Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

      One

      Two

      Three

      Four

      Five

      Six

      Seven

      Eight

      Nine

      Ten

      Eleven

      Twelve

      Thirteen

      Fourteen

      Fifteen

       Sixteen

       Seventeen

       Eighteen

       Nineteen

       Twenty

       Twenty-One

       Keep Reading

       About the Author

       Also by Rosie Thomas

       About the Publisher

       One

      London, 1985

      Harriet looked at her watch.

      In less than an hour, the car would come to take her to Heathrow. In a little more than twelve hours she would be in Los Angeles, with Caspar.

      For a moment, she let herself think about him. She didn’t expect that he would be waiting for her in the crowd at the barrier. Of course he would not. But there would be another car, and then a suite or an apartment somewhere with a view of the ocean, or the blue on blue geometry of a pool. Caspar would be there, wearing a white shirt, with the beginnings of a tan. He would say something, nothing significant, ‘Baby, are you dead from the flight? Come here to me,’ and the resonance of his voice would make it important. He would put his arms around her.

      The television reporter, sitting across the desk with her list of questions ready, saw how Harriet’s face softened and brightened. The electrician noticed it too, and glanced at his lights.

      Then Harriet checked her watch again. She was used to apportioning her time and care, and the technicians’ business with lighting and sound levels was taking too much of it.

      ‘Are you going to need very much longer?’ she asked. ‘The car is coming for me at three.’ The producer’s assistant gave her an encouraging smile. ‘Nearly ready for you now.’

      While she waited, Harriet looked at the wide expanse of her office. The producer of documentaries and his PA murmured together on one of the pair of low sofas, while the sound man and the electrician hovered over their metal boxes. The cameraman waited too, behind the cold eye of his lens. It was a bright day outside, but the brighter television lights dimmed the glow of it. They created, within their circle, an artificial atmosphere of intimacy.

      The PA stretched her long legs in dark stockings, stood up and came across to the desk. She produced a hand-mirror and gave it to Harriet.

      ‘Do you want to make a quick check before we begin?’ At the same moment the reporter cleared her throat, sat upright in her chair. Harriet looked dispassionately at her own reflection. Her face, unremarkable, looked the same as always, except that it wore more make-up than usual. She handed back the mirror.

      ‘That’s fine, if it’s all right for you,’ she said politely.

      ‘Ready to go,’ the sound man announced with one finger pressed to his headphones. The producer sat forward and his PA held her clipboard like a breastplate.

      In the moment before the producer murmured ‘Two, three, and go’ Harriet looked down at her hands, loosely clasped in her lap. The big square diamond in its Thirties platinum setting glittered on her right hand. Harriet wondered fleetingly if she ought to have taken it off for the interview. But then she thought, Rewards. I bought it, I earned it. Why not? She had not taken down the Emma Sergeant portrait of herself from the end wall, nor had she removed the Chinese silk rug from the floor.

      Harriet lifted her hands and rested them on the desk. A few inches from her fingertips, on the pale polished wood, lay a cracked and splintered fragment of packing case. It looked like a piece of driftwood that had been battered by the sea before being cast up on a silver beach.

      The reporter had been looking at it too. Now the two women lifted their heads and their eyes met. Harriet’s ring shone in the full glare of the lights.

      ‘… three, two, one …’ counted down the production assistant.

      There would be a preamble, of course. Alison Shaw, the reporter, would write it, and record it as a voice-over. To go with her commentary there would be establishing shots of the game, in its resplendent boxes, piled to suitable heights in some suitable store. Perhaps this same crew would film a cash-till in the same store, with a close-up shot of hands passing over money in exchange for Harriet’s box. Then there would be one more establishing shot of the huge peacock’s fantail that was the company logo, on the wall of the reception area outside her office, before the cut to Harriet herself. Harriet, sitting behind her big desk in her Jasper Conran suit, her anxiety about missing her flight to Los Angeles and Caspar entirely masked.

      Now the viewer would know that she was a one-woman success story, a girl who had seen an idea and had run with it, taking her own company from a table-top in a borrowed flat to a stock market launch, and winning business and export awards on the way. The programme was one in a series called Success Story. Harriet Peacock, newly