Acts of Love (2 page)

Station-master Pike took the tickets without a smile, greeting those he recognised with a grunt. The mist had a decided chill: it wrapped itself around Arianne. A shiver, less from cold than from dampness, the sheer absence of sunshine and blue sky, snapped Arianne to attention. Back to reality. She searched the sky for a glimmer of light trying to break through. Nothing. Think sunshine, she told herself. This is England. It is autumn.

Arianne placed the cake-box and the black alligator shoulder-bag she was carrying on the wooden bench set against the station wall. She reached into the pockets of her jacket, a torso of sable
with a cowl neck and sleeves of thick cashmere yarn knitted on fat wooden needles in some Paris couture house. She withdrew a pair of black gloves and buckled them across her wrists. Fine, soft and supple leather pampered her hands. She tugged at the knitted waist-band of her jacket and settled it just above her slender hips. For her to wear a jacket such as this now was an extravagance far beyond her present means. There had been a time for such luxuries as the cognac-coloured knit and sable jacket, her black Ralph Lauren suede skirt and Maude Frizon black-and-tan walking shoes. Jason adored spoiling her with luxurious gifts to match a hedonistic and always challenging erotic life behind closed doors, an adventurous and unpredictable one up-front and out in the open.

A reflected glimpse of herself in the station-house window. She wore no hat and her long, silky-smooth, chestnut-coloured hair looked very smart: elegant and cool, cur in its shoulder-length bob. It was not often Arianne pondered her looks. When she did it was usually at a time such as this when she was en route to meet her mother. Artemis would be pleased with her daughter’s appearance today. Lady Hardcastle accorded scant approval to either her daughter or the man she had married. Her daughter was dull, her husband vulgar, a child pretending to be a man. The only good thing about Jason was that he dressed his wife well. At least he had been able to bring out of her daughter a sensuous beauty that seemed to have eluded the girl until he had married her.

The fact of the matter was that Artemis Hardcastle didn’t much care for her daughter. Dull was how she had always described Arianne, beautiful but dull – the reincarnation of her father. Dull was marginally worse than ugly. She had, for that unpardonable sin, abandoned them both when Arianne was five. She divorced them for it, and had moved on twice more before she met Lord Hardcastle, apparent answer to all Artemis’s needs and dreams.

Arianne studied her reflection. She had always been pleased enough with her looks on these intermittent inspections of them. Vanity was no more a part of her psyche than jealousy or self-centredness. But, for her mother’s sake, she wished that she had the exciting, provocative beauty that Artemis had had, and still,
in old age, to some extent retained. The sort of seductive looks, that, combined with a cunning love for men, created the
femme fatale
: a certain female type that stirred men, made them prisoners of the heart, and was capable of destroying them at will. Dangerous beauty. How her mother would have relished that in Arianne. Artemis would have seen that quality in her daughter as an asset, part of ‘getting on’.

‘We both have to live with what we are’ had eventually become Arianne’s attitude to her mother’s constant criticism of her. Arianne was content with herself. That had always been the barrier between mother and daughter. Arianne did have her strengths, enough to accept Artemis at face value and love her for what she was or was not in herself, had been or had never been to her daughter. Arianne managed always to be her own woman, however much she appeared to be submitting to others. It was more than just playing the role of dutiful daughter and making the effort to please Artemis. It was Arianne’s nature to please and it came easy to her. It gave her a certain power all of her own. Combined with her passivity, her quiet beauty, this could be enchanting, attractive, even mysterious. ‘In certain lighting, there is about you a madonna-quality. Arianne. I find it particularly irritating. Not at all sensuous to men. You should try
not
to cultivate that.’ Part of the small-arms fire of Artemis’s lifelong bombardment of her daughter’s self-esteem.

Arianne smiled at the image in the window. She had always been, since a child, secure in herself, in spite of having a mother who was a bolter. She had always been – still was – happy enough being who and what she was. That quality must have come from her mother.

She picked up the cake-box and her handbag and slung its strap over her shoulder. She walked swiftly towards station-master Pike, smiled and handed him her ticket. Glancing through the station window into the deserted waiting-room and out again through another window, she glimpsed Mr Pike’s rose garden. All pruned back and stumpy, it was as barren as a rose garden could look in autumn. She turned back to the station-master. ‘I do miss your rose garden, Mr Pike. And the colourful flowers in your hanging baskets. Especially on a day like this.’

