Wicked Pleasures (70 page)

Something had happened to her, in those early days, weeks of her marriage, that had changed her totally, and he, none of them, had understood, realized even; something that she had had to bear alone, without any help from any of them. Remorse, many years too late, flooded Baby. There was nothing, nothing at all, he could do now. Except, perhaps, try to save Max from one of the worst of her mistakes.

Angie, 1985

Angie was extremely annoyed. No, she wasn’t annoyed. She was angry. Furiously, steamingly angry. With Baby, primarily, but to an extent herself. She had really blown it, she thought, glaring at the nanny as she bustled about the kitchen, sterilizing bottles and mixing formula on the Saturday morning that Baby had left for New York; why she had no idea. God, it would be a relief to get out of this house into something bigger. It had been just slightly over-sized for her on her own, and the occasional overnight visitor. For herself, Baby, two babies and a nanny it was grotesquely too small. Well, the new town house at least was very nice. Her temper improved just momentarily as she contemplated the great cream mansion in Belgrave Square, floor after floor of huge, lofty rooms, even now being painted, papered, plastered, carpeted, miles of silk and brocade hung at its high windows, pantechnicons of furniture delivered daily to its doors. All at the most incredible expense. Baby’s expense. And the one thing she had always wanted, a country house, that was to be hers too; the last thing Baby had said to her as he flung out of the door the night before was, ‘You might start looking at houses in the country, darling, for the weekend. I’m told Hampshire is very nice, give you something to do.’ Give her something to do; as if she needed it. But it was at least something worth doing.

Unlike the other little tasks Baby seemed to have in mind for her: joining the wives’ mafia, getting on the charity circuit, hostessing ladies’ luncheons, partners’ dinners, throwing cocktail parties, attending functions. When she had her company to run, to take care of, her own money to make. What did Baby think he was doing to her; who did he think he had married?

Married? There was a Freudian slip. Marriage seemed as far away as ever; she had imagined a delay, but that once the twins had been born, a most highly visible fait accompli, Baby would push through a divorce and they would be married. And here they were, two little boys eight months old, and she seemed set to remain Miss Burbank for the rest of her life. An unmarried mother, with no security and a great many disadvantages. And Baby was expecting her to give up her work, leave her company, her beloved company that she had built up herself from nothing – well, almost nothing – to go uncared for, and devote her entire life to him. Him and his stupid bloody bank.

Angie poured herself a cup of black coffee; God, she was getting as dependent on caffeine as she was on alcohol. She was suddenly, sharply, reminded of Virginia and their first meeting, when she had sat pretending she liked coffee. She had come a long way since then.

She was part of the family now. Or nearly. And precious little good it seemed to be doing her. It added to her anger, thinking just how little.

Suddenly, on a whim, she picked up the phone and dialled the Hartest number. Baby wanted her to find a country house; who better than Alexander to help her find one – and maybe alleviate her loneliness at the same time? She waited, drumming her fingers on the table, while Tallow went to fetch him to the phone.

‘Alexander? This is Angie here. Alexander, what are you doing this weekend … ?’

They pulled up in front of Hartest just before lunch. Alexander was waiting for them on the steps. He came towards them holding out his hands and smiling.

‘Angie, how very nice. What a lovely idea. It was such a dull weekend before.’

‘Alexander, it’s very nice of you to be so welcoming. And to my family too. This is my nanny, Sandra Jenkins. Sandra, this is Lord Caterham. And these are my children, Alexander, this is Samuel Praeger, otherwise known as Spike, and this is Hugh Praeger, otherwise known as Hughdie. Both good American nicknames, you see.’

‘They’re very fine,’ said Alexander, smiling benevolently, if vaguely, at the twins. ‘And Nanny is dying to play with them. Sandra, if you follow me I’ll show you where the old nurseries are, and Nanny Barkworth will take care of you.’

A gratifyingly goggle-eyed Sandra took Spike up the steps, and Angie followed with Hughdie; Nanny appeared from the inner hall looking very disapproving. ‘You’d better give him to me quickly,’ she said to Angie, taking the baby, indicating clearly that she felt there was not a moment to be lost if Hughdie was to be saved from some appalling and imminent fate, ‘and you come with me,’ she added sternly to Sandra, over her shoulder. Sandra followed meekly, straightening her brown Princess Christian hat, which Spike had tried to pull off. ‘Very silly, I always thought, having a brown hat,’ said Nanny looking her up and down. ‘You really couldn’t expect it to stay on, not with a baby around.’

