href="#ulink_401ed442-ceb4-5adb-929f-4a72c4bfe5ad">Chapter Three
It was one-fifteen in the morning by the time Maxim got back to his house on the corner of Chesterfield Hill and Charles Street.
He had escorted Graeme to the Ritz Hotel after their dinner at Annabel’s, and had then walked home, crossing Piccadilly and heading through Half Moon Street into Mayfair. There was no longer any hint of rain, the air was crisp and dry and usually he would have enjoyed the short walk. Yet all evening he had been fighting this feeling of weight, almost of oppression.
He let himself in, locked the front door behind him, hung his black trenchcoat in the hall cupboard, and paused for a moment, listening.
Nothing stirred. The house was quiet, perfectly still. The staff had gone to bed, were no doubt already fast asleep, and the only sound was the hollow ticking of the antique grandfather clock in the imposing marble foyer where he stood.
Turning off the light, Maxim went up the curving staircase more slowly than usual to the second floor. He crossed the landing, went into the master bedroom where he shed his clothes and put on pyjamas and a dressing gown. He did everything with swiftness before hurrying through into the study which was part of the master bedroom suite, wishing he felt better.
Marco, the butler, aware of Maxim’s nocturnal habits of working late, studying documents and balance sheets well into the early hours, had turned on the lamps and banked up the fire before retiring to his own quarters. The silk-shaded lamps cast a roseate glow throughout and the logs burned brightly in the grate behind the mesh fire screen, threw off welcome warming heat. Maxim seated himself at the French bureau plat, glanced at the telephone messages Marco had placed under a glass paperweight and put them to one side. None were of any great importance, could be dealt with before he left for the airport in a few hours or so. Picking up a pearl-handled paper knife, he slit the manilla envelope which John Vale had dropped off earlier and took out the sheaf of papers.
It was with only the smallest degree of interest that he looked over the accounts of Lister Newspapers which he had fanned out on the desk in front of him. One of Maxim’s greatest assets was his ability to read a financial statement well, and to size up a company quickly with his own special brand of business acumen. This he did now, understanding at once that Lister Newspapers was indeed a good buy, by anybody’s standards. Excellent, in fact. And yet he felt no quickening of his pulse, no excitement in his veins, no thrill at the thought of going after it. Indisputably, his attitude had not changed since the meeting in Alan Trenton’s office. He simply was not interested in making a play for this company. Or was that true for any company?
It struck Maxim, with some force, that he was not particularly interested in the Winonda Group either, and this brought him up in the chair with a small start, instantly made him scrutinise his sudden change of mind.
He had told Graeme to go ahead earlier for a variety of reasons. It was one of her bigger deals; he knew how much it meant to her, he had no wish to disappoint or discourage her. Also, right at the outset he had recognised that Winonda would be an important acquisition for them, an enormously valuable asset to West International when it came to the overall picture of the conglomerate. But he had to admit that he much preferred her to handle the deal herself – with the help of Peter Heilbron and the financial team in the New York office. Certainly he did not want to be the chief combatant in the actual battle, had no interest in being out there on the front line. He would give advice from the trenches. His troops would have to do the hard hand-to-hand fighting.
Maxim frowned intently, wondering about his reluctance to put himself in the middle of the action. He had always been a big part of it in the past, the pivotal point. Surely business wasn’t beginning to bore him, was it? How could that be? Business was his life, wasn’t it? Anastasia had always said so. He winced at the thought of his first wife
A weary sigh escaped, and he ran his hands through his hair distractedly, conscious that he had not been himself of late. He kept up the facade, of course, the facade of charm and magnetism that the world had come to expect. But inside, at the very core of his being, he felt empty. There was a bleakness in his soul, he was joyless for most of the time, and increasingly he was held in the grips of a terrible melancholia he could not fully comprehend. Nor, indeed, explain.
A peculiar feeling began to settle over him, one of claustrophobia. No, oppression. He felt as if he was gagging, suffocating, and he had the most pressing urge to get out of the room, a compulsion to run and not stop running until he had put great distance between himself and this place. He wanted to be far, far away.
A chill coursed through him, and he shivered; it was as though someone had walked over his grave. With this strange thought, goose flesh speckled his arms and his face and he was startled at himself, unaccustomed as he was to feelings of discomfiture, of uneasiness.
Maxim swung his head, glanced around the study, asked himself why he wanted to escape this room. He did not understand. It was his favourite spot in the entire house, filled as it was with treasures from which he had constantly drawn enormous pleasure. Each item had been so lovingly placed here by Anastasia and himself, and he recalled the satisfaction they had derived when they were searching out the antiques, the objects of art and the paintings in England and on the Continent.
The ancient oak boiserie that panelled the walls had been found in an old manor house in Normandy. The French writing desk where he now sat was discovered in an antiquaire’s shop in the Rue du Bac on a weekend trip to Paris. The wall sconces were picked up when they had been travelling through Tuscany, while the remarkable horse paintings by Stubbs had been bought from a peer of the realm whose country seat was in Yorkshire. Altogether it was an eclectic mixture that somehow worked, mostly because the pieces were compatible with each other and shared one important quality, that of excellence.
Although the possessions in his study were beautiful, not all of the items were of great value. Yet they had always meant a lot to him. Now, seemingly, they no longer mattered, since, for some reason he could not understand, he was regarding them through jaundiced eyes.
Irritated with himself, and also baffled, Maxim rose, walked over to the handsome William and Mary inlaid chest under the window, opened a bottle of carbonated water and poured himself a glass. He took a long swallow, carried the glass back to a chair in front of the fire, and sat staring into the flames, a look of abstraction settling on his face.
After a while, as if his mind had been flooded by bright light, he began to see things as they actually were. With a rush of clarity he understood the change in himself, understood his dilemma.
He was a man in crisis.
This sudden self-knowledge came from the deepest, innermost part of his psyche and it gave him a bitter jolt. He sat up straighter, his eyes flaring, and then he closed them convulsively, momentarily stunned.
But it was true. There was no point in denying it anymore, as he had been doing for so long. He was at the most critical point in his life … he could not go on any longer … could not live the way he had been living … and yet he did not know what to do about himself … or about his life.
He was immobilised by uncertainty. Rendered helpless by indecision. Hamstrung by the situations he himself had created. Held in limbo by the people who populated his life.
Placing the crystal tumbler of water he was clutching on the small table next to the chair, Maxim dropped his head into his hands. He was brimming with dismay, completely at a loss. For once he had no solutions for his problems. After a few minutes he lifted his head, smoothed back his hair with one hand, forced himself to relax. And he began to ruminate on his life.
His dear old friend Stubby
