Peach (47 page)

Harry had moved out of their big room into one of his own next door. He said it was because he hated being in their room when she wasn’t there, but Peach wasn’t sure she believed him. It didn’t matter, she preferred it that way. Melinda told her that Harry was still seeing Augusta and though Peach never tried to find out, she was sure that there were other girls as well.

Harry never asked her to accompany him on his frequent travels—“It’s too much to expect the lady tycoon to drop everything just to be with her husband,” he’d said wasp-ishly, but Peach knew he looked forward to being alone—without her. Of course he still made love to her but she had come to the conclusion that for Harry—now she was no longer his inspiration—making love was like exercise, something to be done every day for his physical well-being, and she hated herself for responding to him, knowing that it could have been any one of a dozen girls in his arms and he would have been equally happy.

But when Peach stepped into the de Courmont offices on Tuesday mornings she felt free to be herself. She wasn’t just Wil’s mother or Harry Launceton’s wife. She was Peach de Courmont and she was learning her way in the complex world of the automobile industry.

Her small office was tucked away near the back of the building and it contained only a large plain desk, a filing cabinet and a black telephone. Peach had been taken aback when Jim first showed it to her. Gerard had assigned his full interest in the family company to Peach and, as the de Courmont heiress, she now owned these offices; somehow she’d expected to have a palatial suite overlooking the Avenue Kléber with walnut bookcases and Savonnerie rugs and a beautiful feminine Louis XVI table. She’d imagined herself
choosing pictures for the walls and answering telephone calls from a battery of important red telephones and floating out to lunch meetings at expensive restaurants.

“If you’re serious,” said Jim, “and I think you are, then this is where you start. At the bottom like everyone else.”

Peach sat gloomily behind her new desk on the first morning while Jim explained things to her. “De Courmont have dropped from being one of the top-class producers of automobiles in the world and are fighting a battle to stay in the industry,” he told her, “and at the moment, while they’re not exactly losing, they’re not winning either. They’re managing to hold on to their European market—but only just and of course their American market is now almost nonexistent. Our automobile plants took a beating in the war and there was never enough money afterwards to rebuild and re-tool the way it should have been done. In fact de Courmont could quite easily have gone under after the war. Of course we could have sold off the real estate and still come out with a million or two. Your father left the decision to me and for your sake I wanted to try to keep it going. It was your inheritance and I felt you should have the choice when you were old enough. However, in order to go on we needed to raise capital and there were two ways to go. We could have got money by making the company public and selling its stocks and shares, but that would have meant losing complete control. Or we could have sold off the steel foundries and
some
of the real estate. I chose to do the latter because I wanted you to have the de Courmont company intact. One day it will be yours to do whatever you want with, Peach, but I’m going to make sure that when you make any decision in the future you understand what you are doing. Is that clear?”

Peach nodded, interested.

“Right,” said Jim. “The first thing you’ll do is learn the
history of the company. There’s a library on the third floor with all the old documents and letters filed since 1895. Your grandfather, ‘Monsieur’, kept a record of every meeting and every transaction. You’ll find design drawings and blueprints of the first cars there and details of their specifications and costs. You’ll even find out how he brought the rubber for the tyres all the way from the Amazon, cutting out the middle-men importers and manufacturers, making them in his own factories and saving de Courmont a fortune. You’ll read about his search to find the finest leathers and the best woods, and the methods that were used to give the de Courmont cars their special depth of colour. Monsieur’s cars were among the finest in the world, and one of the first cars on the roads of France. Learn its history, Peach, and then I’ll take you to see de Courmont as it is today.”

Peach was in her office by eight thirty every morning and for two weeks she did nothing but read. It felt strange to hold pages written by the grandfather she’d never known and she examined his severe unadorned handwriting carefully, as if expecting to find a clue to his mysterious personality. His notes were clipped to sheets of suggested designs and reading them she was amazed by the scope of his plans and his attention to detail. By the end of her two weeks she had a good working knowledge of how Monsieur had built his automotive empire from the first de Courmont to the present models being turned out from the automated shop floor. She was ready for the next phase.

Jim knew that two months alone in the industrial provinces near Valenciennes would be enough to test Peach’s strength of purpose. He arranged for her to stay in a small family hotel near the plant and every morning she followed the streams of cars and men to the factory as the early shift began.

Peach spent a week touring the factories learning what
each process was and exactly how a car was constructed from beginning to end. She was taken to see the tooling plants that made automotive parts for the engines and the rolling mills producing the steel. She watched deafened as giant machines stamped out cold grey car bodies and she saw them sprayed in bright new colours. She admired shiny engines being assembled and sat in on discussions about interiors, learning why some upholstery fabrics were good and others not. And she watched, awestruck, as the assembly line rolled relentlessly forward and men crawled over and under and into the skeletons of cars fitting them together bit by bit until, miraculously, at the end of the long line a complete automobile appeared.

After that Peach spent one week in each of the departments. She went to meetings, listening while problems were thrashed out on the structure of the next de Courmont model, and she learned the reasons for its design and which market it was aimed at and how it had been costed and why that price range was important. She listened to complaints in the personnel office about changes in shifts and too-short work-breaks and she met union shop-stewards and management, sitting quietly in a corner and taking in everything that went on. Peach went to work early and she stayed late. She took a train back to Paris every Friday to catch her London flight and she was back again promptly on Tuesday morning having taken the first flight out.

“Do I get a bigger office now?” she asked Jim with a grin when she returned from Valenciennes.

