Nantucket Read Free

Showing off his education is what I’d say. Does he have any weaknesses? Whispers aboutimaginative sex, but I suspect that’s just other people fantasising.”
    â€œSo why do they have to spend the weekend with us?” Cathy had asked.
    â€œWell, for starters, Shiva needs to check out Joe, though he’d never say that.”
    â€œShiva hasn’t done the research?”
    â€œProbably done some – or had it done for him. We have to pretend this weekend is purely social, by the way. No ‘commerce’ involved.”
    â€œWhich is bullshit,” said Cathy. It was a pretence that governed most of their house parties, which for some reason had always offended Cathy.
    â€œWe let Joe and Shiva decide when to admit that,” said Andrew. There seemed to be an argument they needed to have soon.
    â€œTo be honest, it is very difficult to figure out what Shiva knows. Or thinks. He turns the charm on and off as it suits him. Same for temper tantrums.”
    â€œHe’d better not try that with me.”
    â€œThe trick,” Andrew lectured – he’d told her all this before – “the trick is not to take it personally. You have to view him as a machine that occasionally does strange things, and try to figure out how the mechanism works.”
    â€œIs that how you see me?” said Cathy.
    â€œShiva has a massive sense of entitlement,” Andrew continued, ignoring her question. “He had an employee who figured out a way to save him fifty million dollars. Joe unearthed this story. The man asked for a modest raise. Shiva was genuinely shocked. He’d given the man the job that allowed him to score goals. Shiva therefore owned the goals. But many successful entrepreneurs are like that. With Shiva, there’s other stuff goingon. It may have to do with his ancestry, which he tells me he can trace back a couple of thousand years.
    â€œOn the plus side, he seems to be genuinely pleased to be spending the weekend with us. I assume he had to twist Rosemary’s arm. ‘A magical island,’ he calls Nantucket, ‘somewhere out in the vast Atlantic.’ He wants to know if there will be sprites and monsters, wants me to show him ‘the local Caliban,’ as he puts it. Can you think of any candidates?”
    â€œFresh out of monsters,” said Cathy. “But did you tell Shiva Nantucket is only thirty miles from Cape Cod? Or that The Tempest , to which I take it he’s referring, was inspired by the discovery of Bermuda ?”
    â€œNever be smarter than the client,” said Andrew, repeating a maxim he sometimes had trouble obeying. “It was Rosemary who told him where Shakespeare got the idea – when we had dinner in London.”
    â€œSo she likes to parade her erudition too.”
    â€œ Please don’t be touchy, sweetheart.” For just a moment neither of them spoke. Cathy had dropped out of college to marry Andrew, and produced Eleanor almost immediately. For some stupid reason she had an inferiority complex about her lack of a diploma, which no amount of reading could overcome. Andrew himself had been Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard, which he endeavoured never to mention. “But yes,” he continued. “Rosemary got first-class honours at Cambridge, I fear. She wants to go to the whaling museum, by the way.”
    â€œPart of the package,” said Cathy.
    â€œI should warn you that Shiva continues to call me ‘Prospero.’”
    â€œSounds like if he believes something, that makes it true,” said Cathy.
    â€œBit of that,” Andrew had said. “But remember, you don’t have to like him, just be nice to him. And tell me what you think when you’ve met him.”
    â€œI’ll do my best,” Cathy had said.
    For obvious reasons, the weekend needed to be perfect. But Andrew and Cathy were good at this sort of thing.
    Their house was a classic “shore colonial”