Old Sins (82 page)

‘Is there anyone with that kind of money? Who’d give it to you?’

‘I don’t think so. No. Oh, I don’t know.’

‘What about the old guy who put you through college?’

‘I couldn’t ask him. I’d rather get beaten up.’

‘You’ll get worse than beaten up,’ said Billy with conviction.

‘Oh. Well anyway, I still would. I could ask my uncle, but I don’t think there’s anything left. Or – yeah, that’s it. The house.’

‘What house?’

‘The one in Malibu.’

‘It’s your grandmother’s.’

‘I know. But it ought to be mine. I could borrow against it.’

‘Do you have the deeds?’

‘No, but they must be in the house somewhere.’

‘Miles, you really are something,’ said Billy, in tones of great admiration.

Next day, when Mrs Kelly was taking her afternoon nap on the veranda, Miles let himself silently into her room. She slept soundly these days; she was old and weary, and she had several glasses of madeira with her lunch.

In a box under her bed, he found what he wanted: the deeds of the house. Wrinkled documents, in a tatty envelope. He took them out and looked at them, and smiled; then he went straight down to the bank.

‘These are not in your name, Mr Wilburn.’

‘I know. They’re my grandmother’s.’

‘I can’t let you have any money on these without her signature. We need a transfer deed in the first place. Making the property over to you. Signed by you both, with witnesses. And even then I have to draw up a Legal Charge.’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a document saying you’ve borrowed the money, and which we hold until it’s repaid. I have to put a time limit on that of course. Perfectly simple; no problem in any of this. But like I say, first we need your grandmother’s signature on the transfer deed – witnessed.’

‘But she’s – well she’s very old. She’s almost senile.’

‘Doesn’t alter matters.’

‘What would?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Uh-huh. Well thanks anyway. I’ll be back.’

‘Granny Kelly, would you sign this for me?’

‘What’s that, Miles?’

‘Oh, just a form, saying I’m over twenty-one. I’ve applied for a job at the casino.’

‘The casino! What kind of a job is that?’

‘Better than no job. You’ve been trying to get me to work for years. You’ve finally succeeded. You should be pleased. Please sign it. Oh, and we have to get Little Ed and Larissa to witness it.’

‘Miles, this is just ridiculous. Just for a job. Are you sure this is right?’

‘Granny, the world’s changed a bit lately. You don’t realize.’

‘Maybe not. Oh, all right. Providing you go check on those hens and collect the eggs. I don’t trust Little Ed one bit. I know he’s taking them.’

‘You can’t trust anyone these days, Granny.’

‘Right, young man, here you are. A draft for four thousand dollars. To be repaid in three years. OK?’ The bank manager was avuncular, smiling. ‘That’s a lot of money. Don’t you go off with that to the casino now.’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that.’

‘Glad to hear it.’

He paid the debt, stayed away from the casino, stayed away from the women in the hotels. He concentrated on his job on the tennis courts. But he was unhappy, lonely. Billy’s father had finally put his foot down, and was sending him off to work in a bank in Washington.

Billy seemed quite happy about it. ‘I could quite do with a bit of respectability. Don’t you ever want it?’

‘Want what?’

‘Well, you know, kind of normality. A job. Salary. A regular life.’

‘Billy! Do you?’

‘Yeah.’ He grinned sheepishly. ‘Yeah, suddenly I do. I really don’t mind being shipped off to Washington. I’m looking forward to it. Except I’ll miss you.’

‘Billy,’ said Miles, smiling at his friend, ‘you’re out to lunch.’

But when Billy had gone, he did wonder if a regular life might not have its charms.

He felt lonely, suddenly abandoned. Granny Kelly was increasingly senile and confused. Half the time she didn’t seem to know where she was. She would ask him if he’d been down to the beach, or tell him she’d like a drive up to the Hills. He humoured her gently, because he loved her, but it didn’t help him any. For the first time for years he mourned his mother. He was almost afraid; he had no one in the world to turn to. Marcia Galbraith was as senile as his grandmother, more so if anything. Of course there was his uncle, but Bill Wilburn never contacted them again after the drugs case. Well, he hadn’t liked him much anyway.

