Those Wicked Pleasures (10 page)

She rode Biscuit, a frisky seventeen-hands white stallion, and Jamal rode his favourite, a midnight-black Arab mare called Cora. They galloped across Cannonberry Chase at a reckless pace. The chase, the Stantons unenclosed tract of land reserved for breeding and hunting wild animals, was particularly attractive. The terrain challenged a horseman. It included wood and meadows, high and low ground, beaches with sand dunes on one side and cliffs and rougher water on the other.

David and Max were leaving the manor house with Myling and Luan for the stables and an early morning ride, when they saw, in the far distance, a pair of horses racing across a field towards the deer wood. Then flashes of vivid colour, Lara’s silk evening dress streaming out behind her and long, silvery-blonde hair dancing wildly in the wind as she courageously rode Biscuit flat out. They saw her take a three-foot-deep hedge, only to swing the powerful white stallion around and take it again, passing feet away from Jamal as he made the hurdle.

The two couples ran across the terrace to catch a better view of the riders. ‘She’s fucking mad, that girl. More horse-courage than horse-sense. But she sure has got Biscuit on the go. Watch her, she’ll go for that fence again. She’s playing with Biscuit and Jamal. My guess
is twice more before Jamal gets ahead in that race.’ Max was enthusiastic.

David began to laugh. ‘Jamal must be furious. Lara would have taken the lead right from the start to get Biscuit all out. That horse is a great ride if you give him full rein. Lara’s troubles begin when Jamal catches up and passes Biscuit. She’ll have a job controlling that horse then. He’s strong and he’s crazy. He doesn’t like other horses around him and he really hates to be passed. She may be in for a hard fall.’

She took the fence, as Max had predicted, twice more, and then Jamal had her. They jumped the next turn together, and Jamal raced ahead towards the wood. The brothers and the two women were clapping and shouting, it was such an exciting performance. And then they held their breath for several moments when, as David had said, Biscuit reared up and fought Lara’s control. He raced ahead and reared again and Lara was in serious trouble. They saw her thrown forward. She clung to the reins and hung on to his mane, then slipped out of the saddle. David started running towards the field, the others following. Somehow Lara clung on. Jamal must have looked back and seen she was in difficulties. They saw him charge out of the wood towards her. Suddenly Lara was in the saddle again. The magnificent white beast reared up once more and tried to unseat her and then she had him, somehow pulled him in and raced ahead, passing Cora being ridden hell-for-leather by Jamal to her rescue. They all laughed when Jamal was left seated on his horse watching Lara bring Biscuit down to an easy trot. She disappeared into the wood.

They rode together, Jamal on Cora careful to stay always slightly behind Biscuit. Neither of them spoke. Jamal wanted to shout at her, ‘What the fuck was that all about? What do you think you’re trying to prove?’
He stifled the impulse, but he was seething. It was Lara who finally spoke, and then in a whisper, some time after they were deep into the wood.

‘If we are very quiet and keep to a steady pace, we will be able to watch the deer, over there, down in that little valley where the stream is. They’re always there at this time in the morning.’

The horses’ hooves, muffled by a blanket of brightly coloured autumn leaves, dusted up the patches of mist still over the ground that the sun, filtering in angled rays down through the branches of the trees, was fast burning off. The atmosphere was thick with a rainbow of greens and yellows, spatterings of other muted colours in pearly hues. It was like riding through an enchanted forest, but Jamal was too unnerved by Lara to appreciate it. He sidled close to her and took the reins from her hands into his. Never mind the deer for today. Taking her by the waist he slid her from Biscuit to sit her in front of him on Cora. Biscuit seemed unaware of the change: he led them on through the wood.

‘I don’t know what you were trying to prove back there, Lara, and I don’t want to know. I tamed you last night. I rode you sexually as hard as you rode that horse today.’ Lara began to squirm. She took the reins of the stallion from Jamal. He held her more firmly. ‘Last night was only a beginning for us. You would do well to remember that and appreciate it. I am not a stallion you will ever be able to control. I do the controlling. But, remember, for us there is not just sex and control, there is also a kind of affectionate love that has grown over the years. All you have to remember is that they don’t overlap, and that is part of the passion and romance of our relationship. If you don’t understand that today, you will another day. I don’t mind you competing, trying to diminish me in some way,
as long as you know you will be hard-pressed to succeed.’

With that he removed the reins from her hands again and, lifting her by the waist, helped her to remount. He passed the reins back to her once she was seated. She directed the horse away from the wood, and they rode peacefully for some time before she spoke.

‘There were some people watching us. I was hoping there would be. It will make it easier that they know we were out all night and rode as part of that night. Now I’m leading us to the beach and we’ll go for a sail. If we are open about being out all night, there will be no need for lies.’

