New York was having a cold snap. It was trying to snow, the sun was unable to penetrate a blanket of thick, white cloud and the biting wind was the type that froze you to the core. It was just the weather for balaclavas, not that the Upper East Side New Yorkers seemed to notice too much. The collars on their thick coats were pulled up just a little higher, the pace of their walk was just a little bit brisker. Venetia had spent the entire day tucked up at her hotel, the St Regis, making full use of her room, the Christian Dior Suite – ordering room service, drinking hot chocolate and just pottering about the exquisite dove-grey space, too cosy even to think about going outside to shop.
There were plenty of things she wanted to buy, of course; Christmas was coming. She wanted to pick up scented candles from Henri Bendel, trinkets from Tiffany, toys for her friend’s children from FAO Schwarz, but it would all have to wait until tomorrow. Today there was only one thing on her agenda other than keeping warm: getting her New York expansion moving forward. An image of her father, scoffing at her ideas, wanting to undermine all her hard work, popped into her mind. She wouldn’t let him paralyse her, she thought, her mouth set in a thin, determined line. She was here to make things happen.
At half past three on the dot, Venetia took a cab to Fifty-Seventh Street. It stopped outside a tall brownstone building with a bronze plaque at the top of its stoop, which announced that she had reached the offices of Katz, Lloyd and Bellamy.
Christopher Bellamy, Cambridge graduate, City high-flyer and brother of one of Venetia’s schoolfriends had emigrated to New York five years earlier, having married well into a prominent Connecticut family. He had taken his American Bar exams, joined a New York practice and was now a partner in a flourishing real-estate law firm in Midtown.
‘Venetia,’ said Christopher, standing up from behind a wide desk to welcome her. ‘An awfully long way to come for a meeting, but it’s always a pleasure to see you.’
In his late thirties, but looking ten years older, Bellamy’s hair was thinning, the eyes tired from too many sixteen-hour days; but it was an open, honest face, brimming with an integrity that Venetia trusted. She took off her grey cashmere overcoat, folded it over the back of a leather chair and sat down opposite Christopher while he opened a sky-blue cardboard file, a few pages of correspondence fluttering out.
‘So, I see there’s been no movement in your father allowing the board to approve the lease on the Madison property?’ said Christopher briskly.
‘Chris, it’s so frustrating,’ said Venetia, twiddling her fingers on her lap. She was not nervous, just agitated.
‘Well, I’ve had another letter from Zuckerman Real Estate this morning, enquiring when we propose to exchange on the lease,’ said Christopher, taking a swig of coffee. ‘I don’t need to tell you, Venetia, that if the company isn’t authorized to release the funds to do this transaction, then we’re going to have to pull out.’
‘But I need more time,’ said Venetia imploringly. ‘The site is so perfect for us, I just don’t want to lose it.’
‘You may have to,’ said Christopher, kindly but firmly. ‘We can always look again in the New Year if your father becomes a little more, compliant, shall we say?’
Venetia pulled a face. ‘Will it help if I personally pay the premium on the lease?’
She did not have an enormous amount of liquid capital at her disposal, although she knew that as soon as probate on Jonathon’s assets came through, any week now, she would be a very wealthy woman indeed. Although he had left the shares in the company to his brother, the Kensington Park Gardens home, £5 million in cash and a small collection of modern art had been gifted to her.
‘I know how desperate you are to have this site,’ said Christopher, looking sympathetically at her, ‘but I’m here to advise you in the best way I can. For a start, I’m not entirely sure that the freeholders will lease the premises to an individual. Most companies want a commercial outfit as a lessee.’
Venetia had been thinking strategy for the last fortnight.
‘But then I could sub-let it to the company for an amount that doesn’t need a special resolution to be released from the company account, couldn’t I?’
