gained.
Bram was inclined to feel sorry for Plum more than anything else, despite the fact that—
The shrill ring of a telephone in a neighbouring office cut across his private thoughts. He glanced at his watch. He would have to leave soon if he was going to keep his appointment with Anthony on time.
He had known Anthony, or rather Sir Anthony now, since their university days and they had remained in contact, even though their career paths had widely diverged; his into his own business and Anthony’s through work as a student with the voluntary overseas service into the post he now held as the head of a large charity.
‘I’ve got a proposal to put to you and a challenge,’ Anthony had told him several months earlier, and when he had explained what he wanted, Bram had laughed and agreed.
‘You’re right, it is a challenge.’
‘And one you don’t want?’ Anthony had asked him.
‘Leave it with me,’ Bram had responded. ‘Let me think about it….’
Now Bram hurried into the corridor having suddenly remembered something. ‘Jay,’ he called out as he entered his son’s office.
‘Yes.’
Ignoring Jay’s curt hostility, Bram reminded him, ‘You haven’t forgotten about Plum’s eighteenth-birthday party, have you? You’ll need to get her a present.’
Bram winced inwardly as he saw the look in Jay’s eyes. His son had never particularly liked Plum.
‘What have you got in mind? The way I see it, it’s either a chastity belt or a copy of the Kama Sutra, although I suspect that the latter would be superfluous since, according to gossip, she’s already run through every position in it and invented a few more of her own into the bargain. And as for the former—’ he gave his father a wintry, slightly malicious smile ‘—it would be rather a case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, wouldn’t it?
‘Still, it’s good to know that even the supposedly infallible Helena isn’t quite the perfect mother she would like us to think.’
Bram listened to his son in silence. If anything, Jay disliked Helena even more than he did her daughter.
‘Plum’s a child still, Jay,’ Bram said eventually in defence of his godchild. ‘She’s…’
‘She’s a slut,’ Jay supplied brutally.
As he walked past his son’s office half an hour later on his way out of the building, Bram noticed that the door was open and the office empty, Jay’s desk cleared.
Jay wouldn’t let his proposal of expanding the company end where it had today, Bram knew. But on this issue he intended to stand firm, not as Jay had so bitterly accused him, because he wanted to humiliate him and withhold authority and control from him, but because he genuinely believed that the kind of expansion Jay had in mind was too big a risk.
The receptionist, seeing him appear in the front reception area, gave him a startled look and asked him if he wanted her to page his chauffeur.
Bram smiled at her and shook his head. It was a pleasant, sunny afternoon and he didn’t consider himself too decrepit to walk the mile or so across the city to the charity’s head offices.
When he stepped outside and tasted the dust-ridden, polluted air of the capital, he acknowledged that it was at times like this that he most missed the wide-open spaces of Cambridge’s flat fenlands.
The decision to move his business to London had been forced upon him by a variety of circumstances—the need to be based somewhere central to his growing band of worldwide customers; the need to provide Jay with a more stimulating environment than that of a remote, run-down fenland cottage, as well as with the right kind of schooling—but privately he had never stopped missing the silent stillness of the fens.
It was typical of Anthony that he had managed to persuade the owners of the magnificent Georgian building which housed the charity’s headquarters to lease it at a peppercorn rent.
‘It never pays to be too humble,’ he had told Bram when Bram had once commented on the magnificence of the building, which included a mirror-hung ballroom where the cream of society gladly paid a small fortune to rub shoulders with one another and, with any luck, get their photographs on the pages of Tatler in the process.
Bram still wasn’t sure if he was going to be able to provide the help Anthony wanted. He would like to, though, he would like to very much, he acknowledged as he recalled the video Anthony had shown him of a young man, previously almost totally unable to communicate, who through the medium of a specially adapted computer was now actually able to speak.
If he could write programs which would help others in a similar way, it would—what? Offset his burden of guilt at having achieved so much in a material sense while having done so little when it came to his son?
No, but it would give him an immense sense of satisfaction. Communication was a vital part of life, and to be able to help to give others that gift…
Once during his early days in Cambridge he had been exploring the city and had wandered into what he had assumed to be an empty church, just as its choir had started to sing. The sound of their voices raised in an anthem that would probably now be considered too old-fashioned and robust, had briefly moved him to tears.
Unable to sing himself, he had been deeply moved to come so unexpectedly across such a joyously and full-blooded paean of praise.
It saddened him that Jay, who had a very good voice, refused to enjoy his gift. His own gift, if it could be called that, was far more mundane, but if through it he could help others to make their own special sound of joy…
His mouth curled into a faintly self-deprecatory smile. How Jay would have mocked him if he could have read his thoughts.
The young receptionist, who had watched Bram walk into the building, suddenly discovered what it was that made some older men so swooningly sexy. The thought of those heavy-lidded eyes looking deeply into hers, that gorgeously sexy mouth kissing hers, made a delicious shiver of sensual pleasure run through her body.
She bet he’d be terrific in bed as well. Older men were; they took their time, knew what to do, and this one, even though he looked well into his late thirties, also looked as though under that dull city suit he had the kind of lean hard body she had always secretly yearned after. Her boyfriend lifted weights and couldn’t understand that she found his overdeveloped muscles more of a turn-off than a turn-on.
‘Brampton Soames,’ Bram announced himself to the girl, giving her a smile which he would have been surprised to know made her curl her toes in her shoes beneath her desk.
This was Brampton Soames, the multimillionaire. Her face flushed slightly as, with a startled look, she told him, ‘Sir Anthony has had to go out.’
‘Thank you, Jane, I’ll deal with Mr Soames…’
Disappointed, the receptionist watched as Sir Anthony’s secretary walked firmly over to their visitor, drawing him away from her desk and towards the lift.
‘I’m sorry, Mr Soames,’ she was apologising to him, ‘I intended to be here
