Peter James - Perfect People

Enough money to move to Beverly Hills.

Some hope, in the thick of this recession.

It wasn’t even certain, of course, that they would remain in LA. John was up for tenure at USC next year and he really didn’t know whether he would get it. If he did, they would be committed to remaining in LA for a long time, probably the rest of his career, but if not, they might well have to move to another city, maybe even to another country. Although she liked the States, her dream was to live in England again one day, to be somewhere close to her mother and her older sister, Harriet.

It felt strange being back. Neither of them had spoken much on the plane; she’d tried to watch a film but had ended up channel surfing, unable to concentrate. Nor could she get into the book she had bought in the airport before getting on the plane, called The Unborn Child – Caring For Your Foetus.

They were both experiencing a reality check. After four weeks in the cocoon of the ship, they were coming back to be part of the normal world again. To nine months of pregnancy; to keeping absolutely quiet to their friends. To having to be careful with every penny. To a thousand things that needed doing and organizing.

Her pregnancy with Halley had been OK, but not especially great. Some of her friends seemed to sail through their terms; others had struggled. She had been up and down, with bad morning sickness, and she’d been very tired in the last months, which hadn’t been helped by a freak heatwave that had lasted from early June through to August. She’d read in some magazine that the second baby was meant to be much easier. She hoped so.

John finished his call.

‘Everything OK?’ she asked.

‘Yes, just about, I think. Some software glitch with my human evolution program no one can fix. I’ll have to go in tomorrow.’

‘It’s Sunday,’ she said. ‘Do you need to?’

‘Just for half an hour. And I have to get a load of stuff emailed off for Dettore. He seems pretty serious about coming up with funding – I mean, hell, his company spends billions on research – he could finance my whole department for the next thirty years out of petty cash.’

‘I know your half an hour. That means you’ll get home around midnight.’

John smiled, then placed a hand on her belly. ‘How is he?’

‘Fine so far. Good as gold.’ She grinned and placed her hand on John’s. ‘I don’t want to spend tomorrow on my own. I feel kind of flat, nervous about, you know-’ She shrugged. ‘Let’s do something together. I understand you have to deal with your work, but can’t we spend some of it together – go for a hike in the canyons, perhaps? And go visit Halley’s grave – he’ll need fresh flowers, it’s been over a month.’

‘Sure, we’ll do that. And a hike sounds good. Nice to go and walk somewhere without the ground moving under us.’

‘I can still feel the ship swaying,’ Naomi said, pulling out of her handbag the printed booklet Dr Dettore had given her.

She opened it, but instantly her head swam. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, fighting back a sudden, sharp bout of nausea, convinced for a moment that she was going to throw up. She glanced at John, but said nothing. Wondering. Fourteen days.

Was fourteen days too soon for morning sickness?

John’s phone rang and he answered it. It was a young, eager postdoc fellow he had recently taken on called Sarah Neri. ‘Sorry I was out when you rang earlier,’ she said.

‘No problem. Did you get any information?’

‘Yes, there’s a whole ton of stuff. It’s a website connected to the Lloyd’s Register, and the Serendipity Rose is on it. She has a sister ship operated by a cruise line, and all the information you requested is on the cruise company’s website. I’ll email it all to you.’

‘Give me the beats of it now.’

Sarah Neri ran through the key points. Then after he had hung up, he began doing some calculations in his head.

The Serendipity Rose weighed twenty-five thousand tonnes. She had four six-thousand-horsepower engines.

Sarah had found out for him the price of the fuel. The ship was burning around seventeen thousand gallons a day of heavy fuel oil. He figured maintenance, insurance, harbour dues and the fuel costs of the helicopter. Then there was Dettore. Two junior doctors. Three nurses. Two lab technicians. Then all the staff running the ship. The total wage bill would have to be around two million dollars per annum, even assuming the Filipino crew were being paid poorly.

Twenty thousand dollars a day, bottom end, he calculated, and he could be way under in this estimate. The total charge to himself and Naomi had been four hundred thousand dollars. They were there for thirty days. Thirteen thousand, three hundred dollars a day. They had only seen one other couple on the ship, George and Angelina, and the couple who had left as they had arrived. For the first two weeks, Dettore had spent the major portion of each day with himself and Naomi. For the next fortnight, after Naomi had been impregnated, they only saw him briefly once a day, for little more than a courtesy visit. A revolving cycle of three couples on the ship at any one time seemed probable.

Which would produce roughly thirty-nine thousand, nine hundred dollars a day. At these prices Dettore can’t be covering his costs or making any profit.

Why not? If profit wasn’t his agenda, what was?

‘John!’

He glanced at Naomi, startled out of his thoughts by her voice. ‘What?’

‘You’ve driven past our turn-off.’

Ten weeks later, in his seventh-floor office at the Cedars-Sinai hospital, the obstetrician was distracted. He was talking to Naomi but his mind was altogether somewhere else. Dressed in white scrubs and plimsolls that reminded Naomi of Dettore on the ship, Dr Rosengarten was a small, slender, camp man in his late forties, with a nasal voice, wispy bleached hair and a tan with a slightly yellowish hue that made Naomi suspect it came from a tube rather than the Southern Californian sunshine.

She did not dislike him, but equally, he was too aloof for her to warm to. And she found the ornately varnished and gilded Louis XIV furniture, the tasselled drapes and the displays of jade and onyx objets d’art slightly absurd in such a modern setting as this building. It felt more like a boudoir than a consulting room – which was exactly the effect Dr Rosengarten intended, she presumed. No doubt its faux-grandeur impressed some of his clientele.

To her surprise, after all the meticulous care and planning on the ship, Dr Dettore had not offered any kind of immediate follow-up. There was just his ‘Post-Conception Guidelines’ booklet, a suggested reading list of books and websites about the unborn foetus, covering a range of topics from nutrition to spiritual welfare, and a regime of vitamin and mineral supplements. It seemed that once they had climbed out of his helicopter at LaGuardia airport they were out of his care – and out of his life. All he had requested was notification when Luke was born, for his records, and a further consultation to be arranged when Luke was three years old.

She wondered if Dettore’s lack of interest was a reflection on how little of his package they had selected. Although he had kept up his charm towards them, she had sensed a hint of coolness and impatience creeping in towards the end.

It did surprise her that there was no obstetrician or paediatrician in Los Angeles whom he particularly recommended, and that he had simply told them to be guided by their own doctor. For the money they had spent, Naomi thought, she had been expecting some kind of well-planned after-care.

Their own doctor had suggested the same obstetrician, in Santa Monica, who had delivered Halley. But her best friend in LA, Lori Shapiro, had rejected him outright, and not because of the associations with Halley. Lori was married to a fabulously rich radiologist, Irwin, who knew all the medics in the area. Dr Rosengarten was the man to see. She’d had all three of her kids delivered by Dr Rosengarten, and both Irwin and Lori assured her and John that he was the best in the city – reeling off the names of all the A-list celebrities whose babies he had brought into the world.