Those Wicked Pleasures (35 page)

After seven weeks Lara knew that she was pregnant. By that time she already felt herself pulled down into the dirt of Jamal’s life. It was where seemingly she must learn to live. But she was not unaware that he was keeping her virtually a prisoner in the palace by the sea. A place so isolated as not even to have a name. If only the joy that they were going to have a child could lift the barriers he had built around their relationship, she felt there might yet be a way to turn their marriage around.

Jamal was jubilant at the news. In a moment of passion he told her, ‘I love you. You have to believe that I love you, that that’s why I married you. And for this moment, to make a child with you, for you to bear my sons.’ And then wept and fell asleep in her arms. He had a doctor flown in from Paris to Tangiers, and then by helicopter to the residence. When the doctor confirmed Lara’s condition and that she was perfectly healthy, he was sent
away. They flew to Marrakesh to take up residence there the following day.

Life changed once they settled in the house in Marrakesh. Jamal was more the Prince Charming and less the monster. He even granted some of Lara’s wishes. Bonnie arrived with her nanny. Coral, Nancy and the nanny were at last allowed to become a part of Lara’s new household. Jamal treated Bonnie as if she were his own child. He soon charmed the five year old into an attachment to him. There was a month of euphoria, happy families played out in the house in Marrakesh. After being in Morocco for nearly three months, Lara began to meet people and make friends. There were lavish dinner parties with amusing people, an excursion nearly every day to the historic buildings and mosques of Marrakesh, or to the
medina
and cafés and tempting restaurants. There Lara discovered, between the restaurants and Jamal’s cooks, that Moroccan cuisine could be as rich and varied as the French or the Italian.

This country, with the Sahara at its feet and both the Mediterranean and the Atlantic kissing its shores, was a land of contrasts. Like the land, its food was too. Moroccan food in London, Paris or New York, might mean
couscous
, but not for Lara in Marrakesh. For her it meant
b’stilla
. The unbelievably rich
b’stilla aux pigeons
– translated, just plain pigeon-pie – was her favourite. But there was nothing at all plain about the dish. Encased in dozens of onion-skin thin layers of pastry called
warkha
– so thin, in fact, that before cooking you could see through them like a piece of dusty glass – was a highly spiced, highly flavoured mixture of pigeon meat and creamy, lemon-flavoured eggs and almonds, spiced with cinnamon and saffron, and all sweetened with powdered sugar. When baked, its crisp golden pastry
leaves were finer than any filo pastry that Austria or France or Greece could offer.

Lara was enamoured of anything cooked with the
warkha
leaves, such as
trid marrakshia
, which was made with chicken. There were other dishes, and some sweets, and as many salads. She even thought to take Jamal’s cook from Marrakesh back to Cannonberry Chase when they were in residence there. If not for the
b’stilla
, for the
chicken mqualli
with olives and preserved lemons. She learned a great deal more about food from her newfound friends. Lara was taken up and made a great fuss of by the local expatriate community. She found them amusing, Jamal found them annoying. On the surface, life for her in Marrakesh was paradise. Only she knew that it was paradise lost.

As the months passed, Jamal became obsessive about Lara and the child she was carrying. Behind closed doors he began once more to practise his destructive victimisation of her. Only this time it was far worse. If Jamal had found his wife an exciting woman before she was pregnant, as he clearly had, now he found it impossible to stay away from her. He had a wild passion to possess her sexually that he could hardly explain or justify to himself. His lust for her dominated their lives and their marriage. To counteract this grand passion and dependence upon Lara, which he detested, Jamal would seek out ways to punish her. He concocted excuses to justify the punishment: she was spoilt, self-indulgent, wanton, flirtatious, lustful, insatiable. Within months this litany of her vices had drowned out the still small voice of Lara’s self-confidence.

On the brink of despair, she rallied and began to plot an escape. Not an easy task. Especially since Jamal had charmed Nancy, the nanny, and Coral and won their confidence. He was as much their master as he was
Lara’s. And Bonnie the child, saw him as the light of her life. Lara’s entourage, her little household and her daughter, had been taken over by Jamal and had fallen under the spell of Marrakesh. They were besotted by the city, by Morocco and its culture, its colour, its people, the exotic and glamorous life that Jamal and Lara led in that very closed society. Only one person in that household seemed contrary and a threat to their new paradise. Lara alone appeared ungrateful for the life they were all living. Or so Jamal insinuated. Strangely unappreciative of her handsome, charming husband, or his power, social and sometimes political standing in the country. Jamal was the more persuasive for its being his own country that he manipulated their vision of.

So it came about that Lara became increasingly isolated from her own staff, her child, her family, and her old friends.

