Indiscretions (3 page)

Every surface in the pine-paneled kitchen at the rear of the mews house was submerged beneath baking trays and platters. The Cuisinart held freshly made mayonnaise laced with garlic, dripping colanders leaned perilously over the sink as plump juicy lobster tails defrosted—rapidly, Venetia hoped. Spicy avocado halves with cheese topping waited to be baked to creamy perfection and then crowned with a scoop of “caviar.” Venetia prayed that the guest from America would not be too much of a caviar connoisseur. A fluffy rice dish jeweled with morsels of red, green, and yellow peppers waited beside a small mountain of
mange-touts
prepared ready for a quick sautéeing, and a crisply fresh green salad in a tall glass bowl awaited its final glistening dressing of superb olive oil from Provence and a fine tarragon-flavored white wine vinegar.

Venetia stood back and surveyed it with satisfaction. The lobster tails had been an inspired touch—there was almost no cooking to be done, just the avocados and the dessert. As a concession to the well-known American fondness for all things chocolate, there was to be chocolate
soufflé; the mixture was already prepared and only the egg whites remained to be beaten.

It was exactly eight-fifteen as Venetia pulled off the big blue-and-white-striped butcher’s apron and simultaneously the kitchen door crashed open. A hand holding a tall glass of champagne poked from behind it.

“For you,” said Lydia’s contrite voice. “Am I forgiven?”

Venetia laughed. “If that’s the good champagne, I’ll forgive you anything.”

“Roger’s best.” Lydia’s apologetic face peeked cautiously around the door. “I made him open the sixty-nine.” Her quick green glance swept the tables. “And it looks as though no one deserves it more than you do. Oh, Vennie, darling, it’s a feast. You’re so clever—that cookery course was wonderful.”

“Just as a matter of interest, Lydia,” said Venetia, sipping the champagne, “what were you proposing to feed your guests tonight?”

Guiltily Lydia dragged a package from behind the door and pulled out an enormous rib-roast of beef. “I thought this would be nice. Americans like beef, don’t they? I simply didn’t think about the time it takes to cook the damned thing! And speaking of time, we must fly and get ready. Come on, Vennie, leave all this. Go and relax in the bath and make yourself pretty. Roger’s got the wines under control and Kate’s done the table and flowers. The flowers! Oh, Vennie, what would I do without you for an extra daughter? Thank you
so
much.”

Lydia flung her arms around her and Venetia rested her head against Lydia’s soft cheek. This was really where she belonged.

Kate had run her bath, adding masses of delicious gardenia bath oil, and Venetia lay back in the warm, scented water sipping her champagne. It seemed as though she
had never known any other permanent home, not since she was really small. Not until she met Kate. As a lonely child of twelve in her first term at Hesketh’s, Venetia was no novice to the English boarding-school system. Jenny had seen to it that she was first ensconced at the tender age of seven at the ramshackle but prestigious Birch House School in the middle of the Berkshire countryside, and to this day Venetia remembered her first sight of the dormitory with its trim iron-framed beds draped with faded rose cotton bedspreads, each bunched with a comforting cluster of teddies and soft animals; one had even had an old blanket folded neatly into a square, its worn satin binding thinned by the constant softing of small fingers. She recalled the sinking sensation in her stomach as her eyes had swept along the well-polished but battered floors to the small two-drawer chest that stood by the side of each girl’s bed and which was expected to contain all her possessions. On top of each chest, arranged with military precision, were a hairbrush, a comb, and one framed photograph of a smiling family group.

Venetia had clung desperately to Jenny’s hand. After three years in the freedom and pleasure of the Montessori school in Malibu this place seemed like prison.

“Be brave, honey,” Jenny had said. “Remember you’re here because your father was British and you’ll learn how to behave like a lady. I’m not having any child of mine ending up as another L.A. show-business brat. And anyway, it’ll be fun, you’ll see.”

They had been shown by a self-possessed seven-year-old to the one empty bed in “Tenderness” dorm, and Venetia had wondered what had happened to the lucky child who had vacated it.

“All our dorms are named after the special qualities the school hopes that we’ll strive for,” announced their young guide with a wink at Venetia, “—Tenderness, Tranquility, Sympathy, Kindness, and Modesty.”

“What happened to her?” Venetia had asked in a small voice, pointing to the empty bed that was now to be hers.

