AllFreeNovel
Share Us
he national health system, and state education.
“Uppingham, sir, class of ninety-eight,” Eddy barked back, as rehearsed with Cynthia only hours before. The Cheltenham Ladies’ College graduate and model had settled on Uppingham because, she’d concluded, Daddy was a Harrow boy and she was convinced that Eddy pulling rank would only incite her father to a bout of macho one-upmanship—the contemporary equivalent of dueling—a battle she dared not expose her inherently aggressive fiancé to as he would have to lose, and Eddy hated losing. Besides, although Uppingham was not one of the top three schools, Prince Charles had gone there and Cynthia knew this would shut her father up. Cynthia’s mother, Lady Harwood, rotund in Chanel, looked up, her mouth puckering in disbelief.
“Class of ninety-eight,” Eddy repeated, flashing his killer smile at the aging matriarch, who, he decided, couldn’t ever have been beautiful, unlike her twenty-one-year-old daughter, who was so preternaturally stunning she stopped traffic. Eddy froze his smile but kept his gaze steady, then very deliberately winked—his sexy, I’ll-have-you-in-black-lingerie-against-the-Louis-the-XIV-side-table wink. To his secret delight the matriarch dropped both her gaze and spoon. Bull’s-eye. The old charm worked, especially given that what Eddy’s parents had lacked in status and money they had made up for in good looks.
Back in 1981, Eddy’s dad, then long-haired and dashing, had played in a punk rock band named the Aging Lotharios, a moniker that had led to the band playing one gig at the Playboy Club, booked under the misapprehension that the Aging Lotharios were a Rat Pack cover band. Although disastrous for the band, it proved to be a fateful night for Eddy’s father, for he had met Trish, a Playboy bunny from Coventry—a liaison resulting in Eddy’s conception on the fire stairs between the eleventh and twelfth floors.
Uppingham indeed, Eddy mused, now tempted to share the wonder of his origins with Lord and Lady Harwood, if just to see the old man lose his teeth in his beef Wellington. But the young trader was committed to Cynthia—or at least he thought he was. Increasingly he’d begun to wonder whether they had enough in common for marriage and, more disturbingly, whether he could really trust her with his true self. He hadn’t been entirely honest with Cynthia, fobbing her off with some story about how he went to a minor grammar school and his dad was a civil servant who’d dropped dead at forty from a heart attack—a blatant fiction. And now that the reality of getting married was looming Eddy had begun to feel more and more disconnected. Not just from Cynthia, but from himself. It was as if all the lying, the fake background he’d so meticulously built up, had suddenly become translucent. Worse than that, lately he’d actually had to stop himself from self-sabotaging. He glanced over at his fiancée. Pristinely beautiful, she represented more than a trophy wife. She was his golden gateway, his way of getting ahead, which, even in the glory years of early twenty-first-century London, meant some reinvention and the absolute necessity of becoming a member of a club. Carlton House, Cinnamon Club, the Athenaeum, the Army and Navy—whatever, Eddy didn’t really care; he just desperately needed to belong and he was acutely aware that Cynthia was his only passport in. He would marry her, he would, he would!
As if intuiting his sudden reservations, the heiress smiled back, a little quizzical, encouragement gleaming in her eyes. Determined to dismiss his own secret doubts and to further impress his potential in-laws, he launched into a diatribe.
“After Uppingham, there was PP and E at Oxford naturally, then the MBA at Harvard. I always thought a general education was important, even in business, eh, what?” Eddy elaborated, running the H’s through his nostrils like a horse while thinking he sounded like an absolute tosser.
“Quite.” Lord Harwood coughed as Cynthia kicked Eddy under the table; perhaps he had overdone it.
“Which college at Oxford?” Lord Harwood’s voice dripped with cynicism. A sudden chink opened in Eddy’s normally impenetrable confidence. As he looked around wildly his eyes alighted on a Gainsborough portrait of Cynthia’s ancestors: a dour-looking duke and his two sons.
“Trinity,” Eddy blurted out, convinced he’d heard the college mentioned in a radio quiz once. Cynthia kicked him under the table again.