‘Hmm, sub-letting is rarely allowed in most standard commercial leases,’ said Christopher, admiring her lateral thinking, ‘but I’ve set up a meeting with a representative from Zuckerman tomorrow, so we can go down and see if we can thrash this out. At the very least, hopefully we can buy a little more time. In the meantime, your husband’s probate may be through and the new owner of those shares – his brother, I believe – can use his voting rights to allow the New York transaction to go ahead.’
Venetia shook her head. ‘No. Stefan has already told me that when he gets Jonathon’s shares in the Venetia Balcon company, he’s going to continue to allow my father to have the power of attorney until he decides what to do with them. Basically, Stefan can’t be bothered with the company shares, but he certainly doesn’t want me to have them.’
‘That is a worry,’ said Christopher slowly.
‘I do have another idea, though,’ said Venetia, resting her hands on the top of the desk.
‘Go on,’ said Christopher.
‘Stefan refuses to sell the shares to me, but what if a third party acquired them? A consortium or a wealthy individual that was perhaps in favour of my vision for the Stateside expansion?’
‘Jesus, Venetia,’ laughed Christopher, ‘I never knew you had such a devious streak.’
‘I’m desperate,’ said Venetia flatly, ‘I know this is the right thing to do for the company.’
‘Well, I can see a few holes in that scheme. For one, it will take too long – you said probate has yet to come through on Jonathon’s estate? And it really is – how shall I put this? – skirting around the boundaries of the law, shall we say?’
Venetia found herself blushing slightly as Christopher pushed on. ‘If your father really isn’t willing to cooperate, then you have got to hope that he somehow gets off the scene. I hear he’s getting married? Perhaps he’ll lose interest in business. On the other hand – worst-case scenario – he may be interested in buying Jonathon’s shareholding himself. Then we’re in trouble.’
‘I doubt he could afford it,’ said Venetia, shaking her head, ‘I don’t think his finances are very healthy at the moment.’
‘Well, you’ve got to think of something. And if you don’t want the lease on the Madison Avenue property to slip through your fingers, I suggest you think it up pretty quickly.’
When the heels of her Gucci boots hit the pavement outside Christopher’s offices, Venetia just kept on walking. Block after block slipped by as she meandered her way uptown. Every now and then she would pause to look in the shop windows of all her favourite stores. She admired the jewels on velvet cushions in Bulgari, the feathered tweed jackets in Chanel. It was growing dark, and that was when New York started to look its best, The Plaza festooned with fairy lights like a glorious wedding cake, laughing couples, well wrapped up, riding in the hansom cabs that trotted by towards Central Park. It was a cold, crisp, romantic scene that made Venetia think about Jack. She hadn’t been able to shake him out of her consciousness ever since she had cut short their affair after Jonathon’s death. Sheer force of will usually kept him at the back of her mind, but moments like these only made a picture of his face, the sensation of his body, so sharp and real it was as if he was by her side.
She stopped herself. Suddenly feeling the cold, she curled her hands up tighter in her brown leather gloves and strode on purposefully.
After forty-five minutes of walking, she reached her destination. A small store on Madison between Seventy-Eighth and Seventy-Ninth Street. Her store. Although it was a stone’s throw from various Upper East Side favourites: Vera Wang, Cartier, Gucci, it looked a little unloved. White spray-canned writing in the front window announced that its final closing day had only been last week, but already it looked cold and abandoned. To Venetia, however, it glowed with potential as it had done the first time she had set her eyes on the shop two months earlier. The location was perfect, the brownstone building small but with bags of character, with long elegant windows and a white awning that sloped onto the street.
She rested her fingers against the glass and a cloud of chilled breath escaped from her lips, misting up the window-pane. She stayed there a few minutes, trying to peer in, but her eyes would not focus, such was her anger at her father. Let’s see what the meeting at Zuckerman holds in store, she told herself. It was not over yet.
Taking a step backwards from the store she could see the reflection of a man in the glass, watching her. Venetia span around and froze as she looked into his face.
‘Luke … Luke? Is that you?’ she stuttered. It was him, it was.