He scratched behind his ear. Embarrassment, but the faint
smile showed pride. ‘Anybody from the house picking you up, Miss?’

‘No. I ordered a taxi.’

The two stepped into the car park together just as Webb’s taxi pulled in. A new driver, one Arianne didn’t know. She told him, ‘Chessington House, please,’ and sat back. The driver pulled out of the car park, leaving the station-master drawing the freight doors closed. Arianne enjoyed the ride from the station through the countryside even in the dull greyness of the day. The taxi passed through a hamlet and then several villages, carefully unspoilt, balanced between the charm of a thriving rural life and the chocolate-box-pretty English village. No billboards yet, or the vulgar drive-ins one saw everywhere in her own country.

Vulgar bits and all, there were times, many, when she did miss the States, the best parts of being American, just living in your own country. The years of residing and travelling in Europe with Jason were the happiest years of her life. But then, too, so had been those spent living with him in America. The best part of agreeing on a two-year transfer from the New York to the London branch of Christie’s was that she and Artemis were managing to have rather a good time on these weekly visits.

The taxi approached the dry-stone walls circling the fifteen hundred acres that was Chessington Park. Aged trees rose majestically behind the high walls. Arianne thought how clever her stepfather, Gerald, had been to purchase the ten-room apartment for Artemis and himself as a haven for their dotage, those infirm times that were inevitably to come. At Chessington House they would live in comfort and with minimal anxiety over maintaining a life-style to which they were accustomed.

When the hundred and ten rooms of the magnificent Tudor house had been converted into flats of various sizes, Gerald and Artemis had acquired the best of the Georgian wing along with one Tudor tower. The large and sumptuous reception room of a stately house suited their furnishings and art objects, their paintings. With a place for their hunters in the stables, some wonderfully beautiful parkland to ride in, a private nine-hole golf-course to play, and the comforting spectacle of acquaintances more anxiously maintaining their own grand houses nearby, the move had been all he and her mother had hoped for. The house
even boasted an excellent restaurant for the residents, where they could dine, or whence they could obtain house-service so as to eat and entertain in their own dining-rooms. Chessington House gardens were beautifully cared for by the house gardeners, as was their own large, separate garden with its eighteenth-century folly, a place for lively luncheon-parties or tea on a summer afternoon. Perfection. Paradise.

Only the people were wrong. Wrong for each other simply by being there. It was the old story, lived out anew in every condominium.

How had Andrew Marvell, poet and masterly dissector of the pursuit of the earthly paradise in the great age of stately homes, expressed the malaise?

To each other they all appeared unbearably tedious. And what depths of pettiness were plumbed, what heights of aggression attained, in the miniature power struggles for illusory control over areas of the life of the building! The petty and the banal were elevated to forms of art in bickering over the direction of a ‘community’ that nobody had ever wanted to bring into existence.

Three weeks in the spring at the Ritz in Paris. A month in Barbados in March. August in Cap Ferrat, for as long as health and old age could manage. That had been their plan. And it had worked and life had been just fine. Only poor Gerald had too short a time to enjoy it. Quite suddenly he was gravely ill. With the help of their long-serving staff, Artemis sustained Gerald for nearly a year before he died.

Artemis at her very best. She kept Gerald’s spirits up by looking ravishingly beautiful, flirting with him as if he were still the handsome, dashing man she had fallen in love with, running the house as if his illness was not there, giving him, as she had all her life, the best possible time. Small parties, scheduling visits of old friends to keep him amused, bridge games, walks when possible, a wheelchair when not. And when he could no longer go to see his horses, they were brought to him. She kept him surrounded by beauty and laughter, and her love, to the very
end, when he closed his eyes and told her she had been his great love and would remain so beyond life itself, and took his last breath.

But once he was gone, Artemis changed radically. She rarely left the park. Became, at times, reclusive almost to the extreme, and somewhat erratic in her behaviour. And when she did periodically come out of her shell she appeared to be as vivacious and full of charm as ever, surrounding herself with much younger people who were amusing, old roués and gigolos who fell under her spell, only to be rejected by her.

