Objects of Desire (15 page)

‘You are clever, Page.’

‘Well, unfortunately I have had to be.’

‘Everything went surprisingly well. To be honest, I think I’m a little overwhelmed by it all.’

‘I thought for a moment there that Piers Hamilton Hazlit might have done a little overwhelming himself,’ Page teased.

Piers stepped from the hotel into Carlos Place and discreetly slipped the doorman a five-pound note for watching Sally’s black BMW cabriolet. He took several long strides towards Sally who was not as he had left
her, sitting in the car, but standing by it talking to a friend he vaguely recognised. Sally had so many friends: shopping girlfriends, and lunching girlfriends, health-club girlfriends, old girlfriends and new girlfriends – too many friends for his liking.

Looking at her, he felt a moment’s sadness, something poignant, for all the things they had not been to each other. He could still look at Sally and like her, want her, in the same selfish way he had always wanted her and had kept her. Sally was a perfect little package of feminine delight. That was the problem: she was nothing more and nothing less. He made no excuses to himself or to anyone else for liking her Barbie-doll looks, nor for tolerating her frivolous lifestyle. The superficial values that governed her life, her lack of ambition, her exquisite passivity, her adoration of him, had all suited his needs. She had taken little thinking about.

Piers Hamilton Steven George Hazlit was a man mindful of his background and his obligations who was smart enough to manage his affairs through delegation to estate managers and agents so that he was free to play as he wished. His relationship with Sally had always stopped short of love; it was more easygoing fun, convenient sex. She was, if nothing else, a fun girl, an uncomplicated personality. That was good for a man who wanted an affair that takes little, if any, effort at all.

Piers had liked the way Sally was there, always waiting for his return. But he had always been aware
that they were two people adding nothing to each other’s lives. Because they shared nothing together but great sex, it had always been in his mind to end their relationship. Doing so had become an imperative because she had made the fatal mistake of pressing him for marriage and children.

There was little if any guile in Sally. She had undermined her case for a wedding band and a white dress when she was honest enough to admit to Piers that she saw marriage and children as a hedge against old age and loneliness, and that she did not expect that they would change either Piers’s or her lifestyle, which she was perfectly content with. She had played the wrong hand, gambled and lost.

As he looked at her, he realised he would miss her. Her tininess. Everything about Sally was petite: hands, feet, the perfect little breasts, the slim beautifully formed figure. She had often teased him. ‘How clever I am to have been born the right size and shape for Piers Hamilton Steven George Hazlit to play with.’ And she was clever enough to know she was a toy. How many times had she told him she didn’t mind being his play thing, she liked being a full-sized Barbie doll? That was the problem: he could never understand that that was all she wanted to be.

He had told her from the beginning that he wanted more, but underneath her up-market doll’s looks there was a feisty, amusing and sexy lady who hung on to him tenaciously. What Piers could give her was what Sally wanted, and because he gave it to her, she loved
him. She’d waited him out, year after year, and now the years were up as far as he was concerned. She had become boring, the life they lived together too stale and predictable.

Her long dark blonde hair highlighted with streaks of ash and frosted white reflected different shades of gold in the afternoon sunlight. The perfect small pointed face with its turned-up nose and beestung sexy lips, rouged in pale coral lipstick, the huge brown eyes and long thick lashes … She was like the whipped cream on a Viennese hot chocolate. Delicious. He heard her laughter and watched her stand back from her friend, one hand on her hip as she twirled round, as if modelling her Jean Muir wide trousers and long, perfectly cut, soft jacket of the palest pink cashmere, so soft and feminine, so delectable.

The woman, a brunette not nearly as pretty as Sally, but well turned out, said, ‘I love it.’

They saw Piers approaching and the women kissed the air on either side of the other’s face, the girlfriend farewell. They greeted Piers, and the other woman left. He thought rather hurriedly.

‘Do you know what Evelyn said when I told her you’ve dumped me?’

‘I wish you wouldn’t put it that way.’

‘How would you like me to put it?’

‘We’re leaving each other on amicable terms because there is no future for us.’

‘Maybe not for you, Piers, but there was for me. Don’t look so worried. I lied. I’ve been kinder to you
than you deserve. Amicable was the very word I used.’

