unused. In fact, Katherine was for ever to be found in her father’s drawing room instead of her own brightly lit, furnace-hot drawing room upstairs. While she was the first to admit that her father’s home suffered from a shocking lack of interior design, the fact was that she found it far more welcoming than her own, because it invariably had her father in it.

  Victoria and Charles had an exquisite, spacious four-bedroom flat near the famed Hampstead village, which Susannah was growing more and more convinced was an unacceptable extravagance, when there was so much unused room in the family home.

  Annie, unlike both her sisters, had insisted on paying her own way and thanks to her mother’s inheritance and her job at the nearby art gallery, had managed to secure a mortgage on a lovely two-bedroom flat with a balcony in nearby Muswell Hill – or Muswell Hell, as George called it.

  As for the rest of the Markham family though, life was rich. George’s beloved late Great Dane, Rufus the Great, had had a Gucci sleeping basket, collar and lead. And they all still holidayed in the best resorts, with or without Annie. Katherine and Victoria had punishing daily workouts and yoga with the very best instructors, weekly massages, reflexology sessions, manicures, acup
uncture and one-to-one Pilates classes; monthly leg waxes, eyelash curls, colonic irrigation, sunbed and trichology sessions and bi-monthly seaweed wraps. If they had a headache, they popped to their cranial osteopath, a pimple, the country’s best beautician, a fat day, lymphatic drainage. And then there was the morning make-up and hair session with the country’s top professionals. Priceless beauty didn’t come cheap.

  Susannah had started to try and gently persuade George of the dangers of his excessive spending. But it was impossible to order a man whose ancestors had hacked off their servants’ hands for doing less. He had proved deaf to her pleadings.

  Until now. Finally, even he could no longer put off seeing the brick wall of bankruptcy in front of him.

  As Susannah saw it, they had three options. They could pray for a miracle and try to sell the company to a wealthy fool with even less business sense than George; they could face reality and shut it down now before the debts outweighed the assets; or they could open their doors to some management consultants, in the hope that they could turn it around and return it to its glory days. She knew that the third option was probably a non-starter, but she just couldn’t bear to give up yet. The irony was that she needed a team of management consultants in to help her work out which option to take. And to prevent this being a total waste of money, it had to be one of the best. And for that they needed serious money.

  Susannah also knew that for management consultants to be able to earn their millions, she had to get George temporarily out of the picture. Much as she loved and respected the man, she knew that he could single-handedly wreck everything. He was his own company’s biggest millstone.

  On top of that, she knew that George was proud. He would only consent to any of this if it were done in such a way that the public would never realise what was really going on. He couldn’t possibly let anyone think that he needed help.

  This was an incredibly complex, sensitive subject.

  As their conversation glided to the subject of the company, not a moment too soon – or too late – Susannah slowly lifted her briefcase on to the polished table and opened it.