Never had Will been so grateful for a change of subject; Margot’s miraculous ability to read the room.
‘Rowan decided that she was going to do the London Marathon to mark her thirty-fifth birthday,’ he told Margot. ‘It involved buying a lot of fancy kit from Sweaty Betty, two weeks of Couch to 5K, and that was the last we ever heard of Rowan’s running ambitions.’
Margot was still laughing as she went off to order burgers for both of them, and when she came back she had another lime and soda for Will and a bottle of flavoured tonic water for herself. ‘I should probably attempt to do a Dry-ish January,’ she said. ‘So, do you run? You look like you run.’
Had Margot been checking him out? If so, she’d been very subtle about it. Just as Will liked to think that when he noted how Margot was looking, he was discreet about it. What hadn’t been discreet was his reaction earlier at the feel of her body pressed tight against his. The blood had roared around his veins and he’d been relieved when Blossom had killed the mood before Will had had time to embarrass himself.
Even the sense memory of Margot’s curves made Will feel uncomfortably warm and take a long sip of his drink before he could reply to Margot’s question. ‘Used to run. When I lived in New York, I was very fitness orientated. We had these company CrossFit sessions before work where we all got very competitive over burpees and lunge pulls and lifting tyres.’ Jesus! Were any of his memories happy ones?
‘Sounds horrific,’ Margot said as cheerfully as a person who’d never done a burpee could. ‘I’m just grateful, thanks to Blossom, I can now walk all the way up Highgate West Hill without going into cardiac arrest. So, where were you working that enforced torture was company policy?’
That was the thing about sharing a personal anecdote. It led to more questions and answers that didn’t just reveal an unhappy truth, but your unhappy soul, too. Will looked hopefully in the direction of the serving hatch but no food was coming to save him.
‘I worked in finance. Banking,’ he admitted, because people who weren’t bankers didn’t like bankers very much. ‘In layman’s terms, I was the man in charge of checks and balances, making sure that we didn’t invest in anything dodgy or illegal and that our clients didn’t try to launder huge amounts of money through us. You’d be amazed at how many times my colleagues didn’t think that these things were an issue.’
‘OK,’ Margot said, reaching down to grab hold of Blossom’s harness because someone had dropped a piece of bread on the floor a couple of tables down. ‘I suppose that didn’t make you popular with your workmates, if they were wanting to live out all of their Wolf of Wall Street fantasies. Is that why you were lifting tyres pre-breakfast? To try and bond with them?’ Margot was so perceptive. Maybe too perceptive. It had taken Will months and Roland’s gentle coaxing to make the same connection that had taken Margot less than five minutes. ‘Are you the kind of person who thrives under that kind of pressure?’
‘Obviously not, or else I wouldn’t be back working at the family’s floristry business and living above the shop,’ Will said. No, he didn’t say. He snapped.
Margot mimed zipping up her lips. ‘All right, I got the message. I’m shutting up now.’ Then she pulled a face like a dowager duchess who’d just seen a man wearing brown shoes to church.
‘I’m sorry.’ Will made sure to catch Margot’s eye. ‘It’s a touchy subject and I’m a touchy bastard about it.’
‘You don’t have to explain things,’ Margot assured him as she tried to persuade Blossom not to climb up on her lap. ‘I tell people that I’m curious when actually I’m just very nosy.’
‘I’m embarrassed by it now,’ Will conceded. ‘I was always very career-focused, goal-obsessed and strategy driven up until three years ago when I ended up working under Topper Livingston Mercer the Third .’
‘I would never trust a man called Topper.’
‘Then you’re a very wise woman,’ Will said. For fifteen years, his star had been in the ascendant. For all the risks involved in high finance, first in Paris, then in Berlin and finally in New York, Will had carved out a very successful career path by being calm and measured; his aversion to risk was seen as an asset after the financial crash of 2008. The women he dated were calm and measured too. They were just as ambitious as Will; more focused on the forward trajectory of their careers than their romantic relationships.
With that wonderful thing called hindsight, Will now realised that he should never have left a large corporate multinational investment bank, where he relished the rules and the bureaucracy, for a smaller, privately owned entity, with a Wild West attitude to high finance. But they’d offered him the role of Senior Vice President, a seven-figure salary, plus annual bonus, stock options and a whole raft of benefits, from courtside seats for Knicks games at Madison Square Gardens to access to the company yacht. Not that Will cared about basketball or catching the rays on a superyacht, but he had bought into the company culture of high-octane performance both in and out of the office.
‘It became practically a spiritual quest to rise above my past, own my present and bench-press my bodyweight. I would kill it at the team-building weekends, where we’d confront our fears by abseiling down skyscrapers or go white-water rafting. I cringe to think about it now.’
‘It all sounds fucking appalling,’ Margot admitted, as their laden burgers arrived.
Will had very quickly discovered that his appointment had been opposed by Topper, the senior Board Director whose great-great-grandfather had founded the firm. Topper was a WASPy frat boy turned fifty-something finance bro, with a devil-may-care attitude, a third wife who’d been a Victoria’s Secret model and a neon sign on his office wall that said ‘Go Hard Or Go Home’.
He and Topper had somehow co-existed in a state of mutual loathing for two and a half years until Will had put the brakes on Topper’s new fund, his ‘magnum fucking opus’ as he called it. Will had run due diligence and found several red flags, and the board, by the narrowest of margins, had agreed with him. That was when Topper had started freezing Will out. Trash-talking him around the bars and racquetball courts of Wall Street. Cultivating a relationship with the junior members of Will’s team who, unlike the other places Will had worked, had no sense of loyalty. They’d have knifed their own grandmothers to get ahead.
But Will had faced down and survived worse bullies both in his career and in his personal life, so he continued to beat Topper at every endurance challenge the older man could dream up, and he continued to provide checks and balances so they never fell foul of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Then Mo had died and Will didn’t know how the world, his world, would carry on without her in it. Then the world had to manage without Bernie too.
‘You need to decide if your personal life is more important than your career,’ Topper had said coldly when Will had come back from the UK for Bernie’s funeral, though he’d only just come back from taking time off for Mo’s funeral.
Margot paused with the burger halfway to her mouth. ‘Please tell me that eventually you came to your senses and told Topper to do one.’