Without Prejudice Read online

  ‘Not far from there.’ They both knew what this meant – Duval had lived in the ghetto.

  ‘You have quite a past,’ she said without admiration, and he noted the animus in her eyes.

  ‘I’ll let you know when I write my memoirs.’

  ‘From what I hear, you’d sell a lot of copies in London.’

  VIII

  IT HAD FOR a long time seemed cut and dried. Latanya Darling was an exotic figure, half-black (her father had been Jamaican) at a time when London publishing saw no need to diversify the composition of its racial make-up. She was quick-witted and ambitious, moving at a young age from publicity into sales, where she prospered, rapidly running the rep force for one of the divisions at Robert’s old employer in London.

  She was an obvious rising talent in a business that left many people stuck for good in the same job, and she was also fun – friendly, sassy and without airs. She partied hard, hung out with the hipper, younger end of the trade book editors, and doubtless snorted her share of coke from the lid of a Groucho Club loo. On the tall side of average height, she wore heels that made her look taller, and her hair was a mass of gold that ran in a rich shower down to the tops of her shoulders. She was striking rather than beautiful, with café au lait colouring and blue eyes from her Swedish mother, but there was an energy about her that was absolutely galvanising. Robert remembered a group sales review when all the men had been so bowled over by the contributions of this girl-woman that they had found themselves tongue-tied.

  Yet for all her jazzy easy ways, there was something detached about Latanya, and she made it crystal clear that as far as romantic relationships were concerned, she would not find hers among her work colleagues. You couldn’t blame her: most of the men around her were either married or gay, or both, but it intrigued people nonetheless. Any eligible candidates seemed to lack the basic utz, as Robert’s older brother Mike would have called it, that element of testosterone, either literal or professional, that would be a match for her.

  Why she fastened on Robert was a mystery to him. He was eligible, he supposed, since his marriage had fallen apart, and like any of the building’s eligible men he had been well aware of her. But not in a month of Sundays would he have figured himself a catch for the glamorous likes of Latanya Darling.

  He felt battered by his wife’s betrayal, mystified by his resentful son, and old suddenly beyond his years. At work he managed to project a forthright, decisive self in the meetings he conducted, but he felt his authority put on, and had no inner convictions about anything at all. Since publishing was not an easy way to get rich, Robert had always impressed upon his staff that it was essential to have fun while doing it, but it was not an edict he was now following himself. The humour he was known for, which sometimes strayed too close to the anarchic for his own professional good, seemed to have deserted him – like a pair of too-tight trousers, put in the back of a closet with only the dimmest hope that a diet might allow them once again to fit.

  It had come to a head at a sales conference, after the closing banquet. They’d had a good year and the CEO had splurged and sent half the company to Italy, where they convened in a luxurious villa hotel on the outskirts of Rome. The resort was a mix of old estate villa and modern hotel block, and Robert had a spacious double room on the ground floor of the villa. Before the finale dinner he’d rung London to speak with his son, only ten and still taking the separation of his parents hard. But Cathy had claimed the boy was asleep, while Robert could hear his marital successor in the background, talking loudly and clinking his glass.

  After the dinner Robert had come back to his room as soon as he civilly could, since at his age he found he could no longer sustain the late-night foolishness of his youth, tipping drunk into bed at four in the morning. He changed into a polo shirt and swimming trunks, read a proposal for a book one of his editors wanted to spend £150K acquiring, and was feeling unusually sorry for himself when someone knocked. He thought of ignoring it, but went and opened the door, annoyed at the intrusion.

  Latanya Darling was standing there, wearing mauve heels and a raincoat, belted tight at the waist. She held a bottle of champagne with a red ribbon wrapped around its neck. ‘One of the authors said he doesn’t drink,’ she said, waving the bottle.

  ‘Don’t keep shaking it, for Christ’s sakes,’ he said, and she took this as an invitation, walking past him into the room. Five minutes later she undid the belt to her raincoat to reveal bare legs and a silk nightgown, and two minutes after that they were in bed.