Nothing brought that home to her more than the day she and Bonnie were in the Marrakesh kitchen one afternoon baking cookies. Lara said, ‘Just look at you, Bonnie! You’re almost a cookie yourself you’re so covered with flour.’

The child’s face lit up and gleefully she told her mother, ‘A chocolate cookie. I’ll be a chocolate cookie and you can be a gingerbread lady.’

Lara pulled Bonnie on to her lap and began dusting her off with a tea-towel. The child put her hand on Lara’s now rotund tummy, and then placed an ear to it. ‘I wish my baby brother could hear me.’

‘What would you tell him?’

‘That Jamal is going to buy him a pony, and bring Mr Macaroni here, and then Jamal and baby and me will ride off into the desert together.’

‘And what about me?’

‘Oh, you have to stay home here in the house.’

‘Why, Bonnie? Why can’t I come with you?’

‘Because Jamal says you are a bad mummy. You spoil things.’

Lara was appalled; she asked, ‘Bonnie, do you think I am a bad mummy and I spoil things?’ She held her breath. What answer would her five year old come up with?

‘No. But I have to make-believe you are bad and ugly, like the Wicked Witch From The North.’

‘Why? What will happen if you don’t?’

‘Jamal won’t take me with them when they go. And I want to go with them.’

Lara despised herself for asking but her insecurity dictated the question. ‘Bonnie, do you still love your mummy?’

No hint of hesitation. Bonnie’s arms were around Lara’s neck. She planted a huge kiss on her mother’s mouth and held it, pressing hard. When Bonnie released Lara, she gave her a big smile and, leaning against her, whispered in her ear, ‘Oh, yes. But don’t tell Jamal.’

Even Julia, who came to visit, could see no flaw in her marriage. The threesome made a journey up into the Atlas mountains, through the Berber villages. They stayed at a hunting-lodge that had been in Jamal’s family for three hundred years. He played the considerate host, the generous and gallant husband. Julia was fooled. She believed Lara to be happy and Lara, not wanting to spoil the holiday, could not bring herself to admit how miserably unhappy she really was.

Lara felt herself to be dying a little every day. She imagined herself looking in the mirror one day only to find nothing left of her own self to reflect back at her. Jamal would have absorbed all the life in her, leaving her as a mere shrivelled sack of flesh and bone. Only the child she carried seemed to promise a future for her life during
those months of marriage to Jamal. Lara carried easily, and her pregnancy barely showed. As with Bonnie, suddenly in the last eight weeks she began to look heavy with child. That magnified Jamal’s obsessiveness, and with this came a fresh distrust. He had her watched at all times when he was not with her. At one point, a fit of pique at some imagined peccadillo of hers, he even locked her in their rooms.

As so often before in her life, Lara was saved by the men who loved her. One day, Sam called from Paris. He was stranded there over a weekend, waiting for lawyers to draw up documents on the following Monday for him to sign. Could he drop in on them and see Bonnie? Lara almost wept with relief. There had been several lucky features to that phone call. The first was that Jamal had received it. Sam had asked him, not Lara, if he could pay them the visit. Jamal consented. Less because he wanted the company of Sam, whom he did not like, than because it would give him a chance to discuss a financial transaction with him that might be advantageous to both men. That blunted Jamal’s latest obsession: that Lara craved other men to make love to her. Had she taken the call, he most assuredly would have fantasised a new liaison between them. Then he would have watched and listened incessantly. All private conversation would have been proscribed.

Lucky, too, the timing. Lara was just entering her ninth month of pregnancy. That left her enough days to get away. She was determined that she should not have her baby in Marrakesh, or anywhere in Morocco. The third real piece of luck was that a plan was already forming. She had found a way to get a call for help past Jamal and his human watchdogs. She knew she could not escape from him without some shrewd intervention from outside their circle.

For all his searching of drawers and handbags, Jamal had not found Lara’s little amber netsuke. She had only to keep her nerve, get it to David and wait. He had never failed her before. Nothing but the blackest fate could make him fail her now.

Sam arrived, and Lara worked at being very relaxed. Jamal must not sense that she was up to something. The three of them had a particularly good time together. She bided her time, waiting for the moment when she and Sam were alone. She needed only a few minutes, but Jamal never granted them even a few seconds. Only once did she nearly falter: they were having sex and he taunted her with, ‘I have seen the way Sam looks at you. He wants you, fantasises about getting you back into bed. You want him, don’t you? That’s why you’re holding back.’

‘You’re absurd.’

‘Am I? Then prove it. Let go. Give in to me.’