‘No,’ said Sandra. She was clearly far too overawed to argue with this particularly breathtaking example of Nanny’s logic.

‘Now then,’ said Alexander, handing her a cup of coffee in the library, ‘I took the liberty of ringing some agents in Marlborough and Bath and so on, as soon as I knew you were coming, for some particulars of houses. There’s what sounds like an extremely pretty house in Gloucestershire, quite near Stroud. I’d recommend looking at that.’

‘How big is it?’ said Angie doubtfully. Pretty sounded a bit cottagey, not at all what she had in mind. If Baby was going to make her entertain clients in the country, he was going to provide a very nice background for her to do it in.

‘Oh, not very big,’ said Alexander, ‘but charming. A classic, small eighteenth-century house.’

‘Well we do want something quite big,’ said Angie. ‘There’s the twins, and the nanny, and other staff as well, and we’ll be entertaining quite a lot.’

‘Oh, I think this would allow for that,’ said Alexander, smiling at her slightly
amusedly. ‘It has eight bedrooms. And a stable block which you could convert if you wanted to, if you really felt cramped.’

‘Oh I see,’ said Angie. She felt
_silly
suddenly. ‘Well, yes, I could look at that.’

‘Do. I think it would be worth it. And there’s another one, about ten miles from here. How’s your map-reading? Tomorrow I might come with you, if you would like that, but today I’m very busy.’

‘My map-reading is excellent,’ said Angie. ‘And I’d like it very much if you came with me. Thank you.’

She was very happy driving around Wiltshire, looking at houses. She forgot her rage at Baby, her insecurity about her future; the countryside was just tipping over into early spring, the air filled with the oddly human cries of the lambs, the bright blue of the sky shot with drifting cloud, the sheets of Wiltshire landscape soft and rain-rinsed, mellowing in some indefinable way. The hedgerows were studded with snow-drops, and even some early budding primroses; and the birdsong was an almost tangible thing, endlessly rising and falling through the long afternoon. Angie was surprised at the pleasure it all gave her; she was not normally sensitive to such things, the country to her was the bits in between the towns. But Hartest always mellowed her, made her aware of her surroundings, and in her endeavours to appear to Alexander the sensitive, charming person he would like, she found herself (to her own surprise) genuinely enjoying what lay about her.

None of the houses was right; but she returned to Hartest at dusk relaxed and full of stories to tell him, and after paying a fairly perfunctory visit to the nursery, where Sandra was bathing the twins under Nanny’s deeply disapproving gaze, she went downstairs to the room where she had first slept over twenty years ago, and bathed and changed ready for dinner with Alexander.

She had chosen her dress with great care: it had taken her longer to settle on that than it had taken Sandra to complete the whole of the twins’ packing. Something sexy, but not vulgar; sophisticated but not dull; Jasper Conran had cracked it for her, as so often he did, in a dark grey jersey dress, modestly high-necked, charmingly mid-calf, cut on the bias, swirling over her hips, clinging to her breasts. She wore it with black boots, and a very large Butler and Wilson baroque pearl choker. She spent a long time on her hair, putting it up, pulling it down, settling finally for something between the two, with tendrils of hair loose, as if they had slipped the black velvet ribbon that sleeked the rest of it back.

She wasn’t quite sure why it mattered so much; she didn’t fancy Alexander – well, she didn’t think she did. She liked him very much; he had always been courteous towards her, courteous and kind, but there was something more than that, she decided, giving herself a last glance in the full-length swing mirror in her room, spraying herself with Rive Gauche, glossing over her lips yet again. Struggling to define it, she could only say that she wanted to be pleasing to him, make him enjoy her.

She was deeply, romantically intrigued by him, he had always seemed
enigmatic to her, and she was inevitably far more so now, knowing of the new mystery about him, about Virginia, about the marriage, about his children’s parentage, which Baby had told her about and then told her to try and forget.

