Wicked Pleasures (34 page)

‘The old witch isn’t all bad, is she?’ she said to Baby. ‘Virginia always said she was such a good friend to her, I never believed it before.’

‘She’s nearly all good, actually,’ said Baby, smiling at her gently. ‘Just has a funny manner. She’s English, don’t forget. Are you all right, Mother?’

‘No, not really,’ said Betsey, ‘how about you?’

‘The same.’

They were all due to leave the next afternoon. Baby, guiltily relieved to be getting away from the claustrophobic atmosphere, was sitting in the library after breakfast reading, when the Dowager Countess of Caterham came in. He smiled at her rather distantly.

‘Good morning.’

‘Good morning, Mr Praeger. We haven’t spoken very much. I’m sorry.’

‘Force of circumstance,’ said Baby politely.

‘Yes indeed.’ There was a pause. The bright blue eyes looked at him rather intently. ‘You were very fond of your sister, I believe.’

‘Yes,’ said Baby slightly shortly. ‘Most people are. Fond of their sisters, I mean.’

‘Not at all,’ said Lady Caterham. ‘I loathed mine.’

‘Ah well.’

‘I would have liked to have met her, you know. Your sister.’

‘Really?’

‘You sound rather unconvinced.’

‘Well, Lady Caterham, forgive me, but Virginia was very hurt by your – reluctance to meet her. Very.’

‘My reluctance? Mr Praeger, I don’t quite understand. There was no reluctance on my part.’ Lady Caterham was looking at him with a chilly near-distaste.

Baby stared at her. ‘But…’

She sounded impatient. ‘Mr Praeger, if somebody tells you they don’t want to meet you, you don’t push it. As you might possibly say. Even if – especially if, I would say – that person has married your son.’

‘Lady Caterham, I do assure you Virginia would not have said that. She longed to meet you. To have you here. I don’t understand.’

‘Well, Mr Praeger, she may have told you that.’ The deep voice was growing impatient. ‘But I do assure you, the message came over very loud and clear. I was not welcome at Hartest, and never would be. I have to say I found the items in various gossip columns, implying that I had refused to come, very hurtful. Your sister had a lot of friends in the press, I understand.’

‘You could have sued,’ said Baby mildly, ‘if what they were saying really wasn’t true.’

‘Mr Praeger, I am not a rich American. I have better things to do with my money than throw it into the coffers of a national newspaper. I can tell you that any effort I could have made to correct anything your sister’s friends wrote would only have rebounded on me badly.’

‘Not if it wasn’t true,’ said Baby again.

‘Some things are very hard to prove. Anyway, let’s not get sidetracked into that one. I preferred to retain some dignity over it.’

‘But – I still don’t see how the confusion arose,’ said Baby. ‘The idea that she didn’t want to see you. Did she write to you or something? Who told you?’

‘No, we never had any contact,’ said Lady Caterham. She was looking increasingly distant. ‘Never. She never even thanked me for giving her the Caterham tiara. Of course it was hers by right, but even so, I would have liked – well. Never mind. It’s too late now. I’m only glad to have been allowed to meet my grandchildren, albeit a little late. I’m sorry, Mr Praeger, to talk like this about your sister at such a time, but you are clearly under some considerable misapprehensions.’

‘Yes, clearly I am. And I have to admit to being totally baffled –’

‘I also, Mr Praeger.’ She smiled at him suddenly. ‘I can’t imagine how I could have struck such terror into someone. Do I look like a monster?’

‘No, you don’t,’ said Baby politely. ‘But – who did tell you? If it wasn’t Virginia.’

She sighed. ‘My son of course. Alexander. Who else? And very upset and saddened he was by it too.’

He went to find Alexander. He had to. He had always been so sorry for Virginia, in her rejection by Lady Caterham. She had minded so much. What on earth was Alexander playing at? Fucking up the relationship, pretending it came from Lady Caterham, telling Virginia lies. Alexander was sitting in his study, working at some papers. He still looked dreadful. Baby felt a pang of remorse, tempted to withdraw, and then went in and shut the door.

