Something Dangerous (Spoils of Time 02) (3 page)

‘Mummy? You all right?’

‘Yes. Yes, I’m fine. Thank you, darling.’

‘I thought I heard you shouting. You don’t look fine.’

‘Well, I am. Good day at school?’

‘Yes, very. Where are the twins?’

‘Getting ready.’

‘What’s that wizard car outside?’

‘The little red one? It’s their birthday present.’

‘They’ve got a car! Lucky beasts. Can I go and sit in it? When can I have a ride, I want a go—’

Celia laughed, restored as always to good humour and happiness by his presence. The intensity of her feelings for Kit, her beloved youngest child, was so powerful it eclipsed almost every other emotion she knew. Not only beautiful, with his bright gold hair and his dark-blue eyes, not only brilliant – reading at four, writing stories and poetry at seven – but hugely charming, with the kind of social grace seldom seen in a child. At an age when most boys were able to converse only about cricket, model trains and the beastliness of school, Kit liked to talk about books, other people, adults as well as his own friends, and the events of the day. He read the newspaper quite thoroughly every morning at breakfast, and for his last birthday had requested his own Gecophone radio, with its horn and neat wooden box, so much more convenient than a crystal set, so that he could listen to the news and to concerts in his own room.

The twins found this entirely baffling; their own preferred, and indeed only, form of home entertainment being the gramophone on which they played records of dance music, practising new steps with one another ready for the next party or nightclub. Neither did they read the newspapers or books; fashion and society magazines satisfied all their literary requirements.

‘You’ll grow up dreary and boring like Giles,’ they had warned Kit more than once, ‘or even Barty.’ To which he would reply that he thought Barty was the jolliest of girls, and Giles not boring at all either; but in fact he was not in the least serious himself, he had a sense of humour and fun that was irresistible and inexhaustible and he loved to sit on the twins’ beds listening to them chattering and giggling, asking them about their friends, most of whom made a great fuss of him when they came to the house, and where they were going that evening.

‘You’d better be careful, baby brother,’ Venetia had said one night, ‘Mummy wouldn’t approve of your interest in this sort of thing you know. Far too frivolous.’

‘Mummy approves of everything I do,’ said Kit, with the sublime self-confidence of the youngest child, and although he smiled as he said it, it was perfectly true.

Later, when he had gone to bed, Adele said, ‘He is a dear little chap. He is awfully pretty too. Good thing he’s not going away to school just yet. Perhaps that’s why Mummy wouldn’t let him—’

‘Oh it’s much worse at public school,’ said Venetia airily, ‘Boy Warwick told me he had the most terrible time at Eton until he learned to box. After that they left him alone. Anyway, I’m sure Mummy doesn’t know about that sort of thing.’

‘Kit, run along, darling,’ said Celia now, ‘go and get changed for dinner.’

‘OK.’

‘And don’t say OK in your grandmama’s hearing. Please.’

‘OK.’

‘Kit!’

She looked at him sharply; his face was innocently blank. Then he grinned at her. ‘I won’t. I promise. Hallo, Father, just going.’

Oliver disapproved of his rather constant visits to their bedroom; he frowned at Celia. She was stubbing out her cigarette.

‘I wish you wouldn’t smoke in our bedroom, Celia.’

‘I’m sorry, Oliver.’ She so rarely apologised, that she was surprised to hear herself doing it. ‘I was – very annoyed about something.’

‘Then perhaps you should try to be annoyed in your study. What is it?’

‘Sebastian’s going to be very late. Possibly not here until after nine.’

‘Really? That’s unlike him. What’s happened?’

‘He’s been asked to give a second reading. At the Bodleian. The first one was sold out completely.’

‘Well, that’s good, I suppose. For all of us.’

‘You know perfectly well that’s not the point. It’s rude and unkind and extremely arrogant. Clearly being the most prominent children’s author in the country has finally gone to his head. The twins will be so upset—’

‘Celia, I don’t really think they’ll mind very much at all. They have their own friends here, they’re going on to some nightclub, I don’t really think the absence of one rather elderly gentleman—’

‘Sebastian is not elderly, Oliver. He’s our – your age.’

