Free Spirit. PENNY JORDAN
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her breakfast sitting by the balcony, lazily watching the world and his wife go by—most of them apparently driving bright scarlet Porsches, and wearing clothes from a very small and select group of designers.
‘Yuppies,’ the media designated them with fiendish joy, but to Hannah, who was part of them professionally and yet apart from them personally, they sometimes seemed to be a sad, uncertain group, huddled together clone-like for comfort, desperate to conform to their own rigidly set standards. But then she allowed fair-mindedly that any group must seem like that to those on the outside.
She rested her chin in her hands as she stared out across the Thames, busy with craft as people made the most of the sunshine.
She ate the rest of her croissant, bought from the small specialist baker who had opened in the elegant shopping arcade not far from her apartment, acknowledging that she was lucky in her tall slenderness in that she never had to worry about putting on extra pounds.
Her eldest brother Matt had called at the apartment just after she’d moved in. He had been making an overnight stop in London, en route for Alaska and the pipeline whose constructions he had been heavily involved in.
‘Very swish,’ he had approved, grinning at her, as he inspected the stark black and white de´cor and furniture. ‘Not much like home, though, is it?’
‘It isn’t meant to be,’ Hannah had told him sharply, not liking the hint of amusement she sensed beneath his admiration.
Was that why she had almost deliberately set out to soften the harsh lines of the apartment’s design, by bringing in rich textiles, silk damasks in scarlet and gold, India rugs that warmed the bare floorboards?
And in her bedroom she had given way fully to the imaginative side of her nature, the side she normally kept strictly under control, falling for and buying some French bedroom furniture in smooth, strong cherrywood.
The bed had high scrolled head and foot-boards that made her think rather fancifully, when she lay in it looking at the river, that she was lying in her own private barge, perhaps waiting for the tide to take her upriver to the heart of the city, or down-river and out to sea like an Elizabethan buccaneer.
The bed had a rich blue, silk damask quilted eiderdown and matching spread; the silk had cost a fortune and she had wondered if she was a little mad after she had committed herself to its purchase, but there was something about the sensation of the silk, about the richness of its colour, about the sheer luxury of the fabric, that was worth every penny she had spent.
Curled up in the Lloyd loom chair she had filched from her bedroom at home, she studied the fact sheets she had assembled.
The Jeffreys Group had been started as a single cell company almost fifteen years before by Silas Jeffreys, who had seen an opening selling financial services to his fellow ex-graduates as they found their way in the business world. He had advised them on their tax affairs, their pensions, their investments; his financial acumen was so keen that he had been retained by several small, successful companies to reorganise their financial departments, and so his own business had grown.
He was one of the few new-wave financiers who did not feel it necessary to operate from New York as well as London, although he had been approached by various American concerns as a consultant.
The share crisis which had stunned worldwide stockmarkets in 1987 had left him unscathed, which had added to his aura of mystique.
Hannah put the papers to one side and thought of the people she knew by repute who worked for his organisation, all of them with formidable reputations. Jeffreys Group never head-hunted staff—it never needed to. The prestige of working for it was such that Silas Jeffreys could choose his own workforce from among the best financial brains in the country.
Would she be eligible to join that number? She pressed her hand to her stomach to quell the unfamiliar sensation of butterflies fluttering there.
Until now she hadn’t admitted even to herself how important getting this job was. She had developed caution during her teens when she had discovered how much her enthusiasm for maths set her apart from her peers…Seeing how much they, especially her male peers, resented her success and her enthusiasm, she hadn’t allowed herself to want anything too much. She could vividly remember as a teenager the excitement of being invited out on a date and then finding that the boy concerned didn’t share her thirst for knowledge, her determination to use her talents to the full.
Was it then that she had started to teach herself to make a choice? To accept that, no matter what the media hyped, it wasn’t possible to ‘have it all?’
Among her acquaintances there were several couples with high-profile careers and marriages which seemed to thrive on busy schedules and frantic efforts to spend time together; they were happy and fulfilled, these energetic, busy couples who filled every moment of their lives, but Hannah wasn’t sure if she possessed the ability to match such diversification, whether she had it in herself to make a success of marriage and a career. The men she had known had demanded too much from her, making her back off from them, making her fear that they would try to woo her away from her career.
She would like to be one of the enviable few who had it all: a satisfying career, plus a partner with whom she could genuinely share the joys and disappointments of her life, who would genuinely accept her as his equal, who would understand her desire to be part of the busy, thriving world of finance. And yet someone who at the same time understood her nostalgic yearning for a home such as the home her parents had built: comfortable, welcoming…a home where muddy boots and muddy paws were equally welcome, a home where children thrived, a garden full of sunshine in summer and snow in winter, comfortable rooms full of old furniture. And it was this ambiguity within her that insisted she make choices, that insisted that for her a career and marriage could not go hand in hand.
It might be different if she had ever met a man who mattered…a man so essential to her life that he would be the very core of it, and yet instinctively she feared that dependence, that emotional needing.
She closed her eyes, impatient of the deeply romantic vein within her that she preferred to ignore, and was stunned by the immediacy with which her imagination recreated for her the features of a certain tax official.
So, he had an openly visual masculine face, a male aura that had been hard to ignore, a subtle awareness of himself that had been vaguely challenging, giving her the sensation that he was daring her to react to him.
He was probably married with half a dozen children, and a lover tucked away discreetly somewhere, she told herself cynically, banishing his image. It was her mother’s fault that she was suffering this mood of introspection…her loving, old-fashioned mother with her talk of weddings and babies, and her thinly veiled anxiety that she, her daughter, was never going to produce grandchildren for her to coo over and boast about.
She had four brothers, for heaven’s sake, Hannah thought pettishly. Let them produce grandchildren…
She had received several casual invitations from friends for events over the weekend, but she had turned them all down, wanting to concentrate on planning her interview strategy. Besides, there was a Beethoven concert on the radio on Sunday evening which she wanted to hear.
She went to bed early, wishing she could subdue the restless sensation of dissatisfaction which had invaded her. It was counter-productive and dangerous. There was no room for it in her life. Especially not now when she faced what was probably the most challenging interview of her career.
ON MONDAY morning she was up at her normal time. Her interview was at eleven o’clock, which left her plenty of time to get ready. She showered and washed her hair, blowdrying it into its smooth bob, and dressing carefully in a cool cream satin shirt and a new suit in navy with a chalk stripe, severely cut and formidably businesslike.
Navy tights, Jourdan pumps, her expensive navy leather briefcase. On her wrist, her discreet gold watch. The gold ear-rings the boys had bought her for Christmas in her ears. A light spray of the cool fresh perfume she favoured, just to let the interviewer know that, while she had no intentions of trading on her femininity, neither