Old Sins (59 page)

‘I don’t follow.’

‘But it is so simple,’ said Annick, surprised at his denseness. ‘If a woman likes a lipstick, it is because of not just the colour, but the texture, the perfume, even. So she will pay much more for it. It is a personal thing. Eye shadow is different. It is just the fashion, the colours. If you sell the two as a pair, you will persuade her to buy an eye shadow she is not perhaps ready for, especially if it is cheaper. And she will also pay more for the lipstick, because it comes as part of a package.’

‘Yes, I see,’ said Julian. ‘It might work. Test market it in the next promotion.’

It did work. Sales increased by about ten per cent in all the stores offering the new see-saw prices, as Roz had privately named them.

‘It’s very good,’ said Annick happily, to Roz, over the sales figures at the end of the first two months. ‘You are a clever girl. Your father will be pleased with you, I think.’

‘I hope so,’ said Roz. ‘He’s the boss. Come on, Annick, I’ll buy you lunch.’

Roz was enjoying Paris. She had a tiny flat just off the Tuileries; and with Annick’s help she was learning to dress well. She had discovered the joy of French clothes, and the way French women, whether rich or poor, could put together and accessorize an outfit so that the end result was not just stylish,
but witty as well, how the addition of the right, sharply noticeable hat, belt, tights or even earrings could make an unremarkable dress or suit look original and distinctive, how one simple dress could appear romantic, sharply chic or highly sophisticated, according to the wearer’s hairstyle, make-up, accessories and even perfume; how colour should work in an outfit, turning up imaginatively and unexpectedly in shoes, a scarf, a brooch, so that no overall tone was ever quite left to dominate an outfit; how individual style was crucial, and the emphasis of natural assets rather than rigid enslavement to the length, shape, and mood of the season; all this and much more Roz learnt, and spent all of her modest salary and much of her immodest income (which came from the trust set up long ago by Julian and on which she had been drawing since her twenty-first birthday) at such pleasure palaces as the Pierre Cardin boutiques (often visiting with Annick the treasure trove of his markdown emporium on the Boulevard Sebastopol, where for strictly cash you could acquire the most stunning bargains), Dorothee Bis, Cacherel, and occasionally, when she was especially happy or excited, at Chanel, to gorge her taste buds on shirts, T-shirts, earrings, bags.

She began to look very chic; eighties fashion in any case became her well: the trouser suit which suited her rangy walk, the short skirts which showed off her superb legs, the strong, bold colours, the dashingly patterned knitwear which flattered her dark colouring, and the infiltration of the fitness craze into the fashion industry, via the ‘sweats collection’ of Norma Kamali, with her ra-ra skirts, leggings and sweatshirting tops with huge shoulder pads all perfectly suited Roz’s dynamic, athletic style.

She had her dark hair cropped short, which emphasized her large green eyes, her big mouth, making no concessions to prettiness but everything to drama; she learnt to make up superbly, to wear strong colours on her lips and dramatic shapes on her eyes; she had her father’s natural physical grace, she moved, sat, stood well, and she dieted and exercised ruthlessly, running in the Paris streets early every morning, working out in the Juliana salon most evenings, pushing herself harder and harder, until there was not an ounce of spare fat to
be seen on her lean long body. She looked sleek, elegant, expensive. And the look pleased her.

Then she managed to enjoy her work, dull as it was; she felt she was learning things that really mattered; and she also had a very close and good friend. She liked Annick more than she had ever liked any other female, apart from Susan; she was very young, only two years older than Roz herself, fiercely ambitious and hard working (both qualities Roz recognized and respected), but work was very far from everything to her; she was amusing, she was irreverent, she was warm and supportive, and perhaps most importantly, she put no value whatsoever on Roz’s background or position, she made it perfectly plain that she liked her for what she was, no more no less, and never even referred to her father, or why Roz just conceivably might be working with her.

And then there was Michael Browning.

Michael Browning was in love with her. Seriously in love with her. Roz could tell this quite clearly and the novelty of being loved wholeheartedly made her very happy indeed. It improved her temper, shrank the chip on her shoulder to manageable limits, increased her self-confidence, even in her appearance, and enabled her to regard the rest of the world with a little more tolerance.