The taxi left the main road to pass through an impressive entrance. A pair of open iron gates hung on pillars of stone fifteen feet high and topped by a pair of seventeenth-century bronze lions. The mist appeared to cling to the tree trunks and grass and to rise in lazy swirls towards a blanket of low grey cloud pressing down on the parkland. All seemed so quiet. The drive wound up a gentle slope for nearly a mile before the park flattened out. All the time Arianne caught glimpses of the house with its four Tudor towers and lead-domed roofs. Behind them they had left the wood and now were driving through an arboretum dotted with rare trees and shrubs. Two cock pheasants in their bright plumage suddenly burst from some tall grass, and at about a quarter of a mile from the house a fox nonchalantly crossed in front of the taxi. The arboretum thinned out to well-clipped lawns and the house rose into view. They circled the stone fountain and drew up at the front door.

Arianne rang the bell. Several minutes passed before the caretaker, a pensioner called Clive, opened it and greeted her enthusiastically. He escorted her across the domed hall, a Georgian splendour of fine plasterwork and marble boasting a gallery and a grand staircase. Clive rang the bell to Artemis’s flat.

Arianne found her mother sitting in a Georgian wing chair in front of a blazing fire in the drawing room: an impressive double-cube room of egg-yolk yellow silk-damask walls and an ornate plaster ceiling, made more so by the Impressionist paintings in carved and gilded frames. The floors were of rich parquet covered with fine oriental carpets and the windows were hung with French seventeenth-century draperies of ivory silk
embroidered with small flowers exquisitely designed and executed. In places they hung in ribbons and were faded, but that only enhanced their elegance. They were another work of art. The room had the scent of woodsmoke and beeswax, and fresh flowers from the many sumptuous blossoms arranged casually in Ming, Tang and Chien Lung vases placed around the room. It was a far cry from the tacky bed-sit accommodation in Belsize Park where Arianne lived.

Arianne liked this room. The furniture, English and eighteenth century, mixed well with some French pieces of the same period, and yet, for all its formal elegance, there was about the room a sense of homeliness and comfort. The books lying about everywhere, the many silver-framed photos, and Aubusson cushions flung about casually added to this impression, as did the dogs: two West Highland terriers, and a mastiff, dozing, or stretching lazily at Artemis’s feet. And a black and white Great Dane, which, on seeing Arianne, bounded from his place on one of the several sofas in the room. In a great bound that nearly felled her, he had his front paws on her shoulders and was licking her face. The cake-box was saved by Hadley, once Gerald’s valet, now Artemis’s butler-chauffeur.

Artemis had been staring out of the window. She rose from her chair to greet Arianne. ‘Not a very pretty day. But I do rather like it, all this grey. It bodes something mysterious. Like a great dark figure riding out of the mist. Mr Rochester, and wimpy Jane Eyre.’ Artemis began to laugh. ‘I once hated wimpy women; now I am beginning to appreciate they have a way of getting what they want. When I was younger a dull day such as this would have driven me mad. Cake for tea? Or croissants for coffee now?’ she asked as she walked over to her daughter and affectionately pulled on the dog Ralph’s ear.

‘Your favourite, croissants.’

‘Oh, good. Coffee, then, Hadley. In front of the fire, I think. And call the dining room and tell them we will be having a late lunch, my usual table.’ Ralph released Arianne and she gave him a hard spank of affection, and mother and daughter watched him lope away and climb once more on to the sofa.

Arianne smiled to herself, pleased that she had made the effort to dress for her mother. The look of approval in Artemis’s eyes
told her it was worth it. ‘Have you had a good week, Mother?’ she asked.

‘I never know what that question means, Arianne. You always ask it the minute you arrive. It irritates me. You seem to use it as a greeting, or an introduction to a day of small talk. And, oh, how I hate small talk.’

Her words, sharp and hurtful, were too full of truth and they silenced Arianne. True, she never did know how to greet her mother, nor in fact how to have a conversation with her that was other than small talk. The attack told her that Artemis was, at the very least, tetchy today; at worst she was going to be downright difficult. Arianne thought, I’ll settle for erratic.