He felt he would even have welcomed Hugo Dashwood, that he would meet him more than halfway. Funny, the old guy had so completely dropped out of his life. It showed he hadn’t really cared, that he actually was a twenty-two carat, one hundred per cent creep. Odd that it hurt a bit, suddenly. That Dashwood had so absolutely lost interest in him. Creep he might be, but he was someone Miles could claim as at least a bit of his own, of his past. It might even, possibly, be worth contacting him. Not because he wanted to see him exactly, just to feel there was somebody somewhere in the world who he had some kind of a claim on.

Only he couldn’t because he didn’t have the faintest idea where he might be.

In Marcia Galbraith’s desk was a small bundle of letters all addressed to her friend, Dorothy Kelly. She took care that Dorothy never saw her letters; you never knew, someone might
try to tempt her back to California, or Ohio, and away from Nassau and Marcia. And besides, she needed looking after, now that her mind was going, and she and Little Ed and Larissa were all so devoted to her, protecting her from reality. She didn’t want to be bothered with things like letters.

Among the bundle were two from Father Kennedy in Los Angeles, and one forwarded (via Los Angeles) from Hugo Dashwood in New York.

Sussex, 1983

THE NIGHT BEFORE
her wedding, Phaedria ran away.

She didn’t run very far, but she ran nonetheless, and she would probably have run a lot further, made her escape altogether, had it not been for the intervention of the man she was widely rumoured to be unhealthily close to for a bride, David Sassoon, and his erstwhile mistress and her bridegroom’s first wife, Eliza Garrylaig.

There was a vast house party at Marriotts; every bedroom was full and various children of varying ages were sleeping on floors, in box rooms, even the attics.

Fortunately the weather was lyrically warm; the gardens had rushed into an excess of roses, lilac, lupins, delphiniums; the beautiful old walls of the courtyard behind the house were covered with thick, sweet clouds of honeysuckle.

Out on the back lawns were two immense marquees filled with flowers, in urns and baskets, and clambering up the moss-covered pillars that supported the structures; and on the lake, below the lawns, floated two white Victorian riverboats, structured largely of ornate wrought iron, and filled, like the marquees, with flowers. Every hotel for miles around was filled with wedding guests.

Over a thousand people had been invited; and were coming from all over the world: friends and family, and business colleagues and associates from Europe, America, Australia,
Japan. ‘You’re never going to get married again,’ Phaedria had said firmly, ‘I want everyone who’s ever known you to be there.’

The wedding ceremony itself was to be inevitably small and modest, set for ten thirty in the morning in the registry office in Haywards Heath, with only Letitia, Augustus Blenheim (who had left Prosper Merimee with great reluctance and a feeling that the occasion hardly warranted it) and Roz and C. J. present. But at two there was to be a blessing in the village church, attended by a hundred or so family and close friends, and then at three a second ceremony in one of the marquees, with a blessing, music both secular and sacred, and an address.

A small string orchestra was to play, a choir of boy sopranos to sing, and one of the great new young actors of the British stage, Piers Tobias, was to recite the Desiderata.

After the afternoon reception, in the gardens, the guests were to dine and dance in the marquees and the boats; there were two groups and a discotheque, and a superb jazz band who had been specially briefed to play the Charleston at half-hourly intervals for Letitia’s particular delectation.

At midnight there was to be a firework display, to the accompaniment of Handel’s firework music, played by the village band.

Phaedria was to wear a dress by Karl Lagerfeld, and her ten small bridesmaids to wear its replica in miniature; they were to carry not bouquets but garlands of flowers, which were hopefully to rope them together and prevent the small ones from straying too far during the second ceremony, which would clearly lack for them the novelty of the first. Phaedria and Julian were to ride back from the village church in an open laundau, pulled by the beloved Grettisaga (‘I’m surprised you’re not insisting on having her in the church,’ Julian had said), and the children in a series of governess carts, drawn by white ponies.