‘Alexander …’

‘Yes, Baby?’

‘I have to talk to you. It’s about Virginia and – and your mother.’

‘Oh yes?’ The blue eyes were very cold suddenly.

‘Alexander, why on earth did you tell her those lies?’

‘What lies? To whom?’

‘To Virginia. About your mother refusing to come and see her?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘Oh, Alexander, come on. Virginia was always talking about it. It was a source of terrible sadness to her. Now your mother says she would have welcomed Virginia.’

‘It’s true.’

Baby stared at him. ‘What’s true?’

‘She would have welcomed her. Virginia was obsessively jealous of her. She refused to meet her.’

‘I don’t believe you. I just don’t believe you.’

Alexander shrugged. ‘Look – I’m sorry. But it’s true. Baby – I know you loved Virginia very much. So did I. Very very much. Always. I would have done anything for her. I did. But she had – a darker side. She was an alcoholic. As you know. But that wasn’t all. There are many things she couldn’t handle. And like all alcoholics, she – well she lied. A great deal. I didn’t mind. I knew it all and I loved her anyway. But I had to face these things. And I think you should too. She was – not entirely balanced, Baby. I’ve never admitted it to anyone before. But I think you have to know. I’m sorry.’ He looked up at Baby, and there were tears in his eyes.

‘But –’said Baby. ‘But you see I –’

‘Baby,’ said Alexander, ‘Baby, I am finding it very hard to get through this. All of it. I’d rather we left it for now. If you don’t mind. I did my best for her, you know. My very best.’

‘Yes,’ said Baby slowly. ‘Yes, I really think you did. I’m sorry, Alexander. Very sorry.’

He left the study and went for a walk in the woods, wretchedly shocked and unhappy, and realized that in some strange way he had lost Virginia not once now but twice.

He went straight to the office when he got back to New York, desperate for work, for something to think about other than Virginia. Amongst all the other letters on his desk was one with an English postmark. It was from Angie.

Angie, 1980

Angie often thought how terrible it was that her first reaction to the news of Virginia’s death had been pleasure. She hadn’t actually thought she was quite that bad a person. She had felt other more suitable emotions very soon afterwards, sorrow, a sense of very real gratitude, and regret that she had never tried to heal the rift between them. But initially there had been a stab of intense delight, and it had come, that stab, because it gave her a valid reason for getting in touch with Baby.

She had not thought she had actually loved Baby. She had always imagined that she was simply using him: his money, his patent adoration of her, his ability to give her fun. She liked him, she liked him enormously, and she found him immensely attractive – although his capacity actually to deliver the sexual goods was a little disappointing. She really did like those blond, aristocratic, WASP looks best; she had sampled sexy intellectuals, randily intense Jews, bits of rough, blacks, Arabs, and they all had this that or the other going for them. (Especially the Arabs at the moment; the last one she’d gone out with had worn a money belt beneath all his clothes which he’d removed with some reluctance; there was five million pounds in it, he’d told her. She hadn’t believed him and had sat there, stark naked, making him count it in front of her, noticing with some interest that his erection remained rampantly rigid throughout; he obviously found the money as exciting as she did.) But at the end of the day Angie liked breeding; and Baby had had plenty of that. And she had also liked the way he treated her, the respect he gave her, the way he had talked to her, told her things, asked what she would like to do, and not just in bed, but where she wished to eat, walk, stay. Pretending he was the greatest stud since Casanova had been a small price to pay for that, for being treated like a lady. He had been a bit of a soft touch, a slight sucker, which she didn’t actually approve of; the way he had just come up with the money for Mrs Wicks (never cancelled, in spite of everything), paid for her holidays, believed all the lies she had told him. But actually she hadn’t told him that many. She’d liked him too much. And when it had been over, and she had watched his father wiping the extremely expensive floor with him, she had expected only to feel scorn, distaste, perhaps a little nostalgia; and she had felt real pain, genuine grief and loneliness, and she had been glad she had agreed to go to England, not merely because her fee was higher, but because it meant there was no danger of running into him, no frequent stories to read about him in the financial press (and occasionally the gossip columns), she could just begin again, start life on her own, and try to pretend she had never known him.

