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my hand. I wonder if he is amused and intrigued by my presence
but, of course, he doesn't give anything away.
    'Your table is waiting, signora,' he smiles and leads us into
the restaurant. It is plush, spacious and silent. It smells of money. As we sit
down I glance around quickly. There are a few suits talking quietly or nodding with
interest, a beautiful dark-haired girl eating in silence with an enormous greyhaired
woman and two old dowagers both obviously slightly deaf, attacking huge Italian
ice creams with furious concentration, as if they were performing brain surgery
on their worst bridge enemies.
    A waiter asks if we would like anything to drink, his heavy Italian
accent bulldozing through the English consonants. Marion orders a glass of champagne
and so I do too. Then she looks at the menu, her brow furrowed more in contempt
that concentration.
    'You should have the calves' liver,' she says. It seems like
a reasonable idea, so I nod.
    'No, wait, it comes with that awful polenta shit – you know,
like corn meal mush?'
    'Oh, OK.' Feeling brave, I suggest spinach and ricotta ravioli
and then osso bucco. She thinks for a minute and then agrees. Immediately an older
waiter appears and takes our order, nodding approvingly.
    Marion is searching for something inside her tiny handbag so
I look around the room again. Some of the suits are now looking at pieces of paper.
I can overhear the others on a table next to us. Two English businessmen are listening
to a German colleague. He is telling them in clear but heavily accented English
about how he can drive to his apartment in a leisure complex near Kitzbhul on a
Friday night if he leaves the office at about 3p.m. and he can ski and then drive
back late on Sunday night, having had a weekend of skiing and winter sports which
is like having a holiday and if anything urgent happens over the weekend he has
a fax and email in the apartment and so he need never be out of touch with the office.
The English guys, bored out of their palm pilots, nod, smile and raise their eyebrows
with feigned interest and enthusiasm. They're obviously trying to sell to him.
    Marion, still searching in her bag, is talking to me. 'Sorry?'
    'What was it you said you did again at your office?'
    'I sell advertising space in a newspaper.'
    'Is that good?' she asks, still ferreting in her bag.
    'Erm ... well ...' I say to the bag.
    'I mean, good prospects?' she asks, finally re-emerging.
    'It could lead to other things.'
    'That figures, most things could lead to other things. I meant
is the salary good - but obviously not otherwise you wouldn't be working for your
friend.' She grins wickedly.
    'Jonathan? No, exactly.'
    'Did you go to school?' she asks, making a bridge of her fingers
and resting her chin on it. Fortunately I realise that she is talking about college.
    'Yes, I did Business Studies at Warwick ... University.'
    Marion says, 'Well, that sounds useful.'
    'I suppose it could be.'
    'Mind you, I think men learn about business in the real world,
not cooped up in some school room. My father went to Harvard and they taught him
things but he always said the best classes were the ones on Wall Street.' I nod,
just like the suits on the next table. 'He said he got to be CEO of his firm by
what he learned in the job not in class.' She smiles. 'I think you'll find the same.'
    'Probably,' I say, drunk with flattery. Not only is she referring
to me as a 'man' and comparing me to her father but suggesting that I could become
CEO which, as everyone knows, means 'boss' in American. 'Did you grow up in New
York?' I ask. Pleased to have this opening question, Marion watches the waiter serving
her salad with theatrical skill and then begins her life story.
    She was born, the eldest of four, in Manhattan, in a quiet street
just off Park Avenue in the east eighties. Her father worked on Wall Street while
her mother devoted her time to the children. Her two brothers went to Harvard and
then Westpoint and have now