‘You’re a bitch, Rosamund,’ he had said to her frequently, from the very beginning of their relationship. ‘A hard, bad-tempered bitch. And it turns me on. Don’t change. I adore you.’

Being adored by Michael was a dizzy experience. He was thirty-five years old, a rough, tough Brooklyn diamond. His father had run an all-night deli, and Michael had worked in it from the age of fourteen. When sixteen he had observed the ever soaring sales of soft drinks, and wondered if there mightn’t be room for a new one. He talked to a contact with a factory about it, and they came up with Fizzin’ Flavours, a series of new imaginative mixtures in drinks: orange with lemon, blackcurrant with apple, pineapple with grapefruit. Mr Browning Senior shook his head over them, put them on a back shelf and they stayed there. Undeterred, Michael took six crates with him on vacation to California, and set up a stall near the
boardwalk in Venice. They sold in a day, which he had known they would; next day people came back for more, which he hadn’t been so confident about, and were disappointed at having to settle for 7-Up and Pepsi.

Michael flew home again, and went to see the bank; the manager lent him five hundred dollars against his father’s surety. It wasn’t much, but it filled a lot more crates; he shipped them down to Venice and sold them for more than half as much again as he had last time.

Then he went looking for another small soft drinks factory.

In five years Michael Browning was a millionaire with a chain of supermarkets, and married to a nice Jewish girl from Brooklyn called Anita, whom he had impregnated on their second meeting in his newly acquired penthouse just off Madison.

Both families were very happy, and given the size of the penthouse and Michael Browning’s fortune, Anita’s parents were easily able to ignore the fact that she looked just a little plump on her wedding day and that Michael Browning the Third was born a couple of months early.

Five years later Michael was a multi millionaire, heavily involved in oil, as well as food chains, and married to another rather less nice gentile girl from Washington, whom he had seduced on their second meeting in the Waldorf Astoria where he was chairing a conference.

Anita Browning took one look at the ravishing, ice-cool blonde on her husband’s arm in the Cholly Knickerbocker column next day and knew when she was beaten. She took him to the cleaners for two million dollars and refused him access to Little Michael and Baby Sharon except at Thanksgiving, Christmas time, and an occasional weekend at her own specification if she particularly wanted to go off on her own. Michael minded this very much, but there was precious little he could do about it.

Carol Walsh left Michael Browning in 1975, wooed away from him by some older, more socially acceptable money; Michael was left with a profound mistrust of marriage, and a strong need for the company of women, the more beautiful the better. He did not have too much trouble finding them.

He was not very tall, just a little over five foot ten, and neither was he conventionally good-looking. But just looking at him, as Carol Walsh had remarked to her best friend the day after the seduction, made you think about sex. Michael Browning exuded sex, of a strangely emotional kind. He made women think not merely about their physical needs but their emotional ones; he made them aware not only of their bodies but their minds. As a result, he was extraordinarily successful, not only in bed, but in persuading women they would like to join him there at the earliest possible opportunity.

He was dark haired, with a slightly floppy preppy hair cut, ‘Designed to bring out the mother of the bastard in us all,’ Anita had been heard to pronounce in tones of absolute contempt a great deal more than once; he had brown eyes which looked as if they had seen and profited by every possible variety of carnal knowledge; a nose that only just betrayed his Jewish origins; and a slightly lugubrious expression which relaxed into good humour rather slowly, a little reluctantly even. This expression, an entirely natural asset, was nevertheless of great value to Michael Browning in his relationships with women; they felt he must be sad, that he had some problem, some sorrow, and they went to some trouble to ascertain what it might be and whether they could help him with it. By the time they had discovered there was no problem, he could, should he so wish, persuade them to do almost anything.

And then there was his voice. Michael Browning’s voice was unique. ‘It sounds,’ Roz had said to Annick, uncharacteristically poetic in her attempt to describe it, ‘like a voice that started out perfectly ordinary, and then had a punch-up with a dozen men and then got soothed again with honey and hot lemon, with a slug of bourbon thrown in for good measure.’

