Authors: Roberta Latow
E
ton still filled her with awe. It was just the name of a small town in southeast England merging with Windsor on the river Thames. But it was synonymous with a school. For some English people, it was unthinkable that a son of theirs should attend any other school. But she wasn’t one of them. Usually by the time she arrived at the college she had to gear herself up not to be overwhelmed by it. She always wanted to be blasé about the school and gave herself stern little lectures as a means
of achieving it. “You are acting like an American tourist, which you are not. You have a son who studies here. A husband who was a generous benefactor to the school. You yourself have been a benefactress. So what, if these hallowed walls go back to the 1440s when Henry the Something founded the school? You don’t go all wobbly when you walk through Harvard Yard or get an eyeful of ivy-covered wall at Yale.” The lecture rarely worked.
Her next ploy was always rationalization. That never worked either. How can you rationalize an ambience that has developed over more than five hundred years? An atmosphere of time and place, of education, of the molding of young boys into young men. The hundreds of now-silent voices that once echoed through the halls, across the playing fields. The boys, mingling in clusters in their black tails and stiff collars, whose whole lives were formed within these ancient walls, the ghosts of old Etonians, were a force all on their own. The famous scholars and robbers, cads and cowards, heroes, aristocrats, and gentlemen were in the very patina of the stone, the fiber of the wood that Cheyney saw in the architecture of the houses of Eton College. The ambience simply was not going to let itself be rationalized away. Only being a boy and attending the school, like her son Taggart, was ever going to stifle the mystique. A mere parent hadn’t a hope.
Privilege. From outside, it simply reeked of class and privilege. That always managed to be awe inspiring. One day her son might be bound forever to his former schoolmates, as one of an exclusive group of men who made up “the old-boy network” to end all such networks, famed for taking care of its own.
Cheyney had missed that in her life, had always felt the outsider, the loner, although it had never been a problem for her. She was subtly aware that she had missed the bond of old school friendships and the lessons that they taught, something that a fine public school education used to offer. More than that was the basic academic education that could open up doors for him to Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, the best universities in the world. The disciplines of school games and of simply living communally with his fellow man, that Eton was thought to be furnishing; they might mold the character
of Cheyney’s boy as she or Kurt could never do. They loved him too much not to make him go to Eton. But, at what a sacrifice! A sacrifice Cheyney had in the end to make alone because of the sudden death of Kurt a few months before the boy was to leave for England and school. But bravely both mother and son followed through, because it had been Kurt Walbrook’s fervent wish — since the day Taggart was born and he had promptly entered his name for the school — that Taggart Fox become an Eton boy.
Torture for Cheyney when the moment had come to send Taggart away to boarding school. He was a mature thirteen year old, well traveled, intelligent, sophisticated even, for a boy his age, a natural athlete, a likeable lad and leader among his childhood friends. But to Cheyney that day three years before when he had started his first half, he was still the little boy she had to give up so he could become a man.
About the only thing that did place Eton’s awesome presence in reassuring perspective for Cheyney was when she remembered, as she did now, that Taggart, (called TG by the boys in his schoolhouse; initials were currently chic), had taken an instant liking to the school. Insofar as you could measure such things, the boys and the school seemed to take a liking to him. Eton became for both Cheyney and TG a happy and secure experience and part of their lives.
Taggart’s life in school was ruled less by the headmaster than by the man in charge of the house he belonged to. She contacted Taggart’s housemaster and explained about the possibility of her taking on a public office in the States that might cause some interest in the press, and the press to be interested in her son. She wanted the school to ignore it and carry on with their policy of giving out no information on their pupils. The housemaster was loftily reassuring, like one who had been shielding the offspring of princelings and property magnates from importunate newshounds for years. Taggart would not be troubled if he did not want to be. She left the housemaster, declining his invitation to use his reception room, and went to wait for Taggart at the boys’ entrance.