Sometime around eleven, Lara and Jamal returned from their sail and tied up at the dock, where they found Sam waiting for them. He kissed her and placed a proprietorial arm around her. ‘Thanks, Jamal. I hope he remained a gentleman, Lara? Or is it to be pistols at dawn?’

The joke fell a little flat with her. She tried to put aside her irritation with the two men, and so, linking arms with them, walked up the cliff to the manor house. Lara and Jamal were still dressed in their evening clothes. The family and their guests were sitting out on the lawn. It was mid-morning coffee-time. Everyone already knew about their ride and their sail. The only question about the most momentous night of Lara Stanton’s life was asked by her mother. And even it was hardly a question. ‘Lara, dear, out all night should not be made a habit of. Remember, there is something to be said for beauty-sleep.’

Life at Cannonberry Chase, her family, their friends, the guests, staff – nothing had changed, only Lara. She felt at once the same person she had always been, and yet someone else. Lara, grown up? She hardly questioned it but accepted her sexuality and Sam’s love as facts of
life. Even her fear of losing herself in sex as she had with Jamal. Even the excitement, the physical ecstasy, her utter submission to lust.

More than once during the weekend, memories of sexual sensations intruded. Not just those she experienced with Jamal and the two strangers but those she had had with Sam. They excited a desire for more, and yet she could not bring herself to accept any sexual overtures made by Sam. She led him on rather than letting him down, more to distance herself from her sexual encounter with Jamal than for any other reason. For, whatever had passed between them, however she was feeling about Jamal, inconvenient as it was even in its diminished intensity, a
coup de foudre
such as she had experienced with him was not so easily forgotten.

It surprised Lara that with all her lusty thoughts, all the changes she was experiencing in herself, she managed to enjoy her weekend. There was much to be said for the way Jamal behaved. It had been just as he said it would be: they were friends and having fun. Not a hint, not a tease, no innuendo as to what had happened in the house on Fifty-Third Street. She drew closer to Sam.

Two weeks later, they made love again. Their sexual intercourse was, as Sam had kept promising it would be, even more exciting than when he had taken her at Aunt Bidi’s. They confessed yet again how much they loved each other. How great the sex was. They were happy. And, pleased as Emily was when she saw Lara wearing Sam’s fraternity pin, she was relieved when the following week she kissed Lara goodbye and sent her off to Smith College. Lara’s life was proceeding along Emily Dean Stanton’s plan.

NEW YORK
1974

Chapter 6

Four years is a long time in the life of an over-achiever. It can wreak extraordinary changes. With a family of over-achievers as strongly bound together as the Stantons, those individual changes were accepted as a matter of course. Remarkably, the wealthy American landed gentry, powerful and loyal families such as the Stantons, give largely unconditional support to each of their members. Approval or disapproval rarely enters into it. With the foundations of the family so firmly underpinned, and a retinue of trustees and advisers at their disposal, there was not much any of Henry and Emily’s children could not or would not attempt, and for the most part succeed in.

At work or at play – the family always moved in the fast lane. Though the world was only rarely made aware of what they were doing, the Henry Stanton family were making their mark. And as their children pursued their various interests around the world, Emily and Henry and Cannonberry Chase became more and more the powerful axis from which they radiated and to which they returned.

In many ways it was Cannonberry Chase rather than Henry or Emily that wielded the great power over them all. One needs to understand the American country house in the manner of, say, George Washington Vanderbilt’s Biltmore in North Carolina, Kykuit at Pocantico Hills, New York, John D. Rockefeller’s retreat, or Caumsett,
the Field estate on Long Island: their English parks, their country houses as stately homes, and their Marie Antoinette style farms that made their owners appear to be self-sufficient. They were not the celluloid Tara of
Gone With The Wind
, but the real thing, where the lives of their owners seemed to be lived more completely than anywhere else. At least that was the pattern at Cannonberry Chase.

The house there was on the grand scale, but it was not just another grand manor house set down in acres of wilderness. A host of sports and leisure pursuits formed a shared and familiar world for the limited few lucky enough to afford it. Magnificent stable blocks of serious architectural value, and indoor riding-rings, were no less impressive than indoor and outdoor tennis courts and swimming pools, landscaped as part of their architecture. Gymnasiums and basement shooting ranges and bowling alleys were panelled in French walnut. Billiard rooms were as magnificently turned out as libraries. Hunting rooms, game lodges and motor houses or garages were also designed in the grand manner. Boathouses were not in name only. They were one of the most attractive and impressive features of the American country house. The one at Cannonberry Chase was a fine example of its kind, elaborate and large, slung half over the water, and capable of housing half a dozen of the Stantons’ larger boats, several of which were used to cruise into New York when Henry was commuting. The airplane hangar and small grass airfield had always been
de rigueur
for the American country house that had enough land to carve them decoratively into the landscape, as was the eighteen-hole golf course. The hangar on the Stanton estate housed several vintage aircraft as well as a Cessna and a small jet. And Cannonberry Chase boasted an excellent polo field, a maze, and a grotto where Emily entertained her guests with mini-operas.

