Old Sins (130 page)

‘Well for instance, she thought I would like being involved in the stores. And maybe I would. I could just about take that, I guess. I like clothes and nice things.’

‘Yes,’ said Roz, looking at him as he lounged in front of the fire, his long long legs encased in Levis, worn with brown knee-high leather boots, a dark green cashmere polo from Ralph Lauren, a soft brown leather jacket. ‘You’ve learnt your way round the London shops pretty fast, I must say.’

‘Yeah, well it isn’t difficult.’

‘What other ideas did Letitia have?’

‘Well, she thought I might like working with the design guy. What’s his name, David Somebody?’

‘Ah,’ said Roz, ‘David Sassoon.’

‘Yeah, that’s it. I did art at high school. I liked it.’

‘Yes, but with the greatest respect, Miles, you can’t just walk into a very high-powered design set-up and think you can start making waves on the strength of a few school art lessons. It’s a very sophisticated business these days; you’d have to go to art school, learn what you were doing.’

‘OK, OK,’ he said, smiling lazily at her. ‘No need to get all uptight. It was only an idea anyway. Nobody’s actually gone out and bought me a desk. I haven’t even thought it all through yet.’

‘Sorry.’ She smiled at him with an effort. ‘It’s just that it’s a very complex business. I get upset when people imply it’s simple.’

‘You get upset altogether too easily,’ he said. ‘I keep telling you.’

‘Yes, well, I don’t have that much to be happy about at the moment,’ she said.

‘Oh, I don’t know. You have a few pluses in your life.’

‘Like?’

‘Well, like you’re not starving, are you? Not pushed for the odd buck?’

‘No. No, of course not. But –’

‘But money isn’t everything. Is that what you were going to say?’

‘Yes. Yes, I was.’

‘It isn’t everything,’ he said with a sigh, ‘but it sure is a lot. You ask a few people who don’t have any, see what they say.’

‘Yes, I know,’ she said, ‘and of course I’m very lucky in that way, we all are, but it doesn’t, it really doesn’t, buy happiness, contentment, love; it doesn’t ease pain.’

And to her horror she felt her eyes fill with tears.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘that’s good. Cry. Cry and cry. Yell if you want. Let it out.’

‘I can’t,’ she said, smiling at him shakily, ‘not here. Everyone would hear.’

‘OK. We’ll go for a walk. Come on.’ He put out his hand, pulled her up. ‘Get your coat.’

‘Oh, this is ridiculous,’ she said, ‘going for a walk just so I can let out a primeval scream or two.’

‘It isn’t ridiculous at all. You need it. You don’t have to scream anyway. You can just talk it out if you want to.’

‘Oh, all right. Let’s go for a walk anyway. The dogs would like it.’

They fetched coats, put on boots, and Peveril’s three labradors, who had been prancing excitedly round the Great Hall ever since they had first heard the magic word, followed them ecstatically down into the woods.

‘Now I feel silly,’ said Roz, brushing aside a small branch, ‘I can’t cry now, you’re watching me.’

‘OK. You don’t have to cry. You don’t even have to talk. I keep telling you, I just want to help. This was the only way I could see just then.’

‘You are a nice person, Miles,’ she said looking at him, ‘you really are. Why are you so nice?’

He shrugged. ‘Don’t know. My mom and dad were pretty nice people. I guess that helps. My granny is real nice. I’ve had some very nice girlfriends. Plenty of people to set me a good example.’

Roz looked at him. ‘I know Granny Letitia talked to you about – about the possibility that my father was yours. I was worried about that, too. I never told you and I’ve never managed to talk to you about it since, but I was awfully glad that he wasn’t. That it wasn’t possible.’

‘Me too. For lots of reasons.’

‘Yes.’

He looked at her and grinned. ‘Wild, huh? Us being related. Brother and sister.’

‘Yes, well,’ said Roz shortly, ‘we’re not.’

‘No.’

He was suddenly very quiet, walking through the leaves, kicking them almost savagely.

‘What is it, Miles?’

‘Oh – oh, nothing.’

‘Now
you’re
not letting things out. Come on, tell me. If you want to.’

He turned to her, and she saw his blue eyes were full of pain, that there were tears in them. She stepped towards him.

‘Miles, what is it? Please tell me.’