  The upshot was – well, he hadn’t wanted an upshot. He could not deny the slightly fantastic element to the time they were together that night, or the fact that he felt like a small boy who’d fallen into an ice-cream sundae. They had made love, then finished the champagne at two in the morning before falling asleep, only to wake and make love again.

  When morning came and she left for her room, he didn’t feel any remorse; he felt replete. It seemed an unreal episode, entirely enjoyable, and would be spoiled only if they tried to repeat it.

  But Latanya must have felt differently. When they’d landed at Heathrow she’d come up to him in the baggage reclaim area. ‘You can’t avoid me now,’ she said with a nervous giggle, and put her hand on his shoulder, then let it slide down to his ass.

  He had ducked her the next day at work, though there had been a flurry of emails – over a dozen, alternating between accounts of her day and plaintive requests for an answer. He wrote only one back: Absolutely buried right now xr.

  The weekend came and he was out of his flat all day Saturday, returning only in the evening with the bachelor comfort of an M&S ready meal. He was living in Camden Town, while his wife stayed encamped in south London, not far from the house they’d recently sold in Wandsworth. Then at ten o’clock, as he started to think of bed, the doorbell rang and he found Latanya on his doorstep, wearing a skirt five inches above the knee and a smile that said she’d already been to a party. When he let her in she sashayed through his flat like an established girlfriend; he could only think it lucky that she hadn’t brought a suitcase full of clothes. He had tried to protest but she kissed him quiet, and spent the night.

  In retrospect he realised this was an even bigger mistake than their original assignation. For it gave Latanya the false sense that he was as interested in being with her as she was with him. And in bed she had insisted on talking shop into the wee hours – about her ambitions (considerable), her career plans (complex, but well thought out), and most alarming to him, her conviction that together he and she could form a partnership that would result in . . . what? Promotion within the company hierarchy, large bonuses, unrivalled influence and power – she sketched out a virtual dynasty they would forge between them. ‘No one would ever fuck with us,’ she said triumphantly as the small clock on the mantelpiece struck five, and he started to feel there was something slightly hysterical about Latanya, something unstable.

  How do I get out of this? he wondered as he made them coffee Sunday morning. He tried as she left that morning to play things down, suggesting he would be busy for the rest of the weekend, indeed the week ahead as well. But he soon realised that as far as Latanya was concerned they were a couple, and the onslaught of emails in the office continued, written in a tone that suggested he and she were now a workplace alliance as well as ‘an item’. At the end of the day she had appeared in his doorway and he’d pointed to the papers on his desk with a groan, saying he wouldn’t be free for hours. He’d tried the same on Tuesday but when he went home found Latanya on the doorstep in Camden Town.

  ‘Why are you avoiding me?’ she’d said as he let her in.

  There was no point dissembling; he’d already been dishonest enough. So he told her directly, ‘I’m just not ready for a relationship; I’m still leaving the last one.’

  She seemed to accept this, but then she asked, ‘Is there somebody else?’

  ‘No.’ Which was true. He’d met an interesting woman the night before a
t supper with friends – a radical lawyer, attractive, funny, clever in an unaffected way – but she hadn’t seemed very interested in him.

  ‘So what’s the problem?’

  You are, he’d wanted to say, but instead repeated that it was all too much too soon; he wasn’t ready for anything serious. Blunt but true, so he had been taken aback when she continued to argue with him for what seemed hours. Fruitlessly, since each time it came back to what could not be overturned – he didn’t want to be with her. She seemed increasingly agitated, then startled him by demanding in transparent desperation, ‘Is it because I’m dark?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You know what I mean. I’m not Caucasian.’ The anger in that word; ostensible indifference peeled back like a raw onion to show a deep, festering rage.

  ‘Jesus, no, Latanya. What I’m saying is there isn’t an us. I’m sorry – if it sounds patronising to say I’m not right for you, then okay, you’re not right for me.’