The American country-house weekend had been a
major part of these people’s lives ever since the 1920s. The generations able still to live in the grand style were a product of time and environment. They knew no other way of life. This was their life.

Cannonberry Chase did have a kinship with the grand country houses in England and France. But was it the same thing? Not at all. The mansion sat on its own land, twenty square miles of it, beyond the suburbs and any possible site of planned housing. It radiated self-sufficiency. A landed life, even though the money that sustained it never came from the land.

What underpinned the costly creations of Cannonberry Chase was its status as a palatial residence kept largely for sport. It satisfied a desire for the rural life. Like many other such houses, it maintained a large, complex farm. The mid-eighteen-hundreds until the nineteen-forties had been the heyday of magnificent country estates in America but for Cannonberry Chase there had never been a decline. It thrived with the passing years.

Henry, his father and that father’s father, inherited one crucial characteristic: they were powerful and influential citizens who knew how to insinuate their personal thinking into the minds of the great men of their nation. But they also kept them as personal friends. The ultimate diplomats, astute politicians, they contrived to remain non-political and evade the inhibitions of holding office, accepting nothing more than personal power at the side of a friend. Until now.

David had political ambitions. In the four years that had passed since they had all been together for the private viewing of the Stanton wing at the museum, he had taken substantial strides towards the White House. Cannonberry Chase had always been a haven of leisure, a very private meeting-place for the powers that ran the country. In the past Roosevelt, a frequent guest, had
entertained Churchill there. Eisenhower met Eden for informal talks there. Heads of state from various countries had been received by Henry and Emily at Cannonberry Chase as unofficial guests of the White House. They were brilliant hosts, knowing how to put their guests sufficiently at ease to mingle with the family. Guests were made to feel, for a short time, a part of Cannonberry Chase. Powerful politicians and men and women of the world, fascinating minds, promoters of conversation that at times moved like a chess game and at other times amused, had influenced all the children. But it was David more than the others who had been stirred by political power. David who, as far back as Henry could remember, had been more interested in life at the Capitol and geo-politics than the other children, with the exception of Max. He had been fascinated but not interested in a political career for himself.

Cannonberry Chase inculcated home, security, the notion of life lived to the fullest in an atmosphere of elegance and beauty. The scent of success, glimpses of the best of all worlds. It impressed anyone fortunate enough to be a part of it even for a short time. And it gave every one of the Stantons a solid base from which to launch himself.

John married and produced two children during those four years. A grand, high-society wedding at St Thomas’s on Park Avenue, two christenings and four family Christmases at Cannonberry Chase were hardly enough to compensate Lara for the loss of his doting love. Those first years away from home and her brothers were hardly years of separation from them. Phone calls, three or four times a week, endless quick visits and extended holidays with John, David and Steven, and even longer ones with Max remained the heart of Lara’s life, in spite of the attentions of Sam.

What Lara perceived as loss – John’s lack of attention and love for her (which of course it was not, just an alteration) – was compounded by Steven’s running off with a Texas beauty Emily disapproved of. Lynette seemed to have Lara’s once-adoring brother completely besotted not only with herself but with Texas. As with everything, Emily and Henry took Steven’s mistake in their stride, and the family rallied round in support. They waited for Steven to come to his senses and return to them and Cannonberry Chase, with or without Lynette.

Elizabeth kept having children during those four years, returning to Cannonberry Chase for her confinements, to England for the births, and always to Cannonberry Chase for the Stanton family Christmas. It seemed to Lara as if these new wives and Jeremy, Elizabeth’s husband, and their babies, had always been a part of the family and the Chase. It was as if she had grown up with them. They became Stantons, and as such only made the house and the Chase come more alive than ever.

Much as Lara might feel she belonged to the family and was one of them, she also felt somehow apart from them. She attributed her feelings of apartness to the real and deep loss she still felt of that love and attention they had always showered upon her before the Stantons started multiplying. She never let her loss show, and fought hard to overcome her feelings. Once she spoke to Steven, not about her personal feelings but the family and the power it seemed to wield over her. Ever the anthropologist, he suggested to her that she should envisage their immediate family as an expanding, close-knit tribe. The Stantons as the most exclusive club in the world. Therein lay their happiness, that was where their aspirations would always be nourished, support be found for their dreams and needs.

