Into Temptation (Spoils of Time 03) (9 page)

Kit leaving Lyttons had been bad enough. He had been right, of course, he knew her so well; she had seen it as a dreadful blow. She might have physically left the firm, but she was still absolutely a part of it, she had created it, it was hers, as much as one of her children. And Kit was part of it, too. It had made him, as good publishers do make authors, however brilliant their work; shaping them, presenting them, building their reputations, guiding their futures. Kit’s first book had been clever, original, witty; but it had still needed care, creativity, style, in order to achieve the absolute success it had found. And Lyttons, the Lyttons she had made, had provided all those things just as it provided them for other authors; an absolute concern for quality, a total attention to detail, an instinctive sense of the moment. In other hands
Childsway
would have been a different book, and Christopher Lytton would have been a different author, just as successful, perhaps, but different. He had allowed Lyttons to give birth to his career as an author – and was now rejecting them. And rejecting her. His leaving was a rejection of her. She knew him well enough to recognise that. At first, she had struggled without a great deal of success, to look upon it as a piece of personal loyalty. But then his letter had arrived, typed on his special typewriter, telling her that he wanted to avoid any further connection with her.

‘People are still saying, of course, that you are Lyttons, and because that is so undeniably true, I have no wish to be any part of it whatsoever. Please don’t telephone me, or try to see me. I really have no wish for that.’

And then, the awful, final rejection, not the messy, scrawled signature, but a formally typed ‘Christopher Lytton’.

Her only comfort, looking at that name, was telling herself that he was, in some ways, still something of a child.

At first Celia had thought Kit would come round: that he would agree to see her. That she would be able to make him understand at least a little. But he had instructed his secretary to return all her letters – three of them now, each more importunate than the last – had refused to speak to her on the telephone, had rejected all her invitations. The third one she herself recognised would be the last.

‘Please, Kit, I beg of you,’ she wrote, ‘please come. I want so much to try and explain. I cannot allow you to walk away like this.’

The tersely typed answer telling her that it was she who had walked away finally forced her to accept defeat that day.

She had lost Kit. And she didn’t know how to bear it.

CHAPTER 6

‘Just go away. Get out of my room.’

‘But darling—’

‘Mother—’

‘All right. I’m going.’

She went; later she tiptoed up, heard the unmistakable sound of weeping. Male weeping. An awful, literally heartbreaking sound. But – she had agreed. That he should go away. Geordie had persuaded her.

God, Lucas hated Geordie. Hated him for his smarmy charm, the way he could wrap his mother round his little finger, the way he tried to order Lucas about, to play the heavy father, tell him what to do: when he had no right to, no right at all.

But most of all he hated him for something quite different. Something that was nothing to do with Lucas.

He longed to tell his mother but he couldn’t. It would hurt her too much and, besides, he had absolutely no proof. He had tried telling Noni, but she refused to listen, left the room, told him he was disgusting, just making it up to excuse his own behaviour. She thought Geordie was wonderful too, she adored him. It was pathetic.

The first time, he hadn’t wanted to believe it himself. It had been at Christmas, the Christmas after his grandmother had married again; they’d spent it with the Warwicks. It had been pretty grim; Lucas hated most of his cousins, they were so noisy and uncivilised. They didn’t show any interest in the arts or literature or anything like that, Henry only cared about making money, and Elspeth and Amy were very pretty, but their only interests seemed to be boys and hunting; he had nothing to say to any of them. He’d spent most of the day reading, had even tried to get on with his book over lunch until Boy had removed it forcibly from him.

Anyway, that evening they were all playing charades because his grandmother insisted on it and he’d gone to the lavatory; he’d stayed as long as he could, just in the hope that someone would take his turn. And as he came out of the lavatory, with his book stuffed up his jersey, he’d seen Geordie slipping into Boy’s dressing room. Which was odd: odd enough to make Lucas want to know why. He’d walked very quietly along the landing, and stood outside the door which wasn’t quite shut, and he’d heard Geordie saying, ‘Oh, darling, I’m missing you too.’ Then a silence and then, ‘Well, only two more days. And then we’ll have one of our wonderful long lunch hours.’ Followed by his awful, creepy laugh.

Lucas had felt sick; so sick he had had to go back into the lavatory and sit there a bit longer. He tried to tell himself that Geordie had been talking to his sister, or someone he worked with, but he knew he wasn’t. Lucas was quite a precocious fourteen; he read adult fiction and spent a lot of time at the cinema. A clear instinct told him that it had not been a business liaison. He rejoined the party finally and sat staring at Geordie in disgust as he acted
From Here to Eternity
, with embarrassing enthusiasm.

The second time was worse, because Geordie had realised he knew. Adele was out and he heard Geordie come in whistling; Lucas was in the kitchen making some coffee. He’d looked at Geordie, and at first he couldn’t believe it, had to look again to make sure, but there it was, definitely, a great smudge of lipstick on his collar; and he just couldn’t help it, he said, ‘Better change that shirt, Geordie, before my mother comes home.’