  ‘Why? You were as big as a house with me.’

  Is that what it came down to – his undeniable physical attraction to her? He shook his head wearily, but she had come over to the sofa and was all over him, kissing him, stroking him, trying to take his shirt off.

  ‘Stop it,’ he said.

  He stood up and moved towards her, ducking his head back when she tried to slap him, then grabbing her arm. A siren wailed, or at least he thought it was a siren until he realised the sound had come from Latanya. She had screamed, and he dropped her arm in astonishment. The two of them were barely eighteen inches apart but her unfocused eyes were on the ceiling. He looked at her throat, thinking randomly how beautiful it was, as she tilted her head back and started to scream again.

  Soon lights would go on in the neighbourhood, phone calls would be made, and eventually the police would arrive, tired and vexed by yet another ‘domestic’. Latanya had gone past any acceptable boundary of anger; Robert didn’t need a psychiatric handbook to recognise she was hysterical. When she started to scream again he slapped her hard across the face.

  He regretted it right away – until he saw that it had worked. Shocked, she lowered her head and her eyes met his at last and her mouth shut like a clamp. And then she burst into tears, falling forward into his arms, limp as a doll until he made her sit on the sofa, then sat down himself and held her sobbing, cradled in his arms.

  She stayed there almost until morning, alternately weeping and dozing, such was the emotional exhaustion she seemed to feel. And what he felt during this bizarre vigil was a tenderness that had nothing to do with the desire, part sexual, part child-like, that had motivated him. How could I have done this? he thought to himself, repelled as much by his own complicity as by her deranged intensity.

  Daylight broke at last, and this time when she stirred she sat up. There were no tears. ‘Coffee?’ he asked gently, but she shook her head.

  ‘I’ll be going,’ she said.

  It was necessarily awkward for a while after this, though he found that he could usually avoid encountering her alone at work. Sometimes they were in the same meeting, when he found himself unusually reticent, but whole days could go by without a glimpse of her. He was in any case involved with Anna, the lawyer he’d met, a new relationship that soon took him over far more than he’d an-ticipated, as he uncovered the sheer chaos of her personal life. When, seven months later, news was announced of Latanya’s departure for Australia – she would be sales and marketing director there for a rival firm – almost all of his anxiety about their brief embroilment had gone away, and he simply thought, Good for her.

  He didn’t know how many people in the company knew of their brief liaison, and he didn’t care – his life had moved on so resolutely to Anna that it seemed irrelevant. And when Anna got pregnant, intentionally or not, he had more on his plate than a two-night fling with a colleague.

  Only Frank Prothero, an American friend who worked for HarperCollins, said anything, over drinks in a bar around the corner from the Savoy. They usually met three or four times a year, in a friendship that was strictly unprofessional and based on their mutual yearning for baseball. Prothero was a finance guy at Harper, and very senior – it was said even assorted Murdochs listened keenly to what he had to say. He was an unlikely-looking accountant, preferring shaggy tweed jackets to suits, with dark bags under his eyes that reminded Robert of a hound dog.

  When Robert mentioned Latanya’s departure for Oz, Prothero was unusually blunt. ‘No bad thing either, from your point of view.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Robert demanded suspiciously.

  ‘I don’t know what happened between you two, and I don’t want to know.’ Prothero raised both hands to reinforce his detachment. ‘But that woman bears you no goodwill, that I can say.’

  Robert tried to shrug it off. ‘It’s all in the past. No big deal. I wish her well.’

  ‘Not likewise, pal. Like I say, it’s a good thing she’ll be far away. You don’t want her going on about you the way she has been.’

  ‘What way is that?’ He was curious despite himself.

  ‘You don’t want to know,’ said Prothero, and would not be further drawn.

  She came back to London seven years later, to a bigger job with a different publishing company. Robert saw news of it in the Bookseller, but without any sense of alarm – he was too caught up with his job, increasingly tense as their corporate parent demanded unreasonable returns, and his home life, where he and Anna, now long married, were so busy raising their little girl. There didn’t seem any reason to worry about his misguided fling so many years before.