All this Phaedria had orchestrated herself; and now she was tired, and she was frightened, and quite quite certain that she was making a dreadful mistake. She had had supper in the kitchen with Letitia and Madeleine Emerson and her girls, and Eliza and Peveril, who had both been charmed and delighted to have been invited (‘Well, as if I wouldn’t want you there,’ Phaedria had said when Eliza phoned her, laughing, to thank her and congratulate her on her style), and had sat in an
increasing silence while everybody chattered and laughed and gossiped and then had pleaded a headache and gone upstairs to her room. Julian was flying down in the morning – (‘Well, darling, I don’t want to see you on the night before the wedding, it’s unlucky and besides I might be tempted to try and seduce you before our wedding night’).

She lay on her bed, and looked out at the moon in a state of first panic and then misery; what had she done, how had she come to be in this situation, to be marrying this difficult, fearsome man forty years older than she was, to be taking on the responsibility of running five households, to be forced into almost daily contact with a stepdaughter who loathed her, to be heavily involved with a most daunting commercial venture on the basis of the most sketchy knowledge and experience; to have planned a day of such tortuous complexity it would be not just one but a series of miracles if nothing went wrong; and why was there now nobody, nobody at all, who would say, as perhaps a mother, a friend, even might, ‘There, there, all will be well, don’t fret, you’ve done wonderfully.’

Unbidden, the thought of Charles came into her head; he seemed at this distance sanity, normality, kindness, safety. The thought and the memories made her tears start; she sat up on the bed, sobs catching her breath, and knew she had to get away, that what lay ahead was not to be borne, that she could not go through with it. She went to her door and listened; it was silent downstairs now, everyone had gone to bed.

She decided to go at once, quickly, silently, without fuss; by the morning she could be far far away. They could still have a wonderful party without her, it would not be a total disaster, there was still the food (oh, the food, how the food had worn her out), the wine, the music, the dancing – and Julian to host it, charmingly, confidently, brilliantly. He did not really need her; he did not need anybody. She knew that now. However close to him she grew, however much of himself he let her see, there was still so much more that was hidden, secret, mysterious, his own.

She loved him, she had lived with him in the most extraordinary and passionate physical closeness, she had fought with him, laughed with him, hated him, studied him, for six months and still she did not understand him, had seen little
of him that he did not wish her to see, knew little of him that he did not wish her to know.

And so she could not, would not marry him, it was too dangerous, too foolish, too wrong. She would go, and in a few months, weeks even, he would move on to another woman, another body, another set of emotions. And it would not matter to him, not really, not at all. Down the stairs she crept, and out of the front door; she went briefly to the stables, and stroked, kissed Grettisaga and Spring Collection tenderly on their dear, beloved faces (‘I will come back for you’), and then walked quickly to the front of the house. Her Mercedes was parked there; she got into it and, weeping quite hard now, moved off down the drive.

But before she even reached the lane she had to stop. Her tears blinded her, and her heart was thudding so hard, her ears pounding, she felt faint. She pulled in to the side, leant her head on her arms on the steering wheel and sobbed: for everything, for things she had known she cared about and things she had never consciously considered; for Charles, of course, for the golden lost days of Oxford, for her own youth, so strangely and suddenly gone, for her mother, just a distant, confused memory, for her job, for Bristol, for Brian, for her freedom, for days untrammelled by the fierce rigorous demands of the man she had so foolishly, so mistakenly, agreed to marry.

She sat there for a long time, crying harshly, desperately; she felt she knew for the first time in her life precisely where her heart was, and that it was truly breaking; and she did not know what to do.

Out of the darkness she saw first Eliza’s face, startled, concerned; and then David Sassoon’s, tender, anxious. They were together, and why she did not even begin to wonder, walking up the drive; they had seen her car and heard her crying, and now they were with her. They told her to get in the back seat and they got in beside her, one each side, and held her, and David stroked her hair and kissed her poor, ravaged face, and Eliza held her hands and said, over and over again, as if to a small child, ‘Shush, shush, don’t cry, there, there, it’s all right, shush,’ and gradually she calmed, stopped
sobbing, just sat there, looking at them, huge tears rolling down her face.

‘I have to get away,’ she said, when she could speak. ‘I have to go,’ and neither of them argued, or told her not to be silly, merely sat and looked interested, and then, when she was a little calmer still, Eliza said, yes, of course she must if she really wanted to, but why.