‘Try and forget,’ she had said, staring at him, half amused, half shocked by the story, ‘Baby, how could I forget such a thing?’ and he had said she must, she must put it out of her mind now, at once, not let it enter any relationship or conversation she had with Alexander or indeed anyone else in the future, that it was a sacred, secret family trust. ‘He will not, cannot talk about it; he’s withdrawn from it entirely, Charlotte says, doesn’t give any kind of credence to any of it.’ And she had said of course she would never mention it, never allude to it, and she had meant it, known she would not indeed, for any kind of duplicity came easily to her, but it had given Alexander a strange, almost glamorous intrigue for her, made her regard him as someone of infinite curiosity. She smiled at herself and went out of the room; she was greatly looking forward to her evening.

It was a curiously happy one. He was relaxed, easily talkative; he had changed greatly, she realized, getting to know him again, from the dashing young man she had known when he and Virginia had been young and newly married, and he had met her at the station and shown her Hartest for the first time. Some of the changes saddened her: he was vague, forgetful, every so often seeming to withdraw into himself altogether. But he was gentler, less challenging than he had been, and in many ways easier to talk to; they sat and had champagne in the library before dinner and she told him about the houses, and what she had thought about them, and the one she was going to see tomorrow, in Gloucestershire, near Burford, and he had said he would certainly go with her, and be her chauffeur; and he asked her about Baby and the bank, and how Baby was adjusting to life in London, and she had told him (of course) that everything was wonderful, that Baby loved London, that they were very happy, that the house in Belgrave Square was beautiful, pausing only momentarily when he had asked her how Baby had adapted to fatherhood again, and saying, just a little sadly, that he was a wonderful father, but that she herself felt slightly insecure, anxious for her sons, that they were illegitimate, not Praegers, not safely in line for the inheritance of the bank and the fortune, that Fred III was just a little hostile towards her –‘But then who could blame him?’ she had said, laughing, winding a tendril of hair around her finger, ‘I am the scarlet woman, I came between Baby and his wife.’

And he said yes, indeed, that was true, but love was a powerful and almost uncontrollable thing, and that Baby had, he knew, been unhappy with Mary Rose for a long time, and that their children were after all grown up now, even Melissa, grown up enough to handle a divorce, and that it was good that Baby should have a second chance. They were in the dining room by then, eating the most delicious trout Angie had ever tasted, by candlelight; she smiled at him, and said she would feel rather better about everything if there was indeed a divorce that the children had to face, but that she greatly feared there never would be.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘well, you will have to be patient, I’m afraid. I found it the
most difficult thing of all to learn myself, but I managed in the end, and after that everything else seemed quite simple.’

It was a strange answer; Angie was slightly nonplussed. A silence fell; to ease it, she suddenly said, without meaning in any way to be challenging, ‘Alexander, tell me about your childhood. I’d really like to know. Was it happy, here in this beautiful house?’

It was one of her talents, her most powerful attributes, to display, and indeed genuinely to feel, interest in people and their lives; and it was hard to resist her. Alexander looked at her thoughtfully, poured them both another glass of wine (velvety claret that he said went wonderfully well with fish) and started to tell her.

‘My father was very cruel,’ he said, ‘the cruellest person I have ever known. He wasn’t just cruel to me, he was cruel to my mother.’

‘You mean he hit her?’

‘Yes, sometimes. Mostly he just said horrible things to her. Told her she was ugly and stupid and – well, other things.’

Angie was proceeding carefully; she didn’t press him on the other things.

‘And you?’

‘Oh, both things for me as well. He beat me. Quite savagely. With a riding whip.’

‘Why? What for?’

‘Oh – anything. If I didn’t eat my lunch. If I wasn’t well. If I used a wrong word or failed to know my tables. Every morning he tested me on my tables. I never could do maths.’ He smiled at her slightly shakily. ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you all this.’

‘I asked you to,’ said Angie. She had been sitting very quiet, very still, her eyes fixed on Alexander. He was pale, and the hand holding his glass was very tense.

‘Well – you invite confidences. And confidence.’ He smiled at her quickly. ‘He also used to beat me if I wet my bed, which I did quite often. He would come in in the night to check, or very early in the morning. Nanny used to try and get to me first; but she never quite knew when he was coming. And if the bed was wet, he beat me there and then, and then made me go back to it and sleep in it.’