Geordie had glanced in the hall mirror, and then blushed dark, deep red, before grabbing Lucas’s wrist and saying, ‘You can just keep your nasty thoughts to yourself, you little creep.’ And then he had run upstairs and slammed the door to the bedroom. From then on, it was outright war.

And because Lucas simply could not be polite to him, because he couldn’t even bear to think his mother was so stupid as to love and trust this dreadful man, things had gone from bad to worse, until finally Geordie had said that either Lucas went away to school, to learn some manners, or he would leave home himself.

He meant it; Adele knew him well enough for that. He was sufficiently angry at Lucas’s treatment of her – and sufficiently hurt himself, he said – to finally insist. Geordie was very sweet-natured, terribly easygoing; but there was a point beyond which he could not be pushed. And that point had come. Adele loved Geordie too much to risk losing him. Of course he would not actually have gone, she was sure; would not have actually left her and the small, beloved Clio. But he would have read her refusal as a rejection of him, and she was terribly afraid he would have retreated from her, spent more time in New York – which he loved – moved away from her emotionally. Adele had been lonely before in her life; she couldn’t face it again. And so, finally and very reluctantly, she agreed; and Lucas was going to Fletton, in Bedfordshire, currently fashionable for its exquisite buildings and its reputation for the arts and its avant-garde approach to education.

‘We think you’ll enjoy it,’ Adele had said brightly. ‘It’s the most beautiful place, and—’

But Lucas had turned dark and angry eyes on her and said he was quite sure he would hate it.

‘But Lucas! It’s a marvellous school.’

‘So is Westminster. And I’m happy there.’

‘Then you might have tried to behave as if you were happy,’ said Adele briskly, ‘and treated us all with some degree of respect. I’m afraid you have only yourself to blame.’

She seldom came even close to rebuking Lucas; he was clearly startled. But he said nothing.

And now it was the night before his departure. And Adele, racked with remorse, longing to make her peace with him, had tried three times to be allowed into his room. And failed.

Even Noni was doubtful of the wisdom of what they were doing.

‘I’m afraid he may do something drastic.’

‘Noni, like what?’ said Adele, trying to sound light-hearted, firmly pushing down that self-same fear.

‘Run away. Refuse to cooperate. Stay in his room—’

‘Of course he won’t. Noni, he’s only a boy. He’ll do what he’s told.’

‘He hasn’t done that here.’

‘Yes, well, he’s not afraid of us, we have no proper authority over him.’ She hesitated. ‘He clings to the memory of your father, that’s why he won’t accept Geordie.’

‘I know, Maman. And I think he’s awful, honestly. Poor Geordie has been so patient. So have you. So have I, come to that. But Lucas is in a mess. He feels – oh, I don’t know, rejected, I suppose.’

‘Rejected! But Noni, who’s rejected him? No one. Your father is dead, he died ten years ago, we left France in 1940.’

‘I suppose that was it,’ said Noni quietly, ‘you did leave. You didn’t stay.’

‘No. But—’ And then she stopped. Adele could never properly explain why she had left; it was too cruel to the children, too defamatory to their father’s memory. She had always simply told them that he had insisted they went, that because he had been Jewish and they had been English, because the Germans were about to occupy Paris, the danger was too great. When really . . .

‘I know. But don’t you think, from Lucas’s point of view, you should have stayed? Maman, don’t look like that, that’s not what
I
think. I know how brave you were, I can still remember that journey, bits of it, you know I can, and I remember how you always told us how wonderful Papa was, how much you loved him. But – well, I think Lucas sees it differently.’

That, and a strong genetic inheritance, Adele thought. Every year, every month, even, Lucas became more like his father. The same selfishness, the same self-obsession, the same built-in sense of grievance. And the same conviction that he was owed whatever he wanted.

Noni had endured the same hardships, the same sorrows, the same disruption as Lucas, but she had survived, was level, loving, merry-hearted. ‘She is a Lytton,’ Geordie had said once, when Adele had remarked on it, ‘a Lytton like you, my darling. Which is why I love her so very much.’

‘And she loves you,’ said Adele, and it was true, Noni adored Geordie, they were the best of friends. He had never tried to be her father; indeed he had told her at the outset that he would like to be her friend.

‘That is how I regard you,’ he said, smiling at her, ‘as a very dear and special friend. I know I am a little older than you, but I have friends who are many years older than me and the friendship is none the worse for that. Better, indeed, in some ways.’

But his attempts to charm Lucas in the same way had failed absolutely. Lucas had been wary from the very beginning, when Geordie was no more than a visitor. He greeted the news that his mother was to marry him with an intense, dark hostility that was chilling in a child and fought to be allowed to stay away from the wedding. It was only when his great grandmother, one of the very few people Lucas respected, told him he was making himself look ridiculous and that his father would have been ashamed of him, that he agreed to go. Indeed she had done much in the early days to ease the relationship along. But when she died Lucas descended into a dreadful grief and anger. And bitterness that yet another of the few people he had properly loved was gone from him.

He had only been ten at the time; Adele could scarcely remember him so much as smiling at her since. With an almost adult intensity, he had set about making himself awkward, uncooperative, casting a shadow over her new happiness with Geordie.