‘And no doubt seems very elderly to them. Of course it’s a shame, but I’m sure he’ll do his best to get here. He’s very professional. You of all people should respect that.’

Celia was silent. ‘I’ll go and have my bath,’ she said finally, ‘someone has to be ready for this birthday party.’

Years of painful experience had taught her when to give in; when – and only when – Oliver had her in checkmate.

CHAPTER 2

‘Celia, dear, you look tired.’

‘Well, thank you for that, LM,’ said Celia, slightly coldly. They were moving into the dining room after cocktails (mixed rather inexpertly by the twins themselves). ‘Exactly what one wants to hear at the beginning of an evening. I’m not in the least tired, as a matter of fact.’

‘Well, I’m delighted to hear it,’ said LM. ‘I envy you. I’m very tired myself.’

Celia looked at her: it was true. LM did look – well, not exhausted, but weary. She worked much too hard; her position as managing director of Lyttons demanded it to an extent of course, but she could perfectly well have more help. She always said it wasn’t worth it, that it would be more trouble than it was worth. Probably right, too; in Celia’s experience, it was usually a great deal quicker and easier to do things yourself. Just the same, LM wasn’t very young any more: Oliver’s big sister, as she always described herself, was fifty-four this year. The initials actually stood for Little Margaret, for she had been named after her mother; but no name could have suited her less and indeed nobody remembered it most of the time. She was a daunting figure, and became more so as she grew older: tall, very tall, over six foot, thin, with a deep voice and extraordinarily probing dark eyes in a pale face. She dressed with great severity, almost eccentricity, even now wearing the uniform of her girlhood, long skirts, tailored shirts and cravats, tailored jackets, and her mass of dark hair, greying now, was drawn tautly back into a rigidly neat chignon. But she was an acutely attractive woman, with an instant and rather surprising warmth and a quick, sharp humour; men still found her sexually attractive and women invariably liked her too for her directness and lack of guile. She was, Celia often said, her very best friend; they had been through a great deal together.

‘How’s Jay?’ said Kit politely as they sat down. He had been placed next to LM at Celia’s suggestion, knowing he would ask her about Jay, and that she would be able to answer at great length.

‘He’s very well, thank you. Enjoying this term. He’s being tried out for the junior First Eleven already, and he’s playing tennis for his junior house team. And then he’s in the choir—’ LM’s voice had softened; her adoration of Jay, her only child, was legendary in the family, and the only time anyone had seen her cry had been when he had gone away to Winchester the term before. Indeed Gordon, her husband and Jay’s stepfather, had frequently said he would name Jay in any divorce petition he brought.

‘No doubt at all about who LM loves best,’ he would say cheerfully, his pale blue eyes twinkling at her, ‘and it isn’t me.’

A lesser man might have been genuinely jealous of Jay and of LM’s passion for him; but Gordon Robinson was blithely unconcerned by it. He had fallen in love with LM and married her only six years earlier; to him, Jay had been a part not simply of LM’s life but of her very self, and her love for him was essential to her own generous and passionate nature. The fact that she was too old to bear him a child of his own was of no interest to him; small children horrified him. Jay, at eight, tough, cheerful, hugely intelligent, with a passion for the countryside and for wildlife that matched his own, seemed to Gordon an ideal child, readily assimilated into his life.

Gordon came into the room now, talking intently to Oliver; he towered over everyone, making even the huge dining room seem suddenly smaller. He was enormously tall, six foot seven, one of the few men LM could literally look up to, as she often said. Celia adored him, said he was the best addition to the family since herself.

‘My dear Celia, may I say again how lovely you look. Incredible that you should be the mother of all these grown-up children.’

‘I’m not grown up,’ said Kit, ‘I keep her feeling young. Don’t I, Mummy?’

‘For now you do, Kit, yes. I don’t want you growing up any more, though.’

Kit smiled at her. ‘I’ll try.’

