Into Temptation (Spoils of Time 03) (4 page)

Against their will they found themselves swung by her argument. It always happened, thought Venetia; you could go in to see her, ready to fight her, absolutely knowing you were right, and come out shaking your head, thinking how foolish you had been. Feeling guilty that you had dared to question her. She would have been a brilliant barrister . . .

‘So in a year’s time, possibly – probably even – I shall redistribute my shares. Does that seem reasonable to you now? Have I made my position clear?’

‘Quite clear,’ said Giles. His voice was quiet and deathly weary. He could see that once again he was beaten. That once again, he must wait. Wait for his birthright, wait to take his place at the head of Lyttons.

‘Good. Well now, another toast. To Lyttons. Its future.’

‘To Lyttons,’ said everyone obediently.

‘Good,’ said Celia, briskly. ‘Well I’m glad you are all – happy with the situation. As I am. Although,’ she smiled again, the same self-mocking smile, ‘I am sure you will understand this too, it will not be entirely easy for me.’

Good, thought Giles; I hope it’s quite horribly difficult for you, I hope you are wretchedly unhappy with Lord Arden, I hope—

‘Giles, we must go.’ Helena was standing up, her face frozen with disapproval. ‘Celia, do forgive us. Thank you for a very – interesting evening. George, Mary, say goodnight to your grandmother.’

She’s very upset, Adele thought, watching her leave the room, and who could blame her really. She had spent the whole of her married life waiting for Giles’s success and it had never come, not properly. The nearest had been the publication of his book, so well received and well reviewed; but that was in the past now. Poor Giles; white-faced, wretched, kissing his mother as only he could, quickly, hardly touching her face. And the children, the dreadfully dull George and Mary, kissing her dutifully too: but at least they had come. Had not sent rudely dismissive notes. She had got something terribly wrong with Lucas; and she didn’t know how to put it right.

They were all gone by ten-thirty; Celia had expected that, had known – of course – that they disapproved of her and what she was doing, known too that she could not properly explain. It could not have been a Lytton evening, one of those endlessly warm, bright occasions, fuelled with gossip and literary allusion, with fierce argument and fun. They would never be the same again, those evenings. Not quite. She could see that now. Unbelievably, after half a century at the heart of the family, she had moved herself out from it. By choosing to marry Lord Arden, that was what she had done. She had shocked and saddened the family, she could see that very clearly. And she had lost Sebastian too: perhaps for ever. Even possibly, it seemed, Kit. Which was harder still.

But given the the savage and shocking degree to which she missed Oliver, the discovery that she did not want to grow old alone, and neither did she want to find her way in the strange new world that publishing was fast becoming, or to slither into a position where she was regarded with pity or derision or both, and given that Bunny was sweet and funny and affectionate and rich – and impotent – she still felt she had served herself – and them – rather well.

CHAPTER 3

‘I shall do what I like and you can’t stop me. You’re a witch, a wicked, wicked witch and I hope you die in a car crash today—’

‘Thank you for that. No doubt you’ll hear about it if I do. If not I’ll see you later.’

Barty picked up her briefcase and walked out of the kitchen and across the hall; she was just opening the door when she heard footsteps running after her and felt a pair of small arms winding round her waist.

‘Wait, stop, I didn’t mean it, I love you really.’

‘Jenna—’

‘No, no, listen to me, it’s true, I do, I do, so, so much.’

Barty turned round to look at her; at this difficult, dazzling eight-year-old who was at once the light and the blight of her life, whose two-year-old’s temper tantrums had never eased, whose adoration of her was irresistible and whose hatred of her in the face of any opposition was alarming.

‘Well I’m glad to hear that, Jenna. And I love you too. But you are not going to host a sailing party at South Lodge. And that is the end of the matter.’

‘But why not?’

‘Because sailing is dangerous. And I am not going to be held responsible for the possible drowning of a dozen little girls.’

‘We wouldn’t drown. That’s so silly. We would be very careful. And it wouldn’t be on the ocean, it would be on the creek.’

‘Jenna,’ said Barty, setting her briefcase down, realising reluctantly that she had to give this her full attention, ‘you were going to be very careful when you got on Lee’s pony last autumn. But you fell off and broke your arm. You were going to be careful when you went down that run in the Catskills in January and broke your ankle. You were going to be careful when you climbed that tree at South Lodge last summer and fell out of it and concussed yourself. You can’t be careful for yourself, let alone twelve other people. Sailing is potentially a very dangerous thing to do. Now you can have a weekend party, everyone can stay, and you can all go riding on the shore, but you are not going out in sailing boats and that is all there is to it. All right?’

Jenna looked at her; her lovely little heart-shaped face grief-stricken, her extraordinary green-blue eyes filled with tears.

‘But Mummy, I’ve told them now. I shall look so stupid. Please, please, just two of us at a time. And over at Sag Harbor, of course, not the ocean—’

‘Jenna no. You’ll have to un-tell them. And look stupid. It’s not fatal. In any case, I would put money on their mothers all refusing to allow them to come. Now, why don’t you get your bag and I’ll give you a lift to school.’