‘Give him time,’ she kept saying, as Geordie’s amusement at Lucas’s behaviour turned to impatience and finally to a deep, slow anger. Geordie had not encountered much hostility in his life; his charm, his capacity to be interested by, and to like everybody, had made his own life easy, amusing and agreeable.

But time had only made things worse.

Adele drove Lucas down to Fletton alone; Geordie would have made things infinitely worse and while she would have appreciated Noni’s company, she felt there was more chance of communication with Lucas without her. She was wrong; he sat in an icy silence the entire journey, and refused her offer of stopping for lunch.

‘I’d rather just get there,’ he said when she asked him if he was hungry, ‘there’s no point trying to make this journey pleasant.’

Those were the last words he spoke directly to her until a sullen goodbye as she left him with his housemaster on the steps of the famous West Front of Fletton.

She drove away in tears and had to stop several times on the way home because she was crying so hard that she could not properly see, not just from sadness at the parting, for she loved Lucas dearly in spite of his awkwardness, but from guilt and remorse as well. In failing Lucas, as she so obviously had done, she felt she had failed his father. She could imagine only too clearly what Luc would have said about her abandoning his son, as he would undoubtedly have seen it. Never mind that Luc himself had failed her all those years ago.

‘Are you all right, my darling?’

Geordie came in, sat down on the bed, tried to take her hand. Adele snatched it away. He looked hurt, and surprised.

‘Darling. What is it?’

‘Geordie what do you think it is, for God’s sake? I’ve just had to take Lucas to a place he is clearly going to hate, somewhere that I feel pretty unhappy about too. He refused even to kiss me goodbye. I’ve never seen him look so wretched and frightened. Do you think that’s going to make me feel good?’

‘Darling, we did agree—’

‘Did we?’ Adele looked at him, and felt angrier still. ‘I don’t think we did, actually, Geordie. You delivered an ultimatum which left me very little choice in the matter. Now you may prove to be right, but at the moment it doesn’t look like it, and I have just had a day of sheer hell. I think I’d be better on my own for a bit, if you don’t mind.’

Kit was now published by Wesley. He liked the set-up, the size of the house, the fact that it was new, hungry, and much talked about as being imaginative and exciting. He also very much liked his editor there, a woman called Faith Jacobson, who had an extraordinarily sensitive editorial approach; his agent had secured him a very good contract for his next three books.

‘I feel much happier altogether,’ he had told Sebastian, ‘and they have a high visibility in America, which is very good. You should come and join me.’

‘I couldn’t,’ said Sebastian with a sigh. ‘You know what they said about Mary Tudor having Calais written on her heart, I’ve got Lyttons. In a way I’d like to get away of course, but – well, I just don’t feel I can. Lyttons is much more than your mother, it’s a lot of people I’m fond of, Jay and Venetia and poor old Giles—’

‘Everyone calls him poor old Giles,’ said Kit, slightly irritably. ‘I can’t quite see it. He’s got a job – and a company, for that matter – that he almost certainly wouldn’t have if he wasn’t a Lytton.’

‘Hey, steady on! Harsh words.’

‘They’re true. I’m sorry. It’s the one thing I do agree wholeheartedly with my mother about. Giles is not up to that job. He’s also not a very good figurehead for Lyttons.’

‘You should tell her,’ said Sebastian lightly.

But he knew it wouldn’t happen; Kit had not even written to Celia to tell her about Wesley. He had quite simply cut her out of his life.

He was doing it again: staring at her across the silence of the Bodleian. In that blatant, almost insolent way. Elspeth frowned, looked away and started making furious notes from the book on
Paradise Lost
she was studying. Five minutes later, she looked cautiously up again; he was still staring. And worse, she saw a half-smile twitching at his mouth. Damn. He had noticed. Noticed that she had noticed him. Been waiting for her to respond. She should have resisted the temptation. It was just that he was rather – attractive. She couldn’t deny it. He had very large brown eyes, and very dark curly hair that looked as if it didn’t get brushed very often. He tended to wear big shaggy sweaters, and baggy cords, rather than the sports-jacketand-tie look favoured by his contemporaries. He was moderately tall, just shy of six foot, Elspeth imagined, and he had rather long arms and very large hands which gave him an ungainly look. His name was Keir Brown; he was known to his detractors as the Glasgow Gorilla.

Elspeth didn’t like him much: what she knew of him, anyway. He made no attempt to be polite, to get to know her in the usual way, by asking her if she wanted to come for a cup of coffee, or even striking up a conversation after a lecture. He just nodded at her, quite tersely, said ‘hallo’ occasionally and then proceeded to ignore her, as if it was up to her to make the effort. And it annoyed her, this meeting of her eyes in that I-know-you-fancy-me-and-I-fancy-you way. Of course boys had done that to Elspeth ever since she had been old enough to notice; she was very pretty, she had a wonderful figure, and she was quick-witted and sharp and great fun. She wasn’t quite as much of a sexual honeypot as her younger sister Amy – their father said Amy still shouldn’t be allowed out unchaperoned – but men did fancy her, and what was more they admired her, for her clear, bright mind.