‘Oh, well, I was just remembering, you know, it was the last time I ever saw her; she was in the hospital dying, and I was only small, thirteen years old, and I remember thinking I couldn’t
bear it, and I lay there, on her bed in the hospital in her arms, and I just wanted to stay with her, to hold her hand and go with her wherever she was going, and I knew I couldn’t, and I was so unhappy and kind of scared. In the end she went to sleep and they came and told me I should leave, and I had to climb off the bed very gently, very carefully, and go without waking her, and that was the moment when she died for me. Actually she died the next day,’ he said, brushing the tears from his face, ‘but I never saw her again.’

He sat down abruptly on the wet ground; Roz sat beside him. She put her arm round his shoulder, took one of his hands, rested her head against him.

‘I know it’s trite to say it,’ she said, ‘but I think I do know how you feel. And I’m so sorry. But at least you said goodbye to your mother. You were able to say everything you wanted to. That must be a comfort, I should think.’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes, it is. They were happy days in a way, when she was dying. Can you imagine that?’

‘Yes,’ said Roz, thinking of the nightmare three days of her father’s death as he lay in intensive care, an obscene mesh of wires and tubes in and around him, when she had stood and looked at him from outside the room, refusing to go in because Phaedria had been there sitting beside him. ‘Yes, I think I can.’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s a long time ago. Mostly I don’t mind any more. Obviously.’

‘Well, I’m very sorry if I made you unhappy. I wouldn’t have done that for anything.’

He turned and looked at her, took one of her hands and kissed it, then leant forward and kissed her mouth, tenderly, gently, lovingly.

‘You’re a nice lady,’ he said. ‘You didn’t. And I like you very much. Very very much.’

New York, Scotland, London, Eleuthera, 1985–6

PHAEDRIA SPENT MUCH
of the flight to New York being sick. She reflected miserably, looking at her ashen, haggard face in the mirror in the plane lavatory, that until she had got mixed up with the Morell family she had never been sick in her life and for the past year she seemed to have been throwing up almost constantly. It did not seem quite the sort of thing normally associated with life with the rich and famous; she wondered, managing a shaky smile at herself, where she had gone wrong.

She also felt bereft without Julia, without her constant, reassuring, demanding company. She didn’t exactly feel worried about her, Nanny Hunter was quite wonderful and they were staying at Marriotts with Mrs Mildred to keep an eye on things as well, and the excellent GP down there had promised to look in every day just to make sure the baby was perfectly well, but she was quite simply missing her horribly: she felt oddly distracted, some piece of her still fixed firmly behind. Well, it was only for four days. Four days: and two of them with Michael. Phaedria felt interestingly nervous at the notion. She felt she was being presented to him, or at least presenting herself, for examination, rather like an interesting species under the microscope. It was the first time they would spend any time together by arrangement, from choice, and it felt oddly awkward, embarrassing even.

On the other hand, it was a glorious prospect. She surveyed the time, uninterrupted, unthreatened, time to talk, to do things, to make discoveries about one another, and smiled with pure pleasure. Then she considered that the time was likely, indeed certain, to involve a great deal of sex, and she felt sick again. It was not the prospect of the sex itself that was provoking the nausea, but sheer fright at the thought of actually, finally, having to go to bed with Michael. She wanted to, she longed for it, had been longing for it for what seemed like ever, but there was something oddly calculating about the circumstances in which it had to happen. ‘Here you are,’ Fate
seemed to be saying to them both, firmly, sternly even, ‘together at last. Perform.’ This was, as the saying went, no rehearsal, and she was terribly afraid she was going to fluff her lines.

Her fear was partly, largely even, she knew (and recognizing this knowledge sent her lurching into the lavatory yet again) because Michael had had this long, long affair with Roz. And then Phaedria was not confident about herself and her own sexuality at all; she had only ever been to bed with Julian, and he had been (she supposed) very skilful and talented. But she had always been aware that her own input had been very limited, indeed Julian had tended to discourage anything but a fairly passive role from her in bed (and would have liked the same kind of behaviour elsewhere, she thought with a pang that was half amusement, half regret). And much of the time, she had not felt that she was very responsive to him even: there had been occasions when their lovemaking had been wonderful, exquisite even – the night in the car, the last night before Julian’s heart attack, on their honeymoon after she had recovered from her sunburn – but the very fact she could tick them off on her fingers worried her even; maybe she was frigid. Sex certainly hadn’t been up to now a highly motivating force in her life; she often worried also that since Julian’s death she really had not felt any serious frustration at all. Michael had stirred her senses, made her think about sex a great deal, but then, she felt, to a degree that was the emotional excitement of their relationship rather than her own physical needs. At least, she thought, she had felt something very strong for Miles that day; at least something good had come out of it.