“You don’t even rate a secretary yet,” he replied. “The next thing you need to learn about is sales.”

The entire ground floor of the de Courmont building on Avenue Kléber was a showroom. Enormous plate-glass windows displayed the latest model cars, their rich polished colours glowing under spotlights against a background of
deep grey carpet. “This is our window to the world,” said Jim. “Everyone who walks down the Avenue Kléber—the foreign businessman, the tourist, the city-dwellers, the French family in town from the provinces—will see what de Courmont has to offer. But the
real sales
are made by our dealers. Go out and meet them and find out how it’s done.”

Peach spent another exhausting month criss-crossing France and Italy and Germany—even England—doing exactly that, covering thousands of miles in her brand-new dark blue de Courmont—the official family colour.

After that Jim kept her hopping, learning about sales figures and studying market research surveys that showed new trends in the industry and how public opinion was reflected in the new designs. Peach juggled statistics in her head when she was sleeping and analysed colours and carpeting and interior upholstery when she was awake. After she’d stuck with her crash course for six months Jim said, “Okay, now I know you’re serious, the real work begins.”

Peach sank back in her chair with a groan of pure agony. “
Oh No!
What was all this then?” She waved her arm at the desk littered with papers.

Jim grinned. “That was just the beginning. Now, are you ready for the real hard grind or not?”

She glared at him sullenly. “I suppose so.”

“Well then, get yourself smartened up. It’s time to meet upper management.”

Peach hadn’t bought a new dress in ages—not since all those English country lady clothes when she was still trying to be an Augusta for Harry, and she had forgotten what fun it could be. She went to Givenchy and Balmain and Dior and indulged herself disgracefully, buying smart little suits and dresses to wear to the office and a dazzlingly pretty deep blue velvet evening dress that would startle the hell out of Harry’s weekend guests’ wives! And she swept, like a cyclone
through the newest boutiques buying luxurious satin lingerie and beautiful high-heeled shoes and expensive handbags. Away with cashmere and Shetland, she thought, away with loafers and wicker shopping baskets. I’m a businesswoman and I’m going to meet my managing directors.

As chairman, Jim had the large corner office on the first floor with a view along the Avenue. It had the wonderful carpets, the walls lined with bookcases and the paintings and banks of telephones that Peach herself had anticipated. His secretary, who had been with the company twenty-five years and probably knew almost as much about its wheelings and dealings and ups and downs as did anyone else, guarded the entrance from a huge desk that was twice as big as Peach’s desk.

Chic in a business-like grey Chanel suit and a soft claret-coloured blouse, with her russet hair swept firmly back in one of Chanel’s pretty velvet bows, Peach was introduced to the company’s acting president and her directors. Feeling like a nervous schoolgirl she sipped a glass of sherry while they smiled at her indulgently, enquiring how she was liking her job? When they asked about her son she brought out the photographs she always carried in her bag and showed them around proudly and they smiled and said they expected she missed him, and he was such a fine, good-looking boy.

Jim took Peach to lunch afterwards at the Tour d’Argent, watching as she toyed with her food. “Well?” he asked.

“They were being kind to me,” cried Peach seething, “indulging the runaway housewife pretending to be a businesswoman. And I provided them with poor little Wil’s pictures. They think I’m just dropping in to see how the family business is ticking over. I proved their point, damn it. Harry’s right—he calls me ‘the tycoon’—laughing at me!”

“To them you are an amateur. And a woman in a man’s
world,” replied Jim. “Can you prove their judgement wrong?”

Peach glared at him. “Traitor!” she snapped. “What have I been doing all these months? Haven’t I worked hard enough? Didn’t I do everything you asked!”

“You did. But that was just the beginning.” Jim leaned across the table and took her reluctant hand in his. “I must admit I didn’t think you’d last this far, but now I’m betting on you. It’s going to be hard work and long hours and I can see how exhausted you are dashing back and forth to England. Can you take it, Peach?”

“I’ll do it,” said Peach stubbornly. “It’s my company and one day I’m going to run it.”

“Good,” said Jim laughing, “then let’s drink to that and to my potential retirement.”

The house on the Ile St Louis was far too large and grand and Peach felt lost in it. She hadn’t had time to feel lonely before but the meeting today had made her aware that she was. She soaked away her anger and the pent-up fatigue of the past months in a hot bath, wondering if she were right. Could she do it? Was this what she wanted from life? The answer stared back at her as it always had. She adored Wil but in order to keep him she had to stay married to Harry. And in order to stay
sane
while she was married to Harry, she had to have a life of her own. Being the “business tycoon” may not be exactly what she wanted from life, but it kept her so busy that she didn’t have time to think how miserable she was. It would do.

Climbing from the bath tub, she threw on a white terry robe and ran down the stairs into the hall. Monsieur’s portrait stared back at her with her own dark blue eyes. “I’ll do
it,” she said fiercely. “I’ll show them I’m your granddaughter. But now I’m going to do it my way—and I’m going to have some fun.”

Noel’s desk in the small office on the fourteenth floor was neat. Papers lay tidily in the out tray and there was another stack neatly aligned in front of him ready for his attention. Major changes were taking place at the top of the industry. Mort Shively had left US Auto suddenly, supposedly with a contract pay-off in the millions, taking his executive vice-president with him. And Paul Lawrence was leaving Great Lakes Motors to take over Shiveley’s job—at a salary and stock options reputed on the grapevine to be around $750,000 a year with a five-year contract. And now the competition was going to be hot and heavy for the position of Lawrence’s second-in-command.