She had done well; she had arrived back in England with the first cheque from Fred III and a very good idea. It wasn’t entirely original, but it was good.
She combed the then rapidly gentrifying streets of the less fashionable parts of London – Battersea, Clapham, Peckham – for ungentrified houses. If they were bang next door to gentrified ones, so much the better. And she would post letters through the doors, saying she was looking for just such a house and could offer them what was very slightly below the market price. She could do that because she was going to be buying them direct and would thus save them agents’ fees. For every hundred letters she delivered, she would get roughly ten replies; from each of the ten, she would find two houses. This was 1970; the property market had gone mad. She reckoned to buy a small threebedroomed terrace house for £10,000, tart it up – and she did it nicely, Virginia had given her standards, no bubble glass in the windows or phoney Georgian doors for her – put in a bathroom and a fitted kitchen, set a couple of tubs by the front door and sell it for £15,000 three months later. And she did it over and over again, dozens of times. When the property slump came briefly in 1972, she simply held her fire; it didn’t last long. In four years she had doubled Fred’s capital; before she was thirty she was a millionaire.

She was never tempted to move into a higher price bracket; the profits might be larger, but so, she said, were the risks. And there weren’t so many houses. She did get involved briefly in the flat market, buying three-and four-storey houses and converting them, but it was more complex, the conversions were often a nightmare. She could work in the small houses, the chi-chi cottages, with builders she knew personally. The whole thing could be easily controlled. And she liked it, she liked watching dingy little houses, and even rows of dingy little houses, growing pretty and graceful under her skilful eye.

She had bought herself a rather beautiful house in St John’s Wood, in 1975, a small, early Victorian villa, covered in wisteria, with the original shutters, cornices and fireplaces, and an exquisitely planted courtyard at the back, filled with small trees, including a fig, vines and shrubs and several charming stone statues. The house stood quite high above the street and had a large, light basement; Angie converted that into a flat for Mrs Wicks.

She had never been happy, seeing her in the rest home; Angie had the deep conviction of her class that you should look after your own. She went and fetched Mrs Wicks one Saturday afternoon, told them at the home that she would like to leave the standing order running, as a token of her appreciation – well, she thought Baby wouldn’t miss it, and the home had done well by Mrs Wicks – and drove her back to London.

‘You can do exactly what you like here, Gran,’ she said, ‘have a different man in every night, keep cats or budgies or tropical fish, give French lessons, just please yourself. You can keep your pension, no need to give me any rent of course, and if you need a bit of extra, just ask. I’ve got plenty. Only thing you’re not to do is interfere in my life, OK?’

‘OK,’ said Mrs Wicks cheerfully. ‘I’ll do for you, darling, keep you nice and spick and span. I’d like that. This is very good of you, Angie.’

‘You were good to me,’ said Angie.

Mrs Wicks was very happy in St John’s Wood once she had settled down. She and Angie went on some shopping sprees, and she bought herself a lot of silk blouses and what she called smart trousers, and the one thing she had always wanted, a fur coat. It was a mink and Angie told her she’d got it very cheaply; it actually cost over a thousand pounds. It had to be extremely warm for her to go out without it. She had her hair dyed red and styled every week at the salon in St John’s Wood High Street and her nails done as well. She still smoked forty a day, but she used a cigarette holder, ‘Like my friend Marje Proops,’ she told Angie. She had advanced on Mrs Proops, who had then lived in St John’s Wood and often shopped in the High Street, one Saturday afternoon and told her she admired her more than any woman in the world, and that included the Queen and Barbara Castle; Marje had been charmed and they had a cup of tea and a pastry together in Gloriette and from then on Mrs Wicks modelled herself on Marje, and even got glasses like hers and changed the wedding ring she had worn for forty-nine years for a wide band exactly like her heroine’s. She was sixty-seven years old, but she looked younger every year; she had always been very slim, but poverty had aged her. Released from worry about the rent and Mr Wicks she looked quite girlish at times.