‘If you succeed,’ said Oliver, ‘I hope you’ll share your secret with the rest of us. Now, Gordon, why don’t you sit next to Celia, Sebastian is going to be late, detained at some reading or other and Venetia, you sit here next to me and then you, young man and—’

It had been a very good party so far, Giles thought; everyone was chattering away, no one sitting awkwardly silent – except for him, of course. He was used to it, to feeling dull and awkward in company, it was as much a part of any social occasion as getting dressed up and then trying not to drink too much in an attempt to feel more relaxed. But it didn’t get any easier. He looked at them all rather wistfully. His grandmother, the Countess of Beckenham, was delivering a rather technical lecture to anyone who would listen on the importance of keeping bloodstock pure and his grandfather was having a perfectly wonderful time with one of the twins’ prettier friends, apparently listening intently to her account of all the dances she had attended that season, but his attention, Giles knew, was fixed entirely on her unfashionably full bosom. (It had been agreed beforehand with the twins that her personality was quite robust enough to withstand such an onslaught.)

Oliver’s younger brother Jack and the lovely Lily – as she had been known on the theatre posters when Jack had first met her – were sitting rather unconventionally next to one another; they liked to do this, being still rather engagingly in love after seven years of marriage. Giles was half in love with Lily himself; she was so absolutely gorgeous with her red hair and her extremely full white bosom. And Boy Warwick, of course, was charming everyone as usual: smooth bastard, thought Giles. God, he envied him. Most of his relationship with Boy was based on envy, he could never quite understand why they were friends. But for some reason, Boy liked him, had always liked him, from the first days at Eton, when Boy had seemed so glamorous and grown up, Giles so young for his age and homesick, through their years at Oxford (where Boy had arrived with his own servant, into a set of the best rooms, and proceeded to surround himself with the most glittering, the most brilliant of friends – and Giles); right up to now, when Boy paid the merest lip service to his job at his father’s bank and spent most of his life spending his father’s money, while Giles worked so earnestly and for such long hours at Lyttons, resisting for the most part, Boy’s invitations to luncheons, endless nights at nightclubs, and four-day country house weekends.

The reason was actually quite simple: for all his self-indulgent, almost hedonistic lifestyle, Boy was in fact a nice person, surprisingly loyal to his men friends (although less so to his women); Giles had several times covered up for him in scrapes at both Eton and Oxford, and perhaps more importantly, introduced him to his own family circle, with its own quite different sort of glamour, one which Boy was nevertheless fascinated by and enjoyed.

Celia had always struggled not to like Boy; she found him oversophisticated, even when he was fourteen, and had said several times that he was clearly heading into exactly the same lifestyle as his twice-divorced, much-mistressed father. But she failed, and was extremely fond of him; he was amusing, and as he grew up, increasingly charming, with a fine line in flirtatious flattery that she found hard to resist, even while she could see through it. His most heinous crime, in her view, and the one which she found hardest to forgive was not his extravagance, nor his libertine ways, not even his occasional vulgarity of dress, but his idleness, his capacity for filling his days with nothing but pleasure, his apparent lack of any real ambition. It was, she often told him severely, a disgrace; he had a brilliant mind and indeed had come down from Oxford with a first in Greats, but ever since then he had scarcely used it. There was the odd distraction, he had a share in an art gallery in Cork Street, he was on a couple of boards of charities, and a yard in Gloucestershire where he kept some racehorses, a fact which went a long way towards endearing Lady Beckenham to him: but that was all.

The twins adored him: he was so good-looking, with his permanently amused dark eyes and slicked, black hair, his extensive wardrobe, his stable of cars, his hyper-fashionable flat in the Albany, so charming, so amusing, so rich, and above all so unconcerned with anything more serious than the next party, the last race meeting, the latest fashion or piece of gossip. Giles, on the other hand, actually found him rather overpowering, however flattering his friendship; but he could see that the girls, Venetia particularly, liked him and moreover why they should. His dearest wish, in many ways, would be to quite closely resemble Boy Warwick.

The twins were terribly over-excited and telling increasingly risqué jokes egged on by Jack and Kit, but nobody seemed to mind; Celia had moved from her initial bad mood into her most witty and charming form, as she often did on these occasions, and was flirting alternately with Boy and an extremely handsome young man none of them had ever seen before but whom Adele had introduced as her absolutely greatest friend Charley. Oliver was almost silent, benignly enjoying the party around him while as usual not being quite at one with it.