“Edward’s joking, he means Christ Church,” Cynthia told her father, just as Eddy remembered Trinity was in Cambridge.
“In that case you’ll know my old friend Professor Huntington-Blithe. He teaches philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford. I shall ask him about you—probably come up with some dark history, eh?” the aristocrat retorted, then hooted with laughter.
“We’ll invite him to the wedding. It will be St. James and then the usual reception at Claridges?” Lady Harwood cut in, her blue eyes beady against the beak of her patrician nose.
“What do you think, Mummy?” Sarcasm was the nearest Cynthia ever got to wit, Eddy noted grimly. Now that the engagement was official and her parents seemed appeased, his fiancée appeared to be literally bouncing in her seat, reminding him of an overexcited Jack Russell terrier. It was a strangely terrifying sight.
“And I’ve already made the appointment at Hardy Amies. They have this wonderful new designer—you should see the dress I’ve picked out; it is covered in pearls! Real pearls, Mummy!”
“I expect Horse and Hound will want to write an article.”
“And Vogue! Oh, Mummy, it’s going to be so wonderfully lavish.”
“And perhaps we can recoup by selling the rights to Hello! magazine,” Eddy chipped in helpfully. A deathly silence fell on the room.
“That’s a little hoi polloi for the family, my dear fellow. The Harwoods haven’t had to sell anything for over two hundred years,” Lord Harcourt pronounced, the aristocrat’s obvious disdain for the word sell reverberating like a bad odor, making the hackles on the back of Eddy’s merchant neck bristle.
And now you’re marrying off your daughter to a barrow boy, Eddy felt like shouting up to the original Georgian ceiling. But he didn’t. Instead he sat there meekly in a welling pool of self-hatred as the two women turned back to their wedding planning with renewed ferocity, expenses curling around them like a thickening fog, most of which Eddy would no doubt be expected to cover. He suddenly felt like vomiting.
He escaped two hours later, having managed to circumvent any further interrogation from Lord Harwood by engaging him in a vigorous conversation about the pros and cons of blue-chip against the perils of day trading. Outside it was dark and the usual residents of Mayfair had begun to appear like vampires emerging from their coffins: Russian oligarchs and their seventeen-year-old girlfriends; heirs to the Saudi empire; aging entrepreneurs cruising in their Lamborghinis, and the like. In those days the extravagant money earned and spent was comparable to the 1890s rather than the 1980s and London itself had begun to creak under a Dickensian disparity of wealth. It was possible to spend over ten million pounds in a small stretch of New Bond Street and only have a small shopping bag to show for it, and advisers to the wealthy were like courtesans at the Sun King’s court—the more they charged the more desirable they appeared. Eddy was proud to count himself among this privileged set.
A light rain began to fall. Eddy, welcoming the cool pinpricks against his skin, loosened his tie and lifted his face to the wet night. The soothing drops helped wash away the heat of the heavy dinner and port. He knew he should go back to his apartment and read some background notes he had on a new client he was meeting the next day—a powerful Chinese businesswoman, one of the wealthiest in Shanghai, who’d flown in from L.A. that morning—but the evening had jolted him out of his usual equilibrium, the tight control he held over himself that he worked so hard to conceal.
The young trader lived in a converted penthouse flat in a red brick Edwardian apartment building on Marlborough High Street, an area that had just superseded Notting Hill in terms of hipness and was the latest abode of both ambitious young fashion models and aspiring actors. He’d received the two-bedroom apartment with media room, surround sound, and roof terrace in lieu of a fee from one of his clients, who’d gone through a particularly acrimonious divorce.
Eddy, sitting in the Jacuzzi on the roof terrace with the steam curling up into the chilly London air, would often stare out over Piccadilly and the smudge of green that was St. James’s Park, and say to himself, “You’ve made it, mate; you’ve bloody made it and you’re not even thirty,” before sinking back into the piping hot water as if to marinate in the juices of his own financial success. But tonight his usual glow of self-satisfaction felt more than a little sullied. Had he sold out? Would he be happy with Cynthia? He sensed that under all the confidence she had from being monied and professionally successful as a model, she loved him.