“Oh, Candia. She got mumps and her aunt had to come and take her home. Her family is in Hong Kong and I think her mother wants her to stay there until she’s old enough for the big school. All our families live overseas.” The girl’s high-pitched British voice and long vowels had sounded like a foreign language to Venetia.

“There, you see,” Jenny had cried triumphantly, “I told you you wouldn’t be the only kid here without a family.”

“Did you bring your pony?” the girl, whose name was Lucy Hoggs-Mallett, had asked. “Most of us bring them with us.”

“A pony?” Venetia’s face had expressed her surprise. She could swim like a fish, having first had lessons at the Crystal Scarborough Swim School in Hollywood when she was only one year old; by a year and a half she’d been safer in the water than on her own two feet on dry land and had waved triumphantly to Jenny watching through the “portholes” where proud parents viewed their water-happy offspring. She had taken her first tennis lesson at the age of five, knew how to hold a tennis racket properly, and had a firm backhand and a keen eye for the ball; she was no mean hitter in the baseball games at school and on the beach. But a pony! There had never been room for a pony at the Malibu beach house. An occasional “pony ride” in the mini-fun fair in Beverly Hills before they had closed it down and put up a hospital and a shopping center was as much as she knew of horses.

“You’ll have a pony by the end of the week,” Jenny had promised. “What color would you like?” It was as if she were choosing a new dress.

“I don’t know.” Venetia had been doubtful. She wasn’t at all sure she wanted a pony, weren’t they rather big and pushy?

“Well, just don’t get gray,” advised the wise Lucy. “It’ll only roll in the mud and it takes ages to get it to look clean. Mine’s a bay,” she added proudly. “That’s the best color.”

“A bay it shall be,” Jenny had decided, setting out Venetia’s brush and comb and the silver-framed eight-by-ten photograph of herself taken by Avedon for
Vogue
.

“No.” Venetia’s voice had cracked with pent-up emotion as she thrust the picture back at her mother. “We’re only allowed one picture and I want this.” From the battered Snoopy lunch pail that had accompanied her on her previous happy schooldays she brought forth a blurred snapshot of her last birthday party, taken on the beach in front of the Malibu house. A dozen bedraggled denim-clad kids in party hats and with sticky faces beamed toothily at the photographer, and a group of laughing, casual parents lingered in the background.

“That’s my home,” she had announced to the self-confident English girl, “and those are my friends.”

“Oh, you live at the seaside. How lovely.”

The simple generosity of Lucy Hoggs-Mallett’s acknowledgement of Venetia’s world had been endearing, and Venetia had smiled at her, feeling better. Sensing her opportunity Jenny had disappeared to talk once more to the headmistress and then in a flurry of quick good-byes and kisses she had departed. Apart from holidays Venetia Haven never again lived at home with her mother.

Birch House had been run with a light hand and close to the concepts of the names of its dormitories, and the fifty little girls who inhabited those dorms lived in a world of small wooden desks and firm schooling during the day, but by three-thirty they were free. Free to ride ponies, to look after the piebald guinea pigs and flopeared rabbits who, like them, were freed from their cages and allowed to lollop across the broad lawns and rustle around the undergrowth followed by the crashing,
clumsy feet and tender hands of their owners. Birch House acres spread down to the banks of the River Thames, and sometimes in summer they were allowed to swim in its greenish waters whose chill was so different from the Hollywood swimming pools Venetia had once known.

In the long summer holidays she went home to Jenny, but the shorter holidays were a problem. Sometimes she would be put on a plane at Heathrow and met in Geneva or Rome or Nice by a limousine, to be swept off to join up with her older sisters in some grand hotel. Then Jenny would arrive and they would all be together. And life was completely different. She and Paris and India would be treated like princesses: gentlemen from movie companies would demand to know their dearest wishes so that they might grant them, hotel managers gave them the run of the place, room service waiters served extra scoops of ice cream, and Jenny’s latest boyfriend would do his best with his charm to overcome their resentment. It wasn’t until she was almost thirteen and had her first crush on a boy herself that Venetia had understood what Paris had meant when she said, “We mustn’t be jealous of Jenny; after all, if she didn’t have boyfriends none of us would be here.”

