Betrayal (16 page)

Weekends at Melton followed a pattern. We gave a dinner party on the Friday or Saturday with never less than four courses produced by a hired cook we referred to as Cook, and served by the male half of our housekeeping couple masquerading as a butler. On the Saturday we went to some sporting event with our house guests – usually racing or polo – and on whichever evening we were not entertaining we dined at another large house. On Sunday nights, if no guests were staying on, I caught up with some of my paperwork before getting up at five-thirty to drive to London.

‘You’ll be sitting next to Lady Werner,’ Ginny informed me. ‘She’s on lots of boards and welfare organisations. Limps a bit, injured herself hunting years ago, still very horsy. They’ve got lots in training, Derby-winners and things . . .’

I tried to speak, but Ginny was at full gallop.

‘. . . But she’s a trustee of the family charitable trust, you see, along with Sir Frank – they run it together – and they give big donations . . . well, the trust does. We might get as much as fifty thousand for three years running. And they’re awfully nice really—’

‘Ginny—!’ It came out more harshly than I meant it to.

Her eyes widened, her mouth twitched. ‘What?’

I was going to bring up the subject of our expenses, but I faltered. I wasn’t sure I could face the inevitable upset. I could never work out if Ginny believed against all the evidence that she was cutting back, or whether she was simply incapable of doing so, but whenever I mentioned the subject she grew so prickly and defensive that reasonable discussion became virtually impossible.

‘Nothing,’ I said hastily. ‘Anything else I need to do for the weekend?’

‘Absolutely not,’ she declared with the touchy pride of a born organiser. Then, eyeing me: ‘What on earth’s the matter?’

‘Just desperately tired, that’s all.’

‘I can never understand why you have to do it all. Why can’t some of these people take the work off your hands?’

But I didn’t have the energy to explain. ‘They just can’t.’

When she realised I wasn’t going to elaborate she tightened her mouth and went to fetch fresh coffee. Returning, she rested her small chin on her hands and blinked rapidly, a sure sign that she was nervous of whatever she was about to say. ‘By the way,’ she began with studied casualness, ‘Eddie Maynard’s going off to that shooting school for a weekend course. He wanted to know if you were interested in going with him, but I said you were far too busy—’

‘Ginny,’ I said with more patience than I was feeling, ‘it’s not a matter of being too busy. I’m simply not interested in shooting, and that’s all there is to it.’

‘But you used to be.’

‘No, Ginny. I may have said once—’

‘More than once.’

‘Only as a sort of joke,’ I protested.

‘I see,’ she said in a small voice, as if I had altered my story simply to make her look foolish.

She had clung to this ridiculous hope that I would take up shooting for some time; why, I could never fathom. I loathed guns and it saddened me to see wild ducks hanging in people’s game larders.

‘Having a place in the country doesn’t mean we have to do what country people do.’ I realised too late how critical this sounded.

‘It’s not that!’ she protested, breathing fast. ‘You seem to think I want you to take it up for some . . . some . . .’ She agitated her hand. ‘For some
snobbish
reason! I just thought how lovely it’d be for you to have an interest down there, something that’d give you a bit of exercise and fresh air. And you make it sound . . .’ She was gasping for air now, wheezing from low in her chest. I fetched her inhaler from the basket in the corner of the kitchen. Grabbing it, she pulled two squirts into her lungs.

I dropped an arm lightly round her shoulders. ‘Darling, I didn’t mean it like that.’

‘Oh, yes you did,’ she cried between gulps.

‘I just like to relax at Melton, that’s all.’

She fought to speak. Eventually, after an agonising pull on her lungs, she managed to gasp, ‘You really think other people’s opinions are important to me! It’s so insulting!’

I dropped wearily onto the stool next to her.

‘That’s what you think, isn’t it?’ she demanded.

What I really thought came to me with the clarity that only unhappiness can bring: that it was in Ginny’s nature to strive for perfection, that she couldn’t bear any area of our lives to fall short of some far-reaching ideal, and that, by setting herself such high standards, she doomed both of us to constant struggle. With this insight came another, equally clear: that I was deeply weary of this self-imposed burden, that I would gladly leave it all behind.

‘I think it’d be nice to slow down a bit,’ I said.

