42. Adam

42

ADAM

M ost London-based fashion brands have their studios in East London, near to where the majority of the factories are located. There are outliers, of course, most notably Victoria Beckham, who chose an enormous Georgian mansion in Hammersmith to house both her offices and studio space.

Omar Vega is another outlier. As Nige drives us over to Victoria, I explain to Nat that when I started up my own tech company, OfficeScape, after leaving Wolff, I based it in Victoria. Since my shift towards investing in luxury, I’ve kept my entire stable of brands under one roof. Hence, Vega and his team hang out in the same building as a variety of my other businesses.

‘What does OfficeScape actually do?’ she asks me, adding hurriedly, ‘explain it like I’m five.’

I laugh. ‘It fits out and furnishes massive office spaces using AI. Say you’re a tech firm and you’re expanding to a new twenty-floor office in Hong Kong. OS will take the floor plans and input best working practices in terms of productivity and wellbeing, and then it will spit out proposals for how to lay out various divisions and workers within those divisions. It’ll also come up with interior design schemes, furnishing suppliers, budgets and sustainability metrics. Oh, and it can drive the entire ordering process for fitting the buildings out, too.’

She raises her eyebrows. ‘Holy crap. That’s amazing. I didn’t even know that was a thing.’

I stroke her thigh. ‘More and more. Traditionally, all those roles have been carried out by different people—different firms, even. But for rapidly expanding companies, it’s a godsend. And obviously the technology has come a long way, too. The programming infrastructure I built it on fifteen years ago is nothing like what exists today.’

‘How did you even come up with the idea?’ she asks, looking genuinely fascinated.

‘I think I mentioned that Anton took a chance on me—he gave me a job straight out of prison, didn’t make me go through any of the usual channels. God knows, my CV wouldn’t have got me through the front door.

‘Basically, he brought me in as a very junior member of the Corporate Centre, which is the part that oversees the entire enterprise.’ I blow out a breath. The magnitude of his trust in me, of what he did for me, still affects me today. It’s no understatement to say he took a chance on a fucked-up kid and made the world my oyster.

‘He made me do my Business Studies A Level, which I completed in a year thanks to all the material I’d poured over endlessly while I served my sentence. A part-time MBA followed, funded by a Wolff Holdings bursary and essentially credentialising me for the business world.

‘I got involved in so many different projects, I can’t even tell you,’ I continue. ‘But one of the biggest was helping with the expansion of their Madrid office, which was a new Southern European headquarters for them. I did a tonne of the budgeting and cost analysis around it, and it gave me a pretty good idea of the overall process—it was a logistical nightmare of epic proportions. But it gave me the idea that surely things could be streamlined, and it kind of went from there.’

I shrug. ‘I knew technology had to lie at the heart of it. I did some homework and pitched it to Anton. He loved it. Told me to go for it. He let me use company resources to test out some of the technology. In the end he invested—he seeded the entire thing.’

I’m silent for a moment. I didn’t just benefit from Anton’s extraordinary generosity, nor his unshakable belief in me or my ideas. I undoubtedly profited from being at the centre of a company that, while massive, was still at its heart so entrepreneurial. Having access to Wolff’s hive mind, tapping into it, was akin to my fledgling company being nurtured by one of Silicon Valley’s finest incubators.

‘Sounds like investing was a smart move on his part,’ Natalie muses, and I grin, because making my mentor even richer after everything he did for me has been one of my greatest privileges.

‘Yeah. Thankfully, it all worked out and he made a pretty hefty return.’

‘Of course he did. And then you pivoted, basically, into luxury goods?’

‘Can you tell I have a soft spot for them?’ I ask in return, and she grins, pawing at my sweater again. Not that she’s stopped since I put it on earlier. I don’t tend to opt for overt designer logos, preferring quiet luxury, so I’m fond of this understated Brunello Cucinelli sweater. It’s cream cashmere, form-fitting, with camel intarsia bands across each bicep. Simple, but beautifully knitted from the finest cashmere in the world.

Not only could my little fashionista name the brand on sight, but she looked a little shell-shocked when I put it on. She muttered something about how good it looked with my skin tone and then stroked my chest while mumbling about defined pecs.

I think she approves.

Nat—I’m guessing I’m allowed to call her Nat now that she’s allowed me inside her body three times—looks every inch the stunning fashion entrepreneur in the understated outfit I had Clem send over from Selfridges yesterday after securing Nat’s promise that she’d stay the night. She’s in a black cashmere polo-neck, tight jeans and Golden Goose trainers, but her hair is pulled back in its trademark sleek ponytail and her makeup is glowy and perfect.

She doesn’t look like a woman whose insatiable new lover kept her up half the night because he couldn’t keep his hands off her—though it seems from the way she’s stroking my bicep through my sweater that I’m not the only one suffering from that problem.

