Old Sins (15 page)

‘Oh, good.’ She could hear herself sounding gauche and uninteresting. ‘I enjoyed it too. Well, thank you for ringing. I’ll look forward to tomorrow.’

Julian took her out to dinner that first evening at the Connaught. Her godmother had taken her once, as she had to most of the best hotels and restaurants in London; she said it was important for any girl not to be unfamiliar with places she might be taken with men, particularly the more expensive ones, it put them at a disadvantage. But being at the Connaught with Julian was not too like being there with her godmother.

The Connaught, Julian had often thought, and indeed put the thought to the test, had been designed with seduction in mind. It was not just its quite ridiculous extravagance, the way it pampered and spoilt its customers even before they pushed through the swing doors; nor the peculiar blend of deference and friendliness shown by the staff to its more favourite customers; nor its spectacular elegance, nor that of its guests; not even the wonder of its menu, its restrained adventurousness, the treasures of its cellar, the precisely perfect timing of its service; it was the strange quality it had of being something, just a little, like a private house, it had an intimacy, a humanity. He had often tried to pinpoint the exact nature of that quality; as he got ready for dinner with Eliza, contemplating the undoubted pleasure to come, he realized suddenly what it was.

‘Carnal knowledge,’ he said to his reflection in the mirror, ‘that’s what the old place has.’ And he smiled at the thought of placing Eliza within it.

They talked, that night, for hours and hours. Or rather Eliza did. She forgot to eat (her sole went back to the kitchen virtually untouched, to the great distress of the chef, despite Julian’s repeated reassurances) and she hardly drank anything either. She had no need to; she was excited, relaxed, exhilarated all at once simply by being where she was, and the enchantment of being with someone who not only seemed to want to hear what she had to say but gave it serious consideration. Eliza was used to being dismissed, to having her views disregarded; Julian’s gift for listening, for easing the truth from women about themselves, was never more rapturously received – or so well rewarded.

He sat across the table from her, watching her, enjoying her, and enjoying the fact that he was disturbing her just a little, and he learnt all he needed to know about her and more.

He learnt that she was intelligent, but ill-read and worse informed; that she loved clothes, dancing and the cinema; that she hated the theatre and loathed concerts; that she liked women as much as men; that her parents had been strangely unsupportive and detached; that she had been curiously lonely for much of her childhood; that her beauty was a source of pleasure to her, but had not made her arrogant; that she was indeed utterly sexually inexperienced and at engaging pains to conceal the matter; and that she was a most intriguing blend of self-confident and self-deprecating, much given to claiming her incompetence and stupidity on a great many counts. It all added up to a most interesting and desirable commodity.

Eliza learnt little of him, by contrast; trained by her godmother to talk to men, to draw them out, she tried hard to make Julian tell her about his childhood, his experiences in the war, his early days with the company. She failed totally; he smiled at her, his most engaging, charming smile, and told her that his childhood had no doubt been much like her own, as they had been such near neighbours, that she would be dreadfully bored by the rather mundane details of how his company had been born, and that to someone as young as she
was, the war must seem like history and he had no intention of turning himself into a historic figure.

Eliza found this perfectly acceptable; she was still child enough to be told what she should think, and be interested in, and if he was more interested in talking about her than about himself then that seemed to her to be a charming compliment. It did not occur to her that this aspect of her youth was, for Julian, one of her greatest assets. And she was a great deal older and wiser before she recognized it for the ruthless, deliberate isolation of her from his most personal self that it was.

What he did make her feel that night, and for many nights, was more interesting, more amusing and more worldly than she had ever imagined she could be; and more aware of herself, in an oddly potent way. She had always known she was pretty, that people liked to be with her; but that night she felt desirable and desired, for the very first time, and it was an exciting and delicious discovery. It wasn’t anything especially that Julian said, or even that he did; simply the way he looked at her, smiled at her, studied her, responded to her. And for the first time also, since she had been a very young child, she found herself thinking of, yearning for even, physical contact: to be touched, held, stroked, caressed.