She stood by the pigeonholes and watched several boys dart in and out of the boys’ entrance hall, picking up their post, a book, a sock, a cricket hat, a glove, all sorts of odd things,
from the open boxes. She heard them calling Taggart. “Fox, Fox, Fox,” reverberated through the corridors and down the staircase. A few snickers and giggles from the randy boys who desperately associated Fox, Fox, Fox, with fuck, fuck, fuck. Cheyney could hardly hold back a smile.
“That sexy mother of yours is here, TG,” she heard one of the boys say louder than he meant to. The boy had passed her at the foot of the stairs and given her a more than filial glance. He had bounded up the stairs in rampant leaps, three at a time, all but flexing his muscles.
“Fox, you really are a lucky bastard!” she heard him say to her son.
“I tell myself that quite a lot, Andrew.” She recognized the gaiety of Taggart’s voice before she saw him come skipping down the stairs.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Hi, TG.” Then they hugged each other.
“How did you manage this?”
“With difficulty.”
“I’ll bet,” said Taggart, smiling. “But not with too much difficulty, if I know my mom.”
Cheyney put her arm around her son’s shoulder and asked, “A picnic somewhere? Or the Italian restaurant — you know, The House On The Bridge? If we go Italian, then you and the boys in your house get the Fortnum’s deluxe picnic hamper. If we go on the picnic, you get what’s left over of the Fortnum’s hamper. Before you answer, I might add the picnic I had made up is for eight ravenous boys, condemned by their parents to public school food, plus one adult. That should leave sufficient for you to make an unbiased decision.”
“You think of everything, Mom. Tricky decision. I dunno. How serious is this visit? If it’s real privacy we need, then it has to be the picnic.”
“Good thinking, TG. But where?”
They both looked out the window and up at the sky at the same time. “English spring, and picnic. The perfect equation for rain. Someplace with shelter close by has to be the solution,” said Cheyney.
“I know just the place. Down by the river. Only fifteen minutes from here.”
“Sounds okay. Oh, I’m so happy to see you, TG.”
“Me, too, Mom. How long are you here for?”
“Just long enough to have lunch with you and give you some news and make an evening flight to the Schloss.”
“For the official opening of the museum?”
“Yes.”
“I wish I could be there, Mom.” He held up his hand as if to silence his mother before she said a word. “I know, school, and we agreed it would be more fun for me to go with my friends at half term. Good news or bad news, Mom?”
“It may be no news at all, TG. An interesting situation has developed, and I have come to talk to you about it.” Cheyney felt suddenly edgy and looked around her. She asked, “TG, what are we doing standing around here?” Mother and son looked up the stairwell. Half a dozen adolescent, pimply but well-groomed faces drew back from the banisters above them.
Arm in arm they walked from the house to Cheyney’s gray-green Aston Martin. Taggart relaxed when he saw it. “Phew!” he said quietly.
“Does that mean I chose the right car or the right color?”
“Let’s just say you didn’t get it wrong, Mom.”
Cheyney slipped into the cream-colored, glove-leather seat behind the wheel. She turned the key, and the car didn’t spring but purred into life. She eased the gears into first. The car rolled seductively into motion.
She gave her son a sidelong glance, seeking reassurance that neither her presence nor her new car was exposing her son to ridicule. Wealth was better for being understated in these latitudes. She knew how boys were at that age — Mother jetting in to talk to her son was bad enough. The only thing worse was if she sported a hat. Or didn’t. It was difficult to know sometimes. She breathed a sigh of relief. Hatless seemed to be right. And her hair was long and straight and loose, with the shorter sensual wisps at either side of her face reaching to just above her shoulders. It related more to glamour and youth than a mother’s Mayfair hairdo. Flashy cars: red, electric blue, yellow; anything Japanese on four wheels that was supposed to be a sports coupe; Fords could lose Taggart points in the boys’ rating system. Equally a wheelspin, a mother crunching the gears could dog a boy’s career at school for several weeks.
Mothers were best if hardly seen and scarcely heard. Mother-love was better expressed tangibly, through the food hamper. Invisibility was a virtue. Unless she still somehow continued to look more like an erotic young goddess, an imagined sensual delight. Cheyney had something to offer here.