But why? For his own wealth? For the “edge” he had compared with the usual private school boys and trust-fund crowd she normally hung out with? Was he just rough trade for her? And how would she react if she really were to meet his father? How would he ever bridge the gap of status between them? Cynthia never seemed to doubt or fear the future. It was as if she just expected things to work out, for success to simply shower upon her effortlessly. It had been one of the characteristics he’d originally admired so much—her lack of struggle. But now he felt alienated by it. This and a thousand other doubts whirled around his mind as he made his way through the milling crowds on Piccadilly.
It was that magical hour between dinner and before clubbing, in which all manner of unpredictable encounters might ensue. Normally Eddy, a player to the max, reveled in this decadent twilight, but tonight all he wanted was to escape the sense of being soiled, by both his own disingenuousness—the betrayal of class and family—and by the naked prejudice and avarice displayed by his potential in-laws, not to mention his fiancée. Eddy wanted to lose himself until he could feel normal again.
Looking up, he found that he had entered the narrow lanes of Soho; instinct had led him back to the streets of his childhood and his father’s flat—or was it guilt? He checked his Rolex watch. It was too late to arrive at his father’s door; the stall owner would most probably have fallen asleep on the couch by now, after a four-thirty morning start at the market. Eddy could envisage the sleeping bulk of him, a craggy silhouette against the back wall, snoring softly in front of Match of the Day or some such football reportage as the television blinked into the perpetually darkened lounge room. It would be cruel to wake him so late, and besides, Eddy hadn’t seen him in over twelve months. Not wanting to dwell on the reasons why, the trader sauntered on farther into the warren of sex shops, upmarket delicatessens, boutiques, and gay pubs. The streets were alive with tourists, day-trippers, and the homosexual regulars as they window-shopped, ate at café tables set out on the narrow pavement, and hovered around the sex clubs.
But it was hard for Eddy to forget who he was and what he’d compromised as he pushed his way through the pedestrians. His stomach ached from the heavy English food he’d felt compelled to finish at dinner, and his head spun from the cognac and cigar he’d shared with Lord Harwood. He longed for a pint at his local pub but that was at least three city blocks away. As he walked past the comic book shops and the rubber fetish boutiques, memories from his childhood bubbled up, dancing like jeering skeletons against his conscience. What kind of self-made man was he if he had to lie about who he really was? How would he explain his not-actually-dead father to Cynthia? And what was going to happen if Lord Harwood actually did ask Professor Huntington-Blithe about him? How was he going to orchestrate the wedding to avoid a collision between his world and Cynthia’s world? What kind of public humiliation and other unimaginably awkward moments awaited him? The education and history, that profound sense of entitlement that came from such an upbringing—you couldn’t fake that forever. Sooner or later his past would catch up with him and he would be bound to be exposed.
No matter from which angle he examined the dilemma, Eddy couldn’t see a way to resolve it without revealing his true background, and that, in Cynthia’s family circles, would be both social suicide and the end of the engagement. Perhaps he should break it off now. He stopped walking, imagining the scenario, Cynthia’s disbelief and shock, the hurt. It was intolerable. The trouble was he really did care for her. If only there had been some glamorous wisp of childhood achievement he could hold on to—a scholarship, an unexpected friendship with Princess Diana when she visited Berwick Street Market perhaps? Anything! But all he had were the long bouts of truancy and his early mercantile sensibility, none of which stood to win accolades from Lord Harwood no matter how much money he had in the bank.
He stepped off the curb and was almost run over by a speeding Jaguar. Suddenly his frustrations erupted. He ran after the limo, swearing and waving his fist in the air, just managing to thump the boot before it swung into a narrow lane. Gasping for breath, he doubled over, watched by a couple of amazed tourists. Now ashamed, he tried to saunter off casually, but his whole body was infused with anger. There was only one cure he knew of when he felt like this, one way of jolting him back into his own skin—a visit to a brothel. Sex did this to him, anonymous violent sex lacking emotion or expectation, just the clean morality of trade. And so, cheered by the idea, the metals dealer made his way to his favorite knocking shop on Old Compton Street.