There was too much at stake. She gave in to him. It wasn’t difficult, not after she had made up her mind to save her life by submitting to his lust for her. Whatever else he might be, he was still her sexual master. There was a residue of seductiveness on which he could draw. In the morning when he woke her, he presented her with a jewel box. Inside, a necklace of rubies.

She felt sick for what she had done the night before, and the rarefied pleasure she derived from being enslaved to him in lust. Sick at not having thrown the jewels in his face, she confirmed her resolve to leave him. This stick-and-carrot kind of love! An abusive charmer! A failed marriage was better than a lifetime of that. She steeled herself to go through with what she must. Anything to find a way to catch a few minutes alone with Sam.

Jamal didn’t make it easy. Still besotted with her and their night of sex, he would not leave her side. He did
in fact keep her naked in their room for most of the morning. For him there was real beauty in her huge round belly. He had her move for him around the room. He would arrange her in the most lascivious positions, study and caress her. He would suck on her now very heavy breasts. He licked her body and kissed it, and felt filled with affection and admiration for her. When finally he allowed her to dress, he sat on the bed watching her. Once she was ready to leave the room, he slipped his arm through hers and said, ‘If I ever catch you even looking at another man, I will beat you as one whips a whore. You will be thrown to the servants and beggars of Marrakesh to fuck.’

Lara stumbled, but Jamal had her tight by the arm. She recovered herself quickly. She felt a blur of dizziness. Was she about to faint? She fought that off. Then she disengaged his arm and said, ‘Don’t be stupid.’ And she unlocked the bedroom door.

In the airport VIP lounge, Lara found her moment. Distracted by friends who were leaving on the same plane as Sam, Jamal turned away for only a few seconds. That gave Lara all the time she needed. She pressed the
netsuke
into Sam’s hand and folded his fingers tight over it. Then, pretending to kiss him first on one cheek and then the other, as the French do, she whispered in his ear: ‘Give this to David. Tell him it’s dangerous, I’m desperate, I want my baby born in Cannonberry Chase. No questions, Sam. Not a word.’ He looked into her eyes. He squeezed her hand. Could she be sure that he understood?

Sam shook Jamal’s hand and walked away. When he turned from the tarmac to wave goodbye to them, Lara wanted very much to believe that her escape from Jamal had been set in motion.

Chapter 24

Lara’s second divorce did not come easy. Nor was it achieved with dignity or out of the public eye. About the only thing that did come easy was getting over being married to Jamal. She recovered her self-esteem quickly once free from his abusive treatment. A second failed marriage and a life alone were better than suffering with him. She was beyond his taunts, she could rebuild her life.

Now, four years later, she was in her thirties. Two divorces, the second a minor international scandal, were behind her. And she had come through her second failed marriage a stronger woman. How much more she valued freedom now. But she had had to fight hard for hers. To battle with Jamal for divorce and custody of their son Karim. The family deplored the scandal. Once it broke, American high society would have ostracised Lara without a second thought had it not been for Emily Stanton. But she rose to the occasion – beyond it even. The first time Jamal came to Cannonberry Chase, pursuing Lara with armed heavies, reporters and photographers, he was thrown off the estate by the sheriff. Then Emily took to the telephone. Word was put out. Ranks were closed. Jamal was to be frozen out, newshounds to be starved of comment. If folk knew what was good for their position in society, Jamal Ben El-Raisuli did not exist. Her daughter had never married him. The New York Four Hundred would know what was required of them.

Thus had Lara’s lifeline been stitched together. Because, in those early days when she was still carrying Karim, and Jamal had come after her with threats of forcibly removing her to Morocco, she knew she had family and friends rallying around her. Friends whose loyalty survived her being forced to leave them and go into hiding for a year. It was a tug-of-love story that Jamal had warned would turn unsavoury. It might ruin her reputation long before they had settled the legalities in Morocco and the States, the how and where of a divorce.

Finally, the power of the Stantons, their command of wealth and connections, overwhelmed even Jamal. They reached even into the royal palace in Rabat. It was in the end Henry who talked Jamal round to some sort of sense. Henry and the palace. And even that, Henry was convinced, would never have changed Jamal’s mind about a divorce, had Lara not been willing finally to allow Jamal to see his newborn son at less than an hour old. Even though she had been forced by his threats to disappear with her children, she was consistent in sending weekly photographs of Karim to be forwarded to Jamal. It was his son who wore him down at last.

Jamal and Lara met just once, about two years after David had flown her out of Marrakesh. That was one of Jamal’s conditions for a divorce. By then much acrimony had fizzed between them through the tabloids and gossip columns, a ferment of lies and distortions about their marriage. So Lara, knowing what Jamal was capable of, arrived with three minders. They had been with her since the day she left him. He had been enraged. The men must leave. But she had obliged him to talk in their presence.