Jenna gave it a last shot.

‘Please! Don’t you love me at all?’

‘Very much. So much that I want you and indeed your friends to live to grow up. Come on. Or you’ll have to walk with Maria.’

‘I like walking,’ said Jenna, ‘I’m not ready.’

She might have recognised defeat, but she wasn’t prepared for total surrender.

‘Fine. See you tonight. Love you.’

Silence. Barty walked out of the door of Number Seven, the house on the Upper East Side she had bought when she and Jenna had moved to New York, and closed it very firmly. She was fifty yards down the street when the door opened again, and she heard Jenna shout.

‘Love you too.’

She had won then: this time.

She reached her office at Lyttons New York in its brownstone in Gramercy Park and felt calmer even as she looked up at it; many other publishers were in huge modern buildings now in midtown, but Barty adored the gracious mansion-style setting of her workplace, with its iron railings and wide steps running up to the huge front door. She was also extremely excited about her recent acquisition of the house next door to accommodate Lyttons’ slow but steady growth. Five senior editors now, each with their own team; as well as an editorial director, Marcus Forrest, with whom she had an interesting love-hate relationship; a fine list, of both non-fiction and fiction; a steady presence in the best-seller lists; along with a reputation for publishing both popular and literary books. And of course, overall control of Lyttons London, not merely financial but editorial – although that was a discipline rather lightly exercised. Budgets were one thing and she was required to approve them; purchases of books, of authors, promotional plans and scheduling quite another. She walked into her office on the first floor and sank slightly wearily at her desk; she found her run-ins with Jenna extremely exhausting. Exactly as those with Jenna’s father had been . . .

Her secretary, Cindy Phillips, appeared with a steaming mug of coffee; she knew what her boss’s priorities were. No offer of any book, however exciting, no review however brilliant, no sales figures however good – or bad – were given a moment’s consideration until the first coffee of the day was on Barty’s desk. She picked it up, smiled at Cindy gratefully. ‘Thank you. Anything urgent?’

‘Not really.’

‘Fine. I’ll buzz you in a minute.’

She sat drinking the coffee, looking at the picture of Laurence in its silver frame on her desk. Laurence: who Jenna resembled so absolutely, in every way; whose tantrums had been as powerful and exhausting, whose love had been as suffocating, whose emotional blackmail had been as threatening. Who she had loved so very, very much. Who she still missed quite dreadfully . . . She flipped through her post: the usual letters from bookshops and agents, invitations to functions, circulars from various professional bodies – and one from England. Addressed in Geordie MacColl’s unmistakable scrawl. Geordie, who she still felt a most proprietary affection for, having discovered him – what was it, God, almost twenty years earlier – Geordie, whose books still sold and sold, Geordie, who everyone loved, even Celia.

Dearest Barty,

Just to let you know
Wild Horses
is at No. 5 in the
Sunday Times
, Bumpus has given it an entire window and it is going to be the
Evening Standard
Book of the Month for May. Everyone is very delighted with it.

Everyone is not in the least delighted with Celia however. The family is shocked, Sebastian is not speaking to her, Kit refuses to go to the house (which she has said she will continue to live in from time to time, and what does that say for Lord Ardent – the family’s name for him – and his ardour I wonder). I do so hope you will come to the wedding. She would be heartbroken if you did not (if, indeed, she has a heart to break which I know is something constantly under debate), and if you could bring Jenna then that would be quite wonderful.

Adele sends her best love, and so does your beautiful and brilliant goddaughter. And mine to you. Geordie

Well, thought Barty, it would perhaps make up for the non-sailing party. Going to London, a month before the Coronation. Staying on for it perhaps. And she really did not want to break Celia’s heart. On the other hand, it did rather feel like disloyalty to her beloved Wol.

‘I have some lovely news,’ said Izzie. ‘Barty is coming over for the wedding. And bringing Jenna with her.’

Sebastian scowled at her. ‘I’m not sure I like that, I would have expected more loyalty from Barty.’

‘Father really! Barty is the loyallest person in the world. And her loyalty obviously takes in Celia. She always says she owes her everything.’

‘Through gritted teeth. Of course she doesn’t. What Celia did to Barty was of very questionable virtue. It did more for her own ego than it did for Barty—’

‘Oh, Father.’ Izzie sighed, put down her orange juice. ‘You really can’t go on like this. Celia is going to marry Lord Arden, and I know it’s terrible for you—’

‘Absolute nonsense. It is nothing to me who she does or doesn’t marry.’

Izzie ignored this. ‘Well anyway, do you really think Barty would be head of Lyttons if she’d been left where she was all those years ago with her eight brothers and sisters in the slums of London?’

‘Quite possibly yes,’ said Sebastian, ‘she is hugely talented.’ Then he met Izzie’s eyes and smiled reluctantly. ‘Oh all right. Possibly not. But the fact is that Celia may have given Barty everything she thought she needed, but she deprived her of the one thing that really mattered. Her family.’

‘Yes Father.’ Izzie had heard this many times before.