Julian kissed her that night; not chastely on the forehead, but on the mouth; he had had great hopes of that mouth, so full, so soft, so sensual-seeming, and he was not disappointed. ‘You are,’ he told her gently as he drew back, more disturbed than he had expected to be, wondering precisely how long he would be able to defer her seduction, ‘most beautiful. Most lovely. I want to see you again and again.’

He did see her, again and again. Every morning he phoned her, wherever she was, either at home in Wiltshire or at Ethne’s flat in the Albany. If she was in London he insisted on her having lunch witfh him; he would spend hours over lunch, there was never any hurry, it seemed (or hardly ever); he would meet her at half past twelve, and there was always a bottle of Bollinger or Moët waiting by the table when she arrived, and he would sit listening to her, laughing with her, talking to her until well after three. In the evening he met her for drinks at seven, and then took her out to dinner and then to dance at nightclubs; she liked the Blue Angel best in Berkeley Square where Hutch
sat at the piano and played whatever he was asked in his quiet, amused and amusing way, the classics of Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hart, and the great songs of that year, ‘Cry Me a River’ and ‘Secret Love’; but Eliza often asked him to play her own favourite, ‘All the Things You Are’, and sat and gazed, drowned, in Julian’s brilliant dark eyes, and discovered for the first time the great truth of Mr Coward’s pronouncement about the potency of cheap music. They drank endless champagne and talked and talked, and laughed and danced until far far into the night on the small, crowded floor, in the peculiarly public privacy created by warmth and darkness and sexy music.

And every night Julian delivered Eliza home to her godmother and her bed, and drove back to Chelsea and his, after doing no more than kissing her and driving her to a torment of frustration and anxiety. He must, she knew, have great sexual experience; he could not possibly, she felt, be satisfied with mere kissing for very long, and yet the weeks went by and he demanded nothing more of her. Was she too young to be of sexual interest to him, she wondered; was she simply not attractive? Was he (most dreadful thought of all) merely spending so much time with her in the absence of anyone more interesting and exciting? She did not realize that these were precisely the things he intended her to think, to wonder, to fear; so that when the time had finally come for him to seduce her, she would be relieved, grateful, overwhelmed and his task would be easier, more rewarding, and emotionally heightened.

Meanwhile, almost without her realizing it, he aroused her appetite; he did not frighten her, or hurry her, he simply brought her to a fever of impatience and hunger, awakening in her feelings and sensations she had never dreamt herself capable of, and then, tenderly, gently, lovingly, left her be. And he had decided to marry her before he finally took her to bed.

There was much speculation about Julian’s engagement to the almost absurdly young Eliza Grahame Black. Why (London society wondered to itself, and particularly female London society) should a man of such urbanity, worldly knowledge, sexual sophistication, decide to marry a girl sixteen years younger than he was, almost young enough (as London society kept remarking) to be his daughter, with no more experience of
life than the rather limited variety to be gained in the school dormitory and the debutante dance. She might be, indeed she was, extremely beautiful and very sweet, but the marriage of such a person to Julian Morell could only be compared to setting a novice rider astride a thoroughbred and sending it off down a three-mile straight: the horse would do precisely as it wished, and would not pause to give its rider the merest consideration. And perhaps (remarked London society, nodding wisely over a great many cocktails and luncheons and dinners), that was precisely the charm of the match.

The Grahame Blacks received Julian’s request for their daughter’s hand with extremely mixed feelings. Clearly it was a brilliant marriage, he could offer her the world and a little more; moreover he gave every sign of caring very much for her. Nevertheless, Mary had severe misgivings. She felt Eliza was to be led into a life for which she was not prepared and was ill suited; and although her perspective of Julian’s life was a little hazy, she was surprisingly correct.

Julian’s friends were all much older than Eliza, most of them had been married for years, and were embarking on the bored merry-go-round of adultery that occupies the moneyed classes through their middle years. They tended to regard her, therefore, as something of a nuisance, an interloper, who had deprived them of one of the more amusing members of their circle, and in whose presence their behaviour had to be somewhat modified.