‘Luxury goods are the ultimate indulgence for me,’ I confess now. ‘The OfficeScape stuff is great—I get off on all that problem-solving and streamlining. I like smooth processes. Which is odd, because there’s nothing that gives me more pleasure than the total opposite—like knowing how much care and attention has gone into crafting the world’s most desirable goods.

‘And I’m not talking about huge logos, obviously. I’m talking about the labour of love that is hand-combing the most cherished cashmere goats on the planet and artisanal practices that are passed down from generation to generation and which require years of apprenticeship to master. That’s what floats my boat.’

‘Exactly!’ Her brown eyes are shining with fervour. ‘That’s what I love most, too—that’s why I chose the higher end of the market.’ She pauses and returns her hand to my thigh. ‘Do you think some of that fixation comes from having done time? I mean, if you were using newspaper as loo roll at one point, then maybe being able to enjoy possessions purely for their beauty is something you’ve aspired to? It’s the ultimate sign that you’ve moved on.’

It’s something I’ve not only pondered at length over the years but discussed ad nauseam with my therapist. ‘There’s definitely an element of that,’ I admit. ‘My therapist thinks it’s a combination of rewarding myself for having turned things around and establishing safety cues. And it goes way beyond prison. If I grew up mired in uncertainty and deprivation, it stands to reason I’d try to surround myself with enough of a material buffer to mimic stability—or something like that, anyway.’

‘That makes sense,’ she murmurs.

‘I think’—this part is harder to admit, especially to Nat—‘there’s a redemption angle, too. I get to invest in and enjoy the best life has to offer. I’ve got the money, after all. I charter yachts and commission art because I can.

‘And I know that sounds flippant—I mean it as the opposite, really. I never take a single instance for granted. I marvel at my good fortune every fucking day. But it’s something I’ve cultivated very, very intentionally, this ability to surround myself with beauty and ease and to be able to sit with that without guilt or shame or self-recrimination. Does that make sense?

‘At the end of the day, luxury makes me happy, pure and simple, and I’m finally at peace with being happy, I suppose.’

‘That’s as valid a reason as any, and it’s probably how lots of people feel. I’d guess the market is split between those who buy high-end because of the status it implies or the need they have for validation and those for whom beautiful objects and experiences crafted with care bring them a deep, intrinsic happiness.’

‘Especially at a time when fast fashion is threatening to overrun our planet,’ I agree.

‘ Especially now. And, honestly, I have very similar feelings to you about the whole issue. My dad’s investment company went bust when I was seven, and he wasn’t allowed to run money anymore. That’s why my brother and I ended up at St Benedict’s. We lost our lovely house—we had to live in a council flat for years and it was grim.’

‘I’m so incredibly sorry to hear that,’ I murmur. I know far more about Nat’s childhood than I intend to let on, so vague sympathy seems the best policy for now.

‘Thanks. I had nothing like the kind of trauma you and your family lived through, obviously, but it was still pretty shitty for a long time. My mum was depressed, and then…’

She trails off.

And then you beat the shit out of Stephen and put him in hospital, minus one working eye.

She doesn’t need to say it.

I dig my teeth into my lower lip.

‘Anyway,’ she continues, flustered, ‘it wasn’t like we were mega-rich before, but we were comfortable, you know? And I had this bedroom that was all pink and white with a gauzy white canopy over my bed. I loved that room so much. The entire bed was so covered in soft toys I could barely fit in it.’

I smile, but my heart is breaking for her. No, she didn’t lose a sister or have a waste-of-space mother, but I’ll warrant she lost a huge piece of what made her feel like herself when Noel Bennett’s crooked business partner brought them down.

She’s such a lovely person. She tries so fucking hard, all the time. I’ve only known her a couple of weeks, but it’s evident in everything she says and does. That she felt so helpless, so bereft, makes me fucking furious.

‘It all went,’ she says with a little shrug. ‘The flat they moved us to was tiny. I got the box room, and I could only bring a few toys with me. It was such a little shit hole. Anyway, my point is that yeah, running a fashion brand is far harder work than I could ever, ever have imagined, but I’m so happy that I spend my days helping to create beautiful things that make people happy.

‘We’re not saving lives, but there’s something so indulgent about it all, you know? Being surrounded by creative talent and gorgeous fabrics fills my soul—that’s the crux of it.’

She has a beautiful soul, and after everything she’s been through I’m so fucking relieved she’s finding a way to feed it—even if that way is far more rife than I’d like with stress and financial woes.

I’d love to take away all her headaches and allow her to focus only on the work that makes that soul of hers sing.

As I unfasten her seatbelt and pull her into my lap, I vow this to myself:

If it’s in my power to do it, I will.