Without even mentioning Lynette’s name, Steven had
made Lara understand that, besotted as he might be with his wife, he had not lost track. In time Lynette would understand what a privilege it was to be taken into the family, to have become a Stanton. She would one day comprehend the importance of the tribe to her life, and cease fighting it. He hoped she would embrace it, realise not what she had given up but what she had gained by joining it. He had shown Lara that it was no different for Lynette than it was for Jeremy, or anyone who married into the family. Lara should try to make the man she eventually chose understand that.

She had been amused when Steven had said, ‘You can but tell them the truth. Now, in our case, Lynette has a problem about accepting the truth. She fights it. So she irritates Mother, and it’s all a waste. Lynette, after all, is quite selfish. She’s self-centred and, I guess, a bit stupid. She’s gonna create her scandals, cause us embarrassment, and finally lose. Then either she’ll leave me or I’ll throw her out, or we’ll settle down and be happy. Those are the facts. Plus one more: there is no accounting for who or what you fall in love with. You’ll find that out soon enough, La.’

She gave Steven a big hug and a kiss and for a moment she was as close as she had ever been to him. She loved him as in the old days, before he had loved someone else more. No matter how she rationalised it, it still hurt, her brother loving someone else more than her.

In those four years Max had taken tremendous strides forward in his life, and had absorbed Lara into it whenever he could. He, like David, had a fascination with geo-politics. Had he not been a dedicated doctor of medicine, a diagnostician of exceptional merit, he would surely have given his cousin a run for the White House. Instead he had made medicine in the Third World his life and world politics his hobby. He was more like David
than any of his brothers. They were close, sharing many interests, not least womanising. Though Max was no less a ladies’ man than David, he was a more complex one. His love affairs tended to be serious but short. His usually bitter, discarded women claimed that in sex he was a romantic, imaginative, virile lover, but ruthless in dumping them. He broke hearts and thrived on new conquests. Max had a dynamism about him that influenced on a grand scale. It gave him the power to achieve wonders where others failed. He divided his energies between the Stanton medical research foundations in Manhattan and his medical practice, and having a very good time.

In the last four years Lara had been much influenced by Max and David. She often remembered what Jamal had said about David that first night they had been together: that he had learned to live in the Stanton world and, discreetly, out of it. She now understood what Jamal had meant. She was learning from David and Max how to be a rebel with and without a cause, and win. How to use the world and add to it. How to play the world and people and win. How to keep secrets, skeletons even, well hidden. How to handle admiration, adulation, and not be trapped by it.

Between college, breaks with the family in the villa at Cap d’Antibes, travels with her brothers and with friends she had met at Smith, a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, a final year back at Smith again, returns to Cannonberry Chase whenever possible to recharge the batteries, Lara had fast found new worlds to experience. She was voracious in gobbling them up.

Sustained by the family and Sam’s undeniable love for her, the Stanton golden girl became in those years the rebel in the conservative Stanton family. More spoilt and adored by them than ever for her achievements:
valedictorian of her class, winner of yachting trophies any of them would have been proud to take, skiing championships that had eluded all but John in the past, she matured into a ravishing beauty with an undeniable charm of her own that was original and provocative. Yet the family remained critical, always expecting more, as the over-achieving family is prone to do, without overtly asking anything of her.

During those years Lara had managed to side-step Emily’s greater plans for her coming out, her year in society in New York and London, with a promise that she would give herself up to Emily as soon as she had finished school. She had gotten away with that because Emily was satisfied that Sam was still on line as future husband. And Lara and Sam had duly performed as the beautiful couple several dozen times at the more important of the Season’s events during the last four years.

Lara’s brothers and Henry were, however, not so sure that she would settle into the place Emily had envisioned for her and be happy. The men of the family were less concerned with Lara’s sometimes rebellious nature than with the vulnerable submissiveness beneath that superficial rebellion. This worried them more. They were all thankful for Sam, certain she was safe there.

But how safe was she? Henry had lost count of the times he had asked himself that about his favourite child. He had always to counter his own favouritism towards Lara. He would find himself doting upon her, showing his love for her openly, then pull back abruptly. It had always been that way for father and daughter, ever since Lara was a baby. He loved her more – more even than Emily; more than his mistress of twenty years, Janine; more even than the twenty-three-year-old girl he also kept in Paris. Only Emily knew that, and that was why he was so cautious with Lara in her presence.

Emily and Henry had an arrangement. He could stray just so long as he was discreet, and she but no one else knew anything about it. Then she would never leave him. It had always been that way. Those were the conditions she made before she married him. That was the hold she had over Henry: sexual freedom within
her
rules for their marriage. It worked for them. They were devoted to each other as husband and wife, as partners in a family, and until Lara was born he loved and adored Emily more than anyone or anything on earth. But, from then on, conceal it as Henry might, Emily was only second best.