They were not the sort of people Eliza had grown up with, friends of her parents, or even the more sophisticated friends of her godmother; they were, many of them, pleasure seekers, pursuing their quarry wherever they might find it: killing time, and boredom, skiing for weeks at a time in Klosters or Aspen Colorado, following the sun to the Caribbean and the Bahamas, racing at Longchamps, shopping in Paris, Milan and New York, educating their children in the international schools, and spending money with a steady, addictive compulsion. All this Eliza would have to learn: how to speak their language, share their concerns, master their accomplishments, and it would not be easy.

Also, once the first rapture of the relationship was over, Eliza would plainly have to learn to live with Julian’s other great love,
his company; he was an acutely busy man, he travelled a great deal, and his head and to a degree his heart as well as his physical presence were frequently elsewhere. Eliza was very young and she did not have a great many of her own resources; her parents could see much boredom and loneliness in store for her.

There was also that other great hazard of the so-called brilliant marriage, the disagreeable spectre of inequality. It is all very well, as Mary Grahame Black pointed out to Lady Powers, catching a man vastly richer than yourself; but for the rest of your life, or at least until you are extremely well settled into it, you are forced to regard yourself (and certainly others will regard you thus) as fortunate, and worse than fortunate, inferior. Lady Powers pooh-poohed this (mainly because there was nothing else she could do) but she had to concede that it was an element in the affair, and that Eliza might find it difficult.

‘But then, every marriage has its problems. Many of them worse things than that. Suppose she was going to marry somebody very poor. Or dishonest. Or . . .’ she dredged her mind for the worst horrors she could find there, ‘common. The child is managing to hold her own brilliantly at the moment. She will cope. And she does look perfectly wonderful.’

This was true. Eliza did look perfectly wonderful. There was no other way to describe it. She didn’t just look beautiful and happy, she had developed a kind of gloss, a sleekness, a careless confidence. The reason was sex.

Eliza took to sex with an enthusiasm and a hunger that surprised even Julian.

‘I have something for you,’ he had said to her early one evening when he came to pick her up from the Albany. ‘Look. I hope you like it.’

He gave her a small box; inside it was a sapphire and diamond art deco ring that he had bought at Sotheby’s.

‘I thought it would suit you.’

‘Oh, Julian, it’s beautiful. I love it. I don’t deserve it.’

‘Yes, you do. But you can only have it on one condition.’

‘What?’

‘That you marry me.’

Eliza looked at him, very seriously. She had thought, even expected that he would ask her, even while she had been afraid that he would not, and the moment was too important, too serious to play silly games.

‘Of course I will marry you,’ she said, placing her hand in his in a gesture he found oddly touching. ‘I would adore to marry you. Thank you for asking me,’ she added, with the echo of the well-brought-up child she had so recently been, and then, even as he laughed at her, she said, with all the assurance of the sensual woman she had become, ‘but I want you to make love to me. Please. Soon. I don’t think I can wait very much longer.’

‘Not until we are married?’

‘Certainly not until we are married.’

‘I hope you realize this is what I should be saying to you, rather than you to me.’

‘Yes, of course I do. But I thought you probably wouldn’t.’

‘I have been trying not to.’

‘I know.’

‘But I wanted to. Desperately. As I hope you knew.’

‘Well, you can. I wish you would.’

‘Eliza.’

‘Yes?’

‘Will you come to bed with me? Very very soon?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes, yes I will.’

She was ardent, tender, eager to learn, to please, to give, and most important to take. Where he had expected to find diffidence, he found impatience; instead of shyness, there was confidence, instead of reticence a glorious, greedy abandon.

‘Are you quite sure you haven’t ever done this before?’ said Julian, smiling, stroking her tiny breasts, kissing her nipples, smoothing back her silvery hair after she had most triumphantly come not once but three times. ‘Nicely reared young ladies aren’t supposed to be quite so successful straight away, you know, they need a little coaxing.’