‘You know that it’s right for us to go our own ways, you just don’t want to admit it.’

Sally had a conspiratorial look about her. It prompted him to ask, ‘Evelyn looked at me as if I were the enemy, I can’t help but wonder what else you’ve told her and the army of girlfriends you run with?’

‘That you’re sending me on a trip round the world as a consolation prize, to ease your conscience, because you think I need a change of scene as well as a change of life – so I can’t make lunch next Thursday.’

‘Change of scene, change of lifestyle, Sally, and well you know it. You make it sound like a penance. You don’t have to go, you know, you can spend the rest of your life lunching with the girls at San Lorenzo.’

‘Don’t worry, Piers, if I don’t like Page Cooper, whoever she might be, and her travel plans, I
will
be lunching at San Lorenzo next Thursday.’ And she started to walk past him.

He stopped her with a hand on her arm, ‘You’ll like Page Cooper, she’s not at all what I expected.’

‘Well, let’s hope she’s not what I expect her to be like.’

Piers placed his arm round her. Looking down at her, he said, ‘I’ll wait here in the car for you, Sally. Friends? We were never each other’s great love, you know that as well as I do. We just suited each other for a long time. It’s not me you’ll miss, it’s the lifestyle you got used to. Friends?’ he queried again.

Sally knew he was being honest and genuine; she
wanted him to be less honest, less genuine, and less right. He was one of the great catches in the bachelor stakes on the English aristocratic circuit and she had lost him, he had wriggled off the hook. She felt her failure and the loss too deeply to talk of friendship now. She did hope that Page Cooper was all right, though, because the truth was that it wouldn’t be easy facing those girlie lunches, having to get a job, going on the open market for a new man in her life. Travel, all expenses paid, did sound like a penance but was her best option until everyone got used to her break up with Piers, and especially Sally herself.

‘Maybe,’ she told him, and hurried away.

Piers watched her walk into the hotel. She would be all right. He had no doubt they would some day be friends again. What she could not understand, what he had always understood, was that they had been friends who fucked well together, had good times, nothing more than a happy-go-lucky couple who ran with a fun crowd when it suited Piers, and where Sally ran alone when it suited Piers.

Sally had come a long way in the years since he had picked her up at the Dior counter in Harrod’s. He smiled to himself, remembering how enchanted he had been by her Lancashire accent. It somehow didn’t fit the pretty, petite, soft and sexy look of her. Even now he found her northern accent, though fainter after living in the south and running with upper-class-accented girlfriends for so many years, sexy and appealing. She had stood out from the other sales
ladies plying their wares under the bright lights for not being heavily made up and looking just a little vulnerable. Piers had always had a fondness for vulnerable women.

He took a cigar from the case in the inside breast pocket of his jacket, a silver cutter from another pocket. Cutting the tip of the long, slim, hand-rolled Havana cigar, the same brand his father had always smoked, he dropped it in the ashtray. He turned the cigar slowly as he placed the flame of a match to it and puffed. It burned evenly just as the flame reached his fingertips and died. He lit a cigar in exactly the same way his father had. Piers did many things precisely as his father had, he was very much his father’s son.

He turned to look over his shoulder through the rear window of the car. If Sally was not coming through that hotel door that was a good sign. She had taken a look at the women and had liked them enough to sit down and talk to them. He would give her fifteen minutes. If she was not out by then, he would leave a message with the doorman that he had gone to White’s, his club, and would see her later at home.

He turned back in his seat and relaxed. Home. It brought a smile to his lips. Not the four-bedroomed Hays Mews house, once large stables that had belonged to the family’s eighteenth-century Charles Street town house, where he lived when he was in town, but the house he really considered home, Chalfont, a crumbling mansion with a fifteen-thousand-acre estate less than two hours from London. His smile was
in memory of the first time he had brought Sally home for Sunday lunch with the family. Well, the family and sixteen others.