Roz was clearly very sexually motivated, and very sexy, everyone said so, and that just made everything worse, for she would be there, inevitably, a strong, fearsome presence haunting the bed; Phaedria, with yet another pang of terror and misery, wondered just how she was going to handle any of it. Well, there was no escape now. Short of staying on the plane and going back to London, or telling Michael she had changed her mind, she had to go through with it.

She suddenly heard the beep going that meant they were beginning the descent. She washed her face for what seemed like the hundredth time that morning, cleaned her teeth,
brushed her hair, and walked as steadily as she could back to her seat, and on to centre stage.

‘You look terrible,’ said Michael, holding her at ami’s length away from him. ‘I cannot believe how terrible you look.’

He had been standing waiting for her by customs; her heart tipped over at the sight of him. She was struck forcibly, not for the first time, at the way he projected sexual power. He had an immense suppressed energy; he moved slowly, but as if he was waiting for something, as if he was about to take off at great speed. He had obviously made a great effort to look impressive for her; he had on a grey coat she had not seen before with a black velvet collar; his hair was neatly brushed, he was very freshly shaved, his tie was straight, his shirt uncrumpled. His dark eyes, exploring hers, exploring her, were tentative, tender; his mouth oddly soft and half smiling. He looked, she thought, almost cheerful.

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘You, on the other hand, look very nice. Did anyone tell you your face looks as if you had slept in it?’

‘No, I don’t think so. But if it’s your phrase I like it. What have you been doing, for God’s sake?’

‘Throwing up,’ said Phaedria slightly sheepishly.

‘Dear God,’ he said, ‘if you are to continue to vomit every time we come close to one another, I’m not sure there is a great deal of future in this relationship. Come on, darling, Franco is outside with the car. Should I get some strong paper bags in for you?’

‘No,’ she said, smiling at him, thinking how, as always, he carried happiness for her in his wake. ‘No, I’m all right now.’

‘Good.’

The mammoth black stretch waited by the kerb; Franco was ignoring, with an earnest insolence, the harassment of a traffic cop. ‘Good heavens,’ said Phaedria, surveying the car’s length, its tinted windows, its waving aerials, ‘you’ve brought the apartment with you.’

‘Yeah, there’s a double bed and a Jacuzzi inside. Get in, darling, or we’ll all be arrested.’

She got in. ‘This is quite a car,’ she said.

‘It gets me about.’

‘I never understand why these things have two aerials.’

‘One’s for the TV. Keeps me awake while I’m driving. Franco, we’ll just go home for now.’

‘Sure thing, Mr Browning.’

They pulled away from the airport; she sat awkwardly, slightly apart from him, on the back seat, silent, looking out of the window. He looked at her, and his lips twitched.

‘Are you going to tell me what’s the matter, or shall I tell you?’

She looked at him startled. ‘Nothing’s the matter.’

‘Of course there is. Otherwise you wouldn’t be sitting over there like a frightened rabbit.’

She smiled sheepishly. ‘Well, I – well, it’s –’

He smiled at her. ‘OK. Let me tell you. You’re scared. Here we are, two people hardly knowing one another, and the Man Upstairs has shacked us up together for two whole days and told us to get on with it. And in among all the other things we have to get on with is a whole load of screwing. And you know I’ve been to bed a great many times with Roz and I know you’ve been to bed a great many times with her father, and neither of us knows quite how we are going to handle it. Well, let me tell you, baby, I’m shit scared too.’

‘Oh, Michael,’ said Phaedria, crawling thankfully across the seat and into his arms, ‘how is it you always make everything absolutely all right?’

They went to bed as soon as they got back to the duplex. Michael said firmly, removing her coat, taking her hand, leading her up the stairs, that it was really the only thing to do, to get it over and done with. ‘We will deflower one another,’ he said, very seriously, ‘and then we can start to enjoy ourselves.’