If only Barty were there, Giles thought; it would be so much nicer. The family never felt complete without her: ironic, since she was not, strictly speaking, a part of it. She always made him feel happy, happy and at ease; just thinking of her now soothed his discomfort. He imagined her studying in her room at Oxford, quietly and methodically, setting her cool, calm intelligence to work. Not that she’d be exactly enjoying this evening if she was here; she didn’t really like any of the twins’ friends, and she’d hate the idea even more of going on to the Embassy nightclub, as Adele was now suggesting. Just the same, it would have been nice for him . . .

Thank goodness, just thank goodness she wasn’t there, Barty thought, pushing her books back, reaching for her cup of cocoa. She hadn’t dared stop before, partly because she would lose concentration and start thinking about the twins’ birthday dinner and partly because she knew she would realise how tired she was. She still had a great deal of ground to cover that evening, she really wanted to make a start on the Chaucer; but she simply had to have a break. And of course she did start thinking about the birthday party. Most years, even after she had gone up to Oxford she had had to endure it; once in the early days she’d escaped, her mother had been ill, and once she had been ill herself, and there had been the School Certificate year, she’d got out of it then. But that still left quite a few birthdays – for the tradition had started early, when the twins were only nine – of sitting and smiling till her face ached, trying not to feel jealous, trying to enjoy herself, and trying to make the right sort of conversation. It had been especially hard when she was younger, wishing and wishing that Celia hadn’t insisted on it, had let her stay up in the nursery with Nanny, where she felt she more properly belonged. Only of course she didn’t belong there either, and although Nanny was always really nice to her, she knew she found her presence difficult and confusing as well.

As Barty had got older, the feelings of anxiety and envy had been replaced by a sort of resignation, but it was still an especially difficult occasion, with the twins being so over-excited and more likely to patronise her than usual, and some poor boy or other put next to her, having to talk to her while not knowing quite what to make of her – was she a Lytton or wasn’t she – oh, it was always horrible. This year she had the perfect excuse, the perfect escape, no one could be upset. It was wonderful. One of the happiest days in her entire life, she often thought (though of course never said, never would say, to anyone), was when she went up to Oxford, and left the huge house at Cheyne Walk to make a new home for herself, for three years at least, at Lady Margaret Hall. As she waved Celia off – for of course she had insisted on coming up with her, to help her settle in – she had felt only joy, and no regret of any kind, no nervousness even. Except for Celia’s obvious sadness, of course: and at leaving dear Wol as she had always called Oliver. She had turned back into the building, climbed the stairs to her room, and sat there for over an hour, doing nothing at all, contemplating the pure pleasure of being, for the first time in her life, somewhere that was hers by right, where she felt she truly belonged.

And now it was nearly over; she would have to leave again and she was, as well as sad, anxious at where she could go next. Which could certainly not be Cheyne Walk: or not for long, anyway…

Dinner was very much over now; the conversation running down, the early brightness of the evening fading. Venetia felt suddenly and sharply sad; she wanted the day to extend. It must, she would force it. She stood up, smiled round the table. ‘Well, shall we all go to the Embassy? It’s getting late and the others will be there and—’

Adele stood up too. ‘Yes, let’s go. Mummy and Daddy, that was marvellous. Thank you—’

‘Just a moment,’ said Oliver, ‘we’ve forgotten one toast. To Cousin Maud. Come along now.’

This was part of the tradition too: the family raised its glasses, the outsiders had it quickly explained to them.

‘Happy birthday, Maud,’ said Adele.

‘Cheers,’ said Venetia. ‘Happy birthday, Maud.’

‘What a dreadful expression that is, Venetia,’ said Lady Beckenham. ‘Where on earth did you pick it up?’

‘What, “cheers”? Grandmama, everyone says it now.’

‘That doesn’t make it any better. Anyway, how are those relatives of yours, Oliver?’ Lady Beckenham liked to make it clear to outsiders that any vulgarity in the family did not come from the Beckenham side.

‘Very well, thank you, Lady Beckenham. Yes.’ After twenty-four years of marriage to her daughter, Oliver was still unable to address Lady Beckenham by a more familiar name; as she addressed her own husband still as ‘Beckenham’, this was hardly surprising.

‘We were saying, Daddy, it was time another visit was arranged. Either for us or them. What do you think?’ said Venetia.

‘Oh – I don’t know,’ said Oliver.