She cast me a guarded look. ‘Slow down . . .? In what way?’

‘Try not to do quite so much.’

‘You mean – my charity work?’

‘Of course not, no! I meant, see friends less often. Have more evenings to ourselves.’

She was fighting for breath again. ‘But we don’t see people
that
often! And you’ve always said you loved seeing them! And now suddenly . . .! You’re being very confusing, Hugh. And very unfair!’

‘It’s partly the expense,’ I said, grasping the nettle. ‘We have to cut back.’

She cast me a look of quiet injury, as if I had broken all the rules of fair argument. ‘I know that,’ she said stiffly.

‘Any joy with the accounts?’ I tried to hit a light note, absolutely free of reproach.

She gave a long rasping cough and reached for her inhaler again. ‘I’ve had a look through the bills, if that’s what you mean.’

‘You can see, then, that we’re way over budget.’

‘But we never had a budget, darling! You talk about this budget as if it was something passed at a board meeting.’ Her eyes were exceptionally bright, close to anger or tears. ‘I never knew anything about this budget until you invented it! You seem to think I’ve been spending money like water! D’you think I don’t check the bills? D’you think I don’t get the best prices? And I can’t just cancel dinners arranged
months
ago. It’s taken me a
year
to get the Werners to dinner, a whole year!’

‘All I’m saying is that we really must cut back.’

‘You make it sound as though it’s my fault—’

‘No, no,’ I said hastily. ‘Of course it’s not your fault . . .’

‘Provence was your idea!’

This was old ground. ‘Yes.’

‘And Melton.’

I let that one pass; it simply wasn’t worth arguing about. ‘Melton
has
to go as quickly as possible,’ I said.

‘D’you think I don’t know that?’ she cried. ‘I’ve been on to the estate agent every day!
Every
day!’

I remembered other things, the redecorating of the drawing room here at Glebe Place that appeared to be going ahead though I thought we’d agreed to cancel it, and the housekeeper in Provence who was meant to have left last month but still seemed to be in place, and I got that sick clammy feeling I always got when I realised that our spending was still way out of control.

‘I’m doing all I can!’ Ginny declared, sparking with reproach. ‘You make it sound as though I’m trying to make things worse or something!’

‘Of course I don’t think that. I just—’ But a futility blocked my words.

Ginny’s mouth was buttoned down in that expression of hurt and abandonment I knew so well, and, with a swoop of defeat, I reached for her hand. ‘Sorry, sorry . . .’ I wondered how many times we said sorry to each other in the course of an average tiff, and how little this immense weight of apology seemed to achieve.

‘It’s all right,’ she said, with a glint of the uncertain humour she used to signal the end of our arguments. ‘I’ll cut down on the cat food and serve up leftovers and fire Consuela. And if all else fails I can always go on the streets.’ She gave a brave little smile. ‘Not past it yet.’

I took my cue. ‘You can say that again. You’d make a fortune.’

As I put my arms round her I had the sensation of falling off the edge of my life and not being able to stop.

‘Do you shoot?’ asked Lady Werner.

‘No, I’m afraid not.’

‘Ride?’

‘The last horse spotted my beginner’s label at fifty yards and rubbed me off against a tree.’

Lady Werner had the generosity to laugh before turning to respond to the man on her right. It was a relief not to talk for a moment. I was finding conversation hard, partly because I’d drunk too much wine – I was making the most of the last of the good claret I’d laid down ten years ago – partly because my troubles kept blundering into the forefront of my mind, obstructing my words.

I stared dimly at the brilliant scene before me, at the banks of candles and flowers extending down the table, at the rich ruby glow of the wall hangings, at the blood-red and gold of the wine reflected off the crystal; I saw Ginny at the far end of the table, her marble complexion and fine-etched beauty perfectly framed by the vibrant colours around her. I watched her tilt her head towards Werner and listen with rapt attention, and I felt disconnected from the scene, like an imposter in some exotic spectacle.

When the party moved to the drawing room for coffee, I slipped away upstairs and sat in the quiet of the bathroom, gripping my head in my hands, staring unseeing at the carpet. When a return could be avoided no longer, I splashed cold water over my face and made my way back downstairs.