She could read nothing in Taggart’s eyes or his expression. That was good. With Taggart that was a sign that things were as right as they could be, given her appearance at the house at all. She followed her son’s momentarily distracted gaze from his inspection of the car. She saw that a number of the windows of his house were half open. From each one, a clutch of impassive faces peered down at the car to watch them drive away. Supercilious? Admiring? There was such a thing as paying too much attention to adolescent susceptibility. But Cheyney was relieved that she had got it right, amused at the thought that all of them — son included — were waiting for her to fluff their exit. A toot of the horn, acknowledgment in any way that they were there, to them or her son, that would do it. She changed into second and looked through the rearview mirror. Several of them were hanging out of the window as she took the corner. She was delighted, fairly certain she had lost Taggart no points. She slid the gears into third, and they filtered into the traffic. Taggart turned to look at her. She stole a glance and they smiled at each other. Then she turned to concentrate on the traffic and his directions.
“How’s school, TG?” she asked.
“Great.”
“That’s what your housemaster says.”
“Anything else?”
“Interesting boy. Unusual boy. One of the best all-rounders the school has got. First class in athletics and class work. Eton is
jolly
pleased with you, I almost regret to say,” she teased.
“Okay, very funny, Mom.”
“Yes, but funny-good Taggart. I mean that. I’m really pleased for you, and for me. Papa would have been pleased to know how happy you are here, and how well you’re doing.”
“Do you still miss him a lot, Mom?”
Cheyney was surprised by the question. Taggart and his late stepfather had been extraordinarily close, possibly even closer than they would have been had the boy and Kurt been natural
father and son. But, although he talked about his “papa” often, Taggart had never asked her that before. Indeed, never asked her about her relationship with Kurt ever. She wondered what prompted the question.
Taggart was twelve years old when his stepfather died. He was shattered at having lost one of the two people he loved. The constant stream of mourners his father’s death brought to the house didn’t make it easier. Takashi, who was like an older brother for him, helped a great deal. But the intense loss was strangely eased by Taggart’s awareness of having another father.
A year after Kurt’s death, when Taggart was thirteen, he stayed during the school holidays at the country house of his best school friend, the son of a British cabinet minister, host in his own country house to a wide range of personalities. There, Taggart Fox and his school chum met and were befriended by another houseguest — Grant Madigan.
The two boys and the reporter hit it off together. Taggart’s restrained hero-worship of the rugged, realistic, yet gentle and shrewd newsman grew alongside a gradual recognition that this man was probably his father — there could hardly be two Grant Madigans — he was actually confronting and coming to love his own father, without being able to tell the man. Gradually his need to conceal the truth grew into a desire for love, as Kurt had loved him, as father loves son.
In the two years that followed, while Taggart was at Eton and Cheyney Fox was reestablishing herself at the top of the New York art world, Taggart saw Grant Madigan several times, and a relationship began to develop between them. It had always been Taggart’s intention to tell Cheyney he had met his father. But not yet.
He heard his mother answer, “No, not as much as when he died. Don’t think that I’m forgetting Papa. I could never do that. But, the day after tomorrow when we open the Schloss to the public, that part of my life when I was with your stepfather is over, finished forever. I am building a new life without him now, Taggart. But try and understand this, he will always be a part of whatever I do with my life. I’m sure you feel the same way.”
And, yet again, he savored his secret and put off telling her.
Instead he asked, “Did Takashi come over with you?”
Again she was surprised, not by the question, but by the abrupt change of subject. It would have otherwise been perfectly natural for Taggart to ask about Takashi. After Cheyney, Takashi was Taggart’s best friend, and the boy knew that Takashi and Cheyney often traveled together. He had known Takashi since he was five years old and looked upon him with just a slight case of hero worship. When he had understood, just over a year ago, that Takashi and his mother were lovers, the bond between the two grew even stronger. It had been Takashi who taught him the Japanese martial arts. From Takashi he acquired his love for motorbikes and motorbike racing, a subtler admiration for pretty girls, and his desire one day to be a great art historian.