Chalfont Under Edge was not quite the picture postcard image of the perfect Cotswold village but close enough. Its residents took a snobbish pride in being part of Wiltshire and not the tourist-ridden Cotswolds. Piers had pulled his black two-seater Jaguar up before the village pub, the Horse and Hounds, for a drink before going on to the house. It had been packed with people. Heads had turned and the pub had fallen silent when Sally entered but then the chatter and buzz resumed the moment Piers entered behind her. There were pats on the back, handshakes, greetings for him. He had ushered her through the pub to the bar and ordered them drinks. Piers introduced Sally to the publican Jim Withers, the barmaid Sheryl, and several other men standing at the bar.

‘The crowd from the house has been and gone, Piers.’

‘Were there many, Jim?’

‘Quite a few.’

He had turned to Sally and said, ‘Chalfont has a good table.’

‘I don’t know what that means, Piers.’

‘It means people like dining at my mother’s table because she serves good food and wine in abundance. The flowers, table settings, silver, even the guests, are never boring or mean.’

She had smiled at him. It had been an enigmatic smile and when he held the car door open for her he
had asked, ‘Why did you smile when I told you Mother had a good table?’

Quite charmingly she had risen on to her toes and kissed him on the cheek, answering, ‘You’re a real toff, so very upper-class sometimes, and I love it. I suppose I’ll love it even more when I can stop thinking it’s a joke you’re playing on me.’

He puffed on his cigar and opened a window. He could still be amused by remembering those early days with Sally. His mind drifted back again. They had only known each other a few weeks that first time he had brought her to Chalfont.

He drove through the massive ornamental iron gates swung back on stone plinths topped by weatherworn lions with broken tails, the odd leg or ear missing too. The five-hundred-year-old trees and parkland with its lake, the crumbling stone bridge over a stream that fed it, a gentle rolling landscape that Capability Brown had had something to do with, a private English parkland that had seen better times and many more gardeners, was still a place of majestic beauty. The Jacobean stone house, mellowed by the centuries, with its towers and turrets, its lead domes and roof and its many chimneys, was not huge by stately home standards but reeked of history and upper-class privilege. To most first-time visitors it brought gasps of astonishment, admiration, wonder.

But not to the Lancashire lass, Sally Brown. She was a girl who took everything in her stride. She showed none of the awe that many other girls had
when he brought them home for Sunday lunch. Her only comment had been, ‘This house suits you. What fun to be born in a house like this.’

His mother and father had been alive then. His mother, Lady Elspeth, not a great beauty by any standards in her youth, had never improved as some women did with old age. She had, however, been a woman of infinite charm, and famous for her independent spirit and eccentricities. It had been from his mother that he had inherited both his fun-loving nature and his desire for solitude, as and when he wanted it.

Lady Elspeth’s comment, the only one she had ever made to him about Sally, was: ‘She is a nice young thing, Piers. When you’re through playing with her, see you don’t throw her away like a broken toy.’

His father was a handsome man whom Piers admired and resembled not only in looks but in spirit: they shared the same wanderlust, always a challenge to be taken up, an exploration to organise, an expedition to join, some romantic adventure to embark on. That had been his father’s life, and he taken his family with him sometimes, his son certainly from a very young age. Before he became a cabinet minister, he had been an unofficial emissary who travelled abroad to sort out problems for Queen and country. He had been charming to Sally, and when he and Piers had taken an after-lunch walk to the folly on the edge of the lake, had told his son, ‘You are like me in so many ways, my boy. In my day there were showgirls,
actresses, pretty things like your Miss Brown. They’re usually more clever than you think.’

And Sally had been clever, very. She had understood his character and had inched her way into his life by seeing to it that he didn’t have to think about her. Sally was just there. Not at all obtrusive but there, a presence in his life that he hardly had to think about. His friends, the women as well as the men, travelling companions and literary associates, all became her friends.

Harrod’s had soon been left behind. She had been nineteen when he had picked her up at the perfume counter and six weeks later he allowed her to move into his London mews house. He liked keeping her. Every day she learned a little bit better how to fit into Mayfair society and his world, and bettered herself effortlessly. He liked her, respected her for that, that she was changing her life, up-grading herself without losing the essential character he was so attracted to. And she did it without making a great issue of it, that was important to their relationship. How clever she had been to know that. He had been amused by the frivolous life she had chosen for herself: the gossiping, the lunching with girlfriends. Her life became one of shopping, beauty salons, hairdressers and dressing up, most of all just being pretty and amusing and there for him when he wanted her.