The past flooded back like a tsunami, memories swelling over her so quickly she could hardly catch her breath. Luke Bainbridge had been the love of her life; or so she had thought at the time. They had split three years ago, shortly before she had met and married Jonathon. They were the odd couple – she the polished aristocrat, Luke the gung-ho photographer – but it had been a match that worked. For the two-year duration of their relationship they had enjoyed each other, complemented each other, understood one another. He’d slowly knocked down Venetia’s defences, helped her trust men again, enjoy sex, helped her build her business up from the ground. Above all, he had taught her not to take life so seriously. She would have married him in a shot, and she’d been confident he was on the brink of proposing, when the phone call came out of the blue, telling her that he had met somebody else. She had never felt pain so brutal. Her heart ached so badly it eventually went completely numb. Standing in front of her now, Luke looked embarrassed and a little shell-shocked, as if he had instantly regretted stopping at the shop window.
‘I thought it was you,’ he said slowly, ‘I could only see the side of your face.’ He touched his chin as if he were telling her that he could recognize her from a tiny part of her body. She felt a flutter in the pit of her belly. The slightest movement or gesture could still ignite something inside her. Physically he was still the same – his light brown hair was now a little longer, his skin a shade more tanned, he was still incredibly sexy – but his clothes had changed beyond all recognition. Jeans, shirt, expensive loafers, a very polished look, not like the louche scruff that had been his trademark around London. And she couldn’t help but notice the gleam of a gold ring on his wedding finger, so shiny it was almost certainly new.
‘New York suits you,’ she said finally.
He nodded imperceptibly. ‘So what are you doing here?’
‘I’m here on business,’ she replied casually, ‘I leave tomorrow night. And you?’
The atmosphere was thick and taut like a cello string.
‘I live here now,’ he said haltingly, casting his eyes up and down the pavement. ‘Have done for a while.’
‘The photography, I take it?’
‘Kind of,’ said Luke. He now had a slight mid-Atlantic accent. ‘Actually, I’ve got a studio. Two, in fact. One in Chelsea, one in the Meatpacking district.’
Finally he smiled and it reminded Venetia of Jack’s smile, crooked and confident but with a slight hint of awkwardness. They stood awkwardly on the pavement together, seconds seeming like minutes. Venetia just wanted to let him walk away. She certainly had the feeling that Luke was ready to run down Madison screaming. But there was too much unresolved business to let him go. And she didn’t want New York to be an entirely wasted journey.
‘Do you fancy going for a drink?’
Luke’s expression froze, then melted. ‘OK. The Carlyle is just around the corner.’
She smiled to herself. The Carlyle Hotel was chic, its bar a fragrant watering hole for ladies who lunched. Not Luke’s usual style at all. In the old days it had been a running joke that Luke had been Venetia’s ‘bit of rough’. The charming, lovable photographer who could drag her into dive bars and make her stay out late at parties. She was still the same person back then – elegant and poised Venetia, but he brought out another side in her, a more relaxed and casual woman. They turned back towards East Seventy-Sixth street and slipped into the Carlyle’s bar. A cosy, intimate space with an expensive Art-Deco feel, it had the understated intimacy of the rest of the hotel. It didn’t surprise Venetia that many assignations had occurred here: rumour had it that Marilyn Monroe used to meet JFK here for secret trysts.
She felt as if she was having one of her own.
‘Want to share a bottle of red?’ he asked as they slipped onto a chocolate-brown banquette. Ah, just like old times, she thought sadly. ‘OK.’
Luke summoned the waiter, visibly loosening up as he took off his overcoat.
‘Nice tan,’ smiled Venetia. ‘Not a New York tan.’
‘Mauritius, actually,’ he said, shrugging. ‘I’ve just got back.’
‘Oh yes,’ asked Venetia, ‘a job?’
He looked down, fiddling with the button of his coat. ‘Honeymoon, actually.’
It was not the punch in the stomach she had been expecting, more like a slight sting. She had, after all, seen the thick gold band on his finger.