Fortunately Werner wasn’t a demanding conversationalist. I only had to slip in the occasional nod or comment to keep him going for half an hour on the subject of art sponsorship. Harder to stomach was a lawyer called Hodgworth-Hill, whose smooth overbearing manner and open contempt for what he called the common herd began to grate on my overstretched nerves. I wondered why Ginny had asked him; I couldn’t imagine he was involved in charity work. Listening to his gabble I felt a sudden upsurge of resentment. I had the suspicion he would be the last of the dinner guests to leave and I was right.

‘But he’s staying,’ Ginny declared when I caught her in the hall. ‘I told you! Come and play backgammon!’ she urged with feverish gaiety. ‘Come on! We’ll set up two boards!’

She pulled at my hand but I mumbled an excuse about needing to go upstairs for a minute.

Her return to the drawing room was greeted with a cheer. I heard the bombastic tones of the lawyer, followed by shouts of raucous laughter and the clink of glasses, and something overturned inside me. I stood there in the hall, trying to make sense of my raging thoughts, aware that I had reached some terrifying crisis but not absolutely sure what it was about, let alone how to contain it. I only knew that I couldn’t face another moment among these people, that I had to get away.

Once the urge to flee overtook me, it became a desperate compulsion. I didn’t stop to think where I would go or how long I would stay away, I didn’t pause to consider Ginny, I only knew I had to escape. I raced upstairs and, throwing my evening clothes on the floor, pulled on some old jeans and a sweater. Pausing only to scribble a note to Ginny, I blundered out to my car and careered off.

It was madness to drive. I was way over the drink-driving limit, but the stupidity of what I was doing was lost in my greater panic and the need to feel that I was, in some muddled way, regaining a degree of control over my life.

I set out blindly, yet there was never any question of where I would go. Dittisham was the one place I could be alone, the one place where I would have a chance to think.

There was little traffic, the motorway was like a wide black tunnel, I had the sensation of flying. Somehow I stayed awake, miraculously I didn’t kill anyone. Arriving at Dittisham in the dead of night, I wandered from room to room. I couldn’t get over how quiet it was. The hush was miraculous, an all-enveloping cocoon of calm. It seemed to me that I had never really noticed it before, that my mind had been closed to such things for a long time.

Exhaustion made me maudlin. I felt a sudden longing for the past, for the simplicity and focus of my early life. I thought of my father and how much he had meant to me. I grasped at the more elusive memories of my mother, dead for more than twenty years, and thought how little I had really known her.

Eventually I climbed the stairs and, hesitating outside the guest room Ginny and I had always used when we came to stay, passed on down the passage to the small room that had been mine as a boy. It was a storage room now, stacked with trunks and tea chests, but an old metal bed still stood in one corner, and, perched on a rickety table next to it, a lamp from my Indian travels, crowned by a parchment shade. Beneath the bed were my watercolours, hundreds of them, bundled into cardboard folders, relics of the years when I’d had the ambition to paint. It was many years since I had attempted any sort of picture.

Opening the window, I lay down on the hard mattress under an ancient blanket. There was hardly any wind, just a faint movement in the air, but it must have been wafting from the river because I could hear the faint lapping of water. Stupefied by the memories of a thousand untroubled nights, I slept like a child.

‘Nothing gentle about the way David woke me, of course. Rattled the bed head. He wasn’t too pleased with me.’

‘Well, we hadn’t had the best of nights,’ Mary commented drily. ‘Ginny called at something like two, then again half an hour later, not to mention the calls the next morning. We told her you probably weren’t answering the phone, but she wanted David to go and find you there and then, in the middle of the night.’

‘I didn’t hear the phone, I’m afraid.’

‘Why should you?’ For the first time it struck me that Mary actively disapproved of Ginny’s permanent state of edgy anxiety.

‘I didn’t mean to worry Ginny.’

‘David flatly refused, of course. To go out and look for you. Until the morning anyway.’

‘I wasn’t leaving her – it was nothing like that,’ I said, seeking to justify myself further. ‘I never stopped loving her . . .’ But in saying this I was no longer sure what I meant by love, and whether it must always contain so much effort and pain. ‘She worked so hard at everything, at making our lives . . .
full
.’