How to Kill Your Family(96)

I don’t know whether Lottie loved Christopher with a romantic passion back then. Maybe she never did. But they were happy, Grace. Really happy. And that seems like it might mean more than the fireworks and passion that men are always being told women want. Prince Charles, who seems like a decent guy, got in a whole heap of trouble when he answered a reporter who asked if he was in love with Diana by saying ‘whatever “in love” means’.

I didn’t know what to do that night. Watching Mum cry was an awful thing. So I hugged her and gave her a sedative that our family doctor had prescribed for her and left her to sleep. The rest of it came out over the next few weeks. I went back to work and travelled to my mother’s house every Friday night, walking the dog for miles with my sisters and making sure Mum ate (she has a tendency to forget when she’s anxious). Occasionally I’d ask a question or two about my dad, and she’d flush and sag. Sometimes she’d answer, sometimes she wouldn’t, or couldn’t. But I couldn’t let it go. I’d look at my sisters and suddenly see the ways in which their features weren’t like mine. I’d wonder which bits of me were from my mum and which bits were not. My temper was always a source of conversation in my family – I can explode in a way that nobody else does. Christopher was far too mellow, Lottie far too meek. Now I knew it was given to me by someone else. Breeding matters to me, Grace. Not in some stuffy blueblood way, like some of the chaps I went to school with who sought to know what land your family owned in the 1500s, but because it tells you things about yourself that nothing else can. I thought I was the son of Christopher and Lottie Hawthorne and I knew what that meant. I knew who I was, and who I would be. And now I had to figure out the ways in which I was wrong about it all.

She gave me my father’s name on a Sunday, just as I was loading my car up to go back to London. As I lifted the last bag from the boot room, she came over to me, wrapping her arms around her body as though she was protecting herself from me, and kissed my cheek.

‘Simon. Simon Artemis,’ she whispered, as she pulled away from me and walked purposefully back towards the kitchen where my sisters were making cakes.

I am not au fait with the world of celebrity. Ask me about the Kardashians and I will proudly tell you that I thought they were a Middle Eastern dynasty until two years ago. But I know the world of business and that name hit me right between the bollocks. The whole drive home I scoured my brain for every detail I had on him. His parents were bog-standard comfortable middle class – and proud of their recently attained status – but Simon wanted much more for himself. He had that aggressive business mind from the start. He started a market stall selling second-hand electronics down his local high street, but moved on to selling vintage clothes in a poncey West London neighbourhood, when he realised the resale value was higher on a grubby old poncho if you could spin a line about how Jane Birkin might have worn it in the Sixties. He bought his first shop aged 19, which he stocked with old tat bulk-bought from flea markets. It didn’t look so grubby when modelled on stick thin mannequins and bathed in cool neon lighting. Buffered by his family’s own financial security, Simon ran this mini empire all while attending university. Much of his ‘self-made image’ is just that. Image. But it’s helped his reputation immensely.

Clothing wasn’t Simon’s main business interest, though. His real money came from investment and property, but the fashion brand kicked it all off. Since then the Artemis empire had only grown, making him a permanent fixture on the rich list. Simon Artemis was a government adviser on trade and commerce, a token role really but it gave him a sheen of respectability that, to be honest, he didn’t earn.

I don’t know how much you know (or care) about his businesses, but he was a wheeler-dealer from the start and not much changed over the decades. His fashion business worked when so many others failed because he kept a fierce eye on margins and exploited every loophole available to him. He bought Sassy Girl with money from private investors and then paid them back with assets he drew from the business. It didn’t cost him a fucking penny! He pivoted to churning out new clothes when he discovered factories in faraway countries where labour laws were non-existent. This changed when there was an outcry over factory conditions in the mid-Nineties, but he just moved operations to another country more eager to turn a blind eye and more able to keep journalists and activists at arm’s length. Simon employed a team of lawyers and accountants to ensure he paid the minimum UK tax possible, and he kept staff on very dubious contracts which often ended before he’d have been liable to pay benefits. NDAs were rife at his company – God only knows what they covered. There were at least eight cases of women dismissed when they got pregnant, and though his representatives were able to successfully argue that there had been legitimate reasons for the firings, everyone knew that the Artemis company was run by sharks.

I don’t have a problem with any of this, by the way. I believe that business should regulate itself, and that legislation designed to protect workers exponentially stifles innovation and growth. Tie the hands of a corporation too tightly and it will have no choice but to move its headquarters somewhere else – a disaster for the UK economy. Simon played within the law, and I don’t blame him for exploring the limits of it.

I found it hard to accept who my father was for a different reason, and I’m aware that it may paint me in a bit of a bad light to you, Grace. But I’m being totally honest here, and it’s not like you can do anything with this so I have the freedom to be blunt. My main reaction when I found out who my real father was after twenty-three years was one of enormous embarrassment. Christopher was a man who knew which Wellington boot was just the right shade of green so as not to be flashy. He wore subdued wool suits and would never have countenanced a gold card for fear of looking gauche. I grew up in a family where taste and etiquette were innate, bred into us, never discussed because we never needed to articulate any of it. But this man was the opposite of everything I understood. I spent a couple of days searching the internet for every bit of information I could find on him and every single page I clicked on horrified me. Simon owned a fleet of cars with personalised number plates. He wore a ring on his pinkie finger with a coat of arms he’d had designed for his family by a jeweller who sold mainly to Russians. There were various Hello! spreads which showed off the Artemis family home and the amount of cream and gold on display made me groan out loud. It was all indescribably tacky. It was new money, new furniture, arriviste. Everything I knew I wasn’t, without ever having to articulate why.