‘Congratulations. Who is she?’
He was silent for a moment, staring intently at the rim of his wine glass.
‘Fernanda,’ he said quietly, ‘she’s South American. She’s nice, you’d like her.’
Great, thought Venetia, she could picture it now. A twenty-three-year-old model stalking down the Upper East Side with legs as long as ladders and chestnut hair swaying in the wind.
‘A model?’ she asked, knowing the inevitability of the answer.
‘Sometimes. Her family lives in New York. She does a bit for the family business, marketing and so on.’
‘Oh yes? What sort of business?’
Luke cleared his throat. ‘They have a few, actually. Paper, timber, jewellery: they own Lempika’s.’
Venetia nearly choked on her wine. The ridiculously wealthy Brazilian DeSantos family. Fernanda was an heiress. Luke had hit the jackpot.
She sat back in her seat and listened to the bar’s piano. They talked a little about their lives. She told him about her ideas for the New York store, omitting her father’s objections; talked about what her sisters were doing, even about Jonathon’s death three months ago, at which Luke looked genuinely saddened and shaken.
Life looked rosier for Luke. Newly married to Fernanda, living in the townhouse on Eighty-Fourth Street – her money – while the two studios he owned downtown were not just any old studios, but the Banana Studios, two of the most prestigious photographic studios in New York, where swanky ad campaigns were shot and supermodels posed for the covers of the biggest, glossiest magazines. How the hell had he managed that? she thought suddenly. In London he had been just a jobbing photographer.
Luke topped up her glass and told her another story. Anecdotes and reminiscences slipped by as easily as the wine went down. He was still fun to talk to, she thought: that was what she’d always loved about him. But there was one topic that remained unaddressed and, as the minutes ticked by, it became more and more obvious. She had to ask the question. She had to know. She was here in New York to confront issues, to get things moving again, and she wasn’t going to let this one slip by.
‘Did you leave me for Fernanda?’ she said as the last dribbles of the Merlot were poured into her glass.
Luke met her gaze, then stared back down at the table.
‘I didn’t leave you for anybody, Venetia,’ he said softly after a few moments.
She looked at him, puzzled. ‘But that’s what you told me. That day you called it all off.’
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and cleared his throat.
‘I’m sorry how it all happened,’ he said, his voice quieter now. ‘I’m not proud of it, but what happened, how I did it, at the time I thought it was for the best.’
She found herself snorting. ‘For the best? It was like one of those urban myths: movie stars terminating their marriages by fax.’
It still hurt, damn him. Two years of absolute happiness had dissolved into nothing in the space of one phone call when he’d told her he had met somebody else on a job in Paris. She had cried solidly for forty-eight hours, but when the tears had stopped she had driven around to his flat, having decided not to let Luke Bainbridge go without a fight. But nobody came to the door. His home phone had been cut off, his mobile number changed. Neighbours said they hadn’t seen him in a week. He had disappeared out of her life like a ghost.
There was another long pause before Luke spoke again. ‘Four years ago, if you had asked me if I would ever let your father come between us, I would have said no way. Not ever in a million years.’
Venetia felt suddenly nauseous. That word again. Father.
Luke continued in a rush. ‘About a week before it happened’ – Venetia did not need the ‘it’ to be qualified – ‘do you remember? We went for one of your father’s dinners at Huntsford?’
She nodded vaguely. She didn’t really remember, but let him continue.
‘It was late; you’d gone to bed. I remember thinking how I should stay up and try to make an effort with your father – you know, drink, try and have a laugh with him.’
He sighed, his cheeks puffing out noisily.
‘Anyway, it turns out he had a similar idea. He took me to one side and asked me where our relationship was going. I told him how much I loved you, respected you. I thought that’s what you’re supposed to say to fathers.’
His voice lowered a few tones. ‘Of course it was true, anyway. I did love you.’ Luke’s eyes met hers for a fraction of a second then darted away.