‘Mon dieu,’ said Annick. ‘And what does it say, this voice?’

‘Oh,’ said Roz vaguely. ‘Not an awful lot really.’

This was quite true. Michael Browning was not a raconteur, not a dazzler at dinner tables; he spoke with that particular form of Brooklyn succinctness which is so charming when a novelty and so wonderfully reassuring to those who have grown up around it. If he was asked a question, he would answer very fully, he was not a man for monosyllables, and he could be
thoughtful and amusing in conversation. But women in love with him waited in vain to be told that they were beautiful, or charming, or all that he had ever wanted. He told them instead the simple truth: that they were a great piece of ass, that they were terrific company, that he wanted to go to bed with them as soon as possible, that this or that dress looked good on them. All in that gravelly, silken voice, while at the same time looking at them mournfully and interestedly with those dark brown eyes: ‘As if he’s never met anyone quite like you before,’ Roz said on another occasion.

He did not dress particularly well; Roz joined a long line of women who tried to reform his wardrobe, with a total lack of success. He was quite simply uninterested; he bought his clothes in all the proper places – his shirts and ties came from Brooks Brothers, he had his suits tailored at J. Press, his shoes from Paul Stuart, and he acquired all the perpetually crumpled Burberrys, which he lost relentlessly, in London at Harrods. But he never looked stylish, and he always looked as if he had borrowed someone else’s clothes, which didn’t quite suit him, but rather surprisingly managed to fit him fairly well.

He lived in a penthouse duplex on Fifth Avenue, right on the park, one block up from the Pierre; it was much too big for him, but it was useful when Little Michael and Baby Sharon, and the ferocious English nanny who Anita insisted should accompany them, came to stay for the weekend. The duplex was a shrine to new money; it had marble flooring throughout, a pond and a waterfall in the lobby, a living area with a sunken floor and so many mirrored walls you hadn’t the least idea where you really were, a master bedroom with not only a Jacuzzi, a sauna and a sunbed, but a small swimming pool adjacent as well, a large number of very expensive paintings by fashionable New York artists on every wall, a fully equipped gymnasium, a music room complete with a computer-drive piano and a computerized mixing deck so that Michael could indulge in his hobby of composing modern variations on the works of Bach, Mozart and even Wagner when he was feeling particularly creative, a playroom for Little Michael and Baby Sharon which made the toy department of Bloomingdale’s look rather poorly stocked, and a roof garden bearing trees and shrubs so big they had to be hoisted by crane from Fifth Avenue fifty floors up the face of the building.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Michael Browning was that despite his considerable wealth, his success, and the constant parade of women in and out of his life, he remained a comparatively nice unspoilt man. He had, of course, forgotten some of life’s minor hazards; he did not have to worry about letters from his bank manager, nor do his own cleaning; he could go on vacation when he wished either alone or in the company of any number of beautiful women; he could acquire for himself anything at all that he wished for (a great deal, one of his greatest faults being an insatiable greed) and he could rid himself of anything he had ceased to like (be it a set of Louis Quinze chairs, a jet-propelled surf board from Hammacher Schlammer or a complete gold-plated dinner service, to name the three most recent) without giving a thought to how much money he might be losing in the process; but the fact remained, that despite a rather strong streak of self-interest, and a complete inability to deny himself what or whoever he wanted, he was kind, and honest.

He had an extraordinary and genuine interest in everybody; he could become as deeply engrossed in conversation with the teller at the bank about his vacation or the cleaning lady in his office about her grandchildren as he could in his own multi-million-pound deals. It was not in the least unknown for a new secretary to go in for dictation and spend the next thirty-five minutes showing him photographs of her parents’ silver wedding, encouraged to describe painstakingly exactly what the cake had been like, and the precise age and state of health of her father’s great aunt, who had somehow managed to take up a prominent position in nearly every shot. He did not do this sort of thing to charm people, as a means to an end; he simply had a great capacity for wanting to know about people, for finding out what they were really like, and very much enjoying himself in the process.

Which was precisely why he had fallen in love with Roz.