He tried one last time to win her back. He told her how much he loved her, must have her. That she had shattered his life by leaving him. Lara thought it might be true. That he did love her, as much as he was capable of loving any
woman. If there was a tragedy in their marriage, it was that he could not sustain his love for Lara, or any woman. Jamal did not love women. He was not a lover. He was a charmer, a seducer.

Next he insisted that she loved him as she had never loved any other man. That was perhaps another tragic truth. But nothing worked. She remained unmoved by his pleadings, his declarations. Then he went on the attack. He ranted at her deceit. How had she managed to leave Morocco without her passport? Who got her out? She revealed nothing. She gave him nothing. He faced defeat and agreed to give her up.

Lara paid dearly for her freedom, and for having never to see Jamal again. Though she had custody of Karim, she agreed to share him with Jamal, for half of each year, until the boy was thought old enough to make the harrowing choice between his parents. She felt she owed both father and son that. Her instinct told her that Jamal, however incapable of loving women, could love his son. It was an enormous sacrifice. She adored Karim greedily. Like his father, the child had a seductive charm. She could not be immune to a special kind of beauty, like Jamal’s, but with the sweetness of an infant, and then the innocence of a growing child. She ached to keep him close to her always.

One of the unpardonable sins in the Stanton canon was self-pity. And no Stanton – not even Lara – needed to repent of that particular sin. The lesson read had always been to fight it constructively. Do anything that would lead them forward. Lara practised what the family preached. That way lay her salvation. That and the family policy never to advise, never to criticise. Hired professionals were used for that. Such standards allowed the family the luxury of giving each other loyalty and support without embarrassing involvement. Therein resided their freedom
to make their own mistakes, learn to live with them, pay for them, and then get on with their lives.

During the years before she was granted a divorce, Lara lived with her two children. She divided whatever time she could, when she emerged from hiding, between Cannonberry Chase and the family town house. Time that served to confirm the already strong bond she had with her immediate family, their wives and children. Her influence in the family somehow remained undiminished by her messy personal life. Perhaps it even grew. Age difference seemed to play its part. She was twelve years younger than her youngest brother. As the family matured they saw her still as young and vibrant, the personification of their youthful selves.

There was something else: Cannonberry Chase had been the heart of all their lives. Now that most of the family were married with homes and families of their own, only Lara, with her overwhelming passion and love for the place, had time to devote to it. She assisted Henry and Emily in the running and preservation of the estate. Cannonberry Chase had a grip on all the family, it was still the home that governed their lives, still the centre of exciting happenings, the place that bound them together. Still the world within the world that nurtured them. They were all grateful to Lara and impressed with her work there. And increasingly often John and Steven began consulting Lara on other projects the family was involved with. It was Lynette who summed it up best, ‘Cannonberry Chase, I am always competing with Cannonberry Chase. She’s worse than the “other woman”. A mistress I have learned to live with.’

Still the occasional trash magazine tried to rake up Lara’s past, but by this time she was a minor player. It was Jamal who starred, in the handsome playboy of the Arab world role, a semi-tragic figure after his broken marriage.
The magazines did better than the tabloids had out of Lara. They had more to work with. And where better to find it than in a scoop leaked by an irate husband? Especially since the wife involved was one of the wealthiest high-society women in the world. An American married to an Arab. A life-style that dreams are made of, that fantasies thrive on. Intimations of immorality, their bizarre sexual life, spread like mud on the title page. For a week it was horrific, then it went cold on them. The glitz wasn’t there, the gloss turned to dross.

The Stantons lacked the requisite flash. Their money was too old. There was too much of it to mock. The family was too coolly conservative – if you excluded the wayward daughter – to make much muck. The ranks had closed too tight, sealed lips hid wagging tongues. Secrets were buried so deep digging them up was an impossible task for a story withered on the grapevine before it had gotten fruity. No, the mags did better with Jamal as the star, with his escapades and love affairs, his lavish life-style and jet-set friends.

Lara had been through it all before the divorce. She could simply ignore the media gorging itself on her. There was her life to be put together. But she did it as a changed woman. She had given herself unstintingly to her two children for over two years. Now that Jamal was legally out of her life, and the fear of kidnap had receded from her and her children, she resumed a life outwardly much like that she had lived before the fatal afternoon encounter in the Piazza della Signoria.

Busy living and loving, as Lara had been doing all of her life, one tends to think of oneself as living just a day-to-day existence like anyone else. It rarely occurred to Lara that she was constantly augmenting her life. Nor was she really aware of how she was constantly changing, or the transforming effect that life itself was having on her.