‘I told him we were going to move in together that month. Do you remember how we’d planned it all out? It seems weird now that after two years together we weren’t already shacked up. But we were busy, I guess, weren’t we?’
By ‘we’, Venetia knew he meant her. She had resisted his attempts to buy a place together, fobbed him off with excuses about work and hectic schedules, wanting to wait until she was absolutely sure.
‘I thought he would have been pleased,’ said Luke, looking at Venetia imploringly, searching her face for some register of emotion, but it remained blank, impassive. Luke took a slow, deliberate breath before dropping the bombshell. ‘Your father told me he didn’t want me in your life. That I wasn’t good enough for you. He said we all knew it, especially you …’
Luke looked searchingly at Venetia again before continuing. ‘He asked me to think about why you’d been dragging your feet about us moving in together. Of course it had been something I’d been thinking about … He said that you’d told him you saw no future in the relationship. That you didn’t see me as “husband material”.’
‘That’s not true!’ exploded Venetia.
‘What was I supposed to think?’ asked Luke, his face pinched.
‘Then what?’ asked Venetia, not wanting to know any more but being drawn towards the morbid truth.
‘I told him to go fuck himself. Part of me didn’t want to believe it. Then …’ Another long pause. ‘… he threatened me. My flat was ransacked two days later. I never told you, because I knew he was behind it. All my camera equipment, thousands of pounds worth of the stuff, just smashed up and broken. Then I started to notice these nasty-looking blokes following me everywhere, just loitering near me, staring at me. I was scared and I went to see him at the gallery. He said he could make life hell for me, for you. For both of us. I didn’t want us to look forward to a future like that.’
‘So you finished it, just like that? Without even telling me the truth …?’ Venetia’s voice was almost a whisper.
Luke’s face flushed with shame. ‘He offered me money to disappear. A lot of money. I took it and came to New York. I thought it would be best for everyone.’ He dropped his chin to his chest and rubbed his forehead with his palm.
‘How much did I cost?’
Luke could hear the rage in her voice. ‘Van, it wasn’t like that,’ he said, trying to grab her hand across the table.
‘Well, what the hell was it like?’ said Venetia, forcing herself to speak loudly, firmly at him.
‘It was enough for me to get out of your life.’ She looked up and saw him turn away, putting a fingertip to the corner of his eye.
‘Oh yes,’ she spat. ‘Enough for you to open a studio downtown and for you to become the king of New York.’ The shiny gold ring on his wedding finger winked cruelly at her once again. Unconsciously she looked down at her own bare hand. She had taken her ring off a few weeks after Jonathon’s death, put it in a box and kept it there.
‘I thought we were happy, I thought we were in love,’ she said finally, slowly. ‘We could have been happy together.’
‘Oswald wouldn’t have let us be happy,’ he said simply. ‘Can’t you see that? He didn’t want you to be with someone like me, and who can blame him? A jobbing photographer with no real money or kudos who could bring nothing to the Balcon stable. He made me see that I could never give you what you deserved in life. I read that you married Jonathon von Bismarck. You needed someone like him. Oswald needed someone like Jonathon.’
She shut her eyes, remembering. Her father had introduced her to Jonathon shortly after Luke’s departure. Lonely, depressed and hurt, she had let herself be steamrollered into a relationship that should never have got as far as second base, let alone the altar. And now, here she was, a widow, childless, frustrated in her business and hampered by her father. With or without Luke, he had still managed to make her unhappy. She felt defeated, too weak to be angry.
‘I’m sorry, Van.’
Venetia stared blankly at him. She was not in love with Luke Bainbridge any more. He was a coward, an opportunist, who had sold her down the river, and now he had the wife, the house, the business, the gilded life. Luke had the life she should have had. She felt cheated, robbed, manipulated. But one emotion above all others was growing second by second like a virus. It was hate. She hated Oswald for meddling with her life and packaging it up into boxes he approved of. She loathed him, despised him. She knew now that she had to escape his web at all costs. And she would: she just needed some time.