  But then there were flickers, intimations of something he sensed but could not describe. There had been a particularly riotous agents’ party he’d given a miss, going home to look after Sophie while Anna had a late-night conference with a bunch of forlorn Ethiopians, arrested in Clacton, of all places, and now awaiting deportation. The next morning he was outside the conference room, reviewing the agenda before the acquisitions meeting, when he heard two young women editors, already in the room, discussing the party.

  ‘Did you see Latanya Darling?’ one asked the other.

  ‘She was putting it back,’ said the other appreciatively.

  ‘And awfully indiscreet about you-know-who.’

  When he entered the room just then, the two young women looked embarrassed, but also disapproving, as if there were stains on his trousers. Why? They were too young to have been at the company when Latanya had worked there. He couldn’t believe a two-night stand almost a decade before would constitute current gossip value. A proverbial light bulb was flickering that he didn’t like.

  Then he had an argument with another division head, an experienced woman he’d always got on with well enough. But the argument had been a bad one – she’d accused him of poaching an author who had actually begged to shift divisions to his – and he had almost lost his temper. She’d looked at him coldly. ‘I see what they mean about you,’ she’d snapped, then stalked out of the room.

  So it seemed perversely logical to hear an explanation of what was going on from Prothero again, this many years later. ‘You know Latanya Darling’s back?’ Prothero said as they sat in the very same watering hole off the Strand.

  ‘I know,’ he said heavily. All he’d wanted was to have a drink after work, share the usual moan about their respective employers, talk a little baseball, and then go home to his family.

  ‘I’d like to say the girl was carrying a torch for you, Robert, but it’s more like a flamethrower.’

  ‘It was years ago,’ he said wearily. ‘Look, it’s not like we even had a relationship. We spent the night together twice. Okay?’ He looked at Prothero’s face, which was unexpectedly earnest. ‘Jesus, Frank, I need Latanya Darling in my life like I need a hole in the head.’

  Frank clawed at the bowl of peanuts between them, then chomped on a handful. ‘The thing is, she’s saying some pretty rough things.’

  ‘About me?’


  Prothero nodded. ‘I didn’t think you’d exactly want to know, but I thought you needed to.’

  What was she saying? What was the worst a spurned woman could say? That you were bad in bed? Unanswerable, unless you provided a large erection for public display. Or was it something else? That he was kinky – wore a leather jacket underneath the sheets? Liked pain? Or that he was gay? Or that he was a drunk? – though that would be rich coming from Latanya Darling.

  ‘All right. I’m ready. What’s she saying?’

  ‘She says you used to hit her.’ Prothero was looking at his fingers.

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’

  Flabbergasted, he looked wildly around the room. When he looked back at Prothero his friend seemed no less tense for unburdening himself.

  ‘Don’t tell me you believe that, Frank.’

  ‘Of course not. But you were pretty hot-tempered back then.’

  ‘What do you mean, back then?’ he demanded. He was going to get hot-tempered very soon if Prothero didn’t explain.

  ‘When you and Cathy were splitting up.’

  ‘That was eight years ago. I was fine as soon as I met Anna.’

  ‘I know that. But people have long memories – and you were pretty tough in the office. That’s what I was told, anyway. So when this woman starts claiming . . . things, people think, “Ah, that makes sense.” You know, for most people a little smoke makes a big bonfire.’

  Did it? He had never conflated gossip with fact. ‘Cheer up,’ said Prothero suddenly, signalling early for another round. ‘Sometimes bonfires go out of their own accord.’

  This one didn’t. It smouldered but never burst into flame, which meant Robert didn’t get the opportunity to fight the fire. He tried not to become paranoid, ignored the meaningful glances at the occasional party where he and Latanya were in the same room – when interestingly, Latanya always ignored him completely. But he felt that some force was gathering against him.