Paris had been seventeen then and Venetia and India had felt she must surely know what she was talking about. She seemed so much older, and so worldly wise. “Was that what a Swiss boarding school did for you?” Venetia had wondered enviously, admiring Paris’s spare, taut, small-breasted figure and polished black hair. Anything Paris wore looked good, and as she didn’t have to wear a school uniform she had acquired a motley wardrobe, mixing Californian throw-away sporty chic with French style and an Italian way with color that turned heads wherever they went. She made her young sister feel lumpy and dowdy, and though Venetia vowed to give up
puddings at school the following term, on those cold winter days that followed, Paris and her slender chic seemed light years away and school food was all there was. The pudding satisfied some urge other than just a sweet tooth. It was comforting, Venetia supposed, and it was what she needed until she began to take an interest in the opposite sex, and then puddings and puppy fat fell behind her in a forgotten haze and her bones emerged from her plump sweet face, turning her, too, into a more angular, delicate replica of Jenny Haven.

It hadn’t been too bad at half-terms at Birch House, where most of the girls came from military or diplomatic families whose work kept them in far-flung places, but when she had moved on to Hesketh’s, life and holidays became a more serious problem.

Her first half-term was spent in the headmistress’s house on the grounds, and kindly though Miss Lovelace had been, the long weekend alone had been interminable. Besides, it meant the other girls thought she was a spy with a direct line to authority, and therefore they had excluded her from the usual clubbiness of girls who lived together with their sisterly relationships and best friends. And, of course, they knew about her mother. Conversations would stop short when she entered a room and sidelong glances and whispers followed her when she left, and only afterward would she hear about the midnight feast held in the booter, or the secret daring of Melissa Carr, who’d smuggled two bottles of champagne into the sixth-form block after attending Eton’s Fourth of June celebration, Venetia had been in despair; she had longed to be part of it, and if she wasn’t to be part of it, then at least let her go back to Los Angeles—back to Jenny. But her desperate letters were answered with illogical equanimity by Jenny, who would send her another box from Theodore’s or Fred Segal’s, containing gorgeous Californian clothes that bore no resemblance to what the other
girls wore. So Venetia didn’t wear them, afraid of either being laughed at or causing jealousy.

Kate Lancaster had rescued her from all this. Coming back early from a weekend out and finding Venetia alone in the rambling building that was home to them both, along with the forty other girls in Stuart House, Kate had felt a pang of pity and guilt. She didn’t know which emotion it was that made her throw down her weekend case on the bed and rush down the dorm to where Venetia sat alone on her bed.

“Oh, Vennie,” she’d cried, “I’ve had such a super weekend, masses of food, and the dogs were lovely as usual and Mummy forgot we had these French people coming to stay on Saturday night and we already had eighteen in the house. I had to give up my room and have a sleeping bag on the floor. What a laugh! Mummy gets crazier—she once forgot we had the bishop coming for lunch and we had nothing in the larder. Everything in the freezer was frozen solid and the bishop’s weakness is good food. You know what she did? She gave him an enormous gin and fled to the kitchen, quickly made some pastry, and boiled up the only thing in the fridge—the meat we get from the butcher specially for the dogs. She chucked in a few herbs and half a bottle of red wine, slapped the pastry on top, and forty minutes later the bishop was saying he’d never tasted a meat pie as good. He was eating the dog meat!” Kate laughed. “The only trouble was we had to eat it too—and
we knew!
”

Venetia found herself laughing along with Kate. “Did it taste awful?”

“Nothing with that much wine in it could taste awful. And what did you do this weekend?”

Kate lay back on Venetia’s bed, regarding her through half-closed eyelids. She’s really pretty, she thought, but with a mother like hers, who wouldn’t be? She considered her own mother, Lydia. A long, elegantly boned face, a
wide smile, clear, direct greenish eyes and a mass of reddish hair. Attractive rather than beautiful, but though she never seemed to give it much thought, she always looked just right. Whether she was in high green Wellington boots and a padded green vest, walking the dogs at Ranleigh’s, or adorned in taffeta or chiffon for some dinner, she had a quality of “rightness.” And that was exactly what Venetia didn’t have. She didn’t fit anywhere. Was she American? Or was she English? Kate felt even guiltier—they weren’t allowing her to be English, she spent all her time here at school, and alone. Once a year Venetia spent time with her mother in California, or occasionally she met her in Europe—and her two sisters. That was all Kate knew about her.