It was quite remarkable that the men in Lara’s family, and her immediate circle of friends, yet not the women, could see something in her that they were wholly comfortable with and could depend on. One night, after a family dinner and perhaps too much to drink, they retreated to the library where they sat around talking. In answer to Henry’s request that David do something for him, he had said, ‘Ask La. She’s better qualified to handle it. She’s got it all. The big viewpoint. Plenty of strength, enough intelligence, and no personal ambition. She goes after things with more love and passion and courage than I do. Than any of us do, for that matter. She’s the best one to hold the wheel in a storm, and you can rely on her to ride it out.’

Henry took David’s advice that evening. Thereafter, ever more often, he discussed with Lara projects that were of personal interest to him. She seemed to have an ability to cut to the heart of a problem. Her questions usually centred on it. With an economy of involvement she suggested creative and imaginative solutions. Henry and his committees and advisers were increasingly impressed with Lara’s abilities. When Henry was going to Holland for a conference on the world’s wild life, he asked Lara to join him, wanting her feedback from the meetings. In a reception for the executive board she charmed people with her looks and her passion for their projects. So, when a second meeting was called, Henry invited her to sit in. The committee made no objection.

Lara loathed the red tape, the inefficiency, that major charitable organisations got bogged down in. She had only to catch a hint of it in any of the Stanton projects to bring it to John’s or Henry’s attention. She had one pat answer for any excuses from subordinates in the Stanton organisations: ‘You have a board of directors to answer to. As a member of the board, no matter how inactive I
am, I am not satisfied. Find the angle on the problem that will solve it. If you can’t, I want to know why.’

It could be a tough stance to take. But her passionate interest in whatever she was dealing with, her ready suggestions, ensured a receptive audience. Some women in her position would have been written off as interfering amateurs, their contributions resented and rejected. That was not the case with Lara. She held no official post and was not seeking one. She had no obvious private drum to beat. Like all the Stanton men with the exception of David, she preferred working for success behind the scenes. The limelight was for others, who worked much harder than she did. True, people did listen to her because of her money, her name. But she could radiate a straightforward honesty that added considerably to her power to influence.

Lara accompanied Henry to Helsinki. Several months later to a meeting in Geneva. That same year she made a trip with Henry and John to Japan. Always in the role of the dutiful daughter. But the fascination of the executive boardroom, the Machiavellian mire of big business, soon intrigued Lara. And trying to harness their power for a better world, for the conservation of the earth, seemed to her something that everyone could benefit from. She acted swiftly. Her successes were few but selective. Although she kept that working part of her life in perspective, she did enjoy the power she could wield in the boardroom.

Not enough, however, to accept any of the jobs Henry and John thought she should take on. The most she would do was to sit in with Harland on any Stanton trusts’ business, as an interested party and in an advisory position. But, if the family had grown to respect her contributions to their affairs, their respect swelled into admiration at the next annual Extraordinary General Meeting and the dinner afterwards. She shone for them then as never before.

Henry and Steven and Lara had gone to Japan the year before because there was a serious takeover bid from the Japanese against the Stanton Guarantee Trust of Manhattan, the family investment bank, a rival to the likes of Lazards, Morgan Guarantee, N.M. Rothschilds, and Warburg. Billions were at stake. The board was voting on whether to accept the bid. The usual unanimous vote was needed. Every adviser around the table had recommended the family to take up the offer. Following the custom, Henry was to cast the last vote. Voting went around the table. David, Elizabeth, Max, Steven, John, all voted to sell. It was Lara’s turn. She voted not to sell. A stunned silence fell at the table. A dropped pin might have created an echo. Surprise tautened the family’s faces, shock froze the advisers. Lara started to address the board.

‘I can only imagine that none of you has considered what it would really mean. I mean, for us not to have the power and prestige of our bank. To have a part of our heritage taken away. For nearly two hundred and fifty years the bank has been a family business. It alone has funded us. Because of it, we have realised some of our dreams and aspirations. I want my children to inherit the opportunities that it has afforded us. If the bank goes, the Stantons go too. It may take time but eventually we’ll just disperse, well heeled, into the world. We will have lost an essential part of our identity. And America, incidentally, will lose an icon, one that is, in its own small way, as much a part of history as George Washington and Valley Forge. I’d hate that.’

She sat down. Henry voted with her. Afterwards the advisers remained po-faced, enormously disappointed, but not the family. They gathered around Lara and thanked her for being more far-sighted than they were. Elizabeth admitted she had been dazzled by the money; David that he had been thinking of himself and his
ambition. He was grateful to her. Max said, ‘I always knew you were the best of us.’