‘Anyway, I’m very pleased that she’s coming to London. Although I’m not sure if I look forward to meeting that dreadful child again. Typical American, free-ranging, undisciplined—’

‘I think Jenna’s lovely. Not undisciplined at all.’

‘Rubbish,’ said Sebastian. He smiled at her, his fierce old face suddenly tender. ‘What would I do without you, my darling? I don’t know. Now, you write back to Barty and say she can stay here if she wants to. That’ll annoy Celia.’

‘Yes, Father, all right. I must go.’

She went over to him and gave him a kiss. He had visibly cheered up at the thought of seeing Barty. He felt such a very strong bond with her. She supposed it was partly because of their similar circumstances . . . lone parents, in the face of dreadful grief. Only Barty had adored Jenna from the beginning; she had not set her apart, to spend her earliest years in an atmosphere of isolation and dislike . . .

Thank goodness, just thank goodness, Izzie thought, as she started up her small Austin Seven, she didn’t work at Lyttons. Just thinking about the torn loyalties made her shudder. She almost had; there had been a lot of pressure on her, after Oxford, to join the firm. Celia had been very keen and so had her father. But she had resisted, wanting (like Barty she supposed) to make her own way.

She worked for Michael Joseph where she was the publicity manager and showed considerable flair; she was rather a pet of the great Michael Joseph (known in the firm as MJ), and spent quite a lot of time in his office, at the back of the house in Bloomsbury Street being briefed on various projects. ‘We want elegant copy,’ he would say, and elegant copy Izzie produced, for book jackets and catalogues, and for advertisements which she secretly thought should be much more lively, but which said things like ‘The New Monica Dickens’ or ‘C.S. Forester. His new book.’ What Izzie secretly yearned to write was the kind of advertising copy so popular in the United States, hard-hitting plays on words. But there was no way anything like that was going to come out of her department at Michael Joseph.

Still, it was a wonderful first job, and she was very happy there. She was already a modestly well-known figure in the publishing world. Although this was due in part, as she was the first to admit, to being the great Sebastian Brooke’s daughter, she had won a place in it in her own right, through her own talent and her own graceful way with words. She was also very popular; everyone loved her, she was so gentle and sweet-natured and, with her long golden-brown hair and her huge dreamy eyes, she looked rather like a poet herself. And of course like her mother, as those in the literary world who had met Pandora during her brief marriage to Sebastian, frequently remarked.

Izzie was terribly pleased that Barty was coming to the wedding. She adored her. She had been one of the people who had been kindest to her and shown her affection during the first few lonely years of her life; when she had gone away to New York for the first time, Izzie had felt her heart would break. She could still remember standing at the window with her nanny, watching Barty walk down the road after saying goodbye and crying until she could cry no more and then falling asleep on Nanny’s lap.

Her joy when Barty had – well – taken the Lyttons on and beaten them at their own game had been intense. Not that she wasn’t fond of the Lyttons, she was, she had adored Wol, as Barty had called Oliver, and she loved the twins, especially Adele, and of course Noni. They had all lived together for a while, during the war, at Ashingham, Celia’s parents’ estate, and Adele had stood up for her when Kit was being so unkind to her, when he had first come back from the war. And had helped her through the other most difficult time in her life . . . which even now she could hardly bear to think about.

She was going to supper with Adele that evening; it would be fun. She loved them all; Adele and Noni were both like sisters to her, and Geordie – well, she adored Geordie, had a bit of a crush on him in fact. He was so charming and handsome, and he had such gorgeous clothes, and he flirted with her just about enough, not so that she got embarrassed, but so that she felt attractive and interesting. And he still looked so young – younger than Adele, if the truth were told. She just hoped Lucas wouldn’t be too much in evidence. He cast such a blight over everything. Beastly little boy.

‘I’m going to change publishers,’ said Kit. He smiled in Sebastian’s direction: it was not an entirely pleasant smile.

‘Really?’

‘Yes. I just feel I have to make some kind of a protest. Something which will hurt my mother.’

‘But it won’t. Surely. I had the same thought. But it would hurt Lyttons, and Giles and Venetia and Jay, not Celia. She’s gone, walked away.’

‘But she hasn’t, has she? Not really. She’s still got her shares. And she’ll be terribly angry. And hurt.’

‘Kit—’ Sebastian hesitated. He hadn’t thought he could be saying this. ‘Kit, is hurting her terribly really what you want?’

‘Yes,’ said Kit briefly, ‘it is. I can’t bear this marriage. I’d finally learned to trust her again, to accept what she had done and why—’

‘What we had done,’ said Sebastian quietly.

A silence. Then, ‘Yes. Yes, all right. Both of you. And somehow this negates that trust. It’s ugly. It distorts everything. You must see that.’

‘I do,’ said Sebastian. ‘Of course. But—’

‘There aren’t any buts. She is absolutely amoral. And I’m going to leave.’

‘Well – I suppose it’s your decision. I’m still not sure it’s a wise one.’

‘It’s not meant to be wise,’ said Kit. He sounded suddenly like a sulky small boy. ‘It’s meant to be – well, a strong statement.’